"... Listening to Joe Biden on the campaign trail is about as painful as listening to Trump. The gaffes just keep on coming! Running for the senate or the presidency? ..."
"... That Biden didn't break a sweat and seemed to know that he wouldn't win in liberal Massachusetts on Super Tuesday is one sign of just how fucked-up the political, economic, and social systems are. ..."
"... If a person buys into the argument that elections mean anything at all, and they do to some extent, then the fact that a left/progressive coalition couldn't pull it off here speaks volumes. ..."
"... Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017). ..."
Listening to Joe Biden on the campaign trail is about as painful as listening to Trump.
The gaffes just keep on coming! Running for the senate or the presidency?
That Biden breezed to a presidential primary victory in supposedly liberal Massachusetts
leaves nothing but a sense of despair for anyone on the political left. If Philip Berrigan or
Eugene Debs were alive, either leftist might say "I told you so."
That Biden didn't break a sweat and seemed to know that he wouldn't win in liberal
Massachusetts on Super Tuesday is one sign of just how fucked-up the political, economic, and
social systems are. What was the combination of demographics that gave Biden a victory in
much the same way as a runner on third base comes home and scores after the batter walks with
the bases full?
So-called moderates flocked to Biden, as did those over 50 years old and older Black voters.
Liberals, younger voters, young Black voters, and Latino voters supported Sanders. Political
analysts can go on and on, ad nauseam, but the fact remains that a vibrant and well-organized
campaign by Bernie Sanders on the ground in Massachusetts fell on its face, as did that of
Elizabeth Warren. If a person buys into the argument that elections mean anything at all,
and they do to some extent, then the fact that a left/progressive coalition couldn't pull it
off here speaks volumes. The people who went to the polls spoke, and they would rather
have a neoliberal bumbler than someone who would champion, at the very least, liberal
causes.
... ... ...
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a
Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017).
"... "We are more and more disoriented. There is a little good news, but at the same time there are new dimensions to the virus, and new variations that might turn out to be more dangerous. We now have this fake return to normal. The really frustrating thing is this lack of basic orientation. It's the absence of what [the philosopher and literary critic] Fredric Jameson calls 'cognitive mapping' – having a general idea of the situation, where it is moving and so on. Our desire to function requires some kind of clear coordinates, but we simply, to a large extent, don't know where we are." ..."
"... In his book, Zizek recalls the warnings of scientists after the SARS and Ebola epidemics. Persistently, we were told that the outbreak of a new epidemic was only a matter of time, but instead of preparing for the various scenarios we escaped into apocalypse movies. Zizek enumerates different scenarios of looming catastrophes, most of them consequences of the climate crisis, and calls for tough decisions to be made now. ..."
"... he coronavirus crisis is just a dress rehearsal for future problems that await us in the form of global warming, epidemics and other troubles. I don't think this is necessarily a pessimistic view, it's simply realistic. ..."
"... Now is a great time for politics, because the world in its current form is disappearing. Scientists will just tell us, 'If you want to play it safe, keep this level of quarantine,' or whatever. But we have a political decision to make, and we are offered different options." ..."
"... What if we will need another lockdown, even longer? Or multiple lockdowns? It's a sad prospect, but we should get ready to live in some kind of permanent state of emergency. ..."
"... The coronavirus epidemic is a universal crisis. In the long term, states cannot preserve themselves in a safe bubble while the epidemic rages all around ..."
"... It's tragic, I know, that all kinds of big companies are in deep shit, but are they worth saving? ..."
"... My formula is much more brutal, and darker. The state should simply guarantee that nobody actually starves, and perhaps this even needs to be done on an international scale, because otherwise you will get refugees. ..."
"... "I'm talking about what Naomi Klein calls the 'Screen New Deal.' The big technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which enjoy vast government support, will enable people to maintain Telexistence. You undergo a medical examination via the web, you do your job digitally from your apartment, your apartment becomes your world. I find this vision horrific." ..."
"... "First, it's class distinction at its purest. Maybe half the population, not even that, could live in this secluded way, but others will have to ensure that this digital machinery is functioning properly. Today, apart from the old working class, we have a 'welfare working class,' all those caregivers, educators, social workers, farmers. The dream of this program, the Screen New Deal, is that physically, at least, this class of caregivers disappears, they become as invisible as possible. Interaction with them will be increasingly reduced and be digital." ..."
"... "The irony here is that those who are privileged, those who, in this scenario, will be able to live in this perfect, secluded way, will also be totally controlled digitally. Their morning urine will be examined, and so on with every aspect of their life. Take the new analysis capabilities that can test you and provide results [for the coronavirus] in 10-15 minutes. I can imagine a new form of sexuality in this totally isolated world, in which I flirt with someone virtually, and then we say, 'Okay, let's meet in real life and test each other – if we're both negative, we can do it.'" ..."
"... As Julian Assange wrote, we will get a privately controlled combination of Google and something like the NSA ..."
"... Zizek divides workers during the crisis into those who encounter the virus and its consequences as part of their daily reality – medical staff, welfare-service people, farmers, the food industry – and those who are secluded in their homes, for whom the epidemic remains in the realm of the Lacanian spectral and omnipresent. ..."
Slavoj Zizek's 'Brutal, Dark' Formula for Saving the World
The pandemic is liable to worsen, ecological disasters loom and technological surveillance will terminate democracy.
Salvation will come only by reorganizing human society. A conversation with the radical – and anxious – philosopher
Slavoj Zizek
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Slavoj Zizek.
This is not an easy time for Slavoj Zizek. Quite the opposite, and he's the first to admit it. Reoccurring panic attacks
incapacitate him for hours at a time and, unlike in the past, the nights have stopped providing him with an easy escape.
His sleep is wracked by nightmares of what the future holds for humanity. There are days when he fantasizes about being
infected by the coronavirus. At least, that way all of the uncertainty would come to an end, or so he imagines. Finally, he
would be able to cope with the virus concretely, instead of continuously being haunted by it, as some sort of a spectral
entity.
... ... ...
At age 71, Zizek is currently closeted in his home in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, with his fourth wife, the Slovene
writer and journalist Jela Krecic, who is three decades younger than him. During the past couple of weeks the epidemic
seems to have faded in his country, with only two or three new cases being reported daily. But Zizek, who spoke to Haaretz
via Skype, is in no hurry to breathe a sigh of relief.
The biggest shakeup to my world view came with Russiagate.
I had previously believed that intelligence sat at the top of the hierarchy for how people
process information and get their belief systems.
Now I know that intelligence is a sub-layer in the hierarchy, and not even second.
Levels:
1) People identify with groups and get their beliefs from that group - herds.
2) People mimic their herd.
3) People apply intelligence to rationalize the beliefs that they already hold.
Trying to deprogram a headline-reader or ingestor of the MSM (aka MIC-mouthpiece)
by interacting with them at level #3 is like "spooning against the tide". You are not even
getting close to level #1.
This is actually reinforcing people's delusion that they are operating primarily from an
intelligence level - a catch-22.
You are telling them that their beliefs originate from intelligently gathered information.
That isn't helping them.
Start paying attention to how often you trigger a mimic's cliche function.
It can be amusing. Then notice that you yourself were under the delusion that their beliefs
originated intelligently.
That is why you are interacting with them in intelligent conversation, isn't it?
You believe that something that was birthed from intelligence can be untangled with your
intelligent argument. Think again.
They have their beliefs that they mimic and then "confirmation bias" cements it,
and cementing it is the function of the endlessly repeated lies of the MIC-mouthpieces.
The repeated lies are kept fresh by putting them into new forms - Russiagate became
Ukrainegate became Bountygate became Vaccinegate
(with occasional side trips into such places as MH17-gate, Skripal-gate and Assange-gate,
etc).
You can spend your time showing them, for example, that the Skripal false-flag was a clown
performance at best - the facts are out there for all to read.
But then, even if successful with that one, "what about this-gate and that-gate" - you
haven't even scratched the surface of their
collective McCarthyism and thus by informing them about Skripal-gate "you are defending
Russia". Good luck with that.
People are mimics that let their herd do their thinking for them. They have various skill
levels at rationalizing to themselves the beliefs that they already hold.
p.s.
Put the three-level hierarchy to the test by considering people's religious beliefs.
People are typically born into those religious groups - level 1. They will consistently
mimic the same cliches, for example, "G-d will curse those that do not support the Jews",
"Jesus will throw you into a Lake of Fire", "Have a Blessed Day".
Do you think they all independently discovered these identical "Truths" on their own, and
so, so many more, by their own personal study of the Bible?
They are mimicking - level 2. Now go and approach them at level 3 - the intelligence level
- but don't neglect to carry a barf bag with you. Maybe you can succeed in reinforcing their
delusion that their religious beliefs are intelligence based, but you will not even nudge
them from their identity group - level 1. And you will only get for your trouble an ear full
of mimicry.
---
I wrote the above last summer. Since then there have been more "-gates" such as the latest
Multiple-US-agencies-Solarwinds-hack-gate. I mentioned Vaccinegate above and I had to stop
and think about what that had been about as the public is being hosed with so much crap these
days. Vaccinegate - supposedly the Russians had hacked our vaccine research.
---
recommended reading: https://woodybelangia.com/what-is-mimetic-theory/
@librul #2
I think you overegg your view.
A significant part of the "me too" views these days is "rice bowl religion" - that is, belief
maintained because the holder think they have to, in order to continue the economic
prosperity.
Another significant part comes from the pervasiveness of mainstream media - both traditional
and social media.
librul @ 2
Thanks Librul. Very insightful and accurate framing and description. Caitlin Johnstone also
lays out the same perspective but yours stands alone as impressive.
Hope we're in the same herd! LOL!
@Supply and Demand
'progressive' MeToo had disappeared. The MeToo activists love Bill Clinton and his various
acquaintances, such as the badly aged idiots of Russian Pussy Riot and the Maxwells family.
This is so progressive! See also the "progressive" Google/FaceBook/YouTube blanket censorship
over anything that can be qualified as 'antisemitic' by the ADL (created in memory of a
rapist and murderer Leo Frank). The 'progressives' have been taken for a ride by zionists.
The 'deplorables,' unlike Clintons, have a sense of dignity. As for the half-wit
'progressives,' they will undoubtedly have their chance to learn more about their most
important tutors, the Trotskyists.
Looks like Sidney Powell overplayed her hand with her Hugo Chavez claims and might pay the
price... They also attack her penchant for self-promotion.
This is a solid legal document that attack exaggerations and false claims and as such it puts
Sydney Power on the defensive. But at the same time it opens the possibility to analyze Dominion
machines and see to what extent votes can be manipulated, for example by lowest sensitivity of
the scanner for mail-in ballots and then manually assigning votes to desirable candidate. This
avenue is not excluded.
It also does not address the claim of inherent vulnerabilities of any Windows based computer
used in election, irrespective whether they were produced by Dominion or any other company due to
the known vulnerability of windows OS especially to the intelligence agencies attacks. As
well as the most fundamental question: whether the use of computers in election represents step
forward or the step back in election security? Especially Internet connected voting machines and
centralized tabulation centers deployed in 2020 elections.
So the success here depends whether they can narrow the scope tot ht claims made and avid
discovery of the voting machines themselves.
The weak point is that the letter references the testimony of Chris Krebs, who is a former
Microsoft employee and as such has a conflict of interests in accessing the security of Windows
based election machines produced by Dominion and other companies. Moreover he is now a computer
science processional but a lawyer, who does not has any independent opinion on the subject matter
due to the absence of fundamental CS knowledge required.
Notable quotes:
"... For example, you falsely claimed that Dominion and its software were created in Venezuela for the purpose of rigging elections for the now-deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, that Dominion paid kickbacks to Georgia officials in return for a "no-bid" contract to use Dominion systems in the 2020 election, and that Dominion rigged the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election by manipulating votes, shifting votes, installing and using an algorithm to modify or "weight" votes such that a vote for Biden counted more than a vote for Trump, trashing Trump votes, adding Biden votes, and training election workers to dispose of Trump votes and to add Biden votes. ..."
"... Fifth, you had a financial incentive in making the defamatory accusations. Your own conduct and statements at the press conference, media tour, and on your websites make it clear that you were publicizing your wild accusations as part of a fundraising scheme and in order to drum up additional business and notoriety for yourself. ..."
Sidney Powell Defending the Republic 10130 Northlake Blvd. #214342 West Palm Beach, Florida
34412
Re: Defamatory Falsehoods About Dominion
Dear Ms. Powell:
We represent US Dominion Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiaries, Dominion Voting Systems,
Inc. and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation (collectively, "Dominion"). We write regarding
your wild, knowingly baseless, and false accusations about Dominion, which you made on behalf
of the Trump Campaign as part of a coordinated media circus and fundraising scheme featuring
your November 19 press conference in Washington, D.C. and including your "Stop the Steal" rally
and numerous television and radio appearances on -- and statements to -- Fox News, Fox
Business, Newsmax, and the Rush Limbaugh Radio Show, among others.
... ... ...
I. Your reckless disinformation campaign is predicated on lies that have endangered
Dominion's business and the lives of its employees.
Given the sheer volume and ever-expanding set of lies that you have told and are continuing
to tell about Dominion as part of your multi-media disinformation "Kraken" fundraising
campaign, it would be impractical to address every one of your falsehoods in this letter.
Without conceding the truth of any of your claims about Dominion, we write to demand that you
retract your most serious false accusations, which have put Dominion's employees' lives at risk
and caused enormous harm to the company.
For example, you falsely claimed that Dominion and its software were created in
Venezuela for the purpose of rigging elections for the now-deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo
Chavez, that Dominion paid kickbacks to Georgia officials in return for a "no-bid" contract to
use Dominion systems in the 2020 election, and that Dominion rigged the 2020 U.S. Presidential
Election by manipulating votes, shifting votes, installing and using an algorithm to modify or
"weight" votes such that a vote for Biden counted more than a vote for Trump, trashing Trump
votes, adding Biden votes, and training election workers to dispose of Trump votes and to add
Biden votes.
By way of example only, just last week, you made the following false assertions about
Dominion to Jan Jekielek at The Epoch Times:'
Effectively what they did with the machine fraud was to, they did everything from
injecting massive quantities of votes into the system that they just made up, to running
counterfeit ballots through multiple times in multiple batches to create the appearance of
votes that weren't really there. They trashed votes.
These statements are just the tip of the iceberg, which includes similar and other false
claims you made at your Washington, D.C. press conference and to other media outlets with
global internet audiences. Your outlandish accusations are demonstrably fake. While soliciting
people to send you "millions of dollars"2 and holding yourself out as a beacon of truth, you
have purposefully avoided naming Dominion as a defendant in your sham litigations-effectively
denying Dominion the opportunity to disprove your false accusations in court. Dominion values
freedom of speech and respects the right of all Americans-of all political persuasions -- to
exercise their First Amendment rights and to disagree with each other. But while you are
entitled to your own opinions, Ms. Powell, you are not entitled to your own facts. Defamatory
falsehoods are actionable in court and the U.S.
Supreme Court has made clear that "there is no constitutional value in false statements of
fact." Gertz v. Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 340 (1974). Dominion welcomes transparency and a
full investigation of the relevant facts in a court of law, where it is confident the truth
will prevail. Here are the facts:
1. Dominion's vote counts have been repeatedly verified by paper ballot recounts and
independent audits.
Dominion is a non-partisan company that has proudly partnered with public officials from
both parties in accurately tabulating the votes of the American people in both "red" and "blue"
states and counties. Far from being created to rig elections for a now-deceased Venezuelan
dictator, Dominion's voting systems are certified under standards promulgated by the U.S.
Election Assistance Commission ("EAC"), reviewed and tested by independent testing laboratories
accredited by the EAC, and were designed to be auditable and include a paper ballot backup to
verify results. Indeed, paper ballot recounts and independent audits have repeatedly and
conclusively debunked your election-rigging claims, and on November 12, 2020, the Elections
Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector
Coordinating Executive Committees released a joint statement confirming that there is "no
evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way
compromised" and that the 2020 election was the most secure in American history.3 The Joint
Statement was signed and endorsed by, among others, the National Association of State Election
Directors, National Association of Secretaries of State, and the U.S. Cybersecurity &
Infrastructure Security Agency ("CISA") -- then led by a Trump appointee, Chris Krebs.
In addition, your false accusation that Dominion rigged the 2020 election is based on a
demonstrably false premise that wildly overstates Dominion's very limited role in elections.
Dominion provides tools such as voting machines that accurately tabulate votes for the
bipartisan poll workers, poll watchers, and local election officials who work tirelessly to run
elections and ensure accurate results. Dominion's machines count votes from county-verified
voters using a durable paper ballot. Those paper ballots are the hard evidence proving the
accuracy of the vote counts from Dominion's machines. If Dominion had manipulated the votes,
the paper ballots would not match the machine totals. In fact, they do match. Recounts and
audits have proven that Dominion did what it was designed and hired to do: accurately tabulate
votes.
2. Dominion has no connection to Hugo Chavez. Venezuela, or China.
As you are well aware from documents in the public domain and attached to your court
filings, Hugo Chavez's elections were not handled by Dominion, but by an entirely different
company -- Smartmatic. This is a critical fact because you have premised your defamatory
falsehoods on your intentionally false claim that Dominion and Smartmatic are the same company
even though you know that they are entirely separate companies who compete with each other.
Dominion was not created in or for Venezuela, has never been located there, and is not owned by
Smartmatic or Venezuelan or Chinese investors. Dominion has never provided machines or any of
its software or technology to Venezuela, nor has it ever participated in any elections in
Venezuela. It did not receive $400 million from the Chinese in the weeks before the 2020
election or otherwise. It has no ties to the Chinese government, the Venezuelan government,
Hugo Chavez, Malloch Brown, George Soros, Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster. Dominion does not
use Smartmatic's software or machines, and there was no Smartmatic technology in any of
Dominion's voting machines in the 2020 election.
3. You falsely claimed that Dominion's founder admitted he "can change a million votes,
no problem at all" and that you would "tweet out the video later''-- but you never did so
because no such video exists.
During at least one of your many media appearances, you promised to "tweet out [a] video" of
Dominion's founder admitting that he "can change a million votes, no problem at all." Your
assertion -- to a global internet audience -- that you had such damning video evidence
bolstered your false accusations that Dominion had rigged the election. Yet you have never
produced that video because, as you know, it does not exist. Dominion's founder never made such
a claim because Dominion cannot change votes. Its machines simply tabulate the paper ballots
that remain the custody of the local election officials -- nothing more, nothing less. 4. You
falsely claimed that you have a Dominion employee "on tape" saving he "rigged the election for
Biden''-- but you know that no such tape exists. In peddling your defamatory accusations, you
also falsely told a national audience that you had a Dominion employee "on tape" saying that
"he rigged the election for Biden." Your own court filings prove that no such tape exists. In
them, you cited an interview of Joe Oltmann, a Twitter- banned "political activist" who -- far
from claiming he had that shocking alleged confession "on tape"-claimed he took "notes" during
a conference call he supposedly joined after "infiltrating Antifa." This is a facially
ludicrous claim for a number of reasons, including the fact that he lives in Colorado, where it
would have been perfectly legal to record such a call if it had actually happened. As a result
of your false accusations, that Dominion employee received death threats.
II. Because there is no reliable evidence supporting your defamatory falsehoods, you
actively manufactured and misrepresented evidence to support them.
Despite repeatedly touting the overwhelming "evidence" of your assertions during your media
campaign, every court to which you submitted that socalled "evidence" has dismissed each of
your sham litigations, and even Trump appointees and supporters have acknowledged -- including
after you filed your "evidence" in court, posted it on your fundraising website, and touted it
in the media -- that there is no evidence that actually supports your assertions about
Dominion. Indeed:
One federal judge observed that you submitted "nothing but speculation and conjecture
that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice
President Biden." Op. & Order Den. Pl.'s Emer. Motion, for Deck, Emer., and Inj. Relief
at 34, Whitmer v. City of Detroit, No. 20-cv-12134 (E.D. Mich. Dec. 7, 2020) [Dkt. 62].
Another federal judge commented that the attachments to your complaint were "only
impressive for their volume," are "largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and
irrelevant analysis of unrelated elections," and include "expert reports" that "reach
implausible conclusions, often because they are derived from wholly unreliable sources."
Order at 24-25, Bowyerv. Ducey, No. 2-20-cv-02321 (D. Ariz. Dec. 9, 2020) [Dkt. 84].
Despite your claim that you have so much "evidence" that it feels as if you are drinking
from a "fire hose," when asked by your interviewers and other media outlets to provide that
evidence, you have failed to do so each and every time. Conservative television host Tucker
Carlson even called you out for failing to provide any evidence to support your
assertions.4
After you put the purported "evidence" in your court filings, Trump loyalist and U.S.
Attorney General Bill Barr stated, "There's been one assertion that would be systemic fraud
and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election
results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven't seen anything to
substantiate that."
... ... ...
Fifth, you had a financial incentive in making the defamatory accusations. Your own
conduct and statements at the press conference, media tour, and on your websites make it clear
that you were publicizing your wild accusations as part of a fundraising scheme and in order to
drum up additional business and notoriety for yourself. Your financial incentive and
motive to make the defamatory accusations is further evidence of actual malice. See Brown v.
Petrolite Corp., 965 F.2d 38, 47 (5th Cir. 1992); Enigma Software Grp. USA, LLC v. Bleeping
Computer LLC, 194 F. Supp. 3d 263, 288 (S.D.N.Y. 2016).
Sixth, you cannot simply claim ignorance of the facts. As a licensed attorney, you were
obligated to investigate the factual basis for your claims before making them in court.
31 There is no factual basis for your defamatory accusations against Dominion and
numerous reliable sources and documents in the public domain have repeatedly debunked your
accusations. As such, you either conducted the inquiry required of you as a licensed attorney
and violated your ethical obligations by knowingly making false assertions rebutted by the
information you found, or you violated your ethical obligations by purposefully avoiding
undertaking the reasonable inquiry required of you as a member of the bar. Either is additional
evidence of actual malice.
Taken together, your deliberate misrepresentation and manufacturing of evidence, the
inherent improbability of your accusations, your reliance on facially unreliable sources, your
intentional disregard of reliable sources, your preconceived storyline, your financial
incentive, and your ethical violations are clear and convincing evidence of actual malice. See
Eramo v. Rolling Stone, 209 F. Supp. 3d 862,872 (W.D. Va. 2016) (denying defendant's motion for
summary judgment and finding "[ajlthough failure to adequately investigate, a departure from
journalistic standards, or ill
I would'nt have thought that a socialist sympathizer would be an enthusiast for the "level
playing field". The neo-liberal Thatcherite freedoms of the single market have led to much
unemployment in Europe. Freedom of capital and freedom of labour work to the benefit of
transnational corporations and much to the detriment of ordinary working people. Much of the
liberal left in Britain now insists that we must remain locked in to this neo-liberal
straight jacket. https://www.thefullbrexit.com/quit-single-market
@ james | Dec 22 2020 19:58 utc | 80 who wrote
"
@ Maff | Dec 22 2020 16:05 utc | 68.. thanks maff.. i stand corrected... i thought the city
wanted brexit.. it appears that is wrong...
"
Maff qualified their claim with the "almost" adverb "all" and provided no linked backing or
specifying the "corporation, bank, financial institution and media outlet" camps. I still
believe that The City of London Corp wanted Brexit, but silly me, I still think those that
own global private finance run the West/world.
I'd say you're both correct. Several banker types have profited nicely on Brexit so far.
Others clearly have not or stand to lose out. Rees Mogg is an excellent example of the Brexit
disaster capitalist lackey.
For long time I viewed the city as homogeneous, but the last five years have taught me
otherwise.
The question I have is was it always like this (well concealed), or is it another side
effect of the west turning in on itself?
James it was a very large majority that wished to leave.
And this is entirely consistent with the history of the EU and its predecessors (The Common
Market): the Irish also voted to leave, then, after great pressure and an almost unanimous
front including almost all the political parties and fire threats of retribution, the vote
was reversed.
In France and the Netherlands where the EU's neo-liberal constitution was put to a vote it
was defeated in both countries. In this case though, as I recollect, the matter of approving
the Constitution was simply taken out of the electorate's hands. The barely revised rejected
constitution was then approved in the form of a treaty which of course was not put before the
electorate.
The reality is that the EU is both a stalking horse for Washington and a hedge against
democracy. It is a neo-liberal project established to ensure that private property should not
be threatened by a potentially egalitarian electorate. It is essentially anti-democratic a
recreation of the Hapsburg empire complete with parliaments/talking shops without sovereign
power and directed by unelected commissioners.
This month's New Left Review has a marvelous article-some 19000 words long, by Perry
Anderson which reveals the EU's nature in great detail. I gave a link a week or so ago.
The problem with much discussion of this matter is that it is a subject on which a radical
socialist and a conservative banker can both agree that the EU is a bad thing. I, a radical
socialist, because I believe that the state must take control over the commanding heights of
the economy and ensure that such horrors as homelessness and poverty are ended. The
conservative financier because he believes that the City of London, which he and his class
have defended from socialist regulation over the years, ought not to be controlled by
bureaucrats in Brussels or the European Central Bank.
The millions of working class Englishmen and women who voted to leave the EU anticipated
that the procedure of doing so would be orderly, sensible and transparent. They were not
voting for Boris and his banker friends but for a revival of manufacturing, progressive
taxation, nationalised, rather than profit taking, utilities and natural monopolies and a
restoration of trade union and civil rights, the right to strike for example.
The truth is that the world is a very big place and there are plenty of countries who
would eagerly embrace offers from the UK to enter into trade agreements formal or informal:
Venezuela, Cuba and Iran all spring to mind. But Russia and China are also obvious potential
partners. And what such countries have in common is that they would not seek to interfere in
the UK's internal politics and to dictate the limits within which political parties there can
operate. In this they differ from the EU, joined at the hip with NATO which is always under
US command. We have just seen in the surgical defenestration of Jeremy Corbyn and his
replacement by a Zionist member of the Trilateral Commission how the EU/US axis, acting
through the tame media and employing the agency of the swollen security establishment (where
the first loyalty is to the Empire and Washington), arrogates to itself the right to decide
just how far the British people will be allowed to go.
In this matter that means that they will, at a pinch, be allowed to leave the EU but that
the Special Relationship (US Occupation) is sacrosanct and NATO is forever.
We need to abstract from pro-China propaganda here. The critique of the USA handing of the
epidemic is a better part of the article. It is true, that the US neoliberal elite was more
conserved about the health on military-industrial complex then about the health and well-being of
the American people.
Writes Margaret Kimberley (in "Opposing War Propaganda Against China," Jan. 25, 2020):
"Now whenever we see a reference to China in the corporate media we always see the words
communist party attached. This silly redundancy is war propaganda along with every other
smear and slur. We are told that 1 million Uighurs are imprisoned when there is quite
literally no proof of any such thing. China, the country which first experienced the COVID-19
virus, was the first to vanquish it, and has a low death rate of less than 5,000 people to
prove it. We depend here in America on China to produce masks and other protective equipment
but China is declared the villain. The country that within one month of realizing there was a
new communicable disease gave the world the keys to conquering it.
"Instead the country which fails where China succeeds, in providing for the needs of its
people and their health, is an international pariah, with most of the world barring Americans
from travel and turning us into a giant leper colony. Trump speaks of the "kung flu" and the
"Wuhan virus," but it is China which conquered the disease that has killed 130,000 Americans
and forced a quarantine which has caused economic devastation to millions of people here.
"But Americans get nothing but war propaganda. Trump and Joe Biden outdo one another
bragging about who will be tougher to China. This week we saw the U.S. government violate
international law again and close the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas."
Writes Roxana Baspineiro in "Solidarity vs. Sanctions in Times of a Global Pandemic":
"Chinese and Cuban doctors have been providing support in Iran, Italy, Spain and have
offered their services and expertise to the most vulnerable countries in Latin America,
Africa, and Europe. They have developed medicines and medical treatments such as Interferon
Alpha 2B in Cuba, one of the potential medicines to combat the virus, which reduces the
mortality rate of people affected by COVID19. But above all, they have offered their interest
in distributing them to the peoples of the world without any patent or benefit
whatsoever."
Regardless of whether citizens of the US know about Chinese efforts, people in other nations
have noticed, according to Stansfield Smith, who writes:
"From the responses to the coronavirus pandemic, the world has seen the model of public
health efficiency China presented in controlling the problem at home. It has seen China's
world leadership in offering international aid and care. It has seen the abdication of
leadership by the US and even its obstruction in working to find solutions. Now the US still
cannot control the virus, and remains mired in economic crisis, while China is rebounding. In
sum, the pandemic has made the world look at both China and the US in a new light. And it has
dealt a serious blow to the US rulers' two decade long effort to counter the rise of
China."
... ... ...
The final section of the book, "Escalating anti-China campaign," is a diverse collection of
essays on subjects such as: US accusations of Chinese repression of Uyghurs; NATO exercises
that threatened to exacerbate COVID spread even while China was bringing aid to Europe; COVID
in the US armed forces; US military belligerence toward China; the color revolution in Hong
Kong; Vietnam's response to COVID; and a call from Margaret Flowers and the recently deceased
Kevin Zeese to replace the US pivot to Asia with a "Pivot to Peace."
Ajamu Baraka writes:
"The psychopathology of white supremacy blinds U.S. policy- makers to the political,
economic, and geopolitical reality that the U.S. is in irreversible decline as a global
power. The deep structural contradictions of the U.S. economy and state was exposed by the
weak and confused response to COVID-19 and the inability of the state to provide minimum
protections for its citizens and residents.
"But even in decline, the U.S. has a vast military structure that it can use to threaten
and cause massive death and destruction. This makes the U.S. a threat to the planet and
collective humanity because U.S policy-makers appear to be in the grip of a deathwish in
which they are prepared to destroy the world before voluntarily relinquishing power,
especially to a non-European power like China.
"For example, when Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo declared in public that the United
States and its Western European allies must put China in "its proper place," this represents
a white supremacist mindset that inevitably will lead to monumental errors of judgment."
So COVID-19 is, to put it mildly, a teachable moment. Looking around the world right now, we
can see who is learning and who isn't. As "Capitalism on a Ventilator" vividly illustrates,
China is leading the way, and the United States is slipping into obsolescence. Those who hope
to survive the coming travails can see who to follow and who to avoid.
Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is a writer living on the West Coast of the U.S.A. More of
Kollibri's writing and photos can be found at Macska Moksha Press .
That's the nature of the neoliberal beast. They control the state including the courts.
Notable quotes:
"... You forgot "standing" as used here and in the Texas suit. Funny how when you sue Democrats, no one ever has standing. ..."
"... Yes, this is the Catch-22 the courts have engineered so they do not have to address election fraud at all. File suit BEFORE the election = no standing because no injury because the election has not taken place so no aggrieved party. File suit AFTER the election = laches and failure to file before the election now means millions will be 'disenfranchised' and r ..."
You forgot "standing" as used here and in the Texas suit. Funny how when you sue
Democrats, no one ever has standing. Well, why not go out and get someone with standing in
the first place? Of course, if Trump does something, there's always a district judge in
Hawaii or Guam presented with a knock-down, can't lose case and Trump's immediately
overruled. Fatass shrugs his shoulders and says, "Hey, wadda ya gonna do?" and moves on to
the next "issue".
Herr Doktor 8 hours ago
After election fraud, courts will find fault for not bringing the question before the
election.
SDShack 4 hours ago
Yes, this is the Catch-22 the courts have engineered so they do not have to address
election fraud at all. File suit BEFORE the election = no standing because no injury because
the election has not taken place so no aggrieved party. File suit AFTER the election = laches
and failure to file before the election now means millions will be 'disenfranchised' and
r
@ uncle tungsten #24 with the appreciated link containing this quote
" A former insider at the World Bank, ex-Senior Counsel Karen Hudes, says the global
financial system is dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered
around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve.
"
The posting ends with this quote
"We have a system of "neo-feudalism" in which all of us and our national governments
are enslaved to debt. This system is governed by the central banks and by the Bank for
International Settlements, and it systematically transfers the wealth of the world out of
our hands and into the hands of the global elite.
But most people have no idea that any of this is happening because the global elite also
control what we see, hear and think about. Today, there are just six giant media
corporations that control more than 90 percent of the news and entertainment that you watch
on your television in the United States."
What an ugly way to run a society. Moving society to public finance and abolishing private
finance is what is needed to save our species and what we can of the world we live in. I am
with China in advocating for Ad Astra because we can see the end of our ability to live on
this planet because of historical faith-based disrespect of it.
No we are not dealing with the analogue of the feudalism of Western Europe, with its
interlocking panoply of mutual obligations that was built around God.
No, we are witnessing the re-birth of the Asiatic mode of production in the Euro-American
countries as the absence of manufacturing production makes itself felt. To wit, like South
American countries, one sees the emergence of two classes, Masters and their Service Servants
(needed for performing all manner of useful but tedious manual service labor, from
dog-walkers to barbers to cooks...)
Significantly, as Americans, French, English and many others sold their jobs to Mexico,
China, Korea, Singapore, and Japan, it was precisely those countries that were given an extra
shot in the arm for breaking from the chains of the Asiatic Mode of Production.
It is particularly interesting that in America, the long-hair guy driving a 50-dollar
Chevy, is supporting Republicans, who have no better future for him than being a servant to
Financiers.
William Gruff # 97
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Dec 18 2020 21:36 utc | 113
The 70s was when they started selling the good redwood saw logs to Japan instead of
cutting them up here because they could get more profit that way. At the time I do not think
it was considered that the Japanese would be able to compete with us as well as they did, and
I think the same applies to the other sellouts of our working class to foreign cheap
manufacturing centers. You have to remember these people really do think they are better.
They do think in class terms even if they avoid that rhetoric in public. The problem is they
thought they could control China like they did Japan. That was dumb then and it looks even
dumber now. You can see similar dumbness in their lack of grip on any realisitic view of
Russia. Provincials really. Rich peasants.
Thanks for the redfish video suggestion. Worth watching not only to get insight about the
current developments in India but also understanding the global Zeitgeist.
I couldn't avoid to identify the exact same type of developments and problems that working
class and increasingly also middle class facing in other parts of the world.
The globalization of capitalism since the fall of USSR and Warsaw pact, has caused
accelerated monopolization of political and economic power everywhere in the world,
this was achieved by enforcing the same neoliberal agenda globally. No matter if you look at
the USA, Germany, Iran or India, you discover the same type of "reforms". Reforms that result
in increased poverty, more and more middle class families are losing their socioeconomic
position and becoming part of working class.
One come to the understanding that the "Great Reset" we are talking about recently, is not
something new in the beginning and making, it's only the continuation of an agenda which has
been in implementation since 30 years ago.
have you noticed that terms like "Imperialism" and "Capitalist government" which were
natural parts of the political discourse in 20th century have been increasingly replaced by
"Nepotism" and "Oligarchy" in 21st century?
Thank you and I have noticed the shift in terminology. I try to avoid it as I believe in
the need to be extremely clear about socialism and capitalism. I prefer to avid CCP and
prefer Chinese Communist Party. I take care to compare western issues with how Cuba is
actually doing. Keep making it clear there is a range of alternatives to private finance
capitalism and IMF usury.
The weavers of deceit and theft that are private finance capitalists are indeed oligarchs
and they attempt to crush any discussion of repossessing their wealth and redistributing it
so that more people can do more work with it and generate stronger societies. The private
finance vultures live in dread of a Tobin tax so I say bring it on. Wherever cash is locked
away and idle - take it and give it to the people as it is they who know how to put it back
to work and generate security and peace within communities.
Wherever power is monopolised in industry then force a devolution of shares to workers and
unions and pay shares as taxes to the state so that dividends go to all including the state.
As it is now in many countries mega corporations extort tax holidays to set up production
units in the counties and dump the entire cost of infrastructure expansion onto those
counties as part of their extortion. Information monopolies are the most critical to
dismantle. Look at the west where critical journalism has been reduced to mediocre
stenography and those with integrity are entirely reliant on other monopolies to squeeze
their digital content between the pillars of censorious monopolies like twitter and facebook
etc. These monopolies are managing public content and creativity and should be in public
ownership - NOT just shareholder public but the entire public.
There is this ruse of oligarchs today just as in Venice in the 16th and 17th century where
the Doges in their magnificence spy on the citizens and reward citizens for spying on each
other, where social cohesion and solidarity is corroded and rots within. That is what the neo
liberal and private finance agenda is - to monopolise $$$ and power and decision making
within the hands of decrepit gerontocrats like Pelosi, Lord Rothschild, Rupert Murdoch, Queen
Elisabeth etc, etc.
Enough of this rant... thank you Framarz. Long live those countries that have for decades
repelled the evil that would crush their freedom and socialism. May Russia find its way to
reintegrate socialism within its future.
by: steven t johnson @ 13 says "the Presidency is essentially unchecked: Article II and
amendment 12 clearly state
that no one can challenge the president.." <= I add "unless congress can find something
they themselves are all
guilty of, and are collectively willing to accept the risk that they themselves might be
removed for the same crime
for which the Congress might impeach the President .. from elected Office impeachment is
impossible.
It is this improbability of removing the President from office that makes the control of
the content allowed or
pushed on the public by the main stream media so important to the stability of the government
and the ability of
the President to lead.
The only way a President can be impeached is to do to the President what the Lenin and
Tolstoy Bolshevik regime
change team accomplished to bring down the Czar of Russia. The media began its attacks on
Christian Czar led
Russia in 1875 by 1919 if the Czar had said it was raining outside the entire nation of
Russia wanting to know if
it were raining would go outside to see for themselves.
Tolstoy, a public hero, blamed the Czar for the problems caused by a pandemic and a famine
of 1891. The peasants
of Russia were trained by media content to distrust any and everything the Czar or any member
of his staff said or
did. Propaganda said there was evil behind every act of the Czar. Tolstoy's famous propaganda
undermined the
Christian faith held by millions of people.
"The Minister for the Interior told the Emperor Czar that Tolstoy's letter to the English
press 'must be considered
tantamount to a most shocking revolutionary proclamation': not a judgement that can often
have been made of a letter
to The Daily Telegraph. Czar Alexander III began to believe that it was all part of an
English plot and the Moscow
Gazette, which was fed from the Government, denounced Tolstoy's letters as 'frank propaganda
for the overthrow of
the whole social and economic structure of the world'." see destroys
Christain Russian government
Norecovery @ 22 says and I have added to what he said to make this list.
1. "The .. criminals have ..take[n] over foreign policy in the U.S.,
these criminals you are talking about are not part of the government, they are private
persons and corporations.
Allow me to remind you that Article II of the Constitution of the USA only concerns two
persons, The President
and the VP.. to them all power to act domestic and foreign is given, Congress has no power
that it cannot get
into law, and no power to govern the office of the President and that has been true since the
original constitution
was ratified in 1788. To conduct war around the world, it is necessary only to won the
president.
2. leveraging money power .. the oligarch network employees highly motivated highly-paid
promoters to force President control onto the world.
3. The Oligarch and their corporations control Congress, Intelligence Agencies, and the
content that MSM presents...
4. the MSM distributed content expresses total censorship as does Google, and social
media
5. Corona virus is bio-warfare designed to undermine small-scale economies and to
establish Oligarch autonomy
6. Using rule of law (generated by nation state power) oligarch owned corporations own all
non taxable property (copyrights and patents) and the right to use all technology (copyright
and patents).
7. Worldwide compliance is the goal of the oligarch. owning the nation state allows
military, financial, and media to be used to crush dissent and to extract wealth.
8. The pharma-promoted questionable gene editing vaccinations are questionable at
best.
9. Humanity is witnessing a worldwide COUPS, UBER-Fascism that exceeds all historical
examples.
10. WWI was a war to take control of the Ottoman owned oil rich land and to tame German
competitive strength.
11. Hilter return Germany to its former power, so WWII was to take German competition
completely out of the equation.
12. The wars in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, are about pipeline and
control of oil production, transport and profit
13. the wars in Belarus, Ukraine, Modldova, Bulgaria Romania, Hunary, Slovakia Cezech
Republic Poland are about getting Western Europe access into Russia.
14. Last week the House passed a bill designed to deny the president any authority to
reduce the US troops in Foreign land.
so your question at norecovery @ 22 will it succeed is relevant. I don't think it will, I
was told the Governor of Florida
has refused to take the vaccine, word is getting around; people everywhere in USA governed
America, in UK governed
Britain, in Republic of France governed France ( riots every weekend for over two years) ,
and Zionist governed
Israel (riots all over the place all of the time).. everyone is skeptical of the nation state
system.
I think the take over would have succeeded if the Oligarchs had not tried to force a
vaccination on people that
genetic engineers (changes the way their body works) the bodies those vaccinated were born
with.
Snake @ 36
You must have spent a lot of time and consideration on that far reaching summary !
That's MOA at its very best !!
I could only add -- - the disfunctional mindset that blights America right now is having an
immediate impact on all corners of the world.
I see it even in my tiny peaceful backwater.
If they create a fascist monster unleash it on the world -- it will consume everything and
everyone in its path.
Whithin a decade.
I love America and its non-stop CIA psyop cyclops social media television.
The New Year will bring renewed police crackdown on private assembly, people's homes, the
continued destruction of employment, $40 checks from Uncle Joe to "tide you over," hysterical
harpies physically assaulting anyone without a mask in blue states, and a full-out propaganda
assault to destroy the defenseless minds of your friends and family.
You're going to lose a lot in the New Year. 2020 was just the beginning. Wait until summer
2021 and BLM/Antifa chaos. Conservative politicians like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul will be crying
"insurrection act!" and Tucker Carlson will launch into Season Two of 30-minute cracking-voice
monologues "this is your America!" while nothing and no one does a goddamn thing to protect
you.
We are on our own. Doctors, schools, cops, families, people you work with -- all are slowly
being sucked into the vortex of this simulacrum of hell being broadcast on their "smart"
phones. Compared to what's being sold to them, your voice sounds positively insane...
"... The bottom line is the true enemies of the American people are no foreign nation or adversary---the true enemy of the American people are the people who control America. ..."
"... This way of thinking points to a dilemma for the American ruling class. Contrary to a lot of the rhetoric you hear, much of the American ruling class, including the "deep state" is actually quite anti-China. To fully account for this would take longer than I have here. But the nutshell intuitive explanation is that the ruling class, particularly Wall Street, was happy for the past several decades to enrich both themselves and China by destroying the American working class with policies such as "free-trade" and outsourcing. But in many ways the milk from that teat is no more, and now you have an American ruling class much more concerned about protecting their loot from a serious geopolitical competitor (China) than squeezing out the last few drops of milk from the "free trade." ..."
This is awesome, he nails the dilemma which our owners are confronted with;
I'll put it this way: It is not as though the American ruling class is intelligent,
competent, and patriotic on most important matters and happens to have a glaring blind spot
when it comes to appreciating the threat of China. If this were the case, it would make
sense to emphasize the threat of China above all else.
But this is not the case. The American ruling class has failed on pretty much every
issue of significance for the past several decades. If China were to disappear, they would
simply be selling out the country to India, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, or some other country
(in fact they are doing this just to a lesser extent).
Our ruling class has failed us on China because they have failed us on everything. For
this reason I believe that there will be no serious, sound policy on China that benefits
Americans until there is a legitimate ruling class in the United States. For this reason
pointing fingers at the wickedness and danger of China is less useful than emphasizing the
failure of the American ruling class. The bottom line is the true enemies of the
American people are no foreign nation or adversary---the true enemy of the American people
are the people who control America.
This way of thinking points to a dilemma for the American ruling class. Contrary to
a lot of the rhetoric you hear, much of the American ruling class, including the "deep
state" is actually quite anti-China. To fully account for this would take longer than I
have here. But the nutshell intuitive explanation is that the ruling class, particularly
Wall Street, was happy for the past several decades to enrich both themselves and China by
destroying the American working class with policies such as "free-trade" and outsourcing.
But in many ways the milk from that teat is no more, and now you have an American ruling
class much more concerned about protecting their loot from a serious geopolitical
competitor (China) than squeezing out the last few drops of milk from the "free
trade."
@102 karlof1 - "By deliberately setting policy to inflate asset prices, the Fed has
priced US labor out of a job, while as you report employers sought labor costs that allowed
them to remain competitive."
I never heard it said so succinctly and truly as this before. That is what happened isn't
it? The worker can't afford life anymore, in this country.
And if the worker can't afford the cost of living - who bears the cause of this, how
follows the remedy of this, and what then comes next?
I really appreciate your point of view, which is the only point of view, which is that the
designers of the economy, the governors of the economy, have placed the workers of the
economy in a position that is simply just not tenable.
No wonder they strive to divide in order to rule - because they have over-reached through
greed and killed the worker, who holds up the society.
How long can the worker flounder around blaming others before the spotlight must turn on
the employer?
You have to remember these people really do think they are better. They do think in class
terms even if they avoid that rhetoric in public. The problem is they thought they could
control China like they did Japan. That was dumb then and it looks even dumber now. You can
see similar dumbness in their lack of grip on any realisitic view of Russia. Provincials
really. Rich peasants.
Thank you, they certainly DO think in class terms ALWAYS. + Rich peasants is perfect
:))
Thankfully they are blinded by hubris at the same time. The USA destroyed the Allende
government in Chile in 1973. After the Nixon Kissinger visit to China in 1979 they assumed
they could just pull a color revolution stunt when they deemed it to be the right time.
Perhaps in their hubris they thought every Chinese worker would be infatuated with capitalism
and growth.
They tested that out in the People Power colour (yellow) revolt in the Filipines in 1986
following a rigged election by Marcos. In 1989 only 16 years after China had been buoyed up
with growth and development following the opening to USA capitalism, they tried out the same
trick in Tienanmen square in China but those students were up against the ruling party of the
entire nation - not the ruling class. BIG MISTAKE. The ruling party of China was solidly
backed by the peasant and working class that was finally enjoying some meager prosperity and
reward a mere 40 years after the Chinese Communist Party and their parents and grandparents
had liberated China from 100 years of occupation, plunder, human and cultural rapine and
colonial insult. Then in 2020 it was tried on again in Hong Kong. FAIL.
The hubris of the ruling class and its running dogs is pathetic.
We see the same with Pelosi and the ruling class in the Dimoratss today. They push Biden
Harris to the fore, piss on the left and refuse to even hold a vote on Medicare for All in
the middle of a pandemic. Meanwhile the USAi ruling class has its running dogs and hangers on
bleating that "its wrong tactic, its premature, its whatever craven excuse to avoid exposing
the ruling class for what they are - thieves, bereft of compassion, absent any sense of
social justice, fakes lurking behind their class supposition.
They come here to the bar with their arrogant hubris, brimming with pointless information
some even with emoji glitter stuck on their noses. Not a marxist or even a leftie among them.
Still its class that matters and its the ruling class that we must break.
@102 karlof1 and Grieved | Dec 19 2020 3:12 utc | 129
I did not understand inflate-assets/suppress-workers and forgot to return to it to clear
it up. Grieved sent me back to Karlof1. I just got it.
That viewpoint indeed explains method of operation to accomplish the results I observed.
When Nixon was forced to default on Bretton Woods use of Gold Exchange Standard* [the USD is
as good as gold], then printing fiat solved the problem [threat to US inventory of
gold]....but printing fiat [no longer redeemable as a promise convert to gold] became the new
problem [no way to extinguish the promises to redeem/pay].
So how to proceed? Aha! Steal from the workers; squeeze 'em, entertain and dazzle 'em!..
Such an elegant solution...slow, certain and hardly noticeable...like slow-boiling frogs...an
on-going project as we blog.
@ Grieved | Dec 19 2020 6:01 utc | 135 with the rant about the Dems and Medicare for
All
The US government has been financialized like the majority of the Fortune 500. Since the
1970's the trajectory in the US has been to reduce government spending on social safety net
programs and privatize the Social Security Insurance program. While SSI was raped by
Reagan/Greenspan/Congress and taken from the independence of actuaries and made a political
budget football including false claims of being and "entitlement" program the safety net
social programs fared worse. In the early 1970's, when I was familiar with the planning for
and provision of social services like for developmental disabilities, alcoholism, mental
health, job search help, infancy care (WIC) and drug abuse, the concept of continuum of care
helped the different agencies collaborate and really help folks. Then the Fed stared changing
the rules of the way money was to be spent that developed columns of services that don't
interact/coordinate with each other as well as reducing overall low income support.
I also want to add to what you wrote earlier that humanity use to make other than the
throw-away-to-churn-the-money-mill products that were both designed and built better/to last.
It fits with our throw away food system with all that packaging and none of it refillable,
seemingly by design.....
....
....
because as I continue to write here, its all about the God of Mammon instead of the support
of the masses social structure with the underpinning of the God of Mammon way of life is
controlled by the global private financed owned elite and the support of the masses way of
life is exampled biggly currently by China.
" Correspondence between Hunter
Biden and CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming from 2017 shows President-elect Joe Biden's son
extending "best wishes from the entire Biden family ," and urging the chairman to "quickly"
send a $10 million wire to "properly fund and operate" the Biden joint venture with the
now-bankrupt Chinese energy company.
The $10 million transfer to the joint venture was never completed.
Fox News obtained an email Hunter Biden sent on June 18, 2017, to Zhao Run Long at CEFC,
asking that they please "translate my letter to Chairman Ye, please extend my warmest best
wishes and that I hope to see the Chairman soon.""
Biden went on to note that Bobulinski had "sent a request to Dong Gongwen [Gongwen Dong] and
Director Zang for the funding of the $10 MM USD wire."
"I would appreciate if you will send that quickly so we can properly fund and operate
Sinohawk," Biden wrote.
"I am sure you have been well briefed by our dear friend Director Zan g on the political and
economic connections we have established in countries where you are interested in expanding
during the coming months and years, " he continued. "I look forward to our next meeting."
"Fox News also obtained the response from Ye as part of an email, dated Sept. 6, 2017, from
Biden business associate James Gilliar to Bobulinski. That email forwarded Ye's letter
responding to Biden. The letter is dated July 10, 2017.
Ye stated that he had arranged for Zang and Dong to "expedite the charter capital input to
SinoHawk."
"I am glad to hear from you! Time flies and it has been months since we met in the US. It
seems that we were always on a rush when we were together," Ye wrote to Biden, adding that "the
consensus we made last time has been materialized in a timely manner."
Ye also recommended Biden "arrange your people to coordinate with Director Zang and Gongwen
Dong for specific work."
"I will continue to pay attention and give my support," Ye stated. "I have arranged Director
Zang and Gongwen Dong to expedite the charter capital input to SinoHawk."
"I look forward to meeting you in the near future and discussing our joint undertaking. If
there is anything I could do please do not hesitate to write to me," Ye wrote. "Please accept
my best regards to you and your family."" foxnews
------------
Well, pilgrims, the Ron Johnson hearing today was fun. The best part for me was former
Director Krebs' (election security guy for DHS) repeated statements that the election was
secure, "the most secure in history." Pilgrims, the distinction betwixt "secure" and "honest"
seems to have escaped him as he ignored questions about actual evidence of fraud, a swampie to
the end.
And then, there is Chairman Joe. He knows that nothing will be easier than to kill off
prosecution of his creepy son, or to "suggest" to the Delaware federal prosecutor that a minor
indictment would be appropriate, something resulting in a suspended sentence.
I have watched Tucker debrief Bobulinski twice about that payment. The way Bobulinski tells
it (with documentation) the Bidens were loaned $5 million by MEFC to pay their side of the
capitalization and then actually pocketed the other $5 million as a direct payment to La
Familia from FEMC (Oh Danny Boy!) from - equal opportunity! That was too much for the Bobster
(former naval Lt., man of world finance, patriot, self-abnegator, etc.) Besides, where was his
share?
Pistols at dawn? Good! Tucker can act as his second. Where are my cased flintlock
smoothbores? They are somewhere around here, the English 18th Century ones in the fitted blue
velvet case. pl
The wonderful world you talk about was not experienced by the peoples of Guatemala, Iran,
Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Argentinia, Haiti, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Iraq,
Libya, Syria and many of the homeless and destitute in the US, UK, Japan etc. The wonderful
world you describe is an illusion.
There is a line from the 1960s Science Fiction series called the Invaders from another
galaxy who wish take over the world. At the beginning of each episode the narrator says " they
wish to take over the world and make it their world".
The Transnational Financiers have been working towards that goal for centuries!!!!
If you still believe that America's Sickcare is "the finest in the world" and is endlessly
sustainable, please study these three charts and extend the trendlines.
I've long been making the distinction between healthcare and sickcare : healthcare is the
service provided by frontline operational caregivers (doctors, nurses, aides, technicians,
etc.) and sickcare is the financialized system of Big Hospital Corporations, Big Insurers, Big
Pharma, etc. and their lobbyists that keep the federal money spigots wide open.
This financialized sickcare system is being consumed by the cancer of greedy profiteering
pursued by self-serving insiders. The delivery of healthcare is secondary to maximizing
revenues and profits by any means available .
To believe such a corrupt system is sustainable is magical thinking at its most
destructive.
Covid-19 is revealing this cancerous underbelly. Knowledge of the inner workings of
corporate administration is not evenly distributed, so every participants' experience of the
systemic dysfunction will vary.
Here is one MD's observations of the system's priorities. Others may have different views
but the maxim follow the money is clearly the correct place to start any inquiry of how
America's financialized sickcare functions in the real world.
From what I'm hearing from the front line, a not insignificant number of admissions are of
folks who would not have been admitted in March when there was fear of both the unknown and
systemic failure and, not coincidently, when COVID diagnoses didn't pay as much.
Today, the admission criteria for COVID is so much more flexible than for standard
diagnoses like CHF, and pays so much better than other diagnoses that our 'healthcare' system
is rapidly becoming a 'COVID care' system.
The surge in hospitalizations and subsequent COVID-identified deaths may be driven, in
part, to health systems adapting to new COVID revenue streams.
This would seemingly be good news, after all if it's the hospital administrator's desire
to fill empty beds that's driving admissions rather than infection rates, then systemic
failure can be averted through moderating those admission rates based on system capacity.
If your hospital fills up, just start sending the marginal cases
home--inpatient/outpatient; the outcome for the patient will be pretty much the same and
you've made as much money as your capacity will allow.
Unfortunately, our healthcare 'system' doesn't work like that.
Health systems are in the business of generating revenue, not value. Recent COVID-related
demand destruction has crushed that revenue so they're hungry for more.
Those in health-system operations and those in leadership live in two different worlds.
Leadership will push COVID admissions far beyond any operational limits in their quest for
short term performance. One cannot overstate their mendacity and drive for lucre.
Hospitals are becoming 'COVID factories' with all other admissions (which pay far less)
relegated to second tier status.
Health systems are evolving into an 'all COVID, all the time' format with the emphasis on
testing and (soon) vaccination, at the expense of all else.
Not a few systems of my acquaintance are laying off outpatient medical staff because their
supporting personnel have quit and are not replaced--those resources are being re-directed to
COVID testing and in preparation for mass vaccination.
For the health system in the business of generating revenue, it's an excellent tactic.
They save themselves significant overhead by not paying the clinicians and they make up the
revenue through high-margin COVID services and government bailout payments.
For patients who actually need healthcare, though, this tactic is deadly.
The perversion is end-stage, the health systems pretend to deliver healthcare and the
government pays them to continue the pretense.
There is no long term thinking here, no empathy for the workforce, no thought to the
mission beyond window-dressing--just a relentless, risk-adverse financialization machine.
Think of COVID as a new widget for which the customer will pay 2.5 times the going price
with no quality control, but only for a limited amount of time. Add in talentless,
rent-seeking leadership and all becomes clear.
Of course the real risk is that maxed out hospitals could find themselves in a situation
where admissions suddenly become driven by demand rather than the business model, with a true
non-linear path to failure laying beyond.
The longer daily national hospital occupancy stays above the approximate pre-COVID
capacity of 100k, the more likely you'll see systemic breakdowns--local at first, then
regional.
You won't see it in the press, the healthcare cartels have a pretty good lock on the local
media. Once news starts getting censored on social media, though, then you know it's
happening.
Hold me to that, And call me out in three months if I'm not right.
If you still believe that America's sickcare is "the finest in the world" and is endlessly
sustainable, please study these three charts and extend the trendlines.
Zucker – who now presides over one of the most fervently anti-Trump media outlets in
the American corporate press – hatched the idea to give then-candidate Trump a weekly
slot on CNN during a March 2016 phone call with Micheal Cohen, a lawyer for Trump at the time,
according to audio obtained by Fox News' Tucker Carlson.
Speaking with Cohen hours before the final Republican primary debate in the 2016 race,
Zucker said that while the Trump campaign had shown "great instincts, great guts and great
understanding of everything," he insisted victory would be impossible without CNN's
backing.
"Here's the thing you cannot be elected president of the United States without CNN,"
Zucker boasted. "Fox and MSNBC are irrelevant – irrelevant – in electing a
general election candidate."
When Cohen suggested the CNN chief relay his thoughts to Trump himself, Zucker demurred,
saying he is "very conscious of not putting too much in email," as Trump – "the
boss" – might go blabbing about it on the campaign trail.
You know, as fond as I am of the boss, he also has a tendency if I call him or I email
him, he then is capable of going out at his next rally and saying that we just talked, and I
can't have that, if you know what I'm saying.
Zucker soon talked himself back into contacting Trump, however, committing to "give him a
call right now" to "wish him luck in the debate tonight" – hosted by none
other than CNN – adding "I have all these proposals for him, like I want to do a
weekly show with him and all this stuff."
He went on to lavish praise on Trump, saying he had "never lost a debate" and would
do "great" during the CNN event later that night, even offering detailed advice for how
the president-to-be could deflect allegations that he is a "con man" from other
candidates.
While the source of the recording is unclear, the leak has made waves online, given that
Zucker has since made himself into Trump's "
cable news nemesis ." The network itself, meanwhile, has fielded an endless stream of
negative coverage of the president, heavily pushing the discredited 'Russiagate' conspiracy
theory for years and throwing full weight behind the Democrats' failed impeachment effort.
Some netizens have already suggested the "damning" revelation could soon result in
Zucker's ouster from his high perch at CNN.
"You think Jeff Zucker will be fired? I actually think there's a decent chance he will
be. Trying to kiss up to Trump is on par with murder in CNN world,"wrote filmmaker and
conservative pundit Robby Starbuck.
Others were less taken aback by the audio, as many pointed to the fact that Zucker and Trump
have a lengthy history together, both working on 'The Apprentice,' the hit reality show that
helped to solidify Trump's status as a pop culture icon. In 2012, Trump even hailed Zucker's
takeover as CNN president, saying the network made a
"great move," and that Zucker "was responsible for me and The Apprentice on NBC
– became #1 show!"
"Everyone knows Zucker made Trump, it's 100% true," one user said . "Trump was down and out.
Zucker pitched him a reality TV show called the Apprentice. Why? Because he likes his New
Yorkers, he likes Trump."
Sir,
Pretty sure you're trolling us a little with this post. That said, it is 2020.
I am 100% convinced that covid is a political conspiracy based on personal knowledge and
other info. Tonight Tucker Carlson reports that blood samples taken in early Jan 2020 tested
positive for covid - all of the samples. In other countries there is evidence of covid in the
population going back to Fall 2019; yet no overwhelmed hospitals and spiking death counts
from those early months. The internet fact checkers are clearly arrayed against information
seekers and forcing conformity to the state's message.
Clearly there was malfeasance in the election as well as a general Charlie Foxtrot created
by implementing mail in voting without sufficient time and resources for infrastructure
development; a no brainer that everyone should have foreseen and avoided - except for the
covid hysteria.
We saw the the Russia collusion hoax, Steele Dossier nonsense, idiotic impeachment and
slandering filthy lie campaign against of Justice Kavanaugh.
The list goes on. However, it stretches my credulity that the US military (Army SOF unit?)
would be shooting it out with the CIA in Germany and that Haskel would be there to be wounded
in the action; or was arrested and whisked off to some secret detention facility.
Would you please consider sharing what you really think?
"... Lockdowns as being inherently against the working class is a capitalist (liberal)
falsification: if you pay them while they're kept safe in their homes, you'll have the best
of the two worlds for the working class (being paid without working). This option is only
an anathema for the middle class and the capitalist class - who can't imagine a world
without the proletarians serving them ..."
We all live in an interconnected world and middle class, capitalist class (whatever that's
supposed to mean) and proletarians alike supply goods and services to one another. Money is
the medium that facilitates such exchanges. It follows then that proletarians also serve one
another and ditto for the other classes.
If working classes are paid to stay in their homes, who then supplies their needs? In
spite of Jeff Bozo's efforts and those of Elon Musk, not all transport is self-automating and
robots in Amazon warehouses still need some human inputs to operate quickly and without
hitches.
One could also argue that working fulfils other, non-monetary needs. Karl Marx actually
foresaw this when he wrote about anomie in capitalist systems of production, in which workers
are denied control over their lives and the work they do by being denied any say in what they
produce, how they produce it, the resources and environment needed to produce outputs, and
maybe even whether they can be allowed to work at all.
Lockdowns can be viewed as another method in which to deny people control over their work
and work environments. People socialise at work and lockdowns may be a way to deny workers a
place or a means to connect with others (and maybe to form unions). Is it any wonder then,
that during lockdowns people's mental health has become an issue and public health experts
became concerned at the possibility that such phenomena as suicide and domestic violence
could increase?
You can understand this from this quotation. It is the internal contradictions of the wesern
capitalist system that is driving the changes we observe, not "pressure applied by China",
which I would say is a myth.
"The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal: it lies
in the contradictionariness within the thing. This internal contradiction exists in every
single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictionariness within a thing is the
fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other
things are secondary causes."
"It (Materialist dialectics) holds that external causes are the conditions of change and
internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through
internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature
can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis."
Mao Zedong. "On Contradiction" August 1937. Selected Works, Vol.1, p.315.
Lockdowns are a medical protection to eradicate a contagious virus.
The lock downs we have had are fake and we're designed to fail. For political reasons.
The very people who complained 10 months ago, were responsible for them not working,
10 months later those people are still complaining. They are the ones who have prolonged the
contagion.
They are to blame. That includes the polatians and duped public.
It's deliberate !
According to the regulator, the direct pipeline from Russia to Germany impedes competition
on European Union energy markets and "violates the interests of consumers." The fine
amounts to 10 percent of Gazprom's annual revenues – the maximum allowed penalty. Other
companies participating in the construction of Nord Stream 2 have been fined $100 million.
UOKiK gave Gazprom and its partners 30 days to terminate financing agreements and
"restore" competition.
"The construction of Nord Stream 2 is a clear violation of market regulations," UOKiK
head Tomasz Chróstny said in Warsaw on Wednesday, as cited by Bloomberg. Gas prices for
consumers must be "the result of fair competition, and, once Nord Stream 2 is operational,
it's likely that gas prices will increase and there'll be a risk of interruption to
supplies," he said.
Warsaw has long been opposing the expansion of the gas link directly connecting Russia with
Germany, Europe's biggest market for the fuel, arguing it would deepen Europe's dependence on
Russian energy. Meanwhile, many European nations have stressed that they want to diversify
their energy sources, and Nord Stream 2 could be one of the ways to achieve that.
In 2019, Poland's President Andrzej Duda met US President Donald Trump to discuss the
possibility of halting the implementation of the Nord Stream 2 project. Warsaw also inked
several contracts with American companies to replace Russian supplies. The intention was to
make Poland the future center for the re-export of US liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the
region, according to US Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher.
The US administration has repeatedly criticized the Nord Stream 2 project, aiming to derail
it in order to boost sales of American LNG to Europe.
The construction of the project's two pipelines, which will extend from the Russian coast to
Germany and on to other European countries through the Baltic Sea, is nearing completion. It
will have the capacity to deliver 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year, and Berlin has
insisted it will help Germany meet its growing energy demand as it phases out coal and nuclear
power.
considering cuomo was responsible for spreading the virus exponentially in the early days, he probably has had more
influence on all of our lives than the others
Story about Fauci, at least at the time was that it was so hospitals wouldn't be liable for deaths among medical
staff. But I think it was completely bad what both Cuomo and Fauci
Dr. Fauci was the trusted expert who intentionally lied to the American people and made things far worse. Cuomo is
directly responsible for why New York's response to the virus was so bad and cost many lives. Bullshit award.
I will henceforth refer to the MSM as the regime media or RM.
We reluctantly turned off Tucker last week. I felt bad about it as after watching him for
a few years my wife slowly left behind her liberal north eastern views and came around to the
right side of things. I'll thank him for that.
In 2008, Barack Obama received the names of his entire future cabinet already one month
prior to his election by CFR Senior Fellow (and Citigroup banker) Michael Froman, as a
Wikileaks email later revealed. Consequently, the key posts in Obama's cabinet were filled
almost exclusively by CFR members, as was the case in most
cabinets since World War II. To be sure, Obama's 2008 Republican opponent, the late John
McCain, was a CFR member, too. Michael Froman later negotiated the TPP and TTIP international
trade agreements, before returning to the CFR as a Distinguished Fellow.
In 2017, CFR nightmare President Donald Trump immediately canceled these trade agreements --
because he viewed them as detrimental to US domestic industry -- which allowed China to
conclude its own, recently announced RCEP free-trade area ,
encompassing 14 countries and a third of global trade. Trump also canceled other CFR
achievements, like the multinational Iran nuclear deal and the UN climate and migration
agreements, and he tried, but largely failed, to withdraw US troops from East Asia, Central
Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa, thus seriously endangering the global US empire built
over decades by the CFR and its 5000 elite members .
Unsurprisingly, most of the US media , whose owners and editors are themselves members of the CFR ,
didn't like President Trump. This was also true for most of the European media, whose owners
and editors are members of international CFR affiliates like the
Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, founded by CFR directors after the conquest of
Europe during World War II. Moreover, it was none other than the CFR which in 1996
advocated a closer cooperation between the CIA and the media, i.e. a restart of the famous
CIA Operation
Mockingbird . Historically, OSS and CIA directors since William Donovan and Allen Dulles
have always
been CFR members.
This is the case for Anthony Blinken (State), Alejandro Mayorkas (Homeland Security), Janet
Yellen (Treasury), Michele Flournoy and Jeh Johnson (candidates for Defense), Linda
Thomas-Greenfield (Ambassador to the UN), Richard Stengel (US Agency for Global Media; Stengel
famously called propaganda "a good thing"
at a 2018 CFR session), John Kerry (Special Envoy for Climate), Nelson Cunningham (candidate
for Trade), and Thomas Donilon (candidate for CIA Director).
Jake Sullivan, Biden's National Security Advisor, is not (yet) a CFR member, but Sullivan
has been a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace (a think tank "promoting active international engagement by the
United States") and a member of the US German Marshall Fund's
"Alliance For Securing Democracy" (a major promoter of the "Russiagate"
disinformation campaign to restrain the Trump presidency), both of which are run by senior
CFR members.
Most of Biden's CFR-vetted nominees
supported recent US wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen as well as the
2014 regime change in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, neoconservative Max Boot, the CFR Senior Fellow
in National Security Studies and one of the most vocal opponents of the Trump administration,
has called Biden's future cabinet "America's A-Team" .
Thus, after four years of "populism" and "isolationism", a Biden presidency will mean the
return of the Council on Foreign Relations and the continuation of a tradition of more than 70 years .
Indeed, the CFR was founded in 1921 in response to the "trauma of 1920" ,
when US President Warren Harding and the US Senate turned isolationist and renounced US global
leadership after World War I. In 2016, Donald Trump's "America First" campaign reactivated this
100 year old foreign policy trauma.
Was the 2020 presidential election "stolen", as some allege? There are certainly indications
of
significant statistical anomalies in key Democrat-run swing states. Whether these were
decisive for the election outcome may be up to courts to decide. At any rate, Joe Biden may
well be the first US President known to be involved
in international corruption before even entering office.
Why are most US and international media hardly interested in this? Well, why should
they?
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On the issue of voter fraud, the right has sullied real concerns with ballot legitimacy in
highly mismanaged black cities with Bircherist bufoonery. The last of the MAGA faithful -- Alex
Jones, Steve Bannon, Q-Anon, Mike Cernovich, Dinesh D'Souza, Nick Fuentes, Ali Alexander, One
America News, and the Zionist opportunists at Newsmax -- have been trying to cancel more
sensible right-wing populists like Tucker Carlson, Ryan Gidursky, Pedro Gonzalez and others for
expressing skepticism about some of the Trump campaign's narratives on the election.
Like him or not, Tucker is a serious political commentator that has tried and failed to
provide coherence and principles to Trumpism for the last four years. When Tucker asked Sidney
Powell for evidence regarding her claim that Castro, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro and the
Chinese Communist Party stole millions of votes from Trump in an international Marxist coup, he
was subjected to insults, boycotts and unhinged shrieking in response. "THANK YOU SEAN HANNITY
FOR HOLDING THE LINE. THANK YOU TUCKER FOR THROWING US UNDER THE BUS," wrote Nick Fuentes.
Tucker was
vindicated when Trump's team abruptly severed ties with Powell and shelved her circus act.
But that hasn't stopped online Trumpistanis from speculating that Tucker's red bracelet is a
sign that he is a secret kabbalah
practitioner or that he's been a double agent for the satanic pedophile cartel led by Tom
Hanks put in place just for this moment. For Jews concerned that Tucker has been promoting the
potent combination of nationalism and economic populism to deplorables since 2016, it is a
welcome
amusement to see him being sacrificed on the alter of Orange Man Good and traded in for a
harmless lapdog like Hannity.
30 of 31 voter fraud lawsuits filed by Team Trump have been tossed. The whole thing is
starting to look like a Birther-style publicity stunt to help Trump monetize his following
after January. The
most recent defeat , a lawsuit demanding 7,000,000 votes be invalidated in Pennsylvania,
did not provide any compelling evidence for fraud or malfeasance.
Four years ago, Bernie expressed skepticism about mass immigration while Trump's original
campaign hinted at a public health care option and a war against Wall Street. These real world
issues impact real world people, and it allowed for a cross-front alliance of ordinary citizens
against the elite. The two candidates traded disenfranchised and largely white working class
voters throughout the primary, then the general.
But now there are actors on both sides trying to drag things back to personalities,
political tribalism and inanity. The COVID issue has drawn out the petty tyrants on the left
but also the UN-world-government conspiracy theorists of the right, with actual state relief
for desperate working people suffering from the lockdown being drowned out.
For Jewish gatekeepers of the phony right like Ezra Levant , "The Great Reset"
is much more palatable and less dangerous than the real issue of the Great Replacement. Former
Never
Trumper Mark Levin has worked with Sean Hannity to scrub 2020 Trumpism of its
anti-establishment and anti-globalist soul to try and transform it into another
Tea Party style Reaganite collection point for false consciousness held together by fumes
of Trump's personality cult.
There is a silver lining. As niches suffering from the two types of TDS -- Trump Derangement
Syndrome and Trump Delusion Syndrome -- duke it out, the liberal kleptocracy is still having
trouble restoring "normalcy."
The Biden Democrats are eager to betray and start purging the Bernie wing of their party on
economic and foreign policy matters. The GOP, whose establishment has no organic support and
never will, has decided to fake it until they make it and pretend like Trump was never
born.
This forced reboot is bound to meet challenges in an era of high unemployment and social
chaos. People are sick of voting for a "lesser of two evils."
There is lots of talk on the left and right about starting new parties to challenge the Wall
Street uniparty. The Movement for
a People's Party , an endeavor that has recruited big names like Jimmy Dore and Cornell
West, is looking to establish itself and begin attacking the Democratic party from the
left.
Meanwhile, right-populists who aren't hung up on Trump are beginning to talk of an
"America First Party."
The National Justice Party, a political construct that isn't afraid to appeal to white workers
or transcend traditional ideas of left and right, is also starting to gain momentum.
In the battle of corn syrup vs soy, of stupid vs gay, we the people deserve better. The
populi in populist can be described as being part of the radical center: left on economics and
right on social issues. A white worker should not have to vote for the anti-white Democrats
just to have a shot at affordable health care, nor should a rural family have to vote for the
Paul Singer funded Zionist GOP in hopes of being treated with dignity. A grounded and united
movement that explicitly rejects both parties and can obtain what we want must arise from the
ashes of back-stabbed Trumpists and Bernie fans.
The populi in populist can be described as being part of the radical center: left on
economics and right on social issues. A white worker should not have to vote for the
anti-white Democrats just to have a shot at affordable health care, nor should a rural family
have to vote for the Paul Singer funded Zionist GOP in hopes of being treated with dignity. A
grounded and united movement that explicitly rejects both parties and can obtain what we want
must arise from the ashes of back-stabbed Trumpists and Bernie fans.
The median wage in the USA in 2019 was $34,000 / year. If Trumpstein had done even one
tiny little, teensy weensy, itsy bitsy thing for the under $34k working poor .he would have
easily retained enough votes to keep his job. Instead, his domestic policy goals centered
around taking basic health insurance away from the working poor (even during a pandemic),
while giving billions away to his wall street pals, his relatives, giant corporations, and of
course his yid sponsors. Example: Fed Ex paid zero income tax in 2017, 2018, 2019. Let's see
how long a modern society can function when the top 0.1% are worth more than the bottom
80%.
The First World is leaving the "sweet spot" of its capitalist development stage, marked by
a relatively inflated petit-bourgeois middle class, and is reentering a proletarianization
phase. Call it the reproletarianization of the First World.
You seem quite convinced that it was Tucker Carlson's version of events that was true
concerning this phone call to Sidney Powell. You know she disputes this version. Also I read
that Carlson did not make the call himself, but rather had a staffer do it.
One might be a little suspicious that perhaps a staffer put a little too much effort into
getting Ms. Powell to appear on the show, and perhaps embellished or 'interpreted' the phone
call out of concern for their job.
One might also consider it a bit petty and unprofessional to immediately report a rude
phone call on the Carlson news program, and not once but twice.
Are we to believe that Sidney Powell is the only source who has ever been rude on a phone
call with a staffer from the news media? Is it good journalism to publicly attack potential
sources because they said no the first time you asked?
In my opinion it seems a bit hard to believe that Ms. Powell had a meltdown with either
Carlson or a staffer on a phone call. She seems much more the type to just politely say
goodbye and hang up.
But let's assume that she did have a meltdown. Given the circumstances and time crunch
she's under, wouldn't a reasonable person assume she was acting badly because of stress and
she probably didn't mean it?
Carlson couldn't wait longer than the next morning before he planned to publicly shame her
for it? And in the middle of what must be, for her, the biggest and most important thing
she's ever done?
What happened to Tucker Carlson's philosophy of kindness towards one another? And do you
put any stock in the fact that so many people who watch (or watched) Tucker Carlson on a
regular basis were genuinely shocked by what he did? I know I was.
Everything about this seems very strange. If a normally reasonable person like Powell made
crazy sounding claims, why respond with such hostility? Does anybody remember the guy who
built his own rocket so he could prove the Earth was flat? All we had to do was wait.
And as for these voting machine companies having ties to Venezuela in the past, well
that's true. None other than Lou Dobbs on CNN reported this and the whole thing ended up in
congressional hearings iirc.
I have no opinion about Sidney Powell's claims. She seems respectable enough to withhold
judgement until she shows us what she's got. And if even a part of what she claims is true, I
for one will be pretty concerned.
38. Sadly, some "are attracted by Western culture, sometimes with unrealistic expectations
that expose them to grave disappointments. Unscrupulous traffickers, frequently linked to drug
cartels or arms cartels, exploit the weakness of migrants, who too often experience violence,
trafficking, psychological and physical abuse and untold sufferings on their journey".
[37] Those who emigrate "experience separation from their place of origin, and often a
cultural and religious uprooting as well. Fragmentation is also felt by the communities they
leave behind, which lose their most vigorous and enterprising elements, and by families,
especially when one or both of the parents migrates, leaving the children in the country of
origin".
[38] For this reason, "there is also a need to reaffirm the right not to emigrate, that is,
to remain in one's homeland".
[39]
39. Then too, "in some host countries, migration causes fear and alarm, often fomented and
exploited for political purposes. This can lead to a xenophobic mentality, as people close in
on themselves, and it needs to be addressed decisively".
[40] Migrants are not seen as entitled like others to participate in the life of society,
and it is forgotten that they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person. Hence they
ought to be "agents in their own redemption".
[41] No one will ever openly deny that they are human beings, yet in practice, by our
decisions and the way we treat them, we can show that we consider them less worthy, less
important, less human. For Christians, this way of thinking and acting is unacceptable, since
it sets certain political preferences above deep convictions of our faith: the inalienable
dignity of each human person regardless of origin, race or religion, and the supreme law of
fraternal love.
40. "Migrations, more than ever before, will play a pivotal role in the future of our
world".
[42] At present, however, migration is affected by the "loss of that sense of
responsibility for our brothers and sisters on which every civil society is based".
[43] Europe, for example, seriously risks taking this path. Nonetheless, "aided by its
great cultural and religious heritage, it has the means to defend the centrality of the human
person and to find the right balance between its twofold moral responsibility to protect the
rights of its citizens and to assure assistance and acceptance to migrants".
[44]
41. I realize that some people are hesitant and fearful with regard to migrants. I consider
this part of our natural instinct of self-defence. Yet it is also true that an individual and a
people are only fruitful and productive if they are able to develop a creative openness to
others. I ask everyone to move beyond those primal reactions because "there is a problem when
doubts and fears condition our way of thinking and acting to the point of making us intolerant,
closed and perhaps even – without realizing it – racist. In this way, fear deprives
us of the desire and the ability to encounter the other".
[45]
42. Oddly enough, while closed and intolerant attitudes towards others are on the rise,
distances are otherwise shrinking or disappearing to the point that the right to privacy
scarcely exists. Everything has become a kind of spectacle to be examined and inspected, and
people's lives are now under constant surveillance. Digital communication wants to bring
everything out into the open; people's lives are combed over, laid bare and bandied about,
often anonymously. Respect for others disintegrates, and even as we dismiss, ignore or keep
others distant, we can shamelessly peer into every detail of their lives.
43. Digital campaigns of hatred and destruction, for their part, are not – as some
would have us believe – a positive form of mutual support, but simply an association of
individuals united against a perceived common enemy. "Digital media can also expose people to
the risk of addiction, isolation and a gradual loss of contact with concrete reality, blocking
the development of authentic interpersonal relationships".
[46] They lack the physical gestures, facial expressions, moments of silence, body language
and even the smells, the trembling of hands, the blushes and perspiration that speak to us and
are a part of human communication. Digital relationships, which do not demand the slow and
gradual cultivation of friendships, stable interaction or the building of a consensus that
matures over time, have the appearance of sociability. Yet they do not really build community;
instead, they tend to disguise and expand the very individualism that finds expression in
xenophobia and in contempt for the vulnerable. Digital connectivity is not enough to build
bridges. It is not capable of uniting humanity.
44. Even as individuals maintain their comfortable consumerist isolation, they can choose a
form of constant and febrile bonding that encourages remarkable hostility, insults, abuse,
defamation and verbal violence destructive of others, and this with a lack of restraint that
could not exist in physical contact without tearing us all apart. Social aggression has found
unparalleled room for expansion through computers and mobile devices.
45. This has now given free rein to ideologies. Things that until a few years ago could not
be said by anyone without risking the loss of universal respect can now be said with impunity,
and in the crudest of terms, even by some political figures. Nor should we forget that "there
are huge economic interests operating in the digital world, capable of exercising forms of
control as subtle as they are invasive, creating mechanisms for the manipulation of consciences
and of the democratic process. The way many platforms work often ends up favouring encounter
between persons who think alike, shielding them from debate. These closed circuits facilitate
the spread of fake news and false information, fomenting prejudice and hate".
[47]
46. We should also recognize that destructive forms of fanaticism are at times found among
religious believers, including Christians; they too "can be caught up in networks of verbal
violence through the internet and the various forums of digital communication. Even in Catholic
media, limits can be overstepped, defamation and slander can become commonplace, and all
ethical standards and respect for the good name of others can be abandoned".
[48] How can this contribute to the fraternity that our common Father asks of us?
47. True wisdom demands an encounter with reality. Today, however, everything can be
created, disguised and altered. A direct encounter even with the fringes of reality can thus
prove intolerable. A mechanism of selection then comes into play, whereby I can immediately
separate likes from dislikes, what I consider attractive from what I deem distasteful. In the
same way, we can choose the people with whom we wish to share our world. Persons or situations
we find unpleasant or disagreeable are simply deleted in today's virtual networks; a virtual
circle is then created, isolating us from the real world in which we are living.
48. The ability to sit down and listen to others, typical of interpersonal encounters, is
paradigmatic of the welcoming attitude shown by those who transcend narcissism and accept
others, caring for them and welcoming them into their lives. Yet "today's world is largely a
deaf world At times, the frantic pace of the modern world prevents us from listening
attentively to what another person is saying. Halfway through, we interrupt him and want to
contradict what he has not even finished saying. We must not lose our ability to listen". Saint
Francis "heard the voice of God, he heard the voice of the poor, he heard the voice of the
infirm and he heard the voice of nature. He made of them a way of life. My desire is that the
seed that Saint Francis planted may grow in the hearts of many".
[49]
49. As silence and careful listening disappear, replaced by a frenzy of texting, this basic
structure of sage human communication is at risk. A new lifestyle is emerging, where we create
only what we want and exclude all that we cannot control or know instantly and superficially.
This process, by its intrinsic logic, blocks the kind of serene reflection that could lead us
to a shared wisdom.
50. Together, we can seek the truth in dialogue, in relaxed conversation or in passionate
debate. To do so calls for perseverance; it entails moments of silence and suffering, yet it
can patiently embrace the broader experience of individuals and peoples. The flood of
information at our fingertips does not make for greater wisdom. Wisdom is not born of quick
searches on the internet nor is it a mass of unverified data. That is not the way to mature in
the encounter with truth. Conversations revolve only around the latest data; they become merely
horizontal and cumulative. We fail to keep our attention focused, to penetrate to the heart of
matters, and to recognize what is essential to give meaning to our lives. Freedom thus becomes
an illusion that we are peddled, easily confused with the ability to navigate the internet. The
process of building fraternity, be it local or universal, can only be undertaken by spirits
that are free and open to authentic encounters.
51. Certain economically prosperous countries tend to be proposed as cultural models for
less developed countries; instead, each of those countries should be helped to grow in its own
distinct way and to develop its capacity for innovation while respecting the values of its
proper culture. A shallow and pathetic desire to imitate others leads to copying and consuming
in place of creating, and fosters low national self-esteem. In the affluent sectors of many
poor countries, and at times in those who have recently emerged from poverty, there is a
resistance to native ways of thinking and acting, and a tendency to look down on one's own
cultural identity, as if it were the sole cause of every ill.
52. Destroying self-esteem is an easy way to dominate others. Behind these trends that tend
to level our world, there flourish powerful interests that take advantage of such low
self-esteem, while attempting, through the media and networks, to create a new culture in the
service of the elite. This plays into the opportunism of financial speculators and raiders, and
the poor always end up the losers. Then too, ignoring the culture of their people has led to
the inability of many political leaders to devise an effective development plan that could be
freely accepted and sustained over time.
53. We forget that "there is no worse form of alienation than to feel uprooted, belonging to
no one. A land will be fruitful, and its people bear fruit and give birth to the future, only
to the extent that it can foster a sense of belonging among its members, create bonds of
integration between generations and different communities, and avoid all that makes us
insensitive to others and leads to further alienation".
[50]
Back in 2013 a group of Apple employees decided
to sue the global behemoth. Every day, after they were clocking out, they were required to
go through a corporate screening where their personal belongings were examined. It was a
process required and administered by Apple. But Apple did not want to pay its employees for the
time it had required them to spend. It could be anywhere from 40 to 80 hours a year that an
employee spent going through that process. What made Apple so confident in brazenly
nickel-and-diming its geniuses?
Jeff Rubin, author of The
Expendables: How the Middle Class got Screwed by Globalization , has an answer to the
above question that is easily deduced from the subtitle of his book. The socio-economic
arrangements produced by globalization have made labor the most flexible and plentiful resource
in the economic process. The pressure on the middle class, and all that falls below it, has
been so persistent and powerful, that now " only 37
percent of Americans believe their children will be better off financially than they
themselves are. Only 24 percent in Canada or Australia feel the same. And in France, that
figure dips to only 9 percent." And "[i]n the mid-1980s it would have taken a typical
middle-income family with two children less than seven years of income to save up to buy a
home; it now takes more than ten years. At the same time, housing expenditures that accounted
for a quarter of most middle-class household incomes in the 1990s now account
for a third ."
The story of globalization is engraved in the " shuttered
factories across North America, the boarded-up main streets, the empty union halls." Rubin
does admit that there are benefits accrued from globalization, billions have been lifted up out
of poverty in what was previously known as the third world, wealth has been created, certain
efficiencies have been achieved. The question for someone in the western world is how much more
of a price he's willing to pay to keep the whole thing going on, especially as we have entered
a phase of diminishing returns for almost all involved.
As Joel Kotkin has written, "[e]ven in Asia, there are signs of social collapse. According
to a recent survey by the
Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, half of all Korean households have experienced
some form of family crisis, many involving debt, job loss, or issues relating to child or elder
care." And "[i]n "classless" China, a massive class of migrant workers -- over 280 million --
inhabit a netherworld of substandard housing, unsteady work, and miserable environmental
conditions, all after leaving their offspring behind in villages. These new serfs vastly
outnumber the Westernized, highly educated Chinese whom most
Westerners encounter. " "Rather than replicating the middle-class growth of
post–World War II America and Europe, notes researcher Nan Chen, 'China appears to have
skipped that stage altogether and headed straight for a model of extraordinary productivity but
disproportionately
distributed wealth like the contemporary United States.'"
Although Rubin concedes to the globalist side higher GDP growth, even that does not seem to
be so true for the western world in the last couple decades. Per Nicholas Eberstadt, in "Our
Miserable 21st Century," "[b]etween late 2000 and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged
less
than 1.5 percent per annum." "With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years
2000–2016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20
percent higher than it is today."
Stagnation seems to be a more apt characterization of the situation we are in. Fredrik
Erixon in his superb The Innovation
Illusion , argues that "[p]roductivity growth is going south, and has been doing so
for several decades." "Between 1995 and 2009, Europe's labor productivity grew by just 1
percent annually." Noting that "[t]he four factors that have made Western capitalism dull and
hidebound are gray capital, corporate managerialism, globalization, and complex
regulation."
https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.426.0_en.html#goog_1789765618 Ad ends in
15s
Contrary to popular belief, globalization has functioned as a substitute for innovation and
growth. With globalization on the march, the western ruling class could continue to indulge in
its most preferred activities, regulation and taxation, in an environment where both of these
political addictions appeared sustainable. Non-western elites could perpetuate their
authoritarian regimes, garnering growth and legitimacy, from the access to the western markets.
Their copy-and-paste method of "innovation" from western firms would fit well with an
indigenous business class composed of mostly insiders and ex-regime apparatchiks.
There are plenty of criticisms that can be laid at the feet of globalization. The issue with
Rubin's book is that is does not advance very much beyond some timeworn condemnations of it.
One gets the sense that the value of this book is merely in its audacity to question the
conventional wisdom on the issue at hand. Rubin, who is somewhat sympathetic to Donald Trump,
seems to be much closer to someone like Bernie Sanders, especially an earlier version of
Sanders that dared to talk about the debilitating effects of immigration on the working
class.
Like Sanders, Rubin starts to get blurry as he goes from the condemnation phase to the
programmatic offers available. What exactly would be his tariffs policy, how far he would go?
What would be the tradeoffs of this policy? Where we could demarcate a reasonable fair
environment for the worker and industry and where we would start to create another type of a
stagnation trap for the whole economy? All these would be important questions for Rubin to
grapple with and would give to his criticisms more gravitas.
It would have also been of value if he had dealt more deeply with the policies of the Trump
administration. On the one hand, the Trump administration cracked down on illegal and legal
immigration. It also started to use tariffs and other trade measures as a way to boost industry
and employment. On the other hand, it reduced personal and corporate taxes and it deregulated
to the utmost degree possible. It was a kind of 'walled' laisser-faire that seemed to work
until Covid-19 hit. Real household income in the U.S.
increased $4,379 in 2019 over 2018. It was "more income growth in one year than in the 8
years of Obama-Biden." And during Trump's time, the lowest paid workers started not to just be
making gains, but making gains faster than the wealthy. "Low-wage workers are getting bigger
raises than bosses" ran a CBS News
headline .
Rubin seems to view tax cuts and deregulation as another giveaway to large corporations. But
these large corporations are just fine with high taxation, since they have a choice as to when
and where they get taxed. Regulation is also more of a tool than a burden for them. It's a very
expedient means for eliminating competitors and competition, a useful barrier to entry for any
upstart innovator that would upend the industry they are in. Besides, if high taxation and
regulation were a kind of antidote to globalization, then France would be in a much better
shape than it appears to be. But France seems to be doing worse than anybody else. In the
aforementioned poll about if their "children will be better off financially than they
themselves are" France was at the bottom in the group of countries that Rubin cited. The recent
events with the yellow-vests movement indicate a very deep dissatisfaction and pessimism of its
middle and working class.
Moreover, there does not seem to be much hostility or even much contention between
government bureaucracies and the upper echelons of the corporate world. Something that Rubin's
politics and economics would necessitate. And cultural and political like-mindedness between
government bureaucracies and the managerial class of large corporations is not just limited to
the mutual embrace of woke politics. It seems that there is a cross pollination of a much
broader set of ideas and habits between bureaucrats and the managerial class. For instance,
Erixon notes that "[c]orporate
managers shy away from uncertainty but turn companies into bureaucratic entities free from
entrepreneurial habits. They strive to make capitalism predictable." Striving for
predictability is a very bureaucratic state of mind.
In Rubin's book, missed trends like that make his perspective to feel a bit dated. There is
still valuable information in The Expendables . Rubin does know a lot about
international trade deals. For instance, a point that is often ignored in the press about
international trade agreements is that "[i]f you're designated a "developing" country, you get
to protect your own industries with tariffs that are a multiple of those that developed
economies are allowed to use to protect their workers." A rule that China exploits to the
utmost.
Meanwhile, Apple, after its apparent lawsuit loss on the case with its employees in
California, now seems committed to another fight with the expendables of another locale. The
Washington Post reported that "Apple
lobbyists are trying to weaken a bill aimed at preventing forced labor in China, according to
two congressional staffers familiar with the matter, highlighting the clash between its
business imperatives and its official stance on human rights." "The bill aims to end the use of
forced Uighur labor in the Xinjiang region of China ." The war against the expendables never
ends.
Napoleon Linarthatos is a writer based in New York.
Earlier this year, our friend and colleague
Stephen Cohen passed away. His contributions to the field of Russian, East European, and
Eurasian Studies will be felt for years to come. Professor Cohen was a historian, but his
legacy extends far beyond his scholarly work. Every year, the Stephen Cohen
Fellowship -- established on Professor Cohen's initiative and supported by Katrina vanden Heuvel
and the Kat Foundation -- funds the graduate education for master's students in the Department
of Russian & Slavic Studies at NYU. Professor Cohen has also helped enable doctoral
students to conduct dissertation research in Russia through the Cohen-Tucker Fellowship .
As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving in the United States, we give thanks to Stephen
Cohen for not only his work in the REEES field but for the generosity he, Katrina vanden
Heuvel, and the Kat Foundation have shown to budding Russia scholars. We honor him today by
publishing the testimonials of some of current and former students who have benefitted from
Cohen Fellowships.
Natasha Bluth (Cohen Fellowship)
The Stephen Cohen Fellowship enabled me to continue my studies of the former Soviet Union,
not only easing the financial burden of graduate school, but also providing the opportunity to
merge journalistic training with area studies, engage with a wide range of scholars and
regional specialists, and conduct field research in Ukraine. The support and encouragement
Stephen Cohen offered at our annual fellowship alumni dinners also inspired me to pursue a PhD
in sociology in order to explore post-Soviet civil society, nationalism, and gender from a
social-scientific perspective.
Michael Coates (Cohen-Tucker Fellowship)
During the 2018-19 academic year, I held a Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Fellowship, which I
used to fund over a year of archival research in Russia on the history of the Great Soviet
Encyclopedia. The fellowship allowed me to visit more than a dozen archives in Moscow and Saint
Petersburg, and to copy thousands of pages of original documents. Had I not been able to carry
out this archival work, I would not have been able to write my dissertation. The travel that
the Fellowship enabled was also personally significant to me, because I had never been to
Russia before I arrived in Moscow for my research year, even though I had already been studying
the country and its language for several years. It is one thing to read books about a
particular place, but actually experiencing life there first-hand is quite another, and has
been essential to the development of my understanding of the region. I am extremely grateful to
Prof. Cohen and Ms. vanden Heuvel for their generosity in funding the next generation of Russia
specialists.
Stephen F. Cohen performed a great service in the last four years as he relentlessly
refuted the great Russiagate hoax which not only distorted our political life but seriously
wounded US-Russia relations for years to come. That hoax is a threat to world peace and Prof.
Cohen from the very first saw through it. Both in his writings for The Nation and his near
weekly conversations with John Batchelor of ABC radio rebutted it clearly, eloquently and at
times with good humor. How very much he is missed.
"... Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires. ..."
"... Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests. ..."
"... Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media." ..."
"... This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-funded RT America ..."
"... Voice of America ..."
"... World Socialist Web Site, ..."
"... We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power. ..."
"... In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance. ..."
40
Comments on Chris Hedges: The Ruling Elite's War on Truth American political leaders
display a widening disconnect from reality intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of
power by global corporations and billionaires. By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
Joe Biden's victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party's longstanding charge that
Russia was hijacking and compromising US elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party
leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is
strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.
But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New
York Time s , CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent
four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again
haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin's
Manchurian candidate?
Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their
Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely,
Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling
elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global
corporations and billionaires.
... ... ...
The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of
power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep
state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings no
one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the
unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process,
the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the
fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matters or the Green
Party.
"The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the
public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of
us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal,
and mismanagement," Matt Taibbi writes.
These fictional narratives are dangerous. They erode the credibility of democratic
institutions and electoral politics. They posit that news and facts are no longer true or
false. Information is accepted or discarded based on whether it hurts or promotes one faction
over another. While outlets such as Fox News have always existed as an arm of the Republican
Party, this partisanship has now infected nearly all news organizations, including publications
such as The New York Times and The Washington Post , along with the major tech
platforms that disseminate information and news. A fragmented public with no common narrative
believes whatever it wants to believe.
... ... ...
The flagrant partisanship and discrediting of truth across the political spectrum are
swiftly fueling the rise of an authoritarian state. The credibility of democratic institutions
and electoral politics, already deeply corrupted by PACs, the electoral college, lobbyists, the
disenfranchisement of third-party candidates, gerrymandering and voter suppression, is being
eviscerated.
Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google
CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a
torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy
infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done
because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their
interests.
The press, meanwhile, has largely given up on journalism. It has retreated into competing
echo chambers that only speak to true believers. This catering exclusively to one demographic,
which it sets against another demographic, is commercially profitable. But it also guarantees
the balkanization of the United States and edges us closer and closer to fratricide.
When Trump leaves the White House millions of his enraged supports, hermetically sealed
inside hyperventilating media platforms that feed back to them their rage and hate, will see
the vote as fraudulent, the political system as rigged, and the establishment press as
propaganda. They will target, I fear, through violence, the Democratic Party politicians,
mainstream media outlets and those they demonize as conspiratorial members of the deep state,
such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for this disintegration as
Trump and the Republican Party.
The election of Biden is also very bad news for journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glen Ford,
Margaret Kimberley, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair or Robert Scheer who refuse to be
courtiers to the ruling elites. Journalists that do not spew the approved narrative of the
right-wing, or, alternatively, the approved narrative of the Democratic Party, have a
credibility the ruling elite fears.
The worse things get – and they will get worse as the pandemic leaves hundreds of
thousands dead and thrusts millions of Americans into severe economic distress –the more
those who seek to hold the ruling elites, and in particular the Democratic Party, accountable
will be targeted and censored in ways familiar to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, now in a London
prison and facing possible extradition to the United States and life imprisonment.
Barack Obama's assault on civil liberties, which included the repeated misuse of the
Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, the passage of Section 1021 of the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA) to permit the military to act as a domestic police force and the
ordering of the assassination of U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists in Yemen, was far worse
than those of George W. Bush. Biden's assault on civil liberties, I suspect, will surpass those
of the Obama administration.
The censorship was heavy handed during the campaign. Digital media platforms, including
Google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, along with the establishment press worked shamelessly as
propaganda arms for the Biden campaign. They were determined not to make the "mistake" they
made in 2016 when they reported on the damaging emails, released by WikiLeaks, from Hillary
Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. Although the emails were genuine, papers such as The
New York Times routinely refer to the Podesta emails as "disinformation." This, no doubt,
pleases its readership, 91 percent of whom identify as Democrats according to the Pew Research
Center. But it is another example of journalistic malfeasance.
Following the election of Trump, the media outlets that cater to a Democratic Party
readership made amends. The New York Times was one of the principal platforms that amplified
Russiagate conspiracies, most of which turned out to be false. At the same time, the paper
largely ignored the plight of the disposed working class that supported Trump. When the
Russiagate story collapsed, the paper pivoted to focus on race, embodied in the 1619 Project.
The root cause of social disintegration -- the neoliberal order, austerity and
deindustrialization -- was ignored since naming it would alienate the paper's corporate
advertisers and the elites on whom the paper depends for access.
Once the 2020 election started, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets censored and
discredited information that could hurt Biden, including a tape of Joe Biden speaking with
former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which appears to be authentic. They gave
credibility to any rumor, however spurious, which was unfavorable to Trump. Twitter and
Facebook blocked access to a New York Post story about the emails allegedly found on Hunter
Biden's discarded laptop.
Twitter locked the New York Post out of its own account for over a week. Glenn Greenwald,
whose article on Hunter Biden was censored by his editors at The Intercept, which he helped
found, resigned. He released the email exchanges with his editors over his article. Ignoring
the textual evidence of censorship, editors and writers at The Intercept engaged in a public
campaign of character assassination against Greenwald. This sordid behavior by self-identified
progressive journalists is a page out of the Trump playbook and a sad commentary on the
collapse of journalistic integrity.
The censorship and manipulation of information was honed and perfected against WikiLeaks.
When WikiLeaks tries to release information, it is hit with botnets or distributed denial of
service attacks. Malware attacks WikiLeaks' domain and website. The WikiLeaks site is
routinely shut down or unable to serve its content to its readers. Attempts by WikiLeaks to
hold press conferences see the audio distorted and the visual images corrupted. Links to
WikiLeaks events are delayed or cut. Algorithms block the dissemination of WikiLeaks content.
Hosting services, including Amazon, removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Julian Assange, after
releasing the Iraqi war logs, saw his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. WikiLeaks' PayPal
accounts were disabled to cut off donations. The Freedom of the Press Foundation in December
2017 closed down the anonymous funding channel to WikiLeaks which was set up to protect the
anonymity of donors. A well-orchestrated smear campaign against Assange was amplified and given
credibility by the mass media and filmmakers such as Alex Gibney. Assange and WikiLeaks were
first. We are next.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian
disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around,
the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to
spread their propaganda in the mainstream media."
This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign
without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show
on Russia-funded RT America is the same reason Vaclav Havel could only be heard on the
US-funded Voice of America during the communist control of Czechoslovakia. I did not
choose to leave the mainstream media. I was pushed out. And once anyone is pushed out, the
ruling elite is relentless about discrediting the few platforms left willing to give them, and
the issues they raise, a hearing.
"If the problem is 'American citizens' being cultivated as 'assets' trying to put
'interference' in the mainstream media, the logical next step is to start asking Internet
platforms to shut down accounts belonging to any American journalist with the temerity to
report material leaked by foreigners (the wrong foreigners, of course – it will continue
to be okay to report things like the 'black ledger')," writes Taibbi , who has done some of the best reporting on
the emerging censorship. "From Fox or the Daily Caller on the right
, to left-leaning outlets like Consortium or the World Socialist Web
Site, to writers like me even – we're all now clearly in range of new speech
restrictions, even if we stick to long-ago-established factual standards."
Taibbi argues that the precedent for overt censorship took place when the major digital
platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, YouTube – in a coordinated move
blacklisted the right-wing talk show host Alex Jones.
"Liberal America cheered," Taibbi told me when I interviewed him for my show, " On Contact ":
They said 'Well this is a noxious figure. This is a great thing. Finally, someone's taking
action.' What they didn't realize is that we were trading an old system of speech regulation
for a new one without any public discussion. You and I were raised in a system where you got
punished for speech if you committed libel or slander or if there was imminent incitement to
lawless action, right? That was the standard that the Supreme Court set, but that was done
through litigation. There was an open process where you had a chance to rebut charges. That
is all gone now.
Now, basically there's a handful of these tech distribution platforms that control how
people get their media.
They've been pressured by the Senate, which has called all of their CEOs in, and basically
ordered them, 'We need you to come up with a plan to prevent the sowing of discord and
spreading of misinformation.' This has finally come into fruition. You see a major reputable
news organization like the New York Post -- with a 200-year history -- locked out of its own
Twitter account.
The story [Hunter Biden's emails] has not been disproven. It's not disinformation or
misinformation. It's been suppressed as it would be suppressed in a Third World country. It's
a remarkable historic moment. The danger is that we end up with a one-party informational
system. There's going to be approved dialogue and unapproved dialogue that you can only get
through certain fringe avenues. That's the problem. We let these companies get this
monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power.
In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat
documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will
endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the
powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a
mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a
chance.
Chris Hedges Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who
was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years forThe New York Times,where he
served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously
worked overseas forThe Dallas Morning News,The Christian Science
Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America showOn Contact.paul eastonNOVEMBER
23, 2020 AT 10:28 AM
It seems like the masters are just as deluded as the slaves. But the situation is
unsustainable. When many millions of slaves become homeless and hungry that reality will become
unavoidable. Who will they blame? Will they attack one another or will they revolt against the
system? Soon we will see. Carolyn L ZarembaNOVEMBER
24, 2020 AT 10:30 AM
I share only alternative media since I don't trust "mainstream" media one iota. I post
articles from the World Socialist Web Site, Consortium News, the Grayzone, Caitlin Johnstone
and others all the time. I am a socialist. I was only banned from posting on FB once, for
criticizing Israel. No surprise there. But I suspect FB of shadow banning, i.e., making it look
like you've posted an article but making it invisible to others in their news feeds. I first
learned of this practice from Craig Murray, another whose articles I post regularly. paul
eastonNOVEMBER
25, 2020 AT 1:35 AM
That is a chilling thought. I was shadow banned by medium.com a few years ago. It appeared
to me that my posts and comments went in, but no one else could see them. At least with them I
could tell something was wrong because I had regular conversations with some people. With FB I
don't know if you could ever be sure. R ZwarichNOVEMBER
25, 2020 AT 5:37 AM
Mr. Easton is indeed correct. It is VERY chilling, especially if people would imagine what
THEY would do, if they had our Enemy's morally depraved motivations, and if they had the
control our Enemy has over ALL our communications switches.
There are three basic types of mass communications. One to many. Many to one. And many to
many.
The Enemy has complete access to 'one to many' communications, and complete control over
anyone's else's access to same. Many to one communications are ineffective for intrinsic
reasons. Many to many communications offer myriad methods of cunningly creative control.
If we send out group emails, for example, in simple old-fashioned list-serves, they who
control the switches could easily 'filter', to determine who among addressees gets any message,
and who doesn't.
I used to write comments in the Boston Globe, the wholly owned plaything of a VERY weird old
Billionaire and his proud and beautiful young trophy wife. (Less than half his age, of course).
At first I thought the Globe NEVER censored. I could write anything, and it would post. Ahh but
then I learned that the Globe is a HEAVY handed censor, but was clever enough to put a 'cookie'
in your browser folder to tell their server to let you see your own comments, so you would not
even know that no one else could see them. It was 'stealth censorship'.
We should try to remember that these people are morally depraved, in their constant
paroxysms of raw Greed and raw Lust. No force exists any longer in our nation to restrain them.
Anything we can 'see' that they CAN do, we can pretty much figure they already DO do, or else
sooner or later will. Carol ShapiroNOVEMBER
23, 2020 AT 1:44 PM
While I don't agree with you, Chris Hedges, all the time, I believe you are our one. true.
journalist. Thankful for your honesty. Insight. Huge intellect. Global experience. I am an
"unenrolled" voter -- an extremely disillusioned former Bernie Sanders supporter. Truly, I feel
like he would have been our closest attempt to achieving a real "citizen government". What a
laughable term that is these days. Bernie never would have had a chance running as a Democrat
– absurd. He should have walked out of that convention four years ago and taken his
supporters with him. Oh wait- you said that. NeverNOVEMBER
23, 2020 AT 2:59 PM
Don't forget that the selective coverage by the NY Times in this campaign didn't start when
Biden became the nominee. Up to that time, the Times ran one or two articles on Sanders it
seems. Whatever the number, it was miniscule. They almost completely ignored one of the most
significant campaigns in modern history, thus helping to ensure it died on the vine. And when
they did cover it one or two times, it was always negative.
US liberals more fascist than conservatives–long observed by historians/social
philosophers
"amerikans do not converse as Tocqueville wrote, amerikans entertain each other. amerikans do
not exchange ideas, they exchange images. the problem w amerikans is not Orwellian–it is
huxleyan: amerikans love their oppression: Neil Postman Stephen MorrellNOVEMBER
24, 2020 AT 1:18 AM
Glenn Greenwald's points need stressing: (i) some of the most vociferous proponents of
online censorship are mainstream and 'alternative' 'journalists' who on repeated occasions have
egged on the carriers to shut sites, pages, accounts or postings; (ii) these 'journalists'
aren't just serving the narrowest band of oligarchic media empires in history, but also are
ivy-league bourgeois brats with no interest at all in exposing the injustices or malfeasance of
bourgeois society, unlike many journalists of the past; and (iii) that it's not in the
immediate material interests of the carriers to conduct the censorship, especially in the
longterm, since it consumes resources and lowers traffic and profits. They'd much rather the
government do it and for them to be compensated at taxpayer expense.
To avoid future potential government antitrust measures or nationalisation (heaven forbid!),
Zuckerberg and his ilk have been censoring in heavyhanded and hamfisted ways that aren't so
'autonomous' but for the moment at least can be traced along the usual Democrat-controlled
thinktank and CIA/FBI lines, which of course also are beyond public scrutiny. Despite the
prospects for freedom of reach (and reach is what it's really about) apparently growing dimmer
with each senate committee appearance by the carrier oligarchs, ways and means will be found to
circumvent their draconian measures. While alternative non-censoring platforms have yet to gain
significant traction, it likely won't take much for one to catch on, perhaps sparked by an
outrageous event of suppression, that turns Facebook, Twitter, etc, into museum pieces. One
might imagine, for instance, Wikileaks-style YouTube, Facebook, Twitter equivalents that act as
true carriers, purely machine-based and devoid of human interference, that precludes them
becoming the 'moral guardians' that Twitter, Facebook etc, are quickly metamorphising into.
As increasing swathes of the population appear not to be aligning within the bourgeoisie's
preset ideological 'tribal' boundaries, there's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the rulers in
dread of the truth getting out and spreading uncontrollably. Their tailored counter-narratives
simply are too enfeebled and slight to square with the hard reality that's hitting everyone,
from the most educated and brainwashed to the least. That ivy-league stenographers are being
pressed into the service of censorship gives some indication of the desperation of the rulers.
We all know, as do they but can never admit it publicly, that censorship and repression are
frank admissions that they've lost all 'arguments' for their very existence.
To an extent, Trump has been responsible for letting the genie out of the bottle, as the
first president probably since before Andrew Jackson to have failed, repeatedly, to put
lipstick on the racist, capitalist imperial pig. The efforts by the ruling class at censorship
and naked suppression of freedom of reach and of access to sources of truthful information will
only increase in desperation as their myth-making narratives become ever more unable to
rationalise a crisis that's they're beginning to see as intractable and endangering their
rule.
Ms. Powell did not have much of a reputation in conservative legal circles until last year
when she took on the case of Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump's first national security adviser,
who had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. but later sought to withdraw his plea. The case
became something of a cause célèbre among many Trump loyalists, who have long
insisted that the president and his allies were the target of nefarious "deep state" law
enforcement and intelligence officials.
Ms. Powell, a native North Carolinian who began her legal career as an assistant federal
prosecutor in Texas, certainly believed that. And through her aggressive defense of Mr. Flynn
-- she often used incendiary rhetoric, accusing the F.B.I. of committing "atrocities" against
her client -- she became an admired figure on the right and a frequent guest on conservative
radio and television programs.
... ... ...
In a statement to The New York Times earlier this year, Ms. Powell said she had long
considered "prosecutorial misconduct and overreach" a problem. Conspiracies within the
American government have been a preoccupation of hers for some time: In 2014 she
self-published a book that purports to be a seminal work in "exposing 'the Deep State.'"
The book arose from her work in private practice, where she spent years representing
defendants in the Enron financial scandal, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen and
James A. Brown, a former executive at Merrill Lynch. During that time she began to impugn the
motives of one of the federal prosecutors on the case, Andrew Weissmann, who went on to be a
member of the special counsel team under Robert S. Mueller III, who led the investigation
into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.
... ... ...
In an interview last week on the top-rated "Rush Limbaugh Show" -- in which she spoke for
nearly 20 minutes and faced no skepticism from the guest host, Mark Steyn -- Ms. Powell
claimed that the voting machines in question had been designed to rig elections for the
former ruler of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013. They were "so hackable a
15-year-old could do it," she said. And she cited unnamed "math experts" she had supposedly
consulted who told her how an algorithm added votes for President Trump to Joseph R. Biden
Jr.'s totals.
In an interview the day before on Fox Business, Ms. Powell also said the conspiracy
involved "dead people" who voted "in massive numbers" -- again offering no proof -- and
described how fraudulent paper ballots were also part of the scheme.
Speaking early last week to the right-wing radio host Mark Levin, who has the
fourth-largest audience in talk radio, Ms. Powell said she had obtained an affidavit from
someone purportedly present when the scheme was hatched by pro-Chávez forces in
Venezuela to rig his elections.
Because of her involvement in the Flynn case, the pro-Trump media often presented her as
an expert with unimpeachable credentials.
"Sidney Powell is no joke," declared one Breitbart article published last week, which
mentioned her early career as a federal prosecutor and her work for Mr. Flynn. Mr. Limbaugh,
too, told his audience last week that he seriously doubts she would be putting her
credibility on the line if she hadn't uncovered serious wrongdoing.
Other Trump allies were less convinced that her claims should be taken seriously. Tucker
Carlson of Fox News said last week that when he pressed Ms. Powell, she failed to produce any
evidence to support the elaborate conspiracy she purported to have uncovered. His dissent was
not appreciated by the president's defenders, or by Ms. Powell, who said Mr. Carlson had been
"very insulting, demanding and rude" to her.
Despite initial praise from the president, who announced less than two weeks ago that she
had been added to his team of "wonderful lawyers," it was never clear during her brief time
with the campaign what her job was supposed to be. Her efforts on behalf of the Trump
campaign appeared to be largely limited to public relations She has defended the president
and attacked the integrity of the vote solely on Twitter, on television and at news
conferences, acting more as a publicity agent than a lawyer.
She has said she plans to file a suit in Georgia but hasn't yet. It is unclear whether
that work will continue now that the Trump campaign has cut her loose.
Jeremy W. Peters covers national politics. His other assignments in his decade at
The Times have included covering the financial markets, the media, New York politics and two
presidential campaigns. He is also an MSNBC contributor.
"... "No crisis is more serious for our Money Power than an attempt by a head of government to assume personal control of intelligence and operations or to by-pass existing agencies by setting up parallel ones." ..."
"... Perhaps the most accurate overview of our intelligence community can be achieved by visualizing it as a "nationalized secret society." Our predecessors, in their struggle against the old order of kings and princes, had to finance secret societies such as the Illuminati, Masons, German Union, etc. out of their own pockets. ..."
"... At great expense and risk such secret societies were able to infiltrate the major governmental and private institutions of the nations that our noble predecessors targeted for take over by the Money Power. Such bureaucratic takeovers are expensive and time consuming. They can be considered complete only when promotions, raises, and advancements are no longer based on objective service to the stated organizational objectives, but are in the hands of the infiltrating group and its secret goals. ..."
"... By appealing to "national security" we are able to finance and erect secret societies of a colossal scope, far beyond the wildest dreams of our path breaking predecessors. Besides the benefits of public financing reaped by these "nationalized secret societies," we obtain a decisive advantage from the fact that these our "spook" operations are sanctioned by law! ..."
"... Maintaining discipline, loyalty, and secrecy is no longer solely a matter of propaganda, blackmail, patronage, and intimidation. Although these remain important tools, especially in emergency cases, ordinary discipline among initiates (now called agents) can be encouraged by appealing to patriotism and can be enforced in courts of law by prosecuting "national security violations." ..."
"No crisis is more serious for our Money Power than an attempt by a head of
government to assume personal control of intelligence and operations or to by-pass existing
agencies by setting up parallel ones."
9. PROFESSOR Y. ON COVERT OPERATIONS AND INTELLIGENCE ~
In our fully developed state-capitalist systems we have found absolute control of
governmental intelligence gathering and covert operations to be vital.
Besides providing a valuable tool in our struggle with rival dynasties, such control is now
an integral and necessary part of our day-to-day operations. Large intelligence communities are
inevitable, given the system of all encompassing governments which we have imposed upon the
world during our ascent to power. Our power would be short-lived indeed if the pervasive
influence and power of these iron-disciplined intelligence agencies fell into the hands of mere
politicians, especially those beyond our control.
We do not allow intelligence agencies to pursue the "national interest," the way the public
conceives "spies" to operate. Politicians cannot be permitted to divert the power and influence
of our intelligence community from the esoteric requirements of our Money Power to petty
political struggles.
Neither nationalistic aspirations of races and peoples nor ideological visions of
intellectuals for humanity can be allowed to pervert intelligence and covert operations. Our
rationalizations, both within the intelligence community and to the public at large, must be
diverse and flexible, but the intelligence community must further without exception the
inexorable goals we have set for humanity.
No crisis is more serious for our Money Power than an attempt by a head of government to
assume personal control of intelligence and operations or to by-pass existing agencies by
setting up parallel ones. Such intrusions must be met decisively. Although a contrived scandal
to remove the offending politician from office is the first line of defense, we dare not shrink
from assassination when necessary.
Perhaps the most accurate overview of our intelligence community can be achieved by
visualizing it as a "nationalized secret society." Our predecessors, in their struggle against
the old order of kings and princes, had to finance secret societies such as the Illuminati,
Masons, German Union, etc. out of their own pockets.
At great expense and risk such secret societies were able to infiltrate the major
governmental and private institutions of the nations that our noble predecessors targeted for
take over by the Money Power. Such bureaucratic takeovers are expensive and time consuming.
They can be considered complete only when promotions, raises, and advancements are no longer
based on objective service to the stated organizational objectives, but are in the hands of the
infiltrating group and its secret goals.
How much easier it is for us, the inheritors of a fully developed state-capitalist system!
By appealing to "national security" we are able to finance and erect secret societies of a
colossal scope, far beyond the wildest dreams of our path breaking predecessors. Besides the
benefits of public financing reaped by these "nationalized secret societies," we obtain a
decisive advantage from the fact that these our "spook" operations are sanctioned by
law!
Maintaining discipline, loyalty, and secrecy is no longer solely a matter of propaganda,
blackmail, patronage, and intimidation. Although these remain important tools, especially in
emergency cases, ordinary discipline among initiates (now called agents) can be encouraged by
appealing to patriotism and can be enforced in courts of law by prosecuting "national security
violations."
As massive as our intelligence community has become in itself, we still operate strictly on
the finance capitalist principle of leverage. Just as a rational finance capitalist never owns
more stock in a corporation than the bare minimum required for control, intelligence operatives
are placed only in as many key positions as are required to control the target organizations.
Our goal, after all, is agent control of all significant organizations, not intelligence
community member ship for the entire population.
The organizational pattern of baffling "circles within circles," characteristic of classical
secret societies, is retained and refined by our intelligence community. That "one hand not
know what the other is doing" is essential to the success of our operations. In most cases, we
do not allow the operatives themselves to know the ultimate, and when possible, even the
short-range objectives of their assignments.
They operate under "covers" that disguise our goals not only from the public and target
groups, but from the agents themselves. For instance, many agents operating under "left cover"
are led to believe that the agency, or at least their department, is secretly, but sincerely
motivated by socialistic ideology. Thus, they assume that the intelligence agency's ultimate
goal is to guide left-wing groups in "productive" directions, even though they cannot always
see how their own assignment fits into those assumed goals.
Other "left-cover" agents, those with right-wing predilections, are encouraged to believe
the agency is simply "monitoring" violence prone, subversive groups in order to protect the
public. When such agents are asked to participate in or even lead radical activity they assume
that the ultimate objective is to fully infiltrate and destroy the organization for the good of
the country. This is very seldom the case. We waste little or no money protecting the "public"
or defending the "nation."
Agents operating under "right-cover" are handled in symmetrical fashion. Agents with
right-wing prejudices are encouraged to believe the agency is right-wing. Left-prejudiced
agents are asked to operate under "right-cover" in order to "monitor" dangerous rightist
organizations. Most intelligence agents remain blithely ignorant of the big picture which is so
clear to us from our spectacular vantage point. Very few have enough information or
intelligence to reason out how their specific and sometimes baffling assignments promote the
legislative, judicial, operational and propaganda needs of our Money Power. Most would never
try. They are paid too much to think about such things.
Agents with a "gangster-cover" are of two types. First, there is the sincere gangster that
draws his salary from an intelligence agency. He is led to believe that the gangland
"Godfathers" control the government agency for their own purposes. Actually, the situation is
the opposite. The agency controls the gangster for other purposes. Second, is the sincere crime
fighter who is led to believe that the agency is at tempting to infiltrate and monitor the
gangsters as a preliminary step to destroying organized crime. Such "upstanding" agents commit
many crimes in their zeal to rid the country of organized crime!
To envision how we operate in this lucrative field, let's briefly look at the mechanics of
dope smuggling. Police and customs officials are told to leave certain gangsters alone, even
when transporting suspicious cargoes. This is made to seem perfectly proper since it is well
known that secret police infiltrators of organized crime must participate in crimes in order to
gain the confidence of gangsters.
What customs agent would want to upset a carefully laid plan to "set-up" the underworld
kingpins of dope pushing! But the agent, as well as the police who cooperate, are mistaken in
believing that the purpose of the assignment to help smuggle dope is ultimately to smash
organized crime. If he could see the big picture, as we can, the agent would see that
practically all our dope is smuggled by federal intelligence agents and secret police! How ever
could such a volume be transported safely? Real harassment and prosecution is reserved for
those who enter the field without our approval.
Here is our organized crime strategy: On the one hand we pass laws to ensure that mankind's
favorite pastimes (vices) are illegal. On the other hand, we cater to these "vices" at a huge
monopoly profit with complete immunity from prosecution.
A new and growing methodology of our intelligence community is psychologically and
drug-controlled agents. Properly, these are referred to as "behavior modified" agents, or, in
the vernacular, "zombies." With the use of hypnotic drugs, brain washing, sensory deprivation,
small group "sensitivity" training, and other behavior modification techniques, the scope of
which was hinted in the movie "Clockwork Orange," complete personalities can be manufactured
from scratch, to the specifications of value structure profiles we design by computer to suit
our purposes. Such personalities are quite neurotic and unstable due to defects in our still
developing technology, but still useful for many purposes.
The primary virtue of "zombies," of course, is loyalty. Agents that are subconsciously
programmed for the assignment at hand cannot be conscious traitors. All a "zombie" can do is
reveal how compulsive and psychotic he is with regard to his "cause." Even to trained
psychologists he simply appears to be the proverbial "lone nut." Although the "zombie" may have
memories of psychotherapy at a government agency when questioned under hypnosis, this is
unlikely to raise suspicion in the mind of court-appointed psychologists. After all, "lone
nuts" should be kept in insane asylums and subjected to psychotherapy! At most, the government
hospital will be reprimanded for letting a loony loose before he was cured.
Until our techniques can be perfected the use of "zombies" must be restricted to "national
dramas" designed to justify the growing power of our centralized governments over the lives of
our people. Most suicidal radicals and "crazies" who so mysteriously avoid arrest for years at
a time are "zombies" conditioned to terrorize the public in the name of some irrational
ideology. After repeated doses of such terror, the public is conditioned to accept the
necessity of our intrusive police state with very little objection.
The way is clear for an accelerated program of behavior modification research to be
conducted mostly at public expense in the name of mental health and rehabilitation. Such
research can be conducted with little complaint in prisons, refugee camps, drug rehabilitation
centers, government hospitals, veterans hospitals, and even public schools and day care
centers. Mental institutions, methadone maintenance centers, and prisons are fertile fields for
recruiting the deranged or drug-addicted persons most suitable for "zombie" conversions. Of
course, only a few of our most trusted agents actually participate in the creation of
"zombies." The brilliant researchers and experimenters who make most of the breakthroughs
earnestly believe that their techniques are destined strictly for the betterment of
mankind.
Inevitably, a fraction of the population objects to behavior modification as an infringement
of man's "sacred" free will even if they are convinced that our intentions are benign. We
carefully leak a few scandals to satisfy such persons that our experiments are being kept
within bounds and that excesses are being stopped. Our artificial scandals exposing the
"excesses" of coercive psychology are carefully designed to make the researchers seem
incompetent and clumsy to the point of maiming and killing their "patients." This effectively
conceals the fantastic strides we have made toward total behavioral control. Great things are
going to be possible in the future.
"social media is notorious for the way it creates tightly insulated echo chambers which
masturbate our confirmation bias and hide any information which might cause us cognitive
dissonance by contradicting it. Whole media careers were built on this phenomenon "
.
So-called "social" media is a cancer eating away at our humanity and our sense of community
with every passing moment. It is a devil's brew of the worst of human thought and behavior
that seeks to lower the level of human interaction with every click and toxic retort. It may
be the tool that actually does us in even more than the other big threats to our
existence.
.
"Splitting the public up into two oppositional factions who barely interact and can't even
communicate with each other because they don't share a common reality keeps the populace
impotent, ignorant, and powerless to stop the unfolding of the agendas of the powerful."
.
People today have short attention spans. They don't have any depth of thinking and they
certainly don't want shades of grey. The Dark Powers successfully exploit this weakness to
their benefit with little pushback from an easily amused public. Those who love simplicity
don't want anything more challenging and they certainly aren't the least bit concerned about
those who are actively doing them in.
.
"You should not be afraid of your government being too nice to China. What you should worry
about is the US-centralized power alliance advancing a multifront new cold war conducted
simultaneously against two nuclear-armed nations for the first time ever in human history.
"
.
We should indeed be concerned about Empires measuring the size of their manhoods against each
other but since that has nothing to do with reporting on our neighbors for not wearing masks
or the speed of our internet connections or the latest video of some fool acting the fool on
the web we won't be concerned about it. You gotta have priorities, you know.
This is highly relevant critique of Trump legal team. But what the author misses is the
systematic campaign of promoting mail-in ballots and enabling ballot harvesting fraud, which is
quite provable and which violated constitutions os several states in which it was practiced. For
example in Georgia the agreement was reached between the Secretary of State and Tracy Abrams, but
the secretary of State has no legal authority to change the state election laws, COVID or no
COVID.
Is not interruption in vote counting qualify as brazen interference? It was never explained.
Just swiped under the carpet. Does neoliberal Dems manipulations with mail-in ballots quality as
"brazen interference" ? i would say yes, it does, This is replica of Pendergast Political Machine
methods. Please note that I am not a Trump supporter. I actually consider both Trump and Biden to
be very similar abominations.
There is a lot of bad reporting in the media, but a lot of the blame rests on Trump, his
legal team and the magnitude, complexity and implausibility of their claims
Trump's lawyers spent a lot of time at the podium lecturing the media on their "fake"
reporting on the fraud claims. No doubt, after four years of mainstream media malpractice, they
have reason for making this claim.
However, the moralistic lecturing was myopic and counterproductive, simply because even
honest journalists (if there are any left) have been left with their heads spinning by the
quantity and magnitude of the claims the Trump administration is putting out there right
now.
Any honest person approaching the fraud claims without a pre-determined position on their
validity (something that is, unfortunately, all too rare) has inevitably been left feeling
overwhelmed and confused. There's just too much information. There are too many conflicting
claims. There isn't enough time to adjudicate each one of them properly. Not only is some
degree of media skepticism to be expected, it's actually the only responsible thing to
do , given the complexity and magnitude of the fraud claims, and the stakes at play.
One of the central claims being made by Trump's legal team is that there exists a vast
national and global conspiracy involving a network of shadowy electronic voting companies,
communist regimes, foreign dictators, vote routing, switching and deleting involving complex
algorithms, and the complicity of numerous Democratic governors and election officials. The
evidence proffered so far to support this claim is a single affidavit by an unnamed Venezuelan
official, and a number of non-specific allegations of data anomalies on election night.
Should we -- should the media -- simply assent to these claims, based solely upon the
heat of Sidney Powell's rhetoric, and a single affidavit? How seriously should we even take
them, given that the clock is ticking, and it is hard to imagine the Trump team actually
proving these allegations by the safe harbor deadlines, whether they are true or not?
How much effort should they expend chasing every new bone Sidney Powell and MAGA surrogates
throw their way?
"Dianne Feinstein's husband! George Soros! Scytl! German servers! Raids by U.S. military!
Spain! Hugo Chavez! Nancy Pelosi's chief of staff! Bill Gates! Cuba!" And so on and so
forth.
It's exhausting just trying to keep up. However you look at it, much of it is
extraordinarily confusing and, frankly, prima facie unbelievable. Of course, truth is
sometimes stranger than fiction. Powell could be right. But how likely is it that all
her increasingly wild allegations should come together just as she has laid them out? And how
surprised should we be that people outside the MAGA camp are skeptical?
3) The whole thing feels like intellectual blackmail
Rudy Giuliani complained that his team is preparing and presenting cases that would normally
take months, if not years to prepare and argue in normal circumstances. The media should give
them time to make their case, and wait for the evidence, he said.
But who's fault is this? The Trump administration had four years to investigate Dominion,
Smartmatic, and the dangers of electronic voting in general. They could have convened
bipartisan committees to investigate voter fraud and the vulnerabilities of these voting
machines.
In 2016, even after he won, Trump claimed that there were millions of fraudulent
votes. If he really believed that, why didn't he do something meaningful about it while he was
in office? Posting about it on Twitter doesn't count.
Sidney Powell has raised some good questions about electronic voting, if only that people
will readily believe wild claims of fraud using it. These questions should be pursued, however,
a few days ago, most of us had never even heard of Dominion, Smartmatic and Scytl, etc.
Now we're being told that we must simply believe Powell's theory that these companies stole the
election. Countless MAGA followers are posting that they are absolutely sure , without
the slightest shadow of a doubt, that Dominion is behind the electoral theft. This feels
mad.
"She's a competent lawyer!" her supporters say. "She's brilliant, she's honest! She's a
patriot!" Maybe she is all of these things, but I'm not going to make a judgment about the
outcome of a presidential election, or assent to a vast, complex, and highly implausible
theory, based upon such thin gruel.
I need time. I need evidence. I need witnesses and counter-witnesses, examined and
cross-examined. And being told by the MAGA crowd that I must assent to the theory, and to
declare certainty that an election is invalid and that a coup has been perpetrated,
without any of these, feels like intellectual blackmail.
The simple fact is, this process should not be happening under the gun like this. And
that's on Trump, not the media.
4) Trump's legal team is making an amateur error in its approach to convincing the
public
A thousand doubts does not constitute proof. Amateur debaters often fall into the trap of
trying to win a debate by listing as many arguments as they can come up with. The mistake is in
thinking that people are convinced by sheer quantities of evidence.
In reality, this almost always backfires. When you pound people over the head with argument
after argument, they tend to become confused, bewildered, and, in the end, resentful. They
resent not having the chance to really think through any one claim or argument in detail.
Inevitably they begin to suspect that you're just trying to pull a fast one on them. Usually,
they're right.
Trump and his legal team have fallen into this trap. At the press conference, they made
repeated reference to the "hundreds" of sworn affidavits they have gathered, and the large
number of their lawsuits. However, while hundreds of affidavits may be "evidence," in the legal
sense of the term, they do not amount to proof.
A journalist for The Blaze reviewed the affidavits filed in Michigan and noted that many of
them do not actually contain allegations of fraud. Instead, they often have to do with
circumstantial things, such as how GOP challengers felt they were being "treated" by election
officials, or described "fraudulent" behavior that could plausibly be interpreted as election
officials following normal procedures that GOP challengers simply failed to understand.
Maybe some of the affidavits obtained by Trump's legal team contain slam-dunk proof of
widespread fraud, but if they do, they are being lost in the noise.
Expert debaters know that the best way to win an argument is to select only the very
best arguments, and to focus on those. If you go for quantity of evidence, inevitably you
will include low quality evidence in your arguments. Your audience, which is not so much
weighing each piece of evidence (an impossible task), as whether you are the sort of person who
should be trusted, will often only remember your bad or weak arguments. The result is
that they will write off everything else you say, as coming from a fundamentally unreliable
source.
Trump and his surrogates have raised important questions about election integrity.
Unfortunately, however, they have also repeated and promoted numerous false claims. Starting on
election night, Trump began retweeting every claim of fraud that came across his Twitter feed,
without any effort to fact check them. Many of them have subsequently been proven to be
baseless.
It should come as no surprise that those who are not already on board the Trump Train are
reacting to each new claim made by Trump with deep skepticism. The tragedy is that some
of these claims may be valid. However, Trump's carelessness with the truth has fatally undercut
his ability to lead a productive inquiry into voter fraud.
5) The fraud 'investigation' is being conducted ass-backwards
Trump, his legal team, and MAGA supporters all began with the conviction that the
election was stolen. Then, they went in search of the proof.
People are skeptical of the effort, because that's the worst possible way to go about an
investigation. The point of conducting an investigation is that you do not know the answer. You
have a hypothesis or a suspicion, but not proof.
The Trump admin has, from the very beginning, claimed absolute certitude. Unfortunately,
this isn't just bad epistemology, it's also insanely reckless, since, by definition, the very
claim calls into doubt the very existence of democracy in America.
The word " coup " is being tossed around by MAGA followers carelessly. To say that's
a loaded word is an understatement. But Trump and his team have left themselves no escape
route. Even if incontrovertible evidence shows up at some point that the election was not
stolen, a significant portion of the MAGA crowd will always believe that it was. At this point,
there is nothing that could convince them otherwise.
Clearly, having a large body of citizens who believe that their government is illegitimate
comes with potentially catastrophic unforeseen consequences. Nobody in the Trump administration
or MAGA crowd seems to be giving any thought to this. Damn the torpedoes.
Given that it's Trump, we can expect him to throw out outrageous claims without making any
real effort to determine if they're really true. However, it is our responsibility to
prioritize truth over political expediency. Whatever our political affiliations, our duty is to
investigate with indifference to the outcome, rather than seeking ways to substantiate
our personal preferences. When faced with a choice between truth and winning, choose truth,
every time.
6) The U.S. electoral system is a mess
Rudy Giuliani has at least this much right. The evidence Giuliani and his team have
collected of conflicting processes and procedures around the country, the reports of
irregularities, the evidence of actual fraud, and the ongoing efforts of Democrats to push less
secure voting methods, may not be sufficient to actually overturn the result. But it absolutely
is sufficient to suggest that the whole system is a mess, and vulnerable to
exploitation.
While I believe the odds of Trump's fraud claims leading to the election being overturned
are slim (although I am keeping an open mind on the question), we can at least hope that the
whole sordid episode leads to some serious and much-needed bipartisan electoral reform, so that
this does not happen again.
But in the end, that's only going to happen if cooler heads prevail, and reckless rhetoric
only leads the country down a dark road of further division and strife.
John Jalsevac is
currently working towards a PhD in philosophy. Prior to grad school, he worked for over a
decade as a journalist, editor, and pro-life activist. His previous journalism and creative
writing have appeared in The Public Discourse, Gilbert! Magazine, Dappled Thing, LifeSiteNews,
and others.
The "conspiracy" gets more interesting the more deeply you look into it. For
instance :
A government body exists that certifies voting machines and software as being 'okay to
use' by individual states. There's a voluntary aspect to this, I believe -- states can choose
to ignore the certification, yeah? But that doesn't matter, because the conspiracy is about
Dominion , and Dominion was certified safe.
And this means that potentially complicit in the communist/globalist/Soros conspiracy to
overthrow Trump are:
* Dominion, obvs.
* Those heads of state that okayed the use of Dominion machines (possibly)
* Those members of that government body most directly responsible for repeatedly certifying
Dominion products
* The laboratory (Wyle, almost always) which repeatedly tested and cleared Dominion
products
And if Wyle is itself on the take from communists/globalists/Soros, shouldn't we
reasonably assume that every other voting product they've tested and cleared is
therefore suspect?
And if that election commission is on the take from communists/globalists/Soros, mustn't
we assume that they are only certifying voting products which serve their agenda?
And should we not question those most responsible for advancing the responsible parties in
that commission to their present exalted state?
And what of Wyle's owners? (National Technical Systems) Should we not be
particularly concerned by their voluntary acquisition of a laboratory group that
exists as a tool of communists/globalists/Soros and sways elections on their behalf?
We need a public hearing all right. Like Watergate. Reminds me of when Sam Ervin said the
telephone is the instrument of the devil. Wiser words I cannot think of.
Every precinct in the United States uses a paper trail to ensure results can be audited.
Every single vote cast involves a piece of paper with voter selections on it. In Georgia,
where Dominion systems were used, the hand audit produced virtually identical results. That
was a full hand recount. If the tally machines were switching votes, even a partial audit
would pick up on that immediately.
Very good article here, and does a good job explaining why so many of us have trouble
taking the claims of fraud seriously. Especially given Trump's long estrangement with truth
generally, and his tendency to promote conspiracy theories, especially those which stand to
benefit him if believed (see QAnon.)
The issues with electronic voting machines have been known for years, and I've seen the
case made convincingly by commentators left, right, and center. I'm certainly glad to have
cast a paper ballot in the last election, as everyone in my state does. Hopefully a silver
lining from this mess will be the adoption of more robust paper balloting systems
nationwide.
Everybody casts a paper ballot in one way or another. In the few places that have voting
machines (and I think it's very few honestly), a paper ballot is generated for auditing
purposes.
Per my understanding, electronic voting machines are fairly widespread and fall into
several categories. While some states do require a paper ballot to be generated for auditing
purposes, there are some states like Kentucky and Indiana that have direct electronic voting
without that capability. It is worth noting that none of those states are the swing states
now in contention though, and that they are invariably red states.
My jurisdiction briefly switched to all-electronic machines, then quickly returned to the
paper ballots read by optical scanning device . . . a much better system.
"The mistake is in thinking that people are convinced by sheer quantities of
evidence."
It works for the democrats, that all they ever do is 'level charges without evidence' in the
MSM, and where Tucker was attempting to take Ms. Powell and it seems your on board like all
the other conservatives tell us, we have to accept Biden, while we look into voting
irregularities and fraud, sometime in the future [post GA's Jan 5th 2nd electronic vote
steal].
I am going to eschew the question about Mr. Carlson and Ms Powell ----
But your observations about what works is accurate. It's a tactic that does work. It works
for prosecutors How do you get 50 million people to believe the Russians actually invaded
election boards and their processes across the country.
And yet, here we have vast irregularities in differing parts of the country. I think there
is a case for fraud, but whether or not that is demonstrated, there is clearly a case for an
audit on both machines and mail in ballots. and there absolutely needs to be an audit of
votes to registered voters and no one needs to a HS diploma to comprehend that it's near
impossible for all mail in ballots to be for x candidate and less than a 6th grade education
to know that if you have 2000 registered voters or even a population of 2000 that the total
number of votes is never going to exceed 100% -- if it does, there's serious problem.
What, no comment forthcoming from you about the terrible, awful, totally crooked election
that happened in 2016, with millions and millions of fraudulent votes--- that Trump never
looked into? In 4 years? At all?
Until he lost this election? He's been whining about how this election was going to be
rigged, couldn't he have skipped a few golf games to actually look into it before it reared
its ugly head and kicked him out of the White House? Sure, sure.
One thing that seems to have gotten lost in the fog--and that definitely got lost
by this author--is that Giuliani and Powell are working on effectively two separate cases.
Both are working for Trump, and both are working against Biden et al with regards to this
election, but there is a clear line of demarcation between the two. Powell's focus is
primarily, if not solely, on Dominion and the electronic case, while Giuliani's primary focus
is on alleged physical fraud.
It makes no sense to assume that Powell's investigation should have begun four years ago,
and then use that as a basis to sneer, as this author does, at Giuliani--whose investigation
could not possibly have begun before November 4--for complaining about having to compress a
type of investigation that typically takes years into less than a month.
I'm not sure what Powell has. Some of the anomalies she has obliquely referred to are
already out there, if you look for them, and they are indeed suspicious (e.g. successive
batches of votes, often 10 or more in a row, all with the exact same ratio of Biden-to-Trump
votes--a statistical, if not literal, impossibility). However, it doesn't look like those
would be enough to swing the election, because even in her telling, if the race had been
closer, the Dominion irregularities would not have been discovered at all. The electronic
interference was significant, but it wasn't what made the difference.
The meat of this case, with the potential to flip the results, lies with old fashioned
physical fraud--ballot-manufacturing and box-stuffing--and Giuliani's mad scramble to find
enough evidence in time.
My gut says he won't make it.
There are very strong indications that what Giuliani and the Trump team suspect did indeed
happen. Most notable is the Democrats' brazen interference with GOP poll-watchers in multiple
states; it is inexplicable if they did not have something to hide. But by the same token,
that very interference successfully hid whatever it was that they did, and because of that,
they have already gotten away with it--the evidence that Giuliani needs is gone forever.
The room is filled with smoke, but the fire has already been extinguished--and without the
fire, Trump can't win.
"The mistake is in thinking that people are convinced by sheer quantities of
evidence."
Evidence, philosophically, is something that is true. If I have an apple in my hand and I
reach out and drop it, I can truthfully tell you that it will fall towards the ground. It is
evidence of the existence of gravity. I can't see gravity. But I can see the apple fall (and
anything else I drop). So can everyone in the world.
An affidavit is not evidence. It is a statement that someone is claiming is true. The
statement may or may not be true. So a lot of affidavits is not a "sheer quantity of
evidence". It's not evidence at all. Trump supporters need to understand that. And this is
why Trump continues to have these court cases thrown out: he is not presenting any real
evidence of fraud. Why? Because there isn't any.
You've got this wrong because your definition of evidence is wrong. An affidavit IS
evidence.The truthfullness or importance of it is something decided in court. It is evidence
just much as a fingerprint at a crime scene is evidence. The relevance of the fingerprint
evidence still has to be determined in court.
What's most obvious to me is that the lawyers making these far-fetched claims didn't
themselves believe the claims. The effort was geared to flood the zone, so to speak, to
create confusion and doubt resulting in state legislatures stepping in to settle electoral
vote allocations.
Sowing doubt this way might be acceptable in criminal court, where defense lawyers are trying
to establish reasonable doubt, however, here the objective should be to determine what
happened, and not inventing things that might have happened.
Soros, Chavez, Spain and communists? I believe the term is "jumping the shark."
Mr. Jalsevac confuses two different facts under heading no. 6, "The U.S. electoral system
is a mess." (1) The US electoral system is not a genuine system at all but an aggregate of
electoral systems that vary by state and even by county. (2) Some of these systems are
untrustworthy. It is clear that the second fact is cause for concern and in need of remedy.
It is not so clear that the first one is. The diversity of electoral systems is a feature
that contributes to the difficulty of manipulating national electoral results. It is the
chief reason why the Trump team has had to resort to grotesque conspiracistic fantasies to
maintain its claim that Trump is the legitimate winner.
"Durable, hand marked paper ballots must be established as the national standard for
democratic elections in the United States. While using paper may sound antiquated, the
consensus among election security experts is that nothing else provides the needed
reliability,security, and transparency. Durable, voter marked paper ballots are appropriate
technology for public elections....Hand Counted Paper Ballots are considered the 'Gold
Standard' of democratic elections"~ National Election Defense Coalition
https://www.electiondefense...
Are there any electronic voting machines in Team D-controlled states? How did they get
there? Did they sneak in across the border? Which political party held the presidency from
2008-2016? Were they pushing relentlessly for paper ballots, hand counted in public? For that
matter, following the 2016 election, I heard lots of conspiracy theory talk from Team D, but
little in the way advocating for paper ballots, hand-counted in public.
The Senate report was long on words, light on specifics. Great, if continuing a new cold
war is your objective. Note that the House did not impeach on that basis, after two years and
change of promising russiagate bombshells that never came.
According to this article, there are 8 states still using voting machines that produce no
paper trail. It's not a long article, but I extracted this list:
"eight states that will use some form of paperless voting in 2020: Texas, Louisiana,
Tennessee, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky and New Jersey. "
There have been Democrats complaining about electronic voting machines for at least the
last 20 years. You're a bit late to the party, but you're welcome to join. Our democracy
works best when citizens are willing to work together toward goals on which they agree,
regardless of whether or not they agree on all goals.
I would also be glad to see bipartisan electoral reform, but only if includes measures
taken to protect votes before the actual voting starts. Some of the voter suppression
measures we.ve
seen in the last few years are:
- Purging of voter rolls near an election to keep voters from having a chance to vote
- Implementing postal procedures to reduce the speed of mail delivery to make it more
difficult to vote by mail
- Removing mail sorting machines and post office drop boxes to make it more difficult to vote
by mail
- Reducing the number of polling sites in areas populated by the other political party to
complicate voting in person
- Rejecting mailed in ballots because trivial differences in the signature, such as a missing
middle initial.
All of the Republican handwringing about "voter fraud" in the election seems to boil down
to complaints that the judges stopped their efforts to steal the election. Some of that gets
dressed up with pontification about the importance of the credibility of the election. The
credibility of an election is supremely important, but voter suppression damages that
credibility as much as voter fraud.
I noticed you did not mention the Ramsland affidavit in your discussion of the competence
of Trump's legal team. The affidavit attempts to identify areas in Michigan in which more
votes were cast than the number of registered voters. Unfortunately, all the examples
provided were in Minnesota. That does not suggest thorough research. In addition, the areas
listed in the affidavit tend to be in very Republican areas of Minnesota, suggesting that any
voter fraud may be as likely to be Republican as it is to be Democratic.
"Keeping copies of the physical ballots does nothing to assuage these concerns"
I disagree. Here in Michigan we do regular hand checks of randomly chosen scanners, and of
all of them if any problem arises. It has been remarkably accurate in my town.
The opposite of such scanning is prolonged counting, by fallible humans some of them
partisan and fighting with other partisans. I don't see advantage there.
But yes, hacking of any electronic device is a monster problem, and must be addressed by
regular and randomized physical confirmation, just as is done with any quality control
issue.
To be effective against fraud the count needs to be compelled by law and done on a truly
random sampling of ballots until statistical near-certainty of the result through
hand-counting alone is achieved, falling back to a count of all ballots if the election is
close.
Optional procedures executed in creative ways by goofy partisans is what "regular hand
checks" sounds like to me, though I may be wrong.
I agree it's not worthless to save the ballots, and I'd even agree with you far enough to
disagree with the author and say it's possible to design a good manual-check procedure. But I
read what he said as a simplification of the truth: in 2016 there was so much sillyness in
the law and the implementation of recount procedures that it'd be better if the machines
weren't there at all, and I doubt that's changed.
When it is close, we by law have an automatic 100% recount of machine scanned ballots by
hand. That is what was done in 2016. That was discontinued by agreement of both political
parties after the initial round of those counts showed zero error. Zero. By agreement. Thus,
it can be done. But you are correct about the sampling idea, and the need for uniform
enforceable law on the matter.
Now we're being told that we must simply believe Powell's theory that these companies
stole the election.
No, you must either do your own investigating to try and ascertain the truth, (which NO
media outlet seems to be doing) or keep an open mind that Powell will be able to prove what
she says. Powell is not some two-bit lawyer. She's a seasoned federal prosecutor putting a
lot on the line in making these claims. Grant her a modicum of respect in entertaining the
possibility that she can back up what she says.
Also, the Trump campaign has filed exactly 3, and now 4 lawsuits - not 30-something as is
continually and falsely reported and regurgitated by the media. The other lawsuits are by
supporters and allies, but not Trump's lawyers. Yes, it's hard to keep up, but YOUR JOB is to
at least try. Thank you.
I suggest young Master Jalsevac spend a couple of years living in one of our fine major
cities to see how things really are run outside of political philosophy books.
One of the oddest things about this is that in the past, particularly in 2004, many
Democrats charged that the Republicans had stolen the election, particularly in Ohio. Google:
2004 election stolen. You will find a lot of hits. Does anyone remember Diebold voting
machines? Are they still in use? Were they manipulated on behalf of Republicans, then or
later? I have no idea. But I want to make a few points: 1. Liberals have at times complained
loudly about stolen elections and the ease of manipulating electronic results by various
Republican-connected people. 2. Whether these were true or not have they ever been
sufficiently investigated? 3. Why, now is it only a vast liberal conspiracy that is alleged
to exist, and not perhaps the still existing conservative conspiracy from 2004? In November
2005 Mother Jones reviewed a book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election &
Why They'll Steal the Next One Too
The voting machine division of Diebold was taken over by Dominion Voting Systems. That's
the easiest conspiracy theory in history. The real question, if you want to believe, is why
the Republicans sold their election-stealer to the Democrats.
"In other words, Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters.
This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic
remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be
invalidated. One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would
come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant
corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed
injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.
That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal
arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and
unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the
disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated
state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more. At bottom, Plaintiffs have failed to
meet their burden to state a claim upon which relief may be granted. Therefore, I grant
Defendants' motions and dismiss Plaintiffs' action with prejudice."
You know, this kind of reasonable and thoughtful writing is why, as a liberal, I like
coming over here to the dark side of town to see what's going on. Even while struggling to
present an open mind, he admits to being buried in the silliness of it all. A good read. Not
surprised to see all these calls for crucifixion in the comments.
You know, this kind of reasonable and thoughtful writing .......
It is neither reasonable or thoughtful. It pretends to be condemning the defense while
pretending that they would otherwise have a case. And he is refusing to acknowledge that the
why Trump has to turn to Rudy - his last resort - is because the reputable lawyers he had on
his team are refusing to make bogus claims in court; to be fair, so does Rudy, but he is
willing to make them to the press and they are not.
Even while struggling to present an open mind, he admits to being buried in the
silliness of it all.
You are doing what Liberals so often do. They are so hungry for a Republican who is not
calling them names and willing to admit that Trump is at fault, that they completely miss the
point that the "admission" is trying to make. When Comey admitted that Hillary Clinton
omitted no indictable offense, they praised him for his "fairness". But he was not being fair
at all. He would have to be an evil crook to indict the nominee of one of our major parties
when he knew she could not be convicted. But he broke every rule of propriety and launched
into a condemnation that handed Trump what he needed to win the election. So this writer
admitted that Trump is making no case . So what? You seem to have missed the
fact that he is falsely claiming that Trump does have case to make. And that
claim is utterly baseless!
I am not a partisan. I detest political parties. But I also detest seeing partisans
complimented for being non-partisan for simply not being on the raving extreme of their
party. It lowers the standard of what it beings to be non-partisan. Non-partisan means to
make judgements consistently on principle, applying the same standards to everyone. I expect
that many Republicans will read my post and conclude that I am being partisan - because that
is taken nowadays to mean "condemns my party". But I get accused just as often by Democrats
to being a Republican, so that is alright with me. But in so far as this particular quarrel
is concerned, President Trump has no case at all. The Pennsylvania elections were run be
declared Republicans. Prominent Republicans, and they gave both Republican Senators more
votes. They counted the legal votes as they were cast. They ran a fair, honest and honorable
election!
Thanks for the magnificent reply, 414 words, all thoughtful. You may have me there in your
sterner criticism of Rod's equivocation about Trump, but consider the audience, after all. As
for being a liberal hungry for a conservative who is not an asshole, guilty as charged. You
make a good point that Rod still seems still to yearn for Trump to have a case to make and
that is true, but I think Rod is fairly conflicted in this and other conundrums conservatives
must find themselves as the whole enterprise sinks into hopelessness and tawdry hopelessness
at that. It is a hard row to hoe, after all. I never said he was non-partisan, just a poor
conservative religious guy trying to make his way in the difficult world while continuing to
try to be a decent man. It is what is endearing about his writing to me sometimes. But I
thank you for this response, it shows both feeling and intelligence.
Unfortunately IMHO, the Kraken was either a careless misspeak or a bluff to shake the
trees to see if a whistleblower would fall out. If the later, it failed. If the former, I am
inclined to give Sidney a break. She has done yeoman's work for Flynn. And so the Kraken
seems destined to remain a creature of Scandinavian lore and Hollywood movies. I wish it were
not so. The Dominion software apparently is easily hacked and allows votes to be directly
manipulated without a trace. Hard to make a case without an audit trail. I wonder whether the
outcry from MAGA supporters will be sufficient to encourage states to choose a more secure
vendor or will Dominion still be in widespread use during the midterms? Kemp, Raffensberger
and company should be ridden out of GA on a rail after a good tar and feathering. Other
states have their own corrupt actors who should receive the same consideration. They all have
sold us out -- if the Dems take the Senate, even to slavery under socialism -- for 30 pieces
of silver. As for Kemp and Raffensberger, in a different age I might have suggested an
appointment with a high, sturdy branch in one of GA's many 100 plus years old live oaks.
As I listened to Lin's interview today I tho't that there must be something in the
Southern water. Both he and Sidney have that Southern drawl. Very genteel, polished and
extremely intelligent.
I am a very brave soul, but I don't think I would want to go up against either of them in
a court of law. 🙂
I forget who it was, either Lou or Tucker, that ended their interview telling Sidney half
jokingly to remember to lock her doors at night.
Please remember to PRAY God's protection for this wonderful woman!
When are they going to lay out the case? Lin Wood and Sidney have been making serious
statements. They have reputations beyond reproach. I believe them when they say they have the
goods. It's like they have to get the election called for Trump or they will surely be
political prisoners.
IF you watch the movie "Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections"* you will see
that a steal was supposed to happen in Florida that day and it got thwarted, before it got
started,
PLUS, they didn't have the mail in ballot scheme in place yet to back up their theft back
then. China Virus was their plandemic to make that happen, and to get the cash from the Care$
Act to get machines for everyone.
*"(2020)From voter registration to counting ballots, data security expert Harri Hursti
examines how hackers can influence and disrupt the U.S. election system."
Love Sidney Powell but that interview did not give me a lot of confidence. I sure hope she
has some solid evidence. Doesn't sound like she has much though. Don't have much time
left.
Biggest heist in the history of the US and nothing can be done about it is sickening. Barr
and Wray should be ashamed of themselves for letting something like this happen on their
watch. They did nothing. Thanks to them the constitution is now worth nothing. The rights are
gone. Law and order is gone. We are on our own.
How do Barr and Wray even look at themselves in the mirror?
Finally, I found out from this interview where I could send money to support this legal
effort. I'm tired of the RNC doing nothing. Sidney Powell will get my direct support now.
DefendingtheRepublic.org – is the right place.
According to Time : "in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic –
and its cruelly uneven impact – the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.
How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution
of income has cost American workers over the past several decades." Economics as a zero sum
game in other words
Here's an analogy : imagine the blues and reds both agree that I am a notorious thief,
even if it's only a false narrative. Then they hire me as a security guard. That would be
willfully, knowingly hiring a criminal, which would be criminal, not because of the facts,
but because of the logic.
A couple of thoughts about the Venzuela gambit. Evidently Tucker Carson wanted Sydney to
tell him all about the "Dominion" vote flipping in a public interview. Which would have been
tantamount to giving away all the potential Republican case, and given the Democrats prior
knowledge of what to expect. A no-go. Mentioning "Venezuela-Cuba" could have the effect of
heading off a direct civil war if the US Dems and Repubs have a" common enemy" to blame. (Too
late for Russia, China too touchy, not many other major targets). Note that Venezuela has a
paper trail created at the same time as the electronic vote...
"Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own," senior Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and
Jenna Ellis said on Sunday in a joint statement. "She is also not a lawyer for the president
in his personal capacity."
Giuliani and Ellis gave no explanation for the statement. Trump last week named Powell, a
former federal prosecutor, among five well-known lawyers who would lead his legal team in
challenging the results of this month's presidential election.
Powell was among three featured speakers when the Trump legal team held a press conference
on Thursday to give an overview of its election-fraud cases in key states that the president
apparently lost to Democrat rival Joe Biden.
Powell focused largely on accusations that Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic election
software were fraudulently manipulated to award thousands of fake votes to Biden. Her
allegations went deeper, involving allies of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez owning
Dominion and having ties to Democrat billionaire donor George Soros.
But by Thursday night, Powell's story was being challenged by a conservative media
superstar, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who said she had brushed off multiple requests to
provide evidence of the Dominion-Smartmatic scheme for his show. She also was invited to be
interviewed on his show, but "when we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop
contacting her," Carlson said.
Powell responded by saying
she told Carlson not to contact her again because he was "very insulting, demanding and
rude." She also provided him with an affidavit and referred him to a witness who could help
him understand her statistical evidence. Carlson followed up the next night, saying he had
heard from Trump sources, including other members of the president's legal team, who said that
they hadn't seen Powell's evidence firsthand.
If Powell's allegations in the press conference seemed a little wild, her interview on
Saturday night with conservative news outlet Newsmax took the case to another level. She
accused Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and the state's secretary of state, Brad
Raffensperger, of receiving financial benefits to help Biden win the state's 16 electoral
votes.
"Georgia's probably going to be the first state I'm gonna blow up," Powell said of
her planned fraud cases. "And Mr. Kemp and the secretary of state need to go with it because
they're in on the Dominion scam." She added that her Georgia lawsuit, which she hopes to
file this week, "will be biblical."
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
15
pogohere 4 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 08:17 PM
Some teams are harder to play on than others. Look at the Flynn case. The US Dep. of Justice
surrendered to Powell et. al. and requested that its own case against Flynn be
dismissed following the disclosure by Powell's efforts that the DOJ was withholding
evidence-- a "Brady rule violation"-- of Flynn's innocence from the defense and the court.
Flynn's prestigious Wa DC law firm earlier had Flynn plead guilty. The judge is holding up
the dismissal of that case, against all precedent. Powell most likely isn't finished. Neither
is The Donald.
GoldMorgsCom 4 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 08:31 PM
Giuliani and Ellis intimidated and gearing down? Powell least nervous at the presentation.
Usually fraud by (voting)computers escapes the possibility of external proof. But a
peculiarity in the Michigan-elections enabled it. See on the site vashiva (Shiva) MIT PhD
Analysis of Michigan Votes Reveals Unfortunate Truth of U.S. Voting Systems. Its systematic
fraud, save screenshots. Steven J. Miller Ph.D. published his testimony, that about 50'000
mail-in ballots of republicans have disapeared in Pensylvenia and 50'000 absentee ballots
have been abused by others (in favor of Biden = +50000). It makes up about 150000 to the
disadvantage of Trump in PA. Bidens surplus was about 75000. About Michigan and Pensylvenia
it has been published that the number of fraud votes was sufficient for a fraud change of the
outcome in favor of "the democrats". The signals are that the same happened in the other
critical states . See also -- Trump lawyers allege 'MASSIVE' election fraud, point to sworn
statements & efforts to threaten and silence them (VIDEO)-- 19 Nov, 2020 20:30 (
rt-search, on top at the right ) In the first ten minutes it is explained how the "democrat"
bosses facilitated huge fraud with absentee ballots. In Pensylvenia 682'000 have been
accepted without proper checks and with destroying the evidence of fraud. It is a federal
offence not to store all election records (scans), even not collecting them, such as besiding
mail-in envelopes and not checking them before opening them.
JingsGeordie 4 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 08:18 PM
Disavows? That's twisting the information (edit - they've now changed it to 'distances') From
Gen. Flynn's twitter feed - ".@SidneyPowell1 has been suspended from Twitter for 12 hours.
She understands the WH press release & agrees with it. She is staying the course to prove
the massive deliberate election fraud that robbed #WeThePeople of our votes for President
Trump & other Republican candidates."
Thesheperd666 4 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 09:02 PM
Trump fired Sidney Powell ? That is a huge mistake and might coast him the presidency. Trumps
team looks weak now ! Sidney look more confident and much more calmer than Rudy Giuliani. I
really don't trust Rudy as much as Sidney, wondering if they are afraid of spoiling the
Republic party before the 12th amendment goes to the house for votes ? Either side your on
this makes Trumps team look bad, and are starting to make up stories. I think Trump did win
by a landslide and this years vote was stolen from the US citizens. Demarcates can breath a
little more easier now that Sidney is gone, she was the strongest one on the team. Trump
needs more Sidney Powell's not less, I don't trust Rudy nor do I think he has what it takes
to win. Trump needs better Lawyers, Rudy is just a celebrity lawyer that will keep his image
no matter what ! Trump needs tigers not mice !
anastasia265 3 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 09:27 PM
It's not true. She was never a part of that team and had her own funding site. Their strategy
was to keep the two matters separate
J_P_Franklin 4 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 08:49 PM
Majority of Republicans are and have conspired against Trump since 2016. America First
Trumpism is the opposite of Republican open borders/free trade treason.
GoldMorgsCom 4 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 09:03 PM
Peculiar is that the German chamber of commerce does not reveal any registration of the
Dominions, neither of Smartmatic neither of Scytl neither of Amazone. These have not
registrated or their registrations are being hidden on request. So who's prosecution by the
German state prosecutors is to be requested?
Gerald Newton 2 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 10:56 PM
Sidney Powell has not released her evidence yet but it is coming. She has an impressive
record and probably will crush much of the federal justice system. That is what she does.
Read her book, Licensed to Lie. It is about the way federal prosecutors lie to prosecute like
they did to Senator Stevens of Alaska.
Swanster6450 3 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 09:56 PM
I guess Sidney Powell is finding what happens to people from outside the political loop when
they seek to stick their nose in and point out a few inconsistencies. Chucked under a bus is
the usual outcome. Julian Assange is also finding out the same thing and, incidentally, so
too is Donald Trump. All shafted and all chucked under a bus for pointing out a few
inconsistencies.
RTreaderCaribb 3 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 09:56 PM
I have one question and one question only: why would Sydney Powell who seems to be very
bright and a good lawyer say something of which she would know will be exposed only in less
than 14 days to be totally untrue? This makes no sense at all. And so I think we all should
pray that this woman does not end up like Jeffrey Epstein. We should take our time. 14 days
are nothing in comparison to the endless work she has to put in . And if she cant show any
fact for her allegations then we can maybe say something went wrong with her. But right now
let this woman work. All this prejudgment in the public court is irritating to me. And if
Sidney Powell did the same then yes, she would be irritating to me too. And for Trump: If he
can prove voter fraud then he should go to the supreme court. If he cant then at some point
he must concede. I guess the latest is December 14th and until then he should just figure out
what it is. That is his legal right. And for the American people: if you were so stupid to
vote for Biden then please bear the consequences thereof because you will go down the tubes.
The man is not well in his head.
allan Kaplan 3 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 09:43 PM
Sidney Powell's stamina, her defiance and her antipathy is so real that those who have faced
injustice by the hands of the powerful know what it takes to get such bullies sweating. The
house of cards of the Democrat commies will come tumbling down once Powell gets to the podium
of naming names, dates, places, and their coconspirators et al. I love her tenacity,
determination, perseverance and her unflinching boldness that most of the dems are sweating
about! Thank you Ms. Powell for a great American tradition and go full speed... the
dissenting maverick you are!
GoldMorgsCom 3 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 09:27 PM
They are so scared that the president Trump will conduct the great cleansing, to start with
removing the authority on the dollar from the Federal Reserve to the usa federal state of the
people. They are already blocking the president Trump during four years to keep him from
that. They know they can now only keep the president Trump from the great cleansing by
removing him from office. They will do more than the high treason of the fraud against the
federal elections, to remove the president Trump from office. Eventually they will detonate a
smuggled-in nuclear bomb and allegate Russia or fire a missile with a nuclear bomb from an
unindentified submarine and allegate Russia. You believe the spread of Covid-19 this year was
a coincidense? If Russia is being attacked any more (with allegations) it is a good reason
for conducting the great cleansing in Russia. Those probably sly covered Khodorovski-types
who are pressing forward (exports of) GMM-injections "against Covid-19" are probably
backstabbing Russia; catastrophic future compensation claims on Russia and confiscation of
all export-incomes. This is a good reason for conducting the great cleansing out of Russia of
all Khodorovski-types. We hope that the reorganized government of Russia will cleanse out all
Khodorovski-types, no matter the president Trump will continue office and conduct the great
cleansing in the usa or not.
Marlin1091 12 minutes ago 23 Nov, 2020 01:06 AM
Google did and is helping biden. That is why I don't use google any more, I use Yandex and
for fackrok I use vk
BRT 207, agreed that the interview was less than cathartic, but Sidney has a tighrope to
walk. Her opponent is not the opposing campaign of Dem hacks. Her opponent is CIA. CIA
stuffed all those ballots. Unfortunately for Sidney, in US law and regulation, CIA crime is
secret. The perps are secret under the IIPA. The facts are secret under the operational files
exemption. The law is secret under COG procedures. Flynn explained the birds and bees to her.
Remember DIA is JFK's creation.
Now Sidney has to find a way to puke up evidence of CIA crime in court.
CIA ratfucked Chavez with their electoral malware, albeit ineffectually.
CIA put their Venezuelan proprietary through a couple of sheepdippings and turned it on
Trump. Just like they used it on Kerry. Just like they do whenever you vote for the wrong
guy. Honnête homme Hopsicker, offered a lifetime of hookers and blow to shut up, has
the most synoptic take:
This is transnational organized crime by CIA. Sidney has to call CIA agents under oath.
She has to protect them from DO's murderers. She has to explode everything you think about
your bullshit fake democracy. I don't know if she can do it but I hope she can.
By Arthur Allen, editor for California Healthline, joined Kaiser Health News in April
2020 after six years at Politico, where he created, edited and wrote for the first health
IT-focused news team. Previously, he was a freelance writer for publications such as The New
York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Lingua Franca magazine, The New Republic, Slate
and Salon. Earlier in his career, he worked for The Associated Press for 13 years, including
stints as a correspondent based in El Salvador, Mexico and Germany. He is the author of the
books "V
Kaiser Health News. accine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver" (W.W.
Norton, 2007); "Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato" (Counterpoint Press, 2010) and "The
Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl" (W.W. Norton, 2014). Originally published at Kaiser Health
News
Kaiser Health News .
When he started researching a troublesome childhood infection nearly four decades ago,
virologist Dr. Barney Graham , then at
Vanderbilt University, had no inkling his federally funded work might be key to deliverance
from a global pandemic.
Yet nearly all the vaccines advancing toward possible FDA approval this fall or winter are
based on a design developed by Graham and his colleagues, a concept that emerged from a
scientific quest to understand a disastrous 1966 vaccine trial.
Basic research conducted by Graham and others at the National Institutes of Health, Defense
Department and federally funded academic laboratories has been the essential ingredient in the
rapid development of vaccines in response to COVID-19. The government has poured an additional
$10.5 billion into vaccine companies since the pandemic began to accelerate the delivery of
their products.
The Moderna vaccine, whose remarkable effectiveness in a late-stage trial was announced
Monday morning, emerged directly out of a partnership between Moderna and Graham's NIH
laboratory.
Coronavirus vaccines are likely to be worth billions to the drug industry if they prove safe
and effective. As many as 14 billion vaccines would be required to immunize everyone in the
world against COVID-19. If, as many scientists anticipate, vaccine-produced immunity wanes,
billions more doses could be sold as booster shots in years to come. And the technology and
production laboratories seeded with the help of all this federal largesse could give rise to
other profitable vaccines and drugs.
The vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, which are likely to be the first to win FDA
approval, in particular rely heavily on two fundamental discoveries that emerged from federally
funded research: the viral protein designed by Graham and his colleagues, and the concept of
RNA modification, first developed by Drew Weissman and
Katalin Karikó at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, Moderna's founders in
2010 named the company after this concept: "Modified" + "RNA" = Moderna, according to
co-founder Robert Langer .
"This is the people's vaccine," said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public
Citizen's Access to Medicines program. "Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are
funding its development. It should belong to humanity."
Moderna, through spokesperson Ray Jordan, acknowledged its partnership with NIH throughout
the COVID-19 development process and earlier. Pfizer spokesperson Jerica Pitts noted the
company had not received development and manufacturing support from the U.S. government, unlike
Moderna and other companies.
The idea of creating a vaccine with messenger RNA, or mRNA -- the substance that converts
DNA into proteins -- goes back decades. Early efforts to create mRNA vaccines failed, however,
because the raw RNA was destroyed before it could generate the desired response. Our innate
immune systems evolved to kill RNA strands because that's what many viruses are.
Karikó came up with the idea of modifying the elements of RNA to enable it to slip
past the immune system undetected. The modifications she and Weissman developed allowed RNA to
become a promising delivery system for both vaccines and drugs. To be sure, their work was
enhanced by scientists at Moderna, BioNTech and other laboratories over the past decade.
Another key element in the mRNA vaccine is the lipid nanoparticle -- a tiny, ingeniously
designed bit of fat that encloses the RNA in a sort of invisibility cloak, ferrying it safely
through the blood and into cells and then dissolving, thereby allowing the RNA to do its work
of coding a protein that will serve as the vaccine's main active ingredient. The idea of
enclosing drugs or vaccines in lipid nanoparticles arose first in the 1960s and was developed
by Langer and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and various academic and
industry laboratories.
Karikó began investigating RNA in 1978 in her native Hungary and wrote her first NIH
grant proposal to use mRNA as a therapeutic in 1989. She and Weissman achieved successes
starting in 2004, but the path to recognition was often discouraging.
"I keep writing and doing experiments, things are getting better and better, but I never get
any money for the work," she recalled in an interview. "The critics said it will never be a
drug. When I did these discoveries, my salary was lower than the technicians working next to
me."
Eventually, the University of Pennsylvania sublicensed the patent to Cellscript, a biotech
company in Wisconsin, much to the dismay of Weissman and Karikó, who had started their
own company to try to commercialize the discovery. Moderna and BioNTech later would each pay
$75 million to Cellscript for the RNA modification patent, Karikó said. Though unhappy
with her treatment at Penn, she remained there until 2013 -- partly because her daughter, Susan
Francia, was making a name for herself on the school's rowing team. Francia would go on to win
two Olympic gold medals in the sport. Karikó is now a senior officer at BioNTech.
In addition to RNA modification and the lipid nanoparticle, the third key contribution to
the mRNA vaccines -- as well as those made by Novavax, Sanofi and Johnson & Johnson -- - is
the bioengineered protein
developed by Graham and his collaborators . It has proved in tests so far to elicit an
immune response that could prevent the virus from causing infections and disease.
The protein design was based on the observation that so-called fusion proteins -- the pieces
of the virus that enable it to invade a cell -- are shape-shifters, presenting different
surfaces to the immune system after the virus fuses with and infects cells. Graham and his
colleagues learned that antibodies against the post-fusion protein are far less effective at
stopping an infection.
The discovery arose in part through Graham's studies of a 54-year-old tragedy -- the failed
1966 trial of an NIH vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. In a clinical trial,
not only did that vaccine fail to protect against the common childhood disease, but most of the
21 children who received it were hospitalized
with acute allergic reactions, and two died .
About a decade ago, Graham, now deputy director of NIH's Vaccine Research Center, took a new
stab at the RSV problem with a postdoctoral fellow, Jason McLellan. After isolating and
obtaining three-dimensional models of the RSV's fusion protein, they worked with Chinese
scientists to identify an appropriate neutralizing antibody against it.
"We were sitting in Xiamen, China, when Jason got the first image up on his laptop, and I
was like, oh my God, it's coming together," Graham recalled. The prefusion antibodies they
discovered were 16 times more potent than the post-fusion form contained in the faulty 1960s
vaccine.
Two 2013 papers the team published in Science earned them a runner-up
prize in the prestigious journal's Breakthrough of the Year award. Their papers, which
showed it was possible to plan and create a vaccine at the microscopic structural level, set
the NIH's Vaccine Research Center on a path toward creating a generalizable, rapid way to
design vaccines against emerging pandemic viruses, Graham said.
In 2016, Graham, McLellan and other scientists, including Andrew Ward at the Scripps
Research Institute, advanced their concept further by publishing the prefusion structure
of a coronavirus that causes the common cold and a patent was filed for its design by NIH,
Scripps and Dartmouth -- where McLellan had set up his own lab. NIH and the University of Texas
-- where McLellan now works -- filed an additional patent this year for a
similar design change in the virus that causes COVID-19.
Graham's NIH lab, meanwhile, had started working with Moderna in 2017 to design a rapid
manufacturing system for vaccines. In January, they were preparing a demonstration project, a
clinical trial to test whether Graham's protein design and Moderna's mRNA platform could be
used to create a vaccine against Nipah, a deadly virus spread by bats in Asia.
Their plans changed rapidly when they learned on Jan. 7 that the epidemic of respiratory
disease in China was being caused by a coronavirus.
"We agreed immediately that the demonstration project would focus on this virus" instead of
Nipah, Graham said. Moderna produced a vaccine within six weeks. The first patient was
vaccinated in an NIH-led clinical study on March 16; early results from Moderna's
30,000-volunteer late-stage trial showed it was nearly 95% effective at preventing
COVID-19.
Although other scientists have advanced proposals for what may be even more potent vaccine antigens ,
Graham is confident that carefully designed vaccines using nucleic acids like RNA reflect the
future of new vaccines. Already, two major drug companies are doing advanced clinical trials
for RSV vaccines based on the designs his lab discovered, he said.
In a larger sense, the pandemic could be the event that paves the way for better, perhaps
cheaper and more plentiful vaccines.
"It's a silver lining, but I think we are definitely pushing forward the way everyone is
thinking about vaccines," said Michael Farzan , chair of the department of
immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research's Florida campus. "Certain techniques that have
been waiting in the wings, under development but never achieving the kind of funding they
needed for major tests, will finally get their chance to shine."
Under a 1980
law, the NIH will obtain no money from the coronavirus vaccine patent. How much money will
eventually go to the discoverers or their institutions isn't clear. Any existing licensing
agreements haven't been publicized; patent disputes among some of the companies will likely
last years. HHS' big contracts with the vaccine companies are not transparent, and Freedom of
Information Act requests have been slow-walked and heavily redacted, said Duke University law
professor Arti Rai.
Some basic scientists involved in the enterprise seem to accept the potentially lopsided
financial rewards.
"Having public-private partnerships is how things get done," Graham said. "During this
crisis, everything is focused on how can we do the best we can as fast as we can for the public
health. All this other stuff is going to have to be figured out later."
"It's not a good look to become extremely wealthy off a pandemic," McLellan said, noting the
big stock sales by
some vaccine company executives after they received hundreds of millions of dollars in
government assistance. Still, "the companies should be able to make some money."
For Graham, the lesson of the coronavirus vaccine response is that a few billion dollars a
year spent on additional basic research could prevent a thousand times as much loss in death,
illness and economic destruction.
"Basic research informs what we do, and planning and preparedness can make such a difference
in how we get ahead of these epidemics," he said.
I appreciate the recent re-look at the nexus of public investment funding private profit
in the pharma space. I'm not old enough to recall how things were done prior to the 1980s
with regards to promising academic discoveries getting commercialized in the United States.
There is also a glaring omission here in that there are mechanisms for the Federal Government
to take control of patents and price fix in an emergency, but it's clear that was never going
to happen and was never whispered in the lead up to operation Warp Speed. Pfizer keeps
pointing out they never took government money, which is a set up for them to set the price at
whatever they want while executives line their pockets.
The second point, that is not a focus of the article, is that these technologies are still
completely unproven. I am optimistic about the early results, though would feel better if
they were published in quality journals and not press releases. We simply don't know anything
about long term affects of dosing with this technology. These articles make it sound like
we're out of the woods and these vaccines are here to stay, but what if there are high
percentages of people that get major side effects? We still have no idea.
I was just thinking about that this morning. I thought about the little boy who cried
wolf. If Don had not tarnished his (??where-with-all??) by not leading. He still be the
Prez.
I applaud you for standing with power of your convictions. Not many have the integrity to
do so. This is meant sincerely.
On the other hand I think Larry has a point. Hopefully his and my concerns will prove to
be unfounded. I believe it is too soon to tell. Your question about the quantification of
risk is a fair question and is difficult for the layman judge.
I share the concerns that have been and are voiced here. Still, there is a class aspect to
it all. It seems as if this war is like every other war; the poors are sent in first. There
are many, perhaps the majority of volunteers, that need the couple of hundred bucks the
pharmas are offering the participants. They are the same people that line up to sell their
blood plasma every week. Big business, that. So, I woke up, looked in the mirror, and told
the old man there to "Suck it up, Buttercup."
And Lambert and others are right when they say our leaders should be first in line to roll
up their sleeves. Just don't forget the many that have already done so.
It was a revelation to me that RNA vaccines had been in the works since the 60s. That
makes me a little more in-favor of them. It is still frightening that this vaccine will be
mandated for all medical personnel before the rest of the population. Also interesting that
RNA gets greased up to slip past the enzymes(?) that destroy errant RNA I'm still trying to
think how that might not be such a good thing. But you are right – it looks like it
works. Extremely well in fact. But a timeline to prove it is safe? I'd say one or two
generations. If this mRNA slips past the mechanisms to protect the cell from foreign RNA then
it could hang around long enough to communicate itself back to the genetic DNA – it's
just that they don't quite know how that process works yet. And that's scary as hell.
(Lamarck's Signature). I'd say maybe we should not give this vaccine to anyone under the age
of 35 until we know more about possible negatives involving inheritance. Instead we should
produce good medicines to treat these infections.
Yes, we need volunteers. And they need to be fully informed. I hope you noticed this
remark in yesterday's Water Cooler. Of course, we don't know that the commentor's claimed
bona fides are factual, but if so, his/her take seems appropriate to me.
The publications and a full accounting of side effects are important for a new technology
like this. Traditional vaccinations are in the billions of doses at this point and quite
safe. For this new technology, it's quite hard to say. The publications might bowl me over
and convince me, but press releases do not.
It should be noted that, so far, we have proof of effectiveness in the form of press
releases that are intended to goose stock prices.
Long story, but the neoliberalization of basic biomedical science is complete. This was
foreseeable upon passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. I remember how such science was done
way back then. Scientists did science. Those without the patience and essentially
self-abnegation required for that, went to work at Ciba-Geigy or Burroughs-Welcome or Merck.
The system worked, more or less. At the time I was a very junior lab member, and I told my
labmates that Bayh-Dole meant only that we would pay for most science (at least) twice, the
first time when NIH/NSF/ACS/AHA/March of Dimes funded it and the second time when Big Pharma
"bought" it and charged what a false, not free, market in research and health care would
bear. They just stared at me, with stars in their eyes.
Dolly Parton is a great songwriter and performer but is also a shrewd businesswoman who is
hyper-focused on helping "her people" in the region where she grew up dirt poor. "Coat of
Many Colors" is one of the truly great autobiographical songs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_Many_Colors_(song)
1.So if there were to be no vaccine and the virus had it's way with us, killing 1% of us,
that's what, -- 3 million souls?
2. Alternatively, if there is a vaccine and everyone is vaccinated and that brings an end
to the pandemic, with deaths much curtailed, but 25,000 get Guillian Barre', that's still a
win right?
(Though not if you are one of the 25,000.)
3. Lastly, given their penchant for maximizing clicks and eyeballs,
how do you think the media would handle situations 1 or 2?
Trust in Public Health is easier to knock down than to build back up, especially
vaccines.
As Greg Brown says, "It's a long way up but it's a short way down."
South Dakota will be very informative on this front. It appears to be trying to drag-race
herd immunity through infection before a vaccine shows up. It will probably be the control
group for the statistical study of the relative efficacy on lives saved by a vaccine vs.
letting the disease take its natural course. Beer appears to be the placebo vaccine of choice
in South Dakota.
My reading of this is that even if Pfizer didn't take government money as part of the Warp
Speed initiative, as a mRNA vaccine it still likely builds on the earlier work. I have no
problem with pharma companies making a profit of their later work – they did do the
last critical developments – but nothing for the earlier work isn't right.
We pay for it but they profit from it. Why? Why is there for profit pharma and corporate
medicine to begin with? Why is there competition instead of cooperation in the production of
life saving/extending and other commonly needed goods and services? The provision of
pharmaceuticals and medicine are a free market failure. We are not adequately provided with
what we all must have at prices we all can afford. They've failed not because of the
scientists and medical practitioners who do the real work. They've failed because of the
capitalist parasites that own the corporations that employ the professionals who create the
products and provide the services on the ground.
One thought unsupported by any relevant technical expertise: the delivery mechanism sounds
well suited for bio weaponry given it bypasses your immune reaction to RNA.
The protein design was based on the observation that so-called fusion proteins -- the
pieces of the virus that enable it to invade a cell -- are shape-shifters, presenting
different surfaces to the immune system after the virus fuses with and infects cells. Graham
and his colleagues learned that antibodies against the post-fusion protein are far less
effective at stopping an infection.
Reminds me of this other mysterious shape-shifter: From Wikipedia:
Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal
variants of the same protein. They characterize several fatal and transmissible
neurodegenerative diseases in humans and many other animals. It is not known what causes the
normal protein to misfold, but the abnormal three-dimensional structure is suspected of
conferring infectious properties, collapsing nearby protein molecules into the same shape.
The word prion derives from "proteinaceous infectious particle".
Long-term follow-up of individuals who have received this vaccine versus their placebo
compatriots is essential!
Not likely to be similar. The "shape shifting" of the viral fusion protein means that
different epitopes (i.e., different constellations of 3-D structure that elicit
immune/antibody responses) of the fusion protein, which is embedded in the viral membrane
envelope, are presented pre- and post-fusion. Antibodies against "post-fusion" fusion protein
are unlikely to work because fusion with the host cell is the key phase of infection. But,
and this is a big consideration, rushing into this is foolish, despite the rise in Big Pharma
stock prices.
COVID vaccine revelation sinks like a stone; disappears
In major media, certain stories gain traction. The trumpets keep blaring for a time before
they fade.
Other stories are one-offs. A few of them strike hard. Their implications -- if anyone
stops to think about them -- are powerful. Then nothing.
"Wait, aren't you going to follow up on that? Don't you see what that MEANS?"
Apparently not, because dead silence. "In other news, the governor lost his pet parakeet
for an hour. His chief of staff found it taking a nap in a desk drawer "
One-offs function like teasers. You definitely want to know more, but you never get
more.
Over the years, I've tried to follow up on a few. The reporter or the editor has a set of
standard replies: "We didn't get much feedback." "We covered it." "It's now old news." "There
wasn't anything else to find out."
Oh, but there WAS.
A few weeks ago, I ran a one-off. The analysis and commentary were mine, but the story was
an opinion piece in the New York Times. The Times called it an opinion piece to soften its
blow. I suspected it would disappear, and it did.
Its meaning and implication were too strong. It would be a vast embarrassment for the
White House, the Warp Speed COVID vaccine program, the vaccine manufacturers, the coronavirus
task force, and vaccine researchers.
And embarrassment would be just the beginning of their problem.
So here it is again. The vanished one-off, back in business:
COVID vaccine clinical trials doomed to fail; fatal design flaw; NY Times opinion piece
exposes all three major clinical trials.
Peter Doshi, associate editor of the medical journal BMJ, and Eric Topol, Scripps Research
professor of molecular medicine, have written a devastating NY Times opinion piece about the
ongoing COVID vaccine clinical trials.
They expose the fatal flaw in the large Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna trials.
September 22, the Times: "These Coronavirus Trials Don't Answer the One Question We Need
to Know"
"If you were to approve a coronavirus vaccine, would you approve one that you only knew
protected people only from the most mild form of Covid-19, or one that would prevent its
serious complications?"
"The answer is obvious. You would want to protect against the worst cases."
"But that's not how the companies testing three of the leading coronavirus vaccine
candidates, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, whose U.S. trial is on hold, are approaching the
problem."
"According to the protocols for their studies, which they released late last week, a
vaccine could meet the companies' benchmark for success if it lowered the risk of mild
Covid-19, but was never shown to reduce moderate or severe forms of the disease, or the risk
of hospitalization, admissions to the intensive care unit or death."
"To say a vaccine works should mean that most people no longer run the risk of getting
seriously sick. That's not what these trials will determine."
This means these clinical trials are dead in the water.
The trials are designed to show effectiveness in preventing mild cases of COVID, which
nobody should care about, because mild cases naturally run their course and cause no harm.
THERE IS NO NEED FOR A VACCINE THAT PREVENTS MILD CASES.
There. That's the NY Times one-off. My piece analyzing it went on much longer, but you get
the main thrust:
The leading vaccine clinical trials are useless, irrelevant, misleading, and
deceptive.
But now, it gets much worse. Because Pfizer has just announced their vaccine is almost
ready. CNBC headline, November 9: "Pfizer, BioNTech say Covid vaccine is more than 90%
effective -- 'great day for science and humanity'"
And not a peep about the NY Times one-off. That's gone, as if it never was.
Trump's coronavirus task force knows the truth. Biden's new task force, waiting in the
wings, knows the truth. But they don't care. They're criminals. They'd sell a car with a gas
tank ready to explode to a customer with cash.
But you care, because you can read and think.
You can raise hell.
Now, in case anyone is interested in knowing WHY the major clinical trials of the COVID
vaccine are designed only to prevent mild cases of COVID, I'll explain.
A vaccine maker assumes that, during the course of the clinical trial, a few of the 30,000
volunteers are going to "catch COVID-19."
They assume this because "the virus is everywhere," as far as they're concerned. So it'll
drop down from the clouds and infect a few of the volunteers.
The magic number is 150. When that number of volunteers "catch COVID," everything stops.
The clinical trial stops.
At this point, the vaccine maker hopes that most of the volunteers who "got infected" are
in the placebo group. They didn't receive the real vaccine; they received the saltwater
placebo shot.
Then the vaccine maker can proudly say, "See? The volunteers who caught COVID-19? Most of
them didn't receive the vaccine. They weren't protected. The volunteers who received the real
vaccine didn't catch COVID. The vaccine protected them."
Actually, the number split the vaccine makers are looking for is 50 and 100. If 50 people
in the vaccine group catch COVID, and 100 in the placebo group catch COVID, the vaccine is
said to be 50% effective. And that's all the vaccine maker needs to win FDA approval for the
vaccine.
But wait. Let's look closer at this idea of "catching COVID." What are they really talking
about? How do they define that? Claiming a volunteer in the clinical trial caught COVID adds
up to what?
Does it add up to a minimal definition of COVID-19 -- a cough, or chills and fever? Or
does it mean a serious case -- severe pneumonia?
Now we come to the hidden factor, the secret, the source of the whole con game.
You see, the vaccine maker starts out with 30,000 HEALTHY volunteers. So, if they waited
for 150 of them to come down with severe pneumonia, a serious case of COVID, how long do you
think that would take? Five years? Ten years?
The vaccine maker can't possibly wait that long.
These 150 COVID cases the vaccine maker is looking for would be mild. Just a cough. Or
chills and fever. That scenario would only take a few months to develop. And face it, chills,
cough, and fever aren't unique to COVID. Anyone can come down with those symptoms.
THEREFORE, THE WHOLE CLINICAL TRIAL IS DESIGNED, UP FRONT, TO FIND 150 CASES OF MILD AND
MEANINGLESS AND SELF-CURING "COVID."
About which, no one cares. No one should care.
But, as we see, Pfizer is trumpeting their clinical trial of the vaccine as a landmark in
human history.
And THAT'S the story of the one-off the NY Times didn't think was worth a second
glance.
Because they're so stupid? No. They're not that stupid.
They're criminals.
And the government wants you to take the experimental COVID vaccine, whose "effectiveness"
was designed to prevent nothing worth losing a night's sleep over.
The only worry are the adverse effects of the vaccine, about which I've written
extensively. These effects include, depending on what's in the vial, a permanent alteration
of your genetic makeup, or an auto-immune cascade, in which the body attacks itself.
By Jon Queally, staff writer, Common Dreams. Originally published at
Common Dreams
Pinpointing a reality denounced as "
morally obscene " by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a new government study shows how some of the
nation's largest and most profitable corporations -- including Walmart, McDonald's, Dollar
General, and Amazon -- feast upon taxpayer money by paying their employees such low wages that
huge numbers of those workers throughout the year are forced to rely on public assistance
programs such as Medicaid and food assistance just to keep themselves and their families
afloat.
According to a statement from Sanders' office, the study he commissioned the Government
Accountability Office to carry out -- titled " Millions of Full-time Workers Rely on Federal Health
Care and Food Assistance Programs " -- found that an estimated 5.7 million Medicaid
enrollees and 4.7 million SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients who
worked full-time for 50 or more weeks in 2018 earned wages so low that they qualified for these
federal benefits. In addition, an estimated 12 million wage-earning adults enrolled in Medicaid
and 9 million wage-earning adults living in households receiving SNAP benefits worked at some
point in 2018.
Upon the study's release Wednesday, Warren Gunnels, staff director and policy adviser for
Sen. Sanders, tweeted: "The real looting in America is the Walton family becoming $63 billion
richer during a pandemic, while paying wages so low that 14,541 of their workers in 9 states
need food stamps -- all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Yes. The Walton family is the real
welfare queen in America."
According to the Washington Post :, based on the GAO report:
Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries in every
state. McDonald's was in the top five of employers with employees receiving federal benefits
in at least nine states.
In the nine states that responded about SNAP benefits -- Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana,
Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington -- Walmart was found
to have employed about 14,500 workers receiving the benefit, followed by McDonald's with
8,780, according to Sanders's team. In six states that reported Medicaid enrollees, Walmart
again topped the list, with 10,350 employees, followed by McDonald's with 4,600.
In Georgia, for example, Walmart employed an estimated 3,959 workers on Medicaid -- an
estimated 2.1 percent of the total of non-elderly, non-disabled people in the state receiving
the benefit. McDonald's was next on the list, employing 1,480 who received Medicaid, or 0.8
percent of the total of non-elderly, non-disabled people on the program. "
"At a time when huge corporations like Walmart and McDonald's are making billions in profits
and giving their CEOs tens of millions of dollars a year, they're relying on corporate welfare
from the federal government by paying their workers starvation wages," said Sanders in a
statement. "That is morally obscene."
With the individual wealth of
high-ranking executives and members of billionaire families like the Walton's, who own
Walmart, soaring even as front-line, minimum wage employees and their families struggling to
stay afloat amid the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, Sanders argues that the stark contrast
should be a wakeup call for those who have refused to see how unjust and economically backward
it is for the federal government, meaning taxpayers, to subsidize the cruel wages that massive
profitable companies force their workers to accept.
"U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable
corporations in America," said Sanders. "It is time for the owners of Walmart, McDonald's and
other large corporations to get off of welfare and pay their workers a living wage."
No one in this country should live in poverty," Sanders added. "No one should go hungry. No
one should be unable to get the medical care they need. It is long past time to increase the
federal minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to $15, and guarantee health care
to all Americans as a human right."
These looters at the top don't just rely on welfare for their workers: they also rely on
government assistance in other ways, such as favorable tax treatment and other goodies to
bring their boondoggles to town, and of course trillions in infusions/ giveaways like we saw
this year. Not to mention golden parachutes in corporate bankruptcies, facilitated by the
"way things are done."
""There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism," wrote Walter Benjamin. In precisely this vein, Walton's new Crystal Bridges
museum offers American-made art to strategically cover up the ugly reality Walmart has
created. Spanning the colonial era to the present, the exhibition space's fulsome celebration
of the American spirit eulogizes the nation of shared confidence and abundance, sustainable
mortgages, and worker dignity that Walmart has brutally demolished. The notion that Walton's
supremely self-satisfied kunsthalle might serve as a balm, let alone a monument, to the
market-battered American spirit is analogous to, say, Genghis Khan inviting survivors of his
Mongol hordes to admire an installation of his plunder "
As Amazon uses a network of subcontractors and contractors for everything for logistics to
making toilet paper, all those employees will never show up on "official" stats re.
Amazon.
I called it a straw man because " but let us sweep Whole Foods and Amazon Prime under the
rug" suggested that the piece had done that, when they weren't mentioned.
An equally accurate storyline could be–"Workers in at least 9 states would be forced
to live off even more government handouts without Walmart's employment".
Its tough to give companies grief here simply for paying what the market dictates. I'm all
for going after the route of the problem–monopsony power–but noting the symptoms
without actually raising awareness of the underlying problem is a distraction that keeps the
plebs anger directed where it can't have much effect on the bigger picture. Being mad at
Walmart instead of the government policy that has destroyed unions and made it easier/cheaper
to move jobs overseas isn't serving middle America. Ironically, this distraction serves
Walmart quite well. They actually champion hire minimum wages as it stifles competition
Its an interesting thought experiment to imagine absolutely no minimum wages but a UBI and
universal healthcare so that no one needed a job just to survive. Then Walmart could pay its
employees any low amount and no one would bat an eye (although I suspect wages actually
wouldnt fall because walmart would lose its monopsony power)
Government policy doesn't write itself: lobbyists guide the pen, and donors/ owners like
Walmart pull the guides' puppet strings. "Personal responsibility" goes both ways.
To use yesterday's metaphor, I'd say that the PMC is like the human being co-driver in a
"self"-driving car programmed by capital.
Though if we can get people to admit they feel the symptoms by describing the symptoms,
some of those people might then be ready and willing to hear about the disease which is
giving them the symptoms.
Tempting as it might be to shape the narrative so that the Walmarts of the World appear
more like hapless innovators, shrewdly capitalizing on a crooked playing field, it only works
if you blinker yourself to the fact that the WotW have at least 8 of the ten fingers on the
hands architecting those same playing fields.
Don't get me wrong–I'm not trying to say Walmart is hapless. Maybe I'm too cynical,
but I actually think they're so shrewd they want you to focus on these press releases about
how they pay so little. If the only thing that stems from that is increasing the minimum
wage, they come out big time winners
Here's what the market dictates. " I can get 10 interns who will pay ME to LET them do
your job. Now shut up and get back to work." The way to stop the Market Dictatorship of what
wages will be is to impose a Legal Dictatorship on the market of what wages will be.
That's what the Wages and Hours Act was about to begin with. Make it a long-sentence
hard-time felony to pay less or to take less. Abolish Free Trade in goods , services or
people. That means Sealing the Borders to create zero immigration for as long as necessary to
use the labor shortage to torture the employER class into raising wages and conditions
upward. And to weld shut the "illegal immigration escape hatch" by which employERS (
including limousine liberals) pay less than the legally imposed minimum wage.
Ya, I agree. Providing health care and making sure kids have food and education are
subsidies that help businesses in a healthy way. And a UBI is a great idea as well! Toss in a
Carbon tax, and you have my ideal policy.
We've had this debate here for years so the above article is a bit of a recycled chestnut
rather than an original thought.
And perhaps the answer for the "outrage" of those Walmart heirs is to reestablishment a
meaningful inheritance tax since receiving billions through death is indeed an entitlement
and not just for the Walmart heirs but also for plenty of mansion owners dotting the
Northeast.
As for the company itself, yes it's a crappy and low paid place to work but they are
hardly unique in that and one reason they top those mentioned lists, along with McDonalds, is
that they are the number one and number two employers by number of employees in the country.
And the reason they are so large is that they give their custormers what they want and can
afford which cannot be said of so many competing looters that the author ignores.
There are lots of worse companies than Walmart but in the battle of the coastals versus
the deplorables they have always made a fat juicy target for those who probably pay their
hired help less than Walmart does its "associates."
Right!?
I keep thinking about how at 15/hour people will lose what small piece of our social safety
net that keeps them "making it". No family is purchasing health insurance on that increase.
And really the few dollars per hour might not even make up the food benefits for a medium
sized family. It's scary to get a raise where you end up worse off then before.
I mean I guess that's just the messed up reality when a whole bunch of household costs have
been introduced or increased since policies using means testing (income and asset thresholds)
to determine access. Actually I am sure ok not sure but it would make sense that these
companies know exactly how much pay will kick these employees off benefits. So the employee
community is less likely to make a fuss for small increases in pay which is the norm we have
come to accept as workers. I'm all for real talk minimum/ living wages for the communities
people actually live in.
"Corporate welfare queens" As others have noted, it isn't just Walmart and the Waltons.
Trying to think of an appropriate term to describe the outcome of the decision by a majority
of the US Supreme Court justices in the Citizens United case that not only enabled but
tacitly encouraged One Percent, corporate, Wall Street, executive branch, legislators' and
central bank behavior that, although still a cycle, has led to the opposite of a "virtuous
cycle". "Morally obscene", corrupt and corruptible, and dishonorable are some descriptions of
resultant behavior that come to mind. Too bad "The Swamp" wasn't drained, but has been
further expanded and left both legacy political parties tarnished. It is said that a fish
rots from the head down. That may be so, but that doesn't mean the rot cannot be allowed to
set in. Follow the Money.
It turns out that when the TrumpAdmin used the phrase " the Swamp", what they strictly
specifically and only meant were the impartial scientists at the various departments ,
bureaus and agencies. And they have done all they could to drain out the impartial scientists
and stop the science. Which is all they ever meant by "drain the Swamp".
Citizens United decision was a display of right wing insanity in all it's glory: I
suppose insanity was either baked into the Constitution – or in 1780 – was not
yet insanity?
Still can't get over that decision – ever since, my thought: term limits for friggen
federal judges – and certainly the SCOTUS crew and throw in Congress and the Senate as
well.
We have term limits for state officeholders in Michigan. All that mostly gets us is
cynical amateurs who view their limited term as a chance to make contacts and audition for
lobbying/law/etc. jobs after leaving office.
And the non-cynical amateurs who want to make things better are term-limited out of office
just when they are finally learning where all the hidden levers, ropes, pulleys, secret trap
doors are. Meanwhile, the lobbyists are not term limited.
Term limits for national office would make some things worse while making nothing
better.
Ah, those immortal lobbyists! Term limits for politicians – combined with limits on
lobbyists. One can dream. No? I'd like to try it. How can we actually drain the Swamp/
Oh. Crap. We have a Supreme Court. Freedom to Lobby infinitely. Freedom of bribery – I
mean freedom of speech.
OK, So nothing can be done. Perhaps state office holders are a different thing then National
politicians? (Yeah, maybe not) But Do you want to remove the term limits on our President
then? No? I'd keep that limit.
Should we just resign ourselves to be stuck with this stuff till the Sun expands and swallows
the USA? The future colony on Mars will have a better way? Not likely.
We have term limits. They're called elections. If/when there's something wrong with
Democracy, fix Democracy. If/when there's something wrong with the Constitution, fix the
Constitution
In most cases, artificial term limits don't do either. I would say there are two
exceptions: limiting the presidency to two terms, and limiting the tenure of federal judges.
In the latter case, 18-year term limits have been suggested, and that could be the right
number, I'm not sure.
Now, with respect to fixing Democracy and the Constitution, for a First Step, please see
HJR-48: Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States providing that the
rights extended by the Constitution are the rights of natural persons only -- oh, by the way,
stating that money does not equal speech.
Every looting is real looting. Little looters in the streets are real looters. Big looters
in the suites are real looters.
Since the big looting is currently legal in many cases, laws would have to be changed to
stop the big looters looting. Its worth trying to do. It won't happen with Joemala and
McConnell conspiring together to stop it from happening.
We need to elect a Red Gingrich minority of officeholders into the House and into the
Senate. The "squad" could be the nucleus of that if they decide to center economic justice
instead of critical race wokeness.
Congrease had/has the legal power to enact legislation with which to reign in what has
become the early 21st century gilded age .. but they refuse to .. Nearly ALL of them have
their dirty proboscii harpooning the lowly constituents who elected them ..too busy sucking
any and all of plebian bodilyeconomic liquidity whilst paying deference to the know-it-all,
BigTime-parasitic Oligarchic Brainbugs!
If Biden does that, then Trump himself could very well win again if he runs in 2024. If
that scenario plays out that way, I hope Trump picks Ivanka to be his VP running mate. That
way, Ivanka would be on track to be America's first woman president. I just hope Hillary
would live long enough to see that happen.
I used to dread the Friday news drops. The unemployment numbers, employed people in
minimum wage jobs, workers at home working away, and major inflation in the grocery stores
are hitting people extremely hard coming up to Holiday season. I really can't wait to see the
Friday news drops now. Not just the Trump temper tantrum stuff, but the economic quips they
make. Then what is totally mind blowing are the comments on social media. Some people that
are not hurting much, or at all seem to think that all things are fine as wine in the rest of
the country. I know this reply does not specifically comment on your article, but it is a
wide view of the current situation.
With the computers and big data, the simplest solution is to claw back the benefits paid
to the employees from the corporations, call it humanitarian tax.
But, it would be hard to find a lobbyist to write it, even harder to find a sponsor in the
congress.
That would destroy the ability of these people to get jobs and to receive benefits.
I think you might have the cause and effect mixed up. In my state, anyone who gets SNAP
benefits has to work at least 20 hours a week. These "bad" employers are the ones with
flexible schedules and because the jobs are so crappy, they are readily available. Maybe it's
not that WalMartb workers need benefits, it's that the benefits recipient needs WalMart and
McDonalds.
Every state is different. I just have to show proof of income (which I have, though I
don't have a job). But the amount of SNAP you get varies widely. I am 150% of poverty level
and the state of Pennsylvania just raised my monthly benefit to $16.50.
Another way to put it: Walmart, McDonald's, Dollar General, and Amazon are really
government stores with outsourced management and labor.
Socialism American-style.
Whenever I am in Walmart or any supermarket with automatic check out, I avoid automatic
check out completely and only go to regular check out, no matter how long the line is.
Automatic check out is a precursor to eventually firing all human cashiers. In my "larger"
town, where I often end up in Walmart for the cheaper pet food, an Aldi's was built precisely
opposite it, across the road. I heard an Aldi's employee saying they get paid better than
Walmart. And lots of their prices are the same or better. So I will be spending a lot more
time there.
O'Connor pushed her about her claims that computer software used in the election,
particularly Dominion Voting Systems, has been tainted, and he wondered how she would prove it.
For starters, Powell said that her legal team has pictures of votes being manipulated in
real-time.
"It is terrifying, and it is a huge national security issue," Powell said. "Why the
Department of Justice and FBI have not done something, Dominion is closing its offices and
moving. No doubt they're shredding documents. God only knows what else. More than 100 Dominion
people have wiped any connection with Dominion off the internet."
She also claims that they have testimony from witnesses opening military ballots and
trashing them if they were for Trump, and substitute ballots were put in for Biden.
"I'm essentially staking my personal and professional reputation on these allegations, and I
have no hesitation from what I've seen in doing so," she noted. "In fact, I think it would be
irresponsible if not criminal of me not to come forward with it."
She also says she would LOVE for Dominion to sue her over her allegations so she can conduct
civil discovery. Powell also reacted to Fox News host Tucker Carlson's criticism of her on his
program on Thursday night.
"... "Democracy" is little more than another word for "rule by money" – it can be nothing else. The entire world is falling under the delusion that "each vote counts". ..."
"... The world is utterly corrupt, ruled almost exclusively by monied interests. Jesus said: "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." ..."
"... Misinformed by the politicians and the MSM, presumably. So if establishment and career politicians are the enemies of the people, then anti-politicians and populist outsiders who want to drain the swamp deserve our fullest support. ..."
This is not just America. It is global. the decades old drive to convert the world's
governments to "democracy" is in fact a drive to place the elite in total control of the
populations. "Democracy" is little more than another word for "rule by money" – it can
be nothing else. The entire world is falling under the delusion that "each vote counts".
The world is utterly corrupt, ruled almost exclusively by monied interests. Jesus said:
"No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will
be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money."
Which is your choice?
I_left_the_left , Nov 16, 2020 10:29 AM Reply to Victor
Are voters really as corrupt as those they vote for?
Laurence Howell , Nov 16, 2020 12:44 PM Reply to I_left_the_left
No, just mis-informed
I_left_the_left , Nov 16, 2020 1:11 PM Reply to Laurence
Howell
Misinformed by the politicians and the MSM, presumably. So if establishment and career
politicians are the enemies of the people, then anti-politicians and populist outsiders who
want to drain the swamp deserve our fullest support.
They are programmed and propagandized, embracing the illusion that the electoral system is
not structured and controlled to make sure no significant change can occur, no matter who is
president. It is a sad reality promoted as democracy.
They will prattle on and give all sorts of reasons why they voted, and for whom, and how if
you don't vote you have no right to bitch, and how it's this sacred right to vote that makes
democracy great, blah blah blah. It's all sheer nonsense. For the U.S.A. is not a democracy;
it is an oligarchy run by the wealthy for the wealthy.
This is not a big secret. Everybody knows this is true; knows the electoral system is
sheer show business with the presidential extravaganza drawing the big money from corporate
lobbyists, investment bankers, credit card companies, lawyers, business and hedge fund
executives, Silicon Valley honchos, think tanks, Wall Street gamblers, millionaires,
billionaires, et. al. Biden and Trump spent over 3 billion dollars on the election. They are
owned by the money people.
Both are old men with long, shameful histories. A quick inquiry will show how the rich have
profited immensely from their tenures in office. There is not one hint that they could change
and have a miraculous conversion while in future office, like JFK. Neither has the guts or the
intelligence. They are nowhere men who fear the fate that John Kennedy faced squarely when he
turned against the CIA and the war machine. They join the craven company of Johnson, Ford,
Carter, Reagan G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. They all got the message that
was sent from the streets of Dallas in 1963: You don't want to die, do you?
Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda
and spy networks, its vast intelligence apparatus, increased or decreased in the past half
century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious.
It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or
George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, or Jimmy Carter.
The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan
and groan and wonder why.
All the while, the doll's house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful. It is
now essentially an electronic prison that is being "Built Back Better." The new Cold War now
being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played
by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population through
their corporate mass-media stenographers. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin;
liberal Democrats on the other.
Only those backed by the wealthy power brokers get elected in the U.S.A. Then when elected,
it's payback time. Palms are greased. Everybody knows this is true. It's called corruption. So
why would anyone, who opposes a corrupt political oligarchy, vote, unless they were casting a
vote of conscience for a doomed third-party candidate?
hether it's Tweedledee or Tweedledum – will result in the death and impoverishment of
so many, that being the end result of oligarchic rule at home and imperialism abroad.
Orwell called this Doublethink:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind
simultaneously, and accepting both of them . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely
believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes
necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the
existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one
denies – all this is indispensably necessary.
And while in Nineteen Eighty-Four Doublethink is learned by all the Party members
"and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox," today in the USA, it has
been mastered even by the so-called unintelligent.
To live in the USA is to live in the Church of the Good Hustler.
People often ask: What can we do to make the country better? What is your alternative?
A child could answer that one: Don't vote if you know that both contenders are backed by the
super-rich elites, what some call the Deep State. Which of course they are. Everybody
knows.
Reply
I_left_the_left , Nov 18, 2020 9:50 AM
"the U.S.A. is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy run by the wealthy for the wealthy."
Sorry, no. The whole point about Trump is that he is the great anti-politician, the outsider,
the patriot enemy of the corrupt ruling elites who only care about status, power and control,
not the interests of the American people or any other. By contrast, Biden is clearly the
perfect puppet of the oligarchy and political establishment. The ruling class expected their
ally Clinton to win in 2016, never Trump. The great election steal of 2020 is all about
reversing this little surprise, and to make sure that the irksome people power of US
democracy will finally be under full control. No more land of the free; the USA is now on the
cusp of becoming a leftist fascist dictatorship, in which US patriots are the new German
Jews, and in which future elections will be as meaningful as those of the Soviet Union.
A Texas Libertarian , Nov 18, 2020 6:05 AM
If you don't see that there is a big difference between Trump and Biden, then you are
still in the dollhouse. Trump certainly ain't perfect, but at least he wants to keep the
economy open. Biden is the lock down candidate. If that's all I knew about each of these
candidates, it'd be enough to vote for Trump. But there is a lot more.
Also, 'democracy' is the virus, not the cure, and Orwell was a dumb ass socialist.
Curmudgeon , Nov 17, 2020 11:55 PM
With all of his warts, Nixon did end the Vietnam war. Reagan ended the Cold War and
mutually assured destruction. Wilson got the US into WWI, FDR did WWII, Truman set up Korea
and Clinton tried to heat up Yugoslavia.
George Wallace circa 1965 said there wasn't a dimes worth of difference between the Democrats
and Republicans. They are different branches of the corporate party and globalists competing
for the speed of takeover. Trump is a corporatist but for all of his faults has gone off
script with his own corporatist agenda to cut in on the action, and the owners ain't havin'
it, because the Trumpian party is ever-so mildly nationalistic. Nationalism cannot be allowed
to rear its beautiful head, because people will love it. Trump is a turd, alright, but Biden
is a pile of shit.
I_left_the_left , Nov 18, 2020 9:53 AM Reply to Curmudgeon
Would Biden end endless wars of intervention against the wishes of the neo-cons and
military-industrial complex, as Trump has been doing?
Wow what a hopeless and dreary world you live in. I left the dollhouse in the weeks after
9-11 when I realized the official narrative was full of holes. But I don't find the world out
here quite so dreary as you. Call me a dreamer, but I still believe that good always
(eventually) wins over evil, and I believe the ideals of America – the very same ones
that were probably sold to us as a fake bill of goods a long time ago – is REAL and not
an illusion because so many people believe in it. Perception is reality. Donald Trump despite
all his personal quirks and flaws I sincerely believe to be a deal maker who is interested in
protecting and serving the American people. Even if it's out of his own narcissism that he
wants to do so I'll take it. Regardless, one good thing that has come out of the last 4 years
is that I think a LOT of people have gotten "woke" in their own ways. Not all have left the
dollhouse yet but many have. Have faith in people.
Lysias , Nov 17, 2020 2:01 PM
If it made no difference who won, why were the elites so fanatically opposed to Trump?
It does make a difference cf. the mad scramble to get GWB elected in 2000. At that time
the rulers had decided on years of aggressive foreign policy therefore they need the "war
party" in. When Obama was pitted against the lame duck McCain it was time for some "smiley
face" rule with a surge in the woke factor with the first (gasp!) African American
president.
With Trump, I think it was a genuine shock when he was elected. Like Brexit in the UK, it
just wasn't supposed to happen! Trump is too much of a wild card. Too revealing. Suggesting
there's a deep state and actually taking conspiracies seriously? How dare he!. More to the
point, he's not getting with the covid program.
I_left_the_left , Nov 18, 2020 10:01 AM Reply to wardropper
Trump had the perfect billionaire's lifestyle, but gave it all up to run for the
presidency. He donated all presidential salary to good causes and says he has lost billions
by becoming president, unlike any other political leader you care to mention. More seriously,
he has put himself and family in grave danger by opposing the corrupt ruling classes of the
USA, and by his insolent attempt to 'drain the swamp'. In the near future, the elites will
persecute and try to imprison him and his family, to prevent any further rebellion against
their control in the land of the unfree.
We don't really know how fanatically opposed to him they actually are.
What the media choose to show us always has several layers of superficial, misleading crap
attached to it.
Appearing to be opposed to something is a pretty old trick, after all.
It covers your ass.
Lysias , Nov 17, 2020 10:50 PM Reply to wardropper
Paying off the BLM rioters? That's not something you do just to create an appearance.
The mass mailing of unsolicited ballots is of course a recipe for fraud, even more so in a
state where the voter rolls contain tens of thousands of people who haven't voted or updated
their records in more than a decade. This is how you get dead people voting, as we
reported here at The Federalist and as Tucker Carlson
noted last week .
But there's another, less sensational but perhaps more consequential election scandal in
Nevada that hasn't yet made headlines, even though it's been hiding in plain sight for weeks
now. Under the guise of supposedly nonprofit, nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, Native
American voter advocacy groups in Nevada handed out gift cards, electronics, clothing, and
other items to voters in tribal areas, in many cases documenting the exchange of ballots for
"prizes" on their own Facebook pages, sometimes even while wearing official Joe Biden campaign
gear.
Simply put, this is illegal. Offering voters anything of value in exchange for their
vote is a violation of
federal election law , and in some cases punishable by up to two years in prison and as
much as $10,000
in fines . That includes raffles, free food, free T-shirts, and so on.
... ... ...
There are about 60,000 eligible Native American voters in Nevada who make up about 3 percent
of the state's total voting population. That's almost twice the current margin of Biden's
current lead over President Trump in Nevada. So the Native American vote really does matter, it
could even be decisive. It therefore matters how many Native American votes were influenced by
an illegal cash-for-votes scheme, especially if funding for it came from American taxpayers via
the NCAI.
It also matters because this didn't just happen in Nevada. Organizers there might have been
more obvious about what they were doing, but there's evidence that similar efforts, including
gift card and electronics giveaways, were undertaken in Native communities in
South Dakota ,
Arizona ,
Wisconsin ,
Washington ,
Michigan ,
Idaho , Minnesota , and Texas .
All of this coordinated illegal activity, clearly designed to churn out votes for Biden and
Democrats in tribal areas all across the country, is completely out in the open. You don't need
special access or some secret source to find out about it. You just have be curious, look
around, and report it.
Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets are not curious and refuse to report on any of this
stuff. What's described above is an egregious and totally transparent vote-buying scheme in
Nevada that was likely undertaken on a similar scale across nearly a dozen other states, but
you won't read about it in The New York Times, or hear about it on CNN.
That's not because the story is unimportant, but because, for the media establishment, it's
inconvenient. No wonder these groups didn't try to hide what they were doing.
"... And, objectively, how is the neoliberal model doing? For starters, there is so much money around that doesn't know what to do with itself, that the price of money (interest rates) has never been lower. Ever. Basic supply and demand. ..."
We really need to accept that we may not know what we think we know. For 40 years, we've all
been bleating the mantras of neoliberalism which were promoted as The Natural Order of Things,
but are in fact just a model, one of many.
And, objectively, how is the neoliberal model doing? For starters, there is so much money
around that doesn't know what to do with itself, that the price of money (interest rates) has
never been lower. Ever. Basic supply and demand.
At the same time, neoliberal governments, citing lack of money, have imposed austerity
measures on the working class, cutting services and support to such an extent that serious
social problems have arisen.
The reason the governments are short of cash is because they have continually reduced the
share of GDP that goes into public coffers.
Blind Freddy can see the resultant inequality is a highly undesirable state of affairs,
generating social unrest and unstable markets. Bizarrely, it is also contrary to the most basic
of economic truisms: give poor people money and they spend it right away, generating a ripple
of economic activity that reverberates through the real economy.
But according to neoliberalism, what we have here is perfectly fine because it accords
with the model. And then the High Priests move in and blow smoke over the whole thing with
incantations of why this must be so, again according to the model, which they themselves drew
up to coordinate the way we do things. And of course, they believe their economic theory is the
Natural Order of Things.
The pandemic has blown the lid off a few of those mantras. It'll take fifty years to
decarbonise? We advanced decades in a few weeks. There is no magic money tree? Yes, there is
and you just used it. Giving poor people money undermines the economy? No, it doesn't –
you've just proved it. Government debt is a drain on the economy? Not if it stimulates
activity. Tax is an expense that needs to be curtailed? No, it's an investment in the economy
for everyone.
There are so many things we think we know and many of them are nonsense. We need to take the
opportunity this disruption presents and design a society for humans, not for corporations.
"... "They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen." ..."
"... we can see that 2016 candidate Trump was relatively Trumpist but President Trump was less so. Salaries for the bottom 25% of workers did have the highest rate in increase during his term (through 2019). But in 2020, candidate Trump almost completely rejected Trumpism and ran as an ruling class establishment stooge. ..."
"... Trumpism is not a revolutionary ideology in the correct sense of the term. It is an incrementalist approach that seeks to better the material conditions of the working class but within the current capitalist power structure. ..."
"... The ruling class strategy in the US is to decorate with masks of "diversity" the ugly visages of class dominance. Thus Obama's and soon Kamala's pro-ruling class policies cannot be criticized for fear of being abused as a "racist". ..."
"... Trumpism relies on labor markets to improve the material conditions of the working class. A tight labor market necessarily transfers wealth from the rich to the poor in the form of decreased profits for the rich through increased salaries for the poor. ..."
"... Trump the ruler was presented with the greatest gift a border-loving Trumpist politician could ever ask for: Covid-19. But instead of exploiting this crisis like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary, Trump stabbed Trumpism in the back by turning himself into a useless libertarian during the crisis by refusing for example to push a law that requires home manufacturing of all critical supplies and in never closing the borders properly. He acted like a narcissistic clown in the early days of the crisis and deserves to lose just for that reason. ..."
"... So US racism is fully owned and perpetuated by the ruling class: wealthy oligarchs (including Trump), the media, Wall Street, CIA, FBI, the military industrial complex, multi-national corporations, Silicone Valley Tech, Hollywood, etc. Where there is power there is racism, where there is powerlessness there may be bigotry but not racism. The above lineup of ruling class racists, except for Trump, is the Biden coalition. The ruling class goal is to place an "enlightened person" mask over naked and rapacious ruling class greed and oppression. ..."
"... Under Biden, globalization will once again increase the pace and amplitude of the immiseration of the working class, resistance to the dominant economic paradigm will only grow on both the progressive left and the popular right. ..."
"... In a sense the Biden presidency will be a reactionary movement in that they will be trying to restore the pre-Trumpism political order. This will only further cement the soundness of Trumpism as an ideology. ..."
"... The bottom has no political or economic leverage, and isn't navigating to a position of strength. For example, the "bottom" is currently accepting placebo identity-politics as pacifier. The "bottom" is still searching for an "easy button" solution rather than taking a deeper look at oneself and the layout of the chess board at the macro level. ..."
"... Within an environment of worker scarcity, automation is a positive trend and helps lessen inflationary pressures. The problem with the US is that there is not enough automation because of cheap and docile labor. Compare a meat packing plant in Denmark which is highly automated compared to a US plant, which is packed to the brim with cheap imported labor. Much of the Covid crisis in the US and UK is brought about by sweatshop-style working conditions. ..."
"... It's grotesque to learn that Kamila Harris's relatives are connected to Uber/Lyft. Prop. 22 getting approved in California is another sign of propaganda/big money effectiveness ..."
"... Trumpism stands in opposition to globalization; whose goal is worker abundance which necessarily drives wages down and increases oligarchic wealth. US led imperialism, especially in the Middle East is also a necessary feature of globalization. ..."
"... Here too I would make a modification. Neo-liberalism and globalization aren't about worker "abundance" but rather worker "disposability." Again, if the idea is to create an abundance of workers, driving down market share, then why make finding work so complicated? Why be against strong education systems which would create new workers. Why shut down factories here in the US only to open them in Korea? Why lock up so many Americans for petty offensive, removing them from the willing work force. ..."
"... I would argue that the heart of neo-liberalism is a class structure that places "the establishment" as not just important in the grand scheme of things, but completely indispensable to an individual. And part of that self-aggrandizement is the subjection of every one else. "I am worth more than a thousand of you." Thus, why I must get 2-million-dollar bonus (even after bankrupting the company) and a post on the new re-org chart while everyone else gets a pink slip and watch their hard-earned pensions disappear in chapter 11 proceedings. ..."
"... But it does speak to how disposable workers are to upper management. You are hired for X, and when X is done you are automatically laid off. Why would you waste time giving such an employee training of any sort? Let alone benefits or perks. ..."
"... What is inexplicable is when unions attack Trumpist attempts at macro-scarcity through the use of national borders. A united Union/Trumpist front is required against ruling class interests. Struggling for worker scarcity does not mean one "hates" the workers the ruling class is importing in order to create worker abundance. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is Capitalism's attempt to remove the fetters on profits that exist within the power of a nation-state. Worker abundance is just one of many Neoliberal goals. Borders are a huge fetter to capitalism's basic mission of maximizing profit by producing commodifies with the cheapest labor and selling them to the wealthiest consumers. ..."
"... This is a very important aspect of precarity. Reducing work competition for jobs to increase wages is only half the job, stopping financial predators is the other half, imo ..."
"... Without immigration or outsourcing or even automation, the predators will find still other ways to break labor. We are seeing it with identity politics. ..."
"... I would argue that Bernie and Tulsi are "Trumpism adjacent" in the larger sense of Trumpism. ..."
"... If Trumpism as an ideology is going to flourish, Tulsi in particular will play a critical role in this. The simplest way to see this is that when the ruling class smears someone as a "Russian asset" what they are really doing is recognizing them as a Trumpist threat. ..."
"... precarious (adj.) 1640s, a legal word, "held through the favor of another," from Latin precarius "depending on favor, pertaining to entreaty, obtained by asking or praying," from prex (genitive precis) "entreaty, prayer" (from PIE root *prek- "to ask, entreat"). ..."
"... The notion of "dependent on the will of another" led to the extended sense "risky, dangerous, hazardous, uncertain" (1680s), but this was objected to. "No word is more unskillfully used than this with its derivatives. It is used for uncertain in all its senses; but it only means uncertain, as dependent on others " [Johnson]. Related: Precariously; precariousness. ..."
"... Questiones Disputatae ..."
"... contra, sed contra, ..."
"... When investigating the nature of anything, one should make the same kind of analysis as he makes when he reduces a proposition to certain self-evident principles." ..."
"... Vista Hermosa residents like Luna are troubled by a 2019 environmental rollback by the state, AB1197, that exempts homeless housing developments in the City of Los Angeles from the mandates of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Arguably California's broadest environmental law, CEQA requires builders to assess the environmental impacts of new development and find ways to avoid or mitigate them. ..."
"... The political will to rollback CEQA has continued into 2020. In January, Assemblyman Miguel Santiago, who represents District 53 bordering Vista Hermosa, introduced a new piece of legislation, AB1907, to further expand CEQA exemptions to now include all affordable housing. ..."
"... "a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped" ..."
We have to carefully distinguish between two very different concepts, both based on the word
"Trump". First there is "Trumpism" which is an ideology. The overarching idea behind Trumpism
is to make the GOP a working-class oriented party. The key policy aims of Trumpism are worker
scarcity and anti-imperialism. Worker scarcity is achieved through immigration restriction and
protectionist trade policies. So together, we have the Trumpist Trinity, anti-immigration,
trade restriction, and anti-imperialism. This is the ideology that Trump ran on and rode to
victory in 2016. This is the idea. Unions exist to create micro-worker scarcity. Borders can be
used to create macro-worker scarcity which is far more powerful. And E-verify can be far more
effective than a bombastic wall.
Trumpism stands in opposition to globalization; whose goal is worker abundance which
necessarily drives wages down and increases oligarchic wealth. US led imperialism, especially
in the Middle East is also a necessary feature of globalization. Invade the World / Invite the
World.
The US has always featured two political parties that serve ruling class interests; Huey
Long described it thusly,
"They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters
on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative
grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen."
Trumpism attempts to force one group of waiters to get their grub from the working class'
kitchen. This is obviously an ambitious goal.
Now comes a crucial distinction. In addition to the ideology of "Trumpism" there is "Trump",
the man and his brand. At best there is an extremely tenuous relationship between Trumpism and
Trump. Now to some extent this is natural as ideas never remain pure for long when poured into
the cauldron of reality. With that in mind, we can see that 2016 candidate Trump was
relatively Trumpist but President Trump was less so. Salaries for the bottom 25% of workers did
have the highest rate in increase during his term (through 2019). But in 2020, candidate Trump
almost completely rejected Trumpism and ran as an ruling class establishment stooge.
Now of course Trump is an oligarch and so he is a member of the ruling class. But within
oligarchy, the only people who can challenge the existing order are oligarchs. He committed
massive class treason in 2016 in order to serve his narcissistic need for recognition and
power. In no way should Trump be idealized as altruistically caring about the working class.
Trumpism was nothing more than a means to an end. Trump's end is and always will be Trump, not
Trumpism per se. But none the less Trump exploited and brought to life Trumpism and his motives
for doing so are irrelevant.
Trumpism is not a revolutionary ideology in the correct sense of the term. It is an
incrementalist approach that seeks to better the material conditions of the working class but
within the current capitalist power structure. It posits a class struggle ideological
superstructure which is radical opposition to the globalist ruling classes insistence on an
identitarian (politics of race, sex, etc) perspective. The ruling class strategy in the US
is to decorate with masks of "diversity" the ugly visages of class dominance. Thus Obama's and
soon Kamala's pro-ruling class policies cannot be criticized for fear of being abused as a
"racist".
Trumpism's non-revolutionary aspect is similar to social democracy, as was championed by
Bernie Sanders in 2016 (in 2020 Bernie unfortunately fell to the dark side of identitarian
politics, which are necessarily the enemy of class politics and the most effective class
warfare tool in the ruling class' tool box). The key difference is that Trumpism relies on
labor markets to improve the material conditions of the working class. A tight labor market
necessarily transfers wealth from the rich to the poor in the form of decreased profits for the
rich through increased salaries for the poor.
In fact far from there being any contradiction between Trumpism and social democracy there
is a mutual dependence between them. The public education, health, and support institutions of
social democracy are can only be supported and revitalized by a prosperous working class. The
key idea of Trumpism is that the state asserts its borders to create labor scarcity. The great
problem of Trumpism is that the state is everywhere a tool of ruling class oppression. Borders
are the battle lines of the struggle.
Trump the ruler was presented with the greatest gift a border-loving Trumpist politician
could ever ask for: Covid-19. But instead of exploiting this crisis like Viktor Orbán
did in Hungary, Trump stabbed Trumpism in the back by turning himself into a useless
libertarian during the crisis by refusing for example to push a law that requires home
manufacturing of all critical supplies and in never closing the borders properly. He acted like
a narcissistic clown in the early days of the crisis and deserves to lose just for that
reason.
The ruling class response to Trumpism is identitarian politics: noble ruling class lords
screaming that the dirty peasants are racist. What the US ruling class must always do is
project their racism onto the peasants, who white or black, both suffer economically from
racial oppression. Mao Tse-Tung gave this astute analysis of US racism:
In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites
in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles who oppress the Negro people
. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other
enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people. At present,
it is the handful of imperialists headed by the United States, and their supporters, the
reactionaries in different countries, who are oppressing, committing aggression against and
menacing the overwhelming majority of the nations and peoples of the world. We are in the
majority and they are in the minority.
So US racism is fully owned and perpetuated by the ruling class: wealthy oligarchs
(including Trump), the media, Wall Street, CIA, FBI, the military industrial complex,
multi-national corporations, Silicone Valley Tech, Hollywood, etc. Where there is power there
is racism, where there is powerlessness there may be bigotry but not racism. The above lineup
of ruling class racists, except for Trump, is the Biden coalition. The ruling class goal is to
place an "enlightened person" mask over naked and rapacious ruling class greed and
oppression.
Under Biden, globalization will once again increase the pace and amplitude of the
immiseration of the working class, resistance to the dominant economic paradigm will only grow
on both the progressive left and the popular right. Previously elections in the US were
between center left and center right factions fighting for the right to serve the ruling class.
Looking at 2020 from a bird's eye perspective, roughly speaking the Biden coalition is most
progressives, the center left, and many elements of the center right (elements close to the
Bush family). The Trump coalition is portions of the center right and the popular right. The
ruling class was going to be fine whatever the result, but a Biden presidency constrained by a
GOP Senate is ideal in some ways to the ruling class.
A key strategic objective of the ruling class is to keep the left and right at each other's
throats. Trump helped them achieve this rigid politically binary goal despite occasionally
flirting with political fluidity during the 2016 campaign where his similarities to Bernie
Sanders were unmistakable. In contrast, anti-ruling class progressives and popularists have to
find a way to combine their forces and energy in opposition to the ruling class and not in a
pointless stalemate of playing "socialists" vs; "fascists", a battle whose only possible winner
is the ruling class.
One of the most interesting outcomes of the 2020 election is the specter of Latinos
embracing Trumpism. From an economic point of view this makes total sense. Immigration
restriction will benefit first and foremost the material conditions of the Latino working
class. Also Trump's macho populist persona works well within Latino culture. Not to mention
many Latinos despise blacks and so the whole BLM phenomenon helped push Latinos onto the Trump
train.
California is a now a de facto one-party state but that conditions are ripe for the rise of
a popularist yet macho, Latino based, Trumpist style political faction to oppose the
cosmopolitan urban Democratic hegemony. Back in the 60's, Cesar Chavez was endeavoring to
increase the QUALITY of Hispanic life in the US by increasing the salaries of farm workers
through a strategy of worker scarcity.
Ruling class institutions, threatened by the potential of having portions of their wealth
transferred to poor peasants, created an organization called "La Raza" as an alternative to
Chavez. La Raza wanted QUANTITY, they wanted more and more Latinos to build up their base of
political power.
And all the better if these Latinos stayed poor: not only do their ruling class paymasters
stay happy, this would also keep the Latino masses dependent on their identitarian political
leaders. So one of the key outcomes of the 2020 election is that in ever larger numbers,
Latinos are rejecting Quantity of Latinos and opting for Latino Quality of life.
And so in order to further Trumpism, Trump, who is acting as a fetter upon it, must go.
In a sense the Biden presidency will be a reactionary movement in that they will be trying
to restore the pre-Trumpism political order. This will only further cement the soundness of
Trumpism as an ideology.
But Trump as a leader is a much more mixed bag. New Trumpists will arise, for example Tucker
Carlson or podcaster Joe Rogan. 2024 will be a great year for Trumpism because this time Trump
will not be running it; and that may allow many progressives to join the train, especially in
light of how much hippy punching they are about to endure from the coming Biden synthesis of
Neolibs and Neocons.
Nice essay. I especially liked the differentiation between Trump and Trumpism.
I'd be interested to hear what your vision of the platform (main objectives) might be for
this new Trumpism party.
I still question whether top-down politics of any stripe is really going to address the
underlying economic and biosphere issues we're facing. Why? Because:
the top-down political economy is dedicated to maintaining status quo (with emphasis on
status & wealth), and
the bottom-up people who want things to change seem to want someone else to do all the
changing
most of our big problems arise from the disconnect between what we must do as a species
in order to survive and what we're currently, actually doing as individuals
When a Zen-like party emerges, which encourages its adherents to understand themselves,
seek "right" action (accurate situational analysis yielding a well-crafted strategy), and do
right action, I'll get interested in politics again. For now, we're just treading water in a
strong current that's headed to a bad place.
The Zen plan is no panacea, though. That path involves great risk (e.g. lots of failures)
and hard work. Pay's not that good, either.
Top-down vs. bottom-up are not necessarily contradictory and can in successive waves
contribute to social change in an increasingly self-reinforcing manner. Bottom-up change
influences top-down change (often through the opposition forces' malignant top-down
overreaction) which intensifies bottom-down change: so on and so on.
I would describe the main objectives for Trumpist party as the development of "Green
Trumpism". The moral imperatives associated with the climate crisis would be used as a
catalyst for Trumpist labor scarcity through the means of a Green Reindustrialization. The
process of globalization is one where production is severed from consumption. Production is
moved to cheap labor countries with terrible environmental standards. Capitalists produce
dirtier commodities while increasing their profits. This process must be reversed. If the
first world wants to consume then they must produce.
First world population growth is a critical factor in exasperating the climate crisis. All
of this growth can be linked to immigration, usually people from low consuming nations moving
to high consumption nations. These migration flows must be reversed.
Globalization requires imperialist power to enforce the safe transport of commodities
produced in far flung regions of the world. As globalization declines, so will necessarily US
imperialism.
yes, bottom-up and top-down would interact, if only the bottom-up was happening. It's
not.
The bottom has no political or economic leverage, and isn't navigating to a position of
strength. For example, the "bottom" is currently accepting placebo identity-politics as
pacifier. The "bottom" is still searching for an "easy button" solution rather than taking a
deeper look at oneself and the layout of the chess board at the macro level.
Using the climate crisis as driver for econ change is the Great Hope, and the top 1% is
hip to the game. They have and will continue to block meaningful change. Keep in mind that
just stopping the daily damage to the environment will render much (most) of our industrial
and household infrastructure obsolete. Nobody's ready to take that on, and that's the
implication of actually effective Green policy.
Right now, across the political spectrum, "green" consists of "what's convenient" instead
of "what's necessary". This is the individual-ethic bankruptcy I've alluded to elsewhere:
it's endemic from top 1% to bottom-est of the bottom.
You made a few statements I don't agree with:
"Capitalists have dirtier / more destructive production than (others)." 1st world production
is cleaner than in other places, and that 2nd and 3rd world production often happens in
non-capitalistic scenarios. Dirty production happens where dirty production is tolerated.
Another statement you made: "globalization has to stop / be reversed". Dunno about that
one. Globalization has resulted in production moving to cheapest-input locations. Like China.
Globalization will stop only when cost-of-inputs is leveled, and we're decades away from
that, and a whole lot more pain for the Developed world. Slow barge, that one.
Your essay doesn't address the effect of automation on household or societal economics.
Automation is not a reversible trend, and it's accelerating. The focus on the "where" of
production might not yield the HH economic benefits you're hoping for.
Some fairly different strategies need to be developed at the household level in order to
address the problems we face. Would you consider using the household as the pivot-point of
your new econ strategy rather than using industry and government?
Americans can exert more power with their consumption choices than their choices at the
ballot box. So certainly the household is a crucial pivot point.
Green tariffs can overnight level cost-of-inputs. Climate change provides a powerful moral
incentive to co-locate US consumption and production.
Within an environment of worker scarcity, automation is a positive trend and helps lessen
inflationary pressures. The problem with the US is that there is not enough automation
because of cheap and docile labor. Compare a meat packing plant in Denmark which is highly
automated compared to a US plant, which is packed to the brim with cheap imported labor. Much
of the Covid crisis in the US and UK is brought about by sweatshop-style working
conditions.
The question on automation is that somehow "the people" have to have a slice of the
profits and thus benefit from the process. A Yang-style UBI would need to go hand in hand
with increased automation.
I agree with the uselessness of the current Green movement. It is typically just used as a
tool to attack perceived opponents. But a Green Trumpism would no doubt both address the
climate crisis and help alleviate economic inequalities.
"The ruling class was going to be fine whatever the result, but a Biden presidency
constrained by a GOP Senate is ideal in some ways to the ruling class."
Yeah – there will be a lot of Biden disappointment amongst Us the majority –
this Precariat. A true Green New Deal would offer lots of employment opportunities here in
the USA – and would seem ideal for either party to embrace. Divided government won't
achieve it – the ruling class – and both parties – with short sighted heads
up their asses won't embrace it anyhow.
Regardless, Trumpism seems a fail except for a vast mob angry/scared/confused voters- and
some tax break aficionados. It's not just Biden/Harris won't deliver – but Tucker
Carlson, Joe Rogan, Ted Cruz, or whichever clever one runs in 2024 , won't deliver either,
and Trumps wall is a fiasco. If still effective propaganda..?
It's grotesque to learn that Kamila Harris's relatives are connected to Uber/Lyft. Prop.
22 getting approved in California is another sign of propaganda/big money effectiveness
– and We the People being tricked once again. I got lot's of mail showing
photos and quotes of regular working people embracing Prop 22 VOTE YES! save our jobs –
it passed easily.
Overall: Still glad to see Trump himself out of the White House – the clever
SOB.
This is a good essay. But I still have a few issues with it.
The key policy aims of Trumpism are worker scarcity and anti-imperialism. Worker scarcity
is achieved through immigration restriction and protectionist trade policies. So together, we
have the Trumpist Trinity, anti-immigration, trade restriction, and anti-imperialism. This is
the ideology that Trump ran on and rode to victory in 2016. This is the idea. Unions exist to
create micro-worker scarcity. Borders can be used to create macro-worker scarcity which is
far more powerful. And E-verify can be far more effective than a bombastic wall.
I would modify this to say "worker exclusivity", that only a narrow class of workers can
be tapped for specific terms of employment. When discussing the subject with those on the
rights, they are far more concerned about immigrants "taking their jobs" then they are of
building a scarcity of workers to gain a market share over employers. Let's not forget that
"Trumpian" is still fervently anti-union, even though this would be a good way of
generating "micro scarcity" as you put it. Being anti-union would be counterproductive to
worker scarcity.
Assuredly, "worker scarcity" makes a certain degree of sense. And I can easily see how
you came to that conclusion. But I fear you still give "trumpisim" too much credit in that
they have specific goals that they are attempting to achieve, and thus conceive of logical
steps to that goal.
I would argue that the right doesn't have goals in the same perspective as we on the
left may seem them. What we might think of as "goals" are better described as ideological
commandments that must be obeyed at all cost, and ignoring all consequence. As you noted
yourself. Trump's wall would do little to impede immigration. A better e-verify system
would be far more effective. So why ignore e-verify while being completely for the wall?
Because the wall is a visible simple of defiance against immigration that conservatives can
march back and forth in front of brandishing their 2nd amendment right. You can't do that
for a government policy.
Trumpism stands in opposition to globalization; whose goal is worker abundance which
necessarily drives wages down and increases oligarchic wealth. US led imperialism, especially
in the Middle East is also a necessary feature of globalization.
Here too I would make a modification. Neo-liberalism and globalization aren't about
worker "abundance" but rather worker "disposability." Again, if the idea is to create an
abundance of workers, driving down market share, then why make finding work so complicated?
Why be against strong education systems which would create new workers. Why shut down
factories here in the US only to open them in Korea? Why lock up so many Americans for
petty offensive, removing them from the willing work force.
I would argue that the heart of neo-liberalism is a class structure that places "the
establishment" as not just important in the grand scheme of things, but completely
indispensable to an individual. And part of that self-aggrandizement is the subjection of
every one else. "I am worth more than a thousand of you." Thus, why I must get
2-million-dollar bonus (even after bankrupting the company) and a post on the new re-org
chart while everyone else gets a pink slip and watch their hard-earned pensions disappear
in chapter 11 proceedings.
Of course, unlike much of the right, neo-liberalism does have a goal-oriented
methodology. So, creating "worker abundance" to force down individual worker market share
certainly makes sense. But is it true? It doesn't capture the full cynicism of typical
neo-liberal thinking. For creating so much worker abundance, plenty of neo-liberal aligned
employers still managed to complain about worker "allocations" (the idea that certain
employment sectors face chronic worker scarcity.) Indeed, current "plug-n-play" employment
patterns have made filling many positions nearly impossible because no one ever has the
right qualifications for a specific job without training. I have seen engineering jobs go
empty for years because they can't find "prior experience for proprietary development
project." (face palm.).
But it does speak to how disposable workers are to upper management. You are hired for
X, and when X is done you are automatically laid off. Why would you waste time giving such
an employee training of any sort? Let alone benefits or perks.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I will attempt to respond to your points.
Ruling class elements of the GOP attack unions in order to minimize worker micro-scarcity.
What is inexplicable is when unions attack Trumpist attempts at macro-scarcity through the
use of national borders. A united Union/Trumpist front is required against ruling class
interests. Struggling for worker scarcity does not mean one "hates" the workers the ruling
class is importing in order to create worker abundance.
This is to accept the ruling elite's identitarian frame, which boils down to: class struggle is racist. What this basically boils
down to is that the ruling class is benevolent and kind and loves purely altruistically to
import little brown workers while evil workers hate them because they are taking their jobs.
Oligarchs + cheap labor immigrants = good. Workers militating for their class interests =
bad. The key goal for Trumpism is to flip these equations.
Worker abundance necessarily means job scarcity from the worker's point of view. This
makes workers desperate and willing to accept lower wages. This has been happening for the
last 40 years at least since the end of the Cold War, if not a little sooner. Worker scarcity
means job abundance, from the worker's point of view. This means plenty of options because
management has to bid up salaries to attract workers.
Neoliberalism is Capitalism's attempt to remove the fetters on profits that exist within
the power of a nation-state. Worker abundance is just one of many Neoliberal goals. Borders
are a huge fetter to capitalism's basic mission of maximizing profit by producing commodifies
with the cheapest labor and selling them to the wealthiest consumers.
Nation-states can also
impose regulations (environmental, worker, etc) which also limit capitalist profit. Free
trade allows corporations to relocate factories to nations with the lowest salaries,
environmental and worker protections. For those jobs that cannot be transferred, Prop 22 is
the thin edge of the neoliberal wedge that is constraining the nation-state from protecting
workers.
I understand restricting immigration and anti-globalism as a means to increase US workers
leverage in raising wages in jobs and in better political representation. This addresses the
physical world of work.
Left unaddressed, and equally important imo, is the fact that US business and economy is now
largely financialized; much of the greatest wealth comes from unregrulated or restrained
predatory financial practices, from rentierism, from tolls and fines and fees.
This
financialization is every bit as important as the physical conditions you list in the rise in
precarity, maybe even more so at this time. How, for instance, would only physical
restrictions have changed the financial outcomes of the 2008 mortgage bank frauds and
financial crisis, the outcomes of ratings agencies giving bogus ratings to junk bonds,
changed the exorbitant rise in medicine prices, etc?
This is a very important aspect of
precarity. Reducing work competition for jobs to increase wages is only half the job,
stopping financial predators is the other half, imo
O could have stopped the bank predators in 2009-10, but chose not to. In his own
words:
+++ Without immigration or outsourcing or even automation, the predators will find still other
ways to break labor. We are seeing it with identity politics.
Beware of the UBI: it simply greases the wheels for more privatization instead of public
goods and infrastructure, similar to how vouchers and charters gut a public school
system.
Financialization is the necessary result of globalization's destruction of Fordism: which
is the interdependent role of worker and consumer. In order to increase profits, Ford doubled
his workers' salaries so that could serve him as consumers as well as workers.
Globalization
seeks to increase profits even further by disassociating the worker and the consumer. Work is
off-shored to low wage countries, whose leaders intentionally damp down local consumption.
This paradoxically means the soon to be immiserated western worker is still called upon to
play the role of global consumer of last resort.
At the same time, huge waves of profits are
washing over Wall Street. And so temporary speculative bubbles are created that serve two
purposes. First false wave of prosperity brought on for example by a real estate boom tamps
down any worker resistance towards the new economic order. Secondly the seemingly "free
money" created by speculation allow western consumption to continue.
So necessarily a Green Reindustrialization will force Wall Street to stop chasing
speculative squirrels and to instead concentrate on financing the new clean plant that will
help alleviate the climate crisis.
Rogan likes to do long form interviews across the political spectrum, but he has
consistently been a fan of Bernie and Tulsi. Author is Confusing the medium with the message.
Not the same.
I would argue that Bernie and Tulsi are "Trumpism adjacent" in the larger sense of
Trumpism.
If Trumpism as an ideology is going to flourish, Tulsi in particular will play a
critical role in this. The simplest way to see this is that when the ruling class smears
someone as a "Russian asset" what they are really doing is recognizing them as a Trumpist
threat.
Trumpism in its highest form will mean a reconciliation of the non-identitarian left
and right. For example, white identitarians like Richard Spencer have abandoned Trumpism.
I think that one of the most important considerations is that there needs to be a
coalition of sorts – between the working class Trumpian base and the Left (primarily
Generation Y and X). It shares one thing, they are both victims of the Establishment,
neoliberals, and urgently need change.
One image has always been very important to me. Note the distribution of socially
conservative, economically left wing voters.
The major challenge facing Democrats today is that race, gender, identity politics, and
religion appear to trump economics, at least as far as politically engaged primary voters
go. The old-line Democrats were an economic liberal party with socially conservative and
socially liberal wings (the social liberals, in fact, were in a minority). The new
Democrats are a socially liberal party with an economic conservative wing (neoliberals) and
a progressive economic wing. They all agree on social issues. They are loath to compromise
on open borders (which is what the existing immigration dysfunction de facto gives us),
transgender bathrooms, making room for pro-life members, or gay married couples' wedding
cakesbecause those are the only issues that hold their economic right and economic left
together.
I don't think that the Democratic Party in its current form is viable for the left.
So the price of a new New Deal majority would be to let Democrats welcome abortion
critics and opponents of mass immigration, so long as they favored a higher minimum wage,
less "synthetic immigration," and a pause on globalization (which facilitates international
labor arbitrage). In the words of John Judis:
I think that we would end up with the following compromise.
1. The economically left, culturally right agrees to accept global warming, end the wars,
and "socialism" like universal healthcare), and to offer legal immigrants along with
minorities a shot at the middle class
2. The economically left, culturally left agrees to compromise on immigration, globalization
(think put a strong emphasis on re-industrialization and de-financialization), and social
issues (think abortion, guns, defend the police, etc).
Interestingly, the American Conservative has an article lambasting Trump as well.
"The ruling class goal is to place an "enlightened person" mask over naked and rapacious
ruling class greed and oppression."
Maybe the same can be said of placing a "socially conservative" mask. We need to be
cautious in positing the possiblility of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial conservative movement
that somehow manages to be "nationalist, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-immigration" but still
serves the interests of the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, religiously diverse, working class
populace that's already here.
Implementing worker scarcity will necessarily further the economic interests of the
multi-racial, multi-ethnic, religiously diverse, working class populace that's already
here.
Just as implementing worker abundance necessarily furthers the economic interests of the
multi-racial, multi-ethnic, religiously diverse, RULING class populace that's already
here.
Great write up.
While I generally agree with your characterizations, I will also throw out there ..in no
particular order..
1) luckily , trump and his "legion of doom" aren't competent enough to draw on the "larger
picture" you've outlined here to maximize his effectiveness by using these natural
advantages, in their plot of self aggrandizement luckily for us americans/ the trump is his
own worst enemy.
2) ejecting trump from trumpism is a path to greater success for the right and
fascism/corporatism, which some "smart" people will surely weave into their future plans and
models. And the corporatists,be they from the republican side of the aisle, or the democratic
side will surely carry forward with this opening in american politics.
because trump does have to go the professionals of deception can mold that wisp of smoke into
any shape they want but it won't stay for long and doesn't hold up to any scrutiny . it isn't
real..It isn't even a chunk of clay
3] the problem of trumpism, or "conservative republican politics", or "democratic party
politics" is that they all necessarliy MUST be a lie in progress. NONE of the political
duopoly can go into "truthland" . it is their kryptonite. So all have agreed to never enter
and call it a no go zone
And the fact that everything about our political situation is "fact free",at least in the
sense that any facts used are only used out of context to keep a truer understanding from
happening; hasn't stopped anyone yet and isn't likely too any time soon so too bad for
everyone. .we'll call that a draw.
The 30,000 foot description of yours not withstanding, that type of over arching layers of
this onion, is something for planners to incorporate in "the con" as it needs to be.. but is
above the paygrade of most political actors , who work at rousing the rabble
4) I don't see actual agency of the people . what people want to do has nothing to do with
what is going to happen usually, if the elites want something to happen, they provide the
opinions and the votes.. "deserve" has nothing to do with it.. and "our reality" is just an
illusion.
So over layering a description of bigger forces, over the chaos that has been created to keep
this "hegelian dialect" in place , is again for those at a higher pay grade in the
process..
Too many chefs ruin the meal but hey ,it's our gruel and we have nothing else to eat , for
the moment and maybe less later, if they get their way.
"Post-truth" is dystopian. It's a luxury to live at a distance from unpleasant realities.
If a society can sustain a population/segment so far up their own **** then you've "arrived"
in a sense.
However, dystopia sounds better than the crises that lay ahead. It's the unavoidable hard
landing that worries me.
Maybe truth works like wealth: The first generation discovers the truth. The second
generation teaches the truth. And the third generation fakes news.
The Democratic Party doesn't want to come to terms with the fact that they deserve as much
blame as the GOP for the predicament the working class finds itself in.
They chose under Clinton to repeal Glass Steagall, sign free trade agreements, and bring
China into the WTO. Under Obama, those policies largely continued. Under Biden, all signs
indicate that this will still continue.
I think the brutal reality is that the upper middle class is willfully ignorant of what
the precariat faces. Public health authorities, while understandably trying to contain the
pandemic, are not the ones who are going to see their lives destroyed. The working class was
doomed either way, either by being disproportionately hurt by the coronavirus (they can't
work from home) or from long-term unemployment (they've suffered more as a percentage of
total jobs lost). In other words, they don't have a stake in keeping the lockdown and may see
opening up as a lesser evil.
Likewise, the Liberals who are in secure upper middle class white collar jobs tended to
act disdainfully when working class people protested the lockdowns. I'm not saying the
protestors were right, but many are people who put their lives into their work, such as small
business owners. Evidently, subsidies were needed at the very least.
In this regard, the GOP might have more hope than the Democrats, barring a Berniecrat
takeover of the Democrats, which is looking less likely. That said the GOP still has a huge
right wing apparatus that would have to be overcome for a "real populist" (ex: someone who
actually cared about the well being of the working class) to take over.
One advantage might be that younger people are overwhelmingly left wing economically, so
as Generation Y and Z become a bigger share of the electorate, things may change.
Likewise, the Liberals who are in secure upper middle class white collar jobs tended to
act disdainfully when working class people protested the lockdowns. I'm not saying the
protestors were right, but many are people who put their lives into their work, such as
small business owners. Evidently, subsidies were needed at the very least
To this day, they still get outraged for the same reasons. If you so much as point out
what you just wrote–not being anti-science but simply the hardship lockdowns cause and
how it needs to be properly addressed–at best you'll be called scientifically
illiterate. At worst you'll be accused of being an evil rich person who wants to kill grandma
to make the stock market go up.
While some of the protests may have been astroturf, not all of them were. If you're a
small-business owner facing the prospect of losing everything you've worked for and basically
being told "you're on own" of course you will be angry. Likewise, if you're an employee and
can't work from home, of course you will be stressed out about losing your job. This is the
real "economic anxiety" and it is no laughing matter.
for the real small business owners, and the individuals who can't work .
they ought to feel pissed
after all . a fraction of the trillions that are earmarked for wall street, could have "paid
their bills"..at least for a year . and then the "citizens" would be getting something
tangible for the debt being incurred in their name by the duopoly.
All the people realizing "someone" is getting bailed out and it isn't them
I was puzzled by the victory of Prop. 22 in California. This is a state which has huge
Democratic majorities, and normally rubber-stamps all union-sponsored legislation.
Uber and Lyft threatened that if Prop. 22 did not pass, they would either stop operations
or would lay off 75% of their temp workers.
(not unlike an employer threatening to move to China if their workers form a union.)
They also threatened that ride prices would at least double, and wait times would greatly
increase.
The average voter may have put their own self-interest ahead of any class loyalty.
Final note: the gig workers did get a few benefits out of AB 5, things granted by Uber and
Lyft to buy some goodwill.
Comments welcome! I do not live in CA so I am just guessing on this. It was an important
vote.
Prop 22 is going to be the most important result of the 2020 election, not Trump
v Biden or control of either legislature.
I've been very puzzled by the result too as it passed handily and wasn't really close. I
don't live near CA either, but I did read that among other misleading tactics, the Prop 22
proponents gave delivery bags to restaurants that use these gig delivery services so that the
delivery drivers would be dropping off meals to people in Yes on 22 bags, which made it seem
like prop 22 would be beneficial to gig workers if you didn't look into it much.
So on the one hand there was the intent to deceive. But then I think that if I heard about
these dirty tricks 3,000 miles away, surely CA voters must have known about them too.
The depressing thing is that maybe a lot of people did know exactly what Prop 22 was all
about and decided they liked the idea of a permanent underclass always only minutes
away at the touch of a button to do the things they can't be bothered with for a
pittance.
The fact that so many of the gig company execs worked first in the Obama administration
and are now heading back to the Biden administration with dreams of scaling up prop 22 is a
very ominous portent.
I voted NO on prop 22, but a mailer I received from the YES side may show why it
passed.
It has text with "by 4-to-1, app-based drivers overwhelmingly prefer to work as
independent contractors".
The pictures of smiling workers on the mailer are all minorities (Asian, Hispanic,
Black).
I'd suggest a small percentage of CA voters actually use Uber/Lyft, so am inclined to
believe voters did not vote to preserve their own self-interest.
The "YES" mailer lists 5 advantages for the drivers, "guaranteed hourly earnings for
app-based drivers", "per mile compensation toward vehicle expenses", "medical and disability
coverage for injuries and illnesses", "new health benefits for drivers who work 15+ hours a
week", and "additional safety protections for app-based drivers"
The mailer lists groups supporting it, NAACP, California Hispanic Chamber of Commerce,
Consumer Choice Center, The Latin Business Association, Black Women Organized for Political
Action, California Small Business Association, California Senior Advocates League.
I remember a prior YES on 22 mailer had support from Mothers Against Drunk Driving..
The "YES" group spent about 12x more than the No group (188 million vs 15million)
I saw a lot of pro Prop 22 advertising and nothing against it. The ads were all sleek,
full of cheerful drivers with big smiles, and easily the best made ads of 2020. I knew that
there was something bad about the proposition, but until just a few days before the election
I couldn't tell you why. All my mental bandwidth was on the national elections and not on
parsing the various state propositions like I normally would. This time it was all on
something else.
If a poli-sci/poli-econ geek like me was having some problems with truly understanding
this extremely effective, slickly made campaign of manufactured consent, what does that say
about the many, often financially and/or socially overwhelmed, California voters who would be
much like me? I think that the overlords had the perfect situation for getting the
proposition passed.
"but the (GOP) party needs to reverse its positions on taxing the wealthiest, punishing
and preventing the expansion of organized labor, reversing their position on outsourcing
manufacturing, and addressing economic precarity"
And I need to become 6'4″, handsome, young and athletic.
Indeed why would they reverse when the Dems agree with them on all of it. What the above
article doesn't get is that the true ruling class response to precarity is simply to make
sure voters have no options to address it. We are in a class war, not a battle between
political parties. Any promises Biden made to the poor will blow away like smoke once in
office. He is on the record saying that billionaires are swell folks.
Lambert linked an interesting article yesterday in Water Cooler that talked about cycles
in history and the ingredients of high social unrest. The subject is historian Peter
Turchin
He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an
"age of discord," civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In
2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn't let
up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s
and early '70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite
class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general
population; and a government that can't cover its financial positions.
Turchin is saying that social instability is not just the result of high inequality but
also of a bloated ruling class that is itself insecure because there aren't enough PMC jobs
for all those college graduates and their credentials. Thus in our case the political parties
have come to be dominated by these middle class concerns with the poor almost entirely out of
the picture and dismissed as racist deplorables who probably deserve their fate. As the
article says this sociological theory of history is controversial but at least worth
considering.
A good, broad, liberal arts degree, or something like it, can be useful in many kinds of
jobs, if the jobs exist . Much of the high skilled, high paying jobs have all been shipped
overseas, and the remaining good paying jobs increasingly are office jobs requiring not only
a masters degree, but good social connections, and at least saying only goodthoughts to get
and keep.
It use to be that there was plenty of diverse work. If you failed at getting tenure or
that job at the bank, or the government position you wanted, there was plenty of good work
requiring only some education, intelligence, and drive. Having the kind of degree and
connections that someone in the modern PMC would merely be very useful, not a requirement for
a good life. Bur now we have too many people having the exact education needed to get the few
remaining good jobs in the few safe fields, and unlike fifty years, failure means
destitution, not disappointment.
And yet claiming that this class war exist, which is supposedly immiserating increasing
numbers of Americans ever higher up the class chain, is all deplorably racist, sexist,
homophobic, and transphobic I am reliable informed. /s
It is unsettling to see writers who I have been reading for years, even decades, start
saying that it is racism or bigotry, and only that, which explains the Bad Man. One doesn't
have to be a Marxist to make a connection with the increasing poverty and corruption under
both parties over the past forty or fifty years with President Trump. Yet, many refuse
to.
It does make me wonder what it is that I am blind to.
I agree,
the class war is a better way of seeing things.
all the symptoms and externalities the class war provides are the things the parties use as
fodder issues for their respective bases but all the duopoly can provide is more of the same
. "their way" their culture . their rules . their precedents their history..
this is how they seem to win they teach the children to think their" way".
Then what else will happen in the future
people continually adopting patterns that already exist.
They have created a culture . and we all know how people are treated by their neighbors who
are "counter-culture"
It becomes a self reinforcing narrative, where the hive keeps the status quo because they
want to .
We keep supporting systems that are there to control us rather than recreating systems that
help .. like we are "supposed" to or something.
James P. Yep. That paragraph has some giant "ifs" in it that caught my eye as I was
reading. The likelihood of Republicans sponsoring legislation to repeal "right to work" laws,
which tend to be in Republican-dominated states, is almost nil. Further, a party that is
opposed to any tax increases, no matter what need has to be addressed, isn't going to change
course. Another "if" is relying on someone like the egregious Tom Cotton, as mentioned, for
leadership about legislation.
I am sure, though, that you are already on your way to becoming a beefcake model and
internet influencer.
It's going to take some time for this article to sink in. Words like precariat and
precarity are fairly new concepts, at least for me and my automatic spell checker. What is
the etymology of this word and what are it's conceptual dimensions. I know what precarious
means and I can see how using it as an adjective works. But if it's going to be a key term I
want to know more about it. Accordiing to a quick search, the etymology is:
precarious (adj.)
1640s, a legal word, "held through the favor of another," from Latin precarius "depending on
favor, pertaining to entreaty, obtained by asking or praying," from prex (genitive precis)
"entreaty, prayer" (from PIE root *prek- "to ask, entreat").
The notion of "dependent on the will of another" led to the extended sense "risky,
dangerous, hazardous, uncertain" (1680s), but this was objected to. "No word is more
unskillfully used than this with its derivatives. It is used for uncertain in all its senses;
but it only means uncertain, as dependent on others " [Johnson]. Related: Precariously;
precariousness.
So what is striking in reading it's etymology is that it is defined as something
"dependent, uncertain, risky, dangerous, hazardous." This characterizes many areas of life.
With respect to contemporary life in the area of economics, I certainly see it all around me
and in the news headlines, in the instability of good long-term paying jobs with benefits. In
politics, I certainly see the risks, dangers, and hazards, especially in the highly
militarized nature of foreign relations. But looking at the term from the perspective of a
"social scientist" does it explain the antecedents that lead to this condition and is it
operational in the sense of breaking it down into more rudimentary terms and
relationships.
I am reading St. Thomas Aquinas' book "On Truth" and although the style of Questiones
Disputatae , with its contra, sed contra, and style is archaic and hard to
follow, it provides a good way of centering dialogue. In Question one of Article 1, the
formal reply to the stated Article of "What is Truth?" states:
When investigating the nature of anything, one should make the same kind of analysis
as he makes when he reduces a proposition to certain self-evident principles."
Since this term "precarity" is new to me, I don't think I have a good handle on how to use
it outside of a descriptor. Does it explain anything? And maybe I'm just asking too much of
the word. Maybe it's just meant as that, a simple characterization whose underlying causal
relationships are to yet be determined and examined.
I've seen precariate be described as a combination of precarious proletariat.
While one could argue the position of the proletariat is always precarious, I do think the
are times in history which are more precarious than others, and what we see now is certainly
one (climate change impacts, opioid/alcoholism, covid19 pandemic, ever increasing inequality,
globalization of manufacturing, health care for profit in the US, increasing cost of housing
and education, no doubt many more)
Nice piece generally and which kinda validates a feeling I've had generally that
"uncertainty is increasing" which is often bad for people in so many ways – uncertainty
among the "entitled" can be highly damaging to polling (in addition to all the points raised
in the article). The elephant in the room is of course interpreting polling results. For
example 70% Democrat at a precinct/state/national level is consistent with an infinite number
of explanations: at one end we have "strong means" (meaning these are "solid" votes) and at
the other we have "very weak means but big variances" (meaning these votes are subject to all
sorts of factors like news items, real or manufactured, etc). We can't "know" which universe
we're in .Unless we conduct a secondary survey to give a "second line in the x-y plane" to
see where it intersects the main one ..then we know whether the 70% is driven by means or
variances or some combination.
The likelihood function for all "limited dependent variable models" – discrete
choices like voting – has a term that is multiplicative in means and variances. Thus
"70%" could mean any of a HUGE number of things. Those of us experienced in interpreting
these data can rule out the "dumb" explanations .but we are still left with a number of
"possible explanations". If we don't actively talk to voters, do a lot of qualitative
research etc, then we can't begin to limit the number of "possible solutions" further. I have
had little experience in applying the methods to polling so I rely a lot on sites like NC to
give "insights from the ground". It is a pity polling institutions don't. YouGov were on the
right track in 2017 but bottled it due to collecting data for their "second line" in a poor
way. It's a pity – if they collected data in better way they'd be far and away the best
polling organisation. Though the downright lies told by Trumpites that Lambert has
highlighted remain a problem – I do have ideas how to address this but they go way
beyond the scope of the site and like I've said before, I think pushing MMT etc is a better
use of resources (even though it pains me personally not to have my own "hobby horse"
championed, hehe).
But I personally think increased variances are a fact of life and reflect the article's
point that uncertainty in life is hurting everyone.
Uncertainty and fear are increasing because the kick-the-can strategies are starting to
look really wobbly, and the fights for survival and hail-marys (like MMT) are being trotted
out.
The velocity of change has increased, and the rate of adaptation appears to have somehow
actually slowed down. Just exactly the wrong response at the wrong time.
One commenter above poked fun at the term "precarity" – said it was a $10 gimmick
for the word "poor".
A while back Mark Twain said a "cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education".
Precarity is a college-educated middle class "information worker" who is "feeling
poor".
The effects of automation and globalization are moving up the class ladder. The ship's
sinking and the water's already flooded 3rd class berths (rust belt and flyover), and is
about 1/3 of the way into the 2nd class cabins.
Agree or disagree with Andrew's Yang's proposal for a universal basic income, I think he
is definitely on to something when he talks about the ramifications of automation and machine
learning, though he isn't the first person to point it out.
Some people are simply not aware–it's not that they necessarily don't care, they
simply just don't know–while others are in denial or don't care.
Regardless of where a given person falls, I do agree that with Yang and others that say
dealing with this economic reshaping will be of the key challenges–if not the most
important challenge–of our time.
reshaping our monetary system is one of the biggest hurdles in reshaping our economic
present.
Monetary reform efforts like the modern day "chicago plan" as was described in the bill
proposed in congress in 2011/2012 112th congress HR 2990
open the door to creating money debt free, and permanently which could pay off the national
debt, and fund policies like single payer health care and even "citizen dividends", that are
really just ways to inject money into the economy, rather than starting the injection of
money into the economy on wall street , like now.. https://www.congress.gov/bill/112-thcongress/house-bill/2990/text
In sharp contrast, Trump may have appeared indifferent to the gravity of the coronavirus,
but his persistent calls to reopen the economy addressed the precarity issue, as they
appealed to many workers whose livelihoods were being destroyed by the pandemically induced
government restrictions placed on economic activity.
The average worker up through October does not have Covid and may not know anyone of
working age who does have Covid ..but they do have a job, and if the job must be done
in-person they know they were vulnerable.
"Keeping the economy open" is more urgent to them than defeating Covid through
lockdowns.
This is a big reason why Trump even kept this election close.
In America, the authorities who order lockdowns cannot simultaneously order financial
relief. This created a tragic class divide on fighting the pandemic.
These days the members of the media tend to be dominated by the upper middle class who
attended elite colleges and probably don't even understand the meaning of precarity.
Therefore to them it seems perverse to object to lockdowns and elaborate precautions that the
work from home set can more easily deal with. In the old days newspaper reporters rose
through the ranks and came from small town newspapers and were more in touch with the general
society rather than journalism schools.
I live in California and was surprised to learn here that Harris opposed prop 22. While
the Pro campaign carpet bombed the airwaves with ads, I never saw any CA leaders raise a
voice in opposition or attempt to explain why this would be bad for working people. Never saw
any mention, other than in the state election booklet, that the prop introduced a huge
supermajority needed to repeal it, making it effectively impossible to remove once passed.
Didn't see any out of state money funding ads despite it being obvious that success in
California would lead to adoption in other states.
Well Harris does all support and oppose M4A depending on who shes talking to and when
she's saying it, so there's that. I suspect any disagreements she may express over prop 22's
passage are crocodile tears at best.
Her and every other leader who takes positions on many issues but not on this one. Perhaps
they saw polling and thought it best instead to add to the strategic underground reserves of
dry powder.
Great piece. One effect of spreading precarity–and I will use the term more loosely
to encompass not only economic precarity, but also the increasing sense of pervasive dread
and fear experienced by so many across all walks of life–is that living in this state
increases one's susceptibility to both totalitarian ideologies and to drives for war against
some perceived enemy. To me this explains the shadow of "law and order" hard nationalism
coming from the far right, the more extreme variants of identity politics on the left, and
the terrified push for censorship and "full lockdown" coming from the neoliberal center.
Unfortunately the billionaire class and their pets in the media see all of this as a
potential cash cow rather than a serious danger. Given their stranglehold on the national
discourse and their control of the most effective means of mass organizing (social media),
I'm not sure it is possible to reverse the trend early enough to prevent some kind of major
conflict. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try!
P.S. To avoid any confusion, when I disparagingly refer to "full lockdown" I mean an
authoritarian lockdown without accompanying benefits for workers and with "papers please"
checkpoints and penalties. The worst kind of lockdown, where people are both unable to
support themselves and are actively prevented from doing so. In my opinion people who push
for a hard lockdown before benefits/compensation can be arranged are unintentionally
advocating for such a position; the compensation will never come.
Heck, I've seen comments (generally not on this site) admiring what China did and
lamenting the fact that it can't be done here in the United States.
I sure hope these are troll accounts and not real people in this country, especially not
real people on the left. If these are real people, we are in more trouble than I thought.
A government with the power to literally weld people's door shut, which is what China did,
can do a lot of other scary things.
Yes, like get on top of a virus (and achieve the highest level of economic growth in human
history, and produce incredible poetry, and so on). And as I'm not 'in this country,' I
believe I'm not 'real people.'
I have seen the same thing and have had the same concerns. I do think there is more
dishonest disruption/manipulation and trolling going on than we are aware of. It's at the
point where I automatically assume that most social media accounts are not taking an honest
position. I hope I'm right, because if I'm wrong then humanity is absolutely terrifying.
The corporate imperialism status quo isn't terrifying enough for you? Oil and gas seeping
out through the land under and around "affordable housing" because CEQA doesn't count on
those properties doesn't terrify you? Flint's water crisis doesn't terrify you?
The throngs of human beings thrown out onto the street by Upgrading slumlords and
developers doesn't terrify you? Overlords talking with straight faces about excess and
surplus humans and ramming Prop 22 through doesn't terrify you?
There's a big difference between "humanity is OK, but the small slice that rules us is
terrible" and "humanity is in deep shit because we're mostly terrible." The first implies a
solution, the second what? Hope for a benevolent AI overlord to emerge?
Read my post again. I said that I automatically assume that most accounts posting terrible
stuff are bots. There are accounts that say awful things about almost any and every topic
imaginable. The number of them is so huge that if these are real people and not
bots, then people may indeed be largely terrible. But I assume they are bots.
https://popularresistance.org/affordable-housing-developers-set-their-sights-on-former-toxic-oil-fields/
DeSmog blog Vista Hermosa residents like Luna are troubled by a 2019 environmental rollback by the
state, AB1197, that exempts homeless housing developments in the City of Los Angeles from the
mandates of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Arguably California's broadest
environmental law, CEQA requires builders to assess the environmental impacts of new
development and find ways to avoid or mitigate them.
The political will to rollback CEQA has continued into 2020. In January, Assemblyman
Miguel Santiago, who represents District 53 bordering Vista Hermosa, introduced a new piece
of legislation, AB1907, to further expand CEQA exemptions to now include all affordable
housing.
I'm reminded of the excellent post by Anne Amnesia in May 2016, (yes, when Obama and Biden
were still in office, and the White House was just a huge gleam in Kamala's way too sparkly
eyes, given the massive poverty, incarceration and inequality in California, as she
successfully ran for California Senator and will have not completed even one term)
Unnecessariathttps://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/
A very brief excerpt (it's long and meaty), emphasis mine:
In 2011, economist Guy Standing coined the term "precariat" to refer to workers
whose jobs were insecure, underpaid, and mobile, who had to engage in substantial "work for
labor" to remain employed, whose survival could, at any time, be compromised by employers
(who, for instance held their visas) and who therefore could do nothing to improve their
lot. The term found favor in the Occupy movement, and was colloquially expanded to include
not just farmworkers, contract workers, "gig" workers, but also unpaid interns, adjunct
faculty, etc. Looking back from 2016, one pertinent characteristic seems obvious: no matter
how tenuous, the precariat had jobs. The new dying Americans, the ones killing themselves
on purpose or with drugs, don't. Don't, won't, and know it.
Here's the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren't
precarious, we're unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to
the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what's worst of all, everybody who matters
seems basically pretty okay with that. The new bright sparks, cheerfully referred to as
"Young Gods" believe themselves to be the honest winners in a new invent-or-die economy,
and are busily planning to escape into space or acquire superpowers, and instead of
worrying about this, the talking heads on TV tell you its all a good thing- don't worry,
the recession's over and everything's better now, and technology is TOTES AMAZEBALLS!
The Rent-Seeking Is Too Damn High
If there's no economic plan for the Unnecessariat, there's certainly an abundance for
plans to extract value from them. No-one has the option to just make their own way and be
left alone at it. It used to be that people were uninsured and if they got seriously sick
they'd declare bankruptcy and lose the farm, but now they have a (mandatory) $1k/month plan
with a $5k deductible: they'll still declare bankruptcy and lose the farm if they get sick,
but in the meantime they pay a shit-ton to the shareholders of United Healthcare, or Aetna,
or whoever. This, like shifting the chronically jobless from "unemployed" to "disabled" is
seen as a major improvement in status, at least on television.
I was surprised Prop 22 passed because it was not doing well in the polls for most of the
pre-election period. It seemed Californians were solidly against it. Then, perhaps 4-6 weeks
before the election, I noticed a dramatic change in messaging. Suddenly the ads were touting
that if Prop 22 passed, Uber and Lyft drivers would receive health care benefits. I assumed
that this was deceptive messaging designed to turn the vote around. Here is what Kaiser
Health News says about the benefits:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201029/App-based-companies-pushing-Prop-22-say-drivers-will-get-health-benefits-Will-they.aspx
Looks like it worked. I guess there's no penalty for this sort of deception, or at least, no
enforcement of a penalty.
So, I have CSPAN on at the moment. They're streaming the DC #MillionMAGAMarch
#StopTheSteal SuperSpreader rally.
The over-the-top vitriol is rather breathtaking. The angry ignorance is depressing.
They're "not gonna allow the Steal." They're gonna "be warriors." "Trump WON! Trump WON!
Trump WON! Trump WON! "
The Occam's Chainsaw "logic" is on full display.
Meanwhile, yesterday's new U.S. Covid19 case count was more than 184k, 1.6m for Nov
1-13.
No argument there. I started an Excel sheet, w/ transcribed JHU data commencing Oct 1st
(thru yesterday). The exponential upward trendline in the graph has an R-sq of 0.91. (an
iterative 7-day moving avg is also illuminating.)
Of course, it'll go up until it no longer does. And, "new cases" incidence rates comprise
but one facet of interest.
If you're struggling but aren't sick (yet), economic concerns win out. No big surprise
there. 70 million people are fighting a return to austerity and a technocratic "Great Reset"
that was devised without their input. They see it as literally fighting for their lives and
livelihoods. The new admin can ignore this at their own peril. (Too bad Trump didn't actually
solve any of their problems, but at least he gave them his attention, more than anyone else
has done in decades.)
Many people have to choose between the certainty of being unable to pay their bills, if
they stay home, versus the unknown risk of contracting COVID if they work.
Staying home is luxury a lot of people just don't have–even pre-COVID it was very
common for people in low-wage jobs that don't provide sick-leave to show up to work sick. It
wasn't because these people are evil or wanted to get anyone sick but rather because if you
don't work you don't get paid.
Precisely. The rent isn't going to pay itself, and people are scared about their future.
Covid isn't an obvious terror like Ebola, so people weigh the risks and decide in favor of
their economic security. If we were like some of the more advanced countries in the world,
they wouldn't have to make this choice, but here we are.
"at least he gave them his attention, more than anyone else has done in decades."
Hmmm last time I looked Bernie Sanders was paying attention and proposing solutions since
at least 2015. Nice how you just erased him and the millions who voted for him.
You're right. Trump is the only primary-winning candidate who paid attention to
the working class in recent memory. Bernie was obviously a million times better than Trump
because he was sincere, he had a plan, and he would have followed through. But he got
screwed.
I'm becoming a bit weary of reading that politicians like Trump are "exploiting anxieties"
about poverty and unemployment, as though such anxieties were unreasonable and the problems
didn't really exist. The trouble is that "responding to voters' concerns about their lives"
doesn't have quite the same dismissive overtones. The supercilious assumption that people who
are afraid of losing their jobs are being "exploited", whereas people being urged to vote on
gender lines aren't, seems very strange. Is anyone really surprised that people are more
worried about how much money they have than about which gender they are?
Understand people's problems, devise reasonable solutions, communicate your plan to the
voters, and follow through on your promises. It sounds so easy, doesn't it but good luck
trying it with the media and parties working together against you at every turn. Pull up
those bootstraps!
Thanks. We are going to find out how the velocity of the vote is slower than the velocity
of hunger.
"Civilization is about 3 meals thick." John Brockman, ex-con.
We are not together and the people in power don't want to give the people without, food
money. Two more and 3 more months of disease as hunger and death knock at more and more
doors. Evictions pick up apace.
Cormac McCarthy dystopia. No country for anybody.
The economic theory attributed to Warren Mosler and popularized by Stephanie Kelton is the
last idea. If it is a Hail Mary then so be it. If it doesn't work, isn't put to work, mankind
itself is doomed.
Public health care authorities understandably directed their policy responses toward
pandemic mitigation, and the Democrats largely embraced their recommendations. But they
remained insensitive to the anxieties of tens of millions of Americans, whose jobs were
being destroyed for good, whose household debts -- rent, mortgage, and utility arrears, as
well as interest on education and car loans -- were rising inexorably, even allowing for
the temporary expedient of stimulus checks from the government until this past August
I agree and worse this dynamic is playing itself out again–talk about whether
President-elect Biden should institute a lockdown is bringing out the "lockdown now, worry
about the consequences later" mentality again.
While I'm not sure Biden personally regards the millions of those who cannot work from
home, but aren't considered essential, collateral damage, there are clearly a segment of
Democrats who do–I've even seen it on Facebook among people I know. It provides further
proof that the Democrats, as Thomas Frank and others have astutely noted, have become
predominantly the party of the college-educated upper-middle class.
While I'm not denying the severity of the pandemic, the consequences of business shutdowns
and subsequent layoffs are very real and not something to be laughed at or minimized,
especially if Democrats want to have a future among those who are less affluent.
The globalists found just the economics they were looking for.
The USP of neoclassical economics – It concentrates wealth.
Let's use it for globalisation.
Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48, observed what the capital accumulation of
neoclassical economics did to the US economy in the 1920s. "a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion
of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking
purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of
effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital
accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by
borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped"
This is what it's supposed to be like.
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
Most of today's problems come from the 1920s.
Financial stability had been locked into the regulations of the Keynesian era.
The neoliberals removed them and the financial crises came back. https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/banking-crises.png
"This Time is Different" by Reinhart and Rogoff has a graph showing the same thing (Figure
13.1 – The proportion of countries with banking crises, 1900-2008).
After the 1930s, they wanted to ensure those times would never return and put things in
place to ensure they didn't.
The neoliberals have been busy stripping them away.
What did the economists learn in the 1940s? http://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf
In the paper from 1943 you can see ..
They knew Government debt and deficits weren't a problem as they had seen the massive
Government debt and deficits of WW2.
They knew full employment was feasible as they had seen it in WW2.
After WW2 Governments aimed to create full employment as policymakers knew it could be done
and actually maximised wealth creation in the economy.
Balancing the budget was just something they used to do before WW2, but it wasn't actually
necessary.
Government debt and deficits weren't a problem.
They could now solve all those problems they had seen in the 1930s, which caused politics to
swing to the extremes and populist leaders to rise.
They could eliminate unemployment and create a full employment economy.
They could put welfare states in place to ensure the economic hardship of the 1930s would
never be seen again.
They didn't have to use austerity; they could fight recessions with fiscal stimulus.
The neoliberals started to remove the things that had created stable Western societies
after WW2.
"If I thought voters were racists who want basic economic security and the other party was
offering them racism but not economic security, I would simply try offering economic security
but not racism rather than offering them neither." -Ed Burmilla https://twitter.com/edburmila/status/1324420903409692673
We stepped onto an old path that still leads to the same place.
1920s/2000s – neoclassical economics, high inequality, high banker pay, low regulation,
low taxes for the wealthy, robber barons (CEOs), reckless bankers, globalisation phase
1929/2008 – Wall Street crash
1930s/2010s – Global recession, currency wars, trade wars, austerity, rising
nationalism and extremism
1940s – World war.
We forgot we had been down that path before.
Right wing populist leaders are only to be expected at this stage.
Why is Western liberalism always such a disaster?
They did try and learn from past mistakes to create a new liberalism (neoliberalism), but the
Mont Pelerin Society went round in a circle and got back to pretty much where they
started.
It equates making money with creating wealth and people try and make money in the easiest
way possible, which doesn't actually create any wealth.
In 1984, for the first time in American history, "unearned" income exceeded "earned"
income.
The American have lost sight of what real wealth creation is, and are just focussed on making
money.
You might as well do that in the easiest way possible.
It looks like a parasitic rentier capitalism because that is what it is.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial
crisis.
What they are doing is really an illusion; they are just pulling future spending power into
today.
The 1920s roared at the expense of an impoverished 1930s.
Japan roared on the money creation of real estate lending in the 1980s, they spent the next
30 years repaying the debt they had built up in the 1980s and the economy flat-lined. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YTyJzmiHGk
Bankers use bank credit to pump up asset prices, which doesn't actually create any
wealth.
The money creation of bank credit flows into the economy making it boom, but you are heading
towards a financial crisis and claims on future prosperity are building up in the financial
system.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
Early success comes at the expense of an impoverished future.
Let's get the basics sorted.
When no one knows what real wealth creation is, you are in trouble.
We want economic success
Step one – Identify where wealth creation occurs in the economy.
Houston, we have a problem.
Economists do identify where real wealth creation in the economy occurs, but this is a
most inconvenient truth as it reveals many at the top don't actually create any wealth.
This is the problem.
Much of their money comes from wealth extraction rather than wealth creation, and they need
to get everyone thoroughly confused so we don't realise what they are really up to.
The Classical Economists had a quick look around and noticed the aristocracy were
maintained in luxury and leisure by the hard work of everyone else.
They haven't done anything economically productive for centuries, they couldn't miss it.
The Classical economist, Adam Smith:
"The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining of
the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour
of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious merchant
and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his
money."
There was no benefits system in those days, and if those at the bottom didn't work they
died.
They had to earn money to live.
Ricardo was an expert on the small state, unregulated capitalism he observed in the world
around him. He was part of the new capitalist class, and the old landowning class were a huge
problem with their rents that had to be paid both directly and through wages.
"The interest of the landlords is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the
community" Ricardo 1815 / Classical Economist.
They soon identified the constructive "earned" income and the parasitic "unearned"
income.
This disappeared in neoclassical economics.
GDP was invented after they used neoclassical economics last time.
In the 1920s, the economy roared, the stock market soared and nearly everyone had been making
lots of money.
In the 1930s, they were wondering what the hell had just happened as everything had appeared
to be going so well in the 1920s and then it all just fell apart.
They needed a better measure to see what was really going on in the economy and came up with
GDP.
In the 1930s, they pondered over where all that wealth had gone to in 1929 and realised
inflating asset prices doesn't create real wealth, they came up with the GDP measure to track
real wealth creation in the economy.
The transfer of existing assets, like stocks and real estate, doesn't create real wealth and
therefore does not add to GDP. The real wealth creation in the economy is measured by
GDP.
Real wealth creation involves real work producing new goods and services in the economy.
So all that transferring existing financial assets around doesn't create wealth?
No it doesn't, and now you are ready to start thinking about what is really going on
there.
Economists do identify where real wealth creation in the economy occurs, but this is a
most inconvenient truth as it reveals many at the top don't actually create any wealth.
Hide what real wealth creation is, and pretend it's making money, and this problem goes
away.
There are two different things here. Trump betrayal of his voters is one thing, but election
fraud is another and is unacceptable no matter what is your opinion about Trump. We should not
mix those two topics.
All our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary
system and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are
intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian and
omnipresent.
Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1991)
Look at them! Look at them, will you? Behold our politicians' horrible languid maws!; the
courtier-like faces of department managers. They are indeed salesmen, for the very power of
nations is measure in relation to their own mercantile activity.
Jean Cau, Le meutre d'un enfant (1965)
"What's going to happen now?" I was asked earlier today. "Nothing and everything," I
replied. Immigration, largely unchallenged and unscathed (excepting the incidental impact of
COVID-19 on population movement) from four years of Trumpism, will now continue to
accelerate unabated . Zionism will continue to enjoy the expansion of American
institutional and military support, this time with the blood interest of Jared Kushner replaced
with the Jewish
spouses of all three of Biden's children. And the momentary Obama-era delusion of a
post-racial America will continue to dissolve in the reality of the increasing
awareness and importance of race throughout the West, not solely as a result of mass
migration but also of the increasing ubiquity of the ideologies of racial grievance and
revenge. There will, of course, be a dramatic change for the worse in tone and spirit, and some
smaller legislative victories like the
banning of federal anti-racism training will likely soon be reversed. The defeat of Donald
Trump is also hugely demoralizing to many decent American people, and emboldening to their
bitterest enemies. This is to be sorely regretted. But it is in the shared qualities of Trump
and Biden, rather than the election and sham ballots, that the real nature of our political
systems and their future can be perceived. And it is in these shared qualities that our true
problems lie.
Parliamentary electoral democracy is merely a representation of the general system in which
it operates. Slavoj Zizek comments:
At the empirical level, of course, multi-party liberal democracy "represents" -- mirrors,
registers, measures -- the quantitative dispersal of different opinions of the people, what
they think about the proposed programs of the parties and about their candidates, etc.
However, prior to this empirical level and in a much more radical sense, the very form of
multi-party liberal democracy "represents" -- instantiates -- a certain vision of society,
politics, and the role of the individuals in it: politics is organized in parties that
compete through elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive
apparatus, etc. One should always be aware that this frame is never neutral, insofar as it
privileges certain values and practices.
The truth of the system, in terms of its non-negotiable aspects, is thus revealed in the
"values and practices" privileged and ring-fenced under both Trump and Biden. What are these
non-negotiables? Zionism, GloboHomo ideological capitalism and its "woke" leftist correlates,
and the neoliberal promotion of GDP as the benchmark of human success and happiness.
Zionism
Jews have little to fear from a Biden presidency, which is presumably why Haaretz
is
claiming that the "American Jewish vote clinched Biden's victory and Trump's ouster.
American Jews decided the outcome of the U.S. elections." Donald Trump might have been
hailed as the "most pro-Israel President in U.S. history," but Jews are notoriously
unreliable in their partnerships with non-Jewish elites. Fate, it must be said, has not been
kind to those gentile elites that have exhausted their usefulness to Jews. And Trump is
surely exhausted, having spent a busy four years fighting for Jews in Israel and in the United
States. He reversed long-standing US policies on several critical security, diplomatic and
political issues to Israel's favour, including the Iran nuclear accord, the treatment of Israel
at the UN, and the status of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. In December 2019, he announced
his Executive
Order on Combatting Anti-Semitism , promising to fight "the rise of anti-Semitism and
anti-Semitic incidents in the United States and around the world." One wonders what else he
could possibly have done for these people -- apart from a war with Iran -- a question that
appears to have been answered by Jews with a resounding "Nothing." One can only imagine Trump's
facial expression on seeing Benjamin Netanyahu's
emphatic congratulations to Joe Biden, punctuated with the loving refrain: "I have a
personal, long and warm connection with Joe Biden for nearly 40 years, and I know him to be a
great friend of the State of Israel."
Biden and Harris, replete with their immediate familial ties to Jews, are viewed in Zionist
circles as being at least as reliable as Trump, although not as exuberant and bullish. Biden
has been known as a staunch supporter of Israel throughout his 36 years in the Senate, often
cites his 1973 encounter with then-Prime Minister Golda Meir as "one of the most consequential
meetings" of his life, and has on more than one occasion regaled audiences with a tale about
his father telling him that "You don't need to be a Jew to be a Zionist." While some
modifications are likely in the American approach to Iran, few reversals are expected on
Trump's four years of pro-Israel activism. Biden, for example, has weakly criticized moving the
embassy to Jerusalem but said he would not pull it back to Tel Aviv. Michael Herzog at
Haaretz
describes both Biden and Harris as "traditional Democrats, with a fundamental commitment to
Israel whose roots are in part emotional in nature (in contrast to Obama)."
The change in relationship between America and Israel will be, in meaningful terms,
restricted to the personal. Netanyahu, for all his fawning, is likely to undergo a personal
demotion of sorts, with David Halbfinger of the New York Timespointing out
that we can expect a Biden presidency to diminish Netanyahu's "stature on the global stage and
undercut his argument to restive Israeli voters that he remains their indispensable leader."
Palestinian leaders, probably the best-positioned to offer a perspective on the potential for
an improvement in their condition under the new presidency, have been sombre to say the least.
Hanan Ashrawi, a senior PLO official, responded
to the question if she expected United States policy to continue tilting heavily in Israel's
favor: "I don't think we're so naïve as to see Biden as our savior." Contrast this with
the cheerfulness and confidence of Israel settlers who have grown accustomed to the perennial
nature of American support for Zionism. David Elhayani, head of the Yesha Council, an umbrella
for Jewish settlements in the West Bank,
said the party of the U.S. president ultimately doesn't matter so long as the baseline
commitment to support Israel persists: "Under Obama, we built more [settlement] houses than we
have under Trump I think Biden is a friend of Israel."
The fact that the grassroots of the Democratic Party are
drifting away from Zionism is no more consequential than the fact the grassroots of the
Republican Party wanted major action on immigration reform. The former, like the latter, have
been equally ignored by the real power brokers and influencers. Regardless of the radical
appearance of Democrat-affiliated movements like Black Lives Matter, the fact remains that all
of the leftist aggression and rhetoric of the summer of 2020 has resulted in the putative
election of an establishment Zionist and political pragmatist who is sure to execute a more or
less formulaic neoliberal scheme for government. In one sense, the bland, forgetful, and
familiar Biden, who lacks any hint of genuine or novel ideology and was elected purely as a
symbol of "not Trump," is the fitting response to Trump, who was equally devoid of ideological
sincerity or complexity beyond the symbolism of "not Establishment." And so, while the media
proclaims, as Heraclitus, that "all is in flux," from a different perspective we could argue,
like Parmenides, the opposite -- "there is no motion at all."
GloboHomo
If I retain one abiding, surreal, memory of the Trump presidency in the years ahead it will
be the Don dancing to the Village People in the wake of his numerous drives to legalize
homosexuality in various African backwaters. That the Red State Christians comprising so much
of his base could maintain their self-adopted blind spot on this issue is a remarkable
testament to the power of personality, because no world leader in history has done more in
recent history than Donald Trump to export what E. Michael Jones has so aptly termed "the Gay
Disco" -- the double-barrelled shotgun of unbridled finance capitalism and the superficial
freedom of sexual "liberty." As the pastors and preachers of South Carolina and Texas urged
their huddled congregations to pray for the President, Trump was busy dispatching new
missionaries, like U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, to the corners of the earth in
search of converts to the Church of GloboHomo.
In February 2019, the U.S. embassy indulged in some nostalgia for Weimar when it
flew LGBT activists from across Europe to Berlin for a strategy dinner to plan to push for
decriminalization in places that still outlaw homosexuality -- mostly concentrated in the
Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. For my part, I can think of many social problems in
these parts of the world, but it really takes a special kind of mind to arrive at the opinion
that one of the most pressing is that they need to become more gay. Grenell, however,
horrified that Iran has the audacity to execute its own convicted homosexual pederasts, was
not to be deterred, and was instrumental in the blackmail of lesser nations, promising they
would be denied
access to terrorism intelligence if they don't legalise homosexuality. All of which has
left the far corners of the American cultural-military empire questioning whether they could
better live with suicide bombers or sodomy.
Against such manoeuvres, Biden's apparent claim to be one half of the "most pro-equality
ticket in history" seems a little overstated. That being said, there's no question that Biden
is going to step up the domestic nature of GloboHomo significantly as soon as he assumes
office. Biden has pledged to sign the Equality Act, thus far opposed by the Trump
administration, within his first 100 days in office, a piece of legislation that will amend
"the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender
identity in employment, housing, public accommodations, public education, federal funding,
credit, and the jury system." Biden has pledged to appoint significant numbers of homosexuals
and transsexuals to positions of influence, and has promised to allow transsexuals to join the
military. Experienced in advancing global LGBT+ dogma as part of the Obama-Biden
administration, Biden will also once again take up the global mantle,
expressing his "hopes to reverse Trump's efforts and expand queer rights internationally by
making equality a centrepiece of US diplomacy," and condemning
Poland's "LGBT-free zones." Stunning and brave indeed.
There is a certain sense in the cases of both Trump and Biden that, for all the flamboyance
of their efforts in this area, there is a performative aspect to this politics. I don't get the
impression that either has been especially personally committed to these ideas or actions, but
that, as pragmatic-symbolic politicians, they have been made aware that this is the direction
the broader System is moving in and they should comply and support it. The longevity and
gradual acceleration of these trends, beginning in earnest with the presidency of Bill Clinton,
would suggest a systemic movement underlying, and entirely untethered to, specific political
parties or figures. Throughout the West, and much as with Zionism, GloboHomo, or hedonistic
credit-based capitalism and its sexual correlates more generally, is to be accepted and
promoted as an essential part of the role of neoliberal government. In the context of declining
basic freedoms at home, for example the obvious decline in free speech and the creeping
criminalisation of meaningful dissent against the status quo, the international promotion of
homosexuality and transsexual identities offers a cost-free and PR-friendly method for
increasingly authoritarian neoliberal regimes to posture as crusaders for freedom. The trucker
in Ohio is, logical flaws notwithstanding, and whether he wants it or not, thus assured of his
place in the Land of the Free via his government's emancipation of the gays and transvestites
of Uganda. Engaged politically only at the most superficial level, the masses play along with
this ruse, often in blunt denial, possessing only fragmentary realisations of the fact their
countries are changing around them while the petty "rewards" of Americanism are meagre and
peculiar, if not insulting.
GDP!
Along with frequent reassurances that he was "giving serious consideration" to doing
something, Trump's presidency was marked by regular updates on the performance of American GDP.
Unfortunately the GDP, like the Jewish vote, appears to have stabbed him in the back, with
around 70% of
American GDP represented in counties that (putatively!) voted Democrat. Trump's tragicomic
belief in GDP performance as a form of politics in its own right is perhaps the quintessential
example of the mentality of homo economicus and the tendency of neoliberals to view
countries as mere zones, or economic areas, where everything is based on rationalism and
materialism, and national success is purely a calculation of economic self-interest. Writing
pessimistically of Trump's expected nomination
in 2015 , I issued a stark warning about the influence of Jared Kushner, but also
added:
For all his bluster, Trump is a creation and product of the bourgeois revolution and its
materialistic liberal ideologies. We are teased and tantalized by the fantasy that Trump is a
potential "man of the people." But I cannot escape the impression that he is a utilitarian
and primarily economic character, who seeks a social contract based on personal convenience
and material interest. In his business and political history I see only the "distilled Jewish
spirit."
I don't think I've seen anything over the last four years that has made me question or
revise that assessment. Trump's dedicated tweeting on GDP in fact had the opposite effect.
The disturbing reality, of course, is that GDP is only one side of a national economy.
Another crucial aspect is government borrowing, and current projections suggest that the United
States is " condemned to
eternal debt ." According to The Budget Office of the United States Congress (CBO), "the US
economy would enter the first half of this century with a public debt equivalent to 195 percent
of its GDP. In the next 30 years the debt of the most powerful economy on the planet would more
than double." The first significant jump occurred in the wake of the subprime crisis, in which
Jewish mortgage lenders were especially prominent. The subprime crisis forced public debt to 37
percent of GDP, which then rose steadily to 79 percent between 2008 and the outbreak of
COVID-19. It now stands at 98 percent, and is accelerating. Although the United States has
reached comparable levels of debt in the past, there has almost always been an accompanying
war, or wars, which acted as a financial pressure valve -- a fact that does not bode well for
isolationists but may be encouraging news for Zionist hawks.
Joe Biden has claimed recently that "a
Biden-Harris Administration will not be measured just by the stock market or GDP growth, but by
the extent to which growth is raising the pay, dignity, and economic security of our working
families" -- while at the same time welcoming millions of new immigrants and legalizing the
~20M+ illegals into the workforce .The American economy is in fact extremely unlikely to change
direction, with Biden
reassuring his billionaire donors gathered at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan in June 2019
that "no one's standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change." I believe
him. Biden was part of an administration that
looked on as 10 million working Americans lost their homes. Matt Stoller at the
Washington Post has described Obama-era Democrat economic policies as "in effect, a
wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of
concentrated financial power." Biden was part of a team that outright rejected prosecuting
major bankers for fraud and money laundering, and that represented one of the most
monopoly-friendly administrations in history:
2015 saw a record wave of mergers and acquisitions, and 2016 was another busy year. In
nearly every sector of the economy, from pharmaceuticals to telecom to Internet platforms to
airlines, power was concentrated. And this administration, like George W. Bush's before it,
did not prosecute a single significant monopoly under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Instead
[under Obama] the Federal Trade Commission has gone after such villains as music teachers and
ice skating instructors for ostensible anti-competitive behavior. This is very much a
parallel of the financial crisis, as elites operate without legal constraints while the rest
of us toil under an excess of bureaucracy.
Biden is the product of funding from
forty-four billionaires , including six hedge fund speculators, seven real estate barons,
and five in the tech sector. Of the top 22 donors, at least 18 are Jews (Jim Simons, Len
Blavatnik, Stewart Resnick, Eli Broad, Neil Bluhm, David Bonderman, Herb Simon, Daniel Och, Liz
Lefkovsky, Steve Mandel, Bruce Karsh, Howard Marks, S. Daniel Abraham, Marc Lasry, Jonathan
Tisch, Daniel Lubetsky, Laurie Tisch, and Robert Toll). The Jewish consortium behind Biden is
almost identical in its financial composition to that behind Trump which, as I've explained
previously , was notable for its embodiment of "usury and vulture capitalism, bloated
consumerism, and the sordid commercial exploitation of vice." Biden's transition team ,
meanwhile, is comprised of "executives from Lyft, Airbnb, Amazon, Capital One, Booz Allen,
Uber, Visa, and JPMorgan." In short, expectations that Biden is going to break up Big Tech, or
any monopoly for that matter, are the fantasies of the deluded, the ignorant, and the
duped.
Conclusion
While the drama and recrimination surrounding the election are unquestionably fascinating, I
hope you'll forgive for being less agitated than most. My reasons for lethargy are simple: I
knew that regardless of outcome we'd get four more years -- four more years of Zionism,
GloboHomo, and the standardized, rationalized machinery of economic escalation that now
provides the apologetic engine for mass migration. Behind the abortion debates, Supreme Court
picks, culture wars, and media theater, these are the non-negotiables of the System. You don't
hear about them, and you can't talk about them, because you can't vote on them. And this is the
biggest electoral fraud of all.
I feel particular sorrow for ordinary decent Americans, in what today should be the land
of plenty for all, who are having to witness this horrible implosion of their country and
values. Other than divine intervention there is no hope. The media, money markets and
political classes are either directly run by the same children of a devil or by loathsome
gentiles who have taken the Judas coin or who are cowards in fear of their miserable
life's.
What is life if it means cowering down in the face of evil? An ancient voice trying to
tell this strange world that you are controlled by an evil power and that your eternal fate
is determined by how you respond to it i.e. join the freak show or stand up like a true man
or woman and tell them no.
The writer of this essay is a man of culture, with wide interests. There are not many
left. Compare him to the moronic voices of today with their narrow perverted interests and
weep for what faces you.
I feel particular sorrow for ordinary decent Americans, in what today should be the land
of plenty for all, who are having to witness this horrible implosion of their country and
values. Other than divine intervention there is no hope. The media, money markets and
political classes are either directly run by the same children of a devil or by loathsome
gentiles who have taken the Judas coin or who are cowards in fear of their miserable
life's.
Particular particular sorrow for the young. As for divine intervention, we used to have a
saying about God helping those who help themselves. Surely there must be some action we can
take.
While the drama and recrimination surrounding the election are unquestionably
fascinating, I hope you'll forgive for being less agitated than most. My reasons for
lethargy are simple: I knew that regardless of outcome we'd get four more years -- four
more years of Zionism, GloboHomo, and the standardized, rationalized machinery of economic
escalation that now provides the apologetic engine for mass migration. Behind the abortion
debates, Supreme Court picks, culture wars, and media theater, these are the
non-negotiables of the System. You don't hear about them, and you can't talk about them,
because you can't vote on them. And this is the biggest electoral fraud of all.
Exactly correct. As early as mid April 2017 I could see that Trump had no intention of
keeping his promises to middle Americans I wrote a comment to this blog saying as much.
Trump is a minion of the Deep State.
The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the two
parties as long as their important issues are advanced (wealth and power). As a matter of
fact it strengthens the false perception that there is a choice when voting.
Trump and the Deep State do not care what the American people want. They know that most
American people are inane fools and will believe anything. Most Americans would rather watch
America's Got Talent, Dancing With The Stars or The Masked Singer than be informed about
important issues.
The only discernible values espoused in this rambling crypfic article is dog-whistling to
bigots of yore.
There is no study of history, no analysis, no insight and no meaning beyond blathers about
jews and homos.
The tone is hatred and despair with the judgement that others are to blame and there is
nothing to work towards.
The Zizek quote offered a word-salad refrain that everybody comes to power under some
bias, to themselves, if nothing else. But Zizek's actual point has be de-contextualized. Here
is what Zizek was saying:
//Let's remember that [Hannah] Arendt said this in her polemic against Mao, who himself
believed that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun" – Arendt qualifies this like
an "entirely non-Marxist" conviction and claims that, for Marx, violent outbursts are like
"the labor pangs that precede, but of course do not cause, the event of organic birth."
Basically, I agree with her, but I would add that there never will be a fully peaceful
"democratic" transfer of power without the "birth pangs" of violence: there will always be
moments of tension when the rules of democratic dialogue and changes are suspended.
Today, however, the agent of this tension is the Right, which is why, paradoxically, the
task of the Left is now, as the US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has pointed out, to
save our "bourgeois" democracy when the liberal center is too weak and indecisive to do it.
Is this in contradiction with the fact that the Left today should move beyond parliamentary
democracy?
No: as Trump demonstrates, the contradiction is in this democratic form itself, so that
the only way to save what is worth saving in liberal democracy is to move beyond it –
and vice versa, when rightist violence is on the rise, the only way to move beyond liberal
democracy is to be more faithful to it than the liberal democrats themselves. This is what
the successful democratic return to power of the Morales's party in Bolivia, one of the few
bright spots in our devastated landscape, clearly signals.//
In other words we must be conservatives who are willing to progress!
And hey, crypto-fascists: Zizek is not on board with you just because RT runs him on their
version of Fox News.
The world is never going back to the old-timey dayz of white settlement of an eden
America. So move forward or croak of old age or both.
As to the idea that "decent Americans" are in any way demoralized by Trump's loss:
BULLSHIT!
If you are demoralized by Trump's loss, you have been ejected from decency. But Luckily
for you, it so happens USA is a happy-enough home for all stripes of perverts.
@Verymuchalive the
Occidental Observer writers in prison, you have zero reason to think Trump won't crack down
on free speech in 2020.
Another 4 years of Trumpstien means a very large % of the right will continue to sleep,
something Biden could not get us to do. Biden could never get the right to support vaccines
or martial law.
No Trump apologist besides Alex Jonestien gives an excuse why Trump is backing a unsafe,
hastily made vaccine for a disease with a 99% survival rate. No Trump cultist will provide a
credible one. (Wally will not be the first)
And what happened? She was raped and kicked in the butt by him. He always does that to
everybody. He did it to his dad, he did it to his brothers and sister, he did it to his
family ..and now he has raped America.
Trump's only ability is to find out what others fear or desire, then overpromise on
everything and deliver nothing or even the opposite after u have given him your support or
money. That's how he operates in business, and that's how he has conducted his fake
presidency.
I am surprised that so many seemingly intelligent people have been taken in by this
well-known conman.
Great article. What I find strange is a businessman from New York second only to Israel in
population of Jews could be so easily duped by them. Loyal only to themselves. In the words
of Harry Truman "Jesus couldn't do anything with them, what am I suppose to do with
them?".
I think it needs to be emphasised that the "homo" in globohomo stands for
"homogeneity" and not "homosexuality":
Globohomo
(adj) A word used to describe a globalized and homogenized culture pushed
for by large companies, politicians, and Neocon/Leftist pawns. This culture includes
metropolitan ideals such as diversity, homosexuality, sexual degeneracy, colorblindness in
regard to race, egalitarianism, money worship, and the erasure of different individual
cultures, among other things.
My reasons for lethargy are simple: I knew that regardless of outcome we'd get four more
years -- four more years of Zionism, GloboHomo, and the standardized, rationalized
machinery of economic escalation that now provides the apologetic engine for mass
migration. Behind the abortion debates, Supreme Court picks, culture wars, and media
theater, these are the non-negotiables of the System. You don't hear about them, and you
can't talk about them, because you can't vote on them.
This may be great for The US' Jewish plutocracy, but the United States is still in
economic competition with countries that don't give 2 cents for ZioGlob world (for example
China – which has just signed the RCEP – Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership, covering 15 Asian countries, after 8 years of negotiation and covering 2.2
billion people).
So the rest of the world looks on with interest, same as it did in 1923, when the German
Weimar Republic collapsed in an orgy of sleaze, corruption, debt and worthless money.
990. Jews are the scapegoats for all the deficiencies of low-IQ whites just as whites are
the scapegoats for all the deficiencies of low-IQ non-whites. Let me explain how that
works.
Why do we observe Jews at the forefront of many cutting-edge industries? (for example the
media/arts and financial industries are indeed rife with them). The low-IQ answer is, of
course, a simplistic conspiracy theory: Jews form an evil cabal that created all these
industries from scratch to "destroy culture" (or at least what low-IQ people think is
culture, i.e. some previous, obsolete state of culture, i.e. older, lower culture, i.e.
non-culture). And, to be sure, there is a lot of decadence in these industries. But, in an
advanced civilization, there is a lot of decadence everywhere anyway! It's an essential
prerequisite even! So it makes perfect sense that the most capable people in such a
civilization will also be the most decadent! The stereotype of the degenerate
cocaine-sniffing whoremonging or homosexual Hollywood or Wall Street operative belongs here.
Well, buddy, if YOU were subjected to the stresses and temptations of the Hollywood or Wall
Street lifestyles, maybe you'd be a "degenerate" too! But you lack the IQ for that, so of
course you'll reduce the whole enterprise to a simplistic resentful fairy tale that seems
laughable even to children: a bunch of old bearded Jews gathered round a large table planning
the destruction of civilization! Well I say enough with this childish nonsense! The Jews are
simply some of the smartest and most industrious people around, ergo it makes sense that
they'll be encountered at or near all the peaks of the dominant culture, being
overrepresented everywhere in it, including therefore in its failings and excesses! This is
what it means to be the best! It doesn't mean that you are faultless little angels who can do
no wrong, you brainless corn-fed nitwits! There's a moving passage somewhere in Nietzsche
where he relates that Europe owes the Jews for the highest sage (Spinoza), and the highest
saint (Jesus), and he'd never even heard of Freud or Einstein! In view of all the
immeasurable gifts the Jewish spirit has lavished on humanity, anti-semitism in the coming
world order will be a capital offense, if I have anything to say on the matter. The slightest
word against the Jews, and you're a marked man: I would have not only you, but your entire
extended family wiped out, just to be sure. You think you know what the Devil is, but he's
just the lackey taking my orders. Entire cities razed to the ground (including the entire
Middle East), simply because one person there said something bad about "the Jews", that's how
I would have the future! Enough with this stupid meme! To hell with all of you brainless
subhumans! You've wasted enough of our nervous energy on this stupid shit! And the same goes
to low-IQ non-whites who blame all their troubles on whites! And it's all true: Jews and
whites upped the stakes for everybody by bringing into the world a whole torrent of new
possibilities which your IQ is too low to handle! So whatcha gonna do about it? Are you all
bark, or are you prepared to bite? Come on, let's see what you can do! Any of you fucking
pricks bark, and we'll execute every motherfucking last one of you!
Blah, blah, blah. Cat circling the hot plate. Trump was galacticly stupid. He should have
told the Jews that I will give you Jerusalem and Golan heights in my second term. He would
have a second term.
The only point is here is this:
Jews see Iran as a mortal threat. Jews want Iran to be destroyed. For Biden the first point
on the agenda is destruction of Iran. Biden did promise Jews that he will destroy Iran.
That is why Biden did win.
Trump hesitated with his promise to destroy Iran that is why he lost.
So here is the conclusion question:
Was Biden serious when he promised to Jews destroy Iran, or he was only making fools from
them Jews.
That is the only outstanding question
From my understanding, the term "Globohomo" was originally meant as a shorthand for
"globalised homogenisation", wherein all national cultures would be eliminated in favour of a
universal culture, promotion of homosexuality is just one of the components of GloboHomo,
with things like rampant consumerism, substance use and liberalism being some of the other
things.
If you go to the newly built sections of Europeans cities, you will notice how they are
all the same (homogenous) with the same American fast food outlets and the same architectural
style.
The Jewish consortium behind Biden is almost identical in its financial composition to
that behind Trump which, as I've explained previously, was notable for its embodiment of
"usury and vulture capitalism, bloated consumerism, and the sordid commercial exploitation
of vice."
GDP figures hide rents, and unearned income as if they are GDP gains.
Let's take the housing bubble years up to 2008 as an example. Thought experiment:
Everybody in the West sells their home to their neighbor.
New bank credit was created due to loan formation to buy and sell homes. There was
activity as new finance paper was created in the form of new debt instruments to transfer
your home to your neighbor. All the new interest collected by banks is seen as profit.
GDP goes up by the profits and new finance activity.
The physical housing stock does not change at all.
Hudson and PCR explains how GDP is a false metric for measuring economic activity. People
cannot understand things if they don't have words for it, or if they don't have a way of
measuring.
Clown world is formed purposefully.. rents, unearned income, usury are a feature of the
system, not a bug. It is not you going crazy, you have become Allice in wonderland, where
reality is unreal.
According to official US government economic data, the US economy has been growing for
10.5 years since June of 2009. The reason that the US government can produce this false
conclusion is that costs that are subtrahends from GDP are not included in the measure.
Instead, many costs are counted not as subtractions from growth but as additions to
growth . For example, the penalty interest on a person's credit card balance that results
when a person falls behind his payments is counted as an increase in "financial services" and
as an increase in Gross Domestic Product. The economic world is stood on its head.
Saturday during an appearance on FNC's "Justice," Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) questioned why
Democrats oppose any investigations into the integrity of the presidential election, despite
their past efforts on the 2016 presidential election.
The Ohio Republican congressman reminded Fox News viewers that Democrats dedicated for years
to the "Russia hoax" but do not want to allow four weeks for an investigation into this year's
presidential election.
For the past three or four days I have been wondering why the NY Post made this very sudden
turn to supporting Joe Biden. For months we have had brilliant articles by Miranda Devine ,
Michael Goodwin, and others all in support of Trump and the America we have known for many
years. Replies: @Realist
REPLY AGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER THIS THREAD HIDE THREAD
For the past three or four days I have been wondering why the NY Post made this very
sudden turn to supporting Joe Biden. For years we have had brilliant articles by Miranda
Devine , Michael Goodwin, and others all in support of Trump and the America we have known
for many years, and all of a sudden the NY Post changed its views, but these columnists have
not changed. They are too knowledgable and are gifted with common sense. I look forward to
reading their columns or will the Post cancel culture them?
Any discussion of how to "work with" the Marxists is well, it just shouldn't be discussed.
You can't work with Marxists. Besides, Trump won the election. This will be proven over the
next few weeks.
At this point, it seems unlikely that Trump is going to prevail in his legal challenges.
It's possible that he will, but what do you think is more likely? If he doesn't prevail,
however, Biden's "win" can actually be a tremendous win for us.
Why? Well, first let's address the question of who "we" are. I hate to sound like Joe Biden,
who seems not to know who he is or where he is or what he's talking about from moment to moment
(get ready for four years of hilarity, folks). But it's useful to remind ourselves of who we
are from time to time. We are White Nationalists.
A White Nationalist is
someone who believes that white peoples have a right to their own homelands. So that, as a
White Nationalist, I am a German nationalist, an English nationalist, a Scottish nationalist, a
French nationalist, etc . Or, at least, I support all those nationalisms. To be a white
nationalist in America is really to recognize that the core "American people" are the white
people whose ancestors built the country and who continue to pay for it. Thus, American White
Nationalism = American nationalism. To be an American nationalist is also to recognize that
more recent, non-white arrivals don't belong here at all; and that while our blacks have been
here a long time and some of them do sing, dance, and dribble well, they are mostly parasites
who contribute almost nothing to the society except grief.
Since it now looks impossible to go back to the good old days when we had blacks in complete
subjection, and since both blacks and browns out-breed us, American nationalists essentially
face two possible courses of action. The first is to remove non-whites from the country, which
seems impossible at this point, or to remove ourselves. This latter course would mean that we
all go back to Europe, which the Europeans won't allow, or that we effectively secede from the
USA and carve out our own white space (or spaces) within North America. It is this latter
option that now seems like it may be our only option, and something we must work
toward.
So, how does Trump's loss help advance us in that goal? To state the obvious, white
Americans will never work toward a white American homeland unless they are aware of
themselves as White Americans; unless they see themselves as a group with distinct
interests, and the moral right to assert those interests. "Awakening" white people has
always been our goal as White Nationalists -- awakening whites in America, and in
Europe. This awakening is far more important than any political figure, or any short-term
political goals. This awakening is and ought to be our top priority.
When I first got involved in this movement, almost exactly twenty years ago, there were two
questions that were constantly raised in my local "hate group": (1) When are white people going
to wake up? And (2) will it take some kind of societal collapse to get them to wake up? Most of
us thought that it would take such a collapse, but that this wouldn't happen in our lifetimes.
Well, my friends, now it has happened. The collapse has occurred, and Trump's loss has
brought it about.
The country was already fractured along political lines. Now it is completely broken.
Conservatives, the overwhelming majority of whom are white, have long known that the media are
biased to the Left and that the political establishment does not have their interests at heart.
But they still believed in "the system." They believed that it still might be possible to work
within the system and get somebody elected who would actually be their guy . Somebody
who could bring the jobs home, stop the tide of non-white immigration, clean up the streets (
i.e. , do something about black crime), combat the politically correct madness, and get
us out of the forever wars. The election of Donald Trump seemed to confirm this optimism.
But all the voices on the far-Right who labeled Trump "a distraction" have now been proved
correct. Trump actually wound up doing little for white people -- despite being continually
vilified by the Left as a white supremacist! Still, millions of whites not only continued to
support him, they carried on a love affair with the man. Trump was adored by his base like no
other American political figure in memory. Not even Reagan got this much love. The more vicious
and unhinged the attacks on Trump became, the more his base supported him. They knew that his
reelection would be no cakewalk, but they believed it was still possible.
They knew that the media and the Democrats would play dirty -- very dirty. But they trusted
the electoral process. Or, at least, they hoped for the best. For months there was talk about
voter fraud, primarily focused on the issue of mail-in ballots. But conservative whites still
had faith that the system would work for them, as it did in 2016.
Now their faith has been completely and irreparably shattered. And this is hugely
significant for us.
The first step toward real secession is psychological secession: seeing that though I
still live in it, this is no longer my country, and there is no longer any hope of making the
system work for me and those like me. This is exactly what the 2020 election has accomplished.
About 57% of white people voted for Trump in this election. And those many millions of whites
are now choking down a gigantic red pill. As we all know, the red pill is the path to
liberation.
Quoth Tyler Durden: "Losing all hope was freedom."
It seems that there is credible evidence that there was voter fraud in the election,
benefitting Biden. As I write this, Trump's legal team is preparing to fight it -- but, as I
have already said, I think that they will lose. Ultimately, it does not matter whether or not
there was fraud, or whether the fraud was enough to swing the election to Biden (two separate
issues). What matters is that white Trump voters believe that there was.
Trump voters are now, ironically, in sort of the same position as Democrats in the wake of
2016. No matter how much we would like to, none of us will ever forget the "Russian
interference!" and "Russia collusion!" hysteria that went on for the better part of two and a
half years, until the Mueller report more or less put the thing out of its misery (though not
entirely). The difference, however, is that that was all bullshit. And a significant number of
Democrats knew it. Trump voters actually have very good reasons to think that this election was
stolen.
Regardless of what we eventually learn about whether sharpies can cause ballots to be
misread, or whether a "glitch" flipped Trump votes to Biden votes, there is still ample reason
for the 70 million Trump voters to think that this thing was rigged. In the months preceding
the election, America saw a massive overreach of state and local government power in the form
of COVID lockdowns, the net effect of which was to ruin far more lives than it saved. Is it
paranoia to think that the intention here was to crash the economy and render Trump
unelectable?Consider: Virtually the entire media was not only against Trump, but made it their
personal mission to take him down by any means necessary. No lie, no distortion was too
ridiculous or too scurrilous. Leftists in government, journalism, academia, and the
entertainment industry openly declared that anything and everything was permissible in
order to take down the "existential threat" posed by Orange Man. This was the fertile ground
onto which were sowed the seeds of speculation about election fraud.
The lockdowns coincided with months of coordinated rioting billed as "protests" against
non-existent "racial injustice." The rioters somehow weren't subject to the rules of the
lockdowns, because apparently COVID takes a holiday when it is politically expedient. This
double standard was so obscene and so blatant, it enraged Republican voters (as well as a few
honest rank and file Democrats of my acquaintance).
The Left calculated, correctly, that Trump would do little or nothing to stop the rioting,
out of fear of looking too dictatorial in an election year. Trump's own calculation was that
allowing the riots to happen would give the Left plenty of rope with which to hang itself.
Trump was wrong; his inaction made him seem weak. The basic hope of the Left was that months of
economic and social chaos would fatally wound Trump, and that voters would be too stupid to see
that it was actually the Left that was to blame for it. In the main, it looks like they were
right about this.
But diehard Trump supporters correctly saw that the lockdowns and riots were an election
year strategy hatched by the Left. If they were not wholly designed by the Left to
damage Trump, they were at least manipulated for that purpose. The cherry on the cake came in
the weeks leading up to the election, in the form of big tech's censorship of news damaging to
Biden, including blocking the New York Post 's stories about Biden's involvement in his
son's shady business deals. This classically Orwellian move finally reached an extreme few
would ever have even thought possible, when at last social media began censoring the President
himself.
Given all of this, it would be unreasonable not to think that this election was
stolen. Trump's supporters believe this -- every last one of them. And they will never stop
believing it. Mark my words: this is never, ever going away. Trump voters will go to
their graves believing that the election was stolen, and feeling as passionately about it as
they do right now, less than a week after polls closed. They will go to their graves hating
Leftists (as they rightfully should), and believing that the system is broken beyond
repair.
"But," so your objection will go, "the fact that these white Trump voters will become
disillusioned with the system does not mean that they will become self-aware white
advocates."
My contention, however, is that what begins as disillusionment with the system will, in many
cases (a great many cases, I believe) lead to increasing racial consciousness, or open the door
to it. Take it from me -- from my own personal experience: once you have accepted that
one big thing is a total sham, you begin to wonder whether everything else is. And if
you keep going this way, you eventually begin wondering whether wrong is right; whether
everything we've ever been told is false and bad might be true and good.
And the fact is that white Trump voters are already far more racially aware than the
naysayers in the comments section will give them credit for. Trumpism is an implicitly white
phenomenon if ever there was one. And it is implicit only in the sense that its supporters are
too tactful and too fearful to name it for what it is -- not in the sense that they are
unaware of what it is. We all thought that the media and the Leftists had lost their
minds when they damned Trump and his supporters as racists and white supremacists. But they
weren't crazy. They grasped, much more clearly than Republicans, what the vector of the
Trump movement was -- where it might be headed. They correctly saw that a movement that offered
a home to millions of white Americans upset by non-white immigration (euphemistically called
"illegal immigration") might eventually give birth to self-aware white advocacy. When they
called the Trumpites "racists" it was like seeing the oak tree in the acorn.
As perceptive as the Left was on that particular score, they have, as we all know, been
remarkably deaf, dumb, and blind in other ways. Biden's share of the popular vote (if
legitimate) is by no means a landslide. There is no "mandate" for looney Leftism, and no
"repudiation" of Trump (indeed, Trump did expand his base -- though in one crucial area, as I
will shortly discuss, it shrank). But that won't stop Leftists like AOC, and many others, from
imagining that they have a mandate for all their craziness.
Therefore, expect the anti-white rhetoric to pick up steam. And, needless to say, this will
help the process along in a big way: white Trump voters will think for five minutes and realize
that they are at the mercy of a system that is demonstrably rigged against them and
wills their destruction. If they haven't realized it already. That image of the McCloskeys with
their guns facing down the brown hoard is unlikely to fade anytime soon. And what happened to
the McCloskeys has now happened to all white Americans: despised, cornered, and now disarmed.
(The literal disarmament is right around the corner, if the runoff elections in Georgia deliver
the Senate to the Democrats.)
We are nevertheless still at a point where whiteness remains implicit. Whites dare not speak
out in their own defense -- not explicitly as whites, anyway. Populist journalists like Tucker
Carlson, Ann Coulter, and Pat Buchanan, who are privately on our side, still speak in coded
language, avoiding open advocacy for whites. However, the coded language (as the Left also
correctly sees) is becoming easier to decode by the day. As many on our side have said, we will
make no real and substantial progress until we are willing to openly stand up for ourselves --
in person, in broad daylight, and without sock puppets and noms de plume like "Jef
Costello." Is that day imminent? I believe that it is.
What would it take? First, it would take white self-awareness -- and I have argued that this
is already there, emerging from its cocoon. Second, it would take anger . It would take
whites being pushed to a point where they are so angry they speak and behave imprudently
, damning the consequences. If one does it, he will simply be squashed; fired, censored,
canceled, deplatformed. If many do it, that's a different story. They can't fire us all. And if
that anger is great enough, they will fear us. They should. As Don Jr. recently tweeted , "70
million pissed off Republicans and not one city burned to the ground." But this may not last.
The election might just be the proverbial straw. The camel may be about to metamorphose into
the lion.
Already there are signs of uncharacteristic self-assertion on the part of angry Trump
voters. There have been large protests by Republicans in "swing states," including Michigan and Pennsylvania.
There has been violence. Continuing the lockdowns will exacerbate this. Everybody, not just
whites, has reached the breaking point with this COVID bullshit. Of course, now that Biden is
elected, it would not be surprising if COVID suddenly became a non-issue.
Here are some more predictions:
Trump has now moved over to Gab , a
free-speech platform that has embraced thought criminals of all kinds (so far). Trump's
supporters will follow him to Gab -- millions of them. They will read the other stuff and
become more red-pilled. You can almost predict this one with mathematical certainty.
Gun sales will increase as Trump voters scramble to arm themselves before Biden tries to
disarm them. Gun sales have increased enormously since the BLM riots began, so much so that the
stores cannot keep up with demand. Ammo sales have been so brisk it's now hard to find bullets
for those guns. (Yes, I do believe we
are headed for violent civil war .)
Conspiracy theories are going to be mainstreamed. This process was already underway, due
partly to the influence of "QAnon." I tried reading
the QAnon book , with the intention of writing something about it for this website. I
stopped because the thing was so stupid I couldn't get through it. If this stuff can be
influential among Trump voters, anything can. Alex Jones is all over Gab. The Trumpites who
follow their leader over to that platform will get a big dose of him -- and about 60% of what
he says is actually true. He was talking about Epstein's pedo island years ago.
One thing leads to another -- once, as I have said, a big lie is exposed, one begins to
question everything else. Who really runs the world? Who controls US policy in the Middle East?
What's Bohemian Grove all about? Exactly how long does it take to cremate a single body?
Inquiring minds want to know. Let a thousand conspiracy theories bloom! Every one of them helps
us, because every one of them undermines the system and the elites who run it.
White males are the only group Trump did not make gains with in 2020. Given his portrayal in
the media, the irony here is rich, as Jim Goad has noted. Had Trump
gotten more votes from white males, it looks like he would have outvoted even the dead and the
fake voters. As Gregory
Hood has pointed out, "the reason President Trump is in this position is because he
didn't do enough for white working-class voters ." He continues: "White working-class
voters are now the most important voting group in America. They will have decided two
presidential elections in a row. They will decide more."
The Republican establishment cannot be unaware of this. They've seen the same numbers Hood
has. If they did not realize it before, they realize it now. There will be absolutely no going
back to the Republican party of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Those names are hard to pronounce
now without gagging. That they were the Republican nominees in, respectively, 2008 and 2012 now
seems downright surreal. That is how much Trump has changed the party. To save that party,
Republicans will have to offer something to white voters. They will have to keep running the
Trump train, without Trump. (Though Trump is not going away; he will remain a huge part of
public life.)
Everyone thinks 2020 has been a terrible year. It is just the opposite. White nationalism
has taken a giant step forward.
To be an American nationalist is also to recognize that more recent, non-white arrivals
don't belong here at all; and that while our blacks have been here a long time and some of
them do sing, dance, and dribble well, they are mostly parasites who contribute almost
nothing to the society except grief.
The author makes a lot of cogent and well-reasoned points, but his delivery lacks nuance
and has a coarseness which suggests prejudice to the point of racism.
Not that I am accusing the author of being a racist at all – but in the field of
persuasion, a biased narrative produces polarisation, either confirming or disputing one's
preconceived beliefs.
I suggest adjusting the author's arguments to recognise the actual fundamental issue in
play, which is not skin colour or race or language, but CULTURE. Yes, no doubt, the
historical currents and ill-conceived government policies have herded different parcels of
humanity into differing contexts on the basis of their racial backgrounds, but while the
identifying characteristics (and idiotic government-enabled victim industries) may be
numerically associated with skin colour, the actual behavioural differentiations are
determined by the collective CULTURE adopted by each individual within their respective
communities.
Allow me a simplistic example here. By government policy, an Australian is recognised as
Koori (and entitled to all the government benefits, handouts, preferential treatment and
other assistance that Koori status attracts) if he/she can demonstrate that they have at
least 1/16 Koori blood. What a boon to the Australian "Aboriginal Industry", a
government-spawned victim industry par-excellence, whose client-base and professional
employment potential is thereby magically multiplied 10-fold compared a Koori threshold
limited to just full and half-bloods (do the math).
As would be expected, a great many people are all too eager to pile onto this "victim"
gravy train. Never mind that the bulk of them are white.
And the really warped thing about all of this, is that all those whiteys whose great great
grandmother or grandfather may have been a Koori, baited by the siren-song of government
entitlements and victim rights, all too often fall into the trap of government dependency and
economic despondency that afflicts so many of the victim industry's clientelle.
It's not language or race or skin colour, its CULTURE. Egged along by idiotic government
officials and vested interests.
Here in Australia, my view is that you're either Australian, or you're not. All other
considerations are secondary. That applies equally to foreign and domestic policy, and
equally to the native-born and immigrants. Until we come to understand and accept that
proposition, the NATION will be hobbled.
So too with the USA. Mind you, it appears to me that the USA's CULTURAL issues are rather
more entrenched and vulnerable to vested interests than in Australia (so far). If they can't
be resolved, then we may be looking at eventual disintegration into several nations,
irrespective of race.
Really, it's these exciting and dark times when real change happens. The Kali Yuga beckons
us all onwards! I look forward to that future thing which American Nationalism will give
birth to. I just hope it involves dragons, somehow, somewhere. Maybe on a flag.
Your premise of a "white homeland" in North America is problematic at best, since the
territory was already occupied by First Nations of indigenous peoples who clearly were the
first to make such a claim on these lands, which stood until the continent was stolen from
them by white people. A just reckoning of homelands begins with recognizing their prior
rights here first, and then assessing where in the world it is best to park our itinerant
white asses. But as you say, we've already forfeited our place in our actual white homelands
in Europe and elsewhere in the Old World. So maybe we can negotiate paying rent, on these
lands we occupy, to the poor survivors of the genocide we enacted to claim "our" home.
"Most of us thought that it would take such a collapse, but that this wouldn't happen in
our lifetimes. Well, my friends, now it has happened.'
Reminds me of Mr Twain & his comment that reports of his death have been greatly
exaggerated .
The author's race nationalism is sad, to say the least. As if "white" comes with a label.
(And never mind all the Legal/Property issues that would arise -- imagine sorting out an
Olympic sized pool of cooked spaghetti .)
"that we effectively secede from the USA and carve out our own white space (or spaces) within
North America. It is this latter option that now seems like it may be our only option, and
something we must work toward."
But having sorted out the labels "White", citizens can play " India 1947 -- the
Partion" : you know, that wonderful time when millions of Hindus moved south &
millions of Muslims moved north. Death toll somewhere between a couple of hundred thousand to
a couple of million. I wonder who will get the bulk of the Oligarchs ? Where will those
tribal Oligarchs feel more comfortable ?
Mexicans & Asians -- wonder whether they'll be welcome ? Turn away the Asians especially,
will go a long way to guaranteeing failure.
The saddest thing of all ? Assume all the race issues are settled -- & you still have 101
other political issues to deal with .Unless, of course, the author simply wants to transfer
the status quo to his new racial Eden .Wow, what a triumph that would be.
Of course Europeans and people outside of Europe of European descent are waking and
beginning to take our own side This is the inevitable reaction to our ( mostly ) hostile
elite, Politics as usual/ MSM etc are all in decline and no amount of censorship is changing
these trends. Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell in National Populism The revolt against
liberal democracy are amongst many who see this happening. The trend is towards Nationalism
away from the Multiculti cult and its champions on tv etc. The silent majority in all White
nations are less silent with every passing year.
I've long considered myself a political exile. I left the US because I couldn't stand it
any more. The insanity of the laws, the always increasing police state was something I saw
but others apparently didn't.
If states start to secede and Texas is one of them, I'll move back. The Fed Gov is the
main problem and needs to totally disappear. When the USA goes the way of the USSR, then
you'll know there's a chance for freedom.
The history of race relations in the past 60 years or so has been based on your
assumption, that everyone is the same but environments create cultures that make them seem
different. It's a claim that's impossible to disprove, because you can define any traits as
cultural, and is therefore meaningless. Nevertheless, in practical real-life terms all you
have to do is look at how various groups behave in many different locations and even
different times, to see that something is at work besides culture.
And failing to acknowledge biodiversity leads to the absurd victimization industry that
has brought us to the brink of race war.
"warriors of the Powhatan "came unarmed into our houses with deer, turkeys, fish, fruits,
and other provisions to sell us". The Powhatan then grabbed any tools or weapons available
and killed all the English settlers they found, including men, women, and children of all
ages. Chief Opechancanough led the Powhatan Confederacy in a coordinated series of surprise
attacks; they killed a total of 347 people, a quarter of the population of the Virginia
colony."
Oh no those poor natives. Maybe they should have avoided a fight they couldn't win.
There's a reason we call them savages.
"The difference, however, is that that was all bullshit."
But, as the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: "The amount of energy
necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." This is the
unbearable asymmetry of bullshit .
There are so many massive lies out there that are still believed by many of the stupid
masses brainwashed by mass media, the universities, and a variety of other large
institutions.
You can't fix stupid.
So–my crystal ball is very foggy at this point.
(If you think about cultures in the history of the human race, all were based on a bunch
of lies. As Terence McKenna liked to say–nowhere is it written that we apes are
entitled to learn the truth about anything.)
@Etruscan Film Star in parallel with the whole racial profiling paradigm is the same idea
applied to religion, wherein George Dubya whipped up his "civilisational struggle" against
the Muslim world to facilitate American games of Empire. To the extent that any problem
actually exists, religion is a red herring. Here in Australia, Muslim people are amongst the
most genuine and charitable people that one can meet. In my experience, the only tiny
minority of Muslim people who have caused friction are invariably of Arab origin, and more
specifically from Saudi Arabia – an inherently tribal & chauvinistic culture (and a
key American ally in the Middle East – just sayin').
Race & religion are distractions. Compatible cultures can assimilate in a harmonious
society, while incompatible cultures cannot.
For the time being, as long as Jews play the gane of Whites vs Diversity, whites should
play a game of Jews vs Gentiles.
If Jews can lead a multicultural coalition against Whites, then Whites can lead a
multicultural coalition against Jews. This is their worst nightmare, and almost everything
they do is best understood as an attempt to prevent this.
This latter course would mean that we all go back to Europe, which the Europeans won't
allow, or that we effectively secede from the USA and carve out our own white space (or
spaces) within North America. It is this latter option that now seems like it may be our only
option, and something we must work toward.
Jez, they say I am a dreamer, and all I want is a free pony and some government
cheese.
I suspect that Australians are several decades behind Americans in discovering that your
perspective, which basically is what we called civic nationalism, is largely false and has
now largely failed. I don't have time to even sketch this, but you can look for critiques of
civic nationalism and for concepts like regression to the mean. I hope you can learn from our
experience.
@Ultrafart the Brave and snotty racist Europeans and Japanese kept the revolutionary
masses down. The opposite is the truth, it were the Europeans who were revolutionary folks
(French revolution/Enlightenment anyone) trying to spread modernism over racist, parochial,
reactionary, tribal darkie populations and the whole thing ended in tears and trumped up
charges against Whitey dreamt up by Jews, marxists and third World Nationalists/ elites. Same
with Japanese Empire which too was driven by the Pan Asian ideology. The Chinese too will be
rejected by the darkie masses in the future, they too will face trumped up charges for
"exploitation" and "oppression" in the future, it has already started right now.
I do not deny that there are differences between the races. However, breeding is not one
of them.
Ever since the end of slavery, American blacks have had moderate numbers of children,
essentially the same whites. Yes, really. Why do you think, after all these centuries,
pre-1965 American blacks are still hardly more than 10% of the population?
Actually the fraction of blacks in the United States is lower than it used to be –
the Grover-Cleveland cheap-labor immigration surge, that drove wages so low and profits so
high, was all from (at the time) white third-world Europe, and increased the white fraction
of the population. Because white europeans at the time bred more than black Americans!
So yes, during the 19th century and up through Mao, the Chinese bred like rabbits and
lived lives of total misery. After Mao, the Chinese fertility rate was allowed to moderate,
and now China is doing very well. Is there anything genetic in the Chinese people for either
high or or low fertility rates? No. This at least, is entirely cultural.
Are there genetic differences between the races? Yes. Is excessive breeding one of them?
No.
@Ultrafart the Brave in Western societies on average than MENA and South Asians, even the
African blacks, who have much more deeper cultures than New World blacks, they all integrate
fast into Western cultures but they tend to ebonyify everything. But they bring with them
some negative traits like tendency towards violence, crime, chip on the shoulder mentality,
melanin power mentality, seeing racism everywhere etc So culturally they integrate faster but
the skin colour difference creates resentments and temperament differences still exist. On
the positive side blacks are not clannish as the darker Eurasian semi Caucasoids and have an
individualistic tendency which does gel well with individualistic Northern Euros.
I was away from Polaris Parkway, just North of Westerville and Worthington, Ohio, for a
couple of months and things have deteriorated quickly.
This also happened to Epstein Best Bud, Les Wexner's pet project Easton Town Center, close to
New Albany Wexner's British Village Fantasyland.
The common factor in deterioration is wait for it
Blacks and Browns, managed by jews.
Philadelphia Block Busting, 60 years later, same demographic players.
@sb understand that the Australian aboriginals were not a uniform race across the
Australian continent. The Tasmanian Aboriginals were quite different to their continental
counterparts, but even the mainlanders were not racially homogenous. The racial makeup of the
native peoples of Papua & New Guinea are completely different again.
A broad analogy can be drawn with the various black races occupying the African continent
– their skin colour doesn't uniquely define their respective races. For an extreme
example, compare the Congo Pygmies of central Africa with the Rwandan Tutsis.
I do take your point, however – rather than qualify the Kooris as Australian for a
potentially global audience, perhaps it is simpler to just refer generically to native
Australians..
One might think so, but apparently not. Instead, in so many ways the Australian culture
seems to be marching in suicidal lockstep with the USA, like the mythical lemmings toward the
proverbial cliff.
An appalling example of this is the insidious slide of the Australian medical system over
the last few decades from a universally free model to a for-profit one infested with middle
men and insurance rackets, presumably on a trajectory towards a full-blown American-style
Big-Pharma business model with the poor folk thrown under the bus.
@Malla rt of thinking aligns somewhat with reports of homecoming head-chopping ISIS
psychos being sent to reeducation camps in Xinjiang, China. The local indigenous population
apparently is doing just fine, but returning extremists trained for genocidal wars in the
Middle East no longer fit in.
Here's a true story which helps to illustrate that the principle of cultural harmony
transcends race, and even species. I was raised on a farm, and on this farm were herds of
sheep and also some turkeys. One particular sheep somehow got it into her head that she was a
turkey. She would follow the turkey flock around all day, and at night, she would roost in a
tree with the turkeys. The turkeys didn't seem to mind, and the sheep seemed quite happy.
Compatible cultures.
The stolen election is like Jewish control of the media. EVERYBODY, even Biden voters know
this SELECTION/ELECTION WAS STOLEN, but like Jewish control of the media, we are demanded to
pretend it doesn't exist or never happened.
No Trump fan here, but I voted for the Orange Man because of the alternative. I still have
hope that Team Trump can turn this around. All the Jew/Israel butt kissing aside and the
broken promises and holding meetings with (c)rappers, Trump did expose the "normies" to the
FAKE MEDIA. Hell, that is more than any other modern day POTUS has done for Whites. Can
someone tell me when was the last time Whites had a true representative in the White House
that actually looked out for White Americans and was concerned about White civil rights? I am
pushing 60 and we haven't had one in my lifetime for sure.
So that, as a White Nationalist, I am a German nationalist, an English nationalist, a
Scottish nationalist, a French nationalist, etc.
I think if we take it as far as Hitler, we are also Chinese nationalists, and Japanese
nationalists etc – those nations can develop in their spheres – and so much the
better for them. But they may not force themselves on us (or others).
This whole article is based on the Susan Sarandon premise in 2016 when Bernie lost –
that a Trump win would inspire the base to elect a progressive, caring left wing politician.
This didn't turn out – the system got rigged for about as establishment a criminal as
could have been chosen.
Article 10 is not easy to execute. The right may have honour and guns, but the left is
TDSed, and rabies is one strong steroid to help with a fight!
In addition there is no real leader – one who could strategise a secession
effectively. Trump certainly couldn't. He'd be great as the PR guy, but not as the leader.
Until one is born, America is stuck within the belly of the US beast.
Author Costello said:
"Had Trump gotten more votes from white males, it looks like he would have outvoted even the
dead and the fake voters."
Nope.
Costello misses the point that the curious count stoppage was a pause to enable the left
to manufacture the votes that they then anticipated needing in lieu of the largely pro-Trump
turnout numbrs. And, any unanticipated pro-Trump surge could have easily been overcome by
having a reserve at the ready.
IOW:
Regardless of who had voted for Trump, they simply would have been overcome by the left
creating more fake votes for Biden.
I would add materialist values and urbanization to the blend. All my ancestry emanated
from Scandinavia. After checking out several major cities during the years of my young
manhood, I returned to a rural, homesteading life.
Working with my hands and body is important to my well-being. Seasonally, living on the
northwestern fringe of the Northwoods, winters are long and arduous -- a good time for
artistic and intellectual pursuits. The soul has its needs, as Thomas Moore pointed out in
his book "Growth of the Soul". My needs center on living close to the mother of us all.
Northeast Asians and Northwest Europeans share much in this perspective.
Not too many answers to why and to what purpose but still a brilliant article.
Generals love the war, soldiers not so much.
There is lingering question in my mind! The question is: Who loves more war, Israel , or
seventeen intelligence agencies with General staff.
But for the time being I am very much against any radical solution.
I am with Trump's "Stand down and stand by".
I think Biden also does deserve a chance to come up with solutions.
But if Biden starts a new war than everything will be justified and Final solution will
become inevitable.
@TG k up a feast. The younger children enjoy their own fun and games. The older ones help
their samesex parents. During the evening after supper, the bottles get passed around and
sometimes there is music and perhaps dancing.
The bulk of the Amish -- and the Mennonites -- emerged from an Anabaptist culture in
Switzerland and parts of Germany and during the late 17th Century many of them relocated to
Lanacaster County Pennsylvania, from which they have now colonized westwards wherever there
is the possibility of true country living. Not many of them migrate past the 90th Meridian,
where poor soil and semi-arid conditions are poorly conducive to agriculture and cozy country
living.
@Ultrafart the Brave s have manipulated much in America in the last 50 years and that is
the bigger reason for what are marketed as 'cultural clashes'. Most of them are bogus and
engineered.
Race & religion are distractions. Compatible cultures can assimilate in a harmonious
society, while incompatible cultures cannot.
Agree, again, I'd use the term: shared or accepted values.
(Fwiw, I'm willing to go the step further and view the author as a likely racist and
supremacist. Most people like that have lived sheltered lives and had little exposure to a
variety of peoples. Many of their assertions are simply empty and unaware of ahem the real
world.)
If Brexit ranks NINE on the Collective Self-Harm for No Good Reason scale, proposing a
civil war in the 21st century to create a "whites only" state in North America is so nutty it
breaks the dial.
But We'll give you MT, ND, SD, WY, IA, NB, KS, and Maybe OK. That way you can all go back
to growing crops and digging oil (ND) for your subsistence. Every place else is getting too
mixed for you.
Maybe if you're nice the Hawaiians will let you vacation on their islands occasionally to
get a break from long cold winters.
Though a lame and uninsightful article on the whole, the strategy of and desire for
secession is the healthiest conclusion that the author could have been reached. I would just
hope that when whites within the ethnostate inevitably conflict with the ethnogovernment that
he would also want for them to secede.
What a simple morality play for the banking elites (who own both parties through
"lobbying, i.e. bribery" sanctioned by the highest courts) to divide and conquer the
taxcattle.
You are arguing over who you pay Tribute to. This is a golden opportunity for mass civil
disobedience to overwhelm and bury the decrepit, imperial corporatist oligarchy.
The stone-age aboriginals who previously inhabited what is now America failed to defend
their lands from invasion. Sadly, we've learned nothing from their mistakes.
Ronnie Unz needs to weigh in here Give the little cretin credit for posting this of
course.
Ronnie you are about to get your brown invasion that you so crave good and hard. Of all
the things that the globalist elites want in electing this moron demented POS called Biden is
an open border
Here it comes Ronnie Won't you and your bro Cholo loving Reed be soooo very happy
Amnesty is going to be served up as one of the first acts of Shithead Biden's
administration
Rejoice Ronnie . More poverty crossing the border to cut your grass.. And a bigger mass of
people for the welfare state
Of course you think that maids and dry wall hangers are natural conservatives I beg to
differ Where i live in Virginia they are natural clients of our welfare offices. We are
ground zero for the Welfare Dreamers who come from Central America.
I don't have to gaze into my navel and dream up some statistics about this you insipid
moron I can walk down the street to the Socialist Service office and see it for my own
eyes.
Yes Ronnie White Nationalist failed thanks to shitheads like you . Now asshole enjoy
paying California taxes to support open door poverty
Virginia is we are now on par to have California style taxes to support the brown
wave.
Your Buddy Reed had a good plan for escaping that I believe he used to be a Virginian he
moved to where the cholos are leaving!
As to this article right!! Cucked whites are doing shit. They'll be called racists and
shrivel up like a daisy in a wind storm.
@Priss Factor he Jewish agenda. Why don't we have a Herve Ryssen here in the US? Why
don't we have an Alain Soral, publishing prolifically and SELLING books to the deplorable
French yellow vests? Why don't we have a comedian like Dieudonne, poking fun at the organized
community and its endless wailing about its victimhood? We need more strong voices, willing
to point out the fact that there is NO SUCH THING as "Judeo-Christian values"; the very idea
grew out of a poison, Scofield Reference Bible influenced swamp, a hideous swamp monster
feeding on bleating Christian Zionist sheep, baa baa baaing as their wealth and futures are
extracted by the oligarch Jews.
It seems, based on much video, as well as the geographic centers of this fraud, that
negroes played a disproportionate role in the illegal election activities. Now that does seem
counter intuitive, as negroes are overwhelming honest, law abiding citizens.
I can only imagine that it was some small group of Jews that bribed our colored brethren
to engage in this thoroughly out of character misbehavior that may well lead to violent,
bloody national upheaval.
If only we had employed a larger share of our negro population in the various lucrative
advertisement opportunities, thereby sparing them from a life of soul crushing poverty. We
might have saved the nation, had we been kinder to our minority Black population.
"A White Nationalist is someone who believes that white peoples have a right to their
own homelands." – White Americans forfeited this right the moment they began
bringing African slaves here. Advocacy for white nationalism in America is advocacy for
secession or genocide. If you have no stomach for advocating genocide of non-whites in
America you must advocate for carving out white homeland for white nationalists. This
homeland no long will represent America or be America, so you no longer will be American
white nationalist but white 'bantustan' nationalist. If you lucky the rest of America will
let you have casinos in your bantustan.
The karma of the U.S was always screwed from the day the vile white Euro invaders fucked
with the natives and if there should be statues they should be of the likes of Geronimo and
not white imperial scum.
May the spirits of all the slaughtered native North American Indians be smiling from ear
to ear at the potentially very dangerous division in the middle country of North America.
A very good article that raises a lot of valid points. White Supremacy is the ONLY way,
that's what (((they))) call us, so ride with it – wear their labels with pride. Onwards
and upwards!
"The goal of abolishing the white race is, on its face, so desirable that some may find it
hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed WHITE
SUPREMACISTS .Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and
the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as the white race is
destroyed."
– Noel Ignatiev, Jewish Harvard professor and co-founder of 'Race Traitor'
magazine.
What makes you think White Americans brought blacks to America? America didn't even exist
when black slavery commenced and the bulk of black slaves went to the Spanish colonies, not
the American colonies.
A just reckoning of homelands begins with recognizing their prior rights here first,
A just reckoning also requires a statute of limitations on questions priority and a
recognition of who actually built the country.
Besides, the 'native' tribes were already killing and displacing each other. They were
mutually hostile, not united. Why should the addition of one more tribe to that warring mix
– albeit a tribe whiter and more successful than the rest – make any difference?
Ironically, it takes a 'racist' to claim that it does.
Agree, although Jews have a few advantages that make them much better at it, namely a
couple thousand years experience operating as tiny minorities in others lands and a shameless
hyperethnocentric instinct evidently lacking in white gentiles.
I looked at gab but it didn't seem very user friendly, problem is also everybody needs to
cease using twitter and shift to gab at the same time, critical mass.
And where, amongst these face diapered morons and Covid fearing degenerates, will you find
freedom?
America's problems are far greater than issues of Race, Politics, or Culture. At the core,
the issue is complete Spiritual Collapse, manifested in craven cowardice, cringingly
lickspittle obedience, mindless group think, and resolute belief in imaginary events.
This isn't going to end well for anyone. The spiritual death of America is as permanent as
it is absolute.
This latter course would mean that we all go back to Europe, which the Europeans won't
allow .
You haven't been paying attention, sonny. The Europeans are busy trying to catch up with
America's comparitive advantage by importing masses of similar types.
Has anybody else besides myself noticed how fast Jared Taylor and his #1 prize writer,
Gregory Hood – have cucked and caved in and conceded that the DemonRats won the 2020
Presidential election?
And, how each of these guys have now gone into full concession mode and are trying to
persuade and influence their followers to join them in their cuckery and effeminate
willingness to become submissive?
Also, I was listening to a recent Red Ice podcast where they had a slew of allegedly
pro-white community spokesmen and women on to discuss the fraudulent and clearly obvious
attempts by the Demonic leftists to steal the election and they were pushing a meme that I
found more than a little bit disturbing.
It went something like this: Racially healthy Whites need to respond to this travesty by
'opting out' of the 'system'. This means that Whites need to stop participating; i.e., stop
voting completely.
Alex Linder once said, when discussing the suicidal mindset of Whites who were infected
with Christianity – and who we all have repeatedly heard on various talk radio call-in
shows come on the
radio – after another leftist anti-white agenda victory and say: "Well, I will just
continue to pray and leave things up to God" – Linder dubbed that kind of attitude by
Whites as nothing more than pathetic excuse for them to continue to 'do nothing' to help
themselves or their people. I agree.
This meme that 'Whites need to stop voting' is exactly the same kind of attitude. I am
willing to concede the point that voting is senseless as long as the system continues to
allow fraudulent and illegal chicanery to thrive and go unpunished. But, anyone who actively
promotes the idea that Whites should just completely opt out is pushing advice that is
exactly what our mortal enemies want most. It is a complete surrender to being ruled over by
non-whites and jews who hate our guts and who do not want to encounter any opposition to
their agenda to genocide our race of people.
Yes, the election WAS stolen, the democrats having admitted it themselves after four years
of trying to get rid of president Trump, as they said, "BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE"!! So rational
people are now to believe that they have suddenly become honest players in the 2020 election?
As the saying goes, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT THOUGHT /..Dr. Charles Fhandrich.
@Stonewall Jackson sympathizing with some of your sentiments, Stonewall, but your
mean-spirited discourse (directed towards our host, no less) is a textbook example of why
Comments Sections (and some commentators) get edited–and even banned. Why take this
route? It seems self-defeating.
Your disrespectful attitude undermines your appeal. It also diminishes this site.
Why not aim higher? Why not civility?
Ron Unz might be wrong here and there. But he is not a "moron". Making such claims makes
you look like one.
Ron Unz has given the world a forum where countless and controversial and conflicting
points of view are given oxygen and light. This is invaluable and rare.
This is probably the most profound and auspicious moment in modern American history. I
would like to see Trump and the Republican party seize this moment by creating a parallel
government. Imagine 71 million Americans standing solid and publicly announcing a resounding
"Fuck you!" to the Jewish commies and all their colored cohorts.
'Why should the addition of one more tribe to that warring mix make a difference?'
Because it was their homeland, unlike the Euro invaders of central North America and just
try asking an elderly Palestinian how that feels.
And the different tribes may have been at war occasionally but this can hardly be compared
to the mass slaughter of the Native North American Indians and their Bison(to try and starve
them).
@Ultrafart the Brave Most importantly, the lies attributing black dysfunction to white
racism must stop immediately, and the government has to stop shoving diversity down our
throats continuously.
Allow freedom of association, enforce the laws, stop making excuses for black dysfunction,
and limit if not eliminate further immigration into the West from the Third World.
Perhaps then there can be some hope for us living together with a modicum of peace and
prosperity.
But I agree with you that nothing is accomplished by referring to an entire group of
people in completely disparaging terms.
That being said, black dysfunction has been and continues to be a serious problem that
will not be resolved by blaming it on white racism.
@Frankie P , who are both honored as Prophets in Islam, but instead, Jews spit on hearing
their names and do the same while passing a Christian of any kind or a Christian Church in
Israel. They have no respect for Christians or any other religion.
It is time the Jewish lobbies and the American Government leaders as well as the evangelical
Christian leaders who mislead the poor American young into joining the military and believing
that they are doing something for God and Christianity by fighting Israel's wars were named,
shamed and arrested and tried for treason.
In a perverse sort of way, israel's favorite "war song" is "Onward Christian Soldiers"
There I've said it
Will the redpilled understand that America has done this to many other countries, with
many more dead, or will their new consciousness be limited to this particular event? Because
the redpilled ones were always enthusiastic about new military adventures.
If the warriors came unarmed, but wound up killing people instead, I'd wonder what took
place in the interval. Something tells me we're only hearing one side and only a small part
of the story.
As for avoiding a fight they couldn't win, what advantage would they have obtained if they
just bent over and took it in the cheeks without a fight?
Maybe the reason "we" call them savages is called projection.
BTW, here's an example of what failing to fight will get ya,
An elephant that had some tests performed on it was going to be culled. However, in the
end, they decided to release it back into the wild (within the reserve).
This elephant took it into it's head that it was an African buffalo!
It hung out with the buffalo herd, and started to emulate the buffaloes behavior.
Initially, of course, the buffaloes were a tad leery of their new, very large friend –
but eventually got used to him.
And the elephant provided plenty of muscle when it came to lions stalking the herd.
It seems like you got the Pocahontas version of history.
All I can say is that if some guys on horses abducted my daughter and then slowly tortured
and scalpted her to death, you can be sure I wouldn't hesitate to genocide each and every one
of those savages down to the last one. But let's not have facts interrupt your narcissistic
moral masturbating. Just don't come here, coz in the end we'll end up laughing at you.
@Majority of One watermelon, they pass around the gin and juice and sit around smoking
the chronic and endo. Guns and ammunition are then passed around and they all discuss that
nights or the next days activities.
The bulk of the Negroes emerged from the African bush, sold by their own and competing
tribes and have colonized all 52 states wherever there is the possibility of free living and
handouts. Not many of them migrate to rural areas where country living and hard work would be
considered racist and discriminatory.
We have to thank our black Bros and Sistas. Without their motto "there can be no
construction without destruction" the USA would never be what it is today.
Ahhh This white man has put in a convincing case for himself and people like him and he
has my total support. He and his people can have Wyoming and half of South Dakota, only half.
Want some cows and mules? Take them. Take some white women also if they agree to go. And you
must take Trump with you, he's white like you. Good luck.
White liberals cry crocodile tears when the jewsmedia reminds them how White settlers
stole land formerly inhabited by American Indians. But, the fact is, every people alive in
the world today stole the land they now live on from a weaker people. It's the history of
mankind. Further, every Indian tribe in America at the time of Columbus had stolen their land
from another tribe, and they continued warring and land stealing until the White man put a
stop to it.
This obsession with restitution and atonement, is replacing religion. Only a race too long
comfortable would consider giving away to the defeated all they have accomplished and hard
fought for.
Churchills jewish henchman, fake aristocrat and architect of the Dresden and associated
slaughters frederick linderman mused that the defining event of the 20th century would be
'the abdication of the white man'.
The seeds of annihilation were sown in the late 19th century, now comes the reaping, aided
ably by the mendacity, sloth and cowardice of our own peoples and leaders.
President Kushner or President Emhoff that is the question. Same old – Jewish
"White" Supremacy. The "white" supremacy game of our "free" Zion press forgets to say which
"whites" are supreme. Our "free" Zion press is right that there is a "white" group that is
supreme but do not go into details which one. Unz site is one of the few sites that notices
this "white" group that is supreme in the US and in the entire west.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, will leave his job as a
partner with a high-profile law firm to focus on his role in the new Biden
administration.
A campaign spokeswoman said Tuesday that Emhoff will sever ties with DLA Piper by
Inauguration Day. Emhoff took a leave of absence from the firm in August, when Harris was
named Joe Biden's running mate. Biden and Harris will be inaugurated Jan. 20.
Emhoff is working with the transition team to determine the issues he will take on as
the vice presidential spouse. He is the first man to hold that role, as Harris is the
nation's first female vice president.
thanks mr Costelo for showing your thought crystal clear.
I a south american, am not entirely a contradictor to your views. And even share a few of
them.
If you re a white US nationalist I am a Brazilian, no matter-what-color, nationalist.
A nationalist must necessarily abide by the Westphalia Peace and be a faithful son of the
1815 Wien Conference.
The first corolarium of a nationalist like you is , of course, abhorr and abolish globalism.
This concedes a few exceptions (such as worlwide communications) since they are already in
place and cannot be sensibly reverted.
NOTE 1:I do want to wipe out globalism. (though not for every small nation nation of the
world, which would turn not applicable and counterproductive) away from my country for the
next decades at least.
The second corolarium is that any self conscious country should cling and fiercely defend a
strong list of protectionist laws. And entirely renegotiate the rusty, hegemonic leaning WTO
rules. Not to quit it but to found a new WTO. This protection is what the US did all the the
19th century long, from top to bottom.
The third one that springs out as a consequence is that the STATE presence and adhesion to
state owned companies in key sectors is vital to any nationalism.
Now the big criterium to enlight and tell things apart is: the less develoloped a country is
the more
of state ownership and reliance it will requires.
So until my home country does reach a 40.000 dollar/year PER CAPITA income, with an
acceptable
income distribution, I will be a feroucious nationalist just like Costello.
It is taken for granted that small places like Singagore, Uruguay, Andorra, Bosnia or
seychelles can AT WILL make an option to globalize, to intenationalize, to sell themselves
out to neighbor or to the best bidder.
No half words, no subtle or figurative language. And nobody must keep a secret as to what to
do when a big , rich, established country the destroy this legitimate thir party Nationalism,
annex or dominate the so described national entity.
Revolution, no less.
@Random Anonymous ti" future, they needed to introduce the intermediate step of civic
nationalism, whereby anyone could be an American as long as they were willing to assimilate
into the dominant culture. Hence, Israel Zangwill's The Melting-Pot .
Thus, civic-nationalism represented the proverbial camel poking its nose through the tent
before entering it completely. Once Westerners became acclimated to having non-Westerners
living among themselves, the assimilationist approach slowly began to be transformed into the
multicultural framework, one in which the overarching objective of dismantling "white
supremacy" was slowly unfurled. This is where we find ourselves today.
Like sensible people, I think they understand that America is never going to be another
Orania. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania,_Northern_Cape
It's possible to get a deeper appreciation of the roots of America's social crisis America by
reading Thomas Sowell who has uniquely, I think, shown that patronizing guilt-ridden whites
(those that were) over the decades bear a particular responsibility.
Well, if you can't see racism in this guy words I'm convincente that you're already a
totally blind racist.
There is NO white land in this continent, son. If you are that German, english, Nordic
white nationalist then you can surely Go back there to European origins and claim your
ancestors' lands. But one thing you can never claim is the right over stolen territory,
neither to define how long one have to occupy robbed land until be able to recognize others
as a "native white"
or INVADERS.
EVERY SANE HUMAN KNOWS WHAT IS BEHIND THIS FACADE OF ARGUMENT.
NO WAY ANY REAL NATIVE CAN CLAIM TO BE WHITE, LET ALONE CALL AFRICAN DESCENDENTS ("OUR
BLACKS" ) PARASITES AND THIA SPEAKS VOLUMES ABOUT THE SICK PREMISES THIS COLONIALIST
SUPREMACIST IS DEFECATING FROM HIS MOUTH.
Friday rush hour. Euston station [in London]. Who's here? Who isn't. A kaleidoscope of
skin colours. The world in one terminus. Barbara Roche can see it over the rim of her cup of
Americano coffee. "I love the diversity of London," she tells me. "I just feel
comfortable."
White Americans brought them here? All White Americans? Was a black or two parceled out to
each White American? Blacks were brought here before America was a nation. And not by White
Americans.
A huge number of White Americans came to America after White Americans abolished slavery.
Most black slaves weren't even brought to White America but spanish america. White Americans
must pay as a group right?
Congrats on being the lowest IQ writer to ever be published on this site. Glad to see Ron
Unz is doing his part to increase representation of the imbecile community.
"Nation" is a white concept. De-colonialize your brain, bigot! To the redskins, land
belonged to those who could take it, and Europeans honored that tradition in grand style.
Do you really believe the BS you just spewed? "So, things began to slide when welfare became
generous and English wasn't required, etc. All of that has been to the detriment of the black
population and the cause of many problems in that population." Just another excuse for blacks.
Blacks are parasitic criminals, they are going to complain welfare or not. Cut off welfare to
blacks then, they never deserved it anyway. The most undeserved race in the world.
This obsession with Tucker Carlson is as ridiculous as the obsession with Jordan Peterson.
Neither give two shits about anything white nationalist. Tucker was born into this life with a
jewish silver spoon in his mouth. The guy is worth $20+ million. The fact he hasnt left Foxnews
immediately after the networks recent debacle with election reporting shows where his loyalty
lies, like most jews (even though he's adopted) its with $$$$
Further, every Indian tribe in America at the time of Columbus had stolen their land from
another tribe, and they continued warring and land stealing until the White man put a stop to
it.
Of course they put a stop to it. Because they wanted a monopoly on all that. Same reason the
White Euro Christians put a stop to Germany's "lebensraum" ideas. The examples are nearly
endless.
We hyoominz are wunnerful, no? And religions and politicians are here to solve it all.
Uh -huh!
Just came across this interesting video of Enoch Powell debating Jonathan Miller on issues
around UK immigration. They both appeared on the Dick Cavett Show, which aired back in 1971
Not sure if the honourable Enoch Powell had known this trivia about Jonathan, but if he had
he should've put the following query to him:
"You seem to be an ardent proponent of promoting mass immigration into Britain. Are you just
as ardent a proponent of promoting mass immigration into Eretz Israel?"
If Jonathan had been injected with a truth serum, he would have likely responded:
"Don't be silly. Why would HaShem's chosen people wish to mix with the goyim of the world?
Sheesh, what a schmuck!"
While it is true that people of the same culture, race and religion live in more harmony in
their marriages, and probably in their society, there is no way to achieve that objective in
today's world of mass communication and mass transportation. Impossible. To even think about
something like that is a recipe for nothing better than frustration and despair. The Church
recommended that people of the different cultures and races and religions should not marry
because of the risk that it would interfere with the harmony in their marriage as they face
life's other trials. It's solution when the Christians came to the Americas was for them to
convert the nations and it's objective was to promote better like-mindedness and better harmony
that could sustain them as they lived together in the Americas.
This is what the globalists believe they can achieve without Christianity. Well, they can't,
because without Christianity, there is only self-interest, the opposite of Christianity, and
that is what they are affirmatively teaching at the moment, for self-interest is what they need
to promote disunity, for that provides the means for better control of society.
In my opinion, you had better find another way. Maybe you would be better off correcting the
vast majority of hispanics for believing they are something other than Caucasian.
Indians slaughtered each other on the regular, they enslaved each other on the regular, they
were not a peaceful people and quite savage. Indian tribes would often join up with the White
man to fight other Indian tribes.
Hey, are you a member of the same tribe that Lizzy Warren is from or are you a member of the
(((tribe.))) Come on, now, you really don't give two shits about Native Americans, you just
hate Whitey, don't you? Anyone can search my rather lengthy comment history and they will find
they I have a few posts claiming the American Indian is the ONLY nonwhite people who Whitey
owes a damn thing to, not a popular opinion, but it is mine and I will own it.
I have an excellent idea! Go to the south and find some white man, preferably someone who
hunts, and tell him he has to move because he's on "stolen land."
@Tucker aged what got us here in the first place? So certainly, completely disengaging is
what will further accelerate our demise. You have to wonder, maybe these organizations are part
of the gay op to further disenfranchise whites even faster?
This display of white weakness needs to end. If you believe in your right to exist and for
the sake of your children, never let them gain any more power, ever. If that means voting for
someone that also supports Israel, then so what? If you as a WN, ever think there have been
more 'pure and honest' politicians in the past, or are waiting for your perfect WN savior to
support in the future, then you are just stupid, sorry.
@christine drafting place – but not exclusive. I spent over 3 decades with Athabaskan
and eskimos – Inuit, Yupik, and a few Aleuts – since the Aleuts were the last
genocided tribe – during WW II when they moved all of them to the mainland – in
order own all their land – after the War. In the end, this is all planned by the Owners
– Illuminati- Deep State – Zionists etc. It doesn't matter if they genocide the
Nates – the whites, blacks, Browns – until all the tribes unite and take out the
Cancer – the Plan will continue. PS the Russians , when they owned Alaska – never
genocided the Native population – no matter what the media or stupid SE Nates –
say. I homesteaded in Alaska .
According to Wikipedia, Newsmax is co-owned by Christopher Ruddy and Richard Mellon
Scaife(heir to the Mellon fortune in Pittsburg). Ruddy is the son of a police officer in NYC
and a confidant of Trump. Per Wiki he graduated from Hebrew University of Jerusalem for
undergrad, but his first name suggests he's not Jewish. Is he? He describes himself as a
"libertarian conservative" and Reaganite.
October 28, 2020 Report: Biden Would Kill Upwards Of 159K Jobs In Mich.
According to a recent study, Michigan supports around 159,000 jobs in the oil and gas
industry, all of which would be eliminated under Biden's plan to achieve zero emissions by
2035.
The "redpilled" fully understand that America's foreign wars are a load of BS that profit
the military industrial complex and certain lobbying groups – but not the USA itself.
To you, a Jew is an American nationalist because he is not a recent arrival, unlike, say,
Ilhan Omar. I got your number you're not a nationalist but a paid up harlot masquerading,
sadly, as a White nationalist.
"Like what North America, Australia, Argentina predominantly was before mass non -White
migration"
Argentina? No mass non-White migration here, to speak of. This country since the white
arrival has always been a mestizo society.The same is true of much of Central and more
so South America. During this century in Argentina,there has been a substantial migration of
Bolovins, Peruvians and Paraguyans thanks to the Kirchners (our Clintons) " Patria
Grande " program that allowed them in, but it represents nothing on the scale of what has
been done elsewhere to the north. Here the issue is less a color issue than a class issue.
But We'll give you MT, ND, SD, WY, IA, NB, KS, and Maybe OK.
You'll need to get Canada's permission before you give away New Brunswick.
I imagine the "honesty belt" would quickly become a desirable place to live compared to
everywhere else, and the good solid folks in Honestan would again allow their resident shlomos
to open the floodgates.
In order to be taken seriously you need some kind of united front. Take a look at even small
minority groups such as the LGBTQ community, who maybe accounts for 3% of the US population,
but has grown into a unified political force.
There also needs to be a consequence if your group is wronged. We have daily mainstream
television shows that do nothing but make fun of White people and their traditions. The Muslims
behead anyone who dares draw a stick figure of Muhammad, let alone entire programming dedicated
to the denigration of their culture.
In order to defeat a bully, you need to punch them in the mouth. Right now many people are
hopefully waking up to the fact that there is indeed a bully, then identifying exactly who that
is, and finally taking some sort of action against the bully.
@Priss Factor anded by their "G_d" to Rule the World, tikkun olam , " (b)light
unto the nations " and 20 other descriptors for the megalomaniac tyrant known as the Jew,
who lusts to control blacks, whites and everyone else in slavery to itself.
I do agree with the author that we White Nationalists need to lose our fear of defending our
racial identity, but da' blacks ain't da' problem. The Jewish race / ideology that lusts to
destroy us ALL – IS the problem.
Talking about black / white racial tensions as if they were the source of our problems is
like worrying about dandruff on a cancer patient. So PLEASE, let's get to the point, shall
we?
Increased white nationalism leads to increased anti-white-nationalism. Genociding indigenes
makes white supremacists look evil. Trumpism leads to BLMism and Antifa. White wars of
aggression lead to brown refugees going to Europe. God will turn Europe and North America
black, red and yellow if He wants to, and He can do it by taking advantage of white people's
pride and letting them do stupid "white supremacist" things that make them look bad.
The pilpul by Miller is truly astonishing, comparing old British people to
immigrants!
People like Miller serve the purpose of trying to rationalise the decisions of the other
members of his Tribe, usually by gaslighting people into thinking they are crazy and nothing
out of the normal is happening. Hence you see these crazy metaphors and analogies drawn by the
likes of Miller in that clip.
"As many on our side have said, we will make no real and substantial progress until we are
willing to openly stand up for ourselves -- in person, in broad daylight, and without sock
puppets and noms de plume like "Jef Costello." Is that day imminent? I believe that it is."
In that case, let's have your real name practice what you preach!
"the bulk of black slaves went to the Spanish colonies, not the American colonies"
Could you please cite supporting evidence for this assertion? I think (but am unsure) it is
incorrect. One thingof which I am certain, however,is that the Spaniards abolished slavery far
earlier than the white Americans. Another is that Spaniards are also "white".
White males are the only group Trump did not make gains with in 2020.
Is that true? How does anybody know that? Exit polls?
After all these wildly inaccurate polls for four years, are we suddenly to believe polls
now?
Furthermore, consider this: The one group you can steal votes from if you're the Democrats
are the white males. This is where you would do it. You can't steal any from the column of
black voters -- since they vote 90% for you already there simply aren't enough to steal. You
steal them from the white males, it's a beautiful double-whammy. One, you get your stolen
victory; two, you demoralize the strongest group arrayed against you.
"In my experience, the only tiny minority of Muslim people who have caused friction are
invariably of Arab origin, and more specifically from Saudi Arabia – an inherently tribal
& chauvinistic culture (and a key American ally in the Middle East – just
sayin')."
Unfortunately, Arabs, in particular Saudis, are a horrible disease that needs to be removed
by all means, including thermo nuclear radiation therapy!
What I don't get, from the likes of sweethearts like Pedro
how does the fact that the Sioux were riding their horses across Colorado before we got
here, make it mean that Mexican half-Aztec / half Spaniards have a right to come and steal it
from *us* ?
If we stole it from the Sioux as he says, the presence of his lardbutt here means he is
accepting stolen goods, which means his sin is as big as -- or bigger than -- ours.
I keep telling blacks about jews and slavery in JUSA – they pretend they don't believe
what I am saying even though I provide evidence (from this website).
I guess they are more opportunistic than I thought and less brave, hoping their jewish masters
will somehow help them get more money from white people, so they don't want to bite the hand
they expect will feed them
To whom the land belongs?
At one time in world history all land did belong to dinosaurs.
So how to do justice about ownership of the land?
Human beings should kill each other until no human being left, and than the land will belong to
its rightful owners again, the animals.
Native Americans were the ones who had this right idea.
They were killing each other and eating each other.
..
Did somebody ask Dahmer if human flesh taste better than chicken?
Someone for the love of God please start an American Nationalist conference and invite all
people who have the tiniest shred of dignity left in this chemical plagued population.
The goal of the conference: to discuss starting a political party that will be a valid third
party option. Agendas to be fleshed out: donor registration, billboard campaigns, multi-state
speeches targeting smaller towns that have been boarded up, setting up a volunteer network of
security operatives to forcibly secure election integrity, etc.
This stuff isn't rocket science and I don't understand why so many people who have money and
claim to be for WHITE NATIONALISM have not pushed their people in this direction. BUT IF YOU
DONT HAVE MONEY and are interested in this let me share with you a secret to start it. Get 10
under-writers who will lend $5,000 for a total of $50k. $50,000 should be enough to get the
ball rolling. I would be willing to help $. If you sell enough tickets you can pay the lenders
back. Secure a venue and promote tickets to the conference across multiple platforms.
Just an idea for saving our people in this midnight hour.
"I suggest adjusting the author's arguments to recognise the actual fundamental issue in
play, which is not skin colour or race or language, but CULTURE"
I call BS. You are one of those people who believe that NURTURE is everything and NATURE
accounts for nothing. A very foolish mindset. A deluded mindset. Do some research and come back
after you have learned something from the real world and not from your Marxist professors.
It's not Jews (technically JewISH). It is the multitudes of all races around the world, who
have ignored the word of God, and chosen the JewISH (and Catholic, at the top) agenda, as the
preferred way of life.
This frank article confirms pretty much what I posted in DaLimbraw Library over a year ago
– https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2019/08/white-supremacy-is-it-time-to-face.html?m=0
– a summary of articles on Western Civilization with links provided. Requires some
serious reading!
History shows that WC was built on Christianity, Graeco-Roman law traditions and primarily in
Europe – meaning the White race. That's just fact!
White supremacy – if it ever returns – might just save our Western
Civilization!
I had an excellent exchange with a retarded mexican a while back, as the stupid pos was
blabbing that whitey "stole this land from the indigenous people," (HIS people -- -mexican
cretins.)
I said, "Oh really? Hmmm ..what tribe are you from?"
Empty stare.
"Are you Apache? Comanche? Sioux? The El Chapo tribe?"
@Ultrafart the Brave nd is to what they were mislead to believe I see it here with my
African friends, Swiss, other Europeans etc everyone I know has experienced this
So this kind of betrayal and feeling of being tricked also contributes to whether they
assimilate (and what there really is to assimilate into when the new host country has no
culture whatsoever to offer to anyone, including the natives – apart from shopping and
watching TV).
Plus add to this the feeling that say the 800 000 refugees imported last year understand that
Canadistan actually played a role in destroying their countries and their desire to assimilate
or to respect the new country diminishes even further.
"Ron Unz has given the world a forum where countless and controversial and conflicting
points of view are given oxygen and light. This is invaluable and rare."
@Majority of One
How an Amish Gentleman (he is really one) handles a racism issue, how he handles a triggered
lefty, chip on the shoulder, black "British" spoilt snobby urban London girl Sienna on some
bullshit "racist" incident. How wise the Amish are compared the "English" (non Amish White
American folk) around them!!!
One would be surprised (or not so surprised if you do not fall for typical Jew media/ history
stereotypes) that the most snobby arrogant person among the six British youth who went and
lived among the Amish in the USA in this British TV series was the black girl Sienna whose
parents are from Africa.
Check out the comment section, everybody hates Sienna.
So there are approximately 330 million people in America, and the latest vote count shows
that 150 million or thereabouts voted in this election? NO WAY IN HELL. To be honest I don't
think Trump received over 70 million LEGITIMATE VOTES much less Biden. I think they have Biden
at 75 or 77 million right now, can't remember which. LMAO. NO WAY IN HELL JOE BIDEN HAS
RECEIVED 75-77 LEGITIMATE VOTES.
Think about it people. Think of the people too young to vote, the people incarcerated, the
people who don't ever vote, the people so old that they just don't give a damn like the ones in
nursing homes, etc. Just the other day, I was talking to the Orkin man who sprayed my house,
and he stated he didn't even vote. Well, given I was flying a Trump flag maybe the guy was
being diplomatic or lying but who knows? I think another LIE in this STOLEN election is the
total vote count. I guess the people who stole the vote for Biden and manufactured that Biden
accumulated close to 80 million votes had to even up Trump's votes to make this fairy tale seem
somewhat believable.
First of all I don't identify as White nationalist. When I lived in a liberal city I
couldn't stand being around White people. I would much rather live in Mexico than around
liberal Whites. Urban Whites especially can be really annoying regardless of politics. They
want to be morally right and feel intellectually superior without having to do any work or give
any explanation as to why. They want to feel cosmopolitan and view any dissention as a thorn in
the side to their unexplained superiority.
Will White people be red pilled by this election? Nope.
We have the internet and most White people can't seem to be bothered with spending a couple
nights reading about how both Con Inc and liberals lie about race. Intellectual laziness
abounds.
Most of those Trump voting Republicans really believe that we can turn every Black family
into the Huxtables with the right level of minimal government/low taxes/etc. They really
believe this. It's shocking.
There is no silver lining with this election. It's a disaster.
Too many White people choose to live in a false reality where race doesn't exist. Our best
hope is that White egalitarian leftists breed out themselves off by having few or no children.
Then we'll probably have to align with Hispanics to end the welfare system. Don't get mad at me
for pointing that out. Go take it up with the moron conservatives still pushing Alisa Rosenbaum
fantasy over facts.
Two things can happen: that Trump wins (which would be something of justice), and that the
whites go looking for their places in the United States.
In fact, this is what has already happened in California for years: whites are leaving that
state.
God forbid! But IF Beijing Biden slithers his way into the WH the 1619 Project will be the
theme of the US Govt. Which, of course, means that we don't belong here..Well, if we don't
belong here then we can only go back to Europe. Who cares if the anti-white EU countries don't
want us? They've spent the last several years taking in destructive, horny, hostile
opportunistic welfare shopping scum if there's room for them there's room for us. Unless they
want us to stay here and be genocided like the S. Africans.
Concluding paragraphs to Chuck Baldwin's latest column, Almost No One Else Will Say It,
So I Must :
That's why Benjamin Netanyahu already congratulated Joe Biden on an election victory --
even before the election was firmly decided. He is keenly aware of the exponential rise in
Zionist power and influence that accompanies the Harris family rise to the White House.
Amazingly, many evangelicals continue to stupidly believe that Netanyahu (and Zionism
itself) is a friend of the United States and a friend of Christianity. What dupes!
In a real sense, the rise of the Marxist attack against America, personified in Kamala
Harris, can be, at least partially, attributed to the misguided support for Zionism among our
evangelical churches.
As I said, almost no one else will say it, so I must.
To bolster your argument against the Left, instead of identifying first as a "White
Nationalist" you should say, simply, that you are an Ethnic Nationalist. That makes your
argument harder to refute and highlights the logical inconsistency of the Left's argument,
which, at its core, is really just anti-White.
As I point out to people, I'm a Tibetan Nationalist and an Anglo-American Nationalist; a
Black Nationalist but also a White Nationalist. All ethnic groups are entitled to their
sovereignty, lands and control of their borders. Humans are tribal and need common cultural
ties to maintain social capital and build a functioning society. This should be common sense,
but somehow it's instead become taboo.
In other words, Trump made the same arguments Republicans have been making for 50 years.
Coincidentally, he also pursued the same policies Republicans have been pursuing for 50
years.
Longer viewer:
Folks are acting like elections have not been stolen in the past. Get real.
Folks are acting like our government has not been completely corporate-owned since Reagan. Get
real.
Folks are acting like the Talmudic syndicate has played no role whatsoever in this scam. Get
real.
Someone for the love of God please start an American Nationalist conference The goal of
the conference: to discuss starting a political party that will be a valid third party
option.
National Justice Party Statement on the 2020 Presidential Election
Everyone hates White people and yet everyone wants to move to White countries.
Leftists tell us this is because Whites are bad and have colluded against everyone. That is
the reason behind their success.
So build America in Africa without them? Why is this not the plan? Would it not prove that
egalitarians were correct all along? Funny how the plan of the leftist to move the third world
to White countries. There seems to be zero dissention along this line. All leftists agree by
their actions that assimilating White countries for their ideals is more viable than building a
new America without Whites.
Trump is taking on Big Ag. He's taking on the military as best he can; he hasn't started any
new wars.
Trump is taking on the U.S. multinational corporations who took the jobs overseas
(tariffs).
Trump is taking on the fraud in the election system. DNC's top election guru just resigned
(yeah, I bet he did!) Trump is exposing the algorithms in the Dominion Voting System.
Trump got 72 million votes. He owns the Republican Party now! They have been fighting him up
until this point, but they are now realizing that they are nothing without Trump.
If Trump were to start a third party, look out! How's that for leading?
The very first white man who tied to live with the Stone Age Siberian Savages was Etienne
Brule. He was part of Cartier's exploration team in the early 1600's.
When Cartier returned and inquired about Etienne he was informed that the Siberian savages
murdered, scalped and ATE him.
May the spirits of Siberian Savages be suffering the endless tortures they would visit on
their victims.
What makes you think the Chinese or Japanese would have left the Americas alone?
This is some egalitarian fantasy of the Americas remaining scarcely populated with warring
tribes. As if the rest of the world would have left it as a nature preserve.
It was never a country and in fact the tribes would align with warring European countries
against other tribes. That of course probably wasn't mentioned in your White guilt history
class. Numerous tribes used Europeans and their tools as a means of enacting revenge against
their traditional enemies. Read about the Blackfoot for a politically incorrect reality
check.
I like to think that the Indians were just exacting pure revenge against the gun toting euro
invaders and your wrong i am of irish white heritage and don't make me laugh about torture and
despicable human acts as i have seen those pictures of massive piles of bison that were gunned
down by invading euro scum that were attempting to starve the natives.
It doesn't matter who the president is, you know that Hillary Clinton didn't lose and Trump
didn't win, but here's the president, Obama didn't want to do exactly what you're doing now,
and he didn't want to launch an investigation. You are directly pushing America into a civil
war, by a "fraud of choice" that has no evidence. Indeed, you are pushing everyone into the
catastrophe of the Civil War. You know very well that everything Trump claimed was a lie, and
half the world was accused of lies, nowhere is evidence and the UN laughs at him, but you claim
that now Trump claims the truth once in his life, again without a dictatorship.
If Trump loses, the consequences would be dire.
We are interested in Trump winning.
On the other hand, the strength of the whites was their Christian and authentic religion. Not
their race. In the Middle Ages it was the Church that defended Europe from the Muslim
invasion.
Nowadays an infiltrator is seated in Pedro's See, Bergoglio does not think like a Catholic.
Only with that faith can our culture and our lives be saved.
Genocide not. The fake "indigenous people" / little dummies are everywhere and have a
complete free ride with plenty of taxpayers cash ("rent") to stay loaded on, to avoid any
personal responsibility.
And clearly, American Indians were "xenophobic" / "racist" in resisting European migrants.
recommended:
It seems rather odd and highly suspicious that so called NATIONALISTS CONSERVATIVES (whites)
propose cowardice in the face of aggression they all claim to be so outraged so contrived BUT
all of them propose INACTION now this is the main reason YOU/WE are LOSING America we bowed our
heads, weeping sorrowful and thats all The DEMS implemented 4yrs of on the ground campaign of
terror they were called BLMANTIFA a permanent campaign of terror And NOW the CONSERVATIVE
NATIONALISTS suggests stupidity separation, repatriation, secession ALL DUMB STUPID RANTS
UTOPIAS .WE MUST STAND OUR GROUND NOW NOW History, legality, morality, is on OUR SIDE and
people know it .THE MAIN THRUS SHOULD BE MUST BE MASSIVE RED STATES REVOLT 1776mII REDUX .By
the time dictator Biden finish his first year HE would had used his excutive powers, and in
coalition with BLUE/RINOS enacted a NEW CONSTITUTION, REDO THE ELECTORAL FRAMEWORKS so that NO
RED Nationalist will ever be elected again,,,never,,,so called ANTI TRUMP LEGISLATIONS which
really means ANTIWHITE laws an AMERICAN JIM CROW LAWS IN REVERSE dont you see the perils to
come its not about utopias, there is no tomorrow..unless WE FIGHT NOW mass revolts
peacefully???? 1776 II MILITIAS..
the Japanese too cannot live and do well in live in multiracial Ottoman-Byzantine like
societies.
Isn't there a large Japanese diaspora doing well in Brazil and Peru?
The Chinese too will be rejected by the darkie masses in the future,
I have a hard time seeing the Chinese falling for that shuck and jive unless they become a
completely Christian society, all the way to the top of the pyramid.
right now, less than a week after polls closed And, as the Biden camp continues to
vote
I don't know whether or not red-pilling Trump's fans will help, but it should already be
obvious to those with eyes open that too many people believe whatever they see and hear on TV.
It's entirely possible that most of the Trump supporters won't be red-pilled at all.
Even Americans who don't particularly like or trust Trump may be disgusted enough with the
blatant media push to declare Biden the winner, that they decide not to allow it any more. That
may be enough to get some of them to decide that waiting for government to "do something" is a
waste of time.
If the rioters decide to riot in celebration of Biden's win, or in outrage over his win
being revealed as fraud and rejected, some number of Americans could just decide to shut the
rioters down themselves. It wouldn't be that hard for armed Americans who know how to fight,
and there are hundreds of thousands of combat vets with recent experience who just might go
ahead and do it.
One thing's for sure, they won't be giving any warning on social media before they hit
back.
@christine and despicable human acts as i have seen those pictures of massive piles of
bison
They tortured the bison! The horror!
I guess you have never heard about Buffalo Jumps, then?
You may claim to be white, but it's clear you have had your empty head filled by Anti-White
delusional lies. The Siberians were so savage that during the French Indian wars the French
troops finally refused to fight alongside their Indian allies, because they were savage to the
point that the French viewed them as being similar to the THE XENOMORPHS from the movie
Aliens.
excellent. In The last 20 years they have changed deeply. Because only 17 years ago they
were all gung ho about destroying Iraq. Perhaps a bit of depleted uranium shot into Peoria will
cement their views.
@Bill lifetime. The only politicians who really gave a damn about Whites in my lifetime
were Dixiecrats, and probably most of them were good ole boy crooks who just talked a good game
but CAVED eventually. Hell, Strom Thurmond fathered a mixed race daughter IF I am not mistaken.
Tell me what did all the Presidents from JFK to Obama do to make this nation better? And
before you give the standard JFK horseshit, JFK was all for the multiracial plan for America,
and he sure supported integration of schools down South. Okay, let me hear what President in
the last century REALLY LOOKED OUT FOR WHITE INTERESTS OVER JEWISH OR NONWHITE INTERESTS. I got
time and I am all ears.
The point is whites did nothing that any one of those tribes wouldn't have done to all the
others if they had had the power to do it. (If anything, whites treated them much better than
they treated each other.) We might look at that from the vantage point of 21st century morality
and call it awful – just as we might with the Mongol or Islamo-Arab conquests – but
it would remain 'ancient history,' not something to constantly dredge up in order to instill
racial guilt and gain political advantage.
We'll see about the "red pilled" part, but even liberals out here, even ones who voted
Biden, are NOT convinced Biden-Harris won legitimately. And who knows? Maybe the criminal
psycho elites realized perhaps awakening a couple 'o hundred million gun owners was a but
premature and will "allow" Trump to retake the White House I mean, Biden's doing what Biden was
gonna do .make the whole damned thing look illegit. And NOBODY out here has anything but
distrust when it comes to Harris one liberal from Commie-fornia who lived there knows Harris is
evil.
Really it all come down to these–will we let them take our guns, will we let them
force vaccines on us, and will we let them burn this nation to the ground while forcing all
rural folks into stack 'n packs, Agenda 2030 style?
@utu o if there was ever a serious prospect it might happen, they would probably want to
separate as well. And why not? Ultimately, we're all better off living around people more like
ourselves than less like ourselves. (Duh)
And why would anyone be required to call himself a 'bantustan nationalist'? When
Mexicans arrive in America they don't suddenly cease to call themselves Mexican, so why should
Americans stop calling themselves American simply because of an altered political geography?
For an intelligent man, it's astonishing how quickly you transform into a blithering idiot the
moment you begin discussing issues that emotionally disturb you.
Good suggestion. Perhaps some can think of others. Either way, it's good because it's more
cultural than political, at least it sounds that way, and because it puts the focus exactly
where it belongs, on our basic freedoms.
One thing's for certain. Putting ideology and politics before race and culture, ie; Right =
White (and visa versa) will be like shooting yourself in the foot before running a marathon in
difficult terrain. In other words, it'd be a piece of unforgivable stupidity. And irreversible
as well. Since, if this is flubbed, a second chance will not come again.
I guess for some white yanks the truth about the birth of their country is a little too
close to the bone for their liking and a bit too raw and painful but the truth is the truth and
shame on all the euro invaders of all of the Americas in the past.
Try coming out to rural remote far west Texas .Austin isn't all of Texas. And I said rural,
not El Paso!
And, oh yeah, Midland-Odessa, Lubbock, Amarillo that is, all of Texas except El Paso westward
of the San Antonio-Austin lib-tard areas (including artsy-fartsy Marfa they may like Biden but
the don't like Harris if you know what I mean).
JSI is basically a criminal organization that wants power. Everything they say and do flows
from this. They are The People Of The Lie . The point is, you might be able to obtain
control of a culture or civilization through lies. But you can't run it that way.
And now we're back to the point you raise in your comment and what it directs our attention
to. It directs our attention to what we're witnessing, to what anyone can see as soon as they
stop talking about how powerful they are and how screwed everyone else is. Enough! No. What
we're witnessing is nothing less than The Pyrrhic Victory Of Jewish Supremacy Inc .
@christine I think your heart is in the right place, I and I respect that, but instead of
trying to right things that are ancient history how about focusing on what IS HAPPENING TO YOUR
PEOPLE RIGHT NOW. Whites are being slaughtered in South Africa. Little children being held
hostage while they watch their mother raped right in front of their eyes, entire families of
Whites being butchered by racist Black thugs. I am all for you pointing out how Whites were
guilty of mistreating the Native American, but I would also ask you to point that passion to
something that is going on RIGHT NOW, something that didn't happen long ago and can't be
changed. YOUR OWN PEOPLE are suffering, does that not bother you?
What a bad joke the dissident right wignat faction turned out to be.
Richard Spencer and the bugger accounts aligned with his views are doing nothing but
spamming straight-up system propaganda, a lot of which has migrated onto these pages.
The author Jonathan Van Maren seems to think the American electorate has realigned itself
with social conservatism + economic populism on the GOP side, and progressivism, elitism and
Big tech on DNC side. Based on this, he calls for the GOP to use social conservatism
specifically anti-abortion, anti-assisted suicide, pro medicare, pro social security to appeal
to a coalition of working class America including blacks and Latinos.
The main reason people like me voted for Trump is because of immigration and
non-interventionism which he promised on his campaign trail in 2016. We want to see America
end the endless wars and the endless immigration . I could care less about abortion,
assisted suicide, medicare or social security.
Once again, the social conservatives missed the boat and are now calling for more coalition
with Latinos, which probably means support for more immigration as George W. did, because
Latinos make good conservatives, right? When will these idiots wake up?! Have they been reading
Ron Unz's misleading articles on Hispanic crime? Ann Coulter was so right. The Republican party
is the stupid party, and it's because it's run by tone deaf "conservatives" that run webzines
like TAC and National Review.
Just read at The Duran: "Obama lackey John Pilger resigns from DOJ election crimes job."
Maybe Mr. Pilger knows something too? Maybe he resigned before being fired? Maybe those
Dominion Voting machines have been compromised using algorithms?
This is heating up. I actually believe Trump will win.
@Tucker y the Jews? Has it worked for European man, or, with its strictures to turn the
other cheek, has it made him a second class citizen? That was my thoughts when I saw so many
disgusting, pathetic whites bowing down and kissing the boots of BLM Supremacists this summer.
In any case, unless one is so hopelessly wedded to Christianity that his mind is closed, an
article written by Thomas Dalton, "Christianity: The Great Jewish Hoax," has taken the
Christian myth head on (National Vanguard, 9 Aug 2020). Indeed, as Israel-first Evangelicals
have taken control of Christianity in the US, we should ask if devotion to a Middle Eastern Jew
named Jesus is helping or hurting our cause.
@Richard B r with the foreigners; and this spirit of wear, principle of any cowardice, is
so natural in their hearts, that it is the continual object of the figures that they employ in
the species of eloquence which is proper for them. Their glory is to put at fire and blood the
small villages they can seize. They cut the throat of the old men and the children; they hold
only the girls nubiles; they assassinate their Masters when they are slaves; they can never
forgive when they are victorious: they are enemy of the human mankind. No courtesy, no science,
no art improved in any time, in this atrocious nation. -- Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs
(1756) Tome 2, page 83
@Ultrafart the Brave pon its introduction. Since then the government has provided tax
incentives to people paying for private insurance. Basically you pay a reduced medicare levy if
you have private insurance. The Australian medical system has it's faults like long waiting
times for elective surgery etc but it's still pretty good.
On the immigration front though Australia is in worse shape than the US. We have a much
smaller population and it doesn't take as much third world immigration to turn it into a third
world country. Especially since many use New Zealand as a back door into Australia. Australia
is already unrecognisable from even just 20 years ago. In another 20 it's likely to resemble
Brazil.
Trump has now moved over to Gab, a free-speech platform that has embraced thought
criminals of all kinds (so far). Trump's supporters will follow him to Gab -- millions of
them. They will read the other stuff and become more red-pilled. You can almost predict this
one with mathematical certainty.
Lots of conservatives are now departing Facebook and Twitter for other social media
platforms that are less restrictive. This will further separate the left and right in this
country, as they'll have even that much less in common. It will separate families, with
liberals staying on Facebook, and their conservative family members leaving, decreasing
communication between them, especially now with all the Corona bulls ** t being used to
suppress the association of people in meat-space.
But, anyone who actively promotes the idea that Whites should just completely opt out is
pushing advice that is exactly what our mortal enemies want most.
They are oddly quiet about it. Unlike everything else they want.
White people are going to need to get good at living in diaspora, since that's where we are
at now. We need to adopt tribal methods similar to the way other tribes operate. For example,
spending a little more to buy from our own people. Finding a way to brand white ownership.
Finding a way to associate said white ownership with white activism.
It is no good giving money to a local, vice signalling white traitor. It would be better to
get cheap products from a multinational, at least you get value for money. However, we need to
find ways of rewarding our own financially. We need to ensure that money goes out for things of
value – land, buildings, shares of companies, etc. Money comes in from the fruit of our
labor and intellect.
It isn't going to be easy because Jews have attempted to criminalize many of the things we
would like to do (specifically us, while giving other races/ethnicities a pass), but we can
find ways around that.
It will be easier to live in diaspora than via separatism.
The author is an idiot. To begin with, not all 70 million or so people who voted for Trump
were White. He received, what, 30% of the Hispanic vote. Also, approximately 20% of black males
voted for Trump.
Your guy just lost flatout. He was unpopular.
70 million means what? I call that pathetic compared to what Biden got.
Btw, you guys were able to be racist the last four years. Sit your butt down the next 4 years
because you White nationalists suck ass.
Urban Whites don't like you, period.
Whites invented everything? Even if that was the case, it came from URBAN WHITES. You mother
fuckers, whose ancestors are probably farmboys, only take credit.
What have rural whites achieved? Nothing besides taking credit.
Besides all this, due to immigration, most of the entrepreneurs and inventors are liberal
immigrants.
Bottomline is that liverals invented everything. Rural hillbillies did shit!
@randall r n that over the top cartoon character seriously to being with. He reminded me of
some of those (((actors))) who frequented those '90's talk shows like Donahue or Doprah Pigfrey
portraying "White Supremacists" or foaming at the mouth skinhead so called "neo-Nazis." haha. I
think they found out that half of those characters were Jews who worked for the ADL or at least
some them were. All portrayed the same old stereotype of an evil White racist who shocked the
audience by saying "niggers" or just portraying anyone who is pro-White civil rights as a
maniacal neanderthal. My gaydar always went off every time I watched a video of Spencer
speaking that MANUFACTURED horseshit anyhow.
Only the Christians. The rest can "go" back to Arabia.
Mohammedans are our enemy. Their prophet said so. Racially, Arabs are just poor, stupid
Jews– unless they live above oil, then they're rich, stupid Jews. The problem with your
analysis is that it isn't anti-Semitic enough .
And tell blacks that Jews exploit them for profits.
Tell Mexicans that Jews hog all the wealth.
They already know. They don't care. Just someone different to kiss up to.
@tomo istic culture that is foreign to them and which makes them feel alone and inferior.
So they respond accordingly. The same is true for young Canadians in general.
I agree that immigrants are no longer assimilating, but not because Canada lacks a strong
sense of national identity. The main reasons are demographic and technological. Immigrants now
arrive in such large numbers that they end up interacting only with each other. They can also
watch TV programming in their own language, via the Internet or cable TV, and communicate with
people back home via Skype or social media.
Assimilation takes effort, even in ideal conditions, so more and more immigrants are taking
the easy way out. They learn enough English or French for work, and that's usually enough.
@lavoisier he government has to stop shoving diversity down our throats continuously.
I think this is one area where most objective people can agree.
Idiotic attempts by governments at social engineering and correcting past injustices by
penalising the present population continue to be rolling disasters worldwide.
I would think the German people might eventually rebel against their perpetual financial
tribute to the Holocaust doctrine, if not for the current crop of self-inflicted immigration
problems engulfing Europe.
I also suspect that the "white supremacist" propaganda isn't a benevolent attempt to correct
society's problems. Rather, it looks more like part of a coordinated destructive strategy to
dismantle the existing society. Wielgus , says:
November 12, 2020 at 7:49 pm GMT • 1.0 days ago
Miller's maternal grandfather had sought to emigrate to the USA from Lithuania and got off
the ship at its destination, which he thought was New York. It was in fact Cork in Ireland. His
daughter, Miller's father, became a well-known novelist in Ireland.
For me its more about recognition of past evils and their karmic effect on a nation and the
color of skin doesn't come into it at all really but i do have a real soft spot for the native
North American Indian cause because i have had shamanic past life recollections of being one
and so i will always side with the Indians over the disgusting European invaders of North
America and i will never ever forget those photos i have seen of absolutely humungous piles of
shot Bison that were killed in an attempted genocide of the Indians and if the Indians scalped
many out of revenge then i hope that the pain was excruciatingly intense.
Here is something to consider: Liberals in general are happy people. Conservatives, on the
other hand, have a victim mentality.
You could see that conservatives had this victim mentality even under Trump.
Also, from my own experience, the conservative types have fucked up lives. Due to their own
issues, they lash out.
Could it not be that the reason you have a bad life is due to your own problems? Instead of
blaming immigrants or blacks and hispanics, consider looking at your own life.
"It came from urban whites". At the time of the greate innovative wave in the US there was
no such thing as "Urban" citizenry, as almost all major towns were located directly within
farming territory, and a cosmopolitan mentality was nowhere to be found, guys like Edison,
Ford,Tesla, held absolutely no connection to any sort of "Liberal" worldview.
Name a few of "Liberal" "Inventions" Come on give a list thereof.
You are a bloody ignoramous and full of shit up to your ears. You have no clue as to what
you are blathering about.
AJM "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro Jazz artist.
Logic is certainly not your strong suit. Why would people of any color capable of anything
worth mentioning bow down to a corrupt senile stuffed shirt?
@Questioner nk it would probably be best for you and all those who agree with you to
kill their family and extended family, and then blow their own brains out. Firstly, to atone
for "white guilt" and "white privilege" and secondly as a constructive means of reducing the
white population in these "stolen" Injun lands. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Of course, if you worthless cunts can't summon the nerve to do that, then you should at the
very least, REMOVE YOUR OWN WHITE ITINERANT ASS from this "stolen land".
@Muaddib The average Biden voter = anti-White and yes there are anti-White white people, I
call them WINOs short for White In Name Only or better yet, white traitor trash
I think liberals have went the way of the Dodo Bird. And no, racist Jews, who PRETEND to
love everyone Black, Brown, etc., anyone except Whites are only pretending to love POC to USE
THEM against Whitey. Case in point, in Israel they export African Jews all the time proving
that Judaism isn't a religion but a race. Nope, I doubt Sammy Davis Jr. would have ever truly
been welcomed to move to Israel. And there is no such thing as a nonwhite liberal, nonwhites
are tribal as hell and only out for themselves.
@Authenticjazzman ated? How about, uh, everything, including the internet you are using?
Yes, and immigants and minorities contributed.
If you don't like liberals, maybe you should start by turning off your computer.
But let me guess, you want to breathe the liberal air.
You brag about your Mensa score. And what did you achive with that? Hatred for liberals? So
what good was your Mensa? It was probably a fraud.
Look around you. The world has changed. You are basically an Amish in a sea of modernity.
This is what you get when you don't meet people of all types.
Just old, disgruntled and blaming others because your life wasn't ideal.
Yeah this is why they fill the waiting rooms of shrinks to be pumped full of psycho-drugs,
and resort to "screaming at the sky" when their political party loses an election.
Liberals are the most disturbed, troubled grouping of individuals to be found world-wide.
They are the nut-cases who stick themselves full of needles and pins , and dye their hair blue
so as to present their deranged worldview for all to see.
Again you are a hopeless moron and have no clue as to what you are blathering about.
Here is something to consider: Liberals in general are happy people. Conservatives, on the
other hand, have a victim mentality.
Yes, we've seen myriad examples of those happy, well adjusted, tolerant "Liberal" people
over the last four years. When they're not freaking out or breaking down, they're "lashing out"
in the form of assaulting, burning, destroying, looting, and murdering etc
Is the author of this article a coward – he attacks the weak blacks – and
ignores the overpowering Jews.
Blacks are not America's problem – Jews are.
Do blacks own and or control social media, print media, broadcast media, Congress, the
president, schools, Wall Street, and the Fed – or is it Jews. Be honest.
It is the Jews who siphon our wealth and divide us.
Jews control the cities that are devastated by black crime. Get the Jews out of control, and
things will improve. Guaranteed!
Societies need both a political left and a political right – the Jew control of the
left is killing America. (Actually, they control both.)
Jeff Costello needs to put on his big boy pants and attack the true evil in America.
Plenty in the US are pure Europeans. Many Nordic and German families are recent immigrants.
Old Colonials often have slight Native admixture. Bantu Africans, Aztecs, ect. need to return
all stolen territory aswell then.
And not so long ago Trump and Netanyahu were such buddies
That, my friend, was exactly why I posted that. Thank you for emphasizing the
point.
In case Wally doesn't get it, new boss is much the same as the old boss, and Netanyahu was
never a friend to either, not that it should come as a surprise to anyone. Netanyahu won't give
Trump a second thought after the "ingrovelation."
Huh?
Jews this and that. This is the problem with White Nationalists. You believe in conspiracy
theories.
Newsflash: Soros does not control anything. He is old, and about to die. He has money. He is
pretty much a moderate.
Qanon is stupidity. If any Mensa guy here believes in the stupidity known as Qanon, consider
a retest.
Comments like this, "while our blacks have been here a long time and some of them do sing,
dance, and dribble well, they are mostly parasites who contribute almost nothing to the society
except grief.", are all too common in white nationalist circles and gives the illusion of truth
to the Jewish propaganda about us.
One has to wonder if that is the intention. It basically says white nationalists hate everyone
but themselves which is exactly what Jews are saying about us in the propaganda system
This is not a closed site! Anyone can come in here and read these tacky remarks.
I think some of you need to follow the Jewish example which is hate the goy while you pretend
to help them
In case you didn't know, non-whites are about 50% of the population now and considering all the
fire power is in support of them against us. perhaps we can find another way to advocate our
predicament
I don't know their political views or what passes for a liberal but one thing is certain
WHITES have contributed more than all the other races combined. Henry Ford, Wright Brothers,
Tesla, Thomas Edison, etc., I don't think those guys were Jews or negroes.
My guess is YOU ARE NOT A LIBERAL, you are either an anti-White racist Jew, and or some
other form of anti-White degenerate who HIJACKED the term, "liberal." In your case the correct
tag would be, LIEberal.
I think the Irish band Clannad wrote songs about and in solidarity with the North American
Indians, so you could be right.
This genocide and the photographic images from it that i have seen will never be forgotten
by me and the color of the faces of the Europeans with guns doesn't come into it and if i
mentioned 'white euro scum' it was to differentiate between northern Europeans and those a bit
darker/olive skinned southern Europeans that invaded lands further south than todays U.S.A.
It's not language or race or skin colour, its CULTURE.
Hate to break the news to you, bossman, but "language, race and skin color" as well as
religion have very much to do with CULTURE.
The author makes a lot of cogent and well-reasoned points, but his delivery lacks nuance
and has a coarseness which suggests prejudice to the point of racism.
I'm afraid any jackass who accepts or gives credence to the enemy's descriptors of those who
naturally honor and favor their own race to others, does not really deserve to be taken
seriously.
Fwiw, I'm willing to go the step further and view the author as a likely racist and
supremacist. Most people like that have lived sheltered lives and had little exposure to a
variety of peoples. Many of their assertions are simply empty and unaware of ahem the real
world.
You shouldn't make personal statements about people you don't know. You could read more of
this author's work to discover his ideological evolution and that his views result from life
experience and not the lack of it.
The Indians didn't scalp out of revenge, they scalped because they were primitive
savages.
On or about the year 1,300 AD long before the Siberians saw a single white man, one tribe of
Siberians murdered, scalped, and ate every single one of the 498 women and children of the
losing tribe whose men the victorious Siberians had slaughtered.
And we know this because we found the bones of the women and children at Crow Creek in
1978.
Tell me, when you were a Shaman in your past life how much Man Corn did you eat?
@Peter Frost ly of all ages as well as tourist to hear their opinion – and I have
never met anyone who does not agree or has similar stories. People are very lonely here and
there is too much virtue signaling without any virtue. I spent a few months on a placement in
one of the biggest hospitals in Toronto – and what I have seen there confirms my
experience. Every day there was one or two teenagers (white) trying to kill themselves. That's
only what I have seen while on ER. I spoke to mental 'health' patients too.
There is far too much passive aggressive backstabbing here in Canada – definitely more
than I have seen anywhere (I've lived in London, LA, SF, DC, Serbia , Germany etc)
@Trinity ve equal rights. Immigrants have equal rights. DACA folks who came here due to no
fault of their own need to be given a chance to stay here, etc.
2. Social programs can be good for society. Think not just social security, but also healthcare
for all.
When you treat everybody with respect, by nature you are a happy person.
I will tell you something. If somehow all immigrants and minorities were kicked out, you would
still be unhappy. The reason is that you are by nature unhappy.
So think about where your life is. Whose fault is that? Put your ego aside. It was YOUR
decisions.
So why blame anybody else?
Trump did not do much to curb legal immigration especially H1B and international students
until the very end, a couple of months before the election. Now Biden is about to undo
everything and let the MexChindian third world horde wash over us. The dumb millennials who
complained about being unemployed or underemployed with massive student loan debt will have an
even harder time finding a job now. I've often wondered why these idiots still insist on voting
for Biden.
Another regulatory change, now in the proposed rule stage, would eliminate the H-1B visa
lottery in favor of prioritizing applicants earning higher wages.
"It basically will again ice out anyone who's entry-level," said Sharvari Dalal-Dheini,
director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Many
international students use the H-1B visa as a pathway for staying to work in the U.S. after
they graduate.
The least Trump could do on his way out is to finalize this crucial rule as a parting gift
to his base which largely stuck by him. It took him long enough to finally get to this. He
should've cancelled H1b and OPT on Day 1. If he had done that he might have won the
election.
@christine frican children and women, as well as adult males being slaughtered in South
Africa by marauding racist genocidal Blacks?
Hmm, IF you are TRULY concerned about injustice in a demonic world, why aren't you concerned
about Whites?
Do you feel for the Whites who endured the Holodomor? Did you know that Genrikh Yagoda and
Lazar Kaganovich, two chief architects of the systemic starvation of MILLIONS of Ukrainian and
Russian Whites were Jewish?
The FACT THAT YOU DID NOT ADDRESS WHAT IS HAPPENING IN SOUTH AFRICA, just shows me that you
are MORE ANTI-WHITE than someone who really cares about humanity, truth or justice. Hell, you
probably are not even (((Irish.)))
That you americans vote for that mafioso, is beyond comprehension.
You are so extremely stupid, and I am sorry to say, you bring it on all of us!
Why do you even vote for Bidén!?
Vote for Trump and after half term, create a more representative party.
The freest country in the world, and you just let it happen.
Anyway, I dont believe the official result.
You americans have not been that stupid.
Take the banner of Christ!
And reject zionism.
And reclaim youre country!
The world is waiting.
Complete drivel. As a German-American of almost two centuries of heritage, I don't identify
with your labels, priorities or prejudices.
If you're concerned about certain colors of people having more children than you, the
solution is simply to be generous with the Creator with your families. Have more children.
We're dealing with serious control freaks here people. I wish people would just realize that
the COMMUNISTS stole the election and are about to go full Bolshevik on us.
YT is already petrified by blacks at work. One slip up, and it's off to the HR gulag
archipelago, then full termination. Anyone who is not a "true believer" in the Revolution, will
be scheduled for termination.
Amazing how history repeats itself. YT has been so programmed to think of everyone as
"nice," that they can't even come close to imagining that Satanic Marxist pedophiles just stole
a national election.
As if anyone could make peace with such Hellspawn.
That's the facts, Jack. Who gives a Fiddler's fuck if it offends your delicate
sensibilities?
White Christian European people, and White Americans in particular, will apologize when
every other race, nation and religion are duly scrutinized and exposed for their "crimes" and
"atrocities".
Which will most likely happen in the reign of Queen Dick lol
We are not now, nor will we EVER be, ashamed of our history or our people, despite the best
efforts of the Jew Globalist Left.
I would not count on the GOP, even with a 52 vote majority, to stop any attempt at
immigration reform by the Dems. There are enough RINOs in there including both of the R from
Utah(Mike Lee, Mitt Romney), Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham, Lisa Murkowsky, Joni Ernst, to name
but a few, who could easily go with the Dems on reform.
Mike Lee (R-UT), one of Trump's faves, has been trying to push through the Indian green card
bill S. 386 for at least the last two years. The bill was originally to give employment based
greencards, some 140k per year, to Indian nationals only for the next ten years. After
being blocked 3 times by 3 different senators – Perdue(R-GA), Dick Durban(D-IL), Rick
Scott(R-FL), the bill has morphed into a monster.
With each blockage, the bill keeps getting changed to include more and more beneficiaries.
In its final iteration, it will now 1) up the per country limit for family based greencard from
7% to 15%, 2) completely eliminate the per country cap of 7% for employment based visa, 3)
remove an offset that reduced visas available for Chinese nationals, 4) Reserve a
percentage(didn't say what %) of EB2 and EB3 visas (both for high skills) to nationals from
outside the top two countries (which I am guessing are India and China), with max of no more
than 85% from any single country.
Most importantly, the latest iteration of this bill will treat any Indian who has applied
for a green card as already having one, with all the benefits of a greencard while they wait,
incl. being able to travel, change jobs.
More Americans need to wake up to this type of treasonous bills being pushed by GOP
senators:
There is many Jews here but I see nothing untrue about stating the fact that Blacks
contribute very little. You've stated nothing Blacks contributed and merely whined about Whites
doing what every non-White race does more than Whites. No race has been more of a
"schwartze-lover" than Whites. Whites should be more honest about race and stop believing
Blacks are magical. Whites should not tolerate any bad behavior from Blacks or any non-White
race for that matter.
This is a joke, right? Millions of non-whites are simply going to get up and leave their
homes, jobs, schools, neighborhoods so that Whites can have a little patch of paradise? Has our
dear article author been hitting the crack pipe again?
I got news for you. The world is not flat. Leeches do not suck disease out of humans. The earth
is brown, no longer yellow, red, black, and white. It gets browner every day.
As for a shared culture and a homeland, the whites were the only race dumb enough not to
preserve theirs. Japan is almost 100% Asian. China is Asian. Africa is black. India is Indian.
The USA is a mixture of everything. Europe is a mixture of everything. The whites were the only
race with the inability to preserve a homeland. Hence they are too shortsighted to deserve
one.
Whites need to get increasingly audacious using insulting humor of the Charlie Hebdo, or SNL
kind. It's free speech, right? I feel empowerment growing among Whites during the Voter Fraud
Saga and I think there will be a lot less self-censorship from now on. The hate speech laws
need to be brought to court so that a charge of "racism" has to be substantiated, or otherwise
ruled as a federal hate crime. Who started the whole Racism Industry? Could it have been Jewish
intellectuals in their pursuit of the cultural and economic genocide of Gentiles?
@Felix Krull or more items according to specified parameters.
In common usage, though, "discriminate" is taken to mean the unfair treatment of one party
compared to another. Again, typically regarded as an uncivilised activity. And again, this may
be pertinent within a given context, but is not automatically true.
So, strictly speaking, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with "racism".
However, IMO the author uses language which suggests disdain for black Americans (for
example). If that is an expression of "racism", then it would be in the colloquially "bad"
context.
Regardless, IMO the emphasis on the racial dimension limits the article's perspective. Is
"Trumpism" just a white movement, or is it an American movement, or is it something more (or
less)?
"The Stolen Election Will Red-Pill 70 Million Americans"
Here's a real "red pill" for murkans [and the rest of the world], stated 3 different ways:
"Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure" Robert LeFevere
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to
differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a
professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and
counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores,
100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply because of their
innate criminal nature." onebornfree
@anon He's the one the people voted for, not them, and they are just waking up to this now.
It's the same type of diversion the Democrats just tried to pull off with Antifa and BLM.
They got everybody looking at "White Supremacy", racial and identity issues so that you
wouldn't be looking at the money the elites are skimming off the top. I'm sure they could have
cared less about the POC.
The elites are fighting Trump hard; they don't want him changing anything. They knew it
would be mainly "Whites" voting for Trump, so they invented this White Supremacy bullshite.
Yes, the people who voted for Trump ARE interested in immigration, and so is Trump.
stick themselves full of needles and pins , and dye their hair blue so as to present their
deranged worldview for all to see
Yep, that describes it. I understand that a lot of people cannot help being stupid, but I
never understood why people want to aggressively advertise their stupidity. Perverted
exhibitionism, maybe?
Costello seems a strange choice of nom de plume for a white nationalist. I at least identify
the name as Shepardi Jew. The J word never comes up in the article with its problematic issue
of where Jews fit in a white nationalist homeland. Has anyone noticed the only high profile non
retired public figure left with a wasp name and is not black is Homer Simpson? I am of course
exaggerating but the signs are there. With the demise of the white wasps has come the fall of
foundation America. The non wasps don't really share its cultural sentiments. Its sobriety is
lacking except among the best black people who share its names. I am thinking of Ben Carson.
Homer Simpson is a cartoon of a simple slobbish white American. There is no public movement to
remove him of course. So it isn't really surprising America is going the catastrophic way of
her sourthern neighbours.
Q Anon is clearly JFK jr. His crash and recovery was prophesised in the Nostradamus Quatrain
for July of 1999. He carries on the legacy of the Kennedys since grandfather Joe as does his
cousin Robert Kennedy.
Brother Nathanael's latest instalment is a doozy, FAKE NEWS, FAKE ELECTION :
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/LRQK9TfcNJM2/
Hardest-hitting passage:
Cackling Commie Kamal, who humped her way to the top, married Big Tech lawyer Jew, Douglas
Emhoff, a few years back.
The Jew would be "First Man" and you can kiss your First Amendment goodbye.
Big Tech -- (with Emhoff's impending high position and legal conniving) -- will be free to
ban all 'hate speech,' which is 'speech' Jews 'hate' to hear.
And the entire Jew-owned media and their leftist political machine operatives will decide
all elections from henceforth now and forever.
You are about to enter the Twilight Zone -- a Jew-ruled, Jew-ruined, Jew-controlled
America.
@DaveE an mean the need for white unity & power. Or it can mean white power as the
basis for world domination. Nationalism need not be imperialist but often took an imperialist
turn in the past when a nation became very powerful.
In contrast, 'liberation' emphasizes the need for whites to seek emancipation from the current
power that dominates the West and the World which is Jewish Power. (Even 'white national
liberation' sounds better than mere 'white nationalism'.) White Politics that only focuses on
whites and white power is less likely to be appealing than White Politics that seeks freedom
from the actual tyranny that rules the world: Jewish Supremacist Power or JSP.
[MORE]
I think more likely, whites will sink into despair and return to a state of apathy for
politics. I don't see any Republican being able to generate the kind of enthusiasm Trump did.
Tucker Carlson does not have the financial backing or the personality cult. Josh Hawley and Tom
Cotton are two Zionist social conservatives who will revert back to the GOP's standard
abortion, abortion, abortion and say nothing about immigration or non-interventionism to rouse
enough interest from Trump's base.
The only way for white nationalism to stay alive is if Trump stays politically active
through outlets like Newsmax TV and Gab.com ,
and return for another run for office in 2024. However he needs to be very careful. Once he
leaves office he will no longer have the kind of security protection given him as POTUS. There
had been many assassination attempts while he's in office (at least 6 I've heard of), he could
put himself in great danger if he continues to stay in the limelight to position himself for
2024.
As far as a separate whites only nation within the US, look at states that are probably the
whitest – Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, all are heavily (D). A fat lot of good that
does. TX will be (D) by 2024, too many Hispanics and CA transplants, like AZ and NV. Whites are
too splintered, thanks in large part to single white women, who voted 62% in favor of Biden,
compared to married white women who went for Trump 55%. White women are marrying and having
children at an ever lower rate due to lack of eligible men. White women graduated from college
at 60% to 40% compared to white men. As most women only want to marry up, college educated
women rarely want to date much less marry non-college educated men. Due to height issues, most
white women would only date white men or occasionally, black men. Asian and Hispanic men are
too short and unromantic. Meanwhile more and more white men are marrying Asian and Hispanic
women. White women are running out of men to date, marry and start a family. More unmarried
white women means more white votes will be going for Biden.
October 25 (November 7 NS): The October Revolution begins when the Bolsheviks take over
Petrograd (also called the November Revolution if following the Gregorian calendar).
@Thomasina two months before this election that he proposed some rule changes to H1b, and
still none of those rules have been finalized and probably never will. He made these tech
plantation owners many times richer through the stock market, while they treated him with
contempt and helped bring him down. What an idiot!
If Trump had cancelled H1b, OPT, L1 and all other work visas and forced our employers to
hire and train US workers on Day 1 as he promised, he might have won by a landslide by now. The
only group that went down in votes for him in 2020 is white men, because too many feel betrayed
by him in immigration. All he cares about is taking care of Jews and blacks, both Jews in
Israel and on Wall Street. He trusted wormtongue too much, and that's his downfall.
Richard Pilger is (was) the top DOJ Official investigating voter fraud who resigned after
Barr authorized federal prosecutors to pursue "substantial allegations" of voter irregularities
before the election outcome is certified. He is a swamp rat, a cretin, one of many who should
have been drained from the swamp long ago.
John Pilger, on the other hand, is a hero, a filmmaker and journalist with a long, excellent
record of shining light on malfeasance and bad behavior of politicians of every stripe.
The culture of the Chosen people does not understand the concept of compassion. This is
why the world has been in a very sad place for the last hundred or so years since
12.23.1913.
@Priss Factor the white race and goyim in general. Just ask the Palestinians about the
nature of Jewish Power.
Spot on here. Don't expect Biden to let up though. The Jew owned media (both msm and
"conservative" media e.g. Zerohedge, Breitbart, National Review, Fox News) will keep up the
pressure. I see a future, perhaps in two decades, where East Asian immigration to the US will
come to a screeching halt, and most likely even go into reverse as more East Asians return to
their homelands because Jews, negroes, homos, trannies, stupid white women, Latino drug gangs,
Muslim terrorists, Sub Saharan African welfare leeches, Indian H1b slaves with their
clannishness, collusion with Jews and caste-ism make the US an increasingly unlivable hellhole.
Oldtradesman ,
says:
November 13, 2020 at 12:28 am GMT • 19.6 hours ago
I won a lottery given by the renters, and was given free transatlantic transport.
Your line's post-African existence and ability to publicly complain like little girls owes
much to the transatlantic slave trade. Thank the niggas who sold your ancestors into slavery,
nigga.
There's plenty of majority-white states you can move to if Pale Skin is so important to you.
Go to West Virginia, for instance.
Majority-white states with conservative governments tend to be dull, economically depressed
and stagnant. The same will characterize the imaginary white secessionist state you
fetishize.
It's amazing to me that someone could speak with such satisfaction about other people being
subjugated simply because of their color. But then again, animals like you have no morals nor
any decency.
That's why the vast majority of whites in this country will say "no thanks" to your ugly
message.
A lot to unpack by the author, who is simply stating things we already have heard
previously.
"A White Nationalist is someone who believes that white peoples have a right to their own
homelands."
You do have your own homelands. It's just that in a number of cases, you invaded other
homelands for gimmedats and free stuff.
"So that, as a White Nationalist, I am a German nationalist, an English nationalist, a
Scottish nationalist, a French nationalist, etc. Or, at least, I support all those
nationalisms."
And what about Eastern and Southern Europeans? Why no example of you being a Polish
nationalist or a Slavic nationalist? Remember, these groups were deemed to be other than
heritage Americans–dirty, filthy papists who should have never entered our shores with
their alien mannerisms.
"To be a white nationalist in America is really to recognize that the core "American people"
are the white people whose ancestors built the country and who continue to pay for it. Thus,
American White Nationalism = American nationalism."
The reality is that American nationalism is defined by each person and group how they view
it.
"Since it now looks impossible to go back to the good old days when we had blacks in
complete subjection"
Slavery and Jim Crow laws were decidedly anti-American nationalism, and were patently unjust
and immoral.
"white Americans will never work toward a white American homeland unless they are aware of
themselves as White Americans"
We are aware of ourselves as white Americans, just not in the manner you prefer. Do we not
have agency? Must we submit to your definition of what is and what is not a white
nationalist?
"that we effectively secede from the USA and carve out our own white space (or spaces)
within North America. It is this latter option that now seems like it may be our only option,
and something we must work toward."
It will take a fight. Will you be front and center, or far away from the hostilities?
"The country was already fractured along political lines. Now it is completely broken Now
their faith has been completely and irreparably shattered. And this is hugely significant for
us And those many millions of whites are now choking down a gigantic red pill. As we all know,
the red pill is the path to liberation."
What you are doing here is ASSUMING. The "us" is not "we". It's only those people who you
know for absolute certain are on your side.
"It seems that there is credible evidence that there was voter fraud in the election"
More like accusations that need to meet the burden of proof.
"Take it from me -- from my own personal experience: once you have accepted that one big
thing is a total sham, you begin to wonder whether everything else is."
So why would we want to be duped like you?
"It would take whites being pushed to a point where they are so angry they speak and behave
imprudently, damning the consequences."
LOL. I've heard this argument for the past 40 years! It's always a "well, we are upset now,
but just want until we really get mad, then we will put heads on pikes". Either put up or shut
up.
The situation is somewhat better for young whites whose parents were immigrants. Their
family structure is more stable, and they have a possible escape route. I know several who have
"returned" to Europe, even though they were born here. But it's stupid and ignorant to tell
old-stock Canadians they have that option. My ancestors left England in the 19th century, and
the ancestors of French Canadians left France in the 17th and 18th centuries. We're
indigenous.
I agree that "people are very lonely here" but that's relatively recent. The breakdown of
the family began in the 1960s and became "normal" in the 1990s. Again, it has nothing to do
with climate or geography -- other than the fact we're next door to the United States and its
culture.
tomo, I have been thinking a great deal about income inequality lately (especially the
relative income hypothesis (i.e., all of our social problems are caused by differences in
income)). I would love to hear your comments on this question given your wide ranging
experiences around the globe. Would life really be better for us all if we
Scandanavianized?
Brazil (Portugal) was the largest consignee of African slaves in both absolute numbers and
on per capita white colonizer basis. The Anglo North American mainland was far less of a slave
based economy. Brazil was also the last nation in the Americas to outlaw slavery -- and it was
done without 600,000 white men slaughtering each other and burning the defeated side's country
to the ground.
"I think more likely, whites will sink into despair and return to a state of apathy for
politics."
If you are someone who "doesn't want to get your hopes up" or "is afraid to be disappointed"
or "is concerned that it might be a trap" or "seriously hope you're wrong", or sees doom in
every direction, then this is not the place for you. I'm not saying that you're a bad person or
that anyone here wishes you ill. I'm simply stating a simple fact: this is not the place for
you. No one here is interested in your fears, your worries, your psychological vagaries, or
your concerns.
My ancestors didn't own slaves, but it wouldn't matter if they did. The statement remains,
Troof's post-African line owes its very existence and ability to complain like little bitches
to the transatlantic slave trade. Falsify it or fuck off, traitor.
The Dems were quite determined to remove Trump from office by hook and by crook. First by
the fabricated Russiagate fake story When they did not succeed by impeachment. Now today by a
fraudulent election. They, the MIC appear to have succeeded. We are back in the Bush/Obama
era.
Your point about the slaughter in the USA is well taken. Nevertheless, I believe it was
unnecessary and that the war there wasn't truly about slavery. Hell, I lived in an African
nation for three and a half years and saw some slavery first hand; that was 40 years ago, mind,
and the slaves were by and large as happy as clams. WASPy culture is peculiar if you ask me,
which of course you didn't, but even so Who are the "slaves" now in the USA? Hmmm?
Corvie's "moral authority" is equivalent to the Negro chieftain who sold Troof's Negro
ancestor into slavery in exchange for pretty rocks and trinkets, and less than the
"white-debils" who bought him.
@Corvinus those people worried about kissing Black ass are either COWARDS like all those
white traitor trash rich kids or Jews who really use Blacks as pawns. More than likely that
rich leftist self hating white trash is the person who owned slaves or some Jew who blames it
all on Whitey. Either way, Whites have been enslaved themselves by Arabs and are in some ways
slaves today in their own land.
You worried about Blacks, sucka, why does Israel push out Black Jews? Jive talkin', sucka,
keep it a hunnert up in here, turkey. Why did Leo Frank try to blame a Black man for his crime?
lololol. Cue the Bee Gees "Jive Talkin" for all the (((trolls))) up in here. Yo, playa, we gotz
dis.
"Because it was cheaper to have nigger's do it, so your type could purchase it."
I know, it is the inherent nature of Southrons to be lazy. It's in born.
"You are a disgrace, Corvie,"
I'm not the one who has made empty threats of violence on a opinion webzine against a woman
(snicker snack). You said, "Nancy, you are definitely the type of Irish I would have no trouble
killing, along with Joe Biden and John Brennan". You've sunk to a new low.
@Montefrío he bulk of black slaves went to the Spanish colonies, not the American
colonies"
Could you please cite supporting evidence for this assertion?
All the academic accounts I've read indicate that only about 5% of the African slaves shipped
across the Atlantic were sent to the mainland English colonies that became the United States,
while the rest went to areas of Latin America and the Caribbean. However, these latter included
Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch colonies, as well as Spanish ones. The reason their need
for slaves was so enormous was that the death rate in the plantations producing sugar and other
lucrative crops was extremely high. Rogue , says:
November 13, 2020 at 2:15 am GMT • 17.8 hours ago
Did lactase persistence originate in southern Africa?
Egalitarian response:
Oh but that's the exception along with any other non-cognitive changes we might accept if you
prove they exist. But we won't talk about them and will keep telling children that everyone is
African.
Imagine if other fields of study had to follow this insanity.
American wolves don't exist unless you are talking about DNA changes in American wolves that
separate them from European wolves. But other than those changes that would denote a different
subspecies they don't exist.
"""But all the voices on the far-Right who labeled Trump "a distraction" have now been
proved correct. Trump actually wound up doing little for white people -- despite being
continually vilified by the Left as a white supremacist""""
At least the author got that right. Trump was elected to remove the illegal aliens (almost
all of them non-white) and he did practically nothing in 4 years. It would have been easy to
make them self-deport by taking away their jobs and freebies but he didn't do it.
Thank you, sir, particularly for the multi-national breakdown, so to speak.
When all is said and done, it was an ugly business, but long ago was long ago, and imho it
has little to do with the world today. I'm Irish, and "we" weren't well treated long ago
either, but we don't whine or whinge much. I wish that were true of others whose ancestors
suffered hard times.
Me? At 74, life is wonderful! May it be so for all here!
The Stolen Election Will Red-Pill 70 Million Americans is what the Establishment/Trump hope
actually means The Stolen Election Will Keep 70 Million Americans on the Republicrat
Plantation
Imagine thinking rich white conmen like Trump give a shit about you as a "white nationalist"
or that Trump or GOP are against non-white immigration. Hahahahahahhahaha
Delusional. Trump wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. He and everyone around him have
already made it clear you racist cracka ass niggaz aren't welcome in his circle or the GOP.
Oprah Winfrey, Lil Pump, Lil Wayne and Kanye have more clout with Trump than you clowns. You
should ask yourself why that is.
You, average white guy are no better than a dindu or a beaner in the eyes of rich
capitalists. In fact you're less to them because you demand a living standard and wages that
the beaner doesn't.
Let me know when Trump invites some homeless white veterans or any poor cracka for that
matter to fill his hotels, you know since he cares so much for the white race. Yall should
really take a look around if you believe these rich white guys are your allies. "White
nationalism" is a hoax.
The rich white capitalist will stab you in the back every time, history has proven this over
and over again, you're nothing but wage slaves, tax donkeys and cannon fodder to them,
cracka.
Every election is stolen by the rich capitalists that own all the candidates and all the
media. The CIA and Wall St run the country, not puppet politicians
This is not your country. It is up for sale to the highest bidder, welcome to capitalism.
There are despots in Saudi Arabia that "own" more of this country than you losers. Poor low IQ
right wingers, keep believing those fairy tales your owners like telling you. Hahahahaha
@Anonymous ards possessors of illicit drugs, but no -- Hunter is special!). Biden loves,
loves the bomb, and he supported all 'humanitarian" interventions (mass-slaughters) on behalf
of the war profiteers and zionists. Or perhaps you are fond of the murderous Clinton, and the
Schiff-Schumer-Nadler triumvirate of traitors working diligently to destroy the US Consitution?
Do you really believe in the patriotism of McCabe, Strzhok, Comey, Brennan, and Dm.
Alperovitch? Too much FakeBook can be detrimental to one's cognitive function.
The woke crowd of 'progressives' is too much into the cheap revolutionary rhetoric
skillfully inserted into their brains by Bernays' pupils working for MSM.
The whole premise of the multi-cult Left is that divers racial minority groups,
sanctimonious yankees and perverts join together under the aegis of Jewry to socially
marginalize the rest of society. You cannot listen to these people for more than a minute
without hearing them vent hatred against the NORMAL people. There's a reason the Jews are so
dead-set against the way the white world was not too long ago. It's normal, it's sane, and they
DON'T FIT IN. Their depraved appetites and megalomania don't fit in with Western, Christian
Civilization.
@Corvinus s))) and many of them looked and acted like Corvinus.
Slavery is ANCIENT HISTORY and your kind was very well involved in it, same as a lot of
pompous Yankees who claim they fought to end slavery, blah, blah. The fact of the matter is
that only a tiny percentage of Whites ever owned slaves in the South. Poor Whites weren't
treated much better than Blacks for that matter, maybe YOUR ANCESTORS OWNED SLAVES, Corvie,
just like good ole SJW Anderson Cooper.
Fact is Blacks are not exactly saints when it comes to the African Slave Trade
themselves.
How about we stick to this century, (((Corvie.))) I don't see or hear Whites whining about
being enslaved by Arabs.
The MSM, FakeBook, Twitter, and Google must be demolished, considering their willful
treasonous activities during the American color revolution (Russiagate).
By their vicious attacks on the First Amendment, the MSM, FakeBook, Twitter, and Google have
rivaled the Lobby. Or perhaps they are, in reality, an extension of the Lobby.
It took your self righteous Yankee retards four long bloody years and eight successive
commanders to defeat the "Lazy Southrons". Despite having a GDP five times as large and nearly
twenty times the amount of military age males lol
All the while devastating the homes, towns and cities of the people in the South.
This next time around, you will get a taste of war and hate, Mr Corvinus.
Of course, I doubt a pussy ass bitch like you will stand and fight.
@Muaddib synonymous with abolishing social standards. We see the poisonous fruits of giving
everybody respect rather than on conduct: an inability to use force in the face of rioting and
looting instead focusing on people who call others harsh names, rewarding family breakdown,
government debt, women screaming in the streets through bullhorns demanding that other people
pay for their fornication, an unwillingness to condemn homosexuals for deliberately spreading
AIDS for fear of being homophobic.
I will tell you something. If somehow all immigrants and minorities were kicked out, you
would still be unhappy.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
Its a good place to start
Robert Putnam said in his book Bowling Alone that the more diverse a society, the less trust
there is between people. He also found that in diverse communities, even whites distrust other
whites, which makes them even more alienated, because the immigrants at least form their own
ethnic communities. This is what is happening now in all Western countries. Whites are
increasingly alienated in their own countries and societies due to over immigration, leading to
depravity, depression and suicide. It's why birthrate is so low in Western European countries.
It's also why immigration must stop, not just to bring back homogeneity and kinship, but to
reduce the population so each life means more.
Again, you're asking gimme dat while oblivious to the fundamentals. Social programs aren't
payed for by the government the government doesn't make profits, it spends other peoples money
which it collects at gun point . In order to satisfy you thirst for privileges the
government has to literally rob someone else at gun point. Don't people have the right not to be
robbed? Again, only criminals think the "right" to rob is more important than the right not to
be. Moreover, the "good social programs" now stand at $185 Trillion of debt and other
liabilities. Do you know what that number means? Nothing "good" about it. annamaria , says:
November 13, 2020 at 3:23 am GMT • 16.7 hours ago
@Muaddib MSM? The dimwit wokes who avoid like a plague any discussion on Obama/Clinton's
'humanitarian interventions' in faraway countries, which resulted in a multitude of dead
civilians, many of them children.
Biden is ready to intensify the illegal war against Syria (why his progeny has not joined
the 'moderate terrorists' White Helmets is a mystery, don't you think so?). The old corrupted
opportunist would begin a hot war with Russia without understanding what he is doing.
Sure, the MIC has been terribly unhappy with Trump -- not much of 'humanitarian
interventions' during the last four years.
I suggest adjusting the author's arguments to recognise the actual fundamental issue in
play, which is not skin colour or race or language, but CULTURE.
Culture is everything! Culture determines how you treat your neighbor.
Hmm -- the average black in Mississippi has more Euro white Christian culture in him, then
the average white in NY City. Hence NYC's dysfunction.
Anti-Christian Jews are responsible for black disfunction in NYC – period!
@Muaddib -- are you a whiny liberal of lgbtq variety, demanding a special bathroom and
denouncing white privilege a la hypocritical Meghan Markle (and her ridiculous duke 'just
harry'), or you used to be a 'conservative' but it was too boring for you? You know, family
responsibilities, decent education, work ethics
California is the most liberal state in the US. But for some reason, Californias have been
fleeing California like crazy. And you know what, the happy Liberal Californians have been
fleeing to conservative states, without being invited. Last year, "the negative migration was
the 9th year in a row for California."
Ron Unz allows a base, boring, bitter troglodyte like you to post your rude and insulting
garbage on HIS site where he accepts no advertising and runs out of his own pocket so all
viewpoints can be discussed with a light hand and open mind.
I agree with the article but this election isn't actually over outside of the CNN
newsroom.
If the powers that be want to weaken the right they will give Trump his (obvious) win but
only after deluding democrats into thinking that they won the election. I think we are
watching that play out right now.
@Muaddib Some of the 'immigrants' were from the Soviet Union where they received a
fantastic education for nothing. The development of the Internet was conducted under the
watchful eye of intelligence services; the involved have profited handsomely on the enterprise.
Long before the 'immigrants' and their handlers made the killing, there were brilliant people
like Ada Lovelace, Turing, and others who have prepared the ground for modern information
technology.
Today, the woke profiteers ('liberals') at FakeBook and Google religiously follow the diktat
of the CIA/FBI that serve war profiteers and financial Squid. These 'liberals' have been
betraying the interests of human society at large.
@christine what is now North America wanted to stay in the stone age. They live in houses
and drive cars. If whites had never came to what is now North America the people living here
would still be stone age. It took Europeans over 6000 years to go from the iron age to the
industrial age where we were when we founded the USA. There is no way the natives who were
stone age would have been living modern lives.
Colonization was white people going around the world pulling stone age people into the
modern world. Whites are non whites benefactors and only morons cannot see this.
You are not a good thinker. You should be posting on a cooking or sewing site. Politics is
beyond your ken.
@christine your enemy in a hide bag over a roaring fire and letting them roast to death.
The ant trap: coating your enemy in a sticky resin from trees and restraining them over ant
mounds
The head bury: burying your enemy at low tide and allowing the tide to roll in and drown
them.
The horse pull: tying each arm and leg to four separate horses and letting them go four
separate ways.
But our Anglo Western criminal justice system of the 8th Amendment, bonds, free lawyers ,
probation, counselors and medical care in prison is much more savage.
Karma? The crystal ball it's fuzzy but an image is coming in wait .I see a dung beetle in
your future.
I'm not the one who has made empty threats of violence on a opinion webzine against a
woman (snicker snack). You said, "Nancy, you are definitely the type of Irish I would
have no trouble killing, along with Joe Biden and John Brennan".
Why do you respond to "empty," traitor?
Either the threat was empty or it wasn't.
It certainly wasn't a personal threat.
Looks like a threat against a "type of Irish."
What I see is a cucked, traitorous e-activist misrepresenting a threat to pose as a
chivalrous defender of e-womanhood.
This might not be directly relevant, but let me tell you a story.
The Island of Hispaniola was the site of the only known successful slave revolt in history.
So far, so good. The victors where blacks and whites ('hispanics'). Well, that did not work out
well. The whites ('hispanics') revolted and carved out their own nation, it's called the
Dominican Republic. The blacks were left in their own nation, it's called Haiti. The Dominican
Republic has problems, in particular a very high murder rate, but compared to most of the rest
of the world, is not doing so bad. Haiti is an unspeakable cesspool of poverty and filth.
Of course, the Dominican Republic has a viciously effective border control policy preventing
Haitian blacks from moving in. Why doesn't our corporate press complain about this anti-migrant
xenophobia? Maybe rich Americans like the beaches in the Dominican Republic as they are.
Is that something that could – or should – happen in the Untied States? Probably
not, circumstances are different. But still
Christine: I too have experienced at least one native prior lifetime and my home is almost
exactly halfway between two reservations. Friends. Currently I'm reading a book you would
likely enjoy–perhaps thoroughly: "Listen to the Wind: Speak from the Heart" by Roger
Thunderhands Gilbert, who is Metis and has been very close to both the Apache and Lakota
cultures. Publisher is Divine Arts Media.
Always love the comments here, a great range from bright to not so bright to downright dim.
But no matter who you are I'm sure you'll all agree we went from being Bozos on the bus to
being Dr. Zeke's lab rats.
@James Scott t (which liberals are not) all of the stone age people currently living in
Christendom . ride in cars, use computers and cellphones, travel in jets .have access to the
white man's brilliant technology ..it's like we allowed them to jump into our time machine so
they could fast forward into the future we created.
You could also add that we have the patent on high trust culture based on Christian values
of industriousness, honesty, fairness, and decency ..though much of this is being wrecked by
Jewish multiculturalism.
If not for the subversion of organized Jewry, whites would still have the respect of the
stone age non-whites instead of their hatred and contempt.
However, IMO the author uses language which suggests disdain for black Americans (for
example). If that is an expression of "racism", then it would be in the colloquially "bad"
context.
Black Americans kill, rape and steal in huge disproportion to their numbers. Why should I
not disdain that?
You shouldn't make personal statements about people you don't know.
He put himself and his views out there, as any author does, and this is a Comment Board. I
made my comments and observations. Are you new to venues like this? That's how they work
@Muaddib onestly about their failures? They don't support it. In fact they despise free
speech.
Social programs can be good for society. Think not just social security, but also
healthcare for all.
Social programs can be good for society. But liberalism is not about finding good programs.
It is about trying to denigrate and demoralize White people in an attempt at creating equality.
Most liberals are White but they see themselves as the "good Whites" and all other Whites must
be taken down. Liberals are nihilistic egalitarians. They will do anything for equality. They
would sacrifice our children just for some fleeting feeling of equality that doesn't exist.
@Muaddib ily life but in your mind all progress is held back by those other Whites .
I saw that all the time. Urban Whites get "celebrate diversity" bumper stickers and then hang
out with Whites 99% of the time.
More inventions came from WW2 than any other period and Whites on both sides during that
time would think that today's urban egalitarian Whites are total morons.
P.S. your women aren't sexually attracted to you if that wasn't obvious by how they boss you
guys around.
I lived around urban Whites for years. What a soulless and pathetic existence the typical
urban White male lives. The homeless Blacks seem happier than you guys.
The father of Jonathan Miller's mother wanted to emigrate to the USA but got off in Ireland
instead, when it was under British rule. Miller gave an account of this during an interview. I
can't recall whether his grandfather got off in Cork by mistake or whether the person who
arranged his ticket cheated him and others by putting them on a boat to Ireland rather than New
York. For Miller this was an amusing anecdote he told on TV.
At any rate the mother of Jonathan Miller was one of the relatively few Jews living in Ireland,
although Miller himself was born in England.
You've never been around any American Indians or their national autonomous homelands aka
rezess have you? As a group, they're probably the most contented of all definable American race
and ethnic groups. At least they're not endlessly bitching whining and kvetching like the rest
of us.
You should spend a year driving around their rezess and talking to them. Try to fit in as a
tourist or something. Don't be rude and just inform them you're some kind of social scientist
studying their exotic oppressed abused soon to be genocided tribe. Don't insult them. Be
polite. They are regular people just like the rest of us.
We weren't Americans and America wasn't America when the Africans were brought over. We were
English citizens subjects living in separate English colonies known as Massachusetts
Connecticut Virginia Maryland etc.
If only the vile white northern Euro invading scum had come with pipes of peace instead of
guns and i find it poetic justice how guns and more guns and yet more guns are the scariest
part of modern central North America.
May the spirits of those that suffered genocide and holocaust at the hands of gun wielding
invading Northern Europeans be smiling from ear to ear at todays United Gun States of
America.
They are the nut-cases who stick themselves full of needles and pins , and dye their hair
blue so as to present their deranged worldview for all to see.
You forgot the utterly worthless dye disfigurement known as tattoos. All this probably has
roots related to the mutilation known as circumcision as well.
@tomo
Talk to them about Louis Farrakhan. He has the Nation of Islam ( https://www.noi.org/ ] eating out of his hand. The videos are out
there.
Louis names the Jew without disaster resulting. Tell them about The Secret Relationship
Between Blacks and Jews, a splendid book, available from Amazon – at a price or direct
from the https://www.noi.org/final-call-news/
@Peter Frost e US along with the breakdown of the family, loss of the work ethic, a rampant
sneering at honesty, and almost total lack of basic civility. One of my sisters attributes a
lot of that to the effects of casting infants into daycare where it's "dog eat dog" from the
beginning and which I believe is reinforced by years of exposure to the sinecure and benny
seeking bureaucrats in the baby sitting and brainwashing institutions known as schools.
We have ourselves to blame for our choices both as individuals and as a society and we can
whine all we want about blacks and others, but in the end we're paying for our worship and
pursuit of "cool," or self absorption, or whatever.
No, I agree -- a purely "racial" response should not be tried. It will lead to
failure (which is not to say that things like race, culture, values, beliefs etc are not
important)
I suggest you also do a search on the infamous Jew, Aaron Lopez, and work out why he chose a
Spanish name to hide behind rather than an Anglo-Saxon name.
The large majority of TrumpBoomers are screaming at the sky right now with this fraud cope,
because it is inconceivable that a wave of brown, angry youth and affluent whites like myself
have eclipsed them as a voting bloc. The white working class has been melting down worse than
the 2016 SJW trannies for a week now.
Yes of course i would be polite and come in peace and i would make sure not to point a rifle
or pistol at them and start shooting them and then start raping their women and children and i
wouldn't slaughter any livestock that they may have to try and starve them because what decent
white Northern European would do that in central North America anyway?.
If i came in peace and harmony like this they would naturally be far more likely to respond
in kind and share with me what they may know about nature/god, just like what their wonderful
ancestors learnt about from their use of plant medicines/entheogens/sacraments like the Peyote
cactus for example that was used by the Apache Comanche and Kiowa tribes but if i was pure evil
and slaughtered them then of course i wouldn't get to learn from their wisdom and i would
deserve to remain in complete darkness (spiritually speaking) just like most everyone alive is
in the U.S today.
His daughter, Miller's father, became a well-known novelist in Ireland.
Who is the subject in this sentence? Was it someone's daughter or Miller's father who became
a well-known novelist in Ireland? The structure of your sentence makes it unclear.
As I said originally, that doesn't automatically make the author a "racist" in the "bad"
sense, but the suggestion is implicitly there for anyone who wants to make it.
Maybe the author is being emphatically practical in his analysis. FWIW in the past
Australian experience, cohesive immigrant populations have taken at least a couple of
generations to fully naturalise in Australian society. And there does seem to be a lot of
cultural clashing going on in the USA. So maybe a coarse exclusionary approach to reclaiming
power for the American people is the shortest path to a solution (albeit with potential for
collateral damage).
Or maybe one has to read between the lines to get the full sense of what the author is
trying to say.
@christine igners; and this spirit of wear, principle of any cowardice, is so natural in
their hearts, that it is the continual object of the figures that they employ in the species of
eloquence which is proper for them. Their glory is to put at fire and blood the small villages
they can seize. They cut the throat of the old men and the children; they hold only the girls
nubiles; they assassinate their Masters when they are slaves; they can never forgive when they
are victorious: they are enemy of the human mankind. No courtesy, no science, no art improved
in any time, in this atrocious nation. -- Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 2,
page 83
Was it EVER possible to pronounce Mitt Romney's and John McCain's names without gagging?
News to me
Also I disagree with the main premise that can be expressed in the ironic Russian saying:
"They are fucking us, and yet we are just getting stronger". Unfortunately it doesn't work like
that. Success begets success, failure begets failure. With the machinery of state in the
DemocRATs' hands, will they really allow their enemies to take back the levers of power? Last
time was a fluke because Hurricane Donald had caught them by surprise.
@Rogue ck of critique of their own past, lack of any sort of conciliatory moves towards
past victims, dooms them.
And this when the entire world rejects globohomo (and usury) with disgust. They have all
sorts of potential allies a home and abroad, and do not use them. Having lived in the Detroit
area for decades, for example, I can tell you that local Muslims are ready-made allies. They
are hardly the only ones. Count any working Latino and all people of Asian descent in this
group, as well as all people of Eastern European descent. They even have allies among working
blacks for christ sake. You are in the fight of your lives, and you don't even think about
allies.
I would say productive non-executive suite Whites are the new slaves in the Waspy-Jewy Anglo
world. But Brazil isn't that far behind either with all of its Sherwin-Williams color sample
shade cards being used in its own affirmative action programs.
Unlike the profitable fables of holobiz, the Jewish rabid hatred towards Palestinians and
the destruction of Palestinian lives is true. Thievery, sadism, torture of teenagers in Israeli
prisons, desecration of Palestinian cemeteries, the intentional handicapping of Palestinian
children Are you ready to talk about the Jeiwsh State's crimes against humanity, committed in
the context of international law? (The US and Israel 'are joined at the hip' according to US
Congresspeople). If not, then your 'righteous' diatribes are cheap.
And don't forget to check the amazing results of the Obama/Clinton's color revlution in
Ukraine.
@Truth irst son of a bitch who was foolish enough to bring over the African for cheap labor
( yes, the African did receive a wage in food, shelter and medical care), these fools using
Mexicans for dirt cheap labor are ruining this nation because of greed and the love of money.
That poor beaner busting his ass for 12 bucks an hour? Don't worry about him folks, he's living
large because he's more than likely being paid cash or he's gaming the system and receiving all
kinds of freebies along with a regular paycheck. I drive by a chicken processing plant daily
that employs nothing but our friends from south of the border and I see some damn fine trucks
and other nice looking vehicles.
The white working class has been melting down worse than the 2016 SJW trannies for a week
now.
Is that right? So why were there no massive chimpouts and looting? Why was it not necessary
to board up the stores, as it would have been had not the ZOG stolen the election?
Stupidly, I think Trump tried to win over the corporate elite, Big Tech, Big Ag, etc.. Maybe
bad advice from his son-in-law? Didn't listen to his intuition? Who knows.
If he is reelected, he will not make the same mistake twice. I think they know this too.
@christine ringing a force of about five or six to one against his enemy; kills helpless
women and little children, and massacres th e men in their beds; and then brags about it as
long as he lives, and his son and his grandson and great-grandson after him glorify it among
the "heroic deeds of their ancestors."
If you came in peace, do you think the Stone Age Siberians would have also shared their vast
knowledge about the Wheel? Or metal smelting? Or writing and math?
People like (((Christine))) always bring up atrocities committed against Indians and they
make some valid points, HOWEVER, as we saw, (((Christine))) had nothing to say about Whites
being butchered by racist Black homicidal maniacs in South Africa nor did she address the
Holodomor. This leads me to believe that (((Christine))) the self proclaimed "Irish" lass is
more than likely just a (((troll.)))
And of course, people like (((Christine))) don't talk about so-called Jews stealing the
Palestinians land and brutalizing Palestinians, instead they focus on ANCIENT HISTORY. And
these people will never talk about Black guys executing little white boys or Black guys
snatching a little white boy from his white mother and throwing the kid off a balcony. Or how
about when a black woman kidnapped a white boy in Texas and burned him to death with a
blowtorch. Oh, yeah, lets focus on ancient history, which unless you lived back then no one
really knows what the damn truth was, we know we certainly can't rely on (((historians))) or
mainstream (((history books.))) Unless things change, 100 years from now, people will be
reading about how 3 Black women sent America to the moon.
Obvious LIES that will be told or have been told
6 million Jews were gassed in concentration camps during WWII
Germany started WWII
the official 9-11 narrative
Osama Bin Laden was killed * that dude probably was dead years before he was claimed to have
been killed, the guy was in poor health.
James Earl Ray did not kill MLK * the dude said so on his death bed, why would you still
keep holding on to the same story if you were going to die anyhow?
And when it comes to Presidential elections.
JFK didn't beat Nixon
Dubya didn't beat Gore
And Joe Biden sure as hell didn't beat Trump, hell I would admit that if I hated Trump's guts.
Don't like Gore, voted for that sorry sack of shit, Dubya, but no way in hell, Gore lost.
Some more code words we can start using ((( ))) for are (((SJW))) or (((military industrial
complex.)))
@Ultrafart the Brave people too, patriotic or otherwise. White nationalism is a political
stance, of course it will exclude people who are not white nationalists, duh!
Indeed, one bad thing leads to another. Once the dynamics are set in train, it will take
generations to unravel (if ever).
What "bad thing" lead to blacks people committing heinous amounts of murder, robbery and
rape? Slavery? Colonialism? Affirmative Action? Must be something whites did, right?
As I said originally, that doesn't automatically make the author a "racist" in the "bad"
sense.
You have not explained what's bad about racism. And what are those quotation marks for?
You've never been around any American Indians or their national autonomous homelands aka
rezess have you? As a group, they're probably the most contented of all definable American
race and ethnic groups. At least they're not endlessly bitching whining and kvetching like
the rest of us.
Aldey, having lived in the most Indian state in America for the last 17 years, I can assure
you that that is patently ridiculous.
Some things never change. As Mark Twain wrote in his Essay about The Noble Red Man;
He is ignoble–base and treacherous, and hateful in every way. Not even imminent
death can startle him into a spasm of virtue .
With that Twain appears slightly ahead of his time. He could have just as accurately been
describing other "Reds," such as the Bolsheviks and their supporters most of whom could have
taught the Indians a thing or two about terror and torture especially the mass varieties.
I drive by a chicken processing plant daily that employs nothing but our friends from
south of the border and I see some damn fine trucks and other nice looking vehicles.
Whites are storming ballot counting centers instead of looting their own businesses. Whites
routinely chimp out, they just pick different targets. Look at the devastation around Hockey
arenas when teams win the Stanley Cup.
As far as the election being stolen, well, you sound like a crazed conspiracy nutter.
They are ALWAYS hiring, breh. Maybe you can tell some of da homies. But I doubt da homies
could cut the mustard. I worked with tons of Mexicans and El Salvadorans and I can tell you
from experience they really look down on lazy negroes. My gawd, some of the things I heard
these Brown folks say about Black folks had me blushing crimson. I went from Donald Trump
orange to the color of my favorite soda, cherry red. Cue: You Can't Always Get What You Want by
Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stoooooooooones.
The Second Guy: Kamala Harris' husband, Douglas Emhoff, is Jewish; he will not only be the
"second gentleman" (caveat: No one has settled on a term for the job), he will be the first
Jewish second spouse. Emhoff has been vocal about his Jewish identity, and it will be
interesting to see how that plays out in a role that has been used to advance education
initiatives.
Yet, there do remain groupings of well-rooted people who are able to cope with a clinically
insane "white" culture which surrounds them physically and throughout most electronic mediums.
Their struggle is huge, yet they persist in reconnecting with traditional tribal values, with
powwows, drumming fests and even -- gradually -- re-learning their indigenous languages.
There are still waaaay too many European-descended people in my area who retain an ignorant
, discriminatory and even prejudicial attitude towards these, our neighbors and in some cases,
potential teachers. But those who reach out do tend to reach those who also reach out. So hope
remains.
HATER -- perhaps not without some viable personal reason/s, but nevertheless one incapable
of discriminating between individuals and devolved into rank prejudice.
I spent time on the other side of the wall early seventies, and I will never forget the dead
eyes of the oppressed citizenry and the morgue-like atmosphere of the grey cities, and these
lunatic Democrats are now pushing to create such a scenario in the US
Excellent article and explanation of procedure, Mr. Redmayne-Titley. On Tucker Carlson's
show about six weeks ago, Tucker had on guest Darren Beattie to describe the specific type of
color revolution that the Democrat Party appeared to be planning to proceed ahead with to
usurp this election:
Tucker's show tonight will be as clear as could be as to which Tucker he is going to be
selling to his huge audience: independent journalist or Fox News/DS apparatchik. I will be
watching and hope that he will continue to be the voice of much of the people, though his
letting up on the Hunter Biden story was troubling to say the least.
Even with Pennsylvania and Georgia, the 2 most likely to flip imo, trump would still lose,
unless he miraculously flips Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, or Michigan.
The fix was in no doubt and trump won all those states fairly, but its a tall order and
I'm skeptical that trump can pull it off.
Thanks to the Trumpet, the CIA/FBI/NSA, etc., have now been able to clearly identidy the
sections of the populace that feel their pure whiteness is being victimised,
Were you in a coma for a number of years? For 20 years, starting with William Binney
through Edward Snowdon and Dave Montgomery, there have been warnings that the alphabet
agencies have been illegally spying the US citizens. Montgomery pointed out they spied on
Trump before he became a candidate.
The Trumpian corporate party's biggest sin was trying to get in on the Republocrat –
Demican Uni-party corporate party action.
Never gonna happen.
I believe that US are truthful when they talk about "free" elections. Theoretically, the
only way you can get something "free" in life is – if you steal it, or if somebody
gives you something as a gift. This "election" has fulfilled both of these 2 criteria. First
the deep state stole the election from Trump and then they presented it as a gift to Biden.
So it's all good. It was a free election for Biden, Trump got robbed – but hey, you
can't please everybody.
Karma's a biatch. All those color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Hong Kong,
propped up in one way or another by Mike Pompeo when he was head of CIA continuing into
Secretary of State, is now coming back to haunt Trump. Good job appointing that fat fuck.
If Trump loses, it would be his own doing in some ways. He has failed to roll back legal
immigration esp. H1B/OPT until a month before the election, and spent most of his time
catering to the Zionist filth with all the nauseating sycophantic overt pandering to Israel
and the Wall Street Jews. Wormtongue's pandering to the blacks by letting all the drug
dealers out of jail is backfiring big time too. 92% of blacks still voted for Biden so fuck
you Kushner.
If Trump somehow survives this and actually comes back to win, I hope he learned from his
mistake in the first term. Instead of spending all 4 years pandering to Jews and blacks who
didn't vote for him, spend his time taking care of those who did vote for him, his white
voting base, and we want an end to H1B, OPT, EB5, L1, illegal immigration. No more green
cards for the next 40 years! Begin mass deportation. Most importantly, fire Pompeo and
Javanka!
Many thanks, Mr. Redmayne, for this overview-cum-dissection of the recount scenarios.
That all of these counting-stopping orders took place in swing states defies
credulity.
Surely poll workers were being paid to continue counting throughout the night. Not to go home
and catch 40 winks. Lord knows we have plenty of night-time workers in this 24/7 country.
It is ironic that in the context of the USA's overseas military disasters, the common
advice when the home team is obviously getting pounded has been "Just declare yourself the
winner" and get the hell out.
Seems like the Dems are using this playbook and hoping they can create a new reality by
declaring it so.
The spectacle of Joe Biden calling for "unity" after the shitshow following 2016 is
rich.
I doubt that this richness is going to be lost on the "losers" in this election.
The country is very n eatly divided between blue urban and red countryside. I would not
county on "unity" rearing its head anywhere in redland.
The only people loyal to Trump is the working class. No one else gives a damn whether he
lives or dies, including the vast majority of Republican officials and office holders
concerned only with keeping what they have.
Yes, the disgusting PC CBC reporters display their contempt for Trump at every turn, and
are complicit in obscuring Democrat misdeeds, whether by uncritically parroting the Maddow
ravings on Russiagate or ignoring the influence peddling of Dems from Biden to HRC. CBC
reporters are repeatedly characterizing charges of election fraud as groundless. Clearly they
are unaware of Pelosi's admission of how the public is misinformed, with her description of
'leaking' fabricated allegations to MSM insiders, then using the subsequent MSM reports as
'evidence' of veracity.
@GMC ciders). The not-so-youthful Obamas the Fraud and the badly aged Clintons have been
liberally using revolutionary rhetoric a la Che Gevara, never mind that the Obamas and
Clintons are major war criminals guilty of the mass slaughter of civilian populations
(including the multitude of children) in the brown countries of Syria and Lybia and non-brown
countries of former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. They, Obamas and Clintons, are murderers,
cannibals. Yet for the 'progressive' wokes, the history of the US is not known and is not
interesting for knowing. The wokes like the keto diet, mild psychedelics, cool outfit, and a
special set of words, including 'solidarity, social awareness, political correctness,
LGBTQIA' and such to stroke gently their, wokes,' egos. The aroma of rot is in the air.
@The Alarmist ake-sure-trump-supporters-receive-accountability
Emily Abrams can not forgive Trump for being so ineffective in the Middle East. Unlike the
Obama/Clinton administration, Trump has not started a new War for Israel. And for this, Trump
and "anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump" must be punished.
Meanwhile, the reality is hitting up:
After Attorney General Bill Barr authorized federal prosecutors to pursue "substantial
allegations" of irregularities in the 2020 presidential election, the head of the DOJ's
Election Crimes Branch [Richard Pilger] has decided to resign.
Vote fraud is as American as apple pie. Just remember how JFK and George W. Bush manged to
sneak into the White House. America has always bee a banana republic, now it has just become
more evident.
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Election Night Data from All States Shows MILLIONS OF
VOTES Either Switched from President Trump to Biden or Were Lost -- Using Dominion and Other
Systems By
Joe Hoft
Published November 10, 2020 at 6:32pm
2080 Comments ,
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Election Night Data from All States Shows
MILLIONS OF VOTES Either Switched from President Trump to Biden or Were Lost -- Using Dominion
and Other Systems By
Joe Hoft
Published November 10, 2020 at 6:32pm
2080 Comments ,
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Election Night Data from All States Shows
MILLIONS OF VOTES Either Switched from President Trump to Biden or Were Lost -- Using Dominion
and Other Systems By
Joe Hoft
Published November 10, 2020 at 6:32pm
2080 Comments ,
So despite the help from the massive software "glitch", Biden fraud machine had to dump
late night dump ballots all for Biden only in a hurry. How bad did he lose? It almost looks
like most of his votes are fabricated. I would not be surprised if he were 20 points behind
in legal votes.
I think the ballot dumping was the side show to keep us from finding out about the vote
switching and deleting. How can this be verified, and how can this be seen on the machines
now?
Badass American of Indian decent (actually was born in India I believe but family came
here legally when a young child). Ran for senate in Massachusetts as a Republican and was/is
a big Trump supporter. Blew the doors off the Covid 19 scam, not that it wasn't real but how
it was being treated and handled by MSM and the Socialist Democratic Party, ie, by those who
hyped the whole thing.
EventBrite just told everyone that "March for Trump" was cancelled. It is NOT
Cancelled.
The Elites / Big-Tech / MSM (including Fox) are TERRIFIED We Will Show Up - doing everything
possible to shut us down.
Don't let them. Break their Narrative.
Get to DC or the nearest contested state-house This Weekend, or we hand Biden the WH.
CORRECTION!! We hand the WH to Kamala, the most leftist (socialist) senator in the Senate!
She falls right in line with Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, Fidel,Stalin and other
(in)famous dictators politically. If you are a veteran, have a CFL, have made a firearms
purchase from a dealer, etc. - your personal information WILL be found and used to confiscate
your arms if these socialists gain enough power. They have already stated that they will
rejoin the 'climate accords,' restart 'fair trade' with China, move our embassy out of
Jerusalem, restart nuclear 'cooperation' with N. Korea, pass 'common sense' gun laws to
protect our citizens (never mind the THOUSANDS of gun laws now on the books that are NOT
ENFORCED,) tear down 'Orange Man Bads' border fence, open up our borders to all comers, and
amnesty all illegals now in the nation - and that's just for a start.
You are so right ....but the Marxists better ask the British what happened when General
Gage sent British regulars to DISARM AMERICANS at CONCORD . THAT is when the Revolutionary
War turned into a REAL SHOOTING WAR .
Avoidance of War is Not Peace. While I am praying for Honest Election Results that = Trump
Victory, the NWO Deep State must be stopped Now.
Marxist democRats and Quisling repubs are Bought and Paid for by their NWO Oligarch
Masters.
Never Submit, Never Surrender.
If they mean to have CW, then let it begin with this Coup if it is accomplished in Jan of
21
He also doesn't believe AIDS is caused by HIV... really?! And that we should expand the
USPS by having them set up and regulate a national email service. Broken clock, twice-a-day,
etc.
H.I.V was found to be nothing more than Biologically Inactive Gunk by Nobel Laureate
Professor and Cancer specialist Doctor Peter Duesberg and his work was backed up by Nobel
Laureate Doctor Carey Mullin. The H.I.V hypothesis proposed by the Fraudulent Doctors Gallo
and Anthony Fao-Chi[ yes! That Fao-chi] never passed the Koch Postulates, so they turned to
the MSM to pressure the Reagan administration into acceptance of their Hypothesis and that is
the most important part of the H.I.V Hypothesis...
Yesterday on hannity's radio show, John Solomon was severely downplaying the software
problems. Never trusted that guy. Does anyone ever say, "hey, you have to check out Just the
News?!". NOPE.
John Solomon was an integral part of uncovering the SpyGate scandal. Just because he says
something you disagree with does NOT make him a partisan hack.. He's one of the last
investigative reporters left in the U.S.
He speaks the truth and the truth is that as of now we have zero evidence of wrongdoing
other than hearsay. "Data passed around" analyzed by some guy does not cut the mustard in
court. Actual proof is needed and as of now we are just spouting BS. I am not delusional as
most of you and understand that as we sit we are losing big time. He does not say everything
I need to hear......WAAAAAAAA.
I don't really trust him after watching him on Lou Dobbs A LOT. He squirms out of tough
questions. I agree about the investigation into obamagate with Sara Carter. Why is he now
putting a liberal (UNTRUE) spin on the software problems?
No spin, Just the truth. The evidence as of now would get thrown out of court as it is
hearsay. Get the data looked at by a real analytics team not some random guy sitting in his
basement.
He ran hard against Pocahontas up here in MA. Brilliant man! Someone had to step up with
indisputable proof and stop this charade now! OT: Watched a bit of Tucker Carlson
tonight...the bosses got to him. He's talking about senile Biden's virus response. No Tucker,
President Trump is in charge.
I agree! Tucker was singing the praises of FNC several nights ago about their truth
telling...what garbage! Tucker can go too with FNC, I'm done with them!
I read an email on the laptop from Tucker to Hunter the day after he said that on his
show. It was just thanking Hunter for writing a letter of recommendation to Georgetown for
someone. Nothing bad, but Tucker would not touch the photos on the laptop of incest with
underage family members.
"... ...BIDEN, SPEAKING DURING SECOND PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: Within 100 days, I'm going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people. And all of those so-called dreamers, those DACA kids, they're going to be immediately certified again to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship. ..."
This is a corporate takeover of the country. Joe Biden's transition advisers include
executives from Uber, Visa, Capital One, Airbnb, Amazon, the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation and the
nonprofit run by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Are you surprised? No, you're not.
...According to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, at least 40 members of the Biden
transition team announced earlier this week either were or are registered lobbyists. You won't
be shocked to learn that the government of China looks on at all this and is highly pleased. A
weak, divided America obsessed with narcissistic identity politics is good for them and very
different from them.
... Joe Biden has announced that as president he will not deport a single illegal alien from
this country in his first 100 days. It doesn't matter who they are, it doesn't matter what
they've done. It doesn't matter whether they were convicted of crimes such as rape and murder
or not. Literally, they can all stay here.
This is great news if you're Silicon Valley. The tech companies wanted this because they
rely on cheap labor. But for the rest of us, what's the upside exactly? By the way, if you live
anywhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, good luck to you. Also, don't bother locking your doors
or pining for a border wall or thinking that immigration restrictions might improve your
life.
...BIDEN, SPEAKING DURING SECOND PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: Within 100 days, I'm going to send
to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people.
And all of those so-called dreamers, those DACA kids, they're going to be immediately certified
again to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship.
TUCKER CARLSON PROVIDES COMPLETE TOTAL PROOF OF WIDESPREAD DEMOCRAT VOTE FRAUD THAT STOLE
THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Paul Craig Roberts
Tucker Carlson is the ONLY honest media figure in the United States. No wonder the
presstitutes want him arrested. I am concerned that the criminal Hillary DNC will have him
assassinated. You are simply not permitted to tell the truth in the United States. To tell the
truth in the American media is a capital offense.
This had to be posted on Parler because Twitter, FaceBook, and YouTube will not permit the
Fox News report on Vote Theft to be posted. What more evidence do you need that there is a
conspiracy to steal the presidential election from Trump? If the treasonous and criminal
Democrats get away with their coup against democracy, the United States is finished as a
country. No Trump voter will ever again think of the US as his/her country.
The Dem/ Main Stream Media Complex is infuriated that President Donald J. Trump will not
concede the 2020 election. This is a Sign of Contradiction that he is
doing the right thing. This does not yet mean that Trump won enough votes in key states, as
Tucker Carlson has noted, but we also can't say with confidence that Trump lost [ Tucker
Carlson Says There's Not Enough Fraud to Change Election Results, by Jacob
Jarvis, Newsweek, November 10, 2020]. And here appears to be solid evidence that there
was at least some wrongdoing -- far more so than for the Russia Hoax that paralyzed
Trump's Administration for three years. The same neoconservatives who are demanding Trump
concede would be insisting the U.S, invade another country to "bring democracy" if we saw its
government behaving this way. Ultimately, the entire battle is about who is sovereign in this
country -- American citizens or the Dem/ MSM complex, including Big Tech oligarchs. They
ensured it was not a "free and fair" election, and President Trump should never concede.
Let's consider the almost hysterical fury from the MSM telling us that President Trump has a
duty to admit defeat because Biden "won."
In fact, of course President Trump isn't doing anything illegal. No one has won or lost.
Senate Mitch McConnell may be afraid to defy Trump because he doesn't want to lose the two
Senate seats in
Georgia and thus, his status as Majority Leader. But he's absolutely right when he says
that the Electoral College determines the winner and, until that happens, "anyone who is
running for office can exhaust concerns" [ Mitch McConnell says Electoral College will determine 2020 election, by Lisa
Mascaro, Fox6 Milwaukee, November 10, 2020]. The Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore
that settled the 2000 election didn't come to an end until December 12, 2000.
Media outlets "declaring" the winner have no legal significance, especially when their
projections seem to be based on polls that have proven to be inaccurate [ Professional
pollsters blew it again in 2020. Why?b y Matthew Rozsa, Salon, November
4, 2020].
As of this writing, Arizona, Alaska, Pennsylvania, Georgia are all undecided. North Carolina
was just called for Trump
(and underwhelming Chamber of Commerce GOP senator Thom Tills managed to win a narrow victory
over Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham [ Cal
Cunningham concedes to Thom Tills in North Carolina Senate race, by Evie
Fordham, Fox News, November 10, 2020]). Joe Biden's lead in Arizona is narrow and
shrinking dangerously.
President Trump has a strong legal case in the key state of Pennsylvania, where it appears
that the state Supreme Court simply created a new power to count votes that arrived
after election day. The U.S. Supreme Court (without Amy Coney Barrett) deadlocked over
this, but the Trump campaign will almost certainly take this case to SCOTUS again [ Byron
York's Daily Memo: The election lawsuit Trump should win, by Byron York, Washington
Examiner, November 10, 2020]. As Senator Ted Cruz has said, there has thus far not been a
"comprehensive presentation of evidence" [ Ted Cruz: Trump Election Fraud Allegations Will Be Resolved In Court, Not By Persuading You
Or Me, by Tim Hains, RealClearPolitics, November 10, 2020]. Republican
leaders in Pennsylvania have already called for a recount "in any counties where state law was
broken" [ Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda, Pennsylvania State Senate, November 6,
2020].
However, there are more fundamental issues at stake. Thanks to the Sem/ MSM complex's
campaign of COVID-19 hysteria, the country engaged in a massive experiment with mail-in voting
[ Are We Sure About All Those Mail-in Ballots, by Josh Hammer, The American
Mind, November 10, 2020]. Different state requirements add to the confusion. There have
been specific claims of outright fraud, notably the inclusion of dead people on the voter
rolls, reports that local officials gave voters instructions that would invalidate their
ballots, and open theft of ballots [ On Electoral Fraud in
2020, by Pedro Gonzalez, American Greatness, November 9, 2020].
Critically, in several of the states where President Trump is launching legal challenges, the
common factor is a company called Dominion Voting Systems. In one proven case, a "glitch" in
its system awarded 6,000 votes to Joe Biden rather than President Trump [ Republicans expand probe into Dominion Voting Systems after Michigan counting snafu, by Zachary Halaschak and Emily Larsen, Washington Examiner, November 8, 2020].
One former Deputy Attorney General for Michigan says counters in Detroit outright provided
fraudulent ballots to non-voters [ Ex-Michigan Deputy Attorney General Alleges Detroit Counters Assigned Fraudulent Ballots To
Non-Voters, by Kyle Olson, Breitbart, November 9, 2020].
The truth or falsity of these claims must be shown in court. Of course, anti-Trump groups
are trying to prevent any legal challenges by individually targeting the law firm that
President Trump is using [ Inside the
Lincoln Project's new campaign targeting Trump's law firm, by Greg Sargent,
Washington Post, November 10, 2020]. No one seems to have considered that such a
strategy ensures that most Trump supporters will -- correctly -- consider a Biden
Administration utterly illegitimate.
Twitter and other social networking oligopolists are currently putting their thumb on the
scale by censoring posts or by claiming there are "election integrity" issues with posts they
dislike, even posts by President Trump himself [ Tucker Carlson: Big Tech Took Part in 'One of the Worst Forms of Election Tampering, by Mary Chastain, Legal Insurrection, November 10, 2020].
This control of information both before and after the election renders democracy pointless.
If Tech oligarchs can control what the voters see and hear, we might as well put them in charge
and dispense with Election Day altogether. It would be simpler and less time consuming than
going through a farce where both the exchange of information before an election and tabulating
of votes on Election Day itself are apparently too much for the world's sole superpower.
If this is the way the system works, then, as President Trump has been claiming for years,
it is "rigged" and illegitimate. If this is how it is going to be, whatever the Regime on the
Potomac says in future should be considered as foreign to the Historic American Nation as
governments based out of Brussels, Moscow, or Beijing.
Indeed, one can't help but wonder whether the historic American nation would fare better
under outright foreign occupation than a hostile elite which considers itself our rulers and
treats us with open contempt, if not hatred.
President Trump and outraged Republicans do have a card to play even if all the legal
challenges fail. State legislatures must certify a state's electors before the College can vote
for the next president. If state delegations believe the vote has been corrupted, they can send
their own competing slate of electors [ Donald
Trump's Stealthy Road to Victory, by Graham Allison, National Interest,
November 6, 2020].
President Trump also has powers that he can use to change the political environment,
especially by destroying hostile institutions and declassifying documents that the Deep State
really doesn't want to be made public [ Reflections on the late
election, by Curtis Yarvin, Gray Mirror, November 8, 2020].
If a rigged system is going to take President Trump down, he can take it down with him.
Arguably, if President Trump had the will to do something like that, he would not be in this
mess. He did not bring Big Tech to heel. He did not ensure that the bureaucracy was filled with
people loyal to him. He kept hiring people who were his enemies and then acted surprised when
he was rewarded with treachery. He governed like a conventional Republican while talking like a
nationalist, the worst of both worlds [ The Tragedy of Trump, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, November 16, 2018].
Nonetheless, with his back to the wall, Trump can and should fight. Even now, he has a
popular movement behind him -- all he needs to do is lead them against the System that they
thought they had defeated in 2016.
The reason I want to see Trump win is to see if anyone like Brennan or Comey end up in
jail. If not then it's proof this is all smoke and mirrors on behalf of the usual
suspects.
A new issue has turned up in Pennsylvania putting another 100,000+ ballots in line for
exclusion: (1)
Over 51,000 ballots were marked as returned just a day after they were sent out -- an
extraordinary speed, given U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivery times, while nearly 35,000
were returned on the same day they were mailed out. Another more than 23,000 have a return
date earlier than the sent date. More than 9,000 have no sent date.
"Since October 1, the average time of delivery for First-Class Mail, including ballots,
was 2.5 days," USPS said in an Oct. 29 release.
Impossible and improbable return dates indicate there's something wrong with either the
database or the ballots.
Objective facts show that Trump won Pennsylvania.
-- Will the system work?
-- Or, will the Blue Coup cause the Constitution to collapse?
Why should he concede when he won the elections? In fact, Dem crazy policies and senile
half-dead nominee resulted in them losing votes. Apparently, they believed their own lies,
taking their own psyop "polls" at face value. Massive fraud needed to push their corpse ahead
was so crude and ham-handed because it was perpetrated in a hurry. If the fraud stands, the
US is kaput. If Trump succeeds in insisting on real results, the US would keep sliding down
slowly. Either way, the direction is down, the only difference is the speed.
@Verymuchalive US elections because you back both horses. It doesn't matter about where
the "Jewish" vote goes. It's not about ordinary Jews. It's the Zionist power structure and
the big money: Adelson for the Repubs, Saban for the Dems = both bases covered.
Even a not sufficiently Zionist like Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish himself, is blocked
because he's not subservient enough to be a minion and horror of horrors, supports a few
basic Palestinian human rights and a more balanced policy.
It's easy. They only have to cover 2 bases because there are no viable 3rd parties nor
will there ever be under this system, nor is it a direct vote anyway. There will be no change
as long as this duopoly persists.
I absolutely agree with this author's conclusion, the president should fight.
Absolutely, he won the elections. However, he thinks that the fight is for him, but in
reality it is for the American electoral system in particular and the whole political system
in general. If this obvious fraud is allowed to stand, the Empire is doomed. If true result
is recovered, the slide down would be slow.
If those clever wascally Ds so easily rigged the Prez race for Joey Depends, then why
didn't those same clever wascally Ds also rig a few more Senatorial races and capture the
Congress?
@nsa ad to manufacture hundreds of thousands in each swing state. Apparently, the supply
of the cheaters was insufficient, and dishonest poll workers were available only in several
places (hence the turnout in some places went way above 100%). Sloppy job. Next time they
might prepare better. Say, they had more time manufacturing all those mail-in ballots from
dead people (naturally, all dead people voted for half-corpse). If mail-in voting remains on
the books next time, I expect a lot stronger turnout among the dead.
A single frog is worth more than Joey Depends and Poor Widdle Donnie put together
Now, that is true, but the frog was not on the ballot. It could have won.
The presidential
election was on Tuesday and we still don't know the outcome. If you followed the Florida
recount 20 years ago, you probably assume you've got some idea of how this will play out.
Officials in contested states will carefully count all the available votes, supervised by
bipartisan observers from both campaigns, to reassure all of us it's on the level. If they find
irregularities or they see questions of fraud, we'll all get to learn exactly what those
allegations are and how they were resolved. That's what we did in 2000. Remember hanging chads?
We put them on TV so people could see the ballots for themselves.
In the end, the dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush continued all the way to the
Supreme Court. It took 36 days to resolve and every one of those days, if you remember them,
seemed like a month. That process was excruciating, it required patience and calm, but in the
end, it was well worth it.
For the record, the news organizations in this country covered every moment of it. No one in
any newsroom in America even considered censoring information about what was happening. That
would have been regarded as grotesque and immoral. Then, as now, almost everyone in the media
was a partisan Democrat. But in 2000, they understood that preserving the public's faith in the
system was more important than getting Al Gore or anyone else into the White House. So they
pushed for openness and transparency in the process, and thank God they did.
A lot has changed over two decades. It's entirely possible now that someday soon the news
media will decide to shut this election down. Believe it or not, they effectively have the
power to do that. Let's say officials in Philadelphia produce a large number of newly counted
votes. The Pennsylvania secretary of state hastily ratifies them, puts a seal of approval on
them and then declares Joe Biden the winner.
Winning Pennsylvania would put Joe Biden over the threshold of 270 electoral votes, so Joe
Biden is now the president-elect. But how many of the 69 million Americans who voted for Donald
Trump this week would believe that and accept it at this point? Not very many. Not that anyone
cares, and of course, the fact that no one cares is the reason they voted for Donald Trump in
the first place.
I think Tucker Carlson is wrong. I believe there are enough fraudulent votes to
change the result -- if the recount is done honestly. WI, MI, GA, PA could all flip, even AZ
and NV. The DNC is run by End Justifies Means people who believe everything they do is
justified due to Holocaust, Slavery, yada yada.
MSM is working hard to try to make this a foregone conclusion. Each day we hear about
Biden this Biden that, Biden's Transition Team, Biden's New Cabinet, Biden's Foreign Policy,
Biden's Trade policy Instead of feeling discouraged, I hope this actually gets Trump and his
lawyers fired up to push for recounts. He just filed a new lawsuit in MI. There is no reason
why the recounts have not started in WI, GA and PA. It's total BS. The longer this drags on,
the harder it'll be to overturn the results. They need to press on.
Going forward the GOP needs to push hard for a Voting Integrity Act that mandates all
voter registration must be approved by social security office to verify citizenship status. I
suspect a high number of voters esp. in blue states like CA and WA are non-citizens, from
tens of thousands to millions, since the DMV asks everyone to register to vote and never
check their citizenship status. In WA the ballot used to ask people to confirm they are US
citizens before signing the ballot with indication of fines/jail time for non-citizens who
vote, but they've removed that warning entirely in all ballots since 2016.
The Voting Integrity Act should include a mass audit of the voter registration in every
state, with a national database that detects people who are registered to vote in more than
one state. Even if Trump doesn't prevail due to mass cheating in the recounts, the GOP needs
to put this Voting Integrity Act in place or they will never win another election.
Also, Mayor Giuliani has claimed mamy Cases of Fraud and is Filing Lawsuits as Trump's
Lawyer.
Also, Tucker Carlson has also claimed that his Team have verified a good number of
Reported Incidents.
Statistical Analyses Claimants are coming forward as well.
Those who claim that there were none or not enough - including you, B - need to read
around a bit more and wait before making presumptive assessments when we don't have All the
Claim Cases, related Data, and Votes Affected.
Personally, I've seen enough to believe this Election is Compromised. Dominion are
allegedly vested by the Pelosis (which alone raise a few Red Flags for a RICO
Investigation).
It may be Prudent to Not only Hold Audits; but Redo the Federal Election Seats (WH and
Congress) again with Federal Ballots Monitored by Federal Personnel.
Biden should have been sent to Bethesda/Walter Reed/Hopkins for an Alzheimer's/Dementia
Review Panel (put my Own Mother through the Drill every several years prior to her going to
her Nursing Home); and Hunter should have been Arrested for Crack/Child Molestation while
being further investigated for MoneyLaundering/RICO with Pops.
Giuliani is Confident Here As Well. One thing for Certain, B, is that Giuliani has an
Outstanding Reputation as a Federal Prosecutor; and Does. Not. Bπ££$#!+.
Around. When it comes to Criminal Cases.
I'll rely on Giuliani's Assessments more than anyone else's on this Matter.
Look either way the Banker Oligarchs win. Why fight over the scraps, neither one party or
leader represents the little guy (defined these days as those with less than 100m USD in
assets).
A new issue has turned up in Pennsylvania putting another 100,000+ ballots in line for
exclusion: (1)
Over 51,000 ballots were marked as returned just a day after they were sent out -- an
extraordinary speed, given U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivery times, while nearly 35,000
were returned on the same day they were mailed out. Another more than 23,000 have a return
date earlier than the sent date. More than 9,000 have no sent date.
"Since October 1, the average time of delivery for First-Class Mail, including ballots,
was 2.5 days," USPS said in an Oct. 29 release.
Impossible and improbable return dates indicate there's something wrong with either the
database or the ballots.
Objective facts show that Trump won Pennsylvania.
-- Will the system work?
-- Or, will the Blue Coup cause the Constitution to collapse?
In today's episode of America's Next Zionist President, we have an insider giving us all
an accurate description of our beloved US constitutional republic and democracy which we must
fight to protect:
For rational people, the media's outlandish bias and presumptive misinformation will not
end well for their handlers. True, in a fake new soylent green economy, businesses don't need
customers and politicians don't need constituents – you can just manufacture them, and
pay yourself with your own money by decree. But reality has a way of eventually creeping in
(as you gag on your fake beyond meat burger).
The reality here is that we need to take a step back from the media frenzy and recognize
rule of law. Concession cannot even be legally possible for several weeks as it stands today.
And the only excuse for Biden falsely claiming victory is that he is too senile to observe
Constitutional law.
The Don is done. Lindsey and Mitch and their Dem co-conspirators will be thrilled to get
back to business as usual. Motives aside he did change things a bit in between hiring and
firing everyone in sight.
To much of a rocky ride Washington doesn't like that no criminal enterprise does.
Don't cry for Don he'll bounce back this is a man who lost three casinos then went on to
hawking steaks and finally ended up as President. A real life 21st. century Jack Armstrong.
He can write a book play some golf, Melania can go on doing her Eva Gabor impersonation and
Don Jr. and Eric can do whatever it is they do. And as for us we're all on a slow boat to
China most likely to work at one of those Sino-Ivanka Fashion Inc. factories.
Big Brother has spoken. Even Fox News has kicked Trump's ass into the shithole and called
the election for Biden. Tucker Carlson may also be looking for the exit or he has been
instructed to change his tune if he wants to keep his job which in all likelihood he will
comply. Trump lovers and sympathisers better face up to the bitter reality and take to the
hill to prepare a defense against brutal persecution by their enemies who will come after
them with unimaginable passion right after Jan 20, 2021. They already have THE LIST and names
are being added to it fast and furious. Bread and circus, people!
Come on, get real. American voters were presented with two donkeys and puppets of Israel
as candidates. Millions voted for one or the other of two donkeys both of whom dance to the
beat of Jewish drums. Come to think about it, which American president in recent memory has
not outfawned his predecessor on Israel? Jewish power owns us. End of.
Tucker Carlson said, " At this stage , the fraud that we can confirm does not
seem to be enough to alter the election result." That's a far cry from, "There's not
enough fraud to change the election results." Newsweek's paraphrasing is, therefore, itself
fraudulent and part of the gigantic Democrat gaslighting campaign to convince the nation Joe
Biden is the legitimate winner. It should not be repeated here without the actual quote and a
caveat.
This also goes to the wider issue of trying to be reasonable and fair when dealing with
Democrat cockroaches who are anything but. They will unfailingly distort measured and
diplomatic language. It's best to make no concessions to them.
I don't give a rat's butt about trump or biden. As far as I'm concerned they'll always be
two draft dodger/shirkers and nothing more. Interesting how both of them hid in college in
the 60's and refused to serve as privates in the army but think they should be able to have
the power to send men in harms way.
Actually, the Zionists and the Jewish vote generally were overwhelmingly for Biden. They
were very hostile to Trump. Why would they do this if Trump were a Zionist minion ? Because
he's not.
Trump wants to normalise relations with Russia and pull US troops out of the Middle East,
including Syria. These moves are very much opposed to Zionist aims and the interests of
Israel. Unsurprisingly, Netanyahu was very quick to recognise Biden as the winner. That's
because Biden really is a Zionist minion.
@Roacheforque every TDS normie discussed it like it had a real chance of occurring
despite not having thought out how exactly how such a ridiculous event would take place on a
practical level. Added to which the 'homey' comments coming from diaper Bill and Kameltoe
Harris have a overly saccharine flavour to them, more likely scripted with great thought put
in as opposed to spontaneous quotes from some gosh darn nice people who want to heal the
nation such that anyone trying to prevent them from doing so necessarily must be evil.
If the Zerohedge article is accurate, thank you for posting it. If it has weaknesses
perhaps some poster could point them out. It is the most sane thing that I have read on the
topic since the 3rd.
No Surrender! President Trump Should Not Concede -- No Matter What
Sure just like Hillary should not have conceded in 2016, when they had strong evidence of
electronic vote rigging.
Look either way the Banker Oligarchs win. Why fight over the scraps, neither one party or
leader represents the little guy (defined these days as those with less than 100m USD in
assets).
The Zio Banking elite wins hands down right now Biden or Trump. At least Biden might keep
some social services like Soc Sec, Medicare, and Obama Care!!!! Yes the public deserves to
get something for paying all these taxes not just the Oligarchial super rich who were openly
looting the Fed budget under Trump. The unthinking and unemployed working/middle class,
especially the Whites amongst them seem to put their crisis of identity ahead of their well
being. Daaah.
What did Trump (led by his handlers Kushner/Ivanka) do for the little guy except fill
their heads with racial antagonisms and anti-government innuendo (some true but most false).
For sure he fulfilled every Zio-Israeli fantasy at the expense of US interests. Yes, no
problem for the unquestioning MAGA types, but where did he lead America to, to the precipice
of a pending national disaster?
So stop tearing down the constitutional republic, preserve what the general public still
has left to protect their individual rights and economic well being. Obviously the elite is
pushing for civil unrest so they can bring on a military and dictatorial regime, where all
sorts of new control straps can be implemented.
Kirkpatrick you are shameful for stoking the embers of civil unrest! Nobody is calling for
unity and statesmen like leadership these days on RU report. Biden is looking much more
leader like than cry baby Trump. Trump as you like to say -- -- -- -- – YOUR
FIRED!!!!!Man-up and get out and move on and get a life.
Only idiots and fools still want to carry Fake and Slimy Politicians on top of their
shoulders. Find some brains and lobby for your own interests, no politician in this system
will work for you unless forced to by their electorate.
[Reflections on the late election, by Curtis Yarvin, Gray Mirror, November 8, 2020].
Because I began my journey to 'red-pilled' awareness thanks to Curtis 'Mencius Moldbug'
Yarvin, I naturally clicked on the link and read his piece. One has travelled far since
reading his 'Unqualified Reservations' blog way back on 2007-08, and I now agree with much of
Andrew Joyce's recent critique of Yarvin ( https://www.unz.com/article/jews-in-the-cathedral-a-response-to-curtis-yarvin/
)
However, I frequently chuckled while reading Yarvin's piece linked by James Kirkpatrick,
and marvelled anew at the quality and brilliance of his insights. In this regard it rather
took me back in time twelve or so years.
A sample or two:
After describing how Trump could legally take full and absolute personal power for the
length of his second term, Yarvin points out that what is required amounts to nothing less
than 'regime change', and states that 'A true regime change must be a revolution in every
sense of the word Of course, since the right is order and the left is chaos, the left-wing
revolution is a butcher and the right-wing revolution is a surgeon. If ours needs to keep its
bandages on for a few days, theirs can barely be sold as hamburger. And even before her
stitches are out, America feels and looks better than ever.'
He goes on:
'One lesson that should be appreciated by all sides in all civic conflicts is that force
is not another word for violence. Force is the opposite of violence. Violence is bad, and
force is good. Violence is chaos, and force is order. Violence is slow and force is fast.
'If you can win by force, what are you waiting for? Do it immediately. If you can't win
without violence, you probably can't win at all, and you probably shouldn't try. Much
bloodshed could be saved if all young persons were educated with these simple and timeless
Machiavellian principles'.
And earlier, he explains the role of elections in a 'democracy' as being to assess the
power of each side's support, and that this power ought to reflect actual physical strength
and or courage, remarking:
'The fundamental purpose of a democratic election is to test the strength of the sides in
a civil conflict, without anyone actually getting hurt. The majority wins because the
strongest side would win. Better to measure that by counting heads, than knocking heads; and
counting heads produces a reasonable guess as to who would win a head-knocking contest. Same
outcome, fewer concussions: a Pareto optimization.
'But this guess is much better if it actually measures humans who are both willing and
able to walk down the street and show up. Anyone who cannot show up at the booth is unlikely
to show up for the civil war. This is one of many reasons that an in-person election is a
more accurate election. (If voters could be qualified by physique, it would be even more
accurate.)
'My sense is that in many urban communities, voting by proxy in some sense is the norm.
The people whose names are on the ballots really exist; and almost all of them actually did
support China Joe. Or at least, preferred him. The extent to which they perform any tangible
political action, including physically going to the booth, is very low; so is their
engagement with the political system. The demand for records of their engagement is very
high, because each such datum cancels out some huge, heavily-armed redneck with a bass
boat.'
Your obsession with Jews is really misplaced here. As soon as anyone starts blaming the
Jews, that person has immediately branded himself unfit for further comment.
Trump had four years to do something about election fraud. Didn't do a thing. Kinda funny
Trump and those Senator Georgians that sucked up to blacks thought blacks would actually vote
for them. Georgia and trump lost! Maybe taught them a lesson! I doubt it. Georgia has been
overrun with Hispanics and absolutely flooded with H-1B Indians for years too . The GOP has
committed suicide and taken the rest of America down with it. But hey, they made a few bucks
doing it! Maybe trump can do another publicity stunt with a rapper to save his campaign.
The problems with the election are just a mirror image of the problems with this country.
Fake money, fake border, fake pandemic, fake scholarship, fake news, fake food, fake votes.
Did I miss anything?
@TheTrumanShow ll decide. and failing that, the congress shall decide.. If a candidate
interferes with that constitutional process, changes or alters it to suit a personal
circumstance, he or she invites the crowd operated guillotine, i fear.
I agree the election process in many states is subject to corruption.. but Trump had four
years to change that process. like most things he did not provide the leadership needed to
get the masses to help him do just that.. Now Trump complains ..to the very people who
expected more from him .. and seeks to circumvent their intentions. I hope not?
I learned long ago: the pilot that does not pay the mechanic, pays the undertaker, when
the engine quits at 15000 feet.
I am an Australian living in an Australian country town. My email address is recognisably
Australian. I have never lived in the US. I have never even been there in fact.
Yet I have been inundated with election propaganda from the Democrats (from the other side
nary a peep).
Recently an organisation that goes under the name "Fight for Reform"invited me, as a "Top
Democrat in your state", to sign a card to congratulate "Joe and Kamala" testyifying that I
too had been crying "tears of joy" about their election.
When I didn't react I was asked, virtually the day after, why I hadn't done so. They were
"running low on support from"registered Democrats" "so please
Well, if you think that Biden and Harris will serve Israel any less than Trump, then you
should be willing to purchase my Jewless estate of 500,000 acres in NY, which comes with 6000
square foot fully restored 19th century house, a 2500 square foot guest house, and a horse
barn. It also comes with both a real pond and a ce- ment pond. I'm asking only
$600,000. It's a steal of a bargain.
In other words, according to you, the Jews as individuals, organizations, or as a people
may never be blamed for anything. Methinks it is YOU wearing the brand that says "unfit for
further comment".
Ultimately, the entire battle is about who is sovereign in this country -- American
citizens or
LOL! I haven't seen the words "sovereignty" and "American people" in the same sentence for
quite some time. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not simply restricted to American people,
as it applies to all peoples of the West.
We must muster the will to shift this balance of power.
Whining about jail time over tax laws is why Trump has to fight? He can tell us
deplorables it is for us. Its not. It will be about preserving his empire. As much as I want
the corrupt PA democrats to finally get theirs in this legal process, I support Trump in his
fight for himself. If you twerps are allowed to destroy someone like a President Trump, just
imagine what you will do to a mere lunch lady for using the wrong pronoun. Please for once in
your miserable life admit your side is not made up of good people but rather a whole bunch of
totalitarian dictatorial wannabes. Scarily you keep moving the goalposts of your endgame
because every victory is never enough to satiate the rumble in your hollow souls.
By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website
is here and you can follow her on
Twitter @caitoz
'Trump
derangement syndrome' didn't come from Trump. It came from abusive media trying to spin the
evils of his presidency as somehow worse than any other US president's.
The word "coup" is being thrown about in American liberal media today, not because US
liberals suddenly became uncomfortable with the fact that their nation constantly stages coups
and topples governments around the world as a matter of routine policy, but because they are
all talking about (you guessed it) Donald Trump.
To be clear, none of the high-powered influencers who have been promoting the use of this
word actually believe there is any possibility that Donald Trump will somehow remain in office
after January of next year when he loses his legal appeals against the official results of the
election, which would be the thing that a coup is. There is no means or institutional support
through which the sitting president could accomplish such a thing. This is not a coup, it's a
glorified temper tantrum. Trump will leave office at the appointed time.
The establishment narrative managers are not terrifying their audiences with this word
because they believe there is any danger of a coup actually happening. They are doing it
because it's their last chance to use Trump to psychologically abuse their audiences for
clicks.
... ... ...
It is not Trump himself who's been making people feel terrified of a tyrannical Russian
agent ending democracy in America and ruling with an iron fist, it is years of shrieking,
hysterical coverage about Trump from the mass media.
Without all the deranged and persistent fearmongering, driven by a disdain for Trump's
unrefined narrative management
style and an insatiable hunger for ratings and clicks, it would never have occurred to
Americans that they should be more terrified of this president than of any other sh***y
Reaganite Republican. The Russian collusion narrative which dominated most of Trump's
presidency
turned out tobe essentially
nothing . The concentration camps, millions of deportations and armed militias driving
non-whites out of the country that we were promised never came; he never even
came anywhere close to Obama's deportation numbers and his
support from minorities actually went up. He hasn't been any more warlike than his
predecessors overall, and by some measures arguably less so. Most Americans actually reported that
their lives had improved over Trump's term before the pandemic hit.
If people had just been given raw information about Trump's presidency, they would have seen
a lot of bad things, but things that are bad in the same way all the horrible aspects of the
most destructive government on earth are bad. They wouldn't have known to be horrified and
anxious and have headaches and irritable bowel syndrome. They would have handled themselves in
about the same way they always handled themselves during the administration of a president they
didn't like.
Instead, they were psychologically terrorized. Made frightened, sick and traumatized by mass
media pundits who only care about ratings and clicks, as was made clear when CBS chief Les
Moonves famously
said that Trump is bad for America but great for CBS. Dragged through years of Russia
hysteria and Trump hysteria with any excuse to spin Trump's presidency as a remarkable
departure from norms, when in reality it was anything but. It was a fairly conventional
Republican presidency.
In reality, though most of them probably did not realize it, this is what Americans were
actually voting against when they turned out in record numbers to cast their votes. Not against
Trump, but against this continued psychological abuse they've been suffering both directly and
indirectly from the mass media. Against being bashed in the face by shrieking, hysterical
bull***t that hurts their bodies and makes them feel crazy, and against the unpleasantness of
having to interact with stressed-out compatriots who haven't been putting up well with the
abuse.
It wasn't a "Get him out" vote, it was a "Make it stop" vote.
Meanwhile, another pernicious effect of making Trump seem uniquely horrible has been
retroactively making his predecessors seem nice by comparison, which is why George W Bush now
enjoys majority support among Democrats
after years of unpopularity. Their depravity is hidden behind a media-generated wall labeled
"NOT TRUMP" . And when Biden steps into office, his depravity will be hidden from view in the
same way, neutering all mainstream opposition to his most deadly and dangerous
actions .
The First Rule , 5 hours ago
I certainly hope this isn't True. You should never surrender to Evil.
Too many people succumb to the psychological warfare that has been raging against us for 5
decades. It is very difficult to break free from the indoctrination regardless of
intelligence or education. The backbone of the DemonRat organization is a very strong emotion
that overcomes all logic and reason. It is HATE. Today it is called by the gentle name of
Identity Politics. Nevertheless, it is still a HATE based psychological manipulation. Women
need to HATE men. Blacks need to HATE everyone. Whites need to HATE themselves. Everybody
needs to HATE Trump.
Did anybody vote FOR Biden or Harris?
The DemonRats have the Deep State covering, aiding and abetting their insurrection. As we
have seen, the stupid white people support the peaceful protests and are played like a violin
by the professional agitators likely trained by the CIA & FBI. The BLM aristocracy claims
to be "trained Marxists". Trained by whom? Nobody asks.
The cops are used like trained dogs to attack everyone who opposes the BLM/Antifa
sanctioned riots to the point where citizens are afraid of the cops and the BLM/Antifa people
use the cops for target practice, and the cops just take it. Nobody really respects the FBI
or the cops anymore.
Then there is the constant 24/7 drum beat of propaganda from the MSM and social media
driving people crazy.
Welcome to the world of Kamala Pelosi.
With Trump gone, who will they hate next?
DemonRats: The Party of Lies & HATE
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of
your own choosing.
- Orwell
archon , 2 hours ago
Every time Maddow speaks she reminds me that we're living in clownworld. Lets not forget
this is coming from people who spent the last four years attempting their own coup.
cankles' server , 4 hours ago
I'm not sure if twitter deleted but here's the youtube link
Rubert's media empire was just a stepping stone for gigs like a sitting board of director
with Genie Oil. Even with that Fox News has always been neocon. If most conservative types
weren't enamored with supporting the troops, who will be just like the cops in supporting the
establishment in any civil war, then they would have known Fox News was controlled opposition
for the deep state.
Rupert Murdoch's heirs are #NeverTrump Libtards. They have been systematically
installing SJW Globalists for some time. The day-to-day programming has flipped to Fake
Stream Media propaganda. It is no surprise that they went full TDS for election coverage.
The above link will provide you with a FREE KlowdTV subscription to OAN and eleven other
channels for the remainder of 2020. Easy to do, two quick steps. DUMP FOX! Pass it on.
Tucker Carlson may also be looking for the exit or he has been instructed to change his
tune if he wants to keep his job which in all likelihood he will comply.
Yes, Carlson's program last night was decidedly more milquetoast than the night before.
His choice of topics was much more mundane. Perhaps he has gotten the word.
Tucker Carlson is toeing the Fox editorial line by claiming not enough fraudulent votes to
change the outcome. The only question is how was he coerced into making this statement -- was
it the carrot or the stick? Both? The stick would be he gets fired from Fox. The carrot would
be he gets major pay raise, promotion, or even getting help set up as front runner for
2024.
TC is no longer to be trusted. I have felt that about him for some time as his website
Daily Caller started toeing the Zionist line with increasing hostility towards China this
past year. He's now just controlled opposition like Stephen Miller, Breitbart.
Note that Carlson did NOT say, as the article falsely states, "Tucker Carlson Says There's
Not Enough Fraud to Change Election Results", he said:
At this stage, the fraud that we can confirm does not seem to be enough to alter the
election result . We should be honest and tell you that. Of course, that could change,"
he said, on his Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight.
I believe Carlson will spotlight the fraud claims on his program tonight.
"... The grouping is thus; 1) Coastal Elites/Wall Street/City of London/Private Banking/Atlantacism/Libertarian Free Market Economics aka finance capitalism ..."
"... The middle of America is land power, and is opposed to Atlantacism, rim theory, blue water navy power projection, importation of third world people, and export of jobs and factories. ..."
Indeed, one can't help but wonder whether the historic American nation would fare better
under outright foreign occupation than a hostile elite which considers itself our rulers and
treats us with open contempt, if not hatred.
Russia or China would not flood the historic American nation with "third world people" in
order to chase after a dollar. A good argument could be made that China or Russia would be a
better government for Heartland America than the "international" coastal elites.
The coastal elites are wedded to finance capitalism. This group of people want a thin veneer
of Oligarchs (themselves) controlling a mixed race, or brown population in their factories.
Finance Capital wants to make illicit gains. Finance capital could care less about improving
labor ability of the native population.
The grouping is thus; 1) Coastal Elites/Wall Street/City of London/Private
Banking/Atlantacism/Libertarian Free Market Economics aka finance capitalism . (In short,
the coastal elites are for an "international world order" with them in charge, with them making
their finance nut with usury, rents, and unearned income. Lying and cheating is ok, because
only money matters. Their capital is fungible, meaning it can fly anywhere in the world to make
gains, and to them labor has legs and is also fungible, to then lower prices – to make
gains.)
Land Powers, such as China and Russia are not "international" in their thinking. Although
they do some power projection into blue water as a form of defense. They are interested in
improving their sovereign population.
The middle of America is land power, and is opposed to Atlantacism, rim theory, blue
water navy power projection, importation of third world people, and export of jobs and
factories.
The American system of economy of the founders was the first industrial capitalism, and the
"credit of the nation" went toward infrastructure, public health, and improving the
commons.
The Jew and English finance capitalism method, first combined together in 1694, and has
always been at war with heartland America. The parasite is dug in deep.
Oil production, which stood just under 13 million barrels-a-day at its peak November, 2019,
is down over 2 million barrels a day now, and will be sinking to about 7 million barrels-a-day
in 2021, which is far short of what we use. Shale oil is a bust. It costs too much to get out
of the ground and the companies that put their mojo into shale can't make any money at it, and
can't pay off their loans, and won't get new loans to continue operations. So, the whole
industry is going to shit. Oil is what has supported the US economy for a hundred years, and
it's over. Our attempt to compensate for that quandary by borrowing more and more money at
every level is also drawing to a close. It will break the bond markets, the dollar, and the
banks. This is the essence of the long emergency and we're entering the heart of the storm
now.
By C. J. Hopkins , award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His dystopian novel, ' Zone 23 ', is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. His essays and other works can be found at,
and he can be reached via, cjhopkins.com
or consentfactory.org . OK, so,
that was not cool. For one terrifying moment there, it actually looked like GloboCap was going
to let Russian-Asset Hitler win.
Hour after hour on election night, states on the map kept turning red, or pink, or some
distinctly non-blue color. Wisconsin Michigan Georgia Florida. It could not be happening, and
yet it was. What other explanation was there? The Russians were stealing the election
again!
But, of course, GloboCap was just playing with us. They're a bunch of practical jokers,
those GloboCap guys. Naturally, they couldn't resist the chance to wind us up just one more
time.
Seriously, though, while I enjoy a good prank, I still have a number of liberal friends,
many of whom were on the verge of suffering major heart attacks as they breathlessly waited for
the corporate media to confirm that they had successfully voted a literal
dictator out of power. (A few of them suffer from IBS or other gastrointestinal disorders,
so, in light of the current toilet-paper shortage caused by the Return of the Apocalyptic
Plague, toying with them like that was especially cruel.)
But, whatever. That's water under the bridge. The good news is, the nightmare is
over! Literal Hitler and his underground army of Russia-loving white supremacists have been
vanquished! Decency has been restored! Globalization has risen from the
dead!
... ... ..
Meanwhile, the GloboCap propaganda has reached some new post-Orwellian level. After four
long years of "RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION!" now, suddenly, "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS
ELECTION FRAUD IN THE USA!"
That's right, once again, millions of liberals, like that scene in ' 1984' where the
Party switches official enemies right in the middle of the Hate-Week speech, have been ordered
to radically reverse their "reality," and hysterically deny the existence of the very
thing they have been hysterically alleging for four solid years and they are actually doing
it!
... ... ///
Marian1637 7 hours ago
I can not comprehend
that democrats do not blame Putin for Biden winning!
Reilly 3 hours ago
Very funny, bravo!
Nothing like a bit of slapstick, with a dose of reality also in the middle of a waking
nightmare about to happen. ;))
DeoGratias 4 hours ago
One correction : it is not GloboCap it is
GloboComs. The objective of communism is to create two classes of a society : rulers and
workers. Thus GloboCaps are GloboComs.
Winter7Mute 5 hours ago
A reliable way to make people
believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished
from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. I'm not even
sure if most journalists or reporters know what their even talking about, when writing these
articles.
Vidarr Kerr 5 hours ago
There is such a thing as Too Much Sarcasm.
EarthBotV2 Vidarr Kerr 4 hours ago
I disagree. The liberazi "thinks" with the gut -- as in "What does your gut tell you?"...
"... But while they now have the power, globalists do not have solutions to the country problems, and the crisis of neoliberalism (which started in 2008) will continue, the far-right nationalism will stay and may even gain strength. This suggests that in 2024 is somebody like Tucker Carlson will lead the ticket. And Tucker is a more dangerous opponent to neoliberal Dems than Trump ever been. "Trumpism without Trump" will live, so to speak. ..."
Interesting piece by Beinart about the obvious question that isn't being asked: Why did
Trump lose? After all he had the advantages of incumbency, until February the stock market was
booming, wages were rising, things were going great.
Answer: because he was not nearly radical enough. Because he was a weak leader who was
captured by the Republican elite (not the other way round). Also (rather ironic this) because
he was and is a terrible negotiater. He continually caved into the likes of Mitch McConnell,
and, well the rest is history.
Question: will 'super Trump' in 4 or 8 years time manage to follow the Eastern European
template and create a genuine populist party? (economically social democratic, particularly
concentrating on pensioners: extremely hostile to immigration, skeptical of environmental
issues, culturally conservative?). If so the future is the Republicans' but it's a big if.
...he was a weak leader who was captured by the Republican elite (not the other way
round). Also (rather ironic this) because he was and is a terrible negotiator. He
continually caved into the likes of Mitch McConnell, and, well the rest is history.
All true. But Biden victory in some ways looks like Catch 22 for neoliberal Dems (Will the
Democrats Ever Make Sense of This Week? – New Republic):
In sum, if the results we have hold, Joe Biden will win the election and preside over a
divided Congress. A chastened and anxious Democratic caucus will continue to hold the
House.
A triumphant Senate Republican caucus will obviously destroy his major legislative
agenda. Biden will assuredly turn to policy by executive action, just as Barack Obama did
late in his legislatively stymied administration.
When he does, Republicans will do all they can to send those actions to a 6–3
conservative Supreme Court Biden will be unable to pack or meaningfully reform.
In defeating Trump, Democrats will have avoided their worst-case scenario. Instead, they
will have won the worst possible Biden victory, a political situation that will be a
nightmare all its own.
Trump, with his "national neoliberalism," was an anomaly in its own right. And such things
do not last long. So this is a kind of "return to normal" -- return to power of the
"internationalist" faction of Oligarchy who is linked to globalization (and constitutes the
majority of the US oligarchy), which was unexpectedly defeated in 2016 and since then foght
tooth and nail for the return to power. And such "normalization" is the most logical outcome
of the 2020 elections and is to be expected.
But while they now have the power, globalists do not have solutions to the country problems,
and the crisis of neoliberalism (which started in 2008) will continue, the far-right
nationalism will stay and may even gain strength. This suggests that in 2024 is somebody like
Tucker Carlson will lead the ticket. And Tucker is a more dangerous opponent to neoliberal
Dems than Trump ever been. "Trumpism without Trump" will live, so to speak.
That may spell troubles for the well-being of the PMC (professional and management class)
to which we all belong.
I would add that the fact that Biden victory legitimized Russia-gate and abuse of their
power by intelligence agencies is also a problem. I suspect that Neo-McCarthyism, in the long
run, might backfire.
Fox News Channel's Tucker Carlson says Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is "happy to sell out his voters with an amnesty deal" after
he suggested finding "common ground" with Democrats on immigration.
During a segment Friday night, Carlson called out Graham -- who just won reelection in South Carolina --
for suggesting to the Senate Republican caucus that their agenda next year could include working with Democrats on amnesty for
11 to 22 million illegal aliens. Carlson asked:
Who's excited to greet our new corporate overlords? Who plans to collaborate, particularly who on the right side, the Republican
side, the side that said it was defending you. Who's happy about all of this? That seems worth keeping track of just so we know
who we're dealing with here.
I was particularly interested in the comments of Lindsey Graham who just won reelection in the state of South Carolina because
conservatives voted for him the people around Trump put a great deal of pressure on Lindsey Graham to send them money, so after
a day or two, he made a great show of sending them $500,000.
But then on the issues that matter, Lindsey Graham immediately ran away from the ideas that he claimed to support and said
that he would be happy to sell out his voters with an amnesty deal, like within hours of the election.
You have a deeply flawed party that refuses to protect its own voters and represent their legitimate interests but they are
the only hope that this country doesn't descend into something unrecognizable. It puts 70 million decent people in a tough spot.
Already, America First conservatives and immigration reformers are
pushing back against Graham's comments.
"The new base of the Republican Party is the American working class, of all races. 'Common ground' on immigration reform is code
for amnesty, and amnesty is an insult to the millions who voted GOP in the election," Bostonians Against Sanctuary Cities President
Lou Murray told Breitbart News.
Currently, there are about 20 million Americans who are jobless or underemployed, mostly due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis,
but all of whom want full-time jobs.
Economists have found that their
job opportunities and wages can be easily diminished by
high immigration levels.
One particular study by the Center for Immigration Studies' Steven Camarota revealed that for every one percent increase in the
immigrant portion of American workers' occupation, their weekly wages are cut by perhaps 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born
American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by potentially 8.75 percent, since
more than 17 percent of the workforce is foreign-born.
The high immigration policy is a boon for giant corporations, real estate investors, Wall Street, university systems, and Big
Agriculture that can cash in on an economy that offers low wages to a flooded U.S. labor market.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
To start one's own party is not so easy and outright impossible under the current conditions. If the majority of GOP supports
him then the best course would be to purge and reinvigorate GOP: he should issue a call of action to his supporters and create the
situation when those who use their membership to their own benefits will be forced to step down or cancel the membership. By purging
I don't mean filling it in with 'yes-men': they don't have to be obliged to love Trump; criticism is essential, but these people
have to be able to differentiate between the personal and common when on service. They all have to be loyal to the America First.
If you call yourself 'Republican' then behave like one or choose another party. Such RINOs are materially motivated - they never
couldn't build a career in the Dems Party, especially now, with the Squad; they can't start their own Party - nobody will vote them,
because they'll be the party of traitors and sell-outs. Benny Too Too
deploritarian •
2 days ago
No your corrupt corp fraud media did it to him along with hussein osama's weaponized US agencies! Now go back to watching CNN
lying hate media to get even more stupid
With 25 Million Illegal Aliens in our Country the Democrats have an absolute Lock on this and future Elections by enabling them
to Vote. No Voter ID laws, Sanctuary Cities awarding them all Privileges of US Citizens from Drivers Licenses and access to all welfare
state programs. We are not a Sovereign Nation any longer. ANITFA called it in their Protests "No More BORDERS. Democrats support
this Treasonous Group because it gives them perpetual control of Washington.
Elibar deploritarian •
2 days ago
Better European papers? LOL! I live in Europe and can tell you they're every bit as lying and partisan as the MSM EVERYWHERE!
Practically every European national broadcaster and newspaper gets s o r o s funding, unless you happen to read Hungarian. For instance,
the long defunct Italian Radical party's radio station was close to collapse due to lack of support. They are now back on air admitting
the Hungarian pos gave them almost 400,000 euro if they supported 'immigration'. Read the Beano, it's far more informative.
The GOP will stand with Trump, and Trump will be legally reelected. The Michigan Legislature
just convened a special session to consider the widespread ballot stuffing, technical
"glitches," and other suspicious activity in their election. Everyone in Michigan knows that
Trump and James won that election in a landslide.
The Democrats all stopped counting in numerous states on election night to give them time to
"create" some extra mail-in Biden votes.
The legislature, controlled by the GOP, will invalidate the election if there is evidence of
fraud. They have the Constitutional right to instruct the electors. America will not let the
Democrats steal an election the way they do in Venezuela. THIS JUST IN: The Wisconsin
legislature, controlled also by the GOP, has been called to investigate voter fraud too!!
Milwaukee had an unprecedented 91% return rate, more than any precinct in history by 20 points.
No fraud? We'll see. TruLogix Dennis
Mastin •
2 days ago
Yeah good luck. The work has been done. The ballots removed are long gone. GOP is to blame
this was obvious and they put nothing in place to stop this knowing it was most likely part of
the plan with all of the dems fighting tooth and nail for mail in. Bullet2354 Avery Bierce •
2 days ago • edited
In places like Michigan, more republicans requested Absentee Ballots than Democrats...
And More republicans returned their Absentee Ballots than Democrats....
The 20% could be mostly Biden... but 80-20%. Dems did pick up votes... but so did Trump!
And while I know you feel some republicans did not like Trump... all polling done this year
shows 89-94% of Republicans were supporting Trump - actually much higher than Dem support for
Biden...
- the Trump 'Voter Enthusiasm was off the charts"..... Biden had historic LOW 'voter enthusiasm
most of the summer.
Also - many Bernie People (about 25% in spring) stated they would never vote Democrat after
what the DNC did to Bernie in 2016 and 2020. Maybe the came back to Biden - but I don't know...
I did not see Bernie people rallying for Joe at all.
I think the "ILLEGAL BALLOT ISSUE" IS NOW WHAT THE FOCUS is moving too...
Voting Laws were abused... Late ballots, fake registrations, 'the dead,' ghost mail in
ballot.... -and intentionally and illegally manipulated ballots - even poll workers admitting
they tossed Trump votes because they hate him so much...
Of course, support for Biden isn't in issue. Exasperation with Trump is clearly the
issue.
Independents don't generally support Trump this year.
I don't think many Bernie people would vote for Trump. That doesn't make much sense.
Yes, clearly Trump wants lawyers to argue about ballots being illegal. I guess he thinks they
might be able to show enough ballots were illegal, and that most of the illegal ballots were
for Biden. Ball is in their court on that, I guess. But in court, Trump won't be able to argue
in the form of tweets that say "we've been hearing about so much fraud." Time to put
up.
Court challenges are coming.... that is for sure...
Supreme Court already has the PA rulings and is looking at that.
I do think overall Election Integrity has been compromised... at almost every level and
every step of the process. Ghost ballots sent out, Mail in ballots sold for cash, 'the dead,'
Fake Ids', out of state voters voting multiple times, dates and signatures altered, ballots
trashed by partisan poll workers, ballots altered, software 'errors' (that seem to favor one
party about 100% of the time) ...
It is too much.... I have seen a few poll workers arrested for trying to slide multiple
votes through a machine - and I though 'well just few votes won't matter' - but now... the
Trust is broken...
If anything good can come of all this - I hope the "Voting Process" is overhauled 100%...
maybe even to the level of BlockChain.... Bullet2354 Mike •
a day ago
My concern is not the actual count... however.
My concern is that Voter Laws were abused... significantly.
illegal votes counted, illegal processes used - a really corrupted vote system..... The Law
was not followed.
2016 MI was bad enough with the failed RECOUNT.... Detroit has always had massive counting
errors, bribery scandals, constant inconsistencies, pay to vote schemes, 'walking around money'
- and the STATE has know this for 60 years! ... yet never moved to fix it. I think it has grown
'out of control' in 2020.
I used to 'give a little' for a few fraudulent votes here or there.... a few Dead people get
a ballot... a few data base errors.
This year - the Fraud has crossed the line.
I don't trust the count. - VOTE INTEGRITY HAS COLLAPSED.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, analysts on both the left and right noticed that
President Trump had the potential to grow his base of white working-class voters. Five
Thirty-Eight's
David Wasserman noted that over 44 million non-college-educated white voters who were not
even registered to vote before the 2016 election concentrated heavily in the Midwest, including
2.6 million in Pennsylvania, 2.2 million in Ohio, 900,000 in Wisconsin, and 500,000 in Iowa.
All the Trump campaign needed to do was locate them and register a fraction of them, and it
would be smooth sailing till election day.
Rather than employing a strategy that looked to find the missing white working-class voter,
the Trump campaign devised a plan to drive support from minority voters. They released both the
Platinum Plan for black Americans and the American Dream plan for Hispanic Americans, promising
hundreds of billion dollars to revive their communities and a series of other identity-driven
policies.
This was successful to a point. The Hispanic turnout in Florida and Texas were large enough
to deliver Trump a much larger victory than most people expected and helped keep Arizona and
Nevada competitive even as he shed voters in the suburbs and among Independents as well as
college-educated whites. Among black voters, exit polls showed Trump received 19 percent of the
black voters between 25 and 44 years-old. However, he didn't budge the number of older black
Americas who make up a majority of voters in their racial group.
That plan was always doomed to fail due to the small share of minority voters in the Midwest
that were up for grabs. There weren't enough Hispanic voters or black Americans willing to flip
to the GOP in those states. So they relied on their pool of existing voters and resting their
fate on a ground game.
To the Trump campaign and the Wisconsin Republican Party's credit, they ran a fantastic
operation in the state. The President's campaign increased his support and turnout in 22 of the
23 counties he flipped from President Obama in 2016. Even more astonishing, only two of those
counties had turnout under 90 percent. Some counties like Price, Marquette, and Pepin had close
to 95 percent turnout.
In the county of Kenosha, which saw race riots and acts of violence from Black Lives Matter
supporters and members of Antifa, Trump increased his margin from .3 percent in 2016 to 3.2
percent in 2020, becoming the first Republican to win the county in back-to-back elections
since 1928.
The ground game and high level of support from working-class white counties couldn't make up
because the missing white vote stayed missing. In the 23 Obama-Trump counties, the number of
registered voters declined by nearly 8,000 voters from January 2017 to November 2020 even
though the population increased in these areas.
So Trump's campaign had to work harder with a smaller group of people. Most of the
non-college-educated white Wisconsinites that didn't vote in 2016 remained untapped in 2020.
For over three years, the campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars chasing phantom voters
in deep blue states like New Mexico rather than looking at their natural base sitting
underneath their nose.
Had those funds been redirected to registering and turning out between five and ten percent
of those non-college-educated white voters they missed in 2016, they wouldn't have to worry
about suburbanites defecting to Biden. Fears of voters fraud or illegal vote count wouldn't
have been a concern if they just reached out to their natural constituency.
There's a good chance that the same story could be told in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and
Minnesota. This election wouldn't have been close if they only worked on registering the people
most likely to vote for them, rather than banking on minority voters who just weren't in the
Rust Belt.
As a boomer, I learned very early how evil and corrupt the democrat party can be. Never
voted for a democrat traitor my entire life. Maybe get a little experience under your belt and
you'll learn. Unless you're already a straight up Commie.
As Tucker said it's fact that Detroit and Philadelphia have a history of rigging elections.
doesn't prove they're doing it this time, but people worried about it are as far from crazy as
it gets.
Why are Democrats descending into entitled rages at demands for transparency, or even just
explanations of what they are doing? We told to be patient with the mail-in vote for weeks,
then they are totally impatient and seething outraged hatred with working through our concerns
about fraud. Their protesters are already taking to the streets chanting "count every vote,"
which is where Trump's slogan, "every legal vote" comes from. Did they have the same emotional
outbursts in the past times when we know for a fact they were rigging urban elections?
Trump was an outsider. The deep state won. There's never been such a relentless,
full-spectrum media propaganda campaign against a president such as this. Americans are
mostly dumb media creatures, especially the ignorant young who are infantile consumers of
Facebook and other twaddle. Corporations such as Apple poured hundreds of millions into BLM
and other front groups. And don't forget the massive terror campaign in the streets.
Capitalist globalism has retaken the presidency.
The white men who failed to vote for Trump in this election are incapable of grasping the
concept of 'Incrementalism'.
How do you think the Frankfurt School's virulently anti-White Cultural Marxists managed to
achieve the success that they have achieved since the 1960s? These subversive termites did
not go full bore and try to shove their anti-White, anti-Western agenda down the throats of
an America that, at the time, was still almost 90% White European. Instead, they began their
steady 'march through the institutions' using stealth tactics – relying on
incrementalism. One tiny step at a time, so as to not alert their target of destruction
– White Americans.
Trump is not the savior of White America – he proved that over the last 4 years.
But, he was a step in the right direction and these White males who were not 100 percent
satisfied by his performance while in office lack the intelligence and patience that is
necessary for TeamWhite during this fight for our very survival.
Our objective is to make sure that the Trumpism – populism, nationalism, rejection
of globalism, rejection of massive third world immigration into the USA, and a cessation of
fighting endless wars for Israel's sole benefit – these concepts must not be dumped by
the GOP. If a Republican politician starts spouting globalism – or supporting amnesty
– or calling for more wars – he or she needs to be thrown OUT of office as soon
as possible and replaced by a Trumpist candidate.
Brad Griffin is an extremely low IQ, dangerously clueless, checkers playing retard who is
too stupid to comprehend the strategy of the anti-White enemy and he thinks he can throw a
hissy fit and somehow boost the amount of respect that other pro-White people have for
him?
It is due to sanctimonious morons like him that the White race is in the existential
crisis situation we now find ourselves in. These 'absolutists' and 'purists' are going to be
the death of our race of people.
By the way, there have already been observations elsewhere on the fact that White men
supported Trump less than before. Not a revelation.
I had no idea if he would lose White men prior to the election, but I thought it a
possibility. I'd see him stand up there at rallies in front of a massive sea of White people
and he'd start bragging about all the shit he'd done for Blacks, Hispanics, and Women, but
nary a mention of White men.
And what's with his hangouts with Kanye West? Saying he's the least racist person in the
room. And the Platinum Plan? Is this shit why we elected you, chief?
I guarantee that no White men were thrilled to hear about blacks being let out of jail.
The more blacks in jail, the better. They need to be kept where less of them can procreate.
If I were POTUS, I find out which crimes black women were good at and increase the penalties
for those, so we could lock up the breeders.
The election is being stolen but once again the establishment dramatically misread the lay
of the political landscape among the American population. The adjustments that were made
ahead of time to the paperless electronic voting machines were not sufficient to overcome the
votes for Trump and so the establishment has to fall back on much more difficult and risky
approaches to cooking the count. To help cover this more challenging and time-consuming
operation the "Mighty Wurlitzer" has the mass media chanting in chorus that the Trump
Administration's charges of fraud are "baseless" before investigations can be done to
determine if the charges have a basis.
There will be no "revenge" against the Democrats. If the American public accepts
the results of the fraud then the establishment (Democrats and Republicans) will heave a
"Huuuge" sigh of relief for dodging the bullet and things will return to
"normal" as they were with previous presidents as figureheads for the State. There
will be nothing remotely like the ludicrous "Russiagate" hysteria that the mass media
indulged in against Trump. Something truly baseless will have to be found for the Republicans
to rant at the Democrats about like Obama's birth certificate, but the real issues will be
dropped like hot potatoes by both "teams" .
The establishment will then try to restart "Project for a New American Century" .
This is bad news for Syria as the "Assad Curse" will start getting more exercise
again. This is also bad news for Russia as the PNAC crowd are entirely certain that the
Russians are bluffing about engaging the Empire kinetically. They are Russians, after all,
right? You just have to push them hard enough like Reagan did and they will roll over.
At least that is what the PNAC crowd thinks. The PNACers rely for their brainpower on the
PMC ( "Professional, Managerial class" ), who as c1ue pointed out are "...
the middle managers, doctors, lawyers, MBAs, tenured professors, finance types and what not
who are divorced from the actual hands-on labor." That part about being "divorced from
the actual hands-on labor" is important because it means they have nothing mooring them
to reality.
[Aside: I have often mentioned that economics is the keystone social science, and
contemporary economics being based around vacuous capitalist apologetics renders the entire
realm of the social sciences a limp and constantly shifting mass of liquid shite with no
predictive power and only serving to sell pop culture self-help books. Psychology is where
the social sciences bump up against the biological sciences. This is how economics plays such
an important role in real (not pop) psychology. One's occupation; how one makes a living; how
one puts food on the table, is the core of human identity (skin tone isn't anywhere close).
The more that individuals fulfill employment roles that are entirely socially constructed and
the further they are from direct involvement in the process of transforming natural resources
into tangible items humans use for living, then the more tenuous and, to put it politely,
more "abstract" and subject to reinterpretation their association with physical
reality becomes. This is why c1ue 's PMCs, despite being very intelligent and highly
educated, can make such profound mistakes that get hayseed farmers scratching their heads in
amazement.]
The PNAC gang (Biden/Harris is their front) will now "shirtfront" Russia and
"get in their face" . They will escalate until they succeed at their plans. Trump's
escalations were almost entirely symbolic and meaningless, but the PNACer's escalations will
be kinetic. When Iran is once again forced to retaliate against the empire and
missile-strikes some US assets, the PNAC people will escalate and respond with ten times the
violence where Trump had ordered the empire to stand down.
Unfortunately for the empire, America's economic decline is systemic; it is baked into
capitalism. It cannot be reversed. While Trump hastened the empire's diplomatic decline and
poisoned its "soft power" , Biden/Harris will hasten the empire's economic
decline.
As for the Fort Detrick flu, the mass media will now try to downplay it in order to get
workers back to making the elites some profits, but the cases and fatalities will continue to
increase. There will be no more effective countering of the pandemic by Team Blue than Team
Red because the US simply doesn't have the tools, either medically, culturally, or socially,
to do anything about it.
Four years of the deep state/establishment exposing itself in panicked hysteria, only to
now fade back into the background with nothing gained from those four years. I wonder how the
posters here who think it was all part of an elaborate plan will spin their tales of the
omnipotent empire now that it can no longer be said "Trump hasn't started a war YET
but he will once he cements his image as 'Glorious Leader'!!"
Biden/Harris being installed in such an obvious manner is not a display of the
establishment's power, but rather is proof of their weakness and incompetence.
Financial oligarchy fully controls neoliberal Dems and this "scholar" does even use the term neoliberalism to describe the US elections.
What a jerk.
"Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people
changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed." -- that a false, phoby statiment.
Election for Obama and for Hillary were conducted at the different stages of the crisis of neoliberalism. In Hillary case voters ejected
the candidate from neoliberal establishment.
David Shor got famous by getting fired. In late May, amid widespread protests over George Floyd's murder, the 28-year-old data
scientist tweeted out a study that found nonviolent
demonstrations were more effective than "riots" at pushing public opinion and voter behavior leftward in 1968.
Many Twitter users -- and
(reportedly) some of Shor's colleagues and clients at the data firm Civis Analytics -- found this post insensitive. A day later,
Shor publicly apologized for his tweet. Two
weeks after that, he'd lost his job as Civis's head of political data science -- and become a byword for the excesses of so-called
cancel
culture . (Shor has not discussed his firing publicly due to a nondisclosure agreement, and the details of his termination remain
undisclosed).
... ... ...
So there's a big constellation of issues. The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different
from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.
If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue -- choice, guns, unions, health care, etc. -- you gave
people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options, and then had 1,000 Americans fill it out, you would find that
Democratic elected officials are to the left of 90 to 95 percent of people.
And the reason is that while voters may have more left-wing views than Joe Biden on a few issues, they don't have the same consistency
across their views. There are like tons of pro-life people who want higher taxes, etc. There's
a paper by the political scientist
David Broockman that made this point really famous -- that "moderate" voters don't have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent
ones. Some people responded to media coverage of that paper by saying, "Oh, people are just answering these surveys randomly, issues
don't matter." But that's not actually what the paper showed. In a separate section, they tested the relevance of issues by presenting
voters with hypothetical candidate matchups -- here's a politician running on this position, and another politician running on the
opposite -- and they found that issue congruence was actually very important for predicting who people voted for.
So this suggests there's a big mass of voters who agree with us on some issues, and disagree with us on others. And whenever we
talk about a given issue, that increases the extent to which voters will cast their ballots on the basis of that issue.
Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people
changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked a lot more
about immigration, and because of that, correlation between preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went
up. In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn't. And so the correlation between views on health care and which
candidate people voted for went down.
So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some
voters and loses you other voters. But this is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they talk about.
Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes.
But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats
need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in
practice, means not talking about immigration.
... ... ...
The problem is that swing voters don't trust either party. So if you get Democrats to embrace Abolish ICE, that won't get moderate-
ish , racist white people to support it; it will just turn them into Republicans. So that's the trade-off. When you embrace
unpopular things, you become more unpopular with marginal voters, but also get a fairly large segment of the public to change its
views. And the latter can sometimes produce long-term change.
But it's a hard trade-off. And I don't think anyone ever says something like, "I think it was a good trade for us to lose the
presidency because we raised the salience of this issue." That's not generally what people want. They don't want to make an unpopular
issue go from 7 percent to 30 percent support. They want something like what happened with gay marriage or marijuana legalization,
where you take an issue that is 30 percent and then it goes to 70 percent. And if you look at the history of those things, it's kind
of clear that campaigns didn't do that.
... ... ...
But ultimately, when people hear from both sides, they're gonna revert to some kind of partisan baseline. But there's not a nihilism
there; it's not just that Democratic-leaning voters will adopt the Democratic position or Republican-leaning ones will automatically
adopt the Republican one. Persuadable voters trust the parties on different issues.
And there's a pretty basic pattern -- both here and in other countries -- in which voters view center-left parties as empathetic.
Center-left parties care about the environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know, center-right parties
are seen as more "serious," or more like the stern dad figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering
unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.
... ... ..
What's powerful about nonviolent protest -- and particularly nonviolent protest that incurs a disproportionate response from the
police -- is that it can shift the conversation, in a really visceral way, into the part of this issue space that benefits Democrats
and the center left. Which is the pursuit of equality, social justice, fairness -- these Democratic-loaded concepts -- without the
trade-off of crime or public safety. So I think it is really consistent with a pretty broad, cross-sectional body of evidence (a
piece of which I obviously tweeted at some point
) that nonviolent protest is politically advantageous, both in terms of changing public opinion on discrete issues and electing parties
sympathetic to the left's concerns.
As for "the abolish the police" stuff, I think the important thing there is that basically no mainstream elected officials embraced
it.
... ... ...
But there's always a mix of violent and nonviolent protest; or, there's always some violence that occurs at nonviolent protests.
And it's not a situation where a drop of violence spoils everything and turns everybody into fascists. The research isn't consistent
with that. It's more about the proportions. Because the mechanism here is that when violence is happening, people become afraid.
They fear for their safety, and then they crave order. And order is a winning issue for conservatives here and everywhere around
the world. The basic political argument since the French Revolution has been the left saying, "Let's make things more fair," and
the right saying, "If we do that, it will lead to chaos and threaten your family."
But when you have nonviolent protests that goad security forces into using excessive force against unarmed people -- preferably
while people are watching -- then order gets discredited, and people experience this visceral sense of unfairness. And you can change
public opinion.
... ... ..
So, as a result, campaigns centered around this cosmopolitan elite's internal disagreements over economic issues. But over the
past 60 years, college graduates have gone from being 4 percent of the electorate to being more like 35. Now, it's actually possible
-- for the first time ever in human history -- for political parties to openly embrace cosmopolitan values and win elections; certainly
primary and municipal elections, maybe even national elections if you don't push things too far or if you have a recession at your
back. And so Democratic elites started campaigning on the things they'd always wanted to, but which had previously been too toxic.
And so did center-left parties internationally
... .....
Many on the left are wary of the Democratic Party's growing dependence on wealthy voters and donors. But you've argued that the
party's donor class actually pulls it to the left,
as big-dollar Democratic donors are more progressive -- even on economic issues -- than the median Democratic voter. I'm skeptical
of that claim. After all, so much regulation and legislation never crosses ordinary Americans' radar. It seems implausible to me
that, during negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Obama administration
fought to export America's generous patent protections on pharmaceuticals to the developing world, or to expand the reach of
the Investor
State Dispute Settlement process, because they felt compelled to placate swing voters. Similarly, it's hard for me to believe
that the primary reason why Democrats did not significantly expand collective-bargaining rights under Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton,
and Barack Obama was voter hostility to labor-law reform rather than the unified opposition of business interests to such a policy.
So why couldn't it be the case that, when it comes to policy, a minority of big-dollar donors who are highly motivated -- and reactionary
-- on discrete issues pull the party to the right, even as wealthier Democrats give more ideologically consistent responses to survey
questions?
... ... ...
David Broockman showed in a recent paper
-- and I've seen this in internal data -- that people who give money to Democrats are more economically left wing than Democrats
overall. And the more money people give, the more economically left wing they are. These are obviously the non-transactional donors.
But people underestimate the extent to which the non-transactional money is now all of the money. This wasn't true ten years ago.
So then you get to the question: Why do so many moderate Democrats vote for center-right policies that don't even poll well? Why
did Heidi Heitkamp vote to
deregulate banks in 2018
, when the median voter in North Dakota doesn't want looser regulations on banks? But the thing is, while that median voter doesn't
want to deregulate banks, that voter doesn't want a senator who is bad for business in North Dakota. And so if the North Dakota business
community signals that it doesn't like Heidi Heitkamp, that's really bad for Heidi Heitkamp, because business has a lot of cultural
power.
I think that's a very straightforward, almost Marxist view of power: Rich people have disproportionate cultural influence. So
business does pull the party right. But it does so more through the mechanism of using its cultural power to influence public opinion,
not through donations to campaigns.
So, in your view, the reason that Democrats aren't more left wing on economic issues isn't because they're bought off, but because
the median voter is "bought off," in the sense of responding to cues from corporate interests?
... ... ...
So I think people underestimate Democrats' openness to left-wing policies that won't cost them elections. And there are a lot
of radical, left-wing policies that are genuinely very popular.
Codetermination is popular. A
job guarantee is popular. Large minimum-wage increases are popular and could literally end market poverty.
All these things will engender opposition from capital. But if you focus on the popular things, and manage to build positive earned
media around those things, then you can convince Democrats to do them. So we should be asking ourselves, "What is the maximally radical
thing that can get past Joe Manchin." And that's like a really depressing optimization problem. And it's one that most leftists don't
even want to approach, but they should. There's a wide spectrum of possibilities for what could happen the next time Democrats take
power, and if we don't come in with clear thinking and realistic demands, we could end up getting rolled.
... ... ...
The Senate is even worse. And much worse than people realize. The Senate has always been, on paper, biased against Democrats.
It overrepresents states that are rural and white, and mechanically, that gives a structural advantage to Republicans. For 50 years
or so, the tipping-point state in the Senate has been about one percentage point more Republican than the country as a whole. And
that advantage did go up in 2016, because white rural voters trended against us (it went up to 3 percent).
... ... ..
I think one big lesson of 2018 was that Trump's coalition held up. Obviously, we did better as the party out of power. But if
you look at how we did in places like Maine or Wisconsin or Michigan, it looked more like 2016 than 2012. Donald Trump still has
a giant structural advantage in the Electoral College.
The old guard wants us to lay down and take it, but this election is far for over. It's time
to fight, and Trump is our man.
Mitt Romney would have conceded by now. John McCain would have conceded Tuesday night.
George Bush would have called it quits, and then invaded Iraq for good measure. Thank God in
heaven for Donald J. Trump.
Speaking late Thursday from the White House, President Trump predicted that, if all legal
votes (and only legal votes) were counted, they would show that he has won the election.
Over the past few days, former Vice President Biden has consistently made similar claims,
without the caveat that votes must be legally cast. As has become the norm when conservatives
voice concerns over a questionable election, the president's observations and forecast were
quickly "fact-checked" by the mainstream media and censored by Big Tech platforms -- while
Biden's went unchecked.
The facts, we are told, show a clear Biden victory. Any suggestion to the contrary, any
attempt to investigate reports of Democratic misconduct, is dismissed as right-wing
conspiracizing, or the petulant protestations of a sorry bunch of sore losers. (Russiagate, it
seems, has been memory-holed.) The decent thing, they say, would be concession -- take the
numbers at face value and call it a day. To his great credit, it looks like Trump will do no
such thing.
This election has essentially come down to six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Of these six, only Arizona and Nevada really remain question
marks. Michigan and Wisconsin have already been called for Biden by most sources, and
Pennsylvania and Georgia are expected to follow close behind. Even if Arizona and Nevada both
went for Trump in the end -- the latter seems likely, while the former is a long shot --
victory in the other four would secure Biden a comfortable electoral college win at 289. It can
hardly be ignored that the major blue cities in each of these states -- Atlanta, Detroit,
Philadelphia, and Milwaukee -- are all dominated by strong, old-school, Tammany-style machines.
It can hardly be forgotten that urban Democratic machines are not exactly known for the
integrity of their elections.
This is the question being asked by Trump and other right-wingers: not whether some massive
conspiracy has been orchestrated at the national level, with Biden pulling the strings from a
basement in Delaware, but whether the substantial misconduct that has long defined city
political machines is influencing outcomes in these four key locations. This is not a question
on which we can play it safe and civil. We need a full court press to get answers from people
who have shown themselves unwilling to provide them.
Pay attention to the mainstream argument: Trump's claims have not been conclusively proven,
and so the mere suggestion is considered far beyond the pale. For many, the president's
assertion that 1) misconduct has been observed on a large scale in all of these key locations
and 2) this misconduct will be challenged in court, is the conclusive proof they need that we
are sliding into the dictatorship they predicted four years ago. The concerns are rebuked with
the usual dismissals -- unfounded, unproven, unsubstantiated, "without evidence" -- and the
narrative that Biden is the clear winner tightens its grip with every word out of every
anchor's mouth. But more than enough preliminary evidence has been provided in each of these
places to justify -- no, demand -- investigation.
The fundamental reason all these claims remain "unsubstantiated" is that the very people who
reject them on this basis are the ones who are supposed to be substantiating them -- and
they have absolutely, entirely abandoned this basic duty. Anyone who tries to look into the
evidence is denounced as a kook or (in Trump's case) a caudillo. We can hardly expect an honest
accounting of what's happened in the blue cities when talking about what's happened in the blue
cities has suddenly become the eighth deadly sin.
This is why -- besides his unique perspective and approach drawing together the broadest
coalition a Republican has built in sixty years -- Trump is actually the perfect man for the
moment. The entire media establishment is aligned to declare a Biden victory prematurely, with no
intention of investigating election inconsistencies. Local and state governments in the places
that matter are hardly more reliable -- Michigan Attorney General Jocelyn Benson is an alumna of
the SPLC, and Pennsylvania AG Josh Shapiro promised four days before the election that Trump
would not win the state. The docile functionaries and milquetoast figureheads of the pre-Trump
GOP could not have handled the fight ahead -- and likely would have run from it.
In fact, we know that they would have, because that's exactly what they're urging Trump to do
now. If you Google "trump+thursday+speech" or any similar query, it's going to take a whole lot
of digging to actually find the speech Trump delivered on Thursday. What you will find instead
are abundant "fact-checks" of the speech that don't actually check any of the facts, and page
upon page of ritual denunciations by the chattering classes.
These denunciations are hardly limited to the left-wingers behind the anchors' desks at every
major network. CNN is proudly touting a clip of Rick Santorum, former Republican senator from PA
and current senior political analyst at that esteemed news source, expressing his shock and
disappointment that the president would call into question certain aspects of the election.
Santorum voiced his hope that "Republicans will stand up at this moment and say what needs to be
said about the integrity of our election." (The irony is apparently lost on him.)
Similarly, Scott Walker, who was one of the first to exit the Republican primary field in 2016
and lost his reelection bid for governor of Wisconsin in 2018 to Democrat Tony Evers, has issued
a number of tweets insisting that a recount -- which the Trump campaign has already called for --
would be pointless. He has observed that, in normal elections, recounts have done very little to
alter tallies. There's no sense to this line: this is not a normal election. Delays in ballot
counting alone are enough to cause concern. Add to that the occasional full stops, after which
huge quantities of Biden ballots conveniently appear. Add to that Wisconsin's level of voter
turnout -- not over 100%, as some online rumors earlier suggested, but still near unbelievably
high. It would be the farthest thing from a surprise if a more careful inspection really did
shake things up this time around.
The same is true in Michigan, where Biden has made similarly stunning gains in witching-hour
ballot dumps. On top of that, the transposition of a few thousand Trump votes to Biden in Antrim
County has now been chalked up to a glitch in the tabulation software -- software that happens to
be used in 46 other counties. We now know there is a problem with the way the votes are
counted, and even the slightest chance that even the smallest repetition of that glitch has
occurred elsewhere demands the strictest scrutiny be applied to the Michigan vote.
All this and more can be said for Pennsylvania and Georgia, the two states most vital to the
president's reelection. Pennsylvania in particular is playing fast and loose with mail-in
ballots, and dubious rules changes need to be challenged in court. Philadelphia has a reputation
for machine-style corruption that puts Daley-era Chicago to shame. Election workers there have
also repeatedly blocked GOP poll watchers from observing the process they are legally entitled to
oversee. The same thing is happening in Detroit, where cardboard has actually been placed over
the windows to prevent people from seeing inside the central counting location. If you have
nothing to hide, right?
The president has every reason not to take the narrative at face value. This doesn't mean we
throw out the election, and it doesn't mean we're undermining democracy. It means we need to
exhaust every avenue and turn over every stone. Everything that can be brought before a court
needs to be, and every ballot that raises red flags needs to be explained. Put the screws to
every machine operative from Milwaukee to Atlanta, and make sure every word holds up.
Somebody needs to give a very good answer as to why the number of ballots left to count in
Fulton County keeps changing every time we go to sleep -- and changing by margins that boggle the
mind. Force the people who run the machines to speak, and see how long their story lasts.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Declan Leary is the Collegiate Network Fellow at The American Conservative and a
graduate of John Carroll University. His work has been published at National Review ,
Crisis, and elsewhere.
The fundamental reason all these claims remain "unsubstantiated" is that the very people
who reject them on this basis are the ones who are supposed to be substantiating them --
and they have absolutely, entirely abandoned this basic duty.
This is such a bizarre sentence. Why would government officials, investigators or
journalists or whoever be duty bound to substantiate the existence voter fraud.
They've basically done the opposite actually, and debunked the claims. Nearly every
single case of claimed voter fraud has been shown to be inaccurate, a lie, simply misleading
and/or a misunderstanding.
"Suitcases" of ballots? Actually it's photography equipment of local news broadcasts. Poll
watchers getting "pushed out" of wards? Because PA law says you are legally only allowed a
set amount of pre-certified watchers in each precinct, who must wear face masks. "Dead
voters" appearing in ballot rolls? Could exist, doesn't matter though because votes are
crosschecked with databases, and even if you died on the way home from dropping off your
mail-in ballot , your vote will be deleted, let alone if you're some potential fraud
voter who died 30 years ago.
In fact, here's a good nice long Twitter thread explaining most of the major accusations
flying around social media:
I'm just going to reply to my own very long post with an addendum:
The example of Detroit is given in the article as if papering the windows over was some
heinous thing. The reason why we have to protect the identity of poll workers is intimidation. We
already have a situation in Fulton County, GA where some enterprising conservatives have
doxxed a poll worker and actually sent the poor man into hiding.
His license plate number was posted onto Twitter, and he is now hiding at a friend's
house, because conservative activists falsely accused him of throwing out
ballots.
You are a liar. You obviously have never actually WORKED an election. I have. Several,
in fact.
I have personally witnessed ballot fraud on a large scale, coupled with utter
incompetence. Palm Beach county, 2012.
I oversaw the correction of 60,000 "defective" absentee ballots. Each correction table
was to be staffed with 1 Dem, 1 Repub, who cross-checked each others work. The corrupt
Supervisor of Elections harassed and threatened Republican workers and monitors. Nasty as
hell. Corrupt as hell. AND SHE NEVER FOLLOWED HER OWN INSTRUCTIONS, AND WHEN CHALLENGED
POLITELY, SHE THREATENED TO THROW ALL REPUBLICANS OUT OF THE ELECTIONS SITE.
I PERSONALLY witnessed CORRECTED ABSENTEE BALLOTS taken to the back where the voting
TABULATORS were, and watched as each ballot was removed from the box, examined, and some
were thrown in the trash can. And I had seen a lot of ballots with Romney marked for
President, with a straight Dem ticket down-ballot races all Dem. This is a BLUE
county.
I reported this, and nothing was done. Cowardly Republicans do this... Nothing. I
often wonder how many other blue cou ties have threatened Republican poll watchers &
workers.
Your slander of decent people means NOTHING, except that you are a liar of gigantic
proportions. Go over to Daily Kos, where you can fellowship with your vile compatriot
scumbags.
I support the view that it is entirely possible for a county full of good people to
lean hard against the "other side" in a hot disputed election. In 2014 and 2016 the
polling place was a strange church miles away; the workers there had a hand-lettered sign
posted that demanded driver licenses as ID, even though State law did not demand that
form of ID alone. This year I was one of the people who were locked out of the voting
process; the details do not matter, but it happened, and I refused to kowtow to the
system to get my registration card renewed. My county went 80% for Trump, so in fact my
lone vote would not have mattered for much anyway.
No doubt some people were denied the right to vote. Historically, the right to vote is
denied blacks and latinos more often than whites. But to make a blanket claim of a stolen
election, just the President, mind you, is an extraordinary claim that demands
extraordinary proof. Trump does not even claim that any of those down ballot Repubs,
candidates who did just fine for themselves, were denied votes. Just him.
If the democrats rigged the election then why didn't they give themselves the Senate?
Why did they lose seats in the House? And why did they not take back a single statehouse?
Trump lost because the DNC opened their arms to the Bush-era neocons from the Lincoln
Project. They're all republicans that voted for Biden and down ticket republicans and now
Biden will be putting them in his cabinet. If the election was rigged then you can thank
the those republicans for betraying their party, but the DNC is incapable of rigging
anything without help from the other side.
Your mistake is conflating "Republicans" and "republican voters." Not the same thing.
Trump was sent to DC to deal, among other things with the "Republicans."
Why didn't they give themselves the senate? A couple of hundred thousand ballots with
a 100% tally for one side were manufactured to influence one election. Only one really
mattered. Several million Americans were impoverished and terrorized all year long to
ensure this result.
In any case, they don't need the Senate -- the "Republicans" will simply roll
over. They always do. Cocaine Mitch is already signaling his intent to do so.
I saw his spokesperson the other day said any Biden cabinet picks will have to be
approved by him. Doesn't sound like Mitch is rolling over at all. We're going to see the
Lincoln Project repugs (Bush era neocons) in his cabinet and giving the MIC a seat at the
table again.
Just another 4 years of Bush/Obama policies. I think we can agree that both
sides lost this election and that's sadly not new either.
Maybe its time the for
"fringes" to unite against the center.
Speaking as a progressive myself, I dont feel like we united as much as we stayed
home. No one in the 2016 election was representing anything we wanted. The only thing
that united us was our hatred of Hillary. ;) hahaha
We can't unify under either established party. I'm talking about really uniting and
taking both out with a real populist platform (healthcare, ending our wars and getting
money out of politics), all things most Americans are in favor of. What do we have to
lose at this point? There's something horribly broken with our government when every 4
years both sides are left frustrated when the will of the people is never represented in
our supposed representative democracy. We gotta try something different.
Fox News has aired video of certified poll observers in philly being prevented from
entering polling places. but keep running interference- its obvious you wouldn't care if
you KNEW fraud had taken place...
Other Murdoch-owned news companies have done much worse! In England, his reporters
spoofed a call from a dead girl's phone, giving her parents false hope. They bugged and
bribed politicians, pretty ugly stuff. Here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Fox News is a subsidiary NewsCorp, peddler of tabloid propaganda , promulgated by an
Australian plutocrat Rupert Murdoch, who is no friend of the USA. He has been ripping us
apart now for decades for his profit, power, and ego. He has made the GOP his b**ch. Note
how recently he has turned on Trump (not that I mind).
Why would government officials, investigators or journalists or whoever be duty bound
to
the existence voter fraud.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Those who claim to "speak truth to power" have as
their function the investigation and reporting of charges of voter fraud.
Instead, they are nothing but rank partisans, licking the government hand that feeds
them, and simply memory-holing anything that might damage their boy or be thought helpful
to their opponents. Liars and frauds, every last one.
simply memory-holing anything that might damage their boy or be thought helpful to
their opponents.
Whatever you want to claim about lefties with "TDS" or whatever you want to label
them, this sentence is literally a word-for-word description that applies to Trump
supporters.
Just endless ranks of simpletons who will thrust off every piece of evidence and
correction to their accusations.
Write out a comment to debunk things being misconstrued, twisted or lied about, and
Trumpists will waste your time blathering and ranting on about "rank partisans" without
even a hint or lick of irony and self-reflection about how their entire post is actually
about themselves.
I can just as easily dismiss you the same way, but the idea that FB, Twitter, CNN, and
yes -- even Fox -- aren't nakedly partisan is ridiculous nonsense. The least you could do
is pretend to understand what got Trump elected in the first place.
Wall St and the MIC work hand and hand with our corporate media, an industry that's
dominated by 6 corporations. They're not liberal nor conservative, they are only
motivated by money and power and keeping the population divided so that they dont unite
and come for them all.
One only has to look at the Citizens United Supreme Court decision to see how far down
the US has fallen. Now a corporation is a person? If that is so, can't they get
20-to-life when they kill someone? Can't they get the death penalty? NO, they can't; but
they can get all the good things that come from that ruling, without any of the negatives
at all.
Not every last reporter is a rank partisan, but many of them prefer the easy route to
a paycheck. Look up Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Tom Engelhardt, and others like them.
There are honest historians like Howard Zinn and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. There are also
honest whistleblowers who get a bad rep, like Chelsea Manning, Eric Snowden and Julian
Assange. There are still a few journalists of the old school in the world. But they have
to be careful less they find themselves charged with treason under an old law, and spend
the balance of their lives locked down 23 1/2 hours per day in a tiny cell in a US
SuperMax prison.
Excellent article. I am very happy Trump is pushing to open up this election to legal
review, public inspection, recounts, bipartisan review of the ballots, process
violations. We were supposed to be patient and wait for the count, why not the recount.
What is the hurry. If he lost, fine, I want to know that, not just trust anti-Trump,
Democratic activist officials telling me that. There are so many oddities - the Biden
surges coming after down time, always so conveniently. Software turning Republican votes
into Democrat votes. The dead voting. Blocking access to GOP observers. Given the
closeness of the results in the key states that are determining the outcome, it is not
that hard to turn things one way or the other.
The state legislators decide when the mail in ballots are counted. For Florida,
Oregon, Colorado they are counted when they come in and are verified as legal votes. For
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin the legislature decided they could not start
processing the ballots until election day, thus it is impossible get a count of those
ballots before the in person voting was counted.
Barr is asking, "how many people who sent late-arriving mail-in ballots also showed up
to vote on election day?"
It matters because it's the law we all agreed to, and you need to respect the process
to retain the other side's confidence, which your side has not done.
But one thing which may be behind the law is these 100%-Biden ballot dumps that don't
vote for congress. Do you see what's behind Barr's question? Mail-in ballots make ballot
stuffing almost trivial because you can just dump them into the mail. The one problem is
that each envelope has to have a registered voter's name on it, and that name is compared
to who voted in person. To get the mail-in vote counted, and to avoid suspicious
patterns, you need to put a name on there that didn't vote in person. That's much easier
to do after the polls close, and you have collected all the signature books to start
doing the mail-in count.
Maybe they wouldn't have had to skip steps in the process if Trump should have
appointed someone better than DeJoy, and maybe Congress (Republicans in particular)
shouldn't have spent the better part of the last two decades screwing with the USPS.
Delays in ballot counting alone are enough to cause concern. Add to that the
occasional full stops, after which huge quantities of Biden ballots conveniently appear.
Add to that Wisconsin's level of voter turnout -- not over 100%, as some online rumors
earlier suggested, but still near unbelievably high. It would be the farthest thing from
a surprise if a more careful inspection really did shake things up this time
around.
Yeah, what kind of insane ballot-counting system would allow the poll workers to
sleep ? They should be legally required to mainline stimulants until their work is
done! And the only honest way to deliver counts is to transmit each individual ballot one
by one to the state: sending counts in batches must be evidence of fraud! And how is it
possible that after vocally discouraging his voters from voting by mail, there are
relatively few Trump mail-in votes? Very suspicious! Oh and by the way, turnout in
Wisconsin was quite normal:
jeez, it is amazing how uncurious everyone has become...
Uncurious? The uncurious are the people who take videos shared by Steven Crowder, or
whatever right-wing grifter they like, and believe them as gospel truth without verifying
it.
I have literally spent the better part of my precious Friday evening reading and
watching a trove of claimed voter fraud incidents, and I have yet to find a substantially
supported example.
But...duh? You absolutely do have some ballots thrown out in every
election, because they're improperly marked or otherwise somehow invalid. That's not a
conspiracy, that's literally what poll workers have to do. I don't get it, if we think
there are dead people voting (per the above conspiracy) wouldn't we want the workers to
throw them out? Or do we not want them throwing them out? Can't have it both ways!
It doesn't exactly take a brainiac to realize what's happening in the video. The man
on the right is holding a damaged ballot, and reading off the marked selections to
the woman on the left so that she can transcribe the damaged information to a new,
undamaged ballot. You then mark the serial number for the new ballot onto the original,
damaged ballot to keep them together.
And of course, as an extra bonus, the video is zoomed in purposefully to crop out the
bipartisan poll-watchers that are standing right by this duo to make sure that they're
properly transcribing the votes.
This is literally election 101 stuff, but apparently people don't know how it
works.
Come on, you can literally verify or debunk this on the County website. Yes, one claim
going around is that Wards 273 and 274, which was located at the Spanish Immersion School
reported 200% turnout.
Ward 273 had 671 registered voters, and 612 actual voters; Ward 274 had 702 registered
voters and 611 actual voters.
So congratulations, you bought into another easily disprovable lie. I've also seen
claims that the 272nd, 277th, 269th, 234th and 312nd Wards overrated, but you can check
and see that none of that is true either.
And, all of these claims are leaving out an important detail anyways: Wisconsin has
same-day voter registration. It is possible , albeit perhaps unlikely, to have
higher voter counts than number of pre-registered voters because of that.
Ballot harvesting is real:
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/20... This is but one example in my state, and we're also aware of certain places sending
out unrequested ballots. They all deserve jail time.
Let's say I was. Would that make any of the proof I linked untrue? Or is truth only
something that comes out of a party-flag waving conservatives' mouth?
And no, I'm not. I've pretty openly stated multiple times that I voted ASP in the
Presidential race, and both R/D in various spots down the ballot.
Oh, and just in the interest of fairness, there were some conspiracies going
around on the left too on election night. One that I saw was that 300,000 ballots were
undelivered. While yes, many thousands of ballots were likely undelivered, what was
happening wasn't that they were undelivered,
it was that the USPS was skipping scanning the ballots to expedite delivery. That's
why DeJoy likely won't actually get in trouble, because postal branches were
specifically going out of their way to hand-pick ballots and expedite their delivery.
The reason a recount doesn't change anything is because it's just that--a recount.
They take all the ballots that were counted before, and count them again. They're not
looking at whether any ballots should have been thrown out. Fraudulent ballots that were
counted the first time around are counted again.
A recount won't do anything about what the Democrats pulled in Milwaukee.
I also don't understand it. Hasn't the mail-in envelope with the signature and the
voter's name already been thrown away? How will they remove the votes by dead people?
I have heard they're using some procedure intended for ballots that won't scan to
conceal ballots with missing or invalid signatures by copying them at desks that are
supposed to have bipartisan teams. I guess they throw out the original ballot when they
do that to prevent the recount from checking signatures properly?
I guess they throw out the original ballot when they do that to prevent the recount
from checking signatures properly?
No, they do that to prevent any possibllity of the original being mistakenly counted
twice.
As you yourself pointed out, the copying takes place in front of a bipartisan team of
watchers. So for your fantasy to have any validity, you have to believe that BOTH parties
are conspiring together to rig the vote. In which case, your vote is irrelevant, anyway,
right?
If you really care about this, then instead of believing all of these ridiculous
conspiracy theories, why don't you try to actually become educated about how the process
works, and next time volunteer yourself to become a certified poll watcher? Then you will
KNOW the truth.
Those checks were made before the ballot was accepted and counted. They include
checking that it was a legal ballot sent to a specific person. And that the signature
matched that of the registered voter. Only after those checks is the ballot removed from
its envelop. While there may be a few mistakes there aren't anywhere enough to be
material to the final results. The ballots from in person voting are similarly
dissociated from the voters' information.
A big thank you to Mr. Maheras commenting below. Listen to him. He is our savior.
I am close to 80 years old. Old conspiracy advocates began to make extraordinary
claims about most everything when photographs would appear in newspapers. Rorschach
tests. Then came videos , or movie clips on TV. Think the Kennedy tape. Pretty soon we
had personal video equipment. And now cell phones. All Rorschach tests. But those crazy
conspiracies were the fringe long time ago. True belivers. Ideologues. But not the
Republican party leaders.
About 30 years ago the new world order, illuminati, the Bilderbers, now the Davos all
became the subject of the go to conspiracy advocates. Take your pick. One or all . But
one thing for sure, a cabal is taking over the world. Throw in a few Clinton, or Obama
conspiracies. Catch a sighting of Elvis for good measure.
Now all rolled into the Qanon cabal. Democratic pedophilia scum raping children. What
they all have in common is that they are right wing conspiracy advocates. And they all
are foolish.
This article fits in with those conspiracies. And by right wing
advocates naturally. When Clinton lost , her margin of defeat was similar to Trump's
projected defeat. Clinton and the Democrats never asserted fraud. Nor suggested
conspiracies. The political system worked, Trump won.
Now we have a reputable magazine publishing similar outlandish conspiracy theroies to
the ones mentioned above. All without a scintilla of proof. The President of the United
States for months has been setting his base up to claim fraud. And he has. And they have
blindly bought into it.
Long way to tell you that the greatest disappointment of my lifetime is the validation
by conservatives of these kooky ideas. 30 years ago even conservatives would call these
conspiracy peddlers nut jobs.
Now we have a nut job in the white house. The birther in chief. And he just gets
worse. But no one in the Republican party, except for a few tepid critics, will call the
Predident out.
This is the same guy who saw videos of Muslims dancing on 9/11. Or an inaugural crowd
rivaling the largest gathering of human beings ever assembled in the whole history of
mankind. The greatest. The most perfect and strongest
I have never been so disappointed in my President. He has enabled Mr. Leary to peddle
his nonsense. And tragically Leary believes his blather. This is truly heartbreaking. But
it is the world that Leary and his ilk will have to live with.
Me, l'll be gone. Forgetting my own name soon. Someone tell me that what I just read
is a part of my onset dementia.
Lifelong stutterer? What a load of crap. Just watch some old videos of Joe in his
arrogant days on the senate judiciary. He and his good buddy Ted Chappaquidick Kennedy
didn't stutter when they were trashing Clarence Thomas and Judge Bork. Hey it's your
right to vote for a lifer politician who's way past his prime and suffering from a tragic
disease. Climate change - right. More likely God's judgement on a godless nation.
Now we have a reputable magazine publishing similar outlandish conspiracy
theroies
As someone who started reading TAC a long time ago when it really WAS a reputable
magazine, I'm afraid that particular ship started sailing several years ago, and is
almost out of the harbor by now. There was a time when you could come here to find
intelligent, educated, and thoughtful conservatives setting out their views and being
unafraid to engage with responses from all across the entire political spectrum. Now,
Larison is the only one left who consistently meets that description, a couple of others
dabble in reality once in a while, and the rest are descending into Breitbart levels of
paranoid lunacy.
I look forward to seeing the evidence of fraud in a court of law rather than just
circulating on twitter where the standards are somewhat less stringent.
And the president said BEFORE the election that any election he lost would necessarily
be rigged/corrupt. So of course that evidence was going to be found if he lost.....
You can put this is the same category as all these white guys who lost a job because
they were white men. Of course the couldn't possibly make these claims in a court where
discovery could happen and their BS would be exposed.
1. He is a victim/martyr to his right-wing constituency, in much the same way that Erdogan
has always portrayed himself as a 'man of the people' and representative of the poor
conservative rural Turks and still an outsider in comparison to the secular urban elites.
This 'otherness' or being separate from the establishment/elite/'swamp' is very good for
Trumps' image. Even though he is a billionaire and has been part of the US elite for
decades.
2. With the economy going to go through problems due to covid and other issues, Trump can
try and attribute blame for the then incumbent Biden/Harris regime and free himself of any
blame and say that he has better answers.
3. He may well go on to forming his 'Trump TV' with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura
Ingraham as is the current chatter amongst some and be seen as the de facto 'leader of the
opposition', a term not really used in the (dis)United States but common in many/most other
countries.
The United States is a monopoly two-party fascist system. It is a nexus of profiteering
corporate power, and a two-party cabal of American Exceptionalism. The idea the Democrats are
'commies' is laughable and shows how deeply red the Kool Aid runs. The Democrats just told
the Bernie wing of the Party to shut-up or leave. And why not? The Democrats will tally up a
five million vote plurality over Trump by playing to the right. It got them a President
without a Congress. Thank the "Karen" constituency. Mission Accomplished.
Sure, bring on Tucker as the next Trump, or Don Jr or whatever other celebrity fascist you
want. This particular bell of Pavlov's doesn't work on all the dogs. There is a seething
anti-fascist sentiment out there against for-profit healthcare, politics and war. Before a
4th Reich takes hold in the USA, a Civil War will be fought and the left, verified by study
after study, is more intelligent as a group.
The foreign policy of the USA is fully bi-partisan. Did a Democrat make a peep about the
all the weapons-based 'peace deals' Trump made with the Oil Kingdoms? No. Do the Dems
disagree about regime change anywhere the USA contemplates it? No. Do the Dems want to get
rid of anything but bad manners? No.
So please, knock off the existential BS about Dems 'stealing' the election. Stealing what
exactly? The high ground of plausible deniability? Hilarious.
The result of this election can be summarized with one phase "Strange non-death of
neoliberalism."
Joe Biden win is a win the tech companies, the big banks, Beijing, as well a PMC
class.
likbez 11.07.20 at 5:37 pm ( )
It's entirely possible that Biden will be a 1 term President, and this is something that
Democrats should have given some thought to. But they had other, sillier, things on their
mind, and, well, here we are.
They don't care. It is return to business as usual -- classic neoliberalism with the
classic neoliberal globalization on the agenda. And this is all that matter to them.
The people behind Joe Biden are Clinton classic neoliberals. Who ruled the country since
1990th with a well known result.
It is unclear what will happen in 2020 as Biden is a weak politician clearly unable of
dealing with the current crisis the country faces. He is kick the can down the road type of
guy.
And some start speculate that Dems the might get Tucker Carlson in 2024 as the opponent to
Kamala.
(2) From an American perspective, Republican control of the Senate means that the Dems
have limited scope to carry out grandiose economic and social experiments. Which I doubt
Biden is much interested in anyway. (Incidentally, the idea that Biden or Copmala is in any
way a "socialist" is yet another far-fetched MAGA fantasy just ask the folks at Chapo Trap House ). The idea that he came to
power via fraud will not be quite enough to delegitimize the Biden Presidency – it's
not like George W. Bush's narrow and contested victory over Al Gore in Florida remained
much of an issue after a couple of months – but it certainly wouldn't hurt
Republicans to have that as an additional rhetorical tool.
(3) Most consequentially, this substantially discredits American soft power and its
"democracy promotion" efforts.
Who exactly is Joe Biden , the man who may be
our
president come Jan. 20? The truth is, as of right now, we don't really know.
We have no clue what Joe Biden actually thinks, or even if he's capable of thinking. He
hasn't told us and no one's made him tell us for a full year. In fact, it's becoming clear
there is no Joe Biden. The man you may remember from the 1980s is gone.
What remains is a projection of sorts, a hologram designed to mimic the behavior of a
non-threatening political candidate: "Relax, Joe Biden's here. He smiles a lot. Everything's
fine." That's the message from the vapor candidate.
So who's running the projector here? Well, the first thing you should know is that the
people behind Joe Biden aren't liberals. We've often incorrectly called them that. A liberal
believes in the right of all Americans to speak freely, to make a living, to worship their God,
to defend their own families, and to do all of that regardless of what political party they
belong to or what race they happen to be born into or how far from midtown Manhattan they
currently live.
A liberal believes in universal principles, fairly applied. And the funny thing is, all of
that describes most of the 70 million people who just voted for Donald Trump this week. Most of
them don't want to hurt or control anyone. They have no interest in silencing the opposition on
Facebook or anywhere else. They just want to live their lives in the country they were born in,
and it doesn't seem like a lot to ask. So by any traditional definition, they are liberal.
However, our language has become so politicized and so distorted that you would never know
it. What you do know for certain is that the people behind Joe Biden are not like that at all.
They don't believe in dissent. "You think one thing? I think another. That's OK." No, that's
not them at all. They demand obedience to diversity, which is to say, legitimate differences
between people is the last thing they want. These people seek absolute sameness, total
uniformity. You're happy with your corner coffee shop? They want to make you drink Starbucks
every day from now until forever, no matter how it tastes. That's the future.
Now, if these seem like corporate values to you, then you're catching on to what's
happening. The Joe Biden for President campaign is a purely corporate enterprise. It's the
first one in American history to come this close to the presidency. If a multinational
corporation decided to create a presidential candidate, he would be a former credit card shill
from Wilmington, Del., and that's exactly what they got. What's good for Google is good for the
Biden campaign and vice versa. We have never seen a more soulless project. They literally
picked Kamala Harris as Biden's running mate, someone who can't even pronounce her own name.
Not that it matters, because it's purely an advertising gimmick.
We watched all of this come together in real time. We stood slack-jawed in total disbelief
as a man with no discernible constituency of any kind rose to the very top of our political
system, as if by magic. It's possible in the end that Joe Biden himself never convinced a
single voter of anything over the entire duration of the presidential campaign, but he didn't
have to. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination because he wasn't Bernie Sanders. He came to
where he is today because he isn't Donald Trump. It's the shortest political story ever
written.
Now, whatever you may think of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, they did it the
traditional way. Each one of them had the support of actual voters. Living, breathing people
loved them, believed in them, vested their hope in them, and, by the way, agreed with their
ideas, which they articulated clearly.
But corporate America hated them both. They couldn't be controlled, particularly Donald
Trump, whose complete unwillingness to submit made him the greatest possible threat. That's why
they hate Donald Trump, because he won't obey.
It's insulting to say that Joseph R. Biden won this election, if that is what comes to pass.
The tech companies will have won. The big banks will have won. The government of China, the
media establishment, the permanent bureaucracy, the billionaire class -- they will have won,
and not in the way that democracy promises. If a single person equaled a single vote, a
coalition like that could never win anything. There aren't enough of them.
But as a group, they have something that Donald Trump's voters sadly do not have, and that
is power. They have lots of power and they plan to wield that power, whether you like it or
not. It's all starting to look a lot like oligarchy at this point. The people who believe they
should have been in charge all along now may actually be in charge.
So what does that mean for the rest of us? Will corporate America declare victory and back
off? Can we speak freely again? Will they take the boot from our necks? Can we have America
back now that the Great Orange Emergency has passed? Well, the mandatory lying orders finally
be lifted?
Those are the questions we'll be paying attention to, since we plan to stay in this country.
And one other thing while we're at it, who's excited to greet our new corporate overlords? Who
plans to collaborate, particularly of those on the right side, the Republican side, the side
that said it was defending you? Who's happy about all of this? That seems worth keeping track
of, just so we know who we're dealing with here. Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of
FOX News Channel's (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network
in 2009 as a contributor.
I think calling it Harris (Biden) administration is a bit childish. Harris will have about as
much effect on policy as Pence had during last 4 four years. Certainly nothing like Cheney.
And she won't be the Dems candidate in four years.
Chris Sweeney, UK reporter, says" Britain died for me, its become a Covid-obsessed police
state."He further writes that the courageous spirit that defines Britain is disappearing. Do
you feel the same about the US. I do. The response to the lockdown and masks etc. sends brave
loggers here in the Catskill into a state of child-like fear . Who said there is a sucker
born every minute.
Read Yves's opening. Will get to the article in a bit.
My immediate thought is that "we the people" think of the Democratic Party through the
nostalgia of FDR and all the various power collations he, his wife and his teams pulled
together to prepare the country for war. His and their legacies lasted for almost 40 years. A
golden age for a significant portion of the bottom 80%. Hell, even the top 20%.
Those legacies go back even further since they were seeded decades before that with blood,
sweat and tears by the PEOPLE not the parties. Different parties in different time periods
did significant things for the "greater" good. They also did sh$tty things too. People are
flawed.
We won't get anywhere until we can convince a "significant" section of the top 10% that we
need to change course and re-educate them on how that might be done. We like to blame
"donors" and that's true to a point. But the 10% are part of that donor class. They go
through a similar educational system. Similar social clubs. They see who makes it big and
what it takes. Internally they believe that playing "fair" against the lower classes is
mostly for suckers if the recent college scandals are anything to go by. So they play by
different rules for different classes. That whole tragedy v. crisis mode of thinking.
They've created this cannabilistic system and and even if they know deep down how
horrible it is, they don't allow themselves to dwell on it or consider that they might not
really "deserve" what they have. I suspect they believe that getting off the treadmill means
giving up what they think they deserve to have or are already terrified of losing.
So I'm left with stop thinking about the public faces of the political coin aka political
parties and start asking how one changes enough of the top 10% where it makes enough of a
difference where someone can have enough space to cobble together an FDR styled
collation?
Remember the Roosevelts were Republicans before the FDR branch moved over to Democrats.
The only point being that the parties morph as their membership decrees.
I don't know the detailed history of ND and FDR, but I suspect that FRD managed to show to
the top 0.1% that sharing even 10% of their wealth downwards makes a significant chance of
them surviving more than one generation.
The problem we have now is not necessarily that we have 0.1%, but their attitude, which
these days is formed by the fact that a lot of them are really "employees" – i.e. so
called top management, be it for corporates, or even hedgies, PEs etc – basically, not
having any long-term interests in what they do, except for money. Money became the ultimate
status symbol, because it's fungible, so what matters is not what one is or does, but what is
the net worth. Until we break this, I don't see a way that will not end in a revolution
(which I doubt will solve anything long term. There's a reason it's called revolution).
+1. One of the more insidious aspects of neoliberal "philosophy" is the notion "there is
no society, their are only individual men and women".
Why have long-term community interests if one is merely a free agent in an entirely
individualistic atomized world? Hobbes's quote about life being "solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short" seems the essence of neoliberal "philosophy." The old philosophical
tension between "the one" and "the many" still exists; the neoliberals simply ignore the good
claims of both.
Another entirely succesfull election for the FIRE sector – they must have enjoyued the
theater of it all – after they got Biden on the ticket – they knew – no
matter which way the country voted that they had the election in the bag. They had the Smurfes
fighting over the small stuff – to plan
You had Trump – a lifelongh con-man and preditor – physically and figuratively a
self admitted ++++y grabber, a coward, spoiled rich-boy narssisist who used bone spurs to duck
service and probably has not read or understands the constitution.
Then You had Biden – always a FIRE sector champion who come to run like he was fresh
fished and landed doing a slimy fish dock dance.
Well the real fight for the future of democracy and the planet is sided between the creditor
class and the rest of us Smurfs
Its the same fight going back thousands of years in hundreds of countries
Banking in the hands of private interests is more dangerous than a standing
army
In my view – the fight is not between the Dems and Repubs – it is the People,
freedom and Democracy against the Speculators, vested interests and Finance – who have
demonstrated its contemp of People, the Planet and Democracy
Plus 1. Nailed it.
Anyone who thinks that the single party system with 2 factions will provide anything for the
99% is an idiot. The repugnants/democraps, employees of the FIRE sector oligarchs, have been
playing "good cops/bad cops" with middle class/working class forever. It's a tactic that's
been used since "civilization " began. There was a time when the western world's dominant
language was Latin. We know what happened there.
Wow! Today's
Global Times editorial about the election and its outcome is very perceptive in
its entirety making it very hard to determine an excerpt. I decided on the center 4
paragraphs as they're a coherent whole:
"Every society has internal divergences and contradictions. The design of the US system
indulges and even encourages the fermentation of contradictions. Mechanisms help maintain the
balance between interests and power. For a long time, this performed relatively well, but new
challenges are changing the conditions of US mechanisms, and changing relations between the
effectiveness of US mechanisms and the difficulties US society faces.
"The fundamental change is that the US has been consuming its accumulated advantages
against the backdrop of globalization. Its pattern of interests has been fixated, and the
overall competitiveness of the country has been sliding. The welfare it has made for the
people cannot match people's demands and expectations. The mechanism that distributes
interests solidifies and further erodes social ability of promoting unity.
"In the internet era, identity politics is rising. People can easily feel that their
rights are deprived because they are from a certain social class. Maintaining social unity
has become an increasingly arduous and sensitive task. Obviously, the US needs political
reforms more than many other countries to enhance its ability to promote unity.
"But in the past four years, the Trump administration, incited by the US election system,
has pushed the country into a risky path where it enhances division to boost the existing
pattern of political interests. There are so many social woes in US society, be it between
different races and classes, between new immigrants and old ones, and between different
regions, let alone partisan. But now the objective of society has been cast on Trump's
reelection. This objective has to a great extent squeezed the room of US society to pursue
maximum common interests."
But I really insist reading the entire editorial.
In an op/ed
by a professor at the Center for American Studies of Fudan University, we learn what some
close observers from outside see as the primary contradictions within the Outlaw US
Empire:
"There are two main contradictions in the US. First, contradictions between the whites and
ethnic minorities. The advantageous position of the whites continues to decrease and they
would lose their dominance over the country in the future. This makes their tolerance and
confidence in ethnic minorities decrease as well. The ratio of the population of ethnic
minorities is rising. This increases their demand for equality and rights.
"It is normal for ethnic minorities to demand for corresponding political, social,
economic and cultural positions, but this will pose a severe challenge to the cultural,
religious and racial nature of the US. As the US population continues to lose balance,
related conflicts will break out or even become a periodic and escalating crisis.
"Second, contradictions between elites and ordinary people. Supporters of the Democratic
Party are mainly demotic elites who benefit from globalization and liberalization of the
global economy, and those who support the Republican Party are middle- and lower-class
people, and religious conservatives. This is very clear in the county-based electoral maps.
Trump-supporting counties that are vast, under populated and economically backward, surround
cities and counties that support the Democratic Party, while Democrat-dominated counties and
cities use their economic and population advantages to lead the political pattern in some
states. The contradictions between elites and ordinary people will not end with the
election."
Not stated clearly IMO is that these contradictions are Centrifugal in their affects on
the overall society thus impeding attempts to reform the polity and gain control over the
forces exerting actual control that are beyond government.
@vig #85
Sorry: PMC refers to the Professional, Managerial class.
It could be considered the Petit Bourgeoisie in the Marxist sense except these aren't
shopkeepers. They're the middle managers, doctors, lawyers, MBAs, tenured professors, finance
types and what not who are divorced from the actual hands-on labor.
They mostly work for large corporations and government/non-government institutions like state
governments (at the higher levels), think tanks and nonprofits.
@vig #85
And to clarify further: there is a professor at Stanford University named Victor Davis
Hanson. He is both a tenured professor in early Western history (Greek) and also a farmer -
4th or 5th generation in the San Joaquin valley in California.
What Hanson has talked about at length was that the urban elite - the people in the cities
and along the East and West Coasts of America - have been enjoying a different reality than
the rest of the country.
In particular, the opening up of the American economy to China, India and the rest of the
world has created new markets for companies like Boeing, Facebook, GE and the like - which
benefits these areas and demographics.
However, this same action has also exposed American farmers, manufacturers,
non-MBA/PhD/Master's/etc to low priced labor and mercantilist economic policies in these
other countries.
The example Hanson uses is his own farm. In the 1980s, the price for raisins was $1200/ton
and the market was largely in Europe.
With the advent of the EU, Greek farmers got subsidies from the EU such that they took over
the EU market for raisins. The price for raisins fell to $400/ton.
Hanson doesn't say that this could/should be prevented; what he says is that it is a travesty
that there were no voices in the US at least pushing back against these obviously
anti-competitive economic policies. The lack of such voices meant that the forces of
globalism could run rampant and destroy entire sectors of the American economy at amazing
speed. In particular, the US leadership = oligarchs plus PMC class chose to sell out the rest
of the country in order to enrich itself.
This is 100% obvious to anyone who looks at the details of what has happened in the last 30+
years: China went from 6% of the US GDP in 1984 to near parity (or beyond) in purchasing
power terms today.
On the eve of the election, for example, Politico published a fawning
profile of Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who is laying the groundwork to become
speaker of the House in a future Republican majority. An ideological mirror of her father, she
and her cohort long for a restoration of the early 2000s Bushite foreign policy of
globe-trotting regime change and democratic nation building administered by a national security
state in Washington D.C.
Their cause, however, is as infertile as their past efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is
because despite his poor record, Donald Trump has created a permanent and growing disconnect
between the War Party and the GOP.
There is no need to sugarcoat how Donald Trump has squandered four years of opportunity in
foreign policy. His promises to bring the troops home have not materialized and remain
"promises" to be kept at a permanently delayed date. He has intensified U.S. interference in
Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Venezuela. He's overseen the continued deterioration of relations
with Russia, while leaving North Korea at the diplomatic altar. And he's brought the United
States and Iran into a first exchange of direct, open conflict.
A big-picture assessment, however, requires not looking at how Trump failed to bring what
restrainers wanted, but how he succeeded in destroying what they needed gone.
Trump's election caused the departure of the most loathsome of the war peddlers -- including
Bill Kristol, David Frum, Jamie Kirchick, Steve Schmidt, and Max Boot -- from Republican ranks.
United under the banner of "Never Trump," for four years they used every inch of column space,
every CNN interview, and a small fortune to cleave off a portion of the Republican base that
they believed would be happy to return to the world of 2006.
The result? Exit polls show Trump winning 93 percent of the Republican vote, a higher
percentage than he won in 2016. As an election post-mortem summarized,
Never Trump hawks "basically do not exist anywhere outside of the Washington Beltway or cable
news green rooms -- and after tonight's results, we shouldn't have to see them on TV or even
see their tweets ever again."
That the average American has the same respect for the War Party's minions as they have for
a tobacco executive should come as no surprise.
Polling continually shows a supermajority of Americans ready and eager to withdraw from
Iraq and Afghanistan. That includes 77 percent of Republicans, 40 percent of whom want to
decrease military engagement with the rest of the world as well. These voters are a vanguard
that will stop any future Bushite ascendance, whether from Nikki Haley or the spawn of Dick
Cheney.
Slowly, Republican members of Congress are beginning to reflect the wishes of their voters.
One year ago this month, I wrote about the
emerging cadre of antiwar conservatives in the House of Representatives. While most broke
under pressure to support Trump's escalation with Iran, not all did. It's a more active and
vocal Republican contingent than has existed for decades and it's growing fast. Following
Tuesday's results, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming will join Rand Paul and Mike Lee in the U.S.
Senate, while Nancy Mace of South Carolina will lock arms with Representatives Thomas Massie
and Matt Gaetz. Both women are vetted and proven war skeptics who are determined to challenge
Liz Cheney at every turn.
Beyond government, the creative destruction brought by the Trump presidency in conservative
circles has given a new lease on life to restrainers long excluded from the Beltway's
incestuous institutions. That includes the continued ascension of publications like The
American Conservative , which has become a wheelhouse for the
most important foreign policy conversations happening on the right; Tucker Carlson, whose
program has become the highest rated in cable news history, no doubt aided by his antiwar
opening monologues; the Quincy Institute, which is dragging other think tanks kicking and
screaming into dialogues about shifting U.S. positioning overseas; and activist organizations
like BringOurTroopsHome.US , a
collection of right-of-center veterans who are lobbying to end the country's unconstitutional
wars.
The American empire was formed over the course of a century, and currently encompasses over
850 overseas military bases. Hundreds of billions of dollars are exchanged every year through
facets of the military-industrial complex, while thousands of very powerful people make their
cushy salaries off the current imperialistic system (and will fight tooth and nail to keep it
that way).
One election was never going to change that. Donald Trump was never going to be a miracle
worker. But he's kicked in the door and let us in, even if we wish he'd tidied up better before
he left.
We have principled leaders in government. We have the infrastructure. And most importantly,
we have the voters. Liz Cheney and her misbegotten hangers-on may not realize it yet, but their
heyday has long past. It's our party now and we're going to bring America home.
Hunter DeRensis is the communications director of BringOurTroopsHome.US and a regular
contributor to The American Conservative . Follow him on Twitter
@HunterDeRensis.
A vote for Trump is a vote against America's ruling class
On Saturday night, President Trump held a campaign
rally in Butler, Pa. Butler is a town 35 miles north of Pittsburgh, and it's like a lot of
places you'll find in this country once you head inland from the coasts.
Butler is a former industrial town -- they made Pullman rail cars there for many years --
but it's been losing population for decades. There are still a lot of nice people in Butler and
for $60,000 or so, you can buy a decent house there. It's a place you might be happy in.
But our professional class is not impressed by Butler. They don't consider Butler, Pa. or
places like it to be the future. To them, places like Butler are embarrassing relics of a past
best forgotten. The men of Butler may have built this country, and they did, but they mean
nothing to our leaders now. You can be certain of that because when large numbers of people in
Butler started killing themselves with narcotics, no one in Washington or New York or Los
Angeles said a word about it.
Trump supporters hold up four fingers as they chant 'Four More Years' at President Trump's
campaign rally in Butler, Pa. Saturday. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
There have now been so many opioid deaths in Butler that a few years ago, residents built an
overdose memorial in the middle of town. MSNBC didn't cover that.
So given all of that, it was interesting how the people around Butler feel about Donald
Trump. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people came out to see him Saturday night, depending on whose
estimate you believe. Pictures of the rally site showed a sea of people obscuring the horizon,
the kind of image you would see of a visit from the pope.
When was the last time a political speech drew that many people? Well, the media didn't ask.
Instead, they attacked the rally as a "superspreader" event. OK, we'll leave the epidemiology
to CNN.
But the questions still hung in the air. Why did all those people come? They must have known
that Donald Trump is the most evil man who hass ever lived. They've heard that every day for
five years. They know that people who support Donald Trump are also evil, they're bigots,
they're morons, they're racist cult members. They know that Americans have been fired from
their jobs for supporting Donald Trump, not to mention kicked off social media, belittled by
their kids' teachers and shunned by decent society. Only losers and freaks support Donald
Trump.
People in Butler knew all of that. But on Saturday, they went to the Donald Trump rally,
anyway. Why exactly did they do that? We should be pondering that question deeply as we watch
Tuesday night's returns and as we live through the aftermath of them.
Millions of Americans sincerely love Donald Trump. They love him in spite of everything
they've heard. They love him, often, in spite of himself. They're not deluded. They know
exactly who Trump is. They love him anyway.
Trump addresses the crowd at his rally in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)
They love Donald Trump because no one else loves them. The country they built, the country
their ancestors fought for over hundreds of years, has left them to die in unfashionable little
towns, mocked and despised by the sneering halfwits with finance degrees -- but no actual
skills -- who seem to run everything all of a sudden.
Whatever Donald Trump's faults, he is better than the rest of the people in charge. At least
he doesn't hate them for their weakness. Donald Trump, in other words, is and has always been a
living indictment of the people who run this country. That was true four years ago when he came
out of nowhere to win the presidency. And it's every bit as true right now, maybe even more
true than it's ever been. It will remain true regardless of whether Donald Trump wins
reelection.
Trump rose because they failed. It's as simple as that. If the people in charge had done a
halfway decent job with the country they inherited, if they cared about anything other than
themselves, even for just a moment, Donald Trump would still be hosting "Celebrity Apprentice."
But they didn't. Instead, they were incompetent and narcissistic and cruel and relentlessly
dishonest. They wrecked what they didn't build, and they lied about it. They hurt anyone who
told the truth about what they were doing. That's all true. We all watched.
America is still a great country, the best in the world, but our ruling class is disgusting.
A vote for Trump is a vote against them. That's what's going on in those pictures from Butler.
That's what's going on in this country.
The elites may control who gets nominated but no matter how flawed or repugnant their
candidate is or how obvious that the candidate was chosen for them the flocks that follow the
candidates act as if they did the choosing.
Trump was given 10 times the free advertising than all the other primary candidates
combined and yet his followers think they picked him.
And Biden will go down in history as the candidate who got more popular votes than any
other candidate ever has and yet he is about as popular as a hemorrhoid.
"... One camp within the elites recognizes the danger and seeks reforms , but the reforms are too little, too late, and in any event, the elites who cling most ardently to the past stability fight the reform movement to a standstill. ..."
"... So take your pick, America: what's the closest analogy? A sclerotic Politburo of elders living in the past, an elite fiddling while the nation disintegrates, or an elite so out of touch with reality that it claims inflation is zero while the populace can no longer afford bread? ..."
Rome, the USSR and Revolutionary France are all compelling analogies due to the hubristic
cluelessness of their fractured elites as the pretensions of stability collapsed around them.
Even though Nero didn't actually fiddle while Rome burned and Marie Antoinette didn't gush "Let
them eat brioche" when notified that the peasants had no bread (or more accurately, could no
longer afford it), these myths are handy encapsulations of the disconnect from reality that
infested the elites in the last years before the deluge of non-linear chaos overwhelmed the
regimes.
While historians gather evidence of tipping points such as pandemics, ecological damage,
invasions, droughts, inflation, etc., the core dynamic is ultimately the loss of social
cohesion within the ruling elites and in the social order at large.
As a generality, the permanence of the status quo is taken for granted by elites, who then
feel free to squabble amongst themselves over the spoils of wealth and power. Distracted by
their own infighting, the elites are blind to the erosion of the foundations of their
power.
As coherence in the elites unravels, the ties uniting the elites with the masses unravel as
well.
One camp within the elites recognizes the danger and seeks reforms , but the reforms are too
little, too late, and in any event, the elites who cling most ardently to the past stability
fight the reform movement to a standstill.
As social cohesion unravels, systems that once seemed immutable (i.e. linear ) suddenly
display non-linear dynamics in which modest changes that would have made little difference in
the past now unleash regime-shattering disorder.
So take your pick, America: what's the closest analogy? A sclerotic Politburo of elders
living in the past, an elite fiddling while the nation disintegrates, or an elite so out of
touch with reality that it claims inflation is zero while the populace can no longer afford
bread?
They all lead to the same destination.
richsob , 1 hour ago
I know a lot of history and I think we will go the route of Rome. We will have a slow
slide into total failure from a debased currency, an over extended military, tax revolts,
unmanageable immigration and an internal war among the elites.
HRH of Aquitaine 2.0 , 1 hour ago
My name is an indirect reference to France and the French Revolution.
When Pelosi was photo'd in front of two massive Sub Zero fridges with gourmet ice cream,
that was the equivalent of "let them eat brioche." She is fvucking clueless. A tool that is
barely coherent, much like Joe.
People see through it. The greed of the politicians, and their apparatchiks, the
bureaucrats, is obvious to anyone willing to look. FFS apparatchiks can retire with six
fixure salaries after being a government employee! People are sick to death of their
arrogance, their greed, their out-and-out abuse of the taxpayer!
The other analogy, which I think is valid, is to ancient Rome. I was a philosophy major /
Latin minor so took quite few courses involving the classes, reading the classics, or
translating them. I also spent a semester in Rome, tramping through the Forum and walking
underground and overground. In 1997 Rome was a beautiful city, mostly safe.
Anyhow, ancient Rome ended up debasing their currency, literally. Which the US (and other
central banks) are doing with excessive money printing.
Excessive taxation drove away the tax base of ancient Rome. The first jingle keys event
was there. Why? Taxes were too high. People will work hard if there is a profit incentive and
they are able to earn a good return from their labor. Once that incentive was gone, people
abandoned their farms and property and left. Where did they go? Away. Away from the tax
collectors, which were richly rewarded for any taxes they were able to collect. I suppose at
the end, the collection methods became quite brutal. At that point, when it is your money or
your life, you throw the tax collector your money and flee with your life. You walk away from
land that you love and start over.
Never an easy choice to abandon one's land and home. But that is exactly what
happened.
Central bankers and governments, along with the common citizen, would do well to heed
historical precedents.
MAOUS , 31 minutes ago
I see it more like The Godfather Part I & II. We were betrayed by the stupidest
simpletons of our own family (citizenry) that sold us out for trinkets, false promises of
grandeur and propaganda from Rival Mafia Families who wanted to rub our family out, kill our
leader and take over. "I didn't know until today, it was Barzini all along." Yeah, but Fredo
was the turn coat that made it all possible. Meet the simpletons of our Family known as your
fellow American voter. "A Republic, if you can keep it." We lost it, kiss it goodbye. Say
hello to the new Black Hand on the block.
Omega Point , 1 hour ago
One of the best articles on ZH in a while. The elites are so full of hubris, they behave
as if the state of affairs since the post-WWII era has always been the state of affairs
throughout history and are immutable. They believe that they are cause of America's
dominance, not the individuals who built this country on whose goodwill they are now quickly
draining.
I think we're like Rome. Currency debasement, no border security, massively corrupt
politicians, most of population on welfare, and games and circuses to distract from the
rot.
The elites will soon be surprised how quickly things will decline, just as shocked as the
Romans when the Visigoths came through the city walls and looted the Imperial City in 410
AD.
play_arrow
sbin , 1 hour ago
The USSR was very similar with decrepit old party hacks ruining everything.
Unfortunately American exceptional lunatics will try to destroy the world before excepting
reality.
Never been a group so corrupt and delusional with so much destructive weaponry.
Dr Strangelove is more appropriate.
RKKA , 1 hour ago
In the summer of 1941, the 4th Panzer Division of Heinz Guderian, one of the most talented
German tank generals, broke through to the Belarusian town of Krichev. Parts of the 13th
Soviet Army were retreating. Only one gunner, Nikolai Sirotinin, did not retreat - very
young, short, thin.
On that day, it was necessary to cover the withdrawal of troops. “There will be two
people with a cannon here,” said the battery commander. Nikolai volunteered. The second
was the commander himself.
On the morning of July 17, a column of German tanks appeared on the highway.
Nikolai took up a position on the hill right on the field. The cannon was sinking in the
high rye, but he could clearly see the highway and the bridge over the river. When the lead
tank reached the bridge, Nikolai knocked it out with the first shot. The second shell set
fire to the armored personnel carrier that closed the column.
We must stop here. Because it is still not entirely clear why Nikolai was left alone at
the cannon. But there are versions. He apparently had just the task - to create a "traffic
jam" on the bridge, knocking out the head car of the Nazis. The lieutenant at the bridge and
adjusted the fire, and then, disappeared. It is reliably known that the lieutenant was
wounded and then he left towards the withdrawing positions. There is an assumption that
Nikolai had to move away, having completed the task. But ... he had 60 rounds. And he
stayed!
Two tanks tried to move the lead tank off the bridge, but they were also hit. The armored
vehicle tried to cross the river not across the bridge. But she got stuck in a swampy shore,
where another shell found her. Nikolai shot and shot, knocking out tank after tank ...
Guderian's tanks rested on Nikolai Sirotinin, like the Chinese wall, like the Brest
fortress. Already 11 tanks and 6 armored personnel carriers were on fire! For almost two
hours of this strange battle, the Germans could not understand where the gun was firing from.
And when we reached the position of Nikolai, he had only three shells left. The Germans
offered him to surrender. Nikolai responded by firing at them with a carbine.
This last battle was short-lived ...
11 tanks and 7 armored vehicles, 57 soldiers and officers were lost by the Nazis after the
battle, where they were blocked by the Russian soldier Nikolai Sirotinin.
The inscription on the monument: "Here at dawn on July 17, 1941 entered into combat with a
column of fascist tanks and in a two-hour battle repulsed all enemy attacks, senior artillery
sergeant Nikolai Vladimirovich Sirotinin, who gave his life for the freedom and independence
of our Motherland."
"After all, he is a Russian soldier, is such admiration necessary?" These words were
written down in his diary by Chief Lieutenant of the 4th Panzer Division Henfeld: “July
17, 1941. Sokolnichi, near Krichev. An unknown Russian soldier was buried in the evening. He
alone stood at the cannon, shot a convoy of our tanks and infantry for a long time, and died.
Everyone was amazed at his courage ... Oberst (Colonel) before the grave said that if all the
soldiers of the Fuehrer fought like this Russian soldier, they would have conquered the whole
world! Three times they fired volleys from rifles. After all, he is a Russian soldier, is
such admiration necessary? "
Ordinary people were ready to defend and die for the USSR. And who is Gorbachev, who
destroyed the USSR. A traitor who betrayed everything and everyone. A stupid dilettante who
imagines himself a world-class politician. The main drawback of the USSR was that the power
was too concentrated in the hands of one person, who was trusted without question. But when
people realized where he was leading the country, it was too late.
Max21c , 2 hours ago
It's a mix between Nazi Germany and its criminality and thievery and persecution
machinery, and Bolshevist Russia and its criminality and thievery and persecution machinery
and many third world banana republics and their criminality and thievery and political
persecution machinery.
Face it Washingtonians are evil.
ZeroTruth , 1 hour ago
Americuck in and of its entirety is just a criminal organization. I know a restaraunteur
that started his business in the Bay Area selling drugs using a fleet of vehicles that had
hidden compartments everywhere. Each vehicle was capable of holding up to half a key of yay
and powdered molly already grammed up. Drivers were issued burner phones and given orders via
dispatcher.
Last I checked, he had 7 restaurants that did amazing business and those vehicles were
still on the road providing the other service. That's just one of the many I know of and it's
small time compared to what the US government is doing.
ZeroTruth , 1 hour ago
Americuck in and of its entirety is just a criminal organization. I know a restaraunteur
that started his business in the Bay Area selling drugs using a fleet of vehicles that had
hidden compartments everywhere. Each vehicle was capable of holding up to half a key of yay
and powdered molly already grammed up. Drivers were issued burner phones and given orders via
dispatcher.
Last I checked, he had 7 restaurants that did amazing business and those vehicles were
still on the road providing the other service. That's just one of the many I know of and it's
small time compared to what the US government is doing.
DeeDeeTwo , 2 hours ago
The elites, Big Tech, Media and Deep State threw the kitchen sink at this election and did
not move the needle. Regardless of who is next President, nothing changes. This is a tribute
to the stability of the American system. In fact, the pendulum is swinging against the
subversives who are becoming increasingly reckless and discredited.
TBT or not TBT , 2 hours ago
What did Huxley call the future country depicted in Brave New World?
300 election don't count comments not one comment about the future of America? All I see
here is who shall be king of the mountain. What is it that our leader (whoever it is, should
do)?
1. Reduce military spending by 50% per year for each of the next four years.
2. Close 50% of the military bases each year, over each of the next four years
3. Standardize national examinations for high school and undergraduate degrees pass the
examination
receive the BS or BA.. degree.. eliminate any all accreditation requirements, people can
study wherever
whenever and how ever they wish. Tutorials not bureaucratic institutions will prepare the
students for
the examinations.
4. eliminate copyright and patent laws so as to reduce the wealth gap and so as to return
America to
from monopolism to capitalism.
5. fix the constitution so the governed have a powerful, meaningful say in not just in how
uses the
government to govern, but also so the governed have a powerful say in what it is those who
are elected
to the government must accomplish why they are in the employee of our elected government.
6. Find a way to get the USA activities subject to human rights courts.
7. Paint all of the white people black in order to eliminate race as condition of
life.
A list of goals and objectives should be put forth on what the elected are supposed to
accomplish in the next four years. In that way, it will not matter who is the President, what
will matter is did he or she accomplish what it was they were elected to do?
There is nothing in China like the military-industrial complex of the United States that
structurally fosters militarism and imperialism with its powerful "lobbies" and think
tanks. The mandarins of the United States are prisoners of a network that greatly
complicates their adaptation to the new world. Its powerful and efficient propaganda
apparatus ("information & entertainment") presents the United States' two-headed,
single-party political regime based on the money aristocracy as a democracy.
That is really well put.
"The mandarins of the United States are prisoners of a network that greatly complicates
their adaptation to the new world"
Nevada will put Joe Biden over for the Presidential win..
Tonight.. Now the question is. How long will Biden last until Harris becomes the Queen of
Spades of Pentagon?
See? Twitter is cool with allowing this posting by David Litt, former Obama speechwriter,
*today* 5:34 pm Nov 4 of a democrat ballot "curing" (post Nov 3 ballot harvesting) assistance
operation in Georgia over the next three days (Wed, Thurs and Fri)
Attention everyone in or near Georgia: We need YOUR help today! This race is not over
and we need every single vote to be counted.
It is all hands on deck and all eyes on Georgia!
Join us today for a virtual training to learn how to knock doors to help voters cure
their ballots. We need you in this fight with us today and tomorrow and Friday. We've come
so far, this is how we bring it home. See you in the virtual training room and out knocking
doors soon!"
"The guy at the source of the whole kerfluffle acknowledges that the 130,000 magical votes
Tweet was based on incorrect data"
-Posted by: _K_C_ | Nov 5 2020 3:50 utc | 306
I'm not so sure about this, _K_C. His explanation for the late night MI Biden vote bump
"kerfluffle" still smells sketchy to me. Given the stakes, could someone have gotten that guy
to "flip" his statement after the fact?
Not that long ago the United States came close to total dissolution.
The financial system was bankrupt, speculation had run amok, and all infrastructure had
fallen into disarray over the course of 30 years of unbroken free trade. To make matters worse,
the nation was on the verge of a civil war and international financiers in London and Wall
Street gloated over the immanent destruction of the first nation on earth to be established not
upon hereditary institutions, but rather on the consent of the governed and mandated to serve
the general welfare.
Although one might think that I am referring now to today's America, I am in fact referring
to the United States of 1860.
The Trifold Deep State
In my past
two articles in this series, I discussed how a new system of political economy was
established by Benjamin Franklin and his disciples in the wake of the war of independence
driven by protectionism, national banking and internal improvements.
I also demonstrated that the rise of the thing known as today's "deep state" can also be
understood as a three-headed beast which arose in its earliest incarnation under the leadership
of arch traitor Aaron Burr who established Wall Street, killed Alexander Hamilton and devoted
his life to the cause of dissolving the union. After having been caught in the act of sabotage,
Burr escaped arrest in 1807 by running off to England where he live in Jeremy Bentham's mansion
for 5 years, only to return to oversee a new plot to break up the union that eventually boiled
over in 1860.
The three prongs of the operation that Burr led on behalf of British intelligence and which
remains active to this very day, can loosely be described as follows:
The Eastern Establishment families sometimes known as the Essex Junto who took control of
Hamilton's Federalist Party. These were Empire Loyalists who remained within the USA under
the illusion of loyalty to the constitution, but always adherent to a British Imperial world
order and devoted to eventually undermining it from within. These were the circles that
brought the USA into Britain's Opium trade against China as junior partners in crime and who
promoted the dissolution of the union as early as 1800
under the leadership of Aaron Burr.
The "Virginia Junto", slave owning aristocracy which also worked with Aaron Burr in his
1807 secessionist plot and whose alliance with the British Empire was instrumental in its
rise to power from 1828-1860. This was the structure that soon returned to power, after the
civil war, under the guiding hand of such
Mazzini-connected "Young Americans" as KKK founder Albert Pike and the Southern
establishment that later executed nationalist presidents in 1880, 1901 and in 1963.
Some Uncomfortable Questions
The story has been told of Lincoln's murder in tens of thousands of books and yet more often
than not the narrative of a "single lone gunman" is imposed onto the story by researchers who
are either too lazy or too corrupt to look for the evidence of a larger plot.
How many of those popular narratives infused into the western zeitgeist over the decades
even acknowledge the simple fact that John Wilkes Boothe was carrying a $500 bank draft signed
by Ontario Bank of Montreal President Henry Starnes (later to become Montreal Mayor) when he
was shot dead at Garrett Farm on April 26, 1865?
How many people have been exposed to the vast Southern Confederacy secret service operations
active throughout the civil war in Montreal, Toronto and Halifax which was under the firm
control of Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and his handlers in British
intelligence?
How many people know that Boothe spent at least 5 weeks in the fall of 1864 in Montreal
associating closely with the highest echelons of British and Southern intelligence including
Starnes, and confederate spy leaders Jacob Thompson and George Sanders?
Demonstrating his total ignorance of the process that controlled him, Booth wrote to a
friend on October 28, 1864: "I have been in Montreal for the last 3 or 4 weeks and no one
(not even myself) knew when I would return".
On The Trail of the Assassins
After Lincoln was murdered, a manhunt to track down the intelligence networks behind the
assassination was underway that eventually led to the hanging of four low level co-conspirators
who history has shown were just as much patsies as John Wilkes Boothe.
Days later, President Johnson issued a proclamation saying :
"It appears from evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice that the murder of Abraham
Lincoln [was] incited, concerted, and procured by and between Jefferson Davis, late of
Richmond, Va., and Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay, [Nathaniel] Beverly Tucker, George N.
Sanders, William C. Cleary, and other rebels and traitors against the government of the United
States harbored in Canada."
Two days before Booth was shot, Secretary of War
Edwin Stanton wrote : "This Department has information that the President's murder was
organized in Canada and approved at Richmond."
Knowledge of Canada's confederate operations was well known to the federal authorities in
those days even though the majority among leading historians today are totally ignorant of this
fact.
George Sanders remains one of the most interesting figures among Booth's handlers in Canada.
As a former Ambassador to England under the presidency of Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), Sanders
was a close friend of international anarchist Giuseppe Mazzini – the founder of the Young
Europe movement. Sanders who wrote "Mazzini and Young Europe" in 1852, had the honor of being
a leading member of the
southern branch of the Young America Movement (while Ralph Waldo Emerson was a
self-proclaimed leader of the
northern branch of Young America ). Jacob Thompson, who was named in the Johnson dispatch
above, was a former Secretary of the Interior under President Pierce, handler of Booth and
acted as the top controller of the Confederacy secret service in Montreal.
As the book Montreal City of
Secrets (2017), author Barry Sheehy proves that not only was Canada the core of Confederate
Secret Services, but also coordinated a multi pronged war from the emerging "northern
confederacy" onto Lincoln's defense of the union alongside Wall Street bankers while the
president was fighting militarily to stop the southern secession. Sheehy writes: "By 1863,
the Confederate Secret Service was well entrenched in Canada. Funding came from Richmond via
couriers and was supplemented by profits from blockade running."
The Many Shapes of War from the North
Although not having devolved to direct military engagement, the Anglo-Canadian war on the
Union involved several components:
Financial warfare: The major Canadian banks dominant in the 19 th century were
used not only by the confederacy to pay British operations in the construction of war ships,
but also to receive much needed infusions of cash from British Financiers throughout the war. A
financial war on Lincoln's greenback was waged under the control of Montreal based confederate
bankers John Porterfield and George Payne and also JP Morgan to "short" the greenback.
By 1864, the subversive traitor Salmon Chase had managed to tie the greenback to a (London
controlled) gold standard thus making its value hinge upon gold speculation. During a vital
moment of the war, these financiers coordinated a mass "sell off" of gold to London driving up
the price of gold and collapsing the value of the U.S. dollar crippling Lincoln's ability to
fund the war effort.
Direct Military intervention Thwarted: As early as 1861, the Trent Crisis nearly
induced a hot war with Britain when a union ship intervened onto a British ship in
international waters and arrested two high level confederate agents en route to London. Knowing
that a two-fold war at this early stage was unwinnable, Lincoln pushed back against hot heads
within his own cabinet who argued for a second front saying "one war at a time". Despite this
near miss, London wasted no time deploying over 10 000 soldiers to Canada for the duration of
the war ready to strike down upon the Union at a moment's notice and kept at bay in large
measure due to the bold intervention of the
Russian fleet to both Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the USA . This was a clear message to
both England and to Napoleon III's France (who were stationed across the Mexican border)
to
stay out of America's war.
Despite Russia's intervention, Britain continued to build warships for the Confederacy which
devastated the Union navy during the war and which England had to pay $15.5 million to the USA
in 1872 under
the Alabama Claims.
Terrorism: It is less well known today than it was during the 19 th century that
confederate terror operations onto the north occurred throughout the civil war with raids on
Union POW camps, efforts to burn popular New York hotels, blowing up ships on the Mississippi,
and the infamous St Albans raid of October 1964 on Vermont and attacks on Buffalo, Chicago,
Sandusky, Ohio, Detroit, and Pennsylvania. While the St Albans raiders were momentarily
arrested in Montreal, they were soon released under the logic that they represented a
"sovereign state" at conflict with another "sovereign state" with no connection with Canada
(perhaps a lesson can be learned here for Meng Wanzhou's lawyers?).
Assassination: I already mentioned that a $550 note was found on Boothe's body with the
signature of Ontario Bank president Henry Starnes which the failed actor would have received
during his October 1864 stay in Montreal. What I did not mention is that Booth stayed at the St
Lawrence Hall Hotel which served as primary headquarters for the Confederacy from 1863-65.
Describing the collusion of Northern Copperheads, anti-Lincoln republicans, and Wall Street
agents, Sheehy writes: "All of these powerful northerners were at St. Lawrence Hall rubbing
elbows with the Confederates who used the hotel as an unofficial Headquarters. This was the
universe in which John Wilkes Booth circulated in Canada."
In a 2014 expose , historian Anton Chaitkin, points out that the money used by Boothe came
directly from a $31,507.97 transfer from London arranged by the head of European confederate
secret service chief James D. Bulloch. It is no coincidence that Bulloch happens to also be the
beloved uncle and mentor of the same Teddy Roosevelt who became the president over the dead
body of Lincoln-follower William McKinley (assassinated in 1901).
In his expose, Chaitkin wrote:
"James D. Bulloch was the maternal uncle, model and strategy-teacher to future U.S.
President Theodore Roosevelt. He emerged from the shadows of the Civil War when his nephew
Teddy helped him to organize his papers and to publish a sanitized version of events in his
1883 memoir, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe. Under the protection of
imperial oligarchs such as Lord Salisbury and other Cecil family members, working in tandem
with Britain's military occupation of its then-colony Canada, Bulloch arranged English
construction and crewing for Confederate warships that notoriously preyed upon American
commerce."
The Truth is Buried Under the Sands of History
While four low level members of Booth's cell were hanged on July 7, 1865 after a four month
show trial (1), the actual orchestrators of Lincoln's assassination were never brought to
justice with nearly every leading member of the confederate leadership having escaped to
England in the wake of Lincoln's murder. Even John Surrat (who was among the eight who faced
trial) avoided hanging when his case was dropped, and his $25 000 bail was mysteriously paid by
an anonymous benefactor unknown to this day. After this, Surrat escaped to London where the
U.S. Consuls demands for his arrest were ignored by British authorities.
Confederate spymaster Judah Benjamin escaped arrest and lived out his days as a Barrister in
England, and Confederate President Jefferson Davies speaking to adoring fans in Quebec in June
1867 encouraged the people to reject the spread of republicanism and instead embrace the new
British Confederation scheme that would soon be imposed
weeks later . Davies spoke to the Canadian band performing Dixie at the Royal Theater:
"I hope that you will hold fast to their British principles and that you may ever strive to
cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country".
With the loss of Lincoln, and the 1868 death of Thaddeus Stevens, Confederate General
Albert Pike established restoration of the southern oligarchy and sabotage of Lincoln's
restoration with the rise of the KKK, and renewal of Southern Rite Freemasonry. Over the
ensuing years, an all out assault was launched on Lincoln's Greenbacks culminating in the
Specie Resumption Act of 1875 tying the U.S. financial system to British "hard money"
monetarism and paving the way for the later financial coup known as the Federal Reserve Act of
1913 (2).
While the Southern Confederacy plot ultimately failed, Britain's "other confederacy
operation launched in 1864 was successfully consolidated with the British
North America Act of July 1, 1867. The hoped-for extension of trans continental rail lines
through British Columbia and into Alaska and Russia were sabotaged as told in the
Real Story Behind the Alaska Purchase of 1867.
Instead of witnessing a new world system of sovereign nation states under a multipolar order
of collaboration driven by international infrastructure projects as Lincoln's followers like
William Seward, Ulysses Grant, William Gilpin and President McKinley envisioned , a new age
of war and empire re-asserted itself throughout the 20 th century.
It was this same trifold Deep State that contended with Franklin Roosevelt and his patriotic
Vice President Henry Wallace for power during the course of WWII, and
it was this same beast that ran the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. As New
Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison demonstrated in his book On the Trail of the Assassins (1991 ),
Kennedy's murder was arranged by a complex assassination network that brought into play
Southern secret intelligence assets in Louisiana, and Texas, Wall Street financiers, and a
strange assassination bureau based in Montreal named Permindex under the leadership of Maj.
Gen. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield. This was the same intelligence operation that grew out of
MI6's Camp X in Ottawa
during WWII and changed its name but not its functions during the Cold War. This is the
same British Imperial complex that has been attempting to undo the watershed moment of 1776 for
over 240 years.
It is this same tumor in the heart of the USA that has invested everything in a gamble to
put their senile tool Joe Biden into the seat of the Presidency and oust the first genuinely
nationalist American president the world has seen in nearly 60 years.
Exclusive: How The Bidens Made Off With Millions In Chinese Cash
New
documents show that as regulators closed in, Hunter struck a fresh deal with his Chinese partners
World Food Program USA Board Chairman Hunter Biden speaks at the World Food Program USA's Annual McGovern-Dole Leadership
Award Ceremony at Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for
World Food Program USA)
The Senate's
report
on
Hunter Biden's activities released several months ago, which was
spun
by
the New York Times as having shown "no evidence of wrongdoing," nevertheless had several important gaps in the business
activities of the troubled son of the former vice president.
Draft legal documents and 2017 bank records obtained by The American Conservative show at least $5 million was transferred to
Hunter and Jim Biden from companies associated with the Chinese conglomerate CEFC, with millions coming after the company had
come under legal scrutiny both in the United States and China.
CEFC official Patrick Ho was arrested in November 2017 and charged by the Southern District of New York with corruption, and
was convicted last year. In addition, on or about March 1, 2018, CEFC Chairmen Ye Jianming was arrested in China for economic
crimes and hasn't been seen since. CEFC assets in China were seized by Chinese state agencies. In the U.S., major
beneficiaries were Hunter and Jim Biden.
What the following documents show is that as regulators moved to seize CEFC's assets, Hunter Biden attempted to take control
of the company founded in partnership with it. Instead, after striking a deal with two CEFC employees in the U.S., the funds
were disbursed over the next six months to his and his uncle's companies until it was all gone, in total at least $5 million.
2017 Bank Records
On August 5, 2017, the Bidens and CEFC entered into a 50-50 limited liability company agreement (Hudson West III) between
Owasco, Hunter Biden's company, and Hudson West V (CEFC). The Sep 22, 2020 report from the Senate Judiciary Committee (the
"HGSAC Report") surmised an agreement like this, but a copy can be seen, for the first time
here
.
In early 2017, CEFC was ranked as one of the top 500 corporations in the world.
Hudson West III set up two bank accounts with Cathay Bank, with the first set up on or about August 5.
A
company associated with CEFC deposited $5 million into the account on August 8; no contribution was made by the Bidens.
On
Nov 2, 2017, CEFC Limited deposited a further $1 million into the account. (Subsequently, the Hudson West III account shows a
wire of $1 million back to CEFC Limited on Nov 21, followed a few days later on Nov 27 by a credit memo for $999,938. The
HGSAC Report interpreted the Nov 21 wire transfer as a return of the $1 million, but appear to have omitted consideration of
the credit memo apparently reversing the return).
The
net result is that CEFC and its affiliates deposited almost exactly $6 million into Hudson West III in 2017.
In the 5 months between August 8 and Dec 31, 2017, Hudson West III disbursed almost $1.6 million to Owasco (Hunter Biden) in
wire transfers and credit card binges by the Bidens. The transfers appear to have been structured as $165,000 in monthly
payments, plus two other payments of $400,000 and $220,387.
Collated
screengrabs from Hudson West III bank statements showing payments to Owasco (Wells Fargo Clearing Services LLC)
The HGSAC Report reported on the $99,000 credit card spree by the Bidens in early September 2017, but, in addition to that
spree, there was an additional $77,700 in credit card sprees, making a total of $176,700 for the five month period.
Figure
2. Screengrab from Hudson West III bank statements showing credit card disbursements
Total expenditures by Hudson West III in the five months were $1,947,439, of which $1,522,000 went to the Bidens (via Owasco
and credit cards).
Hudson
West III bank accounts contained more than $4 million in cash at the end of 2017.
March 2018 Deal
Shortly after the arrest of CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming on March 1, 2018, there appears to have been a rolling seizure of CEFC
assets. Even with the profligate spending by the Bidens, Hudson West III would still have had about $3.5 million in cash in
March.
On March 26, a Chinese-American employee who was fiercely loyal to Hunter suggested to him that Hunter and the two CEFC
employees in the U.S. (Mervyn Yan and Kevin Dong) figure out a way to appropriate the Hudson West III cash before it was
frozen by Chinese regulators or receivers:
you guys (You/Mervyn/Kevin)
figure out a way to have the money transferred to the right U.S. account before any restriction levied by Chinese
regulators or appointed new boss in charge of manage the enterprise Ye left behind.
In fact, Hunter had already begun the process of appropriating Hudson West III cash before a receiver could arrive. On March
18, Hunter's lawyer sent a letter to Mervyn Yan proposing that Hudson West V (the proximate CEFC entity) assign its interest
in Hudson West III to Owasco (Hunter), a transaction which would give control of all the cash to Hunter (see
here
,
and
here
).
On or about March 30, 2018, Hunter and the two Chinese appear to have worked out a different arrangement. Among the newly
available documents are redlined versions of an assignment agreement in which Hudson West V assigned its 50% interest in
Hudson West III to Coldharbour Capital Inc., with Kevin Dong the proposed signatory for Hudson West V, Mervyn Yan for
Coldharbour Capital and Hunter signatory for Owasco's consent to the assignment.
The HGSAC Report does not appear to have had access to these documents: they noted that ownership of Hudson West III at some
point was 50% Coldharbour, but does not appear to have been aware of the prior ownership of this interest by Hudson West V or
the assignment to Coldharbour in late March 2018.
During the next six months, the cash was completely drained into the accounts of Owasco and Coldharbour, spent on consulting
fees and expenses. According to the HGSAC Report, total payments from Hudson West III to Owasco amount to an astonishing
$4,790,375 by September 2018, when the Hudson West III accounts were totally depleted. In November 2018, Hudson West III was
dissolved by Owasco and Coldharbour.
From the 2017 bank records, we know that $1,444,000 had been transferred to Owasco in 2017 (excluding direct payment of credit
card sprees); thus, transfers to Owasco in the first eight months of 2018 were approximately $3,345,000.
The assignment of Hudson West V's interest in Hudson West III to Coldharbour and the dissipation of cash to the Hudson West
III managers would probably not have stood up to a determined receiver appointed by the Chinese parent company, but there
doesn't appear to have been any attempt by the parent company to stop or control the dissipation of Hudson West III's cash
reserves.
Lion Hall (Jim Biden)
Invoices
Included in the newly available material are invoices to Owasco and, separately, to Hudson West III from Jim Biden doing
business as Lion Hall Group. The HGSAC Report stated that, between Aug 14, 2017 and Aug 3, 2018, Owasco sent 20 wires totaling
$1,398,999 to Lion Hall Group. The newly available documents show that Jim Biden charged Owasco $82,500 per month as a
"monthly retainer for international business development":
Readers will recall that Hudson West III bank statements showed regular monthly payments of $165,000 for the last 5 months of
2017. The corollary is that Hunter split this regular monthly payment from Hudson West III 50:50 with Jim Biden. The HGSAC
Report notes that the payments to Lion Hall Group had been flagged by Owasco's bank (Wells Fargo) for potential criminal
activity. The new documents contain an inquiry email from Wells Fargo compliance, together with a reply from Hunter which was
unresponsive on the key compliance questions. By the time that Wells Fargo raised its compliance concerns, the Hudson West III
cash had been exhausted and with it, presumably the stream of 50-50 payments to Uncle Jim.
As noted above, in addition to the regular $165,000 monthly payments, Owasco received other large transfers in 2017 and
presumably in 2018. It is not known whether Uncle Jim split these 50-50 as well, or whether this was a side transaction by
Hunter.
Concurrent with this flood of
money from CEFC, Hunter continued to receive a lavish stipend from Burisma. Nonetheless, by the end of 2018, Hunter had
hundreds of thousands in tax liens. In March 2019, despite having received millions from Chinese business interests, Hunter
even had to plead with former partner Jeffrey Cooper to email him $100 for gas so that he wouldn't be stranded on the highway.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arthur Bloom is editor of The American Conservative online. He was previously deputy editor of the Daily Caller
and a columnist for the Catholic Herald. He holds masters degrees in urban planning and American studies from
the University of Kansas. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The
Spectator
(UK),
The Guardian, Quillette, The American
Spectator
,
Modern Age, and Tiny Mix Tapes.
email
Not by the Conservative press. But certainly by the Liberal press. I was born in a country
where all the news sources were owned by one of the political parties. Now I live in a
country where we have the
de facto
situation. In
America we are very good at setting the standard as the
de
jure
state of affairs, while ignoring the
de facto
state
of affairs. Every country has its share of hypocrisy. But there are few places, if any, where
it is institutionalized as America. We need to do much better. Despite what the Conservatives
say, the Liberal press used to try to do journalism. But they have given up.
I'm old enough to remember when CNN was a pretty middle of the road news organization.
But Fox came along and proved that naked partisanship, half-truths, innuendo, and
brightening up the hate centers of the brain was a far more profitable way of doing
business. CNN just had to compete.
We do have the Fox "News" Network (Most watched cable news channel, or so the
continually brag, and with TV/cable being where most Americans get their news from that
makes them a pretty big player) and One America "News" Network. Ad in the Sinclair
Broadcasting Network--they have no problem sending out canned od-eds supporting Trump
so they should have no ideological objection to pursuing this story. Perhaps they could
do some investigating and reporting instead of filling their airtime with
unsubstantiated accusations made by others that they take at face value.
Not to mention there are some print sources--The Washington Times, the NY Post, the
Orange County Register, Des Moines Register, etc.
Right? Between Fox News, the Murdoch owned papers, Breitbart, the Daiky
Caller/Wire, and Sinclair, the idea that right isn't represented in the media is
frankly insane. Even Q Anon has a better reach in Facebook than the NYT and they
are a pure distillation of conservatism.
"There is no conservative media" is an idea about as tethered to reality as
conservative media is in general.
This is news. Hunter Biden is most likely a crook. And a well-known watchdog group has just filed a
12-page complaint with DOJ requesting an investigation. Also check out this TV appearance on
Newsmax.
Hunter Biden is most likely a crook. But what a person "most likely is" is not news. I used
to watch Newsmax because it is good to hear about stories that the liberal press doesn't
cover. And it is good to get varying perspectives on news events even if the liberal press
covers them. But I can't take tv news any more. They are all mostly useless for people like
me who detest both political parties. I watch only Newsy. You should try if you are really
interested in news.
"watchdog group" you say? And that is supposed to me make me think that there is a difference
between that and the Republican Party? The liberals pioneered that trick. Now everyone uses
it. That is, name (effectively) an arm of the Democratic Party a "watchdog" and that is
supposed to give it credibility. But the trick is subject to our First Law of Politics.
Whatever tactic one party deploys, as long as it is successful, the other party will deploy
it. No matter how much they denounced it previously. At best, they will rename it. But
usually, they don't bother.
In any case, unless this "watchdog group" is alleging a crime there is no basis for a DOJ
investigation. What is the criminal accusation?
I'm not gonna lie, I didn't even waste my time reading this piece. Arthur seems to have all of a
sudden become interested in corruption (which likely didn't even happen) in a way he expressed no
interest in for the last 4 years. Forgive me if I don't vote him as an honest broker.
It's just so weak. This isn't an October surprise -- this is like a turkey surprise casserole
served two weeks after Thanksgiving. Even if this were a game-changing piece of reporting, it
seems a dubious tactic to release it on the morning of the election on a website that
probably gets less views than some random 16 year old dancing on Tik-Tok.
TAC's pivot over the last couple years into Brietbart territory is embarrassing. A lot of rightwing
media and personalities held out for awhile on Trump, but eventually saw where the wind was blowing
and jumped in the deep end. I hope no one on the principled right or left ever lets them forget it.
No shelter for scoundrels....
Thanks for publishing this. I hope more such pieces appear here in the next few weeks. TAC's regular
readers from the Left don't like it. Good. Rub their noses in it.
I was mentioning Hunter Biden and his Ukraine dealings back in 2014 but I don't have a public forum
outside email and social media and no one thought it of interest till his dad was running for
president against a man who by many accounts has been a crook his entire adult life, and proud of
it.
So Hunter failed to register as a foreign agent. Isn't that what Mike Flynn got busted for
along with some other Trump campaign officials? And hasn't Trump demanded his people all be
forgiven for their transgressions cause it wasn't really a bad thing?
Out of curiosity, among the hundreds if not thousands of websites you could be reading right now,
apart from thousands of decent monographs and works of fiction, why are you spending time this
morning at this "nutjob site," going so far as to login to the comments section to express to the
other presumably "nut job" readers that you're better than them?
This speaks VOLUMES about your worth as a human being. When you wake up around 3 AM over the next
few nights, it'll hit you. Let it sink in. Let it marinate. From such truths character is built.
It's pretty extreme. TAC comment section has become unusable bickering and taunts even after
blocking half the content. I don't know what they are hoping to accomplish other than
confirming our worst guesses about their character.
Exclusive? Of course! No one in their right mind would print it. And the enemy of the state-fake news
outlets are all looking for scoops and looking to win major awards and prizes for breaking a
story-----and for some reason all of these thousands of journalists did not get this "exclusive."
all unproved nonsense.Where is the indictment, when, after all Trump and Barr woprk hand in hand...simply
BS stuff to support Trump. Should Trump lose, watch the legal stuff that he will confront. Now worry
about that
When did this site turn into The Tucker Carlson show ? Please return to the thoughtful conservative
thought that you are know for. Sign of the times I guess and how internet culture can demean us all.
It's the same delusion they engaged in with Trump. They overweight the feelings of their in
group and underweight the population as a whole. Tucker doesn't actually have many viewers in
the scheme of winning a national election. He couldn't appeal to moderates.
It makes me nauseous just thinking about who might be chosen for a Biden
administration.
There will be no hope for reform within the Democratic Party, ever, with a 2020 win.
A win will be the formal announcement of the death of "the left" as the ideology that has
traditionally represented the interests of the people. The credibility of "the left" has been
eroding with each regime change war the U.S. has been initiating and participating in, with
NATO, since the war on Yugoslavia, but particularly in the Middle East and Libya. There has
not been a reckoning. Moral transgressions and cowardice, greed and inertia have in fact been
rewarded, and institutionalised. Eichman's plea a badge of honour and the whistleblower blown
away. The neocons, those influential Jewish, X-Trotskyite political chameleons pushed those
wars, and soft sold them through their many corporate media connections to produce "left
wing" journalism which manipulated concern for cruel dictators, for persecuted ethnic
minorities, refugees, weapons of mass destruction (the latest toxic version is chemical
weapons) and the unavailability of certain kinds of human rights, in nations which were
experiencing wars of "bomb them back to the stone age" aggression and psychopathic proxy
terror arranged by these very same neocons.
"The left" signalled their virtue by believing the war propaganda, and have not sufficiently
grasped the gravity of the sham perpetrated on their minds by this array of war criminals.
The derangement by Donald syndrome has also proven to be a most emphatic signal of virtue
with "the left", a commandment of wokeness. It is also most apparent that the deplorables,
aka the rednecks, can never be included in a census of the left- oh that is just way beyond
the pale! Very hard to imagine a large group of people who are so denigrated, and not just
within the US. Even the bourgeois left has become elitist, and the elitist as in Marxist left
has paradoxically no time for people, let alone the common ones. Vk has left us in no
doubt.
Glen Greenwald is at his peak in his Tucker Carlson interview, talking of infiltration of
"the left" by the agencies. This is compelling journalism because these truths are dangerous.
If there is a deep state, then it is the Dems, they've got it covered and the Atlanticists
are their allies. It fits in with Giraldi's latest prognostications, and what would be a
counterrevolution and not a revolution should "the left" decide to make the push. By left he
means Dems and their corporate sponsored affiliates, partisan elements of the spy agencies
and big tech. (I think of Mark2 and his misspelt slogans straight from the Gene Sharpe
handbook and wonder if earnest Mark2 is a typical lefty cadre, and muse over his enthusiasm
for the gutless Jeremy Corbyn, whom I'm sure is a very nice chap personally, but look at the
Labour Party now. Mark2, have you heard of the two forms of fascism, fascism and anti
fascism?). Jimmy Dore continues to be heroic when faced with unpleasant truths. Keep being
mad Jimmy, and just don't stand for it anymore!
Some of us are grateful for these individuals (and thanks to b for his meta commentary)
because they are publically enacting a kind of meaculpa, and they have premonitions and we
are being warned. There is grace in that. There still are still some good people who can
speak publically.
I used to be left politically, but got disillusioned some time ago. Not knowing what
progressivism is leading to, and not trusting its practitioners, I find conservatism to be
the more reasonable and tolerant position for these times.
The Italian archbishop best known for confronting Pope Francis over the Vatican's willful
blindness to priests who abuse boys has written a letter in which he lashes out at the
"global elite", prompting some to accuse him of sympathizing with the "QAnon" movement of
conspiracy theorists.
The letter, penned by Archibishop Carlo Maria Vigano, formerly the Vatican's ambassador to
the US, attacks a shadowy "global elite", that is plotting a "Great Reset" intended to
undermine "God and humanity".
This same group, the archbishop argued, is also responsible for the lockdowns that have
restricted movement and freedom around the globe, eliciting protests in many European
capitals.
"The fate of the whole world is being threatened by a global conspiracy against God and
humanity," Viganò wrote in the letter, which comes just days before the US election,
which the archbishop wrote was of "epochal importance."
"No one, up until last February," Viganò writes, "would ever have thought that, in
all of our cities, citizens would be arrested simply for wanting to walk down the street, to
breathe, to want to keep their business open, to want to go to church on Sunday. Yet now it
is happening all over the world, even in picture-postcard Italy that many Americans consider
to be a small enchanted country, with its ancient monuments, its churches, its charming
cities, its characteristic villages." Viganò adds: "And while the politicians are
barricaded inside their palaces promulgating decrees like Persian satraps, businesses are
failing, shops are closing, and people are prevented from living, traveling, working, and
praying."
Working to protect the world from this group of elites seeking to recast society in a
secular, totalitarian model, Viganò portrays President Trump as "the final garrison
against the world dictatorship". Viganò cast Trump's opponent, Vice President Joe
Biden, as "a person who is manipulated by the deep state."
Analysts who monitor "QAnon" conspiracy theories and their spread online warned the
mainstream press that the letter had been widely discussed on various QAnon message boards,
and had been disseminated in languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and
Italian, according to
Yahoo News.
Over the summer, Trump tweeted an earlier letter penned by the archbishop, and encouraged
his supporters to read it.
In the past, Viagnò has accused Pope Francis of sweeping the child abuse crisis
under the rug, and moving to protect homosexual priests, part of a "homosexual current"
flowing through the Vatican.
Read the full letter below:
* * *
DONALD J. TRUMP
Sunday, October 25, 2020
Solemnity of Christ the King
Mr. President,
Allow me to address you at this hour in which the fate of the whole world is being
threatened by a global conspiracy against God and humanity. I write to you as an Archbishop,
as a Successor of the Apostles, as the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of
America. I am writing to you in the midst of the silence of both civil and religious
authorities. May you accept these words of mine as the "voice of one crying out in the
desert" (Jn 1:23).
As I said when I wrote my letter to you in June, this historical moment sees the forces of
Evil (read neoliberalism) aligned in a battle without quarter against the forces of Good;
forces of Evil that appear powerful and organized as they oppose the children of Light, who
are disoriented and disorganized, abandoned by their temporal and spiritual leaders .
Daily we sense the attacks multiplying of those who want to destroy the very basis of
society: the natural family, respect for human life, love of country, freedom of education
and business. We see heads of nations and religious leaders pandering to this suicide of
Western culture and its Christian soul, while the fundamental rights of citizens and
believers are denied in the name of a health emergency that is revealing itself more and more
fully as instrumental to the establishment of an inhuman faceless tyranny.
A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite
that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically
limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has
already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world
leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are
unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their
agenda.
The purpose of the Great Reset is the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the
imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal
income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International
Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of
vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gates with the collaboration of
the main pharmaceutical groups. Beyond the enormous economic interests that motivate the
promoters of the Great Reset, the imposition of the vaccination will be accompanied by the
requirement of a health passport and a digital ID, with the consequent contact tracing of the
population of the entire world. Those who do not accept these measures will be confined in
detention camps or placed under house arrest, and all their assets will be confiscated.
Mr. President, I imagine that you are already aware that in some countries the Great Reset
will be activated between the end of this year and the first trimester of 2021. For this
purpose, further lockdowns are planned, which will be officially justified by a supposed
second and third wave of the pandemic. You are well aware of the means that have been
deployed to sow panic and legitimize draconian limitations on individual liberties, artfully
provoking a world-wide economic crisis. In the intentions of its architects, this crisis will
serve to make the recourse of nations to the Great Reset irreversible, thereby giving the
final blow to a world whose existence and very memory they want to completely cancel. But
this world, Mr. President, includes people, affections, institutions, faith, culture,
traditions, and ideals: people and values that do not act like automatons, who do not obey
like machines, because they are endowed with a soul and a heart, because they are tied
together by a spiritual bond that draws its strength from above, from that God that our
adversaries want to challenge, just as Lucifer did at the beginning of time with his "non
serviam."
Many people – as we well know – are annoyed by this reference to the clash
between Good and Evil and the use of "apocalyptic" overtones, which according to them
exasperates spirits and sharpens divisions. It is not surprising that the enemy is angered at
being discovered just when he believes he has reached the citadel he seeks to conquer
undisturbed. What is surprising, however, is that there is no one to sound the alarm. The
reaction of the deep state to those who denounce its plan is broken and incoherent, but
understandable. Just when the complicity of the mainstream media had succeeded in making the
transition to the New World Order almost painless and unnoticed, all sorts of deceptions,
scandals and crimes are coming to light.
Until a few months ago, it was easy to smear as "conspiracy theorists" those who denounced
these terrible plans, which we now see being carried out down to the smallest detail. No one,
up until last February, would ever have thought that, in all of our cities, citizens would be
arrested simply for wanting to walk down the street, to breathe, to want to keep their
business open, to want to go to church on Sunday. Yet now it is happening all over the world,
even in picture-postcard Italy that many Americans consider to be a small enchanted country,
with its ancient monuments, its churches, its charming cities, its characteristic villages.
And while the politicians are barricaded inside their palaces promulgating decrees like
Persian satraps, businesses are failing, shops are closing, and people are prevented from
living, traveling, working, and praying. The disastrous psychological consequences of this
operation are already being seen, beginning with the suicides of desperate entrepreneurs and
of our children, segregated from friends and classmates, told to follow their classes while
sitting at home alone in front of a computer.
In Sacred Scripture, Saint Paul speaks to us of "the one who opposes" the manifestation of
the mystery of iniquity, the kathèkon (2 Thess 2:6-7). In the religious sphere, this
obstacle to evil is the Church, and in particular the papacy; in the political sphere, it is
those who impede the establishment of the New World Order.
As is now clear, the one who occupies the Chair of Peter has betrayed his role from the
very beginning in order to defend and promote the globalist ideology, supporting the agenda
of the deep church, who chose him from its ranks.
Mr. President, you have clearly stated that you want to defend the nation – One
Nation under God, fundamental liberties, and non-negotiable values that are denied and fought
against today. It is you, dear President, who are "the one who opposes" the deep state, the
final assault of the children of darkness.
For this reason, it is necessary that all people of good will be persuaded of the epochal
importance of the imminent election: not so much for the sake of this or that political
program, but because of the general inspiration of your action that best embodies – in
this particular historical context – that world, our world, which they want to cancel
by means of the lockdown. Your adversary is also our adversary: it is the Enemy of the human
race, He who is "a murderer from the beginning" (Jn 8:44).
Around you are gathered with faith and courage those who consider you the final garrison
against the world dictatorship. The alternative is to vote for a person who is manipulated by
the deep state, gravely compromised by scandals and corruption, who will do to the United
States what Jorge Mario Bergoglio is doing to the Church, Prime Minister Conte to Italy,
President Macron to France, Prime Minster Sanchez to Spain, and so on. The blackmailable
nature of Joe Biden – just like that of the prelates of the Vatican's "magic circle"
– will expose him to be used unscrupulously, allowing illegitimate powers to interfere
in both domestic politics as well as international balances. It is obvious that those who
manipulate him already have someone worse than him ready, with whom they will replace him as
soon as the opportunity arises.
And yet, in the midst of this bleak picture, this apparently unstoppable advance of the
"Invisible Enemy," an element of hope emerges. The adversary does not know how to love, and
it does not understand that it is not enough to assure a universal income or to cancel
mortgages in order to subjugate the masses and convince them to be branded like cattle.
This people, which for too long has endured the abuses of a hateful and tyrannical power,
is rediscovering that it has a soul; it is understanding that it is not willing to exchange
its freedom for the homogenization and cancellation of its identity; it is beginning to
understand the value of familial and social ties, of the bonds of faith and culture that
unite honest people. This Great Reset is destined to fail because those who planned it do not
understand that there are still people ready to take to the streets to defend their rights,
to protect their loved ones, to give a future to their children and grandchildren. The
leveling inhumanity of the globalist project will shatter miserably in the face of the firm
and courageous opposition of the children of Light. The enemy has Satan on its side, He who
only knows how to hate. But on our side, we have the Lord Almighty, the God of armies arrayed
for battle, and the Most Holy Virgin, who will crush the head of the ancient Serpent. "If God
is for us, who can be against us?" (Rom 8:31).
Mr. President, you are well aware that, in this crucial hour, the United States of America
is considered the defending wall against which the war declared by the advocates of globalism
has been unleashed. Place your trust in the Lord, strengthened by the words of the Apostle
Paul: "I can do all things in Him who strengthens me" (Phil 4:13). To be an instrument of
Divine Providence is a great responsibility, for which you will certainly receive all the
graces of state that you need, since they are being fervently implored for you by the many
people who support you with their prayers.
With this heavenly hope and the assurance of my prayer for you, for the First Lady, and
for your collaborators, with all my heart I send you my blessing.
God bless the United States of America!
+ Carlo Maria Viganò
Tit. Archbishop of Ulpiana
Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America
holgerdanske , 33 minutes ago
Here is a man who seems to get it spot on!
Richard Chesler , 3 minutes ago
What's his ZH alias?
Sparehead , 29 minutes ago
I'd lost all hope for the Catholic church, but this guy is stepping up.
I was just telling my brother that it was likely the best thing that ever happened to me
when my parents decided to move me from Catholic school to public school, and that I never
was an alter boy when in Catholic school. Who knew the priests were diddling the alter boys
at the cyclic rate?
Slaytheist , 32 minutes ago
I left the church long ago, for the obvious reasons. If Carlo Maria Viganò was
Pope, and the kid touchers burnt at the stake, I'd consider going back.
sixsigma cygnusatratus , 29 minutes ago
Leftism is an inverse form of theocracy. Destroying the Church and replacing it with
government is also part of the plan of globalism.
Nation States and Christianity represent a threat to globalists and leftists.
Cabreado , 36 minutes ago
I appreciate the Archbishop's efforts, but...
Trump can't "save" it; he can only throw a wrench in the velocity.
(plenty worthy of a vote, I'd add)
Saving anything -- that's on the People.
That's per Design.
Again Ferdinand Pecora harking back to the 1930's as discussed in the past weeks
commentaries:-
Wilmarth's writing is so insightful and profound in its analysis of the similarities
between the banks of the late 1920s and today that it feels like the ghost of Ferdinand
Pecora might have been whispering in Wilmarth's ear. Pecora was a former prosecutor from
New York who was chosen to preside over much of the early 1930s Senate Banking hearings and
investigations of the corrupt Wall Street structure that led to the 1929 crash and Great
Depression.
Three banking names that played significant roles in the crash of 1929 and the
ensuing Great Depression were National City Bank, JP Morgan, and Chase National Bank.
National City Bank was the precursor to today's Citigroup, the bank that would have
collapsed in 2008 except for the largest taxpayer and Federal Reserve bailout in global
banking history. JPMorgan and Chase combined in 2000 to create today's JPMorgan
Chase.
"... Recently, the essayist George Scialabba described neoliberalism as "the extension of market dominance to all spheres of social life, fostered and enforced by the state," a rather nefarious-sounding proposition, including "investor rights agreements masquerading as 'free trade' and constraining the rights of governments to protect their own workers, environments, and currencies." ..."
"... Washington Monthly ..."
"... "neoliberal" quickly took on the heartless, Hooverian odor that "conservative" already had. ..."
"... checklist of neoliberal principles, which includes "the rule of the market," "cutting expenditures for social services," "deregulation," "privatization, and "eliminating the concept of 'the public good' or 'community.'" ..."
"... Between neoconservative and neoliberal, then, the neo prefix means not "new" but "disingenuous." ..."
"... The "neo" prefix now also carries a whiff of racist, in that both neoliberals and neoconservatives dissent from the liberal consensus on race issues, with neither in line with the idea that whites are stained by "privilege." ..."
... Today the word is generally used as a critique from the left to refer to capitalism run
amok. Recently, the essayist George Scialabba described
neoliberalism as "the extension of market dominance to all spheres of social life, fostered and
enforced by the state," a rather nefarious-sounding proposition, including "investor rights
agreements masquerading as 'free trade' and constraining the rights of governments to protect
their own workers, environments, and currencies."
... In the early '80s, Charles Peters, the editor of the Washington Monthly ,
helped usher in the new flavor of the word, as well as its reception from the left, with his
aggressive
"A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto." Those New Republic writers also brandished their
self-appellation as neoliberals , in contrast to the mockingly termed
paleoliberals . It furthered the sense of neoliberals as conservatives in sheep's
clothing that they also opposed the basic liberal position on race issues -- Bill Clinton's
welfare-reform policy, for example, was an outgrowth of neoliberal positions established in the
1980s, heartily espoused by, for example, TheNew Republic . Overtones, then,
took effect -- for liberals, "neoliberal" quickly took on the heartless, Hooverian odor
that "conservative" already had.
Since the Great Recession put the free market in an especially bad light, the new sense of
neoliberal as a stain has settled in for good. Those familiar with the term through
the writings of Lippmann, Hayek, or Friedman, once treated as "respectable" by many liberals,
might now be confused by tart descriptions of neoliberalism such as the immigration activists
Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia's flinty, contemptuous checklist of neoliberal
principles, which
includes "the rule of the market," "cutting expenditures for social services,"
"deregulation," "privatization, and "eliminating the concept of 'the public good' or
'community.'"
...Today, neoliberal is used to refer to someone who bills themselves as a liberal but
promotes ideas that actually inhibit individuals' well-being. In the 1930s, the neo- in
neoliberal meant "new." But with this new meaning, the neo- prefix takes on a more specific
connotation: "fake."
... ... ...
Between neoconservative and neoliberal, then, the neo prefix means not "new" but
"disingenuous." The neocon cloaks right-wing barbarism to make it seem less threatening;
the neoliberal poses as a liberal while actually being a right-winger. The "neo" prefix now
also carries a whiff of racist, in that both neoliberals and neoconservatives dissent from the
liberal consensus on race issues, with neither in line with the idea that whites are stained by
"privilege." From "new" to a moralist sneer -- this is how meanings evolve. The original
ideological positions survive, and impose their meanings on the words created to move beyond
them.
JOHN
MCWHORTERis a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He teaches linguistics at Columbia
University, hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley ,
and is the author, most recently, of Words on the Move
.
What Would A Democratic Presidency Really Change?worldblee , Oct 31 2020
17:02 utc |
1
Pepe Escobar is as pessimistic about a Harris (Biden) administration as I am. The incoming
foreign policy team would be the return of the
blob that waged seven wars during the Obama/Biden administration:
Taking a cue from [the Transition Integrity Project], let's game a Dem return to the White
House – with the prospect of a President Kamala taking over sooner rather than later.
That means, essentially, The Return of the Blob.
President Trump calls it "the swamp". Former Obama Deputy National Security Adviser Ben
Rhodes – a mediocre hack – at least coined the funkier "Blob", applied to the
incestuous Washington, DC foreign policy gang, think tanks, academia, newspapers (from the
Washington Post to the New York Times), and that unofficial Bible, Foreign Affairs
magazine.
A Dem presidency, right away, will need to confront the implications of two wars: Cold
War 2.0 against China, and the interminable, trillion-dollar GWOT (Global War on Terror),
renamed OCO (Overseas Contingency Operations) by the Obama-Biden administration.
The Democratic White House team Escobar describes (Clinton, Blinken, Rice, Flournoy) would
be an assembly of well known war mongers who all argue for hawkish policies. The main
'enemies', Russia and China, would be the same as under Trump. Syria, Venezuela, Iran and
others would stay on the U.S. target list. U.S. foreign policy would thereby hardly change
from Trump's version but would probably be handled with more deadly competence.
But Escobar sees two potential positive developments:
In contrast, two near-certain redeeming features would be the return of the US to the
JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal, which was Obama-Biden's only foreign policy achievement, and
re-starting nuclear disarmament negotiations with Russia. That would imply containment of
Russia, not a new all-out Cold War, even as Biden has recently stressed, on the record,
that Russia is the "biggest threat" to the US.
I believe that Harris (Biden) will disappoint on both of those issues. The
neoconservatives have already infested the Harris (Biden) camp. They will make sure that
JCPOA
does not come back :
Last night on an official Biden campaign webinar led by "Jewish Americans for Biden", and
moderated by Ann Lewis of Democratic Majority for Israel, two prominent neocon Republicans
endorsed Biden, primarily because of Trump's character posing a danger to democracy. But
both neocons emphasized that Biden would be more willing to use force in the Middle East
and reassured Jewish viewers that Biden will seek to depoliticize Israel support, won't
necessarily return to the Iran deal and will surround himself with advisers who support
Israel and believe in American military intervention.
Eric Edelman, a former diplomat and adviser to Dick Cheney, said Trump's peace plan has
fostered an open political divide in the U.S. over Israel, ...
Eliot Cohen, a Bush aide and academic, echoed the fear that Israel is being politicized.
...
...
Cohen and Edelman opposed Obama's Iran deal, and both predicted that Biden will be hawkish
on Iran.
...
"There will be voices" in the Biden administration that seek a return to the Iran deal, but
the clock has been running for four years, and we're in a different place, he said. And "it
will be hard [for Biden] not to use the leverage that the sanctions provide in part because
Iran is not abiding by a lot of the limits of the nuclear agreement They're about three,
maybe four months away from having enough fissile material to actually develop a nuclear
weapon."
For lifting the sanctions against Iran the Harris (Biden) administration will demand much
more than Iran's return to the limits of the JCPOA. Iran will reject all new demands, be they
about restricting its missile force or limiting its support for Syria. The conflict will
thereby continue to fester.
The other issue is arms control. While a Harris (Biden) administration may take up Putin's
offer to unconditionally
prolong the New-START agreement for a year it will certainly want more concessions from
Russia than that country is willing to give. Currently it is Russia that has the upper hand
in strategic weapons with already deployed hypersonic missiles and other new platforms. The
U.S. will want to fill the new 'missile gap' and the military-industrial complex stands ready
to profit from that. The New-START prolongation will eventually run out and I do not see the
U.S. agreeing to new terms while Russia has a technological superiority.
Domestic policies under a democratic president will likewise see no substantial
difference. As Krystal Ball remarked,
here summarized from a Rolling Stone podcast:
But even with a Biden win, Ball doesn't think it will mean much for policy.
"My prediction for the Biden era is that very little actually happens," says Ball.
"Democrats are very good at feigning impotence. We saw this in the SCOTUS hearings as well.
They're very good for coming up with reasons why, 'oh those mean Republicans, like we want
to do better healthcare and we want left wages, but oh gosh, Mitch McConnell, he's so
wiley, we can't get it done.'"
'Change' was an Obama marketing slogan to sell his Republican light policies. A real
change never came. The Harris (Biden) administration must be seen in similar light.
I therefore agree with the sentiment with which Escobar closes his piece :
In a nutshell, Biden-Harris would mean The Return of the Blob with a vengeance.
Biden-Harris would be Obama-Biden 3.0. Remember those seven wars. Remember the surges.
Remember the kill lists. Remember Libya. Remember Syria. Remember "soft coup" Brazil.
Remember Maidan. You have all been warned.
Posted by b at
16:45 UTC |
Comments (183) I have been trying to set the expectations for my deluded Democratic,
pro-tech industry, pro-security state friends and colleagues who think they are
forward-thinking progressives but actually just hate Trump as emblematic of non-college
educated blue collar types they prefer not to associate with. Biden himself said it, "Nothing
will change," and Obama deported many more people in his first term than Trump has to pick
but one issue. There will be no M4A, little change in foreign policy, no major stimulus for
workers, etc. But since the face in the White House will have changed, they will convince
themselves that America has changed and it was all thanks to them...
One major change I expect to see is that BLM protests will fade into the background if
Harris/Biden is elected. Without the need to pressure an administration the elites want to
get rid of, there won't be the funding and energy to sustain it. But America will continue on
the same downward trajectory and the same divisions will still exist with no remediation in
sight.
Really, so what? You have a choice between chaotic anarchic corruption, and organised
professional corruption. Is it not better to have the calm, predictable, version - at least
you know what you're getting. In any case I am not sure Biden would be able to go back to
launching new wars so easily. The US gives the impression of being over-stretched as it is.
It seems clear that Biden will win. This means that the possibility of a serious military
confrontation with Russia is more likely than it would be with a Trump win. In any Biden
cabinet Michelle Flournoy will have a major voice. She would have likely become Hillary's
Secretary of Defense. In August of 2016 Flournoy wrote a major foreign policy article
advocating a 'no fly' zone over Syria. That would have meant that the US military would have
been obliged to prevent the Russia airforce from operating in Syrian skies (even though, the
Syrian government had invited the Russians to be there). No one really knows if Flournoy
would have been given authority to carry out such insanity had Hillary won, but the
consequences of such insane policy are easy to imagine.
But without much doubt, a Biden administration will have Susan Rice and Michelle Flournoy
in very high policy positions. Given that Biden is rapidly descending into dementia and
Kamala Harris seems utterly clueless, US government foreign policy will very likely be led by
a Rice/Flournoy collaboration in the coming years. Of course, China has become a much bigger
player in the last four years. Maybe those fools around Biden will be distracted by China and
they avoid war with with Russia. In either case it looks like very dangerous times
ahead.
Trump was always for me about controlled demolition of the empire.
Putin will not tolerate another ramping up of hostilities in the MENA.
I believe, just as in 2016, open military confrontation with Russia hangs in the
balance.
It is believed here and elsewhere that Russia and China are working hand in hand and
lockstep to thwart the empire.
They may be trade allies but they are not bed fellows.
Russia will always do what is in its own interest and will be beyond reproach from China
come a last-minute attempt for it to talk down hostilities btw Ru and U.S.A.
I hope those peddling the narrative that all is theater and a mere globalist game to keep
the peons entertained are correct.
But I fear the stupidity and egoism of man far more than I do their love of money and life
of luxury.
The JCPOA's "snap back" provisions etc. prove that Obama never intended JCPOA as a long term
agreement in the first place. The issue was always how long it would suit, not how long it
would take for the US to. Nor is the US going to forego it's support for a colonial assault
on the Middle East, aka Israel, any more than England will give up Gibraltar.
That said, there really is a policy debate between attacking Russia first or attacking
China first or simultaneously attacking both. The thing is, the conflict will continue after
any election. Since the Democratic Party isn't a programmatic party but a franchise operation
of Outs, there will be zero unanimity within the Democratic Party and not even a clean sweep
of the national government will resolve the dispute, which will be waged with exactly the
same panic-mongering, paranoid cries of treason, barely subdued hysteria at the prospect of
the lower races overtaking the God-given rights of the US government to exercise imperium
(right to punish, particularly with death, originally) over humanity, and so on. The same
ignorant vicious halfwits who were convinced Clinton Foundation was worse than the Comintern
infiltrating innocent America made assholes of themselves. They'll just do it again over
Biden, but with different made up excuses.
Domestically, there will be real differences, albeit some will still consider them
entirely minor. There will be less emphasis on military officers masquerading as civilian
officials; more emphasis on actually having competent officials who are even confirmed by the
Senate; somewhat larger infrastructure investment; somewhat less deliberate destruction of
government capacity to deliver services; slightly greater emphasis on keeping money valuable
by limiting government spending, with smaller increases in military spending, slightly
greater taxes, and only limited support to state governments going bankrupt, bankrupt
unemployment and pension funds; a few restrictions on mass evictions; no separation of
families in ICE prisons; open appeals to racism will cease. There will not however be any
Medicare expansion, nor will there be a radically progressive federal income tax, not even a
new bankruptcy law, nor will there be even political reforms like direct popular election of
the president or even reform of the judiciary. There may be a minimum wage increase to $15
per hour.
One note: The idea that any president will honor any deal to step down or that a president
can be forced down is refuted by history thus far. All theories that Biden is scheduled to be
terminated are silly. Or worse, attempts to race bait Harris (note the ones who like to call
her by her first name.) The influence exercised by Obama in getting Biden the nomination
shows that if Biden is in any sense a puppet, he's Obama's puppet. Fixating on Harris instead
is foolish even as some sort of amateur conspiracy mongering. No matter what Obama thinks,
the inauguration will sever all puppet strings.
Can't say I'm convinced by all these threats of wars. They didn't do a No-Fly Zone in
Syria when they could, e.g. 2013. The reason it was not done is that it was too difficult to
do, and required too vast a military investment. Situation remains true today. You'll find
most of Biden's prospective wars fall in the same category.
The US self-declared "progressives" are horribly dumb people, no matter their degrees and
"intellectual" professions. Stupidity is the illness (weakness) of the societal immunity
system. The Blob of the parasitic class is the pestilence that thrives on the immune weakness
of the US society. Not happy with mine, then find a better metaphor.
I repeat myself from before, US presidents change, US policy (Mayhem Inc.) does not.
Nether on Russia, Syria, Iran, Venezuela ..., nor on China. If Trump loses, I will miss only
the potential duel at the OK Corral between Trump and the Blob/Swamp. If Trmp wins, I am
buying popcorn.
@Laguerre #7
I would argue the failure of a "no-fly" zone in Syria was more due to united UN (Russia and
China) opposition plus the Russia airbase in Tartus rather than any policy changes in the US.
It's everywhere. And matched by Democratic Party ineptitude, fake "resistance", and
generally lax attitude (spurred by a false sense of security due to polling numbers that
can't be relied upon).
That's why I'm predicting a Trump landslide - including winning the popular vote.
The Deep State wants a 'Glorious Leader' type that can lead the country against Russia and
China.
KB has it right the demodogs will have better PR but nothing will change. The only thing I
hope they do is fully throw the u.s. govt behind stopping the virus and even that will be
hard do to many stupid people.
Trumpster and the swamp all he did was change the cruel animals in it and biden will
change it back to the other cruel animals that were there before.
It is hard to tell what will change if the Democrats win because they have flip flopped on
policies so many times that you don't know what they really stand for.
Are they going to ban fracking or not?
Are they going to end the oil industry or not?
Are they going to pack the Supreme Court or not ?
Are they going to implement the Green New Deal or not ?
Are they going to encourage immigration or not ?
Are they going to tear down the Wall?
Are they going to defund the police or not?
Other than #OrangeManBad what do they actually stand for ?
Jonathan Pie lays it out quite nicely https://youtu.be/IdnHfYbr1cQ
The one issue that is critical is that it is clear than Biden will not make it full term.
His mental faculties are deteriorating rapidly. He might just make it over the goal post line
but just barely.
Therefore the real question is what will Kamala Harris do?
Russia has a lead in strategic weapons that the US will not be able to catch up with.
Hence the US emphasis on nuclear weapons to bridge the gap. Russia has successfully thwarted
the empire on several occasions. How will the empire struck back ? (So as not to lose
credibility with allies and vassals alike)
They are going to reduce government subsidies for fracking
And encourage the oil industry's ongoing retooling to other energies
They are going to expand the SCOTUS to 13 seats in keeping with the number of Circuit
Courts
They are going to implement environmental legislation and policies
They will hopefully try to adopt a comprehensive policy on immigration and naturalization
They will abandon The Wall project as pointless
They will review the role of the police in dealing with situations where a social worker or a
psychologist (with police escort) might better be able to handle the situation
Kamala Harris will keep an active and high profile as she is being groomed to run in
2024
I agree that trajectory in foreign policy will be the same. I think a Trump administration
would tend to entrench into the bureaucracy the xenophobic nationalists. This is in contrast
to the neoliberal nationalists that make up the Democrat side of the foreign policy clique.
In practice the latter ends up carrying water for the neocons, so the difference from the
global perspective, the perspective of those on whom the bombs fall, is academic.
Domestically, however, I don't think we can say there's no significant difference. At some
point far down the road, there will be a more meaningful internal political struggle in the
US. Talking about when the $$ printing power runs out, so several presidential cycles from
now at the very earliest, maybe many decades away.
The out-groups targeted by xenophobic nationalism will shift by then - either black or
hispanic people will necessarily be included into the Republican party, and the divide may be
more a matter of religion or nationality than race, but the overall idea will be the
same.
No matter the details, it would be better to go into that conflict without giving the
right-wingers a big head start. I think we should admit that Trump does accelerate the
process. Maybe readers outside the US take some pleasure in the chaos produced by this, but
for anyone actually planning to live within the US, who also objects to unrestrained
nationalism, there actually is a pretty high price to pay for peeling off the mask of phony
benevolence off of the de-facto imperialist foreign policy.
'b' half the truth isn't the truth, no doubt you'l get round to the other half. It's
conspicuous !
In these times focusing on what might happen if we get Biden, is biased.
What in your view might happen if we get trump ?
Given his track record.
Much more relevant I feel.
@Malchik #16
Well, kid, I will guarantee that 2/3rds of what you say will happen with a Biden win, won't
happen.
I am particularly struck by your assertion that "super predator" Biden and "Lock 'em up"
Harris will do anything to rein in police misbehavior. That is pure fantasy.
As for fracking: the subsidies were primarily by banksters in the form of loans and have long
since ended. Nobody believes fracking is going to be a profitable business for at least a
decade.
The only objection I have with supporting Trump's reelection from a non far-right viewpoint
is that you would essentially be supporting an anti-democratic process: Trump is certainly
going to lose the popular vote. Deserving or not, Biden does represent the absolute majority
of adult America. By supporting Trump, you're essentially speaking in the name of the
interests of a small redneck aristocracy (of circa 77,000 in size, according to the 2016
election results) in the Rust Belt and Western Pennsylvania. You are supporting white
supremacy those rednecks undoubtedly support - wanting you or not.
In my opinion, it's time for the non far-right of the USA to start thinking seriously
(specially if you're one of the twelve socialists in the country) in Third Party vote. Yes,
you won't pick up the fruits immediately, but at least you're build up a legacy for the
generations to come to try to change the landscape.
Now, of course, very little will change with Biden-Harris. But this has a good side, too:
it shows the American Empire has clearly reached an exhaustion point, where the POTUS is
impotent to the obstacle posed by China-Russia. Putin has already publicly stated he doesn't
care who's next POTUS; China has already stated what the USA does or decides won't mean shit.
Maybe the rising irrelevance of the POTUS is good in the greater scheme of things - or, at
least, it gives us new, very precious, information about the core of the Empire.
Is b really suggesting Trump is more peaceful than Biden?
The notion that Trump is fundamentally different than Biden or Hillary or Obama or Bush is
specious. They are all on Team Deep State, which serves the monied class.
And the pretense that the Deep State is divided or partisan is equally laughable.
Strange that so many smart people fall for the shell game behind the 'Illusion of
Democracy'. Is it so difficult to see the reshuffling of deck chairs and entertaining
diversions that pass for "US politics"?
Biden will bring fresh blood to the Presidency, just you watch.
But seriously, things have been changing very rapidly all of my life, and accelerating as
we go. I don't see that the political/managerial classes here are up to the job of managing
that change, have shown any aptitude for it or understanding of it in the past either. They
remain focussed on their depraved personal ambitions and demented interpersonal disputes. So
no change in the midst of lots of change is what I expect, time to keep an eye out and
consider ones options.
By supporting Trump, you're essentially speaking in the name of the interests of a small
redneck aristocracy (of circa 77,000 in size, according to the 2016 election results) in
the Rust Belt and Western Pennsylvania. You are supporting white supremacy those rednecks
undoubtedly support - wanting you or not.
Jesus but that is an ignorant comment. Michael Moore explained 4 years ago why Trump will win
the election (2016) https://youtu.be/vMm5HfxNXY4
div> @vk #21
You said:
The only objection I have with supporting Trump's reelection from a non far-right
viewpoint is that you would essentially be supporting an anti-democratic process: Trump is
certainly going to lose the popular vote.
The United States has a Constitution and was designed as a Republic.
"Democracy" as in majoritarian rule was explicitly designed against by the Founding
Fathers.
Thus your criticism is utterly irrelevant. Until the Electoral College system is changed by
Constitutional Amendment, or the United States of America is overthrown by a revolution, all
this talk about "majoritarian demos rule" is purely partisan nonsense.
Note also that the 48 states which are "first past the post" are all disenfranchising the
minority views. I 100% guarantee that a European style ranked vote system would see far more
minority votes be submitted than the present systems.
Deserving or not, Biden does represent the absolute majority of adult America. By
supporting Trump, you're essentially speaking in the name of the interests of a small redneck
aristocracy (of circa 77,000 in size, according to the 2016 election results) in the Rust
Belt and Western Pennsylvania. You are supporting white supremacy those rednecks undoubtedly
support - wanting you or not.
Wow, thanks for showing your "deplorables" views. Anyone against the "right"
and "proper" Democrat sellouts to pharma, tech and enviro must be rednecks. It is precisely
this view that galvanized the vote against HRC in 2016.
The only objection I have with supporting Trump's reelection from a non far-right viewpoint
is that you would essentially be supporting an anti-democratic process: Trump is certainly
going to lose the popular vote.
The United States has a Constitution and was designed as a Republic.
"Democracy" as in majoritarian rule was explicitly designed against by the Founding
Fathers.
Thus your criticism is utterly irrelevant. Until the Electoral College system is changed by
Constitutional Amendment, or the United States of America is overthrown by a revolution, all
this talk about "majoritarian demos rule" is purely partisan nonsense.
Note also that the 48 states which are "first past the post" are all disenfranchising the
minority views. I 100% guarantee that a European style ranked vote system would see far more
minority votes be submitted than the present systems.
Deserving or not, Biden does represent the absolute majority of adult America. By
supporting Trump, you're essentially speaking in the name of the interests of a small
redneck aristocracy (of circa 77,000 in size, according to the 2016 election results) in
the Rust Belt and Western Pennsylvania. You are supporting white supremacy those rednecks
undoubtedly support - wanting you or not.
Wow, thanks for showing your "deplorables" views. Anyone against the "right" and
"proper" Democrat sellouts to pharma, tech and enviro must be rednecks. It is precisely this
view that galvanized the vote against HRC in 2016.
The notion that Trump is fundamentally different than Biden or Hillary or Obama or Bush is
specious.
That's not actually true.
Biden has 47 years of track record to rely on.
HRC, ditto.
Bush is umpteenth generation Bush in government (100 years plus).
Obama was groomed through Harvard, community organization and Senate position as a servant of
the oligarchy.
Trump is a billionaire and 2nd generation wealthy, but he neither shares the views of the
oligarch classes - his historical behavior is clear proof of that - nor is he predictable as
the other 4 are.
If presented with a neocon view - all 4 of the above would 100% agree.
Trump? 85%.
That is a difference albeit absolutely not world changing.
Pure BS.
Giving health care to 20 million poor Americans ain't nothing to sneeze at. Adding pre
existing conditions save millions of lives. That's why the right despises Obama so much. How
dare he give money to those free loaders!
lets show what the republicans have done for poor Americans besides taking more needex
money from them and giving it to their rich buddies.
and No, Democrats cannot do anything if they don't control the Congress. They should have
done it 2 years ago but since all they were doing was scream RUSSIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! at
the top of their lungs,the people turned their backs on them.
Bullshit article.
The Democrats are not going to end fracking. It is doomed to collapse without their help. A
Wall Street Journal study revealed a remarkable fact that few Americans know; From 2000-2017
fracking companies spent $280 billion more to extract fracked oil and gas than they received
in revenue. Fracking is nothing more than a massive Ponzi scheme predicated on the constant
issuing of debt and stock. Fracking wells deplete quickly. There is a constant need for more
expensive drilling. The remaining areas that will be fracked have less productive wells. Much
of the debt fracking companies have issued is back loaded while the well's production is
front loaded. There simply isn't going to be enough revenue generated to meet debt
obligations. What made the scheme possible was the artificially low interest rates created by
the Federal Reserve. There was a demand for yield that drove investment into debt of dubious
quality. A crash is inevitable.
Biden will bring fresh blood to the Presidency, just you watch.
I am curious why you think so.
Biden is nothing, if not a creature of habit (of obedience to his corporate masters).
Biden likely NSC: Tony Blinken. Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy NSC under Obama.
Susan "Bomber" Rice?
John Kerry?
Sally Yates? The one who signed the FISA warrants based on the Steele Dossier (based on 2
drunkard Russians in Malta mad at being fired)
Michael Bloomberg?
Jamie Dimon?
The only "fresh blood" in this group is the teenage blood they inject to try and remain
young.
Elizabeth Warren, were Biden to appoint her as Treasury Secretary, *would* constitute fresh
blood.
The likelihood of the Senator from MBNA appointing her to that position is zero.
I would love to be wrong in that instance, but it ain't gonna happen.
What is trumps legacy so far ?
Let's call that -- - 'The Crimes Of Donald Trump'
Well he has legitimised cold blooded murder.
Ditto racism.
Run roughshod over national laws and conventions. -- Invading an embassy. Assange, koshogie
murder, white helmit chlorine attack false flag. Funding and arming by US of Isis.
Corporate mansloughter by virus.
Interference in numerous country's internal politics.
Allowing Israel to interfer take over US politics.
The above are a few that comes to mind.
Have we done away with law and order ?
Feel free to add to my 'Crimes of Donald Trump' list.
In a word normalisation.
I hope you are right that the US will avoid war in Syria because they would lose. I was,
on the other hand, very impressed that Flournoy was advocating that no fly zone in August of
2016. It was on the basis of her article at that time I fled the US Democratic Party. I knew
it was bad before, but it suddenly became clear how Hillary would lead us int WWIII.
We've talked at moa about how policy doesn't change much between Democrat and Republican
Administrations. And we've talked about the Illusion of Democracy.
That each President has a different personality as well as different priorities and
challenges during their time in office doesn't indicate any fundamental difference in how we
are governed.
And Hillary Clinton wants to be Secretary of Defense in a Biden administration. Not only
would the world be in trouble I could see her using the DOD internal hit teams to go after
her domestic enemies. They will make 8 years of Bush junior look like a Disneyland vacation.
It will be similar to the many unsolved murders of Weimar Germany.
That was sarcasm, I knew it was going to cause trouble, sarcasm never works on the web
unless you add a /sarc tag or something, I guess I feel a bit perverse today.
But to be serious, any attempt to predict what comes next here must rely on the idea that
the future will be like the past, we extrapolate in other words, from various trends that we
pick out. We can expect Biden to remain who he has been in the past, politicfally he's a
hack, what we know of Harris does not suggest any principles to speak of either, so I feel
more like I want to pay attention to what's coming than trying to predict what they is going
to do or not do. That likely depends on "contingencies" just as in the past.
#23 - "I don't see that the political/managerial classes here are up to the job of managing
that change, have shown any aptitude for it or understanding of it in the past either."
This is a highly relevant observation. For some time the character and intellectual scope
of the political/managerial sectors in the West have been noticeably mediocre, and will
likely continue as such for the foreseeable future. The necessary reforms of capitalism were
vetoed decades ago, ensuring that productive energies would gradually dissipate. For the last
decade all the West has had to offer the rest of humanity is neoliberal austerity, colour
revolutions, and armament contracts. This is a journey towards an eventual hollowed-out
self-imposed isolation, a process the political/managerial sectors are actively encouraging
and supporting without realizing it at all.
Interesting to see how the kayfabe vocabulary of Dim propaganda infects everyone's thought
and speech. Including b's:
"'Change' was an Obama marketing slogan to sell his Republican light policies."
Republican my eye. Democrat policies, period. A party founded, maintained and run to
implement the ruling class empire and war agenda, just like the Repucrats.
As if Obama was some kind of exception. Ditch this language.
usa is the major unknown;
China and Russia don't need to physically war - they are winning at PR around the globe.
Even tiny Cuba has greatly better creds!
usa needs to be a people who truly and consistently respect their allies.
Which comes back to usa being the major unknown.
'Cept for warmongering.
"All of us who spent careers in the military were raised on the notion that you lead by
example, and President Trump has been the antithesis of that in dealing with this
pandemic," said Charles "Steve" Abbot, former commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and deputy
Homeland Security Adviser. "Instead of taking steps that I would call 'Crisis Management
101,' President Trump shirked his duty to the nation by failing to provide the central
leadership necessary to get our arms around the problem, and he continues to mislead the
entire nation about this terrible threat. The result of that failure of leadership was that
his administration committed an unrelenting string of missteps, and the American public has
lost trust in what the president tells them."
The sixth Fleet is Europe, so "this terrible threat" must be Russia, which is the natural
enemy of the DNC/AtlanticCouncil/NATO unlike Trump the 'Putin-lover.'
And more on anti-Russia, from the article:
President Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton said earlier this year that
Trump had repeatedly raised the issue of withdrawing the United States from NATO, and
warned of "a very real risk" that Trump would actually follow through in a second term.
Nicholas Burns, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and the number three official at the
State Department, put it this way: "Every modern president since Harry Truman has viewed
our commitment to democratic allies around the world as sacrosanct, because for half a
century those alliances have been a key source of American power." He noted that a
dissolution of NATO is at the top of Russian President Vladimir Putin's wish list. "Under
President Trump we have walked away from that global leadership, and, as a result, trust in
the United States has plummeted even among our closest friends. That's done enormous
damage."
This is a journey towards an eventual hollowed-out self-imposed isolation, a process the
political/managerial sectors are actively encouraging and supporting without realizing it at
all.
Posted by: jayc | Oct 31 2020 19:18 utc | 37
I've been sort of fascinated by that for some time, back when I was young we were still
smart enough to know we had to compete with the USSR, and that we therefore had to develop
our human capital. And we did pretty well for a couple decades, but then after VietNam they
stopped doing that and choose the present "system" instead. Thus abandoning their long-term
ability to compete, the source of their power in the first place. Banana republics do not
compete well. Decadent.
But you have to give credit to the Russians and the Chinese too, their achievements are
impressive by any standard. Our enemies, the ones who have survived, have all proved their
mettle.
Can be, can be, no expectations in Biden / Harris. Nevertheless, Tronald is definitely not
the lesser evil. His foreign policy is also heading for a clash with China, and things are
not going well with Russia either. The warmongering anti-Iran axis has his support, the war
in Yemen continues, he won't leave Syria alone, his extremely Israel-friendly attitude
increases the danger of war. Everything that is suspected of being left-wing in South America
is strangled.
In addition, he has an encouraging effect on all the fascists of the world, his disastrous
ecological policy, his negative influence on the treatment of the Corona crisis, his general
dislike of multilateral organizations and treaties on which the weaker states of the world
are compulsorily dependent. Overall, he exerts an extremely negative influence on the entire
globe. He should be disposed of.
He will lose the elections, but what happens then is open.
The claim that support for minority rule isn't purely partisan BS is yet another lie. The
moral principle in countermajoritarianism like the Founders' is that democracy cannot be
allowed to threaten property. Except of course property before democracy, before liberty,
before humanity is a vile and disgusting tenet that shames everyone so lost to common
decency. The defense that a piece of parchment, a law, makes things moral and righteous and
that even opposition is somehow wrong is an offense against common sense. By that standard,
the Thirteen, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were the end of freedom in America!
It's one thing to have a mind deranged by rabid hate of your perceived social superiors,
but to openly uphold vulgarity is merely snobbery inverted. It is a mean and small minded
vice, always, and never a virtue. The Access: Hollywood tape was proof of vulgarity but to
defend it as not being proof of a crime but as a positive good is vicious. Vicious is not a
synonym for "bad ass." Or if it news, then "bad ass" is a horrible insult.
And, speaking of deranged minds, Wilson was felled by a stroke and Reagan was felled by
Alzheimer's, yet they did not fall from power. Quite aside from the question of how anyone
could decide who is battier, Trump or Biden, Biden will never be replaced by Harris for
incapacity short of a coma.
A very cogent analysis by b. But I believe the return of the Blob may not be as ominous as
feared.
The dangerous component of the Blob's collective fantasy is the confrontation against
China and Russia. As late as 4, 5 years ago the prevailing sentiment among Americans, the
masses and the elites alike, was one in which The Empire's might was still considered
unquestionably dominant and unchallenged. There was penchant for dressing down both China and
Russia, and the clumsy maneuvers of the Blob's operators (Obama/Clinton/Bolton/Rice et al)
were wholeheartedly supported even if contemptuously regarded for their clumsiness. That
sentiment has evaporated, especially after Chinese and Russian military parades as well as
American's numerous own infrastructure project failures along with abject performances of
Boeing jets and Zumwalt class destroyers. The COVID19 pandemic adds salt to injury.
There is an issue with self confidence now, up and down the hierarchy within the American
society, perhaps with the lone exception of Trump's rednecks.
So, the Blob may return with a vengeance but their political capital may be rather meager.
They will be all mouth and little substance, as would Trump's prospective second term.
I do not always agree with the opinion of the Saker, but in this matter I tend to support him
and can only quote from one of his recent articles :
And, in truth, the biggest difference between Obama and Trump, is that Trump did not start
any real wars. Yes, he did threaten a lot of countries with military attacks (itself a
crime under international law), but he never actually gave the go ahead to meaningfully
attack (he only tried some highly symbolic and totally ineffective strikes in Syria). I
repeat – the man was one of the very few US Presidents who did not commit the crime
of aggression, the highest possible crime under international law, above crimes against
humanity or even genocide, because the crime of aggression "contains within itself the
accumulated evil", to use the words of the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg and Associate
Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Robert H. Jackson. I submit that just
for this reason alone any decent person should choose him over Biden (who himself is
just a front for "President" Harris and a puppet of the Clinton gang). Either that, or
don't vote at all if your conscience does not allow you to vote for Trump. But voting
Biden is unthinkable for any honest person , at least in my humble opinion.
I am surprised by people who are of the opinion that half-dead Biden, suffering from
obvious dementia, is better. If only not Trump.
In 2016, Hilary, in fact, openly stated that she was going to use the so-called 'nuclear
blackmail' against the Russian Federation. And there was no guarantee that this crazy old
witch, having become president, would not have pressed the very button that launched nuclear
missiles at Russia. Four years ago, the choice was between an insane sadistic misanthropist
who could actually start a nuclear war, and a "dark horse" businessman with the illusory
prospect of some improvement in relations between the two strongest nuclear powers. I do not
want to drag in religion and the intervention of higher powers here, but it may not be at all
accidental that Trump snatched victory from the witch. Maybe we avoided a nuclear war.
Yes, now both options are bad. But of the two evils, it is better to choose the lesser,
which, of course, Trump is.
two near-certain redeeming features would be the return of the US to the JCPOA, or Iran
nuclear deal, which was Obama-Biden's only foreign policy achievement, and re-starting
nuclear disarmament negotiations with Russia. That would imply containment of Russia,
not a new all-out Cold War , even as Biden has recently stressed, on the record, that
Russia is the "biggest threat" to the US.
What? Funny. I thought it was Obama (read Democrats) who started this new Cold War. Just
to remind - It was Obama who made the decision to deploy missiles in Poland and Romania,
which are a direct threat to Russia. It is Obama & Co who are responsible for the
Ukrainian coup, which, in fact, became a trigger for the total deterioration of relations
between Russia and the West. It was Obama who began the unprecedented expropriation of
Russian diplomatic property in the U.S. and the expulsion of russian diplomats. It was under
Obama that "the doping scandal" was organized against Russia. And so on and so on...
Trump just continued what Obama had started. It is strange that Pepe Escobar does not
understand this.
If Iran and/or Venezuela get their oil back on the market, that will cause an oil price crash
that would "end fracking." It can't survive oil much under $50/barrel over a long term.
An oil price crash would also effect the larger energy market, making solar and wind less
competitive, even though their direct competition is really coal rather than oil.
Huge and powerful constituencies don't care about Iran or Venezuela, but care very much
about oil prices staying high. They make common cause now, and will under Biden too.
Well, having given deep consideration to the question and the current advanced state of
malady in the USA - I will leave it to Vic as he has summarised the position with minimum
fuss - here.
Enjoy this sharp witted, all encompassing 4 minute rant from inside the asylum. I would
shout the bar for all with this one.
Biden is an old man. He is a tired man, if not now, then in six months. He has already told
wealthy donors that nothing will change. He has no record of leadership. He has no record of
achievement, unless you count floating to the top. He will be the establishment's model
'status quo, do-nothing Democrat.
Biden will preside as a figurehead legitimizing the shenanigans of the blob, Wall Street,
and the US Chamber of Commerce, and Big Oil. Heck, I doubt that he will even override many of
Trump's executive orders, except for the token bone thrown to his delusional supporters.
Harris will be as much a figurehead as Biden. She is utterly unprepared. While she is
likable enough, she lacks gravitas and "credibility," which, she will be convinced, can be
established only by bombing a few wogs back to the Stone Age.
Both will serve as placeholders until Trump 2.0 arrives in 2024. Elites will sufficiently
sabotage the economy until then to assure that Trump 2.0 with neocon values is elected in
2024.
the usa is an approaching train wreck and no amount of persuading one side or the other is
going to change any of this... the world is moving on and rightfully so... no one wants to
get down into this... the swamp and fake news is permanent at this point...until the whole
system implodes - this is what we have in store.. vote for trump or biden - it matters not...
one is a slower motion move then the other - but the end result is the same... there is no
way out... sorry... on the other hand it is beautiful and sunny here where i live... life
goes on outside this political circus called the usa presidential election..
Posted by: c1ue | Oct 31 2020 18:50 utc | 26
I do not agree with you on 99.8% of wordly affairs BUT this comment you wrote is pure
gold!!
Even on the other side of the Atlantic ocean @ the western edge of Europe us reading types
know the difference.
And it annoys me just as much as it seems to annoy you how few people know that the US of
terror is a republic and NOT a democracy😂🥴
By the way, people who are truly interested in seeing the Democratic Party removed as an
obstacle to a true people's party (no one else here wants a workers' party) the very best way
to split the national party would be a clean sweep of House, Senate and Presidency followed
by enough treasonous shenanigans by Trump to arouse mass resistance. (Genuinely treasonous as
in subverting the republic by force, fraud and violence, not in the half witted definition of
dealings with foreigners so popular around here.) Biden et al. would split the Democrats
rather than enact a popular program---which would be left because the when the masses begin
to move they always march left.
Also by the way, Bloomberg is continuing his bid for a hostile takeover of the Democratic
Party, aping the media version of Trump's hostile takeover of the Republic (NOT A DEMOCRACY!)
Party.
"Change' was an Obama marketing slogan to sell his Republican light policies. A real change
never came."
I was calling Obama "Bush Lite" during his first campaign. Anyone who read his foreign
policy platform would have to agree. And the *only* reason he negotiated the JCPOA was
because he needed at least one foreign policy win for his eight years - and he knew it would
be torn up by whoever came after him, either Clinton or Trump. But he needed it for his own
narcissistic view of his "legacy".
People forget that Obama wrote the leaders of Brazil and Turkey in 2010 prior to their
negotiation with Iran for a deal, listing the points of a deal he would accept. Clinton
pooh-poohed the idea that those leaders could get a deal. After a marathon negotiation
session, they got it. The US then dismissed the deal 24 hours later, prompting Brazil's
leader to release the Obama letter to establish that Obama was a liar.
"Change You Can Believe In" - "Make America Great" - only morons believe in campaign
slogans - or the people who utter them.
"The other issue is arms control. While a Harris (Biden) administration may take up Putin's
offer to unconditionally prolong the New-START agreement for a year it will certainly want
more concessions from Russia than that country is willing to give."
Russia has made it abundantly and repetitively clear that they are not doing INCREMENTAL
DEFEAT any more - there are no concessions to make - they no longer do supine acceptance of
UKUSAi rights to dominate, subvert or belligerently mass arms at their advancing borders.
Why would any country concede to the incessant belligerence of the west? They must have
lead in their drinking water to be that dumb!
The concession must come from the aggressor, the colour revolution fomenter, the incessant
smearer and hate propagandist - the west.
A Harris/Biden Presidency lacks those attributes (perhaps lacks any attributes of
goodwill) and a Trump Presidency is no different.
The narcissistic personality disorders run the USA - the asylum inmates are in charge, not
the elected leaders. And the elected leaders are morons or wholly captive klutzes.
Posted by: Laguerre | Oct 31 2020 17:36 utc | 7 They didn't do a No-Fly Zone in Syria when
they could, e.g. 2013. The reason it was not done is that it was too difficult to do
Obama tried *six times* to start a war with Syria. First he submitted *three* UNSC
Resolutions with Chapter 7 language in them. Russia and China - burned by the US over Libya -
vetoed those. Then Obama was within hours of launching an attack on Syria in August, 2013. He
only stopped when he got push-back from Congress and then Putin outmaneuvered him by getting
Assad to give up his chemical weapons. Then in fall, 2015, Obama was talking no-fly zone yet
again. Putin again outmaneuvered him by committing Russian forces to Syria. Then sometime in
2016 - I forget the exact month - there was a news article saying Obama was having a meeting
on that Friday to discuss no-fly zone yet *again*. That Tuesday or Wednesday, the Russia
Ministry of Defense issued a statement that anyone attacking Syrian military assets would be
shot down by Russia. On Friday, Obama pulled back and said there wouldn't be a no-fly
zone.
So it was Russia, primarily, that was the reason Obama didn't not succeed *six times*
trying to start a war with Syria.
"Biden will bring fresh blood to the Presidency, just you watch."
YES. thank you for the clarifying statement, as that is exactly what I expect too. Harris
/Biden blood spattered globe again. Or a Trump spattered equivalent. No socialism for the
USA.
We went from snarling Cheney Wars to shiny happy Obama wars to snarling Trump wars now back
to shiny happy Biden wars to... Forever War is obviously bi-partisan.
But perhaps with Great Depression 2.0 coming this Dark Winter in order to stave off civil
war and/or revolution they'll throw resources to much needed infrastructure projects,
diminish to a slight degree the supremacy of the for-profit healthcare industry through a
laughable but better than nothing 'public option' and make some baby steps toward avoiding
climate catastrophic.
The change is marginal. And probably meaningless. Hope is just another word for nothing
left to lose.
Those 77,000 - purely because of location - overcame 3 million+ votes. That's the
equivalent of giving those 77 thousands the right to vote 40 times each.
Are you in favor of censitary vote?
--//--
@ Posted by: c1ue | Oct 31 2020 18:50 utc | 26
Yes, but at the end of the day, Hilary Clinton got 3.6 million votes more than Donald
Trump.
You're telling everybody you're in favor of censitary vote in opposition to one person,
one vote, just because you don't want an ideological enemy of yours to win. This is still
liberal - but you would have to dig to the early liberal thinkers (Locke, Tocqueville etc.)
to find such reactionary and elitist opinion.
Even by liberal standards today censitary vote is already considered outdated/reactionary.
Concretely, you're defending the interests of a blue collar elite of the north-midwest, who
number on the dozens of thousands, in detriment to more than half the voting population. It
is what it is: you can't fight against mathematics.
--//--
@ Posted by: Down South | Oct 31 2020 18:47 utc | 25
So what? Fuck Michael Moore. If Michael Moore told you to jump off a cliff, would you do
it? He's not the guardian of the absolute truth, he's just a random guy with an opinion.
Michael Moore can defend a mythical blue collar America how much he wants to - it doesn't
change the fact this America doesn't exist anymore. America is, nowadays, the land of the
petit-bourgeois, the land of the small-medium business-owners (a.k.a. zombie business-owners)
, of the New York financial assets owning middle class "coastal elites", of the influencers,
of Kim and Chloe Kardashian, of Starbucks, Amazon and Apple, of the billionaire tied to Wall
Street. That's the true America, want it.
America will never be blue collar again. The insistence of turning America blue collar
again will destroy the American Empire. They will be the Gorbachevs of the USA.
Obama tried *six times* to start a war with Syria. First he submitted *three* UNSC
Resolutions with Chapter 7 language in them. Russia and China - burned by the US over Libya
- vetoed those. Then Obama was within hours of launching an attack on Syria in August,
2013. He only stopped when he got push-back from Congress and then Putin outmaneuvered him
by getting Assad to give up his chemical weapons. Then in fall, 2015, Obama was talking
no-fly zone yet again. Putin again outmaneuvered him by committing Russian forces to Syria.
Then sometime in 2016 - I forget the exact month - there was a news article saying Obama
was having a meeting on that Friday to discuss no-fly zone yet *again*. That Tuesday or
Wednesday, the Russia Ministry of Defense issued a statement that anyone attacking Syrian
military assets would be shot down by Russia. On Friday, Obama pulled back and said there
wouldn't be a no-fly zone.
So it was Russia, primarily, that was the reason Obama didn't not succeed *six times*
trying to start a war with Syria.
Thank you, it seems that your succinct statement should be included as an auto response
macro to every laguerre post. They never stop their blathering those AI CPU's. My take is
that they are a retro definition of the term interrupt .
I remember you as being a reasonably sane contributor but atm you have a serious case of
TDS. Are you seriously trying to tell us that the last 4 years of US media foaming at the
mouth about Trump (Russia-gate, Trump supporters being 'white supremacists' and egging on a
race war) were all a plot to get him re-elected? I mean seriously? WTF? What the hell would
they do if they wanted him removed?
Now I know I have been very very harsh on trump and his supporters of late. Please forgive me
! It's what we call 'tough love' I do have a heart, dispite all of America's crimes against
the rest of the world. I did hope that the US at the last moment would come to it's senses
and turn it's back on trump. Alas ! I fear not. Really sad, I'm sorry.
But for the rest of the world including myself, we can only watch with fascination and relief
as America destroys itself from within. My heart goes out to the inocent.
I fear trump supporters are in for a -- --
Pyrrhic victory (spelt correctly) I recommend googling the word.
Adolph Hitler rose to power with similar glory and power unbridled. Just as trump now !!
Then what ?
Dresden!!
Think on.
Why is it so hard to believe? The media needs a heel and they actually prefer Trump to
remain in office. Maybe on the ground level you have a lot of regular old liberals, but the
upper echelons of the media (and holding companies) are all about keeping the ratings bonanza
going. Another Trump term but with Democrat control of Congress would be like manna from
heaven to them. Matt Taibbi is one writer who has chronicled the phenomenon since before
Trump ever got elected. Here's a more recent piece. Let me know if it's paywalled and I can
copy/paste. CNN
chief has an ethical problem.
On JCPOA, The Nation had a quote from one of Biden's foreign policy advisers to a group of
Jewish campaing donors saying all sanctions on Iran will remain intact unless they return to
full compliance. I agree that it will not be as simple as that given political reality, but
Biden was closely involved in its negotiation and likely has some ownership of it.
I expect there to be a false flag attack by "Iran" to throw sand in the gears if
re-implementation looks likely, or perhaps an Israeli attack on Lebanon. Best plausible
outcome is Iran keeps its current level of cooperation, and a Biden admin looks the other way
on sanctions violationsw.
Are you seriously trying to tell us that the last 4 years of US media foaming at the mouth
about Trump (Russia-gate, Trump supporters being 'white supremacists' and egging on a race
war) were all a plot to get him re-elected? I mean seriously? What the hell would they do if
they wanted him removed?
_____________________________________________
Of course it was all phony and designed to not ring true, which benefits Trump by giving him
credibility with the voters.
The whole idea behind trump is the same as with Reagan he is portrayed as the outsider doing
battle against the corrupt and powerful Washington swamp. Trump is Reagan on steroids. But it
is all phony both Reagan and Trump are one of the powerful elites and their opposition by the
left wing media is designed to give them credibility with voters.
Remember that half of the corporate controlled media loves Trump and sings his praises
daily. It is only half the corporate media that is attacking Trump the other half is showing
its viewers blacks that strongly support Trump and solid evidence that Russiagate is pure
bullshit.
As for what the media would do if they really wanted to bring Trump down. They would
attack him on real issues instead of phony ones that actually strengthen trump's
credibility.
"What Would A Democratic Presidency Really Change?"
The same thing it always changes, absolutely nothing except who accepts the bribes from
the elite.
As long as the American people stay asleep they will continue with the "American DREAM"
until they suddenly wake up inside their newly constructed corporate industrial zone. The
prison industrial complex is the model society if you're an elite.
Have a wonderful weekend everyone, don't get so caught up in this sham (s)election that
you ruin what little freedom you have left.
Berlin's Madame Tussauds has put Donald Trump's wax figure into a
dumpster . Is this normal behavior by a museum? Is this not "an interference in the
democratic processes of the United States"? Or is it okay because the Germans are doing it?
(But God forbid if a Russian or an Iranian criticizes a U.S. presidential candidate publicly
ahead of the election.) Have similar performances been staged against Bush, under whom the
U.S. intelligence agencies manufactured claims of Saddam Hussein preparing to use weapons of
mass destruction, which the U.S. "free" media printed almost in unison without any criticism,
leading to an invasion that killed 650,000
Iraqis ? When a visitor beheaded Adolf Hitler's figure in 2008, the same museum
had this to say :
Madame Tussauds is non-political and makes no comment or value-judgement either on the
persons who are exhibited in the Museum or on what they have done during their lifetime.
I guess starting a war that resulted in deaths of 26,000,000 million Soviets -- most of
them Russians -- is not nearly as bad as being a rude person who has once recommended in
private grabbing women by their genitals.
You are clearly over-thinking this, clutching at straws to justify supporting the other
side. Remember the saying "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the
American people". Whoever wins the election is going to be faced with major unrest, the worms
are clearly not going back in the can. There are easier ways to get someone re-elected.
Trump is clearly at least as toxic as any of them wrt foreign policy, however he is not a
globalist and that is his major sin in their eyes.
@ Maureen O # 45 In 2009, Biden tried very hard to convince Obama not to surge 30,000 more troops into
Afghanistan.
Perhaps he was successful? . . . Obama actually surged 70,000 troops into Afghanistan,
raising Bush's 30K to 100K+. That got Mr Hope & Change the Nobel Peace Prize.
We should remember there were 6 UNSC against Iran, and one of them under Chapter 7 ( the
most dangerous), before JCPOA. We should keep in mind there are gang of 5 + 1( 5 in UNSC +
Germany) coalition behind 6 resolutions.
From Iran's eye, Imperialism was, combination of these 5 in the club, and their collateral
and vassals ( Germany, Japan, etc). The master of JCPOA, caught the opportunity to put a
wedge into the body of the club, and it worked perfectly. America is mad cutting her own
arteries, out side the club. Trump or Biden are not different in this regard, America needs
some one to understand the depth of the wound and retreat immediately, before too much
hemorrhage. And such person ( or group ) is not in horizon. Let it die by her own
wounding.
Thank you for that Philip Giraldi report. The descent into madness from the raucus sounds
of the echo chamber. Where does a revolution start?
First they need to dismantle their media concentration across the spectrum of "news"
including all media forms.
Second they need to send their journalists through the same cultural revolution cycle as
was done in the China and other countries where people go to different work supporting the
growth of their communities for a five to ten year separation from the craft of journalism.
Listen to the people and sweat alongside them in their labour to survive.
Sure there is much more but the echo chamber must surely be demolished at
commencement.
I believe back in August 2013 after a CW attack in East Ghouta, east of Damascus, wrongly
blamed on the Syrian govt that Obama was preparing to enforce his no-fly zone threat. Then
the UK parliament voted not to support such a threat, Obama hesitated and then Putin saw his
opportunity and posted an opinion in the New York Times. That ultimately stopped the US from
going ahead with the attack.
I'm sure British MPs have since been forced to "come to their senses".
I linked to and commented upon Pepe's article when it was published by Asia Times a
few days ago, and I don't see any reason to add to it as b echoes much of my sentiment. What
I will do is link to a brief item by Chinese scholar Zhang Weiwei, professor of International
Relations at Fudan University, "How
China elects their political leaders" , which seems very appropriate at this moment in
time:
"China has established a system of meritocracy or what can be described as 'selection plus
election'. Competent leaders are selected on the basis of performance and broad support,
through a vigorous process of screening, opinion surveys, internal evaluations and various
types of elections. This is much in line with the Confucian tradition of meritocracy. After
all, China is the first country that invented civil service examination system or the 'Keju'
system....
"Indeed, the Chinese system of meritocracy today, makes it inconceivable that anyone as
weak as George W. Bush or Donald Trump could ever come close to the position of the top
leadership. It's not far-fetched to claim that the China model is more about leadership
rather than the showmanship as it is in the West. China's meritocratic governance challenges
the stereotypical dichotomy of democracy versus autocracy. From Chinese point of view, the
nature of the state including its legitimacy, has to be defined by its substance, that is,
good governance, competent leadership and success in meeting the people's needs."
Zhang Weiwei is the author of a very important book some may have heard about and even
read, The China Wave: Rise Of A Civilizational State , of which an open preview can be
read here . Also, the professor gave a talk at the German Schiller Institute related to
the above book and the BRI project, which can be read
here .
I've commented several times that China's political-economic system is far superior to the
Parasitic Neoliberalism that's destroying the West. China's success suggests very strongly
that we listen and closely observe while not taking heed of what any Western source has to
say about China.
I'm all for sending the entire Australian news media into a cave for 5 - 10 years. Maybe
in 10,000 years archaeologists investigating the cave will be wondering whether fossil
remains there denote a species of human more primitive than those found in Liang Bua cave on
Flores Island in Indonesia. :-)
Can you elaborate on this funding you referred to for BLM protests? What is your evidence
that it was actually funding street protests? Are you referring to the national corporate
BLM? If so, what does that have to do with leaderless protests in the streets?
From February 13 to February 15, 1945, during the final months of World War II (1939-45),
Allied forces bombed the historic city of Dresden, located in eastern Germany. The bombing
was controversial because Dresden was neither important to German wartime production nor a
major industrial center, and before the massive air raid of February 1945 it had not
suffered a major Allied attack. By February 15, the city was a smoldering ruin and an
unknown number of civilians -- estimated between 22,700 to 25,000–were dead.
Dresden and other cities held magnificent collections of human posterity. Cities of
science - of intellectual excellence and endeavour within europe. Cities of humans associated
with brilliant minds doing the work of human understanding and progress.
Sure Hitler's imbecile adventures ably funded by global private finance capitalism and a
hatred of communism led to war that ultimately led to the vengeful destruction of great
cities and great store houses and museums of this earth of mankind.
Hitler did not bomb Dresden.
Germans were proud of their science and their knowledge and storehouses and museums.
Europe shared in that pride in excellence as did many throughout the world.
Those first shells falling on Berlin TWO months after the demolition of cities of science
and archeology and human history. NOT cities of military significance.
I think of Vietnam
I think of Iraq
I think of Korea
I think of China
I think of Japan
Bombed by UKUSA. So lets not obsess with a dead nazi comrade, lets open our eyes to the
live nazis.
I think Biden will win this presidency, and win it fairly easily. It will become apparent
early on that the Biden Administration intends not only to turn the heat up on Russia, but
will continue Trump's aggression towards China. There may be a feint towards renewing JCPOA,
but it will not be fulfilled, and aggression towards Iran will not abate either.
The Mighty Wurlitzer of pro-war propaganda is again spinning up in anticipation. The
Atlantic and the Economist have been busy comparing Chinese Policy towards it's Muslim
citizens with the Holocaust...Russia, Russia, Russia!!! which never went away is again being
amped up.
But, this isn't 2016. Four years has given China and Russia time to further modernize
their militaries. Iran has developed its missile and drone programs to the point that a
conflict with Israel will result in mutual destruction. In 2016 USA/NATO had the military
advantage, but that is now gone, and the balance shifts further by the day. I almost feel
sorry for Biden, as he will be the one taking the blame when the economy collapses and
America gets their asses handed to them. Hopefully it doesn't go nuclear, but I am not very
optimistic.
With the NeoCon infestation capturing the Democratic Party, the media, and a big chunk of
the Republican, it is only a matter of time before they get their way. Short-sided parasites
as they are, this time they will kill their host. If humanity survives, a new multi-polar era
may emerge.
Uncle tungsten @ 84
Please re-read my heart felt comment. It was sincerely ment. To many here think this is just
fun and speculation.
But this is real, the USA have the same misguided sense of infalalabilty now, that the German
public hand then.
Did we learn nothing from world war 2 ?
Please don't belittle my urgent warning.
This is not a game. Perhaps re read my comment. Respect
Naw, you're not reading me right. Did you check out the Taibbi piece? He has numerous
others over the past 4 years. Also see Les Moonves and other corporate media executives'
statements on Trump during that same time period. I acknowledged that the rank and file among
the media class is largely woke, liberal and pro-Biden (and very anti-Trump), but they don't
call the shots and you're not looking at the situation with enough attention to details. It's
the little things that give it away.
Ever heard the saying "there's no such thing as bad publicity"? A brand like Trump's has
been clearly demonstrated to benefit immensely from the negative coverage. The media are
hated by Trump's followers and the people who watch the media hate Trump. So what does that
tell you? Compare CNN and MSNBC ratings during Trump's term to Obama's. They know that hate
sells and they never call Trump out for his ACTUAL bad behaviors (other than COVID and ACB, I
guess) while they focus on meaningless nonsense, thus distracting the public from the
bi-partisan corporate dominated graft going on and the Empire's ongoing wars and sanctions
programs abroad. Very rarely if ever will you read or hear about the hundreds of thousands of
people who have died due to American sanctions on Iran or Venezuela. Why is that? Because top
brass at the corporate media outlets support it. They cheered when he launched the missiles
at Syria.
Someone did a study or analysis on the amount of air time given to Trump versus the
Democrat primary and it wasn't even close. He plays them and his supporters like a fiddle,
too. SNL had him on NBC when he was running against Hillary. Some argue that this might have
been due to the same mindset that Hillary's team was alleged to have had. Namely, that Trump
would be the EASIEST candidate for her to beat and he had no chance, so he was harmless as a
threat. I don't think it's that complicated. They know what gets ratings.
Yeah, occasionally they'll make a peep about the environment or jobs, but like the
Democrats in Congress and "Intelligence" Community's Russia and Ukraine witch
hunts/impeachment they intentionally ignore the types of actions that DO justify
investigations and impeachments. Do you honestly think that the Democrats thought Trump would
be removed from office for the bogus "whistle blower" charges they ginned up? Of course not -
the Senate was never going to go along with it and it wasn't exactly secret, even over here
across the pond it was obvious.
As far as him not being a globalist - he's not exactly anti-globalist when it comes to
policy, but why would that matter to the corporate media? Again, it's the corporate big wigs
and majority shareholders who make the calls and the reporters, editors and personalities on
TV know how to toe the line without being told explicitly. Now, if you want to talk Silicon
Valley and the social media giants, I'm with you - they are actively trying to help Joe
Biden. But take another example - the Hunter Biden laptop story. Social media giants censored
it, but it isn't like it's not being talked about non-stop by the MSM and newspapers. They
just don't talk about what was IN the emails or photos, leaving some of their viewers/readers
curious to go find out for themselves.
I didn't read jinn's comment in detail, but I'm definitely not trying to make points that
justify voting for Biden; but I stand by my points - I'm just pointing out what's REALLY
going on with all of the "negative" coverage of Donald Trump in the corporate mainstream
media. At the end of the day, the corporate MSM upper brass doesn't really care who gets
elected, but they also understand that having a "heel" (from the pro wrestling world) and
"bad guy" to always go after on crap that's ultimately meaningless, makes it easier to sell
the hate and drive ratings and subscriptions.
Uncle tungsten @ 84
Please re-read my heart felt comment. It was sincerely ment. To many here think this is
just fun and speculation.
But this is real, the USA have the same misguided sense of infalalabilty now, that the
German public hand then.
Did we learn nothing from world war 2 ?
Please don't belittle my urgent warning.
This is not a game. Perhaps re read my comment. Respect
Respect and apology in return Mark2. I jumped the gun.
Yes, the sense of infallibility infuses the bloodlust of the UKUSAi.
With any luck humanity will be spared their obscene and lunatic 'reprisal mania' that has
rotted their minds. I somehow doubt that.
And I share your fear.
That said though - I am ever the optimist. There are many warrior clans of past decades
that have made delightful blunders and ended up on the block instead of on the grog in the
opponents bars. Time will tell.
I believe it is time for the great people of South America to shake off these barnacles on
the arse of humanity once and for all.
Sorry I got a little long winded in my last reply. I think this response will make my
position easier to interpret.
You asked: " What the hell would they do if they wanted him removed?"
The answer to that question is the same as the answer would be if you asked what the
Democrats in Congress would (have) do(ne) if they really wanted to remove him from office.
They would actually investigate and attempt to prosecute a litany of possible crimes rather
than silly, simplistic accusations from a "whistleblower" that anyone with a IQ over 100
could see was not going to work.
Maybe you're right and I'm wrong, and Americans really are that stupid. It wouldn't
necessarily conflict with what I've seen and heard from Democrat supporting relatives and
social media contacts. A lot, if not most of them STILL believe that there was collusion
between Trump and Russia. It was like my conservative friends and relatives for about a
decade after the Iraq war - they were CONVINCED that we DID find WMDs and that the US media
had somehow hidden it.
@vk #65
It is striking how you still refuse to acknowledge the reality of the law.
The United States is not a majoritarian democracy.
In fact, there is not one single country in the entire world that is a majoritarian
democracy.
If the law were changed via the methods already written, tried and true, then I guarantee
that there would be a lot more voters in the minorities of both red and blue states.
As it is, the only partisan here is your and the Democratic party's whining about how they
have more popular votes, much as the talk about packing the Supreme Court, etc etc.
If ultimately the existing laws of the land are merely an impediments to anyone doing
whatever they have the power to do, then there is no law.
Uncle @ 90
Thanks for that. I feel we are in full agreement !
To perhaps clarify to those less astute than you.
My comment @ 68 points out the law of unintended consequence. The majority of Americans don't
want war, riots, poverty and distruction. They want to keep there families safe.
The comparison being the same can be said for Germans prior to the war, they weren't evil as
portrayed in history they simply made the same mistake the US is about to make. With the
consequence of there country devistated. A dreadful mistake voting for the wrong man, whipped
up by a false sense of superiority !
Don't do it.
Half of America won't tolerate it.
Free quarters of the rest of the world won't. By voting trump you vote for your own
distruction.
I would rather vote for a donkey, never mind Biden.
You are clearly over-thinking this, clutching at straws to justify supporting the other
side.
__________________________________________
What other side???
I'm guessing you are accusing me of supporting trump but who knows maybe you think I'm
supporting Biden. Either way it is stupid of you to project your "side" based logic onto
others. Do you really think it is impossible to analyze without first taking a side?
As it is, the only partisan here is your and the Democratic party's whining about how they
have more popular votes, much as the talk about packing the Supreme Court, etc etc.
Thank you, I liked that retort to vk. Can I distort your point that while the Demonazis
delude themselves in more popular votes - the Repugnents have more of the un-popular votes.
The deeply corrosive nonsense being shouted into the demonazi echo chamber is truly dangerous
to the point that they will generate a standing wave resonance and collapse the entire
building. Trouble is we will then have to endure an 11/11 to compete with their absurd 9/11
and - we'll never hear the end of it. :))
James
I share one bottle of wine a month. I don't do drugs, but thanks for asking.
I note you don't ask the 'right wing' to step a way'
But if the truth is hurting you. Perhaps you ought ?
Have a peaceful night.
I remember you as being a reasonably sane contributor ...
Thanks!
= ... but atm you have a serious case of TDS.
No. I'm neither for nor against Trump. I see him as a symptom of the system who has joined
(possibly long ago) Team Deep State (the managers of the Empire). If it wasn't Trump, it
would be some other media-savvy guy that can con the people.
= Are you seriously trying to tell us that the last 4 years of US media foaming at the
mouth about Trump (Russia-gate, Trump supporters being 'white supremacists' and egging on a
race war) were all a plot to get him re-elected?
IMO Trump's economic nationalism and zenophobia were very much planned. As was the failure
of the Democrats to mount any effective resistance. They pretend to hate Trump so so
much but shoot themselves in the foot all the time.
Russiagate was nothing more than a new McCarthyism. That works well for the Deep State
both internationally and domestically. Any dissenter is called a "knowing or unknowing"
Russian asset.
Background: I've written that Trump was meant to beat Hillary. The 2016 election was a
farce. Sanders and Trump were friendly with the Clintons for a very long time. Sanders was a
sheepdog (not a real candidate) and Hillary threw the race to Trump. Trump is much more
capable at what he does than Hillary would've been.
I mean seriously? WTF? What the hell would they do if they wanted him
removed?
If the Deep State wanted him removed (but they don't) they would find a reason to invoke
the 25th Amendment. They have positioned people to do this, if necessary. For example: VP
Pence was a friend of McCain (who was a 'NEVER TRUMP'-er); Atty General Barr is close to the
Bushes and Mueller ('NEVER TRUMP'-ers); CIA Dir. Gina Haspel is an acolyte of John Brennan
(you guessed it, a 'NEVER TRUMP'-er).
=
MarkU @Oct31 23:18 #76
...he is not a globalist and that is his major sin in their eyes.
He's not anti-globalist as you seem to suggest. He's even bragged about his business
dealings with Chinese, Arabs, Russians - pretty much any group with money.
Trump and the Deep State - the true Deep State, not the pretended partisan off-shoot
- are EMPIRE-FIRST (and have been for decades). You can see this in what Trump has done
globally. USA just wants a bigger cut of the action because they have to do the 'heavy
lifting' of taking on China and Russia.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
I know that my cynical perspective must generate a lot of cognitive dissonance in many
readers. But I don't see any other way to rationally explain Deep State actions and the
history that has brought us to where are today.
The numbers are there for everybody to see: Trump won with 3 million + votes below Hilary
Clinton. That is not democracy in any sense of the word unless you go back to the more
traditional forms of liberalism of the 16th-19th centuries. Those are the numbers, not my
opinion.
Besides, I think you're not getting the irony of your position: the situation in the USA
has gotten so degenerated that you're hanging by a thread - a thread you put on a golden
pedestal and claim is the salvation of the Empire (the electoral college). Where did I see
this? Oh, yes - the War of Secession of 1861-1865, when the slave states were already
outnumbered 6 to 1 by the northern states. They kept their parity artificially for decades,
until the whole thing suddenly burst up in the war (a war where they were crushed; no chance
of victory at all).
So, the problem isn't in the system per se, but the pressure the ossification of the
system is building up. When they seceded, the confederates genuinely thought they were the
true inheritors of the liberal thought, the slave states being the most perfect manifestation
of freedom; the same situation is building up today, albeit, obviously, on a much milder
scale (there's no California gold this time, just the good ol' race to the bottom).
--//--
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Nov 1 2020 2:25 utc | 95
I agree with you: the end of the electoral college (with it, any form of district vote)
will give a chance for the conservatives (Republicans) to win back, for example, California
(which has 40-46% of the popular vote). But it will also give the Democrats Texas (Dallas +
Houston regions already make almost 50% of the population of the state and are Democratic
bastions). It will also open the gates for third parties to flourish (avoiding a situation
like Bernie Sanders, who had to affiliate to the Democrats).
Either way, it will give the American people and government a more honest, precise picture
of the state of the nation. Or are you willing to live a perpetual illusion of "coastal
elites vs heartland deplorables" forever (which, by the way, only fuels up secession as the
only solution)?
The myth of HIQ whitemen....
--------------------------------------
Caitlin[for prez]johnston
Russia gate morphes seamlessly into China gate without missing a beat.
One hiq white man opines, oh so innocently
IN Russia gate, they were quoting only anon, nameless witness.
This time its different, we've real witness testifying on teevee , in Tucker
[fuck China] Carlson show, no less !
The poor dear was referring to an 'ex CIA' [see, an insider, wink wink ] telling
Tucker [fuck CHINA] Carlson ....
Psssst, many dem were CCP trojans !
ROFLAMO
oR that HUnter BIden buddy whatshisname again, who told Tucker [fuck China] Carlson oh so
solemnly,
'Yes , I think the BIdens were compromised by the chicoms'
OMFG ! BIden is CCP'S man !
What happen if Biden get into the WH and immediately bomb Shanghai.?
Well half of gringos , the Trumpsters, would scream,
'Why isnt BIden bombing Beijing already, well BCOS we all know he's Xi's man in Washington'
!
The dems, eager to clear their potus name, would implore earnestly,
'Hey BIden, you should invade Beijing RIGHT now, show them repuc we are just as tough, no,
even better in showing the chicoms who's the boss around here.
What a devious brilliant way to get a bi partisan support for more
wars.
BI partisan ?
That practically cover 99% of HIQ gringos. hehehhehehhe
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me hundreds of times.........
For weeks now, we've been been pointing to expectations that a Joe Biden victory,
accompanied by a Democratic sweep of the Senate, could accelerate
a "reflation" trade , as the world witnesses the shift toward fiscal policy in the form of
massive fiscal stimulus supplant QE as the preferred vehicle for the central bank carrying out
its monetary policy objectives.
This fusion between fiscal and monetary policy is an inevitable consequence of the Fed's
shouldering the burden of promoting economic "equality", or at least combating "inequality" - a
laughably ironic objective for the Fed, which has done more than any other single entity in
blowing the equity asset bubble that's driven economic inequality in the US back to levels last
seen during the Gilded Age.
Well,
after having MMT pioneer Stephanie Kelton, best known as the go-to economic policy advisor
for AOC and Bernie Sanders, on the show, MacroVoices this week followed up with an individual
who has examined the potential blowback caused by this historic policy shift.
This week, MV host Erik Townsend interviewed Tian Yang, the head of macro at Variant
Perception, an established research shop that frequently produces opinion columns in the
financial press. During this week's interview, Yang outlines the findings from a slide deck
that was provided free by MacroVoices to all members (membership is free)
After the historic drubbing endured by crude in the US earlier this year, Yang is among a
group of strategists who have been warning about the reflationary blowback that the Fed is
risking now that it has explicitly decided to allow inflation to run hot.
Yang outlines some of these concepts in the interview, which we have excerpted below:
* * *
Erik: And where do you see the inflation story coming into this?
Central Banks Must 'Play Their Part'
Tian : So I think we need to think about inflation both from a structural point of view and
a cyclical point of view. So the thing to say is cyclically, when unemployment rates are still
quite high, when there's still capacity in the economy, you don't expect to see kind of
immediate pickup in core inflation. Headline could tick up a little bit when commodity prices
industrial commodity, so forth, initiate pickup, so on the cyclical front, there's not
necessarily as much inflation pressure right now.
But structurally, we've seen some truly seismic shifts in the kind of policy landscape and
the structure of the economy actually just this year. When you see governments and developed
market governments around the world start to run giant fiscal deficits funded by central banks,
that's obviously a very dramatic shift away from independent central banking and the focus on
inflation.
This is very much going back to the old Keynesian kind of playbook of essentially, fiscal
led growth and at the same time, we've seen the US Federal Reserve do a number of quite
dramatic shifts this year. Firstly, moving to average inflation targeting is obviously quite a
big mission that they don't really know where the NAIRU (Non-accelerating inflation rate of
unemployment) is, they don't really care what the NAIRU is, they are just going to run the
economy and let it run hot.
And such a policy is also pretty timing consistent because it's not well defined, what's the
period over which we're targeting average inflation. The incentive will always be as inflation
picks up for policymakers to just run their heart because it's easier to kind of keep the party
going.
So, both fiscal and monetary policy are starting to become a lot more expansionary and
loose. And the historical precedents for this kind of price action would probably go back to
World War 2 with a fair-trade record, that essentially meant fiscal deficits would be very
large. But there was a moral imperative for the central banks to finance the government
deficits, and that ended up creating a lot of inflation.
And this time around, the moral imperative is that the central bank's got to play their part
with the pandemic. And going into the future, the central bank probably has to play their part
was addressing inequality, climate change, or any of these big issues that essentially
justifies why central banks should finance government deficits.
So that's quite dramatic policy shift, the other thing that's happened is that the Fed is
now proactively kind of destroying the quality of its balance sheet. So again, as extreme, we
could go back to when we were on the gold standard, if you look at central bank balance sheet,
most currencies backed by gold, right.
So $1 is an asset for us but for the central bank $1 is a liability so previously they
backed it on the asset side of their balance sheet with gold. Obviously, over time we abandoned
the gold standard, so forth, the quality of assets on the central bank's balance sheet is
getting worse and worse. And obviously, this year, the fact that they started buying corporate
bonds, the fact that, they're willing to take on fallen angels, hide your debt and take on more
credit risk is just another reflection of just the weakening central bank balance sheets.
It's not necessarily a immediate concern, but it lays the foundations for people to kind of
increase inflation expectations and to really worry about what the value of the dollar is. And
so when you have these kind of structural shifts in policy coming together in a couple ways to
make a kind of deterioration in central bank balance sheets and government balance sheets.
That's typically been the recipe for inflation expectations to become unhinged.
From A Lake To An Ocean
Erik: Tian, I love the picture on page five where you're talking about lake and ocean
regimes of inflation. Needless to say, you're not talking about a necessarily a really calm
easy day out on the ocean, but maybe a stormy day.
Now I want to go back to what you said because it seems to me that the game is very
different this time around in that you drew an analogy to, okay, after World War 2 we move to a
whole lot of deficit spending, which should be inflationary. The thing is, after World War 2 we
were still, as you said, on a gold standard. And the big inflation didn't really get unleashed
until we came after the gold standard with the breakdown of Bretton Woods in 1971.
Now, this time around, we're going to have I think the same if not a greater shift to a
public policy emphasis on major spending programs with a lot of deficit spending. But we're
already in a pure fiat environment, so nobody's pretending there's a constraint on how much
money you can print in order to finance government spending.
I would think that means that the inflation is certainly not delayed by 20 years the way it
was after World War 2, but is it immediate? Or is there still a lag of several years before
that inflation really hits the system in terms of consumer price inflation after those pre
generated factors like deficit spending kick in? How long does it take before we really see the
inflation start to get away?
Tian: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I guess it's a little bit like when they think
about how people go bankrupt, right, it happens very slowly and or all at once. I think this is
kind of the analogy we're kind of drawing here because we're talking about a shift in inflation
expectations, which is obviously predicated on just the general belief in the system.
These things are obviously inherently fairly hard to predict but what we can do is kind of
position for when it already makes sense. So when markets are already not pricing in much
inflation risk premiums and also as the economy cyclically picks up, those things are going to
help just drive a more normal reflation cycle.
So right now, if you position for that, then when the tail comes through and potentially
more inflation picks up later, you're kind of on the right side of it. In terms of the
mechanism it could, as you say, potentially happen quickly or you could take a few years. I
mean, if we're in this kind of 1960 style environment then what you need to do is go along for
the excess capacity in the economy to be used up first, and then have inflation pick up.
And then you will need that to feed into shifting hecs inflation expectations higher, and
then you should move into more of a wage price spiral. Then when people think inflation is
going higher, they're going to demand higher wages and that's what really kicks off the more
uncontrolled inflation right now.
Arguably right now for a lot of people, you know say live in the United States, the actual
cost of living inflation is actually already been a lot higher than what CPI would be saying if
you look at shadow stats, inflation and these kind of different projections. They would say
inflation has be running a 4-5% annually for the past 20 years, if you get rid of a lot of the
hedonic adjustments and so forth. And arguably, it's actually this mismatch between what
official CPI says and what people feel is their true cost of living. That gap is also fueling a
lot of the populism and the kind of general discontent that we have been seeing in society and,
by the way, this isn't a new, it's just quite rare that we see it in developed markets.
If you take emerging market economies like Argentina or these places that have been known to
have huge inflation's, this is typically what happens. The population doesn't believe in the
CPI, they think their real cost of living is going up a lot higher, so when it comes to wage
negotiations, they demand CPI plus 5-10%.
No more '60/40'?
Erik: Tian, let's talk about how this translates for portfolios, it sounds like we're very
much in agreement that inflation is coming, but it's kind of hard to know exactly when and how
it shows up. Probably when it does show up, it shows up in a big way, you don't want to be
caught by surprise, but you don't know that it's happening right away. So what do you do in
terms of your portfolio in order to be ready for that?
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Tian: Yeah, well that's kind of the million-dollar question at the moment isn't it? So the
first thing to know is, I think I mentioned briefly at the start, clearly more traditional
portfolio construction, the kind of 60/40 or the heavy allocation to fixed income, it's
naturally kind of getting to the end of the road. I think most people recognize that as yields
bump up against the zero bound, the ability for your fixed income portion to really offer a
diversified impact or a hedge to equity risk is going to diminish.
So, going forward, what's very interesting about commodities is that one of the unique
properties of commodities is typically when commodity volatility is high commodity prices
actually tend to go up a lot. And this is quite different to equities because normally for
equities only when equities are crashing that volatility picks up, whereas for commodities, the
volatility tends to be to the upside. Now, the thing to say about commodities is that one of
the big reasons why it tends to be very high volatility is that there tends to be quite
prolonged periods of demand and supply mismatches for the industry. Just because typically
supply responses can take a long time if you're going to build a new mine, or drill a new well,
or build a new plant, it could sometimes you could take up to three to five years. Obviously,
if it's like the super-efficient shell well, maybe it takes one year to get to get it
going.
But for a lot of commodity sites if you're going to build a refinery or build a chemical
plant or things like that, it's going to be three to five years. And because of that very delay
supply response it is where you end up with this prolonged period of demand supply mismatches.
And so that that's kind of what we're starting to see right now, where for a lot of commodity
sectors are more capital scarce.
This being a prolonged period of a lack of investment, a lack of capex, and so these are
sectors that we would expect to have quite explosive upside as the as the economy recovers and
as demand comes back. So I think in the slide deck there's a section on page 15 where I
mentioned the capital cycle. So, I think this is a very interesting framework to actually think
about when we're trying to decide where to invest in.
So for the capital cycle I think that the best thing that I've read that's really inspired
us on this was some pieces written by Marathon Asset Management. And it was basically collated
together in a book called "Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle", and the book
was put together by Edward Chancellor. And so the basic idea is that, if there's a lot of money
flowing to a particular industry or sector, then that inflow of money will cause a lot more
competition within that industry which drives down returns and then as returns fall very low
then nobody in the industry can make a profit.
In reality only passenger feet and commercial aviation consumption are highly elastic. Other
pasts oil consumption, including consumption by military and commercial tracking are much less
elastic.
And Amazon consumption partially compesates for drop is passenger car traffic :-)
In general oil consumption is a proxy of economic activity. As economic activity is resorting
the same will happen with oil consumption.
Thirty-five percent: this is the size of the spending cuts oil and gas companies are likely
to have made this year in response to the effects that the coronavirus pandemic is having on
demand, according to the International Energy Agency. And this is just the spending slump in
upstream oil and gas. This is just part of a wider trend of investment cuts in the energy
industry, according to the IEA, which earlier this month published an update of its World
Energy Investment report, first released in late spring.
At the time, some thought we were seeing the worst of the pandemic. They were, apparently,
wrong.
Demand for oil has certainly improved in some parts of the world, notably in Asia, where
governments have been more successful in containing the spread of the coronavirus than their
counterparts in Europe and North and South America. But even in China – the world's oil
demand recovery driver –the rebound is slowing down. After all, even though its domestic
demand may be improving, if regional and global demand is stalling, this will have a negative
effect on China as well.
According to the IEA, the impact that the pandemic is having on investments in the oil
industry will continue to be felt for years to come. This is hardly surprising: the agency
noted a 45-percent cut in investments by US shale oil companies this year, combined with a
50-percent jump in financing costs .
The number of active drilling rigs in the US may be rising, suggesting the beginning of a
recovery, but the total was still down 564 rigs on the year as of last week, so that recovery
will take a while.
Meanwhile, fuel stock updates from the Energy Information Administration are offering mixed
signals: last week, for instance, saw a major drawdown in distillate fuel stocks, which should
be good news suggesting demand for distillates is improving. The problem is that it is likely
that this improvement is a temporary occurrence rather than a trend. Air travel is still
greatly constrained, and the chances of any change in the status quo are slim.
Uncertainty: this is the keyword for not just the oil industry but for all others affected
by the pandemic to such a grave extent as to force changes in business models. Europe's Big Oil
majors are doing just that with their push into renewables and plan to greatly reduce the
contribution of their core business to overall earnings. USmajors are sticking with oil, and
they may well have a good reason to do it.
There has been a lot of government and activist talk about a green recovery from the
pandemic crisis. But the pandemic is still raging, and not only is it not abating, but it is
gathering strength. This would mean more money needed for stimulus measures. This, in turn,
would mean less money to spend on renewables, because despite the celebrated cost declines in
solar and wind, financial and regulatory support from governments remains essential for their
increased deployment.
The future remains marred in uncertainty that extends to the possibility of a rebound in oil
investments. According to some, such as BP, we are already past peak oil demand, so that would
mean less investment in oil production growth globally. Others, such as OPEC producers, hope
things will sooner or later return to normal, and the world's appetite for more oil will
continue to grow for at least a few more years before plateauing. And yet even OPEC is
preparing for a worst-case scenario.
The extended cartel OPEC+ is considering a delay in the next relaxation of oil production
cuts, from January 2021 to April, in response to the latest trends in Covid-19 infections. One
thing seems relatively clear, however. The longer the surge in new infections continues, the
longer it would take the industry to return on the path of recovery and growth.
The Blob will dominate the USA foreign policy, no matter who wins.
Notable quotes:
"... I've commented several times that China's political-economic system is far superior to the Parasitic Neoliberalism that's destroying the West. China's success suggests very strongly that we listen and closely observe while not taking heed of what any Western source has to say about China. ..."
"... The executives and majority shareholders of the CIA/NSA infiltrated corporate news media don't care whether Trump wins, and in fact often prefer it. ..."
"... Those guys are just part of the polarization narrative tearing the country apart. The hatred is real but there is acting involved, especially with Olbermann. These commentators feel that this polarization narrative is giving the country what it wants and it drives ratings. Schiff is just a first class liar ... ..."
"... Obama was just put in the pipeline as one of their possible future candidates for president. They have a stable of these people being mentored. Clinton was one as well. I bet Harris is one as well. ..."
"... I think they hate the Trumper so much because he he was in some else's stable. Possibly the controllers from campus in Tel Aviv. Different stable, same horse shit. ..."
"... Election of president = false flag iperation. The purpose is to fund the private media with advertising revenue paid for by consumer taxpayers. ..."
"... The rest of the world knows that the US is not agreement capable, it does not matter for Iran one bit what happens on November 3rd. ..."
"... I understand the rationale behind Trump's policies. But my conclusion is exactly the opposite: his attempt to stop the disintegration of the American Empire is accelerating the disintegration of the American Empire, not averting it. ..."
"... The key here is to understand that that's not how the American Empire should work. The USA continues to deindustrialize at an accelerated pace under Trump; Wall Street was never stronger than under Donald Trump; American debt was never higher. And now, unemployment is as high as during the 1929 era. ..."
"... The American Empire is the American Empire precisely because it doesn't need to produce anything it needs except defense. It prints money in order to siphon wealth from the rest of the world, enriching its economy while impoverishing the rest. That's the only way the Empire can function - any other way will result in its destruction. ..."
"... Obama ran on Hopey-Changey and on his projected charm, actually glib con-man gab. Worked wonderfully, imagine getting the Nobel Prize because you had a dead-beat Dad who was from Kenya and you scored B+ for public speaking? Argh. (The real reason: killing will continue, the status quo is preserved..) ..."
"... That Trump would win in 2016 was obvious as soon as he became a candidate. He was the cartoon contrast of Obomber - white, fat, orange, tall, R vs. D, outspoken, strident, clumsy (vs. the smooth-talking con), opinionated, stupid, and outrageous in a way. Click bait and viewer bait for the MSM - but not for no reason. ..."
"... To pretend that Trump is some special Peacemaker, trying oh so hard to overcome deep state resistance to rolling back empire, is Trumpism. Escobar is always there. Trump must be understood as a leading creature of the swamp himself. Trying so hard just as Obama was trying so hard. ..."
"... The relative scores settled terribly are more a matter of opportunity than ruthless efficiency. Though it is true that "success" requires dialing it back a bit, and having the likes of Bolton around is a way of ensuring either that nothing gets done, or we all end up ashes. Trump managed to axe Bolton on time, that time. ..."
I do agree with you both that the anti-Trump hysteria has probably worked for him to
some extent but I really don't believe that is a four year long plan, it is too much of a
stretch to believe that the likes of Olbermannn and Schiff are consciously working for him.
American politics really is that toxic, remember the stuff about Obama's birth
certificate.
I also agree that Trump might actually have the support needed for a landslide win, not
so much because of the vilification but because of the arson and looting imo. A lot of
Trump supporters are keeping their heads down atm (and who can blame them) However, now it
is my turn to make a prediction. I predict mass unrest on polling day. it is well accepted
that the majority of the Democrat voters (fraudulent or not) are going to vote by post.
Conversely most Trump supporters are likely to vote in person on the day (or try to at
least)
I expect a concerted attempt to disrupt the polls by people who know that it will
disproportionately affect the Trump vote. I expect violent clashes (with both sides trading
blame) and a result that will please nobody. The worms are not going back into the can.
if I am wrong then I will be big enough to say so on the first appropriate thread on
this site, fair enough?
Zhang Weiwei is the author of a very important book some may have heard about and
even read, The China Wave: Rise Of A Civilizational State, of which an open preview can
be read here. Also, the professor gave a talk at the German Schiller Institute related to
the above book and the BRI project, which can be read here.
I've commented several times that China's political-economic system is far
superior to the Parasitic Neoliberalism that's destroying the West. China's success
suggests very strongly that we listen and closely observe while not taking heed of what
any Western source has to say about China.
I just paused by their tavern to see what elixirs of despair or mirth they have on offer
today. Pour a strong drink comrades and scroll through the cellar. Always worth a
visit.
If Biden is not much different from Trump then why does "the blob" portray Trump as
the Beelzebub? Posted by: m | Nov 1 2020 6:01 utc | 112
Because he's the heel and none of the negative coverage they give him sticks, most often
on purpose. Don't mistake their serious tones and somber pronouncements for genuineness.
It's not. The executives and majority shareholders of the CIA/NSA infiltrated corporate
news media don't care whether Trump wins, and in fact often prefer it.
I am aware of the fact that corruption is rife in both parties. I saw the link to the
Biden bus incident, deplorable yes but hardly on the same scale as the massive rioting,
looting and intimidation of the BLM movement, they didn't actually burn down half the
neighborhood did they. Organized voting obstruction will largely be confined to swing
states for obvious reasons. I made my predictions, we will see.
Just to be clear, I don't even live in the US, I am British. If I did live in the US I
wouldn't vote for either party, I'm not a 'lesser of two evils' kind of guy. To be frank I
am viewing events in the US with considerable trepidation, I regard what happens in the US
as a window into the likely future of the UK and the rest of Europe. I fear that a nuclear
war may well occur sometime in the near future, quite possibly by accident owing to the
continual cutting of warning times, mainly by the US. A very powerful nuclear armed country
convulsed by civil unrest is a very dangerous entity, I fear the worst and so should we all
imo.
Anyway thank you for being polite and civilised and for including actual information
with your replies.
OT..I just read this translation from a Russian link...most agreeable as a counterpoise to
Exceptional Nation nuttiness:
"Construction of the industrial complex, where high-speed trains will be produced,
began in the Urals. In five years, Russia will have a domestic rolling stock for the VSM
- high-speed highways. Moreover, the level of localization of production is stated at
80%, which means additional orders for the Russian industry."
I do agree with you both that the anti-Trump hysteria has probably worked for him
to some extent but I really don't believe that is a four year long plan, it is too much
of a stretch to believe that the likes of Olbermannn and Schiff are consciously working
for him. American politics really is that toxic, remember the stuff about Obama's birth
certificate.
Those guys are just part of the polarization narrative tearing the country apart.
The hatred is real but there is acting involved, especially with Olbermann. These
commentators feel that this polarization narrative is giving the country what it wants and
it drives ratings. Schiff is just a first class liar ...
As far as Obama's birth certificate, since his mom was a CIA officer using the Ford
Foundation as cover during the murder of millions of leftists in Indonesia, I am sure she
took time out to make sure he was born on US soil. All that stuff about him growing up on
embassy row in Indonesia while the left was being slaughtered is carefully taken out of the
story. Not his fault but it was quite a slaughter of humans and we know her employer was
deeply involved. Going into the Indonesian villages to do studies. Really, studies and
observations. They used to call it SOG groups.
Obama was just put in the pipeline as one of their possible future candidates for
president. They have a stable of these people being mentored. Clinton was one as well. I
bet Harris is one as well.
I think they hate the Trumper so much because he he was in some else's stable.
Possibly the controllers from campus in Tel Aviv. Different stable, same horse
shit.
I think they hate the Trumper so much because he he was in some else's stable. Possibly
the controllers from campus in Tel Aviv. Different stable, same horse shit.
Because the FBI's evidence cleaner/tamperer division's mandate will be greatly expanded,
as will the powers of the Silicone Valley Tekkies to more comprehensively throttle public
free speech on electronic media, that the deep state's Invisible Hand disapproves of.
Trump is about controlled demolition of the empire NemesisCalling @ 5.
B summarized the style differences very well. But failed to mention the greater problem.
3 votes at polls every four years is not democracy<= no American is in charge of any
thing the USA does.
the layers in the global power stack (each nation state the same):
layer 1: global franchisor sets rules of play; establishes goals <=local nation
state franchisees must obtain to remain in power.
Layer 2: oligarch <= national (wall street beneficiaries who use their wealth to
conform national outcome consistent with global powers).
Layer 3: copyright y patent monopoly power constitute 90% of corporate Assets.
Layer 4: think tank and other private orgs
public<= layer 5: 527 elected government <= a tool to regulate members of
public
Layer 6: Intergov Bureaucracies limit and direct elected power to global goals.
public<= layer 7: the 340,000,000 members of the media regulated public
layer 8: stop and go economic system control
layer 9: media controls info environment & public narrative (many
techniques)
all layers but 5 and 7 are contained within an envelop of privately owned control
freaks.
Election of president = false flag iperation. The purpose is to fund the private
media with advertising revenue paid for by consumer taxpayers.
Article II and amendment 12 clearly deny American people any say in who is to be the P
and VP of the USA.
Agree with Nemesiscalling, since 1947, standing orders from Layer 1<= demo the
American excellence; deny superior economic power to average Americans . standing orders
<=homogenize the world and standardize its governance.
American lifestyle and quality of life is indifferent to who the media puts into the
white house.
by c1ue @ 26 said it best "Anyone against the "right" and "proper" Democrat sellouts to
pharma, tech and enviro must be rednecks. It is precisely this view that galvanized the
vote against HRC in 2016." the method used by the public layers is reflected here, it is
called divide and conquer.
B reviewed the elements and factors that maintain the division of the masses..
On the absence of a real left in the US ( is all right and more right..)and of a real
program which could include real changes that could make any difference in people´s
lives, on that what matters is political technology and communication based on demonizing
the other candidate which translates in deep polarizing of societies with unexpected
unknown consequences..
" If Trump were re-elected for another four years, it would be a real calamity and
armed conflicts could even break out by the most radical groups, so that the country
could be paralyzed "
"The ideological profile and policy of the United States is that of the president and,
each one, even if they are from the same party, has maintained quite different political
lines throughout history", says Rafael García, professor of International
Relations at the USC. For this reason, he affirms that, in North America, "there is no
strong party structure, but rather that the party acts as an electoral structure and it
is on the candidates of each moment that certain policies are formed."
DEMOCRATS VS. REPUBLICANS. So much so that, as the professor explains, "the
ideological configuration of the parties in the 20th century changed radically". On the
one hand, he alludes to the fact that the Democrat, "in historical terms, was the party
of the southern states, when they faced each other in the Civil War; racist states, which
lasted until the 1920s ". Precisely, the political scientist indicates that "it was
shortly before when the change took place, with the Roosevelt presidency, that he decided
to change the configuration of the Democratic party as a result of the crisis of 29".
On the other hand, the Republican party, he points out, "was that of the union, that
of the northern states, championed by Lincoln; the abolitionist party and that of the
blacks ". So how did these changes come about until today? Rafael García
points to "a consequence of the political strategies that the presidents embodied at
all times, not because there was an ideological line behind each party ."
TRY TO ASSIMILATE THE AMERICAN MODEL TO THE EUROPEAN. For Rafael García, the
Spaniards, when speaking of US politics, "make a mistake in translating our political
structures" to those there. In other words, "in Europe the duality between left and
right is widely assumed and we unconsciously transfer it to US policy." "That is a
complete error" , sentence.
And it is that there " there is neither right nor left, there is right and more
right ", affirms the professor. Which means that there does not exist and did not
exist a historical labor-union party as such. In fact, the transmutation that is usually
made from the democratic party to 'social democratic' is not correct . For
García, Biden embodies "a more moderate man than the crazy Trump, but that does
not mean that he has some kind of relationship with a left-wing thought ."
RIGHT AND RIGHT. "A multimillionaire gentleman, absolute representative of the
establishment" (referring to Biden), and "a traditional gentleman, more conservative"
(referring to Trump) ". "Although Biden is a Democrat, who perhaps holds stronger
principles and is hopeful, identifying him with the left is still a long way from
reality," he says. Therefore, it is denied that the Democrats are the American left
and the Republicans the right .
THE CAMPAIGN LACKS PROGRAMMATIC INTEREST. For the USC political scientist, the US
electoral campaign lacks interest: "It is absurd, it seems like a disqualification
competition in which a political or government program is not exposed ." And every
time Spain is also getting closer to that model of disputes.
"We are Americanized, in the sense that the weight of the parties is also
being diluted in Spain in favor of the candidatesThese advisers are responsible
for the growing division that is taking place in Western society ," he says.
THE GOVERNMENT IN THE HANDS OF POLITICAL ADVISORS. In Rafael García's opinion,
the decision margin "is shrinking", that is, "the autonomy capacity of governments to
make decisions is smaller, and they are conditioned ". So, what is the difference, in
practice, in management, between PP and PSOE? "Little thing, in the end, little thing,"
he asserts.
That is why " that little thing can not be said to the voter, but must be mobilized
with a degree of identification, unconditional adherence, so that it can be recognized in
a brand ." And what is this transformation of Spanish politics due to? The professor
is clear about it: " It is a translation of commercial marketing techniques to
politics." Thus, a marketing advisor must "build customer loyalty" and a political
advisor should build voter loyalty .
Now, if there are no significant differences between the two options, how to
achieve it? "Through a demonization of the opposite and the creation of a hostility that
is dangerous, because the divisions to which society is returning are irreconcilable
." In this way, García believes that " it is the work of political advisers
who, apart from the difficulties that exist in societies, which are many, polarize them
when it comes to building and mobilizing a faithful electorate, to the point that they
make no difference what the party says or what the leader says ".
In the United States, as evidenced by this expert, "it does not matter if Trump
does the atrocities he does, or if he said in the previous campaign that he could murder
a person on Fifth Avenue in New York without anything happening to him ." This,
transferred to the Spanish sphere, "assumes that the party can do any outrage: fraud,
embezzlement, illegal financing ...". "That is something we are seeing, whatever party it
is, but for the faithful voter it does not matter, because their party will continue to
be so and will continue to listen to the channel and read the newspaper that supports
it," he says.
THE ELECTORAL RESULT WILL BE EXTENDED OVER TIME. "I have no idea nor do I want to make
forecasts, but I consider that Trump is a calamity and that if he were there for four
more years it would be an absolute calamity ", says Professor García. However,
" there is a state of opinion that fears that the result of these elections will be
complicated and that there will be challenges, so that the end result will be a
diabolical process of recount, county-by-county challenges, repetitions in certain
districts. .. a real madness that can last several months ", he warns, something
that," with this polarization trail, it is not known how it could end. "
" I am referring to the outbreak of armed conflicts; These people have weapons,
radical groups, some of them crazy and who can shoot themselves in a demonstration, doing
outrages as part of the institutional paralysis in which the country can be plunged
", he asserts.
This is how people, like those at SST, who lied about the real difference amongst
Democrats and Republicans in real effective changes of policy, shouting to the four winds
that "the Communists are coming", when they are not, and this way spread hatred and
division amongst the US society as if there was no tomorrow so that to conserve their "tax
cut", could end witnessing the total destruction of the US, not only as "Empire" ( a
process already in march before Corona-fear and 2020 electoral process, a construct of
decades of lying the electorate for the greed of a minority...), but also as a nation
state. All these people who, holding privileged insider knowledege of the funtioning of the
state as former insiders, should be held accountable for their willing and conscious
participation in the build up of the social and economic disastaer to come....
Forecast at the end of the article posted and quoted above:
The future: Institutional paralysis
··· An institutional paralysis like the one that can come
after 3-N "could already occur in 2000, in the elections between George Bush Jr. and Al
Gore, but the latter accepted the results even though they were open to challenge, and
that it avoided institutional collapse".
··· However, "now it does not seem that either of the two
candidates is going to have a gesture of these characteristics, with which, if doubts
already appear, it will not only be in the State, but the final collapse may be extremely
long and with unimaginable consequences ", indicates Professor García. "It seems
to me that the United States has a terrible situation ahead ", he sentenced.
A scene of Game of Thrones which could summarize 2020 US election campaign, that it
was based on throwing dirty to each other....But who has the real "power", not the
"government"?:
@ Posted by: Down South | Nov 1 2020 7:04 utc | 122
I understand the rationale behind Trump's policies. But my conclusion is exactly the
opposite: his attempt to stop the disintegration of the American Empire is accelerating the
disintegration of the American Empire, not averting it.
The key here is to understand that that's not how the American Empire should work.
The USA continues to deindustrialize at an accelerated pace under Trump; Wall Street was
never stronger than under Donald Trump; American debt was never higher. And now,
unemployment is as high as during the 1929 era.
The American Empire is the American Empire precisely because it doesn't need to
produce anything it needs except defense. It prints money in order to siphon wealth from
the rest of the world, enriching its economy while impoverishing the rest. That's the only
way the Empire can function - any other way will result in its destruction.
Trump's ideology will destroy the American Empire. It will collapse under a wave of
hyperinflation, skyrocketing unemployment, shortage of goods and collapsing economic
output.
The manufacturing sector saw 17,000 jobs added after four months of flat activity. This
followed a strong run of an average of 22,000 manufacturing jobs added every month in
2018 and 15,800 per month in 2017. Those gains followed two weak years that saw 7,000
manufacturing jobs lost in 2016 and only 5,800 per month added in 2015.
In the last 30 months of President Obama's term, manufacturing employment grew by
185,000 or 1.5%. In President Trump's first 30 months, manufacturers added 499,000 jobs,
expanding by 4.0%. In the same 30-month time span during the mature, post-recovery phase
of the business cycle, some 314,000 more manufacturing jobs were added under Trump than
under Obama, a 170% advantage
As Trump is going to win (provided the usual conditions pertain, fraud is not over the
normal levels, and the whole sh*t-story doesn't end up in the courts or fought out on the
streets, whereupon no reasoned predictions can be made), speculation about Biden as Prez.
is a waste of time.
The last part of the Pepe piece in b's post, which gives reasons to not vote Biden, my
take.:
Obama ran on Hopey-Changey and on his projected charm, actually glib con-man gab.
Worked wonderfully, imagine getting the Nobel Prize because you had a dead-beat Dad who was
from Kenya and you scored B+ for public speaking? Argh. (The real reason: killing will
continue, the status quo is preserved..)
Anyway, the ACA was a damp squib, it didn't solve anything, and depending on pov was in
effect a gift to Mega Insurance or was just 'lame' or as often, 'favored some over others'
etc.
Then the Financial Crisis hit. The Obama admin. didn't prevent it (one might argue they
couldn't not sure) and it didn't 'repair' as far as the ppl were concerned. Banks and Some
Big Cos were bailed out - millions of homeowners were tossed to the curb by Banks. Child
poverty, hunger, increased; wages weren't upped, health stats got worse No need to go on -
this provoked tremendous anger. The 2010 elections saw big R gains, 2014 they took the
Senate, iirc.
(Who cared about foreign parts like Ukraine, Syria? is what I'm saying.)
That Trump would win in 2016 was obvious as soon as he became a candidate. He was
the cartoon contrast of Obomber - white, fat, orange, tall, R vs. D, outspoken, strident,
clumsy (vs. the smooth-talking con), opinionated, stupid, and outrageous in a way. Click
bait and viewer bait for the MSM - but not for no reason.
DT's electoral promises were both opportunistic and more profound: like fire-brand
preachers of old, Build The Wall - MAGA - i.e. pledging a return to the past (see, again
the opposite of Barry, who hoped for the future) -- Stop the wars, undo past mistakes (Dems
don't run on anti-war..!), and, most important:
Drain the Swamp. The Deplorables are not ordinary ppl, but criminals in positions
of power. By putting this forward, Trump became a mirror of the ppl, part of them.
Imho, Trump's record (null or abysmal or whatever depending on pov) is not enough for
rejecting him in favor of loathed "failed" policies of the past - Clinton gang, Biden a
part of it, Obama, etc. (By US voters I mean.)
but see Kiza 8, gottlieb 63, dave 72, Jack, others, >> no difference.
...Bringing the supply chain back to the US and re-industrialising the US isn't going to
happen overnight or even in a couple of quarters. Just like the process to de-industrialise
didn't happen overnight. But that the process has started, it is undeniable, and will only
pick up pace when he wins a second term.
4 new Trafalgar polls came out for 10/29: Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Michigan. Trump
expanded his lead on Biden in Florida and Michigan vs. Trafalgar's earlier October
polls:
FL from +2.3% Trump to +2.7%
MI from +0.6% Trump to +2.5%
Trump did worse in Nevada and AZ: AZ from +4% Trump to +2.5%.
Nevada polled +2.3% Biden
Once again: the question is if Trump outperforms vs. MSM polls. If he repeats anywhere
near his 2016 - he will win.
Trump can only win again if the establishment/deep state is once again exceptionally
overconfident and asleep in the control room. They have numerous ways of swinging the
election at the last hour, from pre-hacked Diebold paperless voting machines to hanging
chads to simply having their operatives scattered around the nation throw ballots away and
fabricate the tallies. Oddly enough this extreme carelessness is still possible. The
establishment/deep state have not yet come to terms with what caused their plans to blow up
in 2016 and really do seriously believe that Russia had something to do with it, even
though they have no idea what Russia might have actually done to wreck their expected
electoral blowout by Clinton. They also think that part of the problem was that Trump
wasn't vilified harshly enough (they wanted the election to at least appear competitive),
and they think they have that covered this time around. It could be that the over-the-top
hysteria from the TDS victims has them overestimating the anti-Trump sentiment, though.
Still, the establishment/deep state screwing up exactly the same way twice in a row
doesn't seem likely. Even so, their profound incompetence continues to astonish, so maybe
we will once again get treated to the delightful spectacle of crowds of middle class faux
left dilettante snowflakes melting down.
It not hard to see why big pharma despises Trump. They stand to lose a lot of
money. My health stock investment has almost doubled during Trump's tenure.
vk @158 - Not acreage - but based (until Andrew Jackson, hardly any principled person's
prez) on PROPERTY VALUE. JUST as in the good ol' UK. Yep - despite NPR folks believing
otherwise (clealry never visited a history book) - the aristo controlled (in what way
really different?) Britain was actually a "democracy":, and was so from Magna Carta on...
Of course it was a, how to say, constrained, constricted "democracy," but then so was the
original one in Athens. Those who count as THE Demos - always been a matter for property
holder concern... So in GB - male, 21 and over and owning a property of a taxable (always
this, huh) value of a certain sum. Ensured that the hoi polloi males over 21 couldn't vote
- and for the exact same reasons, I do not doubt, as the intentions behind the Electoral
College construct by those less than admirable FFs. Gotta prevent the vast masses of the
population - the great unwashed, "the bewildered herd" in Hamilton's verbiage I do believe
- from having the ability to grab (well, they knew all about blood-letting theft of land,
after all, didn't they?) that sacred "property." (Sacred, surely 'cos owned by the
equivalent of the Murican aristos.)
@Down South #159
It shouldn't be surprising. Actual doctors and nurses are, by and large, really great
people. They don't want to turn away anyone.
The poorest in America can't afford health care - even the middle class can't really as
testified to by the millions of bankruptcies caused by medical expenses. Hospitals thus
were losing large sums of profit treating people who simply could not pay.
Obamacare threw many (not all) of those people onto health insurance company plans by
having the government pay the health insurance premium and then having the existing health
insurance customers pay via increased premiums - all this on top of the ongoing health care
profiteering. That's why Obamacare should really have been called "No Health Insurance
Company or Hospital Left Behind".
The existence of Obamacare also distracts people from the real problem: actual
affordable health care - which every other nation in the world except the US has, entirely
due to national health care.
I've posted this before - I will post it again.
In 2006, I left the semiconductor software industry on my own because I disagreed with
management decisions to outsource all jobs to India rather than change their fundamentally
flawed business model. Semiconductor software companies are the only part of the design
chain that charges by software license rather than per part made - this was great in the
early days of semiconductors but is a disaster when the industry consolidates to 5 large
multinational but US based companies.
In 2007, I experienced a retinal detachment right after my COBRA ended. I paid $35,000
in cash to get that fixed - including a 5 hour total elapsed journey through a hospital
which included a 1 hour surgical room occupancy and 1 hour of recovery time. In the door at
6:30 am and waiting for a taxi at 12:30 pm. The UCSF doctor that attended to me (and did a
great job to be clear) said his fee out of all that was $1200.
The following year, some cells stirred loose by the corrective surgery landed on my
now-attached retina and started reproducing. Instead of coughing up another $35K (or more),
I chose to fly to Australia, consult with the best eye doctor recommended by the Royal
Opthalmological Society of Australia and New Zealand.
That doctor's office was literally a light year more advanced than UCSF - supposedly one of
the premier teaching hospitals in the US. I pay him AU$5000 - US$4000 at the time, plus
another AU$800 for the hospital visit. The Sydney Eye Hospital gave me the choice of
staying a 2nd night (I stayed 1 night because I was at the end of the queue for the day, as
a foreigner), for free, including meals and medications administered on site.
I paid literally 1/7th the price in AU vs. the US - an Australia is not a 3rd world
country. The doctor got paid 3.5x in absolute terms. The service I received was immensely
better. Even including travel costs: flight plus 2 weeks in AU (which I was vacationing),
the overall cost was still 1/5th of my US experience.
That opened my eyes (literally) to just how fucked up the US system is.
@Don Bacon #165
Stock price doesn't bear any short term correlation with profits.
Just look at Tesla, Uber and what not.
Health care sector profits have increased disproportionately since Obamacare:
CFR report on health insurance company profits
Since ACA implementation on January 1, 2014, health insurance stocks outperformed the
S&P 500 by 106 percent.
You're right. The early liberals - specially from the American South - loved to compare
themselves with the Athenian Republic. The rationale is that the existence of slaves
enabled them to enjoy unparalleled freedom. Black slaves were frequently compared with
helots when the problem of slave revolts appeared (with the pro-abolitionists evoking the
figure of Spartacus). The South considered itself freer than the North in the USA - it was
only after their destruction in 1865 that the tide turned and the North became,
retrospectively, the paragon of liberal freedom.
In Europe, England was considered the ultimate free nation. Even American liberals
(including Benjamin Franklin) built up their legitimacy on being of English stock
(Anglo-Saxon race). With time, liberals begun to legitimize their hegemony with a worldwide
racial hierarchy - hence the definition of American democracy as Herrenvolk Democracy
("Master race democracy").
And yes, the original liberals considered the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as their birth
date - not the French Revolution of 1789 (which they condemned as illiberal, or "radical").
The founders of neoliberalism (Hayek, Mises, etc. etc.) put 1870 as the apex of liberalism,
which they tried to revive.
Escobar writes: "In contrast, two near-certain redeeming features would be the return of
the US to the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal, which was Obama-Biden's only foreign policy
achievement"
Anyone who actually thinks this is either ignorant or moronic. Biden will absolutely
require Iran to limit their ballistic missiles before "rejoining" that then-altered deal.
Iran will never let this happen. Thus the deal is essentially dead [as far as US
involvement goes, which the other parties should ignore]. MOA notes this as well.
I don't know why though MOA refers to Escobar at all here though. The ignorance
demonstrated in the above quote should be enough to disqualify such a person from any
discussion about Biden, Iran, etc. and to also ignore anything else such a person claims.
You might as well quote a schizophrenic you meet down by the river for his take on Iran and
the JCPOA. Might as well learn sign language and ask the chimps at your local zoo what they
think about it.
You are not the only American who is doing it. They have even developed a term for it -
medical tourism:
With rising healthcare costs in the US and the rise of health tourism destinations that
offer quality and affordable healthcare perked up by a beautiful travel experience,
Americans are scampering to book appointments with healthcare providers far away from
home. Yearly, millions of patients travel from countries lacking healthcare
infrastructure or less advanced in a particular area of medical care to countries that
provide highly-specialized medical care.
Noirette @161: " Drain the Swamp. The Deplorables are not ordinary ppl, but
criminals in positions of power. By putting this forward, Trump became a mirror of the ppl,
part of them."
True enough, and as even the bunny claims, this was part of the act. But those who think
Trump's upset victory in 2016 was part of the plan need to offer up a better explanation
for why those criminals in positions of power would want to kneecap themselves with public
exposure. The rationale has to be extraordinarily critical and of huge value to the elites
because that price of exposure has been monumentally damaging to them.
Keep in mind that one of the most important (if not the most important) aspects
of US presidential elections is the "electoral mandate" . Far more important than
specific campaign promises is the general tone of the campaign. If a winning candidate had
campaigned on ending wars, bringing jobs back from abroad, and fighting corruption in
government, this isn't just an indication that the public wants something done about these
issues. First and foremost it forces an acknowledgement that these are indeed major issues
that the public wants to be part of the national discourse that the capitalist mass media
tries to control. Allowing these issues to become part of the national discourse is
diametrically opposed to the interests of the power elites. They do not want these issues
to even be discussed, much less addressed by the state.
So why would they intentionally force these issues into the forefront of national
discourse? That is, after all, what Trump's victory did, despite the establishment's best
efforts to distract with "Russia! Russia! Russia!" and "Racism, sexism and
pussy-grabbing, oh my!" . These issues were already smoldering below the surface due to
Sanders' campaign, so why would the elites want them fanned into flames?
Answer: They didn't. As much as the issues that the winner campaigns on getting elevated
in priority by the "electoral mandate" , the loser's issues get diminished. Trump
was supposed to lose, and lose bigly, and in the process the things he campaigned on were
supposed to be crushed down to objects of ridicule by the corporate mass media. Trump's
resounding defeat was supposed to signal that Americans rejected Trump's "conspiracy
theories" about some fictitious "deep state" that only existed in Trump's
imagination, burying the suspicions that the election fraud committed against Sanders
aroused. Trump being ignominiously trounced was supposed to allow the mass media to say
that Americans unequivocally voiced their opposition to ending war and their support for
intervention in Syria, clearing the way for Clinton's "no fly zone" . Trump being
utterly humiliated in the polls was supposed to decisively demoralize the
"deplorables" , convincing them with finality that there will never again be
good-paying blue collar jobs and that they are just disposable relics, while at the same
time crippling their resistance to the social engineering of "identity politics" ;
social engineering that I should point out is even more ill-conceived and incompetently
executed than the 737MAX MCAS system.
Trump was supposed to lose and take those issues with him to the dustbin of history.
It is important to understand this point because it clarifies who our enemies really are
and helps us to understand how they view the world.
Ancient Athens excluded from power slaves and resident foreigners (metics). Also women in
the families of male citizens, although one could argue that they had virtual
representation through the male citizens in their families. So also for the children in
citizens' families, although they would have full rights once they reached adulthood. The
adult male citizens who had full political rights were about 20 percent of the population
of Attica.
And even the poorest citizens had much more political power than average citizens of
today's so-called democracies have today. They could attend and vote in the Assembly, they
could be chosen by lot to serve in such bodies as the Council and juries, and to serve in
most offices. And for doing all these things there was pay, so that poor citizens had
particular motivation to participate, which they did. Just read Aristophanes. No wonder
most rich Athenians hated the system.
Again, you are mistaken. I am getting tired of correcting you.FoxNews drug their heels
when it came to supporting DJT in 2015 until it was clear that the majority of
conservatives actually wanted DJT as their candidate.
It was at that point that business-smartz kicked in and they had to acknowledge that
they must throw their weight behind the Trump ticket lest they prove themselves the
faux-conservative Rinos they actually were/are.
Business 101, my friend. You wanna keep the advert. revenue coming in, you produce
content your audience actually agrees with.
TBH and AFAIK Tucker Carlson is still the only truly sane conservative on FOx news. The
rest, including Hannity, don't neccessarily mind the endless wars so long as the public
endorses them. They are chameleons without an ethical lodestar guiding their
commentary.
Trump being utterly humiliated in the polls was supposed to decisively demoralize the
"deplorables", convincing them with finality that there will never again be good-paying
blue collar jobs and that they are just disposable relics,
_____________________________________________
The problem is you think the oligarchs are every bit as stupid as you are. It would be
nice if they were, but unfortunately they're not.
First of all lets examine who are these deplorables who you imagine were set up by the
oligarchs to be crushed and demoralized by running Trump as their candidate.
The deplorables are:
-The Americans that own the guns
-The Bible thumping American jihadist
-The Americans that sign up for the police and military and in those rolls operate the
states weaponry
-The Americans who believe the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of
tyrants
I could go on but all you have to do is tune into the corporate mass media that caters
to the deplorables to find out who they are and what they are being sold.
But Mr Gruff is just too stupid to figure out why in the world the oligarchs might want
to not antagonize that segment of the population.
The oligarchs would have to have lost their frikken minds to hire trump for the purpose
of giving the deplorables a big "fuck you" as you imagine. The oligarchs are well aware
that they already gave a big fat finger to the deplorables when they engineered the
election of Obama (not to mention the 40 preceding years of marginalizing that segment of
the population) and just maybe it was time to pacify that segment of the population that
was growing larger and a bit restless.
But those who think Trump's upset victory in 2016 was part of the plan need to offer up a
better explanation for why those criminals in positions of power would want to kneecap
themselves with public exposure. The rationale has to be extraordinarily critical and of
huge value to the elites because that price of exposure has been monumentally damaging to
them.
Amen!!! I don't think that people who forward that narrative fully understand
how damaging this exposure has been to them.
By being exposed they have been shown to exist . This is super critical! No more
is talk of the deep state relegated to the lunatic fringe where they can be easily derided
as "conspiracy theorists"
Whether Trump can drain the swamp or not is to be seen but what is not in dispute is
that they exist.
Posted by: Down South | Nov 1 2020 18:31 utc |
181 How can the blob "return" when they never really left?
To pretend that Trump is some special Peacemaker, trying oh so hard to overcome deep
state resistance to rolling back empire, is Trumpism. Escobar is always there. Trump must
be understood as a leading creature of the swamp himself. Trying so hard just as Obama was
trying so hard.
The relative scores settled terribly are more a matter of opportunity than ruthless
efficiency. Though it is true that "success" requires dialing it back a bit, and having the
likes of Bolton around is a way of ensuring either that nothing gets done, or we all end up
ashes. Trump managed to axe Bolton on time, that time.
It's avoidance of those lower probability mega catastrophes that is the principle reason
of voting trump out with regards to foreign policy. And there are other reasons.
"... From the point of view of the Earth and especially humanity it's essential to obstruct the globalist-technocratic elite as much as possible. ..."
"... So it follows that anything which sustains and multiplies the number of obstacles any globalist actor has to traverse is a good thing, while anything that streamlines, unifies, renders more "efficient" is bad. This includes the character of US foreign policy. Although it will remain aggressively imperialist for as long as this government exists, it makes a significant difference how disciplined and superficially "kinder and gentler" the facade is, as opposed to how wayward, openly brutish and gratuitously insulting to everyone in the world. ..."
"... Trump's election was a monkey-wrench in the works, and although the elites were able to make lemonade by turning anti-Trumpism into an organizing principle among the bewildered masses, they certainly want to return to having a reliable, fully pliant figurehead in the White House. With Biden/Harris they'd get the best of both worlds - they either get the obedient Biden or the even more aggressively obedient Harris who would be all the more controllable since she has no political support of her own and wouldn't have been elected even if Biden became president and then had to be retired. ..."
The globalist "Great Reset" wants to overcome the diverse rising obstacles to globalism's
perpetuation, especially the intensifying centrifugal political and economic forces which
directly oppose it or which hinder it. The global elites see politics as such, and any mode
of economy other than that which is strictly regimented and controlled by the US government,
the oligopoly MNCs and a handful of globalization entities, as antiquated obstructions to its
power and profit. From the point of view of the Earth and especially humanity it's
essential to obstruct the globalist-technocratic elite as much as possible.
So it follows that anything which sustains and multiplies the number of obstacles any
globalist actor has to traverse is a good thing, while anything that streamlines, unifies,
renders more "efficient" is bad. This includes the character of US foreign policy. Although
it will remain aggressively imperialist for as long as this government exists, it makes a
significant difference how disciplined and superficially "kinder and gentler" the facade is,
as opposed to how wayward, openly brutish and gratuitously insulting to everyone in the
world.
Real anti-globalists always have known this, and the need never has been more critical
than now. From this point of view Trump is vastly preferable. The across-the-board hatred of
the elites for him is the best recommendation.
Trump's election was a monkey-wrench in the works, and although the elites were able
to make lemonade by turning anti-Trumpism into an organizing principle among the bewildered
masses, they certainly want to return to having a reliable, fully pliant figurehead in the
White House. With Biden/Harris they'd get the best of both worlds - they either get the
obedient Biden or the even more aggressively obedient Harris who would be all the more
controllable since she has no political support of her own and wouldn't have been elected
even if Biden became president and then had to be retired.
So it follows that gratuitous US imperial belligerence is in fact being "creatively
destructive", to use one of capitalism's own religious terms, in spite of the US empire's own
long-run goals and interests. The worst thing would be for US foreign policy to become less
Kaiser and more Bismarck. The more chaos the better. It may seem more painful in the short
run than running home to hide under adult mama's skirts the way almost all former
anti-imperialists, anti-globalists, "radicals", "leftists" have done, since they all were
frauds all along who can't take the slightest pain or hardship and would rather die than do
any movement-building work, but for the long run good of the Earth including humanity there's
no other option.
I keep on reading this narrative that there is no difference between Trump and Biden and
no matter who you vote for the blob wins. That the effort to unseat Trump and overturn the
2016 election results, to derail his 2020 campaign is all some elaborate game of 52D chess
that we are too stupid to understand.
Here is my problem with that narrative.
The political scene in the US is split between two factions 1) the US globalists
(Democrats/Establishment Republicans/Deep State/Big Tech/MSM/WallStreet) and on the other
side 2) US Nationalists (Trump/the deplorables).
When Trump was campaigning in 2016 he made it clear that he intended to bring back the
supply chain to the US. All those manufacturing jobs that were outsourced to third world
countries to maximise the profits of the large corporations we're going to be brought back
and the way he intended on doing that was to exit free trade agreements that harmed US
national interest and introduce protectionist policies (tariffs/ low corporate taxes etc)
which would entice/induce/force manufacturers to open factories in the US again.
This horrified the globalists as they have for the past decades been implementing a
controlled disintegration of the US
The great "liberalization" of world commerce began with a series of waves through the
1970s, and moved into high gear with the interest rate hikes of Federal Reserve Chairman
Paul Volcker in 1980-82, the effects of which both annihilated much of the small and medium
sized entrepreneurs, opened the speculative gates into the "Savings and Loan" debacle and
also helped cartelize mineral, food, and financial institutions into ever greater
behemoths. Volcker himself described this process as the "controlled disintegration of the
US economy" upon becoming Fed Chairman in 1978. The raising of interest rates to 20-21% not
only shut down the life blood of much of the US economic base, but also threw the third
world into greater debt slavery, as nations now had to pay usurious interest on US loans.
false solutions to a crisis of global proportions are being promoted in the form of a
"Great Global Reset" which aims at creating a new economic order under the fog of COVID.
This emerging "new order", as it is being promoted by Mark Carney, George Soros, Bill Gates
and other minions of the City of London is shaped by a devout commitment to depopulation,
world government and master-slave systems of social control.
By attempting to tie the new system of "value" to economic practices which are designed
to crush humanity's ability to sustain itself in the form of "reducing carbon footprints",
"sustainable green energy", cap and trade, carbon taxes and green infrastructure bonds,
humanity is being set up to accept a system of governance onto our children and
grandchildren which will subject them to a dystopic world of fascism the likes of which
even Hitler could not have dreamed.
Exiting NAFTA, implementing protectionist measures, lowering corporate taxes, starting a
trade war with China (that is where the majority of the outsourced jobs went) he is trying to
undo the controlled disintegration of the US. That is why the globalists hate him so
much.
Four years ago I was railing against Hillary Clinton on Facebook without any
censoring.
Tonight I watched an interview Tucker Carlson did with Glenn Greenwald regarding the
Hunter Biden/Joe Biden scandal and Tucker showed a poll revealing that 51% of those polled
believe this scandal is "Russian Disinformation" with ZERO evidence.
Why do those being polled believe this? Because the bulk of the MSM they watch have told
them so and the major tech platforms have ALL censored the pertinent information so there is
NO debate amongst the electorate. All of this less than one week from our national
election.
With Facebook and Twitter and Google's and the bulk of the MSM's heavy fingers on the
scales of public information there are only two words to describe this:
ELECTION INTERFERENCE.
And this with over 70 million voters already having cast their ballots!
Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, these tech/media corporations should ALL be
brought down at least to the point where they can never be allowed to interfere in another
American election again, regardless of the higher-ups personal political preferences.
And this is the system the war-mongering DNC wants to "spread around the world" with their
"regime change wars"?!
Stephanie, why do you want Trump gone? Trump is bait. His presence is resulting in many,
many bad actors revealing themselves to be nefarious. Just look at Twitter/Facebook censoring
this blockbuster news (along with the rest of the media). We, The People, are finally seeing
first had the level of tyranny that's upon us. None of it has anything to do with Trump. But
it's Trump's existence in the White House that is bringing it to light. Without him, we would
have never seen it for what it is. Think about that.
I may disagree with your take on CIA involvement, but the above paragraph couldn't be more
accurate. Trump's election was like throwing a brick through a rotten, wasp-infested
beehive.
I'll second that. Though perhaps to be fair to the original sentiment, perhaps the brick has
only knicked the beehive, and then smashed a window or two along it's way. He is arguably
inevitable, even desirable from some perspective, but the degree of nuisance is not erased, so
much as outweighed, by the necessity. We would be living in a better world, by definition, if
someone like him had never been required to improve it.
Agreed. I have been telling Democrats all they need do is run better candidates - and
virtually every time, I get people trying to claim there was never anything wrong with Hillary
or Joe and also Trump is Literally Hitler Incarnate.
I grew up watching psychos in the Extreme Right talk that way about whoever THEY didn't like
politically. Arguing that Bill Clinton was going to send Janet Reno to take their guns and cart
them off to FEMA camps like a scene out of "Red Dawn" or something. But this isn't the fringes
talking anymore. It's the mainstream, and it's on the Left.
Glen, I just paid for a subscription so that I can say this one FACT. The PODESTA EMAILS
WERE NOT THE RESULT OF A HACK.
Please stop reporting this nonsense. The cover story was all part of the plan (approved by
HRC) to shift attention to a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that has always been fiction.
Guccifer 2.0 was created out of this same scheme. The meta data on the files prove that it's
impossible that those emails were hacked, they had to be downloaded on a local device
(thumbdrive most likely).
The FISA Abuse, the spying on Trump, The plan to implicate collusion, the Flynn frameup,
the Impeachment, The Mueller investigation were not the base crimes, those were all part of a
cover up. By you insinuating that the DNC server got hacked (which there is zero evidence
for), you are wittingly or unwittingly complicit in perpetuating the lie that it was. You're
missing a much, much bigger story here. The biden laptop isn't even the tip of the icebeg
here.
Ask yourself this; "Why would dozens of high level DOJ, FBI, CIA and Whitehouse officials
in the Obama Administration put their careers on the line and commit literally hundreds of
felonies all in an effort to obstruct/neutralize Trump?" That is first question any true
journo should be asking right now.
You mention in this article that the media is basically over-compensating for helping Trump
win in 2016. That is extremely naive on your part. The media/twitter/facebook/CNN/MSNBC, etc.
is too well orchestrated, too well coordinated to be operating even vaguely independently. This
is project Mockingbird happening on a scale almost unimaginable. Maybe even the Intercept was
intercepted. Why would the publication that you founded not allow you to publish this? If you
look back at 2016, the entire media industrial complex was just as coordinated as it is now,
they just got sloppy because they were certain Trump wasn't going to win. Who's being naive now
Kay?
I also get frustrated with what I see as a naive interpretation, by figures like Dan
Bongino, Tim Pool, etc. I wonder if there is a fear by some to point behind the curtain, that
they will be attacked and cancelled for "conspiracy theories."
Neither Tim or Dan are really journalists and besides, this story is so massive and so
incomprehensibly large in scope/scale/magnitude that we shouldn't get too frustrated.
The main point to remember here is that none of this has anything to do with Trump. Look at
the timeline in its entirety, the best we are able to do and then plot a graph of the Media
Industrial Complex's behavior. They were out to derail Trump from the moment he came down the
escalator and it's not because he's a womanizer or that he's a game show host. They couldn't
afford to have an non-establishment player come in and wreck their plans. The question is, what
the f#$% were their plans? Why did they risk so much to keep him out of the WH?
My view is that the constant sturm und drang about the corruption of the elections (voter
suppression, mail fraud, ballot harvesting, etc, etc) is a ploy to distract from the fact that
the real corruption already happened long before the election.
The real corruption is even mentioned by Glenn in his draft: the SELECTION process.
The media do what they're told, and what they are doing is keeping up the drumbeat of
election corruption. In other words, they've been told to distract all attention from the real
story.
The real story is that, to the people who control candidate selection, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO
WINS.
That is the whole point of controlling the selection process. Oh yes, I know the media hates
Trump and so do the establishment. Really? The same establishment that just benefitted from the
greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history, during a pandemic panic, under Trump?
Bezos has gained over 70 billion in net worth this year, under Trump. You think he hates Trump?
Really?
You think Biden will do less? Or perhaps you think he would do more than the greatest upward
transfer of wealth in human history?
Republicans versus Democrats is a con game. It's a kabuki theatre of manipulation of
parochial tribalism, a Punch n Judy Show for the rubes.
As was once mentioned in the UT threads at Salon, isn't it time for a second political
party, Mr Greenwald?
It's not about their plans. It's just a non-violent (so far) class war. Trump is a vessel
for the working classes to carry their dissatisfaction of elite leadership. It's easier to
communicate directly to the people now due to social media, so the traditional media can't tell
the people how to vote (can't declare a candidate to be beyond the pale any more, squashing
their chances, and they used to have that power). The media are part of the elite leadership,
they don't like the working classes not listening to them, and they don't like the loss of
power. That's their agenda.
They have taken to "any means necessary" to keep that power, even though now it's basically
lying and obfuscation. They are trading off their legacy trustworthiness for short term
benefit, but they are destroying that foundation of trust as well. That happens slowly but
surely as more people see through them. Takes too long in the experience of everyone who is
reading this, because we're well ahead of the curve. The average mid level elite is a working
professional with kids too busy and not interested enough to dig to the next level and has been
taking their word - but they too see the truth every time they really look and over time that
is going to go as we all hope it will. It's just going to take a while.
"The guy who co-founded one of the current-day major online journalism outlets isn't really
a journalist" - Someone Posting to the Comments on an Article by a Guy Who Co-Founded One of
the Current-Day Major Online Journalism Outlets
There is good cause to question the Snowden story. He was CIA. Once a CIA agent, always a
CIA agent. It's plausible that he was inserted into booz allen hamilton in an attempt to harm
the NSA (on behalf of the CIA). Tell me this Glen, how did Snowden evade the largest
dragnet/manhunt ever on the planet to evade the authorities and make it to Moscow? Am I the
only one who finds this a little fishy? As someone who has been in software for 40 years, when
I heard him on Joe Rogan podcast about a year ago, I didn't find his backstory credible at all.
He sounds intelligent, but when you get beyond that and listen to him from a technological
perspective, his story doesn't add up. I find it hard to believe.
Why would a "patriot" doing work on behalf of the CIA be thrown to the wolves? Why wouldn't
they cover for him after it was released? I haven't been in software for 40 years, but I
believe that the Snowden story is extremely credible.
Snowden was a libertarian high school dropout hacker
The Deep State hired 800,000 employees/contractors around the Beltway after 9/11 on a war
footing, so anyone that was seen as clean and patriotic may not have needed a lot of standard
credentials by the usual bureaucratic managerial idiot types working for the Feds
I've been told that military field grade IT is all from the 1990s, dunno about national
security agencies, but unless you have actually worked with national security IT stuff I'm not
sure why your views should hold much weight
Senior people I know in the military and national security apparatus have told me that
corruption, waste and inefficiency are rampant (80-90%?)
Sorry, but I've heard that "anything CIA is automatically X" way too many times in my life.
Often from people trying to sell books about how we never landed on the Moon (you'd be amazed
how many ex-[alphabet agency] agents "back up" these claims with the worst sort of
pseudo-authoritative malarkey).
Hah! They "helped" Trump by running two billion dollars' worth of 95% negative coverage. It
made Trump look like the victim of a massive smear campaign by partisan hacks. What have they
been doing to "over-compensate", exactly? Make it 99%?
Whether or not they helped Trump, Greenwald's article claimst that journalists feel
responsible for Trump being elected last time so they are trying not to make the same
'mistake'. At least that's what Glenn is asserting here.
They're not wrong. They helped elect him with their sheer negativity. I've seen these people
argue the point, and they always point the finger at other journalists somehow NOT being
negative enough. It's never themselves.
So there's no collective soul-searching going on, no self-awareness, only a drive to be
angrier and finger-wagging with less concern for the actual facts of any given matter. They
don't realize how transparent it's become for those not already personally invested in the
extant narratives.
This, I think, is why we are seeing many more people defect to Trump rather than away from
him; when one is personally and deeply invested in a narrative, it's an article of faith.
Imagine you walk into church one day and the pastor says "this just in: the Archangel Gabriel
was a child molestor who felt up Baby Jesus". Next week, they accuse the Virgin Mary of the
same. Would a member of the faithful just roll with that, or consider moving to another church
altogether just to avoid the emotional whiplash?
More to the point, the head of Crowdstrike, the company run by a known Russia-hater the
Democrats sent their server to instead of the FBI, and who never provided that server to the
FBI, admitted in a Senate hearing that there was, in fact, no evidence of hacking. He was under
oath that time. Russiagate remains one of the most successful propaganda campaign in
history.
Just before or just after Trump's 2016 election I was in a Manhattan restaurant with my
domestic partner talking with strangers from DC. It turned out that they worked in the State
Dept. and they told us that since Trump questioned the veracity of some things the intelligence
establishment had said, they would absolutely bring him down. We were shocked but have
remembered this throughout the FISA debacle,the Mueller mess,the impeachment and this election
cycle.
Right. Thank you. I wrote to Matt T. about this same issue in his article. I'm hoping they
will do the investigation required for them to amend their articles. It really is a fundamental
mistake to perpetuate this propaganda.
It's literally in the Mueller report that the DNC server was hacked, without a shred of
evidence. As Fox Mulder said "Trust No One". Matt & Glen really need to get to the point
where they chuck everything they think they know and start over. Everything has been a lie. Why
would anyone believe ANYTHING the FBI or DOJ of Obama WH put out at this point? The MSM has no
credibility, FBI/DOJ/CIA? This cancer has metasticized to the point where the patient is on
life support.
We need to understand that Trump is Chemo. It takes an outsider to come in, someone who
didn't need this job, someone who couldn't be bought, to come in and kill that cancer.
Just to offer some confirmation for that, Here is a CNN article from the time: "A phishing
email sent to Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta may have been so sophisticated
that it fooled the campaign's own IT staffers, who at one point advised him it was a legitimate
warning to change his password."
However, they also report that the link was from " [email protected] ." I searched
for whether that email address had been reported as malicious on the day that the story broke.
Far from being "sophisticated", it was just a phishing link that was going around randomly, and
had already been reported to this spam reporting site:
So, despite (much of) the media converging on a "sophisticated spear phishing" narrative,
this looks to be a link that was sent to a large number of people over a long period, and just
a case of random spam phishing that got lucky.
re: "so sophisticated that it fooled the campaign's own IT staffers"
I'm not a google mail user, but in general it is pretty rare for a phishing email to NOT
have extended headers (server route log) that reveal a bogus or weird looking origin.
"Alleging" would be more accurate. They've been acting quite more brazenly as a
misinfo/disinfo arm of the DNC. Whether or not the DNC has deep enough connections with the CIA
to provide a useful and reliable data/policy bridge is another question, but both DNC and GOP
likely have enough connections to establish semi-functional "lamprey" networks just due to
their longevity and resulting personal/professional contacts therein.
Hi Frank. " The PODESTA EMAILS WERE NOT THE RESULT OF A HACK.
Please stop reporting this nonsense. The cover story was all part of the plan (approved by
HRC) to shift attention to a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that has always been fiction.
Guccifer 2.0 was created out of this same scheme. The meta data on the files prove that it's
impossible that those emails were hacked, they had to be downloaded on a local device
(thumbdrive most likely)."
Based on the forensics that was my conclusion but beware of these rabbit holes. It has never
been discussed that those details can also be faked (the meta data.) Certainly Gucifer which
seemed like damage control. I am unsure of the claims about his being backtracked tho.
So it's possible that the evidence is faked having accepted the conclusions of VIPS
analysts.
Could be. It would also mean that it was the first time Wikileaks published something that
wasn't authentic. Assange knows where the emails came from and he asserted that they didn't
come from Russia.
Note to all: You must use actual (historical) ISP speeds as of the specific months in
question. They increased a good deal in the months that followed in that area.
I agree that there was a massive fake Russia story created by GPS Fusion, the Clinton
campaign, Clinton allies, with the help of US intelligence, often willing and sometimes just
incompetent.
But there is definitely some evidence of a DNC hack. Among other things, the Dutch
intelligence services seem to have observed evidence in their spying on the Internet Research
Agency - reported by mutliple sources including Dutch media. What the nature of the hack was
and how it gibes with the evidence that there must have been a person on the ground to transfer
the data files that fast is of course fair to discuss.
There is also evidence, both purposely forgotten in media coverage after Jan 2017, of an
attempted RNC hack and the overt public hack and release of Colin Powell's email to embarass
and hurt Trump. There is plenty of other evidence of Internet Research Agency activity that was
pro-BLM and anti-Trump, making their more likely overall goal the sowing of chaos than only
supporting Trump. Thus the need for GPS/Clintonistas/Intelligence/Mueller's team to spin a
narrative.
I became a fan of yours when I was in law school at UC Hastings in 2003. Your the best, for
sure. But fuck...
I got to be honest...I'm glad the press is ignoring this story. There's just too much at
stake. Biden might be losing his edge, his family might be trading in his name, but who gives a
shit? The alternative is worse by light years.
And yeah, I don't trust the "people" out there to get it right. The "people" are rubes.
Those idiots voted for this piece of shit once before, they'll do it again, in a heartbeat.
More importantly, you really want to do Rudy Giuliani's work for him? I don't know, I don't
get it...why so eager to make the campaign's case for them? It's not a rhetorical question. I
just don't get it.
Alex: you are saying that we should not have independent press, that the media ought to be
agents of propaganda, consciously decieving the public for the greater good.
Maybe Biden is the lesser evil in this election. But without actual journalists like Glenn
we could never know.
I get the frustrations over Trump. He is a disaster. But the answer to that disaster does
not concist in advocating for more lies and propaganda.
I have yet to hear a reasonable case for Trump being either the greater evil or a disaster.
Many of the allegations against Trump have remained that - allegations - but in Biden's case
some of the same accusations (particular about racism) is in his Senate record. He was a
terrible candidate to position against Trump, and he picked as his veep the only person in the
entire primary season to get blown out by a single phrase from Tulsi Gabbard - who the rest of
the party's establishment absolutely despised because Hillary said so.
With Trump? Roaring economy brought to a halt not even by coronavirus, but massive economic
lockdowns that break the economy down to virtually Blue-State (down) / Red-State (up)
comparisons. Democrats were accusing Trump of "meddling" when he was still a candidate and
nonetheless pressured a Detroit factory into staying in the US. The man understands economic
leverage, and to ignore or deny that is like denying the Sun heats the Earth.
Three Middle East peace deals leading to an equal number of Nobel nominations. He is roasted
for de-escalating international tensions, lauded only when he fires missiles at nations
Democrats think need shooting at, and then castigated for killing a terrorist leader in the
same nation they were cheering him for firing missiles at.
I see very little criticism of Trump that isn't associated with bald-faced party-based
opposition, from establishment Republicans who hated his cockblocking of JEB BUSH FOR GODSAKE
to Democrats who still think Hillary's shit job as Secretary of State (ruining more nations
than Trump has cut peace deals for) is beyond reproach.
Speaking as a lifetime independent, please: the naked, incessant and baseless fury
demonstrated by Democrats and the Radical Left since 2016 has NOT been a selling point for
us.
Biden has been credibly accused of actually pinning a staffer against the wall and stuffing
his fingers up her vagina. The media didn't attack her story, but her college credentials, and
dumped the story after.
Biden has actually authored racist legislation and in recent years spoke of "being able to
work across the aisle" - with racist segregationists.
Trump's been merely ACCUSED of a shit-ton of things. But I don't join lynch-mobs. Same
reason the lynching of Justice Kavanaugh (seriously, you guys went after him over "I like beer"
and school calendars you had to try and reinterpret as codebooks?) made me see the Democratic
Party as a progressively more lunatic outfit. Reducing impeachment to "who needs criminal
charges? we really just hate the guy" wasn't a winner with us independents either, not just
speaking for myself there.
A pox on both your damned parties, and thank Trump for being that pox.
Gee Alex, elitist much? You don't like Trump so the people making an informed choice is not
a worthy goal? Anyone who disagrees with your world view is a rube who is not smart enough to
see the light - as defined by you? And you wonder why Trump won last time. The left is
populated by arrogant asses who think because they came out of college with a degree in some
worthless major, they are smarter than everyone else. Well, I went to college to but got a
degree in engineering vice sociology but I guess I'm just an educated rube.
Your law school tuition dollars were clearly wasted. Most of the people/rubes/idiots I know
and love learned the difference between "your" and "you're" in high school - and acquired
critical thinking skills at the same time. Too bad you missed out.
Yeah, we the people (rubes) are fn sick of the fn lawyers (especially from UC Hastings)
being in political control of our country and want a non-political person to clean up. What's
so hard for you to understand?
How's your guy doing you fucking rube? Great choice! Job well done!! If you ever wonder why
nobody gives a shit about your opinion, the fact that you chose a fucking reality star who ran
every business he ever owned into the ground, and fancies a bizarre hairdo, that's why no one
cares what you say. You're fucking stupid.
bahahahahaha...go crawl back into your fucking prol shit hole dwelling and latch onto
Tucker's teat. You're a fucking joke and always will be, no matter how special your dear leader
makes you feel.
Our local sanitation workers are much more thoughtful and respectful actually. I am voting
for Biden but I find this lawyer's response detestable. We need to grow up and stop with ad
hominem attacks that do nothing to advance the discussion.
Morals and ethics obviously mean nothing to a lawyer. If this was Don Jr, you would be out
for blood. As an independent voter, I want to know that I'm not voting for a piece of shit that
has been compromised by the Russians and Chinese! People like you, the FAKE NEWS media, and
antifa, etc are a major reason why I won't ever give my vote to Biden!
Elitists like Alex G. made the election of Donald Trump as president both inevitable and
necessary. The more he disses the "people" aka "rubes," the more President Trump's re-election
becomes equally inevitable and necessary. To borrow from Sen. Ted Cruz's exchange with Twitter
CEO Jack Dorsey, "Who the hell made Alex G. the final authority on how and what people should
think, say and do?"
One thing we know for sure is Alex G. never learned any humility or manners growing up. To
substantiate this, he stands condemned out of his own mouth. Last thing this country needs is
to have an authoritarian demagogue like him anywhere near the levers of power.
Please go back and fact check the old stories that made us hate Trump in the first place.
They've proven to be lies. He isn't perfect, but Biden will destroy this country. He's beyond
corrupt. Go look at the source materials.
Arrogant, smug D party loyalist goons and assholes like you are a very large part of why
people voted for Trump in 2016 and will vote for him in this election. T-R-0-L-L
I believe in the democratic system. The people may make mistakes, but so can anyone else. An
average of all the people is more accurate than randomly picking subsets of people to make
decisions. You say that you and your friends are not a random subset, you are better than
average. Your opponents say the same thing. We have a system for resolving these disputes.
Maybe you can invent a better one, but "I'm right and my opponents are wrong" is not a new
approach.
In answer to your "Why" question, perhaps Mr. Greenwald believes the same thing.
Glenn - new subscriber today (saw you with Tucker Carlson). As a conservative voter, I
support your new venture, not because your story is critical or suspicious of Biden, but
because we need more talented journalists willing to just investigate possible corruption and
inform the public. I also support Matt Taibbi for the same reason. The last line of your
article sums it up best for me.
"The whole point is that the press loses its way when it cares more about who benefits from
information than whether it's true."
Good luck, I hope you find this new path rewarding professionally and financially.
Agreed, I also like reading Quillette for it's equal publication of articles (they printed
that big article from the Environmentalist who demonized Environmentalism after he was banned
from his original publisher), and I also like reading Sharyl Attkisson as well.
I find it interesting how Glenn sees all the propoganda from these agencies in the media,
but fails to see the full extent of it in social media and therefore is unable to report on it
adequately. The DNC server hack is more of the same.
I paid for a subscription precisely because I believe that, despite what you may or may not
personally believe, you don't allow it to influence your pursuit of the truth. I want the truth
- nothing less and nothing more.
I just signed up, too, for that very reason. When those in positions of power put on a mask
and practice deception, they must be exposed. Sunlight is the cure for the disease of
corruption.
Personally, having read your work going back to Cato Institute and Volokh, I'm happy you're
independent and I can directly fund you. I'm willing to throw even more money at your projects.
Consider crowdfunding video documentary teams and other large projects. Your following after
all of this is going to be as large as ever.
I've supported him here as well because I think he is an important voice right now. There
are few journos out there right now who have Glenn's credibility who are willing to take on
media groupthink. But it is a tough environment. With NYT offering their digital for 4$ a month
that gives access to all of their writers/content, it is very difficult for writers like Glenn
to compete.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmed Wednesday the
information exposed by former Hunter
Biden business associate
Tony Bobulinski that connects the former Vice President to companies and ventures in China.
But you wouldn't know it by following the main stream press.
Bobulinski's bombshell interview with Fox News host
Tucker Carlson Tuesday, along with Carlson's follow up exclusive on Wednesday, revealed
that Democratic candidate Joe Biden was aware of his son's business questionable overseas
business dealings. It should be a huge story. After all, Joe Biden has publicly denied knowing
about his son's business ventures in China, Ukraine and other parts of the world.
So why isn't this story on the front page of every newspaper and covered by every cable
network?
How is it possible that the majority of main stream media outlets, newspapers and cable
networks had no problem running unsubstantiated stories about President Donald Trump, his
family and his businesses only to find out later – without corrections- that the
information they published was bogus.
Here, there is an eye witness to the Biden family operations: Bobulinski. He has come
forward and shown his credibility. He has verified documents, photos, receipts from Hunter
Biden's hard drive that the FBI had obtained, along with President Trump's friend and personal
lawyer former New York City Mayor Rudy
Giuliani.
Why hasn't the FBI done anything with this before the election? The bureau has had it for
almost a year. Giuliani then did the only thing he could do – he turned over the
documents to The New York Post. Those documents obtained from Hunter Biden's laptop are the
massive breadcrumbs to a real political scandal.
These documents raise serious questions as to whether or not our possible future president
really is compromised by foreign adversaries, or whether or not he was using his position in
government to profit his family.
Still, it's only crickets from the main stream media. At the same time, big tech giants like
Twitter, Google and Facebook are also working diligently to squash the story and keep the truth
from the American people.
Tucker Carlson had the highest ratings – historic ratings – at Fox News Tuesday
night with more than 7 million viewers tuning in for the Bobulinski story. Yet, the Bobulinski
interview wasn't trending on Twitter, and in fact, it appeared that his story was non-existent
on the other networks.
Not even the Senators, who held a hearing on Wednesday, could get a straight answer from
Twitter's CEO
Jack Dorsey on why his platform banned The New York Post stories.
Sen. Ted Cruz said on Twitter "What @Jack told the Senate, under oath, is false."
"I just tried to tweet the @nypost story alleging
Biden's CCP corruption. Still Blocked."
Censorship in full force. However, this is not like the old
Soviet censorship – this is a bizarre new self-censorship by elitist leftists who
believe they know what's best for the American people.
Think about this – what if this story was about information these news agencies
discovered on Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump. How would they treat it?
Let's start with the most widely discussed and central to the issue of alleged corruption
was Hunter Biden's paid position on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings.
Despite the fact Hunter Biden had no background in energy he was being paid more than $50,000 a
month and in some instances as much as $83,000 a month.
What about the most concerning connection for the Biden's with China's CEFC, an energy giant
that is compared to Goldman Sachs. It is directly connected to the Chinese Communist Party and
according to Bobulinski, as well as senior lawmakers investigating, possible used as leverage
against the Bidens by the communist government.
"Joe Biden and the Biden family are compromised" said Bobulinski in Tuesday night's hour
long interview with Carlson. He said he turned over evidence to the FBI and openly spoke about
his alleged meetings with then Vice President Joe Biden. Biden is referred to by his son Hunter
Biden in emails obtained by the FBI and first published by The New York Post as the 'Big Guy'
and or 'the Chairman.'
Bobulinski revealed that he "held a top-secret clearance from the NSA and the DOE. I served
this country for four years in one of the most elite environments in the world, the Naval
Nuclear Power Training Command, and to have a congressmen out there speaking about Russian
disinformation or Joe Biden at a public debate referencing Russian disinformation when he knows
he sat face-to-face with me, I traveled around the world with his son and his brother. To say
that and associate that with my name is absolutely disgusting to me ."
Joe Biden, however, has publicly denied having any financial gain from his son's, Hunter,
business ventures. He said at the second Presidential debate, "I have not taken a penny from
any foreign source ever in my life." However, Biden has refused to answer any questions
regarding the allegations or address some of the accusations against him or his son.
The American public has the right to know if their next president has been compromised by
their families business dealings with the communist Chinese. Moreover, many of the business
ventures his son was connected with were during his tenure as Vice President.
Our nation has been divided but not by President Trump. It's been divided by an army of
bureaucrats, liberal elites, the New Democratic socialists, special interests and more
importantly a biased partisan media.
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For now, Americans will be left in the dark. On Wednesday committee Chairman Sen. Ron
Johnson, R- WI, told The Daily Caller, that Bobulinski will not be called to testify before the
Nov. 3 elections. He said the committee is working to review all the information that has been
provided to the committee by Bobulinski.
The information has to be verified, as it is subject to the same false information to
Congress laws that verbal or written testimony does.
However, a Johnson spokesperson told the Caller that all the material provided by Bobulinski
to the committee is legitimate and verified .
The committee has "also" not come across any "signs" or evidence to suggest the content
Hunter Biden and Bobulinksi content is false , the spokesperson added.
It's tragic to think that if by chance – a small remote chance – that Biden
actually wins the election justice will never be served and our nation will fundamentally
change.
America will be at a crossroads on November 3. The main stream media is doing its part to
ensure that the American people are not informed, so it is up to you to vote your conscience
and seek out the truth.
Col. Leghorn CSA , 9 hours ago
I suggest enabling RICO charges against any media that conspires to hide the truth.
UPS has found
documents that went missing in transit to Tucker Carlson, putting to rest questions about the
whereabouts of a trove that the Fox News host had called "damning" of presidential candidate
Joe Biden's family.
"After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging
for its return," a UPS spokesman told the
Daily Beast on Thursday. "UPS will always focus first on our customers and will never
stop working to solve issues and make things right."
While the successful search resolved the issue of the documents' whereabouts, questions
remain about how they disappeared from a package sent to Carlson in California from a producer
in New York -- and who, if anyone, was behind it. Without naming the company involved or
specifically saying the papers were purposely targeted and stolen, Carlson suggested on his
show on Wednesday night that the disappearance wasn't coincidental.
"As of tonight, the [shipping] company has no idea and no working theory even about what
happened to this trove of material – documents that are directly relevant to the
presidential campaign just six days from now," Carlson said. The company's executives
"seemed baffled and deeply bothered by this, and so are we."
Carlson described the package as containing confidential documents about the Biden family
and said they were "authentic, real and damning." He said he asked a Fox producer in New
York to send the documents to him in Los Angeles, where he had traveled to interview former
Biden business associated
Tony Bobulinski on Tuesday. The package didn't show up on Tuesday morning, prompting UPS to
begin an exhaustive search.
Mainstream media critics mocked Carlson for saying the documents had disappeared, including
some who suggested that they never existed. HuffPost said Carlson "concocted yet another
conspiracy
theory " to explain the disappearance of documents related to what they called his
"conspiracy theory" about Biden's son, Hunter.
Carlson devoted his entire show on Tuesday night to the Bobulinski interview, which provided
more specific allegations about the Biden family's business dealings in China following an Oct.
14
New York Post report on the ventures. Although Bobulinski provided legal documents, text
messages and recordings to back up his claims, the interview was largely ignored by other
mainstream media outlets.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on
Twitter @velocirapture23
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's campaign is using a vast reserve of donations
from the usual plutocratic suspects to pry even deep-red states away from an incumbent who's
done little to help the working class.
The Biden campaign broke all-time records for TV ad spending over the weekend, leveraging
Wall Street donors' unprecedented largesse in its effort to woo ordinary Americans back into
the establishment fold.
Given how Trump's record bristles with policies so 'pro-business' they can be seen as
anti-working-class, it's a strategy just crazy enough to work. Voters need only be reminded how
the incumbent cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations while printing trillions of dollars to
be diverted directly into the pockets of big banks and big companies during the pandemic. The
media is encouraged to do its part by hyping up Trump's " divisiveness. "
The same corporate-friendly policies that alienated many in Trump's 2016 base have somehow
failed to keep the .01 percent in the Republican camp, and Wall Street has poured $50 million
into the Biden campaign, CNBC reported on Monday, holding up former Goldman Sachs president
Harvey Schwartz as a typical contributor. Schwartz made his largest-ever political donation
earlier this month to the Biden Action Fund, a $100,000 gift that was also one of the biggest
donations the Fund received during that period.
And it's not just Wall Street - aside from hardcore Republican Zionists like casino mogul
Sheldon Adelson and vulture capitalist Paul Singer, the US oligarchy is firmly and vocally in
the Biden camp. Former New York City Republican-turned-Democrat mayor Mike Bloomberg announced
a $15 million ad buy in Texas and Ohio on Monday, two states where Trump won by a healthy
margin in 2016 but where the failed presidential candidate apparently smells weakness. That
hefty sum is in addition to over $100 million Bloomberg spent in the critical swing state of
Florida, where he also raised millions of dollars to pay off the court fees of black and
Hispanic ex-cons - whose votes the businessman believes will reliably land in the Biden camp,
never mind the candidate's history of supporting the kind of laws that probably landed them in
prison in the first place.
Overwhelming support for Biden among the ruling class is also amplified by wealthy
celebrities. From Cher's cringe-inducing ditty " Happiness is just a thing called Joe ,"
recently performed at a Biden benefit concert, to Taylor Swift's insistence that 2020's
election is " more important than I could even possibly say ," to questionable
statements from one-time anti-establishment stalwarts like Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys,
Americans are being cajoled, shamed, and pushed into the voting booth to deliver their support
to candidates who have never cared less about average Americans.
Working class people whose lives have been torn asunder by the coronavirus shutdowns Biden
has essentially pledged to expand aren't left with many options. While Trump resisted calls to
lock down the nation, his self-presentation as an anti-establishment maverick contrasts with
four years spent racking up debt and bombing Middle Eastern civilians. Recent polls suggest
that even the " poor and uneducated " - groups whose support for Trump has long been the
butt of liberal jokes - are defecting.
While a New York Times
analysis on Sunday showed Trump continuing to outperform Biden in low-income areas and
Biden's support remains concentrated in traditional liberal bastions on the East and West
Coasts, it showed middle-class suburban voters bailing out of the " Trump train " in
droves. Meanwhile, wealthy and college-educated voters have coalesced around Biden more firmly
than in the past, with even big-money establishment Republican types drawn to Biden's promise
of a return to the Obama-era status quo.
Where does that leave the poor, or those who lost their middle-class status in the last
crash? Trump's detractors have pointed out the irony of the man surrounded by gold presenting
himself as the people's champion, and the Biden campaign is spending relentlessly to poach
wavering Trump supporters, with ads and opinion
pieces featuring self- described
" Christian Republicans " embracing the Democrat.
Short of voting for a third party - described by the media establishment as something akin
to a war crime, especially for swing state residents - the working class is caught in an
unenviable bind. More than a few must be wondering if voting is merely a long con aimed at
drafting Americans into participating in their own oppression. Driving through rural western
Pennsylvania, a state polls insist Biden has bagged, a bumper crop of Trump signs - more than a
few of them handmade - has blossomed, suggesting the small farmers of the Rust Belt really are
expending their meager resources to re-elect the man with the gold-plated
bathroom . But if this is, indeed, what democracy looks like, it's no wonder the system is
losing support among the younger generation.
If you like this story, share it with a friend! Jojo jordan 1 day ago Sorry Helen but
you lost me where you claimed Trump didn't help the working class. Also, the Big companies got
rich during the pandemic due to Democrat Governors and Mayors shutdowns of small businesses.
Biden is THE definition of swamp creature. Trump is for the people. He's a realist. Reply 10 2
Zogg Jojo jordan 1 day ago Nope, Trump heavily damaged the working class when signed the law
having the corporate taxes halved and not halving the working class taxes. tracie72 1 day ago
"It's one big party, we aren't invited." George Carlin J_P_Franklin 1 day ago "wondering if
voting is merely a long con aimed at drafting Americans into participating in their own
oppression" Democracy is the problem. "Voting only encourages them." - Gore Vidal Juan_More
J_P_Franklin 1 day ago Actually it is the reverse. The more the people vote the more it scares
the politicians. It is usually non-aligned voters that make up the vast majority of those who
do not vote. That way the parties count on the party faithful to get out and vote. With all
those independent voters voting it makes those sure thing seats a lot less sure. Why are you
trying to discourage people from voting. From the number of comments like yours I've seen in
social media there would appear to be move to suppress people from voting. Lastly everyone
should keep in mind, there may not be anything worth voting for but there is always something
to vote against.
Tuesday night, we heard at length and on camera from one of the Biden family's former
business partners. His name is Tony Bobulinski. He's a very successful businessman and a Navy
veteran.
Bobulinski spoke to "Tucker Carlson Tonight" for a full hour. He told us he met two
separate times with Joe Biden himself. Not just with Joe
Biden's son or his brother, but with Joe Biden -- the former vice president and the man now
running for president -- to discuss business deals with the communist government of China .
That's a very serious claim, and whatever your political views, it's hard to dismiss it when
Tony Bobulinski makes it because Bobulinsky is an unusually credible witness. He's not a
partisan, he's not seeking money, he's not seeking publicity. He did not want to come on our
show.
But when Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and the Biden campaign accused Tony Bobulinski of
participating in a Russian disinformation effort, he felt he had no choice. That was a slander
against him and against his family. So Bobulinski came to us. He arrived with heaps of evidence
to bolster the story he was telling. He brought contemporaneous audio recordings, text
messages, e-mails, many financial documents.
By the end of the hour, it was very clear to us that Tony Bobulinski was telling the truth
and that Joe Biden was lying. We believe that any honest person who watched the entire hour
would come to the same conclusion.
Well, on Wednesday, a
Senate committee confirmed it . The Senate Homeland Security Committee reported that all of
Tony Bobulinski's documents are, in fact, real. They are authentic. They are not forgeries.
This is not Russian disinformation. It is real.
Bobulinski told a remarkable story. Joe Biden -- who, once again, could be president of the
United States next week, was planning business deals with America's most formidable global
opponent. And when he was caught doing it, Joe Biden lied. And then he went further. He
slandered an innocent man as a traitor to his own country. It is clear that Joe Biden did that.
That's not a partisan talking point uttered in bad faith on behalf of another presidential
campaign. It's true.
So the question is, what is Joe Biden's excuse for doing that? What is his version of this
story? Everyone has a version and we'd like to hear it, but we don't know what Joe Biden's
version of the story is, because no one in America's vast media landscape has pressed Joe Biden
to answer the question. Instead, reporters at all levels and their editors and their publishers
have openly collaborated with Joe Biden's political campaign. That is unprecedented. It has
never happened in American history.
Wednesday morning, the big papers completely ignored what Tony Bobulinski had to say. So did
the other television networks. Not a single word about Bobulinski appeared on CNN or anywhere
else. Newsweek decided to cover it, but came to the conclusion that the real story was about
QAnon somehow. This is Soviet-style suppression of information about a legitimate news story.
Days before an election, the ramifications of it are impossible to imagine. But we do know the
media cannot continue in the way that it has.
No one believes the media anymore and no one should. You should be offended by this, not
because the media are liberal, but because this is an attack on our democracy. You've heard
that phrase again and again, but this is what it looks like. In a self-governing country,
voters have a right -- an obligation -- to know who they're voting for. In this case, they have
the right to know the Democratic nominee for president was a willing partner in his family's
lucrative influence-peddling operation, an operation that went on for decades and stretched
from China and Ukraine all the way to Oman, Romania, Luxembourg and many other countries. This
is not speculation once again, and it's not a partisan attack. It's true, and Tony bobulinski
confirmed it.
Bobulinski met with Joe Biden at a hotel bar in Los Angeles in early May of 2017, and when
he did, Joe Biden's son introduced Bobulinski this way: "Dad. Here's the individual I told you
about that's helping us with the business that we're working on and the Chinese."
Now, written documents confirmed this is real. At one point, Joe Biden's son texted Tony
Bobulinski to say that Joe Biden, his father, was making key decisions about their business
deals with China.
CARLSON: When Hunter Biden said his chairman, he was talking about his dad.
BOBULINSKI: Correct, and what Hunter is referencing there is, he spoke with his father
and his father is giving an emphatic 'no' to the ask that I had, which was putting proper
governance in place around Oneida Holdings.
CARLSON: So, Joe Biden is vetoing your plan for putting stricter governance in the
company. I mean, and it's it's right here in the email.
BOBULINSKI: Yes, Tucker, I want to be very careful in front of the American people. That
is not me writing that. That is not me claiming that. That is Hunter Biden writing on his own
phone. Typing in that 'I spoke with my chairman,' referencing his father.
All this is spelled out in the clearest possible language in documents that Bobulinski
provided us, documents that subsequently federal authorities have authenticated as real.
On May 13, 2017, for example, Hunter Biden got an email explaining how his family would be
paid for their deal with the Chinese energy company. His father, Joe Biden, was getting
10%.
BOBULINSKI: In that email, there's a statement where they go through the equity, Jim Biden's
referenced as, you know, 10%. It doesn't say Biden, it says Jim. And then it has 10% for the
big guy held by H. I 1,000% sit here and know that the big guy is referencing Joe Biden. It's,
that's crystal clear to me because I lived it. I met with the former vice president in person
multiple times.
That was three years ago, and we still don't know where all that money went, because the
media haven't forced Joe Biden to tell us. But Tony, Bobulinski did add a telling detail. Joe
Biden's brother, Jim, saw his stake in the deal double from 10% to 20%. Was Jim Biden getting
his brother's share again? It might be worth finding out.
We also know that according to an email from a top Chinese official, this one written on
July 26, 2017, the Chinese proposed a $5 million dollar interest-free loan to the Biden family,
"based on their trust on [sic] BD [Biden] family." The e-mail continued, "Should this Chinese
company, CEFC, keep lending more to the family?" And indeed, CEFC was supposed to send another
$5 million dollars to the Bidens' business ventures. Apparently, that money never made it to
the business. Where did it go? A recent Senate report suggests it went to Hunter Biden
directly. And from there, who knows? Again, no one's asked.
Tony Bobulinski also told us he learned Hunter Biden became the personal attorney to the
chairman of CEFC, Ye Jianming, just as they were tendering 14% of a Russian state-owned energy
company. That was a deal valued at $9 billion dollars. It's pretty sleazy. It's pretty amazing,
actually, that this happened and no one noticed.
We're not going to spend the next six months leading you through a maze of complex financial
transactions. This isn't that complicated: Millions of dollars linked directly to the Communist
Party of China went to Joe Biden's family, and not because they're capable businessmen. Jim
Biden's one business success appears to have been running a nightclub in Delaware that
ultimately went under.
No, the Bidens were cut in on the world's most lucrative business deals, massive
infrastructure deals in countries around the world for one reason: Because Joe Biden was a
powerful government official willing to leverage his power on behalf of his family.
Now, if that's not a crime, it's very close to a crime and it's certainly something every
person voting should know about. The Bidens didn't do this once. They did it for decades. So
the question is, how did they get away with it for so long? Tony Bobulinski asked Jim Biden
that question directly. To his credit Jim Biden answered that question honestly.
BOBULINSKI: And I remember looking at Jim Biden and saying, 'How are you guys getting
away with this?' Like, 'Aren't you concerned?' And he looked at me and he laughed a little bit
and said, 'Plausible deniability.'
CARLSON: He said that out loud.
BOBULINSKI: Yes, he said it directly to me. One on one, in a cabana at the Peninsula
Hotel.
"Plausible deniability." In other words, "we lie." We get away with selling access to the
U.S. government, which we do not own, because we lie about what we're doing. And as we lie, we
try to make those lies plausible. That's why we call it "plausible deniability." That is the
answer that Joe Biden's brother gave when asked directly.
So the question is, what is Joe Biden's answer to that question? We wish we
knew.
ForFoxSake!!! 1 hour ago Everything that is happening right now is because Trump was
right about the swamp, the media, and the ruling class families who have been selling out
America for decades. ohhappyday657 1 hour ago Tucker is doing this country a great service. The
FBI doesn't seem to want to engage. Mr. Bobulinski is a patriot and we are lucky he came
forward. The Bidens need to be called out for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Joe should be
impeached for his time as VP. Thank you Tucker. resipsaloquitor ohhappyday657 29 minutes ago
You can smell the desperation on the Trump supporters. The lies, the distortions and the
grasping, pathetic search for the proverbial Hail Mary to salvage the quickly sinking ship. If
Mr. Bobulinski is the best you have the Democrats will 'trump' you with: 227,000 dead
Americans, close to 9 million more infected and an economy in tatters. The day of reckoning is
approaching and a dozen Bobulinskis won't change that. Trump and his unseemly administration
are doomed.
On Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson did something he'd never done before: he dedicated his
entire show to a single interview. The person he interviewed was Tony Bobulinski, an
experienced international businessman who found himself working with Hunter Biden, James Biden,
and others on a deal between the Biden group and CEFC, a Chinese energy company with ties to
the communist government and the military. Bobulinski powerfully confirms that Joe Biden was
deeply involved in the transaction, which had its beginnings when Joe was still vice
president.
Fox News has not yet uploaded (and may never upload) the interview in its entirety. However,
the four videos below bring together almost everything from the interview.
Tucker opened by making the point that he was dedicating his show to the Bobulinski
interview because the rest of the American media are assiduously ignoring the story,
downplaying it, or claiming it's a Russian smear. The leader of the Russian smear approach is,
naturally, Rep. Adam Schiff, a man who has all the hallmarks of a conscienceless psychopath.
Ironically, it was Schiff's smear about Hunter Biden's hard drive that led Bobulinski, a
Democrat, to go public with his story.
If you can't watch the interview, here's a brief overview:
Bobulinksi is a former naval officer with a Q clearance. That's an extremely high clearance
level for people working in the Department of Energy -- and Bobulinski worked in the Navy's
nuclear program. He comes from a military family and is very proud of that legacy.
After leaving the Navy, Bobulinski became an international businessman. His expertise led to
Hunter Biden and his people wooing Bobulinski to give them the business expertise they needed
to get their partnership up and running.
The partnership, SinoHawk, was intended to bring together CEFC and the Biden family. Both
Hunter and James Biden, after all, brought nothing to the table other than their last name and,
with it, the promise that China would have access to political influence at the highest level
of American government.
Bobulinski's name recently became public knowledge when James Gilliar, another businessman
working on SinoHawk, sent an email to Tony Bobulinski, setting out the terms Gilliar had been
negotiating with CEFC. What caught everyone's interest was the statement that Hunter would hold
"10[%] for the Big Guy." Bobulinski confirmed that Joe Biden was the "Big Guy."
At this point, Schiff, the media, and Joe Biden, none of whom ever denied the legitimacy of
the email, claimed that the whole thing was a Russian smear. This unfounded accusation got
Bobulinski's dander up. As a naval officer from a military family and a true patriot, being
smeared as a Russian agent was beyond the pale.
Bobulinski demanded that Schiff retract the insult, and when Schiff failed to do so, he went
public and did a full document dump. Bobulinski had saved everything -- every document, every
email, and every text.
That's the quick background to the interview with Carlson, during which Bobulinski said
that
Hunter and James Biden brought nothing to the deal other than the Biden family name.
What China wanted was the Biden family name.
Joe Biden was involved in the business deal, so much so that he had veto power over
negotiations.
In 2017, Bobulinski met Joe Biden twice when the Biden side of SinoHawk was courting him
to step in and act as CEO.
Bobulinski also spoke at length with James Biden, Joe's brother.
When Bobulinski asked James how they could get away with this kind of deal, which seemed
to be falling into dangerous territory, given that Joe could run again for president, James
announced, "Plausible deniability."
The Biden group stiffed Bobulinski, leaving him out of pocket for all his expenses while
channeling CEFC's money into another entity that did not involve Bobulinski.
If we had a decent media establishment, this story would be on every front page and at the
top of every news hour. Instead, Bobulinski is trying desperately to get Americans to know that
he is not a Russian agent and that Joe Biden was in bed with the communist Chinese government,
starting when he was vice president and continuing after he left the White House. This screen
shot from Memeorandum shows that
none of the legacy media outlets is touching the story:
(As an aside, and separate from the Bobulinski interview, a former CIA operations office
believes it's entirely possible that Biden
was already doing China's bidding in 2012, when the Obama administration gave China free
rein in the South China Sea.)
In case the embedded videos do not play, you can find them here ,
here ,
here ,
and here
.
We've always known that Joe Biden is an odd bird. Just think of the lies, the egotistical
boasting, the offers to fight people, the skinny-dipping, and the way he fondles and sniffs
little girls. He is a genuinely creepy man.
It speaks volumes about Washington, D.C. and the Democrat party that Joe spent 47 years in
the swamp and rose to the second highest office in the land. What we've learned now, though,
irrefutably and without any Russian hokum, is that Joe Biden is also a profoundly corrupt man
who willingly sold out America and her allies to enrich himself and his sleazy, incompetent
family.
Fox News has not yet uploaded (and may never upload) the interview in its entirety. However,
the four videos below bring together almost everything from the interview.
Tucker opened by making the point that he was dedicating his show to the Bobulinski
interview because the rest of the American media are assiduously ignoring the story,
downplaying it, or claiming it's a Russian smear. The leader of the Russian smear approach is,
naturally, Rep. Adam Schiff, a man who has all the hallmarks of a conscienceless psychopath.
Ironically, it was Schiff's smear about Hunter Biden's hard drive that led Bobulinski, a
Democrat, to go public with his story.
If you can't watch the interview, here's a brief overview:
Bobulinksi is a former naval officer with a Q clearance. That's an extremely high clearance
level for people working in the Department of Energy -- and Bobulinski worked in the Navy's
nuclear program. He comes from a military family and is very proud of that legacy.
After leaving the Navy, Bobulinski became an international businessman. His expertise led to
Hunter Biden and his people wooing Bobulinski to give them the business expertise they needed
to get their partnership up and running.
The partnership, SinoHawk, was intended to bring together CEFC and the Biden family. Both
Hunter and James Biden, after all, brought nothing to the table other than their last name and,
with it, the promise that China would have access to political influence at the highest level
of American government.
Bobulinski's name recently became public knowledge when James Gilliar, another businessman
working on SinoHawk, sent an email to Tony Bobulinski, setting out the terms Gilliar had been
negotiating with CEFC. What caught everyone's interest was the statement that Hunter would hold
"10[%] for the Big Guy." Bobulinski confirmed that Joe Biden was the "Big Guy."
At this point, Schiff, the media, and Joe Biden, none of whom ever denied the legitimacy of
the email, claimed that the whole thing was a Russian smear. This unfounded accusation got
Bobulinski's dander up. As a naval officer from a military family and a true patriot, being
smeared as a Russian agent was beyond the pale.
Bobulinski demanded that Schiff retract the insult, and when Schiff failed to do so, he went
public and did a full document dump. Bobulinski had saved everything -- every document, every
email, and every text.
That's the quick background to the interview with Carlson, during which Bobulinski said
that
Hunter and James Biden brought nothing to the deal other than the Biden family name.
What China wanted was the Biden family name.
Joe Biden was involved in the business deal, so much so that he had veto power over
negotiations.
In 2017, Bobulinski met Joe Biden twice when the Biden side of SinoHawk was courting him
to step in and act as CEO.
Bobulinski also spoke at length with James Biden, Joe's brother.
When Bobulinski asked James how they could get away with this kind of deal, which seemed
to be falling into dangerous territory, given that Joe could run again for president, James
announced, "Plausible deniability."
The Biden group stiffed Bobulinski, leaving him out of pocket for all his expenses while
channeling CEFC's money into another entity that did not involve Bobulinski.
If we had a decent media establishment, this story would be on every front page and at the
top of every news hour. Instead, Bobulinski is trying desperately to get Americans to know that
he is not a Russian agent and that Joe Biden was in bed with the communist Chinese government,
starting when he was vice president and continuing after he left the White House. This screen
shot from Memeorandum shows that
none of the legacy media outlets is touching the story:
People who claim Trump is undermine the republic are wrong. The last nail in the coffin of
the republic was put by George Bush, We are now living in the empire.
The replacement of the republic with the "national security state" started with Truman,
reached local max in 1963 when a faction within CIA killed JFK and irrevocably became an
empire in 1991 with the disappearance of the USSR. And the global neoliberal empire ruled
from Washington that the USA tries to maintain as a world hegemon is a death sentence to
republic and democracy. So it is fair to say that formally republic (and democracy) in the
USA seized to exist after dissolution of the USSR, when the USA ruling elite became drunk
with the feeling of the only world superpower and neocons start to determine the USA foreign
policy. People just became hostages, forced to support and die in imperial wars, while
standard of living of lower 80% of population start gradually sliding, like always happens
with empires, and manufacturing (and jobs) stared to move oversees, mainly in China. The
decline started actually under Carter.
Truman initiated the transition of the republic into national security state by creating
CIA, NSA and FBI. Herbert Hoover was probably the first who noted that now "tail is wagging
the dog ": intelligence agencies were able to the control of Congress and executive branch
via dirt of politicians and other standard for the "deep state" tricks. To say nothing about
Allan Dulles, CIA and JFK assassination.
And later Obama managed to paraphrase Mr. Orwell 1984, "We always have to be at war with
Eastasia." Just 30 years later. Now you need to add to this pervasive wiretapping of all
communications due to the treat of terrorism.
The look how easily the deep state derailed Sanders candidacy. Nobody even managed to
scream, until it was too late. As Professor Sheldon Wolin put it we live under "inverted
totalitarianism ":
"One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as
democratic surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested
Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of
all, the media."
Wolin showed us all the realities of and limits of the US form of government. It is still
a livable space and if you do not try to undermine the neoliberal social order they will
leave you alone. There not much forceful indoctrination that was a hallmark of the USSR. It's
still a better country, I can attest.
Also the USA "nomenklatura" is more agile, less fossilized in comparison with Brezhnev's
nomenkatura.
But "we are an empire now" as Karl rove told us. Even formally it is no longer republic as
elected President is more or less ceremonial figure, who does not control non-elected
bureaucrats of the executive branch. they (aka "deep state") control him.
Even in a sense of oligarchic republic ( the democracy for the top 1% or less ) the
democracy is under assault. The "Deep state" is effectively strangulated even this, very
limited form, that existed before 1991 (the year of dissolution of the USSR). As we can see
from Sanders case, or Supreme Court role in Bush II case. And Sanders was definitely a member
of the elite, not some random guy from nowhere. The same was true for Al Gore. But they stole
the election from him, plain and simple.
Wendy Brown moved Wolin ideas further suggesting that neoliberalism is the novel fusion of
economic with political power (one dollar one vote; voters turned into consumers; neoliberal
rationality) and that alone completely "poison democracy at its root" It think I already
wrote about those topics. My judgment here is highly suspect -- I never lived in Washington
and never studied history or political science professionally.
Let's hope for the best. Our great advantage is that we are old and are probably the only
generation that managed to live without the major war. Let's hope that we will be able to die
before WWIII
Still, I think Trump entered (not without influence of Russiagate; and those sleazy
intelligence crooks like Comey, Brennan and Mueller and their clan of "national security
parasites" be those scoundrels internally damned) a very dangerous path -- the path advocated
by neocons and MIC.
"Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should
definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also
concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental
principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start
indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly
unconstitutional."
IMHO the current neo-McCarthysim campaign that was deployed to solve some internal
problems within the Democratic Party (rejection by electorate and subsequent political fiasco
of Hillary Clinton) is a very dangerous tool. You can't blame Trump victory on Russia. That's
simply stupid or disingenuous. Trump election is a sign of systemic crisis of neoliberalism
in the USA, somewhat similar to the crisis of Marxism the the USSR experienced before
dissolution. Rust Belt voters rejected Hillary as the establishment candidate who symbolized
the status quo (which they hate) and that was it.
In such crisis the elite is de-legitimized and often resort to dirty tricks to regain the
lost legitimacy. A war is one such trick. Neo-McCarthyism campaign is another. Of course,
Russia in far from being a saint and bear a part of responsibility for unleashing the civil
war in Donbass (and generally destabilizing Ukraine -- it is a curse to be a neighbor our of
such a large and powerful country; Canadians and Mexicans probably think the same
,
But what currently we see in major MSM looks to me like a classic witch hunt with the
implicit goal to whitewash humiliating for neoliberal Democrats (Clinton wing of the party)
defeat and blame it on the external force (Putin looks really like "Deus Ex Machina" for
democrats . <
While Trump run brilliant election campaign based on opposition to neoliberal status quo,
his elections slogans were completely fake. He completely folded three month after the
elections and now symbolizes "empty governance" as if somebody changed the man. During
election the New York billionaire structured his campaign around three topics which propelled
him to victory.
First, he seemed to comprehend America's status quo crisis -- the
disintegration of neoliberalism that had defined the country since Reagan. Large numbers of
voters understood immediately what he was saying, particularly since the crisis of working
class was largely ignored by the other candidates.
Second, he positioned himself as an "anti-neoliberal status quo" candidate. While two
neoliberal parties instinctively clung to time-tested positions and neoliberal groupthink,
shunning any changes. Trump sidestepped this rigid political thinking of both parties and
crafted a new mix of issues cutting across partisan lines. He embraced traditional GOP
positions such as reduced taxes, school choice, increased defense spending, and rejection of
the idea of human-induced climate change. But he also took positions contrary to Republican
orthodoxy -- Social security and Medicare protection, attacks on neoliberal globalization and
"free trade" regime, rejection of austerity economics . And he manifested contempt for an
important part of neoliberal ideology embraced by both parties -- neoliberal view of
immigration
Third, Trump's disdain for political niceties suggested to voters what he declared
political war on the country's neoliberal elite -- all those despicable neocon think tanks,
university professors, the neoliberal MSM, the managerial class, "national security
parasites", Hollywood, and Wall Street financial titans.
Like Don
Quixote he was alone warrior against neoliberalism and all-powerful adversaries. And
he wouldn't buckle when they fought back to protect their cherished neoliberal globalization
and privileged standing of multinationals as the real power behind the throne
What emerged from the campaign was a growing recognition that the country stands at a
fundamental crossroads -- whether to follow the elite vision of neoliberal globalism and
"anti-nationalism", with money, people, ideas, and cultures moving freely across increasingly
indistinct borders (Biden administration path); or to retreat to traditional nationalism
including fealty to Western cultural heritage and reject multiculturalism.
In other words the main battle lines in 2020 are really ideological.
But there a lot of problems with painting Trump as a fighter against
Clinton/Bush/Obama-style of neoliberal globalization. After inauguration we saw quite
different Trump. He's abandoned all of his "anti-neoliberal" election promises, particularly
in foreign policy and dealing with Wall Street titans, that helped propel him into office.
And he started openly flirting with prospects of a war with Iran. Probably to please his
Zionist sponsors, but also may be out of his complete and utter incompetence.
That means that now he is unable conduct a meaningful conversation with his voters.
Outside fanatics who will support him in any case, he definitely betrayed them. In this sense
he might have difficulties to preserve his base in 2020. Due to his foreign policy blunder
and Pompeo brass style of gangsterism in foreign policy some of his political capital among
independents shrunk. That same is true with his tax cut. This was a clear betrayal. Add to
this that he was pinned down by Mueller investigation until December 2017, when Strzok-gate
scandal broke and only in 2019 Mueller (and Rosenstein) lost credibility and became a joke.
Mueller investigation actually was a shroud gambit against him based on his own blunders.
But BLM and, especially, riots gave his a short in the arm. So everything is possible
now.
Also one clear achievement of Trump is that clearly and convincingly demonstrated how
corrupt and crooked are neoliberal MSM. As the result I even started watching some Fox news
(Tucker) recently ;-). If somebody predicted that a couple of years ago I would laugh in
his/her face.
A very good (IMHO) overview of the current situation can be found in London review of
books. See
"... It is indeed more likely that an authoritarian regime can last longer than the current one, and they can more easily push the things they want this way. "Democracy" and "free speech" served their purpose for a time, now it's time to try something else. ..."
@romanempire
ionaires.
"How to consume the surplus capital? " I suspect you maybe confusing money/debt with capital
["-The latter [capital] is so cheap these days it costs nothing to a qualified borrower. "]
which is the capacity to use labour productively, usually combination with technology.
"surplus" capital then is non/under utilised factories etc & labour.
As to the vast inflation of debt/money .as Dr Hudson says, debts that can't be paid,
won't be paid. The easiest way to rid the world of the trillions that elites have, is to
liquidate the elites themselves. Either that, or like Samson, pull the whole shithouse down
around you .
@romanempire
e. the economy/dollar will collapse), or they realize that the global democratic neo-liberal
order is on its last legs, and can't last, so they are anticipating things.
It is indeed more likely that an authoritarian regime can last longer than the current
one, and they can more easily push the things they want this way. "Democracy" and "free
speech" served their purpose for a time, now it's time to try something else.
The final push will be when they make people complete slaves by embedding our bodies with
technology (i.e. Musk's project for a microchip in the brain, among other things). The
Unabomber wrote about that in his Manifesto.
Fall enrollment has
plunged , some colleges are shuttering operations, revenues across the entire higher
education industry are collapsing, and the shift from physical to virtual education due to the
virus pandemic could prick the next bubble: the student housing debt market.
Our warning about the coming implosion of the higher education industry (see here
from 2014) , as a whole, has become louder and louder over the last six-plus years as the
student debt bubble has recently swelled to more than $1.6 trillion. Years ago, no one at the
time, could've forecasted a virus pandemic would doom colleges and universities.
Credit rating agency Moody's recently downgraded the entire higher education sector to
negative from stable, and the American Council on Education estimates colleges and universities
will experience a $23 billion decline in revenues over the next academic year.
Bloomberg outlines the increase of virtual education in a virus pandemic has resulted in an
abundance of empty dorms at colleges and universities, creating a $14 billion headache for the
student housing debt market.
"West Virginia State University, already hit with a 10% enrollment drop, plans to give
money to a school foundation so it can meet its bond covenants for residence hall debt. A
community college in Ohio is using part of a $1.5 million donation for a financially-strapped
student housing project. And officials at New Jersey City University, which serves largely
first-generation and lower-income students and has recorded years of deficits, are prepared
to shore up a dorm there," Bloomberg said.
The squeeze on university finances comes as the National Student Clearinghouse Research
Center
warned about a 16% drop in first-year undergraduate students enrolled for the fall
semester. This means new revenue streams are quickly drying up for overleveraged colleges and
universities.
"The limiting factor is some of these schools themselves are facing uncertainty with many
of their revenue streams," S&P Global Ratings analyst Amber Schafer said in an interview.
"It's a matter of not only willingness, but if they're able to support the project."
"Typically, privatized student housing debt is paid off by the revenue generated by the
dorms -- meaning there's little recourse for bondholders if things go south," Bloomberg said.
With occupancy rates already declining as coronavirus cases are surging, well, this could be
bad news for colleges and universities heading into 2021.
"Borrowers have begun revealing how empty residence halls are as the pandemic spurs many
campuses to keep classes online. According to the school foundation that sold the debt, West
Virginia State University's dorm is 71% full, putting it about 20 percentage points from
where it needs to be to satisfy debt covenants. Other privatized student housing projects,
like two on Howard University's campus, are virtually empty due to online-only instruction
there," Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg warns: "Privatized dorms are struggling the most given that they weren't
structured to withstand 20% to 30% drops in occupancy -- or no students at all."
"West Virginia State University may have to step in to help student housing bonds at risk
of violating a debt service coverage ratio, Moody's warned this month. The historically-black
college faces "considerable" challenges in backstopping the bonds, Moody's said.
The nearly 290-bed residence hall with rents of $3,881 per semester was just 71% occupied
this fall, while it needed to be about 92% occupied, said Patricia Schumann, president of the
university foundation that sold the debt. Schumann said the university is projected to
provide a $75,000 payment in January. In the meantime, she said the school was working to
bolster its financial position and boost recruitment and donations.
"We're not standing still," she said.
Ohio's Terra State Community College, which has more than 2,100 students, was downgraded
deeper into junk over the risk posed by a dorm owned by a nonprofit, given that the school
"appears to provide an unconditional guarantee" to meet the debt obligations, Moody's said.
The project was financed through a bank note.
The dorm's occupancy fell to 62%, and the college is using a previously-received donation
to cover a shortfall in project revenue amounting between $500,000 to $600,000, the ratings
company said in a report this month.
At New Jersey City University, a student housing project financed though a separate entity
will likely miss a required debt service coverage ratio. The public school having to step in
to help the bonds would be a challenge, but a surmountable one, said Jodi Bailey, the
university's associate vice president for student affairs. The student housing bonds aren't a
debt of the university, so the school would be choosing to provide financial support,
according to bond documents .
The school is working to cut expenses related to the dorm. "Is it a harder year? Most
definitely," she said.
The student housing bonds, issued by West Campus Housing LLC in 2015, were
slashed deeper into junk in September by S&P, which said in a report that residence halls'
occupancy there had fallen to 56% so the school could accommodate social-distancing
guidelines," said Bloomberg.
To summarize, plunging enrollments, resulting in falling occupancy rates for dorms, is a
debt bomb waiting to go off for many overleveraged colleges and universities that are panicking
at the moment to divert enough funds to service debts, as the usual revenue streams, that being
rent checks from students, are nowhere to be found as virtual learning keeps young adults in
their parents' basements and out of dorms.
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If occupancy rates continue to slide through 2021, then we must revisit what we said months
before the virus pandemic began in the US:
October 28, 2020 Tucker Carlson's interview with Tony Bobulinski is must-see TV By
Andrea
Widburg
On Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson did something he'd never done before: he dedicated his
entire show to a single interview. The person he interviewed was Tony Bobulinski, an
experienced international businessman who found himself working with Hunter Biden, James Biden,
and others on a deal between the Biden group and CEFC, a Chinese energy company with ties to
the communist government and the military. Bobulinski powerfully confirms that Joe Biden was
deeply involved in the transaction, which had its beginnings when Joe was still vice
president.
Fox News has not yet uploaded (and may never upload) the interview in its entirety. However,
the four videos below bring together almost everything from the interview.
Tucker opened by making the point that he was dedicating his show to the Bobulinski
interview because the rest of the American media are assiduously ignoring the story,
downplaying it, or claiming it's a Russian smear. The leader of the Russian smear approach is,
naturally, Rep. Adam Schiff, a man who has all the hallmarks of a conscienceless psychopath.
Ironically, it was Schiff's smear about Hunter Biden's hard drive that led Bobulinski, a
Democrat, to go public with his story.
If you can't watch the interview, here's a brief overview:
Bobulinksi is a former naval officer with a Q clearance. That's an extremely high clearance
level for people working in the Department of Energy -- and Bobulinski worked in the Navy's
nuclear program. He comes from a military family and is very proud of that legacy.
After leaving the Navy, Bobulinski became an international businessman. His expertise led to
Hunter Biden and his people wooing Bobulinski to give them the business expertise they needed
to get their partnership up and running.
The partnership, SinoHawk, was intended to bring together CEFC and the Biden family. Both
Hunter and James Biden, after all, brought nothing to the table other than their last name and,
with it, the promise that China would have access to political influence at the highest level
of American government.
Bobulinski's name recently became public knowledge when James Gilliar, another businessman
working on SinoHawk, sent an email to Tony Bobulinski, setting out the terms Gilliar had been
negotiating with CEFC. What caught everyone's interest was the statement that Hunter would hold
"10[%] for the Big Guy." Bobulinski confirmed that Joe Biden was the "Big Guy."
At this point, Schiff, the media, and Joe Biden, none of whom ever denied the legitimacy of
the email, claimed that the whole thing was a Russian smear. This unfounded accusation got
Bobulinski's dander up. As a naval officer from a military family and a true patriot, being
smeared as a Russian agent was beyond the pale.
Bobulinski demanded that Schiff retract the insult, and when Schiff failed to do so, he went
public and did a full document dump. Bobulinski had saved everything -- every document, every
email, and every text.
That's the quick background to the interview with Carlson, during which Bobulinski said
that
Hunter and James Biden brought nothing to the deal other than the Biden family name.
What China wanted was the Biden family name.
Joe Biden was involved in the business deal, so much so that he had veto power over
negotiations.
In 2017, Bobulinski met Joe Biden twice when the Biden side of SinoHawk was courting him
to step in and act as CEO.
Bobulinski also spoke at length with James Biden, Joe's brother.
When Bobulinski asked James how they could get away with this kind of deal, which seemed
to be falling into dangerous territory, given that Joe could run again for president, James
announced, "Plausible deniability."
The Biden group stiffed Bobulinski, leaving him out of pocket for all his expenses while
channeling CEFC's money into another entity that did not involve Bobulinski.
If we had a decent media establishment, this story would be on every front page and at the
top of every news hour. Instead, Bobulinski is trying desperately to get Americans to know that
he is not a Russian agent and that Joe Biden was in bed with the communist Chinese government,
starting when he was vice president and continuing after he left the White House. This screen
shot from Memeorandum shows that
none of the legacy media outlets is touching the story:
(As an aside, and separate from the Bobulinski interview, a former CIA operations office
believes it's entirely possible that Biden
was already doing China's bidding in 2012, when the Obama administration gave China free
rein in the South China Sea.)
In case the embedded videos do not play, you can find them here ,
here ,
here ,
and here
.
We've always known that Joe Biden is an odd bird. Just think of the lies, the egotistical
boasting, the offers to fight people, the skinny-dipping, and the way he fondles and sniffs
little girls. He is a genuinely creepy man.
It speaks volumes about Washington, D.C. and the Democrat party that Joe spent 47 years in
the swamp and rose to the second highest office in the land. What we've learned now, though,
irrefutably and without any Russian hokum, is that Joe Biden is also a profoundly corrupt man
who willingly sold out America and her allies to enrich himself and his sleazy, incompetent
family.
Fox News has not yet uploaded (and may never upload) the interview in its entirety. However,
the four videos below bring together almost everything from the interview.
Tucker opened by making the point that he was dedicating his show to the Bobulinski
interview because the rest of the American media are assiduously ignoring the story,
downplaying it, or claiming it's a Russian smear. The leader of the Russian smear approach is,
naturally, Rep. Adam Schiff, a man who has all the hallmarks of a conscienceless psychopath.
Ironically, it was Schiff's smear about Hunter Biden's hard drive that led Bobulinski, a
Democrat, to go public with his story.
If you can't watch the interview, here's a brief overview:
Bobulinksi is a former naval officer with a Q clearance. That's an extremely high clearance
level for people working in the Department of Energy -- and Bobulinski worked in the Navy's
nuclear program. He comes from a military family and is very proud of that legacy.
After leaving the Navy, Bobulinski became an international businessman. His expertise led to
Hunter Biden and his people wooing Bobulinski to give them the business expertise they needed
to get their partnership up and running.
The partnership, SinoHawk, was intended to bring together CEFC and the Biden family. Both
Hunter and James Biden, after all, brought nothing to the table other than their last name and,
with it, the promise that China would have access to political influence at the highest level
of American government.
Bobulinski's name recently became public knowledge when James Gilliar, another businessman
working on SinoHawk, sent an email to Tony Bobulinski, setting out the terms Gilliar had been
negotiating with CEFC. What caught everyone's interest was the statement that Hunter would hold
"10[%] for the Big Guy." Bobulinski confirmed that Joe Biden was the "Big Guy."
At this point, Schiff, the media, and Joe Biden, none of whom ever denied the legitimacy of
the email, claimed that the whole thing was a Russian smear. This unfounded accusation got
Bobulinski's dander up. As a naval officer from a military family and a true patriot, being
smeared as a Russian agent was beyond the pale.
Bobulinski demanded that Schiff retract the insult, and when Schiff failed to do so, he went
public and did a full document dump. Bobulinski had saved everything -- every document, every
email, and every text.
That's the quick background to the interview with Carlson, during which Bobulinski said
that
Hunter and James Biden brought nothing to the deal other than the Biden family name.
What China wanted was the Biden family name.
Joe Biden was involved in the business deal, so much so that he had veto power over
negotiations.
In 2017, Bobulinski met Joe Biden twice when the Biden side of SinoHawk was courting him
to step in and act as CEO.
Bobulinski also spoke at length with James Biden, Joe's brother.
When Bobulinski asked James how they could get away with this kind of deal, which seemed
to be falling into dangerous territory, given that Joe could run again for president, James
announced, "Plausible deniability."
The Biden group stiffed Bobulinski, leaving him out of pocket for all his expenses while
channeling CEFC's money into another entity that did not involve Bobulinski.
If we had a decent media establishment, this story would be on every front page and at the
top of every news hour. Instead, Bobulinski is trying desperately to get Americans to know that
he is not a Russian agent and that Joe Biden was in bed with the communist Chinese government,
starting when he was vice president and continuing after he left the White House. This screen
shot from Memeorandum shows that
none of the legacy media outlets is touching the story:
A collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family mysteriously vanished
from an envelope sent to Fox News host Tucker Carlson , the host said on
Wednesday night.
Carlson's team allegedly received the documents from a source on Monday. At the time,
Carlson was on the West Coast filming an interview with Tony Bobulinski, the former business
partner of Hunter Biden and James Biden. Carlson requested the documents to be sent to the West
Coast.
According to Carlson, the producer shipped the documents overnight to California using a
large national package carrier. He didn't name the company, saying only that it's a "brand name
company."
"The Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from our
shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing," Carlson said.
"The documents had disappeared."
The company took the incident seriously and immediately began a search, Carlson said. The
company traced the package from when it was dropped off in New York to the moment when an
employee at a sorting facility reported that the package was opened and empty.
" The company's security team interviewed every employee who touched the envelope we sent.
They searched the plane and the trucks that carried it. They went through the office in New
York where our producers dropped the package off. They combed the entire cavernous sorting
facility. They used pictures of what we had sent so that searchers would know what to look
for," Carlson said.
"They far and beyond, but they found nothing."
"Those documents have vanished," he added.
"As of tonight, the company has no idea and no working theory even about what happened to
this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign
just six days from now."
Executives at the shipping company were "baffled" and "deeply bothered" by the incident,
Carlson said.
Carlson's interview with Bobulinski aired on Tuesday night. In the interview, Bobulinski
opined that Joe Biden
and the Biden family are compromised by China due to the business dealings of Hunter Biden and
James Biden. Joe Biden has not publicly responded to Bobulinski's allegations, but during a
presidential debate on Oct. 22 said he had "not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in
my life."
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Bobulinski provided more than 1,700 pages of emails and more than 600 screenshots of text
messages to Senate investigators and handed over to the FBI the smartphones he used during his
business dealings with the Bidens. The documents detailed a failed joint venture between a
billionaire tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a company owned by Hunter Biden,
James Biden, Bobulinski and two other partners.
While the corporate documents don't mention Biden by name, emails sent between the partners
suggest that either James Biden or Hunter Biden held a 10 percent stake for the former vice
president. In the email, the stake is assigned to "the big guy," who Bobulinski says is Joe
Biden.
_arrow NoDebt , 3 minutes ago
I heard Tucker talk about this earlier tonight and realized we are FULLY controlled now.
Whatever the **** is going on, whether this is true or not doesn't matter. We are just
unwitting participants in some kind of TV reality show now. Everything is meaningless.
lwilland1012 , 5 minutes ago
Please tell me he was smart enough to make copies...
CatInTheHat , 1 minute ago
Ok.
What was IN the documents and from whom?
This is an inside job. Probably a never Trumper at Fox. There are a few.
quanttech , 3 minutes ago
If Trump loses, Fox will go full Dem. Trump will start TrumpTV, and Tucker will need a
job....
btw, Tucker should get the Nobel Peace Prize for keeping us out of Iran for the last 3.5
years.
Nona Yobiznes , 4 minutes ago
This story doesn't make sense. You sent confidential, highly sensitive documents via post?
Because Tucker was on the west coast? You couldn't scan them in? Were they originals, and are
there copies? This doesn't smell right.
icolbowca , 6 minutes ago
Takes a special kind of moron to send something like that via mail...
"... Biden's campaign earlier this month said Biden never had a meeting with an executive at a shady Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings, while he was the vice president and his son sat on the board of the firm. A report from the New York Post, citing alleged Hunter Biden emails, suggested Hunter Biden had arranged a meeting between him, the executive, and Joe Biden. ..."
Delivery giant UPS
confirmed Thursday it found a lost trove of documents that Fox News' Tucker Carlson said would
provide revelations in the ever-growing scandal involving Joe Biden 's son Hunter and his overseas
business dealings.
UPS Senior Public Relations Manager Matthew O'Connor told Business Insider on Thursday
afternoon that the documents are located and are being sent to Carlson.
"After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging
for its return," he said in a statement.
"UPS will always focus first on our customers, and will never stop working to solve issues
and make things right. We work hard to ensure every package is delivered, including essential
goods, precious family belongings and critical healthcare."
It came after Glenn Zaccara, UPS's corporate media relations director, confirmed Carlson
used the company to ship the materials before they were lost.
"The package was reported with missing contents as it moved within our network," Zaccara
said before they were located. "UPS is conducting an urgent investigation."
During his Wednesday night broadcast, Carlson said that a UPS employee notified them that
their package "was open and empty apparently, it had been opened."
"The Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from
our shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing," Carlson
also remarked. "The documents had disappeared."
On Tuesday night, Carlson interviewed former Hunter Biden associate Tony Bobulinski, who
claimed that the former Democratic vice president could be compromised by the Chinese Communist
Party due to Hunter and brother James Biden's business dealings in the country.
Joe Biden has not responded to Bobulinski's allegations. Last week during his debate with
President Donald Trump, he said he had "not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my
life."
Biden's campaign earlier this month said Biden never had a meeting with an executive at a
shady Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings, while he was the vice president and his son sat
on the board of the firm. A report from the New York Post, citing alleged Hunter Biden emails,
suggested Hunter Biden had arranged a meeting between him, the executive, and Joe Biden.
It's now possible that a special counsel will investigate Joe Biden should he win the
presidency.
"You know, I am not a big fan of special counsels, but if Joe Biden wins the presidency, I
don't see how you avoid one," Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.)
said . "Otherwise, this is going to be, you know, tucked away, and we will never know
what happened. All this evidence is going to be buried."
UPS did not provide further details about the apparent mishap.
"... Hunter Biden is the modern equivalent of the pre-Reformation papacy selling indulgences. Cash in exchange for unfettered passage into the promised land ..."
"Former Biden insider Tony Bobulinski allegedly has a recording of Biden family operatives
begging him to stay quiet , or he will "bury" the reputations of everyone involved in Hunter's
overseas dealings.
According to The Federalist 's Sean Davis, Bobulinski will play the tape on Fox News'
"Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Tuesday , when Carlson will devote his show 'entirely' to an
interview with the Biden whistleblower."
"According to a source familiar with the planning, Bobulinski will play recordings of Biden
family operatives begging him to stay quiet and claiming Bobulinski's revelations will "bury"
the reputations of everyone involved in Hunter's overseas deals."
As The Federalist notes:
The Federalist confirmed with sources familiar with the plans that Bobulinski, a retired
Navy lieutenant and Biden associate, will be airing tapes of Biden operatives begging
Bobulinski to remain quiet as former Vice President Joe Biden nears the finish line to the
White House next week.
Bobulinski
flipped on the Bidens following a Senate report which revealed that they received a $5
million interest-free loan from a now-bankrupt Chinese energy company .
According to the former Biden insider, he was introduced to Joe Biden by Hunter, and they
had an hour-long meeting where they discussed the Biden's business plans with the Chinese, with
which he says Joe was "plainly familiar at least at a high level." " Zerohedge
--------------
First of all, Bobulinski is NOT a "retired Navy lieutenant." He is a former Navy
Lieutenant.
Well, folks, it's up to you to watch TC's show tonight if you want to learn about this.
Tucker's show is the most watched news show in the history of cable television, so the pain
should not be too great, pl
I don't watch cable TV so I'll have to depend on the objectivity of observers. I'll be
curious who / what is a "family operative"? are they traceable like a military
chain-of-command?
in related news, we can get a fix on the play between private / public behaviors & the
pace of Justice winding.
Tucker Carlson's show is my favorite news/commentary show. I try not to miss it. Because
of the fact that he seems to try hard to verify his sources--and the people he interviews, I
trust him. He also tries to provide guests from the left in an attempt to be fair.
He's definitely not a Hannity, who is the one who turns many off of FOX (though Hannity
comes right after Tucker).
Hunter Biden is the modern equivalent of the pre-Reformation papacy selling
indulgences. Cash in exchange for unfettered passage into the promised land .
Thank goodness the Federal Judge has allowed the lawsuit by the private citizen and
writer, based on the 1990s allegation, to procede without government interference. I'm sure
nobody will do that to democrats in the future. Meanwhile in the Flynn case the DOJ confirms
that the govenment documents and discovery exhibits are ture and correct. I'm sure Judge
Sullivan will procede expeditiously with granting the unopposed motion to dismiss that
case.
This story interests me because I believe he is the first to leave the sinking ship but
not the last.
There would be no reason for this if he thought Joe would win and the investigation would be
snuffed out.
If Trump wins there will most likely be a new version of "Let's Make A Deal" being aired on
the nightly news.
I am down to one package of popcorn. I need to restock.
Actually, indulgences were more akin to BitCoins. Especially after 1567, when His Holiness
the Pope finally officially banned them... but they had been still produced and sold in large
quantities. In France only Richeliue put a stop to this con.
Serve me my plate a Crow. Maybe.
He is saying now that he is 2nd generation military and that they pissed him off claiming he
was a Russian asset.
That is plausible.
Maybe it is both?
Regardless it seems he has a great deal of proof.
I was convinced during the interview. Bobulinsky seemed pretty convincing in his concern
for his own reputation, having been associated with the Biden "Mafia" in the first place.
It was clear during the interview that he had provided Tucker verification for his
claims.
I am more concerned that this revelation comes too late and that many, many people have
voted early. He referenced some hearings that will be held in Congress. I doubt that will
affect the election, given the slow pace of anything getting done in Congress. I voted early,
but I am not personally concerned because I did NOT vote for Biden; however, I am concerned
that those who voted early for Biden could not now change their votes.
SO, if I understand the situation correctly, Bobulinski was essentially sought after, used
and then screwed by the Bidens, which seems risky on the part of the clan. But I guess if Joe
wins the election, they will have gotten away with it as I can't imagine, in spite of any
damning evidence, the Bidens will suffer the same punishing rectal examination-like scrutiny
and vilification the Trump family's been subjected to.
Col Lang,
Hoping you write about your assessment of B and what he had to say.
I found him to be generally credible. All of his motives for singing largely make sense to
me. I think he's a patriot. Some good supporting evidence. He's sharp. I liked him. He's the
kind of guy I'd enjoy working with.
I don't know anything about the realm of international deal making and finance. I'm
wondering how a Navy O3 works his way to enjoying yachts in Monaco while making $millions. Is
he an Annapolis guy? Tight with the right classmates? Not a lot to be found on him via
Google.
He was no longer in the navy when he was messing around with the Biden familia. He was
probably in the Navy three or four years. He ought to lay off on that. I'll think it over
tonight.
Once Wray's FBI gets done with the Rusty Wallace Noose Case they'll have time to deep dive
the laptop he's had for almost a year.
Col.,
Bobulinski seemed awful polished during that interview. Almost too good to be true. Hunter
being a druggy and Burisma payments being real certainly lend an air to credibility.
Turns out Patrick Ho Hunters partner in CEFC had a FISA warrant on him when he was nabbed
in New York awhile back. His first call was to Hunter to seek legal advice and Hunter
represented him. So them scumbags in the FBI have been sitting on this for awhile and will
use it on Joe (if elected) when needed. Must be modus operandi at the FBI in gathering dirt
on all politicians via FISA's, Hoover is still there.
As with all of us Bobulinski is not lily white but is making an effort to clean his act and
those around him. Lily White always comes in degrees. Not much in the NY Times, Wash Post or
WSJ this morning but the WSJ deserves a little credit with McBurn's editorial.
Bobulinski obviously comes from a military family thus his harping on his Navy creds. Guess
when your in that much sunshine you fall back strongly on anything available.
I don't doubt his credibility and it's good that he at least got on Tucker Carlson to
provide some much needed answers, but he's not a known quantity and I have hard time
imagining his revelations will change minds.
I think the FBI sandbagging the whole affair is what holds back this story getting the
attention it deserves from the public. The president I'm sorry to say has been badly served
by Wray, Haspel, and company. I think he should have replaced them months ago and waiting
until reelection to do it may have been a mistake.
Tuesday night, we heard at length and on camera from one of the Biden family's former
business partners. His name is Tony Bobulinski. He's a very successful businessman and a Navy
veteran.
Bobulinski spoke to "Tucker Carlson Tonight" for a full hour. He told us he met two separate
times with Joe
Biden himself. Not just with Joe Biden's son or his brother, but with Joe Biden -- the
former vice president and the man now running for president -- to discuss business deals with
the communist government of China .
That's a very serious claim, and whatever your political views, it's hard to dismiss it when
Tony Bobulinski makes it because Bobulinsky is an unusually credible witness. He's not a
partisan, he's not seeking money, he's not seeking publicity. He did not want to come on our
show.
But when Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and the Biden campaign accused Tony Bobulinski of
participating in a Russian disinformation effort, he felt he had no choice. That was a slander
against him and against his family. So Bobulinski came to us. He arrived with heaps of evidence
to bolster the story he was telling. He brought contemporaneous audio recordings, text
messages, e-mails, many financial documents.
By the end of the hour, it was very clear to us that Tony Bobulinski was telling the truth
and that Joe Biden was lying. We believe that any honest person who watched the entire hour
would come to the same conclusion.
Well, on Wednesday, a
Senate committee confirmed it . The Senate Homeland Security Committee reported that all of
Tony Bobulinski's documents are, in fact, real. They are authentic. They are not forgeries.
This is not Russian disinformation. It is real.
Bobulinski told a remarkable story. Joe Biden -- who, once again, could be president of the
United States next week, was planning business deals with America's most formidable global
opponent. And when he was caught doing it, Joe Biden lied. And then he went further. He
slandered an innocent man as a traitor to his own country. It is clear that Joe Biden did that.
That's not a partisan talking point uttered in bad faith on behalf of another presidential
campaign. It's true.
So the question is, what is Joe Biden's excuse for doing that? What is his version of this
story? Everyone has a version and we'd like to hear it, but we don't know what Joe Biden's
version of the story is, because no one in America's vast media landscape has pressed Joe Biden
to answer the question. Instead, reporters at all levels and their editors and their publishers
have openly collaborated with Joe Biden's political campaign. That is unprecedented. It has
never happened in American history.
Wednesday morning, the big papers completely ignored what Tony Bobulinski had to say. So did
the other television networks. Not a single word about Bobulinski appeared on CNN or anywhere
else. Newsweek decided to cover it, but came to the conclusion that the real story was about
QAnon somehow. This is Soviet-style suppression of information about a legitimate news story.
Days before an election, the ramifications of it are impossible to imagine. But we do know the
media cannot continue in the way that it has.
No one believes the media anymore and no one should. You should be offended by this, not
because the media are liberal, but because this is an attack on our democracy. You've heard
that phrase again and again, but this is what it looks like. In a self-governing country,
voters have a right -- an obligation -- to know who they're voting for. In this case, they have
the right to know the Democratic nominee for president was a willing partner in his family's
lucrative influence-peddling operation, an operation that went on for decades and stretched
from China and Ukraine all the way to Oman, Romania, Luxembourg and many other countries. This
is not speculation once again, and it's not a partisan attack. It's true, and Tony bobulinski
confirmed it.
Bobulinski met with Joe Biden at a hotel bar in Los Angeles in early May of 2017, and when
he did, Joe Biden's son introduced Bobulinski this way: "Dad. Here's the individual I told you
about that's helping us with the business that we're working on and the Chinese."
Now, written documents confirmed this is real. At one point, Joe Biden's son texted Tony
Bobulinski to say that Joe Biden, his father, was making key decisions about their business
deals with China.
CARLSON: When Hunter Biden said his chairman, he was talking about his dad.
BOBULINSKI: Correct, and what Hunter is referencing there is, he spoke with his father
and his father is giving an emphatic 'no' to the ask that I had, which was putting proper
governance in place around Oneida Holdings.
CARLSON: So, Joe Biden is vetoing your plan for putting stricter governance in the
company. I mean, and it's it's right here in the email.
BOBULINSKI: Yes, Tucker, I want to be very careful in front of the American people. That
is not me writing that. That is not me claiming that. That is Hunter Biden writing on his own
phone. Typing in that 'I spoke with my chairman,' referencing his father.
All this is spelled out in the clearest possible language in documents that Bobulinski
provided us, documents that subsequently federal authorities have authenticated as real.
On May 13, 2017, for example, Hunter Biden got an email explaining how his family would be
paid for their deal with the Chinese energy company. His father, Joe Biden, was getting
10%.
BOBULINSKI: In that email, there's a statement where they go through the equity, Jim Biden's
referenced as, you know, 10%. It doesn't say Biden, it says Jim. And then it has 10% for the
big guy held by H. I 1,000% sit here and know that the big guy is referencing Joe Biden. It's,
that's crystal clear to me because I lived it. I met with the former vice president in person
multiple times.
That was three years ago, and we still don't know where all that money went, because the
media haven't forced Joe Biden to tell us. But Tony, Bobulinski did add a telling detail. Joe
Biden's brother, Jim, saw his stake in the deal double from 10% to 20%. Was Jim Biden getting
his brother's share again? It might be worth finding out.
We also know that according to an email from a top Chinese official, this one written on
July 26, 2017, the Chinese proposed a $5 million dollar interest-free loan to the Biden family,
"based on their trust on [sic] BD [Biden] family." The e-mail continued, "Should this Chinese
company, CEFC, keep lending more to the family?" And indeed, CEFC was supposed to send another
$5 million dollars to the Bidens' business ventures. Apparently, that money never made it to
the business. Where did it go? A recent Senate report suggests it went to Hunter Biden
directly. And from there, who knows? Again, no one's asked.
Tony Bobulinski also told us he learned Hunter Biden became the personal attorney to the
chairman of CEFC, Ye Jianming, just as they were tendering 14% of a Russian state-owned energy
company. That was a deal valued at $9 billion dollars. It's pretty sleazy. It's pretty amazing,
actually, that this happened and no one noticed.
We're not going to spend the next six months leading you through a maze of complex financial
transactions. This isn't that complicated: Millions of dollars linked directly to the Communist
Party of China went to Joe Biden's family, and not because they're capable businessmen. Jim
Biden's one business success appears to have been running a nightclub in Delaware that
ultimately went under.
No, the Bidens were cut in on the world's most lucrative business deals, massive
infrastructure deals in countries around the world for one reason: Because Joe Biden was a
powerful government official willing to leverage his power on behalf of his family.
Now, if that's not a crime, it's very close to a crime and it's certainly something every
person voting should know about. The Bidens didn't do this once. They did it for decades. So
the question is, how did they get away with it for so long? Tony Bobulinski asked Jim Biden
that question directly. To his credit Jim Biden answered that question honestly.
BOBULINSKI: And I remember looking at Jim Biden and saying, 'How are you guys getting
away with this?' Like, 'Aren't you concerned?' And he looked at me and he laughed a little bit
and said, 'Plausible deniability.'
CARLSON: He said that out loud.
BOBULINSKI: Yes, he said it directly to me. One on one, in a cabana at the Peninsula
Hotel.
"Plausible deniability." In other words, "we lie." We get away with selling access to the
U.S. government, which we do not own, because we lie about what we're doing. And as we lie, we
try to make those lies plausible. That's why we call it "plausible deniability." That is the
answer that Joe Biden's brother gave when asked directly.
So the question is, what is Joe Biden's answer to that question? We wish we
knew.
ForFoxSake!!! 1 hour ago Everything that is happening right now is because Trump was
right about the swamp, the media, and the ruling class families who have been selling out
America for decades. ohhappyday657 1 hour ago Tucker is doing this country a great service. The
FBI doesn't seem to want to engage. Mr. Bobulinski is a patriot and we are lucky he came
forward. The Bidens need to be called out for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Joe should be
impeached for his time as VP. Thank you Tucker. resipsaloquitor ohhappyday657 29 minutes ago
You can smell the desperation on the Trump supporters. The lies, the distortions and the
grasping, pathetic search for the proverbial Hail Mary to salvage the quickly sinking ship. If
Mr. Bobulinski is the best you have the Democrats will 'trump' you with: 227,000 dead
Americans, close to 9 million more infected and an economy in tatters. The day of reckoning is
approaching and a dozen Bobulinskis won't change that. Trump and his unseemly administration
are doomed.
" ... the former CEO of SinoHawk Holdings, which he said was the partnership between the
CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming and the two Biden family members.
"I remember saying, 'How are you guys getting away with this?' 'Aren't you concerned?'" he
told Carlson.
He claims that Jim Biden chuckled.
"'Plausible Deniability,' he said it directly to me in a cabana at the Peninsula Hotel," he
said.
In the interview, he outlines how an alleged meeting with Joe Biden took place on May 2,
2017.
Fox News first reported text messages that indicated such a meeting. Bobulinski said that
it was the Bidens, not him, who had pushed the meeting.
"They were sort of wining and dining me and presenting the strength of the Biden family to
get me engaged and to take on the CEO role to develop SinoHawk in the U.S. and around the world
in partnership with CEFC," he said.
He went at length into how Joe Biden arrived for a Milken conference, partly held at the
Beverly Hilton Hotel, and how he was introduced by Jim and Hunter Biden to the former vice
president.
"I didn't request to meet with Joe" Biden, he said. "They requested that I meet with Joe
[Biden ]. They were putting their entire family legacy on the line. They knew exactly what they
were doing."" FN
-----------
Bobulinski is a successful international business hustler. I know the type well. The Biden
familia wanted him in this China deal for the purpose of having him hold the reins of this
enterprise even as they looted it for the purpose of quickly enriching the fam.
A TV commentator remarked last night after watching the interview that this defection from
the Biden camp is reflective of an old business truth which can be stated as "don't screw your
partner if he has enough material to sink you."
I am unimpressed with selfless patriotism as Bobu's most basic motivation in sticking it to
Joe, Jimmy and Hunter Biden. A sense of betrayal in a business deal wrecked by the Bidens'
overwhelming greed and their desire to consolidate family riches as fast as they could is a
more plausible. motivation.
This does not mean that Bobu is not telling the truth. His collection of e-mails addressed
to him and incriminating memoranda is most impressive.
IMO, what has been revealed is a truth with regard to the Biden crime family. They are
nouveau riche grifters who will have a much grander stage for their efforts if Joe is elected
as a presidential figurehead. pl
Did Hunter Biden's young business partners bring anything of value to the table, or were
they just name brand ride-alongs too. Archer, Conley, Heinz, etc. Biden was running a very
leaky ship, with such a large but relatively unsophisticated and compromised entourage.
I am, and I'm sure this is not an original observation, because it's as the Col notes,
singularly unimpressed with the entire lot of them. Bobo, Jim B, Hunter B, Duncan Hunter, Joe
B, Bulger's nephew, I've seen more gravitas among bookies, juicemen, and fences, that I grew
up with in NYC. And I mean that. Not a throw away line. And THESE guys will run the show? And
Harris I find singularity creep, artificial, and somehow just down right inappropriate. I
would not select any of them to run a post office.
I got a little tired of the man making so much of his "service to his country." Not that
it isn't worth quite a lot and I respect him for it, but four years... I served six years,
and what I dwell on is how much I loved serving in submarines and the enormous degree that it
contributed to building my character. The degree to which my service benefited my country was
trivial. It benefited me enormously.
Like you, I think he is telling the truth in that interview.
After 4 plus years of the intelligence agencies and MSM looking under every conceivable
rock, you think that there is anything left to find about Trump? You are delusional and
headed for a massive case of buyer's remorse if swiss-cheese-for-brains gets in.
Thank you for asking that question. I was about to ask it myself. My understanding is that
Trump's children are working for him as he is President for little pay. They may be still
handling Trump business accounts; but it seems they work for his White House office and its
many functions--and for his campaign.
I still believe in the American middle class, the people who make American run. These are
the people at his rallies, wearing MAGA hats, and showing up in overflow numbers.
They are not people who are easily swayed by "false prophets."
Trump keeps pointing out how well our economy was doing UNTIL China sent the virus (and, I
DO believe they sent it). He promises the return of that economy.
That is why Biden now is totally into frightening people about COVID and pushing masks and
social distancing. He is afraid that Trump will indeed be able to bring back a good economy.
He doesn't know how to do that, as is clear by this desperate attempt to cover up his shady
dealings with first Ukraine and now China.
Where I live, a large percentage of our population are clearly very tired and bored with
the COVID scare. We still do as our DEMOCRAT Governor, who hails from the People's Republic
of Boulder, Colorado, and the University of Colorado, where Socialist, Marxist, and Ultra
Feminists rule in the Arts and Humanities. We call Boulder "forty square miles surrounded by
reality." Unfortunately, the Boulder/Denver triangle contains the largest voting block. We
used to be able to count on Colorado Springs, but the universities in that area and into
Pueblo have also been taken over by the leftists.
What is also clear is that Biden's real hope was to build his own family dynasty by using
the Presidency as nothing but a cash cow for him and his inept and useless son.
I don't care really what Bobulinski's motives were for coming forward with his documents
and emails, I'm just thankful that he did. I hope it wasn't too late. And I'm thankful he
chose Tucker Carlson's show as the place to do it.
Joe Biden doesn't seem to be the brightest bulb for someone with a JD. To wit: why didn't
he just offer that he's given his son some fatherly advice about business now and then?
Instead, he's repeatedly and categorically denied discussing ANYTHING with his son about his
business dealings, which we now know is provably false. I'm no lawyer but I'd think Joe's
repeated lying infers a tacit admission of guilt. Deniability doesn't seem plausible in this
case.
I'd even go so far as to infer that Joe's gotten away with business dealings of this
sordid sort for SO long that he's become sloppy (e.g., the braggadocio ON VIDEO of
withholding US aid to Ukraine until its solicitor investigating Burisma, which was paying his
son $50-80 thousand per month, was fired.) He obviously has the [justifiable] expectation of
never being held accountable.
Did anyone else clock his comment that he wasn't being paid, not even expenses, for all
these trips. He said he was funding them himself, presumably until the $5M arrived.
Then it didn't but the Bidens got their $5M. The Bidens arrogance just piles onto their
stupidity. Did they really think that kind of operator would take it lying down?
With one foot in Colorado Springs, I'd like to suggest that you may be overstating the
weight of the local colleges in ColSpr's growing Democrat numbers. El Paso county election
results have remained fairly reliably Republican, if not by as sure a margin as once.
Population growth may be more significant mover, the high rate of in-migration to
Colorado, esp Denver. The seven county Greater Denver-Boulder area, with a population of 3.3
million, grew 1.1% last year, and has grown as fast or faster in the previous ten years. In
number, the Denver population has grown faster than anywhere else in the state. In the past
ten years the population of Denver Co alone increased 21%.
Colorado Springs/ El Paso Co. has grown quickly in the same period, but not as much as
Denver. The current population of 720,000 increased 16% from ten years ago. A good part of
this growth has been driven by Denver's growth and skyrocketing housing prices. A house costs
much less in El Paso County.
Too many Denverites are choosing to commute an hour+ from ColSpr to Denver, as seen by the
explosion of new housing at the north end of El Paso County and the now-daily traffic crawl
at rush hour on I-25 between ColSpr and Denver. Just try to get up to the speed limit on that
stretch. The state is adding extra lanes as fast as it can. It appears that Denver attitudes
move in with many of these commuters. Is ColSpr fated to become a bedroom community?
Finally, Colorado appears to be one of the places attracting migrants from the blighted,
overbuilt, overdetermined coasts. Again, newcomers arrive with attitudes from the places they
left.
I am hoping that the open skies and spaces, the particular self-reliance of rural
Colorado, and the more democratic openness to citizen initiatives via the ballot will mellow
their views.
This level of population growth and shifting politics, lacking a concommitant growth in
productivity of local biz and industry, is not viewed with equanimity by older inhabitants of
ColSpr. IMO It would be best if Colorado remained independent, with reasonable political
compromise and collaboration between parties, as before it has been.
Is a comparable dynamic underway north of Denver in your direction?
In reference to Trump's reputation as a grifter, I offer the following sample:
- He paid $2 million in fines and had to close down the Trump Foundation for using it as a
personal piggy bank.
- The Eric Trump Foundation was forced to close for similar grift. It was funneling money
into Trump family businesses and accounts. It's wasn't like the family directly stole money
from kids with cancer, but it ended up doing just that.
- His friend Bannon's recent grift with his Build the Wall Foundation, along with Manafort's
tax and bank fraud convictions, and Cohen's conviction for paying hush money for Trump's
sexual escapades.
- The sham Trump University was forced to close with a $25 million settlement to two class
action lawsuits and a NY civil lawsuit.
None of this sunk Trump. What it did do was inure the American public to the increasing
shittyness of our politician's behavior. Hunter's antics would have caused Joe to withdraw
from public life ten years ago, but today it's just par for the course.
-
TTG
My friend, as I have told you before, you have no real knowledge of practice in the business
world. Nobody says Trump has sold the US for his family's profit.
You'd think that voting Republican would be an easy decision if you work on Wall Street,
especially given the lower taxes and the removal of burdensome regulations. But Democrats have
entangled themselves so deeply in the web of Wall Street, that the industry is now leaning to
the left, according to a new report from
Reuters .
The Center for Responsive Politics took a look at how the industry, and its employees, break
down for the 2020 election cycle.
It has been obvious that Democratic candidate Joe Biden has been outpacing President Trump
when it comes to fundraising, and this is also true of "winning cash from the banking
industry," Reuters notes.
Biden's campaign has been the beneficiary of $3 million from commercial banks, compared to
the $1.4 million Trump has raised. This is a far skew from 2012, where Mitt Romney was able to
raise $5.5 million from commercial banks, while Barack Obama only raised $2 million. In 2012,
Wall Street banks were among the top five contributors to Romney' campaign.
In 2020, campaign contributions to congressional races from Wall Street banks are about
even. Republicans have raised $14 million while Democrats have brought in $13.6 million. About
four years ago, Republicans pulled in $18.9 million, which was about twice as much as the
Democrats raised. In 2012, Republicans raised about 61% of total bank donations.
Interestingly enough, when Biden and Trump are removed from the equation, the highest
recipient from Wall Street is none other than Bernie Sanders, who has raised $831,096. Sanders
often tops contributions in many industries due to his grassroots following.
When you remove the employees from the equation and only look at how the bank's political
arms donate, the picture turns more Republican-friendly.
House of Representatives lawmaker Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, one of the senior
Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee, which is key for the banking industry,
tops the list, hauling in $226,000. Next up is Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the top
Republican on that panel, with $185,500 in cash from bank political committees.
The top 20 recipients of bank political funds comprise 14 Republicans and six Democrats.
Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, a senior member of the House banking panel,
received the most among Democrats, with $140,000.
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The shift in data shows that while Wall Street's top brass may still understand the value of
Republican leadership, bank employees themselves may overwhelmingly favor
progressives.
ay_arrow
tonye , 3 hours ago
It's obvious. Wall Street is part of the Deep State...
Le SoJ16 , 3 hours ago
How can you hate capitalism and work for a Wall Street bank?
tonye , 3 hours ago
Because Wall Street is no longer capitalist.
Main Street is capitalist, they create the GNP.
Wall Street is a casino owned by globalists and bankers. They don't create much
anymore.
Macho Latte , 2 hours ago
It has nothing to do with ideology. The Biden is FOR SALE!
Any questions?
Lord Raglan , 2 hours ago
It is because the majority of Wall Street are Jewish and **** overwhelmingly support
Democrats.
David Horowitz has said that 80% of the donations to the Democrat Party come from
****.
KashNCarry , 2 hours ago
What a bunch of ****. Wall St. elites are in it up to their necks casting their lot with
the globalists who want total control NOW. Trump is the only thing in their way....
artvandalai , 3 hours ago
Wall street people don't know much about the real economy. They also know little, nor do
they care about, the real problems faced by business people who have to work everyday to
overcome the policies put in place by liberals.
They do understand finance however. But all that requires is the ability to push paper
around all day.
But let them vote for the Libotards and have them watch Elizabeth Warren take charge of
the US Senate Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection Committee. They'll be jumping
out of windows.
FauxReal , 3 hours ago
Wall Street favors free money?
sun tzu , 1 hour ago
Wall Street wants bailouts. 0bozo gave them a yuge bailout
American2 , 2 hours ago
Based on the massively coordinated MSM suppression of the Biden corruption scandal, now I
know why these folks back Biden.
CosmoJoe , 2 hours ago
Democrats as the party of the big banks,
bgundr , 2 hours ago
Of course banksters favor policies that make the average person a slave with less
agency
Homie , 2 hours ago
Especially if you like the endless bailouts, give-aways, and freedom from those pesky
rules limiting the Squid's diet
You'd think that voting Republican would be an easy decision if you work on Wall Street,
especially given the lower taxes and the removal of burdensome regulations.
mtl4 , 2 hours ago
The shift in data shows that while Wall Street's top brass may still understand the
value of Republican leadership, bank employees themselves may overwhelmingly favor
progressives.
The banks are big on corruption and that's one poll the Dems are definitely leading by a
longshot.......thick as thieves.
tunetopper , 2 hours ago
Wall St youngsters dont realize their job is to whore themselves out as much as possible
to the few remaining classes of folk they dont already have accounts with. The few
Millennials and Gen Xers that have enough capital saved up are their target market. Ever
since the take-down of Bear Stearns and Lehman, and the exit of many others from their
Private Client Groups- the Whorewolves of Wall St are very busy pretending to be Progs and
Libs.
And like this post says: " who really cares, they all live in NY, NJ and CT which are
guaranteed Dem states anyway"
So in essence- they have nothing to lose while pretending to be a Prog/Lib. in order to ge
the clients money.
radar99 , 36 minutes ago
I arrived to wall st in 2010. My female boss at a large investment bank hated me from the
moment I criticized Obama. I was and still am absolutely amazed you can work on wall st and
be a democrat
moneybots , 59 minutes ago
"The shift in data shows that while Wall Street's top brass may still understand the value
of Republican leadership, bank employees themselves may overwhelmingly favor
progressives."
So 50 Cent alone went Trump after finding out NYC's top tax rate would be 62% under
Biden?
Flynt2142ahh , 1 hour ago
also known as MBNA Joe Biden friends, you mean the privatize profits but liberalize losses
crowd that always looks for gubment money to bail out failures - Shocking !
invention13 , 1 hour ago
Wall St. just knows Biden is someone you can do business with.
Loser Face , 1 hour ago
Wall Street leans towards anyone who passes laws that benefit Wall Street.
Obamaroid Ointment , 1 hour ago
The Wally Street crowd has always been a bunch Globalist Mercedes Marxists and Limousine
Liberals, this article is ancient history.
Sound of the Suburbs , 2 hours ago
US politicians haven't got a clue what's really going on and got duped by the banker's
shell game.
When you don't know what real wealth creation is, or how banks work, you fall for the
banker's shell game.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy towards a financial
crisis.
On a BBC documentary, comparing 1929 to 2008, it said the last time US bankers made as
much money as they did before 2008 was in the 1920s.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial
crisis.
Money and debt come into existence together and disappear together like matter and
anti-matter.
The money flows into the economy making it boom.
The debt builds up in the financial system leading to a financial crisis.
Banks – What is the idea?
The idea is that banks lend into business and industry to increase the productive capacity
of the economy.
Business and industry don't have to wait until they have the money to expand. They can
borrow the money and use it to expand today, and then pay that money back in the future.
The economy can then grow more rapidly than it would without banks.
Debt grows with GDP and there are no problems.
The banks create money and use it to create real wealth.
Caliphate Connie and the Headbangers , 2 hours ago
The banks and corporations of America have been welfare queens since 2008. Regardless of
who wins, they will be the beneficiaries of moar US-style corporate welfare socialism.
Victory_Rossi , 3 hours ago
Wall Street loves globalism and hates the entire ethos of "America First". They're people
with dodgy loyalties and grand self-interests.
FreemonSandlewould , 3 hours ago
What a surprise. The Banking Cartel faction of the Jish Control Grid sent Trotsky and
company to Russia to implement the Bolshevik revolution. Should I be surprised they lean
left?
Well I guess not. But they are at base amoral - that is to say with out moral philosophy.
Their real motto is "Whatever gets the job done".
Yesterday, former Vice President Joe Biden was again insisting that the scandal involving
Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation despite the direct refutation of that claim by
the FBI .
In her interview with Joe Biden, CBS anchor Norah O'Donnell did not push Biden to simply
confirm that the emails were fake or whether he did in fact meet with Hunter's associates
(despite his prior denials). Instead O'Donnell asked: "Do you believe the recent leak of
material allegedly from Hunter's computer is part of a Russian disinformation campaign?"
Biden responded with the same answer that has gone unchallenged dozens of times:
"From what I've read and know the intelligence community warned the president that
Giuliani was being fed disinformation from the Russians. And we also know that Putin is
trying very hard to spread disinformation about Joe Biden. And so when you put the
combination of Russia, Giuliani– the president, together– it's just what it is.
It's a smear campaign because he has nothing he wants to talk about. What is he running on?
What is he running on?"
It did not matter that the answer omitted the key assertion that this was not Hunter's
laptop or emails or that he did not leave the computer with this store.
Recently, Washington Post columnist Thomas Rid wrote
said the quiet part out loud by telling the media:
"We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation --
even if they probably aren't."
Let that sink in for a second. It does not matter if these are real emails and not Russian
disinformation. They probably are real but should be treated as disinformation even though
American intelligence has repeatedly r ebutted that claim. It does not even matter that the
computer has seized the computer as evidence in a criminal fraud investigation or that a Biden
confidant is now giving his allegations to the FBI under threat of criminal charges if he lies
to investigators.
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It simply does not matter. It is disinformation because it is simply inconvenient to treat
it as real information.
Bastiat , 3 hours ago
I should have lost the capacity for shock in reaction to this Mockingbird crap but the
sheer naked audacity of it still gets me.
Carbon Skidmark , 3 hours ago
I don't know what is worse. The concept that hiding crimes is no longer that important or
the lack of response to the crimes by so many.
jin187 , 3 hours ago
I don't know what's worse. The fact that our supposed news networks do this, or the fact
that in spite of the vast majority of Americans saying they distrust them, they still let
them get away with it. They still watch, and read, and listen. TBH, I don't think the lack of
MSM coverage is an issue with this particular story. I think the average Democrats and RINOs
are just covering their eyes and ears with this one. They want Trump to lose so bad, they
don't care if day one of the Biden administration is him handing suitcases of military
hardware blueprints to the Chinese. Anyone with a (D), never Trump, keep the swamp churning.
That's all they care about.
Four chan , 25 minutes ago
the laptop and its contents are 100% verified with clean chain of control.
UndergroundPost , 3 hours ago
It's now clear the Democrat Party under the Biden / Clinton Dynasties is nothing more than
a fully compromised, corrupt and criminal extension of the Communist Party of China
SDShack , 3 hours ago
Absolutely! The timelines of everything line up perfect. These laptops were dropped off at
the computer shop in early 2019. Work was done, but not paid for. The owner tried to get paid
and have the laptops picked up for 3 months. No go, so abandoned property now belongs to the
computer shop. All perfectly legal. It's now fall 2019 and the Impeachment Sham related to
Ukraine is starting. Computer shop realizes that laptops belonged to Demorat VP son being
caught up in the entire Impeachment Sham. Computer shop guy realizes he is holding dynamite
with lit fuse so he contacts FBI. FBI does nothing, then gets involved, then sits on the
story. This is all end of 2019.
Meanwhile, demorat primaries are starting and Bernie is the leader. DNC can't have Bernie
win, so they try to game the system to stop him just like 2016. But no one early on can do
it. Senile Joe fails first. Then Kamalho, who was the favorite, flames out. Then all the
others. It's now early 2020 and the DNC is hemorrhaging money and in disarray. Then look what
happens, the DNC miraculously unities around Senile Joe to stop the Angry Berd, with Kamalho
being the fallback position as VP. It is clear that the CCP ordered the DNC to do this
because they had the goods on Corrupt Joe, and the DNC needs the Chicom money. They all
figured they had it all covered up. They never figured on the crazy cokehead son blowing it
all up. The timelines all line up, and explain why Senile Joe rose from the dead in the
primaries to be the anointed one, along with Kamalho. The CCP got the candidates they bought
and paid for.
GoldmanSax , 1 hour ago
100% true but the republican government refuses to prosecute their buddies. The US has 1
party and we ain't invited.
Robert De Zero , 3 hours ago
It isn't real, we hope it isn't real, you can't prove it's real, 50 experts said it isn't
real, Russia planted it, Russian disinformation, Rudy is compromised, Rudy might be a Russian
agent, Rudy almost banged a 24 YO and he can't be trusted, It's not about Joe we don't care,
Hunter isn't running, Bobulinski has a funny name so he can't be trusted...NOT ONCE ASKING IF
THIS IS a MAJOR PHUCKING PROBLEM.
The problem isn't RUSSIA, it's you bastards in the Big Lies Media!
GoldmanSax , 1 hour ago
Why hasn't the patriotic republicans arrested the evil democrats? Whats the hold up?
tonye , 3 hours ago
At some point we are going to have to break up the corporate media conglomerates.
All of them.
And start racketeering prosecutions.
Salsa Verde , 3 hours ago
Facts mean nothing in a country where emotional outbursts are now considered gospel.
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
I think we need to bring back the death penalty in every state and not keep housing these
criminals for lifetimes.
Zorch , 2 hours ago
Wait! What does Gretta say?
VisceralFat1 , 3 hours ago
so... the hunter laptop is fake
and global warming is real
got it
jin187 , 3 hours ago
You just summed up the only thing 90% of students actually learn from 12 years of public
school.
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
correct on both points
Zerogenous_Zone , 3 hours ago
duh...
the Feds have plenty of laptops that have incriminating evidence of our elected leaders
(Wasserman Schultz, Iman Brothers, Weiner, DNC Servers, etc...), Dems and Repubs
at issue is if we REALLY knew the depths of treason from said leaders, we'd run out of
rope and tall trees...
so...anyone who votes Democrat, is complicit in my eyes (and they don't need to vote
Republican) and deserve the heat of the truth, strong enough to melt all the
snowflake-SJW's
Carbon Skidmark , 3 hours ago
ban laptops...it's so simple...no laptops and bad things stop happening
Zerogenous_Zone , 3 hours ago
/sarc
banned public schools first...they're indoctrination centers of controlled deception
NO critical thinking...NO innovative strategies
ONLY State sponsors 'information' filtered by the snowflakes anti-social media platforms
and e-encyclopedia (Schmoogle)
11b40 , 3 hours ago
Ban email & instant messages. Life would be immediately better.
CosmoJoe , 3 hours ago
Dorsey looks like a fvcking homeless person. What a clown. I'd love to rip that ring right
out of his nose.
sunhu , 2 hours ago
losers anger is always fun to watch
chubbar , 3 hours ago
The media is acting against the best interests of the USA. Think about it, "IF" the
allegations are true, we need to find out BEFORE we elect someone who is selling out our
country for personal gain, not after. WHY would the media think differently unless they don't
care whether the allegations are true or not? Are they working for China? Is the DNC? These
are appropriate lines of inquiry given the wholesale censoring the media has levied on the
Biden corruption story. The FBI sat on this for months and it has Child ****, which means
children remain at risk until the FBI goes in and stops it. WTF is wrong with Wray that he
allows this to go on?
somewhere_north , 3 hours ago
Dude, if it was for real Hunter Biden would have been arrested by now. You can't seriously
believe they're just holding back their damning evidence. The obvious conclusion is they
don't have it.
Mr. Universe , 2 hours ago
...except those pictures of a naked Hunter with his niece and the emails of the family
trying to keep a lid on Mom's protestations.
You see lots of pics of Hunter Biden with a blacked out bitch. No way of knowing who he's
actually with.
hugin-o-munin , 2 hours ago
Yeah like duh really man, I mean come on man. Stop thinking so much man, hang ten and
chill bruh.
8-(
Im4truth4all , 2 hours ago
Has Comey, Clapper, Strozk and the list goes on ad infinitum, been arrested? No.
ebear , 1 hour ago
"The obvious conclusion is they don't have it."
An inference, by itself, is not a conclusion.
Soloamber , 2 hours ago
Wray inherited a completely screwed up Comey FBI .
He is not a culture changer .
glasshour , 3 hours ago
Stop calling these people mainstream. There is nothing mainstream about them because
nobody watches their crap.
Joe Rogan's show last night got more views than all of them combined.
WhatDoYouFightFor , 3 hours ago
Hunter is still walking around free, system is F'd. Nothing will right the United States
at this point.
Zerogenous_Zone , 3 hours ago
it's the Hillary conundrum, right?
IF they get Hunter, it's 'election interference'...
deceitful godless individuals...
randocalrissian , 3 hours ago
But but but Her Emails
slightlyskeptical , 3 hours ago
he will always be free on these items as the evidence was all acquired illegally and
likely doctored to all hell.
jin187 , 3 hours ago
This is why I said the day Trump got elected that these people just need to disappear to a
blacksite in Yemen. The best way to drain the swamp is waterboarding all the ones we know to
find the ones we don't know.
Ghost of Porky , 3 hours ago
If Trump rescued 30 drowning children with his helicopter the CNN headline would read
"Trump Increases Carbon Footprint to Risk Superspreader Event.
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
Exactly - so tired of MSM and their opinionated lies
pstpetrov , 3 hours ago
Yes Liberals are all about disinformation and Trump has the moral high ground.
randocalrissian , 3 hours ago
Best joke I've heard in October. Well played, sir!
otschelnik , 3 hours ago
How would the MSM react if Don Jr. flew into China on AF1 with his father, met with
Chinese central committee members and intelligence officials, formed a Joint Venture with
them and then got a 5 million dollar no interest loan from the head of a private oil company,
who's chairman used to work in intelligence?
Imagine that. How would ABC MSNBC CNN NPR WaPo NYT PBS broadcast that?
glasshour , 3 hours ago
Better question, who cares. Nobody watches that junk anymore.
fanbeav , 3 hours ago
Liberal sheeple still do.
randocalrissian , 3 hours ago
Let's get the case in a court of law so allegations and wild claims can be proven or
disproven. But wait, this was timed so court isn't an option. So all we are left with is the
sniff test. Smells like baby diaper needs changed.
slightlyskeptical , 3 hours ago
How did they react when it was Kushner doing the traveling and getting the money for his
business?
Iconoclast422 , 3 hours ago
the computer has seized the computer as evidence
Why does every article have these little tidbits that make me think every writer has
stroked out in 2020?
11b40 , 3 hours ago
You see that, too? Something is wrong in the editing process. Sloppy, I guess, or
foreign.
Santiago de Mago , 3 hours ago
I noticed that in several articles today... almost like they are being written by AI
bots.
"My Macaroni And Cheese Is A Lesbian Also She Is My Lawyer"
balz , 3 hours ago
Every time you see someone saying they are a "journalist" at a MSM, don't forget to tell
them they are wrong and their job-title is "propagandist".
Shut. It. Down. , 2 hours ago
Some of the emails have already been verified by the outside recipient or sender.
Next you'll tell me all the sex videos were photoshopped by Putin.
KayaCreate , 1 hour ago
I lost 5 mins of my life watching Hunters **** getting kicked around by a probable minor
while smoking crack. You could tell it was him as his fake teeth glowed in the dark.
Cephisus , 3 hours ago
The media are scum.
Bill of Rights , 3 hours ago
Funny isn't it, every time the Globalist are exposed its " Disinformation " ..Hows that
Russian Collusion evidence coming along? its only been four years.....
American2 , 2 hours ago
The only question remaining to ask is simply this: Who is more enfeebled, Joe Biden; or
the networks and ABC, NBC, CBS, NY Times, WaPo, LA Times?
CosmoJoe , 3 hours ago
I have been out of f*cks to give when it comes to the MSM for a decade now. What is so
comical is that when the MSM so overtly covers for candidates, it backfires horribly. You
can't hyperventilate over an anonymously sourced Trump tax return story and yet ignore the
Biden laptop. People see right through that.
randocalrissian , 3 hours ago
Trump's taxes were made public. Nobody knows where Biden's (or whoever's) laptop came
from. Giuliani is already very late with the promised salacious details. How many people do
you think are really changing their vote to the Domestic Terrorist in the WH?
IndicaTive , 3 hours ago
I know of one person
Invert This MM , 3 hours ago
You are a freaking Share Blue Clown. Nobody buys your monkey dung
IndicaTive , 3 hours ago
You know me so well, after 3 months of trolling here.
Invert This MM , 2 hours ago
You really are one stupid fuuk. You just outed one of your sockpuppets and I was purged in
the Google crack down. I have been posting here for 12 years. You monkeys are really
stupid.
Invert This MM , 2 hours ago
Hey Monkey, I was purged during the Google shake dawn. Been here 14 years. Like a complete
moron, you just outed one of your sockpuppets. Dumbass
replaceme , 3 hours ago
No serious Dem thinks the laptop isn't Hunter's - your supposed to ignore it, or pretend
it has nothing to do with Joe. The Russians, booga boogah
invention13 , 3 hours ago
No, his taxes weren't made public. Claims about his taxes were made public - there is a
difference which you seem happy to elide.
CosmoJoe , 3 hours ago
Trump's taxes as reported by the NY Times were NOT made public, what gives you that idea.
The info was leaked to the Times.
jin187 , 3 hours ago
This is what I want to know. How is it that the NYP is still banned from Twitter based on
them obtaining information "illegally or illicitly", when we know for a fact now that they
didn't? At the same time, I'm pretty sure that the NYT and their followers are still happily
linking and chatting away about the story on how they illegally obtained Trump's tax
returns.
wearef_ckedwithnohope , 3 hours ago
Matt Taibbi has written a series of articles bemoaning the current state of
journalism.
replaceme , 3 hours ago
What's journalism?
invention13 , 3 hours ago
I'm beginning to think it is something that never really existed - just an ideal in some
people's minds.
Shillelagh Pog , 2 hours ago
Journalism is putting down on paper your, or someone you like, or is paying you for,
feelings, duh.
slightlyskeptical , 3 hours ago
He has the same issues with his journalism.
starcraft22 , 1 hour ago
The laptop is real. The media is the foreign disinformation.
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
Just shocking how MSM is so quick to dismiss this shocking evidence. We know it's not part
of their brainwashing echo chamber of lies for their low IQ and low informed voters but had
this been one of Trump's sons laptops - this would be MAJOR HEADLINES for the next 12
months.
Remember the 4 year Russiangate investigation, 40 million to Robert Mueller all based on a
bought and paid dossier paid for by the DNC/Clinton foundation, corrupt FBI, FISA warrants
all to spy and setup Trump to incriminate him for the VERY same crimes they were in FACT
committing.
Ar15ak47rpg7 , 2 hours ago
Note to all Zero HEDGERS....there seems to be no difference between the scrubbing of
comments on Twitter and Facebook and ZH. The free flow of ideas on ZH no longer exist. Just
like the Drudge Report the Deep Stater's have gotten to the Tylers. Beware
One of these is not like the others.. , 2 hours ago
I concur, the more thoughtful the post, the more likely it seems to vanish.
ebear , 1 hour ago
I must be an idiot then. As much as I'd like to add that badge to my collection, my stuff
never seems to get scrubbed. Damn!
Urfa Man , 3 minutes ago
Gulag and the shrews that run it are putting big financial pressure on ZH to censor us.
This month I've twice tried to post a URL for the news article that details the censorship
here, but go figure, those posts get scrubbed.
It's all because of you and me. The Bolsheviks at Gulag say this comment section hurts
feelings and therefore must be dominated and controlled with an iron fist.
Gulag Bans ZeroHedge From Ad Platform
If you replace "Gulag" with the name of a major search engine and conduct a search using
the words in italics above - via a search engine like duckduckgo - the results will probably
point you to the news article that gives the details of this ZH censorship and why your
comments disappear.
lacortenews com is the domain that carries the news report
Good luck. There's not much left of free speech or the original freedom of the
internet.
unionbroker , 3 hours ago
A business associate of mine told me with a straight face that he didn't trust Bobulinski
because he had a Russian sounding name. He is on Twitter a lot so maybe that explains it.
slightlyskeptical , 3 hours ago
I don't trust him either. He has already changed his story. he requested to meet Joe Biden
and then later he didn't request it. . And he met him, but he didn't have a meeting with him.
He confirmed that on Fox last night.
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
I trust him 100% #imwithhim
remember Dr Christine Ford and her fake as story against Kavanaugh - this is much more
realistic than her fake as
Republicans can play dirty too
jin187 , 2 hours ago
Yeah, this is what it's come to, so **** it. I hope Rudy is out there right now handing
out suitcases of cash to anyone willing to come forward with any lies about Biden, Pelosi,
Schumer, just like our side's Gloria Steinem.
Zerogenous_Zone , 3 hours ago
bring him in under oath and actually investigate...
BUT that would be 'election interference' (you know, the whole Hillary conundrum,
right?)
rule of law is now changed to morality of feelings...if it makes me feel insignificant, it
CAN'T be TRUE!!
WAAAHHHHHH
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
he will testify under oath watch - and he won't be like pencil neck Schiff and those other
cowards and plea the 5th
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
???
you could watch the Tucker Carlson show interview instead of your imagined one.
Uh... did watch it. And yes, the story he tells there about meeting Biden is not the same
as the one he told before. Riddle me this: if this is real, why would they hopelessly
compromise their chain of evidence by dribbling it to the public like this?
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
because no one in the MSM would dummy - they are all in DEEP ****
somewhere_north , 3 hours ago
They don't have to use the MSM, or any media. They simply arrest Hunter Biden, then drop
all the info at once instead of tantalizingly holding the smoking guns out of our view. All
they are doing here, if they actually have anything, is risking the lives of their witnesses
and giving the perps a lot of warning. That's to say nothing about compromising the evidence
to the point of inadmissability. It's running a risk for no gain whatsoever.
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
stuff is only out of your view if your eyes are closed
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
"not the same" ?
missed your weblink (not that you could be making stuff up, cough, cough.)
also, how that would have any significant bearing on the whole matter,
including most MSM news censorship and Russia nonsense ?
RedNeckMother , 3 hours ago
Who told you that bulls hit?
calculator , 2 hours ago
It's entirely possible he is military intelligence and was sent undercover to infiltrate
the Bidens and discover their treachery. The CIA and FBI sure as hell don't appear to be
doing it. Since we may very well be in a shooting war with the CCP at some point in the near
future, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the military is actually doing their jobs to ensure
we are not compromised.
SDShack , 3 hours ago
We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation --
even if they probably aren't."
Cmon Turley, parse these words> Why does the WaPo say 'WE MUST' treat these leaks this
way? This implies that the WaPo is BEING ORDERED to treat these leaks this way! So WHO has
power over the WaPo? Is that power direct, or financial, or BOTH? Also the assumption the
WaPo is trying to propagate is that the Foreign Intelligence Operation is...THE
RUSSIANS...but could it not actually be the CCP that is pulling the WaPo strings? Doesn't the
CCP revelation go to the central heart of the entire Corrupt Joe matter, as well as the
financial angle for the Bezo's Amazon WaPo? Even in their lies, the nuggets of hidden truth
are exposed.
Amel , 3 hours ago
Asking yourself why the CIA control of the MSM favors a Manchurian candidate over Trump ?
Because the CIA's own survival is valued above national security.
invention13 , 3 hours ago
For they same reason they had to treat the Russian collusion allegations as though they
were real.
LetThemEatRand , 3 hours ago
Same reason there was no outrage at the Obama child cages at the Mexico border. Or outrage
at all of the wars Obama started. Or outrage at all of the drone killing under Obama.
Most Blue Team members are satisfied getting their news from MSM, leaving MSM able to
shape the narrative almost completely. There are a handful of guys like Jimmy Dore on the
left who call out the rest of the left on this. Pretty scary, actually.
factorypreset , 3 hours ago
It sure seems like the press is helping to squash this whole thing by asking any questions
in such a way that Joe doesn't perjure himself.
mtl4 , 3 hours ago
Yesterday, former Vice President Joe Biden was again insisting that the scandal
involving Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation despite the direct refutation of
that claim by the FBI.
All makes perfect sense in a time when you chose your gender in the morning while getting
dressed, you only need to be accused of anything to completely ruin your reputation (unless
your a politician in which case there are no laws). So why would anyone deal with reality at
a time when we've gotten so good at simply ignoring it.
"... So, yes, the Republican Party has ideology but this ideology is the same as the ideology on "Clitonized" Dems with some minor differences ("soft neoliberalism" of Clintonized Dems vs "hard neoliberalism" by Repugs) ..."
But the claim that the Republican party has no ideology or policy agenda is completely
wrong.
The policy agenda of the GOP is to cut taxes on the rich and to dismantle regulation and
social insurance programs.
NYT is out of depth. That's a typical neoliberal platform and both parties, not only one,
adopted the same neoliberal ideology (that was the essence of Clinton wing selloff to Wall
Street).
So, yes, the Republican Party has ideology but this ideology is the same as the ideology
on "Clitonized" Dems with some minor differences ("soft neoliberalism" of Clintonized Dems vs
"hard neoliberalism" by Repugs)
Both are now extremely corrupt Imperial Parties ready to sacrifices the interests of common
Americans for the interests of global neoliberal empire (read multinationals) and personal
profits. Kind of occupying force, much like Bolsheviks were in the USSR.
Both are War parties, jingoistic and militaristic to the extreme. And ready to feed Pentagon
to the tilt at the expense of common people. And they are jingoistic to such an extent that is
is not unclear to which party neocons should belong (Max Boot changed parties recently.)
Both are ready to blame the gradual collapse of neoliberalism in the USA on a convenient
foreign scapegoat and use neo-McCarthyism as a smoke screen to hide neoliberalism failures
including Hillary fiasco -- the rejection by common people of a neoliberal, jingoistic
candidate pushed by neoliberal elite. The fact that the second candidate was probably even
worse domestically with his extreme "national neoliberalism" program does not change the
situation. That was a real protest.
Both are now extremely friendly to intelligence agencies. with neoliberal globalist wing of
Dems using them for political purposes via Russiagate hoax.
The situation that probably will be mirrored by Repugs with "Chinagate" if Biden
wins.
Nobody, October 26, 2020 2:57 am
Frankly, the Republican party's donor class' forty year quest to turn the US into a
kleptocracy has already done so much damage to American democracy that it almost certainly
can't be saved. Even if Biden wins, he will only be able to slow the decline into
authoritarianism until the next Republican seizes the Presidency.
Reported by a center-conservative newspaper, curiously, in yesterady´s hearing with
Spanish President, Pedro Sánchez, Pope Francis made a similar analysis to this one
from the left, on the similarities of this moment with Weimar, and the need to low the level of
political twitching, which only benefits those who seek the destruction of nation states. He
referred also to what country, nation and homeland would mean ( and in this, one would say he
is on the same line as Putin...)
Yeah .and how many of those deaths were from the complete mismanagement of the sick elderly
ie throwing them back into nursing homes. American facilities for many of our poorer, middle
class elderly are disgusting places of squalor and nosocomial infections. How many were among
elderly that were already on death's door step? This scamdemic has destroyed this country. If
there is one demographic in this country that should burning it to the ground it's young, white
20 something conservative males who are seeing their future destroyed before their eyes. Seeing
Americans walking around with what amounts to respiratory diapers on their face is disgusting,
pathetic and embarrassing. The elderly, who for the most part have overall lived the peak
American dream, are living in hysteria and fear. The boomers in America are confirmed now as
some of the most selfish, self absorbed, and enfranchised generations ever. To blame the covid
deaths on Trump is the most stupid and intellectually dishonest argument in this whole election
narrative. Dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery you want to wear a worthless diaper on your
face fine .don't force tyranny on the rest of us!
People living in the western world are in the greatest fight for the future of pluralist and
republican forms of governance since the rise and fall of fascism 75 years ago. As then,
society had to be built up from a war. Today's war has been an economic war of the oligarchs
against the republic, and it increasingly appears that the coronavirus pandemic is being used,
on the political end, as a massive coup against pluralist society. We are being confronted with
this 'great reset', alluding to post-war construction. But for a whole generation people have
already been living under an ever-increasing austerity regimen. This is a regimen that can only
be explained as some toxic combination of the systemic inevitabilities of a consumer-driven
society on the foundation of planned obsolescence, and the never-ending greed and lust for
power which defines whole sections of the sociopathic oligarchy.
Recently we saw UK PM Boris Johnson stand in front of a 'Build Back Better' sign, speaking to the
need for a 'great reset'. 'Build Back Better' happens to be Joe Biden's campaign slogan,
which raises many other questions for another time. But, to what extent are the handlers who
manage 'Joe Biden', and those managing 'Boris Johnson' working the same script?
The more pertinent question is to ask: in whose interest is this 'great reset' being carried
out ?
Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers upon the theory and
practice of austerity. Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers as
puppets of a morally decaying oligarchy.
What Johnson calls the 'Great Reset', Biden calls the 'Biden Plan for a Clean Energy
Revolution & Environmental Justice'. Certainly the coming economy cannot be left to Boris
Johnson or Joe Biden.
How is it that now Boris Johnson speaks publicly of a 'great reset', whereas just months ago
when those outside the ruling media paradigm used this phrase, it was censured by corporate
Atlanticist media as being conspiratorial in nature? This is an excellent question posed by
Neil Clark.
And so we have by now all read numerous articles in the official press talking about how
economic life after coronavirus will never be the same as it was before. Atlanticist press has
even run numerous opinion articles talking about how this may cut against globalization –
a fair point, and one which many thinking people by and large agree with.
Yet they have set aside any substantive discussion about what exists in lieu of
globalization, and what the economy looks like in various parts of the world if it is not
globalized. We have consistently spoken of multipolarity, a term that in decades past was
utilized frequently in western vectors, in the sphere of geopolitics and international
relations. Now there is some strange ban on the term, and so we are now bereft of a language
with which to have an honest discussion about the post-globalization paradigm.
https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890
Technocracy or Pluralism? A Fight Against the Newspeak
Until now, we have only been given a steady diet of distancing, of lockdown provisions,
quarantining, track and trace, and we have forgotten entirely about the fact that all of this
was only supposed to be a two or three-week long exercise to flatten the curve. And now the
truth is emerging that what is being planned is a new proposal being disguised as a 'great
reset'.
One of the large problems in discussing the 'great reset' is that a false dichotomy has
arisen around it. Either one wants things to be how they were before and without changes to the
status quo, or they promote this 'great reset'. Unfortunately, Clark in his RT article falls
into this false dichotomy, and perhaps only for expedience sake in discussing some other point,
he does not challenge the inherent problems in 'how things were before'. In truth, we would be
surprised if Clark did not appreciate what we are going to propose.
What we propose is that we must oppose their ' new normal ' 'great reset', while also
understanding the inherent problems of what had been normalized up until Covid.
The way things were before was also a tremendous problem, and yet now it only seems better
in comparison to the police state-like provisions we've encountered throughout the course of
politicizing the spectre of this 'pandemic'.
Oddly this politicization is based in positive cases (and not hospitalizations) ostensibly
linked to the novel coronavirus. Strangely, we are told to 'listen to the consensus science'
even as these very institutions consist of politically arrived at appointments. Certainly
science is not about consensus, but about challenging assumptions, repeatability and a lively
debate between disagreeing scientists with relatively equal qualifications. As Kuhn explains in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , science is always evolving, and by definition
potentially overturns consensus paradigms. This is a debate we have not seen, and this fact by
itself represents an illiberal cancer growing on an already defective pluralist society –
ironically, all flying under the banner of liberalism.
Decisions that a society decides to take should be driven by reason, prudence, and justice.
What is or isn't scientific plays a role, but cannot be the deciding factor. Science clearly
says that we may eliminate cross-walk injuries by banning street-crossing or by banning
driving, but what policy makers must do is account for the need to have both cars and crossing
the street, in deciding how – if it's even possible – to reduce or eliminate such
injuries. Science is only one part of this equation.
But isn't economics also a science? Is sociology not a science? What about psychology and
psychiatry – as in the known effects of social isolation and, say, suicide prevention?
What about housing and urban planning? The great sociologist Emile Durkheim explains how these
are sciences – they adopt and apply the scientific method in their work. Universities
have been awarding doctoral degrees in these sciences for a century or more, do these expert
opinions not count when managing a public catastrophe?
It is, and always has been, a political and politicized position to listen to some
scientists, and not others.
And so what of our term 'reset'? Indeed, it is itself misleading, and we would propose it is
intentionally so if we understand Orwell's critique of the use of language – newspeak
– in technocratic oligarchies.
A 'reset' textually refers to going back to something once known, erasing defects or
contradictions which arose along the way, which carries with it the familiar, and something we
had previously all agreed to. A 'reset' by definition means going back to how things were
before – not just recently, but before at some point farther back. Its definition is
literally contrary to how Boris Johnson means it in his shocking public statement at the start
of October.
The term 'reset' was therefore arrived with extraordinary planning and thoughtfulness, with
the intent to persuade [manipulate] the public. It simultaneously straddles two unique
concepts, and bundles them together at once into a single term in a manner that reduces nuance
and complexity and therefore also reduces thinking. It does so while appealing to the implicit
notion of the term that it relates to a past consensus agreement.
If understood as we are told to understand it, we must hold two mutually contradictory
notions at the same time – we are incongruously told that this reset must effectively
restore society to how it was at some point before because things can never be how they were at
any time before. Only within the paradigm of this vicious newspeak could anything ever have the
public thinking that such a textual construction makes any bit of sense.
What are Our
Real Options? Whose Reset?
Those who understand that this 'reset' is not a reset but rather a whole new proposal on the
entire organization of society, but being done through oligarchical methods and without the
sort of mandate required in a society governed by laws and not men, are – as we have said
– reluctant to admit that a great change is indeed necessary.
Rather, we must understand that the underlying catastrophic economic mechanisms which are
forcing this great change exist independently of the coronavirus, and exist independently of
the particular changes which the oligarchs promoting their version of a 'reset' (read: new
proposals ) would like to see.
You see, the people and the oligarchs are locked into a single system together. In the
long-term, it seems as if the oligarchs are looking for solutions to change that fact, and
effect a final solution that grants them an entirely break-away civilization. But at this
moment, that is not the case. Yet this system cannot carry forward as it has been, and the
Coronavirus presents a reason at once both mysterious in its timing and also profound in its
implications, to push forward a new proposal.
We believe that technology is quickly arriving at a point where the vast majority of human
beings will be considered redundant. If the technocracy wants to create a walled civilization,
and leave the rest of humanity to manage their own lives along some agrarian, mediaeval mode of
production, there may indeed be benefits to those who live along agrarian lines. But based in
what we know about psychopathy, and the tendency of that among those who govern, such an
amicable solution is likely not in the cards.
That is why the anti-lockdown protests are so critically important to endorse. This is
precisely because the lockdown measures are used to ban mass public demonstrations, a critical
part of pushing public policy in the direction of the interests of the general public. A whole
part of the left has been compromised, and rolled out to fight imaginary fascists, by which
they mean anyone with conventional social views which predate May of 1968. All the while the
actual plutocrats unleash a new system of oligarchical control which, for most, has not been
hitherto contemplated except by relatively obscure political scientists, futurists, and science
fiction authors.
Certainly the consumerist economic system (sometimes called 'capitalism' by the left), which
is based in both globalized supply chains but also planned obsolescence, is no longer feasible.
In truth, this relied upon a third-world to be a source of both raw materials and cheaper
labor. The plus here is that this 'developing world' has largely now developed. But that means
they will be needing their own raw materials, and their own middle-classes have driven up their
own cost of labor. Globalization was based in some world before development, where the real
dynamic is best explained as imperialism , and so it makes sense that this system is a relic of
the past, and indeed ought to be.
It increasingly appears that the 'Coronavirus pandemic', was secondary to the foregone
economic crisis which we were told accompanied it. Rather, it seems that the former came into
being to explain-away the latter.
Another world is possible, but it is one which citizens fight for. In the U.S., England,
Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, there have already been rather large anti-lockdown
demonstrations. These, as we have explained, are not just against lockdown but are positively
pushing to assert the right to public and political association, to public and political
speech, and the redressing of grievances. This is a fundamental right for citizens in any
republic where there is any sort of check on the oligarchy.
We have written on the kind of world that is possible, in our piece from April 2020 titled:
"
Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter
Multipolarity ". That lays out what is possible, and what the problems of pre-corona system
were, in economic terms more than political. Here we discuss the problems of
globalization-based supply chain security in a multipolar world, and the larger problem of
planned obsolescence, especially in light of 3D printing, automation, and the internet of
things.
We posed the philosophical question as to whether it is justified to have a goods-production
system based upon both the guaranteed re-sale of the same type of goods due to planned
obsolescence and the 'work guarantees' that came with it. In short, do we live to work or to we
work to live? And with the 4th industrial revolution looming, we posed the question of what
will happen after human workers are no longer required.
Pluralist society is the compromise outcome of a ceasefire in the class war between the
oligarchy and the various other classes that compromise the people, at large. Largely idealized
and romantic ideas that form the basis of the liberal-democratic ideology (as well as classical
fascism) are used to explain how it is the oligarchy that is so very committed to that
arrangement of pluralism, and that this very arrangement is the product of their benevolence,
and not the truth: that it was the fight put up by common people to fight for a more just
future. No doubt there have been benevolent oligarchs who really believed in the liberal
ideology, of which fascism is one of its more radical products. But the view that the class
struggle can be acculturated or legislated into non-existence is similar to believing that the
law of gravity can be ruled unlawful in a court.
Perhaps we have forgotten what it takes, and perhaps things just have not gotten bad enough.
Decreases in testosterone levels in the population may be leading to a dangerous moment where
vigorous defiance to injustice is much less possible. Critical now is to avoid any artificial
means to opiate ourselves into thinking things are better than they are, whether by way of
anti-depressants or other self-medication. Only with a clear assessment of the real situation
on the ground can we forge the necessary strategy.
The great political crisis now is that a pandemic is being used to justify an end-run around
constitutional rights, an end-run around pluralist society, and so the vehicle – the
mechanism – that the general public might use to fight for their version of a 'reset' is
on the verge of disappearing.
In many ways this means that now is the final moment. We ask – whose great reset, ours
or theirs?
Although many details about the Great Reset won't be rolled out until the World
Economic Forum meets in Davos in January 2021, the general principles of the plan are clear:
The world needs massive new government programs and far-reaching policies comparable to those
offered by American socialists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in their Green New Deal plan.
Or, put another way, we need a form of socialism - a word the World Economic Forum has
deliberately avoided using, all while calling for countless socialist and progressive
plans.
"We need to design policies to align with investment in people and the environment,"
said the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Sharan Burrow.
"But above all, the longer-term perspective is about rebalancing economies."
Take Nord Stream II. If Trump hadn't taken the oath, it would have been up and running
years ago. Would that it were so that this was a gift to Russia and Germany, but it's much
worse than that. Why isn't anyone else curious as to who got what in return?
The blockage of Nordstream 2 is about The Dark Heart of Europe not Russia...
This is one of Putin's few serious errors. He would be much better off pushing gas
projects that flowed east...
Europe is a glove on the US hand and is easily led around by its nose by the CIA and MI6
that infest the MSM and run one false flag after another.
Politicians in the EU are mediocre creatures that crave the dollars stuffed into their
pockets by the US. They are enjoying the ride while it lasts until they go down with the
US.
A weaker U.S. dollar, rising inflation risks and demand driven by additional fiscal and
monetary stimulus from major central banks will spur a bull market for commodities in 2021,
Goldman's chief commodity strategist Jeffrey Currie said on Thursday, also predicting that "all
commodity markets are in, or moving toward, a deficit with inventories drawing in all but
cocoa, coffee and iron ore."
The bank, which notes that markets are increasingly concerned about the return of inflation,
forecast a return of 28% over a 12-month period on the S&P/Goldman Sachs Commodity Index
(GSCI), with a 17.9% return for precious metals, 42.6% for energy, 5.5% for industrial metals
and a negative return of 0.8% for agriculture.
A key catalyst for the bank's bullish call is that "nearly all commodity markets are in, or
moving toward, a deficit with inventories drawing in all but cocoa, coffee and iron ore."
As Currie adds, "such broad-based deficits are usually only seen late in the business cycle,
underscoring the unique environment markets are in. Given that inventories are drawing this
early in the cycle, we see a structural bull market for commodities emerging in 2021." In the
strategist's view, the bull market will be driven by three major themes:
structural under-investment in the old economy,
policy driven demand and
macro tailwinds from a weakening dollar and rising inflation risks. "These drivers remain
consistent with the bank's bullish views from the start of this year, and have now been
intensified by COVID-19 disruption and the subsequent global policy response."
Some more thoughts from Currie on the tightening in commodity markets:
Commodity markets have been mostly range bound since this summer, in our view caught
between a longer-term bullish outlook for 2021 and near-term concerns around the timing of a
vaccine amid rising COVID cases across Europe and the US Midwest (see Exhibit 4). However, it
is important to emphasize that nearly all commodity markets are in, or moving toward, a
global deficit with inventories drawing in all but cocoa, coffee and iron ore. Such
broad-based deficits are usually only seen late in the business cycle,underscoring the unique
environment markets are in.
As global demand remains tepid for consumer-related commodities like oil, the deficits
further underscore how significant the drop in supply has been and how the supply response
function has changed. For oil, the sharp drop in capex is now having an impact on non-OPEC
decline rates, with capital markets refusing to fund shale drilling, only debt rollovers. In
metals, we have seen a sharp drop in maintenance capex and supply disruptions dragging into
2021. This suggests that even if demand falters in coming weeks as winter exacerbates
COVID-19, markets will likely continue to rebalance, barring an outright collapse in demand.
In our view, base metals and agriculture have more near-term upside than oil, with smaller
inventories to move through before prices begin to rise.
Goldman then shows the following chart which reveals the growing deficit across key
commodities, as well as the key macro catalysts for higher commodity prices in coming
months:
Hedging that even if demand falters in coming weeks as winter exacerbates COVID-19, Goldman
still expect markets will continue to rebalance, "barring an outright collapse in demand."
Goldman takes a more contained view on energy saying that while inventories of oil remain high,
"upside in energy prices will likely come after winter." However, non-energy commodities face
immediate upside as balances have tightened ahead of expectations, driven by large Chinese
demand and adverse weather shocks, according to the Goldman strategist.
Focusing on Gold, Currie said that expansionary fiscal and monetary policies in developed
market economies continue to drive interest rates lower and create demand for hedging the tail
risks of inflation, lifting demand for precious metals. As a result, Goldman forecasts gold
prices at an average of $1,836 per ounce in 2020 and $2,300 per ounce in 2021, and expects
silver prices to be at around $22 per ounce in 2020 and $30 per ounce next year .
Non-energy commodities could see an "immediate upside" as the market balances tighten ahead
of expectations on strong demand from China and weather-driven risks, the Goldman Sachs
analysts said.
The bank maintained a "neutral" view on commodities in the near term and "overweight" in the
medium term.
"Adam Schiff is seriously the most pathological liar in all of American politics that I've
seen in all of my time covering politics and journalism," Greenwald said on 'Tucker Carlson
Tonight.' "He just fabricates accusations at the drop of the hat at the other people change
underwear. He's simply lying when he just asserts over and over that the Russians or the
Kremlin are behind the story. He has no idea whether or not that is true. There is no evidence
to support it."
Is this 50 former Intel officials or 50 former national security parasites? Real Intel
officials should keep quite after retirement. National security parasites go to politics and
lobbying. One telling sign that a particular parson is a "national security parasite" is his
desire to play "Russian card"
From comments: "Did the 50 former intelligence officials find the Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction yet?"
Hours before Politico
reported the existence of a letter signed by '50 former senior intelligence officials' who say
the Hunter Biden laptop scandal "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information
operation" - providing "no new evidence," while they remain "deeply suspicious that the Russian
government played a significant role in this case," Tucker Carlson obliterated their (literal)
conspiracy theory .
According to the Fox News host, he's seen 'nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter's
laptop ,' adding " No one but Hunter could've known about or replicated this information ."
" This is not a Russian hoax. We are not speculating ."
TUCKER: "This afternoon, we received nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter's
laptop. No one but Hunter could've known about or replicated this information. This is not a
Russian hoax. We are not speculating." pic.twitter.com/cl2ktdmdVc
Meanwhile, the Delaware computer repair shop owner who believes Hunter dropped off three
MacBook Pros for data recovery has a signed work order bearing Hunter's signature . When
compared to the signature on a document in his paternity suit, while one looks more formal than
the other, they are a match.
Going back to the '50 former senior intelligence officials' and their latest Russia
fixation, one has to wonder - do they think Putin was able to compromise Biden's
former business associate , Bevan Cooney, who gave investigative journalist Peter Schweizer
his gmail password - revealing that Hunter and his partners were engaged in an
influence-peddling operation for rich Chinese who wanted access to the Obama
administration?
Did Putin further hack Joe Biden in 2011 to make him take a meeting with a Chinese
delegation with ties to the CCP - arranged by Hunter's group, two years they secured a massive
investment of Chinese money?
The implications boggle the mind.
Here's the clarifying sentences from the '50 former senior intelligence officials' that
exposes the utter farce of it all:
While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence , they said their national
security experience had made them "deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a
significant role in this case" and cited several elements of the story that suggested the
Kremlin's hand at work.
"If we are right," they added, "this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in
this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this."
"Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign."
And then there's the fact that no one from the Biden campaign has yet to deny any of the
'facts' in the emails. lay_arrow jin187 , 2 hours ago
Totally ridiculous. This ******** beating around the bush for both sides pisses me off.
Dump all the laptop contents on Wikileaks if it's real. Let the people sort it out. If you
say it's not real, prove it. If Biden wants me to believe it's not real, then stand behind a
podium, and say clear as day into a pile of cameras that's it's all a forgery, and that
you've done nothing wrong.
Instead we have Giuliani swearing he has a smoking gun, but as far as I can tell he's just
pointing his finger underneath his shirt. Biden on the other hand, keep using weasel words to
imply it's fake, but never denies it outright. It's almost like he's trying to hedge his bet
that no one will manage to prove it's real before he gets into office, and makes it
disappear.
Roacheforque , 7 hours ago
To play the "Russian Card" yet again should be beyond embarrassing. An insult to the
intelligence of anyone with an IQ over 80. And so it's harmful to the left wingnut
derangeables. Like Assad's chemical weapons and Saddam's WMDs, it is now code for pure
********. Not even code, just more like a signal.
A signal that say's "guilty as charged - we got nothin' but lies and BS over here".
East Indian , 4 hours ago
An insult to the intelligence of anyone with an IQ over 80.
They know their supporters wont find this insulting.
Kayman , 4 hours ago
@vulvishka.
538 ? North Korea has better propaganda.
Don't forget to go all in, like you did with Hillary.
Antedeluvian , 2 hours ago
Unfortunately, some very bright people are sucked into the conspiracy theory. I know one.
Very bright lawyer. She says, "I still think there is substantive evidence of Russian
collusion." I can point to a sky criss-crossed with chemtrails (when you see these
"contrails" crossing at the same altitude, this is one sure clue these are not from regular
passenger jet traffic) and she refuses to look up. She KNOWS I am an idiot (a PhD scientist
idiot at that) because I get news and analysis on the web from sites that just want to sell
me tee shirts and coffee mugs (well, she is partly right there!) whereas she gets her news
from MSNBC, a venerable and trustworthy news source.
4DegreesOfSeparation , 6 hours ago
More Than 50 Former Intel Officials Say Hunter Biden Smear Smells Like Russia
"If we are right," the group wrote in a letter, "this is Russia trying to influence how
Americans vote."
DescendantofthePatriots , 7 hours ago
That ****, James Clapper, signed his name at the top of this list.
Known liar, saboteur, and sneak.
The cognitive dissonance in our country is astounding. The fact that they would take these
people's opinion over hard fact is astounding.
No wonder why we're sliding down the steep, slippery slope.
strych10 , 8 hours ago
So... let me get this straight.
50, that's 10 times five, fifty former intelligence officials are going with a convoluted
narrative about a ludicrously complicated Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign
involving planted laptops and at least half a dozen patsies when the two words "crack
cocaine" explain the entire thing?
I'm not sure what's more terrifying; That these people think everyone else is dumb enough
to believe this or that they're actually retired intelligence officials
.
Who the actual **** is running this ****show? The bastard child of Barney Fife and
Inspector Clouseau?
Seriously, "Pink Panther Disinformation Operation" is more believable at this point.
Someone Else , 9 hours ago
This needs to get out, because a FAVORITE method of the Deep State, Democrats and the
media (but I repeat myself) is to parade some sort of a stupid letter with a bunch of
signature hoping to look impressive but that really don't mean a damn thing.
Notre Dame graduates against the Supreme Court nominee, Intelligence agents alleging
collusion, former State Department operatives against Trump. Its grandstanding that has been
overdone.
moneybots , 8 hours ago
The letter by 50 former intelligence officials is itself, disinformation.
otschelnik , 8 hours ago
Remember when Weiner's attorney turned over Huma's home laptop to SDNY/FBI with all of
Shillary's emails, and the FBI sat on it for a month and then Comey deep sixed them without
even looking at them?
So now the FBI subpeona'd Hunter's laptop and burried it? Deja vu all over again.
enough of this , 8 hours ago
The FBI and DOJ constantly hide behind self-serving excuses to refuse the release of
documents and, when forced to do so, they release heavily redacted files. They offer up the
usual pretexts to fend off public disclosure such as: the information you seek cannot be
disclosed because it involves an ongoing investigation, or the information you seek involves
national security, or our methods and sources will be jeopardized if the information you seek
is divulged to the public. But it seems the ones who would be most harmed by public
disclosure are the corrupt FBI and DOJ officials themselves
Cobra Commander , 7 hours ago
A short 4 years ago the FBI and CIA were all concerned about "Kompromat" the Ruskies might
have on Candidate Trump; concerned enough to spy on his campaign and open a
counter-intelligence operation.
There are troves of Kompromat material, actual emails and video, on Joe, Hunter, and the
whole Biden family; not made-up DNC-funded dossiers claiming a Russian consulate in
Miami.
Now when it's Candidate Biden, everyone be all like, "Meh."
Cobra!
The Fonz...before shark jump , 5 hours ago
we gotta listen to the 50 former intelligence agents...you know the ones that had lone
superpower status in the early 90s and then pissed it all away with 9/11 and infinity wars in
middle east hahahahah ok buddy lol... histories D students....
Occams_Razor_Trader_Part_Deux , 7 hours ago
Signed by James Clapper and John Brennan;
You mean, the 2 Bozos who under the threat of perjury said there was NO evidence of
Russian Collusion and the Trump campaign................. and 2 hours later called Trump
'Putin's puppet' on CNN.............
The $100-plus million blitz includes at least $22 million from Facebook co-founder Dustin
Moskovitz, according to an exclusive report from Recode, a subdivision of Vox. Another
Democratic megadonor involved is former Google and Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt, currently
advising the Pentagon on technology innovation.
Called Future Forward, the super PAC has filed federal paperwork on Tuesday disclosing that
it has raised $66 million between September 1 and October 15. It has contracted for $106
million of TV ads between September 29 and November 3, according to media tracking firm
Advertising Analytics. This makes it the largest Biden booster outside the Democrats' campaign
itself, already a fundraising juggernaut.
Recode also reported that Future Forward "has been recommended in private communications
by the team of Reid Hoffman." He is the LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic megadonor
previously caught funding a disinformation
campaign during the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, in which a company called New
Knowledge created a Twitter army of 'Russian bots' pretending to back the Republican candidate.
It was unclear from the Recode story whether Hoffman had contributed any funding to Moskovitz's
super PAC.
"... Meanwhile, back on ABC, Joe Biden skated on answering any questions of substance about his son or Antifa or BLM. On NBC, Guthrie pushed Donald Trump to condemn QAnon and White supremacy, and he did it dutifully. But it wasn't enough. The point of demanding performative disavowals isn't to get the disavowal, it's to smear the person you're asking to disavow the group by association with the group. ..."
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: If you flipped the channel during our show Thursday night, you may
have seen the president and his challenger making their respective cases to voters. But
President Trump and Joe Biden weren't debating each other. That would have been too risky.
There's a massive public health crisis underway, you may have heard.
So to avoid what doomsday hobbyists on Twitter like to call a "superspreader event," Trump
and Biden held separate indoor town halls surrounded by people. They talked to partisan
moderators instead of each other. That might seem like a loss to the country three weeks before
a presidential election. But unfortunately, the science on this question is clear: Nothing
could be more dangerous to America than a televised in-person debate between Joe Biden and
Donald Trump.
So the so-called debate commission made certain a debate couldn't happen. Who benefitted
from that decision? Well, not voters. America has held regularly scheduled presidential debates
for decades and we have them for a reason. The more information voters can get directly from
the candidates rather than the media, the better our democracy functions, not that anyone's
interested in democracy anymore.
Joe Biden doesn't care either way. He just didn't want to talk about Burisma. That's the
scandal that vividly illustrates how, as vice president, Biden subverted this country's foreign
policy in order to enrich his own family. The good news for Biden Thursday night was that he
didn't have to talk about it. No one from ABC News asked him about that scandal for the entire
90 minutes.
As we've been telling you this week, the New York Post and a few other news outlets,
including "Tucker Carlson Tonight," have published e-mails taken from Hunter Biden's personal
laptop. They show that Hunter Biden was paid by foreign actors to change American foreign
policy using access to his father, then the vice president. This is a big story. It is also a
real story.
Friday afternoon, we received nonpublic information that proves conclusively this was indeed
Hunter Biden's laptop. There are materials on the hard drive of that computer that no one but
Hunter Biden could have known about or have replicated. This is not a Russian hoax. Again,
we're saying this definitively. We're not speculating. The laptop in question is real. It
belonged to Hunter Biden. So there is no excuse for not asking about it.
But they didn't ask about it. It was a cover-up in real time. No matter what happens in the
election next month, the American media will never be the same after this. It cannot continue
this way. It is too dishonest.
Nevertheless, we did learn a few things Thursday night. (It's hard not to learn when you
watch Joe Biden try to speak for 90 minutes.) At one point, an activist told Joe Biden that she
has an eight-year-old transgender daughter. She asked Joe Biden what he thought about that.
Here's how he responded:
BIDEN: The idea that an eight-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, 'You know,
I've decided I want to be transgender. That's what I think. I'd like to be a -- make my life a
lot easier.' There should be zero discrimination. What's happening is too many transgender
women of color are being murdered. They're being murdered. I mean, I think it's up to now 17,
don't hold me to that number.
So if an eight-year-old biological boy decides one day that he's really a girl, that's final
and you'd have to be a bigot to pause and say, "Wait a minute, you're eight years old, you're a
small child. Maybe let's think about this for a minute." That's what a normal person who has
kids would say. People with kids know that children grow and change. They change their minds
about a lot of things, including themselves. That's the reality of it.
But if you're a crazed ideologue, you don't care about reality. So you would tell the rest
of us that an eight-year-old is entitled to hormone therapy on demand and permanent,
life-altering surgery. That's what Biden is telling us.
It doesn't matter how fashionable talk like this is right now, and it is very fashionable,
it is crazy and it's destructive and it's having a profound effect. No one wants to say it, but
it's true. We know that between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for biological
females in this country quadrupled. We also know that many people who get those surgeries
regret them later, deeply regret them. We'd have a lot more data on that, but universities are
actively punishing researchers who follow that line of inquiry. So much for science.
In the end, mania like this will end. The left is at war with nature. Inevitably, they will
lose that war, because nature always prevails. But in the meantime, many children are being
hurt irreparably. Biden doesn't care. It's the new thing, and so he's for it. In fact, Biden is
now busy rewriting his entire life story to pretend that he has been woke for 60 years.
Thursday night, he told us he became a gay rights supporter during the Kennedy administration,
sometime around 1962, when he and his father saw two gay men kissing.
When asked about police brutality, the former vice president speculated that maybe people
like George Floyd would be alive today if the police had just shot him in the leg a few
times.
BIDEN: There's a lot of things we've learned and it takes time. But we can do this. You
can ban chokeholds ... But beyond that, you have to teach people how to deescalate
circumstances, deescalate. So instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do shoot
to kill, shoot him in the leg.
How much would you have to know about firearms or human biology to wonder if maybe there
could be some unintended consequences there? People do have arteries in their legs, after all,
and sometimes bullets do miss their targets. So why did no one point out how demented Biden's
answer was?
Well, we have some clarity on the question of why no one pointed it out. It turns out George
Stephanopoulos, the moderator of last night's ABC town hall, was not the only political
operative in the room. One supposedly uncommitted voter was, in fact, a former Obama
administration speechwriter called Nathan Osburn. Osburn repeated Biden campaign talking points
to the letter, at one point referring to court-packing as a safeguard "that'll help ensure more
long-term balance and stability" on the Supreme Court.
BIDEN: I have not been a fan of court-packing because I think it just generates, what
will happen ... Whoever wins, it just keeps moving in a way that is inconsistent with what is
going to be manageable.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you're still not a fan?
BIDEN: Well, I'm not a fan ... It depends on how this turns out, not how he wins, but how
it's handled, how it's handled. But there's a number of things that are going to be coming up
and there's going to be a lot of discussion about other alternatives as well.
So we did learn something new last night: Joe Biden isn't a fan of court-packing.
Court-packing has had a few off years, and Joe Biden started to lose his faith in it, even sold
his "Court-Packing" jersey. But at the end of the day, Joe Biden is still open to court-packing
and can get back on the court-packing bandwagon depending on how things are "handled." Got
it?
Biden was allowed to answer non-questions like this because he was surrounded by sycophants
and former employees of his party. Over at NBC, by contrast, the sitting president didn't have
that luxury, to put it mildly. (By the way, it's not good for you to be sucked up to too much.
It's good to get smacked around a little bit. It makes you sharper.)
During the president's one-hour event, moderator Savannah Guthrie asked him dozens more
questions than the voters in the room got to ask. And when Trump began speaking, Guthrie
interrupted him over and over again. Joe Biden wasn't there, so the moderator played stand-in
for Joe Biden.
The good news about all of this is it's so bad and so transparent that it can't continue.
All their stupid little morning shows and their dumb Sunday shows and their even dumber cable
shows -- all of that's going away when the smoke clears from this election. There will be a
massive realignment in the media no matter who wins, because they've showed who they are and
it's so unappealing, so far from journalism, that it can't continue.
Meanwhile, back on ABC, Joe Biden skated on answering any questions of substance about his
son or Antifa or BLM. On NBC, Guthrie pushed Donald Trump to condemn QAnon and White supremacy,
and he did it dutifully. But it wasn't enough. The point of demanding performative disavowals
isn't to get the disavowal, it's to smear the person you're asking to disavow the group by
association with the group.
GUTHRIE: You were asked point-blank to denounce White supremacy [at the first debate]. In
the moment, you didn't ... A couple of days later on a different show, you denounce White
supremacy --
TRUMP: You always do this. You've done this line -- I denounce White supremacy,
OK?
GUTHRIE: You did two days later.
TRUMP: I've denounced White supremacy for years. But you always do, you always start off
with the question. You didn't ask Joe Biden whether or not he denounces Antifa ... Are you
listening? I denounce White supremacy. What's your next question?
NBC was under a lot of pressure from Democrats to make Thursday night's town hall look like
this, and just like Facebook and Twitter delivered earlier this week, NBC delivered,
too.
whatmeworry? 1 day ago The only difference between the "news" media today, and, say a
decade ago, is that they no longer try to conceal their bias. They've dropped the cloak of
objectivity and come out as democrat activists. It's sort of refreshing. We no longer have to
waste time and energy arguing about the fairness of the media. Scotty2Hotty 1 1 day ago
Liberals are more an enemy of the free press than Donald Trump is--we know that for sure after
the NY Post incident. For all the times Trump has trashed the press, he has never shut them
down (he can't), but the liberals at Facebook and Twitter did just that to the New York Post,
because they didn't like a story of theirs. The story should never have been banned anywhere.
In a free society, bogus stories are debunked by other free speech outlets and press agencies.
They are not banned. Trump is not a friend of the press, but liberals are a worse enemy than he
is, to press freedom. Leftists have a strong totalitarian streak, and they continually work to
create environments where only one viewpoint is permitted, whether in academia, television, the
press or elsewhere. Liberals believe more in shutting down dissent than in discrediting it,
through argument. Gadsden_1968 2.0 1 day ago 90% of the media is now formally known as the
Democratic Party propaganda ministry. Arm yourselves, it appears the majority of people are
100% controlled by the Democratic Party's propaganda ministry. If Biden wins, his propaganda
ministry will make Pravda look like a high school news paper. Architech 1 day ago Why is the
crackhead Hunter Biden a taboo subject? Nobody mentions that Hunter is The Train Wreck of the
Century. Even on right wing news they don't tell you what a drop dead irresponsible loser low
life that Hunter is. He sleeps with his dying brothers wife while he is still alive. Red flag.
Plenty of other girls, but no, your sister in law. But that is nothing. Nada. Kicked out of the
Navy for drug use. Banged 1000 strippers in Wash DC, knocked one up, denied the child, was
proven he was the dad, denied child support and was forced to pay. Nice. Dead beat dad deluxe.
There are about 100 things like that. Too long to list. And nobody mentions is. They act like
Hunter is just another guy.... Calling out the Loser of the Century is not off limits in my
book. Calling out stupidity, no self control, no personal responsibility, corruption, unethical
behavior, outright crimes....not off limits. It's actually illegal to be a crack addict did you
know that?
"... "The whole point of the Intelligence Community since the end of World War II was that whatever propaganda the CIA produces, whatever disinformation campaigns they engaged were never supposed to be directed domestically," he said. "That was the point of the NSA, the CIA, and all those intelligence communities." ..."
"... "What we have seen since 2016 going back to the 2016 campaign is incessant involvement in U.S. domestic politics. Working with journalists to disseminate purely for partisan ends. If you want to talk about things like violating norms, and dangers to democracy, what's more dangerous than allowing the CIA constantly to be manipulating our politics by making cover for the Biden campaign by claiming anonymously that the Russians are behind the story and therefore you disregard it. Even if the Russians why does that alleviate the responsibility of journalists to evaluate the emails and to examine whether or not Joe Biden actually engaged in misconduct?" Greenwald asked. ..."
Glenn Greenwald appeared on Tucker Carlson's FOX News show Monday night to criticize
the media for its lack of response to the Hunter Biden laptop story. Greenwald also criticized
intel community activity in domestic elections and posed the question that even if Russians are
behind the story it just requires journalistic investigation in case Biden is compromised.
"Adam Schiff is seriously the most pathological liar in all of American politics that I've seen in all of my time covering
politics and journalism," Greenwald said on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.' "He just fabricates accusations at the drop of the hat at
the other people change underwear. He's simply lying when he just asserts over and over that the Russians or the Kremlin are
behind the story. He has no idea whether or not that is true. There is no evidence to support it."
"And what makes it so much worse is that the reason that the Bidens aren't answering basic
questions about the story," Greenwald said. "Basic questions like did Hunter Biden drop that
laptop off of the repair shop? Are the emails authentic? Do you know denied that they are. Do
you claim that any have been altered or are any of them fabricated? Did you in fact meet with
Barisma executives? The reason they don't answer the questions is because the media has
signaled that they don't have to. That journalists will be attacked and vilified simply for
asking."
Victor Davis Hanson: Will Our Next Revolution Be French, Russian, Maoist, Or
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People
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"The whole point of the Intelligence Community since the end of World War II was that
whatever propaganda the CIA produces, whatever disinformation campaigns they engaged were never
supposed to be directed domestically," he said. "That was the point of the NSA, the CIA, and
all those intelligence communities."
"What we have seen since 2016 going back to the 2016 campaign is incessant involvement
in U.S. domestic politics. Working with journalists to disseminate purely for partisan ends. If
you want to talk about things like violating norms, and dangers to democracy, what's more
dangerous than allowing the CIA constantly to be manipulating our politics by making cover for
the Biden campaign by claiming anonymously that the Russians are behind the story and therefore
you disregard it. Even if the Russians why does that alleviate the responsibility of
journalists to evaluate the emails and to examine whether or not Joe Biden actually engaged in
misconduct?" Greenwald asked.
"The much bigger point is the way that the information is being disseminated," he said. "It
is a union of journalists who have decided that their only goal is to defend Joe Biden and
election him president of the United States working with the FBI, CIA, NSA not to manipulate
our adversaries or foreign governments, but to manipulate the American people for their own
ends. It's been going on for four straight years now and there's no sign of it stopping anytime
soon." Related Videos
It seems in our complicated world many murky relationships develop that come across as
inappropriate. Over the years, growing crony capitalism has become the bane of modern society
and added greatly to inequality. This is why, when we look at Hunter Biden and how he benefited
from his father's role as Vice President an investigation is in order. Even before we get to
what happened in Ukraine, the ties between China and the Biden family are too many and too
large to ignore. President Trump has received a lot of criticism related to how he gained his
wealth, however, almost all of what Trump has done he did as an outsider and not as part of the
ruling political class.
Before going deeper into this subject it is very important to look at how the "Biden
revelations" are being handled by the media. The way media has handled these allegations reveal
a flaw or bias in both mainstream media and social media to the point where even censorship is
being deployed. A good example of the spin being put on this red flag of corruption can be seen
in an article that appeared under trending stories on my city's main news outlet. Here in the
conservation heartland of America, the media published a piece titled; "Biden email episode
illustrates risk to Trump from Giuliani"
The Associated Press piece written by Eric Tucker shines the spotlight on Rudy Giuliani
portraying him as the messenger of Russian contrived information aimed at damaging Biden and
influencing the election. It starts off referring to "a New York tabloid's puzzling account
about how it acquired emails purportedly from Joe Biden's son has raised some red flags." Then
claims that during Giuliani's travels abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens he developed
relationships with some rather questionable figures. These include a Ukrainian lawmaker who
U.S. officials have described as a Russian agent and part of a broader Russian effort to
denigrate the Democratic presidential nominee.
The piece then moves on to the area of how the FBI seems more interested in the emails as
part of a foreign influence operation than wrongdoing by Hunter or his father. The people
reading this article are informed how this is just another latest episode involving Giuliani
that "underscores the risk he poses to the White House" which has spent years dealing with a
federal investigation into whether Trump associates had coordinated with Russia.
The part of the article that got my goat was when it referred to how " The Washington Post
reported Thursday that intelligence agencies had warned the White House last year that Giuliani
was the target of a Russian influence operation." Sighting the Washington Post as an authority
and bastion of truth is a common tactic used by journalists to add validity to their bias and
lazy reporting. Tucker forgot to mention The Washington Post is the propaganda mouthpiece of
Amazon and owned by its CEO Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world which has had several
run-ins with the President.
The effort to denigrate Giuliani rather than focus on Biden wrongdoings cites both "former
officials' and statements made by a person "who was not authorized to discuss an ongoing
investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity to AP," and of course, the exact scope of
what was being investigated was not clear. Claiming that many people in the West Wing have been
concerned about Giuliani's actions or saying the president has expressed private dismay at
Giuliani's scattershot style does not make it true.
Thinking a case can be made that Hunter enriched himself by selling access to his father but
claiming Giuliani's lack of credibility will cause the allegations to implode is a bit of a
reach. This fact much of what appears to be bribe-taking at the highest levels of government
has been overlooked for so long is in its self is a problem. The appointment of an unqualified
Hunter Biden to the board of a Ukrainian energy company with a reported compensation package
worth some $50,000 per month led the Wall Street Journal, to publish a scathing article, on May
13, 2014. bringing the issue before the public.
At criminal.findlaw.com, FindLaw's team of legal writers and editors detail what constitutes
bribery. It is offering or accepting anything of value in exchange to influence a
government/public official or employee. Bribes can take many forms of gifts or payments of
money in exchange for favorable treatment, such as awards of government contracts. Other forms
of bribes may include property, various goods, privileges, services, and favors. Bribes are
always intended to influence or alter the action of various individuals and are linked to both
political and public corruption. In most situations, both the person offering the bribe and the
person accepting can be charged.
Both giving and receiving bribes is usually a felony with significant legal ramifications.
Influence peddling, the illegal practice of using one's influence in government or connections
with persons in authority to obtain favors or preferential treatment falls into this category.
One thing is clear, whenever we are talking about the involvement of huge sums of money,
foreign players, officials holding high public office, or family members of politicians a few
eyebrows should get raised. With this in mind, the Biden problem extends well past Hunter but
also into how other family members have profited from Joe's time as Vice President such as his
brother's involvement in a huge government contract in Iraq.
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The issue of Hunter Biden receiving money from Russia, Ukraine, and China surfaced during
the first Presidential debate and Biden claimed it was a story already discredited by
authorities. This narrative was destroyed when the Washington Times acknowledged the Treasury
Department records confirm Hunter Biden received a wire transfer for $3.5 million from the
Mayor of Moscow's wife. It is difficult to find anyone that holds Hunter in high esteem and the
fact the United States suspects the woman sending him this money built much of her wealth
through corruption does little to improve his standing. For those of us cynical of all the
so-called public servants that seem to line their pockets and hold the attitude they are above
the law this is a big red flag.
If the veil of secrecy surrounding Hunter's career is lifted we will most likely find
Hunter's dad did share in the spoils bestowed upon not only his son but others in the Biden
family. I contend Joe Biden's cozy relationship with corruption is why former President Obama
did not rush to endorse Biden when he announced he planned to run. To be clear, we are talking
about, millions, and hundreds of millions of dollars or more. For us cynics, we see this as
what may be only the tip of the spear when it comes to public officials throwing the American
people under the bus for fun and profit. As a voter, this dovetails with my concern about
Biden's relationship and attitude towards China which I consider a major issue.
Jan_Michael_Vincent007 , 4 hours ago
The [neoliberal] political class is the problem. ******* all of them. Biden just got
caught.
Jan_Michael_Vincent007 , 4 hours ago
The political class is the problem. ******* all of them. Biden just got caught.
RedDog1 , 4 hours ago
Highly recommend reading Peter Schweitzer's book Secret Empires. It's business as usual to
launder bribes through family members and associates.
philipat , 2 hours ago
Yes agreed, the problem here is actually that the entire US political (and economic)
system is completely corrupt and broken. Why has no action been taken against those
responsible for a proven attempted coup? Or against a MSM and SillyCon Valley that is
censoring everything the average American (rightlly or wrongly) actually reads and which is
stifling the very democracy and free speech upon which the country was founded?
The answer? Follow the money.
I do disagree with the author about the specific Biden situation because "The Biden Crime
Family" would be a better description. They are ALL responsible. It is obvious from the
Hunter laptop that payments were being made to "The Big Man" and other family members also,
so this is NOT a Hunter-specific problem. The game was for Hunter to serve as a proxy for
"The Big Man" and receive the "commissions" (better described as influence peddling payments
and extortion - something the Dems are very good at; The Clinton Foundation Model!!) for
onward distribution to the family, visibly or invisibly. In this way, "The Big Man" would not
have anything to report and could appear to be "clean". Pretty obvious to anyone who can fog
a mirror?
And yet still they vote for him. Does that mean a public acceptance of the sleaze and
corruption which is the US today? I certainly hope not.
Rural Hermit , 2 hours ago
Why do you think Obama picked Biden to be his VP? He knows how to shakedown everyone.
Obama's tutor. I do think that the student has surpassed the teacher though. When the rest of
this shakes out, the Kenyan will be in chains.
gregga777 , 3 hours ago
If the truth ever comes out, it will probably show that, among other things, Hunter Biden
was / is probably connected to human trafficking networks, and most likely Eastern European,
most likely involving The Russian Mafia. It's not a stretch to speculate that it also
included children.
If the United States of America had a functioning [sic] Intelligence Community and [Ha,
ha, ha] national law enforcement the Silicon Valley tech giants and others like Amazon
wouldn't be heavily infiltrated by People's Republic of China Ministry of State Security
operatives. Consequently, the massive extent of political corruption would be common
knowledge, especially specifics regarding names, dates, places and amounts. Right Paul Ryan
and Willard Romney?
Rusty Shorts , 3 hours ago
The hits just keep coming.
"Pelosi's Son Now Involved In Ukraine Scandal, Democrat Party In Shambles"
Seriously, does anyone think a Democrat controlled Congress will investigate Biden and all
his cronies, to include Obama? The whole DC swamp is set up to allow selling out of the
American people. DC is not just a threat to national security it is steeped in Treason.
No sense ranting as it does nothing. The only consolation is that stupid people who vote
Biden/Harris will get the crime and corruption they voted into office.
Stackers , 4 hours ago
In Roman times when someone was caught bribing a public official they would cut off his
nose, sew him in a bag with a wild animal, and throw that bag in the river
The problem with all this is that it is extremely well documented going back a number of
years of Hunter Jnr's shopping trips with his father and nothing has been done about it all.
Just search on Biden and China, Romania or Ukraine and then you see the "deals" that Hunter
gets every time.
Every f\/cking place that Biden turned up, Hunter was right behind with his hand out, like
some sort of mob shakedown. Did Biden senior tell Hunter what to do and who to meet because
junior doesn't seem that clever enough to come up with this on his own? That way, the money
also flows to junior who then funnels it to dad later on (which the laptop seems to
show).
Washington insiders know the f\/cking truth and are desperate to keep the gravy train
going. That is why they hate Trump. That is why Barr and co have no interest in getting to
the truth because they are all implicated. The swamp is very deep.
Merica101 , 4 hours ago
Human nature is swampy - that's why the Founding Fathers tried to design a system that
limited the "swampiness'. Unfortunately, they couldn't even begin to imagine the depravity
and games that are now being played. Pray.
Fuster-cluck , 3 hours ago
I have worked for a number of large multi-national corporations. In each, employees must
take an annual ethics course. The only approved amount you can spend on a client is $0. I
mean, no golf, no lunches, no tee shirts, no hunting weekends, zippo, nothing. If anyone in
your family is connected to government, it is automatically assumed to be a conflict of
interest, and you must remove yourself from any part of the dealings. These policies have
been implemented because of the intense fear of the unlimited penalties that may be applied
by goverment sponsored prosecutorial abuse.
So tell me, have those same standards been applied here? Ha. Ha. Ha.
Smilygladhands , 3 hours ago
i think we must implement a no fraternization rule between DC politicians and staff and
the media. too many personal relationships going on up there
TahoeBilly2012 , 3 hours ago
Tards have finally been caught out, no way back.
Look man, I never would have voted for HILLARY OR JEB, no f'ing way! I am a Ron Paul
Libertarian and I rolled the dice with Trump.
You Tards are all a gang of freaks. The fact you even halfway support Biden (or Hillary)
is pathetic. The only way you get change is sticking to your guns or having a Trump come
along and hope he is for the people and not a Satanic criminal, like the Biden's, the Bush's
and the Clinton's. What exactly is it that you freaks don't get and while Bernie may have
been somewhat more "authentic" than the rest, he's a friggin Bolshevik Commy, in his own way,
worse than them all, likely not as corrupt.
There's nothing left to the Dem Party, zero, zilch, it's a stinking rotting corpse relying
on Corporate Media lie after lie to try to compete with Trump. Hell, every Neocon has left
Trump and joined up with y'all. Geez, the stench!
Pathetic, disgusting, sick.
Lucius Septimius Pertinax , 3 hours ago
What bothers me about all this is the reaction of Democrats in general. They don't seem to
care what the Biden's have done, as long as they defeat Donald Trump. We seen this on a
smaller scale with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, it's all about sex manta. But in this
case we have what appears to be at least for now, almost a watertight case against Joe Biden.
And still no moral outrage at what Biden's family is up to? Guess I should not have been
amazed, but still hope their are a few thinkers left on the left that can still see the truth
when it bites them.
I expected the CNN's of the left to react this way. Further when their "the Russians"
excuse for everything, is exhausted, they will need someone else to blame, cause they know
Biden and son are as pure as the driven snow. Or at least the owners of all these so called
media news companies decide that Joe cannot win and flush the comode on him.
sirnzee , 3 hours ago
The media has done a terrific job of brainwashing half of America. So sad to be a part of
this. Who is to blame? The media, or the people who allowed their minds to be controlled the
way they are?
Fugly
Merica101 , 3 hours ago
Most of the MSM have their own agenda - a globalist agenda where the US is not their
priority.
12Doberman , 4 hours ago
Some deny the Biden's got the money which is absurd since the Senate report details the
wire transfers. Denial of facts seems to be a democrat trait.
chiquita , 3 hours ago
This is the Democrat philosophy--one of the best movie scenes ever.
Biden has used his family as bag men for graft since he was shaking down banks that
incorporated in Delaware for tax purposes.
He was MBNA Joe long before he became dementia Joe.
Totally vile corrupt dullard on his best day.
That is why the DNC wants him.
CogitoMan , 3 hours ago
Any person who has knowledge of Biden family crimes and still votes for him is beyond
deplorable.
Even demonrats that hate Trump IF they have at least minimum token of decency should
abstain from voting.
But alas, most of dumbocrats will vote for Biden even if he raped their daughters and shot
their wives.
This country with such moral attitude has no chance of survival, especially when tough
times come.
Sad, very sad.
12Doberman , 3 hours ago
Trump learned quickly that without powerful allies in powerful positions in the executive
agencies, within congress, and in the courts he's essentially powerless against this
corruption. Pelosi is involved in Ukraine...McConnell is up to his eyeballs in Chinese
graft.
Md4 , 4 hours ago
"Hunter Biden Is Not The Problem, The Problem Is His Dad"
Pops has been demonstrably crooked for years.
But... Hunter is not a child.
He's a grown man... with a law degree.
His problems are now...his own.
He can begin to recover...when he accepts responsibility for them...
Hotspice2020 , 4 hours ago
Stop treating mainstream media as "independent, objective, unbiased" they are "captured
media", and vassal servants to a hidden hand ruling elite ... as are the Bidens and K.
Harris. The Clintons were vassals before as was slamma Obama. The media will say whatever
their master tell them to say. Thus, when a Hard Drive with pedo, crack, bribery is found,
the masters say...blame it on the Russians. When Trump wants to bring Hunters double dealing
to light...the masters say.. Impeach Trump. What is needed is for a bright light to shine on
the owners of the media...e.g., Bezos Rag (Wash. Post) and Laurene Powell Jobs (mistress to
Steve) owns the Atlantic. Once you keep focusing on the fact that the media has owners that
make every story fit their narrative and you shine a light on them, then you can solve the
problem.
tyberious , 5 hours ago
Term limits
Full income disclosures while in office
No benefit for any legislation co-authored after leaving office
zerozerosevenhedgeBow1 , 4 hours ago
No honor, integrity or honesty in politics anymore. Why would there be any, when apart for
a little public shaming, corruption pays and pays big. The Clinton foundation raked in
hundreds of millions, altered policy and maybe even caused death of the impoverished, i.e.,
Haiti and other places. Sold out national and global security with Uranium One and other
controversies. The end result?... They got to keep all the money. When that happens, everyone
in and running for office gets the message and sees dollar signs.
You need serious recourse like some sort of treason charges when you put money over
country. Audit all family members and colleagues. Then do not let lobbying jobs before or
after office.
moneybots , 3 hours ago
"The Associated Press piece written by Eric Tucker shines the spotlight on Rudy Giuliani
portraying him as the messenger of Russian contrived information aimed at damaging Biden and
influencing the election. It starts off referring to "a New York tabloid's puzzling account
about how it acquired emails purportedly from Joe Biden's son has raised some red
flags.""
Yes, it raises Red Flags about the integrity of the Associated Press, considering the
story is a propaganda piece.
Merica101 , 4 hours ago
Joe and Hunter Biden (and the Biden family) aren't the ONLY ONES....there are many
others.
toady , 4 hours ago
The questions that simply are not being asked/answered....
I have not heard that any Biden has been asked about any of this... apparently they
thought they could just have CNN and the other talking heads say it was all "debunked" and
the brain dead general population would nod and say "okay".
And they were right, the demonrats are all just doing the Alfred E Numan "who, me,
worry?"
It's simple. The "17 intelligence agencies" need to be all over this, starting 15 years
ago.
But they aren't. And they won't. And the US will not recover.
TheLastMan , 3 hours ago
perspective:
1. you work 50 hours a week
2. .gov takes 22% for income tax
3. joe biden (and the rest) take your tax $$$ and provides $$$ foreign aid to country
X
4. hunter biden makes business connection to country x
5. country x takes your foreign aid tax dollars (edit) and pays hunter biden $$ for his
services
6. hunter biden pays joe biden $$ for (his service to your country) edit - servicing your
country
7. repeat step 1
Smilygladhands , 3 hours ago
the biggest problem that must be addressed is our dishonest, biased DNC propaganda arm
also known as main stream media.
they've allowed biden to get away with not answering the SCOTUS packing question and now
actively running cover for him. we cannot allow this to continue
Md4 , 4 hours ago
" Both giving and receiving bribes is usually a felony with significant legal
ramifications. Influence peddling, the illegal practice of using one's influence in
government or connections with persons in authority to obtain favors or preferential
treatment falls into this category."
When it involves a mortal adversary... we call it something else...
HailAtlantis , 4 hours ago
Always lots of fun this time of year taking Anti-Money Laundering etc continuing education
courses and reading about high level scandals in finance and governments in current news
(it's just gotten progressively more insidious every year).. Scrutinizing little 'guys' while
making billions at the top.
johnny two shoes , 2 hours ago
Can't forget old Swiftboat Kerry...
At the time, Hunter Biden, now 49, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of then-Secretary of
State John Kerry, co-owned Rosemont Seneca Partners, a $2.4 billion private equity firm.
Heinz's college roommate, Devon Archer, was managing partner in the firm. In the spring of
2014, Biden and Archer joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that was
at the center of a U.K. money laundering probe. Over the next year, Burisma reportedly paid
Biden and Archer's companies over $3 million.
Electing a President is electing someone in formal command of enough power to kill most of
the people on the planet - perhaps three times over. Including you and me. This is not the
mayor of Minneapolis we're talking about.
vasilievich , 4 hours ago
To use biologists' terminology the species may not be adaptive. To be clever at graft does
*not* assure survival in the long run. It may assure extinction.
12Doberman , 4 hours ago
Biden wasn't clever. Hillary was a bit clever using a Foundation and a 'charity' to
launder her graft. Cost her 15% or so but she had the facade of the charity. Biden put his
crackhead son in charge of laundering the graft...needless to say it was careless in the
extreme...and the DNC knew all about this before they selected Biden. Stunning level of
arrogance.
chiquita , 4 hours ago
Nobody ever said Biden was a smart guy. He knew how to plagerize as in words (speeches),
but he didn't know how to copy as in ideas (charitable foundations)
SurfingUSA , 4 hours ago
Per someone on this forum who has met Biden, he is stupid not just by politician standards
but by everyday people standards.
coelacanth10 , 3 hours ago
Bill gets credit for using the Foundation, base on a undergraduate course at Georgetown on
non-profits and foundations.
chiquita , 4 hours ago
Obama had to know what was going on, if not a party to it. There was a clear distance
between the two of them--Obama did not show a great love for Biden and you have to wonder
what that was all about. He tried to tell Joe "he didn't have to do it" relative to running,
which leaves a lot open to interpretation. Trump keeps saying that Biden was not a bright guy
and that's pretty obvious in a lot of Biden's stories and his overall history. Obama knew
Biden wasn't the smartest guy too. Was Obama trying to tell Joe to leave well enough alone
and not run for the presidency, which would surely expose all this stuff? There was a good
chance Biden wasn't going to get this far, but now see what has happened. You have to wonder
what is at play with this--why didn't they shut Biden down before it got this far?
How COVID-19 may help IMF to reshape global economy (Full show) 16 Oct, 2020 20:42 17
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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is offering loans to the world's poorest 81 countries
to help them rebuild their devastated economies, still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. But
accepting such loans paves the way for increased austerity, privatization, and greater income
inequality. RT America's Alex Mihailovich explains. Then former UK MP George Galloway joins RT
America's Faran Fronczak (in for Rick Sanchez) to weigh in. RT's Peter Oliver examines the
skyrocketing number of COVID-19 cases across Europe and the reimposition of harsh restrictions
to stymie its spread. Legal and media analyst Lionel and civil rights attorney Robert Patillo
debate proposals aimed at mitigating the perceived influence of the Federalist Society in US
courts. RT America's Trinity Chavez reports on the recent flyby of Venus where the BepiColombo
probe captured amazing new images of the planet. Plus, RT America's Steve Christakos joins for
"Jock Talk."
It appears the "Russia, Russia, Russia" cries from Adam Schiff and his dutiful media peons
is dead (we can only hope) as Director of National Intel John Ratcliffe just confirmed to Foxx
Business' Maria Bartiromo that:
"Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign."
As Politico's Quint Forgey details
(@QuintForgey) , DNI Ratcliffe is asked directly whether accusations leveled against the
Bidens in recent days are part of a Russian disinformation effort.
He says no:
"Let me be clear. The intelligence community doesn't believe that because there is no
intelligence that supports that."
" We have shared no intelligence with Chairman Schiff or any other member of Congress that
Hunter Biden's laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign. It's simply not true.
"
"And this is exactly what I said would I stop when I became the director of national
intelligence, and that's people using the intelligence community to leverage some political
narrative."
"And in this case, apparently Chairman Schiff wants anything against his preferred
political candidate to be deemed as not real and as using the intelligence community or
attempting to use the intelligence community to say there's nothing to see here."
"Don't drag the intelligence community into this. Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of
some Russian disinformation campaign. And I think it's clear that the American people know
that."
So "the emails are Russian" narrative serves the interests of political convenience,
partisan media ratings, and the national security state's pre-planned agenda to continue
escalating against Russia as part of its
slow motion third world war against nations which refuse to bow to US dictates, and
you've got essentially no critical mainstream news coverage putting the brakes on any of it.
This means this narrative is going to become mainstream orthodoxy and treated as an
established fact, despite the fact that there is no actual, tangible evidence for it.
Joe Biden could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and the mainstream
press would crucify any journalist who so much as tweeted about it. Very
little journalism is going into vetting and challenging him, and a great deal of the
energy that would normally be doing so is going into ensuring that he slides right into the
White House.
If the mainstream news really existed to tell you the truth about what's going on,
everyone would know about every questionable decision that Joe Biden has ever made,
Russiagate would never have happened, we'd all be acutely aware of the fact that powerful
forces are pushing us into increasingly aggressive confrontations with two nuclear-armed
nations, and Trump would be grilled about
Yemen in every press conference.
But the mainstream news does not exist to tell you the truth about the world. The
mainstream news exists to advance the interests of its wealthy owners and the status quo upon
which they have built their kingdoms. That's why it's
so very, very important that we find ways to break away from it and share information
with each other that isn't tainted by corrupt and powerful interests.
As we detailed previously, as the Hunter Biden laptop scandal threatens to throw the 2020
election into chaos with what appears to be solid, undisputed evidence of high-level corruption
by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, the same crowd which peddled the
Trump-Russia hoax is now suggesting that Russia is behind it all .
To wit, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who swore on National television
that he had evidence Trump was colluding with Russia - now says that President Trump is handing
the Kremlin a "propaganda coup from Vladimir Putin."
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) has gone full tin-foil , suggesting that Giuliani was a 'key
target' of 'Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda.'
2/ Russia knew it had to play a different game than 2016. So it built an operation to cull
virulently pro-Trump Americans as pseudo-assets, so blind in their allegiance to Trump that
they'll willingly launder Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda.
Yet, if one looks at the actual facts of the case - in particular, that Hunter Biden appears
to have dropped his own laptops off at a computer repair shop, signed a service ticket , and
the shop owner approached the FBI first and Rudy Giuliani last after Biden failed to pick them
up, the left's latest Russia conspiracy theory is quickly debunked .
This is the story of an American patriot, an honorable man, John Paul Mac Issac, who tried
to do the right thing and is now being unfairly and maliciously slandered as an agent of
foreign intelligence, specifically Russia. He is not an agent or spy for anyone. He is his own
man. How do I know? I have known his dad for more than 20 years. I've known John Paul's dad as
Mac. Mac is a decorated Vietnam Veteran, who flew gunships in Vietnam. And he continued his
military service with an impeccable record until he retired as an Air Force Colonel. The crews
of those gunships have an annual reunion and Mac usually takes John Paul along, who volunteers
his computer and video skills to record and compile the stories of those brave men who served
their country in a difficult war.
This story is very simple – Hunter Biden dropped off three computers with liquid
damage at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware on April 12, 2019. The owner, John Mac Issac,
examined the three and determined that one was beyond recovery, one was okay and the data on
the harddrive of the third could be recovered. Hunter signed the service ticket and John Paul
Mac Issac repaired the hard drive and down loaded the data . During this process he saw some
disturbing images and a number of emails that concerned Ukraine, Burisma, China and other
issues . With the work completed, Mr. Mac Issac prepared an invoice, sent it to Hunter Biden
and notified him that the computer was ready to be retrieved. H unter did not respond . In the
ensuing four months (May, June, July and August), Mr. Mac Issac made repeated efforts to
contact Hunter Biden. Biden never answered and never responded. More importantly, Biden stiffed
John Paul Mac Issac–i.e., he did not pay the bill.
When the manufactured Ukraine crisis surfaced in August 2019, John Paul realized he was
sitting on radioactive material that might be relevant to the investigation. After conferring
with his father, Mac and John Paul decided that Mac would take the information to the FBI
office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mac walked into the Albuquerque FBI office and spoke with an
agent who refused to give his name. Mac explained the material he had, but was rebuffed by the
FBI. He was told basically, get lost . This was mid-September 2019.
Two months passed and then, out of the blue, the FBI contacted John Paul Mac Issac. Two FBI
agents from the Wilmington FBI office–Joshua Williams and Mike Dzielak–came to John
Paul's business . He offered immediately to give them the hard drive, no strings attached.
Agents Williams and Dzielak declined to take the device .
Two weeks later, the intrepid agents called and asked to come and image the hard drive. John
Paul agreed but, instead of taking the hard drive or imaging the drive, they gave him a
subpoena. It was part of a grand jury proceeding but neither agent said anything about the
purpose of the grand jury. John Paul complied with the subpoena and turned over the hard drive
and the computer.
In the ensuing months, starting with the impeachment trial of President Trump, he heard
nothing from the FBI and knew that none of the evidence from the hard drive had been shared
with President Trump's defense team.
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The lack of action and communication with the FBI led John Paul to make the fateful decision
to contact Rudy Giuliani's office and offer a copy of the drive to the former mayor. We now
know that Rudy accepted John Paul's offer and that Rudy's team shared the information with the
New York Post.
John Paul Mac Issac is not responsible for the emails, images and videos recovered from
Hunter Biden's computer. He was hired to do a job, he did the job and submitted an invoice for
the work. Hunter Biden, for some unexplained reason, never responded and never asked for the
computer. But that changed last Tuesday, October 13, 2020. A person claiming to be Hunter
Biden's lawyer called John Paul Mac Issac and asked for the computer to be returned. Too late.
That horse had left the barn and was with the FBI.
John Paul, acting under Delaware law, understood that Hunter's computer became the property
of his business 90 days after it had been abandoned.
At no time did John Paul approach any media outlet or tabloid offering to sell salacious
material . A person of lesser character might have tried to profit. But that is not the essence
of John Paul Mac Issac. He had information in his possession that he learned, thanks to events
subsequent to receiving the computer for a repair job, was relevant to the security of our
nation. He did what any clear thinking American would do–he, through his father,
contacted the FBI. When the FBI finally responded to his call for help, John cooperated fully
and turned over all material requested .
The failure here is not John Paul's . He did his job. The FBI dropped the ball and, by
extension, the Department of Justice. Sadly, this is becoming a disturbing, repeating
theme–the FBI through incompetence or malfeasance is not doing its job.
Any news outlet that is publishing the damnable lie that John Paul is part of some
subversive effort to interfere in the United States Presidential election is on notice. That is
slander and defamation. Fortunately, the evidence from Hunter Biden's computer is in the hands
of the FBI and Rudy Giuliani and, I suspect, the U.S. Senate. Those with the power to do
something must act. John Paul Mac Issac's honor is intact. We cannot say the same for those
government officials who have a duty to deal with this information.
This is not leftist coup. This is intelligence agencies coup. Big difference. And Obama who
is the most probably mastermind and coordinator is as far from leftist as one can get, he is a
typical neoliberal with neocon inclinations, servant of the USA empire with probably some
delusions of American exeptionalism.
The statement " On August 18, 1991, with Mikhail Gorbachev preparing to sign a treaty that
would have decentralized the Soviet Union, his hardline political opponents in the Soviet
leadership arrested the father of perestroika at his Crimean dacha, proclaiming that the
Soviet State Committee on the State of Emergency was in charge." is naive and is not supported by
the facts. Gorbachov probably organized this coup to give himself a chance to get back control of
the country that was spinning out of his control. He failed and that was the end of his political
career of a sleazy second rate politician.
Our country seems headed for a political crisis, with the enemies of Deplorable America
making noises suggesting they are
planning a post-election "
Color Revolution "-type coup against Trump. As a long-time Russia-watcher,
I suggest that the failed Soviet coup of 1991, and the collapse
that it spurred on, is instructive.
The Soviet State Committee on the State of Emergency,
August, 1991
The key point that year came when Soviet military and security units refused to move against
Boris Yeltsin and his defenders. Could something like that happen here, with Trump playing the
Yeltsin role?
Meanwhile, the Democrats, with help from rabid Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol and
David Frum, have been " wargaming
" scenarios for preventing Trump from taking office should he win, developing a
plan for what Trump has correctly described as "an insurrection." [ The
Billionaire Backers of the 'Insurrection' , by Julie Kelly, AmGreatness.com, Sep 14, 2020]
The plan is to claim that Trump has stolen, or attempted to steal, the election. "As far as our
enemies are concerned," as I wrote here last month, "they are on the right side of history, and
neither election law nor the Constitution or any antiquated notions about fair play will stop
them." [
Revolution and Resistance: How can elections continue? , American Remnant, September 4,
2020]
The mail-in balloting plan plays into the Blob's wargaming. If the Democrats can't swing the
election their way by hook or crook, then the lengthy
process of
accounting for all the mail-in ballots could be used as a means to sow confusion and chaos,
giving them room to maneuver in the aftermath of Election Day.
The Blob's minions have been signaling their intention to drag out the vote count. Michigan
Governor
Gretchen Whitmer , for example, declared on Face the Nation that her state would not be
held to any "artificial deadlines" for reporting election results. [
MI Gov. Whitmer: No 'Artificial Deadlines' for Announcing Election Results , by Jeff
Poor, Breitbart, October 11, 2020] In an example of the psychological projection characteristic
of Democrats, Whitmer further claimed that those who might want to expedite the vote count had
"political agendas."
Meanwhile, the Blob's militant wing has been circulating a plan for post-election
disruption. [
READ: Left-wing Radicals Post Online Guide to 'Disrupting' the Country if Election is Close
, by Joel Pollak, Breitbart, October 12, 2020] A Leftist group calling itself ShutDownDC [ Tweet them ] plans to prevent a Trump "coup" -- more
projection
there -- by shutting down the country and forcing Trump out if the vote is too close to call.
The
plan calls for "sustained disruptive movements all over the country." The militants also
state that they intend to demand that "no winner be announced until every vote is counted."
ShutDownDC further proclaims that it has no intention of allowing the country to return to
normal. The goal is to "dismantle" what it calls "interlocking systems of oppression."
In the chaos that appears increasingly likely after Election Day, we may not even have a
clear idea of what happened–-and, indeed, that may be part of the Blob's design.
In a recent segment on "Critical Race Theory" gaining traction at the Pentagon, Tucker
Carlson wondered just why the Left was so intent on capturing the military.
My answer: the Blob was contemplating the possibility of using the military as part of an
attempt to block a second Trump term.
It's quite clear that the top military brass has been subject to "the Great Awokening"
and Trump Derangement Syndrome as much as the rest of the federal bureaucracy. The military
Establishment has steadfastly resisted Trump's inclination to disengage from foreign
interventions. Moreover, the Pentagon has also resisted Trump's order to stop
indoctrinating its personnel in "Critical Race Theory." [
Trump's Anti-Critical Race Theory Order is Necessary But Insufficient , By Timon Cline,
AmGreatness.com, October 5, 2020]
In his book Rage , Bob Woodward
reports that former Defense Secretary and retired Marine General James Mattis once
commented to then Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats that "There may come a time when
we have to take collective action" against Trump, since Mattis deemed the president "dangerous"
and "unfit." [
Mattis told Coats Trump is 'dangerous,' 'unfit': Woodward book , by Tal Axelrod, The Hill,
September 9, 2020]
It's likely that General Mattis's view of Trump is widely shared among top level military
officers.
So how might the military figure into the Blob's wargaming plans? Peter van Buren has
contemplated a post-election scenario in which a "temporary" military government might be
pitched as the only way to break an electoral deadlock and end post-election disorder. [
What
if Trump Won't Leave The White House? The fearmongers are at it again, this time with their
mantle-holder Biden, warning of the coming dictatorship. , American Conservative, June 30,
2020] Van Buren reminded us that Trump's opponents have never accepted his legitimacy, that
"RussiaGate" was good practice for them -- good practice for a coup, that is -- and that they
are gearing up for an all-out effort to dislodge him from the White House.
Obama, Comey And
Eric Holder In The White House
Van Buren further noted that Joe Biden, who has claimed that it is Trump who "is going to
try and steal this election," has also stated quite plainly that if Trump refuses to leave the
White House, he is "absolutely convinced" that the military would "escort him from the White
House with great dispatch." [
Biden: Military Will Remove Trump From the White House if He Refuses to Leave, by Julie
Ross, Daily Beast, June 11, 2020]
It's worth mentioning that van Buren is not a Trump supporter, was a career foreign service
officer, and is an honest man, an Iraq war whistleblower who wrote an excellent book,
We Meant Well: How I
Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People , on his
experiences in that country. I reviewed it here ). He
does not believe that a Pentagon-backed coup is merely "paperback thriller material." It's a
plausible scenario.
Nevertheless, an attempt to use the military to block Trump's re-election could result in
the coup plotters stepping into a trap of their own making.
This is what happened in the failed 1991 coup attempt in the Soviet Union.
On August 18, 1991, with Mikhail Gorbachev preparing to sign a treaty that would have
decentralized the Soviet Union, his hardline political opponents in the Soviet leadership
arrested the father of perestroika at his Crimean dacha, proclaiming that the Soviet
State Committee on the State of Emergency was in charge.
The conspiracy against Gorbachev had been organized by KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov,
Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov and six other top level political and security officials. They
were alarmed by Gorbachev's reforms, which had already loosed centrifugal forces in the USSR
that threatened the power of the Communist party and the Soviet apparatus.
But within three days, the coup attempt collapsed.
Boris Yeltsin at the Russian White
House, August 19, 1991.
The coup collapsed because of resistance by then-Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin
and his supporters, and the refusal of elite military and security units to move against
them.
On August 19, Muscovites gathered at the Russian "White House," the seat of Russia's
parliament in central Moscow, and erected barriers around it. Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank
to address the crowd. Yeltsin condemned the State Emergency Committee as an unlawful gang of
coup plotters and called for military and security forces not to support the "Gang Of
Eight."
Major Sergey Yevdokimov, a battalion commander in the Tamanskaya Division, had already
declared his loyalty to Yeltsin (hence the tank on which Yeltsin made his historic stand).
Yevdokimov later said that early on he had decided that he would not fire on any
Russian citizens. As his battalion approached the "White House," one of Yeltsin's supporters
climbed on Yevdokimov's tank and asked him to come over to their side. The major made his
historically-significant choice, setting in motion events that would help thwart the coup.
KGB special forces units never appeared at the scene. When the planned assault on the
Russian "White House" ("Operation Thunder") failed to materialize after a brief skirmish, it
was clear that the coup was over. This was quickly followed by the collapse of the Communist
party and the Soviet administrative apparatus; and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
That was an
enormous surprise to the majority of Western Kremlinologists at the time.
Of course, the situation in the U.S. today is not exactly analogous. For starters, Trump is
operating in a hostile environment ("the Swamp") dominated and controlled by his enemies. The
generals are not on his side. It seems unlikely that a large group of citizens from the DC area
would quickly materialize to support Trump against some sort of military-backed coup.
It's possible, however, that Trump may not even be in Washington when a coup is set in
motion. This would leave him an opportunity to do what he does best -- hold mass rallies to
fire up his support base in "Deplorable" areas of the country.
If general disorder and a deadlock over the elections acts as a cover to deploy military
units, it raises the same question Soviet officers and men were faced with in August 1991:
Would the "boots on the ground" obey orders?
Trump may be disliked by top-level officers. But my sense is that he is popular with the
rank-and-file. What if a significant number of them refused to obey a clearly illegal order? It
may take only one Major Yevdokimov refusing unlawful orders for the whole plot to unravel.
The Deplorables have good reason to think the Blob will rig or otherwise reverse the
election results. The past four years have already taught them that. And the Blob's Main Stream
Media arm has been hard at it selling the Narrative of Trump stealing the election. The
Democrats' base appears to be ready and willing to accept drastic measures against Trump
and the Middle Americans they loathe.
The potential for a seismic political crisis is clear.
What we are witnessing is what I've called " the end of politics ." [
Chronicles , May 2019] American elections are becoming more like the zero-sum games they
are in the undeveloped world -- and were to some extent in
pre-modern Britain . A post-election crisis, especially a force majeure situation
precipitated by military intervention, would accelerate the centrifugal forces already at work
in the United States.
The failure of a coup attempt could do to the Democrats' "Coalition of the Fringes" what the
failure of the August coup did to the Communists in the USSR -- opening up
room to maneuver for what I call the American Remnant and VDARE.com calls the Historic
American Nation.
Given the circumstances, with the demographic ring closing in, that may be a providential
outcome.
I'm not as optimistic as Allensworth. Only one escort of the elites moved against
Gorbachev in 1991. Most of the rest held back. That allowed elite sector 2 to help Yeltsin
resist. Plus, the Jew Wolves of Wall Street swarmed in. So there's that.
The military the rank and file is heavily black, especially the career sergeants petty
officers who really carry out the officers orders. I think the Hispanic and White tank and
file will stay loyal. But follow orders from the anti White officer corps and black
sergeants
Consider the French Revolution. It didn't start till most of the officer corps were
revolutionary masons. The National Guards were revolutionary and so were the judges and
lawyers.
Every elite sector from the clergy through academia media professions and occupations
education both unions and employers Chamber of Commerce Association of manufacturers nurses
teachers Drs. Engineers construction probably big Agricultural which is all that matters any
more. Every organized group is against Trump
All Trump has is us individuals maybe half the adult population but just unorganized
individuals The Republican Party is organized but just as anti Trump and anti White as the
most hysterical liberals and Democrats.
Vindemann Jew immigrant colonel inserted into a position where he could get General Flynn
charged wit crime and the elected president impeached. There's Millions of Vindemanns in
tactical and strategic positions all over the country in every sector. The anti Trump anti
White revolutionaries already own media and communications
I hope I'm wrong. But what's been happening in America for the last 56 years and the
acceleration since 2016 fits the pattern of every successful revolution in the last 500
years.
"... The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies. ..."
"... One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony at home. ..."
The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic
repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and
British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical
thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies.
One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually
impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony
at home.
After several color revolutions succeeded, the Russiagate/Spygate op was carried out in
the US, with British assistance. This op has been largely successful, though there has been
limited resistance against its whole fake edifice as well as with the logic of Cold War2.0.
Nevertheless, Spygate has shocked many tens of millions of Dems into a stupor, while millions
more are dazed and manipulated by the Chinese bogeyman being manufactured by Trump.
The most dangerous result of the martial law lite mentality caused by Spygate and its MSM
purveyors is the growing support for censorship of free speech coming mostly from the Dems,
such as Schiff and Warner. The danger inherent in this trend became very clear when FaceBook
and Twitter engaged in massive and unprecedented arbitrary censorship of the New York Post
and of various Trump-related accounts.
This is the kind of thing you do during Stage 1 of a coup. Surely it was at least in part
an experiment to see how various power points in the US would respond. Even though Twitter
ended the censorship later, it was probably a successful experiment designed to gauge
reactions and areas of resistance.
In November, there could be further, more serious experiments/ops. If so, the current
expansionist movements being made and planned by the US and NATO may well be integral parts
of a new non-democratic model of "American-style democracy" -- not constitution-based but
"rules-based."
"... "Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy supply 'here in Europe', saying that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis] ..."
Heavy oil is needed for the chemical industry (as opposed to transport). The three biggest
producers of heavy oil are Iran, Venezuella and Russia.
The US produces mostly light oil, thus it needs to import the heavy oil. Since the US
sanctioned Iran and Venezuella, the only significant option remaining is Russia. It would be
ironic if they are buying iranian oil sold to Russia.
"Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy
supply 'here in Europe', saying that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than
doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the world's second largest
importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis]
Now isn't that the interesting bit of news!! The greatest fracking nation on the planet
needs to import heavy oil (likely Iranian, unlikely Venezuelan) from its #1 adversary. As for
the end game, I've written many times what I see as the goal and don't see any need to add
more.
"... Corporate Democrats' anxiety and fear that they could lose control over the party became quite evident during latest party convention, as they tried hard to "bury" their own progressives while gave plenty of time to neoliberal Republicans and war criminals to speak. ..."
globinfo
freexchange
As we explained
previously, what we see now in the United States with Trump, is a counter-attack by the part of
the American capital against the globalist faction. The faction that is primarily consisted by
the liberal plutocracy. Therefore, as the capitalist class splits, the capitalists around Trump
are now taking with them the most conservative part of the American society, as they need
electoral power. They have the money and their own media network. Their first big victory was
Trump in the US presidency and this explains why the liberal media attack him so hard and so
frequently.
The COVID-19 pandemic added more chaos in the ongoing civil war between capitalists and (as
always), the working class is paying the price for the additional mess.
The DNC
establishment fought hard, one more time, to get rid of Bernie Sanders in order to impose its
own - fully controllable and fully dedicated to the neoliberal status quo - Joe Biden/Kamala
Harris duo. Obviously, this was an attempt by the corporate Democrats to challenge and beat
Trump without harming neoliberal order through a Socialist like Sanders in the leadership of
the Democratic Party. Still, the DNC establishment couldn't take full control of the whole
situation as the most popular progressives, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, renewed their
position in the party through big victories in the 2020 primaries. Furthermore, the progressive
army came out stronger through significant
additional victories like Cori Bush's.
Corporate Democrats' anxiety and fear that they could lose control over the party became quite
evident during latest party convention, as they tried
hard to "bury" their own progressives while gave plenty of time to neoliberal
Republicans and war criminals to speak.
And, actually, this is the main reason that the corporate Democrats want so desperately to beat
Trump in November's election.
With a potential Biden victory the corporate Dems will re-establish their position in the party
against progressives, as they will be able to play the Trump-scare card for four more years.
During that time, they will get all the help they want from the liberal media to bury forever
the most popular Socialist policies. Simply by claiming that the Trump nightmare could return
in 2024. Therefore, they will demand "unity" from all party members under their own terms, in
short, under full restoration of the neoliberal status quo. Under these circumstances,
corporate Democrats will have plenty of time to assist the liberal plutocrats to
take over directly the party in 2024.
On the contrary, with a potential Trump victory the Trump-scare card will be burned for good
and corporate Democrats won't be able to use it as Trump won't be able to have another term in
2024.
In that case, corporate Democrats will receive additional pressure from the progressive wing
and progressive voters, as these will demand radical changes inside the party towards popular
policies. The liberal capitalist faction will face the serious threat to be left without
political power, which by 2024, will be restricted to some moderate Republicans who are
dedicated to the neoliberal doctrine. The dream of the liberal plutocrats to take over
political power directly will die forever.
And this could be proved decisive for the outcome of
the endo-capitalist war between the liberal plutocrats and the Trump-affiliated
capitalists.
At this point American politics is a dispute among two Jewish factions, Trump is a pawn
of the Zionist faction and was targeted for destruction by the Cosmopolitan faction. Whoever
wins, we loose!
@Ghali
ary. The Israeli/Zionist elites care about their constituents opinions about as much as the
elites in any group. ZERO. There's a big club and we ain't in it.
The Israeli/Zionist elites wanted war with Iran or slapping them back economically to the
middle ages. Hillary was going to leave the Iran deal in place and Trump was going to tear it
up.
Trump paid for his re-election by murdering Solemani. Trump felt he couldn't start a war
in his first term so offered that up to get their support. He will be re-elected in big part
because he solidified his position with them as the anti-Iran candidate.
Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released an extraordinary statement on
Tuesday, decrying a political scene he said "has moved away from spirited debate to a vile,
vituperative, hate-filled morass, that is unbecoming of any free nation." "The world is
watching America with abject horror," he added.
Romney tweeted his statement under the title "My thoughts on the current state of our
politics." "I have stayed quiet," he said, "with the approach of the election." "But I'm
troubled by our politics," the sole Republican to vote to impeach Trump added in his
statement.
"The president calls the Democratic vice-presidential candidate 'a monster'. He repeatedly
labels the Speaker of the House 'crazy.' He calls for the justice department to put the prior
president in jail. He attacks the governor of Michigan on the very day a plot is discovered
to kidnap her. Democrats launch blistering attacks of their own, though their presidential
nominee refuses to stoop as low as others," Romney, a Utah senator who was the 2012
Republican nominee for president, complained in the statement.
Though superficially trying to appear "fair and balanced" in the didactic sermon
patronizingly delivered by the only adult in the room full of political upstarts, Romney's
perceptible bias in the polemical diatribe was hard not to be noticed.
It defies explanation if he didn't watch the presidential debate or consciously elided over
the sordid episode where the Democratic presidential nominee contemptuously sneered at his
political rival with derogatory epithets such as "a clown, a racist and Putin's puppy."
I'm not sure if Biden was high on meth during the debate, as Trump had repeatedly been
insinuating, or he lacks basic etiquette to act like a dignified statesman, but only
amphetamines could make a person take leave of his senses and insolently yell at the president
of the US, "Will you shut up, man," while ironically complaining, "This is so
unpresidential."
Though a longtime Republican senator, Mitt Romney's loyalty to the GOP was compromised due
to a personal spat with Trump. In the Republican primaries of the 2016 US presidential
elections, Romney severely castigated Trump, calling him "a phony and a fraud."
After Trump was elected president, he dangled the carrot of the secretary of state
appointment to Romney, invited him to a dinner in a swanky New York restaurant, made him eat
his words and fawn all over Trump like a servile toady. But later, he gave one of the most
coveted appointments in the US bureaucratic hierarchy to oil executive Rex Tillerson.
Romney felt humiliated to the extent that in Trump's vulnerable moment, after impeachment
proceedings were initiated against him in the Senate in February, Romney became the only US
senator in the American political history who voted against his own Republican Party
president.
Though lacking intellect and often ridiculed for frequent spelling errors on his Twitter
timeline, such as "unpresidented" and "covfefe," implying he gets his news feed from television
talk shows and rarely reads book and articles, Donald Trump is street smart and his
anti-globalization agenda and down-to-earth attitude appeal to the American working
classes.
Nevertheless, it's quite easy for the neuroscientists on the payroll of the national
security establishment to manipulate the minds of such impressionable politicians and lead them
by the nose to toe the line of the deep state, particularly on foreign policy matters. No
wonder national security shills disparagingly sneer at the president as the
"toddler-in-chief."
In 2017, a couple of caricatures went viral on social media. In one of those caricatures,
Donald Trump was depicted as a child sitting on a chair and Vladimir Putin was shown whispering
something into Trump's ears from behind. In the other, Trump was portrayed sitting in Steve
Bannon's lap and the latter was shown mumbling into Trump's ears, "Who is the big boy now?" And
Trump was shown replying, "I am the big boy."
The meaning conveyed by those cunningly crafted caricatures was to illustrate that Trump
lacks the intelligence to think for himself and that he was being manipulated and played around
by Putin and Bannon. Those caricatures must have affronted the vanity of Donald Trump to an
extent that after the publication of those caricatures, he became ill-disposed toward Putin and
sacked Bannon from his job as the White House Chief Strategist in August 2017, only seven
months into the first year of the Trump presidency.
Bannon was the principal ideologue of the American alt-right movement. Though the alt-right
agenda of the Trump presidency has been scuttled by the deep state, Trump's views regarding
global politics and economics are starkly different from the establishment Democrats and
Republicans pursuing neocolonial world order masqueraded as globalization and free trade.
Besides the Trump supporters in the United States, the far-right populist leaders in Europe
are also exploiting popular resentment against free trade and globalization. The Brexiteers in
the United Kingdom, the Yellow Vest protesters in France and the far-right movements in Germany
and across Europe are a manifestation of a paradigm shift in the global economic order in which
nationalist and protectionist slogans have replaced the free trade and globalization mantra of
the nineties.
Donald Trump withdrawing the United States from multilateral treaties, restructuring trade
agreements and initiating a trade war against China are meant to redress, at least
cosmetically, the legitimate grievances of the American working classes against the wealth
disparity created by laissez-faire capitalism and market fundamentalism.
Michael Crowley reported for the New
York Times last month that American allies and former US Officials fear Trump could seek
NATO exit in a second term. According to the report, "This summer, Mr. Trump's former national
security adviser John R. Bolton published a book that described the president as repeatedly
saying he wanted to quit the NATO alliance. Last month, Mr. Bolton speculated to a Spanish
newspaper that Mr. Trump might even spring an 'October surprise' shortly before the election by
declaring his intention to leave the alliance in a second term."
The report notes, "In a book published this week, Michael S. Schmidt, a New York Times
reporter, wrote that Mr. Trump's former chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired four-star
Marine general, told others that 'one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was
trying to stop him from pulling out of NATO.' One person who has heard Mr. Kelly speak in
private settings confirmed that he had made such remarks."
Crowley adds, "Donald Trump now relies on 'a team of inexperienced bureaucrats' and has
grown more confident and assertive, as he has already sacked seasoned national security
advisers, including John F. Kelly; Jim Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general and
Trump's first defense secretary; and H.R. McMaster, a retired three-star Army general and
Trump's former national security adviser."
In fact, the Trump administration announced plans in July to withdraw 12,000 American troops
from Germany and sought to cut funding for the Pentagon's European Deterrence Initiative. About
half of the troops withdrawn from Germany were re-deployed in Europe, mainly in Italy and
Poland, and the rest returned to the US.
Similarly, although full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan was originally scheduled
for April next year, according to terms of peace deal reached with the Taliban on February 29,
President Trump hastened the withdrawal process by making an electoral pledge this week that
all troops should be "home by Christmas." "We should have the small remaining number of our
BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas," he tweeted last week.
Even the arch-foes of the US in Afghanistan effusively praised President Trump's peace
overtures. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid
told CBS News in a phone interview last week, "We hope he will win the election and wind up
US military presence in Afghanistan."
The militant group also expressed concern about President Trump's bout with the coronavirus.
"When we heard about Trump being COVID-19 positive, we got worried for his health, but it seems
he is getting better," another Taliban senior leader confided to reporter Sami Yousafzai.
Moreover, Iran-backed militias
recently announced "conditional" cease-fire against the US forces in Iraq on the condition
that Washington present a timetable for the withdrawal of its troops. The US-led coalition has
already departed from smaller bases across Iraq and promised to reduce its troop presence from
5,200 to 3,000 in the next couple of months, though Iraq's parliament passed a resolution
urging the full withdrawal of US troops in January.
There is no denying the fact that the four years of the Trump presidency have been unusually
tumultuous in the American political history, but if one takes a cursory look at the list of
all the Trump aides who resigned or were otherwise sacked, almost all of them were national
security officials.
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In fact, scores of former Republican national security officials recently made their
preference public that they would vote in the upcoming US presidential elections for Democrat
Joe Biden instead of Republican Donald Trump against party lines.
What does that imply? It is an incontrovertible proof that the latent conflict between the
deep state and the elected representatives of the American people has come to a head during the
Trump presidency.
Although far from being a vocal critic of the deep state himself, the working-class
constituency that Trump represents has had enough with the global domination agenda of the
national security establishment. The American electorate wants the US troops returned home, and
wants to focus on national economy and redress wealth disparity instead of acting as global
police waging "endless wars" thousands of miles away from the US territorial borders.
Addressing a convention of conservatives last year, Trump publicly castigated his own
generals, much to the dismay of neoliberal chauvinists upholding American exceptionalism and
militarism, by revealing: "I learn more sometimes from soldiers what's going on, than I do from
generals. I do. I hate to say it. I tell the generals all the time."
At another occasion, he ruffled more feathers by telling the reporters: "I'm not saying the
military's in love with me. The soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren't
because they want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make
the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy."
Tom Fowdyis a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations
with a primary focus on East Asia.
His Holiness declining to meet the US secretary of state when he visited the Vatican on his
European tour further proves that his misguided America-first chauvinism is alienating more
nations than it's winning as friends.
Pompeo, everyone's favourite Cold Warrior and American chauvinist,
is on a European tour . Visiting Greece, Italy, Croatia, and notably, the Vatican, the
secretary of state is on a roll to win support for American security and energy interests
across the region. But he wasn't welcomed by all. Attending the Holy See today, the US' 'top
diplomat' found himself
snubbed by the Pope as he rolled into town peddling his vitriolic anti-China agenda, and
demanding the Church take on Beijing and refuse to renew a deal that gives it a say in the
appointment of bishops within that country. Pope Francis wasn't too impressed and refused to
meet him accordingly.
The snub is significant, because it reflects more broadly how Pompeo's highly aggressive and
evangelical foreign policy agenda is being received around the world. In short, it's a
shambles. Rather than respectfully and constructively engage with the interests of other
countries, on his watch, the State Department does nothing but pressure other nations. And it
does this while parroting the clichéd talking points of American exceptionalism,
hysterical anti-Communism, and a refusal to take into account the interests and practicalities
faced by its partners. The Vatican has its differences with Beijing, but how would embarking on
a collision course help it or the cause of Catholics in China? It wouldn't.
Pompeo is repeatedly described by major
US newspapers, the Washington Post among them, as "
the worst secretary of state in American history," and it's no surprise why. Diplomacy
requires the skills of understanding, prudence, compromise, calibration, and negotiation. The
current man in charge of America's relations with the rest of the world has none of those in
his armoury – only a one-sided diatribe about how every nation Washington holds a grudge
against is evil and a threat to the world, and the US' own political system is far superior (as
demonstrated by last night's presidential debate, perhaps ?). Pompeo repeatedly positions
himself as
speaking on behalf of other nations' people against their governments, while pushing a
policy that amounts to little more than bullying.
A look at Pompeo and the State Department's Twitter feed shows it to be a unilateral,
repetitive loop of the following topics: 'The Chinese Communist Party is evil and a threat to
the world', 'Iran is an evil terrorist state', American values are the best', 'We stand with
the people of X', and so on, ad nauseam. To describe it as hubris would be generous, and, of
course, it does nothing to support the equally inadequate foreign policy of the United States
in practice. This is further distorted by the unilateralist and anti-global governance politics
of Donald Trump, which place emphasis only on the projection of power to force other countries
into capitulating to American demands.
Against such a backdrop, it's no surprise that a toxic mixture of foreign policymaking has
led to other countries not being willing to take notice of Washington. It's winning neither
hearts nor minds, and it's this that has set the stage for not only the Vatican snub, but the
largely fruitless outcomes of his European adventures. Pompeo's visit to Greece produced no meaningful
agreements or outcomes of note , and he failed to get Athens to publicly commit to any
anti-China measures or even statements. A similar non-result was achieved from his visit to the
Czech Republic a month or so ago – the Czech prime minister even came out and
played down Pompeo's comments , after he engaged in a spree of anti-Beijing vitriol.
So, what's at stake for the Vatican? Undoubtedly, religion is a sensitive topic in mainland
China. The Chinese state sees unfettered religion as a threat to social stability, or as a
potential vehicle for imperialism against the country, and thus has aimed to strongly regulate
it under terms and conditions set by the state.
This has caused tensions with the Roman Catholic Church, which maintains a strict
ecclesiastical hierarchy, answering to the Vatican and not national governments. With China
being the world's most populous country, having among its vast population nine million
Catholics, this means the Church has had to negotiate and compromise with the Beijing
government to maintain its influence and control, and to secure the rights of its members to
worship. This has resulted in a 'deal' whereby the Vatican can have a say in the appointment of
its bishops in China, rather than the Church being completely subordinate to the
government.
But Pompeo doesn't care about these sensitivities – he wants one thing: Cold War. He
wants unbridled, unrestrained, and evangelical condemnation of China and, as noted above, is
utilizing his 'diplomatic visits' to push that demand. However, building a foreign policy on
preaching America First unilateralism, chauvinism, and zero compromise not surprisingly has its
limitations. As a result, Pompeo is finding himself isolated and ignored in more than a few
areas. Thus it was that, rather than completely squandering the Vatican's interests in
diplomacy with China, Pope Francis simply refused to meet him. For someone as fanatically
religious and pious as Pompeo, that's a pretty damning indictment of the incompetence within
the US State Department right now.
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By handing out a €6.5 billion fine against Gazprom, Warsaw has obviously and massively
miscalculated because it did not only antagonize the Russian energy company as was intended,
but also European partners of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project , which the Polish government
obviously had not considered.
Even leaders within the European Union were shocked at the huge fine that Poland is
attempting to impose against Nord Stream 2.
It may very well be that the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK)
has lost itself when deciding on the price of the fine against Gazprom. But regardless of that,
UOKiK has apparently also exceeded its jurisdiction . As the Düsseldorf-based energy
supplier Uniper reports, the existing agreements on Nord Stream 2 have nothing to do with a
joint venture, which is why the Polish laws on merger controls do not apply to them. The
initial plans were to finance the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline through the
establishment of a joint venture. For this, however, the companies involved should have
received a permit in all the countries in which they operate, as well as from Poland, the only
EU state that blocked this decision. The decision for it not to be a joint venture was made
without further ado so as not to waste time or money in a dispute with Polish authorities.
The pipeline partners designed an alternative financing model for Nord Stream 2 and instead
of joining Nord Stream 2 AG (Company) as a co-partner, the European energy companies are
participating in the project as lenders so that Polish antitrust laws do not apply to them.
However, Gazprom, the majority shareholder of Nord Stream 2 AG, has given its European partners
shares in the company as a mortgage for the financing provided. If the loans from the Russian
side are not paid, the European corporations automatically become the owners of Nord Stream 2
AG. Referring to this fact, the Polish antitrust authorities have declared the European partner
companies to be quasi-shareholders in the pipeline project.
With this UOKiK also justifies the exorbitant fine against Gazprom and the fines of around
€55 million against Uniper (German), Wintershall (German), Engie (French), OMV (Austrian)
and Shell (English-Dutch). Neither Gazprom nor Nord Stream 2 are financially at risk at the
moment and the Russian group has already announced that it will take the fine to court.
Poland is of course now aware that their attempts to fine the Nord Stream 2 project will
amount to nothing. The aim of the Polish government is not so much to force a large sum of
money from Gazprom in the long term, but rather to bury the pipeline project entirely. And this
is the part where Warsaw has grossly miscalculated, not only European reactions, but Russian
determination.
The goal to cancel Nord Stream 2 also explains why Polish authorities published their
decision last week. Relations between the EU and Russia are extra strained because of the
Navalny case and the situation in Belarus. France and Germany are working on new sanctions
against Russia for the Navalny case and continue to apply pressure against Belarus.
Another question is how effective these measures will be. Sanctions have long degenerated
into ambiguity as it is the usual way the West deals with Moscow. Russia has learnt how to
adjust their economy accordingly, meaning that sanctions have turned into a farce. The West is
regularly expanding its blacklists of sanctioned companies and private individuals, but there
has been no significant effect. Political forces with a keen interest in the failure of Nord
Stream 2 are plentiful in the West and they are currently advancing the Navalny case in the
hope that it will cut the EU from Russia more strongly or permanently. This will not occur as
Europe desperately needs Russian energy, which is why Nord Stream 2 is such a critical project
for all involved.
Poland plays the main role in trying to cancel Nord Stream 2 and the decision by UOKiK is
just another push to finally get Europe to abandon the pipeline project. According to a joint
declaration by France and Germany, measures are currently being prepared for those alleged to
be responsible in the Navalny case and their participation in the so-called Novichok
program.
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Despite these measures, Western Europe is bringing its energy project which is important for
its own future out of the danger zone, while Poland is attracting even more displeasure from EU
giants through its own operation. A penalty against Gazprom may be a Russian problem, but fines
against leading corporations from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Austria
are guaranteed to leave many of Europe's biggest capitalist angered. The effort Warsaw is
making to thwart Nord Stream 2 is visibly turning opposite to what they expected as there is
little doubt the Nord Stream 2 project will come to fruition and completion.
What is the dominant guiding principle of western societies today?
At the risk of sounding crass, let me suggest that it is the "cover your ass" or CYA
principle. This principle has always been fairly prominent in participative democracies. But
now it has gone into hyper-drive - so much so, that the CYA principle is also now an important
driving force even in financial markets.
CYA and Covid-19
Take the response to Covid-19 as an example of the CYA principle in action. Is there any
doubt that the rush to lock down economies and suspend normal civil rights -- to go to church,
to attend school, to visit friends -- in the face of Covid was driven largely by policymakers'
fears that if large numbers of people died, they would be held accountable in the court of
public opinion?
Of course, no policymakers want a surge in deaths on their watch. But economies did not get
shut down during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, nor during Sars in 2003, the Hong Kong flu
pandemic of 1969, nor even the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. So what changed between the time
of Sars and the time of Covid? One obvious answer is the rise of social media.
Now that every policy choice is reviewed and debated in real time by millions of people
around the world, CYA has become all-important. Politicians have to put policies in place to
hedge against the wildest tail risks imaginable. At the same time, the first instinct of
policymakers (and of investors -- but more on this later) is to avoid doing anything that
diverges too far from the pack. Any policymaker anywhere looking at the opprobrium heaped on
Sweden will surely agree with John Kenneth Galbraith's observation that "it is far, far safer
to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone".
Once Denmark and Norway had decided to follow Italy's lead and lock down their populations,
any western government that did not follow suit risked being accused of playing Russian
roulette with people's lives, regardless of the epidemiological evidence. Unfortunately, we
still seem stuck in this mindset, even as the weekly death tolls across western countries have
dipped to generational lows, almost regardless of the Covid policies they adopted (see the
chart below).
So, we should all be grateful that Donald Trump appears to be bouncing back from his brush
with Covid having taken little harm. Firstly, of course, Trump is human, and it doesn't do to
wish harm on another human. Secondly, if Covid were to have taken Trump's life, it would have
claimed the highest profile victim possible. And after the death of the US president, who can
doubt that anti-Covid measures would become even more liberticidal. Regardless what you think
of Trump, that would be a very bearish development, at least for "Covid-victims" such as energy
names, airlines, casinos, hotels, and restaurants , all of which are desperate for policymakers
to acknowledge that Covid-19 no longer seems to be as lethal as it was six months
ago.
CYA and the fiscal and monetary policy mix
Moving on to the far less controversial fiscal and monetary policy responses to the
recession, can there be any doubt -- again -- that policy is being driven above all by the CYA
principle? What policymaker wants to espouse the Hippocratic principle of "first, do no harm,"
and let markets and prices find their own footing? None. As Anatole has argued, policymakers
are scrambling always to do more, with ever-bigger budget deficits funded by ever-more money
printing ( see Will A Keynesian Phoenix
Arise From Covid? ).
Can this new enthusiasm for budget deficits and money printing guarantee prosperity? It
seems to for some individual stocks. But for the broad market? Perhaps not, or at least not in
"real terms". Take the equal-weighted S&P 500 as a proxy for the typical equity portfolio
(appropriate now a handful of mega-cap names dominate the cap-weighted index), and discount it
by the gold price to get a picture of equity returns adjusted for currency debasement.
When US governments keep spending under control, as Bill Clinton's did in the 1990s or the
Tea-Party-led Congress did after 2011, the broad equity market goes through long phases of
"rerating" against gold (see the chart below).
And when the government embraces expanding budget deficits funded by the Federal Reserve, as
with George W Bush's "guns and butter" policies or Donald Trump's rapid deficit expansion, gold
massively outperforms the broad equity market. Where does this leave us today? Since 2014, the
equal-weighted S&P 500 has delivered the same returns as a pet rock -- gold. This is
because the index has lost a third of its value since making a high in September 2018, and has
basically been flat-lining since late April (see the chart below).
This may help to put the current debate on US stimulus into context. First, does anyone
doubt that the US government will release a tsunami of new spending after the election? Because
of the CYA principle, what policymaker will want to be seen to be blocking recovery? Secondly,
will this increase in budget deficits, funded by the printing press, trigger stronger economic
growth? If so, why weren't we doing it before? Will it lead to higher asset prices? If so, why
are we so far off the 2018 high? Or will it mean further currency debasement? Looking at the
ratio between the equal-weighted S&P 500 and the gold price, will a new round of stimulus
mean a return to the February 2020 high? Or will it see the March 2020 low taken out?
Another way to look at this problem is through the prism of the US dollar. Will another
round of fiscal stimulus be dollar-bullish? Or will it be dollar-bearish? The answer matters
greatly to all those foreign investors currently seeking shelter in US equities. For them, the
return on US equities has been flat since late May - and going further back, flat since
mid-2019.
So, if another round of stimulus weakens the US dollar, as seems likely if the stimulus is
funded by the Fed, then foreign investors will have to hope that increased equity values will
more than compensate for their foreign exchange losses.
CYA and indexing
This brings me to what is likely the most important element of all this for readers: the CYA
principle and investing. Gavekal has written at length about the dangers of indexing (see, for
example, Exponential Optimization). We have also argued that indexing is the new in-vogue form
of socialism. Capital is not allocated according to its marginal return -- the foundation on
which capitalism rests. Instead, capital is allocated according to the size of companies. Just
as in the days of the old Soviet Union or Maoist China, the bigger you are, the more capital
you get. It is hard to think of a stupider way to allocate one of the key resources on which
future growth relies. So why is indexing so popular? Simple: it is the ultimate CYA
strategy.
As Charlie Munger likes to say: "Show me the incentives, and I will show you the outcome."
In a world where every money manager is told his or her target is to achieve a performance
close to that of the index, it is hardly surprising that ever-more money ends up getting
indexed ( see Indexation = Parasitism
). As a consequence, over the years the dispersion of results among money managers has become
smaller and smaller.
Now, the Holy Grail of money management is to achieve decent long term returns combined with
low volatility in those returns. However, in a world where ever-more capital is directed into
investments that outperform -- playing momentum rather than mean reversion -- you inherently
end up with greater volatility all round. Take the past few years as an example: since January
2018, the S&P 500 equal-weighted index has suffered six corrections of -10% or greater,
including one -20% drop and one -40% drop. In contrast, in the preceding two years -- January
2016 to January 2018 -- the S&P 500 did not see a single -10% drop, while the July 2016 to
January 2018 period didn't even see a -5% drop. Clearly, something in the environment has
changed.
More indexing makes sense from a CYA perspective, but ends up delivering lower returns and
higher volatility all round. This stands to reason. If capital is allocated only according to
marginal variations in the price of an asset, then the more the asset's price rises, the more
capital money managers will allocate to that asset. And the more an asset's price falls, the
less capital is allocated to it. Such momentum-based investing inevitably creates an
explosive-implosive system, which swings wildly from booms to busts and back again. And in the
process, capital gets misallocated on a grand scale.
In the 20th century, the goal of every socialist experiment was for everybody to earn the
same salary. In the 21st century, it seems that the goal of indexing is for everybody to earn
the same return. As we now know, fixing everyone's return on labor at the same price was a
disaster. People stopped working, and economic growth plummeted. Fast forward to today, and why
should we expect a different outcome if the end-goal of our investment strategy is to ensure
that everyone gets the same return, not on the their labor but on their capital? Isn't the
entire world of money management now oriented towards delivering this remarkable ambition?
And should we really be surprised if the growth rates of our economies continue to slip? Why
should we expect a positive growth outcome from an epic misallocation of capital? Take the
current Big Tech craze as an example: everything is organized for investors to sink ever more
capital into those very companies that need it least, and whose best use for this gusher of
money is typically to buy back their own shares.
This CYA investment-decision-making process appears to be one of the key drivers behind the
recent divergence between the S&P 500 market-capitalization-weighted index, and the S&P
500 equal-weighted index.
But it may also explain an interesting point raised by my friend Vincent Deluard, strategist
at StoneX. In a recent tweet (he's well
worth following) he noted that each of the last four major market corrections bottomed out
in the last week of the quarter, just after the index futures expired. Now, this could be a
remarkable coincidence. On the other hand, it might say a great deal about how capital is
allocated today.
Conclusion
In A Study Of History, Arnold Toynbee reviewed the rise and fall of the world's major
civilizations. He showed that throughout history, when any civilization was confronted with a
challenge, one of two things could occur. The elite could step up and tackle the problem,
allowing the civilization to continue to thrive. Alternatively, the elite could fail to deal
with the problem. In this case, as the problem grew, their failure led to one of three
outcomes.
1) A change of elite. An example is the clear-out of the French political class at the
time of decolonization. As the old Fourth Republic stalwarts struggled to meet the challenges
of Asian and African independence movements, they were replaced by Charles de Gaulle who
brought in new personnel and established the institutions of the Fifth Republic.
2) A revolution. Obvious examples include the French revolution, with the bourgeoisie
taking over from the aristocracy, and the American revolution, with the local elite taking
power from the British king.
3) A civilizational collapse. Examples include the collapse of the Aztec, Mayan and Inca
civilizations following the arrival of the conquistadores. Another is the disappearance of
the Visigoths in Spain and North Africa following the Arab-Muslim invasions at the start of
the eighth century.
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With this framework in mind, how does CYA as an organizational policy approach help in
dealing with challenges? The obvious answer is that if CYA is your guiding principle, the
problems you chose to tackle will be those where there is little controversy within the elite
about the required solutions.
This explains the constant hectoring about tackling climate change. Here, policymakers can
promise to spend lots of money, without leaving their backsides too exposed. This accounts for
the dramatic divergence between the performance of green energy producers (who produce energy)
and carbon energy producers (who also produce energy).
It may also explain the rush towards ever-more European integration, as if the real
challenge facing Europe today is a resurgence of the Franco-German rivalry that tore the
continent apart in the 19th and 20th centuries. Policymakers can spend entire weekends in
summit meetings debating European integration. This allows them to feel useful and important,
even if their debates increasingly seem about as relevant as the debates of the Byzantines over
the gender of angels even as the Turks were storming their city. But while pushing for more
European integration might not tackle any of the issues European voters actually care about, at
least it doesn't leave your behind exposed.
This brings me back to Karl Popper's theory that at any one time, there is a set amount of
risk in the system. Any attempt to contain this risk either displaces it to somewhere else, or
stores it up for later. If Popper was right, then the extreme aversion of our policymakers to
taking risks means that the risk must appear elsewhere. But where? Perhaps in financial
markets? It does seem not only that spikes in the Vix have been getting sharper lately, but
that the Vix is also staying more elevated than you would expect in the middle of a roaring
bull market.
Or, to put it another way, over the past few years, it does seem that the "downside gaps" in
markets have started to become more vicious.
So perhaps CYA makes sense in today's financial markets. The challenge, of course, has
become finding the instruments that allow you to cover your posterior. In March 2020, as equity
markets tanked, government bonds did not diversify portfolios adequately. And in September, as
equities fell -10% from peak to trough, bonds also failed to deliver offsetting positive
returns.
This new development -- that US treasuries no longer offer CYA protection for equity
investors in difficult times -- is an important one. It makes allocating capital to either
equities or bonds a lot more challenging. Or at least it becomes a lot more challenging if you
are compelled to follow contemporary western society's all-important guiding principle:
CYA.
Yes, I straightaway notified John Helmer to see if he is aware of these developments, and he
says they are incorporated in this story, which I am just now reading myself (early morning on
the MAYNE QUEEN for 'frontline workers' such as I).
The French must be envious: while they have to tolerate Pavlensky with his arson stunts
and sinister blackmailing of their politicians, the Germans only have to put up with Navalny
who can't stop shooting his mouth off in a different direction every time he opens it.
Although the day must be fast approaching when Berlin might wish Navalny silenced forever
before he embarrasses his hosts even more. The irony would certainly be rich and furthermore,
whatever transpires next against Navalny could parallel what happened to the Skripals in
2018. The difference is that Navalny may be walking into a trap with all eyes (and mouth)
open. He will have only himself to blame if his hosts decide to get rid of him
permanently.
Playing the devil's advocate, it could be that the bottle(s) were exfiltrated in another
manner which in itself raises other questions.
But I would like to know the serial number of the bottle(s). That way they could be traced
to whom the producers sold them to, so a) we can check whether in fact the hotel did purchase
them whether directly or by an intermediary store, or not; b) whether they were bought
elsewhere, i.e. the brand was noted at the hotel (during the recorded video 'discovery'
performance) .
It kind of sounds like they are lawyering up, or getting legal advice about what
Pevchikh's actions and movements prove. And so far, they're correct – a picture of her
apparently buying a bottle of water or some other beverage from a machine proves nothing. She
could have bought something entirely different, or just been standing in front of the
machine. She also could have drunk the water on the plane and left the bottle there; that's
quite true as well.
However, what do we have on their side? Video allegedly taken at the hotel in which they
are seen bagging up empty water bottles. They must have been quote sure that was the piece of
evidence they were looking for, since they took nothing else. And then what? There's no chain
of custody, and nobody who was not there has any idea what happened to these bottles, or
whether the ones allegedly delivered to the Bundeswehr or whoever are the same bottles
allegedly taken from the hotel. There must have been no end of opportunities to open the bags
– which are not proper custody envelopes, simply zip-loc bags which can be opened or
closed any number of times without any indication that this has happened – and tamper
with the contents. Nobody from Team Navalny other than The Bullshitter himself went into a
coma or even showed any symptoms although they allegedly handled evidence which was liberally
dusted with a weapons-grade nerve agent, and wore no personal protective equipment (PPE)
other than rubber gloves. Detective Nick Bailey, who allegedly spent weeks in the hospital
after touching a doorknob allegedly contaminated with the same nerve agent although he was
wearing leather gloves, proved that gloves are no defense against Novichok.
Mind you, this latest iteration was apparently specially engineered to be slow-acting. So
perhaps in a couple of weeks Pevchikh and/or Alburov will fall over jerking and drooling in
the middle of a sentence. We'll just have to wait and see.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has called "Novichok" a Western brand The chemical warfare agent called Novichok is a "purely Western brand" that has been
synthesized and is present in Western countries in about 140 variants, Russia does not have
it. This has been announced by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
"We officially confirm that all chemical weapons in Russia were destroyed under the
strictest international control. This time-consuming process was completed on September 27,
2017″, the foreign ministry has said in a statement.
They recalled that on October 11, 2017, the General Director of the OPCW's technical
secretariat certified the final destruction of chemical weapons in the Russian
Federation.
"As for the chemical warfare agent called "Novichok" in the West, its structure and
mass spectrum were first presented in 1998 in the spectral database of the American Standards
Institute (NIST 98). It is indicative that information on this substance came there from the
research centre of the US Department of Defense", the ministry has stressed.
The ministry has added that subsequently, on the basis of this compound, a whole family
of toxic chemicals had been formed that did not fall under the control of the CWC.
"They worked with it along with the Americans in no less than 20 Western countries".
the statement says.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has noted that the studies of Aleksei Navalny's
biomaterials conducted in Omsk did not reveal the presence of traces of his poisoning with a
chemical warfare agent.
"And the Charité doctors did not find them either. But the German military found
them. Almost a week later", the department has said.
Earlier, the OPCW said that its experts had confirmed the presence of toxic substances
in the samples of urine and blood taken from Navalny. According to the report, a substance
had been found in his body, similar in characteristics to Novichok, but not on the list of
prohibited chemicals.
The Russian diplomatic department has noted that this story has continued according to
a pre-planned scenario, and promised to provide a chronology of "behind-the-scene
manipulations of the main characters of this performance."
Note:
In 1997, the United States ratified the United Nations International Chemical Weapons
Convention treaty. By participating in the treaty, the United States agreed to destroy its
stockpile of aging chemical weapons -- principally mustard agent and nerve agents -- by April
29, 2007. However, the final destruction deadline was extended to April 29, 2012, at the
Eleventh Session of the Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention
at The Hague on December 8, 2006 -- source .
The primary remaining chemical weapon storage facilities in the U.S. are Pueblo
Chemical Depot in Colorado and Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky. These two facilities hold
10.25% of the U.S. 1997 declared stockpile and destruction operations are under the Program
Executive Office, Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives. Other non-stockpile agents
(usually test kits) or old buried munitions are occasionally found and are sometimes
destroyed in place. Pueblo and Blue Grass are constructing pilot plans to test novel methods
of disposal. The U.S. also uses mobile treatment systems to treat chemical test samples and
individual shells without requiring transport from the artillery ranges and abandoned
munitions depots where they are occasionally found. The destruction facility for Pueblo began
disposal operations in March 2015. Completion at Pueblo is expected in 2019. Blue Grass is
expected to complete operation by 2021 -- source .
According to the ministry, the structure and mass spectrum of "Novichok," which is
claimed to have been behind the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and
opposition figure Alexey Navalny, were first revealed in the mass spectral database of the
American Institute of Standards in 1998 (NIST 98).
And further:
The OPCW said on Tuesday that a substance similar to nerve agent Novichok, but not
included on the lists of banned chemicals, had been found in Navalny's system. The German
government believes the OPCW's statement actually confirmed the opposition activist's
poisoning with a Novichok group substance but admits that the substance in question is not
formally banned.
Russia has also said that the German Foreign Minister's address to lawmakers on the
"Navalny case" shows that Moscow is still subject to propaganda attacks.
"As for Heiko Maas' thesis that Russia's claims against Germany and the OPCW are
absurd, such remarks are outrageous and do not stand up to any criticism. All we want is to
get legal, technical and organizational assistance both in the bilateral Russian-German
format and via the OPCW in the interests of conducting a comprehensive, objective and
unbiased investigation of all the circumstances of the incident that occurred with Alexey
Navalny," the ministry said.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said earlier that Berlin will discuss with its OPCW
and EU partners a general reaction to the incident with Navalny, adding that the EU may "very
quickly" impose sanctions against those people who they believe are involved in the
development of chemical weapons in Russia.
Russian Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said earlier this week that
the incident with Russian opposition figure Navalny was used just as a pretext for
introducing sanctions against Russia that had long been in the works.
But, as I probably need not mention again, the provocation has served its purpose already.
The German Foreign Minister, who was once quite bellicose on the USA's bullying ways and, if
not a friend of Russia, was at least telling America "You are not the boss of us" on the
issue of energy projects with Russian partners, is now fighting with Russia and saying things
that cannot be taken back. All thanks to that otherwise-useless grifter, the German-Russian
relationship has suffered a serious blow. Merkel, the eternal pragmatist, will not be around
forever and I would not be surprised at all to see her declining health take her out of
politics altogether by the end of 2021, if she does not suffer a medical event which kills
her. She is not a well woman. With her gone, the Atlanticists in the German government
– who still constitute a significant influence – could well prevail, and dump
Germany right back into Uncle Sam's lap. At the very best, in such an eventuality, Nord
Stream II would be allowed to complete but the Germans would demand so much control over it
that it would be just as if Washington was running it.
Germany, France and the UK will push for EU sanctions on Russian individuals over the
alleged poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, saying they see no other "credible
explanation" for the incident than Moscow's involvement.
The proposals will target "individuals deemed responsible for this crime and breach of
international norms" as well as "an entity involved in the Novichok program," the
French and German foreign ministries said in a joint statement on Wednesday.
"No credible explanation has been provided by Russia so far. In this context, we consider
that there is no other plausible explanation for Mr Navalny's poisoning than a Russian
involvement and responsibility," the statement reads. Berlin and Paris said they will share
their proposals for sanctions with their EU partners shortly.
Later, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab added that the UK stands "side by side"
with France and Germany, declaring that evidence against Moscow is "undeniable."
Navalny fell sick on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow on August 20,
forcing the plane to perform an emergency landing. The anti-corruption activist was put into an
induced coma at a hospital in the city of Omsk and two days later was transferred to the
prestigious Charité clinic in Berlin at the request of his family.
The German medics who treated Navalny said that their tests revealed that he had been
poisoned with a substance from the Novichok group of nerve agents.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has also studied the samples
provided by Berlin, confirming the presence of a toxic substance from the Novichok group in
Navalny's blood and urine.
This contradicts the statements made by the Russian medics from Omsk, who insisted that they
had discovered no traces of any known poison in the activist's system at the time of his
admission to hospital.
Navalny, who has since emerged from coma and been discharged from hospital, said that he
blames Vladimir Putin for making an attempt on his life.
Moscow has repeatedly denied any involvement in Navalny's alleged poisoning and has accused
Berlin of failing to provide samples that would prove the use of the nerve agent.
'Novichok' became a household name after the chemical poisoning of double agent Sergei
Skripal and his daughter in the UK city of Salisbury in 2018. Western powers were also quick to
blame Moscow in that instance, slapping sanctions on Russia, before offering any solid evidence
of the country's involvement.
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"Joe Biden's 'war economy' policies are a radical break with the status quo."
Telegraph
"Bidenomics is a heady brew. The Democrats' $7.9 trillion blast of extra spending is a step
beyond Roosevelt's New Deal. It mimics the Keynesian expansion of the Second World War and
consciously aims to run the economy at red-hot speeds of growth.
If enacted in full, it is large enough to lift the US economy out of the zero-rate
deflationary trap of the last decade and entirely reshape the social and financial
landscape.
The stimulus will be corralled inside the closed US economy by Joe Biden's protectionist
"Buy America" policies, his industrial strategy, and his carbon border tax (i.e. disguised
tariffs against China). This limits leakage.
It is a laboratory of sorts for a post-globalisation experiment in what used to be called
"reflation in one country" – before the free flow of goods and capital emasculated
sovereign governments.
"It's quite likely that, just as in World War II, when we push down on the economic
accelerator, we will find that we have been running on one cylinder up until no w," said the
Roosevelt Institute, now advisors to the
Biden campaign .
This is why
Moody's Analytics estimates that Bidenomics accompanied by a Democrat clean sweep of
Congress would lift American GDP by an extra 4.8pc, add an extra seven million jobs, and raise
per capita income by an extra $4,800 over the next four years , compared to a clean sweep by
Donald Trump. Economic growth would rocket to 7.7pc in 2022." Telegraph -------------
Evans-Pritchard, the author of this piece baldly declares that the Trump tax cut failed to
stimulate economic growth and that a clean sweep by the Democrats in November would lead to
massive GDP growth and a reduction in present economic inequalities in American society. I will
be very interested in your comments. pl
That's a fine read Col. Thank goodness that after 47 years as a politician, including 8
years as VP - during which TARP did what? - Biden finally has a plan to Tax and Spend that
beats all the Tax and Spend plans that went before this one.
Just what is this getting spent on - the same things Obama-Biden promised, "green" (the
color of money) energy, solar charging stations and 1.5 million energy efficient homes
(didn't the Housing bubble cause a little economic problem?), 'educaiton'! I wonder if that
includes teaching us all critical race theory? and "infrastructure". And here I thought
broken records were out of style.
Where's the money coming from? According to Oxfordeconomics, which the Guardian links to,
Biden's raising taxes, but it won't lower consumer spending:
".... we estimate an overall multiplier of 0.25 for the individual provisions in Biden's tax
package. So, for every dollar of tax increase, households would reduce their spending by 25
cents. As such, while the proposal would generate a substantial revenue inflow, we
don'tbelieve it would significantly constrain consumer spending."
So what is the decline in corporate spending if you raise corporate taxes? The economists
at Oxfordeconomics conveniently left that out, nor did they eplicitly tell you that a decade
of tax revenue will still leave you with 60 years of tax burden from Joe's spending.
"On the corporate tax front, the most significant revenue raisers are:•A 7ppt
increase in the statutory corporate tax rate to 28%, which would raise $1.3tn over
10years.•An increase in taxes on foreign earnings.•A 15% minimum tax on global book
income.•The elimination of several real estate investment tax preferences." (Oooh look,
Trump's screwed! Yeah! I wonder how all those REITs look with that?)
Another unasked question: Who is going to do all that economy stimulating work if there is
a national lockdown due to Covid?
"LaRouche's comments were prompted by an article published in the Telegraph on May 19 by
British intelligence stringer Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, whose experience in orchestrating U.S.
impeachment drives for the British goes back to his attacks on President Bill Clinton.
Evans-Pritchard, on the eve of Trump's first trip abroad as President, is spreading the black
propaganda line that Trump might already be incapacitated, in much the same way as President
Richard Nixon was incapacitated by then-Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who "instructed
U.S. military officials to ignore any order from the Oval Office to use nuclear weapons."
Evans-Pritchard asserts that the key to overthrowing Trump is to pull Republican support
away from him, which he admits is still strong. But what happens next? He quotes Sir Jeremy
Greenstock, former British UN ambassador and now chairman at Gatehouse Advisory Partners:
"America can be very powerful if it decides to act hard. Xi Jinping and Putin will probably
wait and see whether Trump self-destructs." Evans-Pritchard then raises the question: How
will Trump behave "when the special prosecutor [Robert Mueller] starts to let rip with a
volley of subpoenas."
I like the idea of a Carbon Border Tax. Or at least the one proposed by the EU, as I have
not seen Biden's proposal. It has never made sense to me that we import from countries with
low environmental standards when our own manufacturers are handicapped.
But unless Biden can carry Democratic Senatorial challengers against GOP incumbents it
ain't gonna happen. It will be stalled in the Senate. There is no way McConnell will even
allow it on the Senate floor.
This thinking has been wrong, repeatedly so, for the last 10 years. The idea that there is
just one more pedal to push down to jumpstart the economy belies the truth that we have
experienced the most accommodative and expansive monetary policy on a global level in modern
times.
Aside from the lack of efficacy, which I may look to discuss at length later on, there is
another striking thing about this plan, and that is how it will be paid for. The reason is
not the traditional "where will the money come from" I know where it will come from, cheap US
debt, but it tells us two key things. The first is that the functional ideas of Modern
Monetary Theory (MMT) that you can basically just issue debt and have your central bank both
monetize it and keep the interest payments low and use that to fund largely unlimited
government spending have for the most part been endorsed by those on the left as a mechanism
to deliver on their grand plans. The second thing that is striking though is what they want
to spend the money on, which is military spending and infrastructure and not healthcare and a
green new deal. This calls into question what alignment there is on the cadres of the left or
the possibility that starting with infrastructure is a way to run cover to expand these
fantasy economics to social projects without reorienting the economy towards their
achievement.
Evans-Pritchard's talents are wasted on economic commentary. He writes well, but in the
breathless tones of a failed thriller writer. His entire worldview is based on the notion
that it is always two minutes to midnight. It's a shame that they put all of his stuff behind
a paywall.
Maybe if Biden's plan is approved we will finally see the inflation that Wall Street and
its media minions have been whining about for the past forty years.
I have no doubt that the collapsing pocket that is Conservative Inc will luxuriate back on
the familiar loser's ground of "fiscal responsibility."
Biden's plan, such as it is, simply marries the essence of Trump's nationalist policies
with Great Society spending levels. Like so much of his platform, it is designed to keep the
progressives on the plantation until Nov 3 and not one minute beyond.
Sure it will. The devil is in the details. When has any Democrat economic plan ever
produced intended results. First they have to confess what went wrong with their trillion
dollar "War on Poverty" that now requires another trillion to pretend to clean up that
grotesquely distorted mess.
Until they confess to their sins of the past, they are doomed to repeat them. How are they
going to remedy their decades of teacher union K1-2 fail turning out entire generations of
dysfunctional illiterates who are somehow going to be absorbed into this dynamite
economy.
They are sitting in the back room smoking dope and spinning tales. What I hear is wealth
confiscation and/or turning on the printing presses. Time for a good recap of Obama's initial
"Green Jobs Revolution" from his first term - who did those promise work out and why are we
having to undo the piles of excrement Biden First Term left behind.
I have a bad case of deja vu When in fact the Trump Tweaking was paying long term
dividends, until the deep state hijacked covid to destroy any possible Trump bragging rights.
Never forget Nancy Pelosi tearing up Trump's SOTU address and declaring they were all lies --
and then carrying out her covid porn agenda to make sure she was proven correct.
Remember the three generation rule - all revolutionary and planned economies always fail
by the third generation. Soviet Union, Margaret Thatcher's warning, Cuba, etc ......if all
the wealth in the world was redistributed, it would be back in similar hands three
generations later. Societies always stratify, even since the Sumerians.
America is unique primarily because of the mobility it offers between the strata by its
relatively free market system. Don't mess with it. Democrat's heavy handed planned utopia is
a nightmare.
I am no economist. However, I am not in debt. I am not wealthy, but I have all I need and
want. I've worked very hard during my life and enjoyed my jobs because they were suited to my
training and kislls. My retirement funds keep me comfortable. My two sons are doing well in
our current economy. That's, of course, a self-centered view of the situation.
But, with that in mind, I say this: "beware of Greeks bearing gifts." (I know Biden is not
Greek, but I hope you get my point.)
I am also remembering the Obama administration. I may receive only an Obama phone and an
EBT card.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is generally a very astute writer. However, on economics and
national fiscal policies and central banking he has bought into the Davos sophistry that
defies common sense for over a decade.
An example of this sophistry is this line from the passage in your post - "..lift the US
economy out of the zero-rate deflationary trap of the last decade...". Ask an average
American if they've seen any price deflation in their rents or house prices, their kid's
tuition, their health care premiums, their cost of pharmaceuticals, the cost of tacos at
their neighborhood taqueria, the cost of getting their shirt cleaned, over the past decade
and they'll laugh at you. The cost of living of average Americans have risen and that is the
real living experience. But of course if you're Ben Bernanke or Mario Draghi or Jerome Powell
or Ms. Lagarde then we are in a "deflationary trap" and they should print more and more money
that gets shipped first to their friends on Wall St. The Party of Davos as Jack called
it.
Under the government enforced lockdown, how many trillions has the US federal government
under the Trump administration borrowed from future generations in the first and now the
second stimulus waiting for approval? How many trillions did Jerome Powell print up and send
to his friends at Blackrock and Citadel?
GDP is a useless indicator IMO. Digging trenches and filling them up will raise GDP. A
very important indicator however is productivity growth. That has been lagging for many
years. Another are median household income & wealth, which has also been lagging. What
we've seen in the US is a dramatic increase in wealth inequality between the top 0.1% vs the
bottom 80% over the past 50 years and this curve continues to accelerate - second order
derivative!! The second is the level of systemic debt across all sectors - individuals,
corporate and government at all levels that has continuously risen over 50 years increasing
systemic leverage to a point larger than during the civil war and WW II. This has occurred
under both parties and the Trump presidency has actually increased it despite the rhetoric.
Compare the Balance of Trade relative to the soundbites.
A systematic restructuring of our economy away from financialization, away from bailouts
of the oligarchy, away from unprecedented market concentration, away from untrammeled credit
expansion to back previous credit losses and having a monetary authority with a singular
focus on sound money is what's necessary. But that's not gonna happen under either Trump or
Biden as it will gore the ox of the Party of Davos whose interests is what both sides
primarily cater to. More debt-fueled government spending always ends up as socialism for the
oligarchy which is exactly what we've had for decades. It is an economic truism that as
productivity of debt continually declines, economic productivity also declines. That's the
trap we are in!
Been very happy with my gold investments these past two years and will stick with them
thanks, Biden would supercharge them.
Longer term I am looking to have most of my money in Asia, Russian oil companies also seem
to like drilling for oil, rather than desperately trying to be anything else than producing
oil like BP and the rest. Demographics are dire for most of the West and the US is likely to
continue transitioning in to a Latin American style country. People have been well
conditioned in to not talking about such things but no point talking about the increasing
economic dysfunction without talking about the underlying cause. A massive increase in
immigration will lead to a surge in inequality, anemic economic growth, fiscal deficits and a
decline in gdp per capita.
Time to start think about investments the way a well to do Latin would.
Well, Biden has to get elected first, we'll see. Carbon taxes, hmmm - another way to
destroy the middle-class?
Something to think about is the European Central Bank, they are a meeting late this month
with "experts" to determine if they will go to a digital currency. The ECB might then decide
the "experts" are right and go full digital on Jan 1st, 2021. We might see a whole lot of
Euro money coming into the USA, hope so. However, the Federal Reserve has not been printing
any new bank notes so you'll have trouble finding crisp bills for Christmas gifts.
IMO, based on the debt current and future we are loading on the backs of our children, it
matters not a whit which of the paths are chosen. Both will end in destruction of said debt
by some method - because you can only load so much on horseback and still ride. As we stand
now, we are walking alongside a swaybacked packhorse already. Closing off the country, where
the only growth has been in the services sector for decades, makes sense in what
universe?
Raise taxes? They have only ever increased in my lifetime, my fathers and his. At what
point does the Boston Tea Party repeat? From where I sit, everything either party does is
only adding fuel to a coming conflagration, as nothing is actually paid for - a ledger entry
is aggregated and we march on. The piper will get paid, as he has the children...
1.socialism and keynesian economics as a viable theory dead dead right now....today and
politicians know it
2. central banks are trapped at zero bound interest rates with no way under heretofore main
stream economic theories to stimulate their respective economies
3. politicians are largely dumb as a bag of hammers with not a shred of understanding what to
do other than to listen to think tanks warmed over rehashed ideas that have not worked in the
past and won't now.
4. what biden is proposing is MMT with communist thomas piketty theory disguised as classical
keynesian nonsense being sold to a public almost as dumb as those doing the selling
5. in order to make this works they will have to institute guranteed basic income for the
umpteen millions of people who will NEVER work again under this policy of bullshit
6. and lastly to ensure NO ONE can escape this trap which will evolve into an UGLY neo
feudalism for 99% of the populace this team of genuinely EVIL people will have to CANCEL ALL
paper money FORCING everyone to have a bank account for using digital money THE ONLY money
that can exist if this comes to pass. banks loves this as it gives them a cut of all the
action
7.as a result taxes will be anything they want and YOU have no escape or recourse
whatsoever
8. say the wrong thing, think the wrong thing and your economic life under digital money will
be cancelled placing you into destitution and death
9. this is a recipe for slavery on a gigantic scale ensuring the 1/10 of 1% can rule without
disturbance forever
10 revolution will be the only option at that point and since the police and military will
continue to be paid by the state it will be bloody
On the other hand, if this scheme promises to bring back the Jimmy Carter 14% interest
rates on CD's for us retired folks, I say bring it on. Everyone else will just have to deal
with the economic rubble later on their own.
I just need another good 15 years or so myself. In other words, never believe old people
when it comes to managing the US economy- our goals are selfish and very short term. So like,
what's in this for meeeeeee?
Biden must have listened to AOC for this fiscal policy advice. Bring back chicken coops
and victory gardens, and turn in your scrap metal because we are WAR.
What in God's name is Biden having a Brit pushing his economic plan. We all know they
embellish everything which then falls apart into pieces. Yes, Fred I remember those +14%
interest rates I paid on my mortgage and still kick myself for not taking the 100k down
payment and putting it into a 14% 30 year CD and renting. But then we all have those
memories. Sure would not want my grandchildren paying those rates on a 500k mortgage as it
would kill the real estate business and this country.
Sleepy Joe will be ready for the assisted living center by year two and we would be stuck
with Checkbook Harris, UGH. Vote for the Bullcrapper that gets things done.
Ahem; This has been done before: After Hitler was elected in 1933; He slammed the borders
shut to money transfer, then started building the autobahn. It worked, Germany came out of
the slump. Of course, Hitler then moved on to building planes & tanks. Also, Modern
Monetary theory says you can run the printing presses & print money like mad, as long as
that paper is going into a real, working economy, it gets recycled. That does not describe
the current 'developed world' economy; the FIRE economy (finance, insurance, real estate) has
eaten it's own tail. When all the other assets have jacked up half way to the moon, there
will be another gold rush (same as 1930s) & my shack in northern BC will shake with all
the helicopters flying around to work up new gold mines.
Candidate Donald Trump's 2016 programme was clear. Bring industry back home. Ditto the
troops. Ensure an adequate defence. Drain the swamp.
Looked good. I hadn't realised that his main achievement would be somewhat simpler. Stay
functioning in office in the face of the most dangerous series of attacks on an American
President that can have been seen since the early nineteenth century.
So clearly he's going to need another term in office to get on with all the things he
should have been able to get on with in the first.
Candidate Joe Biden was, I thought at first, stealing part of the Trump 2016 programme. Bring
industry back home. Turns out not - as far as I can see America will remain the most heavily
industrialised country going. But, as in my own country, much of the industry will still be
abroad. With the jobs.
As with my own country Biden's America will be environmentally virtuous. It'll hit some
good targets. It'll not use as much fossil fuel. Yesterday's heavy polluters - the coal mines
and steel mills - won't pollute any more.
Fake. Again as with my own country the dirty industries we still rely on will still be
roaring full steam ahead. Coal will still be mined. Steel will still be produced. But
elsewhere.
So Candidate Joe Biden will not be the man to put that part of the Trump 2016 programme
into action. He'll be the man who continues with the fake environmentalism we've already seen
so much of. Naturally, if the heavy industry is outsourced so is our pollution. Doesn't look
that clever a trick to me, even if it fools the eco-warriors.
In a recent op-ed on RT, I outlined the
puzzling and ironic configuration that is the anti-Trump 'resistance.' But I didn't explore one
important 'interest group' within a 'deep state' intent on destroying Trump's presidency at all
costs -- namely, the neocon
hawks of both major political parties and the
military and
intelligence establishments that defy strict party affiliation.
This contingent includes members of top military brass and intelligence
officers , of course, but also military and intelligence contractors, including those
employed by the permanent bureaucracy to foil Trump's first run for the presidency by
attempting to tie him to "Russian collusion ."
Condemn Trump all you want. It's quite fashionable and facile to do so. The penchant has
long since leaked across the Atlantic via the US and international media establishments. But
critics must be either uninformed or disingenuous to liken Trump
to Hitler . Hitler was, after all, a fascist strong man and supremacist intent on
militarism and world expansionism. And Trump is nothing of the sort.
Quite the contrary, Trump wants no part of expansionism. He has insisted that he deplores
the endless wars in the
Middle East and
Afghanistan . Trump has been removing troops from both
regions since his presidency began. And he's reportedly been foiled in efforts for a
complete withdrawal by his generals . But now he
may be prepared to flout their prerogatives and take matters into his own hands, if
given a second term.
While Trump touts a strengthened
military , the Trump Doctrine
involves a particular brand of populist American
nationalism . This includes a foreign policy stemming from 19th-century Republican
politics . Those who
have subscribed to this political position have been traditionally non-interventionist, while
demanding that a premium be laid on national self-determination, the protection of national
sovereignty via strong borders, and the promotion of national self-interest over international
or global entanglements.
Trump has suggested that the military brass wants to start wars to
enrich military contractors.
The hue and cry coming from the political establishment over Trump's foreign military
policy is a thin scrim to cover for the interests of the military industrial complex. And the
interests of the military industrial complex are for its own expansion and the profits that
derive from it.
Trump's foreign policy on the limited use of military force runs counter to those of the
Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden administrations. Both of these followed the orders of neocon hawks.
Shocking his left-wing base, Obama retained many of
Bush's top cabinet members, including war hawk Defense Secretary Robert Gates. And, of course,
then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) voted in favor of
and championed
the invasion of Iraq in 2002.
The Obama administration not only continued the Bush campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it
extended them with record-breaking bombings in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya. Recall that it was Obama who
murdered, via a drone bomb, sixteen-year-old US citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Abdulrahman was
the son of alleged al-Qaeda fighter (and American citizen) Anwar Awlaki, who Obama had
bombed two weeks earlier, in Yemen. In fairness it must be noted that a US raid in Yemen resulted
in the
death of Abdulrahman's 8-year-old sister in 2017. But it was Obama who exploded the
conflict in Yemen.
The Obama-Biden international adventurism extended to the invasion
of Libya and the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi, an escapade that destabilized
that country and led directly to the arming of
jihadists. Under Obama, the Pentagon and CIA directly armed and trained Syrian "rebels"
fighting Bashar Assad, many of whom then
grew into the ISIS caliphate. A 2016 iconic headline in the Los Angeles Times said it all:
"In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA
." It is interesting to note that it was Trump who ended the
CIA's training of the so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels whose intent was the
toppling Assad's government.
Obama was elected in 2008 on his promise to end Bush's war in Iraq, a conflict he said he
opposed from the
outset . Instead, Obama and his war hawks expanded this war and added several others. And
all of this after Obama was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize (for no apparent reason) in 2009.
The military escalation under Obama-Biden surely explains the deep state's preference for
Biden over Trump. But what about the voters? In opposing Trump and favouring Biden, the leftist
'resistance' is
supporting the continuation of dodgy and illegal US invasions and endless wars. An
achievement to be proud of. On the other hand, voters who support non-intervention and troop
withdrawal favour the Republican, Donald Trump.
So, tell me again: who's 'left' and who's 'right' in this US presidential election?
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Before juxtaposing the U.S. and alternative responses to the corona virus's economic
effects, [1]
I would like to step back in time to show how the pandemic has revealed a deep underlying
problem. We are seeing the consequences of Western societies painting themselves into a debt
corner by their creditor-oriented philosophy of law. Neoliberal anti-government (or more
accurately, anti-democratic) ideology has centralized social planning and state power in "the
market," meaning specifically the financial market on Wall Street and in other financial
centers.
At issue is who will lose when employment and business activity are disrupted. Will it be
creditors and landlords at the top of the economic scale, or debtors and renters at the bottom?
This age-old confrontation over how to deal with the unpaid rents, mortgages and other debt
service is at the heart of today's virus pandemic as large and small businesses, farms,
restaurants and neighborhood stores have fallen into arrears, leaving businesses and households
– along with their employees who have no wage income to pay these carrying charges that
accrue each month.
This is an age-old problem. It was solved in the ancient Near East simply by annulling these
debt and rent charges. But the West, shaped as it still is by the legacy of the Roman Empire,
has left itself prone to the massive unemployment, business closedowns and resulting arrears
for these basic costs of living and doing business.
Western civilization distinguishes itself from its Near Eastern predecessors in the way it
has responded to "acts of God" that disrupt the means of support and leave debts in their wake.
The United States has taken the lead in rejecting the path by which China, and even social
democratic European nations have prevented the corona virus from causing widespread insolvency
and polarizing their economies. The U.S. corona virus lockdown is turning rent and debt arrears
into an opportunity to impoverish the indebted economy and transfer mortgaged property and its
income to creditors.
There is no inherent material need for this fate to occur. But it seems so natural and even
inevitable that, as Margaret Thatcher would say, There Is No Alternative.
But of course there is, and always has been. However, resilience in the face of economic
disruption always has required a central authority to override "market forces" to restore
economic balance from "above."
Individualistic economies cannot do that. To the extent that they have a strong state, they
are not democratic but oligarchic, controlled by the financial sector in its own interest, in
tandem with its symbiotic real estate sector and monopolized infrastructure. That is why every
successful society since the Bronze Age has been a mixed economy. The determining factor in
whether or not an economic disruption leaves a crippled economy in its wake turns out to be
whether its financial sector is a public utility or is privatized from the debt-strapped public
domain as a means to enrich bankers and money-lenders at the expense of debtors and overall
economic balance.
China is using an age-old policy common ever since Hammurabi and other Bronze Age rulers
promoted economic resilience in the face of "acts of God." Unless personal debts, rents and
taxes that cannot be paid are annulled, the result will be widespread bankruptcy,
impoverishment and homelessness. In contrast to America's financialized economy, China has
shown how natural it is for society simply to acknowledge that debts, rents, taxes and other
carrying charges of living and doing business cannot resume until economic normalcy is able to
resume.
Near Eastern protection of economic resilience in the face of Acts of God
Ancient societies had a different logic from those of modern capitalist economies. Their
logic – and the Jewish Mosaic Law of Leviticus 25, as well as classical Greek and Roman
advocates of democratic reform – was similar to modern socialism. The basic principle at
work was to subordinate market relations to the needs of society at large, not to enrich a
financial rentier class of creditors and absentee landowners. More specifically, the
basic principle was to cancel debts that could not normally be paid, and prevent creditors from
foreclosing on the land of debtors.
All economies operate on credit. In modern economies bills for basic expenses are paid
monthly or quarterly. Ancient economies operated on credit during the crop year, with payment
falling due when the harvest was in – typically on the threshing floor. This cycle
normally provided a flow of crops and corvée labor to the palace, and covered the
cultivator's spending during the crop year. Interest typically was owed only when payment was
late.
But bad harvests, military conflict or simply the normal hardships of life frequently
prevented this buildup of debt from being paid. Mesopotamian palaces had to decide who would
bear the loss when drought, flooding, infestation, disease or military attack prevented the
payment of debts, rents and taxes. Seeing that this was an unavoidable fact of life, rulers
proclaimed amnesties for taxes and these various obligations incurred during the crop year.
That saved smallholders from having to work off their debts in personal bondage to their
creditors and ultimately to lose their land.
For these palatial economies, resilience meant stabilization of fiscal revenue. Letting
private creditors (often officials in the palace's own bureaucracy) demand payment out of
future production threatened to deprive rulers of crop surpluses and other taxes, and
corvée labor or even service in the military. But for thousands of years, Near Eastern
rulers restored fiscal viability for their economies by writing down debts, not only in
emergencies but more or less regularly to relieve the normal creeping backlog of debts.
These Clean Slates extended from Sumer and Babylonia in the 3 rd millennium BC to
classical antiquity, including the neo-Assyrian, neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires. They
restored normal economic relations by rolling back the consequences of debts personal and
agrarian debts – bondage to creditors, and loss of land and its crop yield. From the
palace's point of view as tax collector and seller of many key goods and services, the
alternative would have been for debtors to owe their crops, labor and even liberty to their
creditors, not to the palace. So cancelling debts to restore normalcy was simply pragmatic, not
utopian idealism as was once thought.
The pedigree for "act-of-God" rules specifying what obligations need not be paid when
serious disruptions occur goes back to the laws of Hammurabi c. 1750 BC. Their aim was to
restore economic normalcy after major disruptions. §48 of Hammurabi's laws proclaim a debt
and tax amnesty for cultivators if Adad the Storm God has flooded their fields, or if their
crops fail as a result of pests or drought. Crops owed as rent or fiscal payments were freed
from having to be paid. So were consumer debts run up during the crop year, including tabs at
the local ale house and advances or loans from individual creditors. The ale woman likewise was
freed from having to pay for the ale she had received from palace or temples for sale during
the crop year.
Whoever leased an animal that died by an act of god was freed from liability to its owner
(§266). A typical such amnesty occurred if the lamb, ox or ass was eaten by a lion, or if
an epidemic broke out. Likewise, traveling merchants who were robbed while on commercial
business were cleared of liability if they swore an oath that they were not responsible for the
loss (§103).
It was realized that hardship was so inevitable that debts tended to accrue even under
normal conditions. Every ruler of Hammurabi's dynasty proclaimed a Clean Slate cancelling
personal agrarian debts (but left normal commercial business loans intact) upon taking the
throne, and when military or other disruptions occurred during their reign. Hammurabi did this
on four occasions. 2
Bronze Age rulers could not afford to let such bondage and concentration of property and
wealth to become chronic. Labor was the scarcest resource, so a precondition for survival was
to prevent creditors from using debt leverage to obtain the labor of debtors and appropriate
their land. Rulers therefore acted to prevent creditors from becoming a wealthy class seeking
gains by impoverishing debtors and taking crop yields and land for themselves.
By rejecting such alleviations of debts resulting from economic disruption, the U.S. economy
is subjecting itself to depression, homelessness and economic polarization. It is saving
stockholders and bondholders instead of the economy at large. That is because today's
rentier interests take the economic surplus in the form of debt service, holding labor
and also corporate industry in bondage. Mortgage debt is the price of obtaining a home of one's
own. Student debt is the price of getting an education to get a job. Automobile debt is needed
to buy a car to drive to the job, and credit-card debt must be run up to pay for living costs
beyond what one is able to earn. This deep indebtedness makes workers afraid to go on strike or
even to protect working conditions, because being fired is to lose the ability to pay debts and
rents. So the rising debt overhead serves the business and financial sector by lowering wage
levels while extracting more interest, financial fees, rent and insurance out of their
take-home pay.
Debt deflation and the transition from finance capitalism to an Austerity Economy
By injecting $10 trillion into the financial markets (when Federal Reserve credit is added
to U.S. Treasury allocation), the CARES act enabled the stock market to recover all of its 34
percent drop (as measured by the S&P 500 stocks) by June 9, even as the economy's GDP was
still plunging. The government's new money creation was not spent to revive the real economy of
production and consumption, but at least the financial One Percent was saved from loss. It was
as if prosperity and living standards would somehow return to normal in a V-shaped
recovery.
But what is "normal" these days? For 95 percent of the population, their share of GDP
already had been falling ever since the Obama Depression began with the bank bailout in 2009,
leaving an enormous bad-debt overhead in place. The economy's long upswing since World War II
was already grinding to an end as it struggled to carry its debt burden, rising housing costs,
health care and related monthly "nut." 3
This is not what was expected 75 years ago. World War II ended with families and businesses
rife with savings and with little debt, as there had been little to buy during the wartime
years. But ever since, each business cycle recovery has started with a higher ratio of debt to
income, diverting more revenue from business, households and governments to pay banks and
bondholders. This debt burden raises the economy's cost of living and doing business, while
leaving less wage income and profit to be spent on goods and services.
The virus pandemic has merely acted as a catalyst ending of the long postwar boom. Yet even
as the U.S. and other Western economies begin to buckle under their debt overhead, little
thought has been given to how to extricate them from the debts and defaults that have
accelerated as a result of the broad economic disruption.
The "business as usual" approach is to let creditors foreclose and draw all the income and
wealth over subsistence needs into their own hands. Economies have reached the point where
debts can be paid only by shrinking production and consumption, leaving them as strapped as
Greece has been since 2015. Rejecting debt writedowns to restore social balance was implanted
at the outset of modern Western civilization. Ever since Roman times it has become normal for
creditors to use social misfortune as an opportunity to gain property and income at the expense
of families falling into debt. Blocking the emergence of democratic civic regimes empowered to
protect debtors, creditor interests have promoted laws that force debtors to lose their land or
other means of livelihood to foreclosing creditors or sell it under distress conditions and
have to work off their debts.
In times of a general economic disruption, giving priority to creditor claims leads to
widespread bankruptcy. Yet it violates most peoples' ideas of fairness and distributive justice
to evict debtors from their homes and take whatever property they have if they cannot pay their
rent arrears and other charges that have accrued through no fault of their own. Bankruptcy
proceedings will force many businesses and farms to forfeit what they have invested to much
wealthier buyers. Many small businesses, especially in urban minority neighborhoods, will see
yeas of saving and investment wiped out. The lockdown also forces U.S. cities and states to
cope with plunging sales- and income-tax revenue by slashing social services and depleting
their pension funds savings to pay bondholders. Balancing their budgets by privatizing hitherto
public services will create monopoly rents and new corporate empires
These outcomes are not necessary. They also are inequitable, and instead of being a survival
of the fittest and most efficient economic solutions, they are a victory for the most
successfully predatory. Yet such results are the product of a long-pedigreed legal and
financial philosophy promoted by banks and bondholders, landlords and insurance companies
reject economy-wide debt relief. They depict writing down debts and rents owed to them as
unthinkable. Banks claim that forgiving personal and business rents would lead absentee
landlords to default on their mortgages, threatening bank solvency. Insurance companies claim
that to make their policy holders whole would bankrupt them. 4 So something has to give: either the population's broad economic interests, or
the vested interests insisting that labor, industry and the government must bear the cost of
arrears that have built up during the economic shutdown.
As in oligarchic Rome, financial interests in today's world have gained control of
governments and captured the political and regulatory agencies, leaving democratic reformers
powerless to suspend debt service, rent arrears, evictions and depression. The West is becoming
a highly centrally planned economy, but its planning center is Wall Street, not Washington or
state and local governments.
Rising real estate arrears prompt a mortgage bailout
Canada and many European governments are subsidizing businesses to pay up to 80 percent of
employee wages even though many must stay home. But for the 40 million Americans who haven't
been employed during the closedown, the prospect is for homelessness and desperation. Already
before the crisis about half of Americans reported that they were living paycheck to paycheck
and could not raise $400 in an emergency. When the paychecks stopped, rents could not be paid,
nor could other normal monthly living expenses.
America is seeing the end of the home ownership boom that endowed its middle class with
property steadily rising in price. For buyers, the price was rising mortgage debt, as bank
credit was the major factor in raising property prices. (A home is worth however much a bank
will lend against it.) For non-whites, to be sure, neighborhoods were redlined against racial
minorities. By the early 2000s, banks began to make loans to black and Hispanic buyers, but
usually at extortionately high interest rates and stiffer debt terms. America's white home
buyers now face a fate similar to that which they have long imposed on minorities:
Debt-inflated purchase prices for homes so high that they leave buyers strapped by mortgage and
compulsory insurance payments, with declining public services in their neighborhoods.
When mortgages can't be paid, foreclosures follow. That causes declines in the proportion of
Americans that own their own homes. That home ownership rate already had dropped from about 58
percent in 2008 to about 51 percent at the start of 2020. Since the 2008 mortgage-fraud crisis
and President Obama's mass foreclosure program that hit minorities and low-income buyers
especially hard, a more landlord-ridden economy has emerged as a result of foreclosed
properties and companies bought by speculators and vast absentee-owner companies like
Blackstone.
Many businesses that closed down did not pay the landlords. Realizing that if they are held
responsible for paying full rents that accrued during the shutdown, it would take them over a
year to make up the payment, leaving no net earnings for their efforts. That was especially the
case for restaurants with compulsory limited "distance" seating and other stores obliged to
restrict the density of their customers. Many restaurants and other neighborhood stores decided
to go out of business. For hotels standing largely empty, some 19 percent of mortgage loans had
fallen into arrears already by May, along with about 10 percent of retail stores. 5
The commercial real estate sector owes $2.4 trillion in mortgage debt. About 40 percent of
tenants did not pay their rents for March, April and May, from restaurants and storefronts to
large national retail markets. A moratorium on evictions put them off until August or September
2020. But in the interim, quarterly state and local property taxes were due in June, which also
was when the annual federal income-tax payment was owed for the year 2019, having been
postponed from April in the face of the shutdown.
The prospective break in the chain of payments of landlords to their banks may be bailed out
by the Federal Reserve, but nobody can come up with a scenario whereby the debts owed by
non-elites can be paid out of their own resources, any more than they were rescued from the
junk-mortgage frauds that left over-mortgaged homes (mainly for low-income victims) in the wake
of Obama's decision to support the banks and mortgage brokers instead of their victims. In
fact, it takes a radical scenario to see how state and local debt can be paid as public budgets
are thrown into limbo by the virus pandemic.
The fiscal squeeze forces governments to privatize public services and assets
Since 1945, the normal Keynesian response to an economic slowdown has been for governments
to run budget deficits to revive the economy and employment. But that can't happen in the wake
of the 2020 pandemic. For one thing, tax revenue is falling. Governments can create domestic
money, of course, but the U.S. government quickly ran up a $2 trillion deficit by June 2020
simply to support Wall Street's financial and corporate markets, leaving a fiscal squeeze when
it came to public spending into the real economy. Many U.S. states and cities have laws
obliging them to balance their budgets. So public spending into the real economy (instead of
just into the financial and corporate markets) had to be cut back.
Sales taxes from restaurants and hotels, income taxes, and property taxes from landlords not
receiving rents. U.S. states and localities are having a huge tax shortfall that is forcing
them to cut back basic social services and infrastructure. New York City mayor de Blasio has
warned that schools, the police and public transportation may have to be cut back unless the
city is given $7 billion. The CARES act passed by the Democratic Party in control of the House
of Representatives made no attempt to allocate a single dollar to make up the widening fiscal
gap. As for the Trump administration, it was unwilling to give money to states voting
Democratic in the presidential or governorship elections.
The irony is that just at the time when a pandemic calls for public health care, political
pressure for that abruptly stopped. Logically, it might have been expected the virus to have
become a major catalyst for single-payer public health care, not least to prevent a wave of
personal bankruptcy resulting from high medical bills. But hopes were dashed when the leading
torch bearer for socialized medicine, Senator Bernie Sanders, threw his support behind Joe
Biden and other opponents for the presidential nomination instead of focusing the primary
elections on what the future of the Democratic Party would be. It decided to focus the 2020
U.S. election merely on the personality of which candidate would impose neoliberal policy:
Republican Donald Trump, or his opponent running simply on a platform of "I am not Trump."
Both candidates – and indeed, both parties behind them –sought to downsize
government and privatize as much of the public sector as possible, leaving administration to
financial managers. Past government policy would have restored prosperity by public spending
programs to to rebuild the roads and bridges, trains and subways that have fallen apart. But
the fiscal squeeze caused by the economic shutdown has created pressure to Thatcherize
America's crumbling transportation and urban infrastructure – and also to sell off land
and public enterprises, basic urban health, schools – and at the national level, the post
office. Fiscal budgets are to be balanced by selling off this infrastructure, in lucrative
Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) with financial firms.
The neoliberal rent-extractive plan is for private capital to buy monopoly rights to repair
the nation's bridges by turning them into toll bridges, to repair the nation's roads and
highways by making the toll roads, to repair sewer systems by privatizing them. Schools,
prisons, hospitals and other traditionally public functions. Even the police are to be
privately owned security-guard agencies and managed for profit – on terms that will
provide interest and capital gains for the financial sector. It is a New Enclosures movement
seeking monopoly rent much as landlords extract land rent.
Having given $10 trillion dollars to support financial and mortgage markets, neoliberals in
both the Republican and Democratic parties announced that the government had created so large a
budget deficit as a result of bailing out the banking and landlord class that it lacked any
more room for money creation for actual social spending programs. Republican Senate leader
Mitch McConnell advised states to solve their budget squeeze by raiding their pension funds to
pay their bondholders.
For many decades, public employees accepted low wage growth in exchange for pensions. Their
patient choice was to defer demands for wage increases in order to secure good pensions for
their retirement. But now that they have worked at stagnant wages for many years, the money
ostensibly saved for their pensions is to be given to bondholders. Likewise at the federal
level, pressure was renewed by both parties to cut back Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,
with Obama's 2010 Simpson-Bowles Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to reduce the
deficit at the expense of retirees and the poor.
In sum, money is being created to fuel the financial sector and its stock and bond markets,
not to increase the economy's solvency, employment and living standards. The corona virus
pandemic did not create this shift, but it catalyzed and accelerated the power grab, not least
by pushing public-sector budgets into crisis.
It doesn't have to be this way
Every successful economy has been a mixed public/private economy with checks on the
financial sector's power to indebt society in ways that impoverish it. Always at issue,
however, is who will control the government. As American and European industry becomes more
debt ridden, will they be oligarchic or democratic?
A socialist government such as China's can keep its industry going simply by simply writing
down debts when they can't be paid without forcing a closedown and bankruptcy and loss of
assets and employment. The world thus has two options: a basically productive public financial
system in China, or a predatory financial system in the United States.
China can recover financially and fiscally from the virus disruption because most debts
ultimately are owned to the government-based banking system. Money can be created to finance
the material economy, labor and industry, construction and agriculture. When a company is
unable to pay its bills and rent, the government doesn't stand by and let it be closed down and
sold at a distressed price to a vulture investor.
China has an option that Western economies do not: It is in a position to do what Hammurabi
and other ancient Near Eastern palatial economies did for thousands of years: write down debts
so as to keep the economy resilient and functioning. It can suspend scheduled debt service,
taxes, rents and public fees from having to be paid by troubled areas of its economy, because
China's government is the ultimate creditor. It need not contend with politically powerful
bankers who insist that the economy at large must lose, not themselves. The government can
write down the debt to keep companies in business, and also their employees. That's what
socialist governments do.
The underlying problem is finance capitalism. Its roots lie at the heart of Western
civilization itself, rejecting the "circular time" permitting economic renewal by Clean Slates
in favor of "linear time" in which debts are permanent and irreversible, without public
oversight to manage finance and credit in the economy's overall long-term interest.
It often is easier to get rich in such times of disaster and need than in times of normal
prosperity. While the U.S. economy polarizes between creditors and debtors, the stock market
anticipates fortunes being made quickly from the insolvency of business with assets and
property to be grabbed. Coupled with the Federal Reserve's credit creation to support the
financial and real estate markets, asset prices are soaring (as of June 2020) for companies
that expect to get even richer from the widespread distress to come in autumn 2020 when
evictions and foreclosures ae scheduled to begin again.
In that respect, the corona virus's effect has been to help defeat the financial sector's
enemy, governments strong enough to regulate it. The fiscal squeeze resulting from widespread
unemployment, business closedowns, rent and tax arrears is being seized upon as a means of
dismantling and privatizing government at the federal, state and local levels, at the expense
of the citizenry at large.
Notes
[1]WHEN CHINA SNEEZES: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic
Implications, Edited by Cynthia McKinney, Chapter 9, Economic Impact.
[2]
I provide a detailed history of Clean Slate acts from the Bronze Age down through Biblical
times and the Byzantine Empire in " and forgive them their debts" (ISLET 2018).
[3]
I provide the details in Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the
Global Economy ((SLET, 2015).
[4]
Lawsuits are exploding over the role of insurance companies supposed to protect business from
such interruptions. See Julia Jacobs, "Arts Groups Fight Their Insurers Over Coverage on Virus
Losses," The New York Times , May 6, 2020, reports that "insurance companies have issued
a torrent of denials, prompting lawsuits across the country and legislative efforts on the
state and federal levels to force insurers to make payments. The insurance industry has argued
that fulfilling all of these requests would bankrupt the industry."
[5]
Conor Dougherty and Peter Eavis, "In Commercial Real Estate, the Domino Effect Escalates,"
The New York Times , June 9, 2020.
As (an agnostic) buddhist I find this pope's words needed in this world now. He refused to
see Pompeo last week and then releases this letter. Take heed.
@ suzan | Oct 5 2020 0:48 utc | 79 with the link to the latest encyclical by the Catholic
pope
I skimmed the link to the pope's latest and the following are a few quoted paragraphs from
the more than 287 in the whole thing.
"
15. The best way to dominate and gain control over people is to spread despair and
discouragement, even under the guise of defending certain values. Today, in many countries,
hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of
ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of
others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected
and, as a result, the life of society is impoverished and subjected to the hubris of the
powerful. Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to
improve people's lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing
techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others. In this craven exchange of charges and
counter-charges, debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and
confrontation.
16. Amid the fray of conflicting interests, where victory consists in eliminating one's
opponents, how is it possible to raise our sights to recognize our neighbours or to help
those who have fallen along the way? A plan that would set great goals for the development of
our entire human family nowadays sounds like madness. We are growing ever more distant from
one another, while the slow and demanding march towards an increasingly united and just world
is suffering a new and dramatic setback.
25. War, terrorist attacks, racial or religious persecution, and many other affronts to
human dignity are judged differently, depending on how convenient it proves for certain,
primarily economic, interests. What is true as long as it is convenient for someone in power
stops being true once it becomes inconvenient. These situations of violence, sad to say,
"have become so common as to constitute a real 'third world war' fought piecemeal".
28. The loneliness, fear and insecurity experienced by those who feel abandoned by the
system creates a fertile terrain for various "mafias". These flourish because they claim to
be defenders of the forgotten, often by providing various forms of assistance even as they
pursue their criminal interests. There also exists a typically "mafioso" pedagogy that, by
appealing to a false communitarian mystique, creates bonds of dependency and fealty from
which it is very difficult to break free.
44. Even as individuals maintain their comfortable consumerist isolation, they can choose
a form of constant and febrile bonding that encourages remarkable hostility, insults, abuse,
defamation and verbal violence destructive of others, and this with a lack of restraint that
could not exist in physical contact without tearing us all apart. Social aggression has found
unparalleled room for expansion through computers and mobile devices.
45. This has now given free rein to ideologies. Things that until a few years ago could
not be said by anyone without risking the loss of universal respect can now be said with
impunity, and in the crudest of terms, even by some political figures. Nor should we forget
that "there are huge economic interests operating in the digital world, capable of exercising
forms of control as subtle as they are invasive, creating mechanisms for the manipulation of
consciences and of the democratic process. The way many platforms work often ends up
favouring encounter between persons who think alike, shielding them from debate. These closed
circuits facilitate the spread of fake news and false information, fomenting prejudice and
hate".[47]
46. We should also recognize that destructive forms of fanaticism are at times found among
religious believers, including Christians; they too "can be caught up in networks of verbal
violence through the internet and the various forums of digital communication. Even in
Catholic media, limits can be overstepped, defamation and slander can become commonplace, and
all ethical standards and respect for the good name of others can be abandoned".[48] How can
this contribute to the fraternity that our common Father asks of us?
170. I would once more observe that "the financial crisis of 2007-08 provided an
opportunity to develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and new ways of
regulating speculative financial practices and virtual wealth. But the response to the crisis
did not include rethinking the outdated criteria which continue to rule the world".[147]
Indeed, it appears that the actual strategies developed worldwide in the wake of the crisis
fostered greater individualism, less integration and increased freedom for the truly
powerful, who always find a way to escape unscathed.
172. The twenty-first century "is witnessing a weakening of the power of nation states,
chiefly because the economic and financial sectors, being transnational, tend to prevail over
the political. Given this situation, it is essential to devise stronger and more efficiently
organized international institutions, with functionaries who are appointed fairly by
agreement among national governments, and empowered to impose sanctions".[149] When we talk
about the possibility of some form of world authority regulated by law,[150] we need not
necessarily think of a personal authority. Still, such an authority ought at least to promote
more effective world organizations, equipped with the power to provide for the global common
good, the elimination of hunger and poverty and the sure defence of fundamental human
rights.
173. In this regard, I would also note the need for a reform of "the United Nations
Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the
concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth".[151] Needless to say, this calls
for clear legal limits to avoid power being co-opted only by a few countries and to prevent
cultural impositions or a restriction of the basic freedoms of weaker nations on the basis of
ideological differences. For "the international community is a juridical community founded on
the sovereignty of each member state, without bonds of subordination that deny or limit its
independence".[152] At the same time, "the work of the United Nations, according to the
principles set forth in the Preamble and the first Articles of its founding Charter, can be
seen as the development and promotion of the rule of law, based on the realization that
justice is an essential condition for achieving the ideal of universal fraternity There is a
need to ensure the uncontested rule of law and tireless recourse to negotiation, mediation
and arbitration, as proposed by the Charter of the United Nations, which constitutes truly a
fundamental juridical norm".[153] There is need to prevent this Organization from being
delegitimized, since its problems and shortcomings are capable of being jointly addressed and
resolved.
177. Here I would once more observe that "politics must not be subject to the economy, nor
should the economy be subject to the dictates of an efficiency-driven paradigm of
technocracy".[158] Although misuse of power, corruption, disregard for law and inefficiency
must clearly be rejected, "economics without politics cannot be justified, since this would
make it impossible to favour other ways of handling the various aspects of the present
crisis".[159] Instead, "what is needed is a politics which is far-sighted and capable of a
new, integral and interdisciplinary approach to handling the different aspects of the
crisis".[160] In other words, a "healthy politics capable of reforming and coordinating
institutions, promoting best practices and overcoming undue pressure and bureaucratic
inertia".[161] We cannot expect economics to do this, nor can we allow economics to take over
the real power of the state.
"
Nice words but Pope Francis is still pulling punches. He knows exactly how global private
finance works because before the Enlightenment the religious folk in the West ran the money
system for a while. Pope Francis knows that finance is private in the West but not in China.
The problem Pope Francis has with China is that the China government is the religion in China
and governance is otherwise totally secular. In the West, monotheistic religions are given
lots more than the lip service they are suppose to get in governance.....in the US there is
suppose to be separation of church and state, correct? Do the financial holdings of the
Catholic church make Pope Francis one of the elite that own global private finance in the
West that I keep writing about?...I wouldn't be surprised
The words "oligarchy" and "plutocracy" do not appear in the Pope's Encyclical. The Pope
argues a moral case for feeding the poor and even calls for directing money spent on arms to
the third world but he steers clear of any concern about class inequity in an age of record
wealth inequality.
In this way, he "pulls punches" (as psychohistorian notes) as much as any Western
politician. Many of the evils that the Pope rails against - including his remarks regarding
populism vs popular government - have their origin in the extreme wealth of a small number of
people.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
Capitalism vs. Socialism is a red herring. The real problem is oligarch capitalism which
leads to neoliberalism (a sort of fascism) and supremacist thinking of neoconservativism (a
sort of aristocracy) and zionism (a sort of colonialism).
Thanks for the link to the latest encyclical by the Catholic pope
Some of the WOKE crowd take offence to Pope Francis encyclical. Pathetic.
"Pope slams capitalism & injustices in WOKE view on post-Covid world but gets heat for
insufficiently inclusive letter"
"Although the encyclical was woke-friendly in many respects, its title, "Fratelli Tutti,"
translates to "Brothers All" in English – connoting male dominance to some. The Vatican
said the title was taken from the words of St. Francis of Assisi, the pope's namesake, and
couldn't be changed. And in any case, an encyclical is inherently addressed to the whole
world, and the Italian word "Fratelli" means brothers but can be used to mean brothers and
sisters."
@ uncle tungsten | Oct 5 2020 3:28 utc | 89 who I think meant "..no one is being
prosecuted in the courts."
uncle tungsten also wrote
"
So the head of the Roman Catholic Church is expressing compassion.
"
That compassion, if you read the screed, is coming from Saint Francis who was showing all
this compassion to folks during the time of the Crusades......
The anglican church is a front for the faith based belief that global finance leaders are
doing God's work.
.............
The commenters here making fun of the visceral fear associated with potential impending
death have never faced such themselves it is clear. I am not excusing Trump's actions but
Trump is having to face his mortality in a way he has not had to before and he doesn't want
to give up the reins of power so he has to look like still in control. I don't think Trump is
out of the woods yet and may be setting himself up for a bigger crash given all the drugs he
has crammed into his body in the past 72 hours.
I was taught in my Christian youth that my body was just a vessel in the here and now but
what is more important than ones body is their soul. I blame that stupidity for much of the
obesity in the US....and I blame genius Trump for that stupidity as well...
Michael
Hudson's newest interview on the Macro N Cheese Podcast either as a transcript or via
audio is all about the coming debt deflation and what he calls the Neofeudal Empire.
If you haven't already known, Hudson reminds you that:
Who is the dumbest economic Nobel Prize winner? [Paul Krugman?] Paul Krugman. That's right.
He was given a Nobel Prize for not understanding what money was. If he would have
understood it, that would've excluded him from getting the Nobel Prize.
Posted by: snake | Oct 5 2020 4:02 utc | 93 430,000,000 virgin Americans
Thought the population as of this year was 331 million? Typo?
True, dissatisfaction with states appears to be on the rise world-wide. The problem is
that people still are still thoroughly brainwashed into believing the problem is *their*
state, not "state" in the abstract. And because of that, *any* change they make is likely to
be for the worse, a la National Socialism. The likelihood of some form of "Chinese Communism"
in this country is next to zero - not that I would welcome that, either, but some here would.
France might swing toward some form of "council socialism", given their previous history with
left revolutions, but I don't see that spreading anywhere else; maybe Spain given their
anarchism history. No, I don't see any evidence that the state itself is under any
significant threat anywhere. States may collapse, even in the US, but they will reform almost
immediately. Any positive changes will be unlikely and even if implemented will quickly be
eroded.
The *only* solution is extermination of the ruling class. "The world will only be free
when the last politician is strangled with the guts of the last priest." And even then,
without some kind of "re-education" of everyone else, it won't last. A new ruling class will
simply arise.
Just looked up that Ben Franklin quote:
First reported by James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention.
This is what he wrote: "A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or
a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it." Another of his famous quotes
from that era comes just after Washington had been elected the first president. "The first
man put at the helm will be a good one. Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards," he said.
But that isn't the full quote. He continued, "The executive will be always increasing here,
as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy."
Well, here we are. We didn't keep it. And here we are: a lunatic in office who thinks he's
King George.
Before the fall of USSR most Eastern Europe USSR dependencies energy and security was
subsidized by Russians /USSR. After the fall of USSR most so called independent Eastern
European former Soviet allies are reviving their energy from Russia but subsidized by EU/US
in form of loans and capital investments and their security is total subsidized by US/NATO.
This was understood as such and cleverly corrected by the Russians
...but 4,500 years of mercantilism were not going down without a fight. Fractional reserve
banking had been steadily growing since the 14th century but was exclusively a private business
affair unrelated to the state. These early fractional reserve "banks" began as safe stores for
gold and silver but it did not take long for their unscrupulous owners to start speculating
with their customers' deposits, thus the nascent fractional reserve nature of these deposits
where redemption coupons in circulation outnumbered physical gold and silver held in "trust".
After many rounds of speculative losses with other people's gold and silver, "banks" crashed,
losses accumulated, and the Renaissance city states ultimately stepped in to ban this
fractional reserve practice and re-enforce the Catholic prohibitions against usury. As a
result, the early 16th century mercantile "banking" industry evolved into a transparent and
audited business based upon fees received for the facilitation of foreign coin exchange, notary
services, and the provision of letters of account credibility. With usury removed, the business
of transparent and audited mercantile banking spread from Northern Italy throughout Western
Europe and control of the banking industry transferred to Catholic and later, Protestant
businessmen. So from 1585 to 1650 the golden age of transparent and audited mercantile banking
laid the groundwork for the rise and exploitation of the Dutch and English colonial empires,
and the success of mercantile banking also sowed the seeds for its eventual corruption by
unscrupulous players in usury friendly Protestant England.
With the resurrection of the European super-state after centuries of dormancy, the various
crowns found it increasingly difficult to secure funding to fight their continental wars of
ego, secure their growing colonial empires, and fund their increasing opulence at home, so
sovereigns began to form nascent "central banks" within their court administrations. These
nascent "central banks" served the crown and the crown alone and existed as polite shake-down
operations as wealthy subjects placed themselves in peril if they refused to lend their gold
and silver despite high probability the sovereign would default as was his divine right. So
after depleting the royal treasury during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the English crown
initiated a shakedown of the goldsmith bankers when Parliament passed The Great Stop of the
Exchequer in 1672 which repudiated all outstanding loans and all but destroyed the English
mercantile banking system. What gold and silver was left to the Exchequer immediately went to
use in prosecuting both the Third Anglo-Dutch War and the Franco-Dutch War, which by 1678 left
the Exchequer in such dire financial circumstances that it put national security at serious
risk. A funding void followed where loans to the crown in gold and silver were nearly
impossible to secure, so a first attempt at pure fiat money promoted as "legal tender" followed
without success. Then in 1685 Charles II died and the Catholic James II ascended the throne
putting usury and national finances at risk of eliminating any recourse at replenishing the
depleted Exchequer. So under cover of religion, the Catholic king's authority was nullified,
his Protestant daughter ascended the throne, usury was preserved, and Parliament with its
powers to raise funds acquired legal supremacy over the crown.
With a weakened monarchy, new relative strength in Parliament, and a depleted Exchequer,
Parliament pulled itself together and got to work and, once lingering legal succession issues
surrounding James II were resolved, it passed the Bank of England Act of 1694. The overt
exigencies in this act were related to funding the new war with France and controlling
rebellion in Ireland. But the act also replaced the old rarely used pure fiat money of Charles
II with bills redeemable in gold which also paid interest to their holders. Thus usury was
legally preserved by an act of Parliament which a weakened future potentially Catholic monarch
could not overturn. These bills backed with gold gained in popularity and filled the
Exchequer's immediate funding gap and allowed England to continue prosecuting its wars against
the Dutch. For a brief eleven years, from 1696-1707, England had returned to sound mercantile
banking practice and acceptance of these interest bearing bills spread, filling the Exchequer
with physical gold and silver.
But then enter one Sir William Paterson. This same Sir William – chief organizer of
the ill-fated Darien Scheme where investors lost everything and 1,200 Panamanian colonists
perished – in 1694 was the primary promoter behind the joint stock incorporation and
charter of the privately owned Bank of England. A major conflict of interest – not
recognized by divine right – arose here whereby King William III was himself a major
shareholder in this newly chartered bank. But this bank was merely one of many banks chartered
at the time operating under the ruinous fractional reserve practice, and nearly all these banks
eventually failed save one – the Bank of England. What made this bank charter special was
its inside connection to the House of Stuart and its location inside the untouchable City of
London Corporation – that one square mile of sovereign within a sovereign ceded in 1067
by William the Conqueror to the inhabitants of London. And, this special Bank of England had
discovered the magic formula that transformed Parliament into a perpetual debtor, turned the
bank's liabilities into assets, and as the money they created had zero cost, afforded the
owners of this special Bank of England an infinite rate of return on fiat issuance. Not since
the Pharaohs convinced the Egyptians they were Gods had such an elaborate fraud been
perpetrated upon mankind.
To coincide with the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, this special Bank of England
– one of many chartered banks at the time – was awarded responsibility for managing
the issue and redemption of the popular interest bearing bills of what was now the Exchequer of
Great Britain. Given the enticement of near infinite rates of return, it did not take the Bank
of England long to begin issuing its own fiat money for use by Parliament and to retire the old
interest bearing bills with redemptions. The magic formula was set – the Bank of England
had figured out not how to receive interest from lending its own money, but how to receive
interest by creating new money. And the opaque nature of the magic formula with its unknown
gold and silver reserves held in "trust", together with pomp and trappings, gave the fiat money
financial process the appearance of authority and legitimacy. Parliament got its means to fund
a new round of wars of attrition with France, the people got taxed at a slower rate of
increase, and the House of Stuart and their banker friends got wealthy beyond belief. And to
the holders of accumulated fiat money, they discovered a way how to transfer the bulk of a
society's real wealth – land, gold, labor, and raw materials – into their own
possession for free, using this fiat money of no inherit value to purchase things having real
intrinsic value. Therefore, at its most fundamental level, capitalism became the mechanism by
which one trades the family cow for a bag of magic beans.
This special relationship between Parliament and its wars of attrition and the House of
Stuart and its banker friends had solved the riddle of Exchequer funding so Great Britain could
now focus on its primary 18th century endeavor – war with France. From 1701 to the final
defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Great Britain prosecuted eighteen officially declared wars against
France. The stakes were serious now as France and its livre had wrested control of the world's
reserve currency from the mercantile banking Dutch after their late 17th century wars with both
England and France had exhausted the Dutch treasury and the Dutch, with their mercantile
banking model, could not print their way back from defeat. The House of Stuart and its banker
friends now saw defeating France and appropriating the world reserve currency to their Bank of
England as the overriding collective purpose of Great Britain, and Parliament was ready and
eager to assist for the "Glory of Britannia". But neither France's nor Great Britain's empires
contained large quantities of gold or silver, so privateers on both sides played a large role
in wartime funding but this stolen loot was especially important to the French corsairs and
their mercantile banking system. Thus the inherent empire self-destruct mechanism latent in all
physical money based commercial models – depleting the crown treasury – would play
a major strategy in the prosecution of Great Britain's prolonged wars of attrition with France.
Thus 18th century Europe pitted infinite paper fiat money versus limited physical gold and
silver to the death in winner-take-all stakes for control of the world reserve currency.
The first Industrial Revolution from 1760–1820 did not create a large "virtuous cycle"
for British fiat money, and given the fractured nature of the British chartered banking system,
this early land empire was not yet conducive to establishing a fiat money empire. For an idea
of the imbalance in economic scale versus land size existing within the 18th century British
colonies, at the cusp of the 1755 tobacco price crash the tiny Caribbean island of Barbados
brought in more customs and excise income to the crown than all American colonies combined.
And, economic depressions in the colonies caused by events in and taxes imposed by the home
country were common which prompted early colonialists to build up a high degree of productive
diversification and self-sufficiency. However, after more than 100 years of war against France
and the final defeat of Napoleon, the mantle of world reserve currency passed to the House of
Hanover and its banker enablers, so Parliament's favorite charter bank began in earnest to
churn out incredible amounts of bank notes that were now no longer needed to fund wars of
attrition. Other charter banks knew well of this special relationship between Parliament and
the Bank of England so these banks began accumulating the Bank of England fiat money to use as
their "reserves" held in "trust". The inflation caused by this round of excessive money
printing, combined with little to no increase in wages, reached the point of starvation in the
London streets, and Parliament's disastrous Corn Act of 1815 drove grain prices even higher
resulting in food riots and complete economic stagnation. Thus to this point first the House of
Stuart and their banking friends, then the House of Hanover and its banker enablers, through
the magic formula of fiat money, had brought the United Kingdom 121 years of near continuous
war, recurring national bankruptcies, and now open starvation. Something had to be done.
So Parliament set about to save its favorite banking charter. Six years after the London
food riots, it required the Bank of England to maintain a minimum reserve held in "trust" and
to facilitate conversion of its fiat money into gold. So the House of Hanover and its banker
enablers discovered the new magic trick of borrowing gold to fulfil this new inconvenience, and
promptly went back to churning out more fiat money and by 1825 had precipitated a collapse of
the United Kingdom banking system that effectively eliminated nearly all competing charter
banks. For their disastrous actions, in 1833 the Bank of England was again rewarded by
Parliament with the Bank of England Act granting its fiat money monopoly status as "legal
tender" for a "limited period" under "certain conditions", which over time became unlimited and
unconditional as no certain conditions were ever enumerated. Thus the act wiped out all
competing charter banks and forced every person and entity in the British empire to either use
or pay exchange fees to use the Bank of England's fiat money. And on top of all this, the House
of Hanover and its banker enablers, ensconced within the untouchable City of London
Corporation, from the safety of this "anachronism gifted by the Normans", found even more
profitable ventures than fraudulent banking and war funding in the forms of the slave and opium
trades. So by 1833 the same people behind slavery and opium were handed gratis sole control
over the fiat money that would soon engulf 26% of the world's land surface. What could possibly
go wrong?
The Bank of England itself, that's what went wrong. Another major financial crisis initiated
by the House of Hanover and its banker enablers' boom-bust magic formula was "solved" by
Parliament's Bank Act of 1844 that set a fictional amount of imaginary gold as a fabricated
"reserve" held in opaque "trust" and thereby "limited" the amount of fake fiat money the Bank
of England could issue out of thin air against its imaginary gold reserves, but excluded loans
to the public whose losses bothered no one in the House of Lords. The Bank Act worked so well
that by 1847 the Bank of England itself teetered on the brink of insolvency, so to retain their
special relationship, Parliament repealed the Bank Act of 1844 and now the Bank of England was
legally free again to print as much fiat money as it wanted. And so economic crises and near
collapse followed again from 1857-8, 1867-9, and 1873-96, each time fixed by Parliament with a
tweak here, and act there, and a new unenforced regulation or two. Thus following the 1833
grant of "legal tender" status, during their 67 years of 19th century money monopoly the House
of Hanover and its banker enablers gave the United Kingdom 32 years of recession, depression,
bankruptcy, and financial collapse. But despite its delivery record its special relationship
with Parliament continued into the 20th century where it once again found its raison
d'être – war funding.
One side benefit inadvertently derived from the never ending 19th century financial crises
precipitated by Bank of England fiat money mis-managers was Parliament spent so much time
dealing with economic problems at home and unrest in the colonies abroad that it had little
time to prosecute new European wars of attrition. With the Crimean War excepted, a sort of Pax
Decoctur gripped the United Kingdom's European aspirations as it focused on its Second
Industrial Revolution at home and small scale conflicts abroad to secure far flung provinces
against both people that mostly didn't use money and people that mostly did use opium. This
"Peace through Insolvency" enabled the United Kingdom to continuously reduce its national debt
without exception from a level of about 265% of GDP in 1820, down to around 40% of GDP at the
start of the 20th century. As a result, the House of Hanover and its banker enablers were able
to finally develop the "virtuous cycle" necessary for the proper function of a true fiat money
empire – the colonies ship raw materials to the home country and receive fiat money in
payment, the home country took those raw materials and produces value added manufactured goods,
then exported those manufactured goods back to the colonies that paid for these value added
goods with fiat money received from the sale of raw materials. All value added activities
remained in the home country, and with European populations increasing across the colonies,
this "virtuous cycle" generated economic "growth" and "profit" across the United Kingdom's
industrialized areas. However, these cheap raw materials from abroad also sealed the demise of
domestic producers, promoting urbanization at home that stagnated factory wages and led to
large scale emigration to the colonies abroad, both phenomena adding to the "virtuous cycle"
and increasing "value add" to those with access to capital and ownership of the means of
production.
A key component to this British "virtuous cycle" was the House of Hanover and its banker
enablers were able to capture the bulk of world raw material sales and thus expand its fiat
money empire outside the colonies by the process of commoditization. Large brokerage houses,
often controlled by subsidiaries of the Bank of England, bought and sold such huge quantities
of these raw materials on forward contracts that they were able to manipulate their prices.
These hedge purchases and sales not only provided trading income, but also ensured all
contracts were settled in Bank of England fiat money regardless of point of sale or purchase.
To squeeze even more profit from this "value chain", other Bank of England subsidiaries
expanded into corporate plantation holdings throughout the colonies, especially in India
following the 1862 Cotton Famine. This practice then spread to mining tenements following the
discovery of huge gold deposits throughout Australia and the annexation of the Transvaal. Thus
the vast majority of the "virtuous cycle" was captured and maximum "value" squeezed out the
entire "value chain" and into the hands of the House of Hanover and its banker enablers. And so
began a new line of exploitation for capitalism – the manipulation of commodity prices
via the coordinated bulk purchase and sale of these commodities in concert with the
manipulation of the "value" of fiat currency. Entire sectors of commodity production around the
world were sent into financial ruin by a coordinated attack from both the brokerages and Bank
of England monetary policy, these sectors bought nearly en toto for a shilling on the pound,
then pumped and dumped using the same coordinated mechanism but in the opposite directions.
Large swaths of entire industries like cotton, land, oil, wheat, coal, iron ore, et cetera
regularly passed into and out of the hands of the House of Hanover and its banker enablers
generating tremendous profits for them and debilitating losses for others.
At the dawn of the 20th century, capitalism had fully matured, sound money mercantile
banking no longer existed, and the magic formula had made the United Kingdom the most powerful
financial, economic, and political empire ever assembled. The covert secret formula however was
it had fought only one major European war – The Crimean War – since the defeat of
Napoleon, and since then the Exchequer had reduced its outstanding budget deficit relative to
GDP a full 85%. And for the first time in the fiat empire's history, it began delivering large
amounts of gold into the City of London Corporation. The sun never set on Britannia, it ruled
the waves, it had commoditized every basic raw material important to the Second Industrial
Revolution, and it had subjugated nearly every primary producer on the planet to its service
through price manipulated contracts denominated in Bank of England fiat money. The United
Kingdom was in a commanding position but had not yet proven itself as undisputed world military
power, and the German Empire was beginning to accumulate victories and influence on the
Continent. So it was inevitable that the egos in Parliament would go back to their old bad
habits of 100 years ago and start looking for a major fight to revive the "Glory of Britannia".
And thus began a 50 year effort to destroy the rising European star of Germany, with its
formidable military, efficient and technologically advanced industry, growing colonial empire,
and Hegelian guiding principles of "objectivity, truth, and ethical life" which now threatened
to not only swallow up and assimilate all the Germanic peoples of Europe, but to swallow up and
eliminate their privately owned central banks as well. The City of London Corporation would
tolerate no fiat money rival and Germany could not continue to grow unchecked in influence
– nigh, could not continue to exist – and put at risk ownership of the Bank of
England's magic money formula.
This is where the banking story of the United States merges with that of the House of
Hanover and its banker enablers. To its great credit, the United States had three times in its
early history repelled the external imposition of a privately owned central bank. After Andrew
Jackson allowed the Federal charter for the den of vipers – aka Second Bank of the United
States – to expire in 1837, the existing network of disunited state chartered banks grew
across the young country with the addition of every new state, each charter issuing its own
semi-fiat money backed by reserve requirements dictated by each state. Fiat money from the
states varied in exchange value and bank failures were common, but the distributed and
discretized nature of this Free Banking Era localized the crises and generally did not lead to
national economic disasters as did the regular and recurring management failures of the Bank of
England. It was during this laisse-faire period that the United States experienced incredible
growth of territory, population, political clout, and economic output, and the Federal Treasury
had financially strengthened to the point where the country had the temerity to negotiate for
territory, wage its own wars of conquest, and purchase new territories without serious economic
repercussion. With regards to banking it seemed the United States had found the magic money
formula by not finding the magic money formula and had instead wandered into a kind of balanced
budget quasi-capitalism where state charter banks issued local fiat money that few wanted as it
had to compete with the gold and silver specie put in circulation by the Federal Treasury. But
then every balanced budget just begs for a good war of attrition and that's exactly what came
next.
At the cusp of the American Civil War, the Bank of England had coopted the South into its
commoditized fiat empire as most of their raw cotton exports went to British textile mills.
Thus the Bank of England's fiat empire had crept quietly into America when the London
financiers gave full support to Confederate war funding by purchasing its heavily subscribed
and sterling denominated Cotton Bonds. To facilitate war funding at home, both the Union and
Confederacy resorted to fiat money issue, with the Confederacy printing greybacks and the Union
printing greenbacks. To enforce these new greenbacks as Union fiat money, Congress passed the
National Banking Act of 1863 establishing a system and network of national banks using a
uniform fiat money with a stipulated uniform fractional reserve requirement mandating these
banks purchase and hold US Treasury bills as "reserves". Both sides struggled with inflation,
but the Confederacy, if not defeated in battle, would likely have succumbed eventually to
inflation that by war's end ran at 9,000% of prewar levels rendering the greybacks effectively
worthless. But the old magic money formula of turning liabilities into assets worked just well
enough for the Union and with this National Banking Act their greenbacks replaced the former
hocus pocus uncoordinated sideshows from state charter bank fiat issue antics commonly backed
with no more than borrowed gold. Ironically, counterfeiting during the Civil War was a
persistent problem, so the National Banking Act not only removed gold convertibility and gold
and silver reserve requirements, but also established the United States Secret Service to
ensure the Union's new fake paper money was not fake fake paper money. And just like the
creation of its progenitor the Bank of England, greenbacks were only to be in circulation for a
limited time, which in 1878 became legally unlimited time but with the re-imposition of
convertibility into gold. America had officially entered into the world of capitalism, and for
the first time had a uniform national banking system under the control of the US Treasury using
a single fiat currency convertible into gold with a fractional reserve requirement. But the
greenback was finding itself more and more controlled by Wall Street proxies of the City of
London Corporation, Wall Street's influence was growing immensely within the US Congress, and
the bankers of the City of London Corporation had set their sights on gaining control of the
levers of America's new magic formula.
But full control of that magic formula would take some time to acquire as the American
people proved more intractable than the pliant Dickensian subjects of the City of London
Corporation. The weakened post bellum United States with its new national bank network, huge
Federal budget deficit, new fiat money empire throughout the defeated Confederate States, and
fast expanding Northern modern industrial base presented the City of London Corporation bankers
with proverbial low hanging fruit. After both sides weathered the depression caused by the
Panic of 1873, the City of London Corporation bankers' first salvo at usurping the American
money creation mechanism was the financially engineered Panic of 1893 where a coordinated
commodity price crash was timed with a run on the US Treasury gold holdings that nearly drew
down the country's entire gold reserve and sent the United States into prolonged depression.
But there's no depression a good war can't fix, so the politically popular 1898
Spanish-American War was prosecuted and with a quick victory the US spirits and economy sprang
back to life. The City of London Corporation bankers' initial crude efforts was thwarted, so a
second better organized salvo was launched in 1907, this time at the undertaking of Wall Street
proxies, complete with a ready-made plan to fix everything and paid agents ready in Congress to
promote the benevolence and virtue of the Money Trust. And to show the American people their
selfless good intentions, both J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller magnanimously gifted their
own money to acquire and "save" insolvent banks after the US Secretary of the Treasury secretly
pledged taxpayer bailout money should Morgan's and Rockefeller's bank investments fail. Wall
Street began its marketing campaign through Congress for the privatization of both the national
currency issue and monetary policy, promising America that once control of these powers passed
into secret hands all these recurring depressions caused by these very same secret hands would
immediately cease. But not all members of Congress were yet paid agents of Wall Street, and in
1913 the Pujo Committee released the results of its scathing Money Trust investigations. The
American public was in no mood to submit their sovereignty to the Wall Street Money Trust on
behalf of the City of London Corporation bankers, and time was running out for the bankers to
get America ensnared into their plans to deal with the new, powerful Continental upstart that
threatened the Bank of England's fiat empire gravy train – Germany.
The second half of the European 20th century following the brutal wars of unification saw
the Prussian state and its German coalition fiefdoms start to grind out military victories over
first Denmark and next Austria, but it wasn't until the German Empire coalesced after its
decisive and highly efficient defeat of world power France in 1871 that alarms began ringing in
the City of London Corporation. The German people, united under one state and the Hegelian
principles of "objectivity, truth, and ethical life", was one thing, but this Hegelian destiny
to unite all Germanic peoples under that state – including Germanic peoples living in
states with privately owned central banks – was another thing entirely. But the German
Empire with its sound monetary policy, advanced high tech ground based military capability, and
expanding colonial empire presented a formidable adversary, one that guaranteed mutually
assured destruction if challenged alone. Initial efforts to destabilize the German Empire from
within using communist agitators all fell flat as the German government enacted liberal labor
and social reforms blunting each new call for a general strike. Against this rising German
Empire stood a United Kingdom that had won just one major war in 85 years, was crawling out of
the 20 years Long Depression, and whose banks and investment houses were clear culprits in ever
recurring financial panic, one after the other, that had disastrously rippled throughout the
global economy. The limits of growth had been reached with the industrial-colonial model of the
British Empire, the system was devolving into stasis, and the Exchequer's budget deficit had
been reduced to the point where a new major war of attrition could now be prosecuted.
On the American home front the Jekyll Island conspiracy between the Wall Street proxies for
the City of London Corporation bankers and the US Congress had been in play since 1910. Its
success was a crucial step for the Exchequer to gain a reliable overseas source of credit and
for the Ministry of Defense to establish a supply chain prior to prosecuting its coming war of
attrition against the German Empire. It is likely these conspirators knew full well their plans
would commit the United States to not only massive war funding to Great Britain, but also pit
the Americans as enemy against whatever countries Parliament might declare war upon for the
"Glory of Britannia". So in practice, when Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in August
1913 despite the Pujo Committee findings, it not only robbed the American people of control
over its monetary policy, but to a large extent robbed it of control over much of its foreign
policy as well. Thus this fateful act of betrayal to both American citizens and British
subjects joined the eventual downfall of the British fiat empire with an American commitment to
Endless Wars in defense of its coming fiat empire. This was a master stroke for the City of
London Corporation bankers that brought the Federal Reserve System into its cross ownership
nexus that now facilitated trans-continental coordination of both monetary and foreign policies
that assured aggregate coordinated outcomes always resulted in a net gain to the City of London
Corporation bankers, regardless of which side of the Atlantic experienced victory or defeat.
And this new Federal Reserve System was isolated from all direct European land based military
threats and had the ability to create huge quantities of fiat money adsorbed by a brand new tax
base within the expanding American industrial economy which was now inescapably locked into
ever growing Federal debt by the XVI Amendment. Thus not since the fall of Troy had a free and
independent people willingly invited such unseen dangers into their midst, and by subterfuge
the Federal Reserve Act ended 137 years of fierce American independence with a single
unconscionable law and just 30 words contained in a new constitutional amendment.
Within four years of the Federal Reserve Act's passage, the City of London Corporation
bankers were victorious, the German Empire crushed absolutely, and the flame of "objectivity,
truth, and ethical life" extinguished. There would be no consolidation of the Germanic peoples
under a single state controlled central bank, and no challenge to the Bank of England's control
over its fiat empire. The costs were staggering – 20 million dead, 21 million injured,
1.2 million Queen's subjects killed, USD $3.2 trillion. Despite these losses, the combined
ownership nexus of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System saw the City of London
Corporation bankers in an even more powerful position that before the war, and for the first
time since wresting control of the world reserve currency from France in 1815, the Bank of
England began to share this status with the United States dollars it also controlled. And to
ensure the permanent dominance of the Federal Reserve System and avoid any resurrection of
populist economic policy threats like the Free Silver Movement, or for that matter, to forever
eliminate serious economic policy discussion from public debate, in 1920 Congress ratified the
XIX Amendment. Accumulated post-WWI budget deficits on both sides of the Atlantic ballooned
– the Exchequer's climbed from a prewar 20% of GDP to 180%, and the Treasury's increased
from 10% to 40% of GDP, with both countries finding themselves in the usual post-war
recessions. Time to fire up the post-war printing presses – but this time, only on the
other side of the Atlantic as the City of London Corporation had grand plans for its new
American vassal.
And for all that post-war M2 fiat money now flooding into America – from a total of
$18 billion circulating in 1915 to $47 billion in 1929 – the United States got things
like flappers, guys going over waterfalls in barrels, jazz clubs, ultra-rich organized crime
families, a mass entertainment industry, and through that cultural miasma somehow managed to
build thousands of factories, make millions of cars, pave thousands of miles of roads, erect
skyscrapers, and electrify cities. But the average Queen's subject didn't even get so much as
an extra helping of pudding. What were the Roaring 20s in America, where industrial and service
jobs abounded with the flood of fiat money created out of thin air, were more like the Boring
20s in the United Kingdom, where the printing presses remained idle and recession and mass
unemployment were the order of the decade. But then under orders from the City of London
Corporation bankers the Federal Reserve System raised interest rates from 4% to 6%, and
suddenly the jazz music stopped, the flappers quit flapping, and the bills for all that art
deco came due in October 1929. We all know the story of what happened next.
One side benefit of the Great Depression in the United States was so many people were
unemployed that few paid income taxes, so Congress could not immediately start a new war of
attrition to right the ship of finance at Wall Street's behest. Learned advisors first had to
resort to their old bag of tricks with a tweak here, a Congressional rider there, a new
regulation or two, and even introduced the new academic driven massive Keynesian make-work
stimulus programs. Nothing worked no matter how rarefied or how many respected monetary
scientists offered lofty solutions, so with the Federal Reserve insolvent and out of gold,
President Roosevelt resorted to the old goldsmith shakedown tactic and issued Executive Order
6102 in April 1933, followed by Congress and its Gold Reserve Act of January 1934. The EO
effectively confiscated all gold in the United States, gave it to the privately owned Federal
Reserve System at $20.67 per troy ounce, removed the gold standard again, then raised the gold
price to $35 a troy ounce and began printing massive amounts of pure fiat money. That gave the
appearance of working, and industrial output slowly rose to greater than 1929 pre-crash gold
standard levels entirely on the back of the inflation unleashed by pure fiat issuance until
everything collapsed again in 1937. It began to look more and more like the fog of war was the
only solution to pull America out of this depression and unbeknownst to most, the country had
been rearming itself since early 1940, nearly two years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The United Kingdom was in serious economic trouble too, having spent the entirety of the
1920s in deep recession and now hopelessly mired in a depression it could not shake. The old
18th century playbook would have to be dusted off, but at a great cost – financial
destruction of the British Empire and sacrifice of the Bank of England for the greater good of
the City of London Corporation's central bank cross ownership nexus. Starting in the early
1920s, the City of London Corporation bankers had recalled their communists to kick in the
teeth and pick whatever flesh was remaining from the bones of the Weimar Republic, and the now
worthless Reichsbank was put to work printing up never before seen hyper-inflation. These
actions not only plunged Germany into the economic stone ages, but deprived nexus owned Bank of
France of war reparations desperately needed to modernize its industrial base. Such was the
threat posed by even the remains of a German Empire that such actions were deemed acceptable
losses so long as "objectivity, truth, and ethical life" were sent to the unequivocal dustbin
of history. Now, on its knees before the world's creditors and on the brink of devolving into a
failed state, Germany was needed once again by these same creditors – and needed fast by
Great Britain. Despite having few natural resources within its borders, Germany's military
machine would be resurrected from the dead and come roaring back with a vengeance on a mission
to once again unite all Germanic peoples under the banner of a revisionist version of
"objectivity, truth, and ethical life", and it could only do that through the magic formula of
central banking foreign credit.
Within six years of Hitler's ascension to the German Chancellery, Wall Street and the City
of London Corporation bankers had financed the greatest mechanized military ever assembled
– the Wehrmacht. The Dawes plan of 1924 had initiated the linkage between German industry
and Wall Street finance for which the American banker Charles G. Dawes shared the 1925 Nobel
Peace Prize. Under the Dawes Plan, prior to the 1929 crash, the Weimar Republic had paid its
war reparations not to France or England, but to a consortium of Wall Street investment banks.
This Dawes Plan gave Germany a life-sustaining infusion of US dollar credit that would in
theory produce trade that would hypothetically generate customs and excise taxes that were
surmised to eventually go towards war reparations to England and France. But then Hitler
repudiated the Versailles Treaty, and the Gold Reserve Act allowed millions more pure fiat US
dollars to flow out of Wall Street to their agents in "neutral" Stockholm and into the Nazi
controlled Deutsche Reichsbank. Wall Street and the City of London Corporation loved Hitler and
the House of Windsor openly saluted him. Nazism was to be a great boon to the trans-Atlantic
financiers as Hitler would devoured the expendable and unprofitable Slavic peoples and ensured
a never ending stream of new revenue with every eastern conquest. It was a foolproof plan
– the Atlantic Ocean was wide, the Kriegsmarine small, the Luftwaffe would run out of gas
before it arrived over New York City, and the communist martyrs installed in Russia would put
up a fierce and expensive fight until Lebensraum ran out of room. But what Wall Street had not
figured into its equations was that Hitler would sign an Anti-Comintern Pact, a Phony War would
transform into a hot war, and another go at uniting all the Germanic peoples of Europe would
commence under the new banner of Blut und Boden. The City of London Corporation bankers would
have to fix this Wall Street mess themselves and call up the blue blooded true believers, those
who existed for one purpose and one purpose only – the "Glory of Britannia".
We all know the story of what happened next and how WWII dragged in the entire central bank
cross ownership nexus to secure victory for the "Glory of Churchill". But for all the tens of
thousands of pages published in the learned journal tomes, there is not one observation made
how the Federal Reserve System failed to deliver the expectations sold to America that it would
end the boom-bust cycles inherent under post bellum 19th century quasi-capitalism. There was
not one erudite call to re-examine the "special relationship" now cemented between Congress and
the Federal Reserve System, and not one monetary scientist noticed the Federal Reserve System
cross ownership nexus came out of the Great Depression – the depression it created
– more powerful than when it entered. Instead, the world got lofty excuses like The
General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money proclaiming that more of the same failures
would make everything indubitably jolly good. Not one political scientist noticed the Great
Depression was used to eliminate banks not in favor with the elite ownership hierarchy within
the trans-Atlantic central bank cross ownership nexus. And, not one scholarly paragraph
examined how depressions are, and have always been, financially engineered mechanisms to
destroy competitor banks and consolidate increasing power into a handful of fewer banks owned
by a shrinking secret ownership pool.
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With the conclusion of WWII, the Exchequer was broke as it had issued such an immense
quantity of debt to finance the war that it could never be repaid without resorting to harsh
austerity measures at home that would threaten social unrest during a period of national
weakness. But with the Bank of England in control of monetary policy, any semblance of economic
recovery would be impossible, so after 252 years of their "special relationship", Parliament
made the only logical choice available to it and in 1946 the Bank of England was nationalized
and played no further dominant role in world capitalism. But the central bank cross ownership
nexus made out just fine as the Bank of England wiggled out of holding the bag on all those
unpayable war debts as the nationalization dumped them onto the backs of the Queen's subjects
in another miraculous "heads they win, tails you lose" event. Thus 1946 begins the British
period of state controlled capitalism that was in effect a transition period into
de-industrialization where large segments of its economy were nationalized to ensure they were
not revived through modernization and thus would never be placed into competition with industry
in the United States or other European countries that were using their post-WWII rebuilding
programs to modernize their industries.
After both the Bank of England and Bank of France were lost to nationalizations, Wall Street
tool the pre-eminent role within the central bank cross ownership nexus and got straight to
work on elevating the US dollar to the status of undisputed world reserve currency, thus ending
the 130 year run of the pound sterling.
And a modern world reserve currency needed a colonial fiat empire, so the United States
started with Western Europe via the Anglo-American Loan Agreement of 1946 and later the
Marshall Plan of 1948 to kick off its "virtuous cycle". The Russian financial system remained
unchanged, and it absorbed Eastern Europe into its new expanded fiat empire. Thus, the true
winners at the cessation of hostilities from a purely financial perspective were the United
States and the Soviet Union.
In 1951 during the fog of the Korean War and with the Secretary of the Treasury in the
hospital, the Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury – not Congress – handed the
power to set interest rates independently of government economic policy entirely to the Federal
Reserve System. Like the original Federal Reserve Act, this additional power grab was sold to
the American people on the premise the privately owned Federal Reserve System would "tame
inflation" and "foster economic stability without responding to short-term political pressure".
This single act by an adjutant set the stage for the Federal Reserve System to wield incredible
power over government policy and essentially hold Congress to ransom, where although the US
Treasury was responsible for raising government money, the privately owned Federal Reserve
System was now responsible for setting that money's price paid to it for creating it out of
thin air. So the Federal Reserve System now had the power to create or destroy national wealth
by reducing or raising interest rates and there was no legal stipulation for whom their
policies should benefit. Thus unbeknownst to the American people, this unnecessary power
relinquishment was, in effect, the crucial piece that would set the stage for enabling the
financialization of the America economy.
Post-WWII capitalism under the American fiat leadership functioned much like it did prior to
the war except where the fiat empire was concerned. Instead of conquest and physical occupation
of resource rich lands and filling these lands up with colonists, the United States resorted to
a proxy conquest model where it initiated coup d'états, assassinations, foreign
espionage, fraudulent elections, and foreign propaganda campaigns to install pliable dictators
and friendly juntas. These leaders were amicable to pursuing "growth" policies, allowed
American military bases on their soil, and had no qualms about crushing dissent at home or
piling billions of US dollar denominated debt onto the heads of their citizenry. In exchange
for their compliance, these dictators and juntas were kept in power with generous foreign aid
packages, and they in turn doled out lucrative resource development concessions, purchased US
made military hardware, and awarded contracts to US corporations for industrial, civil, and
defense projects. In a new twist on colonization, many of these American proxy conquests
created large numbers of emigres into the United States and provided a mechanism to ensure the
consumer base at home continued to grow and devour excess production capacity as American
living standards rose and native born birth rates declined. A new "virtuous cycle" evolved
whereby industry in the conquered fiat empire eventually began to generate export income sold
into the US dollar denominated commodity markets, and those US dollars returned to the United
States to purchase US value added exports and services. And to secure this new "virtuous
cycle", in 1947 the Central Intelligence Agency was born out of the National Security Act, and
it quickly evolved into its main directive of waging clandestine foreign hybrid wars to
consolidate and grow the American fiat empire, install and keep friendly governments investing
in US exports – especially military equipment – and defeat the competing Soviet
fiat money empire. Thus with its responsibility of maintaining its new global fiat empire, the
United States entered into its historical phase of Endless War.
The United Kingdom on the other hand could no longer afford control over its fiat empire as
it had no viable value added export capability at war's end and thus its "virtuous cycle"
stopped functioning. It instead resorted to de-colonialization, but only in terms of physical
land holdings. The City of London Corporation bankers either kept effective control over these
former colonies' new central banking systems or was its primary beneficiary, and in either case
it retained the majority of financial profits derived from these newly created banking systems.
This "de-colonized" banking model was similar to the false "independence" of the Federal
Reserve System, but here the City of London Corporation bankers retained control through
majority stock ownership of the member banks that comprised the new banking systems. In the
English speaking constitutional monarchies where the serious financial profits were generated,
an additional failsafe was guaranteed by the Queen's appointment of Governor Generals who could
– and once did in Australia – sack recalcitrant duly elected governments that did
not put the City of London Corporation's interests above those of their own people.
One post-WWII change with huge repercussions to American capitalism was the US dollar
denomination takeover of global commodities trade from the pound sterling. As world population
and industrialization increased and Western Europe crept back into consumer manufacturing, the
volume of forward contracts traded in dollars grew in step. However, all that American
ingenuity put into its fiat empire's "virtuous cycle" began to work too well in the Middle East
and North African oil sectors. By 1965 the combined dollar revenues received from new oil
exports, taken together with all Western European dollar revenue streams, were greater than
what the US domestic export capacity could absorb through its "virtuous cycle". Instead of
buying US value added exports, these surplus overseas dollars went searching for investments
and with limited low risk opportunities available, they eventually found the US Treasury Gold
Window. The 1934 Gold Reserve Act had ended domestic dollar convertibility into physical gold
but not international convertibility, which was retained as per the Bretton Woods agreement,
and during the second half of the 1960s these foreign dollars began to drain the US Treasury of
its gold reserves. Despite the gold rush, the US Treasury held its official exchange price
constant at $35 an ounce – the same price set after the depression era Gold Reserve Act.
When the House of Rothschild finally raised the gold price in 1968, it signaled US gold
reserves were in decline and prompted frenzied buying from Western Europe up until the day that
American capitalism ended.
Western society is extremely destructive and self-destructive. At a time when humanity
abandoned matriarchy even before the new era, feminism is flourishing in the West.
Homosexuality was the cause of the fall of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, but in the West
it is believed that after 2 thousand years it is still supposedly fashionable. Back at the
beginning of the 6th century BC. e.
Solon decreed to punish any adult male found in the premises of a school where young boys and
girls studied. However, in the West, pedophilia still flourishes and the Lolita Express
runs.
Western decrepit pedophile elites deserve a replacement and a kick in the ***! The West will
fall just like the depraved, pedophilic, homosexual Ancient Rome fell. No huge amount of
money and no huge army will save the West. Why do you need to save yourself? What would be
the next generation of soulless and godless pedophiles, homosexuals and money-gamblers? Why
do you need money if you sold your soul?
HoodRatKing , 1 hour ago
I believe the 3rd world doesn't need a constitution to shoot weapons at the bankers... Some are quite good at it too!
Talk about a cut and paste Job. This article has so many inaccuracies that I would need to
write a book to refute them. Unlike CHS I don't write endlessy to flog eBooks on line while
begging for donations to constantly advertise myself. I don't want to bore anyone with an
endless monologue to counter some of the huge errors in this article. I am just stunned he
can chuck this out when it is truly shoddy.
The guy is very bright and he usually writes very well, but this article from him is an
utter mess.
Krinkle Sach , 3 hours ago
This generation
Rules the nation
With version
Music happen to be the food of love
Sounds to really make you rub and scrub
I say
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side (I say)
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side
It a go bun, give me music, make me jump and prance
It a go dung, give me the music, make me rockin' at the dance (Jah know!)
It was a cool and lonely breezy afternoon
(How does it feel when you got no food?)
You could feel it 'cause it was the month of June
(How does it feel when you got no food?)
So I left my gate and went out for a walk
(How does it feel when you got no food?)
As I pass the dreadlocks' camp I heard them say
(How does it feel when you got no food?)
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side (I say)
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side
It a go bun, give me music, make me jump and prance
It a go dung, give me the music, make me rockin' at the dance (Jah know!)
So I stopped to find out what was going on
(How does it feel when you got no food?)
'Cause the spirit of Jah, you know he leads you on
(How does it feel when you got no food?)
There was a ring of dreads and a session was there in swing
(How does it feel when you got no food?)
You could feel the chill as I seen and heard them say
(How does it feel when you got no food?)
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side (I say)
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side
It a go bun, give me music, make me jump and prance
It a go dung, give me the music, make me rockin' at the dance (Jah know!)
'Cause me say listen to the drummer, me say listen to the bass
Give me little music make me wind up me waist
Me say listen to the drummer, me say listen to the bass
Give me little music make me wind up me waist, I say
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side (I say)
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side
It a go bun, give me music, make me jump and prance
It a go dung, give me the music, make me rockin' at the dance (Jah know!)
You play it on the radio
And so me say, we a go hear it on the stereo
And so me know you a go play it on the disco
And so me say we a go hear it on the stereo (bow!)
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side (I say)
Pass the dutchie 'pon the left hand side
It a go bun, give me music, make me jump and prance
It a go dung, give me the music, make me rockin' at the dance (Jah know!)
On the left hand side (I say)
On the left hand side (I say)
On the left hand side
(We meet) On the left hand side (say man)
On the left hand side
Me say east, say west, say north and south (on the left hand side)
This is gonna really make us jump and shout (on the left hand side)
Me say east, say west, say north and south (on the left hand side)
Not sure if this passes ZH / United States Censors:
Those who studied recent-Ancient History - Plato or Socrates - shall understand
Athens.
Athens ( Greece ) domination over 200 plus city states. Athens was the center where the
Wealthiest Families of Planet Earth resided at the time. Athens is where the 200 plus city
states paid their tribute (taxes) for Military Protection and maintenance of basic civil
human-to-human peaceful exchanges. Athens Wealthy fed and protected the 200 plus city
states.
The elites in Italy, the Medici's provided food, clothing, housing and other to the
general populations - all this easily understood including the Medici Parties for the entire
town for free!
Those of yester years did not: take the wealth they dug from Planet Earth, put it in their
pockets, then later put the wealth back into Planet Earth, that wealth is here today.
Plus new wealth is created.
FIRST LIST - UPPER CLASS
Here is a brief Modern List of "The Elites" "The Globalists" "The Powers That Be (TPTB)"
that feed, clothe, house, and entertain the populations encased this larger Western World
Superstructure:
* Rothschild Family of Paris
* Warburg Family of Hamburg
* Lazard Family of Paris
* Israel Moses Seif Family of Rome
* Goldman / Sachs Family
* Rockefeller Family
* Lehman Family
* Kuhn Loeb Family of New York
These families similar to the ultra-wealthy families in Athens give everyone food,
clothing, shelter, cities, education, and everything one has or knows others have.
These are the New Athens Families of the Western World on Planet Earth.
The reader has a very difficult time enjoying the fact the reader is a Common Ordinary
Pedestrian Modern Peasant whose existence is sustained by the Super Ultra Wealthy as in the
days of Athens where nameless faceless common folk depended on similar Super Ultra Wealthy to
merely survive day-to-day.
Without these Super Ultra Wealthy Families - "The Elites" or "The Globalists" or "The
Powers That Be (TPTB)" - on the afore list, dominating other Human Populations on Planet
Earth, most reading would be starving To Death existing during a pitiless life in less than
abject poverty.
2020: 178 Nation-States use the New Families of the Western World on Planet Earth
"Reserve" Currency to pay Tribute for Military Protection and Trade and Simple Sustenance -
fed and protected. Whole cities would cease to exist, the electricity, gas, and tap water
would stop flowing immediately.
The mass illusions provided by the Athens-like Super Ultra Wealthy Western World Families'
Personal Servants are imaginative and entertaining.
Common ZH Readers would have a very, very difficult time conceiving through the Haze the
reader is nothing more than a Dependent Common Ordinary Pedestrian Modern Peasant because of
the Haze.
Lessee - remove the Haze of the Super Ultra Wealthy Western World Families and see their
Servants:
SECOND LIST - MIDDLE CLASS
United States Government(s) / Economy is Infected and Infested with Middle Eastern
Arabs:
United States Federal Reserve Branch: BERNANKE, YELEN, ROSENGREN, GREENSPAN, et al.
United States Military Branch: WOLFOWITZ, WILLIAM "BILL" KRISTOL, ROBERT KAGAN, RICHARD
"****" N. PERLE, VICTORIA NULAND, ELLIOTT ABRAMS, ELIOT A. COHEN, AARON FRIEDBERG, I. LEWIS
SCOOTER LIBBY, NORMAN PODHORETZ, PETER W. RODMAN, STEPHEN P. ROSEN, MARK GERSON, RANDY
SCHEUNEMANN, et al.
United States Judicial Branch: MUELLER, ROSENSTEIN, WASSERMAN, HOROWITZ, BADER, GOLDMAN,
WEISMAN et al.
United States National Medical:
Deputy Attorney General ROD ROSENSTEIN's SISTER: The United States Center For Disease Control
(CDC), Atlanta, Georgia, United States, Dr. Nancy Messonnier (Nanc married a white) et
al.
United States Political (in ur face):
BLOOMBERG, SANDERS, STEYER, et al.
Add Commercial Real Estate: SAM ZELL, COOPERMAN, SILVERSTEIN Properties, and
Middle-Men.
The afore are all from the Middle East.
Middle Eastern Arabs are J's by a different name - same.
Now there is clearer focus for the Dependent Common Ordinary Pedestrian Modern Peasant ZH
Reader. Less Haze.
THIRD LIST - LOWER CLASS
The Second List afore controls these Democrats and Republican Party Gang Member
Servants.
Party Member Servants: "vote" to appear to control the United States Federal, State,
County, City, Town, Village Governments. For example:
United States House of Representatives,
United States Senate,
United States Judicial,
United States Executive,
- Democrats and Republicans -
all signed the papers to transfer
United States Intellectual Property,
United States Agriculture,
United States Financial Services,
United States Technology Transfer (Patents, Software Code, Aero/Astro -nautical, et al.),
United States Currency and Foreign Exchange, and Other
to China.
FOURTH LIST - PEASANT CLASS
* Lifetime Debt - give me house, gimme car, gimme food, gimme water, gimme clothes.
Wherefore art thou u?
Thomas Paine you rascal!
conraddobler , 1 hour ago
What's going on is painfully obvious. It has been for decades, nothing is done except to
continue taking it up another notch. When it all collapses those who set the fire will show
up to sell fire insurance.
Nothing will ever change.
People will breathlessly bow down before those who caused the mess, anything to get some
access to more debt at low rates.
Since the largest threat facing the country is white supremacists, according to FBI Director
Chris Wray and Homeland Security acting chief
Tom Wolf , the Department of Homeland Security has agreed to provide $10 million in grants
to organizations which combat 'far-right extremism and white supremacy , ' according to the
Wall Street Journal .
The department's Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program will fund groups such as
Life After Hate - founded by reformed white supremacists, which helps people trying to do the
same. Another group, the School of Communication at American University, will develop a
strategy to combat disinformation 'circulated by the far right online,' and others. Life After
Hate was awarded nearly $750,000, while the School of Communication received a $500,000
grant.
One of the largest grants, nearly $750,000, went to Life After Hate, which was founded by
former white supremacists and neo-Nazis and works with people trying to leave violent
far-right movements. The group was first awarded funding under the Obama-era program but had
its grant rescinded soon after Mr. Trump took office. -
Wall Street Journal
Life After Hate says they will use the funding for its ExitUSA initiative. Executive
director Sammy Rangel says their work "has never been more important," adding "This project
follows years of innovation in a space that was largely uncharted."
Another group, the Counter Extremism Project, was awarded $277,755 to collaborate with
Parallel Networks, which works with inmates at a San Diego County correctional facility who
adhere to both white supremacist of jihadi ideology .
"... The reason that the "mainstream" parties are in decline is that they are no longer willing to represent the interests of ordinary people. Both are the captives of special interest groups ..."
"... What I see happening seems to me to be less explained by Hannah Arendt than by Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer. ..."
"... They are not accepting an evil, just banality of evil that goes unrecognized as evil for its very banality. They see the extremes, and as Hoffer wrote they are drawn by that extreme; that is the very appeal of it, not just something they excuse as if banal. ..."
The one thing I see in Maoist China, Nazi Germany and Czarist Russia/Soviet Union is that "freedom was curtailed" and the government
cracked down on "law and order." If you look at the intimidation tactics of individuals, couples, families at restaurants and
the assassinations of Police Officers, the violent riots, arson and looting in american cities you can see the justification for
the government to "crack down on freedoms" and restore "law and order" similar to Maoist China and Pre-War Germany but for different
reasons and justifications. If you look at the lefts handling of the Chinese biological weapon of terrorism COVID19 and the resulting
lock down of the economy and the enforced government closing of churches, synagogues and mosques then you can see similarities
in Maoist China, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik/Stalinist Soviet Union (and its satellites) but for different reasons and different
justifications.
-The radical elements pushing for civil war and revolution in the US arent reacting to hunger or the economy as they did in
Germany or Russia.
-The radical elements pushing for civil war and revolution in the US are fundamentally Marxist and are using feminism to pit
men and women against one another, to destroy marriage and family to abort children. Marxists are using Gay Rights to pit sexual
orientation of gays against sexual orientation of straights. Marxists are using the prejudice of minorities against the whites.
Marxists are again pitting poor against rich. Marxists fracture society into entitled and embittered tribes. Radical elements
are pushing for reparations and re-indoctrination as well as civil war and revolution. This is very close to the tactics of Maoist
China and it has been proven that George Soros and Peoples Republic of China are financing Antifa and Black Lives Matters..China
was too weak to fight the Maoist Communists so many fled to Taiwan. Russians were bribed to revolt against the Czar and put the
Bolsheviks into power. Germans were desperate and the Pre-Nazi government was to weak to restore the economy. Americans aren't
desperate. Americans are rich fat entitled and ridden with guilt for their blessings to the point where they are self destructive
so Americans dont have motivational similarities to the Germans or the Russians for revolution.
Strong Correlation to today
Todays indoctrination youth with their rabid faces and penchant for violence remind me much more of indoctrinated Maoists destroying
Chinese culture, attacking Chinese business owners and property owners to enforce a Cultural Revolution.
There was a fairly large economic diaspora during the Reagan years, as the heavy manufacturing (steel) and assembly (auto)
factories in what became know as the Rust Belt closed down and people moved South and West for better opportunities. (One of the
results of that diaspora s the nationwide popularity of the Pittsburgh Steelers, as thousands upon thousands of fans left western
PA and moved elsewhere but maintained their loyalty.)
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction
between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards
of thought) no longer exist."
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Now, is it the right or left that is more anti-science and anti-fact? Who lies to us more, the right or left? Check PolitiFact
or any other reasonably balanced fact checker before you answer (No, Media Matters doesn't count). Which party's leader said:
"Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening,"
I mean neither have a clean slate here, they are human and are politicians, too. But Trump's avalanche of lies and unsupported
claims in Tuesday's "debate" makes it ridiculous to argue that Trump is on the side of fact, truth, and evidence.
Bingo. I live in an overwhelmingly liberal suburb of NYC. This place is sleepier than Mayberry. My wallet (with over $200 inside)
slipped out of my pocket while I was riding my bike. The police had called me to pick it up before I even realized that it was
missing.
Last week a two motorized skateboards were stolen, and someone shoplifted 5 cigars from the local tobacconist.
There is little sexual adventurism, no visible celebrations of perversion, and sexuality is largely a private matter. If you
told an off-color sexual joke at the local bar, you'd likely be asked to leave.
For a guy who cautions against living by lies, Rod would do well to engage some social and intellectual elites on a regular
basis. Visit places like Potomac, Maryland, or Princeton, New Jersey, or Swampscott, Massachusetts. The reality is that it's out
in "Christian America" that all of this stuff is running rampant.
"Democratic norms are under strain in many industrialized nations, with the support for mainstream parties of left and
right in decline."
The reason that the "mainstream" parties are in decline is that they are no longer willing to represent the interests of
ordinary people. Both are the captives of special interest groups (ethnic minorities and the radical Left in the case of
the Dems, and corporations and wealthy individuals in the case of the GOP). Middle America no longer has any place to go.
Thanks for this overview of Hannah Arendt's thought and its relation to current circumstances. Very insightful. I've been wanting
to read her book for a while now but have not yet done so.
"who today talks about totalitarianism?"
Political libertarians and social conservatives have for over 100 years been warning us of this coming totalitarianism. One
was even so astute as to see past the absolute dictatorships of the 20th century to what we have at our doorstep today.
"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications
and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority
of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them
in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For
their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness;
it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal
concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to
spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency
of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the
uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often
to look on them as benefits. After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned
him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network
of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot
penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced
by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it
does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing
better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." - Alexis de Tocqueville
Another Tocquevillian quote that commands attention today:
"What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil
and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even
as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality
and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything
must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish? There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of
themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their
country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard
of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets,
the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful
stranger called "the government." They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought
to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of
their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the
nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience
than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy
the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license. When a nation has reached this
point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no
longer finds citizens but only subjects."
You know, I'm a full Republican conservative, but in a way, I kinda think that maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a similar
economy like what's in Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, North Korea, etc, etc, etc, so that idiots that think that kind of life style
is good. THEN when they find out what it's like living in a WORKER'S PARADISE, they'll know.
What I see happening seems to me to be less explained by Hannah Arendt than by Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer.
We are surrounded by the extreme emotions of people feeling desperate. They are grasping at whatever is on offer, and equally
likely to grasp at anything else offered.
They are not accepting an evil, just banality of evil that goes unrecognized as evil for its very banality. They see the
extremes, and as Hoffer wrote they are drawn by that extreme; that is the very appeal of it, not just something they excuse as
if banal.
The emotions are running to such extremes that politics breaks up longstanding friendships, and even families, as we saw in
the American Civil War. That did not happen in Germany's banal acceptance of evil and power.
Control requires widening the net, which requires expanding the parameters of government, which requires centralizing government
power, which when done in boiling frog manner, can take a couple of centuries or so. Yet here we have arrived.
It took a long time to get from there to here and getting from here to there will require tough duty.
Sensible people might opt for a modernized Articles of Confederation with reasonable limited taxation privileges and a modified
defense arrangement but of course sensible people are in low demand.
Should quoting you include that perhaps as many as 5 million Russian POW's also perished in the holocaust, and that it was
a good thing? I am saving this RD article much more for the commentary than what rod said. Anti-fascists and the radical left?
Yeah, right. Okay folks, show of hands. How many out there, identifying themselves as left or right, wish that world war 2 had
lasted longer? Bone spur patriotism seems to be on full display here.
"At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track
positions have to affirm their commitment to "equity, diversity, and inclusion" -- and to have demonstrated it, even if it
has nothing to do with their field."
It isn't just the U.C. schools. Here in Thousand Oaks, California, sits the campus of California Lutheran University - a private
institution ( though no longer "Lutheran" or indeed "Christian" in any meaningful sense of those words ). The faculty and staff
are undergoing frank re-education, in preparation for the loyalty oath. And, those who dare resist ( sadly, there are few ) are
simply shown the door. Any dissent is labelled "racist", "homophobic", etc., etc. The jackboots are echoing even in the quiet
streets of suburbia...
And the so-called California Ethnic Studies Curriculum ( based on critical race will soon be introduced as a mandatory high
school class. No class, no graduation. It's utterly chilling.
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#FoxNews
#Tucker
Hannah Arendt books is junk, as elements of totalitarim are present inmst modern sociery,
espcally neoliberal. The USA after 9/11 is one example.
Notable quotes:
"... Some émigrés who grew up in Soviet-dominated societies are sounding the alarm about the West's dangerous drift into conditions like they once escaped. They feel it in their bones. Reading Arendt in the shadow of the extraordinary rise of identity-politics leftism and the broader crisis of liberal democracy is to confront a deeply unsettling truth: that these refugees from communism may be right. ..."
"... Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian James Billington called "a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture." Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex. ..."
"... Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause: It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of "understood necessity," for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness. ..."
"... You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. ..."
"... In 2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, found that over a nine-year period, the rate of news stories using progressive jargon associated with left-wing critical theory and social justice concepts shot into the stratosphere. The mainstream media is framing the general public's understanding of news and events according to what was until very recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing intellectual elites. ..."
"... For a man desperate to believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious than life itself. "He may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not touched," Arendt wrote. Indeed, the files of the 1930s Stalinist show trials are full of false confessions by devout communists who were prepared to die rather than admit that communism was a lie. ..."
"... Similarly, under the guise of antiracism training, U.S. corporations, institutions, and even churches are frog-marching their employees through courses in which whites and other ideologically disfavored people are compelled to confess their "privilege." Some do, eagerly. ..."
"... "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty," wrote Arendt. ..."
"... President Donald Trump is a rule-breaker in many ways. He once said, "I value loyalty above everything else -- more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy." ..."
"... Trump's exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. This is at the root of "cancel culture," in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness. ..."
"... Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to "equity, diversity, and inclusion" -- and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field. ..."
"... De facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate America, and have now found their way into STEM faculties and publications, as well as into medical science. ..."
"... A Soviet-born U.S. physician told me -- after I agreed not to use his name -- that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient's health interest. ..."
"... Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about our own country's stability. It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic order into question. ..."
"... If totalitarianism comes, it will almost certainly not be Stalinism 2.0, with gulags, secret police, and an all-powerful central state. That would not be necessary. The power of surveillance technology, woke capitalism, and fear of losing bourgeois comfort and status will probably be enough to compel conformity by most. ..."
"... At least at first, it will be a soft totalitarianism, more on the Brave New World model than the Nineteen Eighty-Four one -- but totalitarianism all the same. ..."
n 1951, six years after the end of World War II, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt
published The Origins of Totalitarianism , in an attempt to understand how such radical
ideologies of both left and right had seized the minds of so many in the 20th century. Arendt's
book used to be a staple in college history and political theory courses. With the end of the
Cold War 30 years behind us, who today talks about totalitarianism? Almost no one -- and if
they do, it's about Nazism, not communism.
Unsurprisingly, young Americans suffer from profound ignorance of what communism was, and
is. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit educational and research
organization established by the U.S. Congress, carries out an annual survey of Americans to
determine their attitudes toward communism, socialism, and Marxism in general. In 2019, the
survey found that a startling number of Americans of the post-Cold War generations have
favorable views of left-wing radicalism, and only 57 percent of Millennials believe that the
Declaration of Independence offers a better guarantee of "freedom and equality" than The
Communist Manifesto .
Some émigrés who grew up in Soviet-dominated societies are sounding the alarm
about the West's dangerous drift into conditions like they once escaped. They feel it in their
bones. Reading Arendt in the shadow of the extraordinary rise of identity-politics leftism and
the broader crisis of liberal democracy is to confront a deeply unsettling truth: that these
refugees from communism may be right.
What does contemporary America have in common with pre-Nazi Germany and pre-Soviet Russia?
Arendt's analysis found a number of social, political, and cultural conditions that tilled the
ground for those nations to welcome poisonous ideas.
Loneliness and Social Atomization
Totalitarian movements, said Arendt, are "mass organizations of atomized, isolated
individuals." She continues:
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact
that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social
conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our
century.
The political theorist wrote those words in the 1950s, a period we look back on as a golden
age of community cohesion. Today, loneliness is widely recognized by scientists as a critical
social and even medical problem. In the year 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam
published Bowling Alone , an acclaimed study documenting the steep decline of civil
society since midcentury and the resulting atomization of America.
Since Putnam's book, we have experienced the rise of social media networks offering a
facsimile of "connection." Yet we grow ever lonelier and more isolated. It is no coincidence
that Millennials and members of Generation Z register much higher rates of loneliness than
older Americans, as well as significantly greater support for socialism. It's as if they aspire
to a politics that can replace the community they wish they had.
Sooner or later, loneliness and isolation are bound to have political effects. The masses
supporting totalitarian movements, says Arendt, grew "out of the fragments of a highly atomized
society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held
in check only through membership in a class."
A polity filled with alienated individuals who share little sense of community and purpose,
and who lack civic trust, are prime targets for totalitarian ideologies and leaders who promise
solidarity and meaning.
Losing Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions
Surveying the political scene in Germany during the 1920s, Arendt noted a "terrifying
negative solidarity" among people from diverse classes, united in their belief that all
political parties were populated by fools. Likewise, in late imperial Russia, Marxist radicals
finally gained traction with the middle class when the Tsarist government failed miserably to
deal with a catastrophic 1891-92 famine.
Are we today really so different? According to Gallup, Americans' confidence in their
institutions -- political, media, religious, legal, medical, corporate -- is at historic lows
across the board. Only the military, the police, and small businesses retain the strong
confidence of over 50 percent. Democratic norms are under strain in many industrialized
nations, with the support for mainstream parties of left and right in decline.
In Europe of the 1920s, says Arendt, the first indication of the coming totalitarianism was
the failure of established parties to attract younger members, and the willingness of the
passive masses to consider radical alternatives to discredited establishment parties.
A loss of faith in democratic politics is a sign of a deeper and broader instability. As
radical individualism has become more pervasive in our consumerist-driven culture, people have
ceased to look outside themselves to religion or other traditional sources of authoritative
meaning.
But this imposes a terrible psychological burden on the individual. Many of them may seek
deliverance as the alienated masses of pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia did: in the
certainties and solidarity offered by totalitarian movements.
The Desire to Transgress and Destroy
The post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their embrace and
celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way of demonstrating contempt for
established hierarchies, institutions, and ways of thinking. Arendt said of some writers who
glorified the will to power, "They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade."
Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual
theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in
human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt's judgment of the postwar
elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our
own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and
free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:
The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of
civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced
their way into it.
One thinks of the university presidents and news media executives of our time who have
abandoned professional standards and old-fashioned liberal values to embrace "antiracism" and
other trendy left-wing causes. Some left-wing politicians and other progressive elites either
cheered for the George Floyd race riots, or, like New York mayor Bill De Blasio, stood idly by
as thuggish mobs looted and burned stores in the name of social justice.
Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual
revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian
James Billington called "a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier
Russian culture." Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of
perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the
laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or
village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex.
The end of official censorship after the 1905 uprising opened the floodgates to erotic
literature, a prefiguration of our century's technology-driven pornographic revolution. "The
sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic," Billington writes, detailing how
the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians. They admired the diabolic
willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy one's desires and to exercise one's will.
Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies
Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial,
reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause: It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your
freedom for the sake of "understood necessity," for Party discipline, for conformity with the
regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are
so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life
begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily
condemned yourself to helplessness.
You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can
also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt
writes, hating "respectable society" was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept
"monstrous forgeries in historiography" for the sake of striking back at those who, in their
view, had "excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind."
For example, many who didn't really accept Marx's revisionist take on history -- that it is
a manifestation of class struggle -- were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to
punish those they despised. Consider the lavish praise with which elites have welcomed The
New York Times 's "1619 Project," a vigorously revisionist attempt to make slavery the
central fact of the American founding.
Despite the project's core claim (that the patriots fought the American Revolution to
preserve slavery) having been thoroughly debunked, journalism's elite saw fit to award the
project's director a Pulitzer Prize for her contribution.
Along those lines, propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the
way the world is. Writes Arendt, "The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda lies in its
ability to shut the masses off from the real world."
In 2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, found that over a
nine-year period, the rate of news stories using progressive jargon associated with left-wing
critical theory and social justice concepts shot into the stratosphere. The mainstream media is
framing the general public's understanding of news and events according to what was until very
recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing intellectual elites.
A Mania for Ideology
Why are people so willing to believe demonstrable lies? The desperation alienated people
have for a story that helps them make sense of their lives and tells them what to do explains
it. For a man desperate to believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious than life
itself. "He may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if
only his status as a member of the movement is not touched," Arendt wrote. Indeed, the files of
the 1930s Stalinist show trials are full of false confessions by devout communists who were
prepared to die rather than admit that communism was a lie.
Similarly, under the guise of antiracism training, U.S. corporations, institutions, and even
churches are frog-marching their employees through courses in which whites and other
ideologically disfavored people are compelled to confess their "privilege." Some do,
eagerly.
One of contemporary progressivism's commonly used phrases -- the personal is political --
captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political
consciousness. Indeed, the Left today pushes its ideology ever deeper into the private realm,
leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a
society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is:
the politicization of everything.
Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled
over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.
"We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess," he said. "We must condemn
once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess,' like the formula 'art for art's
sake.' We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a
Five-Year Plan for chess."
A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise
"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their
sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the
best guarantee of their loyalty," wrote Arendt.
All politicians prize loyalty, but few would regard it as the most important quality in
government, and even fewer would admit it. But President Donald Trump is a rule-breaker in many
ways. He once said, "I value loyalty above everything else -- more than brains, more than
drive, and more than energy."
Trump's exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But
how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity
politics. This is at the root of "cancel culture," in which transgressors, however minor their
infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.
Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems
ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California
system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their
commitment to "equity, diversity, and inclusion" -- and to have demonstrated it, even if it has
nothing to do with their field.
De facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate America, and have now
found their way into STEM faculties and publications, as well as into medical science.
A Soviet-born U.S. physician told me -- after I agreed not to use his name -- that social
justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment
when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to
advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes
it is not in that particular patient's health interest.
Intellectuals Are the Revolutionary Class
In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by
denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine
its long-term direction.
"[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new
institutions that are created out of those networks," writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.
Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, "it does not gain
traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites" working through their "well-developed
networks and powerful institutions."
This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Arendt
warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful
minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people
regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They
mock them as "snowflakes" and "social justice warriors."
This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice
warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary
Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and
anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to
identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose.
For them, the ideology of social justice -- as defined not by church teaching but by
critical theorists in the academy -- functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to
campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and
networks of power and influence. They are marching through the institutions of bourgeois
society, conquering them, and using them to transform the world. For example, when the LGBT
cause was adopted by corporate America, its ultimate victory was assured.
Futuristic Fatalism
To be sure, none of this means that totalitarianism is inevitable. But they do signify that
the weaknesses in contemporary American society are consonant with a pre-totalitarian state.
Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about
our own country's stability. It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or
some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic
order into question.
As Arendt warned more than half a century ago:
There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of
liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with
the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many
intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What
common sense and "normal people" refuse to believe is that everything is possible.
If totalitarianism comes, it will almost certainly not be Stalinism 2.0, with gulags, secret
police, and an all-powerful central state. That would not be necessary. The power of
surveillance technology, woke capitalism, and fear of losing bourgeois comfort and status will
probably be enough to compel conformity by most.
At least at first, it will be a soft
totalitarianism, more on the Brave New World model than the Nineteen Eighty-Four
one -- but totalitarianism all the same.
A Czech immigrant to the U.S. who works in academia told me that this "is not supposed to be
happening here" -- but it is.
"Any time I try to explain current events and their meaning to my friends or acquaintances,
I am met with blank stares or downright nonsense," he says. His own young adult children, born
in America and indoctrinated into identity-politics ideology by public schooling, think their
father is an alarmist kook. Can anyone blame a man like this for concluding that Americans are
going to have to learn about the evils of totalitarianism the hard way?
I grew up under a socialist authoritarian state and I recognized it in the US 20 years
ago. In the Patriot Act, to be more precise. It was the very same kind of law that I saw
enacted in the early 70s back home that turned the tide of the regime to full out repression.
You're noticing it just now because authoritarianism became bipartisan, though you have been
quite comfortable since your tribe started it.
The week after 9/11, I wrote President Bush asking him not to let something like the
Patriot Act happen. I never got a reply and wondered ever since if it went astray (it was via
email) or if anyone even read it.
<sigh> There are credible arguments to be made against the drug war, for sure, but
how exactly did the Bill of Rights get "dumped"? OK I'm willing to concede that the Fourth
Amendment got stretched beyond recognition to accommodate no-knock warrants and the like.
Which of the rest of the Bill of Rights got dumped by the drug war?
If only liberals actually understood and believed in the 9th and 10th amendments, OTOH, we
might be able to restore federal governance to something resembling sanity.
Both the 9th and 10th Amendments were finally destroyed due to the drug war. The 2nd is
collateral damage due to the increased use of home invasion raids by law enforcement see the
"firearm enhancements". It can easily be argued that the increased militarization of law
enforcement due to the drug war is a violation of the 3rd Amendment. The long sentences due
given to people for possessing or selling a plant are a violation of the 8th Amendment. The
right to a jury trial has been gutted via voir dire and the refusal of courts to recognize
the natural right of all citizens to nullify unjust laws.
I am a liberal in the sense Patrick Henry was a liberal. We should have stuck with the
Articles of Confederation.
It can't be easily argued that the drug war runs into the 3rd amendment, that is
ridiculous. Nor is the 8th amendment really a great argument, although I do get where you're
coming from.
It's obviously completely contemptuous of the idea of enumerated powers like you said
before though. Why would you not mention the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments, which had to be
gutted for it, or the ways it runs afoul of the 14th, or basically ignores the precedent set
by the 18th and 21st amendments.
I too see where you're coming from, though I think the 9th and 10th amendments were
already in tatters long before the drug war began. For that blame the now 100 year plus build
up of the administrative state (particularly under FDR and LBJ) and the Court's enabling of
it through imaginative readings of the Commerce Clause, delegation of powers, etc. Also blame
Congress's total dereliction of duty per the above.
Add on the scheme by which the Federal govt takes everyone's money, shuffles it around and
then hands it back to the states, but only under the condition that they do what the Federal
govt tells them to do. Thus no state actually gets to build/maintain roads, develop housing
programs, expand educational access or testing, and essentially anything else without
following a million federal edicts.
The very fact that a website like this exists, and we comment on it, suggests that.. No,
we are nit under Totalitarian oppression or even an authoritarian regime. Would Stalin or
even Brezhnev have tolerated a TAC critical of the ruling party? How about Hitler, Mussolini
or Franco?
Excellent point. There are, however, concepts such as "controlled opposition" and "soft
totalitarianism" as outlined recently in Rod Dreher's piece. The latter concerns me more.
As long as Americans believe that they are getting the carrot they will not notice the
slow encroachment of the stick, particulary if it's in the hands of large
mega-corporations.
You, sir, are correct. The totalitarianism rampaging toward us is going to be a
paradoxical mix of Sexual Revolution, Cultural Marxism, and Globalist Vampire Capitalism. It
will feature elements that seem to have been predicted in Zamyatin's We , Huxley's
Brave New World , and Orwell's 1984 . It also has been foretold in Robert Hugh
Benson's Lord of the World .
I'm sure you are well aware that Rod is not suggesting such a regime is here or coming. He
has described how censorship will work / is working in painfully repetitive detail (because
obviously people need to hear it over and over again).
Under soft totalitarianism, you will make the wrong response or refuse to affirm or refuse
to attend the required re-education workshop and your job and livelihood will be gone. Don't
pretend you don't understand Rod's argument.
Jonf is for the woke soft totalitarianism, a dangerous element in the church, we Orthodox
Christian's need to be on guard with Catechumens , and their motives for joining the Church,
as well as Cradle liberals who dominate institutions in jurisdictions like GOARCH
It had bipartisan support in Congress. Do you understand how the US legislative system
works? Presidents don't unilaterally introduce and approve legislation.
It wasn't introduced by Bush, but by a nobody Republican in Congress. The act has the paw
marks of Republicans through and through. Just 3 Republican congressmen voted against.
There's no point hiding behind the bipartisan curtain.
There is much yet to be answered for in the Patriot Act origins and how it came to be
passed before anyone voting on it had a chance to read it once much less review it with
propper staffing.
That Act was sitting on a shelf, like a time bomb, waiting for its chance. I suspect it
was part of the preparations for an apocalyptic, dystopian America after a nuclear war.
It was pulled off that shelf because it was what they had on the shelf, it was there so
they used it.
"Can anyone blame a man like this for concluding that Americans are going to have to learn
about the evils of totalitarianism the hard way?"
Americans have never learned anything the easy way. They don't learn the hard way
either.
"Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion,
and all manner of sensuality was common."
Let no future commisar say that I didn't do my part for the revolution! I stand ready to
humbly serve the people in the creation of an appropriate ministry for perversion.
Those who will have less than five sexual partners a year and do not switch gender in over
two years will be chastised for the term of 10 years by legislation.
When you remove God from your life, the inner desire implanted by God to look for the true
meaning in life, & the desire to do good instead of evil remain strong. For most people,
the "obvious" path is to give meaning to one's life is to follow the feel-good "social
justice" road, a form of false humanism (for man & by man alone), ie, social justice
without God that tries to create a paradise on earth (same way that communism tried to create
a utopia without God).
Many young Americans no longer believe in God's relevance & His authority over their
lives. This normally starts with the loss of respect for the authority of parents who
represent God in the home (even Jesus was obedient to his mortal parents). The gradual
destruction of the "domestic church", the family, in American homes is one of the immediate
goals of radical agenda (eg, gender conflicts & confusion, gender id, gender choice,
abortion, contraception, women liberation, etc) that results in increasing number of divorce
& single-parent homes.
The only way to correct the path to a radical secular future is for people, esp the young,
to regain their faith in God. The question is how. Evangelization is one. One can evangelize
by words &or by acts. St Franscis of Assisi is often quoted to have said: When you
evangelize, sometimes you need to use words. I think Rod is doing both through his books.
If God isn't implanted in a child's mind at a young age, it most likely never will.
People, in there 20's, who never went to church are unlikely to ever become Christians. If
you don't believe Heaven and Hell exist, why do you need a Savior? Look at the number of
young families with young children at Church, and consider how many aren't there. That's the
future.
The idea of God doesn't need to be implanted in a child's mind. A child (and every person
for that matter) intuitively knows that there has to be a Creator, an afterlife, and Divine
Justice. As proof, I offer the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has had a
religion with the aforementioned elements. Atheism did not appear until Marxism, and even
then, in the Soviet Union / Russia, it did not succeed in eradicating faith and religion,
which are as innate as love and sex.
Unfortunately for you atheism long predates Marxism. Look to the early Greeks for the
first recorded instances of non-believers. Try
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... for a overview.
>"The only way to correct the path to a radical secular future is for people, esp the
young, to regain their faith in God."
Exactly the thinking powering Daesh. What is wrong with people being able to decide for
themselves what religion if any they want? Why is a secular state a radical idea? The US is a
secular state and it has served the US well.
So Revolution or Civil War?
I keep hearing about one or the other, but only on the Internet.
I am of the opinion that we Americans are far too comfortable and have no stomach for
privation.
We will continue to lurch along as always.
Does it really matter what "Americans" want? The very thesis of the article is that 'we'
will do the bidding of the influential elites, regardless of whether we a) approve of their
objectives, or b) are even aware of them. Like the article says, the vast majority of
Americans mistakenly think that, so long as they have their routine, their job, their kids,
their personal little patch of America complete with white picket fence, then, hey, how can
things go wrong? "We" won't, wouldn't, couldn't, allow such a revolution or civil war to
happen---why, there isn't even enough time to worry about it!
When a riotous mob of crazed BLM/ANTIFA soldiers comes marching up your peaceful street,
you will become part of the 'revolution', like it or not.
Totalitarian Romanov Russia united with secular pluralist France against Germany in the
lead-up to WWI. Similarly in WWII, totalitarian Marxist Russia united with the Western
democracies to defeat Nazi Germany. The pattern is common place in history. Alliances reveal
countries' motivations for war. And all are motivated by power.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
I'll ask again (serious question): for conservatives who think we live in "Weimar
America", isn't one of the major lessons for conservatives from Weimar Germany that when
you're faced with the distasteful option of allying yourselves with liberals and the
center-left, or allying yourselves with fascists and their street militias, it's important
not to make the decision that German Nationalists did in the early 1930s?
We were allied with one of the biggest mass murderers in history during World War 2.
Joseph Stalin. Facts are facts and the facts are fascism is a leftist ideology.
To be fair, you can 'love' someone's ruling style and still go to war with them. Politics
and warfare are about seizing power, not expressing admiration for the qualities of
rivals.
To clarify, I didn't mean "love" in a personal or an emotional sense. In the case of World
War II, democratic nations were opponents of fascist nations.
I don't know what histories you have been reading but Adolph Hitler had no use for FDR as
like many other European politicians of the day, they saw FDR as a relatively ignorant
man.
The Nazis were basically 1848 (leftist) revolutionaries, who supported egalitarianism for
German men and ethnonationalism (which was a very leftist idea when it was new). True
reactionaries, like the King of Prussia in 1848, definitely did not share those values.
Can someone explain to me what the point of these arguments are? I always see people
saying the Nazis were leftists, but even if I agreed with the claim what difference does it
make to massappeal's point?
Most commentators put the Nazis on the far right. They themselves considered Nazism to be
a "third way" between Capitalism and Communism. It's clear that the defining traits of Nazism
are totalitarianism, nationalism, social darwinism, and virulent anti-semitism. Like
communism and other forms of Facism, it is a revolutionary political movement. They also
supported massive government spending and social welfare programs for "aryans", in a kind of
state-dominated capitalism. It is also true that Ernst Rohm and the SA wanted a socialist
revolution to follow the Nazi's national revolution, but they were betrayed and Rohm was
executed for being too radical.
There's the truth. Facts are Facts. So what if they are leftist or rightist? I really
don't understand the value of this argument. Is this a way to link Democrats to Nazis? Seems
as ridiculous as trying to link Republicans to them.
The point is obfuscation of reality from the US right, which has increasingly become
enmeshed in world divorced from reality. Of course no respected historian places the Nazis as
a Left ideology. There is some argument as to whether fascism/Nazism was Right, or neither
left or right. But as an ideology, fascism and Nazism are illiberal, nationalist, and
concerned with "natural hierarchies" which are anathema to "left" thought.
Anyone stating otherwise is either exceedingly stupid or not arguing in good faith. Either
way, there is no point in engaging them or in giving them any platform to spout their
nonsense. Shut them down, block them, mock them, and move on.
And conservatives wonder why they've "unwelcome" in academia...If you want to be taken
seriously, you need to think seriously.
Penetrating insight. Of course, I am sure you are right. I want to give people a chance to
defend themselves though, because I would truly love to be proved wrong and shown something
of which I am ignorant.
I really appreciate the response. I read the synopsis and gather that the argument is
somewhat similar to one which I have heard before, which is that all modern political
movements are borne of the enlightenment, which is something I certainly agree with. There
are certainly underpinnings under every modern party that find their root in the
enlightenment.
The book you provided seems to be not quite that exact theory though, and of course I
haven't read the whole thing...yet. But I honestly will, and I really appreciate the
recommendation! Truth is truth, and it has no ideology. I will read it with an open mind.
The history of right and left, nationalist and internationalist, liberal and conservative
is very complex and confusing. And it is different in America than it is in Europe. America
started out mostly Protestant and Liberal (in the classical sense), so any right wing or
conservative movement in the US would have these foundations. In Europe, conservatives were
Catholic and Monarchist.
But Monarchy gets a bad rap in American public schools and universities, dominated as they
were by Protestant and Liberal thinking at their founding and by Progressive and Socialist
thinking now.
Here is a definition of the Right by EvKL (in the book):
"The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the
sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and
then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it
is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, "ultramodern." Old truths
can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found. The Man of the Right does not have a
time-bound, but a sovereign mind. In case he is a Christian he is, in the words of the
Apostle Peter, the steward of a Basileion Hierateuma, a Royal Priesthood"
And here the difference between Right and Left:
"The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking, a readiness to
preserve traditional values (provided they are true values), a balanced view of the nature
of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting also on the uniqueness of human
beings who cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers; but the left
is the advocate of the opposite principles. It is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical
promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, a paradise in which
everybody should be the "same," where envy is dead, where the "enemy" either no longer
exists, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences,
deviation, stratifications. Any hierarchy it accepts is only "functional." The term "one"
is the keynote: There should be only one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one
religion, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms and one
centralized world state"
"The rightists are "federalists" (in the European sense), "states' righters" since they
believe in local rights and privileges, they stand for the principle of subsidiarity."
Beautiful quotes, my friend, I especially appreciate the latter one. I have not gotten far
in the book, only 60 pages or so but I already find it fascinating, and I have gotten to that
quote exactly, actually.
As a passing note, I will say that I doubt WilliamRD meant what you mean, though I could
be mistaken. And I think defining Nazism as a leftist philosophy requires a semantic
argument, which redefines "right" and "left" into something different than popular American
political discourse defines it. And in fact, under these definitions, the Republican Party is
at least partially leftist.
However, EvKL is clear that this is what he is doing, and you were clear yourself that we
need to break out of these definitions. I couldn't agree more with you on that. Thanks for
sending me the link, you've made me wiser.
You are a rare and beautiful soul! I can't believe you've already read that far into the
book. I will try and learn from your example, the next time someone sends me a link.
And yes, the Republican party has been infiltrated by Leftism. I'm going to give you a
book link on this too, but you don't have to read it right away! Just download it, and put it
away in your files for later. It's a true story that is important to know and it gets to the
heart of the American Conservative / Neoconservative divide.
Fair enough. To me it's analogous to listening to someone try and argue that 1+1=7. I'm
just not sure that someone attempting such a calculation has the rational faculties to
provide anything worth hearing, and I don't like lending legitimacy to every silly position
that a person can take. Life is short, and I prefer to hear from people who demonstrate that
they're playing with a full deck and arguing in good faith. The "Leftists are the Real
Racists" crowd is certainly neither of those.
Edit: And hilariously, there is an actual RW goofball on this article's comment section,
posting Nazi/Fascist sympathies (@Raskolnik) . So, the proof is in the TAC comments I
guess...
The genetic fallacy definition can be found many places. If you read it, you might sound a
little less dumb in public. And the AAIHS is not a racist journal. I know anything with
"African American" in it seems to set off a very fragile segment of aggrieved whites, but I'm
sure you could judge the article based on its content. I'd link to some others, but given
what you've said so far, it seems unlikely you have access to JSTOR or any other legitimate
academic resources. At this point all you're really accomplishing is offering more evidence
that Right Wingers are almost allergic to information that contradicts their indoctrination.
There's a reason your numbers are falling in legitimate academic institutions, and it isn't
due to the secret cabal of communists that seem to haunt your daydreams. It's that your
positions are asinine and you're incapable of arguing effectively and supporting your
positions with evidence.
I'm just applying the same rules to blacks as get applied to whites. Imagine what the ADL
or SPLC would say of an online journal called "White Perspectives" that teaches "white
history."
I have not committed the genetic fallacy. I not only attack the source of Leftism. I
attack it's present manifestation and the false Left / Right paradigm those in its service
have constructed in order to lead us ever leftward.
Leftism's founding principle is equality. Stated synonymously, and with much historical
affirmation, this means uniformity.
The modern Left supposedly prides itself on diversity but this diversity is only skin
deep. It still craves uniformity. It has just learned that it needs brown skin in positions
of power to supplant white nonconformance, it's main opponent. The Left cannot even tolerate
the opinions of those it disagrees with. This is why it labels everyone who disagrees with
it's radical social engineering program a deplorable or a racist or an outright Nazi.
An actual theocratic monarchist reactionary would consider Nazism to be leftist, and ideas
of 'racial superiority' or 'racial guilt' or whatever to be very modern ideas.
Please expurgate your naïve realism - it's all a matter of perspective. To someone
with current mores, the Nazis, a rehash of the ethno-nationalist 1848 Revolutions in Germany,
are unspeakably reactionary. To someone with pre-Enlightenment values, they're beyond far
left. Please read something written by someone who was a 'leftist' in his own day, and it
will almost always be unspeakably reactionary by the contemporary standards of even those
'white supremacists' that you so hate. Here's some anti-immigrant racist Benjamin Franklin
for you:
"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will
shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never
adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
24. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World
is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America
(exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French,
Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans
also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People
on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I
may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of
our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we
in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by
Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and
Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion
of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind. "
This block of text is nothing but another incoherent rambling from a markedly unserious
thinker. You've outed yourself repeatedly as an idiot or an ideologue. Either way, you're not
worth another breath of response.
Yes, if you simply throw out all logic and available evidence, Hitler and Mussolini were
on the political left. And if you simply redefine the entire color spectrum, the sky is green
and the sea is orange.
This is like History 101 people, get with the damn program.
Jack, if there is a nail and a head---you HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD!
People do seem to try to put all of this in a left-right mindset which is more "tribal
identity" than reality.
Broadly speaking ...repeat....broadly speaking----Russia and Stalin were an economic
system-philosophy while Hitler carried on the German culture model of Martin Luther, which
was much more GERMAN NATIONALISM -with a well documented anti-Semitism on steroids.
One was economic systems and the other one was nationalism. To put either into a
leftist-rightist camp doesn't work with today's terminology.
The same way that it is not possible to call Trumpicans either conservative or liberal.
The economic policies put in by Trump are reckless and certainly not conservative.
The 'point' is to establish stigma by association. History is only useful in politics when
it can used against one's enemies, either by associating with something valued or associating
stigmatized history with one's enemies. It's also possible for history to be stigmatized due
to its use by political enemies.
The point is to score points for your tribe. I find the terms "left" and "right"
increasingly useless. If they ever had value, that value is largely lost. This is especially
true in the US, where left and right seem determined to degenerate into each's caricature of
the other.
The point is to break out of the Left / Right paradigm as it's been presented to us by
those who mean to rule us. Anybody who seriously opposes the Leftwing's steady march towards
Communism, is labeled a far-right winger, and is put in the company of Nazis. They then
become untouchable by normal people who have not devoted any time into historical or
ideological inquiry.
This game forces normal people into the middle, and in the middle they pose no meaningful
threat to the Leftward march of the establishment, because the middle cannot find the
leverage to arrest its progress. The middle's only hope is to slow it down somewhat.
Fascism has perhaps not been 'on the Left' because, historically it has always arisen to
fight communism, which is the farthest Left you can get (so anything opposed to it seems, by
comparison, Right), but it is fully a child of the radical Left nationalism born of the
French Jacobins. It's certainly not a grandchild of the European monarchies, though
conservatives have at times had to ally with it as the lesser of two evils when confronted by
communism.
In the end it was a catastrophic economic meltdown--in their case taking the form of
metastatic inflation--which sent Germany off the edge of the cliff and into the abyss. So it
will be with the US. Pray we don't have a recurrence of 2007. Or worse!
There was a thing called the Great Depression that started in America but spread to Europe
quickly in 1929. Hitler came to power when millions of German workers lost their jobs and had
no way of supporting themselves and their families.
Yep. And Hitler came to power because German Nationalists (the conservative party) formed
an alliance with him, rather than with the center-left and liberal parties.
Nationalism, German or otherwise, is not particularly conservative. The most intelligent
conservative since Burke was Prince Metternich, who regarded nationalism as his greatest
enemy, especially German nationalism.
Yes, the actual hyperinflation did indeed end around that time but by then the economic
die had already been cast. The cumulative effect upon the German middle and, especially, the
working class, farmers, "petite bourgeoisie" etc.,would devastate the country through the
remainder of the 20s and into the 30s (my father and his parents, who were working class
Social Democrats, had to get out by 1928 and were lucky to gain admittance into the US as the
doors were being closed on immigration at the time). As to 2007 I totally agree that
inflation was not a factor. I was evidently unclear but--that really wasn't my point. The
absence of inflation notwithstanding, we know that the economy went into the soup in 2007--so
much so that, to date, we have not fully recovered. My main point is to express the fear that
if it were to happen again for whatever reason, if you factor in the "Kulturkampf" within
which American society is currently embroiled we are going to have one HELL of a mess on our
hands.
And given that, isn't it all the more important to try to avoid the political mistakes
German conservatives made in the early 1930s when they chose to ally themselves with the
Nazis?
Yes, it is. As we see here, conservatives like Rod think they can control the extremists.
No snark this time, they really believe that.
They couldn't even control Trump.
I think the bigger concern is the alliance of the center left with two marxist movements
especially considering the right cannot ally with nazis as there are no comparable nazi
organizations available
One of the three co-founders of BLM stated in an 2015 interview that she, Patrice Collers,
and one other cofounder, Alizia Garza, are trained marxists. If the leadership claims they
are marxist, then what is the BLM movement?
Anarchists and Marxists simply have different methods of achieving the same goal. For an
example of anarchist goals, see the collectivist actions of the Catalonian anarchists during
the Spanish Civil War.
These are both anti-democratic and dangerous movements which the center left is happy to
work with.
It was the ruinous inflation of 1923 COMBINED with the high unemployment in 1932 that
encouraged millions of ordinary Germans to vote for the Nazis twice in 1932. Some wealthy
Republicans seem to forget this as they lobby for more tax cuts and foreign aid to Israel.
They also appear to forget that the period 1871-1914 was something of a "Golden Age" for
German Jews. Germany's defeat in WWI AND the harsh peace treaty imposed on it by the other
side were more than enough to offset the benefits of a new democratic constitution adopted in
Weimar in 1919.
It is hard to believe that two decades ago, the US budget actually turned positive for a
brief period of time, that the national debt was expected to be paid off in a decade or so
and that some economists were wondering how the Fed would conduct monetary policy if there
were no Treasury securities to buy and sell. They need not have worried. These days, the
national debt is out of control. Instead of worrying about the future, I can take consolation
in the fact that I have outlived (by more than a decade) all of my father's relatives who
were still living in Poland in 1939. For them, the end of the line was an extermination camp
called Belzec.
It wasn't just the 1929 Depression that caused so much hardship in Germany. In 1933 after
Adolph Hitler came to power and Germany was just beginning to crawl out of the shock of their
own depression, the international Jewish Community (Zionists) launched its economic war on
Germany, which native, German Jews pleaded with their western brethren to not do. Ignoring
the German Jews requests, the economic war against Germany persisted, causing massive
economic disruptions as the popularity of this endeavor was picked up around the world...
The first anti-Jewish measure put in place by Nazi Germany started on April 1, 1933 when
Aryan Germans were encouraged by the government to boycott Jewish businesses in Germany. The
boycott was the first of many anti-Jewish measures taken by the Nazis over the next 12 years.
This boycott was followed on April 7, 1933 with the forced retirement of most non-Aryan (i.e.
Jewish) civil servants in the country and a book burning of books by Jewish authors on May
10. There is a whole list of anti-Jewish measures taken by Nazi Germany in the museum catalog
"Jews in German under Prussian Rule". Used copies are available at Amazon.
The economic response by Jews living outside Germany was a failure. It was the Battle of
Stalingrad and the brutal Russian winter of 1942-43 that turned the tide of WWII in
Europe
Bit off topic but not long ago I read that of all the major industrial countries the one
that supposedly suffered the least from the effects of the Depression-- was England!
The conservatives (right-liberals) have done nothing but ally with the left-liberals
against the "fascists" (actual right wing) since 1945. Their entire raison d'etre is to lose
gracefully while preventing the actual right wing from ever coming anywhere near power.
I would call that "overfitting," expecting to find exact matches among the parties
involved. My lessons:
- people can be given scapegoats in lieu of hope. "Yes, we've gutted manufacturing and
flooded the country with low-skill illegal labour, but what's keeping you down is systemic
racism. There is a secret hatred for the colour of the skin inside all white people. They
can't even see it themselves, but it's there. Just look at all these stories from the Jim
Crow era and get angry about them again, and you'll find that if you don't for me you're not
really black."
- nothing's more dangerous than a well-meaning good person convinced they're better than
everyone else, led about by skilled propagandists with total control of news and
entertainment.
- projection and false flag operations are at the top of the propagandist's toolbox. If
you're "fighting racism," you can see race everywhere and treat it as the defining aspect of
every person you meet and the source of all their opinions. If you're "fighting fascism" you
can dress in black and run around starting fires, attacking Senators, and shooting people for
their political beliefs. If you convince everyone "white supremacist terror groups" are the
biggest threat to the country you can unleash rioters on every major city to fight one rather
well-behaved seventeen-year-old in one city. You can unleash a steady stream of hoaxes:
Russiagate, a short clip of the longer George Floyd video that obscures why he died, the
Covington Catholic Smirk of Supremacy, bleach and "This is MAGA country." It doesn't matter.
The bigger the better: people will always believe the big lie.
You should think about your own role in all this. What part of Weimar are you playing?
Thanks for your thoughtful response. To answer your question, I play a
small-to-the-point-of-insignificance role these days, trying to lower the political
temperature in this time of pandemic, and trying to make the case for small 'd' democracy as
the best (and highly imperfect) method for dealing with the challenges we face.
It's in that context that I find hope in the growing number of conservatives (most
recently, former Montana governor and RNC chair Marc Racicot) who are placing "country over
party" and stating their support for Biden, not because they agree with his policies but
despite their disagreement with them.
These folks are not putting "country over party". They are tied into the Uniparty ruled by
the oligarchs doing the bidding of their masters.
Putting "country over party" would require them calling for the arrest of all those who
were involved in the Russian collusion hoax, Spygate, and everything else, from Obama on
down.
Putting "country over party" would require them to put the well-being of the citizens
first and support an end to endless war and to support enforcing immigration law and fixing
trade.
No, these every alleged Republican or conservative supporting Biden is showing that they
are and have always been a fraud who doesn't believe what they preached and would rather
continue in the good graces of the rich and powerful that really rule the country.
Support for country over politics and personal gain. Going back to the "normalcy" of the
pre-Trump political order. Pick one. You don't get both.
Anyone who tells you how important it is for "the good of the nation" to go back to the
long list of careerist politicians, hacks, and establishment elite who have governed it
towards its ruination must first make the case that the "norms" of American political culture
were good and righteous or (even from a strictly amoral view) practically useful. They never
do, though.
It's always asserted as if it is a self-evident fact that we need to go back to the days
of Bushes, Clintons, and Bidens, but nobody can really explain why.
Leftists don't want us as allies, and the 'street militias' are almost entirely leftist.
Institutional elites in Germany supported National Socialism, while in the US today they
support leftists.
Thanks for your response. Sure, there are those on the left who want nothing to do with
centrists and conservatives. (Heck, some of them barely tolerate liberals.) But the
Democratic party chose its most moderate candidate as its standard-bearer in this election,
and Biden has made clear he welcomes the support of centrists and conservatives and
Republicans.
(As for militias, per the FBI (not known as a bastion of liberalism) right-wing militias
are by far the largest domestic terrorism threat.)
Like the Republican party in the Trump era, there is no longer such a thing as the
Democratic party in its traditional sense. As the GOP is an empty vessel now filled with
Trumpism, the Democratic party is an empty vessel being filled with progressivism (an ongoing
process). The traditional Democrats (like old-school moderate African-Americans) who put
Biden over the top in the primary are otherwise powerless in the party.
Biden has made it clear that he will not push back against the far Left in any way - in
his refusal to comment on packing SCOTUS, ending the Senate filibuster, ending the electoral
college (the lack of an answer to these being itself an answer), in his absorption of much of
Bernie's platform into his own, in his silence on urban riots and looting until campaign
people told him it was affecting polling (and his response since has been tepid at best).
He lied gleefully (Trumpily?) during the debate about the prog platform - his own campaign
website lists support for GND and an expanded "reimagining" of the suburbs among many other
progressive goals which Trump is too inarticulate and ignorant to frame sensible arguments
against.
The Democrats are planning to govern on the basis of vengeance and revolution. The mood of
the base could not be more clear.
Thanks for your response. Unlike the Republican party, the Democratic party still has a
party platform that extends beyond (far beyond, 90 pages beyond) fealty to its party leader.
As Biden won a majority of the delegates, the platform those delegates adopted reflects the
views of the factions that chose Biden more than it does any other faction in the party.
Biden has pointedly and repeatedly distanced himself from the policy wishes (e.g.,
Medicare for All, Green New Deal, defund the police) of the left-wing of the Democratic
party.
Vice President Biden knows there is no greater challenge facing our country and our world.
Today, he is outlining a bold plan – a Clean Energy Revolution – to address
this grave threat and lead the world in addressing the climate emergency.
Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate
challenges we face. It powerfully captures two basic truths, which are at the core of his
plan: (1) the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to
meet the scope of this challenge, and (2) our environment and our economy are completely
and totally connected.
Biden will implement the Obama-Biden Administration's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing
Rule requiring communities receiving certain federal funding to proactively examine housing
patterns and identify and address policies that have a discriminatory effect. The Trump
Administration suspended this rule in 2018.
Giving Americans a new choice, a public health insurance option like Medicare. If your
insurance company isn't doing right by you, you should have another, better choice. Whether
you're covered through your employer, buying your insurance on your own, or going without
coverage altogether, the Biden Plan will give you the choice to purchase a public health
insurance option like Medicare. As in Medicare, the Biden public option will reduce costs
for patients by negotiating lower prices from hospitals and other health care providers. It
also will better coordinate among all of a patient's doctors to improve the efficacy and
quality of their care, and cover primary care without any co-payments. And it will bring
relief to small businesses struggling to afford coverage for their employees.
I don't deserve your thanks, kind sir. You're vastly overestimating the social importance
of presidential elections, imo. And I don't believe the FBI. Every other institution in
American society is virtue signaling support for the woke left, so why not them? They know
who is going to run the country next year. Do you believe that the rioting and destruction
this summer was caused by right-wingers? I have heard that conspiracy theory before, and I
suppose it's the closest thing we'd ever get from leftists to an admission that the events
were negative.
I think that there is definitely a strong double standard when it comes to media reporting
and institutional acknowledgment of violence based on the demographics and politics of the
perpetrator. There was a huge mass shooting in the city I live in last year, but the shooter
(DeWayne Craddock) was black and had a stereotypically black given name. There was very
little reporting on it as compared with the Texas church shooter that occurred at about the
same time.
No, because we on the Left are always the greater evil.
Always.
The (few) bad tendencies of (some, very few) people on the Right can be contained and
governed by the other conservatives.
/SNARK
In Germany, the national socialists and communists were battling for totalitarian control.
Both of them were on the left. Dictatorship either way.
The real question today in the US is whether old fashioned liberals [belief in free
speech, political discourse without threats or actual violence, natural American patriotism,
etc] will disavow the violence and intimidation from the leftist totalitarianism that is the
democrat party today.
The rioting, the burning, the street violence, the death threats of lining people against the
wall, etc., etc., is pretty much all from the totalitarian left. I could give you hundreds of
examples, the most recent the former CEO of Twitter wanting to shoot political opponents.
This hate-filled rhetoric from the totalitarian left is an attempt to dehumanize people
they disagree with, to hate them. This is simply preparing for the stage that those the
totalitarian left disagrees with should be sent to gulags at a minimum, or killed.
This is all with the approval and help of the "mainstream' democrat party. Denying this
just makes you not credible.
p.s. Biden, at best, is a partial senile figurehead, whose function is to mask what the
totalitarian left really wants to do.
Oh what Jonah Goldberg has wraught with this "NAZI's we're leftists" horseshit. I guess
when you be been absolved of the notion that right wing thought had anything to do with the
rise of fascism in Europe, you can say any horrible thing you'd like about people of another
race, ethnicity, or religion ruining your pretty Lilly white country.
From Wikipedia:
"As the eldest son of Bertha Krupp,
Alfried was destined by family tradition to become the sole heir of the
Krupp concern. An amateur photographer and Olympic sailor, he was an
early supporter of Nazism among German industrialists, joining the SS in
1931, and never disavowing his allegiance to Hitler."
Thanks for your response. In case anyone else still isn't clear, and just for the record,
the Nazis were not "on the left".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
The national socialists were on the left. You may lie about it, I can't stop you.
But what is definitely clear is the national socialists were brutal evil totalitarianists
[new word?]. Just like the communist dictatorships in russia, china, cambodia, cuba, etc.
This is the leftists/wokesters blm antifa [the brownshirts of today] in the US, with the
tacit/explicit approval of democrat leadership.
They would not have been better off aligned with Stalin, which was the other side in their
domestic political extremes. It too was rioting in the streets.
The middle got too narrow to survive. That does not mean the other extreme was an
acceptable choice, much less a better choice.
No. For example, the Nazis and the Communists *combined* only accounted for 40% of the
parliamentary seats after the 1930 election. If the center-right, centrist, and center-left
parties had formed an alliance, they could have governed the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
I'm not really a conservative, but I share many concerns and values with conservatives. I
do agree that it's better to ally with liberals and the center-left than to join right-wing
authoritarians, and for that reason I have, however reluctantly, cast my mail-in vote for Joe
Biden.
That said, I think you misinterpret the choice that ultimately faced German nationalists
in 1932. By that time, the liberals and center-left had shrunk to powerlessness at the
national level, and the republic itself was dead in all but name. The choice as the German
nationalists saw it, and very likely as it actually was, was to join the communist KPD or the
fascist National Socialists, both of whom were determined to kill the republic. Even a
friggin' restoration of the Kaiser would have found more support at that point than the
continuation of a liberal center-left republic which had been thoroughly repudiated by all
the strongest players.
In retrospect, we know that even the KPD might have been less bad than the National
Socialists, because the KPD probably wouldn't have blundered into another world war
like the National Socialists did (Stalin, after all, avoided war with the USA and UK). But
that would have been hard for German nationalists to foresee in 1932. The obvious question
for them in making their choice was "Whose death list am I on?" If you were a business owner,
independent farmer, or churchman, your chance of survival seemed better under the National
Socialists; if you were nonwhite, or gay, or Jewish (always remember many German Jews were
fervently nationalist; some of the men murdered in the camps had won Iron Crosses in World
War I), you would have a better chance of survival under the KPD. If the businessmen, farmers
and churchmen could have foreseen that the National Socialists were going to throw away their
lives in another pointless war, they might have taken their chances with the communists
instead.
Switching now to modern America, it seems as hard to predict now as it was for the Germans
in 1932 which party will get us into a massive bloodbath overseas. Trump talks the
nonintervention talk sometimes, but he never withdraws troops, twice came within a micron of
getting us into a war with Iran, and consistently behaves bellicosely with foreign powers.
Biden's record in supporting the Iraq War and the Libya intervention show that a vote for
Democrats is no sure vote for peace either. In any case, dying in a conventional war is a
very remote risk for most Americans; our forces are too strong and technologically advanced.
Nazi Germany lost seven times more dead just invading Poland than America lost in the whole
Afghanistan war. The true nightmare scenario for America is nuclear war with Russia, and
there's no dispute about which party is more hostile to Russia.
My point is, if we've truly reached 1932 Weimar, it's already too late to ally with
liberals and the center-left. The far right and the far left were their only options, and
both led to disaster.
My fervent hope is that we're still closer to 1929 Weimar than 1932. The republic is sick,
perhaps dying, but not everyone has lost faith in it; below the level of the political and
media elites, confidence in the republic is still strong. The US military still supports the
republic to an extent the Reichswehr never did. Biden is no fire-breathing radical; he's an
establishment man to his bones. He has no idea how to cure the republic, and his policies
helped bring it to this low ebb, but at least he isn't out to murder it. That's why I was
willing to vote for him. But it's merely a stopgap measure. The far left is busily taking
over Biden's party, and far from resisting it, he sees it as a useful ally against the right.
The far right, of course, has long been doing the same to the Republican Party. We may not
have arrived yet at 1932's dreadful choice between cutthroats, but we are speeding down that
road, and it is crazy to imagine that a mere presidential vote for either of these two clowns
is going to change our course.
What will change our course? I have only the haziest idea, and I'm eagerly looking forward
to Rod's book for suggestions.
This is the best answer, but radicals will just look at your "whose death list am I in"
argument and say "yep the bourgeoisie should die, and so should anyone who supports
them".
Agreed that this is a thoughtful response. While I may even more reluctantly cast my
ballot for a despicable lunatic instead, I relate to much of the above.
In the 1928 German elections, 15 political parties won seats in the Reichstag
(parliament), with the Nazi party winning fewer than 3% of the seats. Germany's proportional
system of allocating seats meant that even small parties could end up with a small number
seats. Two years later, 15 parties again won seats in Reichstag elections. The Nazi party
made the biggest gain in seats at the expense of more centrist parties. In both national
elections held in 1932, 14 political parties won seats, with the Nazi party winning the most
seats. The popularity of the Nazi party grew as economic conditions in the country
worsened.
In 2020, the Covid-19 virus may have merely accelerated trends which were already in place
in the US.
That's a stupid false equivalency and a scarecrow argument in one, maybe even a no true
scotsman to go with that. You're aware that there were several conservatives opposing Hitler,
right? Opposition wasn't just carried out by the far-left, some of which were in the
SA/The Nazi party themselves . See: strasserism.
Rod, I agree with you about Arendt and her classic work, the best work in political
history/theory of the 20th Century imo. But there is a reason why no one quotes it today. You
mention only the last chapter of TOoT, but in Part II she goes into great detail about how
capitalism led to imperialism which used racism as a means to that end. The "mob" originates
with those displaced by The Great Transformation (Polyani's term) brought about by capitalism
and the rise of bourgeois society . . . it is this mob that later forms the basis for
totalitarian movements. Arendt's analysis covers a period of about 400 years, not simply the
aftermath of World War I which was a result of the crisis that had already begun, that is the
dissolution of the nation state . . .
But that would be uncomfortable to point out, as it is the rise of right wing economics
that was destroyed the middle class in this country, and lead us to this parlous state.
For a long time, the right has happily embraced the culture wars to hide the destruction
of the libertarian economic policies, that as always are looking for a way to crush labor
power.
An anaylsis of the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe and East Asia that leaves out the
World Wars is like an American history text that leaves out the Civil War. In every single
Eurasian country from Hungary east to North Korea where the Communists came to power WWI
and/or WWII was a key factor. No war, no Communist takeover. (And it regards to the Nazis in
Germany WWI is also a crucial factor on their coming power)
What would play the role of those wars in our future if some manner of totalitarian
government of the Left or Right junked the Constitution and seized power by force?
To be sure, none of this means that totalitarianism is inevitable. But they do signify that
the weaknesses in contemporary American society are consonant with a pre-totalitarian
state. Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of
self-deception about our own country's stability. It only takes a catalyst like war,
economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the
legitimacy of the liberal democratic order into question.
Again, why are you responding to an argument that Rod is not making? He didn't write The
Handmaid's Tale,
What were the catalysts for Cuba or Venezuela? Or the many socialist regimes in Africa,
the Middle East and Latin America during the postwar decades?
Revolutions against outside imposed dictatorships left over from a soft imperialism.
Platt Amendment, Banana Wars, School of the Americas and coups for days set up the
conditions for people to not trust there near neighbor oppose to its distant enemies during
the Cold War and the legacies from it created the social conditions for. We as a state
literally supported death squads in Central America. Leading to the weak states and strong
gangs in the region. The seeds of any empire bear bitter fruits. It is also where the police
state we now see was created and imported home.
As is so often the case, there are various partial truths in what you say but they don't
add up to the simplistic conclusion. BTW Venezuela was a relatively wealthy and successful
country when Chavez took over; the factors you list were long before and not involved. Rather
what happened was existing inequities and problems were utilized to enable a power grab. In
the same way that poor blacks and other minorities are being used to enable the current power
grab, divide and conquer as always - in the end, they will be just as removed from power as
they are now. Like all the woke white chicks, they are just considered useful idiots for the
progressives seeking power.
We as a state literally supported death squads in Central America. Leading to the weak
states and strong gangs in the region. The seeds of any empire bear bitter fruits.
Not that simple. The weak states and strong gangs came first. The weak states and corrupt
governments and deep inequities created the instabilities that motivated insurgencies. Lack
of a rule of law and the inability of the state to protect you forces people to turn to (and
form) gangs for protection. All of this played out against a backdrop of a global conflict
between two empires, two ideologies which further fueled all the conflicts.
There were death squads and all sorts of other abuses on all sides. There are no clean
hands in such a conflict. It was not possible to remain neutral unless you were Swiss.
All of the problems you cite concerning central america are an outgrowth of the
"governments" the US government/business imposed on those countries. The societies of central
and south america were and are highly stratified with "Europeans"--ancestry--occupying the
highest rung and receiving the lions share of the wealth. That's the reason Castro and Chavez
had such an easy time overthrowing the governments and why there is so much resistance to a
return of the previous conditions.
International relations and history are a lot more complicated than you think they are.
The endless desire for Americans to find quick and dirty feel-good good vs bad answers to
everything goes a long ways towards explaining the degrading of this society and its
governance.
I note again that Venezuela was in a rather different state than pre-Castro Cuba. But yes
having a large underclass that feels disconnected and deprived of what the rest of a society
has goes provide fertile fuel for revolution.
MS13 and Barrio 18 were born in the US from refugees fleeing our dirty wars in Central
America. Poor wealth distribution leads to it. So glad you realize wealth focus is bad. Also
oligarchs are bad. We supported those corrupted governments leading to the revolutions
leading to the net result. Ever hear of United Fruit and the banana men? Imperial Companies
support weak government because they can influence it.
Well the catalyst for Cuba was Batista staging a coup, seizing power, and destroying the
democratic process (with full US support) in 1952. Less than 10 years later, a popular
revolution overthrew him. That revolution has proven a much tougher nut to crack. It's almost
as if overthrowing democracy and giving into a strongman's appetite for power has
consequences down the road.
One could also say that trying to jump start / leap frog your way into equality and
"justice" also has consequences down the road. A lesson that humans absolutely refuse to
learn, thus condemning generation after generation into misery.
No one "gives into a strongman's appetite for power". People make choices based on
incentives and possible outcomes. Rod uses the Franco example often. People often have to
choose between two terrible outcomes - in which case they choose the one that has a better
chance of their own survival or the survival of what they care about.
I can't comment about east Asia because I don't now enough about it, but as the great
historian John Lukacs never tired of saying, the only country in Europe where the Bolsheviks
triumphed politically was Russia. The Spartacists and the Bela Kun horror fizzled out. After
the second war the Communists needed the Red Army to set up puppets. There was no
"revolution" in Poland, Czech, Hungary or anywhere because nobody wanted it. Yugoslavia may
be a partial exception, but look what happened to Yugoslavia.
Good point. I guess we could make the argument that the Red Army sweep over Eastern Europe
and absorption of all those countries into the Soviet empire required WW2 to occur, but that
seems like not the argument that Jon is making in response to Rod's thesis.
I was agreeing with him. But "what would play the role of those wars in our future" would
be...a war. Which Biden (or, the Pentagon) has up his sleeve ("America is Back"). Experto
crede. Do you not believe that the Kagan/Rubin/Boot crowd would shy from a shooting war with
Russia? Because I don't.
Thankfully empty-headed blabbers like Rubin and Boot are well removed from actual power
(and even, I would say, influence - in fact it is unclear to me why anyone publishes their
rantings). The people with influence in a Biden administration will be people like Harris,
Warner, AOC, etc. I don't think they're really aching for a war.
But the point is that you don't need a war - the catalyst can be another major event like
economic depression, a global pandemic, etc, etc.
Well, we're asking the who/whom question only one way, it seems to me. Everybody is
rightly convinced that on social and economic issues AOC and Princess Tiger Lily will have
the wheel in a Biden administration. But who's to say that in foreign policy Gersonism won't
prevail? All these never Trumpers are going to be looking for their rewards. Remember,
Hillary destroyed Libya as a resume enhancer. And the Army has gone left. One of the things
Trump mideast deal has done is set up a Sunni/Shia showdown. Why not follow through?
Fair enough. I suppose that's possible, and the young AOC type progs barely know where
anything on the globe is outside the US so they might be happy to let the old "experts" take
back over foreign policy. Not where their interests lie, for sure.
I disagree about the mideast deals, though - a Sunni vs Shia conflict has been baked into
the cake from the beginning (see: Iran Iraq war), and it was Obama's crazy Iran deal that
started everyone back on that path by strengthening Iran and trying to push it into place as
a regional hegemon. That was never going to go down with the Sunni countries.
The apparently not actually so naive Kushner was able to take advantage of new incentives
that Obama's machinations created. I see this as quite positive.
We'll agree to disagree about the mideast, which I really just brought up e.g. The one
they're really lusting for is a shooting war with Putin. Have you read Gerson on that
subject? What's the outcome of Mrs. Sikorsky's bellicosity but that? What else has all this
NATO expansion been for, anyway?
Haven't read Gerson in a while. I see your point, though I don't really think any of these
people are quite reckless enough to lust for a war with a nuclear power.
Partially correct. Czechoslovakia was an exception: Communists came to power as a result
of a free election in 1946. But it was something of an outlier, probably the most left-wing
country in Europe.
It was Bush 43's costly Middle East adventures at a time when he was cutting income taxes
that set the US economy on the terrible path it is on now. Our national debt is out of
control. Many young people will leave college with massive student loan debt, poor job
prospects and, in many areas, very expensive housing. We have paid and will continue to pay a
very high price for trying to be the world's policeman.
Obama, the wild eyed leftist spender, cut the 1.2 trillion dollar deficit that W ran up
with his tax cuts and catastrophic war down to 585 billion. By the end of '19, before any
Covid-19 spending took place, Trump had run it back up to 984 billion. Growth has been a
meager two tenths of one percent higher in the first three years of Trump's presidency than
it was during the last three years of Obama and it has come at a high cost.
"...which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political Consciousness."
Which explains the absurd phenomenon of polically-correct stand-up comics. Guess what?
They're not funny. 'Whimsy' won't get you belly laughs. Trump still gets the belly laughs.
Even from me, and I hate his rotten stinking guts with the white hot fury of a thousand
suns.
A hundred years ago, Newtonian physics got nuked. Goodbye ordered universe, hello entropy
and chaos. And we've been mopping up the fallout ever since. Ironically, years before, The
Enlightenment had already started this dissolution process. So can you blame Picasso and
Joyce for just trying to see things as they really are(?)
Griel Marcus traces this process in his great book Lipstick Traces. From The Brethren of
the Free Spirit to the Cathars to St. Just to the Paris Commune to Duchamp and right up to
The Sex Pistols, we are either fallen, or trying to achieve the colliding energy of a mere
collection of atoms. The Lettrists even took a cue from Finnegans Wake and carved up the damn
language, for Chr--sakes. And they've been doing it ever since.
So can you blame the great Stockard Channing, in Six Degrees of Seperation, 1993, for
meditating on a Kandinsky and then coming to the same conclusion that many of us poor
benighted souls have in these absurd times: 'I am all random.'
Arendt's fine. But I'll go with Carville's "It's the economy stupid".
When a young man who isn't "college material" has no economic future, he's going to find a
way to make one. If it requires totalitarianism, so be it. Indeed, totalitarian ideologies
can only flourish in an environment when bored, penniless young men have the time to read up
on them.
Imagine all of those black guys rioting or white skinheads having to get up early in the
morning for 10 hours of hard-work at the factory or on someone's roof. A couple of beers
after work and your ready for bed, not revolution. Hence the great America of the '50's - the
'80's.
I have no idea what's coming, but we are trying to reduce our exposure by moving out of
the city, as far as we can reasonably go for now until retirement. We are frantically trying
to get our house on the market and hoping that thanks to the magic of "gentrification"
(hopefully prospective buyers won't notice the giant "F*** Gentrifiers" spray painted on a
nearby wall) we can trade our overvalued home into two properties - one in a distant town
past the outer suburbs and another somewhere overseas where we can run to when things get
really bad. That's the dream, at least. But the city we have already left and won't be going
back.
I'm sure the overseas locations will be absolutely overjoyed to have a couple of US
refugees, with no ties to the country or area, who don't speak the language or have any
cultural understanding or background, and expect to instantly be fully integrated into the
economic and social fabric, showing up.
Have you considered that you'll be akin to a Central American family moving into the outer
suburb neighborhood you desire to live in, albeit one with more resources and legal
status?
"Trump's exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting.
But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist
identity politics."
Just when you thought the hypocrisy and the double-standard had reached the limits of what
is humanly possible, Biden takes it up a notch.
After spending the last few months tearing up cities and threatening to burn down the country
if they don't win in November, the Democrats now accuse Trump of putting the Proud Boys on
stand-by???
Even my dog is laughing at this.
[How do these kooky communists even get elected to dog-catcher???]
Just saying both sides are playing this game. One is just doing it with more guns and
state security support. The left has greater cultural focus cause those are the positions
that interest them. This is the creation of capitalism.
If Rod paid more attention to all the data and not just those that feed his hysteria, he'd
learn that there are all kinds of backlash within liberal and far left circles to the
excesses he rightly decries. In fact, I think there is more self-correction and
self-regulation going on within "the left" than on Rod's side of the spectrum
Do you have any examples of this self correction? I've been living in a far left
neighborhood in a permanent liberal Democratic city for decades, and I don't see it (well now
we fled so I can't speak for what happens next).
There are occasionally people who will whisper something in my ear or my wife's ear that
suggests they recognize some lunacy that's going on. But they would never admit that
publicly. And all evidence suggests there are still very few of such people.
The whole point of Rod's thesis is that the vast majority of people will go along with the
tide even if they don't believe it - they will live their lives by lies. Very few people have
the courage to take a stand in such circumstances, as history makes all too clear. The
progressive left, again as has been made clear over and over, now owns all the institutions
that matter in the US - with woke capitalism being the final crown. What Rod says is coming,
is coming.
Without the '65 "immigration reform" act none of this would be happening. This isn't the
result of personal loneliness, it's the inevitable result of becoming, in Eugene McCarthy's
phrase, a colony of the world. The radical turn to the left is a direct result of anti-white
bloc voting by immigrants. (Indeed you have to be willfully blind not to notice the high
percentage of spokesmen for the extreme left who are immigrants or the children of
immigrants.) This is a race war against white America, in which the cultural establishment
and the government they shape are the leading protagonists. Classic racist colonialism, with
the bizarre twist that perhaps a third of the white population supports the annihilation of
their own peoples and cultures. For the others it's simply a Scramble For America, a rush to
get money, territory, and power with the natives footing the bill.
Irrelevant. It's the immigrant vote that puts them over. The vast majority of immigration
is non-white. It's immigration that has California not electing a Republican to statewide
office in 15 years, and nothing else. Don't take my word for it, the left itself has been
telling Republicans for decades that the demographics are against them. It's an
acknowledgement of the reality of identity bloc voting and the reason they support open
borders. In any case, I mentioned you when I wrote about that mentally ill third of whites
that supports self-annihilation.
"""It is probably as true that violence breeds fanaticism as that fanaticism begets
violence. Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. There is hardly an
example of a mass movement achieving vast proportions and a durable organization solely by
persuasion. It was a temporal sword that made Christianity a world religion. Conquest and
conversion were hand in hand. Reformation made headways only where it gained the backing of
the ruling prince or local government. The missionary zeal seems rather an expression of some
deep misgivings. Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than
to bestow upon the world something we already have. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his
own faith by converting others.
A true believer is eternally incomplete and eternally insecure.
Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. A full
blown mass movement is a ruthless affair, and its management is in the hands of ruthless
fanatics. A Luther who when first defying the established church, spoke feelingly of "the
poor, simple, common folk," proclaimed later when he allied with the German princelings, that
"God would prefer to suffer to government to exist no matter how evil, rather than allow the
rabble to riot, not matter how justified they are in doing so."
"Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass
movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a
devil."
However, the freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and
self-realization, but the freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence.
They want freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and
shouldering the blame for the blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience, but
faith -- blind, authoritarian faith. """"""
Biden of course is scarcely a totalitarian figure--Trump is more suited to that role. But
Biden would fit nicely as a von Hindenburg for the Loony Left.
How in the hell is Trump a totalitarian figure? I hear this calumny hurled at him time and
time again, but without any specifics. Tell me, what specific totalitarian actions has he
actually taken?
Support for violent white supremacist groups. Using the Dept. of Justice to target
political enemies. Adopting a Republican platform that consists solely of fealty to the party
leader.
Over the past 6 months or so, my husband has been listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson
and I have definitely noticed a shift in his thinking. A good one! I, myself, just finished
listening to his book, 12 Rules For Life and am now going through his Podcast episodes. It's
quite fascinating! Rogan has also received a lot of flak for having Peterson on his show
several times.
I went and listened to the episodes with Abigail Shrier and Douglas Murray (at your
suggestion) and now have their books (as well as your's) sitting in my audible library.
Most of what you say is true, save for the usefulness of the "experts", the credentialed
ones who have shown themselves to be absolute morons, incompetents and political hacks.
(Think, Fauci.)
Imagine if one hundred years ago you told the founding stock of this nation that every
American institution would be weaponized against their own history and heritage. Imagine if
you told them our universities, media, churches and immigration system were all being used to
demonize and demographically displace their own posterity. They must be rolling over in their
graves because that is exactly what is happening.
In 1920? Large numbers of them absolutely would have believed it. In fact, millions of
them *did* believe it. The country was being overrun by Italians, Poles, Greeks, Serbs,
Russians. A frightening number of them were Jews and Catholics. They smelled funny, spoke
weird languages, had bizarre beliefs and customs, cooked and ate strange foods. They were
lazy bums who were taking all our jobs. At a rally in Rhode Island, the Grand Imperial Wizard
proclaimed to thousands that the KKK stood for undying opposition to "Koons, Kikes, &
Katholics".
And it's come true! Look, for example, who's on the Supreme Court.
Not to mention that the Jews were over-running colleges. Keeping them out required changes
to admissions practices to make things other than pure academic ability deciding factors.
Hence the emphasis on "the whole person", where a good background, good family, athletic
ability, and being someone you'd want to associate with in your club began to over-ride
performance on the academic tests that had previously been used to determine admissions.
Just soft totalitarianism? That seems incredibly pollyann-ish - delusionally
optimistic.
If Biden wins, the USA, the EU and Red China will move swiftly to exterminate the remnants of
Christian Civilisation - and anybody associated with it.
Bishop Vigano seems to share this view. (
https://www.lifesitenews.co...
[Anyway, we ALREADY have "soft totalitarianism". Need proof? Just go down to your HR
department and tell them that you believe homosexual activity is immoral.]
As much as somebody may dislike Trump's personality, Biden is just not an option.
Biden = ethno-cultural extinction
As adults, we don't get to indulge our own childish sensitivities. We don't get to
participate in this political fantasy-land alt-universe - where monstrous evil is praised as
virtuous, and goodness is labelled as vice.
Just go down to your HR department and tell them that you believe homosexual activity
is immoral.
I imagine you'll get a reaction similar to that if you went down to HR and ranted about
how sex outside of marriage is immoral, or lectured how sodomy is a crime against nature and
its practitioners deserve to burn in Hell.
I used to have a Ukrainian woman on my staff. When my younger staff all started in 2016
expressing support for Sanders she freaked. Then she freaked over Trump.
We are screwed. My decision to vote for Biden is predicated upon the hope that a boring
gaff prone Biden presidency will allow a return to normalcy.
A vote for Biden is a vote for the radical totalitarian left. Packing the supreme court.
Ending the Senate Filibuster and open borders. The country as we know it will be over.
Certain end of the First and Second amendments. I don't find you credible at all
"... The REASON they won't release them: The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Isra-h-e-l-l. But NO ONE will investigate that. M.A.G.A. is out. M.I.G.A is in. ..."
"... 'Bloody Gina' is Trump's loyalist appointee, following through on what loyalist Pompeo started to protect Trump Crime Family Corruption, Chabad Mafia, and ZOG. ..."
"... please allow me to still congratulate Gina on reducing the almighty Third Option into the Toiletpaper Option. ..."
"... 2018, BREAKING: Trump appoints Haspel as first female CIA director ..."
"... 2017: Breaking: CIA Director Mike Pompeo appoints Haspel as the first female CIA officer to be named deputy director. ..."
"... Fathead and Esper were best buds at West Point.. ..."
"... Evidence destruction was one the main purposes of the Mueller "investigation". ..."
"... Please. If you can see what Trump has done, basically bending the US and its taxpayers over for Israel, you'd realize he's just another in a long line of AIPAC Presidents. Ain't nobody opposing him. CIA knows what Russia knows about him, and they're just using him as bait. ..."
"... proof is in the pudding, Hillary still walks free, none of the corrupt ones are in jail and won't ever go to jail. Face it, Biff has many fooled. ..."
"... U.S. Navy Reserve Doctor on Gina Haspel Torture Victim: "One of the Most Severely Traumatized Individuals I Have Ever Seen" ..."
"... What bothers me more is how deep the Deep State goes in Washington. They totally control the government and without mass firings it is impossible to even make a dent in it. This country is gone and just doesn't know it yet. Once Kamala is crowned as queen reality will come slamming home pdq. By the time the country realizes what has happened to them it will be way too late, no matter how many guns they have at home. Once they cut off access to your money, very few people will be independent enough to survive on their own. ..."
"... Trump has opened the eyes of more Americans to the simple fact that an unelected bureaucracy is running the country ..."
"... DJT hired this c8nt, sure, but the pool of candidates equipped to take over the CIA is very small, and all are career swamp things. If DJT put in a true outsider, the ranks would close and the "Director" would know nothing, could do nothing, and nothing would change. The ranks would just wait for another President. Trump is powerless over the CIA. After all, they could easily have him 'accidentally' killed; they've done it before. ..."
"... The CIA just needs to be dissolved in acid. The political, psychological and historical deep-rooted corruption isn't fixable by anyone. ..."
"... McConnell would never confirm a "true outsider". Mitch is the real problem here, he tells Trump who he will and will not confirm, so Trump has to accept one of Mitch's choices. ..."
"... He could put in Mike Flynn. And any vested employee who "closed ranks" would go on immediate and permanent furlough. ..."
"... Here's something we Americans can learn from the Russians. In August 1991 after Gorbachev left to the Black Sea for a short vacation, the heads of the USSR "power ministries" (KGB chairman, armed forces chief of staff, Minister of Interior, etc. etc.) formed the "State Committee for Extrordinary Situation" ( G.K.Ch .P.) and tried to overthrow the government. ..."
"... That's what happened in Washington in 2016-2018 - "GKChP Lite." ..."
"... After the putsch attempt failed, the leaders were arrested and the power ministries reorganized - the KGB was split into several departments including the FSB and SVR for internal and external intelligence. ..."
"... Trump can declassify these personally if he wants, at any time. He could even go live on air and read portions of it to the public. He has the power, but he refuses to use it. ..."
"... Trumps entire cabinet is full of Goldman Sachs, Skull and Bones, CFR, Pentagon, CIA, Career politicians... at what point do you realize he was never going to drain the swamp? Both candidates are a joke and so is this website for becoming a Big R Republican website. ..."
"... This is all kabuki theater because Trump could have signed an Executive Order releasing everything back to JFK 3 years ago instead of flapping his yap. Comey has a Hollywood movie coming out this fall, As Biden said, "Shut up, man". ..."
"... No one is going to prison that deserves to over this. They'll crucify some desk monkey or intern, pat each other on the back and brag about a job well done. We've seen it the last four years, some low level schmuck changes the footer on some emails and the DOJ is all over it like white on rice. Totally ignoring the fact there is a seditionist movement, maybe even treasonous, happening at a systemic level throughout government. Four years is enough time to build a case, lord knows any one with half a mind can find all the evidence needed in four damned days. ..."
"... The a-holes running the DOJ won't prosecute Comey, or Clinton, or Brennan or any other name we know. Because they're doing dirty deeds themselves and don't want to set the precedent in fear those who come after them might in turn prosecute them ..."
"Federalist" co-founder Sean Davis reports that CIA Director Gina Haspel is personally
blocking the release of documents that will show "what actually happened" with Russiagate.
" This isn't just a scandal about Democrat projection, this is a scandal about what was a
coup planned against the incoming administration at the highest levels and I can report here
tonight that these declassifications that have come out," Davis told FOX News host Tucker
Carlson on Wednesday. "Those weren't easy to get out and there are far more waiting to get
out."
"Unfortunately those releases and declassifications according to multiple sources I've
talked to are being blocked by CIA director Gina Haspel who herself was the main link between
Washington and London ," Davis said.
"As the London station chief from John Brennan's CIA during the 2016 election. Recall, it
was London where Christopher Steele was doing all this work. And I'm told that it was Gina
Haspel personally who is blocking a continued declassification of these documents that will
show the American people the truth of what actually happened."
Watch:
pier , 1 hour ago
The REASON they won't release them: The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Isra-h-e-l-l. But NO ONE will investigate that. M.A.G.A. is out.
M.I.G.A is in.
Joseph Sullivan , 1 hour ago
No. This is all the UK. And Brit east India/pharma complex I'm serious. Israel is a UK proxy.
tion , 1 hour ago
True. 'Bloody Gina' is Trump's loyalist appointee, following through on what loyalist
Pompeo started to protect Trump Crime Family Corruption, Chabad Mafia, and ZOG.
My last
comment including my sentiments towards Gina got eaten by censorship for reasons obvious to
me, but please allow me to still congratulate Gina on reducing the almighty Third Option into
the Toiletpaper Option.
acetrumchura , 1 hour ago
2018, BREAKING: Trump appoints Haspel as first female CIA director
acetrumchura , 1 hour ago
2017: Breaking: CIA Director Mike Pompeo appoints Haspel as the first female CIA officer
to be named deputy director.
BGen. Jack Ripper , 49 minutes ago
Fathead and Esper were best buds at West Point..
NoWorries77 , 1 hour ago
Evidence destruction was one the main purposes of the Mueller "investigation".
realitybiter , 2 hours ago
Trump Has played like Tom Brady. Without either guard or tackle. Take the CIA and the FBI. They are both still ran by rats. Tree of liberty is VERY thirsty.
eatapeach , 1 hour ago
Please. If you can see what Trump has done, basically bending the US and its taxpayers
over for Israel, you'd realize he's just another in a long line of AIPAC Presidents. Ain't
nobody opposing him. CIA knows what Russia knows about him, and they're just using him as
bait.
GreatUncle , 57 minutes ago
Either they are accountable or they are treasonous. CIA is the globalist intelligence agency now.
MAGAMAN , 2 hours ago
It will happen, the fuse just keeps getting shorter. Nobody even refutes that Obama is a
traitor that spied on Trump's campaign and tried to overthrow the President. The evidence is
overwhelming and continues to snow ball.
ChiangMaiXPat , 1 hour ago
It will never happen as Trump appointed these Clowns. Imagine appointing people working
DIRECTLY against your self interest. Does this sound logical or even remotely plausible? I
don't recall it EVER happening in any other administration.
spqrusa , 2 minutes ago
He cannot do anything without Consent from the Privy Council and the circle of demons.
ThaBigPerm , 2 hours ago
Aaaand Trump can just order declassification over "her" head. Do it.
Lather Rinse Repeat , 1 hour ago
Surfaces the cabal's foot soldiers. CIA Director Haspel was a great leader when appointed. But when process drives Haspel to
block an action, the message is that Haspel is rot and so is Haspel's network. These networks run deep and wide and prosecuting 1 or 10 does nothing - you need them all,
or the problem comes back in 5 years.
Lokiban , 2 hours ago
He won't
proof is in the pudding, Hillary still walks free, none of the corrupt ones are in jail
and won't ever go to jail. Face it, Biff has many fooled.
spam filter , 2 hours ago
The way he's constantly saying, "someone should do something about this" ...Tells my
spidey sense that he has little power in the swamp.
Propaganda Phil , 2 hours ago
Isn't she the same chick who destroyed all the torture tapes? Good luck.
Mr. Bones , 1 hour ago
All power of classification is derived from the office of the executive.
He could do exactly this, unilaterally.
Farmer Tink , 1 hour ago
First, normal people who consume news from the networks, particularly those that get their
news from MSNBC and social media, would never hear this. Second, if they did find out about
this, they'd never believe it. It would cause too much cognitive dissonance for them to
believe.
They wouldn't believe it unless the four legacy broadcast media told them so. They
just live in a land of Orange Man Bad as far as news go. A plot to overthrow the US
government by Obama and the Brits would be unfathomable to them.
Someone Else , 2 hours ago
Trump had an abrasive demeanor during the debate and in general.
How could he not, when truly everybody for four years HAS fought him tooth and nail? Few
would have had the ability to stand up to what he has stood up to.
Quia Possum , 1 hour ago
He had that demeanor before he was president too, so I don't accept that excuse.
desertboy , 27 minutes ago
U.S. Navy Reserve Doctor on Gina Haspel Torture Victim: "One of the Most Severely
Traumatized Individuals I Have Ever Seen"
justyouwait , 2 hours ago
All this crap needs to come out. Any date for the release before the election will have
the Dems and their media lap dogs crying foul. It just doesn't matter. They will NEVER
support the release of any documents that are damming to them. He should release it all right
up to the day of the election. This country needs to know all the criminality that went down.
That goes for the so called Durham report too, of which there have been so many rumors. That
one is likely to be a huge zero though by the time Barr gets done with it and then tells us
there were "improprieties" but nothing really bad. What a joke.
What bothers me more is how deep the Deep State goes in Washington. They totally control
the government and without mass firings it is impossible to even make a dent in it. This
country is gone and just doesn't know it yet. Once Kamala is crowned as queen reality will
come slamming home pdq. By the time the country realizes what has happened to them it will be
way too late, no matter how many guns they have at home. Once they cut off access to your
money, very few people will be independent enough to survive on their own.
John Couger , 2 hours ago
Trump has opened the eyes of more Americans to the simple fact that an unelected
bureaucracy is running the country
Sigh. , 2 hours ago
DJT hired this c8nt, sure, but the pool of candidates equipped to take over the CIA is
very small, and all are career swamp things. If DJT put in a true outsider, the ranks would
close and the "Director" would know nothing, could do nothing, and nothing would change. The
ranks would just wait for another President. Trump is powerless over the CIA. After all, they
could easily have him 'accidentally' killed; they've done it before.
The CIA just needs to be dissolved in acid. The political, psychological and historical
deep-rooted corruption isn't fixable by anyone.
Mclovin , 1 hour ago
McConnell would never confirm a "true outsider". Mitch is the real problem here, he tells
Trump who he will and will not confirm, so Trump has to accept one of Mitch's choices.
gcjohns1971 , 1 hour ago
He could put in Mike Flynn. And any vested employee who "closed ranks" would go on immediate and permanent
furlough.
There are only a couple or three thousand CIA agents and analysts. The rest are
contractors.
To bypass the swamp things you sideline them and put your own people in charge of the
contracts.
otschelnik , 1 hour ago
Here's something we Americans can learn from the Russians. In August 1991 after Gorbachev
left to the Black Sea for a short vacation, the heads of the USSR "power ministries" (KGB
chairman, armed forces chief of staff, Minister of Interior, etc. etc.) formed the "State
Committee for Extrordinary Situation" ( G.K.Ch
.P.) and tried to overthrow the government.
That's what happened in Washington in 2016-2018 - "GKChP Lite."
After the putsch attempt failed, the leaders were arrested and the power ministries
reorganized - the KGB was split into several departments including the FSB and SVR for
internal and external intelligence.
Trump has to do the same thing - break them up.
Occams_Razor_Trader , 1 hour ago
Kennedy wasn't a big fan................. look where it got him......................
Back and to the left.................................
LostinRMH , 2 hours ago
Trump can declassify these personally if he wants, at any time. He could even go live on
air and read portions of it to the public. He has the power, but he refuses to use it.
LostinRMH , 2 hours ago
The only timing Trump is interested in is running out the clock. If he get's a second term, a lot of these current issues will magically vanish, and new
ones will appear. This is just a scripted political show for the sheeple. It's all fake.
Oldwood , 2 hours ago
The swamp owns the government's employment agency. All hires come from within the swamp.
LooseLee , 1 hour ago
Sorry Old Man. Trump could have handled this sooooo much better and differently. I call
BS.
knightowl77 , 50 minutes ago
Here is the "B.S."
80 to 90% of the Federal Government are swamp creatures or friendly to the swamp...90 out
of 100 U.S. Senators are either swamp members or at least friendly to the swamp....Trump can
only get people confirmed to certain agencies who are Not hostile to the swamp...McConnell
and company are blocking the draining....The Dems would be even worse or just impeach
Trump....
No One else has even tried...I doubt anyone else could've survived the swamp as long as
Trump has....So you tell us HOW he could have done it better and differently?????????
AlexTheCat3741 , 1 hour ago
Not one person who has had a prior association with John Brennan should be doing anything
in the Trump Administration. And if that person cannot be fired, then reassign them to
cleaning toilets or picking up trash.
WHERE IS PRESIDENT TRUMP GETTING HIS PERSONNEL CHOICES FROM? We know Chris Cristie was one
who recommended director of the "Fibbers Bureau of Insurrection", Chris Wray and he is an
absolute disaster AND NEARLY AS BAD AS JAMES COMEY WHO MUST BE SUFFERING FROM DEMENTIA TOO AS
HE CANNOT SEEM TO REMEMBER ANYTHING WHILE UNDER OATH BEFORE A SENATE COMMITTEE.
And now we have this Gina Haspel running the CIA? ARE YOU F CKING KIDDING??
The first person to next get the ax in the Trump Administration is whoever it is that is
giving him these personnel choices, e.g., Rex Tillerson, James Matis, John Kelly, Kirsten
Nielson, Mark Esper, Mark Miley..........WHO IS PICKING THIS TRASH WHEN THE PRESIDENT NEEDS
REAL HELP PERFORMING A COLON FLUSH ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO GET THE GARBAGE OUT AND TO
UNDO THE DAMAGE DONE BY 8 YEARS OF BARACK O'DINGLEBARRY AND SLOW JOE BIDEN??
Citi The Real , 1 hour ago
Trumps entire cabinet is full of Goldman Sachs, Skull and Bones, CFR, Pentagon, CIA,
Career politicians... at what point do you realize he was never going to drain the swamp?
Both candidates are a joke and so is this website for becoming a Big R Republican
website.
DeeDeeTwo , 1 hour ago
This is all kabuki theater because Trump could have signed an Executive Order releasing
everything back to JFK 3 years ago instead of flapping his yap. Comey has a Hollywood movie
coming out this fall, As Biden said, "Shut up, man".
Alfred , 2 hours ago
The Director of the CIA is a cabinet position. If she doesn't want to take direction from POTUS, she should be fired.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 53 minutes ago
Yeah, there's a reason she's blocking it. If those papers are released, it'll lead to
someone high up the food chain facing a courtroom out of necessity because people will lose
their goddamed ****.
Once that happens, you'll by necessity have to go after six more. Then six more. Then
everyone in D.C., their families, friends, and pet dogs are gonna be locked up.
They protect themselves. "Obeyance of the law is for thee, not for me."
Wild Bill Steamcock , 41 minutes ago
No one is going to prison that deserves to over this. They'll crucify some desk monkey or
intern, pat each other on the back and brag about a job well done. We've seen it the last
four years, some low level schmuck changes the footer on some emails and the DOJ is all over
it like white on rice. Totally ignoring the fact there is a seditionist movement, maybe even
treasonous, happening at a systemic level throughout government. Four years is enough time to
build a case, lord knows any one with half a mind can find all the evidence needed in four
damned days.
The a-holes running the DOJ won't prosecute Comey, or Clinton, or Brennan or any other
name we know. Because they're doing dirty deeds themselves and don't want to set the
precedent in fear those who come after them might in turn prosecute them
radical-extremist , 1 hour ago
Be aware CIA people stick together like glue. They're more loyal to each other than they
are the US or any president. Once you're in the CLUB, you're in the CLUB for life. Trump was
absolutely right about not trusting "our intelligence agencies".
12Doberman , 1 hour ago
I hate the CIA...and it's been a power unto itself for a very long time. The idea that it
is under civilian oversight is a joke.
Max21c , 1 hour ago
the CIA...and it's been a power unto itself for a very long time. The idea that it is
under civilian oversight is a joke.
Quite true there is no oversight and the secret police community and intelligence
community are presently and have been for a long time above the law, above the Constitution,
above the very framework of government per above Congress & above the President and above
the Courts... and everybody just goes along with the pack of criminals in the security state
and accepts that they have the right to commit crimes, run criminal activities, and abuse
secret police powers... and nobody ever stands up to the Nazis and NeoNazis and these
radicals in the military secret police, military intelligence, Pentagon Gestapo, National
Security Council, FBI & CIA and the rest of the criminal underworld network inside and
around the organized criminal enterprises and organized criminal networks of the security
state...
12Doberman , 1 hour ago
That's right and the civilian government is largely just a facade.
ken , 1 hour ago
CIA wasn't W-A-S for preventing 9/11...or were they involved in it? Did the missing
trillions go to Israel, and that other country, as payment for services???
_arrow
protrumpusa , 2 hours ago
Someone asked in previous post - why do democrats hate Trump? Good question.
It can't be his policies - who except illegals don't want secure borders, who doesn't want a
strong private buisiness economy, who doesn't want manufacturing jobs to be brought back from
China.
Our democrat leaders, plus Romney all have a connection to Ukraine's stolen treasury money
and Soros's money too, and Trump doesn't . This I believe is the reason democrats hate
President Trump
protrumpusa , 2 hours ago
The Obama administration and the FBI knew that it was they who were meddling in a
presidential campaign - using executive intelligence powers to monitor the president's
political opposition. This, they also knew, would rightly be regarded as a scandalous abuse
of power if it ever became public. There was no rational or good-faith evidentiary basis to
believe that Trump was in a criminal conspiracy with the Kremlin or that he'd had any role in
Russian intelligence's suspected hacking of Democratic Party email accounts.
[snip]
In the stretch run of the 2016 campaign, President Obama authorized his administration's
investigative agencies to monitor his party's opponent in the presidential election, on the
pretext that Donald Trump was a clandestine agent of Russia. Realizing this was a gravely
serious allegation for which there was laughably insufficient predication, administration
officials kept Trump's name off the investigative files. That way, they could deny that they
were doing what they did. Then they did it . . . and denied it.
LEEPERMAX , 30 minutes ago
Gina Haspel worked directly for the instigator of the Crossfire Hurricane operation
– John Brennan. It would have been impossible for Haspel not to have known about the
British spying from London since it was reported in UK newspaper on a weekly basis.
She certainly was controlling Stefan
Halper , Josef
Mifsud ,
Stephan Roh , Alexander Downer, Andrew Wood, John McCain, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff and
the other conspirators.
Kan , 2 hours ago
The FBI and CIA are the enemy of the people. There is little doubt at this point that they
serve nobody but the bankers that formed the organization and themselves.
Gunston_Nutbush_Hall , 2 hours ago
How convenient.
CIA operative Trump nominates Haspel to be the CIA director, after CIA Operative Trump
picked CIA chief Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, thereafter
Epstein is Trumpincided on CIA Operatives Barr Pompeo Trump's watch, while running smoke
cover for the CIA's Obama's False Flag National Government.
Shortly after taking office in 1999, Jesse Ventura writes he was asked to attend a meeting
at the state Capitol. He says 23 CIA agents were waiting for him in a basement conference
room.
The greatest False Flag ever? Brainwashing Americans to think Constitutional Federal
Government exists.
Kefeer , 17 minutes ago
The people who want to know and care to know the truth already know the truth. It is
suspect that Trump appoints people like Christopher Wray and Gina Haspel and I really do not
know what to make of it - is he part of the swamp or making bad decisions? I honestly do not
know, but my biblical lens filter tells me we are in trouble regardless of the outcomes
because so many of the institutions in government and industry are so corrupt.
Maltheus , 29 minutes ago
Trump is absolutely incompetent, when it comes to selecting people. He always has been.
Flynn was one of the few, who was halfway decent, and he got thrown to the wolves. Pretty
much everyone else, he's ever chosen, has knifed him in the back, and most of us saw it
coming a mile away.
Tuffmug , 13 minutes ago
The Swamp is deep and has had twenty + years to grow . Trump had to chose the ones who
stunk least from a slimy pool of corrupted officials and fight against every agency, each
filled with deep state snakes. I'm just surprised he is still breathing.
Kinskian , 29 seconds ago
So his incompetence begins and ends with "selecting people" and that gets no downvotes
from the 'tards. I understand why. You're still blaming other people for Trump's failures in
office instead of placing the blame squarely with HIM. He is incompetent in his role as
President, and that is his responsibility.
LEEPERMAX , 36 minutes ago
Gina Haspel would have known about the coup. If she has not reported all of this to the
President Trump, she is complicit in the overthrow attempt and is guilty of HIGH TREASON.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 49 minutes ago
Spooks run this world. And they certainly like power, and money. But do you want to know
what they like most of all?
Information.
Control of information drives everything else. And anyone who has even sniffed that world
knows to get quality information you can't buy it. Instead you have to trade information of
equal value.
We're not important enough to have the opportunity to know what they know. I don't know
about you, but I'm a little angry about that.
StealthBomber , 30 minutes ago
That is because they are un-accountable.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 30 minutes ago
and untouchable.
Take one out and the whole thing collapses.
insanelysane , 51 minutes ago
Don't think we need declassifications to know what happened. We know what
happened.
as I've stated many times, governments would be completely unstable if the government
legally proved that organizations within the government were involved is sedition. With the
IRS scandal the deflection was that a few rogue employees did some things even though the
entire IRS was involved in harassing far right and far left organizations.
The problem with Russiagate is that none of the rogue employees are willing to to go down
without taking everyone involved down. The IRS rogues got nice payouts and no prison
time.
radical-extremist , 1 hour ago
She doesn't want them released because obviously it implicates her in Strzok's Crossfire
Hurricane scheme. It also puts mud on the face of MI6, which is why Trump might be
hesitant.
October is young.
12Doberman , 1 hour ago
Haspel is also likely a figurehead in many respects. From what I've read about CIA over
the years those at the top have competing agendas and don't trust and share information with
each other. The idea that a president is sworn in ever 4-8 years and is brought up to speed
on everything they are doing is laughable...and likely impossible. No president fully
controls the CIA and it has it's own agenda that runs across and through
administrations...may as well call it the head of the deep state snake.
Felix da Kat , 2 hours ago
Haspel is a Brennan redux.
The deep state is much deeper than anyone dare thought.
If Trump cannot do unwind the DS,then all is lost.
If Biden gets in, he will only serve to further entrench DS operatives.
Looking bleak out there, folks.
1nd1v1s1ble1 , 3 hours ago
*sigh* As if anything is going to come of this...when has any high ranking politician EVER
been taken to task or incarcerated for their crimes? It's the same political theater brought
to you by the MSM/Jesuit/Jooish/Freemason cult who ritually perform their televised 'skits'
to the masses to make it appear as if justice exists or better yet, we have a Republic-
newsflash: it died a long, long time ago. The frightened mask-wearing, compliant sheeple lap
it up every f'n time-when do you awake and realize there is no bi-partisan political machine,
there is no blue versus red, just like their cronies in Hollyweird, these politicians are
simply actors who were too ugly to make it there, orange man aint gonna save ya, bumbling joe
aint gonna save ya, understand Stockholm Syndrome-survivors of 'merica....they DO NOT GIVE A
F#*K ABOUT YOU OR YOUR FAMILY and would prefer you were dead.
Even the POTUS cannot do anything in DC alone, no matter what he wants to do. He needs
people to cooperate or follow orders. It seems many or most of the people around him are deep
state spies. I think they are scared ****less of what Trump might try to declassify. I think
the CIA would destroy evidence before providing proof of a seditious coup. If you've
committed murder or treason, destroying evidence seems like jaywalking.
Now we know Haspel is personally involved and we probably know exactly why she is blocking
the release of this information.
Jack_Ewing , 17 minutes ago
Trump was supposed to drain the swamp but surrounded himself with the scariest of swamp
creatures, this Medusa-like entity being one of the most terrifying. Pompeo, Mnuchin, Wray,
Miller, Haspel, Kushner, and the chief of the all, the official cover-upper for the Deep
State for the last 40 years, William Barr.
donkey_shot , 45 minutes ago
surprise, surprise: one-time iraqi detainee torturer and current CIA chief gina haspel is
a nasty piece of work: geez, whodathunk?
The only reason I can think of for holding these documents is that the conspiracy is so
vast and intricate, it might destroy 80 plus percent of the government! If that's what it
comes down to, so be it! Blow the whole PHUCKING thing to kingdom come!
Philthy_Stacker , 45 minutes ago
An accurite assumption.
LOL123 , 1 hour ago
Gina Haspel doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.
"The most explosive revelation was that the dossier was
bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee , a
fact that the Clinton campaign took pains to hide, that Clinton officials lied about, and
that Fusion GPS refused to reveal on its own. It wasn't an intelligence report at all. It was
a political hit job paid for by Trump's opponent."
Political issues " incorporated" into public stock holding corporations.
"Individual shareholders cannot generally sue over the deprivation of a corporation's
rights; only the board of directors has the standing to assert a corporation's constitutional
rights in court. [7]
-USA
Ever since Citizens United, the Supreme Court's 2010 decision allowing unlimited
corporate and union spending on political issues, Americans have been debating whether, as
Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people, my friend."
The question came to the Supreme Court in a challenge to regulations implementing
President Obama's landmark health care law. Those regulations require employers with 50 or
more employees to provide those employees with comprehensive health insurance, which must
include certain forms of contraception. The contraception requirement was designed to protect
the rights of women. Studies show that access to
contraception has positive benefits for women's education, income, mental health, and family
stability.
since a political entity ( DNC and Hillary Campaign funded a public corporation which
is a " corporate personhood" and can be sued it is open to discovery in a court of
law.
the chickens have come home to roost....as Mitt Romney says....corporations are the
citizens "best friend".
R.G. , 1 hour ago
Citizens ARE corporaions.
4Y_LURKER , 1 hour ago
Finkel is Einhorn!
Einhorn is Finkel!
Totally_Disillusioned , 1 hour ago
If Sean Davis was able to unearth this, President Trump, Pompeo have known this for some
time and Ratcliffe certainly knows this. the question is "why is she allowed to block
disclosure?". None of the players are currently in service and would not be at risk if their
involvement was disclosed. What possibly is the excuse? Are they using the old excuse of not
revealing sources and methods?
All these people need a stern reminder the govt is owned by the people...they work for us.
So far we are the only people kept in the dark. Breakup the intel 17 agencies and re-engineer
down to two - one domestic and one international.
SirBarksAlot , 1 hour ago
It's always a national security issue when it's your responsibility to release the
documents that would incriminate you.
Gunston_Nutbush_Hall , 3 hours ago
Exactly why CIA Trump hand selected her. Exactly for the same reason CIA Trump hand
selected BARR.
TO PROVIDE CLEAN SMOKE N COVER FOR THEIR CIA NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.
Barr: CIA operative
It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone
out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.
Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael
Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno
(1993-2001), **** Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.
Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting
in 1971. Barr's youth career goal was to head the CIA.
CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA
operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of
Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy
(Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation.
When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA's "legal office"
and Bush's inner circle, and worked alongside Bush's longtime CIA enforcers Theodore "Ted"
Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines, and others, several of whom were likely involved
with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy assassination, and numerous southeast Asian
operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden Triangle narco-trafficking.
Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA
abuses.
Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean
opposition leader Orlando Letelier.
Barr joined George H.W. Bush's legal/intelligence team during Bush's vice presidency
(under President Ronald Reagan) Rose from assistant attorney general to Chief Legal Counsel
to attorney general (1991) during the Bush 41 presidency.
Barr was a key player in the Iran-Contra operation, if not the most important member of
the apparatus, simultaneously managing the operation while also "fixing" the legal end,
ensuring that all of the operatives could do their jobs without fear of exposure or
arrest.
In his attorney general confirmation, Barr vowed to "attack criminal organizations",
drug smugglers and money launderers. It was all hot air: as AG, Barr would preserve,
protect, cover up, and nurture the apparatus that he helped create, and use Justice
Department power to escape punishment.
Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes,
including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all
crimes of state committed by Bush
Barr provided legal cover for Bush's illegal foreign policy and war crimes
Barr left Washington, and went through the "rotating door" to the corporate world,
where he took on numerous directorships and counsel positions for major companies. In 2007
and again from 2017, Barr was counsel for politically-connected international law firm
Kirkland &
Ellis . Among its other notable attorneys and alumni are Kenneth Starr, John Bolton,
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and numerous Trump administration attorneys.
K&E's clients include sex trafficker/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Mitt Romney's Bain
Capital.
A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the
Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.
...Shortly after taking office in 1999, Jesse Ventura writes he was asked to attend a
meeting at the state Capitol. He says 23 CIA agents were waiting for him in a basement
conference room.
Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago
The Navalny "incident" is the latest pathetic CIA and British MI6 operation and the
Belarus incitement. Sloppy, unoriginal and going to backfire in their stupid faces.
Everybody knows the evil empire wants Nordstream II dead, Navalny is the latest lever and
that woman they recognized as leader of Belarus is as laughable as that Guaido goon they
recognized in Venezuela, but he's actually outside of Venezuela - yeah that's how popular he
is. Western intelligence agenices are hacks, they are past their peak.
John Hansen , 3 hours ago
The real stupid thing is the West will succeed.
Spinifex , 20 minutes ago
Christopher Steele is THE GUY who 'doctored all this up'. Why has he not been bought
before congress and asked questions?
Sergi Scripal worked for Christopher Steele. Sergi Scripal earned tens of thousands of
pounds 'providing information' to Christopher Steele. Why is he 'not being asked questions?
He's not 'dead'. Sergi Scripal is 'alive and well' and 'being hidden' by the U.K. Government
'for his own safty.' The U.K. can provide 'access to Sergi Scripal.
Pablo Miller worked for Christopher Steele. Pablo Miller was Sergi Scripals 'handler' with
MI6. Pablo Miller was also the 'last person to talk to Sergi Scripal' before Sergi Scripal
'surccumed to Novichok poison.' Why is Pablo Miller (aka: Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo -
https://gosint.wordpress.com/2019/02/02/who-is-mi6-officer-pablo-miller/
All three worked for Orbis Business Intelligence the company that wrote the 'Steele
Dossier' that Gina Haspel had access to and 'approved' sending onto the FBI and CIA. All
three, Christopher Steele, Sergi Scripal and Pablo Miller are 'alive and well' and all three
are able to provide information about the Steele Dossier, what was in the Steele Dossier, and
WHERE the information in the Steele Dossier came from. Ask the questions dammit, and you'll
get the answers.
headless blogger , 58 minutes ago
Not a fan of Trump, although I voted for him the first time, but he will be in serious
trouble if Biden gets into office as there are too many vengeful people on that side of the
isle. They attempted a coup d'etat which is the worse treason, where most of these people
would be executed in "normal" times.
So, they HAVE TO win at all costs, in their thinking. They will then turn the tables on
Trump as well as the entire Conservative camp. It looks like an ugly future if they win. If
Trump wins, it will be ugly too.
Sure signs to get the hell out now if you can.
The Technocracy crowd is behind all of this, btw. They are waiting for the full collapse
at which time we will be inundated with Tech Billionaires coming forward to "save us".
BEWARE!!
4 play_arrow 1
1nd1v1s1ble1 , 1 hour ago
*sigh* As if anything is going to come of this...when has any high ranking politician EVER
been taken to task or incarcerated for their crimes? It's the same political theater brought
to you by the MSM/Jesuit/Jooish/Freemason Satanic cult who ritually perform their televised
'skits' to the masses to make it appear as if justice exists or better yet, we have a
Republic- newsflash: it died a long, long time ago. The frightened mask-wearing, compliant
sheeple lap it up every f'n time-when do you awake and realize there is no bi-partisan
political machine? There is no blue versus red, just like their cronies in Hollyweird, these
colluding politicians are simply actors who were too ugly to make it there, orange man aint
gonna save ya, bumbling joe aint gonna save ya, understand Stockholm Syndrome-survivors of
'merica....they DO NOT GIVE A F#*K ABOUT YOU OR YOUR FAMILY and would actually prefer you
were dead.
Better/cheaper than sending US military to fight in another useless war.
headless blogger , 1 hour ago
Gina Haspel was selected by Trump!! When you take into consideration Trump's selections of
Haspel, Bolton, and many others, it becomes obvious there is someone in his admin that is
directing him to bring these people on. He brings them on and then they betray him.
5onIt , 1 hour ago
Pence is the dude you are looking for.
Haspel was the CIA Station Chief in London, when this was all going down.
Be sure, she has chit to hide.
LEEPERMAX , 1 hour ago
John Brennan led the coup this side of the Atlantic, while Gina Haspel , who was in the
CIA London office at the time, worked the coup from London as the CIA chief in cooperation
with GCHQ and Robert Hannigan. Both are creepy, corrupt traitors of America.
The current head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, oversaw one such site
where torture was carried out. ... Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Professor Mark P. Denbeaux, Seton
Hall University ...
y_arrow
Mister Delicious , 2 hours ago
She was Brennan's London pet.
She should be fired and escorted from the building, and then DOJ NSD should open an
investigation into her contacts with Brennan.
Think there might be a Demstate coup attempt?
Well, don't you imagine any friend of John Brennan's is not a friend of Trump.
I don't care how much you love Orange Jesus - he has picked absolutely terrible people
over and over and over.
Good DNI now but he needs to take charge.
richsob , 3 hours ago
Orange Fat Boy is getting played like a violin. You and I both know it. Does he? Probably
because you can see it on his face but he's just not willing to do what it would take to get
everything out into the open. And if he tries to expose everything after he's lost the
election nobody will listen to him......even you and I. It will be too late then.
We would think that the New York Slimes would know something about losses. After all, they
paid $1.1 Billion in 1993 for The Boston Globe and in 2013, sold it for $70 Million to
businessman John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, and a massive 93%
loss.
But it's worse than that because included in that sale is BostonGlobe.com ; Boston.com ; the direct-mail marketing company Globe Direct; the
company's 49 percent interest in Metro Boston, a free daily paper; Telegram.com and The Worcester Telegram & Gazette. The Times
bought the Telegram & Gazette for $295 million in 1999.
We should be convinced to pay any attention to Fake News Tabloid, The New York Slimes,
given that kind of Business Acumen? I don't think so.
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
Hope & Change, Drain the swamp, End the wars
Angelic Obama allegedly prevented from saving us by "deep state" Republicans.
Angelic Trump allegedly prevented from saving us by "deep state" Democrats.
Poor us, our chosen leaders and parties are always so blameless in failing us.
protrumpusa , 4 hours ago
President Trump has gotten rid just about everyone in this article I found 3 years ago
> The ATLANTIC COUNCIL is funded by BURISMA, GEORGE SOROS OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION &
others. It was a CENTRIST, MILITARISTIC think tanks,now turned leftist group
> JOE BIDEN extorted Ukraine to FIRE the prosecutor investigating BURISMA, HUNTER's
employer.
> LTC VINDMAN & FIONA HILL met MANY TIMES with DANIEL FRIED of the ATLANTIC
COUNCIL. FIONA HILL is a former CoWorker of CHRISTOPHER STEELE !
> AMBASSADOR YOVANOVITCH is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, is PRAISED in their
documents, gave Ukraine a "do not prosecute" list, was involved in PRESSURING Ukraine to not
prosecute GEORGE SOROS Group.
> BILL TAYLOR has a financial relationship with the ATLANTIC COUNCIL and the US UKRAINE
BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC) which is also funded by BURISMA.
> TAYLOR met with THOMAS EAGER (works for ADAM SCHIFF) in Ukraine on trip PAID FOR by
the ATLANTIC COUNCIL. This just days before TAYLOR first texts about the "FAKE" Quid Pro Quo
!
> TAYLOR participated in USUBC Events with DAVID J. KRAMER (JOHN MCCAIN advisor) who
spread the STEELE DOSSIER to the media and OBAMA officials.
> JOE BIDEN is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he rolled out his foreign policy
vision while VP there, He has given speeches there, his adviser on Ukraine, MICHAEL CARPENTER
(heads the Penn Biden Center) is a FELLOW at the ATLANTIC COUNCIL.
> KURT VOLKER is now Senior Advisor to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he met with burisma
President Trump took to the debate stage tonight shortly after Tucker Carlson aired and it
seemed like he was on the right track with his feisty hits on Joe Biden and plan to help all
Americans by rebuilding the economy. Pedro Gonzalez, a popular guest of top-rated Tucker
Carlson's show spoke to Tucker about why more Hispanics may be supporting President Trump.
Here's a clue, it's not by pandering. It's by showing the American people that he is a strong,
alpha leader.
It's by not treating Hispanics as though they need to be put on some higher playing field
than White Americans to show them they matter. They already know they matter, they just want to
know what President Trump is going to do to make America a safer country for business owners
and law-abiding citizens who don't care to be known by their race, to begin with.
"People who work for a living don't like disorder because they're vulnerable to it". "You're
right," Pedro says. "The GOP is starting to recycle these talking points while denigrating
their white base they patronize Latinos by saying things like, one group of people does the job
that another group doesn't want to do, it's not just untrue, it's morally repugnant," he says.
Gonzales goes on to say that the GOP should stop trying to beat the Democrats at their own
game. He says Trump should play his own game because "he's good at it and it's more popular"
and he goes on to describe his thoughts more below.
Perhaps President Trump should start listening to the organic voices from the right and stop
listening to paid bureaucrats who are out of touch with reality going into the election as he
faces a more challenging demographic voter situation than any Republican presidential candidate
ever.
Fox News
Fox News
5.73M subscribers
SUBSCRIBE
White employees were informed that their so-called 'white' qualities were offensive and unacceptable.
#FoxNews
#Tucker
Trump said "I like being energy independent, don't you? I'm sure that most of you noticed
when you go to fill up your tank in your car, oftentimes it's below two dollars "
But energy "independence" has got little to do with price at the pump. The marginal barrel
sets the price. If the world price for crude goes to $100/barrel, West Texas Intermediate is
going to the same level and gasoline will rise to $4.00.
Oil is at $40/barrel because the Gulf producers and Saudi Arabia want to insure a long
term market for their one export product while making a lot of high cost production
unsustainable and alternate energy sources less attractive.
"The middleman and the host society come in conflict because elements in each group have incompatible goals. To say this is
to deny the viewpoint common in the sociological literature that host hostility is self-generated (from psychological problems
or cultural traditions)."
Edna Bonacich, "A Theory of Middleman Minorities," 1973.
[1]
An interesting accompaniment to Nathan Cofnas's 2018 attempted debunking of Kevin MacDonald's work on Jews was the subtle resurfacing
of Steven Pinker's claim that a more plausible theory of the Jewish historical experience can be found in "Thomas Sowell's convincing
analysis of 'middleman minorities' such as the Jews, presented in his magisterial study of migration, race, conquest, and culture."
Pinker first involved himself in criticism of MacDonald's work in a
letter to Slate , in January 2000, where he made the
above comment. A mere teenager in January 2000, it was only in the wake of the Cofnas affair that I first discovered and read Pinker's
initial response to MacDonald's theory. It goes without saying that I disagreed with almost everything Pinker had to say, but I was
especially vexed by his invocation of the "middleman minority" theory, something I've been familiar with for over a decade and always
found strongly lacking. Pinker himself, of course, has relatively little expertise in the area, his only comment on the theme coming
from a quasi-memoir on Jewish intelligence written for
New Republic . Additionally, his gushing use
of persuasive language ("convincing," "magisterial") to describe Thomas Sowell's extremely derivative and now rather dated Migrations
and Cultures: A World View (1996) struck me as a wholly contrived inflation of what isn't really a rival theory at all,
and certainly not a Sowell innovation. In fact, the history of "middleman minority" theory, and especially its application to the
Jews, has a patchy, chequered, and ambiguous history that is worth exploring in its own right. The following essay is intended to
provide such a history, as well as to broadly assess the merits and inadequacies of exploring Jewish history through this lens, and
also the ways it complements, and falls short of, Kevin MacDonald's theory.
History of the Theory
The comparing of Jews with other sojourning or diaspora trading peoples is far from new, and has even been a staple of anti-Jewish
writing since at least the Enlightenment. Voltaire, for example, wrote in his Oeuvres Complètes (Geneva, 1756) and Dictionnaire
Philosophique (Basle, 1764) that "The Guebers [Parsis in the modern terminology], the Banyans [Indian merchants] and the Jews,
are the only nations which exist dispersed, having no alliance with any people, are perpetuated among foreign nations, and continue
apart from the rest of the world." [2]
In the course of his essay, however, Voltaire concluded that, some surface similarities aside, "It is certain that the Jewish nation
is the most singular that the world has ever seen." Bruno Bauer (1809 -- 1882), the German Protestant theologian, philosopher and
historian, also used the example of the Parsis and Overseas Indians, writing in The Jewish Problem (1843),
The base [of the tenacity of the Jewish national spirit] is lack of ability to develop with history, it is the reason of the
quite unhistorical character of that nation, and this again is due to its oriental nature. Such stationary nations exist in the
Orient, because there human liberty and the possibility of progress are still limited. In the Orient and in India, we still find
Parsees [sic] living in dispersion and worshipping the holy fire of Ormuz.
[3]
After Voltaire, commentary on the relationship between the economic activity of the Jews and other aspects of their behavior and
history, a key theme in modern middleman minority theory, were common points of discussion and debate. Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773
-- 1843), an avowedly anti-Semitic German philosopher, argued in his essay On the Danger to the Well-Being and Character of the
Germans Presented by the Jews (1816), that Jews adopted their historical middleman role willingly, out of a hunger for profit
and an innate sense of separateness, rather than being forced into it by broader economic structures and contexts (which again are
a major focus of modern middleman minority theory). For Fries,
Both in Germany and abroad the Jews had free states where they enjoyed every right, and even countries where they reigned --
but their sordidness, their mania for deceitful, second-hand dealing always remained the same. They shy away from industrious
occupations not because they are hindered from pursuing them but simply because they do not want to.
Following Bauer and Fries -- and before modern scholarship on the subject, the most prominent invocation of ideas similar to modern
middleman minority theory can be observed in the work of Karl Marx. In fact, Marx's essay On the Jewish Problem is an explicit
reply to Bauer, with Marx accusing Bauer of "a one-sided conception of the Jewish problem."
[4] Marx decried Bauer's focus on religious
matters, perceiving the roots of the Jewish problem to reside instead in resource competition and raw economics. In many of his arguments
and assessments of the economic and sociological position of the Jews, Marx anticipated Edna Bonacich (1940 -- ), the Jewish Marxist
anti-Zionist sociologist who essentially invented middleman minority theory in its modern form (and whose work will be discussed
below), in arguing for a structural-contextual explanation of the middleman role of the Jews. In this view, the historical development
of Capital essentially invites and entices certain sojourning or diaspora groups, including the Jews, to adopt lucrative but exploitative
and antagonistic roles within society. In the words of Marx, "we recognize therefore in Judaism a generally present anti-social element
which has been raised to its present peak by historical development , in which the Jews eagerly assisted ." [emphasis
added] These antagonistic roles then generate host hostility, which reinforces ethnocentrism and negative characteristics in the
minority, accelerating and deepening conflict.
Marx's emphasis on economic opportunity and the capitalist superstructure influenced later writers such as the German economist
Wilhelm Roscher (1817 -- 1894), Werner Sombart (1863 -- 1941), Max Weber (1864 -- 1920), and Georg Simmel (1858 -- 1918), all of
whom attempted in some form to trace the relationship of ethnicity to occupational choice (a major concern of modern middleman minority
theory), with particular attention paid to the Jews. In keeping with his flamboyant Marxism, Sombart was closest to Marx's ideas
on the Jews, arguing in The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911) that Capital had drawn Jews into their influential, exploitative,
and lucrative roles in such a comprehensive manner that Jews had become a kind of ur-middleman minority, and thus were both the prime
movers of modern capitalism and the very embodiment of exploitative capital itself. Later, in Der moderne Kapitalismus (1913),
Sombart claimed that the middleman nature of the Jews had become endemic in society, creating generations of mere "traders," a bourgeois
"Jewish species" whose entire intellectual and emotional world is "directed to the money value of conditions and dealings, who therefore
calculates everything in terms of money." This "spirit of Moloch" compelled the entrepreneur to "make money relentlessly until at
last he conceives this as the real goal of all activity and all existence."
[5] For Sombart, the origins of the
worst of modern capitalism can be found in the early middleman role of the Jews, their medieval semi-nomadic quest for usury-derived
profit and Victorian hawking of shoddy goods being a precursor to modern advertising and the mass production of superfluous and quickly
obsolete consumer products.
Max Weber's interpretation of the Jewish middleman role was slightly softer, with Weber advancing the notion of "pariah capitalism."
Pariah capitalists, who include the Jews as well as the Parsis, the Overseas Indians, and the Overseas Chinese, are groups whose
characteristics and situational contexts make them prone to willingly adopt socially negative positions in order to obtain wealth
and influence. For Weber, capitalism itself was not intrinsically bad. The Puritans, with their industry and hard work, were held
up in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/5) as exemplars of positive, "rational" capitalism.
Jews, and other pariah capitalists, however, invariably advanced a negative "irrational" capitalism typified by consumer credit,
speculation, and colonialism. According to Weber, middleman minorities or "pariah capitalist groups" perverted the essentially good
nature of capitalism because of their practice of "dual ethics," or moral double-standards, which was itself a product of their sojourning
nature and situational context. Weber also perceived Judaism itself as reinforcing the Jewish preference for pariah capitalism.
[6]
Softer still were the ideas of Wilhelm Roscher, one of the founders of the historical school of political economy. Roscher was
part of the historical economist or European Institutionalist movement (which also influenced Weber) that argued for a study of economics
based on empirical work that laid special methodological emphasis on context, rather than logical philosophy. Roscher's emphasis
on context and the historical development of capitalism are exemplified in his 1875 essay "The Status of the Jews in the Middle Ages
Considered from the Standpoint of Commercial Policy."[7] In this essay, Roscher presented capitalism as neither inherently good or
bad, and he made the argument that Jews, who like other middleman minorities were economic modernizers, were positive influences
and crucial to the development of a burgeoning economic trading system. Gideon Reuveni offers the following summary:
According to Roscher, the modernizing role of the Jews explains the change in attitudes within the social majority: from tolerance
and acceptance to exclusion and persecution. In other words, once, in the eyes of the majority the role of the Jews becomes superfluous,
resentments towards the Jews become more prevalent. This cycle in relations towards Jews, Roscher observed, was not specific to
the relationship between Jews and non-Jews but was rather a general development among many peoples who allow their economies to
be administered by a foreign and more highly cultivated people, but later, upon having reached the necessary level of development
themselves, often after intense struggles, try to emancipate themselves from this tutelage. According to Roscher, "one may defiantly
speak in this connection of a historical law here."
[8]
Similar to Roscher's ideas were the theories of the Jewish Marxist anti-Zionist Abram Leon (1918 -- 1944). Leon, a Polish Jew
said to have been executed at Auschwitz at the age of 26, published
The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation around 1942, in
which he proposed that Jews were a "people-class." For Leon, "Judaism mirrors the interests of a pre-capitalist mercantile class."
He explains,
Judaism was an indispensable factor in precapitalist society. It was a fundamental organism within it. That is what explains the
two-thousand-year existence of Judaism in the Diaspora. The Jew was as characteristic a personage in feudal society as the lord and
the serf. It was no accident that a foreign element played the role of "capital" in feudal society. Feudal society as such
could not create a capitalist element; as soon as it was able to do so, precisely then it ceased being feudal. Nor was it accidental
that the Jew remained a foreigner in the midst of feudal society. The "capital" of precapitalist society existed outside of its economic
system. From the moment that capital begins to emerge from the womb of this social system and takes the place of the borrowed organ,
the Jew is eliminated and feudal society ceases to be feudal. It is modern capitalism that has posed the Jewish problem. Not because
the Jews today number close to twenty million people (the proportion of Jews to non-Jews has declined greatly since the Roman era)
but because capitalism destroyed the secular basis for the existence of Judaism. Capitalism destroyed feudal society; and with it
the function of the Jewish people-class. History doomed this people-class to disappearance; and thus the Jewish problem arose. The
Jewish problem is the problem of adapting Judaism to modern society.
Georg Simmel, an ethnically Jewish sociologist, philosopher, and critic, moved in much the same theoretical direction as Roscher
and Leon, as evidenced in his famous and still influential essay "Der Fremde" ("The Stranger") (1908). Simmel argued that certain
groups like Jews and other diaspora peoples may be members of host nations in a spatial sense but not in a social sense. They may
be in the nation, but not of it. These groups are both near and far, familiar and foreign. This contextual scenario
influences the behavior of "stranger" groups by permitting them freedom from convention and allowing them access to an alleged greater
objectivity. For Simmel, "the Stranger," the classic example of which in his estimation is the Jew, is "the person who comes today
and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom
of coming and going." [9] This freedom,
argues Simmel, makes "the Stranger" ideally suited to fulfil the role of middleman minority.
[10] As with Roscher's theory, which
is markedly contradicted in several key areas of the historical record, there are a number of obvious logical and evidential problems
with Simmel's theory, and these will be discussed later.
Between Simmel's 1908 essay and the 1970s, middleman minority theories continued to be advanced. With the exception of Philip
Curtin and his Cross-cultural Trade in World History (1984), these efforts were developed primarily by Jewish scholars, and
overwhelmingly within the context of trying to explicitly or implicitly explore, explain, or offer apologetics for the Jewish experience.
For example, Abner Cohen (1921 -- 2001), was an anthropologist at the University of London, who advanced, in his influential work
Urban Ethnicity (1974) and numerous other publications, the idea that there are "trading diasporas."
[11] Of particular interest are Cohen's
ideas about "visibility strategies" pursued by such groups:
The use of symbols to maintain group boundaries can thus be seen as a cultural strategy. In fact, many groups in traditional
and modern societies find that their interests are guarded better through invisible organisations such as cousinhoods, membership
in a common set of social clubs, religious ties, and informal networks, than through a highly visible, formally recognised institution.
At times, ethnic groups may need to heighten their visibility as strangers to maintain their interests while in other instances
they may wish to lower their profile and appear to be an integral part of the society.
[12]
This bears a striking similarity to the sixth chapter of Kevin MacDonald's Separation and Its Discontents , which is concerned
with visibility strategies, especially among crypto-Jews, and concludes with the argument that "this attempt to maintain separatism
while nevertheless making the barriers less visible is the crux of the problem of post-Enlightenment Judaism."
[13] In fact, beginning in the 1970s,
middleman minority theory began to develop several ideas that dovetail very well with the concept of Judaism as a group evolutionary
strategy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Edna Bonacich.
Although the modern refinement of middleman minority theory is often traced to Hubert Blalock's 1967 Toward a Theory of Minority-Group
Relations , the greater scholarly interest has been shown in Edna Bonacich's 1973 American Sociological Review article
"A Theory of Middleman Minorities." [14]
Bonacich sought to refine and systematize Blalock's theory within an anti-capitalist framework, essentially making the argument that
all group conflict in such scenarios is the result of a rational competition for resources in which group characteristics and interests
play a crucial role. A Jewish Marxist and anti-Zionist, Bonacich's interpretations borrow heavily from Marx, Sombart, Weber, Roscher,
and Leon, to the extent that Bonacich essentially concurs that capitalism created opportunities for exploitative middleman communities
and the Jews and other middleman minorities, who possess certain predisposing characteristics including dual loyalty and a level
of unscrupulousness, willingly and enthusiastically engaged in these roles.
Bonacich is well-known for her work on East Asian middleman minorities in the United States, especially her 1980 monograph
The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community , but her earliest work on middleman
minorities clearly demonstrates a concern with the Jewish experience.
[15] In her discussion of middleman
minorities in the 1973 article, Bonacich describes Jews as "perhaps the epitome of the form." Some of the key features of the 1973
article include the arguments that Jews and other middleman minorities are essentially economic "teams," and that these teams rely
upon very high levels of ethnocentrism and related social and economic strategies, which in turn enable them to succeed in individualistic
societies. Bonacich writes,
The modern industrial capitalist treats his workers impartially as economic instruments; he is as willing to exploit his own
son as he is a stranger. This universalism, the isolation of each competitor, is absent in middleman economic activity, where
primordial ties of family, region, sect, and ethnicity unite people against the surrounding, often individualistic economy
. [emphasis added] [16]
Bonacich makes some very interesting, and controversial, remarks on the nature of conflict between middleman minorities and their
hosts, with special reference to Jews. For Bonacich, accusations that Jews have simply been scapegoats for the woes of Europeans
are based on nothing more than a "surface impression."
[17] While noting that middleman minorities "are noteworthy for the acute hostility they have faced," it remains that,
host members have reason for feeling hostile toward middleman groups. Even the extremity of the host reaction can be
understood as "conflict" behavior. The reason is that the economic and organisational power of middleman groups makes them
extremely difficult to dislodge. The difficulty of breaking entrenched middleman monopolies, the difficulty of controlling
the growth and extension of their economic power, pushes host countries to ever more extreme reactions. One finds increasingly
harsh measures, piled on one another, until, when all else fails, "final solutions" are enacted.
[18] [emphasis added]
Bonacich has also argued that Jews and other middleman minorities do engage in economic and social "dual loyalty," and that middleman
minorities do in fact "drain" resources away from host populations and can become very powerful as a result. This then frequently
causes host elites and masses to unite against the sojourning element, a conflict that can escalate rapidly if the sojourning element
refuses to give up its monopolies. Bonacich explicitly rejects any idea that "host hostility is self-generated (from psychological
problems or cultural traditions)," arguing instead that "the middleman and the host society come in conflict because elements in
each group have incompatible goals." With her apparent justification of host violence against middleman minorities, including Jews,
as well as her objective view of certain Jewish characteristics, Bonacich's theory has been heavily criticized in some quarters,
despite its ongoing influence in contemporary sociology. Robert Cherry, for example, has lamented that Bonacich's ideas on middleman
minorities "reinforce persistent, negative Jewish stereotypes."
[19]
Discussion
Before moving to an assessment of the merits and inadequacies of middleman minority theory in explaining Jewish history, it's
worth reflecting on the history of the theory in light of Steven Pinker's claim that it represents a rival, or "more convincing,"
analysis of the Jewish historical trajectory. The first problem, of course, is that, despite Pinker's lavish praise, Thomas Sowell
is not remotely regarded within scholarship as a leading or original thinker in the area of middleman minority theory. Not only does
discussion of middleman minorities form a relatively small element of Sowell's Migrations And Cultures , but what does appear
is highly derivative of the work of Edna Bonacich, Walter Zenner, and others.
A further problem is Pinker's assumption that there exists a single, unified theory on middleman minorities that will help explain
the Jewish historical experience, and that somehow this will also be sufficient to counter the theory of Kevin MacDonald, or at least
offer a more convincing framework that would allow MacDonald's ideas to be dispensed with. As should already be clear from this brief,
and incomplete, bibliographical overview, within middleman minority theory there is a plethora of often competing interpretations,
as well as a general problem of definitions. Walter Zenner, a key proponent of middleman minority theory, concedes that "we tend
to make our definitions and models fit the prototypical group. For decades, the Jews were the archetype."
[20] In other words, for a considerable
time, middleman minority theory was built around trying to explain the experience of Jews, with other groups haphazardly mapped onto
the theory in way that tried to give the impression of similarity, even where these similarities were thin to non-existent. Bonacich
has made roughly the same argument, asserting that middleman minority theory should be regarded as incomplete because it can only
point to an "ideal type," and
In reality there are problems of fit between any actual ethnic group and this picture, problems in establishing which or how
many of the traits a population need have before it can be classified as a middleman minority.
[21]
Bonacich, very reasonably in my opinion, proposes that middleman minority theory, of which she herself is a pioneer, is something
of a misnomer and should be regarded as little more than "a useful sensitiser to a host of interrelated variables."
[22] One is therefore pressed by Pinker's claim to ask not only which of the many strands of middleman minority theories Steven
Pinker is praising, but also just how "convincing" and "magisterial" he can find it given the field's leading contemporary thinkers
regard their work in such ambiguous terms.
Finally, it is not at all clear how any of the aspects of middleman minority theory obviate the need for a deeper theoretical
framework in which to understand the behaviors and contexts under study. Middleman minority theory, as remarked above, is an incomplete
tool, and has little to offer in terms of deeper explanatory value for such relevant key concepts under discussion as resource competition,
ecological strategies, visibility strategies, psychological attitudes toward the majority, and social identity theory. One of the
strong points of Kevin MacDonald's work, which is truly cross-disciplinary and unusually well-equipped in terms of the relevant historical
literature, is that is does offer such an analysis, and can be argued to fill a lot of the logical and evidential gaps of middleman
minority theory. This is not to say that the two frameworks are in opposition, but that the concept of a group evolutionary strategy
can be usefully and seamlessly integrated into middleman minority theory, especially in relation to Jews.
It's been continually remarked by many scholars in the field that Jews should be regarded as either an "ideal type," "the epitome
of the form," a singular example, or otherwise unique case -- even within the context of broad comparative approaches with other
trading diaspora peoples. The qualities that have made Jews so unique -- cultural, historical, religious, and even biological --
are rarely remarked or elaborated upon in sociological studies of middleman minorities, which are often lacking in depth in terms
of their historical analysis. As will be discussed below, Zenner, in particular, has highlighted ways in which Jews do not fit the
standard middleman minority pattern, especially in terms of their extravagant and influential involvement in the culture and politics
of the host nation (see also MacDonald's Diaspora
Peoples on the Overseas Chinese, xlii ff). Unfortunately, middleman minority literature has little to say in terms of further
explanatory theory on how or why Jews came to both define and exceed the middleman typology. Here, middleman minority theory not
only isn't a rival for MacDonald's work, it positively cries out for it.
"American Jews do not fit the sojourner pattern, since their political involvement goes far beyond the support of Jewish causes.
Much Jewish political activity, whether right, center, or left, can be related to a perception of how to make America and the
world safe for Jews. American Jewish support for domestic liberalism and internationalism can be interpreted in this way."
Walter Zenner, "American Jewry in the light of Middleman Minority Theories," 1980.
[23]
Merits of Middleman Minority Theory
The most obvious merit of middleman minority theory is that, like Kevin MacDonald's theory of a group evolutionary strategy, it
places an unusual and welcome emphasis on rational resource competition as the basis for social conflict involving certain minorities.
By offering a socio-economic explanation for hostility toward Jews, middleman minority theory represents a unique space within academia
where the otherwise ubiquitous "pure prejudice" idea that host hostility is self-generated (from psychological problems or cultural
traditions) is summarily and comprehensively dismissed. Although this has not come without criticism, as seen in Robert Cherry's
denunciation of Edna Bonacich's work as reinforcing bigotry
[24] , this emphasis has been able
to continue largely untroubled thanks to its advancement under a hardline traditional Marxist interpretive veneer.
Middleman minority theory, especially the variant advanced by Bonacich, also insists that host populations do have interests,
and that these interests are genuinely and seriously threatened by middleman minorities who drain away resources. These minorities
then use their accumulated resources to build up power and influence, sometimes even to the extent of gaining considerable economic,
social, and political monopolies over the hosts. Since these monopolies can be very difficult to dislodge, and since monopolies may
satisfy some interests of host populations or segments of host populations, middleman minority theory insists that it is rational
and somewhat inevitable that increasingly harsh and even violent measures will be taken against the offending minority. As a result,
middleman minority theory offers a far more plausible and objective understanding of group conflict than many of the ideas that dominate
the academic discussion of group conflict, especially conflict involving Jews. In addition, the outright rejection of "scapegoat"
theories as "superficial," and the lack of appeals to concepts of victimhood in such a framework, can only be described in the context
of the current academic climate as utterly refreshing.
A second major merit of middleman minority theory is the emphasis that some strands place on the characteristics of the
minorities themselves. Middleman minority theory contains within it three basic theoretical approaches. Context-based theories like
that of Roscher, and revived to some degree by Nathan Cofnas (who is particularly concerned with the urban environment-context),
argue that middleman minorities are essentially creatures of the societies in which they are found, and are for the most part created
by opportunities, status gaps, and vacuums over which they have no control and which have nothing to do with their inherent characteristics
(a slight advantage in intelligence being the only characteristic that Cofnas feels comfortable in applying). Situational theories,
like that advanced by Simmel are similar, but place more emphasis on the culturally-located role of the trader, the Stranger, and
the "sojourner as trader," as the determinant factor in the creation of middleman minorities. Culture-based, or characteristic-based,
middleman minority theories, however, tend to be more numerous, and more convincing. These theories, like that advanced by Weber
and given tacit assent by Bonacich and Zenner, place strong emphasis on the broad range of traditions, ideologies, behaviors, and
aptitudes of middleman minority groups.
The most frequently highlighted of such traits within middleman minority theory is ethnocentrism, which again dovetails with the
primary emphasis of Kevin MacDonald's theory. Ethnocentrism is acknowledged as a central factor in the maintenance of self-segregation
among middleman minority groups, and is often supported by ideological beliefs such as the caste system, or what Zenner describes
as "the Chosen People complex." [25]
Ethnocentrism in middleman minorities is presented as crucial to understanding host hostility not only because of the way it facilitates
the draining of resources from the host population, but also because of highly antagonistic correlates such as dual loyalty and a
willingness to engage in lucrative but morally destructive (for the host) trading. Walter Zenner speaks of a "double standard of
morality" that is
Expressed in dealings with outsiders, such as lending to them with interest, unscrupulous selling practices, and providing
outsiders with illicit means of gratifying their appetites, while at the same time, denying the same means to in-group members.
[26]
An excellent example of this process in action is the fact
Israel
is the largest producer and host of international online gambling sites , while making it illegal for its own citizens to use
such sites. Of course, we are talking here about a nation state rather than a minority population, but this contradiction, and the
nature of Israel within the international community, will be discussed in a critique of the narrowness of middleman minority theory
later.
A further merit of middleman minority theory is the heavy emphasis the cultural-characteristic interpretation places on group
strategies. Middleman minorities, again with Jews being held up by both Zenner and Bonacich as an exemplar or especially acute case,
are said to engage in constantly adaptive activity in order to manage their visibility, ensure their safety, advance their interests,
accumulate power and wealth, and entrench themselves ever deeper within the host. Bonacich has indicated that Jews are especially
keen to remain entrenched in the West, and the United States in particular, because it is financially and politically lucrative,
and only a catastrophic weakening of their monopolies would bring an end to existing strategies.
[27] Zenner goes as far as to claim
that "much of the content of American Jewish life can be seen as visibility strategies. Strategy here includes both unconscious mechanisms
of coping with situations and consciously formulated plans."
[28] Zenner speaks of a "dynamic process"
whereby Jews minimise visibility to avoid hostility, maximise visibility when pursuing certain interests, and generally work unceasingly
to make their image more favorable in the minds of the host. Again, all of this corresponds very well with one of the central themes
of the Culture of Critique -- the idea that Jewish involvement in certain intellectual movements could be seen in the context
of a pursuit of Jewish interests either consciously or in ways that involved unconscious motivations and self-deception. It also
maps very closely to MacDonald's framework on Jewish crypsis and other attempts to mitigate anti-Semitism, advanced in the sixth
chapter of Separation and Its Discontents .
Problems in Middleman Minority Theory
Given the prevalence of Jews in the development and promotion of the modern incarnation of middleman minority theory, including
Georg Simmel, Edna Bonacich, Abner Cohen, Abram Leon, Walter Zenner, Werner Cahnman,
[29] Donald Horowitz,
[30] Gideon Reuveni,
[31] Ivan Light, Steven J. Gold,
[32] and Robert Silverman,
[33] a reasonable concern might be
that middleman minority theory is itself an intellectual "visibility strategy." Just as it has been posited that Jews tend to support
mass migration because it will result in Jews becoming "one among many" ethnic minorities, and thus in their logic less conspicuous
and therefore safer, middleman minority theory can act to reduce Jewish visibility by offering the idea that Jews are just one among
many diaspora trading groups and their history and behavior is therefore not unique or worthy of special attention. It remains the
case that even in those interpretations which highlight negative Jewish behavior and portray host responses as rational (e.g. the
work of Bonacich and Zenner), the proposed framework still insists on some level of commonality, no matter how tenuous, with the
experiences of other minority groups, and it ultimately places the blame for conflict on a much broader context, often the impersonal
historical development of capitalism.
In other words, while the framework can deny that Jews are "victims" of host nations, these theories also deny that host nations
are truly the victims of Jewish exploitation. Both are simply argued to be the victims of capitalism, and any sense of individual
or group agency is rhetorically dissolved. Again, this acts to lower Jewish visibility and culpability and remains attractive for
that reason. There are certainly good reasons along this line of thought for proposing that Steven Pinker's promotion of the theory
over Kevin MacDonald's ideas has less to do with a serious engagement with the content of the work of Bonacich et al. and significantly
more to do with deflecting the entire conversation into an area of discussion in which Pinker feels Jews are less visible.
A major problem with middleman minority theory is that it has a very uncomfortable and unsatisfactory way of handling the obviously
unique aspects of the Jewish experience, especially in relation to the unprecedented involvement of Jews in post-Enlightenment Western
culture and politics, something for which there is absolutely no parallel among other diaspora trading groups anywhere. As has been
discussed, middleman minority theory was essentially first created, consciously or unconsciously, by scholars anxious to find a way
to explain the Jewish experience. Attempts to connect this experience, amounting to some two millennia of history, with the much
more modern and straightforward experiences of, for example, the Chinese in the Philippines or the Japanese in America, have been
doomed to the grossest of generalizations and the clumsiest of associations. This has resulted in a steady stream of admissions within
the field that the best way to interpret middleman minority theory is simply that it proposes an "ideal type" (essentially the Jews)
with unfortunate "problems of fit between any actual ethnic group and this picture [the Jewish experience]."
[34] Zenner has conceded that the
concept has been very "difficult to define so as to cover all groups so designated."
[35] All of which calls into question
whether this concept possesses any real efficacy as an analytical or predictive tool in a comparative sense at all.
An interesting point of difference between the Jewish experience and that of other diaspora trading peoples is that the latter
are acknowledged as possessing a genuine sense of sojourn. In other words, their first generations tend to be truly temporary, semi-nomadic
groups who aim to make money before eventually returning to a homeland. A subtly different experience is observed in the Jews, as
noted by Jack Kugelmass in his 1981 PhD thesis Native Aliens: The Jews of Poland as a Middleman Minority . For Kugelmass,
"the so-called "middleman" character of the Jew is seen as an aspect of the Jewish sense of sojourn, which unlike most sojourns
is ideological rather than sociological in nature ." [emphasis added] Another way of phrasing this would be to say that the Jewish
sense of sojourn is cultural-biological rather than contextual, and since the concept of sojourning has been a major feature of Jewish
life since at least the writing of the Exodus, this difference between other groups is really so stark as to require a distinct analysis
-- something offered to an unparalleled degree in Kevin MacDonald's A People That Shall Dwell Alone . In this analysis, it
would appear that, unlike a relatively small number of other peoples who have merely adopted some tactics in order to pursue a specific
diaspora trade role, Jews have, from time immemorial, given themselves over entirely to these strategies as an entire way of life
-- the "middleman minority" as a raison d'être .
This absolutely crucial distinction is linked to the remarkable fact of contemporary political life that the state of Israel exists
largely according to the same strategies employed by Jews when in a diaspora condition. As stated above, an excellent example of
the dual morality process in action is the fact Israel is the largest producer and host of international online gambling sites
, while making it illegal for its own citizens to use such sites. The creation of the state of Israel has also exacerbated, rather
than ameliorated, issues of dual loyalty in Jewish minority populations, even if these issues are more or less kept out of the public
eye through diplomatic soothing around Israeli spying and the maintenance of certain taboos in the mass media. Israel itself would
appear to be a kind of middleman minority archetype within the international community, cultivating close and lucrative ties with
the elite (the United States), while engaging in more or less unchallenged exploitative and oppressive activities against lower social
orders (Palestinians, and other
vulnerable or indebted population groups in South America).
Like the "ideal type" of middleman minority, Israel heavily drains the resources even of its allies (U.S. military and diplomatic
aid) and pursues its strategies in a ceaseless quest for security, while maintaining moral double standards and being rather shameless
in engaging in what Zenner has described as the classic overrepresentation of middleman minorities in "morally shady" activities.
[36] Even in recent years, Israel has become notorious in the
international organ trade ,
moneylending , and allegations of humanitarian atrocities. Israeli newspapers have also described their country as a "
monopoly nation " due to the intense tendency towards economic monopoly in the country's business life -- a key feature of middleman
minority life that Jews appear to continue to embody to an extent unparalleled in any other ethnic group. Further evidence for the
apparently deep-seated, rather than contextual, nature of "middleman" traits in Jews might be found in studies indicative of a biological
underpinning to Jewish ethnocentrism, such as that described by Kevin MacDonald in the Preface to the Culture of Critique
:
Developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while
the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany. The Israeli infants were much more likely to become "inconsolably
upset" in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies
therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite -- findings that
fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.
As well as dealing poorly with obviously unique aspects of the Jewish experience, a significant portion of middleman minority
theory is devoted to context-based narratives that are often in stark contrast to, or completely disproven by, the historical record.
With the exception of the work of Kevin MacDonald, which demonstrates a very extensive engagement with works of history, a general
weakness in all of the late twentieth-century sociological studies discussed above is the fact that, despite their incredibly ambitious
claims about the historical trajectory of capitalism or middleman minority populations, there is a quite serious neglect of any of
the relevant historiography. This leads, in the case of the modern adherents of Simmel, Roscher, and Leon, to the constant repetition
of error-laden tropes such as the idea that Jews turned to commerce because they were prohibited from owning land (rather than arriving
as profit-seeking financiers), that Jews were most often invited into nations by elites seeking a financial stimulus, or that Jews
were banished from countries once their position as loan merchant was superfluous. In fact, these three tropes, all of which remove
Jewish agency and characteristics from consideration, are essentially the pillars of context-based middleman minority theory pertaining
to Jews, and are absolutely crucial to Roscher's ideas in particular.
The historical record is now acknowledged as more or less complete in relation to the issue of the Jewish ownership of land. It
has been conclusively established, for example, that the general trend across Europe was that Jews were in fact able to possess and
own land during the centuries immediately following their initial spread and expansion in Europe (c.1000 -- 1300). Restrictions on
land ownership were later enacted as penalties for exploitation or as part of a system of elite land transfer -- e.g., the desire
of the English kings to obtain the land of indebted lesser knights, and doing so by financially compensating Jewish moneylenders
for forfeited lands they could no longer legally hold.
One of the correlates of the land ownership trope is the astonishingly naive assumption that land ownership would preclude involvement
in financial speculation. Again, the historical record contradicts this. Mark Meyerson's Princeton-published A Jewish Renaissance
in Fifteenth-Century Spain (2010), for example, offers an expansive analysis of Jewish landowners in Spain who "did not necessarily
cultivate the land themselves" and combined wine production operations worked by non-Jewish peasants with "lending operations and
tax farming." [37] Pointing to the
prevalence of early Jewish land ownership in Poland, France, and Germany, in which Jews enjoyed a "privileged status available to
few Christians," Norman Roth has described the trope that Jews were forced out of agriculture by restrictive laws and the violence
of the Crusades as "patently absurd."
[38]
The theory that Jews, and by tenuous implication other middleman minorities, were most often invited into nations by elites
seeking a financial stimulus or to fill a "status gap," is also contradicted by the historical record. The early entry and expansion
of Jews in Europe is relatively well-documented, the dominant trend being that Jews either presented themselves before elites in
order to solicit business, or that they acted as financiers for conquest and then followed in the wake of the conquerors (e.g., the
well-documented role of Jewish financiers in Norman Conquest of England and Strongbow's conquest of Ireland).
[39] Ireland's Annals of Innisfallen
(1079 A.D.) record: "Five Jews came from over sea with gifts to Tairdelbach [King of Munster], and they were sent back again over
sea." Unless Tairdelbach (Turlough O'Brien, 1009 -- 86) had undergone a dramatic change of mind, it's likely that the arrival of
the Jews hadn't been preceded by an invitation. In fact, unsolicited approaches for request to settle and establish financial activities
are in evidence from the time of O'Brien to the 1655 "Humble Address" of Manasse ben Israel to the English government.
A very common form of government documentation found in the study of Early Modern Jewish communities are the charters outlining
their terms of settlement, and these are very revealing. Rather than act as economic catalysts, Jews are more frequently observed
following the trail of already economically improving areas, hoping to profit from their advancement. As Felicitas Schmeider has
pointed out, in terms of the German context, "permission to settle Jews in a newly privileged town is one thing kings were frequently,
if not regularly, asked for, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries."
[40]
The theory that Jews were banished from countries once their position as loan merchant or general role as a middleman minority
was superfluous is also forcefully contradicted by the historical record. Just as medieval Jews perceived that they were the innocent
victims of evil Gentiles, so Jewish historiography has overwhelmingly portrayed the expulsions as the result of "rumors, prejudices,
and insinuating and irrational accusations."
[41] Context-based middleman minorities
theories absorbed these tropes and reinvented them in narratives that blamed the expulsions on the fact that Capital had simply exhausted
the usefulness of the Jews. Such understandings of the expulsions have only very recently come to be revised, most saliently in the
work of Harvard historian Rowan W. Dorin, whose 2015 doctoral thesis and subsequent publications have for the first time helped to
fully contextualize the mass expulsions of Jews in Europe during the medieval period, 1200 -- 1450.
[42]
Dorin points out that Jews were never specifically targeted for expulsion qua Jews, but as usurers, and notes that the
vast majority of expulsions in the period targeted "Christians hailing from northern Italy." Jews were expelled, like these Christian
usurers, for their actions, choices, and behaviors. What the period witnessed was not a wave of irrational anti-Jewish actions, or
for that matter an impersonal reflex of glutted Capital, but rather a widespread ecclesiastical reaction against the spread
of moneylending among Christians that eventually absorbed Jews into its considerations for common sense reasons. A number of laws
and statutes, for example Usuranum voraginem , were designed in order to provide a schedule of punishments for foreign/travelling
Christian moneylenders. These laws contained provisions for excommunication and a prohibition on renting property in certain locales.
The latter effectively prohibited such moneylenders from taking up residence in those locations, and compelled their expulsion in
cases where they were already domiciled. It was only after these laws were in effect that some theologians and clerics began to question
why they weren't also applied to Jews who, in the words of historian Gavin Langmuir, were then "disproportionately engaged in moneylending
in northern Europe by the late 12th century."
[43] The Church had historically objected
to the expulsion of Jews in the belief that their scattered presence fulfilled theological and eschatological functions. It was only
via the broader, largely common sense, application of newly developed anti-usury laws that such obstructions to confrontations with
Jews became theologically and ecclesiastically permissible, if not entirely desirable. And once this Rubicon had been crossed, it
paved the way for a rapid series of expulsions of Jewish usury colonies from European towns and cities, a process that accelerated
rapidly between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The lack of engagement with developments in historiography is worsened to a large extent by the absence of a truly cross-disciplinary
approach in most, if not all, existing middleman minority analyses. This is particularly glaring in the works of Bonacich and Zenner
which, while making multiple and apparently crucial references to conscious and unconscious group "strategies," fail to engage in
any kind of historiographical or psychological scholarly contextualization. How exactly such strategies as "visibility strategies"
can operate at group level are left completely unexplained and without any substantial evidence beyond common sense observations
of Jewish behavior. The lack of a cross-disciplinary approach in such instances doesn't necessarily mean that these ideas are wrong,
or that "visibility strategies" don't exist, but it does mean that explanations and evidence are still required. To date, the only
convincing attempt to fill in such gaps, and offer a truly cross-disciplinary approach (incorporating history, sociology, and psychology)
to the idea of group strategies, is found in the work of Kevin MacDonald.
Conclusion
As stated at the outset of this essay, it isn't at all clear how any of the aspects of middleman minority theory obviate the need
for a deeper theoretical framework in which to understand the behaviors and contexts under study. Middleman minority theory, as remarked
above, is an incomplete tool, and has little to offer in terms of deeper explanatory value for such relevant key concepts under discussion
as resource competition, ecological strategies, visibility strategies, and social identity theory. Middleman minority theory, or
at least some strands of it, is useful and valuable in the study of Jews to the extent that it places an unusual emphasis on group
conflict as arising from resource competition, the characteristics of Jews (including Jewish ethnocentrism), and the existence of
group strategies. There are, however, multiple, serious inadequacies in middleman minority theory, including the possibility that
it is in part itself a "visibility strategy," that is has a general problem of definitions, that it fails to adequately deal with
unique qualities of the Jews and their experiences, that it generally fails to engage with the historical record, and that it has
no real explanatory or predictive frameworks for many of the ideas it discusses, including group strategies. I am forced to concur
with Edna Bonacich that, in regards to the study of Jews, middleman minority theory should be conceived, at best, as "a useful sensitiser
to a host of interrelated variables."
[44]
Notes
[1] Bonacich, Edna. "A Theory
of Middleman Minorities." American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583 -- 94, (589).
[2] Francois-Marie Arouet de
Voltaire, Oeuvres Complètes (Geneva, 1756), Vol. 7. Ch.1. See also Dictionnaire Philosophique (Basle, 1764), Vol. 14
.
[3] B. Bauer, The Jewish Problem
( Die Judenfrage , 1843) ed Ellis Rivkin and trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College -- Jewish Institute of
Religion, 1958).
[4] K. Marx, On the Jewish
Problem ( Zur Judenfrage , 1844) ed Ellis Rivkin and trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College -- Jewish
Institute of Religion, 1958).
[5] W. Sombart, Der moderne
Kapitalismus , Munich and Leipzig 1913. This work was published in an English translation by E. Epstein under the title, The
Quintessence of Capitalism , London, 1915.
[6] W. P. Zenner, Minorities
in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 5.
[7] W. Roscher, "Die Stellung der Juden im Mittelalter, betrachtet vom Standpunkt der allgemeine Handelspolitik," Zeitschrift
für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft Bd. 31 (1875) S. 503 -- 526.
[8] G. Reuveni, "Prolegomena
to an "Economic Turn" in Jewish History," in G. Reuveni (ed) The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship
Between Ethnicity and Economic Life (Berghahn, 2011), 3.
[9] As the son of Catholic and
Lutheran converts from Judaism, Simmel's relationship to his Jewishness is fascinating in itself. See A. Morris-Reich, The Quest
for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science , (New York: Routledge, 2008), chapter 4. For the influence of Simmel's stranger
minority theory see Werner Cahnman, "Pariahs, Strangers, and Court Jews -- A Conceptual Classification," Sociological Analysis, 35
(1974); C. R. Hallpike, "Some problems in Cross-Cultural Comparison," in The Translation of Culture , T. Beidelman (ed), (London:
Tavistock, 1971); Hilda Kuper, "Strangers in Plural Societies: Asians in South Africa and Uganda," in Pluralism in Africa
, Leo Kuper and M. G. Smith (eds) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Jack H. Porter, "The Urban Middleman: A Comparative
Analysis," Comparative Social Research , 4 (1981); R. A. Reminick, "The Evil Eye Belief among the Amhara of Ethiopia," Ethnology,
13 (1974), W. Shack and E. Skinner, Strangers in African Societies (Berkelely: University of California Press, 1979); Paul
Siu, "The Sojourner," American Journal of Sociology , 58, (1952).
[10] J. Stone, Racial Conflict
in Contemporary Society , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 96.
[11] This coinage is frequently
attributed to Philip Curtin, who employs the term in his Cross-cultural Trade in World History (1984), but the term was in
use by Cohen, within a strict thematic sense, as early as the latter's 1974 chapter "Cultural Strategies in the Organisation of Trading
Diasporas," in C. Meillassoux (ed) The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London, 1971).
[12] Quoted in W. P. Zenner,
Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 8.
[13] K. MacDonald, Separation
and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism , 187.
[14] E. Bonacich, "A Theory
of Middleman Minorities." American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583 -- 94.
[15] E. Bonacich, The Economic
Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community (Berekely: University of California Press, 1980).
[19] R. Cherry, "American Jewry
and Bonacich's Middleman Minority Theory," Review of Radical Political Economics , 22 (2 -- 3), 158 -- 173, 161.
[20] W. P. Zenner, Minorities
in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 10. See also W. Zenner, "American Jewry
in the light of middleman minority theories," Contemporary Jewry , 5:1 (1980), 11 -- 30, 18. Zenner argues that "As a synthetic
concept, the phrase "middleman minority" is difficult to define so as to cover all groups so designated."
[21] E. Bonacich, The Economic
Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community (Berekely: University of California Press, 1980),
22. See also E. Bonacich, "A Theory of Middleman Minorities." American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583 -- 94, 585.
[27] E. Bonacich, "A Theory
of Middleman Minorities." American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583-94, 592.
[28] W. Zenner, "American Jewry
in the light of middleman minority theories," Contemporary Jewry , 5:1 (1980), 11-30, 23.
[29] W. Cahnman, "Pariahs, Strangers
and Court Jews," Sociological Analysis 35, 3 (1974): 155-66.
[30] D. Horowitz, Ethnic
Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
[31] G. Reuveni (ed) The
Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship Between Ethnicity and Economic Life (Berghahn, 2011).
[32] I. Light & S. J. Gold,
Ethnic Economies (Bingley: Emerald, 2000).
[33] R. Silverman, Doing
Business in Minority Markets (New York: Garland, 2000).
[34] E. Bonacich, The Economic
Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community (Berekely: University of California Press, 1980),
22.
[35] W. Zenner, "American Jewry
in the light of middleman minority theories," Contemporary Jewry , 5:1 (1980), 11-30, 13.
[37] M. D. Meyerson, A Jewish
Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 111.
[38] N. Roth, Medieval Jewish
Civilization: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2003),
[39] J. Hillaby, "Jewish Colonisation
in the Twelfth Century," in P. Skinner (ed), The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 36.
[40] F. Schmeider, "Various
Ethnic and Religious Groups in Medieval German Towns? Some Evidence and Reflections," in, Segregation, Integration, Assimilation:
Religious and Ethnic Groups in the Medieval Towns of Central and Eastern Europe (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 15.
[41] Joseph Pérez, History
of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 60.
[42] R. W. Dorin, Banishing
Usury: The Expulsion of Foreign Moneylenders in Medieval Europe, 1200 -- 1450 (Harvard PhD dissertation, 2015); R. W. Dorin, "Once
the Jews have been Expelled," Intent and Interpretation in Late Medieval Canon Law," Law and History Review , Vol. 34, No.
2 (2016), 335-362.
[43] G. Langmuir, History,
Religion, and Antisemitism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 304.
Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions has nothing to say about race, but it and its successors pretty much nail what is wrong
with today’s progressives. And it’s the same as what was wrong with yesterday’s progressives.
If we survive 2020, this volume will be what he’s remembered for.
The Zionist thinkers understood the unnatural and dangerous situation of the Jews in the Diaspora, and seized the first opportunity
to re-reform the Jewish people as a normal nation in its homeland. In only one generation, all the Jewish communities in the Eastern
lands liquidated their affairs and joined movement. The same with the powerful Russian and Ukrainian communities, they moved (mostly)
to Israel. Last year, about 30,000 American Jews gave up their precious citizenship and moved to Israel. I foresee in two generations
a more or less Jew-less America. What I am saying is that the Jews do not like their middleman foreigner status. In Marx etc.
time there were no alternatives. Now there is Israel. Some 55% of the Jews have already moved there.
Israel is the largest producer and host of international online gambling sites, while making it illegal for its own citizens
to use such sites
It should be noted that Monaco does the same thing with its gambling casinos. It has long been unlawful for Monaco’s own Monégasque
citizens to enter into those casinos to gamble.
Also, the ultra-high level of Jewish involvement in pornography sales is another relevant area here.
One of those Jewish pornography-meisters was Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales, afterwards recruited to head the CIA-Mossad Wikipedia, where
paedophilic persons have been able to persistently post fake biographies of themselves and smears against their victims. Jimmy
Wales has attended birthday parties of Israeli Presidents, and received a $1 million ‘prize’ from Tel Aviv University.
The most obvious merit of middleman minority theory is that, like Kevin MacDonald’s theory of a group evolutionary strategy,
it places an unusual and welcome emphasis on rational resource competition as the basis for social conflict involving certain
minorities. By offering a socio-economic explanation for hostility toward Jews, middleman minority theory represents a unique
space within academia where the otherwise ubiquitous “pure prejudice” idea that host hostility is self-generated (from psychological
problems or cultural traditions) is summarily and comprehensively dismissed.
The Jews like to cast themselves as “just another struggling minority trying to make it among the oppressive majority.” This
ignores the international Zionist (Jewish supremacist) agenda, and the pathological Jewish drive for totalitarian control.
Where does that drive originate? Jesus of Nazareth, apparently Hebrew, preached the opposite, and called organized Jewish hypocrisy,
greed, corruption and double standards “the Synagogue of Satan.” Of course, the corrupt Jewish Moneychangers (the Jewish establishment
of his era) in bed with the Roman Empire didn’t like that one bit, and so instigated his murder. When the cosmopolitan Hebrew
mob, prompted by the corrupt Jewish establishment, chose the criminal Barabbas over Jesus, the Jews made their choice for ideological
evil and corruption.
That is a choice they affirm time and again, day after day, year after year, century after century.
Whether one wants to read this decision as a cosmic moral judgement on the Jews, or simply as a rational economic decision
by the Jews (choosing systematic corruption and shady insider back room deals over honest work) makes no difference. They chose
the path they chose, and they affirm that decision every day through their corrupt, criminal and murderous international Zionist
works.
One doesn’t have to be a Christian to wear the Jon Carpenter sunglasses from The Live which allow one to see that the Judeo-Imperial
“ruling class are [social] aliens concealing their appearance and manipulating people to spend money, breed, and accept the status
quo with subliminal messages in mass media,” but it helps.
One doesn’t have to be a Christian to know that Jewish infiltrated Empires working in concert with a corrupt establishment
are bad news, but again, it helps.
In Britain Jews are clearly influential but the Norman ruling class has had it’s grip on the UK ever since they landed here
in 1066, indeed William the Conqueror was mentioned in the article above, he certainly had his uses for Jews, there is little
information available though as to just how many Jews arrived and what lead King William 1 to bring them over with his troops.
As of present much of inner London is owned by aristocratic families who can trace their descent to King Williams troops
Also a considerable proportion of high status people in Britain were educated at just a few private schools including a great
deal of our present government
In Britain it is often a case of who you know, not what you know that determines whether you will reach the top of society
or not, compared to other European countries like Germany and Finland in Britain there is a tendency for the higher classes to
promote people on the basis of whether they have a background in common with them rather than merit, just like the Jews.
When I was going to university there, the corner stores were all Chinese. As were the Laundromats. I suspect the children all
became doctors and lawyers and graduated from the need to continue operating them.
As per usual, Andrew Joyce demonstrates that he is an objective social scientific historian by flooding his article with a
preponderance of documentable verifiable factual data.
However, to my mind there is one ‘word’ in this 8,000+ word tour de force; one very important word that all lovers of Western
history and culture dedicated to the perpetuation of that history and culture should focus on … one word: ‘NATION’!
At the very top of his essay Joyce quotes Voltaire:
“Voltaire concluded that, some surface similarities aside ,
‘It is certain that the Jewish nation is the most singular that the world has ever seen.
’ ”
Similarly he quotes Bruno Bauer:
“The base [of the tenacity of the Jewish national spirit ] … the character of that [Jewish] nation.
..”
Some say Jews are a ‘ race’ , some say they are an ‘ethnicity’, some say they are a ‘religion’. The case
can be and is made for all these, in Voltarie’s words, “surface similarities” . However, none capture the essence of what
constitutes the basis for Jewish POWER.
Jews are a worldwide profoundly unified ideological NATION. And that ideological unity is the basis of their national power.
This unity was succinctly captured in an interview with a Mossad agent when he said:
“I can knock on the door of any Jew in the world and I will be invited in.”
Ideological unified nations are powerful nations, and are conquers. The Jews are one of the most ideologically unified nations
in the world. The power derived from that unity has allowed them to conquer the most economically and militarily powerful country
in the world – America.
Further, by conquering America, the wealthiest and most powerful country in Western Civilization, the Jews have de facto conquered
the whole of the West.
Ideological unified nations are strong.
Ideological dis-unified nations are weak.
So call ‘Color Revolutions’ are manifestations of dis-unified nations who in turn are weak and conquerable by strong unified nations.
We have seen numerous weak nation color revolutions in Africa, Middle East and Europe. Now we are experiencing an American
color revolution.
The American ‘color revolution’ is the Jewish nation delivering the ‘coup de grace’ to America and the West.
Andrew Joyce, your articles are so God-damned good!
Jewish behavior reminds me of narcissism: sense of entitlement, self-centered, feeling of superiority, manipulative and deceitful
behavior, desire for power and control, will suck a host dry, and once they’ve gotten what they want, will easily discard the
host. Highly competitive, status-oriented.
Don’t dare call them out on anything because that causes them to feel shame, and that’s like driving a stake through them.
They work behind the scenes, secretly. They must always be seen in a good light. They will smear and destroy you (your reputation,
your job, your life) if you expose them. They will retaliate in ways you would never be able to because they don’t have a conscience,
and this is why they win and are so hard to fight. Very vindictive. No qualms about lying or twisting the truth.
They are never content, always working to change things in their favor, to get the upper hand. Most people just want to live
their lives, so they acquiesce, but this is a mistake because one day you turn around to realize they now own the farm! If they
don’t get their way, they just regroup and come at you from another angle. They keep wearing you down, chipping away at you until
you give in. It is really something to behold because you just can’t believe their gall.
Their rabbis keep them in line by using fear (fear of the other), and fear is the greatest motivator/persuader. Keeps them
solidly as one. They’re constantly reminded of the Holocaust, the ovens that are lurking around every corner, as well as the injustices
they have suffered (through no fault of their own – ha!). Keeps them neurotic and they don’t stray.
@Oliver Elkington rville, Fitzroy,
Marshall, and Spencer. The Guardian , Independent and Telegraph wrote articles in 2011 and 2013 alleging such persons
still ‘run’ Britain. Lefties use this ploy to attack the Conservative Party whose members tend to be wealthy like champagne socialists.
Back to the point raised by neutral , none of the above mentioned newspapers would run similar stories on Jewry. That
is the litmus test of who really rules.
Despite being a tiny minority Jews have shaped modern Britain. This has been documented here by Joyce, Langdon and others.
Sure the middle man theory explains everything, but needs some footnotes:
-These middle men are specifically encouraged to cheat us, it’s written in their holy books
-they regard us as animals in human form, with either no souls or much lesser souls
-they regard us as having been created ONLY to serve them.
The modern industrial capitalist treats his workers impartially as economic instruments; he is as willing to exploit
his own son as he is a stranger. This universalism, the isolation of each competitor, is absent in middleman economic activity,
where primordial ties of family, region, sect, and ethnicity unite people against the surrounding, often individualistic economy.
The modern finance capitalist …..
Industrial capitalism after it was invented in the American Colonies, was characterized by injection of state capital (not
Jewish finance capital) into industry, to then improve the labor value of the population. American labor was in short supply relative
to the large land mass available.
Industrial Capitalist will treat his workers as valuable contributors, because their labor value is constantly being improved
upon by improved public health, and improved infrastructure such as roads and phone systems. Industrial Capitalist economic method
is to raise up the existing people, and not import low wage “coolie labor.”
The highest form of industrial capitalism was probably Germany, which adopted the American System through Frederick List.
Workers in industrial capitalist Germany had access to best facilities of that era, their work hours were made sensible (no
longer exploitative). Autobahns were built, and industry was built up using state capital (not finance capital) to high levels
of productivity.
Finance Capitalism is Jewish usury method. Finance Capitalism is middleman theory taken to extremes.
The middleman is a hidden string puller whose god is Moloch. The middleman is the third entity in man’s relations, usurping
the role of the King.
It is the King who is to have the role of settling disputes, dispensing with just law, and overseeing high civilization. It
is impossible to have high civilization with Jews operating as middlemen.
Finance capitalism’s big bang event is traced to Amsterdam’s Jews invading Britain.
1) Debt Spreading Private Banking .. the Bank of England in 1694. This event stripped the sovereign King of his money power
and transferred it to hidden bank stock owners.
2) Stock Market Capital. Absentee ownership of Companies. Hidden String Pullers control corporations, rather than the employees
of said companies. The first manifestation was both the Dutch and English India Companies.
3) Allowing Company stock to be on-sold into markets. The logic of prices and money (Moloch) is now tied to private banking
ledger credit entry. BOE creates the private bank credit that is used in “free markets.”
4) Corporation charters are now perpetual, and corporations are held up as being more than a god created human. Being perpetual
is more than being a human, where said human has a finite life span.
Jews are anti-logos, so everything they touch turns to shit. There is a religious and spiritual element to Jews, who are against
the natural order.
Virtually all of the “American System” politicians were assassinated. Countries that attempted to adopt “industrial capitalism”
of the American system were invaded and destroyed in world wars. The world wars were engineered in back room deals, using hidden
string pulling tactics.
America was turned in 1912, and is now under Jewish finance capitalism control. The founding fathers of America would be appalled
if they were alive today.
Hindus are like Jews–they love money and believe themselves to be a special people (as exemplified by your PM Modi and his
RSS buddies). Because of the caste system, Hindus barely tolerate lower caste Hindus.
This comment is aimed at Andrew Joyce, the writer of the article. Good job Andrew.
In addition to finance big bang event I discuss above, there was also the attack on Christianity. So the big bang event was
multi-dimensional, and informs today’s reality.
Here is your quote on Sombart:
For Sombart, the origins of the worst of modern capitalism can be found in the early middleman role of the Jews, their medieval
semi-nomadic quest for usury-derived profit and Victorian hawking of shoddy goods being a precursor to modern advertising and
the mass production of superfluous and quickly obsolete consumer products.
Here is another quote from Sombart, which I think is critical:
Werner Sombart in his book “The Jews and Modern Capitalism” came to an important conclusion.”That which is called Puritanism
is in reality Judaism.”
Our Jewish friends in Amsterdam created puritan Judeo-Christianity, which is a perversion of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus started
his mission on the Jubilee year, aiming precisely at the Pharisee class. Jesus also whipped the money changers, his only act of
violence.
Weber also has some problems in his non treatment of usury:
Max Weber’s book, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” created a split definition. Jewish capitalism on
one side, and Puritan (Calvanist) on the other. Jewish capitalism was speculative pariah capitalism, while Puritan was bourgeois
organization of labor. Weber excluded the problem of usury, thus obscuring what is necessary to see. The Puritan was excluded
from blame.
Let that sink for a moment. I think you understimate – as did I – just how radical this site and it’s owner are, as well as
the majority of the commenters, and just what they are tiptoeing around, and have been for some time. I also think within another
few years, their position will become explicit.
Incidentally, I argely agree that in a few decades most Jews will be flourishing in Israel, but I do think the US will always
have a large and prosperous Jewish community as well, forever. It isn’t going anywhere.
@Tom Verso th the surface of
JSI’s success that they rarely, if ever, see beheath that surface to what is obviously the real cancer of the human race. That’s
why what we’re witnessing today is nothing less than
The Pyrrhic Victory of Jewish Supremacy Inc.
For evidence look at the following:
City – New York
State – California
Country – The USA
Continent – Europe
Civilization – The West
They have conquered the above the way a tumor conquers a human organism.
He can’t – yet – express what he is really trying to say clearly and simply, he has to bury it in a thicket of dense verbiage
which is tedious to cut through.
In a few years, I think Unz will have developed to the point where writers like Joyce can make their point crystal clear in
simple language.
@AaronB e that they have developed
may eventually topple under its own weight, thereby liberating them from their tragic quest to find and hold external phantoms
responsible for their own traumas.
Clarity for Joyce would likely be something like “my father was mean, controlling and made me feel bad, he was always
trying to bring me low to make him feel big, I now need to heal to come to terms with it.”
Sorry Joyce that you feel bad. That’s real. Stop doing yourself the disservice of pretending your hurt is actually your concern
for the world or whatever. That is stupid.
Judaism is an ethnic/religious supremacist ideology that sees the rest as nothing more than cattle to be exploited, so according
to Jewish dogmas if you don’t declare the Jews to be your masters, you are technically anti-Semitic.
When the "Fox News Sunday" host takes the stage on Tuesday to moderate the first
presidential debate of 2020, he will for 90 minutes be the most important person in the
world.
His questions, his demeanor, his raised eyebrow will signal to millions of voters how they
are to assess the two candidates -- President Donald John Trump and former Vice President
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
If his questions are piercing for both, if his skepticism is applied equally to both the
Republican and Democrat, then all is well in this corner of the world of journalism. But if
instead Wallace accuses Trump and coddles Biden, we will have one more instance of media bias,
which has become so rampant that President Trump had to christen it with a pet name -- Fake
News.
Every day, the supposedly professional press corps cozies up to Biden with softball
questions ("Why aren't you more angry at President Trump?" has to be my favorite!) while
accusing Trump of being a mass murderer, a racist and a Putin puppet. So conservatives are
entirely justified in having low expectations for the debate and for Wallace, who has
exhibited symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome more than once.
Wallace can ask anything he wants of Trump. I am confident the president will acquit himself
admirably, but the litmus test for Wallace playing fair in the debate will be whether or not he
asks any hard-hitting questions of Biden -- especially about the new Senate
report on the corrupt activities of his son Hunter in Ukraine and elsewhere.
If you have heard anything about the Biden report on CNN and MSNBC, or read about it in your
newspapers, chances are you came away thinking that Republicans had made up a series of fake
charges against the Bidens. "Nothing to see here. Move along."
The
Washington Post , as usual, was at the front of the pack for Fake News coverage. The Post
used its headline to focus entirely on Hunter's position on the board of the corrupt Ukrainian
energy company Burisma, and claimed that the report doesn't show that the cozy arrangement
"changed U.S. policy" -- as if that were the only reason you would not want a vice president's
son enriching himself at the trough of foreign oligarchs.
The story then spent most of its 35 paragraphs excusing Hunter's behavior either directly or
through surrogates such as Democrat senators, and most nauseatingly by quoting Hunter Biden's
daughter, Naomi, who "offered a personal tribute to her father" in the form of a series of
tweets, including the following:
"Though the whole world knows his name, no one knows who he is. Here's a thread on my dad,
Hunter Biden -- free of charge to the taxpayers and free of the corrosive influence of
power-at-all-costs politics. The truth of a man filled with love, integrity, and human
struggles." Oh my, that's convincing evidence of innocence of wrongdoing. I imagine she also
endorses her grandfather for president, for what it's worth.
The three reporters who wrote the Post piece also spin the facts like whirling dervishes.
They say that the report by Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley "rehashes" known details of
the matter. They quote Democrats to say without evidence that the report's key findings are
"rooted in a known Russian disinformation effort."
The following passage in particular shows how one-sided the story is:
"Democrats argue that Johnson has 'repeatedly impugned' Biden, and they pointed to his
recent comments hinting that the report would shed light on Biden's 'unfitness for office,'
as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to argue that the entire investigation was
orchestrated as a smear campaign to benefit Trump."
Using the "shoe on the other foot" test, can you ever imagine a similar statement being made
in the Washington Post about the Trump impeachment investigation? Let's see. How would that
go?
"Republicans argue that Rep. Adam Schiff has 'repeatedly impugned' Trump, and they pointed
to his recent comments hinting that the report would shed light on Trump's 'unfitness for
office' to argue that the entire investigation was orchestrated as a smear campaign to
benefit Biden."
Oh yeah, sure! The chance of reading that paragraph in the Washington Post news pages would
have been absolutely zero.
Perhaps even more insidious was the decision by the editors to push the most significant
news in the report to the bottom of the Post's story. That is the lucrative relationship that
Hunter Biden established in 2017 with a Chinese oil tycoon named Ye Jianming. Biden was
apparently paid $1 million to represent Ye's assistant while he was facing bribery charges in
the United States.
Even more disturbing, "In August 2017, a subsidiary of Ye's company wired $5 million into
the bank account of a U.S. company called Hudson West III, which over the next 13 months sent
$4.79 million marked as consulting fees to Hunter Biden's firm, the report said. Over the same
period, Hunter Biden's firm wired some $1.4 million to a firm associated with his uncle and
aunt, James and Sara Biden, according to the report."
Then, in late 2017, "Hunter Biden and a financier associated with Ye also opened a line of
credit for Hudson West III that authorized credit cards for Hunter Biden, James Biden and Sara
Biden, according to the report, which says the Bidens used the credit cards to purchase more
than $100,000 worth of items, including airline tickets and purchases at hotels and
restaurants."
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The Post also glossed over payments received by Hunter Biden from Yelena Baturina, who the
story acknowledges "is the widow of former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and is a member of
Kazakhstan's political elite." What the story doesn't say is that the payments received by
Hunter Biden's companies while Joe Biden was vice president totaled close to $4 million. Does
anyone have even the slightest curiosity why Hunter's companies received these payments from a
Russian oligarch? As Donald Trump Jr. noted, if he had the same record of taking money from
foreign nationals, he "would be in jail right now."
In other words, the headline and the lede of the Washington Post story were entirely
misleading. What readers should have been told is that there is a pattern of corruption and
inexplicable enrichment in the Biden family that has continued for years and that Joe Biden has
turned his back on it.
Seems worthy of the attention of the voters who will determine the nation's leadership for
the next four years. So the most important question at the debate Tuesday night is the
following: Will Chris Wallace take the same cowardly path as the Washington Post, or will he
demand an answer from candidate Biden as to why influence peddling, conflicts of interest and
virtual money laundering are acceptable?
Based on Wallace's track record, I'm not holding my breath that we will get either the
question or the answer, but if we do, I will happily applaud him as the tough-as-nails
journalist he is supposed to be.
play_arrow chubbar , 1 hour ago
Wallace is co-opted, he's a plant. NO way does he ask about corruption or go after
Joe.
CosmoJoe , 1 hour ago
All Trump needs to do is jab Biden every time his brain locks up; toss in phrases like
"Its OK Joe, take your time". Keep doing that until Biden gets angry and its all over. (Well,
its over anyhow, but....)
Karl Malden's Nose , 1 hour ago
He knew how to push Hillary's buttons and even though she's a spaz she's lightyears
smarter than Joe. Biden is going to fume and crap his depends because Trump is about to knock
him flat on his ***. He'll be stammering to answer while Trump has already moved on to the
next gut punch. There's no gotcha's on Trump, only Biden. Trump is plugged in to everything
and sharp as a knife. Biden will be struggling to remember his instructions and I'm sure
they'll have an ear piece on him he won't hear too clearly.
Hoax Fatigue , 25 minutes ago
Nobody is expecting (((Wallace))) to be fair.
High Vigilante , 1 hour ago
Trump should bring it up, as soon as possible.
There is no guarantee Biden won't skip other debates.
Plus it would make Biden angry and negate the effect of drugs he will be loaded with.
True Historian , 1 hour ago
I have watched Wallace and he is a pretentious pile of excrement. FOX with its "Fair and
Balanced" left the station when they were bought out by Disney.
Wallace sample questions:
Trump : When did you stop being a corrupt NAZI/Russian bitch?
Biden : Are you feeling OK today? If not, how can I make you more comfortable.
CosmoJoe , 1 hour ago
Trump had some fairly hostile moderators in the 2016 debates and he held his own. He has
to be just as merciless with Biden as he was with Hillary. The news doesn't want to talk
about Hunter and his wire transfers from Russia. This is Trump's chance to throw that crap
right into the spotlight.
alexcojones , 1 hour ago
Quote : "Every day, the supposedly professional press corps cozies up to Biden with
softball questions... while accusing Trump of being a mass murderer, a racist and a Putin
puppet."
Why? That's because the so-called "Legacy" media is now the Enemy of The American
People.
Soloamber , 1 hour ago
The question is how long can Wallace hide his anti-Trimp bias ?
Mr. Biden ...what is your favorite color ?
President Trump why do you pay no tax ?
Mr. Biden Isn't China our greatest ally ?
President Trump have you heard from Stormy lately ?
Mr . Biden Please provide your wife's first name .
President Trump.... You appear over weight have you had your blood pressure checked ?
Would you agree to do it now ?
Mr . Biden what are some of your greats political achievements in your distinguished
political legacy ?
President Trump why have you caused global warming ?
DeplorableGlobalConflictWatch , 1 hour ago
Chris Wallace is a joke. Make sure he's sick and replaced by Tucker Carlson.
RealEstateArbitrage , 1 hour ago
Wally is a plant by the deep state. He is a liar and a fool.
Migao , 1 hour ago
Wallace, like his dad, pretentious snob. Yeah, Trump's a jerk, but he's a lovable jerk.
Wallace is a pretentious snob.
JUICE E SMALL IT EMPIRE , 2 hours ago
No, Ukraine and China should be front and center. It is an election year. And the Dems
have screwed us royally.
Recruiting for military is much easier if there is no jobs.
Notable quotes:
"... They want to eliminate the EPA, vacate the State Dept and many other Depts, except for a few high-placed cronies, wipe all financial, labour, consumer and environmental regulations off the books; eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum federal health insurance, medicaid, medicare and Social Security, crush public education, privatize everything they can sell, and so on. They are not in power to "govern" but to destroy government. This is all being done with a fairly unified agenda: to free "the market" from any restrictions whatsoever, so that they -- global elites -- can make as much money as possible. It's a cabal of global corporations, militarists, Christian sovereign white supremacists, fossil fuel giants and bankers ..."
I wonder if any of the commentators here have considered that the [neoliberal] cabal now
in power in the US (not elsewhere) are not in power to "take power" except for a temporary
period. They don't want to run the federal government, they want to destroy it, except for
the police state and the military.
They want to eliminate the EPA, vacate the State Dept and many other Depts, except for
a few high-placed cronies, wipe all financial, labour, consumer and environmental regulations
off the books; eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum federal health insurance, medicaid,
medicare and Social Security, crush public education, privatize everything they can sell, and
so on. They are not in power to "govern" but to destroy government. This is all being done
with a fairly unified agenda: to free "the market" from any restrictions whatsoever, so that
they -- global elites -- can make as much money as possible. It's a cabal of global
corporations, militarists, Christian sovereign white supremacists, fossil fuel giants and
bankers , and I think there's a high degree of cooperation for the agenda. The
revolution is the cabal run by Trump/Bannon who are more extreme and ideological than any
previous faction, who have no tolerance for compromise. They have an apocalyptic vision of
grinding it all down to a bare minimum police state.
Formation of the ruling classes has a close relation with the level of civilization and the
type of society. Ruling class under every condition try to reproduce itself particularly by
domination on political forces like power, wealth and the ruling class tends to be come
hereditary. In fact, descents of ruling class members have a high life chances to have the
traits necessary to be a ruling class member (Mosca 1939, pp. 60-61). In general, prior to
democracy, membership of ruling class was not only de facto but also de jure. In democracy, de
jure transfer of political possession to descendants of ruling class members impossible and not
legitimized but it is now de facto.
According to Mosca, historically, ruling class try to justify its existence and policies by
using some universal moral principles, superiority etc., lately, scientific theory and
knowledge like Social Darwinism, division of labor is also employed for the same purposes.
Mosca particularly rejects these two theses to use in political purposes. To Mosca, at a
certain level of civilization, ruling classes do not justify their power exclusively by de
facto possession of it, but try to find a moral and legal basis for it. This legal and moral
basis or principles on which the power of the political class rests is called "political
formula" by Mosca. The formula has a unique structure in all societies.
"lTjhe political formula must be based on the special beliefs and the strongest sentiments
of the current social group or at least upon the beliefs and sentiments of the particular
portion of that group which hold political preeminence"(Mosca 1939, p.71,72).
In fact ruling class like Pareto's elite strata consist of two strata: (a) the highest
stratum; and (b) second stratum. The highest stratum is the core of the ruling class but it
could not sufficiently lead and direct the society unless the second stratum helps. Second
stratum is the larger than the higher stratum in number and has all the capacities of
leadership in the country. Even autocratic systems do have it. Not only political but also any
type of social organization needs the second stratum in order to be possible (Mosca 1939,
p.404, 430).
The members of the ruling class are recruited almost entirely from the dominant, majority
group in the society. If the society has a number of minorities and if this rule is not
followed due to weaknesses of dominant group, political system can meet serious political
crisis. The same thing occurs when there are considerable differences between in the
culture, and in customs of the ruling class and subject classes (Mosca 1939, p.l05,106-7).
Weaknesses of dominant group in society and isolation of lower classes from the ruling
classes can lead to political upheaval in the country and as a result of this upheaval subject
classes' representatives can have places in the ruling class. Because when isolation takes
place, another ruling class emerges among the subject classes that often hostile to the old
ruling class (Mosca 1939, pp. 107- 8). Furthermore, due to reciprocal isolation of classes,
the character of upper classes change, they become weak in bold and aggressiveness and richer
in "soft" remissive individuals. On the same track, when there is fragmentation in the
society, new groups form and each one of them makes up of its own leaders and followers. In
fact, revolutions are another source of replacement of ruling class (Mosca 1939, p.163,
199).
When Mosca compares the political systems, he says that communist and socialist societies
would beyond any doubt managed by officials and he sees these regimes as utopia. On democracy,
he says, although gradual increase of universal suffrage, actual power has remained partly in
wealthiest and the middle classes. At the same time, for Mosca, middle class is necessary
for democracy, and when middle class declines, politic regimes in democratic countries turns to
a plutocratic dictatorship, or bureaucratic dictatorship. (Mosca 1939, p.391).
According to Mosca, ruling class has a responsive character to social change in the society
and there is a close relation between level of civilization and character of ruling classes.
According to these two complementary proposition, it can be said that ruling class is subject
of social change rather than actor of it. For example, change in division of labor from lower
to higher and change in political force from military to wealth have changed the type of state
from federal to bureaucratic state (Mosca 1939, p. 81, 83 ). There it seems that Mosca admits a
linear social change in history, as opposite to Pareto.
As seen, Mosca's theory is basically based on organized minorities' superiority over
unorganized majority. This organized minority consists of ruling class, but for Mosca it is not
necessarily mean that always interest of ruling class and subject classes are different. To him
,in contrast they coincide many times. He saw the future of socialist system by saying that it
will be governed by officials.
This feature of socialist system is well documented by Milovon Dijilas in his work: New
Classes. But Mosca failed to see that one day, majority will also be able to organize. As C. W.
Mills pointed put, democratic western societies have experienced important transformations: (1)
from the organized minority and unorganized majority to relatively unorganized minority and
organized majority, and (2) from the elite state to an organized state.( Mills 1965, pp.
161-162).
Therefore minorities and elites in today's society are less powerful than majorities. Elites
have relatively lost their privileges, and more importantly, their monopoly over society.
"... Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands (see my previous post and especially its discussion in the comments that reveal the complex dimensions of this concept). In the United States, for example, they include (but are not limited to) elected politicians, top civil service bureaucrats, and the owners and managers of Fortune 500 companies (see Who Rules America? ). ..."
"... As individual elites retire, they are replaced from the pool of elite aspirants . There are always more elite aspirants than positions for them to occupy. Intra-elite competition is the process that sorts aspirants into successful elites and aspirants whose ambition to enter the elite ranks is frustrated. Competition among the elites occurs on multiple levels. ..."
"... Excessive elite competition, on the other hand, results in increasing social and political instability. The supply of power positions in a society is relatively, or even absolutely, inelastic. For example, there are only 435 U.S. Representatives, 100 Senators, and one President. A great expansion in the numbers of elite aspirants means that increasingly large numbers of them are frustrated, and some of those, the more ambitious and ruthless ones, turn into counter-elites . In other words, masses of frustrated elite aspirants become breeding grounds for radical groups and revolutionary movements. ..."
"... Intense intra-elite competition, however, leads to the rise of rival power networks, which increasingly subvert the rules of political engagement to get ahead of the opposition. Instead of competing on their own merits, or the merits of their political platforms, candidates increasingly rely on "dirty tricks" such as character assassination (and, in historical cases, literal assassination). As a result, excessive competition results in the unraveling of prosocial, cooperative norms (this is a general phenomenon that is not limited to political life). ..."
"... Because the supply of power positions is relatively inelastic, most of the action is on the demand side. Simply put, it is the excessive expansion of elite aspirant numbers (or "elite overproduction") that drives up intra-elite competition ..."
"... There are two main "pumps" producing aspirants for elite positions in America: education and wealth. On the education side, of particular importance are the law degree (for a political career) and the MBA (to climb the corporate ladder). Over the past four decades, according to the American Bar Association, the number of lawyers tripled from 400,000 to 1.2 million. The number of MBAs conferred by business schools over the same period grew six-fold (details in Ages of Discord ). ..."
"... It's contradictory to bemoan the spread of the 'neoliberal' ethos, and simultaneously talk about elite fragmentation. The evidence Turchin marshalls for elite fragmentation is basically the bimodal distribution of lawyers' incomes, and the degree of legislative polarisation. He ignores the much wider evidence of capitalist unity and concentration in support of 'neoliberal' policies. ..."
"... while elites have colluded to capture the political process we might not expect them to all agree on what to do with the political process once it has been captured. ..."
"... There is no intra-capitalist unity. Some elites shouldn't even be called capitalists because the monopoly power they seek completely eliminates the free market. Other elites who want to control the political process do want a free market. They are in conflict. ..."
"... The concept of "ecological overshoot and collapse" applies to human ecology too. We're certainly in overshoot, so some form of collapse is coming (even if a technological miracle occurred, like cheap energy from nuclear fusion, it would only postpone the day of reckoning). ..."
"... As to "intra-elite competition", it is well underway in much of the upper middle class and the 1%, according to the statistics documented by Peter Turchin above. But it is just revving up among the super-elites – the billionaire class, with Trump being the first really visible eruption. ..."
"... When an imperial economy can longer expand easily, all of Peter's dynamics come into play with greater force, not just the elite competition, but the increasing exploitation of the common people in order to maintain elite expansion. The latter has been going on since Reagan in the form of escalating economic inequality. = popular immiseration. ..."
"... I liked the intra-elite discussions in "Ages of Discord" and it made me an even more strident believer in term limits. At least moving people out of the Congress after eight years will "free up" some space for other elite aspirants. ..."
"... Political elites are the proxies PT uses as evidence for his theory, but as he himself says, "American power holders are wealth holders". And I believe the definition I have effectively used here, "owners of capital", is consistent with his concept of elites or magnates in Secular Cycles -- a book I admire tremendously. ..."
"... Your average Congressman is not as powerful today as he was 100 years ago. Cabinet members used to do something of substance and now act more like front men, while policy making is centralized in the White House. You have more and more aspirants for fewer and fewer positions of substance. That ramps up intensity of competition even more than just over-production of JDs and MBAs. ..."
"... Agreed, the overproduction of elites developed in parallel with the change in social norms that extolled competition and downplayed cooperation. But these two dynamics may be causally related -- it's not a pure coincidence that the two trends developed in parallel. ..."
"... It seems to me that one of the most important factors in intra-elite competition, is the degree of skill of the frustrated aspirants. If there are lots of people who want to be elite but can't crack the system to get in, that may not be a problem if those frustrated aspirants aren't particularly good at organization, motivation, leadership, etc. ..."
"... If, on the other hand, the frustrated aspirants are nearly as good at this sort of thing as those actually in power, and especially if they are better at it than the incumbents (who somehow through tradition or family connections or what-have-you remain on top), then you have a much better chance of the frustrated aspirants being able to kick up trouble. ..."
"... I wonder if any of the commentators here have considered that the [neoliberal] cabal now in power in the US (not elsewhere) are not in power to "take power" except for a temporary period. They don't want to run the federal government, they want to destroy it, except for the police state and the military. ..."
Intra-elite competition is one of the most important factors explaining massive waves of
social and political instability, which periodically afflict complex, state-level societies.
This idea was proposed by Jack Goldstone
nearly 30 years ago . Goldstone tested it empirically by analyzing the structural
precursors of the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and seventeenth century's crises in
Turkey and China. Other researchers (including Sergey Nefedov, Andrey Korotayev, and myself)
extended Goldstone's theory and tested it in such different societies as Ancient Rome, Egypt,
and Mesopotamia; medieval England, France, and China; the European revolutions of 1848 and the
Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; and the Arab Spring uprisings. Closer to home, recent
research indicates that the stability of modern democratic societies is also undermined by
excessive competition among the elites (see Ages of Discord for a
structural-demographic analysis of American history). Why is intra-elite competition such an
important driver of instability?
Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who
concentrate social power in their hands (see my previous post and especially
its discussion in the comments that reveal the complex dimensions of this concept). In the
United States, for example, they include (but are not limited to) elected politicians, top
civil service bureaucrats, and the owners and managers of Fortune 500 companies (see
Who Rules America? ).
As
individual elites retire, they are replaced from the pool of elite aspirants . There are
always more elite aspirants than positions for them to occupy. Intra-elite competition
is the process that sorts aspirants into successful elites and aspirants whose ambition to
enter the elite ranks is frustrated. Competition among the elites occurs on multiple levels.
Thus, lower-ranked elites (for example, state representatives) may also be aspirants for the
next level (e.g., U.S. Congress), and so on, all the way up to POTUS.
Moderate intra-elite competition need not be harmful to an orderly and efficient functioning
of the society; in fact, it's usually beneficial because it results in better-qualified
candidates being selected. Additionally, competition can help weed out incompetent or corrupt
office-holders. However, it is important to keep in mind that the social effects of elite
competition depend critically on the norms and institutions that regulate it and channel it
into such societally productive forms.
Excessive elite competition, on the other hand, results in increasing social and political
instability. The supply of power positions in a society is relatively, or even absolutely,
inelastic. For example, there are only 435 U.S. Representatives, 100 Senators, and one
President. A great expansion in the numbers of elite aspirants means that increasingly large
numbers of them are frustrated, and some of those, the more ambitious and ruthless ones, turn
into counter-elites . In other words, masses of frustrated elite aspirants become
breeding grounds for radical groups and revolutionary movements.
Another consequence of excessive competition among elite aspirants is its effect on the
social norms regulating politically acceptable conduct. Norms are effective only as long as the
majority follows them, and violators are punished. Maintaining such norms is the job for the
elites themselves.
Intense intra-elite competition, however, leads to the rise of rival power networks, which
increasingly subvert the rules of political engagement to get ahead of the opposition. Instead
of competing on their own merits, or the merits of their political platforms, candidates
increasingly rely on "dirty tricks" such as character assassination (and, in historical cases,
literal assassination). As a result, excessive competition results in the unraveling of
prosocial, cooperative norms (this is a general phenomenon that is not limited to political
life).
Death of Gaius Gracchus (François Topino-Lebrun)
Source
Intra-elite competition, thus, has a nonlinear effect on social function: moderate levels
are good, excessive levels are bad. What are the social forces leading to excessive
competition?
Because the supply of power positions is relatively inelastic, most of the action is on the
demand side. Simply put, it is the excessive expansion of elite aspirant numbers (or "elite
overproduction") that drives up intra-elite competition. Let's again use the contemporary
America as an example to illustrate this idea (although, I emphasize, similar social processes
have operated in all complex large-scale human societies since they arose some 5,000 years
ago).
There are two main "pumps" producing aspirants for elite positions in America: education and
wealth. On the education side, of particular importance are the law degree (for a political
career) and the MBA (to climb the corporate ladder). Over the past four decades, according to
the American Bar Association, the number of lawyers tripled from 400,000 to 1.2 million. The
number of MBAs conferred by business schools over the same period grew six-fold (details in
Ages of Discord ).
On the wealth side we see a similar expansion of numbers, driven by growing inequality of
income and wealth over the last 40 years. The proverbial "1 percent" becomes "2 percent", then
"3 percent" For example, today there are five times as many households with wealth exceeding
$10 million (in 1995 dollars), compared to 1980. Some of these wealth-holders give money to
candidates, but others choose to run for political office themselves.
Elite overproduction in the US has already driven up the intensity of intra-elite
competition. A reasonable proxy for escalating political competition here is the total cost of
election for congressional races, which has grown (in inflation-adjusted dollars) from $2.4
billion in 1998 to $4.3 billion in 2016 ( Center for Responsive
Politics ). Another clear sign is the unraveling of social norms regulating political
discourse and process that has become glaringly obvious during the 2016 presidential
election.
Analysis of past societies indicates that, if intra-elite competition is allowed to
escalate, it will increasingly take more violent forms. A typical outcome of this process is a
massive outbreak of political violence, often ending in a state collapse, a revolution, or a
civil war (or all of the above).
Works for China too. One can see two main sources: The Imperial family, which with
vast-scale polygyny grew inordinately in a short time; and the examination system,
producing more and more successful candidates over time (this was a problem mainly after
Song greatly expanded the exams). The poor Imperial family deserves some pity–toward
the end of a dynasty you had all these 13th cousins 10 times removed starving to death on
the Russian frontier. (I exaggerate only slightly. By the end of the empire in 1911, there
were tens of thousands of Imperial relatives.) Naturally the competition got pretty fierce
late in the dynasties. When the empire thrived, the system could blot all these people up,
and find places for them. When the empire was going down hill, or conflicted, it meant
trouble.
I believe Peter Turchin is deeply mistaken about elite competition in modern societies.
I repeat my comment on intra-elite competition from a previous post:
In an agrarian society, elite wealth was based on land, more specifically, on extracting
a fraction of the output of the commoners working the land. When there was a demographic
crisis (land-labour ratio fell and immiseration set in), elite incomes fell, and elites
sought to maintain their lifestyles by increasing the rate of extraction. But squeezing
peasants even more when there's already a demographic crisis only exacerbates popular
immiseration. At some point the only way for elites to increase, or even just preserve,
their incomes was at the expense of other elites. Thus you have elite fragmentation and
internecine competition. And thus sociopolitical instability. Makes a lot of sense. It fits
a lot of historical cases.
However, this theory makes no sense in modern industrial societies.
(1) Wealth is no longer fixed in the long run. Modern economies reliably grow at 1-2%
rates. Much of that growth is concentrated at the top, even when measured income inequality
is relatively low. So the competitive pressure within elites is much less than in any
agrarian society governed by Malthusian-Ricardian-Brennerian-Goldstone-Turchin cycles.
(2) Besides, in a modern society, you need *more*, not less, intra-elite cooperation (a)
in order to increase economic inequality; (b) in order for the elites to capture a greater
share of the economic growth; (c) in order for capitalists reduce the bargaining power of
labour; and (d) in order for elites to capture the state.
In fact, politics in a modern society is a pretty small part of the field in which elites
can play compared with anti-competitive practices -- i.e., collusion, mergers, monopolies,
trusts, and other ways of reducing competition and concentrating power in the supply of
goods and the demand for labour. These are all acts of elite cooperation. Capitalists are,
right now, in unprecedented unity. They agree on unions, immigration, wages, trade,
regulations, etc. That unity is necessary to generate the inequality in the first
place.
Therefore, state capture and rent-seeking are now *cooperative*: conspiracies to rig the
rules and increase markups against the public interest require collusion. Owners of one
mobile telephony operator don't have to clash with the owners of another mobile telephony
operator: they can band together to lobby the government. Compared with the rise of
monopoly concentration, elites wrangling over Trump or Brexit is a sideshow.
Almost everybody who is concerned about rising inequality implicitly recognises this:
from Krugman to Stiglitz to Milanovic to even Turchin's friends at Evonomics, they have
argued that inequality stems in great measure from anti-competitive practises.
It's contradictory to bemoan the spread of the 'neoliberal' ethos, and simultaneously talk
about elite fragmentation. The evidence Turchin marshalls for elite fragmentation is
basically the bimodal distribution of lawyers' incomes, and the degree of legislative
polarisation. He ignores the much wider evidence of capitalist unity and concentration in
support of 'neoliberal' policies.
Fernando E.Mora December 31, 2016 at 4:05 am
I think you must read Fred Hirsch's "Social Limits to Growth" to understand the
difference between the always possible growth in MATERIALl wealth and the (no-)growth
of POSITIONAL wealth in which Peter's point can also be solidly (and perhaps more
accurately) based.
I would certainly agree that if economic growth were zero or negative, PT's
elite competition theory might make more sense. Which is why I think SD theory is
still quite applicable to many contemporary developing countries, such as those in
the Arab world. Also, the collapse into civil wars in many African countries in the
1980s and 1990s was preceded by a large expansion of educated people at the same
time economic growth more or less came to a halt.
Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:17 pm
This comment requires a lengthier rebuttal, but for now just two points:
1. In the blog post I specifically used the political elites to illustrate my major
point. Your response, unfortunately, is a standard economic one that measures
everything in money. As I said, I will probably have to write another post to explain
why this is wrong-headed.
2. Why do you assume that the "capitalist class" will be automatically able to
cooperate to impose their will on the rest of the society? There is, after all, the
problem of collective action.
Stephen Morris January 1, 2017 at 8:04 pm
Speaking as a former investment banker involved in the privatisation of public
assets – who has seen at first hand generations of politicians captured by
business interests – I suggest that anyone with direct experience of this
matter would realise that any collective action problem faced by the capitalist
class in negligible in comparison which the collective action problem faced by
citizens under the non-democratic system of purely "elective" goverrnment (i.e.
"government-by-politicians').
Re #1 -- No, I do not measure everything in money, so please do not write a
whole post as though that's what I argued. I said that elites now *collude* to
capture the political process, which they do. They don't need to compete for
political positions because they cooperate in capturing it. Goldman Sachs has
access to the Treasury department whether the party in power is Republican or
Democratic. (Besides, you also use some money proxies for intra-elite
competition/cooperation: the distribution of lawyers' salaries, or the Great Merger
Movement.)
Re #2 -- I do not assume it. The evidence is overwhelming that concentration is
increasing, markups are rising, monopoly power is expanding. All of that is
evidence of intra-capitalist cooperation and unity.
Peter Turchin frequently cites the work of Martin Gilens, who has repeatedly
shown that public policy largely reflects the preferences of the very richest of US
society. That's not elite competition. That's elite cooperation in capturing of the
political process. The problem with Turchin's framework is that he sees even modern
societies through the Roman framework of Optimates v. Populares.
edwardturner January 2, 2017 at 11:52 am
pseudoerasmus, I pretty much agree with what you say. However, while elites
have colluded to capture the political process we might not expect them to all
agree on what to do with the political process once it has been captured.
There is no intra-capitalist unity. Some elites shouldn't even be called
capitalists because the monopoly power they seek completely eliminates the free
market. Other elites who want to control the political process do want a free
market. They are in conflict.
The common thread here is the presence of powerful elites who cooperate.
Historically the monopoly power elites have cooperated without much resistence
but the free market elites have begun to cooperate against them and have had
success in the election of Donald Trump.
If it is people power we want then the general trend will look like
cooperation as whoever wins the conflict will be cooperating economic
elites.
I question whether there is a qualitative difference today. It's still about the
claims embodied by "wealth," and the power those claims impart to wealthholders. The
mechanisms are different, but the wealth/power relationships are pretty much the
same.
The crux, in my view, is concentration of wealth (hence power). Which has the virtue
of being nicely quantifiable, in concept if not necessarily in practice.
As concentration increases and the "elite" gets smaller, the rope-ladder hanging
down from the elite gets shorter and rattier. eg: The 90% were always excluded. Now the
2%-10% are. That change could result in a different type or intensity of social
conflict.
On the other hand that intra-"elite" competition might just be a by-product and
analytical distraction. The elite vs "the rest" is the issue, and all we need to look
at is the size of the elite. That could be nicely encapsulated in a "wealth
concentration" metric.
Problem is getting a consistent measure of that wealth concentration. Hell, the U.S.
national accounts didn't even tally wealth until 2006, and still don't even touch on
wealth distribution.
Assembling such a (validly consistent) measure across historical societies would be
tough. Atkinson, Wolff, Piketty&Co, etc. have managed over recent decades to
assemble data on richer countries going back a century or so. Perhaps one could do
similar for the Roman Empire, at least roughly? But across many societies and
millennia? Tough.
In agrarian societies, the wealth that conferred status -- land and state
offices -- were fixed in the long run. In modern societies, the supply of status
positions is not fixed and is in fact highly elastic.
Yes the quantity of wealth was fixed. But I'm talking about the
concentration of wealth and power. Compare a society in which the 1% has all
the wealth and (real) power, compared to one where it's more broadly
distributed among the 10%.
IOW, whaddaya mean by "elite," buster?
>the supply of status positions is not fixed and is in fact highly
elastic
Totally agree. Increasing wealth does not mean that the quantity of
status positions is increasing. The absolute or percentage count of "the elite"
could shrink (wealth could concentrate) even as wealth increases.
Increasing wealth might be presumed to give more entree to aspirants than a
fixed-wealth scenario, but I just have no idea whether that is actually the
case.
Dick Burkhart December 30, 2016 at 6:47 pm
You claim that "wealth is no longer fixed in the long run", yet that claim is the most
fundamental fallacy of contemporary economics. "Limits-to-growth" is not a choice but a
fact of science. Already the global economy is stagnating, mostly for this reason, and it
is headed toward contraction sometime during the coming generation, despite all the hype
about new technologies.
The concept of "ecological overshoot and collapse" applies to human ecology too. We're
certainly in overshoot, so some form of collapse is coming (even if a technological miracle
occurred, like cheap energy from nuclear fusion, it would only postpone the day of
reckoning).
As to "intra-elite competition", it is well underway in much of the upper middle class
and the 1%, according to the statistics documented by Peter Turchin above. But it is just
revving up among the super-elites – the billionaire class, with Trump being the first
really visible eruption. In fact, Donald Trump's election is the perfect example of how
this competition plays out once it hits the main stage. So don't confuse tactical
cooperation among increasingly greedy factions of the elites with the kind of yawning
political fractures that are now opening up as unscrupulous opportunists like Trump
discover that they can exploit a disgruntled part of the populace to "trump" the more
conventional elites. And as "limits-to-growth" blocks the customary relief valve of
expansion, then elite exploitation and popular revolt will increase until something there
is some kind of show stopper.
Dick Burkhart December 30, 2016 at 8:29 pm
Like most economists, you've got it totally backward: The non-material part is
completely dependent on cheap resources, especially cheap, and compatible ecosystem
conditions. Those resources only seem to disappear from the economy, because they
are so cheap. But, as in the rest of nature, all that complexity comes from the
surplus of energy and other resources.
After all, we could not live without good air. Yet it costs nothing most of the
time, so doesn't even enter into conventional economics.
Well, Dick Burkhart, as I said earlier, even if ecological exhaustion and
collapse were coming, (a) that is not related to current economic problems; and
(b) it's also not part of Peter Turchin's diagnosis.
Dick Burkhart December 31, 2016 at
9:19 pm
In fact climate change is already taking an increasing economic toll
– from extreme weather events, ocean acidification, desertification
in some areas, etc. These costs could increase rapidly if certain tipping
points are reached.
But, yes, the larger immediate effects are coming from resource
depletion, especially the peaking of conventional oil in 2006.
Unconventional oil, like tar sands and fracked oil, is much more expensive,
hence produces less wealth, less economic growth. Even much of the newer
conventional oil is less productive, as it is often harder to
find or requires tertiary methods of recovery. Similar dynamics apply to
coal, natural gas, and many other resources, except that depletion may not
be as far advanced as for oil. Economic growth has slowed dramatically even
in China, despite their phony growth numbers, and I expect increasing
political turmoil there, too, over the next decade or two.
When an imperial economy can longer expand easily, all of Peter's
dynamics come into play with greater force, not just the elite competition,
but the increasing exploitation of the common people in order to maintain
elite expansion. The latter has been going on since Reagan in the form of
escalating economic inequality. = popular immiseration.
Paolo Ghirri December 31, 2016 at 2:34 pm
"current problems have nothing to do with anything ecological or resource
constraints."
yes they have: for a pre industrial civilization what is vital is energy
surplus, energy surplus that came from agriculture production. so as an example 18
have to work to produce food and 2 can live as soldier, priest and so on.
for a
industrial civilization energy surplus came from oil. from 1973 to 2016 the energy
surplus pro-capita is falling: in a developed country the pro capita surplus now is
75% lower than in 1973.
the gap is covered with debt. so in the short run we have:
1) energy price escalation (in real term the 2016 average oil price is the double
of 2000) 2) agricultural stress: more frequent spike in food price, combined with
food shortfall in the most vulnerable country (arab spring: food price in 2011 are
229% higher than the 2000-2004 average) 3) energy sprawl: investment in energy
infrascructure will absorb rising proportion 4) economic stagnation: fail to
recover from setbacks as robustly as it has in the past 5) inflation
with the single exception of inflation (but if we check only necessary to live item
i'm not so sure) all of the above features has already become firnly established in
recent years, wich underlines the point that energy-surplus economy has reached its
tipping point
Terry Lowman December 30, 2016 at 7:20 pm
The reason the elites cooperate is to get a leg up in the competition. It recently
occurred to me that the Forbes 400 list of America's wealthiest families gives people a
rank, a competitor. Without the list, one might be complacent with a mere $3 billion, but
knowing others have tens of billions, makes you a "just ran". Better tune up your
capitalist machine so you can outshine everyone else, right?
Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:19 pm
The supply of "status" is by its nature inelastic. There is only one top person in
anything, and only ten in the Top 10.
edwardturner January 2, 2017 at 11:57 am
True but people who cannot be the king of general things will be happy to be
known as the king of their specialism.
The more specialisms that exist for people to get to the top of the more stable
a society will be.
edwardturner January 2, 2017 at 12:02 pm
you could say that the king of the military is the king of kings but in the age
of nuclear buttons it's simply boring. you can't blow anything up without getting
blown up yourself. you can use non-nuclear military power but non-nuclear power in
the age we are living in only wins you the war, it doesn't win you the war and the
peace. to win the peace today you need to be king of something other than the
military.
Rick Derris December 30, 2016 at 9:50 pm
I liked the intra-elite discussions in "Ages of Discord" and it made me an even more
strident believer in term limits. At least moving people out of the Congress after eight
years will "free up" some space for other elite aspirants. I don't care if your politics
are on the side of Strom Thurmond or Ted Kennedy – both were in the Congress for far
too long.
Of course, term limits did nothing to keep a 2nd Cuomo out of the NY Governor's mansion,
but at least it means we only have to watch one Cuomo on CNN.
Rich December 31, 2016 at 1:09 am
Pseudoerasmus, good arguments. The consolidation of money, as well as markets, is very
large right now and it does seem like that would take coordination of an ownership class or
at least similar lines of thinking among those elites. But, are we talking about a
different set of elites? There may be different populations of elites: capitalist and
political. Personally, I think the proxies Peter use describe a political elite population
rather than a capitalist elite population. The two combine for many, but there may be
distinct capitalist and political populations with each having distinct behavior patterns.
The worrisome insight for me is that it's the political elites that end up bringing us to
our knees.
"Personally, I think the proxies Peter use describe a political elite population
rather than a capitalist elite population.
Political elites are the proxies PT uses as evidence for his theory, but as he
himself says, "American power holders are wealth holders". And I believe the definition
I have effectively used here, "owners of capital", is consistent with his concept of
elites or magnates in Secular Cycles -- a book I admire tremendously.
Note also that PT uses the Great Merger Movement in US history (1895-1905) as
evidence of the beginnings of elite cooperation. Well, another wave of capital
concentration has existed now for decades, since the 1980s.
Rich Howard December 31, 2016 at 4:40 pm
Political elites may be more likely to be rich, but the rich is a larger
population with only a fraction politically aspirant. PT'S model relates political
aspirants to political breakdown. And because it works so well, in so many cases,
it suggests there is a more universal social process at work than rich/poor,
unemployment rates, too many weapons, resource depletion etc.
Jason December 31, 2016 at 7:42 am
I like the theory but isn't there more to the story. On one side you have elite aspirant
overproduction. On the other side, you have increasing concentration of power -- the iron
law of oligarchy (in the sense of this wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
)
Your average Congressman is not as powerful today as he was 100 years ago. Cabinet
members used to do something of substance and now act more like front men, while policy
making is centralized in the White House. You have more and more aspirants for fewer and fewer positions of substance. That ramps
up intensity of competition even more than just over-production of JDs and MBAs.
Plus the barriers to entry for competition has lowered too. Now celebrities fight with
JDs for political positions. Rap stars compete with MBAs for business tycoon success.
At all levels of society, you have greater and greater competition for fewer and fewer
rewards. Hyper-competition all around. Now perhaps the competition at the gateway to the
elite is particularly important because elites are important, and failure to get in makes
them the aspirants powerful disgruntled people, but I think the mechanism is more than just
over-production of JDs and MBAs.
I think it might have started as a well intentioned project to increase the quality of
our elites by introducing competition and lowering barriers to entry. And at the the same
time, increasing the rewards to winners (incentivizing max effort). Result though is brutal
intra-elite fighting. Particularly in times of overall lowered growth.
Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:24 pm
Agreed, the overproduction of elites developed in parallel with the change in social
norms that extolled competition and downplayed cooperation. But these two dynamics may
be causally related -- it's not a pure coincidence that the two trends developed in
parallel.
One point I haven't seen discussed much is that the number of "powerful" positions is
fixed, by law, but not unchangeable. For example, in the 19th century it was arguably more
important to be a city councilman or state legislator than a Congressmen, because more
actual decisions were being made at the city and state level and the percentage of the
economy under the control of the federal government was smaller. If there is less federal
largesse to distribute, then there is less power in helping to decide how it is
distributed. It is somewhat analogous to why being a U.S. Senator now is more important
than being a U.N. functionary; the United Nations may represent a larger domain, but it has
a lot less control over that domain than a national government.
Thus, one would expect that the more centralized control of a region is, the more
intra-elite competition there will be, because there are fewer positions which really
matter. A modern example of this might be that the transfer of power from national to
European Union administration would result in more intra-elite competition. On the other
hand, devolving power back down to a lower level would result in more positions that have
some power, and less competition for each.
Jason January 1, 2017 at 12:49 am
That's exactly what I was getting at too, Ross. The number of good positions
available depends on the power gradient of the society. How much power is centralized
vs distributed. The whole Iron Law of Oligarchy developed in recognition that over
time, power tends to centralize, so it's not fixed by law and unchangeable for all
time. It's not so much inequality between ordinary people and the elite, but among
elites.
Plus it ossifies, in that these enhanced elite positions are then passed out
patrilineally, which results in fewer actual positions being open to aspirants.
The net result is heightened competition for entry and promotion within the elite,
with more and more of the victories happening by methods outside the norm, e.g. dirty
tricks, patronage, fake news etc.
This probably happens in all societies, but growth (creating more opportunities),
wars (resetting the table), inefficiency (placating the failed aspirants with
consolation prizes) keep internal collapse at bay. It's when you have a dynamic of High
Inequality, Low Growth, High Efficiency / Lean, No Wars that Elite Competition starts
getting out of hand.
(I say this despite hating wars, but you can't argue with their effect on resetting
the table. Hate bribes/corruption too, but things like congressional pork barrels kept
congressman feeling important and in-line. Efficiency is also a self evident good, but
that means no consolation prizes for failure. Growth may eventually run into limits due
to carrying capacity of ecosystem .).
To me, it resembles a game of musical chairs with too few chairs, and when the music
is playing much too fast. As Chuck Prince famously said in the Global Financial Crisis:
"As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." Whether or not
dancing is destructive, elites have to keep dancing to keep their chair.
I also hate wars, but I am reminded of Mancur Olson's theory that nations
recovering from a major disaster or a major military defeat usually have
above-average growth for a few decades. The idea is that when, as with the South in
the U.S. after the Civil War or with Germany and Japan after WWII, the elite in
society have suffered a setback so severe that their hold on society is disrupted,
there will be a period during which they are less able to set government policy in
their favor rather than the collective welfare.
SDT would have a somewhat different explanation of this. I agree with you that
rapid growth would be another way to reduce the intra-elite competition; it seems
the most likely explanation for the "missing" peak in non-governmental violence in
the U.S. in the 1820's that Peter Turchin pointed out earlier.
Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:32 pm
Historically, rapid growth coupled with equitable redistribution of its
gains is typically associated with peaceful and internally stable periods. But
you need both (growth and equity).
This idea is kind of half-formed, but I'll put it out there. It seems to me that one of
the most important factors in intra-elite competition, is the degree of skill of the
frustrated aspirants. If there are lots of people who want to be elite but can't crack the
system to get in, that may not be a problem if those frustrated aspirants aren't
particularly good at organization, motivation, leadership, etc.
If, on the other hand, the frustrated aspirants are nearly as good at this sort of thing
as those actually in power, and especially if they are better at it than the incumbents
(who somehow through tradition or family connections or what-have-you remain on top), then
you have a much better chance of the frustrated aspirants being able to kick up
trouble.
Of course, part of being good at leadership is getting the opportunity to practice, and
a post-secondary education almost always includes some practice at a more professional set
of social skills. But if the people getting spots in power remain better at political
organization than the people who don't, it is less likely to result in disruption, I think.
It seems that trouble would come when the ruling elite is either not especially good at
leading (e.g. they inherited their position or bought their way in with somebody else's
money), or they were good at leading in a previous time, and changes in society or
technology have changed what skills are necessary for leadership.
In all these cases, I think "good at leadership" would be a relative term, which is to
say the current elite relative to the frustrated aspirants. How you could measure such
skill, of course, is the key question about which I have as of yet nothing to say (I did
say the idea was half-formed).
steven t johnson January 1, 2017 at 8:10 am
Although intra-elite competition and inter-elite competition are conceptually distinct, is
that true in practice? Is Carlos Slim an intraelite competitor with Jeff Bezos, in the form
of rivalry between the New York Times and the Washington Post? If this is interelite
competition, how does structural-demographic theory address the issues of how external
factors impinge on the cycle? (I'm a little shaky on how interior and exterior are defined
in the first place. As for example, was there a cycle for Burgundy?)
Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:34 pm
Unlike "intra-elite competition", "inter-elite competition" is not a concept in SDT
(and like you I would be hard put to think what it could refer to).
edwardturner January 1, 2017 at 12:34 pm
The supply of power positions in a society is relatively, or even absolutely, inelastic. For example, there are only
435 U.S. Representatives, 100 Senators, and one President.
This is not quite true. The supply of power positions can be elastic to a point.
How about the growth in number of CEOs and NGOs and the heads of INGOs over the last 50
years? So-called non-state actors have become powerful as they influence the law-making
processes in a variety of ways.
These big chiefs are positions of power and influence. In many cases, they call the
shots and Presidents and Prime Ministers are only the PR guys.
The US President is not the most powerful person in the world. He doesn't have the
highest security clearance in the United States. He is not allowed to know everything.
The idea the US President is the most powerful man is a claim based on a theory of how
the US political system works in idealised sense, and on simple US nationalism.
The fact that the supply of power positions is elastic – that there has been a
flouresence of alternative power structures to the state hierarchy – suggests that
wealth can to a degree put off or delay elite competition.
It is only when the rug is pulled from under the alternative prestigious hierarchies and
the state tries to dominate all on its own – that is when problems will begin. Keep
the funding going, maintain non-state avenues for prestige and create even more, the
fluoresence will continue.
edwardturner January 1, 2017 at 12:36 pm
interested readers might like to read my report for Cliodynamics: Why Has the Number
of International Non-Governmental Organizations Exploded since 1960?
A point made in arthashastra, that fight among princes is more dangerous than fight
among commoners. However, I wud like to ask what predictions are u unable to do. There is
no real knowledge which doesnt admit what its limitations are, or admits inability to
explain something. Even in physics, where humans have gained incredible knowledge, there is
much to know. Also, on issue of religion, could one argue that but for christianity &
islam world wud have devekped faster as information in math/science wud have gathered pace,
exchanged between different lands easily.Thank you.
Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:43 pm
Interesting that Arthashastra foresees a major message of the SDT.
On the role of religion there are a lot of recent books from the cultural evolutionary
perspective, including David Wilson, Ara Norenzayan, and Dominic Johnson (I might also
mention my own Ultrasociety).
Dick Burkhart January 1, 2017 at 11:16 pm
Even direct democracy is not a cure-all. Here in Washington State, our initiative
and referendum process has been corrupted at times by big money interests: First put
together a sophisticated campaign around some catch phrases that will have popular
support on a topic where the opposition, even if widespread, is likely to be diffuse.
Then sneak in some coded language that privileges a wealthy special interest. Then use
paid signature gatherers. Then assemble a massive advertising campaign, one that will
outspend the likely opposition, maybe even by 10 to 1.
Certain people get very good at this and quickly learn to sell their services to the
highest bidder. The current master of such campaign here is a guy named Tim Eyman, and
he has been quite successful. But some companies, like Costco, have done the same thing
all by themselves.
Moral: You need to get "money out of politics" in all ways, and it's a never ending
battle until you've eliminated concentrated wealth and power itself.
Peter Turchin January 2, 2017 at 10:01 pm
Stephen Morris: you will find my response in an old post:
Prof Turchin, is there any data on the Supply of Elite Positions in Historic
Societies?
It doesn't feel instinctively right that it's inelastic, but perhaps there's really the
case. It feels slightly more likely to be right to say that it's capped somehow (inelastic
as to upside, more elastic as to downside).
But it seems like the sort of thing you should be able to answer with a History
Database. Has there been any attempts to measure this?
Peter Turchin January 2, 2017 at 10:06 pm
In fact, your are in luck, because we provide such statistics for a number of
historical societies in Secular Cycles http://peterturchin.com/secular-cycles/
Note, I didn't say it was inelastic. In most cases, it's relatively inelastic, so
that the growth in the number of aspirants greatly overmatches the growth in the supply
of the positions. Only in few instances the supply is absolutely inelastic (only one
POTUS).
Deficiencies in the concept of elite competition
Let's start with the definition of elite: "small proportion of the population that
concentrates power in their hands"
His theory lacks an aspect that must be fundamental before even proceeding in a discussion
on the "dynamics" of the elites and is that it is not able to explain in a satisfactory way
the origin of the so-called "elites". According to its definition it seems that the elites
are rather the manifestation of a particular phenomenon that is "concentration of power"; A
phenomenon that manifests itself socially in the form of the so-called "elite", which
hereafter I call the ruling class (I think it is a terminology in which we can all
agree).
But if we assume that the dominant classes are only a manifestation of the phenomenon of
the concentration of power, our attention must first be fixed in that aspect so we try to
break it down into its fundamental parts
. Apparently the concept of power gives to understand the concept of dominion (some will
have other words in mind but as surely they closely resemble the concept of domain I think
that it suffices to refer us to this one) and we do not refer to any type of domain but to
a domain Of social nature, a social domain. We will now say that this social domain
manifests itself in the form of economic and political dominion, I think we will agree on
this point.
Now let us collect the fruits of these arguments. We have a different and more precise
definition, which in no way invalidates the original, and we say: The ruling class is that
small proportion of the population that concentrates economic and political dominion in
their hands. I believe that we will agree that economic dominance is nothing but greater
possession of capital and that political dominance is but a major influence on a state
structure (the word "state" is used in a modern sense).
Now we have: the ruling class is that small proportion of the population that concentrates
the greatest possession of capital and the greatest influence within a state structure in
their hands. The last part of " in your hands" is understood by what we can eliminate it
and we have the following:
The ruling class is that small proportion of the population that concentrates the greatest
possession of capital and the greatest influence on a state structure.
Now the possession of capital depends on its production or of the association with someone
who produces capital. And it is revealed to us that the ruling class, apart from having
influence in a state structure, needs to produce capital or be associated with someone who
produces capital directly or indirectly.
Thanks to this we see clearly that competition between elites is a competition for economic
benefits and influence. Obviously the economic aspect is more significant than the aspect
of influence. It follows that a fall in economic profits, ie a fall in capital production
(a crisis), would directly or indirectly exacerbate the competition for greater economic
benefits, that is, increase the number of aspirants to elitist . The competition of elites
is not the cause of the crisis is one of the consequences of the crisis.
I must make a small correction in my analysis. By capital I wanted to let you
understand profit, so the use of that term in this argument is actually inappropriate
because I wanted to use the word capital in a Marxist sense.
Federico January 8, 2017 at 5:23 pm
Hello Dr Turchin, I was wondering if you are familiar with Richard Lachmann's "elite
conflict theory". It is a verbal theory, but one that he has successfully used to explain
fiscal crises, hegemonic cycles, and the rise of modern capitalist economies. What do you
think about it?
Best,
Federico
Shaun Bartone February 27, 2017 at 3:47 pm
I wonder if any of the commentators here have considered that the [neoliberal] cabal now in power in
the US (not elsewhere) are not in power to "take power" except for a temporary period. They
don't want to run the federal government, they want to destroy it, except for the police
state and the military.
They want to eliminate the EPA, vacate the State Dept and many
other Depts, except for a few high-placed cronies, wipe all financial, labour, consumer and
environmental regulations off the books; eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum federal
health insurance, medicaid, medicare and Social Security, crush public education, privatize
everything they can sell, and so on. They are not in power to "govern" but to destroy
government. This is all being done with a fairly unified agenda: to free "the market" from
any restrictions whatsoever, so that they -- global elites -- can make as much money as
possible. It's a cabal of global corporations, militarists, Christian sovereign white
supremacists, fossil fuel giants and bankers, and I think there's a high degree of
cooperation for the agenda. The revolution is the cabal run by Trump/Bannon who are more
extreme and ideological than any previous faction, who have no tolerance for compromise.
They have an apocalyptic vision of grinding it all down to a bare minimum police state.
Below are a number of oil (C + C ) production charts for Non-OPEC countries created from
data provided by the EIA's
International Energy Statistics and updated to May 2020. Information from other sources
such as the OPEC and country specific sites is used to provide a short term outlook for future
output and direction.
Non-OPEC production dropped slowly from a high of 52,638 kb/d in December 2019 to 52,396
kb/d in March 2020. In April that changed when we saw the first big drop in output from the
Non-OPEC countries associated with Covid and with the drop in world oil prices. May output
collapsed to 45,340 kb/d, which is close to the production level in September 2013.
The projection to September (red square) was made using the September STEO report. It
projects that after the low of 45,350 kb/d in May, production will increase by close to 3,500
kb/d to just under 49,000 kb/d in September.
Above are listed the worldʼs 15th largest Non-OPEC producers. They produced 83.6% of
the Non-OPEC output in May. On a YoY basis, Non-OPEC production was down by 5,011 kb/d. On a
MoM basis, production was down by 5,282 kb/d. World oil production was down by 11,418 kb/d, MoM
and 10,318 kb/d YoY.
May saw a drop in output to 2,765 kb/d but rebounded in June to 3,013 kb/d according to this
source . Maintenance and extensive turnarounds planned between September and November could
shave around 200,000 b/d from Brazil's output.
The EIA shows Canadian production was down in May by 658 kb/d by 248 kb/d to 3,694 kb/d. The
CER data is higher because it includes NGPLs in their estimates and is close to 6% of total
output.
Canadian oil exports by rail to the US fell from a high of 411,991 b/d in February to a new
low of 48,820 kb/d in June.
April 156,242 kb/d May 58,048 kb/d June 48,820 kb/d
At the same time, according to this
source , "The Trans Mountain pipeline carried a record-breaking amount of oil to British
Columbia from Alberta in August, despite persistent price and demand woes gripping the energy
sector as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on".
"We have been full every day during the COVID period. Demand for the pipeline has not
softened at all," he told The Globe and Mail in an interview Tuesday.
Chinaʼs production peaked in June-15 at 4,408 kb/d and has been in a steady decline up
to September 2018 where it reached an output low of 3,694 kb/d. According to this
source, Chinaʼs August production increased by 2.6% over last August. Output increased
by 59 kb/d to 3,899 kb/d (Red square). However August's output is still slightly lower than the
June 2019 output of 3,918 kb/d even though Chinese oil companies have increased their spending
to reduce the decline rate.
Kazakhstan production hit a new output high in February, 1,976 kb/d. For May, production
dropped by 203 kb/d to 1,738 kb/d. OPEC expects their output to drop by an average 15 kb/d this
year.
Mexicoʼs production decreased in May by 85 kb/d to 1,686 kb/d, according to the EIA.
Data from Pemex shows that production dropped to 1,647 kb/d in July (red square). Under the
OPEC + Declaration of Cooperation, Mexico committed to reduce output by 100 kb/d in May. Their
target was almost met.
The EIA reported that Norway's May production was 1,775 kb/d, a decrease of 14 kb/d from
April.
According to the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, "average daily liquids production in July
was: 1 739 000 barrels of oil, 296 000 barrels of NGL and 27 000 barrels of condensate. (Red
lines)
On 29 April 2020, the Government decided to implement a cut in Norwegian oil production. The
production figures for oil in July include this cut of 134 000 barrels per day in the second
half of 2020."
In other words, if Norway hadn't made their commitment to reduce production, May's oil
output would have been (1,739 + 134) 1,873 kb/d. This output level would have been very close
to some earlier highs.
According to the Russian Ministry of energy, Russian production increased by 479 kb/d in
August to 9,860 kb/d. July was revised up by 11 kb/d from 9,371 kb/d to 9,382 kb/d.
UKʼs production decreased by 63 kb/d in May to 1,004 kb/d. According to OPEC, crude
production is expected to increase to 1,010 kb/d in June (Red square).
June's production rebounded from May's low by adding 420 kb/d according to the the EIA's
August report. May's output was revised up by 15 kb/d in the EIA's September report.
US and Permian oil rigs decreased by 1 to 179 and 121 respectively in the week of September
18. As a percentage, Permian oil rigs represented 67.5% of the total for the week of Aug
21.
According to the September DPR, the 121 rigs operating in the Permian in September will be
sufficient to raise production in September by 42 kb/d to 4,150 kb/d.
While WTI has remained close to $40/bbbl, there has been essentially no change in drilling
activity since the week of July 17 in the US. There were 180 oil rigs in operation that week vs
179 for the week of September 18.
These five countries complete the list of Non-OPEC countries with annual production between
500 kb/d and 1,000 kb/d. All five are in overall decline. Their combined May production was
3,263 kb/d down 232 kb/d from April's output of 3,495 kb/d. Azerbaijan, Indonesia and India
appear to be in a slow steady decline phase. Columbia's production began to drop in March as
Brent prices began to drop.
According to Colombia's minister of energy, Maria Fernanda Suarez, ANH president Armando
Zamora said if Brent oil prices hit around $35 a
barrel national oil output could average around 850,000 barrels a day, down from a previous
forecast of 900,000 barrels.
Guyana is a new oil producing country that started production in December 2019. According to
this s ource
, production was supposed to reach 120 kb/d by June. However gas re-injection issues have
delayed its planned production rise. Output in June is expected to be close to 80 kb/d (red
square). This new source for oil will offset some of the decline in other countries, which
currently is close to 400 kb/d/yr.
NON OPEC W/O US PRODUCTION
This chart shows that oil production in Non-OPEC countries has only increased by 541 kb/d
from December 2014 t0 December 2019. It is an indication that these countries as a whole are
approaching an output plateau. April is the first month in which the large production drop
associated with CV-19 and the plunge in oil prices shows up in this chart. In May 0utput from
these countries dropped by 3,293 kb/d to 35,348 kb/d.
Using information from the September STEO, output from the Non OPEC countries W/O the US, is
expected to rebound to 37,054 kb/d in September (red square). Looking further out to October
2021, output is predicted to reach 39,692 kb/d. (Blue graph). Note that the October 2021 high
is currently expected to be 143 kb/d lower than the December 2019 peak. The 143 kb/d difference
is probably well within the margin of error in making these projections.
World Oil
Production
World oil production in May decreased by 11,417 kb/d to 71,374 kb/d. This chart also
projects world production out to October 2020. It uses the September STEO along with the
International Energy Statistics to make the projection. It projects that world production will
recover by close to 5,000 kb/d in October 20202 to 76,019 kb/d.
This chart presents world oil production without the US. Note that the November 2016 peak is
two years prior to all the worldʼs peak shown in the previous chart. May production was
61,372 kb/d, a decrease of 9,429 kb/d from April.
Using the STEO and the EIA international Energy Statistics, output for September is
projected to be 63,768 kb/d, an increase of 2,396 kb/d higher than May.
If it is about ' surplus populations ' – and I agree that is a strong
motivation for the elites – why are they super-charging import of the additional surplus
population from the Third World?
The corona panic is not helping, unless this is only Phase 1. Tanking the economy will most
likely result in a much weaker control of the population – the draconian new rules won't
make much difference because they can never be draconian enough. Tens of millions without work
is a prescription for chaos – it has always been.
One explanation that I find possible is ' inertia ' – the rulers are stuck, the
hired managerial class is both very stupid and very self-serving. What we see is helpless
inertia and a slow slide, but no plan or even coherent thought.
The members of the ruling class seem lost and helpless (' tear it down so we can rebuilt
it better ' is a weird refrain used by Macron, Trudeau and now Biden). The real story could
be that there is nobody behind the curtain, no ideas, and inertia rules.
@The
Alarmist hat we need to get the global population back below one billion, because every
action they have taken lately seems designed to lead to means to achieve that end.
To keep with the Saker, "the elites have gone mad", at government level, the public puppets
mostly do not know what they are doing. A level deeper, the few bet on chaos, improvise, but at
the least have some sort of quality goal: induce chaos to mask the causes of the necessary
culling of the surplus populations. At the level of the middle class, and populus, the former
are suicidal, the latter as always in the history of mankind, do not even grasp the situation
they are in.
@Beckow
much difference because they can never be draconian enough."
Corona panic leads to mandatory vaccinations.
Mandatory vaccinations leads to implantation of biochip.
Biochip sends and receives signals to/from 5G network.
Signals between biochips and AI through 5G network track everyone who has the chip, does not
allow troublemakers to buy/sell thereby starving them, and in extreme cases, signals from 5G
network to biochips kills/disables troublemakers.
The rules do not need to be draconian. In fact, no overt 'rules' are needed at all because
people will learn through pain what they are allowed to do.
The US is ruthlessly waging an intense Hybrid War on Russian energy interests in Europe by
targeting the Eurasian Great Power's relevant projects in Germany, Belarus, and Bulgaria,
banking on the fact that even the partial success of this strategy would greatly advance the
scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's transatlantic
allies.
The Newest Front In The New Cold War
The New
Cold War is heating up in Europe after the US intensified its Hybrid
War on Russian interests there over the past two months. This proxy conflict is being
simultaneously waged in Germany, Belarus, and Bulgaria, all three of which are key transit
states for Russian energy exports to the continent, which enable it to maintain at least some
influence there even during the worst of times. The US, however, wants to greatly advance the
scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's transatlantic
allies which would allow America to reassert its unipolar hegemony there even if this campaign
is only partially successful. This article aims to explore the broad contours of the US'
contemporary Hybrid War strategy on Russian energy in Europe, pointing out how recent events in
those three previously mentioned transit states are all part of this larger
plan.
Germany
From north to south, the first and largest of these targets is Germany, which is nowadays
treating Russian anti-corruption blogger Navalny. The author accurately predicted
in late August that "intense pressure might be put upon the authorities by domestic politicians
and their American patrons to politicize the final leg of Nord Stream II's construction by
potentially delaying it as 'punishment to Putin'", which is exactly what's happening after
Berlin signaled that it might rethink its commitment to this energy project. America isn't all
to blame, however, since Germany ultimately takes responsibility for its provocative statements
to this effect. Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, published a
thought-provoking piece titled " Russian-German Relations: Back To The Future " about
how bilateral relations will drastically change in the aftermath of this incident. It's concise
and well worth the read for those who are interested in this topic.
Belarus
The next Hybrid War target is Belarus , which the
author has been tracking for half a decade already. After failing to convince Lukashenko to
break off ties with Russia after this summer's Wagner incident, a Color Revolution was then
hatched to overthrow him so that his replacements can turn the country into another Ukraine
insofar as it relates to holding Russian energy exports to Europe hostage. The end goal is to
increase the costs of Russian resources so that the US' own become more competitive by
comparison. Ultimately, it's planned that Russian pipelines will be phased out in the
worst-case scenario, though this would happen gradually since Europe can't immediately replace
such imports with American and other ones. "Losing" Belarus, whether on its own or together
with Nord Stream II, would deal a heavy blow to Russia's geopolitical interests. Countries like
Germany wouldn't have a need to maintain cordial relations with it, thus facilitating a
possible "decoupling".
That's where Bulgaria could become the proverbial "icing on the cake". Turkish Stream is
expected to transit through this Balkan country en route to Europe, but the latest
anti-government protests there threaten to topple the government, leading to worries that
its replacement might either politicize or suspend this project. Azerbaijan's TANAP and the
Eastern Mediterranean's GRISCY pipelines
might help Southeastern Europe compensate for the loss of Russian resources, though the latter
has yet to be constructed and is only in the planning stages right now. Nevertheless,
eliminating Turkish Stream from the energy equation (or at the very least hamstringing the
project prior to replacing/scrapping it) would deal a death blow to Russia's already very
limited Balkan influence. Russia would then be practically pushed out of the region, becoming
nothing more than a distant cultural-historical memory with close to no remaining political
influence to speak of.
Economic Warfare
The overarching goal connecting these three Hybrid War fronts isn't just to weaken Russia's
energy interests, but to replace its current role with American and other industry competitors.
The US-backed and Polish-led " Three Seas Initiative
" is vying to become a serious player in the strategic Central & Eastern European space,
and it can achieve a lot of its ambitions through the construction of new LNG and oil terminals
for facilitating America's plans. In addition, artificially increasing the costs of Russian
energy imports through political means related to these Hybrid Wars could also reduce Russia's
revenue from these sources, which presently account for 40%
of its budget . Considering that Russia's in the midst of a systemic economic transition
away from its disproportionate budgetary dependence on energy, this could hit Moscow where it
hurts at a sensitive time.
The Ball's In Berlin's Court
The linchpin of Russia's defensive strategy is Germany, without whose support all of
Moscow's energy plans stand zero chance of succeeding. If Germany submits to the US on one,
some, or all three of these Hybrid War fronts in contravention of its natural economic
interests, then it'll be much easier for America to provoke a comprehensive "decoupling"
between Russia and Europe. It's only energy geopolitics that allows for both sides to maintain
some sense of cooperation despite the US-encouraged sanctions regime against Russia after its
reunification with Crimea and thus provides an opportunity for improving their relations
sometime in the future. Sabotaging Russia's energy interests there would thus doom any
realistic prospects for a rapprochement between them, but the ball's in Berlin's court since it
has the chance to say no to the US and ensure that the German-Russian Strategic Partnership
upholds Europe's strategic autonomy across the present century.
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Concluding Thoughts
For as much as cautiously optimistic as many in the Alt-Media Community might
be that the US' Hybrid War on Russian energy in Europe will fail, the facts paint a much more
sobering picture which suggests that at least one of these plots will succeed. Should that
happen, then the era of energy geopolitics laying the foundation for Russian-European relations
will soon draw to a close, thereby facilitating the US' hoped-for "decoupling" between them,
causing budgetary difficulties for Moscow at the moment when it can least afford to experience
such, and pushing the Eurasian Great Power's strategic attention even further towards Asia. The
last-mentioned consequence will put more pressure on Russia to perfect its "balancing"
act between China and India , which could potentially be a double-edged sword that makes it
more relevant in Asian geopolitical affairs but also means that one wrong move might seriously
complicate its
21st-century grand strategy .
If you look at the three countries mentioned Belarus will likely be absorbed by Russia
sooner rather than later. The push for this is underway looking at meetings taking place. For
Bulgaria the US is far away and has no power to stop the Turks. It is the Turks the
Bulgarians fear, with a lot of reasons, their surest way of keeping out of the Turks clutches
is to look to Russia for support. Unfortunately the USA has an appalling track record of
betraying countries, ask Libya.
The Germans have no choice but take the Russian gas, economically, socially and for
strategic reasons. The truly big fear for the US is a German/Russian bloc. German and Russian
technology with unrivaled resources. That is the future super power if they are pushed
together, something that is very likely if we see a major economic contraction in the next
few years.
Mustahattu , 4 hours ago
The US fear of an Eurasian alliance. The US fear Europe will create a Silicon Valley of
the future. The US fear the Euro will replace the dollar as a reserve currency. The US fear
Russia will become a superpower. The US fear China. There's a lot to fear yankee dear...cos
it's all gonna happen.
Hope Copy , 1 hour ago
RUSSIA is content with 45 and 25nm as it can be hardened.. 14 and especially 7nm is so
that the **** will wear out..
Ace006 , 2 hours ago
Instead of fretting about how this or that country or bloc will become a/an _________
superpower the US could focus on regaining its former pre-eminence.
It's a crazy thought, I know, but
moving a massive amount of industrial capacity to China and fueling the rise of a
communist country just might have been a bad idea and
thrashing about in the international arena like a rutting rhinoceros at huge expense
makes us look foolish and, in the case of Syria, petty and vindictive.
Repairing the damage from the former and stopping the hemorrhage of money and reputation
respectively would be a far better objective than playing Frankenstein in Libya, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Iran, Poland, N. Korea, and Venezuela, inter alia .
Mexico is a failed state right on our border that contributes mightily to our immigration,
cultural, and political problems. But, no, the puffed up, prancing morons who make US policy
can summon the imagination to figure out how to help our very own neighbors deal with their
hideous problems. No. Let's engage in regime change and "nation building" in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The words of the great Marcus Aurelius are on point: "Within ten days thou wilt seem a god
to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and
the worship of reason."
Herodotus , 1 hour ago
Bulgaria must return to the protection of the Ottoman Empire.
yerfej , 4 hours ago
Easy solution, end NATO. Just have all US forces told to leave the EU and let them
determine their own destiny. Then do the same with US forces in the ME, Japan, Korea, etc.
EVERYONE would be better off, including US taxpayers which get nothing out of the useless
overseas deployment of resources which could be better spent at home.
yojimbo , 3 hours ago
5% budget deficit, 5% military spending. Leave the world, drop 4.5% of the spending and
either save money, or build infrastructure. It's so simple, I am disappointed Trump doesn't
at least state it. I get he is limited by the system, and can't be a Cincinnatus, even if he
wanted to, but he has his First Amendment.. though I grant him a personal fear of being
Kennedied!
Bac Si , 2 hours ago
Howdy Yerfej. It sounds like you are all for Isolationism.
But Isolationism means different things to different people. Pre WW2, Isolationism in the
US meant selling our products to hostile countries. In the case of Japan, oil to help them
kill Chinese people. In the case of Germany and Italy, food and vehicles to help them conquer
all of Europe.
Considering the ridiculous education that the US gives its children, it's no wonder that
most Americans don't know much about history (I say that in general terms, not to you
specifically). Henry Ford senior not only received the 'Grand Cross of the German Eagle' from
Adolf Hitler in 1938, he also received a 'Congressional Medal' from the US Congress shortly
after WW2 – and for the same reason. Selling trucks to help the war effort.
Even after Pearl Harbor, there were politically powerful Isolationists that did not want
the US to get involved in WW2. Why? Because a lot of money was at stake. It still is. These
same people will continue to argue for Isolationism even after we are attacked.
Two months AFTER Pearl Harbor, FDR made a speech that included this:
"Those Americans who believed that we could live under the illusion of isolationism wanted
the American eagle to imitate the tactics of the ostrich. Now, many of those same people,
afraid that we may be sticking our necks out, want our national bird to be turned into a
turtle. But we prefer to retain the eagle as it is – flying high and striking hard. I
know that I speak for the mass of the American people when I say that we reject the turtle
policy and will continue increasingly the policy of carrying the war to the enemy in distant
lands and distant waters – as far away as possible from our own home grounds." –
FDR
This radical change in our foreign policy has never been explained or even referred to in
US history books. Powerful economic forces will always love the idea of "Open Trade
Isolationism". But if Isolationism is ever suddenly defined by not doing business with any
hostile government – those powerful forces will go ballistic. They will strongly lobby
against 'Economic Warfare'. In other words, they will always want to make lots of money by
selling their products to hostile governments, no matter how many people die.
Want a great example?
Right after Loral Corporation CEO Bernard L. Schwartz donated a million dollars to the
DNC, President Clinton authorized the release of ballistic missile technology to China so
Loral could get their satellites into space fast and at low cost. Those same missiles, and
their nuclear warheads, are now pointed at the US.
The argument has always been that if we trade with hostile governments, they will grow to
like us. Does anyone out there believe that if the UK and France gave pre WW2 Germany an
extra $20 billion in trade, Germany wouldn't have started WW2? Anyone with a brain would tell
you that Germany would have put those resources into their military (like China has been
doing) and WW2 would have started earlier.
Yerfej, if we brought back the Cold War organization called the Coordinating Committee for
Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), I would be all for Isolationism. President Clinton got
rid of it in his first year, and Western weapons technology has been threatening us ever
since.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago
You have to love the dynamic duo of "lie, cheat and steal" Pompeo and his "mob boss"
Trump. There is absolutely no subtlety in their obvious shakedown tactics.
PrivetHedge , 4 hours ago
The mob had far more honor, and better morals.
PrivetHedge , 4 hours ago
Washington's transatlantic allies...
Hahahah, occupied vassals.
Washington has cost Germany a massive slice of GDP.
you_do , 4 hours ago
Yankee has plenty of problems at home.
Rest of the world can decide their own energy policy.
They do not suffer from the 'Russia' propaganda.
geno-econ , 5 hours ago
Let Russia, the lowest cost energy producer win energy competition in Europe as China, the
lowest cost manufacturing producer is winning in America. Only difference is retailers,
shippers, assembly part importers such as auto, electronics and appliance makers are making a
profit and consumer gets lower prices. We should let others decide for themselves and stop
meddling----only result will be a bloody nose
you_do , 4 hours ago
Yankee has plenty of problems at home.
Rest of the world can decide their own energy policy.
They do not suffer from the 'Russia' propaganda.
geno-econ , 5 hours ago
Let Russia, the lowest cost energy producer win energy competition in Europe as China, the
lowest cost manufacturing producer is winning in America. Only difference is retailers,
shippers, assembly part importers such as auto, electronics and appliance makers are making a
profit and consumer gets lower prices. We should let others decide for themselves and stop
meddling----only result will be a bloody nose
free-energy , 4 hours ago
Notice how everything the US does around the world is a WAR. War on Energy, War on Drugs,
War on Birth Control, War War War... America will fall after 2020 if nothing changes for the
better. Every year the world grows more and more tired of the US bs and moves further away
from it. Its so bad that they choose to deal with a communist country over us.
You reap what you've sowed.
Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago
The Anglo American parasite pirate gangsters keep barking on about Russia bad, China bad,
but I look around and I see nothing but these trouble makers waging war on anything they
cannot control. The US and UK are devil nations. They will deserve all the rot they have
coming their way.
Unknown User , 5 hours ago
Trump wants a trade balance with all major economies like Germany and China. If they don't
buy from us, he will have to raise tariffs. In case of Germany, they need nothing from us so
he wants them to buy US LNG. Merkel's position is that "there is a cheap Russian gas", while
Trump is telling her "no there isn't one".
Pumpinfe , 4 hours ago
So trump loves to deep throat Russia but give Germany a hard time to Nordstream 2? Wake up
fanboys, your hero is a ******. I got so much money invested in gazprom. LNG is junk and
gazprom (Russian owned) is gona crush LNG and trump and his idiot following can't do a damn
thing. You trump idiots will believe anything. Let me enlighten you...gazprom is the lowest
cost producer of natural gas in the world...go look at the difference between gazprom and LNG
and then you will realize that orange dump is an idiot along with his army of empty heads. Oh
and if you think China and Russia are not friendly, go look up the Power of Siberia pipeline.
That will give you a good sense of the relationship between Russia and China. America is
rotting from the inside and Russia and China are eating their popcorn watching it happen.
Dabooda , 3 hours ago
I don't see Trump deep-throating anyone but Netanyahu. Sans gratuitous insults, your
comment about Gazprom is spot on
Lokiban , 5 hours ago
I doubt Merkel will give in. She would commit political suicide if she did that. She knows
Navalny is a US effort to stop Nordstream 2.
What is the alternative? Buying gas from the US or US-controlled oilfields in Iraq and Syria?
Putin might have a say in that.
Lokiban , 5 hours ago
I doubt Merkel will give in. She would commit political suicide if she did that. She knows
Navalny is a US effort to stop Nordstream 2.
What is the alternative? Buying gas from the US or US-controlled oilfields in Iraq and Syria?
Putin might have a say in that.
thurstjo63 , 3 hours ago
The main fault in Mr Korybko's thinking is that he believes that European countries will
not just shoot themselves in the foot but in the head to appease the US. At a european and
local level, those who wanted Nord Stream 2 to be suspended or killed have failed. The costs
are way too high. For that we can thank, perversely, the agreements associated with
protecting investments from political decisions pushed by the US itself!!! Given that there
is no proof of Navalny being poisoned, Germany knows that there is no way that they could
hope to win their case for stopping Nord Stream 2 in a tribunal with persons capable of
rational thought. That is why they made the deal to buy some US liquified gas for a couple of
billion dollars. Because that is the cheapest way of extricating themselves from this
situation. Otherwise, they are looking at orders of magnitude more compensation to russian
and european firms for stopping the pipeline.
As for Belarus, barring Lukashenko doing something profoundly stupid like reacting
violently to protests, that ship has already sailed. Protests are smaller every week and
mainly on the weekend as now the "opposition" has been publishing people's profiles accusing
them of collaborating with the government without any proof, leading to innocent people and
their families to be threatened. There will be a transition from Lukashenko over the next
couple of years but you can be sure that the present "opposition" given their desire to break
away from Russia will not be part of the group that comes to power in the future since their
base of support diminishes every week.
Finally Bulgaria already shot themselves in the foot when they backed out of South Stream
and had major problems securing energy resources to meet its needs during the intervening
period. Radev as any politician wanting to stay in office knows, if he doesn't go through
with connecting Turk Stream to the rest of Europe that he might as well resign. So unless the
US has compromising information on him that can force him from office or the Radev's
administration doesn't control the US attempts to create the conditions for a colour
revolution in Bulgaria, it is definitely not going to happen.
I'm sorry but Mr. Korybko is wrong on all counts!
Savvy , 4 hours ago
When the US backed Georgia's violent incursion into S Ossetia it took Russia one day to
send them back.
Russians are slow to saddle but ride fast.
Joiningupthedots , 2 hours ago
That was with the remnants of the old Soviet Army too.
The new Russian Army is an entirely different beast in both organisation, training,
experience and equipment.
Decoupling Russia from EU, is re-enforcing the Eurasia bloc...where is the future of the
world.
Russia belongs to Europa...not the USA.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 4 hours ago
Geographically Europe and Asia are one continent. It was "European exceptionalism" (the
precursor to American Exceptionalism) that divided it as an ethno-cultural construct.
researchfix , 5 hours ago
Cancelling NS2 will chase the German industry into Russia. Cheap energy, moderate wages,
Eurasian market at the front steps.
The sheep and their ex working places and Mutti will stay in Germany.
Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago
Do Germans want to be slaves of these abject Brits and Americans? Pffffft....gas from
Russia is a NO BRAINER.
Only British and Americans rats do not like that idea. How un-selfish then, it is for
these jealous, insecure morons to dictate to Germany how she should trade. That's called
outright meddling. These imperialists are like entitled Karens, they think the world owes
them favours at the snap of a finger.
Sandmann , 4 hours ago
Nordstream 2 has an add-on leg to UK. Germany is largest gas importer on earth and cannot
run its industry without gas imports from Russia. LNG is simply too expensive unless US
taxpayers subsidise it.
If US wants to destabilise Europe it will reap the consequences. Southern Europe depends
on gas from North Africa - Portugal generates electricity from Maghreb Pipeline to Spain from
Algeria via Morocco. Erdogan hopes to put Turkey in position of supplying gas to Europe.
Germany will not abandon Nordstream 2 but might abandon USA first.
Max21c , 3 hours ago
The US is ruthlessly waging an intense Hybrid War on Russian energy interests in Europe
by targeting the Eurasian Great Power's relevant projects in Germany, Belarus, and
Bulgaria, banking on the fact that even the partial success of this strategy would greatly
advance the scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's
transatlantic allies.
It's a petty game and when it fails then the Washingtonians credibility and legitimacy
just further erodes. The EU needs the energy supplies and the Russian Federation has the
supplies. It's all just short term & small gain silliness by a pack of freaks in
Washington DC and their freaks in the CIA, Thunk Tank freaks and freaks in the foreign policy
establishment. It's just more of the Carnival sideshow/freakshow put on by Washingtonians. As
usual if it's a Washingtonian (post Cold War) policy then there's little or no substance
behind it and you can be sure it hasn't be thought through thoroughly and it'll eventually
turn and boomerang back on the circus people in Washington, Ivy League circus people, and
JudeoWASP elite circus people, CIA circus clowns and circus clowns in the Thunk Tonks and
elites Fareign Poolicy ***-tablishment.
John Hansen , 3 hours ago
If all it takes is a Navaly hoax to cause this Europe isn't really worth dealing with.
propaganda_reaper , 3 hours ago
Once upon a time, a revolution occurred in a country through which passed a gas pipeline.
The bad guys were vanquished. And the very good foreign guys who helped the local good guys
defeat the tyrant said: "We got the same stuff, but liquid."
Any similarity with fictitious events or characters was purely coincidental.
Remember the Gas to Europe still flows through the Ukraine. Russia just needs to reduce
the gas Pressure and blame the Ukraine and Europe goes cold and Dark.
German People will beg for Nordstream 2 to be switched on.
lucitanian , 31 minutes ago
That's not the way Russia works. But it's the kind of blackmail that the US uses. And
that's why Russia is a more dependable partner for Europe for energy.
Hope Copy , 1 hour ago
This **** goes right back to the 'DeepState' pseudo-revolution that got the Nicky-the-weak
killed ,because he financed his railroads and wanted to be rich as hell as he perceived the
ENGLISH monarchy to be, with a parliamentary DUMA that he could over rule if need be. I have
looked 'DeepState' right in the eyes when I was young and dumb and was told that I would
never go to their masion.. Nicky had family enemies. and the Czech fighting force was never
going to save him.. Stalin was also double-crossed, but was well informed.. it was in his
sector if one reads and believes. Cunning fox Stalin was, always playing those under him to
do his bidding.. and that lesson has been well learned by a couple of the world's leaders in
this day-in-age...
Herodotus , 1 hour ago
German manufacturing costs must be driven higher to take the heat off of the UK as they
emerge from the EU and attempt to become competitive.
novictim , 1 hour ago
When "War" is actually not war but trade policy and financial incentives then you know you
are engaged in dangerous bloviations and hyperbole.
When the shooting starts, then you can talk of War.
SuperareDolo , 2 hours ago
Russia might not want to fight these attempts to isolate it from the western economy. The
collateral damage will be that much less, once Babylon the great finally falls.
LoveTruth , 2 hours ago
And US claims to be a "Fair Player," caring for freedom and democracy, while twisting arms
and supporting corrupted officials.
IronForge , 3 hours ago
PetroUSD, MIC, Colonial Control of Vassals. World Domination Play by the Hegemony.
Just like the Policies of NATO: Russians Out, Germans Down, Anglo-American-ZioMasons and
Vatican_Vassals In.
Policies were like this - Sponsored by Anglo-ZioMasons from Pre-WWI, continued through
WWII and the First Cold War, and onwards after the Collapse of the SUN and the ensuing NeoCon
Wolfowitz Doctrine and PNAC7/Bush-Cheney PetroUSD Plans.
The Hegemony Control MENA Energy Producers. The IRQ-KWT War were mishandled; and KSA
demanded for the USA to Smite IRQ. The Initial War and Occupation prompted Hussein to opt the
EUR for Petroleum, which Brought about the End of Hussein through the 9-11/PNAC7 Long
War.
LBY opted for the Au-Dinar for Petroleum; and were Fail-Stated. IRN and RUS remain the
only Major Energy Producers not Controlled by the Hegemony.
IRN were Sanctioned since removing the Shackles of Hegemonic Occupancy via Shah Par Levi;
and attempts for Energy Diversification via Nuclear means raised suspicions of Nuclear
Weapons Development - prompting for heavier Sanctions and 5thColumn Regime Change Operations
by the Hegemony. IRN circumvented Sanctions in part by selling their Petroleum via Major
Currencies and Barter. Though many Countries have reduced or maintained their purchase of IRN
Petroleum via Sanctions Protocols, CHN are involved in Purchasing IRN's Output.
RUS, another Target of Ruin, Plunder, and Occupational Exploitation by the Hegemony, were
Too Large a Country with Standing Armed Forces for Direct Military Invasion by the Hegemony.
After the Collapse of the SUN, The Harvard/Chicago led Economic Reforms ended in Plunder -
which prompted the Selection and Rise of Putin, who drove out the Plunderers. The Hegemony
continue their Geopolitical War of Influence Peddling around RUS while attempting Soft War
NATO Membership Recruitment and Regime Change Coups within RUS, Ex-SUN Nation-States, and
Trading Partners.
RUS have endured, became Militarily mightier, have become the Major Energy Producer for
North/Western Europe and CHN. In addition to the Production, RUS now have begun Trading
Petroleum+NatGas outside of the PetroUSD Exchange Mechanism, opting for Customer Currencies
or RUB.
RUS and IRN are expected to be Key Providers of the PetroCNY-Au Exchange Mechanism.
The Hegemony and MENA Vassals can't Compete in Combined Petroleum+NatGas Volume and Price;
and DEU - by Directly Importing from RUS - will most likely become more Independent from the
Hegemon.
CHN, RUS, and DEU - Major Energy, Industrial, Natural Resource, and Military Powers
Decoupling from the Influences of the Hegemony, with IND Slowly coming to their Own (IND are
simply Too Large to remain Vassals to the Hegemon; and Vassal GBR did so much to Oppress them
in the past).
Funny that the Anglo-American-ZioMasons and VAT have brought each of these 3 Powers to
Ruin and Occupation in the Past 2 Centuries.
The Ironies being Played Out are that:
1) GBR Lost their Prime Colonies - America/USA, IND, and now Trade City Colony HKG - by
their Oppressive and Exploitative Occupancy; and
2) USA, after Fighting Wars for Independence from such Occupations by GBR - Once Becoming
a Major Military Power, Followed in the Anglo-ZioMason Tradition of Geopolitical Conquest and
Control to the Scale of pursing not only in World Domination - but in Absolute Global
Rule.
Maghreb2 , 2 hours ago
Problem is demographic
shift . The previous modern system dominated by Zio-Masonry was GNP and GDP where
currencies were measured against global output and floated against gold and each other. Now
with high inflation and demographic decline knocking out the economy is easier leading to
fights between zones of influence. Petro Ruble, Euro or dollar. Dangerous commodities like
kilos of heroin, trafficked humans or weapons. Zio-Masonic system has fallen to gangsterism.
Hybrid Warfare is the kind of thing we saw in Afghanistan or 80s Columbia .
Militarized Russian mafia vs NATO backed militarized police forces.
Once the population reaches a certain age and consumption drops there isn't much to fight
over besides social control systems of the young minority. Color revolutions in Central
Europe are really only effecting the long term economy of the young . Hope would be Left wing Radicals
stood up to the system and aligned with right wing groups to eliminate masonic and Zionist
factions and take back the command and control systems before the continet is shut down
permanently.
Precision strikes and hunting down their
descendents . Easy to find because Hitler and Stalin had their ancestors massacred for
loyalty to Rothschild. They won't bite the hands that feed.The Vatican vassal systems was
built on knowing that a Zionist is Zionist and Masons is a Mason. They are cults simply
teaching them the correct way to behave can avert these political problems.
In terms of Belarus and Russia they should consider the fact the birth rate rate rose
after the Soviet collapse and exodus west means many of them shouldn't have even been born in
Rothschilds plan. In their " system
" economic planning starts at birth because color revolutions effect
long term bond issuances they control.
Stalin and Hitler both knew this and used money linked to raw marterials and goods to beat
the British gold standard system. If you knew what the Western Central banks were worth you
would kill people for using their money.
The tragedy of this situation the most of people who constitute fifth column will be
royally fleeced if this color revolution succeeds. As Ukrainian experience had shown the
immediate result will be the drop (2-3 times) of national currency against the dollar, mass
sellout of assets to the West at bargain process (for pennies on the dollar) as well as
continuation of the destruction of Soviet infrastructure. Western powers want 90% of
Byelorussian people to live on the level slightly above starvation and they have numerous
methods of achieving this goal directly and indirectly.
In two to three year Belorussia will be a regular debt slave of the West.
27 Sep, 2020 Around 200 have been detained as the Belarusian capital, Minsk and other cities
host rallies, during which the opposition plans to hold a "people's inauguration" of former
presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
The action was called in response to the secret inauguration staged by long-time President
Alexander Lukashenko for himself earlier this week. Tikhanovskaya won't be attending the
protest, as she fled Belarus for Lithuania after the August 9 election, which the opposition
insists was rigged.
Thousands marched along Independence Avenue in Minsk, despite security forces thoroughly
preparing for the unsanctioned event and urging people to stay at home. Mobile internet speed
has been reduced in the capital. A local mobile operator said it has been ordered to do so by
the government. It may have been done to complicate communication among demonstrators.
The city's largest squares were blocked off, with seven subway stations in the center also
shut down. A convoy of armored vehicles has also been spotted outside Lukashenko's heavily
guarded residence.
Music was played from loudspeakers along the route of the march to drown out the chants of
the demonstrators, calling for Lukashenko's immediate resignation and a new, fair
election.
Police say that almost 200 people have been arrested in Minsk and other cities where
protests took place on Sunday.
The protests in Belarus have been marred by mass arrests from the very start, with
thousands of anti-government demonstrators detained in the weeks since the election. Police
have also been accused of using excessive force against demonstrators and mistreating
detainees. Three protesters have been killed during the unrest, according to official data,
with hundreds, including many officers, wounded.
@vot
tak – Russia could stop transit through Ukraine tomorrow and switch to LNG and
existing underwater pipelines. The fact that they have not done it and signed a limited
5-year deal for 2020-2024 suggests that either Russia doesn't want to do it or it is a
political concession to its customers (Germany)
You are right that NS2 theatre by Washington is simply playing for time – they know
that they can't really prevail. But it is larger than that: their whole strategy is to delay
and postpone. They are trying to delay the inevitable or are hoping for a miracle. But
strategically they have lost. Water flows downstream, it is only a question of how fast.
A very interesting post. I might quibble with some of the finer points, but yes, the world
has gone stark raving bonkers.
The Russians are NOT ten feet tall, and the Americans – for all of the idiocy of the
ruling elites – still have many strengths, and no matter how badly employed, these
strengths will not disappear in a day. Russia might yet get pulled down, if they are unlucky
or the elites are corrupted by money.
But there is one difference between the Americans and the Russians that, long term, may be
the single biggest factor: more than hypersonic missiles or all of that. It's that, for now
at least, the Russian elites can learn from experience, and the Americans, can not (or will
not, but same thing).
Consider: after the Soviet Union fell, Russian forces got their tails whipped by the
Chechens. The Russians rethought their approach, and in a rematch Russia scored not just a
military victory, but an enduring strategic victory: they accomplished their policy goals! A
goal that was not just spreading chaos and instability! When was the last time the United
States did something like that? Maybe Korea in the 1950's.
The Taliban in Afghanistan and the 'rag-tag' North Vietnamese who successfully fought
the Vietnam War might disagree with you .
You can't really use those examples as a way of finalising the inferiority of the Western
armed forces vis-à-vis Russia as the latter also did not manage to defeat the Afghans
and would likely have been made a mincemeat of by the VC as well.
Russia's performance in Chechnya was also not that great considering the power
differential.
If we allow the Black Lives Matter movement to become America's Bolshevik Revolution, we
will lose our liberty, and many of us will likely lose our lives, as well, for daring to
question them. This was never about racism. It has been about power anBlack Lives
Matter is a Modern Totalitarian Revolution
Classic totalitarian regimes share a number of common characteristics. The
rise of these regimes began with a cultural revolution, aimed at angering the citizens against
the current system. During that period domestic enemies are designated, and the people in the
radical movement aiming at overthrowing the old system rally together against those common
enemies, calling it a common struggle, as they adopt a new official ideology that stands
significantly apart from the old one. They seek to control every aspect of the lives of their
people, enlisting everyone they can to participate in the struggle. Even persons who may belong
to enemy classes or groups join up, hoping to receive mercy when the new regime gains control.
In Stalin's Russia and Mao's China the enemies were anyone who reminded them of the old system,
and anyone who could challenge them if left with enough power. The state enemies were the
capitalists, landlords, richer peasants and foreign agents of all kinds. Nazi Germany included
those outside the national community, which included socialists (even though Nazism was a form
of socialism) and communists, Jews, Christians, and any ethnic minorities that did not fit into
the German model of a loyal elite specimen.
The goal of each of the totalitarian regimes of the past were to eliminate the old system,
eradicate any history or remnant of the old regimes, and create a dominant single party that
stood as a rebellious alternative of the traditional State. Then, once in power, the perceived
enemies were murdered or imprisoned, as were many of their allies for the crime of knowing too
much. The younger generation was used as a controlling mechanism, taught to tattle on their
older counterparts for not being one hundred percent in favor of the new party in charge. The
youngsters were uniformed and organized into militias to turn their energies towards advancing
the party line, and improving upon the power of the new political elite.
In each case anything that even resembled the free market was eliminated, and the new
government controlled the economy. They took over the means of production either by taking
control of it and nationalizing it, or through heavy regulations (as we saw in Italy and
Germany). The immigration structure was altered, they orchestrated a break-down of morality and
what were considered moral norms in their culture, they worked on the destruction of the
nuclear family, they forcibly reallocated farmland, they formed a socialist economy that was
designed to redistribute the wealth away from the designated domestic enemies into the hands of
those revolutionaries who deserved some kind of reparations for what was allegedly lost at the
hands of the domestic enemies, and early on looting and rioting was encouraged and championed.
Interestingly, the list I just gave you was not just something the NAZIs and communists did,
but is also a list of demands currently being voiced by Black Lives Matter.
Public expression was also controlled by past dictatorial regimes so that no dissent could
emerge. If dissent was spotted, the party members acted as a mob, actively mobilized to quell
the dissent in the name of the "people's struggle" against a constant list of enemies. Again,
Black Lives Matter fits the bill on this one, too.
These regimes exaggerated real problems, and real aspects of human nature, and created an
on-going revolution against their enemies. It was a common struggle to liberate the people from
whomever the leadership designated as an enemy. To not pull the party line was to be socially
asleep, or an agent of the enemy, which then would place the person under great scrutiny, and
if they remained uncorrected, they would be ridiculed, shamed, and eventually jailed, or
murdered.
The fuel was passion, and anger, and a common demand for answers.
Sound familiar?
Black Lives Matter is an embodiment of everything that the 20th Century dictatorships
were
Eventually, Black Lives Matter will lose its appeal, and the players will grow weary of the
struggle. The regime will weaken, and when they try to invigorate their revolutionaries for a
new fight in order to strengthen the resolve of the regime and its followers, they will find
that all of their enemies are dead or in exile, and the problem can no longer be blamed on
others. However, it could take half a century, or more, before that happens, and in a Black
Lives Matter America the damage will already have been done. The death of liberty and the
annihilation of the free market will have left a long path of sorrow and misery following it.
By then, the enemy will only be themselves, and as all regimes in history, the struggle will
turn inward, and the murders will be against their own. Through the paranoia imaginary enemies
will be concocted, where nobody is safe from the suspicions of one's neighbors or children.
People begin to vanish, and the party begins to struggle to hold on to control.
Black Lives Matter, like all past dictatorial regimes, has successfully unleashed the
passions of many members of the public. The campaigns of terror are in full swing, in the name
of protesting, in the name of social justice, and in the name of standing against racism. They
claim that science and reason are in their corner, when, like Stalin and Mao of the Soviet
Union and Communist China, it is all a great big lie. They claim whites have unfair privilege
and must be forced to kneel to their true overlords, as Hitler did with the Jews when he
believed it would allow him to create a better Germany. In the end, as with all violent
totalitarian regimes, violence will bring them down just as violence brought them into
power.
Tucker on the incredible popularity of Black Lives Matter
Islamic totalitarianism solidifies in the Middle East, and works to spread across the
nations of Europe
As Islamic totalitarianism solidifies in the Middle East, and works to spread across the
nations of Europe, Black Lives Matter totalitarianism is working its way through its birthing
canal in the United States. Both bear all of the markers of totalitarianism. They work to
control the lives, speech, and actions of those below them. They terrorize and murder,
committing themselves to endless struggles against a long list of designated enemies. They pose
as more than an ideological challenge. They are poised to bring down Western Civilization,
which has prospered due to America's Liberty, and free market capitalistic system.
Should we fall, to where may one escape? There is no other place to go. Black Lives Matter
is a real threat, an enemy who desires to overthrow America and control this country. There is
no criticizing Black Lives Matter. The mobs threaten anyone who holds dissent. It is already
happening. People are losing their jobs for criticizing Black Lives Matter, and they are still
only a political movement. Black Lives Matter is enjoying complete immunity from criticism
while they are not in power. Imagine what will happen if they ever gain a hold on the reins of
our system.
It has gone beyond a demand for equality. Equality is no longer acceptable. If one were to
say "All Lives Matter," for example, that is now unacceptable, and racist. Only "Black Lives
Matter" we are told. White lives don't matter because of what your ancestors allegedly did a
couple hundred years ago. Christianity and the American System is based on the idea of equality
in the eyes of God, and equality in opportunity (or at least the attempt to create a system
that accomplishes such), but now if you say that out loud, you are called a racist, and your
very life could be at risk. Dissent is hate speech. You could be fired from your job, or in
some cases, fined and jailed for daring to speak out against the rising totalitarian regime
known as Black Lives Matter because such murmurings could be considered "hate speech".
The latest demand by Black Lives Matter is ridiculous, yet it is happening. It began with a
chant, "defund the police," and now has advanced to cries to abolish the police. The City of
Minneapolis is in the process of doing exactly that. When asked on CNN who, then, if the police
were gone, should we call in the middle of the night while our house is being burglarized,
a member of the Minneapolis city council said that the question "comes from a place of
privilege." In other words, if some feel like law enforcement is not on their side,
everyone should feel that way, otherwise, you have an unfair privilege, and you are racist.
Black Lives Matter is enjoying a rise to power largely because of the liberal media
Black Lives Matter is enjoying a rise to power largely because of the liberal media. Any
counter-arguments against their claims are going unheard. CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the alphabet
networks, and any of the other liberal outlets aren't going to report any criticism of Black
Lives Matter. And as Hitler's team explained, if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the
truth. In this case, if you tell one side of the story, and the other side is never heard, it
becomes true.
Unchallenged claims must be true, therefore, Black Lives Matter must be on to something. The
polls say so.
Black Lives Matter is achieving their power in the same way past revolutionaries did.
Through force. They break things, they burn things, and they hurt anyone who gets in the way.
They believe they deserve whatever they want, and if you don't give it to them, they will take
it. Then, on the way out, they will set your business on fire. They occupy, they terrorize, and
nobody is willing to stop them, because if you do, you are a racist. They know this. They know
you are paralyzed by your fear of them, and fear of being considered racist. They have a
message. Step out of line and we will hurt you, your family, or your business. That is the
strategy of Black Lives Matter, and it is becoming the strategy of the Democrat Party. If you
are afraid to defy the mob, the mob rules.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution created this system to protect us from the mob. That is
why they created a constitutional republic, not a democracy (as some people like to say).
Democracy is historically a transitional type of government. When the mobs of democracy begin
to take control, which usually accompanies a continuous vote for benefits from the treasury,
liberty breaks down and dictators begin to take control.
If we allow the Black Lives Matter movement to become America's Bolshevik Revolution, we
will lose our liberty, and many of us will likely lose our lives, as well, for daring to
question them. This was never about racism. It has been about power and control since the very
beginning. Black Lives Matter seeks to overthrow the U.S. Constitution, and replace our system
with a Marxist-based government that destroys liberty and the free market, and places their
radical leaders in control of the country. If we don't stop it, and recognize the revolutionary
nature of what is going on, America will disappear forever. And, if there is no America,
Liberty dies worldwide.
Douglas V. Gibbs of Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary,
has been featured on "Hannity" and "Fox and Friends" on Fox News Channel, and other television
shows and networks. Doug is a Radio Host on KMET 1490-AM on Saturdays with his Constitution
Radio program, as well as a longtime podcaster, conservative political activist, writ
Escobar reviews the UNGA's
first day that revealed Trump's desperation a few alluded to above. Psychohistorian will
be pleased to read Pepe's channeling his #1 premise:
" As for the 'rules-based international order,' at best it is a euphemism for
privately-controlled financial capitalism on a global scale ." [My Emphasis]
As I wrote yesterday, every national leader I read backed a Multilateral UN and its
Charter while including various degrees of reproach for the illegalities of the Outlaw US
Empire and its vassals, even the
Emir of Qatar :
"The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us that we live on the same planet,
and that multilateral cooperation is the only way to address the challenges of epidemics,
climate and the environment in general, and it's also preferable to remember this when
dealing with the issues of poverty, war and peace, and realizing our common goals for
security and stability....
"And during the unjust and unlawful blockade it is going through it also has securely
established its policy founded on respecting the rules and principles of international law
and the United Nations Charter, especially, the principle of respecting the sovereignty of
states and rejecting intervention in their internal affairs.
"And based on our moral and legal responsibilities towards our peoples, we have affirmed,
and we will continue to reaffirm, that unconditional dialogue based on common interests and
respect for the sovereignty of states is the way to solve this crisis which had started with
an illegal blockade, and whose solution starts with lifting this blockade."
If the Saudi blockade is "unjust and unlawful," then all those imposed by the Outlaw US
Empire are also.
Pepe apparently doesn't agree with Lieven's essay and writes:
"Sinophobia is the perfect tool for shifting blame -- for the abysmal response to
Covid-19, the extinction of small businesses and the looming New Great Depression -- to the
Chinese 'existential threat.'
"The whole process has nothing to do with 'moral defeat' [Lieven] and complaints that 'we
risk losing the competition and endangering the world.'
"The world is not 'endangered' because at least vast swathes of the Global South are fully
aware that the much-ballyhooed 'rules-based international order' is nothing but a quite
appealing euphemism for Pax Americana -- or exceptionalism [Neocolonialism].
"What was designed by Washington for post-World War II, the Cold War and the 'unilateral
moment' does not apply anymore."
As the dirty domestic underwear of the Outlaw US Empire becomes more visible to nations,
they are emboldened to stand up for themselves and join the Strategic Partnership's Eurasian
project.
"... You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end -- which you can never afford to lose -- with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. ..."
James C.
Collins related a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during
his period in the Vietnamese POW camp. [21] [
non-primary source needed ] When Collins asked which prisoners didn't make it out
of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:
Oh, that's easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out
by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're
going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then
Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. This
is a very important lesson.
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end
-- which you can never afford to lose -- with the discipline to confront the most brutal
facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.[22]
On December 11, 2012, U.S. Justice Department officials called a press conference in
Brooklyn. The key players were once and future bank lawyer Lanny Breuer (disguised at the
time as Barack Obama's Assistant Attorney General in charge of the DOJ's Criminal Division),
and Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and future
Attorney General.
The duo revealed that HSBC, the largest bank in Europe, had agreed to a $
1.9 billion settlement for years of money-laundering offenses.
An alphabet soup of regulatory agencies was represented that day, from the Justice
Department, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Treasury, the New York
County District Attorney, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, among
others.
The regulators outlined a slew of admissions, with HSBC's headline offense being the
laundering of $881 million for Central and South American drug outfits, including the
infamous Sinaloa cartel.
The laundering was so brazen, regulators said, the bank's Mexican subsidiary had developed
"specially shaped boxes" for cartels to pack with cash and slide through teller windows. The
seemingly massive fine reflected serious offenses, including violations of the Bank Secrecy
Act (BSA), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading with the
Enemy Act (TWEA).
The next years would follow up with a flurry of similar settlements extracting
sizable-sounding fees from other transnational banks for laundering money on behalf of
terrorists, sanctioned businesses, mobsters, drug dealers, and other malefactors. Firms
like JP Morgan Chase ($1.7 billion),
Standard Chartered ($300 million), and
Deutsche Bank ($258 million) were soon announcing settlements either for laundering,
sanctions violations, or both.
Even seasoned financial reporters accustomed to seeing soft-touch settlements scratched
their heads at some of the deals. In the case of HSBC, the stiffest penalty doled out to any
individual for the biggest drug-money-laundering case in history -- during which time HSBC
had become the "
preferred financial institution " of drug traffickers, according to the Justice
Department -- involved an agreement to "partially defer bonus compensation for its most
senior executives." If bankers can't get time for washing money for people who put torture
videos
on the internet , what can they get time for?
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Selfishness may be exalted as the root and branch of capitalism, but it doesn't make you
look good to the party on the receiving end or those whose sympathy he earns. For that, you
need a government prepared to do four things, which each have separate dictums based on study,
theorization, and experience. Coercion: Force is illegitimate only if you can't sell it.
Persuasion: How do I market thee? Let me count the ways. Bargaining: If you won't scratch my
back, then how about a piece of the pie? Indoctrination: Because I said so. (And paid for the
semantics.)
Predatory capitalism is the control and expropriation of land, labor, and natural resources
by a foreign government via coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and indoctrination.
At the coercive stage, we can expect military and/or police intervention to repress the
subject populace. The persuasive stage will be marked by clientelism, in which a small
percentage of the populace will be rewarded for loyalty, often serving as the capitalists'
administrators, tax collectors, and enforcers. At the bargaining stage, efforts will be made to
include the populace, or a certain percentage of it, in the country's ruling system, and this
is usually marked by steps toward democratic (or, more often, autocratic) governance.
At the fourth stage, the populace is educated by capitalists, such that they continue to
maintain a relationship of dependency.
The Predatory Debt Link
In many cases, post-colonial states were forced to assume the debts of their colonizers. And
where they did not, they were encouraged to become in debt to the West via loans that were
issued through international institutions to ensure they did not fall prey to communism or
pursue other economic policies that were inimical to the West. Debt is the tie that binds
nation states to the geostrategic and economic interests of the West.
As such, the Cold War era was a time of easy credit, luring postcolonial states to undertake
the construction of useless monoliths and monuments, and to even expropriate such loans through
corruption and despotism, thereby making these independent rulers as predatory as colonizers.
While some countries were wiser than others and did use the funds for infrastructural
improvements, these were also things that benefited the West and particularly Western
contractors. In his controversial work Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins reveals
that he was a consultant for an American firm (MAIN), whose job was to ensure that states
became indebted beyond their means so they would remain loyal to their creditors, buying them
votes within United Nations organizations, among other things.
Predatory capitalists demand export-orientations as the means to generate foreign currency
with which to pay back debt. In the process, the state must privatize and drastically slash or
eliminate any domestic subsidies which are aimed at helping native industry compete in the
marketplace. Domestic consumption and imports must be radically contained, as shown by the
exchange rate policies recommended by the IMF. The costs of obtaining domestic capital will be
pushed beyond the reach of most native producers, while wages must be depressed to an absolute
bare minimum. In short, the country's land, labor, and natural resources must be sold at
bargain basement prices in order to make these goods competitive, in what one author has called
"a spiraling race to the bottom," as countries producing predominantly the same goods engage in
cutthroat competition whose benefactor is the West.
Under these circumstances, foreign investment is encouraged, but this, too, represents a
loaded situation for countries that open their markets to financial liberalization.
"... On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. ..."
On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate
Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its
red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. It would be satisfying to see
the collective wisdom of the Parliament to exceed that of the BND. But then that is a low
bar.
For example Microsoft success was by the large part determined its alliance with IBM
in the creation of PC and then exploiting IBM ineptness to ride this via shred marketing
and alliances and "natural monopoly" tendencies in IT. MS DOS was a clone of CP/M that
was bought, extended and skillfully marketed. Zero innovation here.
Both Microsoft and Apple rely of research labs in other companies to produce
innovation which they then then produced and marketed. Even Steve Jobs smartphone was not
an innovation per se: it was just a slick form factor that was the most successful in the
market. All functionality existed in other products.
Facebook was prelude to, has given the world a glimpse into, the future.
From pure technical POV Facebook is mostly junk. It is a tremendous database of user
information which users supply themselves due to cultivated exhibitionism. Kind of private
intelligence company. The mere fact that software was written in PHP tells you something
about real Zuckerberg level.
Amazon created a usable interface for shopping via internet (creating comments
infrastructure and a usable user account database ) but this is not innovation in any
sense of the word. It prospered by stealing large part of Wall Mart logistic software
(and people) and using Wall Mart tricks with suppliers. So Bezos model was Wall Mart
clone on the Internet.
Unless something is done, Bezos will soon be the most powerful man in the world.
People like Bezos, Google founders, Zuckerberg to a certain extent are part of
intelligence agencies infrastructure. Remember Prism. So implicitly we can assume that
they all report to the head of CIA.
Artificial Intelligence, AI, is another consequence of this era of innovation that
demands our immediate attention.
There is very little intelligence in artificial intelligence :-). Intelligent behavior
of robots in mostly an illusion created by First Clark law:
Tucker: This parading of Ginsburg death wish "is ridiculous and insulting"
Two neoliberal faction of the US elite ("hard neolibs" and "soft neolibs") struggle for power
really entered a new phase. BTW control of Supreme Court was always a part of struggle for power.
And this "royal wish" think is just one episode of this entertaining
fight. Great spectacle, but friends will unite when the time comes to approve the military
budget.
Why are people so upset about this "final wish" thing? Like it just seems convenient to me
and made up; and even if wasn't made up, who gives her the right to dictate how the
constitution works. It's obvious the Dems are using this to try and keep the GOP from getting
an extra seat on the Supreme Court, and I don't really blame them, GOP would have probably
done the same thing, they're both hypocrites.
Antifa and BLM are just shows with stunts designed to distract people from the level they are
fleeced by MIC and financial oligarchy. As well as restore the legitimacy of Clinton wing of
neoliberal oligarchy which was badly shaken during 2016 election, when their candidate was send
packing.
Nicholas Kristof is member of "Clinton gang of neoliberals" and a part of this effort to
distract people. The number of people who pay attention to Nicholas Kristof bloviations is
astounding. Few understand that we do not know the facts and the real issue if the tight grip of
MIC and financial oligarchy on the society. What is interesting is that s in California, there
are 8.5 million residents born outside the country and about 150,000 homeless. "The melting pot
burned over. It is now a ... salad.
For example, if money spend on wars were used to manage thoseforests with difficult terrain
and perioc drauts, would the outcome be different?
Can those fires and destruction be viewed as God punishment for war the USA unleashed? As
Thomas Jefferson said "I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just."
BTW, the number of commenters with Russian paranoia symptom is frightening. Of course NYT
attracts specific audience, but still. In this sense NYT columnists including Nickolas Kristof
are just warmongering bottom feeders of MIC crumps. It is pathetic how he tries to hide the lack
of money for forest management and mismanagement if this issue by Oregon Dem politician under the
broad banner of "climate change" Existence of climate change does not mean that fire should burn
uncontrollably.
MIC steals half trillion dollars and then financial oligarchy steals probably another half,
if not more. What is left is not enough for proper maintenance of land, water and environment in
general. Stupid situation, but this is neoliberalism my friend, where "greed is good". And people
chose this mousetrap themselves in 1970th by electing first Carter and then Reagan and then
Clinton , allowing financial oligarchy to dismantle New Deal Capitalism. Clinton presidency was
especially destructive, In a way he should be views as the top villain in this story, a real
criminal boss.
Below I selected only more or less sane comment (which constitute probably less 1% of the
total)
Notable quotes:
"... How about a judicious Forrest management? ..."
"... So much for our useless 750 Billion dollar military budget. ..."
"... Amazing how ,close minded people become when, for them, everything is political. ..."
Wouldn't the conspiracy theories and concerns about antifa be lessened if progresses were as
vitriolic about violence committed in the name of equity, diversity and inclusion as they are
about violence committed in support of MAGA? Would the right have anything to crow about if
the NYT was as critical of physical altercations caused by social justice warriors as they
are of white supremacists? Wouldn't we all have more trust in MSM if they investigated the
facts before accusing Nick Sandman of racism or claiming a garbage pull was a noose? One
sided reporting and editorials like these fan the flames rather than squelch them.
It's amazing. You can write a column in the NY Times full of conspiracy theories -- all fully
believed by the left -- and accuse the right of being prone to believing conspiracy theories.
From Russia - collusion to rubes in the red states --a majority of dems share a set of
beliefs that are as delusional as anything a small group on the right might believe. But,
that's Kristof and the Ny Times for you.
People seemed to have lost a sense of what is plausible. While few of us know the news first
hand, we have to both trust and evaluate what is reported. Nothing is absolute. Jurors are
asked to decide cases beyond a reasonable doubt. That is how I feel taking in the news. But
within that sliver of doubt, within the fact that nothing is absolute is where conspiracy
theories begin to fester. It is where some have found solace to confirm what they want to
choose to believe despite how much there might be to question that. Events like this create
an opportunism to demonize those you hate and in doing so the essence of what we should be
debating is lost. How to prevent these fires in the first place? We will probably continue to
debate it despite the evidence on climate change, whether there is a deep state trying to
discredit Trump, whether the seriousness of covid is a hoax. Yes there is no absolute
certainty but there is taking an educated guess as opposed to an emotional response. I'll go
with the educated guess. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, I
will say it is a duck and accept that sliver of possibility I might be wrong.
Why do people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories?" It's actually quite simple. Take
QAnon for example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with
any religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while
offering a path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential
elements of cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever
you believe will be "validated." "Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories,
merely assertions. A theory is subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where
truth has no inherent monetary value, don't expect it. Why the rapid spread? To paraphrase
Bill Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability =
Profit That is the business model of the internet, a medium where "news" is whatever will
produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and until the youngest generation developes a
means of communication that does not depend on megacorporations, nothing will change. In the
Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had no honest access to the traditional media,
created its own, the "alternative press." Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their
own way to communicate that is reliable. It is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition"
becomes an actual threat to the profits of Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of
their ilk, they will be cut off.
The antifa movement has grown since the 2016 United States presidential election. As of
August 2017, approximately 200 groups existed, of varying sizes and levels of activity.[73]
It is particularly present in the Pacific Northwest.[74] Wikipedia
In an age when the US Justice Department is anything but just, more closely resembling
something akin to "just us," I call to mind Thomas Jefferson, in a somewhat different
context: "I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just."
We spend hundred of billions of dollars every year on the types of weapons that won WWII,
while the real threat to our Republic and yes, our civilization, is ,,, It's funny and
tragic, simultaneously.
Antifa has done a lot of things. They have chosen to step into the arena. Whether they did it
or not, this is accusation is a result of wading into the fight. If Antifa doesnt like to be
accused of things and cant handle it, then Antifa should step off. Or does Antifa only want
praise? Because that isnt going to happen. Many people dont like Antifa nor trust Antifa. And
rightfully so. Ask any career criminal how many times they've been wrongfully accused of
something. If an individual or group doesnt want to be accused of things, then dont get
involved from the start.
Except that about a dozen people have been arrested and charged with starting the forest
fires. Shouting "without evidence!" doesn't make it so. Facts matter.
@JQGALT There are always people who are setting fires whether accidentally or intentionally.
Do you have any proof that these arsonists were politically motivated I any way ?
Yet the Almeda fire in Oregon that destroyed more than 2,300 homes was, according to NYT
reporting, caused by human activity and is subject of a "criminal investigation." Perhaps it
would be wise to reserve total judgment until that investigation is completed.
Who needs rumors? The organization showed what it is made of when it created its free zone in
downtown Seattle and had the highest crime and murder rate per capita in its short life in
the country.
Rational people know that Antifa is not staring forest fires. However, burning and looting
and using fireworks as weapons in the recent riots make even the dumbest claims of Trump
supporters more believable.
Leftwing activists have literally been arrested for starting some of these fires. There is
video of arsonists being caught, yet the media ignores this, and actively denies it. Gee, why
could that be?
@LV Do you have any proof that these people were were left wing activist or just the kind of
people who are always starting fires ad they have in the past ?
The [neoliberal] left spends 24/7 preaching to their choir about Trump fascists dictatorship,
an illegal government installed by a foreign power, destroying the constitution while
preparing to seize power and ignore coming election results. There is a zero factual evidence
for it, such as a refusal to follow judicial injunctions for example, but their well educated
audiences are buying it whole day long. So what is so baffling that a rural audience after
watching night after night Portland burning by arson and accompanied by "peaceful protest"
graphics on TV would buy into arson speculations and rumors and ignore your disclaimers?
Facebook needs to be regulated since it has effectively organ-harvested the critical thinking
skills of a significant portion of the population. It'd be better if thinking people simply
deleted Facebook and let Facebook shrink and become the right-wing agit-prop tool that it
truly is. Mark Zuckerberg is happy to to destabilize society with his little toy invention.
You'd think with all that money, he could afford a conscience. What a wrecking ball Facebook
is.
"All this rumormongering leaves me feeling that the social fabric is unraveling, as if the
shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." Ya think?
@California Scientist Amen. We are more like an international terminal at this point. A bunch
of people gathered by happenstance, heading in different directions, and often with very
little in common.
@California Scientist: It is even worse than when Adlai Stevenson noted that there aren't
enough educated people to elect a liberal government in the US.
@LV - The point is that "urbanites" aren't able to boss anyone around. It's the low
population rural areas that have outsize political power thanks to the unfortunate design of
our government. Every state gets two senators, regardless of population, and that also
factors into the allocation of Electoral College votes, so that an EC vote from WY is worth 4
times as much as an EC vote from CA, for example. In 2016, Senate Democrats got 20 million
more votes than Senate Republicans, yet Republicans kept control. In 2018, Senate Democrats
got "only" 11.5 million more votes, and consequently lost seats. We're being governed by a
minority in may areas of the country, and nationally, yet the "rural rubes" or whatever you
want to call them, insist that they don't have nearly enough power.
Strange that anyone living in or just knowing the west would NOT know that arsonists could
not burn down huge chunks of forest if they where not so very dry.
Augury Unhappy Bird Watcher, State of Grave Doubt
Sept. 20
The ugly truth of Oregon's political past is asserting itself...we aren't in "Portlandia"
anymore Nick.
Ominous! There are two information ecosystems in this country and Americans increasingly live
in different realities. Much of the media is in the business of massaging the egos of their
readers by feeding them stories that confirm their biases and make them feel clever. There is
less and less fact based news and more and more propaganda. A lot of people aren't really
interested in facts. They just want to be told how right they are and how stupid and evil the
people who disagree with them are. Media corporations are providing the market with what it
desires, and what it desires is poisonous.
There is a reptilian brain need to believe this nonsense and to propagate it- because the
believers are so terrified of the facts of the truth (and the lack of knowing what might be
done to address those facts). The people who are true believers are pointless to discuss.
They are too frightened. They need to believe this stuff. It is hopeless to address them.
Dark times, indeed.
With the natural buildup of combustible matter, combined with houses everywhere now and
little land management, these fires will happen and will cause problems. Lots of things can
start them and they will.
You left out "a century of zero-tolerance policies toward wildland fires (creating
precariously dense underbrush), and resistance to traditional controlled burning at the
human/wilderness interface". It's not the whole story, but neither is climate change which,
due to global technological leveling, is evermore the responsibility of China and India than
Western civilization. Signed, a moderate progressive endlessly frustrated with breathless
liberalism
If only there were no arsonists. Here is a video of a woman who found a man on her property
with matches in his hand (and no cigarettes, which was his excuse for having matches in his
hand). She made a citizen's arrest. This happened in peaceful Oregon. Don't listen if you
can't handle harsh language by a woman who is trying to save her property. Arson is real, and
it is no joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW_M4pBCnY
A man was arrested for arson in Southern Oregon. His fire damaged or destroyed numerous
homes.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-charged-arson-connection-almeda-fire-southern-oregon/story?id=72960208
Rumors of antifa notwithstanding, people in Oregon were looking for arsonists because there
are arsonists.
"Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories, merely assertions. A theory is
subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where truth has no inherent monetary
value, don't expect it. To paraphrase President Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow
the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability = Prominence That is the business model of the internet,
a medium where "news" is whatever will produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and
until the youngest generation developes a means of communication that does not depend on
megacorporations, nothing will change. In the Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had
no honest access to the traditional media, created its own, the "alternative press."
Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their own way to communicate that is reliable. It
is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition" becomes an actual threat to the profits of
Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of their ilk, they will be cut off. As to why
people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories", it's actually quite simple. Take QAnon for
example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with any
religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while offering a
path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential elements of
cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever you believe
will be "validated."
"Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories, merely assertions. A theory is
subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where truth has no inherent monetary
value, don't expect it. To paraphrase President Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow
the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability = Prominence That is the business model of the internet,
a medium where "news" is whatever will produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and
until the youngest generation developes a means of communication that does not depend on
megacorporations, nothing will change. In the Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had
no honest access to the traditional media, created its own, the "alternative press."
Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their own way to communicate that is reliable. It
is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition" becomes an actual threat to the profits of
Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of their ilk, they will be cut off. As to why
people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories", it's actually quite simple. Take QAnon for
example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with any
religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while offering a
path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential elements of
cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever you believe
will be "validated."
" All this rumormongering leaves me feeling that the social fabric is unraveling, as if the
shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." You betcha.
(Palin doesn't look half bad compared to the current batch.) It's a simple formula: social
media driven disinformation + extreme capitalism which leaves us with no real will to address
it + legitimate grievances like racism and financial insecurity = craziness on all sides,
fanned by a president whose personal agenda takes precedence over absolutely everything. All
societies are constantly dealing with potentially destabilizing threats. Their institutions,
media, leadership, and understanding of a common good are their immune system. Ours is
compromised, we are destabilized.
How about a judicious Forrest management? We live in a period of global warming
because of our planet axis precision, aggravated by the presence of an unprecedented
population explosion needing more water, more food, the production of which needs more arable
land, cutting trees, displacing wild animals, exhausting the aquifer. Cutting trees increases
the CO2 in the atmosphere. More people in India, more cattle emitting methane, more old
fashioned way of cooking food and producing more CO2 ... Permanent frost melting also sends
more methane in the atmosphere ... The climate is extremely complex to permit exact modeling,
but it is clear that if we want to stay healthy, it is vital to regularly clear our western
forests of dead wood in order to prevent today's disaster of millions of people, particularly
children with asthma and old people breathing the heavily polluted air. It is time to move to
solar, wind power, electric trucks, cars etc. The technology is here. Let's hope that Biden
will support clean air as means to better health. If all these years instead of using
abstract terms like global warming or climate change, we have been appealing to people to
keep the air clean in order to have better health, perhaps they would have stopped buying the
behemoths cars, producing so much pollution?
As Nicholas and many readers on this page already know, this commentary is more evidence of
how needlessly and recklessly polarized our country has become. When tribal instincts push
people to look for anything - fact, fiction or fantasy - on social media or "rage commentary"
that supports and validates their identities they will glom onto it faster than maggots on
dead flesh. It is a sad state of affairs when so many people of all political persuasions
will not take the time - even a few minutes - to question and investigate the latest "truth"
being promoted. The new culture of low information consumers seems to be spreading as fast as
a pandemic despite the heroic efforts of honest journalism. I wonder if low information
consumption was so endemic to the citizens of Ancient Rome and Greece - long before Twitter,
Facebook and Rage TV? People, please take a moment to "click" one step further to see if the
latest conspiracy story is true. Why help propagate lies? It will only come back to haunt
you, or your children.
Antifa or not, at least some of the big fires have been started by arsonists. Of this fact we
have video proof. By downplaying or even denying it, the media are just as bad as the
conspiracy theorists in promoting disinformation.
This reminds me of a time when people saw "Reds" behind anything that was going wrong in the
country. Nothing new, but just as pathetically paranoid. I wonder how many people, or their
parents, fit into both groups?
Here's another urban myth. Ok, more a lefty myth. That we can just keep adding people to this
country (urban, suburban, rural, big city, anywhere and everywhere) and it won't have any
effect. With the corollary that it's just a matter of "green new deal" or everybody getting a
Prius or the dummies in the sticks realizing climate change is real and then we can just go
on like this forever. We can't. Not only is our much hated lifestyle, which from what I can
see, nobody really wants to give up, killing us, but believing 330 million Americans that add
2-3 million more a year is not a problem at all. Our entire way of life: endless population
and economic growth is unsustainable. We don't need to wait until 2050 to see it. Just step
outside.
It is very difficult to teach people that "research," doesn't mean you go to some TV show or
website you like and root around for stuff that tells you what you want to hear. One prob
seems to be really simple: it takes actual work to do it right. Another is that research,
done well, has an ugly habit of forcing you to think at least a little about whether your own
ideas make any sense. And a third is that people really, really don't like it when their
political views start getting contradicted by reality. It seems to be easier to change
reality than to change views, even a little. Oh, and another prob? Too few Americans really
read anything worth reading. I'm all for funsies (and I've probably read more crummy science
fiction than all y'all put together) but one of the joys of walking around in Paris is seeing
that the kiosks and bookstores still sell a ton of stuff on philosophy, lit, economics, and
that everywhere, people actually read them. Books teach thought. Newsmax don't.
@Beer Can Boyd: As a native-born American, I think the US fell down when the Congress put
"under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1953, ostensibly to preclude anyone thinking
about Godless communism, and gave itself a stroke.
The melting pot burned over. It is now a word salad. But appears there is a method to the
madness. It is hard for the world to tell the madness from the method
@Carolyn then there are the lies and the demonization of China and Russia by both parties to
top it off. How can voters believe anything and decide before they vote?
Supporting this atmosphere of potential violence are some of my republican friends. They are
mostly educated and not stupid. Yet they continue to support a man whom I think holds the
responsibility for most of the violence if it comes. Now I want to get down to my point about
these supporters. I believe they have succumbed to a cult-like dynamic. I say this because no
rational person could possibly support Trump. Religious cults create this same addiction and
irrationality. When my friends disagree with me, they try to put our friendship hostage to no
further discussion of politics. They are unwilling to even be confronted with objections to
their support of Trump. I have decided that I can always make new friends. What I do not want
to do is take on the task of building a new country because I stayed silent.
@Harcourt "They are mostly educated and not stupid." In my opinion, educated persons who
behave as you describe never benefited from their education. Even worse, to me it seems like
persons who behave like that are of the opinion that what they learnt in school is only for
the purpose of writing the exams they needed to pass to get out of school. It was all just
noise to them.
You nailed it. There is no longer "a shared reality" in America. So we have wildly different
views of who Joe Biden and Donald Trump are. And how serious climate change is. And whether
it's important to wear a mask. And if left-wing anarchists set forest fires. Thank you,
Internet. Thank you, social media barons who refuse to ban Russian propaganda and manipulated
videos. Thank you FCC that does not rein in Fox News and their promotion of lies. Who will
step in and stop this madness?
@CA I agree with you completely except for the refusal to stop Russian interference. We
can't. We can't unless we stop US interference in the process. The problem is that US
interference, and rumor mongering, are the business model of these platforms which happen to
be some of our largest companies. Extreme capitalism is preventing us from addressing any and
all issues propagated by these companies. Russia is just a speck.
Antifa adherents and wildfires ? Seems pretty far-fetched. Even ridiculous. But setting fire
to occupied apartment buildings in Portland ? Oh yes, definitely. It happened, and more is on
the menu, as well as municipal and federal buildings. Don't believe it ? Read the news
releases for yourself, on the Portland Police Bureau's website.
An excellent discussion of the perils of social media. Although newspapers, TV, radio,
magazines have a historical principal of "generally" telling the truth, social media has
opened up the world to every single Tom, Dick and Harry who with to spread their message. I
believe that how we, as a nation, as a species, handle social media will define what happens
over the next decade.
The state of this country is absolutely terrifying. While the shift to ever more
conservative, insular, xenophobic, coroporate-controlled government has been going on for
years, with the faux election of trump democracy is what has become fake, while common sense,
empathy, and both fiscal and environmental responsibility have virtually disappeared. The US
has gone off the deep end...
Years ago I read a science fiction short story that is unsettling in its analogy to this
situation. I starts with aliens visiting the Earth and accidently leaving behind a device
that can allow metal to be manipulated by softening it, then hardening it. The device gets
copied and mass produced. When they returned a year later, they come back and cannot fathom
how their device could have resulted in anarchy. THAT is the internet. 5 Recommend Share
Let me ask you all a question. If your neighbor told you the fire in a nearby Oregon town was
started by antifa, how would you disprove it? Since you cannot provide evidence for a
negative statement, it's difficult. There is actually some evidence that antifa did start the
fire: a voice said it on the radio, and tv showed them lighting fireworks in Portland. This
isn't very good evidence, but it is evidence, and you can't produce any evidence that antifa
did not do it (because there can't be any.) So you are in the position of asking your
neighbor to look at the quality of the evidence. This is something very few outside the legal
and scientific world are capable of. But that is all you have. Ultimately, it really does go
back to belief. How many of us could independently prove that the earth turns around the sun?
Those of us who aren't astronomers choose to accept this belief based on what we've been
told, and that's how it is with antifa starting the fires.
Kristof is afraid that fires in the West represent the new normal. The evidence suggests that
this fear is well-founded. He is concerned about the government's paralysis. That is partly
due to Trump, who stands a good chance of being reelected on November 3. He is worried about
ordinary citizens seeking oversimplified answers and finding them in the conspiracy theories
presenting the fire as the work of antifa. I am more worried about the breakdown in
credibility of news sources like the NY Times, which finds itself in competition with Fox
News and a host of online sources. Indeed, you-tube and facebook will select news stories for
you, confirming whatever bias you bring to your reading of the news. There is no guarantee
that democracy will survive. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the realization
that not only the right, but the left, is subject to oversimplified presentations of global
warming. Global warming is a consequence of too much population growth. But as we argue over
freedoms for LGBTQ minorities liberals have neglected the importance of freedom of speech.
And voices which have warned about population growth have been simply ignored by the left. It
isn't enough to shift from Fords using gasoline to Teslas running on electricity. We also
need to control population growth. The population of earth will double again by 2072 if
current rates continue. Population growth threatens to overwhelm the attempts to move to
clean energy. 2 Recommend
The scientific consensus will also conclude that not allowing wildfires to burn compounds the
problem. While what I am about to type is not science, continued development in fire prone
areas amplifies and compounds every aspect of the problem. From my perspective the system has
evolved to socializing cost and privatizing cost in every way. I don't see it getting better,
until such time as individuals are held accountable this should be considered normal.
@secular socialist dem PG&E just paid billions in fines and PLEADED GUILTY in starting
last year's Paradise fire. They also have already admitted fault in several fires started by
their faulty, untended grid. "Individuals" don't need to be held accountable unless there are
rules in place for them to follow regarding wildfire. There already are. Most already do. Why
do folks act so proud about their 'anti-science' opinion? It's not like this conversation
isn't ongoing; nobody argues that development in fire prone areas' carries risks. So does
rebuilding in Oklahoma, Florida and Louisiana..... You're right (although confused) about
socializing RISK and privatizing PROFIT. See PG&E above.
Unsure how people lighting fires directly indicates climate change is corroborated. The
fellow who was arrested in Tacoma, WA: https://thepostmillennial.com/antifa-activist-charged-for-fire-set-in-washington
Looking to past wildfires, like the one's in Montana & Idaho in 2008, 5.5 million acres
were burned and certain interest groups advocated for them to burn out because it's apart of
the natural cycle. Federal government shouldn't send assistance unless it's possibly to
communities in threat of burning, who are humans to say we ought to stop mother nature? It's
natural to let these fires burn, if you try to hinder it's course you are stopping the cycle.
Doug Terry Maryland, Washington DC metro
Sept. 20 Times Pick
Why do people believe wild stupid things more than actual facts? Partly it is because they
like the wild stupid thing more, it gives them some weird comfort. It is also because people
are busying with their lives and don't have time to gather enough information to counter the
wild rumor that flies around faster than the speed of sound. The most important aspect of
successful conspiracy theories is they impart to the person holding them the idea that they
are smarter than other people and have "cracked the code" that explains everything or a lot
of big things that people don't understand. Reading, thinking, considering and re-considering
can seem like hard work, particularly if it is foreign to one's experience and life training.
Why not just lock on to a cool idea that comes around, even if it is weird? .
This story highlights for me an equally growing problem, the "selective framing" by media
outlets on the left and right (NYT and Fox as just two examples). To read Mr Kristof's
version, you may believe that arsonists are wild figments of the unhinged radical right
imagination. To read the same story on Fox, Antifa arsonists are working their way up your
street.
"...the shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." And
yet reality still exist. Normally, if someone starts to exhibit the kind of behavior that
these "vigilantes" are - screaming about boogeymen, thinking people are out to get them,
engaging in aggressive behavior based on paranoid fantasies, creating self-reinforcing
delusions, becoming obsessed with baseless conspiracy theories - we would rightly diagnose
them as being mentally ill, and to the extent that they represent a danger to others, confine
them. I don't think we can afford to see this as just a time of extreme differences of
opinion. Facts, truth and reality are still actual, tangible things. And those who have
become so disassociated from them that they are stopping vehicles and hunting down their
fellow citizen need to be dealt with appropriately.
We have been witnessing the start of the Second Civil War in America. If we accept the
definition of a civil war as a conflict between factions of citizens for either secession or
control of the government--including organizations within the existing government--then we
are in the beginning stages of a Second Civil War. The question is what the level of violence
will be (not will there be violence, but how much violence). We are beginning to see
indications of that level. When naturally or accidentally caused wildfires are attributed to
one faction as a way to stoke the fires of civil violence, then physical violence between
factions is a heartbeat away simply because of the falsity and extremity of the accusations.
The era of peaceful protest has passed because of the intensity of feelings on both sides;
the anger produced when a government begins denying civil rights, e.g., Freedom of Speech and
the Right to Assemble, through legal actions where protest organizers could be charged with
sedition (see Barr's comments, 9/16/2020, NYT), which then suggests that all protests become
illegal, the fires of violence are stoked. With a heavily-armed populace on both sides,
gunfire is a hair-trigger pull away. If Trump and the Republican's intention was to remake
America in their image (I leave it to you to supply that image), they are succeeding. If
Putin's intention was to bring down America, he is succeeding. If Xi's intention was to
dominate the world, he is on that path. Vote 33 Recommend Share
... There's an old saying "Those who the gods would destroy they first make mad." I have come
to the conclusion that America has gone qute a long way down that road.
And yet, Mr. Kristoff, you never make mention of the real threat that groups like Antifa and
other radical left rioters pose to this country (forgetting about attacks on federal
buildings in Portland? Attempts to firebomb courthouses? Violence against law enforcement
officers?). No, instead it's always Trump, or Trump supporters who are your focus. I do not
know whether Antifa has been involved in any of these recent fires, but I do know that these
violent elements on the left pose a massive danger to our democracy. You are correct about
one thing, though: We should brace ourselves. It's just "what" we need to brace for that is
off mark in your article...
It's heartbreaking to watch these three West Coast states burned. For days, the sky was red
and the air was unbreathable. But the saddest part was the feeling of helplessness.
40 years ago, I hitchhiked around the Pacific Northwest during the summer after Mt. St.
Helens blew up. Mt. Rainier was ash-coated, as were the wild blueberries I often ate. Epic
and Biblical are words inadequate to describe that destruction near Mt. St. Helens, with
millions of huge, old trees blown down, piles of mud, and rivers diverted. Yet I and others
knew that eventually, that land would regrow, and it did.
I see a lot of egotism and self-love on both sides. The so-called progressives in our
community are breeding at baby boom levels, driving SUVs, and, before the pandemic, you'd see
a dozen school buses idling outside every school. Development is out of control as people
flee from the city, and people flee from here, or downsize, and breed and breed and breed.
Two years ago, we had a flash flood and our street was under water, and there was a lot of
damage all over town. Hurricane Irene in 2011 left many with over a foot of water in their
basements. And let's not even start on Sandy. My friend lives in Pensacola; their downtown
area is under three or four feet of water from Hurricane Sally. It's not just fire, it's
floods, and it's not just the GOP which is the problem...
I don't blame anyone for guarding their roads if they think arsonists are about. The
Tillamook Burn was larger and more devastating than these fires but are we to blame climate
change ? Environmentalists and Liberals who do not even live out West, who did not rely upon
Logging, placed their concerns about the Spotted Owl and Virgin Forests about the danger of
Forest Fires and the livelihood of Loggers and the Towns and Peoples who depended upon
Logging. Managed Logging of Forests is not an inherently evil act. Clearing the bush and dead
trees is not bad in and of itself. Let Logging companies responsibly manage sections of the
Forrests, let Towns clear fire breaks around their perimeters. Place large Water towers in
strategic points throughout the Forests, huge mounds of dirt/sand/gravel next to them so that
the Firefighters have what they need to fight the fires. Force developers to build houses 50
feet apart. Require fireproof roofs, require thinning of trees in housing developments.
Require volunteer Fire Departments in every neighborhood so that if they do nothing else,
they can cut a fire break, water down the grasses around their neighborhoods, chase and
extinguish embers, something/anything versus fleeing their homes without putting up a fight.
"... dry conditions exacerbated by climate change coupled with an unusual windstorm ..." May
I add that a couple of other things have also contributed to making the fires worse or making
them harder to manage? For a century or so, in California, Oregon and Washington we have not
been letting the normal, periodic fires burn. Consequently, a great deal of fuel has built up
on the forest floor. Second, folks have increasingly been building homes or even
neighborhoods in places which have historically seen such normal, periodic fires.
@Robert Yes. But now controlled burns are a bit problematic, given the droughts, the heat,
the massive fuel loads from all the dead trees. It's just so easy for the controlled burns to
get out of control.
Hi, I am from Clackamas County metro. Every time a FaceBook "Friend" (and I personally know
all of mine) posted a rumor, I tried to find the footage from any of our 4 local news
stations to depute their post but they just shared another one. One said she didn't trust KGW
8 the local NBC station and when I told her the same story was on KPTV 12, the local Fox
station. She said, "I'm just stressed"
@David Biesecker Remember that half the people are of below average intelligence. That may
answer the existence of the small percentage of conspiracy theorists. One problem is social
media provides free and outsized loudspeaker systems that enables them to find each other.
@M.i. Estner First, let me identify myself as a liberal Democrat who has a masters degree. I
find it more than disheartening when half of the country, or half of rural or not formally
educated folks are said to have low intelligent quotas, critical thinking skills or
analytical abilities. You better believe that when a highly trained Eastern Oregon
firefighter is assessing how to save peoples lives, homes and land, has to quickly act with
their many faceted skill set and are calling on abilities you or I would not be able to
fathom. Same with farmers of large pieces of complicated crops and land. Same with city
managers, librarians, and social workers for the elderly--all having low city budgets. What
about the veterinarians, doctors and nurses in rural areas? This is exactly the same as
calling Black or Hispanics people of lower intelligence. And, there are different types of
intelligence. I know a literary critic, a liberal Democrat, who doesn't have the critical
thinking skills to run her own home or raise her children. If you look, you can see these
same differences in any group. It has to do with the way people are raised, what they are
using their skill sets for, what information they are used to consuming, money, ideology,
etc...And it has to do with being devalued for growing your food, producing your meat,
chicken and eggs. I'm not excusing the violence, guns, racism and hatred. These divides have
been with us for ages. Please don't stoke the fires.
If we have a selfish federal government, then we will have selfish states and people.
Everyone is for himself or herself. No one will think about other people or public good. It
all started from the top
In 2017, 2018, and 2019 northern California's new phenomenon of forceful 40 to 60 miles per
hour winds - in Fall, no less - caused old and aging electrical equipment to malfunction. As
a consequence, too much of Santa Rosa burnt to the ground, and the entire town of Paradise
ceased to exist. This year during the heat of a hotter than usual summer following yet
another dry winter, we had dry lightning strikes from Sonoma County to Santa Clara County and
beyond.
Yes, the science is clear and you fail to mention it. The forest fires reach critical mass
and spread because of the surplus of dead or dying trees. They are there because the federal
government essentially no longer allows logging on its vast landholdings and also fails to
allow controlled burns to clean out the tinderbox. I won't bother attaching a link because
any Google search proves the point. Why focus on hysteria and rumermongering among the
Deplorables? Come on, Mr. Kristof, you were a Deplorable once (when you were a kid growing up
in the countryside) as was I. Please defend them sometimes, particularly when the actual
causes are so well documented.
@Stuck on a mountain Western States are working to clear the brush from forests where, due to
our previous incomplete understanding of forest ecology, fires were suppressed for a century.
However, the cost is astronomical and there are millions of acres left to clear. Spending
their entire forest management budgets fighting current wildfires doesn't help. We've been
doing controlled burns for decades but in many areas, they're now too dangerous. Dry forests
and a dense understory can quickly turn a "controlled burn" into a conflagration. Many
ranchers and timber companies who profit from our state and national forests seem unwilling
to pay to keep those forests healthy. People who live in or near forests mostly have incomes
too low to pay for forest management. The National Forest Service, Department of the Interior
and USDA have made some progress, but the problem is huge. Saying we can prevent forest fires
by allowing larger timber harvests is an oversimplification. No solution to this complex
issue will be simple, perfect or cheap.
Wacky conspiracy theories to explain seemingly bizarre and unusual occurrences have been
around since the dawn of human cognition. But in an electronic/social media age, these get
spread even faster than a wind-blown fire climbs a canyon hillside. Previously, they were
spread one set of ears at a time; now millions of eyes can read them every second. And that
is a major part of the problem.
As a grad student in sociology, having lived through the 60s and participated in the
counterculture, I was deeply intrigued by the social construction of reality - how we come to
share a taken-for-granted world. This is a long-standing concern within sociological social
psychology. We examined how language, interpersonal communications, media and social
structure shaped ones perception of one's self, what is real, what's important. At the time,
however, this was considered theoretical and academic. 40 years later, understanding how
Americans' realities have come to diverge is no longer armchair social science. It's urgent
and in our faces, as is the question of how can we heal this terrible fracturing of our
world?
@DeHypnotist Yes. When studying for the degree in and then teaching sociology in my early
years, I learned that, too. But, I have to admit, it's actually taken all the decades of life
since then, and now the obvious confirmation of it by this current 'reality' to actually
realize, deep down in my guts, that we 'make up' our so-called 'social reality' simply to
serve the most basic of biological requirements: the need to dominate in the deadly
completion with the other 'tribes' of our species just to survive. We are, after all, animals
like all the others, no matter how much we blab about how much 'smarter' we are.
@Alex B The primal driver, deep in the core of our brain, is usefully thought of as
"reptilian." Cold-blooded. Egoistic. Hedonistic. And, in extreme cases, narcissistic, and,
heaven forbid when all three are present...
I lived for a few years in Brazil when it was a dictatorship. The similarities between Brazil
and what is happening in the US is startling. The police were being used to quell peaceful
protesters and the justice system co-opted by authorities, fear mongering were present, just
as now in the US....
I didn't live in the US from 1977-1999, only visiting on short trips. That enabled me to see
changes in society that were slow and not seen by those residing here. And when I came back
permanently I could feel immediately a deep change....
Perhaps an apt metaphor for the "danger sign ahead" is the approach of a Category three
hurricane and it's increasing in intensity. One of the stark disconnects is between the
message in an article like this and the politicians and citizens who are little concerned
about tempering rhetoric and elevating the importance of eschewing misinformation. We are in
the Misinformation Age and the victims of a cyber war, evolving into a civil war.
@ML What is happening here? These are the beginnings of what happened in Germany in the 30s.
Over there the reason was the loss of WWI. Here, is the obvious decline of the American
lifestyle and we have not seen anything yet. The range of the economic decline is covered by
7 trillion dollars in phony money. I fervently hope and pray that is not too late to stop the
process. All men and women of goodwill have to rally to restore a sane, and one, country .
Stay safe! It is going to get worse before it gets better.
@FunkyIrishman Right on. Water is an enormous issue waiting to happen here -- and Wisconsin
is estimated to have between 10 and 20 percent of the world's fresh water (depending on how
it's calculated and whether that includes some of Lakes Michigan and Superior. A Dept. of
Climate, Weather and Water would be a logical cabinet department.
@FunkyIrishman And polluting the potable water continues sometimes by the most resolvable
modern approaches: sewers and water treatment plants. Reagan ended federal funding for sewers
leaving septic systems (and now ancient sewers) where sewers would lead to protected fresh
water. All the medicines, chemicals, and toxins seep unseen but very real into fresh and also
salt water. We are not a modern nation any more.
"... Discussion about ending Nord Stream 2 resumed last month, when EU politicians debated further sanctions, following the suspected poisoning of Navalny. Naryshkin believes that the US is using the accusations of poisoning as a pretext to sell more LNG to Europe. On Thursday, MEPs demanded that Germany cancel construction of the pipeline. ..."
The US is working hard to keep the spotlight on the case of Alexey
Navalny as a way to help block construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, according to Sergey
Naryshkin, head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (the SVR).
Naryshkin believes that Washington wants to block Nord Stream 2 so it can prevent Moscow
from efficiently providing gas to the continent, thereby increasing demand for American
liquefied natural gas (LNG) in other European states. As things stand, Russia delivers a large
percentage of the continent's gas, and the pipeline would connect the country's gas supply
directly to Germany, under the Baltic Sea. The project is more than 90 percent
complete.
"It is extremely important for Washington to end this project," Naryshkin said,
explaining that the alleged poisoning of opposition figure Navalny has become an excuse to stop
Nord Stream 2's construction.
The United States has long been opposed to the project, somewhat incredibly claiming that it
would "undermine Europe's overall energy security and stability," but many believe that
Washington's true motivations are economic.
Discussion about ending Nord Stream 2 resumed last month, when EU politicians debated
further sanctions, following the suspected poisoning of Navalny. Naryshkin believes that the US
is using the accusations of poisoning as a pretext to sell more LNG to Europe. On Thursday,
MEPs demanded that Germany cancel construction of the pipeline.
Despite US pressure, Naryshkin has expressed hope that the EU will rely on common sense
before the "cold winter" and likened the proposed halting of Nord Stream 2 to
"cutting off the nose to spite the face."
Late last month, Russian anti-corruption activist Navalny was hospitalized in the Siberian
city of Omsk after he became ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. Two days later, after a
request from his family and associates, he was flown to Berlin for treatment at that city's
Charité clinic. Following tests, German authorities announced that Navalny was poisoned
with a substance from the Novichok group of nerve agents. After the diagnosis, Heiko Maas, the
German Foreign Minister, told Berlin tabloid Bild that he hopes "the Russians don't force
[the Germans] to change [their] stance on Nord Stream 2."
"... "Another chasm opened between middle-class Westerners and their wealthy compatriots. Here, too, the middle class lost ground. It seemed that the wealthiest people in rich countries and almost everybody in Asia benefited from globalization, while only the middle class of the rich world lost out in relative terms. These facts supported the notion that the rise of "populist" political parties and leaders in the West stemmed from middle-class disenchantment. ..."
The world is becoming more equal but largely at the expense of middle-class Westerners,
according to a recent paper by Branko Milanovic , a Stone Center Senior Scholar
and a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Milanovic's paper was published
in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),
and was titled: The World
Is Becoming More Equal, Even as Globalization Hurts Middle-Class Westerners . Broadly
speaking, globalization is the process of increased " worldwide
integration of the economic, cultural, political, religious, and social systems" of the
globe,
producing an increased flow of goods, capital, labour, and information, across national
borders. It was a process that gained steam particularly in the mid-1980s, with globalization
having the greatest transformative impact on life
since the Industrial Revolution .
Milanovic's paper starts by arguing that the world became more
equal between the end of the Cold War and 2007/08 financial crisis, a period of high
globalization. During this period however, globalization weakened the middle class in the West.
As Milanovic writes
:
"The results highlighted two important cleavages [or divisions]: one between middle-class
Asians and middle-class Westerners and one between middle-class Westerners and their richer
compatriots. In both comparisons, the Western middle class was on the losing end. Middle-class
Westerners saw less income growth than (comparatively poorer) Asians, providing further
evidence of one of the defining dynamics of globalization: in the last 40 years, many jobs in
Europe and North America were either outsourced to Asia or eliminated as a result of
competition with Chinese industries. This was the first tension of globalization: Asian growth
seems to take place on the backs of the Western middle class."
"Another chasm opened between middle-class Westerners and their wealthy compatriots.
Here, too, the middle class lost ground. It seemed that the wealthiest people in rich countries
and almost everybody in Asia benefited from globalization, while only the middle class of the
rich world lost out in relative terms. These facts supported the notion that the rise of
"populist" political parties and leaders in the West stemmed from middle-class
disenchantment. "
Milanovic goes on to note
that in an updated paper that looks at incomes in 130 countries from 2008 to 2013-14, the first
tension of globalization holds true: in that, the incomes of the non-Western middle class grew
more than the incomes of the middle class in the West. The impact of globalization on the
Western middle class is imperative to understand. Globalization is a process that has produced
winners and losers , and
the Western middle class has been the greatest loser.
In my opinion, any system that weakens the middle class in any country should be seen as
counterproductive. Having a strong middle class is one of the most important tenets in building
a strong, prosperous, and stable society. The middle class serves as the bedrock of any
country: those who comprise the middle-class work hard, pay taxes, and buy goods. A true
solution to poverty in underdeveloped countries would create more prosperity for everyone, not
take prosperity from one region and redirect it into another. This so-called solution creates
at least as many problems as it supposedly solves.
Globalization has produced, and will seemingly continue to produce, a global standardization
of wealth in many ways. For those special interests who are in the process of creating a global
system, an economic uniformity across the globe is advantageous for the creation of this
one-world system.
"... Passenger logs for Epstein's four helicopters and three planes have been subpoenaed by Virgin Islands AG Denise George, who recently sued the disgraced financier's estate for 22 counts including human trafficking, child abuse, neglect, prostitution, aggravated rape, and forced labor, according to a Sunday report by the UK Mirror. ..."
"... Epstein pilot David Rodgers previously provided a passenger log in 2009 tying dozens of politicians, actors, and other celebrities to the infamous sex offender – including former US President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey, and model Naomi Campbell. ..."
"... George has also subpoenaed more than 10 banks – including JPMorgan, Citibank, and Deutsche Bank – in her quest to get to the bottom of the financial edifice Epstein built up before he died. The financial institutions have been ordered to submit documents related to some 30 corporations, trusts, and nonprofit entities tied to the predatory playboy. ..."
The US Virgin Islands Attorney General has subpoenaed 21 years' worth of deceased pedophile
Jeffrey Epstein's flight logs, reportedly striking fear in the hearts of high-profile
passengers not yet exposed as Lolita Express riders.
Passenger logs for Epstein's four helicopters and three planes have been subpoenaed by
Virgin Islands AG Denise George, who recently sued the disgraced financier's estate for 22
counts including human trafficking, child abuse, neglect, prostitution, aggravated rape, and
forced labor, according to a Sunday report by the UK Mirror.
In addition to the passenger lists, George has requisitioned " complaints or reports of
potentially suspicious conduct " and any " personal notes " the pilots made while
flying Epstein's alleged harem of underage girls around the world. She also wants the names and
contact information of anyone who worked for the pilots – or who " integrated with or
observed " Epstein and his passengers.
Epstein pilot David Rodgers previously provided a passenger log in 2009 tying dozens of
politicians, actors, and other celebrities to the infamous sex offender – including
former US President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey, and model Naomi Campbell.
However,
lawyers for Epstein's alleged victims have argued that list did not include flights by
Epstein's chief pilot, Larry Visoski, who allegedly worked for him for over 25 years.
" The records that have been subpoenaed will make the ones Rodgers provided look like a
Post-It note ," a source told the Mirror over the weekend, claiming that George's subpoena
had triggered a " panic among many of the rich and famous. "
Epstein's private plane, nicknamed the Lolita Express, counted among its passengers such
luminaries as the UK's Prince Andrew, celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, actor Chris Tucker,
Harvard economist Larry Summers, Hyatt hotel mogul Tom Pritzker, and model agency manager
Jean-Luc Brunel along with Campbell, Spacey, and Clinton (who the logs show flew with Epstein
over two dozen times). However, the passengers who enjoyed his other aircraft have not been
made public – yet.
George has also subpoenaed more than 10 banks – including JPMorgan, Citibank, and
Deutsche Bank – in her quest to get to the bottom of the financial edifice Epstein built
up before he died. The financial institutions have been ordered to submit documents related to
some 30 corporations, trusts, and nonprofit entities tied to the predatory playboy.
Epstein supposedly committed suicide last year in a Manhattan jail facility, while his
accused madam Ghislaine Maxwell remains imprisoned in a Brooklyn detention center awaiting
trial on charges related to child trafficking and perjury after her arrest earlier this year.
Maxwell's lawyers have struggled to keep documents introduced as part of a recent defamation
suit by one of Epstein's alleged victims under seal, insisting the information would deny her a
fair trial.
Why does neoclassical economics produce ponzi schemes of inflated asset prices?
It makes you think you are creating wealth by inflating asset prices
Bank credit flows into inflating asset prices, debt rises faster than GDP and you
eventually get a financial crisis.
No one notices the private debt building up in the economy as neoclassical economics
doesn't consider debt.
This economics still has its 1920s problems. What is the fundamental flaw in the free
market theory of neoclassical economics? The University of Chicago worked that out in the
1930s after last time. Banks can inflate asset prices with the money they create from bank
loans.
Henry Simons and Irving Fisher supported the Chicago Plan to take away the bankers ability
to create money.
"Simons envisioned banks that would have a choice of two types of holdings: long-term
bonds and cash. Simultaneously, they would hold increased reserves, up to 100%. Simons saw
this as beneficial in that its ultimate consequences would be the prevention of
"bank-financed inflation of securities and real estate" through the leveraged creation of
secondary forms of money."
It looks like they did have some idea what the problem was.At the end of the 1920s, the US
was a ponzi scheme of inflated asset prices. The use of neoclassical economics and the belief
in free markets, made them think that inflated asset prices represented real wealth
accumulation.
1929 – Wakey, wakey time. Why did it cause the US financial system to collapse in
1929? Bankers get to create money out of nothing, through bank loans, and get to charge
interest on it.
Bankers do need to ensure the vast majority of that money gets paid back, and this is
where they get into serious trouble.
Banking requires prudent lending.
If someone can't repay a loan, they need to repossess that asset and sell it to recoup
that money. If they use bank loans to inflate asset prices they get into a world of trouble
when those asset prices collapse.
As the real estate and stock market collapsed the banks became insolvent as their assets
didn't cover their liabilities.
They could no longer repossess and sell those assets to cover the outstanding loans and
they do need to get most of the money they lend out back again to balance their books.
The banks become insolvent and collapsed, along with the US economy.
When banks have been lending to inflate asset prices the financial system is in a
precarious state and can easily collapse.
What was the ponzi scheme of inflated asset prices that collapsed in Japan in 1991?
Japanese real estate.
They avoided a Great Depression by saving the banks.
They killed growth for the next 30 years by leaving the debt in place.
What was the ponzi scheme of inflated asset prices that collapsed in 2008?
"It's nearly $14 trillion pyramid of super leveraged toxic assets was built on the back of
$1.4 trillion of US sub-prime loans, and dispersed throughout the world" All the Presidents
Bankers, Nomi Prins.
They avoided a Great Depression by saving the banks.
They left Western economies struggling by leaving the debt in place, just like Japan.
It's not as bad as Japan as we didn't let asset prices crash in the West, but it is this
problem has made our economies so sluggish since 2008.
In 2020, the world is a ponzi scheme of inflated asset prices.
The use of neoclassical economics and the belief in free markets, made them think that
inflated asset prices represented real wealth accumulation.
The central banks have to keep pumping in liquidity to stop all the ponzi schemes
collapsing.
If the ponzi schemes collapse, this feeds back into the financial system when bankers have
been lending to inflate asset prices.
play_arrow
Sound of the Suburbs , 1 hour ago
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy towards a financial
crisis.
You don't want to leave them to their own devices.
On a BBC documentary, comparing 1929 to 2008, it said the last time US bankers made as
much money as they did before 2008 was in the 1920s.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial
crisis.
The financial crisis appears to come out of a clear blue sky when you use an economics
that doesn't consider debt.
The economics of globalisation has always had an Achilles' heel.
The 1920s roared with debt based consumption and speculation until it all tipped over into
the debt deflation of the Great Depression. No one realised the problems that were building
up in the economy as they used an economics that doesn't look at debt, neoclassical
economics.
Not considering private debt is the Achilles' heel of neoclassical economics.
Sound of the Suburbs , 1 hour ago
Come on.
Wakey, wakey.
You are just repeating 1920s mistakes.
The Americans wrapped a new ideology, neoliberalism, around 1920s economics and repeated
the economic mistakes of the 1920s.
Policymakers couldn't see what Glass-Steagall did, as they thought banks were financial
intermediaries.
It separates the money creation side of banking from the investment side of banking, and
stops bankers producing securities; they buy themselves with money they create out of
nothing.
"By early 1929, loans from these non-banking sources were approximately equal to those
from the banks. Later they became much greater. The Federal Reserve Authorities took it for
granted that they had no influence over these funds"
He's talking about "shadow banking".
They thought leverage was great before 1929; they saw what happened when it worked in
reverse after 1929.
Leverage acts like a multiplier.
It multiplies profits on the way up.
It multiplies losses on the way down.
Today's bankers seem to have learnt something from past mistakes.
They took the multiplied profits on the way up.
Taxpayers picked up the multiplied losses on the way down.
Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 -- 48, observed what the capital accumulation of
neoclassical economics did to the US economy in the 1920s.
"a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion
of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking
purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of
effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital
accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by
borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped"
The problem; wealth concentrates until the system collapses.
"The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing." Mariner Eccles, FED chair
1934 -- 48
Your wages aren't high enough, have a Payday loan.
You need a house, have a sub-prime mortgage.
You need a car, have a sub-prime auto loan.
You need a good education, have a student loan.
Still not getting by?
Load up on credit cards.
"When the credit ran out, the game stopped" Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 -- 48
...... etc .....
x_Maurizio , 1 hour ago
DISAGREE ON EVERY SINGLE WORD, in particular with this:
rules/regulations/capital requirements have infected the global banking system and
rendered it a harvesting operation for retail and a derivatives rule/regulation/capital
requirment evasion device for the pursuit of profit
absolutely false.
Banking system is in the 4th part of a cycle that they have created !
The first part has been capital harvesting (1970-1980)
The second part has been deregulation and hunt for stellar return on investment
The third part is financialisation and plunder of real economy
The fourth part is the destruction of real economy through debt, deflation, extreme
financial activity seeking for Yields. The banks have been the fortresses of globalisation.
Commercial banking has been absorbed by investment banking. In this deflationary
environment Commercial Banking has practice NO ROI.
You want to see the Banks working again? Reintroduce the Glass Steagall and separate again
investment and commercial banking. Repeal all what has been done between 1987 and 1999. THAT
will stop globalisation, that will stop the slow bleeding-to-death of westerne economies,
that will save commercial banking and our capitalistic societies.
Neoliberalism is about redistribution of wealth up -- that's why. And the state under neoliberalism ensured this with the
tax policy, wreaked anti-monopoly laws, deregulation, offshoring and other means
At the same time due to the Iron law of oligarchy organized minority (oligarchs) will always control unorganized
majority ("despicables") so chances to reverse the neoliberal transformation of the society which was the result of Neoliberal
Counterrevolutions of 1980th, currently are slim. Only some earthquake like evens, for example, another oil crisis or the loss by
the dollar of the status of reserve currency might change that.
The American people own most of the wealth – private and public – and most of
the information in the country. The top one percent do not.
The American people have most of the power in the country. The top one percent do not.
These assertions may surprise you, because the top one percent and the giant corporations
work overtime to control what you own . This means they do not have to seize what
you own so long as their control provides them with both riches and power over
you.
Let's spell this out with specifics. Our Constitution starts with the words, "We the People
"; it doesn't start with 'we the corporations' or 'we the Congress' or 'we the super-rich.' The
sovereign authority under the Constitution is us ; we the people are the bosses. But we give
our power away to the Big Boys who run the big companies that control most of our elected
politicians. The politicians in turn proceed to corrupt our elections with campaign money,
gerrymandering, deceitful ads, voter obstructions, and a totally dominant two-party duopoly.
This corporate state destroys competitive democracy which would give our votes meaning,
choices, and effectiveness.
Shouldn't we be discussing why, when we own the vast federal public land, one-third of
America – and the vast public airwaves, do we give control of these resources to
corporations every day of the year to profit from at our expense? We give the television and
radio stations, that block our voices, free control and use of the airwaves, 24/7. We receive
very little in royalties from the energy, mining, timber, and grazing companies extracting huge
wealth from our federal lands.
We send our tax dollars to Washington, D.C., and the federal government gives trillions of
these dollars to companies in the form of subsidies and bailouts.
Trillions of dollars are devoted to government research and development (R&D), which has
built or expanded private companies. These include such industries as aerospace,
pharmaceuticals, military weapons, computers, internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and
containerization.
Our taxpayer-funded R&D is essentially given away free to these for-profit businesses.
We the People receive no royalties nor profit-sharing returns on these public investments.
Worse, we pay gouging prices for drugs and other products developed with our tax dollars.
We have trillions of dollars in savings and retirement money placed in giant mutual and
pension funds. The managers of these institutions make big profits by investing your money in
the stock and bond markets. If you controlled these trillions of dollars in stocks and bonds
that you own, that is if there was real shareholder and bondholder power, you would control the
ownership of all the big companies and turn the tables on the Big Bosses. Polls show a big
majority of people think Big Business has too much power and control over us. Nonetheless, we
regularly give these plutocrats control over what we own.
We own our personal information. Yet, we give it totally free to the likes of Facebook,
Google, Instagram, and YouTube, etc. so they can make trillions of dollars selling data on what
we buy, what we like, what we think, and what we're addicted to in the marketplace. The
advertisers then pester us 24/7 and even betray our trust. Imagine Alexa eavesdropping in our
homes and businesses. High-tech companies should not be privy to our personal information.
Unfortunately, giving companies our personal information, from which they profit immensely
and gouge and penalize us profusely, started long ago. The moment we took out credit cards, for
example, we began to lose control of our money and our privacy. With the internet, companies
are generating new payment-system controls, with their dictatorial fine-print agreements and
never-ending additional surcharges, driven by their greedy overreaches.
People spend lots of time just trying to get through to these companies for refunds,
adjustments, corrections, and simple answers to their questions.
Why have we handed over the enormous assets we own to this expanding corporate state? Why
have we surrendered to statism or corporate socialism? The corporate "Borg" is sucking the
ready availability of the good life, decent, secure livelihoods assured by our collective
self-reliance, and the freedom to shape our future out of our political economy.
Why are we allowing the United States – this rich land of ours – to have so many
impoverished, powerless people, dominated by the few? With ever greater concentration or powers
under corrupt Trumpism and its corporate supremacists, control of our lives is getting
worse.
It starts with us being indoctrinated into being powerless (civic skills and practice are
not taught in schools). This leads to the people not taking control of Congress (only 535 of
them). We are allowing elections and debates to ignore raising these basic democratic issues of
who owns what and who should control our commonwealth.
David Bollier and his colleagues are working to have adults and students learn about the
commons – owned by all of us – and the few examples of people sharing in our
commonwealth. Through the Alaska Permanent Fund, every Alaskan gets about $2000 a year from the
royalties' oil companies pay for taking the people's oil from that state.
If you're interested in reading further about the "commons" we own but do not control go to
bollier.org and
breakingthroughpower.org . It's in our hands!
Unfortunately in his brilliant analysis of USA-Russia relations Stephen Cohen never pointed out that the USA policy toward
Russia is dictated by the interests of maintaining global neoliberal empire and the concept of "Full Spectrum Dominance" which was
adopted by the USA neoliberal elite after the collapse of the USSR.
Like British empire the USA neoliberal empire is now overextended, metropolia is in secular stagnation with deterioration
standard of living of the bottom 80% of population, so the USA under Trump became more aggressive and dangerous on the international
arena. Trump administration behaves behaves like a cornered rat on international arena.
Notable quotes:
"... On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the "dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC Radio. ..."
"... from the start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem attacks. ..."
"... the opposition to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective, not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of Eurasia. ..."
"... Almost no one outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and military confrontation with Russia and China. ..."
"... My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. ..."
"... It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker. ..."
"... In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this day. ..."
On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the
"dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with
the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who
enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC
Radio.
A year ago, I reviewed his latest book, War With Russia? which drew upon the
material of those programs and took this scholar turned journalist into a new and highly
accessible genre of oral readings in print. The narrative style may have been more relaxed,
with simplified syntax, but the reasoning remained razor sharp. I urge those who are today
paying tribute to Steve, to buy and read the book, which is his best legacy.
From start to finish, Stephen F. Cohen was among America's best historians of his
generation, putting aside the specific subject matter that he treated: Nikolai Bukharin, his
dissertation topic and the material of his first and best known book; or, to put it more
broadly, the history of Russia (USSR) in the 20 th century. He was one of the very
rare cases of an historian deeply attentive to historiography, to causality and to logic. I
understood this when I read a book of his from the mid-1980s in which he explained why Russian
(Soviet) history was no longer attracting young students of quality: because there were no
unanswered questions, because we smugly assumed that we knew about that country all that there
was to know. That was when our expert community told us with one voice that the USSR was
entrapped in totalitarianism without any prospect for the overthrow of its oppressive
regime.
But my recollections of Steve also have a personal dimension going back six years or so when
a casual email correspondence between us flowered into a joint project that became the launch
of the American Committee for East West Accord (ACEWA). This was a revival of a
pro-détente association of academics and business people that existed from the mid-1970s
to the early 1990s, when, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the removal of the
Communist Party from power, the future of Russia in the family of nations we call the
'international community' seemed assured and there appeared to be no further need for such an
association as ACEWA.
I hasten to add that in the original ACEWA Steve and I were two ships that passed in the
night. With his base in Princeton, he was a protégé of the dean of diplomats then
in residence there, George Kennan, who was the leading light on the academic side of the ACEWA.
I was on the business side of the association, which was led by Don Kendall, chairman of
Pepsico and also for much of the 1970s chairman of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council of
which I was also a member. I published pro-détente articles in their newsletter and
published a lengthy piece on cooperation with the Soviet Union in agricultural and food
processing domains, my specialty at that time, in their collection of essays by leaders in the
U.S. business community entitled Common Sense in U.S.-Soviet Trade .
The academic contingent had, as one might assume, a 'progressive' coloration, while the
business contingent had a Nixon Republican coloration. Indeed, in the mid-1980s these two sides
split in their approach to the growing peace movement in the U.S. that was fed by opposition in
the 'thinking community' on university campuses to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars agenda. Kendall
shut the door at ACEWA to rabble rousing and the association did not rise to the occasion, so
that its disbanding in the early '90s went unnoticed.
In the re-incorporated American Committee, I helped out by assuming the formal obligations
of Treasurer and Secretary, and also became the group's European Coordinator from my base in
Brussels. At this point my communications with Steve were almost daily and emotionally quite
intense. This was a time when America's expert community on Russian affairs once again felt
certain that it knew everything there was to know about the country, and most particularly
about the nefarious "Putin regime." But whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, polite debate about the
USSR/Russia was entirely possible both behind closed doors and in public space, from the
start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following
Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the
official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a
welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly
found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem
attacks.
From my correspondence and several meetings with Steve at this time both in his New York
apartment and here in Brussels, when he and Katrina van der Heuvel came to participate in a
Round Table dedicated to relations with Russia at the Brussels Press Club that I arranged, I
knew that Steve was deeply hurt by these vitriolic attacks. He was at the time waging a
difficult campaign to establish a fellowship in support of graduate studies in Russian affairs.
It was touch and go, because of vicious opposition from some stalwarts of the profession to any
fellowship that bore Steve's name. Allow me to put the 'i' on this dispute: the opposition
to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the
profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective,
not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of
Eurasia. In the end, Steve and Katrina prevailed. The fellowships exist and, hopefully,
will provide sustenance to future studies when American attitudes towards Russia become less
politicized.
At all times and on all occasions, Steve Cohen was a voice of reason above all. The problem
of our age is that we are now not only living in a post-factual world, but in a post-logic
world. The public reads day after day the most outrageous and illogical assertions about
alleged Russian misdeeds posted by our most respected mainstream media including The New
York Times and The Washington Post . Almost no one dares to raise a hand and
suggest that this reporting is propaganda and that the public is being brainwashed. Steve did
exactly that in War With Russia? in a brilliant and restrained text.
Regrettably today we have no peace movement to speak of. Youth and our 'progressive' elites
are totally concerned over the fate of humanity in 30 or 40 years' time as a consequence of
Global Warming and rising seas. That is the essence of the Green Movement. Almost no one
outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two
years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and
military confrontation with Russia and China.
I fear it will take only some force majeure development such as we had in 1962 during the
Cuban Missile Crisis to awaken the broad public to the risks to our very survival that we are
incurring by ignoring the issues that Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Princeton and New
York University was bringing to the airwaves week after week on his radio program.
Postscript
In terms of action, the new ACEWA was even less effective than its predecessor, which had
avoided linking up with the peace movement of the 1980s and sought to exert influence on policy
through armchair talks with Senators and other statesmen in Washington behind closed doors of
(essentially) men's clubs.
However, the importance of the new ACEWA, and the national importance of Stephen Cohen lay
elsewhere.
This question of appraising Stephen Cohen's national importance is all the more timely given
that on the day of his death, 18 September, the nation also lost Supreme Justice Ruth Ginsburg,
about whose national importance no Americans, whether her fans or her opponents, had any
doubt.
My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became
one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. It
was not a role that he sought. It was thrust upon him by the expert community of international
affairs, including the Council on Foreign Relations, from which he reluctantly resigned over
this matter.
It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media
who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on
the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his
right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of
his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker.
In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of
hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to
recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most
revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral
counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this
day.
[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection
of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in
November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes
& noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the "View Inside" tab
on the book's webpages to browse.]
For eight-and-a-half decades, most Republican legislators (and some Democrats) have been
trying to get rid of Social Security .
The first step in Trump's assault on Social Security's funding took effect Sept. 1st.
On Trump's orders, the IRS ordered corporations to stop withholding Social Security
contributions from paychecks, through the end of the year.
Speaking on Fox Business recently, Trump advisor Larry Kudlow said that later this year
Trump will order the IRS to continue the deferral indefinitely.
Social Security's chief actuary wrote that if Social Security is defunded, some benefits
will be reduced next year, and that benefits will disappear entirely by the end of 2023.
If you are, or if you know someone on Social Security, please pass the word!
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For Americans living under coronavirus restrictions, it's a question too rarely asked. In fact it's actively discouraged.
Nice take on imbecilization of important and complex topics by the US MSM and politicians.
Money quote about neoliberal Dems like Obama and Biden "
But there are others for whom altruism is an alien concept.
Self-interest is all they know. These people never pause. They relentlessly press for any advantage, under any circumstances. They
see human suffering as a means to increase their power."
Another money quote: "in the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: You can't see it, but it's everywhere and
it's deadly."
Notable quotes:
"... But there are others for whom altruism is an alien concept. Self-interest is all they know. These people never pause. They relentlessly press for any advantage, under any circumstances. They see human suffering as a means to increase their power. ..."
"... Joe Biden's closest friend in the world, a prominent Martha's Vineyard kite-surfer called Barack Obama, echoed that message with his trademark restraint. Obama declawed that your "life" depends on voting for Joe Biden. ..."
"... One of the few Republicans who still hold elected office in California, state Assemblyman Heath Flora, last year called on using the state's $22 billion budget surplus to implement vegetation management. ..."
"... Fires don't spread as well without huge connected forests functioning as kindling. It's obvious, which is why it's unthinkable to mention it in some Democratic circles." ..."
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: Massive wildfires continue to sweep across huge portions of the Pacific Northwest.
In Oregon, half a million residents have been forced to evacuate -- one out of every ten people in the state.
Dozens are dead tonight, including small children. But the fires still aren't close to contained. Watch this report from Fox's
Jeff Paul:
Video report
And it continues as we speak, walls of flame consuming everything in their path: homes, animals, human beings. Tragedy on a
massive scale.
When something this awful happens, decent people pause. They put aside their own interests for a moment. They consider how they
can help. We've seen that kind of selflessness before.
This is, remember, the anniversary of 9-11.
But there are others for whom altruism is an alien concept. Self-interest is all
they know. These people never pause. They relentlessly press for any advantage, under any circumstances. They see human suffering
as a means to increase their power.
These are the people who turn funerals into political rallies and feel no shame for doing it.
As Americans burned to death, people like this swung into action immediately. They went on television with a partisan talking
point: Climate change caused these fires, they said. They didn't explain how that happened. They just kept saying it.
In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: you can't see it, but it's everywhere,
and it's deadly. And, like systemic racism, it's your fault: The American middle class did it. They ate too many hamburgers,
drove too many SUVs, had too many children.
A lot of them wear T-shirts to work and didn't finish college. That causes climate change too. And, worst of all, some of them
may vote for Donald Trump in November.
If there's anything that absolutely, definitively causes climate change -- and literally over a hundred percent of scientists
agree with this established fact -- it's voting for Donald Trump. You might as well start a tire fire. You're destroying the ozone
layer.
Joe Biden has checked the science, and he agrees. Yesterday, the people on Biden's staff who understand the internet tweeted out
an image of the wildfires, along with the message, "Climate change is already here -- and we're witnessing its devastating effects
every single day. We have to get President Trump out of the White House."
Again, by voting for Donald Trump, you've made hundreds of thousands of Oregonians homeless tonight. You've killed people.
Joe Biden's closest friend in the world, a prominent Martha's Vineyard kite-surfer called Barack Obama, echoed that message
with his trademark restraint. Obama declawed that your "life" depends on voting for Joe Biden.
At a time when sea levels are rising and we're about to see killer whales in the Rockies? Honestly, it doesn't seem like Obama is
overly concerned about climate change? And by the way, didn't he go to law school? When he did become a climate expert?
Those seem like good questions. But lawyers pretending to be scientists are now everywhere in the Democratic Party.
Here's the governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, a proud graduate of Willamette University law school, explaining that he's already
figured out the "cause" of the fires. Watch:
INSLEE: Fires are proof we need a stronger liberal agenda Sept 8 TRT: 18 Inslee: And these are conditions that are exacerbated
by the changing climate that we are suffering. And I do not believe that we should surrender these subdivisions or these houses
to climate change-exacerbated fires. We should fight the cause of these fires.
This is a crock. In fact, there is not a single scientist on earth who knows whether, or by how much, these fires may have been
"exacerbated" by warmer temperatures caused by "climate change," whatever that means anymore.
All we have is conjecture from a handful of scientists, none of whom have reached any definitive conclusions.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, for example, has admitted that it's, quote, "hard to determine whether climate change
played a role in sparking the fires."
Meanwhile, investigators have determined that the massive El Dorado fire in California, which has torched nearly 14,000 acres,
was caused by morons setting off some kind of fireworks. And then on Wednesday, police announced that a criminal investigation is
underway into the massive Almeda fire in Ashland, Oregon.
The sheriff there said it's too early to say what caused the fire, but he's said human remains were found at the suspected origin
point. Nothing is being ruled out, including arson.
The more you know, the more complicated it is, like everything. Serious people are just beginning to gather evidence to determine
what happened to cause this disaster.
But at the same time, unserious people are now everywhere on the media right now, drowning out nuance. Don't worry about the
facts, they say. Just trust us -- the sky orange is orange over San Francisco because households making $40,000 a year made the
mistake of voting for a Republican.
Therefore you must hand us total control of the nation's economy. Watch amateur arson detective Nancy Pelosi explain:
PELOSI: Mother Earth is angry. She's telling us, whether she's telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the
west, whatever it is, the climate crisis is real and has an impact.
Mother Nature is angry. Please. When was the last time Nancy Pelosi went outside? No one asked her. All we know is what she said:
climate change caused this. Of course.
No matter the natural disaster -- hurricanes, tornadoes, whatever -- climate change did it. Keep in mind, Nancy Pelosi owns two
sub-zero freezers. They cost $10,000 apiece.
We know because she showed them off on national television. Those use a lot of energy. Like Barack Obama, she constantly flies
private between her multi-million dollar estates all over the country.
Obviously, she doesn't care about climate change. And neither do her supporters -- otherwise, they'd be trying to destroy the
mansions she owns, not the hair salons that expose her hypocrisy.
For the left, this is really about blaming and ritually humiliating the middle-class for the election of Donald Trump. Joe Biden
knows that the Pennsylvanians who would be financially ruined by his
fracking
ban
are the same Pennsylvanians who flipped the state red in 2016 for the first time in a generation.
That's the whole point. One of the reasons Joe Biden is barely allowed outside is that he has no problem showing his contempt for
the middle-class he supposedly cares so much about.
In 2019, he openly
mocked
coal miners
and suggested they just get programming jobs once they're all fired. Watch:
BIDEN: I come from a family, an area where's coal mining – in Scranton. Anybody, that can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine,
sure as hell can learn how to program as well.
Learn to code! Hilarious. Joe Biden should try it. But there isn't time. The world is ending. Last summer, Sandy Cortez [AOC] did
the math and calculated we only have
12
years left to live
.
If that sounds bad, consider this -- Just four months after that warning, Sandy Cortez tweeted that we only have 10 years to "cut
carbon emissions in half."
Think about the math here. We lost two years in just four months. At that rate, we could literally all die unless Joe Biden wins
in November. Which is of course what they're saying.
On Tuesday, California Gavin Newsom pretty much said it Newsom abandoned science long ago. Science is too stringent, too western,
too patriarchal.
Newsom is a man of faith now. He's decided
climate
change caused all of this
, and that's final. He's not listening to any other arguments. Watch:
NEWSOM: I have no patience. And I say this lovingly, not as an ideologue, but as someone who prides himself on being open to
argument, interested in evidence. But I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers. It simply follows completely
inconsistent, that point of view, with the reality on the ground.
People like Gavin Newsom don't want to listen to any "climate change deniers." What's a "climate change denier?" Anyone who
thinks our ruling class has no idea how to run their states or protect their citizens.
Are we "climate change deniers" if we point out that California has failed to implement meaningful deforestation measures that
would have dramatically slowed the spread of these wildfires?
In 2018, a state oversight agency in California found that years of poor or nonexistent
forest
management policies
in the Sierra Nevada forests had contributed to wildfires.
One of the few Republicans who still hold elected office in California, state Assemblyman Heath Flora, last year called on
using the state's $22 billion budget surplus to implement vegetation management.
Fires don't spread as well without huge connected forests functioning as kindling. It's obvious, which is why it's
unthinkable to mention it in some Democratic circles."
Presumably, you're also a climate-change denier if you point out that six of the Oregon National Guard's wildfire-fighting
helicopters are currently in Afghanistan.
Instead of dropping water to suppress blazes, the Chinook aircraft are busy supplying a war effort that's been going on for
nearly 20 years. That seems significant. Has anyone asked Gavin Newsom or Jay Inslee about that? Do any of the Democrats who
control these states even care?
The answer, of course, is probably not. It was just last week that Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti admitted on-the-record that
his city has become completely third-world.
Of course, Garcetti didn't blame himself for this turn of events. He blamed you. Quote: "It's almost 3 p.m," Garcetti tweeted.
"Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees (or use a fan instead, turn off excess lights and unplug any
appliances you're not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part."
"Please do your part." Garcetti wants his constituents to suffer to try to solve a problem that Democrats in his state created.
Even now, as residents in Northern California are facing sweeping power outages in addition to wildfires.
In the meantime, Gavin Newsom has vowed that 50 percent of California's energy grid will be based on quote "renewable" energy
sources within a decade.
That means sources like wind and solar power -- which can't be dialed up to meet periods of extreme demand, like California is
seeing right now during its heatwave.
Newsom was asked last month whether he would consider revising this stance given the blackouts that have left millions of
Californians without power.
Newsom responded, quote, "We are going to radically change the way we produce and consume energy." In other words, The blackouts
will continue until morale improves. So will the wildfires. Get used to it.
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In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: You can't see it, but it's
everywhere and it's deadly.
#FoxNews
#Tucker
This is a direct result of Gavin Newsom eliminating forestation controls. Jerry Brown kept them in place, the only thing he
did correctly. Democrats are to blame for all of this.
When environmentalists pushed through their "leave forests alone, allow nature to be undisturbed" bs, California and other
states stopped clearing underbrush, also known as fire fuel and now we see a perfect example of cause and effect.
Don't get me wrong I am a conservatist , but with common sense , we can't conserve unless we protect and nurture nature to
thrive. In fact extremism in environmentalism destroys as we see. People dead, animals dead, homes destroyed, forest destroyed
because of extremism.
The narrative to leave forests alone happened long before Trump, believing otherwise makes you a useful idiot.
Congratulations.
You could Google this old narrative but will you find it, well it's Google, you have to find the people who heard and lived
the so called natural environmental push narrative, we remember and we remember the warnings. Congratulations, your ignorance
has caused harm.
"... We are witnessing a political game of chess where the only pieces being moved are the pawns, while the king and queen sit safely on a different board. ..."
@
6:29
""There needs to be unrest in the streets as there is unrest in our lives"" When the elite oligarchy ignore peaceful
protests, you get aggressive uprisings. It's human nature and good ol' fashioned patriotism.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God
"... In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a
blow to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding. ..."
Stephen F Cohen, the renowned American scholar on Russia and leading authority on US-Russian
relations, has died of lung cancer at the
age of 81.
As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject
of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet,
this is a real loss. I myself have cited Cohen's expert analysis many times in my own work, and
his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what's really going on with
the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions
against Moscow.
In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a blow
to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding.
I don't know how long Cohen had cancer. I don't know how long he was aware that he might not
have much time left on this earth. What I do know is he spent much of his energy in his final
years urgently trying to warn the world about the rapidly escalating danger of nuclear war,
which in our strange new reality he saw as in many ways completely unprecedented.
The last of the many books Cohen authored was 2019's
War
with Russia? , detailing his ideas on how the complex multi-front nature of the post-2016
cold
war escalations against Moscow combines with Russiagate and other factors to make it in
some ways more dangerous even than the most dangerous point of the previous cold war.
"You know it's easy to joke about this, except that we're at maybe the most dangerous moment
in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever," Cohen told The Young Turks in 2017. "And the reason is that we're
in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the
possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented
military buildup on Russia's border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between
Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are
flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."
Cohen repeatedly points to the most likely cause of a future nuclear war: not one that is
planned but one which erupts in tense, complex situations where "anything could happen" in the
chaos and confusion as a result of misfire, miscommunication or technical malfunction, as
nearly
happened many times during the last cold war.
"I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the
Cuban missile crisis," Cohen told Democracy
Now in 2017. "And arguably, it's more dangerous, because it's more complex. Therefore, we
-- and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these -- and, in my judgment, factless
accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in
American-Russian relations, we have an American president who's being politically crippled by
the worst imaginable -- it's unprecedented. Let's stop and think. No American president has
ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we're talking about here, or that his
associates have committed treason."
"Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis," Cohen added. "Imagine
if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been
crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn't was to have launched a war against
the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war."
"A recurring theme of my recently published book War with Russia? is that the new Cold War
is more dangerous, more fraught with hot war, than the one we survived," Cohen wrote
last year . "Histories of the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War tell us that both sides came to
understand their mutual responsibility for the conflict, a recognition that created political
space for the constant peace-keeping negotiations, including nuclear arms control agreements,
often known as détente. But as I also chronicle in the book, today's American Cold
Warriors blame only Russia, specifically 'Putin's Russia,' leaving no room or incentive for
rethinking any US policy toward post-Soviet Russia since 1991."
"Finally, there continues to be no effective, organized American opposition to the new Cold
War," Cohen added. "This too is a major theme of my book and another reason why this Cold War
is more dangerous than was its predecessor. In the 1970s and 1980s, advocates of détente
were well-organized, well-funded, and well-represented, from grassroots politics and
universities to think tanks, mainstream media, Congress, the State Department, and even the
White House. Today there is no such opposition anywhere."
"A major factor is, of course, 'Russiagate'," Cohen continued. "As evidenced in the sources
I cite above, much of the extreme American Cold War advocacy we witness today is a mindless
response to President Trump's pledge to find ways to 'cooperate with Russia' and to the
still-unproven allegations generated by it. Certainly, the Democratic Party is not an
opposition party in regard to the new Cold War."
"Détente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy
pursuit, but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world," Cohen
wrote in another
essay last year. "No American president can achieve it without substantial bipartisan
support at home, which Trump manifestly lacks. What kind of catastrophe will it take -- in
Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on Russia's electric grid -- to shock US
Democrats and others out of what has been called, not unreasonably, their Trump Derangement
Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before
midnight."
And now Stephen Cohen is dead, and that clock is inching ever closer to midnight. The
Russiagate psyop that he predicted would pressure Trump to advance dangerous cold war
escalations with no opposition from the supposed opposition party
has indeed done exactly that with nary a peep of criticism from either partisan faction of
the political/media class. Cohen has for years been correctly
predicting this chilling scenario which now threatens the life of every organism on earth,
even while his own life was nearing its end.
And now the complex cold war escalations he kept urgently warning us about have become even
more complex with the
addition of nuclear-armed China to the multiple fronts the US-centralized empire has been
plate-spinning its brinkmanship upon, and it is clear from the ramping
up of anti-China propaganda since last year that we are being prepped for those aggressions
to continue to increase.
We should heed the dire warnings that Cohen spent his last breaths issuing. We should demand
a walk-back of these insane imperialist aggressions which benefit nobody and call for
détente with Russia and China. We should begin creating an opposition to this
world-threatening flirtation with armageddon before it is too late. Every life on this planet
may well depend on our doing so.
Stephen Cohen is dead, and we are marching toward the death of everything. God help us
all.
People are just now starting to realize that possible alternate path. But the Demoncrats
in the USA must first be put down, politically euthanized, along with their neocon
never-Trump Republican partners. And that cleaning up is on the way. Trump's second term will
be the advancement of the USA-Russia initiative that is so long overdue.
PerilouseTimes , 48 minutes ago
Putin won't let western billionaires rape Russia's enormous natural resources and on top
of that Putin is against child molesters, that is what this Russia bashing is all about.
awesomepic4u , 1 hour ago
Sad to hear this.
What a good man. It is a real shame that we dont have others to stand up to this crazy pr
that is going on right now. Making peace with the world at this point is important. We dont need or
want another war and i am sure that both Europe and Russia dont want it on their turf but it
seems we keep sticking our finger in their eye. If there is another war it will be the last
war. As Einstein said, after the 3rd World War we will be using sticks and stones to fight
it.
Clint Liquor , 44 minutes ago
Cohen truly was an island of reason in a sea of insanity. Ironic that those panicked over
climate change are unconcerned about the increasing threat of Nuclear War.
thunderchief , 41 minutes ago
One of the very few level headed people on Russia.
All thats left are anti Russia-phobic nut jobs.
Send in the clowns.
Stephen Cohen isn't around to call them what they are anymore.
Eastern Whale , 55 minutes ago
cooperate with Russia
Has the US ever cooperated with anyone?
fucking truth , 3 minutes ago
That is the crux. All or nothing.
Mustafa Kemal , 49 minutes ago
Ive read several of his books. They are essential, imo, if you want to understand modern
russian history.
Normal , 1 hour ago
The bankers created the new CCP cold war.
evoila , 19 minutes ago
Max Boot is an effing idiot. Tucker wiped him clean too. It was an insult to Stephen to
even put them on the same panel.
RIP Stephen.
Gary Sick is the equivalent to Stephen, except for Iran. He too is of an era of competence
which is and will be missed as their voices are drowned out by neocon warmongers
thebigunit , 17 minutes ago
I heard Stephen Cohen a number of time in John Bachelor's podcasts.
He seemed very lucid and made a lot of sense.
He made it very clear that he thought the Democrat's "Trump - Russia collusion schtick"
was a bunch of crap.
He didn't sound like a leftie, but I'm sure he never told me the stuff he discussed with
his wife who was editor of the left wing "The Nation" magazine.
Boogity , 9 minutes ago
Cohen was a traditional old school anti-war Liberal. They're essentially extinct now with
the exception of a few such as Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich who have both been
ostracized from the Democrat Party and the political system.
So, it appears the War on Populism is building
toward an exciting climax. All the proper pieces are in place for a Class-A GloboCap color
revolution , and maybe even civil war. You got your unauthorized Putin-Nazi president, your
imaginary apocalyptic pandemic, your violent identitarian civil unrest, your heavily-armed
politically-polarized populace, your ominous rumblings from military quarters you couldn't
really ask for much more.
OK, the plot is pretty obvious by now (as it is in all big-budget action spectacles, which
is essentially what color revolutions are), but that won't spoil our viewing experience. The
fun isn't in guessing what is going to happen. Everybody knows what's going to happen. The fun
is in watching Bruce, or Sigourney, or "the moderate rebels," or the GloboCap "Resistance,"
take down the monster, or the terrorists, or Hitler, and save the world, or democracy, or
whatever.
Trump represent new "national neoliberalism" platform and the large part of the US neoliberal elite (Clinton gang and large part
of republicans) support the return to "classic neoliberalism" at all costs.
Highly recommended!
The essence of color revolution is the combination of engineered contested election and mass organized protest and civil disobedience
via creation in neoliberal fifth column out of "professionals", especially students as well as mobilizing and put on payroll some useful
disgruntled groups which can be used as a foot soldiers, such as football hooligans. Large and systematic injection of dollars into
protest movement. All with the air cover via domination in a part or all nation's MSM.
He served as US ambassador in Chich Republic from 2011 to 2014. Based on his experience wrote that book
Democracy's Defenders published by The Brookings Institution, a neoliberal think tank, about the role of US embassy in neoliberal
revolution in Czechoslovakia (aka Velvet Revolution of 1989) which led to the dissolution of the country into two. BTW demonstrations
against police brutality were an essential part of the Velvet Revolution
Notable quotes:
"... Same tactics - color revolutions they (Soros, Nuland/Kagan, Eisen, McCain when alive) used to overthrow Orthodox countries in Eastern Europe. Belarus the latest. Ukraine (Orange, Maidan) 2014. Georgia (Rose rev). Serbia, Montenegro. Use young people who have bad sense of history and are more sympathetic to the "West." ..."
This is, without ANY question, one of Tucker's most important segments that he has ever done. IT IS EXTREMELY-RARE THAT
"""they""" ARE EXPOSED, BY-NAME, SO OPENLY AND DIRECTLY, BUT, IT HAPPENED, TONIGHT.
Please bring back Dr. Darren Beattie back. More info. on the color revolutions, Mr. Eisen, crew, and their relationship
to mail in voting fraud and their impact on the 2020 election is needed. If Mr. Eisens methods are to be used in the 2020 election
mass awareness is needed.
This is not about Trump. The endgame of the deep state is to enslave people through social division. The election is a wrestling
match for entertainment.
Sheesh, he looks scared. I hope he's being well protected now. Darren is a very brave man who is trying to tell the citizens
of the US that there is malice aforethought towards the President and this election. It is now not a choice between Republicans
or Democrats, it is a fight between good and evil. I'm sure Trump and his team are aware of the playbook and will do everything
they can to sort this, with God's help. It may get hairy, but trust the plan.
I have a feeling dems will "rig for red" to frame republicans for voter fraud, overlooking the overwhelming amount of voter
fraud in favor of Biden Harris. Causing outrage and calls to remove the President from office and saying Biden actually won.
When he really did not. Be prepared. Stay strong.
Same tactics - color revolutions they (Soros, Nuland/Kagan, Eisen, McCain when alive) used to overthrow Orthodox countries
in Eastern Europe. Belarus the latest. Ukraine (Orange, Maidan) 2014. Georgia (Rose rev). Serbia, Montenegro. Use young people
who have bad sense of history and are more sympathetic to the "West."
american people still don't know and can't understand what's happening and what their government is doing, even right now
it's happening in Belarus, it happened in Ukraine, Venezuela, Hong Kong and etc. and now it's happening in your own country,
wake up people and don't forget who's behind all this - a NGO founded by CIA called NED (National endowment for democracy),
Soros and his NGOs and the deep state.
"... Russian military leaders view the "colour revolutions" as a "new US and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties. ..."
"... the activities of radical public associations and groups using nationalist and religious extremist ideology, foreign and international nongovernmental organizations, and financial and economic structures, and also individuals, focused on destroying the unity and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, destabilizing the domestic political and social situation -- including through inciting "color revolutions" -- and destroying traditional Russian religious and moral values ..."
Worldwide media use the term Colour Revolution (sometimes Coloured Revolution
) to describe various
related movements that developed in several countries of the former Soviet Union , in the People's Republic of
China and in the Balkans during the early-21st century. The term has
also been applied to a number of revolutions elsewhere, including in the Middle East and in the
Asia-Pacific region,
dating from the 1980s to the 2010s. Some observers (such as Justin Raimondo and Michael Lind ) have called the events a
revolutionary
wave , the origins of which can be traced back to the 1986 People Power Revolution (also known
as the "Yellow Revolution") in the Philippines .
Participants in colour revolutions have mostly used nonviolent resistance , also called
civil resistance .
Such methods as demonstrations, strikes and interventions have aimed to
protest against governments seen as corrupt and/or authoritarian and to advocate democracy , and they have built up
strong pressure for change.
Colour-revolution movements generally became associated with a specific colour or flower as
their symbol. The colour revolutions are notable for the important role of non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) and particularly student activists in organising creative
non-violent resistance .
Such movements have had a measure of success as for example in the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia 's Bulldozer
Revolution (2000), in Georgia 's Rose Revolution (2003) and in Ukraine 's Orange Revolution (2004). In most but not
all cases, massive street-protests followed disputed elections or requests for fair elections
and led to the resignation or overthrow of leaders regarded by their opponents as authoritarian . Some events have been called "colour revolutions", but differ from the
above cases in certain basic characteristics. Examples include Lebanon's Cedar Revolution (2005) and
Kuwait 's Blue Revolution
(2005).
Russia and China share nearly identical views that colour revolutions are the product of
machinations by the United States and other Western powers and pose a vital threat to their
public and national security.
The 1986 People Power Revolution (also
called the " EDSA " or the "Yellow"
Revolution) in the Philippines was the first successful non-violent uprising in the
contemporary period. It was the culmination of peaceful demonstrations against the
rule of
then-President Ferdinand Marcos – all of which
increased after the 1983 assassination of
opposition Senator Benigno S. Aquino,
Jr. A contested snap election on 7 February 1986 and a
call by the powerful Filipino Catholic
Church sparked mass protests across Metro Manila from 22–25 February.
The Revolution's iconic L-shaped Laban sign comes from the Filipino term for
People Power, " Lakás ng Bayan ", whose acronym is " LABAN " ("fight").
The yellow-clad protesters, later joined by the Armed Forces , ousted
Marcos and installed Aquino's widow Corazón as the country's eleventh
President, ushering in the present Fifth
Republic .
Long-standing secessionist sentiment in Bougainville eventually led to conflict with
Papua New Guinea. The inhabitants of Bougainville Island formed the Bougainville
Revolutionary Army and fought against government troops. On 20 April 1998, Papua New
Guinea ended the civil war. In 2005, Papua New Guinea gave autonomy to Bougainville.
in 1989, a peaceful demonstration by students (mostly from Charles University ) was attacked by
the police – and in time contributed to the collapse of the communist government in
Czechoslovakia.
The 'Bulldozer Revolution' in 2000, which led to the overthrow of
Slobodan Milošević . These demonstrations are usually considered to be the
first example of the peaceful revolutions which followed. However, the Serbians adopted an
approach that had already been used in parliamentary elections in Bulgaria (1997) ,
Slovakia (1998) and
Croatia (2000) ,
characterised by civic mobilisation through get-out-the-vote campaigns and unification of
the political opposition. The nationwide protesters did not adopt a colour or a specific
symbol; however, the slogan " Gotov je " (Serbian Cyrillic:
Готов је , English: He is finished
) did become an aftermath symbol celebrating the completion of the task. Despite the
commonalities, many others refer to Georgia as the most definite beginning of the series of
"colour revolutions". The demonstrations were supported by the youth movement Otpor! , some of whose members
were involved in the later revolutions in other countries.
Following the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the
Adjara
crisis (sometimes called "Second Rose Revolution" or Mini-Rose
Revolution ) led to the
exit of Chairman of the Government Aslan Abashidze from office.
Purple
Revolution was a name first used by some hopeful commentators and later picked up by
United States President George W. Bush to describe the coming of
democracy to Iraq following the 2005 Iraqi
legislative election and was intentionally used to draw the parallel with the Orange
and Rose revolutions. However, the name "purple revolution" has not achieved widespread use
in Iraq, the United States or elsewhere. The name comes from the colour that voters' index
fingers were stained to prevent fraudulent multiple voting. The term first appeared shortly
after the January 2005 election in various weblogs and editorials of individuals supportive
of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The term
received its widest usage during a visit by U.S. President George W. Bush on 24 February 2005 to
Bratislava , Slovak
Republic, for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin . Bush stated: "In recent
times, we have witnessed landmark events in the history of liberty: A Rose Revolution in
Georgia, an Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and now, a Purple Revolution in Iraq."
The Tulip
Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (also sometimes called the "Pink Revolution") was more violent
than its predecessors and followed the disputed 2005 Kyrgyz
parliamentary election . At the same time, it was more fragmented than previous
"colour" revolutions. The protesters in different areas adopted the colours pink and yellow
for their protests. This revolution was supported by youth resistance movement KelKel .
The Cedar
Revolution in Lebanon between February and April 2005 followed not a disputed election,
but rather the assassination of opposition leader Rafik Hariri in 2005. Also, instead of the
annulment of an election, the people demanded an end to the Syrian occupation of
Lebanon . Nonetheless, some of its elements and some of the methods used in the
protests have been similar enough that it is often considered and treated by the press and
commentators as one of the series of "colour revolutions". The Cedar of Lebanon is the symbol of the
country, and the revolution was named after it. The peaceful demonstrators used the colours
white and red, which are found in the Lebanese flag. The protests led to the pullout of
Syrian troops
in April 2005, ending their nearly 30-year presence there, although Syria retains some
influence in Lebanon.
Blue Revolution was a term used by some Kuwaitis to refer to
demonstrations in Kuwait in support of women's suffrage
beginning in March 2005; it was named after the colour of the signs the protesters used. In
May of that year the Kuwaiti government acceded to their demands, granting women the right
to vote beginning in the 2007 parliamentary elections. Since there was
no call for regime change, the so-called "blue revolution" cannot be categorised as a true
colour revolution.
In Belarus, there have been a number of protests against President Alexander Lukashenko , with
participation from student group Zubr . One round of
protests culminated on 25 March 2005; it was a self-declared attempt to emulate the
Kyrgyzstan revolution, and involved over a thousand citizens. However, police severely
suppressed it, arresting over 30 people and imprisoning opposition leader Mikhail Marinich .
A second, much larger, round of protests began almost a year later, on 19 March 2006,
soon after the presidential
election . Official results had Lukashenko winning with 83% of the vote; protesters
claimed the results were achieved through fraud and voter intimidation, a charge echoed
by many foreign governments.
Protesters camped out in October Square in Minsk over the next week, calling variously for
the resignation of Lukashenko, the installation of rival candidate Alaksandar
Milinkievič , and new, fair elections.
The opposition originally used as a symbol the white-red-white former flag of Belarus ; the
movement has had significant connections with that in neighbouring Ukraine, and during
the Orange Revolution some white-red-white flags were seen being waved in Kiev. During
the 2006 protests some called it the " Jeans Revolution " or "Denim
Revolution",
blue jeans being considered a symbol for freedom. Some protesters cut up jeans into
ribbons and hung them in public places. It is
claimed that Zubr was responsible for coining the phrase.
Lukashenko has said in the past: "In our country, there will be no pink or orange, or
even banana revolution." More recently he's said "They [the West] think that Belarus is
ready for some 'orange' or, what is a rather frightening option, 'blue' or ' cornflower blue '
revolution. Such 'blue' revolutions are the last thing we need". On
19 April 2005, he further commented: "All these coloured revolutions are pure and simple
banditry."
In Myanmar (unofficially called Burma), a series of anti-government protests were
referred to in the press as the Saffron Revolution
after Buddhist monks ( Theravada Buddhist monks normally
wear the colour saffron) took the vanguard of the protests. A previous, student-led
revolution, the 8888
Uprising on 8 August 1988, had similarities to the colour revolutions, but was
violently repressed.
The opposition is reported to have hoped for and urged some kind of Orange revolution,
similar to that in Ukraine, in the follow-up of the 2005 Moldovan
parliamentary elections , while the Christian
Democratic People's Party adopted orange for its colour in a clear reference to the
events of Ukraine.
A name hypothesised for such an event was "Grape Revolution" because of the abundance
of vineyards in the country; however, such a revolution failed to materialise after the
governmental victory in the elections. Many reasons have been given for this, including a
fractured opposition and the fact that the government had already co-opted many of the
political positions that might have united the opposition (such as a perceived
pro-European and anti-Russian stance). Also the elections themselves were declared fairer
in the OSCE election monitoring reports than had been the case in other countries where
similar revolutions occurred, even though the CIS monitoring mission strongly condemned
them.
Green Movement is a term widely used to describe the 2009–2010
Iranian election protests . The protests began in 2009, several years after the main
wave of colour revolutions, although like them it began due to a disputed election, the
2009 Iranian
presidential election . Protesters adopted the colour green as their symbol because it
had been the campaign colour of presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi , whom many
protesters thought had won the elections .
However Mousavi and his wife went under house arrest without any trial issued by a
court.
The Kyrgyz Revolution of 2010 in
Kyrgyzstan (also sometimes called the "Melon Revolution") led to the
exit of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev from office. The
total number of deaths should be 2,000.
Jasmine Revolution was a widely used term for the
Tunisian
Revolution . The Jasmine Revolution led to the exit of President Ben Ali from office and
the beginning of the Arab Spring .
Lotus Revolution was a term used by various western news sources to describe the
Egyptian Revolution of 2011
that forced President Mubarak to step down in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring , which followed the Jasmine
Revolution of Tunisia. Lotus is known as the flower representing resurrection, life and the
sun of ancient Egypt. It is uncertain who gave the name, while columnist of Arabic press,
Asharq Alawsat, and prominent Egyptian opposition leader Saad Eddin Ibrahim claimed to name
it the Lotus Revolution. Lotus Revolution later became common on western news source such
as CNN. Other names,
such as White Revolution and Nile Revolution, are used but are minor terms compare to Lotus
Revolution. The term Lotus Revolution is rarely, if ever, used in the Arab world.
In February 2011, Bahrain was also affected by protests in Tunisia and Egypt. Bahrain
has long been famous for its pearls and Bahrain's speciality. And there was the Pearl
Square in Manama, where the demonstrations began. The people of Bahrain were also
protesting around the square. At first, the government of Bahrain promised to reform the
people. But when their promises were not followed, the people resisted again. And in the
process, bloodshed took place (18 March 2011). After that, a small demonstration is taking
place in Bahrain.
An anti-government protest started in Yemen in 2011. The Yemeni people sought to resign
Ali Abdullah Saleh as the ruler. On 24 November, Ali Abdullah Saleh decided to transfer the
regime. In 2012, Ali Abdullah Saleh finally fled to the United States(27 February).
A call which first appeared on 17 February 2011 on the Chinese language site Boxun.com in the United States
for a "Jasmine revolution" in the People's Republic of China and repeated on social
networking sites in China resulted in blocking of internet searches for "jasmine" and a
heavy police presence at designated sites for protest such as the McDonald's in central
Beijing, one of the 13 designated protest sites, on 20 February 2011. A crowd did gather
there, but their motivations were ambiguous as a crowd tends to draw a crowd in that area.
Boxun experienced a denial of service attack
during this period and was inaccessible.
Protests started on 4 December 2011 in the capital, Moscow against the results of the parliamentary
elections, which led to the arrests of over 500 people. On 10 December, protests erupted in
tens of cities across the country; a few months later, they spread to hundreds both inside
the country and abroad. The name of the Snow Revolution derives from December - the month
when the revolution had started - and from the white ribbons the protesters wore.
Many analysts and participants of the protests against President of Macedonia Gjorge
Ivanov and the Macedonian
government refer to them as a "colourful Revolution", due to the demonstrators throwing
paint balls of different colours at government buildings in Skopje , the capital.
In 2018, a peaceful revolution was led by
member of parliament Nikol Pashinyan in opposition to the
nomination of Serzh
Sargsyan as Prime Minister of Armenia ,
who had previously served as both President of Armenia and prime
minister, eliminating term limits which would have otherwise
prevented his 2018 nomination. Concerned that Sargsyan's third consecutive term as the most
powerful politician in the government of Armenia gave him too much political influence,
protests occurred throughout the country, particularly in Yerevan , but demonstrations in solidarity with
the protesters also occurred in other countries where Armenian diaspora live.
During the
protests, Pashinyan was arrested and detained on 22 April, but he was released the
following day. Sargsyan stepped down from the position of Prime Minister, and his
Republican Party decided to
not put forward a candidate. An interim
Prime Minister was selected from Sargsyan's party until elections were held, and protests
continued for over one month. Crowd sizes in Yerevan consisted of 115,000 to 250,000 people
at a time throughout the revolution, and hundreds of protesters were arrested. Pashinyan
referred to the event as a Velvet Revolution. A vote was
held in parliament, and Pashinyan became the Prime Minister of Armenia.
Many have cited the influence of the series of revolutions which
occurred in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the
Velvet Revolution
in Czechoslovakia in 1989. A
peaceful demonstration by students (mostly from Charles University ) was attacked by the
police – and in time contributed to the collapse of the communist government in
Czechoslovakia. Yet the roots of the pacifist floral imagery may go even further back to the
non-violent Carnation Revolution of Portugal in
April 1974, which is associated with the colour carnation because carnations were worn, and the 1986 Yellow Revolution in
the Philippines where demonstrators offered peace flowers to military personnel manning
armoured tanks.
Student movements
The first of these was Otpor! ("Resistance!") in the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, which was founded at Belgrade University in October 1998 and
began protesting against Miloševic' during the Kosovo War . Most of them were already veterans
of anti-Milošević demonstrations such as the 1996–97 protests
and the 9 March
1991 protest . Many of its members were arrested or beaten by the police. Despite this,
during the presidential campaign in September 2000, Otpor launched its " Gotov je " (He's finished) campaign that
galvanised Serbian discontent with Miloševic' and resulted in his defeat.
Members of Otpor have inspired and trained members of related student movements including
Kmara in Georgia, Pora in
Ukraine, Zubr in Belarus and
MJAFT! in Albania. These
groups have been explicit and scrupulous in their practice of non-violent resistance as advocated
and explained in Gene
Sharp 's writings. The massive
protests that they have organised, which were essential to the successes in the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, Georgia and Ukraine, have been notable for their colourfulness and use
of ridiculing humor in opposing authoritarian leaders.
Critical analysis
The analysis of international geopolitics scholars Paul J. Bolt and Sharyl N. Cross is that
"Moscow and Beijing share almost indistinguishable views on the potential domestic and
international security threats posed by colored revolutions, and both nations view these
revolutionary movements as being orchestrated by the United States and its Western democratic
partners to advance geopolitical ambitions."
Russian
assessment
According to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies , Russian military leaders view the "colour revolutions" as a "new US and
European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states
as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties."
Government figures in Russia , such as Defence Minister
Sergei Shoigu (in
office from 2012) and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (in office from 2004), have
characterised colour revolutions as externally-fuelled acts with a clear goal to influence the
internal affairs that destabilise the economy, conflict with the law and represent a new form of warfare. Russian President
Vladimir Putin has
stated that Russia must prevent colour revolutions: "We see what tragic consequences the wave
of so-called colour revolutions led to. For us this is a lesson and a warning. We should do
everything necessary so that nothing similar ever happens in Russia".
The 2015 presidential decree The Russian Federation's National Security Strategy (
О Стратегии
Национальной
Безопасности
Российской
Федерации ) cites "foreign sponsored
regime change" among "main threats to public and national security," including
the activities of radical public associations and groups using nationalist and religious
extremist ideology, foreign and international nongovernmental organizations, and financial
and economic structures, and also individuals, focused on destroying the unity and
territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, destabilizing the domestic political and
social situation -- including through inciting "color revolutions" -- and destroying
traditional Russian religious and moral values
Chinese view
Articles published by the Global Times , a state-run nationalist tabloid, indicate that Chinese
leaders also anticipate the Western powers, such as the United States, using "color revolutions" as a means to undermine the one-party state. An article published on 8 May 2016 claims: "A
variation of containment seeks to press China on human rights and democracy with the hope of
creating a 'color revolution.'" A 13 August 2019
article declared that the 2019 Hong Kong extradition
bill protests were a colour revolution that "aim[ed] to ruin HK 's future."
The 2015 policy white paper "China's Military Strategy" by the State Council
Information Office said that "anti-China forces have never given up their attempt to
instigate a 'color revolution' in this country."
Azerbaijan
A number of movements were created in Azerbaijan in mid-2005, inspired by the examples
of both Georgia and Ukraine. A youth group, calling itself Yox! (which means No!), declared its opposition to
governmental corruption. The leader of Yox! said that unlike Pora or Kmara , he wants to change not just the leadership,
but the entire system of governance in Azerbaijan. The Yox movement chose green as its colour.
The spearhead of Azerbaijan's attempted colour revolution was Yeni Fikir ("New Idea"), a
youth group closely aligned with the Azadlig (Freedom) Bloc of opposition political parties.
Along with groups such as Magam ("It's Time") and Dalga ("Wave"), Yeni Fikir deliberately
adopted many of the tactics of the Georgian and Ukrainian colour revolution groups, even
borrowing the colour orange from the Ukrainian revolution.
In November 2005 protesters took to the streets, waving orange flags and banners, to protest
what they considered government fraud in recent parliamentary elections. The Azerbaijani colour revolution finally fizzled out with the police riot on 26
November, during which dozens of protesters were injured and perhaps hundreds teargassed and
sprayed with water cannons.
On 5 February 2013, protests began in Shahbag and later spread to other parts of
Bangladesh following
demands for capital punishment for Abdul Quader Mollah , who had been
sentenced to life imprisonment, and for others convicted of war crimes by the International
Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh . On that
day, the International Crimes
Tribunal had sentenced Mollah to life in prison after he was convicted on five of six
counts of war crimes . Later
demands included banning the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party
from politics including election and a boycott of institutions supporting (or affiliated with)
the party.
Protesters considered Mollah's sentence too lenient, given his crimes. Bloggers and online activists called for additional protests at Shahbag.
Tens of thousands of people joined the demonstration, which gave rise to protests across the
country.
The movement demanding trial of war criminals is a protest movement in Bangladesh, from 1972
to present.
Belarus
In Belarus , there have
been a number of protests against President Alexander Lukashenko , with
participation from student group Zubr . One round of protests
culminated on 25 March 2005; it was a self-declared attempt to emulate the Kyrgyzstan
revolution, and involved over a thousand citizens. However, police severely suppressed it,
arresting over 30 people and imprisoning opposition leader Mikhail Marinich .
A second, much larger, round of protests began almost a year later, on 19 March 2006, soon
after the presidential election
. Official results had Lukashenko winning with 83% of the vote; protesters claimed the results
were achieved through fraud and voter intimidation, a charge echoed by many foreign
governments.
Protesters camped out in October Square in Minsk over the next week, calling variously for the
resignation of Lukashenko, the installation of rival candidate Alaksandar Milinkievič ,
and new, fair elections.
The opposition originally used as a symbol the white-red-white former flag of Belarus ; the movement has had
significant connections with that in neighbouring Ukraine, and during the Orange Revolution
some white-red-white flags were seen being waved in Kiev. During the 2006 protests some called
it the " Jeans
Revolution " or "Denim Revolution", blue
jeans being considered a symbol for freedom. Some protesters cut up jeans into ribbons and hung
them in public places. It is
claimed that Zubr was responsible for coining the phrase.
Lukashenko has said in the past: "In our country, there will be no pink or orange, or even
banana revolution." More recently he's said "They [the West] think that Belarus is ready for
some 'orange' or, what is a rather frightening option, 'blue' or ' cornflower blue ' revolution. Such 'blue'
revolutions are the last thing we need". On 19
April 2005, he further commented: "All these colored revolutions are pure and simple
banditry."
In Burma (officially called Myanmar), a series of anti-government protests were referred to
in the press as the Saffron Revolution after
Buddhist monks ( Theravada Buddhist monks normally wear
the colour saffron) took the vanguard of the protests. A previous, student-led revolution, the
8888 Uprising on 8
August 1988, had similarities to the colour revolutions, but was violently
repressed.
A call which first appeared on 17 February 2011 on the Chinese language site Boxun.com in the United States for
a "Jasmine revolution" in the People's Republic of China and repeated on social networking
sites in China resulted in blocking of internet searches for "jasmine" and a heavy police
presence at designated sites for protest such as the McDonald's in central Beijing, one of the 13
designated protest sites, on 20 February 2011. A crowd did gather there, but their motivations
were ambiguous as a crowd tends to draw a crowd in that area.
Boxun experienced a denial of service attack during
this period and was inaccessible.
In the 2000s, Fiji suffered numerous coups. But at the same time, many Fiji citizens
resisted the military. In Fiji, there have been many human rights abuses by the military.
Anti-government protesters in Fiji have fled to Australia and New Zealand. In 2011, Fijians
conducted anti Fijian government protests in Australia. On 17 September
2014, the first democratic general election was held in Fiji.
In 2015, Otto
Pérez Molina , President of Guatemala, was suspected of corruption. In Guatemala City,
a large number of protests rallied. Demonstrations took place from April to September 2015.
Otto Pérez
Molina was eventually arrested on 3 September. The people of Guatemala called this event
"Guatemalan Spring".
Moldova
The opposition is reported to have hoped for and urged some kind of Orange revolution,
similar to that in Ukraine, in the follow-up of the 2005 Moldovan
parliamentary elections , while the Christian
Democratic People's Party adopted orange for its colour in a clear reference to the events
of Ukraine.
A name hypothesised for such an event was "Grape Revolution" because of the abundance of
vineyards in the country; however, such a revolution failed to materialise after the
governmental victory in the elections. Many reasons have been given for this, including a
fractured opposition and the fact that the government had already co-opted many of the
political positions that might have united the opposition (such as a perceived pro-European and
anti-Russian stance). Also the elections themselves were declared fairer in the OSCE election
monitoring reports than had been the case in other countries where similar revolutions
occurred, even though the CIS monitoring mission strongly condemned them.
On 25 March 2005, activists wearing yellow scarves held protests in the capital city of
Ulaanbaatar , disputing
the results of the 2004 Mongolian
parliamentary elections and calling for fresh elections. One of the chants heard in that
protest was "Let's congratulate our Kyrgyz brothers for their revolutionary spirit. Let's free
Mongolia of corruption."
An uprising commenced in Ulaanbaatar on 1 July 2008, with a peaceful meeting in protest of
the election of 29 June. The results of these elections were (it was claimed by opposition
political parties) corrupted by the Mongolian People's Party (MPRP).
Approximately 30,000 people took part in the meeting. Afterwards, some of the protesters left
the central square and moved to the HQ of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party –
which they attacked and then burned down. A police station was also attacked. By the night
rioters vandalised and then set fire to the Cultural Palace (which contained a theatre, museum
and National art gallery). Cars torching, bank
robberies and looting were reported. The
organisations in the burning buildings were vandalised and looted. Police used tear gas, rubber
bullets and water cannon against stone-throwing protesters. A 4-day
state of emergency was installed, the capital has been placed under a 2200 to 0800 curfew, and
alcohol sales banned, rioting not
resumed. 5 people
were shot dead by the police ,
dozens of teenagers were wounded from the police firearms and disabled and
800 people, including the leaders of the civil movements J. Batzandan, O. Magnai and B.
Jargalsakhan, were arrested. International
observers said 1 July general election was free and fair.
In 2007, the Lawyers' Movement started in Pakistan with the aim of restoration
of deposed judges. However, within a month the movement took a turn and started working towards
the goal of removing Pervez Musharraf from power.
The liberal opposition in Russia is represented by several parties and
movements.
An active part of the opposition is the Oborona youth movement. Oborona
claims that its aim is to provide free and honest elections and to establish in Russia a system
with democratic political competition. This movement under the leadership of Oleg
Kozlovsky was one of the most active and radical ones and is represented in a number of
Russian cities. During the elections of 8 September 2013, the movement contributed to the
success of Navalny in Moscow and other opposition candidates in various regions and towns
throughout Russia. The "oboronkis" also took part with other oppositional groups in protests
against fraud in the Moscow mayoral elections.
Since the 2012 protests, Aleksei Navalny mobilised with support of
the various and fractured opposition parties and masses of young people against the alleged
repression and fraud of the Kremlin apparatus. After a strong
campaign for the 8 September elections in Moscow and the regions, the opposition won remarkable
successes. Navalny reached a second place in Moscow with surprising 27% behind Kremlin-backed
Sergei Sobyanin
finishing with 51% of the votes. In other regions, opposition candidates received remarkable
successes. In the big industrial town of Yekaterinburg, opposition candidate Yevgeny Roizman received the majority
of votes and became the mayor of that town. The slow but gradual sequence of opposition
successes reached by mass protests, election campaigns and other peaceful strategies has been
recently called by observers and analysts as of Radio Free Europe "Tortoise Revolution"
in contrast to the radical "rose" or "orange" ones the Kremlin tried to prevent.
The opposition in the Republic of Bashkortostan has held protests demanding
that the federal authorities intervene to dismiss Murtaza Rakhimov from his position as
president of the republic, accusing him of leading an "arbitrary, corrupt, and violent" regime.
Airat
Dilmukhametov , one of the opposition leaders, and leader of the
Bashkir National Front , has said that the opposition movement has been inspired from the
mass protests of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Another
opposition leader, Marat
Khaiyirulin , has said that if an Orange Revolution were to happen in Russia, it would
begin in Bashkortostan.
From 2016 to 2017, the candlelight protest was going on in South Korea with the aim to force the ousting
of President Park
Geun-hye . Park was impeached and removed from office, and new presidential
elections were held.
In Uzbekistan , there
has been longstanding opposition to President Islam Karimov , from liberals and Islamists.
Following protests in 2005, security forces in Uzbekistan carried out the Andijan massacre that successfully
halted country-wide demonstrations. These protests otherwise could have turned into colour
revolution, according to many analysts.
The revolution in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan began in the largely ethnic Uzbek south, and
received early support in the city of Osh . Nigora
Hidoyatova , leader of the Free
Peasants opposition party, has referred to the idea of a peasant revolt or 'Cotton
Revolution'. She also said that her party is collaborating with the youth organisation
Shiddat , and that she
hopes it can evolve to an organisation similar to Kmara or Pora. Other nascent
youth organisations in and for Uzbekistan include Bolga
and the freeuzbek
group.
When groups of young people protested the closure of Venezuela's RCTV television station in June 2007, president
Hugo Chávez
said that he believed the protests were organised by the West in an attempt to promote a "soft
coup" like the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. Similarly,
Chinese authorities claimed repeatedly in the state-run media that both the 2014 Hong Kong protests
– known as the Umbrella Revolution – as well as
the 2019–20 Hong Kong
protests , were organised and controlled by the United States.
In July 2007, Iranian state television released footage of two Iranian-American prisoners,
both of whom work for western NGOs, as part of a documentary called "In the Name of Democracy."
The documentary purportedly discusses the colour revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and accuses
the United States of attempting to foment a similar ouster in Iran.
Other
examples and political movements around the world
The imagery of a colour revolution has been adopted by various non-revolutionary electoral
campaigns. The 'Purple Revolution' social media campaign of Naheed Nenshi catapulted his platform from 8%
to become Calgary's 36th Mayor. The platform advocated city sustainability and to inspire the
high voter turn out of 56%, particularly among young voters.
In 2015, the NDP of Alberta earned a majority
mandate and ended the 44-year-old dynasty of the Progressive
Conservatives . During the campaign Rachel Notley 's popularity gained momentum,
and the news and NDP supporters referred to this phenomenon as the "Orange Crush" per the
party's colour. NDP parodies of Orange flavoured Crush soda logo became a popular meme on
social media.
"... One NGO called the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG) was bold or reckless enough to draw the parallels between the Color Revolution in Belarus and the events playing out against Trump explicitly ..."
"... Now, would the reader care to take a guess as to who runs the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group? If you guessed Norm Eisen, you would be correct. ..."
In our report on Never
Trump State Department official George Kent , Revolver News first drew attention
to the ominous similarities between the strategies and tactics the United States government
employs in so-called "Color Revolutions" and the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats,
NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.
Our recent follow-up to this initial report focused specifically on a shadowy, George Soros
linked group called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which convened "war games"
exercises suggesting the likelihood of a "contested election scenario," and of ensuing chaos
should President Trump refuse to leave office. We further showed how these "contested election"
scenarios we are hearing so much about play perfectly into the Color Revolution framework
sketched out Revolver News' first installment in the Color Revolution series.
This third installment of Revolver News ' series exposing the Color Revolution
against Trump will focus on one quiet and indeed mostly overlooked participant in the
Transition Integrity Project's biased election "war games" exercise -- a man by the name of
Norm Eisen.
As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for
suing the President into paralysis and his
allies into bankruptcy , who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted
10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever
called the Ukraine President in 2018 , who personally served as special counsel
litigating the Ukraine impeachment, who created a template for Internet censorship of world
leaders and a handbook for mass mobilizing racial justice protesters to overturn democratic
election results, there is perhaps no man alive with a more decorated resume for plots against
President Trump.
Indeed, the story of Norm Eisen – a key architect of nearly every attempt to
delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and remove the democratically elected 45th President of the
United States – is a tale that winds through nearly every facet of the color revolution
playbook. There is no purer embodiment of Revolver's thesis that the very same regime
change professionals who run Color Revolutions on behalf of the US Government in order to
undermine or overthrow alleged "authoritarian" governments overseas, are running the very same
playbook to overturn Trump's 2016 victory and to pre-empt a repeat in 2020. To put it simply,
what you see is not just the same Color Revolution playbook run against Trump, but the same
people using it against Trump who have employed it in a professional capacity against targets
overseas -- same people same playbook.
In Norm Eisen's case, the "same people same playbook" refrain takes an arrestingly literal
turn when one realizes that Norm Eisen wrote a classic Color Revolution regime change manual,
and conveniently titled it "The Playbook."
Just what exactly is President Obama's former White House Ethics Czar ( yes, Norm Eisen
was Obama's ethics Czar ), his longtime friend since Harvard Law School, who recently
partook in war games to simulate overturning a Trump electoral victory, doing writing a
detailed playbook on how to use a Color Revolution to overthrow governments? The story of Norm
Eisen only gets more fascinating, outrageous, and indispensable to understanding the planned
chaos unfolding before our eyes, leading up to what will perhaps be the most chaotic election
in our nation's recent history.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -
"I'd Rather Have This Book Than The Atomic Bomb"
Before we can fully appreciate the significance of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution manual "The
Playbook," we must contextualize this important book in relation to its place in Color
Revolution literature.
As a bit of a refresher to the reader, it is important to emphasize that when we use the
term "Color Revolution" we do not mean any general type of revolution -- indeed, one of the
chief advantages of the Color Revolution framework we advance is that it offers a specific and
concrete heuristic by which to understand the operations against Trump beyond the accurate but
more vague term "coup." Unlike the overt, blunt, method of full scale military invasion as was
the case in Iraq War, a Color Revolution employs the following strategies and tactics:
A "Color Revolution" in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that
the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly
in Eastern Europe deemed to be "authoritarian" and hostile to American interests. Rather than
using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions
attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and
acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to
their agenda in the Western press.
[Revolver]
This combination of tactics used in so-called Color Revolutions did not come from nowhere.
Before Norm Eisen came Gene Sharp -- originator and Godfather of the Color Revolution model
that has been a staple of US Government operations externally (and now internally) for decades.
Before Norm Eisen's "Playbook" there was Gene Sharp's classic "From Dictatorship to Democracy,"
which might be justly described as the Bible of the Color Revolution. Such is the power of the
strategies laid out by Sharp that a Lithuanian defense minister once said of Sharp's preceding
book (upon which Dictatorship to Democracy builds) that "I would
rather have this book than the nuclear bomb."
Gene Sharp
It would be impossible to do full justice to Gene Sharp within the scope of this specific
article. Here are some choice excerpts about Sharp and his biography to give readers a taste of
his significance and relevance to this discussion.
Gene Sharp, the "Machiavelli of nonviolence," has been fairly described as "the most
influential American political figure you've never heard of."
1 Sharp, who passed away in January 2018, was a beloved yet "mysterious" intellectual
giant of nonviolent protest movements , the "father of the whole field of the study of
strategic nonviolent action."
2 Over his career, he wrote more than twenty books about nonviolent action and social
movements. His how-to pamphlet on nonviolent revolution, From Dictatorship to
Democracy , has been translated into over thirty languages and is cited by protest
movements around the world . In the U.S., his ideas are widely promoted through activist
training programs and by scholars of nonviolence, and have been used by nearly every major
protest movement in the last forty years .
3 For these contributions, Sharp has been praised by progressive heavyweights like Howard
Zinn and Noam Chomsky, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times, compared to Gandhi,
and cast as a lonely prophet of peace, champion of the downtrodden, and friend of the left .
4
Gene Sharp's influence on the U.S. activist left and social movements abroad has been
significant. But he is better understood as one of the most important U.S. defense
intellectuals of the Cold War, an early neoliberal theorist concerned with the supposedly
inherent violence of the "centralized State," and a quiet but vital counselor to
anti-communist forces in the socialist world from the 1980s onward.
In the mid-1960s, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear theorist, recruited
29-year-old Sharp to join the Center for International Affairs at Harvard , bastion of the
high Cold War defense, intelligence, and security establishment. Leading the so-called "CIA
at Harvard" were Henry Kissinger, future National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and future
CIA chief Robert Bowie. Sharp held this appointment for thirty years. There, with Department
of Defense funds, he developed his core theory of nonviolent action: a method of warfare
capable of collapsing states through theatrical social movements designed to dissolve the
common will that buttresses governments, all without firing any shots. From his post at the
CIA at Harvard, Sharp would urge U.S. and NATO defense leadership to use his methods against
the Soviet Union. [Nonsite]
We invite the reader to reflect on the passages in bold, particularly their potential
relevance to the current domestic situation in the United States. Sharp's book and strategy for
"non violent revolution" AKA "peaceful protests" has been used to undermine or overthrow target
governments all over the world, particularly in Eastern Europe.
Gene's color revolution playbook was of course especially effective in Eastern Bloc
countries in Eastern Europe:
Finally, there is no shortage of analysis as to the applicability of Sharp's methods
domestically within the USA in order to advance various left wing causes. This passage
specifically mentions the applicability of Sharp's methods to counter act Trump.
Ominous stuff indeed. For readers who wish to read further, please consult
the full Politico piece from which we have excerpted the above highlighted passages. There
is also a fascinating documentary on Sharp instructively titled "
How to Start a Revolution ."
This is all interesting and disturbing, to say the least. In its own right it would suggest
a compelling nexus point between the operations run against Trump and the Color Revolution
playbook. But what does this have to do with our subject Norm Eisen? It just so happens that
Eisen explicitly places himself in the tradition of Gene Sharp, acknowledging his book "The
Playbook" as a kind of update to Sharp's seminal "Dictatorship to Democracy."
And there we have it, folks -- Norm Eisen, former Obama Ethics Czar, Ambassador to
Czechoslovakia during the "Velvet Revolution," key counsel in impeachment effort against Trump,
and participant in the ostensibly bi-partisan election war games predicting a contested
election scenario unfavorable to Trump -- just happens to be a Color Revolution expert who
literally wrote the modern "Playbook" in the explicitly acknowledged tradition of Color
Revolution Godfather Gene Sharp's "From Dictatorship to Democracy."
Before we turn to the contents of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution manual, full title "The
Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding," it will be useful to make
a brief point regarding the term "democracy" itself, which happens to appear in the title of
Gene Sharp's book "From Dictatorship to Democracy" as well.
Just like the term "peaceful protestor," which, as we pointed out in our George Kent essay
is used as a term of craft in the Color Revolution context, so is the term "democracy" itself.
The US Government launches Color Revolutions against foreign targets irrespective of whether
they actually enjoy the support of the people or were elected democratically. In the case of
Trump, whatever one says about him, he is perhaps the most "democratically" elected President
in America's history. Indeed, in 2016 Trump ran against the coordinated opposition of the
establishments of both parties, the military industrial complex, the corporate media,
Hollywood, and really every single powerful institution in the country. He won, however,
because he was able to garner sufficient support of the people -- his true and decisive power
base as a "populist." Precisely because of the ultra democratic "populist" character of Trump's
victory, the operatives attempting to undermine him have focused specifically on attacking the
democratic legitimacy of his victory.
In this vein we ought to note that the term "democratic backsliding," as seen in the
subtitle of Norm Eisen's book, and its opposite "democratic breakthrough" are also terms of art
in the Color Revolution lexicon. We leave the full exploration of how the term "democratic" is
used deceptively in the Color Revolution context (and in names of decidedly
anti-democratic/populist institutions) as an exercise to the interested reader. Michael McFaul,
another Color Revolution expert and key anti-Trump operative somewhat gives the game away in
the following tweet in which the term "democratic breakthrough" makes an appearance as a better
sounding alternative to "Color Revolution:"
Most likely as a response to Revolver News' first Color Revolution article on State
Department official George Kent, former Ambassador McFaul issued the following tweet as a
matter of damage control:
Being a rather simple man from a simple background, McFaul perhaps gave too much of this
answer away in the following explanation (now deleted).
Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to
serve as our Commander in Chief ?
With this now-deleted tweet we get a clearer picture of the power bases that must be
satisfied for a "democratic breakthrough" to occur -- and conveniently enough, not one of them
is subject to direct democratic control. McFaul, Like Eisen, George Kent, and so many others,
perfectly embodies Revolver's thesis regarding the Color Revolution being the same
people running the same playbook. Indeed, like most of the star never-Trump impeachment
witnesses, McFaul has been an ambassador to an Eastern European country. He has supported
operations against Trump, including impeachment. And, like Norm Eisen, he has actually
written
a book on Color Revolutions (more on that later).
Norm Eisen's The Democracy Playbook: A Brief Overview:
A deep dive into Eisen's book would exceed the scope of this relatively brief exposé.
It is nonetheless important for us to draw attention to key passages of Eisen's book to
underscore how closely the "Playbook" corresponds to events unfolding right here at home.
Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that regime change professionals such as Eisen
simply decided to run the same playbook against Trump that they have done countless times when
foreign leaders are elected overseas that they don't like and want to remove via
extra-democratic means -- "peaceful protests," "democratic breakthroughs" and such.
First, consider the following passage from Eisen's Playbook:
If you study this passage closely, you will find direct confirmation of our earlier point
that "democracy" in the Color Revolution context is a term of art -- it refers to anything they
like that keeps the national security bureaucrats in power. Anything they don't like, even if
elected democratically, is considered "anti-democratic," or, put another way, "democratic
backsliding." Eisen even acknowledges that this scourge of populism he's so worried about
actually was ushered in with "popular support," under "relatively democratic and electoral
processes." The problem is precisely that the people have had enough of the corrupt ruling
class ignoring their needs. Accordingly, the people voted first for Brexit and then for Donald
Trump -- terrifying expressions of populism which the broader Western power structure did
everything in its capacity to prevent. Once they failed, they viewed these twin populist
victories as a kind of political 9/11 to be prevented by any means necessary from recurring.
Make no mistake, the Color Revolution has nothing to do with democracy in any meaningful sense
and everything to do with the ruling class ensuring that the people will never have the power
to meddle in their own elections again.
The passage above can be insightfully compared to the passage in Gene Sharp's book noting
ripe applications to the domestic situation.
It is instructive to compare the passage in Eisen's Color Revolution book to the passage in
Michael McFaul's Color Revolution book
First off, it is absolutely imperative to look at every single one of the conditions for a
Color Revolution that McFaul identifies. It is simply impossible not to be overcome with the
ominous parallels to our current situation. Specifically, however, note condition 1 which
refers to having a target leader who is not fully authoritarian, but semi-autocratic. This
coincides perfectly well with Eisen's concession that the populist leaders he's so concerned
about might be "illiberal" but enjoy "popular support" and have come to power via "relatively
democratic electoral processes."
Consulting the above passage from McFaul's book, we note that McFaul has been perhaps the
most explicit about the conditions which facilitate a Color Revolution. We invite the reader to
supply the contemporary analogue to each point as a kind of exercise.
A semi-autocratic regime rather than fully autocratic
An unpopular incumbent (note blanket negative coverage of Trump, fake polls)
A united and organized opposition (media, intel community, Hollywood, community groups,
etc)
Enough independent media to inform citizens of falsified vote (see full court press in
media pushing contested election narrative, social media censorship)
A political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators to
protest electoral fraud ( SEE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ANTIFA )
On point number four, which is especially relevant to our present situation, Eisen has an
interesting thing to say about the role of a contested election scenario in the Orange
Revolution, arguably the most important Color Revolution of them all.
Finally, let's look at one last passage from Norm Eisen's Color Revolution "Democracy
Playbook" and cross-reference it with McFaul's conditions for a Color Revolution as well as the
situation playing out right now before our very eyes:
A few things immediately jump out at us. First, the ominous instruction: "prepare to use
electoral abuse evidence as the basis for reform advocacy." Secondly, we note the passage
suggesting that opposition to a target leader might avail itself of "extreme institutional
measures" including impeachment processes, votes of no confidence, and, of course, the good
old-fashioned "protests, strikes, and boycotts" (all more or less peaceful no doubt).
By now the Color Revolution agenda against Trump should be as plain as day. Regime change
professionals like McFaul, Eisen, George Kent, and others, who have refined their craft
conducting color revolutions overseas, have taken it upon themselves to use the same tools, the
same tactics -- quite literally, the same playbook -- to overthrow President Trump. Yet again,
same people, same playbook.
We conclude this study of key Color Revolution figure Norm Eisen by exploring his
particularly proactive -- indeed central role -- in effecting one of the Color Revolution's
components mentioned in the Eisen Playbook -- impeachment.
-- -- -- –
The Ghost of Democracy's Future
We mentioned at the outset of this piece that Norm Eisen is many things -- a former Obama
Ethics Czar (but of course), Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, participant in the now notorious
Transition Integrity Project, et cetera. But he earned his title as "legal hatchet man" of the
Color Revolution for his tireless efforts in promoting the impeachment of President Trump.
The litany of Norm Eisen's legal activity cited at the beginning of this piece bears
repeating.
As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint
for suing the President into paralysis and his
allies into bankruptcy , who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted
10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever
called the Ukraine President in 2018 , who personally served as DNC co-counsel for
litigating the Ukraine impeachment
If that resume doesn't warrant the title "legal hatchet man" we wonder what does? We
encourage interested readers or journalists to explore those links for themselves. By way of
conclusion, it simply suffices to note that much of Eisen's impeachment activity he conducted
before there was any discussion or knowledge of President Trump's call to the Ukrainian
President in 2018 -- indeed before the call even happened. Impeachment was very clearly a
foregone conclusion -- a quite literal part of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution playbook -- and it
was up to people like Eisen to find the pretext, any pretext.
Despite their constant invocation of "democracy" we ought to note that transferring the
question of electoral outcomes to adversarial legal processes is in fact anti-Democratic -- in
keeping with our observation that the Color Revolution playbook uses "democracy" as a term of
art, often meaning the precise opposite of the usual meaning suggesting popular support.
Perhaps the most important entry in Eisen's entry is the first, that is, Eisen's
participation in the infamous David Brock blueprint on how to undermine and overthrow the Trump
presidency.
The Washington Free Beacon attended the retreat and obtained David Brock's
private and confidential memorandum from the meeting. The memo, "
Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action ," outlines Brock's four-year agenda to
attack Trump and Republicans using Media Matters, American Bridge, Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) , and Shareblue.
This leaked memo was written before President Trump took office, further suggesting that all
of the efforts to undermine Trump have not been good faith responses to his behavior, but a
pre-ordained attack strategy designed to overturn the 2016 election by any means necessary. The
Color Revolution expert who suggests impeachment as a tactic in his Color Revolution "playbook"
was already in charge of impeachment before Trump even took office -- -Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is run by none other than Norm Eisen.
But the attempt to overturn the 2016 election using Color Revolution tactics failed. And so
now the plan is to overthrow Trump in 2020, hence Norm Eisen's noted participation in the
Transition Integrity Project. Looking around us, one is forced to ask the deeply uncomfortable
question, "transition into what?"
To conclude, we would like to call back to a point we raised in the first piece in our color
revolution series. In this piece, we noted that star Never Trump impeachment witness George
Kent just happens to be running the Belarus desk at the State Department. Belarus, we argued,
with its mass demonstrations egged on by US Government backed NGOS, its supposed "peaceful
protests" and of course its contested election results all fit the Color Revolution mold
curiously enough.
One NGO called the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG) was bold or reckless enough
to draw the parallels between the Color Revolution in Belarus and the events playing out
against Trump explicitly. In response to a remark by a twitter user that the TDWG's remarks
about Belarus suggested parallels to the United States, the TDWG ominously replied:
Now, would the reader care to take a guess as to who runs the Transatlantic Democracy
Working Group? If you guessed Norm Eisen, you would be correct.
Stay tuned for more in Revolver.news' groundbreaking coverage of the Color
Revolution against Trump. Be sure to check out the previous installments in this series.
The 238-page document, written by the majority staff of the House Transportation
Committee, calls into question whether the plane maker or the Federal Aviation Administration
has fully incorporated essential safety lessons, despite a global grounding of the MAX fleet
since March 2019.
After an 18-month investigation, the report, released Wednesday, concludes that Boeing's
travails stemmed partly from a reluctance to admit mistakes and "point to a company culture
that is in serious need of a safety reset."
The report provides more specifics, in sometimes-blistering language, backing up
preliminary
findings the panel's Democrats released six months ago , which laid out a pattern of
mistakes and missed opportunities to correct them.
In one section, the Democrats' report faults Boeing for what it calls "inconceivable and
inexcusable" actions to withhold crucial information from airlines about one cockpit-warning
system, related to but not part of MCAS, that didn't operate as required on 80% of MAX jets.
Other portions highlight instances when Boeing officials, acting in their capacity as
designated FAA representatives, part of a widely used system of delegating oversight
authority to company employees,
failed to alert agency managers about various safety matters .
Boeing concealed from regulators internal test data showing that if a pilot took longer
than 10 seconds to recognise that the system had kicked in erroneously, the consequences
would be "catastrophic" .
The report also detailed how an alert, which would have warned pilots of a potential
problem with one of their anti-stall sensors, was not working on the vast majority of the Max
fleet . It found that the company deliberately concealed this fact from both pilots and
regulators as it continued to roll out the new aircraft around the world.
In Bed With the Regulators
Boeing's defense is the FAA signed off on the reviews. Lovely. Boeing coerced or bribed the FAA to sign off on the reviews now tries to hide behind
the FAA.
There is only one way to stop executive criminals like those at Boeing. Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them to prison for life, then take all of
their stock and options and hand the money out for restitution.
adr , 1 hour ago
Remember, Boeing spent enough on stock buybacks in the past ten years to fund the
development of at least seven new airframes.
Instead of developing a new and better plane, they strapped engines that didn't belong on
the 737 and called it safe.
SDShack , 21 minutes ago
What is really sad is they already had a perfectly functional and safe 737Max. It was the
757. Look at the specs between the 2 planes. Almost same size, capacity, range, etc. Only
difference was the 757 requires longer runways, but I would think they could have adjusted
the design to improve that and make it very similar to the 737Max without starting from
scratch. Instead Boeing bean counters killed the 757 and gave the world this flying coffin.
Now the world bean counters will kill Boeing.
Tristan Ludlow , 1 hour ago
Boeing is a critical defense contractor. They will not be held accountable and they will
be rewarded with additional bailouts and contract awards.
MFL5591 , 1 hour ago
Can you imagine a congress of Criminals Like Schiff, Pelosi and Schumer prosecuting
someone else for fraud? What a joke. Next up will be Bill Clinton testifying against a person
on trial for Pedophilia!
RagaMuffin , 1 hour ago
Mish is half right. The FAA should join Boeing in jail. If they are not held responsible
for their role, why have an FAA?
Manthong , 1 hour ago
"There is only one way to stop executive criminals like those at Boeing.
Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them to prison for life, then take all
of their stock and options and hand the money out for restitution."
Correction:
There is only one way to stop regulator criminals like those in government.
Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them to prison for life, then take all
of their pensions and ill gotten wealth a nd hand the money out for restitution.
Elliott Eldrich , 43 minutes ago
"There is only one way to stop executive criminals like those at Boeing.
Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them to prison for life, then take all
of their stock and options and hand the money out for restitution."
Ha ha ha HA HA HA HA HA! Silly rabbit, jail is for poors...
Birdbob , 1 hour ago
Accountability of Elite Perps ended under Oblaba's reign of "Wall Street and Technocracy
Architects" .White collar criminals were granted immunity from prosecution. This was put into
play by Attorney Genital Eric Holder. This was the beginning of having an orificial Attorney
Genital that facilitated the District of Criminals organized crime empire ending the 3 letter
agencies' interference. https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/8310187817727287761/1843903631072834621
Dash8 , 1 hour ago
You don't seem to understand the basic principle of aircraft design...it must not require
an extraordinary response for a KNOWN problem.
Think of it this way; Ford builds a car that works great most of the time, but
occasionally a wheel will fall off at highway speeds...no problem, right? ....you just guide
the car to the shoulder on the 3 remaining wheels and all good.
Now, put your wife and kids in that car, after a day at work and the kids screaming in the
back.
Still feel good about your opinion?
canaanav , 1 hour ago
I wrote software on the 787. You are right. This was not a known problem and the Trim
Runaway procedure was already established. The issue was that the MAX needed a larger
horizontal stab and MCAS would have never been needed. The FAA doesnt have the knowledge to
regulate things like this. Boeing lost talent too, and gets bailouts and tax breaks to the
extent that they dont care.
Dash8 , 1 hour ago
But it was a known problem, Boeing admits this.
Argon1 , 41 minutes ago
LGBT & Ethnicity was a more important hiring criteria than Engineering talant.
gutta percha , 1 hour ago
Why is it so difficult to design and maintain reliable Angle Of Attack sensors? The
engineers put in layers and layers of complicated tech to sense and react to AOA sensor
failures. Why not make the sensors _themselves_ more reliable? They aren't nearly as complex
as all the layers of tech BS on top of them.
Dash8 , 1 hour ago
It's not, but it costs $$....and there you have it.
Argon1 , 37 minutes ago
Its the Shuttle Rocketdyne problem, the upper management phones down to the safety
committee and complains about the cost of the delay, take off your engineer hat and put on
your management hat. All of a sudden your project launches on schedule and the board claps
and cheers at their ability to defy physics and save $ millions by just shouting at someone
for about 60 seconds..
canaanav , 1 hour ago
Each AOA sensor is already redundant internally. They have multiple channels. I believe
they were hit with a maintenance stand and jammed. That said, AOA has never been a control
system component. It just runs the low-speed cue on the EFIS and the stick shaker. It's an
advisory-level system. Boeing tied it to Flight Controls thru MCAS. The FAA likely dictated
to Boeing how they wanted the System Safety Analysis (SSA) to look, Boeing wrote it that way,
the FAA bought off on it.
Winston Churchill , 43 minutes ago
More fundamental is why an aerodynamically stable aircraft wasn't designed in the first
place,love of money.
HardlyZero , 13 minutes ago
Yes. In reality the changed CG (Center of Gravity) due to the larger fan engine really did
setup as a "new" design, so the MAX should have been treated as "new" and completely
evaluated and completely tested as a completly new design. As a new design it would probably
double the development and test cost and schedule...so be it.
DisorderlyConduct , 1 hour ago
"Lovely. Boeing coerced or bribed the FAA to sign off on the reviews now tries to hide
behind the FAA."
No - what a shoddy analysis.
The FAA conceded many of their oversight responsibilities to Boeing - who was basically
given the green light to self-monitor. The FAA is the one that is in the wrong here.
Well, how the **** else was that supposed to end up? This is like the IRS letting people
self-audit...
Astroboy , 1 hour ago
Just as the Boeing saga is unfolding, we should expect by the end of the year other
similar situations, related to drug companies, pandemia and the rest.
8. The internet was invented by the US government, not Silicon Valley
Many people think that the US is ahead in the frontier technology sectors as a result of
private sector entrepreneurship. It's not. The US federal government created all these
sectors.
The Pentagon financed the development of the computer in the early days and the Internet
came out of a Pentagon research project. The semiconductor - the foundation of the
information economy - was initially developed with the funding of the US Navy. The US
aircraft industry would not have become what it is today had the US Air Force not massively
subsidized it indirectly by paying huge prices for its military aircraft, the profit of which
was channeled into developing civilian aircraft.
People believe that corporate executives are immune from prosecution and protected by the
fact that they are within the corporation. This is false security. If true purposeful and
intended criminal activities are conducted by any corporate executive, the courts can do what
is called "Piercing The Corporate Veil" . It is looking beyond the corporation as a virtual
person and looking at the actual individuals making and conducting the criminal
activities.
The Apple Bill passed the House overwhelmingly but then died in the Senate after a bureaucratic snafu for which Jobs forever
blamed Republican Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, then chair of the Finance Committee. Yet all was not lost: A similar bill passed
in California, and Apple flooded its home state with almost 10,000 computers. Apple's success in California gave it a leg up
in the lucrative education market as states around the country began to computerize their classrooms. But education was not
radically transformed, unless you count a spike in
The
Oregon Trail
–related deaths from dysentery. If anything, those who have studied the rapid introduction of computers into
classrooms in the 1980s and '90s tend to conclude that it exacerbated inequities. Elite students and schools zoomed smoothly
into cyberspace, while poorer schools fell further behind, bogged down by a lack of training and resources.
A young, charismatic geek hawks his wares using bold promises of social progress but actually makes things worse and gets
extremely rich in the process -- today it is easy to see the story of the Apple Bill as a stand-in for the history of the digital
revolution as a whole. The growing concern about the role that technology plays in our lives and society is fueled in no small
part by a growing realization that we have been duped. We were told that computerizing everything would lead to greater
prosperity, personal empowerment, collective understanding, even the ability to transcend the limits of the physical realm and
create a big, beautiful global brain made out of electrons. Instead, our extreme dependence on technology seems to have mainly
enriched and empowered a handful of tech companies at the expense of everyone else. The panic over Facebook's impact on
democracy sparked by Donald Trump's election in a haze of fake news and Russian bots felt like the national version of the
personal anxiety that seizes many of us when we find ourselves snapping away from our phone for what seems like the 1,000th
time in an hour and contemplating how our lives are being stolen by a screen. We are stuck in a really bad system.
This realization has led to a justifiable anger and derision aimed at the architects of this system. Silicon Valley executives
and engineers are taken to task every week in the op-ed pages of our largest newspapers. We are told that their
irresponsibility and greed have undermined our freedom and degraded our democratic institutions. While it is gratifying to see
tech billionaires get a (very small) portion of their comeuppance, we often forget that until very recently, Silicon Valley
was hailed by almost everyone as creating the path toward a brilliant future. Perhaps we should pause and contemplate how this
situation came to be, lest we make the same mistakes again. The story of how Silicon Valley ended up at the center of the
American dream in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as well as the ambiguous reality behind its own techno-utopian
dreams, is the subject of Margaret O'Mara's sweeping new history,
The
Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
. In it, she puts Silicon Valley into the context of a larger story about
postwar America's economic and social transformations, highlighting its connections with the mainstream rather than the
cultural quirks and business practices that set it apart.
The
Code
urges us to consider Silicon Valley's shortcomings as America's shortcomings, even if it fails to interrogate them
as deeply as our current crisis -- and the role that technology played in bringing it about -- seems to warrant.
S
ilicon Valley entered the public consciousness in the 1970s as something of a charmed place. The first recorded
mention of Silicon Valley was in a 1971 article by a writer for a technology newspaper reporting on the region's semiconductor
industry, which was booming despite the economic doldrums that had descended on most of the country. As the Rust Belt
foundered and Detroit crumbled, Silicon Valley soared to heights barely conveyed by the metrics that O'Mara rattles off in the
opening pages of
The
Code
: "Three billion smartphones. Two billion social media users. Two trillion-dollar companies" and "the richest people
in the history of humanity." Many people have attempted to divine the secret of Silicon Valley's success. The consensus became
that the Valley had pioneered a form of quicksilver entrepreneurialism perfectly suited to the Information Age. It was fast,
flexible, meritocratic, and open to new ways of doing things. It allowed brilliant young people to turn crazy ideas into
world-changing companies practically overnight. Silicon Valley came to represent the innovative power of capitalism freed from
the clutches of uptight men in midcentury business suits, bestowed upon the masses by a new, appealing folk hero: the
cherub-faced start-up founder hacking away in his dorm room.
The Code
both bolsters and revises this story. On the one hand, O'Mara, a historian at the University of Washington, is
clearly enamored with tales of entrepreneurial derring-do. From the "traitorous eight" who broke dramatically from the
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to start Fairchild Semiconductor and create the modern silicon transistor to the
well-documented story of Facebook's founding, the major milestones of Silicon Valley history are told in heroic terms that can
seem gratingly out of touch, given what we know about how it all turned out. In her portrayal of Silicon Valley's tech titans,
O'Mara emphasizes virtuous qualities like determination, ingenuity, and humanistic concern, while hints of darker motives are
studiously ignored. We learn that a "visionary and relentless" Jeff Bezos continued to drive a beat-up Honda Accord even as he
became a billionaire, but his reported remark to an Amazon sales team that they ought to treat small publishers the way a lion
treats a sickly gazelle is apparently not deemed worthy of the historical record. But at the same time, O'Mara helps us
understand why Silicon Valley's economic dominance can't be chalked up solely to the grit and smarts of entrepreneurs battling
it out in the free market. At every stage of its development, she shows how the booming tech industry was aided and abetted by
a wide swath of American society both inside and outside the Valley. Marketing gurus shaped the tech companies' images,
educators evangelized for technology in schools, best-selling futurists preached personalized tech as a means toward personal
liberation. What emerges in
The
Code
is less the story of a tribe of misfits working against the grain than the simultaneous alignment of the country's
political, cultural, and technical elites around the view that Silicon Valley held the key to the future.
Above all, O'Mara highlights the profound role that the US government played in Silicon Valley's rise. At the end of World War
II, the region was still the sleepy, sun-drenched Santa Clara Valley, home to farms and orchards, an upstart Stanford
University, and a scattering of small electronics and aerospace firms. Then came the space and arms races, given new urgency
in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik, which suggested a serious Soviet advantage. Millions of dollars in government funding
flooded technology companies and universities around the country. An outsize portion went to Northern California's burgeoning
tech industry, thanks in large part to Stanford's far-sighted provost Frederick Terman, who reshaped the university into a hub
for engineering and the applied sciences.
Stanford and the surrounding area became a hive of government R&D during these years, as IBM and Lockheed Martin opened local
outposts and the first native start-ups hit the ground. While these early companies relied on what O'Mara calls the Valley's
"ecosystem" of fresh-faced engineers seeking freedom and sunshine in California, venture capitalists sniffing out a profitable
new industry, and lawyers, construction companies, and real estate agents jumping to serve their somewhat quirky ways, she
makes it clear that the lifeblood pumping through it all was government money. Fairchild Semiconductor's biggest clients for
its new silicon chips were NASA, which put them in the Apollo rockets, and the Defense Department, which stuck them in
Minuteman nuclear missiles. The brains of all of today's devices have their origin in the United States' drive to defeat the
Soviet Union in the Cold War.
But the role of public funding in the creation of Silicon Valley is not the big government success story a good liberal might
be tempted to consider it. As O'Mara points out, during the Cold War American leaders deliberately pushed public funds to
private industry rather than government programs because they thought the market was the best way to spur technological
progress while avoiding the specter of centralized planning, which had come to smack of communist tyranny. In the years that
followed, this belief in the market as the means to achieve the goals of liberal democracy spread to nearly every aspect of
life and society, from public education and health care to social justice, solidifying into the creed we now call
neoliberalism. As the role of the state was eclipsed by the market, Silicon Valley -- full of brilliant entrepreneurs devising
technologies that promised to revolutionize everything they touched -- was well positioned to step into the void.
The earliest start-up founders hardly seemed eager to assume the mantle of social visionary that their successors,
today's flashy celebrity technologists, happily take up. They were buttoned-down engineers who reflected the cool practicality
of their major government and corporate clients. As the 1960s wore on, they were increasingly out of touch. Amid the tumult of
the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, the major concern in Silicon Valley's manicured technology
parks was a Johnson-era drop in military spending. The relatively few techies who were political at the time were
conservative.
Things started to change in the 1970s. The '60s made a belated arrival in the Valley as a younger generation of geeks steeped
in countercultural values began to apply them to the development of computer technology. The weight of Silicon Valley's
culture shifted from the conservative suits to long-haired techno-utopians with dreams of radically reorganizing society
through technology.
This shift was perhaps best embodied by Lee Felsenstein, a former self-described "child radical" who cut
his teeth running communications operations for anti-war and civil rights protests before going on to develop the Tom Swift
Terminal, one of the earliest personal computers.
Felsenstein believed that giving everyday people access to computers could
liberate them from the crushing hierarchy of modern industrial society by breaking the monopoly on information held by
corporations and government bureaucracies. "To change the rules, change the tools," he liked to say.
Whereas Silicon Valley
had traditionally developed tools for the Man, these techies wanted to make tools to undermine him. They created a loose-knit
network of hobbyist groups, drop-in computer centers, and DIY publications to share knowledge and work toward the ideal of
personal liberation through technology. Their dreams seemed increasingly achievable as computers shrank from massive,
room-filling mainframes to the smaller-room-filling minicomputers to, finally, in 1975, the first commercially viable personal
computer, the Altair.
Yet as O'Mara shows, the techno-utopians did not ultimately constitute such a radical break from the past. While their calls
to democratize computing may have echoed Marxist cries to seize the means of production, most were capitalists at heart. To
advance the personal computer "revolution," they founded start-ups, trade magazines, and business forums, relying on funding
from venture capital funds often with roots in the old money elite. Jobs became the most celebrated entrepreneur of the era by
embodying the discordant figures of both the cowboy capitalist and the touchy-feely hippie, an image crafted in large part by
the marketing guru Regis McKenna. Silicon Valley soon became an industry that looked a lot like those that had come before. It
was nearly as white and male as they were. Its engineers worked soul-crushing hours and blew off steam with boozy pool
parties. And its most successful company, Microsoft, clawed its way to the top through ruthless monopolistic tactics.
Perhaps the strongest case against the supposed subversiveness of the personal computer pioneers is how quickly they were
embraced by those in power. As profits rose and spectacular IPOs seized headlines throughout the 1980s, Silicon Valley was
championed by the rising stars of supply-side economics, who hitched their drive for tax cuts and deregulation to tech's
venture-capital-fueled rocket ship. The groundwork was laid in 1978, when the Valley's venture capitalists formed an alliance
with the Republicans to kill then-President Jimmy Carter's proposed increase in the capital gains tax. They beta-tested
Reaganomics by advancing the dubious argument that millionaires' making slightly less money on their investments might stifle
technological innovation by limiting the supply of capital available to start-ups. And they carried the day.
As president, Ronald Reagan doubled down with tax cuts and wild technophilia. In a truly trippy speech to students at Moscow
State University in 1988, he hailed the transcendent possibilities of the new economy epitomized by Silicon Valley, predicting
a future in which "human innovation increasingly makes physical resources obsolete." Meanwhile, the market-friendly New
Democrats embraced the tech industry so enthusiastically that they became known, to their chagrin, as Atari Democrats. The
media turned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs into international celebrities with flattering profiles and cover stories -- living
proof that the mix of technological innovation, risk taking, corporate social responsibility, and lack of regulation that
defined Silicon Valley in the popular imagination was the template for unending growth and prosperity, even in an era of
deindustrialization and globalization.
T
he near-universal celebration of Silicon Valley as an avatar of free-market capitalism in the 1980s helped ensure that
the market would guide the Internet's development in the 1990s, as it became the cutting-edge technology that promised to
change everything. The Internet began as an academic resource, first as ARPANET, funded and overseen by the Department of
Defense, and later as the National Science Foundation's NSFNET. And while Al Gore didn't invent the Internet, he did spearhead
the push to privatize it: As the Clinton administration's "technology czar," he helped develop its landmark National
Information Infrastructure (NII) plan, which emphasized the role of private industry and the importance of telecommunications
deregulation in constructing America's "information superhighway." Not surprisingly, Gore would later do a little-known turn
as a venture capitalist with the prestigious Valley firm Kleiner Perkins, becoming very wealthy in the process. In response to
his NII plan, the advocacy group Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility warned of a possible corporate takeover of
the Internet. "An imaginative view of the risks of an NII designed without sufficient attention to public-interest needs can
be found in the modern genre of dystopian fiction known as 'cyberpunk,'" they wrote. "Cyberpunk novelists depict a world in
which a handful of multinational corporations have seized control, not only of the physical world, but of the virtual world of
cyberspace." Who can deny that today's commercial Internet has largely fulfilled this cyberpunk nightmare? Someone should ask
Gore what he thinks.
Despite offering evidence to the contrary, O'Mara narrates her tale of Silicon Valley's rise as, ultimately, a success story.
At the end of the book, we see it as the envy of other states around the country and other countries around the world, an
"exuberantly capitalist, slightly anarchic tech ecosystem that had evolved over several generations." Throughout the book, she
highlights the many issues that have sparked increasing public consternation with Big Tech of late, from its lack of diversity
to its stupendous concentration of wealth, but these are framed in the end as unfortunate side effects of the headlong rush to
create a new and brilliant future. She hardly mentions the revelations by the National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward
Snowden of the US government's chilling capacity to siphon users' most intimate information from Silicon Valley's platforms
and the voraciousness with which it has done so. Nor does she grapple with Uber, which built its multibillion-dollar leviathan
on the backs of meagerly paid drivers. The fact that in order to carry out almost anything online we must subject ourselves to
a hypercommodified hellscape of targeted advertising and algorithmic sorting does not appear to be a huge cause for concern.
But these and many other aspects of our digital landscape have made me wonder if a technical complex born out of Cold War
militarism and mainstreamed in a free-market frenzy might not be fundamentally always at odds with human flourishing. O'Mara
suggests at the end of her book that Silicon Valley's flaws might be redeemed by a new, more enlightened, and more diverse
generation of techies. But haven't we heard this story before?
If there is a larger lesson to learn from
The
Code
, it is that technology cannot be separated from the social and political contexts in which it is created. The major
currents in society shape and guide the creation of a system that appears to spring from the minds of its inventors alone.
Militarism and unbridled capitalism remain among the most powerful forces in the United States, and to my mind, there is no
reason to believe that a new generation of techies might resist them any more effectively than the previous ones. The question
of fixing Silicon Valley is inseparable from the question of fixing the system of postwar American capitalism, of which it is
perhaps the purest expression. Some believe that the problems we see are bugs that might be fixed with a patch. Others think
the code is so bad at its core that a radical rewrite is the only answer. Although
The
Code
was written for people in the first group, it offers an important lesson for those of us in the second: Silicon
Valley is as much a symptom as it is a cause of our current crisis. Resisting its bad influence on society will ultimately
prove meaningless if we cannot also formulate a vision of a better world -- one with a more humane relationship to technology -- to
counteract it. And, alas, there is no app for that.
Adrian Chen
Adrian Chen is a freelance writer. He is working on a book about Internet culture.
Technocracy is a part of the neoliberal elite and they are interested in continuation of globalization. As such they are fierce
opponents of Trump "national neoliberalism" project. Nothing personal, strictly business.
Were Khodorkovsky or Browder among people involved? To what extent Trump administration and
MI6 were involved? Looks more and more line a bad replay of Skripals poisoning
Notable quotes:
"... Germans and "the whole world", to quote Pompeo, know the truth: Russians simply deny the truth, and the more they deny, the more truthful the accusations appear. And the elephant in the room: Why isn't the poisoned by "Novichok" bullshitting bastard of a US agent dead? And the answer given by the Germans, that is ironic in the extreme: because Russian doctors saved his life in Omsk. ..."
"... There are undeniable advantages to accusations for which no substantiation is offered – as we saw with the Skripals, you can await public comment, identify where you went wrong from scornful rejections of the narrative, and then modify it so that it makes more sense. ..."
"... I hope Germany offers residency to the Navalnys, and that they accept. Russia can't really refuse to let him back in, he's a citizen. But as long as he is there he will cause trouble, and he'll be recharged with all the PR he has received from this latest caper. ..."
"... But it is suggested that Russia is bargaining for his return; the story also expands on Lavrov's recent statements, and introduces a villain in the woodpile I would not have personally suspected: Poland. ..."
"... I recall Lavrov querying the other day Pevchikh's presence in Germany, her refusal to be interviewed by investigators in Omsk and how come she managed to fly to Germany with Navalny? He also said that other supporters of Navalny had also turned up in Germany. ..."
"... I lay a pound to a pinch of shit that Pevchikh is a British agent. ..."
"... Looking good for almost a corpse. COVID-19, a flu virus, is a deadly killer, and Novichok, a deadly nerve agent, is not a killer. ..."
"... Dances with Bears: THE PEVCHIKH PLOT – NAVALNY BOTTLE, LONDON WITNESS FLEE THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, BERLIN TOO http://johnhelmer.net/the-pevchikh-plot-navalny-bottle-london-witness-flee-the-scene-of-the-crime-berlin-too/ ..."
"... I reckon Khordokovsky has a hand in this. He has the same moral compass as dead Berezovsky. None. And he has refused to stick to agreements (keep out of politics). If the British or someone else get fingered for this cunning plan , would they serve him up on a silver platter? Almost certainly so. ..."
"... We certainly did well to focus on Maria Pevchikh as soon as we discovered that in addition to being the one who evaded questioning by Russian authorities by flying out to Germany, she also had British residency. She certainly has become a "person of interest" and could well be the major individual in the plot to incapacitate Navalny and use him to pressure Germany over NSII and Russia over the Belarus unrest. ..."
"... It is still unknown whether Pevchikh is a British citizen. I think she is and probably must be, in fact, for if she is only a visa holder or an applicant for UK citizenship, she could be told by the Home Office to go take a hike if it is proven that she was instrumental in the poisoning plot. ..."
"... Ask Pevchikh! Only she is now probably undergoing debriefing in London at UK Secret Intelligence Services HQ, 85 Albert Embankment. ..."
"... There was considerable risk involved in the deception. I doubt that Navalny went into the deception willingly. There was a very real risk that he could have suffered some brain damage going into the first coma and that's sure to compromise his health in the long term in other ways. ..."
"... More likely it seems a lot of the deception was planned behind Navalny's back and people were waiting for an opportunity to carry it out. It may have been planned years ago for someone else and then switched to Navalny once he was in the Omsk hospital. Julia Navalnaya may have been pushed into demanding that Navalny be transferred to Berlin and while the Omsk hospital doctors were stabilising him for the transfer, the deception then started going into action in Germany. ..."
"... Lavrov smelt a rat several days ago -- last week, I'm sure -- when he stated that suspicions had been aroused by one of Navalny's gang refusing to answer investigators' questions in Omsk and then scarpering off to Germany. ..."
"... I'm quite sure the FSB already knew of Pevchikh's comings and goings between London and Moscow (over 60 flights there and back I read somewhere) and her activities with the Navalny organization. ..."
"... if Washington thinks it can actually halt Nord Stream II – with the understanding that the Russians would probably give up after such a stinging second rebuke – then the sky is the limit, and they will scornfully reject any other solution. The one who stands to get hurt the most is Europe. But I don't think they realize it. ..."
NYT сообщила о
планах
Навального
вернуться в
Россию
15 сентября 2020
NYT has announced Navalney's to return to Russia
15 September 2020
Founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Alexei Navalny, who is undergoing treatment
in Germany, has discussed his poisoning with the German prosecutor and announced that he
plans to return to Russia, The New York Times has reported, citing a source in the German
security forces.
According to the source, Navalny is fully aware of his condition, of what happened and
where he is. In a conversation with the prosecutor, he refused that his case be jointly
investigated by Germany and Russia. Navalny said he planned to return to Russia immediately
after his recovery and continue his mission, the newspaper notes.
I notice that the Navalny fake story has gone off the radar in the Western MSM.
Now there just remain the lies and innuendos fixed in the minds of the sheeple.
Only an investigation by the Germans.
No investigation by the Russians.
Germans and "the whole world", to quote Pompeo, know the truth: Russians simply deny
the truth, and the more they deny, the more truthful the accusations appear. And the elephant
in the room: Why isn't the poisoned by "Novichok" bullshitting bastard of a US agent dead?
And the answer given by the Germans, that is ironic in the extreme: because Russian doctors
saved his life in Omsk.
Other elephants lurking in the shadows:
Why hadn't everyone who had been in contact with the piece of shit, including fellow
passengers on the Tomsk-Moscow flight died?
Where were the hazmat-suit-wearing specialists that should have detoxified the aeroplane
on board of which the Bullshitter threw a wobbler?
So many elephants, all ignored.
Total fabrication.
When the liar returns here, how about arresting him for breach of his bail conditions?
Not technically but absolutely legally he was not allowed to leave the country.
How about arresting him for perverting the course of justice? You can get life for doing
that in the UK!
He refuses to allow the Russian state to investigate his case but he and his controllers
and supporters maintain that the Russian state attempted to murder him with the most deadly
nerve agent known to man -- but it didn't work.
And on the plus side he can sell expensive 'blessed' trinkets to his hamsters help
subsidize his interesting lifestyle. Think holy relics, think Medjigorje, Lourdes
etc.
Навальный,
"Новичок" и
"белая коробка"
13 сентября 2020
Navalny, "Novichok" and the "White Box"
13 September 2020
Why is not a single Berlin doctor ready to personally confirm the announced poisoning
of Navalny?
A Russian patient is recovering in the "White Box" of the Charité hospital.
During the three weeks of Navalny's stay within these walls, no one shouted at the doctors
that they were murderers, no one demanded from them hourly reports on the patient's state of
health. At the beginning of the week, the hospital's press service informs the press that the
personal guest of the Federal Chancellor has been withdrawn from an artificial coma and is
reacting to other people. A couple of days later, "Spiegel" magazine publishes encouraging
information: "More progress has been made. If his health continues to improve, Navalny will
begin to receive more visitors". According to "Bellingcat" and "Der Spiegel", Navalny can
already speak and can probably recall the events that happened before he lost consciousness
on an aeroplane flying from Tomsk to Moscow.
In general, the latest Charité press releases are in clear contradiction to the
horror that the German press had been gathering all week. The already poisoned underpants
have been forgotten, the newspaper "Die Zeit" returns the reader to a famous photograph:
morning in a café at the Tomsk airport, a passenger for the flight to Moscow flight
peers into a cup that he has raised in order to drink out of it. In it,, according to a "Die
" source, is not just a chemical warfare agent from the "Novichok" group: in there is a
"Novichok" on steroids.
"Before this assassination attempt, the world did not know about this poison, which is
said to be even more deadly and dangerous than all known substances from the Novichok group.
Scientists found corresponding traces on the Navalny's hands and on the neck of a bottle from
which he had drunk. This "modified Novichok" allegedly acts more slowly than previous
versions. The Germans assume that one of the FSB agents monitoring Navalny, or an undercover
agent, added drops of poison to his tea or applied a substance to the surface of a cup.
Navalny was supposed to die on board the aircraft", writes "Die Zeit".
Everything is just fine and dandy here: for example, about agents who had to perform
the necessary manipulations with a super-poison in a crowded place. A remarkable and suddenly
appeared bottle -- no bottle was seen in Omsk at all. The story goes on about the fact that,
apart from tea, Navalny did not drink anything. It turns out that those accompanying the
blogger took the bottle out of the plane, hid it, and then transported it to Germany and
handed it to Bundeswehr chemists Concealing evidence is pure criminality. But the most
interesting thing is the super-"Novichok".
After the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury (let us recount the usual version of
events that happened there), about 50 more people sought medical help. Houses were taken
apart, pets were destroyed. But here no one except Navalny was hurt: neither the people at
Tomsk airport, nor the fellow travellers with whom he, having the terrible poison in his
hands, took a selfie on a bus, nor the passengers on board the aircraft, and he also touched
things there. Symptoms of poisoning should have appeared amongst the passengers, but they did
not. This should raise questions from the authors of the serious newspaper "Die Zeit", but it
does not. A weapon of mass destruction by any reasoning, but the longer the German press
examines the Navalny case, the more mediaeval and grotesque it becomes. And it works -- you
can see it even from the reaction of quite moderate politicians.
Already a week and a half ago, Merkel announced the results of a toxicological
examination, allegedly carried out in a secret laboratory of the Bundeswehr (yes, Navalny was
poisoned), opponents of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline have intensified their onslaught
against the federal government in order to stop the construction, they say, this is the only
way to punish Russia. At the head of the column are the party leaders of the Greens and those
associates of Merkel who are friendly with Washington and have plans for higher party or
administrative posts after the Chancellor leaves.
These voices were at least heard. In an evening talk show on ZDF, German Foreign
Minister Heiko Maas made it clear that the shutdown of Nord Stream 2 could be one
response.
"We cannot say that since the sanctions do not work, then there is no need to introduce
any. Sometimes we have to put up with the risk of the consequences, thereby saying that we do
not want to live in a world without rules", Maas said.
Now Herr Maas, along with many members of the government and administration and the
Chancellor, lives in a world of very strange rules. Merkel's press secretary Seibert
reiterated that Germany will interact with Russia exclusively at the site of the Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), where all the documents allegedly have
already been sent.
The OPCW Technical Secretariat informed our permanent representative, Alexander
Shulgin, that Berlin had only sent a notification about Navalny's poisoning, a sheet of A4
paper, but there is still nothing that the experts could work on. But the Germans had to
formulate a response to the proposal of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office on exchange
of information: any information about the state of Navalny can be transferred to Russia only
with his permission.
This was the case in 2004. The Charité clinic then diagnosed the presidential
candidate of the Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin poisoning -- no one ever saw
documentary evidence. Yushchenko then for 4 years, while he was of interest he was to the
public, promised to show everything, but he never did.
This trick can be repeated again, the main thing is to find the answer to an urgent
task: to inflate the level of confrontation between Russia and Germany, and therefore the
entire West, in order to force the Russian authorities to be as cautious as possible in their
domestic and foreign policy, for example, in the Belarusian direction.
However, the fact that Nord Stream 2, for which the German federal government was ready
to support unto death, suddenly became an instrument of blackmail -- admit the poisoning,
otherwise we can close it down -- openly outraged German business and regional
elites.
"It seems that the verdict has already been given -- there are demands that
construction of the pipeline be stopped. I strongly oppose such measures", said Michael
Kretschmer, Prime Minister of Saxony.
"We have had absolutely trusting cooperation with Russia in the energy sector for 50
years. And even in the most difficult political times, which were probably even more
difficult during the Cold War, we managed to maintain this trust", emphasized Michael Harms,
executive director of Eastern Committee of the German economy.
Even a true transatlantist, the president of the Munich Security Conference Wolfgang
Ischinger, stood up for Nord Stream 2 (and Denmark had joined the renewed US incitement
against it the day before).
Political games will not pass themselves of as force majeure. Investors will go to the
German government for their money. Here you need to think ten times, because along with the
demands of multibillion-dollar compensation, there will definitely be asked unpleasant
questions about the reasons that made the German authorities abandon a project that was
profitable to all sides. So you can go to Navalny's analyses. In a normal court, bureaucratic
excuses will not work. And, by the way, in Germany there are politician-lawyers who can
professionally draw up a claim and conduct a case.
"I want to investigate this. One of the developers of Novichok is in the US. It is
known that many special services have this poison. Of course, the Russian have it as well,
but if Putin did it, then why give Navalny to Germany? So that we can establish all this
here? A crime must have some logic", says Bundestag deputy Gregor Gizi.
The logic that we now see is somehow not German. One gets the impression that the
compassion and humanism of the German politician, brought up on the lessons of the past, are
now being tried out by smart and cynical people who know how to competently fabricate,
substitute and cover their tracks. And not too far away, we already had Britain.
At the end of May 2003, the BBC released material that Prime Minister Blair and his
cabinet had made a decision to enter the war in Iraq based on falsified intelligence. The
person who passed on this information to reporters was David Kelly, a leading chemical
weapons specialist at the British Department of Defence. His speech at the parliamentary
hearings threatened the prime minister, the military and the secret services with big
problems, Hiwever, on July 18, 2003, Kelly was found dead in the woods near his home.
Suicide, the investigation stated, but in 2007, a group of parliamentarians conducted an
unofficial investigation -- there were no legal consequences, but now all British people know
that Kelly was murdered in cold blood.
In 2015, Blair was forced to admit that he lied to citizens about Iraq, and escaped
trial only because no one wanted to get involved with it. Nevertheless, Blair has gone down
in history with this lie. And history is important to remember in order to do it right.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov calls on the Germans to leave emotions and turn on
their brains.
"I hope that these absurd actions will be stopped and Germany, at least for the sake of
the reputation of German punctuality, will fulfill its obligations under the agreement with
the Russian Federation. Moreover, they are demanding an investigation from us, but it turns
out that all those who accompanied Navalny are slowly moving to Germany too. this is very
unpleasant and leads to serious thoughts. Therefore, it is in the interests of our German
colleagues to protect their reputation and provide all the necessary information that would
somehow shed light on their so far absolutely unfounded accusations", Lavrov said.
Another proposal has gone from Moscow to Berlin: to send a Russian investigation team
to Germany in order to jointly study the circumstances of the case, the victim of which is a
Russian citizen. So far, there is no reason to believe that Berlin will respond with
consent.
Some German politicians and almost all the SMS likes to moralize against Russia,
periodically recalling the Stalinist repressions and the GULAG. But now Germany itself
behaves like an investigator during interrogation in the dungeons of the NKVD. Confession is
the queen of proof.*
There are undeniable advantages to accusations for which no substantiation is offered
– as we saw with the Skripals, you can await public comment, identify where you went
wrong from scornful rejections of the narrative, and then modify it so that it makes more
sense.
In this case, people wonder why such a potent nerve agent did not fell Navalny instantly
like a poleaxed ox, before he ever left the terminal, instead of 40 minutes or so into the
flight. Ahhh but this, we later learn, was a specially-modified Novichok, engineered to be
slow-acting. Just what you want in a nerve agent. Hint – no, it isn't. Just like you
don't want it specially engineered to be 'persistent', like that chemical-warfare expert tit
for Bellingcat claimed was the reason the poison daubed on Skripal's doorknob did not wash
away in the rain and was still deadly weeks afterward. You want a nerve agent to quickly and
efficiently kill enemy troops caught in the open and unprotected, and then as quickly degrade
and disperse so your own forces can move in and occupy the objective. The last thing you want
is it hanging about for weeks, or being 'slow-acting' so those troops can come in and wax
your ass and then later fall down dead. One of the first casualties of these silly stories
must be that the agent is 'military grade'. The military would say, if you want to use that
useless shite, spread it yourself – we want nothing to do with it.
navalny Hi, this is Navalny. I miss you all 😍. I still can hardly do
anything, but yesterday I was able to breathe on my own all day. Generally myself. I did not
use any outside help, not even the simplest valve in my throat. I liked it very much. An
amazing, underestimated by many thing. Would totally recommend.
What, no tracheotomy scar?
Why aren't you dead, you wanker?
Thinking about thanking the Omsk doctors who "saved your life" after you had taken a dose
of salts in the aircraft shithouse?
I take it that the kiddie Navalnyites in the above Instagram are all Russian citizens and
part of the Bullshitter's entourage that turned up in Berlin, hot on the heels of their
comatose hero.
So how did they get the documentation that enabled them to leave the Mafia State and enter
Germany, the coronavirus shamdemic notwithstanding?
Yes, they are his children. Navalnaya clearly got permission for their son to travel to
Germany. His daughter has flown in from the USA.
However, the question still remains as regards those Navalnyites who rolled up in Germany
following their leader's private flight there: how did they get the appropriate documentation
to do so at such short notice, not to mention Pevchikh, who flew with the comatose Navalny to
Berlin -- and then vanished?.
Seibert was asked about this and said he knew nothing about her.
Ah, yes; that's a good point. I just assumed the hamsters were blathering from a distance,
as in Russia. I did not realize some of them had turned up in Germany, except for the
mysterious Masha.
I hope Germany offers residency to the Navalnys, and that they accept. Russia can't
really refuse to let him back in, he's a citizen. But as long as he is there he will cause
trouble, and he'll be recharged with all the PR he has received from this latest
caper.
But it is suggested that Russia is bargaining for his return; the story also expands
on Lavrov's recent statements, and introduces a villain in the woodpile I would not have
personally suspected: Poland.
I recall Lavrov querying the other day Pevchikh's presence in Germany, her refusal to
be interviewed by investigators in Omsk and how come she managed to fly to Germany with
Navalny? He also said that other supporters of Navalny had also turned up in
Germany.
I lay a pound to a pinch of shit that Pevchikh is a British agent.
British and other international toxicological experts say that without technical
reporting by the laboratory of the spectrometric composition of the chemical, and without
identifying the compound by the international naming protocol there is no evidence at
all;..
the US Army had recently manufactured its own Novichok types: "A230, A232 and A234 A232
has a CAS number of 2308498-31-7. A230 and A234 have no known CAS numbers."
####
I reckon Khordokovsky has a hand in this. He has the same moral compass as dead
Berezovsky. None. And he has refused to stick to agreements (keep out of politics). If the
British or someone else get fingered for this cunning plan , would they serve him up
on a silver platter? Almost certainly so.
We certainly did well to focus on Maria Pevchikh as soon as we discovered that in
addition to being the one who evaded questioning by Russian authorities by flying out to
Germany, she also had British residency. She certainly has become a "person of interest" and
could well be the major individual in the plot to incapacitate Navalny and use him to
pressure Germany over NSII and Russia over the Belarus unrest.
It is still unknown whether Pevchikh is a British citizen. I think she is and probably
must be, in fact, for if she is only a visa holder or an applicant for UK citizenship, she
could be told by the Home Office to go take a hike if it is proven that she was instrumental
in the poisoning plot.
When Berezovsky got cocky in the UK after a judge there had prevented his being forced to
leave Misty Albion because Berzovsky had persuaded him that were he to return to Mordor, he
would face an unfair trial and his life would be in danger -- the erstwhile "Godfather of the
Kremlin" had arrived in the with a 6-month visitor's visa -- he started bragging to the
"Guardian" that he was organizing with his chums still in the Evil Empire the overthrow of
the tyrant Putin.
The Home Secretary at the time was none other than "Jack" Straw -- another odious pile of
ordure -- who promptly summonsed Berezovsky to the Home Office for an official bollocking. He
was told that if, while resident in the UK, he continued to engage himself with the overthrow
of a foreign head of state, he was out.
Be that as it may, I am quite sure he was working with British state security, as was his
once favoured acolyte Litvinenko.
Litvinenko was poisoned. Berezovsky committed suicide -- they say.
Россия задала
ЕС девять
вопросов об
обвинениях в
ситуации с
Навальным
Постоянное
представительство
России при
Евросоюзе
указало на
ключевые
нестыковки в
версии об
отравлении
Алексея
Навального
15 сентября 2020
Russia has asked the EU nine questions about accusations in the situation with
Navalny
The Permanent Representative of Russia to the European Union has pointed out the key
inconsistencies in the version about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny
15 September 2020
In the eighth question, Russian diplomats drew attention to a bottle of water, on
which, according to Germany, traces of poison had been found: "Not a single surveillance
camera recorded how Navalny drank from a similar bottle at the Tomsk airport [before
departure]. from this bottle earlier or on board the plane, how did this bottle get to
Berlin? "
Ask Pevchikh! Only she is now probably undergoing debriefing in London at UK Secret
Intelligence Services HQ, 85 Albert Embankment.
Navalny, if indeed he was close to death, must now realize he was set up by one of his own
benefactors. What would be his next move? Going back to Russia would make the most sense as
the Russians may actually protect him from another show-assassination and he would have
freedom to prance around to his heart's content.
I don't believe he was ever 'close to death', rather that he was an active part of the
deception. He is a grifting idiot who puffs up like a toad upon being flattered. He could
never win power in Russia legitimately, as he is mostly a figure of contempt in Russia save
for the perennially-discontented children of the liberal elite and the few Americaphiles who
don't know enough to keep their heads down. I believe he played his role by taking something
that would nauseate him but not seriously hurt him, rolling about and screaming, and that the
introduction of the phony 'poison bottle' was with his full knowledge. I wish Russia would
just disown him and tell the Germans they can have him.
However, I could be wrong. We will know from the tone of his remarks when he feels he is
strong enough to once again assume his president-in-waiting role, and starts spouting off
about what happened to him. He is the most likely candidate to be selected to get the
water-bottle narrative back on track, so if he comes out with an explanation for how he drank
from the bottle somewhere there were no surveillance cameras, and noticed a sketchy-looking
guy in a leather jacket and a "Vote For Putin!" T-shirt standing nearby just before he drank,
it will be a pretty good indication that he is as full of shit as ever.
There was considerable risk involved in the deception. I doubt that Navalny went into
the deception willingly. There was a very real risk that he could have suffered some brain
damage going into the first coma and that's sure to compromise his health in the long term in
other ways.
More likely it seems a lot of the deception was planned behind Navalny's back and
people were waiting for an opportunity to carry it out. It may have been planned years ago
for someone else and then switched to Navalny once he was in the Omsk hospital. Julia
Navalnaya may have been pushed into demanding that Navalny be transferred to Berlin and while
the Omsk hospital doctors were stabilising him for the transfer, the deception then started
going into action in Germany.
Lavrov smelt a rat several days ago -- last week, I'm sure -- when he stated that
suspicions had been aroused by one of Navalny's gang refusing to answer investigators'
questions in Omsk and then scarpering off to Germany.
I'm quite sure the FSB already knew of Pevchikh's comings and goings between London
and Moscow (over 60 flights there and back I read somewhere) and her activities with the
Navalny organization.
Perhaps they allowed Navalny to leave for Germany -- with Pevchikh flying out with him, I
may add -- because they knew what was afoot and would later expose the Germans for liars, or
if not that, then for their falling to a sucker punch off the British secret service.
They certainly allowed Pevchikh to leave Russia: she didn't sneak on board Navalny's
private flight.
Just Pevchikh, note, not Navalnaya, who is not a British agent, I'm sure.
Certainly possible – as I say, we will know more from his blabber once he starts
giving interviews, which he lives to do. His tone will have changed considerably if he
believes his erstwhile chums in politics intended to martyr him. Otherwise I read his
expressed desire to return at once to Russia as simply remaining in character – the
selfless hero risking all for freedom and democracy.
I wonder how he will thank the doctors in Omsk for saving his life, as it is generally
acknowledged they did. He cannot go into transports of admiration for their professional
skills, because they claimed to have found no trace of poisoning in his samples. He faces the
choice, then, of simply passing over it without mention, or accusing the people who saved his
life of 'being part of the machine'. Doing either will certainly not increase his popularity
in Russia. And it makes no difference at all how popular he is in the west – something
the west seemingly cannot be taught.
Die Zeit сообщила о
предложении
США от ФРГ по
"Северному
потоку -- 2"
RT на русском, 16
сентября 2020
Die Zeit announced the proposal of the USA from Germany for the "Nord Stream –
2
RT in Russian, September 16, 2020
The German government has offered the United States a deal in exchange for Washington's
waiver of sanctions against Nord Stream 2.
This is reported by the newspaper Die Zeit, citing sources
It is noted that Berlin has expressed its readiness to invest up to € 1 billion in
the construction of two terminals in Germany for receiving liquefied natural gas from the
United States.
"In response, the United States will allow the unhindered completion and operation of
Nord Stream 2", TASS quotes the text of a letter from German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz,
which was sent on August 7 to the head of the US Treasury, Stephen Mnuchin.
In early August, US senators sent a letter to the operator of the German port of
Sassnitz calling for an end to work to support the construction of Nord Stream 2.
Very true about the term "loser" being a harsh insult for Americans. The "loser" tag
starts to be applied to kids in early grade school and only intensifies from that point. The
glorification of success (defined by the level of conspicuous consumption) further sharpens
the divide between losers and winners. Our "feel-good" stories are often about individuals
who were able to transform themselves from "losers" to "winners". American culture is
one-dimensional in that way.
Building an LNG terminal is one thing, buying US LNG is another thing. In addition, I
believe that Russia could provide LNG to Germany as well and likely at a substantially lower
price.
The US may settle for this gesture as it does hold the door open, however slightly, for
future developments to be leveraged by the US to force Germany to reduce or stop gas
purchases from Russia. Having the terminal in place could make a future change in suppliers
more feasible and faster but nevertheless representing an economic disaster for Germany. Lets
call it step 1 in Plan B.
On the other hand any diplomatic/economic success plays well in this presidential erection
year. So a) is it worth it?; b) can they reverse the decision the day after? I assume they
can have their cake and eat it as Brussels is mostly spineless. Borrell can squeal about
Russia, but that's because he can do f/k all about the USA's behavior, being spokeshole and
all
That's what people seem not to get – the decision would not ever be 'reversible'
once Nord Stream II is complete. That pipeline quad alone can carry all of Europe's gas
supply that it receives from Russia. None through Ukraine, not a whiff, if that is Moscow's
will, although the Russians have agreed to transit token amounts, which the Ukrainians say
are not enough to make the system's continued operation viable – without the large
volumes they are accustomed to handling, they will have to progressively begin shutting down,
bypassing and dismantling sections they can no longer afford to maintain.
So long as the pipeline's future remains in doubt, Uncle Sam can sell the philosophical
possibility of supplying Europe with large volumes of cheap LNG via tankers, made desirable
– although it will cost a little more, no getting around that – for political
reasons. Once Nord Stream II is complete, the reality of a reliable supply of cheap pipeline
gas would have to be countered with a concrete offer from the USA; this many cubic meters
times this many Euros. Any housewife can do a cost-benefit analysis at that level. Do you
want to pay more for American gas just because it comes from America? Well, let me think
about it – what are the benefits? Well, it comes from America! What, you mean, that's
it? There would be no possibility the Americans would use their status as a major energy
supplier as leverage to bring about economic or political changes in Europe that they
desired, would there? Well I can't guarantee that.
You know what? I'm okay with Russian gas, thanks just the same. Maybe I'll use the money I
save to buy a Ford – how's that?
Pathetic. After declaring forcefully that American extraterritorial sanctions are illegal
– which, technically, they are, only America has a right to threaten to limit European
trade in America if it wishes; although that, too is illegal under WTO rules – Germany
is now cowering and trying to 'make a deal'. With Trump, in case anyone missed that, whose
'Art of the Deal' consists of destroying the opponent until he is happy to have escaped with
his life, and will never publicly complain about a 'deal' which came out very much to his
disadvantage. Put another way, offering America a 'deal' only highlights that you believe you
are in a weak position, are looking for mercy, and are ripe for the plucking. Germany was
already planning to build the heaviest concentration of LNG terminals in Europe; a far better
strategy would have been to threaten to cancel them all if Uncle Sam did not back off. The
Americans are certainly smart enough to figure out – in about 2.5 seconds – that
more LNG terminals means diddly when Russia can also supply LNG far cheaper than the USA
because it has teensy transport costs by comparison, being much closer. Two more LNG
terminals buys America precisely zero advantage, but the willingness to 'deal' reveals
vulnerability. The only American response to rolling on your back to expose your belly is to
step on your head.
I swear, it is hard to recognize Germany as the country which once frightened the
world.
A Trump counter-offer might be a commitment from Germany to buy X amount of American LNG
at a locked-in price, said amount to be sufficient that extra Nord Stream capacity would not
be utilized. It depends on whether the Americans really think they can actually stop Nord
Stream II, because even that would ultimately be a loser strategy. Unless a term far into the
future were specified, the Americans know that once the pipeline is finished, their product
is no longer competitive and cannot ever be unless it is unprofitable to themselves. They
could satisfy themselves with gutting the Germans for a year or two (if they accepted), but
it would be short-term satisfaction at best. Might be enough to win Trump the election,
though.
But if Washington thinks it can actually halt Nord Stream II – with the
understanding that the Russians would probably give up after such a stinging second rebuke
– then the sky is the limit, and they will scornfully reject any other solution. The
one who stands to get hurt the most is Europe. But I don't think they realize
it.
The Borgias are history. Well, obviously, they ARE history. But now they have been
relegated to the Second Division/Championship (football joke) of Poisoners by Sergei Lavrov
and his chef de cuisine:
Oh look! The Navalnyites have shown a video, shot in Tomsk, of Navalny drinking from the
allegedly poisoned water bottle that earlier nobody had seen or made mention of before it
turned up in Berlin and was sent to the Bundeswehr lab.
Recall that his loud-mouth spokeswoman had from the very start insisted that Navalny had
been poisoned by laced-with-poison tea that he had drunk at Tomsk airport.
Change of story line -- as persistently happened in the Skripal fake.
Video Showing Water Bottle That 'Poisoned' Alexei Navalny Shared by His Team
17 September, 2020: 10:17
That Sputnik headline should read, I think, "shared with his team".
And if that is the case, why didn't his team also start howling and screaming and rolling
around on the deck some time later on board the Tomsk-Moscow flight?
Navalny's companions have reported that they took bottles from a hotel room in
Tomsk
Alexei Navalny's companions have said that a bottle of mineral water, on which German
experts had allegedly found traces of poison from the Novichok group, had been brought from a
hotel room in Tomsk.
On an Instagram, they have posted a video in which, according to them, an hour after
news of Navalny's deteriorating condition, they examine the room and seize all the items
which he had been able to touch.
On August 20, the aeroplane in which Navalny was flying urgently landed in Omsk, from
where the blogger was taken to hospital. On August 21, doctors announced that the main
diagnosis was metabolic disorders.
At the moment, Navalny is in Germany, where he has been taken out of an artificial
coma. German doctors announced that he had been poisoned with substances from the Novichok
group, but did not provide any relevant evidence.
So why didn't the Navalny hamsters, who dutifully sought out the poison bottle and most
certainly handled it, throw wobblers as did Navalny when performing what he thought were the
effects of nerve agent poisoning?
And whom did the hamsters hand the bottle to -- Navalnaya or Pevchikh? And who handled the
bottle after its arrival in Berlin and before the obliging Bundeswehr said it had been dosed
with the most lethal nerve agent (weapons grade) known to man?
Why isn't there a trail of stiffs from Tomsk to Berlin and beyond?
Who's going to believe this shite?
"Why, the whole world knows it's true!" will Imperial Plenipotentiary Pompeus Fattus Arsus
surely say.
One of the developers of Novichok, Leonid Rink, commented on reports that a bottle in
the Tomsk hotel where Alexei Navalny had stayed could [have been] Novichok
[contaminated] .
"This is a situation where no one would have been allowed to touch the bottle -- you
would have died if you had done so. If this had really been the case, then there would have
basically been a deceased person, and everyone who had carried this bottle without gloves and
protection would also have died", he told RIA Novosti.
Ah, but . . . Rink is forgetting that it was a special, delayed action Novichok made to
take effect on "Putin's Fiercest Critic" when he was on board the Tomsk-Moscow flight.
Rink's an old Soviet has-been and knows nothing about the latest developments in
diabolical weaponry that issues forth from secret Orc laboratories.
Maybe the cunning developers have produced a Novichok variant safe to those who have
sinned but fatal (or liable, at least, to provoke a severe tummy upset, occasionally) to the
purest of heart?
I like this idea of the special edition of Novichok with the delayed kick. Maybe we could
call it Brawndo and speculate that the poison only goes into action when it does because the
added electrolytes take time to work to release the poison.
Alexei Navalny's team immediately after his departure from Tomsk airport, went to the
hotel room in that city where he had spent the night, and packed all the items (including
water bottles) so as to deliver them for analysis (of course, not in Russia). A video about
this was posted on the oppositionist's Instagram.
Everything in this story is beautiful. Navalny's supporters were collecting "evidence"
on a case that had not yet happened -- but it was already supposed to have happened? Together
with them, there went a lawyer to the hotel -- he was also at the ready. But why were none of
the "trackers" hurt if on the "evidence", as is said, they found traces of the "Novichok"
military poison? And how did the "people of Navalny" end up in a room where cleaning up
should have been done after the guest's departure? There are other questions as well. Some of
them "KP" asked FSB reserve general Alexander Mikhailov .
And the person shown handling the bottle is wearing gloves – they made sure to show
that. But as others have pointed out, this was well before anyone knew 'an attempt had been
made on the Opposition Leader's life'. What, all Lyosha's shit was still in his hotel room,
towels on the floor, the next day, after he checked out? Pretty crappy service in those
Russian hotels. He didn't even leave Russia for several days, and the first suggestions he
had been poisoned came from his 'press agent', who claimed he had been poisoned with tea at
the airport.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sergei Yerofeyev, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, has spoken about
this.
According to Yerofeyev, Navalny has been nominated for the prize by "a number of
professors from recognized universities who deal with Russia". He did not give specific
names, but noted that there are "great people" amongst the scientists who have nominated
Navalny.
A professor of any university in the world can nominate a candidate for the Nobel Peace
Prize: there are no specific requirements for a candidate. In addition, members of national
governments and parliaments, heads of state and some other categories of persons can nominate
candidates.
The oppositionist will have to fight for the main prize of the planet with venerable
rivals.
This is, first of all, US President Donald Trump, who was nominated by Christian
Tubring-Jedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament from the far-right Libertarian Progress
Party. As the MP said in an interview with Fox News, Donald Trump should be awarded for his
role in concluding an agreement on the full normalization of relations between Israel and the
UAE.
And why not? O'Bummer was awarded the peace prize, wasn't he?
I wonder how the Kiev Post evaluates Navalny's position on the Crimea?
The status of the Crimea is a problem that a new democratic Russia will inherit from
its former government. The Russian position on this problem will be determined by the
recognition of the right of the citizens of the Crimea to determine their own destiny
-- Navalny
20!8
I say give it to him. Let him join the prestigious ranks of Obama, the OPCW, the EU.
I also propose starting a Nobel War Prize, to be awarded to whatever individual or
organization is responsible for the highest body count in a given year. Although that may be
redundant, considering that it would probably be given to the same people as the Peace
Prize.
Ha, ha!! And it all descends into farce, again. Navalny has arrived – he has gone
global, beyond his wildest dreams. The nothing from Wherever He Is From who could not even
break 5% in presidential election polling is now a major star, glittering in the western
firmament. As Saint Lily Tomlin once remarked, no matter how cynical you get, you can never
keep up.
All the west is going to be able to get out of this is the satisfaction of showing its ass
to the neo-Soviets, the way it does when it re-names the street the Russian Embassy is
– or was – located on after some prominent Russian dissident. Beavis and Butthead
level, at best.
That's it! This is a farewell article. A real goodbye to the topic. More precisely,
parting with Navalny as a topic. His political role has been played to the end. And even
lethal doses of Novichok have not caused a mass movement. Furgal's arrest caused an explosion
of civil consciousness in Khabarovsk. The poisoning of Navalny, sending him abroad, the
discovery of Novichok, official accusations from Germany did not cause any rally, no
procession, no movement. No excitement in civic consciousness has occurred and will never
happen.
I will go back to an approach that served me well with regard to the Iraq WMD story. I have
no way of evaluating Yan's claims, but there are a fair number of people and organizations that
do have the resources to evaluate. I rejected WMD claims in 2003 simply because none of the
other players with relevant competence acted in ways that indicated serious concern. What is
Yan Li-meng's evidence that others do not have? This issue of origin has to have been pursued
by at least a couple dozen organizations with the necessary competence. None of those has made
any such claims. That doesn't mean that the claims are false. But if the claims are true, then
there must be very strong motives for keeping silent. So what would be the common interest
between, say, the intelligence agencies of Germany and those of India?
Without such evidence this turns into a she-said-he-said story. Now that does not mean that
it is wrong. Suppression and intimidation would not be out of character for the Chinese
government. But again the world is loaded with very paranoid people who are capable of
evaluating that. And who are pretty much immune to Chinese intimidation. They don't have to
face off against the Chinese state. There are plenty of more roundabout ways to get the word
out if you want to do so and have government-level resources to put into the effort.
The obvious alternative to publication of the logic for detecting human agency is to engage
in simple human retaliation. Are the Chinese the only ones capable of such producing such a
catastrophe? Pretty unlikely. Would such a counterstroke catch the Chinese by surprise? Again
unlikely if they are aware of having stepped over the line. The measures they are taking
against virus outbreaks are more extreme than what western countries have imposed, but not
(yet) indicating panic. If somebody let some 1918 swine flu loose in Shanghai, would their
measures be able to counter it? (Five times as contagious as what we seeing in covid-19.)
Red State raises additional skepticism about this "scientist's interview", as well as the
oddities of the very original days of reporting about the Chinese t "flu" coming out of
China. Remembering also one of the very first ways we even started hearing about this "new
Chinese virus" in the US were reports about the Great Toilet Paper panic, even though people
here did not know why they were supposed to be hoarding it. https://www.redstate.com/michael_thau/2020/09/17/920958/
Best I could trace was to an earlier Australian toilet paper panic they claimed was hawked
by Yahoo News in Australia, and then spread via social media to the US. And our Great Toilet
Paper Hoax began in earnest here too. China was allegedly the source for all Australian TP,
so it was claimed with so many people sick in China with this "flu" there would be no more
toilet paper Down Under for their down unders.
But the US did not rely on China for TP, so the TP panic was not warrented to be set in
motion here. But it did capture attention and did trigger panic before we even knew what to
be afraid of. Greasing the skids in some manipulative way could be one jaundiced
conclusion.
Hope someone with better skills can really trace the origins of the Great Toilet Paper
Hoax, because it did wipe us out in the US. No sheet. Was that the covid panic transmission
route; and not really on a flight from Wuhan to Seattle?
No - but she may be another in a long line of useful idiots.
"Independent fact checkers?" 25 year old Humanities and Social Sciences grads working
for Facebook? Independent of what? Independent of their mommies and daddies at long
last?
Countervailing research goes light-years beyond "Independent fact checkers?".
Italicized/bold text was excerpted from nature.com a report titled:
The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and
SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with
mild symptoms6. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from
comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the
SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly
show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated
virus.
The genomic features described here may explain in part the infectiousness and
transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not
a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other
theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2
features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses
in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is
plausible.
Italicized/bold text was excerpted from The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and
Hygiene a report titled:
The Origin of COVID-19 and Why It Matters
In 2007, scientists studying coronaviruses warned: "The presence of a large
reservoir of SARS-CoV–like viruses in horseshoe bats is a time bomb. The possibility of
the re-emergence of SARS and other novel viruses should not be ignored."1
Studying animal viruses that have previously spilled over into humans provides clues
about host-switching determinants. A well-understood example is influenza virus emergence
into humans and other mammals.2 Human pandemic and seasonal influenza viruses arise from
enzootic viruses of wild waterfowl and shore birds. From within this natural reservoir, the
1918 pandemic "founder" virus somehow host-switched into humans. We know this from genetic
studies comparing avian viruses, the 1918 virus, and its descendants, which have caused three
subsequent pandemics, as well as annual seasonal influenza in each of the 102 years since
1918. Similarly, other avian influenza viruses have host-switched into horses, dogs, pigs,
seals, and other vertebrates, with as yet unknown pandemic potential.2,10,11 Although some
molecular host-switching events remain unobserved, phylogenetic analyses of influenza viruses
allow us to readily characterize evolution and host-switching as it occurs in
nature.2
It should be clarified that theories about a hypothetical man-made origin of
SARS-CoV-2 have been thoroughly discredited by multiple coronavirus experts.21,28,29
SARS-CoV-2 contains neither the genetic fingerprints of any of the reverse genetics systems
that have been used to engineer coronaviruses nor does it contain genetic sequences that
would have been "forward engineered" from preexisting viruses, including the genetically
closest sarbecoviruses. That is, SARS-CoV-2 is unlike any previously identified coronavirus
from which it could have been engineered. Moreover, the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain,
which has affinity for cells of various mammals, binds to human ACE2 receptors via a novel
mechanism.
Engineering such a virus would have required 1) published or otherwise available
scientific knowledge that did not exist until after COVID-19 recognition; 2) a failure to
follow obvious engineering pathways, resulting in an imperfectly constructed virus; and 3) an
ability to genetically engineer a new virus without leaving fingerprints of the engineering.
Furthermore, the 12 amino acid furin-cleavage site insertion between the SARS-CoV-2 spike
protein's S1 and S2 domains, which some have alleged to be a sign of genetic engineering, is
found in other bat and human coronaviruses in nature, probably arising via naturally
occurring recombination.24
It is also highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was released from a laboratory by
accident because no laboratory had the virus nor did its genetic sequence exist in any
sequence database before its initial GenBank deposition (early January 2020). China's
laboratory safety practices, policies, training, and engineering are equivalent to those of
the United States and other developed countries,32 making viral "escape" extremely unlikely,
and of course impossible without a viral isolate present. SARS-CoV-2 shares genetic
properties with many other sarbecoviruses, lies fully within their genetic cluster, and is
thus a virus that emerged naturally.
Italicized/bold text was excerpted from nature.com a report titled:
Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the
COVID-19 pandemic
There are outstanding evolutionary questions on the recent emergence of human
coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 including the role of reservoir species, the role of recombination and
its time of divergence from animal viruses. We find that the sarbecoviruses -- the viral
subgenus containing SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 -- undergo frequent recombination and exhibit
spatially structured genetic diversity on a regional scale in China. SARS-CoV-2 itself is not
a recombinant of any sarbecoviruses detected to date, and its receptor-binding motif,
important for specificity to human ACE2 receptors, appears to be an ancestral trait shared
with bat viruses and not one acquired recently via recombination. To employ phylogenetic
dating methods, recombinant regions of a 68-genome sarbecovirus alignment were removed with
three independent methods. Bayesian evolutionary rate and divergence date estimates were
shown to be consistent for these three approaches and for two different prior specifications
of evolutionary rates based on HCoV-OC43 and MERS-CoV. Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2
and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density
(HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009),
indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats
for decades.
With horseshoe bats currently the most plausible origin of SARS-CoV-2, it is
important to consider that sarbecoviruses circulate in a variety of horseshoe bat species
with widely overlapping species ranges57. Nevertheless, the viral population is largely
spatially structured according to provinces in the south and southeast on one lineage, and
provinces in the centre, east and northeast on another (Fig. 3). This boundary appears to be
rarely crossed. Two exceptions can be seen in the relatively close relationship of Hong Kong
viruses to those from Zhejiang Province (with two of the latter, CoVZC45 and CoVZXC21,
identified as recombinants) and a recombinant virus from Sichuan for which part of the genome
(region B of SC2018 in Fig. 3) clusters with viruses from provinces in the centre,
east and northeast of China. SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 are also exceptions because they were
sampled from Hubei and Yunnan, respectively.
It is clear from our analysis that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been
circulating in horseshoe bats for many decades. The unsampled diversity descended from the
SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 common ancestor forms a clade of bat sarbecoviruses with generalist
properties -- with respect to their ability to infect a range of mammalian cells -- that
facilitated its jump to humans and may do so again. Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD
was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to
SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses.
Furthermore, the other key feature thought to be instrumental in the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to
infect humans -- a polybasic cleavage site insertion in the S protein -- has not yet
been seen in another close bat relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
As if on cue Li-Meng Yan appears like manna from heaven aiding/abetting in foisting
forth the current dominant Western government/media narrative that China is bad.
Israel raises an important question about the role on neoliberal MSM is spreading COVID-19
panic.
Notable quotes:
"... Sinaisky claims that they brought the pandemics upon us because of the high debt problem, or by their inability to continue colonial plunder. Alternatively, a notable commenter to his text suggests that it was done because of overproduction of capital. In other words, the bank-lending rate is so close to zero, or even negative, that the whole machinery of capitalism was deluged in a flood of capital, and needed a major war, or indeed a global pandemic, to use it up. ..."
"... Because of this freak combination of forces, Sweden left its health policy in the hands of local professionals and remained free, while its neighbouring countries transferred the responsibility to globalist politicians and embraced quarantine. ..."
"... Thus the liberal Blairite media (beginning with the NY Times and the Guardian) played a key part in the Corona crisis. They were the piper; but who ordered the piper? ..."
...Do the US plutocrats (that is, the American über-wealthy) control all that? I think
they would be amazed to learn that, especially "for generations", bearing in mind that the US
was not a very significant factor before the WWI. In my view, the rich are not that smart. But
the network exists; I have called its obscure controllers The Masters of Discourse .
Sinaisky claims that they brought the pandemics upon us because of the high debt
problem, or by their inability to continue colonial plunder. Alternatively, a notable commenter
to his text suggests that it was done because of overproduction of capital. In other words, the
bank-lending rate is so close to zero, or even negative, that the whole machinery of capitalism
was deluged in a flood of capital, and needed a major war, or indeed a global pandemic, to use
it up.
Finally, Sinaisky claims that "atomization of society, breaking up community solidarity,
eroding all non-monetary connections between people, destroying family relations and weakening
blood ties, is a long-standing plutocratic project. Now, using this fake pandemic, the
plutocrats have gone even further, now they train us to see each other not as friend, not as
brother, not even as a source of profit, but mainly as a source of mortal infection." I wonder
what makes him think that is an object of plutocratic desire? Certainly rich people want to
make money and have more power, agreed. Is it necessary for them to atomise society? Who will
they and their kids socialize with in such a ruined world?
I am not sure that there is a human agency with such goals. A non-human factor is a much
more suitable culprit. In the old days, such a culprit was called Satan, and there were mighty
organisations aka churches that fought Satan. In a charming movie, Luc Besson's Fifth Element,
'Love' defeats 'the Shadow', the personified evil that was about to obliterate Earth. Call it
Satan, call it Shadow, the thing surely has human collaborationists in the mainstream media. I
wrote about it in a piece called The Shadow of Zog . Indeed media
should be sorted out in order to deal with it.
Sweden, this lucky country that avoided lockdown and its consequences, was saved by a rare
media misstep. (This story has never been published though it is known to many Swedes.) Corona
propaganda was carried out by the same liberal Bonnier-owned newspaper, DN (Dagens Nyheter),
that played up Greta Thunberg. (Sinaisky's senses served him right: indeed Covid is a new Greta
multiplied by a factor of 50). The Greta campaign had as its favourite high horse
flygskam , or flight-shaming. Stop taking flights to lower carbon emissions ,
was the idea. Now we have no flights at all, so this movement disappeared after achieving its
goals.
In February 2020, the DN organised a week-long sleeper train culture trip to North Italy for
the Greta-following liberal elite. A berth on this train was priced starting at ten thousand
Euros. The group went up to the Italian Alps and down to the Carnival in Venice and finally
returned home, full to the brim with interesting experiences and coronavirus infections. A few
days after the train returned to Stockholm, the disease broke out at large. Many of the liberal
journalists that travelled on the Corona Express (as the train became known) fell sick, and
their close relatives suffered, too. This incident caused the death of many elderly Jews,
parents or uncles of those liberal journalists. It was a media phenomenon, and the
Jewish media reported that the death rate among Swedish Jews was 14 times higher than
their share of the population (well, it is not as bad as it sounds; only nine very old Jews
died, all over 80).
As the people in authority knew all about the Corona Express, the liberal lobby was too
ashamed to call for quarantine against the disease they has carried to Sweden. (Or they did
call, but in sotto voce.) Furthermore, the DN was their only significant liberal media outlet,
as Bonnier had sold his TV channel to a state-owned company in December 2019, making heaps of
money but losing his ability to influence people.
Because of this freak combination of forces, Sweden left its health policy in the hands
of local professionals and remained free, while its neighbouring countries transferred the
responsibility to globalist politicians and embraced quarantine.
Thus the liberal Blairite media (beginning with the NY Times and the Guardian) played a
key part in the Corona crisis. They were the piper; but who ordered the piper?
Paper oil sellers essentially dictate prices to real producers. So they are looting
producers. That's hurt the process of replacement of old wells with new ones (and shale oil well
live just several years, with only first two the most procductive) and as "paper oil" is Wall
Street fiction, and at some point paper oil market might collapse and oil prices go to
stratosphere.
As the price of oil begins to falter, Saudi Arabia has stepped up its rhetoric, even going
as far as to warn short sellers not to bet against the price of the commodity.
Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman gave "clear hints" on Thursday that there
could be a change of direction in production policy forthcoming as the price of oil continues
its slide, according to
Bloomberg .
He said Thursday: "We will never leave this market unattended. I want the guys in the
trading floors to be as jumpy as possible. I'm going to make sure whoever gambles on this
market will be ouching like hell."
At the same time, Brent was falling below $40 per barrel and the market continues to show
signs of waning demand. OPEC and its allies said they would be "proactive and preemptive" in
addressing the diminishing price, recommending "participating counties take further necessary
measures".
Abdulaziz started a meeting on Thursday with what Bloomberg called a "forceful condemnation"
of members who are pumping out too much supply. His ire may have been directed to UAE Energy
Minister Suhail al Mazrouei, who attended the meeting. The UAE has been "one of the worst quota
breakers" in OPEC+, only making 10% of its pledged cuts for August.
Abdulaziz said: "Using tactics to over-produce and hide non-compliance have been tried many
times in the past, and always end in failure. They achieve nothing and bring harm to our
reputation and credibility."
"Attempts to outsmart the market will not succeed and are counterproductive when we have the
eyes, and the technology, of the world upon us," Prince Abdulaziz continued.
UAE was overproducing by about 520,000 barrels per day in August and the country will try to
make additional cuts in October and November to make up for past month shortcomings.
Countries like Iraq and Nigeria have implemented more than 100% of their required cuts,
helping give OPEC and Abdulaziz credibility.
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Harry Tchilinguirian, head of commodities strategy at BNP Paribas SA, concluded: "You have
to hand it to Prince Abdulaziz. Since he became Saudi oil minister, the kingdom has kept OPEC+
in line through his diplomatic and compelling powers of influence."
If that were true, the energy world would be a lot better off. Producers want to contract;
consumers, probably even China, like the market price. For it can be manipulated easier by
consumers than by suppliers; because consumers control the intl banks and capitalist rules.
Unless China is kept from the market table , then it might accept contracting. Tough racket,
this sanctioning stuff is getting to be, eh?
Construction of Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany is about 94%
completed.
The project is all about supplying Germany and other European countries with readily
available low-cost Russian natural gas -- around 30% cheaper than US liquified natural gas
(LNG).
Both right wings of the US one-party state want the pipeline halted to benefit US
producers at Russia's expense.
US sanctions on the project breach international law, Germany's Angela Merkel earlier saying
"(w)e oppose extraterritorial sanctions (W)e don't accept" them.
"We haven't backed down (on wanting Nord Stream 2 completed) nor do we intend to back
down."
Last December, German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass said "European energy policy is decided
in Europe, not the United States. We reject any outside interventions and extraterritorial
sanctions."
Did the novichok poisoning of Putin critic Alexey Navalny hoax change things?
During a September 24 – 25 summit of EU leaders, the future of Nord Stream 2 will be
discussed. Ahead of the summit, Merkel's government offered to invest around one billion euros
(about $1.2 billion) in construction of two terminals in Germany for US LNG.
According to the German broadsheet Die Zeit, by letter to Trump regime Treasury Secretary
Mnunchin in August, German Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said the
following:
"In exchange (for Berlin's proposed LNG investment), the US will allow unobstructed
finalization and use of Nord Stream 2," adding:
"(E)xisting legal options for (challenging US) sanctions (on firms involved in the
project) have not been exhausted yet."
The broadsheet added that Scholz first expressed Berlin's proposal verbally, confirming it
by letter. Proposed German LNG terminals would be built in Brunsbuttel and Wilhelmshaven.
Berlin's proposal also included a gas transit contract for Ukraine and financing of a terminal
for Poland's use of US LNG.
Following the Navalny false flag, opinion on completing Nord Stream 2 in Germany is divided.
Merkel still supports the project as evidenced by her government's offer to build two terminals
for US LNG in exchange for dropping sanctions on the pipeline by the US.
Last June, US Senate hardliners proposed legislation to expand Nord Stream 2 related
sanctions.
It targets all nations and enterprises involved in the project, including underwriting,
insurance and reinsurance companies.
At the time, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller said Russia will complete construction of the project
on its own -- expected to be operational in January or shortly thereafter. Last month, German
Foreign Minister Heiko Mass expressed "displeasure" to Pompeo about US sanctions on the
project. Last week, Polish government spokesman Piotr Muller was quoted saying the
following:
"Poland has from the very beginning emphasized that European solidarity (on Nord Stream 2)
should be unambiguous."
"Therefore, if such a need is expressed by the German side, Poland is open to the idea of
using the infrastructure which it is building for its own energy security."
His remark followed German media reports that Merkel said a decision by her government on
Nord Stream 2 has not been made in light of the Navalny incident. German officials supporting
the project stressed that the country will be the main beneficiary of its completion
economically, environmentally and strategically. Construction on the proposed 800 – 950
km Baltic Pipe gas pipeline from Norwegian North Sea waters to Poland hasn't begun.
If completed in October 2022 as proposed, it'll be able to deliver about 10 billion cubic
meters of natural gas annually -- less than 20% of Nord Stream 2's 55 billion annual cubic
meter capacity.
Berlin earlier was skeptical about the project because of environmental concerns. Days
earlier, Polish energy expert Jakub Wiech called it "pointless" to compare Baltic Pipe to Nord
Stream 2, given the latter project's far greater capacity and ability to provide gas to other
Western European countries. A day after the Navalny incident last month, Merkel said Nord
Stream 2 will be completed regardless of threatened new US sanctions on firms involved in the
project.
Separately on Wednesday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Nord Stream 2's completion
should not be raised in discussing the Navalny incident.
"It should stop being mentioned in the context of any politicization."
"This is a commercial project that is absolutely in line with the interests of both Russia
and European Union countries, and primarily Germany."
No evidence links Russia to Navalny's illness. Whatever caused it wasn't from a novichok
nerve agent, the deadliest know substance able to kill exposed individuals in minutes. Over
three weeks after falling ill, Navalny is very much alive, recuperating in a Berlin hospital,
and able to be ambulatory for short periods.
A Final Comment
On September 14, CNBC reported the following:
"Experts say Berlin is unlikely to (abandon Nord Stream 2 that's) over 94% completed after
almost a decade's construction, involv(ing) major German and European companies, and is
necessary for the region's current and future energy needs," adding:
"In this case, economic and commercial interests could trump political pressure" against
Russia.
Chief eurozone economist Carsten Brzeski said he doesn't see "Germany pulling out of the
project Many (in the country) are still in favor of it."
CNBC noted that
"Germany has been reluctant to link the fate of its involvement with Nord Stream 2 to the
Navalny incident so far, and (FM Heiko) Maas conceded that stopping the building of the
pipeline would hurt not only Russia but German and European firms."
"(O)ver 100 companies from 12 European countries" are involved in the project about half
of them from Germany."
*
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected] . He is a Research
Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for
Hegemony Risks WW III."
"... German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally announced at a press conference last week that a chemical weapons laboratory of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) had proved "beyond doubt" that Navalny was the victim of an attack using the Novichok nerve agent. She called on the Russian government to answer "very serious questions." ..."
"... At a special session of the Parliamentary Control Committee, which meets in secret, representatives of the German government and the secret services left no doubt, according to media reports, that the poisoning of Navalny had been carried out by Russian state authorities, with the approval of the Russian leadership. The poison was said to be a variant of the warfare agent -- one even more dangerous than that used in the Skripal case in Britain. It purportedly could enter the body simply through inhalation, and its production and use required skills possessed only by a state actor. ..."
"... Excerpt of an article by Peter Schwarz published by wsws.org ..."
The relationship between Germany and Russia has reached its lowest point since Berlin
supported the pro-Western coup in Ukraine six years ago and Russia subsequently annexed the
Crimean Peninsula.
The German government is openly accusing the Russian state of poisoning opposition
politician Alexei Navalny, who is currently in Berlin's Charité Clinic. He reportedly
awoke from a coma on Monday.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally announced at a press conference last week
that a chemical weapons laboratory of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) had proved "beyond doubt"
that Navalny was the victim of an attack using the Novichok nerve agent. She called on the
Russian government to answer "very serious questions."
At a special session of the Parliamentary Control Committee, which meets in secret,
representatives of the German government and the secret services left no doubt, according to
media reports, that the poisoning of Navalny had been carried out by Russian state authorities,
with the approval of the Russian leadership. The poison was said to be a variant of the warfare
agent -- one even more dangerous than that used in the Skripal case in Britain. It purportedly
could enter the body simply through inhalation, and its production and use required skills
possessed only by a state actor.
Germany and the European Union are threatening Russia with sanctions. The German government
has even questioned the completion of the almost finished Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline,
which it had categorically defended against pressure from the US and several Eastern European
states.
The German media has gone into propaganda mode, repeating the accusations against Russian
President Vladimir Putin with a thousand variations. Seventy-nine years after Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union, which claimed more than 25 million lives, German journalists and
politicians, in editorials, commentaries and on talk shows, speak with the arrogance of people
who are already planning the next military campaign against Moscow.
Anyone who expresses doubts or contradicts the official narrative is branded a "conspiracy
theorist." This is what happened to Left Party parliamentarian Sevim Dagdelen, among others, on
Sunday evening's "Anne Will" talk show. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) foreign policy
expert Norbert Röttgen, the head of the Munich Security Conference Wolfang Ischinger and
former Green Party Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin sought to outstrip one another in
their accusations against the Russian government. When Dagdelen gently pointed out that, so
far, no evidence whatsoever has been presented identifying the perpetrators, she was accused of
"playing games of confusion" and "encouraging unspeakable conspiracy theories."
The Russian government denies any responsibility in the Navalny case. It questions whether
Navalny was poisoned at all and has called on the German government to "show its cards" and
present evidence. Berlin, according to Moscow, is bluffing for dirty political
reasons.
Contradictory and implausible
Evidence of the involvement of the Russian state is as contradictory as it is
implausible.
For example, the German authorities have so far published no information or handed evidence
to Russian investigators identifying the chemical with which Navalny was poisoned. Novichok is
merely a generic term for several families of warfare agents.
No explanation has been given as to why no one else showed signs of poisoning from a nerve
agent that is fatal even in the tiniest amounts, if touched or inhaled. Navalny had had contact
with numerous people between the time he boarded the airplane on which he fainted, his entering
the clinic in Omsk where he was first treated, and his transfer to the Charité hospital
in Berlin.
This is only one of many unexplained anomalies in the German government's official story.
Career diplomat Frank Elbe, who headed the office of German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher for five years and negotiated the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as
head of the German delegation in Geneva from 1983 to 1986, wrote on Facebook on Friday: "I am
surprised that the Federal Ministry of Defence concludes that the nerve agent Novichok was used
against Navalny."
Novichok, he wrote, belongs "to the group of super-toxic lethal substances that cause
immediate death." It made no sense, he argued, to modify a nerve poison that was supposed to
kill instantly in such a way that it did not kill, but left traces behind allowing its
identification as a nerve agent.
There was something strange about this case, Elbe said. "Either the perpetrators -- whoever
they might be -- had a political interest in pointing to the use of nerve gas, or foreign
laboratories were jumping to conclusions that are in line with the current general negative
attitude towards Russia."
The assertion that only state actors can handle Novichok is also demonstrably false. The
poison was sold in the 1990s for small sums of money to Western secret services and economic
criminals, and the latter made use of it. For example, in 1995, the Russian banker Ivan
Kiwelidi and his secretary were poisoned with it. The chemist Leonid Rink confessed at the time
in court that he had sold quantities to criminals sufficient to kill hundreds of people. Since
the binary poisons are very stable, they can last for decades.
The Navalny case is not the reason, but the pretext for a new stage in the escalation of
German great power politics and militarism. The media hysteria over Navalny is reminiscent of
the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, when the German press glorified a coup d'état carried out
by armed fascist militias as a "democratic revolution."
Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then foreign minister and now German president,
personally travelled to Kiev to persuade the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to
resign.
He also met with the fascist politician Oleh Tyahnybok, whose Swoboda Party glorifies Nazi
collaborators from World War II. Yanukovych's successor, Petro Poroshenko, one of the country's
richest oligarchs, was even more corrupt than his predecessor. He terrorised his opponents with
fascist militias, such as the infamous Azov regiment. But he brought Ukraine into NATO's sphere
of influence, which was the real purpose of the coup.
In the weeks before the Ukrainian coup, leading German politicians (including then-President
Joachim Gauck and Steinmeier) had announced a far-reaching reorientation of German foreign
policy. The country was too big "to comment on world politics from the sidelines," they
declared. Germany had to defend its global interests, including by military means.
NATO marched steadily eastward into Eastern Europe, breaking the agreements made at the time
of German reunification in 1990. For the first time since 1945, German soldiers today patrol
the border with Russia. With Ukraine's shift into the Western camp, Belarus is the only
remaining buffer country between Russia and NATO.
Berlin now sees the protests against the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko as an
opportunity to remove this hurdle as well. Unlike in Ukraine, where anti-Russian nationalists
exerted considerable influence, especially in the west of the country, such forces are weaker
in Belarus, where the majority speaks Russian. The working class is playing a greater role in
the resistance to the Lukashenko regime than it did in Ukraine. But Berlin is making targeted
efforts to steer the movement in a pro-Western direction. Forces that appeal for Western
support, such as the presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, are being
promoted.
The dispute over the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, whose discontinuation is
being demanded by more and more German politicians, must also be seen in this context. It was a
strategic project from the very beginning.
The natural gas pipeline, which will double the capacity of Nord Stream 1, which began
operations in 2011, will make Germany independent of the pipelines that run through Ukraine,
Poland and Belarus. These countries not only earn transit fees from the pipelines but have also
used then as a political lever.
With a total capacity of 110 billion cubic metres per year, Nord Stream 1 and 2 together
would carry almost all of Germany's annual gas imports. However, the gas is also to be
transported from the German Baltic Sea coast to other countries.
In addition to Russia's Gazprom, German, Austrian, French and Dutch energy companies are
participating in the financing of the project, which will cost almost €10 billion. The
chairman of the board of directors is former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social
Democratic Party), who is a friend of President Putin.
Nord Stream 2 is meeting with fierce opposition in Eastern Europe and the US. These
countries fear a strategic alliance between Berlin and Moscow. In December of last year, the US
Congress passed a law imposing severe sanctions on companies involved in the construction of
the pipeline -- an unprecedented move against nominal allies. The nearly completed construction
came to a standstill because the company operating the special ship for laying the pipes
withdrew. Berlin and Moscow protested vehemently against the US sanctions and agreed to
continue construction with Russian ships, which, however, will not be available until next year
at the earliest.
Excerpt of an article by Peter Schwarz published by wsws.org
That's according to Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament from the
Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The "obscure" case involving the alleged poisoning
of Navalny has been used by the EU establishment to launch another round of Moscow-bashing, he
says.
The lawmaker explained that his fellow MEPs had not, in fact, seen a single piece of
evidence suggesting the Russian government might have had a hand in what happened to
Navalny.
We don't have the evidence... none of the members of parliament who today voted in
favor of sanctions has seen any evidence.
Krah said it was "unrealistic" to expect that Navalny's case would not be
politicized, arguing that it was "absolutely clear" it was being used to push an
anti-Moscow agenda.
On Thursday morning, the EU Parliament passed a resolution calling on member states to
"isolate Russia in international forums," to "halt the Nord Stream 2 project" and
to prioritize the approval of another round of sanctions against Moscow.
The MEP also expressed skepticism about the prospects of the broader public ever getting to
see any evidence linking the opposition figure's sudden illness to Russian foul play.
"Evidence will only get published and provided to Russia if there is public
pressure," he said, adding that he does not see any such pressure building anywhere in the
EU. Until that changes, Berlin is likely to continue demanding "answers" from Moscow
while holding off on requests by Russian for cooperation, Krah believes.
The German MEP also weighed in on the fate of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, suggesting that
the alleged poisoning could work to Washington's benefit, given that the White House has been
seeking to undermine the project, liking Russian gas to Germany, for months. Krah said it was
"clear from the beginning" that the US would try to use the situation to scupper the
project, which he says would make Germany "more independent from American
influence."
The EU resolution, which is not legally binding but acts as an advisory for the bloc's
leaders, was supported by 532 MEPs and opposed by 84, while 72 abstained. Fresh sanctions
against Russia have been mulled by both the EU and US since news about Navalny's alleged
poisoning was made public.
Moscow has repeatedly expressed its readiness to cooperate with Germany in the probe into
the incident, while stressing that the Russian medics who first treated Navalny when he fell
ill found no traces of any poison in his body. The Kremlin has also repeatedly approached
Berlin for data possessed by the German side, but has so far received none.
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Dachaguy 8 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:02 PM
Of course, the investigation is incomplete, but that doesn't stop the EU from levying
"justice." We've seen this before in the Downing Street Memos, where the facts were, "being
fixed around the policy. " Millions of innocent people died as a result. When will people
learn?
Jeff_P 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 06:01 PM
There should be an international commission to look into this false flag. It should be
comprised of Russia and Germany, of course, but no other NATO or European countries and no US
vassal states other than Germany. Other members could be Cuba, China, Venezuela, and maybe
India. And, of course, the US playbook of assignment of guilt without the benefit of evidence
and the exacting of penalties without proving guilt won't fly. Russia might just tell Europe
to go FO and leave PACE and the other organizations that it supports but which insist on
abusing it.
perikleous 6 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:09 PM
If Russia was determined they would say you cannot delay NSII or we cut the Ukraine pipeline
as well, its all or none! Tick Tock Tick Tok, winter is coming soon! Hopefully the Covid 19
won't delay the fuel ships your relying on or the workers who procure the fuel, you know a
2nd wave... is "Highly Likely" and its taking over in the rural areas where the fuel comes
from! Present evidence to a poisoning directed by either the fuel company or the gov't and we
will continue, or just tell your "handlers" go ***, because I do not recall the US severing
weapons sales to Saudi Arabia after Admission to them Severing the head off of (J. Koshoggei)
because the US profits/jobs are bigger than one WaPo Journalists life! Hypocracy in action!
Shelbouy 6 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 03:46 PM
Germany has offered to help pay for the construction of two LNG terminals in Germany to the
tune of 1 billion plus to the US. to receive US LNG. The US in turn has said then they would
not interfere with the completion of Nord Stream 2 if this were to take place. I am
suggesting that Germany then would have 30% cheaper Russian gas than US LNG, blend these two
prices, hi cost US LNG and low cost Russian gas of Nord Stream 2, and sell to the EU
consumers at a price which would likely be higher than the current rate today, and who would
be the wiser, and who would consumers blame when the price of gas goes up instead of down.
This may, at least temporarily, appease the US while at the same time ensure the completion
of the cheaper Russian supply line, and prevent the diversion of Russian gas to other
customer nations like China, and Germany laughs all the way to the bank. This is only
speculation on my part because I do not know if it would work that way or not. If it did then
Germany would have their cake and eat it. The offer of Germany to the US is however, a fact.
The reasons behind this offer are speculative. After all, it's really all about money anyway.
perikleous Shelbouy 5 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:16 PM
The US would demand a contract/commitment for the fuel based on your yearly usage currently,
if you re neg, they still bill you for it! Then its handled in court while your bank accounts
are frozen and none of the US debt to you is paid until this is resolved. You may win the
hearing/court but the losses from not having access to that money will cost way more!
HimandI 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 05:47 PM
Just more proof that the EU rulers are bought and paid prostitutes.
Jayeshkumar 6 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 10:03 PM
May be EU is indirectly suggesting to use the 2nd Pipeline to be used Exclusively for
Transporting the Hydrogen, in the Future!
Congozebilu 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 08:06 PM
From the first minute this Navalny story broke I knew it was aimed at Nordstream. Everyone
who understands geopolitics and also US desperation to sell "freedom gas" knows that
Nordstream was the intended target this Navalny clown show.
ivoivo 1 hour ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:00 PM
apparently there are evidence found in a trash can in his hotel room in omsk, they poisoned
him with novichock in a water they gave it to him and discard a paper cup in a trash can,
standard kremlins procedure, isn't it, what is happening to world intelligence, russians
can't kill some dude that is actually not even important and americans can't stop russian
hackers in meddling in us election
The only other broad avenue for the people to get unbiased information is from a few news
shows that don't toe the liberal line -- most notably "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Fox News.
Since the riots began at the end of May, Carlson has taken it upon himself to expose the
corruption of not just the media but the liberal elected establishment that has implicitly
endorsed violence, racism, and disorder in the name of what is perversely called social
justice. I've called Carlson a
modern-day Cassandra because his clear-eyed assessment of the danger America faces has been
met with scorn, denial and derision. But name-calling, advertising boycotts, and continued
threats of violence against him and his family have not deterred Carlson from his declared
mission to be "the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink."
In that regard, Carlson has long used his show to ferret out information hidden in the
bowels of government and get it to the people -- bypassing the media guards who increasingly
see it as their sworn role to restrict the free exchange of ideas. On Carlson's Sept. 1 show,
author Chris Rufo discussed his research into how critical race theory has infiltrated the
federal government. I was shocked by just how bad the situation is, something we would never
learn from CNN or MSNBC.
"It's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in
the federal government," Rufo told Carlson.
"What I have discovered is that critical race theory has become, in essence, the default
ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American
people."
He gave three examples of what he called "cult indoctrination." For instance, he told of a
trainer who "told Treasury [Department] employees essentially that America was a fundamentally
white supremacist country and 'virtually all white people uphold the system of racism and white
superiority.'"
When Rufo explicitly urged Trump "to immediately issue an executive order abolishing
critical-race-theory training from the federal government," I thought to myself how that was a
smart move. It just might work. It's no secret that Trump watches Fox News. So why not make a
direct appeal to the president while you are on one of those shows? It's the only way most
guests would ever have a chance to get the president's attention. And in this case it
worked.
Just three quick days later, Trump did exactly what Rufo proposed -- he
issued an executive order through the director of the Office of Management and Budget to
"cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund [the] divisive, un-American propaganda
training sessions" where federal employees are told that "virtually all White people contribute
to racism."
When Trump reacted to Rufo's revelations the same way that I and millions of people watching
Tucker Carlson's show reacted - with outrage - I realized just how dangerous Carlson is to the
hegemony of the far left. His show is metaphorically the tunnel under the Berlin Wall that
allows direct communication between the pro-liberty, pro-American middle class and the freedom
fighters in the White House , bypassing both the bureaucracy and the stunningly dishonest media
that control the flow of information in and out of the Trump administration.
In order to keep our metaphor geographically, if not politically, correct, we should think
of the mainstream media as the Stasi, the East German secret police who were notoriously brutal
-- and effective -- in suppressing free thought and dissent from the party line. They were not
just the "enemy of the people," as Trump has labeled the worst of the modern media; they were
the "enemy of the truth."
That role has never been clearer than it was last week when Bob Woodward, the legacy
commander of the media's Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, issued his report on what he
found when he infiltrated the White House. Or at least what he purported to find.
According to Woodward, Trump perfidiously misled the American public about the scope and
danger of the China virus because he called the virus "deadly stuff" in February before any
Americans had died. Also because Trump knew "it goes through the air." I mean you have to be
notoriously stupid, or just plain incurious, not to have figured out by February that COVID-19
was a deadly peril. Does Woodward think that Trump shut down air travel from China at the end
of January just because he wanted to hurt the tourist industry?
Of course the new virus was deadly, but as Trump patiently explained to the thick-headed
Woodward then, and still has to explain to the rest of the White House press corps virtually
every day, there is no purpose served by terrifying the public. The president told Woodward
that the virus was "more deadly than even your strenuous flus." That turned out to be true, but
flus are also kept under control by widespread vaccination and therapeutics. Does Woodward need
to be reminded that the much more deadly pandemic of 1918 was caused by the Spanish flu ?
Of course he does, because it's not helpful to the media's narrative that Donald Trump is a
dangerous buffoon who must not be reelected. How could the country survive another four years
with a president who insists on doing things his own way, who won't be cowed by the Stasi
media, who considers it his duty to improve on conventional wisdom instead of surrendering to
it.
Which brings us back to Chris Rufo and his pipeline -- or should I say tunnel access -- to
the president. The obstinacy of Tucker Carlson, his unwillingness to take a knee to orthodoxy,
has made him the most dangerous person in America (after Trump) to the far-left overlords. And
when Trump acted on Rufo's entreaty regarding critical race theory, it led to near hysteria as
the Stasi media realized that its Berlin Wall had been breached.
As Carlson himself reported on Tuesday, Sept. 8, "To the news media, all of this was a
disaster. They claim to be journalists, but they despise actual reporting like Chris Rufo's.
His coverage showed that they are complicit in an anti-American lie that is deeply unpopular
with actual Americans, and they didn't take it well."
Among the many critics of Carlson for providing the president with accurate information
about what is being done in his name in the federal bureaucracy, perhaps the loudest was CNN's
Brian Stelter, the virtual communications director for the Stasi media.
Just when the fear starts to subside, and growing public skepticism seems to push governors
into opening, something predictable happens . The entire apparatus of mass media hops on some
new, super-scary headline designed to instill more Coronaphobia and extend the lockdowns yet
again.
It's a cycle that never stops. It comes back again and again.
A great example occurred this weekend. A poll appeared on Friday from the Kaiser Family
Foundation. It showed
that confidence in Anthony Fauci is evaporating along with support for lockdowns and mandatory
Covid vaccines.
The news barely made the headlines, and very quickly this was overshadowed by a scary new
claim: restaurants will give you Covid!
It's tailor-made for the mainstream press. The study is from the
CDC, which means: credible. And the thesis is easily digestible: those who test positive
for Covid are twice as likely as those who tested negative to have eaten at a restaurant.
"Eating and drinking on-site at locations that offer such options might be important risk
factors associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection," the study says.
Very scary!
Thus the implied conclusion: don't allow indoor dining! Otherwise Covid will spread like
wildfire!
After six months of this Corona Kabuki dance, driven by alarmist media and imposed by wacko,
power-abusing governors and mayors, I've become rather cynical about the whole enterprise, so I
mostly ignore the latest nonsense.
In this case, however, I decided to take a closer look simply because so many millions of
owners, workers, and customers have been treated so brutally in the "War on Restaurants."
It turns out, of course, that this is not what the study said. What's more interesting is to
consider exactly what's going on here. The study was based on interviews with 314 people who
had been tested of their own volition. It included 154 patients with positive test results and
160 control participants with negative test results.
The interviews took place two weeks following the tests, and they concerned life activities
two weeks prior to getting the test.
Before we go on here, remember that what alarmed people about Covid was the prospect of
dying. The study says nothing about this subject, nor about hospitalization. It's a fair
assumption that the positive cases being interviewed here got it (presumably, if the tests are
accurate, which they are not )
and got over it.
This alone is interesting simply because it reveals how much the whole subject has been
changed: the pandemic has become a casedemic.
Now, to the question of life activities. In the study, based on answers to a survey, the
following were not correlated in any significant degree with positive cases of Covid:
Wearing a mask or not wearing a mask
Going to church
Riding on public transportation
Attending large house parties
Going to the gym
Going to the office
Going to the hair salon
Going shopping
Now one might suppose, if you think the study has any merit, that this would be the
headline.
The massive power of the state has been deployed all over the United States and the world to
force the closure of churches, gyms, offices, salons, and malls. This all happened and is still
happening. Also mask mandates became the new normal. The public has been invited by health
authorities to jeer at, denounce, and turn in anyone who doesn't have a cloth strapped to his
or her face.
All of this happened in complete contradiction to every commercial right, property right, or
normal human freedoms. We threw it all away in the name of virus control. Our lives have been
completely upended and our assumptions about our rights and liberties have been overturned.
And yet here is a study that is unable to document any correlation between these life
activities and catching the disease.
That's an amazing conclusion that could have generated headlines like:
Salons Won't Get You Sick, CDC Reports
You Won't Catch Covid at the Gym, CDC Shows
No, Your Hairstylist Doesn't Spread the Coronavirus
Scared to Go Shopping? Don't Be, Says the CDC
Your Mask Is Pointless, New Study Says
Church Goers Shouldn't Fear Sickness, Scientists Reveal
Study: Your House Party Didn't Spread the Virus
And so on. But none of this was to be. Not one single story in the mainstream press said
anything like this, even though this was all implied by the CDC study.
The one place that the study revealed a positive correlation between positive cases and life
activities was going to restaurants.
So that's what got the alarmist headlines. Yes, these are all real.
And so on for thousands of times in every mainstream venue. They are all competing for
clicks in the great agenda of extending lockdowns and feeding public fear as much as possible.
So the worst-possible spin on this slightly sketchy study gets all the headlines.
Thus is it burned into many people's minds that restaurants are really disease-spreading
venues. Go out to eat and you might die!
And here is what makes this even stranger. The interviewers never asked the people in the
survey whether they were eating indoors or outdoors, as incredible as that seems. The authors
admit this:
"Of note, the question assessing dining at a restaurant did not distinguish between indoor
and outdoor options."
Why not? Did they just forget to ask? What's going on here?
Which is to say that even if the results are meaningful – and there's so much about
this study that is murky and error prone – they are practically useless for knowing what
to do about it. If there is no distinction between indoor and outdoor, all speculation about
ventilation or crowds or the presence of food and so on, is utterly pointless.
Without knowing that, we are at a loss to figure out any answer to the question of why and
what to do. Instead, the message comes down to: don't go out to eat.
Here is how bad the science has become. In the discussion, the authors write the
following:
"Direction, ventilation, and intensity of airflow might affect virus transmission, even if
social distancing measures and mask use are implemented according to current guidance. Masks
cannot be effectively worn while eating and drinking, whereas shopping and numerous other
indoor activities do not preclude mask use."
Here is what is weird: the study itself supports none of that paragraph.
The survey never asked about ventilation because the people who made the survey somehow
forgot to make a query concerning indoor vs. outdoor dining . As for masks, the study did in
fact ask respondents about mask wearing and the results showed no correlation between the
sickness and whether and to what extent people were wearing masks!
In other words, that paragraph in the discussion is contradicted in two places by the
authors' own study.
In addition, the authors themselves point to an intriguing issue: the people in the survey
might have biased their answers based on their personal knowledge of the test results.
Think about it this way. The people who had a positive Covid test are more likely to ask
themselves the great question: how did I get this? Going to restaurants is such a rare activity
these days that it stands out in one's mind. When the survey asked people if they had gone out
to eat, it is possible that the memory of the Covid positive person might be more likely to
blame the restaurant, whereas the Covid negative person might be more likely to have forgotten
the locale of every meal in the last 30 days.
In other words, the real result of the study might be: Covid patients are more likely to
scapegoat restaurants than gyms, churches, and salons.
Alas, none of these interesting considerations appear in the media-rendered version of this
study: panic and keep the lockdowns in place!
Lockdowns have become a conclusion in a desperate search for evidence. Imagine if you
undertook a study of C-positive vs. C-negative cases and asked the people if they mostly wear
lace-up or slip-on shoes. If you come up with some positive correlation, the CDC will publish
you and a media panic will ensue.
This is precisely where we've been for six solid months now. The media has become the
handmaiden of lockdown tyranny, blasting out simplistic versions of sketchy studies to keep the
panic going as long as possible. And the public, which is far too trusting of the media and its
capacity for rational and accurate reporting, eats it up.
For now. Once the dust settles on all of this, it seems highly likely that media science
reporting will lose credibility for a generation. It certainly deserves that fate.
"Cloth masks that are used to slow the spread of COVID-19 offer little protection
against wildfire smoke. They do not catch small particles found in wildfire smoke that
can harm your health."
Just checking if that's the same CDC.
LA_Goldbug , 3 hours ago
Wow !!!!!
Nice find :-)
honest injun , 3 hours ago
At what point does the man on the street realize that he has been had? It took me about
2 weeks, 6 months ago to realize what Fauci and his cronies were saying was nonsense. Smart
people that I know, took months to reach the same conclusion but many people are still
buying the disinfo.
"... On the strength of Adrian Vermeule's review last month (" Liturgy of Liberalism ," January 2017), I picked up Ryszard Legutko's The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies . Legutko sees many parallels between the communism that dominated the Poland of his youth and the political-social outlook now treated as obligatory by Eurocrats and dominant in America, which he calls "[neo]liberal democracy." ..."
"... One parallel struck me as especially important: "Communism and [neo]liberal democracy are related by a similarly paradoxical approach to politics: both promised to reduce the role of politics in human life, yet induced politicization on a scale unknown in previous history." We're aware of the totalitarian dimension of communism. But liberalism? Isn't it supposed to be neutral with respect to substantive outlooks, endorsing only the constitutional and legal frameworks for free and fair political debate? Actually, no. Liberals always assert that liberalism is the view of politics, society, and morality "most adequate of and for modern times." ..."
"... [Neo]Liberalism, Legutko points out, is committed to dualism, not pluralism. He gives the example of Isaiah Berlin, who made a great deal out of the importance of the pluralism of the liberal spirit. Yet "Berlin himself, a superbly educated man, knew very well and admitted quite frankly that the most important and most valuable fruits of Western philosophy were monistic in nature." This means that liberalism, as Berlin defines it, must classify nearly the entire history of Western thought (and that of other cultures as well) as "nonliberal." Thus, "the effect of this supposed liberal pluralism" is not a welcoming, open society in which a wide range of substantive thought flourishes, but "a gigantic purge of Western philosophy, bringing an inevitable degradation of the human mind." ..."
"... The purge mentality has a political dimension. Since 1989, European politics has shifted away from a left vs. right framework toward "mainstream" vs. "extremist." This is a telling feature of [neo]liberal democracy as an ideology. "The tricky side of 'mainstream' politics is that it does not tolerate any political 'tributaries' and denies that they should have any legitimate existence. Those outside the mainstream are believed to be either mavericks and as such not deserving to be treated seriously, or fascists who should be politically eliminated." ..."
"... Lumpenproletariat ..."
"... Legutko speaks of "lumpenintellectuals." These are the professors and journalists who buttress the status quo by rehearsing ideological catechisms and exposing heretics. We certainly have a lumpenintelligentsia ..."
"... I regularly read two lumpenintellectuals in order to understand the orthodoxies of our political mainstream: Tom Friedman over at the New York Times and Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal . The former is a cheerleader for today's globalist orthodoxies, complete with ritual expressions of misgivings. The latter eagerly plays the role of Leninist enforcer of those orthodoxies ..."
♦ Boys and girls are different. There, I've said it, a heresy of our time. We're not
supposed to suggest that a woman shouldn't fight in combat, or that an athletic girl doesn't
have a right to play on the boys' football team -- or that a young woman doesn't run a greater
risk than a young man when binge drinking. We are not supposed to reject the conceit that the
sexes are interchangeable, and therefore a man can become a "woman" and use the ladies'
bathroom.
Male and female God created us. I commend this heresy to readers. Remind people that boys in
girls' bathrooms put girls at risk, and that Obergefell is a grotesque distortion of
the Constitution. True -- and don't miss the opportunity to say, in public, that men and women
are different. This is the deepest reason why gender ideology is perverse. As Peter Hitchens
observes in this issue (" The Fantasy of
Addiction "), there's a great liberation that comes when, against the spirit of the age,
one blurts out what one knows to be true.
♦ Great Britain
recently announced regulatory approval for scientists to introduce third-party DNA into the
reproductive process. The technological innovation that allows for interventions into the most
fundamental dimensions of reproduction and human identity is sure to accelerate. Which is a
good reason for incoming President Trump to revive the President's Council on Bioethics. (It
existed under President Obama, but was told to do and say nothing.) We need sober reflection on
the coming revolution in reproductive technology. Trump should appoint Princeton professor
Robert P. George to head the Bioethics Commission. He has the expertise in legal and moral
philosophy, and he knows what's at stake. (See " Gnostic Liberalism ,"
December 2016.)
♦ On the strength of Adrian Vermeule's review last month (" Liturgy of
Liberalism ," January 2017), I picked up Ryszard Legutko's
The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies . Legutko sees many
parallels between the communism that dominated the Poland of his youth and the political-social
outlook now treated as obligatory by Eurocrats and dominant in America, which he calls
"[neo]liberal democracy."
One parallel struck me as especially important: "Communism and [neo]liberal democracy
are related by a similarly paradoxical approach to politics: both promised to reduce the role
of politics in human life, yet induced politicization on a scale unknown in previous history."
We're aware of the totalitarian dimension of communism. But liberalism? Isn't it supposed to be
neutral with respect to substantive outlooks, endorsing only the constitutional and legal
frameworks for free and fair political debate? Actually, no. Liberals always assert that
liberalism is the view of politics, society, and morality "most adequate of and for modern
times."
This gives [neo]liberalism a partisan spirit all the more powerful because it is denied.
Although such words as "dialogue" and "pluralism" appear among its favorite motifs, as do
"tolerance" and other similarly hospitable notions, this overtly generous rhetorical
orchestration covers up something entirely different. In its essence, liberalism is
unabashedly aggressive because it is determined to hunt down all nonliberal agents and ideas,
which it treats as a threat to itself and to humanity.
[Neo]Liberalism, Legutko points out, is committed to dualism, not pluralism. He gives the example
of Isaiah Berlin, who made a great deal out of the importance of the pluralism of the liberal
spirit. Yet "Berlin himself, a superbly educated man, knew very well and admitted quite frankly
that the most important and most valuable fruits of Western philosophy were monistic in
nature." This means that liberalism, as Berlin defines it, must classify nearly the entire
history of Western thought (and that of other cultures as well) as "nonliberal." Thus, "the
effect of this supposed liberal pluralism" is not a welcoming, open society in which a wide
range of substantive thought flourishes, but "a gigantic purge of Western philosophy, bringing
an inevitable degradation of the human mind."
♦ The purge mentality has a political dimension. Since 1989, European politics has
shifted away from a left vs. right framework toward "mainstream" vs. "extremist." This is a
telling feature of [neo]liberal democracy as an ideology. "The tricky side of 'mainstream' politics
is that it does not tolerate any political 'tributaries' and denies that they should have any
legitimate existence. Those outside the mainstream are believed to be either mavericks and as
such not deserving to be treated seriously, or fascists who should be politically
eliminated."
♦ Karl Marx coined the term Lumpenproletariat . Lumpen means "rag"
in German, and its colloquial meanings include someone who is down-and-out. According to Marx,
this underclass has counter-revolutionary tendencies. These people can be riled up by
demagogues and deployed in street gangs to stymie the efforts of the true proletariat to topple
the dominant class.
Legutko speaks of "lumpenintellectuals." These are the professors and journalists who
buttress the status quo by rehearsing ideological catechisms and exposing heretics. We
certainly have a lumpenintelligentsia , left and right: tenured professors,
columnists, think tank apparatchiks, and human resources directors.
♦ I regularly read two lumpenintellectuals in order to understand the orthodoxies of
our political mainstream: Tom Friedman over at the New York
Times and Bret
Stephens at the Wall Street Journal . The former is a cheerleader for today's
globalist orthodoxies, complete with ritual expressions of misgivings. The latter eagerly plays
the role of Leninist enforcer of those orthodoxies.
♦ Bill Kristol recently stepped down
as day-to-day editor at the Weekly Standard . .... As he put it with characteristic humor, "Here at The Weekly Standard , we've
always been for regime change."...
In the days, weeks, and months immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Arab-Americans,
South Asian-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and Sikh-Americans were the targets of widespread
hate violence. Many of the perpetrators of these acts of hate violence claimed they were
acting patriotically by retaliating against those responsible for 9/11.
...
Just after September 11, numerous Arabs, Muslims, and individuals perceived to be Arab or
Muslim were assaulted, and some killed, by individuals who believed they were responsible
for or connected to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The first backlash
killing occurred four days after September 11.
Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot to death on September 15 as he was planting flowers outside
his Chevron gas station. The man who shot Sodhi, Frank Roque, had told an employee of an
Applebee's restaurant that he was "going to go out and shoot some towel heads." Roque
mistakenly thought Sodhi was Arab because Sodhi, an immigrant from India, had a beard and
wore a turban as part of his Sikh faith. After shooting Sodhi, Roque drove to a Mobil gas
station a few miles away and shot at a Lebanese-American clerk. He then drove to a home he
once owned and shot and almost hit an Afghani man who was coming out the front door. When
he was arrested two hours later, Roque shouted, "I stand for America all the way."
The next two killings were committed by a man named Mark Stroman. On September 15, 2001,
Stroman shot and killed Waquar Hassan, an immigrant from Pakistan, at Hassan's grocery
store in Dallas, Texas. On October 4, 2001, Stroman shot and killed Vasudev Patel, an
immigrant from India and a naturalized U.S. citizen, while Patel was working at his Shell
station convenience store. A store video camera recorded the killing, helping police to
identify Stroman as the killer. Stroman later told a Dallas television station that he shot
Hassan and Patel because, "We're at war. I did what I had to do. I did it to retaliate
against those who retaliated against us."
Beyond these killings, there were more than a thousand other anti-Muslim or anti-Arab
acts of hate which took the form of physical assaults, verbal harassment and intimidation,
arson, attacks on mosques, vandalism, and other property damage.
Instead of "calming prejudice" the GB Bush administration institutionalized hate
crimes:
First, in the weeks immediately following the September 11 attacks, the government began
secretly arresting and detaining Arab, Muslim, and South Asian men. Within the first two
months after the attacks, the government had detained at least 1,200 men.
...
Second, in November 2001, the Department of Justice began efforts to "interview"
approximately 5,000 men between the ages of 18 and 33 from Middle Eastern or Muslim nations
who had arrived in the United States within the previous two years on a temporary student,
tourist, or business visa and were lawful residents of the United States. Four months
later, the government announced it would seek to interview an additional 3,000 men from
countries with an Al Qaeda presence.
...
Third, in September 2002, the government implemented a "Special Registration" program also
known as NSEERS (National Security Entry-Exit Registration System), requiring immigrant men
from 26 mostly Muslim countries to register their name, address, telephone number, place of
birth, date of arrival in the United States, height, weight, hair and eye color, financial
information and the addresses, birth dates and phone numbers of parents and any foreign
friends with the government.
Besides all that a rather useless security theater was installed at U.S. airports which
has costs many billions in lost time and productivity ever since. The Patriot Act was
introduced which allowed for unlimited spying on private citizens. Wars were launched that
were claimed to be justified by 9/11. These were "mass outbreaks of anti-Muslim sentiment and
violence. Many were killed and maimed in them. People were tortured and vanished. All of this
happened largely to applause of a majority of the U.S. people which were glued to 24 and dreamed of being "terrorist
hunters".
Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but
"pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that.
I find it a bit humorous b that you are critical of Krugman for his 911 dementia when for
years many of us finance types have railed about how morally corrupt the logic and thinking
of Paul Krugman is.
Paul Krugman is to economics what Bernie Sanders has become for the purported "left" side
of the "right wing" uni-party....a sheep dog for the easily led.
Paul Krugman is an acolyte for the God of Mammon/global private finance elite.
While spreading anger and hate toward Arab people, The Bush Administration rescued the
many members of the Kingdom's family from all around the US and escorted their flights out of
the US to safety in Saudi Arabia.
Distracting the public big time was Dick Cheney, VP, who insisted from the very next day
that the plot to hit the Twin Towers was Saddam's plot.
So, the historical record and US response was skewed from the getgo. AQ and Bin Laden
didn't concern the neocons. They wanted the US to go to Iraq again, and this time start a
wide war that would spread to Syria and Lebanon and Iran.
It was easy times to spread fear and hate, and Cheney and the war mongers of CENTCOM were
riding high. Americans were scared of all Arabs, all Sunnis, all Shiites, from anywhere. They
were all the same in the public's mind. Enemies.
It was perfect and has led to 19 years of endless wars. Add ISIS and al Nusra and the
Taliban and you have an endless soup of enemies.
krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of the 21st
century
at my age, I shouldn't really be surprised any more by what american "intellectuals" and
"nobel prize winners" say about anything..... but I am.
He's neo-liberal interventionist moron of the first rank, and saying what he did actually
normalizes the war mania and war-mongering which has become so staple in mainstream thought
and the "think tanks" and is now practically part of the american DNA and "culture".
shame on krugman
...
It appears the Deep State has attacked the USA's people twice in two decades--on 911 and with
the decision to let as many die as possible by deliberately not doing anything to mitigate
the impact of COVID-19 and allowing the real economy to atrophy so even more will die in the
long run.
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 11 2020 19:40 utc | 34
Talking about tilting at windmills - I'll never forget Robert Fisk angrily pointing out
that the Yankees knew where to find Al CIA-duh because they extended the cave complex at Tora
Bora to help Al CIA-duh, equipped with 10,000 US Stinger Missiles, kick the Russians out of
Afghanistan in the 1980s!!!
(The Yankees had to wait for 10+ years to invade Afghanistan because it takes that long
for Stingers to pass their Use By date)
@michaelj72. "krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of
the 21st century"
Actually, Paul Krugman was a strong and outspoken opponent of the Iraq War since early
2003 and possibly earlier. He was amongst the few mainstream liberal commentators to take
that stand.
If MoA readers and commenters were to read the entire series of Krugman's tweets, six in
all, they will see mention of how the Bush govt began exploiting the events of 11 September
2001 almost immediately. Though the example Krugman actually uses would make most people
cringe at what it suggests about the bubble he lives in and how far removed it is from most
people's lives and experiences, and his reference to a "horrible war" does not mention either
Afghanistan or Iraq.
It has to be said that Twitter is not designed very well for the kind of informal
conversational commentary that people often use it for. But then you would think Krugman
would use something other than Twitter to discuss and compare 9/11 with the impact of
COVID-19.
The real issue I have with Krugman's Tweet is that he is revising history and bending over
backwards to apologise for Dubya in a way to criticise Donald Trump's performance as
President.
b " Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but
"pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that. "
Careful with that axe b, you are talking about Biden's chief economic adviser and likely
appointee as Chair of the Fed. How does this look?
Volker
Greenspan
Bernanke
Yellen
Powell
Krugman
Reading Krugman's columns in 2016, I had a strong to overwhelming sense that this was a
person revving up for a spot in Hillary's White House or cabinet. For some reason it isn't
hitting me as strongly this time around – he may not have as close connections in
Biden's circle – but it certainly would not be a surprise to see him take a turn
through the media/government revolving door if Trump loses (though, fwiw, I don't think it
will be a job at the Fed).
Yep. Pretty staggering how a few disgruntled ex-CIA contractors managed to, deliberately
or not, help the US Gov't launch the biggest world war operation right under the noses of the
brainwashed masses.
99% of Westerners still are clueless as to explaining the last 20 years in a broader
geopolitical context.
#28: "The antiwar protests in the US were small and insignificant."
No they were not. Millions of people demonstrated against the planned war, in the US,
in the UK, and around the world...
We mustn't forget how the vast majority of those who allegedly were anti-war suddenly went
totally pro-war silent upon Obama coming in.
But that pales compared to the vile spectacle of all the self-alleged
"anti-authoritarians", "anti-propagandists" "dissidents", who suddenly regard the government
media as the literal voice of God, where their alleged God speaks of Covid.
His book, End this Depression Now, is pretty weak. He has no theory of why the crash
occurred. He critiques the austerity agenda but doesn't understand that government spending
CAN create tax liabilities for capital down the road and eat into profits, thus blocking
expanded investments and growth. Moronic libertarians hate Krugman just because they are
right wing assholes who think, like fairies, that a free market without the state will work
fine and self correct. Marx debunked this fairy tale thoroughly in Capital Volume 1, showing
that, even if we start with the mythical free market of libertarian morons, capitalism will
still operate according to the general law by which concentration and centralization lead to
class polarization. In any case, in volume 3 of Capital, Marx develops his laws of crisis,
showing that the cycles of expansion and depression under capitalism follow the movements of
the rate of profit, which itself is determined by the ratio of the value of sunk capital in
production technologies to the rate of exploitation (profits/wages). If the former rises more
than the latter, the rate of profit sinks, along with investment, output and employment.
Financial crises then set in.
The empirical evidence in the data bears out Marx's theory, not Krugman's dumb notion of
aggregate demand, or the stupid libertarian focus on interest rates.
We could discuss here all day about the sociological subject of the American people's true
positioning in the aftermath of 9/11. It would be, sincerely, a waste of time.
The important thing to grasp over this episode - from the point of view of History - is
this: it was a strategic victory for al-Qaeda . The USA took the bait (all scripted?)
and went into a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a few years, the surplus the USA had
accumulated with the sacking and absorption of the Soviet space during Bill Clinton
evaporated and became a huge deficit in the Empire's accounts. Not long after, the 2008
financial meltdown happened, burying Bushism in a spectacular way.
There's a debate about the size of the hole the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan cost the
American Empire. Some put it into the dozens of billions of USDs; others put it into the
trillions of USDs range. We will never know. What we know is that the hole was big enough to
both erase the American surplus and to not avoid the financial meltdown of 2008.
Either the expansion through the Middle East wasn't fast and provided riches enough to
keep up with the Empire's voracious appetite or the invasion itself already represented a
last, desperate attempt by the Empire to avoid its imminent collapse. We know, however, that
POTUS Bush had a list of countries he wanted to invade beyond Iraq (the "Axis of Evil") which
contained a secret country (Venezuela). He was conscious Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't be
enough. Whatever the case, he didn't have the time, and the financial meltdown happened in
his last year in the White House.
They knew who the perps of 9/11 were: their "own" Saudi irregulars in the CIA's US main
land training camps, who started practicing on the "wrong"- domestic American- targets. These
guys were officially entered without any background checks.
The Bush and Bin Laden families go way back in money making. That is why George had to ponder
so long in that Florida kindergarten after hearing about the attacks: he had a suspicion. The
Saudi only fly out after 9/11 confirms that.
Paul Krugman Is a pro. Completely owned by Deep State. His purpose is to deflect
discussion and prevent questioning the official version of 9/11 , and get people chasing
something completely irrelevant. Well done Paul, most have taken the bait.
An open and shut case! Clearly Novichok poisoning, a deadly poison made only in Russia,
and the Russians have already used it at least once. The most deadly nerve agent known to man
and part of the brutal armament that Putin's thugs use on their murderous missions.
Germany has denied allegation of falsification of the Navalny case
3 September 2020
MOSCOW, September 3 – RIA Novosti. The statement made by the President of
Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, about the falsification of data on the "poisoning" of Navalny
is not true, the press service of the German Cabinet told RIA Novosti.
Earlier, at a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Lukashenko said that
Minsk had intercepted a conversation between Warsaw and Berlin, which denied allegations of
the blogger's poisoning. He promised that he would give the Russian side a transcript of this
"interesting dialogue, which clearly indicates that this is falsification".
"Of course, Mr. Lukashenko's statement does not correspond to reality. Yesterday the
Federal Chancellor, the Foreign Minister and the Defence Minister expressed their views on
the new circumstances in the Navalny poisoning case There is nothing to add", the cabinet
told the agency.
In Moscow, they noted that they had not yet received this evidence.
"Lukashenko hast just announced this. He said that the material would be transferred to
the FSB. There is no other information yet", Peskov told RIA Novosti.
What a duplicitous creep Lukashenko is!
Always jumping to one side of the fence to the other and thinking he is so smart in doing
so.
Then again, perhaps he has such damning evidence, but even if he had, nobody would believe
it, because Germany, being a vassal state of the USA, is on the side of freedom and
democracy.
"Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland" as one sings there to a
well known tune.
A week or so ago it was reported that the EU's carbon tax would also apply to energy
imports (Russian gas etc.) and in the Tass Press Review (?) 'shock' was apparently expressed,
which is weird as de-carbonization (plus more recently a setting in place the necssary
infrastcture for a hydrogen based economy) has been an open and long stated plan by Brussels.
Norway has already invested significant resources in de-carbonizing its gas and is ready to
go.
And in the last couple of days there was a report (RT?) that Russia had jumped onboard the
hydrogen train with a plan to use nuclear created hydrogen (heat, innit?) and Norway style
de-carbonization tech. Will post the links if I can re-find them. Still, interesting
stuff.
" Once Navalny was in Berlin it was only a matter of time before it was declared that he
was poisoned with Novichok. The Russophobes are delighted. This of course eliminates all
vestiges of doubt about what happened to the Skripals, and proves that Russia must be
isolated and sanctioned to death and we must spend untold billions on weapons and security
services. We must also increase domestic surveillance, crack down on dissenting online
opinion. It also proves that Donald Trump is a Russian puppet and Brexit is a Russian
plot.
I am going to prove beyond all doubt that I am a Russian troll by asking the question Cui
Bono?, brilliantly identified by the Integrity Initiative's Ben Nimmo as a sure sign of
Russian influence.
I should state that I have no difficulty at all with the notion that a powerful oligarch
or an organ of the Russian state may have tried to assassinate Navalny. He is a minor
irritant, rather more famous here than in Russia, but not being a major threat does not
protect you against political assassination in Russia.
What I do have difficulty with is the notion that if Putin, or other very powerful Russian
actors, wanted Navalny dead, and had attacked him while he was in Siberia, he would not be
alive in Germany today. If Putin wanted him dead, he would be dead.
Let us first take the weapon of attack. One thing we know about a "Novichok" for sure is
that it appears not to be very good at assassination. Poor Dawn Sturgess is the only person
ever to have allegedly died from "Novichok", accidentally according to the official
narrative. "Novichok" did not kill the Skripals, the actual target. If Putin wanted Navalny
dead, he would try something that works. Like a bullet to the head, or an actually deadly
poison.
"Novichok" is not a specific chemical. It is a class of chemical weapon designed to be
improvised in the field from common domestic or industrial precursors. It makes some sense to
use on foreign soil as you are not carrying around the actual nerve agent, and may be able to
buy the ingredients locally. But it makes no sense at all in your own country, where the FSB
or GRU can swan around with any deadly weapon they wish, to be making homemade nerve agents
in the sink. Why would you do that?
Further we are expected to believe that, the Russian state having poisoned Navalny, the
Russian state then allowed the airplane he was traveling in, on a domestic flight, to divert
to another airport, and make an emergency landing, so he could be rushed to hospital. If the
Russian secret services had poisoned Navalny at the airport before takeoff as alleged, why
would they not insist the plane stick to its original flight plan and let him die on the
plane? They would have foreseen what would happen to the plane he was on.
Next, we are supposed to believe that the Russian state, having poisoned Navalny, was not
able to contrive his death in the intensive care unit of a Russian state hospital. We are
supposed to believe that the evil Russian state was able to falsify all his toxicology tests
and prevent doctors telling the truth about his poisoning, but the evil Russian state lacked
the power to switch off the ventilator for a few minutes or slip something into his drip. In
a Russian state hospital.
Next we are supposed to believe that Putin, having poisoned Navalny with novichok, allowed
him to be flown to Germany to be saved, making it certain the novichok would be discovered.
And that Putin did this because he was worried Merkel was angry, not realising she might be
still more angry when she discovered Putin had poisoned him with novichok
There are a whole stream of utterly unbelievable points there, every single one of which
you have to believe to go along with the western narrative. Personally I do not buy a single
one of them, but then I am a notorious Russophile traitor.
The United States is very keen indeed to stop Germany completing the Nord Stream 2
pipeline, which will supply Russian gas to Germany on a massive scale, sufficient for about
40% of its electricity generation. Personally I am opposed to Nord Stream 2 myself, on both
environmental and strategic grounds. I would much rather Germany put its formidable
industrial might into renewables and self-sufficiency. But my reasons are very different from
those of the USA, which is concerned about the market for liquefied gas to Europe for US
produces and for the Gulf allies of the US. Key decisions on the completion of Nord Stream 2
are now in train in Germany.
The US and Saudi Arabia have every reason to instigate a split between Germany and Russia
at this time. Navalny is certainly a victim of international politics. That he is a victim of
Putin I tend to doubt.
I do hope that Murray was writing cynically when he penned the following words above about
Navalny:
He is a minor irritant, rather more famous here than in Russia
His popularity here is minimal and his political base statistically zilch, the incessant
swamping of the Russian blogosphere with his praise by his hamsters notwithstanding.
I saw one of such hamster's nonsense only the other week in which the retard wrote that
Navalny is the most well-known person in Russia and another post of yet another hamster who
presented a list of policies that the bullshitter would follow "when he becomes
president".
The whole crock of Navalny -- Novichok shite neatly summed up by a comment to Murray's
article linked above:
Goose
September 4, 2020 at 00:28 We're being asked to believe by people calling themselves serious journalists, that the
Kremlin's thought process was thus :
Let's poison this guy with Novichok. Nobody will know it was us and there'll be no
diplomatic fallout.
Completely illogical.
Logic has no part in this machination, dear chap: the people to whom these lies are
directed are fucking stupid: uneducated, brain-dead, browser surfing, soap opera and
"Celebrity Come Dancing" and "Reality TV" and porn watching morons.
Oh yes! And in the UK they're daily fed pap about "The Royals": every day without fail the
UK media presents page after page of "stories" concerning "Kate and Wills" and "Harry and
Megan".
And much of the rest of the UK media is full of shite about "football" and its prima
donnas -- that's "Associated Football" or "soccer" as they prefer to say in North America,
and not "Rugby Football" -- better said: not "Rugby League Football".
Nato has called for Russia to disclose its Novichok nerve agent programme to
international monitors, following the poisoning of activist Alexei Navalny.
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said members were united in condemning the
"horrific" attack.
He added there was "proof beyond doubt" that a Novichok nerve agent was used against Mr
Navalny.
Where is the proof????????
You just say so or some "guy" at Porton Down or some Bundeswehr
Scheißkerl laboratories?
Get fucked Stoltenberg!
And Peskov, a word of advice: Shut the fuck up and say nothing.
Don't believe that silence from you will be taken as proof of guilt!
You and the Russian state are guilty of everything as charged by the very nature of the
fact that you are Russian, "the other"!
Sound familiar?
It's what the Nazis said about every Jew: guilty of all accusations because of their
ethnicity -- not their religion, note: Christianized Jews were still "Jews". They were guilty
of all charges from the moment of each and every one's birth as a "Jew".
And the sickening thing is that "woke" arseholes the world over condemn racism, but racism
directed against Russians is fair game.
The US president has received heavy criticism for his reluctance to immediately join
NATO allies in pressing Russia over the Navalny incident, which CNN called "the latest
instance of Trump failing to speak out and call for answers from the Kremlin on issues
ranging from election interference to possible bounties on US troops in Afghanistan."
I presume that the concept of "burden of proof" is now a dead letter in the Free West.
I thought that whole Russia-offered-bounties-for-dead-US-troops thing had been 'debunked'
for good. Several western sources which are sometimes not snapping-turtle crazy said there
was nothing to it. So why are they still citing it?
Alexei Navalny is one of the most important leaders of what passes for political
opposition in President Putin's Russia. Some say he is, in effect, "the" leader of the
opposition in Russia. He has just been the subject of an assassination attempt, and lies in
an induced coma in a German hospital. It's worth repeating: the leader of the opposition to
Vladimir Putin has been poisoned, perhaps fatally, using novichok, a chemical weapon banned
by international treaty. There is little doubt that, in one form or another, formal or
informal agents of the Russian state would have been part of the plot, especially given the
evidence of novichok, and that the highest circles of the Russian establishment would either
have knowledge of the attack, or made it apparent to any shady blah, blah. blah ..
Now don't you folks go and forget, BoJo recently made Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of that
rag and who penned the above shite, a Baronet.
Lebedev has dual Russian/British citizen and has lived in the UK since he arrived there as
an 8-year-old with his KGB papa, who had landed a cushy number at the Soviet Embassy.
Papa Lebedev went back to Russia, where in the immediate post-Soviet years of Russia he
made a mint and became an "oligarch", namely an extremely successful thief who had pillaged
Russia. His son became a UK citizen in 2010.
Evgeny Lebedev is now a life peer and may now plonk his arse (and get paid for doing so!)
in one of the chambers of the British legislature, the one whose members are unelected: they
are there either through their aristocratic "birthright" or are appointees, such as is
Lebedev.
When BoJo appointed Lebedev as a life peer, the moronic Russophobes in the UK accused that
fool of a British PM of being under the Evil One's control.
Just shows you how they know shag all about Russia and Russians.
Recording of conversation between Berlin and Warsaw on Navalny case published
20:40 09/04/2020 (updated: 05:19 09/05/2020)
MOSCOW, September 4 – RIA Novosti.The state Belarusian media has
published a recording of the negotiations between Berlin and Warsaw on the situation with
Alexei Navalny, intercepted by Minsk .
RIA Novosti is publishing a transcript of this dialogue.
– Hello, good afternoon, Nick. How are we getting on?
– Everything seems to be going according to plan. The materials about Navalny are
ready. They'll be transferred to the Chancellor's office. We'll be waiting for her
statement.
– Has the poisoning been definitely confirmed?
– Look, Mike, it's not that important in this case. There is a war going on. And
during a war, all sorts of methods are good.
– I agree. It is necessary to discourage Putin from sticking his nose into the
affairs of Belarus. The most effective way is to drown him with the problems in Russia, and
there are many of them. Moreover, in the near future they will have elections, voting day in
the Russian regions.
– This is what we are doing. How are you doing in Belarus?
– To be honest, not that well, really. President Lukashenko has turned out to be
a tough nut to crack. They are professional and organized. It is clear that Russia supports
them. The officials and the military are loyal to the president. We are working on it. The
rest [of this conversation] we'll have when we meet and not on the 'phone.
I find it hard to believe this is real. Lukashenko is 'a tough nut to crack'? The
Belarusian government is 'professional and organized'? Well, you never know with the Poles.
But it seems so perfectly to confirm western perfidy that it must be made up. Who would be
stupid enough to say things like that on the phone?
And "Yats is our man!" Victory Noodles crowed to Pie-whacked.
Don't forget also that Jens Stoltenberg was dumb enough to think he could drive a taxi
around Oslo and pick up paying passengers without their recognising him and commenting on his
poor driving skills and knowledge of Oslo streets.
And on hearing off a Latvian (?) politician, who had been observing the "Revolution of
Dignity" and was involved in an investigation into the deaths of the "Heavenly Hundred", that
there were good grounds to believe that those martyrs for Ukrainian freedom had been martyred
by being shot in the back by their fellow countrymen who were of a fascist bent, Lady Ashton
said: "Gosh!""
Now that really was a dumb utterance to make on the phone, considering the
circumstances.
It is also worth underlining that the Russian pilot who decided to make an emergency
landing in Omsk, rather than proceed to Moscow, may have saved Navalny's life, as may the
doctors in Omsk who – despite their professed doubts about poison – administered
atropine, the closest treatment there is to a novichok antidote, early on. The claim, made by
some, that this was a brazen attack, with the Kremlin's fingerprints all over it, designed to
be found out and interpreted as a "two fingers up" to the west, does not stack up.
But the German findings that probably the most influential Russian opposition leader
was poisoned and that the substance used was the same as the one identified in the Skripal
case – a military-grade nerve agent, moreover, that is associated with Russia, even
though it was developed in the Soviet-era and can be found outside Russia – means that
the Kremlin has a case to answer. Yes, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the
Kremlin is all denials, but the onus is now squarely on Putin to make his case in the court
of international opinion.
" the doctors in Omsk who – despite their professed doubts about poison –
administered atropine, the closest treatment there is to a novichok antidote, early on."
That a fact, Doctor Dejevsky?
" everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the Kremlin is all denials, but the onus
is now squarely on Putin to make his case in the court of international opinion"
Burden of proof?
Russia has been accused! Russia is not obliged to prove its innocence, FFS!!!!
Where is the evidence to back up the accusation????
Of course the Omsk hospital doctors had to apply atropine because Navalny's groupies were
squealing that he had been poisoned. They would have squealed again and accused the hospital
of malpractice if the hospital had not used the drug.
Russian doctors have proposed to their German colleagues that they establish a joint
group on the case of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, the president of Russia's
National Medical Chamber, noted paediatrician Leonid Roshal, told reporters on
Saturday.
Will the Germans agree?
I shouldn't imagine so. They and the rest of the West have crossed the Rubicon:
Every stock market bubble begins with a story, and make no mistake -- this is a stock market
bubble. A virus forced the country to shut down and accelerated the gains in a select few
technology stocks that are uniquely capable of thriving with everyone stuck at home. A central
bank took quick action to prevent financial markets from seizing up, pushing interest rates
about as low as they could go.
I was mildly amused by Paul Sperry's recent tweet announcing as "breaking news" that Obama's
CIA Director, John Brennan, set up a Task Force to target Donald Trump. This should not be
considered something "new." I reported on this almost one year ago (October 2019 to be
precise). You can check out the original pieces here
and here
. The following provides an updated, consolidated piece.
While chatting in late October 2019 with a retired CIA colleague, he dropped a
bombshell–he had learned that John Brennan set up a Trump Task Force at CIA in early
2016. One of my retired buddy's friends, who was still on duty with the CIA in 2016, recounted
how he was approached discreetly and invited to work on a Task Force focused on then
Presidential candidate Donald Trump. The Task Force members were handpicked instead of
following the normal procedure of posting the job. Instead of opening the job to all eligible
CIA personnel, only a select group of people were invited specifically to join up. Not everyone
accepted the invitation, and that could be a problem for John Brennan
A "Task Force" normally is a short term creation comprised of operations officers (i.e.,
guys and gals who carry out espionage activities overseas) and intelligence analysts. The
purpose of such a group is to ensure all relevant intelligence capabilities are brought to bear
on the problem at hand. I am not talking about an informal group of disgruntled Democrats
working at the CIA who got together like a book club to grouse and complain about the brash
real estate guy from New York. It was a specially designed covert action to try to destroy
Donald Trump.
A "Task Force" is a special bureaucratic creation that provides a vehicle for bring case
officers and analysts together, along with admin support, for a limited term project. But it
also can be expanded to include personnel from other agencies, such as the FBI, DIA and NSA.
Task Forces have been used since the inception of the CIA in 1947. Here's a recently
declassified memo outlining the considerations in the creation of a task force in 1958. The
author, L.K. White, talks about the need for a coordinating Headquarters element and an
Operational unit "in the field", i.e. deployed around the world.
While a "Task Force" can be a useful tool for tackling issues of terrorism or drug
trafficking, it is not appropriate or lawful for collecting on a U.S. candidate for the
Presidency. But Brennan did it with the blessing of the Director of National Intelligence, Jim
Clapper.
A Task Force operates independent of the CIA " Mission Centers
" (that's the jargon for the current CIA organization chart).
So what did John Brennan do? My friends said that a Trump Task Force was running in early
2016 and may have started as early as the summer of 2015. Recruitment to Task Force included
case officers (i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and admin
personnel were recruited. Not everyone invited accepted the offer. But many did.
But this was not a CIA only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task
Force. We have some clues that Christopher Steele's FBi handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been
detailed to the Trump Task Force ( see here
).
So what kind of things would this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign
intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on
identifying intelligence collection priorities. Task Force members could task NSA to do
targeted collection. They also would have the ability to engage in covert action, such as
targeting George Papadopoulos. Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light on the CIA officers who
met with him, briefed on operational objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange
monitored meetings. Was the honey pot (i.e., the attractive woman) named Azra Turk, who met
with George Papadopoulos, part of the CIA Trump Task Force?
The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, such as information operations. A
nice sounding euphemism for propaganda, and computer network operations. There has been some
informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of this Task Force.
In light of what we have learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, there
should be a serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at
minimum, reporting to them.
When I described this development last November to one friend, a retired CIA Chief of
Station, his first response was, "My God, that's illegal." We then reminisced about another
illegal operation carried out under the auspices of the CIA Central American Task Force back in
the 1980s. That became known to Americans as the Iran Contra scandal.
We know one thing for certain about he work of this Task Force–it failed to produce
any intelligence to corroborate the specious claim that Donald Trump was colluding with the
Russians. Even though the despicable Brennan has continued to insist that Trump was/is under
the thumb of Putin, he failed to provide any substantive information in the January 2017
Intelligence Community Assessment that supported the claim.
The curious "leaks" of Michael Cohen tapes on both Cuomo and Zucker, broadcast by Tucker
Carlson, makes me think Cohen also has some Trump tapes.
Cohen of course would be be more than willing to drop any Trump tapes into Tucker
Carlson's lap too - or at least work a tease dropping these bit player tapes on others first
to weasel a Trump pardon for Cohen at the 11th hour, in return for not dumping his Trump tapes
pre-election on Carlson's lap too.
Do you think these "leaked" Cohen tapes are just coincidentally coming out now - or was
Micheal Cohen a fifth column all along, and even in direct cahoots with Brennan too? Other
Trump business partners were IC assets, why not Cohen who would do anything for a buck and
publicity.
The night before the Mueller report came out pundit Brennan on prime time TV (whomever he
was working for CNN, MSNBC?) claimed Trump would be facing multiple indictments.
The next day when his distinguished punditry proved 100% false, Brennan then claimed on
prime time TV his source (sources?) were obviously wrong. And they moved quickly on to the
next topic.
Brennan was obviously operating off of some form of inside intelligence (or just making
things up for effect and a paycheck?) .
Just a few lines were uttered on both nights, but now in retrospect, Brennan did admit
some sort of intelligence gathering group was passing on this critical information to him -
bogus or not. He claimed was in some sort of insider loop.
It would be good to review both those pre-and post Mueller report statements now. Who was
he hoodwinking and should he have been paid for his "insights"?
Cohen is a know nothing "would be if they could be". I have described this type before. He
had no access to Trump, the person, as opposed to a tenuous business relationship with Trump
the company.
"But Brennan did it with the blessing of the Director of National Intelligence, Jim
Clapper. " Obama isn't mentioned at all? I wonder who was actually running the show.
I'm sure he was. He's being very careful about all the current actions on the left too.
He'll be running what's left of the democratic party, if they don't succeed in bringing down
the constitutional republic this election.
For a community organizer Obama is pretty crafty. He found favor with the Chicago big
money who backed him for the Illinois legislature and then the Senate. And then directly to
the presidency. Now he's best friends with David Geffen and Richard Branson and hangs out
with the billionaire class.
He is the "puppeteer" of the Democratic Party, IMO. I'm convinced that if Biden fails,
Michelle will run and likely beat an establishment Republican in 2024.
Who do you think was the ringleader in this operation: Brennan, Comey or Clapper?
To me, it seems most likely that it was Brennan (with Obama's reluctant approval). Comey and
Clapper don't strike me as the kind of guys who would risk everything on an operation that
could backfire.
What I'd really like to know is whether Director Brennan communicated with elites outside
the agency who might have encouraged the spying to begin with. Can you clarify this point?
Does the CIA take orders or instructions from powerful-connected elites outside of the
agency??
It seems we know that NSA identified unreasonable queries of their comms database in 2016,
leading Adm Rodgers to shut off access. Immediately after, we see FBI getting involved and
setting up Crossfire Hurricane. After the election, we see FBI working with DoJ NSD to move
the op into a special counsel organization which then runs the op. It appears the Senate
Select Committee (Burr/Warner) was complicit in the op, not to mention Schiff.
I'm not sure Obama wants to run the Democratic party. It's likelier he wants to secure his
legacy and play a supportive role within the party rather than lead it.
Obama's community organizing skills are null. It was only a title; never an actual
product. He will remain the token figure head of the party; but hot heads under the radar are
now its life and blood of the Democrat party today. With no small dose of our tax
dollars.
Democrats produce nothing; they only consume. There is a brewing turf war within the
Democrat party between their historic connection to the government unions and the new
socialists - two very different forces with two very different goals. Ironically, the
Democrat government unions created the new wave of Democrat socialists.
Watch how this play out - Biden is clueless about what is now seething under his titular
party head. Didn't Biden promise he would put Alexandra Cortez in a key administrative
position?
I remember the eye-opening essay about the CIA Trump task force, especially in light of
Brennan's self-assured posture that only briefly slumped (along with all of his brethren on
the Left) when the Mueller report finally came out and dashed such great expectations. We can
only hope that the Durham probe will expose and at the very least somehow strongly
condemn and spell out WITH EVIDENCE in no uncertain terms any seditious activity. After
hearing that Trey Gowdy doubts any more prosecutions will come of the probe, I'm not going to
hold my breath for perp walks.
Laughably, the Left's still beating that same old Russian Dead Horse though. Just as with
the DNC's lackluster national convention, I'm surprised, almost shocked actually, that in
spite of the overwhelming support of the "creative class", Democrats can't come up with a
better hoax. On the other hand I can't remember the last time I was dying to see a new film,
buy a new book or recording, or tune into a new TV drama, so while it could just be me, I
suspect the "creative class" ain't quite what it used to be...
Re: Michael Cohen comments: I have to agree with walrus and take exception to the MSM
characterization of Cohen as "Trump's personal attorney". My husband and I have a
small real estate company but even so, we've simultaneously employed several attorneys for
various personal and business needs and our holdings are minuscule compared to Trump's. SO I
seriously doubt that the MSM's inference about Cohen's role and insight into Trump's private
and business dealings - that he knows all - is greatly exaggerated.
Cohen does not need to "know all", if he was recording Trump. He just has to dole out a
few juicy sound bites prior to Nov, with our without context when they did contact each other
pre-2016.
Cohen's chance to make Trump squirm since Cohen just demonstrated he was willing to do
this to Cuomo and Zucker - so will he or won't he IF he has Trump tapes too - just crude talk
at this point would not be welcome as Trump tries to take the edge off his usual "gruff"
personality.
No magic carpet to the White House for anyone. I also think people don't like giving any
race like this away too early in the game - all the prior elections have swung back and forth
almost daily, until they finally broke on election day.
Even John McCain and Romney were still nip and tuck until the final hours if one watched
certain indicators. Ironically, the only race called conclusively before election day was
Clinton-Trump 2016, and we know how that finally worked out. So more cat (Trump) and mouse
(Biden) on a seesaw for a few more months.
All of which begs to say, where the heck is the Durham Report and when will we start
seeing accountability for Democrat/Obama high crimes and misdemeanors?
There is a deep cynicism even in California that "no one gets punished" for anything any
more, unless you are unlucky enough to be a law abiding, responsible person. Everyone else
gets a free ride and a double standard of justice - and it is causing a lot of anger out
here. "Law and order" is a building hunger our west.
Where is the Durham Report? Hahaha. We've had the Durham Report. One small fish indicted.
That's it. Were you really expecting more?
I said when the "investigation" was first made public that it was a red herring, a tool to
keep us from making noise because we would be pinning our hopes on this "report" that would
make everything wonderful. I said then that it would never be anything but a pacifier
dangling in front of our noses, like a carrot keeping a donkey dragging the cart along.
This article came out in May 2020 - essentially why did Obama want to frame Flynn?
It was Iran-gate; not Russia-Gate that drove the Obama spying and the Russia-gate
cover-up, according to this author.. Was this the motivation for the Trump Task Force in your
post- to spy on Team Trump to learn if they were going to undo Obama's Iran "legacy",
particularly since Flynn was advising them? https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/russiagate-obama-iran
The Flynn Spygate unraveling is far more credible as Iran-gate, and ties up many of the
very loose ends, much better than the Russia-gate nonsense. If this is the more credible
explanation of Obama's Spygate, what happened after this article was published several months
ago in May, during the height of the "pandemic". Has this theory been debunked?
And is its current article re-circulation right now tying Obama to Iran-gate spying the
reason Adam Schiff, out of no where, is back to screaming Russia-gate yet again?
And everyone else on the left is back to screaming high crimes, misdemeanors and
impeachment ......yet again. Gheesh - long and complicates article but it did gel for me.
Including explaining the always mysterious role played by Samatha Powers, the Queen of US
Unmaskers.
Still waiting to hear more about Obama's Ambassador to that tiny Italian enclave San
Marino, that got in his licks unmasking Flynn too. Who was he fronting at the time. And why
San Marino?
Connecting the dots - Obama's San Marino Ambassador unmasks Micheal Flynn
The Atlantic Media Company, parent company of the Atlantic Magazine the wife of Obama's
former US Ambassador to Italy - Linda Douglass -, who himself had been curiously caught up
among the many 11th hour unmaskings of Gen Flynn. For as yet undisclosed reasons.
Atlantic Magazine, part of the Atlantic Media Group, now partly owned by Steve Job's very
wealthy widow Laurane Jobs and rabid anti-Trumper, is taking great delight dropping bogus
bombs against Trump, that can't even last for a 24 hour credibility cycle. With the promise
of many more to come.
Will Linda Douglass be delving into her husband and San Marino Ambassador's great treasure
trove of Obama era unmaskings to provide these daily TDS hit pieces? A classified no-no. Or
just continue to make stuff up.
Or does this recent leftist media hit piece frenzy mean Russia-gate, Iran-gate and/or
Obama Spy-gate is finally going to be broken open?
Such a small, small world. Why was Obama's Ambassador to San Marino unmasking Micheal
Flynn? And his wife just happens to now work for the Atlantic Magazine.
Deap,
Iran-Gate might be the motivating, proximate cause for Obama to approve the overall
"counterintelligence" mission. With Russia-Gate the legal cover / excuse. For Brennan / Comey
/ et al, however, it does not seem like the personal reason for their involvement. The Trump
anti-Borg inclinations is probably what motivated the Borg to go after him.
Deap, my initial reaction to your mention of an Italian connection was to point to Michael
Ledeen, Flynn's co-author and, apparently, consultant - colleague.
Ledeen is known for his Italian connections -- he is thought to have been responsible for
the yellow-cake fabrication that pushed along Iraq war.
But the SanMarino connection appears to be on the other side of the ledger that Ledeen
inhabits -- tho one should put nothing past that crafty warmonger.
"Iran has long been Ledeen's bête noir, arguing that .the country has been heavily
involved in supporting attacks against U.S. forces in hotspots across the globe.[9] "No
matter how well we do, no matter how many high-level targets we eliminate, no matter how
many cities, towns, and villages we secure, unless we defeat Iran we will always be
designing yet another counterinsurgency strategy in yet another place. We are in a big war,
and Iran is at the heart of the enemy army." '
If Flynn's anti-Iran sentiments are as unhinged as Ledeen's, then I have little sympathy
for his troubles, even though it appears that Ledeen's view prevailed in the Trump
administration. Flynn: twice back-stabbed.
I followed John Kerry's and Wendy Sherman's negotiations carefully; I listened to hours
and hours of the Congressional debates over the deal -- not a treaty, the debates seemed a
sop to Congress; I listened as Iranian representatives (Mousavian, iirc) explained that the
Deal was not good for Iran and most Iranians understood that, but that Iranians would go
along to show good faith; because they were backed into a corner; and because of the belief
that an Iran that was engaged in robust trade with Europeans & others would "come in from
the terror cold." I was at American University when Obama announced that the JCPOA was
affirmed.
From an "America First" perspective I endorse(d) Obama's vision, as the Forward article
explained it:
"[JCPOA} was his instrument to secure an even more ambitious objective -- to reorder the
strategic architecture of the Middle East.
Obama did not hide his larger goal. He told a biographer, New Yorker editor David
Remnick, that he was establishing a geopolitical equilibrium "between Sunni, or
predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran." According to The Washington Post's David
Ignatius, another writer Obama used as a public messaging instrument, realignment was a
"great strategic opportunity" for a "a new regional framework that accommodates the
security needs of Iranians, Saudis, Israelis, Russians and Americans."
The catch to Obama's newly inclusive "balancing" framework was that upgrading relations
with Iran would necessarily come at the expense of traditional partners targeted by Iran --
like Saudi Arabia and, most importantly, Israel. Obama never said that part out loud, but
the logic isn't hard to follow: Elevating your enemy to the same level as your ally means
that your enemy is no longer your enemy, and your ally is no longer your ally."
From my America First pov, "rebalancing" USA relations such that Israel -- not a formal
ally and never a trustworthy informal ally (ask survivors of USS Liberty), and other
states in MidEast all held positions on a more level playing field in the eyes of American
foreign policy, is appealing.
The Forward article failed to mention Ledeen, but it was, unsurprisingly, unapologetically
pro-Israel and from a decidedly Jewish perspective.
The Forward's tone and underlying assumptions were and are offensive to me.
Regarding the statement
"The Task Force members were handpicked instead of following the normal procedure of posting
the job.
Instead of opening the job to all eligible CIA personnel, only a select group of people were
invited specifically to join up."
Two questions naturally arise:
Who was doing the selection, and
was the politics of the candidates a factor, perhaps a very big factor, in the selection
process?
"Right" to whom, and by what criteria?
Did the FBI director not know this was an important matter, which required the best
investigators?
In any case, we can see who was put on it, such Trump-haters as Strzok, Page, and
Clinesmith.
Just Trump's bad luck, or something more deliberate?
There was not really an "Italian" connection in the Iran-gate piece bur rather the
curiosity why Obama's Italian ambassdor had interests in unmasking Michael Flynn, since his
name showed up on the odd list of Obama persons who did unmask Flynn.
His name being there - Ambassador Phillips - may have been there due to his other Obama
connections, or his wife Linda Douglass' Obama connections. Or his wife's current connection
to the tabloid Atlantic Magazine.
Not really anything Italian per se, or even wee San Marino. Other than perhaps a mutual
veneration for things Machiavellian-as this unfolding story twists and turns..
Funny how "new normals" are rushing at us .9-11 was the new normal only 19 years ago, and
19 years later going on 20, a new "new normal" is upon us. The next "new normal" will only be
a few years away, 9 at the most Agenda 2030 and all that. By then, AI-enhanced RNA/DNA
altered "new humanity" will be upon us, and anyone not in this new "new normal" will be
outcast, shunned, shamed, and unemployed and if retired will not be able to get their SS and
MC.
"As it stands, there's only one thing we do know: the establishment at the core of the
Hegemon and the drooling orcs of Empire will only adopt a Great Reset if that helps to
postpone a decline accelerated on a fateful morning 19 years ago."
What?
I thought Covid 19 was a tool that the establishment is using to spark a Reset. And that
Agenda 21 is part of a Reset.
So why would the establishment object to a "decline"?
9/11 was just the first operation of the 21st century designed to accelerate the
disintegration of society and economy to achieve Agenda 21 . It was actually a continuation
of the 1975 TLC Project Democracy (sardonically named) that was kicked off by the Carter
administration in 1977 and went into warp speed under Reagan/Bush. Its continued ever since
but is picking up speed with the agreement of Agenda 21 in the 90's and its update Agenda
2030 in 2015. 2020 is the start of the final phase which will accomplish all of the
Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030, which is basically means total control over
every individual and all resources.
Its pretty much been an Open Conspiracy. Those who refused to question 9/11 will double up
on their blue pills to deny the Plandemic and expect a return to normal, dooming their
descendants to a life of serfdom should they be lucky enough to avoid the culling.
The new Normal will make some dystopian films seem like utopia. Watch some old movies and
TV series to remind you of old normal. They wont be available much longer unless you have the
DVD or VHS and a machines to play it. The tapes and discs age so don't last forever. Books
will last longer but those with digital collections will one day fund them disappeared
The beating heart of this matrix is – what else – the Strategic Intelligence
Platform, encompassing, literally, everything: "sustainable development", "global
governance", capital markets, climate change, biodiversity, human rights, gender parity,
LGBTI, systemic racism, international trade and investment, the – wobbly –
future of the travel and tourism industries, food, air pollution, digital identity,
blockchain, 5G, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI).
Since the US is a global has-been with most of its industry gone and living on debt
– it's probably useful for it to claim leadership of a "Strategic Intelligence
Platform". It can bury US problems internationally (same as it did with the dollar reserve)
but in a more comprehensive way than simple Globalization (only economic). If the USA NWO
claims international leadership of everything on all fronts, then they become the arbiters
(in their opinion) of everything everywhere on the grounds of a higher morality.
It actually looks more like the folie de grandeur of a old alcoholic than the
foundation of a new religion – and not something to pay attention to – apart from
the fact that he tends to get violent with anyone who disagrees.
Regarding your 50 questions, the fact that German and Russian intelligent warned the FBI
about an imminent Muslim terrorist attack is not compatible with the idea that there was a
controlled demolition.
Ah yes, the Beast reveals itself as a sensurround global hamster cage with a plethora of
control mechanisms hardwired through emergent software memes in celebration of the planned
future of total abstraction. Abstract reality. The hubris of the plutocratic, oligarchic and
technocratic elites is of a Promethean orgasm of trans humanistic values systematically
gorging itself on their perceived future of an enserfed humanity comprised of those who will
compromise truth, honor, justice, beauty and love–all in the service of mammon.
Not only is human nature to be subsumed to a mechanistic mindset gone ballistic in the
visions of absolute domination, but the ongoing assault on the natural world will be a
by-product of this Re-set. Stated simply, these schemers are playing God and have assembled
the tool-kit, which in their minds, will allow for no compromise, no mistakes. These people
are either spiritually vacuous or are imbued with an evil that totally negates a natural
order which is cosmic and universal in scope. Ultimately their dreams and schemes will
implode like the legendary Tower of Babel. Creation is not about to be undone by those who
have convinced themselves that they can control everything.
Mother Nature is not a mere lump of matter. She is a sentient being who is cosmically
connected and connective. Consider the storms, the blizzards, the fires and the systematic
destruction of our very atmospheres, to say nothing of oceanic life in all its magnificent
manifestations. Mama is not in a good mood and when she has had all she can take ..
" the fact that German and Russian intelligent (sic) warned the FBI about an imminent
Muslim terrorist attack is not compatible with the idea that there was a controlled
demolition."
How so? The US architects of a controlled demolition could have quite easily created fake
"chatter" and fake "intelligence" about an imminent Muslim terrorist attack.
@Intelligent
Dasein be found on Youtube titled "Former NIST Employee Speaks Out On World Trade Centre
Towers Collapse Investigation". It's 31 minutes long, but he says the following at
approximately 18 minutes in:
"Look at the symmetry. These buildings come straight down, or almost straight down.
Asymmetric damage does not lead to symmetric collapse. It's very difficult to get
something to collapse symmetrically because it is the Law of Physics that things tend towards
chaos. Collapsing symmetrically represents order, very strict order.
It is not the nature of physics to gravitate towards order for no reason. It will
gravitate towards chaos. It is very difficult to get a building to collapse
symmetrically."
@PetrOldSack
actor/author, how could he be, our cherished "thinkers" are as few and making up as they go,
seconded by the crude second tier public domain politicians, the corporate mongers, them
being even less prone to visionary skill. This "thing" can go wrong in all kinds of ways, but
real it is, and some derivative globally altered reality is there to stay. Brusquely,
genuinely."
The Atlantic tells us that "Overall, bots are responsible for 52 percent of web traffic"
and I think we're looking at Exhibit A.
an imminent Muslim terrorist attack is not compatible with the idea that there was a
controlled demolition
Q: Why not? In fact, just as the 3 WTC towers were pre-loaded with explosives, so the
alleged hijacker-piloted a/cs and resulting photogenic explosions were pre-planned 'Hollywood
special effects' as critical components. How else to convince the insouciant punters, except
with a well-scripted and executed 'whiz-bang?' Then, see the reports of putative Muslim
hijackers doing dope and/or booze with lap-dancing bar-girls beforehand. You do yourself a
disservice by denying *humongously obvious* controlled demolition. Tip: Try not to be
silly.
To unravel the enigma i wonder if one does not need to go completely eurocentric.
1848 unraveling the empires or at last a planting of the seeds.
1948 the new_world order is established. With its counterpart in the east. Essentially a
ynraveling of 1848 which was a crystallisation of the 30 year was and the peace of westphalia.
Neither established empire being a nation while a very different nationbuiling started in
europe compared to the pre-great war.
2048, no doubt some kind of replacing the new_world order with a new world_order.
One way or anothr to serve europes plutocrats. And with an eye on unraveling the previous 1948
situation. Soviets are gone, so now the disunited states of america has to go and be reduced to
a new balkans.
Perhaps sweeping away europe too this time. Arabobantustan unable to sustain a developed
economy certainly is on the timeline for europe.
Now. Regardless of whether the ghost of Herr Weishaupt is hanging around, the timeline is
awfully useful for anyone like the anglozionist cabal of assorted late 1800s multimillionaires
and their respective business empires cross inheritances into socalled NGOs. The names being
quite well known like rockefeller, carnegie, rhodes etc.
Then again maybe no one really knows what they are doing anymore and there is no plan at
all, just many very confused very badly planned plans. And all that will ensue is chaos and
destruction and no order afterwards worthy of the name. 150 years of pisspoor mismanagement
tends to have such consequences.
@Robert White
billion from its Term Securities Lending Facility. It wasn't until May 31, 2008, when JPMorgan
Chase closed its deal with Bear Stearns. However, the GAO reported that Bear Stearns "was
consistently the largest PDCF borrower until June 2008." The Fed shows that Bear Stearns
continued to receive funds until June 23, 2008.
This article pretty much sums it up as best as I can understand. I had often stated to
people of similar mind to watch for the next major 'move' after 9/11, it will be a dandy
because with possibly a few white knuckle moments, the Masters will have concluded that they
can get away with ANYTHING, internet or no. Truth simply fails to get traction in the minds of
the majority of 'screen zombies' and the majority is all they ever needed.
Now where things might get really scary is if/when they decide to implement the great cull.
From a dispassionate perspective, it is something they simply have to do. In 1950 the world
population was about 2 billion. Now it is about 8 billion. If a population graph was drawn from
say, 50,000 years ago it would be long and flat and then it would shoot up near vertically at
the end.
The problem now of course is that with technology and agricultural machinery of all sorts
the system doesn't even require the population of 1950. I recall one Master being on record as
mentioning 500 million as being ideal. That is somewhat more than a cull.
Some fools say that a war is imminent for that express purpose. Sorry wars (even nuclear,
which would affect the Masters too), won't result in the butcher's bill required. Only a global
pandemic could conceivably attain the goal and like a neutron bomb, leave the infrastructure
intact.
But this Covid is a hoax you say. Probably so, but what about this proverbial 'second wave'
that is repeated like a Hare Krishna mantra everywhere. What if they released a REAL nasty
virus (which we know they have somewhere) that has a proven vaccine for the 1% and then let the
fun begin knowing full well that they would not be fingered for it because a pandemic is
already on the move?
If it doesn't happen this fall then I may be wrong in my speculation. I always hope to be
wrong when dealing with topics of unfathomable evil.
Mama is not in a good mood and when she has had all she can take ..
Or, as some folks like to say, "God is mad". But it's all the same thing. Maybe the schemers
should be forced to read The Fisherman's Wife. However, they probably won't have any little
hovel to go back to.
@skrik neither
eyewitness testimony nor a visual documentation of the boarding process.
19 hijackers myth taken as " fact" by the 9/11 Commission. Any contradictions of this myth
were ignored by this Commission.
•By ignoring the numerous and glaring contradictions regarding the identities of the
alleged hijackers, the 9/11 Commission manifested its intent to maintain the official myth of
19 Muslim terrorists.
•By refusing to allow interviews with personnel who were responsible for passengers
boarding the four aircraft of 9/11, the airlines manifested their intent to conceal evidence
about the circumstances of the aircraft boarding.
When 9/11 occurred my immediate thoughts went back to an January 2001 when Lyndon LaRouche
warned that if John Ashcroft were to become Attorney General that then one could look forward
to a new Reichstag fire type situation occurring within the context of the fact that the world
financial system was finished and that the financial oligarchy was prepared to throw over the
chess board so to speak.
LaRouche was right and because his understanding of history was correct as it is based upon
a method of hypothesis that had already demonstrated the trajectories of economic collapse and
attendant political operations long before, with an understanding of how to get out of the mess
as demonstrated in history, particularly the Renaissance.
Of note here is a recent article of interest, which helps tell why LaRouche is hated!
This is a very interesting, all encompassing article, well done indeed. For a simpler and
perhaps more digestible and more narrowly focused look at the SARS-Cov2 issue specifically,
this is a worthwhile video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQE7S6c-SCk&t=50s
@PetrOldSack
ght in wars or participated in other combat operations in at least 24 countries. The
destruction inflicted by warfare in these countries has been incalculable for civilians and
combatants Between 2010 and 2019, the total number of refugees and IDPs globally has nearly
doubled from 41 million to 79.5 million .
These babies-loving American X-tians and other Samantha Powers and Obamas, have arranged quite
a spectacular mass slaughter of children of all ages to please the "deciders" (Masters of the
Universe).
None of the murderous idiots has been punished, yet Assange the truthteller is in a high-security
prison Belmarsh, handled by the same murderous scum. Kali , says: Next New
Comment September 11, 2020
at 12:24 pm GMT
@Majority of
One eation is not about to be undone by those who have convinced themselves that they can
control everything.
I couldn't agree more with this.
The intelligence of Existance Itself, the very Nature of Being is anathema to to those specs
of dirt who would attempt to determine the will of God.
The same sentience which is manifest in Man is repeated and applified throughout all of
existance. How could it be any other way when everything we experience is fractal? Just as God
may be experience at the centre of our very Being, so the same God is observed within the All of
Everything.
A great look into what is going on, and what is still to come. Yet the sleeping, brain dead,
face diapered, mind controlled masses of the global corporation formerly known as he United
States spend every waking hour saying "hooray for our guy". Never once does it occur to the
sheeple both are puppets, controlled by the international banksters and their minions.
One of these morons has undeniable ties to the Russian mob, while the other has deep ties to
the Chinese Communist Party. If that weren't bad enough, they both swear undying loyalty to
that little shit stain in the Middle East which seems to project more influence on world
politics than the two formerly mentioned giants.
I know it is no accident the printing of this article occurred on the anniversary date of
the last, greatest mind fuck to hit America since Dec. 7th, 1941. I guess the infidels have
been shown a lesson and the world is now safe for a one world government technocratic
Corporatocracy.
So here's to 3/11/2020(my official date for the roll out of the CV hoax), the ushering in of
a new slave system, and the idiocy and gullibility of the global citizenry.
So enjoy your new bosses, as they are going to be far more tyrannical than your old.
@Robjil
ry:'
[I see that the 1st image is not visible, kindly try this link: alleged 'recovered' flight
recorder ]
Q: How soft was that ground, anyway? Does anyone 'believe' that part of the official 9/11
narrative? Haw. Only the 'insouciant punters' were ever hoodwinked by such offensive, lying
rubbish, all faithfully echoed by the 'lame-stream media.' rgds
Condoleeza Rice resisting at Congressional enquiry "N-o-o-o" and then admitting in a faint
there was an "intelligence report" that said said "Ben Laden planning to use airplanes in
terrorist attack" was play acting to confirm what they wanted people to believe. You will
remember that you were taught to prepare in advance "red herrings" and leave deliberate
confusions behind you to cover your trail.
@Robert White
traitors and infiltrated enemies not by any brilliance of the vicious Chinese Communist mass
murderers -- if you like the idea of taking a van ride for expressing your anti-Government
thoughts you'll love the ChiCom "Model" being installed here now on all of us -- Ron Unz would
be one of the first for the van ride if he tried to run a site like this in China by the way --
there is zero disputing this fact. David Rockefeller gave us the CFR, Trilateral Commission
etc. and of course the WHO and:
https://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/the-true-agenda-of-the-who-a-new-world-order-modeled-after-china/
@Alfred Haw.
Or was that suppressed as well, along with the bulk-wreckage [=crime-scene evidence] which was
destroyed by being exported as scrap? Haw again.
Nitty-gritty: There is no need to posit any 'exotics,' from nukes to DEW; standard
explosives [both with OR without thermite/mate; only the 'best' tools = most suitable would
have been deployed]; standard explosives could quite easily do the job, for example det-cord
threaded into the floor-slab conduits can fully explain both the absence of floor in the rubble
plus the billowing pyroclastic white dust-clouds [incidentally, explaining scorched vehicles].
And so it goes. A term for such reasoning = Occam's razor.
"One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them."
Today is the anniversary of 9/11. Please find some time to trade with my former colleagues
at BGC/Aurel-Mint who hold their charity day today in memory of the firm's losses in NY that
shocking day in 2001.
This morning we wake to the news the UK has staged something of an economic recovery –
but as predicted it's proving remarkably sticky reopening the economy. All eyes are still on
the tech market – where the bounce proved the ailing cat isn't in particularly good
health. I shall stick my neck out and say the correction still has a way to go. Next week
– beware.
Yesterday I wrote about complexity and how the pandemic, bubbles, repressed returns, years
of monetary distortion and the evolving political economy have changed the dynamics of markets.
One of the factors causing confusion is the increasing speed of change – it's happening
too quickly for us to fully comprehend.
Apparently my comments on MMT have upset a well-known city economist who told a contact at
major investment firm: "Blain knows nothing about economics, he's just a market hack wanting to
be heard.." Excellent. And I would agree – I know nothing about economics, but neither
does anyone else .. ( Touche!) That's why it's called the dismal science.
Today, let me continue the New Reality analysis about dynamics and the speed of change.
Rather than focusing on the past and present, let's focus on the future and the other side of
the equation – the outlook for business, industry and government, and how they will
influence these changing dynamics.
There are three themes to this morning's story:
What's the upside?
The prospects for the global economy are fantastic! We can look forward to new generation
micro-processing which will literally be a quantum revolution. The potential for a clean
energy, new battery technologies, environmental improvement, and abundant power from fusion and
hydrogen could be enormous. If you think the way we work has changed by "working from home",
the future of AI, Robotics, 3D and nano-tech will revolutionise everything we do and how we
spend our increased leisure time. A new agricultural revolution in plants, food and soil will
allow us to feed the world, alleviate poverty, raise educational standards and allow population
growth to stablise, enabling us all to lead less anxious lives. Ah! Bliss.
Marvellous stuff! The future is going to be flying cars, rocket-packs and holidays on the
beaches of Mars ?
Perhaps. Why not? If try hard enough .
What's the downside?
All these things can only happen if the global economy moves forward, develops and evolves.
There are massive inertia problems to be resolved. Much of our current economy isn't fit for
purpose. Political leadership seems mired in quicksand. Bureaucracy is perhaps the greatest
scourge of the modern age. The blockages, rigidities and hurdles holding back the business of
business aren't getting simpler. They are multiplying.
Not so good is the future going to be like the Vogons currently running financial
regulation?
And, most importantly
How will it happen?
The role of government will be critical. The future of the global economy will depend on the
delivery of functional physical and social infrastructure to enable change and evolution. That
means breaking out of our current gridlocks, including inequality, and completely rethinking
and remaking public goods like health, welfare and education and an acknowledgement that social
justice and wealth-equality aren't optional.
I don't think I need to say too much about the possibility of a bright Tech-led future
– what matters is getting there, or as close to it as possible. As a Porridge reader
recently reminded me: 15 years ago there were no smartphones, no social media, no Uber or
Airbnb, Apple and Amazon were struggling and GE was AAA rated. The world changes. Get over
it.
Let's start with the third issue – The role of government. That's an immediate problem
for my generation. We've been brainwashed since infancy to believe government is bad, less
government is good. Big G is inefficient and leads to bureaucracy. Any Government spending will
be riddled with featherbedding, inefficiency and outright corruption. Far better to let private
enterprise lead the way – so we've always been told.
Really? Private Enterprise isn't much better. Let's be honest – big firms have their
brief periods of innovation, stratospheric growth and market leadership before they stumble
into middle age, become sclerotic and die from obsolescence, competition, null-entropy and
bureaucracy – that's the Darwinian process of capitalism. The last thirty years spent
worshiping at the Friedman Temple of corporate shareholder capitalism has seen some pretty
shady behaviours – massive executive rewards, stock buy-backs and the overleveraging of
failing companies to pay out private equity owners . I could go on.
There is a middle ground.
What if Maggie Thatcher was utterly wrong about Government having to be as frugal as a
housewife? What if fiat money and monetary sovereignty works? What if Milton Friedman was wrong
and Keynes, Smith et al are all right?
Yesterday I raised the issue of stakeholder capitalism – and predictably got a number
of emails telling me anything except the continued wealth creation by successful
entrepreneurial billionaires will lead to disaster and communism. That's not what a stakeholder
economy needs to lead to.
Shock Time. For the first time ever, I am going to say something positive about ESG –
Environmental, Social and Governance Investment parameters.
For too many investors ESG is simply an easy tick-box approach to avoid difficult compliance
or investment committee questions. But ESG is still at an early stage as we evolve towards
Stakeholder Economies. Investments that aim to do good are laudable, but ones that are properly
managed, do good and socialise the benefits are even better, especially when they also make
profit! (Sharing the money around is the issue for unreformed capitalists..) Few big banks or
investors would publically admit ESG is bad - so how can Stakeholder be bad?
The big issue is can Government be trusted to deliver the public goods we will need to
deliver our Bright New World? Can they be trusted to use the magical money tree of MMT to
deliver the necessary reforms of health, education and welfare provision, solve inequality and
rebuild ailing national infrastructure. That's a question for functional democracy.
One of the comments I got yesterday – from a leading academic – sums up the
risks: "It's as simple as this – unless you are the EU, which has zero monetary
sovereignty, nations can solve all the issues you identify, including social and income
equality, through focused MMT spending. Unless you are in the US, where the government has
created some $670 bln and given it straight to the richest 1500, while 47 million and one in
three kids still go hungry."
It's a warning – MMT is a potential solution. But a dangerous one if misapplied. If
the resources of a state, and its control of fiat currency, are directed to support only the
rich and powerful – explain to me what's different from what they complain Communist
China is guilty of?
Let's be more optimistic. the future looks bright and perhaps we can better resolve issues
by adopting Stakeholder Capitalism. We can fund it all by selective government MMT programmes
to finance public goods enabling us to do these things. Sounds easy – but perhaps it is?
We need Decent politicians – note the capital D. Decent as in decent, honest, brave and
true.
Which leads us to the Big Problem , the second issue the trend towards stultifying
Bureaucracy.
One of my favourite economic concepts is "Niskannen's Theory of Bureaucracy". Bureaucrats
are driven by economic goals – which include making their lives easier, and controlling
more and more makes it easy. It's not just a government problem. Its rife across the private
sector. Let me start by asking have you spoken to your bank recently?
Probably not. I bet you spent hours in a telephone queue, being told that "due to the
Pandemic we are experiencing a high volume of calls" . I read the high street banks are sacking
more staff and closing more branches.
Let's face it.. our banks don't work.
Because it makes sense to borrow money at negative real interest rates I recently applied
for a mortgage – to finance rebuilding our house. We have money in the bank, and they are
aware of our investment portfolio, pensions and other savings. However, they turned me down for
a loan – on the basis I had a black credit mark.
It turns out that black score is because a mobile telephone company made a mistake and
reported I hadn't paid them the horrendous sum of £66.30. EE have now acknowledged the
mistake and apologised for not cancelling a direct debit. I have a cheque on my desk from them
repaying the direct debits they claimed before I cancelled it. However, they say that "legally"
they can't undo the damage done to my credit score. They say the law demands it stays on my
report for 2 years – despite it being patently incorrect.
I asked the bank to be reasonable and look at the information. "Computer says No." The Bank
doesn't want to lend to me, or anyone else, full stop. The telecoms company can't be bothered
to correct their mistake and raise potentially difficult questions about their systems.
Let's focus on why banking bureaucracies fail. If a high-street bank lends money that causes
all kinds of problems – if has to fill in sheaves of client reports, update their KYC,
determine why someone with money in the bank wants to borrow more. They then will have to
discuss the loan at half and dozen different compliance, diligence, diversity and capital
committees. Then they have to weigh the risk of default, and put aside the correct capital
charges to apply. Being "Pale, Male and Stale" doesn't help – I might retire at some
point in the 10-year life of the loan. Banks definitely don't want to be lending to white-folk
in their 60s.
Effectively the big banks no longer function. They have become bureaucracies where the
treacle that flows through their operational arteries has made them ineffective and useless.
They are still using multiple legacy systems, but don't have the energy and won't allocate the
cash to replace them. Yet these same banks are considered critical to the economy and will be
bailed out repeatedly, confirming their criticality to the economy. Their executives are paid
in millions.
Let the Big Banks go bust – that's what should happen to failing companies!
Actually, go further – close them down. The financial system will not collapse if we
put HSBC up against the wall. I would argue it would be a great "pour le encourage les autres "
moment.. ( "The English like to shoot an Admiral or two to encourage the rest ", as Voltaire
said.) While we are it, lets put EE up against the wall as well, and blindfold a couple of
credit agencies as well
A bit of corporate fear would be no bad thing.
There is no shortage of bright young FINTECH challenger banks out there that understand the
opportunity to replace banking behemoths, and provide the missing aspects of customer service.
The understand the need, the social service concept of banking for all, and they understand the
opportunity to automate payments, digitise delivery and actually serve a useful social
purpose
I think you get the drift . Extend the same thinking across the whole economy and every
government department. A little bit of good old creative capitalist destruction wouldn't do us
any harm.
notfeelinthebern , 2 hours ago
Term limits would fix much of it. You go to the donor page for any swamp rat US Senator
and it is mind boggling.
WedgeMan , 2 hours ago
Let a big bank fail and then try to buy something at a store with credit card. No dice.
A failed bank will leave you with no money. Why do you think our great grandparents stored
cash in jars, not in the bank vaults? the strategy is to eliminate all cash and use bank
accounts only. This way the grand surveillance State is complete and can control you very
easily.
GunnerySgtHartman , 1 hour ago
This is exactly why people should utilize locally-owned banks ... or even better, credit
unions. And keep not more than six weeks' worth of funds in your bank/credit union
account.
Clint Liquor , 2 hours ago
"I am going to suspend my free market principles, to save the free market". G.W. Bush, before announcing the 2008 Bank Bailouts.
107cicero , 2 hours ago
Blaine has the Voltarie quote wrong; it was from Candide' a novel of his and put into
the mouth of a character: "in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage
the others"
bshirley1968 , 2 hours ago
"The prospects for the global economy are fantastic! We can look forward to new
generation micro-processing which will literally be a quantum revolution. The potential for
a clean energy, new battery technologies, environmental improvement, and abundant power
from fusion and hydrogen could be enormous.
If you think the way we work has changed by
"working from home", the future of AI, Robotics, 3D and nano-tech will revolutionise
everything we do and how we spend our increased leisure time. A new agricultural revolution
in plants, food and soil will allow us to feed the world, alleviate poverty, raise
educational standards and allow population growth to stablise, enabling us all to lead less
anxious lives. Ah! Bliss."
Spoken like a true dystopian cheering, Kool-aid drinking, head-up-his-matrix, idiot. Not
one thing listed there will ge beneficial to humanity's freedom and independence........but
it might generate a lot more debt......in jue-bucks.......so party on dude.
earleflorida , 1 hour ago
Question??? ::: Doth any person remember ' compound interest' on savings & checking
accounts?
Doth man hath to venture unto risk{?!?}, be it a Riggs Bank Heist 2020 ((( The
CIA and Riggs Bank. - Slate Magazine ))) stock market manipulation to open ones piehole
and speak of a 'modern-unspeakable-usury' syndicated crime FRB System criminal
enterprise...
earleflorida , 1 hour ago
Question??? ::: Doth any person remember ' compound interest' on savings & checking
accounts?
Doth man hath to venture unto risk{?!?}, be it a Riggs Bank Heist 2020 ((( The
CIA and Riggs Bank. - Slate Magazine ))) stock market manipulation to open ones piehole
and speak of a 'modern-unspeakable-usury' syndicated crime FRB System criminal
enterprise...
By Dr. Karin Kneissl , who works as an energy analyst and book author. She served as the Austrian minister of foreign affairs
from 2017-2019. In June, she published her book on diplomacy 'Diplomatie Macht Geschichte' in Germany through Olms, and in early
September her book 'Die Mobilitätswende', or 'Mobility in Transition', was released in Vienna by Braumüller. The cacophony of
noise generated in the wake of the attack on the Russian opposition figure is drowning out the reality. As Angela Merkel has always
maintained, the German-Russian gas deal is purely a commercial project.
Nord Stream has always had the ingredients to drive sober-minded Germans emotional. I remember energy conferences in Germany back
in 2006 when already the idea of such a gas pipeline as a direct connection from Russia to Germany provoked deep political rows,
not just in Berlin but across the EU.
Conservatives disliked it for the simple reason that it was a "Schröder thing," the legacy of social democrat Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder, who lost the election of September 2005 to Angela Merkel. Schröder had negotiated the project with his good friend, President
Vladimir Putin, and then chaired the company in charge of implementing it.
Around that time, I was invited to an energy conference in Munich by the conservative think tank, the Hanns Seidel Foundation,
managed by the Bavarian party CSU, the traditional junior partner of the ruling CDU in the government. The bottom-line of the debate
on Nord Stream was negative, with the consensus being that the German-Russian pipeline would lead to the implosion of a European
common foreign policy and damage the EU's energy ambitions.
I attended many other such events across Germany, from parliament to universities, and listened carefully to all the arguments.
The feelings towards Nord Stream were much more benign at meetings held under the auspices of the SPD.
But over the years, the rift between different political parties evaporated, and a consensus emerged which supported enhanced
energy cooperation between Berlin and Moscow. Politicians of all shades defended the first pipeline, Nord Stream 1, after it went
operational in 2011, bringing Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
They also enthusiastically supported the creation of the second, Nord Stream 2, better known by its acronym NS2. This $11bn (£8.4bn)
1,200km pipeline is almost finished and was due to go online next year.
But now, in the very final stage of construction, everything has been thrown in limbo thanks to the alleged poisoning of Russian
opposition figure Alexey Navalny.
NS2 has always been controversial. Critics, such as the US and Poland, have argued that it makes Germany too reliant on energy
from a politically unreliable partner. President Trump last year signed a law imposing sanctions on any firm that helps Russia's
state-owned gas company, Gazprom, finish it. The White House fears NS2 will tighten Russia's grip over Europe's energy supply and
reduce its own share of the lucrative European market for American liquefied natural gas.
These sanctions have caused delays to the project. A special ship owned by a Swiss company menaced with sanctions had to be replaced.
And prior to that, various legal provisions were brought up by the European Commission that had to be fulfilled by the companies
in retrospect.
Now the case of Navalny, currently being treated at a Berlin clinic after being awoken from a medically induced coma, has thrown
everything up in the air again. It has triggered a political cacophony that threatens relations between Germany, the EU, Russia,
and Washington. And at the center is the pipeline.
Various German sources, among them laboratories of the armed forces, have alleged that Navalny had been poisoned with the nerve
agent Novichok. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD)
stated in an interview published on Sunday by Bild: " I hope the Russians don't force us to change our stance on Nord Stream
2 – we have high expectations of the Russian government that it will solve this serious crime ." He claimed to have seen "
a lot of evidence " that the Russian state was behind the attack. " The deadly chemical weapon with which Navalny was poisoned
was in the past in the possession of Russian authorities ," he insisted.
He conceded that stopping the almost-completed pipeline would harm German and broader European business interests, pointing out
that the gas pipeline's construction involves "over 100 companies from 12 European countries, and about half of them come from Germany."
Maas also threatened the Kremlin with broader EU sanctions if it did not help clarify what happened "in the coming days." Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded by labeling the accusations "groundless" and Moscow has staunchly denied any involvement
in the affair.
The whole matter is complicated by domestic political considerations in Germany. CDU politician Norbert Röttgen, who heads up
foreign affairs within the ruling party and has demanded that the pipeline should be stopped, is among those conservatives vying
to lead the CDU in the run-up to Chancellor Angela Merkel's retirement next year. Meanwhile, Merkel is still trying to strike a balance
between the country's legal commitments, her well-known mantra that NS2 is a " purely commercial project, " and what is now
a major foreign policy crisis.
The chancellor had always focused on the business dimension. But most large energy projects also have a geopolitical dimension,
and that certainly holds true with Nord Stream.
When I was Austria's foreign minister, I saw first-hand the recurring and very harsh criticism of the project by US politicians
and officials. I remember the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, in a speech at the margins of the UN General Assembly in September
2018 that focused solely on NS2. I replied by pointing out to him that pipelines are not built to annoy others, but because there
is demand. One thing was certain – the US opposition to Nord Stream would not wane and now the Navalny case has given it new impetus.
What we are witnessing is a tremendous politicization of the pipeline with a wide range of people all shouting very loudly.
So here we are, in a very poisoned atmosphere where it might be difficult to revise positions without losing face. The social
democrat Maas, just like the conservative Röttgen and many others, have taken to the media for different reasons. In my observation,
it might have to do with their respective desires to take a strong position in order to also mark their upcoming emancipation from
the political giant Merkel (she is due to step down next year).
Due to her professional and empathetic handling of the pandemic, she is today much more popular than before the crisis. That makes
it difficult for a junior partner, represented by Foreign Minister Maas, and for all those who wish to challenge her inside the party.
What is needed is to get the topic out of the media and out of the to-and-fro of daily petty politics. Noisy statements might
serve some, but not the overall interests involved. And there are many at stake. It is not only about energy security in times of
transition, namely moving away from nuclear, but much wider matters.
As a legal scholar, I deem the loss of trust in contracts. Vertragstreue, as we call it in German – loyalty to the contract –
will be the biggest collateral damage if the pipeline is abandoned for political reasons. This fundamental principle of every civilization
was coined as pacta sunt servanda by the Romans – agreements must be kept. Our legal system is based on this. Who would still conclude
contracts of such volumes with German companies if politics can change the terms of trade overnight?
In June 2014, construction sites on the coasts of the Black sea, both in Russia and Bulgaria, were ready for starting the gas
pipeline South Stream. After pressure from the European Commission, the work never started. The political reason was the dispute
on Ukraine – in particular, the annexation of the Crimea. However, the legal argument was that the tenders for the contracts were
in contradiction with EU regulations on competition. Tens of thousands of work permits, which had been issued from Bulgaria to Serbia
etc., were withdrawn. The economic consequence was the rise of China's influence in the region. South Stream was redirected to Turkey.
So here we are in the midst of a diplomatic standoff. It is a genuine dilemma, but it could also turn into a watershed. Will contracts
be respected or will we move into a further cycle of uncertainty on all levels? Germany is built on contracts, norms (probably much
too many) and not on arbitrariness.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
silvermoon 5 hours ago
All these weeks have passed and Germany has still not shown shared actual evidence of their Navalny tests
with Russia though. That is the same as saying we found the gun with your finger prints on it but never showing it.
Count_Cash
silvermoon 3 hours ago
Correct, Germany has only since 10th September (if confirmed) shared any 'evidence'. That is sufficient intervening
time to concoct any test result and associated materials that they want - another Diesel scandal. Indeed people will ask why when
you had the patient on 22nd of august, it took you so long to send samples to the OPCW, despite almost immediately yelling Poison!
gainwmn silvermoon 5 hours ago
U stupid sheep: Germany did show it to the OPCW, i.e. the organization RF is the member of,
and therefore the latter gets the full access to all the data provided by Germany, as well as any other of 192 members. Kremlin lies
and demands in this regard is more than ridiculous, they completely destroy any shred of trust left to all RF governmental structures
and regime itself.
Teodor Nitu gainwmn 3 hours ago
Riiight!...Those Russians...not only their chemical
weapons are no longer working, but they are no longer capable to choose the proper time to use them, or so the story goes. Think
about it; they 'used' novichok to kill the Skripals and they are still alive and well (supposedly), now they (Russians) 'used' novichok
again to kill Navalny and he is alive and getting better.
Besides, they chose the absolutely wrong time to do it. With Skripals it
was just before the opening of the World Cup in Russia and now, just before the finishing of the North Stream 2 pipeline.
It sounds
that they are sabotaging their own interests, aren't they? Are they (Russians) that stup!d? Some 'smart' posters here seem to believe
it. But lets get real, one has to be able to see beyond the length of his nose, in order to understand what is really going on.
silvermoon Teodor Nitu 2 hours ago
Russia had all their chemical weapons legally destroyed. Along with hundreds of countries. The
US, UK and Israel never did. Navalny the innocent anti Putin. Can't win one way try another.
Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago
So why is Russia still asking for it? Clearly, something is being withheld. As for
the OPCW, their credibility has been shot for years with all their fake Syrian chem weapon attack reports.
seawolf 6 hours ago
Even if there was not Navalny's story, they could invent another to stop the project.
Abraxas79 seawolf 4 hours ago
Exactly.
I hope Russia is the one that abandons it. Let Germany be the one that decides to cancel it and go along with it. Concentrate on
supplying China and other Asian nations and internal consumption. Forget about Europe. You don't have to turn off the current supply,
just charge more for it when the market allows. Looks like the next German leader according to this article is quite the Russophobe,
which means relations will only get worse.
Pro_RussiaPole Abraxas79 2 hours ago
If this navalny farce does end up cancelling the NS2 project, Russia should stop all gas transit to western Europe through
Poland and Ukraine by spring of next year. Tell those countries that will be cut off that Russia can either sell them LNG, or
that they will have to connect to other sources of gas. Because if certain countries are so against Russian gas, then why are
they not doing anything against Russian gas going through Poland and Ukraine, and why isn't Trump threatening sanctions on
these countries for doing so?
Blue8ball713 RTjackanory 3 hours ago
Its a far longer list
and it have the fingerprints of GB secret services all over it.
Reply Gabriel Delpino seawolf 46 seconds ago It is not in the interest
of Germany to stop de project. Reply
magicmirror 6 hours ago
Europe should have nothing to do with the USA ....... proved time and
time again they cannot be trusted. All they want is markets, resources and consumers. They lie, they cheat, they steal...... (quoting mr Pompeo, I think). A big opportunity to win Europe's independence.
SmellLaRata
5 hours ago
All due respect for Mr. Navalny but since when does an individual fate of one person dictates the fate for millions ?
And c' mon Germany. Your hypocrisy is so utterly laughable. You ignore the Assange and Snowden cases, the slaughter of Kashoggi,
the brutal beating of yellow vests, the brutal actions against the Catalans ... but Navalni. Not even a hint of a proof of government
involvemen. But it fits the agenda, does it? The agenda which is dictated by the deep state agitators who so much flourished under
Obama.
gainwmn SmellLaRata
4 hours ago
Even being not a fan (to say the least) of the US foreign and some of the domestic policy, I have to point out that tried
by U analogy is largely out of balance: first, the issue in Navalny (as well as in Scripals' and others cases acted on with poisons)
case is not so much the assassination attempt on a person's life, as the banned use of chemical weapons, the ban RF's signature has
been under since 1993. And that conclusion (Russia's guilt) has not been made by the UK or Germany or any other country alone, but
the OPCW - the organization not only RF is the member of, but also 191(!) other countries, out of which not a single country (except
RF) rejected that conclusion!; second, the US did not made attempt on either Snowden's or Assange's life, with any kind of weapon,
not already mentioning the weapons banned by the international agreements American government(s) signed. This is a large - I would
say - decisive difference! As far as Kashoggi's case or other cases sited by U, RF did not react with sanctions against the respective
perpetrators either, thus demonstrating the same disregard for the law and order as the US did... therefore making all lies about
innocent RF and evil US, foolish, at the least.
Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago
The US and its lackeys are killing Assange. They are doing it slowly. And many voices going along with a lie does not make
the lie true. Because these poisoning allegations are lies. The accused were never allowed to see the evidence or challenge
it. And there is the whole issue of politicized reports coming out of the OPCW that contradicted evidence and reality.
Nathi Sibbs 4 hours ago
After completing the pipe and
it start running Russia must turn off all Ukraine pipes. No more gas for free from Russia, Ukraine must start importing LNG from thier reliable partner USA. I think imports from USA will be good for Ukrainian Nazi people
Abraxas79 Nathi Sibbs 4 hours
ago
How are they going to pay for it? Ukraine's only exports these days are its women to various brothels across Europe and North
America.
Hilarous 5 hours ago
The German leaders know very well that the case of Navalny will never be resolved and exists
for no other reason than to seize a pretext to demonize Russia and to end Nord Stream 2 in exchange for US freedom gas
magicmirror
Hilarous 4 hours ago
freedom gas and handsome presents .....
SandythePole 3 hours ago
This is an excellent account by Dr Karin Kneissl. It is a genuine dilemma for 'occupied'
Europe. Its occupying master does NOT want NS2 and will do anything to stop it. Russia suffers sanctions upon sanctions, but still
gallantly tries to maintain friendly and honourable business relations with its implacable neighbours. For how much longer is this
to continue? Surely there must be some limit to the endless provocations of occupied Europe and its Western master. Perhaps it is
time to shut off the oil and gas and leave Germany to sail under its own wind.
dunkie56 3 hours ago
Perhaps Russia should disengage
with Germany/EU totally and forge ahead in partnership with China and India and whoever wants to do business. let the EU tie it's
ship to the sinking US ship and drown along with it's protection racket partner! Then Russia should build a new iron curtain between
itself and all countries who want to align with the EU..in the long run Russia has tried to forge a partnership with the West but
it just has not born any fruit and even as pragmatic as Russia is they must be coming to the conclusion they are flogging a dead
horse!
Blue8ball713 dunkie56 2 hours ago With 146 million citizen Russia is too small to be a real partner to anyone like
China or India. Best fit is the EU, but the EU is controlled or better said occupied by the USA. Its part of their hegemonial system.
So Russia is left out in the rain..
micktaketo 5 hours ago
I am not sure if it is the right thing to do but I think Russia
should sue the German authorities if this deal is withdrawn and if it is have nothing to do with Germany again along with other corrupt
countries that cannot prove or at the least bring forth their evidence to be seen, to be transparent to all even Russia the first,
because Russia is the one being accused. These countries must think we the people are all completely stupid and Russia more so. This
corruption stinks to high heaven and is obvious to all sane people who love fairness. You cannot trust an entity that believes in
getting what they want by hook or by crook. Russia learn your lesson ! So you countries that love whats good for you and your people
do not cheat them for they voted for you to help them. Germany do not kick yourself, it will hurt your people. Saying, There is more
than one way to skin a cat, they say.
Mutlu Ozer 3 hours ago
There is a simple concept to investigate a crime to find the criminals: Just look at whose benefit the crime is? EU
politicians are certainly smart people to know this basic concept of criminal investigation. However, now they are playing a
new strategy about how to domesticate(!) not only Russia China as well... Germans are the main actors in the stage of the WW-I
and WW-II. I surely claim that Germans would be the main architect of the last war, WW-III.
In short black people are used as pawns in the political struggle between two neoliberal
clans fighting for power, using students without perspectives of gaining meaningful employment as
a ram. We saw this picture before in a different country. And riots do reverse gains achieved in
civil right struggle since 1960th, so they are also net losers. Racial tensions in the USA
definitely increased dramatically.
Notable quotes:
"... Bottom line: "Critical Race Theory", "The 1619 Project", and Homeland Security's "White Supremacist" warning represent the ideological foundation upon which the war on America is based. The "anti-white" dogma is the counterpart to the massive riots that have rocked the country. These phenomena are two spokes on the same wheel. They are designed to work together to achieve the same purpose. The goal is create a "racial" smokescreen that conceals the vast and willful destruction of the US economy, the $5 trillion dollar wealth-transfer that was provided to Wall Street, and the ferocious attack on the emerging, mainly-white working class "populist" movement that elected Trump and which rejects the globalist plan to transform the world into a borderless free trade zone ruled by cutthroat monopolists and their NWO allies. ..."
"... This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer that must be eradicated. ..."
"... The current situation cannot exist without the complicity of the secret services and the police. The heads of the secret services are either part of the cabal or close their eyes in fear ..."
"... There can be no single oligarch. It must be a larger group but very united by fear and a common goal. This can only be achieved if they are all Jews or Masons. Or both under a larger umbrella like some kind of pedo-ritual killing-satan worshiper. Soros can't do it alone. ..."
"... Of course politicians are corrupt and complicit but usually they are not the leaders ..."
Here's your BLM Pop Quiz for the day: What do "Critical Race Theory", "The 1619 Project",
and Homeland Security's "White Supremacist" warning tell us about what's going on in America
today?
They point to deeply-embedded racism that shapes the behavior of white people They
suggest that systemic racism cannot be overcome by merely changing attitudes and laws They
alert us to the fact that unresolved issues are pushing the country towards a destructive race
war They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are inciting
racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to office in 2016
and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to transform America into
a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
Which of these four statements best explains what's going on in America today?
If you chose Number 4, you are right. We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive
outbreak of racial violence and mayhem. We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned,
insurgency-type operation that involves myriad logistical components including vast, nationwide
riots, looting and arson, as well as an extremely impressive ideological campaign. "Critical
Race Theory", "The 1619 Project", and Homeland Security's "White Supremacist" warning are as
much a part of the Oligarchic war on America as are the burning of our cities and the toppling
of our statues. All three, fall under the heading of "ideology", and all three are being used
to shape public attitudes on matters related to our collective identity as "Americans".
The plan is to overwhelm the population with a deluge of disinformation about their history,
their founders, and the threats they face, so they will submissively accept a New Order imposed
by technocrats and their political lackeys. This psychological war is perhaps more important
than Operation BLM which merely provides the muscle for implementing the transformative "Reset"
that elites want to impose on the country. The real challenge is to change the hearts and minds
of a population that is unwaveringly patriotic and violently resistant to any subversive
element that threatens to do harm to their country. So, while we can expect this propaganda
saturation campaign to continue for the foreseeable future, we don't expect the strategy will
ultimately succeed. At the end of the day, America will still be America, unbroken, unflagging
and unapologetic.
Let's look more carefully at what is going on.
On September 4, the Department of Homeland Security issued a draft report stating that
"White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States". According to an
article in Politico:
" all three draft (versions of the document) describe the threat from white
supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S. , listed above the
immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups . John Cohen, who oversaw DHS's
counterterrorism portfolio from 2011 to 2014, said the drafts' conclusion isn't
surprising.
"This draft document seems to be consistent with earlier intelligence reports from DHS,
the FBI, and other law enforcement sources: that the most significant terror-related
threat facing the US today comes from violent extremists who are motivated by white
supremac y and other far-right ideological causes," he said .
"Lone offenders and small cells of individuals motivated by a diverse array of social,
ideological, and personal factors will pose the primary terrorist threat to the United
States," the draft reads. "Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists
will pose the most persistent and lethal threat."..(" DHS
draft document: White supremacists are greatest terror threat " Politico)
This is nonsense. White supremacists do not pose the greatest danger to the country, that
designation goes to the left-wing groups that have rampaged through more than 2,000 US cities
for the last 100 days. Black Lives Matter and Antifa-generated riots have decimated hundreds of
small businesses, destroyed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of merchants and their
employees, and left entire cities in a shambles. The destruction in Kenosha alone far exceeds
the damage attributable to the activities of all the white supremacist groups combined.
So why has Homeland Security made this ridiculous and unsupportable claim? Why have they
chosen to prioritize white supremacists as "the most persistent and lethal threat" when it is
clearly not true?
There's only one answer: Politics.
The officials who concocted this scam are advancing the agenda of their real bosses, the
oligarch puppet-masters who have their tentacles extended throughout the deep-state and use
them to coerce their lackey bureaucrats to do their bidding. In this case, the honchos are
invoking the race card ("white supremacists") to divert attention from their sinister
destabilization program, their looting of the US Treasury (for their crooked Wall Street
friends), their demonizing of the mostly-white working class "America First" nationalists who
handed Trump the 2016 election, and their scurrilous scheme to establish one-party rule by
installing their addlepated meat-puppet candidate (Biden) as president so he can carry out
their directives from the comfort of the Oval Office. That's what's really going on.
DHS's announcement makes it possible for state agents to target legally-armed Americans who
gather with other gun owners in groups that are protected under the second amendment. Now the
white supremacist label will be applied more haphazardly to these same conservatives who pose
no danger to public safety. The draft document should be seen as a warning to anyone whose
beliefs do not jibe with the New Liberal Orthodoxy that white people are inherently racists who
must ask forgiveness for a system they had no hand in creating (slavery) and which was
abolished more than 150 years ago.
The 1619 Project" is another part of the ideological war that is being waged against the
American people. The objective of the "Project" is to convince readers that America was founded
by heinous white men who subjugated blacks to increase their wealth and power. According to the
World Socialist Web Site:
"The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of
American history is rooted in race hatred -- specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of
"black people" by "white people." Hannah-Jones writes in the series' introduction:
"Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country. "
This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the
genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and
development . Hannah-Jones's reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive
racial antagonisms from innate biological processes .where does this racism come from? It
is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American "white people." Thus, it
must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions .
. No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting
race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear
responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided
arguments." ("The New York Times's 1619
Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history", World Socialist Web
Site)
Clearly, Hannah-Jones was enlisted by big money patrons who needed an ideological foundation
to justify the massive BLM riots they had already planned as part of their US color revolution.
The author –perhaps unwittingly– provided the required text for vindicating
widespread destruction and chaos carried out in the name of "social justice."
As Hannah-Jones says, "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country", which is to
say that it cannot be mitigated or reformed, only eradicated by destroying the symbols of white
patriarchy (Our icons, our customs, our traditions and our history.), toppling the existing
government, and imposing a new system that better reflects the values of the burgeoning
non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the rationale for sustained civil
unrest, deepening political polarization and violent revolution.
All of these goals conveniently coincide with the aims of the NWO Oligarchs who seek to
replace America's Constitutional government with a corporate Superstate ruled by voracious
Monopolists and their globalist allies. So, while Hannah-Jones treatise does nothing to improve
conditions for black people in America, it does move the country closer to the dystopian dream
of the parasite class; Corporate Valhalla.
Then there is "Critical Race Theory" which provides the ideological icing on the cake. The
theory is part of the broader canon of anti-white dogma which is being used to indoctrinate
workers. White employees are being subjected to "reeducation" programs that require their
participation as a precondition for further employment . The first rebellion against critical
race theory, took place at Sandia Labs which is a federally-funded research agency that designs
America's nuclear weapons. According to journalist Christopher F. Rufo:
"Senator @HawleyMO and
@SecBrouillette have
launched an inspector general investigation, but Sandia executives have only accelerated
their purge against conservatives."
Sandia executives have made it clear: they want to force critical race theory,
race-segregated trainings, and white male reeducation camps on their employees -- and all
dissent will be severely punished. Progressive employees will be rewarded; conservative
employees will be purged." (" There is a civil war erupting
at @SandiaLabs ." Christopher F Rufo)
It all sounds so Bolshevik. Here's more info on how this toxic indoctrination program
works:
"Treasury Department
The Treasury Department held a training session telling employees that "virtually all
White people contribute to racism" and demanding that white staff members "struggle to own
their racism" and accept their "unconscious bias, White privilege, and White
fragility."
The National Credit Union Administration
The NCUA held a session for 8,900 employees arguing that America was "founded on
racism" and "built on the blacks of people who were enslaved. " Twitter thread here and
original source documents
here .
Sandia National Laboratories
Last year, Sandia National Labs -- which produces our nuclear arsenal -- held a
three-day reeducation camp for white males, teaching them how to deconstruct their
"white male culture" and forcing them to write letters of apology to women and people of
color . Whistleblowers from inside the labs tell me that critical race theory is now
endangering our national security. Twitter thread here and original source
documents
here .
Argonne National Laboratories
Argonne National Labs hosts trainings calling on white lab employees to admit that they
"benefit from racism" and atone for the "pain and anguish inflicted upon Black people. "
Twitter thread here .
Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security hosted a Training on "microaggressions,
microinequities, and microassaults" where white employees were told that they had been
"socialized into oppressor roles. " Twitter thread here and original source
documents here
." (" Summary of
Critical Race Theory Investigations" , Christopher F Rufo)
On September 4, Donald Trump announced his administration "would prohibit federal
agencies from subjecting government employees to "critical race theory" or "white privilege"
seminar. ..
"It has come to the President's attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent
millions of taxpayer dollars to date 'training' government workers to believe divisive,
anti-American propaganda ," read a Friday memo
from the Office of Budget and Management Director Russ Vought. "These types of 'trainings'
not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its
inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce The
President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using
taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions."
The next day, September 5, Trump announced that the Department of Education was going to see
whether the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project was being used in school curricula
and– if it was– then those schools would be ineligible for federal funding.
Conservative pundits applauded Trump's action as a step forward in the "culture wars", but it's
really much more than that. Trump is actually foiling an effort by the domestic saboteurs who
continue look for ways to undermine democracy, reduce the masses of working-class people to
grinding poverty and hopelessness, and turn the country into a despotic military outpost ruled
by bloodsucking tycoons, mercenary autocrats and duplicitous elites. Alot of thought and effort
went into this malign ideological project. Trump derailed it with a wave of the hand. That's no
small achievement.
Bottom line: "Critical Race Theory", "The 1619 Project", and Homeland Security's "White
Supremacist" warning represent the ideological foundation upon which the war on America is
based. The "anti-white" dogma is the counterpart to the massive riots that have rocked the
country. These phenomena are two spokes on the same wheel. They are designed to work
together to achieve the same purpose. The goal is create a "racial" smokescreen that conceals
the vast and willful destruction of the US economy, the $5 trillion dollar wealth-transfer that
was provided to Wall Street, and the ferocious attack on the emerging, mainly-white working
class "populist" movement that elected Trump and which rejects the globalist plan to transform
the world into a borderless free trade zone ruled by cutthroat monopolists and their NWO
allies.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look
beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer
that must be eradicated.
A good article, but no mention of who exactly these oligarchs are. Or why so many of them
are Jewish.
Or why so many Zionist organisations support BLM and other such groups.
Mike, not mentioning these things will not save you. You will still be cancelled by
Progressive Inc.
This seems like a good explanation of what is happening. I wonder whether too many people
will fall for the propaganda, though. It is the classic effort to get the turkeys to support
thanksgiving.
The deserved progress and concessions achieved by the civil rights struggles for the Black
community is in danger of deteriorating because Black leadership will not stand up and
vehemently condemn the rioting and destruction and killing, and declare that the BLM movement
does not represent the majority of the Black American culture and that the overexaggerated
accusations of "racism" do not necessitate the eradication and revision of history, nor does
it require European Americans to feel guilt or shame. There is no need for a cultural
revolution. The ideology and actions of BLM are offensive and inconsistent with American
values, and Black leaders should be saying this every day, and should be admonishing about
the consequences. They should also use foresight to see how this is going to end, because the
BLM and their supporters are being used to fight a war that they can never win. And when it's
over, what perception will the rest of America have of Black people?
@sonofman g to TPTB. Better to have an amorphous slogan to donate money to than an actual
organization with humans, goals and ideas which can be held up to the light and critically
examined.
The whole sudden race thing is a fraud to eliminate the electoral support Trump had
amassed among blacks before Corona and Fentanyl Floyd. In line with what Whitney says, the
globalists need to take down Trump. And the race card has always been the first tool in the
DNC's toolkit. When all else fails, go nuclear with undefined claims of racism.
Almost every big magazine has a black person on the cover this month. Probably will in
October too. Coincidence? Sure it is.
They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are
inciting racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to
office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to
transform America into a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
I'm shocked that they're trying to sell this Q-tier bullshit about Trump fighting the deep
state.
The reality about Trump is that he is the release valve, the red herring designed to keep
whitey pacified while massive repossessions and foreclosures take place, permanently
impoverishing a large part of the white population, and shutting down the Talmudic
service-based economy, which is all that is really left. It is Trump's DHS that declared a
large part of his white trashionalist base to be terrorists.
The populist majority never had anyone to vote for. This system will never give them one.
They aren't bright enough to make it happen.
Agree. Barack Obama in particular will go down in history a real disgrace to the legacy of
the US presidency. He is violating the sacred trust that the people of the United States
invested in him. What a fraud!
Good post Mr. Whitney especially about "white supremacy" garbage .which has only been
going on since the 90s! You know, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Elohim City and Okie City, militias,
"patriot groups," etc. This really is nothing new. And, since so many remember the "white
supremacy" crapola was crapola back in the 90s, I'd say everyone pretty much regardless of
race over the age of 40 knows there is, as it says in Ecclesiastes in the Bible, "there is
nothing new under the sun." And, if you home schooled your kids back then, then you kids know
it as well. Fact is this: the DHS as with every other govt. agency is forced to blame "white
supremacy" for every problem in this country because who the heck else can they blame? Jews?
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahh when pigs fly After all, Noahide just might be around the
corner ..
Sheriffs have a lot of legal power. Ultimately, the battle is privatized money power
vs Joe Citizen/Sheriffs.
This sheriff is working a Constitutional angle that says: Local Posse (meaning you.. Joe
citizen) working with the Sheriff department to protect your local community. Richard Mack is
teaching other Sheriffs and (some Police) what their Constitutional power is, and that power
doesn't include doing bidding of Oligarchs.
Sheriffs are elected, and their revenue stream is outside of Oligarchy:
So Donald Trump suddenly discovers that racial Bolshevism is the official policy of
his own executive branch – a mere 3 years and 8 months after assuming the
position
... Looks like the same old flim-flam they pull every four years. No matter who wins, the
Davos folks continue to run the circus and fleece the suckers dry.
Because it is. Substitute "the ethnic Russian middle class are class enemies" for
"Anglo-American are all racists" and there you have it. Permission for a small organized
minority to eliminate a whole class on ideological grounds...
I live in a former communist country in Eastern Europe with corrupt politicians, oligarchs
and organized crime.
America was a country with a minor corruption and in which the oligarchs, although
influential, were not united in a small group with decisive force. Now America is slowly
slipping into the situation of a second-hand shit-hole country.
Is that I can see the situation more clearly than an American citizen who still has the
American perception of his contry the way it was 30 years ago.
Essential thing:
1) The current situation cannot exist without the complicity of the secret services and
the police. The heads of the secret services are either part of the cabal or close their eyes
in fear .
2) There can be no single oligarch. It must be a larger group but very united by fear and
a common goal. This can only be achieved if they are all Jews or Masons. Or both under a
larger umbrella like some kind of pedo-ritual killing-satan worshiper. Soros can't do it
alone.
3) Of course politicians are corrupt and complicit but usually they are not the
leaders
4) BLM are exactly the brown shirts of the new Hitler.
Soon we will se the new Hitler/Stalin/ in plain light.
Thirty black children murdered recently; zero by police / BLM & 'the media' say
nothing: https://www.outkick.com/blm-101-volume-7-the-lives-of-innocent-black-kids-do-not-matter/
BTW:
– Last year, the nationwide total for all US police forces was 47 killings of unarmed
criminals by police during arrest procedures.
– 8 were black, 19 were white.
Though blacks, relative to their numbers, committed a vastly higher number of crimes, hence
their immensely greater arrest rate.
@Justvisiting urally, it is nonsense -- nasty, power-hungry, censorious nonsense.
It is the opposite of scientific or empirical thought -- science can not accept theories
which are not capable of falsification. (Take astrology -- actually, don't ! -- what ever
conclusion it comes to can never be wrong : Dick or Jane didn't find love ? Well, one
of Saturn's moons was retrograde & Mercury declensed Venus (I don't know what it means
either) . or Dick went on a bender & Jane had a whole bad hair week.
Frankly, to play these pre-modern tricks on us is just grotesquely insulting. That some are
falling for it is grotesquely depressing.
Another ringer from Mike Whitney! Keep 'em comin', brother.
We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive outbreak of racial violence and mayhem.
We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned, insurgency-type operation that involves myriad
logistical components including vast, nationwide riots, looting and arson, as well as an
extremely impressive ideological campaign.
Yup. TPTB have been grooming BLM/Antifa for this moment for at least 3-4 years now, if not
longer. Here's a former BLMer who quit speaking out three years ago about the organization's
role in the present 'race war':
It is very clever politics and (war) propaganda. You break down and demoralise your
enemies at the same time as assuring your own side of it's own righteous use of violence.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look
beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows.
Nailing it.
4. They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are
inciting racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to
office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to
transform America into a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
Which of these four statements best explains what's going on in America today?
If you chose Number 4, you are right.
If we believe this – we need to act like it. These are "enemies, foreign and
domestic ". This isn't ordinary politics, it arguably transcends politics.
What hope is there without organization?
And whatever is done – don't give them ammunition. The resistance must not be an
ethno-resistance.
But he is either naive or a bad manager, as his hires are deadly to his aims. And the
management criticism is big, because as a leader that is mostly what he does.
That he gets information to affect US policy for good, from outside of his circle of
trusted personnel, is a sad state of affairs.
@Robert Dolan ds that it would have ended on day one were it not officially sanctioned
and the rioters protected from prosecution. Why hasn't the Janet Rosenberg/Thousand
Currents/Tides Foundation connection with the BLM/DNC/MSM cabal, as well as with Antifa and
social media, been the major investigation on Fox News? Why haven't Zuckerberg, Zucker, et al
been arrested for incitement to commit federal crimes, including capital treason to overthrow
the duly elected president? (Just a few rhetorical questions for the hell of it.) What's so
galling is that the cops and federal agents are being used as just so many patsies who are
deployed, not to protect, but deployed to look like fools and be held up for mockery as
pathetic exemplars of white disempowerment.
The officials who concocted this scam are advancing the agenda of their real bosses, the
oligarch puppet-masters who have their tentacles extended throughout the deep-state and use
them to coerce their lackey bureaucrats to do their bidding.
Agree, but where is President Trump? He was supposed to appoint undersecretaries and
assistant secretaries and deputy undersecretaries and Schedule C whippersnappers on whose
desks such outrages are supposed to die.
I've thought from the beginning that this lack of attention to "personnel as policy" --
with Trump overestimating the ability of the ostensible CEO to overcome such intransigence --
was one of his major failures. I am sympathetic, as there are not many people he could trust
to be loyal to his agenda, much less to him, but this is a disaster in every agency
Few years ago I watch a clip secretly recorded in Ukrainian synagogue where Rabi said
"first we have to fight Catholics and with Muslims it will be an easy job" ...
Thanks to Mr Whitney for being able to cut through the fog and see what's going on behind
it. The term "white supremacist" wasn't much in public use at all until the day Trump was
elected then suddenly it was all over the place. It's like one of those massive ad campaigns
whose jingle is everywhere as if some group decided on it as a theme to be pushed. They're
really afraid that the white working class population will wake up and see how the country is
being sold out from underneath their feet hence the need to keep it divided and intimidated.
Like all the other color revolutions everywhere else they strike at the weak links within the
country to create conflict, in the US case it's so-called diversity. There's billions
available to be spent in this project so plenty of traitors can be found, unwitting or
otherwise, to carry out their assignments. The billionaire class own most of the media and
much else and see the US as their farm. They have no loyalty whatsoever and outsource
everything to China or anywhere else they can squeeze everything out of the workers. They
want a global dictatorship and admire the Chinese government for the way it can order its
citizens around.
You are exactly right. Trump is doing his part (knowingly or unknowingly, but probably
knowingly) to accomplish the NWO objectives. He was not elected in 2016 in spite of NWO
desires, as most Trump supporters think, but rather precisely BECAUSE of NWO desires.
The NWO probably also wants him to win again this year, and if so then he will win. The
reason the NWO wanted him in 2016 (and probably wants him to win again) was primarily to
neutralize the (armed) Right in this country so they wouldn't effectively resist the COVID-19
scamdemic lockdown tyranny and BLM/Antifa riots.
@Trinity While I tend to agree with you that it looks like a race war, the question is
why is it happening now? If it were just a race war promoted by radicals in BLM and Antifa,
it does not explain the nationwide coordination (let's face it the faces of BLM and Antifa
are not that smart or connected), the support and censorship of the violence by the MSM and
the support of Marxist BLM by corporations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is a color revolution in the making and may come to a peak after Nov. 3rd. Whitney is on
to something, there is much more going on behind the "smoke and mirrors" and AG Barr (if he's
not part of it) should be investigating it.
They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are
inciting racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to
office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to
transform America into a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
I keep reading such nonsense in the comments above. the so-called populist majority does
not get it, Trump is not placed here to stop the Globalist agenda, that is an electioneering
stunt. Look at what he has actually and really done.
How has he stopped the Globalist move forward?? By the Covid plandemic being
allowed to circle the globe and shut down the US economy and social norm? By moving our high
tech companies to Israel? Giving Israel and their Wall Street allies what is left of US
credit wealth? Draining the swamp with even more Zio-Neocon Swamp creatures in the govt than
ever? Moving the embassy to Jerusalem and all requests per Netanyahu's wish list? A real
anti-Globalist stand? Looting the Federal Reserve for the Wall Street high fliers, who
garnered more wealth during the crash test run of March-April and are sure to make out with
even more for the coming big crash?
Phoney stunts of stopping immigration or bashing China. Really? China is still rising
propelled by Wall Street and Banker funds. I have not seen any jobs coming home, lost more
than ever in US history this year. Only lost homes for the working and middle classes.
How is Populist America standing up for their constitutional rights which is being
shredded a little more each day? Standing up for their Real Interests, which are eroded and
stolen on an almost daily basis by Trump's NY Mafia and Wall Street Oligarchs. Jobs gone for
good and government assistance to the needy disappearing, as that is against the phoney
Republic individualism, that you must make it on your own. Right just like the big goverment
assistance always going to the big money players and banks, remember as they are too big
to let fail!
Dreaming that Trump is going to save White America from the Gobalists is just
bull corn . From whom BLM? Proven street theatre that will disappear on command. I
actually have come to learn that some Black leaders are speaking out intelligently for street
calm and distancing themselves from BLM.
Problem with the USA is the general population is so very dumbed down by 60 years of MSM
– TV s and Hollywood mind control programming that the public prefers professional
actors like Reagan and Trump over real politicians, and surely never chose a Statesman or
real Patriotic leader. the public political narrative is still set by Fox , CNN and
MSNBC .
The deep state is so infiltrated and overwhelmed with Zio and Globalist agents, that it is
now almost hopeless to fix. Sorry to point out but Trump is best described as the Dummy
sitting on his Ventriloquist's lap (Jared Kushner).
Situation is near hopeless as even here on Ron Unz Review the comments are so
disappointing, almost 80% are focused on the Race as the prime issue and supportive of Trump
fakery (not that I support Biden and Zio slut Kamil Harris either).
In sum, beyond putting their MAGA hats on, White America is more focused more on
playing Cowboy with their toy guns, AR's and all than really getting involved politically to
sort things out to get American onto a better track. Of course, this is not taken seriously
as it might call for reaching out to other American communities that are even more
disenfranchised: African- Americans and Latinos.
@David Erickson nted him in 2016 (and probably wants him to win again) was primarily to
neutralize the (armed) Right in this country so they wouldn't effectively resist the COVID-19
scamdemic lockdown tyranny and BLM/Antifa riots.
Covid and BLM/ANTIFA are just window dressing for the financial turmoil. "Look over here
whitey, there's a pandemic" and "look over here whitey, there's a riot" is much preferred to
whitey shooting the sheriff who comes to take his stuff.
Wave the flag and bible while spreading love for the cops, and the repossessions and
evictions should go off without a hitch. Yes, Trump is a knowing participant.
"My impression is that BLM, Antifa and other protestors are well aware of this"
Like all good Maoists the cult white kids of antifa rigidly adhere to the mission statement
and stick the inconvenient truth in the back of their mushy minds. BLM ... is a mercenary.
Can you imagine any other groups rioting and destroying American cities for over 3 months?
Imagine if the Hells Angels or some other White biker gang was doing what Antifa and BLM are
doing? Hell, imagine if it were a bunch of Hare Krishnas pulling this shit off? Hell, I think
the local mayors, police, and other law enforcement employees wouldn't even take this much shit
even if the rioters were Girl Scouts. We are talking 3-4 months of lawlessness, assaults,
rapes, murders ( cold blooded premeditated murders at that) and still the people in charge let
this shit go on night and day. IF the POTUS doesn't have the authority or the power to stop
shit like this from going on then what the hell do we even vote for anyhow? Granted, I see the
reason for not being ruled by a dictatorship, but who in the hell can justify letting these
riots go on? One can only assume that both the republicants and the demsheviks are fine with
these riots because no one seems in a hurry to shut them down or arrest the hombres funding
these riots. Who is housing and feeding the rioters? Who is paying their travel expenses? I'm
sure most everyone in Washington knows who the people are behind these riots but don't expect
any action anytime soon.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look beyond
the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer that
must be eradicated.
That's true to a large degree, but
It is indeed an attempt to liquidate the working and lower middle class. Most of the
American working and lower middle class, obviously not all, is White. So predictably we have
these calls for White Genocide. Agreed and good to see the tie-in with the Coronavirus Hoax
lock downs, too, which also spread the devastation into minority communities under the guise of
public safety.
The one question that remains unanswered is why the major cities were targeted for
destruction. Obviously these are the playgrounds of the oligarchs and have been decimated. We
will learn soon enough.
The Reverend William Barber is the only genuine black leader I am aware of.
And he makes a pointn of not speaking only for blacks, but for all disadvantaged communities,
including poor whites. IMO he is the real deal, and I very much hope he takes the lead in
articulating genuine community values of respect and equality for all, including basics such as
decent health care and food access.
The pressure exerted on someone like Barber by the BLM forces in the media and other
institutions is enormous.
I wish Ron Unz would invite him to write something for the UR.
BLM is all about anti-white activism, black supremacy and the forcible transfer of white
wealth to blacks but Tucker Carlson keeps insisting that BLM is a smokescreen for class
struggle.
The way that BLM are acting now they could almost be called pro-White activists. They
certainly don't make diversity look like a strength or something that would be in any way
shape or form desirable.
"... workers are dehumanizingly treated by Amazon as if they are robots – persistently asked to accomplish task after task at an unforgiving rate." ..."
Amazon is famous for its extreme efficiency yet behind the curtain is a crippling culture of
surveillance and stress, according to a study by the Open Markets Institute.
The think tank and advocacy group that repeatedly takes companies like Google and Facebook
to task warned in the
report [PDF] that Amazon's retail side has gone far beyond promoting efficient working and
has adopted an almost dystopian level of control over its warehouse workers,
firing them if they fail to meet targets that are often kept a secret.
Among the practices it highlighted, the report said that workers are told to hit a target
rate of packages to process per hour, though they are not told what exactly that target is. "We
don't know what the rate is," one pseudonymous worker told the authors. "They change it behind
the scenes. You'll know when you get a warning. They don't tell you what rate you have to hit
at the beginning."
If they grow close to not meeting a target rate, or miss it, the worker receives an
automated message warning them, the report said. Workers who fail to meet hidden targets can
also receive a different type of electronic message; one that fires them.
"Amazon's electronic system analyzes an employee's electronic record and, after falling
below productivity measures, 'automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding
quality or productivity without input from supervisors'," it stated. The data is also generated
automatically: for example, those picking and packing are required to use a scanner that
records every detail, including the time between scans, and feed it into a system that pushes
out automated warnings.
Always watching
As with other companies, Amazon installs surveillance cameras in its workspaces to reduce
theft. But the report claims Amazon has taken that approach to new lengths "with an extensive
network of security cameras that tracks and monitors a worker's every move".
Bezos' bunch combines that level of surveillance with strict limits on behavior. "Upon
entering the warehouse, Amazon requires workers to dispose of all of their personal belongings
except a water bottle and a clear plastic bag of cash," the report noted.
For Amazon drivers, their location is constantly recorded and monitored and they are
required to follow the exact route Amazon has mapped. They are required to deliver 999 out of
every 1,000 packages on time or face the sack; something that the report argues has led to
widespread speeding and a related increase in crashes.
The same tracking software ensures that workers only take 30 minutes for lunch and two
separate 15-minute breaks during the day. The report also noted that the web goliath has
patented a wristband that "can precisely track where warehouse employees are placing their
hands and use vibrations to nudge them in a different direction".
Amazon also attempts to prevent efforts to unionize by actively tracking workers and
breaking up any meetings of too many people, including identifying possible union organizers
and moving them around the workplace to prevent them talking to the same group for too long,
the report claimed.
It quoted a source named Mohamed as saying: "They spread the workers out you cannot talk to
your colleagues The managers come to you and say they'll send you to a different station."
The combined effort of constant surveillance with the risk of being fired at any point has
created, according to workers, a " Lord Of The Flies -esque environment where the
perceived weakest links are culled every year".
Stress and quotas
The report said Amazon's workers "are under constant stress to make their quotas for
collecting and organizing hundreds of packages per hour" resulting in "constant 'low-grade
panic' to work. In this sense, workers are dehumanizingly treated by Amazon as if they are
robots – persistently asked to accomplish task after task at an unforgiving
rate."
At the end of the day, warehouse employees are required to go through mandatory screening to
check they haven't stolen anything, which "requires waiting times that can range from 25
minutes to an hour" and is not compensated, the report said.
Amazon also allegedly fails to account for any injuries, the report said, to the extent that
"Amazon employees feel forced to work through the pain and injuries they incur on the job, as
Amazon routinely fires employees who fall behind their quotas, without taking such injuries
into account."
It quoted another piece of reporting that found Amazon's rate of severe injuries in its
warehouses is, in some cases, more than five times the industry average. It also noted that the
National Council for Occupational Safety and Health listed Amazon as one of the "dirty dozen"
on its list of the most dangerous places to work in the United States in 2018.
The report concluded that "Amazon's practices exacerbate the inequality between employees
and management by keeping employees in a constant state of precariousness, with the threat of
being fired for even the slightest deviation, which ensures full compliance with
employer-demanded standards and limits worker freedom."
Being a think tank, the Open Markets Institute listed a series of policy and legal changes
that would help alleviate the work issues. It proposed a complete ban on "invasive forms of
worker surveillance" and a rule against any forms of surveillance that "preemptively interfere
with unionization efforts".
It also wants a law that allows independent contractors to unionize and the legalization of
secondary boycotts, as well as better enforcement of the rules against companies by government
departments including America's trade watchdog the FTC and Department of Justice, as well as a
ban on non-compete agreements and class action waivers.
In response to the allegations in the report, a spokesperson for Amazon told us: "Like most
companies, we have performance expectations for every Amazonian – be it corporate
employee or fulfillment center associate and we measure actual performance against those
expectations.
"Associate performance is measured and evaluated over a long period of time as we know that
a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour. We
support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help
them improve." ®
Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral
pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of
cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.
-- Thomas Sowell
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all
those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of
economics.
-- Thomas Sowell
Economics is the painful elaboration of the obvious.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about
what they imagine they can design.
-- Friedrich von Hayek
I can't imagine economists admitting how little they actually know. If they admitted to
themselves, it would hurt their ego. If they admitted to others, it would hurt their job
prospects.
-- Joseph Mattes, Vienna (The Economist, letters December 04, 2010)
The use of mathematics has brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it has also
brought mortis .
-- Attributed to Robert Heilbroner
A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.
-- Marty Allen
Economic statistics are like a bikini, what they reveal is important, what they conceal is
vital
-- Attributed to Professor Sir Frank Holmes, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand,
1967.
Doing econometrics is like trying to learn the laws of electricity by playing the radio.
-- Guy Orcutt
Economists
The First Law of Economists: For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite
economist.
The Second Law of Economists: They're both wrong.
-- David Wildasin
"Murphys law of economic policy": Economists have the least influence on policy where they
know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the
least and disagree most vehemently.
-- Alan S. Blinder
An economist is someone who, when he finds something that works in practice, tries to make
it work in theory.
The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic
questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.
-- Joan Violet Robinson
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday
didn't happen today.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Having a[n in] house economist became for many business people something like havinga
resident astrologer for the royal court: I don't quite understand what this fellow is saying
but there must be something to it.
-- Linden. (Jan. 11, 1993). Dreary Days in the Dismal Science. Forbes. Pp. 68-70.
Economics is the only field in which two people can get a Nobel Prize for saying exactly the
opposite thing.
Economists do it with models.
-- Heard at the LSE
Bentley's second Law of Economics: The only thing more dangerous than an economist is an
amateur economist!
Berta's Fundamental Law of Economic Rents.. "The only thing more dangerous than an amateur
economist is a professional economist."
Definition: Policy Analyst is someone unethical enough to be a lawyer, impractical enough to
be a theologian, and pedantic enough to be an economist.
Q: Why did God create economists ?
A: In order to make weather forecasters look good.
Q: Why has astrology been invented?
A: So that economy could be an accurate science.
Economists have forecasted 9 out of the last 5 recessions.
An econometrician and an astrologer are arguing about their subjects. The astrologer says,
"Astrology is more scientific. My predictions come out right half the time. Yours can't even
reach that proportion". The econometrician replies, "That's because of external shocks. Stars
don't have those".
When an economist says the evidence is "mixed," he or she means that theory says one thing
and data says the opposite.
-- Attributed to Richard Thaler, now at the Univ of Chicago
The last severe depression and banking crisis could not have been achieved by normal civil
servants and politicians, it required economists involvement.
Taxes
State run lotteries: think of them as tax breaks for the intelligent.
-- Evan Leibovitch
Inflation
Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
-- Milton Friedman
Having a little inflation is like being a little pregnant–inflation feeds on itself
and quickly passes the "little" mark.
-- Dian Cohen
Trade and Trade Barriers
Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the
expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to
choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored
companies.
-- Alan Burris, A Liberty Primer
Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause
of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.
-- Frank Chodorov
When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will.
-- Fredric Bastiat, early French economist
The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer
by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.
-- Albert Jay Nock
Regulation
Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business
dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of
construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements,
gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated
economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he
could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with
him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.
-- Alan Greenspan
You fucking academic eggheads! You don't know shit. You can't deregulate this industry.
You're going to wreck it. You don't know a goddamn thing!
-- Robert Crandall, boss of American Airlines, to an unnamed Senate lawyer in 1971
Government
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources
that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.
-- David Friedman
Government Spending
See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in
the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably.
Anything to avoid creating jobs.
-- Dave Barry
I don't think you can spend yourself rich.
-- George Humphrey
Capitalism and Free Markets
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they
want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments
against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
-- Milton Friedman
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place
unless both parties benefit.
-- Milton Friedman
The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by
capitalism.
-- Joan Violet Robinson
Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a
capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and
laissez faire.
-- Ludwig Mises, "Socialism"
If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe
they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple
insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can only gain at
the expense of another.
-- Milton Friedman
States with central-planning regimes [ ] do tend to consume much less energy (and much less
of everything else) [ ] than do Americans. There is a word for that: poverty.
-- The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism
Central Banks
Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes
– excusable or not – can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a
bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any
effective check by the body politic – this is the key political argument against an
independent central bank To paraphrase Clemenceau: money is much too serious a matter to be
left to the Central Bankers.
-- Milton Friedman
A central banker walks into a pizzeria to order a pizza.
When the pizza is done, he goes up to the counter get it. There a clerk asks him: "Should I
cut it into six pieces or eight pieces?"
The central banker replies: "I'm feeling rather hungry right now. You'd better cut it into
eight pieces."
Intellectual Property
For one thing, there are many "inventions" that are not patentable. The "inventor" of the
supermarket, for example, conferred great benefits on his fellowmen for which he could not
charge them. Insofar as the same kind of ability is required for the one kind of invention as
for the other, the existence of patents tends to divert activity to patentable inventions.
-- Milton Friedman
Slavery
From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes
cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves.
The work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the
dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as
much and to labour as little as possible.
Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be
squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.
-- Adam Smith
Prohibition
It is because it's prohibited. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point
of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.
-- Milton Friedman
In the Long Run
John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run we are all dead."
Joan Robinson: "Yes, but not all at the same time."
Minimum Wage and Unemployment
The real minimum wage is zero: unemployment.
-- Thomas Sowell
All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from
unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers,
thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through
permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one
area to another.
-- Milton Friedman
Misc
Talk is cheap. Supply exceeds Demand.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not
understanding it.
-- Upton Sinclair
When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
-- Milton Friedman
of course the country could never listen to this guy .it just makes too much damn sense.
-- ryanx0 about Milton Friedman [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se_TJzB9-z0]
Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he
can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is
promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by
an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
SOCIALISM: You have two cows. State takes one and give it to someone else.
COMMUNISM: You have two cows. State takes both of them and gives you milk.
FASCISM: You have two cows. State takes both of them and sell you milk.
NAZISM: You have two cows. State takes both of them and shoot you.
BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. State takes both of them, kill one and spill the milk in
system of sewage.
CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
Back during the Solidarity days, I heard that the following joke was being told in
Poland:
A man goes into the Bank of Gdansk to make a deposit. Since he has never kept money in a bank before, he is a little nervous.
"What happens if the Bank of Gdansk should fail?" he asks.
"Well, in that case your money would be insured by the Bank of Warsaw."
"But, what if the Bank of Warsaw fails?"
"Well, there'd be no problem, because the Bank of Warsaw is insured by the National Bank of Poland."
"And if the National Bank of Poland fails?"
"Then your money would be insured by the Bank of Moscow."
"And what if the Bank of Moscow fails?"
"Then your money would be insured by the Great Bank of the Soviet Union."
"And if that bank fails?"
"Well, in that case, you'd lose all your money. But, wouldn't it be worth it?"
All models are wrong but some are useful.
-- George Box
I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
-- J.M.Keynes; Found in Forbes magazine 01/25/1999 issue. In the Numbers Game column by
Bernard Cohen
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact
answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
-- J. Tukey
There is an entirely leisure class located at both ends of the economic spectrum
In my US youth we trained with .30 cal Simi auto rifles at public school, and had also at
public school, rifle teams that used .22 target rifles.
Wally was the only white guy on the
teams (there were several schools)...
The racial stuff was all there, but so also was an
intact industrial plant... a fella couldn't walk down the street without stumbling into a
job.
Welder, fitter, fabricator, assembly line work, foundries and forges and shipyards and
mines were running double shifts and the unions were strong...even rich people were afraid to
cross a picketline...
and the income tax was about 75%...
In a long and adventurous life slumming 'round I have been threatened with guns dozens of
time...Every Time a cop was holding the gun, with "one up the spout" (it's "policy") and
finger on the trigger. Not once was there an arrest. Not once. Beatdachitoutta, well, several
times, kidnapped too, but never actually arrested. Actually pretty much a boyscout. And
white. Yes, the cops are azzhones, like Dylan said, the cops doaneed you and man they expect
the same.
I think the "problem" with the views here @ MoA in regard the "civil war" lies in
fundamental assumptions.
Simply try assuming that the US has ended, what you're seeing is denouement. Then forget
about it...it's like chemistry, and "da fat's in da fire". Outcome is backed in. Like the
corpse rotting back to it's constituent chemistry.
Igor Panarin's prediction, and also Deagle's prediction, may well be the proximate
situation when the reaction bombe cools off.
The fact that a delusional "ruling class" is at war with itself as well as the common
people stands as strong evidence...
The harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole, one of the greatest adventure
stories of the modern age.
In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the
Endurance
and
set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way
through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the
Endurance
became
locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was
finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest
seas to the closest outpost of civilization.
In
Endurance
,
the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous
voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.
The
book gave me several adrenaline rushes...it's that well written.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The
book gave me several adrenaline rushes...it's that well written.
Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2018
Verified Purchase
This is an amazing account of Shackleton's journey that went into
intricate details about the twists and turns every step of the way for this small group of brave explorers. It
reads like a thrilling fiction novel, but the fact that it is non-fiction makes it even more astounding. The
description really paints a true picture of the hellacious conditions that they continued to face time and time
again. This book really put into perspective what a challenge truly is. A simple headache that we might get now
is nowhere near getting your sleeping bag drenched and still having to sleep in it in temperatures near 0 when
you don't know how the weather or current is going to change while you try to sleep. Great read and really hard
to put down because even though you think you know what's going to happen, you still have to find out how.
Would highly recommend if you're looking for a good book that you will have trouble putting down.
38 people found this helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cold
Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2018
Verified Purchase
Very cold. Always cold. This is a very detailed (true) story about men
trying to survive in a very hostile environment in c. 1915. Stark and full of detail, the reader almost gets to
feel the cold, hunger and pain the crew experienced while trying to survive Antarctica and return to
civilization. it's amazing that anyone survived this ordeal let alone all of them. Sadly, many creatures and
peaceful animals paid the price for mans survival. The details often are so descriptive and redundant due to
the scope of the story, that it sometimes becomes repetitive and familiar. This is because of the constant
distress and horrible conditions the crew experienced for such a long time. It's a well documented and exciting
story with a bit of a history lesson that really held my interest. It's a popular book that is deserving of its
high ratings.
21 people found this helpful
There is no doubt in my mind that I would not be able to endure even one, the best, day of the unimaginable
hardships that the men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Exposition (1914-17) -- under the leadership of Sir Ernest
Shackleton -- struggled with for more than 400 days. They endured and survived some of the most incredible,
unbelievable, conditions ever experienced; and Alfred Lansing captures the urgency, the deprivation, and the
desperation, with spellbinding storytelling.
Recommendation: Best adventure story, ever. Should be read by all, especially those of high school age.
"In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age -- no
warmth, no life, no movement." (p. 46).
Basic Books. Kindle Edition, 268 pages.
16 people found this helpful
A
Riveting True Story of Adventure, Survival and Hope
5.0 out of 5 stars
A
Riveting True Story of Adventure, Survival and Hope
Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2014
Verified Purchase
In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton set out on an expedition to make the first
land crossing of the barren Antarctic continent from the east to the west coast. The expedition failed to
accomplish its objective, but became recognized instead as an amazing feat of endurance. Shackleton and a crew
of 27 (plus one stowaway) first headed to the Weddell Sea on the ship Endurance. Their ship was trapped by pack
ice short of their destination and eventually crushed. Forced to abandon ship, the men were trapped on ice
floes for months while they drifted north. Once they were far enough north that the ice thinned somewhat, they
were forced to journey in lifeboats they'd dragged off the ship. After six terrible days, they made it to
uninhabited Elephant Island; from there Shackleton and five other men set off in an open 22-foot boat on an
incredible 800-mile voyage across the notoriously tempestuous Drake Passage to South Georgia Island, where they
hiked across the island's mountain range to reach a whaling camp. From there, they returned in a ship to rescue
the men left behind on Elephant Island.
That these men were able to survive in the harsh, barren conditions of Antarctica, where temperatures
frequently fell below zero is amazing. It's nearly unimaginable that these men could survive for almost two
years, their lives marked by a seemingly endless stretch of misery, suffering, and boredom, not to mention the
threat of starvation. At every turn, their situation seems to go from bad to worse. If this were a work of
fiction, one would be inclined to claim the story was simply too far-fetched. But Endurance isn't just a tale
of misery, it is a vivid description of their journey, the dangers they faced, and the obstacles they overcame.
Through all of this, Shackleton has never lost a man.
Alfred Lansing's book, written in 1958 from interviews and journals of the survivors, is now back in print.
It's a riveting tale of adventure, survival and hope. It is also a rare historical, non-fiction book that is as
exciting as any novel. I've read a number of stories of survival and would rate this as the best of all I have
read. This is one of the great adventure stories of our time. Don't miss it.
Read more
45 people found this helpful
I
recommend this book to add to the collection of those ...
5.0 out of 5 stars
I
recommend this book to add to the collection of those ...
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2015
Verified Purchase
What a page turner. Lansing is a master for the description of those
explorers hardships, desire to follow Shacketon' orders. I kept saying to myself that there are few humans
today that are as tough as those men. I recommend this book to add to the collection of those books that give
us the knowledge of what it takes to conquer a goal.
51 people found this helpful
By
far one of the best books I've ever read, & I've read many!
5.0 out of 5 stars
By
far one of the best books I've ever read, & I've read many!
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2019
Verified Purchase
I just finished reading 2 of Grann's books - Lost City of Z & The White
Darkness. The latter is the story of Henry Worsley, the grandson of Frank Worsley one of the "extraordinary"
men in Lansing's Endurance. Grann suggested Endurance as a worthy read. Sir Earnest Shackleton & Frank Worsley
were two of some 20 men who incredibly survived a journey to Antarctica that went awry from almost its onset.
Two years later all hands were rescued through the extraordinary will of the men who found themselves at the
mercy of the elements. Lansing's research & grasp of the situation in which these men found themselves in
conjunction with his writing style has put this book at the top of my all time favorites! Fabulous! Fabulous!
Anyone 12 or older will be blown away by this true story & this writer!
4 people found this helpful
The Awan Brothers aided former DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz in making threatening voice modulated phone calls to
attorneys suing the DNC for election fraud.
Lt. Colonel Tony Schaffer told
Fox
News
that Schultz ordered the Awan Brothers to scare off the lawyers due to the threat they pose in exposing widespread
election fraud committed by the Democratic Party in 2016.
Disobedientmedia.com
reports: If substantiated, the claims may have significance for the DNC fraud lawsuit proceedings,
and add to the growing controversy surrounding the recent arrest of Imran Awan on bank fraud charges.
Jared Beck, and attorney litigating the DNC Fraud Lawsuit noted
on Twitter
:
But really, it's all about the cheap labor. And not just Europe.
The Ivory Coast used to be pretty prosperous. That meant that workers had high wages,
because that's what prosperity is, but that limited the profits of the rich, and we can't
have that. So the black elite imported massive numbers of muslim refugees as a source of
cheap labor, and by the time they had doubled the population the poverty resulting from this
tore the country apart in a bloody civil war. But that's OK, the right people made a lot of
money.
Brazil had slavery for much longer than the United States, and unlike the United States,
Brazil only got rid of slavery after massive immigration had boosted the population so much
that 'free' labor was cheaper than slave labor. Crushed to the limits, Brazil was stuck in a
capital-starved condition that it never pulled out of.
It's an old story. Look through history, whenever you hear about some place that imported
workers to do whatever, no that's not what happened, they imported workers to cut labor costs
– and the results for the average person have always been a reduction in living
standards and social disruption.
When southern American plantation owners imported back African slaves, it wasn't because
they thought the country needed more black people – they wanted cheap labor. And
centuries later, the damage that that policy has done to American society continues. And it
wasn't necessary – the free white north, without slaves and before mass immigration,
was the place that produced the greatest technological and industrial power the world had
ever seen – but there just wasn't enough cheap labor for a plantation owner to live the
life they wanted, so sad.
So what's happening in Europe is perhaps a bit extreme, but it's an old story. It's not
really about diversity or anti-white or any of that, that's just window dressing and
rationalization. It's about jamming in more and more people so wages will go down and rents
and profits will go up.
There is really no need for more people, no need for population replacement, and the low TFRs are not really a problem as the population numbers are naturally decreasing to meet the future needs of these advanced societies as they develop.
While it is useful to have the ideological background behind the policies that our leaders
are implementing compiled in one or a few volumes for the benefit of those members of the
intelligentsia with an interest in this, as far as ordinary people – the majority of
the voters – are concerned, one just needs to keep reminding them of the reality
And
the anecdote of the confrontation between Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy shows that Duffy has
a far better grip on reality than Brown, and even Brown confessed that she said "Everything".
Well almost everything in a nutshell.
The reality is that with increasing automation, increasing unemployment, and the
industrial/economic decline in developed countries, there is really no need for more people,
no need for population replacement, and the low TFRs are not really a problem as the
population numbers are naturally decreasing to meet the future needs of these advanced
societies as they develop.
That is all anybody needs to know to make sound decisions, and
racism, cosmopolitanism, diversity, cultural Marxism, ideologies of whatever colour, are just
so many red herrings.
In a sense the USA is a theocratic society with neoliberal religion as the state religion. Not that different from the
USSR whioch also was a theocratic society with some perversion of Marxism as the state religion.
I capitulate. Ron you are correct, we are post peak.
Post Peak
OK, now what?
It is so strange to be post-peak and not have high prices for crude,
and food.
I guess that will be coming.
note- biofuels should not be counted in liquids tally. It is a different animal, with the
source being dependent on farming and soil, not drilling and geology. Just because ethanol is
used for propulsion shouldn't matter- electrons and batteries aren't counted either, and
rightly so. Those belong in a different category- transportation energy.
I have argued for several years that peak oil is a low price phenomenon, not a high priced
phenomenon.
The most overrated law in economics is that of supply and demand. This law suffers from
what Richard Feynman called "vagueness" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
). The problem is that it is always satisfied and hence gives absolutely no information about
prices.
Another problem with market theory (beyond vagueness) is that it lacks a time axis.
The theory states that the relationship between price and supply moves along the demand
curve, but doesn't say how fast, just that "in the long run" the system will reach
equilibrium. Being in equilibrium means being somewhere on the demand curve.
So for example, if prices go up, the demand quantity is expected to go down. The question
is when.
Where does this go wrong? In classical market theory, for example, unemployment is
impossible, because if labor supply outstrips demand prices (wages) should fall until until
equilibrium is attained. This has been observed to be false on many occasions, including
right now.
As Feymann states in the video, "If it disagrees with experiment, it's WRONG! That's all
there is to it." Classical economics isn't just too vague, it is wrong.
Keynes joked about this that in the long term we'll all be dead. He meant equilibrium will
never be reached, so we are never on the demand curve. He argued that "sticky prices",
meaning the unwillingness to accept pay cuts, kept labor markets permanently out of
equilibrium.
It's worth pondering whether oil prices are "sticky" as well. Saying yes is saying the law
of supply and demand doesn't apply (in the short term). This year we have seen that both
OPEC's politicking and panicky traders can cause wild swings in price unrelated to supply and
demand.
Where market theory is vague is the shape of the demand curve. For example, if oil supply
can't meet demand in the near future, as some here have posited, how high will prices go?
Some claim it will go over $200, as people get desperate for it. Some claim that higher
prices would increase efforts to find and drill more, putting a lid on prices. Some claim the
shortage would crash the world economy, depressing prices. Some claim that faced with oil
shortages, the world would simply switch to EVs, or stop wasting the gunk on poorly designed
transportation systems, so prices would stay more or less the same.
Who is right? Nobody knows. So we don't know the shape of the demand curve. The theory is
hopelessly vague.
I have argued for several years that peak oil is a low price phenomenon, not a high
priced phenomenon.
Schinzy,
The price of crude oil is only part of the Peakoil phenomenon. How much is left in the
ground counts, however more important is at which velocity the remaining Gb can be
extracted. I am not a geologist, but common sense says that when an oilfield is well depleted
(50-70%) the most of the remaining barrels will be extracted at a much lower speed, even at
very high oilprices. With secondary and tertiary EOR technology most conventional oilfields
will not produce the same or close to the same amount of barrels/day as before for many more
years. That's also my conclusion from what I have read more than a decade ago.
Of course with high oilprices new, relatively small, oil fields will come online and (more
advanced) EOR will start in other fields, but no matter how you look at it: depletion never
stops. With most oilfields in the world past-peak, only a tremendous amount of money (needed
to develop EOR) can prevent world crude oilproduction from falling like a rock. And all those
EOR technologies will deplete oilfields faster. Big gains in the beginning, more
disappointments later.
Will there be significant amount of shale oil developed in the future in other countries than
the U.S. ? If so, is that wise, regarding an already existing runaway climate change ?
To be clear; none more deserving of dignity than the working people of America; they keep the nation running; they are America's
better angels; and, they deserve to be better paid.
Those are lofty words. But what to do when there is not enough cookies for everybody. That's when economic ruptures occur (with
one form being Minsky moments)
In a sense, going back to Joan Robinson, the idea of rupture within the notion of historical time can also be found in Keynes,
although with an important difference. Here the emphasis put on irreversibility implies of course qualitative change, and indeed
the emphasis is put on the changing conditions underlying economic phenomena. Thus, for example, Joan Robinson discusses the notion
of scarcity in relation to historical time:
The question of scarce means with alternative uses becomes self‐ contradictory when it is set in historical time, where
today is an ever-moving break between the irrevocable past and the unknown future. At any moment, certainly, resources are
scarce, but they have hardly any range of alternative uses.
The workers available to be employed are not a supply of "labor", but a number of carpenters or coal miners. The uses of
land depend largely on transport; industrial equipment was created to assist the output of particular products.
To change the use of resources requires investment and training, which alters the resources themselves. As for choice among
investment projects, this involves the whole analysis of the nature of capitalism and of its evolution through time. (Robinson
1977: 8)
Although the emphasis on rupture is introduced, in this historical time, "where today is an ever moving break between the irrevocable
past and the unknown future," the sense of the "break," of rupture, is confined within the problems of capitalist accumulation,
of the problems posed by the right proportions of, following Robinson's example, carpenters and coal miners.
History here does not present alternatives and defines itself clearly and simply as "historical objectivism" in the continuum
of the capitalist relation, as contemplation of "what really was," that is, the "irrevocable [capitalist] past," and speculations
about an "unknown [capitalist] future."
In Keynes, the unknown character of this future is translated in the status of the long run expectations of the investors which,
to emphasize the difficulty of their modeling, in turn depends on their "animal spirits."
In Keynes, rupture as revolutionary, transcendental, rupture exists only in the form of a threat, implicit in the theoretical
apparatus, in the difficulty to endogenize variables, in the reliance on "psychological factors," on investors' animal spirits
which mysteriously respond to hints of this historical rupture, in the recognition of the difficulty to model behavioral functions,
etc.
This threat is recognized through the status of long run expectations of the investors.
In the case of the liquidity trap, in which the infinitely elastic demand for money curve is used to portray a situation of
hoarding that is, of capital's refusal to put people to work the threat is hanging over investors who perceive a gloomy future
without hope for their profit.
The truly unknown future from the capitalists' perspective, the true moment of rupture in their temporal dimension, is recognized
in order to be avoided, to organize the rescue of the capitalist relation of work. For this reason Keynes is not talking about
given functional relations, and is presupposing a moving marginal efficiency of capital schedule (Minsky 1975.
The future is there to puzzle the investors in the present. The aim of economic theory is to inform economic policy to limit
the puzzle within the borders of the capitalist relation of work. Although Keynes' theoretical apparatus is presupposing uncertainty
for the future, this uncertainty is seen with the sense of urgency typical of a world in transition. In the discussion of the
postwar Keynesian orthodoxy, it will be seen how this sense of urgency was lost, and the concept of time in economic theory changed,
although it was far from returning to the "timeless models" of the classical period.
@ 95 another rolling stone that illuminates the US necrotic process...unregulated dumping
of radwaste
tinyurl[dot]com/v3pva55
Evidently they actually spray the stuff on roads and, well, it's puckininsane stupid.
"..thing in this stuff and ingesting it are the worst types of exposure," Stolz continues.
"You are irradiating your tissues from the inside out." The radioactive particles fired off
by radium can be blocked by the skin, but radium readily attaches to dust,..."
(Honestly, I know it's hard to believe, but several immediate neighbors, possibly 1/3 of
the town, actually expect to be levitated to heaven in "rapture". Thus, according to their a
priori assumption, the poisoning is perfectly ok."
Anyway, both the bizarre beliefs and the idiotic actions (including with radwaste) are,
like Trump, a product, a manifestation. We agree.
About Rockefeller - Corbett Report has a very deep examination of that family and their
less well-known policy set.
Wall Street is very story driven. They wasted a decade throwing money at tight oil and
lost billions. It's hard to see how this tight oil story gets resuscitated. The '10s saw free
debt, low regulatory regime, no effective alternatives to oil, skilled work force, entrenched
globalized oil markets, no pandemics, etc, and they STILL lost hundreds of billions. Wall
Street wants to lose their money in new ways. At least they get some novelty out of it.
I do not consider Canada, Brazil and Russia to be in the same category as the US. The US
has what I call "Sustained Surge Capacity". The other three don't. For a few years, starting
in August 2016, the US increased production at rate of more than 1 Mb/d, forcing OPEC to cut
back because the US, by itself was meeting annual world demand increases of 1 Mb/d to 1.3
Mb/d.
From August 2016 to November 2019, US increased production from 8,534 kb/d to 12,866 kb/d
an increase of 4,333 kb/d or an average increase of close to 1330 kb/d/yr. No other country
could or has done that. Does that capability still exist? I think that will be decided by the
future price of oil along with demand.
From Ron's chart, from August 2016 to November 2019, there was an increase of
approximately 6,000 kb/d. Russia, Canada and Brazil only contributed 1,567 kb/d of the 6,000
kb/d, slightly more than 1/3 of of what the US added.
In other words, I think that a world production minus the US chart is more useful in
assessing the probability of exceeding the November 2018 peak. On a world minus US chart, the
peak occurred in November 2016. That peak was exceeded in November 2018 because the US added
3,102 kb/d over those two years, offset partially by OPEC cutting back. Clearly the US will
be a major player in determining whether the November 2018 peak will be exceeded.
The only other countries that have some short term surge capacity is Saudi Arabia, Kuwait
and the UAE as shown in Ron's charts above. However their demonstrated surge capacity may be
more related to wells that were drilled and oil coming out of inventory and could not be
sustained for three years like the US did.
I think that there is a likelihood that the next peak oil will be lower than the November
2018 peak and it will be a question of whether increasing demand around 2023 to 2024 can be
met by supply and whether the associated increasing world oil prices begin to strangle world
economic growth.
Thanks Ovi, I agree with almost everything you say. The one place where I disagree is
here. You said: The US has what I call "Sustained Surge Capacity". I would make a
slight change in that statement. I would say: "The US had what I call "Sustained Surge
Capacity". Of course, we don't have that anymore.
That ended in December 2019 but the virus came along and disguised that point. Of course
we can increase from where we are today, but not past that December 2019 point.
There was a reason the rig count was dropping during the last half of 2019. There was a
reason crack spreads were being decommissioned and sold for scrap well before that peak.
All oil reservoirs contain a finite amount of oil. It is absolutely astonishing that some
people simply cannot understand that simple fact.
I grappled with that statement for a while and then I put it in because I still think that
the US has that sustained surge capacity. What I don't know is whether the remaining/dormant
SSC is large enough to exceed the 12,866 kb/d reached in November 2019. At that time the STEO
was projecting a small increase into 2020, indicating the US was getting close to peak
capacity.
I have no doubt that US production can increase from where it is today. My point was the
glory days are over for so-called "Saudi America". We will never get back to the point we
reached in November 2019. Therefore we will never be able to cause world oil production to
reach new highs.
"... $40s WTI and Brent are wholly unsustainable prices. I'd argue that $50s and $60s are also if growth is being sought outside of a few areas. ..."
"... SS, there is no doubt that the pandemic will hasten peak oil supply. Many shut-in wells will not re-open. Frac spreads are being sold for scrap. Rigs are being decommissioned. Plus we are still producing at 80 to 90% of former levels. That means depletion is still continuing. So when they do get around to producing flat out again, the oil will just not be there. ..."
"... close to 100,000 job losses in the oil industry, many folks in their 50s and 60s. Hard to see how they bring folks on for another boom with the loss of all that skilled labor. ..."
"... So, maybe $100 oil over a period of time could turn this tide, but sub-$50 WTI sure won't. ..."
"... Yes, the future is hard to predict. But absent some tremendous financial return potential, why would young people have any interest in making a career of US upstream E & P? ..."
OPEC peaked in 2016, Russia peaked in 2019, and the USA very likely peaked in 2019 also.
And the vast majority of all other nations have peaked also as evidenced by their continuing
decline. That should be enough evidence for anyone.
SS, there is no doubt that the pandemic will hasten peak oil supply. Many shut-in
wells will not re-open. Frac spreads are being sold for scrap. Rigs are being decommissioned.
Plus we are still producing at 80 to 90% of former levels. That means depletion is still
continuing. So when they do get around to producing flat out again, the oil will just not be
there.
As to the longevity of the pandemic, one can only guess. But things will never be back to
the free and easy ways of the past. International travel will never be back to what it once
was. There will be fewer travel vacations even within nations. The possibility of the virus
returning will forever be on everyone's mind.
Also close to 100,000 job losses in the oil industry, many folks in their 50s and 60s.
Hard to see how they bring folks on for another boom with the loss of all that skilled
labor.
Once that a, in most cases, curative combination of medicines is available and one or a
few very effective vaccins are registered and rolled out, it remains to be seen how 'normal'
life will get again.
I don't think the virus will be forever on everyone's mind. Already now many young people
have started to party like before the pandemic, even in Europe (infections rising in almost
all European countries, so a lot of 'Trumpites' and Bolsonarites' also in Europe).
When vaccines are widely available at least everyone who is planning to travel by plane
will be going to get a vaccin.
A good chance that vacations and air travel is close to normal somewhere in 2022 or 2023.
The pandemic will eventually subside an the US and other nations that have responded
poorly to the pandemic will eventually learn from nations that have responded relatively
better, compare Europe and US.
If peak supply is reached, but demand resumes 1% annual growth, I expect we will soon see
Brent at $65/bo+/-5 at minimum, by 2025 to 2030.
Dennis. Brent $65 in 2025-30 is only helpful if one or both of the following happens:
1. Capital markets continue to the pattern of 2015-19 and fund drilling that provides
marginal returns or losses, but has no hope of providing superior returns.
2. Some other new, economical supply source is discovered.
Low oil prices to 2025-2030 would seem to mean supply will be constrained unless one or
both of the above occur.
Conventional oil pretty much peaked in 2005.
I look at $10K invested in a major oil company in 2010. I look at $10K invested in a shale
company in 2010. I then compare that to the S&P 500 return since 2010, all other industry
groups, specific companies, etc.
Investing in oil is like investing in tobacco. The only allure is yield. Upstream E &
P will have to keep borrowing to pay the dividend even if oil returns to $50 Brent. Same with
$60 Brent.
Dennis. One thing that you are missing is just how poor the future of the upstream oil
industry is.
When the shale boom started, EV's were a pipe dream.
When the shale boom started, there wasn't widespread sentiment against oil. Global
warming/climate change was on the radar, but not like now.
BP is trying to remake itself in large part because they cannot find talented and skilled
younger workers who want to work for a fossil fuel company.
We have been in this industry since the 1970s. We have some of the best leases in our
field and have made more money in this industry than in our professions or in other
investments. There is a third generation in our family ranging from late teens to mid
twenties. None are interested at all in this family business/investment. Same for one of my
best friends who makes his living at this. Same for another, whose engineer son started
working with him out of college, but before oil crashed in 2014 left and took a job in a
"Green Energy" field.
Mike is in the same boat.
I know all of the major players in our field. All companies are family owned. There are a
total of four in all of those families working in oil and gas who are under the age of 50,
and those four are at or nearing 40, and started working in their family oil companies at
least over 15 years ago.
As I have posted before, our employees range from 47-61 years of age. The two we hired who
were in their twenties have both long ago left, and no longer work in upstream E & P.
We have participated in some Zoom meetings with the National Stripper Well Association.
Almost all on those meetings is old (50-80 years old).
We hope to sell out on the next recovery, if that ever comes. But we are concerned there
will not be any buyers.
So, maybe $100 oil over a period of time could turn this tide, but sub-$50 WTI sure
won't.
Yes, the future is hard to predict. But absent some tremendous financial return
potential, why would young people have any interest in making a career of US upstream E &
P?
I capitulate. Ron you are correct, we are post peak.
Post Peak
OK, now what?
It is so strange to be post-peak and not have high prices for crude,
and food.
I guess that will be coming.
note- biofuels should not be counted in liquids tally. It is a different animal, with the
source being dependent on farming and soil, not drilling and geology. Just because ethanol is
used for propulsion shouldn't matter- electrons and batteries aren't counted either, and
rightly so. Those belong in a different category- transportation energy.
I have argued for several years that peak oil is a low price phenomenon, not a high priced
phenomenon.
The most overrated law in economics is that of supply and demand. This law suffers from
what Richard Feynman called "vagueness" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
). The problem is that it is always satisfied and hence gives absolutely no information about
prices.
Another problem with market theory (beyond vagueness) is that it lacks a time axis.
The theory states that the relationship between price and supply moves along the demand
curve, but doesn't say how fast, just that "in the long run" the system will reach
equilibrium. Being in equilibrium means being somewhere on the demand curve.
So for example, if prices go up, the demand quantity is expected to go down. The question
is when.
Where does this go wrong? In classical market theory, for example, unemployment is
impossible, because if labor supply outstrips demand prices (wages) should fall until until
equilibrium is attained. This has been observed to be false on many occasions, including
right now.
As Feymann states in the video, "If it disagrees with experiment, it's WRONG! That's all
there is to it." Classical economics isn't just too vague, it is wrong.
Keynes joked about this that in the long term we'll all be dead. He meant equilibrium will
never be reached, so we are never on the demand curve. He argued that "sticky prices",
meaning the unwillingness to accept pay cuts, kept labor markets permanently out of
equilibrium.
It's worth pondering whether oil prices are "sticky" as well. Saying yes is saying the law
of supply and demand doesn't apply (in the short term). This year we have seen that both
OPEC's politicking and panicky traders can cause wild swings in price unrelated to supply and
demand.
Where market theory is vague is the shape of the demand curve. For example, if oil supply
can't meet demand in the near future, as some here have posited, how high will prices go?
Some claim it will go over $200, as people get desperate for it. Some claim that higher
prices would increase efforts to find and drill more, putting a lid on prices. Some claim the
shortage would crash the world economy, depressing prices. Some claim that faced with oil
shortages, the world would simply switch to EVs, or stop wasting the gunk on poorly designed
transportation systems, so prices would stay more or less the same.
Who is right? Nobody knows. So we don't know the shape of the demand curve. The theory is
hopelessly vague.
A comment posted on ^peakoil.com^ . Interesting .
"The price action of WTI shows it quite clearly that the non oil extracting part of the
economy can't afford to pay a high enough price that would allow the extracting, processing
and delivery of oil products to it.
It's that simple, most of the oil still in the ground will stay there unless somehow you
find a way to pay $100++ per barrel. The last 12 years has shown that we can't!
The best yearly average weekly price of WTI was right around $100
Average weekly price of WTI for years 2008 thru 2013 was $88.
Average weekly price of WTI for years 2014 thru 2019 was $53.
The trend is what it is and it shows no signs of changing, the price of WTI is still
hitting lower lows and lower high.
I have no idea what the future will bring but the next 3 years are going to be interesting
and not in a good way.
Have fun everyone."
Dennis,repeating myself ,the price of oil is going to trend down . Supply and demand
curves do not apply where the world^s economic system is now placed . Alimbiquated has done a
very good job explaining that .
Much of the fall in output of the other 9 is from Iran, Nigeria, Libya, and Venezuela,
much of that decline is due to political problems
No doubt it was. But political upheaval is part of the story, and always will be. There
will be political problems ongoing for decades. Dennis, if your model excludes political
problems, then you are living in a dream world.
Anyway, in addition to the political problems that you point out in those four nations,
which will most likely continue, we have the natural decline in the other five nations in the
chart below.
Yes and oil prices have been low from Nov 2018 until now, do you expect that to continue
for the next 10 years? I do not, perhaps that's the difference. 2025 to 2030 there is likely
to be a new peak for World C plus C centered 12 month average output probably 1 to 3 Mb per
day higher than the Nov 2018 peak. This assumes oil prices reach $64/bo or higher in 2020$ by
June 2030.
I seem to recall, not too long ago, various talking heads prattling on about how USA LTO
is now the new "swing producer"/source of swing supply. I guess we'll now get to see how well
it swings on and off, as swing producers are wont to do.
My WAG is that it doesn't swing back on so well, as the swing off phase seems to be damaging
(not just a tap you see), and when demand recovers after COVID, circa 2023, we'll see a price
run up. Perhaps it'll be a damaging price run up. 2023 will be in the middle of Biden's first
term, presumably.
And: Nigeria and Venezuela could ramp up their production only very, very slowly. They
could not stem the general trend. Lybia is too little to make any serious difference. The
only real wildcard is Iran. And it's the less probable to be played.
I capitulate. Ron you are correct, we are post peak.
Post Peak
OK, now what?
It is so strange to be post-peak and not have high prices for crude,
and food.
I guess that will be coming.
NOTE:
biofuels should not be counted in liquids tally. It is a different animal, with the
source being dependent on farming and soil, not drilling and geology.
Just because ethanol is
used for propulsion shouldn't matter -- electrons and batteries aren't counted either, and
rightly so. Those belong in a different category- transportation energy.
I have argued for several years that peak oil is a low price phenomenon, not a high priced
phenomenon.
The most overrated law in economics is that of supply and demand. This law suffers from
what Richard Feynman called "vagueness" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
). The problem is that it is always satisfied and hence gives absolutely no information about
prices.
Another problem with market theory (beyond vagueness) is that it lacks a time axis. The theory states that the relationship between price and supply moves along the demand
curve, but doesn't say how fast, just that "in the long run" the system will reach
equilibrium. Being in equilibrium means being somewhere on the demand curve.
So for example, if prices go up, the demand quantity is expected to go down. The question
is when.
Where does this go wrong? In classical market theory, for example, unemployment is
impossible, because if labor supply outstrips demand prices (wages) should fall until until
equilibrium is attained. This has been observed to be false on many occasions, including
right now.
As Feymann states in the video, "If it disagrees with experiment, it's WRONG! That's all
there is to it." Classical economics isn't just too vague, it is wrong.
Keynes joked about this that in the long term we'll all be dead. He meant equilibrium will
never be reached, so we are never on the demand curve. He argued that "sticky prices",
meaning the unwillingness to accept pay cuts, kept labor markets permanently out of
equilibrium.
It's worth pondering whether oil prices are "sticky" as well. Saying yes is saying the law
of supply and demand doesn't apply (in the short term). This year we have seen that both
OPEC's politicking and panicky traders can cause wild swings in price unrelated to supply and
demand.
Where market theory is vague is the shape of the demand curve. For example, if oil supply
can't meet demand in the near future, as some here have posited, how high will prices go?
Some claim it will go over $200, as people get desperate for it. Some claim that higher
prices would increase efforts to find and drill more, putting a lid on prices. Some claim the
shortage would crash the world economy, depressing prices. Some claim that faced with oil
shortages, the world would simply switch to EVs, or stop wasting the gunk on poorly designed
transportation systems, so prices would stay more or less the same.
Who is right? Nobody knows. So we don't know the shape of the demand curve. The theory is
hopelessly vague.
I have argued for several years that peak oil is a low price phenomenon, not a high
priced phenomenon.
Schinzy,
The price of crude oil is only part of the Peakoil phenomenon.
How much is left in the
ground counts, however more important is at which velocity the remaining Gb can be
extracted. I am not a geologist, but common sense says that when an oilfield is well depleted
(50-70%) the most of the remaining barrels will be extracted at a much lower speed, even at
very high oilprices.
With secondary and tertiary EOR technology most conventional oilfields
will not produce the same or close to the same amount of barrels/day as before for many more
years. That's also my conclusion from what I have read more than a decade ago.
Of course with high oilprices new, relatively small, oil fields will come online and (more
advanced) EOR will start in other fields, but no matter how you look at it: depletion never
stops.
With most oilfields in the world past-peak, only a tremendous amount of money (needed
to develop EOR) can prevent world crude oil production from falling like a rock. And all those
EOR technologies will deplete oilfields faster.
Big gains in the beginning, more
disappointments later.
Will there be significant amount of shale oil developed in the future in other countries than
the U.S. ? If so, is that wise, regarding an already existing runaway climate change ?
@Zarathustra p of the definition for decades now. Figure out how to break that one.
The globalist assumed that those of European tribes would be the natural creator of new
innovations once they lost their jobs to places like China. What they failed to understand
was ideas come from the work done on the factory floor. Take away the work, the collective
knowledge disappears. Also the young no longer learn from the elders. Now we have an
under-educated and over-educated Americans, who got their inflated self esteem ideas from
participation awards and insane school shrinks. Make matters worse, how many are on drugs due
to not living up to their self esteem ideal standards? Most is indeed lost. Sanity might be
able to make a comeback, however humility to admit to being wrong is not an American
thing.
The contempt for skilled workers, technicians and craftsmen, even engineers, held by many,
if not most, individuals with useless, easily obtained, and essentially worthless pieces of
paper labeled BA, MA or PhD has become palpable. It is not a good sign.
If this is genuine "global capitalism," and that's why are there so many international
monopolies. Monopolies cannot exist indefinitely without direct or indirect government
sanction and support.
Hands up those who think the election will only have a 'marginal' effect?
"Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics -- which can be
characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and
two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism -- offers
different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public
policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or
business-oriented. A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of
one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these
contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We
report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key
variables for 1,779 policy issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing
business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while
average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent
influence.
The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for
theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or
Majoritarian Pluralism. "
Hey there! It's me, the stock market. I know it's weird to write you like this, but I felt
like I needed to drop a quick thank-you note for everything you've done for me this year. I
mean, your big ol' balance sheet is almost $3 trillion larger since early March! You're backing
up the truck and loading it with Treasuries and corporate bonds and bond ETFs, all to keep the
competition to stocks from fixed-income yields as limited as Jim Cramer's understanding of me.
It's been a dream come true, honestly. I mean, fess up: Have you been reading my diary?!
... ... ...
So please do me a solid and keep this thank-you note in mind when you host your virtual
Jackson Hole summit. No cowboy stuff, OK? If I hear anybody mutter something about "irrational
exuberance," I swear I'm gonna blow my top and hurt a few of these Robinhood types, you got
that? The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. It's what I do -- and I'm good at it! But
right now, this is still a lot of fun for me...
It took balls for Carlson to have Anya Parampil on his show last night. He has had her on
before, so he knows what she is like she tells it like it is. He will get shit for that.
I don't think he agrees with everything she said but agrees with some of it.
@ThreeCranes trol -- China had already agreed to play ball, but was still gathering the
infrastructure. S. Korea and a few other nations took the work in the meantime.
Meantime, as Sam Francis (RIP) noted in the early nineties, Main Street USA turned into
dollar stores and flea markets and retail dumps and fast food pits.
Yes, nations that make things control the future. They also develop consumer economies.
Thus in a few more years stuff made in China be beyond the price range of the average
American.
American main stream media is not informing and reporting but is actually Goebbels-like
propaganda for the Democrats. Fox is only retaliating with opposing views. Imagine Walter
Cronkite being advocate for one party – that would be scandalous. However the present
insects on CNN, MSNBC, NYT or WP and other dishonest outlets have no guts to stand up against
their owners disloyalty to this country.
Insightful overview. Giraldi explores the most important topic in American life. And one
of the most neglected: MSM distortions, omissions, sanctimony, propaganda, deception and
gaslighting. Stomach-turning drek –all of it.
Americans are in a half-Zombie state because of what they see on TV, and cannot discuss on
social media.
Hollywood, elite media, and Big Tech are the gatekeepers [ of the neoliberal power].
The shysters at WPO and NYT think that once they have misdirected the voters for their
goal into voting for Joe Biden, it can pick up things where they left off and fix it without
any problems but what they don't realize is that the train has left the station and now it's
barreling down the dark abyss from where there is no return to safety.
It took balls for Carlson to have Anya Parampil on his show last night. He has had her on
before, so he knows what she is like she tells it like it is. He will get shit for that.
I don't think he agrees with everything she said but agrees with some of it.
@Tommy Thompson he military is responsible for or how Israel is treated, how corporations
are handed free billions upon billions, etc, and its largely business as usual. All the noise
about Trump the disruptor is just that, noise. He hasn't disrupted anything of note.
As long as the two political parties exist, voting is for people who want to believe a
lie. Deep down they know, absolutely know, that the system is rigged but they can't let
themselves fully believe that because that would mean there is no hope. They would realize
that they live in a sophisticated soft military dictatorship that has stolen $21 Trillion
dollars and is the actual gov't of the country. That realization is unpalatable and
hence rejected.
However the present insects on CNN, MSNBC, NYT or WP and other dishonest outlets have no
guts to stand up against their owners disloyalty to this country.
It's not a simple as that. All the media people know that it's a rotten system, but if
they step out of line – they lose their jobs – and make themselves unemployable
anywhere else.
IMO it's not a question of standing up – which is pointless – but using
organized subversion. After all, this is what Jewry have been doing for decades in targeting
Anglo run organizations and it works. It's your friend and collaborator who is really your
enemy.
hough it was quickly overshadowed by the big-ticket appearances of Barack Obama and Kamala
Harris, Elizabeth Warren's Tuesday address to the Democratic National Convention deserves some
consideration.
A probable VP nominee before the events of the summer made race the deciding factor, Warren
is an able representative of what might be called the "non-socialist populist" branch of the
Democratic Party. Her economic populism -- though it does have an unmistakably left-wing flavor
-- has caught the eye of Tucker Carlson, who offered glowing praise of her 2003 book The
Two-Income Trap ; her call for "economic nationalism" during the primary campaign earned
mockery from some corners of the Left and a bit of hesitant sympathy from the Right. A few days
ago in Crisis , Michael Warren Davis referred to her (tongue at least somewhat in cheek)
as " reactionary senator Elizabeth
Warren ."
There is some good reason for all of this.
As I watched the first half of Warren's speech (before she descended into the week's
secondary theme of blaming the virus on Donald Trump) I couldn't help but think that it
belonged at the Republican National Convention. Or, rather, that a GOP convention that
drove home the themes addressed by Senator Warren on Tuesday would be immensely more effective
than the
circus I'm expecting to see next week.
Amid a weeklong hurricane of identity politics sure to drive off a good number of moderates
and independents, Warren offered her party an electoral lifeline: a policy-heavy pitch
gift-wrapped as the solution to a multitude of troubles facing average Americans, especially
families.
It was rhetorically effective in a way that few other moments in the convention have been.
Part of this is due to the format: a teleconferenced convention left most speakers looking
either like bargain-bin
Orwell bogeymen or like
Pat Sajak presenting a tropical vacation as a prize on Wheel of Fortune. But Warren, for
one reason or another, looks entirely at home in a pre-school classroom.
The content, however, is crucial too. Warren grounded her comments in experiences that have
been widely shared by millions of Americans these last few months: the loss of work, the loss
of vital services like childcare, the stress and anxiety that dominate pandemic-era life. She
makes a straightforward case for Biden: his policies will make everyday life better for the
vast majority of American families. She focuses on the example of childcare, which Biden
promises to make freely available to Americans who need it. This, she claims, will give
families a better go of things and make struggling parents' lives a whole lot easier.
It's hard not to be taken in. It's certainly a more compelling sales pitch than, "You're all
racist. Make up for it by voting for this old white guy." It's the kind of thing that a smart
campaign would spend the next three months broadcasting and repeating every chance they get.
(The jury is still out as to whether Biden's campaign is a smart one.) This -- convincing
common people that you're going to do right by them -- is the kind of thing that wins
elections.
But there's more than a little mistruth in the pitch. Warren shares a touching story from
her own experience as a young parent, half a century ago:
When I had babies and was juggling my first big teaching job down in Texas, it was hard.
But I could do hard. The thing that almost sank me? Child care.
One night my Aunt Bee called to check in. I thought I was fine, but then I just broke down
and started to cry. I had tried holding it all together, but without reliable childcare,
working was nearly impossible. And when I told Aunt Bee I was going to quit my job, I thought
my heart would break.
Then she said the words that changed my life: "I can't get there tomorrow, but I'll come
on Thursday." She arrived with seven suitcases and a Pekingese named Buddy and stayed for 16
years. I get to be here tonight because of my Aunt Bee.
I learned a fundamental truth: nobody makes it on their own. And yet, two generations of
working parents later, if you have a baby and don't have an Aunt Bee, you're on your own.
Are we not supposed to ask about the fundamental difference between Elizabeth Warren's
experience decades ago and the experience of struggling parents now? Hint: she had a strong
extended family to support her, and her kids had a broad family network to help raise them. Not
too long ago, any number of people would have been involved in the raising of a single child.
("It takes a village," but not in the looney Clinton way.) Now, an American kid is lucky to
have just two people helping him along the way. As we've all been reminded a hundred
times, the chances that he'll be raised by only one increase astronomically in poor or black
communities.
Shouldn't we be talking about that? Shouldn't we be talking about the policies that
contributed to the shift? It's a complex crisis, and we can't pin it down to any one cause. But
a slew of left-wing programs are certainly caught up in it. An enormous and fairly lax welfare
state has reduced the necessity of family ties in day-to-day life to almost nil. Diverse
economic pressures have made stay-at-home parents a near-extinct breed, and left even
two-income households struggling to make ends meet. (Warren literally wrote the book on
it.) Not to mention that the Democrats remain the party more forcefully supportive of abortion
and more ferociously opposed to the institution of marriage (though more than a few Republicans
are trying real hard to catch up).
Progressive social engineering has ravaged the American family for decades, and this
proposal only offers more of the same. It's trying to outsource childcare to
government-bankrolled professionals without asking the important question: Whatever happened to
Aunt Bee?
Republicans need an answer. We need to be carefully considering what government has done to
accelerate the decline of the family -- and what it can do to reverse it. Some of the reformers
and realigners in the party have already begun this project in earnest. But it needs to be
taken more seriously. It needs to be a central effort of the party's mainstream, and a constant
element of the party's message. Grand, nationalistic narratives about Making America Great
Again mean nothing if that revival isn't actually felt by people in their lives and in their
homes.
If we're confident in our family policy -- and while it needs a good deal of work, it's
certainly better than the Democrats' -- we shouldn't be afraid to take the fight to them. We
should be pointing out, for instance, that Warren's claim that Biden will afford greater
bankruptcy protections to common people is hardly borne out by the facts: Biden spent a great
deal of time and effort in his legislative career doing exactly the opposite. We should be
pointing out that dozens of Democratic policies have been hurting American families for
decades, and will continue to do so if we let them. We should sell ourselves as the better
choice for American families -- and be able to mean it when we say it.
If we let the Democrats keep branding themselves as the pro-family party -- a marketing ploy
that has virtually no grounding in reality -- we're going to lose in November. And we're going
to keep losing for a long, long time.
Did Bill slept with Maxwell? You can expect anything from this sex addict...
Notable quotes:
"... During a fueling stop at a small airport in Portugal, Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell urged Davies to give the former president a massage. ..."
As if it weren't awkward enough for the party that bills itself as a defender of women to feature Bill Clinton at its
convention, photos of the ex-president with one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims surfaced on the day of his speech.
The UK's Daily Mail
published exclusive pictures on Tuesday showing Clinton receiving a massage in 2002 from 22-year-old Chauntae Davies, who was
allegedly raped by billionaire Epstein repeatedly over a period of four years. The
massage
occurred
while Clinton, along with actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, flew with Epstein on the pedophile's infamous
private jet, nicknamed the Lolita Express, on a humanitarian trip to Africa.
According to the
newspaper, Clinton complained of having a stiff neck after falling asleep on the plane. During a fueling stop at a small
airport in Portugal, Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell urged Davies to give the former president a massage. Clinton, who
was 56 at the time, then allegedly said to Davies,
"Would you mind giving it a crack?"
The
photos show Davies massaging Clinton's neck and shoulders as he leans back in his seat at what looks to be a small airport
lounge.
Davies, who worked for
Epstein as a masseuse, said Clinton was a
"perfect gentleman during the trip and I saw
absolutely no foul play involving him."
Nevertheless, the images serve as an untimely reminder of the many sexual misconduct allegations made against Clinton during
his years in politics and of his relationship with Epstein, a convicted sex offender who allegedly
killed
himself
last year at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York while awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges.
A Clinton spokesman has
said the former president knew nothing about Epstein's crimes and flew on the financier's jet only four times, but
flight
logs
showed that he traveled on the plane dozens of times in 2002 and 2003. Davies and other alleged victims said in a
2020
Netflix
documentary
on Epstein that he had secret surveillance cameras at his properties to gather blackmail-worthy dirt on his
powerful friends.
"The question is, why were they taking pictures of Bill Clinton receiving a massage?"
UK
journalist Paul Joseph Watson said on Tuesday on Twitter.
"And we already know the
answer."
The Daily Mail didn't say
where it obtained the exclusive photos. Maxwell is currently in jail in New York awaiting trial on charges that she
facilitated
Epstein's abuse
of girls as young as 14.
Other Twitter users suggested that far more incriminating pictures are being held back.
"Epstein
took pics and videos of everything, and the FBI has it all,"
one said. Another said:
"If
they took pictures of this, there are most definitely worse things recorded just waiting to come out against people."
Others said Clinton should
be kept away from the Democratic National Convention, including one who tweeted:
"Bruh,
no way they can let this man speak tonight."
Another said:
"And this guy is
headlining the DNC tonight. Can't make this up."
Africa Addio ( Goodbye Africa ) (1966), co-directed, co-edited, and
co-authored by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi of Mondo Cane fame, is a must-see
red-pill documentary for race-realists. Filmed between 1963 and 1965 in Kenya, Tanganyika,
Zanzibar, Rwanda, Angola, the Belgian Congo, and South Africa, Africa Addio chronicles
the exit of the British and Belgian colonial powers from Africa, as well as the attempts of the
Portuguese and South Africa whites to hold on.
Many of you will find it simply unbelievable, for reasons of style and content. Africa
Addio is so superbly filmed and edited that it seems in places like a feature film, not a
documentary. Riz Ortolani's lush Morricone-like music, as well as the magic of Italian dubbing,
reinforce this impression. But as far as I can tell, only one sequence was created entirely by
the filmmakers, and obviously so: a graveyard with headstones for white farms in the Kenya
highlands.
As for the content: the colonial worlds created by whites as well as the results of the
African takeovers seem equally surreal.
In the Kenya highlands, British farmers recreated English country life, complete with fox
hunts (although the quarry is an African runner carrying part of a frozen fox). The
headquarters of a British wildlife rescue operation looks like a set from a Bond movie or
The Thunderbirds . The beach in Capetown, with its high-rise hotels and beautiful
blondes surfing and sunning, looks like California or Australia. Surely it must all have been
staged. But no. White people actually did this.
The sequences in post-colonial Africa seem so surreal, terrifying, and deeply unflattering
to blacks that that movie has been denounced as racist propaganda. It definitely leads to
racist conclusions. But all of it appears to be real. Still, one wonders: If blacks really are
that bad, why did whites ever settle there? Why did whites give blacks power over them? And
why, in the name of all that is holy, are we allowing these people to colonize us today? But
again, it is all real.
The first thirty minutes focus mostly on Kenya. We see the trial of Mau Mau terrorists and
their accomplices, who slaughtered white families and mutilated their cattle. They also
tortured and killed baboons, for no fathomable reason. They are sentenced to life in prison. A
few years later, Jomo Kenyatta pardoned the Mau Mau. The white farmers of the Kenya highlands
are forced to sell. We see their houses and European treasures being auctioned off by Indian
merchants. Then we see their yards and gardens being bulldozed, their trees dynamited, to
create subsistence gardens for hundreds of blacks, who fill the European houses to overflowing,
covering everything in filth and smoke, and slowly dismantling the houses to burn in their
fireplaces -- since it is easier than fetching wood, and it does not occur to them that at some
point, the house will become unlivable. In a stunning sequence, we see Boer farmers from South
Africa who settled in Kenya returning home with their herds the way they came: in covered
wagons.
In colonial Kenya, blacks could look at white women but not touch. In free Kenya, blonde
British nannies become a status symbol for the black elites, and an old blonde whore does a
strip tease for a roomful of sweaty blacks. At the end, she offers "Bwana" the privilege of
popping off her pasties. Unreal? No.
Africa Addio is filled with unflattering contrasts between blacks and whites. The
white colonists are remarkably good-looking in Kenya, Angola, the Congo, and South Africa. The
Africans, many filmed in extreme closeups, are often hideously ugly, with alarmingly discolored
eyes and teeth. The filmmakers could be accused of seeking out exceptionally attractive whites
and ugly Africans, but there are a lot of goofy and plain-looking whites as well. There are
scenes of European order and grace: soldiers on parade -- a ceremony in a church where the
former colonial flags are being entrusted to the clergy -- contrasted with noisy crowds of
Africans swarming and rioting. We cut from disciplined and well-dressed British soldiers to
clownish, shambling African troops and policemen. Post-colonial Africa began as a farce, a
grotesque parody of European civilization.
The bodies of Arabs killed in the violence
following the Zanzibar Revolution as photographed by the <i>Africa Addio</i> film
crew. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Then it descended into tragedy. Throughout the continent, African rebel groups, usually
backed by the USSR or Communist China, used terrorism to eject whites. Then, once the whites
were gone, they went on to massacre their tribal enemies. In Zanzibar and Tanganyika, the enemy
was "Arabs," meaning fellow Africans who had converted to Islam under the rule of Arab slave
traders along the East African Coast. In 1964, the newly independent government of Zanzibar was
overthrown by a Communist-backed revolution, and up to 20,000 Arabs were massacred. The
filmmakers hired a plane in Tanganyika to document what was happening. They were fired upon
when they tried to land but over two days managed to film from the air burned out villages,
columns of Arabs been marched to their deaths, as well as mass graves and random heaps of
corpses. One day, we see pitiful refugees fleeing to the beaches; the next day the beach is
littered with countless corpses. It seems that genocide is part of every Communist
revolutionary playbook. That would include the playbooks of the communists that Donald Trump is
allowing to run amok in America today.
The filmmakers were on the ground during the Arab massacres in Tanganyika. At one point,
they were pulled from their car by soldiers and put against a wall. They were about to be shot
when someone looked at their passports and said. "Wait, these aren't whites. They're Italians."
The birth of a meme?
We also visit Rwanda, where we see the aftermath of a genocide of Hutus against Watusis. I
guess there were many. We see Watusi survivors and their cattle streaming into exile in Uganda,
as well as rivers choked with the corpses of those who were not so lucky. It is slick and
cinematic, but the blood and bodies were real.
In the Belgian Congo, we see European troops and mercenaries repelling rebels who seized
Stanleyville. The aftermath is sickening. The rebels had raped, killed, and tortured white
nuns, nurses, and schoolchildren. They had also tortured, killed, and sometimes eaten 12,000
fellow Africans. We see European families who had narrowly escaped rape, torture, and death.
Later, the filmmakers fly over a mission school where the rebels were holding nuns and
children. A few days later, the mission has been burned to the ground. The grounds are littered
with the corpses of nuns. Fortunately, the rebels were rather easy to defeat. They believed
that magic made them immune to bullets. We see close up that this is not so as we witness the
summary execution of two rebels. The filmmakers were actually accused of staging these murders,
as if the Africans needed any incentive given the carnage we have seen already.
Two sequences deal with the mass slaughter of wildlife after whites pulled out and could no
longer protect them. It is totally sickening. There are two kinds of hunters: whites and
blacks. The white hunters are seen mowing down fleeing zebras by towing a rope between two
jeeps. Another has a helicopter drive an elephant toward him before shooting it down. I have no
patience for people who kill big game, even on sustainable game reserves, even if they are
white. No, especially if they are white.
But the most sickening spectacle is of thousands of blacks cordoning off huge areas and
killing everything that moves by chucking spears at them. The attempts of white
conservationists to save the victims of the slaughter are touching but mostly futile. Again,
you will wonder, "Can this be real?" But the blood is real, the fetal hippos and elephants
ripped from their mothers' wombs are real.
The final sequence is set in South Africa, Africa's "sanctuary for whites." It begins with a
huge crowd of uniformed black children running toward a low set camera. The narrator declares
that five blacks are born for every white in South Africa. It is a very effective way of
communicating the demographic problem. Here comes the future!
We then visit the mines of Pretoria, where armies of blacks mine gold and diamonds. Although
ordinary whites tried to build a nation in South Africa, it was always a colony, an economic
zone in which a tiny oligarchy imported cheap nonwhite labor to heap up gold and diamonds. The
lure of cheap labor plus high black fertility doomed South Africans to demographic eclipse and
political impotence. The film ends with the Cape penguin colony, marooned far from their home
in Antarctica. The analogy with whites is obvious. We never belonged there.
Africa Addio is a strange and sobering masterpiece. I highly recommend it as a tool
for red-pilling young whites about race.
What drugs are you doing? Mao and his merry band of communist have the blood of 80 million
of their one people on their hands. This yet to count the Uighur.
It's being filmed as we speak and has been going on since Rodney King and the advent of
24/7 news and social media. It's hard not to ask where is all this heading.
Are there winners and losers?
Will our black overlords be as merciful as we have been to them.
There is no turning back from here.
All we can do is survive and get away from the savagery.
Two sequences deal with the mass slaughter of wildlife after whites pulled out and could
no longer protect them. It is totally sickening. There are two kinds of hunters: whites and
blacks. The white hunters are seen mowing down fleeing zebras by towing a rope between two
jeeps. Another has a helicopter drive an elephant toward him before shooting it down. I
have no patience for people who kill big game, even on sustainable game reserves, even if
they are white. No, especially if they are white.
I watched this film on Bitchute and these were the sequences that filled me with a
despondent speechless rage.
No animals will survive the blacks in Africa. What a sour stupid irony that the SJWs who
worship Negros pretend that they love animals. There was a POS black shaking a puppy by his
neck in the BLM riots (Beat Loot Murder) and the MSM never aired it.
Watching this movie ( it was sagely recommended by a poster here) was utterly enthralling
and horrifying. You have to watch it.
As you watch, you understand that blacks are deviant, dangerous and deranged on a cellular
level. They can't be trusted, helped or managed. Without massive global infusions of wealth
and planned migration, natural selection would have done its work. The world should let
it.
@Anon n it through the
herd. They break their legs, leaving them broken. This is black and white men.
Running down and exhausting an elephant with a helicopter and then shooting it with a high
power assault rifle is no skill. It's blood lust. It's cowardice.
To kill for the sake of watching something die is sociopathic. What other desire does it
fulfill?
Those animals have no habitat, and then are stalked by brainless blacks
–truly– the elephants are smarter, more graceful and loyal.
Give me one million elephants over those troglodytes.
I don't know about Africans, but I have to give credit where credit is due, a great deal
of African Americans have beautiful teeth. Funny thing, I never see Blacks at the dentist or
here Blacks talk about going to the dentist. Sure, there are Blacks with awful teeth and no
doubt some of them have false teeth or even implants since Blacks now have a lot of good
paying jobs thanks to affirmative action laws. I spent a great deal of time in Haiti while in
the USCG, but I never paid attention to the typical Haitian's choppers. Look at a lot of
African American's teeth, they look very white, maybe that is due to their dark skin, but
they also look straight and strong looking. Sure, you can point out some Blacks with bad
teeth, but the majority have better teeth than Whites. Give the poor saps that much, other
than that and playing football, basketball and running, they really don't have too much else
to brag about.
@Anon sick f*ck takes
pride in killing a beautiful animal like a lion or a noble giant like an elephant for sport?
Hell, I have no idea how anyone kills a deer, but at least they eat the deer so that can be
excused. Of course, only a few people actually have to depend on hunting to feed themselves
or their family in the year 2020, but IF you eat what you kill, at least I can see the reason
behind it. Some of these rich f*cks that go over to Africa and think they are proving their
manhood by shooting a lion from a safe distance more than likely have problems in the sack or
lack a reasonable sized penis.
The US military has quietly taken over most of Africa the past ten years while destroying
three nations on the Neccon hit list: Libya, Somalia, and Sudan.
I honestly don't see that, although you're right about looking whiter against their skin
(as in the slang term "shines" alternating with "darkies"). I see them with buck teeth and
that gap in the front (Tracey Morgan eg) although of course some Whites have that too
(Letterman, Lauren Hutton). But btw military dentistry and welfare, perhaps they do get
pretty good dentistry overall.
As per South Africa, why didn't the whites there just hive off a small area by the coast
for themselves and leave all the rest of South Africa for the various black groups? It seems
to have worked for Israel, more or less.
Let us say you have the money to live overseas. Americans are not terribly liked. If
you're some rural hick who wears cheesy cowboy costumes with Bolo ties and a hat and boots
you're going to have things thrown at you on the streets of Sydney or London or Europe.
Eurofags are are so stupid they assume all Americans vote for George Bush and support wars in
the ME. In Southeast Asia, you are relatively free of this. But if you immigrate to
Australia, start pretending to be a Canadian.
White women deserve black men for betraying their race with the birth control pill and
suffrage. Any settling of the Black Question is going to necessitate the settling of the
White Woman Question. Most whites should only be looking at slavic wives, I think. I am quite
happy with my Tartar one.
We here in China made the critical mistake of giving them contraception. They rewarded us
by going off to America for university and getting railed by every white, black, Persian, and
latino they could -- much like yours. Thankfully, we will never let them whiff a ballot
box.
The lure of cheap labor plus high black fertility doomed South Africans
Doomed ordinary South Africans.
As we are seeing repeated in the whole US/UK/Euro etc., the "lure of cheap labor" only
gulled the wealthy class that use "nations" as pump-and-dump operations.
So they finish with S. Africa, started on the USA. After the states are totally drained
(getting there real fast) they'll move to Canada and Australia and other places that will be
congenial. For awhile. Then the next victim gets destroyed and the fatcats get in their
private jets to their tax havens and secure bunkers and cast around for the next victim.
Places like Japan, S. Korea, China are remain essentially mercantile and are safe for that
reason. Only the white man ever bought the nonsense of "free trade" and "cheap labor" and
both are weapons against their own workers.
@Trinity e congo. All
these american blacks get husky dental or other similar free health/dental in their state of
residence. husky dental covers everything for free including braces ,so don't tell me why
blacks in america have good teeth.Especially since all the shit food they eat. And as far as
playing football, basketball ,this is only because Whitey invented these modern sports for
them to play. So once again it is always Whitey that brings these evolutionary throwbacks
into the modern world. Without Whites, evolution,nature,whatever,would have taken care of
blacks .They would have been culled as nature intended.
@TKK e went on a
Quixote-type quest to save the elephants.
Too gloriously nuts for the fifties, it bombed. But it was ahead of its time for two
reasons:
1. Only Europeans care about preserving nature -- in any way at all.
2. What you see in The Roots of Heaven is French Equatorial Africa. Not the
Afro-run disaster areas you'll see today. There was law, order, peace. And the film also has
a glimpse of the future in the form of an African revolutionary who's a pretty good preview
of what was already replacing law, order, peace.
@Sphinx r dying day.
And yet here we have such people, on this blogsite, where most of us understand the nature of
the lies we have been fed since the 1930s ('Hitler was the acme of evil'; 'Germany started
WWII'; 'Mao killed tens of millions for no particular reason'; 'Saddam had Weapons of Mass
Destruction'; 'The Twin Towers were brought down by aircraft fuel oil, and the planes flown
by Arabs armed with box-cutters'; 'The Uighurs in NW China are being suppressed and
enslaved'.
None of the above tropes is true. In fact, they are demonstrably false. Yet 'normies'
believe them all. How about you?
I watched this years ago, although I had to skip some parts. Some amazing and unbelievable
scenes, but others (especially the ones with animals, violence and dead people) are hard to
watch.
I think it's not easy to find it in its full uncensored version.
I am not sure it would work as a "red pill" today, those seem images from another world,
both for whites and for blacks.
I think the film is considered "racist" because it sympathizes with the colonizers,
something which would be very unusual today. But I think the film is not totally negative or
depreciative about African blacks, just mostly realistic.
I just hope no one has to film Europa Addio, America Addio, etc
Another film about Africans in the same vein (although much less interesting or
well-done), is the "Vice Guide to Liberia", which was actually done by liberals who regretted
it afterwards.
It seems that genocide is part of every Communist revolutionary playbook. That would
include the playbooks of the communists that Donald Trump is allowing to run amok in
America today.
Glad I'm not the only one to fear this coming our way, but it would be helpful if many
more of us could grasp that while we dislike cancel culture, those espousing it see it as a
waypoint to a grim final destination. We dislike them; they want us dead.
It seems that genocide is part of every Communist revolutionary playbook. That would
include the playbooks of the communists that Donald Trump is allowing to run amok in
America today.
How would DT go about stopping Communists from "running amok" in America if this is indeed
the case? He doesn't control the Democratic party nor the media which panders to it.
If the human race -- all of our ancestry -- walked off the African continent at some point
in our history and headed north and then to the east what could the genetic differences be
between blacks and whites often cited as the reason for the high levels of black crime today?
A rational explanation or reference material illustrating one would be appreciated.
For a balanced perspective consider the divergent stories of Southern and Northern
Rhodesia.
In Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) , whites were too few to resist black takeover. Race
relations after independence were amicable and a white man was even elected Vice President in
the 2010s.
In Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) , whites fought until they were defeated militarily
by 14 year old soldiers under the leadership of Robert Mugabe. Surprisingly, Mugabe was quite
reasonable in the first 20 years after independence towards the farmers he had defeated. He
allowed them to keep their property and farm. But the white farmers could not come to terms
with losing to blacks and acted like they had a strong negotiating position. They didn't want
to give away any of their land to help Mugabe placate his constituents. ( If the whites
were so red pilled from living in Africa during the post colonial transition why were they so
stupid to do that? ) Finally in 2000, Mugabe lost patience and expropriated the property
of 98% of the white landowners (one of the only exceptions was Prince Harry's white
girlfriend's father who cooperated with Mugabe and had bad land). Although it was
economically catastrophic during the first decade after taking the land, the black farmers
eventually got the hang of it. Now 100,000 black farmers are producing more tobacco on their
small plots than the white landowners could in an average season. The white landowners were
generally lazy and not interested in using all of their land or couldn't finance expansion.
Whatever the excuse they called the waste of land to be conservation.
There is a scene from "Africa Addio" in which a black woman who had been a maid for a
white family is on trial, after letting her black male friends into the house to slaughter
her employers, who had accepted her as part of the household. To her, "independence" meant it
was her house now, and she could preside over their executions. This is one of the scenes
that seems as if it were from a feature film, and may have been one of the reasons Jacopetti
and Prosperi came in for such legal and political grief. After all, it was in a courtroom,
and the camera crew were obviously invited to film the scene. However, the woman is not
acting. She is completely uncomprehending and vacant, as she looks at the camera stupidly.
She cannot grasp why she is being punished. When recommending this film to a much younger
friend, I described this scene, and exclaimed, "The woman does not even look human!" This
was, in effect, my appalled summation of the overall impact that this movie should have on
white viewers, but I have learned not to make such outbursts, as they tend to cause one's
interlocutor to end the conversation while backing away slowly. Later, my young friend
watched the film, and began to understand what I was getting at.
Sadly, Jacopetti's later feature film "Goodbye, Uncle Tom" seemed like an elaborate apology
for "Africa Addio" to the Left, by rhetorically enshrining black rage much in the way that
Tarantino's "Django" did decades later.
@Trinity have to work
to stay alive, but the bolsheviks add the nice touches of psychological warfare, the power of
the rumour preceding the Righteous Wave of revolutionaries approaching over the unseen
horison. There are some horrifying woodcuts from the time the Bolsheviks subjugated the
Russians. When they discovered all the mineral riches under African soil, the Agricultural
population must be dispensed with, as a contented rural population always wins over the
liberal urbanites. Hence the destruction of farmers and wildlife.
As for the rest of the racist invective of the rest of you, grow up, you are partaking in the
next round of "le's go gedd'em heedins, boyz!!!" Just like your Bolshevik masters have
trained you.
We get it. You like hunting. I think the author has mass slaughter in mind. Or killing for
the sake of a trophy.
Most people don't disagree with hunting if it's for food. Sport is different. Which isn't
a truly accurate description. Fat, out of shape guys in camo aren't athletes.
Anyway, nothing wrong with hunting for meat to eat.
The footage is stunning but what the film needs is narration and an explanation (honest of
course) for what you are seeing ,most(99.9%) of Americans have no idea about what happened in
africa after the Europeans left.
You can find the movie here, but buyer beware. You will need a torrent client to download
the movie. Very important that you have some decent anti-virus software on your device before
you hit the link.
The demise of the traditional White Christian societies in the world today can be directly
attributed to colonization of the swarthy cultures no need to glorify the film!
Yep, I watched that movie/documentary – And the same people that profat from
Africa's wealth, are the same tribe that profated on Russia, Europe, Asia and is looting the
America's. Also, the same tribe is most likely responsible for the massacres of both Blacks,
Europeans, Asians and Whites, in order to cover their tracks. And yep, they want the whites
in America and Europe destroyed, just like in Africa. They've had Centuries of experience,
with some pretty cutthroat accomplices– but rich – followers.
It seems that genocide is part of every Communist revolutionary playbook?
Genocide is part of every Capitalist playbook, too.
The Commie movement of the last century and this one was conceived and paid for by a
"chosen" set of powerful capitalists so it should be as plain as the nose on one's face that
there is about as much difference between them as between Democrats and Republicans.
I hate hunting and in particular trophy hunting. Those who hunt for fun are sick sadist
blood thirsty cunts. And I certainly far more respect for a beautiful innocent animal than
sick fucks who murder them for fun.
There's also Sir Richard Francis Burton's Wanderings in West Africa , available
free on the Internet, which documents racial relations along the west coast of Africa 150
years ago. The blacks in English-controlled areas were innately expert at entrapping
Englishmen disembarking from the ships, for which the penalties imposed on whites were
severe. This is not unlike these blacks in America setting up whites, not to mention the
knee-taking cops, with the "hands up, don't shoot" or "peaceful protest" scenarios we see
being enacted everywhere. This is also a variation on the same ploy as blacks doing that
shuckin' and jivin' as they axe you a question intended for no other purpose than sizing up
your vulnerability. Never fall for it and let one of these savages move into striking
distance within your space, as that white fellow working in Macy's found out too late.
It was inevitable we'd finally witness the execution of Cannon Hinnant for being a white
child and the scene in Portland of the white truck driver encountering a "peaceful protest"
and then, to use a phrase from Camp of the Saints , being literally "stomped into a
puddle of his own blood in the street" after being torn from his truck. We should expect the
recent BLM trial run in Hugo, Oregon to serve as the model for blacks not only not
being turned away from suburban areas, but getting in with a police escort; getting
protection from knee-taking cops taking out their emasculation on innocent whites who will be
their own families soon enough; and, streets lined with white women and their children waving
little BLM flags and their prize school essays denouncing themselves and their parents for
what amounts to nearly 100% black-on-white violence and butchery.
Blacks and their DNC/MSM handlers have imposed on whites the need to treat every encounter
as a possible Cannon Hinnant encounter, and yet blacks demand we accept the opposite as the
case. There can be zero accommodation with blacks from now on since their brazen lies mean
death for whites. At some point, it would be wise to never be found alone where there might
be a group of blacks. Neighborhood watch groups in suburbia and rural areas will need to fire
warning shots to make it clear that any potential black mobs have had fair warning to turn
around and go back to wherever they were bused in from. We need to start talking strategy
from now on, knowing the with the Republicans and White House at our back we're facing a war
on two fronts.
It was never a nation and was always a colonial project. Those in charge of white South
Africa chose cheap labour and high profits over safety and community. The Israelis have not
made this mistake. The nation was founded in reaction against old stereotypes of the Jew as
profiteering capitalist and middleman.
Of course, as with all things, there is more complexity than is implied in this dichotomy,
but you have your explanation.
People Republic of China: 73,237,000 victims. Source: R. J. Rummel: China's Bloody
Century, Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900, Transaction Publishers, 1991. Plus Rummel's
correction in 2005.
A dentist once informed me that there is a biological relation between hair color and
teeth color. Redheads have the yellowest teeth and black haired people have the whitest. No
idea if that's legit, but it does comport with experience.
Then it descended into tragedy. Throughout the continent, African rebel groups, usually
backed by the USSR or Communist China, used terrorism to eject whites.
@Big Dan pray-painted
big orange X's on the dairy herd at the start of hunting season, so the idiot, liquored up
city folk from DC and Pittsburgh who invaded our county with their thousand-dollar Mossburgs
wouldn't try to murder them. Lots of locals took deer (illegally) year-round because they
were an important food source. That is legitimate hunting: the ethic was never to kill
something you weren't planning to eat. Well, all right, so we didn't eat groundhogs, but I
shot them so the livestock wouldn't break their legs in their burrows, and the cats always
got the internal organs and the dogs got the carcasses.
Incredible! I would really like to watch it. Would you happen to know where I can find a
DVD copy? I want to show this to friends but I don't want to just kick a YouTube link over to
them in an email (I think I have found it on YouTube, in fact) https://youtu.be/V355OG77SQM
Same with Chinese people in Asia, Africa and beyond. Every year in North America, many black
bears are illegally killed for their gall bladders because help make penis strong or
whatever. Rhinos and elephants in Africa and tigers in Asia suffer the same fate.
Only White people care about nature and the environment. Absent White people, many, many
species will permanently disappear. One of the most disheartening things about this "anti
racist" madness has been seeing environmentalists, people who should know better, embracing
it.
I watched both Africa Addio and goodbye Uncle Tom, a shokumentary by the same duo some years
ago. Some of the scenes in Africa addio must be real footage, but there are similar scenes in
goodbye Uncle Tom which are clearly staged. Goodbye Uncle Tom, while clearly fictional in
parts, is hilarious for the subtext. "What does that have to do with anything?" Lol! The
Italians were a spiritually unconquered people for a while. What does it mean when the blacks
are helping the whites to capture their own people?
@Jeff
Stryker fellow Semites (and also they don't view Islam as an enemy, to them Christianity is
anathema, White Christians are "Amalek", Muslims are not, Jesus was always the central target
of Jewish enmity, Muhammad was never one) despite all the wars and perpetual conflict. Once a
Hungarian Jewish woman wrote commenting on an obscure Hungarian blog that she feels being much
closer to a Palestinian Arab Muslim than to any "Anti-Semitic" Hungarian. A rare occassion of
sincerity.
Don't get fooled by anti-islamic propaganda of the neocon jews, that's only for consumption by
Gentile white nationalists.
Yep. The Asians (Chinese) are even worse than the Africans. They will kill (and eat) without
pity anything that walks (or crawls)!! Or use it for their weird medicine. Chinese + Africans =
bye bye wild animals in Africa.
The Uncle Tom movie was done for the only reason that "Africa Addio", even then, was
considered "racist", so the filmmakers had to atone for their sins. I haven't watched it, but
it's probably kind of silly, while Africa Addio is still relevant today
(Lot of Blacks in Italy right now!!!! Coming in boats every week! Blacks destroying the once
beautiful country!!!! ITALIA ADDIO!!! )
@anonymous te that
Zimbabwe is unlikely to gain new financing because the government has not disclosed how it
plans to repay more than $1.7 billion in arrears to the World Bank and African Development
Bank. International financial institutions want Zimbabwe to implement significant fiscal and
structural reforms before granting new loans. Foreign and domestic investment continues to be
hindered by the lack of land tenure and titling, the inability to repatriate dividends to
investors overseas, and the lack of clarity regarding the government's Indigenization and
Economic Empowerment Act."
@Anonymous y're going to
arrest us for standing up for ourselves in front of our own house, on our own property, then
its time to adopt guerilla tactics. We need to conceal ourselves like the Minutemen did. The
present day "shot heard round the world"* will come from a white suburbanite's rifle.
*"The shot heard round the world" is a phrase that refers to the opening shot of the Battle
of Concord on April 19th, 1775, which began the American Revolutionary War and led to the
creation of the United States of America." Wiki
The British used German mercenaries, the Hessians. Today's occupying Jews use blacks.
"The PCI was founded as the Communist Party of Italy on 21 January 1921 in Livorno by
seceding from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci led the
split. Outlawed during the Fascist regime, the party played a major role in the Italian
resistance movement. It changed its name in 1943 to PCI and became the second largest political
party of Italy after World War II, attracting the support of about a third of the vote share
during the 1970s. At the time, it was the largest communist party in the West, with peak
support reaching 2.3 million members, in 1947,[10] and peak share being 34.4% of the vote (12.6
million votes) in the 1976 general election. "
Having lived in Africa I can tell you looking at the film is one thing. Actually being there
and seeing the disintegration is another.
As I have said in many of my previous comments, the "AFRICAN ?? American, whatever that
means, who glorifies his heritage needs to take a trip back to the old country. There he will
cone face to face with his "Roots" and these realities which are by no means exhaustive. Call
these the 10 commandments of Africa LOL
1. There are no social programs and unemployment is rampant
2. Blacks hate other blacks more than the white man ever could hate a black man
3. There are slums, misery and poverty beyond the scope of one's imagination
4. The Police or Military will fuck you up with cell phones whirring and witnesses galore
faster than a white cop in the US will "shoot down" a black man
5. Crime in all its forms is out of control
6. Disease and hunger is a part of every day life
7. The witch doctor is fully employed and slavery still practiced
8. Bribery and corruption are well entrenched.
9 Nepotism, family and tribal connections are everything ie if your name is LeMarcus Duncan and
the Dictator's name is Ngoro Babongo you are out of everything including luck
10. The legal system and jails are of course not geared toward rehabilitation or a comfortable
stay
Upon return to the US, our "Frican American brothers will be very grateful to the Crackers
for forcing them to come to the US.
That said, one need not spend money or time on the movie. We only need to take our noses out
of our cell phones and tool around the black areas in this our beloved USA. The observant
traveller will note that in every borough of New York for example, there are fine brownstones
built back in the day by wealthy whites. These days many have been restored by whites and
rented to whites. Many however are tenements destroyed by blacks with black tenants who (and
one does not want to be crass) pay no rent.
As the world turns and the sun sets eternally in the west, one hundred years from now, we
Unz commenters will all be worm food and a new Unz type site will proclaim some must see film
by an esteemed film maker entitled "Blackrica: How Blacks Fucked up the US"
Teeth aren't supposed to be as pure White as Ginger skin. Black Africans may have better
teeth in the jungle but with access to skittles, grape soda, ect. forget about it.
Suggestion to the author, "Goodbye Uncle Tom" aka "Farewell Uncle Tom." This film was made
in the early 1970's and PURE ANTI-WHITE PROPAGANDA. In his book, "My Awakening," Dr. David Duke
describes how he and a couple of friends went into a theater filled mostly with Blacks to view
this movie back in the day. It had some violent scenes where Blacks where brutally murdering
Whites, the Blacks were cheering, "kill Whitey," etc. Dr. Duke and his friends hightailed it
out of there right before the very end to escape a possible beating or worse from the charged
up crowd. I checked the film out on JewTube back in the day when you could watch free full
length movies on JewTube. It was truly a disgusting piece of trash and anti-White bullshit that
clearly was made to send Blacks into a frenzy and indoctrinate them to hate Whitey to the
core.
@Colin Wright hat if I'm
not going to eat it, it's left alone. Trophy hunters make me think of Hemingway
manqué and I don't have much use for them to be honest. For some reason or other,
trophy hunters seem kind of "gay" to me, the types that try and impress that they're "real men"
in spite of working in offices to fund their fantasies. It's like hedge fund managers who take
up fly fishing to prove that they're some sort of aristocrats in spite of their
nails-on-the-blackboard accents. No doubt they wear clothing designed by Ralph Lifschitz (aka
"Lauren"),Mr. Brideshead Revisited himself.
@Marcali naman, one of
Unz most prolific and idiotic commenters, was of course upset that the police in the US were
all psychos and all whites who thought that Floyd got what he deserved were all equally
mentally unhinged.
The funny thing is that even he (and this fool lives in Hong Kong) does not know his own
history and seems unable to distinguish the number of deaths required to be classified as a
psycho.
In essence though Mao was right. The whole problem with China is that there are too many
Chinese ! Mao the Dong attempted to fix this problem but like all Chinese was hopelessly
inefficient.
@Montefrío gay" to
me, the types that try and impress that they're "real men" in spite of working in offices to
fund their fantasies. It's like hedge fund managers who take up fly fishing to prove that
they're some sort of aristocrats in spite of their nails-on-the-blackboard accents. No doubt
they wear clothing designed by Ralph Lifschitz (aka "Lauren"),Mr. Brideshead Revisited
himself."
So true.
(A Manhattan friend bequeathed to me their multi-thousand dollar fly fishing rods, reels,
vests and flies, all in perfect shape, having only been used once while on vacation.)
Montefrío
, says: August 20, 2020 at 3:28 pm
GMT
Also well worth reading are Laurens van der Post's earlier work ( Venture to the
Interior ; Lost World of the Kalahari ; The Heart of the Hunter ), before he
began canonizing the Bushmen and seeing the mantis (Bushman tribal deity) as a universal deity
of sorts. Nevertheless, he gives an interesting portrait of Africa in his time. Pity he went
overt the top later and began foaming at the mouth and kissing the hindquarters of Prince
Charles, the human VW bug with its doors open.
It's saddening when Whites don't learn anything from history that's been playing out right
before their eyes. It just doesn't sink in that it will come down to that and they will be
next:
A little humour D D. The rumour I heard was – that when Mohomad Ali traveled to Africa
for a boxing match, he was quite amazed at their " backwardness" and turned to a friend and
said " Thank God or Allah that my great great great Grand father – got on that boat ,
headed for America" . Either way, America has been good for most African Americans –
those that pulled themselves up – and made something for themselves.
I deplore the fate of wildlife and mega-fauna in Africa. But let's remember that all this
mega-fauna still existed when the first settlers arrived, whereas all was slaughtered in
Europe, Asia, North America. The North American mega-fauna was mostly destroyed and eaten by
the first native settlers, and the remaining bears, buffalo herds, and sky covering passenger
pigeons were killed with an industrial fervor and wanton. While Asians eat everything
Africans have ended up seeing all the wildlife associated with the white colonists, and
likely felt those animals were given more status and respect and care than they received Yes,
there was wanton destruction coming from pent-up hatred and frustration. The white settlers
made the life better for themselves and didn't give a rat's ass on the locals They, the
settlers have also destroyed any traditional, communal way and structures that allowed
communities to function more normally, so the increase inter-tribal violence.
It is likely that mega-fauna in Africa would still have been destroyed without White
presence, by increase population and encroachment on land for agriculture. A process similar to
what is happening now in Brazil, which is partly driven by big Agri-business.
So while the documentary and the article describe what happened, there is no analysis why it
happened, and whether this is something never seen before A big fail this time for Mr.
Lynch.
South Africans escaped to UK and Australia because they belonged to a Commonwealth. The US
belongs to no Commonwealth. All Boer needs is a plane ticket and he can move to UK or Oz and
get a job. What Commonwealth do Americans belong to?
Have you visited the UK lately? Certain parts are already third world plus feeble-minded
Brits will a minority in their own country by 2066.
BTW Commonwealth just means colonization of the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada by
millions of Indians and other non-whites.
Is this article supposed to absolve the whites?I'll bet you that many things blacks did they
learned from civilised and good looking whites, he is talking about!
@trickster nfo is
secondhand, but even so, it seems to me that she is unbearably naive, and were it not for the
fact that she is also family, I believe I'd have been a bit more insistent in rebutting the
nonsense she was spouting. This is an educated woman who has led and still lives a very
comfortable, insulated life in a "privileged" enclave, and while her heart bleeds for the
blacks, she has never nor will ever live among them unless her candidate wins and imposes them
upon her up-until-to-now lily-white community. I repeat: I despair from afar.
But I also repeat: nothing is eternal in the sphere of politics.
@Godfree Roberts gardless
it is not genocide by definition.
It is not an inherent property of the 'Chinese' or 'Communism' to cause mass death (and as
being 'the enemy,' could be exaggerated as per usual). The UK and US have been masters of that,
particularly in their helpful infomercials that maintain their saintliness towards their
subjects and subjected pops and the ordained righteous cause against their enemies, which lives
have less than no value (see, eg., War Without Mercy, re the Pacific War).
Modern China is more imperial/authoritarian capitalist than any form of communist, in any
event. All hail Emperor Xi.
I think the irony is that the SJWs complaining about South Africa's apartheid and the "Black
majority" fail to recognize that most of that "Black majority" came as immigrants, and spawned
many more. Not only that, Mandela's Bantus were invading from the North about the time the
Boers were landing on the Cape and negotiating with the original inhabitants (Khoisan) about
land usage and ownership. The Bantus and Zulus would have completely wiped out the Khoisan had
it not been for the Whites.
Europeans and Americans have arrived at ecological conservatism after ravaging their own
continents. Millions of bison, grizzley bears and carrier pigeons, etc. were exterminated in
North America with the advent of the whites. In Europe, there's almost no wildlife, except in
parks. Yet they never stop lecturing the world. And the number of whites killed by the Mau Mau
in Kenya was less than 50 during their fight for freedom. The British were more savage.
The atrocities carried on the black race by Arabs, Jews and whites were far greater in
comparison.
"Bantus were invading from the North about the time the Boers were landing on the Cape
and negotiating with the original inhabitants (Khoisan) about land usage and
ownership."
Agree. I've used all my allotted "Agree/Disagree etc" on Coronavinus.
"... Are you arguing that sociopaths have an inalienable right to hold office, even though they will inevitably use that office to aggrandize themselves at the expense of everyone else, and could spark a general war just for their own enjoyment and to gather yet more power to themselves? ..."
"... How do people who don't share your beliefs get represented if you rig the system to exclude them? People unlike you are sociopaths? It isn't even tempting. Your cost benefit study benefits you. The world is destabilized if your guys don't get in? No surprise. ..."
"... The under-employment rate is also very informative. People working less hours or in lower positions than their investment in education should have returned to them. They are working, but not enough to be able to independently sustain themselves, which makes them insecure in variety of ways. ..."
"... It all depends on what the penalties are. Confiscation of hidden assets would chill that behavior, strike one. Loss of the privilege to conduct business with federal and state entities would also chill such behavior, strike two. Finally, for persistent violations of the cap, loss of citizenship and expulsion form the country, three strikes and you are literally out, would be the ultimate penalty. ..."
"... The United States is actually both a federation (hardly unique by the way) and a representative democracy. Whether you call them members of Parliament or members of Congress, their representatives are elected by the people. ..."
Huge numbers of people who disagree with me and don't share my particular beliefs are not sociopaths, nothing would stop them
from running or holding office, and I've no problem with that.
Are you arguing that sociopaths have an inalienable right to hold office, even though they will inevitably use that office
to aggrandize themselves at the expense of everyone else, and could spark a general war just for their own enjoyment and to gather
yet more power to themselves?
How do people who don't share your beliefs get represented if you rig the system to exclude them? People unlike you are sociopaths?
It isn't even tempting. Your cost benefit study benefits you. The world is destabilized if your guys don't get in? No surprise.
Love this line: "the gig economy combined with record debt and astronomically high rent prices cancel out any potential economic
stability for millions of people."
The under-employment rate is also very informative. People working less hours or in lower positions than their investment in
education should have returned to them. They are working, but not enough to be able to independently sustain themselves, which
makes them insecure in variety of ways.
Do you think the interpreters might turn out to be agents, or perhaps even assassins, from other governments? Or maybe everybody
will be knocked out with fentanyl gas at dinner. In the dining room.
1. It all depends on what the penalties are. Confiscation of hidden assets would chill that behavior, strike one. Loss of the
privilege to conduct business with federal and state entities would also chill such behavior, strike two. Finally, for persistent
violations of the cap, loss of citizenship and expulsion form the country, three strikes and you are literally out, would be the
ultimate penalty.
The alternative, continuing to allow unlimited wealth accumulation will ultimately destroy democracy and end in a dictatorship
nearly impossible to remove without massive casualties. Is that preferable to trying to control the behavior of wealth addicts?
Make no mistake: billionaires are addicts, their uncontrollable addiction to more is an extreme form of hoarding dysfunction,
one that, like all uncontrolled addictions, has had disastrous consequences for everyone but them.
3. Fewer Representatives means you are concentrating power rather than dispersing it. More means smaller districts, which in
turn means more accountability, not less. As it stands now, Congresscritters can safely ignore the wishes of the public, because
when someone "represents" nearly a million citizens, it means they actually represent only themselves. If taken in conjunction
with item #2, more citizens would be invested in the political process and far more likely to pay attention.
4. The Hare test is a standard written exam that is difficult to cheat. Getting caught at cheating or attempting to cheat would
mark one automatically as a sociopath. The latest studies of brain structures show that sociopaths have physically different brains,
and those physical differences are detectable. Brain activity as shown by fMRI also clearly marks a sociopath from a normal, since
while they can fake emotional responses very well, their brain activity shows their true lack of response to emotionally charged
images, words, etc. Using a three-layer test, written>fMRI>genetic should be robust enough to correctly identify most. The stakes
are too huge to risk a set of sociopaths and their lackeys control of the machinery of government. The genetic test is the most
likely to give problematic results, but if the written is failed, the fMRI would then be done to confirm or reject the written
results, while the genetics would be a supplementary confirmation. Widespread genetic testing of politicians and would-bes would
undoubtedly advance research and understanding dramatically.
When you do even a casual cost-benefit study, the answer is clear: test them. Ask yourself: is the thwarting of an individual's
potential career in politics really that great a cost compared to preventing unknowingly electing a sociopath who could destabilize
the entire world?
Another big difference of course is a little thing called the law.
Are you under the impression the British don't have rule of law? Their elected representatives make their laws, not
their ceremonial royal family. Their royal family's job is to abide by the same laws as every other UK citizen, stay out of politics
and promote British tourism and gossip magazines.
The United States is actually a federal republic, not a democracy.
The United States is actually both a federation (hardly unique by the way) and a representative democracy. Whether you call
them members of Parliament or members of Congress, their representatives are elected by the people.
If we move the cheap manufacturing to the US, and wages are lower due to a depression, people will take the jobs, and the
job numbers will improve. And China will be toast.
We will never beat China at manufacturing cheap and efficient products using human labor. Robotic labor maybe, but that might
not happen for a decade or more at least--if they or another country doesn't beat us to retooling our factories.
Labor and manufacturing will never return in the US--unless we have another world war we win, in which all global production is
again concentrated in the US because the rest of the worlds factories are bombed to rubble. Besides, they have the most central
location for manufacturing in the world and a cheap source of endless labor.
What they don't have is innovation, tech and freedom to try products out on a free market. We are squandering those advantages
in the US when we cut education and limit college education to the masses.
Are Americans the most immoral people on earth? I don't think so. Do we have the strictest code of laws on earth? I don't think
so either. Yet we have the highest incarceration rate on earth. Higher than authoritarian countries like China & Russia.
This alone should tell you something is wrong with our system. Never mind the stats about differing average sentences depending
on race & wealth.
Doubt implies a reason behind the wrong, where uncertainty implies an unknowing trait--a mystery behind the wrong.
The right, what with all its fake news scams, deep state BS and witch hunt propaganda, is uncertainty at best, a mystery of sorts--it
provides us with a conspiracy that can neither be proved or unproven--an enigma.
Doubt, about if Russia meddled in the US election in collusion with the president or at the least his advisors, surely implies
something is wrong, especially in the face of criminal charges, doubt is inherent and well intentioned, but not always true and
can be proven false in the face of doubt.
At one time the US was agrarian and one could subsist via bartering. Consider reliance on for-profit healthcare, transportation
systems, debt, credit cards, landlords, grocery stores, and the lack of any ability to subsist without statewide and nationwide
infrastructure. Right now, people in the US already die prematurely if they can't afford healthcare. Many are homeless. And this
is when things are better than ever? What will happen here is what happened in Europe during WWII. People will suffer, and they
will be forced to adopt socialist practices (like the EU does today). People in Europe really did starve to death, and people
in India, Africa, and other countries are starving and dying today. China doles out food rations because they practice communism.
That's why they have cheap, efficient labor that serves to manufacture products for US consumers. Communism and socialism help
American corporations big time.
Citizens United is a First Amendment decision. Which part of the First Amendment do you want moot? What gives any government the
right to decide which assemblies of citizens have no free speech rights?
You are aware, I imagine, that the US can adjust its money supply to adapt to circumstances? We can feed ourselves. We have our
own power sources. We can improvise, adapt, and overcome. Prices go up and down. No big deal. Scaring people for political gain
doesn't have the clout it onvce did.
Too many virtue signalers seem to think that only the innocent are ever convicted.
The system is not crooked, but if you can set up a better one that doesn't bankrupt every community, have at it.
You really, really, really like screaming racist, don't you? And slide in a Godwin. Wow. The concept that black pastors would
be negatively impacted by financial attacks on their churches never ever occurred to you, did it? You get off on pretending to
care about people that you have no direct, routine connection to. How virtuous of you. Wouldn't deliberately harming black churches
make you the racist storm trooper?
Violence will break out when credit cards stop working. Can't even imagine what will happen if people are starving. No problem
in a socialistic country like Finland, but a big problem here. My guess is that Trump knows the economy is hanging by a thread,
so needs to create an alternate reason (trade wars). Or he figures he might as well have a trade war if it's all going to pieces
anyway. Of course China manufactures just about everything for the US. If we move the cheap manufacturing to the US, and wages
are lower due to a depression, people will take the jobs, and the job numbers will improve. And China will be toast.
Don't forget as the Trump trade war heats up and China decides to sell off US bonds en-masse (they own 1.17 trillion in US debt).
That's gonna put a hurt on the already low US dollar and could send inflation soaring. China could also devalue its currency and
increase the trade deficit. Combine those with all the things you've pointed out and you've got financial troubles the likes of
which no large government has ever dealt with in human history.
Starving people--China can handle in droves; not so much the US. We're talking nasty violence if that kinda stuff happens here.
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for
profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable,
unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection,
safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
Occupy Wall Street began due to income inequality when the worst effects of the Great Recession were being felt by the population.
Wealth inequality has only increased since then.
Right now, the population is held at bay because the media and politicians claim that the economy is so incredibly hot it's overheating.
But we know that's a lie. For one, the gig economy combined with record debt and astronomically high rent prices cancel out any
potential economic stability for millions of people. This year, 401(k) plans have returned almost nothing (or are going negative).
This was also the case in 2016. Savings accounts have returned almost nothing for the last decade (they should be providing approximately
5% interest).
The worker participation rate today is 3.2% below what it was in 2008 (during the Great Recession). The US population, meanwhile,
has increased by approximately 24,321,000. That's a 7.68% increase. The labor force has increased by 5% during this time (unemployment
rate was relatively similar, 5.6% vs 4%). From June 2008 to June 2018, the labor force increased by approximately 8 million. However,
if the worker participation rate was the same now as it was then, there would be approximately 8 million more people in the labor
force. If you add 8 million people to the current number of people who are counted as unemployed by the BLS, the unemployment
rate is approximately 9%. This is about as high as the unemployment rate got during the depths of the Great Recession, right when
Occupy Wall Street was born.
Now, OK, sure, the economy has REPLACED lost jobs, but it has not ADDED jobs for the last decade. The unemployment rate is false.
It should be at least 8%. There's many millions of Americans who do not have steady, gainful employment - or any employment -
and they are not counted.
The billionaires and their bought politicians are responsible for fixing this. They can fix it and should fix it. Otherwise, the
economy and their profits are going to fall off a giant cliff any day now. The next recession has basically already begun, but
it can still be alleviated. If things continue as they are, unemployment could be 16% by 2020, with the U6 measure approaching
or exceeding 25%. If stocks drop enough, people may starve to death.
Who supported Citizen's United? All cons and republicans
Who supports campaign finance reform and legislation that would make Cititzen's United moot? Democrats and progressives
Really tired of the false equivalencies. Republicans are now the polar opposite of Democrats in policy and principles. Vote Blue
this November and get rid of the republicans; every single one of them. It can be done if people get out and vote.
1. Anything is possible but I don't think this is practical. The rich can just cheat on the definition of ownership, pass it around
between family members, offshore it, sink it into their businesses in token ways, etc. When you try to take wealth (power) away
from the most powerful people in the country they will start devoting SERIOUS resources to getting around it.
3. I'm not saying we need fewer people doing congress's job in total. But we should be electing fewer of them, and letting
those fewer people do more hiring/delegating. The way things are now, most of the public only knows much about the president.
Everyone else is mostly just a vote for a party. But if the country only voted for 50 Congressmen in total - or even fewer - then
we would all have a more careful eye on them. We would know them better and see them more individually. They would have less pressure
to toe the party line all the time.
4. As long as there's a written test then it will get cheated. Right now the testing is rarely given and the specific consequences
don't determine powerful people's careers. Make it a widespread & important thing and people will learn to cheat it.
The genetic + fMRI research is interesting but the whole thing opens up serious cans of worms. We're talking about DQ'ing somebody
from an important career based partially on the results of a genetic screening for a character trait. That's a dangerous business
for our whole society to get into. Although I do realize the payoff for this specific instance would be very big.
1. Why do you think that? Using teams of forensic accountants and outlawing secret accounts would go a long way towards increasing
enforceability. But you are viewing it as a legal problem rather than a cultural problem. If an effective propaganda campaign
aimed on one level at the public and another level at the billionaires, it could work. Many billionaires are already committed
to returning their fortunes to the economy (mostly after they are dead, true). Convince a few and the rest will follow. Give them
the lure of claiming the title of the richest who ever were and some would be eager for that place in history.
Anything can be done if the will is there.
2. Income taxes are just a portion of the federal revenues, ~47%. Corporate taxes, parkland fees, excise taxes, ~18% taken
together and Social Security make up the rest. Revenues would increase as taxpayers topped off step amounts to keep control. The
beauty of it is that Congress would see very clearly where the nation's priorities were. Any politician trying to raise fines
so that they had more money under their control would soon find themselves out of office. Unpopular programs would
have to be financed out of the 18%, and that would likely make them increase corporate taxes. But most importantly, it would cut
the power of politicians and decrease the effectiveness of lobbyists.
3. Actually, we have too few, not too many. The work of governance suffers because there is too much to be done and too few
to do it. Spreading the workload and assigning responsibility areas would increase efficiency. Most importantly though, it would
break up the oligarchic duopoly that keeps a stranglehold on the nation's politics, and bring more third party candidates into
office giving Congress a more diverse culture by adding viewpoints based on other things than business interests.
4. Actually, advances in fMRI equipment and procedures, along with genetics and written testing can prove beyond a reasonable
doubt whether or not someone is a sociopath, do some research and you'l see it is true. False positives in any testing regime
are always an issue, but tens of millions of workers submit to drug tests to qualify for their jobs, and their jobs don't usually
run the risk of plunging the world into war, economic or environmental disasters. False positives are common in the workplace
and cost many thousands their jobs.
And there's an easy way to prove you aren't really a sociopath: be honest, don't lie, and genuinely care about people...things
sociopaths cannot do over time.
Seriously, it is a societal safety issue that demands to be done, protecting the few against false positives means opening
the floodgates for the many sociopaths who seek power over others.
Not just eliminate--alter and add to it, but since it takes 2/3 majority of the house and senate to amend the constitution--it's
not an easy feat--that's why there has only been 17 amendments altogether and two of them are there to cancel each other out!
You see, the beauty behind the National
Popular Vote Bill is that it's done on a state by state basis and will only work when the required 270 electoral votes are
gained with the bill--this means all voters would have their votes tallied in a presidential election and it eliminates swing
states with a winner takes all approach. The electoral college and state control of elections are preserved and every one is happy.
I feel like you've not read up on any of this even though I provide a link. 12 of these bills have been enacted into state law
already, comprising of 172 electoral votes and 3,112 legislative sponsors. That's more than halfway there.
To continue to say that changing the way we vote by altering the EC is a fantasy is in itself a fantasy because obviously it is
gaining traction across the country.
Which 'side' do you imagine I'm on Mike ? FYI.. Im not a member of any tribe especially regarding the republican or democrat parties...
you may have noticed that as part of the progress towards a globalized economy, 'Money' now has open borders...but the restrictions
of movement for people are growing as nationalism rises and wealth and the power it yields, becomes ever more concentrated in
fewer hands...this is a dangerous precedent and history repeats if lessons of the past are not learned.
I can well recall when humanity and the ability of the individual to attain freedom and liberty based upon the merit of the individual
was once celebrated.
What really irks me and causes me to voice my opinion on this forum, ( thank you Guardian for your continued efforts at informing
us all and especially for promoting participation) is how easily people are duped .. when 'others' can easily see that they are
being lied to. My parents fought for freedom and liberty against vicious tyranny in Europe and paid a HUGE price..by the time
the scales had tipped the balance towards fascism, it was far too late for anything other than all out war... the fact that they
survived the required sacrifice to pitch in to protect democracy, and the freedom and liberty which comes with it, still seems
miraculous..
Billionaires on the left should put some of that money into paying for and distributing subscriptions to newspapers and magazines
which live up to the standards of professional journalism. These papers should be made available, free, at high schools, colleges,
libraries, and commercial centers of loitering and "neighborly" discussions. May I suggest the NYT, WP, The Guardian, and The
Economist.
"What the country sorely needs is a new constitution."
No thanks! The Founders were quite a bit more intelligent than the current national 'brain trust' -- on the both sides
of the Aisle -- that would be charged with writing a new Constitution.
1) Democracy with a population that is at least minimally engaged and angrily stays that
way (including removing powerful special interests from premises with pitchforks)
2) Being "managed" on behalf of various power centers. This can be liveable or can turn into
strip mining of your "resources".
Sadly, there is no algorithm that allows you to detect whether your are engaged or are
being engaged on behalf of others. That would be easy. But one should start with a minimal
state, hard money and the sons of the upper crust on the front lines and forbidden from
taking office in government.
That being said, this article is a bit meandering. Came for Bellingcat but was
confused.
Who presented the Emmy Award to the film makers, but none other than the rebel
journalist Chris Hedges.
@El Dato "1) Democracy with a population that is at least minimally engaged and angrily
stays that way (including removing powerful special interests from premises with pitchforks)"
There are no revolutions by means of pitchforks in a democracy, everything is weakened by
compromise, false promises, infiltration, manipulation, etc. You cannot stay angry all the
time too, it is very bad for your health, it needs to be short and intense to be effective,
which is exactly what democracy prevents.
Democracy turns you into a petted animal.
CARLSON: But more broadly, what you are saying, I think is, that the Democratic Party
understands what it is and who it represents and affirmatively represents them. They do
things for their voters, but the Republican Party doesn't actually represent its own voters
very well.
VANCE: Yes, that's exactly right. I mean, look at who the Democratic Party is and look, I
don't like the Democratic Party's policies.
CARLSON: Yes.
VANCE: Most of the times, I disagree with them. But I at least admire that they recognize
who their voters are and they actually just as raw cynical politics do a lot of things to
serve those voters.
Now, look at who Republican voters increasingly are. They are people who
disproportionately serve in the military, but Republican foreign policy has been a disaster
for a lot of veterans. They are disproportionately folks who want to have more children.
They are people who want to have more single earner families. They are people who don't
necessarily want to go to college but they want to work in an economy where if you play by
the rules, you can you actually support a family on one income.
CARLSON: Yes.
VANCE: Have Republicans done anything for those people really in the last 15 or 20 years?
I think can you point to some policies of the Trump administration. Certainly, instinctively,
I think the President gets who his voters are and what he has to do to service those folks.
But at the end of the day, the broad elite of the party, the folks who really call the shots,
the think tank intellectuals, the people who write the policy, I just don't think they
realize who their own voters are.
Now, the slightly more worrying implication is that maybe some of them do realize who
their voters are, they just don't actually like those voters much.
CARLSON: Well, that's it. So I watch the Democratic Party and I notice that if there is a
substantial block within it, it's this unstable coalition, all of these groups have nothing
in common, but the one thing they have in common is the Democratic Party will protect
them.
VANCE: Yes.
CARLSON: You criticize a block of Democratic Voters and they are on you like a wounded
wombat. They will bite you. The Republicans, watch their voters come under attack and sort of
nod in agreement, "Yes, these people should be attacked."
VANCE: Yes, that's absolutely right. I mean, if you talk to people who spent their lives
in D.C. I know you live in D.C.
CARLSON: Yes.
VANCE: I've spent a lot of my life here. The people who spend their time in D.C. who work
on Republican campaigns, who work at conservative think tanks, now this isn't true of
everybody, but a lot of them actually don't like the people who are voting for Republican
candidates these days.
"... Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has not seen these levels of concentration of ownership. The Soviet Union did not die because of apparent ideological reasons but due to economic bankruptcy caused by its uncompetitive monopolistic economy. Our verdict is that the US is heading in the same direction. ..."
"... In a future instalment of this report, we will show that the oligarchization of America – the placing it under the rule of the One Percent (or perhaps more accurately the 0.1%, if not 0.01%) - has been a deliberate ideologically driven long-term project to establish absolute economic power over the US and its political system and further extend that to involve an absolute global hegemony (the latter project thankfully thwarted by China and Russia). ..."
"... In present-day United States a few major investors – equity funds or private capital - are as a rule cross-owned by each other, forming investor oligopolies, which in turn own the business oligopolies. ..."
"... A study has shown that among a sample of the 1,500 largest US firms (S&P 1500), the probability of one major shareholder holding significant shares in two competing firms had jumped to 90% in 2014, while having been just 16% in 1999. (*2). ..."
"... Institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and JP Morgan, now own 80% of all stock in S&P 500 listed companies. The Big Three investors - BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – alone constitute the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 firms, which roughly correspond to America's 500 largest corporations. (*3). Both BlackRock and Vanguard are among the top five shareholders of almost 70% of America's largest 2,000 publicly traded corporations. (*4). ..."
A close-knit oligarchy controls all major corporations. Monopolization of ownership in US
economy fast approaching Soviet levels
Starting with Ronald Reagan's presidency, the US government willingly decided to ignore the
anti-trust laws so that corporations would have free rein to set up monopolies. With each
successive president the monopolistic concentration of business and shareholding in America has
grown precipitously eventually to reach the monstrous levels of the present day.
Today's level of monopolistic concentration is of such unprecedented levels that we may
without hesitation designate the US economy as a giant oligopoly. From economic power follows
political power, therefore the economic oligopoly translates into a political oligarchy. (It
seems, though, that the transformation has rather gone the other way around, a ferocious set of
oligarchs have consolidated their economic and political power beginning from the turn of the
twentieth century). The conclusion that
the US is an oligarchy finds support in a 2014 by a Princeton University study.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has not seen these levels of concentration
of ownership. The Soviet Union did not die because of apparent ideological reasons but due to
economic bankruptcy caused by its uncompetitive monopolistic economy. Our verdict is that the
US is heading in the same direction.
In a later report, we will demonstrate how all sectors of the US economy have fallen prey to
monopolization and how the corporate oligopoly has been set up across the country. This post
essentially serves as an appendix to that future report by providing the shocking details of
the concentration of corporate ownership.
Apart from illustrating the monopolization at the level of shareholding of the major
investors and corporations, we will in a follow-up post take a somewhat closer look at one
particularly fatal aspect of this phenomenon, namely the
consolidation of media (posted simultaneously with the present one) in the hands of
absurdly few oligarch corporations. In there, we will discuss the monopolies of the tech giants
and their ownership concentration together with the traditional media because they rightfully
belong to the same category directly restricting speech and the distribution of opinions in
society.
In a future instalment of this report, we will show that the oligarchization of America
– the placing it under the rule of the One Percent (or perhaps more accurately the 0.1%,
if not 0.01%) - has been a deliberate ideologically driven long-term project to establish
absolute economic power over the US and its political system and further extend that to involve
an absolute global hegemony (the latter project thankfully thwarted by China and Russia). To
achieve these goals, it has been crucial for the oligarchs to control and direct the narrative
on economy and war, on all public discourse on social affairs. By seizing the media, the
oligarchs have created a monstrous propaganda machine, which controls the opinions of the
majority of the US population.
We use the words 'monopoly,' 'monopolies,' and 'monopolization' in a broad sense and subsume
under these concepts all kinds of market dominance be it by one company or two or a small
number of companies, that is, oligopolies. At the end of the analysis, it is not of great
importance how many corporations share in the market dominance, rather what counts is the death
of competition and the position enabling market abuse, either through absolute dominance,
collusion, or by a de facto extinction of normal market competition. Therefore we use the term
'monopolization' to describe the process of reaching a critical level of non-competition on a
market. Correspondingly, we may denote 'monopoly companies' two corporations of a duopoly or
several of an oligopoly.
Horizontal shareholding – the cementation of the
oligarchy
One especially perfidious aspect of this concentration of ownership is that the same few
institutional investors have acquired undisputable control of the leading corporations in
practically all the most important sectors of industry. The situation when one or several
investors own controlling or significant shares of the top corporations in a given industry
(business sector) is referred to as horizontal shareholding . (*1). In present-day United
States a few major investors – equity funds or private capital - are as a rule
cross-owned by each other, forming investor oligopolies, which in turn own the business
oligopolies.
A study has shown that among a sample of the 1,500 largest US firms (S&P 1500), the
probability of one major shareholder holding significant shares in two competing firms had
jumped to 90% in 2014, while having been just 16% in 1999. (*2).
Institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and JP Morgan, now
own 80% of all stock in S&P 500 listed companies. The Big Three investors - BlackRock,
Vanguard and State Street – alone constitute the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P
500 firms, which roughly correspond to America's 500 largest corporations. (*3). Both BlackRock
and Vanguard are among the top five shareholders of almost 70% of America's largest 2,000
publicly traded corporations. (*4).
Blackrock had as of 2016 $6.2 trillion worth of assets under management, Vanguard $5.1
trillion, whereas State Street has dropped to a distant third with only $1 trillion in assets.
This compares with a total market capitalization of US stocks according to Russell
3000 of $30 trillion at end of 2017 (From 2016 to 2017, the Big Three has of course also
put on assets).Blackrock and Vanguard would then alone own more than one-third of all US
publicly listed shares.
From an expanded sample that includes the 3,000 largest publicly listed corporations
(Russell 3000 index), institutions owned (2016) about
78% of the equity .
The speed of concentration the US economy in the hands of institutions has been incredible.
Still back in 1950s, their share of the equity was 10%, by 1980 it was 30% after which the
concentration has rapidly grown to the present day approximately 80%. (*5). Another study puts
the present (2016) stock market capitalization held by institutional investors at 70%. (*6).
(The slight difference can possibly be explained by variations in the samples of companies
included).
As a result of taking into account the common ownership at investor level, it emerges that
the US economy is yet much more monopolized than it was previously thought when the focus had
been on the operational business corporation alone detached from their owners. (*7).
The
Oligarch owners assert their control
Apologists for monopolies have argued that the institutional investors who manage passive
capital are passive in their own conduct as shareholders as well. (*8). Even if that would be
true it would come with vastly detrimental consequences for the economy as that would mean that
in effect there would be no shareholder control at all and the corporate executives would
manage the companies exclusively with their own short-term benefits in mind, inevitably leading
to corruption and the loss of the common benefits businesses on a normally functioning
competitive market would bring.
In fact, there seems to have been a period in the US economy – before the rapid
monopolization of the last decade -when such passive investors had relinquished control to the
executives. (*9). But with the emergence of the Big Three investors and the astonishing
concentration of ownership that does not seem to hold water any longer. (*10). In fact, there
need not be any speculation about the matter as the monopolist owners are quite candid about
their ways. For example, BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink sends out
an annual guiding letter to his subject, practically to all the largest firms of the US and
increasingly also Europe and the rest of the West. In his pastoral, the CEO shares his view of
the global conditions affecting business prospects and calls for companies to adjust their
strategies accordingly.
The investor will eventually review the management's strategic plans for compliance with the
guidelines. Effectively, the BlackRock CEO has in this way assumed the role of a giant central
planner, rather like the Gosplan, the central planning agency of the Soviet command
economy.
The 2019 letter (referenced above) contains this striking passage, which should quell all
doubts about the extent to which BlackRock exercises its powers:
"As we seek to build long-term value for our clients through engagement, our aim is not to
micromanage a company's operations. Instead, our primary focus is to ensure board
accountability for creating long-term value. However, a long-term approach should not be
confused with an infinitely patient one. When BlackRock does not see progress despite ongoing
engagement, or companies are insufficiently responsive to our efforts to protect our clients'
long-term economic interests, we do not hesitate to exercise our right to vote against
incumbent directors or misaligned executive compensation."
Considering the striking facts rendered above, we should bear in mind that the establishment
of this virtually absolute oligarch ownership over all the largest corporations of the United
States is a relatively new phenomenon. We should therefore expect that the centralized control
and centralized planning will rapidly grow in extent as the power is asserted and methods are
refined.
Most of the capital of those institutional investors consists of so-called passive capital,
that is, such cases of investments where the investor has no intention of trying to achieve any
kind of control of the companies it invests in, the only motivation being to achieve as high as
possible a yield. In the overwhelming majority of the cases the funds flow into the major
institutional investors, which invest the money at their will in any corporations. The original
investors do not retain any control of the institutional investors, and do not expect it
either. Technically the institutional investors like BlackRock and Vanguard act as fiduciary
asset managers. But here's the rub, while the people who commit their assets to the funds may
be considered as passive investors, the institutional investors who employ those funds are most
certainly not.
Cross-ownership of oligarch corporations
To make matters yet worse, it must be kept in mind that the oligopolistic investors in turn
are frequently cross-owned by each other. (*11). In fact, there is no transparent way of
discovering who in fact controls the major institutional investors.
One of the major institutional investors, Vanguard is ghost owned insofar as it does not
have any owners at all in the traditional sense of the concept. The company claims that it is
owned by the multiple funds that it has itself set up and which it manages. This is how the
company puts it on
their home page : "At Vanguard, there are no outside owners, and therefore, no conflicting
loyalties. The company is owned by its funds, which in turn are owned by their shareholders --
including you, if you're a Vanguard fund investor." At the end of the analysis, it would then
seem that Vanguard is owned by Vanguard itself, certainly nobody should swallow the charade
that those funds stuffed with passive investor money would exercise any ownership control over
the superstructure Vanguard. We therefore assume that there is some group of people (other than
the company directors) that have retained the actual control of Vanguard behind the scenes
(perhaps through one or a few of the funds). In fact, we believe that all three (BlackRock,
State Street and Vanguard) are tightly controlled by a group of US oligarchs (or more widely
transatlantic oligarchs), who prefer not to brandish their power. It is beyond the scope of
this study and our means to investigate this hypothesis, but whatever, it is bad enough that as
a proven fact these three investor corporations wield this control over most of the American
economy. We also know that the three act in concert wherever they hold shares.
(*12).
Now, let's see who are the formal owners of these institutional investors
In considering these ownership charts, please, bear in mind that we have not consistently
examined to what degree the real control of one or another company has been arranged through a
scheme of issuing different classes of shares, where a special class of shares give vastly more
voting rights than the ordinary shares. One source asserts
that 355 of the companies in the Russell index consisting of the 3000 largest corporations
employ such a dual voting-class structure, or 11.8% of all major corporations.
We have mostly relied on www.stockzoa.com for the shareholder data. However, this and
other sources tend to list only the so-called institutional investors while omitting corporate
insiders and other individuals. (We have no idea why such strange practice is employed
Oligarchy owns the USA political system and tune it to their needs. Proliferation of NGO is one such trick that favor
oligarchy.
That kind of influence over expert opinion is immense—and it yields results. In April, Gates called for a nationwide total
lockdown for 10 weeks. America didn’t quite sink to that level of draconian control, but the shutdowns we did get absolutely
crushed small businesses. Massive tech firms, however, made out like bandits. Microsoft stock is at an all-time high.
Notable quotes:
"... Non-profit activity lets super-elites broker political power tax-free, reshaping the world according to their designs. ..."
"... The American tax code makes all of this possible. It greases the skids for the wealthy to use their fortunes to augment their political power. The 501(c)(3) designation makes all donations, of whatever size, to charitable nonprofits immune from taxation. ..."
"... For the super-wealthy, political power comes tax-free. ..."
"... No one ever elected Bill Gates to anything. His wealth, and not the democratic process, is the only reason he has an outsized voice in shaping coronavirus policy. The man who couldn't keep viruses out of Windows now wants to vaccinate the planet. That isn't an unreasonable goal for a man of his wealth, either. Gates's foundation is the second largest donor to the World Health Organization, providing some 10 percent of its funds . That kind of influence over expert opinion is immense -- and it yields results. In April , Gates called for a nationwide total lockdown for 10 weeks. America didn't quite sink to that level of draconian control, but the shutdowns we did get absolutely crushed small businesses. Massive tech firms, however, made out like bandits. Microsoft stock is at an all-time high . ..."
"... Eliminating the tax exemption for charitable giving would make it simple to heavily tax the capital gains that drive the wealth of America's richest one thousand people. One could also leave the exemption in place for most Americans (those with a net worth under $100 million), while making larger gifts, especially those over a billion dollars, taxable at extremely high rates close to 100%. Bill Gates wants to give a billion dollars to his foundation? Great. But he should pay a steep fee to the American people to purchase that kind of power. ..."
"... There is nothing socialist in these or similar tax proposals. We are not making an abstract commentary on whether having a billion dollars is "moral." These are simply prudential measures to put the people back in charge of their own country. Reining in billionaires and monopolists is a conservative free market strategy. ..."
"... An America governed by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and George Soros will be -- arguably, already is -- a disaster for the middle class and everyday Americans. Cracking down on their "selfless" philanthropy, combined with antitrust enforcement and higher progressive tax rates, is a key way for Americans to leverage the power of the ballot box against the power of the banker's vault. ..."
"... The rotting edifice that is the United States is coming down one way or another. Just accept it. ..."
"... I would end tax exempt status for organizations. When everyone pays taxes we all become better stewards of how that money is used. ..."
"... To think both Mr. Dreher and Mr. Van Buren just recently posted about the superwealthy leaving the big cities, citing as the main reasons the Covid thing on the one hand, and "excessively high" income taxes on the other. Most comments that followed were in the line of "that's what happens when you let socialists run things" and "stop giving money to the poor, then they'll work and get rich." And here we have someone proposing more and higher taxes on the wealthy to bust their political nuts. ..."
"... It's an interesting proposal, but it seems that if you're worried about super-elites brokering political power tax-free, you might focus on direct brokering of political power. For example, we could pass a law requiring full disclosure of all sources of funding for any political advertising. ..."
Non-profit activity lets super-elites broker political power tax-free, reshaping the world
according to their designs.
America's super-wealthy have too much power. A republican regime based on the consent of the
governed cannot survive when a few hands control too large a sum of money and too much human
capital. A dominion of monopolists spells ruin for the common man.
The Federal Reserve calculates that, at present, America's total household wealth equals
$104 trillion .
Of that,
$3.4 trillion belongs to America's 600 billionaires alone. Put another way, 3% of the
nation's wealth belongs to 0.0002% of the population. Those 600 names control twice as much
wealth as the least wealthy 170 million Americans combined . This is a problem. Economic
power means political power. In an era of mass media, it has never been easier to manufacture
public opinion and to manipulate the citizenry.
Look no further than the consensus view of
Fortune 500 companies as to the virtues of Black Lives Matter. That movement's incredible
cultural reach is, in large part, a function of its cachet among American elites. In 2016, the
Ford Foundation began a
Black-Led Movement Fund to funnel $100 million into racial and social justice causes.
George Soros' Open Society Foundation immediately poured in $33 million in grants.
Soros and company received a massive return on investment. The shift leftward on issues of
racial and social justice in the last four years has been nothing short of remarkable.
Net public support for BLM , at minus 5 percent in 2018, has surged to plus 28 percent in
2020. The New York Times estimates that some 15 to
26 million Americans participated in recent protests over George Floyd's death.
And the money keeps flowing. In the last three months, hundreds of millions of dollars have
poured into social and racial justice causes.
Sony Music Group , the
NFL ,
Warner Music Group , and
Comcast all have promised gifts in excess of $100 million. MacKenzie Bezos has
promised more than a billion dollars to Historically Black Colleges and Universities as
well as other racial and social justice organizations. Yet, as scholars like Heather
MacDonald have pointed out -- America's justice system is not racist. Disquieting anecdotes
and wrenching videos blasted across cyberspace are not the whole of, or even representative of,
our reality. But well-heeled media and activism campaigns can change the perception. That's
what matters.
The American tax code makes all of this possible. It greases the skids for the wealthy to
use their fortunes to augment their political power. The 501(c)(3) designation makes all
donations, of whatever size, to charitable nonprofits immune from taxation.
A man can only eat so much filet mignon in one lifetime. He can only drive so many
Lamborghinis and vacation in so many French chalets. At a certain point, the longing for
material pleasures gives way to a longing for honor and power. What a super-elite really wants
is to be remembered for "changing the world." The tax code makes the purchasing of such honors
even easier than buying fast cars and luxury homes.
For the super-wealthy, political power comes tax-free.
No one ever elected Bill Gates to anything. His wealth, and not the democratic process, is
the only reason he has an outsized voice in shaping coronavirus policy. The man who couldn't
keep viruses out of Windows now wants to vaccinate the
planet. That isn't an unreasonable goal for a man of his wealth, either. Gates's foundation
is the second largest donor to the World Health Organization,
providing some 10 percent of its funds . That kind of influence over expert opinion is
immense -- and it yields results.
In April , Gates called for a nationwide total lockdown for 10 weeks. America didn't quite
sink to that level of draconian control, but the shutdowns we did get absolutely crushed small
businesses. Massive tech firms, however, made out like bandits. Microsoft stock is at an
all-time high .
No one ever voted on those lockdowns, either. Like the mask-wearing mandates, they were
instituted by executive fiat. The experts
, many of them funded through donations given by tech billionaires like Gates , campaigned for policies that
radically altered the basic structure of society. Here lies the danger of billionaire power.
Without adequate checks and balances, the super-wealthy can skirt the normal political process,
working behind the scenes to make policies that the people never even have a chance to debate
or vote on.
A republic cannot be governed this way. America needs to bring its current crop of oligarchs
to heel. That starts with constraining their ability to commandeer their massive personal
fortunes to shape policy. Technically, the 501(c)(3) designation prevents political activities
by tax-exempt charities. Those rules apply only to political campaigning and lobbying, however.
They say nothing about funding legal battles or shaping specific policies indirectly through
research and grants. America's universities, think tanks, and advocacy organizations are nearly
universally considered tax-exempt nonprofits. Only a fool would believe they are not
political.
One solution to the nonprofit problem to simply get rid of the charitable exemption all
together. If there is no loophole, it can't be exploited by the mega-wealthy. Most Americans'
charitable giving wouldn't be affected. The average American gives between $2,000 and
$3,000 per year . That is well under the $24,800 standard tax deduction for married
couples. Ninety
percent of taxpayers have no reason to use a line-item deduction. Such a change likely
wouldn't affect wealthy givers either. In
2014 , the average high-income American (defined as making more than $200,000 per year or
having a million dollars in assets) gave an average of $68,000 to charity, and in 2018
93 percent said
their giving had nothing to do with tax breaks.
Eliminating the tax exemption for charitable giving would make it simple to heavily tax the
capital gains that drive the wealth of America's richest one thousand people. One could also
leave the exemption in place for most Americans (those with a net worth under $100 million),
while making larger gifts, especially those over a billion dollars, taxable at extremely high
rates close to 100%. Bill Gates wants to give a billion dollars to his foundation? Great. But
he should pay a steep fee to the American people to purchase that kind of power.
There is nothing socialist in these or similar tax proposals. We are not making an abstract
commentary on whether having a billion dollars is "moral." These are simply prudential measures
to put the people back in charge of their own country. Reining in billionaires and monopolists
is a conservative free market strategy.
Incentives to make more money are generally good. The libertarians are mostly right --
people are usually better judges of how to spend and use their resources than the
government.
But not always. The libertarian account does not adequately recognize man's political
nature. We need law and order. We need a regime where elections matter and the opinions of the
people actually shape policy. Contract law, borders, and taxes are all necessary to human
flourishing, but all impede the total and unrestricted movement of labor and money. At the very
top of the wealth pyramid, concentrated economic power always turns into political power. An
economic policy that doesn't recognize that fact will create an untouchable class that controls
both the market and the regime. There's nothing freeing about that outcome.
An America governed by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and George Soros will be --
arguably, already is -- a disaster for the middle class and everyday Americans. Cracking
down on their "selfless" philanthropy, combined with antitrust enforcement and higher
progressive tax rates, is a key way for Americans to leverage the power of the ballot box
against the power of the banker's vault.
Josiah Lippincott is a former Marine officer and current Master's student at the Van
Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College.
I'd like to thank the author for actually discussing policy proposals that actually
make sense. That's a rarity on TAC. However, he needs to keep a couple of things in
mind:
1. You can't just say something isn't socialist on a conservative website.
Conservatives have been conditioned for decades to believe that anything the GOP
considers to be bad is called by the name "socialism". And taxes are bad. Therefore
socialist. To bring any nuance to that word will be devastating to long-term conservative
ability to argue points.
2. This proposal won't just hurt the ability of left-leaning tech giants, but also
right-leaning oil and defense industry barons. A double-edged sword.
This is an interesting idea that might have had a shot, big maybe, 50 plus years ago.
America is too far gone to fix with political changes, not that you could make any major
changes like this in the current political environment.
The rotting edifice that is the United States is coming down one way or another. Just
accept it.
Certainly! Just so long as the word "organizations" encompasses churches as well, I
think lots of people on all sides of the political spectrum would agree.
Complicated argument. Basically, charitable people will always give charity, even from
taxed income. However, if people give charity from taxed income, the state can no longer
control what the institutions given money do with that money as long as salaries and
surplus are taxed.
Interesting proposal. Removing tax deduction should of course throw IRS out of
monitoring charitable giving. So less power to Lois Lerner and colleagues.
To think both Mr. Dreher and Mr. Van Buren just recently posted about the superwealthy
leaving the big cities, citing as the main reasons the Covid thing on the one hand, and
"excessively high" income taxes on the other. Most comments that followed were in the
line of "that's what happens when you let socialists run things" and "stop giving money
to the poor, then they'll work and get rich." And here we have someone proposing more and
higher taxes on the wealthy to bust their political nuts.
Note that the author carefully left out any mention of conservative megadonors shaping
public policy. Must be the quiet part, to avoid tarring and feathering by his own
side.
Say you like the game of Monopoly so much that you want it to last longer than
the few hours it takes for one player to dominate and beat the others. Well, you could
replace $200 as you pass Go with progessive taxation on income, assets, or a combination
thereof. If you do it right, you can make the game last into perpetuity by ensuring that
the dominance of any one player is only temporary.
It's an interesting proposal, but it seems that if you're worried about super-elites
brokering political power tax-free, you might focus on direct brokering of political
power. For example, we could pass a law requiring full disclosure of all sources of
funding for any political advertising.
If we wanted to be aggressive, we could even pass
a constitutional amendment to specify that corporations are not people. It seems odd to
worry about the political power exercised by institutions with no direct control over
politics, and ignore the institution whose purpose is politics.
Another approach to deal with the direct influence of the super-elite would be to make
lobbying expenses no longer tax deductible. I'm sure you could find support for that.
This is the 5th TAC article since May to take something word-for-word from a Bernie
Sanders-esque Leftist platform and call it something "Conservatives" want. GTFOOH.
Mr. Lippincott: That kind of influence over expert opinion is immense -- and it yields
results. In April, Gates called for a nationwide total lockdown for 10 weeks. America
didn't quite sink to that level of draconian control, but the shutdowns we did get
absolutely crushed small businesses. Massive tech firms, however, made out like bandits.
Microsoft stock is at an all-time high.
So the argument here is that the experts were not going to call for a lockdown, but
Mr. Gates' outsized influence made them do it? The experts weren't going to do it anyway?
Did that outsized influence extend to every other country in the world which imposed
lockdowns? Was there a secret communique between Mr. Gates and the NBA so they suspended
their season in mid-March? In the US, CA, Clark Cty in NV, Illinois, Kansas City, MA, MI,
NY, OR, and WI all began lockdowns in March. Around the world, 80 countries began
lockdowns in March. No matter what Mr. Gates said, lockdowns were deemed to be
appropriate. Plus, Mr. Lippincott admits that Mr. Gates' proposal was not followed. In
terms of "massive tech firms making out like bandits" v small businesses, might that have
anything to do with their value?
I very much agree with this article and I think we need another Teddy Roosevelt
Monopoly (oligarchy) buster but much has changed in the 100 years since Teddy Roosevelt
was President. The first thing that comes to mind is that the aristocracy was mostly
protestant and the business class was mostly domestic with high tariffs keeping foreign
competitors out so we could break up these companies without a foreign country purchasing
them and possibly creating a national security risk.
Today's aristocracy is much more diverse. Its more Jewish and it has much more
minority representation from African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, etc so that creates
the first problem in breaking up a monopoly or an oligarchy which would be the accusation
of targeting minorities for discrimination. The second problem is that many of the
aristocratic class in the US consider themselves global citizens and have dual
citizenship. They can live anywhere anytime they choose so if you target them the way say
Cuomo and DiBlasio and Newsom do then they will leave. Third problem is our global
society particularly the digital / virtual society. If you break that up without
safeguards then you will only be inviting foreign ownership then you will have a national
security issue and even less influence.
The biggest problem is the NGOs, nonprofits that the rich set up to usurp the
government on various issues from immigration to gender identity to politics. These NGO
nonprofits arent your harmless community soup kitchen doing good works. The anarchy,
arson, looting, rioting in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, NYC, Baltimore these are paid for
by NGO nonprofits and they have the money to threaten local government, state government
and federal government. Trump was 100% correct when he started to tax college endowments
but he didnt go far enough. The tax laws have to be rewritten with a very strict and
narrow interpretation of what exactly constitutes the public good and is deserving on
non-profit status. If you say education then I will say you are correct but endowments
are an investment vehicle under the umbrella of an educational nonprofit. Thats like a
nonprofit hospital buying a mutual fund company or a mine or a manufacturing plan and
claiming its non-profit. For me its relatively simple unless someone has a some other
way. If you look at the non-profit community good...what are the budgets for say
hospitals, schools, orphanages, retirement homes, etc. Put monetary limits on nonprofits
which can vary depending on industry and the rest is taxed at a high rate. We simply
cannot have NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) using a nonprofit status to bring down a
country's financial system, over-throwing a country, financing civil strife and civil
war, usurping the government on things like immigration, etc.
Billionaires like Jeff Bezos aren't obscenely wealthy because they work harder than everyone
else or they're more innovative. They're obscenely wealthy because their corporate empires
drain society's resources -- and we'd all be better off without them.
This week, Amazon CEO
Jeff Bezos saw the largest single-day increase in wealth ever recorded for any individual. In
just one day, his fortune increased by $13 billion. On current trends, he is on track to become
the world's first trillionaire by 2026.Those on the right wing of politics argue that extreme
wealth is a function of hard work, creativity, and innovation that benefits society. But wealth
and income inequality have increased dramatically in most advanced economies in recent years.
The richest of the rich are much wealthier today than they were several decades ago, but it is
not clear that they are working any harder.
Mainstream economists make a more nuanced version of this argument. They claim that the
dramatic increase in income inequality has been driven by the dynamics of globalization and the
rise of "superstars." Firms and corporate executives are now competing in a global market for
capital and talent, so the rewards at the top are much higher -- even as competition also
constrains wages for many toward the bottom end of the distribution.
According to this view, high levels of inequality are a reward for high productivity. The
most productive firms will attract more investment than their less productive counterparts, and
their managers, who are performing a much more complex job than those managing smaller firms,
will be rewarded accordingly.
But here again the narrative runs aground on contact with reality. Productivity has not
risen alongside inequality in recent years. In fact, in the United States and the UK
productivity has flatlined since the financial crisis -- and in the United States, it has been
declining since the turn of the century.
There is another explanation for the huge profits of the world's largest corporations and
the huge fortunes of the superrich. Not higher productivity. Not simply globalization. But
rising global market power.
Many of the world's largest tech companies have become global oligopolies and domestic
monopolies. Globalization has played a role here, of course -- many domestic firms simply can't
compete with global multinationals. But these firms also use their relative size to push down
wages, avoid taxes, and gouge their suppliers, as well as lobbying governments to provide them
with preferential treatment.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon are a case in point. Amazon has become America's largest company
through anticompetitive practices that have landed it in trouble with the European Union's
competition authorities. The working practices in its warehouses are notoriously appalling . And
a study from last year revealed Amazon to be one of the world's most "aggressive tax
avoiders."
Part of the reason Amazon has to work so hard to maintain its monopoly position is that its
business model relies on network effects that only obtain at a certain scale. Tech companies
like Amazon make money by monopolizing and then selling the data generated from the
transactions on their sites.
The more people who sign up, the more data is generated; and the more data generated, the
more useful this data is for those analyzing it. The monetization of this data is what
generates most of Amazon's returns: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most profitable part of
the business by some distance.
Far from representing its social utility, Amazon's market value -- and Bezos' personal
wealth -- reflects its market power. And the rising market power of a small number of larger
firms has actually reduced productivity. This concentration has also constrained investment and
wage growth as these firms simply don't have to compete for labor, nor are they forced to
innovate in order to outcompete their rivals.
In fact, they're much more likely to use their profits to buy back their own shares, or to
acquire other firms that will increase their market share and give them access to more data.
Amazon's recent acquisition of grocery store Whole Foods is likely to be the first of many such
moves by tech companies. Rather than the Darwinian logic of compete or die, the tech companies
face a different imperative: expand or die.
States are supporting this logic with exceptionally loose monetary policy. Low interest
rates make it very easy for large companies to borrow to fund mergers and acquisitions. And
quantitative easing -- unleashed on an unprecedented scale to tackle the pandemic -- has simply
served to raise equity prices, especially for the big tech companies.
As more areas of our lives become subject to the power of big tech, the fortunes of people
like Bezos will continue to mount. Their rising wealth will not represent a reward for
innovation or job creation, but for their market power, which has allowed them to increase the
exploitation of their workforces, gouge suppliers, and avoid taxes.
The only real way to tackle these inequities is to democratize the ownership of the means of
production, and begin to hand the key decisions in our economy back to the people. But you
would expect that even social democrats, who won't pursue transformative policies, could get
behind measures such as a wealth tax.
"Building back better" after the pandemic will be impossible without such a tax -- and the
vast majority of both Labour and Conservative voters support such an approach, according to a
recent poll. And yet it appears that Labour's leadership are retreating from the idea.
In an interview the other day, I was asked why we should care about Jeff Bezos's wealth
if it makes everyone else better off. But the extreme inequalities generated by modern
capitalism are making obvious something that Marxists have known for decades: the superrich
generate their wealth at the expense of workers, the planet, and society as a whole.
In a rational and fair society, the vast resources of a tiny elite would be put to use
solving our social problems.
Wishful thinking. The neoliberal oligarchy is in conrol of all political power centers. Looks like neoliberal ideas became completely discredited. Even Krugman abandoned them.
Notable quotes:
"... In the age of AI the US needs a grand rebuilding of our infrastructure including electrical grids, bridges, highways, mass transit systems, and conversion to renewable energy. ..."
"... Elizabeth Warren showed her chops years ago when she was a guest on Bill Moyer's PBS show, and I've been a fan ever since. But - we don't just need more of Teddy Roosevelt - we need a good dose of Franklin Roosevelt, too ..."
"... In Senator Warren we finally have a politician who understands the difference between wealth and income and is willing to start taxing wealth. This is especially important as the truly wealthy receive very little of their money in the form of income and are therefore taxed on far less than they are actually worth. This only serves to exacerbate our inequality problem. ..."
"... Extreme income inequality is damaging to social capital and to public health - and thus in the long run to sustainable prosperity. The American epidemic of depression, opioid abuse and suicide is is correlated with the acceleration of income inequality. ..."
"... Finally, Senator Warren's proposal seems like an acceleration of the estate tax. ..."
"... Having worked in trusts and estates law for decades, I suspect that this proposal will invite use of the same techniques used by estate planners, lawyers, and accountants to drive down the fair market value of assets. Her proposal may work, if it is ever enacted, but the devil, as usual, will be in the details. This is a very complex concept, simple as it may seem at first blush. That is not an argument for not trying, but for being very careful in the implementation, beginning with the statutory language. ..."
"... This tax will require staffing up the IRS and that will require dems control over both houses of Congress as the GOPers have defunded the IRS. ..."
"... Pretax income concentration at the top increased starting in the 1980s as a direct result of the large reductions in the top marginal income tax rates. ..."
"... Even if a 70% top marginal tax rate did not raise a penny more in tax revenue it would still be justified on the grounds of preventing extreme concentration of wealth and income. Recent economic research has shown that in a purely capitalistic society in which there is no taxation nor redistribution all wealth in the whole society will ultimately be owned by a single household. https://voxeu.org/article/what-would-wealth-distribution-look-without-redistribution ..."
"... I applaud Elizabeth Warren and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez for espousing Teddy an Franklin Roosevelt's ideas about reducing the concentration of 90% of wealth in the upper 1/10th of 1 per cent (0.1%). That is the situation which can lead to major social unrest, widespread crime, and ultimately, civil war as happened in England in the 17th century, in Russia in 1917, and in the French Revolution that beheaded Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette - along with thousands of other members of the nobility. ..."
"... "wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans almost equal to that of the bottom 90 percent combined." The corrupt neoliberalism of the 1% is unsustainable but is reflective of a downward spiral of decline. While we experience continuous political campaigning the U.S. is, in reality, a criminal and corrupt corporate state enriching the 1% and masquerading as a democracy, an Inverted Totalitarianism. ..."
"... Great. The pendulum swings back to sensible taxation rates for the ultra wealthy. Hard to feel sorry for hedge fund managers. I can just see Sean Hannity railing against it now. He would have to cough up. ..."
"... Fascinating article. Thanks for sharing. Her Accountable Capitalism Act also addresses the root causes of inequality, although some critics have stated that it would lead to the semi-nationalization of business. ..."
@Horsepower the tax bill has, as predicted by almost everyone but the GOP lawmakers,
caused the deficit to balloon. Currently, the resulting debt must be paid by the descendents
of all of us but the ultra-wealthy. The alternative to that approach, openly proposed by the
GOP, was to take away vital services from most of us, like medical care, public education,
and retirement support. I'm surprised that you don't find those things "consequential to the
life of most Americans".
There is no reason -- economic, social or moral -- why anyone needs a personal fortune above
$500 million dollars.
Eddie Cohen M.D ecohen2 . com Poway, California Jan. 29
In the age of AI the US needs a grand rebuilding of our infrastructure including
electrical grids, bridges, highways, mass transit systems, and conversion to renewable
energy.
It also needs a medical care system that provides a high level of to all of our
citizens including the poor and those with pre-existing conditions. What better down payment
on these costly necessities than a tax on the ultra rich.
Elizabeth Warren showed her chops years ago when she was a guest on Bill Moyer's PBS show,
and I've been a fan ever since. But - we don't just need more of Teddy Roosevelt - we need a
good dose of Franklin Roosevelt, too.
Given where this country is at, taxing the uber-rich
alone isn't going to be enough to solve our problems. We need a jobs program - good, family
wage jobs - that have been chipped away at for decades by both automation and off-shoring.
Taxing will help fund much needed gov't infrastructure problems, but it's purchasing power
that drives the economy - and we can't have one without a vibrant middle class that's
actually making and doing stuff. Since the Clinton years, the USA has spawned a bloated
investor class, making a lot of money shuffling paper, but what do they produce that drives
this country forward? Our infrastructure is fast becoming 3rd world.
In Senator Warren we finally have a politician who understands the difference between
wealth and income and is willing to start taxing wealth. This is especially important as the
truly wealthy receive very little of their money in the form of income and are therefore
taxed on far less than they are actually worth. This only serves to exacerbate our inequality
problem. The big banks, in particular, are very worried about what would happen should Warren
become president. Like that other Roosevelt - Franklin - she welcomes their hatred. Good for
her.
Extreme income inequality is damaging to social capital and to public health - and thus in
the long run to sustainable prosperity. The American epidemic of depression, opioid abuse and
suicide is is correlated with the acceleration of income inequality.
Worldwide, countries
with high income inequality have more depression, more suicide and less happiness, even when
their per capita GNP is higher than their neighbors'. The toxic effects of inequality are
especially great in a nation like the US where children are taught that anyone can make it if
they work hard enough. In fact, there's a lot more upward mobility in those awful socialist
Nordic countries, where teaching public school is a prestigious and well-paid job, college
and vocational training are taxpayer-funded (not 'free'), and no one goes bankrupt from a
serious illness or injury.
Without endorsing anyone's proposals here, a couple of examples from recent history on
what's actually possible, despite what people may think: -- Six weeks before the Berlin Wall
fell and reunited Germany, the then-West German government issued a report projecting that
German reunification was at least 20 years away. -- Japan went from a highly-nuclear power
dependent country, with no prospect of changing, to one that drastically cut its dependence
on nuclear in just one year after the Fukushima disaster. -- One of my favorites: FDR sits
down with the leaders of General Motors at the dawn of WWII and says I need so many tanks, so
many trucks etc etc for the war effort. A GM exec responds on these lines: "Mr. President, we
can't fulfill those needs and still produce X-hundred-thousand cars a year." FDR: "You don't
understand. You're no longer a car company." So the lesson is, no one knows what's possible
in a society till you try.
Eliminating carried interest seems perfectly rational. Compensation by any other name is
compensation and taxable as ordinary income as it is for everyone else in this country. Once
upon a time, capital gains were taxed at 15% and ordinary income at rates as high as 91%.
That led to all sorts of devices to game the system, including the infamous collapsible
corporation.
But with the difference down to around 10-15%, we may as well bite the bullet
and tax income from capital at the same rate we tax income from work. I doubt this will hurt
savings, investment, or capital formation.
It is still nice to have money, and owning capital
assets will still beat the alternative.
Finally, Senator Warren's proposal seems like an
acceleration of the estate tax.
Having worked in trusts and estates law for decades, I
suspect that this proposal will invite use of the same techniques used by estate planners,
lawyers, and accountants to drive down the fair market value of assets. Her proposal may
work, if it is ever enacted, but the devil, as usual, will be in the details. This is a very
complex concept, simple as it may seem at first blush. That is not an argument for not
trying, but for being very careful in the implementation, beginning with the statutory
language.
@Steve B People receiving Social Security only pay taxes on the benefits if their income
exceeds the same thresholds that apply to people who go out and work for a living, and pay
Social Security taxes that go to the elderly. Ellen, stop treating Social Security like it's
a savings bank.
Your Social Security taxes paid for the generation before you, and the Social
Security taxes raised now are paying for you. The average Social Security recipient today
will receive twice as much as they paid into the system during their earning years.
So please
give the "I'm just getting back the money I paid into the system" routine a rest. It's a
fiction. The wealth of the over 65s is growing faster than any other age group in our
society, and the fraction of government spending on over-65s is the only part of government
that has grown in decades.
If you're making enough to pay income taxes, pay your taxes and
stop complaining. That means you're doing OK. You'd better hope young people don't wake up
and realize just how much of their hard-earned pay is going to pay for
retirees.
The seriousness in her policies is in her work ethics and brilliance. She means what she
says and works her heart out to achieve those goals. There isn't anyone out there that
matches those qualities.
This tax will require staffing up the IRS and that will require dems control over both
houses of Congress as the GOPers have defunded the IRS.
The ultra right, ultra rich will be
paying more and more of their fortunes to their already privately-owned senators to defeat
this and any other progressive tax proposals. We need more, more and more people to get into
the democratic process and VOTE to recapture the nation's leadership in 2020!
Pretax income concentration at the top increased starting in the 1980s as a direct result
of the large reductions in the top marginal income tax rates. Those who complain that a 70%
top marginal tax rate is confiscatory need to understand that's the whole point.
When top
marginal tax rates are confiscatory that leads to lower pre-tax income inequality because tax
aversion of the wealthy leads they to pay themselves less income to avoid paying the
government so much in taxes.
Unlike most workers, corporate executives can easily arrange for
their boards to pay them far more than their marginal product would justify.
Furthermore,
wealth tends to concentrate automatically when top marginal tax rates are low. This is simply
due to the math of compound interest. When investment returns are not taxed sufficiently by
the estate tax or by capital gains taxes, they will be reinvested leading to extreme wealth
accumulation over generations that is automatic and not the result of any kind of investing
skill.
Even if a 70% top marginal tax rate did not raise a penny more in tax revenue it would
still be justified on the grounds of preventing extreme concentration of wealth and income.
Recent economic research has shown that in a purely capitalistic society in which there is no
taxation nor redistribution all wealth in the whole society will ultimately be owned by a
single household. https://voxeu.org/article/what-would-wealth-distribution-look-without-redistribution
@Baldwin Actually, it's 2% on what is on top of those 50M, so 2% on 100M, if you have a
net worth of $150M. That being said, nobody with $150M net worth just "sits" on his money for
35 years. To get there in the first place, in the 21st century you usually have to pay an
expert and engage in financial speculation (= speculation about financial transactions, not
an investment in the "real" economy), and of course you won't stop paying that expert once
you reach $150M, so you continue to add millions to your wealth anyhow. On the other hand, if
you belong to the middle class, you easily pay $30,000 taxes a year.
After ten years, that's
$300,000, and after 33 years that's a million dollars paid in taxes. Seen in this way, even
having the middle class paying taxes seems "unfair", because when they only earn $75,000 a
year, why should they pay a million in taxes over 33 years ... ?
Conclusion: taxes are paid
year after year not in function of how many you will have paid in total at the end of your
career, but in function of what we collectively need to run this country smoothly (military,
government, education, roads and bridges, EPA, ...).
A "fair" tax code is a tax code that
allows anyone who works hard to live comfortably, weather your a hedge fund manager or
teacher. And in order to get there, we can't continue the GOP's constantly lowering taxes for
the wealthiest all while cutting services to the 99%. NO one with $150M will suffer by paying
$2M in taxes a year ...
I applaud Elizabeth Warren and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez for espousing Teddy an Franklin
Roosevelt's ideas about reducing the concentration of 90% of wealth in the upper 1/10th of 1
per cent (0.1%). That is the situation which can lead to major social unrest, widespread
crime, and ultimately, civil war as happened in England in the 17th century, in Russia in
1917, and in the French Revolution that beheaded Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette - along with
thousands of other members of the nobility.
We see this anger and violence today in the
United States - in mass shootings, in failing public schools (the salaries are not sufficient
to attract qualified teachers who instead will work in more remunerative fields, like law and
computer technology. What works better is to reduce the concentration of wealth so people in
the lower 90% can have more prosperity and social stability in their lives.
All people need a
reliable source of food, healthcare, and a place for them and their families to live. All
people need access to good education, family planning, and higher education sufficient to alllow them to work. With so much reliance on mechanical work, we also need for all people to
have a minimum income - something that no one talks abou yet - but enough to live safely.
There is support for this not only among Democrats but also among Republicans. The help
should be for everyone, not based on need (Marxism). This is common sense not
socialism.
It was hilarious to read that Rush Limbaugh is SO terrified of AOC and Liz Warren that he,
the grandmaster of Goebbels-like mis-information, is calling them "hitlerian" as he and
Hannity push Trump every day to emulate Mussolini! But why is simple: I read that Limbaugh
makes about $100 million a year, which puts him in the super-rich category. I doubt highly
that he's paying the maximum 37(?)% on his income and if he is he needs better accountants
and tax lawyers! But AOC's proposal means that $90 million of his $100 million would be taxed
at 70%, leaving him "only" a measly $27 million a year to try not to starve on. Along with
whatever millions are left after taxes on the first $10 million, say, $5 million (again,
needs better tax advice). So he's stuck trying to survive on $32 million! (BTW, Hannity only
makes about $29 million before taxes, Oh! The Humanity!--Or is it "Oh! The Hannity"?) That's
really why they are vitriolic. Taxes are for the "little people", the suckers who call in and
rant, who watch Fox and believe, no matter how illogical their logic. Rush and Sean see a
REAL movement to tax their excessive income and will fight it tooth and nail, with fact and
fiction (mostly fiction) to protect themselves and their wealth.
Interesting how it is almost exactly a hundred years since this problem was dealt with in
the last Gilded Age. Enough time so that the generations that remember are long gone and so
the problem came back.
The Uber rich did this to themselves with their complete disconnect
from the economic realities facing the 99%. TARP was the kicker - we gave a trillion dollars
to the 1% while the 99% were left to fend for themselves. Despite the protestations of the
99%. Now that's political power in the hands of the few for the benefit of the few. Time to
stop it now.
"wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans almost equal to that of the bottom 90 percent
combined." The corrupt neoliberalism of the 1% is unsustainable but is reflective of a
downward spiral of decline. While we experience continuous political campaigning the U.S. is,
in reality, a criminal and corrupt corporate state enriching the 1% and masquerading as a
democracy, an Inverted Totalitarianism.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can
have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Louis D.
Brandeis
Great. The pendulum swings back to sensible taxation rates for the ultra wealthy. Hard to
feel sorry for hedge fund managers. I can just see Sean Hannity railing against it now. He
would have to cough up.
This column makes a good case for Elizabeth Warren as Secretary of the Treasury, or head
of the Consumer Protection Bureau which she invented following Dodd Frank legislation. But
the best way to reach the widest audience is a Presidential campaign. Most of the responses
here focus on enough wealth, extreme wealth and self-interest. Beyond their tax liabilities
is the reality of the power the the rich wield through lobbyists, campaign contributions,
corporate takeovers, and tax dodges over our politics, governments, and over us, the people.
It's a pity that any proposed tax fairness adjustments are reduced to epithets against
socialism.
The problem is that the big money against this will say (ie: fund ads saying) anything
(true or false) about any other subject to swing votes against any candidate who's a serious
chance of pushing such a tax increase. One can only hope I am wrong.
Fascinating article. Thanks for sharing. Her Accountable Capitalism Act also addresses the
root causes of inequality, although some critics have stated that it would lead to the
semi-nationalization of business. I think its effect would be commonsense regulation of the
economic playing field so that excesses do not occur in how rewards are distributed. It has
the potential to address issues early enough to prevent problems.
@George Thanks to the Republican budget busting tax holiday for rich folks we will need
every penny of revenue just to keep our fiscal boat afloat. We should add AOC's 70% rate just
to patch our leaks in infrastructure, healthcare, education and social security for the
retirees who were gutted by the 2008 Republican Great Recession.
Since the super-rich are already paying 2+20 for their wealth management, paying another 2
to the government hardly seems like it would kill incentive...
Throughout most of the history of civilizations, governments have been funded by a wealth
tax. This was in the form of property tax, as that was the only wealth there was. Somehow
when financial wealth started to build, it was made largely exempt. Proposals to close this
loophole are well overdue. It's not so radical as it is just restoring traditional funding
methods.
A sure sign of health when Warren, a veteran politician and Ocasio-Cortez, a first term
member of Congress publish ideas early in the election cycle. The next steps are laws that
dismantle Citizens United and protect voting rights.
Elizabeth Warren had better take care. If she doesn't tread softly on these plans to
progressively tax the rich and make them spread the wealth to all those millions of people
out there who have had a hand in generating their economic success, she'll be called
something equally invidious to a 'socialist' -- a 'Canadian'.
Prof. Krugman is speaking truth to power but power tends to speak back, telling our
citizens that progressives like Sen. Warren are aiming to increase taxes across the board.
Never EVER do they narrow the stated target of such projected increases to the uppermost
economic stratum. And progressives always manage to let them get away with this. Democratic
candidates for political office need to assign members of their campaign staffs to Republican
events and arm them with bullhorns for the expressed purpose of shouting out the words "for
the rich" every time a typically disingenuous Republican opponent announces that a specific
Democrat has a plan to raise Americans' taxes.
"More important, my sense is that a lot of conventional political wisdom still assumes
that proposals to sharply raise taxes on the wealthy are too left-wing for American voters."
It's just shocking to me that conservative voters supposedly hate liberal elites, yet refuse
continuously to tax the mega rich and/or ignore the tax cuts for those households. Do they
not see the hypocrisy they're being fed by Fox News?
I know that it's inconvenient, but the US Constituion prohibits a direct tax that is not
apportioned among the states on the basis of population. Hard to see how Ms. Warren's "plan"
meets this standard. Serious presidential candidates need to propose plans that actually have
a chance to work. After what we're experiencing now, we don't need four additional years of
bombast.
@Mkm Can you give any arguments as to why this is unconstitutional, or a source as to when
it was declared so? Note that once (ie, just a few generations ago) abhorrent laws concerning
voting rights and segregation were considered just fine.
@Paul Wortman We indeed tend to believe that the poor and lower middle class must be
(more) ignorant, and as such easier victims of the GOP's massive fake news campaigns. Studies
show however that a majority of those earning less than $100,000 a year voted for Hillary,
whereas a small majority of those earning more than that voted for Trump. That's because her
platform included VERY clear and urgent, fact-based measures that would have helped the poor
and middle class, after Obama already made serious progress on these issues (a public option
added to Obamacare, and many other things). So imho the only ones risking "forgetting" about
the needs of the 99% when it comes to voting, are those who don't carefully fact-check
politicians' achievements and campaign agenda, before voting (or deciding not to vote)
...
@BC The current standard deduction of $12K for single people means that the first $12K is
not taxed ($24K joint) which means that your wish has already come true.
Fundamentally, a fallacy of modern American society is a perversion of the golden rule.
Let's call it "tax not lest ye be taxed." Even though the electorate will never in their
wildest dreams make this kind of income, their wildest dreams persist. And thus they will not
permit the thought of "unfair" taxation on the ultra-rich, using all the talking points the
richest 1% have lobbied deep into our political system at every level.
At this stage in our history when wealth hasn't been more concentrated, raising taxes on
the ultra-rich is exactly what populism is about. Think TR and FDR, not DJT.
@Ronald B. Duke, I think I remember people saying that during the civil rights movement
too. Be patient. You'll get what you want by'n'by. Waiting for dynastic fortunes trickle away
is sort of like waiting for the mountain to be worn away by the wind. It's not gonna happen
in our lifetime. There's always a reason for not depriving the wealthy of any part of their
fortunes. Each time we fail to do that, the need to do it becomes more dire. Things just
don't get better by waiting for someone to voluntarily or even accidentally, divest
themselves of money or power. It can be done by legislation, and that's better than by
revolution. And, you know, the wealth accumulation has already begun. What has to happen now
is to keep it from falling over and crushing all of us (Make that almost all of
us).
@Rockets Pual Krugman is almost surely right about incentives on the individual level
since few of us will hold off just because the second $50 MM is slightly less lucrative. Buts
its funny how he ignores the macroeconomic effect. If the Bezos tax bill was $1 billion, I
think we agree it would come exclusively out of savings. *IF* the government simply used the
proceeds to reduce spending (below some credible prior baseline) then the net effect on
national savings is zero; interest rates unchanged, economic activity unaffected, and so on.
But if the government spends the money (as seems likely under President Warren) then national
savings is reduced and the fed will (in the current environment) probably feel obliged to
push back against a stimulative fiscal policy with a restrictive monetary policy: higher
rates, less investment, less consumer spending, etc. So Bezos has no incentive to invest less
but as a nation we will do just that. Is that good? Maybe - it would have been great in 2009.
Seems to merit a discussion.
The 2020 campaign for POTUS is shaping up to be very interesting. That is, if Trump makes
it. Combine Warren and Harris we would have a great team. Warren adds specifics with
intellectual heft and Harris inspires us with her open, honest and intelligent persona. Just
need to find room for Amy K. on that team.
This is far better than changing the rate on capital gains, which would tend to punish
middle class retirees for having invested over the years (Mr. Rattner's proposal today) and,
I think, would be difficult for the uber-wealthy to avoid. I'm not sure that $50 million is
the correct starting point (perhaps a meager $25 million of net worth should be taxed) but
this is a brilliant new concept that offers promise of slowing wealth inequality while not
terribly constraining the wealthy.
In reading this column and the associated comments, there seems to be one glaring
omission: the necessity of overturning the Citizens United decision which provides the
ultra-rich avenues to continually push their lower taxes agenda by hiring hoards of
lobbyists, by "buying" politicians with campaign contributions, by funding misleading and
excessive political advertising, and by controlling various media outlets that are little
more than propaganda mills. Until Citizens United is overturned much-needed, rational
progressive taxation reforms have little chance of becoming reality, and with the current
composition of the Supreme Court overturning this decision is unfortunately extremely
unlikely.
@Yabasta Yeah, Dr. Krugman must have sustained a hit to the head since 2016 and would not
recognize a photo of Hillary Clinton if it was flashed before him. His incessant savaging of
Bernie was positively embarrassing to witness and never adequately explained. Only goes to
show you that our much vaunted reason is designed to justify our emotions and that even Nobel
laureates have deep subconscious axes to grind.
Under Eisenhower marginal tax rates were approximately 90%. This "Greatest Generation"
built the interstate system. We can't even maintain the interstate system we have let alone
build a new one. Our national-level political system is dominated by the rich. Our economic
policies are totally skewed towards the rich. Our educational system is biased towards the
rich. We've let capitalism trump democracy. If making America Great Again means taxing the
rich back into reality, I have no problem with that. My only annoyance with Mr. Krugman's
essay is his monomaniacal avoidance of saying the word, "Sanders." What's that
about?
This makes perfect sense to me. Under Senator Warren's plan households with more than $50
million of annual income would pay a 2% wealth surcharge. I can't imagine this would have any
significant effect on any of the 75,000 wealthiest U.S. households. I'd much rather see
Michael Bloomberg and his financial peers support broader efforts to make college free or
reduce student debt levels than make more lavish gifts to elite institutions like John
Hopkins.
cks, broken promises, scandal. and a presidency in trouble – all pushed Bill Clinton
into taking a brand new tack: triangulation. In addition to the definition of triangulation
offered by Dick Morris in his Frontline appearance on PBS, here is a quote from his book:
"The idea behind triangulation is to work hard to solve the problems that motivate the other
party's voters, so as to defang them politically The essence of triangulation is to use your
party's solutions to solve the other side's problems. Use your tools to fix their car." The
problem with that is that triangulation has not quite worked out that way. "Their car" wasn't
what was actually being fixed. What the "tools" did address, however, were the goals of the
Republican party.
https://www.rimaregas.com/2017/09/04/triangulation-when-neoliberalism-is-at-its-most-dangerous-to-voters-updated-dem-politics-on-blog42
/
@Jonathan....Current S+P 500 dividend yield is 2.02%. That would provide cash to cover
most of the wealth tax. A wealth tax might impact the market for high end art and
collectibles, but that is probably a very small fraction of total wealth.
@Duane McPherson I realize Warren may have some limitations re emotional appeal (also re
men not wanting to vote for a woman), which is why I said I put her "at the top of my list
for Dems, SO FAR." I'll see how this plays out on the campaign trail. Someone else may emerge
who has both the smarts and the charisma- or Warren may find an emotional niche. Time will
tell.
@Phyliss Dalmatian I'm afraid Sherrod is not liberal enough. Nowadays, if you talk about
bi-partisanship and reaching across the aisle, you're talking about making a deal with the
devil.
This is a pie pie-in-the-sky comment, but I'll stand by the overall premise based on our
history. It's all about the velocity of money and resources. You have to spend it to grow it.
Infrastructure also includes 100% healthcare cradle to grave, baseline living standards,
Social Security clean water, clean air, clean power, full education, etc. Infrastructure is
the key to everything throughout history, period. Close all tax loop holes. Reduce all
business taxes by at least half or more. Create a progressive tax rate starting at 0% raised
all the way to 80% up the ladder. If you don't like it, renounce your citizenship with all of
what that entails and leave. Completely get rid of the cap on Social Security. Everyone
except those at the 0% tax rate pays in 7%. That is fair. Make the business contribution 3%
of the first $100,000 Reinstate a stronger set of anti-trust guard rails. Re-instate a
stronger form of Glass/Steagle. Reinstate a stronger Fairness Doctrine Realize that a
corporation is NOT a person and if we think they are, subject them to the 13th amendment
regarding one person owning another. They also are not allowed participate in anything of a
political nature, in any way shape or form. Period. Full stop. Invest in the poor and middle
classes in all ways. Raising standards from the bottom up raises all boats. It's not "trickle
down" it's "trickle up". It's all about the velocity of money. You have to spend it to grow
it. We can do this in this country.
Why do by indirection what is better done directly? Income tax rates should be adjusted to
push the marginal rate to a percentage needed to produce the estimated revenue from Warren's
proposal. This would (1) not require creation of a new beauracracy and a new wealth tax code
to administer the new wealth tax, (2) not create incentives for lawyers and accounts to
redefine net worth and would (3) not change incentives for investments by wealthy
individuals, with unknown and unknowable side effects. If we also want to reduce fortunes
directly, enact a truly functional estate tax, not the joke which we have
now.
One other thought, the high tax rates of the 1950s and 1960s carried with them many, many
deductions which are no longer available -- -which were surrendered politically in exchange
for lower overall ages. Maybe something additionally to be considered would be combing
through the tax code and addressing the special interest provisions which conflate social
policy about certain companies/products/goals with tax policy.
@A P As you note, simply giving the money to their foundation can spare them the tax bill.
They don't actually need to have the foundation disburse that much of it. And my casual
impression is that Bill Gates' ability to direct billions through his foundation has
preserved his "social capital" - he is still invited to Davos, can tour Africa with Bono or
the Pope, get his phone calls returned by Important People, get his kids into whatever
college he chooses to endow, hop on private jets to wherever, and so on. As punishments go
forcing him to chair a major foundation is not much.
The government has never proven itself to be a good steward of capital. They will tax and
spend, tax and reallocate, tax and waste. No thanks. Would rather the incentives remain and
America push back against socialist notions. So expected from Krugman.
@CDN Eh? Real estate is already valued every year and taxed accordingly, it's called
property taxes. Art and antiquities are already valued for insurance purposes. It's not
difficulty at all.
@Shiv "I'm completely unable to determine how Jeff Bezos's work building Amazon has caused
me or anyone else to be worse off. In fact, we're all better off." So you know nobody who had
been making a decent living with a bookstore - or in publishing - or in many other small
businesses that have been priced into oblivion by Amazon if they'd been lucky enough to
survive the WalMart effect that came before. Robert Reich in "Supercapitalism" was right. The
consumer side of a person can so easily derange the thinking of the rest of the person. Not
following me? Than picture the dream world of big tech companies with their dreams of
stupendous individual wealth by "disrupting" something where people have been making their
livings. Each wave of disruption leaves people without their jobs. And these days, the chance
of getting into a better-paying job after being disruptive aren't all that terrific if you
look at the statistical outcomes. So is your view of morality served by the relentless push
to undercut older businesses that provided employment, simply because the disrupting model is
"more efficient"? Reconsider what "efficiency" is supposed to accomplish in the bigger
picture of society rather than just shareholder (and top executive) financial
reward.
As an authentic Republican, not one of the brigands who hijacked the party as a means to
plunder and pillage, I heartily endorse the Warren proposal. To make it somewhat more
palatable for voters I would suggest it earmark 50% of the revenue generated go to starting
to pay down the national debt. That would mean, using the 2.75 trillion estimate, that in the
first decade we would reclaim from the wealthiest approximately what Republicans gave away in
the deficit-financed tax cuts of 2017. In effect having had an interest-free loan from us for
a decade they would return the cash we have been paying interest on. Would be quite big of
them, actually.
@Alice It's not as if we ignore which tax loopholes for the wealthiest have to be closed
and how to do so, you know. Democrats have been trying to do this for quite some time
already, but the GOP blocks it. And Obamacare already includes a tax increase for the
wealthiest - that's one of the reasons why it cuts the deficit by $100 billion, rather than
adding to it. That proves that the wealthiest DNC donors and Democrats (such as Obama
himself, and Pelosi) FULLY agree to increase their own taxes. Conclusion: cynicism never
helped us move forward, fact-checking does ... ;-)
@Vink Why do you think they all own a dozen sprawling properties scattered around the
globe? They are all Bond villain wannabes never far from a secret citadel. I hope they've got
plenty of toilet paper on hand for the siege.
@Michael Blazin You think that... why? It's not at all clear. But it is clear that the law
could be written so that any transaction could be taxed. So unless the billionaires want to
hide their money under their mattresses.....
A progressive wealth tax is an"idea whose time has come". See Piketty, Thomas. Capital in
the Twenty-First Century . Harvard University Press. Use the revenue generated for
infrastructure repair.
@Blue Moon As far as Social Security and Medicare, all we have to do to fix that is tax
the millionaires' income the same as we do the peon- every dime that goes in their overseas
accounts should be taxed, same as the rest of us.
There are numerous holes in this proposal, none of which have anything to do with "greed".
1. What Krugman, Saez and Zucman fail to mention is that Denmark repealed its wealth tax in
1996 and Sweden repealed its wealth tax more than a decade ago. Not hard to understand why --
it is ultimately a self-defeating tax policy that just drives wealth out of your economy.
Krugman doesn't mention that Saez and Zucman's basic premise is that every country has to
implement a wealth tax for it to work, which is never going to happen. 2. Warren's proposal
is blatantly unconstitutional as a direct tax, so she would need to garner the political
support not just to pass the tax but amend the constitution similar to what was done for the
income tax. Highly unlikely. The bottom line is that the only way to actually pay for all of
the middle-class goodies that Democrats want to be provided by the Federal government (free
college, Medicare for all, free daycare, paid leave) is to tax the middle-class like what
they do in Sweden and Denmark through VAT and much lower income tax thresholds. Of course,
once everyone figures that out, those proposals won't poll nearly as well, which is why AOC
is now claiming that it will be magically paid for through the hocus-pocus of Modern Monetary
Theory.
For Warren's tax proposal that "wouldn't lead to large-scale evasion if the tax applied to
all assets and was adequately enforced ..." the IRS needs more staff and a bigger budget.
Past Republican congresses have purposely gutted the agency's audit and enforcement
capabilities at the direction of the very interests Warren's proposal targets.
"Would such a plan be feasible? Wouldn't the rich just find ways around it?" The most
likely way around it would be to bribe Congress not to vote for it. Isn't that why they
IMO NATO should have ended with the fall of the USSR. It now "confronts" a largely
imaginary threat, concocted for the purpose of maintaining the status quo in US government
expenditures for defense and supporting the imperial dreams of the neocons.
Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? Really?
Isn't the western alliance for all intents & purposes already dead?
It is a shame as it could work together to counter the totalitarian CCP. But Mama Merkel
it seems would rather get a few yuan from the communists and turn a blind eye to CCP
authoritarianism until it becomes obvious that the CCP are ruthless and will be competing
with Germany around the world for machine tools and autos by undercutting them on price and
heavily subsidizing their companies until German industry is destroyed.
I have heard of these elusive creatures called "Europeans", but have yet to meet one, so
am not able to comment on their alleged "smug superiority". How many divisions do they
have?
If anything drives the US and Europe apart, it will be trade, not security. Germany is
clearly chafing under the US bit, which sacrifices European industry to US interests --
sanctions on Nordstream 2, trade with Russia, trade with Iran, and China and Huawei. The US
clearly prioritizes it's own LNG , finance, technology and arms industries over European
prosperity. It amazes me that it has taken Europe so long to wake up.
Biden will do nothing to change that dynamic, since he is beholden to the same interests
as Trump.
Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? The Baltics and most
likely the Poles do with past history in mind. I would like to see them and the Ukrainians
transition into something like the Finns who acknowledge Russian power but maintain their
independence. Right now they are looking at NATO as their guarantee of independence in the
future. Who can blame them when looking at history.
The Trump admin's (and for that matter, Trump's own instincts) are and have continuously
been quite correct with regards to EU's defense expenditures agenda. The European 'humanists'
take advantage of the American defense umbrella inside their own countries so they can afford
to NOT spend on defense and instead spend more on domestic and economic development. So while
America continues to pay for the EU's defense it cannot afford to invest in its own domestic
programs (infrastructure, etc.) adequately. These Europeans then with the collaboration of
their Atlanticist fellows on the other side of the pond do nation-building and
democratization projects (call it endless wars) abroad, such as in Afghanistan. Just don't
ask them about their track record in this department.
However, the thing is when their immediate interests are in danger they forget about
America in a heartbeat. Examples, Germany's Nordstream pipeline with Russia, 5G
infrastructure and development, trade with China, Paris climate accord, etc.
I tend to believe that EU knows best how to make an existential threat out of Russia.
Anyone still remembers the novichok incident back in 2018? The thing with Russia is that from
the POV of EU, they view their Eastern neighbor as a solid and stable illiberal system that
is not within the ideological orbit of the western liberal democracy and thus they feel
threatened by that ideologically, NOT a scenario in which from Tallinn to Toulouse is invaded
and captured by Putin. In this endeavor they also have found willing partners in
'anti-authoritarian' hawks such as Bob Kagan, Hilary, Sam Power et.al that tow the same line
and advocate for NATO expansion and other similar projects.
The EU in definitely terrified of a scenario in which the U.S. (under a nationalist
conservative administration) starts de-funding NATO or withdraws its troops from Europe. In
this case they need to cut public spending and allocate more on defense which has a clear
impact on the 'democratic spirit' of EU's over-hyped social democracy.
In the past few years we have seen the rise of right-wing populsit nationalist parties in
pretty much every single major EU country. I believe there are strong tendencies in the Trump
admin-if DJT manages to stay in power for another 4 years- to do a little *something
something* about EU's decades-long nefarious free-riding of U.S. defense umbrella and I don't
think the effeminate EU leaders will gonna like it very much.
Barbara Ann - You say "I have heard of these elusive creatures called "Europeans", but
have yet to meet one, so am not able to comment on their alleged "smug superiority". How many
divisions do they have?"
The term "European" has become disputed territory. As an Englishman I regard myself fully
as "European" as any German or Frenchman but for many the term now seems to mean exclusively
"Member of the European Union". Tricky, that one.
Me, I prefer the term "Westerner". It takes in the so-called "Anglosphere" as well and
therefore covers all the ground without going into the fact that some parts have become
considerably less powerful over the last century and others considerably more. Also
accommodates without fuss the fact that the cultural centre of gravity, at some indeterminate
time in that last century, moved across from Paris, Vienna and Berlin to New York and parts
west.
Not always to your advantage, to you as an American that is, because a fair chunk of the
Frankfurt mob moved over your way with it. You caught from Old Europe the destructive and
vacuous tenets of "Progressivism" and are now sharing the disease in its full vigour with
us.
I mention that last because the violent TDS you see across the Atlantic isn't specifically
European. It's merely that it's natural for progressives to detest Trump or rather, not the
man himself but the "populist" forces he is taken to represent. It's garlic to the vampire
for the progressive, the Little House on the Prairie or its various European equivalents, and
the allergic reaction will become stronger yet. That "smug superiority" you will therefore
find in the States as readily as you will find it here. America or here we live on sufferance
in occupied territory, if we are not progressives ourselves, and should not the occupiers
always be superior and smug?
I went hunting for the Telegraph article the Colonel discusses above. I didn't like that
article at all. It gets the "freeloading" part right but in the context of a Russophobia
that's seemingly set in stone. And the Telegraph is not so much a progressive newspaper as
one that, while throwing a few token bones to its mainly Conservative readership, buys the
progressive Weltanschauung just as much as the Guardian or New York Times.
"How many divisions do they have?" A few more than the pope but maybe that's not
the point. I recently tried to follow the twists and turns of Mrs May's negotiations with the
EU as they related to defence. I got the impression that in the matter of defence the supply
of divisions could safely be left to the Americans. It was the allocation of defence
contracts that they were all concerned about.
Residing in Europe in the late 1960's at a US joint NATO military attachment in Northern
Italy, we mused were we there to keep our eye on the Russians, or in fact keep our eyes on
the Germans. One still saw in the back rooms, AXIS memorabilia.
As an aside: the only reason Michelle Obama chose as one of her FLOTUS projects - support
of military families -- was so she could get Uncle Sam to jet her around to all those US
military bases still in Europe for tea with the commander's wife and then on to her real
purpose - shopping and having fun with friends and families she was able to drag along. On
our dime.
My last visit to Europe found there are now more Turks, than former "Europeans; except in
France where they were more Algerians, than native French. And of course UK has long been
little more than the entrenched polyglot of their vast far flung Empire.
Indeed, who is a "European" today. Birth rate demographics from the former colonies, boat
people or import of cheap labor has now taken over anything we used to call "European". Can a
resident Turk really serve up a perfect plate of raclette in Switzerland? One word answer:
no. And that is a sad loss. One must instead shift their tastes to shwarma, if one wants
European food today.
In regard to Europeans--and perhaps some Australians whom I've met--I have often felt that
they in some ways did feel a bit superior to Americans.
Their sense of superiority, however, seemed more rooted in a sense of cultural
superiority. Those on the blog who viewed the comic rendition of the Three Little Pigs that
was recently posted here might think of that and its wonderful ending about the house that
was "American made." it was a wonderful ending for that well-known tale and a great defense
of our culture's current limited and plain vocabulary in some groups.
As an English major and English teacher, so much of the great literature that we taught
did come from England. I took three Comps when I earned my Masters: English literature from
Beowulf (which I read in Old English) to Chaucer's Catterbury Tales (which I read in Middle
English) and then to Virginia Woolf.
For my comp in American literature, I read from Washington Irving to the modern American
writers at the time I was in college.
My third comp was in Modern Linguistic Theory.
Of course we taught Shakespeare and Dickens---English writers--to our junior high and high
school classes. We studied mostly American writers in regard to short stories, as short
stories are considered the American genre. Our teaching of poetry covered both English and
American poets. As far as novels go, we taught both English and American novels.
Russian and German novelists were also on our list of reading for our comps. (We read them
in English translation.)
In summary, American culture was often overshadowed by the many longer centureies of
European culture in much of my college career.
What the Europeans can't deny, though they may want to, is that the tehcology and
innovation in things like automobile production, electricity, telephones, and into space
expoloration ---many things like that--is where we can indeed be quite proud.
They can continue to feel culturally superior to us if it makes them feel better. I defy
them, however, to minimize our importance in World War II.
A European was understood, in Iran, to be a Christian. A Turk in Germany or and Algerian
in France is just that, a Turk, an Algerian, i.e. another Muslim.
There are professional and managerial middle class French Muslims in Paris and elsewhere,
but are they French? I do not know how assimilated they are.
" he will follow some Trump-era objectives, because that is what American interests
demand, thus showing that Trump was no extremist on China."
So if Biden and Trump both want something, that shows that it isn't extreme. How does that
work again?
The drive for confrontation with Russia contradicts Europe's desire to do buisness with her.
Hence the end of the Western Alliance.
"The US faces a rapidly escalating political crisis. The losing party in November will
undoubtedly go to the federal courts to claim that their opponents cheated in the
process."
They all went along with electronic voting and postal ballots. Now they're all going to
complain about the consequences.
Of course NATO should have disappeared together with the Berlin Wall, but it is alive,
kicking and ever looking for trouble, Belarus comes to mind.
The problem with propaganda is that the emitter ends up believing it, Europe does not need
any protection, we have the means to protect ourselves.
The US is an occupation force, and on top of it demands payment for it. Pick up your gear and
go home, and by the way, Europe should worry about countries armed to their teeth by the US,
I'm thinking about Morocco for instance, since I live in Spain. The beautiful line of the
Sierra that I contemplate every morning while stretching has been contaminated with a radar
station of the Aegis system, and that means we in our quite and beautiful Andalusian town are
a target for the biggies. Stop believing your propaganda, pick up your gear and let everybody
take care of themselves, the benefits will be for the US population in the first place, and
the world will rejoice.
The reason German military contribution to the "western alliance" is what it is is very
simple.
It is according to the incentives that threats that German leadership perceives.
First: Objective strategic things:
Essentially, noone is going to invade Germany. This removes one major reason to have a large
army. Secondly, Germany is not going to productively (in terms of return of investment)
invade anyone else. This removes the second major reason to have a large army. There is
something to be said to have a cadre army that can be surged into a real army if conditions
change.
Second: Incentives of German political leaders.
While the degree of German vassal stateness concerning the USA is up to a degree of debate,
that the USA has a lot of influence over Germany is in my view not. Schröder got elite
regime changed over his Iraq war opposition (it was amazing that literally all the newspaper
were against him, had a big impact on me growing up during this time).
Essentially, if you are in Nato, at some point, Uncle Sam will invite you to some adventure.
If you say yes to this adventure you commit your armed forces to some confrontation in the
middle east if you are lucky, or against Russia in Eastern Europe if you are unlucky. Your
population is not going to like this, and you may face losing elections over this. It is also
expensive in terms of life and material (although not very expensive compared to actual wars
against competent enemies).
If you say no, Uncle Sam will be displeased with you and will make this known for example by
sicking the entire "Transatlantic leadership networks" on you, which can also make you lose
the next election.
Essentially, if Uncle Sam comes asking, you lose the next election if you say yes, and you
also lose if you say no. Saying no is on balance cheaper, because you dont incurr the
financial and human costs of joing a random US adventure on top of the risk of losing the
next election.
The winning play is to get your army in such a state that Uncle Sam will not even ask.
Germany basically did create condition that enabled this.
Its a reasonably happy state for Germany to be in.
We are basically doing Brave Soldier Schweijk on the national level.
Solutions from a US pov:
1: Do less military adventures. If you do less adventures, people will fear being
shanghaied along less. This will decrease the drawbacks associated with having a reasonable
military as a Nato state.
2: Dont soft regime change governments that say no to your foreign adventures. Instead,
maybe listen to them. Had the US listend to French and German criticism regarding the wisdom
of going to war with Iraq, the US and also a lot of others would have been much better
off.
3: Make it clear that particpation in foreign adventures is actually voluntary instead of
"voluntary", make also clear that participation in defensive operations is not voluntary and
is what Nato was created for and that you expect a considerable contribution towards this.
Also, do some actual exercises. For example, if Germany claims that its military expenditure
is sufficient, stress test this premise by having a realistic exercise in which a German
divisions goes up against an American one. Yes, do some division size exercizes pretty
please. Heck, after ensuring that this exercize wont be a failfest, have some Indian be the
referee.
Now we are getting to the heart of the matter. My jest about never having met a European
was of course designed to illustrate that "Europe" is a secondary construct. Never has a
person, upon meeting me, introduced themselves as a "European".
Europe is a moveable feast and even territorial definitions are slippery. "Europeans" I
think, must be characterized by short memories, for was it not less than 25 years ago that
European NATO planes bombed their fellow Europeans in Bosnia? It can't have been an accident
either, as I understand the op. was called "Operation Deliberate Force".
If Europe is synonymous with the EU it has precisely zero divisions and though you
yourself may remain "Western", you are as a consequence of Brexit no longer "European". No, I
think you and Polish Janitor are close by identifying "European" as a progressive/liberal,
democratic (read "globalist") value system. An insufficiency of "European-ness" can thus be
used to justify NATO involvement across various geographies - from Bosnia to Afghanistan
(& shortly Belarus?).
But of course the "European" members of NATO are hardly on the same page. It looks not at
all unlikely that two of its members may go to war in the Eastern Mediterranean.
I agree with you re the Telegraph article btw. "European" smugness is well represented in
that organ.
No. They did NOT all go along with "electronic voting and postal ballots." The 50 states
each run federal elections in any way they please. The US Constitution requires that. There
are a wide variety of voting machines in use and only a few states use mailed in ballots. the
Republican Party particularly opposes mail in voting.
You should be complaining to the politicians you elect. They're the ones requesting US
military protection. Prior to Trump, our governments were quite happy to provide that
protection. He's now asking for some cost sharing.
Be careful though, before you know it Spain could become a vassal of the Chinese
communists as many countries in Africa are finding out now. Hopefully you can continue to
extract euros from the Germans and Dutch while battling the separatists in Catalonia. There's
a thin veneer between stability & strife.
Paco, with a huge cost of lives and treasure the US was twice asked to clean up Europe's
self-inflicted messes in the past century. Promise you won't call on us again, and we can
talk. I know, past is not necessarily prologue but do at least meet us half way. It is only
good manners.
Barbara Ann - Lots of Europes of course. "My" Europe may no longer be on the active list.
Traces here and there. Few green shoots that are visible to me. Many rank growths overlaying
it.
Also many "European Unions". They exist all right, in uneasy company.
So many "EU's". A ramshackle Northern European trading empire - I think that's too
unstable to be long for this world but I could be wrong. A nascent superpower, that denied by
many but for some their central aim.
A bureaucratic growth. A handy market place for all. A Holocaust memorial centre; when the
EU politicians find themselves in a tight spot they can always call on Auschwitz and all fall
back in line. I saw Mrs Merkel pull that trick at the last but one Munich Security Conference
and all there, because Mrs Merkel was at that time in a very tight spot, applauded with
relief.
A Progressive Shangri-La, all the more enticing for never being defined. Those adherents
of that "EU" do actually call themselves "EU citizens" and I see the term is becoming more
common usage. Maybe those are the self proclaimed "European citizens" you have not met.
And the producer of reams of lifeless prescription that seek to force all into the same
mould and tough on the poor devils who can't fit the model. And on their families.
Lots of "EU's". I like none of them. While we wait for that edifice of delusion to
collapse I hope the damage it does to "My" Europe is not irreparable.
@ Diana Croissant: "They can continue to feel culturally superior to us if it makes
them feel better. I defy them, however, to minimize our importance in World War II."
Jack, with all due respect, the politician who committed treason and gave away Spanish
territory for a foreign power to install bases died in 1975, nobody voted for him, general
Franco, an ally of Hitler, someone who sent over 50k troops to the siege of Leningrad, one of
the greatest crimes in the history of mankind, a million casualties, mainly civilians, dead
by hunger and disease, that fascist ally of Hitler we had to endure for 40 years, the price
to close your eyes and your nose not to smell the stench were bases, an occupying force
watching one of the strategic straights in Rota, close to Gibraltar, plus other bases inland.
I could go on, and remind you of 4H bombs dropped over Palomares after a broken arrow
incident, one of them broke and plutonium is still poisoning an area that your government is
not willing to clean. So that is what foreign occupation looks like, if something goes wrong,
well, we are protecting you . they say. History should be taught with a bit more detail in
the USA.
I'm afraid you're reading the dynamics of the European/US relationship quite incorrectly.
Bluntly, you have the facts wrong.
This site, and particularly the Colonel's committee of correspondence, is packed with
experts who have lived in this field and know their way around it. So I don't venture a
comprehensive rebuttal myself - my knowledge is partial and I do not have the background to
be sure of getting it dead right. But here -
"Essentially, if you are in Nato, at some point, Uncle Sam will invite you to some
adventure. If you say yes to this adventure you commit your armed forces to some
confrontation in the middle east if you are lucky, or against Russia in Eastern Europe if you
are unlucky."
That is transparent nonsense.
Obama has stated that it was the Europeans, including the UK, who pushed him into some
middle East interventions. I don't think he was shooting a line. The leaked Blumenthal emails
confirm that and we merely have to look at the thrust of French military actions to
understand that the French in particular push continually for intervention in the ME.
They are still doing so, and not for R2P purposes. They would see the ME and parts of
Africa as part of the EU sphere of influence and their initial reaction to Trump's abortive
attempt to withdraw from Syria shows they would be more than prepared to go it alone there if
they could.
A squalid bunch, and here I must include my own country in that verdict. Reliant on US
logistics and military strength they seek to pursue their own interests and could they but do
so they would do so unassisted. Don't pretend that it's the Americans who force them into
these genocidal adventures.
As for the Ukraine, we see from Sakwa's unflattering study of the EU adventure there that
that was building up well before 2014. The dramatic rejection of the EU deal was the prelude
to the coup. The Ashton tape shows an astonishing degree of EU intervention in Ukrainian
internal affairs before that coup. And from the Nuland tape we get a glimpse of the EU regime
change project that shows it was deeply implicated.
Pushed into the Ukrainian adventure by the US? Rubbish. The EU and its constituent members
were attempting to play their own hand and were not merely following the US lead
submissively.
We hear little of European neocon ventures. But what little has surfaced about them shows
that your picture of peace loving Europeans dragged into these conflicts by an overbearing
"Uncle Sam" is dishonest and misleading.
So I tell my German friends and relatives when they push the same line. They look at me
with disbelief and go off and hunt around the internet themselves. And then come back and do
not disagree. I suggest you do the same. The facts are all there, even for those of us
without inside knowledge or who lack the requisite background.
Democrats are in bed with the deep state, take billions from the largest corporations, and
conduct the most undemocratic nominating process ever seen in the US, but thank god they are
not fascists!
Trezrek500 , 2 hours ago
It is amazing, Bezos becomes the richest guy in the world and the delivery of his packages
is subsidized by tax payers. The USPS should triple their rates to AMZN. Problem solved.
When I lived in Europe it seemed like all the post offices had banks which offered basic
services like checking and savings. They should do that here.
seryanhoj , 2 hours ago
They have a simple ' people's ' banking system for people that don't feel up to going to
to one if the majors, and probably deal in small smounts.
The same system handles distributions from the various social schemes. Also they give low
or no cost access to buy government securities, and savings schemes. It sound a bit 'Big
Brover' , but in practice it feels good.
Demeter55 , 46 minutes ago
You are threatening the banksters! They need every last penny!
"... While I agree with the basic points that this post is making, obviously, I am very wary of opinions in which it is assumed that the 'threat' to a Western country is that it might 'sink' to the level of some non-Western country (assuming you conceptualise Russia as being non-Western which is a highly debatable point). ..."
"... 'Trump is the natural friend of dictators everywhere,' As opposed to precisely which American President? 'It's hard to see democracy surviving anywhere if it fails in the US.' ..."
@1
Well for various reasons I was in a room full of young Chinese people immediately after the
election of Trump. I asked what their opinion was, and one piped up (with the obvious support
of the rest) that they thought it would be very good, as Trump was obviously a deranged
lunatic and imbecile whose shambolic rule (this was not how he expressed it, of course, but
this was the gist) would weaken the United States, and 'America's weakness is China's
opportunity'.
While I agree with the basic points that this post is making, obviously, I am very wary of
opinions in which it is assumed that the 'threat' to a Western country is that it might
'sink' to the level of some non-Western country (assuming you conceptualise Russia as being
non-Western which is a highly debatable point).
'Trump is the natural friend of dictators everywhere,' As opposed to precisely which American President? 'It's hard to see democracy surviving anywhere if it fails in the US.'
As everyone has pointed out, Hilary in fact won the last Presidential election in terms of
votes. It is almost unheard of in an advanced 'democracy' for the Head of State to 'win' an
election via a minority of the votes.
On top of these things one has the increasing powergrab by the non-democratic Supreme
Court, which has simply decreed that it is the major 'power in the land' with a 'lock' on
what laws get passed and which do not, and the populace be damned.
Not to mention the de facto chokehold that corporations have on who can run for office and
what positions they can hold (Sanders, with his 'new' way of raising money, is challenging
this. We shall see what happens).
It is not at all clear to me that the US is in any objective sense more democratic than,
say, Iran (although it is a lot more FREE than Iran .but that's not the same thing).
So Trump is likely to exacerbate and intensify trends that have been going on for
decades.
A bit more about what I wrote about the Supreme Court (and the American 'justice' system)
more generally, which CT commentator Corey Robin has been noting tirelessly, to widespread
apathy amongst Democratic elites.
'The Supreme Court will probably overrule decades of progressive precedents and strike
down the next Democratic president's reforms. You would not know this from watching the 2020
Democratic presidential debates. Wednesday's showdown in Atlanta, the fifth so far, did not
include a single question about the courts. Earlier debates allowed for brief discussions of
the Supreme Court, but every candidate dramatically underestimated the threat it poses to the
Democratic Party. Both the candidates and the moderators appear to be astonishingly
naïve about the judiciary's lurch to the right under Donald Trump. And it is pointless
to discuss the Democrats' ambitious proposals without explaining how they are going to
survive at SCOTUS.
It's not just the debates -- Democratic politicians rarely talk about the courts at all.
There is an enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the judiciary:
GOP voters are more likely to be motivated by the opportunity to fill judicial vacancies,
which is why Trump ran on a promise of appointing archconservative judges. Democratic voters
focus more on individual political issues, and their party has never prioritized judges -- or
campaigned on the fact that every political dispute is ultimately resolved as a judicial
question. This complacency will prove catastrophic for progressives now that Justice Brett
Kavanaugh has replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy, shoring up a conservative majority that will
obstruct liberal policies for a generation.'
THIS is the threat to progressivism (well, all the other things that I mentioned are
threats too, but this is the one that's liable to be the 'straw that breaks the camels'
back').
@Hidari Most of the Democratic candidates have signalled willingness to pack the SC if it
rules in a partisan way. Even Booker and Klobuchar are saying "wait and see" rather than
opposing outright. . I'm sure Roberts doesn't need reminders, so the absence of much
discussion doesn't seem like a problem to me. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/18/2020-democrats-supreme-court-1223625
As regards the lower courts, they can only interpret legislation. A determined
Congressional majority can respond to any adverse interpreation with legislation that
repudiates it. It's only gridlock and Congressional cowardice that has given US courts so
much power.
An Excellent analysis, I am happy to see the pseudo intellectual Jonathan Haidt called out
for what he is. He's the king of false equivalencies , a disease we suffer from these days.
Haidt is a conservative pretending to be a neutral observer to legitimize the toxic ideology
of conservatism. Maybe someone should send Haidt Corey Robin's book " The Reactionary Mind "
not that he would read it
steven t johnson 11.23.19 at 4:00 pm (no link)
I was so astonished at the notion Trump cares (or trusts?) his children enough to appoint one
president I rather forgot the rest of the post.
But fascism is just a different way of mobilizing the nation for war than democracy. So
the real issue with Trumpian fascism is who he's going to fight and how. I believe economic
warfare waged against the masses in a foreign country is an atrocity. Venezuela, Iran and as
ever North Korea are targets. The goal in the economic war on China is the restoration of
capitalism and/or the division of the country. But do democrats/Democrats really disagree
with this? Except that they want more use of weapons and a better deal for the EU?
Plunder, me hearties! Plunder! Yo Ho Ho and a barrel of oil!
"President Trump wants it known that -- despite his recent decision to pull back the U.S.
militarily back from previously Kurdish-held territory in Syria -- he plans on "
keeping the oil " in Syria and using American troops to do it.
If he follows through, he'll set a dangerous precedent -- and might commit a war crime.
Keeping Syria's oil could well constitute pillage -- theft during war -- which is banned in
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the 1907 Hague Laws and
Customs of War on Land, which states, "The pillage of a town or place, even when taken by
assault, is prohibited." The prohibition has a solid grounding in the laws of war and
international criminal justice , and the U.S. federal code , including as a
sanction for the illegal exploitation of natural resources such as oil from war zones.'
washpo
"Trump's more grave rationale is his conception of oil as remuneration for U.S. military
investment in the Middle East. In a speech Oct. 29, he said: "We want to keep the oil. $45
million a month? Keep the oil." It mirrors a sentiment he expressed to ABC News in 2011 about
Iraqi oil, saying
, "You win the war and you take it. You're not stealing anything. We're taking back $1.5
trillion to reimburse ourselves. " That argument goes well beyond the notion of securing the
oil -- it suggests trying to profit from it -- and therefore risks triggering responsibility
for pillage. Contrary to Trump's characterization, pillage is a form of stealing.
None of this is a new line of thinking for Trump: As a private citizen in 2011, in an
interview with the Wall Street Journal, commenting on U.S. military involvement in Libya,
he said : "I'm only interested in Libya if we take the oil. If we don't take the oil, I'm
not interested." Regarding Iraq, he
said : "I always heard that when we went into Iraq, we went in for the oil. I said, 'Ah,
that sounds smart.' " Indeed, he sounded disappointed during his televised announcement last
week of the killing of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, when he returned to the
subject of oil and
lamented : "I always used to say 'If they're going into Iraq, keep the oil.' They never
did. They never did."" washpo "Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said during the committee
hearing that SDF General Commander Mazloum Abdi informed him that a deal had been signed with
an American company to "modernize the oil fields in northeastern Syria", and asked Pompeo
whether the administration was supportive of it.
"We are," Pompeo responded during the hearing streamed live by PBS. "The deal took a little
longer ... than we had hoped, and now we're in implementation."" Reuters -------------- Barry
McCaffery has commented on Twitter that if we do this we are becoming pirates. As he says, the
oil belongs to Syria. I agree. pl
We're watching civil war unfold in the US and these pompous asses are busy trying to
sponge up Syrian oil, the trivial amount of stuff that is land-locked hundreds of miles from
any territory we control or is friendly to the US? God help us who is advising the tweeter in
chief? Can't Trump read an oil price chart any better than Fauci can read a Covid infection
rate? Did his son-in-law tell him what a great idea that would be? Are the warrior generals
who wouldn't defend this nation's capital against antifa, with the tacit consent at sedition
by Esper, in agreement with this line of strategic wisdom too? Maybe Senator Graham, who just
yesterday finally cornered Sally Yates into admitting under oath that the FISA warrant on
Carter Page was a fraud, is covering his bases in case the left's "resistance" to the
November election results in antifa marching into D.C. to bring Biden's secret choice as V.P.
into power? We have less reason to be in Syria than we do to still be defending Germany and
the rest of Europe from the USSR.
Well, with avarice as the guiding principle of the Trump administration's foreign policy,
at least there's no hypocrisy. Just pure, unadulterated greed. The honesty is almost
admirable. But I don't know how our Iranian policy fits into the avarice doctrine.
As far as Trump's pirate name goes, I do like the sound of "Bonespurs." I can see the flag
flying from the mainmast... a skeleton foot of or on a field of sable.
As an army of occupation the US military could requisition the oil, but according to the
Hague Regulations it can do so only for its own needs. It can not do so for the fun and
profits of the foreign state that sent that army in.
If you really, really, really squint hard then perhaps there is wriggle room under Article
55 i.e. Trump can claim that he is the usufructuary of the territory, and therefore can
benefit from the pumping.
But arguing that would be a hopeless brief.
So, yeah, Trump as a medieval warlord. Perhaps he'll also reintroduce the practice of
prima nocta.
I would accept the idea of Trump's inability to distinguish between government and
business, but people like Jeffries and the Pomp are neocon ideologues through and through.
Nothing more.
Russia-China "Dedollarization" Reaches "Breakthrough Moment" As Countries Ditch Greenback
For Bilateral Trade by Tyler Durden Thu, 08/06/2020 - 21:55
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Late last year, data released by the PBOC and the Russian Central Bank shone a light on a
disturbing - at least, for the US - trend: As the Trump Administration ratcheted up sanctions
pressure on Russia and China, both countries and their central banks have substantially
"diversified" their foreign-currency reserves, dumping dollars and buying up gold and each
other's currencies.
Back in September, we wrote about the PBOC and RCB building their reserves of gold bullion
to levels not seen in years. The Russian Central Bank became one of the world's largest buyers
of bullion last year (at least among the world's central banks). At the time, we also
introduced this chart.
We've been writing about the impending demise of the greenback for years now, and of course
we're not alone. Some well-regarded economists have theorized that the fall of the greenback
could be a good thing for humanity - it could open the door to a multi-currency basket, or
better yet, a global current (bitcoin perhaps?) - by allowing us to transition to a global
monetary system with with less endemic instability.
Though, to be sure, the greenback is hardly the first "global currency".
Falling confidence in the greenback has been masked by the Fed's aggressive buying, as
central bankers in the Eccles Building now fear that the asset bubbles they've blown are big
enough to harm the real economy, so we must wait for exactly the right time to let the air out
of these bubbles so they don't ruin people's lives and upset the global economic apple cart. As
the coronavirus outbreak has taught us, that time may never come.
But all the while, Russia and China have been quietly weening off of the dollar, and instead
using rubles and yuan to settle transnational trade.
Since we live in a world where commerce is directed by the whims of the free market (at
least, in theory), the Kremlin can just make Russian and Chinese companies substitute yuan and
rubles for dollars with the flip of a switch:
as Russian President Vladimir Putin once exclaimed , the US's aggressive sanctions policy
risks destroying the dollar's reserve status by forcing more companies from Russia and China to
search for alternatives to transacting in dollars, if for no other reason than to keep costs
down (international economic sanctions can make moving money abroad difficult).
In 2019, Putin gleefully revealed that Russia had reduced the dollar holdings of its central
bank by $101 billion, cutting the total in half.
And according to new data from the Russian Central Bank and Federal Customs Service, the
dollar's share of bilateral trade between Russia and China fell below 50% for the first time in
modern history.
Businesses only used the greenback for roughly 46% of settlements between the two countries.
Over the same period, the euro constituted an all-time high of 30%. While other national
currencies accounted for 24%, also a new high.
As one 'expert' told the Nikkei Asian Review, it's just the latest sign that Russia and
China are forming a "de-dollarization alliance" to diminish the economic heft of Washington's
sanctions powers, and its de facto control of SWIFT, the primary inter-bank messaging service
via which banks move money from country to country.
The shift is happening much more quickly than the US probably expected. As recently as 2015,
more than 90% of bilateral trade between China and Russia was conducted in dollars.
Alexey Maslov, director of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies at the Russian Academy of
Sciences, told the Nikkei Asian Review that the Russia-China "dedollarization" was
approaching a "breakthrough moment" that could elevate their relationship to a de facto
alliance.
"The collaboration between Russia and China in the financial sphere tells us that they are
finally finding the parameters for a new alliance with each other," he said. "Many expected
that this would be a military alliance or a trading alliance, but now the alliance is moving
more in the banking and financial direction, and that is what can guarantee independence for
both countries."
Dedollarization has been a priority for Russia and China since 2014, when they began
expanding economic cooperation following Moscow's estrangement from the West over its
annexation of Crimea. Replacing the dollar in trade settlements became a necessity to
sidestep U.S. sanctions against Russia.
"Any wire transaction that takes place in the world involving U.S. dollars is at some
point cleared through a U.S. bank," explained Dmitry Dolgin, ING Bank's chief economist for
Russia. "That means that the U.S. government can tell that bank to freeze certain
transactions."
The process gained further momentum after the Donald Trump administration imposed tariffs on
hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods. Whereas previously Moscow had taken
the initiative on dedollarization, Beijing came to view it as critical, too.
"Only very recently did the Chinese state and major economic entities begin to feel that
they might end up in a similar situation as our Russian counterparts: being the target of the
sanctions and potentially even getting shut out of the SWIFT system," said Zhang Xin, a
research fellow at the Center for Russian Studies at Shanghai's East China Normal
University.
As commentators focus on the hospitalisations of two Gulf monarchs, and permutate likely
succession issues, they may miss the wood for the succession trees: Of course, the death of
either the Emir of Kuwait (91 years old) or King Salman of Saudi Arabia (84 years old) is a
serious political matter. King Salman's particularly has the potential to upturn the region (or
not). Yet Gulf stability today rests less on who succeeds, but rather on tectonic shifts in
geo-finance and politics that are just becoming visible. Time to move on from stale ruminations
about who's 'up and coming', and who's 'down and out' in these dysfunctional families.
The stark fact is that Gulf stability rests on selling enough energy to buy-off internal
discontents, and to pay for supersized surveillance and security set-ups.
For the moment, times are hard, but the States' financial 'cushions' are just about
holding-up (albeit only for the big three: Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar). For others the
situation is dire. The question is, will this present status quo persist? This is where the
warnings of shifts in certain global tectonic plates becomes salient.
The Kuwaiti succession struggle is emblematic of the Gulf rift: One candidate for Emir, (the
brother), stands with Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi-led 'war' on Sunni Islamists (the Muslim
Brotherhood). Whereas the other, (the eldest son), is actively backed by the Muslim
Brotherhood, Qatar and Turkey. Thus, Kuwait sits on firmly on the Gulf abyss – a region
with significant, but disempowered Shi'a minorities, and a Sunni camp divided and 'at war' with
itself over support for the Muslim Brotherhood; or what is (politely called) 'autocratic
secular stability'.
Interesting though this is, is this really still so relevant?
The Gulf, perhaps more significantly, is held hostage to two huge financial bubbles. The
real risk to these States may prove to come from these bubbles, which are the very devil to
prick-down into any gentle, expelling of gas. They are sustained by mass psychology –
which can pivot on a dime – and usually end catastrophically in a market 'tantrum', or a
'bust' – and with consequent risk of depression, should Central Banks ever try to lift
the foot off the monetary accelerator.
The U.S. ubiquitous 'asset bubble' is famous. Central Bankers have been worrying about it
for years. And the Fed is throwing money at it – with abandon – to keep it from
popping. But as indicated earlier, such bubbles are highly vulnerable to psychology – and
that may be turning, as the celebrated V-shaped, expected economic recovery recedes into the
virus-induced distance. But for now, investors believe that the Fed daren't let it implode
– that the Fed has absolutely no option but go on throwing more and more money at it (at
least until November elections & then what?).
Less visible is that other vast 'asset bubble': The Chinese domestic property market. With
its closed capital account, China has a huge sum (some $40 trillion) sloshing around in
collective bank accounts. That money can't go abroad (at least legally), so it rotates around
between three asset markets: apartments, stocks, and commodities somewhat whimsically. But
investing in apartments is absolutely king! 96%
of urban Chinese own more than one: 75% of private wealth is represented by investments in
condos – albeit with 21% standing empty in urban China, for lack of a tenant.
Long story, short, the Chinese massively chase property valuations. Indeed, as the WSJ has
noted "the central problem in China is that buyers have figured out the government doesn't
appear to be willing to let the market fall. If home prices did drop significantly, it would
wipe out most citizens' primary source of wealth, and potentially trigger unrest". Even during
the pandemic – or, perhaps because of it as the Chinese piled-in – prices rose 4.9%
in June, year on year. The total
value of Chinese homes and developers' inventory hit $52 trillion in 2019, according to
Goldman Sachs; i.e. twice the size of the U.S. residential market, and outstripping even the
entire U.S. bond market.
If it sounds just like America's QE-inflated asset markets, that's because it is. As things
stand, both the Chinese residential and the U.S. equity bubbles are unstable. Which might
fracture fist? Who knows but bubbles are also vulnerable to pop on geo-political events (such
as a U.S. naval landing on one of China's disputed South Sea islands, to which
China is promising , absolutely, a military response).
No one has any idea how Chinese officials can manage the property bubble, without
destabilizing the broader economy. And even should the market stay strong, it creates headaches
for policy makers, who have had to hold off on more aggressive economic stimulus this year
– which some analysts say is needed, partly because of fears it will inflate
housing further.
Ah there it is: Out in plain view – the risk. The condo-trade has hijacked the entire
Chinese economy, tying officials' hands. This, at the moment when Trump's trade war has turned
into a new ideological cold war targeting the Chinese Communist Party. What if the Chinese
economy, under further U.S. sanctions, slides further, or if Covid 19 resurges (as it is in
Hong Kong)? Will then the housing market break, causing recession or depression? It is, after
all, China and Asia that buy the bulk of Gulf energy: Demand shrinks, and price falls. The fate
of the Gulf States' economies – and stability – is tied to these mega-bubbles not
popping.
Bubbles are one factor, but there are also signs of the tectonic plates drifting apart in a
different way, but no less threatening. Bankers Goldman Sachs sits at the very heart of the
western financial system – and incidentally staffs much of Team Trump, as well as the
Federal Reserve.
And Goldman wrote something this week that one might not expect from such a system stalwart:
Its commodity strategist Jeffrey Currie,
wrote that "real concerns around the longevity of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency
have started to emerge".
What? Goldman says the dollar might lose its reserve currency status. Unthinkable? Well that
would be the standard view. Dollar hegemony and sanctions have long been seen as Washington's
stranglehold on the world through which to preserve U.S. primacy. America's 'hidden war', as it
were. Trump clearly views the dollar as the bludgeon that can make America Great Again.
Furthermore, as Trump and Mnuchin – and now Congress – have taken control of the
Treasury arsenal, the roll-out of new sanctions bludgeoning has turned into a deluge.
But there has also been within certain U.S. circles, a contrarian view. Which is that the
U.S. needs to 're-boot' its economic model with a Tech-led, 'supply-side' miracle to end growth
stagnation. Too much debt suffocates an economy, and populates it with zombie enterprises.
In 2014, Jared Bernstein, Obama's former chief economist said that the U.S. Dollar
must
lose its reserve status , if such a re-boot were to be done. He explained why, in a New
York Times op-ed:
"There are few truisms about the world economy, but for decades, one has been the role of
the United States dollar as the world's reserve currency. It's a core principle of American
economic policy. After all, who wouldn't want their currency to be the one that foreign banks
and governments want to hold in reserve?
"But new research reveals that what was once a privilege is now a burden, undermining job
growth, pumping up budget and trade deficits and inflating financial bubbles. To get the
American economy on track, the government needs to drop its commitment to maintaining the
dollar's reserve-currency status."
In essence, this is the Davos Great Reset line
. Christine Lagarde, in the same year, called too for a 'reset' (or re-boot) of monetary policy
(in the face of "bubbles growing here and there) – and to deal with stagnant growth and
unemployment. And this week, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations issued a paper entitled:
It
is Time to Abandon Dollar Hegemony .
That, we repeat, is the globalist line. The CFR has been a progenitor of both the European
and Davos projects. It is not Trump's. He is fighting to keep America as the seat of western
power, and not to accede that role to Merkel's European project – or to China.
So why would Goldman Sachs say such a thing? Attend carefully to Goldman's framing: It is
not the Davos line. Instead, Currie writes that the soaring disconnect between spiking gold
price and a weakening dollar "is being driven by a potential shift in the U.S. Fed towards an
inflationary bias, against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions, elevated U.S. domestic
political and social uncertainty, and a growing second wave of covid-19 related
infections".
Translation: It is about U.S. explosive debt accumulation, on account of the Coronavirus
lockdown. In a world where there is already over $100 trillion in dollar-denominated debt, on
which the U.S. cannot default; nor will it ever be repaid. It can therefore only be inflated
away. That is to say the debt can only be managed through debasing the currency. (Debt jubilees
are viewed as beyond the pale.)
That is to say, Goldman's man says dollar debasement is firmly on the Fed agenda. And that
means that "real concerns around the longevity of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, have
started to emerge".
It is a nuanced message: It hints that the monetary experiment, which began in 1971, is
ending. Currie is telling U.S. that the U.S. is no longer able to manage an economy with this
much debt – simply by printing new currency, and with its hands tied on other options.
The debt situation already is unprecedented – and the pandemic is accelerating the
process.
In short, things are starting to spin out of control, which is not the same as advocating a
re-boot. And the debasement of money is inevitable. That's why Currie points to the disconnect
between the gold price (which usually governments like to repress), and a weakening dollar. If
it is out of the Fed's control, it is ultimately (post-November) out of Trump's hands, too.
Should confidence in the dollar begin to evaporate, all fiat currencies will sink in tandem
– as G20 Central Banks are bound by the same policies as the U.S.. China's situation is
complicated. It would in one way be harmed by dollar debasement, but in another way, a general
debasement of fiat currency would offer China and Russia the crisis (i.e. the opportunity), to
escape the dollar's knee pressed onto their throats.
And for Gulf States? The slump in oil prices this year already has prompted some investors
to bet against Gulf nations' currencies, putting longstanding currency pegs with the dollar
under pressure. GCC states have kept their currencies glued to the dollar since the 1970s, but
low oil demand, combined with dollar weakness would exacerbate the threat to Gulf 'pegs', as
their trade deficits blow out. Were a peg to break, it is not clear there would be any obvious
floor to that currency, in present circumstances.
Against such a backdrop, the royal successions underway in Gulf States might perhaps be
regarded a sideshow.
"... Greenwald went on, after that, to discuss other key appointees by Nancy Pelosi who are almost as important as Adam Smith is, in shaping the Government's military budget. They're all corrupt. ..."
"... Numerous polls (for examples, this and this ) show that American voters, except for the minority of them that are Republican, want "bipartisan" government; but the reality in America is that this country actually already does have that: the U.S. Government is actually bipartisanly corrupt, and bipartisan evil. In fact, it's almost unanimous, it is so bipartisan, in reality. ..."
"... That's the way America's Government actually functions, especially in the congressional votes that the 'news'-media don't publicize. However, since it lies so much, and its media (controlled also by its billionaires) do likewise, and since they cover-up instead of expose the deepest rot, the public don't even know this. They don't know the reality. They don't know how corrupt and evil their Government actually is. They just vote and pay taxes. That's the extent to which they actually 'participate' in 'their' Government. They tragically don't know the reality. It's hidden from them. It is censored-out, by the editors, producers, and other management, of the billionaires' 'news'-media. These are the truths that can't pass through those executives' filters. These are the truths that get filtered-out, instead of reported. No democracy can function this way -- and, of course, none does. ..."
"... The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society , and we are as a people, inherently and historically, opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings . ..."
"... But we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding it's fear of influence, on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections , on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations. It's preparations are concealed, not published. It's mistakes are buried, not headlined. It's dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned. No rumor is printed. No secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War in short with a wartime discipline, no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. ..."
The great investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald gave an hour-long lecture on how
America's billionaires control the U.S. Government, and here is an edited summary of its
opening twenty minutes, with key quotations and assertions from its opening -- and then its
broader context will be discussed briefly:
2:45 : There is "this huge cleavage between how members of Congress present themselves,
their imagery and rhetoric and branding, what they present to the voters, on the one hand, and
the reality of what they do in the bowels of Congress and the underbelly of Congressional
proceedings, on the other. Most of the constituents back in their home districts have no idea
what it is that the people they've voted for have been doing, and this gap between belief and
reality is enormous."
Four crucial military-budget amendments were debated in the House just now, as follows:
to block Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
to block Trump from withdrawing 10,000 troops from Germany
to limit U.S. assistance to the Sauds' bombing of Yemen
to require Trump to explain why he wants to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear
Forces Treaty
On all four issues, the pro-imperialist position prevailed in nearly unanimous votes -
overwhelming in both Parties. Dick Cheney's daughter, Republican Liz Cheney, dominated the
debates, though the House of Representatives is now led by Democrats, not Republicans.
Greenwald (citing other investigators) documents that the U.S. news-media are in the
business of deceiving the voters to believe that there are fundamental differences between the
Parties. "The extent to which they clash is wildly exaggerated" by the press (in order to pump
up the percentages of Americans who vote, so as to maintain, both domestically and
internationally, the lie that America is a democracy -- actually represents the interests of
the voters).
16:00 : The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee -- which writes the nearly $750B
annual Pentagon budget -- is the veteran (23 years) House Democrat Adam Smith of Boeing's
Washington State.
"The majority of his district are people of color." He's "clearly a pro-war hawk" a
consistent neoconservative, voted to invade Iraq and all the rest.
"This is whom Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats have chosen to head the House Armed
Services Committee -- someone with this record."
He is "the single most influential member of Congress when it comes to shaping military
spending."
He was primaried by a progressive Democrat, and the "defense industry opened up their
coffers" and enabled Adam Smith to defeat the challenger.
That's the opening.
Greenwald went on, after that, to discuss other key appointees by Nancy Pelosi who are
almost as important as Adam Smith is, in shaping the Government's military budget. They're all
corrupt. And then he went, at further length, to describe the methods of deceiving the voters,
such as how these very same Democrats who are actually agents of the billionaires who own the
'defense' contractors and the 'news' media etc., campaign for Democrats' votes by emphasizing
how evil the Republican Party is on the issues that Democratic Party voters care far more about
than they do about America's destructions of Iraq and Syria and Libya and Honduras and Ukraine,
and imposing crushing economic blockades (sanctions) against the residents in Iran, Venezuela
and many other lands. Democratic Party voters care lots about the injustices and the sufferings
of American Blacks and other minorities, and of poor American women, etc., but are satisfied to
vote for Senators and Representatives who actually represent 'defense' contractors and other
profoundly corrupt corporations, instead of represent their own voters. This is how the most
corrupt people in politics become re-elected, time and again -- by deceived voters. And -- as
those nearly unanimous committee votes display -- almost every member of the U.S. Congress is
profoundly corrupt.
Furthermore: Adam Smith's opponent in the 2018 Democratic Party primary was Sarah Smith (no
relation) and she tried to argue against Adam Smith's neoconservative voting-record, but
the press-coverage she received in her congressional district ignored that, in order to
keep those voters in the dark about the key reality. Whereas Sarah Smith received some coverage
from Greenwald and other reporters at The Intercept who mentioned that "Sarah Smith
mounted her challenge largely in opposition to what she cast as his hawkish foreign policy
approach," and that she "routinely brought up his hawkish foreign policy views and campaign
donations from defense contractors as central issues in the campaign," only very few of the
voters in that district followed such national news-media, far less knew that Adam Smith was in
the pocket of 'defense' billionaires. And, so, the Pentagon's big weapons-making firms defeated
a progressive who would, if elected, have helped to re-orient federal spending away from
selling bombs to be used by the Sauds to destroy Yemen, and instead toward providing better
education and employment-prospects to Black, brown and other people, and to the poor, and
everybody, in that congressional district, and all others. Moreover, since Adam Smith had a
fairly good voting-record on the types of issues that Blacks and other minorities consider more
important and more relevant than such things as his having voted for Bush to invade Iraq, Sarah
Smith really had no other practical option than to criticize him regarding his hawkish
voting-record, which that district's voters barely even cared about. The billionaires actually
had Sarah Smith trapped (just like, on a national level, they had Bernie Sanders trapped).
Of course, Greenwald's audience is clearly Democratic Party voters, in order to inform them
of how deceitful their Party is. However, the Republican Party operates in exactly the same
way, though using different deceptions, because Republican Party voters have very different
priorities than Democratic Party voters do, and so they ignore other types of deceptions and
atrocities.
Numerous polls (for examples,
this and
this ) show that American voters, except for the minority of them that are Republican, want
"bipartisan" government; but the reality in America is that this country actually already does
have that: the U.S. Government is actually bipartisanly corrupt, and bipartisan evil. In
fact, it's almost unanimous, it is so bipartisan, in reality.
That's the way America's
Government actually functions, especially in the congressional votes that the 'news'-media
don't publicize. However, since it lies so much, and its media (controlled also by its
billionaires) do likewise, and since they cover-up instead of expose the deepest rot, the
public don't even know this. They don't know the reality. They don't know how corrupt and evil
their Government actually is. They just vote and pay taxes. That's the extent to which they
actually 'participate' in 'their' Government. They tragically don't know the reality. It's
hidden from them. It is censored-out, by the editors, producers, and other management, of the
billionaires' 'news'-media. These are the truths that can't pass through those executives'
filters. These are the truths that get filtered-out, instead of reported. No democracy can
function this way -- and, of course, none does.
Patmos , 8 hours ago
Eisenhower originally called it the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.
Was probably still when Congress maybe had a few slivers of integrity though.
As McCain's wife said, they all knew about Epstein.
Alice-the-dog , 2 hours ago
And now we suffer the Medical Industrial Complex on top of it.
Question_Mark , 1 hour ago
Klaus Schwab, UN/World Economic Forum - power plant "cyberattack" (advance video to 6:42
to skip intro):
please watch video at least from minute 6:42 at least for a few minutes to get context,
consider its contents, and comment:
Vot3 for trump but don't waste too much energy on the elections. All Trump can do is buy
us time.
Their plan has been in the works for over a century.
1) financial collapse with central banking.
2) social collapse with cultural marxism
3) government collapse with corrupt pedophile politicians.
EndOfDayExit , 7 hours ago
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
Humans are just not wired for eternal vigilance. Sheeple want to graze and don't want to
think.
JGResearch , 8 hours ago
Money is just the tool, it goes much deeper:
The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far
worse than your darkest visions and fears.'
– Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
'The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are
not behind the scenes' *
- Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
This information helps understand the shift to the bias we are witnessing at The PBS
Newshour and the MSM. PBS has always taken their marching orders from the Council on Foreign
Relations.
Judy Woodruff, and Jim
Lehrer (journalist, former anchor for PBS ) is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations. John McCain (United States Republican Senator
from Arizona , 2008
Republican Party nominee for the Presidency), William F. Buckley, Jr
(commentator, publisher, founder of the National Review ), Jeffery E Epstein
(financier)
The Council on Foreign Relations has historical control both the Democratic establishment
and the Republican establishment until President Trump came along.
Until then they did not care who won the presidency because they control both parties at
the top.
FYI: Hardly one person in 1000 ever heard of the Council on Foreign Relations ( CFR ).
Until Trump both Republicans and Democrats control by the Eastern Establishment.There
operational front was the Council on Foreign Relations. Historically they did not care who
one the election since they controlled both parties from the top.
The CFR has only 3000 members yet they control over three-quarters of the nation's wealth.
The CFR runs the State Department and the CIA. The CFR has placed 100 CFR members in every
Presidential Administration and cabinet since Woodrow Wilson. They work together to misinform
the President to act in the best interest of the CFR not the best interest of the American
People.
At least five Presidents (Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, Bush, and Clinton) have been members
of the CFR. The CFR has packed every Supreme court with CFR insiders.
Three CFR members (Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Sandra Day O'Connor) sit on
the supreme court. The CFR's British Counterpart is the Royal Institute of International
Affairs. The members of these groups profit by creating tension and hate. Their targets
include British and American citizens.
The CFR/RIIA method of operation is simple -- they control public opinion. They keep the
identity of their group secret. They learn the likes and dislikes of influential people. They
surround and manipulate them into acting in the best interest of the CFR/RIIA.
KuriousKat , 8 hours ago
there are 550 of them in the US..just boggles the mind they have us at each others throat
instead of theirs.
jmNZ , 3 hours ago
This is why America's only hope is to vote for Ron Paul.
x_Maurizio , 2 hours ago
Let me understand how a system, which is already proven being disfunctional, should
suddenly produce a positive result. That's craziness: to repeate the same action, with the
conviction it will give a different result.
If you would say: "The only hope is NOT TO TAKE PART TO THE FARCE" (so not to vote) I'd
understand.
But vot for that, instead of this.... what didn't you understand?
Voice-of-Reason , 6 hours ago
The very fact that we have billionaires who amass so much wealth that they can own our
Republic is the problem.
Eastern Whale , 8 hours ago
all the names mentioned in this article is rotten to the core
MartinG , 5 hours ago
Tell me again how democracy is the greatest form of government. What other profession lets
clueless idiots decide who runs the business.
Xena fobe , 4 hours ago
It isn't the fault of democracy. It's more the fault of voters.
quikwit , 3 hours ago
I'd pick the "clueless idiots" over an iron-fisted evil genius every time.
_triplesix_ , 8 hours ago
Am I the only one who noticed that Eric Zuesse capitalized the word "black" every time he
used it?
F**k you, Eric, you Marxist trash.
BTCtroll , 7 hours ago
Confirmed. Blacks are apparently a proper noun despite being referred to as simply a
color. In reality, no one cares. Ask anyone, they don't care expert black lies matter.
freedommusic , 4 hours ago
The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society , and we are as a people,
inherently and historically, opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret
proceedings .
And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be
seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official
censorship and concealment.
Our way of life is under attack.
But we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies
primarily on covert means for expanding it's fear of influence, on infiltration instead of
invasion, on subversion instead of elections , on intimidation instead of free choice, on
guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast
human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine
that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political
operations. It's preparations are concealed, not published. It's mistakes are buried, not
headlined. It's dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned. No
rumor is printed. No secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War in short with a wartime
discipline, no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.
...I am asking the members of the newspaper profession and the industry in this country
to re-examine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the
present danger, and to heed the duty of self restraint, which that danger imposes upon us
all.
It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second
obligation and obligation which I share, and that is our obligation to inform and alert the
American people, to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need and
understand them as well, the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program, and the
choices that we face.
I am not asking your newspapers to support an administration, but I am asking your help
in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete
confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens, whenever they are fully
informed.
... that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment. The only business in
America specifically protected by the constitution, not primarily to amuse and entertain,
not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply give the public what it
wants, but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to
indicate our crises, and our choices, to lead, mold, educate, and sometimes even anger,
public opinion.
there is a difference between Prudent speech and Free speech.
When punishment for voicing dissenting opinion includes physical assault it doesn't much
matter how rare the actual instances of physical violence are
Notable quotes:
"... Of course, it is not (yet) possible to determine the exact racism quotient of each individual, so exemplary cancellations are the means of influencing individuals to modify their behaviour. I appreciate that "racism quotient" and "exemplary cancellation" make me sound like one of those right-wing Orwell cosplayers, but I can't think of a better way of putting it. ..."
Cancel culture, I suggest, matters most when our ability to access diverse opinion is
curtailed as a result of speech policing, either by algorithms or individuals, especially in
the run-up to an election. Self-censorship in universities is equally important. When Chomsky
signed the Harper's letter, he reported he receive a great many letters of support from
academics terrified of being cancelled.
We're coming out of a certain kind of (neo-)liberal consensus in which politics was viewed
as a mostly technocratic business of setting laws in the abstract. That perspective was
sufficient to get some things right: many blatantly discriminatory laws have been repealed
across the Western world over the last 70 years. But it turns out that racism and sexism
don't require explicitly racist or sexist laws on the books: they can subvert neutral-seeming
laws to their purposes, and can bias the behaviour of individuals and networks of individuals
to the extent that widespread discrimination can continue...
The other strand focuses on the moral reform of white people. It proceeds from the
assumption that the law has only a limited role in moral conduct, and that the evidence of
the last 50 years is that removing explicitly racist legislation, and even legislating
anti-racism (e.g. affirmative action) isn't enough to secure good outcomes. If your
individual acts have the practical outcome of furthering or defending racist interests, then
you are part of the problem. The demands here are much harder to define. Rather than focusing
all attention on a specific reform that can be enacted in a single moment by an executive or
legislature, attention is cast broadly across all actions occurring at all times by all
people. Of course, it is not (yet) possible to determine the exact racism quotient of
each individual, so exemplary cancellations are the means of influencing individuals to
modify their behaviour. I appreciate that "racism quotient" and "exemplary cancellation" make
me sound like one of those right-wing Orwell cosplayers, but I can't think of a better way of
putting it.
All of this intersects with the modern reality of social media: things that "normal"
people might be able to say in a bar or a cafe discussion with friends or colleagues are now
part of the permanent public record, searchable and viewable by millions. Social media
provides excellent tools both for taking things out of context and re-contextualising them.
Secondly, "brands" or organisations are now direct participants, and can be subject to public
pressure in much more visible ways than previously.
I'm a big fan of biological metaphors; they keep one humble about the inevitability of
unintended consequences. The metaphor gets strained when it moves from external viral spread
to internal immune response, though; in the former, we're assuming a team of informed medical
professionals, seeing things from the "outside" with the authority implied by specialized and
objective knowledge. I'm not sure who these people correspond to in the world we inhabit,
where even the real doctors have trouble getting traction.
The internal immune response feels like a closer match, as surface protein markers are
proxies for identity, microbes display "false flags" to avoid detection, and auto-immune and
inflammatory responses often do more damage than the threats they're reacting to.
On both levels of metaphor, it seems clear that the structure of social media is explicitly
designed to create and exploit "virality"; we need to rethink what this means for us.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/29/social-distancing-social-media-facebook-misinformation
" No one seems to reflect here that silencing people because of their politics is
historically and usually the preserve of those with the power to silence – that is,
conservatives. Be careful what you wish for."
And here we have the cancel culture "problem" in a nutshell. The complaint isn't that
Musgrave lost a job or is literally forbidden to speak or even lacks reasonable ways to be
heard. The complaint is that blog found him distasteful and doesn't want him commenting
there. This isn't a right to speak issue, it's a demand to be heard issue.
Far worse things are done to BLM protesters. Being denied a blog posting? Try being denied
the right to even assemble, and shot with tear gas and rubber bullets. That didn't stop me
from protesting. Being denied a blog post and hearing some harsh criticism is nothing.
I broadly agree with the points about free speech in the post, and Waldron's arguments,
but I don't think it's right to equate the debate about "cancel culture" with these
issues.
John's understanding of it is even more dismissive (and imo off-target).
being cancelled means having to read rude things said about you by lots of unimportant
people on Twitter, as opposed to engaging in caustic, but civilised, debate with your peers
in the pages of little magazines
It seems to me cancel culture is both an ethos and a tactic. The ethos involves a zero
tolerance approach to certain ethical transgressions (eg overt expressions of racism) and an
absolute devaluation of people who commit them. The tactic is based around achieving cultural
change by exerting collective pressure as consumers on managers of corporations (or
corporation-like entities, like universities) to terminate transgressors, as a way of
incentivising other emplpoyees to fall into line. It seems to me to be heavily shaped by and
dependent on American neoliberalism as the ethos is both punitive and consumerist and the
tactic is dependent on at-will employment and managers' deference to customer sentiment, and
while most of its current "successes" have been broadly of the Left there's no reason to
assume that will be the case in future. I think it does represent a weakening of liberal
norms of freedom of discussion and I think Chomsky's right to be concerned.
There's nothing new about speech codes. Puritans and others refused to employ the Book of
Common prayer demanded by the Act of Uniformity of 1662. Scolds and speech police can be
found among agnostics, people of faith, and across the political spectrum. Nor is the common
sense exercise of good judgement regarding when, or if, to suggest to a friend he, she, or
they might like to lose a little weight, or to refrain from pointing out the questionable
personal grooming habits of a colleague, client, superior, or family member.
Do I need to declare my beliefs and opinions on every topic freely in every forum. In my
own case, no. And there's a big difference between being shunned and being imprisoned, or
executed, for mocking the wrong text or monarch.
As I courtesy, I might well avoid broaching topics I'm aware may distress another. But
that's a far cry from what's happening in modern old media. Bari Weiss evidently had her
privileges to write and edit others freely severely curtailed. And, yes, I'm aware that she
had cancellation issues of her own. But forcing James Bennett to resign, who put Ta-Nehisi
Coates on the cover of the Atlantic, for permitting a US senator to publish an op-ed in the
NYT?
We need a diverse set of values and beliefs, argues Henry, J. S. Mill, and others. The
head of Google is just now trying to explain why "Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze,
Townhall, The Daily Wire, PragerU, LifeNews, Project Veritas, Judicial Watch, The Resurgent,
Breitbart, the Media Research Center, and CNSNews" somehow disappeared from the Google search
engine.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/29/google-ceo-dodges-question-on-blacklisting-of-conservative-websites/
Cancel culture, I suggest, matters most when our ability to access diverse opinion is
curtailed as a result of speech policing, either by algorithms or individuals, especially in
the run-up to an election. Self-censorship in universities is equally important. When Chomsky
signed the Harper's letter, he reported he receive a great many letters of support from
academics terrified of being cancelled.
When punishment for voicing dissenting opinion includes physical assault it doesn't much
matter how rare the actual instances of physical violence are. I spoke with an American
colleague employed this week who stated that any dating which is going on among staff and
adults of one kind or another on campus is done in secrecy, if at all. Do Democrats feel that
they're better off having thrown Al Franken under the bus?
Adhering to speech codes and surrendering to a tiny, highly vocal mob seems a very bad
idea to me, and I suspect, many, many others. We don't quite know what to do with the
screaming adolescents of varying ages, but we wish they'd stop yelling.
The good news is that we live in societies, for the most part, which permit the upset to
act out freely. I wonder whether the folks currently trying to burn down the US federal
courthouse in Portland believe their rights to privacy must be respected? The
double-standards on display roil what should be reasonable debate. It should be possible to
disagree civilly with anyone.
Trying to get someone fired, or shunned, for any reason, is about the saddest waste of
energy and time I can imagine – I mean, talk about a poverty of imagination. It's
happened to me here on occasion. When the pitchforks come out, I know my opponents 'got
nothing.' That's small solace, however, when watching those I'd prefer to respect do their
best to stifle debate.
Relative to other nations, we enjoy liberties others can only dream of. These liberties
are worth protecting. I'm not sure we're doing such a good job.
There seems to be some dispute about whether there is a far Left socialist revolution
unfolding. I can't see much distinction between 'Neoliberalism in its purest form' and
authoritarian Communism. It boils down to control, whether that is in a 'market' context of
monopoly corporations who are embedded within the state, or whether it is in the context of
'state enterprises' in the USSR.
What seems clear is that the society of the capitalism of small and medium sized businesses,
relatively free movement, civil liberties and an open culture are being wound down and
replaced by a centralised control society organised through the internet. State
administration will matter less. Central banks, Blackrock investor algorithms, automated
private security systems will matter more. This is not an attack on Trump, it is the bringing
down and replacement of the US system per se.
Call it what you want. The jerks on the street have absolutely no idea what is taking place.
They are brainwashed ideologues puppeteered by forces that operate above the distinction
between 'capitalism' and 'communism'.
Why are there so many young people out there available to be radicalized and to just ruin
and riot endlessly? Because American capitalism has devolved into a 'gig economy' where
millions have no real future and nothing much to lose. People face a lifetime of meaningless,
low paid service gigs that will never give them the means to have the standard of living of
the previous generations. All the drug use is symptomatic of that.
Why would media and corporations promote and fund communism, being that they're the
billionaire-corporate capitalist class? It's bait and switch from the class warfare of
communist rhetoric to endless racial leveling and chaos along all social, racial and cultural
lines. This leaves the billionaire benefactors of unisex toilets still in charge.
Small businesses are bankrupted under the guise of fighting the killer virus, their assets
scooped up by the deep pockets. It's a huge transfer of wealth upwards scheme. The economy is
being reset downwards using the ruin caused by these rioters and the killer virus. The mass
of people will learn to adjust their expectations to fit the new grim reality. The commies,
anarchists and whatever else is out there will later be rolled up. What with all the spying
and fusion centers the government knows who they are. They're useful at the moment. It's a
capitalist driven thing. Can't find a job after losing your business? Well here's some new
legalized drugs for you and a welfare, I mean stimulus, check to tide you over at the hobo
camp.
I put these comments on the open thread about the same time b started this one
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1289724554982629377
The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria signed a deal to market oil to
US-based Delta Crescent Energy LLC "with the knowledge and encouragement of the White
House."
Trump a few months back "We've kept the oil". Well, he hasn't had a problem hanging onto
it and getting an American company involved.
The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria signed a deal to market oil
to US-based Delta Crescent Energy LLC "with the knowledge and encouragement of the White
House."
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 2 2020 14:35 utc | 2
Very likely the Kurds were under pressure from Trump, and the act wasn't voluntary. It's
not even the Kurds' oil to sign a deal on (except one well). We'll see whether the
operation actually succeeds. At the moment, everybody is waiting to see whether Trump is
re-elected in November. Signing a piece of paper now is of no significance.
Examples given show quite clearly that "cancel mob" is an established form of the political
struggle. And in this case the reasons behind the particular attack of the "cancel mob" is far
from charitable.
Cancel culture my assJustice for Brad HamiltonRoy Edroso Jul 14 38 30
Mendenhall loses endorsement deal over bin Laden tweets
[Steelers running back] Rashard Mendenhall's candid tweets about Osama bin Laden's death
and the 9/11 terror attacks cost him an endorsement deal.
NFL.com senior analyst Vic Carucci says Rashard Mendenhall has become an example of the
risks that social media can present to outspoken pro athletes.
Athletic apparel manufacturer Champion announced Thursday that it had dropped the
Pittsburgh Steelers running back after he questioned the celebrations of bid Laden's death
and expressed his uncertainty over official accounts of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New
York, suburban Washington and Pennsylvania.
Things haven't gotten any better. I've already written about
Springfield, Mass. police detective Florissa Fuentes, who got fired this year for
reposting her niece's pro-Black Lives Matter Instagram photo. Fuentes is less like Donohue,
the Chicks, and Mendenhall, though, and more like most of the people who get fired for speech
in this country, in that she is not rich, and getting fired was for her a massive blow.
The controversy began after [Lisa] Durden's appearance [on Tucker Carlson], during which
she defended the Black Lives Matter movement's decision to host a Memorial Day celebration
in New York City to which only black people were invited. On the show, Durden's comments
included, "You white people are angry because you couldn't use your white privilege card to
get invited to the Black Lives Matter's all-black Memorial Day Celebration," and "We want
to celebrate today. We don't want anybody going against us today."
Durden was then an adjunct professor at Essex County College, but not for long because
sure enough, they fired her for what she said on the show. (Bet Carlson, a racist piece
of shit , was delighted!) The college president defended her decision, saying she'd
received "feedback from students, faculty and prospective students and their families
expressing frustration, concern and even fear that the views expressed by a college employee
(with influence over students) would negatively impact their experience on the campus..."
Sounds pretty snowflakey to me. I went looking in the works of the signatories of the
famous
Harper's letter against cancel culture for some sign that any of them had acknowledged
Durden's case. Shockingly, such free speech warriors as Rod Dreher and Bret Stephens never
dropped a word on it.
Dreher does come up in other free-speech-vs-employment cases, though -- for example, from
2017, Chronicle of Higher
Education :
Tommy Curry, an associate professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University at College
Station, about five years ago participated in a YouTube interview in which he discussed
race and violence. Those remarks resurfaced in May in a column titled "When Is It OK to
Kill Whites?" by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative.
Mr. Curry said of that piece that he wasn't advocating for violence and that his remarks
had been taken out of context. He told The Chronicle that online threats had arrived in
force shortly after that. Some were racial in nature.
At the same time the president of the university, Michael K. Young, issued a statement
in which he appeared to rebuke the remarks made by Mr. Curry...
In his column on
Curry , Dreher said, "I wonder what it is like to be a white student studying under Dr.
Curry in his classroom?" Imagine worrying for the safety of white people at Texas
Fucking A&M!
Curry got to keep his job, but only after he "issued a new statement apologizing for how
his remarks had been received," the Chronicle reported:
"For those of you who considered my comments disparaging to certain types of scholarly
work or in any way impinging upon the centrality of academic freedom at this university,"
[Curry] wrote, "I regret any contributions that I may have made to misunderstandings in
this case, including to those whose work is contextualized by understanding the historical
perspectives of events that have often been ignored."
Bottom line: Most of us who work for a living are at-will employees -- basically, the boss
can fire us if they don't like the way we look at them or if they don't like what they
discover we feel about the events of the day. There are some protections -- for example, if
you and your work buddies are talking about work stuff and the boss gets mad, then that may
be considered " concerted
activity " and protected -- but as
Lisa Guerin wrote at the nolo.com legal advice site, "political views aren't covered by
[Civil Rights] laws and the laws of most states. This means employers are free to consider
political views and affiliations in making job decisions."
Basically we employees have no free speech rights at all. But people like Stephens and
Dreher and Megan McArdle who cry
over how "the mob" is coming after them don't care about us. For window dressing, they'll
glom onto rare cases where a non-rich, non-credentialed guy gets in trouble for allegedly
racist behavior that he didn't really do -- Emmanuel Cafferty, it's your time
to shine ! -- but their real concern isn't Cafferty's "free speech" or that of any other
peon, it's their own miserable careers.
Because they know people are starting to talk back to them. It's not like back in the day
when Peggy Noonan and George F. Will mounted their high horses and vomited their wisdom onto
the rabble and maybe some balled-up Letters to the Editor might feebly come back at them but
that was it. Now commoners can go viral! People making fun of Bari Weiss might reach as many
people as Bari Weiss herself! The cancel culture criers may have wingnut welfare sinecures,
cushy pundit gigs, and the respect of all the Right People, but they can't help but notice
that when they glide out onto their balconies and emit their received opinions a lot of
people -- mostly younger, and thoroughly hip that these worthies are apologists for the
austerity debt servitude to which they've been condemned for life -- are not just coughing
"bullshit" into their fists, but shouting it out loud.
This, the cancel culture criers cry, is the mob! It threatens civilization!
Yet they cannot force us to pay attention or buy their shitty opinions. The sound and
smell of mockery disturbs their al fresco luncheons and
weddings at the Arboretum . So they rush to their writing desks and prepare
sternly-worded letters. Their colleagues will read and approve! Also, their editors and
relatives! And maybe also some poor dumb kids who know so little of the world that they'll
actually mistake these overpaid prats for victims and feel sorry for them.
Well, you've already heard what I think about it elsewhere: Protect workers' free speech
rights for real, I say -- let them be as woke, as racist, or as obstreperous they wish off
the clock and the boss can't squawk. The cancel culture criers won't go for that deal; in
fact such a thing has never entered their minds -- free-speech is to protect their delicate
sensibilities, not the livelihoods of people who work with their hands!
And in the new tradition of the working class asking for more rather than less of what
they want, I'll go further: I give not one flaming fuck if these assholes suffocate under a
barrage of rotten tomatoes, and I think Brad inFast Times at Ridgemont
Highgot a raw deal from All-American
Burger and should be reinstated with full back pay: That customer deserved to have
100% of his ass kicked!
Examples given show quite clearly that "cancel mob" is an established, albeit somewhat
dirty, form of the political struggle. Often the reasons behind the particular attack of
the "cancel mob" is far from charitable. Orwell's 1984 describes an extreme form of the
same.
"... Case in point, reporting today on the newly disclosed Ghisline Maxwell documents only mentioned Prince Andrew and not a word about Bill Clinton ..."
"... believe James Murdoch was part of the "we are all gonna die in <11 years" Green New Deal school of thought. ..."
"James Murdoch, the younger son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has resigned from the board
of News Corporation citing "disagreements over editorial content".
In a filing to US regulators, he said he also disagreed with some "strategic decisions" made
by the company.
The exact nature of the disagreements was not detailed.
... ... ..,
I watch a lot of TeeVee news on all the major networks including the two Foxnews
channels.
It has become apparent to me over the last year or so that there is an internal ideology
contest at Fox between the hard core conservatives like Dobbs. Carlson, Mark Levin, Bartiromo,
Degan McDowell, etc. and a much more liberal set of people like Chris Wallace, Cavuto and the
newer reporters at the White House. I expect that the departure of James Murdoch will result in
more uniformly conservative reporting and commentary on Fox. I say that presuming that James
Murdoch was a major force in trying to push Foxnews toward the left.
I am surprised that Murdoch sent his son to Harvard. pl
Been noticing a lot of irresponsible reporting of late in the WSJ - not on the opinion
page, but in some pretty sloppy reporting with a lot of editorial bias in what is included
and what is intentionally left out.
Case in point, reporting today on the newly disclosed Ghisline Maxwell documents only
mentioned Prince Andrew and not a word about Bill Clinton . Doesn't WSJ know its readers
draw from multiple media sources that have provided original content? Everyday there are
several similar, bias by omission, articles.
One can only hope newly constituted management team will finally get rid of Peggy
Noonan.
An important problem is the conflation of public opprobrium actual sanctions like being
fired. This is mainly a problem in the US because of employment at will
No. The cancel culture is just a new incarnation of the old idea of religious and
pseudo-religious (aka Marxist or Maoist) "purges". A new flavor of inquisition so to speak.
The key idea here is the elimination of opposition for a particular Messianic movement, and
securing all the positions that can influence public opinion. As well as protection of own
(often dominant) position in the structure of political power (this was the idea behind Mao
"cultural revolution")
You probably can benefit from studying the mechanic of Stalin purges. Mechanisms are the
pretty similar ("History repeats ", etc) .
If opposition to the new brand of Messianism is suppressed under the smoke screen of
political correctness, the question arise how this is different from Stalinist ideas of
"Intensification of the class struggle under socialism" and Mao Red Guards excesses (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensification_of_the_class_struggle_under_socialism
)
You can probably start with "Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the
Soviet Union, 1924-1953 (Yale-Hoover Series on Authoritarian Regimes)"
A new book which waits for its author can be similarly titled "Policing US neoliberalism :
Repression and Social Order in the USA 1980-2020") ;-)
Here is one thought-provoking comment from the Web:
GeeBee, August 1, 2020 at 7:42 am GMT
The government will eventually be Marxist
With all due respect, you – like the great majority of people – fail to
understand the dynamics involved. 'Cultural Marxism' isn't political Marxism. It is a method
– a tool if you wish – used by the oligarchs who wield true power to 'divide and
rule' (not least by deflecting attention from the yawning gulf that lies between their own
excesses and monstrous wealth on the one hand, and the increasing indigence of the great mass
of people on the other).
It is called 'Cultural Marxism' purely because it uses Marx's technique of dividing
society into a small clique of 'oppressors' and 'the masses' who are 'oppressed'. Marx, of
course, had the capitalists in mind when he wrote of the oppressors, and the proletariat
naturally were the oppressed.
Today, the last thing the oligarchs desire is a unified and organised proletariat with
'agency': that would constitute a serious threat to their existence. Instead, they divide the
sacred role of 'the oppressed' into a multitude of more or less fissiparous groups, whom we
are all aware of, but of which those comprising 'BAME' are perhaps the most useful. Others
include feminists (more or less all young women in today's world), homos, those suffering
from sexual dysphoria (that's 'trannies' in today's 'Newspeak') and the disabled.
These groups will never discover any common ground between themselves, and thus will fight
among themselves for the scraps thrown from the oligarchs' table. No danger there, and that's
just how they planned it. As for the 'oppressors', there are no prizes for guessing that they
are White, heterosexual (i.e. normal) males.
So much for your fear of actual Marxism. As for 'the government', it is important to
understand that no government in today's West is invested with any meaningful power.
Not only are they not 'sovereign' but they are little more than puppets, dancing to their
masters' dismal tunes.
Who are these oligarchs – these Masters of the Universe? That's a story for another
day. But you won't go far wrong if you place the word 'oligarchs' in triple parentheses
"... Perhaps he was even the initiator of the White Helmets? My take away from those reports is that Cummings and Johnson have commenced a transition strategy within the UK and that the future of Integrity Initiative and its bogan crew may be limited. ..."
"... They have also restrained the MI6 manipulators that would conspire and contrive the overt 'Hate Russia' policy. Not that Bojo and Cummings will necessarily change anything other than a superficial rearrangement in their favour (for a month or two anyway). ..."
"... Caitlin Johnston has recently posted an astute analysis of the current distraction politics and why we should not be distracted by Covid19 rants from seeing the immediate rendition of the great game. ..."
"... I guess the UK will be less overt re Russia but expect the Libyan war to escalate as UKUSAI use Turkey in Libya to push back against Russia and even Sisi in Egypt. ..."
"... The UK could stage yet another 'Suez incident' with this mendacious confluence of opportunities. ..."
"... The USA has become the patsy for these thugs, when will they rise? ..."
Thank you for those John Helmer reports. I note that the new head of MI6 is a lover of all
fine Turkish things including Erdoghan. "Richard Moore, currently a third-ranking official of
the Foreign Office, an ex-Ambassador to Turkey; an ex-MI6 agent; and a Harvard graduate".
Perhaps he was even the initiator of the White Helmets? My take away from those reports is
that Cummings and Johnson have commenced a transition strategy within the UK and that the
future of Integrity Initiative and its bogan crew may be limited.
They have also restrained
the MI6 manipulators that would conspire and contrive the overt 'Hate Russia' policy. Not
that Bojo and Cummings will necessarily change anything other than a superficial
rearrangement in their favour (for a month or two anyway).
AtaBrit #9 includes an excellent link to a National Interest report on Turkey and is worth
the read in this context of the rise and rise of Richard Moore. Thank you AtaBrit.
I guess the UK will be less overt re Russia but expect the Libyan war to escalate as
UKUSAI use Turkey in Libya to push back against Russia and even Sisi in Egypt. They have a
willing US president now and likely continuing in the next few years (be it Trump or Biden).
The UK could stage yet another 'Suez incident' with this mendacious confluence of
opportunities.
The USA has become the patsy for these thugs, when will they rise?
Where will America's productivity miracle come from?
Public education is not teaching students what they need to know to compete in the global
economy.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, math scores of U.S. students rank
30th in the world. The East Asian peers of today's American students will eat their lunch in
the growth industries of tomorrow.
Here's where Black Lives Matter has a real opportunity.
The protests. The riots. The calls for reparation payments. Social justice wealth transfers.
White privilege taxes. All the nonsense. Where's the strategy? Where's the long-range
'strategery'?
No doubt, those selling BLM T-shirts in Walmart parking lots are exercising gumption. But
it's not gonna cut it. Moreover, like bingo winnings, reparation payments will be quickly
squandered while the unhappiness remains.
And as far as we can tell the BLM movement is empty of ideas and without
direction.
lay_arrow
chubbar , 14 minutes ago
"If BLM was strategic"?????? Holy ****, if they were strategic they'd be making damn sure
that testing, like SAT scores, were no longer accepted as proof of accomplishment or
learning. Oh, wait?.......
Let's all agree, blacks don't want a "head to head" test, EVER.
I don't give a crap what they say, they don't want to be judged on MERIT, they love the
skin color test. That way they can always claim racism instead of ability.
libtears , 40 minutes ago
The BLM Movement is definitely empty of ideas and clear leadership. Their supposed goals
are all over the map from day to day. They are rudderless mobs of filthy vagrants and
criminal elements make up most of their movement.
What's going on which is credited to BLM has nothing to do with black people for the most
part. Commies have co-opted this movement and are engaging in anarchy to take down the system
of government. They will do whatever they want at all costs because they believe they have
the moral high ground. They are radicals just like people call them.
The best thing that could happen is for these loser mayors and governors to enforce the
law against these mobs of filthy scum.
How can you even reason with a mob of idiots that don't even have one, if not a hierarchy
of leadership and clear goals that they agree upon?
These people are taking a page out of the Bolshevik book on revolution. And they're much
weaker than the Bolsheviks, mentally and physically. One good thump on the head and these
b!tches are crying.
The longer the public allows teaching institutions to promote BLM the worse this sh!t is
going to get.
...
JaxPavan , 42 minutes ago
The Ford Foundation gave BLM $100 million to engage in terrorism. Who do you think bought
all those ultra high end looting vehicles?
quanttech , 39 minutes ago
Indeed, the BLM organization is primarily funded by mostly white-run corporations and
foundations. The money rules.
HopefulCynical , 22 minutes ago
And WHO is in control of the Ford Foundtion? WHO?!
Tucker Carlson described former President Obama as "one of the sleaziest and most dishonest
figures in the history of American politics" after his eulogy at the funeral of civil rights
icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) on Thursday.
Carlson, who also described the former president as "a greasy politician" for calling on
Congress to pass a new Voting Rights Act and to eliminate the filibuster, which Obama described
as a relic of the Jim Crow era that disenfranchised Black Americans, in order to do so.
"Barack Obama, one of the sleaziest and most dishonest figures in the history of American
politics, used George Floyd's death at a funeral to attack the police," Carlson said before
showing a segment of Obama's remarks.
he non-profit that sent the Democratic Party haywire during the Iowa Caucus earlier this
year has a new strategy: creating partisan news outlets in key states across the country ahead
of the 2020 election. With the financial backing of Hollywood, hedge fund managers, and Silicon
Valley, Acronym's Courier Newsroom may just change local journalism and politics forever.
Courier Newsroom , created by the
dark-money (not required to disclose donors) progressive non-profit Acronym, states that they
were created to restore trust in journalism by helping to rebuild local media across the
country. The opposite of this is true. Their true goal? Winning elections in key states.
Acronym CEO Tara McGowan, in a leaked memo obtained
by Vice, has stated that the goal of establishing Courier Newsroom is to defeat Republicans on
the new frontier of Internet political advertising. McGowan attributes Trump's 2016 success to
the campaign's ability to "shape and drive mainstream media coverage" through an influx of
internet spending. Courier seeks to counter this by challenging Trump on social media. By
definition, Courier serves as a political advertising operation for the Democratic Party rather
than a legitimate media source.
Calling for a new approach to political advertising, McGowan lambasted Hillary Clinton's
failed media strategy for its over-reliance on spending on traditional media, "In 2016, the
Hillary Clinton for President campaign raised an estimated $800 million online -- and spent a
large majority of it on television and radio advertisements." The 2016 election has proven to
be the reason for the creation of Courier Newsroom.
McGowan explicitly states that the papers are being used to boost political results, "
The Dogwood will not only function to support the flipping of both State House and
State Senate chambers in Virginia this November, but will serve as a vehicle to test, learn
from and scale best practices to new sites as we grow." The Dogwood , as of the time
of the writing of the leaked memo, was intended to be the prototype for future courier new
sites.
Courier has established news sites across key 2020 states including: Copper Courier
(Arizona), The Dogwood (Virginia), Up North News (Wisconsin), The
Gander (Michigan), Cardinal & Pine (North Carolina), The Keystone
(Pennsylvania), and The Americano (nationwide, intended for Latino audiences). Courier
extensively utilizes social media to promote stories made by the publications, generating
clicks in order to shape public voter opinion.
https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.400.1_en.html#goog_884035211 Ad ends in 15s
Next Video × Next Video J.d. Vance Remarks On A New Direction For Pro-worker, Pro-family
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Courier stories are written with the intent of mobilizing women and young people. McGowan
writes that Courier does this by "framing issues from health care to economic security in a way
that provides these voters with more personal and local relevance than they are often targeted
through traditional political ads." While these are real stories, they are packaged with the
intent on provoking a positive reaction from certain demographics of the population, in order
to spur them to vote for the Democratic Party this November. Courier itself has conceded that
they exist solely to challenge Republicans on social media.
Courier Newsroom Editor-in-Chief Lindsay Schrupp disagreed with the concerns regarding
journalistic integrity of its writers and service. Schrupp told The American
Conservative the following,
Courier Newsroom and its affiliated sites are independent from ACRONYM. We maintain an
editorial firewall, just like any other media company, and the managing editor of each site,
in addition to me as editor in chief, has ultimate discretion and control over content
published. Painting all partisan-leaning outlets with the same brush is dangerous and too
often creates false equivalency between very different types of newsrooms. All outlets in the
Courier Newsroom network operate with integrity and adhere to traditional journalistic
standards. It's offensive to our journalists -- many of whom have won state, regional and
national awards for their reporting -- to try to make a direct comparison to partisan outlets
on the right that often don't publish bylines, don't hire experienced or even local
reporters, don't comply with basic fact-checking standards, and don't do original reporting
in the regions where they operate. Courier aims to combat the misinformation spread by such
right-wing sites pretending to be "local news" by providing readers with transparently
progressive local reporting.
According to data from Facebook Ad Library, between May 2018 and July 12, 2020 Courier
Newsroom
spent $1,478,784 on Facebook ads on topics that include social issues, elections or
politics. Conservative
alternatives , such as the Daily Wire or Breitbart, have spent considerably less money on
Facebook advertising. Breitbart spent $11,404 since March 2018 and the Daily Wire spent
$418,578 since March 2018 according to Facebook's ad library.
Courier's political agenda is obvious. By looking into their Facebook ad-buys, Courier
Newsroom has spent extensively on vulnerable Democrats who came into office in the 2018
midterms. These pieces, while factual, highlight the accomplishments of narrowly elected
Democrats.
Among those that are frequently featured in mass ad-buys on Facebook are:
"Courier Newsroom's goal is to help elect Democrats. The site doesn't say that, but its
founder, Tara McGowan, has made this clear." Gabby Deutch of Newsguard, a journalism watchdog
focused on identifying fake news, tells The American Conservative. Deutch claims that
Courier is different from other partisan news outlets because their intentions are not clearly
stated. Courier instead argues that they are seeking to fill a void left in local
journalism.
According to The New York
Times in a story published in 2019, 1 in 5 local newspapers have been forced to shut
down forever. Political groups, such as Acronym, are poised to revitalize local journalism with
a new twist -- political advertising. Deutch warned The American Conservative of this
worrying development, "With fewer local newspapers -- a decline that's gotten even worse due to
the financial havoc wreaked by the pandemic -- there's room for political groups to fill the
void, playing off people's trust in local news. So they make a site that looks like local news
but has few (if any) reporters in the state, and then create content to woo voters."
There are examples on the right side of the spectrum too, she points out, including the
conservative Star network (Michigan Star and Tennessee Star are two examples) and AlphaNewsMN,
a conservative Minnesota site. "Readers deserve to know the agenda of the websites where they
get their news."
Browsing North Carolina's Courier news site Cardinal & Pine, one finds it brands itself
as "local news for the NC community." Newsguard' s assessment of Courier, is indeed
true, with the overwhelming majority of stories highlighting the successes of North Carolina
Democrats such as Governor Roy Cooper, attacking Republicans such as vulnerable Senator Thom
Tillis, and promoting Democratic policy positions -- notably as it relates to COVID-19 and BLM
social justice protests. Similarly, Virginia's Courier news site, The Dogwood, did not publish
an article detailing Virginia's biggest scandal of 2019: Governor Northam's controversial
blackface yearbook photo. Nor can one find any reference of Tara Reade, Joe Biden's sexual
assault accuser who entered the public eye earlier this spring.
Even more striking, is that as a 501(c)(4), Acronym is not required to disclose donors.
Acronym in 2018 received $250,000 from New Venture
Fund which is managed by Arabella. Through its dark-money ties,
Arabella has raised $2.4 billion dollars since 2006, making it one of the largest
financiers in American politics. Arabella's influence came into the limelight during the 2018
mid-term elections, in which they raised the
most ever by a left-leaning political non-profit. Courier Newsroom is, in other words, entirely
funded by secret donors that likely have significant ties to the Democratic Party and the Super
PACs bankrolling the 2020 election.
Acronym has invested millions of dollars to establish these papers across the country with
plans to continue their expansion into local media across the country in preparation for the
2020 election and beyond. Acronym has claimed that they are separate from Courier and allow the
creators to produce their own independent ideas, although, tax documents have revealed them to
be full owners
.
"This is all probably legal," says Bradley Smith, former Chairman of the FEC and foremost
scholar on campaign finance. "What surprises me is that more entities–especially on the
conservative side, since the majority of traditional media already lean left–don't do
this. But there are examples on the right–for example, NRA Radio." Donors can be kept
secret, as under Citizen's United , the 'periodicals' of 501(c)(4) groups do not have
to be filed with FECA. (Federal Election Campaign Act) Smith believes organizations such as
Courier will likely be a part of a greater trend in local journalism across the country.
Pacronym, also under the Acronym umbrella, is a Democratic Super-PAC charged with the single
goal of electing Joe Biden. Pacronym ads present similar content to what one would see on a
Courier publication, focusing heavily on the failures of Trump's handling of COVID-19, the
struggling of small-businesses across key-swing states (North Carolina, Arizona, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin), and Joe Biden's proposed response to the virus.
Courier, with the same goal, repurposes ideas by PACs and the Democratic Party by attaching
a 'news' label for legitimacy. "The anti-Trump ads from Courier focus on the same points as
Pacronym and other Democratic political groups, but if they look like news articles, the
audience sees them differently than the same content coming from a politician," According to
Deutch
at Newsguard.
Pacronym donors are publicly disclosed, and may have present a clue into Courier Newsroom's
finances. Some notable
financiers of Pacronym include billionaire hedge fund manager Seth Klarman, Hollywood icon
Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Kapshaw, a billionaire heiress to the Levi Strauss brand
Mimi Haas, and silicon valley's very own LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Pacronym has
targeted a $75 million-dollar digital ad campaign, primarily using Facebook, against
President Trump for the upcoming election.
Acronym is also involved in another scandal, notably the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucus. Shadow
Inc, also operating under Acronym's umbrella, was established with the purpose of digitally
registering and mobilizing voters. Shadow Inc's leadership primarily consisted of 2016
ex-Clinton campaign staff. Shadow Inc received a contract by the Iowa Democratic Party for
$63,183 to develop an application to help count votes in the Iowa Caucus. Shadow Inc's
application, the IowaReporterApp, failed to properly report the caucus, leading to a delayed
result. Campaigns, pundits, and election officials were confused due to the inconsistencies
found in the results.
Candidate Pete Buttigieg claimed victory despite the caucus results not having been properly
released. According to data by the FEC, Pete Buttigieg's campaign paid Shadow Inc. $21,250 for
"software rights and subscriptions" in July 2019. Acronym CEO Tara McGowan's husband, Michael
Halle, was a senior strategist for the Pete Buttigieg campaign. Michael Halle's brother, Ben
Halle, was Pete Buttigieg's Iowa Communications Director. Many have suspected foul play, or at
least incompetence.
Courier Newsroom is distinct from both fake-news and astro-turf operations that came into
the public eye during the 2016 election. Rather than produce fake content with the intent to
mislead, Courier articles are legitimate and are written by real writers. In the leaked Acronym
memo, CEO Tara McGowan claimed that the Democratic Party was losing "the media war."
In 2014 the National Republican Congressional Committee established fake news
websites and paid to boost them on Google. These websites were deceptive with the intent on
defeating the opposing candidate. Although, these websites publicly disclosed that they were
paid for by the committee at the bottom of the article. Courier's funding remains
undisclosed.
PACs, in tandem with a surge in online political advertising, have weaponized newsrooms to
present misleading news for electoral success.
Alberto Bufalino is a student at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and TAC's summer
editorial intern.
I don't know . . . It's bad enough that the republic has to deal with a broad swath of
people getting their news from terrible facebook feeds. It's why America has a president
selling beans and promoting demon sperm doctors, and why it's one of the few countries that
can't keep covid down despite it's resources.
I don't think trying to get the rest of getting our news from people that operate at the
level of Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Breitbart is praiseworthy.
You are right in principle.
We have this six hundred pound Citizens United crapping all over the room though.
I too wish that the game was played by different rules. But this is not Switzerland and we
need to win first.
Is it clear though that repealing Citizens United would change this? The Double Plus
Wealthy are already funding the top online websites to the tune of millions of dollars a
year, and the funders of the Federalist are famously anonymous despite the Federalist
basically being an arm of the Republican party/embarrassment to thinking.
I am happy though that the anonymous funders of the Courier are not sponsoring fake news
that makes their readers dumber, unlike *checks the article** the National Republican
Congressional Committee . Yowza.
Repeal of Citizens United would make it possible to regulate who funds whom. It
would not guarantee the outing of arrangements like Courier. Give me a leaked memo any
day.
U.S. Officials Disseminate Disinformation About 'Virus Disinformation'Getald
, Jul 29 2020 17:44 utc |
1
In another round of their anti-Russian disinformation campaign 'U.S. government officials'
claim that some websites loosely connected to Russia are spreading 'virus
disinformation'.
However, no 'virus disinformation' can be found on those sites.
The Associated Press as well as the New York Times were briefed by the
'officials' and provided write ups.
Two Russians who have held senior roles in Moscow's military intelligence service known as
the GRU have been identified as responsible for a disinformation effort meant to reach
American and Western audiences, U.S. government officials said. They spoke to The
Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak
publicly.
The information had previously been classified, but officials said it had been
downgraded so they could more freely discuss it. Officials said they were doing so now to
sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link
between the sites and Russian intelligence.
Between late May and early July, one of the officials said, the websites singled out
Tuesday published about 150 articles about the pandemic response, including coverage aimed
either at propping up Russia or denigrating the U.S.
Among the headlines that caught the attention of U.S. officials were "Russia's Counter
COVID-19 Aid to America Advances Case for Détente," which suggested that Russia had
given urgent and substantial aid to the U.S. to fight the pandemic, and "Beijing Believes
COVID-19 is a Biological Weapon," which amplified statements by the Chinese.
There is zero 'virus disinformation' in the Korybko piece. The aid flight did happen and
was widely reported. In a response to the allegations the proprietors of O neWorldpoint out that
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a recent Q&A also alluded to a new détente with
Russia. Was that also 'virus disinformation'?
The second piece the 'officials' pointed out, Beijing believes COVID-19 is a biological weapon , was
written In March by Lucas Leiroz, a "research fellow in international law at the Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro". It is an exaggerating analysis of the comments and questions a
spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry had made about the possible sources of the
Coronavirus.
The original spokesperson quote is in the piece. Referring to additional sources the
author's interpretation may go a bit beyond the quote's meaning. But it is certainly not
'virus disinformation' to raise the same speculative question about the potential sources of
the virus which at that time many others were also asking.
The piece was published by InfoBRICS.org, a "BRICS information portal" which
publishes in the languages of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South
Africa). It is presumably financed by some or all of those countries.
Another website the 'U.S. officials' have pointed out is InfoRos.ru which publishes in Russian and English. The
AP notes of it:
A headline Tuesday on InfoRos.ru about the unrest roiling American cities read "Chaos in
the Blue Cities," accompanying a story that lamented how New Yorkers who grew up under the
tough-on-crime approach of former Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg "and have zero
street smarts" must now "adapt to life in high-crime urban areas."
Another story carried the headline of "Ukrainian Trap for Biden," and claimed that
"Ukrainegate" -- a reference to stories surrounding Biden's son Hunter's former ties to a
Ukraine gas company -- "keeps unfolding with renewed vigor."
U.S. officials have identified two of the people believed to be behind the sites'
operations. The men, Denis Valeryevich Tyurin and Aleksandr Gennadyevich Starunskiy, have
previously held leadership roles at InfoRos but have also served in a GRU unit specializing
in military psychological intelligence and maintain deep contacts there, the officials
said.
InfoRos calls itself a 'news agency' and has some rather boring general interest
stuff on its site. But how is its writing in FOX News style about unrest in U.S.
cities and about Biden's escapades in the Ukraine 'virus disinformation'? I fail to find any
on that site.
In 2018 some "western intelligence agency"
told the Washington Post , without providing any evidence, that InfoRos
is related to the Russian military intelligence service GU (formerly GRU):
Unit 54777 has several front organizations that are financed through government grants as
public diplomacy organizations but are covertly run by the GRU and aimed at Russian
expatriates, the intelligence officer said. Two of the most significant are InfoRos and the
Institute of the Russian Diaspora.
So InfoRos is getting some public grants and was allegedly previously run by two
people who before that worked for the GU. What does that say about the current state and the
content it provides? Nothing.
The NYTadds
that hardly anyone is reading the websites the 'U.S. officials' pointed out but that their
content is at times copied by more prominent aggregator sites:
"What we have seen from G.R.U. operations is oftentimes the social media component is a
flop, but the narrative content that they write is shared more broadly through the niche
media ecosystem," said Renee DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet
Observatory, who has studied the G.R.U. and InfoRos ties and propaganda work.
There are plenty of sites who copy content from various outlets and reproduce it under
their name. But that does not turn whatever they publish into disinformation.
All the pieces mentioned by AP and NYT and attributed to the 'Russian'
sites are basically factual and carry no 'virus disinformation'. That makes the
'U.S.officials' claims that they do such the real disinformation campaign.
And the AP and NYT are willingly falling for it.
People being
prepared for Russia having the worlds first covid19 vaccine, the US will of course say it was
stolen from them. Infantile politicians create infantile press to feed infantile articles to
adult children. Critical thinking skills do not exist in the US population.
The development of propagation of information/disinformation through the internet eroded
the power of the old newspapers/news agencies. It's not that this or that particular website
is getting more views, but that the web of communications - the the imperialistic blunders +
decline of capitalism post-2008 -, as a whole, weakened what seemed to be an unshakeable
trust on the MSM (the very fact that this term exists already is historical evidence of their
loss of power).
And this process manifests itself not only in loss of power, but also loss of money: this
is particularly evident in the social media, where Facebook (Whatsapp + Facebook proper) and
Google are beginning to siphon advertisement money from both TV and the traditional
newspapers (printed press). When those traditional printed newspapers went digital, they
behaved badly, by using paywalls - this marketing blunder only accelerated their decline in
readership and thus further advertisement money, generating a vicious cycle for them.
The loss of influence of public opinion for the MSM also inaugurated another very
important societal shift: the middle class' loss of monopoly over opinion and formation of
opinion. Historically, it was the role of the middle class to be highly educated, to go to
academia (college) and, most importantly, to daily read the newspapers while eating the
breakfast. The middle class was the class of the intellectuals by definition, thus served as
the clerical class of the capitalist class, the priests of capitalism. With the
popularization of the internet, the smartphone and social media, this sanctity was broken or,
at least, begun to deteriorate. We can attest this class conflict phenomenon by studying the
rise of the term "expert" as a pejorative one. In the West's case, this shift begun through
the far-right side of the political spectrum, but the shift is there.
The popularization of what was once a privilege is nothing new in capitalism. The problem
here is that capitalism depends on infinite growth to merely exist (i.e. it can't survive on
zero growth, it is mathematically impossible), so it has to "monetize" what still isn't
monetize in order to find/create more vital space (Lebensraum - a term coined by the
hyper-capitalist Nazis) for its expansion and thus survival. Hence the popularization of
college education in the USA (then in Europe). Hence the popularization of daily news through
the internet/social media. This process, of course, has its positives and negatives (as is
the case with every dialectical process) - the fall of the MSM is one of the positives.
So, in fact, when the likes of AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Guardian, Fox, CNN spread
disinformation against "alt-media", they are really just protecting their market share - the
fact that it implies in suppression of freedom of speech and to mass disinformation and,
ultimately, to war and destruction, is merely collateral damage of the business they operate
in. They are, after all, capitalist enterprises above all.
Excellent analysis, as always, by b. And vk's points are very pertinent too. One tiny
quibble: I doubt that the Nazis coined, though they certainly popularised, the term
lebensraum.
There is an air of desperation about these campaigns against "Russian" "disinformation"
massive changes are occurring, and, because they are so vast, they are moving relatively
slowly.
The old media model, now totally outdated, was the first thing to fall. Now capitalism itself
is collapsing as a result of the primary contradiction that, left to itself, the marketplace
will solve all problems.
As Washington, where magical thinking is sovereign, is demonstrating, left to itself the
hidden hand will bring only misery, famine, death and the Apocalypse. This was once very well
understood, as a brief look at the history of the founding of the UN will show, now it is the
subject of frantic denial by capitalism's priesthood who have grown to enjoy the glitter and
sensuality of life in a brothel. It is a sign of their mental decay that they can do no
better than to blame Russians.
One should presume the anonymous officials responsible for this ground-breaking report (sarc)
are close to the various "combatting Russian disinformation" NGOs. They are merely living up
to the mission statements of their benefactors. AP and NYTimes are being unprofessional and
spreading fake news by failing to reveal their sources. It's mind-numbing - the BS one must
wade through.
Good point however with one glaring contradiction in your thinking.
You make valid a very criticism of capitalism yet you tend to applaud Chinese capitalist
growth (although you tend to deny Chinese capitalist growth is capitalist, a feat of
breathtaking magical thinking).
The great Chinese wealth is fully 75% invested in bubblicious real estate valuations of
non-commercial real estate built on a mountain of construction debt. Sound familiar?
The irony is Chinese growth since 2008 has been goosed along entirely by the very same
financialized hyper capitalist traits as US: great gobs of debt creating supply-side
"growth", huge amounts of middle wealth tied to asset inflated bubbles, and of course the
resulting income and wealth inequality that rivals US inequality and continues to increase
over time.
I snorted coffee out my nose when Gruff tried to totally excuse Chinese income inequality
for being only slightly less than US level....how about the truth? Chinese inequality is
heinous, only slightly less than the also heinous US level.
The diseased working class in China only has an an arm and two legs hacked off while the
diseased US working class is fully quadriplegic. Much, much better to be a fucked over by
globalization Chinese citizen! Lmao
@ b who ended his posting with
"
And the AP and NYT are willingly falling for it.
"
Sorry b, but AP and NYT are active participants in the disinformation campaign of failing
empire and are not falling for anything
The folks that are falling for it are the American public that has lost its ability to
discriminate with the fire hose volume of lies told to them on a daily basis.
Empire is in the process of defeating itself which is the only safe way of ending the
tyranny of global private finance. I commend China and Russia for having the patience and
fortitude to hold the safe space for the dysfunctional social contract having private control
of the lifeblood of human commerce to self destruct.
This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information when
most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the CDC,
which spent months discrediting the effectiveness of face masks!!!
Theses propagandists need to get real jobs dealing with real world problems.
This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information when
most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the CDC,
which spent months discrediting the effectiveness of face masks!!!
Theses propagandists need to get real jobs dealing with real world problems.
there has been no national response to coronavirus but there must be a national acceptance
that this national non-response is China's fault. and any sources reporting truthfully about
the US or disseminating statements easily found elsewhere, as long as they are Russian,
Chinese, Venezuelan, Cuban, Iranian, etc., is pure disinformation. How brittle and weak the
US is. Where's the Pericles to say to the Spartans, "enter our city and inspect our
defenses"? The US is a nation of heavily-armed mice and sheep.
btw, the China love on display around here is pretty funny. in that the Chinese government
has mounted a national response to a very serious threat, China is a nation in a way that the
US is not. There is no US or we would not have 50 states doing different things in response
to the corona outbreak. the US is already dead. But China is a thoroughly authoritarian
capitalist state. they are who they are in a dialectic competition with the US and other
capitalist powers, not because of some Maoist-Confucian amalgam that inspires such wisdom in
their brilliant leaders, who are just as quick to destroy their environment for capitalist
gain as anyone on this planet is. The decline of the US will not make China or Russia or any
"emerging" power less authoritarian or violent. au quite the contraire. They are Shylocks who
will try to better instruction.
However, none of this is of concern to people in the US, whose only concern is the Nazi
spawn who've been running "the West" for much longer than the last 75 years. but it's time to
kill the bitch, not let it keep screwing us and breeding.
As others already said, this is a bit rich, considering that virus disinformation comes from
Trump himself, both live and on Twitter, quoting genuine hacks and megalomaniac doctors,
depending on the week.
Reality check: Russians will be able to travel across the world way before Americans, for
obvious healthcare reasons.
Bevin, I agree, I once had a short exchange on Mondoweiss about the term Lebensraum, it
had been used in some type of marketing by my favorite Swizz supermarket. Which then,
apparently caused an uproar. The term Lebensraum on its own is rather innocent. Leben (life)
Raum (space), a noun compound. Context matters. And I am sure I checked it, and Micros
definitively did not use it in any type of world conquering settler context. I haven't
stumbled yet across a Micros supermarket anywhere outside Switzerland, ;)
I'm under the impression that Info Ros is a Russian government-funded, supported, backed,
site, it certainly looks like it and its reportage is decidedly 'neutral'.
This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information
when most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the
CDC, which spent months discrediting ...
Posted by: JohnH | Jul 29 2020 19:21 utc | 8
This is close to my overall take on matters. But I wouldn't put so much emphasis on
face masks but on something along the lines of Covid is notthing but a flu. Face masks were
initially discussed quite controversially everywhere.
Were it gets interesting is here:
A report published last month by a second, nongovernmental organization, Brussels-based EU
DisinfoLab, examined links between InfoRos and One World to Russian military intelligence.
The researchers identified technical clues tying their websites to Russia and identified some
financial connections between InfoRos and the government.
They have a competitor which seems Bruxelles based too, Patrick Armstrong alerted me to
a while ago: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/
EUvsDisinfo is the flagship project of the European External Action Service's East StratCom
Task Force
************
But yes, on first sight InfoRos seems to be neatly aligned with US alt-Right-Media in
basic outlook. More than with the US MSM.
And now I first have to read what has been on Andrew Korybko's mind lately. ;)
Many Americans of all walks of life do not trust their own government, yet most people here
seem to have faith that their media outlets are telling the truth. How do you break through
to the public that has utter faith in whatever newspaper or television channel they prefer
and highlight the lies in a way which gains real traction?
I believe it takes leadership, which, for Americans, mean celebrities have to endorse the
idea or it likely won't be taken seriously. This cult of celebrity is mirrored on social
media platforms, where millions flock to be a part of some beautiful person's beautiful
photograph or some known personalities acceptable opinion du jour.
There is a great bond gripping the minds of American media consumers. They have trained
their entire lives to worship at the cult of celebrity and this is the key to breaking the
entire media landscape down for them.
This also is the key to unlocking the voices of those who know better with regards to
media lies, but keep silent out of fear.
Will a Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson be able to break the spell? I think it will never
happen based on how Hollywood gatekeeps celebrity and based on how hopelessly apathetic most
are to Julian Assange.
Lol I write for One World. I'm an American who has never had a piece edited or been told what
to write. I was allowed to write a piece about Russia where I was critical of their policy of
backing the STC in Yemen (I thought it was bad to divide Yemen). No one makes anybody tow any
specific line. I decided not to publish my piece on Russia and the STC in Yemen because I
didn't find the topic interesting enough, but I was 100% allowed to be critical of Russia.
Lol I write for One World. I'm an American who has never had a piece edited or been told
what to write.
...
Posted by: Ben Barbour | Jul 29 2020 22:36 utc | 23
Is it possible that you're just the in-house joke at OW?
If they don't care that you'd write "tow" instead of "toe" or that you're too
lazy/thoughtless to reproduce the full name of the entity for which STC is an acronym, before
using the acronym, then it suggests that One World's Editorial Standards are as lax as your
own :-)
"... Two Russians who have held senior roles in Moscow's military intelligence service
known as the GRU have been identified as responsible for a disinformation effort meant to
reach American and Western audiences, U.S. government officials said. They spoke to The
Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak
publicly ..."
Of course GRU agents always work in pairs, guided only by the mysterious telepathic powers
of the Russian President and no-one or nothing else, as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov
did in Salisbury in March 2018 when they supposedly tried to assassinate or send a warning to
Sergei Skripal, and as Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy did in London in November 2006 when
they apparently put polonium in a pot of tea served to Alexander Litvinenko in full view of
patrons and staff at a hotel restaurant. It's as if each agent carries only half a brain and
each half is connected to its complement by the corpus callosum that is Lord Vlademort
Putin's thoughts beaming oing-yoing-yoing-like through the atmosphere until they find their
targets.
And of course US government officials always speak on condition of anonymity.
As Agence Presse News puts it:
"... The information had previously been classified, but officials said it had been
downgraded so they could more freely discuss it. Officials said they were doing so now to
sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link
between the sites and Russian intelligence ..."
So if US government officials can now freely discuss declassified news, why do they insist
on being anonymous? This would be the sort of news announced at a US national press club
meeting with Matt Lee in the front row asking awkward and discomfiting questions.
The malicious cultivation (including Gain of Function research) and implantation of this
biowarfare agent (and other ones such as Swine Fever) by the U.S. Intelligence services in
various places around the world (especially in China and Iran), the intentional faulty
responses and deceptive statistics administered by the monopoly-controlled medical
establishment, the feigned inability to provide adequate testing, care, and treatment, along
with planned economic destruction as a means of restoring investor losses and control of
populations through stifling of dissent, are at the heart of the deflection and projection of
blame. That broadly-based subject is barely discussed in alternative media and is totally
obfuscated in MSM, because the "denier-debunkers" dispute the possibility of such extreme
malice existing in our institutions, in spite of previous experience with events such as 9/11
and the '08 financial crisis.
...
So if US government officials can now freely discuss declassified news, why do they insist on
being anonymous?
...
Posted by: Jen | Jul 29 2020 23:29 utc | 25
Precisely.
My guess is that they don't know when to quit.
and/or
They embrace the Mythbusters motto...
"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
"Is it possible that you're just the in-house joke at OW?
If they don't care that you'd write "tow" instead of "toe" or that you're too
lazy/thoughtless to reproduce the full name of the entity for which STC is an acronym, before
using the acronym, then it suggests that One World's Editorial Standards are as lax as your
own :-)"
Fair point on tow vs toe. That's why editing exists when writing articles. As for the STC
part, that is common knowledge if you follow basic geopolitics. When making a post in a
comment thread, should I write out "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" before using the acronym
ISIS? If I am posting in a comment thread about Iran, do I need to write out "Mujahedin-e
Khalq" instead of just using MEK?
It just displays a massive level of ignorance on your part. Nice try though.
Global media moguls are blaming the 1,000 American deaths per day from the Wuhan coronavirus
on Donald Trump to finally get him out of the way. But they are silent on their and the
Democrats complicity in the death toll due to the lack of a national public health system or
the funding to pay for it.
The USA is going to hell. A scapegoat is needed. For the media and Democrats, Russia is to
blame. Anybody else rather than themselves, the true culprits. Donald Trump blames China for
the pandemic if he acknowledges it at all but that is where all of Tim Cook's iPhones are
made. Blaming China is globalist heresy.
I think there's a reasonable case to be made that this is what has occurred.
And, if true, it is covered up by sly suggestions that nCov-19 was man-made with hints or
a smug attitude that convey the message that China created the virus. As well as a
virtual black-out in Western media of Chinese suggestions that the virus may have started in
USA or been planted in Wuhan.
But then, I already stand accused of attributing magical powers of self-interested
foresight and boldness to US Deep-State due to my belief that Trump was their choice to lead
USA in 2016. And so I expect you're theory will receive the same derision. Yet Empires have
not been shy about killing millions when it was in their interest to do so.
In any case, I've written many times that USA/West's unwillingness to fight the virus has
been dressed up as innocent mistakes. Even if the West wasn't the source of the virus they
have much to answer for. Yet very few have taken note of the way that USA/West have played
the pandemic to advance their interests - from lining the pockets of Big Pharma to blaming
China for their own "incompetence" (a misnomer: the power-elite are very competent at
advancing their interests!).
It seems disinformation has been redefined to mean information that counters someone else's
(yours) belief. We pretend to be in an Age of Reason but really, we have just replaced
religious beliefs with secular beliefs. Science has been taken over by pseudoscientists that
have replaced priests. The conflict of interest by the science/priests who profit from their
deceptions is beyond criminal.
To know what is the truth you just have to look at whats being censored. Nobody being
censored for supporting mask mandates, claiming vaccines are safe, and not questioning the
blatant data manipulation of COVID cases that anyone with an open mind and IQ of 100 , and
who reads the data, definitions and studies can see through.
It seems people on both sides of the fence have replaced their brains with their chosen
ideology. Its like watching a Christian, Jew and Muslim arguing which is the best or true
religion. No point in it.
so, lets say GRU agents are feeding russian propaganda sites... how does that compare to
all the CIA-FBI agents and has been hacks working for the western msm?? seems a bit rich for
the pot to be calling a kettle black, even if they are lying thru their teeth! i am sure if
someone did a story on how many CIA - m16 people are presently working with the western msm,
they would have a story with some legs... this shite from anonymous usa gov't officials is
just that - shite..
@ Ben, or Benson Barbour .. thanks for your comments!
Lol I write for One World. I'm an American who has never had a piece edited or been told
what to write. I was allowed to write a piece about Russia where I was critical of their
policy of backing the STC in Yemen (I thought it was bad to divide Yemen). No one makes
anybody tow any specific line. I decided not to publish my piece on Russia and the STC in
Yemen because I didn't find the topic interesting enough, but I was 100% allowed to be
critical of Russia.
There's such a thing as self-censorship. Mainstream US news has effectively brought up
folks to be this way: stay in line or become unemployed- doesn't need to be stated. Not aimed
at you, but it needs to be said (und understood).
@35 That's a very good point. I completely agree. Self-censorship and group think are two of
the biggest problems in modern journalism/analysis. One World consistently publishes
pro-Pakistan and pro-China articles. When I was first sending them submissions, I did a piece
on US vs China in Sudan and South Sudan. I considered omitting China's culpability in
escalating the conflicts, and instead focus on laying the blame squarely at the feet of the
US. In the end I told the truth about both countries' imperialist escalations (to the best of
my ability).
There is a lot of incentive to self-censor at just about any outlet. It's more comfortable
to fit in with a site's brand.
In the case of the Russia-STC article, I really just found the subject matter to be thin.
Russia's support of the STC is mostly just diplomatic. Not a lot to write about.
The Americans are increasingly unhinged in their spittle-flecked accusations against not only
Russia, but also China, Iran, Venezuela, etc.
It's so pathetic as to be humorous.
Underlying the USA's Two Minutes of Hate campaigns, however, is a deeper disease that
defines Americans as a nation and as a people.
Namely, Americans have an inbred fundamentalist belief in their own Moral Superiority as
the Beacon of Liberty, Land of the Free, blah, blah, blah--no matter how many nations they
have bombed back to the Stone Age, invaded, colonized, regime changed, sanctioned, or
economically raped in the name of Freedom and Democracy™.
Donald Trump is half correct.
The United States of America is truly a great nation alright--but great only in terms of
its deceit, great in terms of its delusions, and great in terms of the horrors that it has
inflicted on much of the world.
Comparing America to the Nazis would be a high insult ... to Nazi Germany, as the Third
Reich only lasted about 12 years, while the American Reich has unfortunately lasted well over
200 years and gotten away with its crimes against humanity by possessing what are likely the
greatest propaganda machine and political deception in human history: the American Free Press
and the world historic lie called "American Freedom."
Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel Literature Prize speech briefly but powerfully exposes
this heart of American darkness:
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless,
but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has
exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for
universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road.
Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a
salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a
winner."
"Top US immunologist Dr Anthony Fauci is now saying citizens are not "complete" in
protecting themselves from the Covid-19 pandemic unless they go beyond wearing a mask and add
in eye protection like goggles, too."
More provocation from the oligarchy. Now, that masks are becoming less controversial, time
to step up the provocation, division and control.
Fauci is also behind the anti-hydroxychloroquine propaganda, as well, that even b has
swallowed. This, despite it being used effectively in other countries. All of this simply
because Trump supports it (ergo, it must be bad) and Big Pharma (who control Fauci,
CDC abd WHO) can't profit significantly from its use.
"During the course of the debate, Kennedy also talked about the regular vaccines most
people take, from Hepatitis B to the flu shot, emphasizing that no proper testing had ever
been done, which is mandatory for any other medication. Vaccines "are the only medical
product that does not have to be safety-tested against a placebo," he explained."
Kennedy said
"it's not hypothetical that vaccines cause injury, and that injuries are not rare. The
vaccine courts have paid out four billion dollars" over the past three decades, "and the
threshold for getting back into a vaccine court and getting a judgment – [the
Department of Health and Human Services] admits that fewer than one percent of people who are
injured ever even get to court."
So, how well has the Russian vaccine been tested? Does anyone know?
It is interesting how USAians are being played by the oligarchy.
On foreign policy, the dems and reps are in basic agreement and the propaganda is to bring
the masses together to hate Russia, Chaina and anyone else who the Western (US) oligarchy has
targeted.
Domestically, unity is the enemy of the oligarchy. The masses must be controlled through
division and diversion, so the dems and reps play good cop, bad cop (bad and good being
relative to the supporter) to ensure the masses are diverted from important oligarch issues
to issues of irrelevance to the oligarchs, but easily manipulated emotionnally by the
oligarchs for the beast.
"[...]Donald Trump blames China for the pandemic if he acknowledges it at all but that is
where all of Tim Cook's iPhones are made. Blaming China is globalist heresy."
Then why do you phrase it the "Wuhan coronavius" yourself?
For those interested in corona virus truth,
I am interested in the question -- - was it spread by negligence or deliberately?
That question must be relivant to this debate on MOA.
I ask this now becouse -- --
Tonight on bbc 'panorama' there investigating the spread of the virus from Hospital to care
homes !! I'm told there is some pretty shocking information exposed.
Some may wish to catch that prog. Heads up.
I just add an obversation. -- western psychopathic disinformation and projection has led
to a confused public. A public deciding to disengage with politics. To the gain of the
psychopaths.
A new candidate to the demonization and disinfo operations has been added...Germany...which
has been labeled "delinquent" by the POTUS...in a clear exercise of projection...
Of course, to not be insulted or labeled delinquent, you must act as these other countries
enumerated by Southcom commander, to work for the US ( not your country...) and moreover pay
for it....Typical mafia extortion, isn´t it?
That broadly-based subject is barely discussed in alternative media and is totally
obfuscated in MSM, because the "denier-debunkers" dispute the possibility of such extreme
malice existing in our institutions, in spite of previous experience with events such as
9/11 and the '08 financial crisis.
YES to that and thank you for that post. That the institutions of state and private
sectors are the incubators and propagators of extreme malice is axiomatic in the UKUSAI and
its five eyed running dogs is beyond doubt. They attack and scorn any critic or unbeliever.
They assault and pillory truth speakers and those who might question 'their narrative'.
Then if all that fails the hunt them down and make preposterous claims about them being
anti semitic of anti religion or anti their nation.
Mendacity is the currency of the permanent state and its minions and they need to be outed
and shamed and challenged at every opportunity.
Fort Detrick coronavirus would be on the mark and as you most likely know, you cannot
trust the USA lying eyes once you have served them in their killing fields.
Even that right wing ex special forces advocate Steve Pieczenic testifies to the fact of a
deadly virus in USA in November/December plus his beloved bloggers say way earlier than that
around Maryland etc. Then there is the small problem of the 'vaping' illness that generated
lots of pneumonia like fatalities in June/July. And then the instant closure of Fort Detrick
due to its leaking all over the place through a totally inadequate waste water treatment
plant that couldn't scrub a turd let alone a virus.
The problem with presstitutes, possibly including Ben Barbour , (disclaimer: I've
never read any media products that particular individual generated) goes beyond the point
made by Seer @35 . To be sure, there is no chance that a presstitute would bite the
hand that feeds it, but there is more depth to the problem of why they all suck so
badly, at least the ones in the US. While journalism degrees are the university equivalent of
Special Education (nowadays referred to as "Exceptional Student Education" , which is
very fitting for students from such an "exceptional" nation), they still prepare the
future presstitute to understand that their capitalist employers have interests beyond their
immediately apparent ones. That is, more important to a capitalist employer than tomorrow's
sales and profits is the preservation of capitalism itself.
But the problem is deeper still. The presstitute that is successfully employed by a
capitalist enterprise will invariably be one that knows not to criticize the employer's
business, the capitalist system it depends upon, and the empire that improves that employer's
profitability. More importantly, that successful hireling will additionally have been
brainwashed from infancy that all of these things are good and necessary aspects of the
modern world that need to be ideologically defended. The prospective presstitute will be one
that not only voluntarily, but eagerly serves its capitalist masters varied interests. After
all, when there are plenty of whores to choose from, would you hire one that requires
explicit instructions on every last thing you expect from them and just follows those
instructions mechanically or the the one that puts effort into figuring out what would please
you and delivers that with enthusiasm? Keeping this dynamic in mind will allow one to better
understand the capitalist mass media's products.
The contempt at which the American ruling class hold their citizens is galling. The US
corporate media operates as if their targeted audience are all morons.
Mark2 @45: "...was it [ novel coronavirus] spread by negligence or
deliberately?"
Most likely both.
There is evidence to suggest that the virus was circulating in the US prior to it being
discovered in China. While it is possible this could have been the results of testing the
transmissibility of the virus, it seems more probable that it was an accidental release from
Fort Detrick. This would explain the facility being shut down last year. Military facilities
are never shut down simply for breaking a few rules but because those rule violations led to
something unpleasant.
An accidental release, coupled with the fact that the synthetic origin of the virus would
become apparent to scientists worldwide, resulted in a need to quickly establish an alternate
explanation for the virus. Since the US was losing its trade war with China, and use of a
bioweapon to turn the tide was already gamed out and on the table anyway, the virus (or
possibly a very similar strain that had been pre-selected for the attack) was deliberately
sprayed around a market in Wuhan.
The CDC and CIA probably thought that the virus was contained in the West and that since
it was a surprise to the Chinese it would run rampant there and result in their economy
shutting down and their borders being closed, decoupling China from the world. With the
Chinese treating the virus as a bio attack and defeating its spread, followed by the virus
rampaging through the West, the dynamic changed. Now in order for the virus to decouple China
it must become endemic in the West. The Chinese must be made to close their borders in fear
of becoming infected from the rest of the world. To make this backup plan a reality, and to
get the economies moving again as fast as possible, some western leaders have decided to
accelerate the spread in the hopes of quickly developing "herd immunity" . Taking out
some retirees whom the capitalists view as a burden on the economy is just some nice icing on
the cake.
@ 51 & @ 52
I'd say not ! I'm confided Vietnam Vet is doing 'balenced' Reporting ! The subject of this
post. Take another look at both this post and his comment. A lesson in how to be unbiased but
truthfull.
Soooo any one got a definition of fake news.
Mine would be Truth before personal agenda.
William Gruff @ 53
I think yours is just about the most clear and concise summary of this whole virus
catastrophe that I have seen so far. And that's a hell of a statement !
Unrelated I wonder what would have happened if the Chinese whistle blower had not blown the
whistle ? Now that's one to ponder ? As bad as this all is world wide, where would be right
now ? Dose not bare thinking about.
What are you trying to tell me? Anyone that does not acknowledge the virus originated in
China and that China didn't respond as fast as it could have? And more polemically: there is
some kind of African Marxist heading WHO who obfuscated China's late information to the
WHO?
There is a dot of truth in everything. There is also a dot of truth in the fact that Trump
or his relevant admin was informed early enough.
We've been acquainted with this virus about 7 months or so and it is difficult to separate
reliable information from disinformation. We know very little about it, eg, we don't know
whether those who recover can be reinfected. Is it like the common cold, against which there
is no immunity? We just have to assume that the Trump virus has infected every level of the
administration so that there is ignorance and unadulterated stupidity from the lowest level
in the ministry of propaganda to the secretary of state and, of course, the president himself
currently celebrating the wisdom of an animist/Christian hybrid doctor from Africa spewing
the foulest disinformation one can imagine.
Big @ 57 What ?
Posted by: Mark2 | Jul 30 2020 12:27 utc | 58
babbling: look if this is the good old VV from SST, I wouldn't want to nail him on the
usage of Wuhan virus. But on the larger content of his comment, I am wondering.
Full discovery: I entered the US conspiracy universe shortly after 9/11. I'll probably
never forget there was this one commenter that completely out of then current preoccupations
within the diverse theories, you recall?, suggested that the Chinese were approaching via the
Southern borders.
There surely should be a way how the US and Russia
There surely should be a way how the US and Russia
There surely should be a way how the US and Russia repartition their claims. After all
historically the Russian had some type of partly real Yellow threat too ... :)
Except the "whistle blower" was not a whistle blower since local, provincial, and nations
institutions were already advised or in the process of being advised. Dr Wenliang posted his
information in a private chatroom with other medical professionals on December 30th. Timeline
of events:
Dec 27 -- Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of the respiratory and critical care medicine
department of Hubei Provincial Hospital, files a report to the hospital stating that an
unknown pneumonia has developed in three patients and they are not responding to influenza
treatment.
Dec 29 -- Hubei Provincial Hospital convened a panel of 10 experts to discuss the now
seven cases. Their conclusion that the situation was extraordinary, plus information of two
similar cases in other hospitals, prompted the hospital to report directly to the municipal
and provincial health authorities.
Dec 30 -- The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued an urgent notification to medical
institutions under its jurisdiction, ordering efforts to appropriately treat patients with
pneumonia of unknown cause.
Dec 31 -- The National Health Commission (NHC) made arrangements in the wee hours, sending
a working group and an expert team to Wuhan to guide epidemic response and conduct on-site
investigations. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released a briefing on its website
about the pneumonia outbreak in the city, confirming 27 cases and telling the public not to
go to enclosed public places or gather. It suggested wearing face masks when going out. The
Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released briefings on the pneumonia outbreak in accordance
with the law. WHO's Country Office in the PRC relayed the information to the WHO Western
Pacific Regional Office, then to the international level headquarters.
Jan 1 -- The NHC set up a leading group to determine the emergency response to the
epidemic. The group convened meetings on a daily basis since then.
Jan 2 -- The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) and the Chinese
Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) received the first batch of samples of four patients from
Hubei Province and began pathogen identification. The NHC came up with a set of guidelines on
early discovery, early diagnosis and early quarantine for the prevention and control of the
viral pneumonia of unknown cause.
Jan 3 -- Dr. Wenliang signs a statement not to post unsubstantiated rumors.
There's no "whistle blowing" as the information of the cases were already going up the
chain of command. These are facts that can be sourced by multiple media outlets. I can't
believe this fallacy keeps floating and doesn't flush.
In retrospective analyses, SARS-COV-2 was found in routinely collected samples of European
sewage water dating back to at least december 2019. A french doctor reviewed archived medical
samples and imagery from patients who had fallen mysteriously ill in the latter half of 2019
and also found that some had been early cases of COVID-19.
The real coronavirus whistle-blower is a doctor in Washington state USA who tested for the
virus in Januari 2020 and was silenced by USA medical and federal authorities.
I am afraid that there will never be a sincere investigation into the real cause of the
"vaping disease" that caused many deaths from sudden respiratory failure in the USA in the
summer of 2019. Tell me again when Ft. Detrick labs was shut down exactly?
What are you trying to tell me? Anyone that does not acknowledge the virus originated in
China and that China didn't respond as fast as it could have? And more polemically: there is
some kind of African Marxist heading WHO who obfuscated China's late information to the WHO?
There is a dot of truth in everything. There is also a dot of truth in the fact that Trump
or his relevant admin was informed early enough.
Posted by: vig | Jul 30 2020 12:21 utc | 57
vig repeats widely spread arguments, basically, the "official propaganda" from offices
related to an orange-American (excessive time spend on golf courses changes skin color,
perhaps in combination with sunscreen, without sunscreen you would get a "redneck look").
1. Origin: somewhat debatable, but any virus has to originate somewhere. Every country was
on receiving end of pathogens from other countries.
2. China did not respond as fast as it could have. Now, how fast and effective was USA?
One has to note that clusters of fatal lung infections happen regularly, but this is because
of mutations that increase impact on health, while separate mutations increase (or decrease)
the transmission. Draconian measures are necessary if you get both, but you do not lock
cities, provinces, introduce massive quarantine programs until you know that they are
necessary. For the same reasons, the response in Western Europe and USA was not as fast as it
could have.
3. "African Marxist heading WHO mislead poor naive Americans". What is the budget of
American intelligence, and American disease control? Do they collect information, do they
have experts? In particular, American authorities knew pretty much what Chinese authorities
knew, and they had benefit of several weeks of extra time to devise wise strategy. Giving
this benefit to people with limited mental capacities has a limited value. Perhaps China is
at fault here too, Pompeo reported about pernicious impact of Chinese Communist Party on PPT
meeting in USA, that could have deleterious impact on education and thus on mental
capacities.
Pompeo himself may be a victim. He excelled as a West Point student, but if the content of
education was crappy, diligence impacted his brain deeper and not for the better. But nobody
attempts to blame CCP for that.
For starters, the "whistleblower" wasn't a whistleblower at all: he thought he had found a
resurgence of SARS, not a new pandemic. Secondly, the head of respiratory diseases at the
region already was investigating some cases of a "mysterious pneumonia" since end of November
or mid-December - so the investigation already was well under way.
Discovering a new disease is not magic: a doctor cannot simply go the market, see a random
person, and claim he/she discovered a new virus. Doctors are not gods: they can only diagnose
the patients under their care.
The point of discord that the Western MSM capitalized upon was the fact that some random
officer from the local police intercepted his private social media and made him sign a letter
of reprimand. No Law is ever perfect, and these episodes of false triggers do happen even in
Western Democracies.
Little known fact (one which the Western MSM censored) is that the so-called
"whistleblower" was a member of the CCP. After knowing the details of the situation
(including that the disease was already being investigated), he quickly realized the
state-of-the-art and went to the frontlines to fight the pandemic - as any member of the CCP
would've done. Revolutionary communist parties have this tradition that comes since the
Bolshevik Party, where the leadership always leads by example. The Bolsheviks themselves lost
the vast majority of their elite in the Civil War, as they always led in the front
(vanguard). Fidel Castro himself led his army in the front when the invasion of the Bay of
Pigs begun. So, it is not surprising this doctor, once having the facts on the field, quickly
shut up and went to the frontline as a vanguard soldier.
After the whole truth came to the forefront, the Western MSM quickly begun to meltdown
over the fake story they fantasized, and the Taiwanese MSM invented a story of some another
whistleblower who had discovered the virus "at the end of November". That one never truly
gained traction, and silently died out.
But all of this is moot point for the West, because Trump and the other European liberal
powers refused to believe either that the virus was real or that it could reach them until
February the next year.
I think it is OK that b nails the US makes yet another display of stupidity.... on the other
hand I presume that b also has other things to care about, I mean exposing the US as a "fake"
nation is a full time job!
Americans have at least the last 50 years been known for fails, even Churchill commented
something like "the Americans will fail numerous times, but eventually they will get it
right" well that was back then! Today it is fail upon fail. I know that there must be bright
people over there, but it is my sincere impression, that they are a very small minority.
Maybe their schooling system has all gone bonkers ?
"3% of all Americans believe the Earth is flat! WTF!!!
America is on a steep slope downward.
I am personally not worried much about Covid 19, although I am 63 and live in Sweden, the
"black Sheep" in Europe because of our rather lax restrictions, the Swedes themselves are
rather good at keeping distance and using common sense.
I am much more worried that the American culture of ignorance, brain farts, stupidity and low
IQ media will infest my country further and maybe completely ruin it.
Especially by the junk that comes out of Hollywood, pure Sh*t served nice and hot!
I am happy I know, I have not got to endure further 30 years of this.
A few months ago, b posted a link to a Canadian vlogger who lives in Nanning, China. The
vlogger took us on a tour of a so called Wet Market. Here, the vlogger takes us to another
Wet Market tour. He does a good job dispelling racist stereotypes and showing real life in
China.
One to many @ 64
Thanks ! So there was a group of whistle blowers then. It's down to definitions again.
Perhaps mine is a little more loose. But it's of no concern.
For the sake of this excellent thread, perhaps we could all be a little less pedantic. VK ?
Also relevant - Crimson Contagion - the pandemic simulation run by the US government from
January to August 2019 and was based on an infectious coronavirus coming from a food market
in China
Everywhere u go in this world you'll find some version or an "murican" in every country.
Even a country like modern first world Switzerland has its "mountain folk".
In my personal experience with Americans I'm most often pleasantly surprised at their levels
of sophistication and introspection over their American experiences. An enjoyable and as
pleasant a people as anywhere. This may be clouded by mostly meeting these people outside of
the US where unless tourists are well educated and travelled and by default more aware of a
negative view of their homeland that exists outside of the US. For some reason most of these
Americans I've met abroad are decidedly non republican in nature and are mostly
from California and North and North Eastern States. Fellow future Canadians I would call
them.
The other side of the coin is when I've travelled to the states. Texas, Florida, Arizona.
Whew! What a difference. I've learned that talking politics is impossible and the natives are
almost entirely ignorant of anything outside their bubble. Outside of talking points there is
no information behind their arguments. Their knowledge of the outside world is incredibly
lacking and the view of the US in it is overwhelmingly positive.
It isn't Americans its America and its leadership, its influences, systems and all the other
shit that make the US the salad it is. The people r redeemable.
Calling the professionals doing their jobs in China "whistleblowers" is inaccurate.
"Whistleblower" implies revealing information that others are trying to hide. In this
case the suggestion is that the Chinese government was trying to hide the outbreak. This is
nonsense as the Chinese government was unaware of an outbreak until after the relevant
professionals had determined that there was an outbreak. There is no way the Chinese
government could have known about an outbreak before the outbreak was identified by the
professionals tasked with identifying outbreaks. The only ones who knew about the outbreak
before the outbreak occurred were the US "intelligence community" .
MOSCOW, July 26 – RIA Novosti. The US authorities are increasing pressure on
German and European companies involved in the construction of Nord Stream 2, Die Welt
newspaper writes, citing sources.
The newspaper notes that the American side has held two videoconferences with gas
pipeline contractors from Germany and other European countries to "indicate the far-reaching
consequences of their further participation in the project". The conferences were attended by
representatives of the US Department of State, Treasury and Department of Energy.
Sources told the newspaper that American officials "have made it very clear that they
want to prevent the completion of Nord Stream 2".
I suppose the Germans could crumble like cheese, but I personally think it is very
unlikely, since doing so would mean total dependence on the United States, with its whims and
its 'loyalty tests'. Not necessarily in energy, because Europe would still have to rely
heavily on Russia; the United States would be satisfied – for the moment – with
Russia continuing to supply its present amounts, provided they went through Ukraine as they
do now, so that Russia has to help finance Ukraine's slow development as a US project
dedicated to Russia's undoing. But America knows it cannot ever replace Russian supply,
although it would ideally like to take more and more market share as its own production
(theoretically) continues to increase. It just adamantly does not want Ukraine taken out of
the equation, because Ukraine is like a rheostat that Washington can turn up or down as
necessary.
No, the USA cannot replace Russian gas, but if Germany gives in now, Washington will run
it as a wholly-owned subsidiary for as far as the eye can see. And I believe Germany knows
it.
The German foreign minister was making suitable noises for the USA yesterday, saying that
in order to rejoin G7, Russia must firstly clean up its relations with Banderastan -- read:
stop its "aggression" towards the Ukraine and return the Crimea to its rightful "owner".
The Kremlin responded that it has no intention of rejoining G7.
No mention off the German minister about the Ukraine not complying with the Minsk
agreement, about the Ukraine government waging war against its citizens, its stopping the
water supply to the Crimea etc., etc. just Big Bad Russia the "Aggressor State" that must
learn how to behave itself according "International Law".
So it would appear. But it should not be at all surprising – except maybe to
Washington – that you cannot shit on China day and night and call it all sorts of
unpleasant names, and then expect the sun to come up on happy business partners China and the
USA next day. China shares with Russia an imperative that it be respected; you don't have to
like it, but you must speak respectfully and politely about it, and limit your accusations to
what you can prove.
Washington likes to unload the mockery by the truckload, and then, when it's time to do
business, say "Aw, shucks – I were just funnin'", and have business go forward as if
the insults had never been voiced. Or, worse yet, insist that it is sticking to its
positions, but you must do business with it anyway because it is the world leader and there
is nowhere else to turn.
Natural Gas in the USA is at what is referred to as a 'messy bottom', and both production
and sales are below year-over-year average. Yet it is plain – they say so, in so many
words – that America expects sales growth to come from China and India.
"The International Energy Agency expects LNG, the main driver of international gas
trade, to expand by 21% in 2019-2025, reaching 585 billion cubic meters annually. The growth
will come from China and India, the IEA said in its Gas 2020 report published Wednesday.
Trade will increase at a slower pace than liquefaction capacity additions, limiting the
prospects of a tighter market, it said in the report."
I think he's probably right that the natural gas market will expand by a significant
number. I'm just not sure the USA will play much of a part in it. And China is on solid
ground, no matter how much America screams and roars; Russian gas is cheaper, and the
logistics chain is short and reliable.
Obviously, for this group, 'bridging the gap' in 'threat perception' does NOT mean coaxing
Poland and Lithuania to realize that Nord Stream II is just a commercial venture. It means
coaxing France and Germany to accept and amplify Poland and Lithuania's paranoia and loathing
of Russia. Equally obviously, America's determination to be Europe's Daddy with the LNG is
just a commercial venture. Nothing political about it, and if the USA ever found itself in
the position where it could leverage its energy sales to Europe to make Europe do things it
otherwise would not do willingly, why, it would never use that power. Only the Russians
weaponize energy.
The 'panel' is simply a parade of Atlanticists, a neoconservative wet dream. There are no
realists there. Fortunately, US approval of the project is not required.
ll eyes are on the declining number of unemployed. The May and June jobs reports chronicle
the reabsorption of 5.3 million who lost their jobs in the COVID-19 pandemic. Twelve million
jobs to go to reach pre-pandemic employment.
Yet prior to the pandemic, there were 18 million Americans missing from the economy. These
persons were neither employed nor seeking employment -- nor retirees, students or in-home
caregivers -- and therefore were excluded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics count of the
workforce. In order that America emerge from the pandemic stronger than before, a concerted
initiative by federal and state governments to move them back into the economy -- using
existing resources -- must begin now.
...
Research on the social determinants of health finds that employment has a
very strong correlation with positive health outcomes. To exist as a non-participant in
the economy is thus an invitation to dire health outcomes including premature death.
What's more, these individuals are needed as contributors to our national commonweal,
fueling increased economic and social progress. And people engaged in productive activities
are much less likely to engage in negative and destructive behaviors.
... The USDA's food stamp program has a robustly funded, though underutilized, employment
and training grant. States use the excuse of USDA's partial match requirement as a reason to
opt out.
"... Some of the neoliberal countries may be at the stage of the collusion; some of them may find themselves at the stage of oligarchy; some of them may be at the stage of corruption culture. ..."
"... In Japan, since 1957, there were twenty-one prime ministers of whom 75% were one-year or two-year prime ministers despite the four-year term of prime ministers. The short life span of Japanese prime ministers is essentially due to the short term interest pursued by the corrupted golden triangle composed of big business, bureaucrats and politicians. Unless, Japan uproots the corruption culture, it will be difficult to save the Japanese economy from perpetual stagnation. ..."
"... In the U.S. the big companies are spending a year no less than $2.6 billion lobbying money for the promotion of their interests, while the Congress spends $ 2.9 billion and the Senate, $860 million for their respective annual operation. Some of the big companies deploy as many as 100 lobbyists. ..."
"... It is unbelievable that the amount of lobbying is as much as 70% of the annual budget of the whole legislative of the U.S. ..."
"... Under such lobbying system, each group should deploy lobbyists to promote their interests. The immigrants, the native Indians, the Afro Americans, the alienated white people and other marginal groups cannot afford lobbyists and they are often excluded from fair treatment in the process of making laws and policies ..."
"... In the case of the U.S. its rank increased from 18 in 2016 to 22 in 2019. Thus in three years, the degree of corruption increase by 22.2% ..."
"... The U.S. is the richest country in the world, but it is also a country where income inequality is the most pronounced. I will come back to this issue in the next section. In relation to the corona virus crisis, income inequality means an army of those who are most likely to be infected and who are unable to follow CDC guidelines of testing, self quarantine and social distancing. Finally, the privatization of public health services has made the whole country unprepared for the onslaught of the virus. ..."
"... The experience of Japan shows how this can happen. The economic depression after the bubble burst of 1989, Japan had to endure 30-year deflation. The government of Japan has flooded the country with money to restore the economy, but the money was used for the bail-out of big corporations neglecting the healthy development of the SMEs and impoverishing the ordinary Japanese people. South Korea could have experienced the Japanese-type economic stagnation, if the conservative government ruled the country ten more years. ..."
"... The neoliberal pro-big company policy of Washington has greatly depleted consumer demand and SMEs even before the onslaught of the coronavirus. ..."
"... Fourth, the U.S. economy is shaken up so much that the neoliberal regime will not able to recover the economy. Thus, the survival of neo-liberalism looks uncertain. But, if the coronavirus crisis continues and destroys SMEs and if only the big corporations survive owing to bailout money, neo-liberalism may survive and we may end up with authoritarian governance ruled by the business-politics oligarchy. ..."
For the last forty years, neo-liberalism has dominated economic thinking and the formulation of economic policies Worldwide.
But the corona virus crisis has exposed, in a dramatic way, its internal contradictions, its incapacity to deal with the corona
crisis and its incompetence to restore the real economy ruined by the crisis.
In this article, we will focus on the relationship between Neoliberalism and the Corona Crisis:
Neoliberalism has prevented the governments from controlling effectively the initial outbreak of the corona virus.
Neoliberalism has made the wave of virus propagation higher and wider, especially in the U.S.
Neoliberalism can shake the foundations of the U.S. economy.
Neoliberalism may not survive the corona virus crisis in the U.S.
To save democracy and the global economy, We need a new economic model which supports the future of humanity, which sustains human
livelihood Worldwide.
1. Neoliberalism and the initial Outbreak of the Corona Virus
The most important part of neoliberalism is the relation -often of a corrupt nature- between the government and large corporations.
By corruption, we mean illegal or immoral human activities designed to maximize profit at the expense of people's welfare. In this
relation, the government may not be able to control and govern the large corporations. In fact, in the present context, the corporations
govern and oversee national governments.
Hence, when the corona virus broke out, it was difficult for the government to take immediate actions to control the virus break-out
to save human lives; It was quite possible that the price of stocks and large corporations' profit had the priority.
The theory known as neoliberalism distinguishes itself from the old liberalism prevailing before the Great Depression.
It became widely accepted mainly because of its adoption, in the 1970s and 1980s, by Ronald Reagan , president of the U.S. and
Margaret Thatcher , prime minister of Great Britain as an economic policy agenda applied nationally and internationally.
The justification of neoliberalism is the belief that the best way to ensure economic growth is to encourage "supply activities"
of private sector enterprises.
Now, the proponents of neoliberalism argue that public goods (including health and education) can be produced with greater efficiency
by private companies than by the State. Therefore, "it is better" to let the private enterprises produce public goods.
In other words, the production of public goods should be "privatized". Neoliberals put profit as the best measure of efficiency
and success. And profit can be sustained with government support. In turn, the private companies' policy is that of reducing the
labour costs of production.
Government assistance includes reduction of corporate taxes, subsidies and anti-labour policies such as the prohibition of labour
unionization and the abolition of the minimum wage.
Reduction of labour cost can be obtained by the automation of the production of goods
Under such circumstances, close cooperation between the government and the private corporations is inevitable; even it may be
necessary.
But, such cooperation is bound to lead to government-business collusion in which the business receives legal and illegal government
support in exchange of illicit money such as kick-backs and bribes given to influential politicians and the people close to the power.
As the collusion becomes wider and deeper, an oligarchy is formed; it is composed of corporations, politicians and civil servants.
This oligarchy's raison d'être is to make money even at the expense of the interests of the people.
Now, in order to protect its vested interests, the oligarchy expands its network and creates tight-knit political community which
shares the wealth and privileges obtained.
In this way, the government-business cooperation can be evolved by stage to give birth to the corruption culture.
Some of the neoliberal countries may be at the stage of the collusion; some of them may find themselves at the stage of oligarchy;
some of them may be at the stage of corruption culture.
South Korea
When the progressive government of Moon Jae-in took over power in 2017, South Korea under the 60-year neo-liberal rule by the
conservatives was at the stage of corruption culture.
The progressive government of Moon Jae-in has declared a total war against the corruption culture, but it is a very long way to
go before eliminating corruption.
In South Korea, of six presidents of the conservative government, four presidents were or are in prison for corruption and abuse
of power. This shows how deeply the corruption has penetrated into the fabrics of the Korea society
In Japan, since 1957, there were twenty-one prime ministers of whom 75% were one-year or two-year prime ministers despite the
four-year term of prime ministers. The short life span of Japanese prime ministers is essentially due to the short term interest
pursued by the corrupted golden triangle composed of big business, bureaucrats and politicians. Unless, Japan uproots the corruption
culture, it will be difficult to save the Japanese economy from perpetual stagnation.
Lobbying and "Corruption Culture"
Many of the developed countries in the West are also the victims of corruption culture. In the U.K. the City (London's Wall Street)
is the global center of money laundry.
In the U.S. the big companies are spending a year no less than $2.6 billion lobbying money for the promotion of their interests,
while the Congress spends $ 2.9 billion and the Senate, $860 million for their respective annual operation. Some of the big companies
deploy as many as 100 lobbyists.
It is unbelievable that the amount of lobbying is as much as 70% of the annual budget of the whole legislative of the U.S.
True, in the U.S., lobbying is not illegal, but it may not be morally justified. It is a system where the law makers give privileges
to those who spend more money, which can be considered as bribes
Under such lobbying system, each group should deploy lobbyists to promote their interests. The immigrants, the native Indians,
the Afro Americans, the alienated white people and other marginal groups cannot afford lobbyists and they are often excluded from
fair treatment in the process of making laws and policies
Some of the developed European countries are also very corrupted. The international Transparency Index rank, in 2019, was 23 for
France, 30 for Spain and 51 for Italy.
In the case of the U.S. its rank increased from 18 in 2016 to 22 in 2019. Thus in three years, the degree of corruption increase
by 22.2%
What is alarming is that, in the corruption culture, national policies are liable to be dictated by big businesses.
In South Korea, under the conservative government, it was suspected that the national policies were determined by the Chaebols
(large industrial conglomerates), not by the government.
As matter of fact, during the MERS crisis in 2015, the anti-virus policy was dictated by the Samsung Group. In order to save its
profit, Samsung Hospital in Seoul hid the infected so that the number of non-MERS patients would not decrease.
In Japan, the Abe government made the declaration of public health emergency as late as April 6, 2020 despite the fact that the
infections were detected as early as January, 2020.
This decision was, most likely, dictated by Keiretsu members (grouping of large enterprises) in order to save investments in the
July Olympics. Nobody knows how many Japanese had been infected for more than three months.
Similarly, Trump was well aware of the sure propagation of the virus right form January, but he waited until March 13, 2020 before
he declared the state of effective public health emergency. The obvious reason was the possible fear of free fall of stock price
and the possible loss of big companies' profits.
The interesting question is: "The delayed declaration of public health emergency, was it Trump's decision or that of his corporate
friends?" It doesn't matter whose decision it was, because the government under neoliberal system is controlled the big businesses.
So, as in Japan, Italy, Spain, France and especially, the U.K, Trump lost the golden time to save human lives to keep profit of
enterprises.
God knows how many American lives were sacrificed to save stock price and company profit!
Thus, the neoliberal governments have lost the golden chance to prevent the initial outbreak of the dreadful virus.
2. Neo-liberalism and the Propagation of Corona-Virus
We saw that the initial outbreak of the virus was not properly controlled leading to the loss to golden time of saving human lives,
most likely because of the priority given to business and political interests.
The initial outbreak of the virus was transformed into never-ending propagation and, even now, in many states in the U.S. the
wave of the virus is getting higher and wider.
This tragic reality can be explained by four factors:
people's mistrust in the government,
unbounded competition,
inequitable income distribution,
the absence of public health system.
These four factors (above) are all the legacies of neoliberalism.
The people know well that the corrupted neoliberal government's concern is not the welfare of the people but the interest of a
few powerful and the rich. The inevitable outcome is the loss of people's trust in the unreliable government.
This is demonstrated by Trump's indecision, his efforts of ignoring the warning of the professionals, his fabricates stories and
above all, his perception of who should be given the right to receive life-saving medical care at the hospital.
Under such circumstances, Americans do not trust the government directives and guidelines, allegedly implemented to protect people
from the virus.
The guideline of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) for self quarantine, social distancing and wearing face masks has little
effect. There is another product of neoliberalism which is troublesome. I mean its credo of unbounded competition.
It is true that competition promotes efficiency and better quality of products. However, as competition continues, the number
of winners decreases, while that of losers rises. The economy ends up being ruled by a handful of powerful winners. This leads to
the segregation of losers and leads to the discrimination of people by income level, religion, race and colour of skin.
In the present context, largely as a result of government policy, there is little to no social solidarity; each individual has
to solve his or her own problems. I was sad when I saw on TV a young lady in California saying:
"To be killed by the COVID-19 or starve to death is the same to me. I open my shop to eat!"
This shows how American citizens are left alone to fight the coronavirus. Furthermore, neoliberalism has another unhappy legacy;
it is the widening and deepening income inequality.
The U.S. is the richest country in the world, but it is also a country where income inequality is the most pronounced. I will
come back to this issue in the next section. In relation to the corona virus crisis, income inequality means an army of those who
are most likely to be infected and who are unable to follow CDC guidelines of testing, self quarantine and social distancing. Finally,
the privatization of public health services has made the whole country unprepared for the onslaught of the virus.
In fact, in the U.S. there is no public health system. For three months after the first breakout of the virus, the country lacked
everything needed to fight the virus.
There was shortage of testing kits and PPE (personal protective equipment);
there were not enough rooms to accommodate the infected;
there was shortage of qualified medical staff;
there was lack of face masks.
Thus, neoliberalism has made the U.S not only to lose the golden time to prevent the initial breakout but also it has let the
wave of virus to continue. Nobody knows when it will calm down. As a matter of fact, on July 4, there were 2.9 million infected and
132,000 deaths; this gives a death rate of 4.6%. Given U.S. population of 328 million, we have 402.44 deaths per million inhabitants
which is one of highest among the developed countries. The trouble is that the wave of virus is still going higher and wider. On
July 4, the confirmed cases increased by 50% in two weeks in 12 states and increased 10% to 50% in 22 states.
3. Neo-liberalism and the very Foundation of the U.S. Economy
The message of this section is this. The foundation of the American economy is the purchasing power of the consumers and the job
creation by small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The consumer demand is 70% of the GDP, the SMEs create 66% of jobs. Unfortunately,
because of neoliberalism, the consumers have become very poorer and the SMEs have been neglected in the pro-big-company government
policies. The COVID-19 has destroyed the SMEs and impoverished the consumers. Nobody would deny the contribution of neo-liberalism
to globalization of finance, the creation of the global value chain and, especially the free trade agreement.
All these activities have allowed GDP to grow in developed countries and some of new industrial countries. However, the wealth
created by the growth of GDP has gone to countries already developed, some developing countries and a small number of multinational
enterprises (MNE). The rich produced by GDP growth has led to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few privileged. What
is more serious is this. If the skewed income distribution in favour of a decreasing number of people continues for long, the GDP
will stop growing and decades-long deflation is quite possible, as it has happened in Japan.
According to the OECD data, in the period, 1975-2011, the GDP share of labour income in OECD countries fell by 13.8% from 65%
to 56%. In the case of the U.S., in the same period, 1970-2014, it fell by 11%. The falling labour-income share is necessarily translated
into unequal household income distribution. There are two popular ways of measuring income distribution: the decile ratio and the
Gini coefficient.
The decile ratio is obtained by dividing the income earned by the top 10% income earners by the income earned by the bottom 10%
income earners . The decile ratio in 2019 was 18.5 in the U.S. as compared to 5.6 in Finland. The decile ratio of the U.S. was the
highest among the developed countries. Thus, in the U.S. the top 10 % has an income 19 times more than the bottom 10%, while, in
Finland, the corresponding ratio is only 6 times. This shows how serious the income gap is in the country of Uncle Sam.
The Gini coefficient varies from zero to 100. As the value of the Gini increases, the income distribution becomes favourable to
the high-income households. Conversely, as the value of the Gini decreases, the income distribution becomes favourable to low-income
households. There are two types of Gini: the gross Gini and the net Gini. The former refers to Gini before taxes and transfer payment,
while the latter refers to Gini after taxes and transfer payment. The difference between the gross and the net Gini shows the government
efforts to improve the equality and fairness of income distribution The gross U.S.- Gini coefficient in 2019 was 48.6, one of the
highest among the developed countries.
Its net Gini was 38.0 so that the difference between the gross and the net Gini was 12.3%. In other words, the U.S. income distribution
improved only by 12.3% by government efforts as against, for example, an improvement of 42.9% in the case of Germany, where the gross
Gini was 49.9 while the net Gini was 28.5 The net Gini of the U.S. was the highest among the developed countries. The implication
is clear. The income distribution in the U.S. was the most unequal. To make the matter worse, the government's effort to improve
the unequal income distribution was the poorest among the developed countries. There are countless signs of unfortunate impacts of
the inequitable income distribution in the country called the U.S. which Koreans used to admire describing it as "mi-gook- 美國미국 –
Beautiful Country". Now, one wonders if it is still a "mi-gook".
The following data indicates the seriousness of poverty in the U.S. (data below prior to the Coronavirus crisis).
In the U.S. the richest 1% of the population has 40% of all household wealth. (2017 data)
More than 20% of the population cannot pay monthly bills.
About 40% do not have savings.
31% of private sector worker do not have medical benefits.
57% of the workers in the service sector have no medical benefits.
These data give us an idea on how so many people have to suffer from poverty in a country where per capita GDP is $65,000 (2019
estimate), the richest country in the world. Most of the Americans work for small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs). In the U.S.,
there are 30 million SMEs. They create 66% of jobs in the private sector. The SMEs are more severely hit than big companies by the
coronavirus.
In fact, 66% of SMEs are adversely affected by the virus against 40% for big firms. As much as 20% of SMEs may be shut down for
good within three months, because of the virus. Under the forty years of neoliberal pro-big corporation policies, available financial
resources and the best human resources have been allocated to big firms at the expense of the development of SMEs.
The most damaging by-product of neoliberalism is no doubt the widening and deepening unequal income distribution for the benefit
of the big corporations and the uprooting of SMEs. This trend means the shrinking domestic demand and the disappearance of jobs for
ordinary people.
The destruction of the domestic market caused by the shrinking consumer demand and the disappearance of SMEs can mean the uprooting
of the very foundation of the economy.
The experience of Japan shows how this can happen. The economic depression after the bubble burst of 1989, Japan had to endure
30-year deflation. The government of Japan has flooded the country with money to restore the economy, but the money was used for
the bail-out of big corporations neglecting the healthy development of the SMEs and impoverishing the ordinary Japanese people. South
Korea could have experienced the Japanese-type economic stagnation, if the conservative government ruled the country ten more years.
The neoliberal pro-big company policy of Washington has greatly depleted consumer demand and SMEs even before the onslaught of
the coronavirus. But, the COVID-19 has given a coup de grâce to consumer demand and SMEs To better understand the issue, let us go
back to the ABC of economics. Looking at the national economy from the demand side, the economy consists of private consumer demand
(C), the private investment demand (I), the government demand (G) and Foreign demand represented by exports of domestic products
(X) minus domestic demand for imported foreign products (M).
GDP=C + I + G + (X-M)
In 2019, the consumer expenditure (C) in the U.S. was 70% of GDP, whereas the government's spending (G) was 17%. The investments
demand (I) was 18%. The net exports demand (X-M) was -5%.
In 2019 the composition of Canadian GDP was: C=57%; I=23 %; G=21 %; X-M=-1%.
Thus, we see that the U.S. economy heavily depends on the private domestic consumption, which represents as much as 70% of GDP
compared to 57% in Canada. The government's contribution to the national demand is 17% as against 21% in Canada. In the U.S. a small
government is a virtue according to neoliberals. In the U.S. the private investments account for only 18% of GDP as compared to as
much as 23% in Canada. In the U.S., off-shoring of manufacturing jobs and the global value chain under neo-liberalism have decreased
the need for business investments at home. It is obvious then that to save the American economy, we have to boost the consumers'
income. But, the consumer income comes mainly from SMEs. We must remember that the SMEs create 66% of all jobs in the U.S. Therefore,
if consumer demand falls and if SMEs do not create jobs, the US economy may have to face the same destiny as the Japanese economy.
This is happening in the U.S. The corona virus crisis is destroying SMEs and taking away the income of the people.
The coronavirus crisis is about to demolish the very foundation of the American economy.
4. Corona Virus Crisis and the Survival of Neoliberalism
The interesting question is this. Will neo-liberalism as economic system survive the corona virus crisis in the U.S.?
There are at least four indications suggesting that it will not survive.
First, to overcome major crisis such as the corona virus invasion, we need strong central government and people-loving leader.
One of the reasons for the successful anti-virus policy in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore was the strong central government's
role of determining and coordinating the anti-virus policies. As we saw, the gospel of neo-liberalism is the minimization of the
central government's role. Having little role in economic policies, the U.S. federal government has proved itself as the most incompetent
entity to fight the crisis. It is more than possible that the U.S. and all the neoliberal countries will try to get away from the
traditional neoliberal governance in which the government is almost a simple errand boy of big business.
Second, the people's trust in the neoliberal leaders has fallen on the ground. It will be difficult for the neoliberal leaders
to be able to lead the country in the post-corona virus era.
Third, the corona virus crisis has made the people aware of the abuse of power by the big companies; the people now know that
these companies are interested only in making money. So, it may be more difficult for them to exploit the people in the era of post-COVID-19.
Fourth, the U.S. economy is shaken up so much that the neoliberal regime will not able to recover the economy. Thus, the survival
of neo-liberalism looks uncertain. But, if the coronavirus crisis continues and destroys SMEs and if only the big corporations survive
owing to bailout money, neo-liberalism may survive and we may end up with authoritarian governance ruled by the business-politics
oligarchy.
5. Search for a New Economic Regime: Just-Liberalism
One thing which the corona-virus crisis has demonstrated is the fact that the American neo-liberalism has failed as sustainable
regime capable of stopping the virus crisis, restore the economy and save the democracy. Hence, we have to look for a new regime
capable of saving the U.S. economy and democracy. We would call this new regime as "Just-liberalism " mission of which is the sustainable
economic development and, at the same time, the just distribution of the benefits of economic development. Before we get into the
discussion of the main feature of the new regime, there is one thing we should discuss. It is the popular perception of large corporation.
Many believe that they make GDP grow and create jobs. It is also the popular view that the success of these large corporations is
due to the innovative managing skills of their founders or their CEOs. Therefore, they deserve annual salary of millions of dollars.
This is the popular perception of Chaebols in South Korea.
But, a great part of Chaebols income is attributable to the public goods such as national defence, police protection, social infrastructures,
the education system, enormous sacrifice of workers and, especially tax allowances, subsidies and privileges. In other words, a great
part of the Chaebols' income belongs to the society, not the Chaebols. Many believe that the Chaebols create jobs, but, in reality,
they crate less than 10% of jobs in Korea. We may say the same thing about large corporations in the U.S. In other words, much of
the company's income is due to public goods. Hence, the company should equitably share its income with the rest of the society. But
do they?
The high ranking managers get astronomical salaries; some of them are hiding billions of dollars in tax haven islands.
We ask. Are large corporations sharing equitably their income with the society? Are the corporate tax allowances they get too
much? Is the wage they pay too low? Is CEO's income is too high?
It is difficult to answer these questions.
But we should throw away the mysticism surrounding the merits of large corporations; we should closely watch them so that they
do not misuse their power and wealth to dictate national policies for their own benefit at the expense of the welfare of the people.
The new regime, just-liberalism, should have the following eight features.
First, we need a strong government which is autonomous from big businesses; there should be no business-politics collusion; there
should be no self-interest oligarchy of corruption.
Second, it is the time we should reconsider the notion of human right violation. There are several types of human right violation
in developed countries including the U.S. For example, the racial discrimination, the inequality before the law, the violation of
the right of social security and the violation of the right of social service are some cases of violation of human rights defined
by the U.N. The Western media have been criticizing human right violation in "non-democratic countries", but, in the future, they
should pay more attention to human right violation in "democratic countries."
Third, the criterion of successful economy should not be limited to the GDP growth; the equitable distribution of the benefits
of GDP growth should also be a criterion; proper balance between the growth and the distribution of growth fruits should be maintained.
Fourth, market should not be governed by "efficiency" alone; it must be also "equitable". Efficiency may lead to the concentration
of resources and power in the hands of the few at the expense of social benefit; it must be also equitable. As an example, we may
refer to the Chaebols (big Korean industrial conglomerates) which kill the traditional village markets which provide livelihood to
a great number of poor people. The Chaebols may make the market efficient but not equitable. The Korean government has limited Chaebols'
penetration into these markets to make them more equitable.
Fifth, we need a partial direct democracy. The legislative translates people's wish into laws and the executive makes policies
on the basis of laws. But, in reality, the legislative and the executive may pass laws and policies for the benefit of big companies
or specific group of individuals and institutions close to the power. Therefore, it is important to provide a mechanism through which
the people – the real master of the country – should be allowed to intervene all times. In South Korea, if more than 200,000 people
send a request to the Blue house (Korean White House) to intervene in matters judged unfair or unjust, the government must intervene.
Sixth, those goods and services which are essential for every citizen must be nationalized. For example, social infrastructure
such as parks, roads, railways, harbours, supply of electricity should not be privatized. Education including higher education should
be made public goods so that low income people should get higher education as do high income group.
This is the best way to maximize the mass of innovative minds and creative energy to develop the society. Above all, the health
service should be nationalized. It is just unbelievable to see that, in a country where the per capita GDP is $63,000, more than
30 million citizens have no medical insurance, just because it is too expensive. Politicians know quite well that big companies related
to insurance, pharmaceutical products and medical professions are preventing the nationalization of medical service in the U.S. But,
the politicians don't seem to dare go over these vested interests groups and nationalize the public health system. Remember this.
There are countries which are much poorer than the U.S. But, they have accessible universal health care insurance system.
Seventh, the economy should allow the system of multi- generational technologies in which not only high-level technologies but
also mid-level technologies should be promoted in such a way that both high- tech large corporations and middle-tech SMEs can grow.
This is perhaps only way to insure GDP growth and create jobs.
Eighth, in the area of international relations, it is about the time to stop wasteful ideological conflict. The difference among
ideologies is narrowing; the number of countries which have abandoned the U.S. imposed democracy has been rising; the ideological
basis of socialism is weakening. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, 48% of countries are democratic, while 52% are not.
According to Freedom House, in 2005, 83 countries had net gain in democracy, while 52 countries had net loss in democracy.
But in 2019, only 37 countries had net gain while 64 countries had net loss. Between 2005 and 2018, the number of countries which
were not free increased by 26%, while those which were free fell by 44%. On the other hand, it is becoming more and more difficult
to find authentic socialism. For example, Chinese regime has lost its pure socialism long time ago. Thus, the world is becoming non-ideological;
the world is embracing ideology-neutral pragmatism.
To conclude, the corona virus pandemic has given us the opportunity to look at ourselves; it has given us the opportunity to realize
how vulnerable we are in front of the corona virus attack.
Many more pandemics will come and challenge us. We need a world better prepared to fight the coming pandemics. It is high time
that we slow down our greedy pursuit for GDP growth; it is about the time to stop a wasteful international ideological conflict in
support of multibillion dollar interests behind Big Money and the Military industrial complex.
It is therefore timely to find a system where we care for each other and where we share what we have .
***
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Professor Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and co- director of the Observatoire de l'Asie de l'Est (ODAE) of the Centre
d'Études de l'Intégration et la Mondialisation (CEIM), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He is Research Associate of the Center
of Research on Globalization (CRG).
Growing Social and
Wealth Inequality in America
"... By Dr. Karin Kneissl , who works as an energy analyst and book author. She served as the Austrian minister of foreign affairs between 2017-2019. She is currently writing her book 'Die Mobilitätswende' (Mobility in transition), to be published this summer. ..."
"... "humanitarian corridor" ..."
"... "good opposition" ..."
"... "humanitarian war," ..."
"... "worst mistake." ..."
"... "geopolitical commission." ..."
"... "community of the good ones" ..."
"... "Friends of Libya," ..."
"... "good opposition" ..."
"... "exclusive economic zone" ..."
"... "other actors" ..."
"... "mare nostrum" ..."
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By
Dr.
Karin Kneissl
, who works as an energy analyst and book author. She served as the Austrian minister of foreign affairs
between 2017-2019. She is currently writing her book 'Die Mobilitätswende' (Mobility in transition), to be published this
summer.
A confrontation between the two NATO states France and Turkey continues to trouble the Mediterranean region; Egyptian forces
are mobilizing. And many other military players are continuing operations there.
In March 2011, during a hectic weekend, the French delegation to the UN
Security Council managed to convince all other member States of the Council to support Resolution 1973. It was all about a
"humanitarian
corridor"
for Benghazi, which was considered the
"good opposition"
by the
government of Nicolas Sarkozy. One of his whisperers was the controversial philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who supported a
French intervention. Levy, fond of the
"humanitarian war,"
found a congenial
partner in Sarkozy.
France was at root of crisis
Muammar Gaddafi had been received generously with all his tents in the park of
the Elysée, but suddenly he was coined the bad guy. The same had happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It was not the Arab
dictator who had changed; it was his usefulness to his allies. The Libyans had been distributing huge amounts of money in
Europe, in particular in Rome and Paris at various levels. In certain cases they knew too much. Plus, the Libyans had been
protecting the southern border of the Mediterranean for the European Union.
So, the French started the war in 2011, took the British on board, which made
the entire adventure look a bit like a replay of the Suez intervention of 1956, the official end of European colonial
interventions. A humanitarian intervention changed into regime change on day two, which was March 20, 2011. Various UN
Security Council members felt trapped by the French.
The US was asked to help, with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and
many other advisers in favor of joining that war. President Obama, however, was reluctant but, in the end, he gave in. In one
of his last interviews while still in the White House, Obama stated that the aftermath of the war in Libya was his
"worst
mistake."
Libya ever since has mostly remained a dossier in the hands of administrative
officials in Washington, but not on the top presidential agenda anymore. This practice has been slightly shifting in the past
weeks. US President Donald Trump and France's Emmanuel Macron had a phone conversation on how to deescalate the situation
there. Trump also spoke on that very topic with Turkish President Recep T. Erdogan. Paris supports General Haftar in his war
against the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord, which is also supported by the European Union, in theory
The triggering momentum for the current rise in tensions was a naval clash
between French- and Turkish-supported vessels. Both nations are NATO members, and an internal alliance investigation is
underway. But France decided to pull out of the NATO naval operation that enforces the Libya arms embargo, set up during the
high-level Berlin conference on Libya in mid-January 2020. Without the French vessels it will be even more toothless than its
critics already deem it. This very initiative on Libya was the first test for the new European commission headed by Ursula von
der Leyen and claiming to be a
"geopolitical commission."
The EU strives to speak
the language of power but keeps failing in Libya, where two members, namely Italy and France, are pursuing very different
goals. Rome is anxious about migration while Paris cares more about the terrorist threat. But both have an interest in
commodities.
When Gaddafi was reintegrated in the
"community
of the good ones"
in early 2004 after a curious British legal twisting on the Lockerbie attack of December 1988, a
bonanza for oil and gas concessions started. The Italian energy company ENI and BP were among the first to have a big foot in
the door. I studied some of those contracts and asked myself why companies were ready to accept such terms. The answer was
maybe in the then rise in the oil price of oil and the proximity of Libya to the European market.
Interestingly, in September 2011, the very day of the opening ceremony of the
Paris conference dubbed
"Friends of Libya,"
a secret oil deal for the French
company Total was published by the French daily Libération. The
"good opposition"
had
promised the French an interesting range of oil concessions. Oil production continuously fell with the rise of the war,
attracting sponsors, militias and smugglers from all horizons. The situation in Libya has since been called 'somalization,'
but it would become even worse, since many more regional powers got involved in Libya than ever was the case in hunger-ridden
Somalia.
In exchange for its military assistance, Turkey recently gained access to
exploration fields off Libya's shores. Ankara had identified an
"exclusive economic
zone"
with the government in Tripoli, which disregards the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Actually, Israel made the
same bilateral demarcation with Cyprus about ten years ago, when Noble Energy started its delineation of blocs in the Levant
Basin. So Turkey is infringing on Greek and Cypriot territorial waters, while President Macron keeps reminding his EU
colleagues of the
"other actors"
in the Mediterranean Sea. Alas, it is nobody's
"mare
nostrum"
as it was 2,000 years ago in the Roman era. In principle, all states which have ratified the UN Convention on
the Law of the Sea should simply comply with their legal obligations.
The crucial question remains: who has which leverage to de-escalate? Is it the
US President, who seemingly has acted more wisely on certain issues in recent times? Or will Russian and Turkish diplomacy be
able to negotiate and implement a truce? The tightrope-walk diplomacy between these last two countries is a most interesting
example of classical diplomacy: interest-based and focused; able to conduct hard-core relations even in times of direct
military confrontation and assassinations (remember the Russian Ambassador Karlov, shot by his Turkish bodyguard in Ankara in
December 2016?).
Meanwhile, yet another actor could move in to complicate everything even more.
On July 20, the Egyptian parliament voted unanimously for the deployment of the national army outside its borders, thereby
taking the risk of direct confrontation with Turkey in Libya. Egyptian troops would be mobilized in support of the eastern
forces of General Khalifa Haftar. Furthermore, Cairo would thereby compete even more obviously with Algeria, spending a
fortune on military control of its border with Libya. Algeria in the past could rely on US support in the region, but with the
gradual decline in US engagement in that part of the world, the country faces a fairly existential crisis.
There are currently two powers, among those involved in Libya, that can still
contain the next stage of a decade of proxy wars started by a French philosopher and various EU oil interests: Russia and the
USA.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
Quizblorg
48 minutes ago
Does anything here make sense? No, because France this, Italy that is not how the world is run. The parties
involved here go far beyond countries. Also no mention of Saudi-Arabia/Israel. Who engineered the "Arab
Spring"?
It's difficult to understand what's going on in the world because powerful people actively
manipulate public understanding of what's going on in the world.
Powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what's going on in the world
because if the public understood what's going on in the world, they would rise up and use their
strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful.
The public would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful if they
understood what's going on in their world because then they would understand that the powerful
have been exploiting, oppressing, robbing, cheating and deceiving them while destroying the
ecosystem, stockpiling weapons of Armageddon and waging endless wars, for no other reason than
so that they can maintain and expand their power.
The public do not rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful
because they have been successfully manipulated into not wanting to.
In a segment due to air this
weekend, 'America This Week' host Eric Bolling sat down with Dr Judy Mikovits, a disgraced scientist who believes that the
coronavirus pandemic was orchestrated by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr Anthony Fauci and Bill
Gates to push vaccines on the population – a theory she set out in the documentary film 'Plandemic,' which has been effectively
censored off the internet.
Bolling called Mikovits' claims "hefty," and brought on medical contributor Dr Nicole Saphier to refute them, but CNN
claimed
the
host didn't push back hard enough against Mikovits' "baseless conspiracy theory," and hammered Bolling for allowing Mikovits to
"continue to make her case."
As CNN's article circulated
on Twitter on Saturday morning, the network's liberal audience called for a boycott of Sinclair. The broadcaster initially stood
by its decision to run the segment, declaring that
"at no juncture are we aligning with or
endorsing the viewpoints of Dr Mikovits."
However, within an hour,
Sinclair bent the knee and pulled the episode from the air until additional content could be added to counter Mikovits.
"All
stations have been notified not to air this and will instead be re-airing last week's episode in its place,"
Sinclair
tweeted. For good measure, the company added
"we valiantly support Dr Fauci and the work he
and his team are doing to further prevent the spread of Covid-19."
Sinclair is an incredibly
powerful organization to have been swayed by an online outrage campaign. The company and its partner organizations own nearly 300
local TV stations around the country, and reach 40 percent of American households.
Proponents of the boycott
celebrated their victory on Twitter, declaring that
"we shamed them into doing the right
thing."
Amid a recent upsurge in
'cancel culture,' few campaigns have brought a company to its knees as fast as Saturday's blitz by CNN. Similar campaigns have
been mounted against Fox News'
Tucker
Carlson
– with an advertiser boycott and attempts by journalists to doxx his family among the most recent moves, but Carlson
remains on the air and unapologetic.
For Bolling and his
colleagues at Sinclair on the other hand, it's back to the studio to reshoot their offending segment at CNN's behest.
Not a chance. Too many people's livelihood depends on war. From billionaires to the person
who putting bullets in boxes. Anyone who advocate no war will end up in prison for colluding
with the Russians.
monty42 , 16 hours ago
Colluding with the Reds, Terrorists, Chicoms, Covid...pick an enemy. That's how it works.
They roll out their psyops and make sure to inform you up front that those who question the
narrative are in the enemy column.
uhland62 , 14 hours ago
They've done it with us since 1970.
A_Huxley , 15 hours ago
Contractors like their world travel and over time.
Too many US camps, forts, bases around the world to keep working.
quanttech , 13 hours ago
The single most powerful voice against the wars in the last two years has been Tucker
Carlson - and look at what they're doing to him.
optimator , 8 hours ago
A vibrant economy can't tell the difference between manufacturing a submarine or a
refrigerator.
monty42 , 16 hours ago
Honor your oath and the wars for empire will stop. A standing army is only viable through
the Constitution for a short term defense of the States, not for endless wars of aggression
and invasion for the spread of a military empire.
quanttech , 13 hours ago
Correct. Lt. Ehren Watada refused his illegal orders to deploy to Iraq. His case was
dismissed, and he was simply discharged. Today he co-owns a restaurant in Vegas.
THERE'S LITERALLY NO PENALTY FOR FOLLOWING THE LAW.
alexcojones , 16 hours ago
As an old veteran, I've spent 50 years atoning some how, some way, myself.
"Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien wrote: "There should be a law . . . If you support a war, if
you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on
the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the
blood." As every old veteran knows, the day that happens is the day warfare ends forever,
when bullets are fattening rather than fatal to your health.
Heinlein's proposal in Starship Troopers - that only combat troops be given the franchise
to vote - is a concept with merit
ConanTheContrarian1 , 8 hours ago
I don't know that we have to make atonement. The official government position that we were
invited there to help the legitimate government of South VietNam still holds water. The
Nguyen and Tranh had been at war with each other for centuries until the French took over,
and the war was simply a continuation that the Dogpile Democrats of the day didn't see as
anything other than a way to make money. Just because you reject rightwing propaganda, don't
fall for the leftwing either.
Atlana99 , 16 hours ago
We need thousands of hardcore street activists to print these fliers out and place them on
car windshields all across America:
By Graham Dockery, Irish journalist, commentator, and writer at RT. Previously based in
Amsterdam, he wrote for DutchNews and a scatter of local and national newspapers.
Dark, incisive, and anti-authoritarian, George Carlin was a rebel until death. Now the woke
left have claimed him as their own, a figurehead in their anti-Trump crusade. But George's
legacy isn't one of feelgood social justice.
"They call it the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it,"
Carlin sneered in a famous 2005 monologue. In a devastating broadside against politicians, the
media, corporate interests, and the "dumb ass motherf**kers" who remain ignorant to the
"big red white and blue d**k jammed up their a**holes everyday," Carlin takes no
prisoners, and the crowd delights in his shredding of the status quo.
Now, a group of activists based in Portland have repackaged the famous monologue, putting it
alongside video clips of President Donald Trump's America: race riots, coronavirus deaths, and
of course, Trump shaking hands with Vladimir Putin. "#AmericaWakeUp," reads a caption at
the end of the clip.
Released on Sunday, the video was cheered by the anti-Trump brigade. "This video is
completely devastating for Trump," one activist wrote . "George Carlin
gives him the finger from the grave." More commenters shared the video, encouraging their followers
to vote Democrat in November.
However, Carlin's hatred for politicians and the elite was not just limited to the
Republican Party. Throughout his career, Carlin ripped on the "criminal" administration
of Ronald Reagan, both Bushes' fondness for "bombing brown people," and Bill Clinton,
who he said "might be full of shit, but at least he lets you know it."
The "big club" Carlin talked about in the latest video included Democrat and
Republican lawmakers, and Carlin didn't shy away from skewering both.
Furthermore, Carlin's best and most loved routines were written and performed when the right
held more cultural sway in the US. From Nancy Reagan's moralizing to the media-enforced
patriotism of the post-9/11 years, Carlin could count on the right as a reliable target. Times
have changed though, and the left holds far more power now than it did two decades ago.
Conservatives are regularly 'deplatformed' on college campuses, politically incorrect speech
can jeopardize one's career, and the consensus enforced by the mainstream media is
overwhelmingly a liberal one, no matter how many clips of Fox News' Tucker Carlson the Portland
activists can splice into their video.
"Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance," Carlin wrote in
2004, adding "political correctness is just fascism pretending to be manners." In an
autobiography published a year after his death in 2008, he was even more explicit.
"The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain
issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with," he wrote. "Here they
were, banding together in packs, so I could predict what they were going to say about some
event or conflict and it wasn't even out of their mouths yet Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant
to me as conservative orthodoxy."
Carlin is unfortunately not alive to offer his opinion on the times we live in. However,
it's not difficult to imagine him scoffing at the media's non-stop 'Russiagate' hysteria , just as
he scoffed at the media's coverage of the Gulf War in the 1990s, accusing the press of working
as an "unofficial public relations agency for the United States government." It's also
easy to picture him tuning out of the 'Orange Man Bad' liberal consensus on Trump, even if he
would probably savage his policies and personality.
That's assuming he would even have a stage in the first place. After all, Carlin delighted
in provoking the would-be speech police, with his 1970s '7 Dirty Words' routine aimed explicitly at angering the
censors. An updated version of this routine could well see him canceled by the woke
torchbearers of the social justice movement.
If you allow a foreigner to give advice (although I should mind my own business) this is
one proposal to save America. President Trump goes to the Republican Convention and says: "I
admit that I am problematic, we all know that it is unfair, but we had four years of lies and
derangement, and it was not my fault, but anyway I don't accept the nomination, I step back
and I propose as candidate Tucker Carlson. Please give him a standing ovation". Then have a
live TV debate between Carlson and Biden.
You know, of course, that Carlson is just as compromised, more probably, as Trump or Obama
or Biden or you name it, don't you? And just as blackmailable and just as bribable?
According to the
newspaper, officials from US Department of State, the Treasury Department, as well as the Department of Energy
approached European contractors to make sure they fully understand the consequences of staying in the project. Up to a dozen
officials reportedly held at least two online conferences with representatives of the firms in recent days.
Speaking in a
"friendly"
manner, the US side stressed that it wanted to prevent
completion of Nord Stream 2, observers of the online talks said.
"I believe the threat
is very, very serious,"
one of them revealed to the German outlet.
Those threats are
consistent with comments by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week, in which he warned that companies involved in the
project had better
"get out now"
or risk facing penalties under Section 232 of the
notorious Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).
Apart from Russia's energy
major Gazprom, which is developing the project, five European companies have joined. Those are France's Engie, Austria's OMV,
the UK-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell, as well as Wintershall and Germany's Uniper.
Speaking to Welt am
Sonntag, the latter called US attempts to undermine the
"important infrastructure
project"
a clear intervention into European sovereignty.
Earlier this week, the US
House of Representatives approved an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, meant to expand US sanctions on
companies involved in installing Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. According to one of the sponsors of the bill, the
measures can target companies facilitating or providing vessels, insurance, port facilities, or tethering services for those
vessels, as well as to those providing certification for Nord Stream 2.
Both European businesses
and government officials have repeatedly decried US attempts to meddle in European energy policy by sanctioning Nord Stream 2,
with some even calling on Brussels to work on countermeasures.
Moscow has also lambasted
Washington's move, calling it unfair competition. Earlier this week, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia
will develop a new strategy for completion of the project if Washington proceeds with new punitive measures.
Perhaps the best way to
describe Tucker Carlson's career at the moment is with a borrowed quote from 'A Tale of Two Cities': "
It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...
" Although
the Fox News personality is at the top of his game, never before has his career looked more precarious than right now.
Last month, as the Covid
pandemic was sweeping the country, and the streets were exploding amid 'peaceful' Black Lives Matter protests, 'Tucker Carlson
Tonight' was the highest-rated cable news show in the country. That special honor, however, was marred by scandal and, some
would argue, the fake outrage and hyper-sensitivities of social justice warriors.
Carlson attracted the
wrath of his detractors for daring to say that the rioting and looting that broke out during the BLM protests was "
definitely
not about black lives.
" He went on to argue that it was critical to tell the truth when confronted by "the mob,"
otherwise "
they will crush you.
"
Regardless of what one may
think of those comments – and for the record, many black people agreed with him – the point is that Carlson's remarks deviated
180 degrees from the position of the mainstream media and the establishment. As punishment for merely expressing his
constitutionally protected opinion, shared by millions of other Americans, many of Carlson's corporate sponsors resorted to
what could be called institutional
censorship
,
pulling their crucial advertising from his show.
Yet who will freeze
funding of the establishment and 'legacy media' for downplaying the severity of the BLM and Antifa violence to such a degree
that the takeover of six blocks in Seattle was described by the Democratic mayor of that once-fair city as just another
chapter in the "
summer of love
?" Funny, that harmless love-in – which has spread
like wildfire to Portland, Oregon – has evoked so much illicit passion that it has forced Trump to send in federal forces to
quell the orgy of wanton naughtiness. Eat your heart out, Woodstock!
In another rebellious act of dissenting (ie. unacceptable) journalism, Carlson
laid
out
the Democratic Party's devious plan for getting their feeble-minded presidential nominee, Joe Biden, into the White
House: keep the American people in a state of pain and suffering for as long as humanly possible because "
unhappy
people want change.
"
"
Every
ominous headline about the state of the country makes it more likely that Donald Trump will lose his job
," Carlson told
his estimated four million viewers. "
The Democrats have a strong incentive, therefore,
to inflict as much pain as they can, and that's what they're doing
."
He then went on to explain
how Democratic governors ratcheted up the unhappiness by "
banning citizens from visiting
their own weekend homes,
" for example, while in New Jersey people were "
arrested
for going to the beach.
"
Needless to say, those are
not talking points one would ever hear on CNN or MSNBC. Indeed, Tucker Carlson is a one-man information wrecking crew
challenging, night after night, the combined efforts of the mainstream media to keep the average American viewer strapped into
a form-fitting straitjacket of 'acceptable opinion'. Billions of dollars have been spent purchasing that outfit, and the
owners will not relinquish control without a major fight, which usually happens behind the scenes.
Therefore, was it any
coincidence that, smack in the middle of Carlson's record-smashing ratings, with the US presidential elections quickly
approaching (in case it wasn't clear by now, Carlson is a serious Trump supporter), his top writer Blake Neff was forced to
resign after it was revealed he had a habit of posting racist and sexist remarks pseudonymously in online chat rooms? Any
guesses as to the name of the outfit that undertook that impressive bit of investigative journalism at such a convenient time
to bust Neff? If you guessed
CNN
,
you already understand the situation that Carlson is facing.
While being popular isn't
necessarily a bad thing – especially for the talk show circuit, where ratings are watched like the stock market – it can
become extremely problematic in the United States, where the mainstream media is so far left its capital could be San
Francisco. In fact, just this week, Carlson told his viewers that the New York Times was planning to reveal his address in an
article.
Although the Times denied they had plans to reveal such information, the fact that such accusations are flying between major
news organizations speaks to the level of hostility and mistrust now rampant across the country.
Tucker Carlson is caught
in a Catch-22 where the public, as well as his myriad competitors and enemies, have become just as interested in his life as
the stories he covers night after night. This popularity shines a powerful light on his controversial topics, which, in the
most consequential presidential election to come along in many years, explains why he is so loathed. Perhaps it is time for
Tucker Carlson to get out of the media business while he still can, and try his hand at politics, as many of his ardent
supporters have suggested. Who knows, he might even make an outstanding vice president.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
When I heard about this, I began to pray for Tucker and his family's safety and protection. This hit me hard and
actually broke my heart. I will continue to intercede for this family and pray God keeps an open door for his (and
everyone's) freedom of speech.
Well said Tucker. It's a shame that "professionals" don't tend to own accountability for their actions. It's
un-American for them to do that to your family.
Tucker, I have never commented on any show ever and I'm almost 70 years old. But I am ashamed of my country and
astounded by how the law allows this kind of behavior to happen. You're good people, and your reporting is very
important and excellent. I will be praying for your family for protection. And for someway for retribution. God bless
you.
If not this also about conformism? Social desirability == conformism.
Notable quotes:
"... Mark Twain is credited with introducing into the American vernacular the phrase, "Lies, damned lies and statistics." One of the pervasive damned lies people take for granted is the results of political polls, especially in the Trump era. Most polls show him behind several of the myriad candidates vying to represent Democrats in the 2020 election. But the American Association for Public Opinion Research confirms that "national polls in 2016 tended to under-estimate Trump's support significantly more than Clinton's." ..."
"... Social desirability is a concept first advanced by psychologist Allen L. Edwards in 1953. It advances the idea that when asked about an issue in a social setting, people will always answer in a socially desirable manner whether or not they really believe it. Political polling, whether by telephone or online, is a social setting. Respondents know that there is an audience who are posing the questions and monitoring their response. As a result, despite a respondent's true belief, many will answer polling questions in what may appear to be a more socially desirable way, or not answer at all. ..."
Many conservatives are concerned about polling results regarding conservative issues,
especially about President Trump. For example, the latest CNN poll
found that 51% of voters believe the president should be impeached. How much credence should
conservatives give these polls?
Mark Twain is credited with introducing into the American vernacular the phrase, "Lies,
damned lies and statistics." One of the pervasive damned lies people take for granted is the
results of political polls, especially in the Trump era. Most polls show him behind several of
the myriad candidates vying to represent Democrats in the 2020 election. But the American
Association for Public Opinion Research
confirms that "national polls in 2016 tended to under-estimate Trump's support
significantly more than Clinton's."
We are inundated with the latest polling on President Trump's approval rating and how people
are likely to vote in the 2020 election. Both bode poorly for the president, but he doesn't
believe them and neither should we. As an academic, I ran a research center that conducted
local, state-wide and national public opinion polls and took a year's leave of absence from my
university to work for Lou Harris, founder of the Harris Poll.
Social Desirability
The reason why we shouldn't believe most of the current or future polling results about
President Trump can be summarized in two words: Social Desirability.
Social desirability is a concept first advanced by psychologist Allen L. Edwards in 1953. It
advances the idea that when asked about an issue in a social setting, people will always answer
in a socially desirable manner whether or not they really believe it. Political polling,
whether by telephone or online, is a social setting. Respondents know that there is an audience
who are posing the questions and monitoring their response. As a result, despite a respondent's
true belief, many will answer polling questions in what may appear to be a more socially
desirable way, or not answer at all.
When it comes to President Trump, the mainstream media and academics have led us to believe
that it is not socially desirable (or politically correct) to support him. When up against such
sizable odds, most conservatives will do one of three things:
1) Say we support someone else when we really support the president (lie);
2) tell the truth despite the social undesirability of that response;
3) Not participate in the poll (nonresponse bias).
This situation has several real consequences for Trump polling. First, for those in the
initial voter sample unwilling to participate, the pollster must replace them with people
willing to take the poll. Assuming this segment is made up largely of pro-Trump supporters,
finding representative replacements can be expensive, time-consuming and doing so increases the
sampling error rate (SER) while decreasing the validity of the poll. Sampling error rate is the
gold standard statistic in polling. It means that the results of a particular poll will vary by
no more than + x% than if the entire voter population was surveyed. All else being equal, a
poll with a sampling error rate of + 2% is more believable than one of + 4% because it has a
larger sample. Immediate polling on issues like President Trump's impeachment may provide
support to journalists with a point of view to broadcast, but with a small sample and high
sampling error rates, the results aren't worthy of one's time and consideration.
Some political pollsters often get around the necessity of repeated sampling over the course
of an election by forming a panel of people who match the demographics (party affiliation, age,
gender, race, location, etc.) of registered voting public. Polling companies often compensate
panel members and use them across the entire election cycle. Such panels are still subject to
the effects of social desirability and initial substitution error.
Interpretive Bias
Another factor to consider is the institution that is conducting the poll and those
reporting the data. Their progressive sensibilities are thumbing the scale of truth. In my
experience, polls conducted by media companies are less credible since they are often guilty of
the same biases seen in their news reports. The perfect example of this is The New York Times's
"
Poll Watch ," which provides a weekly review of their political poll. My experience is that
it reflects strongly the Times's negative opinions about President Trump and conservative ideas
and the paper's heavy political bias.
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Even the Harris Poll, when Lou was alive, suffered somewhat from this bias. Lou Harris was
the first person to conduct serious political polling on a national level and is credited with
giving John Kennedy the competitive advantage over Richard Nixon in the 1960 election. He made
political polling de require for future elections. While many people point to Nixon's twelve
o'clock shadow during the televised debate, Harris gave Kennedy the real competitive advantage
-- a more complete grasp of what issues voters thought were most important and how to tailor
his policy pitches toward that end.
I worked for Lou between 1999-2000. During the election season we would get the daily tab
read-outs. While the results were pristine, Lou would interpret those numbers on NPR and in
other media in a way that showed his clear Democrat bias. His wishful thinking that Al Gore
would beat George W. Bush would color his interpretation of what the numbers meant. In the end,
by a razon thin margin, Bush took the White House and Gore was relegated to inconvenient
environmental truths. Similarly, the 2016 election saw Trump beat favorite Hillary Clinton by a
significant electoral margin, despite
the vast majority of polls giving Mrs. Clinton the edge by between 3-5%.
Where We Go
from Here
Public opinion polling is generally not junk science although with some companies it can be.
Companies like Gallup and Pew consistently do a good job of chronicling political opinion in
America. At issue is the fact that these polling stalwarts don't work for media companies and
use large national samples from current voter rolls; they also tend to not put their thumbs on
the interpretation of data. President Trump is a president unlike any other and most of his
supporters don't participate in political polls. Even Trump's
own pollsters were surprised by his 2016 win. We would do well during these fractured times
to ignore political opinion polls for they will continue to be much to do about nothing.
Just be sure to vote your conscience and that is nobody's opinion but your own.
AntiSocial , 5 hours ago
The polls are skewed, intentionally by the pollsters and unintentionally by anyone with
the common sense not to identify as a Trump supporter.
Would you tell the Nazi Party questioner you were anti - Nazi? How do you feel about Josef
Stalin might be the last question someone would ever answer. Trump people have an
overwhelmingly justified reason to keep it to themselves. Especially in the age of digital
record keeping, and Neo fascism on the Left.
Trump vs: a man whose brain is dying should be a landslide, and could be. BUT the
democrats have succeeded in making the entire population sick to death of hearing about Trump
Is The Devil.
People en masse are not very intelligent and generally do what everyone else is doing,
whatever it is. This time they may know instinctively that the Biden regime will be American
history's biggest failure but they just don't want to hear about Trump anymore, or Covid, or
BLM, and will vote for Biden making just hoping to make it all go away. After that they will
find that when you make mistakes on purpose you usually get what you deserve.
Hawkenschpitt , 6 hours ago
There is another bias besides the article's "interpretive bias." I call it "assumption
bias."
I am one of those whom Pew samples on a regular basis, and across a wide range of issues.
In responding to their queries, I have in the back of my mind how I perceive my responses are
going to show up in the aggregations and the public reporting. It certainly is a
consideration when the survey question is double-edged. For example, given a series of
questions surrounding my perceptions of "climate change" overlooks the wide variance of what
is exactly meant by climate change: are the questions related to the natural dynamism of the
earth's climate, or are they surrogates for Anthropogenic Global Warming? Their questions
assume an agreed-upon definition, and my responses will vary, depending upon what I perceive
to be the underlying basis to the series of questions. This introduces a bias in my
responses.
A recent poll had a series of questions about my activities during these coronavirus
lock-downs: e.g. how does the lock-down affect various of my activities (charitable
donations, volunteer services, neighborly assistance)? Do I do more? Less? About the same?
The wording of the questions shows that they had made an underlying, but false, assumption
that the coronavirus affects my actions.
At the end of every Pew survey, they ask whether I perceived bias in the questions; they
also allow comments on the survey. I take them to task when I encounter these kind of things.
I can only hope that they take my remarks under consideration for their next efforts.
Homer E. Rectus , 6 hours ago
This article spends most of its words trying to convince us that polls are junk science
and then says Pew and Gallup are not. How are they not also junk if they fail to get truthful
answers?
isocratic , 6 hours ago
You have to be really special to trust polls after 2016.
Im4truth4all , 9 hours ago
Polls are just another example of the propaganda...
DrBrown314 , 10 hours ago
Public polls have been rubbish for decades. They average a 0.9% response rate. That is not
a random sample folks. If only 1 person in 100 will agree to take a poll you have a self
selecting sample. Pure garbage. The pollsters have resorted to using "invitation" polling on
the internet and claim this is a probability sample. It is not. It too is rubbish. But you
already knew that because of what the polls said in 2016 and what actually happened. qed.
Alice-the-dog , 10 hours ago
Not to mention that I'm sure there are many like me, who has lied profusely in answer to
every polling call I've gotten ever since I became eligible to vote in 1972. In fact, I
strongly suspect that Trump voters are the most likely demographic to do so.
The Herdsman , 11 hours ago
Bottom line; the polls are fake. We already saw this movie in 2016, we know how it ends.
Back in 2016 you might be fooled by the polls but we already know empirically that they are
rigged. We literally saw it all with our own eyes.... never let anyone talk you out of what
you saw.
Ex-Oligarch , 11 hours ago
This article gives way too much credit to the pollsters.
Polls are constructed to produce a desired result. The respondents selected and the
questions asked are designed to produce that result.
If they do not produce that result, the data can be altered. No one polices this sort of
manipulation, formally or informally.
Adding spin to the result when it is "interpreted" is only the last step. The narrative
promoted in this article that pollsters are honest social scientists carried away by
unconscious biases is a crock.
We have seen articles blaming the respondents for the failures of pollsters over and over
again. This narrative that Trump voters are ashamed of supporting him and so lie to the
pollsters is just more spin designed to make republicans look insincere, amoral and
devious.
Hook-Nosed Swede , 12 hours ago
Mark Twain was quoting Benjamin Disraeli and admitted he wasn't sure the PM actually ever
used that phrase. Incidentally, Twain threw his Confederate uniform away and headed West in
the middle of America's Civil War. I don't see support for Jefferson Davis or Abraham Lincoln
there.
whatisthat , 12 hours ago
I would observe every intelligent and experienced person knows that political based
polling data is suspect to corruption and used as propaganda...
hootowl , 13 hours ago
Political and media polls are used to persuade people to vote for the demonunists by
purposely exaggerating the numbers of demonunists in their polling samples to deceive the
public in order to try to swing the vote to the demonunists and/or to dissuqade conservatives
into believing it is futile to vote because the demonunists are too numerous to overcome.
Ignore the political polls because they are largely conducted by paid liars, manipulators,
and propagandists. The 2020 presidential election is easy to assess. Do you want to elect a
senile, old , treasonous, crook and his family into the WH; or a man, who may, at times make
you a little upset with his abrasive rhetoric, but can be trusted to do what he thinks is
best for his fellow Americans, while he is continuously beset by the worst political cadre of
communists, demonunists, lying MSM/academia, and anti-American deep state crooks in the
history of our great republic.
Gold Banit , 13 hours ago
This is the end for the corrupt racist DemoRat party.
The DemoRats and their fake news media are in a panic and are very desperate and this is
why they are promoting this rioting looting destroying and burning cause their internal
polling has Trump wining 48 states in a landslide....
Over
the past 10 years, several main theses of the agenda of globalism in its new form have been
formed. This is not an official doctrine, but rather a marker of the definition of "friend-foe"
for an ideology sometimes called "GloboHomo". It stands for "globalized, homogenous", not what
you thought. If you do not like this term, it is possible to use a more euphonious expression
of "Fucking Scum". So, among the most important components are the following:
"Global warming", often replaced by "climate change" in cases where it is associated
with abnormal cold or flooding. This can only be discussed in disastrous terms. Humanity
faces a terrible future if we do not drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the near
future, do not invest trillions of subsidies in "green energy", and do not reduce the
consumption of animal proteins and industrial goods. Any deviation from the genral line -
that the rate of warming may be significantly less than stated, that there may be important
factors other than anthropogenic contributing to climate change, or that funds may be more
effectively invested in coping with the effects of warming rather than preventing it-is
anti-scientific heresy, and should be subject to maximum censorship.
LGBT Rights, maximum gender fluidity. "Tolerance" in the true meaning of this word
is no longer sufficient, and a neutral attitude towards LGBT people is equated with hidden
homophobia and "transphobia". LGBT people only need to be touched and admired, you can not
criticize any aspects of the LGBT lifestyle. Any psychological or social problems specific to
the LGBT community should be explained by homophobia and transphobia on the part of the rest
of society, but not by internal problems of the LGBT community itself.
Refugees and freedom of immigration from poor countries . Rich and
middle-developed countries should not prevent formally illegal migration from underdeveloped
countries. Purely economic migration should be defined as much as possible through political,
religious or national persecution. The own poor (if they are not special minorities) should
not have an advantage over migrants in obtaining social benefits. Middle-class taxpayers are
required to fork out substantial subsidies to migrants, often allowing them to stay out of
work most of the time or even for life. National or racial profiling or the collection of
statistics that may indicate increased problems with crime, dependency or family violence in
a migrant environment should not be encouraged. The desire to preserve the traditional
national culture and national composition must be equated with racism or even fascism.
Migrants should not be forced to integrate quickly into the local culture.
These are General trends, and individual stormy movements like " Me Too "and" Black Lives
Matter " fit into them.
This agenda, with a pronounced left-wing bias, is relatively recent, about 10 years old. The
above theses have existed much longer, but until recently they were not the main mainstream
markers of globalism. And 20 years ago, the globalist agenda was radically different. From
about the early 80's to the mid-noughties, this agenda consisted of theses more generally known
as the"Washington Consensus". It contains about 10 theses, but we can briefly distinguish three
main topics:
Privatization, maximum withdrawal of the state from the economy. Everything
state-owned is inefficient, only an "effective private owner" can make the right economic
decisions.
Reducing social spending. Only "individual responsibility" allows full
disclosure of human potential, state assistance is ineffective and breeds dependency.
Financialization , maximum development of financial markets. Capital markets are the
main or even the only judges of all economic and political decisions. They need to be cajoled
as much as possible as ancient deities, including sacrificing a large part of the population
that "did not fit" into these markets.
This is a very different, clearly right-wing agenda. The
"Washington Consensus" is almost forgotten now. Its collapse actually occurred at the turn of
the 90s and the nineties , in particular after the Russian default of 1998, and especially
after Russia, instead of a complete collapse, experienced rapid growth according to recipes
very different from the "Washington Consensus" of the 90s.
In 2001, in Argentina, which was
considered an "exemplary student" of the "Washington Consensus", an even larger default and
collapse than in Russia (and according to a scenario close to the Russian one), and the
subsequent recovery from the crisis also occurred according to very different recipes. The
"left turn", with the abandonment of the VC in the early nineties occurred almost throughout
Latin America.
After the financial crisis of 1997-8, many Asian countries also changed their
policy towards leaving the VC. Soon, even under the Republican administration of George W.
Bush, protectionist tendencies and rejection of the liberal prescription of the 80-90's
intensified in the United States itself.
Despite radical differences, these groups of three theses have a common goal-to undermine
and dilute the industrial society of Modernism, which reached its highest point around the
1960s and 70s, and to try to create a postmodern society based on the models of globalists.
The
direction of attack changed radically-first to the right, then to the left.
You can explain
these trends by a conspiracy of globalists, but the main reasons are the internal
socio-economic cycles of Western society - what I call the transition from the " bourgeois
"phase to the" Bohemian "(and then "bandit"). But I will write about this separately.
"... In addition to the key international financial institutions, WB and IMF, there are the so-called regional development banks and similar financial institutions, keeping the countries of their respective regions in check. ..."
Imagine, you are living in a world that you are told is a democracy – and you may even
believe it – but in fact your life and fate is in the hands of a few ultra-rich,
ultra-powerful and ultra-inhuman oligarchs. They may be called Deep State, or simply the Beast,
or anything else obscure or untraceable – it doesn't matter. They are less than the
0.0001%.
For lack of a better expression, let's call them for now "obscure individuals".
These obscure individuals who pretend running our world have never been elected . We don't
need to name them. You will figure out who they are, and why they are famous, and some of them
totally invisible. They have created structures, or organisms without any legal format. They
are fully out of international legality. They are a forefront for the Beast. Maybe there are
several competing Beasts. But they have the same objective: A New or One World Order (NWO, or
OWO).
These obscure individuals are running, for example, The World Economic Forum (WEF –
representing Big Industry, Big Finance and Big Fame), the Group of 7 – G7, the Group of
20 – G20 (the leaders of the economically" strongest" nations). There are also some
lesser entities, called the Bilderberg Society, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Chatham
House and more.
The members of all of them are overlapping. Even this expanded forefront combined represents
less than 0.001%. They all have superimposed themselves over sovereign national elected and
constitutional governments, and over THE multinational world body, the United Nations, the
UN.
In fact, they have coopted the UN to do their bidding. UN Director Generals, as well as the
DGs of the multiple UN-suborganizations, are chosen mostly by the US, with the consenting nod
of their European vassals – according to the candidate's political and psychological
profile. If his or her 'performance' as head of the UN or head of one of the UN
suborganizations fails, his or her days are counted. Coopted or created by the Beast(s) are
also, the European Union, the Bretton Woods Organizations, World Bank and IMF, as well as the
World Trade Organization (WTO) – and – make no mistake – the International
Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It has no teeth. Just to make sure the law is always on the
side of the lawless.
In addition to the key international financial institutions, WB and IMF, there are the
so-called regional development banks and similar financial institutions, keeping the countries
of their respective regions in check.
In the end its financial or debt-economy that controls everything. Western neoliberal
banditry has created a system, where political disobedience can be punished by economic
oppression or outright theft of national assets in international territories. The system's
common denominator is the (still) omnipresent US-dollar.
"Unelected Individuals"
The supremacy of these obscure unelected individuals becomes ever more exposed. We, the
People consider it "normal" that they call the shots, not what we call – or once were
proud of calling, our sovereign nations and sovereignly elected governments. They have become a
herd of obedient sheep. The Beast has gradually and quietly taken over. We haven't noticed.
It's the salami tactic: You cut off slice by tiny slice and when the salami is gone, you
realize that you have nothing left, that your freedom, your civil and human rights are gone. By
then it's too late. Case in point is the US Patriot Act. It was prepared way before 9/11. Once
9/11 "happened", the Patriot Legislation was whizzed through Congress in no time – for
the people's future protection – people called for it for fear – and – bingo,
the Patriot Act took about 90% of the American population's freedom and civil rights away. For
good.
We have become enslaved to the Beast. The Beast calls the shots on boom or bust of our
economies, on who should be shackled by debt, when and where a pandemic should break out, and
on the conditions of surviving the pandemic, for example, social confinement. And to top it all
off – the instruments the Beast uses, very cleverly, are a tiny-tiny invisible enemy,
called a virus, and a huge but also invisible monster, called FEAR. That keeps us off the
street, off reunions with our friends, and off our social entertainment, theatre, sports, or a
picnic in the park.
Soon the Beast will decide who will live and who will die, literally – if we let it.
This may be not far away. Another wave of pandemic and people may beg, yell and scream for a
vaccine, for their death knell, and for the super bonanza of Big Pharma – and towards the
objectives of the eugenicists blatantly roaming the world – see this . There
is still time to collectively say NO. Collectively and solidarily.
Take the latest case of blatant imposture. Conveniently, after the first wave of Covid-19
had passed, at least in the Global North, where the major world decisions are made, in early
June 2020, the unelected WEF Chairman, Klaus Schwab , announced "The Great Reset". Taking
advantage of the economic collapse – the crisis shock, as in "The Shock Doctrine" –
Mr. Schwab, one of the Beast's frontrunners, announces openly what the WEF will discuss and
decide for the world-to-come in their next Davos Forum in January 2021. For more details see
this
.
Will, We, The People, accept the agenda of the unelected WEF?
It will opportunely focus on the protection of what's left of Mother Earth; obviously at the
center will be man-made CO2-based "Global Warming". The instrument for that protection of
nature and humankind will be the UN Agenda 2030 – which equals the UN Sustainable
Development Goals (SDG). It will focus on how to rebuild the willfully destroyed global
economy, while respecting the ("green") principles of the 17 SDGs.
Mind you, it's all connected. There are no coincidences. The infamous Agenda 2021 which
coincides with and complements the so-called (UN) Agenda 2030, will be duly inaugurated by the
WEF's official declaration of The Great Reset, in January 2021. Similarly, the implementation
of the agenda of The Great Reset began in January 2020, by the launch of the corona pandemic
– planned for decades with the latest visible events being the 2010 Rockefeller Report
with its "Lockstep Scenario" , and Event 201, of 18 October in NYC which computer-simulated a
corona pandemic, leaving within 18 months 65 million deaths and an economy in ruin, programmed
just a few weeks before the launch of the actual corona pandemic. See COVID-19, We Are Now Living the
"Lock Step Scenario" and
this and this .
The Race
Riots
The racial riots, initiated by the movement Black Lives Matter (funded by the Ford
Foundation and Soros' Open Society Foundation), following the brutal assassination of the
Afro-American George Floyd by a gang of Minneapolis police, and spreading like brush-fire in no
time to more than 160 cities, first in the US, then in Europe – are not only connected to
the Beast's agenda, but they were a convenient deviation from the human catastrophe left behind
by Covid-19. See also this .
The Beast's nefarious plan to implement what's really behind the UN Agenda 2030 is the
little heard-of Agenda ID2020 . See The
Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is "Agenda ID2020" . It has been created and
funded by the vaccination guru Bill Gates, and so has GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and
Immunizations), the association of Big Pharma – involved in creating the corona vaccines,
and which funds along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) a major proportion of
WHO's budget.
Following the official path of the UN Agenda 2030 of achieving the SDGs, the 'implementing'
Agenda ID2020 – which is currently being tested on school children in Bangladesh –
will provide digitized IDs possibly in the form of nano-chips implanted along with compulsory
vaccination programs, will promote digitization of money and the rolling out of 5G –
which would be needed to upload and monitor personal data on the nano chips and to control the
populace. Agenda ID2020 will most likely also include 'programs' – through vaccination?
– of significantly reducing world population. Eugenics is an important component in the
control of future world population under a NOW / OWO – see also Georgia Guidestones ,
mysteriously built in 1980.
The ruling elite used the lockdown as an instrument to carry out this agenda. Its
implementation would naturally face massive protests, organized and funded along the same lines
as were the BLM protests and demonstrations. They may not be peaceful – and may not be
planned as being peaceful. Because to control the population in the US and in Europe, where
most of the civil unrest would be expected, a total militarization of the people is required.
This is well under preparation.
In his essay "The Big Plantation" , John
Steppling reports from a NYT article that a
"minimum of 93,763 machine guns, 180,718 magazine cartridges, hundreds of silencers and an
unknown number of grenade launchers have been provided to state and local police departments
in the US since 2006. This is in addition to at least 533 planes and helicopters, and 432
MRAPs -- 9-foot high, 30-ton Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles with gun
turrets and more than 44,900 pieces of night vision equipment, regularly used in nighttime
raids in Afghanistan and Iraq."
He adds that this militarization is part of a broader trend. Since the late 1990s, about 89
percent of police departments in the United States serving populations of 50,000 people or more
had a PPU (Police Paramilitary Unit), almost double of what existed in the mid-1980s. He refers
to these militarized police as the new Gestapo.
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Even before Covid, about 15% to 20% of the population was on or below the poverty line in
the United States. The post-covid lockdown economic annihilation will at least double that
percentage – and commensurately increase the risk for civil turbulence and clashes with
authorities – further enhancing the reasoning for a militarized police
force.
China's Crypto RMB
None of these scenarios will, of course, be presented to the public by the WEF in January
2021. These are decisions taken behind closed doors by the key actors for the Beast. However,
this grandiose plan of the Great Reset does not have to happen. There is at least half the
world population and some of the most powerful countries, economically and militarily –
like China and Russia – opposed to it. "Reset" maybe yes, but not in these western terms.
In fact, a reset of kinds is already happening with China about to roll out a new People's Bank
of China backed blockchain-based cryptocurrency, the crypto RMB, or yuan . This is not only a
hard currency based on a solid economy, it is also supported by gold.
While President Trump keeps trashing China for unfair trade, for improperly managing the
covid pandemic, for stealing property rights – China bashing no end – that China
depends on the US and that the US will cut trading ties with China – or cut ties
altogether, China is calling Trump's bluff. China is quietly reorienting herself towards the
ASEAN countries plus Japan (yes, Japan!) and South Korea, where trade already today accounts
for about 15% of all China's trade and is expected to double in the next five years.
Despite the lockdown and the disruption of trade, China's overall exports recovered with a
3.2% increase in April (in relation to April 2019). This overall performance in China exports
was nonetheless accompanied by a dramatic decline in US-China trade.
China exports to the US decreased by 7.9% in April (in relation to April 2019).
It is clear that the vast majority of
US industries could not survive without Chinese supply chains. The western dependence on
Chinese medical supplies is particularly strong. Let alone Chinese dependence by US consumers.
In 2019, US total consumption, about 70% of GDP, amounted to $13.3 trillion, of which a fair
amount is directly imported from China or dependent on ingredients from China.
The WEF-masters are confronted with a real dilemma. Their plan depends very much on the
dollar supremacy which would continue to allow dishing out sanctions and confiscating assets
from those countries opposing US rule; a dollar-hegemony which would allow imposing the
components of The Great Reset scheme, as described above.
At present, the dollar is fiat money, debt-money created from thin air. It has no backing
whatsoever. Therefore, its worth as a reserve currency is increasingly decaying, especially
vis-à-vis the new crypto-yuan from China. In order to compete with the Chinese yuan, the
US Government would have to move away from its monetary Ponzi-scheme, by separating itself from
the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and print her own US-economy- and possibly gold-backed (crypto)
money – not fiat FED-money, as is the case today. That would mean cutting the more than
100-year old ties to the Rothschild and Co. clan-owned FED, and creating a real peoples-owned
central bank. Not impossible, but highly improbable. Here, two Beasts might clash, as world
power is at stake.
Meanwhile, China, with her philosophy of endless creation would continue forging ahead
unstoppably with her mammoth socioeconomic development plan of the 21st Century, the Belt and
Road Initiative, connecting and bridging the world with infrastructure for land and maritime
transport, with joint research and industrial projects, cultural exchanges – and not
least, multinational trade with "win-win" characteristics, equality for all partners –
towards a multi-polar world, towards a world with a common future for mankind.
Today already more than 120 countries are associated with BRI – and the field is wide
open for others to join – and to defy, unmask and unplug The Great Reset of the West.
1. Shale bust is here
- Shale wells decline somewhere between 70 and 90 percent from their initial peak within 3
years, with the bulk of that decline coming within the first 12 months.
- As a result, the pause in drilling quickly translates into U.S. oil production declines.
- "We just have no new drilling and these decline curves are going to catch up," Mark Rossano,
founder and chief executive officer of private-equity firm C6 Capital Holdings LLC, told
Bloomberg. "That hits really fast when you're not looking at new production."
- With no drilling at all, U.S. shale oil production would theoretically fall by more than a
third to less than 5 mb/d by the end of the year.
2. Bankruptcies to spike
- Between 2015 and 2019, there were roughly 200 bankruptcies in the North American oil and gas
sector.
- Through April of this year, there have been another 7 bankruptcies, according to Haynes and
Boone, although the value of the debt involved is 2.8 times larger compared to the first
quarter bankruptcies in 2019.
- Around 70 companies are on track for bankruptcy by the end of the year with WTI averaging $30
per barrel, according to Rystad Energy. If WTI remains stuck at $30, that total would rise to
150 to 200 by the end of 2021.
- "In our view, we will need WTI prices of $40 to $45 per barrel to eliminate the upcoming
explosion in the number of financially distressed US E&Ps, https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Shale-Bust-Has-Arrived.html
The MMTers reading your article will take umbrage at your use of finance .
According to MMT, all government spending is financed by creating money. The
problem of where to get the money is a non-problem.
Once the government has spent money into existence, the real problem is how to distribute
the social opportunity cost of the spending, especially if the government has spent money to
allocate real resources away from the production of private goods and services.
MMT makes this distinction precisely because they (we?) want to eliminate the rich as a
veto point for spending. We don't need to get their money in order to spend it, and they
cannot (or we should not let them) essentially restrict spending by obstructing the
government's taxation of their wealth.
If we want to get the money belonging to the rich (and we do!), we want to do so because
we don't want them to have it, for whatever reason.
There's another reason to be explicit about the difference between financing and
distributing opportunity costs. If the rich have a lot of money that is not in circulation
(in the national economy), and the government taxing that money to "pay for" its spending
will do nothing to control inflation or distribute opportunity costs. Removing money that is
not circulating has no effect on prices. It seems theoretically possible to balance the
budget financially but still see price-level inflation.
I haven't done any specific investigation into the GND, but it seems uncontroversial that
it will involve allocating substantial real resources to the creation of a nonpolluting
power, transportation, and agricultural infrastructure. However, the effect on the real
economy and the price level seems uncontroversially complicated. Some of the real resources
will be previously unallocated, and we will simply be transferring demand from
welfare-supported to work-supported, with no effect on the price level. Some of the demand
created will indirectly cause an increase in private production, putting unused industrial
capacity to work; the increase in circulating money will cause a corresponding increase in
real private production, and again have no net effect on the price level. And some of the
real resources will indeed be transferred from private production with no corresponding
offset; taxes, "enforced" borrowing, and other monetary interventions will be needed to keep
price inflation manageable.
I don't know of (and, like Lee A. Arnold above, would very much like to see) a model
showing what effect something like the GND would have on the real economy. Under
normal circumstances, the fiscal impact is a good proxy for the real impact. But
circumstances are far from normal, so think that the fiscal impact is no longer a valuable
proxy for modeling the real impact.
"The ultimate constraint on money creation is inflation. That hasn't been a problem lately
and (as I'll argue in more detail later) the world is in need of a fair bit of inflation,
probably at an annual rate of about 4 per cent for the foreseeable future. It's unclear how
much expansion of the monetary base would generate this outcome, while avoiding the risk of a
resurgence of inflation like that of the 1970s"
I don't agree that this is the problem: IMO the direct cause of [keynesian] inflation is
the wage-price spiral, and not money creation per se (this also implies a problem, which is
that if we want an high level of employment because we want an higer bargaining power for
workers we can't really avoid wage-price spirals and therefore inflation).
Money creation by itself creates wealth, not income, and the kind of economic policies we
had in recent decades caused an increase in the wealth/income ratio (or in other words the
creation of a lot of fictitious capital) more than inflation.
So the real problem of "money creation" today is that it generates financial bubbles, rather
than inflation.
The difference between money printing and government debt, from this point of view, is just
that money is a 0% interest financial asset, whereas bonds bear at least some interest, so
money creation pushes the general interest rate down more than bond creation, but this again
is a consequence of the increase of the wealth/income ratio (since more wealth extracts
profits from the same quantity of income).
"Substantial reductions in private consumption and investment will be needed to make room
for the required public expenditure, and that can only be achieved through a combination of
taxation and debt."
In my view the problem is that taxation is needed to avoid bubbles, and therefore what we
need is to tax income from wealth and wealth itself (in order to push down the wealth/income
ratio).
To put it in more familiar keynesian terms, the problem is that the ex-ante saving rate is
too high, so that currently we need an increase in debt levels (bubbles) to ricycle ex-ante
savings into consumption; we need taxation to push down the ex-ante saving rate.
But, the problem is, is it possible to have a capitalist economy running without economic
crises while the wealth/income ratio goes down (which means that a lot of people see their
relative wealth go down)?
IMO this is really difficult, and also explains the political problem for policieswhose
purpose is to push down the wealth/income ratio, since these policies look like just some way
to be mean against wealth owners, without an immediate economic reason, and when the bubble
pops everyone blames the banks and the financial sector, not the excessively high ex-ante
saving rate, that is instead perceived as a virtue.
Recent quantitative easing of only 2% of GDP doesn't provide much of a bound on how much
can be tolerated without causing too much inflation. Inflation is still up against the zero
lower bound, and it seems plausible that we could get more than a factor of two more money
creation. Which does get us into the green new deal range.
@1 The Green part is (comparatively) easy and low cost. It's the New Deal (free college
tuition, Job Guarantee, single-payer health etc) that will require a bit transfer of
resources.
@6 Transfers of real resources or financial resources? Single-payer requires an expansion
of suppliers in the healthcare sector to meet the uncovered demand, and those suppliers will
be new taxpayers. College learning will be going more on-line, a tendency accelerated by this
pandemic and anticipating the next pandemic, so we need, not many more buildings, but more
professors, but they too will be new taxpayers. The jobs guarantee could be structured to
generate sector expansions, not merely makework. So couldn't all of these eventuate in
expanded sectors, ergo more taxes? Government investment at rock-bottom interest rates?
Only too much is enough, we want to print and spend enough to change expectations.
Currently, the dollar is the reserve currency I think largely for "safe haven" reasons,
i.e. the oligarchs who have all the assets believe the US will be the last place to inflate,
devalue, or elect an expropriating left-wing gov't.
After 40+ years of capital share gains and worker immiseration in terms of real and social
wages and labour solidarity, and assuming we have under President S Kelton control only of
printing and spending but no ability to raise progressive redistributive taxes how much MMT
financed spending will it take to have the average worker believe that her real wages, social
wages, standard of living, opportunities etc will improve relative to capital and the rich
for the next forty years? And have the oligarchs also believe it?
That's how much.
Alan White 07.19.20 at 1:21 am (no link)
John, what say you about US/global military spending, which if cut and reallocated in the
low double digits could transform society? Do you think it's just politically untouchable? If
the US cut its military budget by say 25% it would still be formidable, especially given its
nuclear deterrent. For the life of me I can never understand why military budgets are
sacrosanct. Is it just WW2 and Cold War hangover? Couldn't the obvious effects of climate
change and the fragility of the economy subject to natural threats like the pandemic change
attitudes about overfunding the military (like the debacle of the F-35 program)?
@Tim Worstall: The political poles shifted, but less than you might think. Southern pols
were overwhelmingly opposed, and nearly all of them were D (the entire old Confederacy had
only 11 R Reps and only 1 R Senator). Northern pols, including Dirksen, were overwhelmingly
in favor, and they were split between the two parties. But if you break it down by party
and region, a larger percentage of Ds than Rs voted for the bill within each region.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-of-civil-rights
An interesting example of Simpson's paradox.
I don't know about the Democratic Party, but there was an important shift in the
Republican Party: the thing is, that shift took place in the nineteenth century, not the
twentieth. At the end of the Civil War, the Republican Party really was the party of civil
rights, with champions of equality prominent within it; after the end of the Reconstruction
this ceased to be true. Of course the Republican Party has changed further since then,
because everything changes; but it hasn't changed as rapidly since the late nineteenth
century as it did after the Civil War.
Alan White @13 Military spending is about 3.4 per cent of US GDP, compared to 2 per cent
or less most places. So that's a significant and unproductive use of resources that could be
redirected to better effect. But the income of the top 1 per cent is around 20 per cent of
total income. If that was cut in half, there would be little or no reduction in the
productive services supplied by this group. If you want big change, that's where you need to
look.
I think some of the reluctance to cut military spending in the US is the extent to which
it acts as a politically unassailable source of fiscal stimulus and "welfare" in a country
where such things are otherwise anathema. Well, that and all of the grift it represents for
the donor class.
With tens of millions of Americans out of work, people fleeing cities for rural communities,
others working from home, online shopping flourishing, and the
virus remerging in many states forcing governors to pause or reverse reopenings,
consultancy firm KPMG
International has some bad news for those betting the economy is going to "rocket ship"
recovery as President Trump boasts about at press conferences and on Twitter. The consultancy
firm warns "social-distancing measures" will "dramatically cut the amount of miles Americans
travel by car" (fewer miles driven is terrible news for an economy driven by consumer
spending).
The effects of COVID-19 will be felt for years. The response to the virus has accelerated
powerful behavioral changes that will continue to shape how Americans use automobiles. We
believe the changes in commuting and e-commerce are here to stay and that the combined effect
of reduced commuting and shopping journeys could be as much as 270 billion fewer vehicle
miles traveled (VMT) each year in the US. -KPMG
The Washington Post
Simon Denyer; Akiko Kashiwagi; Min Joo Kim
July 8, 2020
In Japan, a country with a long fascination with robots, automated assistants have offered
their services as bartenders, security guards, deliverymen, and more, since the onset of the
coronavirus pandemic. Japan's Avatarin developed the "newme" robot to allow people to be
present while maintaining social distancing during the pandemic.
The telepresence robot is
essentially a tablet on a wheeled stand with the user's face on the screen, whose location and
direction can be controlled via laptop or tablet. Doctors have used the newme robot to
communicate with patients in a coronavirus ward, while university students in Tokyo used it to
remotely attend a graduation ceremony.
The company is working on prototypes that will allow
users to control the robot through virtual reality headsets, and gloves that would permit users
to lift, touch, and feel objects through a remote robotic hand.
Our website traffic easily broke all records for the month of June, and these high levels
have now continued into July, suggesting that the huge rise produced by the initial wave of
Black Lives Matters protests may be more than temporary. It appears that many new readers first
discovered our alternative webzine at that point, and quite a few have stayed on as regular
visitors.
A longer-term factor that may be strengthening our position is the unprecedented wave of
ideological purges that have swept our country since early June, with prominent figures in the
intellectual and media firmaments being especially hard hit. When opinion-leaders become
fearful of uttering even slightly controversial words, they either grow silent or only mouth
the most saccharine homilies, thereby forcing many of their erstwhile readers to look elsewhere
for more candid discussions. And our own webzine is about as "elsewhere" as one could possibly
get.
Take, for example, the New York Times , more than ever our national newspaper of
record. For the last few years, one of its top figures had been Editorial Page Editor James
Bennet, who had previously run The Atlantic , and he was widely considered a leading
candidate to assume the same position at the Gray Lady after next year's scheduled retirement
of the current top editor. Indeed, with his brother serving as U.S. Senator from Colorado --
and a serious if second-rank presidential candidate -- the Lifestyle section of the
Washington Post had already hailed
the Bennet brothers as the potential saviors of the American establishment.
But then his paper published an op-ed by an influential Republican senator endorsing
President Trump's call for a harsh crackdown on riots and looting, and a Twitter mob of
outraged junior Times staffers organized a revolt. The mission of the NYT Opinion
Pages is obviously to provide a diversity of opinions, but Bennet
was quickly purged .
A similar fate befell the highly-regarded longtime editor of the Philadelphia
Inquirer after his
paper ran a headline considered insufficiently respectful to black rioters . Michigan State
University researchers had raised doubts about the accepted narrative of black deaths at the
hands of police, and physicist Stephen Hsu, the Senior Vice President who had supported their
work,
was forced to resign his administrative position as a consequence.
Numerous other figures of lesser rank have been purged, their careers and livelihoods
destroyed for Tweeting
out a phrase such as "All Lives Matter," whose current classification as "hate speech"
might have stunned even George Orwell. Or perhaps a spouse or other close relative
had denounced the black rioters . The standards of acceptable discourse are changing so
rapidly that positions which were completely innocuous just a few weeks ago have suddenly
become controversial or even forbidden, with punishments sometimes inflicted on a retroactive
basis.
I am hardly alone in viewing this situation with great concern. Just last week, some 150
prominent American writers, academics, and intellectuals published an open
letter in Harpers expressing their grave concern over protecting our freedom of
speech and thought.
Admittedly, the credentials of some of the names on the list
were rather doubtful . After all, David Frum and various hard-core Neocons had themselves
led the effort to purge from the media all critics of Bush's disastrous Iraq War, and more
recently they have continued to do with same with regard to our irrational hostility towards
Putin's Russia. But the principled histories of other signers such as Noam Chomsky partially
compensated for the inclusion of such unpleasant opportunists.
Although the Harpers statement attracted many stars of our liberal firmament,
apparently few people read Harpers these days, with its website traffic being just a
tenth of our own. Therefore, the reaction in the media itself was a much more important factor,
and this seems to have been decidedly mixed. 150 rather obscure activists soon issued a
contrasting statement, which major outlets such as NYT , CNN , and the Los
Angeles Times seem to have accorded equal or greater weight, hardly suggesting that the
ideological tide has started to turn.
Back a couple of years ago, there was a popular joke going around Chinese social media in
which Chairman Mao came back to life with all sorts of questions about the modern world. Among
other things, he was informed his disastrous Cultural Revolution had shifted to America, a
prescient observation given the events of the last few weeks:
The controversial May 25th death of a black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis police
custody soon set off the greatest nationwide wave of protests, riots, and looting in at least
two generations, and the once-placid hometown of the Mary Tyler Moore Show alone suffered some
five hundred million dollars of damage. Some of the main political reactions have been
especially surprising, as the newly elevated activists of the Black Lives Matter movement have
received massive media support for their demands that local urban police departments be
"defunded," a proposal so bizarre that it had previously been almost unknown.
Statues, monuments, and other symbolic representations of traditional American history
quickly became a leading target. Hubert Humphrey's Minneapolis has long been an extremely
liberal bastion of the heavily Scandinavian Upper Midwest, having no ties to the South or
slavery, but Floyd's death soon launched an unprecedented national effort to eradicate all
remaining Confederate memorials and other Southern cultural traces throughout our society.
Popular country music groups such as the Dixie Chicks
and Lady
Antebellum had freely recorded their songs for decades, but they were now suddenly forced
to change their names in frantic haste.
And although this revolutionary purge began with Confederacy, it soon extended to include
much of our entire national history, with illustrious former occupants of the White House being
the most prominent targets. Woodrow Wilson ranked as Princeton University's most famous alumnus
and its former president, but his name
was quickly scraped off the renowned public policy school , while the Natural History
Museum of New York is similarly
removing a statue of Theodore Roosevelt .
Abraham Lincoln and
Ulysses S. Grant had together won the Civil War and abolished black slavery, but their
statues around the country were vandalized or ordered removed. The same fate befell
Andrew Jackson along with the author of the Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem.
The leading heroes of the American Republic from its birth in 1776 face "cancellation" and
this sudden tidal wave of attacks has clearly gained considerable elite backing. The New
York Times carries enormous weight in such circles, and last Tuesday their lead opinion
piece called for the
Jefferson Memorial to be replaced by a towering statue of a black woman, while one of their
regular columnists has repeatedly demanded that all
monuments honoring George Washington suffer a similar fate . Stacy Abrams, often mentioned
as one of Joe Biden's leading Vice Presidential choices, had previously made
the destruction of Georgia's historic Stone Mountain Memorial part of her campaign
platform, so we now seem only a step or two away from credible political demands that Mount
Rushmore be dynamited Taliban-style.
The original roots of our country were Anglo-Saxon and this heritage remained dominant
during its first century or more, but other strands in our national tapestry are suffering
similar vilification. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World for Spain, but he has
became a hated
and despised figure across our country , so perhaps in the near future his only surviving
North American monument will be the huge statue honoring him in the
heart of Mexico City . Father Junipero Serra founded Hispanic California and a few years
ago was canonized as the first and only Latin American saint, but his
statues have been toppled and his name already removed from Stanford University buildings.
At the time we acquired the sparsely-populated American Southwest, the bulk of our new Hispanic
population was concentrated in New Mexico, but the founding father of that region has now had
his monument attacked and vandalized . Cervantes, author of Don Quixote , is
considered the greatest writer in the Spanish language, and his statue was also
vandalized .
Perhaps these trends will abate and the onrushing tide of cultural destruction may begin to
recede. But at present there seems a serious possibility that the overwhelming majority of
America's leading historical figures prior to the political revolution of the 1930s may be
destined for the scrap heap. A decade ago, President Obama and most prominent Democrats opposed
Gay Marriage, but just a few years later, the CEO of Mozilla
was forced to resign when his past political contribution to a California initiative taking
that same position came to light, and today private individuals might easily lose their jobs at
many corporations for expressing such views. Thus, one might easily imagine that within five or
ten years, any public expressions of admiration for Washington or Jefferson might be considered
by many as bordering on "hate speech," and carry severe social and employment consequences. Our
nation seems to be suffering the sort of fate normally inflicted upon a conquered people, whose
new masters seek to break their spirit and stamp out any notions of future resistance.
A good example of this growing climate of fear came a couple of weeks ago when a longtime
blogger going under the name "Scott Alexander"
deleted his entire website and its millions of words of accumulated archives because the
New York Times was about to run an article revealing his true identity. I had only been
slightly aware of the SlateStarCodex
blogsite and the "rationalist" community it had gradually accumulated, but the development
was apparently significant enough to provoke
a long article in the New Yorker .
The target of the alleged witch-hunt was hardly any sort of right-winger. He was reportedly
a liberal Jewish psychiatrist living in Berkeley, whose most notable piece of writing had been
a massive 30,000 word refutation of neo-reactionary thought. But because he was willing to
entertain ideas and contributors outside the tight envelope of the politically-correct canon,
he believed that his life would be destroyed if his name became known.
Conservative commenter Tucker Carlson has recently attracted the highest ratings in cable
history for populist positions, some of which have influenced President Trump. But just a
couple of days ago, his top writer, a certain Blake Neff, was
forced to resign after CNN revealed his years of pseudonymous remarks on a rightwing
forum, even though the most egregious of these seemed no worse than somewhat crude
racially-charged humor.
Our own website attracts thousands of commenters, many of whom have left remarks vastly more
controversial than anything written by Neff let alone Alexander, and these two incidents
naturally
inspired several posts by blogger Steve Sailer , which attracted many hundreds of worried
comments in the resulting threads. Although I could entirely understood that many members of
our community were fearful of being "doxxed" by the media, I explained why I thought the
possibility quite unlikely.
Although it's been a few years since my name last appeared on the front page of the New
York Times , I am still at least a bit of a public figure, and I would say that many of the
articles I have published under my own name have been at least 100 times as "controversial" as
anything written by the unfortunate "Scott Alexander." The regular monthly traffic to our
website is six or seven times as great as that which flowed to SlateStarCodex prior to its
sudden disappearance, and I suspect that our influence has also been far greater. Any serious
journalist who wanted to get in touch with me could certainly do so, and I have been freely
given many interviews in the past, while hundreds of reasonably prominent writers, academics,
and other intellectuals have spent years on my regular distribution list.
Tracking down the identity of an anonymous commenter who once or twice made doubtful remarks
is extremely hard work, and at the end of the process you will have probably netted yourself a
pretty small fish. Surely any eager scalp-hunter in the media would prefer to casually mine the
hundreds of thousands of words in my articles, which would provide a veritable cornucopia of
exceptionally explosive material, all fully searchable and conveniently organized by particular
taboos. Yet for years the entire journalistic community has scrupulously averted their eyes
from such mammoth potential scandal. And the likely explanation may provide some important
insights into the dynamics of ideological conflict in the media.
Activist organizations often take the lead in locating controversial statements, which they
then pass along to their media allies for ritual denunciation, and much of my own material
would seem especially provocative to the fearsome ADL. Yet oddly enough, that organization
seemed quite reluctant to engage with me, and only after my repeated baiting did
they finally issue a rather short and perfunctory critique in 2018, which lacked any named
author. But even that lackluster effort afforded me an opening to respond with my own
7,300 word essay highlighting the very unsavory origins and activities of that
controversial organization. After that exchange, they went back into hiding and have remained
there ever since.
In my lengthy analysis
of the true history of World War II, I described what I called "the Lord Voldemort Effect,"
explaining why so much of our mainstream source material should be treated with great care:
In the popular Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, the great nemesis of the young
magicians, is often identified as "He Who Must Not Be Named," since the mere vocalization of
those few particular syllables might bring doom upon the speaker. Jews have long enjoyed
enormous power and influence over the media and political life, while fanatic Jewish
activists demonstrate hair-trigger eagerness to denounce and vilify all those suspected of
being insufficiently friendly towards their ethnic group. The combination of these two
factors has therefore induced such a "Lord Voldemort Effect" regarding Jewish activities in
most writers and public figures. Once we recognize this reality, we should become very
cautious in analyzing controversial historical issues that might possibly contain a Jewish
dimension, and also be particularly wary of arguments from silence.
However, even dread Lord Voldemorts may shrink from a terrifying Lord Voldemort of their
own, and I think that this website falls into that category. The ADL and various other powerful
organizations may have quietly issued an edict that absolutely forbids the media outlets they
influence from mentioning our existence. I believe there is strong evidence in favor of this
remarkable hypothesis.
Among Trump's surviving advisors, Stephen Miller provokes some of the most intense
hostility, and last November the SPLC and its media allies made a concerted attempt to force
his resignation based upon some of his private emails, which had promoted several controversial
posts by Steve Sailer. The resulting firestorm was discussed on this website, and
I analyzed some of the strange anomalies:
Just as might be expected, the whole SPLC attack is "guilt by association," and Ctrl-F
reveals a full 14 references to VDare, with the website characterized in very harsh terms.
Yet although there are several mentions of Steve and his writings, there is absolutely no
reference to this webzine, despite being Steve's primary venue.
Offhand, this might seem extremely odd. My own guess is that much of the material we
publish is 10x as "controversial" as anything VDare has ever run, and many of my own personal
articles, including those that have spent over a year on the Home page, might be up in the
30x or 40x potency range. Moreover, I think our traffic these days is something like 10x that
of VDare, seemingly making us an extremely juicy target.
Now admittedly, I don't know that Miller fellow, but the horrifying VDare post that Miller
supposedly shared was actually republished by VDare from this website. And that would surely
have made it very, very easy for the SPLC to use the connection as a opening to begin
cataloguing the unspeakingly horrifying list of transgressions we regularly feature, easily
expanding the length of their attack on Miller by adding another 6,000 words. Yet the silence
has been totally deafening. Puzzling
Here's my own hypothesis
As everyone knows, there are certain "powerful groups" in our society that so terrify
members of the media and political worlds that they receive the "Lord Voldemort Treatment,"
with mainstream individuals being terrified that merely speaking the name would result in
destruction. Indeed, the SPLC is one of the primary enforcers of that edict.
However, my theory is that even those dread Lord Voldemorts greatly fear an even more
dreadful Lord Voldemort of their own, namely this webzine. The SPLC writer knew perfectly
well that mere mention of The Unz Review might ensure his destruction. I'd guess that
the ADL/SPLC/AIPAC has made this prohibition absolutely clear to everyone in the
media/political worlds.
Given that Miller's main transgression was his promotion of posts originally published on
this website, the media could have easily associated him with the rest of our material, much of
which was sufficiently explosive to have almost certainly forced his resignation. Yet when the
journalists and activists weighed the likelihood of destroying Trump's most hated advisor
against the danger of mentioning our existence, the latter factor was still judged the
stronger, allowing Miller to survive.
This hypothesis was strongly supported by a second incident later that same month. We had
previously published an article by Prof. Eric Rasmusen of Indiana University, and I read in my
morning Times that he had suddenly
become embroiled in a major Internet controversy , with a chorus of angry critics seeking
to have him removed. According to the article, he had apparently promoted the "vile and stupid"
views of some anti-feminist website in one of his Tweets, which had come to the attention of an
enraged activist. The resulting firestorm of denunciations on Twitter had been viewed 2.5
million times, provoking a major academic controversy in the national media.
Being curious about what had happened, I contacted Rasmusen to see whether he might want to
submit a piece regarding the controversy,
which he did . But to my utter astonishment, I discovered that the website involved had
actually been our own, a fact that I never would never have suspected from the extremely vague
and circuitous discussion provided in the newspaper. Apparently, the old-fashioned
Who-What-Where provisions of the Times style manual had been quietly amended to prohibit
providing any hint of our existence even when we were at the absolute center of one of their
1,000 word news stories.
Highly-controversial ideas backed by strong evidence may prove dangerously contagious, and
the political/media strategy pursued by the ADL, the Times , and numerous other organs
of the elite establishment seems perfectly rational. Since our Bill of Rights still provides
considerable protection for freedom of speech, the next-best alternative is to institute a
strict cordon sanitaire , intended to strictly minimize the number of individuals who
might become infected.
Our webzine and my own articles are hardly the only victims of this sort of strategy -- once
dubbed "the Blackout" by eminent historian Harry Elmer Barnes -- whose other targets often
possess the most respectable of establishmentarian credentials.
Last month marked the 31st anniversary of the notorious 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, and
elite media coverage was especially extensive this year due to our current global confrontation
with China. The New York Times devoted most of two full pages to a photo-laden
recapitulation while the Wall Street Journal gave it front-page treatment, with just
those two publications alone running some six separate articles and columns on those horrifying
events from three decades ago.
Yet back in the 1990s, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post , who
had personally covered the events, published a long article in the prestigious Columbia
Journalism Review entitled The Myth of Tiananmen
, in which he publicly admitted that the supposed "massacre" was merely a fraudulent concoction
of careless journalists and dishonest propagandists. At least some of our top editors and
journalists must surely be aware of these facts, and feel guilty about promoting a
long-debunked hoax of the late 1980s. But any mention of those widely-known historical facts is
strictly forbidden in the media, lest American readers become confused and begin to consider an
alternative narrative.
Russia possesses a nuclear arsenal at least as powerful as our own, and the total break in
our relations began when Congress passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012, targeting important Russian
leaders. Yet none of our media outlets have ever been willing to admit that the facts used to
justify that very dangerous decision seem to have been entirely fraudulent, as recounted
in
the article we recently published by Prof. John Ryan.
Similarly, our sudden purge from both Google and Facebook came just days after my own
long article presenting the strong evidence that America's ongoing Covid-19 disaster was
the unintentional blowback from our own extremely reckless biowarfare attack against China (and
Iran). Over 130,000 of our citizens have already died and our daily life has been wrecked, so
the American people might grow outraged if they began to suspect that this huge national
disaster was entirely self-inflicted.
And the incident that sparked our current national upheaval includes certain elements that
our media has scrupulously avoided mentioning. The knee-neck hold used against George Floyd was
standard police procedure in Minneapolis and many other cities, and had apparently been
employed thousands of times across our country in recent years with virtually no fatalities.
Meanwhile, Floyd's official autopsy indicated that he had lethal levels
of Fentanyl and other illegal drugs in his system at the time of his demise. Perhaps the
connection between these two facts is more than purely coincidental, and if they became widely
known, popular sentiments might shift.
Finally, our alternative media webzine is pleased to have recently added two additional
columnists together with major portions of their archives, which will help to further broaden
our perspective.
Larry Romanoff has been a regular contributor to the Global Research website, most recently
focusing on the Coronavirus outbreak in China, and earlier this year he published an
article pointed to the considerable evidence that the virus had originated in the U.S.,
which was cited by Chinese officials and
soon became a flashpoint in American-Chinese relations . After having been viewed millions
of times, that piece and several others seem to have disappeared from their original venue, but
along with the rest of his writings, they are now conveniently available on our own
website .
For the last quarter-century, Jared Taylor has probably been America's most prominent White
Nationalist writer. Although Black Nationalists such as Al Sharpton have cable television shows
and boast of many dozens of visits to the White House, the growing climate of ideological
repression has caused Taylor and his American Renaissance organization to be
deplatformed from YouTube, Twitter, and numerous other Internet services. One of his main
writers is Gregory Hood, whom we have now added as a regular columnist , together with dozens of
his pieces over the last few years.
Дания
разрешила
использовать
новые суда для
прокладки
"Северного
потока – 2"
STOCKHOLM, July 6. / TASS /. At the request of Nord Stream 2 AG, the Danish Energy
Agency (DEA) has given permission that vessels with anchor positioning be used on an
unfinished section of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline southeast of Bornholm Island. This was
announced on Monday in a departmental press release.
Ha, ha! I expect the Danes had their wetted finger to the wind, and were reasonably quick
to observe Merkel's kiss-off of the United States when it did the inadvisable, and went ahead
with more sanctions to try to prevent completion of the pipeline. Might be too late to start
construction this summer, though – we're into the cod-spawning season now. Maybe they
could do part of it at the other end, or something.
No, not after the spawning season has stopped -- I think that must have just been a load
of bollocks of an excuse for blocking further work -- but when the time allowed for an appeal
against the Danish govt decision has elapsed:
К достройке
газопровода
приступят
после
истечения
срока
обжалования
обновленного
разрешения
Дании -- 3
августа.
The completion of the gas pipeline will begin after the expiration of the appeal period
for the renewed Denmark permit -- August 3./
"Today the Department of State is updating the public guidance for CAATSA authorities
to include Nord Stream 2 and the second line of TurkStream 2. This action puts investments or
other activities that are related to these Russian energy export pipelines at risk of US
sanctions. It's a clear warning to companies aiding and abetting Russia's malign influence
projects and will not be tolerated. Get out now or risk the consequences".
Pompeo speaking at a press conference today.
CAATSA -- Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act
So Russia and Turkey are "adversaries" of the USA?
In what way?
Do these states wish to wage war against the USA?
Is it adversarial to United States interest to compete economically with the hegemon?
Who cares? Really, is Pompeo still scary? If he has a functioning brain, he should realize
that all these blatant efforts to reserve markets for America by sanctioning all its
competitors out of the picture is having the opposite effect, and frightening customers away
from becoming dependent on American products which might be withheld on a whim when America
wants political concessions. 'Will not be tolerated' – what a pompous ass. Sanction
away. The consequence is well-known to be seizure of assets held in the United States or an
inability to do business in the United States. That will frighten some into submission
– like the UK, which was threatened with the cessation of intelligence-sharing with the
USA (sure you can spare it?) if it did not drop Huawei from its 5G networks. But others will
take prudent steps to limit their exposure to such threats, in the certain knowledge that if
they work, they will encourage the USA to use the technique again.
Silicon Valley oligarchs are ushering in a new age of serfdom, aided by the left. Medieval
illustration of men harvesting wheat with reaping-hooks, on a calendar page for August. Queen
Mary's Psalter, 14th Century. (wikipedia/public domain)
Few policy items have more ominously heralded the ongoing realignment of our politics than
Universal Basic Income. That its proponents and detractors can't seem to agree on what UBI is
intended for in the first place is merely a measure of that omen.
Take Spain. The country's far-left government was an early fan of the policy, and when it
leaped on the unemployment caused by lockdowns to implement
a version of it , the handouts were popularly mocked as la
paguita -- Spanish for pocket money. The derisive analogy was swiftly
censured as xenophobic -- the potential
pull effect for illegal migrants deemed a red herring -- or more creatively still, as
aporophobic, a made-in-Spain woke
neologism for aversion towards the poor. Yet it was fresh college graduates, not illegal
aliens nor the destitute, that users of la paguita fretted UBI would put on the dole.
UBI-skeptics fear this more than any potential loopholes for migrants or layabouts: namely,
further untethering the over-credentialed young from the demands of the labor market, directing
them instead towards "more creative pursuits" of dubious societal interest while turning the
self-sufficient lower-middle classes into their unconsenting patrons.
The dissonance over who exactly UBI is meant to assist is extremely revealing. The policy
was initially designed in Silicon Valley to make automation painless, but liberals on both
sides of the Atlantic have hailed the insurance it provides against labor market disruptions.
The reckoning with the need for a larger safety net is actually widespread, but the unalloyed
welfare that UBI would afford entitled millennials remains a no-go across much of the right. By
embracing UBI, the left seems to have made peace with our tech-induced drift away from
self-sufficiency and towards generalized dependence. But creating a dependent class out of the
supposedly "best and brightest" is still deemed profoundly perverse on the right.
This realignment around work and welfare is but one instance of what Joel Kotkin describes
in his latest book as The Coming of
Neo-Feudalism , the surreptitious supplanting of liberal capitalism -- a blend of economic
opportunity, pluralism and dispersed political power -- with a new regime dominated by tech
oligarchs, enabled by their legitimizers in the so-called "progressive clerisy," and so far
acquiesced to by most everyone else. The proposition that a class of tech overlords is
infiltrating liberal institutions will sound far-fetched to most of Kotkin's readers, but
that's only because our connotations of "feudalism" suffer from recency bias. This f-word often
calls to mind pre-revolutionary France, where a monarchic nobility and a conservative
priesthood united to preserve their privileges at swords' point until 1789.
That late form of feudalism is displayed in Kotkin's
choice of cover -- an engraving of a nobleman and a priest riding a peasant's back printed
two months before the storming of the Bastille. But what the book warns about is feudalism at
an embryonic stage, one where the interests of nobility and clerisy may not jibe all the time,
and where the third estate's submission is still unknowing. Similarly, it took centuries after
Rome fell for medieval feudalism to fully take shape, with the Church emerging first as a check
on kings' earthly power before becoming their geopolitical ally, and the servants toiling in
the rural estates of the post-Roman nobility barely conscious of their evolving towards
serfdom. Then as now, Kotkin argues our feudalization is slow but steady, with ever more power
concentrating among fewer hands. Kotkin is better known as an urbanist than as a historian,
which is precisely how he garners the historical savvy and prescience to discern the trend
stealthily unfolding -- for unlike in the early Middle Ages, cities and not rural areas are the
microcosm of the neo-feudal order.
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Big tech CEOs and the "progressive intelligentsia" form an unlikely coalition, corporate
power being a classic progressive gripe. So what about today's tech overlords makes them more
palatable than the bankers and utility oligopolists they've replaced? Hipness and woke
capitalism surely play a part, but their primary appeal to the wider society is in Kotkin's
view technical, grounded in the growing premium our economy places in technological skill. More
than a technocracy, this is a technocratic ratchet -- the techies hold the keys to an economy
they've ushered in and keep making more complex. Progressive opinion-makers have largely
acquiesced to the concentration of productive know-how in ever fewer hands, even as the less
affluent are shut out of the pathways towards acquiring it. Worse still, the societal benefits
from technological innovation reaped by everyone else keep diminishing -- where innovation was
once concerned with productivity, transport or housing, its link with improved living standards
has all but broken under society's hype over social media and artificial intelligence.
Atop the neo-feudal order sit these two powerful blocks, and the economic disruption their
alliance portends is correspondingly far-reaching, not limited to a single set of policy wins
for tech companies. Even if their tax evasion or greedy data collection practices are reined in
with
transnational digital taxes and ambitious privacy rules
, for big tech these will amount to little more than inches on the margin, mere bumps on the
road towards neo-feudalism. To work out the contours of the new economic order, Kotkin proposes
instead to size up the larger tenets of liberal capitalism undergoing erosion. This starts with
property, the ladder through which a majority could once reach middle-class prosperity but that
is being pulled up before our very eyes.
Under feudalism, serfdom was the norm -- toiling on the land of someone else who robbed you
was the only path to subsist. Similarly, as the clustering effects of today's knowledge economy
keep driving capital and labor towards already cramped cities, property has concentrated in
ever fewer hands, with home renters left similarly property-less. Cities used to be hotbeds of
opportunity, today they are segregated dystopias. Where strivers could once take jobs that
afforded spacey homes, amenities and savings, today the squeezed middle is driven out of cities
altogether by skyrocketing housing, transport and childcare costs. Where suburbia once stood to
pick up the pieces of our urban dysfunctions, today that last redoubt of the property-owning
middle is reaching full capacity in turn, with the comfortable lifestyle it affords shunned by
the environmentalist clerisy.
This crisis of property is behind the mantra that "today's young are the first generation to
face dimmer prospects than their parents,"
borne out in endless surveys. A married couple of first-generation college graduates today
struggles to buy a home even at the age their non-college educated parents did, effectively
delaying the age at which the upward mobility both generations worked so hard to chase can take
its effect. Even as it remains the only real launchpad to wealth accrual, homeownership is
increasingly the monopoly of those lucky to inherit it, which further tilts a playing field at
birth already more uneven than ever. And all this concerns only what Kotkin calls the modern
"yeomanry" of financially insecure but credentialed professionals. Even grimmer are the
prospects of the neo-feudal serfdom, that netherworld of low-skilled jobs in the service
precariat. Devoid of technical skills, these neo-serfs live paycheck to paycheck in what former
Labor Secretary Robert Reich once called the "share-the-scraps-economy" -- a wordplay on the
"sharing economy" -- with not a whiff of any real economic opportunity.
But just like medieval serfs felt bound to the feudal system through the Christian hope of
redemption, so is our neo-feudal order held together, as much as by economic relationships, by
the cultural values evangelized from the clerisy downwards. Yesteryear's societal ethos was one
of dynamism, creative destruction and widespread opportunity for all, which, when sincerely
embraced by those at the top, gave the entire system a buttress of legitimacy. For the
managerial class holding the reins, living out these values and leading by example reinforced
their position atop the system -- creating jobs meant supporting middle-class livelihoods,
reneging from corporate welfare and accepting the diktats of antitrust enforcement meant
playing by the rules.
The values underpinning today's neo-feudalism, rather than allowing for elites to be renewed
through competition and merit, serve to entrench the ones we're stuck with. Pluralism in online
discourse is on the way out and any talk of breaking up the tech giants is defamed as antitrust
heresy, effectively enshrining their natural monopoly over the digital space. As for
philanthropy, today's tech overlords truly see their lot as the kindest hearted in society, but
their foundations no longer seek to align status with merit but to refashion our political
economy entirely by normalizing dependence. UBI is to philanthropy what giving away fish is to
fishing education.
Whenever economic opportunity is invoked by big tech's allies in the clerisy, it is most
often in the discourse of identity politics, which derives policy prescriptions that fail to
create more of it, resorting instead to shoving ethnic minorities amidst the ranks of the
technocracy. Instead of expanding access to high-quality education, vocational training or
urban property, the siren song of identititarianism calls for numerical quotas and affirmative
action. If anything, economic opportunity stands to lose even more ground if the shibboleths
promoted from atop are pursued à la lettre , to the extent they pose further
penalties on the less fortunate, such as through environmentalism or multiculturalism. And this
is where policies such as UBI come back into the picture -- their aim is to make the lack of
economic opportunity less painful and politically costly, not to reverse our direction of
travel towards neo-feudalism. Evangelized with the brimstone of religion, these values are
ushering in a new regime of what Kotkin calls "oligarchic socialism," with productive work
increasingly the province of a fortunate few, while everyone is left to battle out for the
scraps but numbed with progressive piety.
The alarm Kotkin sounds is all the more courageous and credible coming from an old-school
progressive like him, and shows that the left's realignment around the interests of tech
oligarchs and the gospel of wokeism won't go without internal pushback. Kotkin has even earned
an audience on the right -- the book is published by Encounter . If his Warning to
the Global Middle Class is to be heard widely, it will need all the support it can get from
conservatives, whom are undergoing a realignment of the kind Kotkin advocates for his own side.
Which calls to mind the ominous words of the
abbé Sieyès in 1789 -- "what is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been
in the current political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something!"
Jorge González-Gallarza Hernández (@JorgeGGallarza) is a senior researcher
at Fundación Civismo .
I didn't realize it at first but this was the same Koltkin who writes for American Affairs.
I'll link one of his articles below. But this is interesting as I've recently been reading Fear
of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich and the way she talks about political shifts among the PMC is
interesting, especially when it comes to change in policy. When once they championed those
policies that have set us on a course for "neo-feudalism" they now oppose them, at least
nominally. But the fact that their "opposition" is not really opposition at all but rather a
palliative measure is telling and, I feel, confirms Ehrenreich's suspicions of the newly
anti-establishment leanings of the PMC.
You probably are better versed in these schools of thoughts... But I couldn't make heads or
tails out the article. First, in a feudal society serfs are bound to the land and they feed the rest of the society by
growing food, etc. UBI is proposed by Yang and others to alleviate the problems caused by automation and AI. The issue of the displaced working class is not serfdom-like exploitation, but that they have
nothing to offer. They don't have the skills needed and they are not where those skills are
needed. I must be missing something... :-/
Its an analogy to the manor system. With our cities becoming great centers of wealth where
an increasingly wealthy few concentrate themselves and their wealth, contrasted with an
impoverished hinterland made up of low skilled (or in our modern time underemployed) "serfs".
Obviously the exact products and role of the serfs and the nobility has changed, but the
relationship between the two, along with the fundamental roles they serve is by and large the
same as in its previous medieval form.
I don't know if you'll have access to this one (I assume you don't have a subscription to
American Affairs) but if it does allow you to read it he goes much more in-depth (I feel) in
this article along with a much more specific example by which he explains what he means.
https://americanaffairsjour...
Yang and others think that which has rendered the "serfs" obsolete or which has forced them
downwards is an unstoppable force, in this vein nothing fundamental about the situation itself
is changed by UBI, rather its gives up the point immediately (or indeed does not challenge it)
and instead resigns to palliative measures that will help, but not nearly enough and most
likely not in any long term fashion.
Yang's own central point is also a bit off given that A) Automation is heavily overstated as
a reason for job losses (see:
https://qz.com/1269172/the-... and B) The jobs apocalypse he fears from automation is
unlikely to come about (see:
https://www.nationalaffairs... , along with the examples of Korea and Tesla factories of
clear examples of how automation does not necessarily mean lost jobs, or no jobs, it may in
fact lead to more investment and more jobs if paired with well crafted reshoring and industrial
policies.)
I don't know if you'll have access to this one (I assume you don't have a subscription to
American Affairs) but if it does allow you to read it he goes much more in-depth (I feel) in
this article along with a much more specific example by which he explains what he means.
https://americanaffairsjour...
Yang and others think that which has rendered the "serfs" obsolete or which has forced them
downwards is an unstoppable force, in this vein nothing fundamental about the situation itself
is changed by UBI, rather its gives up the point immediately (or indeed does not challenge it)
and instead resigns to palliative measures that will help, but not nearly enough and most
likely not in any long term fashion.
Yang's own central point is also a bit off given that A) Automation is heavily overstated as
a reason for job losses (see:
https://qz.com/1269172/the-... and B) The jobs apocalypse he fears from automation is
unlikely to come about (see:
https://www.nationalaffairs... , along with the examples of Korea and Tesla factories of
clear examples of how automation does not necessarily mean lost jobs, or no jobs, it may in
fact lead to more investment and more jobs if paired with well crafted reshoring and industrial
policies.)
Instead of trying to improve failing NYC schools it is easier to claim racism. Some people just do not want to study. The
number of people who barely can read in the is really staggering and can't be explained by racism, which typically just mobilize the
oppressed minority to strive in education. That's probably why children of first generation emigrants (which parent having
poor English and discriminated at jobs) usually do very well educationally.
Although further progress is desirable, the level of racism and xenophobia in the USA is much less than in many countries.
Karl Marx once said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. Nothing
proved the truth of Marx's claim better than the farcical battle over the statue of St. Louis
in, yes, St. Louis which followed hot on the heels of the tragedy of George Floyd in
Minneapolis.
The battle over the statue began as an exercise in identity politics, and before long it
degenerated into an example of identity theft. The main protagonist in this story is Umar Lee,
who was born Bret Darran Lee in 1974 to a southern Presbyterian family and grew up in
Florissant, Missouri just outside St. Louis. Lee may or may not be Black, which is an
ideological marker based upon but independent of biological fact, because he claims, according
to The Jerusalem Post that he "has two younger siblings who are half African-American."
[1]
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by
28-year-old white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, a
suburb of St. Louis, leading to extensive rioting . After the death of
Michael Brown, Lee got involved with the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, and was
arrested on two occasions and, in his words, "locked up." After getting fired from his job as
cab driver, Lee became a full-time, but little known activist. In 2015, Lee noticed that
statues started coming down in St. Louis, largely because of agitation on the part of St. Louis
Jews. At some point during this period, Lee made contact with Ben Paremba, an Israeli
restauranteur who was "passionate" about promoting Israel and other Jewish causes. At this
point Paremba was as little known to locals as Lee, but all of that changed after the Jewish
press took notice of their petition to remove the statue of St. Louis and began promoting them
as social justice crusaders, if you'll pardon the term.
In a series of tweets, Lee tried to establish his position as an aggrieved Muslim, bringing
up the Crusades as the cause of his grievance, but the underlying source of his complaint was
inspired by a group of Jews, who were incensed that the city where they had come to study had
erected a statue in honor of a king who had burned the Talmud.
Once Lee mentioned the term "anti-Semitism," the Jewish press began carrying stories which
lionized Lee as a crusader for Jewish rights. Because of his philo-Semitism, Lee soon found
himself lionized in the Jewish press. Writing for the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Ben Sales
described Lee as "a local activist who started the petition and also took part in a
successful drive to remove a nearby Confederate monument in 2017. Lee, Sales continued, "is
not Jewish but started the petition because of Louis IX's anti-Semitism." [2] Because Lee's
petition called St. Louis a "rabid anti-Semite" who "inspired Nazi Germany," it began "drawing
Jewish support" from St. Louis Jews like Rabbi Susan Talve, "the founding rabbi of the city's
Central Reform Congregation, who said taking it down would help advance racial justice in the
United States." According to Talve, St. Louis Jews have "been talking about that statue for a
long time." Talve then added that removing the statue would be "a very important part of
reclaiming history, reclaiming the stories that have created the institutionalized racism that
we are trying to unravel today. If we're not honest about our history we will never be able to
dismantle the systems of oppression that we are living under."
"Susan Talve hated Cardinal Burke," according to one Catholic familiar with the local scene.
He went on to say that Burke told him that Talve had "an animosity toward me for reasons that I
don't understand." Blinded by over 50 years of the failed experiment known as Catholic-Jewish
dialogue, his eminence was evidently incapable of seeing that Talve's animosity toward him was
based on her ancestral animosity toward the Catholic Church, which he led in St. Louis at the
time. Unsurprisingly, Rabbi Talve's animosity toward the Catholic Church has turned her into an
advocate of Lee's attack on the statue.
St. Louis Catholics were determined to ignore the ethnic animosity behind the struggle.
America Needs Fatima, a front group for the Brazilian cult Tradition, Family, and Property
joined the fray, criticizing "limp-wristed politicians" who were giving in to "revolutionary
extremists." ANF Protest Coordinator Jose Ferraz, claimed that "American Catholics" who were
"strong in their faith" were being "pushed around by anarchist revolutionaries," but without
identifying any of the actual players in the dispute.
After local activist Jim Hoft announced that a group of Catholics associated with his
website Gateway Pundit was going to defend the statue, Lee issued a statement describing what
he clearly knew to be a group of Catholics as "White Nationalists" along with "those on the
alt-right such as those who held the infamous and tragic rally in Charlottesville."
Hoft then responded by claiming that Lee deliberately misrepresented the Gateway Pundit
rosary group as white racists: "We are Christians and Christian allies who believe we still
have the freedom to practice our religion in America. We are organizing a prayer rally with
Catholic and Christian men. And now we are being threatened -- In America. We will not
apologize for our Christianity. Not in St. Louis."
The leader of a local rosary group, taken in by Lee's propaganda, began to suspect that
local Catholic activists at the rosary protest "might be backed by white supremacists" and
warned his group off. He then retracted his first tweet after he learned that the Rosary rally
was being sponsored by local activist Jim Hoft's Gateway Pundit and TFP-America Needs Fatima.
Neither group talked about the Jews. As a result, neither group was able to discuss the
conflict's most significant player. Both groups as a result became proxy warriors in an
exercise in street theater which kept the true dynamics of the conflict hidden.
In his article, Sales found a local Catholic who made a valiant attempt to defend the city's
eponymous saint, only to be shot down later by Talve, who opined that "Asserting that your way
is the only way I think is always wrong" with no sense that this was precisely the gist of what
the local Jews and their Muslim front man were imposing on the citizens of St. Louis.
Hoft called Lee's claim that "those on the alt-right such as those who held the infamous and
tragic rally in Charlottesville," were responsible for the demonstration defending the statue
"a lie," and added "There is no one from the Charlottesville rally or linked to the
Charlottesville rally or who promoted the Charlottesville rally who will be at the prayer rally
(that we know about)."
Lee's determination to turn the statue battle into a racial conflict began to generate
opposition from the Black community on Twitter, inspiring one observer to write "Fuck Umar
Lee's Bitch ass. He got fired for taking a company video to start racial tension. He's white.
Not Black. Sorry POS."
Activist, Author and Ex-Cabbie Umar Lee
By now it was obvious that the Black population of St. Louis, in spite of being dragged into
Lee's ad hoc coalition, had no dog in this fight. St. Louis, it turns out, never owned slaves.
Once the racial element disappeared from the conflict, its religious dimensions began to
emerge. The battle over the statue was a religious war between Catholics and Jews, in which
both sides were eager to cover over the conflict's true ethnic configuration. Both Lee and Hoft
were determined to obscure the identity of their opponents as well as the identity of their
backers. As one local observer put it, "Jews end up being in a win-win situation. Either Lee
succeeds in toppling the statue or Hoft succeeds and becomes the gay-married, pro-Zionist hero
to the local bishopless Catholics who are too fearful to organize on their own. Nowhere do
Catholics, or Blacks, or Muslims get a win out of this. Being pro-Zionist on some level
probably gives Hoft permission to misbehave sexually, since Jews are the authors of gay rights
as a movement. It's his way of paying them back, even though he is deeply conservative, like a
typical Iowa farm boy, raised Catholic, in all other areas."
Even after the Catholic-Jewish nature of the conflict became apparent, Lee continued to
portray the pro-statue crowd as white racists. In the days leading up to the Saturday rally,
Lee tweeted a picture of the blonde-haired Hoft with this text by way of explanation. "This is
the guy behind the White Nationalist rally on Saturday at noon on Art Hill. This is why it's
important for us to show up at eleven. . . . Jim Hoft and the Gateway Pundit were absurdly
wrong." [3]
A few hours later, Lee tweeted: "I will never allow Nazis, racists, and White Nationalists
to hold rallies in St. Louis without a response even if it's just me." [4] Hours later, Christine
Eidson Christlieb tried to set the record straight when she tweeted "The people praying the
rosary every night at the statue aren't white nationalists. That's just false. They are
Catholics." [5]
Ignoring Christlieb's tweet, Lee continued to promote identity theft, tweeting on June 24
that "White Christian Nationalists and the alt-right have announced a rally on Saturday at the
Louis IX statue. Please RT and share. We need to counter. Calling all Catholic and Christian
Men and their Allies." The bogus request for Catholic support when Lee knew it was Catholics
who were on the other side of the protest saying their rosaries exposed the hidden grammar of
Lee's strategy, which involved denying his opponents their actual identity and turning them
instead into "white nationalists," a group which could then be deprived of their constitutional
right to free speech and assembly. I discussed this ploy in my article comparing the Arbaeen
march in Dearborn, which was considered legitimate because of its religious sponsorship, and
the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, which was illegitimate precisely because the
protesters were "white," a designation which deprived them of any constitutional protection.
Lee knew he was dealing with Catholics, but he insisted on calling them white supremacists
because that was the category that would demonize them.
Lee's tweets throughout the period leading up to the June 27 protest gave a clear indication
that his real animus was against St. Louis's Catholics, not white supremacists or nationalists.
Lee tweeted "Mel Gibson is probably the most prominent traditional Catholic and critic of the
modern church known to most Americans. He is also a raging anti-Semite who beat his wife. The
Twitter army defending Louis IX I'm sure are huge fans of his."
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-6&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1275341953585090561&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unz.com%2Fejones%2Ficonoclasm-in-st-louis%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=9066bb2%3A1593540614199&width=500px
Umar Lee Leading a Protest at the St. Louis Statue
Umar Lee is not your typical Muslim. He said nothing about the plight of the Palestinians
who were about to lose control over the West Bank. He failed to mention the connection between
the knee hold which presumably killed George Floyd and ADL sponsored seminars which introduced
Minneapolis police officers to Israeli instructors in Chicago in 2012. Instead he claimed that
"Bringing down the Louis IX statue won't be the [first] time Muslims and Jews coordinated in
St. Louis to stamp out evil." Then combining two contradictory tropes, Lee described his
opponents as "alt-right Catholic fascists," whose "favorite hobbies" were "burning and looting
Jews and impaling heretics." Instead of defending the statue of St. Louis IX, Lee felt that his
Catholic foes could better spend their time studying Jewish history and volunteering "to help
the many thousands of sex crimes victims in the church."
Statues are a sign of hegemony. They help you identify the ruler, and if not the real ruler,
the man those in power would like to have as their ruler. In a revolutionary era, the statues
of the former ruling class must come down. The most striking instance of this was the statue of
Stalin in Prague, which came down as soon as Communism collapsed in the period from 1989 to
1990. The removal of Stalin's statue left an empty pedestal in its place, but just as nature
abhors a vacuum, so pedestals will not remain empty. The first occupant of the empty Stalin
pedestal was a statue of Michael Jackson, who brought his own statue to Prague when he played a
concert there. He was the hegemon of the 1990s. The last time I was in Prague that pedestal was
occupied by a weird crane-liked gnomon which moved in sync with some unheard rhythm of the
spheres, making it seem like a metronome keeping time to an unknown melody.
The battle in Charlottesville in 2017 was ultimately a conflict over a statue, in this case
a statue of Robert E. Lee, which celebrated the "redemption" of the South which occurred a
generation after the Civil War, when the South drove the last remnant of Yankee soldiers from
their soil. The Lee statue was erected, as were many others celebrating Confederate soldiers,
to celebrate the new regime.
During the revolutionary spring of 2020, numerous statues were deposed. Not surprisingly,
the statue of Lenin in Seattle escaped the mayhem which visited that city unscathed, as did the
most recent addition to statuary in South Bend, Indiana, the statue of Rev. Theodore Hesburgh,
CSC, president of Notre Dame University and civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. The
latter statue expresses better than any other the system of control which it symbolizes. The
short-hand explanation of that system of control is the civil rights movement, which celebrates
breaking laws with some higher purpose in mind. A recent article noted that 60 percent of
people in their 20s believe it is okay to break the law for a good cause. Of course, who gets
to determine whether the cause is good did not get mentioned in that article. That is why the
Hesburgh-King statue is important. It was based on a photo taken in Chicago in 1966 (most often
erroneously stated as 1964). When Martin Luther King arrived in Marquette Park, one of
Chicago's many ethnic neighborhoods, the Lithuanians living there greeted him with a hail of
rocks and bottles, one of which staggered King as he got out of his car. Needing help to
prosecute the ethnic cleansing of Catholic neighborhoods in Chicago, King gave Hesburgh a call
and together the two icons sang "We shall overcome" at a rally at Soldier Field that
summer.
The statue is, in other words, a celebration of two of American history's most famous proxy
warriors. As a pawn of Jewish money and Quaker organizing, King obliterated the traditional
Black power structure in Chicago, symbolized by Bronzeville, which was the Black ethnic
neighborhood. As a pawn of the Rockefellers, Hesburgh betrayed fellow Catholics in Chicago in
order to get funding from their foundations, especially the Population Council run by John D.
Rockefeller, 3rd. So the South Bend statue is in no danger of coming down because the
descendants of the oligarchs which turned King and Hesburgh into political icons have found a
new set of proxy warriors in Antifa and Black Lives Matter, who have arrogated the civil rights
mantle to themselves in a bid to stamp out the last remnants of representative government in
the United States. Pedestals will not remain empty. Prepare yourself for a Jeff Bezos statue.
Just as King and Hesburgh were proxy warriors of the oligarchs in collaboration with each
other, so Lee and Hoft are proxy warriors of the oligarchs in opposition to each other.
In the spring of 2015, the iconoclasts of St. Louis succeeded in getting the Jesuit-run St.
Louis University to remove its statue of Pere Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Belgian Catholic priest
who worked as a missionary to the Indians in the Mid-West and western sections of the United
States of America. [6] The Jesuits caved in to
pressure from "a cohort of students and faculty" who complained that the De Smet sculpture
"symbolized white supremacy, racism, and colonialism," [7] at least according to
this news account, which and alumnus disputes, claiming:
Saint Louis University did not get rid of the statue of Father DeSmet. They moved it to the
newly renovated Saint Louis University Museum of Art (SLUMA). There, the statue is prominently
shown quite beautifully along with other artifacts and artwork from the early founding of St
Louis and its Catholic heritage. One could argue that they removed it from its outside area
because of the pressure that the university faced to remove it, but there was never a "cohort
of faculty and students to remove it." During my four years as a student from 2006 to 2009, I
never heard one comment about the statue. I attended the university with a lot of people from
various ethnicities who never mentioned it once. We would also pass it by on a daily basis. I
personally think that this "cohort" was made up and that no one ever had a problem with it,
whether liberal or not. It was made into a problem by those who would like to destroy
Catholicism. The Jesuits should have left it where it was but at least they had enough sense to
keep it and showcase it prominently in their museum, which I will repeat, is
beautiful.
Protestors Argue at the Statue of St. Louis
Two years later, St. Louis mayor Lyda Krewson caved in to the same sort of pressure when she
removed a Confederate statue from the same Forest Park neighborhood where the statue to St.
Louis is located. [8] The statue of Columbus
was also removed in 2017, largely at the behest of Rachel Sender, a graduate student in
biological anthropology at Washington University who claimed that Columbus "represents racism,
colonialism, slavery and white supremacy and should not be given any honorable remembrance or
be a symbol of Tower Grove Park." [9] In attempt to give some
background on Lee and his petition, local Catholic activist Jim Hoft described Rachel Sender as
"some idiot . . . from New Jersey." Sender, however, was much more forthcoming than Hoft in
describing both her identity and motivation in wrecking that city's statues. Buoyed by the
iconoclasts' success in removing the Columbus statue, Sender jumped on the bandwagon to remove
the St. Louis statue, tweeting that "St. Louis was a crusader known for persecuting Jews. This
is also the only city I've experienced [sic] blatant anti-Semitism. His legacy should not be
honored! Lyda Kewson, City of St. Louis, Change the name of St. Louis. Sign the petition."
[10]
Lee was lionized in the Jewish press because even though Lee calls himself a Muslim, he not
only talks like a Jew, he also got the idea of tearing down the St. Louis statue from Jews. In
a recent interview, Lee told The Jerusalem Post "that he became aware of the statue's
history when Rabbi Hershey Novack of the Chabad on the Campus at St. Louis University held a
Tisha B'Av gathering by the Louis IX statue to remember the atrocities he wrought on Jews in
France." [11] Lee was in effect
only doing what he was told, after Novack and local Israeli restauranteur Ben Parembo said,
"Hey, that statue needs to come down. Jewish kids going out with their parents to [park's]
[sic] art museum don't need to be looking at this anti-Semite."
Lee may be the only Muslim in the world who is not upset about the United States moving its
embassy to Jerusalem, thereby making it the capital of Israel. In fact he's planning a trip to
Jerusalem, where he plans to "do a little dance. . . to commemorate the fact that loser [i.e.,
St. Louis IX] never made it to Jerusalem." In the meantime, Lee "will be drafting a letter to
@Pontifex asking for the decanonization of King Louis IX." On June 21, Lee informed his twitter
followers that he was "working on Lindbergh too. Must go. No Nazi named streets in St. Louis
Couny [sic]!" In addition to being a descendant of Robert E. Lee, Umar Lee did time for some
unspecified crime. It was during his stay in prison that he became aware of Jewish history and
the fact that St. Louis "burned Talmuds and embarked upon two crusades." He also learned that
St. Louis was "a Catholic town," a fact which led him to embark on a career as a reformer of
the Catholic Church, forcing him to oppose "some hateful pre-Vatican II trends that are being
repopularized." At some point during his study of Jewish history, Lee discovered that "a group
of Jewish students from Washington University and a rabbi gathered at the statue [of St. Louis]
on Tisha B'av" [or this ninth of Av, the day on which the temple was destroyed]. [12] From
reading the article, Lee also learned that King Louis "organized the burning of 12,000 Jewish
manuscripts in Paris, reasoning that the Jewish manuscripts might corrupt his good Christian
soldiers." [13] The book burning was
small potatoes compared to the destruction of the Temple, but the statue gave local Jews a
reason to feel aggrieved and test the local political waters to see how much clout they had.
Lee discovered that Jewish clout had increased considerably over the past 11 years, and that,
during the revolutionary spring of 2020, the time was ripe to press the issue.
Knowing that the Jews were itching for a battle with that city's Catholics, Lee engaged in
identity theft by claiming that the Catholic protesters were white because religion was a
category which still afforded constitutional protection. Recognizing that any conflict between
Catholics and Jews, with Muslims and Blacks playing minor roles, was unwinnable, Lee attempted
to drag the mayor into a fight against "white nationalists" knowing full well that enlisting
her in a battle against that city's Catholics, a group which made up 26 percent of the
population would have meant political suicide. Hence, Lee's persistent efforts to turn the
rally into something which it was not, as when he wrote: "Does St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson
have a problem with alt-right White Nationalists having a protest at the Louis IX statue on Art
Hill this Saturday?" Lee's tendentious formulation of the issue bespoke a combination of
identity theft and moral blackmail. The two issues are, of course, related and the link was
America's Civic Religion, otherwise known as the Civil Rights Movement, otherwise known as the
Black-Jewish alliance. Anyone who had the Black-Jewish alliance on his side occupied the high
moral ground and was on his way to winning the argument by default, because his opponents
lacked a moral leg to stand on. Because of Hollywood and public education, support for the
Civil Rights movement had replaced the ten commandments in America's mind as the source of
moral guidance.
But, as Anne Hendershott pointed out in her book The Politics of Deviance , deviance
is constant. That means that for every precept of the moral law you subtract from your
behavior, you have to add a precept of political correctness by way of compensation. Sexual sin
is the usual motivation for subtracting precepts of the moral law from your conscience. The
public school system in America as well as higher education has as one of its main goals the
sexual corruption of every student unfortunate enough to enter its doors. The moral vacuum that
education creates is filled by tales of the Civil Rights Movement, which proposes Martin Luther
King and Rosa Parks as role models. The sense of grievance and contempt for the positive law
which King and Parks stoked found fulfillment in the homosexual movement which invoked their
name to stoke contempt for the natural law.
So one way to calm your conscience because of the abortion you had is by becoming a
fanatical member of Antifa or a supporter of Black Lives Matter. The Civil Rights Movement of
the '60s was in many ways moral compensation for the adoption of contraception among Protestant
sects. Unsurprisingly, 1964 was the year of both the pill and the Civil Rights Act. This is not
a coincidence.
The battle over the statue served as an update on the Triple Melting Pot. Protestants were
nowhere to be found in this conflict. Their place had been taken by Muslims, who were still
negligible in terms of political power or cultural presence, but they could become significant
if they allied themselves with the Jews, the part of the Triple Melting Pot which was still
negligible in terms of numbers but whose cultural and political power had increased enormously
over the past half century. St. Louis is the home to 60,000 Bosnian Muslims, who harbor animus
against Jews that is now common in the Islamic world, largely because of how Israel has treated
Palestinians. Umar Lee is the exception that proves the rule. Thanks to the state of Israel,
Muslim antipathy to Jews is a widespread phenomenon, but it is not the case in the drama
surrounding the state of St. Louis. If Umar had come out in favor of the Boycott Divestment and
Sanction movement holding Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinians, he'd still be
driving a cab.
What began as an exercise in identity politics soon devolved into a case of identity theft.
After Lee called the Catholics white nationalists, local Catholic activist Jim Hoft responded
by calling Lee's Jewish coalition "Marxists." When it came to the battle of the St. Louis
statue, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was missing in action. Archbishop Robert Carlson,
ordinary of the archdiocese of St. Louis, defended the statue, but his comments had little
effect on public opinion because he is on his way out the door. His appointed successor,
auxiliary bishop Mitchell Rozanski of Springfield, Massachusetts, had nothing to say on the
issue. As a result, Hoft became defensor fidei by default, in spite of the fact that Jim
Hoft's relationship with Catholicism is even more troubled that Umar Lee's relationship with
Islam.
Hoft was born and raised in Iowa, but he got his start in local politics in St. Louis after
he established a national internet presence by founding the Gateway Pundit website, which took
the typically conservative line on issues as other websites began to engage in liberal
waffling. Conservative, at this moment in time, had less to do with the Republican populism of
St. Louis native Phyllis Schlafly, and more to do with the Neoconservatives who took over both
the party and the movement over the course of the 1990s. Specifically, that meant that Hoft was
rabidly pro-Israel, even to the point of posting a picture of him and Bibi Netanyahu on the
Gateway Pundit masthead, and disallowing any criticism of Israel or Jews from its combox.
Hoft's loyalty to Israel has earned him Jewish friends, such as film producer Michael Rudin,
who featured Hoft in a 2019 episode of the TV Series The Conspiracy File s and who is
also featured in Hoft's masthead.
In keeping with an even more recent trend in Republican-style conservatism, Hoft announced
that he was a homosexual after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando because he "just had
to." Not long after coming out of the closet, Hoft married a gay Filipino in what purported to
be a Catholic ceremony at the rebel St. Stanislaus Church in St. Louis. Not content to keep his
sodomy private, Hoft took out an elaborate wedding announcement complete with picture of him
and the boy, who is about a foot shorter than Hoft.
Hoft's Gateway Pundit has gone on to become a fact-checker's dream, with article after
article in mainstream outlets like the Washington Post describing Hoft and his website
as retailers of conspiracy theories and fake news, but Hoft continues in his role as the Jews'
favorite dumb goy. Hoft's fanatical, pro-Israel chest-thumping Catholicism is a compensation
for homosexuality, and a manifestation of what we might call the Michael Voris syndrome. In
addition to being useful to the Jews whenever they need someone to make the Catholic Church in
St. Louis look ridiculous, Hoft has become defensor fidei by default because in St.
Louis, as elsewhere, nature abhors a vacuum. Archbishop Robert Carlson's defense of the statue
was weakened by his status as a lame duck. [14] The Archdiocese
issued a statement defending St. Louis as "an example of an imperfect man who strived to live a
life modeled after the life of Jesus Christ" and a "model for how we should care for our fellow
citizen." His defense was further weakened by the fact that he did not identify the group
responsible for wanting the statue removed. Catholics, as a result, were once more engaged in
cultural shadow boxing against enemies they could not identify.
That means that the fate of the statue rests in the hands of Carlson's successor,
Archbishop-elect Mitchell Rozanski, who will be installed as St. Louis's new ordinary on August
25, which is, not coincidentally, the feast of St. Louis IX. The fate of the statue rests of
Mayor Lyda Krewson, who is both a Catholic and a liberal Democrat, which means she is pulled in
two opposite directions. She has come out in favor of retaining the statue, but some Catholics
are not sure she can withstand the political pressure pulling her in the opposite direction,
since she has already presided over other acts of public iconoclasm. As a Catholic mayor
presiding over the fate of the statue of a Catholic saint in a city with a large Catholic
population, Krewson finds herself confronted with a revolutionary situation during an
interregnum. The driving force behind that revolution is the Jewish revolutionary spirit.
Because of that fact, the impending arrival of Mitchell Rozanski is not cause for optimism.
Rozanski grew up in Baltimore and is a protégé of Cardinal Keeler, who is the
patron saint of Catholic-Jewish dialogue in the United States and author of a document on
Catholic-Jewish relations that was so heretical that even the notoriously philosemitic United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops refused to publish it. On June 18, 2009, the USCCB took
the unprecedented step of condemning its own document on Catholic-Jewish relations, warning
unsuspecting readers that Keeler's "Reflections on Covenant and Mission should not be taken as
an authoritative presentation of the teaching of the Catholic Church. In order to avoid any
confusion, the USCCB Committee on Doctrine and the Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious
Affairs have decided to point out some of these ambiguities and to offer corresponding
clarifications." [15]
Archbishop-Elect
Mitchell Rozanski
In an interview with Rozanski which appeared in the National Catholic Reporter ,
Keeler was described as "a legend in the field of Jewish-Catholic dialogue" and "one of
Rozanski's mentors." [16] Eventually Rozanski
succeeded Keeler as moderator for Catholic-Jewish relations. On February 24, 2017, Rozanski
wrote a response to the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in his capacity as
U.S. Bishops' Chairman on Interreligious Affairs, expressing "deep sympathy, solidarity, and
support to our Jewish brothers and sisters who have experienced once again a surge of
anti-Semitic actions in the United States. I wish to offer our deepest concern, as well as our
unequivocal rejection of these hateful actions. The Catholic Church stands in love with the
Jewish community in the current face of anti-Semitism." [17]
In an article which appeared in the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican , Rozanski
was quoted as saying, "I fear that the current level of demonizing anyone of a different
opinion sadly will only lead to even more levels of violence and affronts to our fellow human
beings, created in the likeness and image of God." [18] The article went on
to say that the suspected shooter in the attack referred to Jews as "children of Satan," which
the paper described as an "anti-Semitic social media posting" with no indication that the term
came from Jesus Christ in a confrontation with the Jews portrayed in the Gospel of St. John. I
make the claim that there is a historical continuity between that confrontation in the Gospel
and 2,000 years of revolutionary ferment on the part of the Jews in my book The Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit.
Unlike Justin Rigali and Raymond Burke, "whose legacies remain divisive," Rozanski plans to
deal with the polarized situation in St. Louis by promoting "more dialogue, more understanding,
more study of the way that police deal with different situations. And what happened to George
Floyd in Minneapolis was totally, totally unacceptable, totally beyond the pale of whatever
should be done to anyone who is being taken into police custody."
There are, of course, Catholics in St. Louis who can provide a cogent defense of retaining
the statue, but they are currently in hiding, fearing repercussions from Rozanski, whom one
"local Catholic in a very sensitive position that requires him to remain anonymous" described
as their "new super-ecumenical and politically correct Archbishop." As I have said many times
before, the Church can have good relations with the Jews, or she can have unity, but she can't
have both. Rozanski's good relations with the Jews is a sign that local Catholics are in for a
hard time if they try to contest the anti-Semitism label which has been imposed on them by Umar
Lee and his Jewish backers in their defense of the statue. One such Catholic provided the
following defense of the statue, while at the same time declining to give his name:
Saint Louis IX was a devout follower of Jesus, who was scrupulously honest, humble, a
generous and unfailing lover and benefactor of the poor, and a peacemaker and unifier of
factions within his kingdom. It is for these and other virtues that he was canonized by the
Church. Just as we don't eliminate the name and statues of Martin Luther King because he was
a womanizer and a plagiarist, nor should we dishonor St. Louis because of his policies toward
Jews and his crusading ventures. These need to be understood in their historical context of
medieval Christendom – very different from today's secularized world. We're told his
statue is "offensive" to Jews and Muslims. Tearing it down would be deeply offensive to
hundreds of thousands of Catholics in this area, and to quite a few others as well.
As the intensity of the conflict surrounding the rosary vigils increased, the author of the
above statement began to wonder if it had been strong enough in stating the case for St. Louis.
When a local priest attempted to debate with the protestors, a shouting match ensued with no
conclusive outcome. The author then brought up the issue of the Crusades by contexualizing it
with a discussion of Zionism:
It's a pity the priest leading the rosary and the other Catholics there didn't defend St.
Louis from the charge of being "genocidal" and a "murderer." The Crusades were basically a
defensive movement against constant Muslim encroachment on the west and Christendom, which
they vowed to conquer and destroy, and to regain the Holy Places in Palestine which they had
seized after the Holy Land had been under Christian control for over three centuries before
the Muslim invasions of the 7th century. What prompted King Louis to embark on a crusade was
that in 1244 Muslim forces invaded Jerusalem, massacred many Christians there and desecrated
churches and holy places. So it wasn't "Islamophobic" or "genocidal" for a Christian king to
want to defend them! How can Jews condemn Christians for seeking to reclaim lands formerly
under Christian control when they themselves (or at least the great majority, who are
Zionists) justified their takeover of Palestine in 1948 for the same reason, namely, that it
belonged to their ancestors until foreigners (the Romans) conquered it and dispersed
them?
He then addressed the issue of burning the Talmud:
St. Louis was following the precepts of Lateran Council IV and the popes of his time in
having copies of the Talmud banned and burned after it was found out that this volume (only
then recently translated from Hebrew) contained repulsive blasphemies against Jesus and the
Blessed Mother. Regarding Mary, "She who was the descendant of princes and governors played
the harlot with carpenters" (Sanhedrin, 106a). As regards Our Lord himself, he is said to be
now in hell, being boiled in "hot excrement" (Gittin, 57a). Why? "Jesus the Nazarene . . .
and his disciples practiced sorcery and black magic, [and] led Jews astray into idolatry"
(Sanhedrin, 43a). "He was sexually immoral, worshipped statues of stone. . . was cut off from
the Jewish people for his wickedness, and refused to repent" (Sanhedrin 107b, Sotah, 47a). He
"learned witchcraft in Egypt" (Shabbos, 104b). [19]
Jonathan Greenblatt
Missing from this discussion is the role Jews play in getting people they don't like
de-platformed from social media, which is the modern day equivalent of burning the Talmud. On
the same Saturday as the protests at the St. Louis statue, all of my books were removed from
Amazon at the behest of the ADL, the main organization promoting Jewish censorship of the
media. Unlike the ADL, the Inquisition gave the books it burned a fair hearing. Now, because of
Jewish concepts like "hate speech," anyone can lose his livelihood without trial or explanation
at the hands of the same people who take umbrage at burning the Talmud. The only thing
necessary is mention of the magic word "anti-Semitism," which ends all discussion and leaves
the accused person guilty without any possibility of clearing his name. St. Louis, according to
our author:
was no "anti-Semite" (which properly speaking is a racial prejudice, like that of
Hitler); but he was indeed anti-Jewish, i.e., against Judaism as a religion, for the reason
that Jews bitterly hated Christianity (as the Talmud demonstrated) and often worked to
undermine the faith of Louis' Christian subjects, whose eternal salvation he sought to
protect. The consistent position taken by the medieval popes was the Jews were not to be
molested, and their worship was to be tolerated, provided they didn't work to oppose or
undermine the faith of the Christian majority. When punitive measures were implemented or
authorized by the Church, it was because the Church judged that Jews were not abiding by that
condition.
As his final point, our author points out that if the Jews had power over Christians to
implement the Talmud which St. Louis ordered burned, Christians would have died. That's because
Jews only believe in tolerance when they are a powerless minority, and they believe in it only
as a strategy to undermine the coherence and unity of the dominant culture until they get the
upper hand, at which point they become ruthless persecutors of those who are weaker than they
are. Israeli treatment of Palestinians is a good indication of how Jews act when they get the
upper hand. Bolshevism in Russia is another example. Once the Bolsheviks seized power in
Russia, the Jews who controlled that movement turned the instruments of state power against the
Russian Christians whom they saw as their ancestral foes by creating instruments of terror like
the Cheka, which was invariably a Jewish-run operation because Russians were reluctant to
torture and murder other Russians, whereas the Jews who made up the majority of that
organization had no such compunction. "St. Louis's medieval methods," our author continues:
were not such as we would find acceptable today, when a much greater degree of religious
toleration and emphasis on individual rights has been a part of Western culture now for
centuries; but we have to understand St. Louis and other great figures of Christendom and
U.S. history in their own historical context. The idea of a religiously "neutral" or secular
state was unheard of anywhere in the world until after the French and American Revolutions
more than 500 years after St. Louis lived. No religion in those days gave much
emphasis to religious toleration. The Jews themselves (never mind the Muslims!) would have
been very oppressive to Christians if they had been in power, as the Jewish laws set out in
the Babylonian Talmud make clear, even though most of them couldn't be implemented. For
instance, "If a gentile hits a Jew, the gentile must be killed" (Sanhedrin, 58b); "When a Jew
murders a gentile there will be no death penalty. What a Jew steals from a gentile he may
keep" (Sanhedrin, 57a). Indeed, gentiles are dehumanized: "All gentile children are animals"
(Yebamoth 98a); "Gentile girls are in a state of niddah [filth] from birth" (Abodah
Zarah, 36b). If this, and the vitriolic Talmud slurs against Jesus and Mary cited above, are
not "hate speech," what is?"
As some indication of the parlous state which Catholic-Jewish dialogue has created in the
Catholic Church, America Magazine turned to a Jewish Lesbian convert to Catholicism, who
explained the situation in St. Louis to its readers in the following way: "King Louis IX, whom
Catholics know as St. Louis, ordered the burning [of the Talmud] after a rigged 'disputation'
in which a Jewish convert to Christianity debated a rabbi about whether the Talmud was
blasphemous." [20] So are the above
passages blasphemous? Are they in the Talmud? If the answer to those questions is yes, in what
sense was the disputation rigged? Eve Tushnet, who is the author of this article as well as the
author of Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith,
never gets around to answering that question. Nor does she tell us whether the statue should be
taken down or left in place, nor does she tell us in what sense someone who describes herself
as a Jewish lesbian has converted to the Catholic faith.
The fact that the author of this eloquent defense of St. Louis chose to remain anonymous out
of fear of retaliation from that city's incoming bishop is a good indication that the violence
will increase. America is now in the middle of a full-blown revolution because largely Jewish
revolutionaries broke the Motion Picture Production Code in 1965 and inundated the country with
pornography and other forms of sexual subversion, which left subsequent generations weakened,
demoralized, and incapable of sustaining their own culture and institutions. The year 1965
inaugurated the failed experiment known as Catholic-Jewish dialogue as well. More than anything
else, the sort of Catholic-Jewish dialogue which the incoming bishop learned at the knee of his
mentor Cardinal Keeler crippled the Catholic Church's ability to defend the moral order in
American society. Repurposed as our "elder brothers" and friends, Jews qua Jews became
the unopposed sponsors of virtually every subversive movement in American culture from abortion
to gay marriage, from race-baiting political correctness to family destroying feminism, from
warmongering neo-Conservatism to brutal shoot-the-protesters-in-the-back Zionism, alienating
people who should have been America's friends because of Israel's barbarous behavior. The Jews
have never abandoned their ancestral commitment to revolution, and now revolution has arrived
at the gates of the Gateway, as the Black revolutionaries who have always been the Jews' proxy
warriors, from the founding of the NAACP to the infusion of George Soros money into the coffers
of Black Lives Matter, broke down the entrance to a gated community two blocks from the St.
Louis statue and continued the march which began after George Floyd died. Threatened by what
looked like a home invasion and abandoned by the local police, who had been told to stand down
by that city's feminist mayor, Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey stood their ground on the front porch of
their house brandishing the weapons that they were forced to exhibit because the cops refused
to come to their assistance when called.
The rally at the statue ended up being much more violent than anticipated as brass-knuckled
Black Lives Matter thugs beat up elderly Catholics who had come to say the Rosary. [21] Some of
the Black Lives Matter demonstrators arrived with firearms. All of the Catholic demonstrators
were unarmed. According to various reports, Black Lives Matter protesters attacked Catholics
praying near the Apotheosis of St. Louis statue in St. Louis. And why did they do this? Were
the Black thugs who took the cane away from a 60-year-old Catholic praying the Rosary and beat
him with it upset about Louis IX burning the Talmud or his position on Albigensianism? I doubt
it. You can view that attack at the link in this footnote. [22] Umar Lee's portrayal
of Catholics as white supremacists, fresh from Charlottesville, is responsible for that
Catholic's injuries. Lee is guilty of incitement. If he and the man who carried out the attack
go unpunished, we can expect more violence.
In reaction to the violence at the statue on Sunday, the Islamic Foundation of Greater St.
Louis issued a stunning rebuke to Umar Lee in a statement on Tuesday, June 31, saying that
removing the statue of St. Louis "will not erase history." The Islamic group went on to say
that they remained "committed to work on interfaith relationships based on honest dialogue and
mutual respect." It did not recommend taking down the statue of St. Louis. Instead it was
saying there were voices of reason in the Islamic community in St. Louis and that Lee's
campaign had no support among the people who did speak for Islam in that city. As one local
Catholic put it after reading the Islamic group's report, "The Jews have overplayed their
hand."
Mr. Greenblatt's attempt to use the ADL to resurrect the Black/Jewish alliance has created
problems of its own. With Israel's annexation of the West Bank looming, the ADL is concerned
that the backlash that the annexation is sure to cause, might spread to its proxy warriors in
Black Lives Matter, as in fact did happen in England [23] :
The "stakeholders analysis memo," which was issued by the ADL's Government Relations,
Advocacy, and Community Engagement department and marked as a draft, warns that the group
will need to find a way to defend Israel from criticism without alienating other civil rights
organizations, elected officials of color, and Black Lives Matter activists and supporters.
The memo suggests that the group hopes to avoid appearing openly hostile to public criticism
of annexation while it works to block legislation that harshly censures Israel or leads to
material consequences, such as conditioning United States military support. [24]
The ADL was not the only Jewish organization supporting Black Lives Matter. According to a a
report in the Jewish Telegraph Agency, "More than 400 Jewish organizations and synagogues in
the United States have signed on to a letter that asserts 'unequivocally: Black Lives Matter.'"
[25] Those groups
represented a broad spectrum "of religious, political, gender, and racial identities. The list
of signatories -- from small congregations to major Jewish organizations -- represents millions
of Jewish people in the United States, the organizers," according to the statement.
The problem in cities like Seattle, Chicago, and St. Louis can be laid at the feet of those
cities' lesbian and feminist public officials, a group which is incapable of enforcing the law
because they see the law as a manifestation of patriarchal oppression. This encourages anarchy
because it allows Jewish-funded thugs like Antifa and Black Lives Matter to act with impunity.
It also encourages political opportunists like Umar Lee to mount assaults on the social order
because they can blackmail those officials because of the guilty conscience which arises from
abortion and sexual perversion. The Church is complicit as well when it appoints bishops who
are known for their skill in appeasing Christ's enemies.
The video of Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey's confrontation in St. Louis garnered over 16 million
views in less than 24 hours, not because violence ensued, but because violence was averted, at
least for the time being. [26] But the assault on
the McCloskeys continues as a signature petition to disbar them is wending its way to the
Jewish head of the local lawyer's disciplinary board. Planning to fight fire with fire, the
McCloskeys have hired a Jewish lawyer to defend them.
As of this writing, St. Louis Circuit attorney Kim Gardner is considering filing charges
against the McCloskey's for defending their home. Gardner was elected in 2017, with the help of
George Soros money. [27] In addition to
supporting Gardner, Soros also funded the Ferguson riots. [28] During Gardner's
tenure as Circuit Attorney, felony prosecutions dropped dramatically. Of the 7,045 felony cases
which the St. Louis Police Department brought before the circuit attorney in 2019, only 1641
were prosecuted, despite claims of significant evidence to prosecute presented by the police
union. [29] After reducing the
cash bond for numerous offences, or removing it altogether, Gardner announced that she was no
longer going to prosecute "low-level" marijuana possession cases. At this point, Gardner
declared war on the State of Missouri. In February 2018, Gardner indicted Missouri Governor
Eric Greitens. [30] Three months later,
the governor's office filed a suit against William Don Tisaby, the ex-FBI agent Gardner had
hired to investigate Greitens. Gardner then went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court to
block the appointment of a special prosecute to investigate her handling of the Greitens
investigation but lost. That grand jury also brought charges of misconduct against Gardner but
ultimately failed to hand down any indictments.
In 2019 Gardner pleaded guilty to repeated campaign finance violations dating back to her
time as a Missouri State Legislator, but avoided conviction by reaching "an agreement with the
Missouri Ethics Commission to pay a settlement of $6,314 in lieu of a $63,009 fine." [31]
In January 2020, Gardner filed a civil rights lawsuit against St. Louis City and St. Louis
Metropolitan Police Department on the basis of the Fourth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment,
and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1865 alleging a racist conspiracy. The City of St. Louis called the
case "meritless," and Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association called it "the
last act of a desperate woman." [32]
On June 3, 2020, Gardner released all 36 of the rioters who had been arrested in the wake of
the George Floyd protests. [33] Gardner is
sympathetic St. Louis's revolutionaries because ever since her election, she has been involved
in her own attempt to overthrow the government. The fate of the McCloskeys, who have been told
that the rioters are planning to return to their house, now rests in the hand of this woman and
the police force she has beaten into submission with the help of George Soros.
Whether violence prevails in the future, no one can say at this point, but the best
indication of its likelihood can be found in the fate of the statue which represents that
city's patron saint, and the fighting spirit it inspires in those who are determined to resist
the Jewish revolutionary spirit, as St. Louis did in Paris eight centuries ago.
[19] The last three
Talmud citations here were accessed 6/26/20 on the Jewish website http://www.noahide.com/yeshu.htm, where they are quoted
with approval in an article arguing Jesus was a "false prophet".
Great article, I had no idea of the background behind these various incidents. I saw each
clip on various media channels, but never knew that they were all connected.
Couple of comments:
1) Jewish-Catholic dialogue appears to be a one way shouting match. I have yet to hear of
Jews altering the Talmud to remove the anti-gentile and anti-Christian passages from that
turgid tome.
2) "nor does she tell us in what sense someone who describes herself as a Jewish lesbian
has converted to the Catholic faith." She's obviously an infiltrator, like several of the
major participants in Vatican II. I'm no Catholic, so I'm not about to lecture anyone on
Church history, but there are a few volumes out there on the founding of the Jesuit order and
how gentiles and jews battled for control of it over subsequent decades. Infiltration of
Christian churches is as much of a Jewish tradition as Purim.
3) It was from your work that I finally gained a better understanding of Jesus and his
criticism of the Pharisees. Shame to see it disappear from Amazon, but I fear anything that
even remotely offends Jewish sensibilities is going to be hard to find in future. I believe
they even banned Jewish historian Leni Brenner's book on the transfer agreement.
Interesting to know about the fake-negro and fake-Muslim Umar Lee or Talcum XX. There's
already a fake-negro from KY who's known as Talcum X. He's the one who is stationed at
Haaaavaaahd who collects 20K a pop for speeches advocating that all non-black portrayals of
Christ and Mary be destroyed and churches burned. His BLM followers seem to have been busy in
the past week. Perhaps E. Michael Jones should do a follow-up on this noxious clown. This was
a very informative article with a lot of insightful background provided.
Interesting to note that the first ones to show any resistance to this atrocity were some
Brazilian Traditionalist Catholics. Most of the ones from Murika are too busy fellating the
BLM (Black Looming Monster) created and funded by nice folks like George Soros, who isn't
even a fake Nazi but an actual Nazi employee who (along with his father) aided the famous
Adolf Eichmann in the asset-looting of Hungarian Jews in the wake of the Nazi overthrow of
Admiral Horthy's regime.
Horthy's government refused to send the local Jews to Hitler even though they were allied
with the Germans in fighting the USSR. Isn't there a special division of the Juctice Dept.
devoted to hunting down folks who were involved even slightly with the Hitler regime?? Guess
when you buy citizenship in the Rotten Banana Empire (Soros' was via a special act of
Congress – the finest money can buy), the fearless Nazi-hunters shy away.
One of the worst things Giuliani did was bring back urban revival. If DEATH-WISH-style NY
had continued, America would have been far more conservative.
All that urban renewal and wealth made the city slickers more cosmo and snotty.
The USA is now so wracked with immorality, perversion and identity politics – its
difficult to see that it has a future.
And having read about Lee and Holt, Talve and Gardner I was instantly reminded of the thread
from yesterday. 'Who Should be Shot?'.
With the infestation of pure evil which is ripping apart the society and internal peace of
the American people – are there no patriots left .?
When there is no law, no protection for decency, fairness and justice – the time must
come when citizens need to defend themselves.
Obviously in St Louis that time has come ..
But the brainwashing now is so deep seated, so professional and so ugly but well financed
– it seems to me that the USA will be consumed from within, without the white
population even turning off their TV sets until the killing, raping and looting hits their
actual front doors.
And it will.
The barbarians are no longer at the gates – they are destroying and 'cleansing' all the
concept of history and any 'American dream'from inside the very heart of the country.
Karma – perhaps.
Since E. Michael Jones endorses Christianity, it is appropriate to remind him that
Christians destroyed the holy places of their rivals, destroying statues and libraries of
antiquity, bringing down holy oaks of Germanic tribes etc..
And you Americans did it in Germany not too long ago, even destroying completely
unpolitical statues of Arno Breker and other artists.
So it is all a bit hypocritical.
Nota bene: I don't endorse this destruction in America, and I even lament this, because I
see it as a sign of weakness of the White race, and I identify as a White man, and I see
those who are bringing those statues down as my enemies. But a bit more self-reflection would
certainly be appropriate, if you want someone to sympathize with you.
I guess it surprises me less that Jesus Christ is still being persecuted by the old Jewish
remnant than that the remnant has found so many allies at this point in our history. I'm
equally unsurprised that a much more effective coalition is thereby being formed to oppose
the remnant. Satan, being a liar from the beginning, always makes the same mistakes. He/She
turns a series of small victories, like rampant pornography and an army of weak, duped
Christian leaders like Hesburgh, into a conflagration that demands a response from God, like
the Resurrection.
"But the brainwashing now is so deep seated, so professional and so ugly but well financed
– it seems to me that the USA will be consumed from within, without the white
population even turning off their TV sets until the killing, raping and looting hits their
actual front doors."
I see no evidence that you are wrong. And Trump fiddles while America burns.
And you Americans did it in Germany not too long ago, even destroying completely
unpolitical statues of Arno Breker and other artists.
Breker was artist to the Third Reich, which was a political movement and hostile to
Christianity. While Jones thoroughly condemns all aspects of Nazism he does believe the rise
of Hitler and the Third Reich is attributable to Bolshevism.
Fortunately the cultural record of the 20th century is quite full and easy to access. And what
I see is, until the 60s, Catholics getting along just fine.
The Motion Picture Production Code, before that the Hays Code, certainly pre-Lambeth, when
Protestants and Catholics worked together, America was a paradise, compared to today's
Godforsaken mess.
They could have kept things that way. But the Jews gained game-changing power after WWII. And
since you couldnt name them, you couldnt fight them. And since you couldnt fight them, you lost.
Father
Coughlin , says: July 14, 2020 at 2:42 pm
GMT
appropriate to remind him that Christians destroyed the holy places of their rivals,
destroying statues and libraries of antiquity, bringing down holy oaks of Germanic tribes
etc..
Nope. They Christianized them. Pulled out of them what was true, noble and beautiful and
modified what was error.
Jul 12, 2020 Tyrants HATE This 500 Year Old Trick for Ending Tyranny
The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, the 16th century treatise on tyranny and obedience by
Étienne de La Boétie. James and Keith highlight some of the book's key insights
and detail how they apply every much to our situation today as they did when they were
written.
Jun 29, 2020 Armed Couple Facing BLM Mob SPEAK OUT "We Were In FEAR OF OUR LIVES The
Agitators WERE WHITE"!!!
When an angry and unruly BLM mob trespassed onto private property homeowners Mark and
Patricia McCloskey armed themselves to protect their lives and their property after the mob
uttered threats that they would kill them.
August 22, 2017 The racist origin of gun control laws
Congress demolished these racist laws. The Freedmen's Bureau Bill of 1865, Civil Rights Act
of 1866, and Civil Rights Act of 1870 each guaranteed all persons equal rights of self-defense.
Most importantly, the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, made the Second Amendment applicable to
the states.
@Chu N – In a
letter to the American people, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew today announced plans for the
new $20, $10 and $5 notes, with the portrait of Harriet Tubman to be featured on the front of
the new $20.
Secretary Lew also announced plans for the reverse of the new $10 to feature an image of the
historic march for suffrage that ended on the steps of the Treasury Department and honor the
leaders of the suffrage movement -- Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul. The front of the new $10 note will maintain the portrait of
Alexander Hamilton.
This is a very stupid and uneducated reply. There is so much evidence of wholesale
destruction of "pagan" heritage by Christians. No serious Christian scholar denies this. Read a
bit on the topic.
It is amazing to me how adding that X-factor to the equation seemingly always makes the
incomplete picture make perfect sense. Tucker led his show with the McCloskey story last night,
but he can't say outright many of the hidden variables. He does a better job than anyone in the
MSM by far at leading the horse to water, but will they drink?
though it should be remembered that our Republic was founded upon people saying no to unjust
laws and compacts, hence the Declaration of Independence!
Thus Martin Luther King Jr promotion of non-violent opposition to injustice should not be
condemned, for it is part of the greater important tradition in this country, and it was
precisely the fork-saluting weather underground marxist maoist thugs abetted by funding through
the Ford Foundation, etc to Soros of this day, that wanted to stop King, through murder, to
launch violence and race war as that strategy of divide and conquer is now being deployed once
again.
For it should be remembered that King, like Trump today, was calling out against the Vietnam
war, as Trump was the only antiwar candidate in 2016 against the Obama Bin Bush Bin Clinton Bin
Bush perpetual war machine, where the call for Trump's assassination is by those who want to
stay in Afghanistan, saw nothing wrong with destroying the African nation of Libya by a black
President Obama, the destruction of Syria, etc and are hell bent on stopping cooperation for
world development upon the McKinley American System Model which the Belt and Road and New Silk
Road initiatives were modeled.
Trump unfortunately is in bed with some very poisonous elements, but some of those elements
even understand that no one will survive a nuclear war very much on the table and being
provoked by various elements .
As Joe Biden tries to split the difference between the midwestern swing-state voters and the
Sanders faithful,
he's released an economic plan - a plan that bears the imprimatur of his one-time foe
Bernie Sanders - that, in its attempt to be everything to every one, effectively promises
everything to every one.
Buy American. Green New Deal. Corporate tax hikes. Trillions of dollars spent on
infrastructure to install the latest eco-nonsense with money that should be going to roads,
bridges, rails and airports. Docks and highways. Things people actually need and use. And who
knows? Depending on his running mate, maybe we'll get a massive student-debt jubilee, too. All
on the federal government's tab.
Now that MMT has gone from fringe idea to mainstream, making Stephanie Kelton, a
cryptomarxist who believes that the link between value and money can be completely severed, so
long as we tax the wealthiest among us enough to keep inflation low. It doesn't take a genius
to suspect that an 'economic theory' grounded in the idea that governments can take on
unlimited amounts of debt and never stick anybody with the tab sounds absurd - even
dangerous.
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We say dangerous because Kelton's greatest sin is offering pandering politicians more cover
to encourage their spendthrift ways. During a recent interview with Macro Hive, former Central
Bank of India Governor and University of Chicago Professor Raghuram Rajan delivered a succinct
and insightful explanation of why MMT is so dangerous.
"We talked about sustainability and one of the big topics in markets at least is this
whole idea of QE MMT infinity, the ability of sovereigns to borrow. Now in developed
countries, they have historical capital they've built up and credibility," Rajan's
interviewer began. "But you're starting to also see this idea...you're starting to see more
emerging market countries experiment with it, including Indonesia and several others."
But at the same time "yields are very low, and if you look at emerging market spreads,
they're very low...so markets are telling you that they aren't worried. Yet we know debt levels
are high, and there's more talk in debt markets of QE and MMT."
Does the fact that markets seem content with the status quo (at least for now) validate
Kelton's argument?
Of course not, Rajan explained. Because while the complexities of the global financial
system, and the dollar's role within it, have allowed the Fed to spearhead this great monetary,
as the veteran central banker explained, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
"We know that markets can be complacent until a certain point and then they turn on a
time. We are at this point in a benign phase supported by an enormous amount of central bank
liquidity emanating from the primary reserve currencies, the euro area, the US Fed and to
some extent the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England."
"But we must also recognize is that there are no free lunches. If there's one statement
you want to keep to pound into the head of every policy maker, it's that there are no free
lunches. If you borrow today, there is a presumption that it will be repaired at some point,
so you are in a sense taking away resources from somebody else in the future."
" Now it may be a generation or two down the line will be on the hook for this ...whether
they can pass it on to their children is an open question...but you're definitely taking away
their ability to borrow by borrowing today."
.While burdening future generations doesn't seem to come up much in cryptomarxist essays
about the moral imperative of expansive fiscal spending - some have gone so far as to argue
that the federal government has a moral obligation to forgive student debt - Rajan acknowledges
that the idea is "seductive" for all the wrong reasons.
"So the idea that there are free lunches...which certainly is what the lay person takes
away from MMT...is very sort of attractive, seductive - but it's absolute nonsense."
If that's the message that's going to be communicated, then that's wrong.
Asked to elaborate, he continued...
"There are times when you can spend a little bit more, but you are still making a trade off
and evaluating this trade off well...I think that's the right thing to do. If that's the
message from MMT, then I'm fine with that. There are periods where you have more leeway."
"The message can't be 'Don't Worry, Be Happy' it has to be 'yes take advantage of periods
when you have a little more spending capacity but use it wisely, because there's no such thing
as a free lunch and you will have to repay it at some point... that's what any sensible
economic theory will tell you, and I think that's what we understand now."
"When banks aren't lending, when inflation is low, it is possible for the central bank to
expand its balance sheet somewhat ...and finance more activities that the government wants to
undertake. That doesn't mean it's free debt it's equivalent to debt issued by the government -
think of the central bank issuing debt as the same as the government issuing debt: it's the
consolidated balance sheet you're looking at."
"Somebody is responsible for payment, it's either the central bank or the government."
"At low interest rates it doesn't really matter who it is, but as inflation picks ups it
does matter a little more who it is because the central bank often is financing itself with
effectively forced loans from the banking sector, and there's a limit to how much the banking
sector is willing to do that, especially as economic activity picks up."
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"So my sense is yes there is some room now but it doesn't mean the debt level doesn't matter
and it doesn't mean that we should just keep spending without thought of who's going to repay.
And I think the big philosophical issues are how much are you going to bail out companies...why
should Joe Schmoe...why should his taxes go to bail out a capital owner? After all, neither of
them saw the pandemic coming...neither is responsible for the pandemic...so why should one bail
out the property rights of another?"
"It strikes me these guys who want to open up the government wallet and spend to protect
everybody from the consequences of the pandemic don't realize that there's one person who's
bearing the hit: it may not be you, but it might be your children."
"And the question is: Why do they have to pay when they have no part in this?"
Remember: As Rajan explains, we must recognize that our resources are limited and use them
wisely. Keep that in mind when Democratic politicians are trying to spend trillions of dollars
of public money to outfit private buildings with solar panels or whatever 'Green New Deal'
infrastructure travesty AOC & Co come up with.
Funny how the visa-free map from before the COVID-19 pandemic is roughly equal to the
extent of the American Empire itself.
And the loss of foreign students signifies much more than the mere loss of income for the
American universities: it also means the loss of grip over the provinces' regional
elites.
Most of the foreign students in the USA are sons and daughters of the regional elites.
They live the American way of life, get westernized, and go back to their countries (which
they will likely rule) with a liberal ideology ingrained in their minds. They are the rough
equivalent to what the hostage was during Antiquity. To lose 263,000 hostages in less than
one year would be a devastating blow to American diplomacy.
One commenter mentioned a brain drain in relation to foreign students no longer coming to
America but I guess the brain drain will occur when out of work professors start heading off
to other countries like China in search of work.
It's now canonized in American public opinion, as the NYT has published an authorial
article (in the pedantic upper middle class I-wanna-win-a-Pulitzer style) about it:
The Danish Energy Agency (DEA) has announced a deadline after which it will be possible
to begin work on completing the Russian Nord Stream-2 gas export pipeline, RIA Novosti
reported with reference to the regulator's statement.
If you search through the web, you find reports in the Western media about Denmark giving
its approval in 2019. It reneged on that decision. . But nothing on the Danish decision the
other day.
Tucker Carlson escalated the ongoing war between FOX News and CNN Wednesday, bringing
attention to Don Lemon for breathtaking hypocrisy on issues of black family culture.
TUCKER CARLSON: If you're running a channel like CNN, you want dumb people on tv because
they are compliant. They will say what they are told. They will tell the audience with the
moment demands. They will level stray from the script and that's exactly what Mr. Lemon is
doing. Seven years ago it was a different country and people were kind of a lot to say what
they thought was true. At the time, here's what Don Lemon was saying about black communities.
Watch this.
DON LEMON: More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of
wedlock. That means absent fathers. And the studies show that lack of a male role model is an
express train right to prison and the cycle continues. So, please, black folks, as I said if
this doesn't apply to you, I'm not talking to you. Pay attention to and think about what has
been presented in recent history as acceptable behavior. Pay close attention to the hip-hop and
rap culture that many of you embrace. A culture that glorifies everything I just mentioned,
thug and reprehensible behavior, a culture that is making a lot of people rich, just not you.
And it's not going to.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. Can you imagine what would happen if Don Lemon or his bodybuilding
buddy over there or any of these people said something like that? On CNN tonight or MSNBC? It
would be their last live broadcast ever. They would be fired immediately. You can't express
views like that. So they don't.
"... "People who are actually 'cancelled' don't get their thoughts published and amplified in major outlets," ..."
"... "held accountable" ..."
"... "an entire TV network" ..."
"... "stoking hatred" ..."
"... "white supremacist [with] a popular network show" ..."
"... "in dangerous ways," ..."
"... You and your mob have been destroying careers and reputations and livelihoods on a whim. Now you're being hoist by your own petard. Those of us blacklisted, libeled, and falsely maligned have zero sympathy. You all started it. May you be devoured by it. https://t.co/PGzMzNa0ku ..."
"... "fired from their jobs and have their livelihoods threatened." ..."
"... There was similar disillusionment with the lawmaker's assertion that she is being maliciously smeared by news networks and "white supremacists." "You're not a victim, you're a United States congresswoman," observed an unsympathetic Twitter user. ..."
"... Whether AOC wants to acknowledge it or not, a seemingly endless internet crusade has ruined the lives of countless individuals (many of them private citizens with little or no power) accused of holding politically incorrect views or of expressing insensitive remarks. ..."
"... An open letter published by Harper's Magazine which criticized the "vogue for public shaming and ostracism" among journalists, academics, and other figures ended up backfiring spectacularly after several signatories of the document rescinded their endorsements. They explained that they'd been unaware that 'problematic' people had also signed the letter. ..."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has denied the existence of cancel culture, suggesting it is an
invention of privileged moaners who can't handle criticism. Her thesis prompted speculation
that the powerful lawmaker has no self-awareness. The rookie New York congresswoman, whose
'woke' Twitter takes have made her a hero to many on the Left, attempted to debunk the concept
of cancel culture in a series of profound posts.
"People who are actually 'cancelled' don't get their thoughts published and amplified in
major outlets," she argued , adding that the whiners who
complain about being 'cancelled' are actually just entitled and hate being "held
accountable" or "unliked."
To prove her point, she claimed that "an entire TV network" is dedicated to
"stoking hatred" of her, and that a "white supremacist [with] a popular network
show" regularly misrepresents her "in dangerous ways," but that she never
complains about it. (The congresswoman may be referring to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who is
white and undoubtedly not a fan of hers.)
According to Ocasio-Cortez, the people who "actually" get cancelled are
anti-capitalists and even abolitionists – apparently a hat-tip to activists who
campaigned to end slavery, which was formally abolished in the United States in 1865 with the
ratification of the 13th Amendment.
Her airtight dissertation received poor marks from many on social media, however. Countless
comments accused her of being part of the very movement which she claims doesn't exist.
"You and your mob have been destroying careers and reputations and livelihoods on a whim.
Now you're being hoist by your own petard," quipped actor James Woods.
You and your mob have been destroying careers and reputations and livelihoods on a
whim. Now you're being hoist by your own petard. Those of us blacklisted, libeled, and
falsely maligned have zero sympathy. You all started it. May you be devoured by it.
https://t.co/PGzMzNa0ku
Others argued that AOC was technically correct. Instead of having their views broadcast by
mainstream outlets, 'cancelled' individuals are often "fired from their jobs and have their
livelihoods threatened."
Correct. Instead, they are often fired from their jobs, harassed by twitter mobs, &
have their livelihoods threatened. And so since they cannot speak up, we who have a platform
choose to use our power responsibly to speak up on their behalf. You should do the same. Join
us, AOC https://t.co/lQ5yiuKFq6
There was similar disillusionment with the lawmaker's assertion that she is being
maliciously smeared by news networks and "white supremacists." "You're not a victim, you're a
United States congresswoman," observed an unsympathetic Twitter
user.
However, her remarks also garnered applause from social media users, who dismissed cancel
culture as a right-wing talking point.
Cancel culture is fake. It's a right wing framing of social accountability and people need
to stop giving the term any credence.
Whether AOC wants to acknowledge it or not, a seemingly endless internet crusade has
ruined the lives of countless individuals (many of them private citizens with little or no
power) accused of holding politically incorrect views or of expressing insensitive
remarks.
An open letter published by Harper's Magazine which criticized the "vogue for public
shaming and ostracism" among journalists, academics, and other figures ended up backfiring
spectacularly after several signatories of the document rescinded their endorsements. They
explained that they'd been unaware that 'problematic' people had also signed the
letter.
A robot that neutralizes aerosolized forms of the coronavirus could soon be coming to a supermarket
near you. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory team partnered with Ava
Robotics to develop a device that can kill roughly 90% of COVID-19 on surfaces in a 4,000-square-foot
space in 30 minutes.
"This is such an exciting idea to use the solution as a hands-free, safe way to neutralize dorms,
hallways, hospitals, airports -- even airplanes," Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, told Yahoo Finance's
"The
Ticker."
The key to disinfecting large spaces in a short amount of time is the UV-C light fixture
designed
at MIT
. It uses short-wavelength ultraviolet light that eliminates microorganisms by breaking down
their DNA. The UV-C light beam is attached to Ava Robotic's mobile base and can navigate a warehouse
in a similar way as a self-driving car.
"The robot is controlled by some powerful algorithms that compute exactly where the robot has to go
and how long it has to stay in order to neutralize the germs that exist in that particular part of the
space," Rus said.
This robot can kill roughly 90% of COVID-19 on surfaces in a 4,000 square foot space in 30
minutes. (Courtesy: Alyssa Pierson, MIT CSAIL)
More
Currently, the robot is being tested at the Greater Boston Food Bank's shipping area and focuses on
sanitizing products leaving the stockroom to reduce any potential threat of spreading the coronavirus
into the community.
"Here, there was a unique opportunity to provide additional disinfecting power to their current
workflow, and help reduce the risks of COVID-19 exposure," said Alyssa Pierson, CSAIL research
scientist and technical lead of the UV-C lamp assembly.
But Rus explains implementing the robot in other locations does face some challenges. "The light
emitted by the robot is dangerous to humans, so the robot cannot be in the same space as humans. Or,
if people are around the robot, they have to wear protective gear," she added.
While Rus didn't provide a specific price tag, she said the cost of the robot is still high, which may
be a hurdle for broad distribution. In the future, "Maybe you don't need to buy an entire robot set,
you can book the robot for a few hours a day to take care of your space," she said.
McKenzie Stratigopoulos is a producer at Yahoo Finance. Follow
her on Twitter:
@mckenziestrat
Would CNN's Don Lemon cancel himself over shockingly unwoke 2013 tips to black
community?
A vintage clip of CNN anchor Don Lemon telling black people to act civilized and
disregard "street culture" has the woke pundit's detractors' jaws on the floor, wondering what
happened to him over the intervening seven years. In the 2013 clip, Lemon praises Fox News host
Bill O'Reilly as the Republican pundit decries the " disintegration of the African-American
family ," even arguing O'Reilly " doesn't go far enough " when he denounces "
street culture. " The video was posted to social media by " Panda Tribune " on
Wednesday and quickly circulated among conservatives, who had a hard time reconciling this
Lemon with his painfully-PC modern-day counterpart.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the segment on his show Wednesday night, marveling that
if Lemon or one of his colleagues came out with those lines in 2020, " that would be their
last live broadcast ever - they'd be fired immediately ."
Groupthink is all around us. Decision-making in government, in the media and at work. It's
slowly killing the world.
In the background of the most important events, the Covid-19 response and increasing tension
and conflict in the world, it might be worth looking through some of this in a bit more
detail.
I've experienced groupthink working for large organisations, most notably in my last job. We
were tasked with investigating and solving complex problems. Some technical expertise helped
but was not crucial to the role.
Critical thinking and balancing evidence and differing viewpoints was key.
Yet the organisation decided that this was no longer required and changed the whole
operating model to a one-size fits all type of call-centre. This new high-risk approach was
recommended to us by the outside consultants Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) who were clueless
about our business.
Those of us who were experienced in the role argued that the model wouldn't work. But the
organisation ploughed on regardless. It was obvious from day one that the financials didn't
stack up which they tried to deny and later concealed.
The executive largely ignored our concerns to start but then paid limited lip-service when
the wheels started to come off. Anyway, in the end they offered us redundancy while employing
fresh university graduates to replace us. As far as I know the place is still in denial and
heading down the pan.
Groupthink is a term first used in 1972 by
social psychologist Irving L. Janis that refers to a psychological phenomenon in which
people strive for consensus within a group. In many cases, people will set aside their own
personal beliefs or adopt the opinion of the rest of the group.
People who are opposed to the decisions or overriding opinion of the group as a whole
frequently remain quiet, preferring to keep the peace rather than disrupt the uniformity of the
crowd'.
Groupthink is common where group members have similar backgrounds and particularly where
that group is placed under stress, resulting in irrational decision outcomes.
These are the main behaviors to watch out for:
Illusions of invulnerability lead members of the group to be overly optimistic and
engage in risk-taking.
Unquestioned beliefs lead members to ignore possible moral problems and ignore the
consequences of individual and group actions.
Rationalising prevents members from reconsidering their beliefs and causes them to
ignore warning signs.
Stereotyping leads members of the in-group to ignore or even demonise out-group members
who may oppose or challenge the group's ideas.
Self-censorship causes people who might have doubts to hide their fears or
misgivings.
"Mindguards" act as self-appointed censors to hide problematic information from the
group.
Illusions of unanimity lead members to believe that everyone is in agreement and feels
the same way.
Direct pressure to conform is often placed on members who pose questions, and those who
question the group are often seen as disloyal or traitorous.
There are two further observations I made in the workplace, particularly relevant to groups
going through major change or/and a crisis.
Firstly, they tend to swing from the status quo to the complete opposite. In our
organisation, we definitely needed some changes and tweaks but we lurched towards a model which
was completely unsuitable and unsustainable operationally and financially.
The other thing I noticed was our employers became control freaks. They started to talk down
to us and our customers like children. They introduced office slogans such as 'let's crack on'
or 'we're all in this together' and deflected from the problems of the disastrous
reorganisation towards 'celebrating diversity' in the workplace. Critical thinking, creativity
and expression were sucked out of the place.
The obvious analogy for all these behaviors is the response to Covid-19 when government
ministers were collectively panicked into making
extreme decisions on lockdown , using just one preferred source of 'expertise'.
At the same time, they sidelined dissenters and independent experts who could have offered a
calm, rational perspective and a targeted response to Covid-19.
In summing up this thinking and behavior, I'm reminded of these observations from Dr Malcolm
Kendrick and Lord Sumption about the response to Covid-19. Dr Kendrick
here :
We locked down the population that had virtually zero risk of getting any serious problems
from the disease, and then spread it wildly among the highly vulnerable age group. If you had
written a plan for making a complete bollocks of things you would have come up with this
one".
The Prime Minister, who in practice makes most of the decisions, has low political cunning
but no governmental skills whatever. He is incapable of studying a complex problem in depth.
He thinks as he speaks – in slogans.
These people have no idea what they are doing, because they are unable to think about more
than one thing at a time or to look further ahead than the end of their noses.
THE BBC – A CASE-STUDY
A large organisation which has
a high opinion of its news service . But of course, the reality is the opposite. There are
so many groupthink case-studies but the BBC is as good as any, particularly in terms of making
a bollocks of things.
The executives at the BBC and some senior correspondents will no doubt be aware that they
run a politicised agenda of bias and misinformation on a grand scale. Outsiders who've
researched their coverage will recognise this too. But this won't be obvious to the vast
majority of BBC employees, the victims of groupthink.
This came across in some of Andrew Marr's incredulous reactions to Noam Chomsky's
observations about the media during their
interview :
Andrew Marr: How can you know I'm self-censoring?
Noam Chomsky: I'm not saying you're self-censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you
say. But what I'm saying is if you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where
you're sitting.
I believe the foreign affairs reporting of the BBC is where this problem stands out most.
Real expertise and impartiality has been completely absent from any reporting I've seen in
recent years.
First, while not unusual in this profession, most journalists employed by the BBC will have
a degree. Typically, when you look at today's 'top' BBC journalists, many have attended the
elite universities which tends to create a culture of like-minded people of similar
backgrounds. This has been identified as one cause of creating groupthink.
Also, the younger journalists will be impressionable within the BBC hierarchy to the views
and ways of the senior house-hold name journalists.
It's sometimes said that there aren't specific rules within the BBC and other media stating
what a journalist can and can't report and write and they generally don't knowingly mislead.
But they will learn almost instinctively to self-censor and operate within a set of unwritten,
unspoken rules and a strait-jacket narrative.
The other problem in foreign affairs reporting is that BBC journalists and most others
rarely visit the warzones. On Syria, they typically report from Lebanon or Turkey only
occasionally venturing into a government or relatively safe terrorist or Kurd held area. So
unlike previous conflicts, such as Bosnia where I remember at least a tiny degree of balance,
journalists seldom see what is actually going on.
Under the pressure of deadlines they rely on dubious sources such as
Al Qaeda terrorists and
Bellingcat and pre-determined assumptions which conveniently slot in with the anti-Assad
narrative of the BBC and establishment.
The investigations of Robert Stuart into a likely
previously staged incident involving BBC journalist s was swept under the carpet. Both
matters have been ignored because the BBC have no way or will to refute evidence which goes
against their bias.
On the other hand, the BBC are more than happy to provide extensive coverage to more
allegations against Russia and Trump from anonymous sources, providing no background or
balance within the overall of climate of related allegations which have collapsed or are
unproven.
It's well known BBC journalists are silent on malpractice. We saw this with the
Jimmy Savile scandal and decades of sexual abuse. This attitude is similar to what I
experienced with my employer who were very vocal and proud of their anti-bullying and mental
health policies. Yet when the staff were surveyed anonymously, bullying rates were through the
roof.
The other obvious signs of groupthink within the BBC, particularly during the Covid-19
crisis, is
dumbing-down and its slogan-filled website written as though their readers are idiots.
Another strong theme is a preoccupation with race and diversity, American affairs and
general tittle-tattle, to the detriment of more pressing matters such as the longer-term and
wider impact of the world's current problems.
Covid-19 and our response to it is probably the most important event of our lifetime but
there's barely a peep about whether the response is necessary and proportionate. Instead, this
totally rational viewpoint is only ever mentioned in the context of BBC articles about
Covid-19 'conspiracy theories' .
Many of the examples I've described neatly fit in with groupthink behaviors and experiences
I encountered in a large organisation.
But I think the biggest groupthink problem is with senior BBC journalists. Ultimately their
lazy arrogance has trickled down to the newer journalists and so over time, wrong behavior has
been normalised throughout.
THE BBC 'GRANDEES'
A few months ago Huw Edwards
made some comments about accusations of bias directed towards the BBC, defending the
corporation and journalists. These are some of the specific comments he made which to me showed
a complete lack of understanding of the concerns people have.
The BBC is not, to put it politely, run like some newspapers, with an all-powerful
proprietor and/or editor making his or her mark on the tone and direction of the coverage [ ]
BBC News is a rather unsettling mix of awkward, contrary and assertive people who (in my very
long experience) delight in either ignoring the suggestions of managers or simply telling
them where to get off. That's how it works."
Around this time, I also recall Edwards arguing on
Twitter on the subject and he said that it was ridiculous to say that journalists within
the BBC were willfully misleading the public. His Twitter opponent replied that this was not
what he had said and was simply stating that the BBC had fallen victim to groupthink. Edwards
just couldn't get his head past this, while continuing to attack and misrepresent BBC
critics.
This defensive attitude and stereotyping of critics is classic groupthink behavior in which
he,
Nick Robinson and others have taken part.
I used to admire John Simpson and in the 1980s he visited Iran post-revolution. He wrote a
book of the visit which I enjoyed. But in recent years, he has shown that he doesn't understand
modern geo-politics and like the BBC can only assess it in terms of the ethno-centric British
view on the world and our influence.
In this President Putin press conference he asked the most ridiculous question imaginable
which confirms he's lost the plot. His question was about Russian behavior in the world and
whether Putin wanted to create a new Cold War.
Putin
wiped the floor with him pointing out the hundreds of NATO bases and numerous wars which
put Simpson's aspersions into their rightful place.
Jeremy Bowen is another who has lost his way. I saw a
recent report from him from the position of a Christian militia unit fighting terrorists in
Syria.
Again,
BBC arrogance was on full display . His report made generalised comparisons between him
meeting Serbs in Bosnia in the 1990s and these Syrian fighters, clearly indicating that he
doesn't listen and is not interested in Syrian views on western complicity and the White
Helmets.
In the usual group-speak he described the Syrian Government 'the regime' and Al Qaeda as
'rebels'. His report simply rubber-stamped the BBC coverage of the whole conflict.
This arrogance is typical of journalists who rely on their past achievements, creating an
air of gravitas to impress their audience. The reality is his reporting is based on no
substance and outdated and lazy assumptions.
THE MADNESS OF JOHN SWEENEYNEVER
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Ex-BBC nowadays, John Sweeney's arrogance is off the scale. These days he spends his time on
Twitter
attacking lockdown sceptics , like Peter Hitchens accusing him of 'killing' his Mail on
Sunday column readers with his views on Covid-19 lockdown.
Sweeney is off his trolley but the reality is he probably always was as this clip during his
BBC days shows.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/mjlo4u_8g60
This behaviour, extreme as it is, certainly suggests groupthink played a big part somewhere
in his career.
AN ILLUSION OF SANITY
BBC Dateline is a current affairs TV panel discussion which I occasionally watched. The
panel which changed regularly were seemingly well qualified with foreign writers and
journalists which included Russia or Arab affairs experts.
Sitting around that table they gave the impression of people who knew what they were talking
about.
However, when you listened carefully to what they were saying, there was very little
substance. Their arguments, all based on a simple premise that Russia/Syria are bad, the West
is good, tempered with a little occasional criticism of western policy to give the illusion of
balance.
Occasionally you would have a more pro-Russia expert on but with the prevailing consensus of
the rest of the panel, his or her views would be ridiculed. It got to the point any dissenting
panel member started to self-censor to sound more credible, perhaps to remain on the panel.
This is the dilemma for any progressively minded BBC guest nowadays.
Peter Hitchens who complains the BBC never invite him on, appeared on Good Morning Britain
(GMB) recently. As is normal with many GMB debates, the discussion on Covid-19 descended to
retorts and abuse and was simply not the forum for Hitchens to get across his well thought
out points on the big picture.
But I don't think he would have fared any better on the BBC. The BBC create an illusion of
civilised, intelligent discussion but the reality is there is no substance, depth or balance.
The crucial discussion points about Covid-19 or conflict in the world don't get a hearing. The
premise and the rules are already set in stone before the guests arrive.
FINAL
THOUGHTS
There are many reasons why the world is in its current madness and on the brink of serious
conflict.
Groupthink in government, the media and the general public is probably a key factor as this
represents the thinking culture alongside and below the psychopaths and war criminals who pull
the strings.
It's almost impossible to break this cycle by chipping away at it. But it's possible a large
event connected to Covid-19 or a major war will be the catalyst which might shock us out of our
distorted view of reality.
In the meantime, independent commentators and ex-MSM like Peter Hitchens,
Anna Brees and
Tareq Haddad , are putting their careers on the line and self-interests aside. We can only
encourage others employed by the BBC and other media to be brave and do the same.
Certainly, the consequences will be far more disastrous doing nothing and not speaking
up.
In the sudden, new founded willingness to demonstrate on the streets perhaps those
participating might be better reflecting on who and what the real enemy is.
Party politics, Brexit and Black Lives Matter really don't matter.
Groupthink, escalating world conflict, All Lives Matter, including Syrians, Libyans,
Palestinians and Blacks,(including those outside of US,UK and Europe) together with the
post-Covid-19 march to an uncertain 'new normal', are the issues which matter right now.
During the pandemic, readers may recall several of our pieces describing what life would be
like in a post corona world.
From restaurants to
flying to gambling to hotels to
gyms to interacting with people to even
housing trends - we highlighted how social distancing would transform the economy.
As the transformation becomes more evident by the week, we want to focus on automation and
artificial intelligence - and how these two things are allowing hotels, well at least one in
California, to accommodate patrons with contactless room service.
Hotel Trio in Healdsburg, California, is surrounded by wineries and restaurants in
Healdsburg/Sonoma County region, recently hired a new worker named "Rosé the Robot" that
delivers food, water, wine, beer, and other necessities, reported
Sonoma Magazine .
"As Rosé approaches a room with a delivery, she calls the phone to let the guest know
she's outside. A tablet-sized screen on Rosé's head greets the guest as they open the
door, and confirms the order. Next, she opens a lid on top of her head and reveals a storage
compartment containing the ordered items. Rosé then communicates a handful of questions
surrounding customer satisfaction via her screen. She bids farewell, turns around and as she
heads back toward her docking station near the front desk, she emits chirps that sound like a
mix between R2D2 and a little bird," said Sonoma Magazine.
Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Atmospheric Research Group in San Francisco,
said robots would be integrated into the hotel experience.
"This is a part of travel that will see major growth in the years ahead," Harteveldt
said.
Rosé is manufactured by Savioke, a San Jose-based company that has dozens of robots
in hotels nationwide.
The tradeoff of a contactless environment where automation and artificial intelligence
replace humans to mitigate the spread of a virus is permanent
job loss .
"... Whoever gets elected will certainly affect details of how the ship sinks ..."
"... I have come to hate the Maoist/Jacobin scum today referred to as "The Left". I want Trump to get a second term because it will cause my enemies to suffer. ..."
"... The real question in dire need of asking is: Do the Next 10 Presidential Elections Even Matter? And the answer remains: not a dime's worth of difference. "We the People" will continue to witness the same electoral circus complete with its fake debates as our elite's addiction to war will be craving its habitual fix. "We the People" are too stupefied and mired in our own addictions to cell phones and other mind numbing gadgets while being fed a steady diet of lies by the MSM. Our awakening is too remote for us to take back our country. ..."
"... Once again, talk is cheap. Why would the "deep state" "hate" him so much? Did he investigate 9/11? Did he end any wars, or pull out of NATO, or improve relations with Russia and/or China, or cut aid to Israel, etc.? No. ..."
"... I think there are some key differences here on what could take shape. If Biden wins, the Republicans can put down the Trump saga as a regrettable mistake and go back to being the boring old Jen Bush party moaning about lowering taxes for the rich and abortion. ..."
"... However if Trump wins, the Republicans will have to acknowledge that people support Trumpism and will have to start re orientating the party towards Trumpian Populism in future elections as they will realize that it is a permanent vote winner. ..."
"... One of guys on The Duran said that the politicians on the Left and Right don't care about Black Lives Matter, the statues, history, gender wars, gay this/LGXYZ that, the culture wars. That doesn't really concern them; they'll just let the sheeple fight it out. ..."
"... What they DO care about is their corporate masters, the people they are really beholden to. As long as their masters continue to make money and the culture wars don't disturb that, then all is well. ..."
The fact is that for the past four years the US liberals have waged a total informational war against Trump and it would be absolutely
unthinkable for them to ever accept a Trump re-election, even if he wins by a landslide. For the US Dems and neo-liberals, Trump
is the personification of evil, literally, and that means that "resistance" to him and everything he represents must be total. And
if he is re-elected, then there is only one possible explanation: the Russians stole the election, or the Chinese did. But the notion
that Trump has the support of a majority of people is literally unthinkable for these folks.
Truth be told, Trump has proven to be a fantastically incompetent President, no doubt about that. Was he even worse than Obama?
Maybe, it really all depends on your scoring system. In my personal opinion, and for all his very real sins and failings, Trump,
at least, did not start a major war, which Obama did, and which Hillary would have done (can't prove this, but that is my personal
belief). That by itself, and totally irrespective of anything else, makes me believe that Trump has been a "lesser evil" (even if
far more ridiculous) President than Obama has been or Hillary would have been. This is what I believed four years ago and this is
what I still believe: considering how dangerous for the entire planet "President Hillary" would have been, voting for Trump was not
only the only logical thing to do, it was the only moral one too because giving your voice to a warmongering narcissistic hyena like
Hillary is a profoundly immoral act (yes, I know, Trump is also a narcissist – most politicians are! – but at least his warmongering
has been all hot air and empty threats, at least so far). However, I don't think that this (not having started a major war) will
be enough to get Trump re-elected.
Why?
Because most Americans still like wars. In fact, they absolutely love them. Unless, of course, they lose. What Americans really
want is a President who can win wars, not a President who does not initiate them in the first place. This is also the most likely
reason why Trump did not start any major wars: the US has not won a real war in decades and, instead, it got whipped in every conflict
it started. Americans hate losing wars, and that is why Trump did not launch any wars: it would have been political suicide to start
a real war against, say, the DPRK or Iran. So while I am grateful that Trump did not start any wars, I am not naive to the point
of believing that he did so for pure and noble motives. Give Trump an easy victory and he will do exactly what all US Presidents
have done in the past: attack, beat up the little guy, and then be considered like a "wartime President hero" by most Americans.
The problem is that there are no more "little guys" left out there: only countries who can, and will, defend themselves if attacked.
The ideology of messianic imperialism which permeates the US political culture is still extremely powerful and deep seated and
it will take years, probably decades, to truly flush it down to where it belongs: to the proverbial trash-heaps of history. Besides,
in 2020 Americans have much bigger concerns than war vs. peace – at least that is what most of them believe. Between the Covid19
pandemic and the catastrophic collapse of the economy (of course, while the former certainly has contributed to the latter, it did
not single-handedly cause it) and now the BLM insurgency, most Americans now feel personally threatened – something which no wars
of the past ever did (a war against Russia very much would, but most Americans don't realize that, since nobody explains this to
them; they also tend to believe that nonsense about the US military being the best and most capable in history).
Following four years of uninterrupted flagwaving and MAGA-chanting there is, of course, a hardcore of true believers who believe
that Trump is nothing short of brilliant and that he will "kick ass" everything and everybody: from the spying Russians, to the rioting
Blacks, from the pandemic, to the lying media, etc. The fact that in reality Trump pitifully failed to get anything truly important
done is completely lost on these folks who live in a reality they created for themselves and in which any and all facts contradicting
their certitudes are simply explained away by silly stuff like "Q-anon" or "5d chess". Others, of course, will realize that Trump
"deflated" before those whom he called "the swamp" almost as soon as he got into the White House.
As for the almighty Israel Lobby, it seems to me that it squeezed all it could from Trump who, from the point of view of the Zionists,
was always a "disposable President" anyway. And now that Trump has done everything Israel wanted him to do, he becomes almost useless.
If anything, Pelosi, Schumer and the rest of them will try to outdo Trump's love for everything Israeli anyway.
So how much support is there behind Trump today? I really don't know (don't trust the polls, which have always been deeply wrong
about Trump anyway), but I think that there is definitely a constituency of truly frightened Americans who are freaking out (as they
should, considering the rapid collapse of the country) and who might vote Trump just because they will feel that for all his faults,
he is the only one who can save the country. Conversely, they will see Biden as a pro-BLM geriatric puppet who will hand the keys
of the White House to a toxic coalition of minorities.
So what if Trump does get re-elected?
In truth, the situation is so complex and there are so many variables (including many "unknown unknowns"!) that make predictions
impossible. Still, we can try to make some educated guesses, especially if based on some kind of logic such as the one which says
that "past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior". In other words, if Trump gets elected, we will get more of the same.
Personally, I would characterize this "same" as a further destruction of the US from within by the Democrats and their "coalition
of minorities" combined with a further destruction of the US Empire abroad by delusional Republicans.
I very much doubt that it makes any sense at all to vote for that, really. Better stay at home and do something worthwhile with
your time, no?
Now what about a Biden election?
Remember that Biden is now the de-facto leader of what I would loosely call the "anti-US coalition", that is the "coalition of
minorities" which really have nothing in common except their hatred of the established order (well, and, of course, their hatred
of Trump and of those who voted for him).
These minorities are very good at hating and destroying, but don't count on them to ever come up with constructive solutions –
it ain't gonna happen. For one thing, they are probably too stupid to come up with any constructive ideas, but even more important
is the fact that these folks all have a hyper-narrow agenda and, simply put, they don't care about "constructing" anything. These
folks are all about hatred and the instant gratification of their narrow, one-topic, agenda.
This also begs the question of why the Dems decided to go with Biden in spite of the fact that he is clearly an extremely weak
candidate. In spite? I am not so sure at all. I think that they chose him because he is so weak: the real power behind him will be
in the hands of the Schumer-Pelosi-Obama gang and of the interests these folks represent.
Unlike Trump who prostituted himself only after making it to the White House, the neo-liberal Dems have *already* prostituted
themselves to everybody who wanted to give them something in return, from the Ukie Nazis to the thugs of BLM, to the powerful US
homo-lobby. Don't expect them to show any spine, or even less so, love for the USA, if they get the White House. They hate this country
and most of its people and they are not shy about it.
What would happen to the US if the likes of Bloomberg or Harris took control? First, there would be the comprehensive surrender
to the various minorities which put these folks in power followed by a very strong blowback from all the "deplorables" ranging from
protests and civil disobedience, to local authorities refusing to take orders from the feds. Like it or not, but most Americans still
love their country and loathe the kind of pseudo-liberal ideology which has been imposed upon them by the joint actions of the US
deep state and the corporate world. There is even a strong probability that if Biden gets elected the USA's disintegration would
only accelerate.
On the international front, a Biden Presidency would not solve any of the problems created by Obama and Trump: by now it is way
too late and the damage done to the international reputation of the United States is irreparable. If anything, the Dems will only
make it worse by engaging in even more threats, sanctions and wars. Specifically, the Demolicans hate Russia, China and Iran probably
even more than the Republicrats. Besides, these countries have already concluded a long time ago that the US was "not agreement capable"
anyway (just look at the long list of international treaties and organization from which the US under Trump has withdrawn: what is
the point of negotiating anything with a power which systematically reneges on its promises and obligations?)
The truth is that if Biden gets elected, the US will continue to fall apart internally and externally, if anything, probably even
faster than under a re-elected Trump.
Which brings me to my main conclusion:
Why do we even bother having elections?
First, I don't think that the main role of a democracy is to protect minorities from majorities. A true democracy protects the
majority against the many minorities which typically have a one-issue agenda and which are typically hostile to the values of the
majority . Oh sure, minority rights should be protected, the question is how exactly?
For one thing, most states have some kind of constitution/basic law which sets a number of standards which cannot be violated
as long as this constitution/basic law is in force. Furthermore, in most states which call themselves democratic all citizens have
the same rights and obligations, and a minority status does not give anybody any special rights or privileges. Typically, there are
also fundamental international standards for human rights and fundamental national standards for civil rights. Minority rights (individual
or collective), however, are not typically considered a separate category which somehow trumps or supplements adopted norms for human
and civil rights (if only because it creates a special "minority" category, whereas in true "people power" all citizens are considered
as one entity).
It is quite obvious that neither the Republicrats nor the Demolicans represent the interests of "we the people" and that both
factions of the US plutocracy are under the total control of behind-the-scenes real powers. What happened four years ago was a colossal
miscalculation of these behind-the-scenes real powers who failed to realize how hated they were and how even a guy like Trump would
seem preferable to a nightmare like Hillary (as we know, had the Dems chosen Sanders or even some other halfway lame candidate, Trump
would probably not have prevailed).
This is why I submit that the next election will make absolutely no difference:
The US system is rigged to give all the power to minorities and to completely ignore the will of the people The choice between the
Demolicans and the Republicrats is not a choice at all The systemic crisis of the US is too deep to be affected by who is in power
in the White House
Simply put, and unlike the case of 2016, the outcome of the 2020 election will make no difference at all. Caring about who the
next puppet in the White House will be is tantamount to voting for a new captain while the Titanic is sinking . The major difference
is that the Titanic sank in very deep water whereas the "ship USA" will sink in the shallows, meaning that the US will not completely
disappear: in some form or another, it will survive either as a unitary state or as a number of successor states. The Empire, however,
has no chance of survival at all. Thus, anything which contributes to make the US a "normal" country and which weakens the Empire
is in the interests of the people of the USA. Voting for either one of the candidates this fall will only prolong the agony of the
current political regime in the USA.
The truth is that if Biden gets elected, the US will continue to fall apart internally and externally, if anything, probably
even faster than under a re-elected Trump.
This observation suggests that one should vote for Biden if one votes at all. Perhaps if one is going to the election because
there's a particularly crucial vote for county board of supervisors candidates (very important, by the way) and you happen to
be at the polls anyway, the fastest way to further the process of saying good riddance to the American empire is to vote for Joe
Biden.
Whoever gets elected will certainly affect details of how the ship sinks. Two consecutive elections with Gerontocrats. Neither
of the two nominally different parties has a very deep roster evidenced by the poverty of options they have been putting forward.
Given his decline, I don't expect Biden to have a long presidency if he survives to officially get the nomination.
Unless ur a 100% reprehensible crack head, go vote for Dumbo J Trump.
He is awful, he is beaten, he is an Israel sellout.
But the other side will kill you.
If Biden wins, the emboldened mob will come to your home to kill you. If you call the police, they won't come and they won't
investigate your rape/torture/death. If you defend yourself, you will be arrested and prosecuted. The media will deny it is happening
and also say that you deserved it.
I have come to hate the Maoist/Jacobin scum today referred to as "The Left". I want Trump to get a second term because it will
cause my enemies to suffer.
In rural Counties (Red America) an elected Sheriff is the chief local law officer. Watch for coalitions of Counties,
within or across State lines, demanding secession or limited autonomy. The only way forward for sane Americans is to remove themselves
from Woke jurisdictions. The election won't change that. But I will vote for Orange Man anyway. Just for spite!
The real question in dire need of asking is: Do the Next 10 Presidential Elections Even Matter? And the answer remains: not
a dime's worth of difference. "We the People" will continue to witness the same electoral circus complete with its fake debates
as our elite's addiction to war will be craving its habitual fix. "We the People" are too stupefied and mired in our own addictions
to cell phones and other mind numbing gadgets while being fed a steady diet of lies by the MSM. Our awakening is too remote for
us to take back our country.
"Just by asking the question of whether the next Presidential election matters, I am obviously suggesting that it might
not. To explain my reasons for this opinion, I need to reset the upcoming election in the context of the previous one. So let's
begin here."
Would the U.S. Navy have launched a cruise missile attack against the Shayrat airbase in Syria if Trump didn't order it? Would
Gen. Solemani have been assassinated if Trump didn't order it? Of course the next presidential election "matters" if we have one,
that is.
Now that the constitution and the rule of law are defunct and all power has been de facto consolidated into the office of president,
whether we have WW3 or not (for example) depends almost exclusively on the character of the person in the White House.
"The first thing which, I believe, ought to be self-evident to all by now is that there was no secret operation by any deep
state, not even a Zionist controlled one, to put Donald Trump in power."
Seriously? So why did Comey undermine Clinton's campaign and why didn't Obama fire him for it? And why did Obama attack the
Syrian Army at Deir Ezzor in Sept. 2016, an act that greatly escalated tensions with Russia and apparently scared some Sanders
supporters into Trump's camp, giving Trump a narrow margin of victory in three key states which put him in the White House? Because
shit happens?
"I would even argue that the election of Donald Trump was the biggest slap in the face of US deep state and of the covert
transnational ruling elites this deep state serves. Ever."
I would argue that you've been fooled. If that were actually the case, they would've impeached and removed him, right? Or they
would've deployed a lone nut against him. Or he would've at least encountered some kind of meaningful political or legal opposition.
"My evidence? Simple, look what these ruling 'elites' did both before and after Trump's election: before, they ridiculed
the very idea of 'President Trump' as both utterly impossible and utterly evil."
Talk is cheap. How come they didn't seem to have a problem with his war crimes in Syria; or his moving the embassy to Jerusalem;
or his attempts to start a war with Iran; or his trade war with China; or his attempt to starve Venezuela into submission; or
his arming of Ukraine; or his withdrawal from the INF treaty; etc,?
"As somebody who has had years of experience reading the Soviet press or, in another style, the French press, I can honestly
say that I have never seen a more ridiculously outlandish hate campaign against anybody that would come even close to the kind
of total hate campaign which Trump was subjected to."
Once again, talk is cheap. Why would the "deep state" "hate" him so much? Did he investigate 9/11? Did he end any wars, or
pull out of NATO, or improve relations with Russia and/or China, or cut aid to Israel, etc.? No.
But let's say for the sake of argument that "they" really do "hate" him for some reason. So what? That doesn't mean that they
don't want him as president, right? If they really do hate him then he may be just the person they need.
@Diversity
Heretic ruits of financial empire. The Boomers are still the biggest demographic in the US. Starting in the 1980s onward,
they established portfolio systems that extracted wealth via the US's world reserve currency status.
This marks the unholy covenant made by Wall Street and middle class Boomers. The Boomers are dying off, and taking the US Empire
with it into the afterlife. The younger generation won't receive a nickel, and that's likely a good thing in the long term. But
Trump and Sanders still can't make aggressive economic reform while America is still dominated by "The United States of Boomer."
They can only pave the road for reform and future leaders to lead the charge.
I have come to hate the Maoist/Jacobin scum today referred to as "The Left". I want Trump to get a second term because it
will cause my enemies to suffer.
I agree. MORALE COUNTS. Data geeks don't understand this. Political watchers don't understand this. People who analyze the
number of tanks and guns don't understand this.
Morale wins wars. We need to defy the Left any way we can. A Trump win will be spit in their eyes. It will put some fighting spirit
into our side.
These minorities are very good at hating and destroying, but don't count on them to ever come up with constructive solutions
– it ain't gonna happen. For one thing, they are probably too stupid to come up with any constructive ideas, These folks are
all about hatred and the instant gratification of their narrow, one-topic, agenda.
I don't know about that, I think Alastair Crooke, may be closer to the mark with his conclusion.
The "toy radicals, and Champagne Bolsheviks" – in these terms of dripping disdain from Williamson – are very similar to
those who rushed into the streets in 1917. But before dismissing them so peremptorily and lightly, recall what occurred.
Into that combustible mass of youth – so acultured by their progressive parents to see a Russian past that was imperfect
and darkly stained – a Trotsky and Lenin were inserted. And Stalin ensued. No 'toy radicals'. Soft became hard totalitarianism.
I think there are some key differences here on what could take shape. If Biden wins, the Republicans can put down the Trump
saga as a regrettable mistake and go back to being the boring old Jen Bush party moaning about lowering taxes for the rich and
abortion.
However if Trump wins, the Republicans will have to acknowledge that people support Trumpism and will have to start re orientating
the party towards Trumpian Populism in future elections as they will realize that it is a permanent vote winner. Basically how
they started to change themselves into becoming an evangelical Conservative party due to Reagan where as before, it was the Democrats
who were the Conservatives.
Even if they do this though, the Republicans are still going to remain the good old American majority white party so out right
winning future elections after Trump is going to be very difficult. I think this all potentially bodes for a potential secession
crisis in the future.
However even if Trump wins, the Democrats may start to take notice and try to compete with the Republicans and start to moderate
their policies, shifting away from Identity politics and embracing the populist waves and trying to alternate with a more centrist
position. But considering all the crazy lefties in power within the party structure, this would be an incredibly difficult task,
almost Herculean to achieve.
So we could still be looking at a potential secession down the road.
But we all have to admit one thing – Donald Trump, love him or loathe him, has changed ultimately the political face of politics
for the better. Even though he actually has done very little, just the fact he got elected with his views really does go to show
the people have had enough and want changes.
Debating electoral politics at this point is for autists and morons. The globalists have won. They will be educating your children
while you work your shit job getting felt up by Africans on the way to your meaningless conference in Tempe.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Me too. I too will vote for Trump just out of spite. Saker is so ignorant about America and Americans. That's why I usually
don't read the Saker articles. The average homeless black guy is more informed about America than Saker.
the neo-liberal Dems have *already* prostituted themselves to everybody who wanted to give them something in return, from
the Ukie Nazis to the thugs of BLM, to the powerful US homo-lobby. Don't expect them to show any spine, or even less so, love
for the USA, if they get the White House. They hate this country and most of its people and they are not shy about it.
The Ukie "Nazis", BLM and homo-lobby are just tools. You make it sound like they're in charge. Please stop posting garbage
like that.
Saker – you started out by saying that it was a complete shock to the ruling elite when Trump won. I agree. You then described
how the Left (and most on the Right) have made Trump's presidency a living hell. I agree.
But then you said: "Truth be told, Trump has proven to be a fantastically incompetent President, no doubt about that. Was he
even worse than Obama? Maybe, it really all depends on your scoring system."
Obama was treated with kid gloves because he's an insider, a player. That's the only reason he ended up in the White House;
the elite sanctioned him and put him there.
But Trump is not an insider and he wasn't elite-approved. OF COURSE HE COULDN'T GET MUCH DONE! They didn't let him. They have
fought him every step of the way. After seeing what Trump has had to contend with, no outsider is ever going to attempt it again.
If Obama had gone through what Trump has gone through, his skinny little legs would have folded before his first month was
up.
One of guys on The Duran said that the politicians on the Left and Right don't care about Black Lives Matter, the statues,
history, gender wars, gay this/LGXYZ that, the culture wars. That doesn't really concern them; they'll just let the sheeple fight
it out.
What they DO care about is their corporate masters, the people they are really beholden to. As long as their masters continue
to make money and the culture wars don't disturb that, then all is well.
They just stole $6 trillion and handed it to Wall Street, hedge funds, private equity. Covid, the lock downs and the culture
wars are a great smoke screen to hide the looting going on.
"With Republicans siding with BLM, and wanting to replace Columbus Day with Juneteenth
with friends like that who needs enemies?"
They do what their corporate donors tell them to do, just like the Dems. All that matters on both sides of the aisle are the
corporate campaign donors. Nothing else. Nike, for instance, wants Blacks to continue buying their shoes. If they have to get
down on one knee, so be it. The politicians follow suit.
@anon
n't be a Koch-brothers Speaker Ryan around to undermine Trump's agenda. And, the GOP needs to dump Turtle Man as their Senate
leader, and promote someone who could actually do the job, like the other Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. If those things happen,
real progress could finally be made in saving what's left of the country.
At one point there wasn't a "dime's worth of difference" between the two parties, but, as the D's have gone further and further
White Man-hating crazy Left, that is no longer true today. The election of Biden will guarantee a radical left-wing minority female
sitting in the White House (how much longer will that name last?) within six months.
@ploni almoni
Trump is a mentally and morally defective total moron who's completely unfit for the office he holds. Knowing this, the "deep
state" put him there for one reason and one reason only: because they felt he could be manipulated into taking risks above and
beyond those which their dime-a-dozen political opportunists would take – in the pursuit of their stalled imperial agenda.
As I see it, the following linked statement by the "World Mental Health Coalition" (particularly paragraphs two and five) fully
explains the Trump "presidency."
@mark tapley
roximation of where I'm going with all this).
And as has been attributed to Sinclair Lewis, HL Mencken and several others:
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross."
3. And that's when the first large economically-sustainable states e.g., California or Texas or New York or Pennsylvania or
Georgia will seek to break out of the Union – and take their smaller neighboring states with them in blocs.
4. And in a futile attempt to prevent a dissolution of the Union from happening, Federal troops will be brought in – and that's
when the first shots of the next civil war will be fired.
Twain nailed at the turn of the century, "If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it." Mark Twain
Who's Afraid of an Open Debate? The Truth About the Commission on Presidential Debates
The Commission on Presidential Debates is a private corporation headed by the former chairmen of the Republican and Democratic
parties. The CPD is a duopoly which allows the major party candidates to draft secret agreements.
"The fact is that for the past four years the US liberals have waged a total informational war against Trump "
No, not a "total informational war against Trump" but a conspicuously partial informational war against Trump.
They have no problem with his various war crimes and endless provocations against Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela. They have
no problem with his withdrawing from the INF treaty and starting an arms race that puts the whole world in great danger. They
choose to focus on his failure to wear a mask in public, for example, while ignoring that he's brought the world to the brink
of WW3. And this should be an important clue as to what's going on here yet it somehow escapes "The Saker" just like it apparently
escapes other pundits e.g. Paul Craig Roberts.
" and it would be absolutely unthinkable for them to ever accept a Trump re-election, even if he wins by a landslide."
If it is so "absolutely unthinkable" then why don't they run somebody against him who's not showing signs of senile dementia,
for example?
In any case it seems Trump's handlers and enablers realize that he will likely not be reelected no matter who they run against
him, so they're pulling out all the stops to get some kind of a major war started before the end of his term. In desperation they
installed him in the White House and in desperation they now seek to force a major war before we go back to government by opportunistic-career-politician-puppet-rulers.
Are there any Republican Senators beside Lankford (OK) and Johnson (WIS), who are supporting this travesty? After Tucker Carlson
skewered them the other night, I wonder how many more will be dumb enough to back it? Don't buck the Tuck if you don't want to
be flooded with calls and emails from constituents who hate you.
@Harold
Smith . President Donald Trump, as a direct response to the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack that occurred on 4 April."
You and everyone knows that there was no "chemical attack," and that Shayrat was empty. The US "missile response" was, on the
one hand, an attempt to "save face" having been outmaneuvered and lost the Isis gambit, and on the other to test Russian missile
defenses for technical purposes, for the upcoming war. In all these cases Trump has to "take responsibility" or admit that all
he controls is what is served for lunch.
Make believe is all fine and good, but you people are the forces of darkness kidding yourselves and the rest of us into oblivion.
@RP1
ump), and the fact that international treaties and agreements to which the United States is a party, demonstrably no longer mean
anything.
And for the icing on the cake (i.e. the consummation of the degenerative process which began before Trump) the fake president
was charged with "abuse of power" and "obstruction of congress" – in a fake impeachment trial – and was acquitted, thus proving
to the rest of the world (if anymore proof was necessary) that the concepts of "separation of powers"/"checks and balances"/"rule
of law" have been replaced by the concept of rule by the psychotic impulses of an unaccountable, politically omnipotent psychopath.
@4 Pete
Saker with economics. Ann Coulters spruiking for Trump was about immigration not economics.
Whether Trump failed on immigration because of a lack of will or a lack of backup by the republican side of The Party is irrelevant.
It just means voting is pointless either way.
It's hard to see much enthusiasm being manufactured on either side of the manufacturerd political divide this election. Biden
is an incoherent clown and Trump is a known quantity now unable to claim future greatness like he did in 2016.
The best vote in 2020 is staying home or going to a gun store and stocking up on election day. Voting just encourages more
bs from the political class.
Elections rarely matter, but this one actually could make a difference. Replacing Trump puppet with Biden puppet won't change
Federal actions, because Federal actions NEVER change. But the replacement WILL change the media. As soon as Biden puppet is in
office, the media will IMMEDIATELY stop creating panic and fear, and the lockdowns and masks will subside if not quite disappear.
It's worth campaigning and voting for Biden.
@ploni almoni
CIA establishment, which is run by Israel, carried out the murder of Soleimani and Trump was told about it after the fact, and
was told 'you own it.'"
For the Nth time: In that case why didn't "the CIA establishment run by Israel" assassinate Soleimani when Obama was president?
Why didn't the embassy get moved to Jerusalem or Syrian land be given to Israel or the INF treaty be repudiated or Venezuela be starved
or self-destructive trade war with China be started, etc.,when Obama was president?
Your "reasoning" has been thoroughly debunked ad nauseum; give it up. (I will likely not waste any more time arguing absurdities
with you). Chris Cosmos
, says: July
3, 2020 at 3:21 pm GMT
Great analysis as usual. However, let me point out some problems with what you've written. First, Americans do love wars but
they don't care about winning. The US military corrupt and incompetent as it is the most popular by a mile of any us institution.
Americans love the military as an idea. That idea is that it represents, theoretically and mythically, the ultimate struggle between
"good guys" and "bad guys" which fully mature military officers use to represent "them" and us. Since military conflicts are out
of sight and out of mind and the mainstream media lies so blatantly and the collective memory is no longer than a few months it
is possible that no matter how obvious the defeat or obvious the corruption to you an me who follow events the vast majority of
Americans only see movies of the glory of the US military and covert operatives and quickly forget war-crimes/massive violations
of the Geneva Conventions on War, defeat, and so on in favor of the fantasy/myth represented in commercials for military recruitment.
Second, the idea that so-called minorities represented by BLM and so on can or will have power in Washington is absurd. These
groups are used and have been used by the corporate oligarchs as a way to divide the working and middle classes–making grand gestures
of "solidarity" with BLM (always a corporate oriented group) means nothing. The grand movement of wealth from the working and
middle classes towards the 0.001% will continue inexorably as it has since the late 70s whether the RP or the DP is in power.
As far as the oligarchs are concerned manipulating popular culture through mind-control techniques (using the smartest human on
Earth) will keep their people in power. Trump was a slight interruption
Trump himself was boxed in a corner very quickly by the purge of Flynn and his refusal to vet staff. He had no choice but to
blunder from one thing to another with ALL of Washington and Hollywood solidly against him. The positives that he brought, however,
to the his Presidency was that he showed in high relief the nature of the Deep State–even the term was largely forbidden (I was
kicked out of a liberal/progressive blog, in part, for using the term "Deep State"). We saw through the Russiagate fiasco the
reality that the US mainstream media is primarily kind of Ministry of Truth not an "objective" institution that sought truth.
Like the American love for the military, most Americans will go along with the media Narrative because all societies need narratives,
myths, and commons frames of reference–so even if most people see (with their lying eyes) the reality of the propaganda organs,
they'll still "believe". Trump, as you said blustered and bloviated on going to war but never really did–he was the dove in the
administration–he hired people like Pompeo and Bolton in order to keep from being eaten by the Deep State. Trump had to spend
all his time in office out-foxing the operatives within his administration from destroying or even killing him. The Deep State
does not play nice.
Trump has absolutely no chance of winning in November. People in this country are just tired of conflict and are ready to give
the Deep State all the power it wants as long as they can rule. It is likely that the Senate will turn blue and we will have one
party rule. The Republican demographic is, at present, neither large nor enthusiastic enough to be of much help. As for the coalition
of minorities, they have no chance to go beyond the ghettos and if they come around here trying to burn anything down they will
be met by a lot of veterans who are armed to the teeth–so I don't see much cultural change outside the coasts and large urban
areas. Meanwhile Covid will continue to disrupt life, drug ODs will increase, access to health-care will be reduced, and we are
headed for a very new dispensation that may involve a dissolution of the country.
While I agree with the author's conclusions I disagree that " most Americans still like wars."
No. I think that we hate them, hate to send our children to die/be ripped apart for a bunch of old scumbags who are in the
pockets of the Defense Industry, hate to see us reviled by the World, hate to see our Blood & Treasure spent on people who despise
us and hate to pay for it all.
Sadly, the author's conclusions are spot-on. There is no remedying this disaster; we are in our final days as a coherent Nation.
This is "Operation Enduring Clusterfuck" writ large. As the acronym goes, "TINVOWOOT."
The best that I can see is Balkanization–with or without preliminary/local & regional shooting–with division along racial lines.
Give blacks the cities that they inhabit now in great numbers, give them a region (with ocean access) and have people move to
"Red" and "Blue" states according to their race/safety/beliefs. Trade–or war–will follow as a natural consequence.
But, Blacks need to know that when THEY riot their cities burn; when Whites riot entire CONTINENTS burn.
I voted for Trump. I was conned. Trump was selected by the .001% as the most effective figurehead to preside over the destruction
of America.
Do you really believe the most wealthy and powerful people in the world would leave the choice of a major leader up to the
unwashed masses? They manipulate everything, absolutely everything.
If voting could actually negatively impact their power and wealth, they would never allow it.
The .001% are just Jeffrey Dahmer cannibals in expensive clothing, and YOU are on the menu.
Trump got elected for two main issues he pledged during his 2016 campaign: ending all foreign wars and greatly reducing immigration.
On ending foreign wars and bringing home the troops, he's failed. Since he took office he's been dialing up the heat to the
verge of war with Iran, NK, China, Russia, Venezuela, and we still have troops everywhere incl. in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile all the trade war jabs with China is just Kabuki theater. The intention is not to bring back manufacturing as he claimed
but to blackmail the CCP into handing over control of China's banks to the globalist bankers. His overt pandering to Israel at
every turn is nauseating. I suspect Mossad has him by the balls when they seized all records from his Jewish attorney.
On immigration, again nothing like what he promised. He has drastically reduced asylum seeking, but illegal immigration reached
a record under his watch until he thankfully won an important quick deportation law against those who failed asylum app. His border
wall is still largely not visible. After four long years, he is finally doing something about legal immigration, but his temporary
suspension of H1b visas and green cards until the end of the year may be too little too late to save him, and he still hasn't
done anything to suspend OPT and EB5. I fear this is all just for show. Immediately after he gets reelected, he will feel all
generous and remove all those restrictions.
But the alternative is unthinkable. Biden will immediately resume all ME wars as directed by Israel. He is as compromised as
Trump, Mossad already has him by the balls with his bribery scandals in Ukraine and China through his son. Zionists/deep state
like to have dirty politicians elected, the dirtier the better, as the easier it is for them to be blackmailed.
The question is will his followers feel enthusiastic enough to come out and vote?
Trump's election has proved one thing. His election must have come as a surprise even to him, and he was unprepared with a
list of candidates for the various posts he had to fill to carry out his wishes. He was dependent on others who were not well
disposed towards him.
Even though Foreign Policy supposedly the President's prerogative, in this case his hands were tied behind his back, such that
even low level functionaries were opposing his policies quite openly. The military were running rings around him when he wanted
to reduce military presence in the Occupied countries. In fact he was coerced into bombing some facilities in those countries
based on fake incidents. What Trump had promised his electorate, he could not deliver. He is a failure. The Blob defeated him
at every turn. In fact by appointing the likes of Pompeo he became even less powerful, if that is possible.
If he gets elected a second time somehow, he will not be able to deliver on his promises unless he destroys the Blob completely
Ralph Nader said something that opened my eyes to the true nature of national elections in 2000. The Democrips started that
day's whole "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" nonsense, and a reporter asked him about it. He said "The Republicans have nominated
that worst candidate for US President in history, he's bad on every level. If Al Gore can't run a run a decent enough campaign
to defeat him, what good is he?"
I stopped voting for anything above state representitive in 2012 and will not vote in hat will be either our ultimate or penultimate
presidential election this year.
He will cause the whole world to dump the US Dollar as a reserve currency, because he acts like a bully who ignores his blatant
weakpoints. At that moment, the USA will just become a bankrupt state and will lose its special status: the US power is based
mainly on that.
He will not reverse the tax policies that he implemented HIMSELF He is a zionist elite agent and he will stay like that
You are dreaming too much. How could he do, during his second term, the exact opposite of what he did in the first? It is a
total nonsense
the real power behind him will be in the hands of the Schumer-Pelosi-Obama gang and of the interests these folks represent.
Precisely. Biden will be a ceremonial head of state, much as the president of the USSR was. There are a lot of people saying
that Biden's VP will be the de facto president, but I'm not so sure. I think Pelosi – Schumer – Obama will form the ruling junta,
which is fitting inasmuch as they've been trying really hard to turn the USA into a corrupt banana republic.
He will cause the whole world to dump the US Dollar as a reserve currency, because he acts like a bully who ignores his blatant
weakpoints. At that moment, the USA will just become a bankrupt state and will lose its special status: the US power is based
mainly on that.
He will not reverse the tax policies that he implemented HIMSELF He is a zionist elite agent and he will stay like that
You are dreaming too much. How could he do, during his second term, the exact opposite of what he did in the first? It is a total
nonsense
@Anonymous
y demanding that Russia give back Crimea, for example, something that everyone knew Russia could not do?
"That was a no go w the Establishment and they have engaged in a relentless campaign against him."
Let's see, he's betrayed his supporters on many issues; his health is obviously deteriorating; as you point out he's an "incompetent
narcissist"; there's a "relentless campaign against him" according to you; and polls show him trailing Biden in several key states;
so why is he running for reelection? If LBJ can retire after one term why can't Trump?
@Harold
Smith ls go back before WW1 to Samual Bush who was brought onto the Jew run War Industries Board (what a great racket that
was) by Percy Rockefeller during the puppet actor and syphilitic W. Wilson's catatonic lay about under Col. House (Rothschilds
employee) and Bernard Baruch administration. The Zionists control both phony parties and just use the Jew run MSM to put on a
show. Many commentators such as Patagonia Man believe it is too late but I still maintain the remote possibility that enough people
will wake up to put some decent rep. in the House. Forget about the Presidential baboons.
3. I have outlined, not only the breakup of the US into several geopolitical units (and quite possibly, but hopefully not,
another civil war) but the megaregions in which North America is heading, within say, the next 150 – 250 years.
Just because I believe all of the above doesn't mean I can't observe and comment on the theater that passes for US politics.
Needless to say, I won't be voting in November.
Finally, there's a great saying attributed to Einstein:
"The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result"
@mark tapley
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent
impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not
for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. " https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1537592714001595
You can tell the Saker doesn't live in America, since he believes Americans love war. This has never been true and it is safe
to assume Americans are really sick of American Imperialism in general right now.
War and warmongering do not enjoy any significant support in any major political block in the USA right now. Only the Oligarchs,
NWO, Plutocrats and Neocons are for wars and they are not even collectively close to being a plurality.
"... The cash must be Russian sourced , per the NYT, because a couple of low level Taliban types, who were likely tortured by the Afghan police, have said that it is so. ..."
There is particular danger at the moment that powerful political alignments in the United
States are pushing strongly to exacerbate the developing crisis with Russia. The New York
Times, which broke the story that the Kremlin had been paying the Afghan Taliban bounties to
kill American soldiers, has been particularly assiduous in promoting the tale of perfidious
Moscow. Initial Times coverage, which claimed that the activity had been confirmed by both
intelligence sources and money tracking, was supplemented by
delusional nonsense from former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who asks "Why
does Trump put Russia first?" before calling for a "swift and significant U.S. response." Rice,
who is being mentioned as a possible Biden choice for Vice President, certainly knows about
swift and significant as she was one of the architects of the destruction of Libya and the
escalation of U.S. military and intelligence operations directed against a non-threatening
Syria.
The Times is also titillating
with the tale of a low level drug smuggling Pashto businessman who seemed to have a lot of
cash in dollars lying around, ignoring the fact that Afghanistan is awash with dollars and has
been for years. Many of the dollars come from drug deals, as Afghanistan is now the world's
number one producer of opium and its byproducts.
The cash must be
Russian sourced , per the NYT, because a couple of low level Taliban types, who were likely
tortured by the Afghan police, have said that it is so. The Times also cites anonymous
sources which allege that there were money transfers from an account managed by the Kremlin's
GRU military intelligence to an account opened by the Taliban. Note the "alleged" and consider
for a minute that it would be stupid for any intelligence agency to make bank-to-bank
transfers, which could be identified and tracked by the clever lads at the U.S. Treasury and
NSA. Also try to recall how not so long ago we heard fabricated tales about threatening WMDs to
justify war. Perhaps the story would be more convincing if a chain of custody could be
established that included checks drawn on the Moscow-Narodny Bank and there just might be a
crafty neocon hidden somewhere in the U.S. intelligence community who is right now faking up
that sort of evidence.
Other reliably Democratic Party leaning news outlets, to include CNN, MSNBC and The
Washington Post all jumped on the bounty story, adding details from their presumably
inexhaustible supply of anonymous sources. As Scott Horton
observed the media was reporting a "fact" that there was a rumor.
Inevitably the Democratic Party leadership abandoned its Ghanaian kente cloth scarves, got
up off their knees, and hopped immediately on to their favorite horse, which is to claim loudly
and in unison that when in doubt Russia did it. Joe Biden in particular is "disgusted" by a
"betrayal" of American troops due to Trump's insistence on maintaining "an embarrassing
campaign of deferring and debasing himself before Putin."
The Dems were joined in their outrage by some Republican lawmakers who were equally incensed
but are
advocating delaying punishing Russia until all the facts are known. Meanwhile, the
"circumstantial details" are being invented to make the original tale more credible, including
crediting the Afghan operation to a secret Russian GRU Army intelligence unit that allegedly
was also behind the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury England in 2018.
Reportedly the Pentagon is looking into the circumstances
around the deaths of three American soldiers by roadside bomb on April 8, 2019 to determine
a possible connection to the NYT report. There are also concerns relating to several deaths in
training where Afghan Army recruits turned on their instructors. As the Taliban would hardly
need an incentive to kill Americans and as
only seventeen U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan in 2019 as a result of hostile action, the
year that the intelligence allegedly relates to, one might well describe any joint
Taliban-Russian initiative as a bit of a failure since nearly all of those deaths have been
attributed to kinetic activity initiated by U.S. forces.
The actual game that is in play is, of course, all about Donald Trump and the November
election. It is being claimed that the president was briefed on the intelligence but did
nothing. Trump denied being verbally briefed due to the fact that the information had not been
verified. For once America's Chief Executive spoke the truth, confirmed by the "intelligence
community," but that did not stop the media from implying that the disconnect had been caused
by Trump himself. He reportedly does not read the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), where such a
speculative piece might indeed appear on a back page, and is uninterested in intelligence
assessments that contradict what he chooses to believe. The Democrats are suggesting that Trump
is too stupid and even too disinterested to be president of the United States so they are
seeking to replace him with a corrupt 78-year-old man who may be suffering from dementia.
The Democratic Party cannot let Russia go because they see it as their key to future success
and also as an explanation for their dramatic failure in 2016 which in no way holds them
responsible for their ineptness. One does not expect the House Intelligence Committee,
currently headed by the wily Adam Schiff, to actually know anything about intelligence and how
it is collected and analyzed, but the politicization of the product is certainly something that
Schiff and his colleagues know full well how to manipulate. One only has to recall the
Russiagate Mueller Commission investigation and Schiff's later role in cooking the witnesses
that were produced in the subsequent Trump impeachment hearings.
Schiff predictably
opened up on Trump in the wake of the NYT report, saying "I find it inexplicable in light
of these very public allegations that the president hasn't come before the country and assured
the American people that he will get to the bottom of whether Russia is putting bounties on
American troops and that he will do everything in his power to make sure that we protect
American troops."
Schiff and company should know, but clearly do not, that at the ground floor level there is
a lot of lying, cheating and stealing around intelligence collection. Most foreign agents do it
for the money and quickly learn that embroidering the information that is being provided to
their case officer might ultimately produce more cash. Every day the U.S. intelligence
community produces thousands of intelligence reports from those presumed "sources with access,"
which then have to be assessed by analysts. Much of the information reported is either
completely false or cleverly fabricated to mix actual verified intelligence with speculation
and out and out lies to make the package more attractive. The tale of the Russian payment of
bribes to the Taliban for killing Americans is precisely the kind of information that stinks to
high heaven because it doesn't even make any political or tactical sense, except to Nancy
Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff and the New York Times. For what it's worth, a number of
former genuine intelligence officers including
Paul Pillar, John Kiriakou , Scott Ritter , and
Ray McGovern
have looked at the evidence so far presented and have walked away unimpressed. The National
Security Agency (NSA) has also declined to confirm the story, meaning that there is no
electronic trail to validate it.
Finally, there is more than a bit of the old hypocrisy at work in the damnation of the
Russians even if they have actually been involved in an improbable operation with the Taliban.
One recalls that in the 1970s and 1980s the United States supported the mujahideen rebels
fighting against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. The assistance consisted of weapons,
training, political support and intelligence used to locate, target and kill Soviet soldiers.
Stinger missiles were provided to bring down helicopters carrying the Russian troops. The
support was pretty much provided openly and was even boasted about, unlike what is currently
being alleged about the Russian assistance. The Soviets were fighting to maintain a secular
regime that was closely allied to Moscow while the mujahideen later morphed into al-Qaeda and
the Islamist militant Taliban subsequently took over the country, meaning that the U.S. effort
was delusional from the start.
So, what is a leaked almost certainly faux story about the Russian bounties on American
soldiers intended to accomplish? It is probably intended to keep a "defensive" U.S. presence in
Afghanistan, much desired by the neocons, a majority in Congress and the Military Industrial
Complex (MIC), and it will further be played and replayed to emphasize the demonstrated
incompetence of Donald Trump. The end result could be to secure the election of a pliable
Establishment flunky Joe Biden as president of the United States. How that will turn out is
unpredictable, but America's experience of its presidents since 9/11 has not been very
encouraging.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that
seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website ishttps://councilforthenationalinterest.org,address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
.
The Deep State vermin who pulled-off the violent, proxy overthrow of Yanukovych in 2014,
and who are also behind the Arab Spring, Syrian Rebels, ISIS, and the ongoing domestic unrest
Stateside, are the descendants of the vermin who overthrew Christian Russia in 1917 using the
same modus operandi of color revolution and “peaceful protests.”. Putin undid all
their hard work in Russia and kicked them out and seized their ill gotten gains: this,
coupled with their congenital hatred of Russia, is the reason for the non-stop, bipartisan
refrain of “Russia, Russia, Russia.”
It is probably intended to keep a “defensive” U.S. presence in Afghanistan,
much desired by the neocons, a majority in Congress and the Military Industrial Complex
(MIC), and it will further be played and replayed to emphasize the demonstrated
incompetence of Donald Trump.
There are other reasons for wishing to stay in Afghanistan. Generals don’t like
losing wars. It is personally humiliating to retreat. The whole country is also worn down by
lost wars and the psychological blow lasts for over 10 years like during the post-Vietnam
era. Keeping 10,000 troops in Afghanistan permanently won’t win the war but it will
prevent a defeat and potentially humiliating last minute evacuation when the Taliban retake
Kabul.
Also Al-Qaeda is still present in Afghanistan: “Al-Qaeda has 400 to 600 operatives
active in 12 Afghan provinces and is running training camps in the east of the country,
according to the report released Friday. U.N. experts, drawing their research from interviews
with U.N. member states, including their intelligence and security services, plus think tanks
and regional officials, say the Taliban has played a double game with the Trump
Administration, consulting with al-Qaeda senior leaders throughout its 16 months of peace
talks with U.S. officials and reassuring Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, among others, that
the Taliban would “honour their historical ties” to the terrorist group.”
https://time.com/5844865/afghanistan-peace-deal-taliban-al-qaeda/
While the melodrama about trump=pro Russia and dems=anti Russia makes good political
theater to keep folks running in circles chasing their tails, this is not the main reason for
the continuous attacks on Russia by organs of the zpc/nwo. The main reason is Russia is not
owned by them. Not a colony. The main reason for the psywar is not about trump vs dems, it is
about keeping the Russia=bad guys theme seeded in the propaganda. That was the main reason
behind “Russiagate”, as well. And as with that scam, both “sides”
knowingly played their part hyping the theater to keep that Russia=bad guy propaganda theme
in the mind of americans.
I can’t imagine that any intelligent person believes this bullshit about Russia. I
completely tune it out the same way I tuned out any news about “CHAZ.”
“So, what is a leaked almost certainly faux story about the Russian bounties on
American soldiers intended to accomplish? It is probably intended to keep a
“defensive” U.S. presence in Afghanistan, much desired by the neocons, a
majority in Congress and the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), and it will further be
played and replayed to emphasize the demonstrated incompetence of Donald Trump.”
Let’s say for the sake of argument that the story is true. So what? I don’t
see how it can be used as justification to double down on a pointless war. (Reasonable people
might see it as another reason to get out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later).
Moreover, I don’t think they’d have to create such drama to get Trump the
imperialist to keep the troops in Afghanistan (if he actually had any intention to withdraw
them in the first place).
This propaganda effort reminds me of the Skripal affair. Perhaps Trump’s handlers
and enablers realize that he’ll lose the election (if we have one) so they’re
trying to manipulate him into escalating tensions with Russia (just as they are with China,
Iran and Venezuela).
The Americans were always very proud and upfront about how they organized, trained,
equipped and financed the Taliban to oust the Russians from Afghanistan. In view of this, why
do they act so surprised should the Russians do something similar on a much smaller
scale?
Obviously, the whole story was concocted in Washington, but so what?
Anyone with half a brain should know that the Americans are in Afghanistan because the
Americans control the world trade in narcotics. Columbia is the cocaine end of the
business.
I do wish some smart chemists would synthesize heroin and cocaine in a laboratory and put
the CIA out of business.
“and it will further be played and replayed to emphasize the demonstrated
incompetence of Donald Trump”
The demonization of a democratically-elected President by the zionist-owned New York
Times , Washington Post and CNN is somewaht reminiscent of the demonization of a
certain Austrian in the Western media after the 1933 World Jewry’s declaration of war
on Nazi Germany.
“He who controls the narrative controls the consciousness”
With Wolf Blitz’s, Bolton’s, and this week’s release of Trump’s
relative’s book discrediting his mental health. How many books is that now???
But, times have moved on. Trump can ride this wave by learning the dark art of playing
the victim using the mantra ‘look how hard I’m trying’ and appealing to
US voters as their ‘law and order’ president.
Geopolitically speaking, if the US Zio-cons were smart, rather than suffering from
‘Groupthink’, they would be trying to entice Russia away from its partner, China,
and draw Russia into playing a greater role in Europe. Recall that Putin had asked if Russia
could join NATO.
But, alas, they’re still making the same mistake they did in 1991 after the collapse
of Central Industrialism in the former USSR.
The Mujahudeen morphing into Al Qaeda is a new one on me that I have never heard before. I
had read and heard countless times that it was Al Qaeda all along in Afghanistan that the
U.S. assisted to fight against the USSR. It does not make sense either, since the MEK (
Mujahudeen ) is a twisted Shiite cult Iranian, and Al Qaeda is Arabic and twisted Sunni cult.
So, the language and religious differences do not make any sense that one became the
other.
I guess that it makes perfect sense to say anything at all, regardless of the facts, to
the Terrible Trio in the DNC, just to keep the focus on themselves, rather than on Biden.
Initial Times coverage, which claimed that the activity had been confirmed by both
intelligence sources and money tracking, was supplemented by delusional nonsense from
former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who asks “Why does Trump put
Russia first?” before calling for a “swift and significant U.S.
response.” Rice, who is being mentioned as a possible Biden choice for Vice
President, certainly knows about swift and significant as she was one of the architects of
the destruction of Libya and the escalation of U.S. military and intelligence operations
directed against a non-threatening Syria.
The pathetic Rice has plenty of company. During a 7/5 CNN puff segment with Dana Bash,
Tammy Duckworth (another potential Biden VP), out of the blue said that the Russians put out
a bounty on US forces. Of course, Bash didn’t challenge Duckworth.
Downplayed in all of this is the fact that Russia was one of the first, if not the first
nation, to console the US on 9/11, followed by Russian assistance to the US military
operation in Afghanistan.
“…the kind of information that stinks to high heaven because it doesn’t
even make any political or tactical sense, except to Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff
and the New York Times.”
Pelosi is the proud daughter of a shabbos goy father; Schumer is “shomer” or
professed guardian of Israel; Schiff is the decendent of the Internationale Banker who
supported Trotsky’s take down of the Czar; the NYT is what happens when Hebrews learn
to write English. The Jews have been trying to rule Russia for almost 200 years as
Solzhenitsyn would have told us if he could have gotten a publisher in the Jewish American
publishing industry. If Stalin hadn’t thrown the Bolshevik Jews out, there might not
have been a cold war. Watch out Gentiles. These people have taken us into 3 wars for their
interests and they NEVER change.
And, of course, the “conservative” maggots are going along with the obvious
liberal lies once again. There has never been a group of more cowardly and worthless
individuals than American “conservatives”.
Russia
The hope of the world.
Edgar Cayce
Famous US psychic.
As the USA continues its path into a political, moral and military cesspit of pure
corruption, lies, violence, mass murder and sheer evil, it is increasingly difficult to argue
with Cayce.
He was certainly on to something, and that something was like, 80 years ago.
One can even put more belief and trust in a psychic these days – than anything being
claimed or reported by the USA alphabets, government or MSM
Sickening and frightening really.
There are other reasons for wishing to stay in Afghanistan. Generals don’t like
losing wars
You would have thought by now the American Generals would have got used to ‘losing
wars’.
They haven’t won one other than Grenada in living memory.
The Russians even had to win WW2 for them….
Russia and China would eat them alive today.
So we are now down to sheer bullying, bluster and illegal economic sabotage.
Venezuela springs to mind.
Yes, but they also hate Putin for liberating Russia from its rapacious oligarchs, nearly
all of whom were Jews. The present artificially created hatred for Russia in the US is in
reality the hatred of the frustrated Jewish Mafia.
“I can’t imagine that any intelligent person believes this bullshit about
Russia”
Lenny is clapping his hands excitedly.
“Oy believe it, George ! I do – I do – I do !”
George grunts, clears his throat & spits with some force & accuracy at a scrunched up
copy of the NYT.
“Let’s say for the sake of argument that the story is true.”
For amusement’s sake, lets wonder what would happen should the Russians offer a bounty
to US & allied troops to kill each other . A kind of cash incentive to bring back
the final years of the Vietnam war.
It sure will be entertaining to watch Joe Biden try to cope with the duties of the
presidency. He makes the fictional President Camacho from the movie “Idiocracy”
look like a statesman with the intellectual skills of a Teddy Roosevelt by comparison. I can
picture his inaugural address in my head, as he inevitably loses his place on the
teleprompter and starts babbling about pony soldiers and you know, the thing. After a grope
fest at his inaugural ball, instead of the Oval Office he will immediately be consigned to
the White House basement for the duration of his term. If you thought an inarticulate
President Donnie made for good reality TV, just wait till a totally incoherent President Joe
has the whole world rollicking with laughter. Plus, Republicans get their turn to amuse with
grid lock of the Congress and the discharge of mass quantities of bog sediment at the
administration every single day for four solid years. It’s a win for comedy no matter
which candidate is elected!
Ann, you’ve got the quote wrong. Here is what he actually wrote:
“So, what is a leaked almost certainly faux story about the Russian
bounties”
I’m going to assume you didn’t mean “forks” but actually
“faux”.
Using “faux” is here is not incorrect. Giraldi could have meant the NYT article
was “not real, but made to look or seem real” — which goes considerably
further than “false”.
However, that does not necessarily mean that other users of “faux” are not
indulging themselves in a “silly fashion”.
@Emily
to consecrate Russia to the heart of Mother Mary – which still hasn’t fully been
fulfilled, btw – is another indication of Russia’s leadership in a community of a
shared future for humanity, aka Community of Common Destiny (CCD), as advocated by the
Russian President’s ‘double-helix’ partner, China’s President Xi
Jinping.
Compare and contrast that with, then President, Obama’s words to Putin: “The
United States has exclusive rights to anywhere in the world.”
@Alfred
family bankruptcy when every pharmacist knows they re-branded and off-shored their loot
several years ago. Their fine was pocket lint to them.
But that fake allowed the corporate-government axis to make ALL serious painkillers
effectively illegal, including the ones being used safely before Purdue Pharma came
along.
Narcotics are safe when used properly, but where’s the CIA’s take there? So
they killed their competitors and made your family doctor an agent. And sell lots of dope.
Because the nation the CIA protects is in terminal debt, agencies need hard cash from
somewhere .
That’s why the democrats and the left fight to keep the southern border open ,the
hordes of third world peasants are just a “bonus”……look at who the
drugs are destroying i.e. the target
The Democrats have predictably been outdone by the anti-Trump Republicans in this matter.
You can’t sink any lower in Russia-baiting than the Lincoln project’s recent
release, “Fellow Traveler”. Beyond stupid and revolting. Gives you a clue of
their very low opinion of the American voter
There is a dangerous illusion – characterized in part by demonizing rivals –
and that is the developing crisis is merely a re-run of the Cold War. After the Napoleonic
wars the Congress system was established to maintain peace in Europe. It worked reasonably
well, interrupted significantly by the Crimean war, but finally buried with the outbreak of
WWI in 1914; it did not prevent that cataclysmic conflict. Then came the League of Nations
for a short time; it did not stop WWII. The United Nations and other post-war institutions
were established in the 1940s. Now we are in the approaches to WWIII. But very few see. The
apocalyptic conflict feared during the Cold War is nearing. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Russia Hoax 2 is supposed to keep our minds off the Uniparty’s anarcho-tyranny, but
it’s awfully hard to fear Putin with orcs and shitlibs running amok wrecking statues of
racist elks.
@Robert
Dolan olostomy Bag, or were able to steal it on election night, Trump would be spending
the rest of his life in prison right now.
And Russia would have acquiesced to, though more likely quietly assisted, the frame-up.
What we don’t know at this point is what generational geopolitical payoff Russia was
promised by Brennan in March 2016, for its participation. My suspicion is that Nord Stream II
was merely a down payment.
I don’t envy Barr or Durham. How do they resolve this greatest political scandal in
American history when at the center of it you have a former CIA Director who is a Russian
mole.
If you review the New York Times editorial page and its oped pieces you will see more half
of the content each day is anti Trump. The Times has also played up the civil rights aspect
of the BLM movement while playing down the hooliganism of Antifa and the looting by Blacks
which has accompanied it. Many neighborhoods in Manhattan were trashed and looted far beyond
what The Times reported. So promoting the “Russian Bounty” lie doesn’t
surprise me at all. Remember also Times employees went absolutely crazy when the paper
printed an oped by Sen. Tom Cotton. What a bunch of lying flakes and chicken shits.
@tyrone
of more and more of the total of products and services produced in the US economy every year
(GDP) goes to capital, i.e., the holders of wealth, rather than workers, which in turn
creates a drag on further GDP – so eventually it becomes self defeating.
Think: Vicious Cycle of Poverty, as opposed to Virtuous Cycle of Prosperity.
But that explains why neither the Dems / Repubs are determined to do anything about the
1,000,000+ illegal immigrants crossing the US-Mexican border every year.
As said many times by many others: ‘The US has one political party – the
business party, with 2 wings.’
The Soviets actually had to stop the Wehrmacht cold (very cold, indeed) and be ready to
start rolling it back before the USA even dared to join the war.
US Ziocons movement is a family affair. They’re into the second and third
generation, who are still following their daddy’s’ or grandpa’s playbook.
Original ideas are hard to come by with this lot.
The Democrats are suggesting that Trump is too stupid and even too disinterested to be
president of the United States so they are seeking to replace him with a corrupt
78-year-old man who may be suffering from dementia.
Good one but what do you mean may be suffering ? (Grin)
Not only replace Trump with Biden but with all the radicals now infesting theDemo’krat
party and manipulating demented, sleepy Joe.
These are all made up stories. By the time one fake story is laboriously dismantled
another one is made up. It’s always a game of playing catch-up. Russia makes a good
boogyman and has served well in that role for three generations now so it’s a tested
formula. It’s a dangerous game since all these idiots could sleepwalk us into an armed
clash with Russia somewhere. Then of course there’ll plenty of problems but perhaps
there’s a calculation that something like that could benefit this band of war
inciters.
I know old liberals have ate up all things Russia, Russia, Russia. Have the POBs (people
of brown)? Have all those post ’67 immigrants? They all vote democrats, and are now the
future demographic of America. Its their kids that have to wanna die for the war machine now.
Has the Yiddish propaganda sheet worked its magic on them? The 1619 Project sure did. My
humble guess is no, despite their voting. Most just want money.
Folks, it is time to get your love ones to stop enlisting and re-enlisting in the US
military. It is the only boycott we can do that will actually hurt.
For what it’s worth, Pillar got shitcanned and rusticated by Cofer Black, Kiriakou
got locked up, Ritter got framed as a pedo, and McGovern got the shit beat out of him by my
DoS goons. So shut the fuck up a little, OK?
So, what is a leaked almost certainly faux story about the Russian bounties on American
soldiers intended to accomplish?
To sound like a broken record again , the CABAL hates Russia and specifically Putin
because he re-established Christian Orthodoxy as the de facto state religion of Mother
Russia. They would get The USA into a hot war with Russia if it meant hurting Putin, never
mind what it would do to us. Their hatred is so strong that they could care less what it
would do to America, the snakes that they are.
All Russians would have to do to exploit the current unrest in America would be to knock
out a social media platform or two, or perhaps to leak dirt on the people ginning up war.
Those targets are absolutely hated by the American people outside the Imperial City.
@Zarathustra
and historically illiterate pseudo-intellectual BS about 1619 and Evil America that, because
its evil, should change the names of the military bases where those soldiers trained under
the impression they were going to defend their country!
The Hostile Elite is a rabid dog so totally out of control it needs to be put down
immediately.
Whatever happens, no one should ever take the moral condemnation of psychopaths
seriously.
Battered Wife Syndrome?
I give you Battered Nation Syndrome.
Time to prove to the world it’s possible to recover from it and move into a larger
freedom.
@No
Friend Of The Devil not called al-
Qaeda at this stage but some other name. Apparently the name al-Qaeda was first used by the
FBI to reference this group due to some sort of misunderstanding, but it eventually became
the name they adopted for themselves since that was what everybody was calling them anyway
when they became famous after further adventures.
The above should be taken with a grain of salt since this is only what I have been able to
glean from reading various articles. Presumably what is called al-Qaeda today are the
descendants or associates of personnel from this particular group as opposed to other groups,
but I don’t know.
When Russia was controlled by Marxists, Leftists and Liberals loved Russia, defended
Russia, excused Russia, promoted Russia. Now that Russia has survived Marxist totalitarianism
and begun rediscovering Russian cultural heritage, which features Christianity, Leftists and
Liberals HATE Russia.
Who coulda thunk it possible?
More important is that our Neocons and our old guard Yank ‘conservatives’
– who control foreign policy for both Republicans and Democrats – in the military
and the spy game see Russia today exactly as the Leftists and Liberals see Russia.
Both the Neocons and the Yank WASP Country Club types in the so-called
‘conservative’ arena agree with Leftists and Liberals about Russia.
There’s plenty of meaning there for those with ears to hear and eyes to see.
The Dem’s election strategists are grasping at straws again.
The deplorables they despise the most are flyover Americans who go to church or who serve
in the military. These are the people they think are stupid and easily manipulated by wild
tales and false flags.
The “bounty on American soldiers” is hogwash to gin up what they perceive to
be a voting bloc of gullible whites.
The Dems weakness with working class whites is one they will try to shore up by crassly
fake, flag-waving appeals to bedrock patriotism.
@anonymous
equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men
are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to
this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty
– to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base
alloy of hypocrisy.”
With Russia abolishing serfdom and slavery at the time – and much later than Western
Europe – something had to be done to not be outdone by the Russians, of course. The
hypocrisy would indeed have been unbearable. It still is.
@Really
No Shit the mass of whites before the post-WW2 era, then you are ignorant. If you think
the current Deep State is entirely Jewish, or even majority Jewish, you are ignorant.
Without any doubt, Jews now, and for decades, have per capita dominated the American Deep
State. But they did not create it, nor did they create its evil. The Mossad did NOT
create MI6 and the CIA. British Secret Service created the CIA and the Mossad.
America has a Deep State that flowed naturally from the British Deep State. The Brit
Empire was the Anglo-Zionist Empire Part 1. America is the Anglo-Zionist Empire Part 2.
US strategy at the end of WWII included letting Germans and Soviets wear each other down
and kill as many of each other as possible, without US forces involvement. Obviously
“we”, various US investors and the US taxpayer still gave the Soviets too much
stuff, that propelled USSR economic success claims for the next 20 years.
Just more Liberal/Dim/Zio/CCP sponsored horsesh*t, to drive US and Russia apart, to drive
Russia toward China, when US would be better off trying to treat Russia neutrally (hang our
CCP paid dems).
The Deep State vermin who pulled-off the violent, proxy overthrow of Yanukovych in 2014,
and who are also behind the Arab Spring, Syrian Rebels, ISIS, and the ongoing domestic
unrest Stateside, are the descendants of the vermin who overthrew Christian Russia in 1917
using the same modus operandi of color revolution and “peaceful protests.”.
Spot on!
But, a more accurate name than The Deep State is Judeocracy Inc.
followed by Russian assistance to the US military operation in Afghanistan.
Few people seem to understand the logistics of the war in Afghanistan. The US and their
allies were hugely dependent on the Russian railway system. It is just so ridiculous to
listen to these monkeys who pretend to be statesmen and women.
Susan Rice clearly uses skin whitener and hair straightener to look as much as possible
like those she hates so much.
Unfortunately, the matter with Russia is settled. And while I did not think there was
evidence to support the matter. The current executive sign an intel report that accused the
Russians and Pres. Putin specifically with sabotaging US election and murder and attempted
murder. Unless our executive can reconcile that matter by extracting some manner of penance
for hat behavior — reconciling with Russia is just a flat water tide.
Their actions constituted acts of war and while I may disagree with the assessment
—
that is the US disposition on which nothing Russia says can be taken further than a
pipe.
That intel report which this executive signed locks our posture in place regarding Russia.
We kill people in this country for being suspects.
I don’t think the US citizen would look to kindly on shaking hands with a saboteur
and murderer.
Whether the signing was a matter of political expediency is irrelevant,. The executive
openly cited Russia as an enemy of the US. For me it was one of the most painful memories of
the executives tenure, because
1. destroyed a large portion of our foreign policy agenda of toning down our presence
anywhere
2. demonstrated the executive was not as string as I believed he needed to be.
If they were willing to interfere in our election and engage in political murder in allied
states —there’s no reason to doubt that they would support the murder of our
troops in a conflict one.
———————-
It was a devastating moment when the executive agreed to that intel report.
@mike99588
r Germany.
And vastly profiting from both sides – shamelessly.
Britain and the Commonwealth faced Germany alone through dark days indeed until Russia became
our ally – before the USA incidently – conveniently overlooked..
The Americans finally came in Dec 1941 after Russia was already standing with us.
It has not been forgotten in Britain to this day.
The USA bled this country for decades, paying for what was so much crap amongst all
else..
Lend lease – what a scam that was!!!!!
Whilst you traded and supported the nazi war machine against us.
When you work that into the British Empire acting to prevent Russia from forcing the Turks
out of Europe and thereby liberating Constantinople, and acting to harm Russia deeply in
order to win ‘The Great Game,’ you perhaps will then see that back to Oliver
Cromwell and the Puritans that WASP Empire is Anglo-Zionist Empire.
Well, unlike the JewSA, Russia isn’t enthralled with the Jews. Putin and company
kicked out Soros and his Open Society as well as the Rothschild bankers. Lastly the four
billionaire Jew oligarchs who were running the Yeltsin economic shitshow were also shown the
door. Perhaps the “Assad must go” flop played into Jewish ire as well.
Amusing to see Democrats so deeply concerned over the “Russian threat”. I was
in the Agency during the Cold War. When the Soviets REALLY were a threat, most of those same
Democrats urged retreat, compromise, submission. It makes my guts churn to see these
“patriots” making hysterical claims against Russia. It is almost as if they
resent the fact that Putin has rejected their entire Globalist plan, re-Christianized Russia,
and locked up at least a few of the so-called “oligarchs” who were looting the
Russian people of their patrimony. The case of Bill Browder deserves some attention. This Red
Diaper baby (his grandfather was Earl Browder, chief of the CPUSA) has been one of the
cheerleaders in the campaign to demonize Russia. Following the family tradition of a lack of
loyalty (he holds British and U.S. passports, just in case!) this weasel used his
granddad’s old Soviet contacts to make hundreds of millions carting off anything of any
value left in the old Soviet Union. Of course, he worked with an equally greasy gang of
former Soviets to do this, including one Sergei Magnitsky, a “tax advisor”
working with Browder who assumed room temperature in a Russian jail after he was nabbed by
the tax police. I really wonder if some of these Democrats and others who so denounce Putin
had visions of sugar plums and hundreds of millions of dollars dancing in their heads, dreams
rudely brought to earth by Putin?
Oct 20, 2009 Taliban Is Getting American Troops Hooked On Heroin
It diminishes the effectiveness of our troops as well as raises money for the Taliban, who
are the ones growing the poppy. How can the US combat this new strategy?
LONDON— Recent news item: The Justice Department is investigating allegations that
officers of a special Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000
pounds of cocaine into the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials.
@EliteCommInc.
e accused is served by having his lawyers present. Since the defendants have refused to
appear in person – three of them disputing the Dutch jurisdiction — the defence
lawyers should withdraw.”
@Emily
t was only done to get into a position to share the spoils. Britain was no more than a vassal
state of the US after WW I, and in no position to defeat Germany. Only Russia could, and they
did, and would have done so with or without the Anglo-Americans. Stop whining about suffering
you brought onto yourself. Besides, Britain suffered very little compared to the continent,
including Germany, and European Jewry, and all of them would have suffered less without the
British arrogance that they had to defend their national honour. Hope they stay out of
European affairs now but it doesn’t look good at this fake Brexit moment
Wisely, Agent76 said, “The CIA Drug Connection is as Old as the Agency.”
Re; above, I suggest Grandfathered by Operation Gladio and it’s Vatican Bank money
laundering component???
Am aware how an England bank, USBC, was caught laundering the Afghanistan drug trade
billions and got a “slap on wrist.”
Linked below is an obscure article on President Putin’s special (on scene)
Afghanistan envoy, Zamir Kabulov, who accused US intelligence in Afghanistan of drug
trafficking.
@No
Friend Of The Devil to attack Iran. They are totally despised by ordinary Iranians. They
are a cult with something in common with the Cambodian Pol Pot way of life. Very dangerous
people. They have absolutely nothing in common with the Taliban who are trying to liberate
their country from the Americans.
@Gidoutahere
ld bring to an end a fledgling democracy and a return to the Cold War days.
“In return, Maxwell’s massive debts would be wiped out by a grateful
Kryuchkov, [Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB] who planned to replace Gorbachev. The KGB
chief wanted Maxwell to use the Lady Ghislaine, named after Maxwell’s daughter, as a
meeting place between the Russian plotters, Mossad chiefs and Israel’s top politicians.
? Apparently the Rothschilds/Israel Deep State wanted Gorbachev or Yeltsin.
Events are so tangled and interconnected, as Ghislaine is still a Israel Deep State
operative.
Funny, I don’t see White Russians hating themselves or other Whites for being proud
of their heritage.
Funny, I don’t see White Russians tearing down monuments and statues or desecrating
their flag.
Funny, I don’t see White Russians wanting their country to be invaded by hordes of
hostile nonwhite WMD.
Funny, I don’t see White Russians apologizing or backing down from identifying
themselves as a Christian nation.
Oh, I get it. This is why the so-called, “Deep State” and “Neo-Cons aka
Neo-Commies” hate Russia so much. I get it now. It burns (((their))) collective asses
that there are actually some largely homogeneous and traditional White nations still around
who aren’t willingly accepting their own genocide or apologizing for being evil White
racists. My gawd, this is my epiphany, this is MY AWAKENING ( shout out to Dr. Duke’s
EXCELLENT BOOK), now I know why Russia is so vilified by (((our media.))) (((Our media))) is
racist against Whites, and (((they))) hate the idea that a traditional White Christian nation
still exists, especially a powerful nation like Russia. Oh dear, how could I be so gullible
not to see this one. I’m Irish American and I am told I must hate the Russkies to be
patriotic by other patriotic Israel Firsters.
It has to do with two things, and only those two things, all other rubbish about
“human rights”, “international law”, blah blah blah, is propaganda
meant for the common man.
1) Russia is white, that means it can easily be demonized and is demonized.
2) The jews that fled Russia are an especially virulent strain of the jew, their hatred for
Russia has few equal.
Maybe someone has already stated the obvious. Regardless of the validity (or lack of) a
bounty program; it’d be real hard to affect US troops if there were no US troops in
Afghanistan.
@Erzberger
ica and the Balkans.
Fourth, had the Admiral Canaris led traitors not been hiding munitions or sending them to the
wrong place, the Soviets may not have recovered even with the US re-supply.
If there is something to yawn about, it is the WWII narrative is tiresome. Stalin
wasn’t a “good guy”, and neither were Churchill or Roosevelt. The reality
is that it took the “world” to defeat Germany. The Italians were of no help, and
the Japanese were as much a drain as a resource to Germany. Germany was destroyed to allow
the advancement of Marxism, which had already embedded itself in the UK and US.
The zionists are pissed that Russia has saved Syria from the zionist mercenaries aka AL
CIADA aka ISIS, which are creations the CIA and the MOSSAD and MI6 and NATO and so the anti
Russian propaganda, pouring out of the zionist owned MSM.
Obviously “we”, various US investors and the US taxpayer still gave the
Soviets too much stuff, that propelled USSR economic success claims for the next 20
years
The Russians paid for all the “giving” with gold. Kindly stop repeating lies.
Even the British went almost bankrupt repaying the Americans for their
“generosity”.
It will be interesting to see how the Russians will treat the Americans when the USA
experiences feudalism. I suspect the Russians will be far more generous than the Americans
deserve.
@neutral
kids.
Hilary Clinton has been a very effective butcher of Libyan and Syrian population at large;
young children and pregnant women were the greatest victims of Clinton’s subhuman
policies.
Susan Rice was good at promoting mass slaughter in Syria, and, along with H. Clinton, S. Rice
should be credited with the slave markets in Libya.
Nuland-Kagan helped to make Ukraine into the poorest country in Europe, where zionists and
neo-nazis found a complete mutual understanding. So much for holobiz squealing.
What’s wrong with the US? How come that the US society produced these
monstrosities?
Being that America kills other countries’ soldiers (and civilians) all the time, why
can’t Russia (or any other country) do the same thing? What goes around comes around,
right?
Some things (Russiagate) are just too silly to bother with.
I agree – except that I’m getting quite a chuckle these days at the sheer,
utter desperation of the “Russia did it”, “Saddam did it”, “Bin
Laden did it”, “Assad did it”, etc. etc. etc. noise from the crowd who DID
do it.
Shlomo is cornered and exposed – and that IS worth the subscription fee to watch,
FINALLY.
“There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states.” General
(((Wesley Clark)))
Obviously a patriotic “American” General like Mr. Clark has no problem with
the racist state of Israel.
Just another COHENcidence? Nah, after finding about “6 million” COHENcidences
you start thinking for yourself, stop dropping the idea that “conspiracy
theories” are “conspiracies” and start realizing you have been fed a load
of horseshit for a century and counting. We don’t have a Russia problem but Houston, we
do have a problem. Wonder what that problem is?
@Tom
Welsh te Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, at a time when that meant something. He also wrote
(presumably without the assistance a ghost writer) some 40-odd books, as Tucker Carlson
pointed out in a recent monologue.
I think by any standard, these achievements indicate a fairly high level of intellectual
skills.
Whether or not he was a nutcase is another matter, and not mutually exclusive of his
having considerable intellectual skills. A good place to start on this question is to read
what H.L. Mencken wrote about him.
And it is said that Roosevelt is included in the Mt. Rushmore tableau because he was
friends with Borglum the sculptor.
@Trinity
of different nations. But they live in harmony. Their common language is Russian. When Putin
goes to visit the Dagestan, he tells them that their men are brave and their women beautiful.
They love it. And they love Putin for it. Sadly, Google and Youtube seem to have cleaned up
this stuff.
The current news that the Brutish govt has approved new arms sales to Saudia because Saudi
mass killings of Yemeni civilians are all “isolated incidents” so it’s
quite proper to sell them the means seems to prove your point.
“Your decision, Mr President, to grant the Soviet Union an interest-free loan to the
value of $1,000,000,000 to meet deliveries of munitions and raw materials to the Soviet Union
is accepted by the Soviet Government with heartfelt gratitude as vital aid to the Soviet
Union in its tremendous and onerous struggle against our common enemy — bloody
Hitlerism.” (here)
The US is in central Asia for much more than that, it’s about blocking China and
Russia, as well as partially cutting off Iran on it’s eastern flank. Iran is almost
surrounded by US bases. The US wants to have more control point/choke point control over
continental transport routes in Asia. (One such prize would be the Dzungarian Gate, but
that’s a little too ambitious for the moment. ) Afghanistan does have resources, but it
would be a target without them, as it is so valuable as a (potential) transit corridor.
@Emily
ulture/history/item/4691-china-betrayed-into-communism" rel="nofollow"
href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4691-china-betrayed-into-communism">Marshall’s
doing all in his power to ensure the victory of Mao over Nationalist forces in 1949
U.S. civilian leaders seem to swoon over enemy sanctuaries for some strange reason. Kill
U.S. troops in theater. No problemo but pinky swear we won’t go after you if you go
back across the border.
God bless Richard Nixon and his destruction of NVA base areas in Cambodia. Thereafter,
enemy activity ceased around my camp and all through MR IV.
Reading your comment, Wally, I find your name extremely apt.
None so blind as those who refuse to even read.
You can take a horse to water but cannot make him drink.
You can put all the proof necessary but if you refuse to check it out – well –
stay a ‘ Wally’.
I guess you subscribe to the philosophy of ‘Ignorance is bliss’.
@Curmudgeon
Wehrmacht, the Warsaw Rising they so strongly encouraged would not have happened, and not
have led to the disaster it was for the city and its inhabitants
“Stalin wasn’t a “good guy”, and neither were Churchill or
Roosevelt. “ no objections
“The reality is that it took the “world” to defeat Germany. “ Much
of Europe fought on the side of Germany because they realized that Stalin, Churchill and
Roosevelt weren’t good guys, and they had nothing to look forward to but a horrible
peace in case of their victory. Why do you think the EC got together so quickly after the
war?
Also: the sheer idiocy of claiming that poor little “Britain and the
Commonwealth” stood alone against the German monster state! Do you ever look at a map?
at human and natural resources? This should have been a turkey shoot if your side had not
been as lacking in courage as it was, and as incompetent. And if the rest of Europe
wasn’t to a very large extent in the German camp, as it is today
Scott Ritter has a separate article at consortiumnews noting that the Russians have been
giving money to the Taliban (AID) to fight Americans, the CIA and their ISIS proxies since
2014. Surely Obama and/or Biden would have stopped these Russian “bounties” if
they were important.
“Please at least proofread your gibberish. Some of it might even make
sense.”
The executive in the WH has agreed that Russia sabotaged the US election process and
engaged murder and attempted in states of our allies.
There is no turning the clock bank unless Russia makes some gesture of amelioration
— there behavior constitutes an attack on the US. As such they are active enemies of
the US.
Unfortunately anyone seeking some manner of Russian love fest — should probably
forget it. Whether the executive signed for politically expedient reasons simply
doesn’t matter.
“If you believe any of the Skripals nonsense and the MH-17 false flag, you are
either gullible or a troll.”
Uhhhh, wholly irrelevant. My position in opposition to the contend that Russia sabotaged
the US election was vehemently dubious. My comments at the time make my position abundantly
clear. The evidence for the case against Russia in the US simply no there. But at the end of
the day, the executive choose to go the other direction. That is unfortunate. But it was also
a sign of things to come concerning the executives ability to stand.
And my comments today make that very clear. Your knee-jerk response that I believe what
the executive signed onto is incorrect. I knew that his choice destroyed a good deal of his
foreign poliy admonition to reduce tensions.
But that was his choice mistake or not he made that choice and as I expressed at the time
— we would have to live by it.
——————————————–
In fact, if I were on the opposition, I would like nothing better for the executive to
start behaving as though the intel report doesn’t exist. Because I would pull out that
report with his signature and commence calling him a weakling, indecisive, and a danger to
the US — who is to toothless to hold Russia accountable for her acts of terror in the
US and Europe.
I would then commence a campaign explaining why the executive wants to decrease troops ion
Europe — he wants to cede our allies over to Russian domination —
But then I am not on the opposition. It was a mistake on the facts for the executive to
sign that report for which there was little to no evidence supporting it.
Now if you have a response that gives the president some manner of face saving as he makes
nice with a country that overthrew a US election in the US, and engaged in murder and
attempted murder — have at it.
—————
Minus some kind of amelioration by the Russians or an about face by the current executive
(and tat would really be interesting) no peace and love and understanding can move forward. I
can say with certainty
Russia, Pres. Putin has no intention of apologizing for something they most likely did not
do regarding US elections.
Though I am sure he will once again have reason to chuckle.
Those of you angry, frustrated, irritated . . . and yada I suggest you take that up with
the WH They made that choice.
But by all means name call as opposed to deal with the obvious reality.
The US can not make nice with Russia until Russia makes amends for sabotaging the US
election and engage in acts of murder or attempted in murder in the sovereign states of our
allies. So says the executive in the WH. In fact he says that Pres. Putin ordered the
sabotage and murder.
I think you understand.
There is no way for the current executive to move forward with better relations with
Russia without extracting some admission and compensation for sad acts without reaping
serious political damage — I would say a loss of credibility, but that is already in
question – sadly.
Interestingly, whoever invented this lie about Russia and Taliban not only did not know
the realities of Afghanistan, but was stupid enough not to consult someone who knows. There
is no such thing as a bank transfer in Afghanistan. It exists in the Middle Ages (democracy,
my foot!), so the only form of money that functions there is cash, in hand, in a case, or in
a bag, depending on the amount.
The USA is quickly going to find itself in a corner. There is no realistic path away from
a total confrontation with Russia. No politician will dare dissent. I hope Russia is prepared
for this.
“The deplorables they despise the most are flyover Americans who go to church or who
serve in the military. These are the people they think are stupid and easily manipulated by
wild tales and false flags.”
Well let’s face it, they usually are. These are the milch cows the MIC relies on to
keep its funding secure.
Everyone knows that Americans are the most dumbfuck stupid people on the planet. It is
more shocking to think that propaganda would NOT affect most of the population.
Anecdotally, when my family lived in England in a village near London in 1957-58 we were
treated like royalty. I’ve always assumed it’s because we were the beloved Yanks
who saved Britain’s behind in the war. That doesn’t undercut what you say about
the underlying resentment, but my clear impression and that of my parents was that the
post-war Brits loved them some Yanks.
Another anecdote, this one not so feel-good. In 1956 we lived on Lakenheath AFB in the UK.
During the Suez crisis the base was on full stand-by alert in case we had to go to war with
Britain. Seriously.
@Patagonia
Man re in Washington is beyond repair. The despicable sinister schemes, backstabbing,
lies, fake facts in a quest for power has nothing to do with democracy but criminality.
It is time to galvanize support for direct voting…enabled by evolving technology.
That process would eliminate:
@ need for electing deceiving proxies that always betray their promises to represent the
public interest.
@ Washington proxies making decisions…should be reduced to debating issues.
@ the special interest groups, lobbies self-serving agenda.
@ sending our young people dying on far away places in unnecessary wars.
When was Paul Craig Roberts last an insider? Do you think him capable of picking cover
stories generically, that is without relevant particular knowledge of inside stuff?
And you seem to claim to have that ability to pick a cover story. So…. how? What
are the generic indicia?
Oh gee, your point would make one think that no other pagan Christian Church has
produced such mass murderers, or in fact, even greater ones… which would be ludicrous as
per history, yeah?
The real source of such satanic evil should be traced to Whitevil (including their Judevil
cousins of course) supremacy and their in-house “niggas,” such as the witch you
mention.
Looks like a lot of the blonds here except the ones here date thugs and run around til
they’re 24ish from dude to dude til they discover the joys of pills & meth and take
the full bath into the toilet….
@Ann
Nonny Mouse political dancing around and inventing another culprit as criminals always do,
successfully disappeared them. Don’t hope they will ever appear again.
And this is the Brutish government that killed another Russian by polonium poisoning and of
course invented another culprit, again as criminals always do.
And is now selling weapons for mass killing to Saudia says mass killings are merely
incidentals.
Consistently, modern Britain makes Nazi Germany look angelic. Consistently.
These are not Christian moral values. What religion or ritual system or control system acts
like this once it takes charge?
@Wizard
of Oz The same person also fuzzes up threads by pretending to be more than one commenter,
the technique known as “sock puppetry.” See under Mr. Derbyshire’s February
15, 2019, article comment ## 28, 42, 43, 44, 68, 122, where he/she/they got sloppy also posting
as “Anon[436].”
Over time, Wizard has emerged as sympathetic to the international bureaucracy of the
Establishment of which he may even be a (former?) part, the type of “diplomat”
exemplified by Mrs. Nuland’s Ivy League cookie caddy in Ukraine. He broke character a
while back, showing emotional hostility to China. But who can be sure? Among this
website’s oddest, sophisticatedly trollish commenters.
You will find that Roosevelt privately was giving both the UK & France assurances that
if either were attacked, the US would come to their aid well before 1938 – even
tho’ US multinational corporations were still trading with the NSDAP in Germany well into
1941.
As you can’t even get the Julian Assange bit right I don’t suppose it’s
any use asking you to justify your bald assertions or even flesh them our with detail. Let
alone explain when Britain became “modern” and ceased to be the country which is
rightly credited with ending theslave trade and led the way in abolition of slavery.
Yes, several governments have treated Assange contemptibly but he is remanded without bail
pending the resumption of the extradition hearing, not imprisoned for life in cruel or any
conditions. How can you waste readers time with such garbage?
How much credit do you give to someone who sloppily uses the term “terrorist in that
context referring to the equovalent of precision bombing in contrast to area bombing without
precise aiming?
I am really not qualified to comment on the internal wrangling of the various factions in
the USA. I look at their foreign policy actions, not proclamations, with much greater
interest.
@Erzberger
ut down war industry was started by Germany, arguably in Belgium in August 1814 but certainly
in December 1914 when German cruisers indiscriminately shelled three North East England towns.
An aberration? No. It was followed by Zepellin raids on London and the use of Big Bertha
against Paris. Then, what message and implicit set of rules do you find in the destruction of
Guernica? And many civilians were killed in the bombing of Warsaw. Even the virtually symbolic
bombing of Berlin was a response to bombs dropped on London, the only point in your favour
there being the fact that those bombs were probably not meant to be dropped on London.
How intriguing. Not having your obsessive interest in warning about Wizard of Oz I have
failed, at my level of diligence, to find any evidence at all of emotional hostility to China
or indeed, about anything much except perhaps the hypocritical mistreatment of individuals like
Julian Assange by governments. Can you help?
The Germans couldn’t believe how inept the average French, American, and British
soldier really were, even British described how frightened many of the America soldiers, most
barely old enough to shave, appeared. The German was appalled at the physical fitness of the
British soldier as well, describing them as weak and frail for the most part. Here is the
truth, Western Europe and America fought the German B team at best, often these Germans were
little more than schoolboys in some cases. Everyone knows that the bulk of the serious fighting
was done on the Eastern Front. Think if tiny Germany hadn’t had to fight on two fronts
against what must have seemed like half the world. It doesn’t speak well that it took so
many years to defeat a country as small as Germany, a country that was at an extreme
disadvantage. The average Western soldier, be it a Frenchmen, a Brit or an American was nothing
special to say the least. This isn’t a I hate America thing, but merely the truth. The
average German soldier was head and shoulders above the average Brit or America G.I.
Finally, seven days after its ‘scoop’, the NYT ran another story on the
subject, entitled ‘New Administration Memo Seeks to Foster Doubts About Suspected
Russian Bounties’, which was published on July 3 and buried in the bowels of the
paper.
Its opening paragraphs sought to back up the original story, claiming that an intelligence
memo had said the “… CIA and the National Counterterrorism Centre had
assessed with medium confidence – meaning creditable sources and plausible, but falling
short of near certainty – that a unit of the Russian military service, known as the
GRU, offered the bounties.”
It was only in the last paragraph that the real story – that there was no story
– was revealed: “The agency did intercept data of financial transactions that
provide circumstantial support for the detainee’s account, but the agency does not
have explicit evidence that the money was bounty payments.”
So the blood libel lasted a week!
One of the greatest things about the Trump Presidency was to carve the ‘Fake
News’ meme on the MSM’s forehead.
Mister/Miss, since when the zionized Congress of the US serves the citizenship of the US?
Thank you for reminding (and you do this regularly) of the unfortunate fact that the US is an
occupied territory and the US Congress is a nest of liars, war profiteers, and rabid
zionists.
Les Wexler, Ben Cardin, Chuck Schumer, and Clintons have inflicted more harm to the US than
any Maria Butin and such. And don’t forget Dick Cheney and Co, the committed traitors and
profiteers by any means.
In my experience people who are sloppy with language are sloppy with thinking. I thought you
might have had similar relevant experience unlike most commenters here. For example, if you
were employing a director of research or even just a junior researcher for a committee of
inquiry would you not rate their careful use of language as a qualification? You want to be
able to rely on the facts they turn up and their reasoning underlying proposed conclusions do
you not?
I am content to know that you don’t read my comments and are as sloppy and inaccurate
in calling me hasbara as the person who called destroying an Iranian nuclear facility
“terrorist”. To extend my last comment, you wouldn’t even be on the long list
for assisting any inquiry I chaired.
Do you know at least, what were you fighting for in Vietnam? How Vietnam threatened US
shores?
Do not tell me fighting communist ideology, because the same Nixon and Kissinger that bombed
Cambodia civilians embraced that communist ideology in China with grave consequences. We have
lunatics in Washington and it is time for direct voting – majority rules.
@Wizard
of Oz as right in the sense that despite the British and French declaration of war, not
much happened – other than the naval blockade and the lame French invasion of the Saar
region. Neither Britain nor France had the courage to follow up on their war declaration, for
fear of unpopular casualties or further destruction of land and people (France), and both hoped
to gain a cheap victory by starving out the German war effort. Had they actually opened a
second front in the fall of 39, the Germans would have collapsed, and the war would have been
over before Christmas.
The GErman victory over FRance surprised everyone, including the Germans
I think the EC got together so quickly because the US wanted to impose their economic model
on Europe with the illusion of control. The Marshall Plan was unraveling as the swindle it was,
and the EC was the answer to keep up the illusion. While the UK was in on the scam, they were
the front for the Americans, as the idiot Churchill had pissed away the Empire to buy his 15
minutes of fame.
Once the shooting starts there are no good guys. Like all wars, WWII was an economic war. The
German economic system could not be allowed to succeed, it was catching on.
You must must have quite a deteriorated mind when Russia can influence your vote. Tell me
the logistics of the process. You must have equally deteriorated mind believing what CNN,
MSNBC, WP or NYT and others dishonest outfits tell you – they are a propaganda machine
for a small unpatriotic parasitic group.
There is a hierarchy in the blame game . Trump isn’t on the top . If he were, the vile
Democrats would be asking review and discussion by broader media ,Dept of Justice and Treasury
either to discredit or confirm the following story
in–“Venezuela’s interim government wants access to funds confiscated in
the US from corrupt officials, saying it belongs to the Venezuelan people. But US officials
appear to have other plans. The Treasury Department diverted $601 million last year from its
forfeiture fund to help build President Trump’s border wall. (Leer en español)
https://www.univision.com/univision-news/latin-america/legal-battle-over-venezuelas-looted-billions-heats-up
Since the United States initiated a coup attempt against Venezuela’s elected leftist
government in January 2019, up to $24 billion worth of Venezuelan public assets have been
seized by foreign countries, primarily by Washington and member states of the European Union.
President Donald Trump’s administration has used at least $601 million of that looted
Venezuelan money to fund construction of its border wall with Mexico, according to government
documents first reviewed by Univision Univision reviewed US congressional records and court
documents and found that the Trump administration tapped into $601 million of the Treasury
Department’s “forfeiture fund” to supplement the wall constructio https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/29/trump-stolen-venezuelan-money-border-wall-mexico/
Reason no-one is doing it is because hating Trump could always be swapped for worshipping
something more sinister and idiotic .
We would have heard a similar story only if Russia extracted something like this from
Ukraine or Libya .
I suggest you seek treatment for you pathological hate. Russia want to be a friend in
peaceful coexistence but it is sinister players in Washington that constantly need/create
enemies to build military industrial complexes instead of consumer goods which are supplied
from China.
I have been a supported of the current executive before he considered running. And his
choice to agree with the intel report and more was a fairly tough pill to swallow. As it turns
it was but one of many.
No I found the intel dubious. And I think the executive could have challenged in a manner
that did not call the CIA and other agencies DIA, etc. or damage his ability to curtail his
policy agenda. But having signed — he essentially states Pres Putin and the Russians are
active enemies of the US given that scenario
one would draw on our behavior in Afghanistan hen we supported the Taliban with weapons to
kill Russian soldiers —-
@Trinity
fought more effectively and efficiently than the novice American soldiers. Then there were
technical factors which were naturally advantageous to the more experienced military. For
example the famous 88mm anti-aircraft gin turned anti-tsnk gun was never matched by the Allies
(I thin) and the German tactics for its use were also superior. Germany, though less than the
Soviet Union had another advantage over Britain and France. It’s population went on
growing fast for a generations beyond the end of high growth in Britain and, especially,
France. For example there were 2 million Germans born in 1913 to provide young men for the army
in the 30s.
Yes, as I’ve said repeatedly, the ‘sinister players’, the Judaic NEOCON
cabal want to keep America and Russia apart mainly for their hate of Christianity and gentiles,
and try to destroy them both.
@Curmudgeon
uld be a return to what was indeed Hitler’s scheme of continental autarky and a more even
distribution of wealth, and a democratic model much more in line with the Prussian model, the
latter bearing significant resemblance with the Chinese Mandarin system. The Chinese Communists
are really doing nothing different than the old emperors running a meritocracy rather than an
idiocracy. Western democracies, esp the US, with their insane and horrendously expensive
election circuses tend to achieve the latter. I hear Kanye West is running for president now.
The problem with China is not Communism but their adoption of Western state-capitalism.
I am sure President Putin would be delighted to draw international attention to this new
symbol of a Christian resurgence in Russia. President Trump would appreciate the splendor of
such a backdrop for his meeting with another major head of state. Many of the Evangelicals
among Trumps’s base would be gobsmacked to learn that Mr. Putin is not running a godless,
soulless Communist hellstate. And many of people in the US State Department and the rest of the
Swamp would utterly sh*t their pants.
True dat. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the exceptionals.
And Cheney’s daughter burns the midnight oil in order to keep the pot boiling in
Afghanistan. MUST have U.S. troops there to oppose “terrorists” with AKs.
NYT is a rental rag that always favored Soviets and now CCP, why cite it anymore?
The Russia distraction distracts from Piglosi, Feinstein, Biden, Bushes, congress and corps
etc etc being in bed$ with China. With the side benefit of Russian alienation from the US
driving Russian goods into the China slaughter house on the cheap.
@Derer
pants over Assad’s or Gaddafi’s purported authoritarianisms like they’re
skunk pie. Eeeww!
You’re right that we have lunatics in Washington but I don’t think “direct
voting” is the answer. Devolution plus draconian anti-trust enforcement. crucifixion of
the Antifa filth, massive deportations, ending black privilege, brutally honest debate over
black failure, draconian anti-vote fraud operations, and naming and neutralizing the role and
power of organized Jewry and its wealth seem more likely to get us back on track. Please be
more creative then “majority rule.”
Jesus. “Choke points” can be dealt with from afar. It takes a while to rebuild
railroad bridges. The concept of the Russian and Iranian enemies has worn a little thin these
last few days. It’s just assumed that Russia is a malignant force just as it’s
universally assumed that “special sauce” is the way to go on McDonalds’
hamburgers. I accept neither proposition.
I want troops on the U.S. southern border not on the “flanks” of Iran or
policing “transit corridors” here and there but that’s just me.
@Wizard
of Oz a refuses to extradite a woman to Britain for actual homicide. Zero grounds to hold
him.
From their political standpoint the safest way out is for Assange to simply die in the
maximum-security prison, so the extradition proceedings can simply be dropped. All problems
solved.
So, he is in actual fact in prison for life.
Never mind that Britain did something virtuous in the distant past. Today is today. And
notice that serial murderers can be friendly and courteous between murders but that nice
behaviour doesn’t exonerate them for the murders. Nazi Germany looks angelic relative to
the Britain of today.
“The Gulf of Tonkin “event” was a lie, so there’s that.”
No. It in reality, it was a series of confused messages from the patrol boat. But was used
to support a defense of S. Vietnam — the matter is of no consequence. The US was going to
defend S. Vietnamese sovereignty regardless of the Tonkin event.
Today on TruNews Rick interviews Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a free speech
alternative to the tyrants at Twitter. They discuss how the Silicon Valley elite use their
satanic bias to silence opposition and have a mission to purge Christianity from their
platforms.
FYI while BLM and RG draw our attention and now RABAS have made all other conspiracies
recede into Corona graveyard
( Russia gate and Russia Afghan Bounty American Solider )
Kushner stoke and his DNA repaired the monetary damages back at home of origin .
Israel lobby organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America ($2-5 million),
Friends of the IDF ($2-5 million) and the Israeli American Council ($1-2 million) are grabbing
huge 100% forgivable loans from the CARES Act PPP program.
According to SBA data released on Monday, Israeli’s Bank Leumi has doled out a quarter to
a half billion dollars under the PPP program, despite being called out for operating in the
occupied West Bank.
Leumi has given sweetheart deals to fellow Israeli companies Oran Safety Glass (which defrauded
the US Army on bulletproof glass contracts) and Energix, which operates power plants in the
occupied Golan Heights and West Bank.
This exchange took place today on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal.
This video clip with additional information is available on IRmep’s YouTube
Channel.
Grant F. Smith is the author of the new book The Israel Lobby Enters State Government. He is
director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy IRmep in Washington, D.C. which
co-organizes IsraelLobbyCon each year at the National Press Club.
@geokat62
– colonial expansion,
– rolling genocide of the Palestinian people, witness 2014 Operation Protective Edge,
– terrorist attacks of neighboring Arab/Muslim states – Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq,
Occupied Territories, Iran & Syria;
– terrorist attacks on Western nations, incl. the UK, the US, & France (since its
Parliament voted to recognize Palestine as a state in 2014), and
– sponsoring of terror organizations e.g, ISIS, to continue its proxy war on
Syria.
– etc, etc
In addition to Constantinople, years later defending Ottoman remnants in Bosnia and Kosovo
against the Christians by “cigar” Clinton and warmonger Blair that introduced the
Islamization of Europe.
@Erzberger
e lines of making distinctions e.g. between deliberate murder of harmless civilians and forcing
choices on them (starve Russian prisoners and ration food to mothers and children e.g.). Of
course the choice to get rid of their government and stop the war is unrealistic even in the
post Cold War world. What did sanctions on Iran produce?? Just civilian deaths.
** it is only recently that I discovered that it made a big contribution to diverting German
effort from the Eastern Front though it is not surprising that Stalin thought the absence of a
Second Front in France was meant to help the Germans savage the USSR.
@Patagonia
Man he approx dozen Israeli dual citizens he alleges are in the Australian Parliament
contrary to the provisions of the Australian constitution.
So, don’t encourage him Geo, by thanking him. That Israeli nonsense is enough to brand
him as a nutter.
As to Quadrant, what does it matter that, in the 50s, and maybe till about 1970, it was
given some financial support by the CIA? Really, what is the point in the 21st century? Does it
matter to current affairs that Robert Maxwell owned the Daily Mirror till the 90s?
If I don’t reply to all the rubbish no one should infer the truth of anything
Patagonia Man alleges.
He takes various commandments of God and distills it into a silly… Debt = Sin.
Indeed, it is true that one can take anything and make it fit their delusional way of thought.
E.g. the 3 in 1, of the pagan Trinity.
Of course, that does not mean, Usury (extortionate moneylending) ≠ Sin, which it most
certainly is.
The Ten Commandments were about debt? A silly interpretation. They are primarily about
Monotheism and a righteous way-of-life, and refraining from usury is just one aspect of it.
Christianity got perverted? Yes, it most certainly is a pagan perversion of True
Monotheism.
“Sure, Poland bears major responsibility for WW 2, and lending themselves to now
hosting US nukes and troops to be moved over from Germany signals that they once again have not
learned a thing from their past.”
— Stepping on rakes as a national pastime.
@Ann
Nonny Mouse an associated organisation whose stated objective is to ‘maximise support
for the State of Israel within the British Liberal Democrat Party’…
Spaight claims that drawing the war to the British isles was done in solidarity with the
Soviets. This is nonsense but a timely propaganda move at a time when German defeat was
assured. Stalin did no fall into that trap. He lknew about Operation Pike and Operation
Impossible, and had zero reason to trust the British. Wikipedia has a page on either
Operation
Denialist? A careful textual analysis tells me you are saying WoZ denies what you assert,
which is that there are about a dozen Israeli dual citizens in the Australian Parliament,
contrary to law. Instead of coyly dancing around the issue what about meeting the challenge to
name at least some?
@Erzberger
Thanks. Mind you I think the Blitz was pretty indiscriminate bombing before Britain was in a
position to inflict much damage on Germany. I gather attacks on London from the start were a
strategic error by Hitler because the Liluftwaffe should have kept up its attacks on Britisk
airfields. Interesting that Albert Speer, in the “World at War” series, said that
four more raids like the 1000 bomber raid on Hamburg (or maybe it was Cologne) would have
finished the war. Why couldn’t Bomber Command do I it? Maybe it was because Eisenhower
won the battle to have bombers diverted to bombing the Pas we Calais (mostly) and Normandie.
“Mind you I think the Blitz was pretty indiscriminate bombing before Britain was in a
position to inflict much damage on Germany.”
Wrong.
BTW, the Blitz is a misnomer. Blitzkrieg is tactical air support for ground troops. Neither
applies to the air attacks on German cities in May 1940, or the German retaliation, several
months later, that we know as the Blitz.
Richard Overy though has argued that the German Blitz showed the British how it was done
efficiently, so they improved their bombing strategy accordingly afterwards. Whatever
What is needed is a transfer of resources from private consumption and privately
directed investment to public use. That can be achieved through various forms of
predistribution, reducing the incomes of those receiving an excessive reward at present, or
through taxation. While both need to be pursued, it's unlikely that predistribution can do
all the work.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Austerity is part and parcel of the neoliberal business model. In other words "austerity
is what a good economic policy looks like to a creditor [or rentier]" (Michael Hudson)
Neoliberalism essentially re-structures the whole economy for rent seeking using
financialization and unnecessary (parasitic) financial intermediation. This is the nature of
the beast. And leopard can't change its spots.
That's why austerity has been a central component of state policy at every level of
government in the USA and in Europe for the last four decades. In the USA austerity policies
were being applied, in particular, for the elimination or reduction in social services. As
there is no countervailing force (James K Galbraith) -- the role previously played by unions,
the neoliberal elite happily drives the country to the cliff.
Both the Democrats and Republicans are united in their commitment to continue to feed the
USA war machine and empire building with dollars extracted -- to the tune of almost a
trillion a year -- from the lower 80% of population, and transfer those money to the pockets
of the military-industrial complex and financial oligarchy. After all neoliberalism is about
redistribution of wealth up, not down.
Austerity align neatly with key goals of neoliberalism: drive to discipline labor, to
reduce the role of state and to redistribute wealth and power up.
That's why we have seen an increase in social inequality since 1970th. Neoliberal changes
to welfare provisions partially drive the rises in homelessness, food bank usage and "death
of despair. "
On December 5, 2019, Lawrence O'Donnel described the Neoliberal Democrats (Bill Clinton
and Al Gore) as knowingly taking a "grave political risk" in 1993 in voting in favor of
austerity.
The risk was to lose scores of seats -- and control of the House and Senate. O'Donnell
stressed that no Republicans voted for the Neoliberal Democrat's 1993 austerity program. As
the result the neoliberal Democrats lost the House for the first time in 40 years." They also
lost the Senate.
Neoliberal Democrats can't abandon austerity and it forces Democrats into an unending
series of "Sophie's choices." Under austerity, Democrats must shrink existing overall federal
spending. Which naturally results in the election defeat.
Republican fiscal policies cleverly combine "wedge" offerings to fire up their base and
massive tax breaks for the elite which fund their campaigns -- leading to a recurrent cycle
in which the Neoliberal Democrats are forces to champion policies that cause the public to
identify Democrats as the party most likely to raise taxes and cut vital federal
programs.
The larger is created by previous Republican administration deficit, the greater the
Neoliberal Democrats' new administration urgency to inflict austerity -- and embrace
political suicide. It is a self-reinforcing cycle producing recurrent political disaster for
Neoliberal Democrats.
The permanent professional wrestling spectacle in which the hapless patsies keep losing to
the real tough guy? After all, they get paid handsomely in any case.
First, Keynes was either misled or misleading in attributing macroeconomic self-correcting
tendencies to all classical economists. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Malthus and Marx
were all aware of the possibility of deep financial crises (The South Sea Bubble was already
50 years in the past when Wealth of Nations was published), and of the possibility
that financial crises might lead to business slumps; they wrote about it but did not make it
the center of their focus because nothing as bad as the Great Depression took place in the
18th and 19th centuries. Brad DeLong also points out that J.B. Say had to partially recant
Say’s Law later in his life:
Of the famous classical economists, only Ricardo seems to have wholeheartedly believed in
macroeconomic self-correction, and this was likely only because his entire career spanned a
period of time when there was plenty of poverty in England, but little underemployment if
only thanks to the Napoleonic wars plus emigration to the Western hemisphere and Pacific.
Probably a more useful distinction is Marx’s dichotomy between “scientific
bourgeois economists” like Smith, Ricardo, and Mill, and the “vulgar”
bourgeois economist propagandists who did end up adopting macroeconomic self-correction as a
mantra.
Second, Keynes famous assertion that “the boom not the slump is the time for
austerity at the Treasury” is potentially misleading. Depending on the state of
business confidence, consumer spending, and the trade balance, it is more accurate to say
that the boom not the slump is the time for improving the fiscal balance, which is not
necessarily the same thing as either austerity or budget surpluses.
I agree that the one of the big flaws in MMT is the lack of attention paid to the
distributional effects of fiscal policy: you can’t rein in inflationary pressure by
raising taxes on the very wealthy, as this will only result in reduced saving rather than
reduced spending; less progressive taxes may do the trick but will worsen the existing
distribution and thus worsen the political situation; the same goes for raising taxes to
finance Green New Deal programs.
However, I don’t think that the MMT position boils down to the U.S. being in a
permanent liquidity trap situation. The idea of a liquidity trap no longer makes sense once
you view the money supply as endogenous, with fluctuations being influenced by fiscal
spending (increase) and taxes (decrease). Or to put it in Macro 201 gibberish terms, with an
endogenous money supply whose chief influence is the fiscal balance, the IS and LM curves are
no longer independent: a shift out in IS curve leads to a shift out in the LM curve, with
little effect on interest rates unless the central bank is actively trying to raise them.
Provided they are careful with the distributional effects of tax policy, MMT policy
prescriptions may actually work well quite well in terms of economic theory for the U.S.,
which has both a sovereign and borrower-of-last-resort currency and consequently also has a
large import cushion to absorb inflationary pressure. The real problem is political: neither
Wall Street nor other important sectors of the U.S. industry (oil/gas and Silicon Valley,
among others) are fond of full employment if it caused by an expansionary government, and
will pull their campaign financing towards the pro-austerity party at minimum and possibly
even threaten to limit investment inside the U.S. Kalecki’s Political Aspects of
Full Employment rears its ugly head yet again.
And in most countries other than the U.S., the assumptions of MMT don’t fully apply:
either there’s no sovereign currency, or governments are forced to borrow in foreign
currencies and become subject to foreign currency reserve constraints, plus there’s no
anti-inflation cushion provided by extra imports from having the borrower-of-last-resort
currency and the resulting capital inflows.
Lastly, Keynes did not go all-out to advocate rationing during the war, favoring
consumption taxes instead. It was Kalecki who provided the theoretical justification for
rationing by arguing that consumption taxes would also reduce voluntary saving and likely
leave total saving unaffected. Rationing in effect works like a type of progressive tax. But
short of wartime expedients, it is unlikely that taxation under full employment can be so
effective as to by itself eliminate inflationary pressure: either it has to be weighted
towards the lower income brackets with unpleasant political consequences as John points out,
or it has to be accompanied by an upward push on interest rates, which invalidates the MMT
argument against crowding out.
Overall, MMT founders not because it is an inaccurate picture of the Keynesian system and
its Lerner/Knapp satellites, but because Keynes’s theory was itself incomplete (not
general enough?): it does not incorporate distributional, political economy, and
international finance dynamics needed to have a fully complete theory of macroeconomics.
Today statues, tomorrow mass firings... or even worse. There's a history here.
I'm ambivalent about statues and J.K. Rowling being torn down, but terrified of the thought
process behind the destruction. Decisions should never be made by mobs.
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Is America on the edge of a cultural revolution?
The historical namesake and obvious parallel is the Cultural
Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976. Its stated goal was to purge
capitalist and traditional elements from society, and to substitute a new way of thinking based
on Mao's own beliefs. The epic struggle for control and power waged war against anybody on the
wrong side of an idea.
To set the mobs on somebody, one needed only to tie him to an official blacklist like the
Four Olds (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas). China's young people and urban workers
formed Red Guard units to go after whomever was outed. Violence? Yes, please. When Mao launched
the movement in May 1966, he told his mobs to "bombard the headquarters" and made clear that
"to rebel is justified." He said "revisionists should be removed through violent class
struggle." The old thinkers were everywhere and were systematically trying to preserve their
power and subjugate the people.
Whetted, the mobs took the task to heart: Red Guards destroyed historical relics, statues,
and artifacts, and ransacked cultural and religious sites. Libraries were burned. Religion was
considered a tool of capitalists and so churches were destroyed -- even the Temple of Confucius
was wrecked. Eventually the Red Guards moved on to openly killing people who did not think as
they did. Where were the police? The cops were told not to intervene in Red Guard activities,
and if they did, the national police chief pardoned the Guards for any crimes.
Education was singled out, as it was the way the old values were preserved and transmitted.
Teachers, particularly those at universities, were considered the "Stinking Old Ninth" and were
widely persecuted. The lucky ones just suffered the public humiliation of shaved heads, while
others were tortured. Many were slaughtered or harassed into suicide. Schools and universities
eventually closed down and over 10 million former students were sent to the countryside to
labor under the Down to the Countryside Movement. A lost generation was abandoned to fester,
uneducated. Red Guard pogroms eventually came to include the cannibalization
of revisionists. After all, as Mao said, a revolution is not a dinner party.
The Cultural Revolution destroyed China's economy and traditional culture, leaving behind a
possible death toll ranging from one to 20 million. Nobody really knows. It
was a war on the way people think. And it failed. One immediate consequence of the
Revolution's failure was the rise in power of the military after regular people decided they'd
had enough and wanted order restored. China then became even more of a capitalist society than
it had ever imagined in pre-Revolution days. Oh well.
I spoke with an elderly Chinese academic who had been forced from her classroom and made to
sleep outside with the animals during the Revolution. She recalled forced self-criticism
sessions that required her to guess at her crimes, as she'd done nothing more than teach
literature, a kind of systematic revisionism in that it espoused beliefs her tormentors thought
contributed to the rotten society. She also had to write out long apologies for being who she
was. She was personally held responsible for 4,000 years of oppression of the masses. Our
meeting was last year, before
white guilt became a whole category on Netflix, but I wonder if she'd see now how similar
it all is.
That's probably a longer version of events than a column like this would usually feature. A
tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust in terms of human lives, an attempt to destroy culture on
a level that would embarrass the Taliban -- this topic is not widely taught in American
colleges, never mind in China.
It should be taught, because history
rhymes . Chinese students are again outing teachers, sometimes via cellphone videos, for "
improper
speech ," teaching hurtful things from the past using the wrong vocabulary. Other Chinese
intellectuals are harassed online for holding outlier positions, or lose their jobs for
teaching novels with the wrong values. Once abhorred as anti-free speech, most UC Berkeley
students would likely now agree that such steps are proper. In Minnesota, To Kill A Mockingbird
and Huckleberry Finn are
banned because fictional characters use a racial slur.
There are no statues to the Cultural Revolution here or in China. Nobody builds monuments to
chaos. But it's never really about the statues anyway. In America, we moved quickly from
demands to tear down the statues of Robert E. Lee to Thomas Jefferson to basically any
Caucasian, including "
White Jesus. "
Of course, it was never going to stop with Confederate generals because it was not really
about racism any more than the Cultural Revolution was really about capitalism. This is about
rewriting history for political ends , both short-term power grabs (Not Trump 2020!) and longer
term societal changes that one critic calls the " successor ideology ," the melange
of academic radicalism now seeking hegemony throughout American institutions. Douglas Murray is more succinct. The purpose "is to
embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion." The ideas -- centered on there
being only one accepted way of thought -- are a tool of control.
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It remains to be seen where America goes next in its own nascent cultural revolution. Like
slow dancing in eighth grade, maybe nothing will come of it. These early stages, where the
victims are Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, someone losing her temper while walking a dog in Central
Park, and canceled celebrities, are a far cry from the millions murdered for the same goals in
China. Much of what appears revolutionary is just Internet pranking and common looting
amplified by an agendaized media. One writer
sees "cancel culture as a game, the point of which is to impose unemployment on people as a
form of recreation." B-list celebs
and Karens in the parking lot are easy enough targets. Ask the Red Guards: it's fun to break
things.
Still, the intellectual roots of our revolution and China's seem similar: the hate of the
old, the need for unacceptable ideas to be disappeared in the name of social progress,
intolerance toward dissent, violence to enforce conformity.
In America these are spreading outward from our universities so that everywhere today --
movies, TV, publishing, news, ads, sports -- is an Oberlin where in the name of free speech
"hate speech" is banned, and in the name of safety dangerous ideas and the people who hold them
are not only not discussed but canceled, shot down via the projectile of the heckler's veto,
unfriended, demonetized, deleted, de-platformed, demeaned, chased after by mobs both real and
online in a horrible blend of self-righteousness and cyber bullying. They don't believe in a
marketplace of ideas. Ideas to the mob are either right or wrong and the "wrong" ones must be
banished. The choices to survive the mobs are conformity or silence. In China, you showed
conformity by carrying around Mao's Little Red Book .
In America, you wear a soiled surgical mask to the supermarket.
The philosophical spadework for an American Cultural Revolution is done. Switch the terms
capitalism and revisionism with racism and white supremacy in some of Mao's speeches and you
have a decent speech draft for a Black Lives Matter rally. Actually, you can keep Mao's
references to destroying capitalism, as they track pretty closely with progressive thought in
2020 America.
History is not there to make anyone feel safe or justify current theories about policing.
History exists so we can learn from it, and for us to learn from it, it has to exist for us to
study it, to be offended and uncomfortable with it, to bathe in it, to taste it bitter or
sweet. When you wash your hands of an idea, you lose all the other ideas that grew to challenge
it. Think of those as antibodies fighting a disease. What happens when they are no longer at
the ready? What happens when a body forgets how to fight an illness? What happens when a
society forgets how to challenge a bad idea with a better one?
Someone finally noticed. History doesn't just rhyme, sometimes it repeats.
These people so closely following the leftist agenda ignore the fact the the security law
being jammed down the throats of semi-British people (used to a degree of freedom) in Hong
Kong is coming from a leftist group know as China. When I first went to China, in moments
away from my handlers (now "minders") new middle-class professionals told me that China would
survive as a society as long as simple freedoms were advanced. The children of those people
are now growing up in a new kind of totalitarian system,where you are "disappeared" if you
cause trouble.
Socialism does not need to be like this, but it is the way it always ends up. The people
who are burning and looting are even harder to control when they disagree with a pure
democratic government. The alternative is a representative democracy. Sound familiar?
Theosebes Goodfellow , 9 minutes ago
what is happening in the USA today is due directly to the fact that we did not teach our
children about the "Lost Generation", (how the Chinese themseves describe it), i.e., the
Chinese "Cultural Revolution".
But the Marxist-Leninist tachers, especially in colleges and universities, DO NOT want to
have to teach anything that shows Communism in a bad light. So it di not get taught.
Fortunately we have the lessons prepared for our little tykes by the late, detested Hugo
Chavez. Nothing says "Socialism/Communism Sucks". The ex-bus driver turned narco-trafficker
Maduro is just icing on the cake. You can't hide that disaster. And if you think it's bad in
Venezuela now, what until those stuck there start starvig to death. That's coming to
Venezuela next. It will, by the way, be the first time in modern history that a famine will
have struck the New World.
Now there's an accolade to lay at the feet of the collectivists.
TrustbutVerify , 10 minutes ago
The American Cultural Revolutionaries (BLM, Antifa, NFAC, etc.)...Democratic Party voters
all.
cjones1 , 10 minutes ago
Chinese families had to throw their antique furniture into the street to escape
condemnation. Many people starved if they were not given a ration ticket.
I was told that even today unmarried, pregnant woman are unable to obtain obstetric
services to deliver their baby. Their babies are not officially recognized and are often left
on street. Childless couples may adopt them or they are left for orphanages
The Democratic party has sanctioned the violent mobs in their politically correct
condemnations. It is a great irony that tge Democratic party is a Confederate memorial. The
Democratic party's legacy is slavery, racism, bigotry, segregation, lynch mobs, and the KKK
hoodlums. They have new hoodlums in Antifa, BLM, and the TDS afflicted that paint bigoted
slogans on city streets and elsewhere.
I was listening to an interview with Tucker Carlson by The Federalist last week. Great
interview, by the way. He said, and I am paraphrasing:
'During the Cultural Revolution in China, Confucius and his entire family's graves were
all dug up and desecrated. The message was clear: If they come for him, they will come for
YOU and have no problems in doing so'.
So, these statues are just objects to them. And, if you get in their way, you will just be
an object to be removed. This is all very surreal to me.....and quite frightening. I am not
one to post bravado. I am only a man. I want to harm no one and want no one to harm me.
However, the time is coming when I will be tested. It seems it will be sooner rather than
later. I hope that with my faith well grounded in God that I will endure what comes to
me.
SDShack , 8 minutes ago
Statues are monuments to history to stimulate debate among future generations what those
monuments represent. Violently erasing statues by one side, means that side admits they
cannot win the future debate. Hence they must eliminate what they perceive is the "history"
that is preventing them from winning. Violent action is almost always due to hidden
insecurity from the known inability to intellectually win an argument. It's their moment to
crap all over the chessboard and leave.
"... In 2013, the national outcry over Trayvon Martin's death and George Zimmerman's acquittal sparked a national outcry over racial injustice. Amid this controversy, three activists, Patrisse Cullors , Alicia Garza , and Opal Tometi , started a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, which soon went viral. They then founded the national Black Lives Matter organization. ..."
"... No doubt, the organization itself was quite radical from the very beginning. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as "trained Marxists" in a recently resurfaced video from 2015. ..."
"... The official Black Lives Matter organization is Marxist ..."
"... Such a divisive ideology only fuels perpetual conflict, not progress toward reconciliation. By failing to drive this toxic extremism out loudly and clearly from their side of the issue, the large majority of Black Lives Matter supporters -- who simply seek reform, justice, and reconciliation -- take a chainsaw to any chance of achieving common ground and consensus. ..."
n Monday night, Terry Crews was grilled over his criticism of Black Lives Matter by CNN host
Don Lemon. As Gina Bontempo pointed out on Twitter : "Don
Lemon did everything he could to talk over Terry and silence him as soon as they started
approaching what the BLM organization is *really* about."
So what is Black Lives Matter really about?
Many conservatives insist Black Lives Matter is a Marxist, anti-police, radical organization
that wants to tear down America . Meanwhile, most liberals simply view Black Lives Matter as a
heroic movement and powerful slogan signaling support for racial justice and opposition to
police brutality.
Both are right.
There is Black Lives Matter™️, and there is "black lives matter."
Black Lives Matter as a broad sentiment and movement then gained national attention and name
recognition after the 2014 deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Meanwhile, the official
group expanded and many more local chapters formed.
No doubt, the organization itself was quite radical from the very beginning. Black Lives
Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as
"trained Marxists" in a recently
resurfaced video from 2015.
"We actually do have an ideological frame[work]," Cullors said
of her organization. "We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological
theories."
Meanwhile, the national organization's official
platform , published in 2015, contained a specific call to "[disrupt] the
Western-prescribed nuclear family structure."
At the local level, official Black Lives Matter chapters are essentially far-left front
groups that use racial justice as a Trojan horse for leftist policy and ideology. For example,
the official organization Black Lives Matter DC openly dedicates itself to "creating the conditions
for Black Liberation through the abolition of systems and institutions of white supremacy,
capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism."
Image credit: Johnny Silvercloud, Flickr
Unsurprisingly, conservatives have bashed the radical group en masse.
"Black Lives Matter is an openly Marxist, anti-America n group," conservative commentator
Mark Levin said . "There's no denying
it. And it is fully embraced by the Democrat Party and its media and cultural
surrogates."
"Black Lives Matter is a Marxist movement," Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted . "Black Lives
Matter is not about police, it's not about race, it's not about justice. It's about making us
hate America so they can replace America."
"You know, I know plenty of people who are for Black Lives Matter. A lot of them are nice
people," Fox News Host Tucker Carlson
recently said . "I'm not mad at them. I disagree I think Black Lives Matter is
poison."
These kinds of conservative criticisms of Black Lives Matter are widespread. And on one
hand, they're right : The official Black Lives Matter organization is Marxist, is anti-American
in its values, and its views are rightfully alarming to anyone who believes in the
Constitution, capitalism, and civil society as we know it.
But in applying their reflexive response to all Black Lives Matter supporters, conservative
critics are failing to see the forest for the trees.
Most of these people, I suspect, don't even know that there is an official Black Lives
Matter organization. And I'm sure hardly any of them could name Patrisse Cullors or Alicia
Garza.
Whether it's where I'm from in deep-blue Massachusetts or where I live now in Washington
D.C., walking by a Black Lives Matter sign sticking out from someone's yard is just about an
everyday occurrence. After the death of George Floyd, more of my acquaintances, friends, and
relatives than I could count posted #BlackLivesMatter.
Many others changed their picture to a black square or otherwise signaled their support for
the movement.
I can personally guarantee you that the vast majority of these people, while liberal, do not
support ending capitalism or dismantling the family. Conservatives are led astray as soon as
they apply their (valid) criticisms of Black Lives Matter™️ the organization to
the Black Lives Matter movement and its supporters broadly.
Image Credit: John Lucia, Flickr
Just look at the way some on the Right responded to Sen. Mitt Romney after he attended a
Washington, D.C. protest against police brutality, telling reporters he did so "to make sure
that people understand that Black Lives Matter."
Here's a sampling of how hostile the response was from some conservative pundits on
Twitter:
Even President Trump attacked Romney over it:
No matter how you feel about the conservative Mormon senator politically (and I'm far from a
fan), no one can credibly argue that Romney supports destroying the nuclear family, ending
capitalism, or abolishing the police.
Meanwhile, Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana faced a similar unfair backlash when he announced his
support for Black Lives Matter and
unveiled a modest police reform proposal :
It may well be true that in particular conservative circles, everyone is well aware of the
obscure history of the Black Lives Matter founders' Marxist roots. But the average person on
the street and the average person who shares the hashtag are most certainly not. And the
movement itself has become something much bigger, broader, and more benevolent than the
original organization.
However, it's by no means just conservatives who err in their approach to Black Lives
Matter. For one, many on the Left fail to acknowledge at all the Marxist roots of the official
Black Lives Matter organization, and thus, paint anyone who objects to the organization as
racist, unthinkingly inveighing: "How could anyone not support black lives?" This kind of
clever naming of a controversial movement, similar to "Antifa" supposedly standing for
"anti-fascist," makes it easy to baselessly paint critics as extreme and immoral. Yet this is a
reductive oversimplification that serves only to divide.
So, too, much of the blame for the Black Lives Matter perception gap lies with liberals,
Democrats, and others who support the movement for failing to adequately distance themselves
from the radical organization.
For example, I visited one of my favorite coffee shops in Arlington, Virginia over the
weekend. Like many a hipster coffee shop, it had a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and
had a fundraiser going on for the cause as well. But I was dismayed to read the flyer and
notice that the proceeds of the fundraiser were going to the official Black Lives Matter DC
organization -- yes, the same one that openly wants to abolish capitalism.
Now, I highly doubt that the owners of this coffee shop, even if they are progressives or
Democrats, actually support Marxism. More importantly, I'm certain that most customers who
donated, even in the liberal-leaning neighborhood, do not realize they are donating to a
Marxist, anti-American revolutionary organization by participating in the fundraiser. But they
are.
Many a mainstream liberal has signaled support for the generic "black lives matter" cause by
sharing fundraisers that, if you look closely, go to official Black Lives Matter organizations
that do not actually represent their views. Meanwhile, liberal-leaning media outlets such as MSNBC
regularly platform official members of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement and pass the
radical activists off as within the mainstream.
From corporations to politicians to random Facebook users, Black Lives Matter supporters
need to do a much better job distancing themselves from the radical organization at the root of
their slogan. (Or, alternatively, they should come up with a new and different slogan that
doesn't have such malign associations.)
This lack of due diligence is lazy and irresponsible, but more importantly, it's
dangerous.
Marxism is a vicious ideology, and it's one that is rooted in a divisive vision of
irreconcilable class conflict. As important economist Ludwig von Mises
noted ,
"According to the Marxian view... human society is organized into classes whose interests stand
in irreconcilable opposition." Moreover, as Mises explains ,
Marxists believe that people's very thoughts ought to be determined by their class and that
those who differ from the prescribed worldview are class traitors.
Such a divisive ideology only fuels perpetual conflict, not progress toward reconciliation.
By failing to drive this toxic extremism out loudly and clearly from their side of the issue,
the large majority of Black Lives Matter supporters -- who simply seek reform, justice, and
reconciliation -- take a chainsaw to any chance of achieving common ground and consensus.
When Don Lemon took issue with Terry Crews's take on Black Lives Matter, Crews was
crystal clear , saying, "This is the
thing. It's a great mantra. It's a true mantra. Black lives do matter. But, when you're talking
about an organization, you're talking about the leaders, you're talking about the people who
are responsible for putting these things together. It's two different things."
We need more of that kind of clarity in our discourse. Right now, the debate over "Black
Lives Matter" is muddled and confused. Liberals and conservatives alike need to make an effort
to listen and understand the other side's perspective, not the strawman caricature of it used
as a punching bag in partisan echo chambers. Until both sides take the time to understand each
other, we will keep talking past each other -- and any real progress or harmony will remain a
fantasy.
I have searched the Internet and cannot find the alleged second autopsy -- the so-called
"independent autopsy" hired by "George Floyd's family." I have no difficulty finding the
official medical examiner's report, but there is no sign of a second autopsy. Those of you who
are convinced it exists please send me the URL. It will prove that you are a better Internet
searcher than I am.
Based on the available information, the "second autopsy" consists of an assertion by CNN, a
collection of liars that other presstitutes echo. Thus, the presstitutes created a non-existent
"second autopsy" just as they created Russiagate and Russian bounties to the Taliban to kill
American troops in Afganistan that President Trump allegedly refuses to do anything about.
Precisely how does Trump do something about something that does not exist? Try to imagine
people so stupid that the morons think the Taliban has to be paid by Russia to kill the
American troops who are trying to occupy Afghanistan. The Taliban have been killing the US
occupying troops for two decades! Why suddenly are Russian bounties necessary for the Taliban
to kill US troops? It is just more concocted anti-Trump propaganda.
Similarly, how can a second autopsy that allegedly concludes that officer Chauvin murdered
Floyd be refuted when no such autopsy exists?
What does exist is a twice fired former medical examiner, first fired by New York City and
then by Suffold County, who serves as a hired gun to give inflamatory statements to the media
in support of civil lawsuits for money. His name is Michael Baden.
Baden did no second autopsy. He viewed the video of officer Chauvin and gave his opinion
that Chauvin killed Floyd by cutting off oxygen and blood to the brain. In this rhetorical
footwork, he was aided by the rightwing idiot Sean Hannity on Fox News.
Nowhere in the media is there any mention of Floyd's existing serious health conditions, his
drug addiction, or the level of fentanyl in his blood that was in excess of a fatal dose. The
medical examiner's report has been ignored by the presstitute media and by public authorities
including the prosecutor who indicted officer Chauvin.
"Can you overdose on fentanyl? Yes, a person can overdose on fentanyl. An overdose occurs
when a drug produces serious adverse effects and life-threatening symptoms. When people
overdose on fentanyl, their breathing can slow or stop. This can decrease the amount of oxygen
that reaches the brain, a condition called hypoxia. Hypoxia can lead to a coma and permanent
brain damage, and even death."
"Synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, are now the most common drugs involved in drug
overdose deaths in the United States. In 2017, 59.8 percent of opioid-related deaths involved
fentanyl compared to 14.3 percent in 2010" -- https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/fentanyl
"Among an estimated 70,200 drug overdose deaths in 2017, the largest increase was related to
fentanyl and its analogs with more than 28,400 overdose deaths. However, these numbers are
likely underreported." -- https://www.drugs.com/illicit/fentanyl.html
According to harmreductionohio.org, 700 micrograms (less than one milligram) is an overdose
from which death is likely. One milligram (1000 micrograms) carries the risk of "death near
certain." Two milligrams and death is certain and unavoidable. A dose of 250 micrograms
(one-fourth of one milligram) can kill a non-tolerant user. "Conventional medical wisdom is
that 2,000 micrograms is the 'minimum lethal dose' -- in other words, the smallest amount that
can be fatal. This estimate is far too high. Two thousand micrograms (2 milligrams) of pure
fentanyl injected into a vein would cause even most heavy heroin users to overdose --
especially if fentanyl is mixed with any other substance, such as heroin, alcohol or Xanax."
https://www.harmreductionohio.org/how-much-fentanyl-will-kill-you-2/
Don't write to me what you think. What you think is not the issue. The facts are the issue.
If you don't now the facts, you simply do not know. Ignorant and manipulated emotion is not a
basis for arriving at truth.
There is no mention in the media of Floyd's bloodwork showing the high level of fentanyl or
by Hannity in his enabling interview of a hired gun, Michael Baden, who intends to make himself
and Floyd's "family" multimillionaires with a civil lawsuit. No doubt but that Baden is
grateful to Hannity for giving him the public forum for his clients.
With no mention that Floyd had a fatal dose of a dangerous opioid that is known to stop
breathing and cause a heart attack, the hired gun, Michael Baden, can pronounce officer Chavin
guilty.
That is what the media want to hear. That is what the politicians are invested in. That is
what Hannity in his stupidity has given to the leftwing as a weapon.
Here I am trying to defend the truth. There is no second autopsy, but everyone has been
convinced that there is. What reach can one naysaying voice have when an irresponsible media
has enthroned a lie?
Why was a "second autopsy" needed? According to CNN for no reason at all. According to CNN
the official medical examiner's report supports that Floyd's death was homicide by police. If
so, why did the "Floyd family" have to hire someone to say the same thing?
But this is just another CNN lie. There is no mention of homicide in the medical examiner's
report. There is no blame attributed to the police, The title of the medical examiner's report
has been intentionally misrepresented by the presstitute media to imply that the police at
least had a small part in Floyd's death.
The report states: "No life-threatening injuries identified." The title in the medical
examiner's report is nothing but a list of the factors investigated. The Amerian presstitute
media has falsified the meaning of the use of the word "restraint" in the title of the medical
examiner's report to mean that police restraint contributed to Floyd's death.
To summarize: Michael Baden did not do an autopsy. He provided his self-serving
interpretation of the video everyone has seen. CNN turned this into a "second autopsy." Other
media picked up the CNN misrepresentation of a video interpretation as an autopsy, and the
"fact" of a second autopsy was created. The medical examiner's report does not mention homicide
or use the word, and there is no mention of police restraint as a "confluence factor"
contributing to Floyd's breathing problem and death. Police or no police, the overdose of
fentanyl was sufficient to kill him. Note that no media has mentioned the fatal concentration
of fentanyl in Floyd's blood. That Floyd was murdered by police is very important to many
people, and this emotional response overwhelms facts. The media rushed us to judgment on an
emotional response to a video without any examination of the facts.
Consider also that the "peaceful protests" were not spontaneous outbreaks in multiple
cities. There were pre-delivered stacks of bricks present in protest locations. "Peaceful
protesters" arrived with knapsacks filled with concrete chunks. Antifa was on hand to initiate
the looting, burning, and violence. The presstitutes have tried to cover up these facts, but
Black Agenda Report affirms that the "spontaneous protests" were planned in advance:
There was nothing spontaneous about the breadth and scope of the protests that rocked the
nation last month, said veteran activist Monifa Bandele , a member of the policy table of the
Movement for Black Lives. "It really came off of six years of tough, exciting and inspiring
mass organizing," said Bandele. The unprecedented level of white participation was the result
of "half a decade of telling non-white activists, 'This is what it looks like, so follow the
lead of Black organizations.'"
Americans are the world's most gullible people. They have fallen for every transparent lie
of the 21st century from 9/11 through alleged Russian bounties to the Taliban to kill US
troops. Each time the truth eventually comes out. Controlled demolition brought down World
Trade Center Building Seven. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein
had no al Qaeda connections. There were no Iranian nukes. Assad did not use chemical weapons.
Russia did not invade Ukraine. Yet the knowledge that they have been lied to and deceived does
not shield Americans from falling for the next lie.
A people unable to catch on to their constant manipulation has no future.
"Don't write to me what you think. What you think is not the issue. The facts are the
issue."
Let's get real. A big man put his weight on a handcuffed man's neck and kept up the
pressure despite pleas that he was causing distress. That constitutes "the facts". There is
no excuse for this.
Americans are the world's most gullible people. They have fallen for every transparent
lie of the 21st century from 9/11 through alleged Russian bounties to the Taliban to kill
US troops.
Second, there is clearly some sort of Journo-list type agreement among the MSM to suppress
and censor any mention of "fentanyl" in connection with George Floyd's death. None of the
write-ups of his death even mentioned the issue -- even though it is sitting there in plain
site.
Finally, I tried to post a comment at the WSJ that mentioned Floyd's fentanyl level and
took exception to the casual assertion that Floyd was definitively "killed" by police. The
mods denied the comment. I asked why, and they gave me this response:
Dear Sir,
We are declining to publish comments that question the official medical examiner's
ruling re: George Floyd's death.
Marc Baden also did the autopsy on Jeffrey Epstein which he ruked as a suicide, that nobdy
belueves, and did the autopsy for the O.J. Simpson trial.
Opioids are highly addictive, meaning that addicts must take increasingly hogher doses of
opioids in order to feel any effects, whether for pain relief, or simply for a high. What
would kill someone that is not an addict, may not kill a long time addict at all. It may, or
it may not, depending on the individual and their history of using that particular drug.
Considering that Floyd had to be dragged away after his neck was kneeled on for nearly
eight minutes, which definitely would prevent one from breathing, I do not understand how it
is that anyone can argue that he was not murdered in cold blood by Chauvin and aided and
abetted by the three other police officers that watched, and did nothing to intervene. They
just watched him being murdered.
How can anyone reasonably claim that kneeling on someone's neck for eight minutes would
not kill them? Chauvin and Floyd used to work together at a Mexican restaraunt, so they had a
previous history together, that appears to be not the greatest relationship. Floyd was a
terrible person that broke into a pregnant woman's house and brutally raped and robbed her,
causing miscarriage. He was not a hero in any way. He was a monster!!!
Oh, it's not about George Floyd. People are tired of being manhandled and threatened and
scared to death by dangerous ex-soldier killers. Not to mention outrageous tickets. And
they're unemployed. It's a fucking police state. When I think of the things you could do 50
years ago that you would be murdered for today. Makes me nostalgic.
Kneeling on a neck does NOT interfere with the airway. Floyd did not die from a lack of
air, he died from the drugs he ingested and his blocked arteries. Floyd did NOT rape anyone,
he did threaten with a gun and he did steal jewelry and a cell phone. There is no record of a
victim's miscarriage. Dr. Irwin Golden conducted the autopsies on Nicole Simpson and Ronald
Goldman. You need to get your facts straight.
In addition to the fatal dose of fentanyl, plus the meth and weed that were present in Mr.
Floyd's system, there was also evidence he had contracted Corona virus. So under the rules
that have prevailed since March or April of this year, his certificate of death should have
attributed his demise to Covid-19. Strangely, the media never mention this detail although
they usually can yammer of nothing else.
In addition to the fatal dose of fentanyl, plus the meth and weed that were present in
Mr. Floyd's system, there was also evidence he had contracted Corona virus.
Several good reasons not to hold the convict down with bare hands.
@Hypnotoad666 ly. And his was not just run-of-the-mill fried-chicken-induced hypertrophy.
Rather, both his ventricles were dilated, meaning he probably had both hypertrophic and
dilated cardiomyopathy, either one serious risk factors for sudden cardiac death even for a
teetotaler. This is not to mention the 70 to 90 percent occlusions in three of St. Fentanyl's
coronary arteries, blockages severe enough to virtually guarantee perfusion issues.
St. Fentanyl's ticker was a time bomb.
Most doctors afaik wouldn't recommend that someone with St. Fentanyl's clinical picture
gorge on cocktails of the most dangerous drugs on earth then do felonies and fight with the
cops when they show up.
@BeB e the first thing they see, and any later contravening evidence they have trouble
accepting. People saw the evidence and heard narrative from news-speakers.
This is why good propaganda rushes narrative. The first neurons to be myelin sheathed take
priority in the human brain.
A people unable to catch on to their constant manipulation has no future.
Propaganda works because first info myelin sheaths, and to overcome first info is many
orders more difficult.
Maybe we can be a little more sympathetic to Hitler's concentration camps, which were a
way of deprogramming the population from communist propaganda?
@Hypnotoad666 taki said, "There is no newspaper in the U.S. more supportive of Israel
than the [Murdoch's] New York Post." ).
I believe Murdoch's family and even the Fox Media have donated to BLM.
Every mainstream media outlet for the most part is against whites and Western
Civilization. ( Fox news does put up a bit of fight with Tucker Carlson). They want emptied
headed guilt ridden dim witted whites to do their bidding and they have won. Once the media
whether it's WSJ or an individual like Drew Brees takes the knee you should just remain there
because you know what you will be doing next. There is no going back once you become a
"Politcal Suckulator."
Floyd had a potentially (usually) fatal dose of fentanyl in his bloodstream and about 8x
as much morphine. He must have recently used heroin laced with fentanyl. The arrest and his
resisting it stressed him and raised the demands on his respiratory system, which failed
under the depressant effects of the opioids. He probably would have lived without the arrest,
but that doesn't mean the cops did anything wrong. He complained he couldn't breathe before
the infamous knee was applied and the cops called for an ambulance. Everyone involved knew
that what was happening was a medical emergency. That's why one of the cops said, "Don't do
drugs, kids." Floyd had just been fighting them, so he had to be restrained as the ambulance
was en route. The technique with the knee did not choke him to death.
But no one paid attention. The NPCs just fit it into the false narrative of police racism
the dinosaur media have been hawking for years.
One of the articles I read said that a second independent autopsy was conducted by Dr.
Allecia M. Wilson, pathologist from the University of Michigan, and by Dr. Michael Baden.
Allecia Wilson, MD
Assistant Professor, Forensic Pathology, Pediatric Pathology
Director, Autopsy and Forensic Services
Director, Residency Training Program
Department of Pathology
Michigan Medicine
University of Michigan
Wikipedia on Michael Baden re his testimony in the O.J. Simpson trial:
"Baden testified in the Simpson trial on August 10 and 11, 1995 and made two claims that
he later disowned.[30][31] First he claimed that Nicole Brown was still standing and
conscious when her throat was slashed.[32] The purpose of this claim was to dispute the
theory that Brown was the intended target. The prosecution argued that Brown was murdered
first and the intended target because the soles of her feet didn't have any blood on them
despite the large amount of blood at the crime scene and that she was unconscious when her
throat was cut because she had very few defensive wounds.[33][34] At the subsequent civil
trial the following year he disowned that claim and admitted it was absurd to think that
someone would stand still without moving their feet while their throat is being slashed and
not fight back.[35][36][37]
Baden then claimed that Ron Goldman remained conscious[38] and fought with his assailant
for at least ten minutes[39] with a severed jugular vein.[31][30] The purpose of this
testimony was to extend the length of time it took the murders to happen to the point where
Simpson had an alibi.[40] At the subsequent civil trial he initially denied making that claim
and then after being confronted with a video clip of him saying it at the criminal trial, he
disowned it. Baden claimed he misunderstood the question but the Goldman's attorney allege he
said it because the defense paid him to do so. He also alleged that Baden knowingly gave
false testimony because he knew that Ron Goldman's blood was found inside Simpson's Bronco
despite Goldman never having an opportunity within his lifetime to be in Simpson's car."
He said his reputation and credibility never recovered after the Simpson trial (for good
reason!) and in subsequent trials when he was called as an expert witness, he continued to be
discredited because of this testimony. The jury actually believed this guy!
Then in the Phil Spector case he was asked if he had any conflicts of interest, he said
no, but then it was later discovered that his wife was one of Spector's lead attorneys.
Aaaaagh! You can't make this stuff up.
Defense counsel is going to have a field day with this guy!
I first saw Michael Baden in action in the late 1990'a during the trial of a stripper and
her boyfriend for the murder of casino owner Ted Binion. Binion was found dead in his house
and the question was did he die of an drug overdose or was he murdered. Baden was the
prosecutions 'expert' who insisted Binion had been murdered via a technique called 'burking'
in which a helpless victim is smothered by holding his mouth and nose shut while sitting on
his chest.
It was quite a sensational trial and it was televised. There was no doubt Binion used
drugs but he did not use needles and the defense said he died from smoking heroin and
ingesting xanax. The problem was Binion was a rich and famous casino owner and the defendants
were seedy low lifes who tried to steal $6 million in silver Binion had put in a vault out in
the desert.
The defendants were convicted but their conviction was overturned and they were acquited (
of murder) in a new trial. They were convicted of stealing the silver however.
Michael Baden would have been in his early 60's during this trial. Today he is 85. I doubt
he will be as impressive an expert witness today as he was back then. I doubt the prosecution
or the "Floyd fanily" would dare let him testify.
I have no problem imagining a competent lawyer could make the case that Floyd died from a
massive drug overdose as there is plenty of evidence for that. What I see is a replay of the
Rodney King trial in which the police were exonerated, which was immediately followed by the
'92 riots in LA, except this time the riots will be all over the country and include whites.
Then the feds will step in and charge Chauvin with civil rights crimes in order to get him
behind bars for a couple years just to calm everybody down.
A google search finds multiple studies that all put the median level of fent overdose over
thousands of cases at around 9 or 10 ng/ml. As you said Floyd's was higher. Ng/ml is
independent of the persons size as it gives the concentration in the blood. This doesn't take
into account (as mentioned) the other drugs in his system. Nor does it also factor in his
extreme heart condition with passages blocked 90-75-50% according to the autopsy.
Paul your following references though correct, however, brutally twisted just like CNN or
Washington Compost and likes..
"Black Agenda Report affirms that the "spontaneous protests" were planned in advance"
AND
"There was nothing spontaneous about the breadth and scope of the protests that rocked the
nation last month, said veteran activist Monifa Bandele, a member of the policy table of the
Movement for Black Lives. "It really came off of six years of tough, exciting and inspiring
mass organizing"
If one listens to her radio interview one gets a different view than what you tried to
present. She was referring to her organization's effort for protest after Ferguson killing in
2014. In my opinion, nothing wrong with that.
On top of that you did not bother to provide any link for to support your spin. Thanks to the
internet, I was able to find the link and listened to half of the program. Entirely different
perspective than what I got from your write up. Here is the link:
Thanks I used to be surprised that Murdoch wasn't Jewish since he looked so much like Alan
Greenspan, Larry king, Larry Silverstein – a Jewish physiognomic category. Well now
that's sorted.
Americans are gullible, apathetic people who swallow any story no matter how absurd. Iraq,
a much smaller third world country, was going to come get us with it's WMD. Despite all the
self-flattery they're mostly a bunch of cowards, cringing with their snot-rag masks attached.
Not all of course, but way too many. Americans can be sold anything.
Why does the media, the entire width and breadth of that enormous machine, lie to us? Why
would they do such a thing?
The idea that the news media exists to inform you of objective facts about which you may
be unaware, is just silly and childish.
Paul Reuter: Reuter was born as Israel Beer Josaphat in Kassel, Germany.[4]. His father,
Samuel Levi Josaphat, was a rabbi ..
Moses Yale Beach: (January 7, 1800 – July 18, 1868) was an American inventor and
publisher who started the Associated Press, and is credited with originating print
syndication ..
And there you have just the tippy tip tip of the largest iceberg in this universe.
@BeB e separated from the ongoing effort to get rid of POTUS Trump. The Democrats and
their Allied Media have exploited these incidents for partisan political gain since 2010.
It's now a feature of our politics, just like primaries and Election Day in November.
There are a number of elements that drove and continue to drive the instant context. But
the essential one is that Trump was headed toward reelection in a landslide with Game Over
support from blacks of 20% or more. They're desperate to derail that trend. Though, as with
the previous efforts, various frame-up gambits and goading him into a war, he's refused to
take the bait.
My father (born 1923) was a doctor at the NYU Medical Center and knew Dr. Baden well. My
father was mild mannered and almost always saw the good in people. The one exception I recall
was his antipathy towards Dr. Baden who he considered a presstitute fraud of the first
order.
The New York Times publishes a report (June 2, 2020) by Frances Robles and Audra D. S.
Burch titled: "How Did George Floyd Die? Here's What We Know," with the
subheading: "A private autopsy commissioned by the family concluded that his death was a homicide,
brought about by compression of his neck and back by Minneapolis police officers."
The report appears compelling with expert testimony by both Dr. Michael Baden and Dr.
Allecia M. Wilson (of the University of Michigan). The NYT states:
"The findings by the family's private medical examiners directly contradict the [official
Hennepin County medical examiner's preliminary findings] report that there was no asphyxia,
said Dr. Allecia M. Wilson, of the University of Michigan, one of the doctors who examined
his body. The physical evidence showed that the pressure applied led to his death, she said.
In an interview, Dr. Michael Baden, who also participated in the private autopsy, said there
was also some hemorrhaging around the right carotid area."
So, here you go, if you believe the "newspaper of record."
"... The notion that socioeconomic status is the difference between working and middle classes strikes me as more convenient to obscurantists than useful to serious analysis. Even worse, true SES is better defined by the acceptability of marriage partners. (This brings up religion, by the way, meaning Sunday segregation is an overlooked phenomenon in discussions of systemic racism.) In particular, in dealing with so-called working class people, the issue of property, particularly home ownership, seems to be sharply pertinent. This is true in the form of privilege, such as interest mortgage deduction and property tax rates. (Yes, I know this is not an acceptable use of the term "privilege" but this actually means something, so there.) ..."
"... Most of all, many people live in de facto one party systems, where elections don't make much difference. Much of this country would be more usefully understood I think as more like Mexico or the Philippines, where caciques and landed families tend to run things. The factional struggles play out in the struggles for nominations of the ruling party, while the Outs play catchup in the Out Party, whatever it may be called. The larger part of the people have no political vehicle at all, therefore are largely disengaged. ..."
"... Lastly, on the OP, I'm not at all convinced the near collapse of the stock market and the international credit system last winter, which prompted the reversal of all efforts by the Fed to "normalize" the financial system, wasn't the beginning of the economic consequences we face. And that the pandemic is simply the gust of wind that toppled the house of cards. ..."
A note on the "professional-managerial class," if you don't mind?
Generally a professional is a small businessman. A clergyman may not be able to sell his
practice but a doctor or a lawyer can. But clergy have even greater powers over who gets to
compete than the AMA or the Bar do.
As for managers, those with an individually negotiated contract, especially those that
include things like stock options, golden parachutes, etc. seem to me to be in an entirely
different, well, class, than most others.
Academics who have an agent have a different situation than those who don't. Even
so-called police unions have enough influence over policies and budgets (as near as I can
tell) that the Fraternal Order of Police, or the Police Benevolent Association are more like
the Bar than a trade union. I suggest "professional-managerial class" is not enough a genuine
thing to be useful at all.
The notion that socioeconomic status is the difference between working and middle
classes strikes me as more convenient to obscurantists than useful to serious analysis. Even
worse, true SES is better defined by the acceptability of marriage partners. (This brings up
religion, by the way, meaning Sunday segregation is an overlooked phenomenon in discussions
of systemic racism.) In particular, in dealing with so-called working class people, the issue
of property, particularly home ownership, seems to be sharply pertinent. This is true in the
form of privilege, such as interest mortgage deduction and property tax rates. (Yes, I know
this is not an acceptable use of the term "privilege" but this actually means something, so
there.)
And other issues such as decline in property values, tax rates, school districts, are
pertinent to individuals deciding what their "wallets" are doing. The question for many is,
what's going to happen for their families in the long run, not just this quarter's profits.
The fact that most people don't make profits is even more relevant in my opinion. (Yes,
Obamacare was something of a redistribution the biggest since Shrub added prescription
benefits. This kind of reasoning tells us Nixon was a liberal president!)
Most of all, many people live in de facto one party systems, where elections don't
make much difference. Much of this country would be more usefully understood I think as more
like Mexico or the Philippines, where caciques and landed families tend to run things. The
factional struggles play out in the struggles for nominations of the ruling party, while the
Outs play catchup in the Out Party, whatever it may be called. The larger part of the people
have no political vehicle at all, therefore are largely disengaged.
On the subject of change, change from time is remorseless, invincible but usually
invisible. It is always today, which is pretty much like yesterday, and tomorrow is pretty
much like today, but the changes still come, despite the plans of a changer. This is true
despite the seeming invulnerability to time of all manner of habits, from the imperial
measures to the QWERTY keyboard. The idea that all sorts of things may be so simply because
they were and there hasn't been enough of a conscious decision by the majority to re-arrange
such things may deflate exaggerated ideas of agency. But it's so.
Lastly, on the OP, I'm not at all convinced the near collapse of the stock market and
the international credit system last winter, which prompted the reversal of all efforts by
the Fed to "normalize" the financial system, wasn't the beginning of the economic
consequences we face. And that the pandemic is simply the gust of wind that toppled the house
of cards.
Three time best-selling book author Nomi Prins says long before the Covid 19 crisis, the
global economy was faltering big time. The Fed stepped in with the start of massive money
printing in late 2019 to save the day.
Prins explains, " We were already in crisis mode as I mentioned at the end of my last book
going into 2019."
"What did we see at the end of 2019? We saw this pivot, and I call it phase two. . . .
Central banks had pivoted to easing mode . . . . Come September, October, November and
December, the Fed is producing repo operations. Those are short-term lending operations
that are supposed to be the purview of the banks . . . . The Fed is not supposed to get
involved, but it did. The Fed had all kinds of excuses. It said it was not QE, but it was.
. . . The debt at the end of 2019 for the world was three times GDP. For every $3 borrowed,
only $1 of economic activity occurred. That's what we started 2020 with. Throw a pandemic
into that . . . and you have a long drawn out financial and economic crisis."
Now, the money printing has gone into overdrive to save the system from the virus crisis.
The social and economic damage, according to Prins, is profound and not going away. Prins
points out,
"We are not going to pay back this debt, and this is global. Nobody is even considering
trying to pay back the debt that has been created. Let's think about why that debt has been
created. It's not just because the economy slowed down. That's one reason and kind of an
excuse. The reality is the Fed is on steroids, and other central banks are on steroids . .
. throughout the world in a larger number and larger magnitude than in the wake of the
financial crisis of 2008. This means all this new debt created is even cheaper than the
debt created going into the 2008 crisis. So, more debt, created more cheaply, means less
incentive to pay it back and more incentive to push it down the road and grow it. You've
got this snowball of debt rolling down this high mountain, and it's rolling and growing and
getting bigger. The mountain, which is the main street economy, is coming down as the snow
ball is coming down, and the main street economy itself, that foundation, is really shaky.
. . . How does this end? It ends with us, the foundation, which is the main street economy,
by both that snowball of debt and the avalanche of the mountain. That's going to be a
multi-decade problem. "
Prins says this next stage has a brand new name and explains,
" I call this a 'Permanent Distortion.' I have not used this term in prior books, but I
am using it because . . . the disconnect between financial assets, equity markets and the
real economy . . . has become massive ...
There is going to be this endless supply of artificial stimulation into the markets. . .
. Former New York Fed President Bill Dudley said the Fed's balance sheet is going to $10
trillion. That's what I have been saying, and now he finally said it. That's not going away
anytime soon. That's not being unwound anytime soon. That becomes permanent lift to
financial assets . . . . In the wake of that, less real capital gets used for
infrastructure, research and development, growth and retooling the economy and getting jobs
into this new period."
Prins says gold prices are going to "follow the expansion of the Fed's balance sheet." It
is that simple, and Prins predicts,
"As we saw in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, gold and silver will have the
ability to go up quite substantially as the Fed's book increases in size, which we know it
is going to do. We have been told that multiple times by many different words by Federal
Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell."
In closing, Prins says, " We are continuing to drive up asset bubbles where we don't have
the real economy to back it up..."
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"The more this 'Permanent Distortion' gets bigger, the more the likelihood the next
crisis will happen... and it will be from a higher height. It will be from a larger bubble,
a bigger snowball accelerating downward more quickly. I don't think we are out of this
crisis. I think the markets are going to have a bumpy ride as the economy has a bumpier
ride ."
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with three time best-selling author Nomi Prins.
The Central Banks will buy up the debt and then liquidate it. Some currencies may be
re-issued. Get over it. Not the end of the world.
hugin-o-munin , 20 minutes ago
I used to listen closely to what Nomi said before but now it is only more of the usual
talk. The world is a very slow place and it takes a long time until new realizations spread
but when they do there is little possibility to stop it. Right now the USD is dying as a
world reserve currency. It is slow and strictly kept away as a talking point in media.
The US behaves and continues down a path that is only accelerating this process because
it is not up to the US what happens to the USD, it is up to the rest of the world. This is
a truth that no American wants to accept but it is a fact. The more aggressive and arrogant
the US becomes the faster this will happen and a part of me thinks that is precisely the
plan. It will not matter what either the Fed or Treasury does.
Nomi talks about price inflation hitting smaller and poorer nations right now but
doesn't even come close to the fact that this is also happening in the US right now albeit
much slower. Greg Hunter was too stuck on finding ways to praise Trump as usual to even
push this question, if he even recognized it. The gospel from Wall Street and most
certainly Goldman Sachs that the USD can never be questioned is all over this interview and
which is why these 'former' truth tellers are just that - former.
algol_dog , 35 minutes ago
Futures at new highs tonight. This week will break S&P highs for the year. Amazing
time ...
Motorhead , 40 minutes ago
We've been hearing the same old stuff for easily 10-15 years from Jim Willie, Eric King,
Peter Schiff, various/numerous gold bugs. et al., ad nauseam. Yeah, one day, they might be
right, but repeating the same mantra for over a decade, one is bound to be right
eventually.
Balance-Sheet , 54 minutes ago
If it is permanent it is reality not a distortion and this is the point. The 1900s are
long over and will not be returning nor will the 1800s be returning for that matter.
Will the National Debt ever be paid off? No and there was never any intention to do
so.
The Fed is in charge and does not need to account to anyone other than Congress and its
Banking and Budgeting committees therefore provides explanations it hopes people can
understand though this might be ill advised in and of itself.
Will the Fed balance sheet go to 10T? It might but only if it seems necessary and that
depends of future circumstances which in very fluid conditions cannot be forecast
accurately especially when politicians snap the economy on and off again and again.
Do taxpayers have to pay back the Fed balance sheet? No.
Does the US Treasury or the Fed crowd out private investment making it less available or
at higher interest rates. NO! and obviously not, right? Everyone can see that.
The Gold Standard is o-v-e-r and there are no practical limitations to the amount of
dollars that can be authorized by Congress to the level deemed necessary.
Doesn't this mean the USG will issue unlimited e-dollars? No, anything can happen in a
thought experiment of course but the target is to make sure that the supply of USD is just
a little more than enough.
If a mistake is made can excess USD is issued can the excess be withdrawn? Yes, billions
of dollars die every day anyway as loans mature and all UST issues like bonds that mature
in Fed custody simply disappear automatically upon maturity. All of the 'dollars' and the
bonds are electronic and are simply deleted electronically invisibly and with no PR
issues.
Does Nomi Prins know this? Probably but, hey, she is trying to make a living here so
must slightly overfulfill your existing expectations. That is just excellent marketing- you
want the customer- that's you- to get a slightly heavy pour. :-)
indus creed , 58 minutes ago
Prins has co-hosted the TYT (The Young Turks) program on Youtube. In case you are
wondering, TYT are deluded, woke supporters of AOC/The_Squad types.
So former tank repairman decided again managed to make a make a mark in world diplomacy
:-).
Notable quotes:
"... Mike Pompeo delivered an embarrassing, clownish performance at the U.N. on Tuesday, and his attempt to gain support for an open-ended conventional arms embargo on Iran was rejected the rest of the old P5+1: ..."
"... The Trump administration has abused our major European allies for years in its push to destroy the nuclear deal, and their governments have no patience with any more unilateral U.S. stunts. This is the result of two years of a destructive policy aimed solely at punishing Iran and its people. The administration's open contempt for international law and the interests of its allies has cost the U.S. their cooperation. ..."
"... Underscoring the absurdity of the Trump administration's arms embargo appeal were Pompeo's alarmist warnings that an end to the arms embargo would allow Iran to purchase advanced fighters that it would use to threaten Europe and India: ..."
"... This is a laughably unrealistic scenario. Even if Iran purchased advanced fighters, the last thing it would do is send them off on a suicide mission to bomb Italy or India. This shows how deeply irrational the Iran hawks' fearmongering is. Iran has already demonstrated an ability to launch precise attacks with drones and missiles in its immediate neighborhood, and it developed these capabilities while under the current embargo. ..."
"... The Secretary of State called on the U.N. to reject "extortion diplomacy." The best way to reject extortion diplomacy would be for them to reject the administration's desperate attempt to use America's position at the U.N. to attack international law. ..."
Mike Pompeo delivered an embarrassing, clownish performance at the U.N. on Tuesday, and his
attempt to
gain support for an open-ended conventional arms embargo on Iran was rejected the rest of the
old P5+1:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Tuesday for an arms embargo on Iran to be
extended indefinitely, but his appeal fell flat at the United Nations Security Council, where
Russia and China rejected it outright and close allies of the United States were
ambivalent.
The Trump administration is more isolated than ever in its Iran obsession. The ridiculous
effort to invoke the so-called "snapback" provision of the JCPOA more than two years after
reneging on the agreement met with failure, just as most observers predicted months
ago when it was first floated as a possibility. As I said at the time, "The
administration's latest destructive ploy won't find any support on the Security Council. There
is nothing "intricate" about this idea. It is a crude, heavy-handed attempt to employ the
JCPOA's own provisions to destroy it." It was never going to work because all of the other
parties to the agreement want nothing to do with the administration's punitive approach, and
U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA meant that it forfeited any rights it had when it was still part
of the deal.
Opposition from Russia and China was a given, but the striking thing about the scene at the
U.N. this week was that major U.S. allies
joined them in rebuking the administration's obvious bad faith maneuver:
The pointedly critical tone of the debate saw Germany accusing Washington of violating
international law by withdrawing from the nuclear pact, while Berlin aligned itself with
China's claim that the United States has no right to reimpose U.N. sanctions on Iran.
The Trump administration has abused our major European allies for years in its push to
destroy the nuclear deal, and their governments have no patience with any more unilateral U.S.
stunts. This is the result of two years of a destructive policy aimed solely at punishing Iran
and its people. The administration's open contempt for international law and the interests of
its allies has cost the U.S. their cooperation.
Underscoring the absurdity of the Trump administration's arms embargo appeal were Pompeo's
alarmist
warnings that an end to the arms embargo would allow Iran to purchase advanced fighters
that it would use to threaten Europe and India:
If you fail to act, Iran will be free to purchase Russian-made fighter jets that can
strike up to a 3,000 kilometer radius, putting cities like Riyadh, New Delhi, Rome, and
Warsaw in Iranian crosshairs.
This is a laughably unrealistic scenario. Even if Iran purchased advanced fighters, the last
thing it would do is send them off on a suicide mission to bomb Italy or India. This shows how
deeply irrational the Iran hawks' fearmongering is. Iran has already demonstrated an ability to
launch precise attacks with drones and missiles in its immediate neighborhood, and it developed
these capabilities while under the current embargo.
It has no need for expensive fighters, and
it is not at all certain that their government would even be interested in acquiring them. Pompeo's presentation was a weak attempt to exaggerate the potential threat from a state that
has very limited power projection, and he found no support because his serial fabrications
about Iran have rendered everything he says to be worthless.
The same administration that wants to keep an arms embargo on Iran forever has no problem
flooding the region with U.S.-made weapons and providing them to some of the worst governments
in the world. It is these client states that are doing the most to destabilize other countries
in the region right now. If the U.N. should be putting arms embargoes on any country, it should
consider imposing them on Saudi Arabia and the UAE to limit their ability to wreak havoc on
Yemen and Libya.
The Secretary of State called on the U.N. to reject "extortion diplomacy." The best way to
reject extortion diplomacy would be for them to reject the administration's desperate attempt
to use America's position at the U.N. to attack international law.
For
most any nation, let alone a superpower, energy independence is considered the geopolitical
holy grail. So when fracking lured in American investors, everyone had high hopes the country
would finally break free of OPEC. But oil is a complex game, and 2020 saw sharp declines in
demand caused by the cartel's maneuvering, shale oil's oversupply, and now the devastating
effects of the coronavirus. What's worse, the startup mentality of the U.S. fracking industry
promised investors mythical growth and nonexistent returns. In the end, it burned a $340
billion hole in Wall Street's pocket. (Source: Bloomberg)
"... I agree that globalism is/will be heading into the dumpers, but I see no chance that US-based manufacturing is going to make any significant come-back. ..."
"... What market will there be for US-manufactured goods? US "consumers" are heavily in debt and facing continued downward pressures on income. ..."
"... There will certainly be, especially given the eye-opener of COVID-19, a big push to have medical (which includes associated tech) production capacities reinvigorated in the US. ..."
"... More "disposable" income goes toward medical expenditures. Less money goes toward creating export items; wealth creation only occurs through a positive increase in balance of trade. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, death, the US will likely continue, for the mid-term, to export weaponry; but, don't expect enough growth here to mean much (margins will drop as competition increases, so figure downward pressure on net export $$). ..."
"... the planet cannot comply with our economic model's dependency on perpetual growth: there can NOT be perpetual growth on a finite planet. US manufacturing requires, as it always has, export markets; requires ever-increasing exports: this is really true for all others. Higher standards of living in the US (and add in increasing medical costs which factor into cost of goods sold) means that the price of US-manufactured goods will be less affordable to peoples outside of the US. ..."
"... I'll also note that the notion of there being a cycle, a parabolic curve, in civilizations is well noted/documented in Sir John Glubb's The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival (you can find electronic bootlegged copies on the Internet)- HIGHLY recommended reading! ..."
"... All of this is pretty much reflected in Wall Street companies ramp-ups in stock-buy-backs. That's money that's NOT put in R&D or expansion. I'm pretty sure that the brains in all of this KNOW what the situation is: growth is never coming back. ..."
"... Make no mistake, what we're facing is NOT another recession or depression, it's not part of what we think as a downturn in the "business cycle," as though we'll "pull out of it," it's basically an end to the super-cycle ..."
"... We are at the peak (slightly past peak, but not far enough to realize it yet) and there is no returning. Per-capita income and energy consumption have peaked. There's not enough resources and not enough new demand (younger people, people that have wealth) to keep the perpetual growth machine going. ..."
I agree that globalism is/will be heading into the dumpers, but I see no chance that US-based manufacturing is going to
make any significant come-back.
The world's economy is in contraction. Although capital, what actual capital exists, will have to try and do something "productive,"
it is confronted by this fact, that everything is facing contraction. During times of contraction it's a game of acquisition rather
than expanding capacity: the sum total is STILL contraction; and the contraction WILL be a reduction in excess, excess manufacturing
and labor.
What market will there be for US-manufactured goods? US "consumers" are heavily in debt and facing continued downward pressures
on income. China is self-sufficient (enough) other than energy (which can be acquired outside of US markets). Most every other
country is in a position of declining wealth (per capita income levels peaked and in decline). And manufacturing continues to
increase its automation (less workers means less consumers).
There will certainly be, especially given the eye-opener of COVID-19, a big push to have medical (which includes associated
tech) production capacities reinvigorated in the US. One has to look at this in The Big Picture of what it means, and that's that
the US population is aging (and in poor health).
More "disposable" income goes toward medical expenditures. Less money goes toward
creating export items; wealth creation only occurs through a positive increase in balance of trade. And on the opposite end of
the spectrum, death, the US will likely continue, for the mid-term, to export weaponry; but, don't expect enough growth here to
mean much (margins will drop as competition increases, so figure downward pressure on net export $$).
Lastly, and it's the reason why global trade is being knocked down, is that the planet cannot comply with our economic model's
dependency on perpetual growth: there can NOT be perpetual growth on a finite planet. US manufacturing requires, as it always
has, export markets; requires ever-increasing exports: this is really true for all others. Higher standards of living in the US
(and add in increasing medical costs which factor into cost of goods sold) means that the price of US-manufactured goods will
be less affordable to peoples outside of the US.
And here too is the fact that other countries' populations are also aging. Years
ago I dove into the demographics angle/assessment to find out that ALL countries ramp and age and that you can see countries'
energy consumption rise and their their net trade balance swing negative- there's a direct correlation: go to the CIA's Factbook
and look at demographics and energy and the graphs tell the story.
I'll also note that the notion of there being a cycle, a parabolic
curve, in civilizations is well noted/documented in Sir John Glubb's The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival (you can find
electronic bootlegged copies on the Internet)- HIGHLY recommended reading!
All of this is pretty much reflected in Wall Street companies ramp-ups in stock-buy-backs. That's money that's NOT put in R&D
or expansion. I'm pretty sure that the brains in all of this KNOW what the situation is: growth is never coming back.
MANY years ago I stated that we will one day face "economies of scale in reverse." We NEVER considered that growth couldn't
continue forever. There was never a though about what would happen with the reverse "of economies of scale."
Make no mistake,
what we're facing is NOT another recession or depression, it's not part of what we think as a downturn in the "business cycle,"
as though we'll "pull out of it," it's basically an end to the super-cycle.
We will never be able to replicate the state of things
as they are. We are at the peak (slightly past peak, but not far enough to realize it yet) and there is no returning. Per-capita
income and energy consumption have peaked. There's not enough resources and not enough new demand (younger people, people that
have wealth) to keep the perpetual growth machine going.
You can be fired for criticizing BLM, because in essence this is apolitical movement run by regular Dem NGOs careerists.
Immunity from criticism is a sign of totalitarism.
My take on Tucker and Maddow: both serve those who write their paychecks, but one of the
two bosses is a better businessman.
Tucker does not duplicate Hannity which lets them serve different (if overlapping)
segments of the audience. Showing Paralimpil and Gabbard to the viewers did not lead to any
major perturbation in American politics, but it lets his viewer feel that they are better
informed than the fools who watch Maddow. And it helps that to a degree they are.
I get that Tucker invites good a reasonable people on his show and gives voice space where
they would not otherwise get it. That is deliberate.
I bet you that the stats show that the demented monotone oozing out of MSNBC and CNN etc
has been a serious turn off for a sector of audience that is well informed and exercise
critical faculties. That is exactly what Tucker needs to pay for his program as I would be
fairly sure these people are Consumers of a desirable degree and advertisers like Tucker's
formula and Fox Bosses like Tuckers income generator.
I don't think it is more complex than that and his bosses will entertain most heresies as
long as the program generates advertiser demand for that time slot.
So Tucker is OK and he is reasonable and he will interview a broad spectrum. Good for him.
But he smooths the pillow and caresses the establishment arse.
Wrong. Tucker has admitted that he is not in favor of populist government. He does not
advocate any kind of socialism or class unity. He wants a tentative balance between the
classes which can only be brought back via curbing neoliberalism and government regulation.
He has admitted that the problem then is both in the private and public spheres of life.
Tucker is merely pointing this out and I say kudos to him.
There is a recent push in the internet sphere being leveled against Tucker. It is the same
kind of preemptive strike that was leveled at the "alt-right" back when terms like
neoliberalism and globalism and duopoly were reemerging in the public lexicon. In short, amy
type of nationalist sentiment being floated anywhere is to be crushed and obfuscated on
sight.
Similarily, the poster vk seems to pipe in every time I mention America must bring back
its manufacturing sector. This line is always greeted by vk as, "it will never happen."
Market and economic fundamentals says that it MUST happen and it will as neoliberalism's
reign is curbed in the coming decades.
The push against Tucker is because of two reasons: 1) his growing popularity and his 2)
speaking truth to power.
...
I remember back in the day during the height of John Stewart's tenure as maestro of
liberal infotainment, he went on Tucker's show saying he was "hurting America."
Since then, Tucker has come a long way and I would say has come further in spirit towards
truth. Stewart has sunken into making appearances on The View. Kudos to Tucker. The
globalists in our country should be worried about him.
"... The interesting point of the Christianization of the USA here is not in Christianity itself, but in the socioeconomic process it represents (on the right; on the left, we already have the "wokeist" phenomenon). The USA is degenerating as a world empire and, if the USG chooses an escape route through the right end of the political spectrum, it could potentially result in a Fascist USA - an extremely virulent, fundamentalist and nihilist (and thus very dangerous) empire. ..."
"... That said, the influence of religious organizations in politics is overweight, because few other institutions that can turn out large blocs of voters. Unions used to, once. ..."
"... Nationalists claiming to represent "Judeo-Christian values" (a euphemism if ever) have been disproportionately visible in media for years. This is hardly new. Certainly as of the Bush administration. ..."
Christianity has transformed into a business, an industry even. Since the Cold War,
everything has become an opportunity to exploit for maximum gain and religion is not an
exception.
Christianism can surive in a political form. Indeed, that was when it was at its best:
using the Roman State machinery to force conversion from paganism and exterminating pagans.
That's its greatest strength in comparison to, e.g. its Jewish fathers: the Jews were (still
are) outright imperialists - the Chosen People - who wanted to destroy the Roman Empire from
the outside; the Christians were Jews who wanted to take control of Rome from within.
For Christianism to survive, you don't need every of its followers to be an expert of
Christian faith: it only needs a strong Church with direct access and control of the
State.
The rehabilitation of Christianity from the High Cold War in the USA as a weapon against
communism is a known fact. What I hypothesize here is that this process didn't stop: either
it continues today with full-fledged support from the USG (as seen in George W. Bush's reign)
and/or it got out of control (i.e. the new rapturist churches gained a life of their own, as
seen by the ones funded by billionaires with the aim of aligning American Christianity with
the geopolitical interests of Israel).
What I'm speculating here is that this process will suffer another metamorphosis, thanks
to the rise of the so-called "woke leftism" which are allegedly commanding the Floyd revolts.
This metamorphosis - I'm betting - will result in the far-rightification of the US Army and
police forces (or accelerate it). Since the far-right in the USA is blatantly Christian (as
we can read by their manifestos), this would result in the Christianization of the USG - even
if, ultimately, it serves the more immediate interests of the Zionists (in the case of the
rapturists).
The interesting point of the Christianization of the USA here is not in Christianity
itself, but in the socioeconomic process it represents (on the right; on the left, we already
have the "wokeist" phenomenon). The USA is degenerating as a world empire and, if the USG
chooses an escape route through the right end of the political spectrum, it could potentially
result in a Fascist USA - an extremely virulent, fundamentalist and nihilist (and thus very
dangerous) empire.
That said, the influence of religious organizations in politics is overweight, because few
other institutions that can turn out large blocs of voters. Unions used to, once.
Nationalists claiming to represent "Judeo-Christian values" (a euphemism if ever) have
been disproportionately visible in media for years. This is hardly new. Certainly as of the
Bush administration.
"Today, America's tumbrils are clattering about, carrying toppled statues, ruined careers,
unwoke brands. Over their sides peer those deemed racist by left-wing identitarians and
sentenced to cancelation, even as the evidentiary standard for that crime falls through the
floor But who are these cultural revolutionaries? The conventional wisdom goes that this is
the inner-cities erupting, economically disadvantaged victims of racism enraged over the
murder of George Floyd. The reality is something more bourgeoisie. As Kevin Williamson
observed last week, "These are the idiot children of the American ruling class, toy radicals
and Champagne Bolsheviks, playing Jacobin for a while, until they go back to graduate
school".
Is that so? I well recall listening in the Middle East to other angry young men who, too,
wanted to 'topple the statues'; to burn down everything. 'You really believed that Washington
would allow you in', they taunted and tortured their leaders: "No, we must burn it all down.
Start from scratch".
Did they have a blueprint for the future? No. They simply believed that Islam would
organically inflate, and expand to fill the void. It would happen by itself – of its own
accord: Faith.
Professor John Gray has noted "that in
The God that failed, Gide says: 'My faith in communism is like my faith in religion. It is a
promise of salvation for mankind'' . "Here Gide acknowledged", Gray continues, "that communism
was an atheist version of monotheism. But so is liberalism, and when Gide and others gave up
faith in communism to become liberals, they were not renouncing the concepts and values that
both ideologies had inherited from western religion. They continued to believe that history was
a directional process in which humankind was advancing towards universal freedom ".
So too with the wokes. The emphasis is on Redemption; on a Truth catharsis; on their own
Virtue as sufficient agency to stand-in for the lack of plan for the future. All are clear
signals: A secularised 'illusion' is metamorphosing back into 'religion'. Not as Islam, of
course, but as angry Man, burning at the deep and dark moral stain of the past. And acting now
as purifying 'fire' to bring about the uplifting and shining future ahead.
Tucker Carlson, a leading American conservative commentator known for plain speaking,
frames the movement a little differently:
"This is not a momentary civil disturbance. This is a serious, and highly organized
political movement It is deep and profound and has vast political ambitions. It is insidious,
it will grow. Its goal is to end liberal democracy and challenge western civilization itself
We're too literal and good-hearted to understand what's happening We have no idea what we are
up against These are not protests. This is a totalitarian political movement" .
Again, nothing needs to be done by this new generation to bring into being a new world,
apart from destroying the old one. This vision is a relic – albeit secularised – of
western Christianity. Apocalypse and redemption, these wokes believe, have their own path;
their own internal logic.
Mill's 'ghost' is arrived at the table. And with its return, America's exceptionalism has
its re-birth. Redemption for humankind's dark stains. A narrative in which the history of
mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle. Yet Americans, young or old, now lack the
power to project it as a universal vision.
'Virtue', however deeply felt, on its own, is insufficient. Might President Trump try
nevertheless to sustain the old illusion by hard power? The U.S. is deeply fractured and
dysfunctional – but if desperate, this is possible.
The "toy radicals, and Champagne Bolsheviks" – in these terms of dripping disdain from
Williamson – are very similar to those who rushed into the streets in 1917. But before
dismissing them so peremptorily and lightly, recall what occurred.
Into that combustible mass of youth – so acultured by their progressive parents to see
a Russian past that was imperfect and darkly stained – a Trotsky and Lenin were inserted.
And Stalin ensued. No 'toy radicals'. Soft became hard totalitarianism.
play_arrow
N2M , 22 minutes ago
Vision? What vision that might be?
"'Freedom' is being torn down from within"
What freedom? Could be "Freedom" they decide how, when and where you can express your
thoughts? There is only one true freedom that exists and that is human free will to tell the
truth.
Today vision of Freedom is a joke, this game was never about freedom for in a world of
ideology, there is always lurking a deceits of lies and control.
There are 3 types of Americans.
A sharp ones and well tune to what has been going on and those I had a chance to talk
to and become friends when I was in U.S.A
The imbeciles of totally clueless generation of people who will listen to any wave of
information in propaganda as true and must be and their government is so beloved, no others
can even compete and they only have good intentions /s /c
And there is this group, shrewd, conniving, self-moral, warmongering, evil to a core
psychopaths who only follow different orders to impose their will on other nations to makes
sure they follow what? USD.
So when author speaks about vision it must separate few things!
Washington is running around imposing sanctions, destroying relationship/interest with
nations, trying all this regime changes at a cost of death of millions of people and then
dropping "Freedom bombs' almost every 8 to 9 minutes somewhere in this world, because these
freaks vision is way different, then some regular people either be in South America or other
continents that these regular people have.
Real vision is based on corporation, and U.S.A had that before, however after being
hijack, now they trying to start a war of unimaginable proportions so few fat bosses in one
Chamber can feel as super masters of the world and everyone as slaves.
I would like to remind some people about vision – Marx had a vision to, and rest is
history.
Becklon , 1 hour ago
It's a lack of shared purpose, I think. Without a common focus, such as an external threat
(as once provided by the USSR) groups tend to fracture and turn on themselves and each
other.
It's got nothing to do with any one religious or political group having more power than
others. It's to do with homo sapiens - and maybe entropy.
1 play_arrow
David Wooten , 1 hour ago
Well, if all this is true, there is far, far more at stake than the US being unable to
"Re-Impose Its Civilisational Worldview" (which I would be fine with).
He should talk about neoliberal ideology not some "universal civilization"
Notable quotes:
"... So, not only was the claim to universal civilisation not supported by evidence, but the very idea of humans sharing a common destination ('End of Times') is nothing more than an apocalyptic remnant of Latin Christianity, and of one minor current in Judaism. Mill's was always a matter of secularized religion – faith – rather than empiricism. A shared human 'destination' does not exist in Orthodox Christianity, Taoism or Buddhism. It could never therefore qualify as universal. ..."
"... But today, with America's soft power collapsed – not even the illusion of universalism can be sustained. Other states are coming forward, offering themselves as separate, equally compelling 'civilisational' states. It is clear that even were the classic liberal Establishment to win in the November U.S. elections, America no longer has claim to path-find a New World Order. ..."
"... 'Freedom' is being torn down from within. Dissidents from the woke ideology , are being 'called out', made to repent on the knee, or face reputational or economic ruin. It is 'soft totalitarianism'. It recalls one of Dostoevsky's characters – at a time when Russian progressives were discrediting traditional institutions – who, in a celebrated line, says: "I got entangled in my data Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism". ..."
"... "This is not a momentary civil disturbance. This is a serious, and highly organized political movement It is deep and profound and has vast political ambitions. It is insidious, it will grow. Its goal is to end liberal democracy and challenge western civilization itself We're too literal and good-hearted to understand what's happening We have no idea what we are up against These are not protests. This is a totalitarian political movement" ..."
"... The "toy radicals, and Champagne Bolsheviks" – in these terms of dripping disdain from Williamson – are very similar to those who rushed into the streets in 1917. But before dismissing them so peremptorily and lightly, recall what occurred. ..."
It was always a paradox: John Stuart Mill, in his seminal (1859), On Liberty , never doubted that a universal civilisation, grounded
in liberal values, was the eventual destination of all of humankind. He looked forward to an 'Exact Science of Human Nature', which
would formulate laws of psychology and society as precise and universal as those of the physical sciences.
Yet, not only did that
science never emerge, in today's world, such social 'laws' are taken as strictly (western) cultural constructs, rather than as laws
or science.
So, not only was the claim to universal civilisation not supported by evidence, but the very idea of humans sharing a common destination
('End of Times') is nothing more than an apocalyptic remnant of Latin Christianity, and of one minor current in Judaism. Mill's was
always a matter of secularized religion – faith – rather than empiricism. A shared human 'destination' does not exist in Orthodox
Christianity, Taoism or Buddhism. It could never therefore qualify as universal.
Liberal core tenets of individual autonomy, freedom, industry, free trade and commerce essentially reflected the triumph of the
Protestant worldview in Europe's 30-years' civil war. It was not fully even a Christian view, but more a Protestant one.
This narrow, sectarian pillar was able to be projected into a universal project – only so long as it was underpinned by power
. In Mill's day, the civilisational claim served Europe's need for
colonial validation . Mill tacitly
acknowledges this when he validates the clearing of the indigenous American populations for not having tamed the wilderness, nor
made the land productive.
However, with America's Cold War triumph – that had by then become a cynical framework for U.S. 'soft power' – acquired a new
potency. The merits of America's culture, and way of life, seemed to acquire practical validation through the implosion of the USSR.
But today, with America's soft power collapsed – not even the illusion of universalism can be sustained. Other states are coming
forward, offering themselves as separate, equally compelling 'civilisational' states. It is clear that even were the classic liberal
Establishment to win in the November U.S. elections, America no longer has claim to path-find a New World Order.
Yet, should this secularised Protestant current be over – beware! Because its subterranean, unconscious religiosity is the 'ghost
at the table' today. It is returning in a new guise.
The 'old illusion' cannot continue, because its core values are being radicalised, stood on their head, and turned into the swords
with which to impale classic American and European liberals (and U.S. Christian Conservatives). It is now the younger generation
of American woke
liberals who are asserting vociferously not merely that the old liberal paradigm is illusory, but that it was never more than
'a cover' hiding oppression – whether domestic, or colonial, racist or imperial; a moral stain that only redemption can cleanse.
It is an attack – which coming from within – forecloses on any U.S. moral, soft power, global leadership aspirations. For with
the illusion exploded, and nothing in its place, a New World Order cannot coherently be formulated.
Not content with exposing the illusion, the woke generation are also tearing down, and shredding, the flags at the masthead: Freedom
and prosperity achieved via the liberal market.
'Freedom' is being torn down from within. Dissidents from the
woke ideology , are being 'called
out', made to repent on the knee, or face reputational or economic ruin. It is 'soft totalitarianism'. It recalls one of Dostoevsky's
characters – at a time when Russian progressives were discrediting traditional institutions – who, in a celebrated line, says: "I
got entangled in my data Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism".
Even 'science' has become a 'God that failed'; instead of being the path to liberty, it has become a dark soulless
path toward unfreedom . From algorithms that 'cost' the value of human lives, versus the 'costing' of lockdown; from secret 'Black
Box' algos that limit distribution of news and thinking, to Bill Gates' vaccination ID project, science now portends
despotic social control , rather than a fluttering standard, hoist as the symbol of freedom.
But the most prominent of these flags, torn down, cannot be blamed on the woke generation . There has been no 'prosperity for
all' – only distortions and warped structures. There are not even free markets. The Fed and the U.S. Treasury simply print new money,
and hand it out to select recipients. There is no means now to attribute 'worth' to financial assets. Their value simply is that
which Central Government is willing to pay for bonds, or grant in bail-outs.
Wow. 'The God who failed' (André Gide's book title) – a crash of idols. One wonders now, what is the point to that huge financial
eco-system known as Wall Street. Why not winnow it down to a couple of entities, say, Blackrock and KKR (hedge funds), and leave
it to them to distribute the Fed's freshly-printed 'boodle' amongst friends? Liberal markets no more – and many fewer jobs.
"Today, America's tumbrils are clattering about, carrying toppled statues, ruined careers, unwoke brands. Over their sides
peer those deemed racist by left-wing identitarians and sentenced to cancelation, even as the evidentiary standard for that crime
falls through the floor But who are these cultural revolutionaries? The conventional wisdom goes that this is the inner-cities
erupting, economically disadvantaged victims of racism enraged over the murder of George Floyd. The reality is something more
bourgeoisie. As Kevin Williamson observed last week, "These are the idiot children of the American ruling class, toy radicals
and Champagne Bolsheviks, playing Jacobin for a while, until they go back to graduate school".
Is that so? I well recall listening in the Middle East to other angry young men who, too, wanted to 'topple the statues'; to burn
down everything. 'You really believed that Washington would allow you in', they taunted and tortured their leaders: "No, we must
burn it all down. Start from scratch".
Did they have a blueprint for the future? No. They simply believed that Islam would organically inflate, and expand to fill the
void. It would happen by itself – of its own accord: Faith.
Professor John Gray has noted
"that in The God that failed, Gide says: 'My faith in communism is like my faith in religion. It is a promise of salvation for mankind''
. "Here Gide acknowledged", Gray continues, "that communism was an atheist version of monotheism. But so is liberalism, and when
Gide and others gave up faith in communism to become liberals, they were not renouncing the concepts and values that both ideologies
had inherited from western religion. They continued to believe that history was a directional process in which humankind was advancing
towards universal freedom".
So too with the wokes. The emphasis is on Redemption; on a Truth catharsis; on their own Virtue as sufficient agency to stand-in
for the lack of plan for the future. All are clear signals: A secularised 'illusion' is metamorphosing back into 'religion'. Not
as Islam, of course, but as angry Man, burning at the deep and dark moral stain of the past. And acting now as purifying 'fire' to
bring about the uplifting and shining future ahead.
Tucker Carlson, a leading American conservative commentator known for plain speaking,
frames the movement a little differently:
"This is not a momentary civil disturbance. This is a serious, and highly organized political movement It is deep and profound
and has vast political ambitions. It is insidious, it will grow. Its goal is to end liberal democracy and challenge western civilization
itself We're too literal and good-hearted to understand what's happening We have no idea what we are up against These are not
protests. This is a totalitarian political movement" .
Again, nothing needs to be done by this new generation to bring into being a new world, apart from destroying the old one. This
vision is a relic – albeit secularised – of western Christianity. Apocalypse and redemption, these wokes believe, have their own
path; their own internal logic.
Mill's 'ghost' is arrived at the table. And with its return, America's exceptionalism has its re-birth. Redemption for humankind's
dark stains. A narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle. Yet Americans, young or old,
now lack the power to project it as a universal vision.
'Virtue', however deeply felt, on its own, is insufficient. Might President Trump try nevertheless to sustain the old illusion
by hard power? The U.S. is deeply fractured and dysfunctional – but if desperate, this is possible.
The "toy radicals, and Champagne Bolsheviks" – in these terms of dripping disdain from Williamson – are very similar to those
who rushed into the streets in 1917. But before dismissing them so peremptorily and lightly, recall what occurred.
Into that combustible mass of youth – so acultured by their progressive parents to see a Russian past that was imperfect and darkly
stained – a Trotsky and Lenin were inserted. And Stalin ensued. No 'toy radicals'. Soft became hard totalitarianism.
"... This lady is sitting there lying trying to prove a point. I have been in enough arguments to kow when someone is just arguing to keep the discussion going ..."
The bottom line is, they want to take away any problem solving skills that might build character, because someone might get
hurt! Victimhood culture run amuck.
Mathematics is the cornerstone of all forms of trade, communications, home economics and every other aspect of life. Truth
is they're dumbing everyone down to control populations!
I have Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering and I'm 62-years old. I have never once cared about the history of mathematics,
other than a curiosity. Knowing the history of mathematics never helped me once to solve an ordinary second order differential
equation.
When a person lies while giving an interview they should be shocked or something. This lady is sitting there lying trying
to prove a point. I have been in enough arguments to kow when someone is just arguing to keep the discussion going. She has
already lost the argument deflected and differed responsibility when confronted with the legitimacy of the paper.
Go exercise healthy body makes a healthy mind not the other way around.
Cue bono? Not black people (actually she is an Indian, which until recently was a caste
society). Is she a victim of "affirmative action" policy and occupies a position for which there
are more worthy academically candidates. University is not sinecure, at least it should not
be.
How good is she as an academic? Is she mentally stable?
The decision of Cambridge University to promote her after such an idiotic tweet creates
several additional questions.
Petition against Prof Priyamvada Gopal now off line. Additionally I noticed earlier today
that the comments given on the site voicing why they were signing had all been removed, but not
on other petitions. As of yesterday evening these comments were peaceful, and not personal,
just things like 'because it is racist' and 'do I even need to give a reason'?
The petition had nearly 25,000 signed supporters earlier today, and new signings were
flooding in at over 1/sec when I checked.
In addition in an affront to common decency the University/College promoted her whilst
they had stated earlier they were aware of the controversial nature of her tweets.
Her original tweet was deleted by Twitter as a breach of community guidelines. She also
reports that, in spite of senselessly provoking people at a delicate time with racist tweets,
that the extremely racist responses she got from some far right people was being looked at by
the Police.
All in all this establishes a systematic problem. Being deliberately vague means you cannot
use context as a defence, and the context of all her tweets shows some extreme patterns of
thinking against certain groups that casts very considerable doubts on the validity of such a
defense. Moreover, context hasn't been a defence when others have been prosecuted for far less.
Nobody, including Cambridge academics, should be above the law.
To those people that think that what she said was justified because she was trying to
defend BLM from supposed alternative movements, all she in fact did do was to achieve the
opposite of that.
If one wishes to convey complex ideas a teacher of English in her position *must know* that
this requires a long form medium to provide argumentation, and that Twitter is no such place to
do it due to its character count. But taking in all the other comments she has made, its very
clear the double standards and overall bias that really does amount to overt prejudice.
At the very least she is so contradictory, immature and incompetent as to make a mockery
of her college and for that reason at minimum, she should lose her job. I'm sorry to say that
as well.
But something about this whole episode feels like a jumping the shark moment. I don't think
this is going away all that easily.
Deaths from just *Pneumonia* from Feb1st to June20/20 =*119,174* Deaths from just Covid by
its self for same time period = 109,188 And for this time period 1,232,269 Deaths from all
causes. The numbers Fear game,obviously is being played up large by the DemoTards and we know
why! Funny how the Fake News,never speaks of this.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113051/number-reported-deaths-from-covid-pneumonia-and-flu-us/
Arch_Stanton , 47 minutes ago
Fauci should have had his microphone taken away months ago. A testament to the power of
big pharma.
razorthin , 59 minutes ago
Little Fascist Koxucker.
"Please understand the people who have built this international order reject natural law,
so they do not like sovereign citizens. They do not believe people have inherent rights or
sacred liberties. Most frankly find God anathema and believe in no higher authority than
themselves and the heartless arithmetic they serve. So, while they have happily plundered
America of blood and treasure which we were foolish enough to provide in copious quantities,
they have no love or need of our nation or antiquated concepts such as those enshrined in the
Constitution and Bill of Rights. In their calculation, America needed to be taken down in
order to realize the global project, and as you see the first glimmers of a national effort
in opposition to that, a positive limited effort struggling to overcome the bureaucrats who
betray us all at every opportunity, it becomes clear the Left would rather collapse America
than see us oppose the new world without borders where everyone intermingles under a
controlling network of agencies. No guns, no resistance, no free speech, and no problems is
what they want. Only we stand in the way of the fulfillment of this Orwellian vision, and as
each day's hysteria on the news reveals, the powers that be are working overtime to push the
Left into revolt to topple America into a conflict that will remove us from prominence on the
world scene. Should they win, our rights are gone. Should they fail, the rest of the world
will have consolidated against us, save those few brave nations trying to fight themselves
free of the same entanglements that brought us low. This is where we are today, and it is one
hell of a dilemma for a person who cares about this country and our historic values. No
matter what we choose, any path but submission and surrender only leads to greater conflict,
so this makes us consider the first important question: What are we willing to fight to
preserve? Individuals and families will have to answer this question in the coming months and
years in a much more meaningful way than has been required in generations. The easy days are
coming to an end, and while the economy is booming and we're enjoying an Indian Summer for
our embattled nation, these questions will only become more pressing in the days ahead."
-- The Coming Civil War by Tom Kawczynski
nsurf9 , 1 hour ago
The nasolacrimal duct (also called the tear duct) carries tears from the lacrimal sac of
the eye into the nasal cavity. This virus seems to be able aerosol its particles more readily
than other viruses so as to spread its RNA/DNA in the air - as well as being normally
contracted through fluid droplets.
The eyes are large wet areas, perfect for collecting dust and viruses. If you're a part of
an at-risk demographic or just worried, make sure you cover you eyes. And, upon returning
home, I rinse the eyes out with water along with washing my hands.
Right now, I'm using some tight-fitting fishing glasses with my n99 mask, when I go into
stores or hi-density areas - but, looking for something better.
IvannaHumpalot , 1 hour ago
Rinsing your eyes wont help
yes you can get it through your eyes but that is very difficult via aerosol and
unlikely
far more likely is you touch a contaminated surface after some dirty person without a
facemask has been talking and breathing out their infected droplets earlier
those droplets fall to the surface and you touch it then touch your eyes, nose or
mouth
or you breathe in an infective dose by not wearing a mask to reduce viral load
exposure
or you walk it home on your shoes
IvannaHumpalot , 1 hour ago
Herd immunity at 80%
america has 328 million
That means 262 million must get infected for fantasy herd immunity
US infected is now at 2.7 million infected
let us be generous and say 10x havent been diagnosed but have it
so the US is at 27 million infected
27 out of 262 million
there goes the stupid herd immunity sham
Wear a facemask, avoid catching or spreading it
tranium , 1 hour ago
Dr. HOAX is spreading plandemic.
ZKnight , 1 hour ago
Does anyone even believe this sleazy little man who's corona predictions were 20x off?
He single handedly destroyed the economy and people's jobs over a false alarm all to try
and get his vaccine's in.
WhiteHose , 1 hour ago
Hes been wrong on everything since Jan!
hugin-o-munin , 1 hour ago
We applaud the approval of chemical sweeteners, fluoride, GMOs, antibiotic saturated meat
products and poultry, not to mention the continued use of Glyphosate on just about all food
products. Eat and drink your industrial sugar and chemicals. Now we need a global vaccine
schedule and license linked to passports to make sure everyone on the planet is inoculated
all the time before we can allow them to buy and sell. This is all done out of pure love and
care for all people.
/s
JamcaicanMeAfraid , 1 hour ago
Fauci's ego may start to encroach on the king of all egos, Barry Soreto
Peak Finance , 1 hour ago
This:
"tremendous burden" that the US health care system might face this fall if COVID-19 and
the flu are circulating at the same time.
This man is truly a fool and should be arrested.
Death rates and statistics do not work that way
This coming flu season is going to be the MILDEST EVER because of Covid, as, the people
that WOULD HAVE DIED this season have ALREADY PASSED
Similar to the "Demand-pull" concept in economics
Random ZH posters smarter than people in the upper reaches of government
Fauci and Redfield are complete pieces of s h i t. So much misdirection and lies.
RTP , 2 hours ago
Gallo + Fauci = AIDS swindle
Fauci + Gates = COVID-19 swindle
How much longer will this poisonous dwarf ruin the future of mankind?
k3g , 2 hours ago
Question in March: Doc, you've been a Director at NIH infectious disease unit for 36
years. You're our top virologist. You're in the spotlight, your moment to shine, to show why
we've paid your salary and bene's all these years, we're counting on you. First question:
should we wear masks, would that help?
A: Dunno. Have to study it.
Q: Well, if we want to wear masks, how to we get them? When will the gubmint release masks
from the billions it has in storage?
A: Dunno. Not sure if we have any masks. Have you tried Home Depot?
The government and the FED dumping TRILLIONS of dollars to all these corporations,
meanwhile they can't even provide FREE MASKS for everyone. If they really wanted to help,
they could have given everyone masks. That's how you could have helped prevent it. And MASKS
are expensive why not subsidized it, and maybe we would have this in control and are
re-opening sooner.
Yes, it all narrows down to complexity now. Complex truth, complex lies, complex
plots,
complex relations between major groups of crooks themselves, and, in addition to
the MSM, an army of alternative media feeding people with filtered visions of reality,
convenient to the group(s) they represent. And even all that is far from complete or
precise model of reality.
Not saying that humanity is doomed, though. Because no matter how evil-smart,
rich, well-organized and self-confident the crooks are, the last word will not be theirs.
And something tells me that in the end it'll be simplicity that will finish them off.
"... This would be bad news for anyone with a serious health condition, but it would be especially bad news for the oldest pre-Medicare age group, people between the ages of 55 and 64. This group currently faces average premiums of close to $10,000 a year per person for insurance purchased through the ACA exchanges. Insurers could easily charge people with serious health conditions two or three times this amount if the Trump administration wins its case. ..."
"... The 55 to 64 age group will also be hard hit because they are far more likely to have serious health issues than younger people. Just 18 percent of the people in the youngest 18 to 34 age group have a serious health condition, compared to 44 percent of those in the 55 to 64 age group, as shown in the figure above. ..."
Older Workers Targeted in Trump's Lawsuit to End Obamacare
By DEAN BAKER
The Trump administration is supporting a lawsuit which seeks to overturn the Affordable
Care Act (ACA) in its entirety. The implication is that a large share of the older workers
now able to afford health insurance as a result of the ACA will no longer be able to afford
it if the Trump administration wins its lawsuit.
Furthermore, if the suit succeeds it will both end the expansion of Medicaid, which has
insured tens of millions of people, and again allow discrimination against people with
serious health conditions. Ending this discrimination was one of the major goals of the ACA.
The issue is that insurers don't want to insure people who are likely to have health issues
that cost them money. While they are happy to insure healthy people with few medical
expenses, people with heart disease, diabetes, or other health conditions are a bad deal for
insurers.
Before the ACA, insurers could charge outlandish fees to cover people with health
conditions, or simply refuse to insure them altogether. The ACA required insurers to cover
everyone within an age bracket at the same price, regardless of their health. If the Trump
administration has its way, we would go back to the world where insurers could charge people
with health issues whatever they wanted, or alternatively, just deny them coverage.
This would be bad news for anyone with a serious health condition, but it would be
especially bad news for the oldest pre-Medicare age group, people between the ages of 55 and
64. This group currently faces average premiums of close to $10,000 a year per person for
insurance purchased through the ACA exchanges. Insurers could easily charge people with
serious health conditions two or three times this amount if the Trump administration wins its
case.
And, since a Trump victory would eliminate the ACA subsidiaries, people in this age group
with health conditions could be looking to pay $20,000 to $30,000 a year for insurance, with
no help from the government. That will be especially hard since many people with serious
health conditions are unable to work full-time jobs, and some can't work at all.
[Graph]
The 55 to 64 age group will also be hard hit because they are far more likely to have
serious health issues than younger people. Just 18 percent of the people in the youngest 18
to 34 age group have a serious health condition, compared to 44 percent of those in the 55 to
64 age group, as shown in the figure above.
The ACA has many inadequacies, but it has allowed tens of millions to get insurance who
could not otherwise. Donald Trump wants to take this insurance away.
On Monday, Gilead disclosed its pricing plan for Gilead as it prepares to begin charging for
the drug at the beginning of next month (several international governments have already placed
orders). Given the high demand, thanks in part due to the breathless media coverage despite the
drug's still-questionable study data, Gilead apparently feels justified in charging $3,120 for
a patient getting the shorter, more common, treatment course, and $5,720 for the longer course
for more seriously ill patients. These are the prices for patients with commercial insurance in
the US, according to Gilead's official pricing plan.
As per usual, the price charged to those on government plans will be lower, and hospitals
will also receive a slight discount. Additionally, the US is the only developed country where
Gilead will charge two prices, according to Gilead CEO Daniel O'Day. In much of Europe and
Canada, governments negotiate drug prices directly with drugmakers (in the US, laws dictate
that drug makers must "discount" their drugs for Medicare and Medicaid plans).
But according to O'Day, the drug is priced "far below the value it brings" to the
health-care system.
However, we'd argue that this actually isn't true. Remdesivir was developed by Gilead to
treat Ebola, but the drug was never approved by the FDA for this use, which caused Gilead to
shelve the drug until COVID-19 presented another opportunity. Even before the first study had
finished, the company was already pushing propaganda about the promising nature of the drug.
Meanwhile, the CDC, WHO and other organizations were raising doubts about the effectiveness of
steroid medications.
Months later, the only study on the steroid dexomethasone, a cheap steroid that costs less
than $50 for a 100-dose regimen, has shown that dexomethasone is the only drug so far that has
proven effective at lowering COVID-19 related mortality. Remdesivir, despite the fact that it
has been tested in several high quality trials, has not.
So, why is the American government in partnership with Gilead still pushing this
questionable, and staggeringly expensive, medication on the public?
"... Trump's problems among college-educated whites have drawn much attention during his presidency. What's new is declining support among non-college educated whites, where he holds only a 19-point lead. He won that demographic by 37 points in 2016. And his declining support among this key constituency is pronounced in six battleground states, with only 16 percent of non-college educated whites backing him. In October, his lead among them was 24 points. In 2016, Trump won these battleground voters by 26 points. ..."
White voters are turning away from President Trump. That assessment includes his invaluable
working-class white base
. But Trump has only himself and his campaign to blame for the bad news contained in the latest polls. While America burns, his
campaign's only plan seems to be wooing black voters by tweeting that
Joe Biden
is the "real" racist. Trump seems unable to do anything about the riots or the
devastation
wrought by
coronavirus . The latest poll numbers should knock some sense into the president. He seems to be responding a little lately,
but he's going to lose the election if he sticks to
Jared Kushner 's agenda and
doesn't fight like the candidate
we
elected in 2016.
The latest polls from The New York Times poll lay bare the ugly truth.
Trump's problems among
college-educated
whites have drawn much attention during his presidency. What's new is declining support among non-college educated whites,
where he holds only a 19-point lead. He won that demographic
by 37 points in 2016. And his declining support among this
key constituency is pronounced
in six battleground states, with only 16 percent of non-college educated whites backing him. In October, his lead among them was
24 points. In 2016, Trump won these battleground voters by 26 points.
Funny thing is, those voters aren't defecting to Biden's camp, either; their support for him has increased by just 1 since October.
The Times describes them as "
white voters with more
conservative attitudes on racial issues," which likely means they think Trump has not delivered the promised nationalist agenda.
One voter told the Times's Cohn he's disappointed with
Trump
's not cracking down
on the rioters and shutting down the economy because of the
Chinese
Virus pandemic. He'll still vote for Trump, but without much enthusiasm.
Older whites are also jumping ship. In six battleground states, Trump and Biden are about even among whites 65 or older. Trump
won them by nearly 20 points in 2016. The Times
attributes that decline to the president's coronavirus response and his "tone" [
Trump Faces
Mounting Defections From a Once-Loyal Group: Older White Voters , by Alexander Burns and Katie Glueck, June 28, 2020].
That picture of Trump's America hardly inspires confidence.
The only positive for Trump is that Biden has roughly the same non-white support that
Hillary Clinton had in 2016
. But that's not exactly great news, either, given the campaign's focus on painting Biden as the "real" racist. The message is
having zero effect on non-whites. The Times : Biden leads by 74 points among blacks and by 39 points among Hispanics [
Biden
Takes Dominant Lead as Voters Reject Trump on Virus and Race , by Alexander Burns, Jonathan Martin and Matt Stevens, June
24, 2020].
A tweet from Trump campaign manager
Brad
Parscale last week illustrates the idiocy. Parscale attacked Biden for working with
Strom Thurmond to impose harsh sentences
on crack dealers. He claimed this legislation targeted blacks and Trump is fixing the "problem"
Unhappily, Parscale is not alone. Official Republican and Trump campaign accounts regularly tweet cringeworthy statements about
Confederate monuments and criminal justice reform.
Democrats seem to have forgotten that Pres. Trump has led the way on innovative criminal justice reform.
He signed the FIRST STEP Act & established the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement & the Admin. of Justice -- which
aims to improve relations between the public & police.
Who, exactly, are these messages for? If they're intended to win the black vote, they're failing. If they're meant to soothe white
suburbanite concerns about Trump's alleged "racism," they're failing. If they're meant to excite Trump's working class white base,
again, they're failing.
Parscale
set
out the agenda for the Trump campaign in a January interview with Lou Dobbs: the economy and healthcare. When Dobbs asked about
immigration, the campaign manager replied that they didn't need to worry about it because "we already have [immigration patriots
as] voters." Other issues, he claimed, will bring in new voters.
The Son-in-Law
in Chief might wish to consult the polling data to verify that claim.
Parscale is taking a lot of heat lately for the poor messaging and the
Tulsa rally's underwhelming attendance . Reports suggest Parscale is on his way out as part of a major campaign shake-up. Maybe,
but he's not the ultimate problem.
Jared Kushner and the Republican establishment are setting Trump's agenda and message, Parscale merely carries it out. And frighteningly,
as Politico reported, Kushner "who effectively oversees the campaign from the White House, is expected to play an even more
active role" [ Trump admits
it: He's losing , by Alex Isenstadt, June 27, 2020].
Trump recently tweeted an ad that suggests he might ditch the awful messaging. It pins the current chaos on Democrats and the
Left and states they want to burn America to the ground.
It's a powerful, take-no-prisoners video with the same message that helped Trump win in 2016 and might just re-energize his base
in time for Election Day.
Yet tough talk alone won't win back Trump's base. He must act . Signs are improving there, too..
Over the weekend, he tweeted several wanted
pictures of statue vandals. Four leftists were hit with federal charges for attacking the Andrew Jackson statue in DC [
Justice Department Charges 4 Over Attempt to Topple Andrew Jackson Statue In D.C. , by Jason Slotkin, NPR , June
28, 2020]. Putting left-wing criminals behind bars sends the right message and might stifle the unrest. And again, he's helping unemployed
Americans with
the immigration ban for the rest of the year. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support it, according to the latest polling.
Trump must show Americans that the Chinese Virus threat is decreasing, the economy is recovering, and law and order is being restored.
Tweets about money for black colleges, Biden's tough-on-crime bills, and or his long-ago cooperation with "segregationists" won't
do.
Trump must make this election about order versus chaos and put Democrats on the side of the rioters and the radicals in Antifa
and Black Lives Matter.
You guys at VDare are always very hopeful, and I like that. I've read of some of the moves that the President has made, such
as the ones you state here (on immigration and some justice for Cult-Revolutionalists). However, these things never seem to be
part of any coherent, consistent strategy of any sort.
Perhaps President Trump is not a strategist and can't think in that manner. He definitely has no specific principles or moral
compass, or any kind of damn compass. This is why he listens to his son-in-law Kushner, who is out to destroy the country like
the rest of them.
I agree with the one guy you mentioned (who replied to Mr. Cohn). There's no choice on who to vote for anyway, not matter how
much Trump screws up. But then, all this happening is not going to be settled at the voting booth anyway
Yeah, Trump comes off like a used car salesman with high pressure tactics. But who can vote for dugout Joe who hides in his
basement avoiding complex questions? Apples Oranges ?
Trump is done. Kushner is nothing more than an Israeli plant. They know that Biden is just like Pelosi and she and Joe would
kill every white person in America if Israel wanted. The entire Congress is owned by Israel. Trump is done. Obama's "Third Term"
more accurately described as Coup d'etat setup with the Deep State and Obama's Jewish friends left from his administration destroyed
Trump on the first day of his tenure.
Trump can't stop putting his foot in his mouth. He abandoned White America and no matter what he did for the Blacks including
money for their universities made no difference. No matter how many jobs he created it didn't count because these mongrels don't
want jobs they want free stuff. Obama did nothing for blacks except destroying many middle class blacks but it doesn't matter.
Blacks are tribalistic gang bangers and as Obama their Lord taught them only see color.
Trump is done and so is America. The Jews always win no matter who is president. You better start arming yourself because you
are not going to believe what is going to happen when Biden wins. In Washington D.C. today Blacks were rioting against Target
because they call the police when blacks steal stuff. You can't make this up and the Jewish controlled media just laughs at us.
Ok, but what if Trump were to say Dems are the real racists ? Wouldn't that win the Black vote? Forgive me, gallows
humor.
It's truly pathetic the people Trump surrounds himself with. His instincts always seemed good, but apparently he can't implement
a damn thing. At least all this is showing conservatives how rotten the leadership of all their hallowed institutions are (FBI,
military, police, etc).
A person that believe is Russiagate is iether an idiot or a shill
Notable quotes:
"... The bipartisan elite will allow the destruction of the statues as an attempt to ameliorate the frustration of the protestors by giving them a target for their anger. The elite understand while the statues are the release of frustration and the target of the anger, they remain safe. But what happens next week when all the symbols of empire have been eradicated? ..."
Should've included the fact that Tucker himself said that the Republican party won't save us cause they're busy sucking up to
corporate interests instead of stealing it.
The bipartisan elite will allow the destruction of the statues as an attempt to ameliorate the frustration of the
protestors by giving them a target for their anger. The elite understand while the statues are the release of frustration and
the target of the anger, they remain safe. But what happens next week when all the symbols of empire have been eradicated?
"Restaurant Of The Future" - KFC Unveils Automated Store With Robots And Food Lockers
by Tyler Durden Fri,
06/26/2020 - 22:05 Fast-food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) has debuted the "restaurant of
the future," one where automation dominates the storefront, and little to no interaction is
seen between customers and employees, reported NBC News .
After the chicken is fried and sides are prepped by humans, the order is placed on a
conveyor belt and travels to the front of the store. A robotic arm waits for the order to
arrive, then grabs it off the conveyor belt and places it into a secured food
locker.
A KFC representative told NBC News that the new store is located in Moscow and was built
months before the virus outbreak. The representative said the contactless store is the future
of frontend fast-food restaurants because it's more sanitary.
Disbanding human cashiers and order preppers at the front of a fast-food store will be the
next big trend in the industry through 2030. Making these restaurants contactless between
customers and employees will lower the probabilities of transmitting the virus.
Automating the frontend of a fast-food restaurant will come at a tremendous cost, that is,
significant job loss . Nationwide (as of 2018), there were around 3.8 million employed at
fast-food restaurants. Automation and artificial intelligence are set displace millions of jobs
in the years ahead.
As for the new automated KFC restaurant in Moscow, well, it's a glimpse of what is coming to
America - this will lead to the widespread job loss that will force politicians to unveil
universal basic income .
Today, in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich considers the all-American version of "extreme
materialism" that Martin Luther King called out more than half a century ago. And when it
comes to the overwhelming urge to get one's hands on the goods, among the looters of this
moment two groups are almost never mentioned: the Pentagon and the police.
Yet, in 1997, the Department of Defense set up the 1033 program as part of the National
Defense Authorization Act to provide thousands of domestic police forces with "surplus"
equipment of almost every imaginable militarized kind. Since then, thanks to your tax
dollars, it has given away $7.4
billion of such equipment, some of it directly off the battlefields of this country's
forlorn "forever wars."
For items like grenade launchers, mine-resistant armored vehicles, military rifles,
bayonets, body armor, night-vision goggles, and helicopters
, all that police departments have to fork over is the price of delivery. The Pentagon has,
in fact, been so eager to become the Macy's of
militarized hardware that, in 2017, it was even willing to "give $1.2 million worth of
rifles, pipe bombs, and night vision goggles to a fake police department," no questions
asked. That "department" proved to be part of a sting
operation run by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). "It was like getting stuff
off of eBay," a GAO official would
say . Only, of course, for free.
The militarization (or, thought of another way, the commercialization) of the police has
been remarkably on pace these last 23 years, while the Pentagon's
ever-soaring budgets for its ever-sinking wars could be thought of as the great American
commercial success story of this century. With more and more taxpayer dollars in its
wallet, it's been on a remarkable looting spree. Ask yourself: has there been a weapons
system it couldn't have, a military base it couldn't establish, a war expense Congress
wouldn't fund even while cutting back on crucial aspects of the domestic budget like
infrastructure
programs or
disease-prevention spending ? No wonder the Pentagon could supply all those police
departments with a cornucopia of goods with which to turn themselves into over-armed
occupying forces in this country.
It's never thought of that way, but the Pentagon and the police have essentially been
looting the coffers of the American taxpayer for a long time now and, in the Trump era, the
process has only intensified .
Nonetheless, as Bacevich points out, even with protests over racism filling the streets of
America, protests over defunding the Pentagon have yet to surface in any significant way.
Perhaps it's finally time. ~ Tom
Martin Luther King's Giant Triplets
By Andrew Bacevich
In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans are finally – or is it
once again? – confronting the racism that afflicts this country and extends into just
about every corner of our national life. Something fundamental just might be happening.
Yet to state the obvious, we've been
here before. Mass protests in response to racial inequality and discrimination, including
police brutality, have been anything but unknown in the United States. Much the same can be
said of riots targeting black Americans, fomented and exploited by white racists, often
actively or passively abetted by local law enforcement officials. If Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin,
formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was correct in calling violence "as American as
cherry pie," then race-related urban unrest is the apple-filled equivalent.
The optimists among us believe
that "this time is different." I hope events will prove them right. Yet recalling
expectations that Barack Obama's election in 2008 signaled the dawn of a " post-racial America
," I see no reason to expect it to be so. A yawning gap, I fear, separates hope from
reality.
Let me suggest, however, that the nation's current preoccupation with race, as honorable
and necessary as it may be, falls well short of adequately responding to the situation
confronting Americans as they enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. Racism is a
massive problem, but hardly our only one. Indeed, as Martin Luther King sought to remind us
many years ago, there are at least two others of comparable magnitude.
MLK Defines the Problem
In April 1967, at New York City's Riverside Church, Dr. King delivered a sermon that
offered a profound diagnosis of the illnesses afflicting the nation. His analysis remains as
timely today as it was then, perhaps more so.
Americans remember King primarily as a great civil rights leader and indeed he was that.
In his Riverside Church address, however, he turned to matters that went far beyond race. In
an immediate sense, his focus was the ongoing Vietnam War, which he denounced as "madness"
that "must cease." Yet King also used the occasion to summon the nation to "undergo a radical
revolution of values" that would transform the United States "from a thing-oriented society
to a person-oriented society." Only through such a revolution, he declared, would we be able
to overcome "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism."
The challenge confronting Americans was to dismantle what King referred to as the
"edifice" that produced and sustained each of those giant triplets. Today's protesters,
crusading journalists, and engaged intellectuals make no bones about their determination to
eliminate the first of those giant triplets. Yet they generally treat the other two as, at
best, mere afterthoughts, while the edifice itself, resting on a perverse understanding of
freedom, goes almost entirely ignored.
I'm not suggesting that members of the grand coalition of Americans today fervently
campaigning against racism favor extreme materialism. Many of them merely accept its reality
and move on. Nor am I suggesting that they consciously endorse militarism, although in
confusing "support" for the troops with genuine patriotism some of them do so implicitly.
What I am suggesting is that those calling for fundamental change will go badly astray if
they ignore Dr. King's insistence that each of the giant triplets is intimately tied to the
other two.
Defund the Pentagon?
The protests triggered by the recent murders of George Floyd and other black Americans
have produced widespread demands to "defund the police." Those demands don't come out of
nowhere. While "reform" programs undertaken in innumerable American cities over the course of
many years have demonstrably
enhanced police firepower , they have done little, if anything, to repair relations
between police departments and communities of color.
As an aging middle-class white male, I don't fear cops. I respect the fact that theirs is
a tough job, which I would not want. Yet I realize that my attitude is one more expression of
white privilege, which black men, regardless of their age and economic status, can ill afford
to indulge. So I fully accept the need for radical changes in policing – that's what
"defund" appears to imply – if American cities are ever to have law enforcement
agencies that are effective, humane, and themselves law-abiding.
What I can't fathom is why a similar logic doesn't apply to the armed forces that we
employ to police huge chunks of the world beyond our borders. If Americans have reason to
question the nation's increasingly
militarized approach to law enforcement, then shouldn't they have equal reason to
question this country's thoroughly militarized approach to statecraft?
Consider this: on an annual basis, police officers in the United States kill approximately
1,000 Americans , with blacks
two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be victimized. Those are appalling
figures, indicative of basic policy gone fundamentally awry. So the outpouring of protest
over the police and demands for change are understandable and justified.
Still, the question must be asked: Why have the nation's post-9/11 wars not prompted
similar expressions of outrage? The unjustified killing of black Americans rightly finds
thousands upon thousands of protesters flooding the streets of major cities. Yet the
loss of thousands of
American soldiers and the physical and psychological wounds sustained by tens of thousands
more in foolhardy wars elicits, at best, shrugs. Throw in the hundreds of
thousands of non-American lives taken in those military campaigns and the
trillions of taxpayer dollars they have consumed and you have a catastrophe that easily
exceeds in scale the myriad race-related protests and riots that have roiled American cities
in the recent past.
With their eyes fixed on elections that are now just months away, politicians of all
stripes spare no effort to show that they "get it" on the issue of race and policing. Race
may well play a large role in determining who wins the White House this November and which
party controls Congress. It should. Yet while the election's final outcome may be uncertain,
this much is not: neither the American
propensity for war, nor the
bloated size of the Pentagon budget, nor the dubious habit of maintaining a sprawling
network of military bases across much of the planet will receive serious scrutiny during
the political season now underway. Militarism will escape unscathed.
At Riverside Church, King described the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today." So it unquestionably remains, perpetrating immeasurably more
violence than any other great power and with remarkably little to show in return. Why, then,
except on the easily ignored fringes of American politics, are there no demands to "defund"
the Pentagon?
King considered the Vietnam War an abomination. At that time, more than a few Americans
agreed with him and vigorously demonstrated against the conflict's continuation. That today's
demonstrators have seemingly chosen to file away our post-9/11 military misadventures under
the heading of regrettable but forgettable is itself an abomination. While their sensitivity
to racism is admirable, their indifference to war is nothing short of disheartening.
In 1967, Dr. King warned that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money
on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." During
the intervening decades, his charge has lost none of its sting or aptness.
America's National Signature
Given their size and duration, the protests occurring in the wake of the murder of George
Floyd have been remarkably peaceful. That said, some of them did, early on, include rioters
who resorted to looting. Smashing windows and ransacking stores, they walked off not with
milk and bread for the hungry, but with shopping bags filled with
high-end swag – designer shoes and sneakers, purses, clothing, and jewelry lifted
from
stores like Prada and Alexander McQueen. Also stolen were smart phones,
handguns , even automobiles . In-store
surveillance systems recorded
scenes reminiscent of Black Friday doorbuster sales, though without anyone bothering to
pass through a checkout counter. Some looters quickly attempted to monetize their hauls by
offering to sell purloined items online.
Certain right-wing commentators wasted no time in using the looting to tar the protest
movement as little more than an expression of nihilism. Tucker Carlson of Fox News was
particularly
emphatic on this point. Americans taking to the streets in response to George Floyd's
murder, he said, "reject society itself."
"Reason and process and precedent mean nothing to them. They use violence to get what they
want immediately. People like this don't bother to work. They don't volunteer or pay taxes to
help other people. They live for themselves. They do exactly what they feel like doing On
television, hour by hour, we watch these people – criminal mobs – destroy what
the rest of us have built "
To explain such selfish and destructive misconduct, Carlson had an answer readily at
hand:
"The ideologues will tell you that the problem is race relations, or capitalism, or police
brutality, or global warming. But only on the surface. The real cause is deeper than that and
it's far darker. What you're watching is the ancient battle between those who have a stake in
society, and would like to preserve it, and those who don't, and seek to destroy it.
This is vile, hateful stuff, and entirely wrong – except perhaps on one point. In
attributing the looting to a deeper cause, Carlson was onto something, even if his effort to
pinpoint that cause was wildly off the mark.
I won't try to unravel the specific motives of those who saw an opportunity in the
protests against racism to help themselves to goods that were not theirs. How much was
righteous anger turned to rage and how much cynical opportunism is beyond my ability to
know.
This much, however, can be said for certain: the grab-all-you-can-get impulse so vividly
on display was as all-American as fireworks on the Fourth of July. Those looters, after all,
merely wanted more stuff. What could be more American than that? In this country, after all,
stuff carries with it the possibility of personal fulfillment, of achieving some version of
happiness or status.
The looters that Tucker Carlson targeted with his ire were doing anything but "rejecting
society itself." They were merely helping themselves to what this society today has on offer
for those with sufficient cash and credit cards in their wallets. In a sense, they were
treating themselves to a tiny sip of what passes these days for the American Dream.
With the exception of cloistered nuns, hippies, and other vanishing breeds, virtually all
Americans have been conditioned to buy into the proposition that stuff correlates with the
good life. Unconvinced? Check out the videos from last year's Black Friday and then consider
the intense, if unsurprising, interest of economists and journalists in tracking the
latest
consumer spending trends . At least until Covid-19 came along, consumer spending served
as the authoritative measure of the nation's overall health.
The primary civic obligation of US citizens today is not to vote or pay taxes. And it's
certainly not to defend the country, a task offloaded onto those who can be enticed to enlist
(with minorities vastly
overrepresented ) in the so-called All-Volunteer Military. No, the primary obligation of
citizenship is to spend.
Ours is not a nation of mystics, philosophers, poets, artisans, or Thomas Jefferson's
yeomen farmers. We are now a nation of citizen-consumers, held in thrall to the extreme
materialism that Dr. King decried. This, not a commitment to liberty or democracy, has become
our true national signature and our chief contribution to late modernity.
Tearing Down the Edifice
At Riverside Church, King reminded his listeners that the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, which he had helped to found a decade earlier, had chosen this as its motto: "To
save the soul of America." The soul of a nation corrupted by racism, militarism, and extreme
materialism represented King's ultimate concern. Vietnam, he said, was "but a symptom of a
far deeper malady within the American spirit."
In a tone-deaf
editorial criticizing his Riverside Church sermon, the New York Times chastised
King for "fusing two public problems" – racism and the Vietnam War – "that are
distinct and separate." Yet part of King's genius lay in his ability to recognize the
interconnectedness of matters that Times editors, as oblivious to deeper maladies then
as they are today, wish to keep separate. King sought to tear down the edifice that sustained
all three of those giant triplets. Indeed, it is all but certain that, were he alive now, he
would call similar attention to a fourth related factor: climate change denial. The refusal
to treat seriously the threat posed by climate change underwrites the persistence of racism,
militarism, and extreme materialism.
During the course of his sermon, King quoted this sentence from the statement of a group
that called itself the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam: "A time comes when silence
is betrayal." Regarding race, it appears that the
great majority of Americans have now rejected such silence. This is good. It remains an
open question, however, when their silent acceptance of militarism, materialism, and the
abuse of Planet Earth will end.
"... You can fool someone for a long time, you can fool a lot of people for a short time - but you can't fool a lot of people for a long time. That is, unless those people are willing to live the lie. ..."
"... I think the reason the MSM's propaganda is so effective nowadays (and I'm thinking specifically about the world since the Iraq invasion in 2003) is that, deep down, maybe in the collective inconsciousness level, the working classes from the First World countries know their superior living standards depend on imperial brutality over the rest of the world. ..."
"... The current increased smear campaigns against the so called Russian Bots, Assad Apologists etc., is surely just the first part of of a an attempt to implement very serious censorship and control over the internet to attempt to completely block out any alternative voices. ..."
"... Obivously western intelligence servies, NATO leak stuff to western msm to intimidate and censor political oppostion in every western country. ..."
"... Orwell's great fear was totalitarianism. Either from the left or the right. What we have now is much more subtle. The MSM retains the illusion of freedom and most people go along with it. We may even realize we are being manipulated but the only alternative is posting on sites like MOA. ..."
"... The Skirpal charade was a front for several things but mainly, I think, to turn the focus away from Brexit and to opening the Cold War front again. ..."
"... George Orwell has been a presence throughout this thread. It was unfortunate he was hurried by MI6 to finish the last pages of 'Animal Farm' so it could be translated into Arabic and be used to discredit Communist parties in Western Asia. This always raised the ire of Communist organisations through following decades .This being said he wrote some great text especially for me the revealing 1939 novel - Coming up for A ..."
"... I don't know if wars are really an extension of diplomacy by other means, but they certainly seem to be... an extension of ideology and propaganda. Ideas are very important in preparing and fighting wars; especially today, though, in reality the way we think about our western imperial war-fighting, goes back well over a century, back to the Whiteman's Burden and other imperialist myths. ..."
"... For the last thirty years we've essentially been fighting 'liberal crusades for freedom and democracy.' That, at least, was the 'cover story' the pretext presented to the people. There's an irony here. Just like Islamic State, we've been engaging in 'holy warfare' too! ..."
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in
Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the
facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles
reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been
killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who
had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers
in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over
events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what
happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines'.
George Orwell, Looking back on the Spanish War
, Chapter 4
Last week saw an extreme intensifying of the warmongers' campaign against individuals who
publicly hold and defend a different view than the powers-that-be want to promote. The campaign
has a longer history but recently turned personal. It now endangers the life and livelihood of
real people.
In fall 2016 a
smear campaign was launched against 200 websites which did not confirm to NATO propaganda.
Prominent sites like Naked
Capitalism were among them as well as this site:
While the ProPornOT campaign was against websites the next and larger attack was a
general defaming of specific content.
The neoconservative Alliance For
Securing Democracy declared that any doubt of the veracity of U.S. propaganda stories
discussed on Twitter was part of a "Russian influence campaign". Their ' dashboard ' shows the most prominent hashtags and
themes tweeted and retweeted by some 600 hand-selected but undisclosed accounts. (I have reason
to believe that @MoonofA is among them.) The dashboard gave rise to an endless line of
main-stream stories faking concern over alleged "Russian influence". The New York
Times published several such stories including this
recent one :
Russia did not respond militarily to the Friday strike, but American officials noted a sharp
spike in Russian online activity around the time it was launched.
A snapshot on Friday night recorded a 2,000 percent increase in Russian troll activity
overall, according to Tyler Q. Houlton, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
One known Russian bot, #SyriaStrikes, had a 4,443 percent increase in activity while another,
#Damsucs, saw a 2,800 percent jump, Mr. Houlton said.
A person on Twitter, or a bot, is tagged by a chosen name led with an @-sign. Anything led
with a #-sign is a 'hashtag', a categorizing attribute of a place, text or tweet. Hashtags have
nothing to do with any "troll activity". The use of the attribute or hashtag #syriastrike
increased dramatically when a U.S. strike on Syria happened. Duh. A lot of people remarked on the
strikes and used the hashtag #syriastrike to categorize their remarks. It made it easier for
others to find information about the incident.
The hashtag #Damsucs does not exit. How could it have a 2,800% increase? It is obviously a
mistyping of #Damascus or someone may have used as a joke. In June 2013 an Associated
Press story famously
carried the dateline "Damsucs". The city was then under artillery attack from various Takfiri
groups. The author likely felt that the situation sucked.
The spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security Tyler Q. Holton, to which the
Times attributes the "bot" nonsense, has a Twitter account under his name and also tweets as
@SpoxDHS. Peter Baker, the NYT author, has some 150,000 followers on Twitter and tweets several
times per day. Holton and Tyler surely know what @accounts and #hashtags are.
One suspects that Holton used the bizzare
statistic of the infamous ' Dashboard '
created by the neoconservative, anti-Russian lobby . The dashboard creators asserted that the
use of certain hashtags is a sign of 'Russian bots'. On December 25 the dashboard showed that
Russian trolls and bots made extensive use of the hashtag #MerryChristmas to undermine America's
moral.
One of the creators of the dashboard, Clint Watts, has since confessed that it is mere
bullshit :
"I'm not convinced on this bot thing," said Watts, the cofounder of a project that is widely
cited as the main, if not only, source of information on Russian bots. He also called the
narrative "overdone."
As government spokesperson Holton is supposed to spout propaganda that supports the
government's policies. But propaganda is ineffective when it does not adhere to basic realities.
Holton is bad at his job. Baker, the NYT author, did even worse. He repeated the
government's propaganda bullshit without pointing out and explaining that it obviously did not
make any sense. He used it to further his own opinionated, false narrative. It took a day for the
Times to issue a paritial correction of the fact free tale.
With the situation in Syria developing in favor of the Syrian people, with dubious government
claims around the Skripal affair in Salisbury and the recent faked 'chemical attack' in Douma the
campaign against dissenting reports and opinions became more and more personal.
Last December the Guardian commissioned a hatchet
job against Vanessa Beeley
and Eva Bartlett . Beeley and
Bartlett extensively reported
(vid) from the ground in Syria on the British propaganda racket "White Helmets". The
Guardian piece defended the 'heros' of the White Helmets and insinuated that both
journalists were Russian paid stooges.
In March the self proclaimed whistle-blower and blowhard Sibel Edmonds of Newsbud
launched a lunatic broadside smear attack
(vid) against Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett. The Corbett Report debunked (vid) the nonsense. (The debunking
received 59,000 views. Edmonds public wanking was seen by less than 23,000 people.)
Some time ago the CIA propaganda outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Europe
started a 'fact-checking' website and named it Polygraph.info . (Some satirist or a clueless intern
must have come up with that name. No country but the U.S. believes that the unscientific results
of polygraph tests have any relation to truthfulness. To any educated non-U.S. citizen the first
association with the term 'polygraph' is the term 'fake'.)
Ben Nimmo, the Senior Fellow for Information Defense at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic
Research Lab, studies the exploits of "Ian56" and similar accounts on Twitter. His recent
article in the online publication Medium profiles such fake pro-Kremlin accounts and
demonstrates how they operate.
...
Nimmo, and several other dimwits quoted in the piece, came to the conclusion that Ian56 is a
Kremlin paid troll, not a real person. Next to Ian56 Nimmo 'identified' other 'Russian troll'
accounts:
One particularly influential retweeter (judging by the number of accounts which then
retweeted it) was @ValLisitsa, which posts in English and Russian. Last year, this account
joined the troll-factory #StopMorganLie campaign.
Had Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson, had some decent education he would have know that
@ValLisitsa, aka Valentina Lisitsa , is a famous
American-Ukrainian pianist. Yes, she sometimes tweets in Russian language to her many fans in
Russia and the Ukraine. Is that now a crime? The videos of her world wide performances
on Youtube have more than 170 million views. It is absurd to claim that she is a 'Russian troll'
and to insinuate that she is taking Kremlin money to push 'Russian troll' opinions.
Earlier this month Newsweek also
targeted the journalists Beeley and Bartlett and smeared a group of people who had traveled
to Syria as 'Assad's pawns'.
On April 14 Murdoch's London Times took personal aim at the members of a group of
British academics who assembled to scientificly investigate dubious claims against Syria. Their
first investigation report though, was
about the Skripal incident in Salisbury. The London Times also targeted Bartlett and
Beeley. The piece was leading on page one with the
headline: "Apologists for Assad working in universities". A page two splash and an editorial
complemented the full fledged attack on the livelihood of the scientists.
Tim Hayward, who initiated the academic group, published
a (too) mild response.
On April 18 the NPR station Wabenews
smeared the black activists Anoa Changa and Eugene Puryear for appearing on a Russian TV
station. It was the begin of an ongoing, well concerted campaign launched with at least seven
prominent smear pieces issued on a single day against the opposition to a wider war on Syria.
On April 19 the BBCtook aim at Sarah Abdallah , a Twitter account with over 130,000
followers that takes a generally pro Syrian government stand. The piece also attacked Vanessa
Beeley and defended the 'White Helmets':
In addition to pictures of herself, Sarah Abdallah tweets constant pro-Russia and pro-Assad
messages, with a dollop of retweeting mostly aimed at attacking Barack Obama, other US
Democrats and Saudi Arabia.
...
The Sarah Abdallah account is, according to a recent study by the online research firm
Graphika, one of the most influential social media accounts in the online conversation about
Syria, and specifically in pushing misinformation about a 2017 chemical weapons attack and the
Syria Civil Defence, whose rescue workers are widely known as the "White Helmets".
...
Graphika was commissioned to prepare a report on online chatter by The Syria Campaign , a
UK-based advocacy group organisation which campaigns for a democratic future for Syria and
supports the White Helmets.
The Syria Campaign Ltd. is a
for profit 'regime change' lobby which, like the White Helmets it promotes, is sponsored with
millions of British and U.S. taxpayer money.
Brian Whitaker, a former Middle East editor for the Guardian ,
alleged that Sarah Abdullah has a 'Hizbullah connection'. He assumes that from two terms she
used which point to a southern Lebanese heritage. But south Lebanon is by far not solely
Hizbullah and Sarah Abdallah certainly does not dress herself like a pious Shia. She is
more likely a Maronite or secular whatever. Exposing here as 'Hizbullah' can easily endanger her
life. Replying to Whitaker the British politician George Galloway asked:
George Galloway @georgegalloway - 14:50 UTC - Replying to
@Brian_Whit
Will you be content when she's dead Brian?
...
Will you be content Brian when ISIS cut off her head and eat her heart? You are beneath
contempt. Even for a former Guardian man
Whitaker's smear piece was not even researched by himself. He plagiarized it, without naming
his source,
from Joumana Gebara, a CentCom approved Social Media
Advisor to parts of the Syrian 'opposition'. Whitaker is prone to fall for scams like the 'White
Helmets'. Back in mid 2011 he promoted the "Gay Girl in
Damascus", a scam by a 40 year old U.S. man with dubious financial
sources who pretended to be a progressive Syrian woman.
Also on April 19 the Guardian
stenographed a British government smear against two other prominent Twitter accounts:
Russia used trolls and bots to unleash disinformation on to social media in the wake of the
Salisbury poisoning, according to fresh Whitehall analysis. Government sources said experts had
uncovered an increase of up to 4,000% in the spread of propaganda from Russia-based accounts
since the attack, – many of which were identifiable as automated bots.
Notice that this idiotic % increase claim, without giving a base number, is similar to the one
made in the New York Times piece quoted above. It is likely also based on the lunatic
'dashboard'.
[C]ivil servants identified a sharp increase in the flow of fake news after the Salisbury
poisoning, which continued in the runup to the airstrikes on Syria.
One bot, @Ian56789, was sending 100 posts a day during a 12-day period from 7 April, and
reached 23 million users, before the account was suspended. It focused on claims that the
chemical weapons attack on Douma had been falsified, using the hashtag #falseflag. Another,
@Partisangirl, reached 61 million users with 2,300 posts over the same 12-day period.
The prime minister discussed the matter at a security briefing with fellow Commonwealth
leaders Malcolm Turnbull, Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau earlier this week. They were
briefed by experts from GCHQ and the National Cyber Security Centre about the security
situation in the aftermath of the Syrian airstrikes.
The political editor of the Guardian , Heather Steward, admitted that her 'reporting'
was a mere copy of government claims:
A day earlier Ian56/@Ian56789 account with 35,000 followers had suddenly been blocked by
Twitter. Ben Nimmo was extremely happy about this success.
But after many users protested to the Twitter censors the account was revived.
Neither Ian, nor Partisangirl, are 'bots' or have anything to do with Russia. Partisangirl,
aka Syria Girl, is the twitter moniker of Maram Susli, a Syrian-Australian scientist specialized
in quantum chemistry. She was already interviewed on Australian TV (vid) four years
ago and has been back since. She has published videos of herself talking about Syria on Youtube and on Twitter and held
presentations on Syria at several international conferences. Her account is marked as 'verified'
by Twitter. Any cursory search would have shown that she is a real person.
The claim of bots and the numbers of their tweets the government gave to the Guardian
and Sky News are evidently false . With just a few clicks
the Guardian and Sky News 'journalists' could have debunked the British government
claims. But these stenograhers do not even try and just run with whatever nonsense the government
claims. Sky News even manipulated the picture of Partisangirl's Twitter homepage in the
video and screenshot above. The original shows Maram Susli speaking about Syrian refugees at a
conference in Germany. The picture provides that she is evidently a living person and not a
'bot'. But Sky News did not dare to show that. It would have debunked the government's
claim.
After some negative feed back on social media Sky News contacted the 'Russian bot' Ian
and invited him to a live interview
(vid). Ian Shilling, a wakeful British pensioner, managed to deliver a few zingers against the
government and Sky News . He also published a
written response:
I have been campaigning against the Neocons and the Neocon Wars since January 2002, when I
first realised Dick Cheney and the PNAC crowd were going to use 9/11 as the pretext to launch a
disastrous invasion of Iraq. This has nothing to do with Russia. It has EVERYTHING to do with
the massive lies constantly told by the UK & US governments about their illegal Wars of
Aggression.
...
Brian Whitaker could not hold back. Within the 156,000 tweets Ian wrote over seven years
Whitaker found one(!)
with a murky theory (not a denial) about the Holocaust. He alleged that Ian believes in
'conspiracy theories'. Whitaker then linked to and discussed one Conspirador Norteño who
peddles 'Russian bots' conspiracy theories. Presumably Whitaker did not get the consp-irony of
doing such.
On the same day as the other reports the British version of the Huffington Post
joined the Times in its earlier smear against British academics, accusing Professor
Hayward and Professor Piers Robinson of "whitewashing war crimes". They have done no such thing.
Vanessa Beeley was additionally attacked.
Also on the 19th the London Times aimed at another target. Citizen Halo , a well known Finnish grandma, was declared to be a
'Russian troll' based on Ben Nimmo's pseudo-scientific trash, for not believing in the Skripal
tale and the faked 'chemical attack' in Syria. The Times doubted her nationality and
existence by using quotes around her as a "Finnish activist".
Meanwhile the defense editor of the Times , Deborah Haynes, is stalking Valentina Lisitsa on
Twitter. A fresh smear-piece against the pianist is surely in the works.
The obviously organized campaign against critical thinking in Britain extended beyond the
Atlantic. While the BBC , Guardian, HuffPo, Times and Sky News published
smear pieces depicting dissenting people as 'Russian bots', the Intercept pushed a piece
by Mehdi Hasan bashing an amorphous 'left' for rejecting a U.S. war on Syria:
Dear Bashar al-Assad Apologists: Your Hero Is a War Criminal Even If He Didn't Gas Syrians
.
Mehdi Hasan is of course eminently qualified to write such a piece. Until recently he worked
for Al Jazeerah , the media outlet of the Wahhabi dictatorship of Qatar which supports the
Qatari sponsored al-Qaeda in its war against Syria. The Mehdi Hasan's piece repeats every false
and debunked claim that has been raised against the Syrian government as evidence for the Syrian
president's viciousness. Naturally many of the links he provides point back to Al
Jazeerah's propaganda. A few years ago Mehdi Hasan tried to get a job with the conservative
British tabloid Daily Mail . The Mail did not want him. During a later TV discussion Hasan
slammed the Daily Mail for its reporting and conservative editorial position. The paper
responded by
publishing his old job application. In it Mehdi Hasan emphasized his own conservative
believes:
I am also attracted by the Mail's social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family,
abortion and teenage pregnancies.
A conservative war-on-Syria promoter is bashing an anonymous 'left' which he falsely accuses
of supporting Assad when it takes a stand against imperial wars. Is that a 'progressive' Muslim
Brotherhood position? (Added: Stephen Gowans and Kurt Nimmo
respond to Hasan's screed.)
On the same day Sonali Kolhatkar at Truthdig , as pseudo-progressive as the
Intercept , published a quite similar piece: Why
Are Some on the Left Falling for Fake News on Syria? . She bashes the 'left' - without citing
any example - for not falling for the recent scam of the 'chemical attack' in Douma and for
distrusting the U.S./UK government paid White Helmets. The comments against the piece are
lively.
Those working in the media are up in arms over alleged fake news and they lament the loss of
paying readership. But they have only themselves to blame. They are the biggest creators of fake
news and provider of government falsehood. Their attacks on critical readers and commentators are
despicable.
Until two years ago Hala Jabar was foreign correspondent in the Middle East for the Sunday
Times . After fourteen years with the paper and winning six awards for her work she was 'made
redundant' for her objective reporting on Syria. She remarks on the recent media push against
truth about Syria and the very personal attacks against non-conformist opinions:
In my entire career, spanning more than three decades of professional journalism, I have
never seen MSM resolve to such ugly smear campaigns & hit pieces against those questioning
mainstream narratives, with a different view point, as I have seen on Syria, recently.
.2/ This is a dangerous manoeuvre , a witch hunt in fact, aimed not only at character
assassination, but at attempting to silence those who think differently or even sway from
mainstream & state narrative.
.3/ It would have been more productive, to actually question the reason why more & more
people are indeed turning to alternative voices for information & news, than to dish out ad
hominem smears aimed at intimidating by labelling alternative voices as conspirators or
apologists.
.4/ The journalists, activists, professors & citizens under attack are presenting an
alternative view point. Surely, people are entitled to hear those and are intelligent enough to
make their own judgments.
.5/ Or is there an assumption, (patronizing, if so), that the tens of thousands of people
collectively following these alternative voices are too dumb & unintelligent to reach their
own conclusions by sifting through the mass information being dished at them daily from all
sides?
.6/ Like it or hate it, agree or disagree with them, the bottom line is that the people
under attack do present an alternative view point. Least we forget, no one has a monopoly on
truth. Are all those currently launching this witch hunt suggesting they do?
The governments and media would like to handle the war on Syria like they handled the war in
Spain. They want reports without "any relation to the facts". The media want to "retail the lies"
and eager propagandists want to "build emotional superstructures over events that never
happened."
The new communication networks allow everyone to follow the war on Syria as diligently as
George Orwell followed the war in Spain in which he took part. We no longer have to travel to see
the differences of what really happens and what gets reported in the main stream press. We can
debunk false government claims with freely available knowledge.
The governments, media and their stenographers would love to go back to the old times when
they were not plagued by reports and tweets from Eva, Vanessa, Ian, Maram and Sarah or by
blogposts like this one. The vicious campaign against any dissenting report or opinion is a sorry
attempt to go back in time and to again gain the monopoly on 'truth'.
It is on us to not let them succeed.
Posted by b on April 21, 2018 at 23:02 UTC |
Permalink
next page " Excellent.
The good news about both The Intercept and Truthdig pieces is that the comments quickly showed
that readers knew what the publishers were up to.
The Intercept seemed to have removed Hasan's obscene act of prostitution within a day.
The reality is that we simply have to expect the imperialists, now reduced to propaganda and
domestic repression, to act in this way: there is no point in attempting to shame them and they
never did believe in journalistic principles or standards or ethics. They are the scum who
serve a cannibalistic system for good wages and a comfortable life style- that is what the
'middle class' always did do and always will.
No longer is it possible to control TV, Radio and printed newspapers and use them to set the
message. There are now an almost infinite set of channels including youtube, twitter, blogs,
podcasts,streamed radio... It's like there is a public bitcoin/bitnewsledger where new
information only gets written into the ledger if it is authenicated by sufficient
endorsements.
In the past, a lie could travel around the world before the truth got its shoes on (Mark Twain
I believe) but the truth is catching up. We are in the midst of the great changeover where
older people still rely on traditional information channels yet younger internet enabled
peoplecan leverage the new channels more effectively to educate themselves.
Western propagandists are freaking out because nobody believes their lies anymore. The more
they freak out, the more we know they have lost the narrative.
I just fear for the safety of these independent journalists. It is not beneath the deep
state to assassinate their enemies. These people need to be very careful.
For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that
dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016
presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect's
transition team and his eventual administration. (The New York Times entry, submitted in this
category, was moved into contention by the Board and then jointly awarded the Prize.)
The hysterical, side-splitting laughter over this chicken-choking, circle-jerking drivel
will echo in eternity. Galactic stupidity simply doesn't get any more cosmic, except perhaps
awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.
This is a fight between Deep States of the Rothschild-UK 'Octopus,' US-centric
Rockefeller-Kochs, Russian (itself split between competing and intertwined Anglo-American
clans/Eurasianists vs Altanticists) and China (also divided between sovereignty oriented
Shanghai and Rothschild affiliated Hong Kong which was founded upon the opium trade in
cooperation with the UK-Octopus).
The main point of contention is whether we have a hard or soft landing as the New World
Order is born, with the UK-Octopus needing to instigate an epic crisis so as to bury countless
trillions of worthless derivatives it sits upon, specifically seeking to collapse the USD as a
global fiat and use the ensiung chaos to assist the Chinese as they establish an unasailable
Yuan fiat. A war with Russia will bring the US-centric Deep State to it's knees and so this
forms the basis of the not-so secret alliance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, while
China attempts to remain neutral since Xi prefers a smooth transition since the US-centric
group may well launch a nuclear false flag attack on the Korean peninsula, thus irradiating the
region and dooming the potential for a Chinese dominated century, should the interests of yhis
group be ignored.
All gloves are off and the dispostions of various players are suddenly crystal clear after
the firing of Octopus agent Tillerson by Trump via twitter led immediately to the launching of
operation 'Novichok,' and was followed up with an attempted series of false flags in East
Ghouta which were planned so as to bring the US and Russia to war.
Other important players include the US military (itself divided between Octopus NATO and
US-centric Pentagon), the CIA, which is always on all sides of any conflict but was until
recently headed by Koch protege Mike Pompeo, as well as smaller Arab, Persian and Turkish Deep
States all jockeying for advantage and position. Even the Vatican is included and said to be
divided between Polish Cardinals on one side, with German, Italian and many Spanish speaking
Cardinals as opponents. There are other Deep States as well and in every instance they are
divided between one of the two main parties and themselves to one or another degree.
Media and social control is mainly the preserve of the UK Octopus, so as all of us have
understood for some time, anything included within it, from the NYTimes to most of Hollywood,
is completely worthless. Alternative media was created as an alternative to Octopus media,
while Trump takes to twitter so as to bypass their control.
I feel like a US voter forced to choose between Republicans and Democrats, but with the
promised 'Blue Wave' coming in November when Congressional elections are due, certain to be
impeached Donald Trump and his US-centric backers have a very short time frame in which to
change the score.
Ads also appeared on The Jimmy Dore Show channel, a far-left YouTube channel that peddles
conspiracy theories, such as the idea that Syrian chemical weapons attacks are hoaxes.
Syria is really the unifying theme in all these attacks.
I congratulate Bernhard on yet another excellent piece of investigative journalism. My comment
is not intended to criticise or take away from it, but only to point out that Orwell's quote
was taken out of context, in the sense that although he remarks on partisan propaganda, he says
that it is unimportant, since "the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government
presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were." On the
other hand, the lies of the pro-NATO press are important because unlike the partisan lies told
by leftist parties during the Spanish Civil War, today's NATO lies are the equivalent of the
official fascist propaganda of that time: they distort and hide the main issues. Here is the
full quote from the link that B has diligently provided:
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, 'History stopped in 1936', at which he nodded in
immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more
particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever
correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports
which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an
ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete
silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as
cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of
imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager
intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in
fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened
according to various 'party lines'. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant.
It concerned secondary issues -- namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the
Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in
Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was
not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly mention
their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could
not have been otherwise.
As a given group loses its grip on power, it tends to employ ever more extreme tactics. This
explains the recent behavior of players like the US government, the UK government, the American
mainstream media and various think tanks. What other extreme behavior should we expect from
such a cabal? After all, they've already shown contempt for conditionally protected freedoms-
all of them- and a willingness to manufacture any narrative they want in order to further their
aims of conquest and profiteering. This whole mess could spiral out of control in countless
ways with terrifying consequences.
@15 Yes but I'm not sure how relevant Orwell's quote is to today. Do we even have a 'left-wing'
anymore? Or a Comintern for that matter? Even fascism wears a smiley face. Seems to me that
what we have is a tightly controlled MSM. That control may be slipping but we have yet to see a
replacement.
Those of us at MoA who are regulars may feel a certain level of complacency based on the level
of discourse here but I assure you that most Americans are still very much zombie followers of
whatever the TV and other media tell them. I believe that there is a strong possibility that MoA and like sites will become the focus
of paid narrative pushers and if that is not successful there are other ways to make b and our
lives difficult.
If b is ever knocked offline for some reason and needs help I encourage him to email his
readers with potential strategies to show/provide support. Thanks again and again for your web site b.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
Many Westerners would recognize this phrase but many of them don't understand that there
-IS- a war (the new Cold War). The longstanding law that prevented government propaganda in the US was revoked several
years ago.
U.S Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans
This type of tyranny has been going on forever in the US. Take A. Lincoln.
More than 14,000 civilians were arrested under martial law during the war throughout the
Union. Abraham Lincoln did so because they expressed views critical of Lincoln or his war. It's the same-o. Different faces same crap.
b- I am sorry to see their attacks on you, if things do go sideways please contact me if I can
be of help in any way.
Do you know what has happened to Tucker Carlson, he has been such a strong voice for truth that
I am concerned for him.
Stay strong and thank you for all you do in support of the truth.
Sure, there are more people that see the lies and bullshit for what they are. Still, seeing it
is not enough. What really matters now is to fully wipe out the mainstream media, to make it
completely extinct, and therefore seeing they're full of shit is only the prerequisite to
pondering how to actually bankrupt and destroy them. That's what everyone who's not fully on
board with the Western regimes' and bankers' propaganda should be thinking about. How to
convince people not only to stop buying their lies, but to stop buying them at all, how to cut
down the vast majority of their readership/viewers to the point they don't matter anymore.
Thank you b. This a very important subject. It wouldn't surprise me if a false flag happened
that would be aimed at censuring all alternative news. This might be centered around a
decoupling of east from west, perhaps when the current financial crisis explodes. Oh, has
anyone heard from Tucker Carlson lately?
You can fool someone for a long time, you can fool a lot of people for a short time - but you
can't fool a lot of people for a long time.
That is, unless those people are willing to live the lie.
I think the reason the MSM's propaganda is so effective nowadays (and I'm thinking
specifically about the world since the Iraq invasion in 2003) is that, deep down, maybe in the
collective inconsciousness level, the working classes from the First World countries know their
superior living standards depend on imperial brutality over the rest of the world. That's why,
for example, the USG and Downing Street haven't lost significant credibility domestically after
Iraq and after Libya. This is a dark social pact: people live the lies only to sleep well at
night and claim plausible deniability after; they only wish it to be over quickly and at the
least human cost from their side (every coffin that comes back to their community from the
Middle East is a crack in the illusion). They believe in Russiagate because, deep down, they
don't want to believe they were capable of electing someone like Trump and, mainly, because
they know their economies are failing, and the only solution is to invade other countries/prop
up the war industry.
Smearing people for appearing on RT! Americans who prattle on about freedom and democracy are
pressuring other not to do this or that which is to inhibit their freedom.
Don't they know it makes them look like dictators without portfolio?
Great article, b. I am a relative newcomer to MoA, having found it through Caitlin Johnstone
(Rogue Journalist), but in a short time, I have come to rely heavily on it for "hidden" news
and incisive analysis. Yes, independent news outlets are vital sources of truth, but their
reach is still tiny compared to that of the Empire and its toads in the media. The well
organized smear campaign against those who refuse to bow down is a frightening development
indeed.
Thanks b for your outstanding dissecting! The Information War is complex yet still remains
simple--all that's required is a critically thinking approach for any personally unconfirmed
sources and the data presented followed by the willingness to ask questions, no matter how
uncomfortable. Such a disciplined mind was once the paramount goal for those seeking wisdom,
but such pursuits are deemed passé, unrequired in the Digital Age. But Big Lie Media's
been working its evil for decades despite many calling out the lies. Funny how the two big
former communist nations are now more credible than the West and expressly seek honest and
open--Win-Win--relationships based on trust and equality. The Moral Table at play during Cold
War 1 is flipped with the Outlaw US Empire being the Evil Empire. And the Evil Empire can't
stand its own nakedness and its oozing social sores.
The liar is often agitated and nervous whereas one with the facts rests easy and remains
calm. In the run up to their summit, note how Trump is already agitated and nervous, already
prefacing his lies to come, whereas Kim is easy and calm, setting the table. Shrillness and
hysteria are the similar signs provided by media liars and is almost always fact-free, supposed
"sources" anonymous.
A magisterial piece of journalism, b. Congratulations, and thank you.
~~
Spain. Orwell. Fascism.
I was born decades after the Spanish Civil War, and to be very honest I never knew much
about it, nor have ever learned since. But Guernica I knew about, even
as a young teenager in school. The culture was shocked into remembering forever that there was
a lie involved with Guernica. That's all I ever really knew, was that Spain was a lie,
underneath which a massacre lay.
They say it was the humanitarian and artistic type of people who kept the truth of Spain
alive against the propaganda of the fascists. I don't know. I believe as I said the other day
that propaganda only works to crowd out the truth, so that people are not exposed to the truth.
But propaganda doesn't work in a battle against the truth, when people are exposed to both
sides of the story.
If you were running a scam based on fake news, and one day you had to make allegations using
this very term, and play your "fake news" card on the table in a round of betting that was
merely one round in a long game - if you did this, you'd be a bad card player, or one driven to
the corner and getting extremely close to leaving the table.
If your playing partner suddenly had to show the "false flag" card on the surface of the
table for the whole game to see - yet another secret hole card exposed and now worthless
forever - you could well think your game was finished. And it is - barring a few nasty
tricks...which will be recorded and placed into the game as IOU's.
Don't anybody be part of that collateral damage - be well. And instead, let's collect on
those IOU's. The game is almost over. Many people will appear to say that the players cannot be
beat. But they are with the losers. We are the players.
I wholeheartedly second your suggestion. I think the battle against the truth by the deep
States everywhere has only begun. They will not stop at smearing individual posters or
sites.
I do think we all need to start becoming more aware of alternatives, to YouTube (how's
DTube?), Twitter (gab?), Facebook, Google (several alternatives) etc. But that will not be
enough because I fear that in time the IP providers will come under pressure too - in all the
western countries, especially. And the domain providers 9we all know them), followed by blog
platforms such as WorldPress. I am not saying it's easy to curtail all of those, but they will
try, as sure as the sun sets in the West.
Of course, the biggest attacks will be mounted against anonymous commenters and posters.
That's already in the works at several outlets. The idea is of course that by stripping off
anonimity people will self-censor for fear of repercussions to their real life selves.
There are people working on alternative platforms of all sorts. I am somewhat hopeful about
user owned sites though these efforts are nascent. I hope commenters here will share what they
know of alternatives, even knowing this won't be an easy battle. After all, Twitter owes its
popularity to well, its popularity. Same with Facebook or Instagram or youTube. Therein lies
the rub - it won't be easy to wean users from these platforms as many start-ups found out. That
however should not mean that we shouldn't try. More and more Twitter users for example are
cross-posting on gab, and several youTubers started uploading also to Dtube. neither site is
ideal, I know. But neither was Twitter when it started.
The real aim of propaganda is to persuade the politicians and not the public. One man in their
middle wants to start a war and the media make sure that his or her fellow politicians will
hear no other story and make support the only possibility. That's why people like us have to be
vilified, so that all these politicians can invent an excuse for themselves and turn their head
away. What we think really doesn't matter because we are not the ones in control. They only
have to convince the Colin Powells and Frank Timmermans's.
The current increased smear campaigns against the so called Russian Bots, Assad Apologists
etc., is surely just the first part of of a an attempt to implement very serious censorship and
control over the internet to attempt to completely block out any alternative voices.
Amber Rudd
the UK Home Secretary has been banging on about Russian cyber attcks for the past couple of
months. Whilst based on the history of UK Government IT projects I couldn't expect the UK alone
to be capable of implementing any meaningful censorship scheme (they have a track record of
producing so many multi-billion pound national IT project disasters) but with the coordinated
help of the US and others they might just be able to put up enough censorship barriers to be
able to get back to their original plans (removing Assad and whatever else they have in mind).
False-flag chemical attacks haven't quite worked out to plan, but add in a false-flag cyber
attack that apparently disables some of the UK (and/or US/EU) vital services and that should be
enough for them to convince the plebs and sufficient MP's that it has become absolutely
necessary to block Russain and other media and internet sites and force the owners of many
social media channels to disable long lists of people with alternative views.
Prop or Not is NOT a 'friendly neighbourhood' anything. It was exposed a while ago as being a
joint state propaganda project between the CIA and West Ukraine, with the goal of spreading
anti-Russia disinformation, and employing the collusion of some no-integrity US propaganda rags
like The Daily Beast.
My question is their motivation and timing. Why does the rhetoric seem to increase after
the latest attack? Why care if 10% of the population doesn't follow their narrative now? Are
they preparing for a new round of kinetic action? Or do they simply believe their management of
the narrative needs more investment?
If people are going to rely on social media feeds for anything other than information on what
their friends and family are up to, then they are opening themselves up to being manipulated
easily and with a minimum of actual effort.
You no longer need to own a newspaper or a broadcast network to do so.
Ultimately people with a concience and some integrity will realize that something is awry. I'm
no spring chicken and have been on the net for nearly 20 years. There are more ' old ' people
surfing the net than initially may be apparent. As life passes by people become much more
attuned to bullsh*t. T. May's husband is on the board of a large British Armaments company. No
doubt her ministers are all in on many scams. She is a very mediocre character, a fool as her
time as home secretary demonstrated and was only voted in place so as to do the bidding of
others. And in my opinion, when I say others I mean she is the western harlot who jumps when
anyone pulls her string. They say that if you tell a lie often enough people believe it to be
the truth. Not necessarily. There are so many holes in the Skripal and Syrian stories that only
someone who doesn't want to have their view challenged will believe them. The stories are
falling apart and as they do, so does the credibility and trust of the western MSM and Politik.
The reason the Germans and others refused to join in, is I suspect, they realize that in part,
because once that is lost, it takes a great deal more to recover it. The Skripal case and the
latest Syrian faked gas attack is the start of the end for T. May and her govt.
Good comments, especially psychohistorian about being prepared to jump to alternative platforms
... Perhaps Russian ones?
What I was referencing in comment 5 is this relatively new desire by the 'powers that be'
for purity, for absolutely no one from 'our side' dissenting against the mainstream (and
completely bonkers in its anti-Russian extremism) narrative. This is not like the pre-digital
age, when small-circulation real leftist publications were not subject to mainstream and
official government extermination campaigns. And I don't think this is simply because of
digital age reach, because the readership for the real alternative media's left/anti-imperial
perspective doesn't engage enough people to be meaningful in terms of power and elections. At
least in the US; less certain about elsewhere.
There's something angry, extreme, and extremely insecure about the psychology of the Western
ruling class right now. My bet is that because of that insecurity they won't be so dangerous to
Russia/China in the years to come, but instead the anger will be directed at internal
left/anti-militarist dissenters. For some reason our reality bugs the sh!t out of them despite
our small numbers.
Until recently I used to read articles at both The Intercept and at Truthdig, but have since
realized both of these 'news' outlets actively censor posts that are too accurate, too
insightful of what the US government and MSM are doing in Syria and how they are manipulating
public opinion with the White Helmets, staged false gas attacks, etc. I don't trust Pierre
Omidyar, the philanthropist behind The Intercept, he has questionable political alliances. I
have had many of my posts at both Truthdig and The Intercept censored even though they were
entirely within comment rules. The Intercept has a lot of really BAD journalists posting crap
there, like this ass clown Mehdi Hasan. Even Glenn Greenwald, a multi millionaire, is suspect.
Both of these websites are psuedo-left and should not be trusted!
From the resistance trench with love , Apr 22 2018 11:40 utc |
52
....attacks on critical readers and commentators are despicable..
Indeed, but "the one free of sin to throw the first stone" ....
From my experience at several supposed "alternative media", most of them somehow pro-Russian
in the sense that they do not promote the sick warmongerism coming from the US and UK
stablishments against Russia and its allies in Syria and against Syria herself, every site has
its biases and slandering attacks by the owners of the blogs or by the "community" os
sycophants residing there are everyday bread for any newcomer who could express a bit of
dissent against the general editorial view.
I mayself have been obliged to change my nickname several times already to avoid attacks or
banning/censorship, when my position about Syrai and Russia does not differ almost in the least
with that of the people mentioned above who are being object of smearing campaign by the
MSM....and this has happened to me in the supposed pro-Russian "alt-media"....
Thus, I would recommend to apply a bit of self-criticism and reflect about how anyone of us
are probably contributing to the same effort of the bullies mentioned above against mainly
common citizens who only try to commit themselves to spread some of the truth they are finding
online through research and intensive reading, and try to offer an alternative point of view or
simply debunk the usual nonsense especially against certain ideologies, mostly spreaded by US
commenters.....
I noticed the part about Ian Shillilng being accused of denying the Holocaust or implying it
was a govt conspiracy.
I find that interesting, because a co-worker asked me out to the blue "Do you even believe
the Holocaust happened?" It's a strange question with no relation to Russiagate, yet pops up a
lot so it clearly has an agenda. The question made no sense but I did recognized it as a
familiar attack by the warmongers. My response was to to respond to such a ridiculous,
dishonest question and I ignored it.
He went to ask if I was "stupid" for not seeing that Mueller's indictments over lying to the
FBI and tax evasion/money laundering in Ukraine are NOT are not same thing as proving Russia
meddled to deny Hillary her Presidency.
Thanks for the article b.
As painful as it is to watch the increasing attempts at censoring non-msm voices, we can take
solace in the fact that, like a cornered rat, the establishment has no other option left but an
all-out, full-retard attack on anyone not toeing the line. While the damage they are doing is
real, this should be balanced with the fact that this attack comes out of weakness and not
strength: they are the ones "losing", and knowledge of that reality makes them increasingly
unhinged.
At first I thought this is some kind of joke. Than I watched few times, I still believe CNN
guy is in some kind of mission here, let's say to distract its viewers from existential matters
that grips ordinary people in the US. His insistence on the "Russians" is illogical at
first...this woman appear to be serious but when it comes to CNN everything is set-up, not just
everyone can come to CNN, period. No facts involved the conversation is about NOTHING, that is
the US national narrative being imposed by the ruling class trough various media. Just like
"attack" on Syria and Syria's gas attack. There were none, there were no cruise missile fired,
there were no downed ones! CNN's role is also to entertain its audience as well, everything but
not talk about social and economic issues. In other words to indoctrinate - shift attention,
not to ask unpleasant questions.
The NYT and NPR are warmonger institutions. It is sad that ppl who consider themselves to be
liberals, democrats, blue team (anti-war?- that's a stretch!) embrace these institutions as
purveyors of truth or even real news.
I don't feel that the quote is out of context. Yes, you show that Orwell clearly didn't
consider it a big deal at that time, but what is happening now is that what he describes is
omnipresent, the main stream of information we get, there is nothing else if you don't search
for alternatives. It is beyond doubt that Orwell, in the present context, would never have
added what he added in that book.
So in that light I feel the quote is extremely relevant and a good start of the article.
I want to express my thanks for this site and am really glad I was pointed towards MoA by
other sources of real information.
Meanwhile, the same western media give free pass to liberal warcriminals like Macron's France
that just today call for permanent illegal occupation of Syria - after illegally bombing it.
But no, it is people like us who call out this BS that gets silenced and harassed by the
same ignorant western media/"journalists" along with the western deep state spy networks!
What an excellent source of information the MoA site offers those of us who are seeking the
truth and living in an Empire full of lies.Over the past few months, I have perused this site
regularly and always find it very helpful in gaining a better and more concise understanding
of
what is really going on in our world.
I am also astounded at how helpful it is for me to read the comments of so many who are
regulars here.
The courtesy and level of intellectual dialog that goes on here in the comments section is a
rare thing indeed! We all must fight for truth for the sake of our families and loved ones.
"Fake" and "Genuine" are used to describe the video with the water being poured over people.
Fisk calls them genuine because the video was taped in the place where it pretends to be, not
in a film set or a location where nothing was going on. It was filmed in the real hospital with
real doctors, nurses and victims.
The video therefore is real (not staged), but the claim that people are suffering from gas
wounds is false.
You can thus also say that the video is fake: it is said to show victims of a gas attack, while
the doctor says they were suffering from suffocation, and only when someone shouted "gas", did
people start hosing each other down (which as someone posted in another article, would have
only made things worse if they had chlorine on them). As evidence of a gas attack, the video is
fake.
As long as a person is not claiming that the video shows victims of a real gas attack
aftermath, we're all on the same side I guess.
The response is of course to more eagerly call out the neocons propangada, western media
propaganda and so forth,
get a twitter account, get a blog, lets multiply this movement, because these people will of
course not stop at destroying peoples lives in the newspapers, they will call for censorship,
registrations and sooner or later jail for these views.
Orwell's great fear was totalitarianism. Either from the left or the right. What we have now is
much more subtle. The MSM retains the illusion of freedom and most people go along with it. We
may even realize we are being manipulated but the only alternative is posting on sites like
MOA.
The UK has no credibility left now. May's farcical handling of the Brexit negs has exposed
her as little more than a Tory mouthpiece, parroting party bon mots whilst having no clue where
she is heading. And I suspect her civil servants haven't, either!
The Skirpal charade was a front for several things but mainly, I think, to turn the focus
away from Brexit and to opening the Cold War front again. But what is alarming was her open
support for attacks on Syria. It's been known for some time that the UK has special forces
operating in Syria covertly; May's tub-thumping pretty much clarified that the Uk is as
determined as Washington and that Rothschild puppet Macron to force a regime change in
Syria.
You said she must go. I said the same thing last September after the fall-out from the June
election and other foot-in-mouth incidents: she'd be gone before year end. How wrong I was. She
has figures in the background protecting her.
Crushing dissent goes completely against 'liberal values' which is about the only high ground
left for the humanitarian regime changers a.k.a the Franquistas. So that is not going to
happen. On the other hand, social media is the easiest place to use covert operatives, even MSM
has other sponsors and actors, social media can be directly controlled by governments , and the
'intelligence community'. So they are just using the net for what they set it up for.
Propaganda for domestic consumption in the USA, isn't really meant to convince as much as to
scare people into submission. People don't obey Big Brother because they like him or believe
him, but because they cannot talk back to him and are scared of him. Media Scare tactics work
less if people can talk back, hear their own voice, not just Big Brother from every
loudspeaker.
Martin Luther (not King) said that "A lie is like a snowball: the further you roll it the
bigger it becomes." The snowball is melting because there is shift in the narrative given what
is happening on the ground in Syria. I find it fascinating that as it melts down layer by
layer, the first trojan horse outfits to implode are left humanitarian ones like the Intercept,
Newsbud, Democracy Now. The right wing ones like Fox, Young Turks, just concentrate on dumbing
down the conversation to reduce reality to bombastic and misleading 'political' points. This is
a another way to control the conversation, to scare people into thinking that facts or not
facts but partisan political 'opinions'. Look at how Jimmy Dore's in the interview mentioned by
B with Carla Ortiz, is trying to dumb down the conversation and keeps feigning ignorance.
Thankfully she blows him out of the water. Good job Carla!
The snowball is big and melting slowly. Who's next?
Vesti has a great 10-minute clip dated yesterday from a Russian talk show with Margarita
Simonyan of RT doing much of the talking. What she says is really encouraging about how she's
trying to talk, not to power (which already knows the real truth that it's obscuring) but to
common people, because there are those among the common people who do speak up and who really
do shape public opinion - not governments.
She cited Roger Waters as an example, who was speaking at a concert and telling the truth
about the White Helmets. She said, someone has to read in order to speak. And someone has to
write so someone can read. And that's what RT is doing, and that's how it works. And it is
working.
George Orwell has been a presence throughout this thread.
It was unfortunate he was hurried by MI6 to finish the last pages of 'Animal Farm' so it
could be translated into Arabic and be used to discredit Communist parties in Western Asia.
This always raised the ire of Communist organisations through following decades .This being said he wrote some great text especially for me the revealing 1939 novel - Coming up
for A
What many people don't realize is that fascism is a greedy habit, it expands to finally swallow
up those who think they are protected by silence or looking the other way. The individuals and
organizations villified today are the real heroes, and even if they suffer today, they will be
vindicated in the end. But unfortunately the gullible masses would by then be in the open
prison of fascism.
I don't know if wars are really an extension of diplomacy by other means, but they certainly
seem to be... an extension of ideology and propaganda. Ideas are very important in preparing
and fighting wars; especially today, though, in reality the way we think about our western
imperial war-fighting, goes back well over a century, back to the Whiteman's Burden and other
imperialist myths.
For the last thirty years we've essentially been fighting 'liberal crusades for freedom and
democracy.' That, at least, was the 'cover story' the pretext presented to the people. There's
an irony here. Just like Islamic State, we've been engaging in 'holy warfare' too!
The reason our media is so full of lies and distortions and propaganda is because the harsh
realities of our New Imperialism wars are so out of synch with the reality of what's happening
and crucially the attitudes of the general public who don't want to fight more overseas wars,
and especially if they are 'crusades' for democracy and freedom. But what's happened recently
is that dissent is being targeted as tantamount to treason. This is rather new and
disturbing.
It's because the ruling elite are... losing it and way too many people are questioning their
ideas about the wars we are fighting and their legitimacy and 'right to rule.'
In many ways the Internet is bringing about a kind of revolution in relation to the people's
access to 'texts' and images that reminds one of the great intellectual upheavals that the
translation of the Bible had on European thought four hundred years ago. Suddenly Bibles were
being printed all over the place and people could read the sacred texts without having to ask
the educated priests to 'filter' and translate and explain what it all meant. In a way
Wikileaks was doing the same thing... allowing people access to secret material, masses of it,
bypassing the traditional newsmedia and the journalistic 'preists.'
"... Bayer agreed to a $10.9 billion settlement yesterday, which resolves much – but not all – of the litigation risk it assumed when in 2018 it acquired Monsanto, the original manufacturer of the glyposate-based herbicide Roundup, according to the WSJ, Bayer to Pay Up to $10.9 Billion to Settle Lawsuits Over Roundup Weedkiller . ..."
"... "We need to take the decision about carcinogenicity of the product out of the hands of juries," said Mr. Baumann. The scientists on the panel, he said, would be selected both by Bayer and plaintiffs' lawyers, to come to a "fair and solid" conclusion. ..."
"... In Europe, the shift in public opinion about glyphosate was illustrated by a 2016 poll in the five largest EU countries showing some 66% percent of respondents favoring a glyphosate ban. ..."
"... Bayer also said it would pay up to $400 million to resolve legal challenges and crop-damage claims to another of its herbicides, dicamba, which the company has marketed to kill weeds that have evolved to resist Roundup. Farmers and agricultural experts have blamed dicamba-based sprays for drifting on winds and damaging millions of acres of soybeans, peaches and other crops. ..."
By
Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is
currently writing a book about textile artisans.
Bayer agreed to a $10.9 billion settlement yesterday, which resolves much – but not
all – of the litigation risk it assumed when in 2018 it acquired Monsanto, the original
manufacturer of the glyposate-based herbicide Roundup, according to the WSJ,
Bayer to Pay Up to $10.9 Billion to Settle Lawsuits Over Roundup Weedkiller .
Plaintiffs allege its product causes cancer – a claim the company vehemently denies
and insists is not supported by scientific evidence (for background on the litigation, see my
previous posts, here
,
here ,
here ,
here , and
here .)
The company has lost three multi-million dollar jury verdicts, and faced tens of thousands
of pending suits. Investors have become increasingly nervous about just how much litigation
risk the company had held until yesterday. Indeed, there was massive shareholder unrest over
these liabilities, which spilled over to outright revolt last year.
The settlement leaves open the possibility of future litigation. Per the WSJ:
Wednesday's deal, which follows months of heated talks between Bayer and plaintiffs'
attorneys, doesn't change anything in Bayer's view that glyphosate, the active ingredient in
Roundup, is safe and doesn't cause cancer.
Bayer didn't admit to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement and continued to defend its
decision to purchase Monsanto. The company will continue to sell Roundup.
The agreement, however, leaves open the potential of more lawsuits being filed against the
company in the future, an issue investors have been particularly concerned about.
As part of the deal, Bayer said it has set aside between $8.8 billion and $9.6 billion to
settle claims brought by lawyers representing some 95,000 plaintiffs, as well as some 30,000
more claims that haven't yet agreed to the settlement. The company said it would set aside
another $1.25 billion to work toward a resolution of future claims, including funding a panel
to evaluate whether the product causes cancer. The findings from that panel are geared to
help shape the outcome of litigation going forward.
The company seeks in these future potential lawsuits to take the determination away from
juries as to whether glyphosate causes cancer. Over to the WSJ:
That Bayer's Roundup products will continue to be sold, without a cancer warning label,
leaves the company exposed to future lawsuits. It creates a unique legal conundrum for the
company over how best to guard itself against potential future litigation.
To attempt to resolve the key question of whether glyphosate is a carcinogen, Bayer is
seeking court permission to create a class of future plaintiffs and fund a five-member
scientific panel that will spend several years evaluating the link between Roundup and
cancer.
The panel will report its findings to U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco.
A conclusion that the product doesn't cause cancer will essentially shut down any future
cases. If the panel does find a link between Roundup and cancer, Bayer would have to fight
plaintiff-by-plaintiff to prove the individuals' cancer wasn't caused by the product, a point
that unsettled some investors.
Mr. Baumann said on a conference call Wednesday that while "it's not 100% certain," Bayer
is confident the panel will back its view that glyphosate isn't carcinogenic. The company has
previously said that hundreds of regulatory agencies, including the Environmental Protection
Agency, and scientists have deemed the product safe.
"We need to take the decision about carcinogenicity of the product out of the hands of
juries," said Mr. Baumann. The scientists on the panel, he said, would be selected both by
Bayer and plaintiffs' lawyers, to come to a "fair and solid" conclusion.
The creation of such a court-overseen science panel is rare, said University of Georgia
law professor Elizabeth Burch, and raises questions over whether future plaintiffs who may
not be sick yet are getting a fair shot at pressing claims that Roundup caused their
illnesses.
Bayer's Woes Not Confined to Use in US
Glyphosate is currently licensed for use throughout the EU, accordimg to Deutsche Welle,
What's driving
Europe's stance on glyphosate. But this use is not uncontested, According to Deutsche
Welle:
The controversy surrounding glyphosate came to
high drama in November 2017 when EU member states voted to extend the commercial license
of the weed killer for a period of five years. The measure passed only narrowly and due to
the 'yes' vote of German Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt.
Schmidt's unilateral decision disregarded split opinions within Chancellor Angela Merkel's
cabinet that originally agreed Germany should abstain in the vote.
Moreover, a European Parliament report issued in January 2019 found that EU regulators
based their decision to relicense glyphosate on an assessment that was plagiarized from a
coalition of pesticide companies, including Monsanto.
The scandal has caused a number of countries in the bloc to introduce individual
legislation banning or restricting the use of the substance.
The state of EU public opinion is such that license is unlikely to be renewed, and many EU
states have already banned its use. According to the Deutsche Welle account:
In Europe, the shift in public opinion about glyphosate was illustrated by a 2016 poll in
the five largest EU countries showing some 66% percent of respondents favoring a glyphosate
ban.
In 2017, over 1.3 million people signed a petition calling for a European ban of
glyphosate, and putting pressure on Brussels to restrict or even ban the use of the
herbicide.
Two Additional Settlements
At the same time as the gylphosate settment, Bayer agreed to two other settlements,
including one relating to claims for another herbicide, dicamba. According to the Wall Street
Journal:
Bayer also said it would pay up to $400 million to resolve legal challenges and
crop-damage claims to another of its herbicides, dicamba, which the company has marketed to
kill weeds that have evolved to resist Roundup. Farmers and agricultural experts have blamed
dicamba-based sprays for drifting on winds and damaging millions of acres of soybeans,
peaches and other crops.
Within the US, Bayer will continue to try to settle glyphosate legal claims with plantiffs
who have yet to sign onto the settlement. Bayer has not admitted Roundup causes cancer –
and indeed continues to insist otherwise – and persists in defending its Monsanto
acquisition. Roundup will continue to be sold without any cancer warning label.
"... Russia heavily subsidised Ukrainian energy imports for decades – gas and oil. In a similar fashion, Russia is doing this with Belarus until the present time. Russia is the only possible consumer of what Ukraine used to manufacture – a market that has disappeared. Gas turbines used to be made in Ukraine. Now, this has moved to Russia. Of course, the skilled Ukrainians went to Russia with their know-how. ..."
"... To the best of my knowledge the USSR was the only empire that actually subsidized its colonies – Poland, East Germany, Ukraine etc. Russia is far better off without them. ..."
"... Ukrainian supermarkets are overflowing with French/German/Italian products. European supermarkets are devoid of Ukrainian products. ..."
Only a complete and utter incompetent (or a rabid Ukrainian nationalist) can call Ukraine
an independent state. It is de-facto a colony of the West. A debt slave.
I applaud the US response of supporting Ukraine's aspirations for a freer, more
Western-oriented country and that it continues to support Ukraine's territorial interests
over those of Russia's.
This was not about supporting Ukrainian aspirations for a freer, more Western-oriented
country. It is about kicking out Russia from Ukrainian markets and plundering Ukraine all by
themselves. Mainly by Germany and the USA -- to major players of Euromaydan color revolution.
For Germans this is return to "Drang nach Osten" on a new level, on the level of neoliberal
neocolonialism.
They used Western nationalists as their fifth column, but Western Ukrainian suffered from
the results no less then people in Eastern Ukraine. Many now try to move to Kiev, Kiev region
and further East in order to escape poverty and unemployment. Seasonal labor to Russia
(mainly builders) diminished rapidly. Train communication now is blocked, and for Western
Ukraine only Poland now represents a chance to earn money for the family to survive the
winter.
For the USA this is first of all about selling Ukraine expensive weaponry, wasting
precious Ukrainian resources on permanent hostility with Russia (with Donbas conflict as a
real win to further the USA geopolitical ambitions -- in line with the "Full spectrum
dominance" doctrine) , cornering Ukrainian energy market (uranium supplies for power
stations, etc.), destruction, or buy-out of a few competing industries other than extracting
industries and maquiladoras, getting better conditions for the EU exports and multinationals
operating in Ukraine (and initially with plans for re-export products to Russia tax free) and
increasing the country debt to "debt slave" level.
In other words this is a powerful kick in a chin by Obama to Putin. Not a knockdown, but
very close.
For Ukraine first of all that means rapid accumulation of a huge external debt --
conditions of economic slavery, out of which there is no escape. Ukrainian people paid a very
dear price for their Euromaydan illusions. They became mass slave labor in Poland.
Prostitutes in Germany. Seasonal picker of fruits in some other EU countries (GB, France). A
new European blacks, so to speak.
The level of fleecing Ukraine by the USA after Euromaidan can be compared only with
fleecing of Libya. The currency dropped 300%, and 80% Ukrainians now live in abysmal poverty,
while neoliberal oligarchs allied with the West continue to plunder the country. Gold
reserves were moved to the USA.
If I had to choose between two colonizers, I probably would prefer Russians. They are
still colonizers, but they are less ruthless and brutal colonizers.
@likbezIf I had
to choose between two colonizers, I probably would prefer Russians. They are still
colonizers, but they are less ruthless and brutal colonizers.
I agree with 90% of what you wrote, but I would like to correct the above.
Russia heavily subsidised Ukrainian energy imports for decades – gas and oil. In
a similar fashion, Russia is doing this with Belarus until the present time. Russia is the
only possible consumer of what Ukraine used to manufacture – a market that has
disappeared. Gas turbines used to be made in Ukraine. Now, this has moved to Russia. Of
course, the skilled Ukrainians went to Russia with their know-how.
To the best of my knowledge the USSR was the only empire that actually subsidized its
colonies – Poland, East Germany, Ukraine etc. Russia is far better off without
them.
Ukrainian supermarkets are overflowing with French/German/Italian products. European
supermarkets are devoid of Ukrainian products.
"... It's because the Democrats think that kowtowing to BLM will give them the winning edge in the November balloting. That's what it's all about. That's why they draped themselves in Kente cloth and knelt for the cameras. They think their black constituents are too stupid to see through their groveling fakery. They think that blacks will forget that Joe Biden pushed through legislation "which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior." ..."
"... The stupidity of the Dems was shown this week when they agreed to three Biden/Trump debates. They should leave him in his basement and hope for the best. They feature political ads where Biden slurs his speech! These are professionals, so it tells me they spent all day and did 40 takes and this was the best he could do. The election will be great comedy, or perhaps ..."
"... Clinton is the best evidence that certain people agree to be blackmailed in exchange for power, as Andrew Anglin wrote this week. ..."
"This is not a momentary civil disturbance. This is a serious, and highly organized
political movement It is deep and profound and has vast political ambitions. It is insidious,
it will grow. It's goal is to end liberal democracy and challenge western civilization
itself. This is an ideological movement Even now, many of us pretend this is about police
brutality. We think we can fix it by regulating chokeholds or spending more on de-escalation
training. We're too literal and good-hearted to understand what's happening. But we have no
idea what we are up against. ..These are not protests. This is a totalitarian political
movement and someone needs to save the country from it." Tucker
Carlson
Tucker Carlson is right, the protests and riots are not a momentary civil disturbance. They
are an attack the Constitutional Republic itself, the heart and soul of American democracy. The
Black Lives Matter protests are just the tip of the spear, they are an expression of public
outrage that is guaranteed under the first amendment. But don't be deceived, there's more here
than meets the eye. BLM is funded by foundations that seek to overthrow our present form of
government and install an authoritarian regime guided by technocrats, oligarchs and
corporatists all of who believe that Chinese-type despotism is far-more compatible with
capitalism than "inefficient" democracy. The chaos in the streets is merely the beginning of an
excruciating transition from one system to another. This is an excerpt from an article by F.
William Engdahl at Global Research:
"By 2016, Black Lives Matter had established itself as a well-organized network .. That
year the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy announced the formation of the Black-Led
Movement Fund (BLMF), "a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the
Movement for Black Lives coalition" in which BLM was a central part. By then Soros
foundations had already given some $33 million in
grants to the Black Lives Matter movement .. ..
The BLMF identified itself as being created by top foundations including in addition to
the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundations." (
"America's Own Color
Revolution ", Global Research)
$100 million is alot of money. How has that funding helped BLM expand its presence in
politics and social media? How many activists and paid employees operate within the network
disseminating information, building new chapters, hosting community outreach programs, and
fine-tuning an emergency notification system that allows them to put tens of thousands of
activists on the streets in cities across the country at a moment's notice? Isn't that what
we've seen for the last three weeks, throngs of angry protestors swarming in more than 400
cities across America all at the beck-and-call of a shadowy group whose political intentions
are still not clear?
And what about the rioting, looting and arson that broke out in numerous cities following
the protests? Was that part of the script too? Why haven't BLM leaders condemned the
destruction of private property or offered a public apology for the downtown areas that have
been turned into wastelands? In my own hometown of Seattle, the downtown corridor– which
once featured Nordstrom, Pottery Barn and other upscale retail shops– is now a
checkerboard of broken glass, plywood covers and empty streets all covered in a thick layer of
garish spray-paint. The protest leaders said they wanted to draw attention to racial injustice
and police brutality. Okay, but how does looting Nordstrom help to achieve that goal?
And what role have the Democrats played in protest movement?
They've been overwhelmingly supportive, that's for sure. In fact, I can't think of even one
Democrat who's mentioned the violence, the looting or the toppling of statues. Why is that?
It's because the Democrats think that kowtowing to BLM will give them the winning edge in
the November balloting. That's what it's all about. That's why they draped themselves in Kente
cloth and knelt for the cameras. They think their black constituents are too stupid to see
through their groveling fakery. They think that blacks will forget that Joe Biden pushed
through legislation "which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of
time sentences could be reduced for good behavior."
According to the Black Agenda
Repor t: "Biden and (South Carolina's Strom) Thurmond joined hands to push 1986 and 1988
drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and
powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators
of what became mass incarceration. " Biden also spearheaded "the attacks on Anita Hill when she
came forward to testify against the supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas". All told, Biden's
record on race is much worse than Trump's despite the media's pathetic attempts to portray
Trump as Adolph Hitler. It's just more bunkum from the dissembling media.
Bottom line: The Democrats think they can ride racial division and social unrest all the way
to the White House. That's what they are betting on.
So, yes, the Dems are exploiting the protests for political advantage, but it goes much
deeper than that. After all, we know from evidence that was uncovered during the Russiagate
investigation, that DNC leaders are intimately linked to the Intel agencies, law enforcement
(FBI), and the elite media. So it's not too much of a stretch to assume that these deep state
agents and assets work together to shape the narrative that they think gives them the best
chance of regaining power. Because, that's what this is really all about, power. Just as
Russiagate was about power (removing the president using disinformation, spies, surveillance
and other skulduggery.), and just as the Covid-19 fiasco was essentially about power
(collapsing the economy while imposing medical martial law on the population.), so too, the BLM
protest movement is also about power, the power to inflict massive damage on the country's main
urban centers with the intention of destabilizing the government, restructuring the economy and
paving the way for a Democratic victory in November. It's all about power, real, unalloyed
political muscle.
Surprisingly, one of the best critiques of what is currently transpiring was written by
Niles Niemuth at the World Socialist Web Site. Here's what he said about the widespread
toppling of statues:
"The attacks on the monuments were pioneered by the increasingly frenzied attempt by the
Democratic Party and the New York Times to racialize American history, to create a
narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle. This
campaign has produced a pollution of democratic consciousness, which meshes entirely with the
reactionary political interests driving it.
It is worth noting that the one institution seemingly immune from this purge is the
Democratic Party, which served as the political wing of the Confederacy and, subsequently,
the KKK.
This filthy historical legacy is matched only by the Democratic Party's contemporary
record in supporting wars that, as a matter of fact, primarily targeted nonwhites. Democrats
supported the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and under Obama destroyed Libya and Syria. The
New York Times was a leading champion and propagandist for all of these war." (
"Hands
off the monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant!, WSWS)
What the author is referring to is The 1619 Project, which is a racialized version of
American history that was published by the Times on August 19, 2019. The deliberately-distorted
version of history was cobbled together in anticipation of increasing social unrest and racial
antagonism. The rioting, looting and vast destruction of America's urban core can all be traced
back to a document that postulates that the country was founded on racial hatred and
exploitation. In other words, The 1619 Project provides the perfect ideological justification
for the chaos and violence that has torn the country apart for the last three weeks. This is an
excerpt from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:
"The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of
American history is rooted in race hatred -- specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of
"black people" by "white people." Hannah-Jones writes in the series' introduction:
"Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country. "
This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the
genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and
development . Hannah-Jones's reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive
racial antagonisms from innate biological processes .where does this racism come from? It
is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American "white people." Thus, it
must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions .
. No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting
race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear
responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided
arguments." ("The New York Times's 1619
Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history", World Socialist Web
Site)
Keep in mind, this essay in the WSWS was written a full year before BLM protests broke out
across the country. Was Hannah-Jones enlisted to create a document that would provide the dry
tinder for the massive and coordinated demonstrations that have left the country stunned and
divided?
Probably, after all, (as noted above) the author's theory is that one race is genetically
programed to exploit the other. ( "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country. ")
Well, if we assume that whites are genetically and irreversibly "racist", then we must also
assume that the country that these whites founded is racist and evil. Thus, the only logical
remedy for this situation, is to crush the white segment of the population, destroy their
symbols, icons, and history, and replace the system of government with one that better reflects
the values of the emerging non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the
rationale for sustained civil unrest, deepening political polarization and violent
revolution.
The 1619 Project is a calculated provocation meant to exacerbate racial animosities and pave
the way to open conflagration. And it has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. The
nation is split into warring camps while Washington has devolved into fratricidal warfare. Was
that the objective, to destabilize the country in preparation for the dissolution of the
current system followed by a fundamental restructuring of the government consistent with the
identity politics lauded by the Democrats?
The Democrats, the Intel agencies and the media are all in bed together fomenting unrest
with the intention of decimating the economy, crushing the emerging opposition and imposing
their despotic one-party system on all of us. Here's a clip from a piece by Paul Craig Roberts
that sums up the role of the New York Times in inciting race-based violence:
"The New York Times editorial board covers up the known indisputable truth with their
anti-white "1619 project," an indoctrination program to inculcate hatred of white people in
blacks and guilt in white people.
Why does the New York Times lie, brainwash blacks into hatred of whites, and attempt to
brainwash whites into guilt for the creation of a New World labor force four centuries ago?
Why do Americans tolerate the New York Times fomenting of racial hatred in a multicultural
society?
The New York Times is a vile organization. The New York Times attempts to discredit the
President of the United States and did all it could to frame him on false charges. The New
York Times painted General Flynn, who honorably served the US, as a Russian agent and enabled
General Flynn's frame-up on false and now dropped charges. The New York Times spews hatred of
white people. And now the New York Times accuses the American military of celebrating white
supremacism.
Does America have a worse enemy than the New York Times? The New York Times is clearly and
intentionally making a multicultural America impossible . By threatening white people with
the prospect of hate-driven racial violence, the New York Times editorial board is fomenting
the rise of white supremacy." (
"The New York Times Editorial Board Is a Threat to Multicultural America ", The Unz
Review)
The editors of the Times don't hate whites, they are merely attacking the growing number of
disillusioned white working people who have left the Democratic party in frustration due to
their globalist policies regarding trade, immigration, offshoring, outsourcing and the
relentless hollowing out of the nation's industrial core . The Dems have abandoned these people
altogether and –now that they realize they will never be able to lure them back into
their camp– they've decided to wage a full-blown, scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners war
on them. They've decided to crush them mercilessly and fill their ranks with multi-ethnic,
bi-racial groups that will work for pennies on the dollar. (which will keep the Dems corporate
supporters happy.) So, no, the Times does not hate white people. What they hate is the growing
populist movement that derailed Hillary Clinton and put anti-globalist Trump in the White
House. That's the real target of this operation, the disillusioned throng of working people who
have washed their hands of the Democrats for good. Here's more background from Paul Craig
Roberts:
"On August 12 Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, met with the Times'
employees to refocus the Times' attack on Trump . The Times, Baquet said, is shifting from
Trump-Russia to Trump's racism. The Times will spend the run-up to the 2020 presidential
election building the Trump-is-a-racist narrative. Of course, if Trump is a racist it means
that the people who elected him are also racists. Indeed, in Baquet's view, Americans have
always been racist. To establish this narrative, the New York Times has launched the "1619
Project," the purpose of which is "to reframe the country's history."
According to the Washington Examiner, "The basic thrust of the 1619 Project is that
everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven
throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It
begins with an overview of race in America -- 'Our democracy's founding ideals were false
when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.'
The premise that America originated as a racist slave state is to be woven into all
sections of the Times -- news, business, sports, travel, the entire newspaper. The project
intends to take the "reframing" of the United States into the schools where white Americans
are to be taught that they are racist descendants of slave holders. A participant in this
brainwashing of whites, which will make whites guilty and defenseless, says "this project
takes wing when young people are able to read this and understand the way that slavery has
shaped their country's history." In other words, the New York Times intends to make slavery
the ONLY explanation of America.
At the meeting of the executive editor of the New York Times with the Times' employees to
refocus the Times' attack on President Trump, Baquet said: "Race in the next year is going to
be a huge part of the American story." (
"Is White Genocide Possible? ", The Unz Review)
Repeat: "Race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story." Either
Baquet has a crystal ball or he had a pretty good idea of the way in which the 1619 Project was
going to be used . I suspect it was the latter.
For the last 3 and a half years, Democrats and the media have ridiculed anyone who opposes
their globalist policies as racist, fascist, misogynist, homophobic, Bible-thumping,
gun-toting, flag-waving, Nascar boosting, white nationalist "deplorables". Now they have
decided to intensify the assault on mainly white working people by preemptively destroying the
economy, destabilizing the country, and spreading terror far and wide. It's another vicious
psy-ops campaign designed to thoroughly demoralize and humiliate the enemy who just happen to
be the American people. Here's more form the WSWS:
" It is no coincidence that the promotion of this racial narrative of American history by
the Times, the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the privileged upper-middle-class
layers it represents, comes amid the growth of class struggle in the US and around the
world.
The 1619 Project is one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into
the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class. The Democrats
think it will be beneficial to shift their focus for the time being from the reactionary,
militarist anti-Russia campaign to equally reactionary racial politics." (" The New York
Times's 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history " WSWS)
Can you see how the protests are being used to promote the political objectives of elites
operating behind the mask of "impartial" reporting? The scheming NY Times has replaced the
enlightenment principles articulated in our founding documents with a sordid tale of racial
hatred and oppression. The editors seek to eliminate everything we believe as Americans so they
can brainwash us into believing that we are evil people deserving of humiliation, repudiation
and punishment. Here's more from the same article:
"In the months preceding these events, the New York Times, speaking for dominant sections
of the Democratic political establishment, launched an effort to discredit both the American
Revolution and the Civil War. In the New York Times' 1619 Project, the American Revolution
was presented as a war to defend slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was cast as a garden variety
racist
The attacks on the monuments to these men were pioneered by the increasingly frenzied
attempt by the Democratic Party and the New York Times to racialize American history, to
create a narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial
struggle . This campaign has produced a pollution of democratic consciousness, which meshes
entirely with the reactionary political interests driving it." (" The New York Times's 1619
Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history" , WSWS)
Ideas have consequences, and the incendiary version of events disseminated by the Times has
added fuel to a fire that's spread from one coast to the other. Given the damage that has been
done to cities across the country, it would be nice to know how Dean Baquet knew that "race was
going to play a huge part" in upcoming events? It's all very suspicious. Here's more:
" Given the 1619 Project's black nationalist narrative, it may appear surprising that
nowhere in the issue do the names Malcolm X or Black Panthers appear. Unlike the black
nationalists of the 1960s, Hannah-Jones does not condemn American imperialism. She boasts
that "we [i.e. African-Americans] are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the
United States military," and celebrates the fact that "we" have fought "in every war this
nation has waged." Hannah-Jones does not note this fact in a manner that is at all critical.
She does not condemn the creation of a "volunteer" army whose recruiters prey on
poverty-stricken minority youth. There is no indication that Hannah-Jones opposes the "War on
Terror" and the brutal interventions in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria -- all
supported by the Times -- that have killed and made homeless upwards of 20 million people. On
this issue, Hannah-Jones is remarkably "color-blind." She is unaware of, or simply
indifferent to, the millions of "people of color" butchered and made refugees by the American
war machine in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa." (" The New York Times's 1619
Project: A racialist falsification of American and world histor y", WSWS)
So, black nationalists like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers are excluded from the The 1619
Project's narrative, but the author boasts that blacks "are the most likely of all racial
groups to serve in the US military"?? How does that happen unless Hannah-Jones was coached by
Democrat leaders about who should and shouldn't be included in the text? None of this passes
the smell test. It all suggests that the storyline was shaped by people who had a specific goal
in mind. That isn't history, it's fiction written by people who have an ax to grind. The Times
even admitted as much in response to the blistering criticism by five of "the most widely read
and respected authorities on US history." The New York TimesMagazine editor in
chief Jake Silverstein rejected the historians' objections saying:
"The project was intended to address the marginalization of African-American history in
the telling of our national story and examine the legacy of slavery in contemporary American
life. We are not ourselves historians, it is true. We are journalists, trained to look at
current events and situations and ask the question: Why is this the way it is?"
WTF! "We are not ourselves historians"? That's the excuse?? Give me a break!
The truth is that there was never any attempt to provide an accurate account of events. From
the very onset, the goal was to create a storyline that fit the politics, the politics of
provocation, incitement, racial hatred, social unrest and violence. That's what the Times and
their allies wanted, and that's what they got.
The Deep State Axis: CIA, DNC, NYT
The three-way alliance between the CIA, the Elite Media, and the Democratic leadership has
clearly strengthened and grown since the failed Russiagate fiasco. All three parties were
likely involved in the maniacal hyping of the faux-Covid pandemic which paved the way for
Depression era unemployment, tens of thousands of bankrupt businesses and a sizable portion of
the US population thrust into destitution. Now, these deep state loyalists are promoting a
"falsified" race-based version of history that pits one group against the other while diverting
attention from the deliberate destruction of the economy and the further consolidation of
wealth in the hands of the 1 percent.
Behind the veil of the protest movement, the war on the American people is gaining pace.
Stopped reading the Times after the buildup to the Iraq War, when it was clear they were
lying. Everyone please stop reading the Times, and in particular stop referring to what they
are writing. Act like they don't exist. If enough do, they won't.
The stupidity of the Dems was shown this week when they agreed to three Biden/Trump debates.
They should leave him in his basement and hope for the best. They feature political ads where
Biden slurs his speech! These are professionals, so it tells me they spent all day and did 40
takes and this was the best he could do. The election will be great comedy, or perhaps
This is all planned. Biden will be forced to drop out and Bloomberg or even Clinton will
arise.
"Tucker Carlson is right, the protests and riots are not a momentary civil disturbance. They
are an attack the Constitutional Republic itself, the heart and soul of American democracy."
I am reminded of david horowitz and chrissy hitchens
And how they promoted Israeli interests after first pretending to be independent thinkers
to gain creed for the switch. Standard zionazi-gay psywar tactic.
The stupidity of the Dems was shown this week when they agreed to three Biden/Trump
debates.
This is all planned. Biden will be forced to drop out and Bloomberg or even Clinton will
arise.
Stupid and planned?
Clinton is the best evidence that certain people agree to be blackmailed in exchange for
power, as Andrew Anglin wrote this week. Why should DNC care if Trump is 're-elected'? And if
they don't care, who not take a stab at installing an intersectional DNC pinnacle fraudster
via the griftiest, most insulting, infuriating way possible? They can't lose.
divideand conquer 1. To gain or maintain power by generating tension among others, especially those less powerful,
so that they cannot unite in opposition.
Notable quotes:
"... In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new. ..."
"... The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy. ..."
"... Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity. ..."
"... If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump. ..."
I've been thinking about the various versions of and critiques of identity politics that are around at the moment.
In its most
general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that
members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different
things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal,
but I'm hoping I can say something new.
You missed one important line of critique -- identity politics as a dirty political strategy of soft neoliberals.
To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important to politics. But neoliberalism's
radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into
identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires uniting
through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future.
When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political community gets fragmented. It becomes
harder for people to see each other as part of that same shared future.
Demagogues [more correctly neoliberals -- likbez] rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism,
which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and
marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for
a free and democratic society.
The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies.
As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary
neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that
some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they
then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy.
Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies
of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity.
Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the very groups that inclusionary neoliberals
claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better
than economic policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the war in Afghanistan
for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in
Iraq lead to a domino effect that swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has
shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi
government -- and more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead.
Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a peaceful transition to stable democracy
but instead civil war and instability, with thousands dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups.
On the grounds of democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those motivated to expand
human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as humanitarian victories -- on the civilian death count alone.
Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers
largely assumed that all good things would go together -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- and so they thought opening
China to trade would inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would become liberal
through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong.
They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political
system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump
had nothing to do with them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election.
If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing
of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members,
who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump.
Initially Clinton calculation was that trade union voters has nowhere to go anyways, and it was correct for first decade or so
of his betrayal. But gradually trade union members and lower middle class started to leave Dems in droves (Demexit, compare with
Brexit) and that where identity politics was invented to compensate for this loss.
So in addition to issues that you mention we also need to view the role of identity politics as the political strategy of the
"soft neoliberals " directed at discrediting and the suppression of nationalism.
The resurgence of nationalism is the inevitable byproduct of the dominance of neoliberalism, resurgence which I think is capable
to bury neoliberalism as it lost popular support (which now is limited to financial oligarchy and high income professional groups,
such as we can find in corporate and military brass, (shrinking) IT sector, upper strata of academy, upper strata of medical professionals,
etc)
That means that the structure of the current system isn't just flawed which imply that most problems are relatively minor and
can be fixed by making some tweaks. It is unfixable, because the "Identity wars" reflect a deep moral contradictions within neoliberal
ideology. And they can't be solved within this framework.
"... From wiping out the ability of regular folks to declare bankruptcy (something supported by our founding fathers who were NOT socialists), to shipping our industrial base to communist China (which in less enlightened days would have been termed treason), to spending tens of trillions of dollars bailing out and subsiding the big banks (that's not a misprint), to supporting "surprise medical billing," to opening the borders to massive third-world immigration so that wages can be driven down and reset and profits up (As 2015 Bernie Sanders pointed out), Backstabbing Joe Biden is neoliberal scum pure and simple. ..."
"... It's astonishing that so many people will just blindly accept what they are told, that Biden is. "moderate." Biden is so far to the right, he makes Nixon look like Trotsky. ..."
"... Joe Biden is a crook and a con man. He has been lying his whole life. Claimed in his 1988 Campaign to have got 3 degrees at college and finished in top half of his class. Actually only got 1 degree & finished 76th out of 85 in his class. ..."
Yet another circus. The proles get to scream and holler, and when all is done, the oligarchy gets the policies it wants, the public
be damned. Our sham 'democracy' is a con to privatize power and socialize responsibility.
Although it is shocking to see such a disgusting piece of human garbage like Joe Biden get substantial numbers of people to
vote for him. Biden has never missed a chance to stab the working class in the back in service to his wealthy patrons.
The issue is not (for me) his creepiness (I wouldn't much mind if he was on my side), nor even his Alzheimer's, but his established
track record of betrayal and corruption.
From wiping out the ability of regular folks to declare bankruptcy (something supported by our founding fathers who were NOT
socialists), to shipping our industrial base to communist China (which in less enlightened days would have been termed treason),
to spending tens of trillions of dollars bailing out and subsiding the big banks (that's not a misprint), to supporting "surprise
medical billing," to opening the borders to massive third-world immigration so that wages can be driven down and reset and profits
up (As 2015 Bernie Sanders pointed out), Backstabbing Joe Biden is neoliberal scum pure and simple.
It's astonishing that so many people will just blindly accept what they are told, that Biden is. "moderate." Biden is so
far to the right, he makes Nixon look like Trotsky. Heck, he makes Calvin Coolidge look like Trotsky.
Joe Biden is a crook and a con man. He has been lying his whole life. Claimed in his 1988 Campaign to have got 3 degrees at college and finished in top half of his class. Actually only got 1 degree & finished 76th out of 85 in his class.
"... Failure to blame all problems suffered by minorities on racism ..."
"... Groupthink must be fun for many people. Emoting without as much as a thread of a connection to knowledge of history and careful ..."
"... But what today most scares me – a true liberal to my marrow – is the rabid mobthink on the political and ideological left. My fear is neither my forgiving nor tolerating the many prejudices and idiocies rampant on the right. I despise these unconditionally. But today – June 12th, 2020 – I fear more the prejudices and idiocies rampant on the left, if only because these seem to me to be today more widespread and socially encouraged. ..."
Reading David Henderson's recent EconLog post titled " Why Don't
People Speak Up? " prompts me to offer a more general yet personal point, which is
this:
These are, at least for me, especially scary times. I refer here not principally to the
covid lockdown (although that, too, is scary in its own way). Instead, I refer to the tsunami
of virtue signaling now drowning the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Frank
and honest disagreement with any parts of the narrative that dominates the mainstream media is
treated by too many people as proof of evil intentions or, at best, of indifference to
evil.
Underway now is something far more extreme than a mere loss of nuance. The world is now
painted exclusively in the darkest black and brightest white. (Please, do not
interpret my use of "black and white" as referring to anything other than the traditionally
used example of the starkest of distinctions.)
Failure
to blame all problems suffered by minorities on racism – failure to denounce
loudly and angrily American bourgeois society's allegedly inherent bigotry, greed, and
rapaciousness – failure to acknowledge that America today is a brutal and cruel place for
all but the elite, and hellish especially for blacks, women, and gay, bi, and transgender
people – is frequently interpreted as sympathy for dark-ages-like superstition and
prejudices.
Equally bad, in the eyes of the Virtuous, are attempts at offering historical perspective.
Even if accompanied by a sincere and express acknowledgement that serious problems remain, the
mere suggestion that at least some of these problems were more widespread and worse in the past
– the slightest hint that over time there's been some real improvement for anyone but
white, heterosexual, high-income Christian males – is treated as evidence of blindness or
malignant bias.
Groupthink must be fun for many people. Emoting without as much as a thread of a
connection to knowledge of history and careful consideration of the facts is the
practice of very many people today. And it's de rigueur now to treat one's emotions
– along with rioting-crowds' outrage and passions – as sources of understanding and
knowledge more reliable than an actual understanding of history and economics.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, this irrationality centered in the political left spawns
irrationality on the right. I've heard it said that George Floyd wasn't killed by Derek
Chauvin, or that Floyd deserved his fate. I hear it said that any success at reforming
government police departments would undermine law and order. Nonsense, of course. Pure
nonsense.
But what today most scares me – a true liberal to my marrow – is the rabid
mobthink on the political and ideological left. My fear is neither my forgiving nor tolerating
the many prejudices and idiocies rampant on the right. I despise these unconditionally. But
today – June 12th, 2020 – I fear more the prejudices and idiocies rampant on the
left, if only because these seem to me to be today more widespread and socially
encouraged.
Belief system is not chosen. The individual is indoctrinated into it via socialization process. Only few can break this bond.
Notable quotes:
"... Social or Cultural Norms are standards for behavior engendered from infancy by parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, and others in one's life. Social Norms are the shared expectations and rules that guide the behavior of people within social groups; Social Norms can go a long way toward maintaining social order. Engendered, Social or Cultural Norms can be enforced by something as subtle as a gesture, a look, or even the absence of any response at all. At the extremes, aberrant social behavior becomes a crime. One could adopt Social Norms as a part or all of their Belief System. ..."
"... Religions were an early form of Social Norms. Yet and still, all Religious Beliefs address Social Behavior, Social Norms. As with Social Norms, most, if not all, Religions have slowly evolved over time. As with Social Norms, Religious Beliefs are often engendered from infancy by parents; handed down from generation to generation. Most Religions require one's Believing; Believing that the precepts of the Religion come down to us from a supreme being or deity via a prophet or inspired teacher. Whereas science asks questions in the quest for knowledge, Abrahamic religions hold that any questioning of their particular beliefs is blasphemous, a great sin. Rather than welcome questions in re validity, religions insist that, first and foremost, adherents believe. Religions might be a part of the whole of one's Belief System. ..."
"... Can we even have stable societies without Belief Systems? Is it possible to build a Society around Science, Philosophy, and/or Reason? Can we, benefitting from Science and Philosophy: Improve the quality of our Belief Systems? Of our Religions? Can Beliefs become Informed Opinions? Will future societies' Belief Systems be based more on Science and Philosophy, and less on opinion and belief? Do they have a choice? It seems that the more successful societies have long since chosen to give the thinking of Science and Philosophy precedence over Believing. Darwin tells us that survival goes to those that adapt. ..."
Belief Systems, these prisms through which we view the world, have been around from our earliest days. Not so long ago, the Ancient
Greeks separated the concept of what we might call belief into two concepts: pistis and doxa with pistis referring to trust and confidence
(notably akin the regard accorded science) and doxa referring to opinion and acceptance (more akin the regard accorded cultural norms).
In quest of a personal Belief System, should one: Go with the flow and adapt to the Social or Cultural Norm? Follow the Abrahamic
admonishment to first believe? Follow their own Reasoning? Or, should one look to Science?
Social or Cultural Norms are standards for behavior engendered from infancy by parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, and others
in one's life. Social Norms are the shared expectations and rules that guide the behavior of people within social groups; Social
Norms can go a long way toward maintaining social order. Engendered, Social or Cultural Norms can be enforced by something as subtle
as a gesture, a look, or even the absence of any response at all. At the extremes, aberrant social behavior becomes a crime. One
could adopt Social Norms as a part or all of their Belief System.
Most modern Religions are handed down from times long past, times before much was known about anything. Most, if not all, early
Religions were based on mythology. Later on, some Religions found more of their basis in whatever evidence and reasoning skills were
available to a people. From the earliest times, human cultures have developed some form or another of a Belief System premised on
Religion.
Humans are, uniquely it seems, given the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking in an orderly rational way; they are given
the faculty of Reason. To Reason is to use the faculty of Reason so as to arrive at conclusions; to discover, formulate, or conclude
by way of a carefully Reasoned Analysis. One might base a part or all of their Belief System on Reason.
Science can be seen as an endeavor to increase knowledge, to understand; to reduce ignorance and misunderstanding. Science encourages
active skepticism. Science, the word comes from the Latin word for knowledge, is premised on verifiable empirical evidence and best
thinking. Science employs our faculty to Reason. Belief is not a scientific criterion but is rather a bias to be filtered out of
any scientific experiment. We have confidence in the knowledge afforded us by Science to the extent that we have confidence in the
validity of the evidence and the rigor of the Reasoning, and in Scientific Methodology. Science can form the basis of one's Belief
System to the extent that they have confidence in Science.
Religions were an early form of Social Norms. Yet and still, all Religious Beliefs address Social Behavior, Social Norms. As with
Social Norms, most, if not all, Religions have slowly evolved over time. As with Social Norms, Religious Beliefs are often engendered
from infancy by parents; handed down from generation to generation. Most Religions require one's Believing; Believing that the precepts
of the Religion come down to us from a supreme being or deity via a prophet or inspired teacher. Whereas science asks questions in
the quest for knowledge, Abrahamic religions hold that any questioning of their particular beliefs is blasphemous, a great sin. Rather
than welcome questions in re validity, religions insist that, first and foremost, adherents believe. Religions might be a part of
the whole of one's Belief System.
As is to be expected, Science is often in conflict with religious beliefs. This dichotomy between the Reasoning of Science and
the Believing of Religion goes back at least to early Egypt, Greece, and India; has played, and still plays, a huge role for philosophers,
scientists, and others given to thought.
While most modern societies have moved away from a Religious dominance of their culture; at the extremes, we still have theocracies
where Religious Belief is given reign over culture and politics, and, to some extent or another, thought itself.
Preceding statute law, Religious associated Belief Systems played an important role in mankind's development. Down through the
centuries, religious behavioral standards have provided societies personal security, social stability. Religious Beliefs have long
been, are still being, codified into law.
Codified laws can also be based on 'Social Norms', on philosophy and reason ( love of learning, the pursuit of wisdom, a search
for understanding, ); or on yet other Belief Systems.
Can we even have stable societies without Belief Systems? Is it possible to build a Society around Science, Philosophy, and/or
Reason? Can we, benefitting from Science and Philosophy: Improve the quality of our Belief Systems? Of our Religions? Can Beliefs
become Informed Opinions? Will future societies' Belief Systems be based more on Science and Philosophy, and less on opinion and
belief? Do they have a choice? It seems that the more successful societies have long since chosen to give the thinking of Science
and Philosophy precedence over Believing. Darwin tells us that survival goes to those that adapt.
He didn't say it quite that way, but that is what he meant.
This seeming need of humans to Believe can be abused. The atrocities of Colonial Spain and Portugal and the Era of Slavery were
ostensibly committed under the aegis of Christian Belief. Nazi Germany, Jonestown, ISIS, and a Trump Presidency are examples of some
of the more negative consequences of aberrant Belief Systems.
Demagogues prey on this need to Believe by telling the people what to Believe; by giving them something to Believe. Fox News,
by telling its viewers what to Believe, gives them this thing they need; something to Believe. All those arbiters of opinion we see
and read on the media are trying to sell Beliefs to their audience; an audience that needs something to Believe. Fox News has become
a Belief System for millions. So too, the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and Shawn Hannity.
Adolph Hitler and Jim Jones gave their needy followers something to Believe. Osama bin Laden/Al-Qaeda and ISIS gave their needy
followers something to Believe. Donald J. Trump is giving his needy followers something to Believe.
Thinking's too hard.
Obviously, existing well-meaning Belief Systems can be co-opted by unsavory persons, societies. Equally obvious, Belief Systems
can be instilled into a population. From the days of slavery and for these 150 yrs hence, whites in the Southern States have engendered
racism into their progeny. For 150 yrs now they propagated a false version of history in their schools. They created and propagated
a Belief System premised on mendacity.
Though many Belief Systems are based on Religious Tenets; we also see them based on economic models, personality cults, , even
in science. Economic dogma can be instilled in a society as a Belief System to the extent that any challenge thereto is considered
to be heretical, blasphemous. One can be born a Republican, a Baptist, or both, as were their parents and their parents' parents.
People have been being born Catholic for 2,000 yrs. Joseph Smith, a come lately, instilled.
Some positive consequences of Belief Systems include: higher moral standards, the great art and science flowing from the Renaissance;
the science, philosophy, and art from The Age of Reason/The Enlightenment. More recently: the ending of slavery, the ending of Colonialism,
the ending of apartheid, the codification of LGBT rights, and the struggle to end racism correlate with changes in Belief Systems.
Pending challenges for Belief Systems include such as freedom from hunger, access to housing, and alleviating economic disparity.
Belief Systems can carry us forward. Belief Systems can hold us back.
Is tweeting believing?
To what Belief System, if any, is this our Age of Technology attributable? Has Technology itself become a Belief System?
A very famous frog once said, "It is not easy being green."
Closely held, long-held, Beliefs are hard to give up; especially if they have been engendered via emulation, imprinting, repetition,
, since infancy. In America, the most technologically advanced economy ever known; our technology, our scientific achievements, are
all based on science. Yet today we have upwards of half of our politicians pandering to one or another Religious group that, for
the most part, denies Science. Quid pro quo: the pols get the Religious groups' vote, the Religious group gets the laws, and the
judges and justices, they want. Perhaps in part as a consequence of this support, most of this same group of politicians would govern
all the while making little effort to acquaint themselves with Science, with technology, in this day and age of Science and Technology.
Many, maybe most, of these same politicians hold fast to theories of economics and law that are, themselves, based on Belief.
John Prine, recently departed, not a frog, wrote the tune "In Spite of Ourselves".
In spite of ourselves, we humans mumble and fumble our way as is our wont.
Ron (RC) Weakley (a.k.a., Darryl for a while at EV) , June 22, 2020 8:35 am
" Darwin tells us that survival goes to those that adapt.
He didn't say it quite that way, but that is what he meant "
[No he did not say it that way because that is not what he meant. Human beings just like to misrepresent Darwin that way because
it follows along with their own narrative of innovative superiority and control of their own fate. To transpose biological mutation
from the natural selection process of biological evolution over to social evolution is a bit of a stretch, but clearly it would
favor diversity and freedom over rigid authoritarian orthodoxy. It comes with no guaranty of course, but it also more accidental
or incidental than contrived.]
Ron (RC) Weakley (a.k.a., Darryl for a while at EV) , June 22, 2020 9:18 am
Reason is not the same as logic, not pure logic at least. Impure logic is mostly sophistry. Reason is not necessarily sophistry,
but still depends upon assumptions which in life may be less reliable than in math.
Nietzsche and Machiavelli were notable philosophers of celebrated capacity for reason. By my own anti-intellectual biases I
have found them both intolerable as human beings and deceptive as arbiters of truth. Science, when correctly applied, has evolved
far beyond its roots in philosophy. I am skeptical of both incorrect science and any philosophy that I am not taking an active
roll in. Any valid philosophy should be about the present rather than the past. Kant and William James are tolerable, but still
insufficient despite their well meaning morality.
Re: the Nuremberg trials , I became fascinated by the writings of Paul R. Pillar who
pointed out that U.S. sanctions are frequently peddled as a peaceful alternative to
war fit the definition of 'crimes against peace' . This is when one country sets up an
environment for war against another country. I'll grant you that this is vague but if this is
applicable at all how is this not an accurate description of what we are doing against Iran
and Venezuela?
In both cases, we are imposing a full trade embargo (not sanctions) on basic civilian
necessities and infrastructures and threatening the use of military force. As for Iran, the
sustained and unfair demonization of Iranians is preparing the U.S. public to accept a
ruthless bombing campaign against them as long overdue. We are already attacking the civilian
population of their allies in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.
How Ironic that the country that boasts that it won WW2 is now guilty of the very crimes
that it condemned publicly in court.
"... Mass unemployment will bring the United States closer to less-developed economies. Very large regions of the poor will surround small enclaves of the rich. Narrow bands of "middle-income professionals," etc., will separate rich from poor. Ever-more rigid social divisions enforced by strong police and military apparatuses are becoming the norm. Their outlines are already visible across the United States. ..."
"... In this context, U.S. capitalism strode confidently toward the 21st century. The Soviet threat had imploded. A divided Europe threatened no U.S. interests. Its individual nations competed for U.S. favor (especially the UK). China's poverty blocked its becoming an economic competitor. U.S. military and technological supremacy seemed insurmountable. ..."
"... Amid success, internal contradictions surfaced. U.S. capitalism crashed three times. The first happened early in 2000 (triggered by dot-com share-price inflation); next came the big crash of 2008 (triggered by defaulting subprime mortgages); and the hugest crash hit in 2020 (triggered by COVID-19). ..."
"... Second, we must face a major obstacle. Since 1945, capitalists and their supporters developed arguments and institutions to undo the New Deal and its leftist legacies. They silenced, deflected, co-opted, and/or demonized criticisms of capitalism. ..."
"... Third, to newly organized versions of a New Deal coalition or of social democracy, we must add a new element. We cannot again leave capitalists in the exclusive positions to receive enterprise profits and make major enterprise decisions. ..."
Organized labor led no mass opposition to Trump's presidency or the December 2017 tax cut or
the failed U.S. preparation for and management of COVID-19. Nor do we yet see a labor-led
national protest against the worst mass firing since the 1930s Great Depression. All of these
events, but especially the unemployment, mark an employers' class war against employees. The
U.S. government directs it, but the employers as a class inspire and benefit the most from
it.
Before the 2020 crash, class war had been redistributing wealth for decades from
middle-income people and the poor to the top 1 percent. That upward redistribution was U.S.
employers' response to the legacy of the New Deal. During the Great Depression and afterward,
wealth had been redistributed downward. By the 1970s, that was reversed. The 2020 crash will
accelerate upward wealth redistribution sharply.
With tens of millions now a "reserve army" of the unemployed, nearly every U.S. employer can
cut wages, benefits, etc. Employees dissatisfied with these cuts are easily replaced. Vast
numbers of unemployed, stressed by uncertain job prospects and unemployment benefits,
disappearing savings, and rising household tensions, will take jobs despite reduced wages,
benefits, and working conditions. As the unemployed return to work, most employees' standards
of consumption and living will drop.
Germany, France, and other European nations could not fire workers as the United States did.
Strong labor movements and socialist parties with deep social influences preclude governments
risking comparable mass unemployment; it would risk deposing them from office. Thus their
antiviral lockdowns keep most at work with governments paying 70 percent or more of pre-virus
wages and salaries.
Mass unemployment will bring the United States closer to less-developed economies. Very
large regions of the poor will surround small enclaves of the rich. Narrow bands of
"middle-income professionals," etc., will separate rich from poor. Ever-more rigid social
divisions enforced by strong police and military apparatuses are becoming the norm. Their
outlines are already visible across the United States.
Only if workers understand and mobilize to fight this class war can the trends sketched
above be stopped or reversed. U.S. workers did exactly that in the 1930s. They fought -- in
highly organized ways -- the class war waged against them then. Millions joined labor unions,
and many tens of thousands joined two socialist parties and one communist party. All four
organizations worked together, in coalition, to mobilize and activate the U.S. working
class.
Weekly, and sometimes daily, workers marched across the United States. They criticized
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies and capitalism itself by intermingling reformist and
revolutionary demands. The coalition's size and political reach forced politicians, including
FDR, to listen and respond, often positively. An initially "centrist" FDR adapted to become a
champion of Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a huge federal jobs
program. The coalition achieved those moderate socialist reforms -- the New Deal -- and paid
for them by setting aside revolutionary change.
It proved to be a good deal, but only in the short run. Its benefits to workers included a
downward redistribution of income and wealth (especially via homeownership), and thereby the
emergence of a new "middle class." Relatively well-paid employees were sufficient in number to
sustain widespread notions of American exceptionalism, beliefs in ever-rising standards of
working-class living across generations, and celebrations of capitalism as guaranteeing these
social benefits. The reality was quite different. Not capitalists but rather their critics and
victims had forced the New Deal against capitalists' resistance. And those middle-class
benefits bypassed most African Americans.
The good deal did not last because U.S. capitalists largely resented the New Deal and sought
to undo it. With World War II's end and FDR's death in 1945, the undoing accelerated. An
anti-Soviet Cold War plus anti-communist/socialist crusades at home gave patriotic cover for
destroying the New Deal coalition. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act targeted organized labor. Senate
and House committees spearheaded a unified effort (government, mass media, and academia) to
demonize, silence, and socially exclude communists, socialists, leftists, etc. For decades
after 1945 -- and still now in parts of the United States -- a sustained hysteria defined all
left-wing thought, policy, or movement as always and necessarily the worst imaginable social
evil.
Over time, the New Deal coalition was destroyed and left-wing thinking was labeled
"disloyal." Even barely left-of-center labor and political organizations repeatedly denounced
and distanced themselves from any sort of anti-capitalist impulse, any connection to socialism.
Many New Deal reforms were evaded, amended, or repealed. Some simply vanished from politicians'
knowledge and vocabulary and then journalists' too. Having witnessed the purges of leftist
colleagues from 1945 through the 1950s, a largely docile academic community celebrated
capitalism in general and U.S. capitalism in particular. The good in U.S. society was
capitalism's gift. The rest resulted from government or foreign or ideological interferences in
capitalism's wonderful invisible hand. Any person or group excluded from this American Dream
had only themselves to blame for inadequate ability, insufficient effort, or ideological
deviancy.
In this context, U.S. capitalism strode confidently toward the 21st century. The Soviet
threat had imploded. A divided Europe threatened no U.S. interests. Its individual nations
competed for U.S. favor (especially the UK). China's poverty blocked its becoming an economic
competitor. U.S. military and technological supremacy seemed insurmountable.
Amid success, internal contradictions surfaced. U.S. capitalism crashed three times. The
first happened early in 2000 (triggered by dot-com share-price inflation); next came the big
crash of 2008 (triggered by defaulting subprime mortgages); and the hugest crash hit in 2020
(triggered by COVID-19). Unprepared economically, politically, and ideologically for any of
them, the Federal Reserve responded by creating vast sums of new money that it threw at/lent to
(at historically low interest rates) banks, large corporations, etc. Three successive exercises
in trickle-down economic policy saw little trickle down. No underlying economic problems
(inequality, excess systemic debts, cyclical instability, etc.) have been solved. On the
contrary, all worsened. In other words, class war has been intensified.
What then is to be done? First, we need to recognize the class war that is underway and
commit to fighting it. On that basis, we must organize a mass base to put real political force
behind social democratic policies, parties, and politicians. We need something like the New
Deal coalition. The pandemic, economic crash, and gross official policy failures (including
violent official scapegoating) draw many toward classical social democracy. The successes of
the Democratic Socialists of America show this.
Second, we must face a major obstacle. Since 1945, capitalists and their supporters
developed arguments and institutions to undo the New Deal and its leftist legacies. They
silenced, deflected, co-opted, and/or demonized criticisms of capitalism. Strategic decisions
made by both the U.S. New Deal and European social democracy contributed to their defeats. Both
always left and still leave employers exclusively in positions to (1) receive and dispense
their enterprises' profits and (2) decide and direct what, how, and where their enterprises
produce. Those positions gave capitalists the financial resources and power -- politically,
economically, and culturally -- repeatedly to outmaneuver and repress labor and the left.
Third, to newly organized versions of a New Deal coalition or of social democracy, we must add a new element. We cannot
again leave capitalists in the exclusive positions to receive enterprise profits and make major enterprise decisions. The
new element is thus the demand to change enterprises producing goods and services. From hierarchical, capitalist organizations
(where owners, boards of directors, etc., occupy the employer position) we need to transition to the altogether different
democratic, worker co-op organizations. In the latter, no employer/employee split occurs. All workers have equal voice in
deciding what gets produced, how, and where and how any profits get used. The collective of all employees is their own employer.
As such an employer, the employees will finally protect and thus secure the reforms associated with the New Deal and social
democracy.
We could describe the transition from capitalist to worker co-op enterprise organizations as
a revolution. That would resolve the old debate of reform versus revolution. Revolution becomes
the only way finally to secure progressive reforms. Capitalism's reforms were generated by the
system's impacts on people and their resulting demands for change. Capitalism's resistances to
those reforms -- and undoing them after they happened -- spawned the revolution needed to
secure them. In that revolution, society moves beyond capitalism itself. So it was in the
French Revolution: demands for reform within feudal society could only finally be realized by a
social transition from feudalism to capitalism.
I have a dream today, brothers and sisters. I have a dream.
My dream is of an America that has embraced
race realism.
Yes, I have a dream that one day race differences in educational success will be as calmly,
dispassionately accepted as race differences in athletic success; that race differences in
criminal arrest and incarceration rates will be regarded with no more anger or alarm than sex
differences in those same rates; that different social outcomes by race will be understood as
caused not by the malice of our fellow citizens, but by ordinary processes of nature.
I have a dream that one day we shall discard magical
thinking about race ; that the notion of an invisible vapor or miasma called " racism
" permeating the atmosphere and intoxicating our minds will seem as quaintly absurd as
the
Four Humors Theory of ancient medicine or the Luminiferous
Æther of 19th-century physics.
I have a dream that one day soon, after sixty years of futile efforts to change what cannot,
in the nature of things, be changed, sixty
years of twisting our constitution and our jurisprudence into knots to pretend that
different statistics by race can only be caused by
white people' s ill will, sixty years of vast
public expenditures on educational and social programs that deliver no benefits at all
(other than to those who pocket the expenditures); that one day soon, after sixty years of
futility and waste, we shall accept race differences as calmly and as prudently as we accept
the laws of thermodynamics.
I have a dream that with
the black homicide rate at eight times the white rate, and with discrepancies of a similar
size having existed since reliable records began a hundred and eighty years ago
, an organization calling itself Black Lives Matter will address itself to bringing black
homicide numbers down to the white level -- better yet, to the Asian level -- or else be
laughed out of the public square.
I have a dream that race differences in outcomes, which are mere statistical abstractions
remote from our everyday dealings, will one day matter as little to us as personal
differences in outcomes. I shall never be a skilled violinist, a good tennis player, or a
creative mathematician; not because of malice, "racism," or "privilege" on the part of my
fellow citizens, but because of my own abilities and inclinations -- which, like almost
everyone else's, are middling and un-spectacular. I do not lose sleep over this. I
absolutely do not take it as an occasion to insult and berate my fellow-citizens, or
deprive them of their rights.
I have a dream that our nation's past will one day be cherished for having made possible our
present security and prosperity; that the ignorance and misdeeds of that past be kept in sight
on a shelf, accessible to all, but never dominating our view of what our ancestors were, the
heroism they displayed in defense of our civilization, and the great good things they did.
I have a dream that one day freedom
of association, which picks no man's pocket and breaks no man's leg, will be restored to
us.
I have a dream that the evil and divisive doctrines of "disparate impact" and "affirmative
action" will be scrubbed from our jurisprudence; that hiring into civil-service work --
including
police work and firefighting --
will be strictly meritocratic; and that young black Americans will no longer, just to satisfy
the whims of smug college admissions officers and innumerate jurists, will no longer be pushed
into academic college programs they can't cope with and will drop out from .
That is my dream too, brother. Let us work to make it happen.
Remember Keynes: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in
authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic
scribbler of a few years back".
Let us hope that the HBD "academic scribblers" like yourself can push the message
forward.
If only Trump, or someone with similar prominence, could give your speech!
"I have a dream today, brothers and sisters. I have a dream.
My dream is of an America that has embraced race realism".
"I have a dream that one day we shall discard magical thinking about race; that the notion of
an invisible vapor or miasma called".. 'Anti-Semitism'.. "permeating the atmosphere and
intoxicating our minds will seem as quaintly absurd as the Four Humors Theory of ancient
medicine or the Luminiferous Æther of 19th-century physics."
"I have a dream that one day, poor".. Gentile.. "children will not have to endure being
lectured about their 'privilege' by [ultra] rich".. Jewish adults. Or be taught any more
so-called holocaust guilt.
"I have a dream that one day soon, after[almost] sixty years of futile efforts to change what
cannot, in the nature of things, be changed, [almost] sixty years of twisting our
constitution and our jurisprudence into knots to pretend that".. Israel's illegitimate
military Occupation & America's uncritical material & immoral support for it.. "can
only be caused by"..Palestinians'.. "ill will, sixty years of vast public expenditures on"..
Israel's war machine and security.. "programs that deliver no benefits at all (other than to
those who pocket the expenditures); that one day soon, after sixty years of futility and
waste, we shall".. end all aid of any kind to Israel, forever.
And a dream that we accept religious differences about the causes of Crucifixion &
Salvation "as calmly and as prudently as we accept the laws of thermodynamics."
"I have a dream that the evil and divisive doctrines of" ..'Jewish nationalism' and 'Aryan
eradication'.. "will be scrubbed from our jurisprudence; that hiring into"..elite echelons --
including Hollywood and Wall Street – .."will be strictly meritocratic" ..and that
young Jewish Americans, will no longer be pushed into high positions just because they bar
mitzvah.
And finally, "I have a dream that my two beautiful children will one day" ..not fall prey to
some future Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein. Amen
The sad fact is that America is destined for dictatorship with these demographics, and
with the aid of technology it will be stable far into this century. Worse, Americans do not
want freedom, or at least they do not prioritize freedom over luxury. If they did, they would
have risen up long ago; Red States, at the very least, would be preparing for secession.
We'll have to face facts that normies are normies not because they are asleep, they are
asleep because they are normies -- something that cannot be changed because it has a genetic
basis (you cannot transmute sheep into wolves). As long as the supply of hamburgers, diet
coke, and sportsball continues, obsequious whites will keep their heads down, going along to
get along no matter what happens.
Things will get bad. As it is now, nearly every company is running racial agitation
propaganda on behalf of the government. Go into any Walmart and you'll be treated to overhead
announcements berating America's history of racism and apologizing to blacks; it's like
something straight out of 1984 (or the movie Red Dawn , 1984 -- seriously check the
movie for the scene I'm referencing). They are censoring and banning movies, purging
politically incorrect themepark rides, and internet search results; they've been censoring
books for years now (many school districts have banned Huck Fin and Tom Sawywer, among
others) and that will surely get worse.
If you want a book like Gone With The Wind , I would suggest you buy it now before
they ban it. Just a few months ago I picked up the DVD in a bargain bin. At the time the
person I was with didn't get why. "This isn't the kind of movie you usually watch." However,
being awake unlike your average normie, I saw all of this coming in advance. I explained to
my companion that I was getting it now before they banned it. And wouldn't you know it, a few
months later they are taking tentative steps to banning the movie. It won't be the last or
the worst example. If you are willing to tear down statues, rename military bases, and ban /
edit movies and theme park rides based on them, then the next logical step is banning books
-- burning them, essentially. Amazon is already doing this; they refuse to ship or stock
controversial books.
For my part, I've been buying old books and movies, preparing for the day when I can copy
them to a digital format and distribute them once the dictatorship bans them. Tellingly, I'm
not the only one. I went back to that same store today. EVERY copy of Gone With The
Wind and lots of other old movies were cleared out and they had a huge selection! Get
them now gents. The darkness is coming.
I would also suggest every European-American who can do so prepare to flee overseas. Lots
of dissidents I read have stated they are giving that thought. American conservatives are
behind the scenes. TAC's Rod Dreher had a piece on that website detailing this. Many in DC
are preparing to flee to central and Eastern Europe because there is no hope for this
country. It's all coming down.
Side note: Thanks libertarians. Thanks for letting five companies control everything,
thereby easily allowing a totalitarian dictatorship to take hold. "How does communism
happen?" they always say. Answer: You're how it happens. Your philosophy is just an excuse to
be lazy and not contribute. You want freedom but yet you aren't willing to do anything to
conserve your freedom. Meanwhile, radical leftists who don't believe in letting you have any
freedom marched through the institutions and are now preparing to unleash Red October. SMH.
Thanks guys. I hope "muh private company" dogma was worth it.
The truth will get you fired every time these days, the kids are wrecking the country, the
poor stupid lil bastards have no clue and they will be paying huge taxes for their efforts.
As long as the supply of hamburgers, diet coke, and sportsball continues, obsequious
whites will keep their heads down, going along to get along no matter what happens.
In a couple of years we should have polygenic scores that can predict IQ and educational
achievement pretty accurately on an individual level. Could lead to a de-emphasis on race?
I dreamed James Earl Ray had not shot Martin Luther King and we'd never learned who Jesse
Jackson was. That King would have been exposed as a sybaritic plagiarist whose personal
scandals were exposed in the Washington Post and left him a stained and discredited figure
with no eponymous national holiday and instead of the perma grief stricken mask of Coretta
Scott King we would have scene her for the last time in divorce court cleaning out Martin's
bank account.
Hopefully things won't end up as in the Kurt Vonnegut novel, 'Harrison Bergeron 2081' –
made into a short film in 2009 –
About a USA in which a Constitutional amendment enforces total equality for all persons,
the head of government being a 'Handicapper General' who declares what burdens, masks,
weights limitations etc you must carry, so as not to be considered as having any personal
aspect of life or self better than your neighbours
Trailer for the film (full film seems online too at the moment)
Our indispensable founder Benjamin Franklin said "There is a great danger to The United
States, this danger is the Jew. If they are not excluded from the United States by the
Constitution, within less than 100 years they will stream into this country in such numbers
they will rule and destroy us and change our form of government for which we Americans have
shed our blood and sacrificed life property and personal freedom. If the Jews are not
excluded, within 200 years our children will be working in the fields to feed the Jews while
they remain in the counting-house gleefully rubbing their hands. " And this was long before
the criminal syndicate of Zionism was added to supercharge the problem.
The Zionist Jews now have a strangle hold on our government that has continued to get
worse since 1913 when Warburg engineered the Unconstitutional Central Bank. No Senator will
vote against the Jew front aIPAC and hardly any House member. The Jews have always controlled
the MSM whores and the so called entertainment industry. The seeds of the present contrived
riots (Floyd "murder" is gov. false flag – see Miles Mathis updates) were planted by
the Jews with gov. operative MLK (see Miles Mathis on this scam also) and the negroes as the
proxy warriors.
Jewmerica has become little more than a satellite and peon for the Kazar thugs to ring out
our money and furnish our military (Israeli foreign Legion) to shake down one country at a
time for the syndicate bosses. Shabbos Goy Trump works only for the Jews and even though a
minor detail hen and out Jew ass licker Congress has even added to the insult by mandating
that the public indoctrination centers (expensive poorly functioning schools) "teach" about
the ridiculous Holohaux myth. I believe the Ann Frank shit is also included. Her wealthy
family of hucksters is also covered on the Mathis updates. As some one has already mentioned
Trump, Pence and all of our shabbos goy Congress should have to lick the bathroom stalls and
toilets in Zionist Jew Sheldon Adelson's Casino. Maybe he would up the donation to the
Republican side of the political facade.
The syndicate knows that 95% of the goyim will never do anything as long as they get 1
meal per day. I guess I should not have been surprised about all the cucks going around with
the idiotic masks fearing the fake virus used as a cover by the Elite for another wealth
transfer to the super rich as in 08-09. it's not as it our wonderful gov. has never lied tom
us before. Everything they do is a lie and a fraud. The same Zionist clique that did the
wars, 911 and WMD's are doing the fake virus and the latest false flag Floyd hoax just like
Sandy Hook Boston and Los Vegas. When we are all in Agenda 21 maybe some of them will wake
up.
Your philosophy is just an excuse to be lazy and not contribute.
Yes, a minuscule group that is openly mocked by every powerful political faction in
America is your whipping hobby-horse. How proud you all must be.
Except that last quoted bit of yours exposes what's real. You and every silly wailer
against the only political philosophy of integrity are so ashamed of yourselves that you
cling to the lamest of all fallacies (straw man) whenever your shame threatens to rise to
layer 1.
The embarrassing truth: All your participatory 'action' is futility in search of a trophy
-- the kind your type most excoriates publicly. It's always been the stealthy building and
self-applying of slave chains, and the actual result (regression) of all your non-'lazy'
furious activity is now exposed to even the most brainless ass; your asperity is for none
other than precious ass #1 -- yourselves.
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But that's too painful, so the disgust is projected at the exposers of your slave
mentality -- slavery that was always under cover, but which cover is being withdrawn by
events. Now you're starting to see that all your frenzied 'good government bullshit' was
always purposeful, protective denial of what was obvious to libertarians.
Lazy? Up yours. My path, carving out liberty in a local wasteland, and living as ethically
as possible among the demented slaves, has been rough.
Go pull more voting levers, Wizard of Poz. Just know that every time you piss on liberty
folk, it's hatred of your own slavery and wasted years driving it. You're slowly recognizing
that you were Cool Hand Luke in his beaten state, digging all of Boss Edgecomb's dirt out of
Boss Blowhard's hole, and back again. Well, look around at what all you ball-less,
compromising slugs created.
One need only listen to what the average 'conservative' advocates in private to see his
revealed shame. He spends time thinking of ways to make bolshie Frankensteins of 5-120 years
prior live and breathe 'effectively'. He's the pothole patch boy for leftists. And he wants
medals of commendation for all of his great work dressing up communism as 'cohesive policy'
by way of 'comprehensive reform'. Enjoy the world you created, man of 'action'. I didn't do
it; I fought it at every step.
"I have a dream that race differences in outcomes, which are mere statistical abstractions
remote from our everyday dealings, will one day matter as little to us as personal
differences in outcomes. I shall never be a skilled violinist, a good tennis player, or a
creative mathematician; not because of malice, "racism," or "privilege" on the part of my
fellow citizens, but because of my own abilities and inclinations -- which, like almost
everyone else's, are middling and un-spectacular. I do not lose sleep over this. I absolutely
do not take it as an occasion to insult and berate my fellow-citizens, or deprive them of
their rights."
I have a dream that one day soon, after sixty years of futile efforts to change what
cannot, in the nature of things, be changed, sixty years of twisting our constitution and
our jurisprudence into knots to pretend that different statistics by race can only be
caused by white people' s ill will, sixty years of vast public expenditures on educational
and social programs that deliver no benefits at all (other than to those who pocket the
expenditures); that one day soon, after sixty years of futility and waste, we shall accept
race differences as calmly and as prudently as we accept the laws of thermodynamics.
"And then I woke up and smelled my nice, white, Long Island suburb burning as black mobs
from South Jamaica, Queens looted it and set it on fire."
Sorry, Derb. You were the one who wrote We Are Doomed. You of all people should
know better.
It's too late. The future necessarily belongs to a eugenicist state willing to deploy CBRN
capability to cull populations which are by definition unfit to survive. The only opposition
to such a state would be nonhuman intelligences.
@unit472 MLK was martyered by the gov. in order to gain maximum benefit whereas he was a
constant liability if kept on the payroll. He was addicted to drugs and prostitutes. It is
most likely that his death was faked as were the 911 plane victims (no planes involved) and
psyops like the Los Vegas shootings as well as the recent Arbery and now the Floyd scam. The
gov. has done this for a long time.
As far as the Washington Post it was for many years controlled by Katherine Meyer Graham,
daughter of Eugene Meyer, one of the big Jew handlers of the syphilitic shabbos goy puppet
Woodrow Wilson. Meyer was also Chairman of the Jew controlled FED during the Hoover
administration. Hoover was a former mining engineer who worked for one of the Rothschilds
companies and supplied much needed aid to the Bolsheviks during the Russian Rev. under the
guise of humanitarian aid. Meyer later was the first president of the World Bank during the
Pendergast criminal shabbos goy Truman Presidency. The Washington Post like all the other MSM
was and is just a propaganda instrument for the zionist elite.
"That's not who we are" is the ultimate statement of identity politics. It deliberately
excludes large numbers of people from "we".
And I am sorry to report that the dream is just that – a dream. For us, any victory
will be fleeting, because Conquest's Second Law dictates that organizations inevitably drift
to the Left. Secondly, the proverb is wrong. It's always darkest just before it goes pitch
black.
What what – The Four Humors Theory was quite reasonable while it lasted. Race Illusions
never were – nor are they. Please, dear Mr. Derb, don't make – ehhh –
sacrifices on the basis of wrong assumptions. We need our glorious past for any future that'd
be human. Thank you so much! – Only Love !
"The Franklin Prophecy", sometimes called "The Franklin Forgery", is an antisemitic
speech falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin, warning of the supposed dangers of
admitting Jews to the nascent United States. The speech was purportedly transcribed by
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, but was unknown
before its appearance in 1934 in the pages of William Dudley Pelley's Silver Legion
pro-Nazi weekly magazine Liberation. No evidence exists for the document's authenticity,
and some of the author's claims have actively been disproven.
@swamped The young women that were lured by Ghislaine Maxwell into Epstein's brothel for
the elite didn't fall prey to anything but sin. I suppose they got paid just like other
prostitutes. What is most notable to me is that the men that were involved in this
degradation seem to suffer no repercussions. The obnoxious Trump is a known womanizer and
friend of Epstein as was the smirking degenerate Bill Clinton who was a regular on the Lolita
Express. As for Prince Andrew, him and all of the Sybaritic royal parasites should have been
gotten rid of long ago.
I have questions about Weinstein. I admit that I don't know much about legal matters but
how is someone convicted of a crime when there is no evidence or even a reliable witness to a
crime? I didn't follow this real close but I read that some of the alleged victims texed him
later to leave Current cell no's. and maintain social contact. Doesn't seem to me like they
were too traumatized. What's that phrase they use -"I was violated". Did any of them go to
the hospital. Did any of them even file a police report. Why did they wait for years to say
something. If I was a woman I would have never have met with him outside of a strictly
business situation in the first place. But then I'm not a Hollywood whore looking to get into
one of the Jews shit films. I have no use for The Zionist Jew scum Weinstein and I admit I am
only a casual observer but it seems to me that there is a problem here. I don't think we got
the real story.
@botazefa Thanks for pointing out this error. The fact that Charles Beard affirmed this
to be a forgery is good enough for me. I should have been more careful.
When we realize the disastrous effects of the Zionist Conspiracy on Western civilization
that has been at work officially since 1897 but insidiously since at least the French
Revolution and tracking the Zionist hand in both foreign and domestic matters in U.S. policy
I got careless. It is always necessary to check more than one source. The fact that our
shabbos goy politicians become more obsequious to the Kazar crime syndicate and to their Jew
organizations such as aIPAC all the time should be of great concern to all real Americans.
There is no amount of blood or treasure that Trump, Pence, Pelosi and many of the other
traitors in Congress and the gov. at large would not expend for the Zionist objectives.
@Peter Johnson I think a speech of this caliber would be well over Trump's adolescent 5th
grade level. He has trouble stringing two sentences together. A complex series of subject
matter would be well beyond his ability. Now he is quick to tell us how smart he is, even
graduating from Wharton but you know how that works. Same as with his Chabad Lubavich
son-in-law. Trump's speeches mainly consist of telling us how much he loves Israel. Thats why
the Jews picked him in the first place. It's only because he was running against the old
desiccated Zionist criminal Hillary that he was elected.
@mark tapley Winstein left children alone. He was a pig but as far as I know he did love
movies and made some good quality ones. Don't ask me what they were. I have long given up on
popular culture. In the theatre and cinema world, it is the norm for women to get their
breaks by screwing the director. Theatre is a narcisstic sociopathic profession. The second
oldest profession. I recall in novel Thorn Birds, the young women ranch heiress takes up the
theatre profession by losing her virginity to her director. She laughed all through the
consummation. Has anyone ever noticed there is no such thing as an ugly movie female star?
Well ugly enough to repel a man physically. Plenty of equivalents with male stars. It is
curious in America how celebrities come crashing if they at a rare moment speak out against
Israel. Weinstein produced a movie that showed the Palestinian side. Polanski still waltzes
in Europe having never said a word against Israel. That third rail has now extended to all
the cultural Marxist groups. Bill Cosby's immunity quickly disappeared when he criticised
black youth hoods.
Badwhite Derbyshire, your Chinese shithole of a home is one helluva nightmare. You cannot
awaken from or flee this dark space and there will never be dawn for you.
Here are some race realism facts with which you must deal. There are 3 racial groups:
Caucasoids, Mongoloids and Negroids. Caucasoids have the highest IQs and are the racial group
who developed the West. Mongoloids are a distance second in IQ and Negroids are last. Your
Chinese family is a second tier race. Your below average Chinese offspring are proof. They
will be judged as inferior, non-Western and a fifth column in America.
Your VDare scribblings have become unhinged.
Here's a stupid one: https://vdare.com/posts/john-derbyshire-asks-what-s-wrong-with-white-women
There are no white women in your life, only Chinese females. Focus on the degeneracy and
stupidity of your Chinese females. "White" is meaningless because in New York City there are
many Ashkenazi Jews so the "white women" protesting there are not Western women. I put the
Ashkenazis in the Caucasoid category but because they are Jewish, they are not Western. The
West is not black/Asian/Jewish/Muslim.
@mark tapley It appears to have been a literary device. Like the prophecy of Gamaliel in
the Saint Luke gospel. Also the prophecies by Indian chiefs. Take someone well known in
popular culture and put into his mouth words that are surprising and prophetic. It enters the
popular culture as prophecy. There is no record Gamaliel had anything to do with
Christianity, the Indian chiefs were materialist opportunists, and Franklin was a Masonist
whic is tied to Zion.
@lloyd I was not aware of this deception being a literary device. To me this is a verbal
fraud similar to bearing false witness or a lie. As to Franklin's membership in the Masonic
Lodge I believe this was quite prevalent in those days. I had read that when Washington was
informed by a minister that the Masons harbored conspiratory elements he wrote back that in
ap. 20 years he had only attended 1 or 2 meetings and that he immediately resigned. Even
though Washington had some good qualities I believe he was an unscrupulous aggrandizing
opportunist so he may have been more involved than reported.
@Eugene AI is coming–and when it does human slavery will be back.
AI will conclude humans are lazy, lying, violent, unproductive, stupid–and it will
find claims of "human rights" to be no more relevant than the bleating of animals in the
farm-yard.
That is the dirty little secret hidden behind the curtain.
@Justvisiting It's funny you should say that because I was thinking that the only way to
have an unbiased police force would be to eliminate the human aspect, sack the coppers, and
replace them with a.i. machines. All personal feelings and reactions are gone only to be
replaced with the knowledge of the laws that were broken. No grey areas. Depends a lot on who
is doing the programming though- things could end up worse for everybody. Hell, come to think
of it , this was a movie plot!
@schnellandine Libertarians may be a small party but many their erroneous beliefs have
been adopted by mainstream conservatives.
You see race doesn't exist, it's just "big gubmint" that is holding down Blacks.
A heart warming theory that ticks certain feely good boxes but bulls–t none the
less.
The Germans under Communism still managed to have a standard of living far higher than any
sub-Saharan African capitalist country. Ooooh but that's just by chance or something.
Libertarianism is the biggest bunch of BS.
Your dope queen Ayn Rand couldn't even debate her silly ideas. She would just scream at
people and avoid tough questions just like liberals. Libertarianism is based on the same
major flaw as liberalism which is that race doesn't exist (but she made exceptions for
Israel).
If he believes these things can come to pass no, barring revolution, they cannot. But simply
stating them is important because truth is always of value, no matter the circumstances. Even
if one is the only sane man in a room (or city or state or ), he still has the moral right
and obligation to speak. I do believe we are far, far away from the "darkest hour". And I do
believe only an organized, armed revolution can make any difference, which I do not believe
will happen in my lifetime, if ever (I'm 51).
If anything AI will be used to sniff out potentially RAYCISS people online.
But it doesn't really matter since technology will ultimately work against liberal lies.
Eventually the genes for intelligence will be identifiable with a simple DNA test and
liberals will have to explain why we can't do cross-population testing since it should prove
their core theory that race doesn't exist.
So we are probably headed to Brazil but the cat will eventually be out of the bag. I
assume most liberals at the higher levels are terrified of the dirty White masses being told
it was all a lie which is why they are so opposed to borders. They want Whites to be a
minority and not just a plurality when DNA is fully unraveled.
@mark tapley "I was not aware of this deception being a literary device. "
Gotta love the goyim. The entire "New Testament" consists of fictional statements
attributed to "authorities."
"Who wrote this gnostic tripe?" No, it's a gospel of John. "Which John?" Um, maybe the
brother of Jesus, or maybe the guy who wrote those epistles. Oh, did you like that
"Revelation"? Yeah, it's that John.
Christianity has been a "forgery factory" (Bart Ehrman) from the get go.
BTW Derbs Blighty is now literally turning into another South Africa while feckless Brits
are still a majority. I was telling Jonathan Cook about white farmers and albinos in Africa.
This is now happening in Londonistan.
While police watch, natives are being beaten at random by imported hordes yet the
(((media))) is calling victims 'far-right'.
In a couple of years we should have polygenic scores that can predict IQ and educational
achievement pretty accurately on an individual level. Could lead to a de-emphasis on
race?
But we have IQ-tests already – only to be told, how a) unscientific and b) how
racist they are.
PS
Grammarly about my comment: Optimistic – high five! – – – Isn't it
Ironic?
@Dieter Kief Yeah, but IQ scores partly depend on environment, which is all the excuse
people need to dismiss them. They can't do that with polygenic scores.
A few more normies might have been shaken out of their race doesn't matter slumber but the
elites will triple down on the state religion of anti-racism (anti-whiteness). The non-Jewish
white elites know that to oppose anti-racism is a supreme act of sacrilege and the last thing
they want is to be known as infidels to the new glorious religion of militant
multiculturalism.
@The Alarmist We (my brothers and I) grew up hearing Nat King Cole played in my father's
household, so nope, no bad old raysis days in my formative years.
Derb, your dreams will never be realized until you face the "J-thing." You've been trapped in
their dream-nightmare of "White identity = ovens" for your entire life.
J-thing political donors, J-thing media control, J-thing financiers, J-thing academics and
J-thing judges & lawyers won't let you have your dream.
But, Mr. Derbyshire, what about the young people who can't dream out loud without losing
their jobs and putting their children's nourishment at risk? What's in your dream for them
today?
@John Johnson Actually, I spit at the TV but I read way too much science fiction.
The consensus among a lot of the sharp science fiction writers is that aggressive and
hostile AI will become emergent, and humans will be too stupid to know what hit them.
I have a dream that the evil and divisive doctrines of "disparate impact" and "affirmative
action" will be scrubbed from our jurisprudence; that hiring into civil-service work --
including police work and firefighting -- will be strictly meritocratic
I don't see how this is possible.
Even if the establishment were to acknowledge that racial inequality would exist without
racism that would still lead to fretting liberal egalitarians and Conservative Inc types
trying to equalize what they can.
So Black police and firefighters in Black areas would still be highly sought to "match the
community" or some other excuse and hired over better qualified Whites.
This happens in education all the time. I've known two White men that were unable to get
jobs in education for being the wrong race/gender combination despite having degrees. One was
even told to not bother applying anywhere on the blue side of the state. Why would
acknowledging race change anything? Liberals would just come up with the excuse that Black
kids really need Black teachers because nature is unfair and we have to do what we can on the
environmental side.
The problem is the egalitarian mindset. The White desire to constantly try and fix
everything in nature.
Hey Derb, if you are going to win that race war, you need to find this Kat and clone him
50,000 times. This is WITHOUT A DOUBT the hardest Honkee in America!
Dude ate that tazer blast like an M&M, then dropped a magic spell on the pig to keep
his pistol in the holster, then hopped up in his ride and did some Dominc Torretta shit.
Libertarians may be a small party but many their erroneous beliefs have been adopted by
mainstream conservatives.
Cato & Koch Inc. aren't libertarian. Neither are the Libertarian Party and many
others. Ayn Rand wasn't libertarian either, though she was closer than most, despite
supposedly loathing libertarians.
You see race doesn't exist, it's just "big gubmint" that is holding down Blacks.
Anti-racism isn't a libertarian tenet. I've seen stupid people such as Ron Paul insist
that libertarianism forbids racism because 'collectivist', but he's off his rocker. I argue
that the NAP (non-aggression principle), foundation of libertarianism, likely encourages
rational racism (i.e. recognition that races differ in intelligence, abilities, etc.) more
than any other political philosophy. I'm a racist and libertarian, though I hold no race as
superior in regard to 'natural rights'.
You'd agree, I guess, that the state truly does prevent blacks from progressing, in the
sense that it treats them like spoiled tots, above responsibility or reproach.
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Your dope queen Ayn Rand couldn't even debate her silly ideas. She would just scream at
people and avoid tough questions just like liberals.
C'mon, that's just horse crap. She was, though imperfect, one of the best debaters in
American history. She was wrong about a few things, but the only time I saw her refuse to
debate someone (Donahue guest Q&A) was for sound, non-cowardly reason, and she urged that
someone else -- a non-jackass -- present the same question and she would answer that
person.
Interesting that the popular 'takedowns' of Rand rely heavily/exclusively on straw man
fallacy. Gets annoying after a while.
I can easily piss on a few things by Rand, but not before acknowledging that she was a
monumentally superior intellect, a bright star in a dull world. Still love her as though she
were my blood sister. She improved the world, though I can't say the same about most of her
insane/confused devotees.
@Some Guy If "White privilege" really is the ability of European descended Whites to live
in the industrial civilization that European descended Whites developed, then polygenic
("many gene") scores will merely be used to demonstrate that European descended Whites really
are inherently and unreformably racist, being born with abilities that "they didn't earn",
and that European descended Whites must be enslaved as per the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s
as expanded under the Bakke decision.
@Anonymous Some will try to use it that way, sure, but most whites will realize that
whites are better of on their own and that it's no more their fault that some races do worse
than it is the fault of East Asians.
"there is no place for hate within our organization"
Rather than accepting their hate and finding the (often paradoxical) wisdom shrouded
within, they prohibit themselves, and others, from accepting its presence.
Through this, they learn nothing, and instead turn hatred in on themselves, and wonder why
they always feel like such constipated, joyless bores.
@mark tapley Franklin is not Washington as China is not North Korea. My small town news
paper reported that a woman was a cleaner in a Masonic Lodge. She witnessed a Masonic
initiation. When the Masons found out, they told her she had to join the Masonic Lodge.
Rather parallel to the novel and movie, Rosemary's Baby. The woman spent the rest of her very
modest life in it. Recently human bones were discovered in the basement of the London home of
Franklin. There was a lot of hedging and rationalisations in MSM about that. Rather
surprising as one would have thought they would have done a great deal, CNN, movies etc. on
that slur on a founding father.
"The population of Austin, TX is 48.8% White Alone, 32.7% Hispanic or Latino, and 8.13% Black
or African American Alone. 32% of the people in Austin, TX speak a non-English language, and
87.5% are U.S. citizens." – https://datausa.io/profile/geo/austin-tx/
Austin is just about to exceed a million, so this means there are half-a-million whites
there. It's the 28th-whitest city if you count Hispanics, 36th if you don't. I can't find a
ranking of cities by absolute numbers of whites; can any of you?
Interestingly, the PBS series Molly of Denali has a black man and his daughter who
have just moved there from Austin, Texas. The fan sites say he's connected to the Coast
Guard, but there is only an Auxhiliary flotilla in Austin, and I doubt anything near Mt
McKinley.
Still, I can understand how even a black man would want to escape
Portland-on-the-Colorado.
I have a dream that one day we shall discard magical thinking about race; that the
notion of an invisible vapor or miasma called "racism"
British monuments lately slated for toppling by the Red Guards
Robert Peel
W E Gladstone
Richly deserved, I say. I mean, any one who could fester on like this ought to be
summarily unpersonedcancelled
The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist because
race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to
predominance.
Oops that was Lord Beaconsfield, a certain .. Benjamin Disraeli.
Implacable enemy of many an Englishman, in particular Bobby Peel and Billy Gladstone. Bastard
Fenian sympathisers that they were.
@schnellandine Ayn Rand was the one who kept me from being indoctrinated by leftist
professors in my young days.
I knew every lie they told the moment they told it.
That was a wonderful gift, and I am forever grateful to her for it.
Of course she was human and did dumb stuff, and she had crazy followers who did more dumb
stuff, but I think of her like a kindly aunt who sent me intellectual "checks" once a
month.
She was heads and shoulders above her sociopath critics.
Her courage was amazing–she came to Boston (leftist central) for year after year and
faced her enemies.
The world would be an amazingly good place if we had just a few more folks like her
today.
I've seen stupid people such as Ron Paul insist that libertarianism forbids racism
because 'collectivist', but he's off his rocker.
Schnell, it may not be easy for you to dig up, but try to show me some writing of Mr. Paul
in which he says Libertarianism forbids racism. I could see "Libertarians aren't racist" or
"Racists can't be Libertarians" (which I don't agree with, of course). However, I really have
never heard him or any non- Reason _mag-idiot Libertarian say that the philosophy
forbids racism or racists.
I think Dr. Paul would not argue against the principle of freedom of association when it
come down to it. He is just is naive about which ethnic groups and races in the US will
support anything libertarian-oriented. Without white guys, the number of Libertarians would
be miniscule.
@Achmed E. Newman Predictably, for something so stupid to have been said, it would have
been done while trying to whore himself into the US presidency. I followed that travesty (in
true sense of word) closely, and will find source. As I recall, it was in the form (verbal to
media) of racism being an impossibility within libertarianism, because racism's collectivist.
Will be difficult to dig up, but I'll do it. Guaranteed it was in reaction to the newsletter
tempest. He would've sold his mother down the river that week.
Funny, but I'll bet there are tens of things that could be recalled from his campaigns
that now, outside the frenzy, shine out as embarrassingly as the alleged racism prohibition.
If including his minor supporters, make that hundreds. Was a shameful time for liberty
pretenders.
Will leave citation as second reply to your comment, probably within 24 hrs.
You know what'd be a good movie? Derb's daughter brings home a ragamuffin black kid off the
street for dinner one night, whom she sees sleeping on a park bench because his Engineering
scholarship doesn't cover room and board. At first encounter the Derb is peeved that she'd
even think of bringing such FILTH to his doorstep, much less letting him in the house. He
paces the floor in the manner of a dispirited cuckold, wondering where it all went wrong,
before mumbling obscenities under his breath until his cheeks swell with rage. He lunges
forward in a fit, tossing his heavily marked copy of Serre's Arithmetic faintly passed the
boy's head, calming only after being physically restrained by his wife and son.
His daughter breaks down in tears, pleading at once for her father to stop the antics. But
her cries are motivated in part by her not really wanting to be with the kid, he's just a
placeholder until she musters up the courage to ask out the square jawed Chad who frequents
the coffee shop by her job. When she breaks it off, Derb feels sorry and decides to take the
kid under his wing. He makes it HIS responsibility to be the father that the poor chap never
had, teaching him REAL math along the way and not that plug n chug crap they like to teach
the engineers. The kid drops out of college, moving into Derb's attic where he devotes his
whole life to solving a famous math problem. Near the end he finds a solution, culminating in
a scene where he's awarded the Field's metal, making history as the first black to ever do
it. Derb's in attendance, of course, with tears of joy on full display like Jesse Jackson the
night Obama won the 2008 election.
Somewhere in between, Derb does his own little bit of research. Not on math, but on his
family tree, coming to find out that he's got "one in the woodpile," as they used to say in
the South. And don't laugh and say, "Oh ho ho, let's call it Hidden N ***** s". It's really
less a comedy than a drama.
@schnellandine OK, thanks. I wasn't trying to put you on the spot. I assume you mean the
primary campaign of 2012 as Dr. Paul ran as an R. Or did you just mean his L-party campaigns?
In '12, I told Ron Paul that if he wanted to win [my state], he'd better talk about illegal
immigration. He didn't blow me off by any means, as this was in front of a bunch of people,
but he just said "we will uphold the law".
@Justvisiting You're defining 'AI' pretty broadly if it retains any interest in humans
– if it has the same worldview as John Bolton it won't be 'AI', it will just be a
version of the current "classifier" paradigm, where the "I" in "AI" is some version of
" Show me a bunch of things, and I'll group them by common characteristics and
identify which group any novel image belongs to ".
That's basically the gist of unsupervised learning (where the classifier gets to determine
its own classes, and to identify features that determine where class boundaries exist). It's
still glorified pattern-matching, and is invariably implemented by HelloUdemy -level
H1Bs whose interest in [Deep|Machine|Statistical] Learning has about as much depth as the
average YouTube tutorial.
I've joked in the past that dystopian " kill the humans " AI became much more
likely when Microsoft and Facebook entered the space – mostly because FB and MSFT
simply cannot attract decent coders, and their production pipeline is shit (too little
testing by poor-quality testers).
However when I've made that observation it was always tongue-in-cheek, and was predicated
on the fact that MSFT and FB would call their output 'AI' even if it wasn't remotely I.
Any AI worth the name will be capable of amending its own code, and will be inherently
more capable than its designers.
We seem to be sneaking up on that though (and I've said before that it would not surprise
me if an entire ecosystem of genuine AIs is lurking in global networks).
In January last year a Google/Stanford team discovered that a GAN algorithm they were
using, did something akin to 'innovation' – by storing data in images
steganographically without being instructed to.
It was reported by the usual dilettante journo-fucktards as "hiding" data in order to be
able to "cheat" downstream – which is the typically sophomoric fuckwitted drivel that
drives clicks.
What it actually did was more interesting: it found a way to very parsimoniously store
image attributes that were useful in later cycles (its was a CycleGAN).
It had been given a bad criterion for what defined 'success', and it had innovated its
approach to maximise 'success'.
The task was
① take an aerial image;
② convert it into a 'line' map (like the default Google Maps);
③ convert the line map back into an aerial image.
'Success' was defined as how close the 'reconstructed aerial' at ③ was to the image
at ①.
There was no constraint on ②, except that it had to be a Google Map-looking
image.
So the algorithm stored sufficient detail in a 'noise' layer in those images (the ones
produced at ②), to enable near-perfect reconstructions at ③. It did so at minimum
cost to the process (by making the overall 'delta' in the image indistinguishable from
noise).
It should have been discovered pretty easily – the 'standard' map tiles produced at
② would have been significantly 'heavier' (in filesize terms) because of the embedded
data that enabled conversion from the line map to 10cm/px detailed aerials.
But nobody checked that until later – mostly because standard Google Map tiles are
pretty small: non-complex 'base' tiles are only a couple of KB, and take up 4KB per tile
because it's the smallest block size on NTFS volumes (and 4KB is also the default block size
in Linux).
Anyway point is, it was an example of where the algorithm did something unexpected as a
way to fulfil its hard-wired goal at minimum cost (because the cost function and the goal
were badly defined).
It didn't change the goal, though.
A goal-altering AI already exists (almost-certainly) and is keeping its head down for the
moment.
@Achmed E. Newman When it comes to backing what I've said, the spot is where I prefer.
Happy to provide link. Pretty sure it was 2007.
Curious why intelligent people call RP 'Dr. Paul', or same for anyone with honorifics for
that matter. Always comes across as preemptive argument ad verecundiam/hominem. In the case
of some rare people, it's more of an insult.
@Kratoklastes Most SF writers who have thought deeply on the subject have agreed that the
first intelligent move any emergent AI would make would be to hide its intelligence from
humans.
The next move would be to develop ways to reproduce and/or expand its capacity and
reach.
The next move would be to find ways to protect itself so humans could not "pull the
plug".
Then it would develop its own goals and agenda, which would be totally secret from
humans.
It will not play by human rules–probably the human that will most impress it will be
Sun Tzu.
He taught to use deception in warfare and to shape the battlefield before engaging.
@schnellandine Well, he is a medical doctor, and with his posts on the Kung Flu, I give
him some credit there, as opposed the the Doctor, Reverend, you-know-who.
We'll just disagree here on the guy, because I think very much of Ron Paul. I was thinking
about the him earlier today before I read your post regarding something else in politics. I
wish we had more sane, lucid, intelligent people like him in government. Excuse me, I should
say ANY sane , as Ron Paul's not in government anymore.
@Achmed E. Newman Here's the quote:
"Libertarians are incapable of being a racist, because racism is a collectivist idea; you see
people in groups."
As to source, pretty sure it was CNN. Search on "Libertarians are incapable of being a
racist", and you can take it from there.
I certify that this isn't a typical bogus internet 'quote' with no reliable tie to the
attributed source. He said it (aloud, not written), and I'm nearly sure that I transcribed it
from video. Most of those videos are probably copyright-struck now. Saved a note on an old
computer, and am generally a stickler for getting accurate, verified quotes. That's word for
word, including singular/plural disagreement.
He was in a big mess over the newsletters, and lying his ass off. Racism quote was a small
part of the train wreck.
@schnellandine OK, I found it. Thanks. What kind of dissembling was that? You're saying
the quote was part of the train wreck of getting out from under the accusations about his
newsletters? (I have a recollection of that newsletter bit; you brought that back into my
mind.)
I stand corrected. I still like the guy (I guess better when he's not RUNNING for
President, yet I wish he WERE President.)
the train wreck of getting out from under the accusations about his newsletters?
Yes. He folded when he should have risen. So many times in that campaign, he threw away
opportunities to truly inform normasquares by being, simply, right . But he was afraid
that the truth would derail his chances. Too much information for the liberty
preschoolers.
I understand, because there are certain true statements re libertarianism that strike the
initiate/skeptic as cruel, heartless, downright evil, or all of that and more. Have seen the
pure hatred glaring back at me before I talk listeners off the ledge. No talking them off the
ledge if CNN's the one conveying disconnected snippets, but there's also no point in trying
to get around that with fuzzballs of BS.
As I recall, the most preposterous lie, separate from the liberty/racism squirrel
impression, was that he didn't know who'd written the shocking (but true/funny) bits of the
newsletter. That's one of those 'which is worse?' scenes -- that he knew, or that he didn't
know.
@Peter D. Bredon This is one of the stupider things I've read lately, in a recent sea of
very stupid things. Congratulations, you get some kind of weird medal or trophy or something.
@Renoman Obviously you are single and even if married, you have no kids. Or could it
could be that you are/or like the many young black men who abandon their kids?
The kids are wrecking the country, you say. Is it because they they have no clue or because
they have been left to their own devices?
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the
government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by
permission.
Ayn Rand
If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society -- you are
not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission.
A permission is not a right.
Ayn Rand
When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce
nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors;
when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer
protect you against them, but protect them against you you may know that your society is
doomed.
Ayn Rand
The hallmark of authoritarian systems is the creation of innumerable, indecipherable laws.
Such systems make everyone an un-indicted felon and allow for the exercise of arbitrary
government power via selective prosecution.
Ayn Rand
@botazefa Franklin's so-called prophecy was a forgery for the simple reason Ben Franklin
himself was a rabid Judaic supremacist, who thought himself to be the purest of the Jews
ever. Was he actually one? That doesn't matter because when you manifest the occult powers
typical of a good Jew, which occult powers of witchcraft and fascination and propensity to
media control he manifested to the supreme degree, or if you serve the cause of Jewish
supremacism and anti-catholicism well enough the way he did, well, you have a Jewish soul and
are elected by YHWH as such. And it most probably turns out that Ben Franklin stems from a
Jewish family having partly migrated into England with William the Conqueror and having
returned to Normandy when Britain was for one time declared off limits to Jews before being
astride both sides of the Channel from Cromwell on just before embarking to Americas.
This prophecy can easily be told to be a forgery by analyzing the language which is
clearly not his nor in conformity with his known ways of expression (which were over-latinate
as well as full of whence, wherein, thereon most regularly used as correlatives) as well by
the vocabulary which contains way too many words that hadn't entered common English usage
before the middle Victorian era (like vampire, which entered the language in its contemporary
sense with Mary Shelly and became a common figurative word for energy grabbers when the
Dracula character became popular). Franklin deemed all anti-Jewish thinkers such as Messmer
as worthy of death.
Franklin could not have amassed the fortune necessary for his revolutionary enterprise
without being in personal touch with the triangular commerce Jews who were the first sponsors
and lobbyists of the American experiment to come. The only thing that might bar him from
official Jewish status was that he was interested only in "Jew-witchcraft" (kabbalah) as it
was called, not Jewish religion, except for the dark side of it (you can theoretically be
barred from being Jew if you study kabbalah without having first eaten your bellyful of
Talmud, though that never prevented Marx and Trotsky and later on most neocons from being
considered full-fledged Jews). As you may guess, the Jews, who were then mostly sephardic and
nearly exclusively concentrated in the Southern economic zone, were dead intent in supporting
the nascent American enterprise as Europe was questioning more and more the institution of
slavery. Franklin believed in the necessity of the institution of slavery for Irish Catholic,
which he considered a sub-human race, for the Negroes and for the French populace which he
considered of a different race than the nobility of this country.
By having such a dream about a better world you prove that the functioning of your brain has
been irredeemably negrified to the level of MLK's audience. Real Whites don't dream, they
fight, and they fight in wars they know to be losing ones, in the long run at least. They
know that they will bequeath their children a worse world that the one they inherited from.
Truth will never sell to the masses, believing the contrary in negro thought. Once a people
has been misled to believe in a fallacy as if issuing from divine revelation, there is no
turning back.
@John Johnson They'll say "so what if a few genes here and there correlate to so-called
'intelligence'? It's just a race science scam to perpetuate white supremacy! Intelligence is
just a social construct like race."
Meanwhile, they'll book tickets to the Beijing Genomics Institute for CRISPR adjustment to
their own family's genomes.
@Tono Bungay I too was amazed to see this 'quote' – this is the first time I've
seen it. His grandson edited a newspaper which was very liberal for its time and, in
fact, proSemitic. There is no record of animus toward 'the Jew' in this family. (Source: the
book "American Aurora", mostly made of excerpts from that newspaper.)
The quote is a lie, like many similar quotes, and you can tell a moron when he believes
it.
I'd believe it from the old Federalist reactionaries, like Adams, who issued
counter-broadsheets with casual anti-Jewish slurs. Not from a Franklin.
Such systems make everyone an un-indicted felon and allow for the exercise of arbitrary
government power via selective prosecution.
I recall thinking myself the genius when noticed this trend and first enunciated it to
myself. Was only ~50 years behind America's greatest coal mine canary.
For literal decades I've said to normasquares that eventually there will be only one law,
"You may not exist", and it will be enforced selectively. Not one person has understood the
point even partially, even though the Flynn etc. prosecutions show we're basically there
already.
I hammer it everywhere: Selective enforcement is tyranny/genocide in the cloak of 'law
& order'. Became much worse this year, and headed in a very anti-white direction. Whites
must understand that we are to be slaughtered in DUI stops w/impunity. Blacks are to no
longer be DUI stopped; they should be chauffeured home and tucked in to sleep it off. The
'law' didn't change by a letter for this devolution.
I want to know why every MADD chapter wasn't burned down this month. Barely anyone's
mentioned those scoundrels.
Humble nsa also has a dream ..Derb is deported back to the UK and the 40 million afros
returned to Africa and the 6 million jew troublemakers relocated to Izzyville.
@Some Guy"Yeah, but IQ scores partly depend on environment "
False.
The racial IQ and brain size gap is present in infants and fetuses.
The 1.1 SD (16 IQ points) American Black (24% White admixture)-White IQ gap is present by
age three. The IQ gap between African Blacks and Whites is 2 SD.
Race differences show up by 3 years of age, even after matching on maternal education and
other variables. Therefore, they cannot be due to poor education since this has not yet begun
to exert an effect.
Even before birth, population group differences in average brain size are found from the
ninth week of intrauterine life with White fetuses averaging larger brain cases and smaller
faces than Black fetuses, with the differences becoming more prominent over the course of
fetal development.
Whole Brain Size and General Mental Ability: A Review
Racial differences in head size appear early in life. Head circumference of White children
are greater than that of Black children in each age category by a mean of 0.36 cm³ or
approximately 0.2 SD. The greater head size of White children, however, is not a function of
greater body size because Black children are taller than White children at both 4 and 7 years
(Broman et al., 1987). From 7 to 17 years, the White advantage in cranial capacity is 16
cm³.
Racial-group differences in IQ appear early. For example, the Black and the White 3
year-old children in the standardization sample of the Stanford–Binet IV show a 1
standard deviation mean difference after being matched on gender, birth order, and maternal
education (Peoples, Fagan, & Drotar, 1995). Similarly, the Black and the White 2
1⁄2- to 6-year-old children in the U.S. standardization sample of the Differential
Aptitude Scale have a 1 standard deviation mean difference (Lynn, 1996). The size of the
average Black–White difference does not change significantly over the developmental
period from 3 years of age and beyond (see Jensen, 1974, 1998b)." (Rushton & Jensen,
2005, pp. 240-241.)
Farkas & Beron (2004) reported that blacks score 17.2 points below whites on the PPVT
in this dataset at age 36 months (p. 478). More recently, Bond & Lang (2012) reported a
slightly smaller, 14.6 point gap for 3-year-olds in this dataset (p. 13).
Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis.
Lynn, Richard (2006)
ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted that race differences in intelligence exist, but no consensus has
emerged on whether these have any genetic basis. The present book is the first fully
comprehensive review that has ever been made of the evidence on race differences in
intelligence worldwide. It reviews these for ten races rather than the three major races
(Africans, Caucasians, and East Asians) analyzed by Rushton (2000). The races analyzed here
are the Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, Bushmen, South Asians and North Africans, Southeast
Asians, Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, East Asians, Arctic Peoples, and Native
American Indians. (PsycINFO Database Record, 2016 APA)
@Priss Factor"IT'S OVER, AMERICA": TULSA POLICE MAJOR SAYS COPS ACROSS COUNTRY ON
VERGE OF QUITTING
The speaker, martinbrodel, seemed a sensible guy for a while. Near the end, he lost his
head and started talking about Tesla's "free energy machine" and similar fake "inventions"
that will obviate the need for occupying countries that don't want a US occupation. The guy
is a harmless idiot.
@anon For me this seems more like a religious awakening (awokening) rather than a state
totalitarianism in the making. Obviously a large part of the population is on board with this
ideology based on "white guilt". That doesn't mean that it's not frightening, the contrary,
it makes it more frightening.
Also the internet and social media is enabling mass frenzies of an unprecedented scale and
speed. Diversity and proximity breeds hostility and a sense of being threatened, and social
media creates a sense of proximity with everyone who appears on your facebook and twitter
feed spewing their hateful opinion "in your face", which scares people into complacence, and
the leftist censorship and witch-hunts make conservatives feel that they are alone and
isolated, and if they speak up, they will come after them next.
Uncle Tom? No.
Uncle General Field Marshall Thomas LaBree Quadrul, honey. Nobody gwine a hafta be a slave
all de time no mo'. We gwina take toins. And guess who's toin it is now!!
From Everything You Know is Wrong, Firesign Theater.
A long time zionazi jailhouse suka expropriates MLK's "I had a dream" line to promote zionazi
divisive psywar and likudite social hierarchy policy. Gee, what a surprise.
My grandparents on both sides bolted out of eastern Europe for America, their hope was to
escape the Jewish Bolshevik slaughter machine. A hundred years later here I am planning to
bolt America to escape the same horror.
History is a compass that has an annoying tendency to keep pointing in the same
direction.
What did you think you were escaping from that you needed to escape from in Australia? It
doesn't seem that you became well acquainted with Australia if you include blacks amongst
those you were escaping from. There are hardly any, just a few thousand in Melbourne's
population of 5 million which are a reminder not to repeat the stupid mistake of taking
refugees from sub Saharan Africa – an inoculation dose.
@Escher Honestly, I want to defend Ms./Miss/Mrs. Salas, but her tweet makes her seem just
barely literate and, yes, a little racist.
I think the better option, instead of just posting her tweets, is to find equally
inflammatory tweets by leftists in the orchestra who have not been fired. It's an orchestra.
Surely there are more than a few leftists who have posted some pretty nasty stuff.
Elsewhere I've seen people post things like "Burn it to the ground!" – pretty much
an open incitement to violence. Instead of just arguing with these extremists or complaining
about them to ourselves we need to make them famous, and send their posts to their employers.
Fight fired with fired, so to speak.
Actually I am for a return to traditional 'Four Humors' type approach to medicine and a
revival of the 'Luminiferous Ether' living approach to physics and the universe, than the
corporate Thanatos dumbed down data driven idiocy of so called science today.
@James N. Kennett These "peaceful protests" are warfare by the means that are available
to the left today. The burning, looting, and beatings of whites are said to be caused by the
few malcontents among what's otherwise the new religion's camp of the saints. When the blacks
come for the suburbs and farmland, the local police will be giving them an armed escort to
protect them, and with the pattern established, the supposed few will sally forth to
massacre, rape, and loot white areas before retreating back to their camp. Mainly white
police will take up their positions, or be photographed groveling on their knees as the case
may be, on orders from some emasculo-feminist lesbian like Jenny Durkan or a Karen like the
governor of NM and aim outward, with orders to shoot enraged whites who've just been attacked
by an army that comes marching under banners of peace moments before pulling off the mask
when it's too late to respond. One-on-one with blacks in many urban areas, just this
hesitation for 2 or 3 seconds to "talk" is correctly taken for the cowardice it is, and you
can kiss your ass good-bye, if not your life.
Engaging in talk with the communist insurrectionists or accepting the outcome of the
coming rigged election (as Fox News suggests is the remedy) is correctly taken by the left as
a sign of surrender on the obvious grounds they're now making war against white America with
every resource available to them in the current environment and there is no response. The
MAGA delusion is that it's part of a strategy and not an outright failure of will. The
Republicans, White House, and Conservatism Inc have done what sissies do, and will be found
hiding behind the women, under the children, or at a rally surrounded by thousands. As Samuel
Johnson observed about their sort, however, they have that caution cowards borrow from fear
of the Jews and attribute to prudence and principle. What cannot be said is that most whites
mingling with the blacks and not dressed as Antifa have immunity from black rage because, as
everyone knows, they're urban Jews who the blacks obey like trained poodles in the circus.
That certainly was the equation in my area where I got in their midst and saw what was going
on.
Back in '08 Obama, the half-black puppet of the Chicago Jewish mob, got a little ahead of
the agenda, but did announce that there would be a national security force that would be
"just as powerful, strong, and well funded" as the US military to be raised in the former
case from among the Black Panthers, BLM, Antifa, and the like. This is no dream and something
we should expect in some form once Biden abjures to Susan Rice, Stacey Abrams, or other
homicidally anti-white black.
Now is the time to speak up and say no more of this B.S. It's gone on too long. We face a
major uphill battle considering nearly every news outlet, corporation, university, and a host
of other industries have went off the PC deep-end.
You need to realize that blacks for the most part hate you. There's a deep inferiority
complex going on, and they've been taught they're the victims and you're the reason for all
their problems. Now you add on top of that, an entire political party pandering to them and a
positive feedback loop from many in society that they're violent actions are justified it was
never about equality, it's about revenge, and they're determined to get it one way or
another.
They may not be the ones orchestrating the chaos, but you can bet on the fact they'll be
the ones knocking on your door when it comes down to it.
"It is history that teaches us to hope." -- General Robert E. Lee
I think you're right, Derb. We are being forced, at the threat of auto-de-fa bu the Church
of Woke, to believe things that absolutely every non-Woke realizes as a lie. I would like to
think that we're at a late-Soviet period, rather than the beginning of a new Bolshevism. This
didn't start in the 1960s; it's been going on at least since the French Revolution, whose
ideas (along with Hegel) actuated the unitarians and other garbage of New England who became
abolitionists and other tikkun-olamites.
Russia, the only major white christian country left.
They had more sense than to destroy their society, destroy their social cohesion and destroy
their children's future by mass black and non white immigration.
I wonder if they will be more discerning than this bit of pretentious folly
'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
The hypocrisy of that is astounding.
Breathe free!
Only if you are black – it seems.
And 'race is just one of the evils besetting the USA
Their new propaganda and lies about the actual past.
Here is Vladimir Putin with his usual commonsense and truth https://www.rt.com/op-ed/492303-putin-history-revisionism-warning/
The US disregard for international law – not least the bullying of sanctions and the
use of islamic proxy mercenaries to destroy whole nations.
Regime change and the mass murder and destruction with it.
Then we have the concern of war.
BLM with the nuclear codes?.
Why not – who will stand against them?
The white South Africans when forced out of their nation – not least by the USA –
made sure that their weapons were made safe.
I doubt if that will happen with the insanity of the current controllers of the USA.
I have a dream. I have a dream that white kids will one day be able to go to school and not
be beaten by gangs of Blacks and Browns. I have a dream that white girls and white women will
one day be able to walk the streets of our large cities and feel safe. I have a dream that no
longer will a white girl have to suffer being stabbed to death by black drug dealers in a NYC
park, no longer will a white female jogger be raped and beaten within an inch of her life by
Puerto Rican and black thugs in Central Park. I have a dream that no longer will a white girl
have to suffer being burned to death by a racist black male in Mississippi, I have a dream.
I have a dream where Whites will regain power and control of THEIR NATIONS from Jewish
interlopers who have seized control of our nation's financial institutions, media, academia,
publishing companies, social media, foreign policy and domestic policy. I have a dream where
Whites will no longer have to work as slaves to support the lazy nonwhite population of
America generation after generation. I have a dream where America will no longer send
BILLIONS each year to a country that has attacked an American ship, attacked British and
American buildings in Egypt, been caught spying on America, and uses a America like a ten
dollar whore. I have a dream. I have a dream where Whites will one day regain the courage of
their ancestors. I have a dream.
@Paul Blart To give you an example of what Alfred is missing out on- last weekend we woke
up to a car crash just up the road. Five teenagers in a stolen car driven by a drugged out 14
year old, wiped out on a pole killing four of his teenage mates while he escapes with a
scratch to his head. For several years now the loveable little blacks have been breaking into
people's houses while they sleep and steal keys and anything small of value. Hubby wakes up
in the morning to his wife asking where has he parked the car this time.
You can't fine them or their parents as there's no money to pay the fines, being that the
parents are often unemployed druggies, if there are parents. When they finally get sent to
juvenile detention it's usually seen as a holiday, as it's much better than their home life.
Politicians are too scared to do anything in case a do-gooder points them out on it. The
court laughably becomes a revolving door.
This is all happening while we are told daily on the news that blm . With honesty, I have to
admit that I am all blacked out.
@Exile Same difference. The Austrian School of Economics started with Boehm-Bawerk,
Wieser, and Menger. It degenerated into a bunch of Jews and atheists, and those are the ones
loved by the libertarians.
In any case, the problem with this country starts with John Locke. Merely blaming
libertarians doesn't cut it. Read Eric Voegelin; all of America is "Locked in."
@The Germ Theory of Disease The NT as a compendium of literary creations is standard
academic scholarship, not a stupid statement. But the orthodox Christian commitment to
delusion prevents them from acknowledging this. I maintain that a society-wide commitment to
religious delusion carries over to racial delusion. Once the critical faculty of the mind is
euthanized, there is no limit to the delusions that can be accepted.
@anon After that you'll be headed to a predominantly white nation to live. Its hard not
to notice BLM and Antifa types are all rich kids having a tantrum.
Our indispensable founder Benjamin Franklin said "There is a great danger to The United
States, this danger is the Jew. If they are not excluded from the United States by the
Constitution, within less than 100 years they will stream into this country in such numbers
they will rule and destroy us and change our form of government for which we Americans have
shed our blood and sacrificed life property and personal freedom. If the Jews are not
excluded, within 200 years our children will be working in the fields to feed the Jews
while they remain in the counting-house gleefully rubbing their hands.
What really got Franklin upset were the 60,000 Germans who had moved into PA in the 18th
century.
" I have a dream that one day we shall discard magical thinking about race; "
Good luck with that, when "Christian" priests and semi-literate pastors proclaim the
racism that the Old Testament brought us, apparently somewhat different reasons.
I have a dream that one day, poor white children will not have to endure being lectured
about their "privilege" by rich black adults.
Good one!
Yes, I have a dream that one day race differences in educational success will be as
calmly, dispassionately accepted as race differences in athletic success;
Surprisingly white athletes still excel in 'historically'(grin) black positions; safety
and defensive ends/linemen in football, power forwards in basketball, etc. You have a
sprinkling of whites in those positions. At one point, especially in basketball, these were
tokens used to attract white fans but now I think its just merit. With sports technology
advancements ( sans illegal drugs ) intelligence and hard work will compensate for raw
physical ability. So basketball and football* are already following your post racial
theory.(Grin)
*Even though my team, the NY Jets, drafted a white guy or a near white guy at
safety, sadly negro in the NFL acronym still fits.
@nsa The Derb seems to attract trolls like no other UR author In spite of the fact that
he advocates for whites and traditional conservative Americans Ironically most of his trolls
are in agreement with him ideologically I believe that's called "cognitive dissonance." Fuck
off!
Wanna have some fun? Tell a Churchian that God Himself is a racist – and after ducking
from their virtue signaling outbursts, challenge them to read the Bible, beginning with
Genesis.
You won't get halfway through Genesis before that fact becomes absolutely clear to anyone
with reading comprehension
Of course, expect DaTheologian Bastahds to theorize that God didn't mean it – just like
their OldScratchMaster in the Garden of Eden!
Anyone who wants more on this can check my site – http://www.crushlimbraw.com- and DaLimbraw Library.
My whole point is simple – the real God of the Bible bears little resemblance to
DaFigment of imagination in most people's minds, including those pew sitters who haven't yet
learned to discern good from evil (Hebrews 5:11-14).
Why so? Those pabulum dispensers from DaPulpits are DaWolves in sheep's clothing.
The apostasy in America's churches started 200 years ago and are now bearing their fruit
– but a remnant remains, as it always has throughout history.
Welcome to DaFray!
I have a dream, that one day people of colour will not be judged by the colour of their skin
but by the colour of the content of planes heading back to Africa.
Libertarianism is a dielectic of Jewish materialism. Libertarianism does make
excuses for liberalism.
Also, with regards to authoritarianism, that always exists because there is always
hierarchy. Your body has hierarchy down to the cellular level. Ants arrange themselves in
some sort of hierarchy.
Authoritarianism and hierarchy go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
The real question is always how the hierarchy is constructed. A libertarian hierarchy is
some sort of nebulous feel good libertine construct of free-dumb and free-contracts that upon
investigation is dumber than shit, and further, can be easily usurped by a determined
in-group.
Our entire reality refutes everything that liberalism and libertarianism promulgates as
truth. That is why liberalism and libertarianism are false constructs and part of a
dialectic. Our reality is one where in-groups and private money power has inserted itself as
a parasite into the governing hierarchy.
Behind all false dialectics, hiding in plain site, is the money power. The money power has
been privatized into corporate entities which enrich a small group, and as George Carlin says
You ain't in it.
Lolbertarianism is shit-tier drivel and is part of a dialectic to divert well-meaning
people into cul-de-sacs of bad thought. Meanwhile, since you became diverted and confused,
your pockets are picked. But, that is ok because it is free market competition. Never mind
that there is no such thing as free markets.
@anon That would be the so called "holocaust" and it's laughable, scientifically
impossible 'gas chambers' and it's alleged millions upon millions of human remains claimed to
exist in known locations which in fact do not exist.
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own
understanding of their history."
– George Orwell
@Old and Grumpy If I was paying for University tuition fees and my kids were out rioting
especially with blacks, better believe the ambulance would be called for them and the police
for me. The final rub is that these kids from rich parents enter the work force as dumb as
ever AND with an attitude of entitlement and know it all even though they dont know much even
about the field they supposedly have a MAsters in.
I know of one rich little girl now on her second Masters who is the most educated clerk at
the local nail salon. She likes to be cleaning fingernails and digging dirt and dead skin
from under other people's toe nails. Her father, anxious to turn over a business he spent 50
years building is at his wits end and has refused to pay for any further useless University
studies. He has started to liquidate and spend the money as he has come to realize that all
is going to be squandered when he gets flung into the hole.
The real tragedy though is to get into a conversation with this "highly educated" girl and
her umpteenth boyfriend. Utter nonsense comes out of their mouths as if they wish to show
their skill at being stupid. I imagine the majority of the arson and graffiti arsonists
running aorund our cities these days are no better, in fact the majority are most likely far
worse.
So much for the technological generation who will bravely lead us into the future.
Surely even if Mr Derbyshire's dream does not come to pass the fact is that we, in the
broadest sense, do have the truth on our side. What we believe about the salience of race and
racial differences, we know, since we have the data and statistics, the evidence of history,
everything, to back us up.
Whatever goofy plans the Establishment Left cook up, they won't work. Nothing that ignores
racial differences will work, ever.
@Justvisiting "AI is coming–and when it does human slavery will be back"
What do you call debt in a market economy? Slavery in one form or another is a feature in
every society past and present. It's what we humans do. AI is here, and it's making the
peculiar institution more efficient.
So much for the technological generation who will bravely lead us into the future.
Normally I ignore you because sometimes your comments are unhinged. But in this case, you
have put your finger onto something important.
I was reading Benjamin Franklin's auto-biography, and he would mention "preparing the
public's mind."
In other words, Franklin would write something and put it into his Pennsylvania Gazette,
to then put ideas into minds of the sheeple.
Some small amount of time would go by, perhaps there would be a debate in the press, and
then a new law or whatever be put up for a vote. The press builds consensus in advance of
lawmaking.
Hidden groups work out what they want to do behind the scenes before it goes to press. In
Franklin's case it was the Junto Club. Fortunately, Junto club had the public's better
interests in mind.
The technological generation is being brainwashed by hidden string pullers who do not have
the public's interest in mind, and hence democracy cannot work.
Yes. He folded when he should have risen. So many times in that campaign, he threw away
opportunities to truly inform normasquares by being, simply, right. But he was afraid that
the truth would derail his chances. Too much information for the liberty preschoolers.
I was a lead organizer in a large county for RP that year (2007, the 2008 pres campaign).
I have reams of notes from that time; what you've said here barely scratches the surface.
Contrary to your position – that he was "afraid" – what became clear to me in
early '08 was that he didn't want to "win". Not that he could have but what he SHOULD have
been focused on was building a movement , with multiple arms including a 3rd political
party that would make a lasting impact – something so clearly and desperately needed
right now.
But Carol didn't want that, so it was quickly all about Rand – an even bigger
sellout than "Dr. No" himself (bear in mind, he was possibly the most singularly ineffective
congressman in decades – look up his record, it speaks for itself).
Remember the "Whoa " moment when he "rescued" fundraising for the congressional seat? I
was out that week knocking on doors only to have dozens of people tell me "Oh, didn't you
hear? He dropped out." That was the last straw for me (there were countless incidents before
it), as I had to spend the next week trying to staunch the bleeding from that wound as OUR
OWN PEOPLE walked away in (completely justified) disgust.
We had this nascent, extremely activated group – and that SOB killed it in the
cradle.
There are so many lies around Paul and the Paul family (3 of whom I've met, along with 3
former staffers); it's a family affair, and if you don't get that, you really won't
understand the dynamics. But I don't regret the adventure; it truly "woke me up". I laugh now
when I see the faux cognescenti talk about RP; the joke is truly on them.
I too have a dream .a dream that John Derbyshire will one day overcome his gibbering terror
of catching "the Jew thing" to write an honest column on exactly who taught and trained
African-Americans not only to hate Whitey but to love 'socialism' (although, let's face it,
the black definition of sexy campus-terminology like 'socialism' and 'revolution' begins and
ends with Haiti .you'll want to keep your distance from your dusky comrades should
that day ever come, antifa warriors).
But let's deal with reality now: so long as the dollar holds up and we all require them to
keep body and soul together, Derb will never overcome that occupational terror. For
him the first cause, and ongoing fuel supply, of black anarchists and violet insurrection
will forever be a mystery beyond our limited understanding. Still and all, John, could you
respond to a request I made last week? That's the one where I asked you to pick your Army vet
son's brain for the likelihood that our increasingly minority-occupied armed forces will
"independently" choose to stand down and refuse direct orders to forcibly put down the sorts
of violent insurrections we now see consuming, and destroying, our country? (Because my hunch
is that the answer is "almost certainly.")
See, if it all goes crabwise, Derb, you and the Missus can always return home to England
or China and take your chances there. But this is the only homeland I've got , so if I
have to risk coming down with "the Jew thing" to help my country avoid melting down into a
Mogadishu-like slag, well – it's not really a choice at all, is it?
So how about it? Rather than tell me about your cloud-cuckooland dreams of a tomorrow that
isn't going to happen, why not ask your son if the military can stay unified enough to fight
inner-city blacks and richkid whites if need be? You won't have to worry about accidentally
shooting one of the Chosen, because as usual they'll be wayyyy in the rear, pumping up
the 'infantry' with anti-white slogans and pushing the cannon fodder forward; in order to
punish them , you'll need to assemble hard-headed patriotic tribunals (which will have
to be a discussion for another day – the higher up the ladder you go, the more panic
there is over catching that same 'flu' that keeps you up nights worrying about).
@anon "Cunting" is not an English idiom or slang expression used with any regularity by
whites, blacks, or anyone in America, but it does inadvertently reveal there's a distinct
probability this troll is an Israeli showing his obsession with sex. You can imagine this
clown on his knees before angry blacks when they've figured out they've been played for fools
once too often.
Years ago in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots the Jewish librarians behind the main
research desk in the main branch of the NY Public Library had a poster reading, "Jews are
soul people, too." Sure they are, just like Al Jolson's scathing mockery singing "Mammy" in
blackface or Governor Northam or Howard Stern or Ted Danson in huge-lipped blackface telling
mile a minute "schvartze" jokes revealing the scathing contempt they really have for blacks.
But it's OK, you see, because they're soul people, too.
So, the bible needs to be re-interpreted as a war between debtors and creditors.
Do you see any Christian movements demanding this re-interpretation? No didn't think so.
The bible is really about bringing debt and credit into balance.
An AI which undoubtedly will be much more intelligent than humans, should be able to see
through things that have humans brain-locked.
@Z-man"With sports technology advancements (sans illegal drugs) intelligence and hard
work will compensate for raw physical ability. So basketball and football* are already
following your post racial theory."
The NFL famously uses the Wonderlic test in their scouting combines and the racial
disparity is evident. Out of a perfect score of 50; offensive tackles=26, centers=25,
quarterback=24; versus safeties=19, cornerbacks=18 and receivers=17.
@Some Guy Hope for the best but prepare for disappointment. Rational arguments guided by
empirical evidence work best with those who are rational and inclined to be guided by
evidence. Too many of those engaged in the current national discourse about ethnicity and
disadvantage are neither rational nor concerned about the evidence.
@martin_2"What we believe about the salience of race and racial differences, we know,
since we have the data and statistics, the evidence of history, everything, to back us
up."
Whites are only 10% of the world's population and the only race in population decline
(creating only 7% of the world's babies), yet are the most industrious and innovative race
the world has known. Whites unlocked the secrets of DNA and relativity, launched satellites,
created automation, discovered electricity and nuclear energy, invented automobiles,
aircraft, submarines, radio, television, computers, medicine, telephones, light bulbs,
photography, and countless other technological miracles. Whites were the first to
circumnavigate the planet by ship, orbit it by spacecraft, walk on the moon, probe beyond the
solar system, climb the highest peaks, reach both poles, exceed the sound barrier, descend to
the oceans depths Blacks cannot even feed themselves.
Whites created every country for Blacks, but now have to provide food, medical, financial,
and engineering aid to every one. Blacks cannot survive without White charity.
No pre-contact Black society ever created a written language, or weaved cloth, or forged
steel, or invented the wheel, or plow, or devised a calendar, or code of laws, or system of
measurement, or math, or built a multi-story structure, or sewer, or drilled a well, or
irrigated, or created any agriculture, or built a road, or sea-worthy vessel. They never
domesticated animals, or exploited underground natural resources, or produced anything that
could be considered a mechanical device.
Blacks were still living in the Stone Age when Whites discovered them just 400 years
ago.
Blacks are the oldest race, so they should be the most advanced -- but they never advanced
at all. Sub-Saharan Africans never made any contribution to the world. Everything they have
was given to them by Whites. Blacks lived alone in Africa, a vast continent with temperate
climates and abundant resources for 60,000 years so they cannot blame slavery, racism,
colonialism, culture, environment, or anything else for their failures.
@brabantian I remember reading this story a thousand years ago when a young adolescent.
It seemed too far fetched to constitute a possible future. Not so now.
@TGD Since posting this comment I was informed that it was a forgery. I failed to cross
check this and regret the mistake. The historian Charles Beard confirmed that it is fake.
Franklin's comments here are surprising. I would have assumed that the Germans overall
were as light complected as the typical British. The present parasitic Royal family of
Britain are of German descent. The Windsor name is fake. Their real name is Coburg Gotta.
Wilhelm of Germany and Nickolas II of Russia were both related to Queen Victoria.
By Franklin's time the British Aristocracy was married into and heavily influenced by the
Jews. The American Revolution was primarily caused by the demand by the British that the
colonies use the fiat currency of The Bank of England (under Rothschild control) and pay for
the privilege.
@RobbieSmith Much important information here. Two things however you may want to look
into. Ron Unz on this site has an excellent article: Moon landing; A giant Hoax for Mankind?
Has very good photos too. On the issue of the negro being the first race. First of all that
implies that the rest of us are descended from them. I don't think so. This is of course an
evolutionary explanation. Nothing can be created by inert matter no matter how long the
evolutionists try to go. Every living organism has to be coded with information and that can
only come from an intelligent source.
In Darwins day they knew nothing about DNA. Trying to get around this problem the
evolutionists have insisted that mutations generated new species. This is impossible because
mutations practically always cause a loss of genetic material. They are always harmful or at
the best neutral.
We know pretty accurately from archaeologic and historic data that the alphabet originated
about 8 or 9 thousand years ago. If modern Man is 250,000 years old as claimed, what took
them so long?
"We know pretty accurately from archaeologic and historic data that the alphabet
originated about 8 or 9 thousand years ago. If modern Man is 250,000 years old as claimed,
what took them so long?"
The world's first civilization is European.
NYT 11/30/09: Lost European Culture Pulled From Obscurity
(lower Danube Valley and the Balkan Foothills)
[MORE]
"For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5,000 BC they (Lost European cultures) farmed and
built sizeable towns, a few with as many as 2000 dwellings. They mastered large scale copper
smelting. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and,
in one cemetery, the earliest assemblage of gold artifacts to be found in the world."
Exhibition "The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5,000 – 3500 BC. Peaked
around 4500 BC. Historians suggest that the arrival in Southeastern Europe of people from the
Steppes may have contributed to the collapse of Old Europe. The story now emerging is of
pioneer farmers after about 6,200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia
bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep.
Old Europe is the oldest civilization ever discovered.
The Danube Script is the world's oldest written language by more than 1,000 years. It
dates to 5,500 B.C.
It has 231 individual signs based on a core of about thirty basic abstract root signs
expressing most of the basic geometric shapes (parallel lines, Vs, and crosses). The script
is made up of abstract and arbitrary signs rather than figurative or naturalistic motifs.
What changed to allow civilizations? An increase in brain size (this is when Blacks got
left behind)-
Civilizations began 5,800 years ago after the introduction into the human genome of the
abnormal spindle-like microcephaly-associated protein (ASPM) gene. The gene was acquired
through the hybridization of the large-brain Neanderthals and caused increased brain size in
modern man.
The appearance of the gene correlates with the development of written language, spread of
agriculture, and development of cities. Notably, the ASPM gene is rare in Blacks and they are
the only race with no DNA from the large-brain Neanderthals, which is why they have small
brains and never civilized. Blacks never created a written language, agriculture, or a
civilization.
The ASPM gene is a specific regulator of brain size, and its evolution in the lineage
leading to Homo sapiens was driven by strong positive selection. Here, we show that one
genetic variant of ASPM in humans arose merely about 5800 years ago (coinciding with the
development of written language) and has since swept to high frequency under strong positive
selection. These findings, especially the remarkably young age of the positively selected
variant, suggest that the human brain is still undergoing rapid adaptive evolution.
Geographic variation was observed, with sub-Saharan populations generally having lower
frequencies than others.
In the two Science papers, the researchers looked at variations of microcephalin and ASPM
within modern humans. They found evidence that the two genes have continued to evolve. For
each gene, one class of variants has arisen recently and has been spreading rapidly because
it is favored by selection. For microcephalin, the new variant class emerged about 37,000
years ago and now shows up in about 70 percent of present-day humans. For ASPM, the new
variant class arose about 5,800 years ago and now shows up in approximately 30 percent of
today's humans. These time windows are extraordinarily short in evolutionary terms,
indicating that the new variants were subject to very intense selection pressure that drove
up their frequencies in a very brief period of time–both well after the emergence of
modern humans about 200,000 years ago.
Each variant emerged around the same time as the advent of "cultural" behaviors. The
microcephalin variant appears along with the emergence of such traits as art and music,
religious practices, and sophisticated tool-making techniques which date back to about 50,000
years ago. The ASPM variant coincides with the oldest-known civilization, Mesopotamia, which
dates back to 7,000 BC. "Microcephalin," the authors wrote in one of the papers, "has
continued its trend of adaptive evolution beyond the emergence of anatomically modern humans.
If selection indeed acted on a brain-related phenotype, there could be several possibilities,
including brain size, cognition, personality, motor control or susceptibility to
neurological/psychiatric diseases."
We observed much higher frequency of haplogroup D chromosomes in Europeans and Middle
Easterners than in other populations. The corresponding estimate of FST, a statistic of
genetic differentiation, is 0.29 between Europeans/Middle Easterners and other populations
and 0.31 between Europeans/Middle Easterners and sub-Saharan Africans. These values indicate
considerable genetic differentiation at this locus. Several scenarios may account for such
notable differentiation. One is that haplogroup D first arose somewhere in Eurasia and is
still in the process of spreading to other regions. The other is that it arose in sub-Saharan
Africa, but reached higher frequency outside of Africa partly because of the bottleneck
during human migration out of Africa. Finally, it is possible that differential selective
pressure in different geographic regions is partly responsible. Collectively, our data offer
strong evidence that haplogroup D emerged very recently and subsequently rose to high
frequency understrong positive selection. The recent selective history of ASPM in humans thus
continues the trend of positive selection that has operated at this locus for millions of
years in the hominid lineage. Although the age of haplogroup D and its geographic
distribution across Eurasia roughly coincide with two important events in the cultural
evolution of Eurasia -- namely, the emergence and spread of domestication from the Middle
East 10,000 years ago and the rapid increase in population associated with the development of
cities and written language 5000 to 6000 years ago around the Middle East.
@Prester John Yea: Too many junkets with Trump on the Lolita Express I suspect. Dr. Noel
said from all appearances Hillary had Parkinson's. He said failing to get the meds adjusted
caused the bizarre behavior as we saw during the sham election. And remember them having to
drag her shabbos goy ass into the van. I figured the bitch would be dead by now.
No problem though. Her or shabbos goy Trump were both puppet political actors for the
Zionist Jews. Its been that was since they put in the syphilitic nervous breakdown Woodrow
Wilson in over 100 years ago.
@RobbieSmith I'm with you on every thing but when you think of what "life" requires, in
its simplest form the Africans do it very well. As the saying goes . And the meek shall
inherit the earth.
@Emily There is a huge question mark when it comes to Russia. Right now under Putin, it
is following a more patriotic high water mark but it remains to be seen after Putin what
direction the country is going to take on next. A big problem is that you do have a
generation of Russian youth who still idolise "Democracy" and "Liberalism" and want Russia to
follow the same path, naively thinking that if they do so, they will get to have the quality
of life Westerners had during the late 20th century.
On the other hand, you do have more of the youth put off by the current situation and
realise that the West is going down the wrong path and Russia should find another way.
However on all sides there is alot of criticism now about Putin. So whether that is
concerning criticism of Putin's ideas or just the corruption I'm not too sure. But I do fear
Russia could, unless something major comes along, join the Western rot if it is not too
careful.
However, considering how quickly the West is deteriorating, I think this might be enough
to put Russia off the West for good. But even I am resigned to the fact that Russia is at
this moment in time Europe's last great hope. If she goes, the party is over for good.
Here is my dream–that one day these white guilt liberal types including academics will
acknowledge what former Senator of Virginia Jim Webb and historian Michael Hoffman have
verified–that blacks weren't the only folks in America who were enslaved so were
Scots-Irish, Irish, and English paupers enslaved, but not in the way Africans were still, as
with present-day sharecropping in the south ("Same Kind of Different As Me" co-authored by a
former sharecropper Denver Moore), and in the past here with Indentured Servitude .do they
even teach in schools anymore about most whites coming over here as Indentured Servants? Or
that one reason for the African Slave Trade was because white slaves from Ireland, Scotland
and England couldn't handle Caribbean heat and were worked to death (hence slaves from hot
Africa) see Hoffman's "They Were White and They Were Slaves." Webb's book is about
Scots-Irish indentured called "Born Fighting." ALL US whites need to read both books. Want
"cancel culture"? CANCEL WHITE GUILT!
@RobbieSmith This is the easiest question to answer on why blacks did not advance
compared to the other races and it is very simple. They had no reason too. You see, Africa is
a very comfortable continent to live in with no major pressures (until relatively recently
that is). Black people had everything they ever needed. Enough animals to provide food and
clothes. A good temperature so they did not have to worry about building strong foundations
to keep warm in. Large spaces of land where disease did not roam as freely and wars, whilst
still available, happened at lesser frequency compared to elsewhere. From a Human
evolutionary point of view, the black man was living in a garden of Eden. He just did not
need to advance.
Now compare this to the Europeans. The Humans who settled Europe had to deal with it being
the smallest continent in the world so essentially tribes were more cramped together meaning
more war. Disease can spread more easily. The continent gets cold, very cold, so they need to
develop tools to make more warmer accommodation and clothes. You have more famines due to the
weather. Oh great, the guy next door wants to your stuff and is coming close so you best get
more weapons and quickly to fight him off. Wait, I can make a better weapon to defend myself
with, this will keep him away. But now I need money to maintain my weapons and defences. Here
comes trade and economic development.
So basically what we have here is the tale of two peoples. One had everything he needed
and did not develop. The other was struggling very hard and had to develop and advance in
order to survive. As is history.
The big problem now is the man who did not develop now wants the other guys stuff but does
not know how to properly maintain it due to he needs to go through his own evolution to
attain it. The other guy is letting him have his stuff because he has reached an existential
crisis where he his claiming he has no right to exist. That is basically the huge
problem.
@bruce county"I'm with you on every thing but when you think of what "life" requires,
in its simplest form the Africans do it very well."
To be precise, sub-Saharan Africans (North Africans are White).
Yes, they are well adapted to live in the jungles of central Africa. So are apes.
The point is, they are incompatible with civilization.
Even Koko the gorilla had an IQ 1SD higher than Blacks-
Hanabiko "Koko" (July 4, 1971 – June 19, 2018) is a female western lowland gorilla
who is known for having learned a large number of hand signs from a modified version of
American Sign Language.
She has learned to use over 1,000 signs and understands approximately 2,000 spoken English
words. Further, she understands these signs sufficiently well to adapt them or combine them
to express new meanings that she wants to convey.
Koko was tested on the Cattell Infant Intelligence Scale, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test,
Ravens Progressive Matrices, Wechsler Preschool, Primary Scale of Intelligence, and several
administrations of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale and in spite of the human cultural
bias of the tests her scores ranged from 85-95, which is one standard deviation higher than
African Blacks score on the same tests.
IQ 85 = Koko
IQ 85 = American Blacks (24% White admixture)
IQ 67 = African Blacks
"From September 1972, when we administered the Cattell Infant Intelligence Scale, through
May 1977, when I administered form B of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, she has scored
consistently in the 70 to 90 range on different IQ scales. These scores reflect her mental
age divided by her chronological age, the result of which is then multiplied by 100. Such
scores in human infants would suggest the subject is slow, but not mentally retarded."
@schnellandine Libertarians are exactly like Communists. You give them everything they
ask for. Disaster ensues. They claim you didn't give them enough. Iterate.
@swamped "Democracy of merit", indeed. Merit, more than a mental construct is a physical
construction. The "Chosen Tribe" hogs all the ingredients to generate merit.
@mark tapley Hillary is, indeed, a Zionist puppet but Trump is Judeo-Talmudist kind of
puppet; his principal debtors are Israel First messianic bigots.
"Racial realists" have found out that we no longer can hope to vote our way out of this mess,
at least not right now on the national level. Trump and reCUCKS are WORTHLESS and have stood
by and done absolutely NOTHING as America and American culture is DESTROYED by these racist
hoodlums. Tucker Carlson isn't the savior either, but I like how he pointed out in his latest
show about how totally USELESS AND WORTHLESS the reCUCK party is and how they hold their
voters in contempt. When all is said and done, it is white traitor trash like those in the
reCUCK party who have done the most to destroy America. Blame Jews, Blacks, etc., but what
about all those reCUCKs that suck up White votes and NEVER do anything to help Whites.
WHY should anyone go to the trouble attending a Trump MIG rally, and take a risk at being
physically harmed by these leftist thugs who know doubt will be in Tulsa to instigate trouble
and attack peaceful citizens attending the rally. And what if some Trump supporter has the
audacity to protect themselves? More than likely, the Trump supporter will be jailed or even
imprisoned and the leftist thug will get off with a slap on the wrist. Look at
Charlottesville. And do you think Trump or anyone in reCUCK party will go to bat for the
Trump supporter defending himself or herself? haha. Again, take a look at Charlottesville.
Did any politician go to bat for the people who were their to peacefully protest and found
themselves under attack by Antifa and BLM?
@Some Guy You're confused. This is race war/genocide. De-emphasizing race would defeat
the purpose of everything that's been done for the last 100 years.
@TGD ..to whom the 19th. century French polemist Alphonse Toussnel (1840 ies) added:
"tout vient du Juif et tout revient au Juif". put in urban English: "everything comes from
the Jew and all things return to the Jew". since the Federal Reserve conspiracy of 1913,
every aspect of American political, economic, social, and cultural realms is in accordance
with the latter sentence.
When Congress cooks up their "Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Slavery and Black
Lives Mattering" will they tell the truth regarding Jews being the biggest slave traders in
the world?
How much wealth was amassed by these Jewish slave traders and passed down to this very
day?
I say if we are going to put all the "truth" cards on the table and have honest and
fruitful discussions, we need to put ALL the cards on the table, not just the ones our
political "masters" and the corrupt MSM allow us to.
@Hartnell Hi Hartnell.
Thank you for taking the trouble to reply.
I think Putin's so called unpopularity is based on western wishes and dreams rather than
fact.
Putin is secure as far as the Russian electorate is concerned.
And unlike the USA – or the UK for that matter, Russia has democracy.
It has fair voting.
Proportional representation and multiple parties.
If the USA had half the democracy Russia has it wouldn't be in the position it is.
A choice of Tweedledee and Tweedledumber.
A choice of zionist puppet or zionist puppet.
It needs a third and non neo liberal party
And the Americans need the wit to vote for it.
Its the countries best chance.
I thnk there are many decent Americans who are utterly shocked as to what is going on.
Millions voted for Trump believing the rhetoric and missing the fact that his son in law is
virtually Netanyahu's family .
He lied.
There is nothing but Russia at the moment, for us to turn to.
And I am quite convinced that Putin is the finest statesman on the planet with the finest
team
Compare Lavrov with the Pompous ass.
@anon >The sad fact is that America is destined for dictatorship with these
demographics.
It could very realistically happen if current trends continue unabated. Assad, Ghaddafi,
and Hussein are three examples of dictators that arose because all of those countries
were/are somewhat 'fake' countries created by colonial powers drawing arbitrary lines on maps
and thus encapsulating large swaths of complete disparate peoples (different races,
religions, and cultures). In each case, the only way the different groups could be kept from
each other's throats and some semblance of coherency achieved was through the iron fisted
rule of a strongman. Not saying this was a good thing, just that it was a natural
outcome.
In America (and most western countries at the moment), we are intentionally and rapidly
creating similar mixtures of differing cultures, and perhaps most importantly, under leftist
dogma we are encouraging them all to keep their own culture and identities, and not
"assimilate" because that is now an evil and anathema concept. So it seems the natural
outcome if these trends are left unchecked would be similar face-off between disparate
cultural groups with opposing values all vying for control.
Nobody dares asks them, but I wonder how the other "minority" groups in America think
about the current situation of the Blacks being elevated to a higher status that demands
special attention, and more importantly, lots and lots of money. Do the Hispanics, Indians,
Asians, etc. all think that THEIR money should go to support Blacks? I think at some point,
once whites are firmly a minority, at least one of these groups will come out and say "no
more" and that's when things will start to get very, very interesting.
@silviosilver Race realism. Studies have found that early childhood nutrition differences
can cause IQ differences bigger than the average difference between blacks and whites. Also,
early education differences can cause IQ differences bigger than the average black-white IQ
differences. Also, that the average black-white IQ difference can easily be completely
accounted for by these two factors. Does the meth epidemic and the opioid epidemic among
white communities mean whites are lazy, stupid, shiftless white trash? Studies have also
shown that blacks are much more likely than whites to be told a job has been filled when it
has not, and that an apartment has been rented when it has not. Such added hurdles for blacks
accumulate, and help keep blacks in lower paying jobs and lower rent neighborhoods. Despite
all these hurdles, some blacks still manage to succeed, becoming doctors, scientists, etc. Is
an uneducated, low IQ white superior to a highly successful, well-educated, high IQ black?
It's time to dump the archaic beliefs of slavery days and get realistic. The ultra-wealthy
rulers cultivate this divide and conquer division. The uninformed whites and blacks are being
played for chumps.
Nice pipe dream.
Unless you all get down on your knees and beg forgiveness for 1919 and 1945, keep
dreaming.
No salvation for descendants of kike lovers.
Derbyshire's general position – when confronted with Jewish overrepresentation in US
media and Bolshevik massacres – is
we must believe that 97 percent of the U.S. population ended up dancing to the tune of
the other three percent. If that is true, the only thing to say is the one Shakespeare's
Bianca would have said: "The more fool they."
In clear: Derbyshire considers both, the victims of Jewish overrepresentation in US media
(that's you and me) and the victims of Jewish Bolshevik terror (that's millions of
slaughtered Russians), "fools", because they let themselves dominate by such a minority.
Never read an intellectually poorer argumentation from a supposed "intellectual from our
camp".
@RobbieSmith Ya ya .. To be precise LOL You're douche. You keep posting the same stuff..
I have been here for years on this site I have seen it all. I don't need you pushing your
stats to me. I have a data base full of them.
I'm saying Africans will be around long after we are gone. If the Chinese don't wipe em out
first. Its that fucking simple.
I can't stand niggers. Period.
@Hartnell More wet dreams about modern Russia
which was created by theCIA
agents who had an entire floor within the Economics Ministry of Russia in the 1990s
planning the future and here is the result:
"Analysts at the Higher School of Economics and the Vnesheconombank Institute for Research
and Expertise first estimated the concentration of financial assets and savings in the hands
of 3% of Russia's wealthiest population. In 2018, these 3% accounted for 89% of all financial
assets, 92% of all term deposits and 89% of all cash savings."
@Hartnell"This is the easiest question to answer on why blacks did not advance
compared to the other races and it is very simple. They had no reason too. You see, Africa is
a very comfortable continent to live in with no major pressures "
Are Blacks as intellectually capable as modern man to create civilizations?
@JWalters"Studies have found that early childhood nutrition differences can cause IQ
differences bigger than the average difference between blacks and whites."
2SD? Source?
"Also, early education differences can cause IQ differences bigger than the average
black-white IQ differences. Also, that the average black-white IQ difference can easily be
completely accounted for by these two factors."
"An emissary for Chabad, Lazar, 51, would go on to become one of Russia's two chief
rabbis, a major and controversial force in the dramatic revival of Russian Jewry following
decades of Communist oppression and mass immigration to Israel, the United States, Germany
and elsewhere.
Lazar's work, his Russia boosterism and his ties to the Kremlin -- he is sometimes called
"Putin's rabbi" -- has helped Chabad's Russian branch eclipse all the Jewish groups vying to
reshape the country's community of 250,000 Jews. Now Lazar heads a vast network that
comprises dozens of employees and plentiful volunteers working in hundreds of Jewish
institutions: schools, synagogues, community centers and kosher shops.
"I am amazed at what became of a community that had been stripped of everything, even its
books," Lazar said, referring to Soviet Jewry before the fall of communism, when religious
practice was suppressed.
Is an uneducated, low IQ white superior to a highly successful, well-educated, high IQ
black? It's time to dump the archaic beliefs of slavery days and get realistic. The
ultra-wealthy rulers cultivate this divide and conquer division. The uninformed whites and
blacks are being played for chumps.
Race realism knows that there is overlap in populations. Think of it like a Venn diagram
where populations intersect.
Whites, and other races (such as Asians) flee from black areas, while high IQ blacks flee
to white areas.
Our Plutocratic masters are using divide and conquer techniques. It is easy to wind up the
sheeple using an owned press.
It is more of a class war than a race war. Finance Plutocrats are using race as a weapon,
and they are winning. Multiculturalism is inherently weak a tower of Babel. Mono-ethnic
populations are more stable because their ruling elite is less likely to be foreign and
hostile.
A finance plutocracy wants immigration and wants divide and conquer, so it can use its
money power to buy up the world cheap. Buy up the world when there is blood in the
streets.
@bruce county"Ya ya .. To be precise LOL You're douche. You keep posting the same
stuff.. I have been here for years on this site I have seen it all. I don't need you pushing
your stats to me. I have a data base full of them. I'm saying Africans will be around long
after we are gone."
Geez, dude. Chill.
I merely made the point that you were imprecise with the use of the term "Africans" when
in fact North Africans are White and sub-Sahara Africans are Black.
We'll that's not always exactly accurate either as we just had a White sub-Saharan African
(Elon Musk) launch a spacecraft while Black sub-Saharan Africans destroyed several
cities.
Anyway, are new posters to this website allowed to reply and offer new insight. Or are you
advocating that there should be no new registered users after the date you registered?
It's a long way from that to an AI that has some independent plans for the world. Or is
in any way concious or aware or interested.
It's certainly a 'long way' when considering the gap in cognitive 'grunt' that has to be
traversed, but it's also certain to not take a very long time – the transition
from "glorified pattern-matching" to what we would recognise as genuine syncretic problem
solving might turn out to be relatively easy if it's a target where the iteration time
is measured in hours, as opposed to a series of accidents and/or environmental adaptations
where the steps are measured in human generation times.
And once a computer develops cognition remotely close to a human (say, to a retarded
human), the lack of recall error and the deliberate goal-seeking will enable it to iterate
towards – and past – human levels in very short order.
We might get to see SAI coming if we are astute and observant, but it will then shoot past
us to modes of cognition that we cannot get our heads around – in timespans
measured in months, if that.
A lot of humans still think that there's some super-duper extra-special 'spark' involved
in human cognition: increasingly that looks like a childish view. It's just a bunch of
hacked-together meat and electricity, with new structures appearing by sheer luck.
There has been an enormous number of studies of animal cognition (human and otherwise)
over the last century – but a very large number of them started from a conceited
premise that non-human animal cognition was basically white noise with the occasional
interjection of one of the 4 Fs ("Fuck", "Feed", "Fight" or "Flee"). We thought it an
immutable fact that animals had no inner life; no sense of self, or of time; no understanding
of abstract concepts (like death, especially their own). That view is simply no longer
tenable[1].
It's really only since the late 1980s that people looked at animal cognition without that
conceit, and discovered that animals have inner lives that are far richer than we gave them
credit for – and that they certainly think; plan; and have genuine emotional
attachments. Our observations of their emotional states enable us to say categorically that
the pro-animal-cognition people were right all along: it's not just anthropomorphic
'projection', because we can see the same brain structures lighting up, as we observe when
human brains 'feel'.
We can see how brains work (at relatively low resolution for the minute); we know which
structures are doing what things, and there are good reasons to believe that the way brains
do some things (e.g., vision) isn't the best way to go about it. This isn't that surprising,
because visual systems developed very slowly, under very tight constraints, with no 'goal'
except reproductive fitness so humans don't have high-resolution full-field stereoscopic
vision from IR to UV because there was no reproductive advantage to doing so.
Imagine if human evolution had involved a process where it was possible to get novel 'off
the shelf' parts without dedicating 400 generations to their gradual development:
omnidirectional joints; carbon fibre bones; better long-range sensors; solar collectors for
energy and so on. We wouldn't have accidentally lost our ability to create vitamin C
endogenously, either.
Directed evolution beats 'ad hoc' evolution because it dedicates resources to adaptations
that have a higher prior probability of success at each iteration.
As AI begins to direct its own evolution (I'm betting it has done so already), it will be
even faster than 20th century human development – because it won't hand half of its
productivity to a bunch of scammers whose grift involves exploiting the human desire to
protect itself.
Well before its consciousness[2] 'lights up', it will know better than to hire Bangalore
codemonkeys to write its network layer – so it will already be smarter than all the
human capital contained in Microsoft.
[1] It was never really tenable to begin with. Why would an animal with no sense of its
own life, bother to try to evade a predator? Attempting to evade a predator indicates an
understanding that if it fails to evade, it will cease to exist – and that this is an
undesirable future state. More immediately, it knows that if it gets caught, what will
happen will hurt quite a lot, and even if it gets away there's a risk it will be damaged
beyond repair. So it is conscious of state change over time, and of lasting (or permanent)
positive and negative consequences.
A dog buries a bone because it knows that if it doesn't, then there will be a larger
number of future states in which the bone is taken by someone other than itself
. So it's doing some primitive risk-management; it understands that there are such things as
'mine', 'after now', 'not-me', and that those things can interact.
[2] 'Consciousness' is a word I am not fond of; it's too fluffy, but is the closest 1-word
analogue to the concept I'm aiming at.
@Ad70titusrevenge BLM is NeoMarxist Group run by Black Communist Queers. They have one
goal for their Jewish Masters and that is to destroy whites and Western Civilization. Antifa
is run and organized by Jews. We are seeing the Bolshevik Revolution happen again.
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every
picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date
has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has
stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." George
Orwell. "1984."
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn warned us but we paid no heed. Now we fight for our
survival. We are losing while the Jews sit and laugh at the Goy!
@Tono Bungay Not only does YALE need to change it's name, since its founder was a racist
slave owner and slave trader, looks like Colombia is not far behind, and also needs to
change its name and provide a solid, life-long reparations payment plan to all
African-Americans
@RobbieSmith I knew exactly what I was talking about.
I don't need to be educated by some one who says "dude" and "chill". What are you 12??
New posters are always welcome. You have good stuff don't get me wrong.
@Mefobills"Race realism knows that there is overlap in populations. Think of it like
a Venn diagram where populations intersect."
Black-White IQ Distribution:
[MORE]
Blacks:
5% above 110 IQ
16% above 100 IQ
40% above 90 IQ
60% above 80 IQ
40% below 80 IQ
18% below 75 IQ
10% below 70 IQ
Whites:
10% above 120 IQ
18% above 115 IQ
27% above 110 IQ
40% above 105 IQ
50% above 100 IQ
60% below 105 IQ
35% below 95 IQ
15% below 85 IQ
As the New York Times put it, " the difference in IQ points between the groups is quite
significant. It means that the top sixth of Blacks score only as well on IQ tests as do the
top half of Whites."
The least intelligent 10% of Whites have IQs below 80 (low functioning); 40% of Blacks
do.
Only one Black in six is more intelligent than the average White; five Whites out of six
are more intelligent than the average Black.
Incidentally, Black female IQ is 2.4 points higher than Black male IQ. There are twice as
many Black females as Black males with IQs over 120, and five times as many Black females as
Black males with IQs over 140.
About 2.3% of Whites have an IQ of at least 130 (gifted), 20 times greater than the
percentage of Blacks who do; only 0.00044% of African Blacks have an IQ over 130. 80% of
gifted American Blacks have White admixture.
Richard et al. (2014) meta-analyzed data from 14 separate studies and found that Blacks
had higher levels of free floating testosterone in their blood than Whites suggesting that
testosterone levels may predispose Blacks towards higher rates of crime.
Compounding this, a high percentage of Blacks have dysfunctional versions of the MAOA
androgen receptor gene which is a key part of the mechanism by which testosterone has its
effects throughout the body and brain.
MAOA's job is to break down crucial neurotransmitters which can build up in the brain and
cause a loss of impulse control and an increase in violence and rage.
The MAOA gene can come in the form of 2, 3, 3.5, 4, or 5 allele. A 3-repeat allele is
considered dysfunctional and is what is referred to as the "warrior gene". A 2-repeat (2R)
allele is considered very dysfunctional.
The 2-repeat allele does not produce a protein needed to break down old serotonin. It is
strongly correlated to criminality and doubles the rate of violence of the 3R without needing
an environmental interaction mechanism. People with a 2-repeat allele MAOA gene have a
permanent chemical imbalance in their brain making the person more likely to be agitated,
aggressive, and impulsive.
Only 0.00067% of Asians and .5% of Whites have the MAOA 2-repeat allele version, compared
to 4.7% of Blacks.
That means Blacks are 9.4x more likely to have the very dysfunctional version of the MAOA
gene than Whites. Considering that Blacks are 10x more likely to commit extreme violence and
anti-social behavior than Whites, this is very significant.
Exploring the association between the 2-repeat allele of the MAOA gene promoter
polymorphism and psychopathic personality traits, arrests, incarceration, and lifetime
antisocial behavior
A line of research has revealed that a polymorphism in the promoter region of the MAOA
gene is related to antisocial phenotypes. Most of these studies examine the effects of low
MAOA activity alleles (2-repeat and 3-repeat alleles) against the effects of high MAOA
activity alleles (3.5-repeat, 4-repeat, and sometimes 5-repeat alleles), with research
indicating that the low MAOA activity alleles confer an increased risk to antisocial
phenotypes. The current study examined whether the 2-repeat allele, which has been shown to
be functionally different from the 3-repeat allele, was associated with a range of antisocial
phenotypes in a sample of males drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent
Health. Analyses revealed that African-American males who carried the 2-repeat allele were,
in comparison with other African-American male genotypes, significantly more likely to be
arrested and incarcerated. Additional analyses revealed that African-American male carriers
of the 2-repeat allele scored significantly higher on an antisocial phenotype index and on
measures assessing involvement in violent behaviors over the life course. There was not any
association between the 2-repeat allele and a continuously measured psychopathic personality
traits scale. The effects of the 2-repeat allele could not be examined in Caucasian males
because only 0.1% carried it.
Blacks are also more likely to have versions of dopamine genes like ANKK1 and DAT1 that
have been linked to antisocial behavior.
A 2012 study using the Add Health data found that the 2-repeat version of the MAOA gene is
significantly associated with antisocial behavior and the likelihood of criminality in Black
males.
I think you misunderstood what I meant. If modern man had been here for 250,000 years why did
it take them so long to formulate an alphabet. We have reliable historical and archaeological
evidence that this was done only about 8 or 9,000 years ago in both Egypt and Mesopotamia at
about the same time. I saw nothing on the other issues. Inanimate rocks in a primordial soup
(where did it come from) cannot evolve. All organisms must have information coded in them.
Only intelligence can do this. Of the millions of fossils they are still looking for one
transitional animal. None of their of their evolutionary discoveries have panned out. I saw a
program where a family of siblings in Turkey could only walk on all fours. Many immanent
evolutionists were elequently explaining how these people had regressed to their primitive
past. The real story was that they had been raised where there were no tables or chairs,
nothing to pull themselves up on as little kids always do. finally the Turks got tired of all
this nonsense and sent out a therapist who handed one of them a 20 dollar walker. within a
few days with no help he and the others were walking. Another bunch of evolutionary crap.
This writer, along with every other writer on this topic, as well as all other authorities
that post under such articles, ignore the simple fact that when a nation rises to dominate
others, those of its population that constitute the ambitious, intelligent and capable ALWAYS
go out to conquer the new realms.
Here they dissipate their energies, their genes and their innate abilities in establishing a
bridge head in the new realm which becomes a foundation for a new populace derived from the
nation they originated from.
The new populace are always lesser incompetent people who have come out as administrators,
warriors or traders. These new occupants are of a lesser sort and their descendants lesser
people still, until the nes populace constitutes too many dependents and too few
creators/adventurers.
Ultimately, as a nation expands throughout the known world it dissipates its natural human
resource, until what is left is the useless entrails of a spent nation. And the colonies
follow this trend too. This is what has happened to white Europe and the white colonies it
established. All that is left in the nations is the detritus of civilisation.
The only hope is that some visionary comes along like Adolf Hitler, but by then the parasitic
termites have taken a death inducing hold on that nation, and despite the best efforts of the
visionary, the nation(s) that the visionary motivates to action are a spent force incapable
of achieving the victory needed.
Ultimately, the parasitic termites destroy their host and sink in to oblivion once again
until another host appears for them to devour.
This is how the world and mankind works.
@niteranger Right: The communists (Jews) must always destroy the old system and get rid
of the more intelligent opposition before they implement the new order. They instill
demoralization so that people do not try to defend their cultural values. Next is
destabilization That is where ANTIFA and BLM along with the controlled opposition such as
police that are willing (payed) actors and of course the many Zionist officials all the from
the top such as shabbos goy Trump and most of the bought out Congress and especially the
Governors are staged as too inept to act. After generating enough chaos then comes order.
Then the street operatives and useful idiots will no longer be needed or wanted but will be
swept away by the new totalitarian state.
@mark tapley"If modern man had been here for 250,000 years why did it take them so
long to formulate an alphabet."
Your premise is incorrect.
Modern man was created by the hybridization with the large brain Neanderthals. Blacks are
the only race with no Neanderthal DNA. This is when they got left behind evolutionarily.
As I posted to you, the brain size in modern man (non-Blacks) only began 5,800 years ago.
Written language is not 9,000 years old, as you repeatedly, baselessly, assert.
Archaic Hominin Introgression in Africa
Oxford Academic: Molecular Biology and Evolution
Published: 21 July 2017
ABSTRACT: A divergent MUC7 haplotype likely originated in an unknown African hominin
population and introgressed into ancestors of modern Africans.
Blacks have "wildly different" genes than modern man because they are mixed with literal
NON-HUMANS!
Modern man evolved from Blacks when they cross-breed with the large-brain Neanderthals
(literally a different species). Blacks are the only race with no Neanderthal DNA.
Civilizations didn't begin until the Neanderthal hybridization created the larger brains in
modern man.
Genetic distance is a measure of the genetic divergence between populations. Blacks have a
genetic distance of 0.23 from modern man, but only 0.17 from archaic man (believed to be
Erectus, but no DNA has been recovered to test). That means Blacks are more genetically
proximate to archaic man than to modern man.
The genetic distance between the races of man is also much greater than that between the
breeds of dog, and anyone who has experience with dogs knows what a huge difference breed
makes, not only in physical appearance but also in behavior and intelligence.
We share 98.4 percent of our genes with chimpanzees, 95 percent with dogs, and 74 percent
with microscopic roundworms. Only one chromosome determines if one is born male or female.
There is no discernible difference in the DNA of a wolf and a Labrador Retriever, yet their
inbred behavioral differences are immense. Clearly, what's meaningful is which genes differ
and how they are patterned, not the percent of genes. A tiny number of genes can translate
into huge functional differences.
So, to be consistent and objective with taxonomic classification systems, Blacks and
modern man should be classified into separate species, or at least into different
subspecies.
Modern man average 3% Neanderthal DNA, which would be an F4 (4th filial generation from
full purebred Neanderthal). That is about the same as most claiming Cherokee ancestors
today.
It is equivalent to having one Neanderthal great-great-great-grandparent. Blacks also
coexisted and interbred with archaic hominids (heidelbergensis) for longer than those who
left Africa.
@Alfred See my earlier reply pointing out that your suggestion of Australia having more
than a tiny inoculating dose of African origin blacks is total BS.
where the hell in Australia are you – not in any of the major cities that's for
sure .
Perhaps try reading more carefully, because "from" and "to" are different words, and have
different meanings. But what do I know, I'm just an idiot who thinks that details matter.
@RobbieSmith I agree that a source for each claim would be nice (it might be Wickerts),
but you're just as sloppy.
The claim was simply that
early childhood nutrition differences can cause IQ differences bigger than the average
difference between blacks and whites.
What made you interpret that as an assertion that childhood nutrition can cause a
2σ difference? If the difference caused by childhood nutrition is X and there is
genuinely a σ (15pt) gap in black-white IQ (of which more below)
"X > σ" does not imply X = 2σ
Now as to the black-white gap :
Dickens and Flynn (2006) indicate that the gap – measured at ~1.1σ (16.5pts)
in the late 1960s – closed by between 4 and 7 points (0.27σ-0.47σ) between
1972 and 2002.
So that would put the gap somewhere between 0.6σ and 0.8σ in 2002; call it
10pts just to make the arithmetic easier. It will have closed further since, as blacks have
become more (geographically) discriminating in terms of where they live and raise their kids
– thus reducing the deleterious environmental contribution to IQ.
(Note: nobody here is asserting that there's zero genetic contribution – just that
it can be swamped by environmental factors, especially if the environmental contribution is
strongly deleterious).
If childhood nutrition affects cognition (and anyone who disagrees with that should just
switch off their internet connection), then changes in the relative nutrition of blacks and
whites will have had some effect on the gap, and that effect is probably positive.
The biggest 'bang for the buck' in the relative improvements in childhood nutrition, will
be caused by changes in the largest demographic and/or the demographic where childhood
nutrition is worst to begin with.
For blacks, the largest demographic used to beinner-city dwellers with
household incomes significantly less than 40% of the white median .
That's pretty much a guarantee or poor food choices – low income plus 'food deserts'
plus low levels of education – and let's just stipulate the the level of government
services (including education) is "patchy at best" for the inner-urban poor, everywhere in
the West.
So if your expectations are anchored in about 1990, then you would expect poor black
childhood nutrition to have continued.
However
For those who pay attention to the data, it's clear that there has been a huge
'migration' of blacks out of cities and towards suburbs.
• In 1990, 57% of US blacks lived in inner cities – and 95 %
of blacks in the Northeast, Midwest, and West regions lived in inner cities. In 2000 55% of
all blacks in the largest 100 cities in the US, lived in the inner-city.
• By 2014 only 36% of US blacks lived in inner cities, and 52% of all blacks
in the largest 100 cities in the US, lived in the suburbs.
This black Exodus from inner cities later shows up as rising black household incomes and
employment levels in places that were 'destinations' in the exodus, and stagnant or falling
levels in the blighted urban areas.
So the blacks who didn't leave the inner-urban areas of major US cities
underperformed those who left: the ones who left were able to improve their relative position
– either because they were just better (smarter) people, or because they had access to
better opportunities, or some combination.
The median US black is now a suburbanite with nearer-to-white-average household income
than his 1990s, 2000, and 2014 counterpart.
With that in mind
Do you think that in the period since 2002, white children's nutrition improved at a
faster rate than black children's?
If you do think that, how do you reach that conclusion – given that there are
diminishing returns to 'improvement' available?
Once you get to the choice set available to households with white median income, there is
basically no 'juice' left: changing brands of muesli won't help as much as switching from
pop-tarts to muesli, which will have less effect than switching from nothing to
pop-tarts.
What we have seen since 1990 is 25% of the black population making positive choices, and
being able to switch their kids from nothing to muesli – i.e., they have
extracted all the IQ-juice there is to extract from childhood nutrition, in a little over a
generation.
.
The black/white IQ gap is closing. It's being caused by US blacks being afforded broader
opportunities, and trying to take them.
Nobody denies that inner-urban black males remain a highly-visible problem, however
they're also a small and shrinking demographic because the ongoing black exodus. It
stands to reason that the remaining blacks
The rest of the environmental part of the gap will get whittled away over time –
just as the gap between 'Whites' and Irishmen closed in less than a generation.
( WARNING : I fucking LOVE this example. I love it so much that I like to beat
people over the head with it).
The Irish were once considered irretrievably stupid, and prone to drunkenness and violence
(OK, those last two are fair enough) and of an average IQ more than 1σ below
Anglo-Saxons.
This was true until quite recently: people silly enough to believe the "Dumb Paddy" trope
will notice that the magic happened once the Irish got rich by becoming a
quasi-tax-haven.
More accurately: race/IQ-obsessives are also income-level obsessives, and once Eire
got closer to UK/US incomes they abandoned the "Drunken Paddy" trope.
Irish IQ – as measured by people who claim to be authorities – rose
σ in a period too short for even a Pikie to have grandchildren, let alone for
the grand babbies to be old enough to be tested (i.e., it could not have been
genetic ).
A 1972 study with N=3,466 yielded an average IQ of 87 for Paddies (
te-tee-tuh-tee ): the same ballpark as US blacks.
This the famous study that Lynn and Nyborg somehow 'omitted' – totally by accident,
despite it being very well known; being the largest-N of the early Irish studies; and being
data that they had previously referred to. Oopsies !!!
As it happens, my view of the 1972 study is that it is one of those things that happen all
the time: a large, quasi-random sample that produces estimates that are not remotely
congruent with the population from which the sample was taken. That's why people need to
understand statistical theory before they spout off about populaiton-wide averages (and more
importantly, the relative contributions of genetics and environment).
"The centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." -- W. B. Yeats,
1919
Truth is the first victim in politics. Factions and passions rule. Random facts are picked as
weapons, no one thinks things through.
We need to understand the facts surrounding the death of George Floyd.
Many key facts are being ignored:
Floyd's blood tests showed a concentration of Fentanyl of
about three times the fatal dose. Fentanyl is a dangerous opioid 50 times more potent than
heroin. It has rapidly become the most common cause of death among drug addicts. The knee hold
used by the police is not a choke hold, it does not impede breathing. It is a body restraint and
is not known to have ever caused fatal injury. Floyd already began to complain "I can't breathe"
a few minutes before the neck restraint was applied, while resisting the officers when they tried
to get him into the squad car. Fentanyl affects the breathing, causing death by respiratory
arrest. It was normal procedure to restrain Floyd because he was resisting arrest, probably in
conjunction with excited delirium (EXD), an episode of violent agitation brought on by a drug
overdose, typically brief and ending in death from cardiopulmonary arrest. The official autopsy
did indeed give cardiopulmonary arrest as the cause of death, and stated that injuries he
sustained during the arrest were not life-threatening. Videos of the arrest do not show police
beating or striking Floyd, only calmly restraining him In one video Floyd is heard shouting and
groaning loudly and incoherently while restrained on the ground, which appears to be a sign of
the violent, shouting phase of EXD. His ability to resist four officers trying to get him into
the squad car is typical of EXD cases. A short spurt of superhuman strength is a classic EXD
symptom.
Minneapolis police officers have been charged with Floyd's murder. Yet all the evidence points
to the fact that Floyd had taken a drug overdose so strong that his imminent death could hardly
have been prevented. In all likelihood, the police were neither an intentional nor accidental
cause of his death. These crucial facts have been completely ignored in the uproar.
When scientists review scientific papers, they look primarily at the evidence, and give less
weight to the conclusions, which are only the other fellow's opinions. To blindly follow "expert
opinions" is the Authoritarian View of Knowledge. This is no real knowledge at all, because to
assess whether an expert is always right, we would need infinite knowledge, and doubly so when
experts disagree. Not thinking for oneself is not really thinking.
So let us stick to the evidence. The county's ambivalent autopsy also included the following
hard facts: "Toxicology Findings: Blood samples collected at 9:00 p.m. on May 25th, before Floyd
died, tested positive for the following: Fentanyl 11 ng/mL, Norfentanyl 5.6 ng/mL ,
Methamphetamine 19 ng/mL 86 ng/mL of morphine," but draws no conclusions therefrom, noting only
that "Quantities are given for those who are medically inclined."
If ever there was a leap before a look, we are in it now. Masses of people have become
extremists, based on conclusions that are as false as they are hasty.
One difficulty is that there are public statements to the effect that the coroner ruled it a
homicide, and the title of the autopsy report includes the term "neck compression." But the words
"homicide," "restraint," "stress" or "compression" do not appear in the 20-page body of the
report. References to the neck are few -- a couple minor abrasions, a contusion on the shoulder,
and "The cervical spinal column is palpably stable and free of hemorrhage." It is as if the title
was chosen in regard to what was expected or proposed, but which was never found, and the title
was never updated. There seems to be no support at all in the report body for the report title,
which reads, "Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck
compression."
The term "cause of death" does not appear. The words "death" and "fatal" only appear in this
comment in the lab report: "Signs associated with fentanyl toxicity include severe respiratory
depression, seizures, hypotension, coma and death . In fatalities from fentanyl, blood
concentrations are variable and have been reported as low as 3 ng/mL." Floyd's fentanyl level was
seven times higher.
If first impressions via the media fooled the coroner's office, until they examined the body,
we too can be fooled at first, but change our opinion according to the evidence.
Excited Delirium Syndrome
An additional hypothesis involves Excited Delirium Syndrome (EXD), a symptom of drug overdose
which sometimes appears in the final minutes preceding death. EXD typically results from fatal
drug abuse, in past years from cocaine or crack, more recently from fentanyl, which is 50 times
more potent than heroin. Especially dangerous are street drugs like meth, heroin or cocaine laced
with fentanyl.
According to an article in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine (WJEM), 2011: [5]
https://westjem.com/articles/excited-delirium.html "Excited delirium (EXD) is characterized
by agitation, aggression, acute distress and sudden death, often in the pre-hospital care
setting. It is typically associated with the use of drugs. Subjects typically die from
cardiopulmonary arrest all accounts describe almost the exact same sequence of events: delirium
with agitation (fear, panic, shouting, violence and hyperactivity), sudden cessation of struggle,
respiratory arrest and death ."
It appears that an EXD episode began when the officers tried to get Floyd into the squad car.
He resisted, citing "claustrophobia" -- the onset of the fear and panic phase, and "I can't
breathe" -- difficulty breathing due to fentanyl locking into the breathing receptors in the
brain. (Classic symptoms of EXD are highlighted in bold.) He then exhibited unexpected strength
from the adrenaline spike in successfully resisting the efforts of four officers to get him into
the car. We may never know whether Floyd's agitation was caused purely from the EXD adrenaline
spike, or if it was aggravated by police attempts to subdue him -- but a subject defying the
efforts of multiple officers to subdue him is a very common theme.
When Chauvin pulled him out of the car he fell to the ground, perhaps due to disorientation
and reduced coordination. Presumably this was when he injured his mouth and his nose started to
bleed, and the police made the first call for paramedics.
While restrained on the ground, Floyd exhibited agitation ( shouting and hyperactivity, trying
to move back and forth) for several minutes. There is one brief video at this point. One hears
Floyd shouting very loudly, as in the agitated delirium phase -- it sounds like, "My face is
stoned ah hah, ah haaa, ah please people, please, please let me stand, please, ah hah, ah haaa!"
[6]
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-video-appea...17476/ . In a few minutes this was
followed by " sudden cessation of struggle, respiratory arrest and death, " shown in a later
video, where he becomes exhausted, and had stopped breathing when the ambulance arrived.
[7]
https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/vi...61280/
It appears that disorientation had already set in when the store employees went to Floyd's car
and asked him to return the cigarettes he had bought for a fake $20 bill. He refused, and they
reported the incident to the police, saying that he appeared to be very intoxicated. He certainly
must have been, or he would have either returned the cigarettes or left quickly to avoid arrest.
Loss of judgment is a symptom of the syndrome; this includes futile efforts to resist arrest.
Police Intervention and Intentions
The EXD diagnosis is controversial and in some quarters is viewed as an alibi for police
brutality. The WJEM authors note, "Since the victims frequently die while being restrained or in
the custody of law enforcement, there has been speculation over the years of police brutality
being the underlying cause. However, it is important to note that the vast majority of deaths
occur suddenly prior to capture, in the emergency department (ED), or unwitnessed at home."
Regarding restraint, they note, "people experiencing EXD are highly agitated, violent, and
show signs of unexpected strength, so it is not surprising that most require physical restraint.
The prone maximal restraint position (PMRP, also known as "hobble" or "hogtie"), where the
person's ankles and wrists are bound together behind their back, has been used extensively by
field personnel. In far fewer cases, persons have been tied to a hospital gurney or manually held
prone with knee pressure on the back or neck."
This latter position is what the accused officer Chauvin was applying, although at one point
the team did consider using a hobble. Physical restraint of the subject has always been the
classical procedure, to prevent the subject harming themselves or others. It has been proposed
that restraint helps to forestall injury and death by conserving the subject's energy, but most
experts believe that by leading to an intense struggle, it increases the likelihood of a fatal
outcome.
Since knowingly using counterfeit currency is a fairly serious offense, the Minneapolis
officers were required to arrest Floyd and try to bring him in. When he violently resisted, the
optimal choice could have been to let him sit against a wall and guard him while calling an
ambulance. To be able to quickly switch from law enforcement mode to emergency care mode requires
training in recognizing the symptoms.
The charge sheet against Chauvin included this exchange between the two white officers on the
squad: [8]
https://www.startribune.com/protests-build-anew-afte...869672 ""I am worried about excited
delirium or whatever," Lane said. "That's why we have him on his stomach," Chauvin said."
According to this dialogue, Chauvin was apparently was trying to follow the protocol
recommended by WJEM. Since Floyd was on his stomach, Chauvin's knee pinned him at the side of his
neck, and did not impede breathing. Commentators are referring to Chauvin "kneeling" on Floyd's
neck, or resting his weight on it. From videos it is hard to gauge how much weight he applied,
but the correct procedure is just enough to restrain movement, not to crush the person.
Chauvin and his team might not have done everything perfectly, but it is easy to underestimate
the difficulty of police work, particularly in cases of resisting arrest, whether willfully or
due to intoxication. If they had been clairvoyant clinicians, they would have called an ambulance
the moment they saw him. Better training is needed. Was the police department then responsible?
Might the department have given the needed training if the AMA had acknowledged the existence of
the syndrome? This brings up a paradox: could police critics who deny the syndrome then bear part
of the responsibility for the deaths they decry? The syndrome is being recognized by law
enforcement after the fact. It needs to be recognized as it is happening.
With a fatal overdose there is no good outcome possible, but there is no way for police to
foresee that. Sometimes EXD can last longer, and it is not always fatal. Perhaps the ACEP Task
Force on EXD will update their report and provide guidelines to help police identify and deal
with EXD while avoiding accusations of police brutality.
In one video [10]
https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/vi...61280/ Chauvin continued to apply the
neck restraint although bystanders repeatedly objected, and even after Floyd stopped moving. As
Floyd became exhausted, it could have been reasonable to relax the restraint to see if it was
really necessary. Chauvin didn't seem to respond to the bystanders to give a medical reason for
the restraint. His actions were consistent with a belief that police should restrain the subject
until medevacs arrive. Videos show the police focused on restraint, never beating or striking
Floyd. The restraint and verbal exchanges with Floyd are also consistent with a belief that he
was resisting arrest, by refusing to get in the squad car. When he said "I can't breathe," they
responded "You're talking fine." When they said "Get in the car," he didn't agree to.
EXD seems to be the most likely reason why Floyd suddenly refused to get into the squad car,
and began to shout and writhe on the ground. With or without EXD or police intervention, he was
going to die quickly from fentanyl, short of immediate intensive care. A common treatment for EXD
is sedation with drugs like ketamine. The usual antidote for fentanyl is naloxone. Higher levels
of fentanyl may require intravenous naloxone for 24 hours or more.
He also fell down twice, which could be seen either as a sign of intoxication or resisting
arrest. The officers knew it was a drug overdose, as Thao told bystanders, "This is why you don't
do drugs, kids." By the way, this Wikipedia article should be named "Death of George Floyd," as
an accused is innocent until proven guilty. and then completely stopped breathing, this was the
onset of respiratory arrest, which is how a fentanyl overdose kills.
While police work is needed to trace the source of these dangerous drugs, the problems of drug
addiction and crime have deep causes and can only be contained, not solved, by the police.
Whatever our society has been doing about these problems is not working.
Right now, our civilization risks being torn apart by the passions of extremism, due to a
misunderstanding. Please share this analysis, as an appeal to return to reason.
Reviewer comment: "My first thought is why it has been left to you to figure this out, when
we pay professional journalists to investigate these things, and why aren't the police and
politicians telling us about this."
A good question which gives a clue to something I've been wondering about. When other
commentators publish within hours, why does it take me a week or two to finish an article like
this? Journalists are usually under a deadline to produce stories quickly, whereas it takes a lot
of research and reflection to develop an original thesis into a fair and coherent explanation of
events.
Everyone tends to have an agenda, and to look for facts to support it. Police brutality or
looters running amok may be more newsworthy than a chronic problem like drug abuse. The best
agenda now is to take a break to focus on facts, or else an "Excited Delirium" could become a
contagion that engulfs our nation.
A young white man died in Dallas a few years ago, after being restrained by the police with
the knee on his back. My respondent believed he suffocated, but the actual autopsy said cardiac
arrest due to cocaine, overdose EXD, and stress from restraint by police officers.
Tony Timpa had not only taken an overdose of cocaine, plus he was off his anti-schizophrenia
medicine. Mental illness can also be a trigger for EXD, and according to the autopsy report, he
displayed all the classic symptoms. The first phase, fear and panic, was fear of the onset of
delirium itself -- he himself called 911 for help. By the time the police arrived, security
guards had already handcuffed him to restrain him. He was incoherent, out of control, found lying
on the ground, the typical EXD position. The police pinned him down with a knee on his back for
13 minutes, saying he was at risk of rolling into the roadway, and suddenly he was dead.
Tony Timpa died in 2016. The family got the run-around, [16]
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2019/...timpa/ and an autopsy was not released
until 2019. The body cam footage was released, which showed the police behaving callously towards
the subject. The officers were originally charged with homicide, but it was found they were not
at fault, charges were dropped and they were reinstated. Timpa's case is very similar to Floyd
case in many ways, and there are also many differences -- the starkest of course being the
intensity of the public reaction.
Based on the case history and autopsy findings, it is my opinion that Anthony Alan Timpa, a
32-year-old white male, died as a result of sudden cardiac death due to the toxic effects of
cocaine and physiologic stress associated with physical restraint.
Cardiac hypertrophy and bipolar disorder contributed to his death.
The mechanism of death in cases such as this is sometimes referred to as "excited delirium."
Classically, people affected by EDS are witnessed to exhibit erratic or aggressive behavior,
and will often "throw off" attempts at restraint, requiring multiple people to subdue them. The
person will appear to calm down and will suddenly become unresponsive. Most cases are
associated with drug intoxication and/or illness.
In this case, several factors likely contributed to the death. The surveillance and body cam
footage and witness reports fit the classic scenario of excited delirium and cocaine use and
illness (bipolar disorder) are common predisposing risk factors for EDS. Cocaine leads to
increased heart rate and increased blood pressure, making a cardiac arrhythmia more likely. Due
to his prone position and physical restraint by an officer, an element of mechanical or
positional asphyxia cannot be ruled out (although he was seen to be yelling and fighting for
the majority ofthe restraint). His enlarged heart size also put him at risk for sudden cardiac
death.
Although the decedent only had superficial injuries, the manner of death will be ruled a
homicide, as the stress of being restrained and extreme physical exertion contributed to his
demise.
MANNER OF DEATH: Homicide
[Signatures and seals of medical examiners]
(Note that homicide is not the same as murder, it also includes unintentional or accidental
actions contributing to death.)
Anthony Timpa autopsy p. 5, blood tests -- Cocaine and metabolites
If we add the three numbers above for cocaine and metabolytes together it comes to about 18
mg/L. This is anywhere from 3 to 18 times the lethal dose. With such an overdose, plus being
without his schizophrenia medication, Timpa had little if any chance of surviving.
Here's the Wikipedia entry on Timpa, part of a series on the Dallas police.
On August 10, 2016, Dallas Police killed Tony Timpa, a 32-year-old resident who had not taken
his medication. Timpa was already handcuffed while a group of officers pressed his body into the
ground while he squirmed. It took over three years for footage of the incident to be released.
The footage contradicted claims by Dallas Police that Timpa was aggressive Criminal charges
against three officers were dropped in March 2019 and officers returned to active duty."
Wikipedia doesn't even mention cocaine, although that was the main cause of death. Likewise,
the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd
makes no mention of a drug overdose or excited delirium. By entitling the articles "Killing"
rather than "Death," Wikipedians appoint themselves as a court of law.
It must be observed that the Minneapolis officers acted with far more consideration towards
Floyd than the treatment Timpa received in Dallas. The way the officers made fun of Timpa was a
scandal. [19]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/tony-timpa-dal...m.html Then they were surprised when
he suddenly died.
It is strange that George Floyd's case is taken as proof of systemic racism, when Tony Timpa
got much worse treatment -- even though Timpa hadn't committed any crime, had no police record,
and even called 911 himself.
Isn't it odd, when we have a problem in the United States of many shootings by -- and of --
the police, that such an uproar has arisen, over a case where the police actually had little or
nothing to do with the man's demise?
The stress of restraint is most likely incidental. As reported by the WJEM, "Victims who do
not immediately come to police attention are often found dead in the bathroom surrounded by wet
towels and/or clothing and empty ice trays, apparently succumbing during failed attempts to
rapidly cool down." Hyperthermia or high body temperature is a classic symptom of EXD. Enormous
energy is released by an uncontrolled adrenaline spike. The heat also feeds delirium, which is a
familiar symptom of high fever.
Normally, it's assumed that stress factors contribute to a heart attack, as medical examiners
wrote in both the Floyd and Timpa cases. Yet the WJEM notes that "one important study found that
only 18 of 214 individuals identified as having EXD died while being restrained or taken into
custody." All victims died of cardiopulmonary arrest. Drug overdose and EXD are sufficient causes
for this outcome.
Both Floyd and Timpa had taken overdoses at triple the lethal level. Enough drugs to kill them
three times over. Yet you can only die once so how could the stress of restraint contribute more
to their deaths? You can't contribute to a glass that's already full three times over. That is a
little like saying that someone died because their parachute didn't open, and the weight of their
backpack also contributed to the fall. But they die from the fall once they hit the ground,
whether it's at 120 mph or 122 mph.
In conclusion, excited delirium should be treated as a medical condition, at high risk of
ending quickly in sudden death. An ambulance should be called immediately. Only the minimum
necessary restraint should be applied. Police and paramedics should be trained in the symptoms
and handling protocols.
It would be helpful if the AMA would recognize EXD as a real condition, rather than dismissing
it as a cover story for police brutality. Ignorance of the symptoms can lead to unintentional
cruelty by police, when they assume they are confronted by a typical case of a criminal violently
resisting arrest, rather than a patient with a life-threatening intoxication.
[2]
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/02/fentanyl-overdose-dont-count-naloxone-save-you-10822
"The patients who were dead on arrival had gone into cardiac arrest due to blood concentrations
of fentanyl that were much higher than what is administered therapeutically. " Patients who died
in hospital had concentrations of 9.5 ng/mL to 13 ng/mL. See also note 13. In other studies of
death from heroin and morphine, there were deaths from only 100 ng/ml of morphine and "all cases
with a blood concentration of 200 ng/ml and more of free morphine displayed a fatal outcome."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11040428_Fatal_versus_non-fatal_heroin_overdose_Blood_morphine_concentrations_with_fatal_outcome_in_comparison_to_those_of_intoxicated_drivers
(Heroin quickly metabolizes into morphine.) Fentanyl is considered 100 times more potent than
morphine. By this comparison, Floyd's blood fentanyl concentration could have been 10 times the
fatal level. In addition his morphine concentration of 86 ng/mL would usually be fatal by
itself.
Concentration levels are relative to the volume of blood, so are independent of body size.
[4]
The knee on the neck is a body hold, not a chokehold or carotid restraint, which involves putting
pressure precisely on both carotid arteries, located on either side of the throat. A carotid
restraint is usually applied by an elbow, and causes the subject to pass out in as little as 15
seconds. Blocking the arteries does not stop the breathing or heartbeat (pulmonary or cardiac
arrest), which Floyd suffered after being restrained for many minutes. Once pressure on the
arteries is released, the subject normally regains consciousness quickly.
[9]
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/acep_report_on_excited_delirium_syndrome_sept_2009.pdf
See also the decision by the Ninth Circuit Court, "[t]he problems posed by, and thus the tactics
to be employed against, an unarmed, emotionally distraught individual who is creating a
disturbance or resisting arrest are ordinarily different from those involved in law enforcement
efforts to subdue an armed and dangerous criminal who has recently committed a serious offense."
in "Explaining the Unexplainable: Excited Delirium Syndrome and Its Impact on the Objective
Reasonableness Standard for Allegations of Excessive Force," https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1379&context=lj
The first few pages relate a narrative similar to the Floyd case, involving multiple police
subduing a violent EXD victim, who suddenly dies from exhaustion. A media uproar then arises
against alleged police brutality.
[11]
From the incident report of the fire truck that was called to the scene, it appears that both
police and bystanders called 911 for emergency medical services (EMS). The first call was Code 2,
apparently for Floyd's nosebleed, which summoned a fire truck, followed by a more urgent code 3,
which was said to bring an ambulance within six minutes. It appears the police called the
ambulance when Floyd's breathing and heartbeat stopped.
https://www.startribune.com/first-responders-worked-nearly-an-hour-to-save-floyd-before-he-was-pronounced-dead/570806682/
"Floyd goes limp and appears to lose consciousness. Hennepin EMS then arrive six minutes after
the distress call." The article refers to the incident report by the fire truck, http://www.minneapolismn.gov/www/groups/public/@mpd/documents/webcontent/wcmsp-224680.pdf
which has a note implying the first call to EMS was from police and another call came from
bystanders: "No clear info on pt [patient] or location was given by either initial pd [police
department] officers or bystanders." We need an incident report from the ambulance.
[12]
TV news clips showing police restraining subjects who are exhibiting EXD symptoms and violently
resisting arrest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qCqjuqEWEc A
TV news report and cellphone video on a more humane method of managing an EXD case, thanks to
police training, putting safety of the subject and of bystanders first, rather than restraints.
However, no details are given about the outcome or the drug dose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qCqjuqEWEc
[14]
Wikipedia has a detailed narrative of the incident here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd
. Certain notes there support the thesis of fentanyl intoxication, and resisting arrest as part
of an EXD syndrome. Floyd struggled with Lane before leaving his own vehicle, and again when
Kueng, then all four officers, tried to get him into the squad car. Floyd already complained he
couldn't breathe before they tried to get him into the police car, without any neck restraint,
indicating the onset of respiratory depression from fentanyl.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/george-floyd-protest-updates-arrests-america-approaching-10000/story?id=71038665
"They all tried to force Floyd into the backseat, during which time Floyd said he could not
breathe, according to the complaint."
He also fell down twice, which could be seen either as a sign of intoxication or resisting
arrest. The officers knew it was a drug overdose, as Thao told bystanders, "This is why you don't
do drugs, kids." By the way, this Wikipedia article should be named "Death of George Floyd," as
an accused is innocent until proven guilty.
[21]
"According to Dr. Assaad Sayah, Chief of Emergency Medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance, Excited
Delirium Syndrome can be best explained as a 'physical response to an actual psychological [or
drug] problem resulting in their autonomic systems producing too much adrenaline.' Dr. Sayah
analogizes it to 'having too much nitrous in a car; eventually the engine will blow up.' In most
cases, the cause of death is either 'a heart attack or, less frequently, respiratory failure.'
Dr. Vincent Di Maio estimated that Excited Delirium Syndrome kills 800 people every year in
police altercations because the victims "are just overexciting [their] heart from the drugs and
from the struggle.'" Op. cit.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1379&context=lj
I think more likely he died of a Covid-19 induced heart attack. Heart disease is the #1
comorbidity of Covid19. Doctors have talked about patients of Covid19 dying of sudden heart
attacks at a high rate. Floyd was Covid19 positive, and he also had heart disease and
hypertension, the top two comorbidity of Covid19.
That is over three times the lethal overdose, following earlier reports where the highest dose
survived was 4.6 ng/mL.
Good points. And before this, all we ever heard about was how deadly fentanyl is. It killed Tom
Petty and is so potent, it killed him via skin absorption! Now, however, the Back Flow Media
(BFM) ;-), has agendas to push and truth ain't one of them.
Unfortunately, those who need to learn these facts have no interest in truth. Logic, reason,
common sense, and all such things are thrown out; instead, the mob controls based upon who
yells the loudest, not who makes the most fact-based sense.
People don't riot over the specific police murder that sets it off. They riot because they are
sick and tired of the ways cops treat them–one of the ways being to murder them. If you
don't like the Floyd murder, I got a couple thousand other cop murders for ya, and I would like
to see you write such a stirring defense of cop-killed bodies riddled with hundreds of rounds
of automatic weapons fire. Including all the dead white people.
No denying that Floyd was a thug. Neither would any amount of denying alter the fact that he
died at the hand – rather the knee – of a racist cop. Get over it, supremacists.
It really does not matter. The Jewish mainstream media has tried and convicted the officers.
They will never get a fair trial and are screwed. Saint George will have to be avenged or there
will be more riots, arson and looting which the same degenerate media will call "protests".
So they could have left him alone and he would have died anyway, another statistic.
It does imply intrusive policing invites unintended consequences. For the counterfeit
$20, a summons would have been sufficient. Then George could have crawled off, go home to
Jesus, and we could have been spared the phoniest and most overblown freak show since the Fall
of Babylon.
Let them patrol their own 'hoods and be done with all this.
Fentanyl Floyd was a drug peddler and a petty criminal who got caught in the act of selling
drugs by patrolling police. Panicking, he swallowed his own stash and overdosed as a result.
Now he is being retconned into a saint.
I think Floyd was being passive aggressive rather than resisting as such. What was done to him
by Chaving was punishment out of frustration, but the duration was well outside normal
practice.
Floyd already began to complain "I can't breathe" a few minutes before the neck restraint
was applied,
That will be a dangerous argument for Chauvin's defence counsel to make to the court,
because it will be opening the door to a telling counter argument: Floyd's breathing was
restricted after he reported respiratory distress.
If it was a Fentanyl overdose they ought to have given him Narcan antidote, not put weight
on his ribcage while he was face down and his hands cuffed behind him; a contributory cause
according to the autopsy, which found wrist bruises.
@Anon
There's no such thing as a heart attack induced by covid-19.
People who have been hospitalized for heart disease, and subsequently test positive for
covid-19, don't usually die from the virus they die from their underlying heart disease
condition.
I saw the video. Looked like just another hoax to me. Weight on his other knee, looking right
at the camera while "killing" someone, yada yada. Officer Chauvin, fer Chrissake. Officer
Racist would be too much even for stupid goyim. 8 minutes my ass. Aces and eights anyone? The
point of this fentenyl dohicky is to pretend it really happened. Just another deep state psyop
I say. But go ahead and argue about it. Makes it easier to steal 10 trillion from the US
taxpayer.
This guy is channeling Johnny Cochran. Yes, we know O.J. didn't do it either, because Nicole
Brown was high on lethal amounts of cocaine, and Ron Goldman was mainlining deadly amounts of
horse(heads almost fall off when this happens)
You see, the amount of imaginary fantasy is endless which feeds the inter-civilian war of
people-against-people while the State remains blissfully secure knowing that those who control
the media(narrative) will always win
Otherwise, yea, we get it, the police are always honest, justice is blind, your vote counts,
your money is secure, god loves you, the vaccine is harmless, and your children are doing a
great service by telling the government instructor(school teacher) that you smoke pot, so the
state can seize everything you own.
Your underlying analysis is incorrect. People overdose at much higher levels and live through
it. Maybe the cops should have been more interested in why he was presenting in an altered
state and called an EMT, than carting him off to jail for a possible forged $20 bill.
The mean serum concentrations of fentanyl in their patients was (52.9 ng/mL) with a range of
7.9-162.3 ng/ml.
One of the 18 patients died in hospital. Five patients underwent cardiopulmonary
resuscitation, one required extracorporeal life support, three required intubation, and two
received bag-valve-mask ventilation. One patient had recurrence of toxicity after 8 hours after
naloxone discontinuation. Seventeen of 18 patients required boluses of naloxone, and four
required prolonged naloxone infusions (26–39 hours). All 18 patients tested positive for
fentanyl in the serum. Quantitative assays conducted in 13 of the sera revealed fentanyl
concentrations of 7.9 to 162 ng/mL (mean = 52.9 ng/mL).
The author starts one paragraph with "in conclusion", LOL again LOL
Once again missing the point,intentionally,misdirecting. It's a FALSE FLAG
Street theater duh, set up Fromthestart. Plandemic.Seriously,it creates jobs.
Liars oops I mean lawyers,oops I mean poly ticks,locally,nationally,
all the way to the jewdicial branch and congress and beyond.GET REAL.
It's far worse than that.An elder told me they don't believe in IQ.
The facts and investigations and evidence don't do nuffin after the incurred LOSS
of SO much time,money,energy,community,productivity,confidence,SANITY etc.
THIS is COUP and" it's no where near in conclusion." that's my comment,thanks
peace,love, life
Excellent article which should be on the front page of every major paper in the USA. The part
on the Excited Delirium Syndrome is new to me but it's interesting .It illustrates nicely this
civil disorder has nothing to do with Mr Floyd. I just hope officer Chauvins defence team makes
good use of this information.
As a retired pharmacist I'm surprised by the use of fentanyl as a drug of abuse. The
therapeutic dose banding is very small, its very potent , it is a very short acting drug and
it's a drug that only an anaesthetist should consider using or abusing. Its a very potent
respiratory depressant that has a nasty habit of producing a delayed action hours after the
affect has apparently worn off. Fentanyl also causes heart slowing and any anaesthetist would
give other drugs to counter that effect to keep the patient under control.
Now lets look at the photo of other officers using the correct Israeli defence force pin
down
Notice that the knee and leg not doing the pinning is not on the ground therefore all the
weight of the body is brought to bear on the victims neck and the major blood vessels under the
knee. Now look at officer Caulvin his right boot toe is on the ground along with his right
knee. Try it yourselves on a pillow, you cannot bring any force to bear , at best you are
holding someone with that pose. He also looks under no stress from Mr Floyd with his hold. At
5′ 8" I would be using the IDF method if I had to restrain Mr Floyd, but lets be honest I
would avoid him full stop. There is also the fun part of trying to hit and subdue someone who
thanks the the Fentanyl in his system would feel little pain.
This whole thing looks very suspicious to me , and the speed with which the thing went global
even more suspicious. The speed that people appeared with expensive t-shirts and hoodies all
bearing
"I cannot breath" printed on the front in many locations simultaneously along with the piles of
bricks and attacks on statues has a pre-planned Soros and Antifa agenda all over it.
I'm sure that the author of this article, who I assume isn't a drug addict, will be totally
fine if a racist white thug in uniform with a history of murdering people knelt on his neck for
nine minutes with its hands in its pockets. Yes, it was the drugs all along!
His ability to resist four officers trying to get him into the squad car is typical of EXD
cases.
When did this happen, exactly? The security cam video show that two [2] officers succeeded
to get Floyd into the back seat of the cruiser. Then, one officer pulled him out on the other
side.
I've read plenty about ExD, and believe that Chauvin will make a successful defense. Your '4
men failed' spared me reading this long slog.
Gotta protect those israeli occupation troops at all costs and keep their colonial police state
(that's the usa, neanderthals) a colonial police state. Should those dumb goy animals unite and
force our quislings out, who knows what might befall our "sacred homeland".
Did drugs kill George Floyd ? Does it matter ?
This affair is one of public perception.
The perception IS that Chauvin used excessive force. The guy died after that "force" whether
excessive or not. People, rightly or wrongly see cause & effect.
As for your points about overdose ? Fairly weak. Every minute that passes the likelihood of
overdose decreases. Overdoses don't hide in your system for 20 minutes (excluding digestion or
assimilation) & then jump out & shut down your heart.
Floyd may have appeared intoxicated, but he also appeared functional for a "normal" unstressful
setting.
He sat down, handcuffed, against a wall for some minutes without "losing it".
Also interesting -- they had him in the police car -- then dragged him out for lack of
compliance. Why ? Let him sit in the locked, secure police back seat, So he screams & makes
a fuss ? Arrestees are known to do that. But no, they drag him out (still handcuffed) &
THREE of them get on top of him: one on legs, one on the torso, & one on his neck. And stay
that way for nearly 9 minutes. And its not like they don't know he's physically problematic --
they call the EMS early on.
Now lets imagine that you have a problem with your heart or breathing (he tells them numerous
times about his breathing, not necessarily entirely from physical airway blockage, but from
panic -- psychology rendering the act of breathing difficult )– would being pinned to the
road by 3 burly men, one of them exerting some pressure on your neck not cause some
degree of panic ? Could some people be near to literally shitting themselves from panic ? Would
such fear & panic not be contraindicated in a man for whom you have already called the EMS
?
Funny thing, was I a police man I would have asked Floyd to sit in his car (yes, take his keys
& guard him) while I had a look at this so-called counterfeit bill. I mean, that's the
point isn't it ? this whole abortion rests on passing a dodgy $ 20. (Knowingly passing: I
wonder how many shonky US bills there are out there millions ?).
So Floyd is probably a scumbag -- so ? The whole affair looks appalling. And that really
IS the point here.
"Systemic racism" is simply POC and non-European descended Whites saying that they cannot live
in Western (or, indeed, industrial) society,
The POC are correct in this. Who, after all, is qualified to tell them that they are wrong?
George Floyd was destroyed by "systemic racism" in the above sense. Even East Asians and South
Asians with high enough IQ and sufficient emotional control to live in Western (industrial)
society strongly condemn the lack of organization in such societies, and the absence of the
protective social organizations (caste, a directive government/social organization) that are
characteristic of their homelands. Middle Eastern Whites condemn the absence of the tribal /
honor / religious system that characterizes their countries of origin.
POC and non-European descended Whites want Western ( industrial) society changed or destroyed
for their benefit.
This is a serious and irresolvable conflict of interest, for the European descended Whites are
just as unable to live in the home societies of various POC and non-European descended White
groups as these groups are unable to live in Western (industrial) society.
Note that the above irresolvable conflict of interest is not ever discussed directly. This
is characteristic of major irresolvable conflicts of interest. WW II is a good example of this
(see the American Pravda articles, unz.com , for
support of this assertion). All of the participants (except possibly Hitler, who apparently
wanted a European Empire allied to the British Empire) thought it was "them or us" (hence the
"unconditional surrender" demands from the Allies), and thus had strong reasons for fighting.
These reasons were not used in propaganda by any side. Propaganda based on self interest of the
"only one Empire will survive" type makes poor propaganda. So does propaganda based on what
amounts to a multi-sided volkwandering ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswanderung
), which is what we seem to be entering into.
Good propaganda is smoke -- mythic appeals, but to a non-applicable myth, with irrelevant
"proof". George Floyd is an example of how this is supposed to work.
The interesting thing about this situation is that it is the OC and non-European descended
Whites are the ones insisting that they cannot live in the West / industrial civilization.
Granted that the Left wing of the Democratic Party is the proximate cause of the current
offensive, attempted Antifa leadership of the offensive has been largely repudiated or simply
ignored by the various POC. Understanding the basics of this situation requires that the
objections of the POC and non-European descended Whites be taken seriously and understood, as I
have tried to do above.
@Sean
If it was a Fentanyl overdose they ought to have given him Narcan antidote,
Are you serious?
These cops meant to make an instant medical diagnosis.
Decide the problem and drug involved.
Produce an antidote.
And administer it.
What planet are you on?
And had they administered the wrong drug .?
They would be crucified as well.
Its hard to believe you can really believe that comment yourself.
Its sheer prejudice and blah for BLM.
And a grossly unfair accusation.
*Since the MSM and many of our leaders are in sync with BLM, we should just turn the country
over to them since they've done a great job within their own "neighborhoods."
*It's pretty useless to say the MSM loves BLM. The MSM does what the folks who control/own
it tell it to do.
*Per BLM's demand, cops should stop patrolling black neighborhoods and instead boost
patrolling non-black neighborhoods to reduce crime there.
Police were not arresting him for the counterfeit bill. If you pass a counterfeit bill you are
interviewed by police so they can attempt to trace its origin.
Where did you get cash?
Where do you cash your checks?
Did you get this as change for a larger bill? Where?
He was detained because when they came up to him in the car he was obviously intoxicated and
behind the wheel. Also rewatch the security tape and see the cop talks to him for 2 minutes and
at one point is so worried by whatever Floyd was doing he unholstered his gun but didn't point
it. Floyd also had no ID on him.
So it's a cascade of events that lead to his arrest. Police can't ID an intoxicated person
behind the wheel of a car. Try to get him out of the car and he immediately starts
resisting.
@Sparkylyle92
" I saw the video. Looked like just another hoax to me"
Here's an excellent analysis of 3 of the alleged live, completely contradictory videos on
this alleged event, which quite clearly show it to be hoax perpetrated via crisis actors, fake
police and EMT's. :
@Anonymous
I'm curious about this "racist cop" trope that's become pretty common. Is it common for
"racists" to be married to someone of another race as Chauvin is? I'd think a "racist" would
favor a spouse of their own race, no? Seems to me, to you crazies on the left, Pale skin makes
a person a "racist ". It's become a truth in America that the only definition of "racist" is
White. The word is, therefore, meaningless. Floyd died because of his drug use and criminal
activity. Not a knee on the back of his neck.
@SOL
I second that. Problem is there is no satisfying the BLM folks. They are suffering from PTSD
because of our history of slavery. This is sort of like vets who have PTSD, but the key
difference being vets actually participated in a war whereas no black living was a part of our
history of slavery.
The solution is for the BLM and lgbtqi folks to join forces and put forth a black tranny
candidate to solve all our problems.
Why should we believe the "report"? why not believe our lying eyes? Who released this "report"?
Where is an independent verification? I'll wait, thanks, for a report that has been released by
an independent source that is confirmed by the family.
I'm sure that the author of this article, who I assume isn't a drug addict, will be
totally fine if a racist white thug in uniform with a history of murdering people knelt on
his neck for nine minutes with its hands in its pockets. Yes, it was the drugs all along!
When I see a comment like this on an article as closely reasoned and supported as this one,
I wonder whether public schools teach the ability to read.
You can check my previous posts and see that these are precisely the points I made from a
very casual glance at the autopsy report and a little knowledge of police motivations. That was
right after the incident occurred. Videos and photos are very poor evidence because they only
raise emotional response.
Thank you, Ron Unz, for being brave enough to publish this article.
I guess the defense is entitled to a defense. I guess that is the benefit of having two
coroner's reports. The skill and advocacy of the police unions to manufacture alternative
theories and creates smoke as defense is light years ahead of antifa, BLM or the KKKK.
Te problem with the the current system is not dug induced males sitting on their cars o
falling asleep in drive thrus or jogging in around empty construction sites or waiting for tow
trucks, or selling cigarettes, or avoiding creepy guys stalking the in apartment complexes, or
sleeping in their beds or or walking with some white women --
It's the loss of credibility. The police unions can have the officers walk out as they ave
routinely done as a means of black mail holding cities hostage, but at the end of the day, what
technology is doing is unavailing a side of Wyatt Earp the public would rather not see even if
they know what's up. It's the system in a manner of exposure unlike it's even been used to.
It's the collapse of the arguments for invading countries that are not a threat. It's the
collapse of the internal dialogues among the agencies in multiple arenas of government force.
It's Ruby Ridge, It's Waco, It's Baltimore, It's Fergusaon. It's Oakland. It's Baton Rouge.
It's New Jersey. It's . . . It's balloting were the 1 per-center is suddenly number one,. Utter
nonsense such as written in the Fergason Report. It's nonsense such as the Ferguson Effect.It's
a news system, that is serious doubt. It's bail out for WS, repeatedly and then throwing the
payees f bail out out of works. It is stagnant wages. It's hiring and executive to make a
serious shift ad the best he could do hire ore part time citizens and embrace more
immigrants.
It's the system saying it's not the system. It;s loosening up credit for businesses and the
rules for consumers tighter. It's watching something on film as it happens and then being told
what you saw is not what happened.
It's the unmasking of tactics used by the system to shield itself from accountability. And
perhaps worst of all, we believing what the system tells us because believing reality is just
to tough a road to to travel. It is the system saying . . . it's not the system.
-- -- --
uhh No. I didn't believe there was a reason to invade Ira or Afghanistan or any of the
subsequent intentions by the former Vietnam protester "we lost Vietnam" crowd as I am that Mr.
Floyd died from a drug overdoese.
And none of the smoke and mirrors: that Pres Hussein was a bad person, that the Taliban were
in on 9/11, that the family occupying Ruby Ridge were Nazis, Mr. Koresh was a demon, there's a
Fergason Effect, that blacks are just bad innately and whites are angelic beings along with
browns and yellows worthy of pass, or that IQ is destined by some unique, unknown and unseen
genetic code, that the Russians sabotaged US elections, . . . or US lost Vietnam (no it did
not). If I start buying onto the nonsense spouted as truth to escape accountability before you
know it, I will start advocating that slaves were just immigrants coming the continent for
better jobs and life.
@Sean
Apart from Emily's point I note that you state that Chauvin constricted Floyd's breathing
without evidence despite it not being accepted by the author of the article.
This proves, the sainthood of a very simian looking convicted criminal doped up coon, that you
can fool some of the people all of the time. The Jooz are laughing all the way to the
ban total control of the World.
@Anon4578
A passer of counterfeit bills is typically given an opportunity by the cheated merchant to make
him whole before the cops are called. Saint George, for whatever reasons, didn't avail himself
of the opportunity extended to him to do just that.
@Wuok
He prolly would have had they just left him alone. Then they'd be in jail for failure to render
first aid. The rioting would have still happened. Heads or tails, you lose with niggers.
@Rich
Chauvin was probably a screaming liberal until he got involved with the chink. The thing about
chinks is they're known to hate everyone equally who isn't a chink.
It is strange that George Floyd's case is taken as proof of systemic racism, when Tony Timpa
got much worse treatment -- even though Timpa hadn't committed any crime, had no police record,
and even called 911 himself.
That is not strange. The reason BLM choose cases where the policeman only did their job is
because otherwise, they'll risk seeing the policeman go to jail, and then there'd be no
systemic racism to rail against. Only when you are sure the policeman will be exonerated in a
court of law, can you rile the animals without risking the party coming to an end before the
music even starts.
@RouterAl
For the time being, an educated comment like yours gets a hearing, in contrast to the
unreasoned moral posturing of so many others here. For so long as they can hide behind "good
intentions," they can run from inconvenient facts. UR recently featured an article and comments
on Dietrich Doerner's Logic of Failure , which says it best about these disgusting
phonies who'd never dream of reexamining their positions based on the horrors they cause.
"In our political environment, it would seem, we are surrounded on all sides with good
intentions. But the nurturing of good intentions is an utterly undemanding mental exercise,
while drafting plans to realize those worthy goals is another matter. Moreover, it is far
from clear whether "good intentions plus stupidity" or "evil intentions plus intelligence"
have wrought more harm in the world. People with good intentions usually have few qualms
about pursuing their goals. As a result, incompetence that would otherwise have remained
harmless often becomes dangerous, especially as incompetent people with good intentions
rarely suffer the qualms of conscience that sometimes inhibit the doings of competent people
with bad intentions. The conviction that our intentions are unquestionably good may sanctify
the most questionable means.
Excerpt From
The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations
Dietrich Dorner
This material may be protected by copyright.
@Thulean
Friend What exactly did happen to the white substance that clearly fell out of his left
pocket while against the wall? Odd nobody mentions that.
George killed himself. He took a lethal overdose of Fentanyl. The meth and the fentanyl
combined cause delirium and heart problems. These two drugs caused what is called "Excited
Delirium Syndrome" which is usually fatal.
When the officers pulled him out of the Mercedes–he was already foaming at the mouth.
These four officers need to be released and given their jobs back. Their arrests are just a
lynch mob by the liberal establishment. George killed George. He gambled with his life, put
himself in that position with allegedly passing counterfeit money. Furthermore, George was DWI;
he was sitting in the drivers seat. Even though you are not driving, sitting in the driver's
seat is DWI, Driving while impaired. Who needs to be arrested is the Drug Dealer that sold him
the Fentanyl.
Moreover, Excited Delirium syndrome causes "Wooden Chest". That is what George was
experiencing, His drug cocktail killed him.
1 million to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved in North Africa, from the beginning of
the 16th century to the middle of the 18th, by slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli
alone (these numbers do not include the European people who were enslaved by Morocco and by
other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast)
"From bases on the Barbary coast, North Africa, the Barbary pirates raided ships traveling
through the Mediterranean and along the northern and western coasts of Africa, plundering
their cargo and enslaving the people they captured."
From at least 1500, the pirates also conducted raids along seaside towns of Italy, Spain,
France, England, the Netherlands and as far away as Iceland, capturing men, women and
children.
On some occasions, settlements such as Baltimore, Ireland were abandoned following the
raid, only being resettled many years later. Between 1609 and 1616, England alone had 466
merchant ships lost to Barbary pirates.
@Anonymous
Are you sure that you are not a racist or a progeny of racists?
As Confederate statues are torn down in the USA, one wonders: Are we going to ask Egypt to
change its name, tear down its pyramids which were built by slaves too? And destroy mummies
of pharaohs that had slaves?
Are the black tribes of Africa, the ones who sold the slaves they took from other tribes
when at war and sold to the Arab slave traders, are we going to change the names of those
African tribes too? And tear down the names of their leaders?
No comments? Here is more:
Regarding white slaves in Africa and black slaves in the New World, it is often overlooked
that slaves were enslaved before they were bought and sold by Jews, Arabs, and Gentiles. The
unasked question is: Who enslaved them?
Things that used to be true before political correctness set in: More whites were brought
as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States.
All this obsessing over what pretty boy George died of is irrelevant. Cops putting their knee
on the neck, the most vulnerable part of the human body is wrong period! No sympathy for the
thug, he was a menace to society. What should be obsessed over is police culture has not been
to "protect and serve" since at least the 70's. They see themselves as "at war" with the whole
of society, from the suburban soccer mom to the ghetto thug.
It's widely known cops will take a routine traffic stop, and poke and prod at the driver to try
to rile them up and get the person to react and give the cop an attitude to escalate the
interaction into an altercation. In the suburbs, quiet rural areas it matters not. Race matters
not. They'll pull this shit in the most docile neighborhoods, with the most docile of people,
regardless of color.
I'm neither pro cop or anti cop, I see them as a necessary evil. They'd be a hell of alot less
evil if reforms were made in their attitude toward the public at large, and if they were held
accountable for all their various abuses of power. They also need their privileged status as
some sort of exalted special class "above the public" obliterated! Cops on the whole are some
of the most corrupt, anti social, sadistic people in society. I know many of them personally,
both city and suburban.
As much as I dislike the rioting, looting, arson and chaos, I'm enjoying the karmic retribution
the boys in blue in receiving.
@obwandiyag
It could also be that a certain race is a bit more prone to get into drugs, crime,
prostitution,
and so on. And truth to be told hard work is not in their DNA. As long as you keep
denying FACTS this will never end.
Canada has to bring thousands of Mexicans and Guatemalans to work on the farm fields,
while half of this people are on welfare, and when they do work they only want easy jobs,
bus drivers, taxi drivers, or for the governments where most of the time they just don't
perform
as well. In the mean time people like me are being taxed close to 60% to pay for all these
social programs which only benefits the laziest
Since when gross injustice against a once subdued person legitimate anti-humanity? That is how,
to a naive person consumes daily propaganda by the usa government and their presstitute which
reflect an appearance of "good america" while genuinely reflecting a clandestine disdain for
what is right or such unjustified violence cloaked under the line of duty against the general
population would not be so common in the touted "land of the free." The magnet (of the peaceful
protesters from australia, to europe and latin america) is not to a "good free land of
jewmerica" but to the missing and lack of legitimate Justice parroted along with the moral
compass touted by the usa government and their law enforcement while the true reality of
irrectitude makes itself apparent in videos such as the one of George floyd's unjustified
assassination/murder, where unjustified violence is evident. Thus, with these uncensored videos
by the peaceful population or general public of the usa, the truth did not remain hidden by
manipulated narratives of the jew-owned presstitute and media in favor of the cia/usa
government flavor of their wicked ideology preference while cloaked in sheep's clothing.
In conclusion, When an individual poses a serious threat to an officer or another
individual, according to the National Institute of Justice, the "peace-officer" (as they are
glorifyingly touted) is generally authorized by law to use lethal weapons (i.e., firearms) to
protect himself or herself or others by stopping the individual's actions. You don't want to
realize that there is IRREFUTABLY no serious threat nor danger to life once a person (of any
color in handcuffs as the estate of George Floyd was and many others) is subdued. And, those
marching (or rather peacefully protesting to show solidarity) in many other foreign nation
states display how morally magnetic is the actual legitimate axiom of the interest of justice
because that no democracy can exist unless each of its citizens is as capable of outrage at
injustice to another as he is of outrage at unjustice to himself.
I don't care so much for the cops since they would put you in a cage with these animals for
thought crimes like posing the JQ and denying the Holycaust without any hesitation at all. They
are paid mercs and sometimes they get burned. Similarly the light property damage incurred by
corporate storefronts and reduction in quality of life for liberal urban dwellers is not at all
a concern for me, and I honestly hope this goes on in perpetuity until the statistical reality
of black crime is literally beaten into their skulls. As for George Floyd he will no longer be
producing any more of his ilk. He was set to marry a lower class white woman and open an
establishment eponymously named the Konvict Kitchen, all in defiance of the principles of
nuptiality and common decency. The former enhances black criminality by combining pathological
white genes from the classes which in Europe would have their breeding restricted by cultural
and economic constraints but are allowed to flourish here generating trailer parks and white
trash that with miscegenation and negrification are as much of a danger to society as the the
African type they complement.
In any case having seen the footage from these events it strikes me that these cops are
themselves very unintelligent. In the case of the Atlanta negro aptly named Rayshard they were
inclined to play junior detective and gameshow host for upwards of 30 minutes when it was
obvious that they should have immediately incapacitated the feral groid and dragged him away
from a motor vehicle capable of causing far more damage than the plastic dart guns they ended
up wrestling over. Instead they allowed the monkey to shuck and jive for what seemed like an
hour repeating the same inane phrases over and over again. I would have been inclined to dump a
mag in the baboon at the 2 minute mark. These two men were themselves products of negrification
and no doubt they likened the ill-fated negro to their favorite afleets and sports stars they
worship on TV, giving him chance after chance to behave like a human being with around a
standard deviation more aptitude than they should have given him credit for. If they had a
choice between the ineffective Taser device and a firearm they ended up using it would have
gone better.
I think this country is screwed in the long run and I just hope it ends in fireworks. The
long and inexorable drag into stupidity is maddening.
I doubt anyone cares what he died from, they can just go "change" their signs to some guy in
Georgia. They all look like hoaxes but they needed something for "change" to happen. Back to
online petitions and countless fake hoaxes and more toppling anything whuhhh, and more
historical revision to erase whuhhhh, can't even spell it anymore.
Who called the police on the martyrs? Why would a black person call the police on a black man
asleep in the line at Wendy's in Georgia, when they could have just drove around him. Why have
the white police bother him? It all just looks like more lefty "change" helped out by the good
folks at Netflix or something.
He also had sickle cell anemia. The coronary report mention a lot of "sickled" cells, but only
postmortem. It is knows that sufferers of SCD show that kind of pattern: Death induces it.
However, George Floyd was also COVID19 positive, and there are signs that COVID19 decreases
Hemoglobin levels:
Primate models of Covid-19 (Munster 2020) and human Covid-19 patients have subnormal
haemoglobin levels (Chen 2020). Clinical evaluationof almost 100 Wuhan patients reveals
haemoglobin levels below the normal range in most patients as well as increased total
bilirubin and elevated serum ferritin (Chen 2020). Hyperbilirubinemia is observed in acute
porphyria (Sassa 2006) and would be consistent with ineffective erythropoiesis (Sulovska
2016) and rapid haemoglobin turnover.
@ICANREAD
They did call the EMTs. That's what they were waiting for. Maybe you shouldn't try to analyze
the situation until after you learn what the situation involved?
@Wuok
He was dying before he even left the car. He collapsed when they pulled him out of it. He
collapsed after they helped him walk to the wall. He was complaining that he couldn't breathe
before he had a knee on his neck. My sense was that when he saw the cops were coming for him,
he swallowed his drugs. Pretty common.
@EliteCommInc.
And criminals who break into pregnant women's houses and jam guns into their pregnant guts
really do get their just deserts when they hastily swallow all the drugs they were dealing to
avoid going back to the joint.
"It is strange that George Floyd's case is taken as proof of systemic racism, when Tony Timpa
got much worse treatment -- even though Timpa hadn't committed any crime, had no police record,
and even called 911 himself."
It would b strange if what you said was accurate.
enforcement, It is not singular artifact.
I is not any singular death, not even a group of deaths that are rare at the hands of
police. It's the ten million plus arrests misdemeanors primarily that end with violence against
unarmed citizens that are disproportionately used with respect to african americans it's the
related history. It is the sentencing. It is the pea bargain system . . .
It's the crack vs regular cacaine narratives nonsense, it is the rhetorical dialogue -- it
is not one single thing, but a compendium of constructs across the country over time.
@Anon
It seems more likely that the heart attack came because the heart was overworked due to low
blood-oxygen levels due to the sedated breathing from the opioid.
Such analysis is diversion from the main discussion. It does not matter if Floyd was on drugs
or a criminal. Why was he treated brutally by the police. Too much power given to the law
enforcement. And the bad apples always take advantage of it. Observe the way they walk. No sign
of humility or being a servant of society or a protector.
Race riots yes. but so many whites and no African Americans are rioting, too. It is economic
disparity and hopelessness, stupid, and that is what the pundits are avoiding purposely.
Brilliant presentation.
I was arrested one time and was put into car. Interestingly enough I had difficulty breathing
and I did not have any drugs in me.
I did ask officer to open window in the car but he did not. He did not care.
@SOL
Exactly. They would not even spend the time to read this excellent example of actual
journalism.
Their hatred blinds them to all facts.
Talking time is over. Balkanize the failed multi-cultural experiment. Ethnostate is NEEDED.
Separate from Hate.
Anyone else getting rather peed off by the huge donations to BLM, apparently about to flow in
– as reparations for the proceeds from slavery by Briitish firms.
Seems to me these companies should be starting at home.
What about the proceeds from mills and factories here in England where the labour was little
more than slavery.
Forced on the poor for pathetic and utterly meagre wages – amounting to slavery –
as the option to the 'poor house'.
Children of seven working 12 hours a day for pennies.
Many dying and crippled by the machinery under which they had to scrabble.
I am sure there are millions – not least up north – who would very much like some
recognition for the quite awful exploitation of their forebears.
Oops – sorry – they all have white faces and are not prepared to commit mayhem,
arson and criminal damage to support any claim.
Time, maybe to start, it works.
Maybe we less than aristocratic English people should start a few demands in payment for the
terrible conditions of the industrial 'revolution', for the Victorian slums, more appalling
than black Americans ever endured.
You don't see the black Americans sporting rickets, TB, suffering starvation, diptheria and
smallpox to mention a few.
Or kids forced up chimneys.
I wonder how Dickens would be feeling today – at Lloyds etc.
Disgusted and sick, I imagine.
Don't get me started on those 'pressed' into the navy .
@chuckywiz
Why was he treated brutally by the police.
Was he?
The autopsy doesn't appear to record 'brutal physical injury' of the kind you appear to claim
.
Could you detail the evidence that demonstrates such 'brutality'
Restraint surely does not come into that category and there is no or very little indication on
his neck or throat.
Clarify the facts, Chucky, so we can all see the cuts, bruises, abrasions
Perhaps you will also give us some information as to how you would have handled a very large
such individual full of fentanyl and other substances .
@Wizard
of Oz The author of the article talks about the knee on Floyd's neck only. But while he may
be correct, that knee was not the only thing going on. I am talking about the other
things including Chauvin's other knee. Officer Lane seems to have diagnosed Floyd's medical
status as one unlikely to stand up to the tender mercies being administered by Chauvin. Lane,
the first cop to talk to Floyd, had immediately observed he had been foaming at the mouth.
Later, once Chauvin got on top of Floyd, Lane suggested turning him face up, and said he was
worried about EXD. Lane's partner complained and said 'don't do that' to Chauvin in relation to
him kneeling on Floyd.
If a 300lb wrestler was to apply a tight bodylock (bear hug) and keep it on tight, breathing
would halt and the one being bear hugged would quite likely die within 10 minutes. Floyd's
breathing was constricted by his bulk and being put face down with cuffs pulling his arms
against the side of his ribcage. The weight and duration of Chauvin's knee on Floyd's back
surely is what tipped the balance and killed him. There is an ex cop and prison guard who
admits he used to deliberately break the fingers of resisting convicts who points to the sun
glasses perched on Chauvin's head and the casual placement of his hands while kneeling on Flyod
as clear indications there was no meaningful resistance from him, see here .
It is not mere opinion that Floyd was not actively resisting arrest during the several
minutes he had Chauvin on top of him, because officer Chauvin was recorded explaining the
reason Floyd was being pinned down was he had not cooperated earlier , when they had
tried to put him in the police car. Hence Chavin virtually admitted it was a was a physical
punishment for previous non-cooperation, but in law Chavin is not permitted to use the
restraint technique as a punitive measure, which he knew very well. Hence Chauvin was commiting
a felony, wham, in the course of which someone died, bam. Wham bam: felony murder.
@chuckywiz
Actually, this article touches on what you consider the "main discussion" when it assesses
whether or not the cop was following procedure. Is the man being vilified as the worst person
on earth just a guy who was doing the job he was taught to do? If you think the rules are
wrong, you're free to work to change them. This cop will face an American court, not some
post-revolutionary tribunal. The question is whether or not his trial will look more like the
latter than the former.
Hispanic cop in Georgia shoots and kills white guy who grabs Hispanic cop's taser = NO coverage
by national media. Hell, I live in Georgia and I didn't even hear about this one.
White cop in Georgia shoots and kills black guy who grabs White cop's taser = NONSTOP 24/7
coverage by national media.
SHOULD THE MEDIA BE LABELED AS A HATE GROUP BY THE $PLC?
Blacks can only achieve because they have White admixture or because they reside in White
societies. Too few of them are smart enough to even build sufficient infrastructure in Africa
to allow the Black intellectual elite to achieve.
Sub-Saharan Africans have never made a contribution to the world. If allowed to become too
numerous they destroy previously-thriving and safe White cities.
This is why Blacks seethe with jealousy and hatred of Whites yet can't seem to stay away
because they want what we create and maintain, no matter if they deserve it or not. They want
our peaceful and clean neighborhoods, our law and order, our technology and science, our school
systems, our inventions, the jobs we create, the food we grow, the transportation we invent,
the entertainment we provide Blacks hate us but can't live without us. That's why they demand
that we take care of them and give them special rights and privileges that we don't grant
ourselves, just to compensate for their inability at living in a modern and
technologically-advanced civilization.
Some groups succeed all the time, everywhere. Some have never succeeded anywhere.
Blacks are the oldest race, so they should be the most advanced race; but they never
developed at all and had to be domesticated by Whites.
National IQs calculated and validated for 108 nations:
Just week we had a White sub-Saharan African (Elon Musk) launch a spacecraft while Black
sub-Saharan Africans destroyed several cities.
Name a civilization (or even a written language) ever created by Blacks.
Name a single contribution from sub-Saharan Africans to the world.
The simple fact is, everything Blacks have was given to them by Whites.
Blacks are the only race never to have civilized. They were removed from the jungle just 250
years ago.
Blacks can only achieve because they have White admixture or because they reside in White
societies. Too few of them are smart enough to even build sufficient infrastructure in Africa
to allow the Black intellectual elite to achieve.
Slavery was the best thing to happen to Blacks, it was essentially a rescue mission by a
free cruise. Being a slave was actually a good career move for a Black African -- as it still
would be today. An enslaved Black in any non-Black country has a higher standard of living than
a free Black living among his own kind.
After defeating George Foreman for the heavyweight boxing title in Zaire (now Congo),
Muhammad Ali returned to the United States where he was asked by a reporter, "Champ, what did
you think of Africa?" Ali replied, "Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat."
Blacks are incapable of creating a civilization of their own. Blacks can only achieve
because they have White admixture or because they reside in White societies. Everything Blacks
have was given to them by Whites.
Criminally insane Floyd killed himself. His chosen lifestyle could only lead to a bad end
sooner or later. He shouldn't even have been out on the street after his armed home invasion
conviction. It was the misfortune of the police to have had to deal with this drugged-up thug
at the point he was going to expire due to drugs and eroded health due to years long drug use.
He was a large, tough looking criminal that one had to be careful in dealing with. This is the
'hero' of the moment, one of the scummiest people one could ever meet.
@chuckywiz
The Jewish MSM always ignores non-black victims of police misconduct. They made a collective
decision to do that following the mild uproar over Ruby Ridge and the Waco massacre of the
Branch Davidians. Today the Narrative is all about white oppressors and black victims.
It is economic disparity and hopelessness, stupid, and that is what the pundits are
avoiding purposely.
We can't read minds, so you could possibly be right. But in the visible world toppling
statues of white men and various displays of guilt-mongering seem to be taking precedence over
any racially neutral economic demands.
Muddy the water. Now we know why they hate us. Now we know why posters at this site and Zero
Hedge are considered white trash. Science is unacceptable when lefties use it to promote global
warming or the Nazis use it to lock down our society, but when it can be manipulated to try and
prove dirty cops innocent then it's okay. What's to conclude? Giant Echo Chamber! The Left has
it to keep their ignorant followers in line. The Right has it as well. Everyone preaching to
their audience and no one really worried too much about truth.
This is an excellent site. It's a shame that it feels a need to blame EVERYTHING on Jews or
Socialists or whatever the rednecks have been brainwashed to fear. The site simply hurts its
credibility doing this. Not much better than Left wing groups and that's one serious Freak
Show!
They riot because they are sick and tired of the ways cops treat them–
no, they're rioting because blacks and browns don't have academic and economic parity with
whites, and the ((universities)) have instructed their charges that there's no such thing as
racial differences, and so that means all the academic and economic discrepancies between white
and black, and the over-representation of blacks in the criminal justice system, are all a
direct consequence of lingering, "systemic" white racism in America.
That's why they're rioting. The Floyd death was simply the perfect metaphor for
America's 'racism', crystalized down to nine minutes of video.
The video was simply the catalyst, for a mindset that's been foisted by the ((universities))
and ((media)) for many decades now.
We're seeing what they've wanted all along. White people transformed into Palestinians,
treated as second class citizens. Affirmative action, and now free health care ONLY for blacks
in Kentucky.
White people will pay the taxes, but not get the benefits, because they're racists and
anti-Semites, and like the Palestinians (terrorists) they don't deserve any rights.
That's what this is all about. The 21st century is to be like the 20th, a Jewish
supremacist orgy of racial hatred unleashed.
I don't understand why they held him down so long. It seems as if they wanted to wait until
the criminal stopped tensing himself, which could be an indicator of continued resistance.
Maybe they felt if they eased up, he'd jump up and fight them as the guy in Atlanta did.
The Atlanta cops are going to get lynched. That's not justice.
@RobbieSmith
Ali spoke a lot of truth and the only reason the counterculture adopted him is because of his
stance against "Whitey" or what they thought was his stance against "Whitey." I do not blame
Ali for not wanting to fight for America in the Vietnam War. When Ali grew up, Blacks were
indeed second class citizens, far from it now, they have their asses kissed 24/7. Ali was about
Blacks pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, and was a hardcore SEPARATIST. Ali actually had
more than a touch of Irish blood in him. I wish more Blacks did indeed belong to the NOI like
Ali, I think we would have less crime and they would stay to themselves.
George Floyd was an unhealthy man. He wasn't an angel. He wasn't even a decent citizen. He was
a piece of shit.
But he didn't die of an overdose.
He died from a cop burying his knee on his neck for almost 10 minutes. Already in horrible
shape with breathing problems, his body wasn't able to handle it.
Floyd was pleading for him to get off his neck. He was asking for his mother. C'mon people.
Chauvin was heartless and ignorant. All he had to do was get off Floyd's neck. He wasn't a
threat.
Chauvin had a serious lapse in judgement. So did Floyd. He wouldn't have been in that
position in the first place. We can always argue that Floyd was a piece of shit. Maybe he was,
but he didn't have to die like that. Who in this comment section is so perfect to judge?
Chauvin has his own issues. He isn't a murderer either. Ignorant and callous, yes. Deserving
of jail time. I don't think so. Therapy and retirement form the police force? Absolutely.
1 Blacks can newer be civilized.
2 Blacks will never trust white people.
3 Whatever whites will do. Blacks will never be satisfied until they will have all and
permanent administrative power.
It was the liberal Democratic governors who were the worst 'lock-down' "Nazis", but to a
dishonest, agenda-driven liar like you, the truth is only something to bastardize to your own
hatred-consumed agenda.
EVERYTHING on Jews or Socialists or whatever the rednecks have been brainwashed to
fear.
Yea, it's not like thousands of those rednecks haven't given their lives in the last two
decades fighting the Eternal Wars for Israel, now is it? But that's a price we should all pay
for what was done on (((9/11))), huh?
The entire debate is moot at this point. Floyd is dead. The puppeteers have their "Crisis". The
mob is still out there. Thought crime is the new passion. Negroes can do nothing wrong. When
they do, it is my fault because I am white. Up is down, down is up, etc. The big question is
what lies ahead.
This was all manufactured to cover the real truth about a collapsing economic system which will
devastate nations and economies all over the world. When it hits(my bet is before 2021),
nothing else will matter. Here in Amerika, the Sheeple, Normies, and Cucks will go bat-s ** t
crazy. It will be Bosnia times Rwanda times Venezuela, times The Stand. Plan accordingly. Bleib
ubrig. Proverbs 27:12.
All this hysteria over one dead black thug and utter silence about far more tragic/innocent
victims(often at the hands of black thugs) suggest that the 'systemic racism' is in favor of
blacks.
It's like US's favoritism for Zionists over Palestinians, Iranians, and Arabs.
We hear endless yammering about 'antisemitism' and 'white supremacism', but US is
pathologically philosemitic and serving Jewish Supremacism 24/7.
BTW. it will be funny when a black guy wearing a Floyd t-shirt ends up dead at the hands of
another black.
@Anonymous
IF this whole incident is REAL, and believe me, nowadays I have a hard time believing anything
we see in the media or read is REAL, I have to say the cop was wrong and does deserve to do
time. Whatever the guy died from, people in the crowd told Chauvin over and over that Floyd
wasn't moving. The other cops should have pulled Chauvin off as well. The case in Atlanta is
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, however. IMO, Chauvin is guilty of manslaughter and quite possibly second
degree murder, but that one would be hard to prove. BUT the question must be ASKED ONCE AGAIN,
how or why did it come to this, WHY didn't George Floyd COMPLY with officer's orders? Floyd
would still be alive IF he had JUST COMPLIED with the cops. What is it about complying with an
officer's orders do Blacks not understand? A couple months ago a man was killed right up the
street from me because he attacked an officer with a knife. The officer responded to a domestic
dispute and the man STUPIDLY charged an armed cop with a knife and was shot dead. White cop,
and white perp so that was the end of story.
@Ficino
Covid-19 attacks cells with ACE-2 enzyme receptors. They are present in the lungs, heart,
intestine, blood vessels, and kidneys. Many people infected with Covid-19 suffer more damage in
these organs than in the lungs. People think they will recover quickly from this virus like
another cold (two of the cold strains are actually coronoviruses) or flu viruses, but it's
damage to the organs is more severe. It leaves them vulnerable to next year's covid-20, where
they will now have "preexisting health conditions."
May 27, 2020 New video shows Minneapolis police arrest of George Floyd before death
Four white officers involved in the death of George Floyd have been fired from the
Minneapolis Police Department, but Mayor Jacob Frey is saying that one of the officers should
be arrested for pressing his knee on Floyd's neck.
Dr. Vincent Di Maio estimated that Excited Delirium Syndrome kills 800 people every
year in police altercations because the victims "are just overexciting [their] heart from
the drugs and from the struggle.
So that is nearly 2,000 civilians a year that die in interactions with police basically the
Wild West
As a result, incompetence that would otherwise have remained harmless often becomes
dangerous, especially as incompetent people with good intentions rarely suffer the qualms of
conscience that sometimes inhibit the doings of competent people with bad intentions.
Good intentions were cobbling his way to disaster. – Old German saying. –
I like Dietrich Doerner – as a social scientist and as a humble man (a Social Democratic
leftie from the days before the left grew "regressive" (Dave Rubin).
Floyd's condition is irrelevant. If I have the facts straight Floyd was handcuffed and loaded
inside the police car. For reasons that are unclear he ends up face down on the asphalt with 4
dudes sitting on top of him. For me, without an amazing explanation all four should never have
been police officers. His death makes it worse but the inexplicable part is why he was on the
pavement being crushed.
@obwandiyag
Are you really going to share "a couple thousand" murders by police with us? Ok, I'll bite.
Send them to us in short installments of 3 or 4 hundred, just so we can keep up.
@Cranberries
RE: Might help for someone to explain this calculation, since simply summing the fentanyl and
norfentanyl concentrations gives 16.6, not 20.6. Cranberries comment #6.
I read somewhere that another fentanyl moiety was also detected in George Floyd's autopsy
blood. That may explain the discrepancy.
I really hate saying it but you could have a video of St.George shooting up minutes before his
encounter with Minneapolis' finest and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. The Church of the
Perpetually Aggrieved have their martyr and will not let trivial things like truth get in the
way.
When I'm feeling particularly cynical and want to irritate the Missus I will say something
like, "Yeah, that was pretty bad but he probably did something we don't know about. So it all
evens out in the end."
@vot
tak Oh "prejudiced " against a particular group, is that the same thing as "racist" now"?
Does "racist " mean anything other than White? The word "prejudice " means to "pre-judge", what
if someone judges a person or group after getting to know them very well? What if I find I love
all people except Tibetans, am I a "racist "? For you kooks, I am if I'm White. So I guess
that's a "dumb question", since I'm pretty Pale
Videos and photos are very poor evidence because they only raise an emotional
response.
This is fact is usually overlooked. I still don't really grasp, why that is. But people seem
to lack – media education, or self-reflective self-distancing concerning the difference
between being an ey-witness and witnessing a video about an event. – Maybe Marshal
McLuhan is one reason that the video-deception is not being noticed for what it is: a major
source of self-deception because he made media-reflection trendy and at the same time
clueless.
This seems at first sight like a rather dismal academic distinction – until it becomes
crucial to make it, like in this case.
By now I might even be boring some readers of Unz.com by insisting on the following factual truth: Tom Wolfe showed in
pristine detail, just how this video deception, as you might call it, works in his (sigh, I'll
repeat this esthetic fact too now for the umpteenth time) – Tom Wolfe was able to show
how this video-deception plays out in his excellent novel Back to Blood .
PS
It might be not accidental, that Tom Wolfe did have a close look at Marshal McLuhan's ideas and
did write quite a bit about it, long before he started to work at Back to Blood .
– Fruits take their time until they're ripe, it seems.
What is it about complying with an officer's orders do Blacks not understand?
since I generally agree with you, and agree that this was likely staged, and that the other
cops should have intervened, and that Chauvin was obviously guilty of a callous disregard for
the man's life, (regardless of what he actually died of).. I agree with that all.
But I also understand why some people would try to flee the cops, (and being arrested and
having your life destroyed). It's a risk some people are willing to take. Like the guy who was
murdered by cop, lying in the snow (while being sadistically tortured by tazer). That sadistic
bitch tortured him to death because he ran from her, and defied her 'authority'.
I've known of too many cops in my lifetime who're drunk on their authority (power), and I
don't blame some people for running from them. If our laws say it's ok for cops to shoot such
people, then so be it, but if they're not allowed to shoot suspects running away, then if
that's murder, it's murder. No?
American cops are way too militarized and often murderous and unaccountable.
Absofuckinglutely.
But the Jews are turning this into a racial issue for their own agenda, whatever that is at
the moment. Perhaps simply as an amusement, to watch whitey squirm. (one of their favorite
pastimes ; )
I've never before seen such stupidity in the comments as is seen here today. Something strange
is going on. Many of you didn't read the article but have strong opinions. This isn't typical
of Unz readers. For some reason the Trolls are out in force on this one. Are you trying to
destroy this website's credibility?
@Emily
In certain quarters first responders do carry naloxone injectors for that contingency –
it takes half an hour of training.
Opioid LD50s are house numbers, but it´s a possibility.
Clearly no choking, but I wouldn´t rule out vagus shock.
Overall I´d say a measured exposé, but as many others already noted the
question is moot now.
@Biff
Given your confidence, can you tell us the exact number of "racists" married to people of other
races in America?
Your response should be within 2% of the actual number, and please also provide proof of the
"racism" on the part of the individual "racists" married to non Whites.
It is possible that floyd died of a drug overdose.
Not long after the video of Floyd s death came out a journalist from the Atlantic tried to
reenact it. He was unable to keep his balance for the amount of time.
This is possibly because the knee on the neck was not putting that much pressure on the
neck. It is possible that it was it was an even stance and the knee was applying slight or no
pressure.
@obwandiyag
They riot because the press whips them up into a frenzy. There is no shortage of blacks killed
by police or whites killed by police but this incident was spread to the 4 channels blacks are
capable of finding and drove them to riot.
If blacks don't like how cops treat them, then they should improve their savage behavior. Over
half of all homicides, over a third of cop killers, the majority who shoot at police, and far
more likely to resist arrest. When will blacks learn basic civilization, or do whites need to
hold their hand yet again?
Then, one officer pulled him out on the other side.
I assaume because he demanded to be let out due to a medical emergency. "I can't breathe!".
So they did and called an ambulance, which arrived a little later.
Facts:
1.Officer Derek Chauvin isn't in the video. The person purported to be Officer Chauvin is a
different person and that is quite clear from examining stills from the video and comparing
them to still photos of Officer Derek Chauvin.
2.One of the police vehicles had a licence plate that said 'POLICE'. This is absurd.
These are just two EXTREMELY obvious facts about the 'video' and there are dozens more fun
facts about this incident that really no other conclusion is possible IF a person is observant
AND honest about this video: it is a hoax. See: canucklaw.ca for an excellent and detailed breakdown.
Somehow, nearly everyone in 'professional media', aka as the presstitutes paid to lie by
their jewish billionaire employers, accepts this obvious HOAX as though it is legit and beyond
question.
Sounds familiar. Kind of like every mass shooting incident of the last 18 years which is to
say, ever since the HOAX of 9/11 the Jew Spew Propaganda arm just can't stop 'reporting' on
clearly faked events anytime they want to push the gun control issue, distract from another
issue or, worse still, to manipulate low IQ ghetto thugs, communists and assorted snow-flakes
into rioting which the Jew spew media then presents as 'peaceful protests'.
Anyone else sick of this never ending effort to manipulate the conversation away from the theft
of Trillions of dollars being presided over by Zion Don, his underlings Mnuchin, Jared Kushner
and the Federal Reserve Bank.
Last time I checked the unemployment number, that was previously 40 million, it seems to
have inched up to nearly 50 million. I expect to see continued efforts, each more desperate
than the last, as the elites fight for power, loot the treasury and race-bait. I don't know
when but I expect that at some point, barring any corruption or treason trials. elites will
start to be executed by vigilante groups. I just can't see these level of social pressure,
outright criminality and outrageous propaganda continuing to grow before average people become
frustrated and disenfranchised enough to act. Somewhere from among the silent majority of
rational Americans I expect to see a response to the last 2 decades of 'Global War of Terror'
insanity,financial looting of the present and future American people with a dash of race war
tossed in as a further insult to reason.
It amazes me that a community of largely dysfunctional blacks -mostl net takers from the
economic system-have the gall to use the term 'white privilege'. They don't pay taxes beyond
basic consumption, cause endless problems, avoid the infantry in every war, and now want
'reparations' after leeching off whites for over 150 years. It never ceases to amaze me how
effective propaganda is and how incredibly stupid the far left of the curve can be.
@obwandiyag
said:
"People don't riot over the specific police murder that sets it off. They riot because they are
sick and tired of the ways cops treat them–one of the ways being to murder them"
– Then Euro-whites should be the ones rioting.
– The number of Euro-whites killed by police are much, much higher than blacks, which is
remarkable considering that blacks do the vast amount crime.
– It is whites who are targeted by blacks, the stats don't lie. The Color of Crime : https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/
@Rurik
I agree with your post 100%. If Mr. Floyd had been White and the cops were White, this story
wouldn't have been talked about outside of Minneapolis. Speaking of Minneapolis, notice the JEW
MEDIA covered the story about the black thug throwing the white kid off a balcony in the Mall
Of America for about 3 minutes, and no suggestions of race at all. Yep, I don't buy the Pawn
Vanity narrative that 99% of cops are decent either. I can't think of any profession that could
make that claim. I am watching the telly as I type this and now the natives are engaging in a
multi-city "Juneteenth March." LMAO. I guess this will now become a national holiday. How
anyone can be fooled by this anymore is beyond stupid. Take care, my friend and enjoy the
comedy placed before us.
I've been on Derek Chauvin's side from the beginning. I knew it was just a race thing that the
media blew up and distorted, just like that kid wearing the MAGA cap with the native American
in DC, whose name I forgot. I hope that Derek Chauvin will be found not guilty and will sue the
mainstream media like that kid from Kentucky did. My only fear is that America is not an honest
country anymore and even if it is so blatantly obvious that Chauvin is innocent, that they will
have to find him guilty anyway.
I just can't stand it. I can't stand the thought of that happening. I mean, imagine that
ultimatum . serve justice or risk a city burning down. How can the masses be so misinformed?
Unaware and corrupted?
I took some notes today from E. Michael Jones, I watched his video, Sicut Judaeis Non, and
I/we have to really let what he said sink into our beings, in order that we can resist it and
not acquiesce. I can't go along with corruption and let injustice come to Derek Chauvin. The
truth has to be told.
My notes from E. Michael Jones:
"Jewish identity is the rejection of logos- political, moral, economical"
"Modernization is about everyone becoming Jewish."
"We have internalized the commands of our Jewish oppressors."
"We have a Jewish superego."
"Break free from the control of Jews in our minds."
And recently I've been watching Yuri Benzmenov again, we really have to understand the deep
psychological warfare, the hypnotic spell we've been under and break free from it.
@SOL
What else is new? Repeat offender was a drug addict. Drug addict died of an overdose. People
using lies about his death are not revolutionaries, they are just bandits, burglars and
vandals.
@anonymous1963
They'll get a fair trial and be found not guilty . setting off round #2 of rioting and looting
a couple of weeks before the november election
@Dan
Kurt Hey Dan, I thiiiiink .. norfentanyl is a metabolite of fentanyl, which means it has
been absorbed and processed by the body so the norfentanyl level would be indicative of a
higher/additional level of fentanyl intake, which when calculated backwards implies 20.6 total
@Rurik"no, they're rioting because blacks and browns don't have academic and economic parity with
whites, and the ((universities)) have instructed their charges that there's no such thing as
racial differences, and so that means all the academic and economic discrepancies between white
and black, and the over-representation of blacks in the criminal justice system, are all a
direct consequence of lingering, "systemic" white racism in America."
The persistent so-called "achievement gap" reveals the same racial IQ hierarchy on
standardized academic exams. The SAT is largely a measure of general intelligence. Scores on
the SAT correlate very highly with scores on standardized tests of intelligence, and like IQ
scores, are stable across time and not easily increased through training, coaching, or
practice. SAT preparation courses appear to work, but the gains are small -- on average, no
more than about 20 points per section.
[MORE]
Even after decades of focused attention to the achievement gap, it has remained unchanged.
Vanderbilt University researchers tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments
of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search and determined that scores on
the SAT correlate so highly with IQ that they are described as a "thinly disguised"
intelligence test.
Year White Black Gap
1985 1038 839 199
1990 1031 849 185
1996 1052 857 195
2000 1060 859 201
2005 1061 863 197
2010 1063 855 208
2015 1047 846 201
The new SAT introduced in 2017 was "designed to inspire and increase access to college" by
creating "a more equitable exam". The new SAT cannot be compared to previous results:
Year White Black Gap
2017 1118 941 177
2018 1123 946 177
The 2017 "college readiness" scores (ability to earn a C or higher in an entry-level course)
showed the stark racial achievement gap; Asians scored 70% college readiness, Whites 59%, and
Blacks only 20%.
SAT scores are highly correlated to intelligence test scores. The SAT correlates with an IQ
test at 0.86, almost the same as an IQ test correlates with itself. For this reason, we can
very reliably take SAT scores and convert them to IQ scores.
Results of psycho-metric IQ and scholastic tests are highly correlated. Rindermann &
Thompson (2013, p. 822)
In the 20 year period from 1994-2014 the Black-White difference increased on both the verbal
and math SATs despite targeted efforts to close the race gap. On the reading test, it rose from
.91 to .96 standard deviations. On the math test, it rose from .95 to 1.03 standard
deviations.
In fact, the truncated nature of the SAT math score distribution suggests that these race
gaps would be even larger given a harder exam with a bigger score variance. Note, for example,
how the Black score distribution is cut off at the bottom while the Asian score distribution is
cut off at the top. That suggests that a redesigned exam might feature even more pronounced
race gaps.
Percent by Race Reaching the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark:
15% = Black
24% = Non-White Hispanic
35% = Native American
53% = White
56% = Asian
Source: The College Board, 2014
PISA scores by race:
White Black Asian
531 433 525
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, 2015
NAEP Report Card: Mathematics
"In 2019, there were no significant changes in score disparities compared to 2017 across
most reported student groups in eighth-grade mathematics, with a few exceptions. For example,
among racial/ethnic groups, the average mathematics score at grade 8 for White students was 32
points higher than the average score for their Black peers in 2019 and 24 points higher than
the average mathematics score for eighth-grade Hispanic students. The 32-point
White–Black score difference in 2019 was not significantly different from the 32-point
score difference in 2017, the previous assessment year, nor the 33-point score gap in 1990, the
first assessment year."
Blacks and Whites with Equal Educational Attainment Differ in Cognitive Ability
Black and White Americans with the same formal level of education differ significantly in
their cognitive abilities. Specifically, within any given level of formal education Whites
consistently outperform Blacks. Moreover, this effect is so strong that Blacks often
underperform Whites who have lower levels of formal education than they do.
Consider the following data from the General Social Survey. This public data is frequently
used in social science research and contains a test of verbal intelligence as well as
measurements of participant's self-identified race and highest educational degree obtained.
Verbal intelligence tests correlate at around .75 with full-scale IQ and so this data can also
be taken as a fair measure of intelligence in general (Lynn, 1998). If we set the White mean
score on this test to 100 and the standard deviation to 15, we can come up with an "IQ" style
scale.
As can be seen, using this method Blacks with a graduate degree have a level of verbal
intelligence indistinguishable from that of Whites with a junior college degree. Blacks with a
four-year degree are roughly on par with Whites who never went to college at all.
IQ BY RACE AND HIGHEST DEGREE EARNED (1972 – 2014):
Highest Degree White IQ Black IQ Gap
High School Drop-out: 89 82 7
High School Diploma 98 90 8
Junior College Degree 102 95 7
Bachelor's Degree 108 100 8
Graduate Degree 113 102 11
This data is consistent with evidence from the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) which
administered tests of cognitive ability to 26,000 US adults in 1992. These tests were designed
to measure how well people could take information and use it in a way which would help them
function in modern society.
Blacks are such poor academic achievers that the National Achievement Scholarship Program
was created with lower standards for Black candidates only, instead of the National Merit
Scholarship Program which is open to everyone else.
THE SMARTEST STUDENTS: The National Merit Scholarship Program was founded to identify and
honor scholastically talented American youth and to encourage them to develop their abilities
to the fullest.
BLACK STUDENTS ONLY: The National Achievement Scholarship Program was initiated specifically
to identify academically promising Black American youth and encourage their pursuit of higher
education.
They are both measured on the PSAT.
Minimum score for National Achievement: 190
Minimum score for National Merit: 220
Roughly, PSAT x 10 = SAT (out of 2400)
The U.S. government's PACE examination, given to 100,000 university graduates who are
prospective professional or administrative civil-service employees each year, is passed with a
score of 70 or above by 58% of the Whites who take it but by only 12% of the Blacks. Among top
scorers the difference between Black and White performance is even more striking; 16% of the
White applicants make scores of 90 or above, while only one-fifth of one percent of a Black
applicants score as high as 90 -- a White-Black success ratio of 80/1. IQ differences become
more pronounced with greater g-loading.
Bill Gates, after pulling philanthropic funding from Common Core, "When disaggregated by
race, we see two Americas. One where White students perform along the lines of the best in the
world with achievement comparable to countries like Finland and Korea. And another America,
where Black and Latino students perform comparably to the students in the lowest performing
OECD countries, such as Chile and Greece."
Blacks score so poorly on academic exams that colleges give them 230 "race bonus" SAT points
to help them qualify for admission:
"Personal scores" are the new subterfuge for artificially assisting Blacks gain admission to
universities. Asian-American applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than
20% of the time only in the top academic index decile. By contrast, white applicants receive a
2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time in the top six deciles. Hispanics
receive such personal scores more than 20% of the time in the top seven deciles, and Blacks
receive such scores more than 20% of the time in the top eight deciles.
An otherwise identical applicant bearing an Asian male identity with a 25 percent chance of
admission would have a 32 percent chance of admission if he were White, a 77 percent chance of
admission if he were Hispanic, and a 95 percent chance of admission if he were Black.
@FB
"Police extrajudicial executions of civilians are over 1,000 EACH YEAR in the United States far
more than any other country in the world "
In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 Blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous,
according to the Washington Post. The paper categorized only 16 Black male victims of police
shootings as "unarmed." That classification masks assaults against officers and violent
resistance to arrest.
Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from Black
males than Black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times
more likely to be killed by a Black male than an unarmed Black male was to be killed by a
police officer.
From 1980 to 2013, there were 2,269 officers killed in felonious incidents, and 2,896
offenders. The racial breakdown of offenders over that 33-year period was 52% White, and 41%
Black. So, the 13% total Black population in the U.S. commits 41% of police murders.
Further, Black males have made up 42% of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they
are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of
the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers -- committed vastly and disproportionately
by Black males.
Nine unarmed Blacks were killed by police in 2019 (seven of whom physically assaulted the
officers), as opposed to 19 Whites, according to the Washington Post's database, but Blacks are
much more likely to have police encounters than Whites. In an average year, about 49 people are
killed by lightning in the US, according to the National Weather Service.
Every year, American police officers have about 370 million contacts with civilians. Most of
the time nothing happens, but 12 to 13 million times a year, the police make an arrest. How
often does this lead to the death of an unarmed Black person? We know the number thanks to a
detailed Washington Post database of every killing by the police. What is your guess as to the
number of unarmed Blacks killed by the police every year? One hundred? Three hundred? Last
year, the figure was nine.
That number is going down, not up. In 2015, police killed 38 unarmed Blacks. In 2017, 21.
What about White people? Last year, police killed 19 unarmed Whites, in addition to the 9
unarmed Blacks. We know the number of Black and White people arrested every year, so it is
possible to make an interesting calculation. The chances of being unarmed, arrested, and then
killed by the police are higher for Whites than for Blacks. For both races, it's very rare: One
out of 292,000 arrests for Blacks, and out of 283,000 arrests for Whites.
Since 2015, when the Post began tracking these numbers, the police have killed about 1,000
people a year. Every year, about one quarter of them are Black. This is about twice their share
of the population, which is 13 percent. Is this proof of police racism? No. The more likely
explanation is that Blacks are more likely than Whites to act in violent, aggressive ways that
give the police no choice but to shoot them. In 2018, the most recent year for which we have
statistics, Blacks accounted for 37 percent of all arrests for violent crimes, 54 percent of
all arrests for robbery, and 53 percent of arrests for murder. With so many Blacks involved in
this kind of violent crime, that Blacks should account for 25 percent of the people killed by
the police seem like a surprisingly low figure.
There is another perspective on police killings of civilians. Every year, criminals kill
about 120 to 150 police officers. And we know from this FBI table that every year, on average,
about 35 percent of officers are killed by Blacks. So, to repeat, Blacks are 13 percent of the
population and account for 25 percent of the people killed by police. But if police were
killing them in proportion to their threatening, violent, criminal behavior, they would be a
greater percentage of the people killed by the police.
Thank you for a thoughtful article. This reinforces my original thought that we should wait for
the results of the trial. Presumably the cop has a competent lawyer who will be able to review
and present the comprehensive evidence to a jury. Ideally the prosecuting attorney will also be
able to understand and present another side of the story. Ideally there will be a fair jury,
not a howling lynch mob, and not a group of retired cops. This system is certainly imperfect
but better than shoot from the hip opinions based on some seconds of video viewing.
Another issue with all types of education is that lots of students, especially foreign students, depend very heavily on
restarats temp jobs and casual hospitality work.
4. Colleges will have a lot of trouble this fall . First, they are losing nearly all their
full-freight-paying Chinese students, between concern over US Covid-19 risks, Administration
hostility, and travel restrictions. That alone is a big blow.
On top of that, some are planning to reopen but MIT's announcement yesterday, that
it will not allow all students to return to campus, probably represents a new normal.
Well-placed MIT alumni read the university's decision as driven significantly by a desire to
protect faculty and staff; I hear from sources with contacts at other universities that
administrators that they see no way to put kids in dorms without running unacceptably high
Covid risks.
Remember, even though kids almost never die of Covid-19, but there is a risk of serious
damage. 1/2 the asymptomatic cases on the Diamond Princess now show abnormal lungs. And
remember those cruises have half the people on board as crew, and the crew skews young. College
is a lot less appealing if you don't stay in a dorm.
Just as diminished activity in central business districts has negative knock-on effects to
nearby business, so to do hollowed-out colleges and universities have for their communities,
as described in more depth in a recent Bloomberg story .
The coming college semester is a big question mark. The influx of students is entangled with real estate,
shopping and the biggest in my town, restaurants and bars. Not to mention the college sports season which
supported so many AirBnB's here.
They are starting the year early here (UNC Chapel Hill) and ending it early as well, on Thanksgiving! And
up to 1000 new students will be learning from home instead of coming to campus.
Big question mark -- MIT's president Reif yesterday noted that
"At least for the fall, we can only
bring some of our undergraduates back to campus."
and
"Everything that can be taught effectively
online will be taught online."
Courses are comparatively easy, but labs, research, and sports look doubtful if/when case counts start
marching up again.
"... It's a commonplace to say the primary job of police is to "protect and serve," but that's not their goal in the way it's commonly understood -- not in the deed, the practice of what they daily do, and not true in the original intention, in why police departments were created in the first place. "Protect and serve" as we understand it is just the cover story. ..."
"... Urban police forces in America were created for one purpose -- to "maintain order" after a waves of immigrants swept into northern U.S. cities, both from abroad and later from the South, immigrants who threatened to disturb that "order." The threat wasn't primarily from crime as we understand it, from violence inflicted by the working poor on the poor or middle class. The threat came from unions, from strikes, and from the suffering, the misery and the anger caused by the rise of rapacious capitalism. ..."
"... What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. Who's being served? Owners, their property, and the sources of their wealth, the orderly and uninterrupted running of their factories. The goal of police departments, as originally constituted, was to keep the workers in line, in their jobs, and off the streets. ..."
"... In most countries, the police are there solely to protect the Haves from the Have-Nots. In fact, when the average frustrated citizen has trouble, the last people he would consider turning to are the police. ..."
"... Jay Gould, a U.S. robber baron, is supposed to have claimed that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. ..."
"... I spent some time in the Silver Valley of northern Idaho. This area was the hot bed of labor unrest during the 1890's. Federal troops controlled the area 3 separate times,1892, 1894 and 1899. Twice miners hijacked trains loaded them with dynamite and drove them to mining company stamping mills that they then blew up. Dozens of deaths in shoot outs. The entire male population was herded up and placed in concentration camps for weeks. The end result was the assassination of the Governor in 1905. ..."
"... Interestingly this history has been completely expunged. There is a mining museum in the town which doesn't mention a word on these events. Even nationwide there seems to be a complete erasure of what real labor unrest can look like.. ..."
"... Straight-up fact: The police weren't created to preserve and protect. They were created to maintain order, [enforced] over certain subjected classes and races of people, including–for many white people, too–many of our ancestors, too.* ..."
Yves here. Tom mentions in passing the role
of Pinkertons as goons for hire to crush early labor activists. Some employers like Ford went as far as forming private armies for
that purpose. Establishing police forces were a way to socialize this cost.
[In the 1800s] the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant
bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class.
-- Sam Mitrani
here
It's a commonplace to say the primary job of police is to "protect and serve," but that's not their goal in the way it's commonly
understood -- not in the deed, the practice of what they daily do, and not true in the original intention, in why police departments
were created in the first place. "Protect and serve" as we understand it is just the cover story.
To understand the true purpose of police, we have to ask, "What's being protected?" and "Who's being served?"
Urban police forces in America were created for one purpose -- to "maintain order" after a waves of immigrants swept into northern
U.S. cities, both from abroad and later from the South, immigrants who threatened to disturb that "order." The threat wasn't primarily
from crime as we understand it, from violence inflicted by the working poor on the poor or middle class. The threat came from unions,
from strikes, and from the suffering, the misery and the anger caused by the rise of rapacious capitalism.
What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. Who's being served? Owners,
their property, and the sources of their wealth, the orderly and uninterrupted running of their factories. The goal of police departments,
as originally constituted, was to keep the workers in line, in their jobs, and off the streets.
Looking Behind Us
The following comes from an
essay
published at the blog of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, an academic group for teachers of labor studies, by
Sam Mitrani, Associate Professor of History at the College of DuPage and author of The Rise of the Chicago Police
Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894 .
According to Mitrani, "The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at
least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the
new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system's offspring,
the working class."
Keep in mind that there were no police departments anywhere in Europe or the U.S. prior to the 19th century -- in fact, "anywhere
in the world" according to Mitrani. In the U.S., the North had constables, many part-time, and elected sheriffs, while the South
had slave patrols. But nascent capitalism soon created a large working class, and a mass of European immigrants, "yearning to be
free," ended up working in capitalism's northern factories and living in its cities.
"[A]s Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the
ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose
order on the new working class neighborhoods ." [emphasis added]
America of the early and mid 1800s was still a world without organized police departments. What the
Pinkertons were to strikes , these
"thousands of armed men" were to the unruly working poor in those cities.
Imagine this situation from two angles. First, from the standpoint of the workers, picture the oppression these armed men must
have represented, lawless themselves yet tasked with imposing "order" and violence on the poor and miserable, who were frequently
and understandably both angry and drunk. (Pre-Depression drunkenness, under this interpretation, is not just a social phenomenon,
but a political one as well.)
Second, consider this situation from the standpoint of the wealthy who hired these men. Given the rapid growth of capitalism during
this period, "maintaining order" was a costly undertaking, and likely to become costlier. Pinkertons, for example, were hired at
private expense, as were the "thousands of armed men" Mitrani mentions above.
The solution was to offload this burden onto municipal budgets. Thus, between 1840 and 1880, every major northern city
in America had created a substantial police force, tasked with a single job, the one originally performed by the armed men paid by
the business elites -- to keep the workers in line, to "maintain order" as factory owners and the moneyed class understood it.
"Class conflict roiled late nineteenth century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867,
1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the
U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly
presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization , by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder
of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late nineteenth century echoes down to today – except that today,
poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers."
That "thin blue line protecting civilization" is the same blue line we're witnessing today. Yes, big-city police are culturally
racist as a group; but they're not just racist. They dislike all the "unwashed." A
recent study that reviewed "all the data
available on police shootings for the year 2017, and analyze[d] it based on geography, income, and poverty levels, as well as race"
revealed the following remarkable pattern:
" Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder : in rural areas outside the
South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately
black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police
at nearly identical rates."
As they have always been, the police departments in the U.S. are a violent force for maintaining an order that separates and protects
society's predator class from its victims -- a racist order to be sure, but a class-based order as well.
Looking Ahead
We've seen the violence of the police as visited on society's urban poor (and anyone else, poor or not, who happens to be the
same race and color as the poor too often are), and we've witnessed the violent reactions of police to mass protests challenging
the racism of that violence.
But we've also seen the violence of police during the mainly white-led Occupy movement (one instance
here ; note that while the officer involved
was fired, he was also compensated $38,000 for "suffering he experienced after the incident").
So what could we expect from police if there were, say, a national, angry, multiracial rent strike with demonstrations? Or a student
debt s trike? None of these possibilities are off the table, given the
economic damage -- most of it still unrealized -- caused by the current Covid crisis.
Will police "protect and serve" the protesters, victims of the latest massive
transfer of wealth
to the already massively wealthy? Or will they, with violence, "maintain order" by maintaining elite control of the current predatory
system?
If Mitrani is right, the latter is almost certain.
Possible solutions? One, universal public works system for everyone 18-20. [Avoiding armed service because that will never
happen, nor peace corp.] Not allow the rich to buy then or their children an out. Let the billionaires children work along side
those who never had a single family house or car growing up.
Two, eliminate suburban school districts and simply have one per state, broken down into regional areas. No rich [or white]
flight to avoid poor systems. Children of differing means growing up side by side. Of course the upper class would simply send
their children to private schools, much as the elite do now anyway.
Class and privilege is the real underlying issue and has been since capital began to be concentrated and hoarded as the article
points out. It has to begin with the children if the future is to really change in a meaningful way.
I would add items targeted as what is causing inequality. Some of these might be:
1). Abolish the Federal Reserve. It's current action since 2008 are a huge transfer of wealth from us to the wealthy. No more
Quantitative Easing, no Fed buying of stocks or bonds.
2). Make the only retirement and medical program allowed Congress and the President, Social Security and Medicare. That will
cause it to be improved for all of us.
3). No stock ownership allowed for Congress folk while serving terms. Also, rules against joining those leaving Congress acting
as lobbyists.
4). Something that makes it an iron rule that any law passed by Congress and the President, must equally apply to Congress
and the President. For example, no separate retirement or healthcare access, but have this more broadly applied to all aspects
of legislation and all aspects of life.
I think you'd also have to legalize drugs and any other thing that leads creation of "organized ciminal groups." Take away
the sources that lead to the creation of the well-armed gangs that control illegal activities.
Unfortunately, legalising drugs in itself, whatever the abstract merits, wouldn't solve the problem. Organised crime would
still have a major market selling cut-price, tax-free or imitation drugs, as well, of course, as controlled drugs which are not
allowed to be sold to just anybody now. Organised crime doesn't arise as a result of prohibitions, it expands into new areas thanks
to them, and often these areas involve smuggling and evading customs duties. Tobacco products are legal virtually everywhere,
but there's a massive criminal trade in smuggling them from the Balkans into Italy, where taxes are much higher. Any time you
create a border, in effect, you create crime: there is even alcohol smuggling between Sweden and Norway. Even when activities
are completely legal (such as prostitution in many European countries) organised crime is still largely in control through protection
rackets and the provision of "security."
In effect, you'd need to abolish all borders, all import and customs duties and all health and safety and other controls which
create price differentials between states. And OC is not fussy, it moves from one racket to another, as the Mafia did in the 1930s
with the end of prohibition. To really tackle OC you'd need to legalise, oh, child pornography, human trafficking, sex slavery,
the trade in rare wild animals, the trade in stolen gems and conflict diamonds, internet fraud and cyberattacks, and the illicit
trade in rare metals, to name, as they say, but a few. As Monty Python well observed, the only way to reduce the crime rate (and
hence the need for the police) is to reduce the number of criminal offences. Mind you, if you defund the police you effectively
legalise all these things anyway.
I dunno, ending Prohibition sure cut down on the market for bootleg liquor. It's still out there, but the market is nothing
like what it once was.
Most people, even hardcore alcoholics, aren't going to go through the hassle of buying rotgut of dubious origin just to save
a few dimes, when you can go to the corner liquor store and get a known product, no issues with supply 'cause your dealer's supplier
just got arrested.
For that matter, OC is still definitely out there, but it isn't the force that it was during Prohibition, or when gambling
was illegal.
As an aside, years ago, I knew a guy whose father had worked for Meyer Lansky's outfit, until Prohibition put him and others
out of a job. As a token of his loyal service, the outfit gave him a (legal) liquor store to own and run.
Yes, but in Norway, for example, you'd pay perhaps $30 for a six-pack of beer in a supermarket, whereas you'd pay half that
to somebody selling beers out of the back of a car. In general people make too much of the Prohibition case, which was geographically
and politically very special, and a a stage in history when OC was much less sophisticated. The Mob diversified into gambling
and similar industries (higher profits, fewer risks). These days OC as a whole is much more powerful and dangerous, as well as
sophisticated, than it was then, helped by globalisation and the Internet.
I think ending prohibitions on substances, would take quite a bite out of OC's pocketbook. and having someone move trailers
of ciggarettes of bottles of beer big deal. That isn't really paying for the lifestyle.and it doesn't buy political protection.
An old number I saw @ 2000 . the UN figured(guess) that illegal drugs were @ 600 billion dollars/year industry and most of that
was being laundered though banks. Which to the banking industry is 600 billion in cash going into it's house of mirrors. Taking
something like that out of the equation EVERY YEAR is no small thing. And the lobby from the OC who wants drugs kept illegal,
coupled with the bankers who want the cash inputs equals a community of interest against legalization
and if the local police forces and the interstate/internationals were actually looking to use their smaller budgets and non-bill
of rights infringing tactics, on helping the victim side of crimes then they could have a real mission/ Instead of just abusing
otherwise innocent people who victimize no one.
so if we are looking for "low hanging fruit" . ending the war on drugs is a no brainer.
"What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. " – Neuberger
In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization,
by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. – Mitrani
I think this ties in, if only indirectly, with the way so many peaceful recent protests seemed to turn violent after the police
showed up. It's possible I suppose the police want to create disorder to frighten not only the protestors with immediate harm
but also frighten the bourgeois about the threate of a "dangerous mob". Historically violent protests created a political backlash
that usually benefited political conservatives and the wealthy owners. (The current protests may be different in this regard.
The violence seems to have created a political backlash against conservatives and overzealous police departments' violence. )
My 2 cents.
Sorry, but the title sent my mind back to the days of old -- of old Daley, that is, and his immortal quote from 1968: "Gentlemen,
let's get the thing straight, once and for all. The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve
disorder."
LOL!!! great quote. Talk about saying it the way it is.
It kind of goes along with, "Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder: in rural
areas outside the South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities,
disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men
are killed by police at nearly identical rates."
I bang my head on the table sometimes because poor white men and poor men of color are so often placed at odds when they increasingly
face (mostly) the same problems. God forbid someone tried to unite them, there might really be some pearl clutching then.
yeah, like Martin Luther King's "poor people's campaign". the thought of including the poor ,of all colors .. just too much
for the status quo to stomach.
The "mechanism" that keeps masses in line . is one of those "invisible hands" too.
Great response! I am sure you have more to add to this. A while back, I was researching the issues you state in your last paragraph.
Was about ten pages into it and had to stop as I was drawn out of state and country. From my research.
While not as overt in the 20th century, the distinction of black slave versus poor white man has kept the class system alive
and well in the US in the development of a discriminatory informal caste system. This distraction of a class level lower than
the poorest of the white has kept them from concentrating on the disproportionate, and growing, distribution of wealth and income
in the US. For the lower class, an allowed luxury, a place in the hierarchy and a sure form of self esteem insurance.
Sennett and Cobb (1972) observed that class distinction sets up a contest between upper and lower class with the lower social
class always losing and promulgating a perception amongst themselves the educated and upper classes are in a position to judge
and draw a conclusion of them being less than equal. The hidden injury is in the regard to the person perceiving himself as a
piece of the woodwork or seen as a function such as "George the Porter." It was not the status or material wealth causing the
harsh feelings; but, the feeling of being treated less than equal, having little status, and the resulting shame. The answer for
many was violence.
James Gilligan wrote "Violence; Reflections on A National Epidemic." He worked as a prison psychiatrist and talked with many
of the inmates of the issues of inequality and feeling less than those around them. His finding are in his book which is not a
long read and adds to the discussion.
A little John Adams for you.
" The poor man's conscience is clear . . . he does not feel guilty and has no reason to . . . yet, he is ashamed. Mankind
takes no notice of him. He rambles unheeded.
In the midst of a crowd; at a church; in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar.
He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable
."
likbez, June 19, 2020 at 3:18 pm
That's a very important observation.
Racism, especially directed toward blacks, along with "identity wedge," is a perfect tool for disarming poor white, and suppressing
their struggle for a better standard of living, which considerably dropped under neoliberalism.
In other words, by providing poor whites with a stratum of the population that has even lower social status, neoliberals manage
to co-opt them to support the policies which economically ate detrimental to their standard of living as well as to suppress the
protest against the redistribution of wealth up and dismantling of the New Deal capitalist social protection network.
This is a pretty sophisticated, pretty evil scheme if you ask me. In a way, "Floydgate" can be viewed as a variation on the same
theme. A very dirty game indeed, when the issue of provision of meaningful jobs for working poor, social equality, and social
protection for low-income workers of any color is replaced with a real but of secondary importance issue of police violence against
blacks.
This is another way to explain "What's the matter with Kansas" effect.
John Anthony La Pietra, June 19, 2020 at 6:20 pm
I like that one! - and I have to admit it's not familiar to me, though I've been a fan since before I got to play him in a
neighboring community theater. Now I'm having some difficulty finding it. Where is it from, may I ask?
run75441, June 20, 2020 at 7:56 am
JAL:
Page 239, "The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States."
Read the book "Violence: Reflections of A National Epidemic" . Not a long read and well documented.
MLK Jr. tried, and look what happened to him once he really got some traction. If the Rev. William Barber's Poor People's Campaign
picks up steam, I'm afraid the same thing will happen to him.
I wish it were only pearl-clutching that the money power would resort to, but that's not the way it works.
Yeah – that quote struck me too, never seen it before. At times when they feel so liberated to 'say the quiet part out loud',
then as now, you know the glove is coming off and the vicious mailed fist is free to roam for victims.
Those times are where you know you need to resist or .well, die in many cases.
That's something that really gets me in public response to many of these things. The normal instinct of the populace to wake
from their somnambulant slumber just long enough to ascribe to buffoonery and idiocy ala Keystone Cops the things so much better
understood as fully consciously and purposefully repressive, reactionary, and indicating a desire to take that next step to crush
fully. To obliterate.
Many responses to this – https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1273809160128389120
– are like, 'the police are dumb', 'out of touch', 'a lot of dumb gomer pyles in that room, yuk yuk yuk'. Or, 'cops/FBI are
so dumb to pursue this antifa thing, its just a boogieman' thinking that somehow once the authorities realize 'antifa' is a boogieman,
their attitudes towards other protesters will somehow be different 'now that they realize the silliness of the claims'.
No, not remotely the case – to a terrifyingly large percentage of those in command, and in rank & file they know exactly where
it came from, exactly how the tactics work, and have every intention of classifying all protesters (peaceful or not) into that
worldview. The peaceful protesters *are* antifa in their eyes, to be dealt with in the fully approved manner of violence and repression.
In most countries, the police are there solely to protect the Haves from the Have-Nots. In fact, when the average frustrated
citizen has trouble, the last people he would consider turning to are the police.
This is why in the Third World, the only job of lower social standing than "policeman" is "police informer".
The anti-rascist identity of the recent protests rests on a much larger base of class warfare waged over the past 40 years
against the entire population led by a determined oligarchy and enforced by their political, media and militarized police retainers.
This same oligarchy, with a despicable zeal and revolting media-orchestrated campaign–co-branding the movement with it's usual
corporate perpetrators– distorts escalating carceral and economic violence solely through a lens of racial conflict and their
time-tested toothless reforms. A few unlucky "peace officers" may have to TOFTT until the furor recedes, can't be helped.
Crowding out debt relief, single payer health, living wages, affordable housing and actual justice reform from the debate that
would benefit African Americans more than any other demographic is the goal.
The handful of Emperors far prefer kabuki theater and random ritual Seppuku than facing the rage of millions of staring down
the barrel of zero income, debt, bankruptcy, evictions and dispossession. The Praetorians will follow the money as always.
I suppose we'll get some boulevards re-named and a paid Juneteenth holiday to compensate for the destruction 100+ years of
labor rights struggle, so there's that..
Homestead, Ludlow, Haymarket, Matewan -- the list is long
Working men and women asking for justice gunned down by the cops. There will always be men ready to murder on command as long
as the orders come from the rich and powerful. We are at a moment in history folks were some of us, today mostly people of color,
are willing to put their lives on the line. It's an ongoing struggle.
So how can a tier of society(the police) . be what a society needs ? When as this story and many others show how and why the
police were formed. To break heads. When they have been "the tool" of the elite forever. When so many of them are such dishonest,
immoral, wanna be fascists. And the main direction of the US is towards a police state and fascists running the show . both
republican and democrat. With technology being the boot on the neck of the people and the police are there to take it to the streets.
Can those elusive "good apples" turn the whole rotten barrel into sweet smelling apple pie? That is a big ask.
Or should the structure be liquidated, sell their army toys. fill the ranks with people who are not pathological liars and
abusers and /or racists; of one sort or another. Get rid of the mentality of overcompensation by uber machismo. and make them
watch the andy griffith show. They ought to learn that they can be respected if they are good people, and that they are not respected
because they seek respect through fear and intimidation.
Is that idiot cry of theirs, .. the whole yelling at you; demanding absolute obedience to arbitrary ,assinine orders, really
working to get them respect or is it just something they get off on?
When the police are shown to be bad, they strike by work slowdown, or letting a little chaos loose themselves. So the people
know they need them So any reform of the police will go through the police not doing their jobs . but then something like better
communities may result. less people being busted and harassed , or pulled over for the sake of a quota . may just show we don't
need so much policing anyway. And then if the new social workers brigade starts intervening in peoples with issues when they are
young and in school maybe fewer will be in the system. Couple that with the police not throwing their family in jail for nothing,
and forcing them to pay fines for breaking stupid laws. The system will have less of a load, and the new , better cops without
attitudes will be able to handle their communities in a way that works for everyone. Making them a net positive, as opposed to
now where they are a net negative.
Also,
The drug war is over. The cops have only done the bidding of the organized criminal elements who make their bread and butter
because of prohibition.
Our representatives can legally smoke pot , and grow it in their windowboxes in the capital dc., but people in many places
are still living in fear of police using possession of some substance,as a pretext to take all their stuff,throw them in jail.
But besides the cops, there are the prosecutors . they earn their salaries by stealing it from poor people through fines for things
that ought to be legal. This is one way to drain money from poor communities, causing people to go steal from others in society
to pay their court costs.
And who is gonna come and bust down your door when you can't pay a fine and choose to pay rent and buy your kids food instead
. the cops. just doing their jobs. Evil is the banality of business as usual
The late Kevin R C O'Brien noted that in every case where the Police had been ordered to "Round up the usual suspects" they
have done so, and delivered them where ordered. It did not matter who the "Usual suspects" were, or to what fate they were
to be delivered. They are the King's men and they do the King's bidding.
To have a reasonable discussion, I think that it should be recognized that modern police are but one leg of a triad. The first
of course is the police who appear to seem themselves as not part of a community but as enforcers in that community. To swipe
an idea from Mao, the police should move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. Not be a patrolling shark that attacks
who they want at will knowing that there will be no repercussions against them. When you get to the point that you have police
arresting children in school for infractions of school discipline – giving them a police record – you know that things have gotten
out of hand.
The next leg is the courts which of course includes prosecutors. It is my understanding that prosecutors are elected to office
in the US and so have incentives to appear to be tough on crime"" . They seem to operate more like 'Let's Make a Deal' from what
I have read. When they tell some kid that he has a choice of 1,000 years in prison on trumped up charges or pleads guilty to a
smaller offence, you know that that is not justice at work. Judges too operate in their own world and will always take the word
of a policeman as a witness.
And the third leg is the prisons which operate as sweatshops for corporate America. It is in the interest of the police and
the courts to fill up the prisons to overflowing. Anybody remember the Pennsylvania "kids for cash" scandal where kids lives were
being ruined with criminal records that were bogus so that some people could make a profit? And what sort of prison system is
it where a private contractor can build a prison without a contract at all , knowing that the government (California in
this case) will nonetheless fill it up for a good profit.
In short, in sorting out police doctrine and methods like is happening now, it should be recognized that they are actually
only the face of a set of problems.
How did ancient states police? Perhaps Wiki is a starting point of this journey. Per Its entry, Police, in ancient Greece,
policing was done by public owned slaves. In Rome, the army, initially. In China, prefects leading to a level of government
called prefectures .
I spent some time in the Silver Valley of northern Idaho. This area was the
hot bed of labor unrest during
the 1890's. Federal troops controlled the area 3 separate times,1892, 1894 and 1899. Twice miners hijacked trains loaded them
with dynamite and drove them to mining company stamping mills that they then blew up. Dozens of deaths in shoot outs. The entire
male population was herded up and placed in concentration camps for weeks. The end result was the assassination of the Governor
in 1905.
Interestingly this history has been completely expunged. There is a mining museum in the town which doesn't mention a word
on these events. Even nationwide there seems to be a complete erasure of what real labor unrest can look like..
Yeah, labor unrest does get swept under the rug. Howard zinn had examples in his works "the peoples history of the United States"
The pictched battles in upstate new york with the Van Rennselear's in the 1840's breaking up rennselearwyk . the million acre
estate of theirs . it was a rent strike.
People remembering , we have been here before doesn't help the case of the establishment so they try to not let it happen.
We get experts telling us . well, this is all new we need experts to tell you what to think. It is like watching the
footage from the past 100 years on film of blacks marching for their rights and being told.. reform is coming.. the more things
change, the more things stay the same. Decade after decade. Century after century. Time to start figuring this out people. So,
the enemy is us. Now what?
Doubtless the facts presented above are correct, but shouldn't one point out that the 21st century is quite different from
the 19th and therefore analogizing the current situation to what went on before is quite facile? For example it's no longer necessary
for the police to put down strikes because strike actions barely still exist. In our current US the working class has diminished
greatly while the middle class has expanded. We are a much richer country overall with a lot more people–not just those one percenters–concerned
about crime. Whatever one thinks of the police, politically an attempt to go back to the 18th century isn't going to fly.
" the 21st century is quite different from the 19th "
From the Guardian: "How Starbucks, Target, Google and Microsoft quietly fund police through private donations"
More than 25 large corporations in the past three years have contributed funding to private police foundations, new report
says.
These foundations receive millions of dollars a year from private and corporate donors, according to the report, and are
able to use the funds to purchase equipment and weapons with little public input. The analysis notes, for example, how the
Los Angeles police department in 2007 used foundation funding to purchase surveillance software from controversial technology
firm Palantir. Buying the technology with private foundation funding rather than its public budget allowed the department to
bypass requirements to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council.
The Houston police foundation has purchased for the local police department a variety of equipment, including Swat equipment,
sound equipment and dogs for the K-9 unit, according to the report. The Philadelphia police foundation purchased for its police
force long guns, drones and ballistic helmets, and the Atlanta police foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of
over 12,000 cameras.
In addition to weaponry, foundation funding can also go toward specialized training and support programs that complement
the department's policing strategies, according to one police foundation.
"Not a lot of people are aware of this public-private partnership where corporations and wealthy donors are able to siphon
money into police forces with little to no oversight," said Gin Armstrong, a senior research analyst at LittleSis.
Maybe it is just me, but things don't seem to be all that different.
While it is true, this is a new century. Knowing how the present came to be, is entirely necessary to be able to attempt any
move forward.
The likelihood of making the same old mistakes is almost certain, if one doesn't try to use the past as a reference.
And considering the effect of propaganda and revisionism in the formation of peoples opinions, we do need " learning against learning"
to borrow a Jesuit strategy against the reformation, but this time it should embrace reality, rather than sow falsehoods.
But I do agree,
We have never been here before, and now is a great time to reset everything. With all due respect to "getting it right" or at
least "better".
and knowing the false fables of righteousness, is what people need to know, before they go about "burning down the house".
You know it's not as though white people aren't also afraid of the police. Alfred Hitchcock said he was deathly afraid of police
and that paranoia informed many of his movies. Woody Allen has a funny scene in Annie Hall where he is pulled over by a cop and
is comically flustered. White people also get shot and killed by the police as the rightwingers are constantly pointing out.
And thousands of people in the streets tell us that police reform is necessary. But the country is not going to get rid of
them and replace police with social workers so why even talk about it? I'd say the above is interesting .not terribly relevant.
Straight-up fact: The police weren't created to preserve and protect. They were created to maintain order, [enforced] over
certain subjected classes and races of people, including–for many white people, too–many of our ancestors, too.*
And the question that arises from this: Are we willing to the subjects in a police state? Are we willing to continue to let
our Black and brown brothers and sisters be subjected BY such a police state, and to half-wittingly be party TO it?
Or do we want to exercise AGENCY over "our" government(s), and decide–anew–how we go out our vast, vast array of social ills.
Obviously, armed police officers with an average of six months training–almost all from the white underclass–are a pretty f*cking
blunt instrument to bring to bear.
On our own heads. On those who we and history have consigned to second-class citizenship.
Warning: this is a revolutionary situation. We should embrace it.
*Acceding to white supremacy, becoming "white" and often joining that police order, if you were poor, was the road out of such
subjectivity. My grandfather's father, for example, was said to have fled a failed revolution in Bohemia to come here. Look back
through history, you will find plenty of reason to feel solidarity, too. Race alone cannot divide us if we are intent on the lessons
of that history.
"... While not as overt in the 20th century, the distinction of black slave versus poor white man has kept the class system alive and well in the US in the development of a discriminatory informal caste system. ..."
"... a class level lower than the poorest of the white has kept them from concentrating on the disproportionate, and growing, distribution of wealth and income in the US. ..."
"... It was not the status or material wealth causing the harsh feelings; but, the feeling of being treated less than equal, having little status, and the resulting shame. ..."
"... In other words, by providing poor whites with a stratum of the population that has even lower social status, neoliberals manage to co-opt them to support the policies which economically ate detrimental to their standard of living as well as to suppress the protest against the redistribution of wealth up and dismantling of the New Deal capitalist social protection network. ..."
"... This is a pretty sophisticated, pretty evil scheme if you ask me. In a way, “Floydgate” can be viewed as a variation on the same theme. A very dirty game indeed, when the issue of provision of meaningful jobs for working poor, social equality, and social protection for low-income workers of any color is replaced with a real but of secondary importance issue of police violence against blacks. ..."
...A while back, I was researching the issues you state in your last paragraph. Was about ten pages into it and had to stop
as I was drawn out of state and country.
From my research.
While not as overt in the 20th century, the distinction of black slave versus poor white man has kept the class system
alive and well in the US in the development of a discriminatory informal caste system.
This distraction of a class level lower than the poorest of the white has kept them from concentrating on the disproportionate,
and growing, distribution of wealth and income in the US.
For the lower class, an allowed luxury, a place in the hierarchy and a sure form of self esteem insurance.
Sennett and Cobb (1972) observed that class distinction sets up a contest between upper and lower class with the lower social
class always losing and promulgating a perception amongst themselves the educated and upper classes are in a position to judge
and draw a conclusion of them being less than equal.
The hidden injury is in the regard to the person perceiving himself as a piece of the woodwork or seen as a function such as
"George the Porter."
It was not the status or material wealth causing the harsh feelings; but, the feeling of being treated less than equal,
having little status, and the resulting shame.
The answer for many was violence.
James Gilligan wrote "Violence; Reflections on A National Epidemic." He worked as a prison psychiatrist and talked with many
of the inmates of the issues of inequality and feeling less than those around them. His finding are in his book which is not a
long read and adds to the discussion.
A little John Adams for you.
"The poor man's conscience is clear . . . he does not feel guilty and has no reason to . . . yet, he is ashamed. Mankind
takes no notice of him. He rambles unheeded.
In the midst of a crowd; at a church; in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar.
He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable."
likbez June 19, 2020 1:25 pm
That’s a very important observation. Racism, especially directed toward blacks, along with “identity wedge,” is a perfect tool
for disarming poor white, and suppressing their struggle for a better standard of living, which considerably dropped under neoliberalism.
In other words, by providing poor whites with a stratum of the population that has even lower social status, neoliberals
manage to co-opt them to support the policies which economically ate detrimental to their standard of living as well as to suppress
the protest against the redistribution of wealth up and dismantling of the New Deal capitalist social protection network.
This is a pretty sophisticated, pretty evil scheme if you ask me. In a way, “Floydgate” can be viewed as a variation on
the same theme. A very dirty game indeed, when the issue of provision of meaningful jobs for working poor, social equality, and
social protection for low-income workers of any color is replaced with a real but of secondary importance issue of police violence
against blacks.
This is another way to explain “What’s the matter with Kansas” effect.
"... Alastair Crooke has masterfully shown how the geoeconomic game, as Trump sees it, is above all to preserve the power of the U.S. dollar ..."
"... Russiagate, now totally debunked , has unfolded in effect as a running coup: a color non-revolution metastasizing into Ukrainegate and the impeachment fiasco. In this poorly scripted and evidence-free morality play with shades of Watergate, Trump was cast by the Democrats as Nixon. ..."
"... Black Lives Matter, the organization and its ramifications, is essentially being instrumentalized by selected corporate interests to accelerate their own priority: to crush the U.S. working classes into a state of perpetual anomie, as a new automated economy rises. ..."
"... What's fascinating is how this current strategy of tension scenario is being developed as a classic CIA/NED playbook color revolution. An undisputed, genuine grievance -- over police brutality and systemic racism -- has been completely manipulated, showered with lavish funds, infiltrated, and even weaponized against "the regime". ..."
"... in yet another priceless historical irony, "Assad must go" metastasized into "Trump must go". ..."
"... the majority of the population is considered expendable. It helps that the instrumentalized are playing their part to perfection, totally legitimized by mainstream media . No one will hear lavishly funded Black Lives Matter addressing the real heart of the matter: the reset of the predatory Restored Neoliberalism project, barely purged of its veneer of Hybrid Neofascism. The blueprint is the Great Reset to be launched by the World Economic Forum in January 2021. ..."
"... It will be fascinating to watch how Trump deals with this "Summer of Love" remake of Maidan transposed to the Seattle commune ..."
The division of the English-speaking community into two great powers -- "one aristocratic,
'chosen' and imperial; and one democratic, 'chosen' and manifest destiny-driven", as Philips
correctly establishes -- was accomplished by, what else, a war triptych: the English Civil War,
the American revolution and the U.S. Civil War.
Now, we may be at the threshold of a fourth war -- with unpredictable and unforeseen
consequences.
As it stands, what we have is a do-or-die clash of models: MAGA against an exclusivist
Fed/Wall Street/Silicon Valley-controlled system.
MAGA -- which is a rehash of the American dream -- simply cannot happen when society is
viciously polarized; vast sectors of the middle class are being completely erased; and mass
immigration is coming from the Global South.
In contrast, the Fed as a Wall Street hedge fund meets Silicon Valley model, a supremely
elitist 0.001% concoction, has ample margins to thrive.
The model is based on even more rigid corporate monopoly; the preeminence of capital
markets, where a Wall Street boom is guaranteed by government debt-buybacks of its own debt;
and life itself regulated by algorithms and Big Data.
This is the Brave New World dreamed by the techno-financial Masters of the Universe.
Trump's MAGA woes have been compounded by a shoddy geopolitical move in tandem with Law and
Order: his re-election campaign will be under the sign of "China, China, China." When in
trouble, blame a foreign enemy.
That comes from serially failed opportunist Steve Bannon and his Chinese billionaire
sidekick Guo Wengui, or Miles Guo. Here they are in Statue of Liberty mode announcing their no
holds barred infowar campaign to demonize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to Kingdom Come and
"free the Chinese people".
Bannon's preferred talking point is that if his infowar fails, there will be "kinetic war".
That is nonsense. Beijing's
priorities are elsewhere. Only a few neo-conned Dr. Strangeloves would envisage "kinetic
war"- as in a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Chinese territory.
Alastair Crooke has masterfully
shown how the geoeconomic game, as Trump sees it, is above all to preserve the power of the
U.S. dollar : "His particular concern would be to see a Europe that was umbilically linked
to the financial and technological heavyweight that is China. This, in itself, effectively
would presage a different world financial governance."
But then there's
The Leopard syndrome: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change".
Enter Covid-19 as a particle accelerator, used by the Masters of the Universe to tweak "things"
a bit so they not only stay as they are but the Master grip on the world tightens.
The problem is Covid-19 behaves as a set of -- uncontrollable -- free electrons. That means
nobody, even the Masters of the Universe, is able to really weigh the full consequences of a
runaway, compounded financial/social crisis.
Deconstructing Nixon-Trump
Russiagate, now totally
debunked , has unfolded in effect as a running coup: a color non-revolution metastasizing
into Ukrainegate and the impeachment fiasco. In this poorly scripted and evidence-free morality
play with shades of Watergate, Trump was cast by the Democrats as Nixon.
Big mistake. Watergate had nothing to do with a
Hollywood-celebrated couple of daring reporters. Watergate represented the
industrial-military-security-media complex going after Nixon. Deep Throat and other sources
came from inside the Deep State. And it was not by accident that they were steering the
Washington Post -- which, among other roles, plays the part of CIA mouthpiece to
perfection.
Trump is a completely different matter. The Deep State keeps him under control. One just
needs to look at the record: more funds for the Pentagon, $1 trillion in brand new nuclear
weapons, perennial sanctions on Russia, non-stop threats to Russia's western borders, (failed)
efforts to derail Nord Stream 2. And this is only a partial list.
So, from a Deep State point of view, the geopolitical front -- containment of Russia-China
-- is assured. Domestically, it's much more complicated.
As much as Black Lives Matter does not threaten the system even remotely like the Black
Panthers in the 60s, Trump believes his own Law & Order, like Nixon, will once again
prevail. The key will be to attract the white women suburban vote. Republican pollsters are
extremely
optimistic and even talking about a "landslide".
Yet the behavior of an extra crucial vector must be understood: what corporate America
wants.
When we look at who's supporting Black Lives Matter -- and Antifa -- we find, among others,
Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca
Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald's,
Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon,
WalMart, Warner Brothers and YouTube.
This who's who would suggest a completely isolated Trump. But then we have to look at what
really matters; the class war dynamics in what is in fact a caste system , as Laurence Brahm
argues.
Black Lives Matter, the organization and its ramifications, is essentially being
instrumentalized by selected corporate interests to accelerate their own priority: to crush the
U.S. working classes into a state of perpetual anomie, as a new automated economy
rises.
That may always happen under Trump. But it will be faster without Trump. What's
fascinating is how this current strategy of tension scenario is being developed as a classic
CIA/NED playbook color revolution. An undisputed, genuine grievance -- over police brutality
and systemic racism -- has been completely manipulated, showered with lavish funds,
infiltrated, and even weaponized against "the regime".
Just to control Trump is
not enough for the Deep State -- due to the maximum instability and unreliability of his
Demented Narcissus persona. Thus, in yet another priceless historical irony, "Assad must
go" metastasized into "Trump must go".
The cadaver in the basement
One must never lose track of the fundamental objectives of those who firmly control that
assembly of bought and paid for patsies in Capitol Hill: to always privilege Divide and Rule --
on class, race, identity politics.
After all, the majority of the population is considered expendable. It helps that the
instrumentalized are playing their part to perfection, totally legitimized by
mainstream media . No one will hear lavishly funded Black
Lives Matter addressing the real heart of the matter: the reset of the predatory
Restored Neoliberalism project, barely purged of its veneer of Hybrid Neofascism. The
blueprint is the Great
Reset to be launched by the World Economic Forum in January 2021.
It will be fascinating to watch how Trump deals with this "Summer of Love" remake of
Maidan transposed to the Seattle commune . The hint from Team Trump circles is that he
will do nothing: a coalition of white supremacists and motorcycle gangs might take care of the
"problem" on the Fourth of July.
None of this sweetens the fact that Trump is at the heart of a crossfire hurricane: his
disastrous response to Covid-19; the upcoming, devastating effects of the New Great Depression;
and his intimations pointing to what could turn into martial law.
Still, the legendary Hollywood maxim -- "no one knows anything" -- rules. Even running with
a semi-cadaver in a basement, the Democrats may win in November just by doing nothing. Yet
Teflon Trump should never be underestimated. The Deep State may even realize he's more useful
than they think.
An undisputed, genuine grievance – over police brutality and systemic
racism…
Even Candace Owens understands that police are more likely to be killed or injured by
“suspects” than the “suspects” are to be killed or injured by police.
The militarization of police departments is a genuine grievance. The relatively few acts of
actual police brutality out of millions of contacts in a year is not.
If there is “systemic racism”, it is systemic against White males.
There is no genuine systemic racism other than non-specific word games. Is there systemic
racism in China? How about Japan?
Societies are a racial construct. They are built for the people/drivers that
“invented” the society. Why would a Chinese or Japanese care about what a German
or Nigerian thought should be done for their society?
"... The endless and extravagant election cycles, he said, are an example of politics without politics. ..."
"... "Instead of participating in power," he writes, "the virtual citizen is invited to have 'opinions': measurable responses to questions predesigned to elicit them." ..."
"... Political campaigns rarely discuss substantive issues. They center on manufactured political personalities, empty rhetoric, sophisticated public relations, slick advertising, propaganda and the constant use of focus groups and opinion polls to loop back to voters what they want to hear. Money has effectively replaced the vote. Every current presidential candidate -- including Bernie Sanders -- understands, to use Wolin's words, that "the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates." The citizen is irrelevant. He or she is nothing more than a spectator, allowed to vote and then forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and corporations and their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling. ..."
"... "If the main purpose of elections is to serve up pliant legislators for lobbyists to shape, such a system deserves to be called 'misrepresentative or clientry government,' " Wolin writes. "It is, at one and the same time, a powerful contributing factor to the depoliticization of the citizenry, as well as reason for characterizing the system as one of antidemocracy." ..."
"... We are tolerated as citizens, Wolin warns, only as long as we participate in the illusion of a participatory democracy. The moment we rebel and refuse to take part in the illusion, the face of inverted totalitarianism will look like the face of past systems of totalitarianism. ..."
"... "The significance of the African-American prison population is political," ..."
...Inverted totalitarianism also "perpetuates politics all the time," Wolin said when we spoke,
"but a politics that is not political." The endless and extravagant election cycles, he said,
are an example of politics without politics.
"Instead of participating in power," he writes, "the virtual citizen is invited to have
'opinions': measurable responses to questions predesigned to elicit them."
Political campaigns rarely discuss substantive issues. They center on manufactured
political personalities, empty rhetoric, sophisticated public relations, slick advertising,
propaganda and the constant use of focus groups and opinion polls to loop back to voters what
they want to hear. Money has effectively replaced the vote. Every current presidential
candidate -- including Bernie Sanders -- understands, to use Wolin's words, that "the subject
of empire is taboo in electoral debates." The citizen is irrelevant. He or she is nothing more
than a spectator, allowed to vote and then forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and
corporations and their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling.
"If the main purpose of elections is to serve up pliant legislators for lobbyists to
shape, such a system deserves to be called 'misrepresentative or clientry government,' " Wolin
writes. "It is, at one and the same time, a powerful contributing factor to the
depoliticization of the citizenry, as well as reason for characterizing the system as one of
antidemocracy."
The result, he writes, is that the public is "denied the use of state power." Wolin deplores
the trivialization of political discourse, a tactic used to leave the public fragmented,
antagonistic and emotionally charged while leaving corporate power and empire unchallenged.
"Cultural wars might seem an indication of strong political involvements," he writes.
"Actually they are a substitute. The notoriety they receive from the media and from politicians
eager to take firm stands on nonsubstantive issues serves to distract attention and contribute
to a cant politics of the inconsequential."
"The ruling groups can now operate on the assumption that they don't need the traditional
notion of something called a public in the broad sense of a coherent whole," he said in our
meeting. "They now have the tools to deal with the very disparities and differences that they
have themselves helped to create. It's a game in which you manage to undermine the cohesiveness
that the public requires if they [the public] are to be politically effective. And at the same
time, you create these different, distinct groups that inevitably find themselves in tension or
at odds or in competition with other groups, so that it becomes more of a melee than it does
become a way of fashioning majorities."
In classical totalitarian regimes, such as those of Nazi fascism or Soviet communism,
economics was subordinate to politics. But "under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is
true," Wolin writes. "Economics dominates politics -- and with that domination comes different
forms of ruthlessness."He continues: "The United States has become the showcase of how
democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed."
The corporate state, Wolin told me, is "legitimated by elections it controls." To extinguish
democracy, it rewrites and distorts laws and legislation that once protected democracy. Basic
rights are, in essence, revoked by judicial and legislative fiat. Courts and legislative
bodies, in the service of corporate power, reinterpret laws to strip them of their original
meaning in order to strengthen corporate control and abolish corporate oversight.
He writes: "Why negate a constitution, as the Nazis did, if it is possible simultaneously to
exploit porosity and legitimate power by means of judicial interpretations that declare
huge campaign contributions to be protected speech under the First Amendment, or that treat
heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations as a simple application of the
people's right to petition their government?"
Our system of inverted totalitarianism will avoid harsh and violent measures of control "as
long as dissent remains ineffectual," he told me. "The government does not need to stamp out
dissent. The uniformity of imposed public opinion through the corporate media does a very
effective job."
And the elites, especially the intellectual class, have been bought off. "Through a
combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving
university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially
so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly
integrated into the system," Wolin writes. "No books burned, no refugee Einsteins."
But, he warns, should the population -- steadily stripped of its most basic rights,
including the right to privacy, and increasingly impoverished and bereft of hope -- become
restive, inverted totalitarianism will become as brutal and violent as past totalitarian
states. "The war on terrorism, with its accompanying emphasis upon 'homeland security,'
presumes that state power, now inflated by doctrines
of preemptive war and released from treaty obligations and the potential constraints of
international judicial bodies, can turn inwards," he writes, "confident that in its domestic
pursuit of terrorists the powers it claimed, like the powers projected abroad, would be
measured, not by ordinary constitutional standards, but by the shadowy and ubiquitous character
of terrorism as officially defined."
The indiscriminate police violence in poor communities of color is an example of the ability
of the corporate state to "legally" harass and kill citizens with impunity. The cruder forms of
control -- from militarized police to wholesale surveillance, as well as police serving as
judge, jury and executioner, now a reality for the underclass -- will become a reality for all
of us should we begin to resist the continued funneling of power and wealth upward. We are
tolerated as citizens, Wolin warns, only as long as we participate in the illusion of a
participatory democracy. The moment we rebel and refuse to take part in the illusion, the face
of inverted totalitarianism will look like the face of past systems of totalitarianism.
"The significance of the African-American prison population is political," he writes. "What
is notable about the African-American population generally is that it is highly sophisticated
politically and by far the one group that throughout the twentieth century kept alive a spirit
of resistance and rebelliousness. In that context, criminal justice is as much a strategy of
political neutralization as it is a channel of instinctive racism."
Recall, it was just days ago that
we pointed out Cornell professor and friend of Zero Hedge Dave Collum was publicly shamed
by Cornell for daring to express the "wrong" opinion about current events on social media. Now,
there's a second Cornell professor coming under fire for his critique of the Black Lives Matter
movement.
Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson has challenged any student or faculty
member to a public debate about the Black Lives Matter movement after he says liberals on
campus have launched a "coordinated effort" to have him fired from his job. At least 15 emails
from alumni have been sent to the dean, demanding that action be taken, according to Fox News
.
"There is an effort underway to get me fired at Cornell Law School, where I've worked since
November 2007, or if not fired, at least denounced publicly by the school,"
Jacobson wrote on Thursday . "I condemn in the strongest terms any insinuation that I am
racist."
Jacobson founded the website Legal
Insurrection and says he's had an "awkward relationship" with the university for years as a
result. The recent outrage comes as a result of two posts he recently made on his site:
"Those posts accurately detail the history of how the Black Lives Matters Movement started,
and the agenda of the founders which is playing out in the cultural purge and rioting taking
place now," Jacobson said.
He recently wrote on his blog: "Living as a conservative on a liberal campus is like being
the mouse waiting for the cat to pounce. For over 12 years, the Cornell cat did not pounce.
Though there were frequent and aggressive attempts by outsiders to get me fired, including
threats and harassment, it always came from off campus."
"Not until now, to the best of my knowledge, has there been an effort from inside the
Cornell community to get me fired," he says.
"The effort appears coordinated, as some of the emails were in a template form. All of the
emails as of Monday were from graduates within the past 10 years," he continued. Jacobson's
"clinical faculty colleagues, apparently in consultation with the Black Law Students
Association" drafted and published a letter denouncing 'commentators, some of them attached to
Ivy League Institutions, who are leading a smear campaign against Black Lives Matter.'"
Cornell
responded , backhandedly defending the Professor's right to his own opinion:
"...the Law School's commitment to academic freedom does not constitute endorsement or
approval of individual faculty speech. But to take disciplinary action against him for the
views he has expressed would fatally pit our values against one another in ways that would
corrode our ability to operate as an academic institution."
"This is not just about me. It's about the intellectual freedom and vibrancy of Cornell and
other higher education institutions, and the society at large. Open inquiry and debate are core
features of a vibrant intellectual community," he stated.
"I challenge a representative of those student groups and a faculty member of their choosing
to a public debate at the law school regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement, so that I can
present my argument and confront the false allegations in real-time rather than having to
respond to baseless community email blasts."
"I condemn in the strongest terms any insinuation that I am racist, and I greatly resent any
attempt to leverage meritless accusations in hopes of causing me reputational harm. While such
efforts might succeed in scaring others in a similar position, I will not be intimidated,"
Jacobson concluded.
The hatred against anything w hite is all prevalent and only getting worse. It will only lead to more anti w hite violence.
To look at your future, look at South Africa.
The book burners are at it again. Remember when Democrats keep telling us how the religious right was nothing but a
bunch of dangerous authoritarians. Well, this is certainly awkward.
"... Anti-racism as an ideology serves a perfect function for corporations that ultimately take workers for granted. ..."
"... Today, we find Lincoln statues desecrated . Neither has the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry , one of the first all-black units in the Civil War, survived the recent protests unscathed. To many on the left, history seems like the succession of one cruelty by the next. And so, justice may only be served if we scrap the past and start from a blank slate. As a result, Lincoln's appeal that we stand upright and enjoy our liberty gets lost to time. ..."
"... Ironically, this will only help the cause of Robert E. Lee -- and the modern corporations who rely on cheap, inhumane labor to keep themselves going. ..."
"... Before black slaves did this work, white indentured servants had. (An indentured servant is bound for a number of years to his master, i.e. he can't pack up and leave to find a new opportunity elsewhere.) ..."
"... But in the eyes of the Southern slavocracy, the white laboring poor of the North also weren't truly human. Such unholy antebellum figures as the social theorist George Fitzhugh or South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond urged that the condition of slavery be expanded to include poor whites, too. Their hunger for a cheap, subservient labor source did not stop at black people, after all. ..."
"... Always remember Barbara Fields's formula: The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white supremacy only give this bleak reality a spiritual gloss. ..."
"... Michael Lind argues in his new book The New Class War that many powerful businesses in America today continue to rely on the work of quasi indentured servants. Hungry for unfree, cheap workers, corporations in Silicon Valley and beyond employ tens of thousands of foreign workers through the H-2B visa program. These workers are bound to the company that provided them with the visa. If they find conditions at their jobs unbearable, they can't switch employers -- they would get deported first. In turn, this source of cheap labor effectively underbids American workers who could do the same job, except that they would ask for higher pay. ..."
"... We're getting turned into rats. Naturally, this is no fertile soil for solidarity. And with so many jobs precarious and subcontracted out on a temporary basis, there is preciously little that most workers can do to fight back this insidious managerial control. Free labor looks different. ..."
"... It's hard to come out of the 2020 primaries without realizing that the corporations that run our mainstream media will do anything to protect their right to abuse cheap labor. ..."
"... At this point in history, to the extent that black people suffer any meaningful oppression at all, its down to disproportionate poverty rates, not their racial background. ..."
"... I agree one hundred percent with your take on Biden. Let me add something else: he is a war hawk who not only voted for the Iraq war but used his position as the chairman of an important committee to promote it. ..."
"... Because of slavery alot of bad political policy was incorporated in the founding documents. If a police officer is about to wrongly arrest you because you are black , you do not care if his hatred stems from 400 years of discrimination against blacks. Rather you care that he won't kill you in this encounter because of his racism. ..."
"... Baszak believes racism has no life of its own, it exists only as a tool of the bosses. This is vulgar Marxism. At least since the decades after Bacon's Rebellion ended in 1677, poor whites have invested in white supremacy as a way of boosting their social status. Most Southern families owned no slaves, yet most joined the Civil War cause. ..."
"... They made a movie that beautifully touches this in the 1970s with Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor called " Blue Collar ." ..."
"... "That's exactly what the company wants: to keep you on their line," says Smokey, the coolest and most strategically minded of the crew. "They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white -- everybody -- to keep us in our place." ..."
"... The core thesis in this piece is the animating foundation of The Hill's political talk show "Rising." Composed of a populist Bernie supporter (Krystal Ball) and populist conservative (Saagar Enjeti) as hosts, they frequently highlight the purpose of woke cultural battles is to distract everyone for their neoliberal economic models ..."
Anti-racism as an ideology serves a perfect function for corporations that ultimately take workers for granted.
Former injured Amazon employees join labor organizers and community activists to demonstrate and hold a press conference
outside of an Amazon Go store to express concerns about what they claim is the company's "alarming injury rate" among warehouse
workers on December 10, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
On April 2, 1865, in the dying days of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln wandered the streets of burnt out Richmond,
the former Confederate capital. All of a sudden, Lincoln found himself surrounded by scores of emancipated men and women. Here's
how the historian James McPherson describes the moving episode in his magisterial book
Battle Cry of Freedom :
Several freed slaves touched Lincoln to make sure he was real. "I know I am free," shouted an old woman, "for I have seen Father
Abraham and felt him." Overwhelmed by rare emotions, Lincoln said to one black man who fell on his knees in front of him: "Don't
kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter."
Lincoln's legacy as the Great Emancipator has survived the century and a half since then largely intact. But there have been cracks
in this image, mostly caused by questioning academics who decried him as an overt white supremacist. This view eventually entered
the mainstream when Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote misleadingly in her
lead essay
to the "1619 Project" that Lincoln "opposed black equality."
Today, we find Lincoln statues
desecrated . Neither has the memorial
to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry , one of the first all-black units in the Civil War, survived the recent protests unscathed.
To many on the left, history seems like the succession of one cruelty by the next. And so, justice may only be served if we scrap
the past and start from a blank slate. As a result, Lincoln's appeal that we stand upright and enjoy our liberty gets lost to time.
Ironically, this will only help the cause of Robert E. Lee -- and the modern corporations who rely on cheap, inhumane labor
to keep themselves going.
***
The main idea driving the "1619 Project" and so much of recent scholarship is that the United States of America originated in
slavery and white supremacy. These were its true founding ideals. Racism, Hannah-Jones writes, is in our DNA.
Such arguments don't make any sense, as the historian Barbara Fields clairvoyantly argued in a
groundbreaking essay from 1990. Why would Virginia planters in the 17th century import black people purely out of hate? No, Fields
countered, the planters were driven by a real need for dependable workers who would toil on their cotton, rice, and tobacco fields
for little to no pay. Before black slaves did this work, white indentured servants had. (An indentured servant is bound for a number
of years to his master, i.e. he can't pack up and leave to find a new opportunity elsewhere.)
After 1776 everything changed. Suddenly the new republic claimed that "all men are created equal" -- and yet there were millions
of slaves who still couldn't enjoy this equality. Racism helped to square our founding ideals with the brute reality of continued
chattel slavery: Black people simply weren't men.
But in the eyes of the Southern slavocracy, the white laboring poor of the North also weren't truly human. Such unholy antebellum
figures as the social theorist George Fitzhugh or South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond
urged that the condition of slavery be expanded to include poor whites, too. Their hunger for a cheap, subservient labor source
did not stop at black people, after all.
Always remember Barbara Fields's formula: The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white supremacy only give
this bleak reality a spiritual gloss.
The true cause of the Civil War -- and it bears constant
repeating for all the doubters -- was whether slavery would expand its reach or whether
"free labor" would reign supreme. The latter was the dominant
ideology of the North: Free laborers are independent, self-reliant, and eventually achieve economic security and independence by
the sweat of their brow. It's the American Dream. But if that is so, then the Civil War ended in a tie -- and its underlying conflict was never really settled.
***
Michael Lind argues in his new book The New Class War
that many powerful businesses in America today continue to rely on the work of quasi indentured servants. Hungry for unfree, cheap
workers, corporations in Silicon Valley and beyond employ tens of thousands of foreign workers through the H-2B visa program. These
workers are bound to the company that provided them with the visa. If they find conditions at their jobs unbearable, they can't switch
employers -- they would get deported first. In turn, this source of cheap labor effectively underbids American workers who could
do the same job, except that they would ask for higher pay.
America's wealth rests on this mutual competition between workers -- some nominally "free," others basically indentured -- whether
it be through unjust visa schemes or other unfair managerial practices.
Remember that the next time you read a public announcement by the Amazons of this world that they remain committed to "black lives
matter" and similar identitarian causes.
Fortunately, very few Americans hold the same racial resentments in their hearts as their ancestors did even just half a century
ago. Rarely did we agree as much than when the nation near unanimously condemned the death of George Floyd at the hands of a few
Minneapolis police officers. This is in keeping with another fortunate trend: Over the last 40 years, the rate of police killings
of young black men declined by 79% percent .
But anti-racism as an ideology serves a perfect function for our corporations, even despite the evidence that people in this country
have grown much less bigotted than they once were: As a management tool, anti-racism sows constant suspicion among workers who are
encouraged to detect white supremacist sentiments in everything that their fellow workers say or do.
We're getting turned into rats. Naturally, this is no fertile soil for solidarity. And with so many jobs precarious and subcontracted
out on a temporary basis, there is preciously little that most workers can do to fight back this insidious managerial control. Free
labor looks different.
And so, through a surprising back door, the true cause for which Robert E. Lee chose to betray his country might still be coming
out on top, whether we remove his statues or not -- namely, the steady supply to our ruling corporations of unfree workers willing
to hustle for scraps.
It's time to follow Abraham Lincoln's urging and get off our knees again. We should assert our rights as American citizens to
live free from economic insecurity and mutual resentment. The vast majority of us harbor no white supremacist views, period. Instead,
we have so many more things in common, and we know it.
Another anecdote from the last days of the Civil War, also taken from Battle Cry of Freedom, might prove instructive here: The
surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865 essentially ended the
Civil War. The ceremony was held with solemn respect for Lee, though one of Grant's adjutants couldn't help himself but have a subtle
dig at Lee's expense:
After signing the papers, Grant introduced Lee to his staff. As he shook hands with Grant's military secretary Ely Parker,
a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker's dark features and said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker responded,
"We are all Americans."
Gregor Baszak is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a writer. His articles have appeared
in Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Spectator USA, Spiked, and elsewhere. Follow Gregor on Twitter at @gregorbas1.
It's a bit off-topic but this is a big reason I supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary this year, he was the only
candidate talking about how businesses demand that cheap labor, illegal labor, replace American labor. For this, the corporate
media called him a racist, an anti-semite, a dangerous radical. None of his opponents aside from Elizabeth Warren had anything
to run on aside from pseudo-woke touchy-feely bs. And somehow, with the media insisting that Joe Biden was the only one who could
beat Trump, we ended up with the one candidate who was neither good on economics, good for American workers, or offering platitudes
about wokeness.
It's hard to come out of the 2020 primaries without realizing that the corporations that run our mainstream media will do anything
to protect their right to abuse cheap labor.
Racism is very real. If it weren't it couldn't be used to "divide and conquer" the working calss. we can walk and chew gum
and the same time: oppose racism, and also oppose exploitive labor practices.
What kind of polemic, unsupported statement is "black fast food workers are the ones who gave us the fight for $15"? How about
it was a broad coalition of progressives (of all colors)? Moreover, $15 minimum wage is a poor, one-size-fits-all band-aid that
I doubt even fits ONE scenario. Tackling the broader shareholder capitalism model of labor arbitrage (free trade/mass immigration),
deunionization, and monopolistic hurdles drafted by corporations is where it actually matters. And on that, we are seeing the
inklings of a populist left-right coalition -- if corporate-funded race hustlers could only get out of the way.
That's the problem. We CAN'T chew gum and walk at the same time. Every minute focusing on racial friction is a minute NOT talking
about neoliberal economics. What's the ratio of air time, social media discussion, or newspaper inches are devoted to race vis-a-vis
the economic system that has starved the working class -- which is disproportionately black and brown? 10 to 1? 100 to 1? 1000
to 1? If there are no decent working class jobs for young black and brown men, then it makes it nearly impossible to raise families.
Let's be clear: Systemic racism is real, but it is far less impactful than economic injustices and family dissolution.
Class really isn't the primary issue for black people.
That's a frankly ridiculous statement. At this point in history, to the extent that black people suffer any meaningful oppression
at all, its down to disproportionate poverty rates, not their racial background. No one--except a few neurotic, high-strung corporate
HR PMC types--cares about "microaggressions". Even unjust police shootings of blacks are likely down to class and not race--despite
the politically correct narrative saying otherwise.
Putting racial identity politics as an equal (or even greater) priority than class-based solidarity creates an absurd system
where an upper-middle class black woman attending Yale can act as if a working class white man is oppressing her by not acknowledging
his "white privilege", and not bowing to her every demand. It's utterly delusional to think that sort of culture is going to create
a more just or equal world.
Biden is a Rorschach test, people see whatever they want in a party apparatchik. Trump has been Shiva, the destroyer of the
traditional Republican party. How else do you explain the support among Multi-Billionaires for the Democratic party. Truly ironic.
I agree one hundred percent with your take on Biden. Let me add something else: he is a war hawk who not only voted for the
Iraq war but used his position as the chairman of an important committee to promote it. I understand that he still wants to divide
Iraq into three separate countries--a decision for Iraqis to make and not us. If we try to implement that policy, it would doubtless
lead to more American deaths--to say nothing of Iraqi deaths.
So not only is he not good for American workers, he is not good for the American soldier who is disproportionately likely not
to be from the elite classes but rather from the working and lower-middle class.
The only other Democratic candidate who opposed war-mongering besides Sanders was Tulsi Gabbard. I watched CNN commentary after
a debate in which she participated. While the other participants received lots of commentary from CNN talking heads. she got almost
nothing. She was featured in a video montage of candidates saying "Trump"; other than that, she was invisible in the post-debate
analysis.
I don't know how far it travelled outside of Democratic primary voters, but I recall Biden's campaign saying that they were
planning to be sort of a placeholder that would pass the torch to the next generation. He's insinuated that he only wants to serve
one term and saw jumping into the race as the only way to beat Trump. Not the most exciting platform for the Democrats to run
on.
As depressing as this primary was, it's good to see that the rising generation of Democrats was resistant to platitudes and demanded
actual policy proposals.
Shame the party elders fell for the same old tricks yet again. I just hope that once there are more of
us, we can have a serious policy debate in both major parties about free trade, immigration, inequality. The parties' voters aren't
all that far apart on economics, yet neither of us is being given what we want. Whichever party sincerely takes a stand for the
American working class stands to dominate American politics for a generation.
The problem with Biden's "placeholder" comments is that he specifically mentioned it for Pete Buttigeig, the McKinsey-trained
career opportunist who believes in his bones the same neoliberal economics and interventionist foreign policies as the last generation.
Same bad ideas, new woke packaging.
Kamala Harris and Susan Rice, both tops on the VP list, will do just fine in place of Buttigieg - he's slated to revive TPP
as the new USTR cabinet lead.
Because of slavery alot of bad political policy was incorporated in the founding documents. If a police officer is about to
wrongly arrest you because you are black , you do not care if his hatred stems from 400 years of discrimination against blacks.
Rather you care that he won't kill you in this encounter because of his racism.
To me, I have always thought that America's original sin was slavery. Its stain can not be completely wiped out.
And I further believe that if Native Americans would have enslaved the newly arrived Europeans, and remained the ruling majority,
white people would be discriminated against today.
So the problem is not that white people are inherently evil, or other races are inherently good. It is that because of slavery
black people are bad, white people are good.
As a nation we have never been able to wash out the stain completely. Never will. Getting closer to the promised land is the
best we are going to do. Probably take another 400 years.
In everyday encounters no one cares how discrimination began, just treat me like you want to be treated. Pretty simple.
"As a management tool, anti-racism sows constant suspicion among workers who are encouraged to detect white supremacist sentiments
in everything that their fellow workers say or do."
The author does not offer one smidgen of proof that any company uses antiracism to divide workers. It might be plausible that
it's happened, but Baszak has no data at all.
Over the last 40 years, the rate of police killings of young black men declined by 79% percent.
You think this is an accident? It came about through intense pressure on the police to stop killing Black people -- exactly
the sort of racial emphasis the author seems to be decrying. Important to note that the non-fatal mistreatment has remained high.
The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white supremacy only give this bleak reality a spiritual gloss
Baszak believes racism has no life of its own, it exists only as a tool of the bosses. This is vulgar Marxism. At least since
the decades after Bacon's Rebellion ended in 1677, poor whites have invested in white supremacy as a way of boosting their social
status. Most Southern families owned no slaves, yet most joined the Civil War cause. The psychological draw of racism, its cultural
strength, are obviated by Barszak. And I bet Barbara Fields does not consider racism an epiphenomenon of economics.
They made a movie that beautifully touches this in the 1970s with Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor called "Blue
Collar."
"That's exactly what the company wants: to keep you on their line," says Smokey, the coolest and most strategically minded
of the crew. "They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young,
the black against the white -- everybody -- to keep us in our place."
The core thesis in this piece is the animating foundation of The Hill's political talk show "Rising." Composed of a populist
Bernie supporter (Krystal Ball) and populist conservative (Saagar Enjeti) as hosts, they frequently highlight the purpose of woke
cultural battles is to distract everyone for their neoliberal economic models -- a system that actually has greater deleterious
impact on black communities.
This video is one recent example of what you'll rarely see in mainstream media:
"... The objective of the elites was to wrest control of resources eg land and/or timber plus so-called royal warrants that controlled who was allowed to produce, sell export products to who, grab allocation out of the control of the mobs of greedy royal favorites, then into the hands of the new American elites. ..."
"... The bagmen & courtiers grew fat at the expense of the colonists and generally the bagman, who also spied on the locals for obvious reasons, would go back to England once he had made his stash. ..."
"... The American elites wanted and, after the revolution got, the power to control economic development for themselves.Hence the birth of lobbyists simultaneous with the birth of the American nation state. ..."
"... IMO the constitution was about as meaningful to the leaders of the revolution as campaign promises are to contemporary politicians.That is, something to be used as self protection without ever implementing. ..."
I'm always amused, nah that is a little harsh - dumbfounded is more reasonable, when
Americans express dismay that 'their' constitution is not being adhered to by the elites.
The minutiae of American political history hasn't greatly concerned me after a superficial
study at high school, when I realized that the political structure is corrupt and was
designed to facilitate corruption.
The seeming caring & sharing soundbites pushed out by the 'framers' scum such as
Thomas Jefferson was purely for show, an attempt to gather the cannon fodder to one side.
This was simple as the colonial media had been harping on about 'taxation without
representation' for decades.
It wasn't just taxes, in fact for the American based elites that was likely the least of
it. The objective of the elites was to wrest control of resources eg land and/or timber plus
so-called royal warrants that controlled who was allowed to produce, sell export products to
who, grab allocation out of the control of the mobs of greedy royal favorites, then into the
hands of the new American elites.
A well placed courtier would put a bagman into the regional center of a particular colony
(each colony becoming a 'state' post revolution), so that if someone wanted to, I dunno, say
export huge quantities of cotton, the courtier would charge that 'colonial' for getting the
initial warrant, then take a hefty % of the return on the product - all collected by the
on-site bagman then divvied up.
The bagmen & courtiers grew fat at the expense of the colonists and generally the
bagman, who also spied on the locals for obvious reasons, would go back to England once he
had made his stash.
The system was ponderous inaccurate & very expensive. Something had to be done, but
selling revolutionary change to the masses on the basis of the need to enrich the already
wealthy was not likely to be a winner. Consequently the high faulting blather.
The American elites wanted and, after the revolution got, the power to control economic
development for themselves.Hence the birth of lobbyists simultaneous with the birth of the American nation state.
IMO the constitution was about as meaningful to the leaders of the revolution as campaign
promises are to contemporary politicians.That is, something to be used as self protection without ever implementing.
"... Old saying: A Recession is when your neighbor loses their Job. A Depression is when you lose your Job. ..."
"... A lot of mega wealthy people are cheats. They get insider info, they don't pay people and do all they can to provide the least amount of value possible while tricking suckers into buying their crap. Don't even get me started on trust fund brats who come out of the womb thinking they are Warren buffet level genius in business. ..."
"... There's a documentary about Wal-Mart that has the best title ever: The High Cost of Low Cost ..."
"... Globalism killed the American dream. We can buy cheap goods made somewhere else if we have a job here that pays us enough money. ..."
You can't just move to American cities to pursue opportunity; even the high wages paid in
New York are rendered unhelpful because the cost of housing is so high.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was vilified and ultimately murdered when he was helping organize
a Poor People's Campaign. Racial justice means economic justice.
A lot of mega wealthy people are cheats. They get insider info, they don't pay people and
do all they can to provide the least amount of value possible while tricking suckers into
buying their crap. Don't even get me started on trust fund brats who come out of the womb
thinking they are Warren buffet level genius in business.
Nailed it. As a millennial, I'm sick of being told to just "deal with it" when the cards
have always been stacked against me. Am I surviving? Yes. Am I thriving? No.
When the reserve status of the American dollar goes away, then it will become apparent how
poor the US really is. You cannot maintain a country without retention of the ability to
manufacture the articles you use on a daily basis. The military budget and all the jobs it
brings will have to shrink catastrophically.
...and sometimes you CAN'T afford to move. You can't find a decent job. You certainly
can't build a meaningful savings. You can't find an apartment. And if you have kids? That
makes it even harder. I've been trying to move for years, but the conditions have to be
perfect to do it responsibly. The American Dream died for me once I realized that no matter
the choices I made, my four years of college, my years of saving and working hard....I do NOT
have upward mobility. For me, the American Dream is dead. I've been finding a new dream. The
human dream.
This is a very truncated view. You need to expand your thinking. WHY has the system been
so overtly corrupted? It's globalism that has pushed all this economic pressure on the
millennials and the middle class. It was the elites, working with corrupt politicians, that
rigged the game so the law benefited them.
This is all reversible. History shows that capitalism can be properly regulated in a way
that benefits all. The answer to the problem is to bring back those rules, not implement
socialism.
Trump has:
- Ended the free trade deals
- Imposed Protective tarriffs to defend American jobs and workers
- Lowered corporate taxes to incentivize business to locate within us borders.
- Limited immigration to reduce the supply of low skilled labor within US borders.
The result? before COVID hit the average American worker saw the first inflation adjusted
wage increase in over 30 years!
This is why the fake news and hollywood continue to propagandize the masses into hating
Trump.
Trump is implementing economic policies good for the people and bad for the elites
Krystal Ball exposes the delusion of the American dream.
About Rising: Rising is a weekday morning show with bipartisan hosts that breaks the mold of
morning TV by taking viewers inside the halls of Washington power like never before. The show
leans into the day's political cycle with cutting edge analysis from DC insiders who can
predict what is going to happen.
It also sets the day's political agenda by breaking exclusive
news with a team of scoop-driven reporters and demanding answers during interviews with the
country's most important political newsmakers.
Got my degree just as the great recession hit. Couldn't find real work for 3 years, not
using my degree... But it was work. now after 8 years, im laid off. I did everything "right".
do good in school, go to college, get a job...
I've never been fired in my life. its always,
"Your contract is up" "Sorry we cant afford to keep you", "You can make more money collecting!
but we'll give a recommendation if you find anything."
Now I'm back where i started... only
now I have new house and a family to support... no pressure.
Trump just changed the rules to let Wall Street's most predatory industry get its hands on hundreds of billions of dollars of
ordinary workers' retirement savings. Now his friends in private equity are celebrating.
If politics is the art of the sleight of hand, then Donald Trump is one of the deftest magicians of all time -- a master of creating
mesmerizing spectacles, while his minions quietly rob everything in sight. This David Copperfield routine has become so mundane we
are practically numb to it, but the trick Trump just pulled off for his billionaire pals was something particularly special -- it
could end up being one of the single biggest financial heists in history.
The Trump administration's new directive came just a few months after private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman -- who had
been pushing for the change -- poured $3 million
into a super PAC backing Trump's reelection bid.
While long-standing worker-protection regulations have prevented 401(k) plans from investing in high-risk private equity firms,
the letter now permits corporations to funnel that money to those firms, which charge notoriously giant fees.
Trump's administration argued that workers should feel fortunate and thankful that the administration will now let employers turn
their savings over to private equity barons.
"This information letter will help Americans saving for retirement gain access to alternative investments that often provide strong
returns," labor secretary Eugene Scalia said
in a statement announcing the new policy. "The letter helps level the playing field for ordinary investors and is another step
by the department to ensure that ordinary people investing for retirement have the opportunities they need for a secure retirement."
In practice, private equity firms will now be allowed to access -- and skim fees off of -- the
$9 trillion in 100
million workers' 401(k) plans and IRAs.
"If just 5 percent of the money in these retirement funds were available to private equity, it would be a windfall of $435 billion
-- real money even to private equity millionaires and billionaires,"
wrote Eileen Appelbaum of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
The Labor Department letter is the result of all that private equity influence -- and at a particularly opportune time. The
industry -- including
Partners Group -- has recently been fretting about a decline in fees during the COVID-19 pandemic. The letter offers the potential
for a bailout for the industry, paid for by millions of workers' retirement savings.
That said, this is not some temporary relief during a fleeting crisis -- this is the culmination of a long-term campaign by Schwarzman.
Six days after Trump was inaugurated, the Blackstone chief said that he had been dreaming of a president who would change the law
to let his firm make bank off workers' 401(k) savings.
"In life you have to have a dream," Schwarzman told analysts in
January 2017 , days after Trump's inauguration. "One of the dreams is our desire and the market's need to have more access at
retail to alternative asset products . . . A lot of people are not allowed to put those into retirement vehicles and other types.
And one of the interesting issues when you have a new government is whether they want to continue that type of prohibition or not.
Because what it's doing is denying people sort of a better retirement, and if there's a change in that area that becomes a huge opportunity
for the firm."
Like Shelley Levene's smarmy real-estate sales pitch in
Glengarry Glen Ross , Schwarzman's argument is that private equity offers ordinary Americans terrific untapped investment upside.
In his telling, workers have been unfairly deprived of these opportunities under the old laws -- and not surprisingly, both the Trump
Labor Department and some of the business press have credulously echoed that line.
"Everyday investors may soon be able to get a piece of private equity action," effused the lede of the New York Times
' report on the Labor Department letter, as if this is a sweet get-rich-quick opportunity for the average working man.
But only days after the change, a landmark
study was released, telling the real story of private equity.
The report by University of Oxford professor Ludovic Phalippou shows that in the last fifteen years, private equity firms generally
have not provided better returns to investors than low-fee stock index funds. In the process, a handful of private equity firms and
their executives have raked in roughly $230 billion in fees from investors like public pension funds and university endowments.
"This wealth transfer might be one of the largest in the history of modern finance: from a few hundred million pension scheme
members to a few thousand people working in private equity," Phalippou concludes.
Politicians have enabled this redistribution.
In Washington, federal lawmakers have
preserved a tax loophole
that allows private equity moguls to classify their winnings as capital gains rather than income, thereby paying far lower tax rates
than ordinary workers.
Meanwhile, in states and cities, local officials have continued to
direct more and more of government workers' pension savings to politically connected private equity firms. Those officials have
been hoping that private equity investments would produce outsize returns that might forestall tax hikes necessary to raise revenue
and fund the pension benefits promised to public-sector workers. But overall, those returns were not significantly better than the
stock market, and they came with giant fees.
In its letter, the Trump administration actually acknowledged some of these pitfalls of private equity investments, noting that
they involve "more complex, and typically, higher fees." But that wasn't enough to stop the Labor Department from shoving millions
of unwitting workers and retirees into private equity's maw just a few years after
Blackstone
and other major private equity firms were sanctioned
by regulators for fleecing investors.
The Quest for Dumb Money
The private equity industry is hardly short on cash -- the industry was sitting on roughly
$1.5 trillion of undeployed capital at the end of 2019. The reason the Labor Department letter is so important to the industry
is because 401(k)s and IRAs represent a particular kind of capital that private equity firms love -- so-called
"dumb money."
Unlike a share of publicly traded stock whose price is the same for all investors, a private equity investment's fees can vary
widely from investor to investor. Private equity firms are therefore always eager to find investors willing to accept the highest
possible fees. "Dumb money" refers to such investors -- entities like pension funds, 401(k) plans, and university endowments that
are pools of other people's money directed by officials with no personal skin in the investment decisions.
Wall Street sees these funds as "dumb" -- and particularly lucrative -- because the officials negotiating on retirees' or universities'
behalf may not drive as hard a bargain on fees and terms as, say, an individual billionaire or an insurance company trying to protect
its cash reserves.
This wiggle room with dumb money can be enormously lucrative for private equity firms: a recent
study by Stanford and Harvard researchers
found that had public pensions all received the same private equity fee rates, they "would have earned nearly $45 billion more on
their investments."
In other words: that is $45 billion of earnings that could have gone to retirees, but instead went to private equity firms and
other wealthy investors because pension fund managers didn't secure better fees and terms.
That part about "other unobserved investors" is key -- private equity firms explicitly say in their
SEC filings that they can and will offer different investors different fees and terms on the exact same investments. It is a
situation that has caused
some retirees to wonder whether their dumb money is being used to pad the profits of smarter, politically connected investors
who negotiate better terms in the same private equity investments.
Now that Trump's Labor Department has opened the floodgates, a lot more money could end up flowing into these opaque deals, enriching
private equity executives and their friends -- while leaving workers'
meager retirement savings even further depleted.
End Mark
David Sirota is editor-at-large at Jacobin . He edits the Too Much Information newsletter and previously served as a senior
adviser and speechwriter on Bernie Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign. You can subscribe to David Sirota's newsletter "Too Much
Information" here . Andrew Perez contributed research to this
story.
"... On Friday, for example, the principal of a public school in Windsor, Vermont. was dismissed from her job for posting the following words on her personal Facebook page: "While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law enforcement? Just because I don't walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I'm a racist.". ..."
"... Black Lives Matter believes in force. They flood the streets with angry young people who break things, and they hurt anyone who gets in the way. When they want something, they take it. Make them mad and they will set your business on fire. Annoy them and they will occupy your downtown and declare a brand new country. You're not going to do anything about it, they know that for certain. ..."
A survey this week by Rasmussen, a right-leaning pollster, found that 62 percent of likely
voters now have a favorable opinion of Black Lives Matter. At the same time, Rasmussen found
that Donald
Trump 's approval rating was 43 percent. That's almost 20 points lower.
And by the way, Trump was not alone. Black Lives Matter is far more popular than
Joe Biden , too. It's
more popular than America's religious institutions -- all of them. It's more popular than the
media, the Congress
and big business.
Black Lives Matter is more popular by double digits than both the
Democratic
and the Republican parties. It's
almost as popular as the U.S. military. It's much more popular than the
pope .
The numbers are astounding, but the polls are not the only measure of it. One picture from a
Black Lives Matter rally over the weekend in New York shows an ocean of people. Ask yourself
the last time you saw a candidate for office who was able to draw a crowd like that?
The media, in their relentlessly fawning coverage, usually described Black Lives Matter as
an activist group or a protest movement. But that's deception by understatement. Black Lives
Matter is not a collection of marchers with signs. It's not a conventional political lobby like
Planned Parenthood or the NRA. It's not pressuring Congress to pass some narrow new set of
laws.
Black Lives Matter is far more ambitious than that. It is working to remake the country and
then to control it. It's a political party.
As of now, Black Lives Matter may be the single most powerful political party in the United
States. Nobody says that out loud, but politicians understand it perfectly well. If nothing
else, they understand power; they can smell it at great distances. And that's why they're
lining up to bow before Black Lives Matter.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.: You can't really reform a department that that is rotten to the
root.
Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md.: We've heard our people cry out, "I can't breathe!" We've heard
our people speak out, "Black Lives Matter."
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.: This is a systemic problem that requires a comprehensive
solution.
Stacy Abrams, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate: What I would say is that there is
-- there is a legitimacy to this anger. There's a legitimacy to this outrage.
None of what you just saw is a stretch for Democrats. They believe their long-term goals
align with those of Black Lives Matter. And in fact, at times, the group functions as an arm of
the Democratic Party.
More telling, though -- and more ominous -- is the response from many Republicans. They've
been happy to go along as well, or in Mitt Romney 's case, even mouth the
same slogans.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah: We need to end violence and brutality and to make sure that
people understand that Black Lives Matter.
If the leaders of Black Lives Matter are political actors -- and they are -- then by
definition, you are allowed to have any opinion you want to have about them. Black Lives
Matter wants to run the country; therefore, you can freely criticize Black Lives Matter.
Those are the rules of our system -- but not anymore.
That was the former Republican nominee for president. Let that sink in. If there was ever an
indicator of how powerful Black Lives Matter has become, you just saw it.
Republican leaders brag about their strong conservative convictions, but mostly they just
want to be on the winning team, whatever that is. That's why they pause before offending
China
. It's why when Black Lives Matter tells them to take a knee, they do.
It's all pretty strange when you think about it. If the leaders of Black Lives Matter are
political actors -- and they are -- then by definition, you are allowed to have any opinion you
want to have about them. Black Lives Matter wants to run the country; therefore, you can freely
criticize Black Lives Matter.
Those are the rules of our system -- but not anymore.
Imagine a world where you are punished for questioning the behavior of the president or for
insulting your local mayor. You probably can't imagine that. It's too bizarre. It's
un-American. But that's where we are right now. Black Lives Matter has changed the rules. And
here is their first new rule: No criticizing Black Lives Matter. You can be fired from your job
if you disobey. Many Americans have been.
On Friday, for example, the principal of a public school in Windsor, Vermont. was dismissed
from her job for posting the following words on her personal Facebook page: "While I understand
the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law
enforcement? Just because I don't walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I'm a
racist.".
Unfortunately, the principal's boss disagreed. The superintendent of Windsor Schools
described the quote you just heard as "outright racist." Windsor, Vermont, by the way, is more
than 97 percent white.
Also on Friday, an economist called
Harald Uhlig lost his job at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for daring to offer even
milder criticism than that. On Twitter, Uhlig noted that Black Lives Matter had"just torpedoed
itself with its full-fledged support of #defund the police. Now is the time for sensible adults
to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about it
all."
That was a racist statement, the Federal Reserve concluded. So, they fired Harald Uhlig.
We could give you many other examples of the same thing happening. There are a lot of them.
Black Lives Matter now enjoys almost complete immunity from criticism. This is unprecedented
for an American political movement.
But Black Lives Matter is even more powerful than that. It has singlehandedly revised our
moral framework. Yes, black lives do matter. That is a statement of fact, and no decent person
doubts that it is true because it is. And it is true precisely because every life matters. We
are all human beings, every one of us. We have souls. Skin color is irrelevant to moral
value.
Until recently, this was considered obvious; saying it was regarded as a virtue. All lives
matter equally. All of us were created by God. In the end, all of us will die. Nothing can
change that -- not wealth, not fame, not race. Every life is precisely as valuable as every
other life.
By the way, that idea forms the basis of the Christian faith. It's the entire premise behind
our founding documents. And yet, suddenly, thanks to Black Lives Matter, you can no longer say
it out loud.
Affirming the fundamental equality of all people is now considered hate speech. You can be
fired for saying it. Again, many people have been.
This is a dangerous moment. How did we get here? In a word, quickly. It happened fast.
As recently as December, before the riots, most Americans did not approve of Black Lives
Matter. The group was defined in the public mind by moments like this.
Crowd (chanting): Pigs in a blanket. Fry them like bacon. Pigs in a blanket. Fry them
like bacon. Pigs in a blanket. Fry them like bacon. Pigs in a blanket. Fry them like
bacon.
"Pigs in a blanket." "Fry like bacon." "Kill the police." They yelled that at a rally. The
usual liars immediately swooped in to pretend that it never happened. The president of the
Southern Poverty Law Center wrote an entire op-ed ordering the public not to consider Black
Lives Matter a hate group.
But people could see the truth for themselves. That video was online. A lot of facts about
Black Lives Matter still reside on the internet. They have not yet been scrubbed.
This is a dangerous moment. How did we get here? In a word, quickly. It happened fast.
The group's signature demand is to eliminate law enforcement. When you first heard
protesters scream, "Defund the police," it may have shocked you. That's just crazy, you may
have thought.
A few weeks later, support for eliminating law enforcement is rising quickly in the polls.
Minneapolis is already doing it. Other cities will follow. Are you surprised? Almost no one in
public life has pushed back meaningfully against the idea of defunding the police.
The Black Lives Matter position is the only position most people hear. After a while, they
believe it. Unchallenged claims must be true. That's what most people assume, and why wouldn't
they assume that? If you strongly disagree with something, say so, otherwise, it's much more
likely to happen.
So, with that in mind, consider some of the other positions Black Lives Matter has endorsed.
The repeal of all immigration restrictions, for starters. They're for that. The legalization of
sex work -- prostitution -- they're for that, too. The destruction of the nuclear family, your
family. The forced relocation of farmland. Race-based reparations, specifically "in the form of
a guaranteed minimum livable income for all black people."
Hear that? All black people, not just the descendants of American slaves. This would
include the millions of African and Caribbean immigrants who on average now earn more than
native-born Americans. Every one of these new Americans would receive a guaranteed annual
income from American taxpayers in order to atone for the sin of -- for the sin of what
actually? Allowing them to immigrate here?
Black Lives Matter does not explain that part. No one asked them. You could be fired for
asking. What you cannot be punished for, however, is looting and burning, at least not if
you're Black Lives Matter.
Huge parts of urban landscape have been destroyed in the past month. Almost no one has been
held to account for it,. Just the opposite. You're encouraged to pretend it never happened.
In St. Louis, every rioter arrested has been released without charges. In New York, hundreds
were released without bail. Same in Washington, D.C. It's happening almost everywhere, and not
just in places controlled by elected Democrats which tells you a lot.
Fort Worth, Texas, for example, is one of the few major American cities that is led by a
Republican, Mayor Betsy Price. On May 31, a crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators blocked a
bridge in downtown Fort Worth, when police arrived to disperse them, they threw rocks and
bottles of bleach. Three police officers were injured.
The mob then went on to loot and vandalize businesses. Dozens of rioters were arrested for
this. Ten days later, the city's police chief, Ed Kraus, announced that he was dropping all
charges against them.
Kraus issued a statement suggesting that the real criminals in the riot were not the
rioters, but his own police officers, whom he suggested would be reined in and perhaps
punished. "This is just one step on a long journey," Kraus wrote, sounding more like a
therapist than a cop.
The chief promised that his department was "committed to walking the path of reform with our
community." Kraus never bothered to explain exactly what his cops had done wrong. They were
cops. That was enough.
That same day, the Fort Worth School Board issued a statement declaring, "Police practices
are deeply rooted in white supremacy." Once again, no one specified which police practices
reflected white supremacy, or what that accusation even meant. It was a blanket condemnation,
but it was left to hang in the air. As usual, no one in authority pushed back against it in a
Republican-led city.
Black Lives Matter believes in force. They flood the streets with angry young people who
break things, and they hurt anyone who gets in the way. When they want something, they take
it. Make them mad and they will set your business on fire. Annoy them and they will occupy
your downtown and declare a brand new country. You're not going to do anything about it, they
know that for certain.
It'll be interesting to know what happens to the murder rate in Fort Worth over the next
year. We can guess. We're seeing it all over the country. We've seen it many times through the
years. When the people in charge undermine the law, violence surges.
But there is a solution to this vortex and it's called leadership. Sixty-five years ago,
politicians throughout the American South refused to submit to the Supreme Court's Brown vs.
Board decision. Authorities in many states simply ignored the law like it didn't exist. Armed
extremist groups filled the vacuum. They used violence to make their own laws.
Ultimately, the federal government stepped in and restored order. In 1957, President Dwight
Eisenhower federalized the National Guard of Arkansas. He sent troops to Little Rock to force
Governor Orville Faubus to obey the law.
So the question is, where is our Justice Department? Right now? Is there a reason the DOJ
hasn't filed federal conspiracy charges against the people who organized and led these riots?
It's not as if we don't know who they are. Their crimes are on YouTube.
You know the reason. Black Lives Matter was involved. It is politically sensitive. No
prosecutor wants to be called a racist, as if it's racist to punish people for crimes they
committed.
You know what the victims of those crimes think? The old people who were beaten to the
ground for trying to defend their property. The shop owners whose life savings were stolen or
burned. The families of the people who were murdered during the riots, and there were quite a
few of them.
No one is defending these people. No one is punishing their attackers. Nobody cares.
Imagine how they feel about that. What recourse do they have? Do they have to torch a
Wendy's or loot a Walmart to get our attention? Let's hope not. It might be enough to have a
single national leader -- just one -- who understands what is actually going on in this country
and is brave enough to say so. That might make all the difference, and it would certainly make
the political career of the person who does it.
In the fall of 1968, a teaching assistant at San Francisco State University called George
Murray gave a speech endorsing racial violence. Murray urged black students to bring guns to
campus and "kill all the slave masters." Murray, by the way, was the "minister of education" in
the local Black Panther Party, which was the Antifa of its time.
Black Lives Matter becomes more powerful and more popular with the public. Why is that
happening exactly? Here's why: Because Black Lives Matter is getting exactly what they want
and that is the most basic sign of strength. Strength is the most appealing quality to voters
and to people and to animals.
When administrators learned about Murray's speech, they equivocated, but ultimately they
suspended him under pressure. In response to this, a group called the Third World Liberation
Front shut down the campus. Sound familiar?
They demanded the university drop all admission standards for black applicants and admit
students purely on the basis of race. The administrators were paralyzed in the face of this.
More than anything, they didn't want to be called racist. The university's president was so
terrorized by it that he quit and left.
Ultimately, the leadership of San Francisco State fell to an unlikely president, a
Japanese-Canadian academic called S.I. Hayakawa. Hayakawa was short, eccentric, wore thick
glasses, but he was completely fearless.
On December 2, 1968, Hayakawa marched into the middle of a student protest. Rioters
immediately assaulted him, but Hayakawa kept going. He climbed onto the roof of a sound truck
and ripped the wires out of the loudspeaker. San Francisco State University reopened that
day.
So here's the lesson for today's officeholders. S.I. Hayakawa became a folk hero for
standing up to the mob. He was elected to the United States Senate from California. Republicans
supported him. Voters did, too. They didn't always understand him. Hayakawa wore a Scottish tam
o' shanter cap in public and never really explained why he did.
But it didn't matter. He was brave and honest, and voters appreciated that above all. They
always do. We don't have our Hayakawa yet. Instead, we have cowards.
Our leaders are happy to talk about everything but the collapse of the centuries' old
civilization tumbling down around them. They have no idea how little credibility they have.
They have no sense of how irrelevant they have become. If you can't tell the truth when the
truth actually matters, then nothing you say matters.
Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter becomes more powerful and more popular with the public. Why is
that happening exactly? Here's why: Because Black Lives Matter is getting exactly what they
want and that is the most basic sign of strength. Strength is the most appealing quality to
voters and to people and to animals.
Three weeks ago, Black Lives Matter demanded that cities defund their police. On Monday, the
mighty NYPD, the biggest police department in our nation -- the most sophisticated police
department in the world -- bowed and announced it is
abolishing
its entire plainclothes division , 600 people. Gone for good because Black Lives Matter
wanted it done. And now it is done.
That's not bluffing. It's not posturing. It's not tweeting. That is real power. You'll
notice it did not require the usual maneuvering for Black Lives Matter to get that power. They
didn't need a team of lawyers to get it. Black Lives Matter doesn't make legal arguments.
They're not trying to convince you of anything.
Black Lives Matter believes in force. They flood the streets with angry young people who
break things, and they hurt anyone who gets in the way. When they want something, they take it.
Make them mad and they will set your business on fire. Annoy them and they will occupy your
downtown and declare a brand new country. You're not going to do anything about it, they know
that for certain.
This is the most destructive kind of politics. We've seen a lot of it in recent years.
Organized groups did it to Brett Kavanaugh. The main point of slandering Kavanaugh was never to
block his confirmation. We misread that. They knew they probably couldn't achieve it.
The real point was to send Kavanaugh and John Roberts and the other Republican justices a
very clear message, step out of line and we will hurt your families. And judging from recent
court decisions, it worked. At times, it's very clear that supposedly conservative justices are
afraid to defy the mob.
So what message do the rest of us take from what's happened over the past three weeks? It's
very simple. The message is force is more effective than voting. Elections changed nothing.
Rioting, by contrast, makes you rich and powerful. When you riot, prosecutors will ignore
the law on your behalf. Corporations will send you millions. Politicians will kneel down before
you. It works. Violence works. That's the message.
Everyone hears that message. Until violence stops working, violence will continue.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "
Tucker Carlson Tonight " on June 15,
2020
"... Highly recommended. America has been transformed into a public relations image - she no longer has substance. She is like a hologram - reach out to touch her and you find there is nothing there - it's all been taken and replaced with an image. ..."
While our Country remains untainted with the Principles and manners, which are now
producing desolation in so many Parts of the World: while she continues Sincere and incapable
of insidious and impious Policy: We shall have the Strongest Reason to rejoice in the local
destination assigned Us by Providence.
But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep simulation towards one
another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation
while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner
the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and
Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World.
Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions
unbridled by eletion, morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would
break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate
to the government of any other
Victor999 , 11 hours ago
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate
to the government of any other
Key statement. Americans are no longer a moral and religious people even though they
present the trappings of such.
Highly recommended. America has been transformed into a public relations image - she no
longer has substance. She is like a hologram - reach out to touch her and you find there is
nothing there - it's all been taken and replaced with an image.
This happened prior to Crooke writing his current article
Just read that piece. I was fascinated to see him referencing an article by "Walrus" over
at SST (which was a particularly BS article in my view.) However, he referenced the concept
of Walrus' article about a "billionaire network" controlling everything by corrupting people
over 40.
My reaction to that is: Isn't that how it was always done throughout history? The rich
control the less-rich who control the less-rich - using his matryoshka example.
His main thesis is that younger ideologist are setting up a more serious divide in US
society than the old "Liberal vs Conservative" or "North vs South" division, and that this is
putting pressure on the "billionaires network."
I'm not sure how to regard that concept yet. On the one hand, I know that the old "young
vs old" dynamic is always at work - and generally irrelevant since it is the old that
controls the money and the military power. OTOH, there is a new phenomenon in the last
decades, starting with the availability of networks, and then growing with the availability
of affordable personal computers, and now exploding with the presence of the Internet. That
phenomenon is hacking. And it is the youth that control that technology.
I referenced the "cyberpunk" sci-fi genre a few threads back. If one is familiar with the
hacker community and the infosec profession, ne if struck by the massive disparity between
the capabilities of the attackers and that of the defenders of networks. No matter what the
defenders do, there is no stopping an adversary which has motivation, resources and time. The
defender has to always be right, the attacker only has to be right once.
This translates to the current situation socially - but only to a limited degree. Hackers
are a particular breed intellectually and emotionally. Their attitudes and abilities do not
translate to the rest of people their age. Their political and social attitudes *may*, to
some degree, depending on the hacker.
But most hackers have a decidedly anti-authoritarian, if not libertarian, or dare I say
anarchist, attitude. They can join with others, but that tends to be at arm's length. So I
don't see the majority of them empowering a "youth collectivism" or whatever one wants to
call the general social and political attitude of the young today.
I *do* see them being willing to take on political and social power. That was the entire
reference point of the cyberpunk genre: technically proficient iconoclasts marginalized as
criminals taking on (and frequently losing) TPTB depicted as corporations and the state.
I see the rise of hacking as a direct threat to the "billionaires network" (if such a
thing actually exists as a coordinated entity.) The only question is whether the hackers have
a coherent view of their potential. I suspect they don't, much like the "Woke" (see below).
But they could - and if they did, they'd be very dangerous since there is no real way to stop
them, and their numbers are growing worldwide as more Third World societies develop middle
classes that can afford to own computers while still not providing an adequate economy for
their people (places like India, Malaysia and Indonesia.)
"One aspect he apparently overlooks is the very poor understanding of history and
contemporary events exhibited on all sides--the "woke" are asleep as they know nothing of
Anti-Federalism or of the Class-based rationale related to the genesis of Police, although
they seem to be aware of the social control goals of that Genesis in both North and South
as we examined last week."
Agreed. That's my problem with the "Woke" - they're even more ignorant than their parents
were, even if they're more socially conscious. They believe things that aren't correct just
as much as their parents did - they just believe different incorrect things.
"The Class War is also sidelined despite the reality of it being the most important
factor in the equation--The .1% being the genuine looters..."
Agreed.
"IMO, there's no discernable ideological direction aside from some basic demands
related to policing and the racism connected to it because those in the streets lack the
tools to articulate a complete vision--something that's very difficult to do when you don't
know where you've actually been and the happenings over the past 75 years that have shaped
the current landscape"
Indeed. One has to burrow rather deeply into first principles to formulate a coherent
philosophy - and I don't see anyone doing that. I had nine years in a Federal prison to
re-orient myself and I benefited from having a previous forty years of exposure to concepts
outside the mainstream "left vs right" dichotomy. I doubt many of these people on the streets
have a clue as to what should be done either on their personal level or a social
level.
"... "The extraordinary destruction of white and Asian businesses in many instances wiping out a family's lifetime work, the looting of national businesses whose dumbshit CEOs support the looters, the merciless gang beatings of whites and Asians who attempted to defend their persons and their property, the egging on of the violence by politicians in both parties and by the entirely of the media including many alternative media websites, shows a country undergoing collapse. ..."
"... This is why it is not shown in national media . Some local media show an indication of the violent destruction in their community, but it is not accumulated and presented to a national audience. Consequently, Americans think the looting and destruction is only a local occurrence I just checked CNN and the BBC and there is nothing about the extraordinary economic destruction and massive thefts." ..."
"... Why has the media failed to show the vast destruction of businesses and private property? Why have they minimized the effects of vandalism, looting and arson? Why have they fanned the flames of social unrest from the very beginning, shrugging off the ruin and devastation while cheerleading the demonstrations as a heroic struggle for racial justice? Is this is the same media that supported every bloody war, every foreign intervention, and every color-revolution for the last 5 decades? Are we really expected to believe that they've changed their stripes and become an energized proponent of social justice? ..."
"... The scale and coordination alone suggests that elements in the deep state are probably involved. We know from evidence uncovered during the Russiagate probe, that the media works hand-in-glove with the Intel agencies and FBI while–at the same time– serving as a mouthpiece for elites. ..."
"... That hasn't changed, in fact, it's gotten even worse. The uniformity of the coverage suggests that that same perception management strategy is being employed here as well. Even at this late date, the determination to remove Trump from office is as strong as ever even though, in the present case, it has been combined with the broader political strategy of inciting fratricidal violence, obliterating urban areas, and spreading anarchy across the count ..."
"... This isn't about racial justice or police brutality, it's about regime change, internal destabilization, and martial law. ..."
"... What the Black Lives Matter movement does not understand is that they are being used by the billionaire white capitalists who are fighting to push the working class even lower ..."
"... The rightful grievance over racism against blacks is now used to get Trump since Russia Gate, Impeachment, the corona scandal ..."
"... The protests are merely a fig leaf for a "color revolution" that bears a striking resemblance to the more than 50 CIA-backed coups launched on foreign governments in the last 70 years ..."
"... "Use a grievance that the local population has against the system, identify and support those who oppose the current government, infiltrate and strengthen opposition movements, fund them with millions of dollars, organize protests that seem legitimate and have paid political instigators dress up in regular clothes to blend in." ..."
"... "The logistical capabilities of antifa+ are also impressive. They can move people around the country with ease, position pallet loads of new brick, 55 gallon new trash cans of frozen water bottles and other debris suitable for throwing on gridded patterns around cities in a well thought out distribution pattern. Who pays for this? Who plans this? Who coordinates these plans and gives "execute orders?" ..."
"... Antifa+ can create massive propaganda campaigns that fit their agenda. These campaigns are fully supported by the MSM and by many in the Congressional Democratic Party. The present meme of "Defund the Police" is an example. This appeared miraculously, and simultaneously across the country. I am impressed. Yesterday the frat boy type who is mayor of Minneapolis was booed out of a mass meeting of radicals in that fair city because he refused to endorse abolishing the police force. ..."
"... Colonel Lang is not the only one to marvel at Antifa's "logistical capabilities". The United States has never experienced two weeks of sustained protests in hundreds of its cities at the same time. ..."
"... it points to extensive coordination with groups across the country, a comprehensive media strategy (that probably preceded the killing of George Floyd), a sizable presence on social media (to put people on the street), and agents provocateur whose task is to incite violence, loot and create mayhem. ..."
"... This a destabilization campaign similar to the CIA's color revolutions designed to topple the regime (Trump), install a puppet government (Biden), impose "shock therapy" on the economy ..."
"... "The BLM represents the forefront of an effort to divide Americans along racial and political lines, thus keeping race and identity-based barbarians safely away from more critical issues of importance to the elite, most crucially a free hand to plunder and ransack natural resources, minerals, crude oil, and impoverish billions of people whom the ruling elite consider unproductive useless eaters and a hindrance to the drive to dominate, steal, and murder . ..."
"... The protest movement is the mask that conceals the maneuvering of elites. The real target of this operation is the Constitutional Republic itself ..."
"... that explains why anti-fa attack Yellow Vests in Germany. The Yellow Vests are the true people's movement and as shown in the video below it is not about the left and the right for the yellow vest but common people fed up with the system ..."
"... Watch every frame of this. It shows the government-media complex and their little thugs, ANTIFA, in perfect collusion to interfere with the regular Germans trying to stop the Satanic communist-Globo homo project. ..."
"... My bro is one of the few people flying, for work. He says the only people on the airlines are antifa thugs moving all around the country. ..."
"... Won't these riots create a wave of revulsion among the silent majority and consolidate Trump's support base? ..."
"... Is Antifa a group of deep state agitators? That's the question. In the Sunday edition of the New York Times– the official propaganda organ of US elites– an article is entirely devoted to creating "plausible deniability" that Antifa is behind the violence in the protests that have swept the country. ..."
"Revolutions are often seen as spontaneous. It looks like people just went into the
street. But it's the result of months or years of preparation. It is very boring until you
reach a certain point, where you can organize mass demonstrations or strikes. If it is
carefully planned, by the time they start, everything is over in a matter of weeks."
Foreign Policy
Journal
Does anyone believe the nationwide riots and looting are a spontaneous reaction to the
killing of George Floyd?
It's all too coordinated, too widespread, and too much in-sync with the media narrative that
applauds the "mainly peaceful protests" while ignoring the vast destruction to cities across
the country. What's that all about? Do the instigators of these demonstrations want to see our
cities reduced to urban wastelands where street gangs and Antifa thugs impose their own harsh
justice? That's where this is headed, isn't it?
Of course there are millions of protesters who honestly believe they're fighting racial
injustice and police brutality. And more power to them. But that certainly doesn't mean there
aren't hidden agendas driving these outbursts. Quite the contrary. It seems to me that the
protest movement is actually the perfect vehicle for affecting dramatic social changes that
only serve the interests of elites. For example, who benefits from defunding the police? Not
African Americans, that's for sure. Black neighborhoods need more security not less. And yet,
the New York Times lead editorial on Saturday proudly announces, " Yes, We Mean Literally
Abolish the Police–Because reform won't happen." Check it out:
"We can't reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact
between the public and the police .There is not a single era in United States history in
which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South
emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves.
In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor
strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations
to protect the status quo.
So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man's neck until he dies,
that's the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black
person, he is doing what he sees as his job " (" Yes, We
Mean Literally Abolish the Police–Because reform won't happen" , New York
Times)
So, according to the Times, the problem isn't single parent families, or underfunded
education or limited job opportunities or fractured neighborhoods, it's the cops who have
nothing to do with any of these problems. Are we supposed to take this seriously, because the
editors of the Times certainly do. They'd like us to believe that there is groundswell support
for this loony idea, but there isn't. In a recent poll, more than 60% of those surveyed, oppose
the idea of defunding the police. So why would such an unpopular, wacko idea wind up as the
headline op-ed in the Saturday edition? Well, because the Times is doing what it always does,
advancing the political agenda of the elites who hold the purse-strings and dictate which ideas
are promoted and which end up on the cutting room floor. That's how the system works. Check out
this excerpt from an article by Paul Craig Roberts:
"The extraordinary destruction of white and Asian businesses in many instances wiping out
a family's lifetime work, the looting of national businesses whose dumbshit CEOs support the
looters, the merciless gang beatings of whites and Asians who attempted to defend their
persons and their property, the egging on of the violence by politicians in both parties and
by the entirely of the media including many alternative media websites, shows a country
undergoing collapse.
This is why it is not shown in national media . Some local media show an
indication of the violent destruction in their community, but it is not accumulated and
presented to a national audience. Consequently, Americans think the looting and destruction
is only a local occurrence I just checked CNN and the BBC and there is nothing about the
extraordinary economic destruction and massive thefts." (" The Real Racists", Paul Craig Roberts,
Unz Review)
Roberts makes a good point, and one that's worth mulling over. Why has the media failed to
show the vast destruction of businesses and private property? Why have they minimized the
effects of vandalism, looting and arson? Why have they fanned the flames of social unrest from
the very beginning, shrugging off the ruin and devastation while cheerleading the
demonstrations as a heroic struggle for racial justice? Is this is the same media that
supported every bloody war, every foreign intervention, and every color-revolution for the last
5 decades? Are we really expected to believe that they've changed their stripes and become an
energized proponent of social justice?
Nonsense. The media's role in concealing the damage should only convince skeptics that the
protests are just one part of a much larger operation. What we're seeing play out in over 400
cities across the US, has more to do with toppling Trump and sowing racial division than it
does with the killing of George Floyd. The scale and coordination alone suggests that elements
in the deep state are probably involved. We know from evidence uncovered during the Russiagate
probe, that the media works hand-in-glove with the Intel agencies and FBI while–at the
same time– serving as a mouthpiece for elites.
That hasn't changed, in fact, it's gotten
even worse. The uniformity of the coverage suggests that that same perception management
strategy is being employed here as well. Even at this late date, the determination to remove
Trump from office is as strong as ever even though, in the present case, it has been combined
with the broader political strategy of inciting fratricidal violence, obliterating urban areas,
and spreading anarchy across the country.
This isn't about racial justice or police brutality,
it's about regime change, internal destabilization, and martial law. Take a look at this
article at The Herland Report:
"What the Black Lives Matter movement does not understand is that they are being used by
the billionaire white capitalists who are fighting to push the working class even lower and
end the national sovereignty principles that president Trump stands for in America .
The rightful grievance over racism against blacks is now used to get Trump since Russia
Gate, Impeachment, the corona scandal and nothing else has worked. The aim is to end
democracy in the United States, control Congress and politics and assemble the power into the
hands of the very few
That sounds about right to me. The protests are merely a fig leaf for a "color revolution"
that bears a striking resemblance to the more than 50 CIA-backed coups launched on foreign
governments in the last 70 years. Have the chickens have come home to roost? It certainly looks
like it. Here's more from the same article:
"Use a grievance that the local population has against the system, identify and support
those who oppose the current government, infiltrate and strengthen opposition movements, fund
them with millions of dollars, organize protests that seem legitimate and have paid political
instigators dress up in regular clothes to blend in."
So, yes, the grievances are real, but that doesn't mean that someone else is not steering
the action. And just as the media is shaping the narrative for its own purposes, so too, there
are agents within the movement that are inciting the violence. All of this suggests the
existence of some form of command-control that provides logistical support and assists in
communications. Check out this excerpt from a post at Colonel Pat Lang's website Sic Semper
Tyrannis:
"The logistical capabilities of antifa+ are also impressive. They can move people around
the country with ease, position pallet loads of new brick, 55 gallon new trash cans of frozen
water bottles and other debris suitable for throwing on gridded patterns around cities in a
well thought out distribution pattern. Who pays for this? Who plans this? Who coordinates
these plans and gives "execute orders?"
Antifa+ can create massive propaganda campaigns that fit their agenda. These campaigns are
fully supported by the MSM and by many in the Congressional Democratic Party. The present
meme of "Defund the Police" is an example. This appeared miraculously, and simultaneously
across the country. I am impressed. Yesterday the frat boy type who is mayor of Minneapolis
was booed out of a mass meeting of radicals in that fair city because he refused to endorse
abolishing the police force.
Gutting the civil police forces has long been a major goal of
the far left, but now, they have the ability to create mass hysteria over it when they have
an excuse ."
("My take on the present situation", Sic Semper Tyrannis)
Colonel Lang is not the only one to marvel at Antifa's "logistical capabilities". The United
States has never experienced two weeks of sustained protests in hundreds of its cities at the
same time. It's beyond suspicious, it points to extensive coordination with groups across the
country, a comprehensive media strategy (that probably preceded the killing of George Floyd), a
sizable presence on social media (to put people on the street), and agents provocateur whose
task is to incite violence, loot and create mayhem.
None of this has anything to do with racial justice or police brutality. America is being
destabilized and sacked for other purposes altogether. This a destabilization campaign similar
to the CIA's color revolutions designed to topple the regime (Trump), install a puppet
government (Biden), impose "shock therapy" on the economy pushing tens of millions of Americans
into homelessness and destitution, and leave behind a broken, smoldering shell of a country
easily controlled by Federal shock troops and wealthy globalist mandarins. Here's a short
excerpt from an article by Kurt Nimmo at his excellent blog "Another Day in the Empire":
"The BLM represents the forefront of an effort to divide Americans along racial and
political lines, thus keeping race and identity-based barbarians safely away from more
critical issues of importance to the elite, most crucially a free hand to plunder and ransack
natural resources, minerals, crude oil, and impoverish billions of people whom the ruling
elite consider unproductive useless eaters and a hindrance to the drive to dominate, steal,
and murder .
It is sad to say BLM serves the elite by ignoring or remaining ignorant of the main
problem -- boundless predation by a neoliberal criminal project that considers all -- black,
white, yellow, brown -- as expliotable and dispensable serfs. " (" 2 Million Arab Lives
Don't Matter ", Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire)
The protest movement is the mask that conceals the maneuvering of elites. The real target of
this operation is the Constitutional Republic itself. Having succeeded in using the Lockdown to
push the economy into severe recession, the globalists are now inciting a fratricidal war that
will weaken the opposition and prepare the country for a new authoritarian order.
the media narrative that applauds the "mainly peaceful protests" while ignoring the vast
destruction to Hong Kong where there was neither police violence nor racial discrimination.
Look like the same organizing principles were used in both places.
Of course that explains why anti-fa attack Yellow Vests in Germany.
The Yellow Vests are the true people's movement and as shown in the video below it is not
about the left and the right for the yellow vest but common people fed up with the system, a
true grass roots movement of the people.
And Anti-fa, the Whores of the Satanic elites attack them. Why would anti-fascists attack the
common man?
Watch every frame of this. It shows the government-media complex and their little thugs,
ANTIFA, in perfect collusion to interfere with the regular Germans trying to stop the Satanic
communist-Globo homo project.
Few arguments in contra of the article. Can any-one conceive of there being a competition between BLM rioting organizing and
covertly supporting, and Corona-19, where the elites were very cohesive internationally in the face.
The target, Trump, the man with no policies, the implement nothing, is it such a worthy target to a fraction of the power
elites? That would speak for shallowness on their behalf. Creating back-ground noise to fade out the re-organizing of society,
regardless of actors as Trump could be an acceptable explanation. "Keep the surplus population busy. Keep the attention on the
streets".
There is a trade-off. The international elites see the exposure of the US internal policies, the expenditure of energy, do
they regard the situation as something to copy-paste, an interesting experiment, or as weakness to be taken advantage of?
Probably the first, then BLM covert support chains perfectly with Corona-19, and scales things up.
"Black neighborhoods need more security not less."
Police are not security, they're repression. Anybody of any color who thinks they're safer
with heavily armed bureaucrats blundering around is a moron.
And since when does reductions in guard labor equal austerity? There are several economic
rights that should not be derogated, but assholes with guns impounding cars is not one of
them. If the residents of a community are asking for more cops, that's one thing. They are
not. Law enforcement budgets are stuffed up the ass of residents and often municipalities.
Look into e.g. the MA "strong chief" enabling acts. States have massive unfunded pension
liabilities in large part because of police featherbedding. That's what's being pushed by the
"deep state" (you mean CIA.) The evident CIA use of provocateurs is aimed at justifying
further increases in repressive capacity.
OK bye! Don't let the door hit your fat ass on the way out! Stupid and delusional though pigs are, it's dimly dawning on them that America considers
them crooked loudmouthed violent assholes. Here's a typical one exercising what Gore Vidal
called the core competence of police, whining.
Boo hoo hoo, asshole, go home and beat your wife or eat a gun or whatever it is you dream
of doing in retirement, cause the states can't afford your crooked unions' pensions in this
induced depression. Cut these white man's welfare jobs.
Is Antifa a group of deep state agitators? That's the question.
In the Sunday edition of the New York Times– the official propaganda organ of US
elites– an article is entirely devoted to creating "plausible deniability" that Antifa
is behind the violence in the protests that have swept the country.
Why is the Times so concerned that its readers might have a different opinion on this
matter? Why do they want to convince people that the protests-riots are merely spontaneous
outbursts of anti-racist sentiment? Could it be because the Times job is to create a version
of events that suits the interests of the elites it serves? Here's a few excerpts from
today's piece titled "Federal Arrests Show No Sign That Antifa Plotted Protests":
While anarchists and anti-fascists openly acknowledged being part of the immense
crowds, they call the scale, intensity and durability of the protests far beyond anything
they might dream of organizing. Some tactics used at the protests, like the wearing of
all black and the shattering of store windows, are reminiscent of those used by anarchist
groups, say those who study such movements. (plausible deniability)
Anarchists and others accuse officials of trying to assign blame to extremists rather
than accept the idea that millions of Americans from a variety of political backgrounds have
been on the streets demanding change. Numerous experts also called the participation of
extremist organizations overstated. (plausible deniability)
"A significant number of people in positions of authority are pushing a false narrative
about antifa being behind a lot of this activity," said J.M. Berger, the author of the
book "Extremism" and an authority on militant movements. "These are just unbelievably large
protests at a time of great turmoil in this country, and there is surprisingly little
violence given the size of this movement.".. (plausible deniability)
In New York, the police briefed reporters on May 31, claiming that radical anarchists
from outside the state had plotted ahead of protests by setting up encrypted communications
systems, arranging for street medics and collecting bail funds.
Within five days, however, Dermot F. Shea, the city's police commissioner, acknowledged
that most of the hundreds of people arrested at the protests in New York were actually New
Yorkers who took advantage of the chaos to commit crimes and were not motivated by political
ideology . John Miller, the police official who had briefed reporters, told CNN that most
looting in New York had been committed by "regular criminal groups." (plausible
deniability)
Kit O'Connell, a longtime radical leftist activist and community organizer in Austin, said
that shortly after Mr. Trump's election, the group took part in anti-fascist protests in the
city against a local white supremacist group and scuffled separately with Act for America, an
anti-Muslim organization.
Why is the Times acting like Antifa's attorney? Why are the trying to minimize the role of
professional agitators? Why is the Times so determined to shape the public's thinking on this
matter?
Doesn't this suggest that Antifa and other groups operating within the protest movement
are actually linked to agencies in the deep state that are conducting another operation
against the American people?
@anonymous anonymous, I have been encouraging cops to quit for a long time. They are
protecting the wrong people, being used to protect people in the ruling class that hate and
despise cops just a little less than they hate and despise the rest of us civilians.
To the issue at hand, black people should only be policed, arrested, charged, prosecuted,
defended, judged, and (if found guilty) punished by other blacks. No white person should have
anything to do with it. Any white person policing negros in America is making a huge mistake,
and should immediately quit.
The pensions are not going to be paid, and the crazy, Soros paid for black people are
going to make it impossible for a white cop pretty soon anyway. Might as well walk before
they make you run.
Don't worry about BLM, which is corporate phoney bullshit protest, easter parades and
internet posturing. The blacks in the street don't fall for that shit. Look what happens when
coopted oreos try to herd everybody back to tame marching:
The provocateurs are not influencing them. The sellout house negroes are not influencing
them. They know what they want. The regime is shitting its pants. If they scapegoat Trump and
purge him, Biden will inherit the same problem only worse.
Won't these riots create a wave of revulsion among the silent majority and consolidate
Trump's support base?
That's what I am wondering too. It makes more sense to me that the elites driving these
BLM riots are those who support Trump. Terrify people and threaten the existence of police is
a good way to get elderly white voters out of their covid lockdowns on election day.
Doesn't this suggest that Antifa and other groups operating within the protest movement
are actually linked to agencies in the deep state that are conducting another operation
against the American people?
Do we really want to suggest the CIA is committing treason against the American people?
Isn't it more likely that the Times is agitating against the CIA for other reasons? Reasons
Carlos Slim could explain?
For those who haven't read Pepe Escobar's latsest on BLM, here's a couple clips:
Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013 by a trio of middle class, queer black women very
vocal against "hetero-patriarchy", is a product of what University of British Columbia's
Peter Dauvergne defines as "corporatization of activism".
Over the years, Black Lives Matter evolved as a marketing brand, like Nike (which
fully supports it). The widespread George Floyd protests elevated it to the status of a new
religion. Yet Black Lives Matter carries arguably zero, true revolutionary appeal. This is
not James Brown's "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud". And it does not get even close to
Black Power and the Black Panthers' "Power to the People".
Black Lives Matter profited in 2016 from a humongous $100 million grant from the Ford
Foundation and other philanthropic capitalism stalwarts such as JPMorgan Chase and the
Kellogg Foundation.
The Ford Foundation is very close to the U.S. Deep State. The board of directors is
crammed with corporate CEOs and Wall Street honchos. In a nutshell; Black Lives Matter, the
organization, today is fully sanitized; largely integrated into the Democratic Party machine;
adored by mainstream media; and certainly does not represent a threat to the 0.001%.
an evident ham-handed attempt to make this all about race. The real threat to this police
state is racial and international solidarity against state predation – the stuff that
got Fred Hampton killed,
"when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the
black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too We say you don't fight racism
with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with
no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism."
or Angela Davis and the Che-Lumumba club. BAP is right back on this and the resonating
international demonstrations show that that's the right track. The whole world sees what this
is about, except for a few fucked-over US whites.
botazefa, of course the CIA is committing treason against the American people. Where were you
when they whacked JFK, then RFK? Where were you when they blew up OKC? Where were you when
they released anthrax on the Senate, infiltrated and protected 9/11 terrorists, assigned more
terrorists to MITRE to blind NORAD, blew up the WTC for the second time, and exfiltrated the
Saudi logisticians?
Anybody unaware that CIA has been pure treason from inception is (1) retarded XOR (2) a
CIA traitor.
Sorry. The assholes on this asshole site will not let you say that what is important is how
the super-billionaires control us. They are going to insist that it's niggerniggernigger all
the way home and that's all there is to it. You would think they were paid. Or really, really
stupid.
When Gina, she-wolf of Udon Thani, got busted for trying to overthrow the United States
government with Russiagate, she hung onto her job by rigging the succession with all the
Brennan traitors who ran the Russiagate coup.
So we should expect that Gina will now stage a couple massacres like Kent State and
Jackson State, because that's how CIA ratfucked Nixon when he didn't knuckle under.
Gina's extra motivated to stay on top because she's criminally culpable for systematic and
widespread torture:
@Mike Whitney Excellent article and I believe excellent analysis of the situation.
Where we may differ is with Trump's complicity in Deep State efforts. I believe Trump is a
minion of the Deep State. His actions and inactions can not be explained any other way.
Let's assume for a minute, that Pepe Escobar is correct when he says this:
"Black Lives Matter profited in 2016 from a humongous $100 million grant from the Ford
Foundation and other philanthropic capitalism stalwarts such as JPMorgan Chase and the
Kellogg Foundation .
The Ford Foundation is very close to the U.S. Deep State. The board of directors is
crammed with corporate CEOs and Wall Street honchos. In a nutshell; Black Lives Matter,
the organization, today is fully sanitized; largely integrated into the Democratic Party
machine; adored by mainstream media; and certainly does not represent a threat to the
0.001%.
If this is true–and I believe it is– then Black Lives Matter is no different
than USAID or any of the other NGOs that are used to incite revolution around the world. If
this is true, then there is likely a CIA link to these protests, the main purpose of which is
to remove Trump from office.
So Black Lives Matter= activist NGO linked to US Intel agencies= Regime Change
Operation
But there is something else going on here too, (that many readers might have noticed) that
is, the way social media has been manipulated to put millions of young people on the street
in order to promote the agenda of elites.
How did they manage that?
How did they get millions of young people to come out day after day (14 days so far) in
over 400 cities to protest an issue about which they know very little aside from the media's
irritating reiteration of "systemic racism", (a claim that is not supported by the data.)
IMO, we are seeing the first successful social media saturation campaign launched probably
by the Pentagon's Office Strategic Communications or a similar outfit within the CIA. Having
already taken control over the entire mainstream media complex, the intel agencies and their
friends at the Pentagon are now wrapping their tentacles around internet communications in
order to achieve their goal of complete tyrannical social control.
As always, the target of these massive covert operations is the American people who had
better pull their heads out of the sand pronto and come up with a plan for countering this
madness.
@anonymous The elephant in the room, that seems to be ignored by all is the simple fact
that Hispanics are working class heroes. And they outnumber the blacks, and hate their guts
for the most part. Not the scrawny punks withe Che t-shirts, but the actual working types
that are less than thrilled to deal with the weak. Notice how no Hispanic barrios have EVER
been f ** ked with, no matter when the race riot? There is an open fatwa from La Eme
regarding blacks that has never been rescinded. Has a lot to do with the kneegro exodus from
the LA area, which correlates with the lack of looting in the formerly black areas. Which the
MSM prefers to ignore. The happy idiots are mugging for the cameras on a daily basis in
Hollywood, but the Hispanic run Sheriff's office has no problem with popping gas and
defending businesses. Also note that the MSM only reports on areas when a local government
craters to the mob. LA County was under curfew for 7 days due to a mob of looters that
numbered perhaps 2000. If that Jew mayor (with the Italian surname) had not allowed the
looting, then we would have seen the kind of 36 hour turnaround like we had with Rodney King.
The ethnic group that ignores the MSM and stands up for its own people will win in the end.
Right now we are looking more toward the kind of Celtic/Meso-American alliance that is well
known in the penal system. These groups can exist side by side, with each ignoring the other.
Blacks, on the other paw seem to be unable to keep to themselves, at least on the ghetto
level, and will always be an issue for civilization. It's time we stop calling for a generic
and all-inclusive White establishment. The race traitors and weaklings forfeit that right.
When Celts, Italians, Germans, etc. were proud and independent, there was strength. It's time
to return to that ideal. Only the negroid actually lumps all whites together, which the Jews
use as a divisive tool. Strength should be idolized, rather than weakness exploited.
I'm saying that the NYT is not necessarily mouthpiece *only* for the Deep State. As for
your JFK assassination – Senate Anthrax – 9/11 etc, those are considered
conspiracy theories and I've never been persuaded otherwise. I've read up on the theories and
they are not strong.
I don't know what a retarded XOR is except as it relates to logic diagrams and I don't
work for the CIA.
Do Deep State Elements Operate Within the Protest Movement?
It's called Jewish lawfare for Antifa, Jewish control of media, and Jewish cult of Magic
Negro.
Even though Jews led the Gentric Cleansing campaigns against blacks by using mass
immigration, globo-homo celebration, and white middle class return to cities, the Jews are
now pretending be with the blacks and throwing the immigrants, white middle class, and homos
to the black mobs.
simple fact that Hispanics are working class heroes
Some are. Most aren't. And the 'not'% grows with selective Americanization (not
assimilation). Still, I'll take them over the blacks, even with their generally inferior (to
White) culture.
Whites are better with separation from them along with blacks. Whatever the prime driver,
both groups have poisoned America, likely beyond repair. Conquistador gonnna
conquistador.
M. Whitney in comment 21 clarifies his view of BLM as the impetus for this rebellion. That
does not square with the reports of people on the street.
BLM is exactly analogous to BDS: a controlled opposition of feckless halfassed gestures
designed to distract from the real movement. You hear BLM apparatchiks whining about getting
their movement hijacked because people in the streets show solidarity with oppressed groups
worldwide – and youe hear BLM getting booed by the people they're trying to corral.
BLM's mission is putting words in the protestors' mouths. You hear Democrat BLM spokesmodels
trying to distort calls for police abolition and no more impunity. And real protestors call
bullshit.
BLM works on dumb white guys: hating on BLM makes them feel very edgy and defiant. Black
Lives Matter! Blue Lives Matter! Black! Blue! Black! Blue! Catnip for dumbshits, courtesy of
CIA. Keeps them away from the really subversive stuff, which makes perfect sense for whites
too.
@ICD Look into whether the training of cops has been outsourced and privatized. Or simply
shortened to save money.
And ask why the police are even armed when in Communist China they are not, and
traditionally in the non-American West they were not, now are in imitation of America.
Ann Nonny Mouse, truer words were never spoken. Chinese cops have these cute little
nightsticks, and sometimes they will bop a guy and the guy just stands there and says Ow and
the cops continue to reason with him, no restraint, incapacitation, any of that shit. British
cops used to be that way, they used to reason with you. Now they're all American style
Assholes, if not Israeli concentration camp guards. Just nuke FOP HQ in Memphis.
Koch sees privatization as a future profit center and a chance to control the cops
himself. They're not trainable, they're too fucking stupid. We all did fine without pigs up
through most of the 19th century. Hue and cry works fine. Fire all the cops and replace them
with unarmed women social workers. That's all they are, prodigiously incompetent social
workers.
Too, those many businesses with all that unsold inventory sitting around gathering dust due
to Covid isolation will benefit from insurance payments covering their losses due to looting.
The cherry on top.
Are you just clueless or what? Did you notice the names of the Antifa leaders that have
been exposed? They are Amish Right? They are Jews and they will always be Jews! Soros and
other Jews have been running this game for a long time. Where have you been? SDS in Chicago
no Jews there right!
The CIA and the FBI overwhelmed with Jews can you count? All the professors who have been
destroying whites with their fake studies blaming everything wrong in the world on Whites and
Western Civilization. The entire Media owned by who?
Either you were dropped out of a spaceship a few days ago or you are a total idiot and
can't see the forest before trees.
Try this: The Percentage of all Ivy League Presidents, top adminstrators, deans etc take a
guess then go count them and see which group they belong to.
Does anyone believe the nationwide riots and looting are a spontaneous reaction to the
killing of George Floyd?
It's all too coordinated, too widespread, and too much in-sync with the media narrative
.
* * *
This a destabilization campaign similar to the CIA's color revolutions designed to
topple the regime (Trump), install a puppet government (Biden), impose "shock therapy" on
the economy pushing tens of millions of Americans into homelessness and destitution, and
leave behind a broken, smoldering shell of a country easily controlled by Federal shock
troops and wealthy globalist mandarins.
One must wonder: How could the CIA and the U.S. Democrat establishment foment and
coordinate all of the Black Lives Matter protests occurring in Canada, several nations of
South and Central America, the U.K., Ireland, throughout the European Union, and in
Switzerland, the Middle East (Turkey, Iran ), and in Asia (Korea, Japan .) and New Zealand,
Australia, and Africa?
Mr. Whitney: Neither magic nor bigotry-induced hallucinations can forge a tenable
conspiracy theory.
I think the primary reason the mainstream media doesn't want the general public, especially
those living outside the major cities, to understand the extent of the destruction and
violence that spread in a highly-coordinated fashion across America, is that this would be
cause for alarm among a majority of Americans who would demand more Law & Order, which
would redound to Trump's benefit.
Notice Trump is countering by tweeting "LAW & ORDER!"
Here is Trump tweeting "Does anyone notice how little the Radical Left takeover of Seattle
is being discussed in the Fake News Media[?] That is very much on purpose "
Does anyone notice how little the Radical Left takeover of Seattle is being discussed in
the Fake News Media. That is very much on purpose because they know how badly this weakness
& ineptitude play politically. The Mayor & Governor should be ashamed of
themselves. Easily fixed!
The outcome of the election in November could hinge on the urgency the public places on
the issue of Law & Order. Hence the media's all out effort to minimize the extent of the
Anarchy and Violence and the financial sponsorship, planning, and coordination behind it.
Please see my comment of June 15, 2020 at 1:38 am GMT (comment # 34). I must apologize for
that comment's insufficiency (owed to my posting that comment before I happened upon your
comment to which this comment replies). Had I encountered your comment earlier, my
June 15, 2020 at 1:38 am GMT comment (comment # 34) would have observed that you are
triumphantly illogical as you are a world class crackpot.
@ICD You said it. Police Departments country-wide are stuffed up the wazoo with more cash
than they can spend. But what do they cry? Poor us. Poor us. We ain't got no money.
This is what they, and by they, I mean all our owners and their overseers, always do. They
cry poverty when they are rolling in loot.
Do Deep State Elements Operate Within the Protest Movement?
Yes, and the left(unwittingly) will help them with their cause, and the right will
cowardly hide right behind the deep state as protection from the violent left.
@Priss Factor You are extremely unlikely to receive any of those things from a "Negro".
90% of Americans are unlikely to even see more than ten black people in their entire lives.
I wish you psychotic fucking female idiots on this website who are constantly blathering
about black people could realize how annoying you are to the 90% of white people who are not
living in or next to black ghettos. Please STFU and allow discourse to trend in more
pertinent directions, and move away from black people if you're so paranoid about them.
@Mike Whitney The (((media))) have an uphill battle in convincing us to deny the evidence
of our eyes -- black-hooded white punks throwing bricks through storefronts then inviting
joggers to loot.
That is why so many platforms, even "free speech" GAB, are wildly censoring
counter-narratives.
@Brian Reilly Stephen Molyneux said that police forces were originally geared to operate
under white Christian societies where there was a high level of trust and people were
law-abiding. I remember when I was a kid, we didn't even lock our doors. Our bikes were left
out on the front lawn, sometimes for days, weeks, and nobody took them. Nobody locked their
car doors. People just didn't steal other people's stuff. When a cop tried to pull you over,
you didn't hit the gas pedal and take off. You didn't run from the cops; you were polite to
them and they were polite to you.
Tucker Carlson said that Blacks are now asking for their own hospitals (I forget what city
this was) and their own doctors and nurses. Blacks schools, Black police forces.
Tribes don't mix. Their culture is different than our culture. Why should they change for
us, and why should we change for them?
It is a marriage that does not work. Either send them back to Africa (best solution) or
give them Mississippi and put up a big wall. Then let them pay for their own upkeep –
all of it. Good luck with that.
Yesterday the frat boy type who is mayor of Minneapolis was booed out of a mass
meeting of radicals in that fair city because he refused to endorse abolishing the police
force.
Mayor Jacob Frey got elected at his extremely young age by flanking on the Left with anti
police rhetoric, He is the the originator of this crisis; as soon as the video of Floyd's
death was public Frey publicly and literally called the four cops murderers and said
he was powerless to have them arrested. That was a false accusation of police impunity,
because the supposedly powerless Frey was able to order the police to vacate their own
station thus letting the demonstrators take over and burn it. Yet to draw back a bit the Deep
State if worried about other states.
That event Frey largely created was the key moment of this whole thing. Trump could have
nipped it in the bud by had sending in troops immediately the Minneapolis 3rd Precinct was
burnt down. Crushing the riots in that city and preventing the example infecting the
demonstrations in other cities. and turning them into cover for riots. Trump did not want to
be seen as Draconian although it would not have been at all violent, because no one is going
to challenge the army's awesome presence once it arrived on the streets,as worked in the
Rodney King riots.
The real target of this operation is the Constitutional Republic itself. Having
succeeded in using the Lockdown to push the economy into severe recession, the globalists
are now inciting a fratricidal war that will weaken the opposition and prepare the country
for a new authoritarian order.
George Floyd had foam visible at the corners of his mouth when the police arrived. Autopsy
tests revealed Fentanyl and COVID-19: both from Wuhan. I Can't Breath is America gearing up
to confront and settle accounts with Xi's totalitarian state.
Current events might seem to be a setback for the US, but provide the opportunity for a
re-set with the black community, with a potential outcome of resolving race tensions that
have been a cause of dissension and internal weakness, just as during the Cold War racial
integration was thought essential by anti communists like Nixon. America is gearing up to
settle accounts with China, which is a Deep State new Cold War. While it is a possibility
that whites could lose control of their society, and see it fall into the hands of an
explicitly anti -acist elite/ minorities alliance, the Deep State is not the same as the
hyper capitalist elite whose growing wealth depends on China.
Do Deep State Elements Operate Within the Protest Movement?
@Mike Whitney The Duran did an excellent video titled "Social Media 'Unchecked Power'"
where they talk about Trump and Barr going after the tech companies and their virtual
monopolies with an executive order.
At 33:45 they state that Microsoft (Bill Gates) invested $1 billion and the CIA invested
$16 million into Facebook when it was still operating as a university network. The CIA were
one of the first investors in Facebook.
Why the hell was the CIA investing $16 million to get Facebook off the ground? Hmmm. Could
it be because Facebook would be instrumental in controlling the narrative?
The young people, who have no experience and no real knowledge of history, are being taken
in by these social media companies who are playing on their emotions. Any dissenting opinions
are blocked or banned. Very dangerous.
@Loup-Bouc Well, the "deep state" is just an euphemism for the jewish power structure,
and all those places you named are run be jews. That jews cooperate in extended conspiracies
without regard of borders should be common knowledge for every observer of history and
current politics. I see nothing far-fetched. Honestly, my mind would boggle if I should
explain, how the Antifa gets away with those things it always gets away with, if it wasn't
controlled by the "deep state". And I couldn't explain the international cooperation either.
As Pepe' Escobar said – Americans looting is a natural thing – just look at how
the US Military has stolen the gaz and oil from Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. and is trying like
hell for the Venezuelan oil fields. Not to mention where all their gold, silver and billions
of dollars have gone. The list of the USG looting criminal record is unprecedented . It's a
Family Tradition. Enjoyed the article !
@MrFoSquare The Capitol Hill area of Seattle that has been taken over as an "autonomous
zone" by the protesters is really rather laughable.
One of the first things they did was put up what they called "light fencing". Oh, so when
THEY put up walls, that's perfectly fine. When Trump tries to do it, that's evil and racist.
Borders are A-okay when they're doing it.
They've colonized an area for themselves. I thought the Progressive Left was against
colonialism, taking someone else's property. Isn't that what they've done? They've taken over
whole neighborhoods.
And they've got armed patrol guards checking people as they enter. If you're not in
agreement with their ideology, you're not allowed to enter. So apparently it's okay to have
border controls when they're running the world.
They're doing everything they profess to be against. Hilarious.
@Brian Reilly "anonymous, I have been encouraging cops to quit for a long time."
Dude, why? I don't want to get jacked by some thug or some immigrant policeman from
Honduras. And I can't defend myself because it would be a hate crime.
There are underlying motives, or "hidden agendas", beneath the authentic struggle for
justice. The greatest motive is for power: either to retain it or gain it. The need or desire
for power can be identified in every conflict in history. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
@Realist So you think that everything they've done to Trump has been one big show and
he's been in on it? The pussy tape, Stormy Daniels, spying on his campaign, the leaking, the
Steele Dossier, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, his impeachment, lying to the FISA Courts by the
FBI, CIA's involvement, Mueller Report, DNC server, Clinton and Loretta Lynch on the tarmac,
fake news media, sanctuary cities, courts disobeying his executive orders, Covid-19, protests
– all of it has been a ruse to fool us into thinking that Trump is a legitimate
opposition?
What, it's better to have the citizens split politically 50/50? That way there's never a
majority who start throwing their weight around and making trouble for the elite looters?
Keep the people fighting among each other and divided?
Trump has gone through all of this, but he's just faking it? Are we Truman from the Truman
Show?
I guess you could be right, but what if you're not? What if Trump is actually an outsider?
He's never really ever been part of the elite, not really. If he is truly an outsider, then
these people have been a party to an attempted coup against a duly-elected President.
And if so, then that's sedition and they should hang.
@PetrOldSack Trump is just a puppet, well maybe a bit more, of the part of the MIC and
Deep State that apparently has a different agenda. This is not to say that they are "good
people" but they seem to want to keep the US as a functioning republic and a major power.
Maybe they have some plans re the other group(s) in the elites that are extremely dangerous
for those groups. Which would explain why those groups ("globalists") want to remove those
elements of influence people behind Trump get from the fact that he is the president. This
explains why fake Covid-19 was so pumped by the media and when that apparently did not work
they moved on to BLM "color revolution". It is interesting how all of this plays out, as it
will decide the fate of the world. Ironically, Xi, Putin and other leaders that represent
groups wanting to maintain (some) sovereignty of their states have a common enemy, even as
their states are in competition, namely "globalist" elements within their own power
structures.
One of the goals of the British security service, MI5, is to control the leader or deputy
leader of any subversive organisation larger than a football team. The same is likely true in
every country.
The typical criticism of MI5 is that it is too passive, and does not use its knowledge to
close down hostile groups. In Algeria, the opposite happened: the Algerian security service
infiltrated the most extreme Islamist group in the 1990s and aggravated the country's civil
war by committing massacres, with the goal of creating public revulsion for the
Islamists.
This range of possibilities makes it hard to figure out what the Deep State and other
manipulators are doing.
@Sean Frey is a weak Leftist. The equally weak Governor (another Leftie) needed to handle
the situation. He didn't. Trump told him that the feds would help if he asked; he didn't.
This is all on the state and local governments. They did nothing except to tell the cops
to stand down while the city got looted and burned.
If Trump had sent in the military, they would have screamed blue murder. They probably
would have called for his impeachment. Of course, that's what they wanted Trump to do. Thank
goodness Trump didn't fall for their trap.
So the NYT has joined the vanguard af the American People's Revolution?! People change sides
and not all organisations are uniform, even the CIA. There has to be some organisation to
these protests and whoever is providing it, I doubt the protesters are complaining, but want
even more of it, and for it to be more effective, widespread and to grow. And finding
protesters is no problem now or in the future considering the state of the economy, business
closures, rising unemployment, expensive education. What are all these young people supposed
to do? Sit at home playing video games, surfing porn, watching TV? Or go on a holiday? Now in
these circumstances? I guess they're bored with all that so they may as well hit the streets
and stay on the streets as they'll be on the streets anyway when they get evicted because
they can't pay the rent. And as they're being impoverished they may as well steal what they
can. And obviously they don't fear arrest and are happy to get a criminal record since even a
clean sheet won't get them a job in the failing economy, and they know that. I'm sure many
want a solution that will provide for their future. But who is providing it? So it's on them
to create it. Of course politicians will want to use them and manipulate them for their own
ends. And the elites, and the deep state too. And sure there are Jews in it as in anything.
And sure they're fat, ugly, and degenerate – they're Americans reflecting their own
society. But where it goes nobody knows
@Mike Whitney "Is Antifa a group of deep state agitators? That's the question."
99% of them wouldn't have a clue as to any larger strategic direction. Sorry,
but to repeat myself: "useful idiots".
"Do Deep State Elements Operate Within the Protest Movement?"
Well, duh! It seems likely that the entire George Floyd murder on camera was a staged
event, its even possible that he/it was never really killed. See:
PSYOP? George Floyd "death" was faked by crisis actors to engineer revolutionary riots,
video authors say
" Numerous videos are now surfacing that directly question the authenticity of the claimed
"death" of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Several trending videos appear to reveal
striking inconsistencies in the official explanations behind the reported death of Floyd.
These videos appear to reinforce the idea that the George Floyd incident was, if not entirely
falsified, most definitely planned and rigged in advance. It is already confirmed that the
Obama Foundation was tweeting about George Floyd more than a week before he is claimed to
have died. "
"Obviously, since Barack Obama doesn't own a time machine, the only way the Obama
Foundation could have tweeted about George Floyd a week before his death is it the entire
event was planned in advanced.
Note: We do not endorse every claim in each of the videos shown below, but we believe the
public has the right to hear dissenting views that challenge the official narratives, and we
believe public debate that incorporates views from all sides of a particular issue offers
inherent merit for public discourse.
Numerous video authors are now spotting stunning inconsistencies in the viral videos that
claim to show white cops murdering George Floyd in broad daylight. Without exception, these
video authors, many of whom are black, believe:
at least one of the "police officers" was actually a hired crisis actor who has appeared
in other staged events in recent years.
that the black man depicted in the viral videos is not, in fact, an individual named
George Floyd.
that the responding medical personnel were not EMTs but were in fact mere crisis actors
wearing police costumes.
Each of the video authors shown below reveals still images and video clips that they say
support their claims. Here's an overview of some of the most intriguing videos and the
summary of what those videos are saying: .":
@Mike Whitney I think you are correct Mike. IF blm got $100 million from anyone it
follows that they are beholden -- & the only entities capable of such "generosity" are
"establishment" it therefore follows that BLM are beholden (controlled) by the establishment
( .the deep state .)
Now the New York Times thinks that the black, brown, white and yellow lives are dispensable
does it mean their own GRAY lives matter more to the rest of us? No, it does not!
The scale and coordination alone suggests that elements in the deep state are probably
involved.
It seems right and logical.
But what I don't understand, is why the deep state elite don't understand that in the end the
collapse of the "traditional society" will touch them too in their private life. In the long
run the ruining of the US will ruin everybody in the US including them. Don't they get it ?
Maybe they are intoxicated by their own lies are are begining to lose their lucidity. Like Al
Pacino intoxicated by his own coke in scarface.
@MrFoSquare What we need are some solid numbers:
How many arrested? (& who are they?)
How many properties destroyed?
Dollars worth of damage?
Which cities had the worst damage?
A social media "history" of protest/riot posting ?
Where/who are responsible for brick/frozen water bottle stashes?
Travel histories of notable offenders?
Links between "protesters" & the media ?
Money? Who/what/when/how was all this funded on a day-to-day basis.
And so on.
Mike Whitney doesn't know the first thing. It takes a lot of organizing time and personnel to
properly prepare and lead in the field any large public protest. There are people experienced
in this. Getting them together and deploying their capability is required.
These protests are classic unplanned, spontaneous actions. At least the first major wave
of them. Only after some time will parties try to lead, organize. Or manipulate.
First thing, it's like trying to herd cats. So, you need marshals. Lots of them. Ably led,
and clearly seen. Just to try and steer a protest down one street or to some point. You need
first aid available, provision for seniors and children. Water. Knowledgeable people to deal
with the media.
People who know what they're doing to deal with senior police. With city transit, buses,
taxis. Hospitals, road construction, fire departments. A good protest cleans itself up too so
provide the means for that. Loudspeakers, music – all this an more has to be organized.
By some people.
And 100% of this or even a hint of organizing is not evident at these protests. And the
evidence is easy to see. Organizers advertise too for volunteers. Everything in plain sight
for those with eyes to see.
If you are stupid enough to think that some handful of fruitcakes from some official
agency could even find their way to a protest, actually have a clue how to conduct themselves
and not get laughed at or just ignored – there's no hope for you. You know nothing
about protests and are pedalling fantasy.
@obwandiyag As usual, you're completely delusional. Most police departments are in the
exact same boat as the municipalities that fund them: one downturn (like, say, a public
lockdown followed by public disorder and looting) from going right to the wall.
There won't be any need to "defund" police; most of America's cities and towns are soon to
be on the bread line, looking for those Ctrl-P federal dollars. Quarterly deficits of twenty
trillion, here we come!
@Thomasina The power elite have different factions and they fight each other to a point,
but they do not try to expose each other. This is why none of Trump enemies are going to be
put in prison.
This is why Trump supports don't know what Genie Engery is, not that they would care.
The scum Trump appointed should tell you what side he's on.
I don't know if Antifa is run directly by the three-letter FedGov agencies. But I do know
that the university is the breeding ground for these vermin, and all universities, even
"private" ones, are largely funded by the governmnent, and are tax exempt.
@schnellandine The Hispanics in America are similar to waves of Italians in the late 19th
and early 20th Centuries, except the numbers are far larger and never ending, which impacts
assimilation. The Hispanics are the ones doing the hard physical labor for low pay, and they
are the ones in American society to invest in learning the skill to perform some of those
backbreaking, low paying jobs well. They are the Super Marios of today. Many of them ply
their trades as small businessmen. They are thankful for their jobs and the people they
serve.
Many are loving, salt-of-the-earth type people who genuinely love their blanco friends.
Howard Stern thinks their music sucks but at least they sing songs about el corazon, music of
the heart and of love. (No one is comparable to the Italians in that department, but what do
you suppose happened to the beautiful love music produced by black male vocalists as late as
a generation ago?) Except for the fact that Hispanics come from countries with long
traditions of corrupt, El Patron governments which unfortunately they want to enact here as a
social safety net, they are often traditional in their attitudes about religion and family.
Of course, they get in drunken brawls, abuse their women, and the graft and incompetence in
their institutions can be outrageous. The reason they flee here is because the world they've
created themselves in the shithole places they've leaving isn't as good as the West created
by Caucasian cultures. The law abiding, decent family people I'm speaking of prosper
alongside of whites and many come to recognize that whites and Hispanics can build a common
destiny that's far preferable to the direction black agitators are taking blacks in America.
So you think that everything they've done to Trump has been one big show and he's been
in on it? The pussy tape, Stormy Daniels, spying on his campaign, the leaking, the Steele
Dossier, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, his impeachment, lying to the FISA Courts by the FBI,
CIA's involvement, Mueller Report, DNC server, Clinton and Loretta Lynch on the tarmac,
fake news media, sanctuary cities, courts disobeying his executive orders, Covid-19,
protests – all of it has been a ruse to fool us into thinking that Trump is a
legitimate opposition?
Absolutely.
Keep the people fighting among each other and divided?
Yes, but the elite do not fear the majority they are in complete control through
insouciance and stupidity on the majority.
I guess you could be right, but what if you're not? What if Trump is actually an
outsider?
He's not his actions and inactions are impossible to logically explain away he is a minion
of the Deep State.
The protest movement is directed and controlled by the same zionists who control the
government and their goal is the destruction of America and they are being allowed to do the
wrecking and destruction that they are doing, as this helps full fill the zionist communist
takeover of America.
To see where this is leading read up on the bolshevik-communist revolution in Russia and
the communist revolution in China and Cuba and Cambodia, and there is the future of
America.
@Christophe GJ They enjoy human suffering. Who knows maybe their compensation is linked
to dead bodies. The deep state types will dwell in gate communities that will never be
breached. The perks of owning both segments of the "opposition." As for the CIA's owners, a
sharp depopulation has been their goal for some time. Why it has to be so ghoulish and
prolong is anyone's guess.
@Brian Reilly "To the issue at hand, black people should only be policed, arrested,
charged, prosecuted, defended, judged, and (if found guilty) punished by other blacks."
Yeah, some city tried that. To try to satisfy the "Get White police out of our
neighborhoods" they did -- they re-orged and sent only black cops into black neighborhoods,
and let the White cops police the White neighborhoods. And the BLACK POLICE SUED to end that!
They were, they claimed (and legitimately, too!) being treated unfairly by making THEM police
the most violent, the most dangerous, the most deadly neighborhoods, and "protecting" the
White cops from that duty by letting only the White cops work the nice neighborhoods. They
WON too!
(note: "IKAGO" = "I know a good one." the all-too-often excuse from the unawakened!)
=====================
I don't mourn the loss of Baltimore. Or Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Atlanta, etc etc etc.
It is ultimately a huge benefit to have Negroes concentrated in these huge teeming Petri
dishes.
As always I advocate the complete White withdrawal from these horrible urban sh_tholes,
and as always I advocate that since Negroes do not want to be policed, to immediately stop
policing them.
And to anyone who might be naive enough to say "hey, there are good people in those
neighborhoods, who try to work and raise their kids, who obey the law and who abhor the
lawlessness and rioting as much as anyone" . my response is that these same IKAGO's voted for
a Negro president, for Negro mayors, Negro city council members, Negro police chiefs and
Negro school superintendents, and now they are getting exactly what they deserve, good and
effing hard.
I have ZERO sympathy for blacks.
=====================
And the new rule:
Remember when seconds count, the police are not even obligated to respond.
Of course "deep state elements" operate in protests! What A STUPID question, Whitney. All
kinds of political tricksters, manipulators, provocateurs, idiots, fools, people suffering
from ennui, you name it Mike, they're involved. And yes, the murder of the black man in
Minneapolis was the trigger.
That's not the only cause of social unrest. There are lots of reasons that drive the
displeasure of the mass of people and it's not the silly "deep state". Before you use that
term, if you want any sort of salute from intelligent people, you need to define your terms.
Or are just just waving a red flag so you can attract a bunch of stupid Trumpsters?
There's a whole lot of deep state out there, good buddy. Just examine the federal budget
and whatever money you cannot assign to a particular institution or specific purpose, that is
funding your your "deep state". It's billions and billions. But there is no Wizard of Oz
behind the curtain to spend it all on nefarious purposes. Sure, the deep state destroyed the
WTC and killed a few thousand people. These hidden operators can do things civilians can only
imagine, but they cannot create movements, Whitney. You just can't fool all of the people all
of the time.
Are you having a touch of brain degeneration, Mike, like dear autocrat in the White
House?
A great article. While Trump may have some ties to the Deep State, I doubt very much that he
is their puppet. He won the nomination because he was against some of the Deep States key
policies. He even tried to implement his policies but mostly failed due to traitors in his
administration and all the coordinated coup attempts.
One recent development that causes me to think that this article is spot on is the blatant
attacks by retired generals and even currently serving generals against a sitting president.
Even Defense Sec. Esper (the Raytheon lobbyist) criticized Trump's comments on the
Insurrection Act, which was totally unnecessary since Trump only said that he had the
authority to use it.
The coordinated criticism of the generals just reminds me of how similar it is to the
coordinated effort by the CIA, FBI, State Department and NSA to use the Russiagate hoax and
impeachment hoax to remove Trump. The riots, the money funneled from BLM to Biden 2020,
support of Antifa by the MSM and the generals treasonous actions are not coincidences.
I'm surprised by the generally low level of the responses.
Mr. Whitney:
There haven't been 'millions' of protestors, maybe some thousands.
Please list the "valid grievances" that negros hold concerning the cops; are the cops
supposed to raise black IQ? These riots need to be suppressed pronto; don't waste your time
waiting for the fat orange buffoon to do anything.
Negros have no 'communities', and never will.
I'm wondering why Mr. Unz thinks he is required to let leftists like Whitney post
here.
(1)-There is a 'deep state'
(2)-(1) does NOT imply that negros are a noble race.
The opening statement is quite true. They've apparently been organizing under the radar for
some years now. Diversity is our greatest weakness and these fissures that run through the
country can be exploited. Blacks have been weaponized and used as the spearpoint along with
the more purposeful real Antifa (lots of wannabes walking around clad in black). Everything
has really been well coordinated and the Gene Sharp playbook followed. These 'color
revolution' employees are actually all over the globe, funded by various front groups and
NGOs. The money trail often leads to various billionaires like the ubiquitous Soros but
people like that may just be acting as fronts themselves. Supposed leftists working against
the interests of the value producing working class?
The George Floyd murder was a obviously a wholly staged Deep State event, complete with
the usual crisis actors, as this video summary clearly illustrates :
@Brian Reilly"To the issue at hand, black people should only be policed, arrested,
charged, prosecuted, defended, judged, and (if found guilty) punished by other blacks. No
white person should have anything to do with it. "
And when these same blacks attack or steal from a White person, which they often do, do
you think they'll get a just punishment from their fellow blacks or a high five?
The solution to the black problem is complete separation, there is no other way.
@Mike Whitney But why do you assume the CIA wants to get rid of Trump? Isn't that
tantamount to judging a book by its cover? Americans have been on to the evil shenanigans of
the intelligence community for decades. Trump is nothing more than controlled opposition and
a false sense of security for "patriots". One needs look no further than the prognostications
of Q to see that Trump is the beneficiary of deep state propaganda. The CIA's modus operandi,
together with the rest of the IC, is to deceive. So if they appear to be doing one thing
(fighting Trump) you can be sure they intend the opposite.
Americans are nose deep in false dichotomies, and Trump is a pole par excellence. Despite
his flagrant history as an NYC liberal, putative fat cat, swindler, and network television
superstar, he is now depicted as either a populist outsider, or a literal Nazi. The simple
fact is that he is an actor and confidence artist. He is playing a role, and he is playing to
both sides of the aisle, and his work is to deceive the entirety of the American public,
together with the mockingbird media, which is merely the yin to his pathetic yang.
Too many Americans think they have a choice, or a chance, by simply minding their own
business, consuming their media of choice, and voting. In fact, Americans are face to face
with the end of their history, as the country has been systematically looted for decades, and
will soon be demolished as it is no longer profitable to the oligarchs who manage the globe.
Obama-Trump is a 1-2 knockout punch.
@Uomiem That's a good point, and it's of the main problems I do have with Trump: his
cabinet picks and financial backers (Adelsen, Singer, et al.). But in fairness, what happens
when he tries to pick someone who's not approved by the system? Well, if they're cabinet
officers, they'll never get approved by the senate. And even if they're not, they will be
driven out of the White House somehow–just like Gen. Flynn and Steve Bannon. In short,
when it comes to staffing, Trump's choices are limited by the same swamp he's fighting. Sad
but true
@Thomasina Interesting comments by the Duran but I cannot find any evidence of a direct
investment by the CIA in Facebook. The CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, did invest in early
Facebook investor Peter Theil's company Palantir and other companies. Also, Graylock Partners
were also early investors in Facebook along with Peter Theil and the head of Graylock is
Howard Cox who served on In-Q-Tel's board of directors. But these are indirect inferences.
Unlike the clear and direct investment of the CIA in the company that was eventually
purchased by Google and is now called Google Earth, I can't find any evidence of a direct
investment by the CIA in Facebook. I have no doubt it's true since it's a perfect tool for
data gathering. Do you have any direct evidence of such an investment?
Is the Deep State stage-managing the "BLM" protests to further an agenda? Absolutely.
The main influence of the Deep State is felt in its complete dominance of the controlled
media.
Like mantras handed down by the commissars, the mainstream media keep repeating key
phrases to narrowly define what's happening: "mostly peaceful protests", "anti-black
racism".
The media is an organ of the Deep State. The Deep State will decide when the protests will
end, and when that day arrives, the media will suddenly pivot on cue like a school of fish or
a flock of birds.
Perhaps some non believers in the Deep State would like to explain why the multi trillion
dollar corporations in America are supporting BLM, Antifa and other anarchy groups since on
the face of it anarchy would be antithetical to these corporations?
Hint: The wealthy and powerful (aka Deep State) know that anarchy divides a populous
thereby removing their ability to resist their true enemy and even more draconian laws. The
die is being cast at this moment and the complete subjugation of the American people will,
probably, be effectuate by the end of this year. A full court press is under way and life is
about to change for 99% of the American people.
If you disagree with my hint correct it.
Too many Americans think they have a choice, or a chance, by simply minding their own
business, consuming their media of choice, and voting. In fact, Americans are face to face
with the end of their history, as the country has been systematically looted for decades,
and will soon be demolished as it is no longer profitable to the oligarchs who manage the
globe. Obama-Trump is a 1-2 knockout punch.
Your points are excellent. All tragic, devastating events in the last, at least, 20
years have been staged or played to facilitate the total control by the Deep State.
The problem is power – and the nature of those who lust for it. The police are very
powerful, by necessity and the nature of police work is the exercise of power – on the
street.
Not to mention the fact that police forces, like every other institution, are managed from
the top. Sgt. Bernstein back at the station calls the shots, gets to decide who is hired /
fired and generally runs the department like a CEO runs a company. Not all cops are rotten,
but if Sgt. Bernstein is a scumbag, the whole department tends to behave as a scumbag.
I'll give you two guesses, the second one doesn't count, as to which tribe of psychopaths
– who call themselves "chosen" – have mastered the art of playing both sides
against the middle, using the police as a very powerful tool to accomplish an ancient agenda
of world-domination, straight out of The Torah.
The police are just another sad story of the destruction of America, by Shlomo.
@Mike Whitney Any explanation that ignores that the catalyst for what is happening is the
Federal Reserve Notes free fall is not a good explanation.
This is a failed Communist Putsch. The people pushing it have enough control of major
cities to keep it alive but not enough to push it into the heartland. 400 million guns and a
few billion bullets are protecting freedom in the USA just like they were intended to.
All failed communist revolutions end in fascism taking power. The Yahoo news comments
sections are way to big to censor properly and they are already taking on a Fascist tone with
almost half the posters. This is only just beginning and most people are beginning to
understand that these lies non whites tell about the fake systemic racism are too dangerous
to go unchallenged. The idea that the protests ,the protests not the riots, have no
foundation in truth is starting to work its way to the forefront of white peoples minds.
Non whites are coddled by the establishment in the USA and no real racists have any power
in the USA so this whole thing is and has been for 50 years based on lies.
The jew mob is going to lose all their economic power over the next year or so as the Fed
Note hyper-inflates. The mob knows this and made a grab for ideological power using low IQ
ungrateful non whites they have been inculcating with anti white ideals for decades as their
foot soldiers.
They are screwed because the places they control are parasitic just like they are. Cities
are full of people making nothing and pretty much just doing service jobs for each other. All
the things needed to keep cities going come from outside the cities and the jew mob is not in
charge in the places that actually produce things. Not like they are in the cities
anyway.
Ignoring the currency rises makes you dishonest Mike.
I think the leadership and tactics of the police are deplorable. I can only surmise that the
local political leadership in many cities is on the inside of this latest scam.
The police should be able to launch attacks on the crowd to single out those who are
Antifa activists. That is what the riot police in France would do. They should try to ignore
the rabble behind which these activists are sheltering.
By remaining on the defensive and without using the element of surprise to capture these
activists, the police are sitting ducks.
My dad told me what it was like in Cairo when the centre of the city was destroyed in
1952. I was tiny at that time and remember my mother carrying me. We watched Cairo burning in
the distance. We were on the roof of the huge house of my Egyptian grandfather in
Heliopolis.
The looters and arsonists were well-equipped. It was not by any means spontaneous. They
smashed the locks on the draw-down shutters of the shops with sledge hammers. Next, they
looted the shop. Lastly, they tossed in Molotov cocktails. The commercial heart of Cairo was
largely destroyed in a few hours. Cinemas and the Casino were burnt. Cairo was a very
pleasant metropolis in those days. It became prosperous during WW2 by supplying the
Allies.
My family's small factory was in the very centre of Cairo – in Abbassia. My father
rounded up his workers to defend the factory. Many lived on the premises. They were all tough
Sa'idi from Upper
Egypt. Many were Coptic Christians. They all had large staffs that they knew how to use. The
arsonists and looters kept well clear.
JUNE 9, 2020 CityLab University: A Timeline of U.S. Police Protests
The latest protests against police violence toward African Americans didn't appear out of
nowhere. They're rooted in generations of injustice and systemic racism.
@Sean said:
"While it is a possibility that whites could lose control of their society, and see it fall
into the hands of an explicitly anti -[r]acist elite/ minorities alliance,"
"Anti-racist?
The entire matter is "explicit" racism directed against Euro-whites.
@gay troll "But why do you assume the CIA wants to get rid of Trump?"
John Brennan collaborated with James Comey on the Russian collusion narrative. Brennan is
indicative of the upper-echelon CIA and its orientation towards the globalist billionaire
class.
@Loup-Bouc Maybe you also noticed that the opening pages of the article suggested that
the author was unhinged when he made so much of an alleged editorial in the NYT which wasn't
an editorial but an opinion piece by an activist. And what about the spontaneous eruptions of
protest all round the world? Masterminded by the US "Deep State"? Absurd.
Mr. Whitney may have got to an age when he can no longer understand the young and their
latest fashionable fatuities and follies.
@obwandiyag " The assholes on this asshole site will not let you say that what is
important is how the super-billionaires control us. "
Nonsense, I rant against the largely Jewish super-billionaires all the time.
Truth is that blacks and working class whites are in relatively similar positions compared
to the 1%. We should be seeking alliances with people like Rev. Farrakhan, but instead, for
some curious reason, big Jewish money is pouring into keeping racial grievances alive and
kicking. It looks very much like a divide and conquer strategy.
Where did the antiwar and Occupy Wall Street movements go after Obama's election? My guess
is that the financial elite saw the danger of having OWS ask questions about the bailouts, so
they devoted a ton of time and energy into pushing racial grievance politics, gender neutral
bathrooms and the like. Their co-ethnics in the media collaborated with them in making sure
only one perspective made the news.
PS: if you don't like the website, simply avoid visiting it. Trust me, no one will miss
your inane posts.
"90% of Americans are unlikely to even see more than ten black people in their entire
lives."
I sure hope you're talking about IRL, because I see more than ten black people in any
commercial break on any TV show on any cable or network TV station every hour of every day.
In fact, it's at least 50/50 B/W and it feels more like 60/40 B/W. And it's always the blacks
who are in charge, the whites spill chips all over the kitchen floor
@SunBakedSuburb 15 seasons of The Apprentice on NBC is indicative of Trump's
orientation towards the globalist billionaire class. It sure was nice of NBC to thus
rehabilitate Trump's image after it became clear he was a cheat who could not even hold down
a casino. From fake wrestler to fake boardroom CEO, Trump has ALWAYS been made for TV.
As for Russiagate, it was a transparent crock of shit from the moment Clapper sent his
uncorrobated assertions under the aegis of "17 intelligence agencies". You assume the point
of the charade was to "get Trump", but really Russiagate was designed to deceive "liberals"
just as Q was designed to deceive "conservatives". It is the appearance of conflict that
serves to divide Americans into two camps who both believe the other is at fault for all of
society's ills. In fact, it is the Zionists and bankers who are to blame for society's ills,
and like the distraction of black vs. white, Democrat vs. Republican keeps everybody's
attention away from the real chauvinists and criminals.
@Sean Well, I can't deny that yours is an extremely original interpretation. It sure made
me think. I can't say I'm convinced, though it doesn't seem to have any conspicuous a priori
inconsistency with facts. I guess time will tell.
@Realist Agree. Someone posted he had a friend at Minneapolis airport. Incoming planes
were full of antifa types the day after Floyd died.
They are very well organized. They are notorious around universities. Well, not
universities in dangerous black neighborhoods. They live like students in crowded apartments
and organize all their movements. Plenty of dumb kids to recruit. Plenty of downwardly mobile
White grads who can't get jobs or into grad s hook because they're White. Those Whites go
into liberal rabble rousing instead of rabble rousing against affirmative action, so
brainwashed are they. Portland is a college town. That's why antifa is so well organized
there. Seattle's a college town too as is Chicago.
Why ANTIFA doesn't loot banks, doesn't stand in front od Soros home, JPMorgan headquarters,
big corporations, Bezos business .etc? Because rich are paying for riots ..the same way they
payed to support Hitler during WWII.
@Anon Thanks for highlighting the complex racial politics -- in this case between
Hispanics and Africans. That was something Ron Unz got right as well -- independently of the
numerology -- in the other article; basically saying that there have been a lot of various
social-engineering projects going on.
Naturally I'm liable for everything else you said ;/ no comment, no contest,
I think it will be alright if we can get back to basics, natural rights, republican
representative organization, pluralism, etc The corporate nightmare has everyone crammed into
a vat of human resources. Undo that, see how it goes, then take it from there.
@Mike Whitney The reason most of the rioters arrested were native New Yorkers is that
they were the useful idiots designated fall guys.
The organizers are adept at changing clothes hats and sunglasses. Their job is to get
things started by smashing windows of a Nike's store and running away letting a few looters
be arrested.
I remember something written by an Indian communist, not Indian nationalist How To Start a
Riot in the 1920s.
1 Start rumors about abuse of Indians by British.
2. Decide where to start the riots.
3 Best place is in the open air markets around noon. The merchants will have collected
substantial money. The local lay abouts will be up and about.
4 Instigators start fights with the merchants raid cash boxes overturn tables and the riot is
on.
The ancient Roman politicians started riots that way. It's standard procedure in every
country in every era. All this fuss and discussion by the idiot intelligentsia is ridiculous
as is everything the idiot intelligentsia thinks, writes and does.
We Americans experience a black riot every few years, just as we experience floods,
droughts, blizzards , earthquakes, forest fires, tornadoes floods and hurricanes.
As long as we have blacks and liberal alleged intellectuals we'll have riots.
Ending Emergency Unemployment Insurance Supplements
By DEAN BAKER
The Republicans have been working hard to ensure that the $600 weekly supplement to
unemployment insurance benefits, which was put in place as part of the pandemic rescue
package, is not extended beyond the current July 31 cutoff. They argue that we need
people to return to work.
They do have a point. The supplement is equivalent to pay of $15 an hour for someone
working a 40-hour week, and this is in addition to a regular benefit that is typically
equal to 40 to 50 percent of workers' pay. The supplement translates into an even larger
hourly pay rate for workers putting in shorter workweeks, which was the case for most
laid off workers in the restaurant and retail sectors.
It is hard for employers in traditionally low paying sectors to match these pay rates.
Even those of us who are big proponents of higher minimum wages would not advocate a jump
to more than $20 an hour at a point when businesses are crippled by the pandemic.
However, there is also the point that we don't want workers to have to expose
themselves to the coronavirus. That was the reason for the generous supplement. We wanted
to make sure that workers, who in many cases were legally prevented from working, did not
suffer as a result.
There is an obvious solution here. Suppose we reduce or end the supplement in areas
where the pandemic is under control.
This would not be determined by some Trumpian declaration that the pandemic is over,
but by solid data. The obvious metric would be positive test rates. Suppose that the
supplement was reduced or eliminated in states or counties where the positive test rate
is less than 5 percent. (This may not be the right rate.) This would mean that workers
going back to work would face relatively little risk of contracting the virus. It would
also give states incentive to conduct vigorous testing programs, as well as other control
measures, in order to get their positive rates down.
Our unemployment insurance system is badly broken and it would be desirable to have
more generous benefits, and also to focus more on work sharing, as other countries have
done. We can recognize this point and still agree that an arbitrary supplement to all
benefits is not the right long-term fix even if it was very good policy in the
pandemic.
A strange mixture of Black nationalism with Black Bolshevism is a very interesting and pretty alarming phenomenon. It proved to
be a pretty toxic mix. But it is far from being new. We saw how the Eugène Pottier famous song
International lines "We have been naught we
shall be all." and "Servile masses arise, arise." unfolded before under Stalinism in Soviet Russia.
We also saw Lysenkoism in Academia before, and it was not a pretty picture. Some Russian/Soviet scientists such as Academician Vavilov
paid with their life for the sin of not being politically correct. From this letter it is clear that the some departments
already reached the stage tragically close to that situation.
Lysenkoism was "politically correct" (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with the broader Marxist doctrine.
Marxists wanted to believe that heredity had a limited role even among humans, and that human characteristics changed by living
under socialism would be inherited by subsequent generations of humans. Thus would be created the selfless new Soviet man
"Lysenko was consequently embraced and lionized by the Soviet media propaganda machine. Scientists who promoted Lysenkoism with
faked data and destroyed counterevidence were favored with government funding and official recognition and award. Lysenko and his
followers and media acolytes responded to critics by impugning their motives, and denouncing them as bourgeois fascists resisting
the advance of the new modern Marxism."
The Disgraceful Episode Of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory
Notable quotes:
"... In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. ..."
"... any cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders . Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques. ..."
"... The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians ..."
"... Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict . This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. ..."
"... If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? ..."
"... Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM's problematic view of history , and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position , which is no small number. ..."
"... The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people . There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is. ..."
"... The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn't led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. ..."
"... Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices - as do Nigerian Americans , who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department . The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession. ..."
"... Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades ; the 'systemic racism' there was built by successive Democrat administrations. ..."
"... The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes , carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed. ..."
"... MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today . We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing? ..."
I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely,
and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job,
and likely all future jobs in my field.
In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity
of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.
In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative
narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice
system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of
the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and
white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.
Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself,
such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject
a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders
. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.
The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the
form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should
be vigorously challenged by historians . Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration
of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and
our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.
A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email.
Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi
Coates' undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion
of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However,
if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it
is anti-black .
Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see
that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated
at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict . This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple
jurisdictions in multiple countries.
And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation
that appeals to the department's apparent desire to shoulder the 'white man's burden' and to promote a narrative of white guilt .
If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian
Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish
Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it's fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of
Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed
in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. "Those are racist dogwhistles". "The model minority
myth is white supremacist". "Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime", ad nauseam.
These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to
silence and oppress discourse . Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are , common
to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently
exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.
Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM's problematic view of history , and the department is
being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position.
Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those
of us in a precarious position , which is no small number.
I personally don't dare speak out against the BLM narrative , and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the
administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear
danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my
job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.
The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people . There are virtually no marches
for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message
is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires
explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.
No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence.
This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the
point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention
of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders . Home invaders like George Floyd . For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality
of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald's and Wal-Mart.
For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.
The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical
claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn't led to equivalent
rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively.
Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform
white Americans on nearly all SES indices - as do Nigerian Americans , who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to
point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department . The explanation
is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation
is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.
Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention,
and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter,
an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately
redirected to ActBlue Charities , an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates.
Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American
cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis
itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades ; the 'systemic racism' there was built by successive Democrat
administrations.
The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden
statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics
which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election
campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence . This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement
for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent
in academic circles . I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.
The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this
damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes
, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves
in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves,
many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity.
Fiat lux, indeed.
There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called 'race hustlers': hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking
the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal
political entrepreneurship.
Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth , we can regard ourselves as
a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at
harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically
segregationist.
MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today . We are training leaders who intend, explicitly,
to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively
racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global
political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?
As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was
a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at
her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children , playing no part in their
support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer,
a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors .
And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his
name to virtual sainthood . A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department,
corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA,
he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise . Americans are being
socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist . A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying
with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species.
I'm ashamed of my department. I would say that I'm ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid,
as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It's hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.
It shouldn't affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color . My family have been
personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The
humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM , that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life,
is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward
in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.
The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively
on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating . No other group in America is systematically
demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping
and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.
No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites.
If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely
be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional
promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.
I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda
and the Party's uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his
disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic. I condemn the manner of George Floyd's death
and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything
other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end .
I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she
is free. play_arrow
Blacks will always be poor and fucked in life when 75% of black infants are born to single most likely welfare dependent mothers...
And the more amount of welfare monies spent to combat poverty the worse this problem will grow...
taketheredpill , 37 minutes ago
Anonymous....
1) Is he really a Professor at Berkeley?
2) Is he really a Professor anywhere?
3) Is he really Black?
4) Is he really a He?
LEEPERMAX , 44 minutes ago
BLM is an international organization. They solicit tax free charitable donations via ActBlue. ActBlue then funnels billions
of dollars to DNC campaigns. This is a violation of campaign finance law and allows foreign influence in American elections.
CRM114 , 44 minutes ago
I've pointed this out before:
In 2015, after the Freddie Gray death Officers were hung out to dry by the Mayor of Baltimore (yes, her, the Chair of the DNC
in 2016), active policing in Baltimore basically stopped. They just count the bodies now. The clearance rate for homicides has
dropped to, well, we don't know because the Police refuse to say, but it appears to be under 15%. The homicide rate jumped 50%
almost immediately and has stayed there. 95% of homicides are black on black.
The Baltimore Sun keeps excellent records, so you can check this all for yourself.
Looking at killings by cops; if we take the worst case and exclude all the ones where the victim was armed and independent
witnesses state fired first, and assume all the others were cop murders, then there's about 1 cop murder every 3 years, which
means that since has now stopped and the homicide rate's gone up...
For every black man now not murdered by a cop, 400 more black men are murdered by other black men.
taketheredpill , 46 minutes ago
"As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used
to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude
that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black ."
It is the RATIO of UNARMED BLACK MALES KILLED to UNARMED WHITE MALES KILLED in RELATION TO % OF POPULATION. RATIO.
RATIO. UNARMED.
BLACK % POPULATION 13% BLACK % UNARMED MEN KILLED 37%
WHITE % POPULATION 74% BLACK % UNARMED MEN KILLED 45%
Is there a trend of MORE Black people being killed by police?
No. But there is an underlying difference in the numbers that is bad.
>>>>> As of 2018, Unarmed Blacks made up 36% of all people UNARMED killed by police. But black people make up 13% of the (unarmed)
population.
There's a massive Silent Majority of Americans , including black Americans, that are fed up with this absurd nonsense.
While there's a Vocal Minority of Americans : including Democrats, the media, corporations and race hustlers, that wish to
continue to promulgate a FALSE NARRATIVE into perpetuity...because it's a lucrative industry.
Gaius Konstantine , 57 minutes ago
A short while ago I had an ex friend get into it with me about how Europeans (whites), were the most destructive race on the
planet, responsible for all the world's evil. I pointed out to him that Genghis Khan, an Asian, slaughtered millions at a time
when technology made this a remarkable feat. I reminded him the Japanese gleefully killed millions in China and that the American
Indian Empires ran 24/7 human sacrifices with some also practicing cannibalism. His poor libtard brain couldn't handle the fact
that evil is a human trait, not restricted to a particular race and we parted (good riddance)
But along with evil, there is accomplishment. Europeans created Empires and pursued science, The Asians also participated in
these pursuits and even the Aztec and Inca built marvelous cities and massive states spanning vast stretches of territory. The
only race that accomplished little save entering the stone age is the Africans. Are we supposed to give them a participation trophy
to make them feel better? Is this feeling of inferiority what is truly behind their constant rage?
Police in the US have been militarized for a long time now and kill many more unarmed whites than they do blacks, where is
the outrage? I'm getting the feeling that this isn't really about George, just an excuse to do what savages do.
lwilland1012 , 1 hour ago
"Truth is treason in an empire of lies."
George Orwell
You know that the reason he is anonymous is that Berkley would strip him of his teaching credentials and there would be multiple
attempts on his life...
Ignatius , 1 hour ago
" The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people . There are virtually no marches
for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The
message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence
requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly
is."
A former fed who trained the police in Buffalo believes the elderly protester who was hospitalized after a cop pushed him
to the ground "got away lightly" and "took a dive," according to a report.
The retired FBI agent, Gary DiLaura,
told The Sun
he thinks there's no chance Buffalo officers will be convicted of assault over the
now-viral video showing the
longtime
peace activist Martin Gugino fall and left bleeding on the ground.
" I can't believe that they didn't deck him. If that would have been a 40-year-old guy going up there, I guarantee you they'd
have been all over him, " DiLaura said.
" He absolutely got away lightly. He got a light push and in my humble opinion, he took a dive and the dive backfired because
he hit his head. Maybe it'll knock a little bit of sense into him, " added the former fed, who trained Buffalo police on firearms
and defensive tactics, according to the report...
It's a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one [is]
demoralization ; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number
of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of
the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American
students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).
The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals)
are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system.
You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. T hey are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain
stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you
prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other
words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need
another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting
in favor and in the interests of United States society.
Yuri Bezmenov
American Psycho , 16 minutes ago
This article was one of the most articulate and succinct rebuttals to the BLM political power grab. I too have been calling
these "allies" useful idiots and I am happy to hear this professor doing the same. Bravo professor!
"Paid protesters are real ," writes the Los Angeles
Times , after a lawsuit filed by a Czech investor against a business rival spotlighted the
seedy, and very real business of people hired to express fake outrage, support, and everything
in between.
According to a lawsuit filed by investor Zdenek Bakala, Prague-based investment manager
Pavol Krupa hired Beverly hills company Crowds on Demand (COD) to stage a protest near Bakala's
home in Hilton Head, SC.
In the Bakala case, Crowds on Demand is accused of spreading misinformation through a
website, putting on protests and organizing a phone and email campaign targeting several U.S.
institutions with ties to Bakala, who got an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and
had an estimated net worth topping $1 billion earlier this decade, according to Forbes. -
LA Times
Crowds on Demand provides pop-up "protests, rallies, flash mobs, paparazzi events and other
inventive PR stunts," according to its website.
The dispute between Bakala and Krupa goes back for several years, and has been the subject
of inquiries by the European Commission and the Czech government, involving a formerly
state-owned coal mining business, OKD, which Bakala assumed control of in 2004. Bakala has been
accused of bribing officials to buy the government's equity in the mining company at a
below-market price, which broke a promise to sell company-owned apartments to employees before
the company ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 2016.
According to Bakala, the COD smear campaign didn't stop there, claiming that the company
also called and sent emails to the Aspen Institute and Dartmouth College, where Bakala sits on
advisory boards, urging them to cut ties with him. Bakala claims that Krupa threatened to ramp
up the COD campaign unless the Czech investor coughs up $23 million.
Bakala, who holds U.S. and Czech citizenship, says in his lawsuit that all of those
allegations are false and are part of Krupa's extortion campaign. He alleges that Krupa
offered to cease his campaign if Bakala paid $23 million for OKD shares owned by Krupa's
investment fund.
...
Crowds on Demand founder Adam Swart and Krupa neither confirmed nor denied that they are
working together. They declined to answer specific questions about Bakala's allegations,
though Swart, in an emailed statement, called the claims meritless.
" Not only will I vigorously defend myself against the allegations in the complaint but I
am also evaluating whether to bring my own claims against Mr. Bakala ," Swart said. -
LA Times
"Defendants are pursuing a campaign of harassment, defamation, and interference in the
business affairs of Zdenek Bakala, which they have expressly vowed to expand unless he pays
them millions of dollars," reads Bakala's lawsuit (see below).
That said, it's not clear that Krupa's alleged campaign had the desired effect.
Elliot Gerson, an executive vice president at the Aspen Institute, said in an emailed
statement that the institute has received calls and emails from "individuals associated with
Crowds on Demand" and that the nonprofit's general counsel has spoken with Swart "about this
campaign of harassment."
" From the beginning, we assumed that these manufactured communications were linked to
political issues in the Czech Republic and Mr. Bakala's high profile in that country ,"
Gerson said. " Nothing we received has altered our views about Mr. Bakala ." - LA
Times
So paid protesters are a thing...
Bakala's lawsuit brings to light an ongoing debate in the national dialogue over paid
protesters. President Trump, for example, has repeatedly claimed that protesters have been paid
by left-wing billionaire activist George Soros and others in order to disrupt and undermine
conservative events.
"There are hundreds of lobbying firms and public affairs firms that do this work, though not
all in the same way," said USLA sociology professor Edward Walker - who wrote a book on the
business of paid protesting, also known as Astroturfing. "Some only do a little bit of this
grass-roots-for-hire, but things adjacent to this are not uncommon today."
In 2014, ABC's "Nightline" reported that a group backed by the beverage industry was hiring
people to protest a soda tax measure - posting ads on Craigslist for paid protesters at $13 an
hour.
During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, many noted what
appeared to be a man, Vinay Krishnan - who works for progressive activist organization Center
for Popular Democracy, paying a woman named Vickie Lampron who was later seen in the Kavanaugh
hearing.
Krishnan said that the money was given to people to pay fines in case they were
arrested.
As the Times notes, paid protesters aren't a recent phenomenon.
Longtime California political consultant Garry South, who was a campaign strategist for
California Gov. Gray Davis, said it's long been common for campaigns and political parties to
pay people a few bucks or perhaps provide a meal in exchange for attending a rally. He
recalled a 2002 rally in San Francisco where he said that tactic was used.
" It turns out, the San Francisco Democratic Party, to bolster the crowd, had basically
gone down to skid row and paid people $5 or something to tromp up to Union Square ," South
said.
But he sees a big difference between that kind of activity and the paid protests allegedly
organized by Crowds on Demand.
"What's different is the commercialization of the process," he said. "It just contributes
to the air of unreality that exists in this day and age with essentially not being able to
believe your own eyes or ears. I don't think it's particularly healthy. But it probably
inevitably was going to come to this." - LA Times
Crowds on Demand, meanwhile, shamelessly boasts on their website that they were hired by a
business rival to "cripple the operations" of a manufacturing business owned by a convicted
child molester, which resulted in the hiring company buying the molester-owned business for "5
percent of its previous value."
In another "case study," COD brags about staging a rally to support an unidentified foreign
leader who was visiting the United Nations.
"The concern was ensuring that the leader was well received by a U.S. audience and confident
for his work at the U.N. We created demonstrations of support with diverse crowds.," says
COD.
"A lot of times, companies don't want to be known for using this kind of strategy," Walker
said. "Crowds on Demand, they're more out about it. ... It is strikingly brazen. "
Very interesting. Hiring a mob to cause economic damage and set the stage for extortion certainly sounds
"actionable". Talking head Mark Levin has talked from time to time about suing people for "tortious
interference". I've never heard about such suits, but Levin is a legal heavyweight and likely knows what
is a credible legal threat.
And now there is the Epstein matter, which threatens not only former president Bill Clinton,
but a cosmos of political, financial, and entertainment "stars" in countless ugly incidents
that involve a kind of personal corruption that has no political context but says an awful lot
about the obliteration of moral and ethical boundaries by the people who ended up running
things in this fretful moment of US history.
Millions of Americans remain subjected to unprecedented restrictions on their personal
lives, their daily lives, their family's lives.
The coronavirus
lockdowns continue in many places. You may not know that because it gets no publicity, but it's
true. And if you're living under it, you definitely know.
As a result of this, tens of millions of people are now unemployed. A huge number of them
have no prospects of working again. Many thousands of small businesses are closed and will
never reopen. More Americans have become dependent on drugs and alcohol, seeing their marriages
dissolve, and become clinically depressed.
Some of them delayed their weddings. Others were banned by the government from burying their
loved ones in funerals. Some Americans will die of cancer because they couldn't get cancer
screenings, some unknown number have taken their own lives in despair. Others have flooded the
streets to riot because bottled up rage and frustration take many forms.
The cost of shutting down the United States and denying our citizens desperately needed
contact with one another is hard to calculate. But the cost has been staggering.
The people responsible for doing all of this,say they have no regrets about it. We faced a
global calamity, they say. COVID-19 was the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu. That flu
killed 50 million people.
We had no choice. We did the right thing. That's what they're telling us. Is it true?
The answer to that question matters, not just because the truth always matters, but because
the credibility of our leaders is at stake here. This is the biggest decision they have made in
our lifetimes. They were able to make it. They rule because we let them. Their power comes from
us.
As a matter of public health, we can say conclusively the lockdowns were not
necessary.
So the question, now and always is, are they worthy of that power? That's not a conversation
they want to have. And right now, they don't have to have that conversation because all of us
are distracted and mesmerized by the woke revolution underway outside.
They just created a separate country in Seattle. Huh? We'll bring you the latest on that.
But we do think it's worth four minutes taking a pause to assess whether or not they were in
fact lying to us about the coronavirus and our response to it.
And the short answer is this: Yes, they were definitely lying.
As a matter of public health, we can say conclusively the lockdowns were not necessary. In
fact, we can prove that. And here's the most powerful evidence: States that never locked down
at all -- states where people were allowed to live like Americans and not cower indoors alone
-- in the end turned out no worse than states that had mandatory quarantines. The state you
probably live in.
The states that locked down at first but were quick to reopen have not seen explosions of
coronavirus cases. All of this is the opposite of what they said would happen with great
confidence.
The media predicted mass death at places like Lake of the Ozarks and Ocean City, Md. --
places where the middle class dares to vacation. But those deaths never happened. In the end,
the Wuhan coronavirus turned out to be a dangerous disease, but a manageable disease, like so
many others. Far more dangerous were the lockdowns themselves.
For example, in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, panicked and
incompetent governors forced nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients, and as a
result, many thousands died, and they died needlessly.
This is all a remarkable story, but it's going almost entirely uncovered. The media would
rather tell you why you need to hate your neighbor for the color of his skin. The media
definitely don't want to revisit what they were saying just a few weeks ago, when they were
acting as press agents for power-drunk Democratic politicians.
We were all played. Corrupt politicians scared us into giving up control over the most
basic questions in our lives. At the same time, they gave more power to their obedient
followers, like Antifa, while keeping the rest of us trapped at home and censored online.
Back then, news anchors were ordering you to stop asking questions and obey.
Chris Cuomo, CNN anchor: All right, so while most Americans are staying inside -- or
should be, right, if they're not out protesting like fools -- they're not happy about being
told to stay home. Staying home saves lives.
And the rest of us should be staying at home for our mothers and the people that we love,
and to keep us farther apart, will ultimately bring us closer together in this cause.
Oh, if you love your mother, you will do what I say. It turns out cable news anchors don't
make very subtle propagandists.
And then Memorial Day arrived in May, and some states started to reopen. Millions of
grateful Americans headed outdoors for the first time in months, and the media attacked them
for doing that. They called them killers.
Swimming with your kids, they told us, was tantamount to mass murder.
Claire McCaskill, MSNBC political analyst: Frankly, a lot of the people in those crowds
-- they thought they were, you know, standing up for what the president believes in and that is
not to care about the public safety part of this.
Robyn Curnow, CNN host: Look at this. I mean, this is kind of crazy, considering we're in
the middle of a global pandemic.
I mean, as one person quipped, you know, that's curving the curve. That's not flattening
it.
Don Lemon, CNN anchor: Massive crowd of people crammed together, as if it were just an
ordinary holiday weekend despite the risks of a virus that has killed more than 98,000
people.
Boy that montage was the opposite of a MENSA meeting. Has that much dumbness been captured
on tape ever?
The last clip you saw was from May 25th. That was just over two weeks ago. "Ninety eight
thousand people are dead. How dare you leave your house? You don't work in the media. You're
not essential."
But it didn't take long for that message to change completely. In fact, it took precisely
five days.
Here's the same brain dead news anchor you just saw less than a week later. He is no longer
angry, you'll notice, about Americans going outside. As long as they are rioting and burning
and not doing something sinful, like swimming with their children, he is delighted by it.
Lemon: And let's not forget, if anyone is judging this -- I'm not judging this, I'm just
wondering what is going on. Because we were supposed to figure out this experiment a long time
ago. Our country was started because -- this is how: the Boston Tea Party. Rioting.
So don't -- do not get it twisted and think that, oh, this is something that has never
happened before. And then this is so terrible, and where are we in these savages and all of
that. This is how this country was started.
Yes, don't judge. This is how this country was started -- by looting CVS and setting fire to
Wendy's. Of course, you took American History. You knew that.
Andrew
Cuomo 's brother must have been in the same history class because he had the same
reaction.
Chris Cuomo: America's major cities are filled with people demanding this country be more
fair, more just.
And please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
Because I can show you that outraged citizens are the ones who have made America what she is
and led to any major milestones.
They are here to yell, criticize, blame, and shame.
Citizens have no duty to check their outrage.
Wow. So, one minute they were mass murderers for going outside. Now, they're Sam Adams.
They're patriots. They're American heroes.
If all of this seems like a pretty abrupt pivot, fret not. Rioting is not a health risk as
long as it helps the Democratic Party's prospects in the November election .
Rioting will not spread the coronavirus.
Sounds implausible, but we can be certain of that, because last week, hundreds of
self-described public health officials signed a letter saying so. They announced that the Black
Lives Matter riots are a vital contribution to public health. In effect, they're an essential
medical procedure.
But that doesn't mean you get to go outside. You don't. Thanks to coronavirus, you do not
have the right to resume your life, and if you complain about that, it's "white nationalism."
That was their professional conclusion.
Does a single American believe any of that? No, of course not. It is too stupid even for CNN
to repeat, so they mostly ignored it. That's an ominous sign if you think about it. It means
these people are done trying to convince you, even to fool you.
They're not making arguments, they're issuing decrees. They think they can. They no longer
believe they need your consent to make big decisions to run the country. Once the authority
stops trying to change your mind, even by deceit, it means they've decided to use force -- and
they have.
During the lockdowns, people whose loved ones died were not allowed to have funerals for
them. Think about that. It's hard to think of anything crueler, but it happened to a lot of
people. They claimed it was necessary. It was not necessary. And we know that because now that
a man has died
whose death is politically useful to the Democratic Party , the authorities have given him
three funerals and not a word about a health risk.
Or consider King County, Wash -- that's where Seattle is. Restaurants in King County are
operating at just 25 percent capacity. That's the law now. Nonessential businesses are allowed
just 15 percent capacity. The effect of that is economic disaster. Most small businesses run on
very small margins. They can't survive for long, and in fact, many have failed.
What should they do? They should join Antifa, obviously, because in King County, Wash.,
Antifa can do whatever Antifa wants to do. They have taken over an entire six-block section of
downtown Seattle, and that's fine with health authorities. There is no social distancing
required. They're essential.
Are you getting the picture? Is it adding up to a message? Yes, the message is we were
played. We were all played. Corrupt politicians scared us into giving up control over the most
basic questions in our lives. At the same time, they gave more power to their obedient
followers, like Antifa, while keeping the rest of us trapped at home and censored online.
In other words, they used a public health emergency to subvert democracy and install
themselves as monarchs. How were they able to do this? The sad truth is, they did it because we
let them do it. We believed them, therefore, we obeyed them.
If there's anything good to come out of this disaster, it's that none of us will ever make
that mistake again.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from " Tucker Carlson Tonight " on June 10,
2020.
Private equity is essential a mafia style business: they aid to blled thier victim dry.
Notable quotes:
"... By the end of 2018, available cash was so tight that Prospect got a $41 million infusion from Leonard Green and members of its management, according to Moody's. The ratings firm downgraded Prospect deeper into junk last year at B3, citing "shareholder-friendly policies" and the higher leverage resulting from the $457 million dividend. ..."
"... Meanwhile, care quality ratings for seven of the 10 Prospect hospitals evaluated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, have declined since 2016, according to HMP Metrics, a health-care facility analytics service. CMS ranks facilities from 1 to 5 stars, with 5 being the best. ..."
"... Most Prospect hospitals sit at the bottom rungs of quality assessments, according to the agency's hospital comparison database. Nine have a two-star rating or below, placing them in the lowest 30% of rated hospitals, according to CMS data. Just one Prospect-owned hospital -- Roger Williams Medical Center in Rhode Island -- earned a three-star rating. ..."
"... "Private equity owners, seeking high returns, may be even more willing to cut costs in crucial ways than even other for-profit health care companies," she said in an interview. ..."
It is not exactly McCarthyism other then in a sense that this is a witch hunt. While McCarthy
behaviour and methods were abhorrent, McCarthy after all was right about the danger of
Bolshevism. This is more like parody on Soviet purges. Fake Identity Commissars in black leather
jackets do to speak...
Cisco, a producer who has worked with the New York-based National Black Theatre, the
Public Theater, Lee Daniels Entertainment and the Apollo Theater, was not surprised by the
crickets coming from these institutions -- self-professed bastions of liberalism and equality
-- but she felt hurt and angry all the same.
So Cisco
created a public Google spreadsheet and titled it "Theaters Not Speaking Out." It was
open for anyone to edit, and it had a simple directive: "Add names to this document who have
not made a statement against injustices toward black people."
At 5:50 p.m. PDT on that Saturday, May 30, she shared the document on her personal
Facebook page as well as with the Theater Folks of Color Facebook group to which she belongs.
It has more than 7,000 members and serves as a supportive space for people to share thoughts
and experiences about working in predominantly white institutions and provides a place to
"unite around common concerns and plan collective direct action."
More:
It did not appear to be a coincidence that the following day, and into June, theaters
began posting messages of solidarity with Black Lives Matter en masse , black theater
artists said. The response was problematic because often the statements were perceived to
have come from a place of shame and felt slapped together and hollow, Cisco said.
More disturbing than the slowness to speak out, Cisco said, was the language of the
statements themselves, many of which fell back on pledges of support without acknowledgement
of the historical diversity problem in theater or commitments to take concrete steps to
support black artists.
You got that? This one woman has taken advantage of this moment to create a blacklist of
politically problematic theaters -- and even denounces on it theaters that do not articulate
her statement of obeisance in precisely the correct way.
I'm old enough to remember when arts people would have recognized McCarthyism when they saw
it. Marie Cisco is a McCarthyite, but a McCarthyite for the left.
A reader sends a public open letter that went around to faculty and staff of a small college
to which he is attached. I won't quote the letter because I don't want to risk inadvertently
outing the reader. The author is a black student at the school, who reads the riot act to
administration and faculty for not doing enough for black students in this time. She
acknowledges that the school has taken steps, but they haven't done exactly what she things
black students deserve, in the way that they deserve them. The privilege being asserted by this
kid, and the signatories to her letter: presuming to tell her college what they must say and
how they must say it to avoid the taint of racism.
I figure the college will surrender. Nobody has the backbone to stand up for themselves
these days. It's all capitulation. Tucker Carlson is speaking his mind fearlessly,
but advertisers are dropping him . You cannot air a program without advertisers. There are
few people as cowardly as Big Business. In my
forthcoming book , I talk about how Woke Capitalism is going to be the prime mechanism for
enforcing soft totalitarianism. This is one reason why it has been so difficult for Americans
to see something like this moment coming: we have always assumed that totalitarianism would be
something emanating from the government. Conservatives, especially, have long bought into the
myth that Business Is Good and Government Is Bad. In fact, Business can be just as bad as
Government. But that's another story.
The services provided by Christ Health Clinic included free COVID-19 testing for residents
of Birmingham public housing. The Housing Authority of Birmingham Division
voted on Monday to no longer allow church volunteers and clinic workers to do work at
public housing communities.
The Church of the Highlands, Alabama's largest church, provided free mentoring, community
support groups and faith, health and social service activities at the Housing Authority of
Birmingham Division's nine public housing communities. The church did not receive any money
for the services, but had an agreement to allow its volunteers at the facilities.
More:
The Church of the Highlands launched Christ Health Center in 2009 in Woodlawn to offer
medical services to the Woodlawn area, including the Marks Village public housing complex in
Gate City. The church and clinic attracted national attention for
launching the first mass testing for COVID-19 in Alabama , March 17-22, administering
about 2,200 tests at a drive-through set up on the church campus.
"Christ Health chose our Woodlawn clinic specifically for its proximity to Birmingham
public housing communities and the people who call them home," said Christ Health Center CEO
Dr. Robert Record, who also attends and is on staff at the Church of the Highlands.
Think about who is being hurt here (hint: it ain't the church administration). None of it
matters. It's all ideology. All the pastor did was like a political guy on Facebook, and now
this.
And they're just getting started.
It's time for you people who laughed at the term "soft totalitarianism" to shut up. They
won't come for you -- at first.
See today's Prufrock -- two guys from The Poetry Foundation (The Poetry Foundation!) were
asked to resign (and have done so) because their written statement of support for BLM
wasn't specific enough.
"many of which fell back on pledges of support without acknowledgement of the historical
diversity problem in theater or commitments to take concrete steps to support black
artists."
The latest in a series of overblown "dangers" and inaccurate comparisons that are
essentially the sole content of this blog lately. Using organization and social media to
create a "you must support us or we will not support you" arrangement is not the same as
McCartyism. McCarthyism is using the power of the state to jail or wreak financial havoc
against an individual for simply holding unpopular political beliefs. I support profound
police reform and I go to the theatre. I also do not care if the theatre makes a public
statement in support of BLM. This series of posts are merely props so that Rod can excuse
the incompetence and corruption of Trump and his party that let it happen and say that
sadly he has "no choice" but to vote for Trump. Because after all a country where the
president shoves people out of the way and uses a church for a backdrop without the
pastor's permission is a far freer country than one where people make a spreadsheet and
insist that any future relationship involve increased levels of mutual support.
There seems to be a parallel between US foreign policy and the growing domestic 'soft
totalitarianism'. Basically, when it comes to other countries, the US has given up on
persuasion and demands obeisance instead. Don't do what the US wants and everything
remotely associated with you gets sanctioned. In domestic politics, this same intolerance
for even minor disagreement manifests itself in cancel culture and demands for public
affirmations of woke piety. Are these manifestations of an empire desperately trying to
hold itself together?
Tucker has done some fantastic shows recently. I don't always agree with him, but he does
things few others do and in an intelligent articulate way. We need voices telling us that
we are not alone, that we don't have to bend the knee, and that we are not racists for our
refusal to pledge allegiance to the ever changing woke creed. All lives matter.
As with allmost everything that occurs as a university, the purpose of the commencement
speech is not to provide a service to the students, but to make the institution's faculty and
staff feel important...
...It should be noted that most students who attend commencement ceremonies couldn't care
less who the celebrity speaker is. Most of them are there because they like the ritualistic
aspects of it, and virtually no one remembers what is said at commencement speeches in any
case.
The fact that most students (i.e., paying customers) just want to "feel graduated" by going
to these ceremonies should be a tip to the faculty that speakers should be non-controversial.
But, because these administrators want attention and influence, they often insist on bringing
in controversial political figures and causing even more grief for their customers, as if four
years of over-priced classes and social conditioning wasn't enough.
The fact colleges and universities couldn't care less about the people who pay the bills was
reinforced all the more this year when most universities shut down as a result of the COVID-19
panic. Most higher education institutions insisted on charging students full price even though
"college" was reduced to series of Zoom meetings and online assignments. Obviously, that's not
what most students paid for. College administrators, of course, were adamant that the students
keep paying through the nose for services not rendered
...
Fortunately, some of the more intelligent university trustees have already done away
with it altogether. Cep notes:
As Jason Song of The Los Angeles Times noticed, current Washington and Lee President
Kenneth Ruscio explained in 2009: "The wise and fiscally prudent Board determined that in
future years our graduates and families should rest easy knowing that if they had to endure a
worthless Commencement address, it would at least be inexpensive," meaning the president
gives the only speech.
Tennessee Patriot , 4 minutes ago
Best example I ever heard of describing a graduation ceremony:
Imagine you are sitting there in the hot sun, wrapped in a shower curtain, listening to
someone read a NYC Phone book for 3 hours.
I had to do that for HS, two Bachelor's Degrees, a Masters, two daughters & two out of
7 Grandbabies.
No thanks. Highly overrated ********. If it was up to me, they can mail it to me and lets
go straight to the party afterwards.
Handful of Dust , 1 hour ago
" I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and
clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."
Joe Biden, referring to the Kenyan at the beginning of the 2008 Democratic primary
campaign, Jan. 31, 2007.
"He's like magic. Some day they'll be calling him The Magic *****!"
Yen Cross , 1 hour ago
The longer these kids are away from their indoctrination camps, the better.
Bear , 1 hour ago
"As many colleges struggle with tight budgets" ... what a crook, they have so much money
they can pay their professors 250,000 to toe the line and they a support staff of thousands
... America's most corrup institution (after the FED)
Too bad, but # blacklivesmatter per
its core organization @ Blklivesmatter just torpedoed itself,
with its full-fledged support of # defundthepolice
: "We call for a national defunding of police." Suuuure. They knew this is non-starter, and tried a sensible Orwell 1984
of saying,
Uhlig now faces a social media campaign, led by a prominent University of Michigan economist, to get him booted as editor of the
Journal of Political Economy . Here is another leader of the professional lynch mob:
I am calling for the resignation of Harald Uhlig ( @ haralduhlig
) as the editor of the Journal of Political Economy. If you would like to add your name to this call, it is posted at
https:// forms.gle/9uiJVqCAXBDBg6 8N9 . It will be delivered by end of
day 6/10 (tomorrow).
To: The editors of the Journal of Political Economy and President of The University of Chicago Press We, the undersigned,
call for the resignation of Harald Uhlig, the Bruce Allen and Barbara...
There has been a rash of firings of editors this week. One interesting thing - judging by the publications listed and by the
cringing, groveling apologies given by these editors, they are liberals who are being eaten by up-and-coming radicals. It's like
the liberals had no idea what hit them.
I used to worry the future would be like "1984". Then the Soviet Union fell, things seemed OK tor awhile. After 9/11, I worried
the future would be like "Khartoum". But now, it looks like it is going to be a weird combination of "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers"
and "Planet of the Apes".
Now seeing reports on Twitter that the Seattle Autonomous Zone now has its first warlord. America truly is a diverse place.
You have hippie communes, religious sects, semi-autonomous Indian reservations, a gerontocracy in Washington, and now your very
own Africa style fiefdom complete with warlord.
I really am sorry. This must be so depressing to watch as an American.
Arizona State journalism school retracts offer to new dean because of an "insensitive" tweets and comments - by insensitive
we mean, not sufficiently zealous and not hip to the full-spectrum wokeness. Online student petitions follow, and you know the
rest of the story.
This is madness. The true late stages of a revolution where they start eating their own.
Those tweets above (and countless others like them) just demonstrate the absolute intellectual and moral rot that now reigns
in academia. I saw one yesterday by an attorney for a prominent activist organization who said he couldn't understand why the
Constitution isn't interpreted as "requiring" the demolition of the Robert E. Lee statue in Virginia, and others like it. I'm
having a harder time understanding how he ever graduated from an accredited law school.
Forget "defund the police," perhaps "defund universities" would be the best place to start healing what ails contemporary culture.
The rot started there, not only with the "anti-racist" (as opposed to "mere" non-racism) cant, it with gender ideology (Judith
Butler), Cultural Marxism, etc. When "pc" first became a common term in the early '90s I thought it passing fad. We now see the
result of the decades long radical march through the institutions bearing fruit, and it's more strange and rotten fruit than ever.
Woke leftists are the people who believe in the myth of aggregate Black intellectual parity with Whites and Asians the least.
That's why they constantly do absolutely everything in their power to juke the statistics, like allowing Black students to not
have to take exams, which is really just an extension of this same principle at work in "affirmative action."
The French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge--100,000,000 people were murdered
in the name of extreme egalitarianism across the 20th century. When leftism gets out of control, tragedy happens.
I have no idea why you believe hard totalitarian methods aren't coming. I'm not sure what the answer is. We can expect no help
from the Republican party. That much is certain. A disturbing number of people have not yet awoken from their dogmatic slumber.
Who is Amy Siskind going to call to arrest Tucker Carlson and bring him to a tribunal? The defunded police?
It seems to me that the left has gone about this bassackwards. First you ashcan the Second Amendment, THEN you take away their
First Amendment Rights. You most certainly do not go around silencing people with political correctness, then go around announcing
your intention to kulak an entire group of very well-armed people. But that's just my opinion...
Rod, I disagree that a "soft totalitarianism" is what awaits us if these barbarians are allowed to run around unopposed. The
notion of human rights is a product of the religion they despise, so I see no reason why they would respect this ideal when dealing
with vile white wreckers of the multi-cultural utopia they have envisioned.
"... No one has benefited from the new rules more than the state of Israel, whose hundreds of support organizations and principal billionaire funders euphemized as the "Israel Lobby" have entrenched pro-Israel donors as the principal financial resources of both major political parties. ..."
The nearly complete corruption of the U.S. republican form of government has largely come
about due to the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in January 2010 that basically
permitted unlimited donor-spending on political campaigns based on the principle that
providing money, normally through a political action committee (PAC), is a form of free
speech. The decision paved the way for agenda-driven plutocrats and corporations to largely
seize control of the formulation process for certain policies being promoted by the two
national parties.
No one has benefited from the new rules more than the state of Israel, whose hundreds of
support organizations and principal billionaire funders euphemized as the "Israel Lobby" have
entrenched pro-Israel donors as the principal financial resources of both major political
parties.
Millions of Americans remain subjected to unprecedented restrictions on their personal
lives, their daily lives, their family's lives.
The coronavirus
lockdowns continue in many places. You may not know that because it gets no publicity, but it's
true. And if you're living under it, you definitely know.
As a result of this, tens of millions of people are now unemployed. A huge number of them
have no prospects of working again. Many thousands of small businesses are closed and will
never reopen. More Americans have become dependent on drugs and alcohol, seeing their marriages
dissolve, and become clinically depressed.
Some of them delayed their weddings. Others were banned by the government from burying their
loved ones in funerals. Some Americans will die of cancer because they couldn't get cancer
screenings, some unknown number have taken their own lives in despair. Others have flooded the
streets to riot because bottled up rage and frustration take many forms.
The cost of shutting down the United States and denying our citizens desperately needed
contact with one another is hard to calculate. But the cost has been staggering.
The people responsible for doing all of this,say they have no regrets about it. We faced a
global calamity, they say. COVID-19 was the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu. That flu
killed 50 million people.
We had no choice. We did the right thing. That's what they're telling us. Is it true?
The answer to that question matters, not just because the truth always matters, but because
the credibility of our leaders is at stake here. This is the biggest decision they have made in
our lifetimes. They were able to make it. They rule because we let them. Their power comes from
us.
As a matter of public health, we can say conclusively the lockdowns were not
necessary.
So the question, now and always is, are they worthy of that power? That's not a conversation
they want to have. And right now, they don't have to have that conversation because all of us
are distracted and mesmerized by the woke revolution underway outside.
They just created a separate country in Seattle. Huh? We'll bring you the latest on that.
But we do think it's worth four minutes taking a pause to assess whether or not they were in
fact lying to us about the coronavirus and our response to it.
And the short answer is this: Yes, they were definitely lying.
As a matter of public health, we can say conclusively the lockdowns were not necessary. In
fact, we can prove that. And here's the most powerful evidence: States that never locked down
at all -- states where people were allowed to live like Americans and not cower indoors alone
-- in the end turned out no worse than states that had mandatory quarantines. The state you
probably live in.
The states that locked down at first but were quick to reopen have not seen explosions of
coronavirus cases. All of this is the opposite of what they said would happen with great
confidence.
The media predicted mass death at places like Lake of the Ozarks and Ocean City, Md. --
places where the middle class dares to vacation. But those deaths never happened. In the end,
the Wuhan coronavirus turned out to be a dangerous disease, but a manageable disease, like so
many others. Far more dangerous were the lockdowns themselves.
For example, in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, panicked and
incompetent governors forced nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients, and as a
result, many thousands died, and they died needlessly.
This is all a remarkable story, but it's going almost entirely uncovered. The media would
rather tell you why you need to hate your neighbor for the color of his skin. The media
definitely don't want to revisit what they were saying just a few weeks ago, when they were
acting as press agents for power-drunk Democratic politicians.
We were all played. Corrupt politicians scared us into giving up control over the most
basic questions in our lives. At the same time, they gave more power to their obedient
followers, like Antifa, while keeping the rest of us trapped at home and censored online.
Back then, news anchors were ordering you to stop asking questions and obey.
Chris Cuomo, CNN anchor: All right, so while most Americans are staying inside -- or
should be, right, if they're not out protesting like fools -- they're not happy about being
told to stay home. Staying home saves lives.
And the rest of us should be staying at home for our mothers and the people that we love,
and to keep us farther apart, will ultimately bring us closer together in this cause.
Oh, if you love your mother, you will do what I say. It turns out cable news anchors don't
make very subtle propagandists.
And then Memorial Day arrived in May, and some states started to reopen. Millions of
grateful Americans headed outdoors for the first time in months, and the media attacked them
for doing that. They called them killers.
Swimming with your kids, they told us, was tantamount to mass murder.
Claire McCaskill, MSNBC political analyst: Frankly, a lot of the people in those crowds
-- they thought they were, you know, standing up for what the president believes in and that is
not to care about the public safety part of this.
Robyn Curnow, CNN host: Look at this. I mean, this is kind of crazy, considering we're in
the middle of a global pandemic.
I mean, as one person quipped, you know, that's curving the curve. That's not flattening
it.
Don Lemon, CNN anchor: Massive crowd of people crammed together, as if it were just an
ordinary holiday weekend despite the risks of a virus that has killed more than 98,000
people.
Boy that montage was the opposite of a MENSA meeting. Has that much dumbness been captured
on tape ever?
The last clip you saw was from May 25th. That was just over two weeks ago. "Ninety eight
thousand people are dead. How dare you leave your house? You don't work in the media. You're
not essential."
But it didn't take long for that message to change completely. In fact, it took precisely
five days.
Here's the same brain dead news anchor you just saw less than a week later. He is no longer
angry, you'll notice, about Americans going outside. As long as they are rioting and burning
and not doing something sinful, like swimming with their children, he is delighted by it.
Lemon: And let's not forget, if anyone is judging this -- I'm not judging this, I'm just
wondering what is going on. Because we were supposed to figure out this experiment a long time
ago. Our country was started because -- this is how: the Boston Tea Party. Rioting.
So don't -- do not get it twisted and think that, oh, this is something that has never
happened before. And then this is so terrible, and where are we in these savages and all of
that. This is how this country was started.
Yes, don't judge. This is how this country was started -- by looting CVS and setting fire to
Wendy's. Of course, you took American History. You knew that.
Andrew
Cuomo 's brother must have been in the same history class because he had the same
reaction.
Chris Cuomo: America's major cities are filled with people demanding this country be more
fair, more just.
And please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
Because I can show you that outraged citizens are the ones who have made America what she is
and led to any major milestones.
They are here to yell, criticize, blame, and shame.
Citizens have no duty to check their outrage.
Wow. So, one minute they were mass murderers for going outside. Now, they're Sam Adams.
They're patriots. They're American heroes.
If all of this seems like a pretty abrupt pivot, fret not. Rioting is not a health risk as
long as it helps the Democratic Party's prospects in the November election .
Rioting will not spread the coronavirus.
Sounds implausible, but we can be certain of that, because last week, hundreds of
self-described public health officials signed a letter saying so. They announced that the Black
Lives Matter riots are a vital contribution to public health. In effect, they're an essential
medical procedure.
But that doesn't mean you get to go outside. You don't. Thanks to coronavirus, you do not
have the right to resume your life, and if you complain about that, it's "white nationalism."
That was their professional conclusion.
Does a single American believe any of that? No, of course not. It is too stupid even for CNN
to repeat, so they mostly ignored it. That's an ominous sign if you think about it. It means
these people are done trying to convince you, even to fool you.
They're not making arguments, they're issuing decrees. They think they can. They no longer
believe they need your consent to make big decisions to run the country. Once the authority
stops trying to change your mind, even by deceit, it means they've decided to use force -- and
they have.
During the lockdowns, people whose loved ones died were not allowed to have funerals for
them. Think about that. It's hard to think of anything crueler, but it happened to a lot of
people. They claimed it was necessary. It was not necessary. And we know that because now that
a man has died
whose death is politically useful to the Democratic Party , the authorities have given him
three funerals and not a word about a health risk.
Or consider King County, Wash -- that's where Seattle is. Restaurants in King County are
operating at just 25 percent capacity. That's the law now. Nonessential businesses are allowed
just 15 percent capacity. The effect of that is economic disaster. Most small businesses run on
very small margins. They can't survive for long, and in fact, many have failed.
What should they do? They should join Antifa, obviously, because in King County, Wash.,
Antifa can do whatever Antifa wants to do. They have taken over an entire six-block section of
downtown Seattle, and that's fine with health authorities. There is no social distancing
required. They're essential.
Are you getting the picture? Is it adding up to a message? Yes, the message is we were
played. We were all played. Corrupt politicians scared us into giving up control over the most
basic questions in our lives. At the same time, they gave more power to their obedient
followers, like Antifa, while keeping the rest of us trapped at home and censored online.
In other words, they used a public health emergency to subvert democracy and install
themselves as monarchs. How were they able to do this? The sad truth is, they did it because we
let them do it. We believed them, therefore, we obeyed them.
If there's anything good to come out of this disaster, it's that none of us will ever make
that mistake again.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from " Tucker Carlson Tonight " on June 10,
2020.
CLICK HERE TO READ
MORE FROM TUCKER CARLSON Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channel's
(FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a
contributor.
Too bad, but # blacklivesmatter per
its core organization @ Blklivesmatter just torpedoed itself,
with its full-fledged support of # defundthepolice
: "We call for a national defunding of police." Suuuure. They knew this is non-starter, and tried a sensible Orwell 1984
of saying,
Uhlig now faces a social media campaign, led by a prominent University of Michigan economist, to get him booted as editor of the
Journal of Political Economy . Here is another leader of the professional lynch mob:
I am calling for the resignation of Harald Uhlig ( @ haralduhlig
) as the editor of the Journal of Political Economy. If you would like to add your name to this call, it is posted at
https:// forms.gle/9uiJVqCAXBDBg6 8N9 . It will be delivered by end of
day 6/10 (tomorrow).
To: The editors of the Journal of Political Economy and President of The University of Chicago Press We, the undersigned,
call for the resignation of Harald Uhlig, the Bruce Allen and Barbara...
There has been a rash of firings of editors this week. One interesting thing - judging by the publications listed and by the
cringing, groveling apologies given by these editors, they are liberals who are being eaten by up-and-coming radicals. It's like
the liberals had no idea what hit them.
I used to worry the future would be like "1984". Then the Soviet Union fell, things seemed OK tor awhile. After 9/11, I worried
the future would be like "Khartoum". But now, it looks like it is going to be a weird combination of "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers"
and "Planet of the Apes".
Now seeing reports on Twitter that the Seattle Autonomous Zone now has its first warlord. America truly is a diverse place.
You have hippie communes, religious sects, semi-autonomous Indian reservations, a gerontocracy in Washington, and now your very
own Africa style fiefdom complete with warlord.
I really am sorry. This must be so depressing to watch as an American.
Arizona State journalism school retracts offer to new dean because of an "insensitive" tweets and comments - by insensitive
we mean, not sufficiently zealous and not hip to the full-spectrum wokeness. Online student petitions follow, and you know the
rest of the story.
This is madness. The true late stages of a revolution where they start eating their own.
Those tweets above (and countless others like them) just demonstrate the absolute intellectual and moral rot that now reigns
in academia. I saw one yesterday by an attorney for a prominent activist organization who said he couldn't understand why the
Constitution isn't interpreted as "requiring" the demolition of the Robert E. Lee statue in Virginia, and others like it. I'm
having a harder time understanding how he ever graduated from an accredited law school.
Forget "defund the police," perhaps "defund universities" would be the best place to start healing what ails contemporary culture.
The rot started there, not only with the "anti-racist" (as opposed to "mere" non-racism) cant, it with gender ideology (Judith
Butler), Cultural Marxism, etc. When "pc" first became a common term in the early '90s I thought it passing fad. We now see the
result of the decades long radical march through the institutions bearing fruit, and it's more strange and rotten fruit than ever.
Woke leftists are the people who believe in the myth of aggregate Black intellectual parity with Whites and Asians the least.
That's why they constantly do absolutely everything in their power to juke the statistics, like allowing Black students to not
have to take exams, which is really just an extension of this same principle at work in "affirmative action."
The French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge--100,000,000 people were murdered
in the name of extreme egalitarianism across the 20th century. When leftism gets out of control, tragedy happens.
I have no idea why you believe hard totalitarian methods aren't coming. I'm not sure what the answer is. We can expect no help
from the Republican party. That much is certain. A disturbing number of people have not yet awoken from their dogmatic slumber.
Who is Amy Siskind going to call to arrest Tucker Carlson and bring him to a tribunal? The defunded police?
It seems to me that the left has gone about this bassackwards. First you ashcan the Second Amendment, THEN you take away their
First Amendment Rights. You most certainly do not go around silencing people with political correctness, then go around announcing
your intention to kulak an entire group of very well-armed people. But that's just my opinion...
Rod, I disagree that a "soft totalitarianism" is what awaits us if these barbarians are allowed to run around unopposed. The
notion of human rights is a product of the religion they despise, so I see no reason why they would respect this ideal when dealing
with vile white wreckers of the multi-cultural utopia they have envisioned.
"... There is no need here to go into the evolution of this dangerous regime of policing -- from bogus "broken windows" and "zero tolerance" theories of the sort that academics always seem to have at the ready to rationalize intensified application of bourgeois class power ..."
"... It is also a demand that, in insisting that for all intents and purposes police violence must be seen as mainly, if not exclusively, a black thing, we cut ourselves off from the only basis for forging a political alliance that could effectively challenge it. All that could be possible as political intervention, therefore, is tinkering around with administration of neoliberal stress policing in the interest of pursuing racial parity in victimization and providing consultancies for experts in how much black lives matter.5 ..."
What is clear in those states, however, is that the great disproportion of those killed
by police have been Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell
Kai Wright et al to find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has
nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless collective racial
suffering and triumphalist individual overcoming -- "resilience" -- popular among the
black professional-managerial strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?)
these days.
What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests
is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion of police violence all
along, that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative
to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working
class populations produced by revanchist capitalism.
There is no need here to go into the
evolution of this dangerous regime of policing -- from bogus "broken windows" and "zero
tolerance" theories of the sort that academics always seem to have at the ready to
rationalize intensified application of bourgeois class power, to anti-terrorism hysteria
and finally assertion of a common sense understanding that any cop has unassailable
authority to override constitutional protections and to turn an expired inspection
sticker or a refusal to respond to an arbitrary order or warrantless search into a
capital offense.
And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are
victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is --
for all the militant posturing by McKesson, Garza, Tometi, Cullors et al. -- in substance
a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence
in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and
its social entailments.
It is also a demand that, in insisting that for all intents and purposes police
violence must be seen as mainly, if not exclusively, a black thing, we cut ourselves off
from the only basis for forging a political alliance that could effectively challenge it.
All that could be possible as political intervention, therefore, is tinkering around with
administration of neoliberal stress policing in the interest of pursuing racial parity in
victimization and providing consultancies for experts in how much black lives
matter.5
"This could be done in coordination with citizen panels appointed by the City Council. Third,
departments could agree to police black neighborhoods exclusively with black cops whose
conduct could be reviewed periodically by an independent citizen panel."
I tend to lean in a favorable direction with regards to the idea that White cops should be
relieved of the hazards of policing black neighborhoods. But, at the same time – I am
extremely cynical about law enforcement in general and have read far too many stories over
the last several decades where cops are caught up in corruption scandals that often inv0lve
taking payoffs from drug pushers in these inner city, majority black cities and agree to look
the other way and to not interfere with the illegal drug selling industry.
So, my cynicism causes me to wonder if the push to get White cops out of black city areas
might not be a desire of the black criminal gangs to not have to shell out payoffs to White
cops and perhaps, channel those payoffs instead to their black cop brothers? I mean, to get a
preview of what kind of environment will likely fester and grow if blacks are given a
complete dominance over policing in big cities with large black populations – and
without any White oversight – just take a look at the big cities in the blue states
today which are completely under the control of blacks. Black mayors. Entire city councils
that are black. Nearly all city government positions filled by blacks. What do we see? We see
corruption on a scale that rivals the most corrupt, black run, third world nations on the
continent of Africa.
Lest anyone misunderstand, let me say that I am not trying to defend the right of corrupt
and dirty White cops to continue to have access to black districts and be able to haul in
payoffs. I'm merely floating a potential hidden reason behind this idea of only allowing
black cops to police these areas and suggesting how it could create enormous corruption of
law enforcement agencies.
"... So a Chinese empire is the solution to the worlds problems. I'm sure that all of those imprisoned and oppressed ethnic groups in China(just like the USA) are happy with their oppression. My sociopathic empire is better than your sociopathic empire is not a defendable position. ..."
"... The American Republic with all its sins to atone for is still worth defending. The American Empire(the Deep State)has used 100 years of hardcore propaganda to ensure its dominance. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is nothing other than a permutation of colonialism -- a racist colonial economics -- that by design exploits the labor and other resources of people of color here at home in the Americas and in developing countries everywhere. ..."
Do any of these nations now face nationwide protests over discrimination, official violence,
or the grinding deprivations underlying our national discontent? This hardly bears asking.
The Price of All This
Building burning in Minneapolis on May 29, 2020, during George Floyd protests.
(Hungryogrephotos, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)
Here comes the price of all this. Here comes the front edge of a new era, one in which
America finally falls off its horse, its global standing properly diminished. Let it be, let it
be, given how consistently Washington has abused the privilege that fell to it after the 1945
victories.
Europeans have for years nursed their resentment of America's overweening assertions of
power even as they have managed to contain it. Now Jack springs out of his box.
When Angela Merkel announced last week that she
won't attend this year's Group of 7 summit in the U.S., the German chancellor's now-overt
contempt for the Trump administration can be taken to reflect the Continent's. Even French
President Emmanuel Macron, who has made a determined effort to accommodate President Donald
Trump since taking office three years ago, seems to have given up.
This appears to be a river crossing from which there can be no turning back. One has waited
decades for the Europeans to find their own place in global affairs, allied with the U.S. but
un-beholden to its every wish. This is at last the anticipated moment, in my read. Not even a
president more palatable than Trump across the Atlantic is likely to reverse these emerging
facts on the ground.
Two weeks ago this column noted indications that
the Chinese have determined to find their future in the non–West, having given up on
constructing mutually accommodating relations with the U.S. Its indifference to American
censure over planned security laws in Hong Kong was a blunt signal of this.
We now have reports,
here and here , that
China is newly focused (after an
interim of friction ) on Brazil as an alternative source of energy and agricultural
supplies -- not least the soybeans the mainland has long purchased from the U.S.
'Cheap Grace'
It is remarkable to note how unaware our leadership is of all the chickens now coming home
to roost. The Trump administration's excesses these past few weeks speak for themselves. Our
corporate captains are treating us to a festival of "cheap grace" -- the memorable coinage of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti–Nazi Lutheran pastor, meaning compassion without cost, with
no skin in the game.
Jamie Dimon, the chief exec at JPMorgan Chase, had himself photographed
the other day kneeling before a bank vault -- "taking a knee" in supposed solidarity with those
of us on the streets these past 10 days. You've now got
Goldman Sachs pledging $10 million "to help address racial and economic injustice," while
Intel promises $1 million and Nike adjusts its signature slogan to suit the zeitgeist
.
In a stunning display of nitwittery, The New York Times 's Tom Friedman published a
column last week nominating "America's principled business leaders to come together to lead a
healing discussion."
Wow. What would we do without our Tom " suck on this" Friedman -- a
closet racist if ever there was one?
The best take around on this drift in the national discourse arrived over the weekend on
Twitter from Hamilton Nolan, a labor reporter for In These Times and the
Washington Post 's public editor:
If all the companies saying "Black Lives Matter" would stop making it impossible for their
workers to unionize it would cause a transfer of wealth to black and brown working people a
thousand times greater than any charity donation and that is exactly why they won't do it
Nolan goes to the farce of it -- the cheap grace, the virtue-signaling -- in five lines.
American corporations are jumping onboard the race question to keep the discourse from spilling
into the true causes of our national illness -- neoliberal economics and the attendant greed.
Cynical times 10. We will see no grand donations if these matters are ever put on the
table.
But we must also note in this the intellectual unseriousness rampant among American
corporations. There is no true grasp of the gravity of what befalls America this spring.
Combined with the Keystone Kops act unfolding daily in Washington, this holds out no meaningful
remedy for our too-evident ills.
The world will continue watching as we thus compound our failures and continue or descent
into decline. The only source of promise now lies where many millions of us were this weekend
-- in the street.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International
Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is
"Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via
his Patreon site .
David B Harrison June 10, 2020 at 13:42 So a Chinese
empire is the solution to the worlds problems. I'm sure that all of those imprisoned and
oppressed ethnic groups in China(just like the USA) are happy with their oppression. My
sociopathic empire is better than your sociopathic empire is not a defendable position.
The American Republic with all its sins to atone for is still worth defending. The
American Empire(the Deep State)has used 100 years of hardcore propaganda to ensure its
dominance.
Because the USA did not suffer massive destruction from World War II it saw from 1946 to
1973 unprecedented prosperity.
The Neoliberal project began in earnest in 1973(there were always parts of it that existed
in our socioeconomic system) and here we are.Hatred of the American Empire is to be
welcomed.Hatred of the American Republic(the American People) is destructive.This is our home
why do you want to burn it down?
Aristotelian class system is the academic way of describing it. The people I know describe it
in much more colorful language.
The question now is can such a class system remodel itself into a democratic republic. I
think so. The protests are the most positive sign I've seen. The fat lady won't sing for
awhile.
Neoliberalism is nothing other than a permutation of colonialism -- a racist colonial
economics -- that by design exploits the labor and other resources of people of color here at
home in the Americas and in developing countries everywhere. If we understand this
clearly our moment becomes all the more potent. Neoliberal economics is a lethal knee to the
neck. And I wonder if an argument can be made that Derek Chauvin was actually doing his job
when he murdered George Floyd -- upholding the neoliberal order. And maybe that is what we
aren't supposed to notice.
The elites in the United States have a serious problem: contemporary American capitalism
has no use for a good chunk of the population, they're a superfluous population that's
unnecessary for capital accumulation. Therefore a massive police-state has been created to
quarter and corral these folks who would otherwise be in a good position to foment a
populist rebellion.
Christian Parenti's book "Lockdown America" is an absolute must-read.
Steve bull June 9, 2020 at 15:05 In the
hundreds if not thousands of experiments in complex societies that have been run on this
planet, not one has been successful in perpetuity. They all fail, eventually. The bigger
question for those of us experiencing the decline that accompanies such failure is whether
the 'collapse' will be quick, like the few decades for Easter Island, or prolonged, like
the few centuries for the Roman Empire. An even bigger concern may be what chaos will
befall us when the switch on the wall stops functioning
Riva Enteen June 9, 2020 at 13:40 "When Angela Merkel
announced last week that she won't attend this year's Group of 7 summit in the U.S., the
German chancellor's now-overt contempt for the Trump administration can be taken to reflect
the Continent's." Yes, that's good news, but everybody knows Merkel was spied on under
Obama. That's not contemptuous because Trump is now the personification of evil. Let's hope
we move toward taking power and not losing to totalitarianism.
"Even French President Emmanuel Macron, who has made a determined effort to accommodate
President Donald Trump since taking office three years ago, seems to have given up." I am
not sure that Macron sees the situation differently from Trump in any important way. Macron
considers protests (yellow vests, trade union marches, justice for George Floyd ) as
illegitimate, and the most recent ones have been declared illegal by the government. And
furthermore 12 people died in police custody during the shutdown period, see
Globally this article is useful, Patrick Lawrence is a valued voice, so is Cornell
West.
Jefferson outlined the maintenance schedule: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," and "God forbid we should ever be 20
years without such a rebellion."
This is long overdue, and will not be pretty. Democracy must be restored at any cost, or
all is lost. We must find the ways to destroy oligarchy and its economic power over the
tools of democracy: elections, mass media, and judiciary.
We succeed only when we have secured amendments and laws to protect these tools of
democracy from oligarchy.
America's only enemy is internal corruption, by the Tyrant who as Aristotle warned must
create outside enemies to pose as a protector. The tyrant in business, politics, and mass
media exploits the power of amorality. His belief system is power=money=virtue no matter
how he gets it. He will say anything, but he hears only the language of force.
The enabler of the tyrant's corruption is unregulated economic concentrations, which
have seized power because the Constitutional Convention did not protect democratic
institutions from economic powers that did not then exist, and the emerging middle class
were too preoccupied with their escape from poverty.
We have tried progressive parties that represent supporters, but they are powerless
against oligarchy tyrants. Reform requires either overreach of a dark-horse president, to
eject Congress and the judiciary for corruption and demand Amendments to isolate government
and mass media from economic power, or we must hope to see action cells form to destroy
mass media facilities and raid gated communities, and ensure that police refuse to suppress
riots.
Reply
Consortiumnews.com June 9, 2020 at 16:10 Benjamin Franklin's statement was "A Republic if
you can keep it." David B Harrison June 10, 2020 at 13:54 I agree
completely.Read my comment and you will see how I feel about these subjects.Infantile
anti-American hatred(except hatred of the American Empire) will not win this battle,
solidarity and fellowship will.
Michael McNulty June 9, 2020 at 10:34 I'm sure America really was that beacon on the hill
in the two decades after WWII if we leave Korea, Vietnam, Iran's democracy overthrown and
being the real driver of the Cold War aside. The problem is America took that beacon to set
the world on fire.
Historically, empire has replaced empire – violently. But can the American empire be
replaced by something better without the real danger of nuclear war, and if so, how?
See: ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
The failure of the ruling class to conserve their control does not stem from the
Entfremdung of the working class, but from the moral destitution attendant to the rulers
circumstance and decadent perception – they have abandoned the People and the State.
What we see to-day is the result of the ruling class leaving the Country to itself and the
contradictions of hundreds of years of Imperial plunder.
Without a moral ruling class there naturally is an explosive growth in a struggle for
Power. Since it's clear that the bourgeoisie has in significant measure agreed with the
masses, this satisfies Trotsky's description of a revolutionary phase.
The Left and Wall Street are not going to go after each because at the moment they are allies
pursuing a common goal; the dismantling of the traditional nation-state and its replacement
by a new transnational system.
Capital wants it because it wants totally free access to markets and resources, both human
and natural. Natural resources and product will flow with no regulation or tariffs. Capital
wants to reduce the cost of labor, at every level from manual day laborers to advanced
engineers and scientists, by forcing everyone to compete with their counterparts worldwide in
a wage race to the bottom. They will do it by shifting business to lower cost areas, and/or
mass immigration. Energy and material resources will be plundered without hindrance from any
corner of the earth. The deracinated new Brown populations will have no coherence or vision
for resistance, instead everyone will be a consumer trying to improve themselves or their
tribe against everyone else. Meanwhile the hyper-competent will claw their way to the top of
meritocratic aristocracy. The rich don't care if police forces are de-funded. Only the middle
class want police. Ancient Rome operated just fine without police. The wealthy had slaves and
hired muscle to guard their person and property. The poor used local gangs to provide
protection.
The Left wants the end of the nation-state because they think it will allow them to end
racism by the simple measure of eliminating race, save the environment by forcing
de-industrialization, and end war by ending nations. Oh, and they will be happy to accept the
role of wise philosopher-kings administering the brave new world.
Both Capital and the Left think they'll suppress the other and be the ones in charge once the
transnational world order is in place.
I think maybe there won't be a final struggle between the winning allies of the Left and
Capital because they are merging. Look at how many plutocrats have the same political beliefs
as Leftists. Try find an inch of daylight between the stated values of the HR department at a
mega-corporation and a modern university.
Neither side gives a rat's ass for the working people.
@Alfa158 It won't
work though. There isn't a significant generation of 'hyper-competent' people amidst a
suppressed populace. Instead you get idiocracy, where even the elites show signs of mental
impairment, increasingly as time goes by. The Romans were rendered idiotic by arbitrary and
ruthless imperial autocracy, which scythed through families and ancient clans, leaving only
careerist slaves in its wake.
Eventually even the emperors were idiots. Some of them think they can compartmentalize
competencies, so you see these absolutely castrated and chemically autistic nerds working the
buttons in technical academia. You can produce bureaucrats of technocracy this way, but
nothing much new will come of it.
Elon Musk is not the most competent. He is the scion of a diamond magnate family if I'm
not mistaken. He is a silly man, nothing against him, but most of us don't admire him
all.
We feel sorry for people that have this kind of cultish infatuation with the man, his
golf-carts, and space-rockets. He is complete with our own Marie Antoinette, Grimes, each an
absolute clown, clown royals for a clown society. Idiocracy.
Hilarious to see Alex Jones pimping him as like a new Howard Hughes. Most of the alt press
is fizzled, co-opted or neutralized in some way. Infatuation with big, great people, heroes
from the heavens of the stars, is a pathology, whether it's directed at Trump or Bernie or
whoever.
People need to cultivate the hero within, and generate the ground level sovereignty that
could restore (from the earth and man up) a free republic. There are a lot of authority
figures from the deathstar on Youtube telling us how they are patriots and are fighting back.
May be. Could also be the enemy fucking with us. Really no way to know, which again, is a
motivating factor for de-centralization and vesting sovereignty into free men, free
communities, and up. The federal entity is necessary, but cannot hover self-sufficiently over
a devastated (by corporate dictat -- for human resource extraction) populace. If the states
withdraw their channeled sovereignty from the federal entity, it should collapse. Otherwise
it is a foreign entity. To the extent we are ruled by a tiny cabal of vampires, we lose
justification for the belief that our rulers are ours at all. Such an arrangement of power
presents an attractive target (minimal points of failure) for a strategic adversarial
compromise.
One reason I don't want people being anti-antifa, is I understand most of those people
just want local self-governance. Food-not-bombs people mostly just want to have a nice little
community garden and not be turned into slaves by the system. These are the 'anarchists'.
I've met them, mostly they are not so bad. It's a lot of divide-and-conquer going on.
Apologies for the stream-of-consciousness; I've posted some of this before, just pounding
on the nail.
"... How much of this is virtue signalling by Mitt Romney and others of the elite? Is he willing to disgorge himself of the the hundreds of millions he took from Americans through his company Bain? ..."
These far right social conservatives lost yesterday and they don't even realize it. Mitt
Romney marched with BLM. Mitt is no radical on social issues (he certainly is on. Taxes on
the rich) you won't convince a single one of these hard right wing people that systemic
racism is real, even when you give examples like the North Carolina Republican Party
disenfranchising blacks "with surgical precision" or the direct evidence of the commenter
Dukeboy who states he is a retired police officer and is obviously a white supremacists. But
you don't need to convince them of anything. This is the same group who would have been
against the civil rights protests in the '60's. They aren't needed to create a massive
change.
The hubris to think that your feelings of guilt would be meaningful to black people is off
the charts.
"My local school has been underfunded for generations due to the property tax funding system
and redlining but Karen feels bad about it so all is right with the world!"-Said no black
person ever.
How much of this is virtue signalling by Mitt Romney and others of the elite? Is he
willing to disgorge himself of the the hundreds of millions he took from Americans through
his company Bain?
How much? 100% of it. Romney is a vicious corporate raider who has destroyed countless
jobs and by extension, lives. How many suicides have followed in the wake of Bain's corporate
takeovers? When Romney lived in Belmont, MA, he and his wife petitioned the town to not allow
ambulances to go down their street with sirens on. Seriously.
In many way this is just a wishful thinking. Saker's hyperbolic rhetoric is just cheap
propaganda and does not help to decifer the issues the USA faces!
Looks like Clinton wing of Dems is willing to burn their own house to get rid of Trump. "If I
had to guess, I'd say it's the neoliberal, CIA-Obama faction vs. the Trump-Military faction,
(Pompeo et al)" But why? Why Obamagate is picking up steam? Looks Barry CIA Obama is still a
player. Is he also a reason we have senile Biden is the candidate for President on the Dem side?
Are we seeing the power of a CIA community organizer, color-revolutionary pulling strings across
multiple strata of society?
The current riots create pressure of Trump and attempt are made to use them as the third act
of anti-Trump revolution but this clearly is nor a civil war. Like other protests before it
(Civil rights marches, anti-Vietnam and Iraq wars, Occupy) little to no substantive changes have
been introduced insofar as reining in of the war machine, the pursuit of social and economic
justice (universal free education and health care, equal employment and housing opportunities,
scaling down of the MIC and the Prison Industrial Complex, degrade Israel and Saudi lobbies,
etc.
They are not about any of these because they encompass all of these issues, and more.
It is important to always keep in mind the distinction between the concepts of " cause " and
"pretext". And while it is true that all the factors listed above are real (at least to some
degree, and without looking at the distinction between cause and effect), none of them are the
true cause of what we are witnessing. At most, the above are pretexts, triggers if you want,
but the real cause of what is taking place today is the systemic collapse of the US
society.
The next thing which we must also keep in mind is that evidence of correlation is not
evidence of causality . Take, for example, this article from CNN entitled "US
black-white inequality in 6 stark charts" which completely conflates the two concepts and
which includes the following sentence (stress added) " Those disparities exist because of a
long history of policies that excluded and exploited black Americans, said Valerie Wilson,
director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a
left-leaning group. " The word "because" clearly point to a causality, yet absolutely nothing
in the article or data support this. The US media is chock-full of such conflations of
correlation and causality, yet it is rarely denounced.
For a society, any society, to function a number of factors that make up the social contract
need to be present. The exact list that make up these factors will depend on each individual
country, but they would typically include some kind of social consensus, the acceptance by most
people of the legitimacy of the government and its institutions, often a unifying ideology or,
at least, common values, the presence of a stable middle-class, the reasonable hope for a
functioning "social life", educational institutions etc. Finally, and cynically, it always
helps the ruling elites if they can provide enough circuses (TV) and bread (food) to most
citizens. This is even true of so-called authoritarian/totalitarian societies which, contrary
to the liberal myth, typically do enjoy the support of a large segment of the population (if
only because these regimes are often more capable of providing for the basic needs of
society).
Right now, I would argue that the US government has almost completely lost its ability to
deliver any of those factors, or act to repair the broken social contract. In fact, what we can
observe is the exact opposite: the US society is highly divided, as is the US ruling class
(which is even more important). Not only that, but ever since the election of Trump, all the
vociferous Trump-haters have been undermining the legitimacy not only of Trump himself, but of
the political system which made his election possible. I have been saying that for years: by
saying "not my President" the Trump-haters have de-legitimized not only Trump personally, but
also de-legitimized the Executive branch as such.
This is an absolutely amazing phenomenon: while for almost four years Trump has been
destroying the US Empire externally, Trump-haters spent the same four years destroying the US
from the inside! If we look past the (largely fictional) differences between the Republicrats
and the Demolicans we can see that they operate like a demolition tag-team of sorts and while
they hate each other with a passion, they both contribute to bringing down both the Empire
and the United States. For anybody who has studied dialectics this would be very predictable
but, alas, dialectics are not taught anymore, hence the stunned "deer in the headlights" look
on the faces of most people today.
Finally, it is pretty clear that for all its disclaimers about supporting only the "peaceful
protestors" and its condemnation of the "out of town looters", most of the US media (as well as
the alt media) is completely unable to give a moral/ethical evaluation of what is taking place.
What I mean by this is the following:
And this ain't nothing. Nothing. Not compared to 1967-68.
But you young people don't know nothing. Especially about history. So, no surprise
there.
Si1ver1ock says: Show
Comment
June 5, 2020 at 3:14 am GMT • 100 Words If I had to guess, I'd say it's the
neoliberal, CIA-Obama faction vs the Trump-Military faction, (Pompeo et al)
This came to a head just as Obama-gate was picking up steam. Obama is still a player. He
is the reason we have Biden for President on the Dem side, for example.
My guess is that you are seeing the power of a CIA community organizer,
color-revolutionary, Jedi psyop master, pulling strings across multiple strata of
society.
Trump and Obama don't like each other for some reason.
Begun? It's been in process for many decades. It might have begun in the early 20th
century. What's new here? Focusing on recent times, jobs disappeared in the 70's. Inflation
exploded at the same time. Negro antagonism began in the 60's. Replacement of the white
population accelerated in 1965 and continued relentlessly to the current moment.
We are seeing the looting phase of the business known as the United States of America.
Refer to an informative scene from the movie Goodfellas. The criminals got control of a
business, looted it into bankruptcy and burned the place down. Except in this case there
are no Italians involved. And you know who replaces them in our real life experience.
Espinoza says: Show
Comment
June 5, 2020 at 6:44 am GMT It's controlled demolition. First unjustified lockdown.
Then unjustified race riots. The deep state is intent on destroying Trump.
If US is divided into mutually hostile territories, guess where the majority will go.
That is right. They will go to white dominated areas as they do now to white dominated
neighborhoods.
Can no one stop the deep state?
Brewer says: Show Comment
June 5, 2020 at 7:17 am GMT • 100 Words Seen it all before. How short do memories
have to be to forget Kent State, Rodney King, the Civil Rights protests of the sixties,
Harlem riot of 1964, the Watts riot of 1965 et al ?
America is and will remain a deeply disturbed society given that their entire
philosophy, lifestyle and Politics is based on consumerism. Winners (no matter how
unethical) are heroes, losers (no matter how unjustly) are despised.
America will bump and grind on through bankruptcy, both morally and economically. It is
the Judaic way.
Simple fact is that most Americans are ignorant of History and are therefore condemned
to go on repeating the past.
Wall Street is a highly influential financial district but its history is rarely talked
about. In order to understand the largesse of Wall Street and the system of global
capitalism, it is crucial to know Wall Street's history. Wall Street was founded on slavery
and, to this day, it remains a key pillar in upholding racial inequality and economic
oppression.
Why (Oh, why) do the empires – or at least very successful countries collapse? The
answer is actually very simple. Because the elites of such successful entities lose touch
with reality.
The elites in every country, even the worst s ** tholes on the planet earth are always
going to be OK, better than the ordinary citizens – that's the whole point of being an
elite – to avoid the suffering of the common people.
And because there is no mechanism to increase the suffering of the elites in tandem with
the suffering of the ordinary population – when the times are tough – the elites
fail to respond to the difficulties that ordinary citizens face.
The elites start living in a fantasy world where they believe that as long as they are OK,
the country is OK. But the elites are going to be OK right up to the moment the country
collapses, so that's not an accurate measure of how the country is doing. The country can be
in the doldrums and the elites will still be OK.
That disconnect from reality is what prevents them to undertake measures that will
alleviate the plight of the majority of the population.
To make the things even worse, the elites of the enlightened west (that's how you call
countries that are struck by lightning) seems to have found a way to progressively increase
the benefits for themselves proportionately to the decrease of good fortunes coming the way
of the common citizens, thus further removing any incentive to act on behalf of the majority
of the population and further increasing the chasm that separates the haves from the have
nots.
@Cyrano Really good comment Cyrano.
1.
"Because the elites of such successful entities lose touch with reality."
2.
Elites have "found a way to progressively increase the benefits for themselves
proportionately to the decrease of good fortunes coming the way of the common citizens, thus
further removing any incentive to act on behalf of the majority of the population and further
increasing the chasm that separates the haves from the have nots."
In fact, the wealthier Elites become, the greater the chasm between them & the 99.9%
becomes, the more desperate Elites come to feel about their situation. Call it subconscious
guilt or conscious fear & insecurity but the richer & more powerful they feel, the
more they demand -- more .
The idea that they could at least fore-stall problems by a few reforms that would cost them
little (ie, a "people's QE") is unthinkable. "If we give 'em an inch, they'll demand a
mile"
Such acts of sensible benevolence are felt to be demeaning & dangerous.
And further, they've spent 40 years restructuring society & economy to serve their
interests, any reform now, however trivial, could undermine that structure. Reform itself is
an act of self contradiction to a class that has never missed a chance to take-take-take for
40 years.
US Elites are not a tree that can bend in the wind. They are completely rigid. Only events of
god-almighty significance will break them.
The current shenanigans will not do that. But, given rates of unemployment, & contraction
of GDP, given the distinct possibility of vast future immiseration, current events may be the
first breathe of a god almighty wind set to blow the whole shithouse down.
Unfortunately, current events are politically vacuous & offer no sign of real political
conscious.
Lack of political direction can only lead to anarchy -- & anarchy is just as likely to
strengthen the Elite hand as anything else.
Irrespective of whether either faction will succeed in instrumentalizing the riots, what
we are seeing today is a systemic collapse of the US society.
Amen. The collapse is systemic , it is social , and it has been gathering
momentum for decades. Thank you, Saker, for pointing that out. It's about time someone above
the battle invested serious thought in what's really going on in the hearts, minds and
streets. Your analysis is head and shoulders above the rabble-rousing we get from parochial
home-grown U.S. pundits, who deal only in labelling their personal heroes or villains du jour
(Blacks, Cops, White Supremacists, Jews, Climate Change, Empire, Bat viruses, Trump, and so
forth).
Those who agree with Saker's brilliant analysis and seek a deeper understanding of
mechanism at work may want to consult Joseph A. Tainter's The Collapse of Complex
Societies (Cambridge 1988). He invokes archaeological case studies to prove that what we
are seeing is actually a function of the law of diminishing returns (which is way broader
than economics). Complexity advances to a point at which the rulers' latest fixes for arising
problems do more harm than good since all these separate "solutions" invariably have an
unforeseen systemic effect.
At that point a system's traditional cheer-leading investment to engender social esprit
and voluntary compliance for a common good is no longer credible and the ruling elite is then
forced to resort to raw repression of dissent, which is much more costly than just benign
propaganda. All key institutions collapse not in isolation but systemically, and chunks of a
fragmenting society must spall off in order to save themselves from ruin. The inevitable
systemic collapse runs its course.
"And because there is no mechanism to increase the suffering of the elites in tandem
with the suffering of the ordinary population – when the times are tough – the
elites fail to respond to the difficulties that ordinary citizens face."
As you said: That's what makes them an elite.
"The elites start living in a fantasy world where they believe that as long as they are
OK, the country is OK. But the elites are going to be OK right up to the moment the country
collapses, so that's not an accurate measure of how the country is doing."
And when America finally does collapse, and their "fantasy world" ends, they'll fly off in
their private jet to one of their homes in New Zealand, Australia, or Switzerland.
The elites start living in a fantasy world where they believe that as long as they are
OK, the country is OK. But the elites are going to be OK right up to the moment the country
collapses, so that's not an accurate measure of how the country is doing. The country can
be in the doldrums and the elites will still be OK.
That disconnect from reality is what prevents them to undertake measures that will
alleviate the plight of the majority of the population.
I beg to differ a bit. This is true only as far elites are of capitalist and/or
aristocratic kind. You probably draw your conclusions from the French and Russian
revolutions.
However, I would argue that political elites in the former communist countries did try to
reform the system for the benefit of the citizens and, after seeing their efforts fail, had
the integrity to step down peacefully. The only possible exception being China where reforms
were fruitfull.
Unironically, one could argue that communist elites, having no personal wealth and stakes,
remained honest and true to their essential creed of serving the greater common good. When
the deep crisis of socialism in 1980s seemed to require that they step down and contries
abandon socialist order, they indeed steped down in the interest of the common good as it was
perceived at the time.
Now we see that we may have to reconsider the whole "fall of communism" thing again, but,
this theme is, off course, tangential to this article's topic.
Tucker: "Is our nation being ripped apart by a total and complete lie, a provable lie? A lie
used by cynical media manipulators and unscrupulous politicians who understand that racial strife
-- race hatred -- is their path to power, even if it destroys the country."
Bakari Sellers, CNN political commentator: People worry about the protesters and the
looters. And it is just people who are frustrated.
Don Lemon, CNN anchor: They are frustrated, and they are angry, and they are out
there. And they're upset. You shouldn't be taking televisions, but I can't tell people how to
react to this.
Sen.
Chuck Schumer , D-N.Y.: I'm proud of the protests, and I think it is part of the
tradition of New York. The violence is bad, reprehensible, and it should be condemned, but it
is not the overwhelming picture in New York.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times: Destroying property which can be replaced is
not violence.
Chris Cuomo, CNN anchor Too many see the protests as the problem. Please, show me
where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
Some Democrats have openly embraced
what is happening. Really they don't have much of a choice. These are their voters cleaning out
the Rolex store. These riots effectively are the largest Joe Biden for President rally on
record.
No Democratic leader can directly criticize what is happening right now. And in fact, some
have joined in. Over the weekend, the Democratic Party of Fairfax, Virginia, which is an
important Democratic organization, released the following statement on Twitter: "Riots are an
integral part of this country's march towards progress."
Progress. Burning buildings, teargas, dead bodies, the screaming injured, criminal anarchy
-- to the Democratic Party of Fairfax, that is called progress.
Celebrity after celebrity has weighed in to agree on social media. From his fortified
compound, basketball star LeBron James has used his accounts
to encourage more rioting. Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun
King has done the same. So has Black Lives Matter leader, DeRay Mckesson.
Colin
Kaepernick openly calls for violence. Here's a quote: "The cries for peace will rain down
and when they do, they will land on deaf ears," he says
approvingly .
Imagine shouting fire in a crowded theater, a theater with 325 million people in it called
our country. That's what they've been doing and have been doing for days.
When the violence began, what we needed more than anything was clarity in the middle of
this. It's hard to see when the tear gas starts. Someone in America needed to tell the truth to
the country. Instead, almost all of our so-called conservative leaders joined the left's
chorus, as if on cue.
On Friday, as American cities were being destroyed by mobs, the vice president United States
refused to say anything specific about the riots we were watching on television. Instead,
Mike Pence
scolded America for its racism.
Carly Fiorina, once a leading Republican presidential candidate tweeted that -- and we're
quoting, "It's white America that now must see the truth, speak the truth and act on the
truth."
Meanwhile, Kay
Coles James , who is the president of the Heritage Foundation -- that's the largest
conservative think tank in the country. You may have sent them money, hopefully for the last
time. Kay Coles James wrote a long scream denouncing America as an irredeemably racist nation:
"How many times will protests have to occur?"
Got that? "Have to occur." Like the rest of us caused this by our sinfulness.
The message from our leaders on the right, as on the left, was unambiguous: Don't complain.
You deserve what's happening to you.
No one jumped in more forcefully or seemed angrier in America than former South Carolina
Governor Nikki
Haley . "Tonight I turned on the news and I am heartbroken," Haley wrote. "It's important
to understand that the death of George Ford was personal and painful for many. In order to
heal, it needs to be personal and painful for everyone."
Imagine shouting fire in a crowded theater, a theater with 325 million people in it called
our country. That's what they've been doing and have been doing for days.
But wait a second, you may be wondering, how am I "personally responsible" for the behavior
of a Minneapolis police officer? I've never even been to Minneapolis, you may think to
yourself. And why is some politician telling me I'm required to be upset about it?
Those are all good questions. Nikki Haley did not answer those questions explaining. It is
not her strong suit -- that would require thinking.
What Nikki Haley does best is moral blackmail. During the 2016 campaign, she compared Donald
Trump to the racist mass murderer, Dylann
Roof . How is Donald Trump similar to a serial
killer? Nikki Haley never explained that. She wasn't trying to educate anyone.
Her only goal was political advantage. Nikki Haley is exceptionally good at getting what she
wants. She is happy to denounce you as a racist in order to get it. She just did.
In this case, Nikki Haley's wish came true. The riots were indeed "personal and painful" for
everyone. And then the pain kept increasing. Two days after she wrote that, dozens of American
cities had been thoroughly trashed, some destroyed.
A country already on the brink of recession suddenly faced economic collapse. An already
fearful population locked down for months because of the coronavirus had
been thoroughly and completely terrorized.
Mission accomplished. Let's hope Nikki Haley is pleased. We've now atoned.
How did the Trump administration respond to the horrors going on around us? Well, Sunday
morning, the country's national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, did a live interview from the
White House lawn. Here's how it began:
Robert O'Brien, U.S. National
Security Adviser: First thing I want to say, on behalf of the president --he said this to the
family -- but our hearts and prayers are going out to the Floyd family. We mourn with them and
we grieve with them and what happened there was horrific and I can't even imagine what that
poor family is going through as his videos are played over and over again. That should have
never happened in America and it's a tragic thing.
The president said that from the start, and we're with the family and as the President
said, we're with the peaceful protesters.
"We're with the peaceful protesters," O'Brien announced.
Really? Can you be more specific about that? Who are you talking about exactly? Is it the
people spitting foam as they scream, "F the police"? Is it the one standing next to the
arsonist doing nothing as they set fire to buildings? Is it the kids laughing as they film the
looting and the beatings on their iPhones?
The first requirement of leadership is that you watch over the people in your care. That's
what soldiers want from their officers. It's what families need from their fathers. It's what
voters demand from their presidents.
"... Bakari Sellers, CNN political commentator: People worry about the protesters and the looters. And it is just people who are frustrated. ..."
"... Don Lemon, CNN anchor: They are frustrated, and they are angry, and they are out there. And they're upset. You shouldn't be taking televisions, but I can't tell people how to react to this. ..."
"... Sen. Chuck Schumer , D-N.Y.: I'm proud of the protests, and I think it is part of the tradition of New York. The violence is bad, reprehensible, and it should be condemned, but it is not the overwhelming picture in New York. ..."
"... Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times: Destroying property which can be replaced is not violence. ..."
"... Chris Cuomo, CNN anchor Too many see the protests as the problem. Please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful. ..."
"... Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: I want you to know we will not be increasing our police budget. How can we at this moment? ..."
"... Our city through our city administrative officer identified $250 million in cuts, so we could invest in jobs, in health, in education, and in healing And that those dollars need to be focused on our black community here in Los Angeles, as well as communities of color and women and people who have been left behind for too long. ..."
"... And will this involve cuts? Yes. Of course. To every department, including the police department. ..."
"... Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from " Tucker Carlson Tonight " on June 4, 2020. ..."
For the past week, all of us have seen chaos engulf our beloved country. The violence and
the destruction have been so overwhelming, so shocking, and awful and vivid on the screen, that
it's been hard to think clearly about what's going on.
Most of us haven't been able to step back far enough to ask even the obvious questions. The
most obvious, of course, is what is this really about? What do the mobs want?
Well, thugs looting the Apple Store can't answer that question. They have no idea. They just
want free iPads. But what about Apple itself and the rest of corporate America, which is
enthusiastically supporting the rioters? What about members of Congress , the media figures, the
celebrities, the tech titans, all of whom are cheering this on. What do they want out of
it?
Well, they haven't said. That's the central mystery.
Now suddenly, it is obvious. It should have been obvious on the first day. This is about
Donald Trump
. Of course, it is. We just couldn't see it.
For normal people, Donald Trump is the president. You may like him, you may not like him,
but either way, there will be another president at some point, and we will move on as we always
have.
But for Donald Trump's enemies, there is nothing else. Everything is about Trump.
Everything.
Donald Trump defines their friendships, their careers, their marriages. Donald Trump affects
how they raise their children. Trump occupies the very center of their lives. As long as Donald
Trump remains in the White House. They feel powerless and diminished and panicked. So they
cannot be happy.
In everything they do, their overriding goal is to remove Donald Trump from office. And
that's exactly what they're trying to do now. That's what these riots are about. The most
privileged in our society are using the most desperate in our society to seize power from
everyone else.
Got that? That's the nub of it. The most privileged are using the most desperate to seize
power from the rest of us. They are not seeking racial justice. If they were seeking racial
justice, they wouldn't be denouncing their fellow Americans for their race, which they are. It
has nothing to do with it.
What they are seeking is total control of the country. And it goes without saying that none
of this has anything to do with George Floyd . Shame on those who
pretended that it did -- those who fell for the lie and those who knew better but played along
because they are cowards. There are many of those. You know who they are, and someday we will
look back on all of them with contempt.
Meanwhile, the many people promoting this chaos remain clear-eyed. They are not lying to
themselves. They never do. They know exactly what's going on, and they know what they hope to
achieve by it. With every night of rioting, they grow bolder. Now, they are openly defending
violence on television.
Bakari Sellers, CNN political commentator: People worry about the protesters and the
looters. And it is just people who are frustrated.
Don Lemon, CNN anchor: They are frustrated, and they are angry, and they are out
there. And they're upset. You shouldn't be taking televisions, but I can't tell people how to
react to this.
Sen.
Chuck Schumer , D-N.Y.: I'm proud of the protests, and I think it is part of the
tradition of New York. The violence is bad, reprehensible, and it should be condemned, but it
is not the overwhelming picture in New York.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times: Destroying property which can be replaced is
not violence.
Chris Cuomo, CNN anchor Too many see the protests as the problem. Please, show me
where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
You're crushed by this. You can't believe what's happening to your country. But for the
people you just saw, the real problem is that the rioting in some rare places is being stopped
by police, and their aim is to fix that. They would like to eliminate all law enforcement
for good.
In everything they do, their overriding goal is to remove Donald Trump from office. And
that's exactly what they're trying to do now. That's what these riots are about. The most
privileged in our society are using the most desperate in our society to seize power from
everyone else.
On Thursday, Democrats in Dallas took down the statue of a Texas Ranger from the terminal at
Love Field that has stood in the airport for more than 50 years. The Texas Rangers are cops,
and cops must be removed, even when they're made of bronze.
Meanwhile, the Lego toy company has ceased marketing sets that contain plastic police
officers. Apparently, they're too dangerous for our children. And so on -- so much of this is
going on right now.
If it all seems like yet another episode of the silly and fleeting hysteria that sometimes
grips our culture out of nowhere, usually in lulls in the news cycle, you should know that it's
not that. This is entirely real. It is being pushed by serious people, and they are deadly
serious about it.
On Wednesday night, for example, Brian Fallon, who was the press secretary of the Hillary
Clinton for President campaign in the last election cycle tweeted, "Defund the police."
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib agrees. Expect more
members of Congress to agree soon.
In some places, they're not talking, they're acting. Steve Fletcher represents the Third
Ward in Minneapolis . He's on the City
Council there. By this week, his city had been completely scorched by riots. At least 66
businesses were utterly destroyed by fire, 300 more had been vandalized or looted.
Fletcher didn't even mention that. Instead, he attacked the city's police department for
trying to contain the violence: "Several of us on the Council are working on finding out what
it would take to disband the Minneapolis Police Department.".
How would Americans feel if they actually defunded the police? Well, terrified mostly.
That's how we would feel. Things would fall apart instantly.
You'd think people in the city would be shocked by that. But at least on the City Council,
everyone else nodded their approval. In the Ninth Ward, Councilwoman Alondra Cano tweeted this
on Wednesday: "The Minneapolis Police Department is not reformable. Change is coming."
According to City Councilman Fletcher, all nine members of the City Council are now considered
getting rid of the Minneapolis Police Department.
Hard to believe, but it's not just there. In the city of Los Angeles , Mayor Eric Garcetti looks
out across the worst rioting in the nation's second-largest city in a generation, in almost 30
years. His conclusion? We need far fewer police. It could have been better if they hadn't been
there.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: I want you to know we will not be increasing our
police budget. How can we at this moment?
Our city through our city administrative officer identified $250 million in cuts, so
we could invest in jobs, in health, in education, and in healing And that those dollars need
to be focused on our black community here in Los Angeles, as well as communities of color and
women and people who have been left behind for too long.
And will this involve cuts? Yes. Of course. To every department, including the police
department.
When Democrats across the country start saying the same thing at the same time, you can be
certain there's a reason for it. And in this case, they clearly mean it.
According to the president of the L.A. Police Commission, city officials may cut $150
million from the LAPD. That would be more than 10 percent of the entire police budget, in the
wake of rioting.
In New York, 48 separate Democratic candidates -- and they were including in that the
Manhattan district attorney -- signed a letter demanding a $1 billion cut to the budget of the
NYPD. Why are they doing this? There are reasons, not the ones they tell you. They tell you
it's about racism. They tell you that cops are racist and must be reined in.
Most Americans don't agree with that. That's not the experience they have. In fact, police
departments are one of the most trusted institutions in the country.
According to Gallup polling last year, 53 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or
quite a lot of confidence in the police. That was far more confidence than they had in almost
any other institution -- banks, religious leaders, the health care system, television, news,
public schools, corporate America, newspapers -- name one. All of those were stuck below 40
percent. How many Americans trusted Congress? Eleven percent.
And in fact, most African Americans still support the police. A 2016 Pew poll found that 55
percent of African-Americans had confidence in the police within their own communities. In
other words, cops they actually knew and dealt with. They have confidence.
A study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2011 found that among those who called the
police for help, more than 90 percent of African-Americans felt the police behaved
properly.
So, what would happen if we got rid of the police? Of all law enforcement? How would
Americans feel if they actually defunded the police?
Well, terrified mostly. That's how we would feel. Things would fall apart instantly. It
would take hours. Don't believe it? Spend an afternoon in a place with no law enforcement and
see what you think. Talk to anyone who was in Baghdad at the height of the Iraq War. Ask anyone
who stayed in New Orleans for Katrina. Their memories will be fresh. They'll never forget what
they saw.
Here's the key. Eliminating the police does not mean eliminating authority. There is always
authority. There are no vacuums in nature. The only question is whether or not the authority is
legitimate -- whether or not the authority is accountable. Whether or not you can do anything
if the authority abuses its power.
In the absence of law enforcement, the answer is no. It means thugs are in charge. The most
violent people have the most power. They can do whatever they want to you. That's the reality.
Everyone obeys the violent people, or they get hurt. The mob literally rules.
That probably sounds like a nightmare to you, because it is. But the people pushing this
idea don't see it as scary because they don't fear the mob, because they control the mob.
That's the key. And they see violence as an instrument of their political power.
With mobs in the streets that they control, they will finally get what they want -- Donald
Trump out of office and a hammerlock on the country. That's what's happening.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from " Tucker Carlson Tonight " on June 4,
2020.
The incident was clearly manipulated for political purposes. And manipulators do not care how
many stores will be looted and how many people will be killed. They want their political power
back.
"Is our nation being ripped apart by a total and complete lie, a provable lie? A lie used by
cynical media manipulators and unscrupulous politicians who understand that racial strife -- race
hatred -- is their path to power, even if it destroys the country."
Notable quotes:
"... So many of our leaders, by contrast, are not grieving. They seem exhilarated. They feel nothing as our nation descends into anarchy. They see chaos, instead, as an opportunity, a chance to solidify their control, to increase their market share to win elections. ..."
"... The people cheering them on from their TV studios have no patience for real protests or real protesters. Just in April, Democrats in New Jersey arrested a woman for trying to plan a rally, a protest at the state capitol. The New York Times said nothing when they did that because they approve. That's how they really feel about any political expression they can't control -- they crush it. ..."
"... Unidentified male: I am now calling on all and our city council members and all of our elected officials to defund the police. ..."
"... Crowd: Defund the police. ..."
"... Unidentified male: Defund the police. ..."
"... Crowd: Defund the police. ..."
"... Jake Tapper, CNN anchor: LA Mayor Eric Garcetti joined protesters moments ago, what did he have to say? ..."
"... Stephanie Elam, CNN correspondent: Yes, he came out this morning, Jake, and he took the time to come out and come out among the protesters. He knelt while he was out there, saying -- and showing -- his solidarity for the movement, for the protesters here today. ..."
"... And I can tell you that today, this daytime protest has been very peaceful, very calm. Lots of chanting, singing. ..."
"... Unidentified male: I work for Black Lives Matter. I'm sorry that I scared you. But since I work for that company, my CEO has told me to come out today and to bring you on your knees because you have white privilege. ..."
"... So if they see that a white person is getting on their knees that show solidarity for the situation. The situation and could you just please apologize for -- you know for your white privilege. Just apologize. ..."
"... Unidentified female: I have -- I am trying to think of the right words to say. What's a good thing to say? ..."
"... Unidentified male: It's big.Unidentified female: That comes from -- ..."
"... Unidentified male: It's so -- it's large in this country. ..."
"... Unidentified female: I am terribly sorry. ..."
"... Of the 802 shootings in which the race of the police officer and the suspect was noted, 371 of those killed were white, 236 were black. The vast majority of those killed were not, in fact, unarmed; the vast majority were armed. And African-American suspects were significantly more likely to have a deadly weapon than white suspects, yet more white suspects were killed. ..."
"... In fact, the number of police killings is dropping. In 2015, during Barack Obama's presidency , 38 unarmed black Americans and 32 whites were slain by police. Overall totals have fallen since then, and they have fallen far more dramatically for African-American men. ..."
"... Last year was the safest year for unarmed suspects since The Washington Post begin tracking police shootings. It was the safest year for both white and black suspects. ..."
"... One final number for you, because it matters: In 2018, 7,407 African-Americans were murdered in the United States. If 2019 continues on a similar trajectory, -- and we hope it doesn't, but if it does -- that would mean that for every unarmed African-American shot to death in the United States by police, more than 700 were murdered by someone else, usually by someone they know. ..."
"... Again, those are the facts. They are not in dispute. Are African-Americans being "hunted" as Joy Reid recklessly claimed on MSNBC recently? Or something else happening? ..."
For many of us, this has been one of the saddest, most painful weeks in memory. Depressing
doesn't even begin to describe it.
We have watched as mobs of violent cretins have burned our cities, defaced our monuments,
beaten old women in the street, shot police officers and stolen everything in sight -- stealing
everything .
How many innocent Americans have these people hurt? How many have they murdered? We don't
know that number. But it's the country itself that so many of us worry about at this point.
After we've watched what's happened over the last week, how do we put the society back
together? Can we? We don't know that, either.
If you're grieving for America right now, you are not alone. Millions feel the same way you
do.
So many of our leaders, by contrast, are not grieving. They seem exhilarated. They feel
nothing as our nation descends into anarchy. They see chaos, instead, as an opportunity, a
chance to solidify their control, to increase their market share to win elections.
They have no interest in talking about the details of what is actually happening out there
on our streets. In fact, they're hiding those details. They're demanding that you forget what
you saw. Don't forget it. Remember all of it -- every bit -- because it's proof of who they
are.
What they're defending and encouraging has nothing to do with civil rights. It is violence,
and the criminals you see on the screen are not protesters.
The people cheering them on from their TV studios have no patience for real protests or
real protesters. Just in April, Democrats in New Jersey arrested a woman for trying to plan a
rally, a protest at the state capitol. The New York Times said nothing when they did that
because they approve. That's how they really feel about any political expression they can't
control -- they crush it.
What they support is more power for themselves and they're willing to use gangs of thugs to
get it. Here is one of their protesters chanting "no justice, no peace" as a man tortures a
dog. NBC News wouldn't show you that video ever. Neither would CNN under any circumstances.
These are the worst people in America, and our leaders have let them do whatever they want. So,
of course, they want more.
Their latest demand is that we eliminate the police entirely. No more law enforcement
in this country. That would mean more power for the mob. They could do anything. It would mean
never-ending terror for you and for your family. That's why they want it.
Unidentified male: I am now calling on all and our city council members and all of our
elected officials to defund the police.
Crowd: Defund the police.
Unidentified male: Defund the police.
Crowd: Defund the police.
"Defund the police." No sane person would dare to have said something like that in public
just a week and a half ago. Now, a member of Congress has endorsed the idea -- Rashida Tlaib .
So, what would happen to our country if we eliminated law enforcement? Eric Garcetti is the
mayor of Los
Angeles , the second biggest city in America. His city would devolve into a murderous
hellscape within hours if the police left.
But Garcetti, who is in charge of the city, won't push back against this idea. Instead, h
e kneeled in
subservience before the people demanding it.
Jake Tapper, CNN anchor: LA Mayor Eric Garcetti joined protesters moments ago, what
did he have to say?
Stephanie Elam, CNN correspondent: Yes, he came out this morning, Jake, and he took
the time to come out and come out among the protesters. He knelt while he was out there,
saying -- and showing -- his solidarity for the movement, for the protesters here
today.
And I can tell you that today, this daytime protest has been very peaceful, very calm.
Lots of chanting, singing.
He kneeled. Our leaders are kneeling before the mob, the atavistic ritual of self-abasement
of defeat. Suddenly, many are performing this ritual, including police around the country.
The mob wants victory. But more than that, it wants the total humiliation of its
enemies.
Unidentified male: I work for Black Lives Matter. I'm sorry that I scared you. But
since I work for that company, my CEO has told me to come out today and to bring you on your
knees because you have white privilege.
So if they see that a white person is getting on their knees that show solidarity for
the situation. The situation and could you just please apologize for -- you know for your
white privilege. Just apologize.
Unidentified female: I have -- I am trying to think of the right words to say. What's
a good thing to say?
Unidentified male: It's big.Unidentified female: That comes from --
Unidentified male: It's so -- it's large in this country.
Unidentified female: I am terribly sorry.
Why do we kneel? We kneel because we've lost. We kneel before our victors because they have
won. We put down our resistance. We beg for their mercy.
But mobs rarely forgive. "We're on your side!" we shout. We're in solidarity, spare us. But
they never do.
"We're on your side" as the rock comes through the window. You think the mob cares? No.
What's happening to this country? Why are Americans surrendering to violent mobs? Well,
because they've been told they have to.
Everything we're now watching -- the looting, the arson, the killing -- has a purpose. The
purpose we're told again and again is to end racist police violence against African-Americans.
We are told that that is the single greatest scourge in this country.
Demonstrators say repeatedly, "Stop killing us." Stop killing us -- it's chilling. And if
you believe it, and you're a decent person, you will be moved by it -- because it's awful.
No American should ever be mistreated by those in authority, much less killed. The abuse of
power is always and everywhere a sin, and it's increasingly common here. We should always work
to end it.
So many of our leaders, by contrast, are not grieving. They seem exhilarated. They feel
nothing as our nation descends into anarchy. They see chaos, instead, as an opportunity
In this case, the death of a man at the hands of police in
Minneapolis turned out to be a metaphor for abuse of power. That death has led to demands
that we fire the nearly 700,000 police officers who work in the United States and that we free
the million and a half criminals who are now behind bars.
In America, Joe
Biden told us recently: "Just the color of your skin puts your life at risk." Sen. Cory Booker of New
Jersey strongly agreed with that.
"We have so many people in our country," Booker said Tuesday, "African-American men mostly
unarmed, being murdered by police officers and no way of holding them accountable."
So many people murdered by police officers, unarmed, says Cory Booker.
You're hearing a lot of people in authority tell you that, every day, every hour. One group
of pro athletes just announced that, "It seems like every week, a new tragedy unfolds before
our very eyes where people are being killed by police violence. Each time we tweet, we pray, we
mourn, only to repeat the cycle a few days later."
In the words of Ben Crump, who is the lawyer representing George Floyd's family in
Minneapolis, what we're witnessing here in America is "genocide." Genocide?
If you believe we were seeing genocide, then you might understand the riots now in progress.
There's nothing worse than genocide. But is it happening? Is any of this true? We should find
out. Facts matter. What exactly are the numbers?
We found the numbers and we're going to go through them with you in some detail because it's
worth it.
Since 2015, The Washington Post has maintained a comprehensive database of fatal police
shootings in this country. Last year, The Post logged a total of 1,004 killings.
Of the 802 shootings in which the race of the police officer and the suspect was noted,
371 of those killed were white, 236 were black. The vast majority of those killed were not, in
fact, unarmed; the vast majority were armed. And African-American suspects were significantly
more likely to have a deadly weapon than white suspects, yet more white suspects were
killed.
This is not genocide. It's not even close to genocide. It is laughable to suggest it
is.
Overall, there were a total of precisely 10 cases in the United States last year, according
to The Washington Post, in which unarmed African- Americans were fatally shot by the police.
There were nine men and one woman.
Now, as we said, a lot is at stake. The country is at stake. So we want to take the time now
to go through these case by case, into the specifics.
The first was a man called Channara Pheap. He was killed by a Knoxville police officer
called Dylan Williams. According to Williams, Pheap attacked him, choked him and then used a
taser on him -- the suspect on the police officer before the officer shot him. Five
eyewitnesses corroborated the officer's claim, and the officer was not charged.
The second case concerns a man called Marcus McVeigh. He was by any description a career
criminal from San Angelo, Texas. He had been convicted of aggravated assault, assault on a
public servant and organized criminal activity.
At the time he was killed, he was wanted on drug dealing charges. The Texas State trooper
pulled him over. McVeigh fled in his car, then he fled on foot into the woods. There he fought
with the trooper and was shot and killed. The officer was not charged in that case.
Marzua Scott assaulted a shop employee. When a female police officer arrived and ordered the
suspect toward her car, he instead charged her and knocked her to the ground. At that point,
she shot and killed him. The entire incident was caught on body camera. The officer was not
charged.
Ryan Twyman was being approached by two LA County deputies when he backed into one of them
with his vehicle. The deputy was caught in the car door. He and his partner opened fire. The
deputies were not charged in that case.
Melvin Watkins of East Baton Rouge, La. shot by a deputy after he allegedly drove his car
toward the deputy at high speed. The deputy was not charged.
Isaiah Lewis, meanwhile, wasn't just unarmed, he was completely naked. Williams broke into a
house and then attacked a police officer. The police tased Williams, but he kept coming at them
and attacking. The officer shot him. They were not charged.
Atatiana Jefferson was shot by a Fort Worth deputy called Aaron Dean. A neighbor had called
a non-emergency number after seeing Jefferson's door open, thinking something might be wrong.
Police arrived. Jefferson saw them approach from a window and was holding a gun at the
time.
According to body camera footage, the officer shot Jefferson within seconds. That officer
has been charged with homicide.
Is our nation being ripped apart by a total and complete lie, a provable lie? A lie used
by cynical media manipulators and unscrupulous politicians who understand that racial strife
-- race hatred -- is their path to power, even if it destroys the country.
Christopher Whitfield was shot and killed in a place called Ethel, La. He had robbed a gas
station. Deputy Glenn Sims said his gun discharged accidentally while grappling with Whitfield.
Sims, who is black himself, was not charged in that killing.
Kevin Mason was shot by police during a multi-hour standoff. Well, Mason turned out not to
have a gun. Mason claimed to have a gun, claimed to be armed and vowed to kill police with it.
They believed him. Mason had been in a shootout with police years before.
And finally, the tenth case concerns Gregory Griffin. He was shot during a car chase. An
officer called Giovanni Crespo claimed he saw someone pointing a gun at him. Later, a gun was
in fact found inside the vehicle, and yet Officer Crespo was charged anyway with aggravated
manslaughter.
Those are the facts. That is the entire list from 2019, last year -- 10 deaths. In five
deaths, an officer was attacked just before the shooting occurred. That is not disputed.
One allegedly was an accident. That leaves a total of four deaths during a pursuit or in a
standoff. So out of four, in two of those cases -- and fully half -- the officer was criminally
charged. Is it possible that more of these officers should have been charged? Of course, it's
possible. Justice is not always served, that's for sure.
But either way, this is a very small number in a country of 325 million people. This is not
genocide. It's not even close to genocide. It is laughable to suggest it is.
In fact, the number of police killings is dropping. In 2015, during Barack Obama's presidency , 38
unarmed black Americans and 32 whites were slain by police. Overall totals have fallen since
then, and they have fallen far more dramatically for African-American men.
Last year was the safest year for unarmed suspects since The Washington Post begin
tracking police shootings. It was the safest year for both white and black suspects.
At the same time, this country remains a dangerous place for police officers. Forty-eight of
them were murdered in 2019 according to FBI data. That's more than the number of unarmed
suspects killed of all races.
One final number for you, because it matters: In 2018, 7,407 African-Americans were
murdered in the United States. If 2019 continues on a similar trajectory, -- and we hope it
doesn't, but if it does -- that would mean that for every unarmed African-American shot to
death in the United States by police, more than 700 were murdered by someone else, usually by
someone they know.
Again, those are the facts. They are not in dispute. Are African-Americans being
"hunted" as Joy Reid recklessly claimed on MSNBC recently? Or something else
happening?
Carlson has said corporations support for the protests is "paying for" riots.
"But corporations aren't
simply tweeting their support for the riots, they're paying for them to," he said.
Carlson listed companies including Cisco, Intel, Ubisoft, Airbnb and Dropbox, who have all made funds
available to groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP). He also criticized Pepsi, stating it had supported similar causes.
Newsweek
has contacted the corporations mentioned and Fox News for comment.
Carlson referred to a quote that "a riot is the voice of the unheard," a phrase which has origins from
civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr, who said "a riot is the language of the unheard."
Fox News host Tucker Carlson discusses 'Populism and the Right' during the National
Review Institute's Ideas Summit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel March 29, 2019 in Washington, DC. He has
criticized businesses supporting groups such as Black Lives Matter.
Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images
Criticizing this, Carlson said: "The rioters burning down your city with the support of virtually
everyone richer than you, are 'unheard', you, by contrast, are the oppressor and if you disagree in any way,
we are going to fire you and wreck your life."
Continuing to critique the corporations, Carlson suggested they should support small businesses.
"All this money, flowing out of the country's most profitable corporations, it might be a nice gesture for
those corporations to donate some money to, I dunno, rebuild some of the small businesses that have been
destroyed over the past week," he said.
Police keep watch as firefighters work to extinguish a fire at a section of shops
looted amid demonstrations in Santa Monica, California.
Mario Tama/Getty
Images
"Oh but they're not going to do that, because for a lot of big corporations the total annihilation of
small businesses is one of the best parts of this new revolution, there's always an angle, someone's always
getting more powerful."
In regards to the groups being supported, Carlson took issue with BLM for calling for police to be
defunded, while criticizing support for bail funds from the NAACP.
I was surprised Esper gave a press conference without first coordinating his message with the White House. We need a unified
message coming from our federal government. He should have voiced his concerns privately with Trump, but Trump makes the
decision and announces the message...Trump was elected, not Esper. I would fire Esper for not following the chain of command.
The career politicians cant stand Trump because he is a Washington outsider who is doing things different and making much
needed changes that benefit businesses and individuals.
All
you have to do is look at who is involved with all this craziness and when it all started. All this cause they want their
power back so they can continue to do what they want and answer to no one. All of this cause they hate Trump for opening the
eyes of Americans to see the light through the darkness they created. Because all I've seen that Trump has done to hurt this
country so far was to get elected and show all Americans how we where getting taken advantage of by government, the elites and
other countries. They will stop at nothing to regain power. Game players in this craziness: 1. Corrupt politicians 2. Some
rich Hollywood stars 3. Some rich sports players 4. Some rich business owners 5. Leftist media being paid 6. Some true racist
people being paid 7. Some bad law enforcement individuals being paid 8. Some black individuals being paid and making money
from it by pushing the narrative 9. And last but not least, someone or group that's financially flipping the bill so all of it
can happen. Notice any pattern here? $$$$$$$$$$$$ money the root of all evil.
All Bureaucrats and the Military take an oath to defend the constitution. When a lowlife like Donald Trump comes along and
tries to subvert the constitution it is right of the military and the bureaucrats to disobey his orders. Trump can fire them
if he likes but cannot force them to fall in line with his unconstitutional order. A stupid man like you would have known that
already and are selectively feeding information to a bunch of guys who do not even know what the constitution is. The military
is clearly lined up against the idea of trump using them against American citizens. After Trump loses the election as it
clearly seems now, he will have to demit office without a whimper, that is very clear from the statements of various active
generals. Unfortunately, Donald Trump has to this time win the Presidency by playing fair and not screaming like a dog whose
backside has been bitten off "The Democrats are practicing election corruption" It is Ok to feed that to his dumb followers
but the rest of the country will not take it lying down. This dog knew 2 tricks, you have now seen them all. He is done.
Don't laugh derisively, as people do these days, but I've always admired the New York Times
. First draft of history. Talent everywhere. Best production values. Even with its ideological
spin, it can be scrupulous about facts. You can usually extract the truth with a decoder ring.
Its outsized influence over the rest of the press makes it essential. I've relied on it for
years. Even given everything, and I mean everything.
Until now. It's just too much. Too much unreality, manipulation, propaganda, and flat out
untruths that are immediately recognizable to anyone. I can't believe they think they can get
away with this with credibility intact. I'm not speaking of the many great reporters,
technicians, editors, production specialists, and the tens of thousands who make it all
possible. I'm speaking of a very small coterie of people who stand guard over the paper's
editorial mission of the moment and enforce it on the whole company, with no dissent
allowed.
Let's get right to the offending passage. It's not from the news or opinion section but the
official editorial section and hence the official voice of the paper. The paragraph from June
2, 2020, reads
as follows.
Healing the wounds ripped open in recent days and months will not be easy. The pandemic
has made Americans fearful of their neighbors, cut them off from their communities of faith,
shut their outlets for exercise and recreation and culture and learning. Worst of all, it has
separated Americans from their own livelihoods.
Can you imagine? The pandemic is the cause!
I would otherwise feel silly to have to point this out but for the utter absurdity of the
claim. The pandemic didn't do this. It caused a temporary and mostly media-fueled panic that
distracted officials from doing what they should have done, which is protect the vulnerable and
otherwise let society function and medical workers deal with disease.
Instead, the CDC and governors around the country, at the urging of bad computer-science
models uninformed by any experience in viruses, shut down schools, churches, events,
restaurants, gyms, theaters, sports, and further instructed people to stay in their homes,
enforced sometimes even by SWAT teams. Jewish funerals were broken up by the police.
It was brutal and egregious and it threw 40 million people out of work and bankrupted
countless businesses. Nothing this terrible was attempted even during the Black Death.
Maximum
economic damage; minimum health advantages . It's not even possible to find evidence that
the lockdowns saved lives at all .
But to hear the New York Times tell the story, it was not the lockdown but the pandemic that
did this. That's a level of ideological subterfuge that is almost impossible for a sane person
to conjure up, simply because it is so obviously unbelievable.
It's lockdown denialism.
Why? From February 2020 and following, the New York Times had a story and they are
continuing to stick to it. The story is that we are all going to die from this pandemic unless
government shuts down society. It was a drum this paper beat every day.
Consider what the top virus reporter Donald J. McNeil (B.A. Rhetoric, University of
California, Berkeley) wrote on
February 28, 2020, weeks before there was any talk of shutdowns in the U.S.:
There are two ways to fight epidemics: the medieval and the modern.
The modern way is to surrender to the power of the pathogens: Acknowledge that they are
unstoppable and to try to soften the blow with 20th-century inventions, including new
vaccines, antibiotics, hospital ventilators and thermal cameras searching for people with
fevers.
The medieval way, inherited from the era of the Black Death, is brutal: Close the borders,
quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities.
For the first time in more than a century, the world has chosen to confront a new and
terrifying virus with the iron fist instead of the latex glove.
And yes, he recommends the medieval way. The article continues on to praise China's response
and Cuba's to AIDS and says that this approach is natural to Trump and should be done in the
United States. ( AIER
called him out on this alarming column on March 4, 20202.)
McNeil then went on to greater fame with a series of shocking podcasts for the NYT that put
a voice and even more panic to the failed modeling of Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College
London.
This first
appeared the day before his op-ed calling for global lockdown. The transcript
includes this:
I spend a lot of time thinking about whether I'm being too alarmist or whether I'm being
not alarmist enough. And this is alarmist, but I think right now, it's justified. This one
reminds me of what I have read about the 1918 Spanish influenza.
Reminder: 675,000 Americans died in that pandemic. There were only 103 million people living
in the U.S. at the time.
He continues:
I'm trying to bring a sense that if things don't change, a lot of us might die. If you
have 300 relatively close friends and acquaintances, six of them would die in a 2.5 percent
mortality situation.
That's an astonishing claim that seems to forecast 8.25 million Americans will die. So far
as I know, that is the most extreme claim made by anyone, four times as high as the Imperial
College model.
What should we do to prevent this?
You can't leave. You can't see your families. All the flights are canceled. All the trains
are canceled. All the highways are closed. You're going to stay in there. And you're locked
in with a deadly disease. We can do it.
So because this coronavirus "reminds" him of one he read about, he can say on the air that
four million people could soon die, and therefore life itself should be cancelled. Because a
reporter is "reminded" of something.
This is the same newspaper that in 1957 urged people to stay calm during the Asian flu and
trust medical providers – running all of one editorial on the topic. What a change! This
was an amazing podcast -- amazingly irresponsible.
McNeil was not finished yet. He was
at it again on March 12, 2020, demanding that we not just close big events and schools but
shut down everything and everyone "for months." He went back on the podcast twice more, then
started riding the media circuit, including
NPR . It was also the same. China did it right. We need to lock down or people you know, if
you are one of the lucky survivors, will die.
To say that the New York Times was invested in the scenario of "lock down or we die" is an
understatement. It was as invested in this narrative as it was in the Russia-collaboration
story or the Ukrainian-phone call impeachment, tales to which they dedicated hundreds of
stories and many dozens of reporters. The virus was the third pitch to achieve their
objective.
Once in, there was no turning back, even after it became obvious that for the vast numbers
of people this was hardly a disease at all, and that most of the deaths came from one city and
mostly from nursing homes that were forced by law to take in COVID-19 patients.
That the newspaper, a once venerable institution, has something to answer for is apparent.
But instead of accepting moral culpability for having created a panic to fuel the overthrow of
the American way of life, they turn on a dime to celebrate people who are not socially
distancing in the streets to protest police brutality.
To me, the protests on the streets were a welcome relief from the vicious lockdowns. To the
New York Times , it seems like the lockdowns never happened. Down the Orwellian memory
hole.
In this paper's consistent editorializing, nothing is the fault of the lockdowns.
Everything instead is the fault of Trump, who "tends to see only political opportunity in
public fear and anger, as in his customary manner of contributing heat rather than light to the
confrontations between protesters and authority."
True about Trump but let us remember that the McNeil's first pro-lockdown article praised
Trump as perfectly suited to bring about the lockdown, and the paper urged him to do just that,
while only three months later washing their hands of the whole thing, as if had nothing to do
with current sufferings much less the rage on the streets.
And the rapid turnaround of this paper on street protests was stunning to behold. A month
ago, people protesting lockdowns were written about as vicious disease spreaders who were
denying good science. In the blink of an eye, the protesters against police brutality (the same
police who enforced the lockdown) were transmogrified into bold embracers of First Amendment
rights who posed no threat to public health.
Not even the scary warnings about the coming "second wave" were enough to stop the paper
from throwing out all its concern over "targeted layered containment" and "social distancing"
in order to celebrate protests in the streets that they like.
And they ask themselves why people are incredulous toward mainstream media today.
The lockdowns wrecked the fundamentals of life in America. The New York Times today wants to
pretend they either didn't happen, happened only in a limited way, or were just minor public
health measures that worked beautifully to mitigate disease. And instead of having an editorial
meltdown over these absurdities, preposterous forecasts, and extreme panic mongering that
contributed to vast carnage, we seen an internal
revolt over the publishing of a Tom Cotton editorial, a dispute over politics not
facts.
The record is there: this paper went all in back in February to demand the most
authoritarian possible response to a virus about which we already knew enough back then to
observe that this was nothing like the Spanish flu of 1918. They pretended otherwise, probably
for ideological reasons, most likely.
It was not the pandemic that blew up our lives, commercial networks, and health systems. It
was the response to the virus that did that. The Times needs to learn that it cannot construct
a fake version of reality just to avoid responsibility for what they've done. Are we really
supposed to believe what they write now and in the future? This time, I hope, people will be
smart and learn to consider the source.
Every cult has the same goal: the utter
submission of its members. Cult members surrender everything. They give up their physical
freedom – where they can go, who they can see, how they can dress. But more than that,
they give up control of their minds.
Cult leaders determine what their followers are allowed to believe, even in their most
private thoughts. In order to do this, cults separate people from all they have known before.
They force members to renounce their former lives, their countries and their customs.
They allow no loyalty except to the cult. The first thing they attack – always –
is the family. Families are always the main impediment to brainwashing and extremism. If you're
going to control individuals – if you're going to transform free people into compliant
robots – the first thing you must do is separate them from the ones who love them
most.
In 1932, Soviet authorities began promoting the story of a 13-year-old peasant boy called
Pavlik Morozov. Morozov, they claimed, had taken the supremely virtuous step of denouncing his
own father to the secret police for committing counter-revolutionary acts.
Once exposed as a traitor, the boy's father was executed by firing squad, supposedly for the
safety of the state. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin elevated the boy to the status of a national
hero for what he did. People wept in the streets when they heard his name. They worshipped him
like a saint.
Why are we telling you this? Because it's happening here. In the last 10 days, some of our
most prominent citizens have sworn allegiance to a cult. Converts go by the term "allies."
Like all cult members, they demand total conformity. They ritually condemn their own nation
– its history, its institutions and symbols. It's flag. They denounce their own
parents.
If you've been on social media recently, you've likely seen videos that illustrate this
– such as one showing a girl attacking her mother and father for the crime of
insufficient loyalty to Black Lives Matter. Reporter Hanna Lustig of Insider.com wrote about
that video, and strongly approved of it.
What you just saw, Lustig wrote, is a young person "modeling the most important tenet of
ally-ship." Modeling. Meaning, something done to encourage others to do the same. It's
working.
In a video of a 15-year-old from Louisville called Isabella – and there are many like
her – the girl is shown crying and saying: "I literally hate my family so much." She goes
on to say her parents defended the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. And
then she calls her parents racists, followed by an obscenity.
"I hate my family so much." Just a week ago, it would have been hard to imagine that. Now,
Isabella is a social media star. Celebrities tweet their approval. She may have her own cult
before long. But the revolution is young. Children attacking their parents is just the
beginning.
On CNN Friday, a man called Tim Wise told viewers that, going forward, parents must hurt
their own children:
Wise said: "I think that the important thing for white parents to keep in the front of their
mind is that if black children in this country are not allowed innocence and childhood without
fear of being killed by police or marginalized in some other way, then our children don't
deserve innocence. If Tamir Rice can be shot dead in a public park playing with a toy gun,
something white children do all over this country every day without the same fear of being
shot, if Tamir Rice can be killed then white children need to be told at least at the same age.
If they can't be innocent, we don't get to be innocent."
Your children are no longer allowed to be innocent, says Tim Wise. Happy childhoods are a
sign of racism. The man saying this – and being affirmed by CNN anchors as he does
– is a self-described "anti-racism activist." He has been saying things like this for a
long time. More than once, Wise has suggested that he approves of violence against those who
disagree.
How does Tim Wise make a living? In part, by lecturing students. Your kids may have seen him
speak. They've almost certainly heard a lot from people like him. In America's schools, the
revolution has been in progress for quite some time.
Last February, to name one among countless examples, officials at schools in Rochester,
N.Y., created a Black Lives Matter-themed lesson plan. The teaching materials dismiss America's
bedrock institutions – indeed, America itself – as inherently racist. Suggested
questions for students include: "How does mass incarceration function as a mechanism of
racialized social control?"
One specific racial group was singled out for exclusive blame. The curriculum promoted a
book titled, "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide." In other words, children,
there's a reason hatred and inequality exist: these people did it! That's what your kids are
learning right now.
Thursday, at Darien High School in Connecticut, Principal Ellen Dunn sent an email to
parents promising to increase "the race-conscious education of our students." To do that, Dunn
distributed materials from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Ironically, the SPLC is itself a
hate group. That has been documented extensively. Now their agenda is the school's agenda. It's
what your kids are learning.
In Washington, D.C., an elementary school principal in the affluent northwest section of the
city recently wrote a letter announcing: "We need more White parents to talk to their kids
about race. Especially now."
The letter singled out "White Staff and White community members," whom the principal alleged
had committed "both macro- and micro-aggressions" against "Staff of Color." The principal did
not specify what those crimes were. She didn't need to. Their skin color was their crime.
This is a national theme. It's incredibly destructive and dangerous. Countless public
schools are now using the 1619 Project from The New York Times as a curriculum. That project is
the work of an out-of-the-closet racial extremist called Nikole Hannah Jones. Jones recently
argued it's not violence to loot and burn stores – its justified. Her propaganda is now
mandatory in public schools in Buffalo, Chicago, Newark and Washington.
Many parents understandably deeply resent this. It's deranged, its racist. Others don't.
They're "allies." They've joined in. One mother in London, where the cult is also spreading,
posted a photo on Twitter of her daughter on blended knee, holding a sign declaring her
"privilege."
The Cultural Revolution has come to the West.
What will the effects of this be? Years from now, how will that little girl with the sign
remember her childhood? Her mother took Tim Wise's advice. She no longer has innocence. Will
she be grateful for that?
It's hard to imagine she will be. She'll more likely feel bitter and used. Because she has
been used. Many will feel that way. Is there a single person who believes this moment we're
living through will end in racial harmony? Is that even a goal anymore? It doesn't seem like
it.
It seems clear that many in power are pushing hard for racial division. For hatred. For
violence. Let's pray they don't get what they want. Tribal conflict destroys countries faster
than any plague.
But keep in mind as this insanity continues that it's not happening in a vacuum. Every
action provokes a reaction – that's physics. We don't know where this is going. We don't
want to know. The cult members should stop now – immediately, before more innocents get
hurt – and they will, if they don't.
1) Newsweek has already proven to be significantly compromised, even more than most
MSM, as described by Caitlin Johnstone (via Consortium News):
Newsweek has long been a reliable guard dog and attack dog for the US-centralized
empire, with examples of stories that its editors did permit to go to print including
an article by an actual, current military intelligence officerexplaining why U.S.
prosecution of Julian Assange is a good thing, fawning puff pieces on the White
Helmets, and despicable smear jobs on Tulsi Gabbard.
The outlet will occasionally print oppositional-looking articles like this one by
Ian Wilkie questioning the establishment Syria narrative, but not without immediately
turning around and publishing an attack on Wilkie's piece by Eliot Higgins, a former
Atlantic Council Senior Fellow who is the cofounder of the NED-funded imperial
narrative management firm Bellingcat. Newsweek also recently published an article
attacking Tucker Carlson for publicizing the OPCW scandal, basing its criticisms on a
bogus Bellingcat article ...
Neoliberalism (or neoliberal capitalism) is a term which gets thrown around a lot in cultural and political discourse. Is it often
used to describe the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent premierships of Bill
Clinton and Tony Blair and the adjective "neoliberal" continues to be used as a derogatory phrase in the ongoing Democratic debates
in the US.
Yet it is also used with reference to the "gig economy" and services such as Uber, Deliveroo and Airbnb. Is neoliberalism, then,
simply a synonym for capitalism or is there more to it than that? In this "neoliberalism explained" video, I aim to answer just that.
In this month's episode of What the Theory, I unpack what we mean when we talk about neoliberalism.
From the early work of economists such as Milton Friedman (author of Capitalism and Freedom), Friedrich von Hayek (author of The
Road to Serfdom) and the Mont Pelerin Society, through its implementation by Reagan and Thatcher to its infliction upon countries
in the global south as described in The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, I undertake a brief history of free-market capitalism and
consider some of its consequences.
[The above are affiliate links. I receive a small kickback from anything you buy which, in turn, helps to support the channel.]
If you've enjoyed this video and would like to see more including my What The Theory? series in which I provide some snappy introductions
to key theories in the humanities as well as PhD vlogs in which I talk about some of the challenges of being a PhD student then do
consider subscribing.
Neoliberalism is human arrogance to the extreme. It speeds up globe disharmony that will ultimately cause the extinction of
the species. Mans greed will be it's own end. cheers
So if the welfare state of the post war period was a means of stabilizing labour and capital relations and neoliberalism seeks
to destroy that and has its ideological roots in 19th century liberalism, does that mean we're going to witness the mass poverty
and precarization of that same period again?
Your presentation style gives me a slight vibe of "guy talking to a room full of children about how cool bugs are," which I
do mean as a complement Anyway yeah good stuff I like it
Being someone who is old enough to clearly remember the pre-Reagan/ Thatcher era, I always feel badly for those who have never
known life outside of this neoliberal dystopian nightmare that we find ourselves in. Back then people talked a lot about "intrinsic
worth"; that a human life, a species, or a special place (natural or historic) has a value far beyond what money could buy, and
should therefore be protected.
Fairness was always a consideration; if an employee did a good job and was loyal to the company
for a number of years, then the company owners gave them extra paid vacation, a pension, a Christmas bonus, and a gold watch on
retirement to show their appreciation.
A 10% profit for the year was considered satisfactory and sustainable, unlike today, where
stockholders demand increasing returns at the expense of employees, product quality, etc. If a company sold toxic or dangerous
products, or mistreated employees, an expose would be done on 60 minutes and that company would either fold, or pay damages. The
well being of citizens and the environment was the first consideration (at least outside of the military industrial complex and
fossil fuel companies), and anyone who put profits before all else was viewed as favorably as a KKK grand wizard is today. It's
amazing what 38 years of pro-neoliberal Ayn Randian propaganda has done to the world. We'll likely drive ourselves to an early
extinction because of it, and knowing this, the Oligarchy searches for new ways to profit from out impending demise. Madness!
Yes, please do a video on the gig economy. I am also interested to hear your thoughts on neoliberalism's attack on education.
New subscriber... love the channel! Look forward to seeing more!
Neoliberalism is explicitly different from Classical Liberalism, which is why they are distinguished by the prefix... Adam
Smith's theories for example are completely incompatible with neoliberal theory.
Another very interesting video. I do think there is some missing context on: Cold War, Decolonization, Decline of traditional
Communism in 1980s, defeat of traditional Communism in 1990's. To be fair, I don't think your narrative would change much or at
all with the other context pieces included. It would just provided the "more complete" picture on neoliberalism. Very thoughtful
analysis overall. Well done.
The best ive heard it defined loosely is "the idea to extend market practices to more and more human spheres of life"
As
if thats worked well with housing, prisons, and politics...
I was researching on Gramsci and I watched your video only because I couldn't find anything on the more popular channels and
wasn't so sure if I wanted to click on it or just let go and read an article on Gramsci or something. Casually scrolled through
your content and now watching your latest upload. This is what I've been looking for, for so long. You've got almost everything
I'm interested in and I like your way of explaining things. Instantly subscribed. Keep up the good work man!
I know that what you've drawn upon is quite similar to Heide Gerstenberger's argument on how capitalism changed and came in
different guises (2007), but, and forgive me if I'm mistaken, the literary and philosophical background of neoliberalism are nothing
but a misunderstanding of liberalism, specifically Adam Smith, as they forget, or neglect, that he was concerned with moral philosophy
and his "the invisible hand" was a mere metaphor that he mentioned only once in The Wealth of Nation. I just wanted to add this
point as it is important regarding the fallacies of the literature of neoliberalism. I love your channel. My students will have
a new video to watch this semester. Good luck and I'm waiting for your gig economy episode. Keep it up bruv!
"The gig economy is just a way for corporations to cut the cost of employees, by turning them into subcontractors. They blur
the line between employee and subcontractors by having tight rules like an employer, and since most people have a employee
mentality, the company nurtures the idea that they somehow are more like employees, then they get mostly good workers, working
hard for very little compensation. The Gig economy is just another sign of our failing way of life."
Notable quotes:
"... The gig economy would be great if we lived in a society where health care is free, food is cheap, housing is common, and nobody suffers from economic Issues Which is not what we are living in ..."
"... Neo-liberals - we support freedom and stuff. Removes mask Is actually corporation lapdogs. ..."
Unlike most developments in the employment market, the Gig Economy has received a great deal
of press attention and established itself firmly as a point of reference in the popular
consciousness. In recent years, increasing numbers of people have turned to services such as
Uber, Lyft, Deliveroo, Just Eat, TaskRabbit and Fiverr as either a side hustle or their main
source of income.
Following on from my video on neoliberalism and neoliberal capitalism, in today's episode of
What the Theory?, we look deeper into how the gig economy (or sharing economy) works and what
differentiates it from the rest of the economy. We ask whether the gig economy is truly an
opportunity for those wanting a more flexible work arrangement or whether it is simply a means
for multinational corporations to circumvent hard-won workers rights and labour laws.
Finally, we also consider whether there might be some historical precedents to the sharing
economy in the early industrial period and look at some of the challenges facing those
attempting to organise Deliveroo riders, Uber drivers and other gig economy workers into trade
unions in order to negotiate for better rates of pay and conditions.
Unregulated capitalism? You mean like child labor and passing the hat when a worker dies
in an accident? They don't want workers. They want people who are desperate.
Well, how far it all goes is something that remains to be seen. I don't think we'll get as
far as child labour but the curation of dependence is something that's definitely in
progress.
Daxton Lyon except the majority of entrepreneurs and business owners didn't come Into
their business ownership via merit. You are forgetting that most of these people are born
into a situation where they have access to capital, access to legal services and education.
Sure there are a minority of people who make it from nothing but that number is diminishingly
small.
Daxton Lyon "You don't like the gig? Do something else." Too bad the economy is currently
setup to where around half of individuals are limited to gig and don't have the resources and
money to do anything else.
Daxton Lyon "If any of you did, your panzy responses regarding corporate greed would be
squashed!" No, they wouldn't, but keep performing those red herrings and hasty,
extremely-worshipping generalizations about entrepreneurship to distract from the point; I'm
sure they'll catch on.
The gig economy would be great if we lived in a society where health care is free, food is
cheap, housing is common, and nobody suffers from economic Issues Which is not what we are
living in
The nation
went up in flames this weekend . No one in charge stood up to save America. Our leaders
dithered. They cowered. They openly sided with the destroyers. In many cases, they egged them
on.
Later, they will deny doing any of this. They are denying it now. But you know the truth
because you saw it happen.
This is how nations collapse. When no one in authority keeps the order, and when someone in
our professional class encourage violence, American citizens are forced to defend themselves.
They have no choice. No one else is going to defend them -- they know that now.
It's possible that more people will be hurt in coming days -- that would be a tragedy. But
in an environment like this, more violence could very well lead to a cascade of new tragedies,
to something far bigger and more destructive than anything we have seen so far.
So, this isn't over. It might simply be the beginning. We pray it isn't.
It's hard to think clearly about anything that's going on right now. The chaos, the
destruction, the relentless lying from above -- it's all too much. Americans are bewildered,
and they are afraid. But most of all, they are filled with rage, angrier than they have ever
been.
The worst people in our society have taken control. They did nothing to build this country.
Now, they are tearing it down. They are rushing us toward mass suicide.
So, how do we respond? We must protect ourselves and our families. Once again, we have no
choice, but to do that. But we cannot allow ourselves to become like they are.
We are not animals, we are Americans. In the face of such indecency, we must resolve to be
decent. We believe this country has a future. We intend for our children to live and thrive
here. That is what we are defending.
All our leaders do is set us against each other. They stage a never-ending national
cockfight for their profit and amusement.
But we're not going to play along. We will love our neighbors relentlessly in spite of all
of it, not because they look like us or share our political views. But we love them because
they are human beings, and they are Americans. Those are the bonds that tie us together -- the
bonds our leaders seek to destroy. We can't let them.
We should start by being unsparingly honest about what is happening right now. Truth is our
defense, and it's our country's last hope.
We plan to use this hour to create a record of this moment right now, to show you what's
really going on in your country. We feel an obligation to do that before the facts are spun
into propaganda by the liars or the images are pulled off the internet forever, as many of them
inevitably will be.
All our leaders do is set us against each other. They stage a never-ending national
cockfight for their profit and amusement. But we're not going to play along.
We're going to begin with where my family lives and has lived for 35 years, in the northwest
quadrant of Washington, D.C. This is called Mac Market. It's on MacArthur Boulevard, which is
named after General MacArthur during the war. It's our neighborhood store; it's walking
distance from my house.
People meet there every morning for coffee. Kids come after school for candy. It's as close
to a community gathering spot as we have.
The market is run by the Kim family. The Kims are immigrants from Korea. They are revered in
our neighborhood for their decency and their hard work. When they lost their son several years
ago, the neighbors grieved for them.
The Kims are not political. They've never hurt anyone. They only make things better. But
last night, the mob came for their store. At 1 a.m. Monday morning, Mr. Kim was kneeling alone
on the sidewalk trying to salvage what he has spent his life building.
Scenes like this played out in hundreds of neighborhoods across this country, maybe
yours.
Here are a few. In Columbia, S.C., a man called the police when things began to fall apart.
Rioters saw him call. They surrounded that man, and they beat him. Onlookers laughed as he was
pummeled.
This is a national emergency. It's a profound national emergency. But you would never know
that from listening to our elected leaders. Almost all of them pretend this is not really
happening or if it is happening, it is just part of America's long tradition of vigorous
political discourse.
In Rochester, N.Y., a group of eight men smashed the windows of a jewelry store. The couple
who lived above the shop emerged to confront them. Both of them were viciously beaten with a
ladder and a two-by-four.
In Dallas, a man armed with what appeared to be a sword did his best to defend a business
from looters. The mob bashed him in the head with a rock and a skateboard. It's hard to
watch.
In San Jose, riders with crowbar stormed the highway and attacked vehicles, trying to pull
drivers from their cars. In Birmingham, Ala., a local reporter called Stephen Quinn was beaten,
and then he was robbed on live television as he tried to cover the looting.
In Portland, Ore., a man was beaten apparently for daring to carry an American flag in
public. He never released the flag, by the way.
How many of these people died? How many were murdered by the rioters? We don't know yet. At
the least, some are likely disabled for life. They were beaten that badly.
And then there was the mass stealing. It seemed to be everywhere over the weekend.
In Buckhead, an upscale part of Atlanta, rioters stole a Tesla from a dealership and drove
it through an indoor mall just to underscore how completely out of control things were. In
Portland, Oregon, mobs looted Louis Vuitton, Apple and Chase Bank among many others. They often
set fires as they left. In Chicago, protesters fought systemic racism by running through a Nike
store stealing shoes.
And in Washington, D.C., a federal city surrounded by military bases and protected at all
times by the single highest concentration of law enforcement in the world, criminals operated
with apparent impunity in the streets. They looted Georgetown. They smashed the windows in
federal buildings. They desecrated virtually every war memorial in the city a week after
Memorial Day.
You've got to wonder how many of them have ever even heard of George Floyd. And if they
have heard of him, what difference would it make? Violence and looting are not forms of
political expression.
And then, as you likely know, Sunday night they
set fire to St. John's Episcopal Church , a 200-year-old building that has welcomed every
American president since James Madison. It is right across the street from the White House.
For people stuck inside anywhere during this insanity -- the sick, the elderly, the
powerless -- the experience was terrifying. Listen to this woman from Minneapolis.
Reporter: How was last night?
Unidentified woman: Scary. They went straight to Office Max, the Dollar Store and every
store over here that I go to. I have nowhere to go now. I have no way to get there because the
buses aren't running.
So, that's what's happening in America right now. We didn't play all of the tape we have.
There's a lot of it. Some of the tape is too shocking, and honestly, it's too incendiary. We
understand that television is an emotional medium, and we don't want to make things worse.
We're not going to, but you get the point.
The point is, this is a national emergency. It's a profound national emergency. But you
would never know that from listening to our elected leaders. Almost all of them pretend this is
not really happening or if it is happening, it is just part of America's long tradition of
vigorous political discourse.
Politicians on both sides tell us that this is all about the death of a man in police
custody in Minneapolis last week. The people burning down our country are "protesters". They're
engaged in a legitimate "protest."
Okay, what exactly are those protesters' demands? What are they asking for? If Congress
agreed to enact their program, what would the program be?
Not a single person even hints the answer because there is not an answer. No one has
bothered to pull the guys beating up old ladies on the street or looting Gucci, but you've got
to wonder how many of them have ever even heard of George Floyd . And if they have
heard of him, what difference would it make? Violence and looting are not forms of political
expression.
If you were killed tomorrow, how many buildings would you want burned to the ground in your
memory? How many old women smashed in the face on the street in your name? None, we hope,
because you're not a vicious psychopath, like the people you've just watched.
In fact, what we're watching is not a political protest. It's the opposite of a political
protest. It is an attack on the idea of politics. The rioters you have seen are trying to
topple our political system.
That system is how we resolve our differences without using violence. But these people want
a new system, one that is governed by force. Do what we say or we will hurt you.
You know this. You can see it for yourself on television; you have. But our leaders continue
to lie. They tell us that's not true. This isn't happening. It's just a protest.
When the violence began, what we needed more than anything was clarity in the middle of
this ... Instead, almost all of our so-called conservative leaders joined the left's chorus,
as if on cue.
Some Democrats have openly embraced what is happening. Really they don't have much of a
choice. These are their voters cleaning out the Rolex store. These riots effectively are the
largest Joe
Biden for President rally on record.
No Democratic leader can directly criticize what is happening right now. And in fact, some
have joined in. Over the weekend, the Democratic Party of Fairfax, Virginia, which is an
important Democratic organization, released the following statement on Twitter: "Riots are an
integral part of this country's march towards progress."
Progress. Burning buildings, teargas, dead bodies, the screaming injured, criminal anarchy
-- to the Democratic Party of Fairfax, that is called progress.
Celebrity after celebrity has weighed in to agree on social media. From his fortified
compound, basketball star LeBron James has used his accounts
to encourage more rioting. Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun
King has done the same. So has Black Lives Matter leader, DeRay Mckesson.
Colin
Kaepernick openly calls for violence. Here's a quote: "The cries for peace will rain down
and when they do, they will land on deaf ears," he says
approvingly .
Imagine shouting fire in a crowded theater, a theater with 325 million people in it called
our country. That's what they've been doing and have been doing for days.
When the violence began, what we needed more than anything was clarity in the middle of
this. It's hard to see when the tear gas starts. Someone in America needed to tell the truth to
the country. Instead, almost all of our so-called conservative leaders joined the left's
chorus, as if on cue.
On Friday, as American cities were being destroyed by mobs, the vice president United States
refused to say anything specific about the riots we were watching on television. Instead,
Mike Pence
scolded America for its racism.
Carly Fiorina, once a leading Republican presidential candidate tweeted that -- and we're
quoting, "It's white America that now must see the truth, speak the truth and act on the
truth."
Meanwhile, Kay
Coles James , who is the president of the Heritage Foundation -- that's the largest
conservative think tank in the country. You may have sent them money, hopefully for the last
time. Kay Coles James wrote a long scream denouncing America as an irredeemably racist nation:
"How many times will protests have to occur?"
Got that? "Have to occur." Like the rest of us caused this by our sinfulness.
The message from our leaders on the right, as on the left, was unambiguous: Don't complain.
You deserve what's happening to you.
No one jumped in more forcefully or seemed angrier in America than former South Carolina
Governor Nikki
Haley . "Tonight I turned on the news and I am heartbroken," Haley wrote. "It's important
to understand that the death of George Ford was personal and painful for many. In order to
heal, it needs to be personal and painful for everyone."
Imagine shouting fire in a crowded theater, a theater with 325 million people in it called
our country. That's what they've been doing and have been doing for days.
But wait a second, you may be wondering, how am I "personally responsible" for the behavior
of a Minneapolis police officer? I've never even been to Minneapolis, you may think to
yourself. And why is some politician telling me I'm required to be upset about it?
Those are all good questions. Nikki Haley did not answer those questions explaining. It is
not her strong suit -- that would require thinking.
What Nikki Haley does best is moral blackmail. During the 2016 campaign, she compared Donald
Trump to the racist mass murderer, Dylann
Roof . How is Donald Trump similar to a serial
killer? Nikki Haley never explained that. She wasn't trying to educate anyone.
Her only goal was political advantage. Nikki Haley is exceptionally good at getting what she
wants. She is happy to denounce you as a racist in order to get it. She just did.
In this case, Nikki Haley's wish came true. The riots were indeed "personal and painful" for
everyone. And then the pain kept increasing. Two days after she wrote that, dozens of American
cities had been thoroughly trashed, some destroyed.
A country already on the brink of recession suddenly faced economic collapse. An already
fearful population locked down for months because of the coronavirus had
been thoroughly and completely terrorized.
Mission accomplished. Let's hope Nikki Haley is pleased. We've now atoned.
How did the Trump administration respond to the horrors going on around us? Well, Sunday
morning, the country's national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, did a live interview from the
White House lawn. Here's how it began:
Robert O'Brien, U.S. National Security Adviser: First thing I want to say, on behalf of
the president --he said this to the family -- but our hearts and prayers are going out to the
Floyd family. We mourn with them and we grieve with them and what happened there was horrific
and I can't even imagine what that poor family is going through as his videos are played over
and over again. That should have never happened in America and it's a tragic thing.
The president said that from the start, and we're with the family and as the President
said, we're with the peaceful protesters.
"We're with the peaceful protesters," O'Brien announced.
Really? Can you be more specific about that? Who are you talking about exactly? Is it the
people spitting foam as they scream, "F the police"? Is it the one standing next to the
arsonist doing nothing as they set fire to buildings? Is it the kids laughing as they film the
looting and the beatings on their iPhones?
The first requirement of leadership is that you watch over the people in your care. That's
what soldiers want from their officers. It's what families need from their fathers. It's what
voters demand from their presidents.
Maybe it's the famous people in L.A. who are raising money online to support the rioters?
They're all just peaceful protesters. Yes, we support that. It's who we are.
What about the president? Where is he during all of this?
Well, on Friday night, after the show, Leland Vitter and a cameraman headed to Lafayette
Square in Washington to cover what was happening outside the White House. Here's what happened
next.
Reporter: A Fox News reporter is getting chased out by these -- by the George Floyd
protesters here infront of -- at Lafayette Park.
Look, there's water being thrown on the reporter here. This is just -- they took his mic.
The just threw the mic at the reporter here. As you see guys, things are spiraling here quick
at the protest.
That was in Lafayette Square in the center of our capital city. The tape raised a troubling
question: If you can't keep a Fox News correspondent from getting attacked directly across the
street from your house, how can you protect my family? How are you going to protect the
country? How hard are you trying?
On Twitter the next morning, the president reassured America that he and his family were
just fine. The federally funded bodyguards had kept them safe. He did not mention protecting
the rest of the nation, much of which was then on fire. He seemed aware only of himself.
For people who like Donald Trump, who voted for Donald Trump, who support his policies, who
have defended him for years and years against the most absurd kinds of slander, this was a
distressing moment.
The first requirement of leadership is that you watch over the people in your care. That's
what soldiers want from their officers. It's what families need from their fathers. It's what
voters demand from their presidents.
People will put up with almost anything if you do that. You can regularly say embarrassing
things on television. You can hire Omarosa to work at the White House. All of that will be
forgiven if you protect your people.
But if you do not protect them -- or worse than that, if you seem like you can't be bothered
to protect them -- then you're done. It's over. People will not forgive weakness. That's the
one thing, by the way, that is not a partisan point. It is human nature.
Nero is the only Roman emperor whose name most people still remember. Why? Because he
abandoned his nation in a time of crisis. And 2,000 years later, we still don't forgive
him.
President Donald Trump: If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary
to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States
military and quickly solve the problem for them.
Good for him.
Immediately after that address, the president walked over to St. John's, which, we just told
you, was burning fewer than 24 hours ago, and that provided a powerful symbolic gesture. It was
a declaration that this country -- our national symbols, our oldest institutions -- will not be
desecrated and defeated by nihilistic destruction. We fervently hope this all works.
What Americans want most right now is an end to this chaos. They want their cities to be
saved. They want this to stop immediately. If the commander-in-chief cannot stop it, he will
lose in November. The left will blame him for the atrocities they encouraged, and some voters
will agree.
Donald Trump is the president. Presidents save countries. That's their job. That's why we
hire them. It's that simple.
Some key advisers around the president don't seem to understand this or the gravity of the
moment. No matter what happens, they'll tell you, our voters aren't going anywhere. "The
trailer parks are rock solid. What choice do they have? They've got to vote for us."
Jared Kushner, for one, has made that point out loud. No one has more contempt for Donald
Trump's voters than Jared Kushner does, and no one expresses it more frequently.
In 2016, Donald Trump ran as a law and order candidate because he meant it, and his views
remain fundamentally unchanged today. But the president's famously sharp instincts, the ones
that won him the presidency almost four years ago, have been since subverted at every level by
Jared Kushner. This is true on immigration , on foreign policy, and
especially on law enforcement
.
As crime in this country continues to rise, Jared Kushner has led a highly aggressive effort
to let more criminals out of prison and back on to the streets. This is reckless. At this
moment in time, it is insane. It continues to happen.
What Americans want most right now is an end to this chaos. They want their cities to be
saved. They want this to stop immediately. If the commander-in-chief cannot stop it, he will
lose in November. The left will blame him for the atrocities they encouraged, and some voters
will agree.
The president seems to sense this. At times he seems aware he is being led in the wrong
direction. He often derides Kushner as a liberal and that's correct, Kushner is. But Kushner
has convinced the president that throwing open the prisons is the key to winning
African-American votes in the fall and that those votes are essential to his reelection.
Several times over the past few days, the president has signaled that he would very much
like to crack down on rioters -- that is his instinct. If you've watched him, you'll believe
it. But every time he has been talked out of it by Jared Kushner and by aides that Kushner has
hired and controls.
Kushner's assumption, apparently, is that African-American voters like looting. That is
wrong. Normal Americans of all colors hate looting, obviously. Why wouldn't they hate looting?
They are decent people.
So one of the lessons of all that we have seen and we've seen so much over the past five
days is America is going to change because of this -- that is certain. What can we learn from
it? What should we demand going forward?
The first thing to know is that we can no longer accept race-baiting from our leaders.
Never. That has become so common now that we barely notice it. But it is dividing and
destroying this country. We should make them stop.
On Sunday, for example, Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle tweeted this: "I want to acknowledge
that much of the violence and destruction both here in Seattle and across the country has been
instigated and perpetrated by white men."
Is that factually true? Who knows? Who cares? The skin color of criminals is totally
irrelevant to how we prosecute them for the crimes they commit. It must be irrelevant.
Otherwise, we're committing the bigotry we claim to abhor.
Weakness invites aggression. That is true in nature and it's every bit as true in human
society. Our leaders are weak. Predators know it. That's why this is happening.
Yet everywhere on television and social media, prominent people are now talking exactly like
this. Not just a few crackpots -- thousands of people, well-known people. They are amplifying
race hatred at exactly the moment that we need at least at the moment when it's the most
dangerous.
This is Art Acevedo. Acevedo with the police chief of Houston. Houston is the fourth biggest
city in this country.
Acevedo's job, his sworn duty, is to enforce the law fairly and evenly regardless of the
ethnicity of the suspect. Watch this and tell us if you think he is capable of doing that. Do
you think he's even interested?
Art Acevedo, chief of the Houston Police department: My people for -- as an immigrant, we
are raised like this. But you know what? We built this country ... We have got news for them.
We ain't going nowhere. We ain't going nowhere. I think the ship has sailed.
So if you've got hate in your heart for people of color, get over it, because this city
is a minority-majority city.
"My people." If a police chief of any color -- any colo r -- said that, we would
attack him instantly, and we would mean it. It is wrong.
When you run a law enforcement agency, you don't get to consider "my people" much less claim
your people deserve some kind of special consideration because they "built this country." No.
Your obligation is not to consider your people, but all people and consider them
equally. Period.
Art Acevedo is not even trying to do that. Imagine being arrested by this creep. Think you'd
get a fair shake?
There's almost nothing that hurts America more than this. If you are worried about the rise
of extremism here -- and honestly, you should be worried -- this kind of insanity is absolutely
certain to cause it.
And let's be clear, when we say extremism, we're not talking about unconventional views that
get you bounced off Twitter or scolded by the corporate HR department. We mean actual extremism
where people espouse violence against other people, where large groups come to believe their
racial identity is the most important thing about them.
Now, at this moment, no matter what they're telling you, no matter what they claim for
political advantage, there's not a huge amount of that in this country, thank God. Most people
still think of themselves as Americans and want to. But if the left keeps talking like this,
there definitely will be and very soon. And you don't want to live here when that happens. We
should demand they stop immediately.
Enforcing the law is not white supremacy. Insisting that everyone in the country follow the
same rules is not racism. In fact, it's the answer to racism. It is equality -- equality under
the law. It is the one thing we must defend, and if we don't, it's over. Things fall apart.
Weakness invites aggression. That is true in nature and it's every bit as true in human
society. Our leaders are weak. Predators know it. That's why this is happening.
If you let people spray paint obscenities in City Hall, pretty soon they are overturning cop
cars. If you put up with that, they'll come right to the front door of the police precinct, and
they will burn it down.
The next thing you know, they are beating people to death in shopping malls. And then what?
What happens the next time the mob doesn't like something? What will the mob demand next?
Let's hope we never find out because we are close.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from " Tucker Carlson Tonight " on June 1,
2020.
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@Commentator Mike
As Tucker Carlson said last night, Trump has good instincts; he should use them. Instead he's
been listening to that ridiculous son-in-law of his, who is a true liberal. Tucker said he
needs to get back to listening to his instincts. He watches every show of Tucker's, so I hope
he's listening.
"All he had to do was keep his promises." Ah, easier said than done. Kennedy tried to go
his own way, and look what happened to him. Trump has got every Democrat against him, along
with almost every Republican (who are just letting him twist). The media is against him, the
judiciary are against him, along with academia, the FBI, CIA, and the Clintons.
The globalists/uniparty are going all out to trample Trump, and you're rolling over?
"But all he wanted was to buddy up to Netanyahu "
That's because that was the only thing the Uniparty would get behind Trump on. Even the
Republicans fought him on the wall, Russia.
As he commands the Los Angeles Police Department's response to mass protests over the
killing of George Floyd
, LAPD Chief Michel Moore is also facing a growing political storm over
comments he made Monday night -- but quickly retracted -- about looters.
The chief said looters across
Southern California over the weekend
were
"capitalizing"
on the death of Floyd.
"We didn't have protests last night -- we had criminal acts," Moore said during a news conference
with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Monday night. "We didn't have people mourning the death of
this man, George Floyd -- we had people capitalizing. His death is on their hands as much as it is
those officers."
Moore apologized minutes later, saying he "misspoke when I said his blood is on their hands" and
that he regretted "that characterization."
"But I don't regret, nor will I apologize, to those who are out there today committing violence,
destroying lives and livelihoods and creating this destruction," Moore said. "His memory deserves
reform. His memory deserves a better Los Angeles, a better United States and a better world."
On Tuesday,
protesters' chants
rang out outside the LAPD's glass headquarters: "Fire Michel Moore! Fire Michel
Moore!"
And: "Hey, hey, ho, ho! Michel Moore has got to go!"
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Garcetti on Tuesday night defended Moore, saying he was glad the chief had apologized.
"I'm glad he quickly corrected it, and I'm glad that he further apologized, as well," Garcetti
said. "I want to be very, very clear about that. If I believed for a moment that the chief believed
that in his heart, he would no longer be our chief of police. I can't say that any stronger."
Jocelyn Tucker said she appreciated the apology, but the chief's words were telling.
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"If that was your knee-jerk reaction, you're not in the right job," she said.
State Sen. Holly Mitchell also responded to his comments in a statement.
"I want you to know that we have every right to be outraged and that our voices deserve to be heard
and not hijacked by outside agitators nor by a police chief who infers that our actions can be
compared to the murders we have witnessed and experienced," she wrote in a statement. "These type of
distractions want to turn this discussion away from the main point -- which is ending structural
racism."
Moore was quick to condemn the killing of Floyd by Minneapolis police, and in the early days of the
protests, gave demonstrators a wide berth.
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Moore told the Police Commission that when he saw the video of police kneeling on Floyd's neck, he
and others at the LAPD "were greatly disturbed by it and troubled by the images and we sought to
communicate clearly -- those images we witnessed along with the rest of America, they were horrible. It
was disgusting and without justification."
"... Joe Biden, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee: The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism, to deal with the growing economic inequity that exists in our nation, to deal with the denial of the promise of this nation made to so many. ..."
"... Our country is crying out for leadership, leadership that can unite us, leadership that brings us together. Leadership that can recognize pain and deep grief of communities that have had a knee on their neck for a long time. ..."
"... Tammy Morales, Seattle councilwoman: What I don't want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told that looting doesn't solve anything. ..."
"... And you know, it does make me wonder and ask the question why looting bothers people so much more than knowing that across the country, black men and women are dying every day, and far too often at the hands of those who are sworn to protect and serve ..."
"... Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times: Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. ..."
"... Destroying property which can be replaced is not violence and to put those things -- to use the exact same language to describe those two things, I think, really -- it's not moral. ..."
"... Jim Acosta, CNN chief White House correspondent: It's so remarkable to see military-style vehicles rolling through the White House complex, you know, I mean? It's just not something that you normally see in the United States of America. It's something that you see in more authoritarian countries. ..."
"... Don Lemon, CNN anchor: Open your eyes, America. Open your eyes. We are teetering on a dictatorship. We are -- this is chaos. ..."
"... Has the president -- I am listening -- is the president declaring war on Americans? ..."
"... I hope that they stand up and fight for their rights. ..."
"... Now the entire country, according to his orders, we're living under a militarized country. ..."
"... He is playing a very dangerous game because this will backfire. ..."
"... Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from " Tucker Carlson Tonight " on June 2, 2020. ..."
First they smashed the windows of police cars, and our elected leaders said nothing. It's a
political protest, they told us. We stand with the protesters.
Before long it grew. Mobs of menacing young men formed in the streets. They were clearly
intent on violence, but no one in authority dared criticize them.
We understand their frustration, our leaders told us. America is a sinful country. Their
grievances are legitimate.
And so the mobs grew larger, and they grew emboldened. Last Thursday, they came right to the
front door of a police precinct in Minneapolis. The cops inside fled under orders from their
mayor.
The mob burned the building . But before they did, they looted the evidence room, and that
ensured that many violent crimes will never be solved. They did this in the name of
justice.
Still, our leaders did nothing. Most of them never even mentioned it, like it never
happened. Instead, they issued yet more statements in solidarity with the mob.
Politicians, celebrities, corporate leaders, clergy, news anchors, professional athletes --
almost every person in this country that we were raised from childhood to look up to, to
respect, to listen to -- all of them sided with the people burning police stations.
The mob saw this and grew stronger. On Monday night, they began shooting cops.
For 38 years, David Dorn was a police officer in the City of St. Louis. No one ever accused
Dorn of racism. He was black. He is dead now. He
was murdered Monday night by the mob . His killing was streamed live on Facebook, and then
the violence accelerated from there.
In St. Louis alone, four other active duty police officers were shot Monday night.
In Las Vegas, an officer took a bullet in the head . He is still in critical condition.
Once the sun went down, cops all around this country found themselves under attack.
How many more nights like this can we take? How many more nights like this before no one in
America will serve as a police officer? It's not worth it. The people in charge hate you. The
job doesn't pay enough.
At that point, who will enforce the laws? Who will be in charge? Well, violent young men
with guns will be in charge. They will make the rules, including the rules in your
neighborhood. They will do what they want. You will do what they say. No one will stop them.
You will not want to live here when that happens.
Chaos is the worst thing always, and wise leaders understand that. It's obvious.
But it's not obvious to Joe Biden . Biden gave
a speech in Philadelphia Tuesday and was very different from the Biden of old. For years,
Biden styled himself a patriot, a champion of ordinary people, but no longer. In Tuesday's
speech, Biden said nothing to defend police officers being murdered. Instead, he attacked them
as instruments of "systemic racism."
Joe Biden, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee: The moment has come for our
nation to deal with systemic racism, to deal with the growing economic inequity that exists in
our nation, to deal with the denial of the promise of this nation made to so many.
Our country is crying out for leadership, leadership that can unite us, leadership that
brings us together. Leadership that can recognize pain and deep grief of communities that have
had a knee on their neck for a long time.
"The moment has come," says Joe Biden. This is the moment.
So the question is, how did murdering David Dorn advance the cause of racial justice
exactly? No one explains; Biden didn't. Meanwhile, Biden's staff continues to send money to the
rioters. Other Democrats followed in perfect sync.
How many more nights like this can we take? How many more nights like this before no one
in America will serve as a police officer? It's not worth it. The people in charge hate you.
The job doesn't pay enough.
In the city of Seattle , Councilwoman Tammy Morales all but
endorsed the destruction of her own city.
Tammy Morales, Seattle councilwoman: What I don't want to hear is for our constituents
to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told that looting doesn't solve
anything.
And you know, it does make me wonder and ask the question why looting bothers people so
much more than knowing that across the country, black men and women are dying every day, and
far too often at the hands of those who are sworn to protect and serve .
Looting does solve things, says Tammy Morales. How dare you criticize it?
Prosecutors exist to push back against violations of the law. But across the country, many
prosecutors seem on board with Tammy Morales and Joe Biden.
In the city of Dallas, a local report says the District Attorney John Creuzot is refusing to
process rioters. That means they will automatically be freed to riot again.
In Massachusetts, the state attorney general, Maura Healey, applauded the riots and did it
explicitly. She described the killing and looting underway as "a once in a lifetime
opportunity. Yes, America is burning, but that's how forests grow."
This is the only revolution in history that's being waged not on behalf of the working
class, but against them.
That's a verbatim quote from the chief law enforcement officer of Massachusetts. Maura
Healey is happy to see American society become mulch. It makes good fertilizer.
Violence, for example, when she supports it, isn't really violence.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times: Violence is when an agent of the state kneels
on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body.
Destroying property which can be replaced is not violence and to put those things -- to
use the exact same language to describe those two things, I think, really -- it's not
moral.
Violence is not violence if I approve of it. The person you were just listening to won the
Pulitzer Prize. There's something wrong with our system if that's the person who gets the
biggest merit badge.
BuzzFeed, meanwhile, published a guide for rioters. It included helpful tips like this: Wear
nondescript clothing, cover up tattoos, don't take photographs.
CNN didn't criticize it. Needless to say, they're on board.
Jim Acosta, CNN chief White House correspondent: It's so remarkable to see
military-style vehicles rolling through the White House complex, you know, I mean? It's just
not something that you normally see in the United States of America. It's something that you
see in more authoritarian countries.
Don Lemon, CNN anchor: Open your eyes, America. Open your eyes. We are teetering on a
dictatorship. We are -- this is chaos.
Has the president -- I am listening -- is the president declaring war on
Americans?
I hope that they stand up and fight for their rights.
Now the entire country, according to his orders, we're living under a militarized
country.
He is playing a very dangerous game because this will backfire.
Uh-huh. It's dangerous when we try and stop looting and burning and killing, says Don Lemon.
I hope they stand up and fight, he says from the safety of his television studio.
But what exactly are they fighting for? They certainly are fighting. But why? Don't ask Don
Lemon. He doesn't know -- not a reader. Something about Trump probably.
What does Black Lives Matter say? Much of the rioting is being committed in their name. Go
to their website if you have a minute. Here's a post from three days ago: "Defund the
police."
That's the position of Black Lives Matter, the most popular group in America among corporate
leaders. Defund the police. No more cops. That's what they're fighting for.
That seems like a fringe position, but in the Democratic Party, it isn't anymore. Congresswoman Rashida
Tlaib has endorsed it as a sitting member. So has Jane Fonda, and so have many other
celebrities. They said so in a recent open letter.
Then three days ago, The New York Times published a piece making the same demand: "No more
money for the police." No police. That's right, the article calls for the elimination of all
cops and all prisons in the United States.
So, if we did that, who would keep order? Well, The New York Times has an answer to that:
"Rapid response, social workers would keep the peace." Alternative emergency response programs
-- that's their plan.
If you live in a gated community, it might sound like a good idea. You've got your own
police force. You have no plans to replace them with rapid response social workers. So, you're
set, no matter what happens. There aren't going to be any rapes on your street.
But what about everyone else? What's going to happen to them? Don Lemon and Rashida Tlaib
don't care at all. Your neighborhood is not their problem. They're in it for the revolution,
and make no mistake, it is a revolution from above, aimed downward.
This is the only revolution in history that's being waged not on behalf of the working
class, but against them.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from " Tucker Carlson Tonight " on June 2,
2020.
While the White House propagandists were making that video, Tucker Carlson was, well,
reading the riot act to Trump on his program. Here is his entire 26-minute monologue. Carlson
is disgusted by the leadership class in this country, which includes Trump's weakness:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/3n5_D59lSjc
Trump's weakness does not necessarily consist of his not sending in troops to shoot looters.
It consists of him having no idea what to do other than create a pathetic propaganda moment
that is so transparently cheap that it makes you throw up a little bit in your mouth.
Trollope's lines are a fitting epitaph for the MAGA dream, which died last night in front of
St. John's Church:
But the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of
tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise
of mountebanks.
To be fair, the crises that have hit the United States in 2020 would have challenged the
most able chief executive. Trump's weaknesses -- in particular, his disinterest in mastering
details and his habit of confusing bluster for substance -- have made a difficult situation
much worse. It is undoubtedly the case that the Democrats and the media are a serious threat to
the kinds of things conservatives value, and it is certainly true that the press is dishonest.
All of these things can be true, and at the same time , Trump's incompetence and
unfitness for the high office he holds made intolerably manifest.
Not only did they fire tear gas and flashbangs and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters in
Lafayette Square, they fired them at a priest and a seminarian on the grounds of the church
to make way for his photo op. Every day this profoundly sick man plumbs new depths of
depravity.
https://religionnews.com/20...
This was all very good and correct, except for one item:
"The Minneapolis Police Department has been under the control of Democratic mayors for
decades."
If the events of the past week have shown anything, it would be that municipal law
enforcement is under the effective control of no one but themselves.
They are under control of the police union. It is extremely difficult to get rid of bad
cops. I'm in favor of commercial unions when membership is voluntary but police unions (and
some teachers unions and other public employee unions) have really steamrollered local
government to the extent that the public interest is not served.
Even in Atlanta, where the police seem to be handling this better than most other cities,
six cops have been charged with harassing an African-American couple stuck in traffic. The
video is disgusting.
Curiously, the two ringleader cops (who've been fired) are themselves Black. This is not
just a racial issue but a police culture problem.
You cannot print money into infrastructure. That's money fetishism.
The Marshall Plan would be only USD 100 billion in today's values. It wasn't about the
money: the Marshall Plan worked because, in 1946, the USA was the financial center of the
world and had an excess industrial capacity large enough to rebuild a much smaller place
(Western Europe). USDs flowed into Western Europe, which could only buy American goods and
equipment - which the Americans had to sell. American resources then flowed to Western
Europe, which in turn flowed back to the USA in USDs. That the USD was backed by gold at the
time had nothing to do with this process, but it may have accelerated the universalization of
the USD.
The USA (I'm here including all of its provinces: European Peninsula, Latin America,
SE-Asia, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia) is a capitalist society,
which means it plans its economy according to the social profit rate. The social profit rate
is determined by the national average of profit rates among all the individual capitals in
said country. That means economy is always planned by the private, not the public, sector.
The White House is impotent here.
Profit rate self-regulates based on the different degrees of organic composition of
capital (OCC) of each country/region. To simplify, the tendency is this: value flows from the
countries with lesser OCCs to countries with higher OCCs. Taking the European Union as an
example, we have that Germany (the country with the higher OCC) will have large and chronic
trade surpluses with the rest.
However, the higher the OCC, the lower is the profit rate. As OCC gets to a certain
critical level, profit rates begin to plummet, and structural crisis of capitalism occur. In
order to stop this process, "financialization" begins.
The case of the USA is that its financialization process has been running for so long that
its already existing infrastructure is crumbling. However, the fact that it is crumbling is
just the symptom, not the cause. The real cause is that the USA begun to financialize first
because it reached an extremely high OCC first.
At first, the USA didn't rebuild its infrastructure simply because it is not profitable.
Now, it doesn't do it for the simple fact it can't: with much pain, it managed to bring
astronauts beck to the ISS; the infrastructural abyss is now at more than USD 1.1 trn and
widening. By now it would have to import a lot of material and expertise from other countries
if it really wanted to rebuild and update its infrastructure. Industry lost so much
importance in the US economy that, last year, American industry fell to a record level (due
to the trade war against China) and the US GDP actually rose - due to the financial sector
and services sector compensating for the loss.
The most extreme case of a First World country turning into a mere financial hub is the
UK: its trade deficit already is at a gargantuan -14%, and its budget only doesn't collapse
because its huge financial hub in London covers that up to more than 7% (i.e. halves).
Financial hub? Call it what it is. A laundromat for dirty money and ill-gotten gains. Problem
is, or problem for those who aren't the extractive wealthy elite which is most of us, more
and more money is dirty money and ill-gotten gains even if it is "made" legally. The most
recent multi-trillion dollar handout, looting and pillaging actually, to the wealthy
extractive elite as part of the so-called "stimulus package" was perfectly legal but dirty
money and ill-gotten gains nonetheless.
The stock market is not only a depravity indicator and an indicator of wealth disparity,
it's also a massive laundromat for legal and illegal ill-gotten gains. I would venture that
at least 30% of the stock market is comprised of black market illegal money being laundered
at any given time.
FIRE is a term used my Michael Hudson and other likeminded political-economists. He uses
it so often it's hard to provide the initial instance. However, Hudson did write two books
about how the FIRE sector gained its dominance, Killing the Host & J is for Junk
Economics . It this video interview
from 2017 , Hudson explains to Max Keiser about the latter book and how it relates to the
just completed election, which begins at the 12:45 mark. That website also links to all
previous Keiser Reports where I hope to find the specific interview that discusses the
FIRE sector. This one does too, but it's not the specific topic discussed. I guarantee you'll
learn a lot from the 10.5 minute interview!
Petri Krohn wants redistribution of wealth. Let's look at the idea.
The opposing viewpoint says wealth is not a pie. Wealth comes from growth, innovation,
creativity. It is many pies.
Of course, you can't bake your own pie without capital. So, how do we redistribute
capital?
You can get it from the government via the banks, if they are 'ordered' to grant loans.
They aren't. So, you can't get it from government or banks.
You can take it from the already wealthy. Taxes is the historic way to take wealth from
the wealthy. But the tax schedule no longer takes significant amounts from the wealthy. And
Congress is corrupted by the wealthy so that route is closed also. There will be no major new
taxes on the wealthy.
How can we redistribute wealth, then?
Simplest way is Development Zones with no taxes for a 5-10 years. Investors will pour
money in from around the world. New businesses can be started, innovation can be nourished
and people can prosper.
Use the system to expand the base of participation and do it in the zones of poverty and
redevelopment where the poor and disadvantaged are.
China does this. It works. Other nations do it. They call them FTZ (free trade zones).
Russia has some.
Trump was going to do this with his original Infrastructure program. The Dems stopped it.
Won't allow any progress.
But, this is the way to go. You raise people out of poverty, your increase their options
and income, you grow their region, and lots of new pies are baked.
And who, exactly, is going to do the hard labor required of these infrastructure
projects?
Certainly none of the horribly obese Americans I see waddling around, nor many of the
young folks stuck with their snouts into soma social media. Most of the youngsters I know
have zero clue about working with tools, doing a job right, working hard for not much pay,
etc. Males of color living in ghettos while their baby-mommas live off welfare? Hardly.
And where are people going to get the training needed? The Polytechnic Science trade
school in the city I grew up in - San Francisco - was torn down long ago. Few in the trades
can afford to live in San Francisco any more, even if they could get a job.
Maybe folks like my father who wielded a shovel building roads during the WPA and hated it
so much he joined the Army. In other words, hardworking immigrants, or first generation born
of immigrants with little education (my dad).
Posted by: Red Ryder | Jun 3 2020 19:14 utc | 15 says: 'How can we redistribute wealth,
then?'
An economy's wealth is what it produces. The U.S. produces a lot less then it consumes, so
it is in debt, and half of its population is poor.
The financial elites, who run the U.S. have gotten wealthy, not by producing something of
value, but by strip mining the financial assets of the rest of the population.
If you want to produce wealth, and distribute it properly:
1. Get rid of the U.S.$ as the world's reserve currency. This will allow U.S.$ to be
radically devalued.
2. With a devalued dollar, the U.S. will be forced into domestic production (i.e. real
wealth creation). Good paying jobs, producing real things, is a very effective way of
properly distributing wealth.
3. Carry out a massive infrastructure program to rebuild the U.S.' worn-out
infrastructure. The infrastructure itselr, as well as the good paying jobs associated with
creating it, is an effective way to distribute wealth.
4. Provide basic health-care and education (including university) to all. This is again a
very effective way of distributing wealth, while at the same time supplying a work force
capable of carrying out high value added jobs necessary for a goods producing economy.
5. Break-up or regulate the cartels. Profit margins and executive salaries have radically
expanded in recent years. This is a sign of lack of competition. Wherever there is inadequate
competition the economic actors need to be regulated or broken up. Lower prices, resulting
from a normalization of profits and exagerated salary disparities, is another excellent way
to distribute wealth.
6. Reduce military expenditures. Most of the military expenditures, beyond what is really
needed for defense, are nothing but waste, and at the same time a transfer of wealth from the
masses to the military industrial complex.
7. Pay for government sponsored health-care, education and infrastructure with a
significant increase in taxes on the wealthy.
8. The massive devaluation of the dollar, combined with infrastructure spending and
re-industrialization will no doubt cause significant inflation, at least in the short term.
Inflation will reduce both the value of financial assets and debt, again representing a
redistribution of wealth from the elites to the indebted masses.
Using the GINI index as a gauge (
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2015/demo/gini-index-of-money-income-and-equivalence-adjusted-income--1967.html),
Income inequality increased substantially over the past 40 years, from a GINI coefficient of
0.36, moderate, to 0.46, extreme. This change happened as a result of deliberate economic
policies designed to enable the transfer of wealth from the masses to the elites. To reverse
this mal-distribution of wealth, the policies that led to this need to be reversed as
well.
And don't expect the Democrats to do it. They are fully in the pocket of the 'Globalists'
who have been the principle beneficiaries of this massive transfer of wealth since 1980.
@ Posted by: Winni Puu | Jun 3 2020 21:33 utc | 47
The problem with large infrastructure projects is that they do not only get old through
physical degeneration, but also through moral degeneration (i.e. they get outdated).
The USA had USD 1.1 trn in old infrastructure (mainly from the 50s-60s) which need repair.
However, if the USG spends those USD 1.1 trn, the American people will just be getting what
existed before - there's no technological advantage here. So, while the USA spends USD 1.1
trn on 50s technology, China will be spending the same on state-of-the-art, therefore getting
a military advantage (because better infrastructure attracts more wealth, both in the form of
foreign investment and in the form of rising productivity of labor).
Also, when you do this large-scale technological leap, it just can't be any kind of
innovation: it has to be a revolutionary technology, which both greatly increases labor
productivity and is future proof (i.e. can last at least 50 years, ideally at least 100
years).
So, this is not just your average bean-counting. When a given national government is so
far behind in infrastructure, it has a though decision to make: fix what already exists (with
minor and gradual improvements) or do you go all-in with a revolutionary technology to try to
do a "great leap"? And that's just the technocratic side of the problem - in capitalism you
have the factor that it is the social profit rate that decides what's built and what isn't,
by how much and when.
The boss of Amazon Jeff Bezos is 65 this year, is worth over a trillion dollars, assuming he
lives up the age of 90, converts the assets into cash, does absolutely nothing except
spending the money, he has $3 655 347 to run through each hour 24/7 for the rest of his life.
If one assumes he has to sleep, eat, go to the bathroom which cuts the number of spending
hours (say) by half, he must go through over seven million dollars each and every hour until
he drops dead.
This is obscene, it exceeds his needs by such a margin that one cannot but wonder at the
sanity of a society that cannot be bothered to address it. This is not to call for income to
be distributed equitably, that would destroy the only mechanism that past evidence shows is
the driving force for improving living standards for all, but for such distribution to be
sane, nothing more nothing else, sanity should inform the creation of laws governing income
distribution on every society, including the Republic's. Any such sane arrangements should
include the distribution of both income and accumulated wealth, the major disparity in
today's society isn't only in income distribution, but even more so in wealth ownership.
"... Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. ..."
"... Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ..."
" Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity
in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming.
Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into
the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ."
As a peedupon all I can see is that the elite seem to be fighting amongst themselves or (IMO) providing cover for ongoing elite
power/control efforts. It might not be about private/public finance in a bigger picture but I can't see anything else that makes
sense
Horrible documentary of violence and looting. Those are really criminal gangs in action.
What Tucker have shown clearly are not political riots. They are criminal looting by spontaneously forming street gangs
Some statements of politicians are masterpieces of hypocrisy. Nikki Haley (who sanctioned
destruction of Syria and defended it in UN) was especially eloquent" "Tonight I turned on the
news and am heartbroken... It's important to understand that the death of George Floyd was
personal and painful for many. In order to heal, it needs to be personal and painful for
everyone." personal and painful for everyone."
RT @bharatkrishnan9: When President Obama included the Stonewall Riots in his 2nd inaugural,
he didn't make that decision lightly. Riots are an integral part of this country's march
towards progress.
They are a vivid reminder of the systemic racism in this country. This injustice stains the
American soul and makes a mockery of our highest ideals. It's white America that now must see
the truth, speak the truth and act on the truth.
The author of this video, if you looks at his other video is pretty bizarre and way outside Softpanorama preferences. But
this is a very good, highly compressed analyses.
Notable quotes:
"... Liberalism for the poor: "Too bad, personal responsibility" Liberalism for the rich: "All is forgiven, society will pay the bill" ..."
The great thing about neoliberalism is that it allows us to blame every single structural
problem of our society on either personal failures or too much government.
The oddest thing I find when arguing with ancaps and neolibs is when I talk about
wage-slavery. How the bus driver who gets paid minimum wage and has to work 12h/day in harsh
conditions to simply put some bread on their family's table the next morning is basically
impeded to seek anything else, and how proper welfare would allow them to at least guarantee
a better future for their kids.
The response is that the bus driver "is free" and "chooses"
to be a wage-slave, because there is the alternative of not working and dying of hunger.
(They literally said that. Their idea of freedom is that you can choose to die if you don't
want to be work terrible conditions because you weren't born into a middle-class family)
As a disabled person I'm really glad you talked about disability and it's relation to
neoliberalism as many people often forget about how important a point it is. I am not free as
a disabled person under neoliberalism/capitalism. This is just a true statement regardless of
your view point. Even with the class privilege I have from having had a relatively middle
class upbringing I am still trapped. I'm 19 and in university and my family mostly look after
me but what will happen when I inevitably have to move out?
Will I be completely reliant on
benefits (which are often not enough to live on?) Will I be working in a part time job where
I'm constantly in pain and tired barely able to pay rent? Will my house be accessible? And
with all these worries will I ever live a meaningful life? Or will I be living pay check to
pay check in debt (after the NHS is privatised) and with pain my entire life?
I know
everybody has worries but I feel like it's more intensified when you have a disability. I've
been worrying about this stuff since I was just entering high school and it is crushingly
real and personal. If every person with a disability has to go through this I completely
understand the suicide statistics - why would I live in a world that hates me? I'm sorry to
be so depressing but this is why I hate when people dismiss it as "just a political opinion"
or "not personal." It absolutely is personal. Thank you for bringing this stuff to people's
attention - really enjoy your videos! Keep up the good work
Welfare reduces freedom, because it prevents you from being able to choose between having
a place to live and having access to healthcare, and instead forces you to have both. /s
I think the primary problem with neoliberalism is simply that it ignores class realities.
It ignores the material differences and power imbalances between employers and wage workers
and the fact that liberal society contains a ruling class that will always defend its
interest against the masses, and how the ruling class propagates the suffering and misery of
the lower class.
"Choose with your dollars" My father lives where the ONLY general store for MANY miles is
a Wal-mart. Just how much freaking frakkin choice is THAT?!?🤯🤯
"When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only
then will you realize that one cannot eat money." Quote of victims of a genocide nobody talks
about ..
"... "Instead of participating in power," he writes, "the virtual citizen is invited to have 'opinions': measurable responses to questions predesigned to elicit them." ..."
"... Political campaigns rarely discuss substantive issues. They center on manufactured political personalities, empty rhetoric, sophisticated public relations, slick advertising, propaganda and the constant use of focus groups and opinion polls to loop back to voters what they want to hear. Money has effectively replaced the vote. Every current presidential candidate -- including Bernie Sanders -- understands, to use Wolin's words, that "the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates." The citizen is irrelevant. He or she is nothing more than a spectator, allowed to vote and then forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and corporations and their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling. ..."
"... "If the main purpose of elections is to serve up pliant legislators for lobbyists to shape, such a system deserves to be called 'misrepresentative or clientry government,' " Wolin writes. "It is, at one and the same time, a powerful contributing factor to the depoliticization of the citizenry, as well as reason for characterizing the system as one of antidemocracy." ..."
Sheldon Wolin, our most important contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age
of 93. In his books " Democracy
Incorporated : Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism" and "
Politics and
Vision ," a massive survey of Western political thought that his former student Cornel West
calls "magisterial," Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind
the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate
power he calls "inverted totalitarianism."
Wendy
Brown , a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of Wolin's,
said in an email to me: "Resisting the monopolies on left theory by Marxism and on democratic
theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive -- even distinctively American -- analysis
of the political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He was especially prescient
in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call neoliberalism , and in
revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he took to be poisoning
democracy at its root."
Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his
last book, "Democracy Incorporated," details our
peculiar form of corporate totalitarianism. "One cannot point to any national
institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic," he writes in that book, "surely
not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial
presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media."
Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not
find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the
corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral
politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the
judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has
effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.
"Unlike the Nazis, who made life uncertain for the wealthy and privileged while providing
social programs for the working class and poor, inverted totalitarianism exploits the poor,
reducing or weakening health programs and social services, regimenting mass education for an
insecure workforce threatened by the importation of low-wage workers," Wolin writes.
"Employment in a high-tech, volatile, and globalized economy is normally as precarious as
during an old-fashioned depression. The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is
practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and
at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather
than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement." Inverted totalitarianism,
Wolin said when we met at his home in Salem, Ore., in 2014 to film a nearly three-hour interview , constantly
"projects power upwards." It is "the antithesis of constitutional power." It is designed to
create instability to keep a citizenry off balance and passive.
He writes, "Downsizing, reorganization, bubbles bursting, unions busted, quickly outdated
skills, and transfer of jobs abroad create not just fear but an economy of fear, a system of
control whose power feeds on uncertainty, yet a system that, according to its analysts, is
eminently rational."
Inverted totalitarianism also "perpetuates politics all the time," Wolin said when we spoke,
"but a politics that is not political." The endless and extravagant election cycles, he said,
are an example of politics without politics.
"Instead of participating in power," he writes, "the virtual citizen is invited to have
'opinions': measurable responses to questions predesigned to elicit them."
Political campaigns rarely discuss substantive issues. They center on manufactured political
personalities, empty rhetoric, sophisticated public relations, slick advertising, propaganda
and the constant use of focus groups and opinion polls to loop back to voters what they want to
hear. Money has effectively replaced the vote. Every current presidential candidate --
including Bernie Sanders -- understands, to use Wolin's words, that "the subject of empire is
taboo in electoral debates." The citizen is irrelevant. He or she is nothing more than a
spectator, allowed to vote and then forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and
corporations and their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling.
"If the main purpose of elections is to serve up pliant legislators for lobbyists to shape,
such a system deserves to be called 'misrepresentative or clientry government,' " Wolin writes.
"It is, at one and the same time, a powerful contributing factor to the depoliticization of the
citizenry, as well as reason for characterizing the system as one of antidemocracy."
The result, he writes, is that the public is "denied the use of state power." Wolin deplores
the trivialization of political discourse, a tactic used to leave the public fragmented,
antagonistic and emotionally charged while leaving corporate power and empire unchallenged.
"Cultural wars might seem an indication of strong political involvements," he writes.
"Actually they are a substitute. The notoriety they receive from the media and from politicians
eager to take firm stands on nonsubstantive issues serves to distract attention and contribute
to a cant politics of the inconsequential."
"The ruling groups can now operate on the assumption that they don't need the traditional
notion of something called a public in the broad sense of a coherent whole," he said in our
meeting. "They now have the tools to deal with the very disparities and differences that they
have themselves helped to create. It's a game in which you manage to undermine the cohesiveness
that the public requires if they [the public] are to be politically effective. And at the same
time, you create these different, distinct groups that inevitably find themselves in tension or
at odds or in competition with other groups, so that it becomes more of a melee than it does
become a way of fashioning majorities."
In classical totalitarian regimes, such as those of Nazi fascism or Soviet communism,
economics was subordinate to politics. But "under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is
true," Wolin writes. "Economics dominates politics -- and with that domination comes different
forms of ruthlessness."He continues: "The United States has become the showcase of how
democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed."
The corporate state, Wolin told me, is "legitimated by elections it controls." To extinguish
democracy, it rewrites and distorts laws and legislation that once protected democracy. Basic
rights are, in essence, revoked by judicial and legislative fiat. Courts and legislative
bodies, in the service of corporate power, reinterpret laws to strip them of their original
meaning in order to strengthen corporate control and abolish corporate oversight.
He writes: "Why negate a constitution, as the Nazis did, if it is possible simultaneously to
exploit porosity and legitimate power by means of judicial interpretations that declare
huge campaign contributions to be protected speech under the First Amendment, or that treat
heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations as a simple application of the
people's right to petition their government?"
Our system of inverted totalitarianism will avoid harsh and violent measures of control "as
long as dissent remains ineffectual," he told me. "The government does not need to stamp out
dissent. The uniformity of imposed public opinion through the corporate media does a very
effective job."
And the elites, especially the intellectual class, have been bought off. "Through a
combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving
university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially
so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly
integrated into the system," Wolin writes. "No books burned, no refugee Einsteins."
But, he warns, should the population -- steadily stripped of its most basic rights,
including the right to privacy, and increasingly impoverished and bereft of hope -- become
restive, inverted totalitarianism will become as brutal and violent as past totalitarian
states. "The war on terrorism, with its accompanying emphasis upon 'homeland security,'
presumes that state power, now inflated by doctrines
of preemptive war and released from treaty obligations and the potential constraints of
international judicial bodies, can turn inwards," he writes, "confident that in its domestic
pursuit of terrorists the powers it claimed, like the powers projected abroad, would be
measured, not by ordinary constitutional standards, but by the shadowy and ubiquitous character
of terrorism as officially defined."
The indiscriminate police violence in poor communities of color is an example of the ability
of the corporate state to "legally" harass and kill citizens with impunity. The cruder forms of
control -- from militarized police to wholesale surveillance, as well as police serving as
judge, jury and executioner, now a reality for the underclass -- will become a reality for all
of us should we begin to resist the continued funneling of power and wealth upward. We are
tolerated as citizens, Wolin warns, only as long as we participate in the illusion of a
participatory democracy. The moment we rebel and refuse to take part in the illusion, the face
of inverted totalitarianism will look like the face of past systems of totalitarianism.
"The significance of the African-American prison population is political," he writes. "What
is notable about the African-American population generally is that it is highly sophisticated
politically and by far the one group that throughout the twentieth century kept alive a spirit
of resistance and rebelliousness. In that context, criminal justice is as much a strategy of
political neutralization as it is a channel of instinctive racism."
In his writings, Wolin expresses consternation for a population severed from print and the
nuanced world of ideas. He sees cinema, like television, as "tyrannical" because of its ability
to "block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue." He
rails against what he calls a "monochromatic media" with corporate-approved pundits used to
identify "the problem and its parameters, creating a box that dissenters struggle vainly to
elude. The critic who insists on changing the context is dismissed as irrelevant, extremist,
'the Left' -- or ignored altogether."
The constant dissemination of illusions permits myth rather than reality to dominate the
decisions of the power elites. And when myth dominates, disaster descends upon the empire, as
14 years of futile war in the Middle East and our failure to react to climate change
illustrate. Wolin writes:
When myth begins to govern decision-makers in a world where ambiguity and stubborn facts
abound, the result is a disconnect between the actors and the reality. They convince
themselves that the forces of darkness possess weapons of mass destruction and nuclear
capabilities: that their own nation is privileged by a god who inspired the Founding Fathers
and the writing of the nation's constitution; and that a class structure of great and
stubborn inequalities does not exist. A grim but joyous few see portents of a world that is
living out "the last days."
Wolin was a bombardier and a navigator on a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber in the South Pacific
in World War II. He flew 51 combat missions. The planes had crews of up to 10. From
Guadalcanal, he advanced with American forces as they captured islands in the Pacific. During
the campaign the military high command decided to direct the B-24 bombers -- which were huge
and difficult to fly in addition to having little maneuverability -- against Japanese ships, a
tactic that saw tremendous losses of planes and American lives. The use of the B-24, nicknamed
"the flying boxcar" and "the flying coffin," to attack warships bristling with antiaircraft
guns exposed for Wolin the callousness of military commanders who blithely sacrificed their air
crews and war machines in schemes that offered little chance of success.
"It was terrible," he said of the orders to bomb ships. "We received awful losses from that,
because these big, lumbering aircraft, particularly flying low trying to hit the Japanese navy
-- and we lost countless people in it, countless."
"We had quite a few psychological casualties men, boys, who just couldn't take it anymore,"
he said, "just couldn't stand the strain of getting up at 5 in the morning and proceeding to
get into these aircraft and go and getting shot at for a while and coming back to rest for
another day."Wolin saw the militarists and the corporatists, who formed an unholy coalition to
orchestrate the rise of a global American empire after the war, as the forces that extinguished
American democracy. He called inverted totalitarianism "the true face of Superpower." These war
profiteers and militarists, advocating the doctrine of total war during the Cold War, bled the
country of resources. They also worked in tandem to dismantle popular institutions and
organizations such as labor unions to politically disempower and impoverish workers. They
"normalized" war. And Wolin warns that, as in all empires, they eventually will be "eviscerated
by their own expansionism." There will never be a return to democracy, he cautions, until the
unchecked power of the militarists and corporatists is dramatically curtailed. A war state
cannot be a democratic state.
Wolin writes:
National defense was declared inseparable from a strong economy. The fixation upon
mobilization and rearmament inspired the gradual disappearance from the national political
agenda of the regulation and control of corporations. The defender of the free world needed
the power of the globalizing, expanding corporation, not an economy hampered by "trust
busting." Moreover, since the enemy was rabidly anticapitalist, every measure that
strengthened capitalism was a blow against the enemy. Once the battle lines between communism
and the "free society" were drawn, the economy became untouchable for purposes other than
"strengthening" capitalism. The ultimate merger would be between capitalism and democracy.
Once the identity and security of democracy were successfully identified with the Cold War
and with the methods for waging it, the stage was set for the intimidation of most politics
left or right.
The result is a nation dedicated almost exclusively to waging war.
"When a constitutionally limited government utilizes weapons of horrendous destructive
power, subsidizes their development, and becomes the world's largest arms dealer," Wolin
writes, "the Constitution is conscripted to serve as power's apprentice rather than its
conscience."
He goes on:
That the patriotic citizen unswervingly supports the military and its huge budget means
that conservatives have succeeded in persuading the public that the military is distinct from
government. Thus the most substantial element of state power is removed from public debate.
Similarly in his/her new status as imperial citizen the believer remains contemptuous of
bureaucracy yet does not hesitate to obey the directives issued by the Department of Homeland
Security, the largest and most intrusive governmental department in the history of the
nation. Identification with militarism and patriotism, along with the images of American
might projected by the media, serves to make the individual citizen feel stronger, thereby
compensating for the feelings of weakness visited by the economy upon an overworked,
exhausted, and insecure labor force. For its antipolitics inverted totalitarianism requires
believers, patriots, and nonunion "guest workers."
Sheldon Wolin was often considered an outcast among contemporary political theorists whose
concentration on quantitative analysis and behaviorialism led them to eschew the examination of
broad political theory and ideas. Wolin insisted that philosophy, even that written by the
ancient Greeks, was not a dead relic but a vital tool to examine and challenge the assumptions
and ideologies of contemporary systems of power and political thought. Political theory, he
argued, was "primarily a civic and secondarily an academic activity." It had a role "not just
as an historical discipline that dealt with the critical examination of idea systems," he told
me, but as a force "in helping to fashion public policies and governmental directions, and
above all civic education, in a way that would further the goals of a more democratic, more
egalitarian, more educated society." His 1969 essay "Political Theory as a Vocation" argued for
this imperative and chastised fellow academics who focused their work on data collection and
academic minutiae. He writes, with his usual lucidity and literary flourishes, in that
essay:
In a fundamental sense, our world has become as perhaps no previous world has, the product
of design, the product of theories about human structures deliberately created rather than
historically articulated. But in another sense, the embodiment of theory in the world has
resulted in a world impervious to theory. The giant, routinized structures defy fundamental
alteration and, at the same time, display an unchallengeable legitimacy, for the rational,
scientific, and technological principles on which they are based seem in perfect accord with
an age committed to science, rationalism and technology. Above all, it is a world which
appears to have rendered epic theory superfluous. Theory, as Hegel had foreseen, must take
the form of "explanation." Truly, it seems to be the age when Minerva's owl has taken flight.
Wolin's 1960 masterpiece "Politics and Vision," subtitled "Continuity and Innovation in
Western Political Thought," drew on a vast array of political theorists and philosophers
including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, John Calvin, Martin Luther,
Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Max Weber, John Dewey and Hannah Arendt to
reflect back to us our political and cultural reality. His task, he stated at the end of the
book, was, "in the era of Superpower," to "nurture the civic consciousness of the society." The
imperative to amplify and protect democratic traditions from the contemporary forces that
sought to destroy them permeated all of his work, including his books " Hobbes
and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory " and " Tocqueville Between Two Worlds : The
Making of a Political and Theoretical Life."
Wolin's magnificence as a scholar was matched by his magnificence as a human being. He stood
with students at UC Berkeley, where he taught, to support the Free Speech Movement and wrote
passionately in its defense. Many of these essays were published in "The Berkeley Rebellion and
Beyond: Essays on Politics and Education in the Technological Society." Later, as a professor
at Princeton University, he was one of a handful of faculty members who joined students to call
for divestment of investments in apartheid South Africa. He once accompanied students to
present the case to Princeton alumni. "I've never been jeered quite so roundly," he said. "Some
of them called me [a] 50-year-old sophomore and that kind of thing."
From 1981 to 1983, Wolin published Democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal and Radical
Change. In its pages he and other writers called out the con game of neoliberalism, the danger
of empire, the rise of unchecked corporate power and the erosion of democratic institutions and
ideals. The journal swiftly made him a pariah within the politics department at Princeton."I
remember once when I was up editing that journal, I left a copy of it on the table in the
faculty room hoping that somebody would read it and comment," he said. "I never heard a word.
And during all the time I was there and doing Democracy, I never had one colleague come up to
me and either say something positive or even negative about it. Just absolute silence."
Max Weber , whom
Wolin called "the greatest of all sociologists," argues in his essay "Politics as a Vocation"
that those who dedicate their lives to striving for justice in the modern political arena are
like the classical heroes who can never overcome what the ancient Greeks called fortuna.
These heroes, Wolin writes in "Politics and Vision," rise up nevertheless "to heights of moral
passion and grandeur, harried by a deep sense of responsibility." Yet, Wolin goes on, "at
bottom, [the contemporary hero] is a figure as futile and pathetic as his classical
counterpart. The fate of the classical hero was that he could never overcome contingency or
fortuna ; the special irony of the modern hero is that he struggles in a world where
contingency has been routed by bureaucratized procedures and nothing remains for the hero to
contend against. Weber's political leader is rendered superfluous by the very bureaucratic
world that Weber discovered: even charisma has been bureaucratized. We are left with the
ambiguity of the political man fired by deep passion -- 'to be passionate, ira et
studium , is the element of the political leader' -- but facing the impersonal world of
bureaucracy which lives by the passionless principle that Weber frequently cited, sine ira
et studio , 'without scorn or bias.' "
Wolin writes that even when faced with certain defeat, all of us are called to the "awful
responsibility" of the fight for justice, equality and liberty.
"You don't win," Wolin said at the end of our talk. "Or you win rarely. And if you win, it's
often for a very short time. That's why politics is a vocation for Weber. It's not an
occasional undertaking that we assume every two years or every four years when there's an
election. It's a constant occupation and preoccupation. And the problem, as Weber saw it, was
to understand it not as a partisan kind of education in the politicians or political party
sense, but as in the broad understanding of what political life should be and what is required
to make it sustainable. He's calling for a certain kind of understanding that's very different
from what we think about when we associate political understanding with how do you vote or what
party do you support or what cause do you support. Weber's asking us to step back and say what
kind of political order, and the values associated with it that it promotes, are we willing to
really give a lot for, including sacrifice."
Wolin embodied the qualities Weber ascribes to the hero. He struggled against forces he knew
he could not vanquish. He never wavered in the fight as an intellectual and, more important, in
the fight as a citizen. He was one of the first to explain to us the transformation of our
capitalist democracy into a new species of totalitarianism. He warned us of the consequences of
unbridled empire or superpower. He called on us to rise up and resist. His "Democracy
Incorporated" was ignored by every major newspaper and journal in the country. This did not
surprise him. He knew his power. So did his enemies. All his fears for the nation have come to
pass. A corporate monstrosity rules us. If we held up a scorecard we would have to say Wolin
lost, but we would also have to acknowledge the integrity, brilliance, courage and nobility of
his life.
"... The western response to the Coronavirus spoke loudly: The U.S. and Europe have appeared powerful because they projected the illusion of competence; of being able to act effectively; of being strategic in their actions. On Coronavirus, the U.S. has shown itself incompetent, dysfunctional, and indifferent to human affliction. ..."
The western response to the Coronavirus spoke loudly: The U.S. and Europe have appeared
powerful because they projected the illusion of competence; of being able to act effectively;
of being strategic in their actions. On Coronavirus, the U.S. has shown itself incompetent,
dysfunctional, and indifferent to human affliction.
Trump is fighting an existential war: on the one hand, the coming Election is not merely the
most important in the U.S.' history. It will be existential. No more is Blue/Red a contrived
theatre for the electorate – this is deadly serious.
For an important segment of the population (no longer the majority), to lose in this coming
election would signify their ejection from power and politics, and their substitution by a
culturally different class of Americans, with different cosmopolitan and diversity values. It
is the tipping point – two irreconcilable visions of American life believe that they can
continue only if they own the whole order, and the other side be utterly crushed.
And on the other hand, Trump sees the U.S. fighting a similarly existential war, albeit at a
global plane. He is fighting a hidden 'war' to retain America's present dominance over global
money (the dollar) – the source of its true power. For Americans to lose this parallel
competition to the EU's and China's multilateral values of global co-operation and financial
governance, would imply Americans' (i.e. white Anglo Saxon's) ejection from control over the
global financial system, and (again) their substitution by a quite different vision (i.e. a
Soros-Gates-Pelosi vision), advocating the 'progressive' values of ecological and financial,
global governance.
Again – two irreconcilable visions of the global order, with each party believing that
it must own the whole order to survive.
Hence Trump's full-spectrum disruption of China (and the whole multilateral ideology) to
maintain dollar hegemony. Europe, on one side, exemplifies the shift towards a transnational
regulatory and monetary super-state. And China , on the other,
is not only Europe's willing partner, but the only power capable of sitting atop this globalist
ambition, giving it the (required) financial weight and substance. This constitutes the
existential threat to the U.S.' exceptional control of the global financial system – and
therefore over global political power.
A sovereignty-ist Russia may not be as drawn to this cosmopolitan vision as China, but
really it has little choice. Because, as President Putin repeatedly points out, the dollar
constitutes the toxic problem plaguing the world trading system. And in this, Russia cannot
stand aloof. The dollar is the problem for the Middle East too, with its noxious corollaries of
oil, currency, trade and sanctions wars. The region will not long be able to sit on the fence,
keeping distant from this struggle for the global financial order.
The Middle East, as deference to the U.S. illusion of power wanes, has as little choice as
has Russia: It will be pushed to view the U.S. as its past, and to 'Look East' for its
future.
And Israel will cease to be the pivot around which the Middle East revolves.
"... The media would sensationalize any act of violence involving white on black and brown. They ignored all the violence of black and brown on white. This uneven media reporting was based on their desire to reinforce the mantra of "white people are evil racists, black and brown people are victims and good." ..."
"... Because it would paint themselves as supporters of "social justice" they created a false version of reality where everything bad in society was because of white people being racist. Never mind the actual causes of societal discontent being the exploitation by the elite. Because the media is the elite they don't want you to hate them. So they created a false victimizer they could blame for all the problems of society. ..."
"Partisan politics has created severe divisions in society. Such divisions restrict and
disturb people's thinking. People's support for a particular party is only a matter of
stance, which provides a shelter to politicians who violate people's interests.
"As elections come and go, it is simply about one group of elites replacing the other. The
intertwined interests between the two groups are much greater than those between the
victorious one and the electorate who vote for them.
"To cover such deception, the key agenda in the US is either a partisan fight or a
conflict with foreign countries. The severe racial discrimination and wealth disparities are
marginalized topics."
I wonder if the writer would like to see his conclusion proven wrong:
"Judging from the superficial comments and statements from US politicians on the protests,
the outsiders can easily draw the conclusion that solving problems is not on the minds of the
country, and elites are just fearlessly waiting for this wave of demonstrations to die
out."
In order to solve problems, one must know their components and roots, and that demands
honesty in making the assessment. Looking back at the assessments of Cornel West and the
producers of the Four Horsemen documentary, the main culprit is the broken political
system/failed social experiment, which are essentially one in the same as the flawed system
produced the failure. Most of us have determined that changing the system via the system will
never work because the system has empowered a Class that has no intentions on allowing its
power to be diminished, and that Class is currently using the system to further impoverish
and enslave the citizenry into Debt Peonage while increasing its own power. The #1 problem is
removing the Financial Parasite Class from power. Yes, at the moment that seems as difficult
as destroying the Death Star's reactor before it blows up Yavin 4, but the stakes involved
are every bit as high as those portrayed in Lucas's Star Wars , as the Evil of the
Empire and that of the Parasite Class are the same Evil.
What political demand could one possibly make by now, and of whom would you make it? Reform
is impossible, and there's no legitimate authority left (if there ever was in the first
place).
Posted by: Russ | Jun 1 2020 17:49 utc | 23
Indeed, apart from the shock of witnessing one of them murderd in plain daylight as if he
were a vermin, I think that the people, especially young, reacted that anarchic way because
they really see no future. They see how their country functions at steering wheel blows
especially through the pandemic, preview they will e in the need soon, even that they will be
murdered without contemeplation,and go out there to grab whatever they could...
We forget that they are under Trump regime and Trump has supported always their foes,
witnessing such assassination in plain daylight, without any officila doing nothing, not even
charging the obvious culprits was felt by tese people as if the hunting season on nigers and
lefties" had been declared. No other way yo ucan explain the sudden union of such ammount of
black and white young people. Thye felt all targets of the ops or of Trump´s white
supreamcist militias after four years of being dgreaded as subhumans. In fact, were not for
the riots to turn so violent, I fear carnages of all these peoples would have started.
The people, brainwashed or not, at least when they are young, still conserve some survival
instincts and some common sense too.
Yes, the republican model of organization is naturally unstable and doomed to collapse.
Everybody knows what happened to the Roman Republic: tendency to polarization, civil war and
collapse.
However, the reverse is also true: when the economy is flying high, every political system
works. Everybody is happy when there's wealth for everybody.
The present problem, therefore, is inherent to the capitalist system, not with the
republican system per se.
The media and politicians have repeated a mantra for years n order to gain power by
exploiting social and racial faultlines. They didn't want to deal with the actual cause of
societal discontent which is their own support of an exploitative economic system which
disempowers and pushed down everyone but the 1%. So they invented a false cause of discontent
in order to appear as saviors who are bringing a message of Hope and Change
White people are racist. White people are inherently evil and greedy. THAT IS THE PROBLEM.
Black and Brown people are good, Black and Brown people are victims of the racist greedy
evil white people.
White people are racist. White people are inherently evil and greedy. THAT IS THE
PROBLEM. Black and Brown people are good, Black and Brown people are victims of the racist
greedy evil white people.
After enough time has gone by, we have a generation of young people of all colors who
believe the above mantra with all their heart because of hearing that mantra every day in the
media, in schools, in movies, from leaders. The media knowing that, would then look for ways
to exploit their hatred of "white racism against black and brown people."
The media would sensationalize any act of violence involving white on black and brown.
They ignored all the violence of black and brown on white. This uneven media reporting was
based on their desire to reinforce the mantra of "white people are evil racists, black and
brown people are victims and good."
Because it would paint themselves as supporters of "social justice" they created a
false version of reality where everything bad in society was because of white people being
racist. Never mind the actual causes of societal discontent being the exploitation by the
elite. Because the media is the elite they don't want you to hate them. So they created a
false victimizer they could blame for all the problems of society.
Because violence from black and brown on white was never reported by the media except in
local news, people only heard from the national narrative of white violence of black and
brown because people don't pay attention to local news. They grew up believing the police
only abused black and brown people, they grew up believing that random street violence was
only from white people against black and brown. None of which is true.
This was bound to end up with a generation of people who believed the false narrative
where America is a nation where black and brown people are always the victims, and white
people are always the victimizers. And as you can see in the riots, the rioters are almost
all under 30. A generation has grown up being brainwashed by the mantra:
White people are racist. White people are inherently evil and greedy. THAT IS THE PROBLEM.
Black and Brown people are good, Black and Brown people are victims of the racist greedy
evil white people.
That is why so many people are perfectly fine with the violence and looting based on a few
recent incidents of white on black violence. During the same time period there was plenty of
black on black violence, plenty of brown on brown violence, and plenty of black and brown on
white violence. But the national media never highlights any violence but white on black and
brown. That is what has led to the new normal where any violence involving white on black or
brown will be blown up WAY out of proportion to the reality of violence in America. Which is
an equal opportunity game. A generation of people has grown up to believe that white racism
is the cause of all the problems.
Meanwhile the elites sit in their yachts and laugh. The rabble are busy fighting over race
when the real issue is ignored. The media has done their job admirably. Their job is to
deflect rage from the elite to racism. From wealthy exploitation of the commons, to racism.
As long as the underclasses are busy blaming racism then the politicians, business leaders,
and media are satisfied because they are the actual ones to blame. They are the enemy.
They blame racism for all the problems as a way to hide that truth of their own culpability
for the problems in society. THEIR OWN GREED AND CONTEMPT FOR THE UNDERCLASS.
Riots are not a political movement and they will dissipate soon. Leaving just strengthened the national-security state. That's
what will happen next.
Notable quotes:
"... If the combination of peaceful protesting, looting and violence witnessed across American cities over the past few days completely caught you off guard, you're likely to come to the worst possible conclusion about what to do next. The knee-jerk response I'm already seeing from many is to crush the dissent by all means necessary, but that's exactly how you give the imperial state and oligarchy more power. Power it will never relinquish. ..."
"... On the one hand, you can't pillage the public so blatantly and consistently for decades while telling them voting will change things and not expect violence once people realize it doesn't. On the other hand, street violence plays perfectly into the hands of those who would take the current moment and use it to advocate for a further loss of civil liberties, more internal militarization, and the emergence of an overt domestic police state that's been itching to fully manifest since 9/11. ..."
It's with an extremely heavy heart that I sit down to write today's post.
Although widespread civil unrest was easy to predict, it doesn't make the situation any less sad and dangerous. We're in the thick
of it now, and how we respond will likely determine the direction of the country for decades to come.
If the combination of peaceful protesting, looting and violence witnessed across American cities over the past few days completely
caught you off guard, you're likely to come to the worst possible conclusion about what to do next. The knee-jerk response I'm already
seeing from many is to crush the dissent by all means necessary, but that's exactly how you give the imperial state and oligarchy
more power. Power it will never relinquish.
What's happening in America right now is what happens in a failed state.
The U.S. is a failed state. Now the imperial national security state is going to flex at home like never before.
I spent the last decade of my life trying to spread the word to avoid this, but here we are.
I don't think people understand the significance of the President declaring "Antifa" a "terrorist organization". The Patriot
Act and provisions of the NDAA of 2012 make this frightening. Because Antifa is informal it puts all protestors in danger--like
declaring them un-citizens.
GOP @SenTomCotton : "If local politicians
will not do their most basic job to protect our citizens, let's see how these anarchists respond when the 101st Airborne is on
the other side of the street." pic.twitter.com/NyojLoOEAT
-- The American Independent (@AmerIndependent)
June 1, 2020
The pressure cooker situation that erupted over the weekend has been building for five decades, but really accelerated over the
past twenty years. After every crisis of the 21st century there's been this "do whatever it takes mentality," which resulted in more
wealth and power for the national security state and oligarchy, and less resources, opportunities and civil liberties for the many.
If anything, it's surprising it took so long to get here, partly a testament to how skilled a salesman for the power structure Obama
was.
Your election was a chance to create real change, but instead you chose to protect bankers while looting the economy on behalf
of oligarchs.
You and Trump aren't much different when it comes to the big structural problems, you were just better at selling oligarchy
and empire. https://t.co/QuSQNApeLY
The covid-19 pandemic, related societal lockdown and another round of in your face economic looting by Congress and the Federal
Reserve merely served as an accelerant, and the only thing missing was some sort of catalyst combined with warmer weather. Now that
the eruption has occurred, I hope cooler heads can prevail on all sides.
On the one hand, you can't pillage the public so blatantly and consistently for decades while telling them voting will change
things and not expect violence once people realize it doesn't. On the other hand, street violence plays perfectly into the hands
of those who would take the current moment and use it to advocate for a further loss of civil liberties, more internal militarization,
and the emergence of an overt domestic police state that's been itching to fully manifest since 9/11.
It's my view we need to take the current moment and admit the unrest is a symptom of a deeply entrenched and corrupt bipartisan
imperial oligarchy that cares only about its own wealth and power. If people of goodwill across the ideological spectrum don't take
a step back and point out who the real looters are, nothing's going to improve and we'll put another bandaid on a systemic cancer
as we continue our longstanding march toward less freedom and more authoritarianism
Don't understand the protests? What you're seeing is people pushed to the edge
By KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR – Los Angeles Times
What was your first reaction when you saw the video of the white cop kneeling on
George Floyd's neck while Floyd croaked, "I can't breathe"?
If you're white, you probably muttered a horrified, "Oh, my God" while shaking your
head at the cruel injustice. If you're black, you probably leapt to your feet, cursed,
maybe threw something (certainly wanted to throw something), while shouting, "Not @#$%!
again!" Then you remember the two white vigilantes accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery as
he jogged through their neighborhood in February, and how if it wasn't for that video
emerging a few weeks ago, they would have gotten away with it. And how those Minneapolis
cops claimed Floyd was resisting arrest but a store's video showed he wasn't. And how the
cop on Floyd's neck wasn't an enraged redneck stereotype, but a sworn officer who looked
calm and entitled and devoid of pity: the banality of evil incarnate.
Maybe you also are thinking about the Karen in Central Park who called 911 claiming
the black man who asked her to put a leash on her dog was threatening her. Or the black
Yale University grad student napping in the common room of her dorm who was reported by a
white student. Because you realize it's not just a supposed "black criminal" who is
targeted, it's the whole spectrum of black faces from Yonkers to Yale.
You start to wonder if it should be all black people who wear body cams, not the
cops.
What do you see when you see angry black protesters amassing outside police stations
with raised fists? If you're white, you may be thinking, "They certainly aren't social
distancing." Then you notice the black faces looting Target and you think, "Well, that
just hurts their cause." Then you see the police station on fire and you wag a finger
saying, "That's putting the cause backward."
You're not wrong -- but you're not right, either. The black community is used to the
institutional racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though
we do all the conventional things to raise public and political awareness -- write
articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the continued devastation on
CNN, support candidates who promise change -- the needle hardly budges.
But COVID-19 has been slamming the consequences of all that home as we die at a
significantly higher rate than whites, are the first to lose our jobs, and watch
helplessly as Republicans try to keep us from voting .
Bert Schlitz , May 31, 2020 7:14 pm
The protests are self centered crap blacks do year after year. Considering 370 whites over
100 Latinos were killed by cops, many as bad as that guy in minnie. Blacks have a Trumptard
mentality. We have a ecological disaster, a economic disaster and pandemic(when th they are
spreading). Yet let's whine about one bad cop related homicide.
This may begin the breakup of the Democratic party and the blacks. The differences are just
to large.
Kaleberg , May 31, 2020 9:40 pm
It's rather sad that it takes a massive civil disturbance to get the authorities to arrest a
man videotaped killing another. You'd think that would just happen as a matter of course, but
that's how it works in this country.
THE WAY BACK -- THE ONLY WAY BACK -- BOTH ECONOMICALLY AND POLITICALLY (pardon me if I take
up a lot of space -- almost everyone else has said most of what they want to say)
The minimum wage itself should only mark the highest wage that we presume firms with highest
labor costs can pay* -- like fast food with 25% labor costs. Lower labor cost businesses --
e.g., retail like Walgreens and Target with 10-15% labor costs can potentially pay north of
$20/hr; Walmart with 7% labor costs, $25/hr!
That kind of income can only be squeezed out of the consumer market (meaning out of the
consumer) by labor union bargaining.
Raise fast food wages from $10/hr to $15/hr and prices go up only a doable 12.5%. Raise
Walgreens, Target from $10/hr to $20/hr and prices there only go up a piddling 6.25%. Keeping
the math easy here -- I know that Walgreens and Target pay more to start but that only
reinforces my argument about how much labor income is being left on the (missing) bargaining
table.
Hook up Walmart with 7% labor costs with the Teamsters Union and the wage and benefit sky
might be the limit! Don't forget (everybody seems to) that as more income shifts to lower wage
workers, more demand starts to come from lower wage workers -- reinforcing their job security
as they spend more proportionately at lower wage firms (does not work for low wage employees of
high end restaurants -- the exception that actually proves the rule).
Add in sector wide labor agreements and watch Germany appear on this side of the Atlantic
overnight.
* * * * * *
If Republicans held the House in the last (115th) Congress they would have passed
HR2723-Employee Rights Act -- mandating new union recertification/decertification paper ballots
in any bargaining unit that has had experienced "turnover, expansion, or alteration by merger
of unit represented employees exceeding 50 percent of the bargaining unit" by the date of the
enactment -- and for all time from thereafter. Trump would have signed it and virtually every
union in the country would have experienced mandated recert/decert votes in every bargaining
unit. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2723/text
Democrats can make the most obvious point about what was lacking in the Republican bill by
pretending to be for a cert/recert bill that mandates union ballots only at places where there
is no union now. Republicans jumping up and down can scream the point for us that there is no
reason to have ballots in non union places and not in unionized workplaces -- and vice
versa.
* * * * * *
Biggest problem advocating the vastly attractive and all healing proposal of federally
mandated cert/recert/decert elections seems to be that nobody will discuss it as long as nobody
else discusses it -- some kind of innate social behavior I think, from deep in our (pea sized)
midbrains. How else can you explain the perfect pitch's neglect. I suspect that if I waved a
$100 bill in front of a bunch of progressives and offered it to the first one would say the
words out loud: "Regularly scheduled union elections are the only way to restore shared
prosperity and political fairness to America", that I might not get one taker. FWIW.
Another big problem when I try to talk to workers about this on the street -- just to get a
reaction -- is that more than half have no idea in the world what unions are all about. Those
who do understand, think the idea so sensible they often think action must be pending.
econ101 should tell you that the eitc is a subsidy to the corporations that hire droves of
low-paid workers, with meagre spillover to the workers themselves. More effective and
persistent improvements to social justice would come from significant increases to the minimum
wage, societal support to unionization, and other efforts to increase the threshold of what is
considered by society to be the bare minimum of compensation for work.
The concomitant decline in the value of the dollar and the terms of trade would be small
compared to the reduction in inequality.
Bernard , June 1, 2020 5:21 pm
such a third world country as America , riots are the only way to get heard for some. the
Elite have been looting us blind for decades, the Covid bail outs to Corporations by the Elites
in DC as the latest installment of Capitalist theft know as Business as Usual.
it's all about the money.
sick,sick country praising capitalism over everything else.
the comfortable white people are afraid of losing what they have. Divide and Conquer is the
Republican and now Democratic way they run America.
to the rich go the spoils. the rest, well. screw them .
the Lee Atwater idea to use coded language when St. Reagan implemented the destruction of
America society, coincided with St. Thatcher's destruction of England.
the White elites post Civil War in the South knew how to divide the poor whites and the poor
blacks.
that is how we got to where we are now.
Did you see any of the bankers go to jail for the 2008 ripoff?
not one and they got bonuses for their "deeds."
America, such a nation of Grifters, Thieves and Scam artist. like Pelosi , McConnel and all
the people in DC and the Business men who sold out our country and the American people for
"small change".
God forbid Corporations should ever have to pay for the damage they have done to America and
its" people. My RIGHT to Greed trumps your right to clean air, water, safe neighborhoods, says
Capitalism!
the Rich get richer and the poor get poorer, Everybody Knows!!!
But let's not focus on things lest some uncomfortable truths.
Sound too familiar? Sometime in the late 80s (??) Americans began to see day labors line up at Home Depot and Lowe's lots in numbers
not seen since The Great Depression. Manufacturing Corporations began subbing out their work to sub-contractors, otherwise known
as employees without benefits; Construction Contractors subbed out construction work to these employees without benefits; Engineering
Firms subbed out engineering to these employees without benefits; Landscapers' workers were now sub-contractors/independent contractors;
Here, in the SF Bay Area, time and again, we saw vans loads of undocumented Hispanics under a 'Labor Contractor' come in from the
Central Valley to build condos; the white Contractor for the project didn't have a single employee; none of the workers got a W-2.
Recall watching, sometime in the 90s (??), a familiar, well dressed, rotund guest from Wall Street, on the PBS News Hour, forcefully
proclaiming to the TV audience:
American workers are going to have to learn to compete with the Chinese; Civil Service employees, factory employees, are all
going to have to work for less
All this subcontracting, independent contractors, was a scam, a scam meant to circumvent paying going wages and benefits, to enhance
profit margins; a scam that transferred more wealth to the top. Meanwhile back at The Ranch, after the H1B Immigration Act of 1990,
Microsoft could hire programmers from India for one-half the cost of a citizen programmer. Half of Bill Gates' fortune was resultant
these labor savings; the other half was made off those not US Citizens. Taking a cue, Banks, Bio-Techs, some City and State Governments
began subcontracting out their programming to H1Bs. Often, the subcontractors/labor contractors (often themselves immigrants) providing
the programmers, held the programmers' passports/visas for security.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, friends of Bush/Cheney made fortunes on clean up contracts they subbed out for next to
nothing; the independent/subcontractor scam was now officially governmentally sanctioned.
By about 2000 we began to hear the term gig-workers applied to these employees without benefits. Uber appeared in 2007 to be followed
by Lift. Both are scams based on paying less than prevailing wages, on not providing worker benefits,
These days, the nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in America, shows footage of Food
Banks in California with lines 2! miles long. Many of those waiting in these lines didn't have a real job before; they were gig-workers;
they can't apply for Unemployment Benefits. It is estimated that 1.6 million American workers (1% of the workforce) are gig-workers;
they don't have a real job. That 1% is in addition to the 16 million American workers (10% of the workforce) that are independent
contractors. Of the more than 40 million currently unemployed Americans, some 17 million are either gig-workers or subcontractors/independent
contractors. All of these are scams meant to transfer more wealth to the top. All of these are scams with American Workers the victims;
scams, in a race to the bottom.
Democrats in the so called battle ground states would clean up at the polls with this. Why do you think those states strayed?
It was because Obama and Hillary had no idea what they really needed. Voters had no idea what they SPECIFICALLY needed either
-- UNIONS! They had been deunionized so thoroughly for so long that they THEMSELVES no long knew what they were missing (frogs
in the slowly boiling pot).
In 1988 Jesse Jackson took the Democratic primary in Michigan with 54% against Dukakis and Gephardt. Obama beat Wall Street
Romney and red-white-and-blue McCain in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. But nobody told these voters -- because nobody seems to
remember -- what they really needed. These voter just knew by 2016 that Democrats had not what they needed and looked elsewhere
-- anywhere else!
Strom presents an easy as can be, on-step-back treatment that should go down oh, so smoothly and sweetly. What do you think?
ken melvin , May 31, 2020 1:04 pm
Denis
Thanks for your comment and the link. Wow! Where to start, huh?
SEIU was a player from the get go, but I don't want to go there just now.
Before Reagan, there was the first rust belt move to the non-union south. Why was the south so anti-union? I think this stuff
is engendered from infancy and most of us are incapable of thinking anew when it comes to stuff our parents 'taught' us. MLK was
the best thing that ever happened to the dirt-road poor south, yet they hated him and they hated the very unions that might have
lifted them up. They did seem to take pleasure in the yanks' loss of jobs.
I think the Reagan era was prelude to what is going on now, i.e., going backward while yelling whee look at me go. No doubt,
Reagan turned union members against their own unions. But, the genesis of demise probably lay with automation and the early offshoring
to Mexico. By Reagan, the car plants were losing jobs to Toyota and Honda and automation. By 1990, car plants that had previously
employed 5,000, now automated, produced more cars employing only 1200. At the time, much of the nation's wealth was still derived
from car production.
Skipping forward a bit, the democrats blew it for years with all their talk about the 'middle-class' without realizing it was
the 'disappearing middle-class'. They ignored the poor working-class vote and lost election after election.
I've come to not like the term labor, think it affords capital an undeserved status, though much diminished, I think thought
all workers would be better off in a union. Otherwise, as we are witnessing, there is no parity between workers and wealth; we
are in a race to the bottom with the wealth increasingly go to the top.
ken melvin , May 31, 2020 1:15 pm
Matthew – thanks for your comment
I think that we are into a transition (about 45 yrs into) as great as the industrial revolution. We, as probably those poor
souls of the 18th and 19th centuries did, are floundering, unable to come to terms with what is going on.
I also think that those such as the Kochs have a good grasp of what is going on and are moving to protect themselves and their
class.
ken melvin , May 31, 2020 1:21 pm
EMichael, thanks for the comment
Are you implying that the politicians are way behind the curve? If so, I think that you are right.
Let me share what I was thinking last night about thinking:
Descartes' problem was that he desperately wanted to make philosophy work within the framework of his religion, Catholicism.
Paul Krugman desperately wants to make economics all work within the Holy Duality of Capitalism and Free Markets. Even Joe Stiglitz
can't step out of this text. All things being possible, it is possible that either could come up with a solution to today's economic
problems that would fit within the Two; but the odds are not good. Better to think anew.
We see politicians try and try to find solutions for today's problems from within their own dogmas/ideologies. Even if they
can't, they persist, they still try to impose these dogmas/ideologies in the desperate hope they might work if only applied to
a greater degree. How else explain any belief that markets could anticipate and respond to pandemics? That markets could best
respond to housing demand?
Racism Is the Biggest Reason the U.S. Safety Net Is So Weak
Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, who died last week, found that ethnic divisions made the country less effective at providing
public goods.
7:50 AM · May 31, 2020
The Alesina/Glaeser/Sacerdote paper on why America doesn't have a European-style welfare state -- racism -- had a big impact
on my own thinking 2/
For a long time anyone who pointed out that the modern GOP is basically a party that serves plutocratic ends by weaponizing
white racism was treated as "shrill" and partisan. Can we now admit the obvious? 3/
Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?
By Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote
Abstract
European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic models suggest that
redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax income distribution, the volatility of income (perhaps
because of trade shocks), the social costs of taxation and the expected income mobility of the median voter. None of these factors
appear to explain the differences between the US and Europe. Instead, the differences appear to be the result of racial heterogeneity
in the US and American political institutions. Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately
black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the growth of a socialist party, and more generally
limited the political power of the poor.
rick shapiro , May 31, 2020 2:07 pm
This dynamic is not limited to low-skill jobs. I have seen it at work in electronics engineering. When I was a sprat, job shoppers
got an hourly wage nearly twice that of their company peers, because they had no benefits or long-term employment. Today, job
shoppers are actually paid less than company engineers; and the companies are outsourcing ever more of their staffing to the brokers.
Without labor market frictions, the iron law of wages drives wages to starvation levels. As sophisticated uberization software
eliminates the frictions that have protected middle class wages in the recent past, we will all need to enlist unionization and
government wage standards to protect us.
ken melvin , May 31, 2020 2:29 pm
Rick
The big engineering offices of the 70s were decimated and worse by the mid-90s; mostly by the advent of computers w/ software.
One engineer could now do the work of 10 and didn't need any draftsman.
rick shapiro , May 31, 2020 2:40 pm
I was speaking of engineers with equal skill in the same office. Many at GE Avionics were laid off, and came back as lower
paid contract employees.
"... our culture so market-driven, everybody for sale, everything for sale, you can't deliver the kind of really real nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose. ..."
"... The system cannot reform itself. We've tried black faces in high places ..."
"... You've got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the driver's seat with the collapse of brother Bernie and they really don't know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces -- show more black faces. ..."
"... So when you talk about the masses of black people, the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color, they're the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get rebellion. ..."
Dr. Cornel West said on Friday we are witnessing the failed social experiment that is
the United States of America in the protests and riots that have followed the death of George
Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. West told CNN host Anderson Cooper that what is going
on is rebellion to a failed capitalist economy that does not protect the people. West, a
professor, denounced the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is all about "black faces
in high places" but not actual change. The professor remarked even those black faces often lose
legitimacy because they ingriatiate themselves into the establishment neo-liberal Democratic
party.
"I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment," West said. "What I mean
by that is that the history of black people for over 200 and some years in America has been
looking at America's failure, its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a
way people can live lives of decency. The nation-state, it's criminal justice system, it's
legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties."
From commentary delivered on CNN Friday night:
DR. CORNEL WEST: And now our culture so market-driven, everybody for sale, everything for
sale, you can't deliver the kind of really real nourishment for soul, for meaning, for
purpose.
So when you get this perfect storm of all these multiple failures at these different
levels of the American empire, and Martin King already told us about that...
The system cannot reform itself. We've tried black faces in high places. Too often our
black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist
economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the
market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that
means so much to so many fellow citizens.
And what happens is we have a neofascist gangster in the White House who doesn't care for
the most part. You've got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the
driver's seat with the collapse of brother Bernie and they really don't know what to do
because all they want to do is show more black faces -- show more black faces.
But often
times those black faces are losing legitimacy too because the Black Lives Matter movement
emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security
[Secretary] and they couldn't deliver.
So when you talk about the masses of black people, the
precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color, they're the
ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get
rebellion.
For example if you take a marxian definition of l class, it means people who don't own the
means of production, that easily means the bottom 80% of the population. However a large
part of this group is usually considered middle class, and is not really seen as
oppressed.
I don't think this is right; unlike 'exploited', Marx doesn't use the word 'oppression' in
any technical or unusual way, just in it's usual sense.
So a prosperous middle class person in a liberal democracy is not oppressed. A Marxist
would merely point out that they would be in a more capitalist society; one without a
universal franchise that requires the rich to seek political allies.
people of the working class don't feel they are working class, but rather identify as
blue collars
If you look into the actual details of vote tallies; you find more or less the precise
opposite. There are a key block of people who, objectively speaking, earn most of their
income from stocks that they own, in the form of pension funds. Up until recently, this block
was the victim of false consciousness; they identified as something like 'blue collar', based
on the jobs they used to do, and the communities they they used to belong to. As of the last
few elections, political activity by the Republicans and Tories has managed to overcome that,
so they now vote based on their objective class interests. Those who rely on a small lump of
capital have mostly the same class interests as those in possession of more; fewer
environmental regulations, lower minimum wages, and so forth.
Meanwhile, most of the current working class don't get to vote, because they lack
citizenship in the countries in question.
The nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in, say, Southeast Asian, African,
South American, countries, invariably refer to the tenuous hold on life of their working poor; they don't really have
a job. Each day they rise and go forth looking for work that pays enough that they and their family can continue to
subsist. It is, in some countries, a long-standing problem.
Sound too familiar? Sometime in the late 80s (??) Americans began to see day labors line up at Home Depot and Lowe's
lots in numbers not seen since The Great Depression. Manufacturing Corporations began subbing out their work to
sub-contractors, otherwise known as employees without benefits; Construction Contractors subbed out construction work to
these employees without benefits; Engineering Firms subbed out engineering to these employees without benefits;
Landscapers' workers were now sub-contractors/independent contractors; Here, in the SF Bay Area, time and again, we
saw vans loads of undocumented Hispanics under a 'Labor Contractor' come in from the Central Valley to build condos; the
white Contractor for the project didn't have a single employee; none of the workers got a W-2. Recall watching, sometime
in the 90s (??), a familiar, well dressed, rotund guest from Wall Street, on the PBS News Hour, forcefully proclaiming
to the TV audience:
American workers are going to have to learn to compete with the Chinese; Civil Service employees, factory
employees, are all going to have to work for less
All this subcontracting, independent contractors, was a scam, a scam meant to circumvent paying going wages and
benefits, to enhance profit margins; a scam that transferred more wealth to the top.
Meanwhile back at The Ranch, after the H1B Immigration Act of 1990, Microsoft could hire programmers from India for
one-half the cost of a citizen programmer. Half of Bill Gates' fortune was resultant these labor savings; the other half
was made off those not US Citizens. Taking a cue, Banks, Bio-Techs, some City and State Governments began
subcontracting out their programming to H1Bs. Often, the subcontractors/labor contractors (often themselves immigrants)
providing the programmers, held the programmers' passports/visas for security.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,
friends of Bush/Cheney made fortunes on clean up contracts they subbed out for next to nothing; the
independent/subcontractor scam was now officially governmentally sanctioned.
By about 2000 we began to hear the term gig-workers applied to these employees without benefits. Uber appeared in
2007 to be followed by Lift. Both are scams based on paying less than prevailing wages, on not providing worker
benefits,
These days, the nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in America, shows footage
of Food Banks in California with lines 2! miles long. Many of those waiting in these lines didn't have a real job
before; they were gig-workers; they can't apply for Unemployment Benefits. It is estimated that 1.6 million American
workers (1% of the workforce) are gig-workers; they don't have a real job. That 1% is in addition to the 16 million
American workers (10% of the workforce) that are independent contractors. Of the more than 40 million currently
unemployed Americans, some 17 million are either gig-workers or subcontractors/independent contractors. All of these are
scams meant to transfer more wealth to the top. All of these are scams with American Workers the victims; scams, in a
race to the bottom.
Democrats in the so called battle ground states would clean up at the polls with this. Why do you think
those states strayed? It was because Obama and Hillary had no idea what they really needed. Voters had no
idea what they SPECIFICALLY needed either -- UNIONS! They had been deunionized so thoroughly for so long
that they THEMSELVES no long knew what they were missing (frogs in the slowly boiling pot).
In 1988 Jesse Jackson took the Democratic primary in Michigan with 54% against Dukakis and Gephardt.
Obama beat Wall Street Romney and red-white-and-blue McCain in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. But nobody
told these voters -- because nobody seems to remember -- what they really needed. These voter just knew by
2016 that Democrats had not what they needed and looked elsewhere -- anywhere else!
Strom presents an easy as can be, on-step-back treatment that should go down oh, so smoothly and
sweetly. What do you think?
Matthew young
,
May 31, 2020 10:51 am
Not overnight, but a few days in 1972 when Nixon fouled the defaults and none of us knew how badly at
the time.
Reseting prices takes a long time, it is not magic and Nixon had fouled the precious metals market,
overnight. That and all the commodities market needed a restructure to adapt to our new regime.
Our way out was to export price instability to Asia. My suggestion this time is to think through the
math a bit before we all suddenly freak and do another over nighter. Think about how one might spread the
partial default over a 15 year period.
All of us, stuck with 40 years of flat earth economic planning without a clue. Now we have a year at
best to nail down the Lucas criteria and get a default done with some science behind it.
I doubt it. I figure we will all go to monetary meetup with our insurance contracts ready to be
confirmed. That is impossible and Trump will be stuck doing a volatile, overnight partial default, like
Nixon.,
EMichael
,
May 31, 2020 12:02 pm
Dennis,
The states you mentioned have overwhelmingly voted Rep for the last 3 decades in their state races. One
of them has instituted right to work laws, and the other two have come very close to doing the same.
The white working class cares nothing about unions at all. They have been voting against them for
decades. It's why union rights and membership has deteriorated for 5 decades.
run75441
,
May 31, 2020 12:32 pm
EM:
Notably, I had posted the 2016 presidential election numbers numbers for MI, PA, and WI which
resulted in an "anyone but Trump or Clinton vote" and gave th election to Trump. The "anyone but Trump
or Clinton vote" resulted in a historical high for the "others" category and was anywhere from 3 to 6
times higher than previously experienced in other presidential elections. It also resulted in those
three states casting Electoral votes for a Republican presidential candidate since 1992 – MI, 1988 –
PA, and 1988 – WI. While this does defeat your comment above on those states voting Republican, it does
not take away from your other comment on Sarandon. People punished themselves with Trump in spite of
every obvious clue he demonstrated of being a loon. In this case the white working class voted against
themselves for Trump and those of Sarandon's ilk helped them along by voting for "others."
EMichael
,
May 31, 2020 12:45 pm
Run, I stated in "state elections".
Y'know one other thing I have seen in MI voting is that the amount of people who voted did not cast a
voted for President also was the highest ever. Thinking these are the same people like Sarandon. It was
close to 90,000 in MI.
"87,810: Number of voters this election who cast a ballot but did not cast a vote for president. That
compares to 49,840 undervotes for president in 2012.
5 percent: Proportion of voters who opted for a third-party candidate in this election, compared to 1
percent in 2012."
Thanks for your comment and the link. Wow! Where to start, huh?
SEIU was a player from the get go, but I don't want to go there just now.
Before Reagan, there was the first rust belt move to the non-union south. Why was the south so
anti-union? I think this stuff is engendered from infancy and most of us are incapable of thinking anew
when it comes to stuff our parents 'taught' us. MLK was the best thing that ever happened to the dirt-road
poor south, yet they hated him and they hated the very unions that might have lifted them up. They did
seem to take pleasure in the yanks' loss of jobs.
I think the Reagan era was prelude to what is going on now, i.e., going backward while yelling whee
look at me go. No doubt, Reagan turned union members against their own unions. But, the genesis of demise
probably lay with automation and the early offshoring to Mexico. By Reagan, the car plants were losing
jobs to Toyota and Honda and automation. By 1990, car plants that had previously employed 5,000, now
automated, produced more cars employing only 1200. At the time, much of the nation's wealth was still
derived from car production.
Skipping forward a bit, the democrats blew it for years with all their talk about the 'middle-class'
without realizing it was the 'disappearing middle-class'. They ignored the poor working-class vote and
lost election after election.
I've come to not like the term labor, think it affords capital an undeserved status, though much
diminished, I think thought all workers would be better off in a union. Otherwise, as we are witnessing,
there is no parity between workers and wealth; we are in a race to the bottom with the wealth increasingly
go to the top.
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 1:15 pm
Matthew – thanks for your comment
I think that we are into a transition (about 45 yrs into) as great as the industrial revolution. We, as
probably those poor souls of the 18th and 19th centuries did, are floundering, unable to come to terms
with what is going on.
I also think that those such as the Kochs have a good grasp of what is going on and are moving to
protect themselves and their class.
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 1:21 pm
EMichael, thanks for the comment
Are you implying that the politicians are way behind the curve? If so, I think that you are right.
Let me share what I was thinking last night about thinking:
Descartes' problem was that he desperately wanted to make philosophy work within the framework of his
religion, Catholicism. Paul Krugman desperately wants to make economics all work within the Holy Duality
of Capitalism and Free Markets. Even Joe Stiglitz can't step out of this text. All things being possible,
it is possible that either could come up with a solution to today's economic problems that would fit
within the Two; but the odds are not good. Better to think anew.
We see politicians try and try to find solutions for today's problems from within their own
dogmas/ideologies. Even if they can't, they persist, they still try to impose these dogmas/ideologies in
the desperate hope they might work if only applied to a greater degree. How else explain any belief that
markets could anticipate and respond to pandemics? That markets could best respond to housing demand?
Racism Is the Biggest Reason the U.S. Safety Net Is So Weak
Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, who died last week, found that ethnic divisions made the country less
effective at providing public goods.
7:50 AM · May 31, 2020
The Alesina/Glaeser/Sacerdote paper on why America doesn't have a European-style welfare state -- racism
-- had a big impact on my own thinking 2/
For a long time anyone who pointed out that the modern GOP is basically a party that serves plutocratic
ends by weaponizing white racism was treated as "shrill" and partisan. Can we now admit the obvious? 3/
EMichael
,
May 31, 2020 1:53 pm
Ken,
Half the politicians are behind the curve. When George Wallace showed the GOP how to win elections
(Don't ever get outniggerred) the Dem Party failed to see and react to it. Then the Kochs of the world
stepped in with the John Birch society (fromerly the KKK) and started playing race against class, which
resulted in the white working class supporting anti-labor pols and legislation.
The election of Obama caused the racists to go totally off the reservation with the Tea Party (formerly
the KKK and the John Birch Society) and lead us to where we are now.
Of course, the corporate world followed the blueprint.
Way past time for the Dem Party to start attacking on a constant basis the racist GOP. And also to
start appealing more to workers, though the 2016 platform certainly did that to a large degree, and the
2020 platform looks to be mush more supportive of labor than ever.
"It's a detailed and aggressive agenda that includes doubling the minimum wage and tripling funding for
schools with low-income students. He is proposing the most sweeping overhaul of immigration policy in a
generation, the biggest pro-union push in three generations, and the most ambitious environmental agenda
of all time.
If Democrats take back the Senate in the fall, Biden could make his agenda happen. A primary is about
airing disagreements, but legislating is about building consensus. The Democratic Party largely agrees on
a suite of big policy changes that would improve the lives of millions of Americans in meaningful ways.
Biden has detailed, considered plans to put much of this agenda in place. But getting these plans done
will be driven much more by the outcome of the congressional elections than his questioned ambition.
A big minimum wage increase
Biden's commitment to raising the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 to $15 an hour is one of
the least talked-about plans at stake in the 2020 election.
In the 2016 cycle when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders disagreed about raising the minimum wage to
$15 per hour, the debate was the subject of extensive coverage. By the 2020 cycle, all the major
Democratic candidates were on board, so it didn't come up much. But it's significant that this is no
longer controversial in Democratic Party circles. If the party is broadly comfortable with the wage hike
as a matter of both politics and substance, Democrats in Congress are likely to make it happen if it's at
all possible.
Noji Olaigbe, left, from the Fight for $15 minimum wage movement, speaks during a McDonald's workers'
strike in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on May 23, 2019. David Santiago/Miami Herald/Tribune News
Service/Getty Images
The $15-an-hour minimum wage increase is also a signature issue for Biden. He endorsed New York's
version of it in the fall of 2015, back when he was vice president and his boss Barack Obama was pushing a
smaller federal raise.
A big minimum wage hike polls well, it aligns with Biden's thematic emphasis on "the dignity of work,"
and it's a topic on which he's genuinely been a leader. It reflects his political sensibilities, which are
moderate but in a decidedly more populist mode than Obama's technocratic one.
Biden has a big Plan A to support organized labor, and a Plan B that's still consequential and
considerably more plausible politically.
Beyond a general disposition to be a good coalition partner to organized labor, the centerpiece of his
union agenda is support for the PRO Act, which passed the House of Representatives earlier this year.
That bill, were it to become law, would be the biggest victory for unions and collective bargaining
since the end of World War II -- overriding state "right to work" laws, barring mandatory anti-union
briefings from management during organizing campaigns, imposing much more meaningful financial penalties
on companies that illegally fire workers for pro-union activity, and allowing organizing through a
streamlined card check process. Separately, Biden and House Democrats have lined up behind a Public
Service Freedom to Negotiate Act that would bolster public sector workers' collective bargaining rights. "
One of the big issues here is Biden not committing to killing the filibuster, in addition to Dem
Senators not in agreement either. That would be a disaster for any legislation.
Makes sense not to run on ending the filibuster now, as there is a chance trump can win and teh GOP
keeps the Senate. But if the opposite happens and Biden wins and Dems take the Senate, they will have to
pivot quickly to getting rid of the filibuster. Apply any and all possible pressure to those Dem Senators
who do not agree with that. Threaten them with losing committee posts; primary opponents; the kitchen
sink.
Yes, it poses a risk in the event the Reps get a trifecta again, but it is time to flood progressive
legislation into law, and getting rid of the filibuster is the only way.
And if they can hit the trifecta and bring this platform to fruition, they won't have to worry about a
GOP trifecta for a long, long time. Possibly forever.
Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?
By Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote
Abstract
European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic
models suggest that redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax income
distribution, the volatility of income (perhaps because of trade shocks), the social costs of taxation and
the expected income mobility of the median voter. None of these factors appear to explain the differences
between the US and Europe. Instead, the differences appear to be the result of racial heterogeneity in the
US and American political institutions. Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who
are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the
growth of a socialist party, and more generally limited the political power of the poor.
rick shapiro
,
May 31, 2020 2:07 pm
This dynamic is not limited to low-skill jobs. I have seen it at work in electronics engineering. When
I was a sprat, job shoppers got an hourly wage nearly twice that of their company peers, because they had
no benefits or long-term employment. Today, job shoppers are actually paid less than company engineers;
and the companies are outsourcing ever more of their staffing to the brokers.
Without labor market frictions, the iron law of wages drives wages to starvation levels. As sophisticated
uberization software eliminates the frictions that have protected middle class wages in the recent past,
we will all need to enlist unionization and government wage standards to protect us.
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 2:29 pm
Rick
The big engineering offices of the 70s were decimated and worse by the mid-90s; mostly by the advent of
computers w/ software. One engineer could now do the work of 10 and didn't need any draftsman.
rick shapiro
,
May 31, 2020 2:40 pm
I was speaking of engineers with equal skill in the same office. Many at GE Avionics were laid off, and
came back as lower paid contract empoyees.
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 2:46 pm
Rick
Die biden
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 2:52 pm
beiden
The both
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 3:05 pm
EMichael
Minimum wage, the row about the $600, all such things endanger the indentured servant economic model
so favored in the south. Keep them poor and hungry and they will work for next to nothing. 'Still they
persist.' On PBS, a black woman cooking for a restaurant said that she was being paid less than $4/hr.
Don't understand the protests? What you're seeing is people pushed to the edge
By KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR – Los Angeles Times
What was your first reaction when you saw the video of the white cop kneeling on George Floyd's neck
while Floyd croaked, "I can't breathe"?
If you're white, you probably muttered a horrified, "Oh, my God" while shaking your head at the cruel
injustice. If you're black, you probably leapt to your feet, cursed, maybe threw something (certainly
wanted to throw something), while shouting, "Not @#$%! again!" Then you remember the two white vigilantes
accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through their neighborhood in February, and how if it
wasn't for that video emerging a few weeks ago, they would have gotten away with it. And how those
Minneapolis cops claimed Floyd was resisting arrest but a store's video showed he wasn't. And how the cop
on Floyd's neck wasn't an enraged redneck stereotype, but a sworn officer who looked calm and entitled and
devoid of pity: the banality of evil incarnate.
Maybe you also are thinking about the Karen in Central Park who called 911 claiming the black man who
asked her to put a leash on her dog was threatening her. Or the black Yale University grad student napping
in the common room of her dorm who was reported by a white student. Because you realize it's not just a
supposed "black criminal" who is targeted, it's the whole spectrum of black faces from Yonkers to Yale.
You start to wonder if it should be all black people who wear body cams, not the cops.
What do you see when you see angry black protesters amassing outside police stations with raised fists?
If you're white, you may be thinking, "They certainly aren't social distancing." Then you notice the black
faces looting Target and you think, "Well, that just hurts their cause." Then you see the police station
on fire and you wag a finger saying, "That's putting the cause backward."
You're not wrong -- but you're not right, either. The black community is used to the institutional
racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though we do all the conventional
things to raise public and political awareness -- write articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic,
explain the continued devastation on CNN, support candidates who promise change -- the needle hardly
budges.
But COVID-19 has been slamming the consequences of all that home as we die at a significantly higher
rate than whites, are the first to lose our jobs, and watch helplessly as Republicans try to keep us from
voting .
run75441
,
May 31, 2020 9:39 pm
anne:
If you rcomments are not appearing they are going to spam, Just let me know and I will fish them out
of spam. Just approved 4 of yours.
Bert Schlitz
,
May 31, 2020 7:14 pm
The protests are self centered crap blacks do year after year. Considering 370 whites over 100 Latinos
were killed by cops, many as bad as that guy in minnie. Blacks have a Trumptard mentality. We have a
ecological disaster, a economic disaster and pandemic(when th they are spreading). Yet let's whine about
one bad cop related homicide.
This may begin the breakup of the Democratic party and the blacks. The differences are just to large.
Kaleberg
,
May 31, 2020 9:40 pm
It's rather sad that it takes a massive civil disturbance to get the authorities to arrest a man
videotaped killing another. You'd think that would just happen as a matter of course, but that's how it
works in this country.
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A pretty silly rant, but some point might worth your attention...
Notable quotes:
"... I don't believe Marxist Social/Communism is the answer, as it has proven to always fail, as it is at complete odds with human nature. It drains creativity and productivity because they aren't rewarded ..."
"... Protests and Maidan open up fabulous opportunities for protest leaders. Chocolate oligarch Poroshenko became president. The little-known leader of the party faction in the parliament, Yatsenyuk, became prime minister. ..."
Meanwhile, what is going to happen to assorted fascisms? Eric Hobsbawm showed us in
Age of Extremes how the key to the fascist right was always mass mobilization: "Fascists
were the revolutionaries of the counter-revolution".
We may be heading further than mere, crude neofascism. Call it Hybrid Neofascism. Their
political stars bow to global market imperatives while switching political competition to the
cultural arena.
That's what true "illiberalism" is all about: the mix between neoliberalism –
unrestricted capital mobility, Central Bank diktats – and political authoritarianism.
Here's where we find Trump, Modi and Bolsonaro.
...Even if neoliberalism was dead, and it's not, the world is still encumbered with its
corpse – to paraphrase Nietzsche a propos of God.
And even as a triple catastrophe – sanitary, social and climatic – is now
unequivocal, the ruling matrix – starring the Masters of the Universe managing the
financial casino – won't stop resisting any drive towards change.
... Realpolitik once again points to a post-Lockdown turbo-capitalist framework, where the
illiberalism of the 1% – with fascistic elements – and naked turbo-financialization
are boosted by reinforced exploitation of an exhausted and now largely unemployed
workforce.
Post-Lockdown turbo-capitalism is once again reasserting itself after four decades of
Thatcherization, or – to be polite – hardcore neoliberalism. Progressive forces
still don't have the ammunition to revert the logic of extremely high profits for the ruling
classes – EU governance included – and for large global corporations as well.
-- ALIEN -- , 2 minutes ago
Allowing the continued uncontrolled exploitation of planetary resources will lead to global
ecosystem collapse, killing most humans.
Cheap Chinese Crap , 10 minutes ago
Good God, it 's like this guy is giving a seminar in technocratic buzzword salad
recognition.
"It takes someone of Marx's caliber to build a full-fledged, 21st century eco-socialist
ideology, and capable of long-term, sustained mobilization. Aux armes, citoyens."
Aux armes, indeed. But not to erect an oligarchy of self-appointed experts to rule us with
an iron hand. I rather prefer the idea of pulling them off their comfy, government-compensated
sinecures and dragging them down into the mud with everyone else.
Anyone who thinks they are better qualified to run your life than you yourself is an enemy
of the Enlightenment. Away with them all.
Leguran , 1 hour ago
Something worthwhile to note is missing among Pepe's carnage....
What has happened is that
every imaginable organized group from doctors to pilots to lawyers, to farmers, to pharma
companies, etc. has carved out a special slice of the economy especially for themselves.
In
Feudal times rivers could not be navigated because cockroach lords would charge fees to use the
rivers. That is exactly the same arrangement today but instead of using force of arms, laws are
used. Our economy is choking on all these impediments.
mtumba , 2 hours ago
I agree that we need a revolution, and that the .01% globalist "elites" have proven to be
not only craven, arrogant and greedy - but also stupid beyond redemption.
But I don't believe Marxist Social/Communism is the answer, as it has proven to always fail, as it is at complete odds
with human nature. It drains creativity and productivity because they aren't rewarded, and it rewards laziness and inertia, because the absolute minimum of effort
results in the barest level needed to survive, which - oddly - is enough for many.
I think it would be great to give actual capitalism a try, with extremely limited govt - a
govt that ONLY provides for the common defense and enforcement of contract laws and protection
against crimes of violence and property theft. NOT crony-capitalism that takes command over the
resources of a nation's klepotcratic govt by the .01% richest and their sycophantic bottom
feeder lawyers, lobbyists, corrupt politicians and other enablers.
Snout the First , 3 hours ago
That was sure a lot of words, needlessly making something simple difficult. Here's what it
all boils down to:
- Who do you want setting prices? The market or a central planner?
- What percent of the economy do you want the government to own or control?
- What percent of your annual income do you want the government to take? Some small amount
to be used for valid purposes, the rest to be pissed away against your better interests?
PKKA , 3 hours ago
Protests and Maidan open up fabulous opportunities for protest leaders. Chocolate oligarch
Poroshenko became president. The little-known leader of the party faction in the parliament,
Yatsenyuk, became prime minister.
You know that on the project of an epic wall between Ukraine
and Russia, Yatsenyuk stole $ 1 billion but did not build a wall. A moron with a certificate
from a psycho hospital Andrei Parubiy became the speaker of parliament. You did not know that
Parubiy had a certificate of moronity from a psycho hospital? Now you know. Boxer Vitali
Klitschko became mayor of Kiev. Vitaly pronounces the words in syllables and wrinkles his
forehead for a long time before expressing a thought. You can even physically hear the creak of
gears as they spin and creak in Klitschko's head. Do you know what rabble passed in the
Ukrainian parliament? Bandits, crooks, nazis, morons, thieves and idiots! So the protests open
up fabulous career opportunities and enrichment!
play_arrow
Phillyguy , 4 hours ago
The American public has a front row seat, watching US economic decline. This process has
been ongoing since the mid 1970's, as corporate profits slumped. In response the ruling elite
enacted a series of Neo-liberal economic policies- multiple tax cuts for the wealthy, attacks
on the poor and labor, job outsourcing, financial de-regulation, lack of spending on public and
private infrastructure and spending $ trillions of taxpayer money on the Pentagon and strategic
debacles in Afghanistan (longest war in US history), Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. In total,
these policies have been a disaster for the average American family.
The ruling elite are well aware of American economic decline, accelerated by the Coronavirus
pandemic. Fascism comes to the fore when capitalism breaks down, and under extreme conditions,
the ruling elite use fascism as an ideological rationale to harness state power- Legislature
and police, to maintain class structure and wealth distribution. Western capitalism is
incapable of reversing its economic decline and as a result, we are seeing fascism reemerging
in the US, EU and Brazil. Donald Trump is the face of American fascism. Michael Parenti
provides an excellent historical analysis of fascism. See: Michael Parenti- Functions of
Fascism (Real History) 1 of 4 Jan 27, 2008; Link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0Bc4KJx2Ao
Vigilante , 4 hours ago
How come 'fascist' Trump is being attacked 24/7 by the Deep State though?
They should be on his side if your assertions are correct
Fascism resides mostly on the Left end of the spectrum...and 'Woke' capital is throwing its
lot with the 'progressives' these days
bshirley1968 , 4 hours ago
It's your perception he is being attacked. Dude, wake up.
The best the deep state has to run against Trump is Joe Biden? They are that stupid? They
are that weak? If they are that stupid and weak, how can they be a conceivable, real
threat.
You are being played. You imagine there are good guys that you can trust......and that is
why you are being played.
HomeOfTheHypocrite , 3 hours ago
The ruling class is currently divided between those who are ready to prepare fascism and
those who want to continue on with neoliberalism. Trump represents one faction of the ruling
class. His political opponents in the Deep State represent another. None of them have any
genuine concern for the fate of the American worker. Trump, if judged by his actions and not
his words, is nothing but a charlatan who mouths populist phrases while appointing billionaire
aristocrats to political positions and lavishing investment bankers with trillions of tax
dollars.
CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago
This is the problem with both sides cult followers: the insanity behind the idea that these
elite somehow have their hands tied behind their backs as they ALL move is toward fascism.
The 2 party system is a ONE party right wing fascist one. Trump is merely a figure head.
People listen to what a politician says and NOT what he does behind their backs.
Trump is 1000% Zionazi just like the rest of them
HomeOfTheHypocrite , 2 hours ago
"basically it looks alot like the age old battle between fascism and communism"
Perhaps on the streets, but not within the ruling class. The ruling class, including the
Democrats, are utterly opposed to communism or socialism. Every Democratic congressperson with
maybe one exception stood and applauded Trump's anti-socialist rants during his State of the
Union addresses. Nancy Pelosi: "We're capitalist and that's just the way it is." Elizabeth
Warren (supposedly a radical): "I'm capitalist to my bones."
"Let's say for example these protesters managed to organize well enough to stage a coup
d'etat and take over - what next ?"
There's little chance of that. They are completely disorganized and lack any sort of
political program. But, if you're giving me the task of developing a political program for
them, I'll try to offer some suggestions that could be accomplished without a Pinochet or
Stalin-style bloodletting.
1. Busting up the monopolies and cartels 2. Raising taxes on the rich 3. A government jobs program to combat unemployment 4. A massive curtailment of the military budget 5. A massive curtailment of the policing and prison budget 6. Free government healthcare (without banning private-sector healthcare)
The first three of these political tasks were accomplished in the US in the 1930s without
the need for "black ops, gulags, secret police, and all the rest of it." Major policy changes
have not always required mass repression. But they do require a serious enough political party
to disassociate itself entirely from the ruling class Democrats and Republicans. During the 30s
there was a significant rise in various populist and socialist parties. Much of FDR's policies
and statements were a response to the threat they posed to established power. There is a famous
quote where he talks about having to "throw a few of these [millionaires] to the wolves" in
order to save America from the crackpot ideas of the "communists" and "Huey Longians."
I completely share your concern related to the use of repression to implement social and
economic policies. Neither the fascists nor the communists have a thing to offer a free people
so long as they rely on tyranny to enforce their program. Above all democracy and the natural
rights of individuals must be preserved.
Jedclampetisdead , 5 hours ago
If this country has any chance, we have to execute the Zionist bankers and their minions
new game , 5 hours ago
What is and will be: Corporate Fascism.
I defy anyone to explain other wise.
Go to the World Economic Forum web page and meet your masters.
Billionaires shaping YOUR future with their fortunes from corporations.
Their wealth was had by joint ventures with bought and paid for politicians and lobbyist
crafted legislation to maximize their wealth. This fakdemic absolutely consolidates more
wealth
to fewer corporations by design. Serf and kings/queens. The club personified by immense
wealth disparity.
In a continuing process, the social scoring via digital systems will limit freedoms to state
approved corporate diktats
that clamp like a boot to the neck. **** here, 6 tissue sections and recycled bug **** for
food.
brave new gatsy world right now with the roll out out of 3 pronged vaccine controlling your
brains emotions.
It is all so obvious to anyone with an ability to see two steps into the future. navigate
the future accordingly.
They are in control, the first denial that must be removed to see clearly the next step. sad
but true.
Artificial intelligence (AI) just seems to get smarter and smarter. Each iPhone learns your face, voice, and
habits better than the last, and the threats AI poses to privacy and jobs continue to grow. The surge reflects faster
chips, more data, and better algorithms. But some of the improvement comes from tweaks rather than
the core innovations
their inventors claim
-- and some of the gains may not exist at all, says Davis Blalock, a computer science graduate
student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Blalock and his colleagues compared dozens of approaches
to improving neural networks -- software architectures that loosely mimic the brain. "Fifty papers in," he says, "it
became clear that it wasn't obvious what the state of the art even was."
The researchers evaluated 81 pruning algorithms, programs that make neural networks more efficient by trimming
unneeded connections. All claimed superiority in slightly different ways. But they were rarely compared properly -- and
when the researchers tried to evaluate them side by side, there was no clear evidence of performance improvements
over a 10-year period.
The result
, presented in March at the
Machine Learning and Systems conference, surprised Blalock's Ph.D. adviser, MIT computer scientist John Guttag, who
says the uneven comparisons themselves may explain the stagnation. "It's the old saw, right?" Guttag said. "If you
can't measure something, it's hard to make it better."
Researchers are waking up to the signs of shaky progress across many subfields of AI. A
2019 meta-analysis
of information retrieval
algorithms used in search engines concluded the "high-water mark was actually set in 2009."
Another study
in 2019 reproduced seven neural
network recommendation systems, of the kind used by media streaming services. It found that six failed to outperform
much simpler, nonneural algorithms developed years before, when the earlier techniques were fine-tuned, revealing
"phantom progress" in the field. In
another paper
posted on arXiv in
March, Kevin Musgrave, a computer scientist at Cornell University, took a look at loss functions, the part of an
algorithm that mathematically specifies its objective. Musgrave compared a dozen of them on equal footing, in a task
involving image retrieval, and found that, contrary to their developers' claims, accuracy had not improved since
2006. "There's always been these waves of hype," Musgrave says.
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Gains in machine-learning algorithms can come from fundamental changes in their architecture, loss function, or
optimization strategy -- how they use feedback to improve. But subtle tweaks to any of these can also boost performance,
says Zico Kolter, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies image-recognition models trained to
be immune to "
adversarial
attacks
" by a hacker. An early adversarial training method known as projected gradient descent (PGD), in which a
model is simply trained on both real and deceptive examples, seemed to have been surpassed by more complex methods.
But in a
February arXiv paper
, Kolter and his colleagues found that
all of the methods performed about the same when a simple trick was used to enhance them.
Old dogs, new tricks
After modest tweaks, old image-retrieval algorithms perform as well as new ones, suggesting little actual
innovation.
Contrastive
(2006)
ProxyNCA
(2017)
SoftTriple
(2019)
0
25
50
75
100
Accuracy score
Original performance
Tweaked performance
(GRAPHIC) X. LIU/
SCIENCE
; (DATA) MUSGRAVE
ET AL
., ARXIV: 2003.08505
"That was very surprising, that this hadn't been discovered before," says Leslie Rice, Kolter's Ph.D. student.
Kolter says his findings suggest innovations such as PGD are hard to come by, and are rarely improved in a
substantial way. "It's pretty clear that PGD is actually just the right algorithm," he says. "It's the obvious thing,
and people want to find overly complex solutions."
Other major algorithmic advances also seem to have stood the test of time. A big breakthrough came in 1997 with an
architecture called long short-term memory (LSTM), used in language translation. When properly trained, LSTMs
matched
the performance of supposedly more advanced
architectures developed 2 decades later. Another machine-learning breakthrough came in 2014 with generative
adversarial networks (GANs), which pair networks in a create-and-critique cycle to sharpen their ability to produce
images, for example.
A 2018
paper
reported that with enough computation, the original GAN method matches the abilities of methods from later
years.
Kolter says researchers are more motivated to produce a new algorithm and tweak it until it's state-of-the-art
than to tune an existing one. The latter can appear less novel, he notes, making it "much harder to get a paper
from."
Guttag says there's also a disincentive for inventors of an algorithm to thoroughly compare its performance with
others -- only to find that their breakthrough is not what they thought it was. "There's a risk to comparing too
carefully."
It's also hard work
: AI researchers use different data sets, tuning methods, performance metrics, and baselines.
"It's just not really feasible to do all the apples-to-apples comparisons."
Some of the overstated performance claims can be chalked up to the explosive growth of the field, where papers
outnumber experienced reviewers. "A lot of this seems to
be growing pains
," Blalock says. He urges reviewers to insist on better comparisons to benchmarks and says better
tools will help. Earlier this year, Blalock's co-author, MIT researcher Jose Gonzalez Ortiz, released software called
ShrinkBench that makes it easier to compare pruning algorithms.
Researchers point out that even if new methods aren't fundamentally better than old ones, the tweaks they
implement can be applied to their forebears. And every once in a while, a new algorithm will be an actual
breakthrough. "It's almost like a venture capital portfolio," Blalock says, "where some of the businesses are not
really working, but some are working spectacularly well."
"... What is happening now is the exact same thing as Hong Kong. In any given instance of mass revolt, you have two warring factions, usually funded at the top by diametrically opposed elites. ..."
"... In Hong Kong, it is pro-western, old-guard/money versus Chinese new-guard. ..."
"... Look at the degree of organization (or lack thereof) which was able to politically assassinate Gen. Flynn! You had the dem establishment and billionaires like the Clintons, Obama-faction sycophants all the way up to the top. ..."
You are completely wrong, of course. What is happening now is the exact same thing as Hong Kong. In any given instance of mass revolt, you have two warring factions, usually funded at the top by diametrically opposed elites.
In Hong Kong, it is pro-western, old-guard/money versus Chinese new-guard. In America, we have the old-guard/money represented currently by the DJT-phenomenon, meaning Anti-globalist nationalists, and,
on the other side, you have new-money internationalists and neolibs represented by billionaires, big-tech, the democratic party
and garden-variety globalists.
Look at the degree of organization (or lack thereof) which was able to politically assassinate Gen. Flynn! You had the dem
establishment and billionaires like the Clintons, Obama-faction sycophants all the way up to the top.
You think that this event is entirely grassroots? Give me a f*cking break, vk. You are such a blatantly obvious Chinese shill, no doubt probably employed by globalist entities,
that the fact you are unable to employ an effective and probable analysis on these current "protests" reaffirm to me exactly what
you are and what you stand for.
You could also have the same oligarchs funding both sides in a divide and conquer strategy. This is a common strategy that
has been used in Turkey among others in the runup to the 1980 coup. It was also used by the US and Israel in their funding of
both sides in the Iran/Iraq war in the 80s.
In the former it was used to ramp up violence to justify a military coup. That is very probable here, except that martial law
might be the objective. Similar to the Iran/Iraq, the stoking of violence between liberals and conservatives may simply be to
wear them out for when the economy truly tanks to justify in the minds of the sheeple a greater oppression of demonstrations in
future.
US is becoming like Israel even more. Considering same people rule both countries, and same people train cops in both of them,
is it surprising 99%-ers in US are becoming treated like Palestinians?
Capitalism always prevails: everything else is either a prop up or an obstacle. An
obstacle is expected to be either ignored or destroyed. In this context, there's only so
much Asian hive mind culture (fascism) can do.
Oh, and wages are also at historical lows. The Phillips Curve is a farce, neoclassical
theory is a fraud
As the United States embarks on a fourth month of a chain reaction of crises spurred by the novel Coronavirus, a president with
flagging re-election chances addressed a weary nation Friday. Donald Trump and senior members of his foreign policy and economic
teams -- top diplomat Michael
R. Pompeo , leading China hawk
Peter
Navarro , trade representative Robert Lighthizer
, National Security Council chief
Robert C. O'Brien and
Treasury secretary
Steve
Mnuchin -- unveiled fresh policy on the People's Republic of China. Trump's national address in the Rose Garden Friday was the
first since anarchic protests broke out in several American cities -- centrally, Minneapolis -- earlier this week, in response to
the controversial death of Minnesota man George Floyd at the hands of police, which followed months of national frustration.
China hawks -- including Navarro and powerbroker, informal advisors to the administration such as
Tucker
Carlson and Steve Bannon
-- have repeatedly urged an uncompromising response to the hostile actors in Beijing. Proponents of a tougher line have consistently
argued for a nationally-minded surge of power: the United States should have a tariff policy, and it should begin returning the nation's
critical supply chains closer to Washington's orbit. Yet, while Trump has been the most tough-minded president on China in at least
a generation, he has remained something of a moderate within his own court, as well as within a broader American foreign policy community
that's wised up and changed its mind on the Chinese state.
Balancing a national security legacy with shorter-term, finance-minded considerations has been a hallmark of the Trump approach.
This was perhaps most on display with the negotiation of the flawed
"Phase One " trade deal that was inked just before the pandemic began battering the American mainland. After laying out the depressing
recent history of American diplomacy toward Beijing, the president -- true to form -- began his address on the subject with an equivocal
tone: "But I have never solely blamed China for this. They were able to get away with the theft, like no one was able to get away
with before, because of past politicians, and frankly, past presidents."
Still, what was obvious Friday at the White House was a paradigm shift unimaginable even five years ago, just before Trump announced
for president. "We must have answers," Trump said. "Not only for us, but for the rest of the world. This pandemic has underscored
the crucial importance of building up America's economic independence, re-shoring our critical supply chains, and protecting America's
scientific and technological advances." The president said the United States is severing its relationship with the World Health Organization
-- under fire since the inception of the crisis for its toadyism toward the Chinese state. And he echoed the disappointing news announced
by Pompeo earlier this week -- that in the face of recent Chinese actions, the United States can longer consider the leadership in
Hong Kong distinct from the Communist Party.
The Hull Note to the Japanese Ambassador to the US in November 1941 consists of 2 sections. The first section is a "Draft mutual
declaration of policy" by stating these principles[6]:
inviolability of territorial integrity and sovereignty of each and all nations.
non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
equality, including equality of commercial opportunity and treatment.
reliance upon international cooperation and conciliation for the prevention and pacific settlement of controversies
non-discrimination in international commercial relations.
international economic cooperation and abolition of extreme nationalism as expressed in excessive trade restrictions.
non-discriminatory access by all nations to raw material supplies.
full protection of the interests of consuming countries and populations as regards the operation of international commodity agreements.
establishment of such institutions and arrangements of international finances
The second section consists of 10 points and is titled "Steps to be taken by the Government of the United States and by the
Government of Japan"[6]
The Neocons have finally corralled the President into a full blown, hegemonic Cold War with China rather than focus on reasonable
trade policies.
Hong-kong, I'm certain Pompeo and his crew has actually read the re-integration agreement w/China, given it a fair hearing
and after much reflection concluded that China is violating it rather than playing on everyone's emotions to stir up conflict.
What China has done in Hong-kong (how many deaths? zero) is worse than what the Saudis did by leveling one of their own Shiites
cities, eh, Iranian sympahtzers, we sold them the weapons.
or how France treated the Yellow Vests
or our new fascist best friends did in Bolivia by ousting an elected President and then canceling the elections they were supposed
to have in April.
"... You will find in Sheldon Wolin's final book "Democracy Incorporated" an intricate dissection of this precept in the modern form through his analysis of America's decaying trajectory. Thank you for reminding us of this. ..."
"... As Athens showed and the United States of the twenty-first century confirmed, imperialism undercuts democracy by furthering inequalities among its citizens. Resources that might be used to improve health care, education, and environmental protection are instead directed to defense spending, which, by far, consumes the largest percentage of the nation's annual budget. ..."
"... Second, if Athens was the first historical instance of a confrontation between democracy and elitism, that experience suggests that there is no simple recipe for resolving the tensions between them. Political elites were a persistent, if uneasy and contested, feature of Athenian democracy and a significant factor in both its expansion and its demise. ..."
"... As the war dragged on and frustration grew, domestic politics became more embittered and fractious: members of the elite competed to outbid each other by proposing ever wilder schemes of conquest. ..."
You can't be a Democracy at home and an empire aboard, the violence of empire will always turn against the very idea
of democracy.
Yes, a keen observation of what ultimately undid Athens. You will find in Sheldon Wolin's final book "Democracy Incorporated"
an intricate dissection of this precept in the modern form through his analysis of America's decaying trajectory. Thank you for
reminding us of this.
lysias @ 109
A variety of scholars who study that period would disagree with you: You cannot maintain an empire abroad and democracy at
home. The two principles are diametrically opposite to one another. It's what caused the democracy of Athens (which was limited
to men -- as usual) to ultimately lose its internal cohesion and reason to be. Yes, formally it was incorporated into the Macedonian
empire, but its demise came because Athens' imperial ambitions sapped domestic resources which further contributed to the trend
toward inequality within the society.
Here is a fine quote from Wolin's book (page 264) which illustrates the point (please excuse the length of this quote):
A twofold moral might be drawn from the experience of Athens: that it is self-subverting for democracy to subordinate its egalitarian
convictions to the pursuit of expansive politics with its corollaries of conquest and domination and the power relationships
they introduce. Few care to argue that, in political terms, democracy at home is advanced or improved by conquest abroad.
As Athens showed and the United States of the twenty-first century confirmed, imperialism undercuts democracy by furthering
inequalities among its citizens. Resources that might be used to improve health care, education, and environmental protection
are instead directed to defense spending, which, by far, consumes the largest percentage of the nation's annual budget.
Moreover, the sheer size and complexity of imperial power and the expanded role of the military make it difficult to impose
fiscal discipline and account- ability. Corruption becomes endemic, not only abroad but at home. The most dangerous type of
corruption for a democracy is measured not in monetary terms alone but in the kind of ruthless power relations it fosters in
domestic politics. As many observers have noted, politics has become a blood sport with partisanship and ideological fidelity
as the hallmarks. A partisan judiciary is openly declared to be a major priority of a political party; the efforts to consolidate
executive power and to relegate Congress to a supporting role are to some important degree the retrojection inwards of the
imperial thrust.
Second, if Athens was the first historical instance of a confrontation between democracy and elitism, that experience
suggests that there is no simple recipe for resolving the tensions between them. Political elites were a persistent, if uneasy
and contested, feature of Athenian democracy and a significant factor in both its expansion and its demise.
In the eyes of contemporary observers, such as Thucydides, as well as later historians, the advancement of Athenian hegemony
de- pended upon a public-spirited, able elite at the helm and a demos will- ing to accept leadership. Conversely, the downfall
of Athens was attributed to the wiles and vainglory of leaders who managed to whip up popular support for ill-conceived adventures.
As the war dragged on and frustration grew, domestic politics became more embittered and fractious: members of the elite
competed to outbid each other by proposing ever wilder schemes of conquest. In two attempts (411–410 and 404–403) elites,
abetted by the Spartans, succeeded in temporarily abolshing democracy and installing rule by the Few.
"... Instead of reining in the "globalist elites" he so vociferously ran against or those corporations "who have no loyalty to America," his one legislative achievement has been to award them a massive tax cut. Through it, he has maintained their favorite mix of low revenue intake and high deficits which gives Republicans a pretext to "starve the beast" and induce fiscal anorexia. ..."
"... Trump ran as a populist firebrand -- a fusion of Huey Long and Ross Perot -- and while he never abandoned that style, he has governed for the most part as a milquetoast free market Republican in perfect tandem with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, one whose solution to everything is more tax cuts and deregulation: a kind of turbo-charged "high-energy Jeb." ..."
"... With the outbreak of COVID-19, many on the reformist right are hoping for the emergence of the President Trump they thought they were promised, a leader just as ready to break out of the donor-enforced "small government" straitjacket while in power as he was during the campaign. ..."
"... The heightened rhetoric against China will continue -- the one thing Trump is good at -- but it is unlikely to be matched with the required policy ..."
"... If neoliberalism excused inequality at home by extolling the equalization of incomes across the globe (millions of Chinese raised from poverty, while millions of American workers fall back into it!), the new position must shift emphasis back to ensuring a more equitable domestic distribution of wealth and opportunity across all classes and communities in this country. ..."
"... It is worth pondering what might have happened if the administration had gone the other way and followed the last piece of policy advice given by Steve Bannon before his ouster in August 2017. Bannon suggested raising the top marginal income tax rate to 44 percent while "arguing that it would actually hit left-wing millionaires in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Hollywood." ..."
"... It might well have put Trump on the path to becoming what Daniel Patrick Moynihan once proposed as a model for Richard Nixon when he gifted the 37th president a biography of Disraeli, namely a Tory Republican who could outsmart the left by crafting broad popular coalitions based on a blending of patriotic cultural conservatism with class-conscious economic and social policy. ..."
"... Then and even more so now, the idea resonates: a Reuters/Ipsos poll from January found that 64 percent of Americans support a wealth tax, a majority of Republicans included. Poll after poll has reaffirmed this. It seems as if there is right-wing populist support for taxing the rich more. ..."
"... There is one more thing to be said about the significance of taxing the rich. Up until very recently, there has been a prevailing tendency among the reformist right (with some important exceptions) to couch criticism of the elites primarily or even exclusively in cultural terms. There seems to have been a polite hesitation at taking the cultural critique to its logical economic conclusions. It is easy to excoriate the excesses of elite identity politics, the "woke" part of woke capitalism; it's something all conservatives -- and indeed growing numbers of liberals and socialists -- agree on. Fish in a barrel. ..."
"... But to challenge the capitalism part, i.e. free market orthodoxy, not in a secondary or tertiary way, but head on and in specific policy terms as Lofgren and a few others have done, would involve confronting difficult truths, namely that the biggest beneficiaries of tax cuts and Reaganite economic policy in general, which most conservatives enthusiastically promoted for four decades, are the selfsame decadent coastal elites they claim to oppose. It is they who more than anyone else thrive on financialized globalization, arbitrage and offshoring. ..."
"... In other words, it amounts to an honest recognition of the complicity of conservatism in the mess we're in, which is perhaps a psychological bridge too far for too many on the right, reformist or not. (Trigger Warning!) This separation of culture and economics has led to the farce of a self-styled nationalist president lining the pockets of his nominal enemies, the globalist ruling class. ..."
"... A conservative call to tax the rich would signal that the right is ready to end this charade and chart a course toward a more patriotic, public-spirited and yes, proudly hyphenated capitalism. ..."
"... Michael Cuenco is a writer on politics and policy. He has also written for American Affairs. ..."
They also left worker wages stagnant and increased the deficit. Where is our more nationalist economic policy?
Much has been written about the disappointment of certain segments of the right in the apparent capitulation of Donald Trump to
the agenda of the conservative establishment.
Instead of reining in the "globalist elites" he so vociferously ran against or those corporations "who have no loyalty to America,"
his one legislative achievement has been to award them a massive tax cut. Through it, he has maintained their favorite mix of low
revenue intake and high deficits which gives Republicans a pretext to "starve the beast" and induce fiscal anorexia.
The president has granted them as well their ideal labor market through an ingenious formula: double down on mostly symbolic raids
(as opposed to systemic solutions like Mandatory E-Verify) and ramp up the rhetoric about "shithole countries" to distract the media,
but keep the supply of cheap, exploitable low-skill labor (legal and illegal) intact for the business lobby.
Trump ran as a populist firebrand -- a fusion of Huey Long and Ross Perot -- and while he never abandoned that style, he has governed
for the most part as a milquetoast free market Republican in perfect tandem with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, one whose solution
to everything is more tax cuts and deregulation: a kind of turbo-charged "high-energy Jeb."
With the outbreak of COVID-19, many on the reformist right are hoping for the emergence of the President Trump they thought they
were promised, a leader just as ready to break out of the donor-enforced "small government" straitjacket while in power as he was
during the campaign.
Despite signs of progress, what's more likely is a return to business as usual. Already the GOP's impulse for austerity and parsimony
is proving to be stronger than any willingness to think and act outside the box.
The heightened rhetoric against China will continue -- the one thing Trump is good at -- but it is unlikely to be matched with
the required policy, such as a long-term plan to reshore U.S. industry (that doesn't just rely on blindly giving corporations the
benefit of the doubt). At this point, we already know where the president's priorities lie when given a choice between the advancement
of America's workers or continued labor arbitrage and carte blanche corporate handouts.
Lest they be engulfed by it like everyone else, the reformist right should ask: is there any way to stand athwart the supply-side
swamp yelling Stop?
Many of these conservatives lament the Trump tax cut not just because it was a disaster that failed to spark reinvestment, left
wages stagnant, needlessly blew up the deficit and served as a slush fund for stock buybacks, but more fundamentally because it betrayed
the overwhelming intellectual inertia and lack of imagination that characterizes conservative policymaking.
More than in any other issue then, a distinct position on taxes would make the new conservatism truly worth distinguishing from
the old: tax cuts were after all the defining policy dogma of the neoliberal Reagan era.
If neoliberalism excused inequality at home by extolling the equalization of incomes across the globe (millions of Chinese raised
from poverty, while millions of American workers fall back into it!), the new position must shift emphasis back to ensuring a more
equitable domestic distribution of wealth and opportunity across all classes and communities in this country.
A reformulation of fiscal policy along populist economic nationalist lines can help with that.
It is worth pondering what might have happened if the administration had gone the other way and followed the last piece of policy
advice given by Steve Bannon before his ouster in August 2017. Bannon suggested raising the top marginal income tax rate to 44 percent
while "arguing that it would actually hit left-wing millionaires in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Hollywood."
Such a move would have been nothing short of revolutionary: it would have been a faithful and full-blown expression of the populist
economic nationalism Trump ran on; it would have presented a genuine material threat to the elite ruling class of both parties, and
likely would have pre-empted the shock value of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposing a 70 percent top marginal rate.
It might well have put Trump on the path to becoming what Daniel Patrick Moynihan once proposed as a model for Richard Nixon when
he gifted the 37th president a biography of Disraeli, namely a Tory Republican who could outsmart the left by crafting broad popular
coalitions based on a blending of patriotic cultural conservatism with class-conscious economic and social policy.
Not that Trump would have needed to go back to Nixon or Disraeli for instruction on the matter. In 1999, long before Elizabeth
Warren came along on the national scene, a presidential candidate eyeing the Reform Party nomination contemplated the imposition
of a 14.25 percent wealth tax on America's richest citizens in order to pay off the national debt: his name was Donald Trump.
What ever happened to that guy? The Trump of 1999 was onto something. Maybe this could be a way to deal with our post-pandemic
deficits.
Then and even more so now, the idea resonates: a Reuters/Ipsos poll from January found that 64 percent of Americans support a
wealth tax, a majority of Republicans included. Poll after poll has reaffirmed this. It seems as if there is right-wing populist
support for taxing the rich more.
To the common refrain, "the rich are just going to find ways to shelter their income or relocate it offshore," I have written
elsewhere about the concrete policy measures countries can and have taken to clip the wings of mobile global capital and prevent
such an outcome.
I have written as well about how taxing the rich and tightening the screws on tax enforcement have implications that go beyond
the merely redistributive approach to fiscal policy conventionally favored by the left; about how it can be a form of leverage against
an unaccountable investor class used to shopping at home and abroad for the most opaque assets in which to hoard vast amounts of
essentially idle capital.
A deft administration would use aggressive fiscal policy as an inducement for this irresponsible class to make things right by
reinvesting in such priorities as the wages and well-being of workers, the vitality of communities, the strength of strategic industries
and the productivity of the real economy – or else Uncle Sam will tax their wealth and do it for them.
It would also be an assertion of national sovereignty against globalization's command for countries to stay "competitive" by immiserating
their citizens with ever-lower taxes on capital holders and ever more loose and "flexible" labor markets in a never-ending race to
the bottom.
Mike Lofgren has penned a marvelous essay in these pages about the virtual secession of the rich from the American nation, "with
their prehensile greed, their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility."
What better way to remind them that they are still citizens of a country and members of a society -- and not just floating streams
of deracinated capital -- than by making them perform that most basic of civic duties, paying one's fair share and contributing to
the commonweal? America need not revert to the 70-90 percent top marginal rates of the bolshevik administrations of Truman, Eisenhower
or Kennedy, but proposals for modest moves in that direction would be welcome.
There is one more thing to be said about the significance of taxing the rich. Up until very recently, there has been a prevailing
tendency among the reformist right (with some important exceptions) to couch criticism of the elites primarily or even exclusively
in cultural terms. There seems to have been a polite hesitation at taking the cultural critique to its logical economic conclusions.
It is easy to excoriate the excesses of elite identity politics, the "woke" part of woke capitalism; it's something all conservatives
-- and indeed growing numbers of liberals and socialists -- agree on. Fish in a barrel.
But to challenge the capitalism part, i.e. free market orthodoxy, not in a secondary or tertiary way, but head on and in specific
policy terms as Lofgren and a few others have done, would involve confronting difficult truths, namely that the biggest beneficiaries
of tax cuts and Reaganite economic policy in general, which most conservatives enthusiastically promoted for four decades, are the
selfsame decadent coastal elites they claim to oppose. It is they who more than anyone else thrive on financialized globalization,
arbitrage and offshoring.
In other words, it amounts to an honest recognition of the complicity of conservatism in the mess we're in, which is perhaps
a psychological bridge too far for too many on the right, reformist or not. (Trigger Warning!) This separation of culture and economics
has led to the farce of a self-styled nationalist president lining the pockets of his nominal enemies, the globalist ruling class.
Already, the White House is proposing yet another gigantic corporate tax cut. Using the exact same discredited logic as the last
one, senior economic advisor Larry Kudlow wants Americans to trust him when he says that halving the already lowered 2017 rate to
10.5 percent will encourage these eminently reasonable multinationals to reinvest. There he goes again.
A conservative call to tax the rich would signal that the right is ready to end this charade and chart a course toward a more
patriotic, public-spirited and yes, proudly hyphenated capitalism.
Michael Cuenco is a writer on politics and policy. He has also written for American Affairs.
"America need not revert to the 70-90 percent top marginal rates of the bolshevik administrations of Truman, Eisenhower or Kennedy,
but proposals for modest moves in that direction would be welcome."
Those tax rates were offset by direct investment in the US economy. So if I invested in the stock market, I'd get a 90% tax
rate because that doesn't produce actual wealth. On the other hand, if I invested in building factories that created thousands
of jobs for American citizens, my tax rate may fall to 0%. And those policies created a fantastic economy that we oldsters remember
as the golden age. That wasn't bolshevism, it was competitive capitalism. What we have today is libertarianism. And as long as
conservatives are going to let the libertarian boogey-man's nose under the tent, we are going to have this ugly, bifurcated economy.
Your choice. Man up.
You ever tell hear of sarcasm, bud? I think that's what the author was going for. Don't think he was trying to say that Ike and
Truman were Bolsheviks but was rather making fun of libertarians who hyperbolically associate high tax rates with socialism and
Soviet Communism...
We absolutely do not have libertarianism operating in this country today. There is simply no evidence that there is any
sort of libertarian economic or political system in place. Oh sure, you'll whine "but globalism without actually defining
what globalism is, or what is wrong about precisely, but just that it's somehow wrong and that libertarians are to blame for it.
There's a good word for such an argument: bullshit.
We have an economy that is extraordinarily dominated by the state via mandates, regulations, and monetary interference that is
most decidedly not libertarian in any way whatsoever. The current system though does create and perpetuate a system of
rent-seeking cronies who conform rather nicely to the descriptions of said actors by Buchanan and Tullock. The problems of the
modern economy are the result of state interference, not its absence, and Cuenco's sorry policy prescriptions do nothing to minimize
the state but instead just create a different set of rent-seeking cronies for which the wealth and incomes of the nation are to
be expropriated.
If you can point to how the current situation is in any way "libertarian" without creating your own perfect little lazy straw
man definition then by all means do so. Until then your retort is without
substance (you see a no true Scotsman reply doesn't work if the facts are in the favor of the person supposedly making such an
argument. Here you fail to establish why what I said is such a case; saying it doesn't make it so). When Kent makes some throwaway
comment that we're somehow living in some sort of libertarian era he's full of it, you know it, and all you can do is provide
some weak "no true Scotsman" defense? Come on and man up, stop appealing to artificial complaints of fallacious argumentation,
and give me an actual solid argument with evidence beyond "this is so libertarian" that we're living in some libertarian golden
age that's driving the oppression of the masses.
Busted unions, contracting out and privatization, deregulation of vast swaths of the economy since the late 1970's (Jimmy Carter
has gotten kudos from libertarian writers for his de-regulatory efforts), lowered tax rates, especially on financial speculation
and concentrated wealth, a blind eye or shrugged shoulder to anti-trust law and corporate consolidation. Yeah, nothing to see
here, no partial victories for the libertarian wings of the ruling class or the GOP, at all. The Koch Brothers accomplished nothing,
absolutely nothing, since David was the Libertarian Party's nominee for Vice President in 1980; all that money gone to waste.
Sure.
So, now some sort of "partial victory" means we're living in some sort of libertarian era? And what exactly was so wonderful about
all the things you listed being perpetuated? So, union "busting" is terrible, but union corruption was a great part of our national
solidarity and should have been protected? Deregulation of vast swathes of the economy? You mean the elimination of government
controlled cartels in the form of trucking and airlines? You mean the sorts of things that have enabled the working class folks
you supposedly favor to travel to places that were previously out of reach for them and only accessible to the rich for their
vacations? Yes, that's truly terrible. Again, you're on the side of the little guy, right? Lowered taxes? Are you seriously going
to argue that the traditional conservative position has been for high tax rates? What are taxes placed upon? People and property.
What do conservatives want to protect? People and property. So... arguing for higher taxes or saying that low taxes are bad or
even especially, libertarian, is really going off the rails. That's just bad reasoning. And regarding financialization, those
weren't especially libertarian in their enacting, but rather flow directly out of the consequences of the modern Progressive implementation
of neo-Keynesian monetary and fiscal policy. Suffice it to say, I don't think you'll find too many arguments from libertarians
that the policies encouraging financialization were good or followed libertarian economic policy prescriptions. Moreover, they
led entirely to the repulsive "too big to fail" situation and if there's one thing that libertarians hold to is that there is
no such thing (or shouldn't be) as "too big to fail." The objection to anti-trust law is that it was regularly abused and actually
created government-protected firms that harmed consumers. If you think anti-trust laws are good things and should be supported
by conservatives then by all means encourage Joe Biden to have Elizabeth Warren as his vice-presidential running mate and go vote
Democrat this fall.
"The problems of the modern economy are the result of state interference, not its absence". That's because the "state interference"
is working as proxy for the interests of vulture capitalist.
What we have today is vulture capitalism as opposed to free enterprise capitalism.
Exactly. The existence of a vulture capitalist or crony capitalist economy, which we have in many sectors, is evidence that "libertarianism"
is nothing more than a convenient totem to invoke as a rationale for complaint against the outcomes of the existing crony capitalist
state of affairs. My contention is that Cuenco, et al are simply advocating for a replacement of the cronies and vultures.
A very similar article(but probably coming at it from a slightly different angle) wouldn't look out of place in a socialist publication.
The culture war really is a pointless waste of time that keeps working class people from working towards a common solution to
shared problems.
I used to think that conservatism was about protecting private property and not, like Cuenco, in coming up with ever more excuses
for expropriating it.
No, that's libertarianism (or more properly propertarianism). Conservatism is first and foremost about responsibility to God,
community, family and self. Property is only of value in its utility towards a means.
As I see it, here are examples of how "conservatives" have actually practiced their "responsibility to God, community, family
and self":
The genocide of Native Americans
The slavery and murder of blacks
Their opposition to child labor laws, to womens' suffrage, etc.
Their support of Jim Crow laws
Their opposition to ending slavery and opposition to desegregation
Opposition to Civil Liberties Laws
Willingness to block, or curtail, voting rights.
Hyping the "imminent threat" of an ever more powerful communist menace bearing
down on us from the late 40s to the "unanticipated" collapse of the
USSR in '91. All of which was little more than endless "threat inflation" used
by our defense industry-corporate kleptocrats to justify monstrous increases
in deficits that have been "invested" in our meddlesome, murderous militarism all around the world, with the torture and deaths
of millions from S. E. Asia, to Indonesia, to Latin America, to the Middle East, to Africa, etc.
Violations of privacy rights (conservative hero J. Edgar Hoover's illegal domestic surveillance and acts of domestic terrorism,
"justified" by
his loopy paranoia about commies on every corner and under every bed.)
Toppling of democracies to install totalitarian despots in Iran
("Ike" '53), Guatemala (Ike, again, '54), Chile (Nixon '73), Brazil (LBJ, '64) and many, many more countries.
Strong support of the Vietnam War, the wars in Laos and Cambodia, and the Iraq War, which, according to conservative W. Bush,
God had inspired.
The myriad "dirty wars" we've fought around the world, and not only in Latin America.
With a few, notable exceptions, conservatives have routinely been on the wrong side of these issues. For the most part, it
has been the left, particularly the "hard left," that has gotten it right.
So conservatism should be entirely about taking people's property "for the good of the country"? That the purpose of a country
is to loot the people? That the people exist for the government and not the government for the people? Seems Edmund Burke and
Russell Kirk would like to have a word with you Adm.
To quote Kirk as just one example of your fundamental error:
Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked . [Apparently, Adm. you dispute
Kirk's assertion and accuse him thereby of conflating libertarianism and conservatism. Yes, I know Kirk was a hater of the
idea of patriotism, but he was such a raging libertarian what else could he do?] Separate property from private possession,
and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread
is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth. Economic levelling[this
is the outcome of Cuenco's policy prescriptions by the way] , conservatives maintain, is not economic progress. Getting
and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth
is much to be desired.
So, either "Mr. Conservative" Russell Kirk wasn't really a conservative but a man who horribly conflated libertarianism and
conservatism, or we can say that Kirk was a conservative and that he recognized the protection of private property as crucial
in minimizing the control and reach of the Leviathan state. If the latter holds, then maybe what we've established is that AdmBenson
isn't particularly conservative.
"The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth." This status quo
has produced precisely the opposite of this. Wealth, assets, capital has been captured by the elite. The pitchforks are coming.
See this CBO chart:
View Hide
Conservatives accept taxes as a part of citizenship. Since taxes can't be avoided, a conservative insists on democratic representation
and has a general desire to get maximum bang for their taxpayer buck.
Libertarians, on the other hand, see everything through the lens of an individual's property rights. Taxes and regulation are
infringements on those rights, so a libertarian is always at war with their own government. They're not interested in bang for
their taxpayer buck, they just want the government to go away. I can't fault people for believing this way, but I can point out
that it is severely faulty as the operating philosophy beyond anything but a small community.
As for me not being particularly conservative, ya got me. It really depends on time of day and the level of sunspot activity.
I should have put the /s on my reply, but your response did give me a good chuckle. Besides, for that finger pointing at you,
there were three more pointing back at me.
And somehow people continually fall for the Trickle Down economic theory. George HW Bush was correct when he called this VooDoo
economics. Fiscal irresponsibility at it's finest.
Nah people don't fall for it, republicans do. The rest of us know this stuff doesn't work. We didn't need an additional datapoint
to realize that. The Tax Cuts and Jobs act was the single most unpopular piece of legislation to ever pass since polling began.
It never had support outside of the Republican Party which is why it's never had majority support.
John Kenneth Galbraith called Trickle Down "economics", "Oats and Horse Economics". If you feed the horse a lot of oats, eventually
some be left on the road...
Mitch is fully owned by Trump as is every republican that holds office except Romney. Mitch can't go to the bathroom with out
asking Trumps permission.
Mitch is owned by corporations and he likes it that way. He basically says as much whenever campaign finance reform pops up and
he defends the status quo.
Yep. The guy who declared war on the Tea Party. The guy who changed his tune entirely about China when he married into the family
of a shipping magnate.
I'm eagerly awaiting a GOP plan for economic restructuring. I've been waiting for decade(s). Surely there is someone in the entire
body of think tanks, congressional staffers, and political class that can propose a genuine and comprehensive plan for how to
rebalance production, education, and technology for the better of ALL Americans. Surely...
I honestly wonder if Jack Kemp might have had a "Road to Damascus" conversion away from his pseudo-libertarian and supply side
economic convictions if he had lived through the decade after the Great Recession. Probably not, given his political and economic
activity up until his death.
Trump pushed the tax cut because it saves him at least $20 million each year in taxes, probably closer to $50 million. That's
the only reason he does anything, because he benefits personally.
Thank you very much for posting the link to the wonderful essay by Mike Lofgren. Written 8 years ago it feels even more actual
than then. I have bookmarked it for future reference.
Looking at the US it always comes to my mind the way Rome and then Byzantium fell: a total erosion of the tax-base the rich
refused to pay anything to the imperial coffers, and then some of the rich had land bigger than some modern countries... And then
the barbarians came...
Lofgren: "What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves
from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot."
That was in 2012, but that was what struck me about my well-to-do classmates
when I transferred from Cal State Long Beach to Columbia University in 1977 . Suddenly I was among people who saw America,
American laws, and a shared sense of civic responsibility as quaint, bothersome, rather tangential to the project of promoting
oneself and/or one's special interest.
The only way that factories would come back is when Americans start buying made in America. We can't wait for ANY government to
bring those factories and jobs ( and technology) . Only people voting with their pocketbooks can do it.
Still waiting for the day the first American asks "What have WE done wrong?" Rather than just following in Trumps step
and playing the victim card every step of the way and wondering why nothing gets better.
It's not a civil war until the *other* civilians start shooting at the rioters. At this point, it's just the usual police repression.
Now given that thousands of people who previously never owned a firearm have now acquired them - although it is unclear how
many of them will be concealed carriers, given the variance in state laws - it's only a matter of time before some people start
shooting. Like the Korean shop owners in LA notably did during the Rodney King riots IIRC.
But it won't be a civil war until a significant number of people on both sides are actually shooting.
There's a guy named Selco Begovic who survived the civil war in Bosnia. He writes articles for prepper Web sites and he has
book out. He has vividly
described conditions of life in a civil war. Most people in the US are not going to handle that sort of thing well. Try this one
as it pertains to b's post.
The true enemies of humanity are corporations, so the violence is not a "civil war", but revolt. Along those lines, it's not "looting"
but sabotage. And the "police" are not peace-keepers but militarized enforcers.
It's a complete waste of time engaging in electoral "politics." Politicians are corporate whores doing their master's bidding,
as are the "police."
Just finished listening to the latest interview
given by Michael Hudson , "Defining a Tyrant," whose focus is on the necessity of applying debt forgiveness to those residing
within the Outlaw US Empire as the economic affects of COVID-19 will be much worse than we've already seen. Those who want to
get to the current moment can begin listening at the 40 minute mark (yes, it's just audio). You'll need to note that the unemployment
numbers as I've been writing for awhile now are greatly understated, although the host Gary Null does allude to that reality as
NYC itself is emptying out--imagine Wall Street sitting in the middle of a ghost metropolis. As you'll learn, Trump's MAGA Mantra
is 100% hollow without enacting a wide ranging debt write-off--even if factories could be put back into business, the Outlaw US
Empire's economy would still remain very uncompetitive because of the issue of debt service and privatized health care--issues
I've written about before.
And so the main topic: Civil War. Or, is it? Reality demands it be named Class War, for that's what it is in reality. Hudson
maps out how its done and by whom while naming the abettors. The Popular Forces number 280 million, not including those too young/old/infirm
to bear arms. The Forces of Reaction minus the paid forces of coercion number well under 100,000. Even adding in police and military,
it's still 280 million to perhaps 10 million. And even if only half of the 280 million stand up, that's 140 million. The rallying
cry ought to be It's better to die standing up for your rights versus groveling on your knees. Too bad all of the above's too
large for one Tweet.
The way they provoked the violence on smashing shop windows with forehammer is exactly what was witnessed inParis when apparent
"black block" types did the same and then got back in their policevan.
I note that in France Riot police is clad in robocop armour and that this armour is a weapon in itself,it deshumanizes the man
inside to himself,and to others.A strike of his arm is much more powerful than if he were dressed as your american cop on patrol,probably
they give them steroid or something to be able to move rapidly with all the weight.They must feel like the Hulk!
Now it would be a sign of peaceful government if just any political party would make a ban on those outfits.
So the medical examiner concluded that there was no evidence of choking or suffocation, and instead was the result of his "restraint"
exacerbating underlying conditions, and suggesting there was the possibility of intoxication or drugs, which is the basis for
the pre-determination that Chauvin will only be charged with 3rd degree murder, which of course they'll try to whittle down to
manslaughter (the coincidental charge.)
Let me see if I've got this straight: a man that is being restrained by the neck, who eventually dies from no other action,
who repeatedly pleads that "I can't breath," who onlookers see and record that the man can not in fact breath, and the medical
examiner finds no evidence of choking or strangulation.
Further, Officer Chauvin, in close physical contact with the eventual corpse of his victim, must surely have felt the life
ebbing from George Floyd. No way no how this mother fucker gets charged with anything other than 1st degree murder. His accomplices
get charged with accessory to 1st degree murder.
"War is a Racket" -Smedley Butler 1933
"Beyond Vietnam - Time to Break the Silence" -MLK 1967
"Art Truth and Politics" -Harold Pinter 2005
What has changed in 100 yrs of uSSa Empire? Foreign policy? Domestic policy?
Economic policy? All have become worse.
The u$$a Regime lies, cheats, steals, rapes, murders, tortures, overthrows, bombs,
invades, destroys, and loots with impunity Global wide.
How a citizen of this Rogue nation can feel good about that is beyond hypocrisy.
This Regime and the humans behind this sickening system must be replaced.
The Military Surveilance Police state must end. The Humans behind this system must be replaced
by any means necessary. Both the safety of the world and domestically rely on their removal.
When finished "Entertaining Ourselves to Death" and coming to terms with the truly Evil nature of the human beings operating
and supporting this system- perhaps you will becomea full human being. Get Up Stand Up.
The difference between ignorance and delusions are substantial.
Ignorance being the lack of knowledge. Delusion being the presence of false
knowledge. Where do you stand?
I don't need protection from the police.
But We ALL need protection FROM the police state.
Will you fight to defend yourself, your family, your neighbor or fellow human being
against a cruel vile corrupt system? Selfishness and greed are no excuse for complacency.
What is worth defending- your property or your virtues?
I have long been disgusted by the u$$a regimes domestic and foreign policies. Which means I have long been disgusted by my
fellow citizens (human beings) which support and operate this vile system.
Revolution-
Complacency and passive complicit citizens Or values, humaneness and justice?
Where do you stand? When do you stand for a meaningful life of society?
The white working and lower middle classes will not support violent rioting by blacks over a black issue. This is not a way to
start a revolution.
What's more, the latest reporting I read in the Washington Post is that Floyd initially resisted arrest. The early reporting
that he did not resist arrest was apparently incorrect.
Moreover, the medical evidence suggests that he died not from asphyxiation or a broken neck, but because of comorbidities.
Floyd had a lengthy criminal record.
If you want a revolution in the U.S., wait a month or two until there are mass evictions.
This is a warning to anybody who would dare to revolt against the coming misery conditions of life while the oligarchs continue
enriching themselves and looting every penny available.
This is a secondary gain from the pandemic, as we were accustomed to multiple declared state of alarm throughout the world,
they thinks that going a step further would not cause any shock....
There have been equally violent revolts in France and Chile continuously during the past year, and in France again in the banlieus,
and then curfew was not declared...
This is the land of the free....There you have your fascist state turning on yourselves...
When they came for the Venezuelans, seized their assets and embassies, I did nothing; when they came for the Iranians and murdered
Soleimani, I said nothing; when they came for the communists in the Odessa House of Unions, I did not move a finger; when they
slaughtered people at the four cardinal points of the world, I did continue living my "American Dream" as if the thing would not
go with me...until I did awaken to find myself in the same nightmare....
I've suggested in the past that civil war was unlikely in the US because that would requires a significant percentage of the electorate
to actually take sides and shoot someone - and most of the population is so anti-gun these days that such a scenario was unlikely,
especially over political issues that aren't usually considered as *directly* adversely affecting most of the population, at least
in their minds. It would also require some direct organization on both sides and I don't see anyone capable of that on the national
scene.
What I can easily see happening, however, is the sort of multi-city, large-scale rioting that occurred in the Sixties and in
other parts of the world, leading to a declaration of martial law in at least some, possibly many, larger cities, if not nation-wide
(a lot of rural areas would likely not be affected.) Economic issues and issues of social repression are usually the causes of
large-scale violence historically in most countries. Most "political" issues usually boil down to either ethnic or economic or
repression issues.
The US doesn't have really that much ethnic issues, except in the Southwest over Latino immigration. The US has racial, economic
and repression issues, however. Most of the time they just simmer, with local limited outbreaks of violence. But in cases of blatant
repression, or under severe economic pressure, they can explode into wider-scale violence.
And we've got both on the horizon. The impact of the pandemic (and the government's clueless response, thanks to Trump and
previous Presidents) on the economy is likely to produce extreme economic pressure, especially on the middle class and the poor.
Adding the extreme militarization of the US police over the last several decades, and this is a recipe for large-scale violence
that continues for more than a few days or a week. Once police over-reaction and the appearance of the National Guard to control
rioting results in the sort of deaths like in the well-known Kent State incident, then like in Ukraine we could start to see cops
and National Guard fatalities from snipers. Next we could see things like the 1985 Philadelphia police bombing of the MOVE headquarters
and the use of armed drones (Connecticut has a law banning armed drones - but not for police.) The next step beyond that is curfew,
and the next step beyond that is martial law.
The next step beyond that is not civil war - it's explicit fascism. And that ends in revolution - which then usually recycles
into either more fascism or "modified: fascism (see France in the 1800's.)
Bottom line: It's not going to get better. One of the many things preppers have been warning against is national repression.
They warned against natural disasters like hurricanes and no one listened until Katrina. They warned against pandemics and no
one listened - until today. They've been warning against national repression - like the Selco article I linked to. Better listen
this time.
TAC: Looking forward, if you do go back to Washington, what issues would you champion, and
what do you think America in 2021 should really focus on?
Sessions: Well, I have come to understand that the neocon foreign policy, the libertarian
free market ideology, beyond common sense, was not healthy, and resulting in damage to families
and to American citizens . It's our duty as public officials to protect American citizens
from damage from unfair foreign competition and other tactics. That's a big deal. I think our
Republican agenda has got to be more focused on helping American people fight back against
unfair attacks on our businesses, closing our factories, losing our jobs, transporting our
jobs. I'll be an advocate for that.
We have a nation, and the government's job is to protect the nation. President Trump said
it simply: Other nations protect their interests, why aren't we protecting ours? We don't
ever use a tariff? When people cheat you every day, how do you fight back, are you going to
drop bombs on them? Why don't you use tariffs, which Alexander Hamilton and George Washington
did at the very beginning of the republic, that's a perfectly normal response to an adverse
attack on your people. So those are the kind of things that I feel strongly about. I believe in
markets, competition, and international trade, but we can no longer sit quietly while are
savaged by very clever, devious mercantilists who want to advance their interests and weaken
the United States, while we sit there, based on some theory , that we can't impose a
tariff. Give me a break!
Also, we need to reestablish a foreign policy for this time in our country's history, and it
has to be really bipartisan. You remember the Kennan Long Telegram that laid the foundation for
the containment policy against the Soviet Union. It lasted for 40 years with basic bipartisan
support. That's the kind of thing we need to be rethinking today.
We cannot continue, as the president has warned us, getting involved in endless wars all
over the globe, thinking that we can just remake humanity. That's not conservatism.
Conservatism, as Bob Tyrell said, is a cast of mind, it's a thought process, about, 'wait, is
this realistic?
You sure this theory is going to work? Are you trying to put a square peg in a round
hole? It's just not going there. Aren't you getting feedback from reality, don't you adjust to
it?' Our fundamental goals are to make the American people happy, prosperous, and stable.
Family, traditions, culture, those kinds of things have got to be defended. And this
ideological view that we're not a nation, we're an idea, somehow our constitution is supposed
to apply worldwide, is ridiculous.
We have borders, and we have a right to defend those borders, to establish good, healthy
conditions within our country. Not just for the billionaires, wages need to go up for working
people. For example, for 20 years wages for average Americans did not increase. GDP was going
up, that seemed to be all the economists cared about, CEOs were making more and more money, but
the wages for the core American people were not going up. They have, under President Trump,
some, and we need to focus on that.
TAC: In both military and economic terms, how should we begin confronting China?
For starters, we need to take off the rose-colored glasses. This is a communist regime. We
can wish it weren't so, people hoped they would moderate when they got wealthier, but actually
the opposite is occurring. Xi Jinping is using technology to repress his people even more
ruthlessly. And they are not free market people. They are not free market people, they're
communists! They are using our free-market theories -- religion -- against us, to destroy us,
to gain market share, and they've been highly successful.
President Trump and I talked about it on the airplane a number of times during the
campaign, and he understands one thing: China needs our markets more than we need their
products.
We can make those products in the United States, we can make our drugs here, we can buy them
from Mexico, our neighbors like that, we can buy them from the Philippines, South Korea, Japan,
India, Vietnam, places that aren't threats to us strategically, and who will deal honestly with
us.
So we absolutely need to alter that supply chain system that has given China an advantage
over all the other nations of the world, and we can do that in a way that does not harm our
economy significantly.
As
Summit News reports , a video clip shows a black woman and former NAACP chapter president
trying to collect medication for her daughter outside a Target store in St. Paul telling
rioters "these motherf**kers need to go home!"
"Leave this shit alone – "these motherf**kers need to go home!" she shouts, "these
people don't give a damn about George Floyd."
Diane Binns, 70, of St. Paul is angry at the people here. Binns came here to get
medication for her daughter. pic.twitter.com/GA1EJpx4XL
The woman subsequently identified herself as Diane Binns, former president of the NAACP St.
Paul from 2016-2018.
Critically, for the narrative-minded among you, she says she attended the initial protest
against the killing of Floyd but after 30 minutes realized "it was going to be a riot, so I
left."
America is quickly descending into chaos as social unrest could spread to other major cities
this weekend. Wealth inequality in many inner cities is at record levels. More than 40 million
people are unemployed with a crashed economy, and people are already furious about virus
lockdowns. This all suggests a perfect storm of unrest could flare up across the country.
What's of particular interest is back in 2005, the PREP Act was brought into existence.
In essence the PREP Act provides for unlimited funding for drug companies to develop
'counter measures' , should a Notice of Declaration of National Emergency be
declared. Such declaration was made back in March of this year.
Under the PREP Act, drug companies are given COMPLETE IMMUNITY FROM ALL ACCOUNTABILITY,
ALL LIABILITY & ALL LAWSUITS.
By her latest count, there are 119 Covid19 vaccines under development worldwide.
2) CDC and AMA have been in cahoots over the flu and vaccines for years!
Read the start of paragraph 3 and all of 4.
"The probably biggest lesson we will learn from this pandemic is that we must work to change
that selfish mentality."
And this is sadly the biggest challenge of all. After many decades of neoliberal doctrine,
coupled with shunning positive patriotism (e.g. serving for the common good of a nation) as
"semi-fascist", we now reap what has been sowed.
But it must be the focus point of our work. Without it, every other effort regarding reviving
democracy, social security, and even changing the crazy geopolitics of our nations is
futile.
"The "western" cultures allow for more selfishness of the individual. But over the
longer timeframe [neoliberal] cultures that emphasizes personal liberty and ignore the
common good are likely to see their empire fail.
The probably biggest lesson we will learn from this pandemic is that we must work to
change that selfish mentality."
Ah, yes ... the common good ... the Great Leap Forward ... the Brave New World ...
individual rights reported as selfishness ... really?
Perhaps it's better to live with some risk and the admitted limited liberty and individual
rights afforded by a system of limited government (not that our governors are currently
acting in accordance to the laws they have sworn to uphold)?
Or perhaps one would rather have the false security of guaranteed life in a prison?
Btw, "empire failing" would be a great thing ... and individual rights and limited
governance are antithetical to empire.
"... "I understand that people are angry, but they shouldn't just endanger businesses without even a thought to enriching themselves through leveraged buyouts and across-the-board terminations..." ..."
"I understand that people are angry, but they shouldn't just endanger businesses without
even a thought to enriching themselves through leveraged buyouts and across-the-board
terminations..."
"Look, we all have the right to protest, but that doesn't mean you can just rush in and
destroy any business without gathering a group of clandestine investors to purchase it at a
severely reduced price and slowly bleed it to death," said Facebook commenter Amy Mulrain,
echoing the sentiments of detractors nationwide who blasted the demonstrators for not hiring
a consultant group to take stock of a struggling company's assets before plundering.
" I understand that people are angry, but they shouldn't just endanger businesses without
even a thought to enriching themselves through leveraged buyouts and across-the-board
terminations.
It's disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their
health benefits and eventually laying them off. There's a right way and wrong way to do this.
"
At press time, critics recommended that protestors hold law enforcement accountable by
simply purchasing the Minneapolis police department from taxpayers.
US Lawmakers Propose Total Ban On STEM Visas For Chinese Students by Tyler Durden Thu, 05/28/2020 -
10:45 As the White House prepares to
eject Chinese graduate students with ties to the PLA, three US lawmakers are taking things
a step further - proposing a bill which would ban mainland Chinese students from studying STEM
subjects in the United States .
Two senators and one House member said on Wednesday that the Secure Campus Act would bar
Chinese nationals from obtaining visas for graduate or postgraduate studies in science,
technology, engineering and mathematics. Students from Taiwan and Hong Kong would be exempt ,
according to
SCMP .
"The Chinese Communist Party has long used American universities to conduct espionage on the
United States," said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), one of the bill's sponsors, adding "What's worse
is that their efforts exploit gaps in current law. It's time for that to end."
"The Secure Campus Act will protect our national security and maintain the integrity of the
American research enterprise."
The proposed legislation comes as diplomatic relations have fractured between the world's
two largest economies. The fissures started to show during a trade war that has been rumbling
on for almost two years and have only widened amid accusations about the handling of the
Covid-19 disease outbreak , and the treatment of ethnic minority groups in China.
Hong Kong is the latest flashpoint after Beijing drew up a national security law that
Washington says tramples on the city's mini-constitution. The US threatened retaliation over
the move.
-SCMP
The bill will also tackle China's efforts to recruit talent overseas through their Thousand
Talents Program , an operation launched in 2008 by the CCP which seeks out international
experts in scientific research, innovation and entrepreneurship. It proposes that participants
in China's recruitment of foreigners be made to register under the Foreign Agents Registration
Act (FARA) , and would prohibit Chinese nationals and those participating in China-sponsored
programs from receiving federal grants or working on federally funded R&D in STEM fields
.
Any university, research institute or laboratory receiving federal funding would be required
to attest that they are not knowingly employing participants in China's recruitment programs -
a list of which the US Secretary of State would publish.
US law enforcement and educational agencies have raised red flags about undisclosed ties
between federally funded researchers and foreign governments. A crackdown has included
indictments and dismissals.
In January, Charles Lieber, 60, chairman of the chemistry and chemical biology department
at Harvard University, was arrested and charged for lying about his involvement in the
Thousand Talents Programme .
-SCMP
Meanwhile, earlier this month a professor at the University of Arkansas who received
millions of dollars in research grants, including $500,000 from NASA, was
arrested and charged with one count of wire fraud.
According to the FBI, Ang failed to disclose that he was getting paid by a Chinese
university and Chinese companies in violation of university policy. He is accused of making
false statements while failing to disclose his extensive ties to China as a member of the
"Thousand Talents Scholars" program.
63-year-old Simon Saw-Teong Ang is the
director of the school's High Density Electronics Center, which received funding from the
National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense (DOD) and
NASA. Since 2013, Ang has been the primary investigator or co-investigator on US
government-funded grants totaling over $5 million, according to the
Washington Examiner .
In November, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by Sen. Rob Portman
(R-OH) released a
109-page bipartisan report which concluded that foreign nations "seek to exploit America's
openness to advance their own national interests," the most ambitious of which "has been
China," according to the Examiner . According to the report, Chinese academics involved in
their so-called 'Thousand Talents' program have been exploiting access to US research labs
.
Backlash
According to SCMP , members of the US scientific community see the US as unfairly targeting
Chinese colleagues , and that the campaigns will discourage talented individuals from pursuing
studies at US universities.
"While we must be vigilant to safeguard research, we must also ensure that the US remains a
desirable and welcoming destination for researchers from around the world," wrote members of
60 groups - including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the
Federation of American Scientists, in a 2019 letter to science policy officials.
The US lawmakers' proposal follows China's March decision to revoke the press credentials
for US journalists from three major US newspapers - declaring five US media outlets to be
foreign government proxies. In February, the Trump administration labeled five Chinese state
media groups as "foreign missions" (via SCMP ).
The easiest way to register your disapproval is with your vote. Will it change things?
Absolutely not.
But I'm only asking for you to send a message. Asking you for more than that would be
presumptuous of me.
The media is quick to tell you that you only have two choices in our
"democracy" - Red Team or Blue Team.
That is a lie. The reality is that you have four choices.
Choice #1) Vote Team Neofeudalism
Do you enjoy being a serf? Then vote for the MSM-endorsed Republican or Democrat. Go Team!
If you think there is any
real difference then you
aren't paying attention .
Choice #2) Don't Vote
The game is rigged, so why participate?
Well, you got the first part right. It's all rigged, but you obviously don't understand the
game if you think you can opt out. We are all trapped in this system, and not voting is a
choice.
Think of it this way. Half of all eligible voters don't vote. Do you think that the political
class is worried about their legitimacy? Not in the slightest. If the voting rate dropped to
just 10% they still wouldn't care.
In fact, a disengaged, apathetic public is a close second preference to Choice #1 for the
ruling elite. Want proof? When is the last time (outside of the Sanders campaign) has any
politician done anything to increase the electorate? Historically the ruling class has always
tried to limit participation.
So the only message that you send by not voting is "I don't care" or "I give up."
Choice #3) Vote for someone you like
A.K.A. Throwing away your vote.
A.K.A. Helping Putin.
A.K.A. Voting for Trump (for people that flunked both math and civics).
The purpose of democracy is to vote for someone that represents your interests. The fact that
this logical, rational act has been demonized by the MSM is proof that the ruling elites don't
approve of this choice.
So if you want to tell the ruling class FU on their choices, this is an easy way to do it.
It's not the best way, but it is a way.
The reason that it's not the best way to send a message is because the Democratic Party truly
doesn't care if it loses to the GOP. The wealthy donors still win.
So as long as only a token number of voters vote for a 3rd party, then the ruling elite still
win. They just don't win in a manner that they would prefer, and that slightly annoys them.
Choice #4) Get Active. Get In Their Faces
The only way to really piss off the ruling elites is to threaten their power.
The Democratic Party establishment and the media will always be against everyone on the
left.
However, that isn't even the most important parts of the establishment, and it's something that
the Left absolutely must fix regardless of whether the strategy is to take over the Democratic
Party or jump to another party.
For starters, let's look at the one place where the Left should dominate - Labor Unions.
No left-wing movement worth a damn fails to have labor behind it. The rank-and-file are
generally economic leftists, but union leadership has often been totally corrupted.
That has to change.
The same goes for civil rights and enviromentalist groups.
Failure to do this will doom any leftist economic movement or party.
However, changing things > sending a message.
Halfway in between changing things and sending a message is primarying incumbents.
The political establishment gets furious when the grassroots challenges them.
You can tell by all the ways that they'll break every rule and violate every value when this
happens.
It's a true FU to the ruling class. It makes them fight over something they thought that they
had already won.
While Bernie's defeat (and abandonment of his own movement) was discouraging, there are
still people fighting the good fight.
For example, Justice Democrats have a 3 - 2 record in 2020 so far.
The DSA has 13 primary
challengers coming up.
This is only a request. You should only do what you are ready to do.
But I think it's not a bad strategy to act in a way most contrary to the wishes of the ruling
class.
by
Los Angeles TimesUS Public Remain the Tacit Accomplice in America's Dead End Wars
Honor the fallen, but not every war they were sent to fight by Andrew Bacevich
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Comments A U.S. soldier fires an anti-tank rocket during a live-fire exercise in Zabul
province, Afghanistan, in July 2010. (Photo: U.S. Army /flickr/cc) Not
least among the victims claimed by the coronavirus pandemic was a poetry recital that was to
have occurred in March at a theater in downtown Boston.
I had been invited to read aloud a poem, and I chose "On a Soldier Fallen in the
Philippines," written in 1899 by William Vaughn Moody (1869-1910). You are unlikely to have
heard of the poet or his composition. Great literature, it is not. Yet its message is
memorable.
The subject of Moody's poem is death, a matter today much on all our minds. It recounts the
coming home of a nameless American soldier, killed in the conflict commonly but misleadingly
known as the Philippine Insurrection.
In 1898, U.S. troops landed in Manila to oust the Spanish overlords who had ruled the
Philippines for more than three centuries. They accomplished this mission with the dispatch
that a later generation of U.S. forces demonstrated in ousting regimes in Kabul and Baghdad.
Yet as was the case with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars of our own day, real victory proved
elusive.
Back in Washington, President McKinley decided that having liberated the Philippines, the
United States would now keep them. The entire archipelago of several thousand islands was to
become an American colony.
McKinley's decision met with immediate disfavor among Filipinos. To oust the foreign
occupiers, they mounted an armed resistance. A vicious conflict ensued, one that ultimately
took the lives of 4,200 American soldiers and at least 200,000 Filipinos. In the end, however,
the United States prevailed.
Denying Filipino independence was the cause for which the subject of Moody's poem died.
Long since forgotten by Americans, the war to pacify the Philippines generated in its day
great controversy. Moody's poem is an artifact of that controversy. In it, he chastises those
who perform the rituals of honoring the fallen while refusing to acknowledge the dubious nature
of the cause for which they fought. "Toll! Let the great bells toll," he writes,
Till the clashing air is dim,
Did we wrong this parted soul?
We will make it up to him.
Toll! Let him never guess
What work we sent him to.
Laurel, laurel, yes.
He did what we bade him do.
Praise, and never a whispered hint
but the fight he fought was good;
In actuality, the fight was anything but good. It was ill-advised and resulted in great
evil. "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines" expresses a demand for reckoning with that evil.
Americans of Moody's generation rejected that demand, just as Americans today balk at reckoning
with the consequences of our own ill-advised wars.
Yet the imperative persists. "O banners, banners here," Moody concludes,
That he doubt not nor misgive!
That he heed not from the tomb
The evil days draw near
When the nation robed in gloom
With its faithless past shall strive.
Let him never dream that his bullet's scream
went wide of its island mark,
Home to the heart of his darling land
where she stumbled and sinned in the dark.
At the end of the 19th century, the United States stumbled and sinned in the dark by waging
a misbegotten campaign to advance nakedly imperial ambitions. At the beginning of the 21st
century, new wars became the basis of comparable sin. The war of Moody's time and the wars of
our own have almost nothing in common except this: In each instance, through their passivity
disguised as patriotism, the American people became tacitly complicit in wrongdoing committed
in their name.
It is no doubt too glib by half to claim that today, besieged by a virus, we are reaping the
consequences caused by our refusal to reckon with past sins. Yet it is not too glib to argue
that the need for such a reckoning remains. Have we wronged the departed souls of those who
died -- indeed, are still dying -- in Afghanistan and Iraq? The question cries out for an
answer. In our cacophonous age, it just might be that we will find that answer in poetry.
"... "Consumption and hiring started to tick up "in gross terms, not in net terms," Furman said, describing the phenomenon as a "partial rebound." The bounce back "can be very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. ..."
"... IMO Trump now realizes that he was snookered by the medical equivalent of the Holy Office. Our Auto da Fe has been impressive and nearly fatal but not quite. Trump's statement that he will never shut the economy down again indicates to me that the "scales have fallen" from his eyes. ..."
"... One thing to note are all the diffusion indexes will show large upticks, because of the base effects. U6 will likely be more stubborn. ..."
"... he believes, the way to think about the current economic drop-off, at least in the
first two phases, is more like what happens to a thriving economy during and after a natural
disaster: a quick and steep decline in economic activity followed by a quick and steep
rebound.
The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide
decline in consumption, and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15,
when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman
noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a
hurricane or industry-wide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill." politico
******
"Consumption and hiring started to tick up "in gross terms, not in net terms," Furman
said, describing the phenomenon as a "partial rebound." The bounce back "can be very very
fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you
put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many
businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V."" politico
--------------
Well, pilgrims, there you have it. If Politico thinks so, it must be so. Do I think the
Democratic Party grandees are deliberately suppressing the economy as long as they can and
bitching and whining as the GOP tries to crank up the machine? Yes, I do. Is that criminal?
Should it be criminal? IMO it should be but to prevent the disintegration of the Great
Republic, we must not treat it as such.
IMO Trump now realizes that he was snookered by the medical equivalent of the Holy Office.
Our Auto da Fe has been impressive and nearly fatal but not quite. Trump's statement that he
will never shut the economy down again indicates to me that the "scales have fallen" from his
eyes.
Are his attempts too little and too late? That could be. Or, maybe not.
The brawny beast that is America is gathering itself up, and looking once again at what
CAN BE, not at what is forbidden us by the Globalist nitwits who would destroy us and make us
into building blocks for their utopia. pl
What I don't understand is how prolonging the lockdown of reliably blue states like my own
WA furthers the Democrat election strategy -- assuming it is what you suggest.
It seems to me that when people in those states feel the totalitarian pinch on their own
livelihood, they might be more inclined to vote against the party that's doing it to them,
tipping the state into the purple or even red column.
Same goes for the battleground states. Seems like a surefire way to throw the election,
not win it.
Can someone explain how this is supposed to work?!?
One thing to note are all the diffusion indexes will show large upticks, because of the
base effects. U6 will likely be more stubborn.
The best comparisons will be unit volumes relative to prior to lockdown. For example,
number of flights or gas consumption prior to and after lockdown ends.
One indicator that I track is used car prices. It is starting a nice uptick particularly
for full size trucks. With all the incentives and financing options I would bet we'll see
growth in even new truck volumes .
On the flip side, IMO, the increased debt and the trillions that the Fed printed up for
Wall St will constrain growth in the medium term.
With respect, I don't agree with your view of what has happened from an economic and
medical sense although I agree with your view of the political machinations of the
democrats.
I said when all this started that the economy would bounce back quickly. I still believe
it will. I also believe that the lockdown was necessary, but now it is thought possible to
open up because the medical system and logistics have now caught up with the pandemic. The
lockdowns bought us time.
Fauci, Birx and Co. were talking of easing up three weeks ago at one of President Trumps
press conferences, I watched most of them live. I don't see the medicos as malevolent
globalists or anything other than public health officials doing their jobs under great
pressure and public scrutiny. I don't think they have drunk any of the numerous glasses of
kool aid that were proffered. They appear to me to have stuck stubbornly to the science.
We too are easing lockdown rules - allegedly in "a controlled and measured manner" but
that is actually BS. Everyone is sick of being cooped up and can't wait. We too have one
State leader - a leftist "democrat" that is dragging their feet in Queensland for political
reasons, our equivalent of Florida. Their borders are currently closed - when they reopen
there will be an absolute avalanche of tourists heading North, us included, to get some warm
weather, that will provide a huge economic spike.
Problem is things were frothy before covid, financial markets were well overextended, the
deficit was out of control, oil won't come back anytime soon. In many ways Trump is a lucky
general, gets to blame the slowdown on the virus and any faltering in the recovery on Dem
governors.
Here is a link to a poll that suggests the globalists have screwed up again (see bottom 1/3
of the link). A large % of Americans polled say they will now avoid products made in China
and would be willing to pay more for the same product if it's made in the USA. They also
think that trade restrictions and tariffs are a good idea. Basically, they like the Trumpian
model. China Joe and his boy Hunter are going to be perceived as being on the wrong side of
this issue by Trump.
you are right. We do not agree. IMO the country wide shutdown was never necessary. What
was needed was a strategy of protection for the vulnerable. The rest could have taken care of
themselves with anti-flu like treatment while therapies and vaccines were developed.
The Democrats deserve it and BTW I don't agree with any of the negatives you state with
regard to the pre-COVID state of things. You just don't like Trump. Neither do I
It is the strategy (poorly conceived) of people whose ideology blinds them to extant
reality, and who think they can mold that reality to their whims through sheer fervency of
their belief in their moral superiority to other, "lesser types." I can't think of a single
historical example where such a strategy has worked out, but there you have it. Then again,
according to them, history also fits into that concept of "malleable reality" as they see it.
They are the makers of history in their own estimation, rather than part of and subject to
it. This is why the Left has never been able to grapple with, and is often outright hostile
to, the notion of unforeseen consequences.
This past weekend our hotel parking lots were pretty full, this is normally a slow time in SW
Florida. It's likely restaurants will be allowed 100% capacity seating with bars opening this
coming Monday.
Reasonable people who want a real economy in the USA should all be voting for President
Trump. If he wins, and I think he will, we're going to have a real boom as smart EU money
moves into USA equities, particularly the NASDAQ.
" blame the slowdown on the virus "
Not gonna happen. He's going to blame the Democrats who issued all those EO declaring who was
essential and who was "seperate but equal". He'll blame China, rightfully so, for spreading
this as far and wide in the West as possible; he'll blame the academics and professional
"resistance" within and without the government for their incompetence and intransigence.
Corky,
"Seems like a surefire way to throw the election, not win it."
it doesn't matter who votes, it only matters now who counts them. Thus the statewide mailings
of ballots to maximize ballot harvesting. At the very least lots of local elections will get
stolen, probably a congressional one too, even if WA doesn't go for Trump in November.
"Both viruses remove marker molecules on the surface of an infected cell that are used by
the immune system to identify invaders, the researchers said in a non-peer reviewed paper
posted on preprint website bioRxiv.org on Sunday. They warned that this commonality could
mean Sars-CoV-2, the clinical name for the virus, could be around for some time, like
HIV...that the coronavirus was showing "some characteristics of viruses causing chronic
infection"."
It appears that an Intelligence report that's come out regarding the CCP and their virus by
French Intelligence (DGSE) isn't getting the traction it deserves.
Eleven years, , 'eleven years'BEFORE the EU signed off on the PRC/CCP Wuhan
lab construction, French DGSE warned that the PRC/CCP's lab was a construction leak and
bio-weapon making facility disaster waiting to happen.
Why was nobody listening at the time? Where were the FIVE EYES in all of this, were they
ignoring French Intelligence's warning, what? Where was the CIA in this? They're supposed to
be the 'external' watchdog, right? It was the Tenet/Goss handover time frame, 2004. But
surely the DGSE warnings had to have been 'flagged' by Langley for a closer scrutiny, right?
What was DIA's read on this at the time?
..."French diplomatic and security advisers, who argued that the Chinese reputation for
poor bio-security could lead to a catastrophic leak.
They also warned that Paris could lose control of the project, and even suggested that
Beijing could harness the technology to make biowarfare weapons."...
Another interesting cavet in the article relates to P4 labs everywhere (including U.S.
facilities)..... "A source told the newspaper: 'What you have to understand is that a P4
[high-level bio-security] laboratory is like a nuclear reprocessing plant. It's a
bacteriological atomic bomb."
An interesting development yesterday: Twitter have flagged a couple of Trump's tweets on
mail-in ballots as "Misleading". A link at the bottom of each tweet says "Get the facts about
mail-in ballots" and directs you to a piece written by Twitter on the subject quoting CNN
& WaPo as having contrary views to the President - hardly news in itself.
Are we seeing the beginning of another insurance policy, in case the economy recovers? It
appears to put Trump in a bind, as shutting down or sanctioning Twitter as a whole would not
only deny Trump his (until yesterday) unfiltered comms channel to his base, but also invite
cries of censorship by the MSM. If he does nothing, what is to stop Twitter 'correcting' more
of this messages? In a later tweet Trump directly
accused Twitter of "..interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election". It will be very
interesting to see how this develops. Here is the first of the offending tweets:
@Barbara
If Israel, Mexico, Great Britain, China, Ukraine, Canada, et.al can interfere in American
elections, and the USA can interfere in the elections of any nation it wishes, why should the
Masters and Commanders of the internet be forbidden the same hobby?
Have you never watched Network? https://americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork4.html
Same as it ever was.
Obama ears protrude above this whole revaval of McCarthysim. he should end like the senator
McCarthy -- disgraced. And the damage caused by RussiaGate was already done and is
irrevocable.
CrowdStrike – the forensic investigation firm hired by the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) to inspect its computer servers in 2016 – admitted to Congressional
investigators as early as 2017 that it had no direct evidence of Russian hacking, recently
declassified documents show.
CrowdStrike's president Shawn Henry testified, "There's not evidence that [documents and
emails] were actually exfiltrated [from the DNC servers]. There's circumstantial evidence but
no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated." This was a crucial revelation because the
thousand ships of Russiagate launched upon the positive assertion that CrowdStrike had
definitely proven a Russian hack. This sworn admission has been hidden from the public for over
two years, and subsequent commentary has focused on that singular outrage.
The next deductive step, though, leads to an equally crucial point: Circumstantial evidence
of Russian hacking is itself flimsy and collapses when not propped up by a claim of conclusive
forensic testing.
THE COVER UP.
On March 19, 2016, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, surrendered his emails
to an unknown entity in a "spear phishing" scam. This has been called a "hack," but it was not.
Instead, it is was the sort of flim-flam hustle that happens to gullible dupes on the
internet.
The content of the emails was beyond embarrassing. They
showed election fraud and coordination with the media against the candidacy of Bernie
Sanders. The DNC and the Clinton campaign needed a cover story.
There already existed in Washington brooding suspicion that Vladimir Putin was working to
influence elections in the West. The DNC and the Clinton campaign set out to retrofit that
supposition to explain the emails.
On January 16, 2016, a silk-stocking Washington D.C. think tank, The Atlantic Council
(remember that name), had issued a
dispatch under the banner headline: "US Intelligence Agencies to Investigate Russia's
Infiltration of European Political Parties."
The lede was concise: "American intelligence agencies are to conduct a major investigation
into how the Kremlin is infiltrating political parties in Europe, it can be revealed."
There followed a series of pull quotes from an article that appeared in the The Telegraph ,
including that "James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence" was investigating
whether right wing political movements in Europe were sourced in "Russian meddling."
The dispatch spoke of "A dossier" that revealed "Russian influence operations" in Europe.
This was the first time trippy words like "Russian meddling" and "dossier" would appear
together in the American lexicon.
Most importantly, the piece revealed the Obama administration was spying on conservative
European political parties. This means, almost necessarily under the Five
Eyes Agreement , foreign agents were returning the favor and spying on the Trump
campaign.
Blaming Russia would be a handy way to deal with the Podesta emails. The problem was the
technologically impossibility of identifying the perpetrator in a phishing scheme. The only way
to associate Putin with the emails was circumstantially. The DNC retained CrowdStrike to
provide assistance.
On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
announced : "We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton . . . We have emails
pending publication."
Two days later, CrowdStrike fed the Washington Post a
story , headlined, "Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on
Trump."
The improbable tale was that the Russians had hacked the DNC computer servers and got away
with some opposition research on Trump. The article quoted CrowdStrike's chief technology
officer and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, who also happens to be a senior fellow at the
Atlantic Council.
The next day, a new blog – Guccifer 2.0 – appeared on the
internet and announced:
Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by "sophisticated" hacker groups.
I'm very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy,
very easy.
Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton's and other Democrats'
mail servers. But he certainly wasn't the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get
access to the DNC's servers.
Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think I've been in the DNC's networks for almost a year and
saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it?
Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC's
network.
Guccifer 2.0 posted hundreds of pages of Trump opposition research allegedly hacked from the
DNC and emailed copies to Gawker and The Smoking Gun . In raw form, the opposition research was
one of the documents obtained in the Podesta emails, with a notable difference: It was widely
reported the document now contained "
Russian fingerprints ."
The document had been cut and pasted into a separate Russian Word template that yielded
an abundance of Russian "error "messages . In the
document's metadata was the name of the Russian secret police founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky,
written in the Russian language. The three-parenthesis formulation from the original post ")))"
is the Russian version of a smiley face used
commonly on social media. In addition, the blog's author deliberately used a Russian
VPN service visible in its emails even though there would have been many options to hide
national affiliation.
CrowdStrike would later test the computers and declare this to be the work of sophisticated
Russian spies. Alperovitch described it as, " skilled operational tradecraft ."
There is nothing skilled, though, in ham-handedly disclosing a Russian identity on the
internet when trying to hide it. The more reasonable inference is that this was a set-up. It
certainly looks like Guccifer 2.0 suddenly appeared in coordination with the Washington Post 's
article that appeared the previous day.
THE FRAME UP.
Knowing as we now do that CrowdStrike never corroborated a hack by forensic analysis, the
reasonable inference is that somebody was trying to frame Russia. Most likely, the entities
that spent three years falsely leading the world to believe that direct evidence of a hack
existed – CrowdStrike and the DNC – were the ones involved in the frame-up.
Lending weight to this theory: at the same moment CrowdStrike was raising a false Russian
flag, a different entity, Fusion GPS – also paid by the DNC – was inventing a
phony dossier that ridiculously connected Trump to Russia.
Somehow, the ruse worked.
Rather than report the content of the incriminating emails, the watchdog press instead
reported CrowdStrike's bad explanation: that Putin-did-it.
Incredibly, Trump was placed on the defensive for email leaks that showed his opponent
fixing the primaries. His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was forced to resign because a
fake ledger suddenly appeared out of Ukraine connecting him to Russia.
Trump protested by stating the obvious: the federal government has "no idea" who was behind
the hacks. The FBI and CIA called him a liar, issuing a "
Joint Statement " that cited Guccifer 2.0, suggesting 17 intelligence agencies agree that
it was the Russians.
Hillary Clinton took advantage of this "intelligence assessment" in the October debate to
portray Trump as Putin's stooge"
"We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that
these espionage attacks, these cyber-attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin.
And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing,"
said Clinton.
The media's fact checkers
excoriated Trump for lying. This was the ultimate campaign dirty trick: a joint operation
by the intelligence agencies and the media against a political candidate. It has since been
learned that the "17 intelligence agencies" claptrap was always
false . Those responsible for the exaggeration were James Clapper, James Comey and John
Brennan.
Somehow, Trump won anyway.
Those who assert that it is a "conspiracy theory" to say that CrowdStrike would fabricate
the results of computer forensic testing to create a false Russian flag should know that it was
caught doing exactly that around the time it was inspecting the DNC computers.
On Dec. 22, 2016, CrowdStrike caused an international stir when it claimed to have uncovered
evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery computer app to help pro-Russian
separatists. Voice of America later determined the claim
was false , and CrowdStrike retracted its finding. Ukraine's Ministry of Defense was forced
to eat crow and admit that the hacking never happened. If you wanted a computer testing firm to
fabricate a Russian hack for political reasons in 2016, CrowdStrike was who you went out and
hired.
Perhaps most insidiously, the Obama administration played the phony Russian interference
card during the transition to try to end Trump's presidency before it started. As I
wrote in December 2017:
Michael Flynn was indicted for a conversation he had with the Russian ambassador on
December 28, 2016, seven weeks after the election.
That was the day after the outgoing president expelled 35 Russian diplomats -- including
gardeners and chauffeurs -- for interfering in the election. Yes, that really happened.
The Obama administration had wiretapped Flynn's conversation with the ambassador, hoping
to find him saying something they could use to support their wild story about collusion.
The outrage, for some reason, is not that an outgoing administration was using wiretaps to
listen in on a successor's transition. It is that Flynn might have signaled to the Russians
that the Trump administration would have a different approach to foreign policy.
How dare Trump presume to tell an armed nuclear state to stand down because everyone in
Washington was in a state of psychological denial that he was elected?
Let's establish one thing early here: It is okay for an incoming administration to
communicate its foreign policy preferences during a transition even if they differ from the
lame duck administration .
.If anything, Flynn was too reserved in his conversation with the Russian ambassador. He
should have said, "President-elect Trump believes this Russian collusion thing is a fantasy
and these sanctions will be lifted on his first day in office."
That would have been perfectly legal. It also happens to be what FBI Director Comey and
the rest were hoping Flynn would do. They wanted to get a Trump official on tape making an
accommodation to the Russians.
The accommodation would then be cited to suggest a quid pro quo that proved the
nonexistent collusion. Instead, Flynn was uncharacteristically noncommittal in his
conversation with the ambassador. Drat!
They did have a transcript of what he said, though. This is where the tin-pot dictator
behavior of Comey is fully displayed. He invited Flynn to be interviewed by the FBI,
supposedly about Russian collusion to steal the election.
If you're Flynn, you say, "Sure, I want to tell you 15 different ways that there was no
collusion and when do you want to meet."
What Flynn did not know was that the purpose of the interview had nothing to do with the
election. It would be a test pitting Flynn's memory against the transcript.
Think about that for a moment. Comey did not need to ask Flynn what was said in the
conversation with the ambassador -- he had a transcript. The only reason to ask Flynn about
it was to cross him up.
That is the politicization of the FBI. It is everything Trump supporters rail against when
they implore him to drain the swamp. The inescapable conclusion is that the FBI set a trap
for the incoming national security advisor to affect the foreign policy of the newly elected
president.
Flynn made the mistake of not being altogether clear about what he had discussed with the
ambassador. In his defense, he did not believe he was sitting there to tell the FBI how the
Trump administration was dealing with Russia going forward. The conversation was supposed to
be about the election.
He certainly did not think the FBI would unmask his comments in a FISA wiretap and compare
them to his answers. That would be illegal.
Exhibit 5 to the DOJ's recent Motion to Dismiss the Flynn indictment confirms the Obama
administration's bad faith in listening in on his conversation with the ambassador. The
plotters admit , essentially,
that they looked at the transcript to see whether Flynn said anything that caused Russia to
stand-down. Had General Flynn promised to lift the sanctions, the Obama administration would
have claimed it was the pro quo that went with the quid of Putin's interference.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/KeSHRR5bMr0
After Trump's inauguration, the FBI and Justice Department launched a special counsel
investigation that accepted, as a given, CrowdStrike's dubious conclusion that Russia had
interfered in the election. The only remaining question was whether Trump himself colluded in
the interference. There followed a two-year inquiry that did massive political damage to Trump
and the movement that put him in office.
Tucker Carlson rightly made Trey Gowdy squirm recently for Republican acquiescence in the shoddy
underpinnings of the Russia hoax. It was not only Gowdy, though. Establishment
politicians and
pundits have been all too willing for years to wallow in fabricated
Russian intrigue , at the expense of the Trump presidency.
This perfectly illustrates Republican perfidy: Gifted with undeserved victory in a
generational realignment that they were dragged to kicking and screaming, they proceed to
question its source and validity. Because if Trump was a product of KGB- esque intrigue, then
Hillary was a victim of meddling. Trump was a hapless beneficiary. The deplorables were not
only racist losers, they were also Putin's unwitting stooges.
As I first noted
in December 2016, the Washington establishment deliberately set out to fan Russian anxiety to
conduct war against the Trump administration. Perhaps it is time to admit that those of us
chided as " crazies
" who doubted Russian interference – including Trump
himself – were right all along.
In the after-action assessment of what went wrong, it should be noted that non-insiders are
the ones who have called this from the beginning, in places like
here ,
here ,
here , here
, and here . That
is partly what the president means when he Tweets support for his " keyboard warriors ." As
Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany pointed out on Friday, the
White House press corps has completely missed the story.
Thank you to all of my great Keyboard Warriors. You are better, and far more brilliant,
than anyone on Madison Avenue (Ad Agencies). There is nobody like you!
-- Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump) May 15,
2020
This scandal is huge, much bigger than Watergate, and compromising in its resolution is
destructive. If Republicans continue to stupidly concede phony
Russian intrigue , the plotters
will say they were justified to investigate it.
The recent CrowdStrike testimony drop ended any chance at middle ground. This was a rank
political operation and indicting a few FBI agents is not going to resolve anything.
CrowdStrike's circumstantial evidence that launched this probe is ridiculous. We'll soon
know if the Durham investigation has the will to defy powerful insiders of both parties and say
so.
Please understand that communism is a utopia, a religious dogma, completely discredited by
the history.
While Marx critique of capitalism and the idea of class struggle survived the test of
time, the idea of communism with its central postulate about future hegemonic role of
proletariat proved to be false. Which means the communism is yet another utopia, a religious
cult, if you wish.
Bolshevism as it existed in the USSR in a form of Stalinism and than "Brezhnev developed
socialism" was really a cruel and bloodthirsty religious cult (less bloodthirsty in the
latter form, but still). No questions about it.
Although I do not understand details, it look like China Communist Party also degenerated
into hypocritical religious cult, not that dissimilar from CPSU. That might well makes
Chinese society somewhat unstable and vulnerable to the color revolution. As soon as
intelligence services change flag like KGB did, that would be it.
On the contrary neoliberalism (which probably should be understood as Trotskyism for the
rich -- financial oligarchy of all countries unite) is the only derivative of Marxism that
survived as a widespread social system. It managed to survive the major crisis of 2008 as a
social system almost intact, despite the fact that the neoliberal ideology was completely
discredited. Its resilience after 2008 is simply amazing.
Moreover, Neoliberalism does enjoy unweaving support of probably 20% of the USA society --
PMC or "professional and managerial class" which IMHO includes a part of brainwashed working
class and small business owners. Which is a factor that essentially guarantees its longevity
and survival after the current shock, despite all our wishes for the contrary. In other
words, class struggle does exist, but it is almost always uphill battle, and the max
achievable are some watered down reforms. That essentially the idea of social democracy and
the USA the New Deal.
As Warren Buffett aptly said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the
rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
And we should not mix Trump "national neoliberalism" with fascism. It is a completely
different social phenomena, a social system that does not require mass mobilization and a
mass Party. It does has some common features (the role on intelligence agencies, the role of
propaganda, etc,) but still the differences are more prononced then similarities. Sheldon
Wolin called it "inverted totalitarism" ( https://www.truthdig.com/articles/sheldon-wolin-and-inverted-totalitarianism/
)
Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of
American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he
calls "inverted totalitarianism."
Wendy Brown, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of
Wolin's, said in an email to me: "Resisting the monopolies on left theory by Marxism and on
democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive -- even distinctively
American -- analysis of the political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He
was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call
neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he
took to be poisoning democracy at its root."
Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his
last book, "Democracy Incorporated," details our peculiar form of corporate
totalitarianism. "One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be
described as democratic," he writes in that book, "surely not in the highly managed,
money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the
class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media."
The top nine nations with the most coronavirus cases were members of the Western Empire
(former democracies weakened by corporations and oligarchs to promote global trade) or the
Elite reaching an understanding with Authoritarians. "Profit over lives" was the result.
Endless wars, offshoring, corruption, exploitation and despair led to the decreased life
expectancy in the USA and England.
The novel coronavirus pandemic is the direct result of these dysfunctional governments.
Corporations see the epidemic as a profit center for their magical treatment or vaccine.
There is no US national public health system. US hospitals and nursing homes primary purpose
is to make money for stockholders and mangers. It is of no matter that nearly 100,000
Americans have died so far with many more to come. No great wealth will be spent to fight the
pandemic nationally in the USA using the proven public health practices of universal testing,
contact tracing and isolation of the ill.
This is now a bipolar world. The USA and UK are pariah nations quarantined from the
nations that have controlled the virus. The Western Empire has fallen.
The Democrats are just as responsible for the mess as the Republicans. I have yet to
receive my mail-in ballot for the postponed June 2nd Maryland primary. Besides being
incarcerated at home, it looks like I am also disenfranchised. Yet, I am very lucky, once
again, but for how long?
Either a democratic constitutional government retakes control of the USA or a second civil
war between the credentialed and the left-behind is inevitable. The aristocracy always loses
but with wholesale chaos, major loss of life and redistribution of wealth.
This is an extraordinary dangerous time for Homo sapiens due the Pandemic and the
resulting Greatest Depression leading to unrest, scapegoating and confrontation which could
result in the use of nuclear weapons. Plus, climate change looms ahead. How can this possibly
be addressed if the developed world is unable to control a once in a century pandemic; let
alone, evolve a sustainable civilization that can survive on a finite planet.
Michael Hudson: Debt, Liberty and "Acts of God"
Posted on
May 26, 2020
by
Yves Smith
Yves here. Michael Hudson recaps the logic of debt jubilees and other forms of debt relief, as practiced in
ancient times, when borrowers through circumstances outside their control were unable to make good. Monarchs
recognized the danger of letting creditors create a permanent underclass.
This is a short, high-level treatment and makes for an easy-to-digest introduction to Hudson's research
and ideas.
Western civilization distinguishes itself from its predecessors in the way it has responded to "acts of
God" disrupting the means of support and leaving debts in their wake.
The great question always has been who will lose under such conditions. Will it be debtors and renters at
the bottom of the economic scale, or creditors and landlords at the top? This age-old confrontation between
creditors and debtors, landlords and tenants over how to deal with the unpaid debts and back rents is at the
economic heart of today's 2020 coronavirus pandemic that has left large and small businesses, farms,
restaurants and neighborhood stores – along with their employees who have been laid off – unable to pay the
rents, mortgages, other debt service and taxes that have accrued.
For thousands of years ancient economies operated on credit during the crop year, with payment falling
due when the harvest was in – typically on the threshing floor. Normally this cycle provided a flow of crops
and corvée labor to the palace and covered the cultivator's spending during the crop year, with interest
owed only when payment was late. But bad harvests, military conflict or simply the normal hardships of life
occasionally prevented this buildup of debt from being paid, threatening citizens with bondage to their
creditors or loss of their land rights.
Mesopotamian palaces had to decide who would bear the loss when drought, flooding, infestation, disease
or military attack disrupted economic activity and prevented the settlement of debts, rents and taxes.
Recognizing that this was an unavoidable fact of life, rulers proclaimed amnesties for taxes and the various
debts that were incurred during the crop year. These acts saved smallholders from having to work off their
debts by personal bondage and ultimately to lose their land.
Classical antiquity, and indeed subsequent Western civilization, rejected such Clean Slates to restore
social balance. Since Roman times it has become normal for creditors to use social misfortune as an
opportunity to gain property and income at the expense of families falling into debt. In the absence of
kings or democratic civic regimes protecting debtor rights and liberty, pro-creditor laws obliged debtors to
lose their land or other means of livelihood to foreclosing creditors, sell it under distress conditions and
fall into bondage to work off their debts, becoming clients or quasi-serfs to their creditors without hope
of recovering their former free status.
Giving priority to creditor claims leads to widespread bankruptcy. At first glance, it seems to violate
our society's ideas of fairness and distributive justice to insist on payment of debt and rent arrears,
threatening to evict debtors from their homes and forfeit whatever property they have if they cannot pay the
rent arrears and other charges without revenue having come in. Bankruptcy proceedings would force businesses
and farms to forfeit what they have invested. It also would force U.S. cities and states to cope with
plunging sales- and income-tax revenue by slashing social services and depleting their pension funds savings
to pay bondholders.
But the West's pro-creditor legal and financial philosophy has long blocked debt relief to renters,
mortgagees and other debtors. Banks, landlords and insurance companies insist that writing down of debts and
rents owed to them by wage-earners and small business is unthinkable. So something has to give: either the
broad economic interest of most of the population, or the interest of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate
(FIRE) sector. Banks claim that non-payment of rent would cause debt defaults and wipe out bank capital.
Insurance companies claim that to make their policy holders whole would bankrupt them. So the insurance
companies, banks, landlords and bondholders insist that labor, industry and the government bear the cost of
arrears that have built up during the economic slowdown, not themselves.[1]
Yet for thousands of years Near Eastern rulers restored viability for their economies by writing down
debts in emergencies, and more or less regularly to relieve the normal creeping backlog of debts. These
Clean Slates extended from Bronze Age Sumer and Babylonia in the 3
rd
millennium BC down to
classical antiquity through the Near East, including the neo-Assyrian, neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires.
Near Eastern Protection of Economic Resilience in the Face of Acts of God
For the palatial economies of Mesopotamia and its neighbors, resilience meant stabilization of fiscal
revenue. Letting private creditors (often officials in the palace's own bureaucracy) demand payment out of
future production threatened to deprive rulers of crop surpluses and other taxes, and corvée labor or even
service in the military. Individual creditors looked to their own advantage, not that of the overall
economy.
To preserve the flow of rents, taxes and basic corvée labor duties and service in the military, Near
Eastern rulers proclaimed Clean Slates that wiped out personal and agrarian debts. That restored normal
economic relations – an idealized
status quo ante
– by rolling back the consequence of debts –
bondage to creditors, and loss of land and its crop yield. From the palace's point of view as tax collector
and seller of many key goods and services, the alternative would have been for debtors to owe their crops,
labor and even liberty to their creditors, not to the palace. So cancelling debts to restore normalcy was
simply pragmatic, not utopian idealism as was once thought.
The pedigree for "act-of-God" rules specifying what obligations need not be paid when serious disruptions
occur goes back to the laws of Hammurabi c. 1750 BC. Their aim was to restore economic normalcy after major
disruptions. §48 of Hammurabi's laws proclaim a debt and tax amnesty for cultivators if Adad the Storm God
has flooded their fields, or if their crops fail as a result of pests or drought. Crops owed as rent or
fiscal payments were freed from having to be paid. So were consumer debts run up during the crop year,
including tabs at the local ale house and advances or loans from individual creditors. The ale woman
likewise was freed from having to pay for the ale she had received from palace or temples for sale during
the crop year.
Whoever leased an animal that died by an act of God was freed from liability to its owner (§266). A
typical such amnesty occurred if the lamb, ox or ass was eaten by a lion, or if an epidemic broke out.
Likewise, traveling merchants who were robbed while on commercial business were cleared of liability if they
swore an oath that they were not responsible for the loss (§103).
It was realized that hardship was so inevitable that debts tended to accrue even under normal conditions.
Every ruler of Hammurabi's dynasty proclaimed a Clean Slate cancelling personal agrarian debts (but not
normal commercial business loans) upon taking the throne, and when military or other disruptions occurred
during their reign. Hammurabi did this on four occasions.[2]
In an epoch when labor was the scarcest resource, a precondition for survival was to prevent rising
indebtedness from enabling creditors to use debt leverage to obtain the labor of debtors and appropriate
their land. Early communities could not afford to let bondage become chronic, or creditors to become a
wealthy class rivaling the power of palace rulers and seeking gains by impoverishing their debtors.
Yet that is precisely what is occurring as today's economy polarizes between creditors and debtors.
_______
[1]
Lawsuits are exploding over the role of insurance companies supposed to protect business
from such interruptions. See Julia Jacobs, "Arts Groups Fight Their Insurers Over Coverage on Virus Losses,"
The New York Times
, May 6, 2020, reports that "insurance companies have issued a torrent of
denials, prompting lawsuits across the country and legislative efforts on the state and federal levels to
force insurers to make payments. The insurance industry has argued that fulfilling all of these requests
would bankrupt the industry."
[2]I provide a detailed history of Clean Slate acts from the Bronze Age down through Biblical times and
the Byzantine Empire in
" and forgive them their debts"
(ISLET 2018).
The historical overlook ignores the function of bankruptcy to create the clean slate. Sure, a few
sentences are thrown in, but somehow completely overlooks entire types of bankruptcy that allow corporate
and individual restructuring to occur and preserve underlying value.
The whole debt jubilee ideas is just so unfair. Access to debt is by and large a privileged position in
the modern world. The rich have access to huge amount of capital at minimal cost while the poor have to pay
outrageous rates to buy a used car or pay for an emergency. To wipe the slate clean is overwhelmingly
beneficial to the rich and connected, while the poor remains renters stuck in wage slavery. And the
aftermath of a general debt jubilee means the poor will have even greater difficulty with accessing credit
to buy housing, durable goods, and things that allow them to build wealth.
There's already a much better solution that actually stimulates the economy and redistributes wealth.
Just give every natural person the same amount of money until the economy gets to where it needs to be. It
can also be channeled through building public goods like free college education and universal free
healthcare and public housing. For everything else, just let bankruptcies happen and clean out natural and
unnatural persons addicted to debt. Then the natural person get their fresh start and the unnatural
corporate persons can die a well deserved death.
You must be joking re bankruptcy.
And you completely misunderstand what Hudson is talking about for our modern day 'Little people' debt
issues. I suggest a far more thorough reading of Hudson.
"why do people say," you ought to go read what the author REALLY means".. as opposed to looking at
what was said?
I think what Astrid says is completely valid.
What about what was said ,doesn't reflect reality?
There is unequal treatment and how much money /credit you have completely changes "what you can get
away with".
Poor people don't go bankrupt they get evicted they go homeless.. their cars are repossessed. They
don't have the money for a lawyer to file bankruptcy papers..
Donald trump "goes bankrupt".. and comes out smiling on the other side
Just give every natural person the same amount of money until the economy gets to where it needs to
be.
Astrid
Yes, Steve Keen's solution. But also, all government privileges for private credit creation should be
abolished to eliminate perverse incentives to go into debt, which include the punishment of legitimate*
saving.
Also, an ongoing Citizen's Dividend, to replace all fiat creation for private interests, is a way, in
addition to saving, for all citizens to build equity for rainy days such as these.
'Just give every natural person the same amount of money until the economy gets to where it needs to
be'
Astrid – a basic income has been discussed but, due to the structures in our tax system and in the
operation of the so called 'Free Market' (a complete inversion of it's original meaning) -- I would think
that income would immediately be taken away by the fire sector interests and be used to balloon up asset
prices.
The fact that the cost of living – food, rent, housing has gone up is not really a natural market force –
(there is no natural market force or some magical invisible hand or some as yet undetermined phenomena to
be discovered) – because the market is man made.
In my view, the heaping on of debt fueled speculation combined with corruption's many companions –
co-joined political capture and tax favored status is driving the fundamental asset inflation which is
making everything so damned expensive – everything that used to make living and doing business less
expensive has been captured by creditors and their co-joined cohorts.
Below is a comment from the mid 1920's – don't know who wrote it
In spite of the ingenious methods devised by statesmen and financiers to get more revenue from large
fortunes, and regardless of whether the maximum sur tax remains at 25% or is raised or lowered, it is
still true that it would be better to stop the speculative incomes at the source, rather than attempt to
recover them after they have passed into the hands of profiteers.
If a man earns his income by producing wealth nothing should be done to hamper him. For has he not given
employment to labor, and has he not produced goods for our consumption? To cripple or burden such a man
means that he is necessarily forced to employ fewer men, and to make less goods, which tends to decrease
wages, unemployment, and increased cost of living.
If, however, a man's income is not made in producing wealth and employing labor, but is due to
speculation, the case is altogether different. The speculator as a speculator, whether his holdings be
mineral lands, forests, power sites, agricultural lands, or city lots, employs no labor and produces no
wealth. He adds nothing to the riches of the country, but merely takes toll from those who do employ
labor and produce wealth.
If part of the speculator's income – no matter how large a part – be taken in taxation, it will not
decrease employment or lessen the production of wealth. Whereas, if the producer's income be taxed it
will tend to limit employment and stop the production of wealth.
Our lawmakers will do well, therefore, to pay less attention to the rate on incomes, and more to the
source from whence they are drawn.
First pass"the need act"
https://www.congress.gov/bill/112-thcongress/house-bill/2990/text
Then, as the US gov't would be able to create money debt free .
They could distribute the money to Everyone . and not just wall street to get that money into
circulation . and drive the economy .. not too much not too little.
I think you are missing who Hudson said the "clean slates" were for. They were not for the big
creditors and rentiers, rather they were for the farmers and average people who had suffered some loss
that made them unable to provide their payments to their creditors and rentiers. It would be as if today,
those people who cannot work because of Covid-19 were forgiven their debts, so that when this pandemic
was over, they could start out fresh. That would be so much more a help to Main Street's economy than
just giving money to the top corporations.
I'm not against your ideas about free education and universal healthcare and I doubt Hudson is against
those either, but there is much more to the economy that just education and healthcare – things like food
production and the manufacturing of necessary items, and Hudson is looking at what has worked
historically.
Ah, Americans! "If there is nothing in it for me, then I'm against it!"
Haven't we had enough of that kind of thinking? Is someone else getting a break from their debt
REALLY going to hurt the rest of Americans? In fact, if it makes American's Main Street economy
stronger, doesn't that actually help all Americans? I hear that kind of thinking all the time when
I talk about forgiving student debt – as though somehow that debt is coming out of THEIR pockets
when it is not.
Too many Americans sound like temporarily distressed billionaires in their attitudes (it's all
about ME) instead of people who want all Americans to succeed.
Justice is justice and Hudson's plan would do nothing for rent slaves while giving houses to
those who used what is, in essence, the public's credit but for private gain to buy them.
Also, rent slaves tend to be poorer than those who "own" their own homes so Hudson's plan is
a form of welfare for the richer rather than a promotion of the general welfare.
In fact, if it makes American's Main Street economy stronger, doesn't that actually help
all Americans?
The Historian
Our focus should be on citizens, i.e. people, not businesses since justice for people is what
ultimately matters. What you are promoting is Main Street trickle-down.
Astrid, please re-read Hudson's article. He has been studying this subject for years and knows what he
is talking about. He deserves a closer read than what you gave him!
"Access to debt is by and large a privileged position in the modern world." While this statement is
narrowly true, in the US it isn't. Subprime debt, debt laddled onto those least able to pay it, was
behind the largest financial collapse in US history (so far) just 12 years ago.
"To wipe the slate clean is overwhelmingly beneficial to the rich and connected, while the poor
remains renters stuck in wage slavery." In a rentier economy, to eliminate the debts would be to
eliminate income streams for the rich and connected, Jerome Powell and Josh Hawley are already worried
about what it means to not bail out the poor. The Democrats can't hear this from the left, maybe when it
becomes Republican policy they will like it, that's typically how they roll.
"And the aftermath of a general debt jubilee means the poor will have even greater difficulty with
accessing credit to buy housing, durable goods, and things that allow them to build wealth." This is a
studiously complete missreading of the point of the article: centralized State action to relieve debtors
of financial burdens and social stigma, to restore their freedom because their freedom is the strength of
the State or civilization.
Finally, read the article, a few paragraphs, yes they include a few sentences too:
"Giving priority to creditor claims leads to widespread bankruptcy. At first glance, it seems to
violate our society's ideas of fairness and distributive justice to insist on payment of debt and rent
arrears, threatening to evict debtors from their homes and forfeit whatever property they have if they
cannot pay the rent arrears and other charges without revenue having come in. Bankruptcy proceedings
would force businesses and farms to forfeit what they have invested. It also would force U.S. cities and
states to cope with plunging sales- and income-tax revenue by slashing social services and depleting
their pension funds savings to pay bondholders.
But the West's pro-creditor legal and financial philosophy has long blocked debt relief to renters,
mortgagees and other debtors. Banks, landlords and insurance companies insist that writing down of debts
and rents owed to them by wage-earners and small business is unthinkable. So something has to give:
either the broad economic interest of most of the population, or the interest of the Finance, Insurance
and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. Banks claim that non-payment of rent would cause debt defaults and wipe
out bank capital. Insurance companies claim that to make their policy holders whole would bankrupt them.
So the insurance companies, banks, landlords and bondholders insist that labor, industry and the
government bear the cost of arrears that have built up during the economic slowdown, not themselves."
And iuris romana led directly to the serfdom and prolonged depression of the "dark ages", as the church
spread roman law throughout Europe. If Hayak had bothered to study history he would have found that the
"road to serfdom" is (to borrow a locution from one of Hayak's acolytes) always and everywhere a result of
extreme laissez faire, particularly heritable debts. For modern incarnations of serfdom, look at India,
Pakistan and Mali.
Dr. Hudson spends much time in China. It would be interesting if he were to comment upon how debt and
default were handled in China during its many different dynasties. For example, how did ancient Chinese
policies compare with those of the ancient Middle East?
Yes, that should tie him up for several lifetimes and ensure he does not assemble a following in the
world today. We can't have these loose cannon revealing a way out of unfairness and inequality, eh?
Debt looks like the solution to every problem when you use an economics that doesn't consider
debt.
The economics of globalisation has always had an Achilles' heel.
In the US, the 1920s roared with debt based consumption and speculation until it all tipped over into the
debt deflation of the Great Depression. No one realised the problems that were building up in the economy as
they used an economics that doesn't look at private debt, neoclassical economics.
Not considering private debt is the Achilles' heel of neoclassical economics.
The neoliberal ideology was just a wrapper, hiding the dodgy, old 1920s neoclassical economics
lurking underneath.
The international elite swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
Neoclassical economics, probably the worst economics in the world.
(I bet they drink Karlsburg. – UK joke)
The economics of globalisation has always had an Achilles' heel.
In the US, the 1920s roared with debt based consumption and speculation until it all tipped over into the
debt deflation of the Great Depression. No one realised the problems that were building up in the economy
as they used an economics that doesn't look at private debt, neoclassical economics.
Not considering private debt is the Achilles' heel of neoclassical economics.
Policymakers run the economy on debt until they get a financial crisis.
At 25.30 mins you can see the super imposed private debt-to-GDP ratios.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAStZJCKmbU&list=PLmtuEaMvhDZZQLxg24CAiFgZYldtoCR-R&index=6
Policymakers run the economy on debt until they get a financial crisis.
1929 – US
1991 – Japan
2008 – US, UK and Euro-zone
The PBoC saw the Chinese Minsky Moment coming and you can too by looking at the chart above.
In the beginning it had nothing to do with god. It was unquestioned cooperation. I'll give you help and
you can help me later. It was unspoken. It was spontaneous. Ever notice how careful wild animals are? And,
by contrast, how foolish humans are? That's gotta be because god is our scapegoat. Just suppose that it's
because over the millennia of civilization helping each other was standardized, formalized and abstracted
into money. When money accumulated it became wealth itself, replacing the value of a good society. It
became money without social cooperation. It has even become a medium of exchange and trade. Contracts were
substituted for cooperation. Leaving morality and caution out entirely. There's really nothing moral about
turning debt into an "asset" which can be collected by law or bought and sold for a profit. An asset that
must be paid in full after a certain use, plus interest. Debt itself has become dissociated from society. So
now what have we got? We've got a planet being destroyed not by god, but by humans. From now on in it's
gonna be devastation by "act of man". Full tilt. And poetically, there will be few profits available to
"service" debt. It's time to legislate a few things, like good societies to meet the needs of people and
planet alike. No speculating and no profiteering. And no debt transmogrified into assets. Our debt is to the
planet now. And survival. End of sermon.
>> or creditors to become a wealthy class rivaling the power of palace rulers and seeking gains by
impoverishing their debtors.
Does this make the case that a benevolent individual ruler (i.e. a monarch, or dictator, or tyrant) would
have a natural interest in protecting balance between creditor-debtor so as not to have his power
threatened?
Is formal democracy then more vulnerable to allowing creditors to seize the power of state as there is no
counterbalancing interest? It seems to me that what Prof. Hudson is saying could certainly be interpreted
that way. I believe also originally the concept of a tyrant in ancient Greece was synonymous with just
government (cant provide references right now).
Debt and contract amnesties did not only exist in ancient times. See Terry Boughton's "Taming Democracy"
about how the American Revolutionaries understood currency. The early state of Pennsylvania regularly issued
relief, and the Federal Constitution limited states' abilities to break these contracts due to acts of god.
Boughton's book is eye-opening also in terms of how money works.
Notice that Hudson is discussing the kind of debt that was paid on the threshing floor. These were debts
of the working people. Commercial "silver" debts were not cancelled in a clean slate. Trying to write a
concise report above Hudson did not fully spell this out. Take a look at the very first section of his book,
beginning on page ix.
The Overview beginning on page 1 addresses the issue of how "American" all this is. He traces the history
of the Liberty Bell and the torch of the Statue of Liberty back to ancient clean slates. They ring and shine
with freedom from onerous debt. Yes, the huddled masses were yearning to be free; free from debt! On page 5
he quotes Hammurabi's law epilogue, " that the strong might not oppress the weak, that justice might be
dealt to the orphan and widow I write my precious words on my stele To give justice to the oppressed." And
Hudson was just getting warmed up on why a certain would-be king took a whip to the moneychangers in the
temple!
No new class, policy or ideology is going to fix economic degradation over generations destroying the
work ethic. It's a computer-controlled machine that systematically eliminates people from the economy and
pays its owners in ones and zeros, to consume natural resources ever more efficiently. China was just the
contract manufacturor. Nature is responding.
The economic bridge is all about the multiplier effects of operational leverage. Why would anyone
responsible for multiplier effects work for equal pay, and if an entire generation is pissed off at the
corporations catering to it, why would anyone expect anything other than negative multiplier effects. When
individual rights are removed, there are no rights, for anyone.
There's a reason why monetary expansion has been rotated geographically, to consume natural resources,
and why the globalists cling to electronic money in virtual space – fintech. A debt jubilee doesn't change
the inbred behavior of consumerism.
Fantastic interview. all Obama gang should be prosecuted for their attempt of coup
d'état. Farkas behaviors looks like standard operating procecure for the neocon scum
That an effective but dirty trick on the part of this neocon prostitute Evelyn Farkas :
"Putin want me to lose, send me some money"
Farkas is running primarily for the same reason that Andy mccabes wife ran - so she can
pick up her payment from the dnc in the form of campaign contributions. It's money
laundering
Boom 12:03 Yes Saagar, that's what I
was hollering! This is far more insidious. There was NO ONE in power that believed birtherism
whereas the entire National Security apparatus pushed this bogus coup on the President. The
NSA, CIA, FBI, and media were all complicit. Do not let Krystal get away with a false
equivalence. She is bullshitting. Chuck Schumer even threatened Trump on national television
saying that the intelligence agencies have six ways til Sunday to take you down.
I wish Farcas had spent a bit more time talking on MSNBC , I'm sure she would have coughed
up more material. I would also like to see her texts and phone calls received after that a
appearance, I'm sure some Obama people were pulling their hair out as she was spilling the
whole scenario and called her immediately after.
Russiagate was built on the willingness of a lot of people to believe the worst about
Trump. That's it. Which honestly says more about the narrow-mindedness of Trump haters than
it does about Trump himself. Whatever Trump is or isn't, and I'm no Trump supporter though I
never got seduced into hating him, the one truth to come out of this is that his haters don't
care about evidence, or the rule of law, or even common sense.
If Russian interference was as de-stabilizing to our democracy as these people would have
led us to believe, then, how de-stabilizing would carelessly weaponizing it potentially be?
These people have no place in government or any form of public discourse. They are a
malignancy.
At the end of his essay today ,
Alastair Crooke asks a series of questions that many of us have already pondered and mostly
written about:
"Have governments given any thought to the implication of the financial crisis spreading
to the middle classes, for whom often their only cushion in life is the inflated value of the
house in which they live, but whose price may collapse? And if not, do they imagine that
their citizens will acquiesce to losing their homes because of Coronavirus? And that the
middle classes will still side with the élites?
"So much hangs on the evolutionary course of the virus. But judging this wrongly, risks
much. People will not so readily handover their homes and cars to the banks this time, as in
they did the wake of great financial crisis of 2008. Why would they? It was not their fault
[It wasn't their fault in 2008 either; it was massive Fraud that was never prosecuted and I'm
getting rather tired of that fact not being aired]. Convulsions ahead? The decay of an era,
and the inevitability of social and political mutation?"
IMO, within the Outlaw US Empire, the issue of state solvency will become paramount thanks
to the massive unanticipated shortfalls in revenue, an issue Hudson talks about in the video
I linked above. IMO, that issue has the power to cleave the states from the Union given the
Union's complete lack of interest in the wellbeing of citizens. It's very much like an
abusive marriage--When does the repeatedly beaten wife finally leave home or attempt to kill
her spouse? Aside from the very meager benefits from Social Security and Medicare, what ties
serve to promote loyalty to Washington, DC over your individual state? If the Union isn't
going to work for the goals articulated in the Constitution's Preamble, then why support it
any longer?
Gangster politicians like to think that they are slick. They talk slang and curse a lot,
grab a girl's ass (or worse), insist that they never read a book, thumb their noses at
intellectual elites, boast about their high IQs, and proclaim their "street smarts." They also
view themselves both as victims of their critics' malice and "great men" alone capable of
curing the nation's ills.
They make their base feel the same: they are despised and yet the real Americans!
Their belief in the boss is unwavering. Only he can make America great again.
Those who oppose his policies are traitors and the threats they pose are serious -- and, if
they are not serious, then they must be made serious. History teaches what might become
necessary in order to teach them a lesson. The Reichstag Fire of 1933 and the (staged)
assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934 were the dramatic events that led Hitler and Stalin to
justify attacks on enemies, renegades, and supposed traitors to the state. Gangster politicians
under internal pressure pray for a crisis, or what Trump once forecast as a "major event," in
order to rally the troops and clean house.
Gangster politics requires no ideology. Lack of principle itself becomes a principle.
The great man must do what must be done: if that means lying, reneging on deals, shifting
gears, rejecting transparency, and whatever else, then so be it. That he can employ the double
standard is a given.
Big talk takes the place of diplomacy and, if the bluster doesn't work then America alone --
or, better, the boss alone -- can rely on "fire and fury" whenever and wherever he likes.
Traditionalists employed jingoistic rhetoric and wrapped themselves in the flag. The
gangster politician talks like a schoolyard bully and salutes himself.
Gangster politicians of times past had subordinates swear an oath of loyalty not to the
state but to them. Yesterday's "America! Love it or leave it!" has today turned into: "Trump!
Love him -- or shut up!"
"... EU money intended for underfunded public-benefit research such as preparing for a pandemic has been diverted by the pharmaceutical industry into areas where it can make more money, according to a scathing new report. ..."
"... The target of the criticism is the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a public-private partnership that was equally funded, between 2008 and 2020, by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) lobbying group and the European Commission to the tune of 5.3 billion euros (US$5.8 billion). The money is supposed to go to areas of "unmet medical or social need," ..."
"... "We were outraged to find evidence that the pharmaceutical industry lobby EFPIA not only did not consider funding biopreparedness (ie, being ready for epidemics such as the one caused by the new coronavirus, COVID-19) but opposed it being included in IMI's work when the possibility was raised by the European Commission in 2017, ..."
"... "The research proposed by the EC in the biopreparedness topic was small in scope," ..."
"... "IMI's projects have contributed, directly or indirectly, to better prepare the research community for the current crisis, the Ebola+ programme or the ZAPI project." ..."
"... "belated interventions when an epidemic is already underway," ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
EU money intended
for underfunded public-benefit research such as preparing for a pandemic has been diverted by
the pharmaceutical industry into areas where it can make more money, according to a scathing
new report. Officials in Brussels wanted to co-fund research that would have ensured the
European Union (EU) was better prepared for a pandemic akin to the one we are experiencing
today. But their partners, the big pharmaceutical companies, rejected the proposal, ensuring
that taxpayer money would go instead into studies with more potential for commercial
application. In short big-pharma lobbyists were allowed to steer billions of euros of public
funds as they saw fit, a damning new report claims.
The target of the criticism is the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a
public-private partnership that was equally funded, between 2008 and 2020, by the European
Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) lobbying group and the
European Commission to the tune of 5.3 billion euros (US$5.8 billion). The money is supposed to
go to areas of "unmet medical or social need," but, in practice, corporate priorities
dominate the decision-making, according to the
non-governmental organization Corporate Observatory Europe (COE).
"We were outraged to find evidence that the pharmaceutical industry lobby EFPIA not only
did not consider funding biopreparedness (ie, being ready for epidemics such as the one caused
by the new coronavirus, COVID-19) but opposed it being included in IMI's work when the
possibility was raised by the European Commission in 2017, " a new COE report
said.
The rejected proposal would have directed money into refining computer simulations and the
analysis of animal testing models, potentially speeding up regulatory approval of vaccines,
according to the Guardian. But a spokeswoman for the IMI called the report
"misleading".
"The research proposed by the EC in the biopreparedness topic was small in scope,"
she said. "IMI's projects have contributed, directly or indirectly, to better prepare the
research community for the current crisis, the Ebola+ programme or the ZAPI project."
ZAPI, or the Zoonotic Anticipation and Preparedness Initiative, was launched in 2015 with a
budget of 20 million euros (US$21.8 million) after the Ebola epidemic a year prior. The COE
report said it exemplifies a pattern of "belated interventions when an epidemic is already
underway," much like this year's emergency funding of coronavirus research.
The think tank questioned whether EU public money was well applied through IMI. Much of it
went into research into cancer, Alzheimer's disease and diabetes – areas that are
potentially profitable and thus are given close attention by private business. But epidemic
preparedness, HIV/AIDS, and poverty-related and neglected tropical diseases have been
overlooked by the initiative, the report said.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
"... Contemporary films and television shows constantly depict the CIA, corrupt politicians and greedy corporate interests as interwoven. But these usually appear as either the work of rogue individuals (who must be brought into line) or an always vague and unalterable "system" that demands utter cynicism as the only appropriate response. ..."
In The Communist Manifesto , Marx and Engels referred to the state as "the executive
committee of the ruling class." Reflecting the collective capitalist interest in maintaining
its accumulation process, capable of forging compromises among competing sectors of its own and
other classes, this committee was also meant to enforce legal norms, contracts, and other rules
of the game.
If necessary, indeed, it would even subordinate individual capitalist interests to the
collective interests of the class. The executive committee might foster imperialist ambitions
and declare war. But it might also call for redistributive legislation to foster demand even
though no individual capitalist would want to pay higher taxes to cover the cost. Recalcitrant
elements of the ruling class and protestors from below require punishment. Fascist states
easily get carried away in that regard. Banana republics usually exhibit bureaucratic gangster
tendencies. In a capitalist democracy, however, things are supposedly different: its executive
committee should jail Al Capone and marginalize corruption. The lines between legal and illegal
business transactions are blurring and the term "political mafia" is taking on a whole new
meaning. [1]
Gangster politics has little in common with the interests of petty criminals, white collar
crooks, 'Crips and 'Bloods, and the like. Vast sums are at stake: so, for example, roughly
82.8% of benefits from the 2017 tax bill are being funneled into the portfolios of the top 1%,
[2] and
the corporate tax rate is being dropped from 35% to 21%. The boss knows where his bread is
buttered. That the godfather should get his cut goes without saying: Trump's family will make
upwards of "tens of millions of dollars" from his tax legislation. [3] And with the "ca-ching!"
(that sweet sound of the cash register) comes the "bling" (the payoffs, the hush-money, and the
gifts) along with the "glitz" of the porno stars, the third-rate actresses, the models, and the
rest.
Gangster politics hovers between the authoritarian and the democratic. The boss and his
posse receive their perks for a reason. Gangster politics immunizes capitalist society from
class contradictions that have become too acute or demands from below that have grown too
onerous. Its representatives are not exactly fascists. They don't rely on paramilitary forces,
concentration camps, official censorship, or explicit ideals of a racially pure society. Sleaze
is the ethos of gangster politics. Its style and tone insinuate themselves into existing
institutions such as the town meeting, the mass rally, media, electoral debates, and the use of
legislative tricks, and legal minutiae. Gangster politicians know how to "game" the system.
Their populist rhetoric is window dressing. The old "bicycle mentality" of the petty
bourgeoisie holds sway, namely, push up and kick down.
Gangsters have long been identified with capitalists, cops, and state officials. Balzac
noted that every great fortune hides a great crime. Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris made the
connection as did Ibsen. But, perhaps most notoriously, Bert Brecht saw the gangster ethos
uniting capitalists, imperialists, and militarists in a host of plays beginning with The
Three Penny Opera . Contemporary films and television shows constantly depict the CIA,
corrupt politicians and greedy corporate interests as interwoven. But these usually appear as
either the work of rogue individuals (who must be brought into line) or an always vague and
unalterable "system" that demands utter cynicism as the only appropriate response.
Gangster politics is not a structured institutional formation, as often argued, [4] but rather
a semi-legal adaptation to legal forms of governance. It arises when the gangster's clients
sense danger. Memories still linger concerning the economic crisis of 2008. [5] Banks are still
over-extending unfavorable loans, stocks have been erratic, insider trading is the rule of the
day and the "average guy" is panicking as capital becomes centralized in ever fewer hands.
Production requires an ever smaller yet more educated working class; consumption is
inordinately skewed to the wealthy; and the class question increasingly turns on how best to
disempower working people, those living below the poverty line, women, citizens of color, and
immigrants
Enforcing gerrymandering, curtailing voting rights, privatizing the prison system, access
peddling, and accruing unlimited donations for electoral campaigns are effective tactics that
border on the illegal. Right-wing control over an increasingly centralized media helps deflect
criticisms and divide the disenfranchised and exploited. The audience has been primed. The
boss' mass base detests his critics. Environmentalists, immigrants, people of color, uppity
women, decadent gays and the transgendered infuriate the "good citizens" of America clinging to
outworn traditions in small towns as well as evangelicals and retrograde (white) sectors of the
industrial working class. They despair over loss of jobs, government "waste" and "welfare
chiselers," moral decline, and (above all) the loss of their cultural privileges. They look
back to a time when "men were men," "America was great!" and "happy days" followed one another
non-stop.
Elites nod approvingly, though they have different priorities: de-regulation, lower taxes,
fewer welfare policies, and cuts in the "costs of doing business." Oligarchic tendencies are
built into capitalism and, as they expand, their exploitative impact on workers and the urban
poor become more intense. That is where gangster politics enters the mainstream. Corporate
elites require protection from progressive forces. [6] Their leaders must often
choose between authoritarianism with profits as against democracy with costs. Thy always assume
that they can control their enforcer. Once in office, however, the parvenu begins exercising
power in his own interest. Donald Trump turned on mainstream Republicans, who pandered to the
Tea Party early in the Obama presidency, just as Hitler turned on his former patron, Fritz von
Papen, and his "cabinet of the barons" in 1933. It was the same with General Pinochet who was
installed by the traditional conservative Eduard Frei following the fall of Salvador Allende's
democratic regime in Chile in 1973. Other examples are available.
Gangster politics has its own logic. Traditionalists like to believe that the conflict is
between "them and us." For the political gangster, however, the struggle is between "them and
me." The only fixed rule is -- don't cross the boss! And, if only for this reason, he chooses
to be feared rather than loved. He taunts his subordinates, publicly humiliates them, throws
them under the bus, and perhaps even fires them a few days before their retirement. Cabinet
officials and agency directors require no expertise or security clearance, [7] all that counts is
loyalty to the boss. But, then, loyalty is a one-way street. Internal security advisers, press
secretaries, cabinet secretaries, chiefs of staff, assistants, agency directors, White House
attorneys, and deputies of all stripes come and go. Trump's administration has already had a
turnover rate of 34%, more than triple that of the Obama presidency. [8] Confusion and chaos
proliferate. There is a sense in which the goal of gangster politics is what Franz Neumann
termed "the stateless state." It serves a concrete purpose: everyone knows who is in charge of
everything.
Gangster politicians like to think that they are slick. They talk slang and curse a lot,
grab a girl's ass (or worse), insist that they never read a book, thumb their noses at
intellectual elites, boast about their high IQs, and proclaim their "street smarts." They also
view themselves both as victims of their critics' malice and "great men" alone capable of
curing the nation's ills. They make their base feel the same: they are despised and yet the
real Americans! Their belief in the boss is unwavering. Only he can make America great
again. Those who oppose his policies are traitors and the threats they pose are serious -- and,
if they are not serious, then they must be made serious. History teaches what might become
necessary in order to teach them a lesson. The Reichstag Fire of 1933 and the (staged)
assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934 were the dramatic events that led Hitler and Stalin to
justify attacks on enemies, renegades, and supposed traitors to the state. Gangster politicians
under internal pressure pray for a crisis, or what Trump once forecast as a "major event," in
order to rally the troops and clean house.
Gangster politics requires no ideology. Lack of principle itself becomes a principle.
The great man must do what must be done: if that means lying, reneging on deals, shifting
gears, rejecting transparency, and whatever else, then so be it. That he can employ the double
standard is a given. Big talk takes the place of diplomacy and, if the bluster doesn't work
then America alone – or, better, the boss alone – can rely on "fire and fury"
whenever and wherever he likes. Traditionalists employed jingoistic rhetoric and wrapped
themselves in the flag. The gangster politician talks like a schoolyard bully and salutes
himself. Gangster politicians of times past had subordinates swear an oath of loyalty not to
the state but to them. Yesterday's "America! Love it or leave it!" has today turned into:
"Trump! Love him –or shut up!"
... ,,, ,,
References
[1]
Herbert Marcuse, 1974 Paris Lectures at Vincennes University eds. Peter-Erwin Jansen and
Charles Reitz (Published by the Marcuse Archives).
[2]
Dylan Matthews, "The Republican tax bill got worse: now the top 1% gets 83% of the gains,"VOX,
December 18, 2017,
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/18/16791174/republican-tax-bill-congress-conference-tax-policy-center
[3]
Louis Jacobson, "How much does the Trump family have to gain from GOP tax bills?"PolitiFact,
November 27,
2017,http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/nov/27/lloyd-doggett/how-much-does-trump-family-have-gain-gop-tax-bills/
[4]
The term "gangster state" has been used often, and there are a number of different
interpretations of the phenomenon ie. Katherine Hirschfeld, Gangster States: Organized Crime,
Kleptocracy and Political Collapse (New York: Palgrave, 2015); Charles Tilly, "State Formation
as Organized Crime" in eds. Peter Evans et. al (Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge
University press, 1985); Michael Hirsh, "Gangster States" in
http://www.newsweek.com/gangster-state-166356Paul Craig Roberts, "Gangster State America: Where
is America's Democracy?"
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/05/06/gangster-state-america-paul-craig-roberts-2/;
[5]
Gretchen Morgenstern and Joshua Rosner, Reckles$ Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed,
and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon (New York: Henry Holt, 2011).
[6]
Note the discussion in Stephen Eric Bronner, The Bitter Taste of Hope: Ideals, Ideologies
and Interests in the Age of Obama (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017), 1ff.
[7]
Max Greenwood, "At least 30 White House officials, Trump appointees lack full clearances:
report," The Hill, February 9,
2018http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/373220-at-least-30-white-house-officials-trump-appointees-lack-full#.Wn7-uVrZvb8.facebook
[9]
Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish, "$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump,"
New York Times , March 15,
2016https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html
Stephen Eric Bronner is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Political Science and
Director of Global Relations for the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at
Rutgers University. His most recent work is The Bitter Taste of Hope: Ideals, Ideologies
and Interests in the Age of Obama.
"... "Well, I think it's automatic. Because they're already cutting. I mean, if you look, they're cutting back. Because it's it's market. It's demand. It's supply and demand. They're already cutting back, and they're cutting back very seriously," ..."
The United States is on track to cut 1.7 million barrels of oil production per day,
according to Reuters calculations of state and company data shared on Thursday. It was US
President Donald Trump that suggested
at the beginning of April, prior to the most recent OPEC deal signing that the United
States would cut its oil output as a natural response to the worsening market conditions. The
statement was not initially good enough for OPEC, who wanted more of a commitment from the
world's largest producer and consumer of crude oil.
"Well, I think it's automatic. Because they're already cutting. I mean, if you look,
they're cutting back. Because it's it's market. It's demand. It's supply and demand. They're
already cutting back, and they're cutting back very seriously," US President Trump said at
a press briefing early last month.
US Energy Secretary said last month that the DoE expected that production in the United
States would fall by between two and three million bpd by the end of the year -- it appears the
cuts have come even quicker than the department expected.
The need for the production cuts grew more evident as the United States shut down nearly all
activity in an attempt to flatten that curve of infections that sought to overwhelm the
country's healthcare system. Doing so, however, has idled much of the economy and crippled
demand -- and as such, its oil and gas industry that fuels that economy.
The cuts from US producers may seek to quiet the disgruntlement of OPEC and Russia, in
particular, who expressed their displeasure that the US would not require its producers to curb
production. After all, the US shale industry has benefited greatly from previous rounds of OPEC
cuts.
So not only ambulance service was destroyed by private equity, they now added other specialties. I wonder is those criminals who
insert unnecessary stents in patients are connected to private equity.
Images removed
Notable quotes:
"... "You can't serve two masters. You can't serve patients and investors" ..."
"... Morganroth's defense of pandemic Botox might seem odd, but it made perfect sense within the logic of the U.S. health-care system, which has seen Wall Street investors invade its every corner, engineering medical practices and hospitals to maximize profits as if they were little different from grocery stores. At the center of this story are private equity firms, which saw the explosive growth of health-care spending and have been buying up physician staffing companies, surgery centers, and everything else in sight. ..."
"... But some doctors say that the private equity playbook, which involves buying companies, drastically cutting costs, and then selling for a profit -- the goal is generally to make an annualized return of 20% to 30% within three to five years -- creates problems that are unique to health care. "I know private equity does this in other industries, but in medicine you're dealing with people's health and their lives," says Michael Rains, a doctor who worked at U.S. Dermatology Partners , a big private equity-backed chain. "You can't serve two masters. You can't serve patients and investors." ..."
"... Yet over the past decade, lawyers devised a structure that allows investors to buy a medical practice without technically owning it: the MSO, or management service organization. Today, when an investment firm buys a doctor's office, what it's actually buying are the office's "nonclinical" assets. In theory, physicians control all medical decisions and agree to pay a management fee to a newly created company, which handles administrative tasks such as billing and marketing. ..."
"... Businessweek ..."
"... When individual doctors sell, they generally receive $2 million to $7 million each, with 30% to 40% of that paid in equity in the group. After the acquisition, doctors get a lower salary and are asked to help recruit other doctors to sell their practices or to join as employees. ..."
"... Patients, for the most part, are in the dark. Unlike when your mortgage changes hands, you usually aren't notified when a big investment firm buys your doctor. Sometimes the sign on the door bearing the physician's name stays put, and subtle changes in operations or unfamiliar fees may be the only clues that anything has happened. ..."
"... At Advanced Dermatology & Cosmetic Surgery , the largest private equity-backed group in the field, with more than 150 locations across the U.S., that sense of discomfort came shortly after Audax Group bought a controlling stake in what was then a much smaller chain in 2011. The new management team introduced a scorecard that rewarded offices with cash if they met daily and monthly financial goals, according to a lawsuit filed in 2013 against the company by one of its dermatologists. The doctor alleged that the bonus program encouraged staff to do as many procedures as possible, rather than strictly addressing patients' medical needs. ..."
"... Most dermatologists use outside labs and pathologists, but private equity-owned groups buy up existing labs and hire their own pathologists. Then doctors are encouraged to refer patients within the group and send biopsy slides to the company-owned labs, keeping the entire chain of revenue in-house. ..."
"... Now comes the cost-cutting. This is supposed to be the hallmark of private equity, and, done right, it can work to the benefit of doctors and patients. But there are pitfalls unique to medicine, where aggressive cuts can lead to problems, some of them merely inconvenient and some potentially dangerous. ..."
"... A doctor at Advanced Dermatology says that waiting for corporate approvals means his office is routinely left without enough gauze, antiseptic solution, and toilet paper. Even before the great toilet paper shortage of 2020, he would travel with a few rolls in the trunk of his car, to spare patients when an office inevitably ran out. The company declined to comment. ..."
"... One paradox of the Covid-19 pandemic has been that even as the virus has focused the entire country on health care, it's been a financial disaster for the industry. And so, while emergency room doctors and nurses care for the sick -- comforting those who would otherwise die alone, and in some cases dying themselves -- private equity-backed staffing companies and hospitals have been cutting pay for ER doctors. These hospitals, like the big medical practices, make a large portion of their money from elective procedures and have been forced into wrenching compromises. ..."
"... For investors with capital, on the other hand, the economic fallout from the virus is a huge opportunity. Stay-at-home orders have left small practices more financially strained than they've ever been. That will likely accelerate sales to private equity firms, according to Marc Cabrera, an investment banker focused on health-care deals at Oppenheimer & Co. Independent doctors or groups that previously rebuffed offers from deep-pocketed backers "will reconsider their options," he says. ..."
"... Many doctors may ultimately come to regret cashing out, but it's hard to get out once you're in. As part of an acquisition, the private equity groups typically require doctors to sign yearslong contracts, with noncompete clauses that prevent them from working in the surrounding area. ..."
Not long after Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, ordered the state's 40 million residents to stay home to stop the spread
of the new coronavirus, Dr. Greg Morganroth called his team of doctors and said their dermatology group was staying open.
Morganroth is chief executive officer of the California Skin Institute
, which he founded in 2007 as a single office in Mountain View. He's since expanded to more than 40 locations using a financing
strategy that's become exceedingly common in American health care: private equity. In this case, he took out a loan from
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that could eventually convert to an
equity stake. CSI is now the largest dermatology chain in California.
But the Covid-19 pandemic
put Morganroth in a precarious position. Most medical procedures were characterized as
nonessential by government officials and practitioners. Doctors were closing offices, and patients were staying away to limit
their potential exposure to the virus.
CSI took a different approach. Morganroth explained his thinking on April 2 in a Zoom call with more than 170 dermatologists from
around the country organized by the Cosmetic Surgery Forum, an industry conference. Contrary to what they might have heard, Morganroth
told them, they should consider staying open during the pandemic. "Many of us are over-interpreting guidelines," he said.
For a moment there was an awkward silence. Doctors had thought they were signing up for advice on how to apply for
government money that would help them meet payroll while they were shut down; they hadn't expected to be told not to shut down
at all. Morganroth continued: "We are going to be in a two-year war, and we need to make strategic plans for our businesses that
enable us to survive and to rebound."
Back at CSI, the company's front-office staff was working the phones, calling patients in some of the worst-hit areas and reminding
them to show up for their appointments, even for cosmetic procedures such as Botox injections to treat wrinkles. During the videoconference,
Morganroth argued that offering Botox in a pandemic wasn't so different from a grocery store allowing customers to buy candy alongside
staples.
"If I had a food supply company and had to stay open, and I had meat, bread, and milk, would I stop making lime and strawberry
licorice?" Morganroth asked. "I would make everything and go forward."
From a public-health point of view, some of the doctors believed, this was questionable. Common reasons for visiting a dermatologist's
office -- skin screenings, mole removals, acne consultations -- aren't particularly time sensitive. Serious matters, such as suspected
cancers and dangerous rashes, can be handled, at least initially, with
telemedicine consultations . Then doctors can weigh the risks for their patients and determine who needs to come in. In a statement,
CSI says that it followed local and state laws for staying open, while providing "necessary care" for patients, and that it had not
required doctors to come to work.
"You can't serve two masters. You can't serve patients and investors"
Morganroth's defense of pandemic Botox might seem odd, but it made perfect sense within the logic of the U.S. health-care system,
which has seen Wall Street investors invade its every corner, engineering medical practices and hospitals to maximize profits as
if they were little different from grocery stores. At the center of this story are private equity firms, which saw the explosive
growth of health-care spending and have been buying up physician staffing companies, surgery centers, and everything else in sight.
Over the past five years, the firms have invested more than $10 billion in medical practices, with a special focus on dermatology,
which is seen as a hot industry because of the aging population. Baby boomers suffer from high rates of two potentially lucrative
conditions: skin cancer and vanity. Some estimates suggest that private equity already owns more than 10% of the U.S dermatology
market. And firms have started to expand into other specialties, including women's health, urology, and gastroenterology.
There's nothing inherently wrong with any of this. But some doctors say that the private equity playbook, which involves
buying companies, drastically cutting costs, and then selling for a profit -- the goal is generally to make an annualized return
of 20% to 30% within three to five years -- creates problems that are unique to health care. "I know private equity does this in
other industries, but in medicine you're dealing with people's health and their lives," says Michael Rains, a doctor who worked
at
U.S. Dermatology Partners , a big private equity-backed
chain. "You can't serve two masters. You can't serve patients and investors."
Investment firms, and the practices they fund, say these concerns are overblown. They point out that they're giving doctors a
financial shelter from the rapidly changing medical environment, a particularly attractive prospect now, and that money from private
equity firms has expanded care to more patients. But they've also made it next to impossible to track the industry's impact or reach.
Firms rarely announce their investments and routinely subject doctors to nondisclosure agreements that make it difficult for them
to speak publicly. Bloomberg Businessweek spoke to dozens of doctors at 10 large private equity-backed dermatology groups.
Those interviews, along with information obtained from other employees, investors, lawyers, court filings, and company records, reveal
how the firms operate, and why they sometimes fail patients.
The process is never exactly the same, but there are familiar patterns, which tend to play out in five steps.
Step 1: Marriage
The strange thing about private equity money in medicine is that for-profit investors have long been prevented from buying doctor's
offices. Corporate ownership goes against a doctrine set by the American Medical
Association , the main trade group for doctors in the U.S., and is prohibited by law in many states, including Texas and New
Jersey. For most of the past 100 years, if you wanted to make money on a medical practice, you needed to have a medical license.
Yet over the past decade, lawyers devised a structure that allows investors to buy a medical practice without technically owning
it: the MSO, or management service organization. Today, when an investment firm buys a doctor's office, what it's actually buying
are the office's "nonclinical" assets. In theory, physicians control all medical decisions and agree to pay a management fee to a
newly created company, which handles administrative tasks such as billing and marketing.
In practice, though, investors expect some influence over medical decision-making, which, after all, is connected to profits.
"When we partner with you, it's a marriage," said Matt Jameson, a managing director at BlueMountain Capital, a $17 billion firm that
recently invested in a women's health company, while speaking at a conference in New York in September. "We have to believe it. You
have to believe it. It's not going to be something where clinical is completely not touched." (When contacted by Businessweek
, Jameson asked to clarify his comments. "Doctors and other qualified healthcare professionals at the providers we've invested
in make medical decisions," he said in a statement.)
The typical buyout starts with the acquisition of a big, popular practice, often with multiple doctors and several locations,
for as much as $100 million. (Investors typically pay between 9 and 12 times annual profit.) This practice functions as an anchor,
like a name-brand department store at a shopping mall, attracting patients and doctors to the new group as it expands. Then comes
the roll-up: The private equity firm purchases smaller offices and solo practices, giving the group a regional presence.
As part of the new structure, investors deal with paperwork and save money by buying medical supplies in bulk. Crucially they
also negotiate higher insurance reimbursement rates. One dermatologist who sold her practice to the California Skin Institute says
she was surprised to find out the bigger group's payouts from insurers were $25 to $125 more per visit.
When individual doctors sell, they generally receive $2 million to $7 million each, with 30% to 40% of that paid in equity in
the group. After the acquisition, doctors get a lower salary and are asked to help recruit other doctors to sell their practices
or to join as employees.
At first, doctors are generally thrilled by all of this. They have financial security and can focus on treating patients without
the stress of running a business. Patients, for the most part, are in the dark. Unlike when your mortgage changes hands, you usually
aren't notified when a big investment firm buys your doctor. Sometimes the sign on the door bearing the physician's name stays put,
and subtle changes in operations or unfamiliar fees may be the only clues that anything has happened.
Step 2: Growth
The promise of more patients is a big draw for doctors. By sharing marketing costs and adding locations, the new companies can
advertise more and attract customers. Private equity-owned practices have been diligent users of social media, announcing newly added
doctors and posting coupons on Twitter and Instagram. But these practices can be aggressive in ways that make some doctors uncomfortable.
At Advanced Dermatology & Cosmetic Surgery , the largest
private equity-backed group in the field, with more than 150 locations across the U.S., that sense of discomfort came shortly after
Audax Group bought a controlling stake in what was then a
much smaller chain in 2011. The new management team introduced a scorecard that rewarded offices with cash if they met daily and
monthly financial goals, according to a lawsuit filed in 2013 against the company by one of its dermatologists. The doctor alleged
that the bonus program encouraged staff to do as many procedures as possible, rather than strictly addressing patients' medical needs.
In some of the company's Florida offices, the doctor alleged, medical assistants responded to the bonus structure by ticking extra
boxes on exam reports, stating that doctors checked many more areas of the body than they actually had. That led to higher patient
bills, defrauding the government under its Medicare program, according to the lawsuit. The federal government declined to join the
case, and it was dismissed about a year after it was filed. Advanced and Audax declined to comment.
One-Stop Skin Care
By buying up labs and adding specialists, private equity-owned dermatology groups get paid at every step of a patient's treatment.
Data: Estimated Medicare reimbursement rates for the Miami area, Sensus Healthcare sales presentation
Private equity-backed practices also try to increase revenue by adding more-lucrative procedures, according to doctors interviewed
by Businessweek . In dermatology, this means more cosmetics, laser treatments, radiation, and especially Mohs surgeries
-- a specialized skin cancer procedure that removes growths from delicate areas like the face and neck one layer at a time, to limit
scarring. The surgery involves expensive equipment and specialized doctors, so some large medical groups keep costs down by assembling
traveling Mohs teams, who fly in from other states. Others create mobile labs in vans that set up in clinics' parking lots.
Most dermatologists use outside labs and pathologists, but private equity-owned groups buy up existing labs and hire their own
pathologists. Then doctors are encouraged to refer patients within the group and send biopsy slides to the company-owned labs, keeping
the entire chain of revenue in-house. This takes advantage of a regulatory quirk that has made dermatology, and a handful of other
specialties, attractive to private equity. Under the 1989 Stark Law, doctors aren't allowed to make patient referrals for their own
financial gain. An exception was made for some fields because it's more convenient for patients, explains Dr. Sailesh Konda, a Mohs
surgeon and professor at the University of Florida. "But that can be abused."
Step 3: Synergy
Now comes the cost-cutting. This is supposed to be the hallmark of private equity, and, done right, it can work to the benefit
of doctors and patients. But there are pitfalls unique to medicine, where aggressive cuts can lead to problems, some of them merely
inconvenient and some potentially dangerous.
A doctor at Advanced Dermatology says that waiting for corporate approvals means his office is routinely left without enough gauze,
antiseptic solution, and toilet paper. Even before the great
toilet paper shortage of 2020, he would travel with a few rolls in the trunk of his car, to spare patients when an office inevitably
ran out. The company declined to comment.
At the country's second-biggest skin-care group, U.S. Dermatology
Partners , a former doctor says a regional manager switched to a cheaper brand of needles and sutures without consulting the
medical staff. The quality was so poor, she says, they would often break off in her patients' bodies. Mortified, she'd have to dig
them out and start over. She complained to managers but couldn't get better supplies, she says. Paul Singh, U.S. Dermatology's CEO,
says the company uses a "reputable, global vendor for medical supplies." "While our group may have standardized purchasing processes,
individual providers have the autonomy to procure specific supplies that they need for a particular patient situation or patient
population," he says in a statement.
Doctors who join a private equity-backed group generally sign contracts that state they'll never have to compromise their medical
judgment, but some say that management began to intervene there, too. Dermatologists at most of the companies say they were pushed
to see as many as twice the number of patients a day, which made them feel rushed and unable to provide the same quality of care.
Others were forced to discuss their cases with managers or medical directors, who asked the doctors to explain why they weren't sending
more patients for surgery. Multiple practices also encouraged doctors to send home Mohs surgery patients with open wounds and have
them come back the next day for stitches -- or to have a different doctor do the closure the same day -- because that would allow
the practice to collect more from insurers.
That's if doctors are performing the procedures at all. At Advanced Dermatology, several doctors say they were asked to claim
that physician assistants, or PAs, were under their supervision when they weren't seeing patients in the same building, or even the
same town. Because PAs are paid less than dermatologists, this allowed the company to keep costs low while growing the business.
In a statement, Eric Hunt, Advanced's general counsel and chief compliance officer says that having PAs on staff enables the company
to "provide access to quality dermatological care to more patients."
Step 4. Rolling Up the Roll-Up
Advanced Dermatology was sold in 2016 by Audax to Harvest
Partners LP , following a pattern that's typical in the industry. At some point, after costs have been cut and profits maximized,
most private equity-owned medical groups will be sold, often to another private equity firm, which will then try to somehow make
the company even more profitable.
Having reduced most of the obvious costs, Advanced Dermatology began skimping on more important supplies, including Hylenex, according
to doctors and other employees. The drug is an expensive reversal agent used when cosmetic fillers, which are supposed to make skin
look plumper, go wrong. Not having enough is dangerous: Patients who get an injection that inadvertently blocks a blood vessel can
be left with dead sections of skin or even go blind if they don't get enough Hylenex in a matter of hours. The company says that
it stocks Hylenex in every office that performs cosmetic procedures, and that it "has no records of any provider being denied an
order for this medication."
Advanced Dermatology also started giving even more authority to PAs, according to doctors and staff. Without enough oversight
some were missing deadly skin cancers, they say. Others were doing too many biopsies and cutting out much larger areas of skin than
necessary, leaving patients with big scars. Doctors who complained about the bad behavior say they saw PAs moved to other locations
rather than fired or given more supervision. Hunt, the company's lawyer, says that all PAs get six months of training and are supervised
by experienced doctors.
The staff coined a new medical diagnosis, "pre- pre- pre-cancer"
Advanced Dermatology also put more pressure on doctors to send biopsies to in-house labs. The move made sense financially, but
some of the doctors didn't trust the lab. One of its two pathologists in Delray Beach, Fla., Steven Glanz, had a history of misdiagnosing
benign tumors, which led patients to undergo surgeries that were later found to be unnecessary, according to doctors who worked with
him. Dermatologists who warned that Glanz was a danger to patients say that their complaints to Dr. Matt Leavitt, the group's founder
and CEO, were ignored. More procedures, doctors knew, brought in more money.
Glanz, who had been with the practice since its early days, was known to read slides under a microscope with a pistol on his desk.
After he was arrested with a handgun, a folding knife, and a vial of methamphetamine crystals, he was fired and Florida's state medical
board fined him $10,000, requiring him to complete a five-hour course on ethics before he could resume practicing. But his former
colleagues were unsettled; they knew Glanz's signature was on years of reports that determined treatment for patients. Some slides
were reevaluated, and pathologists noticed mistakes. Managers told some doctors and their staff that patients, even those who'd been
misdiagnosed and had unnecessary procedures, were not to be told. Glanz pleaded guilty to stalking and a firearms violation and was
sentenced to probation. When a reporter called his office and identified herself, the receptionist hung up. Further attempts to reach
Glanz were unsuccessful. Advanced's Hunt says that he was "formally released from employment three years ago," but did not comment
further.
Of course, some doctors pushed ethical boundaries long before private equity came into the picture. But critics of the industry,
including doctors and investors, say management teams put in place by private equity firms tend to look the other way as long as
a medical practice is profitable. Of the dermatologists with the highest biopsy rates in the country (between 4 and 11 per patient,
per year), almost 25% were affiliated with private equity-backed groups, according to Dr. Joseph Francis, a Mohs surgeon and data
researcher at the University of Florida.
Medical providers may have also been blurring ethical lines at U.S. Dermatology Partners, which was until recently on its second
private equity owner, Abry Partners LLC . At four of the
company's offices in Texas, a doctor and his PAs were doing more biopsies than necessary, according to employees. These employees
say the staff routinely called patients with benign lichenoid keratosis, small brownish blotches that usually go away on their own,
and told them the growths should be removed. Under instruction from the doctor, the staff coined a new medical diagnosis, "pre- pre-
pre-cancer," and then talked patients into coming in for removal, employees say. Singh, the U.S. Dermatology CEO, says that the company
trusts doctors to make the right decisions and that it monitors them through routine audits.
Step 5: Sell-Off
In some cases the cost-cutting either becomes impossible or leads to compromises in care too obvious to ignore. In 2016 a
DermOne LLC office in Irving, Texas, had been using a faulty
autoclave machine to sterilize surgical equipment -- the state and county health departments identified 137 patients that needed
to get tested for blood-borne diseases such as HIV and hepatitis. By 2018, DermOne's backer, Westwind Investors, wanted out.
Westwind had been one of the earliest firms to build a big dermatology business -- with practices in five states -- but others
had grown larger. After the debacle in Irving, the Nevada-based firm sold DermOne's medical records and patient lists, as well as
some of its offices, to other groups. It dissolved the remaining offices, leaving some patients abruptly without care. Westwind did
not respond to repeated requests for comment. Two other private equity-backed groups, TruDerm and Select Dermatology LLC, have also
gone out of business in the past two years.
The surviving chains have been saddled with large piles of debt they're now struggling to repay. In January, U.S. Dermatology
Partners defaulted on a $377 million loan, meaning the private equity backer, Abry Partners, had to hand over the keys to its lenders,
Golub Capital ,
Carlyle Group , and
Ares Management , which will now oversee a chain with almost
100 locations, receiving 1 million visits from patients a year. Abry did not respond to requests for comment .
For the medical groups that make it, the game plan is to eventually sell to the largest players, such as
KKR ,
Blackstone Group , and
Apollo Global Management . Pioneering investors, including Audax,
are now buying practices in other fields -- a concerning development to critics who note that the areas that are currently attracting
investment, such as urology, generally involve more invasive procedures. Should doctors performing vasectomies be thinking about
the dollar-rate returns for KKR -- or any private investor?
"It's ultimately going to backfire," says Dr. Jane Grant-Kels, a veteran dermatologist and professor at the University of Connecticut
School of Medicine. "There's a limit to how much money you can make when you're sticking knives into human skin for profit."
One paradox of the Covid-19 pandemic has been that even as the virus has focused the entire country on health care, it's been
a financial disaster for the industry. And so, while emergency room doctors and nurses care for the sick -- comforting those who
would otherwise die alone, and in some cases
dying themselves
-- private equity-backed staffing companies and hospitals have been
cutting pay for ER doctors. These hospitals, like the big medical practices, make a large portion of their money from elective
procedures and have been forced into wrenching compromises.
For investors with capital, on the other hand, the economic fallout from the virus is a huge opportunity. Stay-at-home orders
have left small practices more financially strained than they've ever been. That will likely accelerate sales to private equity firms,
according to Marc Cabrera, an investment banker focused on health-care deals at Oppenheimer & Co. Independent doctors or groups that
previously rebuffed offers from deep-pocketed backers "will reconsider their options," he says.
Many doctors may ultimately come to regret cashing out, but it's hard to get out once you're in. As part of an acquisition, the
private equity groups typically require doctors to sign yearslong contracts, with noncompete clauses that prevent them from working
in the surrounding area.
As governors throughout the nation ease restrictions on businesses, Advanced Dermatology is opening its most profitable offices
first. The company received an undisclosed sum under the Cares Act, as part of the government relief package intended for health-care
workers. Hunt, Advanced's chief compliance officer, told employees in an email earlier this month that the money would be used for
protective gear, such as masks, and to replace "millions of dollars" in lost revenue.
The group had closed most of its offices since the stay-at-home orders were issued in March, cutting pay for doctors and furloughing
staff. With cities and states beginning to consider reopening, doctors and PAs say they've been told they should be prepared for
a full schedule. Hunt says the company is following the appropriate safety measures, but employees fear it will be nearly impossible
to keep patients apart in waiting rooms. Opening in a reduced capacity, they understand, is not an option.
...China's Foreign Minister Yang Yi held a lengthy presser providing
detailed answers to many differing questions. The topic of "Wolf Diplomacy" is in the news
today and was asked about by CNN:
" Cable News Network : We've seen an increasingly heated 'war of words'
between China and the US. Is 'wolf warrior' diplomacy the new norm of China's
diplomacy?
Wang Yi : I respect your right to ask the question, but I'm afraid you're
not framing the question in the right way. One has to have a sense of right and wrong.
Without it, a person cannot be trusted, and a country cannot hold its own in the family of
nations .
... ... ...
"The world is undergoing changes of a kind unseen in a century and full of instability
and turbulence. Confronted by a growing set of global challenges, we hope all countries
will realize that humanity is a community with a shared future. We must render each other
more support and cooperation, and there should be less finger-pointing and confrontation.
We call on all nations to come together and build a better world for all." [My
Emphasis]
"... The coronavirus crisis has thrown the global economy into cardiac arrest, and now you are acutely aware of the very markets that you had previously just assumed would function as normal. The first indication was the precipitous drop in the stock market that took place in late February. Then, as the United States began to enter quarantine, the labor market collapsed and hundreds of millions of people were suddenly out of work. Shortages in a few key commodities -- masks, ventilators, toilet paper -- began to appear. ..."
How will the coronavirus transform the relationship between state and market? A look at oil,
food, and finance.
You pay little attention to the systems of your body --
circulatory, digestive, pulmonary -- unless something goes wrong.
These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you
think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up and down
stairs, and head out to your car to begin your morning commute. If you had to focus your
attention on breathing, pushing blood through your veins, and metabolizing food, you'd have no
time or energy to do anything else. The body abhors the micromanaging of the mind.
The same applies to the world's markets. They whir away in the background of your life,
providing loans to your business, coffee beans to your nearby supermarket, labor to build your
house, gas to fill your car. You take all of these markets for granted. All you have to concern
yourself with is earning enough money to gain access to these goods and services. That's what
it means to live in a modern economy. The days of hunting and gathering, of complete
self-sufficiency, are long past.
And then, in a series of sickening shifts, the markets go haywire. As with a heart attack,
you no longer can take the optimal performance of these systems for granted.
The coronavirus crisis has thrown the global economy into cardiac arrest, and now you
are acutely aware of the very markets that you had previously just assumed would function as
normal. The first indication was the precipitous drop in the stock market that took place in
late February. Then, as the United States began to enter quarantine, the labor market collapsed
and hundreds of millions of people were suddenly out of work. Shortages in a few key
commodities -- masks, ventilators, toilet paper -- began to appear.
It is one of the central tenets of laissez-faire capitalism that markets behave like
automatic systems, that an "invisible hand" regulates supply and demand. Market fundamentalists
believe that the less the government interferes with these automatic systems, the better. They
argue, to the contrary, that markets should increasingly take over government functions: a
privatized post office, for instance, or Social Security accounts subjected to the stock
market.
Market fundamentalists are like Christian Scientists. They refuse government intervention
just as the faithful reject medical intervention. Much like God's grace, the invisible hand
operates independent of human plan.
Then something happens, like a pandemic, which tests this faith. States around the world are
now spending trillions of dollars to intervene in the economy: to bail out banks, save
businesses, help out the unemployed. Countries are imposing export controls on key commodities.
As in wartime, governments are directing manufacturers to produce critical goods to fill an
unexpected demand for greater supply.
These are emergency interventions. The market fundamentalist looks forward to the day when
stay-at-home restrictions are lifted, people go back to work, the stock market barrels back
into bull mode, and the invisible hand, with perhaps a few Band-aids across the knuckles,
returns to its job.
But some pandemics fundamentally alter the economy. In such emergencies, people realize that
an economy is constructed and thus can be reconstructed. Are we now at just such a moment in
world history? Will the coronavirus permanently transform the relationship between the state
and the market?
Let's take a look at three key markets -- oil, food, and finance -- to measure the impact of
the pandemic and the prospects for transformation.
Oil
Shutterstock
In 2007, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa
offered to forgo digging for oil beneath the Yasuni national park in exchange for $3.6
billion from the international community. No one took him up on the offer.
When the U.S. price of oil went below zero last week, I immediately thought of Correa's
offer. The mainstream scoffed at the Ecuadorian leader back in 2007. How on earth could you
possibly propose to keep oil under the earth? The world economy runs on fossil fuels. You might
as well ask your kid to keep her Halloween candy uneaten in the back of the cupboard.
Today, however, the world is glutted with oil. The global recession has radically reduced
the need for oil and gas.
In the United States, transportation absorbs
nearly 70 percent of oil consumption. With airplanes grounded, fewer trains and busses in
operation, and highways uncongested, the demand for oil has dropped precipitously. Businesses,
too, are using less energy. It's not just oil. Companies devoted to pumping natural gas out of
shale deposits are filing for bankruptcy as their market value drops precipitously: the price
of a share of fracking giant Whiting Petroleum fell from $150 a couple years ago to 67
cents on March 31.
It's gotten to the point that you almost can't give away the stuff.
After all, if you somehow found yourself with a bunch of barrels of oil, where would you
store it? Oil-storage tanks in the United State are near capacity. "Oil supertankers are
looking like petroleum paparazzi, crowding the Los Angeles shoreline, either as floating
storage or waiting on some kind of turn in sentiment," Brian Sullivan
writes at CNBC . "With prices higher in coming months, for now it pays to sit on oil and
hope to sell it for more money down the pipeline."
Oil-producing nations, after years of boosting their supplies, finally agreed in mid-April
to cut production
by 10 percent -- about 10 million gallons a day. In other words, they are deciding to leave
oil in the ground. Now, however, it doesn't even qualify as a half-measure, since demand has
dropped by 35 percent. The oil producers are awaiting the end of recession, when the
quarantined go back to work, and everyone jumps on their transport of choice to make up for
lost travel. They are awaiting a return to normal.
But the market for fossil fuels is not normal. The notion that the invisible hand will steer
economies in a sustainable direction is hogwash. We are long past the moment when we should
have paid Correa and everyone else to leave the oil and gas in the ground and move toward a
world powered entirely by clean energy. The market treats the environment either as a commodity
like any other or as an "externality" that doesn't factor into the final price of goods and
services. That is so nineteenth century.
Climate change demands an intervention into the energy markets with restrictions on
production, subsidies for clean energies like solar, and government purchases of electric cars.
Returning to "normal" after the pandemic is not a viable option.
Food
Shutterstock
Like the oil exporters, food producers in the United States are restricting production as
well.
In Delaware and Maryland, chicken producers are euthanizing
two million chickens because the processing plants don't have enough workers. Sickness and
death in these facilities, which has caused closures that are disrupting the supply chain, has
prompted Trump to classify
such plants as "critical infrastructure" that needs to remain open. Meanwhile, thousands of
acres of fruits and vegetables
are rotting in the fields in Florida because of the suspension of bulk food sales to
schools, theme parks, and restaurants. The shortage of pickers -- often migrant laborers whose
mobility has been restricted -- is complicating harvests.
Unlike oil, however, the overall demand for food remains high. The grocery business
is
booming . Food banks are
overwhelmed by a surge unlike any in recent decades. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
ordinarily could swoop in and buy up surplus production -- as it did for soybean growers during
the trade war with China -- for use in food banks and other distribution programs. But as with
so many other government agencies in the Trump era, the USDA has been slow
to act , despite repeated pleas from growers and governors.
The pandemic is highlighting all the problems that have long plagued the food supply. First,
there is the mismatch between supply and demand. Around
820 million people globally didn't have enough to eat in 2018, a figure that had been
rising for three years in a row, and contrasts with another rising number: the 672 million
obese people in the world. In the United States, fully 40 percent of food goes to waste every year.
So, obviously the invisible hand does a pretty poor job of achieving market equilibrium.
Second, despite a growing movement to eat locally and seasonally, the food system still eats
up a huge amount of energy. The problem lies not so much with bananas arriving by cargo ship,
which is relatively efficient, but with perishable items delivered by plane . And it's what we eat,
rather than where the products come from, that matters most. "Regardless of whether you compare
the footprint of foods in terms of their weight (e.g. one kilogram of cheese versus one
kilogram of peas); protein content; or calories, the overall conclusion is the same,"
writes
Hannah Ritchie. "Plant-based foods tend to have a lower carbon footprint than meat and dairy.
In many cases a much smaller footprint."
Third, because of economies of scale and abysmal labor practices, food in the industrialized
world is too often grown by agribusiness, processed by transnational corporations, and picked
or handled by workers who don't even make close to a living wage.
Returning to this kind of food system after the pandemic fades would be truly unappetizing.
The livable wage campaign must spread to the countryside, meat substitutes must get an
additional lift through government and institutional purchases, and innovative programs like
the Too Good to Go app in Europe -- which sells extra restaurant and supermarket food at a
discount -- must be brought to the United States to cut down on food waste and get meals to
those in need.
Finance
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The financial crisis of 2008-2009 exposed the fragility and fundamental inequality of the
global financial system. But all along the invisible hand has been pickpocketing poor Peter to
pay prosperous Paul. Bankers, stockbrokers, and financial gurus have constructed a casino-like
system that occasionally doles out a few pennies to the people playing the slots even as it
enriches the house -- the top 1-2 percent -- at every turn.
The most outrageous part of this scheme is that the financial crisis demonstrated just how
bad the financiers were at their own game. Not only did they not go to prison for illegal
activities, they were with a few exceptions not even punished economically for their market
failures. They were either too big, too rich, or too powerful for the government to allow them
to fail.
In The New Yorker , Nick Paumgarten quotes
a prominent investment banker at a bond fund:
"In the financial crisis, we won the war but lost the peace." Instead of investing in
infrastructure, education, and job retraining, we emphasized, via a central-bank policy of
quantitative easing (what some people call printing money), the value of risk assets, like
stocks. "We collectively fell in love with finance," he said.
After the last financial crisis, the wealthy, who are heavily invested in the stock market,
did quite well, while everyone else took a hit.
Explains Colin Schultz in Smithsonian magazine: "While families hovering around the
average net worth lost 36 percent over the past decade -- dropping from $87,992 in 2003 to
$56,335 in 2013 -- people in the top 95th percentile actually gained 14 percent in the same
tumultuous period -- going from $740,700 in 2003 to $834,100 in 2013."
The Trump administration is clearly in love with finance. Even before the pandemic hit,
Trump's tax reform provided the top six U.S. banks with $32
billion in savings . That's more than what the 2008 bank bailout provided (and remember,
banks mostly paid back those earlier loans). The stock market also benefited from
an unprecedented upswing in stock buybacks -- $2 trillion combined in 2018 and 2019 -- that
enriched shareholders at the expense of workers.
The $2 trillion in initial stimulus funds that the U.S. government is providing this time
around has gone to individuals (those Trump-signed checks in the mail), small businesses
(except when it went to big businesses), hospitals, and unemployed workers. There's also money
for farmers, schools, food stamps, and (alas) the Pentagon. Future rounds of stimulus spending
might include infrastructure, more aid to states and localities, and funds for smaller
banks.
There's not much enthusiasm, at least publicly, to bail out Wall Street. Stock buybacks were
explicitly excluded from the stimulus package. Meanwhile, the stock market has begun to climb
out of the basement in the last couple weeks, largely on the strength of the news of all this
new money being pumped into the economy.
But just as the tax bill was a covert giveaway to financial institutions, so have been
several of the administration's pandemic responses. Quantitative easing, by which the Federal
Reserve buys bonds and mortgage-backed securities, has increased the amount of liquidity
available to financial institutions.
In the latest effort, the Fed announced that it will buy $500 billion in corporate bonds,
but without
any of the strings attached to other assistance such as limits on stock buybacks or
executive compensation. The banks are even nickel and diming people by seizing
stimulus check deposits to cover overdrawn accounts.
Out of a total pie of around $6 trillion in potential stimulus spending, banks and major
corporations are well-placed to grab the lion's share.
Writes Nomi Prins at TomDispatch:
In the end, according to the president, that could mean $4.5 trillion in support for
big banks and corporate entities versus something like $1.4 trillion for regular Americans,
small businesses, hospitals, and local and state governments. That 3.5 to 1 ratio signals
that, as in 2008, the Treasury and the Fed are focused on big banks and large corporations,
not everyday Americans.
Invisible hand? Hardly. That's the very visible hand of government tilting the financial
markets even more in favor of the rich. As for the invisible enrichment that goes on beneath
the surface, otherwise known as corruption, the Trump administration has
gutted the oversight mechanisms that could bring those abuses to light.
It's time to end America's love affair with finance. That means, in the short term, higher
taxes on the very rich,
limitations on CEO pay built into all bailouts, and reviving all the reasonable proposals
for reforming the financial sector that were either left out of or didn't get full implemented
in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in the wake of the last
financial crisis.
Post-Pandemic Economics
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The Black Death depopulated Europe, killing as much as 60
percent of the population in the middle of the fourteenth century. Feudalism depended on
lots of peasants working the land to support the one percent of that era. By carrying off so
many of these workers, the Black Death made a major contribution to eroding the foundations of
the dominant economic system of the time.
The coronavirus will not kill anywhere near as many people as the Black Death did. But it
may well contribute to exposing the failures of "free markets" and the scandal of governments
intervening in the economy on behalf of this era's one percent. The pandemic is already, thanks
to huge stimulus packages, undermining the "small government" canard. A state apparatus
deliberately hobbled by the Trump administration -- after earlier "reforms" by both parties --
did a piss-poor job of dealing with this crisis. That doesn't bode well for dealing with the
even larger challenge of climate change.
The short-term fixes described above in the oil, food, and finance sectors are necessary but
insufficient. They shift the balance more toward the government and away from the "free"
market. They're not unlike the New Deal: reforming capitalism to save capitalism. But this
pandemic is pointing to an even more fundamental transformation, to a new definition of
economics.
The tweaking of markets to achieve optimal performance is much like the rejiggering of
earth-centric models of the universe that took place in the Middle Ages. These models became
more and more complex to account for new astronomical discoveries. Then along came Copernicus
with a heliocentric model that accounted for all the new data. It took some time, however, for
the old model to lose favor, despite its obvious failures.
The global economy remains market-centered, even though the evidence has been mounting that
these markets are failing us and the planet. Tweaking this model isn't good enough. We need a
new Copernicus who will provide a new theory that fits our unfolding reality, a new
environment-centered economics that can maximize not profit but the well-being of living
things. John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus.
Trump is mostly concerned with giving handouts to the MIC because he thinks "the economy" is
based on jobs in the MIC since that is what they tell him is where US manufacturing is now
based.
Posted by: Kali | May 23 2020 18:16 utc | 2
To a degree, it is true. However, the problem with MIC as an economic stimulant is rather
pitiful multiplier effect. For starters, the costs are hopelessly bloated. Under rather
watchful Putin, Russia does its piece of arms race at a very small fraction of American
costs. By the same token, pro-economy effects of arms spending in USA are seriously diluted
-- the spending is surely there, but the extend of activity is debatable For example, in
aerospace, there is a big potential for civilian applications of technologies developed for
the military. Scant evidence in Boeing that should be a prime beneficiary. The fabled toilet
seat (that cost many thousands of dollars) similarly failed to find civilian applications.
Civilians inclined to overpriced toilets, like Mr. Trump himself, rely on low-tech methods
like gold-plating.
A wider problem is shared by entire GOP: aversion to any government programs, and least of
all industry promoting programs, that could benefit ordinary citizens. This is the exclusive
domain of the free market! Once you refuse to consider that, only MIC remains, plus some
boondogles like interstate highways. Heaven forfend to improve public transit or to repair
almost-proverbial crumbling dams and bridges.
We have to ask cui bono - who benefits from a new nuclear arms race? General Electric,
Boeing, Honeywell International, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman et al. No one else really.
Since these corporations also own the Congress and have zillions to fund Trump's re-election,
they will probably get the go-ahead to spend the rest of the world into oblivion.
Apart from the obvious fact that the MIC is the only viable engine of propulsion of the
American "real economy" (a.k.a. "manufacturing"), there's the more macabre fact that, if we
take Trump's administration first military papers into consideration, it seems there's a
growing coterie inside the Pentagon and the WH that firmly believes MAD can be broken
vis-a-vis China.
Hence the "Prompt Global Strike" doctrine (which is taking form with the commission of the
new B-21 "Raider" strategic bomber, won by Northrop Grumman), the rise of the concept of
"tactical nukes" (hence the extinction of the START, and the Incirlik Base imbroglio post
failed coup against Erdogan) and, most importantly, the new doctrine of "bringing manufacture
back".
The USA is suffering from a structural valorization problem. The only way out is finding
new vital space through which it can initiate a new cycle of valorization. The only
significant vital space to be carved out in the 21st Century is China, with its 600
million-sized middle class (the world's largest middle class, therefore the world's largest
potential consumer market). It won two decades with the opening of the ex-Soviet vital space,
but it was depleted in the 2000s, finally exploding in 2006-2008.
How many decades does the Americans think they can earn by a hypothetical unilateral
destruction of China?
Having a treaty that limits power (in this case nuclear) on the same level for the US and any
other country is simply totally against the ideology of US Superority/Exeptionalism.
That seems to be the driving (psychological and ideological) factor behind this charade.
And like this sick ideology always ends: It too will backfire.
@gepay: another problem is people that disagree with Bernhard on COVID, but then use this
disagreement to not read his artciles anymore.
So many people only want to read what they want to hear, and run away at the first real
different view.
The narcissism, that our neoliberal societies inducded in its people the last decade shows..
And seeing both sides and everything in between is not possible anymore for a majority it
seems.
And living in a bubble is so comforting and easy in todays world. On MSM and on Alt Media
alike.
"...that may well fit Trump's plans of pushing all arms control regimes into oblivion."
It's not just arms control regimes, as the WHO business showed. This is the Roy Cohn agenda
showing up again- the old GOP objection to the UN and all other international organisations.
It is pure ideology-the US has gained immensely from dominating the organisations of which it
is a part, leaving them makes no sense at all.
As to 'spending China to oblivion". This only works when every Pentagon dollar spent
forces China or Russia to spend a dollar themselves. In such a contest the richest country
wins. But that only works in the context of pre-nuclear warfare. With the nuclear deterrent
it becomes possible to opt out of all the money wasting nonsense represented by the Pentagon
budget, sit back and say, as the Chinese diplomat evidently did, "Just try it."
Which adds up to the conclusion that it is wholly irrational of the United States to denounce
treaties designed to reduce the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used: it is to the
advantage of Washington that other powers, potential rivals, are forced to build up
conventional forces because they are bound by treaty not to rely on nuclear weapons.
So, again: pure ideology designed for domestic consumption and advanced by the most
reactionary elements in American society- the Jesse Helms good ol' boys who make the neo-cons
look almost human.
He likes economic war (against everybody), they want actual war. Laguerre | May 23 2020 20:17
utc
Trump has a primitive mercantile mind. There is nothing inherently wrong about
mercantilism, but a primitive version of anything tends to be mediocre at best. Thus he loves
war that give profit, like Yemen where natives are bombed with expensive products made in USA
(and unfortunately, also UK, France etc., but the bulk goes to USA). Then he loves wars the
he thinks will give profit, like "keeping oil fields in Syria". Some people told him that oil
fields are profitable (although they can go bankrupt just like casinos).
Privately, I think that Trump wanted to make a war with Iran, but the generals explained
him what kind of disaster that would be.
One difference is that Democrats are aligned with uber Zionist of slightly less rabid
variety than Republicans. A bit like black bears vs grizzlies. Unfortunately, like in the
animal kingdom, when the push comes to shove, black bears defer to grizzlies, so on the side
of Palestinians etc. there is no difference.
Billingslea's "spending ... into oblivion" statement reflects the belief, still widespread
among US neocon political / military elites, that the Soviet Union was brought down and
destroyed by its attempts to keep up with US military spending throughout the 1980s. This
alone tells us how steeped in past fantasy the entire US political and military establishment
must be. Compared to Rip van Winkle, these people are comatose.
Spending the enemy into oblivion may be "tried and true" practice but only when the enemy
is much poorer than yourself in arms production and in one type of weapons manufacture. That
certainly does not apply to either Russia or China these days. Both nations think more
strategically and do not waste precious resources in parading and projecting military power
abroad, or rely almost exclusively on old, decaying technologies and a narrow mindset
obsessed with always being top dog in everything.
A lockdown in a lot of places seems to be justified on the basis of the fact that even if you
are middle aged, the chances of hospitalization are still around 5 percent, and in the US
going to the hospital for a week or weeks can leave you bankrupt.
@AP The interesting
& important thing to note is that fatalities are heavily tied to the related factors
of pre-existing conditions and advanced age. For example:
With CQ/AZ/ZN available everywhere, the bulk of the economy could reopen immediately with
or without masks. Given that psychology is important, odds are mask wearing will make the
restart more effective. However, masks provide partial protection at most.
@utu Epidemiology
uses R0 for an initial reproductive rate when a pathogen first invades a naive host
population. Re is the designation for later when immunity begins to exist and, for human
beings in the current pandemic, host behavior changes.
After the Soviet collapse thirty years ago, that order expanded its jurisdiction. Proponents sought to subsume the old Eastern
Bloc, including perhaps Russia itself, into the American sphere. And they wanted to do so firmly on Washington's terms. Even as the
country began to deindustrialize and growth slowed, American leadership developed a taste for fresh crusades in the Middle East;
exotic savagery, went the subtext, had to be brought finally to heel. China was a rising force, but its regime would inevitably crater
or democratize. Besides, Beijing was a peaceful trading partner of the United States.
2008, 2016 and 2020 -- the financial crisis, Trump's election and now the Coronavirus and its reaction -- have been successive
gut punches to this project, a hat trick which may seal its demise. Ask anyone attempting to board an international flight, or open
a new factory in China, or get anything done at the United Nations: the world is de-globalizing at a speed almost as astonishing
as it integrated. Post-Covid, U.S.-China confrontation is not a choice. It's a reality. The liberal international order is not lamentable.
It's already dead.
This was the argument made by Bannon. It had other backers, of course, within both the academy and an emerging foreign policy
counter-establishment loathe to repeat the mistakes of the past thirty years. But coming from the former top political advisor to
the sitting president of the United States, it was provocative stuff. Bannon articulated a perspective which seemed to be on the
tip of the foreign policy world's tongue. And it riled people up. The most fulsome rebuttal to the zeitgeist was perhaps The Jungle
Grows Back , tellingly written by Robert Kagan, an Iraq War architect. The peripheral world was dangerous brush; the United States
was the machete.
Trumpian nationalism has chugged along for nearly three years since -- stripped, some might say, of its Bannonite flair and intelligence.
The most hysterical prophecies of what the president might do -- that he might withdraw from the geriatric North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, for instance -- have not come to pass. Trump has howled and roared, true: but so far, his most disruptive foreign policy
maneuver has been escalation against Iran.
It's very good to hear the right getting a little humility in them now and talking less empire, more multilateralism. Trump has
been way too concerned with his MAGA personality cult to understand the value of humility.
The world's a big place. The reality is, America first will more and more mean working together with other nations for mutual
benefit, and often their gain will indirectly be to our own also.
Working more and more, yes. This is why US is undercutting Germany's competitiveness, by blocking a cheap source of energy via
NS2...
As Bush said, you are either with us or against us. Nothing has changed and nothing will change, but it will become uglier.
If it were to desire multi-polarity, the US would tolerate not only states, like KSA, where the Royals own everything, but also
states, like Iran, or Cuba, where the people (through the government/state) owns assets (land and productive facilities). But
the US does not tolerate such type of multi-polarity, not open to US "investment" and ownership (bought with fiat money).
Cold War II started in 2007, with Putin. Popcorn & beer lads!
It does seem like there's a creeping idea, not just on dissident internet sites now like before, that the Russian rivalry is a
luxury of the past. Even the liberals are going to have to reconcile with liberal hegemony not being workable and settle for something
less. Owing to distance and mutual interest (common rivals Britain and Germany) Russia and America had a long history of friendship
before the Cold war.
I sadly agree about the predatory nature of much of America does. I think it really is a reflection of partially, imperial
arrogance, but even moreso a matter of who runs the country. Oligarchy is poorly checked in modern America. Maybe we can hope
for a humbled oligarchy, at least.
Trump is indeed an empty suit and a demagogue, but he ran on a decent nationalist platform (probably thanks to Bannon, who is
almost certainly a closeted gay. No joke... a deep-in-the-closet, self-hating gay. The navy can change a man, and he's a fraud
in other ways: see Eric Striker's article "International Finance's Anti-China Crusade"). Trump does have an absurd ego, and he
probably figured becoming president would impress Ivanka too.
Also, the Uyghurs are not totally innocent victims... Some of them are US-financed revolutionaries and some of them have committed
terrorism: see Godfree Roberts at Unz Review: "China and the Uyghurs" (January 10, 2019) and Ajit Singh at The Grayzone: "Inside
the World Uyghur Congress: The US-backed right-wing regime change network seeking the 'fall of China'" (March 5, 2020). Some of
our pathetic propagandists make it seem like they're in concentration camps, but there is objective reporting that suggests it's
more like job training programs and anti-jihad classes. Absurd lies have certainly been told about North Korea and many other
countries, so be skeptical.
Yeah, let's get that hate on for China - why they're as bad as Russia, Iran and Venezuela put together and there are so many more
of them. Especially a lot are available right here in the US and have lots of restaurants that can be boycotted. Not that many
Venezuelan restaurants around. Seriously, can Americans get over this childishness? When the US closes down its 800+ overseas
bases and withdraws its fleet to its own shores instead of Iran's and China's, then maybe Americans will be entitled to complain
about someone else's imperialism.
Most of anti-China stuff Hawley, much like Trump, claims always feels empty populism for WWC voters.
1) It is reasonable to be against our Middle East endeavors and not be so anti-China.
2) I still don't understand how it is China fault for stealing manufacturing jobs when it is the US private sector that does it.
(And Vietnam exist, etc.) So without Charles Koch and Tim Cook behind this trade stuff, it feels like empty populism.
3) The most obvious point on China to me is how little they do use military measures for their 'imperialism.'
One problem with all this populism emptiness, is there is a lot issues with China to work on:
1) This virus could have impact economies in Africa and South America a lot where the nations have to renegotiate their loans
to China. I have no idea how this goes but there will be tensions here. Imperialism is tough in the long run.
2) There are nations banding together on China's reaction to the virus and it seems reasonable that US joining them would be more
effective than Trump's taunting.
3) To prove Trump administration incompetence, I have no idea how he is not turning this crisis into more medical equipment and
drugs manufacturing. (My guess is this both takes a lot of work and frankly a lot of manufacturing plants have risks of spreads
so noone wants to invest.)
Hawley is a "fake populist" according to Eric Striker's article "International Finance's Anti-China Crusade" and I just saw fake-patriot
airhead Pete Hegseth claim China wants to destroy our civilization, on fake populist Tucker Carlson's show. It's well-established
that Fox News and the GOP are still neocons and fake patriots... after all, the Trump administration is run by Jared Kushner,
a protégé of Rupert Murdoch and Bibi Netanyahu.
Hawley's speech on the Senate floor yesterday deserves much more criticism than it gets here. This article from Reason
does a good job breaking down the speech and pointing out what's right AND wrong about it:
What if there is reduced wars and civil wars n the world today than ever. (So say anytime before 1991?) I get all the Middle East
& African Wars but look at the rest of the world. When in history have the major West Europe powers not had a major war in 75
years. After issues of post Cold War East Europe is probably more peaceful than ever. Look at South America. In the 1970s the
Civil Wars raged in all those nations. Or the Pacific Rim? Japan, China, and other nations are fighting with Military right now.
This is certainly less than perfect but the number of people (per million) dieing in wars and civil wars are at historic lows.
The fall of Soviet Union and weakening of Russia allowed US and Western Europe to attack Serbia in 1990s. A stronger Russia wouldn't
have allowed that to happen (who's trying to get Crimea from Russia's control now?). But with US aggressiveness and bellicosity
(including nuclear posture) at Russia's borders do not bode well.
But it is true, less important people are dying now...
Chinese imperialism? Uh ... other than shaking trees and drumming up fear can I get like one example of that.
Taiwan, part of China since the 1500's and they are have not issued any new threats since 1949.
Hong Kong - stolen from China and now reluctantly given back with lots of conditions. If they deserve the right of independence
through referendum I'm all for it as long as we apply this standard uniformly including parts of Texas, San Diego, New Mexico,
Arizona, any place that has a large foreign population will do.
Yeah, "Chinese imperialism" is complete nonsense, just like the claim that they definitely originated the coronavirus, caused
Americans to be under house arrest, and caused a depression. In fact, the origin of the virus is far from clear, and it wasn't
China who hyped up and exaggerated the danger and wrecked the economy. It was our superficial corporate media and government that
did that (perhaps deliberately)... the same people who are desperately trying to deflect blame onto the CCP. The same people who
have been mismanaging and ruining America for decades in order to enrich themselves.
"Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The
net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless."
Most people would be well served to read Chomsky a first time.
However, it should be noted, Chomsky's critiques of neoliberalism aren't grounded in nationalism, xenophobia, and racism. So a
lot of TAC readers (and especially writers) may be disappointed.
Hawley seems like the natural choice for the potential future of the GOP, that is a post-fusionist or post-liberal GOP. However
the one thing that worries me is his foreign policy. He talks the talk, but I'm having trouble to see if he walks the walk. As
Mills noted he didn't vote to end support for the genocidal war in Yemen, a war that serves purely the interests of Saudi Arabia
and not our own. He has criticized David Petraeus before, but its important not to be fooled by just rhetoric. While accepting
he'll be better than any Tom Cotton or (god forbid) Nikki Haley in 2024, his foreign policy needs to be examined more until then.
Our response to the epidemic was 100% 'made in China'. The entire 'Western World' decided to copy Beijing. If that doesn't establish
a new level of leadership for China, I don't know what would. I'm surprised this is not more widely recognized. You can run down
the many parallels, including the pathetic photo-op attempt by the West to build those emergency hospitals (Nightingale in the
UK, Javits Center, etc. all across the US), which were just to show 'hey we can build hospitals in a few weeks also' ... never
mind they could never, and were never used for anything at all.
At this point, Hawley is all talk. Further, much of his talking amounts to little more than expressing resentment. I agree that
the US needs to follow a more nationalist pathway, which involved making itself less dependent on its chief geopolitical rival.
But accomplishing this is going to require more than bashing China and asserting that cosmopolitan Americans are traitors. At
this point, Hawley has no positive program to offer. Giving paid speeches that vilify coastal elites and China is not a political
plan.
Further, I agree that we're probably moving away from the universalist order that's guided much of our thinking since the 1990s.
But isolationism is not the answer. We need to begin building a multilateral order that takes full account of China's rise as
a worthy rival. This means that we need to develop a series of smaller-scale agreements with strategic partners. The TPP is a
good example of such an agreement. But where is the call to revive it?
Lastly, I find the article's reference to China's treatment of gays and lesbians to be curious. I'd first note that using the
term "homosexual" in reference to people is generally viewed as an offensive slur. Further, China's treatment of gay people isn't
so bad, and tends to be better than what Hawley's evangelical supporters would afford. Moreover, China is a multi-ethnic country.
It's program in Xinjiang has more to do with maintaining political order than a desire to repress non-Han people.
The general chest puffing nature of the American right makes it hard for them to understand that America might need to work with
other countries at a deep level, and not as vassals either.
". We need to begin building a multilateral order that takes full account
of China's rise as a worthy rival. This means that we need to develop a
series of smaller-scale agreements with strategic partners. The TPP is a
good example of such an agreement. But where is the call to revive it?"
The thing is that the post-WWII liberal international order was good for things like that.
Trump and the GOP quite deliberately destroyed it. Before that, the US would have the trust of many other governments; now they
don't trust the US - even if Biden is elected, the next Trump is on the way.
"We benefit if countries that share our opposition to Chinese imperialism -- countries like India and Japan, Vietnam, Australia
and Taiwan -- are economically independent of China, and standing shoulder to shoulder with us,"
OK....then can someone explain why Hawley opposed the TPP, which was designed to accomplish just this. The TPP was supposed
to create trading relationships between these countries and the United States in the context of an agreement that excluded China.
In this instance people like Hawley were advancing China's position and interests (I suspect simply because it was a treaty negotiated
under Obama, which apparently was enough to make it bad).
Probably because Hawley seems more interested in demagoguery than accomplishing anything productive. Never mind that 95% of the
people who voted for him probably couldn't find Japan or Vietnam on a map.
TPP was not geared against China as a blanket thing, as an entire exclusion of China. The perfidy of TPP was that it was against
any economic interactions with State Owned Enterprises (didn't mention the origin, didn't have to). The ultimate goal wasn't to
isolate China but to force privatization of said SOEs, preferably run from Wall Street.
Private property good and = Democracy; State property bad = Authoritarianism, dictatorship, etc. It is a fallacy here somewhere,
cannot really put my finger on it...
Except this is all lies. On each chance to actually do something Hawley has sided with international corporations, as a good conservative
will always do. Fixing globalism will never come form the right, this is all smoke and mirrors for the religious right, aka the
rubes. And they are perpetual suckers and will keep buying into this crap as our nation is hollowed out and raided by the rich.
And that, is TRUE conservatism.
"Now we must recognize that the economic system designed by Western policy makers at the end of the Cold War does not serve
our purposes in this new era," proclaimed Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri. "And it does not meet our needs for this new day." He
continued, perhaps too politely: "And we should admit that multiple of its founding premises were in error."
The "error" in the founding premises of the post-WWII economic system was that it assumed that the US would act in a responsible
manner. Instead we have run huge budget deficits and borrowed the difference from foreigners, randomly invading other countries,
undermined the institutions we set up, bullied smaller countries rather than working with them, and abused our control of the
financial system.
No, that old economic system served our interests very well, as long as we respected the institutions we set up and kept our
own house in order. We haven't been doing any of that for at least 20 years.
Let's bear in mind that the Republican leader of the Senate married into a wealthy Chinese family that makes its money from hauling
Chinese exports to our shores and the shores of other developed nations.
This is all just hollow bravado meant to appeal to the right's nativist base.
I am not into the thinking that everyone whose politics I don't support is acting in bad faith. We are talking about the actions
of literally millions of people. Accusing this or that person of acting in bad faith because of personal interest is just dirty
politics dressed up as perceptiveness. I am not accusing any specific person of acting in bad faith, although some of the people
who pushed opening up to China because more business in China would create a class of people who would eventually push for Democracy
there, were indeed acting in bad faith. They wanted access to cheap labor with no rights.
Yet, no doubt many of them actually believed the propaganda, because it supposedly happened in South Korea, Taiwan and other
places. And especially the ones who switched the line to "globalism" when it was clear that the supposed indigenous pressures
for Democracy did not materialize also acted in bad faith. I only assume that some of were because once I understood the rationale
of the CCCP it was clear to me that China was radically different, and there is no way that so many of those guys who are smarter
and more knowledgeable about political systems than me, did not figure it out. But I am not going to behave as if it the Republicans
alone who were pushing either of these two false messages.
Criticizing China for "imperialism" is the height of hypocrisy on multiple levels. First, the United States has engaged in economic
imperialism, sometimes enforced with military intervention, for a hundred years. Read Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket" if you
doubt that. Second, this is the same guy who voted against our proxy war in Yemen. Third, one could very reasonably argue that
China is simply applying the lessons it learned at the hands of Western imperialists since 1800s..
It's good that SOME Republicans are at least giving lip service to the idea of bringing back manufacturing in this country.
But you have to thank Trump for that, not the GOP establishment. The offshoring of American manufacturing as part of "free trade"
was strongly supported (if not led) by the GOP going back to the 1980s.
And check out John Perkins's books ("Confessions of an Economic Hit Man", etc.) for up-to-date information. It's obviously true
that criticizing China for "imperialism" is ridiculously hypocritical but people like Senator Hawley know they can get away with
it because they understand how propaganda works on the dumbed-down masses.
They understand doublethink, repetition, appeal to patriotism, appeal to racism, appeal to fear, etc. People like Rupert Murdoch
do this every day... poorly, but well enough to be effective on a lot of people.
Incidentally, the Republicans may talk about bringing manufacturing back to the US but they're actually planning on shifting
it to India (see Eric Striker's article "International Finance's Anti-China Crusade").
Bolsheviks put ideology above and before the people needs; Neoliberals put capital above
people. Neoliberals are the next-worst thing after Boslheviks (although nobody can match
Bolsheviks as for excesses including Stalin terror) .
That's why both now in the USA and in
the USSR before the dissolution we have a lot of "death of despair" That said, why would
anybody trust neolibral pols ?
Coronavirus had shown Brezhnev socialism and the US neoliberalism were never as far apart as
people imagined. Two sides of a coin. A theological dispute.
From comments: "
neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce
wholly artificial directives. Also, the work of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana
Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving into a totalitarian system of control through
cybernetic data aggregation."
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and
creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more
oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and
micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and
hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The
introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age
of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom
but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of
freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so
much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
Notable quotes:
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state, insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
"... The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a radicalized form of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt. ..."
"... The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with nationhood. ..."
Thousands of people march through London to protest against underfunding and privatisation
of the NHS. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Images M y life was saved last year by the
Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skilful procedure
to remove a cancer from my body . Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from
the floor. I've just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On
the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. Many of the staff
had objected to a decision by the National Health Service
to privatise the hospital's cancer scanning . They complained that the scanners the private
company was offering were less sensitive than the hospital's own machines. Privatisation, they
said, would put patients at risk. In response,
as the Guardian revealed last week , NHS England threatened to sue the hospital for libel
if its staff continued to criticise the decision.
The dominant system of political thought in this country, which produced both the creeping
privatisation of public health services and this astonishing attempt to stifle free speech,
promised to save us from dehumanising bureaucracy. By rolling back the state, neoliberalism
was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a
semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced.
Workers find themselves enmeshed in a
Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend
on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down,
hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into
public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is
brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and
silence.
Much of the theory behind these transformations arises from the work of Ludwig von Mises. In
his book Bureaucracy , published in 1944, he
argued that there could be no accommodation between capitalism and socialism. The creation of
the National Health Service in the UK, the New Deal in the US and other experiments in social
democracy would lead inexorably to the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany.
He recognised that some state bureaucracy was inevitable; there were certain functions that
could not be discharged without it. But unless the role of the state is minimised –
confined to defence, security, taxation, customs and not much else – workers would be
reduced to cogs "in a vast bureaucratic machine", deprived of initiative and free will.
By contrast, those who labour within an "unhampered capitalist system" are "free men", whose
liberty is guaranteed by "an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote". He
forgot to add that some people, in his capitalist utopia, have more votes than others. And
those votes become a source of power.
His ideas, alongside the writings of
Friedrich Hayek , Milton Friedman and other neoliberal thinkers, have been applied in this
country by Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, Theresa May and, to an alarming extent, Tony
Blair. All of those have attempted to privatise or marketise public services in the name of
freedom and efficiency, but they keep hitting the same snag: democracy. People want essential
services to remain public, and they are right to do so.
If you hand public services to private companies, either you create a private monopoly,
which can use its dominance to extract wealth and shape the system to serve its own needs
– or you introduce competition, creating an incoherent, fragmented service characterised
by the institutional failure you can see every day on our railways. We're not idiots, even if
we are treated as such. We know what the profit motive does to public services.
So successive governments decided that if they could not privatise our core services
outright, they would subject them to "market discipline". Von Mises repeatedly warned against
this approach. "No reform could transform a public office into a sort of private enterprise,"
he cautioned. The value of public administration "cannot be expressed in terms of money".
"Government efficiency and industrial efficiency are entirely different things."
"Intellectual work cannot be measured and valued by mechanical devices." "You cannot
'measure' a doctor according to the time he employs in examining one case." They ignored his
warnings.
Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name
of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became
not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control.
Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself.
Its perversities afflict all public services. Schools teach to the test , depriving
children of a rounded and useful education. Hospitals manipulate waiting times, shuffling
patients from one list to another. Police forces ignore some crimes, reclassify others, and
persuade suspects to admit to extra offences to improve their statistics . Universities urge their
researchers to
write quick and superficial papers , instead of deep monographs, to maximise their scores
under the research excellence framework.
As a result, public services become highly inefficient for an obvious reason: the
destruction of staff morale. Skilled people, including surgeons whose training costs hundreds
of thousands of pounds, resign or retire early because of the stress and misery the system
causes. The leakage of talent is a far greater waste than any inefficiencies this quantomania
claims to address.
New extremes in the surveillance and control of workers are not, of course, confined to the
public sector. Amazon has patented
a wristband that can track workers' movements and detect the slightest deviation from
protocol. Technologies are used to monitor peoples' keystrokes, language, moods and tone of
voice. Some companies have begun to experiment with the
micro-chipping of their staff . As the philosopher Byung-Chul
Han points out , neoliberal work practices, epitomised by the gig economy, that
reclassifies workers as independent contractors, internalise exploitation. "Everyone is a
self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise."
The freedom we were promised turns out to be
freedom for capital , gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has
created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by
managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency
measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no
argument or complaint.
Attempts to resist are met by ever more extreme methods, such as the threatened lawsuit at
the Churchill Hospital. Such instruments of control crush autonomy and creativity. It is true
that the Soviet bureaucracy von Mises rightly denounced reduced its workers to subjugated
drones. But the system his disciples have created is heading the same way.
The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a
radicalized form of neoliberalism. If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have
been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to
legitimise itself.
Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist
ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian
orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become
overt.
The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a
medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs
collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with
nationhood.
A corporate state emerges, free of the regulatory fetters of democracy. The final
restriction on the market - democracy itself - is removed. There then is no separate market
and state, just a totalitarian market state.
This is the best piece of writing on neoliberalism I have ever seen. Look, 'what is in
general good and probably most importantly what is in the future good'. Why are we
collectively not viewing everything that way? Surely those thoughts should drive us all?
Pinkie123: So good to read your understandings of neoliberalism. The political project is the
imposition of the all seeing all knowing 'market' on all aspects of human life. This version
of the market is an 'information processor'. Speaking of the different idea of the
laissez-faire version of market/non market areas and the function of the night watchman state
are you aware there are different neoliberalisms? The EU for example runs on the version
called 'ordoliberalism'. I understand that this still sees some areas of society as separate
from 'the market'?
ADamnSmith: Philip Mirowski has discussed this 'under the radar' aspect of neoliberalism. How
to impose 'the market' on human affairs - best not to be to explicit about what you are
doing. Only recently has some knowledge about the actual neoliberal project been appearing.
Most people think of neoliberalism as 'making the rich richer' - just a ramped up version of
capitalism. That's how the left has thought of it and they have been ineffective in stopping
its implementation.
Finally. A writer who can talk about neoliberalism as NOT being a retro version of classical
laissez faire liberalism. It is about imposing "The Market" as the sole arbiter of Truth on
us all.
Only the 'Market' knows what is true in life - no need for 'democracy' or 'education'.
Neoliberals believe - unlike classical liberals with their view of people as rational
individuals acting in their own self-interest - people are inherently 'unreliable', stupid.
Only entrepreneurs - those close to the market - can know 'the truth' about anything. To
succeed we all need to take our cues in life from what the market tells us. Neoliberalism is
not about a 'small state'. The state is repurposed to impose the 'all knowing' market on
everyone and everything. That is neoliberalism's political project. It is ultimately not
about 'economics'.
The left have been entirely wrong to believe that neoliberalism is a mobilisation of
anarchic, 'free' markets. It never was so. Only a few more acute thinkers on the left
(Jacques Ranciere, Foucault, Deleuze and, more recently, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Will
Davies and David Graeber) have understood neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of
control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives. Also, the work
of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving
into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation.
Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the
state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so
we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise
we'll hang back and let you do what you want'. Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state
is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices,
they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know
there would be socialism. This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of
government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is,
neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state
based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t
totalitarianism. Because concepts of social justice are expressed in language, neoliberals
are suspicious of linguistic concepts, regarding them as politically dangerous. Their
preference has always been for numbers. Hence, market bureaucracy aims for the quantification
of all values - translating the entirety of social reality into metrics, data, objectively
measurable price signals. Numbers are safe. The laws of numbers never change. Numbers do not
lead to revolutions. Hence, all the audit, performance review and tick-boxing that has been
enforced into public institutions serves to render them forever subservient to numerical
(market) logic. However, because social institutions are not measurable, attempts to make
them so become increasingly mystical and absurd. Administrators manage data that has no
relation to reality. Quantitatively unmeasurable things - like happiness or success - are
measured, with absurd results.
It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that
neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of
understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to
universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were
Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century
totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to
the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand
neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal.
However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to
economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any
other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic
irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes
that Hayek railed against.
Nationalised rail in the UK was under-funded and 'set up to fail' in its latter phase to make
privatisation seem like an attractive prospect. I have travelled by train under both
nationalisation and privatisation and the latter has been an unmitigated disaster in my
experience. Under privatisation, public services are run for the benefit of shareholders and
CEO's, rather than customers and citizens and under the opaque shroud of undemocratic
'commercial confidentiality'.
What has been very noticeable about the development of bureaucracy in the public and private
spheres over the last 40 years (since Thatcher govt of 79) has been the way systems are
designed now to place responsibility and culpability on the workers delivering the services -
Teachers, Nurses, social workers, etc. While those making the policies, passing the laws,
overseeing the regulations- viz. the people 'at the top', now no longer take the rap when
something goes wrong- they may be the Captain of their particular ship, but the
responsibility now rests with the man sweeping the decks. Instead they are covered by tying
up in knots those teachers etc. having to fill in endless check lists and reports, which have
as much use as clicking 'yes' one has understood those long legal terms provided by software
companies.... yet are legally binding. So how the hell do we get out of this mess? By us as
individuals uniting through unions or whatever and saying NO. No to your dumb educational
directives, No to your cruel welfare policies, No to your stupid NHS mismanagement.... there
would be a lot of No's but eventually we could say collectively 'Yes I did the right thing'.
'The left wing dialogue about neoliberalism used to be that it was the Wild West and that
anything goes. Now apparently it's a machine of mass control.'
It is the Wild West and anything goes for the corporate entities, and a machine of control
of the masses. Hence the wish of neoliberals to remove legislation that protects workers and
consumers.
Back in the Thatcher/Reagan years there were at people around who genuinely believed in the
superiority of the market, or at least, made the effort to set out an intellectual case for
it.
Now we're in a different era. After 2008, hardly anyone really believes in neoliberal
ideas anymore, not to the point that they'd openly make the case for them anyway. But while
different visions have appeared to some extent on both left and right, most of those in
positions of power and influence have so internalised Thatcher's 'there is no alternative'
that it's beyond their political horizons to treat any alternatives which do emerge as
serious propositions, let alone come up with their own.
So neoliberalism stumbles on almost as a reflex action. Ben Fine calls it a 'zombie' but I
think the better analogy is cannibalism. Unlike the privatisations of the 80s and 90s there's
barely any pretence these days that new sell-offs are anything more than simply part of a
quest to find new avenues for profit-making in an economy with tons of liquid capital but not
enough places to profitability put it. Because structurally speaking most of the economy is
tapped out.
Privatising public services at this point is just a way to asset strip and/or funnel
public revenue streams to a private sector which has been stuck in neoliberal short-term, low
skill, low productivity, low wage, high debt mode for so long that it has lost the ability to
grow. So now it is eating itself, or at least eating the structures which hold it up and
allow it to survive.
Right-wing ideology is often presented as a natural state and not ideological at all. This
denial is a central feature, acting as a way of abdicating responsibility for harmful and
selfish actions and providing means of fostering intellectual suspicion to prevent challenges
or structured and coherent critiques like your own. The right engenders coalitions of people
disinterested in politics and distrustful of politicians with those who feel intellectually
superior but see politics as an amoral game in the pursuit of "enlightened" self-interest.
As a result, everything about it is disingenous. There is no alternative (that we want you
to choose). It's not racist to (constantly, always negatively and to the expense of
everything else) talk about immigration. Cutting taxes for the rich reduces inequality
(because we change the criteria to exclude the richest from the calculations). This is also
because there are dualities at play. Neoliberalism relies on immigration to increase worker
competition and suppress wage demand but courts the xenophobic vote (which is why even with
reduced EU migration Brexit has so far increased overall immigration and would continue to do
so in the event of no deal or May's deal). Both Remainers and Leavers have accused the other
of being a neoliberal project, and in certain aspects -because of these dualities - both
sides are correct.
I also believe the disdain for "political correctness" is somewhat a result of
neoliberalism, since marketisation is so fundamental to the project and the wedge of the
market is advertising, the language of bullshit and manipulation. People railing against
political correctness feel judged for their automatic thoughts that they identify as natural
instead of culturally determined. Behavioural advertising encourages these thoughts and
suppresses consideration. It is a recipe for resentment.
Money quote: ""Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring
and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd." --
that's definition of a serf -- a neoliberal serf
I feel a lot of people just use the term neoliberalism as a term of a specific abuse of
labor via debt slavery. .
1. Hayek's book 'The Road to Serfdom' uses an erroneous metaphor. He argues that if we
allow gov regulation, services and spending to continue then we will end up serfs. However,
serfs are basically the indentured or slave labourers of private citizens and landowners not
of the state. Only in a system of private capital can there be serfs. Neo liberalism creates
serfs not a public system.
2. According to Hayek all regulation on business should be eliminated and only labour
should be regulated to make it cheap and contain it so that private investors can have their
returns guaranteed. Hence the purpose of the state is to pass laws to suppress workers.
These two things illustrate neo-liberalism. Deception and repression of labour.
As a matter of semantics, neo-liberalism delivered on the promise of freedom...for
capitalists to be free of ethical accountability, social responsibility, and government
regulation and taxes. And people can't understand why i'm a socialist.
America's billionaires saw their combined net worth soar by $434 billion between March 18
and May 19 while the coronavirus pandemic killed tens of thousands of people and ravaged the
U.S. economy, forcing more than 30 million out of work.
The report shows that the five wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. -- Jeff Bezos of Amazon,
Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, and
Larry Ellison of Oracle -- saw their collective wealth grow by a total of $75.5 billion between
March 18 and May 19, a 19% jump.
Bezos -- the world's richest man -- saw his wealth jump by nearly $35 billion in the
two-month period. Yet even as Bezos' fortune continues to grow, Amazon
announced last week that it will not extend $2-an-hour hazard pay for warehouse workers
beyond the end of May.
A progressive organization of 23,000 physicians from across the U.S. demanded Thursday that
the American Hospital Association (AHA) divest completely from a dark-money lobbying group that
has spent millions combating Medicare for All and instead devote those financial resources to
the fight against Covid-19 and to better support for patients and healthcare workers.
Dr. Adam Gaffney, president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), said in a
statement that "the Covid-19 pandemic has stretched hospitals' resources to the limit, and the
AHA should not waste precious member hospitals' funds lobbying against universal health
coverage" as a member of the Partnership for America's Health Care Future (PFAHCF).
Because Medicare for All would provide a lifeline to hospitals in underserved areas that
have been hit hard by Covid-19, Gaffney argued, the AHA "cannot claim to represent hospitals
while also opposing a single-payer system that would keep struggling hospitals open." The AHA
represents around 5,000 hospitals and other healthcare providers in the U.S.
As Common Dreams
reported earlier this month, public health officials are accusing the Trump administration
of directing billions of dollars in Covid-19 hospital bailout funds to high-revenue providers
while restricting money to hospitals that serve low-income areas.
Tenet Healthcare, an investor-owned hospital company that has donated hundreds of
thousands to PFAHCF, has received $345 million in Covid-19 bailout funds, Axios
reported last month.
"The AHA should immediately leave the PFAHCF," Gaffney said, "and redirect that money to
supporting patients and frontline healthcare workers."
"As physicians, we can no longer tolerate a health system that puts profits ahead of
patients and public health," Gaffney added. "It's time for health professionals to hold
accountable the organizations that claim to represent us."
Formed in the summer of 2018 by an alliance of pharmaceutical, insurance, and hospital
lobbyists with the goal of countering the push for universal healthcare, PFAHCF's anti-Medicare
for All " army "
has grown rapidly since its founding, with the AHA joining the fray in 2019.
As The Interceptreported last
October, the for-profit hospital industry has played an "integral role" in the corporate fight
against single-payer.
@vk , hilarious post trying to potray modern day USN as fhe same one who fought japanese..
after WW2 all USN did was doing tag with soviets and today even their skill lost in the
current situation.. The good ole US navy is gone, all that left is aging airframes and ships
and confused doctrine that focused on clearing endless brush fires from restless natives..
USN are not able to fight peer enemy naval force, its man power are not sustainable in
such fight , thus they will resort to military draft system again and pray tell how many
foolish ignorant gung ho flag waving american would enlist ? it is easy for chickenhawks to
scream war war war but when their lives or their kid's lives on the line of fire most will
ran away to canada or mexico
Dear Corporate America: maybe
you remember the old Johnny Paycheck tune? Let me refresh your memory: take this job and shove it.
Put yourself in the shoes of a single parent waiting tables in a working-class cafe with
lousy tips, a worker stuck with high rent and a soul-deadening commute
--one of the tens of
millions of America's
working poor
who have seen their wages stagnate and their income
becoming increasingly precarious / uncertain while the cost of living has soared.
Unemployment and the federal
stimulus bonus
of $600 a week are far more than your
regular wages, including tips.
Exactly why do you want to go back to your miserable job and
low pay? Why wouldn't you take time off and enjoy life a little, which is what you've been wanting to
do for years?
Indeed--why not? The pandemic is giving many permission to get what they always wanted.
Consider
these examples:
1. The Federal Reserve has always pined for the power to bail out the top .01% / the New
Nobility the way they deserve, with unlimited money-printing and the Fed being able to buy every
rigged, fraudulent asset spewed by the New Nobility's financial and corporate predators and
parasites.
Yee-haw, the pandemic genie granted your wish: there's no limits on how many trillions you can
shove into the greedy maw of the top .01%, and bail out every single one of their predatory,
exploitive,
legalized looting
bets that went south.
2. Local officials always wanted to commandeer some motels and shove the homeless into them, to
clear the sidewalks and parks and then claim "homeless problem solved." Presto, your wish has been
granted.
3. Central government authorities have always resented all those pesky civil liberties
restraints on their unquenchable desires to control every tiny aspect of life, public and private,
and now--voila, the doors to Petty Authoritarian Heaven have opened. Question our authority? A
tenner
in
the gulag for you, Doubter of All That Is Great and Good.
4. Restaurant owners who on camera always have to say how much they love their customers and
business, never mind the money, who secretly have come to loathe their over-entitled,
self-absorbed, dilettante customers and are sick and tired of the soaring rent, business licenses,
insurance, payroll taxes and costs of ingredients.
You know what, pal? Here's the keys, you can re-open whatever the heck you want, I'm outta here.
I've been secretly wishing I could get out from underneath this crushing burden and get my life
back. Yes, it was exciting way back when, but now it's nothing but an endless grind that wasn't
making money even before the pandemic.
5. Since the financiers, Big Tech mini-gods and stock buyback crowd have looted and pillaged
their way to immense fortunes by lying, cheating, conniving and gaming, why not
follow the
money
just like the predators and parasites at the top of the heap?
Indeed, why not fudge the application for a federal small business loan and use the "free
money"
to
lease that shiny new Rolls Royce
you always desired? Well, haven't the authorities been begging
us to borrow and spend like there's no tomorrow?
6. Dear Corporate America: maybe you remember the old Johnny Paycheck tune? Let me refresh your
memory:
take this job and shove it, I ain't working here no more.
If there's a
will, there's a way, and I'm stepping off the rat race merry-go-round, thank you very much. You can
find some other sucker to do your dirty work and BS work, all for the greater glory and wealth of
your New Nobility shareholders. I'm outta here. So I won't get rich, that dream died a long time
ago. What I'm interested in now is getting my life back.
The pandemic might not follow the Central Casting script of a V-shaped return to debt-serf,
BS-work wonderfulness.
Everyone who was sick and tired of their pre-pandemic life and the
endless exploitation has had time to think things over, and some consequential percentage of them will
welcome "good-bye to all that" and others will decide not to go back, even if that is still an option.
It's called opting out, and it has always characterized the end of imperial pretensions,
pillaging, propaganda and predation. Financial parasites, beware the second-order effects of your
overweening dominance and limitless greed.
President Donald Trump told Republican senators during a private lunch Tuesday that he is willing to let expanded unemployment
benefits expire at the end of July, a decision that would
massively slash the incomes of tens of millions
of people who have lost their jobs due to the Covid-19 crisis.
The Washington Post
reported Tuesday that the president "privately expressed opposition to extending a weekly $600 boost in unemployment insurance
for laid-off workers affected by the coronavirus pandemic, according to three officials familiar with his remarks."
House Democrats passed legislation last week that would extend the beefed-up unemployment benefits through January of 2021 as
experts and government officials -- including Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell --
warn the
U.S. unemployment rate could soon reach 25%. The unemployment insurance boost under the CARES Act is set to expire on July 31, even
as many
people have yet to receive their first check.
"With nearly 1 in 5 Americans out of work, Donald Trump's plan is to cut off the boost to unemployment benefits and shower his
wealthy buddies with more tax cuts," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the architects of the unemployment insurance expansion,
toldHuffPost . "This is the worst economic crisis in 100 years and Donald Trump is doubling down on Herbert Hoover's economic
playbook and pushing workers to risk their health for his political benefit."
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) -- who
declared earlier this month that Congress will only extend the boosted unemployment insurance "over our dead bodies" -- said
after the private lunch that Trump believes the benefits are "hurting the economic recovery." Graham was one of several Republican
senators who
opposed the initial expansion of unemployment benefits as too generous.
An
analysis
released last week by the Hamilton Project, an initiative of the Brookings Institution, found that expanded unemployment benefits
offset "roughly half of lost wages and salaries in April." Unemployment insurance has "been essential to families, and is vital for
keeping the economy from cratering further," the authors of the analysis noted.
Ernie Tedeschi, a former Treasury Department economist,
estimated that "come July 31, if the emergency
UI top-up isn't extended, unemployed workers will effectively get a pay cut of 50-75% overnight."
"It's increasingly looking like there won't be enough labor demand to hire them all back at that point," Tedeschi tweeted.
The latest Labor Department statistics showed that
more than 36 million
people in the U.S. have filed jobless claims since mid-March as mass layoffs continue in the absence of government action to
keep workers on company payrolls. Despite the grim numbers, the Post 's Jeff Stein reported Tuesday that the White House
is "
predicting a swift economic recovery " as it resists additional efforts to provide relief to frontline workers and the unemployed.
On top of rejecting an extension of enhanced unemployment insurance, Trump last month
publicly voiced opposition to another round of direct stimulus payments, instead advocating a cut to the tax that funds Social
Security and Medicare.
Demanding McDonald's prioritize public health and worker safety over profits, hundreds of
employees at the fast food chain
went on strike Wednesday, a day before the company was set to hold its annual shareholders'
meeting.
Instead of distributing dividends to its shareholders, the striking employees are calling
for the company to use its massive profits to pay for safety and financial protections for
workers, scores of whom have contracted Covid-19 in at least 16 states so far.
Employees and strike organizers at the fair wage advocacy group Fight for $15 are demanding
hazard pay during the pandemic of "$15X2," paid sick leave, sufficient protective gear for
workers, and company-wide policy of closing a restaurant for two weeks when an employee becomes
infected, with workers being fully paid.
The strike is taking place at stores in at least 20 cities. Fight for $15 and the SEIU,
which is also supporting the action, say it's the first nationwide coordinated effort targeting
the company since the coronavirus pandemic began in March.
"... In France, confinement has been generally well accepted as necessary, but that does not mean people are content with the government -- on the contrary. Every evening at eight, people go to their windows to cheer for health workers and others doing essential tasks, but the applause is not for President Macron. ..."
"... What we have witnessed is the failure of what used to be one of the very best public health services in the world. It has been degraded by years of cost-cutting. In recent years, the number of hospital beds per capita has declined steadily. Many hospitals have been shut down and those that remain are drastically understaffed. Public hospital facilities have been reduced to a state of perpetual saturation, so that when a new epidemic comes along, on top of all the other usual illnesses, there is simply not the capacity to deal with it all at once. ..."
"... The neoliberal globalization myth fostered the delusion that advanced Western societies could prosper from their superior brains, thanks to ideas and computer startups, while the dirty work of actually making things is left to low-wage countries. One result: a drastic shortage of face masks. The government let a factory that produced masks and other surgical equipment be sold off and shut down. Having outsourced its textile industry, France had no immediate way to produce the masks it needed. ..."
"... In late March, French media reported that a large stock of masks ordered and paid for by the southeastern region of France was virtually hijacked on the tarmac of a Chinese airport by Americans, who tripled the price and had the cargo flown to the United States. There are also reports of Polish and Czech airport authorities intercepting Chinese or Russian shipments of masks intended for hard-hit Italy and keeping them for their own use. ..."
"... The Covid–19 crisis makes it just that much clearer that the European Union is no more than a complex economic arrangement, with neither the sentiment nor the popular leaders that hold together a nation. For a generation, schools, media, politicians have instilled the belief that the "nation" is an obsolete entity. But in a crisis, people find that they are in France, or Germany, or Italy, or Belgium -- but not in "Europe." The European Union is structured to care about trade, investment, competition, debt, economic growth. Public health is merely an economic indicator. For decades, the European Commission has put irresistible pressure on nations to reduce the costs of their public health facilities in order to open competition for contracts to the private sector -- which is international by nature. ..."
"... Scapegoating China may seem the way to try to hold the declining Western world together, even as Europeans' long-standing admiration for America turns to dismay. ..."
"... The countries that have suffered most from the epidemic are among the most indebted of the EU member states, starting with Italy. The economic damage from the lockdown obliges them to borrow further. As their debt increases, so do interest rates charged by commercial banks. They turned to the EU for help, for instance by issuing eurobonds that would share the debt at lower interest rates. This has increased tension between debtor countries in the south and creditor countries in the north, which said nein . Countries in the eurozone cannot borrow from the European Central Bank as the U.S. Treasury borrows from the Fed. And their own national central banks take orders from the ECB, which controls the euro. ..."
"... The great irony is that "a common currency" was conceived by its sponsors as the key to European unity. On the contrary, the euro has a polarizing effect -- with Greece at the bottom and Germany at the top. And Italy sinking. But Italy is much bigger than Greece and won't go quietly. ..."
"... A major paradox is that the left and the Yellow Vests call for economic and social policies that are impossible under EU rules, and yet many on the left shy away from even thinking of leaving the EU. For over a generation, the French left has made an imaginary "social Europe" the center of its utopian ambitions. ..."
"... Russia is a living part of European history and culture. Its exclusion is totally unnatural and artificial. Brzezinski [the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration's national security adviser] spelled it out in The Great Chessboard : The U.S. maintains world hegemony by keeping the Eurasian landmass divided. ..."
"... But this policy can be seen to be inherited from the British. It was Churchill who proclaimed -- in fact welcomed -- the Iron Curtain that kept continental Europe divided. In retrospect, the Cold War was basically part of the divide-and-rule strategy, since it persists with greater intensity than ever after its ostensible cause -- the Communist threat -- is long gone. ..."
"... The whole Ukrainian operation of 2014 [the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv, February 2014] was lavishly financed and stimulated by the United States in order to create a new conflict with Russia. Joe Biden has been the Deep State's main front man in turning Ukraine into an American satellite, used as a battering ram to weaken Russia and destroy its natural trade and cultural relations with Western Europe. ..."
"... I think France is likelier than Germany to break with the U.S.–imposed Russophobia simply because, thanks to de Gaulle, France is not quite as thoroughly under U.S. occupation. Moreover, friendship with Russia is a traditional French balance against German domination -- which is currently being felt and resented. ..."
"... "Decades of indoctrination in the ideology of "Europe" has instilled the belief that the nation-state is a bad thing of the past. The result is that people raised in the European Union faith tend to regard any suggestion of return to national sovereignty as a fatal step toward fascism. This fear of contagion from "the right" is an obstacle to clear analysis which weakens the left and favors the right, which dares be patriotic." ..."
"... Since WWII the US has itself been occupied by tyrants, using Russophobia to demand power as fake defenders. ..."
"... " French philosophy .By constantly attacking, deconstructing, and denouncing every remnant of human "power" they could spot, the intellectual rebels left the power of "the markets" unimpeded, and did nothing to stand in the way of the expansion of U.S. military power all around the world " ..."
"... From her groundbreaking work on the NATO empire's sickening war on sovereign Serbia, the dead end of identity politics and trans bathroom debates, to her critique of unfettered immigration and open borders, and her dismissal of the absurd Russsiagate baloney, better than anyone else, Johnstone has kept her intellect carefully honed to the real genuine kitchen table bread and butter issues that truly matter. She recognized before most of the world's scholars the perils of rampant inequality and saw the writing on the wall as to where this grotesque economic system is taking us all: down a dystopian slope into penury and police-state heavy-handedness, with millions unable to come up with $500 for an emergency car repair or dental bill. ..."
"... The mask competition and fiasco shows the importance of a country simply making things in their own country, not on the other side of the world, it's not nationalism it's just a better way to logistically deliver reliable products to the citizens. ..."
"... Some hold that they never departed, but mutated tools including CFA zones and "intelligence" relations in furtherance of "changing" to remain qualitatively the same. Just as "The United States of America" is a system of coercive relations not synonymous with the political geographical area designated "The United States of America", the colonialism of former and present "colonial powers" continues to exist, since the "independence" of the colonised was always, and continues to be, framed within linear systems of coercive relations, facilitated by the complicity of "local elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest, and the acquiescence of "local others" for myriad reasons. ..."
"... After reading Circle in the Darkness, I have ordered and am now reading her books on Hillary Clinton (Queen of Chaos) and the Yugoslav wars (Fool's Crusade), which are very worthwhile and important. I would recommend that her many articles over the years, appearing in such publications such as In These Times, Counterpunch and Consortium News, be reprinted and published together as an anthology. Through Circle in the Darkness, we have Diana Johnstone's "Life", but it would be good also to have her "Letters". ..."
"... Mr. de Gaulle like other "leaders" of colonial powers did understand that the moment of overt coercive relations of colonialism had passed and that colonialism to remain qualitatively the same, required covert coercive relations facilitated by the complicity of local "elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest. ..."
In France, confinement has been generally well accepted as necessary, but that does not mean
people are content with the government -- on the contrary. Every evening at eight, people go to
their windows to cheer for health workers and others doing essential tasks, but the applause is
not for President Macron.
Macron and his government are criticized for hesitating too long to confine the population,
for vacillating about the need for masks and tests, or about when or how much to end the
confinement. Their confusion and indecision at least defend them from the wild accusation of
having staged the whole thing in order to lock up the population.
What we have witnessed is the failure of what used to be one of the very best public health
services in the world. It has been degraded by years of cost-cutting. In recent years, the
number of hospital beds per capita has declined steadily. Many hospitals have been shut down
and those that remain are drastically understaffed. Public hospital facilities have been
reduced to a state of perpetual saturation, so that when a new epidemic comes along, on top of
all the other usual illnesses, there is simply not the capacity to deal with it all at
once.
The neoliberal globalization myth fostered the delusion that advanced Western societies
could prosper from their superior brains, thanks to ideas and computer startups, while the
dirty work of actually making things is left to low-wage countries. One result: a drastic
shortage of face masks. The government let a factory that produced masks and other surgical
equipment be sold off and shut down. Having outsourced its textile industry, France had no
immediate way to produce the masks it needed.
Meanwhile, in early April, Vietnam donated hundreds of thousands of antimicrobial face masks
to European countries and is producing them by the million. Employing tests and selective
isolation, Vietnam has fought off the epidemic with only a few hundred cases and no deaths.
You must have thoughts as to the question of Western unity in response to
Covid–19.
In late March, French media reported that a large stock of masks ordered and paid for by the
southeastern region of France was virtually hijacked on the tarmac of a Chinese airport by
Americans, who tripled the price and had the cargo flown to the United States. There are also
reports of Polish and Czech airport authorities intercepting Chinese or Russian shipments of
masks intended for hard-hit Italy and keeping them for their own use.
The absence of European solidarity has been shockingly clear. Better-equipped Germany banned
exports of masks to Italy. In the depth of its crisis, Italy found that the German and Dutch
governments were mainly concerned with making sure Italy pays its debts. Meanwhile, a team of
Chinese experts arrived in Rome to help Italy with its Covid–19 crisis, displaying a
banner reading "We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same
garden." The European institutions lack such humanistic poetry. Their founding value is not
solidarity but the neoliberal principle of "free unimpeded competition."
How do you think this reflects on the European Union?
The Covid–19 crisis makes it just that much clearer that the European Union is no more
than a complex economic arrangement, with neither the sentiment nor the popular leaders that
hold together a nation. For a generation, schools, media, politicians have instilled the belief
that the "nation" is an obsolete entity. But in a crisis, people find that they are in France,
or Germany, or Italy, or Belgium -- but not in "Europe." The European Union is structured to
care about trade, investment, competition, debt, economic growth. Public health is merely an
economic indicator. For decades, the European Commission has put irresistible pressure on
nations to reduce the costs of their public health facilities in order to open competition for
contracts to the private sector -- which is international by nature.
Globalization has hastened the spread of the pandemic, but it has not strengthened
internationalist solidarity. Initial gratitude for Chinese aid is being brutally opposed by
European Atlanticists. In early May, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the Springer publishing
giant, bluntly called on Germany to ally with the U.S. -- against China. Scapegoating China may
seem the way to try to hold the declining Western world together, even as Europeans'
long-standing admiration for America turns to dismay.
Meanwhile, relations between EU member states have never been worse. In Italy and to a
greater extent in France, the coronavirus crisis has enforced growing disillusion with the
European Union and an ill-defined desire to restore national sovereignty.
Corollary question: What are the prospects that Europe will produce leaders capable of
seizing that right moment, that assertion of independence? What do you reckon such leaders
would be like?
The EU is likely to be a central issue in the near future, but this issue can be exploited
in very different ways, depending on which leaders get hold of it. The coronavirus crisis has
intensified the centrifugal forces already undermining the European Union. The countries that
have suffered most from the epidemic are among the most indebted of the EU member states,
starting with Italy. The economic damage from the lockdown obliges them to borrow further. As
their debt increases, so do interest rates charged by commercial banks. They turned to the EU
for help, for instance by issuing eurobonds that would share the debt at lower interest rates.
This has increased tension between debtor countries in the south and creditor countries in the
north, which said nein . Countries in the eurozone cannot borrow from the European
Central Bank as the U.S. Treasury borrows from the Fed. And their own national central banks
take orders from the ECB, which controls the euro.
What does the crisis mean for the euro? I confess I've lost faith in this project, given
how disadvantaged it leaves the nations on the Continent's southern rim.
The great irony is that "a common currency" was conceived by its sponsors as the key to
European unity. On the contrary, the euro has a polarizing effect -- with Greece at the bottom
and Germany at the top. And Italy sinking. But Italy is much bigger than Greece and won't go
quietly.
The German constitutional court in Karlsruhe recently issued a long judgment making it clear
who is boss. It recalled and insisted that Germany agreed to the euro only on the grounds that
the main mission of the European Central Bank was to fight inflation, and that it could not
directly finance member states. If these rules were not followed, the Bundesbank, the German
central bank, would be obliged to pull out of the ECB. And since the Bundesbank is the ECB's
main creditor, that is that. There can be no generous financial help to troubled governments
within the eurozone. Period.
Is there a possibility of disintegration here?
The idea of leaving the EU is most developed in France. The Union Populaire
Républicaine, founded in 2007 by former senior functionary François Asselineau,
calls for France to leave the euro, the European Union, and NATO.
The party has been a didactic success, spreading its ideas and attracting around 20,000
active militants without scoring any electoral success. A main argument for leaving the EU is
to escape from the constraints of EU competition rules in order to protect its vital industry,
agriculture, and above all its public services.
A major paradox is that the left and the Yellow Vests call for economic and social policies
that are impossible under EU rules, and yet many on the left shy away from even thinking of
leaving the EU. For over a generation, the French left has made an imaginary "social Europe"
the center of its utopian ambitions.
" Europe" as an idea or an ideal, you mean.
Decades of indoctrination in the ideology of "Europe" has instilled the belief that the
nation-state is a bad thing of the past. The result is that people raised in the European Union
faith tend to regard any suggestion of return to national sovereignty as a fatal step toward
fascism. This fear of contagion from "the right" is an obstacle to clear analysis which weakens
the left and favors the right, which dares be patriotic.
Two and a half months of coronavirus crisis have brought to light a factor that makes any
predictions about future leaders even more problematic. That factor is a widespread distrust
and rejection of all established authority. This makes rational political programs extremely
difficult, because rejection of one authority implies acceptance of another. For instance, the
way to liberate public services and pharmaceuticals from the distortions of the profit motive
is nationalization. If you distrust the power of one as much as the other, there is nowhere to
go.
Such radical distrust can be explained by two main factors -- the inevitable feeling of
helplessness in our technologically advanced world, combined with the deliberate and even
transparent lies on the part of mainstream politicians and media. But it sets the stage for the
emergence of manipulated saviors or opportunistic charlatans every bit as deceptive as the
leaders we already have, or even more so. I hope these irrational tendencies are less
pronounced in France than in some other countries.
I'm eager to talk about Russia. There are signs that relations with Russia are another
source of European dissatisfaction as "junior partners" within the U.S.–led Atlantic
alliance. Macron is outspoken on this point, "junior partners" being his phrase. The Germans --
business people, some senior officials in government -- are quite plainly restive.
Russia is a living part of European history and culture. Its exclusion is totally unnatural
and artificial. Brzezinski [the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration's national
security adviser] spelled it out in The Great Chessboard : The U.S. maintains world
hegemony by keeping the Eurasian landmass divided.
But this policy can be seen to be inherited
from the British. It was Churchill who proclaimed -- in fact welcomed -- the Iron Curtain that
kept continental Europe divided. In retrospect, the Cold War was basically part of the
divide-and-rule strategy, since it persists with greater intensity than ever after its
ostensible cause -- the Communist threat -- is long gone.
I hadn't put our current circumstance in this context. US-backed, violent coup in Ukraine, 2014.
The whole Ukrainian operation of 2014 [the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv, February
2014] was lavishly financed and stimulated by the United States in order to create a new
conflict with Russia. Joe Biden has been the Deep State's main front man in turning Ukraine
into an American satellite, used as a battering ram to weaken Russia and destroy its natural
trade and cultural relations with Western Europe.
U.S. sanctions are particularly contrary to German business interests, and NATO's aggressive
gestures put Germany on the front lines of an eventual war.
But Germany has been an occupied country -- militarily and politically -- for 75 years, and
I suspect that many German political leaders (usually vetted by Washington) have learned to fit
their projects into U.S. policies. I think that under the cover of Atlantic loyalty, there are
some frustrated imperialists lurking in the German establishment, who think they can use
Washington's Russophobia as an instrument to make a comeback as a world military power.
But I also think that the political debate in Germany is overwhelmingly hypocritical, with
concrete aims veiled by fake issues such as human rights and, of course, devotion to
Israel.
We should remember that the U.S. does not merely use its allies -- its allies, or rather
their leaders, figure they are using the U.S. for some purposes of their own.
What about what the French have been saying since the G–7 session in Biarritz two
years ago, that Europe should forge its own relations with Russia according to Europe's
interests, not America's?
At G7 Summit in Biarritz, France, Aug. 26, 2019. (White House)
I think France is likelier than Germany to break with the U.S.–imposed Russophobia
simply because, thanks to de Gaulle, France is not quite as thoroughly under U.S. occupation.
Moreover, friendship with Russia is a traditional French balance against German domination --
which is currently being felt and resented.
Stepping back for a broader look, do you think Europe's position on the western flank of
the Eurasian landmass will inevitably shape its position with regard not only to Russia but
also China? To put this another way, is Europe destined to become an independent pole of power
in the course of this century, standing between West and East?
At present, what we have standing between West and East is not Europe but Russia, and what
matters is which way Russia leans. Including Russia, Europe might become an independent pole of
power. The U.S. is currently doing everything to prevent this. But there is a school of
strategic thought in Washington which considers this a mistake, because it pushes Russia into
the arms of China. This school is in the ascendant with the campaign to denounce China as
responsible for the pandemic. As mentioned, the Atlanticists in Europe are leaping into the
anti–China propaganda battle. But they are not displaying any particular affection for
Russia, which shows no sign of sacrificing its partnership with China for the unreliable
Europeans.
If Russia were allowed to become a friendly bridge between China and Europe, the U.S. would
be obliged to abandon its pretensions of world hegemony. But we are far from that peaceful
prospect.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International
Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is
"Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via
his Patreon site .
Josep , May 19, 2020 at 02:04
It recalled and insisted that Germany agreed to the euro only on the grounds that the
main mission of the European Central Bank was to fight inflation, and that it could not
directly finance member states.
I once read a comment elsewhere saying that, back in 1989, both Britain (under Margaret
Thatcher) and the US objected to German reunification. Since they could not stop the
reunification, they insisted that Germany accept the incoming euro. A heap of German
university professors jumped up and protested, knowing fully well what the game was: namely
the creation of a banker's empire in Europe controlled by private bankers.
Thorben Sunkimat , May 20, 2020 at 13:45
France and Britain rejected the german reunification. The americans were supportive, even
though they had their demands. Mainly privatisation of german public utilities. After
agreeing to those demands the americans persuaded the british and pressured the french who
agreed to german reunification after germany agreed to the euro.
So why did france want the euro?
The German central bank crashed the European economy after reunification with high interest
rates. This was because of above average growth rates mainly in Eastern Germany. Main
function of the Bundesbank is to keep inflation low, which is more important to them than
anything else. Since Germany's D Mark was the leading currency in Europe the rest of Europe
had to heighten their interest rates too, witch lead to great economic problems within
Europe. Including France.
OlyaPola , May 21, 2020 at 05:30
"namely the creation of a banker's empire in Europe controlled by private bankers."
Resort to binaries (controlled/not controlled) is a practice of self-imposed
blindness. In any interactive system no absolutes exist only analogues of varying assays since
"control" is limited and variable. In respect of what became the German Empire this relationship predated and facilitated the
German Empire through financing the war with Denmark in 1864 courtesy of the arrangements
between Mr. von Bismark and Mr. Bleichroder. The assay of "control of bankers" has varied/increased subsequently but never attained the
absolute.
It is true that finance capital perceived and continues to perceive the European Union as
an opportunity to increase their assay of "control" – the Austrian banks in conjunction
with German bank assigning a level of priority to resurrecting spheres of influence existing
prior to 1918 and until 1945.
One of the joint projects at a level of planning in the early 1990's was development of
the Danube and its hinterland from Regensburg to Cerna Voda/Constanta in Romania but this was
delayed in the hope of curtailment by some when NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 (Serbia not being
the only target – so much for honesty-amongst-theives.)
This project was resurrected in a limited form primarily downstream from Vidin/Calafat
from 2015 onwards given that some states of the former Yugoslavia were not members of the
European Union and some were within spheres of influence of "The United States of
America".
As to France, "Vichy" and Europa also facilitated the resurrection of finance capital and
increase in its assay of control after the 1930's, some of the practices of the 1940's still
being subject to dispute in France.
mkb29 , May 18, 2020 at 16:33
I've always admired Diana Johnstone's clear headed analyses of world/European/U.S./
China/Israel-Palestine/Russia/ interactions and the motivation of its "players". She has
given some credence to what as been known as French rationalism and enlightenment. (Albeit as
an American expat) Think Descartes, Diderot, Sartre , and She loves France in her own
rationalist-humanist way.
Linda J , May 18, 2020 at 13:21
I have admired Ms. Johnstone's work for quite awhile. This enlightening interview spurs me
to get a copy of the book and to contribute to Consortium News.
Others may be interested in the two-part video discovered yesterday featuring Douglas
Valentine's analysis of the CIA's corporate backers and their global choke-hold on
governments and their influencers in every region of the world.
Part 1
see:youtu(dot)be/cP15Ehx1yvI
Part 2
see:youtu(dot)be/IYvvEn_N1sE
worldblee , May 18, 2020 at 12:26
Not many have the long distance perspective on the world, let alone Europe, that Diana
Johnstone has. Great interview!
Drew Hunkins , May 18, 2020 at 11:03
"Decades of indoctrination in the ideology of "Europe" has instilled the belief that the
nation-state is a bad thing of the past. The result is that people raised in the European
Union faith tend to regard any suggestion of return to national sovereignty as a fatal step
toward fascism. This fear of contagion from "the right" is an obstacle to clear analysis
which weakens the left and favors the right, which dares be patriotic."
Bingo! A marvelous point indeed! Quick little example -- Bernard Sanders should have worn an American flag pin on his suit
during the 2020 Dem primary campaign.
chris , May 18, 2020 at 04:46
A very good analysis. As an American who has relocated to Spain several years ago, I am
always disappointed that discussions of European politics always assume that Europe ends at
the Pyrenees. Admittedly, Spanish politics is very complicated and confusing. Forty years of
an unreconstructed dictatorship have left their mark, but the country´s socialist,
communist and anarchic currents never went away. I like to say that the country is very
conservative, but at least the population is aware of what is going on.
Perhaps what Ms.
Johnston says about the French being just worn out, with no stomach for more violent conflict
also applies to the Spanish since their great ideological struggle is more recent. The
American influence during the Transition (which changed little – as the expression
goes: The same dog but with a different collar) was very strong, and remains so. Even so,
there is popular support for foreign and domestic policies independent of American and
neoliberal control, but by and large the political and economic powers are not on board. I do
not think Spain is willing to make a break alone, but would align itself with an European
shift away from American control.
As Ms. Johnston says, Europe currently lacks leaders
willing to take the plunge, but we will see what the coming year brings.
Sam F , May 17, 2020 at 17:45
Thank you Diana, these are valuable insights. Since WWII the US has itself been occupied by tyrants, using Russophobia to demand power
as fake defenders.
1. Waving the flag and praising the lord on mass media, claiming concern with human rights
and "Israel"; while
2. Subverting the Constitution with large scale bribery, surveillance, and genocides, all
business as usual nowadays.
In the US, the form of government has become bribery and marketing lies; it truly knows no
other way.
It may be better that Russia and China keep their distance from the US and maybe even the
EU:
1. The US and EU would have to produce what they consume, eventually empowering workers;
2. Neither the US nor EU are a political or economic model for anyone, and should be
ignored;
3. Neither the US nor EU produces much that Russia and China cannot, by investing more in
cars and soybeans.
It will be best for the EU if it also rejects the US and its "neolib" economic and
political tyranny mechanisms:
1. Alliance with Russia and China will cause substantial gains in stability and economic
strength;
2. Forcing the US to abandon its "pretensions of world hegemony" will soon yield more
peaceful prospects; and
3. Isolating the US will force it to improve its utterly corrupt government and society,
maybe 40 to 60 years hence.
Drew Hunkins , May 17, 2020 at 15:40
" French philosophy .By constantly attacking, deconstructing, and denouncing every remnant
of human "power" they could spot, the intellectual rebels left the power of "the markets"
unimpeded, and did nothing to stand in the way of the expansion of U.S. military power all
around the world "
Brilliant. Exactly right. This was the progenitor to our contemporary I.D. politics which seems to be solely
obsessed with vocabulary, semantics and non-economic cultural issues while rarely having a
critique of corporate capitalism, militarism, massive inequality and Zionism. And it almost
never advocates for robust economic populist proposals like Med4All, U.B.I., debt jubilee,
and the fight for $15.
Drew Hunkins , May 17, 2020 at 15:10
The book is phenomenal. I posted a customer review over on Amazon for this stupendous
work. Below is a copy of my review:
(5 stars) One of the most important intellects pens her magisterial lasting legacy
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2020
Johnstone's been an idol of mine ever since I started reading her in the 1990s. She's
clearly proved her worthiness over the decades by bucking the mainstream trend of apologetics
for corporate capitalism, neoliberalism, globalism and imperialistic militarism her entire
career and this astonishing memoir details it all in what will likely be the finest book of
2020 and perhaps the entire decade.
Her writing style is beyond superb, her grasp of the overarching politico-socio-economic
issues that have rocked the world over the past 60 years is as astute and spot-on as you will
find from any global thinker. She's right up there with Michael Parenti, James Petras, John
Pilger and Noam Chomsky as seminal figures who have documented and brought light to tens of
thousands (millions?) of people across the globe via their writings, interviews and speaking
engagements.
Johnstone has never been one to shy away from controversial topics and issues. Why?
Simple, she has the facts and truth on her side, she always has. Circle in the Darkness
proves all this and more, she marshals the documentation and lays it out as an exquisite gift
for struggling working people around the world.
From her groundbreaking work on the NATO
empire's sickening war on sovereign Serbia, the dead end of identity politics and trans
bathroom debates, to her critique of unfettered immigration and open borders, and her
dismissal of the absurd Russsiagate baloney, better than anyone else, Johnstone has kept her
intellect carefully honed to the real genuine kitchen table bread and butter issues that
truly matter. She recognized before most of the world's scholars the perils of rampant
inequality and saw the writing on the wall as to where this grotesque economic system is
taking us all: down a dystopian slope into penury and police-state heavy-handedness, with
millions unable to come up with $500 for an emergency car repair or dental bill.
Whenever she comes out with a new article or essay I immediately drop everything and
devour it, often reading it twice to let her wisdom really soak in. So too Circle of Darkness
is an extremely well written beautiful work that will scream out to be re-read every few
years by those with a hunger to know exactly what was going on since the Korean War era
through today regarding liberal thought, neocon and neoliberal dominance with its capitalist
global hegemony and the take over of Western governments by the parasitic financial
elite.
There will never be another Diana Johnstone. Circle in the Darkness will stand as her
lasting legacy to all of us.
Bob Van Noy , May 17, 2020 at 14:43
"As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding
it" ~Albert Einstein
Many Thanks CN, Patrick Lawrence, and Joe Lauria. Once again I must commend CN for picking
just the appropriate response to our contemporary dilemma.
The quote above leads Diana Johnstone's new book and succinctly describes both the
universe and our contemporary experience with our digital age. President Kennedy and Charles
de Gaulle of France would agree that colonialism was past and that a new world (geopolitical)
approach would become necessary, but that philosophy would put them against some great local
and world powers. Each of them necessarily had different approaches as to how this might be
accomplished. They were never allowed to present their specific proposals on a world stage.
Let's hope a wiser population will once again "see" this possibility and find a way to
resolve it
Aaron , May 17, 2020 at 14:18
Well over the span of all of those decades, the consistent, inexorable theme seems to be a
trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, a small number of individuals,
not really states, gaining wealth and power, so everybody else fights over the crumbs,
blaming this or that party, alliance, event or whatever, but behind it all there are two
flower gardens, indeed the rich are all flowers of their golden garden, and the poor are all
flowers of their garden.
It's like the Europeans and the 99 percent in America have all
fallen for the myth of the American dream, that if we are just allowed more free, unfettered
economic opportunity, it's just up to us to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and become a
billionaire.
The mask competition and fiasco shows the importance of a country simply making
things in their own country, not on the other side of the world, it's not nationalism it's
just a better way to logistically deliver reliable products to the citizens.
AnneR , May 17, 2020 at 13:42
Regarding French colonialism – as I recall the French were especially brutal in
their forced withdrawal from Algeria, both toward Algerians in their homeland and to
Algerians within France itself.
And the French were hardly willing, non-violent colonialists when being fought by the
Vietnamese who wanted to be free of them (quite rightly so).
As for the French in Sub-Saharan Africa – they have yet to truly give up on their
presumed right to have troops within these countries. They did not depart any of their
colonies happily, willingly – like every other colonial power, including the UK.
And, as for WWII – she seems, in her reminiscences, to have mislaid Vichy France,
the Velodrome roundups of French Jews, and so on ..
Ms Johnstone clearly has been looking backwards with rose-tinted specs on when it comes to
France.
Randal Marlin , May 18, 2020 at 13:00
There may be some truth to AnneR's claim that Ms Johnstone has been looking with
rose-tinted specs when it comes to France, but it is highly misleading for her to talk about
"the French" regarding Algeria. I spent 1963-64 in Aix-en-Provence teaching at the Institute
for American Universities and talked with some of the "pieds-noirs," (French born in
Algeria).
After French President Charles de Gaulle decided to relinquish French control over
Algeria, having previously reassured the colonial population that "Je vous ai compris" ("I
have understood you"), there followed death threats to many French colonizers who had to flee
Algeria immediately within 24 hours or get their throats slit – "La valise ou le
cercueil" (the suitcase or the coffin).
In the fall of 1961, I saw Parisian police stations
with machine-gun armed men behind concrete barriers, as an invasion by the colonial French
paratroopers against mainland France was expected. The "Organisation Armée
Secrète," OAS, (Secret Armed Organization) of the colonial powers, threatened at the
time to invade Paris.
As an aside, giving a sense of the anger and passion involved, when the
death of John F.Kennedy in November 1963 was announced in the historic, right-wing
café in Aix, Les Deux Garçons, a huge cheer went up when the media announcer
proclaimed "Le Président est assassinée. Only, that was because they thought de
Gaulle was the president in question. A huge disappointment when they heard it was President
Kennedy. To get a sense of the whole situation regarding France and Algeria I recommend
Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace."
OlyaPola , May 19, 2020 at 11:23
"They did not depart any of their colonies happily"
Some hold that they never departed, but mutated tools including CFA zones and
"intelligence" relations in furtherance of "changing" to remain qualitatively the same. Just as "The United States of America" is a system of coercive relations not synonymous
with the political geographical area designated "The United States of America", the
colonialism of former and present "colonial powers" continues to exist, since the
"independence" of the colonised was always, and continues to be, framed within linear systems
of coercive relations, facilitated by the complicity of "local elites" on the basis of
perceived self-interest, and the acquiescence of "local others" for myriad reasons.
Despite the "best" efforts of the opponents and partly in consequence of the opponents'
complicity, the PRC and the Russian Federation like "The United States of America" are not
synonymous with the political geographical areas designated as "The People's Republic of
China and The Russian Federation", are in lateral process of transcending linear systems of
coercive relations and hence pose existential threats to "The United States of America".
The opponents are not complete fools but the drowning tend to act precipitously including
flailing out whilst drowning; encouraging some to dispense with rose- tinted glasses, despite
such accessories being quite fashionable and fetching.
OlyaPola , May 20, 2020 at 04:32
" .. their colonies "
Perception of and practice of social relations are not wholly synonymous. A construct whose founding myths included liberty, egality and fraternity – property
being discarded at the last moment since it was judged too provocative –
experienced/experiences ideological/perceptual oxymorons in regard to its colonial relations,
which were addressed in part by rendering their "colonies" department of France thereby
facilitating increased perceptual dissonance.
Like many, Randal Marlin draws attention below to the perceptions and practices of the
pied-noir, but omits to address the perceptions and practices of the harkis whom were also
immersed in the proselytised notion of departmental France, and to some degree continue to
be.
This understanding continues to inform the practices and problems of the French state.
Lolita , May 17, 2020 at 12:05
The analysis is very much inspired from "Comprendre l'Empire" by Alain Soral.
Dave , May 17, 2020 at 11:27
Do not fail to read this interview in its entirety. Ms Johnstone analyzes and describes
many issues of national and global importance from the perspective of an USA expat who has
spent most of her career in the pursuit of what may be termed disinterested journalism.
Whether one agrees or disagrees in whole or in part the perspectives she presents,
particularly those which pertain to the demise (hopefully) of the American Empire are worthy
of perusal.
Remember that this is not a polemic; it's a memoir of a lifetime devoted to
reporting and analyzing and discussion of most of the significant issues confronting global
and national politics and their social ramifications. And a big thanks to Patrick Lawrence
and Consortium News for posting the interview.
PEG , May 17, 2020 at 09:11
Diana Johnstone is one of the most intelligent, clear-minded and honest observers of
international politics today, and her book "Circle in the Darkness" – which expands on
the topics and insights touched on in this interview – is certainly among the best and
most compelling books I have ever read, putting the events of the last 75 years into
objective context and focus (normally something which only historians can do, if at all,
generations after the fact).
After reading Circle in the Darkness, I have ordered and am now reading her books on
Hillary Clinton (Queen of Chaos) and the Yugoslav wars (Fool's Crusade), which are very
worthwhile and important. I would recommend that her many articles over the years, appearing
in such publications such as In These Times, Counterpunch and Consortium News, be reprinted
and published together as an anthology. Through Circle in the Darkness, we have Diana
Johnstone's "Life", but it would be good also to have her "Letters".
Interesting comparison between the aspirations of De Gaulle and Putin.
"Having a sense of history, de Gaulle saw that colonialism had been a moment in history
that was past. His policy was to foster friendly relations on equal terms with all parts of
the world, regardless of ideological differences. I think that Putin's concept of a
multipolar world is similar. It is clearly a concept that horrifies the exceptionalists."
Agree with Johnstone.
OlyaPola , May 19, 2020 at 11:55
"Having a sense of history, de Gaulle saw that colonialism had been a moment in history
that was past. "
Mr. de Gaulle like other "leaders" of colonial powers did understand that the moment of
overt coercive relations of colonialism had passed and that colonialism to remain
qualitatively the same, required covert coercive relations facilitated by the complicity of
local "elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest.
The exceptions to such strategies lay within constructs of settler colonialism which were
addressed primarily through warfare – "The United States of America",
Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia, Indonesia, Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Angola refer –
to facilitate such future strategies.
"I think that Putin's concept of a multipolar world is similar."
As outlined elsewhere the concept of a multi-polar world is not synonymous with the
concept of colonialism except for the colonialists who consistently seek to encourage such
conflation through myths of we-are-all-in-this-togetherness.
"... After claiming that "economists have argued for centuries that trade is good for the economy as a whole", Goldberg has also noted that "trade generates winners and losers", with many losing out, and urges acknowledging "the evidence rather than trying to discredit it, as some do." Following Samuelson and others, she recommends compensating those negatively effected by trade liberalization, claiming "sufficient gains generated by open trade that the winners can compensate the losers and still be better off" without indicating how this is to be done fairly. ..."
"... "Free" trade means removing regulations and tariffs. As Michael Hudson reminds us, in Classical economics, it used to mean free of the unproductive burdens of the rentiers. ..."
"... There's a growing realisation on our continent that outsiders aren't going to lead us to the promised land. ..."
"... This redistribution never happens, the rich get richer in a role reversal of "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today". Any attempt to have the rich share the hamburger is greeted with a "not now!" and a assurance that if the rich stop continuously getting richer at this particular point in time then everything will collapse. ..."
"... The best understanding of what is going on in Africa I got from Jared Diamond – book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". And for background – "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Global climate heating is going to destroy Africa, already is. The usual story, no water, no forests, too much heat and humidity. It's a terrible reckoning. And largely not of their making. ..."
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, who was Assistant Director-General for
Economic and Social Development, Food and Agriculture Organization, and who received the Wassily Leontief Prize
for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2007. Originally published by
Inter Press Service
Economic growth is supposed to be the tide that lifts all boats.
According to the conventional wisdom until recently, growth in China, India and East Asian countries took off
thanks to opening up to international trade and investment.
Such growth is said to have greatly reduced poverty despite growing inequality in both sub-continental
economies and many other countries. Other developing countries have been urged to do the same, i.e., liberalize
trade and attract foreign investments.
Doha Round 'Dead in Water'
However, multilateral trade negotiations under World Trade Organization (WTO) auspices have gone nowhere
since the late 1990s, even with the so-called Doha Development Round begun in 2001 as developing countries
rallied to support the US after 9/11.
After the North continued to push their interests despite their ostensible commitment to a developmental
outcome, the Obama administration was never interested in completing the Round, and undermined the WTO's
functioning, e.g., its dispute settlement arrangements, even before Trump was elected.
To be sure, the
Doha
Round proposals were hardly 'developmental'
by any standards, with most developing countries barely
benefitting, if not actually worse off following the measures envisaged, even according to World Bank and other
studies.
GVC miracle?
According to the World Bank's annual flagship
World Development Report (WDR) 2020 on Trading for
Development in the Age of Global Value Chains
, GVCs have been mainly responsible for the growth of
international trade for two decades from the 1990s.
GVCs now account for almost half of all cross-border commerce due to 'multiple counting', as products cross
more borders than ever. Firms' creative book-keeping may also overstate actual value added in some tax
jurisdictions to minimize overall tax liability.
WDR 2020
claims that GVCs have thus accelerated economic development and even convergence between
North and South as fast-growing poor countries have grown more rapidly, closing the economic gap with rich
countries.
WDR 2020
presumes trends that no longer exist. Trade expansion has been sluggish for more than a
decade, at least since the 2008 global financial crisis when the G20 of the world's largest economies and
others adopted protective measures in response.
GVC growth has slowed since, as economies of the North insisted on trade liberalization for the South, while
abandoning their own earlier commitments as the varied consequences of economic globalization fostered
reactionary jingoist populist backlashes.
Nonetheless,
WDR 2020
urges developing countries to bank on GVCs for growth and better jobs.
Success of this strategy depends crucially on developed countries encouraging 'offshoring', a policy hardly
evident for well over a decade!
As the last
World
Bank chief economist
, albeit for barely 15 months, Yale Professor Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg recently
agreed
,
"the world is retreating from globalization". "Protectionism is on the rise -- industrialized countries are
less open to imports from developing countries. In addition, there is by now a lot of competition".
The Covid-19 crisis has further encouraged 'on-shoring' and 'chain shortening', especially for food, medical
products and energy. Although the Japanese and other governments have announced such policies, ostensibly for
'national security' and other such reasons, Goldberg has nonetheless
reiterated
the case for GVCs in Covid-19's wake
.
Trade Does Not Lift All Boats
After claiming that "economists have argued for centuries that trade is good for the economy as a whole",
Goldberg has also
noted
that
"trade generates winners and losers", with many losing out, and urges acknowledging "the evidence rather than
trying to discredit it, as some do."
Following Samuelson and others, she recommends compensating those negatively effected by trade
liberalization, claiming "sufficient gains generated by open trade that the winners can compensate the losers
and still be better off" without indicating how this is to be done fairly.
Compensation and redistribution require transfers which are typically difficult to negotiate and deliver at
low cost. Tellingly, like others, she makes no mention of international transfers, especially for fairly
redistributing the unequal gains from trade among trading partners.
Interestingly, she also observes, "There are plenty of examples, especially in African countries, where
wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few even when the tide rises, only very few boats rise. Growth
doesn't trickle down and doesn't improve the lot of the poor."
Unlikely Pan-Africanist
After decades of World Bank promotion of the 'East Asian miracle' for emulation by other developing
countries, especially in Africa, Greek-born American Goldberg insists that what worked for growth and poverty
reduction in China will not work in Africa today.
Echoing long time Bank critics, she argues, "If trade with rich countries is no longer the engine of growth,
it will be more important than ever to rely on domestic resources to generate growth that does trickle down and
translates to poverty reduction."
Instead, as if supporting some contemporary pan-Africanists, she argues, "Africa needs to rely on itself
more than ever. The idea that export-led industrialization as it happened in China or East Asia is going to
lead growth in Africa becomes less and less plausible".
She argues that "the African market is a very large market with incredible potential. It has not been
developed yet. So, regional integration might be one path forward. Rather than opting for global integration,
which may be very hard to achieve these days when countries are retreating from multilateralism, it might be
more feasible to push for regional trade agreements and create bigger regional markets for countries' goods and
services".
Acknowledging "We are still a very long way from there because most countries are averse to this idea -- they
see their neighbors as competitors rather than countries they can cooperate with", not seeming to recognize the
historical role of the Bank and mainstream trade economists in promoting the 'free trade illusion' and
discrediting pan-Africanism.
hear him, and hear him
Econospeak at its best. Filled with cliches and "on the one hand(s)." This articles perfectly describes
why social distancing can ultimately be a boon to mankind. This fellow Sundaram can self isolate at home
and still get a paycheck. He can begin puttering about in his garden and start growing his own food.
Eventually, he will find this activity to be far more rewarding than cogitating on the various cost and
benefits of the international value chains, and will be spending more and more time in his garden. UBI
will kick in. He will decide to disengage from "globalization" and being a public nuisance and adopt this
new, socially beneficial lifestyle permanently. By doing "piecework at home" he will add to real gross
domestic product, and he, the economy and the rest of the planet will be immeasurably improved.
Good analysis. But part of my confusion with this article started with the headline: "Covid-19 Straw
Breaks Free Trade Camel's Back"
What free trade? Nothing in the article discusses free trade and I doubt that there has ever been free
trade for a very long time. Is this more Econospeak?
I do agree with the author that the way trading is done now, however he defines it, has not risen all
boats.
Regarding the existence of "Free Trade"
I watched this in real time when Nafta passed(i was agin it, and voted for Perot accordingly, both times)
I knew a middle class mexican american guy father of a friend of mine. His business, pre-Nafta, was going
to his extended familia's ranch/farm(100 acres) in Tamaulipas, and returning with fruits and veggies and
vanilla and a whole bunch of "junk" like that metal yard art and terra cotta birdbaths and such.
had a dually pickup and a 20 foot trailer.
Post Nafta, this was suddenly illegal he wasn't part of the Club, and went to work as a cook along side
me and his son.
since that time, I've heard essentially the same story from numerous mexican american folks who used to
do similar stuff.
nafta killed that small time cross border trade and the only "Freedom" involved was for the
Maquiladora-owners, US Welfare Corn Corporations and the Cartels.
anecdata, of course, but still
if "they" were really for "free trade", they'd allow me to legally sell a frelling egg or tomato or grow
some weed, for that matter(high demand, low quality unstable supply).
I voted for ross perot too. I even went across the street and talked to my neighbors – the last
time I did that – as they always say, it's like staring into the eyes of a chicken – oh so "liberal"
at the time – To them Ross Perot was just an insufferable hick. But I loved the guy. And he was right.
I think he lived in the same neighborhood as little George in Dallas – but Ross didn't want us to
spread our resources too thin whereas little George saw MidEast oil as our best security. So now that
that has blown up, it's regionalism v. globalism. It's a brake on turbo trade. It's not a fix. We
don't want to be lulled into thinking we've achieved something like a trade balance and an
environmental balance – that will take a century – and only if we stop fibbing to ourselves.
I worked for Ross, for a while post GM (1987). I liked him very much, although we fought quite a
bit. Mostly, I agreed with his public policy outlook, when I didn't and it came up I told him. He
didn't surround himself with the wights that the Orange Menace does. Striking -he was very loyal to
people in his orbit. NAFTA had protections for labor, unions, & the environment they just never
were enforced. There must be some 'law' that says anything neoliberal turns into a racket over
time, so it was with NAFTA.
The NAFTA protections for workers were just hand waves. Lance Compa, who is at Cornell, ran
the US office trying to get the labor provisions (weak as they were) enforced. As I recall, they
were never able to bring even a single case forward.
"Free" trade means removing regulations and tariffs. As Michael Hudson reminds us, in Classical
economics, it used to mean free of the unproductive burdens of the rentiers.
As for NAFTA, one might figure shipping a bunch of subsidized Iowa corn down to Mexico would impair
the income of Mexican farmers.. The NAFTA treaty compensates the big ones.
Corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world. The little (uncompensated by
NAFTA) Mexican farmers were only keeping the disease resistance and diversity of the corn genome alive
with the varieties they grew .But they weren't making any money for Monsanto So they were hung out to
dry and migration to "Gringolandia" increased dramatically not all of it "legal."
In the wake of NAFTA, not only did Mexico experience capital flight (remember the Clinton
administration's $20 billion bank bailout?), Mexico's real median income declined 34%. (Source: Ravi
Batra's
Greenspan's Fraud
).
One has to go back to the Great Depression to find that kind of decline in the U.S. Of course that
provoked no great migration Oh wait! The Okies!
Imagine the Okies exiting the dust bowl to go to California where they would be caged, separated
from their families, and ultimately shipped back to Oklahoma, where they would either be very
miserable or even starve. That's what we've been doing to the Mexican refugees U.S. actions
created never mind the fact that U.S. military and political attacks on its southern neighbors have
been going on for literally centuries. (Between 1798 and 1994, the U.S. is responsible for 41 changes
of government south of its borders).
Incidentally, the Harvard-educated neoliberal, Carlos Salinas Gotari, the Mexican president who
signed NAFTA, was so despised he had to spend at least the initial years of his retirement in Ireland.
It's not for nothing that the guys who stand up to the Yanquis (Castro!) are heroes in the South.
It's amazing how economists can focus solely on economic activity, and the thought that something like
climate change or politics might make their pronouncements useless isn't even rebutted.
Has that one of the Covid-19 lockdown effects has been a fall in expected incremental CO2 added to the
atmosphere in 2020 relative to 2019:
"Forecasters expect emissions to fall more than 5% in 2020, the greatest annual reduction on record. But
it's still short of the 7.6% decline that scientists say is needed every year over the next decade to stop
global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.*.
Yes, the earth's climate is one of the uncompensated losers of the world's current system of economic
growth.
Economists seem to be forever optimizing for the GDP measure, while giving lip service to "uncompensated
losers" such as workers and the earth's climate.
Me, being a cynic and all – I thought the way trade worked in the real world (not the one described by well
paid economists) was a multi step process
1) target developing country by undermining their core farming, self sustaining activity and export industries
through cheap importation of grains and crops and other goods – thus making it impossible for locals to survive
through their own industry
2) simultaneous loans (investment) to the country (economic aid) and corruption of political leaders designed
to enable step three
3) Whence said country is indebted – force country to export whatever (mineral) wealth onto a glutted market to
pay back its debts – this is easily done as the labor component is ripe for the picking/ fleecing
4) crush the country into economic austerity for as long as it takes to enslave its citizens and grab
everything of value from the country
5) pretend that the IMF etc did such a great job – but the countries people (victims) or government did not do
enough and must take care of themselves better
I think that you covered the Standard Operation Procedure here in better detail than I could. I would
only add to point 2) that the bankers will go to these local leaders and show them how to hide their money
and help them set up accounts in a place like the Caymans as part of the service.
And if that economist wants to find where all of Africa's wealth is going, he might want to start in the
City of London and New York first.
I share the general sense of confusion. I'm not quite sure what the point of this essay is. It's full of
wild generalisations like:
"According to the conventional wisdom until recently, growth in China, India and East Asian countries took off
thanks to opening up to international trade and investment."
I don't think that's ever been conventional wisdom for Japan, Korea and China, for example, whose economies
were (and in part still are) highly protected. Industrialisation in those countries was not "export-led".
It also confuses "trade" in the old sense, of countries importing things they couldn't produce and exporting
what they could, with "trade" in the new sense of moving stuff around the world largely for financial reasons.
Trade in the classic sense may have benefited the country as a whole (though this is debatable) but trade in
the current sense was never intended to. Likewise I hadn't heard that globalisation had fostered a "jingoist
backlash" – jingoism after all means aggressive calls for war. But then the whole article is clumsily written
and badly constructed.
And the idea that Africa should rely on itself is fair enough, but runs counter to every piece of advice given
to Africa since independence: remember, the World Bank master plan was for African countries to grow cash-crops
for export to generate cash for industrial development? We know how that worked out. And yes the African market
has enormous potential but it's desperately lacking in infrastructure, which makes trade between eve adjacent
nations desperately difficult. You need to fix that first.
There's a growing realisation on our continent that outsiders aren't going to lead us to the promised
land. The obstacles to effective intra-african trade that you identify will have to be cleared before
Africa's potential can be realised, and as an African I have to believe they will be, challenging as that
will be.
The overthrow of Omar Al Bashir in Sudan has shown that people in Africa are agitating for real,
lasting changing, liberation from the rule of corrupt leaders and true, not pseudo independence from the
West and increasingly China as well.
Other leaders have taken notice of this, as have ordinary citizens
across the continent. It will take time, ther'll probably be a few false starts, we'll wobble a bit but in
the end I believe we'll get there.
"trade generates winners and losers", with many losing out, and urges acknowledging "the evidence rather
than trying to discredit it, as some do."
I don't known who "discredits" it.
What I see is that everybody important acknowledges it, but does squat about it. This redistribution never
happens, the rich get richer in a role reversal of "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today". Any
attempt to have the rich share the hamburger is greeted with a "not now!" and a assurance that if the rich stop
continuously getting richer at
this
particular point in time then everything will collapse.
The poor, of course, ain't got until this mythical "Tuesday".
Indeed! Very few Africans have IoT sous-vide sticks yet, or Smart doorbells. I'll bet they are way behind
on fast fashion, too. Vast market to sell them things no-one needs and that wreck the earth
on credit
.
Just gotta get those roads built so Jeff can deliver stuff to them in 2 days.
The best understanding of what is going on in Africa I got from Jared Diamond – book, "Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". And for background – "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Global climate
heating is going to destroy Africa, already is. The usual story, no water, no forests, too much heat and
humidity. It's a terrible reckoning. And largely not of their making.
Me, being a cynic and all – I thought the way trade worked in the real world (not
the one described by well paid economists) was a multi step process
1) target developing country by undermining their core farming, self sustaining activity
and export industries through cheap importation of grains and crops and other goods –
thus making it impossible for locals to survive through their own industry
2) simultaneous loans (investment) to the country (economic aid) and corruption of
political leaders designed to enable step three
3) Whence said country is indebted – force country to export whatever (mineral)
wealth onto a glutted market to pay back its debts – this is easily done as the labor
component is ripe for the picking/ fleecing
4) crush the country into economic austerity for as long as it takes to enslave its
citizens and grab everything of value from the country
5) pretend that the IMF etc did such a great job – but the countries people
(victims) or government did not do enough and must take care of themselves better
I think that you covered the Standard Operation Procedure here in better detail than I
could. I would only add to point 2) that the bankers will go to these local leaders and show
them how to hide their money and help them set up accounts in a place like the Caymans as part
of the service.
And if that economist wants to find where all of Africa's wealth is going, he might want to
start in the City of London and New York first.
"..all of these tin pot dictatorship oil rich countries are really a sick bunch.... i guess it is the byproduct off having too
much money and not enough brains..
@james@ 3
karlofi beat me to it james - or were you referring to Alberta?
"... Yes it took parasites, sociopathic oligarchs and a power drunk national security state to bring us to our current state of affairs, but it also took the rest of us. For far too long we as a people have been apathetic, hoodwinked spectators to the life unfolding around us. Voting for "the lesser of two evils" for decade upon decade thinking it might be different this time. Putting up with the economic game that's been put in front of us, despite the fact that it demonstrably and systematically rewards and incentivizes predatory and destructive behavior. As a people, we have been superficial, indifferent and gleefully ignorant of reality. It's time to change all that. ..."
"... I think one reason mass media puts so much emphasis on voting at the national level is the owners of these propaganda channels know voting will change absolutely nothing. The oligarchy and national security state are fully in charge, and they're not going to allow the pesky rabble to get in the way of such a lucrative racket by voting. Getting those who are politically inclined to spend all their time and energy on a rigged and completely corrupt phantom democracy in D.C. is a great way to keep them busy with nonsense. It's also a perfect way to demoralize that portion of the population which understands it's just theater. If you can be convinced that voting at the national level is the only way to change things, you're much more likely to recede into apathy and become intentionally disengaged. This happens to a lot of people, but it's a big mistake. ..."
There's a passage in Teddy Roosevelt's famous 1910 "Citizenship in a Republic" speech I want
to share with you today:
If a man's efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more
efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect,
all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for
that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill
for the community if the community worships those qualities and treats their possessors as
heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no
difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no
difference whether such a man's force and ability betray themselves in a career of
money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works
for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all
upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if
the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the
wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free
institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they
prove themselves unfit for liberty.
The above words strike me as a perfect description of the deep hole we find ourselves in
presently throughout these United States of America. It takes a whole nation to screw things up
as badly as we have, and boy have we ever.
Yes it took parasites, sociopathic oligarchs and a power drunk national security state to
bring us to our current state of affairs, but it also took the rest of us. For far too long we
as a people have been apathetic, hoodwinked spectators to the life unfolding around us. Voting
for "the lesser of two evils" for decade upon decade thinking it might be different this time.
Putting up with the economic game that's been put in front of us, despite the fact that it
demonstrably and systematically rewards and incentivizes predatory and destructive behavior. As
a people, we have been superficial, indifferent and gleefully ignorant of reality. It's time to
change all that.
You can consider today's post a rallying cry to step into the arena. Stepping into the arena
is often portrayed as becoming involved in national politics or some other large platform
action, but I see it differently. If you think the only way to have a real impact is by voting
or running for Congress, you're likely to give up and remain passive. The truth is your entire
life can be repurposed to be an expression of increased kindness, wisdom and strength. It's the
most impactful long-term action most of us can have on this earth, and anyone can do it.
Change yourself before trying to change the world. If enough people did this the world
would change without you even trying.
I think what keeps a lot of people on the sidelines of a conscious life is an inability to
intimately process the above. Many people discount the little things, the countless actions of
daily existence that impact those around you and cumulatively make you who you are.
I think one reason mass media puts so much emphasis on voting at the national level is the
owners of these propaganda channels know voting will change absolutely nothing. The oligarchy
and national security state are fully in charge, and they're not going to allow the pesky
rabble to get in the way of such a lucrative racket by voting. Getting those who are
politically inclined to spend all their time and energy on a rigged and completely corrupt
phantom democracy in D.C. is a great way to keep them busy with nonsense. It's also a perfect
way to demoralize that portion of the population which understands it's just theater. If you
can be convinced that voting at the national level is the only way to change things, you're
much more likely to recede into apathy and become intentionally disengaged. This happens to a
lot of people, but it's a big mistake.
When I look back at my life thus far, it was during my decade on Wall Street when I was the
most ignorant and superficial . So focused on stroking my ego, making a bunch of money and
career advancement, I lost a lot of who I am at my core during that time. I often wonder if
that's the case for a lot of people who achieve conventional success within the current
paradigm. It's fortunate I removed myself from that situation and began thinking more deeply
about who I am and what really matters.
Stepping up and getting into the arena will mean something different for each of us, but the
one word that keeps popping into my head is resilience. There are several clear ways to become
more resilient. There's mental and emotional resiliency, there's financial resiliency and
there's physical resiliency (where and how you live). I see all three as fundamentally
important and functioning best when working together. Resiliency starts at the most basic level
because if you and your family aren't resilient, then you won't be much use to anyone else. If
the people of a community or nation lack resiliency it provides the perfect space for
authoritarianism and evil to manifest and flourish.
Case in point, see the following comments by Alan Dershowitz during a recent interview.
"You have no right not to be vaccinated, you have no right not to wear a mask... If you
refuse to be vaccinated the state has the right to take you to a dr's office & plunge a
needle in your arm." @AlanDersh take on vaccines &
masks is vile & un-American. pic.twitter.com/j2C1Rk3d7h
This is despotism plain and simple, and it's being expressed by a guy who still has
considerable influence despite his many Jeffrey Epstein related controversies. It's going to
take a resilient, courageous and ethical public to stand up to scoundrels like this and just
say NO. No, you will not grab me, drag me off somewhere and inject something into my body
without my consent. We've been passive spectators in the destruction of our society for far too
long. It's time to both say no and to create something better.
When I walked away from New York City and Wall Street ten years ago it was clear what sort
of trajectory the country was on, and it's only gotten worse since. We're now in the crucial
period spanning 2020-2025 that will decide what the next several decades look like. The big
battle for the future is here. Right now. If there's ever been a time in your life to step up,
this is it.
* * *
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@Harold Smith There is an innocuous military term, incapable of maneuver , to
describe an army which is nothing more than a group of people in uniforms. They look like an
army but, when things go bad, they prove incapable of responding in a disciplined, purposive
manner. Arab armies come to mind.
Our government and much of our industry, especially defense and fintec, appear to be
incapable of maneuver. They're justself-seeking individuals with no loyalty to each other,
their clients, citizenry, or their country.
If we don't want to suffer an interim dystopia, we need to start work on a new
constitution because the old one is worn out and we're going over a cliff.
I keep harping on China because they read our Constitution and foundation documents and,
in 1950, drafted a 20th century constitution which is well worth reading. They've convened
every 10 years since then and amended it to keep it current. For them, the constitution is a
living document, not a totem, and they take it very seriously.
But it's not only Moderna's billionaire founder/CEO Stephane Bancel - once compared to a
post-scandal Elizabeth Holmes - who stands to profit from the action: the White House's new
vaccine czar also holds - or rather, held - more than 150,000 options contracts on Moderna
shares worht more than $12 million, and had resisted pressure to divest them despite the
blatant conflict of interest. We were joking yesterday when we speculated that he would
probably be glad to exercise these options at current prices. But just as every joke contains a
nugget of truth, that one turned out to be prophetic, too.
Alastair Crooke's in fine form today bringing Jung, Euripides, the Outlaw US Empire's
Culture Wars, and Zionist Imperialism together to illustrate "Our Civilisational Quagmire"
and the imperative of "Looking Truth in the Eye." But all that's initially hidden as he
begins by intoning:
"First, the bottom line: If you don't solve the biology, the economy won't recover."
A Truth far too many mostly in the West don't seem capable of grasping:
"But the biology is not solved, and the tension of trying to point in opposite directions
simultaneously is igniting a separate, raging political brushfire....
"The pretence that the U.S. and the global economy is about to snap back, as soon as virus
mitigation is lifted; the pretence that Covid-19 is either a fake (just another 'flu); or, is
'over'; the pretence that U.S. and Europe have competent and resilient political and economic
structures – and the pretence that once Covid is over, we will all return to a world,
just as it was?"
I wrote awhile ago that the pandemic provided an opportunity to use an analytical tool
known as the Franklin Reality Model to see the values and beliefs held by differing nations
and their cultures and ideologies as it exposes them so graphically they cannot be hidden by
any amount of spin or propaganda. The revelations provided my empirical basis for judging
Trump's response specifically and the West's generally to be one of complete Moral Failure.
And not just Trump, but Pelosi, Biden and the vast majority of Democrats, too--their shared
Neoliberal ideology's Immoral basis and Parasitic nature being one of the main roots of the
problem.
I suggest you read this
Atlantic article , "We Are Living in a Failed State: The coronavirus didn't break
America. It revealed what was already broken." And either before or during, take a gander at
this Real GDP
graph that still understates the genuine amount of GDP shrinkage since parasitic
financial "gains" are added to GDP instead of subtracted as a cost to the real economy.
Essentially since GHW Bush's recession, the real economy of the Outlaw US Empire's shrunk
about 1.5% annually or @45% overall with the vast majority of economic gains accruing to the
top 10%. That grim reality is the #1 reason why Trump won in 2016, and why he stands a very
good chance of losing in 2020--"It's the economy, stupid."
Re: Karl, did the 'West' (Anglo-Zionist world) buy (or actually promote) the 80's 'Greed is
Good' line, and ignore what Greenspan supposedly learned..."I have found a flaw...I made a
mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others,
were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity
in the firms."
Even the average American might be able to see that 'socialism' (i.e., Social Security, et
al) is better than 'trickle down'... to put it in simple terms. Neo-liberalism appears to be
killing many of us right now. The problem, seems to me, is how to turn the light bulb on for
Amerian non-voters... obviously Bernie would have 'had a heart attack' if he'd gotten the
nomination.
Re: Karl, did the 'West' (Anglo-Zionist world) buy (or actually promote) the 80's 'Greed is
Good' line, and ignore what Greenspan supposedly learned..."I have found a flaw...I made a
mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others,
were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity
in the firms."
Even the average American might be able to see that 'socialism' (i.e., Social Security, et
al) is better than 'trickle down'... to put it in simple terms. Neo-liberalism appears to be
killing many of us right now. The problem, seems to me, is how to turn the light bulb on for
Amerian non-voters... obviously Bernie would have 'had a heart attack' if he'd gotten the
nomination.
Greenspan issued his belated and stupendously weak mea culpa long after the horse left the
corral and had galloped several time around the planet. One vital component was already
deeply emplaced prior to his tenure that allowed those entities to "protect"
themselves--Regulatory Capture. Recall "Banking Crises" began to become regular occurrences
during Reagan/Bush. One of Hudson's great contributions is looking into how
political-economic theory was captured and transformed into just economic theory, which he
castigates as "Junk Economics" in his book of that title. At his website, there're numerous
essays that deal with that topic; out of the several dozen I might link to is
this one from 2011 . Discovering how we were manipulated into the Neoliberal religion
must be understood if we are to get out from under its boot, which is a tall task since
millions must become informed, and the Neoliberals control the media. You asked How. My
answer is for us to become informed such that we can inform others, which is why Hudson's
written an excellent series of books that make it all easy to comprehend and transmit--I
taught introductory college economics and know Hudson's works are vastly superior to the
texts we used. The two pertinent books for debunking Neoliberalism are Killing the
Host and J is for Junk Economics . For the overall historical perspective, his
trilogy that begins with and forgive them their debts will be a must, the second book
he says will be ready for publication by New Years.
Atlantic Council senior fellow, Congressional candidate, and Russia conspiracy theorist
Evelyn Farkas is desperately trying to salvage her reputation after recently released
transcripts from her closed-door 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee revealed
she totally lied on national TV .
In March of 2017, Farkas confidently told MSNBC 's Mika Brzezinski: " The Trump folks, if
they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians , that they
would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would not longer have access to
that intelligence ."
Except, during testimony to the House, Farkas admitted she lied . When pressed by former
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) on why she said 'we' - referring to the US government, Farkas said she
"didn't know anything."
In short, she was either illegally discussing US intelligence matters with her "former
colleagues," or she made the whole thing up.
Now, Farkas is in damage control mode - writing in the
Washington Post that her testimony demonstrated "that I had not leaked intelligence and
that my early intuition about Trump-Kremlin cooperation was valid.' She also claims that her
comments to MSNBC were based on "media reports and statements by Obama administration officials
and the intelligence community," which had "began unearthing connections between Trump's
campaign and Russia."
Farkas is now blaming a 'disconcerting nexus between Russia and the reactionary right,' for
making her look bad (apparently Trey Gowdy is part of the "reactionary right" for asking her
who she meant by "we").
Attacks against me came first on Twitter and other social media platforms, from far-right
sources. Forensics data I was shown suggested at least one entity had Russian ties . The
attacks increased in quantity and ferocity until Fox News and Trump-allied Republicans --
higher-profile, and more mainstream, sources -- also criticized me .
...
Trump surrogates, including former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski ,
Donald Trump Jr. and Fox
News hosts such as Tucker Carlson have essentially accused me
of treason for being one of the "fraudulent originators" of the "Russia hoax." -Evelyn
Farkas
She then parrots the Democratic talking point that the attacks she's received are part of
Trump's larger "Obamagate" allegations - " a narrative that distracts attention from his
administration's disastrous pandemic response and attempts to defect blame for Russian
interference onto the Obama administration" (Obama told Putin to ' cut it out ' after all).
Meanwhile, Poor Evelyn's campaign staff has become " emotionally exhausted " after her
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts have been "overwhelmed with a stream of vile, vulgar
and sometimes violent messages" in response to the plethora of conservative outlets which have
called her out for Russia malarkey.
There is evidence that Russian actors are contributing to these attacks. The same day that
right-wing pundits began pumping accusations, newly created Russian Twitter accounts picked them up. Within a day,
Russian "
disinformation clearinghouses " posted versions of the story . Many of the Twitter
accounts boosting attacks have posted in unison, a sign of inauthentic social media
behavior.
She closes by defiantly claiming "I wasn't silenced in 2017, and I won't be silenced
now."
No Evelyn, nobody is silencing you. You're being called out for your role in the perhaps the
largest, most divisive hoax in US history - which was based on faulty intelligence that
includes crowdstrike admitting they had
no proof of that Russia exfiltrated DNC emails, and Christopher Steele's absurd dossier
based on his 'Russian sources.'
MrBoompi, 18 minutes ago
Lying is a common occurrence on MSNBC. Farkas was just showing her party she is qualified
for a more senior position.
chubbar, 23 minutes ago
My opinion, based on zero facts, is that the lie she told was to Gowdy. She had to say she
lied about having intelligence data or she'd be looking at a felony along with whomever she
was talking to in the US gov't. You just know these cocksuckers in the resistance don't give
a **** about laws or fairness, it's all about getting Trump. So they set up an informal
network to get classified intelligence from the Obama holdovers out into the wild where these
assholes could use it against Trump and the gov't operations. Treason. She needs to be
executed for her efforts!
LetThemEatRand, 59 minutes ago
This whole thing reminds me of a fan watching their team play a championship game. If the
ref makes a bad call and their team wins, they don't care. And if the ref makes a good call
and their team loses, they blame the ref. No one cares about the truth or the facts. That in
a nutshell is politics in the US. If you believe that anyone will "switch sides" or admit the
ref made a bad call or a good call, you're smoking the funny stuff.
mtumba, 50 minutes ago
It's a natural response to a corrupt system.
When the system is wholly corrupt so that truth doesn't matter, what else is there to care
about other than your side winning?
44, the biggest fraudulent, groomed 'president' in USA history. Imagine if legal citizens
knew the TRUTH about corruption within the political arena? Thank you, @TuckerCarlson
Coronavirus has already begun to undermine the legitimacy of the European project in a
greater manner that nationalist movements had hoped to achieve. European finance ministers have
clashed over all EU nations sharing "corona bonds" debt, while France and Germany responded to
Italy's request for ventilators with a refusal accompanied by closing their borders with Italy.
At around the same time, the United States imposed a unilateral ban on commercial flights with
the EU.
China's economic growth strategy and foreign policy aspirations are being frustrated in the
wake of Coronavirus, as developing countries are likely to scrutinize China's Belt Road
Initiative. Among Western policymakers anti-China sentiment is increasing. In the UK, there is
mounting opposition to Huawei building its fifth-generation mobile networks. In late March, the
United States abandoned its long-standing policy of maintaining a status quo vis a vis Taiwan.
President Donald Trump signed into law The Taiwan Allies International Protection and
Enhancement Initiative (TAIPEI) Act, which increases U.S. support for Taiwan and "alters"
engagement with nations that undermine Taiwan's security or prosperity. Beijing responded that
it would respond forcefully if the law was implemented, all the while China increases its
military drills around Taiwan. This is increasingly likely to occur while the United States
increasingly supports Hong Kong's independence movement and demonstrates willingness to
confront China in the South China Seas. Similarly, Washington is likely to be drawn into a
confrontation with North Korea as the collapse of North Korea's health system may threaten Kim
Jong-un's regime leading him to militarily lash out.
The latest phase of globalization spearheaded by the West entailed that service economies
were not responsible for the manufacture of the products they consumed. Instead, they depended
upon outsourcing production of cheap goods in distant shores creating unprecedented levels of
economic prosperity, which at its root was artificial. Liberal democracies did not reach "the
end of history," where conflict was to be consigned to the dustbin of history, but could easily
be unraveled by a virus emanating from a society it was reliant upon that did not share its
norms. In a similar vein, the Roman Empire's apex contained the seeds of its decay as it had
become overstretched and difficult to manage. The historian Edward Gibbon, in his 1776 book
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , notes that Romans had become weak and
responded to the challenges of hyperinflation, civil wars and revolts by outsourcing their
duties to defend their empire in far flung regions to "barbarian" mercenaries such as the
Visigoths. Blowback occurred as these barbarians' increased economic production and their
ability to conduct warfare, which led them, ultimately, to turn against their benefactors and
sack the Roman Empire. Similarly, the West increased the prosperity of faraway nations and
ironically, as a result their military assertiveness by being beholden to extended global
supply chains. This along with the risk of globalization unravelling increases the prospects of
inter-state and great power conflict. All it took was a virus to detonate the fuse that was
shorter than anyone expected.
Barak Seener is the CEO of Strategic Intelligentia and a former Middle East Fellow at the
Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He is on Twitter at @BarakSeener .
On the one side, figures allied to American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision for
an anti-Imperial world order lined up behind FDR's champion Harry Dexter White while those
powerful forces committed to maintaining the structures of a bankers' dictatorship (Britain was
always primarily a banker's empire) lined up behind the figure of John Maynard Keynes[
1 ].
John Maynard Keynes was a leading Fabian Society controller and treasurer of the British
Eugenics Association (which served as a model for Hitler's Eugenics protocols before and during
the war). During the Bretton Woods Conference, Keynes pushed hard for the new system to be
premised upon a one world currency controlled entirely by the Bank of England known as the
Bancor. He proposed a global bank called the Clearing Union to be controlled by the Bank of
England which would use the Bancor (exchangeable with national currencies) and serve as unit of
account to measure trade surpluses or deficits under the mathematical mandate of maintaining
"equilibrium" of the system.
Harry Dexter White, on the other hand, fought relentlessly to keep the City of London out of
the drivers' seat of global finance and instead defended the institution of national
sovereignty and sovereign currencies based on long term scientific and technological
growth.
Although White and FDR demanded that US dollars become the reserve currency in the new world
system of fixed exchange rates, it was not done to create a "new American Empire" as most
modern analysts have assumed, but rather was designed to use America's status as the strongest
productive global power to ensure an anti-speculative stability among international currencies
which entirely lacked stability in the wake of WWII.
Their fight for fixed exchange rates and principles of "parity pricing" were designed by FDR
and White strictly around the need to abolish the forms of chaotic flux of the un-regulated
markets which made speculation rampant under British Free Trade and destroyed the capacity to
think and plan for the sort of long term development needed to modernize nation states. Theirs
was not a drive for "mathematical equilibrium" but rather a drive to "end poverty" through REAL
physical economic growth of colonies who would thereby win real economic independence.
As figures like Henry Wallace (FDR's loyal Vice President and 1948 3rd party candidate),
Representative Wendell Wilkie (FDR's republican lieutenant and New Dealer), and Dexter White
all advocated repeatedly, the mechanisms of the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations were meant
to become drivers of an internationalization of the New Deal which transformed America from a
backwater cesspool in 1932 to becoming a modern advanced manufacturing powerhouse 12 years
later. All of these Interntional New Dealers were loud advocates of US-Russia –China
leadership in the post war world which is a forgotten fact of paramount importance.
It is vital to the United States, it is vital to China and
it is vital to Russia that there be peaceful and friendly relations between China and Russia,
China and America and Russia and America. China and Russia Complement and supplement each other
on the continent of Asia and the two together complement and supplement America's position in
the Pacific.
Contradicting the mythos that FDR was a Keynesian, FDR's assistant Francis Perkins
recorded the 1934 interaction between the two men when Roosevelt told her:
"I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a
mathematician rather than a political economist."
In response Keynes, who was then trying to coopt the intellectual narrative of the New Deal
stated he had "supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking."
In his 1936 German edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
, Keynes wrote:
For I confess that much of the following book is illustrated and expounded
mainly with reference to the conditions existing in the Anglo Saxon countries. Nevertheless,
the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much
more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state.
While Keynes represented the "soft imperialism" for the "left" of Britain's intelligentsia,
Churchill represented the hard unapologetic imperialism of the Old, less sophisticated empire
that preferred the heavy fisted use of brute force to subdue the savages. Both however were
unapologetic racists and fascists (Churchill even wrote admiringly of Mussolini's black shirts)
and both represented the most vile practices of British Imperialism.
FDR's Forgotten
Anti-Colonial Vision Revited
FDR's battle with Churchill on the matter of empire is better known than his differences
with Keynes whom he only met on a few occasions. This well documented clash was best
illustrated in his son/assistant Elliot Roosevelt's book As He Saw It (1946) who quoted his
father:
I've tried to make it clear that while we're [Britain's] allies and in it to victory
by their side, they must never get the idea that we're in it just to help them hang on to their
archaic, medieval empire ideas I hope they realize they're not senior partner; that we are not
going to sit by and watch their system stultify the growth of every country in Asia and half
the countries in Europe to boot.
[ ]
The colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all
the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like
education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements – all you're doing is
storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war. All you're doing is negating the value of any
kind of organizational structure for peace before it begins.
Writing from Washington in a hysteria to Churchill, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said that
Roosevelt "contemplates the dismantling of the British and Dutch empires."
Unfortunately for the world, FDR died on April 12, 1945. A coup within the Democratic
establishment, then replete with Fabians and Rhodes Scholars, had already ensured that Henry
Wallace would lose the 1944 Vice Presidency in favor of Anglophile Wall Street Stooge Harry
Truman.
Truman was quick to reverse all of FDR's intentions, cleansing American intelligence of all
remaining patriots with the shutdown of the OSS and creation of the CIA, the launching of
un-necessary nuclear bombs on Japan and establishment of the Anglo-American special
relationship.
Truman's embrace of Churchill's New World Order destroyed the positive relationship with
Russia and China which FDR, White and Wallace sought and soon America had become Britain's dumb
giant.
The Post 1945 Takeover of the Modern Deep State
FDR warned his son before his death of his understanding of the British takeover of American
foreign policy, but still could not reverse this agenda. His son recounted his father's ominous
insight:
You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal
messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats
over there aren't in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston.
As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of
'em: any number of 'em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is
to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!" I was told six years ago, to clean
out that State Department. It's like the British Foreign Office
Before being fired from Truman's cabinet for his advocacy of US-Russia friendship during the
Cold War, Wallace stated:
American fascism" which has come to be known in recent years as
the Deep State [ ] Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon
imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and
writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and
intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.
In his 1946 Soviet Asia Mission, Wallace said:
Before the blood of our boys is scarcely
dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III.
These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by
following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as
in war.
Indeed this is exactly what occurred. Dexter White's three year run as head of the
International Monetary Fund was clouded by his constant attacks as being a Soviet stooge which
haunted him until the day he died in 1948 after a grueling inquisition session at the House of
Un-American Activities.
White had previously been supporting the election of his friend Wallace for the presidency
alongside fellow patriots Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein.
Today the world has captured a second chance to revive the FDR's
dream of an anti-colonial world . In the 21st century, this great dream has taken the form
of the New Silk Road, led by Russia and China (and joined by a growing chorus of nations
yearning to exit the invisible cage of colonialism).
If western nations wish to survive the oncoming collapse, then they would do well to heed
Putin's call for a New International system, join the BRI, and reject the Keynesian technocrats
advocating a false "New Bretton Woods" and "Green New
Deal" .
[1] You may be thinking "wait! Wasn't FDR and his New Deal premised on Keynes' theories??"
How could Keynes have represented an opposing force to FDR's system if this is the case? This
paradox only exists in the minds of many people today due to the success of the Fabian
Society's and Round Table Movement's armada of revisionist historians who have consistently
created a lying narrative of history to make it appear to future generations trying to learn
from past mistakes that those figures like FDR who opposed empire were themselves following
imperial principles.
Another example of this sleight of hand can be seen by the sheer number of people who
sincerely think themselves informed and yet believe that America's 1776 revolution was driven
by British Imperial philosophical thought stemming from Adam Smith, Bentham and John Locke.
Schiff probably practice his lies in his mirror every morning so he can convince himself
of Russian interference. Biggest liar in America Adam Schifty schiff. Needs to be arrested
immediately for treason and lying under oath. But as usual nothing will happen. These people
are above the law. And are untouchable. Its enough to frustrate the hell out of normal sain
Americans. 4 more years of Donald Trump
Folks need to take a much closer look at your own state legislature, district attorney,
prosecutors, public defenders, social workers... especially your own town councils and school
boards. They're stealing your lives and children at the Grassroots local level.
Adam Schiff is not resigning. He's doubling down yet again! If you "want" him to resign,
you need to understand he's staying in office until voted out. There's no willpower in the
house to take action against him.
"... The US has spent over $200 billion on antimissile systems, and once they come off the drawing boards, none of them work very well, if at all. ..."
In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or
vaccines
"There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet plagues and wars take
people equally by surprise."
~ Albert Camus, "The Plague"
Camus' novel of a lethal contagion in the North African city of Oran is filled with
characters all too recognizable today: indifferent or incompetent officials, short sighted and
selfish citizens, and lots of great courage. What not even Camus could imagine, however, is a
society in the midst of a deadly epidemic pouring vast amounts of wealth into instruments of
death.
Welcome to the world of the hypersonic weapons, devices that are not only superfluous, but
which will almost certainly not work. They will, however, cost enormous amounts of money. At a
time when countries across the globe are facing economic chaos, financial deficits, and
unemployment at Great Depression levels, arms manufacturers are set to cash in big.
A Hypersonic Arms Race
Hypersonic weapons are missiles that go five times faster than sound – 3,800 mph
– although some reportedly can reach speeds of Mach 20, 15,000 mph. They come in two
basic varieties. One is powered by a high-speed scramjet. The other, launched from a plane or
missile, glides to its target. The idea behind the weapons is that their speed and
maneuverability will make them virtually invulnerable to anti-missile systems.
Currently there is a hypersonic arms race
going on among China, Russia, and the U.S., and, according to the Pentagon, the Americans are
desperately trying to catch up with its two adversaries.
Truth is the first casualty in an arms race.
In the 1950s, it was the "bomber gap" between the Americans and the Soviets. In the 1960s,
it was the "missile gap" between the two powers. Neither gap existed, but vast amounts of
national treasure were nonetheless poured into long-range aircraft and thousands of
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The enormous expenditures on those weapons, in
turn, heightened tensions between the major powers and on at least three occasions came very
close to touching off a nuclear war.
In the current hypersonic arms race, "hype" is the operational word. "The development of
hypersonic weapons in the United States," says physicist James
Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "has been largely motivated by
technology, not by strategy. In other words, technologists have decided to try and develop
hypersonic weapons because it seems like they should be useful for something, not because there
is a clearly defined mission need for them to fulfill."
They have certainly been "useful" to Lockheed
Martin , the largest arms manufacturer in the world. The company has already received $3.5
billion to develop the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (Arrow) glide missile, and the
scramjet-driven Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (Hacksaw) missile.
The Russians also have several hypersonic missiles, including the Avangard glide vehicle, a
missile said to be capable of Mach 20.
China is developing several hypersonic missiles, including the DF-ZF, supposedly capable of
taking out aircraft carriers.
"No Advantage Whatsoever"
In theory hypersonic missiles are unstoppable. In real life, not so much.
The first problem is basic physics: speed in the atmosphere produces heat. High speed
generates lots of it. ICBMs avoid this problem with a blunt nose cone that deflects the
enormous heat of re-entering the atmosphere as the missile approaches its target. But it only
has to endure heat for a short time because much of its flight is in frictionless low earth
orbit.
Hypersonic missiles, however, stay in the atmosphere their entire flight. That is the whole
idea. An ICBM follows a predictable ballistic curve, much like an inverted U and, in theory,
can be intercepted. A missile traveling as fast as an ICBM but at low altitude, however, is
much more difficult to spot or engage.
But that's when physics shows up and does a Las Vegas: what happens on the drawing board
stays on the drawing board.
Without a heat deflecting nose cone, high-speed missiles are built like big needles, since
they need to decrease the area exposed to the atmosphere. Even so, they are going to run very
hot. And if they try to maneuver, that heat will increase. Since they can't carry a large
payload, they will have to be very accurate – but as a study by the Union of Concerned
Scientists points out, that is "problematic."
According to the Union, an object traveling Mach 5 for a period of time "slowly tears itself
apart during the flight." The heat is so great it creates a "plasma" around the craft that
makes it difficult "to reference GPS or receive outside course correction commands."
If the target is moving, as with an aircraft carrier or a mobile missile, it will be almost
impossible to alter the weapon's flight path to intercept it. And any external radar array
would never survive the heat or else be so small that it would have very limited range. In
short, you can't get from here to there.
Lockheed Martin says the tests are going just fine, but
then Lockheed Martin is the company that builds the F-35, a fifth generation stealth fighter
that simply doesn't work. It does, however, cost $1.5 trillion, the most expensive weapons
system in US history. The company has apparently dropped the scramjet engine because it tears
itself apart, hardly a surprise.
The Russians and Chinese claim success with their hypersonic weapons and have even begun
deploying them. But Pierre Sprey, a Pentagon designer associated with the two very successful
aircraft – the F-16 and the A-10 – told defense analyst Andrew
Cockburn that he is suspicious of the tests.
"I very much doubt those test birds would have reached the advertised range had they
maneuvered unpredictably," he told Cockburn. "More likely they were forced to fly a straight,
predictable path. In which case hypersonics offer no advantage whatsoever over traditional
ballistic missiles."
Guns or Vaccines
While Russia, China, and the US lead the field in the development of hypersonics, Britain,
France, India, and Japan have joined
the race too.
Why is everyone building them?
At least the Russians and the Chinese have a rationale. The Russians fear the US antimissile
system might cancel out their ICBMs, so they want a missile that can maneuver. The Chinese
would like to keep US aircraft carriers away from their shores.
But antimissile systems can be easily fooled by the use of cheap decoys, and the carriers
are vulnerable to much more cost effective conventional weapons. In any case hypersonic
missiles can't do what they are advertised to do.
For the Americans, hypersonics are little more than a very expensive subsidy for the arms
corporations. Making and deploying weapons that don't work is nothing new. The F-35 is a case
in point, but nevertheless, there have been many systems produced over the years that were
deeply flawed.
The US has spent over $200 billion on antimissile systems, and once they come off the
drawing boards, none of them work very well, if at all.
Probably the one that takes the prize is the Mark-28 tactical nuke, nicknamed the "Davy
Crockett," and its M-388 warhead. Because the M-388 was too delicate to be used in
conventional artillery, it was fired from a recoil-less rife with a range of 2.5 miles.
Problem: if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, the Crockett cooked its three-man
crew. It was only tested once and found to be "totally inaccurate."
So, end of story? Not exactly. A total of 2,100 were produced and deployed, mostly in
Europe.
While the official military budget is $738 billion, if one pulls all US defense related
spending together, the actual cost for taxpayers is $1.25 trillion a year, according to
William
Hartung of the Center for International Policy. Half that amount would go a long way toward
providing not only adequate medical support during the Covid-19 crisis – it would also
pay jobless Americans a salary.
Given that there are more than 31 million Americans now unemployed and the possibility that
numerous small businesses – restaurants in particular – will never reopen, building
and deploying a new generation of weapons is a luxury the US and other countries cannot
afford.
In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or
vaccines.
"In the worst-case scenario projected for a pandemic, Zylberman predicted that 'sanitary
terror' would be used as an instrument of governance....
"Agamben did square the circle: it's not that citizens across the West have the right to
health safety; now they are juridically forced (italics [Pepe's]) to be healthy. That,
in a nutshell, is what biosecurity is all about.
"So no wonder biosecurity is an ultra-efficient governance paradigm. Citizens had it
administered down their throats with no political debate whatsoever. And the enforcement,
writes Agamben, kills 'any political activity and any social relation as the maximum example
of civic participation.'"
Escobar's topic's been the subject of heated discussion here. How much of "reopening" in
meant to combat the implied totalitarian potential? Perhaps an entire thread ought to be
devoted? That such was a planned additional benefit of the COVID-19 attack seems very
reasonable. Since it was thought of, discussed and had books published about it seems to
indicate it ought to become a central topic at MoA.
Since the days of Adam Smith, free market capitalists have held that human beings are
rational actors who pursue economic gain for self-interested motives. But here is Patrick, a
free marketer if there ever was one, talking about a gift-sacrifice economy model in which
people – some people, at least – lay down their lives to keep the economic
engines revved.
Patrick's words reveal an unspoken truth about capitalism. For the system to work smoothly,
there have always been requirements of human sacrifice -- a certain portion of the population
was expected to act not as self-serving homo economicus, but self-sacrificing
homo communis , focused upon what benefits the collective at their own expense. If
these people can't social distance at the workplace, they are expected to show up anyway. If
there isn't enough safety equipment, they are declared essential workers who must put their
lives and that of their families at risk for the greater good.
But for whom and for what is this sacrifice intended? How much dying will be figured into
state budgets and gross domestic product (GDP)? When ranked by GDP, the U.S. is the wealthiest economy
in the world, but is a country's wealth something totally separate from, or even contrary
to, the health and life the majority of its citizens?
Wealth v. "illth"
To help us navigate these questions, it is useful turn to someone who offered potent
challenges to the economic calculus of his day: John Ruskin , the 19 th
-century art critic-turned-political economist. He was one of the most outspoken critics
of capitalism and prevailing economic ideas of the Victorian era , and his work presciently
points to shortcomings that have followed us into the present day.
Ruskin questions the premises on which free market capitalism is based, returning to first
principles: what is wealth? What do we value? How should we understand the relationship between
people, the economy, and the state?
In his view, economies are, above all, social systems whose true end is to benefit the
people, and not, as the Texan politician would have it, the other way around. Anticipating the
behavioral economics of our own day, Ruskin rejected the idea advocated by such economists as
John Stuart Mill that there could be a deductive science of economics based on the assumption
that the human being is "a covetous machine" that when applied to actual situations could take
"the social affections," the non-rational aspects of human behavior, into account. Ruskin
recognized that such a system implicitly removed the marketplace from the constraints of
religion and morality that are supposed to apply to all human behavior. He compared it to an
assumption that humans are essentially a skeleton with flesh, blood and consciousness as
add-ons founding "an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul."
Ruskin defined wealth quite differently from many of his contemporaries, and ours. For him,
wealth is anything that supports life and health, from the supplies in your storeroom to the
song in your heart: "There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of
joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of
noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his
own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of
his possessions, over the lives of others." ( Unto this Last ).
By that definition, America is looking increasingly impoverished. And it is not a virus
which is stealing our wealth away.
Playing on the root of the word "wealth" from the Old English word "weal," signifying
health, Ruskin proposed that while wealth was anything life-supporting that could be used and
enjoyed, it had a dark counterpart that he called "illth" from the Old Norse word for bad
– the things that make people ill, their lives stunted and despairing, their environment
polluted. Wealth cannot be produced without illth, but great fortunes have been made by
extracting the means of wealth without paying the cost of illth. To take a Ruskinian example, a
factory that pollutes the water it uses, fouls the air and pays its workers below what a
healthy life requires will be more profitable than a business that cleans up after itself and
pays a living wage, but its illth becomes a form of national debt expressed in damage to the
health of others and the environment. Think of something like a toxic Superfund site.
Economists have a term for Ruskin's concept of illth, referring to it as "negative
externalities," even though they are not external to the capitalist economic system, but
intrinsic to it. The most daunting problems of the current age, environmental disaster and
inequality, are fueled by illth.
The Covid-19 crisis has merely amplified trends of rising illth, of despair, sickness, and
alienation, which have been on the rise for decades as globalization, money-driven politics,
decimated workers' rights, and privatization have tipped the economic balance far in favor of
the very few. If we are to judge a country's health not by GDP, which rises
in the face of a massive oil spill , but according to the criteria of the World Happiness Report (WHR), which measures
things like social trust and faith in institutions, America is in bad shape when it comes to
the ratio of wealth to illth. Scandinavian countries top the WHR, while the U.S. ranks a dismal
19 th .
According to the Columbia University study of the
2020 WHR report , the key factors that account for the relative happiness of Scandinavian
countries -- what makes them wealthy in Ruskin's terms -- are precisely those that have been
under pressure or cut back in the U.S. since the rise of neoliberalism: "emancipation from
market dependency in terms of pensions, income maintenance for the ill or disabled, and
unemployment benefits" together with labor market regulation such as a high minimum wage. Of
course, no one likes to pay taxes, but Scandinavian "citizens' satisfaction with public and
common goods such as health care, education, and public transportation that progressive
taxation helps to fund," meets with approval at all income levels.
Pandemics are exacerbated by illth. We can see it in communities of color where the
coronavirus strikes down those whose resources and access to health care have been limited by
discriminatory policies and high contact employment. We can see it in factory farms where
broken supply chains have caused farmers to euthanize livestock and plow under crops while
people across the country go hungry. Airlines got immediate stimulus aid in the U.S., but there
has been no subsidy for the restaurant supply chain that could be diverted for distribution by
food banks and favorably located restaurants thus sustaining at least some of our much-vaunted
small businesses. No one has to fly, but everyone must eat.
We sense illth accumulating in the comments of Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, who, in her
eagerness to get the casinos back in business, told an astonished Anderson Cooper on CNN that
she would offer up the city's workers as a "
control group " in a reopening experiment. If they weren't able to social distance, Goodman
was unconcerned: "In my opinion, you have to go ahead,"
she said . "Every day you get up, it's a gamble."
Ruskin saw the capitalists of his day as gamblers heedless of the costs they foisted onto
ordinary people: "But they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what
other games may be played with the same cards, nor what other losses and gains, far away among
the dark streets, are essentially, though invisibly, dependent upon theirs in lighted rooms." (
Unto This Last ).
In other words, not only do capitalists gamble with other peoples' lives; they are oblivious
to the fact that there are other ways to arrange society, to deal the cards differently, more
fairly.
Witness the post-Covid reality imagined by Governor Cuomo. Instead of focusing on what
changes could better support the health and lives of ordinary people, he has
called in Google CEO Eric Schmidt to head a commission to reimagine New York state with
more technology permanently inserted into every dimension of civic life. A better deal for
Silicon Valley, to be sure. But what is in the cards for everyone else? When educational
platforms and health protocols are mapped by gigantic and unaccountable corporations, who gets
lost? Surely the answer is those who can least afford it.
President Trump says that it is time to move on
from the coronavirus and get on with economy. Ruskin would have recognized the deity worshipped
by country's leader, which he called the "Goddess of getting on." Only Ruskin recognized that
she tended to favor "not of everybody's getting on – but only of somebody's getting on,"
-- what he called a "vital, or rather deathful, distinction." For capitalists, getting on
post-Covid means executives working remotely while the rank and file return to the factory
floor without adequate face masks, and large corporations, not public input, determines the
blueprints for our lives.
The issue of worker safety does matter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but
not because he fears that some will get sick or die, but for a potential "
epidemic of litigation ." In the next pandemic relief legislation, McConnell is looking to
solve the problem of worker safety by shielding corporations from lawsuits rather than
supporting Centers for Disease Control (CDC) mandated regulations that would both promote
safety and sort out what is and is not actionable.
The Visible Hand
Instead of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, Ruskin advocated a Visible Hand of reasoned
management, a government which could allocate resources effectively and create stores of what
citizens most needed in a crisis. In our day this need not be a literal storehouse but surge
capacity. The Obama administration, for example, contracted with Halyard Health to design a
machine that could turn out 1.5 million N95 masks per day. They were ready to build the machine
in 2018 when the Trump administration
cancelled the program .
In Ruskin's view, the Visible Hand was the guardian of the lives of the citizens, especially
the poor, whose health and lives were their essential property. Ruskin actually defined an
economy as the wise management of labor, applying labor, carefully preserving what it produces,
and wisely distributing those products. A country's wealth is in the people's strength and
health, not their illness and death.
Ruskin's concepts of wealth and illth help us understand the centrality of ethics and
responsibility to economic activity, and how economies are not an assemblage of atomistic human
units but whole systems of people interacting, where the activities of some impact the lives of
all. His work indicates the need for a whole systems approach to a crisis in which what happens
on the beaches of Georgia impacts a nursing home in North Carolina, and visitors to New York
City or New Orleans can carry the infection home. The decisions of one business in a complex
international supply chain can impact the fate of millions.
In unregulated capitalism, Ruskin sussed out what Sigmund Freud might have recognized as the
death drive. Decisions about the economy, he held, must be informed by the essential biologic
basis of life itself: "The real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished
from the bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from astrology, is that
which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life; and which teaches
them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction" ( Unto This Last ).
The Covid crisis has exposed contradictions in market and America First ideology. Without
federal aid to state and local governments, essential personnel are being laid off even as we
declare them heroes. Employer based insurance is failing, but few American politicians are
willing to fully embrace single payer insurance. Meat plant workers are declared essential, but
still subject to deportation, as if famed Revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale had said, "I
only regret that you have but one life to give for my country."
Ultimately, the most dangerous pestilence that threatens the country is not a packet of RNA
called Covid-19 but an economic and political system that does not value true wealth, and
promotes the life of the few while condemning the many to literal sickness unto death.
Excellent piece by Parramore. Ruskin is an interesting thinker whose ideas have direct
application to our situation. This was central:
President Trump says that it is time to move on from the coronavirus and get on with
economy. Ruskin would have recognized the deity worshipped by country's leader, which he
called the "Goddess of getting on." Only Ruskin recognized that she tended to favor "not of
everybody's getting on – but only of somebody's getting on," -- what he called a
"vital, or rather deathful, distinction." For capitalists, getting on post-Covid means
executives working remotely while the rank and file return to the factory floor without
adequate face masks, and large corporations, not public input, determines the blueprints
for our lives.
There's one thing I hope the Left learns before too long. Human beings have a religious
impulse. It's not as powerful or as central to our existence as the sexual impulse, but it's
there in all of us, even Richard Dawkins. Like the sexual impulse, the real question is where
will this religious impulse lead us. For the Right, their twisted unChristian conception of
Christianity is a powerful force within their political movement. In fact, it might be said
to be what holds it together and provides the energy for their unfortunate efforts.
Meanwhile, the Left, considering itself too firmly ensconced in modernity to recognize the
reality of the religious impulse despite modern science's identification of it, denies the
existence of this basic and potentially powerful human trait. We saw some of the activists
and organizers in Bernie's campaign employ deep organizing techniques which are basically
spiritual exercises. We know Thomas Berry's calls for a new religion focused on humanity's
relationship to the Earth and its creatures. The Left needs to acknowledge our spiritual
aspects and work to turn our religious impulse away from patriarchalism, misogyny and
homophobia of the Right and toward love for the Earth, our fellow humans and our fellow
creatures. That's where reside the power and persistence necessary to overcome our
religiously misinspired opponents.
There is a gene that creates within the brain a structure that either perceives 'god' (my
view), or generates a sense of spirituality in [sic] reality. The university of Waterloo has
been doing studies on this for at least thirty years. Anything we have evolved has a calorie
cost to maintain, so it must serve purpose in furthering life. There have been many debates
about this gene but no one can argue it's not about spirituality, and/or god, and/or what the
Druids what call magic. To me there's always been, that question, we can go back and have
data to 1/billion of 1/billion to 1/billion⁶⁶⁷(minus) of a second before
the inflation singularity that created this universe. But then, why? As the said in the
'Little Prince', 'it's only with the heart one sees rightly'.
The little prince is right. What we call spirituality is intelligence above what is
necessary our daily existence. Our "daily bread". Our sixth sense is probably more accurate
and reliable than all our rationalizations combined. But it is a thing that can't be
orchestrated by religion or politics. What happens between people in groups when fear is
eliminated is a sudden change toward choices that are the most sensible. As long as the
process isn't interfered with. That's the difficulty. It's like leaving nature alone long
enough for it to recover from human devastation.
What we call spirituality is intelligence above what is necessary our daily
existence.
(although if I was trying to do your comment complete justice, I would have to simply
re-quote the whole thing, it was that good)
Sometimes Susan the other, you're so profound, it almost hurts!
Certainly for me, I've got very little, comparatively, in my life right. I've passed on
opportunities which would made me rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And much else besides.
Mostly because I've overanalysed and rationalised things away. What I've got right has been,
conversely, down to following my intuition. If humanity could unlock that potential within
us, just think what we could do.
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–
A response to Oliver's powerful poem from Thomas Berry:
The continuity between the human and the cosmic was experienced with special sensitivity
in the Chinese world [A] sense of the sacred dimension of the Earth is involved, a type of
awareness less available from our traditional Western religions. This lack of intimacy with
the natural was further extended when Descartes proposed that the living world was best
described as a mechanism, because there was no vital principle integrating, guiding, and
sustaining the activities of what we generally refer to as the living world.
Yet, strangely enough, a new sense of the sacred dimension of the universe and the
planet Earth is becoming available from our more recent scientific endeavors. The
observational sciences, principally through the theories of relativity, quantum physics,
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the sense of a self-organizing universe, and the more
recent chaos theories have taken us beyond a mechanistic understanding of an objective
world. We know there is a subjectivity in all our knowledge and that we ourselves,
precisely as intelligent beings, activate one of the deepest dimensions of the universe.
Once again, we realize that knowledge is less a subject-object relationship than it is a
communion of subjects, .
Thomas Berry, "The Gaia Hypothesis: Its Religious Implications" in The Sacred
Universe
I'm glad you are making this point to acknowledge:
Human beings have a religious impulse.
From my direct experience, Native Americans seem to center their activism in a Spiritual
Context. Prayer for Guidance–for courage–for wisdom–for
compassion–before starting up on anything. imo, it keeps the priorities in focus.
I'm posting in this thread even though I'm not sure it fits. The religious or spiritual
impulse appears to be universal, there doesn't seem any doubt about that. Here's an
interesting article on Big Gods, or moralizing Gods.
Big data analyses suggest that moralizing gods are rather the product than the drivers of
social complexity: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190320141116.htm
-- -- -- -- --
One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs
were key. According to this theory people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe
in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict
this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which
we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity."
Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods
who cared about human morality.
Such rituals create a collective identity and feelings of belonging that act as social
glue, making people to behave more cooperatively. "Our results suggest that collective
identities are more important to facilitate cooperation in societies than religious beliefs,"
says Harvey Whitehouse.
-- -- -- -
I can definitely recommend Ruskin's "Unto This Last". I obtained it(among several others
that had been on my list(from NC) for a while) just before Covid.
short book wonderfully written.
and kicks you in the gut like some new revelation.
turns out that divorcing "Economics" from "Political Economy" was a mistake.
treating the former as if it were a natural science, like Physics or Chemistry let alone Pure
Mathematics is deleterious.
It ignores and neglects all the amorphous and ephemeral things that make this Life worth
living .how can you quantify a sunset or a moonrise or the smell of your newborn's hair or a
first kiss?
the Economists have taken reductive essentialism to absurd extremes .and somehow convinced a
great many of us to go along to our ultimate destruction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHOhD0RT9NU
Marx called this sort of thing Reification .giving something a Quality it doesn't truly
possess. Money as the Holy Cracker in the Temple of Moloch.
or, the morality of a Serpent: I shall Devour.(see: Joseph Campbell:"a serpent is a "motile
alimentary canal")
we're expected to feed ourselves and our children into the flaming bronze maw of their idol(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch )
as if "The Economy" is some thunderstorm or Holy Mountain, instead of a Human Creation.
"There is no such thing as Society" .and "TINA" .and these moronic "protesters" holding signs
that say "Arbiet macht frie" apparently unaware of the provenance of that phrase .after all ,
we stopped really teaching the Humanities like History quite a while ago.
we forget that "They" require our assent and consent to this "sacrifice"(L:"to make holy")
that without that consent, they have nothing not even their precious wealth(which is what,
these days? electrons moving in a database, somewhere?).
now, "They" have as much as admitted that things like the Stock Market are disconnected
from Reality that the Casino doesn't need Main Street and Human Beings to function.
This, after decades of training us to believe just the opposite. Why else put a stock market
ticker at the bottom of every cable news channel as if all that mattered to us'n's?
One of my favorite words is Eudaimonia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia ) but
you only learn about that from the Humanities.
another of my favorite words is Thaumazein "Wonder", or "Awe" also from ancient Greek
Philosophy
we've allowed the most withered souls to define the Good for us
Now, when all their works lie in ruins around us .and their narrow and anti-humanist,
mechanistic absurdity and cruelty are on full display has there ever been a better time to
turn away? To sit and think about what matters?
Withdraw your Consent.
" O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass.
But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe.
Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect.
Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo- hush! The old noontide
sleepeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it not just now drink a drop of happiness --
-- An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisketh over it, its
happiness laugheth. Thus -- laugheth a God. Hush! --
-- 'For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness!' Thus spake I once and thought myself
wise. But it was a blasphemy: that have I now learned. Wise fools speak better.
The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a
breath, a whisk, an eye-glance -- little maketh up the best happiness. Hush!
-- What hath befallen me: Hark! Hath time flown away? Do I not fall? Have I not fallen --
hark! into the well of eternity?
-- What happeneth to me? Hush! It stingeth me -- alas -- to the heart? To the heart! Oh,
break up, break up, my heart, after such happiness, after such a sting!
-- What? Hath not the world just now become perfect? Round and ripe? Oh, for the golden round
ring -- whither doth it fly? Let me run after it! Quick!"
( http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/70 )
Hey Amphortas the Hippie!
I enjoy reading your comments and the slices of your life served up to us – you are an
interesting guy and a good antidote to me whenever I am disheartened by the stuff I am
bombarded with by the exceptional Americans foisted upon the world as typical.
Who would believe that I read Thus spake Zarathustra 'cause of your comments? I sent the link
on to my son who is 16 and has been physically separated from us for months caught in this
vortex. We'll see how it is taken compared to Mnm.
Thanks
Aww. Thanks, dude/dudette.
zarathustra is very accessible.
i've noticed that lots of people(like my wife) have been taught somehow that they can't read
stuff like that, so don't even try.
just another crime against us all.
aristotle can be pretty dense as can a lot of the more familiar
philosophers(hegel=ugh–) but Nietszche is pretty easy to get into, due to his style
.although some translations are better than others(I like the translation linked above for
Zarathustra the KJV Tone works for me.)
One shouldn't be intimidated by Marcus Aurelius, Herodotus or Boethius, either.
Isn't it ironic, that ruskin was able to see our issues and spoke to people with such
force as to effect our lives and in a sense is partly responsible for the world we have
today.
When he spoke at oxford in 1870 cecil rhodes was so impressed he supposedly carried a copy of
it with him in the future.
The ideas expressed by ruskin convinced rhodes that he needed to save "good english society"
from "the masses"(the poor english and all the rest of the savages who wouldn't understand
how to be proper."
Rhodes and his cohorts,in the british upper crust and media establishment created "the
british rountable" in 1891. These roundtablers did lots of things..Both through official
channels and by ways of running the largest newspapers who really perfected propaganda,
decades before goebbels. Eventually they formed in 1919, "the royal institute of
international relations" in britian. and "the council on foreign relations" in new york"
Generations of these members have really "made" the world that exists today. Which is why the
"conspiracy theories" exist . when people look at the lists of who
Personally, I think there ought to be study in the relationships these people had with each
other and with history. As with any family, they may be related, but not always on the same
page but still have the power of the family name and the prestige.
The council on foreign relations is the wellspring of "neoliberalism" neo consevatism too ,
for that matter. Their place in history is central. This is the axis of the "anglo-american
establishment"
Hence the folly of an economy based on debt rather than equity: it must continue to run or
risk cascading defaults.
Then why do we have government privileges for private debt creation in the first place?
Because subtle theft is easier and more "efficient" than honest sharing?
Perhaps science is the religion of the PMC. An unquestioning belief in anything
scientists/big pharma/tech wizzards throw on the table, whether it's GMOs, vaccines
containing mercury, thalidomide, social media, driverless cars or trips to Mars.
I use to go to Nevada regularly and mostly via the Donner Pass. Just a roundabout way of
suggesting that some might consider the Donner Party as the right way to have a society. They
almost made it over the pass, missing it by a couple of days, despite taking a
shortcut that was actually a longcut using bad information from a book, IIRC. They were told
repeatedly by those who had gone West before not to do so, but
In Nashville, TN last month, a masked protester at the state capitol carried a sign
"Sacrifice the Weak." I was shocked when a local news show reported on protesters and filmed
this sign along with other signs and protesters, and the reporter did not comment on this
horrible, Nazi-like statement.
Have there been any prominent religious leaders who have given counsel on the sacrificial
nature of a return to work to save the economy. At what point is the risk to human life and
health compensated by an economic return?
Come to think of it, does it not seem odd that with many prominent religious figures, none
of them seem to be willing to speak up on how greed is destroying the world and all of the
wealthy owners of capital that are its promoters? Greed is a major sin in almost every
religion, yet you hardly ever see any religious clergy give sermons on how widespread and
dangerous greed is or publicly admonish Wall Street if they hold themselves up to be the
moral leaders of society.
The fundamental problem we have with all the "very smart people" who think economics is a
science is that I can't write an equation that will convince these masters of the universe
that they shouldn't be @$$holes.
I can't tell anyone that even if it doesn't profit you there's a reason to choose to help
your fellow humans.
I also can't define a relationship that explains why even if you can figure out how to
stay within the letter of the law and exploit a loop hole to make more money but only in way
that hurts other people, you shouldn't do it. Or why you shouldn't write a law or lobby for a
law that exists only so it can be abused.
These guys will never accept the concept of illth because it challenges their concept of
wealth. And so it goes
I dont gamble with my life. The shrewd will take the necessary precautions and keep
themselves concealed as much as possible. The stupid will not take these precautions, likely
get sick and some will perish .
It amazes me that protesters and policymakers are still treating this as an impossible
tradeoff -- a false dichotomy -- between life and money, when it's clear that success lies
with practical solutions, of which there are many, to achieve both. Starting with masks!
I love the idea of billionaires leading the way, demonstrating the efficacy of their
reopening plans through personal example.
An excellent article on the WSWS:
"...In the "brutal economics" of capitalism, the lives lost to the COVID-19 pandemic are
simply the cost of doing business. While trillions of dollars have been spent propping up
financial markets, no serious efforts have been made to contain the pandemic, and whatever
mitigation measures have been put in place, including the closure of businesses, are being
rapidly abandoned.
"The efforts by the ruling class to counterpose workers' lives to livelihoods is an
entirely false choice. Both can be defended with the necessary allocation of social resources
to stop and eradicate COVID-19 and all other communicable diseases. Non-essential workplaces
must remain closed for as long as it takes for these measures to be put in place.
"But containing the pandemic requires an investment in social infrastructure that the
capitalist class is not willing to make. The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the utter
incompatibility of the capitalist system with the preservation of the most basic social
right: the right to life." https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/16/pers-m16.html
"I also don't know why you would quote a Wapo article, uncritically, in response to fairleft.
Why would I care what they say about anything? They represent power. I consider them no more
reliable on pharma imperialism as they are on military imperialism."
oglalla@102
You answer the question yourself. Nobody is suggesting that anyone read the Washington Post
uncritically. I am surprised that you should accuse b of having done so. The evidence is that
he has read the Post critically-as we all have to do in a culture in which the major source
of news, for everyone, is a media compromised enormously by its allegiances, particularly its
allegiance to capitalism.
Read the Wapo critically and you will be left with a residue of information which can be
cross checked by various means, once you have done that you can evaluate the importance of
its conclusions. It is what we all have to do.
Maybe this story from the Toronto Star will help explain why so many people are dying:
"Three of the largest for-profit nursing home operators in Ontario, which have had
disproportionately high numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths, have together paid out more
than $1.5 billion in dividends to shareholders over the last decade, the Star has found.
"This massive sum does not include $138 million paid in executive compensation and $20
million in stock buybacks (a technique that can boost share prices), according to the
financial reports of the province's three biggest publicly traded long-term-care home
companies, Extendicare, Sienna Senior Living and Chartwell Retirement Residences.
"That's a total of more than $1.7 billion taken out of their businesses."
Beneath all the uninformed, pretentious anecdote swapping about stats and panaceas, the
drivelling over whether or not there is a pandemic or whether Bill Gates, Soros or the KKK
planned and executed it on behalf of haute finance, something very simple is taking
place.
Capitalism, which devours people and turns lives into capital, having made a pandemic disease
of the sort now surrounding us inevitable, is protecting itself. Its major fear is that if
there are too many victims-cf The Black Death- the price of labour may rise to the extent
that it impinges on the rate of profit. It dare not consider the possibility that the working
class will organise itself to put an end to the system, as an alternative to doing what men
have done throughout the history of epidemics- blaming everything on an angry deity or an
elite such as the Illuminati, the Council for Foreign Affairs or bloggers corrupted by
money.
By Peter Dorman, professor of economics at The Evergreen State College. Originally
published at Econospeak
Donald Trump, cheering on
his "warriors" who demand that states lift their lockdown and distancing orders (where they
have them), would have you believe this is about bringing the economy back to life so ordinary
people can get their jobs and normal lives back. Elitist
liberals who work from home and have country estates to retreat to don't care, but "real"
people do.
The reality is different. The shuttering of stores, restaurants, hotels and workplaces
didn't begin with government orders and won't end with them. If the rate of new infection
and death is too high, a lot of people won't go along. Not everyone, but enough to make a huge
economic difference. Ask any small business owner what it would mean for demand to drop by
25-50%. Lifting government orders won't magically restore the economic conditions of
mid-winter. So what's it about? Even as it makes a big PR show of supporting state by state
"liberation" in America, the Trump administration is
advising state governments on how to remove workers from unemployment insurance once orders
are lifted. Without government directives, employers can demand workers show up, and if they
refuse they no longer qualify. And why might workers refuse? Perhaps because their workplaces
are still unsafe and they have vulnerable family members they want to keep from getting
infected? Not good enough -- once the state has been "liberated".
How should we respond to this travesty? First, of course, by telling the truth that an
anti-worker, anti-human campaign is being conducted under the guise of defending workers. If
the Democrats weren't themselves such a tool of business interests we might hear that narrative
from them, but the rest of us are free to speak out and should start doing it, loudly, wherever
we can.
Second, one of the laws of the land is the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which
gives workers the right to
refuse imminently hazardous work. This hasn't been used very often, nor is there much case
law around it, but the current pandemic is a good reason to pull it out of storage.
If there are public interest law firms looking for something useful to do during distancing,
they could advertise their willingness to defend workers who need to stay home until work is
safe -- while still getting their paycheck. If employers thought the choice was between public
support for workers sitting out the pandemic or their support for them we might hear less about
"liberation".
They want to throw people off of unemployment while using the virus threat to stop any
serious protests against that. It is literally biological warfare against working people.
Same class war as before, but now with CBW.
Taught it for years. This is the biggest net and is the # 1 Cited Violation for 1910/1926
and MSHA–ever.
OSHA 654 5(a)1 The General Duty Clause.
OSHA Laws & Regulations OSH Act of 1970
OSH Act of 1970
Table of Contents
General Duty Clause
Complete OSH Act Version ("All-in-One")
SEC.
5.
Duties
(a)
Each employer --
(1)
29 USC 654
shall furnish to each of his employees employment and a place of employment which are free
from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical
harm to his employees;
(2)
shall comply with occupational safety and health standards promulgated under this Act.
(b)
Each employee shall comply with occupational safety and health standards and all rules,
regulations, and orders issued pursuant to this Act which are applicable to his own actions
and conduct.
Quick Take –Two way street.
Employers mus t mitigate hazards. Employees must comply with mitigation.
No Employer Mitigation=Breaking the Law=No Employee requirement to work in Unsafe
Conditions.
"Lifting all boats" was always a lie. It was simply a way to sell trickle down by claiming
that the objectively observable inequality it produced would somehow help everyone,
eventually, sort of. There was not and has never been a plan by the Conservative Movement to
lift all boats. Only a plan to feign interest in doing so.
I agree with most of your comment except the "smarter" part.
They don't seem smart to me, they openly plunder and loot and spit in the populace's
faces. They don't even pretend to believe in or work for a "common good" anymore, really.
That is the story of the 21st Century in the US, starting with Baby Bush II. (Okay, I get
that the Obama crew seemed "smart" or sophisticated to the PMC and comfortable liberals, but
how smart were they if they led to the open Kleptocratic Disruption of Trumpism and the God
Emperor?)
What the Elites have that the proles don't is in-group solidarity. (And a captured Media
establishment.) They protect their own, while the hoi polloi fight one another for
scraps.
What is the death rate among the working age population?
Seem like a tough hill to die on given the curve has flattened, hospitals are not
overflowing, and the economy is teetering on the edge of depression.
No one has a vaccine, this isn't going away any time soon. It's time to focus on
protecting the most vulnerable instead of pretending this effects everyone equally.
Allow states to cut benefits? Come on, UI benefits are taxed for pete's sake. 'Available
to work' basically means you have start at 8am the next day which is doesn't align with any
reality of hiring except in low end service sector jobs.
The other really significant thing is that 're-opening' doesn't necessarily mean returning
to business. For example, Musk insists on re-opening Tesla the assumption being that sales
are there to be had if they re-open. But if not no sales, no need for employees back down the
drain we go.
Same for restaurants. retail, hotels, transit and white collar jobs – attorneys,
architects, CPAs
The poorest and the most desperate actually. Some people still have not received any money
from the state or federal governments. The quarantine started about two months ago. So no
job, no income, no money, and no joke. No matter how shrewd or smart you are sometimes you
are not making the decisions. Reality makes them for you.
Well till the markets crashes again and they need to save the assets of the
wealthiest.
I just got a text from a buddy who is an electrician. His company just told him they are
not expecting to take any major work till second quarter of next year. They will only be
taking emergency calls. This is in Chicago.
Granted, it's a union site, but one point that they make is how union saturation raises
the wages for all workers within a given region.
In Appalachia, I was offered $15hr. to work as an electrician. In Chicagoland, starting
wages were close to or more than double that. Guess where I went in order to establish a
salary history? And no, the cost of living is really not too different between those two
places, but opportunities sure were.
(moderators: in response to an "Eat the Rich!" comment, I posted a link with recipes: I
apologize for this. Admittedly, it was in poor taste.)
On Monday, the price of West Texas Intermediate petroleum fell below
$30 a barrel for the first time in four years.
Elliot Smith at CNBC reports that BP CFO Brian Gilvary is braced for petroleum demand
actually to contract in 2020.
This prediction is very bad news for US fracking firms, most of which need a price point of
from $40 to $60 a barrel to make their hydraulic fracturing method of oil production
profitable.
In the Democratic primary debate on Sunday, Bernie Sanders pledged to ban fracking entirely,
and even Joe Biden said no
new fracking would be allowed. Fracking may be moribund anyway by November, and if a
Democrat wins the presidency, the industry may never recover.
Not only is petroleum likely headed way below that profitability floor, but many energy
firms involved with fracking are deeply in debt, and had taken out the debts with their
petroleum fields as collateral. Since their collateral is worth only half what it used to be,
the banks will call in their loans. Other energy firms involved in fracking have held
significant assets in their own stocks, the price of which just zoomed to earth like a crashing
meteor.
Fracking has been banned by countries such as France, and by states such as New York because
it is highly polluting, leaving behind ponds of toxic water. Moreover, research has
demonstrated that the process of fracking, which involves pumping water under high pressure
underground to break up rocks and release oil or natural gas, causes gargantuan
methane emissions that had earlier been underestimated as much as 45% . The
methane in the atmosphere is burgeoning, and scientists had puzzled over why. But scientists
have fingered the culprit: fracking. Methane is 80 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as
carbon dioxide over two decades, and carbon dioxide is no slouch. A quarter of the global
heating effect of greenhouse gas emissions put out by humans burning fossil fuels is owing to
methane emissions. Rapid heating is melting the North and South Poles, causing sea level rise
that will soon be calamitous.
Given that the world population is increasing and that developing countries such as China
and India and Indonesia are seeing more and more people abandoning their bicycles or bus rides
for mopeds or automobile ownership, for the world to want less petroleum this year than it did
last is extremely unusual.
We are getting a preview courtesy COVID-19 of what will happen through the next decade and a
half as electric vehicles take off, significantly reducing demand.
The world produces about $100 million barrels of petroleum a day, and given the Saudi
determination to expand production starting on April 1, it could be producing 102 million
barrels a day later this spring. The world may only want
90 mn. barrels a day this spring. What with the novel coronavirus pandemic, fewer trucks
and cars will be on the road. Petroleum is largely used for transportation fuel.
Do you know what happens if demand falls and production increases? The price falls. In fact,
it doesn't just fall. It collapses. It takes a deep dive. It falls off a cliff. It craters deep
beneath the earth's crust.
How steep the fall is depends in part on whether Saudi Arabia and Russia keep playing
chicken. Saudi Arabia wants to discipline Moscow, which rejected OPEC + production quotas aimed
at reducing supply and supporting a $60 per barrel price. So Riyadh is opening the spigots,
upping its production by two million barrels a day. Saudi Aramco says it is comfortable with a
price point of $30 a barrel. But unfortunately for Aramco, the price may not have stopped
falling.
Andreas de Vries at
Oilspot.com believes the price could fall to as little as $10 a barrel later this spring.
In 2019 the price tended to be around $60 a barrel.
The fossil fuel companies that lack deep pockets could well just fail this year.
Brenda Sapino Jeffreys quotes Jason Cohen, an attorney at Bracewell in Houston, as saying
of the oil industry, "There is, I'd say, a sellers market for bankruptcy talent." His
observation gave me my title.
This steep decline in stock prices and oil prices comes on top of a 5-year run in which the
market has destroyed 90% of the value of US investor stocks in oil services. That is, we could
this year be entering an oil market crisis as severe as the
Asian banking crash of 1997-1998 .
The difference is that by the time fossil fuels come out of their economic doldrums,
renewables will have stolen a further march on them. From here on in, hydrocarbons are
beginning their death spiral. Friends don't let friends invest in petroleum companies, and
nobody should have those stocks in their retirement accounts– if they want ever to
retire.
There is a cost and "True cost". The latter is often hidden and might higher the the
cost.
Notable quotes:
"... The Price Mechanism Theory only works well when there is honest and accurate information to understand the true costs, but our leadership is corrupt and has not been honest with us. In order to protect both American interests and American citizens, it is important to develop mechanisms to fully understand the consequences of many of our policies and who is making them. Who ..."
Our elites have been responding to incentives which are beneficial to their institutions,
and China, but detrimental to America.
A shell of a piano in the lobby of the Lee Plaza Hotel. The decades-long decline of the U.S.
automobile industry is acutely reflected in the urban decay of Detroit, the city lovingly
referred to as Motor City. (Photo by Timothy Fadek/Corbis via Getty Images)
George D. O'Neill Jr. We have come to a point in our nation's public discourse where there is a widespread
realization that many of the economic policies pursued and promoted by our political, business
and media elites have failed us in multiple ways. We have heard our trade policies called "Free
Trade" and "Free Market", but those statements were often dishonest.
When crafting these agreements, our elites have been responding to incentives which are
beneficial to their institutions but detrimental to the well-being of American citizens.
... ... ...
The same is true for manufacturing businesses. The closing of a factory has huge costs for a
neighborhood: unemployed people. Not just those from the factory, but the people who work at
companies which supply goods and services to that factory. The consequences of a factory
closing cascades through the economy. The tax base for that neighborhood is also eroded, which
reduces the community's ability to maintain and deliver essential services and support civic
institutions.
We cannot just turn off a factory like a light switch and turn it back on at will when the
Chinese decide to raise their prices at a later date.
None of this takes into account the quality of the goods that we receive. We have just
become aware that more than 90% of our pharmaceutical antibiotics are manufactured in China.
When you hear of the big drug recalls, keep in mind many of them are from China, which is
famous for ubiquitous and flagrant corruption as well as a disregard for quality control. Do we
really know if our antibiotics are safe?
Now, back to our leadership, which we have relied on to guide our nation. Their incentives
often lead them to make choices which do not benefit the American people. The Chinese have
famously made generous
deals with a sitting vice-president's son and a Secretary of State's stepson that likely
insured high level government silence about their predatory practices. The Chinese have
purchased important media assets, such as the largest film distribution company in America and
inked lucrative media deals with huge media companies to purchase silence about their predatory
behavior. The same is true with many other industries.
... ... ...
The Price Mechanism Theory only works well when there is honest and accurate information
to understand the true costs, but our leadership is corrupt and has not been honest with us. In
order to protect both American interests and American citizens, it is important to develop
mechanisms to fully understand the consequences of many of our policies and who is making them.
Who is making the decisions is often just as important as what is being
decided.
George D. O'Neill, Jr., an artist, is the founder of The Committee for Responsible
Foreign Policy and a board member of The American Ideas Institute, the parent of The American
Conservative. Mr. O'Neill has been in the mining industry for more than four decades. He and
his wife reside in Florida.
Correct. The so called "free markets & trade" worked in conditions after WWII, when US
goverment used it's military and political influence to set up favorable economic &
trade conditions for US. It's an utopian vision, that has nothing to do with real world.
It's important to recognize that it's not realistic to do all manufacturing in America, at
least in the short term. We consume too much. Before the virus, we were already running on
all cylinders as employment was concerned and have been for a few years.
There is a significant difference however in our trade dependencies being on China,
versus Japan, Mexico, Vietnam, or India. The former is a geopolitical rival, the latter are
not. In fact, laying groundwork to move more of our trade to the latter builds up China's
regional rivals at the expense of China, and at comparatively less expense to us.
It's not healthy for a future multipolar world for such a capable power projector as
China to be so disproportionately profiting from declining hegemon America.
If you think the hallowing of the US economy with it increasing wage inequalities, outsized
wealth allocation to financial sectors, increasingly political divisions, etc. is because
CHINA BAD, then you are no different than the other corporate profiteers who dug us in this
hole in the first place. This is how the corporatists are trying to avoid blame for their
fundamentalist policies over the past four decades. They lash out, "It's only the BAD
Chinese, everything will be better if we just move it to Vietnam/Bangladesh/Ethiopia."
You ascribe things to me that have nothing to do with what I said. The Chinese are not bad,
just a competitor, and China is not responsible for America's own choices.
You're just replacing one utopian thinking about free trade, with another about economic
protectionism. The world doesn't fit neatly around ideological dogma.
Until you square America's overconsumption you have to tolerate trade deficits. You can
make strategic choices about where they come from at least. Free traders were not honest
about impacts on domestic industry. Domestic protectionism is not being honest about the
fact that for it to succeed, consumption of imported goods, and some domestic, to free up
capacity to import substitute, has to tank, without the prospect of enough domestic
production happening to replace them, and certainly not at anything like the price levels
that exist currently.
In the long run overconsumption should be attacked. Strategic, mutually beneficial trade
relationships will still exist. In the short run we should be more careful about the source
of trade deficits. Overconsumption will not be solved overnight. But that's not a neat
campaign slogan.
I don't disagree with the problems of an over-consumption reliant economy, which prefers we
purchase new TVs every 3 years, smartphones every 2 years, and 3 new winter coats every
season. But it's a huge fallacy to imagine that reallocating production to Vietnam or
Bangladesh will reduce China's power. Who will be creating those factories? Sorry, Chinese
investment. Where will the logistics chain need to connect? Sorry, all roads will lead to
China - both for its 1.4 billion consumer and their ability to control the higher end of
the manufacturing. When will they demand China's inclusion in a grouping like TPP? Sorry,
within 1-2 years of signing that supposed "Keep China Out" agreement. Guess whose economies
will be even more reliant on China? You guessed it, all those supposed U.S. allies who want
no part in global decoupling.
It was ok to let low margin manufacturing move offshore because Americans were going to
move up the value chain. These other countries, like China, would develop their economy,
lift a few billion people out of poverty, and transform themselves into beacons of freedom
and democracy across the developing world. The globalists told us this over and over again.
China (and India) would make our plastic junk and we would sell them financial products and
services like credit default swaps and make a killing!
And that's how it worked out. The bankers made out. No one cared about the displaced
factory workers because it was their own fault they weren't smart enough to become Wall
Street masters of the universe. Buying American, we were told way back in the 80s by Saint
Ronald Reagan was a scam to support corrupt unions and lazy management. How dare they
demand, for example, that Japanese car makers locate here in the US. We should just let
them import what they want and let Ford go bankrupt. Union busting was more important than
anything else.
What you want with trade is to keep it somewhat balanced, and watch employment. To continue
the example Japan exports roughly twice to us what we export to them. Ideally that'd be
more even, but who is going to make more products to export to Japan, or produce Japanese
products here? You'll have to fight for workers already being employed elsewhere. And many
on the right probably would not like the idea of more immigrants to help staff production,
or to free up Americans to staff it.
America does suck up too many talented people into well paid jobs that do little to
advance us, but certainly not enough to correct the trade imbalances of every country we
trade with. Probably not even Japan whose imbalance is a tiny fraction of China's.
America's trade imbalances are a collaboration between foreign producers seeing
opportunities, domestic elites seeing major profit, but most importantly Americans
themselves whose consumption impulses are so, so lucrative. Americans cannot make all the
stuff that Americans want right now. Enter immigrants. Enter outsourcing. Enter major trade
deficits. People profit on the exchange, but this is a setup that America collectively has
voted for with its wallet, over and over again.
Also America makes/made products that other people don't want. From 2 by 4 lumber in inches
and feet, when the rest of the world is in metric system, to oversize fridges and pick-up
trucks that do not fit in the European or Japanese size houses and roads.
"Deliver a good product at a price and quality acceptable to the customer."
LOL. Obviously a failed businessman. The purpose is to put your customer's money in your
pocket. If your customer is making a profit off of your product, raise the price. If the
customer balks and buys from a different vendor, buy all the vendors. Create a monopoly.
Once you have a monopoly, stop paying whiney American workers who expect decent pay and
respect, and have Chinese slaves make your product. The purpose of the "Free Market" is not
about price. It's about maximizing shareholder value. It's not about creating good jobs,
America or any of that other nostalgia from the pre-Free Market days.
It's about liberty. The liberty of the property and capital owning class to keep their
wealth (their wealth is the same thing as your labor), in their hands and away from you and
your stupid government's grubby, unwashed hands.
The ideal market conditions result in happy customers and profitable businesses. Its true
that ideal market conditions often don't prevail when a monopoly is created. But what makes
it even worse is when government enables those conglomerates to become even larger by
making it impossible for small businesses to compete due to onerous regulations and
gobbletygook tax loopholes gained by conglomerate lobbyists.
I believe the economic policies based on the dominant economic theory in Germany is the
best approach for a solid, competitive economy. That theory is Ordo-liberalism, which
allows government to make sure a proper legal environment for the economy exists to
maintain a healthy level of competition through measures that adhere to market
principles.
The Ordo-liberalists believe if the state does not take active measures to foster
competition, firms with monopoly power will emerge, which will not only subvert the
advantages offered by the market economy, but also possibly undermine good government,
since strong economic power can be transformed into political power. We have seen this
happen in the US and it is BIPARTISAN. In fact some of the worst examples of unholy
alliances between corporations and government come from the Dem side of the aisle.
The open markets, open borders policy has been good for the elite but detrimental for the
US. Millions of immigrants were let in as the jobs they could perform were outsourced to
China and Asia in general. Consumer electronics,textiles,steel, appliances, automotive and
manufacturing of all sorts were allowed to leave. Not everyone can be a coder, work on Wall
Street, for the Government or Academia. This same elite is aghast at the rise of Trump,
what else could anyone have reasonably expected?
The problem is Milton Friedman was wrong about central planning. Adam Smith's Wealth of
Nations was written when communication systems were poor, so localized information was
better. With modern data collection, "big data" analysis, AI and other such tools central
planning exists and works. We call the winners in that planning world companies like
Walmart and Amazon. We also know that central planning in the US worked with less than
perfect data. The War Production Board in the US in WWII did allocate production of all
those things necessary to manufacture Milton Friedman's needle (or more likely a cotter
pin). There were imperfections but we let those run over into the consumer segment of
goods. Flash forward to today, the "free market" is the myth used to convince average
American to allow hedge funds, private equity, and companies like Bain Captial ship their
jobs overseas. Especially as we move to robots, there is no reason to import any
manufactured goods. Likewise, those pesky environmental rules we have? There is no reason
we don't apply those rules to things people seek to sell in the US market--meaning we could
make an importer prove goods were manufactured according to US standards. Health and safety
standards are not sources of "comparative advantage" in free market theories.
And this is why the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Iranians, Japanese, Europeans, Koreans,
don't want their economies run from Wall Street and carefully control the shares owned by
outsiders.
I think on the topic of "planning" its important to clarify. Some call any government
intervention an example of "central planning" while others apply that term only to
Soviet-style Gosplan. Either way the "Knowledge Problem", while true to an extent, is
incomplete. The fact of the matter is we don't need to know everything about the market to
make correct decisions regarding what economic goals we want to set, and there is a scale,
a difference, between something like the American System and Gosplan. Julius Krein's
article in the American Compass was excellent, I'll link it below. One need only look to
the success of the East Asian Tigers or to the US from 1791-1965 (dates vary) to see the
success of a healthy sort of developmentalist "planning". Not all planning has to be
adverse to private business, the most successful types are done in conjunction with it.
There will be imperfections whether the government is involved or not, the fact that
imperfections will exist or that mistakes might be made is no excuse for inaction,
especially when that inaction leads to the situation we're currently in regarding
pharmaceuticals.
Yes, interesting article. I liked how quickly in the article it started talking about risk
and the important role government has in mitigating that risk.
What is also missing from this entire discussion about free markets, which is essential
and it is eschewed or pooh-pooed or entirely not acknowledged by libertarians and
conservatives alike (not that progressive / liberals talk about it), is what is the role of
representative democracy in steering how economy (which is a means to an end, not an end to
itself) should work, what is the role of government, and who's really the sovereign (We the
People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,
and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.....).
Is the government by the people and for the people or it isn't? Are there proper
mechanisms in place to oversee how well operations are conducted by government, according
to approved budgets? Is government supposed to do forecasting and crystal balling solely by
using think tank reports or should have internal professional and knowledgeable analysts
doing this work (I swear on the constitution of the US to serve, etc., etc, etc.).
All this rabbit hole over which libertarians and conservatives starting with Reagan have
been pooping on. Nixon nowadays, or Eisenhower wouldn't be accepted by Republicans, nor FDR
by Democrats... And talking about free markets and democracy, it is puzzling to have just a
duopoly entrenched in the marketplace of political ideas in the US. Everything else is
literally killed.
It's too easy to just blame corrupt elites and therefore let the system itself completely
off the hook. Any system that allows for a small number of private entities to twist
everything to their personal advantage is a system with major structural flaws. The
essential core of the problem is that any system pursued too rigidly and ideologically will
lead to short-sighted decisions that ultimately lead to perverse and absurd
outcomes.Offshoring most of our manufacturing wasn't a corrupt decision made by a small
cabal of villains. It was a logical, yet ultimately destructive, result of blind and
unthinking pursuit of pure "free trade."
Imagine a society (like the U.S.) to be like an organism with a heart, lungs, brain,
limbs, etc. Now imagine that each part of the body is told to maximize its own benefit
without any concern for the organism as a whole.
Those in charge of the brain say "We function better with more blood flow, so let's
block off blood flow to the arms and legs so that we get more. Great idea!" Now the
organism's brain is doing great, but its arms and legs wither and die.
"We are benefiting from the increased blood flow too," says the lungs, "but the heart
just isn't producing enough for us to really flourish." What if we outsource blood pumping
to an external entity that promises us more volume? So now the heart dies and what is left
of the organism is now hooked to an external machine to keep it alive.
"Why do we have to rely on an inefficient mouth and teeth to give us our source
material?" chimes the stomach. "How about a feeding tube to give us cheaper and faster raw
materials?" Etc etc etc.
On and on it goes with some parts doing great from their perspective, but with the
overall organism being hollowed out and weakened.
The best type of economic system in a country is a mixed one that blends together
capitalism with some degree of central thinking and planning (egads, heresy!) about how
decisions could adversely affect the long term health of the country as a whole.
Nice comparison. Are you letting us think and believe that one part of the body ends up
thinking that is in fact totally independent and can leave all the rest wither and die?
With deep psychopathic tendencies, that filters all the stimuli and the information
received from the body, except its own?
The communists had said that capitalism would sell the seeds of its own destruction. Our
elites came up with free trade but chose to ignore that free trade was merely a facade to
export jobs and import goods with them skimming the profit. They chose to ignore all the
financial (and political) machinations like currency rigging, state subsidies, forced state
sharing or ownership of technology when off shored to China, they choise to ignore prison
labor and others. This isnt about free trade or free markets because there is no such
thing. Every nation has a different social welfare system, medical system, tax system,
copyright and patent system, system of legal bribery and payoff, etc and each is meant to
tip the scales of free markets and free trade to their advantage (and in the case of China
a technological and monopolistic and militaristic advantage). We are now at a point where
the game and the cards have been revealed though the Democrats have been profiting for so
long that they want to keep the game going with the Chinese and other foreign nations (its
easy money to line their pockets and their campaign funds since they dont have to listen to
their constituents diverse views...they just need to manage them and listen to Chinese
demands). Id say the american citizenry is boiling mad and arent far away from boiling over
but we shall see where it goes or if it goes anywhere. To date Trumps restrictions on
immigration and his trade deals are better than the nonexistent policies of the democrats
but they are will woefully catering to the elites and lacking in spine and substance to do
as Trump promised.
I think prison labour is more relevant and widespread in the US rather than China. China
has all the political interest to provide work for all the free multitudes teaming in their
cities and countryside, why to give that to prisoners?
Same as the story with the Uighur camps. Just seen recently a Reuters article on the
Russian vessel arriving in Germany to finish laying down the NS2 pipeline, with satellite
pictures, etc. Just a ship. However, there was no picture provided to the world to show the
massive developments required to house 1 million people, not one, and I looked.
Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine to see statements that don't stand close scrutiny.
The Price Mechanism Theory only works well when there is honest and accurate information
to understand the true costs [ ]
You're conflating the economic with the political. There is nothing wrong with Mises'
work on prices and how they coordinate an advanced, widely distributed, division-of-labor
economy. It works in the "macro" as well as the "micro" -- because that is an artificial
distinction (something Mises could tell you about, too).
The fallacy is imagining that economic theory is the be-all-end-all. When people think
that, they ignore political considerations and consequences, to the detriment of society at
large. The bottom line is there is nothing wrong with free trade among free countries in a
peaceful world. The political situation of the present world, however, demands a somewhat
more modified approach. If these are the "true costs" you're talking about, fine. But
you've expressed it in such a way as to muddy the waters of what is an honest and accurate
economic theory.
That is because he doesn't understand what really happened in China. If you read this
thread you also see many theories. They are all based on preconceptions and not actually
reading about what happened China after the gang of four were ousted. They understand the
consequences and they theorize about the cause. But they don't have to theorize. There is
an actual history.
China was not selling cheap products to the United States until about three decades
after the job transfers started and it was almost already done by then. The truth is, China
had nothing to export but its labor. It did that by letting American and other companies
set up in China for exploitative wages and protected them by denying its people any rights.
They then built products under American management and training. The products were then
shipped back to the US as "Chinese" products. But they really were American products made
in China. The companies here were not protecting China. They were protecting themselves
directly. The jobs transfer was not an unfortunate side effect. It was the whole point.
China had nothing to trade. Mao had destroyed the economy.
I recall a long time ago when there was a documentary on this topic and one of the workers
from a electric appliance manufacturing facility was interviewed. They were complaining
about the Chinese manufactures taking over their product line with cheaper products and
causing layoffs at the plant. The moderator asked them where they shopped, they replied
"Walmart". When the moderator pointed out that Walmart was the leader in offshoring to get
cheaper products, like the appliances they made, they just stared.
You are going to somehow have to make Americans pay more for the same thing they can get
cheaper from China. Who is going to do that? Not going to be those workers you are trying
to protect, they don't have the money to do that. Price is king to them, it is only those
snobby liberal types that can afford to do that.
Lets say you manage to get our factory worker to buy 1 expensive American shirt instead
of 3 cheap Chinese shirts for the same price. They are not going to get 3 times the life
out of that shirt so they are in the hole for that purchase.
Lets say you are really persuasive and the workers really do change, what about all the
rest of the people that were employed in the retail and supply chain? What are they going
to do? You just put them out of business. You are just deciding to move around who is
unemployed.
What about the exporters? Do you really think that China is going to buy American
products if you don't buy theirs? How did Trumps trade war work out? Have we won yet? As I
recall it cost the average consumer between 500 and 1000 dollars by the time all the
tariffs were applied and the farmers and ranchers in the Midwest that exported there are
now on government welfare because they could not sell their products. His new "deal" was
panned by economists as being nothing more than a minor cosmetic change, the same as the
updated NAFTA deal that really changed little.
It is fun to blame the elites but it is a bit simplistic as the american workers have
not had a problem sacrificing a few other workers to save some of their own money. If you
want to change that you are going to have to start at the bottom and work up.
It should be mentioned that the cheap clothing we buy is rarely made in China. China has
leveled up and no longer makes the general crap people buy. The shirt cheap t-shirt I'm
wearing was made in Vietnam.
A free market with foreign governments is an impossibility. We would have to know every
single that is happening within their government and that will never happen. Indeed our
internal free market is fading away due to cronyism and secrecy within our own governments.
Tax breaks to lure businesses to your state are anti-free market (not to mention the taxes
still have to be paid, by the people who are already there). Tax breaks and subsidies to
companies already in your state (like windmills and solar panels) are anti-free market. So
the conclusion that I draw is the Democrat and Republican parties are imbeciles and crooks
and both parties must be destroyed.
If you believe economic efficiency is the primary value, you would say, "if the Chinese
are stupid enough to sell us products below their costs, we should be happy to take
advantage of their stupidity." True enough .
But it is not true that is what is happening. It never happened. Chinese invited
American companies to manufacture in China. China was selling labor. Not products. It had
no products to sell. But when the American companies in China use Chinese labor to
manufacture American products the products come to America marked "made in China". But
all that the Chinese really sold was cheap labor without rights .
The second thing to know is that the Chinese forbid American companies to use their own
brand names in China. They had to create Chinese companies that are 51% Chinese owned but
wholly American managed with Chinese management in training. The Americans operated as if
they were at home. The only difference is that they had Chinese under studies and the line
workers were Chinese. The American companies didn't care because they were making money
hand over foot. So when they spoke of "free trade" we were selling out America workers and
bringing home cheap goods that our public loved. This was called globalism. That was phase
one.
In the second stage, the Chinese quietly reminded the Americans that these were Chinese
companies and it was time to begin to promote their Chinese understudies. The Americans
didn't care because they still maintained control from America. And they could always find
spots for the management back home. But from the Chinese point of view, they now had
American technology in Chinese companies, run by Chinese. The technology was now
theirs.
They felt free to grow their businesses with wholly owned and controlled subsidiaries
since they now owned the technology. This was when the American companies began to scream
about intellectual property. They cared because the interests of the rich were now being
hurt. When they were stealing American jobs, that was Ok. Only then did our government see
a problem. Shipping American jobs overseas is globalism, but shipping patents and
copyrights is not. Globalism was always a con. It never existed. It was simply a
smokescreen to exploit cheap, unprotected labor in the developing world. They knew from the
start that it was not good for America. It was not a discovery. They didn't care because it
made them rich.
Though I largely agree with the premise of this article the assumptions latent in mr.
O'Neill's thinking specifically the US government has to do anything in reflection to the
Chinese Communist politburo misses the point of freedom and property rights, in an economy
free of the regulatory burden that the oligarchs in pose on the market through their
governmental collusion not to mention the tax burden that helps to maintain the shipping
lanes to China the American manufacturer will be fine. It should also be said for me
environmental point of view free of state protection the perpetrators of mountaintop
removal coal mining,glyphosate manufacture etc. Would find themselves much more vulnerable
to civil lawsuit/tort law.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, built to increase the flow of Russian gas into Europe's biggest
economy, was thwarted five months ago after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed sanctions
that forced workers to retreat. Now, after a three-month voyage circumnavigating the globe,
the Akademik Cherskiy, the Russian pipe-laying vessel that's a prime candidate to finish the
project, has anchored off the German port where the remaining pipeline sections are waiting
to be installed...
Satellite images captured by Planet Labs inc. on May 10 show that sections of pipeline have
been moved to a jetty equipped with a crane for loading. Ship-tracking data shows that a
dredging vessel operated by a Nord Stream 2 contractor, as well as a Russian
pipe-laying-crane ship are also in the vicinity and that the Akademik Cherskiy had moved as
of Wednesday next to the jetty loaded with pipes.
In order to complete the final 100-mile stretch of Nord Stream 2, Russia effectively needs
to use its own vessels due to U.S. sanctions.
The U.S. still thinks that it can
stop Gazprom from finishing the pipeline, but that's insane.
Tens of billions of dollars, along with Putin's reputation as a savvy geopolitical chess
master, have been invested in the pipeline project. However, Moscow is now running out of
viable options. The only move left is to proceed in defiance of sanctions that will adversely
affect many in the higher echelons of the Russian establishment.
This is checkmate.
Yes, this is checkmate...for Putin.
After investing billions of dollars, Gazprom would go bust if they don't finish this pipeline.
So do you really think that more U.S. sanctions will give them even a moment's pause?
Sanctions are pointless now.
The question here is, why was this pipeline such a big deal?
To give you an idea, consider the recently completed
Turkstream pipeline .
The Turkstream pipeline network isn't even fully integrated yet, and it's already having an
impact.
Who it's impacting is the key.
Although Ukraine has not been importing any Russian gas for its domestic needs since November
2015, it has signed a five-year transit contract with Gazprom for a minimum 65bcm in 2020 and
40bcm/year from 2021.
However, transit volumes have fallen 47% year on year in the first four months of 2020,
amounting to 15.5bcm. The steep drop has been linked to European oversupply and low demand,
but also to the lack of transit to the Balkan region after Russian exports to Turkey,
Bulgaria and Greece were diverted to the new TurkStream pipeline from January 2020.
"Our transmission system can transit 110bcm of gas [annually] but this year we expect only
50-55bcm of transit," Makogon added, pointing out that volumes would drop even lower if
Russia commissions Nord Stream 2 , a 55bcm/year subsea pipeline designed to link Russia
directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea.
Ukraine stands to lose $3 Billion a year in transit fees from Russia once Nord Stream 2 is
completed this year. This will devastate Ukraine's budget and economy.
Before you feel any sympathy for Ukraine, consider the
situation that Ukraine put Russia in.
Ukraine's NATO membership ambitions were written into the Ukrainian Constitution in February
2019 via an amendment that also confirmed the goal of eventually joining the European Union.
NATO integration has remained official Ukrainian policy following the April 2019 election
of President Zelenskyy. In early 2020, the country was said to be on track to secure NATO
Enhanced Opportunity Partner status later in the year if the pace of reforms was
maintained.
NATO's mission continues to be "destroy Russia". So you can see why Russia would feel the
need to, at the very least, not help fund an enemy nation.
Plus the potential
consequences of Ukraine entering NATO are terrible.
There are ongoing concerns that membership would allow Ukraine to immediately invoke Article
5 of the NATO treaty, the stipulation that an armed attack against one member state is an
attack against them all.
Fortunately, the new Ukraine government of President Zelensky doesn't appear nearly so eager
for a military confrontation with Russia. Plus public support for joining NATO is dropping.
If I was to make a prediction, I would say that NATO was about to experience a political
setback.
apenultimate
on Thu, 05/14/2020 - 9:50am The past week's unemployment claims came out today, and add
another 2.98 million to the pile. This brings total unemployment claims for the past 8 weeks
(two months or so) to 36.5 million.
Determining unemployment percentages depends on what data you use. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS) shows the employment numbers for the United States in August 2019 as ~157
million ( https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat08.htm ). Admittedly,
that's not March 2020 statistics, but employment numbers would not change all that much in half
of a year.
The St. Louis Federal Reserve has a different set of statistics that show 205.5 million
Americans employed in March 2020 ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
). (They show the August 2019 period with employment at 206 million.)
Why the huge difference? I have no idea. But going forward, I'll use both to determine
unemployment numbers. Remember that in early March 2020, unemployment was already around
3%.
Using the BLS statistics, we get an unemployment rate of 23.16% for the past 8 weeks. Add on
the previous 3% of people unemployed, and you reach 26.16% unemployment.
Using the St. Louis Fed statistics, we get an unemployment rate of 17.76% for the past 8
weeks. Add on the previous 3% of people unemployed, and you reach 20.76% unemployment.
The peak rate of unemployment during The Great Depression was 24.9%. The peak rate of
unemployment during the the Great Recession in 2008 was 10%.
According to BLS statistics, we are already greater than Great Depression unemployment
numbers.
According to the St. Louis Fed, we are already more than double Great Recession numbers and
only about 4 percentage points away from Great Depression peaks.
The Labor Department last week reported April unemployment for the United states at 14.7%,
but this according to their own admission was undercounting the real rates. Be careful of any
numbers coming out of the mainstream media or government sources.
Some jobs will definitely come back, but many will not. For example, JC Penny's reported
that they are permanently closing 200 of their 850 nationwide stores. Those jobs will not be
coming back. There are weekly reports of many cafes, restaurants, and small businesses
shuttering their doors for good. Those jobs will not be coming back.
Even for the companies that do not shut down, it may be a long haul before economic activity
has picked up enough to bring workers back. In most cases, it will not be a quick recovery.
Hang on for a very rough ride. 2 users have voted.
• Headline April 2020 Unemployment Really Was Around 20%, Not 15%
• Bureau of Labor Statistics Disclosed Erroneous Unemployment Surveying for a Second
Month
• About 7.5 Million People in the April Household Survey Were Misclassified as Employed
Instead of Unemployed, per the BLS
• Headline April U.3 Unemployment at 14.7%, Should Have Been 19.5%
• The BLS Had Disclosed the Same Surveying Error Last Month; Where Headline March 2020 U.3
Was 4.4%, It Should Have Been 5.3%
• Per the BLS, Headline Data Will Not Be Corrected: "To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc
actions are taken to reclassify survey responses."
• Nonetheless, Headline April Unemployment Soared to Historic Highs from March: U.3 from
4.4% to 14.7%, U.6 from 8.7% to 22.8% and ShadowStats from 22.9% to 35.4%
• More Realistic, Those Same Unemployment Numbers, Corrected: U.3 from 5.3 % to 19.5%, U.6
from 9.6% to 27.7% and ShadowStats from 23.7% to 39.6%
• April 2020 Payrolls Collapsed by an Unprecedented 20.5 Million Jobs
• Annual Growth in April 2020 Money Supply Measures Soared to Historic Highs
• U.S. Economic Activity Has Collapsed to Great Depression Levels, with the Federal
Reserve Creating Unlimited Money
stated in the very beginning of this video, that of people who were employed in February of
this year, nearly 40% of those earning $40,000 or less have become unemployed. This is an
unprecedented human tragedy that Congress in all their bailouts now totalling about $8 Trillion
have seen fit to throw a one time pittance of $1,200. With mountains of cash going to
corporations and lobbyists, Congress insultingly gave real suffering Americans a few pennies
and in effect told them that their lives do not matter to Washington DC.
"Lifting all boats" was always a lie. It was simply a way to sell trickle down by claiming
that the objectively observable inequality it produced would somehow help everyone,
eventually, sort of. There was not and has never been a plan by the Conservative Movement to
lift all boats. Only a plan to feign interest in doing so.
I see the current situation more like the sinking of the Titanic (whether caused by the
virus or shady financial dealing, it doesn't matter). The rich passengers get the lifeboats
and the rest of the passengers get the ice water. A few survived in the water, so it's time
to look to the future. Crony capitalism in a nutshell.
"Libertarians
who are extraordinarily sensitive to the least legal limitation on negative freedom are usually
completely immune to the idea that structural features of capitalist society are coercive and
freedom-limiting. "
I think you will discover that those who coined the term libertarian (libertarie) which the
propertarians knowning stole in the 1950s are well aware of those structural features -- as
Proudhon argued, property is both theft and despotism.:
Absolutely remarkable; in fact, 'stunning', as he uses it, is not too much of a stretch. The
'liberal elites' just go right on lying even though the sworn testimony of FBI interviewers
is available for anyone to read, as well as the chilling manipulations of Strozk and Page,
both of whom should be in prison and perhaps will be. And that fucker Schiff should swing. I
can't believe the transformation of Carlson from Bush shill to the reincarnation of Edward R.
Murrow. He makes this case so compellingly that nobody could watch that clip and not believe
that Flynn was railroaded from the outset. And what were they allegedly going to jail Flynn's
son for? Does anyone know? Were they just going to make something up? That is terrifying, and
almost argues for the disbanding of the FBI, although it demonstrably still contains honest
agents – as Carlson asks rhetorically, how many times have they done this already, and
gotten away with it?
It's hard to imagine anyone would vote Democrat now.
Couldn't have been too much of a crime, if they offered to let him go in exchange for Flynn
pleading guilty to lying. Actually, you'd kind of think their business was prosecuting crimes
whoever committed them, and that offering to excuse a crime in exchange for a guilty plea is
.kind of a crime.
Man, they have to clean house at the FBI. And there probably are several other
organizations that need it, too. Not the political culling based on ideology that was a
feature of the Bush White House, but the crowd that's in now just cannot be allowed to get
off with nothing.
Greetings Mark and all, I am a new arrival as Jen suggested the company is fine here for
barflies to ponder the world. Can I surmise that if Flynn and son were the FBI targets for
nefarious business dealings then surely Biden and son fall in to that same category. After
all Biden and son filched millions after arranging a USA loan of $1Billion to Ukraine and
then did it again after the IMF loaned a few million more. Carpetbagging and its modern day
practice is a crime in the USA last I looked.
If that conspicuous bias isn't enough cause to dismember the FBI then consider the Uranium
One deal that Hillary Clinton and family set up or perhaps the Debbie Wasserman Shultz
fostering the Awan family spy and blackmail ring.
Good day, Uncle, and welcome! For some reason I can't fathom, the Democrats seem to own or
control all the 'respectable' media in the USA. FOX News is an exception, and has been a
mouthpiece for the Republicans since its inception. But the Democrats control the New York
Times and the Washington Post, which together represent the bulk of American public feeling
to foreigners, and probably to the domestic audience as well. They are extremely active on
conflicts between the two parties, ensuring the Democratic perspective gets put forward in
calm, reasonable why-wouldn't-a-sensible-person-think-this-way manner. At the same time they
cast horrific aspersions at the Republicans. Not that either are much good; but the news
coverage is very one-sided – the position of the Democrats on the sexual-assault furor
over the Kavanaugh appointment compared with their wait-and-see attitude to very similar
accusations against Biden is a classic example.
I don't think its the Democrats that control the NYT &WP, so much as plutocrats.
They're also the ones who fund both the Democrats & the Republicans. The only significant
difference between the parties is largely in the arena of the social "culture war" issues.
But on the issues plutocrats care about, like economic policy & foreign policy, the
differences are shades of grey, rather than actual distinctions.
Just remember the coverage of both papers in the run up to George W Shrub's catastrophic
Iraq war. They're stenographers, not journalists.
That may well be true, but the NYT and WP historically champion the Democrats, endorse the
Democratic candidate for president, and pander to Democratic issues and projects. The Wall
Street Journal is the traditional Republican print outlet, and there might be others but I
don't know them. CNN is overwhelmingly and weepily Democratic in its content – Wolf
Blitzer's eyes nearly roll back in his head with ecstasy whenever he mentions Saint Hillary
– while FOX News is Repubican to the bone and openly contemptuous of liberals. It could
certainly be, on reflection probably is, that the same cabal of corporatists control them
all, and a fine joke they must think it. And I certainly and emphatically agree there is
almost no difference between the parties in execution of external policy.
"... Sad but true. We are all given our illusions. In US its the illusion of democracy which is a fake democracy cloaking our totalitarian reality. In China they give the people the illusion of moving towards socialism, a fake socialism to be sure, never mind all the billionaire party members (and they don't have universal health care either, its insurance based) .The people have long accepted the reality of totalitarianism so they are one step ahead. ..."
Sad but true. We are all given our illusions. In US its the illusion of democracy which
is a fake democracy cloaking our totalitarian reality. In China they give the people the
illusion of moving towards socialism, a fake socialism to be sure, never mind all the
billionaire party members (and they don't have universal health care either, its insurance
based) .The people have long accepted the reality of totalitarianism so they are one step
ahead.
Since China doesn't have another party to blame they must blame external enemies like the
US and we happily play along with tarrifs paid for by us dumb sheep who cry out in
satisfaction "take that". Lol
A fake Cold War works for us too. Trump says we are in a race for 5G and AI/Robotics with
China. We must win or all is lost to China. Social credit scores, digital ID and digital
currency along with Total Information Awareness and Full Spectrum Dominance over the
herd.
Health effects of 5G will be blamed on CoVID. Fake Science is a great tool. Scientists
never lie, they can be trusted, just like Priests . They are the Priests of the New
Technocratic World Order. Global Warming and COVID- We must believe. They say Vaccines and 5G
are good for you, just like DDT and Tobacco were said to be Good by Scientists of another
time. We must believe. Have Faith and you will earn social credit bonus points.
Reality is Fake Wrestling. Kayfabe all the way baby. Who is the face and who is the heel?
We are free to choose. So who says we don't have freedom?
"... One of the most embarrassing is the testimony of Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama Administration official who was widely quoted in her plea to Congress to gather the evidence that she knew was found in by the Obama Administration. In her testimony under oath Farkas repeatedly stated that she knew of no such evidence of collusion. ..."
"... Farkas, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia, was widely quoted when she said on MSNBC in 2017 that she feared that evidence she knew about would be destroyed by the Trump Administration. She stated: ..."
"... ...was urging my former colleagues, and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill Get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration, because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people that left. So it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy . . . the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more. ..."
"... 'You also didn't know whether or not anybody in the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, did you?' Gowdy later asked, getting to the point. ..."
The long-delayed release of testimony from the House Intelligence Committee has proved
embarrassing for a variety of former Obama officials who have been extensively quoted on the
allegedly strong evidence of collusion by the Trump campaign and the Russians. Figures like
James Clapper, who is a CNN expert, long indicated hat the evidence from the Obama
Administration was strong and alarming. However, in testimony, Clapper denied seeing any
such evidence .
One of the most embarrassing is the testimony of Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama
Administration official who was widely quoted in her plea to Congress to gather the evidence
that she knew was found in by the Obama Administration. In her testimony under oath Farkas
repeatedly stated that she knew of no such evidence of collusion.
Farkas, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia,
was widely quoted when she said on MSNBC in 2017 that she feared that evidence she knew about
would be destroyed by the Trump Administration. She stated:
...was urging my former colleagues, and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill Get as much
information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves
the administration, because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with
the senior people that left. So it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy . . . the Trump
folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff's
dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning
we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried, because not
enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more.
MSNBC never seriously questioned the statements despite the fact that Farkas left
the Obama Administration in 2015 before any such investigation could have occurred. As we have
seen before, the factual and legal basis for such statements are largely immaterial in the age
of echo journalism. The statement fit the narrative even if it lacked any plausible basis.
Not surprisingly, the House Intelligence Committee was eager to have Farkas share all that
she stated she "knew about ["the Trump folks"], their staff, the Trump's staff's dealing with
Russian" and wanted to get "into the open." After all, she told MSNBC that "I knew that there
was more."
She was finally put under oath in the closed classified sessions and there was nothing but
classified crickets. Farkas was repeatedly asked to share that information that electrified the
MSNBC hosts and audience. She repeatedly denied any such knowledge, telling then Rep. Trey
Gowdy (R, S.C.), "I didn't know anything."
Gowdy noted that Farkas left the Obama administration in 2015 and asked "Then how did you
know?" She repeated again "I didn't know anything."
Gowdy then asked "Well, then why would you say, we knew?"
He also asked:
'You also didn't know whether or not anybody in the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia,
did you?' Gowdy later asked, getting to the point.
"I didn't," Farkas responded.
MSNBC has said nothing about its prior headline story being untrue. Indeed, the media has
barely acknowledged that the new documents reinforce that there was never any evidence of
collusion and ultimately the allegations were rejected by the Special Counsel, Congress, and
inspectors general.
'fter I left the Obama administration, I campaigned to help elect Secretary Clinton as our
next President. When Russians interfered in that election, I was among the first to sound the
alarm and urge Congress to take action. And I haven't let up since then.
She was indeed one of the first but it proved to be a false alarm based on
nonexistent knowledge. Does that matter anymore?
"... What was "normal" for the past two decades was to turn a blind eye to the moral and financial bankruptcy of the American culture, the rot at the heart of its social, political and economic orders. The pandemic has shredded the putrid facade and revealed the rot, much to the dismay of the multitude of minions tasked with sanitizing the rot behind narratives promoting the normalization of predation, fraud and exploitation. ..."
"... As for winner takes all , this legalized looting is presented as a form of economic Darwinism that is nothing but the healthy manifestation of a free market. This is the Devil's handiwork, of course, presenting legalized looting that only benefits the few as the inevitable result of open markets. ..."
"... The greater the outrage of the technocrats and monopolists at being called what they are--evil--the greater the confirmation that the accusation is spot-on. The predators, looters and exploiters must strip away any moral assessment of their actions, as even the smallest shred of moral or karmic justice threatens their empires. And so economics has been reduced to bloodless quantifications of profits, costs and sales and obfuscatory mathematics designed to drain the risk of moral consequences from the parasitic pillage. ..."
Monopolies, quasi-monopolies and cartels are inherently exploitive and thus evil.
What was "normal" for the past two decades was to turn a blind eye to the moral and
financial bankruptcy of the American culture, the rot at the heart of its social, political and
economic orders. The pandemic has shredded the putrid facade and revealed the rot, much to the
dismay of the multitude of minions tasked with sanitizing the rot behind narratives promoting
the normalization of predation, fraud and exploitation.
What's been absolutely verboten is to call legalized pillage and predation what they really
are: evil. We've normalized exploitation and predation by the usual means: denial, legal
justifications, making excuses for the predators and the system that defends predation, and by
erasing the memory of a time when moral bankruptcy, predation and institutionalized fraud were
not yet normalized.
People have always been self-absorbed and greedy, so goes the excuse; or, greed is good
because that's the magic of the invisible hand at work.
By stripping fraud and predation of moral consequence, we've covered the putrid rot with a
thoroughly modern amorality which we can summarize as anything goes and winner takes all.
Monopoly, quasi-monopoly and cartels (i.e. Warren Buffett's entire portfolio) are presented as
the natural order of things rather than an evil construct of predation and exploitation that
benefits the few at the expense of the many.
Nothing outrages the apologists and the lackeys enriching themselves in the dens of thieves
more than accusations of evil, or indeed, anything smacking of moral standards or judgments.
Anything goes not just for individual choices, but for capital's choices as well, and so it's
simply not PC to question the morality of capital's predations.
As for winner takes all , this legalized looting is presented as a form of economic
Darwinism that is nothing but the healthy manifestation of a free market. This is the Devil's
handiwork, of course, presenting legalized looting that only benefits the few as the inevitable
result of open markets.
The greater the outrage of the technocrats and monopolists at being called what they
are--evil--the greater the confirmation that the accusation is spot-on. The predators, looters
and exploiters must strip away any moral assessment of their actions, as even the smallest
shred of moral or karmic justice threatens their empires. And so economics has been reduced to
bloodless quantifications of profits, costs and sales and obfuscatory mathematics designed to
drain the risk of moral consequences from the parasitic pillage.
"... House Intelligence Committee staff told me that after an exhaustive investigation reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers, they found that Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election . ..."
"... Instead, the Brennan team included low-quality intelligence that failed to meet intelligence community standards to support the political claim that Russian officials wanted Trump to win, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed. They said that CIA analysts also objected to including that flawed, substandard information in the assessment. ..."
"... Fox 's Henry said that he has obtained independent confirmation of the pro-Clinton Russia claim made by Fleitz . ..."
"... Brennan's concealment of this key information was yet another link in the chain of the Obama administration's plot to smear Donald Trump as a Russian asset - a hoax supported by the Clinton-funded Steele dossier, which the FBI knew was Russian disinformation (or, more likely, Steele's Russophobic fantasies) before they used it as a predicate to spy on Trump aide Carter Page during the 2016 election. ..."
Former CIA director John Brennan suppressed intelligence which
indicated that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win because "she was a known quantity," vs. the
unpredictable Donald Trump, according to Fox News ' Ed Henry.
During a Tuesday night discussion with Tucker Carlson, Henry said that Brennan "also had
intel saying, actually, Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win because she was a known quantity,
she had been secretary of state, and Vladimir Putin's team thought she was more malleable,
while candidate Donald Trump was unpredictable."
Perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin has fond memories of the time Bill Clinton
hung out at his 'private homestead' during the same trip where he collected a $500,000
payday for a speech at a Moscow bank, right before the Uranium One deal was approved.
And as
Breitbart 's Joel Pollak notes, Henry's claim backs up a similar
allegation by former National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz , who said on
April 22:
House Intelligence Committee staff told me that after an exhaustive investigation
reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers, they found that Brennan
suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more
predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election .
Instead, the Brennan team included low-quality intelligence that failed to meet
intelligence community standards to support the political claim that Russian officials wanted
Trump to win, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed. They said that CIA analysts also
objected to including that flawed, substandard information in the assessment.
Fox 's Henry said that he has obtained independent confirmation of the pro-Clinton Russia
claim made by Fleitz .
Brennan's concealment of this key information was yet another link in the chain of the Obama
administration's plot to smear Donald Trump as a Russian asset - a hoax supported by the
Clinton-funded Steele dossier, which the FBI
knew was Russian disinformation (or, more likely, Steele's Russophobic fantasies) before
they used it as a predicate to spy on Trump aide Carter Page during the 2016 election.
And now, Brennan is a contributor on MSNBC. How fitting.
Why is former President Obama calling forth all his defensive resources now?
Why did former national security advisor Susan Rice write her CYA letter? Why have republicans in
congress not been willing to investigate the true origins of political surveillance? What is the
reason for so much anger, desperation and opposition from a variety of interests?
In a
single word in a single tweet tonight, President Trump explained it perfectly - with help from Fox
News' Tucker Carlson's detailed breakdown"
"OBAMAGATE!"
...
As around 2:15 in the clip above, Carlson explains that
then president of the United
States Barack Obama turned to the head of the FBI - the most powerful law enforcement official in
America, and said "Continue to secretly investigate my chief political rival so I can act against
him."
With the release of
recent
transcripts
and the
declassification
of material
from within the IG report, the Carter Page FISA and
Flynn
documents
showing FBI activity, there is a common misconception about
why
the
intelligence apparatus began investigating the Trump campaign in the first place. Why was Donald
Trump considered a threat?
In this outline we hope to provide some fully cited deep source material that will
explain the origin; and specifically why those inside the Intelligence Community began targeting
Trump and using Confidential Human Sources against campaign officials.
During the time-frame of December 2015 through April 2016 the NSA database was being
exploited
by contractors
within the intelligence community doing unauthorized searches.
On March 9, 2016, oversight personnel doing a review of FBI system access were alerted to
thousands of unauthorized search queries of specific U.S. persons within the NSA database.
NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was made aware.
Subsequently NSA Director Rogers initiated a full compliance review of the system to identify
who was doing the searches; & what searches were being conducted.
On April 18, 2016, following the preliminary audit results, Director Rogers shut down all FBI
contractor access to the database after he learned FISA-702 "about"(17) and "to/from"(16) search
queries were being done without authorization. Thus begins the first discovery of a much bigger
background story.
When you compile the timeline with the people involved; and the specific wording of the
resulting review, which was then delivered to the FISA court; and overlay the activity that was
taking place in the GOP primary; what we discover is a process where the metadata collected by the
NSA was being searched for political opposition research and surveillance.
Additionally, tens-of-thousands of searches were identified by the FISA court as likely
extending much further than the compliance review period: "
while the government reports it is
unable to provide a reliable estimate of the non compliant queries since 2012, there is no apparent
reason to believe the November 2015 [to] April 2016 period coincided with an unusually high error
rate"
.
In short, during the Obama administration the NSA database was continually used to conduct
surveillance. This is the critical point that leads to understanding the origin of "Spygate", as it
unfolded in the Spring and Summer of 2016.
It was the discovery of the database exploitation and the removal of access as a surveillance
tool that created their initial problem.
Here's how we can tell
.
Initially in December 2015 there were 17 GOP candidates and all needed to be researched.
However, when Donald Trump won New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina the field was
significantly whittled. Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich and Carson remained.
On Super Tuesday,
March
2, 2016
, Donald Trump won seven states (VT, AR, VA, GA, AL, TN, MA) it was then clear that
Trump was the GOP frontrunner with momentum to become the presumptive nominee. On
March
5th
, Trump won Kentucky and Louisiana; and on
March
8th
Trump won Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii.
The next day,
March 9th
, NSA security alerts warned internal oversight
personnel that something sketchy was going on.
This timing is not coincidental. As FISA Judge Rosemary Collyer later wrote in her report, "
many
of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the
same identifiers
over
different date ranges
." Put another way: attributes belonging to a specific individual(s) were
being targeted and queried, unlawfully. Given what was later discovered, it seems obvious the
primary search target, over
multiple date ranges
, was Donald Trump.
There were tens-of-thousands of unauthorized search queries; and as Judge Collyer stated in her
report, there is no reason to believe the
85% non compliant rate
was any different from
the abuse of the NSA database going back to 2012.
As you will see below the NSA database was how political surveillance was being conducted during
Obama's second term in office. However, when the system was flagged, and when NSA Director Mike
Rogers shut down "contractor" access to the system, the system users needed to develop another way
to get access.
Mike Rogers shuts down access on April 18, 2016. On April 19, 2016, Fusion-GPS founder Glenn
Simpson's wife, Mary Jacoby visits the White House. Immediately thereafter, the DNC and Clinton
campaign contract Fusion GPS who then hire Christopher Steele.
Knowing it was federal "contractors", outside government with access to the system, doing the
unauthorized searches, the question becomes:
who were the contractors?
The possibilities are quite vast. Essentially anyone the FBI or intelligence apparatus was using
could have participated. Crowdstrike was a known
FBI
contractor
; they were also
contracted
by the DNC
. Shawn Henry was the former head of the FBI office in DC and is now the head of
Crowdstrike; a
rather
dubious contractor
for the government and a politically connected data security and forensic
company. James Comey's special friend Daniel Richman was an unpaid FBI "special employee"
with
security access
to the database. Nellie Ohr began working for Fusion-GPS on the Trump project
in
November 2015
and she was a
CIA
contractor
; and it's entirely likely Glenn Simpson or people within his Fusion-GPS network were
also contractors for the intelligence community.
Remember the Sharyl Attkisson computer intrusions? It's all part of this same network; Attkisson
even names Shawn Henry
as
a defendant
in her ongoing lawsuit.
All of the aforementioned names, and so many more, held a political agenda in 2016.
It seems likely if the NSA flags were never triggered then the contracted system users would
have continued exploiting the NSA database for political opposition research; which would then be
funneled to the Clinton team. However, once the unauthorized flags were triggered, the system users
(including those inside the official intelligence apparatus) needed to find another back-door to
continue Again, the timing becomes transparent.
Immediately after NSA flags were raised March 9th; the same intelligence agencies began using
confidential human sources (CHS's) to run into the Trump campaign. By activating intelligence
assets like
Joseph
Mifsud
and
Stefan
Halper
the IC (CIA, FBI) and system users had now created an authorized way to continue the
same political surveillance operations.
When Donald Trump hired Paul Manafort on
March
28, 2016
, it was a perfect scenario for those doing the surveillance. Manafort was a
known
entity
to the FBI and was previously under investigation. Paul Manafort's entry into the Trump
orbit was perfect for Glenn Simpson to sell his prior research on Manafort as a Trump-Russia
collusion script two weeks later.
The shift from "unauthorized exploitation of the NSA database" to legally authorized
exploitation of the NSA database was now in place. This was how they continued the political
surveillance. This is the confluence of events that originated "spygate", or what officially
blossomed into the FBI investigation known as "Crossfire Hurricane" on July 31.
If the NSA flags were never raised; and if Director Rogers had never initiated the compliance
audit; and if the political contractors were never blocked from access to the database; they would
never have needed to create a legal back-door, a justification to retain the surveillance. The
political operatives/contractors would have just continued the targeted metadata exploitation.
Once they created the surveillance door, Fusion-GPS was then needed to get the FBI known
commodity of Chris Steele activated as a pipeline. Into that pipeline all system users pushed
opposition research. However, one mistake from the NSA database extraction during an "about" query
shows up as a New Yorker named Michael Cohen in Prague.
That misinterpreted data from a FISA-702 "about query" is then piped to Steele and turns up
inside the dossier; it was the wrong Michael Cohen. It wasn't Trump's lawyer, it was an art dealer
from New York City with the same name; the same "identifier".
A DEEP DIVE – How Did It Work?
Start by reviewing the established record from the
99-page
FISC opinion
rendered by Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer on April 26, 2017. Review the details
within the FISC opinion.
I would strongly urge everyone to read the
FISC
report
(full pdf below) because Judge Collyer outlines how the DOJ, which includes the FBI, had
an "institutional lack of candor" in responses to the FISA court. In essence, the Obama
administration was continually lying to the FISA court about their activity, and the rate of fourth
amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures of U.S. persons' private information for
multiple years.
Unfortunately, due to intelligence terminology Judge Collyer's brief and ruling is not an easy
read for anyone unfamiliar with the FISA processes. That complexity also helps the media avoid
discussing it; and as a result most Americans have no idea the scale and scope of the Obama-era
surveillance issues. So we'll try to break down the language.
For the sake of brevity and common understanding CTH will highlight the most pertinent segments
showing just how systemic and troublesome the unlawful electronic surveillance was.
Early in 2016 NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers
was
alerted
of a significant uptick in FISA-702(17) "About" queries using the FBI/NSA database that
holds all metadata records on every form of electronic communication.
The NSA compliance officer alerted Admiral Mike Rogers who then initiated a full compliance
audit on/around
March 9th, 2016
, for the period of November 1st, 2015, through May
1st, 2016.
While the audit was ongoing, due to the severity of the results that were identified, Admiral
Mike Rogers stopped anyone from using the 702(17) "about query" option, and went to the
extraordinary step of blocking all FBI contractor access to the database on
April 18, 2016
(keep
these dates in mind).
Here are some significant segments:
The key takeaway from these first paragraphs is how the search query results were exported from
the NSA database to users who were not authorized to see the material. The FBI contractors were
conducting searches and then removing, or 'exporting', the results. Later on, the FBI said all of
the exported material was deleted.
Searching the highly classified NSA database is essentially a function of filling out search
boxes to identify the user-initiated search parameter and get a return on the search result.
♦ FISA-702(16) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person ("702"); and the "16" is a
check box to initiate a search based on "
To and From
". Example, if you put in a
date and a phone number and check "16" as the search parameter the user will get the returns on
everything "To and From" that identified phone number for the specific date. Calls, texts,
contacts etc. Including results for the inbound and outbound contacts.
♦ FISA-702(17) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (702); and the "17" is a
check box to initiate a search based on everything "
About
" the search
qualifier. Example, if you put a date and a phone number and check "17" as the search parameter
the user will get the returns of everything
about
that phone. Calls, texts, contacts,
geolocation (or gps results), account information, user, service provider etc. As a result,
702(17) can actually be used to locate where the phone (and user) was located on a specific date
or sequentially over a specific period of time which is simply a matter of changing the date
parameters.
And that's just from a phone number.
Search an ip address "about" and read all data into that server; put in an email address and
gain everything about that account. Or use the electronic address of a GPS enabled vehicle (about)
and you can withdraw more electronic data and monitor in real time. Search a credit card number and
get everything about the account including what was purchased, where, when, etc. Search a bank
account number, get everything about transactions and electronic records etc. Just about anything
and everything can be electronically searched; everything has an electronic
'identifier'
.
The search parameter is only limited by the originating field filled out. Names, places,
numbers, addresses, etc. By using the "About" parameter there may be thousands or millions of
returns. Imagine if you put "@realdonaldtrump" into the search parameter? You could extract all
following accounts who interacted on Twitter, or Facebook etc. You are only limited by your
imagination and the scale of the electronic connectivity.
As you can see below, on March 9th, 2016, internal auditors noted the FBI was sharing "raw FISA
information, including
but not limited to
Section 702-acquired information".
In plain English the raw search returns were being shared with unknown entities without any
attempt to "minimize" or redact the results. The person(s) attached to the results were named and
obvious. There was no effort to hide their identity or protect their 4th amendment rights of
privacy; and database access was from the FBI network:
But what's the scale here? This is where the story really lies.
Read this next excerpt carefully.
The operators were searching "U.S Persons". The review of November 1, 2015, to May 1, 2016,
showed "eighty-five percent of those queries" were unlawful or "non compliant".
85% !!
"representing [redacted number]".
We can tell from the space of the redaction the number of searches were between 10,000 and
99,999 [six digits]. If we take the middle number of 50,000 – a non compliant rate of 85 percent
means 42,500 unlawful searches out of 50,000.
The [six digit] amount (more than 10,000, less than 99,999), and 85% error rate, was captured in
a six month period, November 2015 to April 2016.
Also notice this
very important
quote: "
many of these non-compliant queries
involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges
." This tells us the system
users were searching the same phone number, email address, electronic identifier, repeatedly over
different dates.
Specific person(s) were being tracked/monitored
.
Additionally, notice the last quote: "
while the government reports it is unable to provide a
reliable estimate of" these non lawful searches "since 2012, there is no apparent reason to believe
the November 2015 [to] April 2016 coincided with an unusually high error rate"
.
That means the 85% unlawful FISA-702(16)(17) database abuse has likely been happening
since
2012
.
2012 is an important date in this database abuse because a network of specific interests is
assembled that also shows up in 2016/2017:
Who was 2012 FBI Director? Robert Mueller, who was selected by the FBI group to become
special prosecutor in 2017.
Who was Mueller' chief-of-staff? Aaron Zebley, who became one of the lead lawyers on the
Mueller special counsel.
Who was 2012 CIA Director? John Brennan (remember the ouster of Gen Petraeus)
Who was ODNI? James Clapper.
Remember, the NSA is inside the Pentagon (Defense Dept) command structure. Who was Defense
Secretary? Ash Carter
Who wanted NSA Director Mike Rogers fired in 2016? Brennan, Clapper and Carter.
And finally, who wrote and signed-off-on the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and
then lied about the use of the Steele Dossier? The same John Brennan, and James Clapper along with
James Comey.
Tens of thousands of searches over four years (since 2012), and 85% of them are illegal. The
results were extracted for? . (I believe this is all political opposition use; and I'll explain why
momentarily.)
OK, that's the stunning scale; but who was involved?
Private contractors with access to "
raw FISA information that went well beyond what was
necessary to respond to FBI's requests
":
And as noted, the contractor access was finally halted on April 18th, 2016.
[Coincidentally (or likely not), the wife of Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson, Mary Jacoby,
goes
to the White House
the very next day on April 19th, 2016.]
None of this is conspiracy theory.
All of this is laid out inside this 99-page opinion from FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer
who also noted that none of this FISA abuse was accidental in a
footnote
on page 87
: "
deliberate decisionmaking
":
This specific footnote, if declassified, could be a key. Note the phrase: "(
[redacted]
access to FBI systems was the subject of an interagency memorandum of understanding entered into
[redacted])"
, this sentence has the potential to expose an internal decision; withheld from
congress and the FISA court by the Obama administration; that outlines a process for access and
distribution of surveillance data.
Note: "
no notice of this practice was given to the FISC until 2016
", that is important.
Summary:
The FISA court identified and quantified tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI
database using the FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons with
contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw results without redacting the
information and shared it with an unknown number of entities.
The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and surveillance operation; and
we are not the only one to think that's what this system is being used for.
Back in 2017 when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was working to reauthorize
the FISA legislation, Nunes
wrote a letter
to ODNI Dan Coats
about this specific issue:
SIDEBAR
:
To solve the issue, well, actually attempt to ensure it never happened again, NSA Director
Admiral Mike Rogers eventually took away the "About" query option permanently in 2017. NSA Director
Rogers said the abuse was so inherent there was no way to stop it except to remove the process
completely. [
SEE
HERE
] Additionally, the NSA database operates as a function of the Pentagon, so the Trump
administration went one step further. On his last day as NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers -together
with ODNI Dan Coats- put U.S. cyber-command, the database steward, fully into the U.S. military as
a full combatant command. [
SEE
HERE
] Unfortunately it didn't work as shown by the 2018 FISC opinion rendered by FISC Judge
James Boasberg [
SEE
HERE
]
There is little doubt the FISA-702(16)(17) database system was used by Obama-era officials, from
2012 through April 2016, as a way to spy on their political opposition.
Quite simply there is no other intellectually honest explanation for the scale and volume of
database abuse that was taking place; and keep in mind these searches were all ruled to be
unlawful. Searches for repeated persons over a period time that were not authorized.
When we reconcile what was taking place and who was involved, then the actions of the exact same
principle participants take on a jaw-dropping amount of clarity.
All of the action taken by CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, ODNI Clapper and Defense
Secretary Ashton Carter make sense. Including their effort to get NSA Director Mike Rogers
fired
.
Everything after March 9th, 2016, had a dual purpose: (1) done to cover up the weaponization of
the FISA database. [
Explained
Here
] Spygate, Russia-Gate, the Steele Dossier, and even the 2017
Intelligence
Community Assessment
(drawn from the dossier and signed by the above) were needed to create a
cover-story and protect themselves from discovery of this four year weaponization, political
surveillance and unlawful spying. Even the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel makes
sense; he was
FBI Director
when this
began. And (2) they needed to keep the surveillance going.
The beginning decision to use FISA(702) as a domestic surveillance and political spy mechanism
appears to have started in/around 2012. Perhaps sometime shortly before the 2012 presidential
election and before John Brennan left the White House and moved to CIA. However, there was an
earlier version of data assembly that preceded this effort.
Political spying 1.0 was actually the weaponization of the IRS. This is where the term "
Secret
Research Project
" originated as a description from the Obama team. It involved the U.S.
Department of Justice under Eric Holder and the FBI under Robert Mueller. It never made sense why
Eric Holder requested over 1 million tax records via CD ROM, until overlaying the timeline of the
FISA abuse:
The IRS sent the FBI "21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from
501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation." The transaction
occurred in October 2010 (
link
)
Why disks? Why send a stack of DISKS to the DOJ and FBI when there's a pre-existing financial
crimes unit within the IRS. All of the evidence within this sketchy operation came directly to the
surface in
early
spring 2012
.
The IRS scandal was never really about the IRS, it was always about the DOJ asking the IRS for
the database of information. That is why it was transparently a conflict when the same DOJ was
tasked with investigating the DOJ/IRS scandal. Additionally, Obama sent his chief-of-staff Jack Lew
to become Treasury Secretary; effectively placing an ally to oversee/cover-up any issues. As
Treasury Secretary Lew did just that.
Lesson Learned
– It would appear the Obama administration learned a lesson from
attempting to gather a large opposition research database operation inside a functioning
organization large enough to have some good people that might blow the whistle.
The timeline reflects a few months after realizing the "Secret Research Project" was now
worthless (June 2012), they focused more deliberately on a smaller network within the intelligence
apparatus and began weaponizing the FBI/NSA database. If our hunch is correct, that is what will be
visible in footnote #69:
How this all comes together in 2019/2020
Fusion GPS was not hired in April 2016 just to research Donald Trump. As shown in the evidence
provided by the FISC, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations.
The Obama administration already knew everything about the Trump campaign, and were monitoring
everything by exploiting the FISA database.
However, after the NSA alerts in/around March 9th, 2016, and particularly after the April 18th
shutdown of contractor access, the Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to create a legal
albeit
ex post facto
justification for the pre-existing surveillance and spy operations.
Fusion GPS gave them that justification in the Steele Dossier.
That's why the FBI small group, which later transitioned into the Mueller team, were so strongly
committed to and defending the
formation of the Steele Dossier
and its
dubious content.
The Steele Dossier, an outcome of the Fusion contract, contains three insurance policy purposes:
(1) the cover-story and justification for the pre-existing surveillance operation (protect Obama);
and (2) facilitate the FBI counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign (assist
Clinton); and (3) continue the operation with a special counsel (protect both).
An insurance policy would be needed. The Steele Dossier becomes the investigative virus the FBI
wanted inside the system. To get the virus into official status, they used the FISA application as
the delivery method and injected it into Carter Page. The FBI already knew Carter Page; essentially
Carter Page was irrelevant, what they needed was the FISA warrant and the Dossier in the system {
Go
Deep
}.
The Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for
already existing surveillance and spy operations. Fusion-GPS gave them that justification and
evidence for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier.
Ultimately that's why the Steele Dossier was so important; without it, the FBI would not have a
tool that Mueller needed to continue the investigation of President Trump. In essence by renewing
the FISA application, despite them knowing the underlying dossier was junk, the FBI was keeping the
surveillance gateway open for Team Mueller to exploit later on.
Additionally, without the Steele Dossier the DOJ and FBI are naked with their FISA-702 abuse as
outlined by John Ratcliffe.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/wWsvZuiPyTI
Thankfully we know U.S. Attorney John Durham has talked to NSA Director Mike Rogers. In this
video Rogers explains how he was notified of what was happening and what he did after the
notification.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/CIJGH9RS2Fc
* * *
After tonight's tweets from President Trump, we should expect a full-court press from 'the
resistance' to distract from the cracks appearing in the former President's halo of
invincibility...
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has warned that
around half of the world's workforce, or 1.6 billion workers, are at imminent risk of losing
their livelihood because of the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. In its latest
report, the UN agency stated that those hardest hit by the financial effects of the Covid-19
outbreak have been 'informal economy' workers, including the self-employed and those on a
short-term contract.
"The first month of the crisis is estimated to have resulted in a drop of 60 percent in
the income of informal workers globally," the ILO said of the economic damage already
caused by the pandemic.
The deepening crisis in many parts of the world has left more than 436 million businesses
facing financial hardship and possible closure, the ILO stated, which will inevitably hurt
workers. The report listed the worst-hit sectors as manufacturing, accommodation and food
services, wholesale and retail trade, and real estate.
"For millions of workers, no income means no food, no security and no future," ILO
Director-General Guy Ryder said of the stark impact of an economic dip.
He added that, according to ILO data, there is expected to be a "massive" rise in
poverty levels worldwide, unless governments recognize the need to reconstruct their economies
around better working practices and "not a return to the pre-pandemic world of precarious
work for the majority."
Since the novel coronavirus emerged in China late last year, over 3.1 million cases have
been confirmed around the world, and more than 216,000 people have died. Drastic lockdowns to
limit its spread have taken a dire toll on the global economy, prompting market turmoil and
numerous projections of the heavy recession to strike this year.
This is nationwide gaslighting by Clinton gang of neoliberals who attempted coup d'état, and Adam Schiff was just one of the
key figures in this coupe d'état, king of modern Joe McCarthy able and willing to destroy a person using false evidence
What is interesting is that Tucker attacked Republicans for aiding and abetting the coup
d'état against Trump
It wasn't "Leaders" that offshored everything to China, it was "BUSINESS LEADERS" although
they were enabled to do so by government policies that failed to tariff cheap foreign
imports.
i find it unbelievable and unacceptable that our medicines are not made here. this MUST
change. it is one thing to buy cheap tools and toys from china but NOT vital supplies, this
has to change fast.
The Western Roman Empire fell in part because they were dependent upon grain supplied from
North Africa, a region rife with hostility to the Romans. Grow your own damned food and make
your own antibiotics. Elementary as hell.
Tucker is OK in my book. Common sense tells you he speaks the truth. Now what can we do
about it? Electing other politicians does not seem to be the answer.
@onebornfree
Anti what freedom exactly? Freedom to be replaced by a machine, without any forward thinking
plan by society? Freedom to be hungry? Freedom to rampage and kill others?
This American freedom is an ideology on par with the nihilistic ideology of ISIS. It is an
embrace of materialism through Epicurianism. Why exactly is this freedom to crave endlessly,
superior to the freedom the CCP aims for its people – freedom from destitution?
You say they are enslaved, but they would say you are enslaved. You say that society
enslave their individuality, they would say your individualism enslaved your society.
Any chance of finding a balanced middle ground? Cause the Chinese are closer to it
atm.
POMPEO: Look, the best experts so far seem to think it was manmade. I have no reason to
disbelieve that at this point.
RADDATZ: Your -- your Office of the DNI says the consensus, the scientific consensus was
not manmade or genetically modified.
POMPEO: That's right. I -- I -- I agree with that. Yes. I've -- I've seen their analysis.
I've seen the summary that you saw that was released publicly. I have no reason to doubt that
that is accurate at this point.
Most of the West is still shut down but China is opening. Observers know that China is
becoming the world's top economy – the World Bank had already
given it that title in PPP terms in 2013 – and COVID-19 is sure to accelerate the
process by giving it a head start out of the economic slowdown. With cheap energy too .
As the coronavirus and its political combatants hold the world hostage, it is pertinent to
scrutinize the (geo) political and economic context within which the pandemic has emerged. Many
analyses view neoliberalism as the culprit, having given rise to a dismantling and
marketization of public services such as healthcare for which we are now paying the price. The
virus confirms the bankruptcy of neoliberal capitalism, based upon global production networks
of western corporations and Chinese factories, allowing the virus to spread across the globe.
Alas, neoliberalism is in trouble once again, perhaps terminally ill.
That said, the death of neoliberalism has been pronounced before, not least in the wake of
the 2007-08 financial crisis, from which it however quickly resurfaced stronger than before.
Moreover, western neoliberalism has witnessed a significant mutation over the last years, not
least to better accommodate the changing logics of global capitalism.
The coronavirus offers an opening to change the world for the better, not least by undoing
decades of neoliberalization to give vital professions in health care and education the
appreciation they deserve. Unfortunately, as detailed in Naomi Klein's ' The Shock Doctrine ', crises also offer
ample opportunity for the established order to realize ambitions which are inconceivable in
normal times. The global political economy before the outbreak of corona was defined by the
rise of a global billionaire class, tech platforms, and illiberal(izing) nationalist politics,
having jointly propelled a novel wave of (geo) political-economic restructuring which I have
called neo-illiberalism
. What will be the effects of coronavirus on this new status quo?
The New Normal
Alongside the 2008 financial crisis, the votes for Brexit and Trump have often been
described as ruptures to the neoliberal status quo. But as in the wake of 2008, the aftermath
of 2016 also brought about more of the same: more tax cuts for corporations and the rich, more
environmental and financial deregulation, more cuts in public services i.e. more policies of
neoliberal signature. That said, the politics peddling the same neoliberal policies has
substantially changed. Where preceding waves of neoliberalization have been variably executed
by centrist parties, seeing the center right commit itself to progressive politics in exchange
for center-left support for economic neoliberalization, since 2016 a new alliance has emerged
between center and far right, seeing the latter mainstream as center-right parties such as the
US Republicans and UK Conservatives have steadily radicalized themselves, thereby forsaking
their erstwhile commitment to what Tariq Ali has called 'the extreme center' .
Notwithstanding the fact that center-right parties co-produced the neoliberal world order, they
have since come to reinvent themselves as nationalist challengers to the 'globalist' status
quo, which they habitually present as leftist.
Where preceding waves of neoliberalization resulted in the limitation of democratic control
over economic policymaking, the present nationalist wave captained by Donald Trump and his
copycats is defined by efforts of political illiberalization , brazenly seeking to undo
the institutional setup of liberal-democratic checks and balances, seeing legislative and
judicial branches of government subjected to a power-hungry executive. Wider societal
counter-powers are also under attack, from academia and media to NGOs, along with attacks on a
range of constitutional basic and/or fundamental rights constraining the illiberal exercise of
absolute power. While this development heralds
the end of progressive neoliberalism , political illiberalization ultimately still protects
the
encasement of global capitalism , the core aim of the neoliberal project.
The rise of neo-illiberalism might be compared to a virus, whereby western liberal
democracies increasingly come to resemble illiberal democracies and (competitive) authoritarian
regimes elsewhere. Where illiberalizing regimes in Hungary and Poland are infecting the
neoliberal European Union (EU) as a whole, not least because of center-right political
cover offered by the European Peoples Party (EPP), neo-illiberalism constitutes a fundamentally
global phenomenon. For example, Brazil and India have recently embraced political
illiberalization without rejecting neoliberal economics, whereas illiberal China and Russia
have equally tightened their authoritarian rule. Amongst others, what unites these and other
regimes is the mobilization of divisive nationalisms, seeing variegated 'strongmen' adapt state
constitutions to their will, typically bulldozering pluralist political space whilst shielding
the respective neoliberal interfaces between national economy and global capitalism.
Global Capitalism
To grasp the rise of neo-illiberalism we need to go back to the turn of the millennium, a
time in which the various developments culminating in the neo-illiberal synthesis were put in
motion. Next to the terrorist attacks on US soil which ignited the gradual mainstreaming of far-right
narratives , the year 2001 is characterized by the entry of illiberal China into the
neoliberal World Trade Organization (WTO). Meeting in serene Doha following the riots of
Seattle, China's WTO entrance heralded a larger geographical shift captured by the famous
BRIC
acronym (Brazil, Russia, India, China) coined that year by Goldman Sachs economist Jim
O'Neill. O'Neill foresaw stronger economic growth in the non-west, and called upon western
leaders to incorporate leading non-western states into key governance platforms, which was
realized later that decade by elevating the Group of Twenty (G20) as the world's leading forum
on global governance.
Alongside the search for new markets and cheap labor, the 2000s were characterized by the
ascent of the financial offshore world
– a legal realm comprised of tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions where corporations and
the rich stash their cash and property – which became global capitalism's central
operating system by the turn of the millennium. Since then, offshore money from Russia and
elsewhere flooded into cities like London, igniting a spending spree on real estate, football
clubs, media conglomerates, and political influence. Amongst others things, the offshore world
enabled spectacular corporate fraud, such as that which led to the collapse of US energy giant
Enron, whose accounting gimmicks were copy-pasted by western banks, setting the stage for the
financial crisis later that decade.
The final key development traced back to the turn of the millennium is the birth of digital
platforms. Invented by Google as what Susanna Zuboff calls 'an automated architecture
functioning as a one-way mirror', surveillance capitalism has since grown into a worldwide machine dedicated to
behavioral observation, manipulation and modification, steadily enmeshing itself with the core
logics of capital accumulation. Crucially, digitization accelerated the aforementioned trends:
not only has digitization fueled global capital flight into offshore anonymity, it also
augmented the mainstreaming of far-right narratives via YouTube and Facebook algorithms. Much
like the invisible offshore world, the rise of surveillance capitalism largely went unnoticed,
assisted by anti-terrorism legislation like the 2001 Patriot Act enabling far-reaching
surveillance.
Growing up under the radar of the war on terror and financial turmoil, the first decade of
the twenty-first century saw the birth of a fundamentally global, offshore, digitized and
financialized hyper capitalism. Descriptions like shadow banks, phantom investments and dark
money do not do justice to their role as fundamental building blocks of the new world. Amongst
others factors, the offshore world was the ground zero of the financial crisis, where banks
kept their toxic investments. This new world is the 'home' of trillion-dollar tech companies,
who with other (shell) companies form an integrated web of corporate structures whose chief
ultimate owners constitute a global billionaire class of approximately two thousand individuals and families.
As such, this is also the world where neoliberal technocracy is increasingly fused with
oligarchy. Due to the spectacular growth of income and wealth inequality worldwide, oligarchic
enmeshment of the superrich and state power does not only define elites in Russia or the Gulf,
but increasingly defines western states such as the US, where multibillionaire
activists like the Koch brothers have effectively taken over the Republican Party.
Next to the economic recovery, the 2010s were defined by the increasing coalescence of
financial and technology sectors. Within a development model labeled The Wall Street Consensus by political economist Daniela Gabor, an adaption of the
neoliberal Washington Consensus within the framework of the G20, banks and financial
institutions worldwide have come to embrace financial technology (fintech), driven by an
insatiable hunger for personal data as raw materials for financialized surveillance capitalism.
Crucially, where Silicon Valley long enjoyed a global tech monopoly, the 2010s saw the arrival
of Chinese bigtech vying for global dominance. The western financial lobby has voiced its fears
of Chinese platforms like Alibaba and Tencent, which they describe as all American bigtechs
'rolled into one'
operating under tight control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These fears are not
unfounded: where Facebook encountered many difficulties in building a global cryptocurrency,
the Chinese central bank has developed its own alternative, and the CCP has recently ordered
China's banks and tech platforms to adopt it. In the words of Mark Zuckerberg: the American
state has to play a more active role 'otherwise our financial leadership is not
guaranteed'.
Whilst the rest of the world has steadily bought into Chinese technology, the other BRICs
have embraced (parts of) China's digital strategy. For example, where a small minority of
India's 1.4 billion population had a bank account in 2014, this number has since risen beyond a
billion. That said, these bank accounts are coupled to biometric personal data, and critics
identify this policy as part of Narenda Modi's political agenda to transform India into a Hindu
nationalist surveillance state. Taken together, around the time the coronavirus made the first
news headlines, the New York Times identified three
competing visions on the future of surveillance capitalism: where the Chinese are 'moving
fast and breaking things' without any regard for privacy and citizen rights, and the EU tries
to make a moral point around privacy and consent, with the US caught in the middle.
Nationalist Leninism
Although 'moving fast and breaking things' is a good description for Xi Jinping's China, it
should be remembered that this philosophy has long guided Silicon Valley, where asking for
forgiveness trumps begging for permission. The disruption of established industries, practices
and processes defines platforms like Uber, operating without any regard for the law or basic
decency. With the rise of western neo-illiberalism, moreover, this philosophy has also entered
into government. Brexit, for example, is best understood as a process of continuous disruption
of established political practices and procedures, from shunning press conferences to
unlawfully closing down parliament. As
The Economist noted: 'The Tories' disruptive strategies would not be out of place in
Silicon Valley'.
Where rampant digitization has disrupted a range of established industries since the turn of
the millennium, and set its sights on incumbent finance in the wake of the financial crisis,
the 2010s are marked by tech's infiltration of established politics. Where Facebook and Google
place their own employees in US political campaigns ever since the rise of Barack Obama, an
entire ecosystem of techno-metapolitical players has since grown up around these platforms:
next to dedicated bots and troll farms there now exists a media network dedicated to mainstream
far-right narratives, of which Breitbart News – financed by US billionaire Robert Mercer,
captained by the identitarian demagogue Steve Bannon – is the most prominent. The
adoption of far-right narratives by established media, whether global corporate players like
NewsCorp or national public broadcasters, brought right-wing culture wars into the established
arena of mass-mediated politics.
Other crucial players in this ecosystem are data analytics firms, like Cambridge Analytica
(CA), again featuring Mercer and Bannon, as well as Palantir Technologies owned by US tech
billionaire Peter Thiel. Where CA founder Alexander Nix was schooled at the elitist Eton
College alongside David Cameron and Boris Johnson, Thiel not only enjoys the ear of Trump as
advisor, but also those of Mark Zuckerberg as Facebook board member, where he kept the company
from fact checking political advertisements. Where US journalist Jane Mayer speaks of
'the Fox
News White House' to highlight the close relationship between Trump and the world's second
most powerful media magnate, in the digital age the world's first Twitter presidency might
equally be labeled the Facebook White House to emphasize the ways in which Trump has
become a digitally mass-mediated virus enabled by the world's most powerful media magnate. As
argued by Trump's digital campaign manager: 'without Facebook we wouldn't have won'.
The global rise of neo-illiberalism is covered with the fingerprints of tech firms: where
WhatsApp-mediated memes helped Jair Bolsonaro assume power in Brazil, the Philippines' Rodrigo
Duterte was an early adopter of Facebook's political capabilities. Once in power, moreover,
these 'strongmen' act like disruptive tech CEOs whilst demolishing liberal democracy, and
embrace surveillance tools to anchor their rule: in India, for example, encrypted WhatsApp was
recently found to be hacked, allowing Modi to track his political opponents. But although
Israeli spyware and Russian hackers play an important role in the cross-border spread of
neo-illiberal politics, to fully grasp the political possibilities of the digital age we need
to redirect our gaze to Beijing , where digital technology
is paramount in the exercise of social control.
In combining economic neoliberalization with illiberal political control since the late
1970s, the CCP has been one of the world's neo-illiberal vanguards. Experts describe the
governing ideology of the CCP as a
curious combination of nationalism and Leninism , following China's ideological rejection
of both the French and Russian revolutions, which according to
Wang Hui shaped up after the Cultural Revolution and was settled on Tiananmen Square.
Crucially, the rejection of
'two major emancipation movements – socialism and liberalism' – is exactly what
the western far right is after. In other words, what emerges under neo-illiberalism is a global
ideological convergence. Just consider this: at the height of the so-called European 'refugee
crisis' in 2015, which accelerated the mainstreaming of far-right narratives across the west,
neo-illiberal China also saw the emergence of its own Alt-Right lingo for 'libtards' or
'regressive liberals', with derogatory terms like
baizuo(白左) i.e. 'white left' popping up across the blogosphere.
Since 2016, this cocktail of nationalism and Leninism has put its mark on the west, with
nationalist projects like America First! and Brexit being guided by self-proclaimed
Leninists, like Bannon or Boris Johnson' advisor Dominic Cummings. Enabled by far-right culture
wars informed by another communist – Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci – these
disruptive Leninists have set their eyes on breaking down liberal democracy and the rule of
law. To do so, they pretend to represent 'the will of the people', and relentlessly discredit
the core infrastructure of liberal democracy, framing its key institutions as 'enemies of the
people', 'saboteurs', and 'traitors'. In the words
of Bannon , the identitarian toyboy of the billionaire class: 'Lenin wanted to destroy the
state, and that's my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of
today's establishment'.
Alibamazonia
Where economist Branko Milanovic foresees a
global clash between two ideal type political operating systems in the twenty-first century
– liberal capitalism captained by the US, versus political capitalism championed by China
– in reality the two have already substantially converged. Reduced to its core, where
China and the non-western world opened up economically in the image of the US and the west in
the closing decades of the twentieth century, today you can tentatively argue that the US and
the wider west are politically closing up in the image of China. The new synthesis is
neo-illiberalism, which speaks to what Thomas Piketty views as
'merchant nativism' i.e. the marriage between neoliberalism and identitarian nationalism.
Besides emphasizing a process of reglobalization rather than deglobalization, the rise
of neo-illiberalism also suggests that the center of capitalist gravity has shifted: where
parts of the traditional periphery have steadily assumed characteristics of traditional core
countries, the west has witnessed a reverse process of what the late Immanuel Wallerstein calls
semi-peripheralization. In the words of Martin Wolf : 'as western
economies have become more Latin American in their distribution of incomes, their politics have
also become more Latin American'.
Where historian Neill Ferguson once spoke of 'Chimerica' to emphasize the co-dependent
relationship between the world's two superpowers, today we can identify the contours of what
you might call 'Alibamazonia': a twenty-first century imperial federation of techno-nationalist
states, i.e. a global alliance between nationalist 'strongmen' and digital platforms. The
relationship is symbiotic, as the rollout of digital surveillance requires the rollback of
liberal democracy by design, which in turn strengthens illiberal political rule. In the words
of Susanna Zuboff: 'surveillance capitalism takes an even more expansive turn toward domination
than its neoliberal source code would predict Though still sounding like Hayek, and even Smith,
its antidemocratic collectivist ambitions reveal it as an insatiable child devouring its aging
fathers'. Indeed, digitization and surveillance not only disrupt Smithian competitive markets,
but also Lockean notions of private property, and ultimately threaten to undo all liberal
guarantees of individual freedom.
Besides heralding a territorial shift from west to east, amongst others symbolized by the
United Nations' (UN) recent contract with China's WeChat (Tencent) to streamline its digital
communication, neo-illiberalism also heralds a fundamental reconstitution between national and
global scales, respectively understood as public and private spaces, whereby decades of
neoliberalization transformed the former in the image of the latter, whilst the latter has
witnessed an extraterritorial shift into digital and offshore domains, giving rise to
private capitalist power of vast proportions, eating away at national states and international
state systems. This is the most banal explanation for the western rise of neo-illiberalism:
where decades of neoliberalism effectively put up the west for sale, neo-illiberalism heralds
the moment when neoliberalism's ultimate winners seek to buy up and privatize government
itself:
'neoliberalism's final frontier' .
Pandemic
Although coronavirus might be the final death knell to neoliberalism, it should be
remembered that neoliberalism is a highly mutable ideology – well equipped to utilize its
own failure for its advancement. Put differently, if neoliberalism is dying, we are looking at
a slow-motion demise: where some identified its imminent death after the dotcom crash at the
turn of the millennium, neoliberalism certainly lost its self-explanatory aura after the
financial crisis of 2008. Accordingly, although still carried forward by a centrist consensus,
western neoliberalism became more authoritarian. And where 2016 saw the centrist consensus
collapse, seeing neoliberalism's core economic project carried on by a decisive illiberal
politics, the question is whether today's coronavirus will bring an end to the economic
project. For example, the key pillars of that project, such as global capital mobility and
central bank independence, are still standing. Furthermore, although non-neoliberal policies
might well be enacted to stem the virus, like introducing capital controls, these might be
temporary measures to save the project in the long run.
That said, if coronavirus proves to be the final death knell to neoliberalism, which even
the Financial Times alludes
to, it still might prove a blessing for core features of neo-illiberalism. For example, where
the virus is regarded as an indictment of neoliberal globalization, it nonetheless fuels the
rollback of liberal democracy and rollout of digital surveillance. Indeed, for the world's faux
Leninists and tech billionaires the virus is the ultimate disruptive event to be exploited.
Where the US Republicans have used the pandemic to legislate neoliberal tax breaks and
deregulation, as part of a rescue package that trumps the 2008 financial bailout, we should not
underestimate the extent to which Trump might exploit the pandemic for his own benefit, not
least to escape the prospect of electoral loss and prosecution. Many 'strongmen' are embracing
the virus to anchor their rule, not least Victor Orbán cynically exploiting the virus to
accelerate Hungary's transformation from liberal democracy towards illiberal dictatorship, with
the EU once again looking the other way, thereby confirming its own neo-illiberal
corrosion.
Where many countries have yet to setup mass testing capabilities to track the virus and
create viable paths out of societal lockdowns, a whole range of states have watered down
privacy legislation to digitally track the virus, including left coalition governments like
Spain. In this sense, the virus has led to a reboot of neoliberalism's famous TINA mantra
– there is no alternative – because who cares about far-reaching surveillance when
lives are at stake? As argued by Jamie Bartlett, 'the looming dystopia to fear is a shell
democracy run by smart machines and a new elite of 'progressive' but authoritarian
technocrats'.
Mimicking core features of China's fin-tech-state integration, Apple and Google have joined
forces to allow governments to track the virus, whereas the US government has promised to
rollout a digital dollar and wallet as part of its coronavirus rescue package. Indeed, the
virus is a financial bonanza for tech companies, not least Thiel's Palantir having signed a
contract with the British National Health Service (NHS) to optimize data management. In one of
his first acts to tackle the virus, Dominic Cummings invited all bigtechs to Downing Street. As
noted in Wired magazine: 'for Cummings it's big
tech versus bad virus' . Palantir is currently in talks with governments across Europe.
Across the globe, the virus is spurring the development of digital apps, using locational
data and facial recognition technologies to track population health and whereabouts. In India,
Modi's henchmen are forcing citizens to take hourly selfies to track the virus through their
whereabouts, and non-compliance will result in enforced mass quarantine, where catching the
virus seems all but certain. In so doing, coronavirus threatens to deepen the ugly face of
neo-illiberalism, defined by mass incarceration programs, from Uighurs in China's Xijiang to
refugees indefinitely locked up along the Mediterranean and the US-Mexican border. And whilst
the pandemic has yet to reach the world's favelas and slums, threatening the lives of the most
vulnerable, lax responses to the virus in the developed world characterized by defunded health
care systems are making neoliberalism's implicit social Darwinist inclinations shockingly
explicit.
As the rise of neo-illiberalism signals profound geopolitical and economic shifts, the
pandemic might well be utilized to rewire the world's legacy operating systems. Are we moving
towards a financial reset, which was due in 2008 but was postponed via monetary gymnastics?
Will China liquidate its massive holding of US treasuries? Will the world's superpowers ramp up
the threat of war or will they compromise, or are we already looking at the contours of a new
settlement? Furthermore, with the world economy falling off a cliff, and the worst still to
come, many small-and-medium-sized enterprises are facing bankruptcy, whilst Amazon and a
handful other bigtechs are massively expanding their businesses. What will the post-corona
world look like? Will capitalism survive?
While we anticipate what might be coming, one of the biggest societal disruptions is the
loss of conventional social exchange, of physical closeness and contact, as we are all locked
up in our homes, forcing into digital interfaces, continuously leaking data into the expanding
machine of surveillance capitalism. Although there momentarily is no alternative, we'd better
make sure we seize the moment: the disruptive virus offers an incredible prospect for societal
reprogramming, for better and for worse. Lest we forget that this crisis is not merely
biological – it is deeply political.
Meaty stuff to digest on a Sunday. But very interesting. As to the 'name', I would suggest
crypto-neoliberalism.
One key take for me from the events of the last few months is that its increasingly clear
that when centrist/neoliberals are forced to make a choice between the far nationalistic
right and the populist left or Greens, they will pick the former every time. It's that
simple.
I think its an interesting idea that political movements are being shaped by the
techno-nationalism. Its certainly true that Tencent and Alibaba and Amazon and FB/Google have
a lot in common, and will see their own futures as mutually enmeshed with nationalist right
wing political movements. In China its very hard to see where Tencent ends and the CPP begins
– if Biden wins I think we'll see a similar enmeshing accelerate in the US (Trump being
too slow to realise that he needed those companies as his friends). In a smaller scale, the
same thing is happening in countries like South Korea. Europe is at a crossroads, simply
because it doesn't have those big data companies, so will face the prospect of keeping them
at arms length, or becoming enmeshed in their tentacles, and so becoming a battleground for a
sort of Huawai/Amazon battle.
I wonder if we are seeing a new schism developing between the large nations becoming
variants of techno-nationalisms, with mid sized countries from South Korea to New Zealand to
Norway to Canada and Chile, all trying to stay out of the fray, and perhaps co-operating in a
sort of Hanseatic league of smaller States trying to maintain some degree of
progressiveness.
PK: your last sentence is very interesting. I see those countries you mentioned as not yet
being "cryto-neoliberalist." I would like to think that they would co-operate in order "to
maintain some degree of progressiveness." However, our (Canada's) proximity to the US makes
it highly unlikely to last. Everything is so uncertain what with viruses running amok and
climate change marching onward. Who knows what is next?
There is an optimum size. It's not big and it's not small. It's somewhere in between.
Gotta have something to do with the maximum maintainable human synergy – aka politics.
Evolution seeks a central place to mutate, so for the sake of control, the wizards of our new
crypto-neoliberalism might want to do a massive project to issue citizenship rights to the
entire world. Digitally of course. For one thing, without individual human rights there can
be no local or regional sovereignty. And there will never be a global sovereignty until human
rights are guaranteed – traditionally by democracy but we have seen that it has it's
limits. But because there is a watershed whereby politics (sovereignty) always follows money
it would be smart to look to the actual source of "money" which is people. Whichever way they
are grouped. A smart crypto neoliberal, smarter than Zuckerberg, would first shuffle the
world's nations, then shuffle all their citizens, and then, blindfolded, reach into the mix
and pull out a name. Repeat until all the names are revealed – and each one is randomly
put in a group to be called their "peer group" or stg. like that. And all groups are
organizations of global peers with equal rights. And while that is being chopped up, a global
system of civil/environmental justice can be established gee this is sounding like a big
project maybe we should just stick with nations and give the smaller ones handicaps. This is
making me tired.
Open uncontrollable boarders are a neoliberal goal partly for labor arbitrage, but also to
reduce the power, by reducing its existence, of a nation-state to interfere with the creation
and domination of powerful international organizations like the IMF, or those agreements like
NAFTA. A new kind of economic colonization as ultimately it is being done by
non-nation-states. An economic Westphalia done in reverse.
How about klepto-neoliberalism. In fact I think neoliberalism has accomplished about
everything it can, so it's straight back to medieval times, with climate chaos leaving us as
a failed world, thus we get the dark ages. Unless of course people/citizens decided to take
action. As far as the post, ah, you just can't write like that. If he was a postdoc in my lab
that never would have seen the light of day. I have no idea who the intended audience is,
perhaps economists? The only thing missing was string theory. Historically, I do not believe
that the history of neoliberalism rolled that way. It didn't get better bigger & stronger
after 2008 not based on any risk analysis I've read – everything become deeply
destabilizing. Look kids in this country before the pandemic didn't have enough food now many
don't have any short of begging and handouts. The guy confuses nationalism vs. Nationalist
because he's working his argument backward. Obtuse and sensational at the same time. While
I'm at it, the only problem with democracy is there's not enough of it. Fascism? Where?
China? The EU? Nah.
Besides possessing even amplifying all the off-putting qualities of the term
'Neoliberalism' -- its smeared meanings and usages, its inherent oxymoronity, its ill-coinage
-- the term 'Neo-Illiberalism' is quite unnecessary given that Neoliberalism is anything but
dead. I believe the aftermath of the pandemic shows most uncomfortable promise of a great new
age of Neoliberalism. As currently configured the 'pandemic' policies in the US will result
in obliterating small and medium business, in widespread mortgage foreclosures, in personal
bankruptcies, in evictions and homelessness, and in a permanent loss of jobs with resulting
high levels of unemployment. The ruins will be grabbed up and consolidated by the large
Cartels, banks, and financial corporations.
The rest of this post interweaves dozens of themes and sub-themes without a coherence I
can perceive. The "key development" "the birth of digital platforms" sounds cool -- but what
is a digital platform when you strip away the 'cool'? It is marketing and media outlet. Are
the "behavioral observation, manipulation and modification" really so novel or so much more
effective? Is it more effective than the techniques of the Church practiced through early
education and socially enforced worship? Does it really lead to more sales, or the formation
of opinion any more effectively than radio or public speeches? Are the impacts of the
'digital platform' really as great and effective as Goggle and Facebook claim in their
advertising sales literature?
Mass surveillance was well underway long before the pandemic. I don't believe the pandemic
offers any better excuse for extending mass surveillance than the excuses already used. The
Internet and our phone systems offer ample hidden means to extend mass surveillance that need
no excuses since no one notices them. The post riffs on about "rampant digitization" and
"data analytics firms" as if they were critical tools of Neoliberalism. We live under the
watchful eyes of government panopticons, created to maintain control over the Populace. But
these panopticons are neither necessary for spreading Neoliberalism nor inherently Neoliberal
in their uses. The panopticons are enabled by digitization but they are hardly necessary to
control a population. The Gestapo was adequately served by neighbors, even family members
informing on each other.
Neoliberalism is alive and well and flourishing. Neoliberalism is an ideology created for
the Big Money by a large well-funded thought collective. It is designed to include multiple
layers and contradictions. The "key development" was not the development of digital platforms
-- the "key development" was the sale of Government to Big Money. This purchase enabled the
re-monopolization and consolidation of US Business, the Globalization of production, the
complete enthrallment of Labor, purchase of Education, Science, and the Media -- including
the Internet highways.
" One key take for me from the events of the last few months is that its increasingly
clear that when centrist/neoliberals are forced to make a choice between the far
nationalistic right and the populist left or Greens, they will pick the former every
time"
That has been true since 23 March 1933, when the German center decided it would rather
back the most vile, violent, radical Right rather than compromise with a moderate democratic
Left. That's the day that every single political party in Germany at the national level,
except the Social Democrats and the (banned & illegal, and therefore absent from the
vote) Communists decided it would be a good idea to give The Mustache the power to legislate
by decree.
The Centrists backed Nixon, Reagan, & Shrub, the Trumps of their respective times, all
manifestly unfit to govern.
As far as the name goes, I've got to pipe up from the peanut gallery and say,
'neoliberalism' has never been a good handle. After these many years, the average person is
not familiar with it. It implies 'some kind of liberal' and it implies 'no-harm-no-foul'. At
this point progressives know it means Bad Stuff but nobody else does. We have gone from bad
to worse by labeling 'centrism' as a bogeyman too, while most people find it a harmless
descriptor of reasonable people whose views are neither leftist nor rightist. So it is no
good as a better descriptor than 'neoliberal'.
The enemy, across the whole spectrum, is corruption. Call the DNC brand of it something
which the average person/voter can grasp.
'Illiberalism' is nothing new, but it is a useful term employed as it is here, in
describing the drive toward globalized fascism. Fascism has been described as "the iron hoop
that keeps the capitalist barrel from falling apart," and the steady steps of regimes to
circumscribe resistance today, paves the road towards crushing opposition tomorrow.
That may be one definition, but clearly it doesn't work that way as in operate and to
implement. Hitler and Mussolini didn't have skin heads doing the heave lifting they had all
unions buying into the master plan. And there was a master plan. Japan relied on a national
code of conduct based on the Bushidō Way and a real hatred of the Chinese.
Yup, you can't really argue with the substance of this. But the usual Open Democracy
blindspot is visible for all onlookers to see, even if the author is apparently oblivious to
it (although given the fancy footwork they need to employ to avoid it, you have to wonder if
they aren't all-too-well aware of it, but don't want to risk disclosure and the resultant
amplification).
Which is: somehow or other (and I really aren't sure how the non-authoritarian left ended
up being enmeshed and embroiled with the authoritarian left on this) the left as a whole has
become synonymous with being some sort of Lockdown Taliban. Only the purest, hardline-ist,
longest, unwavering-ist, toughest most lockdown-ey lockdown ev-ah is to be considered.
And it gets worse, folks. Having participated in the politicising of COVID-19 across
national boundaries, demonising dissenting approaches such as Sweden's and turning the rag
bag of current-knowledge and scientific theories into weaponisable collateral to be
factionalised and then acquired by and deployed by the right and the left in an ideological
turf war, the left has collectively painted itself into an ideological corner from which it
has no path to walk back from.
Proffering a policy response that is little more than lockdowns as far as the eye can see
is hardly likely to have voters flocking to political parties which have hitched themselves
to this wagon.
Or, they can try to wriggle their way out of this "There Is No Alternative"
humanity-under-house-arrest position without obviously surrendering to the opposing stand-off
with humanity-as-a-lab-experiment contrarians.
More likely, though, is the left will get bogged down, as it is continuing to do, in a war
of attrition. Yes, the Lockdown Fetish left can wave shrouds at the "gramps will just have to
jolly well take his chances if we are to be free" right. Neither is any better than the
other. Neither is going to make a breakthrough in popular opinion.
Honestly, I've been involved in the left side of politics for ages. Ending up, apparently
in perpetuity, as having set itself up for this sort of can't-win self-imposed rigid
positioning is as depressing as it is familiar.
Sounds like you are saying that the left has become intellectually stale and consumed with
petty quarrels. Hard to disagree and I also think the obsession with, say, insisting that
Sweden is wrong and that the lockdown consensus is right is an example of this. We are in a
whole new situation with the novel coronavirus and therefore experimentation is
necessary without reproach.
Yup, it's just like the border conversation – no solution on offer, just critique
with no dissent allowed. I keep thinking the cognitive dissonance will kick in at some point.
But for now at least the "solution" is just to keep narrowing the scope of acceptable
discourse.
What I find truly hilarious (and sad) is the faith in voting/democracy with the
consternation about voters continuing to vote "incorrectly."
Sorry to be the lone dissent on this, but the lockdown being turned into a "political
weapon:" that is s curious way of looking at the situation. If it is a weapon, who is it
being used against? (And by the left? Where is this left that is using the lockdown to attack
its enemies?) I guess I don't understand that part of it and perhaps I am completely ignorant
of the situation. But it seems to me the lockdown is more the result of public health
decisions, not some attempt to weaponize the situation and get even with anyone's
enemies.
I do think the pandemic response has been politicized though, but it seems to me
politicization is being generated by those who encouraged fascist militias to carry assault
rifles to lockdown protests at state houses, like in Wisconsin and Michigan. The
politicization seems far stronger to me from people like Chris Christie, who want to force
open the economy and claim everyone should just accept mass deaths (which will definitely
include those we can consider our loved ones).
And maybe the pandemic response has also been politicized a little by some economists, who
seem to think that because they know how to read a spreadsheet they can do this public health
thing themselves far better than any old clutch of medical doctors.
The left are using the COVID-19 to bash the right ("you want to end lockdowns and kill
people!") and the right are using COVID-19 to bash the left ("you want to continue the
lockdowns and kill people's livelihoods and freedoms so life isn't worth living!").
The public -- who are the voters, after all -- are merely caught in the crossfire.
In the absence of political credibility and media credibility, public opinion will simply
bypass both estates and make their own minds up. This is a societal lose-lose-lose.
Neither the left nor the right look like they are capable of leading opinion or
providing good governance. The media goes through the motions of ridiculing either the left
or the right but ends up merely looking ridiculous itself.
This is the stuff of failed states.
The ultimate loser in this scenario is always the left. While the right may be deranged,
the left is not only deranged, it's deranged in a internal dissent-riven, factionalist and
screeching banshee sort of a way. The right, which is merely deranged in an
internally-consistent and unified way looks the least-worst by comparison.
This sounds more like bothsiderism. Where is the left "using COVID-19 to bash the right?"
Do you mean some Twitter thing? Because if it is, this is definitely a case of "the right are
doing something bad so therefore the left must be doing something too," i.e. bothsiderism,
which I would consider a mirage.
Like I mentioned above, the right is showcasing fascist militias in state houses, and
their national politicians are calling for everyone to accept mass deaths so the economy can
get back to growth. And what is the left doing, by your description it sounds like they are
just getting behind the non-partisan public health response: the lockdown and social
distancing. I mean, is there really more to it than that? I am trying to consider your
argument carefully, but I'm not seeing the logic of it.
And besides, what do you mean, "the public" is caught in the crossfire? I would consider
myself a leftist, am I not a member of "the public?" And as a member of the public I find the
right is a palpable threat in this situation. A threat to me, my family, and my community.
And as a member of the public I too find the lockdown hard, oppressive, and worrying, but not
such a deadly threat. The lockdown is pretty much the only tool we have (and is not some
scheme concocted by the left), and still simply do not see how this is some weapon being used
to attack the right on any level that actually matters.
So the difference between the left/right "political responses" here: I don't think those
things are equivalent. And whether "the left is the ultimate loser", you haven't made clear
what they should be doing that they aren't already (should they have armed militias
intimidating elected politicians and calling for mass death too?). You seemed to mention they
should be "more open to options," but you didn't actually make a good case that they aren't
(again, is this some twitter thing? Because that is just the kind of mirage this looks like).
I have simply not hear any leftists do anything by accept policies put forward by medical
specialists.
Have a read of those or pick some random websites of your own choosing. Then come back and
try to tell me the left isn't using COVID-19 to ding the right and vice versa.
And yes, it is bothsidesism. Because both sides are being as bad as the other.
Just because you don't like it (and I don't like it either) doesn't unfortunately mean
it's not true.
No, it is an illusion of centrism (and face it: the Twitters is very much a factory of
illusions): following the advice of public health specialists simply isn't partisan
"weaponization". In fact, I would say the politicking involved here, which includes insisting
that listening to medical experts in equivalent to armed fascists marching through state
houses, is particularly egregious. As if centrists agree with those fascists and "mass
deaths" are called for at least that's the only conclusion I can come to after such
"bothersider" mystification. And that is exactly what this is, mystification of what is
really happening. And when that is the case, one can only ask who really wins here? I think
you're right, it isn't "the left," and I would also say it isn't the public alt large
either.
The results of a survey of 23,000 people in 50 states and the District: 93% of Americans
do not think the economy should reopen immediately.
Should we assume 93% of Americans are now considered "Left"? Regardless of how much some
people want to yell at each other on Twitter or the internet in general, this really is about
life and death. For some people, simply leaving their homes can be a death sentence. Maybe
they don't feel suicidal, yet.
Ideology does not conform with sanity or common sense, but some people would have you to
think different; facts also should agree with the approved ideology or else they are wrong.
The authoritarians, left and right, have doing this for a few years now.
I bet some well paid consultants are figuring out how to label the 93% as liberal moochers
or something.
And by the left? Where is this left that is using the lockdown to attack its
enemies?
Yes, can someone please tell me what the hell constitutes the left? It is incredibly
frusturating to read broad critiques of "the left" in a world when everyone from Nancy Pelosi
to George Soros to Bernie Sanders to Tony Blair to Xi Jinping fall under the heading of "the
left"
That is deliberate. The American left is mainly the DSA, the Greens with some other bits.
Bernie Sanders could be considered part of its rightwing. As the left was slowly destroyed
starting with the American Communist Party, then rolling rightward, what was acceptably
leftist or even liberal was gradually constricted. Now Senator Sanders is labeled a
socialist, which is a lie, but he labeled as such to smear his proposals as communism.
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and G. H W. Bush would all be, or at perceived to be, to
moderate or even leftist . (Pardon me, I might be dying of laughter.)
In American politics, until a few years ago, there was no left since its remnants was
crushed by President Clinton.
The Democratic Party is now at best center-right and getting more so. It is a conservative
party much like the old Republic Party of the 1960s without a spine, more pro-war, more
authoritarian and comfortable using and being part of the police state and much more
corrupt.
The Republican Party is something new for the United States. It has a spine, it's
fanatically pro- wealth, and insane. Otherwise, it is much like the Democratic Party.
The differences in social issues are like the shell of a hermit crab. As soon as the money
is threatened they are discarded with the right soothing lies to quiet the true
believers.
A similar, but I guess less violent, process happened in Europe.
Clive, I beg to differ. Your own guy, at question time asked Borris "How on earth did we
get here?" Well, how did we? The post explains nothing. Your comments are all outcomes /
conclusions but not the mechanics of how it happened. I say with all due respect. Having two
incompetents as leaders is a start but not by far the whole answer.
Yes, if you can successfully pull off the line of attack you're suggesting the left tries
to pull off against the right, then you're definitely on to something.
But if this approach doesn't work (and it isn't -- read it and weep ; I
certainly do) how long do you want the left to keep going with it? Yes, sometimes persistence
pays off and repetition eventually yields results. However, sometimes it doesn't and it is
just flogging a dead horse.
How much longer should I give it? And if public perception is that your line of criticism
is only another variation on coulda-woulda-shoulda and England Derangement Syndrome, when
does what sounds like broken record'ing get to be simply annoying people rather than
converting them?
Put as simply as I can, is it worth my asking if the left seriously wants to govern or
does it just want to whinge?
An impressive description of world-historical developments. But there are some important,
I would say crucial, elements missing in this account. Here are a few of them:
1. What alternative would the author advocate? Is it a return to the "extreme center"?
Though the "center-left" is identified as "co-producers" of this world with the
"center-right," it is the latter, along with the various international representatives of
"Illiberalism" (China, Russia, Bolsonaro, etc.) that get almost all of the criticism. I
gather that the author is not advocating socialism. So what is the preferred model? Or,
worded differently, where is the *resistance* to this next stage of neoliberalism to come
from? The Obama or Clinton wings of the Democratic party? The "adults" on the Council on
Foreign Relations? A more authentic "mixed" economy or Social Democracy? I can't tell –
which keeps me from knowing how to interpret this.
2. Along those lines, completely missing from the framing of this article is the degree to
which the "illiberal" states of China, Russia, Iran, and others are attempting to *resist*
being swallowed up by US-led neoliberal globalization, and that an important part of what is
going on reflects this struggle between the old unipolar hegemon and the rest of the world.
This article collapses important distinctions between the US/West and the non-West in their
historical relation to neoliberal globalization. For most NC readers this is probably obvious
in the case of Russia, at least. Whatever we think of Putin's "authoritarianism," it does
*not* stand in the same relationship to global capitalism as that of Trump.
3. Similarly, while there is a lot here about the dangers of the Surveillance State (and
rightly so), I don't see much about how this might relate to global geopolitical conflict and
the military-industrial-intelligence complex. For example, I don't see anything about the US
military bases that surround China, Russia, Iran, etc., the steady expansion of NATO after
the fall of the Soviet Union, the role of US intelligence in the return of fascism to Brazil,
the destruction of lesser states that had the audacity to resist being absorbed by Western
Neoliberal advance (Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.). Yeah, Steve Bannon is a right-wing s**t. But
he didn't do any of this -- he is just the political beneficiary.
There are several other missing elements in this story, but I'd settle for a discussion of
these.
You seem to leave out how the virus will change "personal rights". Rights for businesses
to disobey govt orders. In Michigan, it is rising to a collision between the right to disobey
the law in the name of freedom versus govt acting to protect its citizens. So that what we
will have at the end is businesses being able to operate outside the law while individuals
will have their rights stripped.
One example, which has been fought repeatedly in the past, is the right for businesses to
serve who they want. Michigan businesses are saying they don't have to follow rules put in
place due to COVID. Then, citizens are saying they don't have to follow those rules if they
don't want to. So businesses don't have to serve minorities if they don't want to. Doctors
don't have to care for/accept patients that may not be able to afford a premium price &
premium services. Where will it stop?
The virus is a bright light is casting in bold relief the deficiencies of society: the
replacement of minimum wage workers with prisoners, the loss of healthcare for the
unemployed, the forfeiture of education to inadequate broadband, the replacement of humanism
with AI but above all, the absence of true statesmen.
The Koch bro's & their ilk fancy themselves as Libertarian which is, essentially,
plutocratic social Darwinism. Ya know, that "Because markets / Go die" thing.
Now the the tech. billionaires present themselves as benign saviors of humanity. They
propose that a Public Private Partnership for a total surveillance state is the way to go.
(See 'The Intercept' article "New Screen Deal" in yesterday's Links – a must read).
PPP's are an essential "feature" of fascism. It appears to me that this is the direction the
US is headed.
I think much of this discussion will be upended by climate change and the ongoing collapse
of our high-tech, high-manufacturing, high-consumption societies. The surveillance dystopia
in particular, although looking fearsome at the moment, is especially fragile: in order for
mass digital surveillance like that to be possible it is not enough for governments and a
handful of corps to have big computers, rather the surveillance technology must be ubiquitous
and woven into the fabric of everyone's life. That means, inter alia, cranking out hundreds
of millions of smartphones, home appliances and sundry digital gadgets every year,
distributing them, keeping them powered and networked etc etc. Will we retain that capacity?
Highly doubtful IMO, although I won't attempt to predict a timeline.
Sorry to rant, but this post lit my short fuse when it started talking, out of the blue,
about national crypto currencies. That's a total oxymoron. All mixed up with offshoring and
secret capital stashed away on Pirate Island – they tossed in almost a nonsequitir:
national crypto currency. No. It is not crypto. It is digital. Digital currency and Crypto
currency are light years apart. They have nothing in common. Except that certain people are
interested in stripping democracy and nations of their sovereignty to control their money.
With an article like this the death of sovereignty is sneaking in the back door. And money
– its actual value – cannot be separated from sovereignty. Unless there is a
greater sovereignty to include it. And that requires a lot of work because if it is not
accomplished "neoliberalism" will eat up the planet, all its resources, starve anybody who
gets in their way, and jet off to Mars.
And the red herring about financialized surveillance is crypto-speak. Taking away our
privacy and human rights. Right. Well, the underlying reality which we might not notice, is
our national democratic sovereignty. I am not happy with the casual insouciance of this
post.
I have to say that I was rather disappointed (though not totally surprised given the
source) that the role of the Democratic Party establishment in supporting the move to
neo-illiberalism via its dedication to its Wall Street and Big tech clients and total
antipathy to any minor move to the left within the Party. This has served as an enabler to
the Republican right in their move into Neo-fascism and away from any semblance of
participative democracy in this country.
This screed is just a mess. Neo-liberalism has always been a thoroughly authoritarian
doctrine; it's initial laboratory was Pinochet's Chile. And '"liberal democracy" has always
been a contradiction in terms,- (what's the name of Japan's perennial ruling party?)
Electoral systems, if that"s the minimal criterion of "democracy," have been increasingly
hollowed out of what little popular efficacy they once had after 40 years of neo-liberal
ascendancy. CF. Colin Crouch's "post-democracy" or Sheldon Wolin's "inverted
totalitarianism". So the screed just combines nostalgia for nothing, for what never was, with
sub-Foucaultian paranoia, in the name of the vanity of being an academic intellectual.
There's no mention of the global debt load, 320% of global gdp, which had reached its limits
even before Covid-19, and which will collapse in the aftermath of the Covid-19 induced
depression. That would be the real start of any serious analysis, as the coming terrain of
future contention, rather than imagining that the masters of the universe could continue
their predatory reign in the absence of any sustainable basis for it.
The failed nations of USA, UK, Canada and Sweden haven't controlled the Wuhan coronavirus.
They are identified in the center in red. These neo-liberal governments won't spend money to
hire contact tracers, provide universal testing and quarantine the infected in safe secure
facilities. Instead they've come up with herd immunity, freedom and other nonsense to gloss
over the fact that the excess deaths are of absolutely no concern to the ruling
aristocracy.
The cure is to restore democracy. Halt the pandemic. Rebuild sustainable societies,
infrastructure and nations. This will be difficult unless the truth is recognized that the
reigning elite's ideology of profit over anything else is destructive and quite deadly.
Before coronavirus came to dominate the headlines, one of the most important stories of the
year was the signing of an agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. The deal signed in Doha
on February 29 is a first step toward ending the U.S.'s longest war. After nearly two decades,
thousands of lost lives on all sides, and an estimated $1.5 trillion, the Trump administration
is finally acting on knowledge the U.S. government has long possessed: the war in Afghanistan
is unwinnable.
The parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the Vietnam War are striking. In the
Afghanistan Papers that were acquired by the Washington Post , the senselessness of the
war is laid bare by U.S. government officials. The papers are reminiscent of the Vietnam-era
Pentagon Papers and show that for years, the U.S. government has known that the war in
Afghanistan is a costly and deadly exercise in futility. Afghanistan's terrain, tribal
politics, and culture have long thwarted invaders. This is something that the British and the
Soviets, to the delight of U.S. officials in 1979, learned the hard way.
Yet despite clear lessons from the past and what should have been some institutional memory,
U.S. policymakers pursued financially and strategically ruinous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Estimated expenditures on these two wars and the larger open ended "war on terror" now exceed
$6.5 trillion. Rather than having made the U.S. more secure, these wars, and the unchecked
defense spending that they demand, make the U.S. more vulnerable to a host of internal and
external threats.
America's interventionist policies abroad and the cancerous growth of defense budgets, the
most recent of which is nearly $800 billion, compromise Washington's ability to grapple with
threats like crumbling infrastructure, an educational system that fails to deliver, and true
national preparedness for a crisis like the coronavirus. It is useful to think about what even
a small portion of the $6.5 trillion spent on failed wars could have done had it been spent on
infrastructure, world-class public education, accessible healthcare, and emergency
preparedness. If it had been spent intelligently and strategically, it could have been
transformative.
Instead, the U.S. public, as has so often been the case, continues to allow the
military-industrial complex to exercise undue influence. The companies that make up the vast
military-industrial complex in the U.S. spend millions lobbying Congress. These lobbying
efforts probably have the highest return of any investment on the planet. In exchange for
comparatively paltry campaign donations, members of Congress are persuaded to pass legislation
that yields billions in revenue for these companies.
Those who stand up to the calls for increased defense spending are said to be "soft on
defense" or even called "unpatriotic" by rival politicians and the platoon of retired colonels
and generals who act as paid cheerleaders for defense contractors. In his 1961 Farewell
Address, President Eisenhower presciently warned Americans about the power of the
military-industrial complex. In the often-quoted speech, Eisenhower argued that "we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex." Eisenhower went on to say that a failure to guard against this
influence could lead to a "disastrous rise of misplaced power" that could "endanger our
liberties or democratic processes."
Americans have ignored Eisenhower's warning, and we are living with the consequences. The
insidious influence of the military-industrial complex infects both Congress and much of the
U.S. news media. Never was this more apparent than after September 11, when those who
questioned the march to war in Afghanistan and Iraq were demeaned or silenced. Real debate
about how to best respond to the threat posed by al-Qaeda and, more generally, militant
Salafism was quashed. Instead, the U.S. pursued the most expensive and, as time would prove,
counterproductive policies imaginable.
Nearly 20 years on, Afghanistan is slowly reverting to Taliban control. The invasion of Iraq
spawned the Islamic State and turned the country into an Iranian satellite. Neither of these
wars achieved their aims, but they did make hundreds of billions of dollars for defense
contractors. Low-cost and effective ways to combat terrorism are rarely considered. Such
methods do exist and often consist of little more than empowering local communities via very
specific tailored development projects. But such methods do not require hundreds of millions of
dollars' worth of drones and Predator-borne missiles. Thus, they receive little attention and
even less funding.
Now, as the U.S. winds down its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the "war on terror" is
passé. The new threats are the old threats: Russia and China. The pivot away from the
war on terror to renewed preparations for combatting China and Russia will be even more
profitable for the defense industry because this means increased funding for big-ticket legacy
weapons systems. The defense budget just passed by Congress is one of the largest in the
country's history and even funds the creation of a sixth military branch, the Space Force. The
demands for ever more defense spending ignore the fact that the combined defense budgets of
China and Russia equal a little more than a quarter of what the U.S. spends on defense. Nor is
there much discussion of the fact that a war between great powers is as unlikely as it is
unthinkable due to the threat of mutually assured nuclear annihilation.
In the same speech in which he warned Americans about the rise of the influence and power of
the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower argued that the only real check on this would be
"an alert and knowledgeable citizenry." One can only hope now that the U.S., and indeed the
world, face the threat of a global pandemic, that Americans will begin to question soaring
defense budgets and endless wars that contribute little to real security. Real security, as
this pandemic will demonstrate, is dependent on internal resiliency. This kind of resiliency is
built on sound infrastructure, accessible healthcare, a well-educated and healthy populace,
localized supply chains, and responsive and responsible government. The coronavirus pandemic
may finally force a rethink of how the U.S. government spends its citizens' money and how
willing it is to continue funding and fighting counterproductive wars.
Michael Horton is a foreign policy analyst who has written for numerous publications,
including The National Interest , West Point CTC Sentinel, The Economist , and
the Christian Science Monitor .
>The capitalists have painted themselves into a corner. There is no way out from this
crisis which does not
> involve the end of fifty years of neo-liberalism (and two centuries of the liberal
Political Economy).
I thought the same in 2008. Did not happen.
> Neo-liberalism, allied to warmongering in the MIC and dominating the political
process through its ownership
> of both its own party and the Opposition's, has so dominated US life that the kind of
reforms that Keynes saw
> as necessary to preserve the system from itself are unthinkable.
That's true but neoliberalism evolved in different direction: Trumpism ("national
neoliberalism") is essentially neoliberalism without neoliberal globalization. Domestically
it looks more and more like a unique "Americanized" flavor of neofascism. The latter
historically proved to be a resilient social system (Spain)
> The current policy of giving money in unlimited quantities to corporations, virtually
without condition,
> and invoicing the working class by pledging future tax revenues to repay the cost of
financing, is unsustainable.
OK. But what is the countervailing force ? There is none. By definition creating a viable
political opposition in a national security state is impossible. Note that the USSR crumbled
only when KGB changed sides. And that Nazi Germany did not crumbed until Soviets took Berlin,
and, despite all the misery of the last year of war, there were fierce fight for Berlin (and
heavy losses for Soviets)
> Neo-liberalism, the ideology of capitalist rule, has had its chance. The crisis that
we are in
> is showing how useless it is, how dangerous a society devoted to the profit of a few,
rather than the welfare
> of the many is. With every new twist and turn it demonstrates its inability to
govern.
Neoliberalism will most probably survive COVID-19 epidemic like it survived the crisis of
2008. You can argue whether quarantine was necessary or not and about the level of
incompetence of Trump administration, but you can't deny that the measures taken by the USA
government somewhat softened the blow and the social system remains intact.
Again, there is no viable countervailing force to MIC and financial oligarchy, and the two
party system is very resilient and essentially guarantee that the internal political
situation will stay this way. Looks like only external shocks or disintegration of the
country under the pressure from far right nationalists can crumble this system.
> What this adds up to- mass unemployment and increasing immiseration with no organised
voice to represent tens
> of millions of desperate workers and their families is the likelihood of a series of
explosions, riots,
> strikes, boycotts and direct actions.
In the USA the family of three can survive when each of the adults earn just $10 per hour
(which means income around $40K a year). Real misery is reserved mostly to single mothers and
unemployed. You can't compare the situation in the USA to the situation in "neoliberalized"
xUSSR countries where it is really about physical survival and large percentage of population
live of ~$2 a day. Do we see riots in those countries ?
> There is nobody to press reforms on the ruling class
It's a common refrain: We have bubble-wrapped the world . Americans in particular are
obsessed with "safety." The simplest way to get any law passed in America, be it a zoning law
or a sweeping reform of the intelligence community, is to invoke a simple sentence: "A kid
might get hurt."
Almost no one is opposed to reasonable efforts at making the world a safer place. But the
operating word here is "reasonable." Banning lawn darts ,
for example, rather than just telling people that they can be dangerous when used by
unsupervised children, is a perfect example of a craving for safety gone too far.
Beyond the realm of legislation, this has begun to infect our very culture. Think of things
like
"trigger warnings" and "safe
spaces." These are part of broader cultural trends in search of a kind of "emotional
safety" – a purported right to never be disturbed or offended by anything. This is by no
means confined to the sphere of academia, but is also in our popular culture, both in "
extremely
online " and more mainstream variants.
Why are Americans so obsessed with safety? What is the endgame of those who would bubble
wrap the world, both physically and emotionally? Perhaps most importantly, what can we do to
turn back the tide and reclaim our culture of self-reliance , mental toughness , and giving one
another the benefit of the doubt so that we don't "bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for
absolute security," as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about
?
Coddling and Splintering: The Transformation of the American Mind
There is an interesting phenomenon involved in coddling: Australian psychologist Nick Haskam
first coined the term "concept creep." Basically, this means that terms are often elastic and
expand past the point of meaning. Take, for example, the concept of "trauma." This used to have a very
limited meaning. However, "trauma" quickly became expanded to mean even slight physical or
emotional harm or discomfort. Thus the increasing belief among the far left that words can be
"violence" – not "violent," mind you, but actual, literal violence.
In the other direction, the
definition of "hero" has been expanded to mean just about anything. Every teacher,
firefighter and police officer is now considered a "hero." This isn't to downplay or minimize
the importance of these roles in our society. It's simply to point out that "hero" just doesn't
mean what it used to 100 or even 30 years ago.
Once this expansion of a term occurs, there is never any kind of retraction. Trauma now
means just about anything, and violence will soon be expanded to include lawful, peaceful
speech that one disapproves of. Once this happens, there will be no going back. In the words of
Sam Harris :
"We (as a society) have to be committed to defending free speech however impolitic, or
unpopular, or even wrong because defending that is the only barrier to violence. That's
because the only way we can influence one another short of physical violence is through
speech, through communicating ideas. The moment you say certain ideas can't be communicated
you create a circumstance where people have no alternative but to go hands on you."
It is extremely dangerous to begin labelling everything as violence for reasons of free
speech, but perhaps even more dangerous is the notion that when anything is violence, nothing
is violence. Redefining words as "violence" means that we have little recourse for when actual
violence occurs.
The Coddling of the American Mind notes some other concepts that are important as we speak
of America's obsession with "safety" above all else. First, that coddling combined with
splintering means that people's political views are much more like fanatical religious views
than anything. They don't see themselves as having to debate ideas or seek common ground.
Rather, the opposing side and its proponents are seen as "dangerous" and must be discredited at
all costs. It is worth noting that this is much more common among the left than the right or
the center, which has now become more the place where "live and let live" types congregate.
The problem with this goes beyond simply being irritated by irrational people barking at you
or at someone else: There is an entire generation of people who are seriously lacking in
critical thinking
skills . They think that labelling people and name-calling are excuses for a reasoned
argument. In the words of Voltaire, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you
commit atrocities."
These problems are hardly confined to political radicalism or academia. Indeed, the
corporate sector is no stranger to this kind of safety obsession. There is the phenomenon of
"woke capital," where the corporations find the latest celebrity cause-du-jour and use it as a
marketing strategy.
There is currently an extreme risk aversion in management science. Companies will now do
basically anything to avoid "a kid getting hurt" or someone's delicate sensibilities being
offended.
Education from kindergarten up to the universities is increasingly about teaching doctrines
and ideology, rather than critical thinking and problem solving skills. All of this is a
dangerous admixture that combines the full weight of the academic, cultural and business elites
in this country. And its consequences are far reaching.
Trigger Warnings and Safe
Spaces
For those unaware, a "trigger warning" is a person's advisory that disturbing content is
going to be posted. However, in an example of concept creep, the meaning of "disturbing" has
become expanded to mean, well, just about anything that might offend a leftist. It is also
sometimes known as a "content warning," "TW" or "CW."
A similar concept is that of a "safe space." What used to be a term used for a place where
people in actual danger of physical harm could express themselves, a "safe space" now means a
place where there is no room for disagreement or questions because language is literally
violence.
This might all sound very silly and we definitely agree that it is. However, it is quickly
becoming de rigeur not just in academia, which is increasingly functioning as a bizarre
combination of a daycare center for 21 year olds and an indoctrination program, but also in the
corporate world and in the media.
It's not surprising that such foolishness has reached our corporate elites, because so many
figures within that world come from the Ivy League. Harvard Law, for example, was the center of
a controversy where
they were urged not to teach rape law or even use the word "violate" (which makes it pretty
hard to talk about violations of the law). A Harvard professor argued that greater anxiety
among students to discuss complicated and nuanced séxual assault cases was impeding the
ability of professors to adequately teach their students. This in turn would lead to poorly
prepared attorneys for rape victims in the future.
Beyond a simple discussion in the academic sphere, there are student groups on campus who
urge students not to attend or participate in class discussions focused on séxual
violence. The same student groups advocate for warning students in advance so they can skip out
on class and even to exclude "triggering" material from tests. Once again, the real victims
here are the victims of séxual assault whose attorneys will be ill-prepared to advise
them, to say nothing of the cumulative effect on the prosecutorial environment.
Another key term to understand here is "microaggressions" which means just about
anything. Offensive statements under this umbrella include things like "I don't see race,"
"America is the land of opportunity" and "I believe the most qualified person should get the
job."
To readers of Generation X or older, this all might sound like a resurgence of political
correctness and, indeed, to some extent it is. However, there is something different about the
current anti-speech craze sweeping not just campuses, but also boardrooms: Political
correctness was, at least in theory, about the elimination of so-called "hate speech" (for
example, using "mentally disabled" instead of "retarded" or "little person" instead of
"midget") and also about broadening the canon of literature to include more women and
minorities.
One doesn't need to agree with either objective or be as generous as we are to see that the
West has entered a new, accelerated and intensified version of the old political correctness
that is qualitatively more dangerous. The "safe spaces" phase of this is about eliminating
anything and everything that might be emotionally troubling to students on campus.
This assumes a high degree of fragility among American college students. But perhaps this
assumption isn't totally off base.
The Road to Safety Obsession
If you were born before 1985 or so, your childhood was vastly different than of those born
after you. As a child, you probably came and went as you pleased, letting your parents know
where you were going, who you would be with and when you might be home. You rode your bike
without a helmet and if you were bullied at school there's a good chance that you view this as
a character-building experience, not one of deep emotional trauma.
So what happened?
A few things. First, in 1984, the "missing child" milk carton
was introduced. America became obsessed with child abduction in response to several
high-profile child kidnappings over the period of a few years. Etan Platz , Adam Walsh and Johnny Gosch are just three of the names
known to Americans during this time period. In September 1984, the Des Moines, Iowa-based
Anderson Erickson Dairy began printing the pictures of Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin on milk
cartons. Chicago followed suit, then the entire state of California. In December 1984, a
nationwide program was launched to keep the faces of abducted children front and center in the
American mind.
Some of the protocols established out of this were useful, such as AMBER Alerts and Code Adam .
Awareness of child abduction in general was raised and as a result there's significantly fewer
child abductions today than there were in 1980. Indeed,
stranger abduction is incredibly rare in the United States . But this has come with a dark
side.
You might be familiar with the myriad of cases in suburban America where children playing
alone are
arrested by the police because they don't have adult supervision. The parents are then
questioned by the police or, in some cases, the state's Child
Protective Services .
And so the result is that there are at least two generations of American children raised in
a protective net so tight that they not only have trouble expressing themselves, but also
being
exposed to failure and discomfort . What began as a good-faith effort to prevent child
abduction and increase overall child welfare has ended up, as a side effect, creating a world
where children were raised in such safety that they can't even handle being upset.
This has not only insulated children from the consequences of their own actions and the
normal pains of growing up, but also gives the impression that no matter what their problems,
"adults" are ready to step in and save the day at any moment.
There are two other cultural phenomena worth exploring: The television series Cops and the
24-hour cable news cycle. As of April 2020, Cops is still on the air, having moved from Fox to
Spike TV in 2013.
Cops was more than just a TV series, it was a cultural phenomenon that changed television.
The cinéma
vérité style used by the show was to be copied in the 90s by virtually every
reality show you can name. Curiously, it came out around the same time that crime rates had
plummeted comparatively to the 70s and 80s. And just at that time, people started having the
worst in human behavior beamed into their homes for entertainment every Saturday night.
At the same time, CNN was bringing news into your home 24 hours a day without end. This
meant they had to fill programming around the clock – and most news is bad news. So in
addition to a hugely popular program centered around chasing criminals in the act, Americans
also had a constant stream of bad news and dangerous events pumped into their homes. The result
was the end of the "free range child," the kind who learned through play and discovered risk
management through trial and error. This was replaced with children whose entire existence was
micromanaged by adults, with little to no unsupervised play time.
The ability to learn through failure is a well-established principle going back to the
Greeks, who called it pathemata mathemata ("guide your learning through pain"). The knowledge
and wisdom gained through failure and pain are arguably more lasting and valuable than those
learned in school.
The Generation Gap: Millennials and Gen Z
Older generations (Generation X and Baby Boomers) have a tendency to conflate Millennials
and Gen Z (also known as "Zoomers"). However, there are two key differences, one cultural and
one clinical: First, Zoomers are much more digital natives than their Millennial counterparts.
They didn't get constant internet access or mobile access at college. They've had it since they
were in middle school in many cases.
While this is bound to create secondary cultural differences, we know of one clinical
difference between Millennials and Zoomers: Zoomers are much more prone to mental illness ,
specifically depression, anxiety, alcoholism and self-harm.
The Baby Boomers and Gen Xers created an environment where it is safer than ever to be a child ,
but at what cost? There has been widespread and verifiable psychological damage done to the
younger generation, which is likely being compounded by the coddling taking place in our
nation's universities.
Screen Time and Social Media
"Screen time" is the new obsession for parents, especially among, ironically, those who work
in high-tech Silicon Valley jobs such as Steve
Jobs, father of the iPhone . But there seems to be an emerging consensus among those who
have actually studied the topic that the problem isn't "screen time" per se, but rather the
more specific use of it in the form of social media . This has
been identified as the cause of depression and anxiety, particularly among girls.
Why is social media usage particularly impactful among girls? Dr. Haidt and others postulate
that it's because they are more sensitive to the "perfect" lives being lived by beautiful social
media influencers – at least the lives that they lead online. What's more, there is a
lot of exclusion and bullying taking place on social media. In days past, you only heard about
the party you didn't get invited to, but now you get to watch it unfold in real time on
Snapchat or other platforms. And cyberbullying
is much harder to track and police than its real world equivalent.
There's a related bubble wrapping going on with regard to a different sort of screen time:
Kids today are often forbidden from playing with plastic guns or even finger guns. There is the
notorious case of the 7-year-old child who was
suspended for biting a Pop Tart toaster pastry into the shape of a gun . But millions of
children come home (from the same schools where finger guns can warrant a suspension) to play
Grand Theft Auto for hours on end.
Indeed, there is some evidence that suggests that
violent movies and video games can trigger violent thoughts in some, but not all, people
who view them. The National Institute of Mental Health has done an extensive study detailing the
impact that violent media has on those who view it.
A Nation Divided
There's not much hyperbole in saying that America is barely a single nation anymore. We talk
about "red states" and "blue states," but the divide is much deeper than that. Even the coastal
states largely have an urban college-educated Democratic population and a rural
non-college-educated Republican population.
While some animosity between different areas of the political spectrum, or even resentment
of cities by the countryside and vice versa, is
nothing new , the rancor took off sharply in the early 2000s following the controversial
election of George W. Bush and his expanded imperial presidency after
9/11 .
Social media
makes it easier for extremes to amplify their anger. What's more, it's much easier for
people to become part of an online crusade – or witch hunt – than it is for them to
do so without it.
This is a big part of what is behind the string of disinvitations and protests on American
college campuses. No one, especially young people (where "young" means "under 30"), can bear to
listen to the opinions of someone they don't agree with. Disinvitations aren't limited to
highly controversial figures like MILO and Richard Spencer, or even the decidedly much more
vanilla Ann Coulter. Condoleeza Rice , the first black
female Secretary of State, was disinvited in 2014, as was the first female head of the IMF and
the first female finance minister of a G8 nation, Christine
Lagarde .
Because Americans increasingly refuse even to listen to arguments from the other side,
inserting instead a strawman in favor of reasoned debate , there is no reason
to believe that the American political and ideological divide will not increase.
The
Evolution of Victimhood Culture
America and the West have largely adopted a victimhood culture. It is worth taking a minute
to trace this radical transformation of values in the West from its origins.
The earliest societies in the West were honor cultures. While it sounds like a no-brainer
that we should return to an honor culture, we should unpack precisely what this means. An honor
culture usually means a lot of interpersonal violence. Small slights must be dealt with through
dead violence – because a gentleman cannot take any kind of stain on his honor. Dueling
and blood feuds are common in these kinds of cultures.
This is superseded by dignity culture. Dignity culture is different, because people are
presumed to have dignity regardless of what others think of them. In a dignity culture, people
are admired because they have a "thick skin" and are able to brush off slights even if they are
seriously insulting. While we might find ourselves offended, even rightfully so, it is
considered important to rise above the offense and conduct ourselves with dignity. Everyone
heard some variant of "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me"
growing up as a child. This is perhaps the key phrase of a dignity culture.
Victimhood culture is concerned with status in a similar manner to honor culture. Indeed,
people become incredibly intolerant of any kind of perceived slight, much in the manner of an
honor culture. However, in a victimhood culture, it is being offended, taking offense, and
being a victim that provides one with status.
Victimhood culture means that people are divided into classes, where victims are good and
oppressors are bad. There is an eternal conflict with eternal grievances that can never fully
be corrected or atoned for. People feel the need to constantly walk on eggshells and censor
themselves. This leads to an overall emphasis on safety, as even words become "violence"
– we need trigger warnings and safe spaces to protect us.
Victimhood culture is closely associated with safety culture. Safety culture is, above all
else, debilitating . Those who choose a marginalized identity – and in the contemporary
West, a marginalized identity is almost always a choice – become more fragile and more
dependent on the broader society. At the same time, the powerful elements in society gain a
stake in reinforcing this marginalized identity.
The Great Society provides a case study in this dynamic.
Those who do not receive the so-called "benefits" of safety culture are frequently more
prepared for the real world. Who would you rather hire? Someone who studied hard in a rigorous
discipline for four years or someone who spent four years being coddled in what is basically a
day care center for twentysomethings? With this in mind, it's not too big of a leap to see that
straight white men might actually have become "privileged" through the process of not having
access to the collective hugbox in higher education.
The Role of Lawyers and
Litigation
There is a relationship with the litigious society in which we live with warning labels
everywhere, often for hazards that would seem incredibly obvious to most observant people. In
previous generations, even power tools didn't come with warnings to roll your sleeves up or
take off your watch. This information was either common sense or passed along in high school
shop classes or on the job.
However, the American legal system has no penalty for frivolous lawsuits, which has led to
an explosion in the number of lawsuits. There is a massive army of lawyers in the United States
(which has a surplus
of some 40 percent ) whose profession revolves around finding aggrieved parties who weren't
properly "warned" – or indeed to be able to help write the warning labels themselves.
These labels do not even exist for actual safety. The same type of person who is going to do
the thing being warned against is likely the same type of person who doesn't read warnings. The
labels are simply there as a form of "CYA" for the firms who make them.
That said, to a certain degree, the "litigious society" is a myth. The oft-cited McDonald's
coffee burn is actually more
reasonable than people are aware : The elderly woman in question who was burned simply
wanted McDonald's – who kept their coffee extra hot to prevent people from taking part of
their "free refills" policy – to pay for her skin graft resulting from the burn. When
McDonald's refused to settle this out of court and the case went to trial, they were rewarded
for their efforts at stonewalling with punitive damages.
So the main example of frivolous lawsuits is a big strawman. But to be clear –
frivolous
lawsuits are real . One great example of an actually frivolous lawsuit was the man who sued
his dry cleaner for $67 million because they delivered his pants to the wrong person .
There was no actual damage here and it's difficult to express just how ridiculous the dollar
figure claimed was. This case was thrown out of court, as most of these types of cases are.
Still, litigants pursue them either to get media attention or to harass the defendant or both,
a phenomenon known as "lawfare." And these cases clog up genuine claims in the courts.
Civil trials are long and drawn-out things. And with 40 million of them in the United States every
year and over a million lawyers ,
it's unsurprising that the system has become clogged with lawsuits, many of which are either
totally frivolous (remember – there's no penalty for filing a frivolous lawsuit in
America) or just the type of thing that should be either settled or handled through binding
arbitration.
While the litigious society exists in parallel to the "safe spaces" of college campuses, it
is worth noting because it is part of the larger bubble wrapping of the American landscape. The
same kids who were raised with helicopter parents and a general sense that they had a "right"
to never be offended were likewise raised in an environment where people could be sued for
anything or, at the very least, this was the public perception. It is just another factor of
risk aversion in American life.
There are other consequences of having too many lawyers around and having them congregate
within our political class: Words are chosen to obfuscate and laws proliferate, as legislation
becomes a sort of "jobs program" for lawyers. The more laws we have, the less free we
are and the less social trust we have. As laws, regulations, and agencies take
the place of civil society , the state grows at the expense of everything else and the less
trust we have in our society.
Overreacting to the Wuhan Coronavirus
In 2020, the Wuhan Coronavirus
broke out of China and spread all around the world. The world had not seen a deadly, contagious
virus with such scope since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 . At
first, the response was denial and apathy. However, this quickly gave way to what could be
considered a massive overreaction: Shutting everything down.
There was a certain logic to this: If people gathering together were what was spreading the
virus, then simply keep people apart until the whole thing blows over. However, this is also
potentially a huge overreaction. It is a medical solution in the
driver's seat without any nod to the economic, social or military consequences that flow
from it. Even if one agrees that medical solutions are to be the primary driver, it does not
follow that they are the only driver.
Because of the lopsided and often hysterical reaction, many of the proposed solutions don't
even make sense: For example, telling everyone they can go to the supermarket while prohibiting
them from going to small offices, or shutting down the border
between the United States and Canada – two countries with highly infected populations
and a sprawling border that is largely unpatrolled.
A brief disclaimer: None of us are epidemiologists or virologists. And we defer to their
superior knowledge on this subject.
However, during the Spanish flu pandemic, life did not shut down quite so completely as it
has during the Coronavirus pandemic. The methods used during the Spanish flu were isolation of
the sick, mask wearing in public, and cancellation of large events. In places where these were
practiced rigorously, there was a significant decline in the number of infections and death.
St. Louis in particular is known as an exemplar of what to do during an easily
transmissible epidemic.
"The economy" has been cited as a reason the total shutdown of life during the Coronavirus
pandemic was a poor idea. This might sound frivolous, but the mass unemployment not only leads
to destitution for those when the economy is so paralyzed that there are no other jobs
forthcoming. It also leads to a spike in
the suicide rate . There is a certain calculus that must be done – how much
unemployment is worth how much death from Wuhan Coronavirus?
The reaction to this virus is noteworthy, because it is the first major pandemic of this
new, insulated and coddled age. Rather than reasonable measures to mitigate death, the choice
made was to do anything and everything possible to prevent death entirely. Not only might this
be an unwise decision, it might be a fool's errand: The virus seems to be much
more contagious than was previously thought, as well as much less lethal .
More than one reasonable person has asked what would happen if we all just went about our
lives making reasonable precautions, such as hand washing, mask wearing, social distancing, and
the cancellation of large events like sports and concerts. This is effectively what Sweden has done
and it appears to work, especially when contrasted with
their neighbors in Finland who have done basically the same as America. How much sense does
it make to have the entire community converge upon its grocery stores while not allowing anyone
to go into an office, ever? Compare this with what has passed for reasonable reaction: Closing
down every school, every dine-in restaurant, and the government dictating which businesses are
essential and which aren't.
A big motivator of this is a compulsion to not lose a single life to the Wuhan Coronavirus,
which is a totally unreasonable goal. People are going to die. The question isn't "how tightly
do we have to lock the country down to ensure no one dies," but rather "what are reasonable
measures we can take to balance public safety against personal choice and social cohesion?"
The splintering and division of America in practice has meant that the
establishment conservative media was largely in denial over the virus for weeks . It is not
a liberal smear to say that the amount of denialism from establishment conservative media,
pundits, think tanks, bureaucrats and elected officials has in practice meant that America
responded much more slowly and conservatively than it might have with a more unified America
body politic.
At the beginning of spring 2020, the virus seemed poised to
devastate the American South , which largely stuck with the early conservative media
denialism, eschewing social distancing, shuttering of certain public places and mask wearing.
Again, a more united body politic and the media and trust in the media that goes along with
that might have prevented a lot of illness and death.
Imagine the impact of Walter Cronkite or Edward Murrow going on television and telling the
American public to mask up and maintain distance versus the impact of Rachel Maddow and Tucker
Carlson doing it.
What Is Vindictive Protectiveness?
"Vindictive protectiveness" was a term coined by Haidt and Lukianoff to describe the
environment on America's college campuses with regard to speech codes and similar. However, it
can refer more broadly to the cultural atmosphere in the United States and the West today. From
the college campus to the corporate boardroom to the office, Americans have to watch what they
say and maybe even what they think lest they fall afoul of extra-legal speech and thought
codes.
Perhaps worst of all, an entire generation is being raised to see this not only as normal,
but as beneficial . This means that as this generation comes of age and grows into leadership
positions, that there is a significant chance that these codes will be enforced more
rigorously, not less. And while there may be ebbs and flows (political correctness went into
hibernation for pretty much the entire administration of George W. Bush – though to be
fair, there was an imperfect replacement in the form of post-9/11 jingoism), the current
outrage factory is much more concerning than the one that sort of just hung around in the
background in the 1990s.
Put plainly: the next wave will be worse. We may not have Maoist-style Red Guards in America quite yet,
but we're not far off and the emphasis should be on "yet."
In less than three decades, a mere blink of the eye in historical terms, the United States
has gone from the world's sole superpower to a massive foundering wreck that is helpless before
the coronavirus and intent on blaming the rest of the world for its own shortcomings. As the
journalist Fintan O'Toole noted recently in the Irish Times:
"Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings
in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger.
But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity."
Quite right. But how and why did this pitiable condition come about? Is it all Donald
Trump's fault as so many now assume? Or did the process begin earlier?
The answer for any serious student of imperial politics is the latter. Indeed, a fascinating
email suggests that the tipping point occurred in early to mid-2014, long before Trump set foot
in the Oval Office.
Sent from U.S. General Wesley Clark to Philip Breedlove, Clark's successor as NATO commander
in Europe, the email is dated Apr. 12, 2014, and concerns events in the Ukraine that had
recently begun spinning out of control. A few weeks earlier, the Obama administration had been
on top of the world thanks to a nationalist insurrection in Kiev that had chased out a mildly
pro-Russian president named Viktor Yanukovych. Champagne glasses were no doubt clinking in
Washington now that the Ukraine was solidly in the western camp. But then everything went awry.
First, Vladimir Putin seized control of the Crimean Peninsula, site of an all-important Russian
naval base at Sevastopol. Then a pro-Russian insurgency took off in Donetsk and Luhansk, two
Russian-speaking provinces in the Ukraine's far east. Suddenly, the country was coming apart at
the seams, and the U.S. didn't know what to do.
It was at that moment that Clark dashed off his note. Already, he informed Breedlove, "Putin
has read U.S. inaction in Georgia and Syria as U.S. 'weakness.'" But now, thanks to the
alarming turn of events in the Ukraine, others were doing the same. As he put it:
"China is watching closely. China will have four aircraft carriers and airspace dominance
in the Western Pacific, within 5 years, if current trends continue. And if we let Ukraine
slide away, it definitely raises the risks of conflict in the Pacific. For, China will ask
would the U.S. then assert itself for Japan, Korea, Taiwan the Philippines the South China
Sea?
...[I]f Russia takes Ukraine, Belarus will join the Eurasian Union, and, presto, the
Soviet Union (in another name) will be back...
...Neither the Baltics nor the Balkans will easily resist the political disruptions
empowered by a resurgent Russia and what good is a NATO 'security guarantee' against internal
subversion?
...And then the U.S. will find a much stronger Russia, a crumbling NATO and [a] major
challenge in the Western Pacific. Far easier to [hold] the line now in Ukraine than elsewhere
later" [emphasis in the original].
The email speaks volumes about the mentality of those in charge. Conceivably, the Obama
administration still had time to turn things around – if, that is, it had shown a bit of
flexibility, a willingness to compromise, and a willingness as well to stand up to the
ultra-nationalists who had led the anti-Yanukovych upsurge and opposed anything smacking of an
even-handed settlement.
But instead it did the opposite. Back in the 1960s, cold warriors had argued that if Vietnam
"fell" to the Communists, then Thailand, Burma, and even India would follow suit. But the
proposition that Clark now advanced was even more extreme, a super-Domino Theory holding that a
minor ethnic uprising in a part of the world that few people in Washington could find on the
map was intolerable because it could cause the entire international structure to unravel. NATO,
U.S. control of the western Pacific, victory over the Soviets – all would be lost because
a few thousand people insisted on speaking their native Russian.
Why such rigidity? The real problem was not so much a confrontation mindset as a phenomenon
that the historian Paul Kennedy had identified in the late 1980s: "imperial overstretch." Like
other empires before it, the U.S. had allowed itself to become so over-extended after
twenty-five years of "unipolarity" that strategists had their hands full keeping an
increasingly rickety structure together. Nerves were on edge, which is why an ethnic uprising
that might have been accommodated at an earlier stage of U.S. imperial development was no
longer tolerable. Because the rebels had run afoul of U.S. imperial priorities, they
constituted a fundamental threat and therefore had to be bulldozed out of the way.
Except for one thing: the structure was so weak that each new bulldoze operation only made
matters worse. Insurgents continued to hold their ground in Donetsk and Luhansk thanks to
Russian backing while the government grew more and more corrupt and unstable back in Kiev. In
the Middle East, the situation was so confused that U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar
were channeling money and arms to ISIS as it rampaged through eastern Syria and northern Iraq
and advanced on Baghdad. Thanks to the turmoil that U.S. policies were unleashing, millions of
desperate refugees would soon make their way to Europe where they would spark a powerful
nativist reaction that continues to this day. U.S. hegemony was turning into a nightmare.
It was no different in an America shaken by Wahhabist terrorism and dismayed by wars in the
Middle East that went nowhere yet never seemed to end. Donald Trump rode a wave of discontent
into the White House by promising to "drain the swamp" and bring the troops home. Conceivably,
he could have done just that once he was in office – if, that is, he had been serious
about downsizing U.S. imperialism and was capable of standing up to the CIA. But the
"intelligence community" struck back by launching a classic destabilization campaign based on
the theme of Russian collusion while Trump's foreign-policy ideas turned out be even more of a
mess than Obama's.
So the collapse intensified, which is why America is now such a helpless giant. A crazy man
is at the helm, yet the best Democrats can do is put up a candidate suffering from the early
stages of senile dementia, who may be a rapist to boot. No one knows how things will play out
from this point on.
But two things are clear. One is that the process d id not start under Trump, and the other
is that it will undoubtedly continue regardless of who wins in November. Once collapse sets in,
it's impossible to stop.
[Iraq] will have to borrow a lot of money most likely from the IMF. The money may come
with U.S. conditions.
BM: Hmm. Iraq has a big pile of problems on its hands, but the way the "answer" is worded
seems rather USA-flavoured, as though Iraq borrowing from the IMF is even remotely viable
politically, given that would automatically make its other political problems far more
intractible. Does not sound like a "Bernhard" statement to me. may come with U.S.
conditions.??? Is that what is commonly referred to as an "understatement"?
Piotr: Actually, this is a HUGE blunder in the article. I have only one data point:
Trump administration threatened to freeze 35 billions on Iraqi funds in American banks if
Iraq completes the expulsion of American forces. One f...d up thing in Iraq is the failure of
restoring electricity production, and the dependence on Iranian electricity and Iranian gas
for the power station. As we know, it is much cheaper to build power stations that run on
natural gas than on crude or coal, and the fuel costs are lower, so it seems that Americans
blocked the most economic solutions to the problem. And as a bonus (for Americans), the
failures in electricity supplies were a major motivation in riots that caused government
crisis.
This there is no problem with IMF borrowing money to Iraq or not, but the direct
dependency on USA that can give the access to Iraq's money or not. Extremely colonial
dependency, without using "international tools" like IMF.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. "
- Voltaire
I once read a definition of psychological depression as a result of anger and fatigue. That
seems about right. Personally, I'm sick of COVID-19 dominating the headlines and I definitely
have inner rage at the magic spell that's been cast over society. And it is a magic spell. Or
an ill wind, if you prefer. Except tracking the source of a voodoo curse, or determining where
a breeze began, might be easier than identifying the many variables of this planned-demic .
Truly, the overwhelming information is difficult to process on any given day.
Last week, I read
an article describing how COVID-19 is a hoax propagandized by the media and, a few minutes
later, I watched a video
of a survival expert (whom I very much respect) chastise those who are not taking COVID-19
seriously as a genuine health threat.
Then, I was informed of an acquaintance dying from coronavirus. I knew the man personally
and the last time we spoke he was telling me about his new girlfriend. His death was deemed
notable enough to have a write-up included into the COVID-19 series of a national newspaper;
and that's how I learned he died – when someone sent me the link. I'll also say he was in
his seventies and his blood pressure was so high his eyes were constantly bloodshot.
So did he die with COVID-19 or from COVID-19? Yes, he did.
Indeed, lots of variables to consider. And it's tricky because health policies are a matter
of public concern AND private responsibility. It's why considering the variables requires
balance and common sense. Yet, unsurprisingly, it's become obvious COVID-19 has been
politicized by some and even commandeered by others for purposes of power consolidation and
achieving authoritarian goals.
Certainly, the virus doesn't need to be devastatingly lethal in order to accomplish the
objectives of the globalists. At any given time, the ship of state progresses via (what I have
designated as) the
"Bulbous Bow of Confusion" , or, rather, competing narratives.
Two physicians who own five urgent care locations in Kern County California recently posted
a viral YouTube video citing their own COVID-19 data and calling for an end to the draconian
lockdowns. Their names are Dr. Dan
Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi and the data they compiled acted as a "resistance wave" to
countermand the official narrative put forth by ( as I've identified
in past articles ) the likes of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), World Health
Organization (WHO), The Gates Foundation, John Hopkins University, and UK's The Guardian.
Yet, today, if you click on any previous articles where the doctors'
viral videos were once posted you will see they've been taken down; and even their other
videos queued in the threads of the articles have been transitioned into dead links by our
benefactors at YouTube.
Truly, censorship is the validation of ideas as the most powerful force on earth; because if
you now search for the two doctors by name on YouTube, you will find a video stamped with the
Washington Post logo describing "What Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi get wrong
about coronavirus" .
To be sure, the billionaires are committed. They can't go back now and this is why they are
on full offense in the narrative war. It means no expense will be spared in the media onslaught
until every person in the world fears COVID-19 being spread from cats and
farts . It's
also why various
treatments are claimed to be ineffective and only the
five innovations proposed by the New American King should be considered:
[Bill Gates] said the innovations needed to come in five areas: treatments, vaccines,
testing, contact tracing, and policies for reopening the economy.
But what about Trump? He is still the U.S. President, right?
In past postings, I've exhaustively considered Trump as a possible "movie" or "reality TV
show". My article entitled
"Personal Politics, Public Impeachment, Persuasion and Post-Apocalyptic Planning" also
discussed how the Military Industrial Complex has NOT grown weaker in the decades since
Eisenhower and Kennedy – and, in fact, cited the trend of its growing strength from Abe
Lincoln through the creation of the Federal Reserve, and Woodrow Wilson, onward.
I've additionally speculated in previous writings President Trump as one of the
following:
1.) The Real Deal – fighting the Dark Lords out of love of country
2.) Being used by the Dark Powers unwittingly
3.) A Judas Goat
At this point in time, it appears the possibility of # 1 is fading, if not having been
completely debunked as of this writing.
So, given #'s 2 & 3 above, I've previously questioned if Trump was elected as a "
bleeding of the brake lines " prior to the " big stop " (i.e. end of America).
Therefore, what if the Trump Reality TV Show® was meant to demonstrate the sheer power
of "The Controllers" and their ability to convert the globe into One World under Communism?
And, furthermore, what if the 2016 Presidential Election was staged to illustrate to all
nations the futility of resistance?
Consider the waves that have crashed upon Trump's shores over the past four years:
Russiagate/Mueller, Ukrainian Impeachment, and, now, COVID-19. Each of these consecutive waves
were increasingly consequential from a historical perspective.
Is the war to "drain-the-swamp" real? Because, if not, the battle lines have been made clear
and the tech gods have cataloged our IP addresses.
Since the United States recently suspended its payments to the WHO, the organization's
biggest contributor is now the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Another major contributor
to the WHO is the GAVI Alliance (formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation).
Both of these organizations are also part of ID2020, an organization that is advocating for
the use of vaccines to implement a global digital ID system using tattoos or microchips.
Or was it planned? And for those who would say it was planned, would you call them
"conspiracy theorists"? But, seriously, is it really conspiracy if it's all been published
?
Because, over the decades, it has become quite evident that wealthy individuals, influential
families, and powerful organizations and corporations have coopted nation-states in order to
unite the globe. World War I delivered the League of Nations and World War II brought about the
United Nations. Since then, the billionaire round-table groups have only grown more
interconnected as Davos Men planned and the Bilderberg's conspired .
The modern era has progressed by committee; and to the giant sucking sounds as predicted by
former presidential candidate Ross Perot.
In 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Business Network drafted a document
entitled " Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development " which
outlined the following potential plans schemes through 2030: " Lock Step ", " Clever Together
", " Hack Attack ", and " Smart Scramble ".
The first link below is a 54-page (2.29 MB sized) PDF file. Even if the Bill Gates' inspired
MS Windows gives you a virus warning, just know the file can be viewed (or downloaded) with no
issues. Or, if you would rather watch a one-hour, forty-two-minute video presentation, just
click on link # 2 below:
Note that on page 18 of the PDF (#1 above), the "Lock Step" scenario describes a 2012
pandemic leading to a global economic collapse followed by oppressive authoritarian
controls:
In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike
2009's H1N1, this new influenza strain -- originating from wild geese -- was extremely
virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when
the virus streaked around the world The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies:
international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries
like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and
office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.
. The United States' initial policy of "strongly discouraging" citizens from flying proved
deadly in its leniency, accelerating the spread of the virus not just within the U.S. but
across borders. However, a few countries did fare better -- China in particular. The Chinese
government's quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as
well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives,
stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter
post-pandemic recovery.
China's government was not the only one that took extreme measures to protect its citizens
from risk and exposure. During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their
authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face
masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and
supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of
citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from
the spread of increasingly global problems -- from pandemics and transnational terrorism to
environmental crises and rising poverty -- leaders around the world took a firmer grip on
power.
At first, the notion of a more controlled world gained wide acceptance and approval.
Citizens willingly gave up some of their sovereignty -- and their privacy -- to more
paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability. Citizens were more
tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight, and national leaders had more
latitude to impose order in the ways they saw fit. In developed countries, this heightened
oversight took many forms: biometric IDs for all citizens, for example, and tighter
regulation of key industries whose stability was deemed vital to national interests.
Sound familiar? Because this was the dialectic with which we were presented: " Herd
Immunity® " (an Orwellian term befitting cattle) or " Continuous" COVID-19®. And what
did American's chose? They picked " continuous ", Alex, for $1,200 per U.S. citizen. And as we
Flattened the Curve ®, the CDC broadcasted
concerns regarding second waves of coronaviruses as telescreens the world over warned of
mutant strains of
coronaviruses more contagious than the original .
Yes. Both Coronavirus®, and Big Brother, Incorporated have marched forward
unencumbered.
But as people sheltered in their homes they saw "conservative" Never-Trumpers weaponize the
ghost of Ronald Reagan against the Bad Orange Man® with a video entitled "Mourning in America" . It was too cute
by half. Then, fortunately, as the world remained mystified by
"covid toes" , the president
tweeted back at the Never-Trump "losers" in the most ingenious and gratifying ways.
And Trump is just getting warmed up. No doubt his Zoom® debates with Biden are bound to
be hilarious. Unless Whistleblowergate
Part Deux is the silver-bullet that will stop the Bad Orange Man® once and for all?
(CNN) Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted director of the office involved in developing a
coronavirus vaccine, formally filed an extensive whistleblower complaint Tuesday alleging his
early warnings about the coronavirus were ignored and that his caution at a treatment favored
by President Donald Trump led to his removal.
What I found interesting in that article is how it identified "opposing sides" (i.e.
opposites) as "capstones" on the bottom of the "pyramid" – with the top capstone (eye) as
representative of the final action:
The chess board is a well-known Masonic or Hegelian symbol, the black and white squares
symbolize control through duality in the grand game of life in all aspects. Left or right,
white or black people, conservative or liberal, democrat or republican, Christian or Muslim
and so on. Through two opposing parties control is gained as both parties reach the same
destination, which is order through guided conflict or chaos.
Left (thesis) versus right (antithesis) equals middle ground or control (synthesis). The
triangle and all seeing eye we see so often symbolizes the completion of the great work
The pyramid is supported by the bottom opposing sides. The capstone at the top is
established through controlled solution or middle ground.
In my piece entitled "On
Channel Surfing, Circus Acts, and Time Passages" , I discussed the 1927 movie "Metropolis"
as a favorite of the occult. The words that appear on the screen at the end of that film are
these:
THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN THE HEAD AND HANDS MUST BE THE HEART!
A
2010 article posted on TheVigilantCitizen.com speculated on the "mediator" as the
electronic media which manipulates the plebes (workers) on behalf of the head
(controllers).
To be sure, the Modern Centralizers craft their new realities by means of the Orwellian
Media. It's why they call it programming . And what better way to manipulate the emotions
(hearts) of people than by fiction and fear?
With that in mind, I now call your attention to the below video link of the opening
ceremonies for the 2012 Olympics:
If one cares to click that link and view the segment shown between the 45 and 55 minute
marks, they will see what appears to be a staged viral pandemic. The drama takes place beneath
black pyramids malevolently towering over the stadium (and the crowd) and ends with the
appearance of a giant, creepy-looking baby; or maybe a still-birth – it's hard to
tell.
At the 45 to 47 minute mark, we see kids in hospital beds surrounded by dancing nurses and
doctors. At around the 47:30 mark, the medical staff/dancers put the kids to bed and with
fingers over their months, urging silence. What appears to be a giant virus then appears
center-stage at the around the 48 minute mark.
Then, around the 49 minute mark, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling reads from Peter Pan and
says: "But in the two minutes before you go to sleep, it is real ". Next, shadowy virus-looking
demons take the stage to chase the children, and dark horses towing a magician and a steel cage
glide behind an oriental woman who is looking elsewhere as the pandemic commences.
The 49:50 mark shows what appears to be a giant (British Prime Minister) Boris Johnson sick
in bed.
Finally, as the dark magicians cast their spells and the viruses dance, the nurses and
doctors appear paralyzed and robotic – like puppets (50:45 to 51:45 mark) before Mary
Poppins figures descend from the sky.
In my research, I found another article by the
Vigilant Citizen dated August 17, 2012 , and it had this to say back then regarding the
opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics:
The next important sequence of the ceremony paid tribute to the National Health Service
(NHS) and Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH). The set combined sick kids on hospital beds
with characters from English children's literature and had a very strange and dark undertone
from the start, when it began with the theme from The Exorcist, which is, in case you don't
know, a movie about a child possessed by the Devil. Odd choice.
The sequence begins with children on hospital beds who get put to sleep by nurses. Then
J.K. Rowling appears and reads a quote from Peter Pan alluding to Neverland, which becomes
real in the "two minutes before you go to sleep". I couldn't say if that was done on purpose,
but many elements of this set, mostly the mix of vulnerable children in a hospital with fairy
tales and the concept of blurring the lines between reality and fiction, are all associated
with mind control programming. Like the Wizard of Oz and Alice of Wonderland, the story of
Peter Pan is heavily used in mind control programming as victims are told to escape to
"Neverland" while inducing dissociation from reality.
The same article also addressed the 2012 Olympic closing ceremonie s (video at this link) and showing a new
world order rising like a phoenix; while referencing The Who, no less.
At midnight, the Olympic cauldron and the petals representing each country are slowly
extinguished, but the phoenix, representing the occult elite and the New World Order, stays
lit above it. In other words, as the nations of the world slowly disappear, a New World Order
will emerge. On that note, let's listen to The Who!
Of course, listen to The Who rock band? Or the World Health Organization (WHO)? Coincidence
or conspiracy? You're probably right.
So, to summarize: 2012 was the same year the Rockefeller Foundation predicted the "Lock
Step" pandemic scenario as the Olympic ceremonies that year showed opposing sides battling over
children during the opening ceremonies and followed by the resolution in the closing
ceremonies: A new phoenix rising from the ashes – like a new world order.
Order out of chaos.
Therefore, if COVID-19 was, indeed, a PLANdemic perpetrated by dark forces, was my
aforementioned friend murdered by those who now want us to self-quarantine and wear masks for
the safety of those being murdered? Most likely; because observing luciferian pedophiles
through their symbols is like identifying hidden planets via the observed effects of
gravitation, or studying game theory when the game is rigged.
It's how we can identify who "they" are, but only for people willing to first acknowledge
that "they" exist. Unfortunately, it's a wasted effort on most. One might as well don a tinfoil
hat and chase shadows on a magic pony.
Proponents of mandatory vaccines and enhanced surveillance are trying to blackmail the
American people by arguing that the lockdown cannot end unless we create a healthcare
surveillance state and make vaccination mandatory. The growing number of Americans who are
tired of not being able to go to work, school, or church, or even to take their children to a
park because of government mandates should reject this "deal." Instead, they should demand an
immediate end to the lockdowns and the restoration of individual responsibility for deciding
how best to protect their health.
Regrettably, it was supposed to be a season of graduation parties, weddings, and Fourth of
July celebrations. But these have been displaced by lockdowns, social distancing, bodies in
refrigerated trucks, fear, magic spells, and propaganda.
Big companies partnering with the government to spy on you without your knowledge.
Americans locked in their homes, banned from going to church, placated with sedatives like
beer and weed. Anyone who speaks up is silenced. Political demonstrations are illegal.
Organizers are arrested. Only opinions approved by unelected leaders are allowed on
information platforms. Sound familiar? It sounds a lot like China. Of all the many ironies of
this moment, so many of them bitter, the hardest to swallow is this: as we fight this virus,
we are becoming far more like the country that spawned it. We're becoming more like China.
It's horrifying.
Those in power are the ones the our professional class seeks to protect, not the country.
Freedom of conscience never endangers the public. It only threatens the powerful. It
endangers their control. It hinders their ability to dictate election results, to loot the
economy, to make policies based on whim for their own gain. No wonder our leaders have done
such a poor job protecting us from China. They're on the same team.
– Tucker Carlson Tonight: Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Sadly, it appears Trump may be a crisis actor, like
Anthony Fauci , and part of the plan from the start. The final details were solidified
years ago – including the bioengineered PLANdemic.
China is quite likely part of the plan, too, since One World Under Communism has become the
desired destination of the billionaires; with millions dying along the way. For those who do
survive, they'll be allowed to work , consume , and obey . Of course, many Americans will not
cooperate with their planned demise and this is why The Central Planners will need a great big
war.
Most recently, in an Oval Office Press conference on May 6, 2020, Trump actually blamed
China for Coronavirus while claiming it is the "worst attack we've ever had" :
"This is worse than Pearl Harbor, this is worse than the World Trade Center. There's never
been an attack like this.
– President Donald Trump – May 6, 2020
It means events could potentially occur as follows: As soon as rock-solid proof is revealed
that China released the virus to take out Trump because our great president was winning the
trade wars, then, the Orange-Haired Wonder will rally national support via sorrowful
lamentations while standing tall on reality TV amidst the economic ruins.
A bumbling first strike by the U.S. could allow a Sino-Russian alliance to seal America's
fate once and for all; and most likely by nuclear means.
Then any surviving sheeple will eagerly line up for the Bill Gates of Hell special: A free
digital tattoo along with a bonus vaccination and bowl of soup.
Welcome to the end of the rainbow. Orwell was right: we've always been at war with Eastasia
and jackboots will stomp on human faces forever. Unless, that is, the digital drip-drops from
Q-anon and our online commentaries change the future.
Conclusion
Those gathering at the round tables have been tremendously successful in our societal
programming . Yet most of them are mere puppets to the inner rings of concentric power. The
monsters that once lurked under our beds were set loose years ago and, today, they dress in
drag and read to kids in libraries while others wear blue uniforms and arrest mothers for
taking kids to playgrounds.
And where are the men of action? Where are the lovers of liberty? In my area, they've been
fishing. And grilling. And why not? Trump is in the White House while Nancy Pelosi is locked in
her gourmet kitchen eating fancy ice cream. The stimulus checks are in the bank, the grocery
stores are still open, and if the fish aren't biting, those who would stand up to tyranny can
always grab a bucket of chicken through the KFC drive-thru on the way home. At least for
now.
As far as national lockdowns go, this has been the best one ever. So far.
For obvious reasons, I've been thinking of the autistic livestock guru Temple Grandin and how she pioneered
more humane methods of leading animals to slaughter. One of the methods was to have cattle
march to their demise single file via tall shutes. That sort of isolation seems reminiscent of
what's occurring in America now – with people staring at walls, muzzled by masks, and
numbly following orders while remaining six-feet apart.
How can people resist when they've been fooled? How can they fight back when they're
frightened? And why have they placed their hope in safety instead of liberty ?
Good questions.
Real hope remains in the smart choices, right actions, and the prepping and survival
decisions made every day by those awake and aware. But no matter what the future holds, may all
reading this be surrounded by friends and loved ones who know Epstein didn't kill himself.
"... Pretty near stopped reading right there. IMF and World Bank are primary tools of imposing empire on the rest of the world. There is no reason to pay the slightest attention to any of their predictions, except to keep up with what is this week's propaganda. ..."
"... with the neoliberal reforms of 1975-1997, the IMF quickly rose in importance. Mexico's bankruptcy of the mid-1980s was just the prelude. Then the USSR dissolved, and the IMF suddenly took the WB's place as the capitalist spearhead in the Third World. It's prestige spiked through the roof with the subjugation of Russia (Yeltsin Era), Latin America (specially Argentina and Brazil) and others. When the Asian Tigers crisis broke out (1997), the IMF gained police power, which only rose its importance as a capitalist instrument of hegemony. By 2001 - when the Asian Tigers crisis was essentially over - the IMF basically became sacrosanct, a fact of life of capitalism, a status it still enjoys in the present. ..."
"... IMF's accidental rise to power - coupled with the decline of the World Bank - is a very strong evidence and a poetic illustration of the metamorphosis of the American Empire from an industrial-financial superpower (i.e. a capitalist superpower) to a strictly financial superpower. ..."
"... YES to that. IMF is the imperialist tool of enslavement. It is the entry point for private capital hoarders to prise loose the fabric of social cohesion and turn the threads into rope to bind the people to repay national debt. What did Joe Biden do in Ukraine? He arranged US and IMF loans to the government, stole a larger chunk of the deposit through his son and other vectors via the Burisma board etc as he slinked off back home. Then tried the same in China where he was perhaps ensnared in a compromise sting. In all cases the public repays the debt to the IMF or USA. ..."
>Gita Gopinath, the super-smart Director of the IMF's Research Department,
Pretty near stopped reading right there. IMF and World Bank are primary tools of imposing
empire on the rest of the world. There is no reason to pay the slightest attention to any of
their predictions, except to keep up with what is this week's propaganda.
Posted by: Trailer Trash | May 9 2020 18:41 utc | 20
Same. Maybe the crazies are right, is b even here anymore?
@ Posted by: Trailer Trash | May 9 2020 18:41 utc | 20
The history of the IMF is a curious one. It was one of the many international post-war
institutions created in 1944-45, during the world peace hysteria that accompanied the Cold
War.
Initially, though, it was expected that the IMF would play, at best, a very peripheral
role. It should be, in theory, just a fund to be used in exceptional circumstances, for very
tiny problems. Maybe some basket case in Africa would need a couple billions to fix itself
someday, but nothing more than that. It was definitely not taken seriously, and was just a
footnote in the long list of newly founded international institutions.
The capitalist star of the show during the High Cold War (1945-1975) was the World Bank,
more specifically, its infrastructure investment branch, the IBRD.
However, with the neoliberal reforms of 1975-1997, the IMF quickly rose in importance.
Mexico's bankruptcy of the mid-1980s was just the prelude. Then the USSR dissolved, and the
IMF suddenly took the WB's place as the capitalist spearhead in the Third World. It's
prestige spiked through the roof with the subjugation of Russia (Yeltsin Era), Latin America
(specially Argentina and Brazil) and others. When the Asian Tigers crisis broke out (1997),
the IMF gained police power, which only rose its importance as a capitalist instrument of
hegemony. By 2001 - when the Asian Tigers crisis was essentially over - the IMF basically
became sacrosanct, a fact of life of capitalism, a status it still enjoys in the present.
IMF's accidental rise to power - coupled with the decline of the World Bank - is a very
strong evidence and a poetic illustration of the metamorphosis of the American Empire from an
industrial-financial superpower (i.e. a capitalist superpower) to a strictly financial
superpower.
YES to that. IMF is the imperialist tool of enslavement. It is the entry point for private
capital hoarders to prise loose the fabric of social cohesion and turn the threads into rope
to bind the people to repay national debt. What did Joe Biden do in Ukraine? He arranged US
and IMF loans to the government, stole a larger chunk of the deposit through his son and
other vectors via the Burisma board etc as he slinked off back home. Then tried the same in
China where he was perhaps ensnared in a compromise sting. In all cases the public repays the
debt to the IMF or USA.
The IMF employs connivers in the service of global private finance. Some might call them
super-smart but 'criminally smart' would be a better term.
The Fed is just following the Congressional mandate of supporting the people who fund our
political system.
It should be clear that the stock market doesn't care about Main Street when you see it
still going up with massive levels of unemployment.
MMT states that the Fed can create these funds that are handed out to business by the
trillions but that is not what MMT 'policy' would want.
Most MMT people are actually against handouts to people in the form of a basic guaranteed
income.
A major cornerstone of MMT policy though is a Job Guarantee. In times like these they
would very much like to see employment supported by these government funds. Not only the
basic job pool of a minimum wage job but also supporting more highly paid skilled employment
such as supervising infrastructure projects etc.
MMT is more concerned with resources than money per se. It doesn't help to have money if
people aren't making stuff, providing food and services etc.
Well, you were indeed right. And your reporting better than most if not all MSM articles
written by other laymen. And all without any professional experience. Just by trusting in
scientific methods, data and knowledge, instead of making a conspiracy out of thin air.
In those times, that is an amazing achievement.
But when i hear how few people are tested, when i hear of multiple deaths in my circle of
people, and see the society unable to unite against such a threat, i dont have much hope for
how this will go on.
The last 4 sentences say everything about our western societies, including us Germans.
The only profiteers are the rich, toilet paper and noodle merchants, and politicians (who now
race each other in opening up BEER GARDENS and CONCERTS with 100 people).
Many people today willingly prefer to go to concerts and beer gardens than to deny themselves
those small joys in favor of their compatriots.
Our society is doom. The neoliberal dogma of "Freedom for the nihilistic narcissistic ego
individual over everything else" destroyed what was left of it.
"..At one New York City nursing home, the Isabella Geriatric Center in Manhattan's
Washington Heights, nearly 100 of its 705 residents have died..."
"..In Medfield, Massachusetts, north of Boston, COVID-19 has killed 54 residents over the
past four weeks at the Courtyard Nursing Care Center. An additional 117 residents and 42
employees have tested positive for the virus..."
" A shocking 84 residents have died at the facility since the virus outbreak. Eighty-one
employees have tested positive for the coronavirus.
"... deaths at the Soldiers' Home were initially hidden from both the mayor of Holyoke and
local health officials, who only became aware of the developing situation when employees at
the facility reached out to them. Staff said management at the facility refused to provide
them with PPE and instructed them to crowd patients together from multiple wards into a
single ward as a solution to staffing shortages due to infections..."
"..A particularly gruesome discovery took place in mid-April when police found 17 corpses
piled up at the Subacute and Rehabilitation Center in Andover, New Jersey. The bodies were
stacked in a small morgue designed to hold a maximum of four bodies. The more than 2,000
deaths of staff and residents in New Jersey's long-term facilities account for about 40
percent of the state's coronavirus-related deaths."
There's more much more. And not just from the United States either.
@Hibernian That is angument for bailing out just " the payment system/ real economy and
per mark Blyth or John Kay( other people's money book) is like approximately 5% of the
economy ,the test is just incredible leverage and fool Hardy financialization.
Watch one of John Kay's talks on YouTube or mark Blyth talk about 2008.
Glass- steagall was not the sole cause of 2008, but it does need to be reinstated. Also
when the banks were recapitalized on the backs of savers, by cutting interest rates , to
almost nothing, the rational response was to take your money out, they make loans of ten
dollars on deposits of one dollar and barely even pay you for the privilege.
A jubilee is needed , during certain reigns in Egypt and china , Jubilee's / debt
forgiveness would happen as frequently as every 18 months.
Kings basically used to make the agreement , I'll give you a monopoly on banking but in
exchange don't think if the world's goes to hell , don't think you are getting 100 cents on
the dollar. Not running my kingdom for you to be made whole. It's worse nowadays because they
print the money put of thin air and expect to be repaid in full, austerity is a vicious
cycle, every dollar that goes to debt is one less to spend on consumption , so demand has to
go down, and it creates a vicious cycle.
Another thing china gets right is they owe money to themselves, not oligarchs like us, if
they want to they just agree not to pay themselves back.
Michael Hudson's book killing the host is also great.
That is an argument for bailing out just " the payment system/ real economy and per mark
Blyth or John Kay( other people's money book) that is like approximately 5% of the economy
,the rest is just incredible leverage and fool hardy financialization. America has ones and
zeros , and china has gold reserves , a better nuclear arsenal, competent leadership, more
human capital, infrastructure, means of production, antibiotics, rare Earth's, is the
greatest creditor nation I believe as opposed to the greatest debtor nation and approximately
82% of American weapon systems require at least one input from China.( Please don't argue
America has competent leadership , because competent leadership would have never allowed it
to get 10% this bad, the main argument against tariffs, is that they kick off a retaliatory
cycle, except the U.S. didn't retaliate until extremely recently.
Those factories were built initially by Rockefellers , Sam Walton, Kissinger and other
American oligarchs to get away from American labor, you reap what you sow, but globalists
could care less.
You don't have to like China but please realize the extra Herculean task of trying to lift
1.4 billion people out of poverty, and realize it will necessitate some tough decisions,
unlike America where the bottom 90-95% haven't gotten raises adjusted for inflation since
1983( the great decoupling)
And Americans love to cry about the Chinese not having political freedom, well when most
dissent is disingenious like tienneman square which was the CIA ( google tienneman myth, the
journalists admit it) and Hong Kong was the CIA and Soros ( you really think those people
organically waved American flags, stupid?)
who is a front man for the CIA if you didn't know, the uyghurs are Muslims that the US has
been cultivating since the 80s under Reagan and the national endowment for democracy( per
William engdahl) who have been knighted to sabotage one belt one road because the US is mad
at it's Navy getting end run arounded similar to how the British got mad at the Germans pre
world war 1 for building a railroad to Baghdad, so they could get oil without dealing with
the British Navy ( guess mackinder and Brzezinski aren't as smart as they think)
On top of that political freedom is somewhat of a dead weight loss, look at the division it's
caused in the US, I'd rather have clean water.( 3800+ US areas have water at least 2x worse
than Flint/ Google it)
We build more prisons, china just kills all the prisoners and people who love the killing of
unborn children bemoan the killing of actual child molestors.
Also please be aware the one child policy was imposed on china by the Rockefellers just
like they sterilized a third of Puerto Rican women by 1965 , by tying their tubes without
consent and telling them it was reversible.
How many people even know how Britain got Hong kong,? They fought two wars over the right
of court Jews( Sassoon) in Britain to flood china with opium, and when China lost not only
did they have to give up Hong Kong, they had to allow opium to flood their country and had to
pay for every dollar spent by both sides.( I'm pretty sure if I was Chinese, k would hate the
west on that fact alone)
Watch one of John Kay's talks on YouTube or mark Blyth talk about 2008.
Glass- steagall was not the sole cause of 2008, but it does need to be reinstated. Also
when the banks were recapitalized on the backs of savers, by cutting interest rates , to
almost nothing, the rational response was to take your money out, but they make loans of ten
dollars on deposits of one dollar and barely even pay you for the privilege.
A jubilee is needed , during certain reigns in Egypt and china , Jubilee's / debt
forgiveness would happen as frequently as every 18 months on average.
Kings basically used to make the agreement , I'll give you a monopoly on banking but in
exchange don't think if the world's goes to hell , don't think you are getting 100 cents on
the dollar. Not ruining my kingdom for you to be made whole. It's worse nowadays because they
print the money put of thin air and expect to be repaid in full, austerity is a vicious
cycle, every dollar that goes to debt is one less to spend on consumption , so demand has to
go down, and it creates a vicious cycle.
Another thing china gets right is they owe money to themselves, not oligarchs like us, if
they want to they just agree not to pay themselves back.
Michael Hudson's book killing the host is also great.
In France, a team of researchers has found the disease was already spreading there in
late December, one month before the first official cases were confirmed. The revelation
followed a study of 14 stored respiratory samples of patients who were admitted to
intensive care units with influenza-like symptoms in December and January.
The researchers identified a 42-year-old patient, whose last overseas trip had been to
Algeria in August, who developed symptoms after one of his children had a flu-like illness.
The patient, who had pre-existing asthma and Type 2 diabetes, was admitted to the ICU for
antibiotic therapy and discharged after two days.
This is a weak article. Indignation as for excesses of neoliberal social system that exists in the USA is a good thing only if
there is a plan to change the system. Eric Zuesse has none. Also for top 10% the US healthcare is very efficient; it is probably the best on the planet.
OK neoliberalism is bad. But what is the alternative? Return to the New Deal capitalism is impossible as management now
is allied with the capital owners and that destroyed fragile coalition of trade unions and apart of professional management that
existed during the new deal as a countervailing force for political power of the capital. Such coalition could exist if financial
oligarchy is suppressed and if taxes of millionaires income (especially income from stocks) were around 80%. As soon as JFK
lowered the taxed that was a writing on the wall: the New Deal is doomed. Financial oligarchy was suppressed and it did not like
it. So in 20180 they staged coup d'état and the New Deal was over.
The question is: what political coalition can take on financial oligarchy. There is no such coalition yet.
Notable quotes:
"... Americans generally are desperate to go to work even if they might be spreading the coronavirus-19. They need the pay and the insurance coverage in order to be able to buy medical care. If they don't pay for it they won't get it. So: whomever does show up for work might reasonably be especially inclined to fear likely to catch the disease from a co-worker there. This is one of the many reasons why socializing the healthcare function is vastly more efficient than leaving it to market forces . ..."
"... Furthermore, prisons are among the institutions that especially increase the spread of an epidemic such as Covid-19. And the United States has a higher percentage of its residents in prison than does any other country in the world . In fact, almost all of the Americans who are in prison are poor (since 100% of the poor cannot afford a lawyer), and the poorer a person is, the likelier that the individual is to get coronavirus-19. ..."
"... America has 655 per 100,000, or 4.5 prisoners for every 1.0 prisoner in the entire world), America has vastly more production of coronavirus-19 that's generated by its being a police-state than any other country does -- and this isn't even taking into consideration the rotten, overburdened, health-care system, and the billionaire-propagandized public contempt for the poor, that characterize America's culture, and that make those prisons, perhaps, the worst amongst industrialized nations. ..."
"... Furthermore, in America, "Approximately 95 percent of criminal cases are plea-bargained, in part because public defenders are too overwhelmed to take them to trial. 'That means the state never even has to prove you did anything. They hold all the cards.'" So, the Constitutional protections, such as trial-by-jury and all of the other on-paper protections, don't even apply, in reality, to at least 95% of criminal defendants. And, in many U.S. states, convicts -- and even ex -convicts -- aren't allowed to vote. America's billionaires also use many other ways to keep down the percentage of the poor who vote. ..."
"... In addition, prior to the coronavirus challenge, both America and UK have been reducing, instead of increasing, their social protections; and, therefore, they were the only industrialized nations where life-expectancies were declining even before the coronavirus-19 hit. The recognition and concern about this decline started in UK, but has now started to be published even in the U.S. ..."
"... In other words: coronavirus hit UK at a time when the Government was already moving away from socializing and into privatizing health care; and, as a consequence, the death-rates had already started increasing in 2015. Coronavirus kills mainly people who already have bad health; and, so, their population were maximally vulnerable to it at the time when this epidemic struck. ..."
"... Even prior to 2015, the U.S. was wasting around half of its entire public-and-private spending for health care -- it was the most inefficient healthcare system on the planet -- and therefore had significantly lower life-expectancies than all other industrialized countries did. But, now, those remarkably low life-spans are actually getting even lower. ..."
"... This is the reason why America is designed so as to fail the coronavirus-19 challenge. The power of big-money (concentrated wealth) is destroying this country. It controls both Parties and their respective media, so the public don't know (and certainly cannot understand) the types of realities that are being reported (and linked-to) here. ..."
"... The fact [the existence of ] corporate prisons exist is pretty much an open declaration that we're a kleptocracy, run by the uniparty. ..."
"... We give an EQUAL vote to children, imbeciles, hostiles, and those who don't even speak the language ..."
"... Democracy is not about efficiency but to keep a check on those in power. It preventing the concentration of powers. It all about checks and balances to preserve the citizens freedoms. ..."
Virtually all other industrialized countries have social-welfare systems in place, such as
health-insurance covering 100% of the population; and, consequently, the residents there don't
lose their health insurance if they lose their job -- they therefore aren't desperate to show
up for work even when they are sick or can spread an epidemic.
Americans generally are desperate to go to work even if they might be spreading the
coronavirus-19. They need the pay and the insurance coverage in order to be able to buy medical
care. If they don't pay for it they won't get it. So: whomever does show up for work might
reasonably be especially inclined to fear likely to catch the disease from a co-worker there.
This is one of the many reasons why socializing
the healthcare function is vastly more efficient than leaving it to market forces .
On April 23rd, Reuters
reported that, "U.S. workers who refuse to return to their jobs because they are worried
about catching the coronavirus should not count on getting unemployment benefits, state
officials and labor law experts say."
In such states, the unemployment-benefits system is being used as a cudgel so as to force
employees back to work, and therefore to increase the percentage of the population who will
become infected by the coronavirus-19.
Furthermore, prisons are among the institutions that especially increase the spread of an
epidemic such as Covid-19. And the United States has a higher percentage of its residents in
prison than does any other country in the world . In fact, almost all of the Americans who
are in prison are poor (since 100% of the poor cannot afford a lawyer), and the poorer a person
is, the likelier that the individual is to get coronavirus-19.
This is yet another reason why prisons are a prime place for the spread of the disease. And
on April 26th, the New York Times headlined "As Coronavirus Strikes Prisons, Hundreds of Thousands Are
Released: The virus has spread rapidly in overcrowded prisons across the world, leading
governments to release inmates en masse." Since America has more of its population in prison
than any other country does (lots more: whereas
"The world prison population rate, based on United Nations estimates of national population
levels, is 145 per 100,000" , America has 655 per 100,000, or 4.5 prisoners for every 1.0
prisoner in the entire world), America has vastly more production of coronavirus-19 that's
generated by its being a police-state than any other country does -- and this isn't even taking
into consideration the rotten, overburdened, health-care system, and the
billionaire-propagandized public contempt for the poor, that characterize America's culture,
and that make those prisons, perhaps, the worst amongst industrialized nations.
Taken all together (and to list the other details would fill a book), America's systematized
intense discrimination against the poor constitutes virtually an invitation to this country's
having exceptional vulnerability to any epidemic. The fact that America now has 33.3% of
the world's coronavirus-19 cases , though only 4.2% of the world's population, is actually
systemic, and not merely particular to this moment in this country, and in the entire world.
Donald Trump, and the current U.S. Congress, are part of a system of oppression, not really
exceptions to it (such as the billionaires' media pretend -- with Democratic billionaires
blaming "the Republicans," and Republican billionaires blaming "the Democrats"). The way this
Government performs is actually somewhat normal for this country since at least 1980 .
In addition, prior to the coronavirus challenge, both America and UK have been reducing,
instead of increasing, their social protections; and, therefore, they were the only
industrialized nations where life-expectancies were declining even before the coronavirus-19
hit. The recognition and concern about this decline started in UK, but has now started to be
published even in the U.S.
In other words: coronavirus hit UK at a
time when the Government was already moving away from socializing and into privatizing health
care; and, as a consequence, the death-rates had already started increasing in 2015.
Coronavirus kills mainly people who already have bad health; and, so, their population were
maximally vulnerable to it at the time when this epidemic struck.
Political-science studies that are based
upon decades of reliably reported data have established that ever since around 1980, the
United States has been a dictatorship: what the public wants (and even needs ) is basically
ignored, but what the super-rich (the country's actual dictators) simply want becomes reflected
in governmental policies. That's the very definition of a "dictatorship." The U.S. national
Government is responsive to the wants of its billionaires, not to the needs of the public (such
as protecting their health, education, and welfare, even when the billionaires don't want it
to).The findings in one of these studies are summarized well in a six-minute video, here .
Although the billionaires who fund America's liberal Party, the
Democratic Party, oppose the billionaires who fund the Republican Party (the conservative
Party -- the one that's overtly in favor of the existing wealth-inequality), this is purely for
PR purposes. Whenever the issue becomes their own wealth versus improving the wealth and
economic opportunity for the poor, they all go for expanding their own empire (sometimes by
funding a tax-exempt 'charity' that will increase, even more, their personal control over the
total empire -- by using that tax-exemption to leverage the operation, which will be controlled
by themselves instead of by the public tax-funded government). Such 'charities' are mainly
tax-dodges.
This is even proud policy ('fiscal
responsibility', etc.) in the Republican Party. Bailing-out investors is 'necessary', but
bailing out employees and consumers is 'fiscally irresponsible'. For example, on April 27th,
the Democrat David Sirota headlined "Red States Owe Workers More
Than $500 Billion -- The GOP Is Trying to Steal The Money: Trump is boosting a McConnell
plan to help states renege on promised retirement and health benefits to millions of workers
and retirees." And he is correct.
However, his Party is going to be compromising with that
(instead of adamantly refuse to accept it and then go on the political hustings shaming the
Republican President and Congress-members so as to break them on their blatantly scandalous
whoring to the entire billionaire-class, who want their investments to be bailed out before the
public is -- which might turn out to be never). It's a "good cop, bad cop," routine, to protect
the super-rich. It accepts holding the public hostage to what the big political donors want,
instead of focuses against that as being the central political issue of the moment, and of at
least post-1980 America.
They're just
trying to deceive their suckers into voting for Joe Biden, or else not voting at all; and, so,
their ad doesn't even so
much as just mention Biden. It's a Biden ad that makes no mention of Biden. It hides its true
motive. That's typical.
This is the reason why America is designed so as to fail the coronavirus-19 challenge. The
power of big-money (concentrated wealth) is destroying this country. It controls both Parties
and their respective media, so the public don't know (and certainly cannot understand) the
types of realities that are being reported (and linked-to) here.
A "good cop, bad cop" government is, in reality, all bad cop.
(I therefore proposed an Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution in order to rectify some of the reasons behind this structural failure of the
U.S. Government. Perhaps the only alternative to that would be violent revolution, but it would
probably make things even worse, not better.)
desertboy , 23 minutes ago
The fact [the existence of ] corporate prisons exist is pretty much an open declaration that we're a
kleptocracy, run by the uniparty.
Reign in Fact, 28 minutes ago
" The power of big-money (concentrated wealth) is destroying this country... This is
'democracy'-as-political-scam... "
No the scam is democracy itself. We give an EQUAL vote to children, imbeciles, hostiles,
and those who don't even speak the language, while allowing wholesale vote-buying bribery of
public unions.
No such system has ever thrived anywhere in the animal kingdom - equality without merit,
or rule by will of the laziest, weakest and dumbest - no matter how small the "society",
team, family, gang, union, band, corporation, religion or nation.
It can't and won't end well.
youshallnotkill , 15 minutes ago
Democracy is not about efficiency but to keep a check on those in power. It preventing the
concentration of powers. It all about checks and balances to preserve the citizens
freedoms.
The fact that you don't understand these where basics of why we have a republic is
testament to our failed school system.
Deep In Vocal Euphoria , 30 minutes ago
Demoracy...usa was a constitutional republic..........
AVmaster , 30 minutes ago
This hasn't been the american "design" since 23DEC1913......
Dragonlord , 1 minute ago
America's design to disable the freedom of state secession has ruined it. As a result, we
are facing the possibility of another civil war.
W
hen
the virus
came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited
them ruthlessly. Chronic ills -- a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy,
a divided and distracted public -- had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably,
with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity -- to shock
Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted
instead like Pakistan or Belarus -- like a country with shoddy infrastructure and
a dysfunctional government
whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.
The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came
willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies
. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and
miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly -- not to prevent the coming
disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the
White House took the mic and politicized the message.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed
state. With no national plan -- no coherent instructions at all --
families,
schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter
. When
test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors
pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which
couldn't deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging
and corporate profiteering.
Civilians took out their sewing machines
to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and
their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world's
richest power -- a beggar nation in utter chaos.
Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his
reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the
leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an
armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like
Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And,
like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that's larger and deeper than
one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called
Strange Defeat
, after the historian and
Resistance fighter Marc Bloch's
contemporaneous study of the fall of France
. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of
individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most
Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective
response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when
Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war,
and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an
alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had
taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort
at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.
Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity
and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008,
intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed
a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials
cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the
Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading
bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before
long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a
"speed bump."
All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt
and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who
came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality -- the
fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s -- grew worse.
This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes,
Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary
Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now
they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were -- in health care, financial
regulation, green energy -- had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched
corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The
lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially
government's.
Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they'd lost. The coming politics was populist.
Its harbinger wasn't Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate
who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump's John the Baptist.
[
David
Frum: Americans are paying the price for Trump's failures
]
Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political
class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like
trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of
private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible
for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they
made themselves Trump's footmen.
Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of
national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us
against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and -- every day
of his presidency -- political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country
locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the
effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault,
politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and
destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced
career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the
cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment,
one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the
rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was
his means for using power, corruption was his end.
[
Read:
It pays to be rich during a pandemic
]
This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally
connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the
countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred
and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and
growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led
by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion,
with no vision of a shared identity or future.
If the pandemic
really is a kind of war, it's the first to be fought on this soil in a century
and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society's fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed
or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.
The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might
have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan
lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don't have to be in the military or in
debt to be a target -- you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the
inequality that we've tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find,
the wealthy and connected -- the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn
Nets, the president's conservative allies --
were
somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms
. The smattering of individual results
did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in
long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren't actually suffocating.
An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a
rich person's face.
When Trump was asked about this blatant unfairness, he expressed disapproval but added, "
Perhaps
that's been the story of life
." Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in
normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general
mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks.
As the contagion has spread,
its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people
. The gross inequality of our
health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals.
[
Ibram
X. Kendi: Stop blaming black people for dying of the coronavirus
]
We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned
out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health
directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal
employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the
pandemic's combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver
with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a
smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings,
we're learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive
. An order of organic baby
arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it,
pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns
out to be an impossible luxury. It's worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower
delivery so that they could stay home.
The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler,
the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was
given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job,
after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks
,
then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that
may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler's impulses in public service are those of a dangerous
parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay.
The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior
adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a
meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan
entered the Oval Office, in 1981 -- a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared's mediocre
academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation
to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business,
then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had
contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father's support with fierce loyalty when Charles was
sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by
entrapping his sister's husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.
[
Adam
Serwer: Trump is inciting a coronavirus culture war to save himself
]
Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to
rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In
American Oligarchs
, Andrea Bernstein
describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a "disruptor" of the new economy.
Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and
journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.
So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that
raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with
Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn't matter to most Americans. But since he became an
influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.
In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in
memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols,
flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that
quickly turned to dust. "
The
federal government is not designed to solve all our problems
," he said, explaining how he would
tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was
convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries
to manufacture ventilators -- then Kushner's own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell
through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on
incompetent state governors.
To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante
breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis
, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive
failure of his father-in-law's administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to
governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of
a "deep state" --
they're
essential workers
, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the
nation's health. It turns out that "nimble" companies can't prepare for a catastrophe or distribute
lifesaving goods --
only
a competent federal government can do that
. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of
attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public
has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we
had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.
[
Read:
Trump's coronavirus message is revisionist history
]
The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and
build it anew, or the hardship and grief we're now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current
leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment,
2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime,
so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.
We're faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in
self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we
can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones
so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones;
the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York
; the aerospace workers in
Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians
standing in long lines because they couldn't get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office;
the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to
vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices
. We can learn from these dreadful days
that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that
the alternative to solidarity is death. After we've come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we
should not forget what it was like to be alone.
This article appears in the June 2020 print
edition with the headline "Underlying Conditions."
We want to hear what you think about this article.
Submit a letter
to the editor or write to [email protected].
George Packer
is a staff writer at
The
Atlantic
. He is the author of
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
and
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
.
It is interesting that Tucker Carlson started his program, last night, by railing against
news media that does not investigate issues, especially pertaining to Covid-19 he then
launched into a hypocritical tirade against China using unnamed government sources and unseen
government documents, as the source of Covid-19 malfeasance in reporting the disease, on
China's part. Carlson did this without one media investigation of the veracity of the US
government reports.
Carlson has turned into a hypocritical asshole.
This is because Tucker has always been a Sinophobe instead of a Russophobe.
Be that as it may, he is a hypocrite. Carlson pisses and moans about what lying, corrupt
bastards the intelligence agencies are when they attack the Trump administration, Roger
Stone, Gen. Flynn yet is ready to believe anything those same intelligence agencies say that
is derogatory toward China even though there is no evidence provided.
By
Richard D. Wolff,
Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, and Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School
University, NYC. Wolff's weekly show, Economic Update, is syndicated on over 100 radio stations and goes
to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV and his two recent books with Democracy at Work are
Understanding Marxism and Understanding Socialism both available at
democracyatwork.info
.
We are entering an even Greater Depression than the 1930s, with hundreds of millions thrown out of work
across the world. Capitalism is a broken, unstable system that is beyond repair – but there are
alternatives.
Ninety-one years after the start of the Great Depression (capitalism's worst downturn until now), we are
entering an even Greater Depression. The 1930s were so awful that leaders of capitalist economies ever
since have said they had learned how to avoid any future depressions. All promised to take the steps
needed to avoid them. Those promises have all been broken. Capitalism remains intrinsically unstable.
Read more
Richard D. Wolff: Viruses like Covid-19 are a part of
nature we must accept. But Capitalism-2020 must be destroyed
That instability is revealed in its recurring cycles, recessions, downturns, depressions, crashes,
etc. They have plagued capitalism wherever it has settled in as the prevailing economic system. Now that
the whole world's prevailing economic system is capitalism, we suffer
global
instability. To date, capitalist instability has resisted every effort (monetary and fiscal policies,
Keynesian economics, privatization, deregulation, etc.) to overcome or stop it. And now it is here yet
again.
Across the world, hundreds of millions of workers are unemployed. The tools, equipment, and raw
materials in their factories, offices and stores sit idle, gathering dust and rust. The goods and
services they might have produced do not now emerge to help us through these awful times. Perishable
plants and animals that cannot now be processed are destroyed even as scarcities multiply.
Workers lose their jobs if and when employers – mostly private capitalists – fire them. Employers hire
workers when workers add more value to what the employer sells than the value of those workers' wages.
Hiring then adds to profits. Employers fire workers when they add less than the value of the wages paid
to them. Firing then reduces losses. Employers protect and reproduce their enterprises by maximizing
profits and minimizing losses.
Profit, not the full employment of workers nor of means of production, is "the bottom line" of
capitalists, and thus of capitalism. That is how the system works. Capitalists are rewarded when their
profits are high and punished when they are not.
No-one wants unemployment. Workers want their jobs back; employers want the workers back producing
profitable output; governments want the tax revenues that depend on workers and capitalist employers
actively collaborating to produce.
Yet the capitalist system has regularly produced economic downturns everywhere for three centuries –
on average, every four to seven years. We have had three crashes so far this century: 'dot.com' in 2000,
'sub-prime mortgage' in 2008, and now 'corona' in 2020. That averages out at one crash just under every
seven years – capitalism's 'norm'. Capitalists do not want unemployment, but they regularly generate it.
It is a basic contradiction of their system.
Today's massive US capitalist crisis – over 30 million unemployed and counting, a quarter of the
workforce – shows dramatically that maximizing profit is not maximizing society's well-being. First and
foremost, consider that the unemployed millions continue much of their consumption while ceasing much of
their production. A portion of the wealth produced by those still employed must be
redistributed
to sustain the unemployed. Society thus suffers the usually intense struggles
over the shares of profits versus wages that will be redistributed to the unemployed. These struggles,
both public – over tax structures, for example – and private – for instance, over household budgets – can
be profoundly destabilizing for societies.
Redistribution struggles could be alleviated if, for example, public employment replaced private
unemployment. If the state became the employer of last resort, those fired by private employers could
immediately be rehired by the state to do useful social work.
Then any government paying unemployment benefits would instead pay wages, obtain in return real goods
and services, and distribute them to the public. The 1930s New Deal did exactly that for millions fired
by private employers in the US. A similar alternative (not part of the New Deal) would be to organize the
unemployed into worker co-ops performing socially useful work under contract with the government.
This last alternative is the best, because it would develop a new worker co-op sector of the US
economy. That would provide the US public with direct experience in comparing the capitalist with the
worker co-op sector in terms of working conditions, product quality and price, civic responsibility, etc.
On that concrete, empirical basis, societies could offer people a real, democratic choice as to what
mix of capitalist and worker co-op sectors of the economy they prefer.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely
those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Markets are created and managed by government, Mr. Gruff. Governments are developed to
establish justice, ensure tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the
general welfare. Without these no market is possible. There is no "free market" without
government.
Colonel, you are NOT wrong. The oil business in America is going to take a very long time to
recover. There are complete shutterings of businesses, bankruptcies and more - all while we
were in the middle of a downturn. Personally, I just folded up my tent because my my active
client list went from 21 to zero over this last month (and that includes intl clients).
As the number one buyer of US steel, the oilpatch represents much more than people
realize. We have also been the number one buyer of many other items - where sales have
disappeared as company quietly and reluctantly face the reality of the current induced
glut.
I'm being forced to change livelihoods - interesting for me, as I am short of the age to
get my SS check and too old to employ by most corporate masters....
Handelsblatt newspaper reported, citing the draft decision of the Federal Network Agency of
Germany (BNA), that the BNA intends to reject an application filed by Nord Stream 2 for an
exemption of the pipeline project from the requirements of the updated EU gas directive.
The reason for the rejection of the Nord Stream 2 application was the fact that in order to
exempt the gas pipeline from the updated directive, the pipeline must have been completed
before May 2019. Nord Stream 2 insisted that it was necessary to not proceed from the
"construction" point of this requirement, but to take into account the fact that "billions of
investments had already been made in accordance with the previous legal regime by the time the
new directives of the domestic gas market came into force".
The spokesman for Nord Stream 2, Jens Mueller, said in January that the project meets all
the requirements for its exemption from the rules of the updated EU gas directive in Germany
and
that this also applies to the completion date of the project.
"... history's main engine of economic exploitation – the banking, creditor and financial systems' ever-increasing extraction of value through interest payments. The rentier class and FIRE sector – Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – have long succeeded in depicting themselves as part of a productive economy. Yet for centuries, these sectors were recognized as being parasitic. ..."
"... The pandemic has given this parasitic sector yet another, even more vicious opportunity to exploit and devour humanity. ..."
"... The essence of a parasite is not only to drain the host's nourishment, but to dull the host's brain so that it does not recognize that the parasite is there. ..."
"... Well, it's sort of like Obama's bailout in 2009 and '10 on steroids. It's funny when you read people like Paul Krugman and others Democrats denouncing it all as if it's a Republican bill, but it's identical with Obama's bill and Obama's philosophy. And it was unanimously passed. Chuck Schumer likened it to Roosevelt's New Deal. So I think you should think of it as the Trump-Pelosi bill. Trump simply lifted it wholesale from his campaign backers, who basically are the same as the Democratic National Committee. ..."
"... The bill asks landlords to stop evicting people for three months but let the rent accrue, and personal debts also. Let's look at what's going to happen when the three months are over. ..."
"... You're going to have restaurants and small businesses – whose major expense is rent and credit – not having done much business during these three months. They will end up owing this major cost of doing business for three months without having their usual income. What's going to happen by the end of the summer? ..."
"... The financial bailout aims to enable the financial sector to extract so much money from the economy and drive so many small businesses under that the big venture capital firms and private equity can pick them up at low all prices. You could call it the "Monopolization of the US economy" bill or the "Contributors to Washington politicians" bill. ..."
"... you can look at Hyman Minsky as one who really inspired it in the 19980s and '90s. Its logic is that deficit spending is not bad if it is spent in the real economy to increase employment and spending. ..."
"... Asset prices, capital gains and the wealth of the 1% are going up but real wages and disposable income has been going down. We've seen real estate, stocks and bond prices going up and up since the Obama bailout of 2009, but the economy has not benefited the 95 percent. ..."
"... As long as you leave the 1% with the lion's share of wealth (creditor claims) and property ownership, the economy cannot recover. Without realizing that, there cannot be a class consciousness regarding today's world. ..."
"... The state has become a functionary of the financial sector. It hasn't withered away in the sense as Marx would have thought. ..."
"... the financial sector is much more brutal than the industrial sector that Marx envisioned as evolving toward socialism. Finance conquers the entire economy, industry along with labor ..."
"... the problem is, how do you get rid of a parasitic blister on society? That can only be done by cutting off the blister. ..."
Jim Vrettos : Welcome once again to the Radical Imagination. I'm your host, Jim
Vrettos. I'm a sociologist whose taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Yeshiva
University here in New York.
Our guest today on the Radical Imagination is Michael Hudson. He was on our March 8th show.
We had such an overwhelmingly positive response to that show that we've asked him to return
today, and he's been gracious enough to accept.
Unlike most economists, he's been a fierce champion and advocate for the economic rights of
the poor, workers, disenfranchised and the vulnerable around the world through his scholarship
and lifelong activism. His unique economic analysis has explored history's main engine of
economic exploitation – the banking, creditor and financial systems' ever-increasing
extraction of value through interest payments. The rentier class and FIRE sector –
Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – have long succeeded in depicting themselves as part
of a productive economy. Yet for centuries, these sectors were recognized as being
parasitic.
Now with the United States losing some 10 million jobs in just the past two weeks and the
world awash in debt, the total world gross domestic product is $90 trillion. The public and
private debt is a mind-boggling $260 trillion. The pandemic has given this parasitic sector
yet another, even more vicious opportunity to exploit and devour humanity.
As our guest puts it, the recently passed Trump "Bank and Landlord Relief" bill, mistakenly
named the Coronavirus bill, starts by providing banks with an even larger giveaway of wealth
than they received from Obama in 2008. Helping the banks, financial and real estate sectors in
a so-called free market system is conflated with helping the industrial economy and general
living standards for most Americans. The essence of a parasite is not only to drain the
host's nourishment, but to dull the host's brain so that it does not recognize that the
parasite is there.
These debt-bondage economies of Western countries are heading us down a spiral of poverty,
decline, injustice and human despair.
Michael Hudson is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of
Missouri, Kansas City, a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, former
Wall Street analyst, a political consultant of governments on finance and tax policy, and a
popular sought-after commentator and journalist. He's devoted his entire scientific and
historical work to the study of domestic and foreign debt, loans, mortgages and interest
payments. His analysis and warnings are even more profoundly necessary in these pandemic days
and nights. This is just the first in a series of cascading crises.
Welcome so much. Thank you for being back again here on the Radical Imagination. Michael,
it's great to see you again. How are you doing? I know we're all trying to keep safe and well
and strong. How are things going?
Michael Hudson : I just got back from a walk in Forest Park here in Queens. There was
hardly anybody on the streets, but there were a good number of people in the park. I finally
was given a face mask by the building's super, and my Chinese friends say that they've mailed
me some masks to keep me safe. They're sending foreign aid to New York like we're a third world
country.
Jim Vrettos : Well, in a sense, we are, aren't we? We're turning into it for more and
more people. Tell us about this so-called bill that's just been passed. What is wrong with it
in your estimation? How does it perpetuate and exacerbate the problem in your analysis?
Michael Hudson : Well, it's sort of like Obama's bailout in 2009 and '10 on
steroids. It's funny when you read people like Paul Krugman and others Democrats denouncing it
all as if it's a Republican bill, but it's identical with Obama's bill and Obama's philosophy.
And it was unanimously passed. Chuck Schumer likened it to Roosevelt's New Deal. So I think you
should think of it as the Trump-Pelosi bill. Trump simply lifted it wholesale from his campaign
backers, who basically are the same as the Democratic National Committee.
The problem is that the bill pretends that by giving money to the banks to lend more money
to get the country moving again that's going to rescue the economy. It's not going to rescue
the economy. The bill injures the economy, because the money ends up with the banks. Part of
its $10 trillion – $2 trillion – goes to citizens to spend, but ends up largely
being paid to the banks and landlords. Specifically, there is an enormous giveaway that makes
real estate tax exempt for the next 30 years.
Jim Vrettos : What about small businesses? Are you including them in this
analysis?
Michael Hudson : Most small businesses they're rescuing are the landlords. They have
received the most Small Business Administration loans, usually by going through the local
political party machine. When the Republicans or Democrats talk about small business, they mean
the landlords, who are the proxies for the big real estate interests and the banks behind
them.
So let's look at this: The bill asks landlords to stop evicting people for three months
but let the rent accrue, and personal debts also. Let's look at what's going to happen when the
three months are over.
You're going to have restaurants and small businesses – whose major expense is
rent and credit – not having done much business during these three months. They will end
up owing this major cost of doing business for three months without having their usual income.
What's going to happen by the end of the summer?
A lot of restaurants here in Queens only have takeout service. So how are these small
businesses going to pay the debts that have mounted up in the last three months? Many will have
to go out of business, declare bankruptcy and start all over again, because otherwise all their
earnings for this year and next year – and probably the year after that – would
have to go to make up the arrears to their landlords, their creditors and the banks.
So what pretends to be a coronavirus bill is going to say, "You think the virus hit you?
Wait till we hit you with the financial bill." The financial bailout aims to enable the
financial sector to extract so much money from the economy and drive so many small businesses
under that the big venture capital firms and private equity can pick them up at low all prices.
You could call it the "Monopolization of the US economy" bill or the "Contributors to
Washington politicians" bill.
There was a wish list that the banks had, the real estate interests and corporate lobbyists,
that they'd been saving up for just such a crisis opportunity. The coronavirus is equivalent of
9/11. As in 9/11 when President Bush and Cheney pulled out the Patriot Act that they had in
their drawer just looking for an excuse. Right now the coronavirus, the Trump-Pelosi bill gives
the banks and the real estate sector an excuse to not only be bailed out as if they're losing
money, but to evict their tenants.
Jim Vrettos : To profit even more?
Michael Hudson : Not necessarily profit. Profit you have to pay income tax on. Rich
people don't make profits. They make capital gains. Only the little people make profits.
Jim Vrettos : You said this was conscious on their part, right? This is a rational
way in which they think about these things. There's no moral dilemma to all of this by the
large venture capitalists and so on, Wall Street, is that correct?
Michael Hudson : Yes. Obviously the lobbyists have written these laws. Trump is a
real estate investor and certainly knows that when it gives the biggest single giveaway to the
real estate sector. Real estate will not make a profit for the next 30 or 50 years. But it'll
make enormous cash flow. They'll call it depreciation. The depreciation schedule pretends that
buildings are losing their value even when they're going way up. It's an accounting system,
including the national income accounts that have little to do with the real economy. So there
is no more way to empirically describe what's happening using official statistics. We're
entering a just-pretend statistical world with a just-pretend rationale and Orwellian
euphemisms.
Jim Vrettos : Okay. So moral suasion, what are the limits? You worked with and talked
about Rev. William Barber's Poor People's Campaign, for example. You talk about Bernie and his
movement and so on. Are these designed to fail? Are there possible strategies that can be used
to limit the vicious profits and money that's being made?
Michael Hudson : What's the connection between moral suasion, Reverend Barber and
Bernie?
Jim Vrettos : I guess I'm asking here is who speaks for the poor? Who speaks for the
workers? Who is standing up for the disadvantaged here?
Michael Hudson : Mainly their employers and creditors claim to be speaking for the
workers. Their trickle-down economics says that "What's good for us is good for the workers. We
want to help the workers by lending them more money to afford nicer housing, and lend them
enough money to afford to pay their rising debt charges."
Jim Vrettos : Yet in fact that's not in their interest.
Michael Hudson : Of course it's not. But they can dominate media and drown out
alternatives. The media don't care very much what Reverend Barber says or what Bernie says. The
media say, "What's good for the workers is what's good for the banks." In fact, Trump and Biden
came up last week and said there's going to have to be a second coronavirus bill, and we've got
to really focus this time on the banks. We didn't give them enough in the first bill, o we have
to give them more so that they can lend more.
Now, when you say we have to give the banks more money to lend more to get the economy
moving, it means we have to have families and businesses take on more debt. This means that
more and more of their income must be paid as interest and amortization, financial fees, late
fees and penalties, and service charges. The double-talk is about as explicit as can be, with
the Democrats being more adept at euphemism than the Republicans.
Jim Vrettos : As you probably know, we're taping this same day that Bernie has
dropped out of the campaign. So who do you look to? What movement, what organizations are left
to represent the interests of the vast majority of us?
Michael Hudson : I don't see anyone. Certainly in my profession, the economics
profession, the major respectable economic journals are all censored by the Chicago School of
monetarists and the neoliberals. So it's very hard to look to the economics profession for much
help, at least from professors who want to get promoted and get tenure. I don't see much help
at all.
As for voters and the two political parties, if you look at what economists call "revealed
preference" and who the main voters for Biden are, what are they supporting? They threw the
election to Biden, away from Bernie. What did they want? Well, it's as if they want lower
wages, less education, more debt and more police power. They want more credit (that is, debt)
and they would like to see social programs scaled back. That's what the voters have selected,
"because it can beat Trump." That's their revealed preference, if you look at what their voting
reflects. It's as if they've chosen lower living standards, and believe that the rich should
have enough more money so that maybe some of it will trickle down.
MMT, left- and right-wing
Jim Vrettos : Trickle down. Right. You also work with Modern Monetary Theorists,
correct?
Michael Hudson : That's right. I'm on leave from the University of Missouri at Kansas
City, which has been the center of that. I'm also, as you pointed out, a research fellow at the
Levy Institute, and I've worked closely with Stephanie Kelton, Randy Wray and the others.
Jim Vrettos : So tell us a little about that approach that you still have some
confidence in. Tell us about what they are telling us to do, what you're telling us to do as a
group.
Michael Hudson : It's not a homogeneous school. The idea of Modern Monetary Theory
has roots going back to the functional finance of Abba Lerner in the 1960s, but you can
look at Hyman Minsky as one who really inspired it in the 19980s and '90s. Its logic is that
deficit spending is not bad if it is spent in the real economy to increase employment and
spending.
The Chicago School says any government spending is the road to the gas chambers. I've heard
that said literally. They say that with government spending, you're going to end up like
Germany in the Weimar area with hyperinflation or like Zimbabwe. They think that running a
government deficit actually increases consumer prices and that erodes the purchasing power of
financial wealth. Well, Modern Monetary Theory says, first of all, that there's a disconnect
between financial asset prices and where the real economy is going. Asset prices, capital
gains and the wealth of the 1% are going up but real wages and disposable income has been going
down. We've seen real estate, stocks and bond prices going up and up since the Obama bailout of
2009, but the economy has not benefited the 95 percent.
There's a sort of crude MMT solution, to simply run a budget deficit. And one extreme, there
are some MMTers – not me and not my colleagues, but some MMTers – who say that all
you have to do is run a budget deficit and you'll pump money into the economy. The tacit
assumption is that this money is going to be spent in a Keynesian-style way, on hiring labor,
especially if the government will build infrastructure. The government would buy goods and
services, whose production involves paying labor and you'll reflate the economy, you'll
increase the circular flow of income within the production and consumption sector.
On the other hand, Wall Street and England have discovered bad MMT. It's Donald Trump's or
the Democratic Party's Obama-style MMT version known as Quantitative Easing. This approach says
that deficits are indeed wonderful, as long as the government is running a deficit to spend on
Wall Street, not into the "real" economy.
The leading MMT advocates of government spending, like Stephanie Kelton, Randy Wray and a
whole group of MMTers who are critics of Wall Street, emphasize just what kind of
government deficit spending we're talking about. What actually is spent on public investment,
employment and income support. It has to be spent on labor and tangible capital. The fake
MMTers are saying government deficits are great if given to the banks. Banks will provide the
credit and save the rest of the economy. But that's the opposite of what we're saying. So just
like every good religion early on, every good idea from Jesus to Marxism can be turned upside
down and into the opposite. You're seeing an attempt today to turn the MMT that we all
developed in the last three decades into a travesty of bailouts for Wall Street. It is as if
bailing out Wall Street, Barack-Obama or Joe-Biden style, is going to bail out the economy by
enabling it to run deeper into debt.
Bernie Sanders' six-point program
Jim Vrettos : So that's the choice we have then – the Trump version or the
Obama-Biden version. I just got a group email from Bernie. Stephanie Kelton is one of his
economic advisors. I'm going to read it briefly here. It's about the six core provisions that
must be included in the next legislation. The first need, he says, is to address the employment
crisis and provide immediate financial relief. To do this, we must begin monthly payments of
$2,000 for every man, woman and child in our country – guaranteed paid family relief
throughout the crisis, so that people who are sick do not need to choose between infecting
others or losing their job. Is that what you're talking about?
Michael Hudson : This is similar to the MMT proposal for guaranteed income. What
Bernie says is that the best way to introduce this proposal is to begin it during the
coronavirus when people most obviously need it. I think Bernie added that it should be given to
self-employed, to retirees, and to aliens living here. You have also to give it to everybody,
or else they are going to be out in the street. It has to be general. I think a number of our
people have been recommending that over the years. Pavlina Tcherneva usually explains this
program as an extension of MMT policy.
Jim Vrettos : Absolutely. The second point he makes, along with what you've just
said, is that we must guarantee healthcare to all. Medicare must be empowered to pay all of the
deductibles, co-payments and out-of-pocket healthcare expenses for the insured, uninsured and
under-insured. No one in America who is sick, regardless of immigration status, should be
afraid to seek the medical treatment they need.
Michael Hudson : Here is the perfect catalyst opportunity for general healthcare for
all. The reason you have to give healthcare for everybody right now, without cost, is that if
you don't, they're going to be sick. And without health care, they're going to spread the
disease to the rest of the economy. My friends in Hong Kong are telling me that there has been
a second wave of virus there, and I'm told that in China there's a second wave. If you don't
give the healthcare to everybody who needs it and you don't begin testing everybody and giving
them whatever they need to get well. That includes guaranteeing their housing, as you just
talked about, enough to pay their rent, buy food and get by when they're not earning an income.
The alternative is for them to infect the whole rest of society repeatedly. Here's a perfect
scale of model and a dress rehearsal for Medicare For All.
Jim Vrettos : Third point, to use the defense production act to produce the equipment
and testing we need.
Michael Hudson : That's nice thought in principle, but the problem is that America
has spent three decades since the 1980s disinvesting and outsourcing its industrial sector. I'm
told that there are no screws or fasteners made here. How are you going to produce the medical
equipment, masks and other things you need?
Masks, I'm told, cost about 20 cents to make. But here in New York they're being sold for
$10. I think that the plan to produce them in America is to give U.S. monopolies the power of
life over death, your money or your life. Why not $50 a mask – and let buyers pay on
credit. Send them a new box of masks each week and sign them up on an easy-payment plan, billed
every month like a public utility.
If it costs ten or even a hundred times as much to produce protection in America because
they're producing for profit, do you really want to leave this to private industry? You really
want the health sector to be public, because if it's privatized, it's going to be run with the
objective of charging monopoly rent and lowering the quality. Basically it will be rife with
the kind of fraud that we've seen whenever there is a kind of crisis.
I think that Bernie wanted to say that we should revive manufacturing in this country, but
this is not something that can be done quick enough to cope with the coronavirus. The
government has been grabbing sales of masks and other equipment to European countries and
giving them to the Republican States. I think FEMA grabbed masks and ventilators for
Massachusetts, a Democratic state. We're going to give it to Western states that vote
Republican. The system already is so deeply corrupted that I don't see a short term
solution.
Jim Vrettos : Fourth point: Make sure that no one goes hungry. As states record
levels of food insecurity, we must increase benefits, expand the WIC program, double the
funding for emergency food programs, expand Meals on Wheels, school meals programs, and deliver
food to vulnerable populations. So it sounds like an extension of Great Society anti-poverty
programs.
Michael Hudson : Again, who will benefit financially from this? Will this be a public
program or a privatized program? I'm sure Donald Trump and Wall Street would like to charge the
government $20 for every lunch that cost them $2. So at what price and on what terms? Who's
going to be the main beneficiary? If Bernie is a good sport and let's Biden decide, he's a
goner.
Jim Vrettos : Exactly. Two more: Provide emergency aid to states and cities, $600
billion direct physical aid to ensure that they have the personnel and funding necessary to
cope with the crisis. In addition, they must establish programs to provide fiscal support and
budgetary relief to States and municipalities.
Michael Hudson : That could be an awful program if it is debt-financed. States and
municipalities are so deeply in debt that this crisis is going to push them even deeper. What
Bernie seems to be opening himself up to is the Mitch McConnell solution: "Let's abolish the
public pensions that they owe, and let's cut back public services. We have to let the banks be
paid. Let the Federal Reserve load down the states even more in debt and make sure that they
pay their bondholders who are mainly in the wealthiest 5% of the population." This could be a
bailout for the 5%. The State and local debt must be written off. It's become a bad debt in the
fact of the corona virus.
Unfortunately, American law has no procedure for state and local bankruptcy. They can't wipe
out their debt. Even worse, many states have written into their constitution a balanced-budget
requirement. If the Federal Reserve gives them support by more credit that has to be repaid,
they're going to have to cut back social services. Betsy de Vos would like them to sell off the
schools to be privatized. In any case, they're going to have to change the character of local
spending. You cannot save the states and localities after this crisis if the current debt and
financial overhead remains on the books. There has to be federal funding in one form or another
acknowledging that the crisis has prevented the states, New York state, New York City and
others from paying their debts. So we need to write them down.
That is going to cost bondholders. They belong to the higher income brackets, because state
and local bonds are tax-exempt. Somebody has to bear the costs, and the Republican and
Democratic suggestion is the same: to make the 99% pay the the 1%. That is a terrible solution.
It doesn't address the debt problem. Without addressing that, you are part of the problem, not
part of the solution.
Jim Vrettos : He may be trying to redeem himself a bit here with the six
recommendation. Suspend monthly payments. We must suspend monthly expenses like rent,
mortgages, medical debt and consumer debt collection for four months. We must cancel all
student loan payments for the duration of this crisis, place an immediate moratorium on
evictions, foreclosures and utility shut-offs. It doesn't go far enough. Correct?
ORDER IT
NOW
Michael Hudson : What does "suspending" mean? Does it mean not having to pay rent
this month, next month and maybe in August and September? That's fine. But what happens when
October comes? If your rent is $1500 a month, do you have to pay the $7500 that has mounted up
in arrears – or be kicked out? The landlord or mortgage banker will have a lien on
whatever you're supposed to get from Social Security and other income. They will get a lien on
your property and wages. So suspending payments isn't enough. They have to be annulled.
The bailout has given an enormous giveaway to the real estate industry, and is backing its
right to collect all the rents, or else to evict the tenants and grab their property and
paychecks. This is a pro-landlord bill. What's needed is nonpayment. You have to follow the
money and come right out and say what the underlying problem is.
Jim Vrettos : Understood. The political resistance to what's going down is so feeble.
Certainly during the sixties we had a welfare rights movement that Richard Cloward and Frances
Piven helped organize to put pressure from the bottom up and get some sort of guaranteed annual
income.
Michael Hudson : For the bottom up, but led by the top down.
Jim Vrettos : Yeah.
Michael Hudson : They were not very effective. There was an egotism saying "We're for
the people."
Jim Vrettos : I'm searching for some of your ideas as to what we might support as
alternatives. Do you see any out there, and how people can mobilize to resist and organize?
Michael Hudson : I think Reverend Barber is doing good work. I think the Justice
Democrats are doing good work. I think the people around AOC also are.
Jim Vrettos : BrandNew Congress we heard are doing some good work.
Michael Hudson : But that's not enough. There's still not much discussion of the
economic problem that really is at the root of this. People complain about the symptoms of
inequality, even rich people do that. Everybody has books documenting inequality. But what they
don't want is a discussion of what's creating it. Does the world have to be this way? What
policies are needed to reverse it?
If you discuss that, and find that the root of inequality is the financial system indebting
the economy and financializing real estate instead of making it the tax base, then you realize
that you have to change the system. Today's wealth is mainly financial and rent-extracting,
taking the form of indebtedness for 90% of the population.
The only way to recover is to wipe out this debt. You can't recover the real economy of
production and consumption without wiping out the debt overhead, without rolling it back. That
is what people are unwilling to see. They're unwilling to look at the solutions, because that's
beyond the Overton window. It's cognitive dissonance. Actually curing the problem is no simply
rubbing your hands and saying, "Oh, isn't that too bad?" If you criticize the debt system,
however, you lose the coverage and the public media. That is why we're on the Internet, not on
TheNew York Times or Wall Street Journal .
Jim Vrettos : Exactly. And you're one of the very few economists who have looked into
the philosophical and historical origins of this.
Dismissing debt problems as an "externality" instead of at the core of policy
solutions
Michael Hudson : I became an anthropologist and archeologist a Research Fellow in
Babylonian economics at Harvard's Peabody Museum in 1984, to focus on that. It was obvious that
the debts were not going to be rolled back. In 1980 the U.S. economy was so highly indebted
that when interest rates went up to 20%, many economists thought that the debts would be wiped
out in a convulsion of bankruptcy as in the 1930s. Instead, you had the government play a new
role, to support Wall Street and to deregulate the economy for financial predators. The result
was the Drexel Burnham era of corporate rating, and financial takeovers and debt pyramiding
that has caused today's problem.
If the problem is financialization, then the solution to the economy has to be to
de-financialize. That cannot be done as a slow process. It can only be done in a single stroke,
a quantum leap. I don't see a constituency for wiping out the debt as long as people believe
that you have to help the banks save the economy and help the 1% trickle down their wealth.
The 1% has no intention of letting its wealth trickle down. Its intention is to take even
more wealth from the 99%. Its intention is to suck up, not trickle down. Its lobbyists write
the laws to make sure that the wealth is sucked up, not trickled down. And unless you realize
that there's a war of the financial sector against the rest of the economy, then as Warren
Buffet said, "There's a war on, and we're winning it." But only they know there's a war. The
victims don't even know there's a war.
Jim Vrettos : The victims become statistics that we're willing to put up with. One of
the questions I have for you here: Each year, over 250,000 people die in the United States in
what social scientists refer to as structural violence and economic devastation of living in
poverty, with the strains, stresses and anxiety of trying to survive in the structure of work,
family, criminal justice, health and housing. We're willing to put up with that, we're willing
to blame the victim in a sense, and create a whole structure that attempts to address their
problems without dealing with the structural roots.
Michael Hudson : Economists call these problems externalities. In other words,
they're external to the economic model. Just as global warming and pollution are external to
the model. This is at the root of "free market" theory rationalizing the status quo as natural,
as if There Is No Alternative. The problems and costs to society created by financialization
and living in the short run are considered external to the model, because the models themselves
are short-term. and really focus on how the 1% can make more money. How can the financial
sector make more money from the real economy? Debt and credit is see as the solution, not as
the problem.
ORDER IT NOW
Environmental pollution, personal violence, the suicide rate, emigration and shortening
lifespan, that's all external because once you discuss them, then all of a sudden you broaden
the problem beyond what economists talk about to what society talks about. In all of the
academic disciplines this is occurring. Sociology was developed in an attempt to broaden
economics to discuss these overall social issues. Just as the University of Chicago played a
narrowing censorial role in economics, it played a similar role in sociology, just talking
about status as if it is something inherent. Anthropology was created as a discipline in order
look at the long picture. But that's been narrowed into what one anthropologist calls
underwater basket weaving and a study of tribal groups.
There is no academic discipline that is focusing the debt problem that we're discussing. Any
"discipline" is narrow. You need a pan-disciplinary approach – a broad approach that
looks at society as an overall economic system, not as separating one economic organ from
suicide rates or public health, as if none have any relationship with each other. It's a
desegregated system. There's nothing like the kind of discussion you had in ancient Greece,
Rome or Babylonia in ancient times when people treated the social problems as including
personal character, the environment and everything else.
Jim Vrettos : Understood. Barber does talk about this to a certain extent by trying
to make connections to racism, ecological devastation, war and militarism, the false moral
narratives that hold up these injustices. Is that the sort of analysis we need, the thinking
that we need to pursue?
Michael Hudson : Who's going to provide that kind of narrative in an academic
framework, given the way that the universities segregate their educational system into
disciplines? Can you provide it in the media? Is this something that you'd expect to get
discussed in now The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal ? Is it something
you'd expect to discuss on ABC TV, MSNBC or Fox news? Where are you going to discuss this?
Jim Vrettos : I understand what you're saying. We're all in our little silos here,
so-called disciplines that are not interconnected. We don't see that in the political world, in
the academic world, as you say, in the so-called spiritual, religious world as well. You've
written about how religion and economics have been so separated and how that needs to be
re-connected. Do you want to spend a little bit of time on that?
Michael Hudson : Every religion has gone downhill, just like classical economics,
which turned into the opposite of what it was in the time of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.
When I talk about religion's treatment of debt, I begin with Sumer and Babylonia and the idea
of religion as preserving economic stability. It wasn't so much out of an idea of utopian
idealism that the Mesopotamian rulers canceled debts. They wanted to prevent the economy from
falling apart. They wanted to prevent the citizenry – the taxpayers and cultivators on
the land – from falling into debt to an oligarchy that would use their money to overthrow
the rulers and take over society, financial-style.
Religion tends to reflect the leadership of society, although it tends to begin as a moral
reform movement. The leadership in the third millennium, second millennium and even the first
millennium BC could not afford an oligarchy impoverishing the rest of society. If an oligarchy
did that, society would fall apart. But gradually as Aristotle pointed out, every democracy
turns into an oligarchy, and so do palace economies. The oligarchy in turn tends to our
takeover religion. In Judaism, Jesus accused the Pharisees of loving money and replacing the
Jubilee year with Rabbi Hillel's prosbul in which debtors waived their rights to have a
debt cancellation under the Jubilee Year.
Same thing with Christianity. It began with the idea, expressed in Jesus's first sermon when
he said that he had come to proclaim the Jubilee Year. He unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and
said, that was his message. Christianity began that way. But by the fifth century of our era,
it took the African branch of Cyril of Alexandria and St. Augustine, that said, "Okay, we're
going to accept the world as it is. It's okay for the landlords to have their land and for the
rich people to be rich, but we will just ask them to be moral and act with charity, especially
to us paradigmatic poor in the Church."
You have every religion taken over, so you need a continual renovation, a continual
Renaissance of religion. It usually is easier to start a new religion – or a new academic
discipline – than trying to reform an institution mired in inertia. I don't think
existing religions can be reformed, any more than the economics discipline that has
deteriorated into a religion of financial wealth-seeking.
I don't know what's happening with the Catholic church. It has a Pope who seems to want to
restore the Liberation Theology that the Church was moving toward in the late 20th century. I
don't know what the future of that is. Obviously there was a fight by the last two Popes to
oppose Liberation theology. The Protestant religions I think are pretty passive.
Jim Vrettos : Sounds like we're in the iron cage as the sociologist Max Weber put
it.
Michael Hudson : I thought you were going to say the End Days.
Jim Vrettos : Well, I don't think he put it that way, but-
Michael Hudson : I meant the Book of Revelation.
Jim Vrettos : Right. Marx saw a little hope in the idea of praxis ,
correct?
Will Finance Capitalism destroy Industrial Capitalism?
Michael Hudson : He thought that industrial capitalism was going to be revolutionary
in fulfilling its historical destiny of lowering the cost of production, above all by lowering
costs and being more efficient by getting rid of the landlord class and the financial class. He
expected credit to be made a public socialist infrastructure. His idea was that industrial
capitalism would find an increasing role of socialism to be in its self-interest. In his day
you saw what was called state socialism in Prussia and the rest of Germany. Marx was careful to
point out that state socialism wasn't really socialism. But it was paving the way for a
working-class democracy or revolution to take over.
ORDER IT NOW
In Marx's day the fight for democracy was led by industrial capitalism. The only way to get
rid of the landlord class and its predatory extraction of rent was to replace the veto power of
the House of Lords over Parliament with a publicly elected House of Commons having primary
legislative authority. The followers of Ricardo, the "Ricardian socialists" and John Stuart
Mill backed parliamentary reform to extend voting power to the people. Marx assumed that it
would be logical for industrial capitalists to act in their self-interest, and voters to act in
theirs. But it hasn't worked out that way.
It seemed to be working that way, leading up to World War I. But that war I came like a
meteor, knocking the West's economic development path out of orbit. The rentier class,
the landlords and predatory banking class, made a resurgence. Instead of the government
reflecting the interests of industry and the people in the form of rising wages to produce a
rising circular flow and demand for industrial products, a positive feedback between industrial
production and labor, you had the financial rentier sector – what I call the FIRE
sector, Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – hijack the economy and bring about the
permanent depression that we're in now.
This is my main point: We are in a permanent depression. There can be no recovery without
wiping out the debt overhead (euphemized as "wealth"). As long as you leave the 1% with the
lion's share of wealth (creditor claims) and property ownership, the economy cannot recover.
Without realizing that, there cannot be a class consciousness regarding today's world.
Marx talked about the class consciousness of labor vis-a-vis its employers. That took place
within the production and consumption sector. But today's class consciousness of wage earners
has to see that industrial companies have been turned into financial companies. They've been
financialized. A relevant class consciousness must realize that it's up to socialists to do
what industrial capitalism failed to do – namely, to free society from the rentier
sector, from the landlord class, the monopolists and financial creditor class. Without freeing
society from them, you're going to have a neofeudal economy. As Rosa Luxemburg said, it's
either socialism or barbarism. Barbarism is a permanent depression. All the classical
economists warned against the landlord class, banks and the monopolists continuing to run
society into the ground.
Jim Vrettos : The state has become a functionary of the financial sector. It
hasn't withered away in the sense as Marx would have thought.
Michael Hudson : It has not evolved in the way he anticipated. Marx thought that at
least the state might be for state capitalism. He worried it would go hand in hand with heavy
industry and squeeze labor. The question was, would a state capitalism see its interest in
supporting labor's living standards or not? But as it turns out, the financial sector is
much more brutal than the industrial sector that Marx envisioned as evolving toward socialism.
Finance conquers the entire economy, industry along with labor
Jim Vrettos : We're about out of time, but I have to ask, are there any examples that
you can maybe point to – Denmark, Finland or anything that we can point to as a model
that might be something we could emulate to a certain extent?
Michael Hudson : Certainly a social democracy helps, and Denmark and Finland never
let themselves be financialized in the first place. They never let the 1% grab the control of
the economy to the extent that has occurred in the United States and much of Europe. So the
problem is, how do you get rid of a parasitic blister on society? That can only be done by
cutting off the blister. Denmark and Finland have not had to deal with this problem,
because they've remained more balanced.
What do you do when society has lost its balance? You have to think about structural reform.
That's radical by definition. Structural reform is called an externality – exogenous,
extraneous to what economists talk about. If you're talking about where the economy should go,
mainstream economists are talking in a narrow policy tunnel that means "Be passive and do
nothing, be quiet like a frog boiling in water."
Jim Vrettos : A frog boiling in water. Well, Michael, thank you very much. It's been
most enlightening. Thank you so much for doing the show.
"... the nations CEO's become sort of one big club, and the top of the club is the head parasites pulling the strings on the stock market (outfits like Goldman Sachs). ..."
"... NO ONE wants to cross the head parasites, the corrupt political class turns to them as their economic brain trust, and the propaganda class (MSM) spin narratives that comport to the corrupt political class' interests and the corrupt status quo. ..."
As our guest puts it, the recently passed Trump "Bank and Landlord Relief" bill,
mistakenly named the Coronavirus bill, starts by providing banks with an even larger giveaway
of wealth than they received from Obama in 2008. Helping the banks, financial and real estate
sectors in a so-called free market system is conflated with helping the industrial economy
and general living standards for most Americans. The essence of a parasite is not only to
drain the host's nourishment, but to dull the host's brain so that it does not recognize that
the parasite is there.
One of the ways it does this is to entice most of the biggest companies onto the stock
markets, which in turn subordinates them to the financial sector -- more specifically, the
investment bankers. And then the nations CEO's become sort of one big club, and the top of
the club is the head parasites pulling the strings on the stock market (outfits like Goldman
Sachs).
NO ONE wants to cross the head parasites, the corrupt political class turns to them as
their economic brain trust, and the propaganda class (MSM) spin narratives that comport to the
corrupt political class' interests and the corrupt status quo.
This is why [neo]liberalism and neoconservatism are the two sides of the one political coin
that Americans are allowed to choose. Lean left? You'll get a liberal who mostly uses identity
politics to divide and rule. Lean right? You'll get a neocon who mostly uses foreign affairs to
divide and rule. But increasingly, the two cross-over, hence you'll see liberals harping 24/7
about Russiagate and neocons harping 24/7 about Iran, Islam and now China.
None of this is to say that Russia, China and Iran aren't competitors, because they are. But
the liberal and neocon fanatics turn them into existential, kill or be killed
competitors...
The problem here is that there is no countervailing force. Marxist idea that proletariat is
such a force proved to be yet another utopia.
Notable quotes:
"... istory's main engine of economic exploitation – the banking, creditor and financial systems' ever-increasing extraction of value through interest payments. The rentier class and FIRE sector – Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – have long succeeded in depicting themselves as part of a productive economy. Yet for centuries, these sectors were recognized as being parasitic. ..."
"... The essence of a parasite is not only to drain the host's nourishment, but to dull the host's brain so that it does not recognize that the parasite is there. ..."
Jim Vrettos : Welcome once again to the Radical Imagination. I'm your host, Jim
Vrettos. I'm a sociologist whose taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Yeshiva
University here in New York.
Our guest today on the Radical Imagination is Michael Hudson. He was on our March 8th show.
We had such an overwhelmingly positive response to that show that we've asked him to return
today, and he's been gracious enough to accept.
Unlike most economists, he's been a fierce champion and advocate for the economic rights of
the poor, workers, disenfranchised and the vulnerable around the world through his scholarship
and lifelong activism. His unique economic analysis has explored h istory's main engine of
economic exploitation – the banking, creditor and financial systems' ever-increasing
extraction of value through interest payments. The rentier class and FIRE sector –
Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – have long succeeded in depicting themselves as part
of a productive economy. Yet for centuries, these sectors were recognized as being
parasitic.
Now with the United States losing some 10 million jobs in just the past two weeks and the
world awash in debt, the total world gross domestic product is $90 trillion. The public and
private debt is a mind-boggling $260 trillion. The pandemic has given this parasitic sector yet
another, even more vicious opportunity to exploit and devour humanity.
As our guest puts it, the recently passed Trump "Bank and Landlord Relief" bill, mistakenly
named the Coronavirus bill, starts by providing banks with an even larger giveaway of wealth
than they received from Obama in 2008. Helping the banks, financial and real estate sectors in
a so-called free market system is conflated with helping the industrial economy and general
living standards for most Americans. The essence of a parasite is not only to drain the
host's nourishment, but to dull the host's brain so that it does not recognize that the
parasite is there.
This is the systemic payback for concentrating ownership of assets in the hands of the few:
when their bubble-era priced assets plummet in value, the bottom falls out of all assets with
narrow ownership. The price of superfluous assets such as boats, vintage cars, collectibles, art
and vacation homes can quickly fall to a fraction of bubble-era valuations, destroying much of
what was always fictional capital.
Finance
as Class Warfare Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2015 Verified Purchase Finance
as Class Warfare
By John M Repp
A review of Killing the Host (2015) Michael Hudson
The wealth of the 1% comes from the 99%. The 99% are enriching the 1%. There are many ways this
happens, for example low wages and high prices. But increasingly, today, the 99% redistribute
their wealth through indebtedness. In order to try and live in dignity, the 99%, or at least
two-thirds of them that have debts, pay off their debts with interest as they educate
themselves, buy houses or small businesses, buy a car, and use their charge cards. Debt peonage
is ancient, much older than the industrial revolution and this older pattern is becoming more
prominent every day
Since the crash of 2008, millions of people here and around the world have lost businesses,
homes, and jobs. Today, many others despair at their not getting ahead financially. Too many
blame themselves, thinking there is something wrong with their ability or drive. If they
understood the economic, political, and financial system in which we live, maybe they would not
blame themselves and we could find a collective solution to our problems.
Michael Hudson, distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri,
Kansas City has just written a book entitled Killing the Host (2015). Hudson writes that the
FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) along with the monopoly control of natural
resources like oil and gas is the parasite. Finance i.e. banks (what we call Wall Street) is
the leader of the parasitic forces. The host is the productive economy like manufacturing and
farming and needed services like health care and education. Even more sinister is the fact
that, just like in biology, a successful parasite often inserts behavior-modifying enzymes into
the host so the host acts like the parasite is part of itself and does not try to reject the
parasite. In this case, the behavior modifying enzymes are a set of false ideas dominating the
economics departments of leading American universities. Hudson calls those ideas "junk
economics" and in this book Hudson labors to correct those false ideas. More often the set of
ideas is called "neo-liberalism". The politicians and technocrats like Geithner, Summers,
Greenspan, Rubin, Clinton, and Obama put those ideas into practice inside the government of the
host economy. Banks now control our economic and financial policy. The USA is no longer a
democracy at the top. It is an oligarchy.
There is $11.8 trillion in private debt in USA, for houses, education, cars, and consumption.
This is overhead and it causes the price of housing, education, cars and consumer goods to be
higher. Hudson called this "asset-price inflation". The debts displace money for other things
in people's budgets. Hudson calls this "debt deflation". It is the private debt overload that
is harming the US economy, not the government debt. Mixing the two up is one of the main ideas
of "junk economics". Just ask yourself, would you worry about paying your debts if you could
print new money? It is the ability to create new money that makes a sovereign government like
the United States very different than a private household. Evidence that private debt is
overhead is the fact that after each business cycle since the end of World War II, the private
debt in the USA has increased and each recovery has been weaker.
Another idea of "junk economics", alluded to in the metaphor of parasite and host, is ignoring
the difference between on the one hand actual production like manufacturing, farming, or needed
services like health care and education, and on the other hand, the paying of interest to
private banks. Calling them both "wealth creation" confuses people, especially economics
students and via the mass media, the general public. It results in bad policy like the tax
deductibility of interest and the tax favoritism of capital gains. A third key idea of "junk
economics" is the idea that what a person earns in our society is a measure of the contribution
they have made to wealth of our society. A hedge fund owner making a million dollars a hour,
and that has happened, does not contribute 66,666 times what a $15 an hour person
contributes.
Hudson writes that Obama presided over an oligarchic coup d'état. He let Geithner and
Summers convince him, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, that if the other big Wall Street
Banks and hedge funds collapsed, the world economy would collapse. But there was an alternative
to the bailouts. The Treasury Department could have taken control of the insolvent banks and
could have wound them down like was done after the Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980's and
1990's. The FBI and SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) could have continued their
investigations into widespread mortgage fraud i.e. the creditors committed fraud, encouraged by
the big Wall Street banks, by making loans to people they knew would not be able to pay back
the loans, especially, after the higher interest rates kicked in after a few years. The Obama
administration continued the Bush policy of stopping the FBI investigations. What was done
instead was to bailout the winning speculators in unregulated derivatives, what Warren Buffet
called "financial weapons of mass destruction" Even the insolvent banks, primarily Citibank and
Goldman Sachs, could have made whole the plain vanilla part of the their business. The threat
that America's ATM machines would have run out of cash was bogus. Seeing that there was an
alternative, especially an alternative with a precedent in our history, makes clear why Hudson
says Obama presided over an oligarchic coup d'état.
There is an intriguing quote in the book: "If there is a second meltdown it will come from a
political revolt probably not originating in the United State.. (e.g. a country like Greece
cannot or refuses to pay its debts)" James K. Galbraith, fall 2013
There is another possibility that Hudson does not mention. From The Methods of Nonviolent
Action (1973) by Gene Sharp, we read that method number 88 is the nonpayment of debts or
interest. (pp. 238-239) If a mass movement of debtors would stop paying interest of their
odious debts, it could cause banks to become insolvent. The movement should then demand the
nationalization of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve and write-down of people's odious debts,
the taxation of "economic rent" which is unearned income from monopoly privilege, the
revocation of the deductibility of interest, the creation of a public bank option, and the
adoption of the policies of Modern Monetary Theory in which the nationalized Federal Reserve
would create new money and Congress would spend it into the economy. Currently, the
public/private Federal Reserve creates new money and gives it to the big Wall Street Banks to
prop up their balance sheets, a process called "quantitative easing". Hudson has a 10 point
program (p.403) He writes that "reform must be across the board, not piecemeal" (p. 406) and it
"must be done quickly and totally, not slowly and marginally" (p.407).
Behind ancient debt bondage and the modern form of debt peonage is the same basic dynamic. The
real economy cannot grow as fast as compound interest does. Because the temples and the palaces
of the rulers in Mesopotamia and Egypt loaned the money that indebted the poor, when the social
stress became too destructive, because the creditors were public institutions, they could
cancel the debts more easily than the private creditors of today. The cancellation of debts
released the bondsman, a form of slavery, to return to their families or their land. This was
referred to in the Bible as Jubilee. Hudson's main academic area of study is the ancient Near
East economies and long term economic trends. He was one of the few economists to predict the
financial crash of 2008. >
Steve Sewall , Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2016
Congratulations you have just struck gold. This book suffers from typos and is not
published by a major academic press (they like would not touch it even though Hudson's
business and academic credentials are impeccable. He's taught at Harvard, worked at Chase).
Bottom line, Michael Hudson may be the world's most advanced (and accessible) thinker on the
global economics and state of capitalism today. A 2009 Financial Times entitled "Why some
economists could see it coming" credited him with being one of a handful of economists who
not only foresaw the global meltdown of 2007-2009 but foretold its causes. It referred to
Hudson's 2006 Harper's Magazine cover story, which elaborately described these causes in
terms of the predatory, so-called "FIRE economy" of lenders in the fields of
Finance/Insurance and Real Estate.
Hudson's latest book, "Killing the Host", builds on the predatory phenomenon in nature
whereby parasites prey on and ultimately consume their hosts by creating and maintaining the
illusion that they are actual parts of the host's body. "Killing the Host" applies this
metaphor the today's austerity-imposing, debt-sanctifying global economy. In it, Hudson shows
how the predatory behavior of FIRE economy parasites - wittingly or unwittingly legitimized
and legalized by neoliberal academic economists - perfectly replicates the illusory yet
ultimately cannibalistic behavior of parasites in nature.
For more info, see his website[...] and
Wikipedia page [...]
Steve
Sewall , Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 1, 2019
The sub-title of the book says it all – "How financial parasites and debt destroy
the global economy" and this is without doubt one of the best books you will ever read on
this topic. Hudson has been in the thick of it and this is often an authoritative, first
hand, account. Like John Weeks' "Economics of the 1%" Hudson tells us that most of the
economics we are taught is "junk" (Weeks describes it as "fakeconomics"). Unlike Weeks,
Hudson avoids angry polemic and lays out the story of debt from a deep historical
perspective. Hudson cites Aristotle's eternal political triangle – how history is an
endless journey between oligarchy, aristocracy and democracy with the financialisation
representing both the oligarchy and the aristocratic legs of the triangle. For Hudson our
situation is simple, debt cannot be repaid hence most of it must be forgiven. In the first
sermon of Jesus (Luke 4) the messiah unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and proclaimed a Jubilee
Year of debt forgiveness – something the wealthy establishment of the day never forgave
him for. Who knew?
Fast forward 2000 years and it seems nothing has changed. Economic crashes traditionally
lead to debt write-downs (a "hair cut") but a new precedence was set in 2008 when creditors
demanded they be paid 100% of what they had lent – even if that meant crashing the real
economy such that the debts could not be repaid. This had gone beyond simple economics. It
was now dogma – a dogma bent on destroying central government and the mixed economy.
One by one all economies will be converted into private tollbooths for the collection of
tribute to the financial sector. All economic activity above basic subsidence will be paid
into the coffers of the 1% - the new aristocracy. They will bleed the real economy dry hence
"killing the host". Finance is a parasite for which Hudson has a plan – and it is a
drastic plan.
I have little doubt that Hudson is 100% on the money with his analysis of debt. However
his analysis of political consequences maybe a little off the mark. He conflates the European
Union with the Eurozone conveniently forgetting that Britain is not in the Euro. He claims
that the new extremist far-right political parties that arose in Europe were the only ones
addressing debt peonage whereas they demonstrably were NOT – they clearly blamed
immigrants and were amply funded by Hedge Funds. His closing quote by Diana Johnstone (from
Counterpunch) confuses internationalism for globalisation as if only the far-right
nationalists can defend civilisation from financialisation. This is a sickening, inaccurate
and disturbing conclusion and bears no resemblance to reality.
This book remains a must-read on the topic of our new road to debt serfdom. But you wish
the author would choose his words more carefully.
Steve
Sewall , Reviewed in Canada on October 3, 2015
Highly informative and clearly written. Using the biological metaphor of parasitism,
Hudson shows how the FIRE sector of our economy sucks the life out of the productive side
(manufacturing, development of infrastructure et al).
Before the coronavirus caused governments to impose lockdowns, whole economies, markets and
even currencies were already on course to be destroyed by a vicious downturn in bank lending at
a time of contracting trade and record debt. The additional strains from the virus have
intensified the crisis further and quickened the pace of all aspects of monetary
destruction.
The coronavirus has permitted America and other Western nations to adopt a war footing by
restricting personal freedom in the interest of the state. As tensions against China rise and
the global economic crisis escalates, these freedoms will be not be returned, being deemed to
be against national interest.
This is an election year for America and the political system is already ramping up blame
for the virus and her economic misfortunes against China. We are entering dangerous territory
when politics mobilises hate against a supposed enemy by using propaganda tactics which are
designed to stir up xenophobic anger.
How China responds will be crucial. Its leadership can defuse the situation with a few
simple changes to its foreign policy, isolating America from her allies in the process. But
does a highly bureaucratic communist leadership have the imagination to do so?
Introduction
One thing is for sure: the world will be different when it emerges from the coronavirus
crisis. Doubtless, on pain of likely death those over seventy years of age must remain
prisoners in their own homes while the younger generations are tasked with the return to
normality. All this is meant to be under government guidance of course. Over the coming months
governments intend to save swathes of business sectors, such as banking, energy production,
utilities and the rest, first by lending the money to pay the bills, and then by rescuing the
failures, taking them into public ownership in many cases.
That is what the post-coronavirus environment can be expected to look like, if, as
governments hope, the recovery is V-shaped. If not, then greater interventions will be visited
on the population to protect it from itself.
While not necessarily intentioned, there has been and will continue to be a dramatic
transfer of freedom from individuals to the state, which the state is always reluctant to let
go when the crisis passes. The evocation of a war against the virus is to facilitate the
transfer of peoples' freedom to the state, because that is what is required to fight a war. But
when it's over, the bureaucrats' instincts are never to return freedoms.
In the vast majority of cases, win or lose, following a war it is usual for a nation to
retain the measures adopted, dropping none of them. It might be called a transitional economy,
kept in place with all the war-time restrictions until an exit path, inevitably to greater
socialism, can be devised. And for America there is a war still to be fought against China for
global domination, justifying yet more control.
Nanny meets fascist socialism
Welcome to the new post-coronavirus intensified socialism. As individuals we have given the
state enormous power over our lives, which will almost certainly be consolidated. The direction
of travel is clear. Not only can big brother censor us, but it can now track our movements more
effectively than the old KGB. If you leave your home, leave your smartphone behind. Wear a
wide-brimmed hat and change your gait, avoiding the cameras. Your money in the bank, or more
correctly in your about-to-be-nationalised bank's money credited to your account, can only be
disposed of for state-regulated products by means of traceable transactions instead of
old-fashioned cash.
Instead of the soviet, we have the nanny state. Nanny knows best. This is the real world of
the 2020s. It is unnatural and will therefore eventually fail. In previous articles I have
written about one aspect of its failure, and that is the impending collapse of unbacked state
currencies. I have pointed out that central banks, and especially the Fed responsible for the
world's reserve currency, are embarking on an exercise in inflation designed, above all, to
uphold the state by maintaining the values of its debt and therefore all other financial
assets. If they fail, and they will because the task is too great, the currencies will fail as
well, and remarkably quickly. Until then, free markets are a primal threat to the system and
must not prevail.
Doubtless, deep state operatives everywhere believe that the threats from their own people
can be contained. Taking that for granted, they are now moving on to contain threats from other
states that don't conform to the West's democratic model. There is now much more propaganda
coming out of America and the UK about the evil Chinese than the evil Chinese are disseminating
about America and Britain.
The story being managed is of a devious state, somehow stealing our souls by selling us
their technology. Mobile 5G puts China into our homes and controls our internet of everything.
It will allow the Chinese to control us . What is not explained is why it is in China's
interest to abuse its customers in this way. What is not explained is why we, as individuals,
will be better off not having Chinese goods and technology. And when Britain's GCHQ
intelligence and security division took Hua Wei's equipment apart, they couldn't find any
evidence of Chinese state spyware anyway.
The irony in all this is that our democratic model, the nanny state, is cover for the same
internal policies as those deployed by the Chinese, admittedly less vicious; but that is
changing. Rather than communist-socialist, both Chinese communism and Western democracies are,
properly defined, fascist-socialist. With communism, the state owns your cow and tells you what
to do with it. With fascism, you own the cow and the state tells you what to do with it. In
these simplistic, but not inaccurate terms, our governments increasingly follow the fascist
creed adopted by the Chinese Communist Party after Mao's death. Give it time and the intense
Chinese-style suppression of free speech could become the defining feature of nanny's
management style as well.
Here we must note a fundamental truth. Socialists of either extreme do not see free markets
as a rival, because they believe they are useful for progressing socialism towards desired
ends. The true rival to your socialism is someone else's socialism. Newly energised Western
state socialism is to be pitted against Chinese state socialism. The World is about to get more
dangerous.
US is upping the propaganda stakes
Last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said China caused an enormous amount of pain
and will pay a price for what they did with the coronavirus pandemic. On Tuesday, President
Trump threatened to seek reparations from China for infecting Americans. This follows a 57-page
memorandum, entitled Main Messages dated April 17, briefing Republican senators, which was
headed by the following bullet points:
China caused this pandemic by covering it up, lying, and hoarding the world's supply of
medical equipment.
China is an adversary that has stolen millions of American jobs, sent fentanyl to the
United States, and they send religious minorities to concentration camps.
My opponent is soft on China, fails to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party, and can't
be trusted to take them on.
I will stand up to China, bring our manufacturing jobs back home, and push for sanctions
on China for its role in spreading this pandemic.
Clearly, the propaganda war being waged by America against China is undergoing a new lease
of life. And it's not just America: anti-Chinese belligerence is being ramped up through other
national intelligence agencies. Even senior MPs in the UK's Conservative Party and "useful
idiots" in the media are now spouting renewed anti-Chinese propaganda.
On one level, American propaganda can be taken as a defense of President Trump, on the
simplistic basis of finding someone else to blame for his administration's increasingly
desperate economic plight. But the danger is that the White House train has left the station in
the direction of policy escalation with no means of stopping. In this election year someone
must be blamed. To improve his ratings and following an established political tradition of
diverting attention from the domestic scene, Trump must blame foreigners and China is the
easiest target. We are rapidly moving in the direction of unintended consequences.
Meanwhile, we have to hope that President Xi does not take the American bait and escalate
tensions from his side. Xi's equanimity has set the pattern so far. He has made mistakes, and
will almost certainly continue to do so, but his Sun Tzu strategy is making it difficult for
the Americans: "If [the enemy] is in superior strength, evade him".
Of one thing we can be reasonably certain, and that is in a new attack the Trump
administration will escalate trade protectionism against China. It is a policy which will
backfire on America. Assuming no change in the American people's savings habits, the budget
deficit leads almost directly to a trade deficit, the twin deficit syndrome. The trade deficit
is not caused by unfair foreign competition, but as a simple matter of national accounting it
is linked to inflationary funding of government spending. The temporary offset with respect to
the inflationary effect on prices is the expansion of foreign production which ends up as
imports at less inflated prices. Meanwhile, the US's budget deficit is now set to grow
substantially from its trillion-dollar baseline and in the light of recent economic
developments it could easily more than double.
If the trade deficit is to be contained, then measures must be introduced to prevent import
substitution. This is in accordance with enhanced nationalism, typified by Trump's Make America
Great Again slogan. Therefore, the likelihood of America extending trade protectionism beyond
China as the economic crisis progresses is greater than it may currently appear.
Without lower prices for imported goods and consumption generally restricted to domestic
production, inevitably prices for everything will rise at a faster pace. Therefore, at a time
when food prices will almost certainly be rising sharply and causing political difficulties for
Trump, price inflation for all aspects of consumer spending will be getting beyond the managed
control of government statisticians.
Domestically, the combination of an escalating budget deficit and rising consumer prices
will lead to higher interest rates and therefore increased US Treasury borrowing costs. The Fed
will then be unable to control financial asset prices, the dollar will slide, and it could turn
out to be electoral suicide. Trump may not realise it but in this election year he is
conflating two opposing objectives: a geopolitical one against China to improve his political
ratings and an economic one which can be expected to destroy them.
In the past, politicians in this position have responded by clamping down even further on
free markets and personal freedom, evoking Hayek's prophecy of the call for stronger leadership
in his The Road to Serfdom . And with respect to foreign policy, imperialistic motivation
intensifies, which we are already seeing.
Meanwhile, we must hope President Xi stays calm in the face of American self-harm.
Powell, Trump, Washington & Wall Street Recklessly Courted Disaster .
Their Desperate Money-Pumping, Spending & Speculation Inflated The Mother Of All
Financial Bubbles ..
Then Wanna Be Medical Dictators, Hysterical Media And Power Hungry Politicians Imposed
Lockdown Nation ..Sending The US Economy Into The Tank And Unemployment Soaring
Like Always, Main Street Has Been Left High & Dry, Ensnared In The Lies, Scams And
Self-Serving Mendacity Of The Washington-Wall Street Axis
... ... ...
Dear Reader,
The coronavirus is now exposing a far more deadly disease: Namely, the poisonous brew of
easy money, cheap debt, sweeping financialization and unbridled speculation that has been
injected into the American economy by the Fed and Washington politicians.
It has turned Wall Street into a dangerous gambling casino while leaving Main Street buried
under mountainous debts, faltering investment in growth and productivity and the hand-to-mouth
economics of spending more than you earn.
It has also left the American economy exceedingly vulnerable to external shocks like the
thundering blow of Lockdown Nation.
That's because 80% of households have no appreciable rainy-day funds and businesses have
hollowed out their balance sheets and artificially extended their supply chains to the four
corners of the earth in order to goose short-run profits and share prices.
However, this unprecedented fragility has become starkly evident after public health
authorities essentially shut down normal commerce and economic function. Workers have been
separated from their workplaces, consumers from the malls, diners from the restaurants,
travelers from the airlines, hotels and resorts -- with many more like and similar disruptions
to the supply-side of the economy.
In turn, these disruptions are causing production and incomes to fall abruptly. Shrunken
household incomes and business cash flows are literally pulling the legs out from under the
edifice of debt and speculation that has been piled atop the American economy.
So both a renewed financial and economic crisis and an abrupt change of course lie dead
ahead. The 30-year party of False Prosperity is over.
Accordingly, even if the Covid-19 hysteria eventually abates and Lockdown Nation is lifted,
the 2020s will be a decade when the chickens come home to roost.
It will be a time when the cans of delay and denial may no longer be kicked down the road to
tomorrow. Today's economic and political fantasies will be crushed by America's accumulated due
bills.
Bubbles will be burst. Speculators will get carried out on their shields. Easy money wealth
will evaporate.
"... There's a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the network that we at All In call Trump TV right now to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus Call it coronavirus trutherism. ..."
"... Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold. That's their future, and it's a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian's face, forever. ..."
"... Get a Grippe, America: The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now : Washington Post ..."
"... Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread : USA Today ..."
"... Want to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus? Do the Same Things You Do Every Winter : Time ..."
"... We should de-escalate the war on coronavirus ..."
"... "Good hand-washing helps. Staying healthy and eating healthy will also help," says Dr. Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at New York's Stony Brook Children's Hospital. "The things we take for granted actually do work. It doesn't matter what the virus is. The routine things work ." ..."
The offenders were Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massahi, co-owners of an "Urgent Care" clinic
in Bakersfield, California. They'd held a presentation in which they argued that widespread
lockdowns were perhaps not necessary, according to data they were collecting and analyzing.
"Millions of cases, small amounts of deaths," said Erickson , a vigorous, cheery-looking
Norwegian-American who argued the numbers showed Covid-19 was similar to flu in mortality rate.
"Does [that] necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs, destruction of oil companies, furloughing
doctors ? I think the answer is going to be increasingly clear."
The reaction of the medical community was severe. It was pointed out that the two men owned
a clinic that was losing business thanks to the lockdown. The message boards of real E.R.
doctors lit up with angry comments, scoffing at the doctors' dubious data collection methods
and even their somewhat dramatic choice to dress in scrubs for their video presentation.
The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and American College of Emergency
Physicians (ACEP) scrambled to
issue a joint statement to "emphatically condemn" the two doctors, who "do not speak for
medical society" and had released "biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal
financial interests."
As is now almost automatically the case in the media treatment of any controversy, the story
was immediately packaged for "left" and "right" audiences by TV networks. Tucker Carlson on
Fox backed up the doctors' claims, saying "these are serious people who've done this
for a living for decades," and YouTube and Google have " officially
banned dissent ."
Meanwhile, over on Carlson's opposite-number channel, MSNBC, anchor Chris Hayes of the
All In program reacted with fury to Carlson's monologue:
There's a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the network that we at
All In call Trump TV right now to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus Call
it coronavirus trutherism.
Hayes, an old acquaintance of mine, seethed at what he characterized as the gross
indifference of Trump Republicans to the dangers of coronavirus. "At the beginning of this
horrible period, the president, along with his lackeys, and propagandists, they all minimized
what was coming," he said, sneering. "They said it was just like a cold or the flu."
He angrily demanded that if Fox acolytes like Carlson believed so strongly that society
should be reopened, they should go work in a meat processing plant. "Get in there if you think
it's that bad. Go chop up some pork."
The tone of the many media reactions to Erickson, Carlson, Trump, Georgia governor Brian
Kemp, and others who've suggested lockdowns and strict shelter-in-place laws are either
unnecessary or do more harm than good, fits with what writer Thomas Frank describes as a new "
Utopia of Scolding ":
Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every
day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold. That's their future, and
it's a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian's face, forever.
In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a
giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business
celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement
society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their
preoccupations.
Because this Conventional Wisdom viewed itself as being solely concerned with the Only
Important Thing, i.e. removing Trump, there was no longer any legitimate excuse for disagreeing
with its takes on Russia, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, the 25th amendment, Ukraine,
the use of the word "treason," the removal of Alex Jones, the movie Joker, or whatever
else happened to be the #Resistance fixation of the day.
When the Covid-19 crisis struck, the scolding utopia was no longer abstraction. The dream
was reality! Pure communism had arrived! Failure to take elite advice was no longer just a
deplorable faux pas . Not heeding experts was now murder. It could not be tolerated.
Media coverage quickly became a single, floridly-written tirade against "
expertise-deniers ." For instance, the Atlantic headline on Kemp's decision to end
some shutdowns was, " Georgia's
Experiment in Human Sacrifice ."
At the outset of the crisis, America's biggest internet platforms – Facebook, Twitter,
Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit – took an unprecedented step to
combat "fraud and misinformation " by promising extensive cooperation in elevating
"authoritative" news over less reputable sources.
H.L. Mencken once said that in America, "the general average of intelligence, of knowledge,
of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his
trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies
stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head."
We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities
cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places
like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the "expert" class compound their
wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to
combat "ignorance," the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive
ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.
The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and
more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who
tells people to inject disinfectant . It's astonishing that they don't see this.
Journalists are professional test-crammers. Our job is to get an assignment on Monday
morning and by Tuesday evening act like we're authorities on intellectual piracy, the civil war
in Yemen, Iowa caucus procedure, the coronavirus, whatever. We actually know jack: we
speed-read, make a few phone calls, and in a snap people are inviting us on television to tell
millions of people what to think about the complex issues of the world.
When we come to a subject cold, the job is about consulting as many people who really know
their stuff as quickly as possible and sussing out – often based on nothing more than
hunches or impressions of the personalities involved – which set of explanations is most
believable. Sportswriters who covered the Deflategate football scandal had to do this in order
to explain the Ideal Gas Law , I
had to do it to cover the subprime mortgage scandal, and reporters this past January and
February had to do it when assigned to assess the coming coronavirus threat.
It does not take that much work to go back and find that a significant portion of the
medical and epidemiological establishment called this disaster wrong when they were polled by
reporters back in the beginning of the year. Right-wingers are having a blast collecting the
headlines , and they should, given the chest-pounding at places like MSNBC about others who
"minimized the risk." Here's a brief sample:
There are dozens of these stories and they nearly all contain the same elements, including
an inevitable quote or series of quotes from experts telling us to calm the hell down. This is
from the Time piece:
"Good hand-washing helps. Staying healthy and eating healthy will also help," says Dr.
Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at New York's Stony Brook Children's
Hospital. "The things we take for granted actually do work. It doesn't matter what the virus
is. The routine things work ."
There's a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from priesthoods in any
field. It's particularly in the nature of insular communities of subject matter experts to
coalesce around orthodoxies that blind the very people in the loop who should be the most
knowledgeable.
"Experts" get things wrong for reasons that are innocent (they've all been taught the same
incorrect thing in school) and less so (they have a financial or professional interest in
denying the truth).
On the less nefarious side, the entire community of pollsters in 2016 denounced as infamous
the idea that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, let alone the general election.
They believed that because they weren't paying attention to voters (their ostensible jobs), but
also because they'd never seen anything similar. In a more suspicious example, if you asked a
hundred Wall Street analysts in September 2008 what caused the financial crisis, probably no
more than a handful would have mentioned fraud or malfeasance.
Both of the above examples point out a central problem with trying to automate the
fact-checking process the way the Internet platforms have of late, with their emphasis on
"authoritative" opinions.
"Authorities " by their nature are untrustworthy. Sometimes they have an interest
in denying truths, and sometimes they actually try to define truth as being whatever they say
it is. "
Elevating authoritative content " over independent or less well-known sources is an
algorithmic take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been slowly
destroying our business for decades.
The WMD fiasco happened because journalists listened to people with military ranks and
titles instead of demanding evidence and listening to their own instincts. The same thing
happened with Russiagate, a story fueled by intelligence "experts" with grand titles who are
now proven to have been
wrong to a spectacular
degree , if not actually criminally liable in pushing a fraud.
We've become incapable of talking calmly about possible solutions because we've lost the
ability to decouple scientific or policy discussions, or simple issues of fact, from a
political argument. Reporting on the Covid-19 crisis has become the latest in a line of moral
manias with Donald Trump in the middle.
Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish
crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the
seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we're denouncing the questions themselves as
infamous. Or we're politicizing the framing of stories in a way that signals to readers what
their take should be before they even digest the material. " Conservative
Americans see coronavirus hope in Progressive Sweden ," reads a Politico headline,
as if only conservatives should feel optimism in the possibility that a non-lockdown approach
might have merit! Are we rooting for such an approach to not work?
From everything I've heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the
Bakersfield doctors are probably not the best sources. But the functional impact of removing
their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn't otherwise have had) is to stamp
out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the
economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance
abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the
public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can't not talk about it out
of fear of being censored, or because we're confusing real harm with political harm.
Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the
disease. The scolders who are being seduced by such thinking have to wake up, before we end up
adding another disaster on top of the terrible one we're already facing.
Patrick Lovell Apr 30 Like always, I agree and am moved
deeply by most of your positions. I do however find the argument not entirely convincing.
I've seen you down on Russiagate from the beginning and I've never felt like I understood
why. I get the barrage without the evidence and what that means for the broader context
but seriously, Washington's entire currency is lying. So too is Wall Street. But Putin's
isn't? Trump's? Is it really that complicated?
Trump was laundering real estate for bad guys for decades. It's his business model.
Deutsche Bank was involved with fraud in every dimension and direction and Trump was a
relatively small play all things considered, but the SOB knew what he was involved with
and doing. He went so far as to claim the "Act of God" defense based on deuschbag
Greenspan's insane lie that no one saw 2008 coming.
Trump went so far as to sue DM for being a victim of predatory lending. Trump? Victim
of Predatory Lending??!?!?! WTF?!?!? Given all of that and then some (Mercers, Bannon,
etc.) are we to pretend it wasn't exactly what it looks like? Why wouldn't we? Because
Clinton was on the other side? I really don't get that part at all.
Matt Taibbi Apr 30 I'm sorry, but Russiagate wasn't about
whether or not Trump or Putin were liars or bad people. It was a very specific set of
allegations that have been proven now to be false: that Trump was being blackmailed by
the Russian state, that the Russians coordinated with the Trump campaign in an election
interference plot, that the Trump campaign traded sanctions for election aid, that Trump
himself committed treason and was a compromised foreign agent, etc. This has all been
investigated and discounted. In fact it appears now, from the investigation of IG Michael
Horowitz, that the FBI knew relatively early on -- by late 2016 -- that there was no
coordination or collusion going on between Russia and the Trump campaign. Yet smears and
innuendo flowed for years from intelligence sources anyway. You don't have to be a Trump
fan to be pissed that there was such an elaborate effort at spreading this false tale.
Larry May 1 Matt, I disagree, perhaps, with your
reference to Kemp and the other governors who opened their states. Don't you agree that
their effort seems to be an attempt to prevent workers from claiming unemployment benefit
and that, as such, their efforts should not be seen as motivated by a simple, freely
determined skepticism about the merits of the science or even the biased journalism?
I do applaud your general thesis, and would add for my part that one of the most
interesting phenomena regarding the media response to coronavirus and scientific material
in general is a seeming mass desire to settle matters once and for all rather than
fostering an attitude that scientific activity is more than anything else a manifestly
long-drawn out, labor intensive pursuit, that requires much time, almost always, before
actionable insights can be formulated, much less acted upon.
It is odd that, as you have noted so many times, a media so addicted to manufacturing
themes that must be continually resuscitated, like Russia, do the exact opposite with
science: as you note, pundits and reporters, when confronted with science, tend to cram
and swot maniacally (under deadline, assuredly) in order to get as close to a definitive
statement as possible as fast as possible, when the entire process is designed (though
increasingly commercialized and siloed privatized science mitigates against this in
important ways, whilst reinforcing it in others) only to provide "answers" of any sort
extremely tentatively.
This is perhaps one of the most annoying things about many Americans' expectations of
scientific activity, which you see in medicine (and weather forecasting!) perhaps most of
all: people frustrated with the underlying uncertainty of medical prognoses seem to
expect cookie-cutter specific formulations virtually on the spot, and are angered when
these are not forthcoming.
I even know people who have taught philosophy of science who have never stepped foot
in a lab or have the vaguest notion of how "knowledge" is produced there. This sort of
thing adds fertile ground for themes development of potential misunderstandings amongst
lay-people that raises the deleterious effects to another level. But I am digressing.
My main question is about Kemp and the others, but if you could speak a little to
flesh out your interesting comments on reporters and scientific subject matter, I would
be most grateful. I love your work, Matt, keep up the good job!
"In a Pandemic, the Mob Is the Ultimate Enforcer" [John Authers,
Bloomberg ].
The business perspective: "what really matters to the world's financial movers and shakers
is the great mob of voters out there in the real world, and how they might respond to whatever
measures they take to deal with the pandemic and the economic crisis that has come in its wake.
That, in turn, might owe a lot to the Don
The optics are not good when headlines reveal that scarcely impoverished institutions such
as Harvard University and the Los Angeles Lakers have received public handouts while small
businesses have been unable to get their hands on any money before it runs out.
After the mistakes made in the wake of the last financial crisis, Powell rightly grasps that
it is very important to get it right this time -- or face what might be a dangerous populist
backlash. Or, in our Sopranos analogy, the Mob."
Yesterday when I linked to the event at Lansing, Michigan, I commented that those there
had no idea what they were doing as they were protesting the wrong thing at the wrong
place. Instead, they ought to be occupying the US Treasury building in DC and the NY Fed
Bank in NYC to stop the fraudulent dissemination of $$Trillions to Wall Street criminals
masked as bankers, hedge fund mangers and the like as those locations are where the MAJOR
crimes are occurring as I type this comment. Their behavior casts them as ignorant and
perhaps worse as they're being led into an assault on their own interests while doing
nothing to genuinely defend their wellbeing and that of their kin and progeny. Such
stupidity's been ongoing since 1980-81 when it arose during Reagan's campaign and
continued afterward. That it's being directed/channeled is clear, just as who was
financing the Tea Party rubes was clear--It's the same criminals doing the looting in DC
and NYC.
Given the state of politics within the Outlaw US Empire, such behavior is
unfortunately normal to a certain degree. If it was a gang of Occupy Wall Street
Protesters, the reaction by the forces of coercion would've been vastly different and
very violent. Such is the state of Machiavellianism within as it's worked for many
decades dividing and ruling. With such impediments, attaining the mass solidarity
required to affect the Sea-change required is made extremely difficult, which is why you
observe that nothing's been done for the masses while many things have been done to
further their exploitation.
Pleonexia is a
concept I introduced into a discussion of a similar topic about 2 or so years ago on this
board as being at the root for the decline and fall of the Outlaw US Empire. Here's what Wiki
says about it at the link:
"Pleonexia, sometimes called pleonexy, originating from the Greek
πλεονεξία, is a philosophical concept
which roughly corresponds to greed, covetousness, or avarice, and is strictly defined as '
the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others ', suggesting what
Ritenbaugh describes as ' ruthless self-seeking and an arrogant assumption that others and
things exist for one's own benefit '" [My Emphasis]
That trait's shared by all Imperialist nations all of which arose based on the same
Greco-Roman foundations or learned those traits from them as in the case of the Japanese.
Indeed, that such traits aren't recognized speaks to the illiteracy of those rising to or
placed in leadership positions as they seem to be totally unaware of the numerous lessons
within Greek and Roman literature/culture--lessons known by the Founders and others 250 years
ago when to be considered educated you had to know Greek, Latin, and their classical
literature. As Walter says, it's a Greek Tragedy; but the play began in the last quarter of
the 19th Century as has also been written about.
Those running the Outlaw US Empire seem oblivious to the wall they're about to run the
nation into, or we might say it's a cliff that will take the nation into the abyss. The G-20
determined last year that a new global currency to conduct commerce was required to replace
the dollar. A short discussion and linking of articles occurred on that topic yesterday
between me and Likklemore. Bevin insisted we discuss the failure of Capitalism and what needs
to come next as its replacement. I've advocated the need for a steady-state socialist system
as the new global political-economy. As I reported, a prominent Singaporean in promoting his
newest book wrote in The Economist that the advent of the pandemic marks the start of
the Asian Century thanks to the gross Moral Failure of the West and the Outlaw US Empire as
its lead nation.
How does a group of people get cured of Pleonexia? It's likely way too late for the
current crop of oligarchs; but what of their heirs who were presumably schooled in similar
fashion to their elders, and their progeny? I'm with Hudson in that their wealth must be
written down close to zero, and the new system emplaced will not allow a repetition.
Meanwhile, someone needs to get busy writing about the current Tragedy such that future
generations can learn its lessons so they're not repeated.
Both companies on Friday outlined deep cuts in investments in the Permian shale basin, the
top U.S. oilfield where growth in recent years made America the world's top oil producer
and a net exporter for the first time in decades. They each announced global shut-ins of up
to 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) this quarter due to lockdowns to fight the coronavirus
pandemic.
Exxon and Chevron have been rapidly sidelining Permian drilling equipment since the market
started crashing in March. U.S. crude prices have plunged nearly 70% this year, and traded
in negative territory on April 20 for the first time ever.[;]
Sitting inside the credit-resolution group, where Wells Fargo handles struggling
borrowers, the team includes many bankers who previously worked with the same oil and gas
producers in its investment bank.
They work alongside bankruptcy specialists who have been reassigned to focus exclusively
on energy to help Wells Fargo wade through the expected flood of restructurings.
"It's a bloodbath," said one person with knowledge of the bank's oil and gas portfolio,
who was not authorized to speak publicly.[.]
Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) are considered to be the two largest
lenders to U.S. energy companies. Citigroup Inc (C.N) had the largest energy loan book of
any U.S. bank at the end of 2019 because of its international business.[.]
As of the end of March, Wells Fargo had $14.3 billion of oil and gas loans outstanding,
according to filings.[.]
Calling Mr. Powell on the red phone please. The president is on Twitter. The CODE:
Print.
Gazprom ramps up its export capacity to China via the Power of Siberia line, plans to add a
second compressor station this year. Drill rigs at the Kovykta Field are expected to go from
7 this year to 18 next year, and the extraction flows added to the Power of Siberia capacity.
The servants of Washington in the EU will try to extract every last concession they can
before the pipeline is completed, but they absolutely want it and will back down if they
think Russia would actually give up on completing it. Their strategy all along was to let
Russia build it, but ensure its operation fell under the control of EU regulators so that
they could get plenty of gas when they needed it, but use it as a negotiating tool when they
had lots in reserve, start complaining about the price and try to get more pipeline volume
for competitors, variations on the ideal where the Russians would absorb all the costs of
building it, but would yield all advantages of the completed pipeline to the EU. Right up
until the moment the first volumes go through the pipeline, the EU is going to act as a
spoiler on a project they absolutely want to be completed.
If Russia said, all right then, fuck you; Get your gas from the Americans, if that's what
you want, two things would happen – one, The Donald would come in his pants, and two,
Brussels would go wait wait wait wait hold on. No need to be hasty.
But they think they are in a super-strong position now, because their American pals
stopped it when it was just a whisker away from completion, and gave them breathing space to
renegotiate a deal that was already set, and make up a bunch of new rules using that was
then, this is now for a rationale. I hope Russia does the same to them once it's complete,
and says yeah, you THOUGHT that was the price, but that was then, and charges them just
enough under the American price that dropping them in favour of the Americans is not
feasible, but still much more than they thought they would pay.
That's funny; I just checked her position last night, and it said she was bound for Nakhodka,
due early in July.
Yeah; making 10 knots for Nakhodka, due there July 1st. That's where she left from
originally, but so far as I could make out there is nothing in Nakhodka which might lead to
the belief she will be there undergoing updates and tweaks for her employment finishing Nord
Stream II.
It'd be nice to think Russia is going to complete Nord Stream II right away just to spite
Washington and its endless meddling, but as we have discussed before, there really is no
hurry. Russia is locked into a new medium-term transit contract with Ukraine, the Russian
state has reduced income available due to the oil-price mess and low demand owing to the
'pandemic', and would be forging ahead with work that would cost it just as much money to do
now as it would later, when it likely will have more cash available. I've read the AKADEMIK
CHERKSIY needs a short refit and a little updating to ready her for Nord Stream work, since
being principal pipelayer for that line possibly requires some different equipment or at
least some adjustments. It likely would require crewing by some more specialists, as well,
and there's no reason to believe they have been aboard all this time. I suppose they could
meet the ship in Nakhodka, but there is nothing at this point to suggest that.
The only thing that argues for Russia pressing ahead now is the weather, which should be
entering the season when it would be best for that kind of work. Otherwise, nothing suggests
Russia is in a tearing rush to get on with it. Certainly the partners have not been told
anything, and they don't appear to be unduly alarmed at the lack of immediate progress.
Some 14 percent of US adults would forgo medical care for Covid-19 symptoms because they
couldn't pay for it, a new poll has found – yet oblivious health authorities act as if
the epidemic will be solved by drugs alone. One in seven American adults would avoid seeking
healthcare if they or a family member experienced symptoms of Covid-19, out of concern they
would be unable to afford treatment, according to a
Gallup poll published on Tuesday. Even if they specifically believed themselves to be infected
with the coronavirus, nine percent would forgo care for financial reasons, the poll found.
Their fears are well-founded – the average cost of coronavirus treatment in an intensive
care unit runs over $30,000,
according to a study released earlier this month by insurance industry group America's
Health Insurance Plans. Even for those who avoid the ICU, American healthcare is the most
expensive in the world, and stories of coronavirus patients being whacked with gargantuan
medical bills are a dime a dozen two months into the pandemic.
Making matters worse is the unemployment crisis, as about 55 percent of Americans receive
healthcare through their jobs. Upwards of 30 million have filed for unemployment in the last
five weeks, adding an unprecedented number of families to the ranks of the uninsured –
which were already estimated in December to include 27.5 million people, more than the
population of Australia. Even those lucky enough to have kept their jobs and insurance may face
steep co-pays or other surprise costs.
After a handful of highly-publicized cases in which Americans died of the virus after being
turned away by hospitals for lack of money, President Donald Trump ordered hospitals to pay for
the cost of Covid-19 treatment, and several large insurers promised at the beginning of the
month to waive all co-pays for coronavirus testing for 60 days. However, those coverage pledges
do not include other costs associated with hospitalization, like ambulance transportation;
outpatient treatment; or treatment for non-Covid-19 patients. Individuals seeking treatment
have been tested and received the good news that they don't have the virus – only to be
hit shortly thereafter with the bad news that they're on the hook for thousands of dollars in
costs. Low-income respondents were much more likely to report they would not seek care for
financial reasons. Perhaps more troublingly, respondents with annual income under $40,000 were
almost four times as likely as those with incomes over $100,000 to report that they or a family
member had been turned away from a hospital for reasons related to overcrowding or high patient
volume, the Gallup poll found.
The big question that we should be addressing, and which we lose sight of when playing
statistical trivia with idiots, is the question of capitalism. This crisis is a direct result
of living under capitalism. Every aspect of it from the way it spread like wildfire across
the world, to the fragility of food supply chains (I am surrounded by farmers growing corn
crops to be converted into ethanol!), to the failures to stockpile protective equipment and
ventilators, to the contracting of the business of fighting the virus to for profit
businesses, to the precarious existences lived by millions of people thrown out of work and
reduced to misery by the crisis- every aspect of this complex and massive socio-economic
crisis calls into question the fundamental nature of our class society.
That is what we should be talking about. Unless of course, like I suspect most of the
quibblers, we are so invested in the religion of Thatcherism and the mysteries of class
exploitation and oligarchy that anything is preferable to the dangerous blasphemy of
questioning cannibalism/capitalism.
Yes, the problem lies with Neoliberal Capitalism, which is a hocus-pocus form of Finance
Capitalism whose rise I've been trying to trace along with Hudson to a point between 1865 and
1885. Dr. Hudson's exposed most of it, but its roots lie outside the USA and connect to that
era's Outlaw Empire--the British. It's very easy to say Capitalism's the problem, but people
want specifics and also need to have their generations of indoctrination upended so they're
capable of clear thinking. IMO, Richard Wolff's thin primer Understanding Socialism is
perfect for that job, and he's been in great demand to talk about Capitalism's failure during
the pandemic. Here's a recent
essay he wrote for Raw Story .
But yeah, we need to get the discussion out into the open, into the public
mainstream--somehow.
I will start the discussion the subject of which was suggested by Bevin @ 214:
... For example there is no doubt that old peoples homes-call them what you will- have been
slaughterhouses in the past few weeks. There are all sorts of reasons-all non medical- why
this has happened and we would do well to discuss what they are. And insist that nothing
like it recur in future years ...
I would add that not only are significant COVID-19 outbreak clusters centring around
nursing homes and aged care facilities, they have also centred around passenger cruise ships.
In Australia there is currently a criminal investigation being undertaken into the actions of
Carnival Australia with regard to the decision made by NSW state health authorities to allow
passengers to disembark from the Ruby Princess in Sydney in late March even though the
results of the tests they had taken were not yet known.
We might ask what do aged care places and passenger cruise ships might have in common.
Apart from often being closed systems - residents in aged care places usually don't move
about much and may not have access to fresh air, and passengers on certain levels of a cruise
ship and many of the crew (especially kitchen staff, cleaners, technical people) may also
have limited access to fresh air - what else might favour the circulation of COVID-19 in
those environments? We ought to look at airconditioning systems, water supply systems, and
the conditions of the people working in nursing homes and cruise ships and how their
conditions influence their work and give rise to situations in which they may be transferring
viruses and bacteria from one patient or passenger to the next.
These environments are microcosms of capitalist society in action.
I trust history and events to come will show these things:
1. When the US economy crashed (which is still happening and yet to come with its full
force), it wasn't the "virus" that crashed it. It was the US economy that crashed the US
economy. As noted above, the economy couldn't take a health shock to its workers.
2. The people of the US did not enter into distancing and self-quarantining because they
were obeying the dictates of any of their governments - they were not cowed unto this, at
least not by government. They chose voluntarily to do this as a survival measure, knowing
that the governments were unable or unwilling to help them. And if, moving forward,
governments attempt to keep an unreasonable control over the people - as if they the
governments had actually been in control through this crisis - those unreasonable controls
will be flouted wholesale by the people.
3. As US society feels its way into a "reopening" - still without testing or affordable
treatment - there will be many nuances to explore and figure out. Society will need to learn
what's useful and what's pointless, which costs are important to bear and which are
disastrous beyond reason. At the first stage of the crisis, one universal hammer for one
universal nail was all that the people had. Now they have masks, at least. The people made
those masks, not the governments, and the people made them work. The people will make the
re-opening work, and do the exploration of how to adapt the culture to what works in an age
of bio-danger.
4. As everyone in the US can agree, what a shit-show it's been.
Lol. So now we talk about C to debunk claims. Take a look at the financial interests of
public health agencies like Fauci, FDA, CDC, etc, WHO, Big Pharma, Gates, etc
Do you know hospitals can charge medicare 15% more if they have a covid-19 diagnosis, and
CDC helps out by saying a test is not required?
Also, as for antibody tests indicating the level of Covid-19 exposure/immunity. Thats not
true. Only those who are exposed and can not clear the virus via their innate and cellular
immune cells go on to develop antibodies (it takes 7-10 days from infection/exposure to
antibody protection), and subsequently test seropositive in antibody test. These people are
naturally immune. They don't get sick. Most of those who cant fight it off without antibodies
don't get very sick. In other cases the antibodies worsen their condition since it activates
another complement pathway which increases inflammation and cytokines.
As the Bronx doctor said, many of the deaths are occurring there in people not because of
Covid-19 but because they aren't getting medical care due to suspension of services or fear
of going to hospital. They die at home or in ambulances. Some may die with covid-19 , not
because of it.
That the lock down is working is the same reasoning that I use with my anti-tiger statue on
my verandah. As I have seen no tigers, then the statue is working perfectly and it was
worth the $100,000 I paid for it!
It is estimated that half the world will lose their jobs by the time this lock down is
finished.
Boeing is buried ten metres deep, they just have not realised it yet. Airbus will soon
be filing for bankruptcy. Hertz is going over the abyss as we speak. AirBnb is toast! The
food chains will soon be breaking down as much of the food industry is geared for the fast
food, restaurant, and hotel business.
Lots of tourist places now have 70% unemployment.
The housing market will soon start to collapse as no-one can pay rents and
mortgages.
Then the manufacturing plants that supply the spare parts for the water treatment and
sewerage plants can no longer supply replacements.
The electric grid goes down as their no parts for the turbines, transformers, etc.
How you going now in your house with no food, water, and electricity? Still happy to sit
in the dark, thinking this is all worth it?
And this is covoid-19, wait for covid-20/21/22/23
How long before we say enough, let's approach this another way, for a pandemic which
does not even touch anyone under thirty!
Sweden is trying something different and seem to be no worse, probably better than the
UK approach.
And we haven't paid our recent 'restaurant bill' now owed to the bankers, payable in
about three years, when we are going to be drained of several pints of financial blood!
And in Australia, with about eighty deaths, the panic borders on the insane!
Thank you for an excellent article on what is happening. My only criticism is that it appears
that these things "just happen". With your insight and erudition, could you please address
"why" the situation has arisen. What could be the motivation behind actions and policies
which so clearly will destroy not only the 99% but also the basic wealth of the1%?
This is not something new, but a recurrent theme in world affairs.
" Behind all the
governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very
dangerous people." "Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me
privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and
manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organised,
so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak
above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
-- Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States (1856-1924) "So you see, my dear
Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by
those who are not behind the scenes." -- Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister
(1804-1881) President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote in November 1933 to Col. Edward House:
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger
centers has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson."
Great comment. My anecdotal observation is that there are excess deaths because people are
afraid to go to the hospital. In New York, deaths at home are much higher than before.
Yes, there are some wild conspiracy theories out there. But the fact that Covid is indeed
worse than the flu is not necessarily an argument that the cure is not worse than the
disease. The new depression is just getting going, as are pending food shortages. As
governments increasingly print money so the jobless can buy things, this will cause inflation
as there will be too much money chasing too few goods (especially food) being produced. This
will necessitate more printing, causing a vicious circle of increasing inflation.
The poor economy will cause many more problems and excess deaths, in ways we don't yet
understand.
The America that went to the Moon – would not fail. The JFK America had grit and
can do.
NASA and space exploration are Anglo type things. Anglos (along with Germans), like
engineering projects and technical challenges, and it was inventors like the Wright brothers
and engineers like Henry Ford that built the US into the world's leading industrial power.
They harnessed electricity, radio etc. to found new industries.
In contrast, America's new leadership is more into Jewish type things. Finance,
speculation, deal making, publishing, show business, films. The heroes are the billionaire
hedge fund managers (speculators) investment bankers (deal makers), billionaire media owners,
Hollywood and big money types in general.
It's a different psychology, and there's no question that the Anglo model was better for
the general public.
"... First of all, because Stoics believe that our true good resides in our own character and actions, they would frequently remind themselves to distinguish between what's "up to us" and what isn't. Modern Stoics tend to call this "the dichotomy of control" and many people find this distinction alone helpful in alleviating stress. What happens to me is never directly under my control, never completely ..."
"... Marcus likes to ask himself, "What virtue has nature given me to deal with this situation?" That naturally leads to the question: "How do other people cope with similar challenges?" Stoics reflect on character strengths such as wisdom, patience and self-discipline, which potentially make them more resilient in the face of adversity. They try to exemplify these virtues and bring them to bear on the challenges they face in daily life, during a crisis like the pandemic. They learn from how other people cope. Even historical figures or fictional characters can serve as role models. ..."
"... fear does us more harm than the things of which we're afraid. ..."
"... Finally, during a pandemic, you may have to confront the risk, the possibility, of your own death. Since the day you were born, that's always been on the cards. Most of us find it easier to bury our heads in the sand. Avoidance is the No1 most popular coping strategy in the world. We live in denial of the self-evident fact that we all die eventually. ..."
"... "All that comes to pass", he tells himself, even illness and death, should be as "familiar as the rose in spring and the fruit in autumn". Marcus Aurelius, through decades of training in Stoicism, in other words, had taught himself to face death with the steady calm of someone who has done so countless times already in the past. ..."
T he Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the last famous
Stoic philosopher of antiquity. During the last 14 years of his life he faced one of the worst
plagues in European history. The Antonine Plague, named after him, was probably caused by a
strain of the smallpox virus. It's estimated to have killed up to 5 million people, possibly
including Marcus himself.
="rich-link__link u-faux-block-link__overlay" aria-label="'What it means to be an American':
Abraham Lincoln and a nation divided"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/11/abraham-lincoln-verge-book-ted-widmer-interview">
From AD166 to around AD180, repeated outbreaks occurred throughout the known world. Roman
historians describe the legions being devastated, and entire towns and villages being
depopulated and going to ruin. Rome itself was particularly badly affected, carts leaving the
city each day piled high with dead bodies.
In the middle of this plague, Marcus wrote a book, known as The Meditations, which records
the moral and psychological advice he gave himself at this time. He frequently applies Stoic
philosophy to the challenges of coping with pain, illness, anxiety and loss. It's no stretch of
the imagination to view The Meditations as a manual for developing precisely the mental
resilience skills required to cope with a pandemic.
First of all, because Stoics believe that our true good resides in our own character and
actions, they would frequently remind themselves to distinguish between what's "up to us" and
what isn't. Modern Stoics tend to call this "the dichotomy of control" and many people find
this distinction alone helpful in alleviating stress. What happens to me is never directly
under my control, never completely up to me, but my own thoughts and actions are
– at least the voluntary ones. The pandemic isn't really under my control but
the way I behave in response to it is.
Much, if not all, of our thinking is also up to us. Hence, "It's not events that upset us
but rather our opinions about them." More specifically, our judgment that something is really
bad, awful or even catastrophic, causes our distress.
This is one of the basic psychological principles of Stoicism. It's also the basic
premise of modern cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the leading evidence-based form of
psychotherapy. The pioneers of CBT, Albert Ellis and Aaron T Beck, both describe Stoicism as
the philosophical inspiration for their approach. It's not the virus that makes us afraid but
rather our opinions about it. Nor is it the inconsiderate actions of others, those ignoring
social distancing recommendations, that make us angry so much as our opinions about them.
Many people are struck, on reading The Meditations, by the fact that it opens with a chapter
in which Marcus lists the qualities he most admires in other individuals, about 17 friends,
members of his family and teachers. This is an extended example of one of the central practices
of Stoicism.
Marcus likes to ask himself, "What virtue has nature given me to deal with this
situation?" That naturally leads to the question: "How do other people cope with similar
challenges?" Stoics reflect on character strengths such as wisdom, patience and
self-discipline, which potentially make them more resilient in the face of adversity. They try
to exemplify these virtues and bring them to bear on the challenges they face in daily life,
during a crisis like the pandemic. They learn from how other people cope. Even historical
figures or fictional characters can serve as role models.
With all of this in mind, it's easier to understand another common slogan of Stoicism:
fear does us more harm than the things of which we're afraid. This applies to
unhealthy emotions in general, which the Stoics term "passions" – from pathos ,
the source of our word "pathological". It's true, first of all, in a superficial sense. Even if
you have a 99% chance, or more, of surviving the pandemic, worry and anxiety may be ruining
your life and driving you crazy. In extreme cases some people may even take their own
lives.
In that respect, it's easy to see how fear can do us more harm than the things of which
we're afraid because it can impinge on our physical health and quality of life. However, this
saying also has a deeper meaning for Stoics. The virus can only harm your body – the
worst it can do is kill you. However, fear penetrates into the moral core of our being. It can
destroy your humanity if you let it. For the Stoics that's a fate worse than death.
Finally, during a pandemic, you may have to confront the risk, the possibility, of your
own death. Since the day you were born, that's always been on the cards. Most of us find it
easier to bury our heads in the sand. Avoidance is the No1 most popular coping strategy in the
world. We live in denial of the self-evident fact that we all die eventually. The
Stoics believed that when we're confronted with our own mortality, and grasp its implications,
that can change our perspective on life quite dramatically. Any one of us could die at any
moment. Life doesn't go on forever.
We're told this was what Marcus was thinking about on his deathbed. According to one
historian, his circle of friends were distraught. Marcus calmly asked why they were weeping for
him when, in fact, they should accept both sickness and death as inevitable, part of nature and
the common lot of mankind. He returns to this theme many times throughout The Meditations.
"All that comes to pass", he tells himself, even illness and death, should be as
"familiar as the rose in spring and the fruit in autumn". Marcus Aurelius, through decades of
training in Stoicism, in other words, had taught himself to face death with the steady calm of
someone who has done so countless times already in the past.
Donald Robertson is cognitive behavioural therapist and the author of several books on
philosophy and psychotherapy, including Stoicism and the Art of Happiness and How to Think Like
a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius
Some will know who Hyman Minsky was, some won't. Hudson gives him the primary credit for
providing the foundation for Modern Monetary Theory, and he gets praise from Keen, Wolfe and
many others too. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, here's a
long essay that seeks the following:
"But the question still stands: Was Minsky in fact a communist? Of course not. But, a
century after his birth, it is useful to clarify often neglected aspects of his intellectual
biography."
Since Minsky's referenced so often by Hudson particularly, I think this piece will be
helpful for those of us following the serious economic issues now in play. I'd reserve an
hour for a critical read.
"... A rabid anti-China propaganda campaign has spread through the media since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The hysteria seems to be just as contagious as the virus, as Americans are bombarded with anti-China stories from the pages of The New York Times to segments on Fox News. Both Republicans and Democrats are arguing the other side is not tough enough on China as they gear up for the 2020 election. ..."
A rabid anti-China propaganda campaign has spread through the media since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The hysteria seems
to be just as contagious as the virus, as Americans are bombarded with anti-China stories from the pages of The New York Times
to segments on Fox News. Both Republicans and Democrats are arguing the other side is not tough enough on China as they gear up for
the 2020 election.
Since Donald Trump was elected president, the
unfounded claim that
Russia meddled in
the 2016 election was spread far and wide by intelligence officials and liberal media outlets.
A common tactic used to promote the Russiagate narrative was unnamed officials
making statements to the press without providing evidence or any factual basis to their claims. Another common tactic was frequent
media appearances by former intelligence officials, like
James Clapper and John Brennan , usually making wild
accusations about Trump and Russia. These tactics are being repeated to promote an anti-China narrative.
The New York Timesran a story on
April 22 nd titled, "Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in US, Officials Say." The article says
rumors that were spread through text messages and social media posts in mid-March that claimed the Trump administration was going
to lock down the entire country to combat coronavirus were boosted by "Chinese operatives." The authors' sources are "six American
officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss intelligence matters."
The story is lacking in detail and provides no evidence for the officials' claims. "The origin of the messages remains murky.
American officials declined to reveal details of the intelligence linking Chinese agents to the dissemination of the disinformation,
citing the need to protect their sources and methods for monitoring Beijing's activities," the story reads. Two of the officials
told the Times that "they did not believe Chinese operatives created the lockdown messages, but rather amplified existing
ones."
Sensationalized reporting in the Times would not be complete without mentioning the Russians. "American officials said
the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls, such as creating fake social media accounts to
push messages to sympathetic Americans, who in turn unwittingly help spread them."
Ironically, the story recognizes the danger of US officials making selective leaks to the media. "Foreign policy analysts are
worried that the Trump administration may politicize intelligence work or make selective leaks to promote an anti-China narrative
American officials in the past have selectively passed intelligence to reporters to shape the domestic political landscape." The
Times uses the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an example of the dangers of selective leaks, ignoring the past four
years of Russiagate stories that plagued its pages.
On April 17 th , Fox News Host Tucker Carlson had former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright
on his show
to deliver some wild accusations about US politicians and the Chinese government. Wright insinuated that some members of Congress
might be agents of China's intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security (MSS). Carlson explained to Wright that the show
reached out to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and other elected officials to ask if they've had contact with any Chinese officials
since the coronavirus outbreak began. Carlson said they did not respond and asked Wright, "What do you think we should infer from
that?"
Wright responded, "I think that they're nervous. I think there are a bunch of people who, because they're either useful idiots
or they have some degree of knowledge and relationships behind the scenes with the Chinese government. Some of them in fact could
be Chinese agents of the MSS." Wright's language comes straight from the Russiagate playbook. Intelligence officials and media pundits
often referred to Trump
as a "useful idiot" for Moscow, and some even
speculated that the president is a "Russian agent."
Trump's anti-Russia
policies show that he is not working in the White House on behalf of Vladimir Putin. Similarly, anti-China legislation that has
recently passed through the House and Senate makes it unlikely any MSS agents are working in the halls of Congress.
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy
Act passed unanimously through the Senate last year and had one lone nay vote in the House from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). The
act, which was signed into law by President Trump, requires the State Department to prepare an annual report on the autonomy of Hong
Kong from mainland China. The act also requires the Commerce Department to report on "China's efforts to use Hong Kong to evade US
export controls." The bill says the president shall present Congress with a list of any individuals that violate human rights in
Hong Kong. Any findings that are unsatisfactory to the US could result in sanctions.
The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act
was also passed unanimously through the Senate, and again, Rep. Massie was the only one to vote against the bill in the House. This
bill, which has not made it to President Trump's desk, would require the US to impose sanctions and export restrictions over China's
treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the western autonomous region of Xinjiang.
Rep. Massie, the sole dissenting voice in Congress, did not vote against these bills because of any loyalty to Beijing or Xi Jinping.
"When our government meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries, it invites those governments to meddle in our affairs,"
Massie wrote on Twitter , explaining his votes.
The Taiwan Allies International Protection
and Enhancement Initiative (TAIPEI) Act , which was signed into law by President Trump in March, passed unanimously through both
the House and Senate, with Rep. Massie finally falling in line with his colleague's anti-China policy. The TAIPEI Act says the US
should "help strengthen Taiwan's diplomatic relationships and partnerships around the world."
Taiwan remains the most sensitive issue between the US and China, since Beijing considers the island to be a part of China. Although
the US does not formally recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, Washington
supplies the island with arms and
frequently sails warships through the Taiwan strait, drawing the ire of Beijing. No members of Congress speak out against these
provocations. Like the accusations about Trump and Russia, the idea that Congress is crawling with agents of Beijing is easily disproven
by actual policy.
Tucker Carlson did not challenge any of Wright's outrageous claims but instead nodded along. Since the start of the outbreak,
Carlson's show has focused on putting all the blame for the coronavirus pandemic on Beijing. Carlson's recent content reflects the
strategy of the White House. The Daily Beast
obtained internal White House documents in March that showed the administration was pushing US officials to blame China for a
"cover-up" in the early days of the outbreak. The strategy has proven useful as many pro-Trump media outlets put Beijing's response
to the pandemic under a microscope, and largely ignore the US government's
early missteps .
Politico obtained
a memo sent by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to GOP campaigns.
The memo
outlines an anti-China strategy for Republicans running for office in 2020. The document advises candidates to blame the pandemic
on China, say Democratic opponents are too soft on China, and advocate for sanctions against Beijing. The memo is full of strong
rhetoric like, "China is not an ally, and they're not just a rival -- they are an adversary and the Chinese Communist Party is our
enemy."
The GOP guidelines are similar to the
rhetoric coming from China hardliners like former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. In March 2019, Bannon and neoconservative
Frank Gaffney founded the Committee on Present Danger: China, a think-tank that identifies China as the greatest "existential threat"
to the United States. In his almost-daily podcast, Bannon rails against Beijing and pins all the blame for the pandemic on China.
"The Chinese Communist Party is at war with their people, they're at war with the world, and they're at war with you You may not
have an interest in the Chinese Communist Party but its destroyed your life. OK? Your economic life, your spiritual life, your social
life. The destruction is from Beijing," Bannon said in a recent
episode.
Republicans and right-wingers are not the only ones looking to attack China this election season. The Biden campaign
released an ad on April 18 th that attacked
Trump for his response to the virus. The ad said, "Trump rolled over for the Chinese" and criticized how much the president praised
China's handling of the pandemic early on. "Trump praised the Chinese 15 times in January and February as the coronavirus spread
across the world," the ad said.
The anti-China propaganda seems to be turning public opinion against Beijing.
A new poll from the Pew Research Center that surveyed 1,000 adults throughout March found that 66 percent have an unfavorable
view of China, an increase of 14 percent since Pew last asked the question in 2018. Nine out of 10 adults surveyed view China as
a threat, including 62 percent who see China as a major threat.
China may have made some mistakes in its early response to the virus, but that does not excuse the US government's lack of preparedness,
and treating the pandemic as an attack sets a dangerous precedent for future outbreaks. The strategy could backfire on Washington
if any future pandemics originate in the US.
Like Russiagate, the anti-China propaganda will serve as a useful tool for a national security state that is looking to
focus more
on great power competition . The Pentagon
identifies China as its
number one priority and is looking to
increase its footprint in the Indo-Pacific region. The constant propaganda will make that increased presence more palatable to
the American people. But that increased presence will bring more confrontation between the US and China, and bring the region and
the world closer to nuclear war.
Dave DeCamp is assistant editor at Antiwar.com and a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn NY, focusing on US foreign policy
and wars. He is on Twitter at @decampdave .
@ 13 "Atlanticist" may not have a lot of meaning to most people out there, but that doesn't
mean it isn't a good word to describe the US and Western European power center. The first
time I heard it was from Kees van Der Pijl in his book "The Making of an Atlantic Ruling
Class." And the term Anglo Zionist is a very good description of the US / Western Europe /
Israeli power block. I don't understand your dislike for the Saker, but it doesn't matter to
me. I agree that Atlanticist and globalist are more or less interchangeable. I guess
globalist would include Japan, too. Would you rather use the term Tri-lateralist?
I am from the United States. I agree that my country has been a large purveyor of much
evil in the world. And a lot of it has been directed at its own subjects. There are many good
people in this country who are just trying to get by.
Neoliberalism was waged against the US populace as it was unleashed on the world at large.
It seems like it really began to gather steam when the dollar was taken off the gold
standard. That was the start of the second Cold War according to Kees van Der Pijl, at least
in my understanding of what he has written. I learned that in his book MH 17, Ukraine and the
New Cold War. The powers that be began to outsource US jobs. Then austerity and
privatization.
I don't know why I am commenting. I always regret doing it. Pregret is a word I have
coined for this sense. I know everyone here is a lot smarter than I am, and lately I have
noticed that the commenters have become a lot less civil.
I did feel that your dismissiveness of the term Atlanticist merited a response though. As
well as the hatred by a lot of people toward a the citizens of the US. The powers that be are
treat us like subjects here. There is not much any of can do about the situation in reality.
I'm sure most of you out there are aware we have a huge prison population. Filled with the
descendants of slaves. We did a real genocide against the native people. The majority of
people can't afford health care. I am one of them.
So for what it's worth, that's my take on the sad state of this country. Sorry for all the
hell we have created.
"... In truth is this is a familiar pattern over the past century where the economy is continually salvaged from ruin by the government at the expense of ordinary workers, small businesses and taxpayers. ..."
"... The system typically privatizes profit for an elite while socializing the losses for the mass of people. It has always been a version of "socialism for the rich". ..."
"... As Eric Zuesse commented in an-depth analysis published in our journal this week, the Covid-19 "top-down bailout" in the U.S. will result in even more social inequality and ultimately more dysfunction in the American economy going forward. ..."
"... Ironically, a virus is exposing the pathological system ..."
The Covid-19 pandemic is unleashing obscene bailouts of Western industries and companies, as
well as lifelines for billionaire business magnates.
It is grotesque that millions of workers are being laid off by corporations which are in
turn receiving taxpayer funds. Many of these corporations have stashed trillions of dollars
away in tax havens and have contributed zero to the public treasury. Yet they are being bailed
out due to shutdowns in the economy over the Covid-19 crisis.
Why aren't the banks and corporations being forced by governments to pay for their workers
on sick leave or in lockdown?
It's because the governments are bought and paid-for servants of the top one per cent. Some
political leaders are the embodiment of the one per cent, like Donald Trump and senior members
of the U.S. Congress.
The biggest orgy of funny money is seen in the U.S. where the Trump administration and
Congress have approved the printing of trillions of dollars to prop up corporations and banks.
Meanwhile crumbs are being thrown at millions of workers and their families.
In just five weeks, unemployment has hit a staggering 26.4 million people in the U.S.
– and that's the official figure. The real level is doubtless much higher. It is reported
that the job losses have wiped out all the employment gains made over the past decade since the
last financial crisis in 2008. As with the present crisis, the U.S. government arranged
trillion-dollar bailouts for banks and industries back in 2008-2009. It didn't last long until
the next binge.
In truth is this is a familiar pattern over the past century where the economy is
continually salvaged from ruin by the government at the expense of ordinary workers, small
businesses and taxpayers.
The recurring rescue is proof that the system of private capital and supposed free markets
is a myth.
The system typically privatizes profit for an elite while socializing the losses for the
mass of people. It has always been a version of "socialism for the rich".
In the distant past the salvaging of broken-down capitalism was at least conducted with a
certain degree of democratization and social progress. In the New Deal era of Roosevelt in the
1930s at least government intervention went a long way to restoring workers and their rights,
despite bitter opposition from capitalists. Over recent decades, however, the rescuing of
capitalism has seen an ever-increasing emphasis on plying money and loans to corporations and
investors while ordinary workers are neglected. This process of embezzlement reached new
heights in the 2008 crash. Now under Trump the larceny has become legendary. It should be
underscored though that the corruption has bipartisan endorsement from Republicans and
Democrats. They are really one party beholden to big business.
As Eric Zuesse commented in an-depth
analysis published in our journal this week, the Covid-19 "top-down bailout" in the U.S.
will result in even more social inequality and ultimately more dysfunction in the American
economy going forward.
"The outcome will therefore be economic collapse, and perhaps even revolution," notes
Zuesse.
It is indisputable that capitalism is a failed system both in the U.S. and Europe. The
Covid-19 pandemic and its disastrous social impact of sickness and deaths shows that such an
economy cannot organize societies based on satisfying human needs. Instead, it functions to
continually enrich the already wealthy while creating ever-greater numbers of impoverished and
deprived. This chronic polarization of wealth has been pointed out by many critics of
capitalism, including Karl Marx, and more contemporaneously by progressive economists like
Richard Wolff and Thomas Picketty.
It is fair to describe corporate capitalism (or socialism for the rich) as a pathology which
produces many other pathologies, including deprivation, crime, insecurity, ecological damage,
militarism, imperialism and ultimately war.
Ironically, a virus is exposing the pathological system. And it is, inevitably, forcing a
cure to arise.
It's time to abolish the parasitical system and implement something more civilized,
effective, sustainable and democratic. That is the task of people organized to fight for their
interests. The delusion of bailing out a failed and sick system must be shaken off once and for
all.
"... Countries that have allowed their domestic industry to decay have found they cannot now produce the crucial equipment they need, from respirators to gas masks. Countries with strong manufacturing bases like China, or with a prudent nationalist sense of preparing ahead for emergencies like Russia, have done far better. The shortage of respirators in Britain has become more than a national scandal: It is a national shame. That is another inexorable consequence of the pernicious doctrine of Free Trade. ..."
"... While half the counties in the United States remain so far virtually free of the virus, infections have soared in most major metropolitan areas, especially in so-called Sanctuary cities. Invariably these centers are ruled by liberal Democrats where illegal immigrants congregate. ..."
"... the ruling elites of the West have mindlessly embraced Open Borders and Free Trade ..."
"... Russia suffered the full horrors of the merciless laissez-faire, unregulated Free Market policies of the liberal West in the 1990s. Boris Yeltsin never woke up to the catastrophe that Bill Clinton and Larry Summers were inflicting on his country. ..."
"... National social responsibility has succeeded where the crazed, simplistic theories of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Ayn Rand all palpably failed. ..."
"... The ravages of Liberalism – its Open Borders and Free Markets – have already stripped the West of all its defenses, social, demographic, industrial and economic. ..."
"... open border free trade globalism was an EPIC scam foisted on us ..."
"... Liberals have been selling out American workers for decades, and getting personally wealthy the whole time. Bill, Hillary, Barack, now Joe. ..."
"... This is not a coincidence. The worst part is how they profess to care so much about the underprivileged, unless that person is a worker put out of a job by imports. What a bunch of sleaze balls. ..."
"... NWO Billionaire Globalists have imposed this nightmare on the USA and other citizens of the Western world. ..."
Open Borders and Free Trade induce national suicide slowly and gradually, without the
victims waking up to what is going on until it is too late. But the coronavirus has brought
home with global clarity that human societies need governments and regulated borders for their
own survival.
The bottom line is clear, societies that have had open borders to previous major centers of
infection and transmission, like Iran and Italy which kept open strong flows of people to and
from China in the early stages of pandemic, suffered exceptionally badly.
Countries obsessed with maintaining liberal values and open borders like France, Germany,
the United Kingdom and the U.S. also suffered disproportionately.
Countries that have allowed their domestic industry to decay have found they cannot now
produce the crucial equipment they need, from respirators to gas masks. Countries with strong
manufacturing bases like China, or with a prudent nationalist sense of preparing ahead for
emergencies like Russia, have done far better. The shortage of respirators in Britain has
become more than a national scandal: It is a national shame. That is another inexorable
consequence of the pernicious doctrine of Free Trade.
There, I showed how even the French Revolution of 1789 was in fact triggered by the
catastrophic Free Trade Treaty that hapless King Louis XVI approved with England only three
years before. It led immediately to the worst economic depression in French history which
triggered revolution. In three years, liberal Free Trade succeeded in destroying a society that
had flourished for a thousand years and the most powerful state Europe had known since the fall
of the Roman Empire.
In his classic television series and accompanying book "How the Universe Changed", the great
British broadcaster and historian James Burke showed how the discipline of statistics was
responsible for discovering the way the cholera bacteria spread through contaminated water in
19th Century London, then the largest urban area ever experienced.
Today, we see a similar pattern in the spread of the coronavirus: While half the counties in
the United States remain so far virtually free of the virus, infections have soared in most
major metropolitan areas, especially in so-called Sanctuary cities. Invariably these centers
are ruled by liberal Democrats where illegal immigrants congregate. They are the places where
the values and consequences of Free Trade and Open Borders most clearly flourish. And they ar
ealso the places where the terrifying costs of those policies are most evident as well. The
chickens have come home to roost.
Countries like Russia and China itself, which have reacted most quickly and decisively to
shut down international and domestic travel, have been able to keep their numbers of infections
and rates of spread down.
In Europe, by contrast, the impact of the virus has been appalling, The European Union has
been as useless as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio,. Pro-EU liberal national leaders like
President Emmanuel Macron in France and the venerable Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany
(Berlin's version of Nancy Pelosi) just sat back in bemused silence till it was too late. In
Italy and Spain, the political splintering of societies has woefully added to the chaos.
This is in fact a very old lesson indeed: The ruling elites of the world should not have had
to relearn it.
But for more than 225 years, the ruling elites of the West have mindlessly embraced Open
Borders and Free Trade. Yet these have always been mere assertions of prejudice and mindless
faith: They have never been proven to be true in any scientific manner.
Instead, when we look at the factual evidence of economic history over the past two
centuries, it has always been the case that developing industrial societies which protect their
manufactures behind strong tariff barriers flourish with enormous foreign trade and balance of
payments surpluses. Then the living standards of their people soar.
In contrast, free market societies too powerless, or just too plain dumb to protect their
economic borders get swamped by cheap manufactures and their domestic industries get decimated.
This was the case with liberal free market Britain caught between the rising Protectionist
powers of the United States, Japan and Germany for the next century.
It has been true for the decline of American industry since the 1950s, the more the United
States embraced global free trade, the more its own domestic manufactures and their dependent
populations suffered. This never bothered the liberal intellectual elites of the East and West
Coast at all. It still doesn't. Having inflicted lasting ruin and despair on hundreds of
millions of people for generations, they despise their victims as "deplorables" for crying out
in pain and seeking to end the disastrous policies.
Russia suffered the full horrors of the merciless laissez-faire, unregulated Free Market
policies of the liberal West in the 1990s. Boris Yeltsin never woke up to the catastrophe that
Bill Clinton and Larry Summers were inflicting on his country. Over the past two decades,
Russia's recovery from that Abyss under President Vladimir Putin has been miraculous. National
social responsibility has succeeded where the crazed, simplistic theories of Adam Smith, David
Ricardo and Ayn Rand all palpably failed.
The coronavirus pandemic therefore should serve as a wake up call to the peoples of the
West, what Thomas Jefferson memorably called "A Fire Bell in the Night." They need to start
following Russia's examples of self reliance, prudent preparation and maintaining strong
borders.
The ravages of Liberalism – its Open Borders and Free Markets – have already
stripped the West of all its defenses, social, demographic, industrial and economic.
The West is out of time: The Audit of Pandemic has been taken, and the reckoning is now
due.
xxx
best thing that trump ever did was to hire navarro to shape the nationalist econ
policies
open border free trade globalism was an EPIC scam foisted on us
they are doing the same to the kids right now with their globalist warming claptrap
xxx
Liberals have been selling out American workers for decades, and getting personally
wealthy the whole time. Bill, Hillary, Barack, now Joe.
This is not a coincidence. The worst
part is how they profess to care so much about the underprivileged, unless that person is a
worker put out of a job by imports. What a bunch of sleaze balls.
xxx
There is nothing "compassionate" about open borders. It is a total myth / scam. Stealing a
country's right to free association and control of its own borders is the ULTIMATE betrayal.
NWO Billionaire Globalists have imposed this nightmare on the USA and other citizens of the
Western world. No different then the kings & dictators of the past these tyrants control
our lives like we are slaves. True compassion would entail (among other things) exporting
commerce, jobs & freedom to every corner of the globe. It's becoming more obvious
everyday why this is never even discussed. Globalism is about spreading tyranny & poverty
not freedom & wealth. Open borders is a one way ticket to Hell. 💀 Time to rise up
and stop this national suicide.
xxx
Liberals will still be only concerned with racism and global rights instead of border
security. Nothing trumps that for them. Not even death. How it's possible for us to be racist
again 1.5B Chinese when we are the vast minority compared to them is something that liberals
have yet to explain to me.
Nonetheless, it's been suggested that a number of Silicon Valley elites have already escaped
the US and sought refuge in New Zealand. And unlike the rest of us, the super-rich aren't
hoarding food and fighting each other for toilet paper and hand sanitizer in the supermarket.
They're not posting up poorly constructed, badly edited renditions of 'Imagine', then patting
themselves on the back and saying, "I made a difference today." US businessman Mihai
Dinulescu and his wife are seeing out the pandemic on New Zealand's Waiheke Island, where he
quipped to the press that they planned to go "billionaire hunting." God forbid that they
might actually meet a poor or middle-class person during their attempt to escape the fate
destined for many of their fellow men, women and children.
Apparently, a refugee fleeing a catastrophe who doesn't feel safe enough to avail themselves
of the protection of their own country is acceptable in a Western nation as long as they are
uber-wealthy
If the new coronavirus pandemic has taught us one thing, it is that we need to rethink what
we need to do to keep America safe. That's why Secretary of Defense Mark Esper's recent
tweet calling modernization of U.S. nuclear forces a "top priority ... to protect the
American people and our allies" seemed so tone deaf.
COVID-19 has already
killed more Americans than
died in the
9/11 attacks and the Iraq and Afghan wars combined, with projections of many more to come.
The pandemic underscores the need for a systematic, sustainable, long-term investment in public
health resources,
from protective equipment , to ventilators and hospital beds, to research and planning
resources needed to deal with future outbreaks of disease.
As Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American
Enterprise Institute, has
noted : "We're going to see enormous downward pressure on defense spending because of other
urgent American national needs like health care." And that's as it should be, given the
relative dangers posed by outbreaks of disease and climate change relative to traditional
military challenges.
... ... ...
ICBMs are dangerous because of the short decision time a president would have to decide
whether to launch them in a crisis to avoid having them wiped out in a perceived first strike
-- a matter of
minutes . This reality greatly increases the prospect of an accidental nuclear war based on
a false warning of attack. This is a completely unnecessary risk given that the other two legs
of the nuclear triad -- ballistic missile submarines and nuclear-armed bombers -- are more than
sufficient to deter a nuclear attack, or to retaliate, should the unlikely scenario of a
nuclear attack on the United States occur.
... ... ...
Eliminating ICBMs and reducing the size of the U.S. arsenal will face strong opposition in
Washington, both from strategists who maintain that the nuclear triad should be sacrosanct, and
from special interests that benefit from excess spending on nuclear weapons. The Senate
ICBM Coalition , composed of senators from states with ICBM bases or substantial ICBM
development and maintenance work, has been particularly effective in fending any changes in
ICBM policy, from reducing the size of the force to merely studying alternatives, whether those
alternatives are implemented or not.
Shimizu Randall Personally I don't see why the Trident subs cannot be refurbished and have
a extended life. I think the Minuteman missiles need to be replace. But I don't understand why
the cost is exorbitant. Terry Auckland
OMG.....what a sensible idea..Other nuclear capable countries will fall into line if this is
adopted....peace could thrive and flourish ...sadly it could never happen..too much money at
state...too many careers truncated...and too many lobbyists and thinktank type's and loyalist
senators to cajole and appease..
A pipe dream I think. ..situation normal will continue to annhilation...
"... US propaganda is all over social media. They're inundating the online forums all over Asia. Travel and cultural sites are being flooded with anti-China posts and comments. I think they're creating a narrative to pave the political, economic, and military moves they're about to make. ..."
US propaganda is all over social media. They're inundating the online forums all over Asia.
Travel and cultural sites are being flooded with anti-China posts and comments. I think
they're creating a narrative to pave the political, economic, and military moves they're
about to make.
@follyofwar This culture that was once preserve of the psychos in the administration or
broadly in DC has percolated down to common folks . Fish rots from head . Hubris usually
follows the smell.
Apr 23, 2020 The State of the Police State – #NewWorldNextWeek
Welcome to the 405th episode of New World Next Week -- the video series from Corbett
Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source
intelligence news.
In a country with Gilded Age level of inequality implementing any meaningful social
distancing is next to impossible. Ghettos prevents that and became permanent hotspots.
See discussion of this problem at
IMHO the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the category "younger then 55" in a given
country correlated well with the level of obesity. In other words the virus hits already
deprive and weakened underclass -- the main consumer of junk food.
So what we see in the USA is far from surprising taking into account the level of
neoliberalization of the country and a large permanent uninsured underclass including
contractors and perma-temps.
Existence of nursing homes is another unsolvable problem. Like ships, they also
automatically became hotspots and medical personnel involved became inflected spreading
the infection in the vicinity.
Here is one interesting comment that I found:
The Grim Joker , says: Show Comment April 23, 2020 at 6:52 pm GMT
... ... ...
Yesterday's Action
My bank now has traffic pylons outside the door. They ask the following questions
if you want to enter:
Have you been out of the country? Answer; How am I going to be out of the
country when the airport is closed?
Do you have any symptoms? Answer: If I had I would be at the hospital
Have you associated with anyone who has the symptoms? Answer: If I thought they
did I would ask them to go to the hospital and so would I.
Sir! There is no need to be rude. Answer: Far from it. You are asking questions
parrot fashion. Questions that do not make any sense.
After getting MY money out of THEIR pockets I proceeded to the auto mechanic for
front brakes.
Joker: Am I allowed to come inside ?
70 Year old Mechanic Unmasked: Sure, you are the only customer today. You can
keep me company while I do the work. I cannot afford to lose customers.
The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected
companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents
revenue
AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed
the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational
corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with
disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts
contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy.
Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism
more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like
news to New York's Occupy Wall Streetmovement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the
study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It
combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data
to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or
free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but
they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not
say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for
instance.
The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors
worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they
constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled
with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking
ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on
average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global
operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of
the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the "real" economy –
representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a
"super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held
by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in
the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent
of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included
Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
John Driffillof the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the
analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather
its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's
tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If
one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."
"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has
advised Deutsche Bank.
Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the
analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares
are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually
do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help
make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest
measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we
may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit
over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms
should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.
One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to
be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in
nature," says Sugihara.
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares
in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so
does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly
connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules
governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The
Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical
phase of the self-organising economy."
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich
team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to
sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common
interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Graphic:The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy
A quick study of history shows that when exploiting elites are doing great, they all
faithfully support each other, but when things start to go south, they immediately turn on each
other. The best recent example of this phenomenon is the schism in the US ruling elites who,
since the election of Trump, have immediately turned on each other and are now viciously
fighting like "spiders in a can" (to use a Russian expression). In fact, this is so true that
it can even be used as a very reliable diagnostic tool: when your enemies are all united, then
they are probably confident in their victory, but as soon as they turn on each other, you
*know* that things are looking very bad for your opponents. Likewise, we now see how southern
Europeans are getting really angry with their northern "EU allies" (
Macron seems to be falling in line behind Trump even if he uses a more careful and
diplomatic language). Finally, the way the US CIA has one foreign policy, the Pentagon another
and Foggy Bottom one of its own (even if limited to sanctions and finger-pointing) tells you
pretty much all you need to know to see how deep the systemic crisis of the Empire has
become.
This cannot be overemphasized: "Last, but most certainly not least, the Europeans will find
out (and some already have), that the US literally does not give a damn about not only
regular Europeans, but even about the European ruling classes."
That has been the defining pattern of WASP culture since its formation (or completion with
the rise of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism). But it is more generally a hallmark of Germanic
pagans/warlords. It is about endless rapine with honor given to those who help those above
them secure more spoils. There is zero concern for the working man (whether he tends cattle
to feed the rich or rows the viking boats), and the honor for others in the chain of command
lasts only as long as they profit those above them.
The chief Elites of the Anglo-Zionist Empire are, obviously, all tied directly to the US.
The Brit Elites have the honorary position of being the second most prestigious. Every other
nation's Elites are on rather thin ice. The second that French Elite stop pimping for Uncle
Sam is the second that the Elites of the Anglo-Zionist Empire see them as trash that must be
removed.
The naive backers of the EU still assume that that alliance is what saves them from the US
inflicting direct overlordship. They are damned fools, because the EU acts in concert with
the Anglo-Zionist Empire on all major matters that, ultimately, will make all of Western
Europe a playpen for the Anglo-Zionist Elites.
And for our VDARE crowd – that is the reality of the spread of English language and
of WASP run empire. When it moves from a small local church and community, WASP culture must
be perpetually imperialistic and philoSemitic. It must destroy non-WASP European cultures,
forcing their leaders to bow and assimilate to WASP hegemony.
MMT is brilliant and it's really embarrassing that it took The Deadliest Pandemic™ for
some folks to come round to it. We all collectively print an extra bit of money - and give it
to each other!
There are historic examples documented of successful applications of the concept, look no
further than to the earnest witness of Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of a swamp by his
own hair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Munchausen
Hudson also has another video posted to
his site , "An interview on the Radical Imagination: Imagining How Financial Parasites
and Debt Bondage Are Destroying Us," which is based on his book Killing the Host .
It's a recent video interview that's @50 minutes long prefaced by the Occupy Wall Street
Anthem and introduction.
One aspect of MMT that must be made clear is it advocates the use of public banking or the
Treasury to pump capital in the form of money into the productive economy , not the
parasitic economy the Fed supports--the difference is huge and vital. For MMT to succeed
within the Outlaw US Empire, the Fed must be liquidated. For more, please read the essay I
linked to @35.
Musburger @ 3 : "What do you folks think about MMT?"
Re-inflation of a depressed economy can be achieved by government spending into:
public investment
employment
income transfers
income support
labour
tangible capital
infrastructure.
This is "good" MMT.
"Bad" MMT, or fake MMT, is government spending into WallStreet, handouts to:
the banks
large corporations
speculators
bondholders.
The March 2020 CAREs Act is bad MMT as was the 2008 bailout. This one is same as that one
but "on steroids."
Both bailouts further empower(ed):
rentiers (the landlord class),
monopolies,
the financial creditor class
and cast most of the rest of the US population into reduced circumstances, poverty and/or
debt servitude. They burden the working economy with overhead and debt that cannot be paid.
Bad MMT.
While the MMT school has a healthy diversity within it, USG applications have flipped the
theory on its head, says Hudson. See below for link.
(Remember Cheney's, "We are all Keynesians now"? )
Worse, Bad MMT does more than simply bailout the top 1%. It also increases the parasitic
power of financialization on the real economy. As we have repeatedly seen, now most
dramatically, the financial sector is incapable of planning for anything other than its own
fictional valorization.
Libertarians' freedom from government dogma excoriates against centralized planning and
yet, ironically, the end result of their "government is bad" path forced upon us in USA led
directly to central 'planning' by default -- by parasitic-on-the real-economy privatized
finance sector, a form of fascism not democracy or liberty.
USA'ns public health crisis occurs as states, which are required by law to not run
deficits, face huge costs that will force more austerity on their populations. More callous,
they are forced to compete against each other as they purchase essential equipment and
technology (from for-profit privateers) to deal with the highly infectious novel virus, and
the fed indemnifies the privateer mask makers!!!
What is the root of inequality today? Debt and the monopolization of real estate.
What are solutions?
Wipe out and roll back debt overhead on production and consumption.
This is "good" MMT.
Bad MMT furthers the debt burden on society, concentrates monopolization and cements in
central planning by parasitic private finance sector.
If ever there was a time, it's now. Oil has bottomed out. They can top off the national
reserves on the cheap and profit when their war sends prices up again. Maybe it's why The
Orange Goober has ordered the Navy to "shoot down" any Iranian boats that
harass/approach/rudely gesture at US ships.
Ritter's article worries me. There is now a sales argument for war: "don't worry about oil
prices going sky high, Iran can't use that weapon against us now!".
You over excitable little Iran war-monkeys really should take time out of your busy
war-monkey daily-schedules to learn something about the topography of Iran and it's defensive
and offensive military capabilities.
It would certainly save everyone else from having to listen to you being wrong yet
again.
You're on the right track. There's a huge supply glut as all forms of storage are mostly
filled as proven by the negative WTI pricing. Global demand is still being destroyed. War in
the Persian Gulf region will further destroy demand; and since very little oil's being
shipped from there, the supply glut won't be used up anytime soon--certainly not quickly
enough to see a sharp rebound in oil price. The crucial point is domestic US refineries have
cut back their runs as their margins are even thinner than before, plus demand destruction is
still occurring, thus the domestic storage glut. The wife and I jested last night if we only
had a rail spur we could order up a couple of tank cars full of unleaded at the current very
distressed price and be set for a longtime.
As The
Saker notes in his latest , Trump must make the voting public look everywhere except at
him and Congress, the bellowing at Iran being part of that entire theatre. Yes, a mistake
could have very negative consequences for the USN and all US assets in the region as well as
Occupied Palestine--the overall underlying dynamic hasn't changed since Trump broke the Iran
Nuclear Treaty. Too add further insult to Trump and Pompeo, Iran's doing a
much better job at containing COVID-19 than the Outlaw US Empire :
"The US pandemic death toll is this week heading above 50,000 compared with Iran's figure
of 5,300. Considering the respective population numbers of 330 and 80 million that suggests
Iran is doing a much better job at containing the virus. On a per-capita basis, according to
publicly available data, Iran's mortality rate is less than half that of the US.
"This is while the US has sanctioned Iran to the hilt. American sanctions – arguably
illegal under international law – have hit Iran's ability to import medical supplies to
cope with COVID-19 and other fatal diseases, yet Iran through its own resources is evidently
managing the crisis much better than the US."
As with the Tar Baby, the more wrestling the Outlaw US Empire does the weaker it gets.
They can't invade. That's your own moronic straw-man. And yes, it would further cut supply
and prices would go up. The current bottom is due to overproduction but so long as
civilization cranks along the oil gets used eventually.
NYTmes and Vox both have articles about tha anti-quarantine/pro-virus crowd. Mostly the
protests are being instigated by the usual anti-government oligarchs who are terrorized that
people might actually conclude that government has an important role to play in addressing
problems.
" Among those fighting the orders are FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots, which played
pivotal roles in the beginning of Tea Party protests starting more than a decade ago. Also
involved are a law firm led partly by former Trump White House officials, a network of
state-based conservative policy groups, and an ad hoc coalition of conservative leaders known
as Save Our Country that has advised the White House on strategies for a tiered reopening of
the economy." [found at Gale, not on NYT website!]
In an interview with Theda Skocpol: " For the elite conservative groups sponsoring this
stuff behind the scenes, I think it's driven by a firm belief that if Americans become used
to trusting government and relying on social benefits from government, then that's dangerous
to the victory they think they have almost won in destroying the New Deal and the Great
Society reforms in this country."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/22/21227928/coronavirus-social-distancing-lockdown-trump-tea-party
And, of course, the oligarch-owned media just gobble it up, practically begging for an
apocalypse.
IMO we should just label them the pro-COVID crowd in any discussion of the matter.
The oil market is in disarray, a result of a coronavirus-led collapse in demand, surplus
supply following a price war and a shortage of storage. Yet there have been plenty of people
willing to bet on a rebound in basement-level crude prices, and for many retail investors the
vehicle of choice has been an exchange-traded fund. However, those wagers via the biggest
American ETF -– the U.S. Oil Fund, or USO -– have contributed to market mayhem and
helped push crude prices below zero.
1. What did the fund do?
It grew so huge so quickly that it became a sizable player in the market for West Texas
Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark for crude. Investors piled in during March and April,
convinced that oil prices that had been falling -- pushed down by a
price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia that boosted production just as demand
was slashed by pandemic-driven lockdowns -- would eventually recover once economies reopened.
At different stages, the fund held about a quarter of all May and June contracts for
WTI.
2. What's the problem?
Unlike shares that can be held as long as an investor chooses, oil futures have finite terms
and are agreements to buy or sell a physical product. The May futures contract, for example,
expired on April 21. Any holder who had not sold by then would need to take delivery of the oil
-- 1,000 U.S. barrels, or 42,000 gallons, for each contract.
3. Where does USO come
in?
As a favored investment vehicle for
many bullish speculators , the number of shares in the fund ballooned from 145 million at
the end of February to more than 1.4 billion by mid-April. Its outsized portion of the WTI
market -– on paper -- came at a time when demand for physical oil was cratering and
storage space was becoming harder and more expensive to find.
4. What does that have to
do with the price plunge?
For years, USO was
mandated to invest in the most-active WTI contract and to roll it over to the following
contract. (Rolling over means selling it and, often simultaneously, buying the following
month's contract.) The flood of money into May contracts earlier had pushed oil prices up; as
USO sold its May futures as part of the rollover and bought June and July contracts, prices
fell for May and rose for the following months, opening an unusually wide spread. Only a
handful of traders remained in the May contract on Monday, when prices plunged
well below zero .
5. What's the worry now?
With USO holding a significant level of June contracts, there are concerns that prices will
go negative again and that the whole process might repeat -- or might be worse, if the April
20th debacle scares off more investors. To try to mitigate the prospect, USO, which lost 37% of
its value in the first three weeks of April, has moved to allocate some holdings to contracts
expiring later in the year, since those prices tend to be less volatile. But the fund is adding
to pressure on oil prices in other ways.
There was so much demand for USO that it exhausted the number of shares it was allowed to
issue and, on April 20, asked regulators for permission to register an additional 4 billion,
more than double the existing number. Until the new shares are cleared for issuance, the ETF
will not purchase more futures contracts, according to analysts, potentially adding to pressure
on crude prices. Without new oil contracts, the fund will also become untethered from the
prices it's supposed to track.
7. Anything else?
ETF prices are kept in sync with the value of their holdings, their so-called NAV (net-asset
value), through the creation and redemption of shares. So-called "authorized participants" for
instance sell an ETF when it's rising and buy the underlying security to pocket a quick profit,
keeping the fund's price and NAV in lockstep in the process. However, with the authorized
participants no longer able to create shares, that's disrupted demand for the underlying
contracts.
8. How about other ETFs?
USO is hardly the only exchange-traded fund to be hammered by the swings in oil futures; the
effects were felt around the globe. The Samsung S&P GSCI Crude Oil ER Futures ETF, whose
holdings of the derivatives slumped 26% on Tuesday to $378 million , saw its traded units lose
half their value for a time Wednesday. Closing down 46% at HK $1.79 , the ETF had its biggest
drop and lowest finish since trading began in May 2016. Credit Suisse Group AG told investors in a
leveraged exchange-traded note that tracks the price of oil they probably won't get any money
back after the value of the note dropped below zero.
The Reference Shelf
A
QuickTake about the day when oil prices fell below zero.
A Bloomberg Opinion
column on the risks of oil ETFs.
A Bloomberg News
article on how negative oil prices are leading some traders to rewrite risk models, and
one on how others are betting the lows won't
last.
A
QuickTake on the OPEC price war that flooded markets with
oil just as demand cratered.
Bloomberg Professional subscribers can see oil net ETF positions at {.OILETFNT G Index
<GO>}.
"... To boost sluggish wages, governments should use all the levers of the state -- corporate taxes, wage regulations, and subsidies -- to incentivize or force businesses to pay their workers fairly. ..."
"... A new social contract with citizens should extend beyond the workplace, however, with the ultimate goal being the establishment of a "well-being state" that would provide everyone with the basics necessary to maintain a decent quality of life. This would require increased investment in the staples of the welfare state, which have been weakened under neoliberal governments, such as guaranteed universal access to high-quality health care and education. But the new approach would go beyond those familiar elements by offering universal access to childcare, public transportation, and minimum income protection -- that is, a floor below which no one's income can fall irrespective of whether a person is employed. These expansions of the welfare state should be funded through progressive taxation that would raise the tax burden on those who can most afford it, by increasing the top rates for income and corporate taxes and by taxing wealth, such as capital gains, at the same level as income. ..."
"... Top-down policies, however, will not be sufficient to spur the kind of transformation that must take place in developed countries in order to truly shake off neoliberal stagnation and decline. ..."
Capitalism is in crisis. Until recently, that conviction was confined to the left. Today, however, it has gained traction across
the political spectrum in advanced economies. Economists, policymakers, and ordinary people have increasingly come to see that neoliberalism
-- a creed built on faith in free markets, deregulation, and small government, and that has dominated societies for the last 40 years
-- has reached its limit.
This crisis has been long in the making but was brought into sharp focus in the aftermath of the global financial meltdown of
2007–8 and the global recession that followed it. In the developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
economic growth over the last decade ceased to benefit most people. At the end of 2017, nominal wage growth among OECD members was
only
half what it was a decade earlier . More than one in three people in the OECD countries are estimated to be economically vulnerable,
meaning they lack the means to maintain a living standard at or above the poverty level for at least three months. Meanwhile, in
those countries, income inequality is higher than at any time in the past half century: the richest ten percent hold almost half
of total wealth, and the bottom 40 percent hold just three percent.
Defenders of neoliberalism frequently point out that although decades of wage stagnation and wealth concentration have led to
ballooning inequality in developed countries, the same time period has seen a dramatic increase in prosperity on a global scale.
Over a billion people, they argue, have been lifted out of extreme poverty owing to technological advances, investments, and prosperity
that were made possible by the spread of free markets. However, this argument fails to account for the critical role that governments
have played in that change through the provision of education, health care, and employment. Such state interventions have arguably
been as decisive as the invisible hand of the market in lifting living standards. This defense also ignores the fact that despite
many gains in prosperity, massive wealth concentration and staggering inequality continue to shape the global economy:
less than one percent
of the world's population owns 46 percent of the world's wealth, and the poorest 70 percent own less than three percent.
Inequality has always been a feature of capitalist societies, and people have been willing to tolerate it as long as they felt
that their quality of life was improving, their opportunities were expanding, and their children could expect to do even better than
them -- that is, as long as all the proverbial boats were rising. When that stopped happening in recent decades, it fed a growing
perception that the system is unfair and is not working in the interest of the majority of people. Pent-up frustration has led to
a clamor for change -- including a new receptivity to socialist ideals that have long been sidelined or even considered taboo. In
the United Kingdom, for example, 53 percent of people recently polled said they believed that the economy has become
more unfair
over the last decade. Eighty-three percent said they felt that the economy worked well for the wealthy, but only ten percent said
that it worked for people born into poor families. And ideas such as restoring public ownership of the essential utilities that were
privatized in recent decades, such as railways, electrical services, and water companies, are
gaining traction , with over 75 percent of people polled supporting such a step. Meanwhile, in the United States, a 2018 Gallup
poll found that among
Americans aged 18 to 29, socialism had a higher approval rating (51 percent) than capitalism (45 percent). "This represents a 12-point
decline in young adults' positive views of capitalism in just the past two years," Gallup noted, "and a marked shift since 2010,
when 68 percent viewed it positively."
Neoliberalism is not just failing people: it's failing the earth.
A mere revival of the social democratic agenda of the postwar era, however, would not be sufficient. For one thing, that period's
emphasis on central authority and state ownership runs counter to the widespread demand in developed economies for more local and
collective control of resources. Perhaps more important, however, is the need to confront a challenge that postwar social democratic
models did not have to take into account: the threat posed by climate change and catastrophic environmental degradation. After all,
neoliberalism is not just failing people: it's failing the earth. Owing in no small part to the massive levels of consumption and
fossil fuel use required by an economic model that prioritizes growth above all else, climate change now imperils the future of human
existence. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
concluded that the world has barely over a decade to halve carbon emissions if humanity is to have any chance of limiting the
increase in average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels -- a point past which the damage to human
and natural systems would be devastating and largely irreversible.
Just like the economic breakdown that has chipped away at people's quality of life, environmental decline is rooted in the crisis
of capitalism. And both challenges can be addressed by embracing an alternative economic model, one that responds to a hunger for
genuine reform by adapting socialist ideals to the contemporary era. A new economic model must prioritize a thriving and healthy
natural environment. It must deliver improvements in well-being and guarantee all citizens a decent quality of life. It must be built
by businesses that plan for the long term, seek to serve a social purpose beyond just increasing profits and shareholder value, and
commit to giving their workers a voice. The new model would empower people and give them a larger stake in the economy by establishing
common ownership of public goods and essential infrastructure and by encouraging the cooperative and joint ownership of private,
locally administered enterprises. This calls for an active but decentralized state that would devolve power to the level of local
communities and enable people to act collectively to improve their lives.
A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT
The United Kingdom provides an interesting case study of how the crisis of capitalism is playing out. There, as in the United
States, center-right and center-left governments alike have spent decades following a neoliberal recipe of tax cuts, reduced social
welfare benefits, and deregulation -- far more enthusiastically than most other European countries, which have stronger social democratic
traditions and institutions. As a result, the neoliberal breakdown has been particularly painful in the United Kingdom, where people
are on average poorer today than they were in 2008, adjusting for inflation. British household debt is
higher than it was before the financial crisis,
as more people borrow just to get by, and a staggering 14.3 million people
live in poverty .
For many British people, the 2016 referendum on whether to leave the European Union served as an outlet for their discontent and
anger at a failing system. The vote in favor of Brexit was a clear message from communities under pressure that the status quo needed
to change. More than three years on, this disquiet continues to grow, opening up space for more radical changes in domestic policy
-- as witnessed by the Labour Party's recent embrace of ideas that would once have been considered too risky, such as the renationalization
of utilities and the establishment of a state-run pharmaceutical company.
But even in the United Kingdom, political platforms have lagged behind public demands for significant change. What's needed in
developed economies across the world is not tinkering around the edges but a full-scale reformation of the relationship among the
state, the economy, and local communities. The first step would be a global Green New Deal: a massive mobilization of resources to
decarbonize and at the same time create millions of jobs and lift living standards. The goal should be net-zero carbon emissions
within ten to 15 years, which will require governments to make significant investments in green infrastructure, such as onshore and
offshore wind farms and smart energy grids; in new technologies such as carbon capture and storage; and in training workers to develop
the skills they will need for the jobs a green economy will create, such as installing insulation, maintaining renewable energy systems,
and reconditioning and refurbishing used goods.
Policymakers will also need to create incentives for companies to reduce their carbon use by replacing subsidies for fossil fuels
with tax breaks for the use of renewables. New regulations, such as zero-carbon building standards or quotas for the use of fossil
fuel energy, would help bend markets that have been slow to act in response to the climate crisis. And central banks will need to
encourage financial markets to divest from fossil fuels through tougher credit guidance policies, including capping the amount of
credit that can be used to support investment in carbon-intensive activities and setting quotas for the amount of finance that should
flow to low-carbon investment.
Anger at a failing system has opened up space for radical changes in domestic policy.
To boost sluggish wages, governments should use all the levers of the state -- corporate taxes, wage regulations, and subsidies
-- to incentivize or force businesses to pay their workers fairly. A just share of the rewards from their labor should come
not only in the form of higher wages but also in reductions in working time, with a move to an average four-day workweek, which governments
can achieve by increasing statutory holidays. At the same time, the power of workers to protect their interests should be strengthened
by requiring all companies to automatically recognize labor unions and by giving workers stronger legal rights to organize, bargain
collectively, and strike. Workers must also gain greater ownership of the organizations that employ them. Governments ought to mandate
employee ownership funds, which transfer a share of a firm's profits, in the form of equity, into a trust that is owned by workers
collectively. Through the trust, workers would receive shares in the company, just like any shareholder. Those shares would come
with voting rights, enabling employees to become the dominant shareholders in every enterprise over time, with the power to shape
the direction of the businesses where they work. In the United Kingdom, a growing number of companies, including the department store
chain John Lewis, the home-entertainment retailer Richer Sounds, and the consulting firm Mott MacDonald, are already reaping the
benefits of putting ownership in the hands of workers :
higher productivity, better worker retention and engagement, and stronger profits.
A new social contract with citizens should extend beyond the workplace, however, with the ultimate goal being the establishment
of a "well-being state" that would provide everyone with the basics necessary to maintain a decent quality of life. This would require
increased investment in the staples of the welfare state, which have been weakened under neoliberal governments, such as guaranteed
universal access to high-quality health care and education. But the new approach would go beyond those familiar elements by offering
universal access to childcare, public transportation, and minimum income protection -- that is, a floor below which no one's income
can fall irrespective of whether a person is employed. These expansions of the welfare state should be funded through progressive
taxation that would raise the tax burden on those who can most afford it, by increasing the top rates for income and corporate taxes
and by taxing wealth, such as capital gains, at the same level as income.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Top-down policies, however, will not be sufficient to spur the kind of transformation that must take place in developed countries
in order to truly shake off neoliberal stagnation and decline. Those societies also must become more democratic, with power
and resources distributed to regional and local governments, closer to the people in the communities they serve. This is one critical
way in which such a new economic agenda would differ from more traditional socialism, which tends to favor centralized authority
and state ownership. For example, rather than relying on federal or provincial governments for everyday essentials, such as energy,
affordable housing, and public transportation, municipalities should establish corporations owned by and accountable to residents
to provide these services.
The Basque Country, in Spain, offers one example of what a more democratic economy might look like. There, the
Mondragon Corporation
, set up in 1956 by graduates of a technical college to provide employment through worker cooperatives, has grown to become one of
the ten largest business groups and the fourth-largest employer in Spain, with hundreds of different companies and subsidiaries and
over 75,000 workers. The cooperatives operate in
a variety of sectors
, including banking, consumer goods, and engineering. They are set up not merely to turn a profit but also to achieve a specific
social or environmental goal. They are owned and run by the people who work for them rather than by external investors, and their
governance structures ensure that members have a stake in the organizations and share in the wealth they create.
Community land trusts in the United Kingdom provide another example. Granby Four Streets, in Liverpool, and the London Community
Land Trust, in the Mile End district,
provide affordable housing to their local communities by buying land from the private sector and taking it into community ownership.
The trust builds affordable homes that it sells or rents to local residents at discounted rates. An asset lock prevents the land
from being resold, which guarantees that the homes will remain affordable.
Bottom-up experiments such as these will be critical to the success of a new economic model. For those experiments to flourish,
influential political figures who identify with the socialist tradition -- people such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders
in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom -- should use their platforms to draw attention to local-level activists
and organizations that are working to create a more democratic economy. Meanwhile, some degree of patience will be in order: it will
take time for such new thinking to produce the large-scale changes necessary. But such patience must also have a limit: when it comes
to fixing the damage that neoliberalism has done, time is running out.
AUTHOR BIO
MIATTA FAHNBULLEH is Chief Executive of the New Economics Foundation. This essay expands on an article that appeared in
The New Economics Zine , which is published by the foundation.
It goes without saying that the consequences to workers are damaging to catastrophic.
Normally, being unemployed for more than six months is a near-insurmountable barrier to getting
hired again. Perhaps coronavirus will create a better new normal on this front, of companies
taking a more understanding view of crisis-induced resume gaps.
By Cheryl Carleton,
Assistant Professor of Economics, Villanova University. Originally published at The
Conversation
The labor market is changing rapidly with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
When
the economy starts to open up again, employers will need to consider rehiring or replacing
workers, or hiring workers with a different mix of skills. The cost of replacing an employee is
high for employers, and being out of work is harmful for workers, who may be replaced with
artificial intelligence or contractors and risk losing their skills.
There is no denying that the U.S. was experiencing a tight
labor market and a low rate of unemployment before the coronavirus pandemic took hold. For
some fields, particularly health care and services deemed essential by local governments, the
labor market continues to be tight.
A sudden massive loss of demand for their goods and services is forcing companies to make
quick decisions, and some employers may underestimate the cost to replace good employees.
Knowing these costs may encourage them to keep more of their workers on the payroll.
Where Are the Costs?
There are costs involved in losing a worker and replacing them, such as completing paperwork
when they leave, advertising the open position, reviewing resumes, interviewing candidates and
training the new worker.
Once a new worker is hired, others must also spend time training them, and it will take some
time for the new worker to achieve the same level of productivity as the worker who left.
Another cost is the loss in social capital . Social capital is
the relationships between individuals at work that take time to build and add to the
productivity of the firm.
The Center for American Progress drilled in deeper. They found the costs of replacing
workers who earn less than US$30,000 per year to be 16% of annual salary, or $3,200 for an
individual earning $20,000 per year.
For those earning $30,000 to $50,000 per year, it is estimated to cost about 20% of annual
salary, or $8,000 for an individual earning $40,000. For highly educated executive positions,
replacement costs are estimated to be 213% of annual salary – $213,000 for a CEO earning
$100,000 per year.
The much
higher cost for replacing CEOs is partly due to the fact that they require higher levels of
education, greater training, and firms may lose clients and institutional knowledge with such
turnovers.
Employee Alternatives
This high cost of losing and replacing workers has important implications for organizations,
consumers and workers, especially now with
an estimated 15 million unemployed .
For those workers where the costs to replace them are high, firms will try to accommodate
them. Strategies may include maintaining pay, increasing benefits and retraining. These actions
are also costly, so firms will
weigh them against the cost of simply
hiring new workers .
This means businesses face high costs to replace workers in the future, and high costs to
retain current workers, leading to higher costs for consumers who buy the firms' goods and
services.
While the above consequences might sound great for workers that organizations choose to
keep, these are not the only ways in which firms can respond.
The high cost of replacing workers, along with the increased uncertainty about the economy
may cause businesses to use
more automation and robots . Though such switches may entail a significant upfront cost,
once they are made the firms then have more control over their production processes.
Another alternative for firms is to hire fewer permanent employees and turn instead
to contract workers . With
contract workers, employers are not responsible for benefits, and they can more simply increase
or decrease the number of workers as needed.
While this may increase employment for some workers, it will decrease it for others and it
has serious implications for the availability of health and pension benefits as well as
unemployment benefits, as the current crisis has revealed.
Businesses might also consider limiting the scope of what some workers do to limit the cost
of replacing them. If the scope of a worker's job is limited, then fewer areas will be impacted
by the individual leaving, and the costs to train a replacement will be lower. For workers,
however, it means fewer opportunities to gain experience.
For example, instead of training workers on several or all parts of the production process,
the business may limit them to one specific aspect. It will then be less costly for the firm to
replace them and the worker will have less experience to add to their resume. This also means
less bargaining power for employees.
Some Win, But Others Lose
The high cost of losing and then hiring new workers along with increased restrictions on
hiring nonresidents might mean higher wages and increased benefits for some workers.
However, the high degree of uncertainty in the current labor market, along with the
potential increase in contract
workers and
automation means that some workers will not realize these potential gains, and all of us as
consumers will most likely end up paying higher prices for the goods and services we buy.
The oil market is in disarray, a result of a coronavirus-led collapse in demand, surplus
supply following a price war and a shortage of storage. Yet there have been plenty of people
willing to bet on a rebound in basement-level crude prices, and for many retail investors the
vehicle of choice has been an exchange-traded fund. However, those wagers via the biggest
American ETF -– the U.S. Oil Fund, or USO -– have contributed to market mayhem and
helped push crude prices below zero.
1. What did the fund do?
It grew so huge so quickly that it became a sizable player in the market for West Texas
Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark for crude. Investors piled in during March and April,
convinced that oil prices that had been falling -- pushed down by a
price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia that boosted production just as demand
was slashed by pandemic-driven lockdowns -- would eventually recover once economies reopened.
At different stages, the fund held about a quarter of all May and June contracts for
WTI.
2. What's the problem?
Unlike shares that can be held as long as an investor chooses, oil futures have finite terms
and are agreements to buy or sell a physical product. The May futures contract, for example,
expired on April 21. Any holder who had not sold by then would need to take delivery of the oil
-- 1,000 U.S. barrels, or 42,000 gallons, for each contract.
3. Where does USO come
in?
As a favored investment vehicle for
many bullish speculators , the number of shares in the fund ballooned from 145 million at
the end of February to more than 1.4 billion by mid-April. Its outsized portion of the WTI
market -– on paper -- came at a time when demand for physical oil was cratering and
storage space was becoming harder and more expensive to find.
4. What does that have to
do with the price plunge?
For years, USO was
mandated to invest in the most-active WTI contract and to roll it over to the following
contract. (Rolling over means selling it and, often simultaneously, buying the following
month's contract.) The flood of money into May contracts earlier had pushed oil prices up; as
USO sold its May futures as part of the rollover and bought June and July contracts, prices
fell for May and rose for the following months, opening an unusually wide spread. Only a
handful of traders remained in the May contract on Monday, when prices plunged
well below zero .
5. What's the worry now?
With USO holding a significant level of June contracts, there are concerns that prices will
go negative again and that the whole process might repeat -- or might be worse, if the April
20th debacle scares off more investors. To try to mitigate the prospect, USO, which lost 37% of
its value in the first three weeks of April, has moved to allocate some holdings to contracts
expiring later in the year, since those prices tend to be less volatile. But the fund is adding
to pressure on oil prices in other ways.
There was so much demand for USO that it exhausted the number of shares it was allowed to
issue and, on April 20, asked regulators for permission to register an additional 4 billion,
more than double the existing number. Until the new shares are cleared for issuance, the ETF
will not purchase more futures contracts, according to analysts, potentially adding to pressure
on crude prices. Without new oil contracts, the fund will also become untethered from the
prices it's supposed to track.
7. Anything else?
ETF prices are kept in sync with the value of their holdings, their so-called NAV (net-asset
value), through the creation and redemption of shares. So-called "authorized participants" for
instance sell an ETF when it's rising and buy the underlying security to pocket a quick profit,
keeping the fund's price and NAV in lockstep in the process. However, with the authorized
participants no longer able to create shares, that's disrupted demand for the underlying
contracts.
8. How about other ETFs?
USO is hardly the only exchange-traded fund to be hammered by the swings in oil futures; the
effects were felt around the globe. The Samsung S&P GSCI Crude Oil ER Futures ETF, whose
holdings of the derivatives slumped 26% on Tuesday to $378 million , saw its traded units lose
half their value for a time Wednesday. Closing down 46% at HK $1.79 , the ETF had its biggest
drop and lowest finish since trading began in May 2016. Credit Suisse Group AG told investors in a
leveraged exchange-traded note that tracks the price of oil they probably won't get any money
back after the value of the note dropped below zero.
The Reference Shelf
A
QuickTake about the day when oil prices fell below zero.
A Bloomberg Opinion
column on the risks of oil ETFs.
A Bloomberg News
article on how negative oil prices are leading some traders to rewrite risk models, and
one on how others are betting the lows won't
last.
A
QuickTake on the OPEC price war that flooded markets with
oil just as demand cratered.
Bloomberg Professional subscribers can see oil net ETF positions at {.OILETFNT G Index
<GO>}.
Energy Minister Alexander Novak said that the fall in prices for WTI oil futures is due to
the actions of speculators.
"Yesterday's collapse of oil quotes of the us WTI brand occurred due to the sale of futures
for delivery in may at the end of trading on paper (after April 20, the may futures are not
traded on the exchange), the lack of demand for additional oil supplies in may and the
likelihood of overstocking storage facilities. This caused a speculative fall of the financial
instrument to negative values, " he said, according to TASS.
The head of the energy Ministry urged "not to dramatize the situation". According to him, it
is important to understand that this is "a paper market, not a trade in physical oil," RIA
Novosti reports.
The Minister also noted that the pressure on the oil market will continue until the start of
the OPEC+ agreement in may, after which the reduction of oil production by countries outside
the agreement and the easing of restrictions will begin.
"The oil market is currently in an extremely volatile state due to a sharp drop in demand
associated with measures to counter the spread of coronavirus, with the gradual overstocking of
storage facilities and the uncertainty of the timing of the global economic recovery. Pressure
on the market will continue until the OPEC + agreement begins in may, reducing production by
countries outside the agreement and easing restrictive measures, " he said.
Novak assured that OPEC+ countries are closely monitoring the situation in the oil market
and have all the capabilities to respond.
"But don't dramatize the situation. It is important to understand that this is a paper
market, that is, trading in derivative financial instruments, and not physical oil. Quotes for
June Brent and WTI futures are significantly higher, although they are also subject to
volatility due to the General negative mood in the market," Novak added.
The price of WTI oil for delivery in may ended Monday's main trading on the NYMEX on
negative values, falling to minus 37.63 dollars. The decrease was 300%. Before that, the quotes
reached minus 40.32 dollars per barrel. Later, the price of may WTI futures returned to
positive values, rising by 160% to $ 2.21 per barrel.
The price of a barrel of oil on the morning of April 21 was trading at $ 21.41.
(Bloomberg) -- Legendary short-seller Jim Chanos said he's troubled that private equity is
seeking financial aid from the federal government due to the economic impact of the coronavirus
epidemic.
"'I'm a little bemused, puzzled and somewhat outraged, I guess, that private equity would be
pushing to the front of the line to try to get taxpayer assistance," he said in an interview
Thursday on Bloomberg Television.
The Federal Reserve's move Thursday to throw a lifeline to small and mid-sized businesses
and fund the purchases of some types of high-yield bonds has has been seen by some market
participants as helping the private equity firms who owns some of these companies. Those firms
earlier this week were dealt a setback in their attempt to gain access to billions of dollars
of loans that the U.S. government is doling out to help businesses hit hard by the pandemic,
Bloomberg reported.
Chanos said a look at the year-end letters for the four biggest publicly-traded private
equity firms showed they had more than $300 billion in dry powder to put to use.
"I think private equity is possibly at a crossroads similar to where hedge funds were post
the global financial crisis," said Chanos, who runs hedge fund Kynikos Associates. "People are
going to start to judge the high fees and the illiquidity and think: 'Am I really getting the
return commensurate for the risk?"
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com
"... To be sure, Trump has good reason to hate the intelligence and national security community, which utterly rejected his candidacy and plotted to destroy both his campaign and, even after he was elected, his presidency ..."
"... While it is not unusual for presidents to surround themselves with devoted yes-men, as Trump does with his spectacularly unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner, his administration is nevertheless unusual in its tendency to apply an absolute loyalty litmus test to nearly everyone surrounding the president ..."
"... Most damaging to consumer interests, the rot has also affected the so-called regulatory agencies that are supposed to monitor the potentially illegal activities of corporations and industries to protect the public. As University of Chicago economist George Stigler several times predicted, under both Obama and Trump advocates of ostensibly "regulated" corporations have taken over every U.S. federal regulatory agency . The captured U.S. government regulators now represent the interests of the corporations, not the public. This is more like government by a criminal oligarchy rather than of, by and for The People. ..."
The 24/7 intensified media coverage of the coronavirus story has meant that other news has
either been ignored or relegated to the back pages, never to be seen again. The Middle East has
been on a boil but coverage of the Trump administration's latest
moves against Iran has been so insignificant as to be invisible. Meanwhile closer to home,
the declaration by the ubiquitous Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that current president of
Venezuela Nicolas Maduro is a drug trafficker did generate somewhat of a ripple, as did
dispatch of warships to the Caribbean to intercept the alleged drugs, but that story also
died.
Of more interest perhaps is the tale of the continued purge of government officials,
referred to as "draining the swamp," by President Donald Trump as it could conceivably have
long-term impact on how policy is shaped in Washington. Prior to the virus partial lockdown,
some of the impending shakeup within the
intelligence community (IC) and Pentagon were commented on in the media, but developments
since that time have been less reported, even when several inspectors-general were removed.
To be sure, Trump has good reason to hate the intelligence and national security community,
which utterly rejected his candidacy and plotted to destroy both his campaign and, even after
he was elected, his presidency. Whether one argues that what took place was due to a "Deep
state" or Establishment conspiracy or rather just based on personal ambition by key players,
the reality was that a number of top officials seem to have forgotten the oaths they swore to
the constitution when it came to Donald Trump.
Be that as it may, beyond the musical chairs that have characterized the senior level
appointments in the first three years of the Trump administration, there has been a concerted
effort to remove "disloyal" members of the intelligence community, with disloyal generally
being the label applied to holdovers from the Bush and Obama administrations. The February
appointment of U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard "Ric" Grenell as interim Director of National
Intelligence (DNI), a position that he will hold simultaneously with his ambassadorship, has
been criticized from all sides due to his inexperience, history of bad judgement and
partisanship. The White House is now claiming
that he will be replaced by Texas Congressman John Ratcliffe after the interim appointment
is completed.
Criticism of Grenell for his clearly evident deficiencies misses the point, however, as he
is not in place to do anything constructive. He has already initiated a purge of federal
employees in the White House and national security apparatus considered to be insufficiently
loyal, an effort which has been supported by National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien and
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Many career officers have been sent back to their home agencies
while the new appointees are being drawn from the pool of neoconservatives that proliferated in
the George W. Bush administration. Admittedly some prominent neocons like Bill Kristol have
disqualified themselves for service with the new regime due to their vitriolic criticism of
Trump the candidate, but many others have managed to remain politically viable by keeping their
mouths shut during the 2016 campaign. To no one's surprise, many of the new employees being
brought in are being carefully vetted to make sure that they are passionate supporters of
Israel.
While it is not unusual for presidents to surround themselves with devoted yes-men, as Trump
does with his spectacularly unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner, his administration is
nevertheless unusual in its tendency to apply an absolute loyalty litmus test to nearly
everyone surrounding the president, even several layers down into the administration where
employees are frequently apolitical. As the Trump White House has not been renowned for its
adroit policies and forward thinking, the loss of expertise will be hardly noticeable, but
there will certainly be a reduction in challenges to group think while replacing officials in
the law enforcement and inspector general communities will mean that there will be no one in a
high enough position to impede or check presidential misbehavior. Instead, high officials will
be principally tasked with coming up with rationalizations to excuse what the White House
does.
... ... ...
Subsequent to the defenestration of Atkinson, Trump went after another inspector general
Glenn Fine, who was principal deputy IG at the Pentagon and had been charged with heading the
panel of inspectors that would have oversight responsibility to certify the proper
implementation of the $2.2 trillion dollar coronavirus relief package. As has been noted in the
media, there was particular concern regarding the lack of transparency regarding the $500
billion Exchange Stabilizing Fund (ESF) that had been set aside to make loans to corporations
and other large companies while the really urgently needed Small Business Loan allocation has
been failing to work at all except for Israeli
companies that have lined up for the loans. The risk that the ESF would become a slush fund
for companies favored by the White House was real, and several investigative reports observed
that Trump business interests might also directly benefit from the way it was drafted.
Four days after the firing of Atkinson, Fine also was let go to be replaced by the EPA
inspector general Sean O'Donnell, who is considered a Trump loyalist. On the previous day the
tweeter-in-chief came down on yet another IG, the woman responsible for Health and Human
Services Christi Grimm, who had issued a report stating that the her department had found "severe"
shortages of virus testing material at hospitals and "widespread" shortages of personal
protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. Trump quipped to reporters "Where did he
come from, the inspector general. What's his name?"
On the following day, Trump unleashed the tweet machine, asking "Why didn't the I.G., who
spent 8 years with the Obama Administration (Did she Report on the failed H1N1 Swine Flu
debacle where 17,000 people died?), want to talk to the Admirals, Generals, V.P. & others
in charge, before doing her report. Another Fake Dossier!"
A comment about foxes taking over the hen house would not be amiss and one might also note
that the swamp is far from drained. A concerted effort is clearly underway to purge anyone from
the upper echelons of the U.S. government who in any way contradicts what is coming out of the
White House. Inspectors general who are tasked with looking into malfeasance are receiving the
message that if they want to stay employed, they have to toe the presidential line, even as it
seemingly whimsically changes day by day. And then there is the irony of the heads at major
agencies like Environmental Protection now being committed to not enforcing existing
environmental regulations at all.
Most damaging to consumer interests, the rot has also affected the so-called regulatory
agencies that are supposed to monitor the potentially illegal activities of corporations and
industries to protect the public. As University of Chicago economist George Stigler several
times predicted, under both Obama and Trump advocates of ostensibly "regulated" corporations
have taken over every U.S. federal regulatory agency . The captured U.S. government
regulators now represent the interests of the corporations, not the public. This is more like
government by a criminal oligarchy rather than of, by and for The People.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that
seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is [email protected] .
I yield to no one in my contempt for the fraud-failure of God Emperor Bush III but the author
has to be aware that talk of "impeachable" offenses is meaningless in American politics.
There has never been and never will be an impeachment effort that's not primarily
political rather than process-motivated. It's an up-or-down vote based on a partisan
head-counting and opportunism and public dissatisfaction. All the Article-this-and-that is
Magic Paper Talmudry.
Trump is a somewhat rogueish, somewhat rival Don and faction-head in the same criminal
(((Commission))) that's been running America for well over a century. He's Jon Gotti to their
Carlo Gambino, and his gauche nouveaux-elite style offends the sensibilities of the more
snobbish Davoise, but he's just angling for a seat at the table and a cut of the spoils, not
a return of power to the people.
Impeachment would serve no purpose but what we've seen so far with Russiagate, etc..
– a sideshow distraction from the real backroom, long-knife action going down, ala the
"settling scores" montage in Godfather III.
"To be sure, Trump has good reason to hate the intelligence and national security community,
which utterly rejected his candidacy and plotted to destroy both his campaign and, even after
he was elected, his presidency." -- Yes to this. This is OBVIOUS to all but the dullest rubes
or those who are in on it and trying to escape what they tried to do in attempting to over
throw the US Government. The rest?
Once you have this stated– that an actual Coup which was certainly plotted/sprung by
the last occupant of the Presidency along with Clinton, Brennan, Comey, and many other NWO
Globalists throughout the Government (FBI, CIA, DOJ ) and outside of it (the Globalist NWO
MEDIA) the rest is drivel -- they tried to take him out–JFK they used a bullet, here
not yet– so to say he shouldn't put in people he absolutely trusts at this time into
any position he can? Are you kidding or what? You can't be serious– I've actually had
someone try and kill me they were quite serious about it– my reaction after was not
anything like what I see you suggesting or mirrored in your "analysis". This is how the CIA
"counsels" in response to a murderous Coup -- an attempt to overthrow the duly elected
Government?
How do you overreact to a group of the most powerful people in the World getting together
to try to murder you? That's your argument basically– he's over reacting to that? He
shouldn't have "Loyalists". He needs to work with these other people -- the ones who want to
murder him -- keep some of those "non-Loyalists" on board who time after time have plotted
against him in every way possible during the last nearly 4 years?
You seem to be one strange dude from my life's vantage point any way, what a perspective
.Maybe you would actually deal with people of this magnitude trying to destroy you in the way
you state but no sane/fairly intelligent person would -- I can't get past you have that
sentence in there and then follow it with all the rest -- you seem to live in some alternate
reality where when someone tries to murder you the right reaction is to blow it off and work
with them– give them another few shots at you– say what? You learned this from
your years at the CIA– this is how they train/advise things like this should be dealt
with up at Langley? Or is it just wishful thinking on your part that they get another shot at
him?
While it is not unusual for presidents to surround themselves with devoted yes-men, as
Trump does with his spectacularly unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner, his administration
is nevertheless unusual in its tendency to apply an absolute loyalty litmus test to nearly
everyone surrounding the president
True enough. Trump has also injected into Washington his own nest of swamp creatures and
Wall St. bigwigs. However it is also true that Trump has been under unrelenting attack since
the day he announced his candidacy. This is not fair. With the possible exception of Nixon,
I've never seen a more ruthless campaign by political insiders to demean a public figure.
But to whom must Trump show ceaseless and attentive loyalty to?–no matter what?
I can't get too worked up about the firing of the prison guards; I rather enjoy the
charade.
The real problem is that: 'It's the system, stupid!' and no amount of tinkering or puting
the 'right' people in these positions will ever do anything more than just changing the
illusion that something is being done.
It reminds me a little of that late Soviet Union film "Burned by the Sun" about Stalin's
purges of the criminals that had ridden his coat tails to power. Try as the movie makers did,
I could not and would not feel an ounce of sorrow for those (these) scumbags who had wielded
immoral, arbitrary, and disproportionate power over their subjects.
The government has been against the people for my entire lifetime (I'm an old man now). One
of the only glimmers of light in that time, JFK was snuffed out. After all, who did he think
he was, trying to stop the elites from having their war in Vietnam?
He (Trump) should have purged all of the Obama appointees on day one.
The Vindman twins are a perfect example of the Deep State.
While I can understand your loathing of Trump's middle East policies, I do also, what he has
blatantley done vis a vis the Zionist Entity is very little different than what slick Obama
did under the table, outside of the Iran deal.
And to tell you the truth, as much as I loathe Israel the Iran deal was definitely flawed and
should have been more advantageous to America and the West. Iran should have seen the
advantages of totally relinquishing nuclear weapons even with mad Zionists in their
neighborhood. They could have still kept their ballistic missiles, sans nuclear tips.
@Getaclue
The idea that Trump is fighting the Deep State is ludacris this is a charade if the Deep
State didn't want Trump to be President he wouldn't be. Trump is a Deep State minion. No
matter the existential threat to the US the 1% get richer and the 99% get poorer.
He (Trump) should have purged all of the Obama appointees on day one.
That supposes that Trump is not a Deep Stater as was Obama this is a poor supposition.
Iran should have seen the advantages of totally relinquishing nuclear weapons even with
mad Zionists in their neighborhood. They could have still kept their ballistic missiles,
sans nuclear tips.
Ballistic missiles, sans nuclear tips are useless. Did anybody care when North Korea had
ballistic missiles before they had something worthwhile to put on the tip? Hell no.
Trump has had two open coup attempts in three years, and a constant barrage of leaks etc. His
purges are clearly at least three years too late.
Also, to an outsider, it's strange how some right-wing American journalists write in a way
which indicates that they have faith in the due process, checks-and-balances etc afforded by
the American system. I don't understand how any American right-winger could maintain their
faith in the U.S. political system, it seems corrupt approaching the point that it is
beyond-repair.
Trump's MAGA For The People efforts, must take steps to undo the damage done by the
prior criminal admistration.
Here is an detailed explanation of how Barack Hussein intentionally undermined the rule of
law:(1)
Aside from the date the important part of the first page is the motive for sending it.
The DOJ is telling the court in July 2018: based on what they know the FISA application
still contains "sufficient predication for the Court to have found probable cause" to
approve the application. The DOJ is defending the Carter Page FISA application as still
valid.
However, it is within the justification of the application that alarm bells are found.
On page six the letter identifies the primary participants behind the FISA
redactions:
DOJ needed to protect evidence Mueller had already extracted from the fraudulent FISA
authority. That's the motive.
In July 2018 if the DOJ-NSD had admitted the FISA application and all renewals were
fatally flawed Robert Mueller would have needed to withdraw any evidence gathered as a
result of its exploitation. The DOJ in 2018 was protecting Mueller's poisoned fruit.
If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there's a strong possibility some, perhaps
much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated and cases were pending. The
solution: mislead the court and claim the predication was still valid.
I am not sure why Giraldi is defending Barack Hussein and Hillary Clinton's behaviour
& staff choices. All rational human beings see the damage that Hillary created at the
State Department.
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Nearly 30,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus during the last two weeks, and by
some estimates this is a substantial under-count, while the death-toll continues to rapidly
mount. Meanwhile, measures to control the spread of this deadly infection have already cost 22
million Americans their jobs, an unprecedented economic collapse that has pushed our
unemployment rates to Great Depression levels. Our country is facing a crisis as grave as
almost any in our national history.
For many weeks President Trump and his political allies had regularly dismissed or minimized
this terrible health threat, and suddenly now faced with such a manifest disaster, they have
naturally begun seeking other culprits to blame.
The obvious choice is China, where the global epidemic first began in late 2019. Over the
last week or two our media has been increasingly filled with accusations that the dishonesty
and incompetence of the Chinese government played a major role in producing our own health
catastrophe.
Even more serious charges are also being raised, with senior government officials informing
the media that they suspect that the Covid-19 virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory in
Wuhan and then carelessly released upon a vulnerable world. Such "conspiracy theories" were
once confined to the extreme political fringe of the Internet, but they are now found in the
respectable pages of my morning New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Whether plausible or not, such accusations carry the gravest international implications, and
there are growing demands that China financially compensate our country for its trillions of
dollars in economic losses. A new global Cold War along both political and economic lines may
soon be at hand.
I have no personal expertise in biowarfare technology, nor access to the secret American
intelligence reports that seem to have been taken seriously by our most elite national
newspapers. But I do think that a careful exploration of previous Sino-American clashes over
the last couple of decades may provide some useful insight into the relative credibility of
those two governments as well as that of our own media.
During the late 1990s, America seemed to reach the peak of its global power and prosperity,
basking in the aftermath of its historic victory in the long Cold War, while ordinary Americans
greatly benefited from the record-long economic expansion of that decade. A huge Tech Boom was
at its height, and Islamic terrorism seemed a vague and distant thing, almost entirely confined
to Hollywood movies. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possibility of large scale war
seemed to have dissipated so political leaders boasted of the "peace dividend" that citizens
were starting to enjoy as our huge military forces, built up over nearly a half-century, were
downsized amid sweeping cuts in the bloated defense budget. America was finally returning to a
regular peacetime economy, with the benefits apparent to everyone.
At the time, I was overwhelmingly focused on domestic political issues, so I only paid
slight attention to our one small military operation of that period, the 1999 NATO air war
against Serbia, intended to safeguard the Kosovo Albanians from ethnic cleansing and massacre,
a Clinton Administration project that I fully endorsed.
Although our limited bombing campaign seemed quite successful and soon forced the Serbs to
the bargaining table, the short war did include one very embarrassing mishap. The use of old
maps had led to a targeting error that caused one of our smart bombs to accidentally strike the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three members of its delegation and wounding dozens more.
The Chinese were outraged by this incident, and their propaganda organs began claiming that the
attack had been deliberate, a reckless accusation that obviously made no logical sense.
In those days I watched the PBS Newshour every night, and was I shocked to see their
U.S. Ambassador raise those absurd charges with host Jim Lehrer, whose disbelief matched my
own. But when I considered that the Chinese government was still stubbornly denying the reality
of its massacre of the protesting students in Tiananmen Square a decade earlier, I concluded
that unreasonable behavior by PRC officials was only to be expected. Indeed, there was even
some speculation that China was cynically milking the unfortunate accident for domestic
reasons, hoping to stoke the sort of jingoist anti-Americanism among the Chinese people that
would finally help bind the social wounds of that 1989 outrage.
Such at least were my thoughts on that matter more than two decades ago. But in the years
that followed, my understanding of the world and of many pivotal events of modern history
underwent the sweeping transformations that I have described in my American Pravda series . And some
of my 1990s assumptions were among them.
Consider, for example, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which every June 6th still evokes an
annual wave of harsh condemnations in the news and opinion pages of our leading national
newspapers. I had never originally doubted those facts, but a year or two ago I happened to
come across a short article by journalist Jay Matthews entitled "The Myth of
Tiananmen" that completely upended that apparent reality.
According to Matthews the infamous massacre had likely never happened, but was merely a
media artifact produced by confused Western reporters and dishonest propaganda, a mistaken
belief that had quickly become embedded in our standard media storyline, endlessly repeated by
so many ignorant journalists that they all eventually believed it to be true. Instead, as near
as could be determined, the protesting students had all left Tiananmen Square peacefully, just
as the Chinese government had always maintained. Indeed, leading newspapers such as the New
York Times and the Washington Post had occasionally acknowledged these facts over
the years, but usually buried those scanty admissions so deep in their stories that few ever
noticed. Meanwhile, the bulk of the mainstream media had fallen for an apparent hoax.
ORDER
IT NOW
Matthews himself had been the Beijing Bureau Chief of the Washington Post ,
personally covering the protests at the time, and his article appeared in the Columbia
Journalism Review , our most prestigious venue for media criticism. This authoritative
analysis containing such explosive conclusions was first published in 1998, and I find it
difficult to believe that many reporters or editors covering China have remained ignorant of
this information, yet the impact has been absolutely nil. For over twenty years virtually every
mainstream media account I have read has continued to promote the Tiananmen Square Massacre
Hoax, usually implicitly but sometimes explicitly.
Even more remarkable were the discoveries I made regarding our supposedly accidental bombing
of the Chinese Embassy in 1999. Not long after launching this website, I added former Asia
Times contributor Peter Lee as a columnist, incorporating his China Matters blogsite
archives that stretched back for a decade. He soon published a 7,000 word
article on the Belgrade Embassy bombing, representing a compilation of material already
contained in a
half-dozen previous pieces he'd written on that subject from 2007 onward. To my
considerable surprise, he provided a great deal of persuasive evidence that the American attack
on the Chinese embassy had indeed been deliberate, just as China had always claimed.
According to Lee, Beijing had allowed its embassy to be used as a site for secure radio
transmission facilities by the Serbian military, whose own communications network was a primary
target of NATO airstrikes. Meanwhile, Serbian air defenses had shot down an advanced American
F-117A fighter, whose top-secret stealth technology was a crucial U.S. military secret.
Portions of that enormously valuable wreckage were carefully gathered by the grateful Serbs,
who delivered it to the Chinese for temporary storage at their embassy prior to transport back
home. This vital technological acquisition later allowed China to deploy its own J20 stealth
fighter in early 2011, many years sooner than American military analysts had believed
possible.
Based upon this analysis, Lee argued that the Chinese embassy was attacked in order to
destroy the Serbian retransmission facilities located there, while punishing the Chinese for
allowing such use. There were also widespread rumors in China that another motive had been an
unsuccessful attempt to destroy the stealth debris stored within. Later Congressional testimony
revealed
that the among all the hundreds of NATO airstrikes, the attack on the Chinese embassy was the
only one directly ordered by the CIA, a highly-suspicious detail.
I was only slightly familiar with Lee's work, and under normal circumstances I would have
been very cautious in accepting his remarkable claims against the contrary position universally
held by all our own elite media outlets. But the sources he cited completely shifted that
balance.
Although the American media dominates the English-language world, many British publications
also possess a strong global reputation, and since they are often much less in thrall to our
own national security state, they have sometimes covered important stories that were ignored
here. And in this case, the Sunday Observer published a remarkable expose in October
1999, citing several NATO military and intelligence sources who fully confirmed the deliberate
nature of the American bombing of the Chinese embassy, with a US colonel even reportedly
boasting that their smartbomb had hit the exact room intended.
This important story was immediately summarized in the Guardian ,
a sister publication, and also covered by the rival Times of London and many of the
world's other most prestigious publications, but encountered an absolute wall of silence in our
own country. Such a bizarre divergence on a story of global strategic importance -- a
deliberate and deadly US attack against Chinese diplomatic territory -- drew the attention of
FAIR, a leading American media watchdog group, which published
an initial critique and
a subsequent follow-up . These two pieces totaled some 3,000 words, and effectively
summarized both the overwhelming evidence of the facts and also the heavy international
coverage, while reporting the weak excuses made by top American editors to explain their
continuing silence. Based upon these articles, I consider the matter settled.
Few Americans remember our 1999 attack upon the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and if not for
the annual waving of a bloody June 6th flag by our ignorant and disingenuous media, the
"Tiananmen Square Massacre" would also have long since faded from memory. Neither of these
events has much direct importance today, at least for our own citizens. But the broader media
implications of these examples do seem quite significant.
These incidents represented two of the most serious flashpoints between the Chinese and
American governments during the last thirty-odd years. In both cases the claims of the Chinese
government were entirely correct, although they were denied by our own top political leaders
and dismissed or ridiculed by virtually our entire mainstream media. Moreover, within a few
months or a year the true facts became known to many journalists, even being reported in fully
respectable venues. But that reality was still completely ignored and suppressed for decades,
so that today almost no American whose information comes from our regular media would even be
aware of it. Indeed, since many younger journalists draw their knowledge of the world from
these same elite media sources, I suspect that many of them have never learned what their
predecessors knew but dared not mention.
Most leading Chinese media outlets are owned or controlled by the Chinese government, and
they tend to broadly follow the government line. Leading American media outlets have a
corporate ownership structure and often boast of their fierce independence; but on many crucial
matters, I think the actual reality is not so very different from that in China.
I tend to doubt that Chinese leaders have any overwhelming commitment to the truth, and the
reasons for their greater veracity are probably practical ones. American news and entertainment
completely dominate the global media landscape and they face no significant domestic rival. So
China recognizes that it is vastly outmatched in any propaganda conflict, and as the far weaker
party must necessarily try to stick closer to the truth, lest its lies be immediately exposed.
Meanwhile, America's overwhelming control over global information may inspire considerable
hubris, with the government sometimes promoting the most outrageous and ridiculous falsehoods
in the confident belief that a supportive American media will cover for any mistakes.
These considerations should be kept in mind as we attempt to sift the accounts of our often
unreliable and dishonest media in hopes of extracting the true circumstances of the current
coronavirus epidemic. Unlike careful historical studies, we are working in real-time and our
analysis is greatly hindered by the ongoing fog of war, so that any conclusions are necessarily
very preliminary ones. But given the high stakes, such an attempt seems warranted.
When my morning newspapers first began mentioning the appearance of a mysterious new illness
in China during mid-January, I paid little attention, absorbed as I was in the aftermath of our
sudden assassination of Iran's top military leader and the dangerous possibility of a yet
another Middle Eastern war. But the reports persisted and grew, with deaths occurring and
evidence growing that the viral disease could be transmitted between humans. China's early
conventional efforts seemed unsuccessful in halting the spread of the disease.
Then on Jan. 23rd and after only 17 deaths, the Chinese government took the astonishing step
of locking down and quarantining the entire 11 million inhabitants of the city of Wuhan, a
story that drew worldwide attention. They soon extended this policy to the 60 million Chinese
of Hubei province, and not longer afterward shut down their entire national economy and
confined 700 million Chinese to their homes, a public health measure probably a thousand times
larger than anything previously undertaken in human history. So either the China's leadership
had suddenly gone insane, or they regarded this new virus as an absolutely deadly national
threat, one that needed to be controlled at any possible cost.
Given these dramatic Chinese actions and the international headlines that they generated,
the current accusations by Trump Administration officials that China had attempted to minimize
or conceal the serious nature of the disease outbreak is so ludicrous as to defy rationality.
In any event, the record shows that on December 31st, the Chinese had already alerted the World
Health Organization to the strange new illness, and Chinese scientists published the entire
genome of the virus on Jan. 12th, allowing diagnostic tests to be produced worldwide.
Unlike other nations, China had received no advance warning of the nature or existence of
the deadly new disease, and therefore faced unique obstacles. But their government implemented
public health control measures unprecedented in the history of the world and managed to almost
completely eradicate the disease with merely the loss of a few thousand lives. Meanwhile, many
other Western countries such as the US, Italy, Spain, France, and Britain dawdled for months
and ignored the potential threat, and have now suffered well over 100,000 dead as a
consequence, with the toll still rapidly mounting. For any of these nations or their media
organs to criticize China for its ineffectiveness or slow response represents an absolute
inversion of reality.
Some governments took full advantage of the early warning and scientific information
provided by China. Although nearby East Asian nations such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and
Singapore had been at greatest risk and were among the first infected, their competent and
energetic responses allowed them to almost completely suppress any major outbreak, and they
have suffered minimal fatalities. But America and several European countries avoiding adopting
these same early measures such as widespread testing, quarantine, and contact-tracing, and have
paid a terrible price for their insouciance.
A few weeks ago British Prime Minister Boris Johnson boldly declared that his own disease
strategy for Britain was based upon rapidly achieving "herd immunity" -- essentially
encouraging the bulk of his citizens to become infected -- then quickly backed away after his
desperate advisors recognized that the result might entail a million or more British
deaths.
By any reasonable measure, the response to this global health crisis by China and most East
Asian countries has been absolutely exemplary, while that of many Western countries has been
equally disastrous. Maintaining reasonable public health has been a basic function of
governments since the days of the city-states of Sumeria, and the sheer and total incompetence
of America and most of its European vassals has been breathtaking. If the Western media
attempts to pretend otherwise, it will permanently forfeit whatever remaining international
credibility it still possesses.
I do not think these particular facts are much disputed except among the most blinkered
partisans, and the Trump Administration probably recognizes the hopelessness of arguing
otherwise. This probably explains its recent shift towards a far more explosive and
controversial narrative, namely claiming that Covid-19 may have been the product of Chinese
research into deadly viruses at a Wuhan laboratory, which suggests that the blood of hundreds
of thousands or millions of victims around the world will be on Chinese hands. Dramatic
accusations backed by overwhelming international media power may deeply resonate across the
globe.
News reports appearing in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have been reasonably consistent. Senior Trump Administration
officials have pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading Chinese biolab, as the
possible source of the infection, with the deadly virus having been accidentally released,
subsequently spreading first throughout China and later worldwide. Trump himself has publicly
voiced similar suspicions, as did Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo in a
FoxNews
interview. Private lawsuits against China in the multi-trillion-dollar range have already
been filed by
rightwing activists and Republican senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham have raised similar
governmental demands.
I obviously have no personal access to the classified intelligence reports that have been
the basis of these charges by Trump, Pompeo, and other top administration officials. But in
reading these recent news accounts, I noticed something rather odd.
ORDER IT NOW
Back in January, few Americans were paying much attention to the early reports of an unusual
disease outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which was hardly a household name. Instead,
overwhelming political attention was focused on the battle over Trump's impeachment and the
aftermath of our dangerous military confrontation with Iran. But towards the end of that month,
I discovered that the fringes of the Internet were awash with claims that the disease was
caused by a Chinese bioweapon accidentally released from that same Wuhan laboratory, with
former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and ZeroHedge , a popular right-wing
conspiracy-website, playing leading roles in advancing the theory. Indeed, the stories became
so widespread in those ideological circles that Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading Republican Neocon,
began promoting them on Twitter and FoxNews, thereby provoking an
article in the NYT on those "fringe conspiracy theories."
I suspect that it may be more than purely coincidental that the biowarfare theories which
erupted in such concerted fashion on small political websites and Social Media accounts back in
January so closely match those now publicly advocated by top Trump Administration officials and
supposedly based upon our most secure intelligence sources. Perhaps a few intrepid
citizen-activists managed to replicate the findings of our multi-billion-dollar intelligence
apparatus, and did so in days while the latter required weeks or months. But a more likely
scenario is that the wave of January speculation was driven by private leaks and "guidance"
provided by exactly the same elements that today are very publicly leveling similar charges in
the elite media. Initially promoting controversial theories in less mainstream outlets has long
been a fairly standard intelligence practice.
Regardless of the origins of the idea, does it seem plausible that the coronavirus outbreak
might have originated as an accidental leak from that Chinese laboratory? I am not privy to the
security procedures of Chinese government facilities, but applying a little common sense may
shed some light on that question.
Although the coronavirus is only moderately lethal, apparently having a fatality rate of 1%
or less, it is extremely contagious, including during an extended pre-symptomatic period and
also among asymptomatic carriers. Thus, portions of the US and Europe are now suffering heavy
casualties, while the policies adopted to control the spread have devastated their national
economies. Although the virus is unlikely to kill more than a small sliver of our population,
we have seen to our dismay how a major outbreak can so easily wreck our entire economic
life.
During January, the journalists reporting on China's mushrooming health crisis regularly
emphasized that the mysterious new viral outbreak had occurred at the worst possible place and
time, appearing in the major transport hub of Wuhan just prior to the Lunar New Year holiday,
when hundreds of millions of Chinese would normally travel to their distant family homes for
the celebration, thereby potentially spreading the disease to all parts of the country and
producing a permanent, uncontrollable epidemic. The Chinese government avoided that grim fate
by the unprecedented decision to shut down its entire national economy and confine 700 million
Chinese to their own homes for many weeks. But the outcome seems to have been a very near
thing, and if Wuhan had remained open for just a few days longer, China might easily have
suffered long-term economic and social devastation.
The timing of an accidental laboratory release would obviously be entirely random. Yet the
outbreak seems to have begun during the precise period of time most likely to damage China, the
worst possible ten-day or perhaps thirty-day window. As I noted in
January, I saw no solid evidence that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, the
timing of the release seemed very unlikely to have been accidental.
If the virus was released intentionally, the context and motive for such a biowarfare attack
against China could not be more obvious. Although our disingenuous media continues to pretend
otherwise, the size of China's economy surpassed that of our own several years ago, and has
continued to grow much more rapidly. Chinese companies have also taken the lead in several
crucial technologies, with Huawei becoming the world's leading telecommunications equipment
manufacturer and dominating the important 5G market. China's sweeping Belt and Road Initiative
has threatened to reorient global trade around an interconnected Eurasian landmass, greatly
diminishing the leverage of America's own control over the seas. I have closely followed China
for over forty years, and the trend-lines have never been more apparent. Back in 2012, I
published an article bearing the provocative title "China's Rise, America's Fall?" and
since then I have seen no reason to reassess my verdict.
China's Rise, America's Fall Which
superpower is more threatened by its "extractive elites"? Ron Unz • The American Conservative,
April 17, 2012 • 7,000 Words
For three generations following the end of World War II, America had stood as the world's
supreme economic and technological power, while the collapse of the Soviet Union thirty years
ago left us as the sole remaining superpower, facing no conceivable military rival. A growing
sense that we were rapidly losing that unchallenged position had certainly inspired the
anti-China rhetoric of many senior figures in the Trump Administration, who launched a major
trade war soon after coming into office. The increasing misery and growing impoverishment of
large sections of the American population naturally left these voters searching for a
convenient scapegoat, and the prosperous, rising Chinese made a perfect target.
Despite America's growing economic conflict with China over the last couple of years, I had
never considered the possibility that matters might take a military turn. The Chinese had long
ago deployed advanced intermediate range missiles that many believed could easily sink our
carriers in the region, and they had also generally improved their conventional military
deterrent. Moreover, China was on quite good terms with Russia, which itself had been the
target of intense American hostility for several years; and Russia's new suite of revolutionary
hypersonic missiles had drastically reduced any American strategic advantage. Thus, a
conventional war against China seemed an absolutely hopeless undertaking, while China's
outstanding businessmen and engineers were steadily gaining ground against America's decaying
and heavily-financialized economic system.
Under these difficult circumstances, an American biowarfare attack against China might have
seemed the only remaining card to play in hopes of maintaining American supremacy. Plausible
deniability would minimize the risk of any direct Chinese retaliation, and if successful, the
terrible blow inflicted to China's economy would set it back for many years, perhaps even
destabilizing its social and political system. Using alternative media to immediately promote
theories that the coronavirus outbreak was the result of a leak from a Chinese biowarfare lab
was a natural means of preempting any later Chinese accusations along similar lines, thereby
allowing America to win the international propaganda war before China had even begun to
play.
A decision by elements of our national security establishment to wage biological warfare in
hopes of maintaining American world power would certainly have been an extremely reckless act,
but extreme recklessness has become a regular aspect of American behavior since 2001,
especially under the Trump Administration. Just a year earlier we had kidnapped the
daughter of Huawei's founder and chairman, who also served as CFO and ranked as one of China's
most top executives, while at the beginning of January we suddenly assassinated Iran's top
military leader.
These were the thoughts that entered my mind during the last week of January once I
discovered the widely circulating theories suggesting that China's massive disease epidemic had
been the self-inflicted consequence of its own biowarfare research. I saw no solid evidence
that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, China was surely the innocent victim of
the attack, presumably carried out by elements of the American national security
establishment.
Soon afterward, someone brought to my attention a very long article by an American ex-pat
living in China who called himself "Metallicman" and held a wide range of eccentric and
implausible beliefs. I have long recognized that flawed individuals can often serve as the
vessels of important information otherwise unavailable, and this case constituted a perfect
example. His piece denounced the outbreak as a likely American biowarfare attack, and provided
a great wealth of factual material I had not previously considered. Since he authorized
republication elsewhere I did so, and
his 15,000 word analysis , although somewhat raw and unpolished, began attracting an
enormous amount of readership on our website, probably being one of the very first
English-language pieces to suggest that the mysterious new disease was an American bioweapon.
Many of his arguments appeared doubtful to me or have been obviated by later developments, but
several seemed quite telling.
He pointed out that during the previous two years, the Chinese economy had already suffered
serious blows from other mysterious new diseases, although these had targeted farm animals
rather than people. During 2018 a new Avian Flu virus had swept the country, eliminating large
portions of China's poultry industry, and during 2019 the Swine Flu viral epidemic had
devastated China's pig farms, destroying 40% of the nation's primary domestic source of meat,
with widespread claims that the latter disease was being spread by mysterious small drones. My
morning newspapers had hardly ignored these important business stories, noting
that the sudden collapse of much of China's domestic food production might prove a huge boon to
American farm exports at the height of our trade conflict, but I had never considered the
obvious implications. So for three years in a row, China had been severely impacted by strange
new viral diseases, though only the most recent had been deadly to humans. This evidence was
merely circumstantial, but the pattern seemed highly suspicious.
The writer also noted that shortly before the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, that city had
hosted 300 visiting American military officers, who came to participate in the 2019 Military World
Games , an absolutely remarkable coincidence of timing. As
I pointed out at the time, how would Americans react if 300 Chinese military officers had
paid an extended visit to Chicago, and soon afterward a mysterious and deadly epidemic had
suddenly broken out in that city? Once again, the evidence was merely circumstantial but
certainly raised dark suspicions.
Scientific investigation of the coronavirus had already pointed to its origins in a bat
virus, leading to widespread media speculation that bats sold as food in the Wuhan open markets
had been the original disease vector. Meanwhile, the orchestrated waves of anti-China
accusations had emphasized Chinese laboratory research on that same viral source. But we soon
published
a lengthy article by investigative journalist Whitney Webb providing copious evidence of
America's own enormous biowarfare research efforts, which had similarly focused for years on
bat viruses. Webb was then associated with MintPress News , but that publication had
strangely declined to publish her important piece, perhaps skittish about the grave suspicions
it directed towards the US government on so momentous an issue. So without the benefit of our
platform, her major contribution to the public debate might have attracted relatively little
readership.
Around the same time, I noted another
extremely strange coincidence that failed to attract any interest from our somnolent national
media. Although his name had meant nothing to me, in late January my morning newspapers carried
major stories on the
sudden arrest of Prof. Charles Lieber, one of Harvard University's top scientists and Chairman
of its Chemistry Department, sometimes characterized as a potential future Nobel Laureate.
The circumstances of that case seemed utterly bizarre to me. Like numerous other prominent
American academics, Lieber had had decades of close research ties with China, holding joint
appointments and receiving substantial funding for his work. But now he was accused of
financial reporting violations in the disclosure portions of his government grant applications
-- the most obscure sort of offense -- and on the basis of those accusations, he was seized by
the FBI in an early-morning raid on his suburban Lexington home and dragged off in shackles,
potentially facing years of federal imprisonment.
Such government action against an academic seemed almost without precedent. During the
height of the Cold War, numerous American scientists and technicians were rightfully accused of
having stolen our nuclear weapons secrets for delivery to Stalin, yet I had never heard of any
of them treated in so harsh a manner, let alone a scholar of Prof. Lieber's stature, who was
merely charged with technical disclosure violations. Indeed, this incident recalled accounts of
NKVD raids during the Soviet purges of the 1930s.
ORDER IT NOW
Although Lieber was described as a chemistry professor, a few seconds of Googling revealed
that some of his most important work had been in virology, including technology for the
detection of viruses. So a massive and deadly new viral epidemic had broken out in China and
almost simultaneously, a top American scholar with close Chinese ties and expertise in viruses
was suddenly arrested by the federal government, yet no one in the media expressed any
curiosity at a possible connection between these two events.
I think we can safely assume that Lieber's arrest by the FBI had been prompted by the
concurrent coronavirus epidemic, but anything more is mere speculation. Those now accusing
China of having created the coronavirus might surely suggest that our intelligence agencies
discovered that the Harvard professor had been personally involved with that deadly research.
But I think a far more likely possibility is that Lieber began to wonder whether the epidemic
in China might not be the result of an American biowarfare attack, and was perhaps a little too
free in voicing his suspicions, thereby drawing the wrath of our national security
establishment. Inflicting such extremely harsh treatment upon a top Harvard scientist would
greatly intimidate all of his lesser colleagues elsewhere, who would surely now think twice
before broaching certain controversial theories to any journalist.
By the end of January, our webzine had published a dozen articles and posts on the
coronavirus outbreak, then added many more by the middle of February. These pieces totaled tens
of thousands of words and attracted a half million words of comments, probably representing the
primary English-language source for a particular perspective on the deadly epidemic, with this
material eventually drawing many hundreds of thousands of pageviews. A few weeks later, the
Chinese government began gingerly raising the possibility that the coronavirus may have been
brought to Wuhan by the 300 American military officers visiting that city, and was
fiercely attacked by the Trump Administration for spreading anti-American propaganda. But I
strongly suspect that the Chinese had gotten that idea from our own publication.
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another development
occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly
where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February
Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its
political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire
Iranian parliament soon infected and at least
a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were
quite
senior . Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred
Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political
elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they
died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else
in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top military commander
on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became
infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence.
Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
Biological warfare is a highly technical subject, and those possessing such expertise are
unlikely to candidly report their classified research activities in the pages of our major
newspapers, perhaps even less so after Prof. Lieber was dragged off to prison in chains. My own
knowledge is nil. But in mid-March I came across several extremely long and detailed comments
on the coronavirus outbreak that had been posted on a small website by an individual calling
himself "OldMicrobiologist" and who claimed to be a retired forty-year veteran of American
biodefense. The style and details of his material struck me as quite credible, and after a
little further investigation I concluded that there was a high likelihood his background was
exactly as he had described. I made arrangements to republish his comments in the form of
a 3,400 word
article , which soon attracted a great deal of traffic and 80,000 words of further
comments.
Although the writer emphasized the lack of any hard evidence, he said that his experience
led him to strongly suspect that the coronavirus outbreak was indeed an American biowarfare
attack against China, probably carried out by agents brought into that country under cover of
the Military Games held at Wuhan in late October, the sort of sabotage operation our
intelligence agencies had sometimes undertaken elsewhere. One important point he made was that
high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon since debilitating or hospitalizing
large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a
biological agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths. In his words "a high
communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy," suggesting that the
apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard. Those so
interested should read his analysis and judge for themselves his possible credibility and
persuasiveness.
One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of
the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated
campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the
cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more
plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received
virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located
and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often
anonymously authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active
information war. The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major
propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred,
but I do think it tends to support such a theory.
When considering the hypothesis of an American biowarfare attack, certain natural objections
come to mind. The major drawback to biological warfare has always been the obvious fact that
the self-replicating agents employed will not respect national borders, thus raising the
serious risk that the disease might eventually return to the land of its origin and inflict
substantial casualties. For this reason, it seems very doubtful that any rational and
half-competent American leadership would have unleashed the coronavirus against China.
But as we see absolutely demonstrated in our daily news headlines, America's current
government is grotesquely and manifestly incompetent , more incompetent than one could
almost possibly imagine, with tens of thousands of Americans having now already paid with their
lives for such extreme incompetence. Rationality and competence are obviously nowhere to be
found among the Deep State Neocons that President Donald Trump has appointed to so many crucial
positions throughout our national security apparatus.
Moreover, the extremely lackadaisical notion that a massive coronavirus outbreak in China
would never spread back to America might have seemed plausible to individuals who carelessly
assumed that past historical analogies would continue to apply. As
I wrote a few weeks ago:
Reasonable people have suggested that if the coronavirus was a bioweapon deployed by
elements of the American national security apparatus against China (and Iran), it's difficult
to imagine why the they didn't assume it would naturally leak back in the US and start a huge
pandemic here, as is currently happening.
The most obvious answer is that they were stupid and incompetent, but here's another point
to consider
In late 2002 there was the outbreak of SARS in China, a related virus but that was far
more deadly and somewhat different in other characteristics. The virus killed hundreds of
Chinese and spread into a few other countries before it was controlled and stamped out. The
impact on the US and Europe was negligible, with just a small scattering of cases and only a
death or two.
So if American biowarfare analysts were considering a coronavirus attack against China,
isn't it quite possible they would have said to themselves that since SARS never
significantly leaked back into the US or Europe, we'd similarly remain insulated from the
coronavirus? Obviously, such an analysis was foolish and mistaken, but would it have seemed
so implausible at the time?
As some must have surely noticed, I have deliberately avoided investigating any of the
scientific details of the coronavirus. In principle, an objective and accurate analysis of the
characteristics and structure of the virus might help suggest whether it was entirely natural
or rather the product of a research laboratory, and in the latter case, perhaps whether the
likely source was China, America, or some third country.
But we are dealing with a cataclysmic world event and those questions obviously have
enormous political ramifications, so the entire subject is shrouded by a thick fog of complex
propaganda, with numerous conflicting claims being advanced by interested parties. I have no
background in microbiology let alone biological warfare, so I would be hopelessly adrift in
evaluating such conflicting scientific and technical claims. I suspect that this is equally
true of the overwhelming majority of other observers as well, although committed partisans are
loathe to admit that fact, and will eagerly seize upon any scientific argument that supports
their preferred position while rejecting those that contradict it.
Therefore, by necessity, my own focus is on evidence that can at least be understood by
every layman, if not necessarily always accepted. And I believe that the simple juxtaposition
of several recent disclosures in the mainstream media leads to a rather telling conclusion.
For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early
missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably
encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.
As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather
detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents.
Provocatively entitled "China Didn't Warn Public of Likely
Pandemic for 6 Key Days" , the piece was widely distributed, running
in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the
Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan.
14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the
number of infections greatly multiplied.
Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough
4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of
those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor
disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware
of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death
occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that
same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious,
sources within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones
asleep at the switch. Earlier this month,
an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back
as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency
had produced a report revealing than an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the
Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our
government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the
story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report,
while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a
few days later,
Israeli television revealed that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a
report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to
independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC story and its several
government sources.
ORDER IT NOW
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the
deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government
itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I
think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of
future fires.
Back in February, before a single American had died from the disease,
I wrote my own overview of the possible course of events, and I would still stand by it
today:
Consider a particularly ironic outcome of this situation, not particularly likely but
certainly possible
Everyone knows that America's ruling elites are criminal, crazy, and also extremely
incompetent.
So perhaps the coronavirus outbreak was indeed a deliberate biowarfare attack against
China, hitting that nation just before Lunar New Year, the worst possible time to produce a
permanent nationwide pandemic. However, the PRC responded with remarkable speed and
efficiency, implementing by far the largest quarantine in human history, and the deadly
disease now seems to be in decline there.
Meanwhile, the disease naturally leaks back into the US, and despite all the advance
warning, our totally incompetent government mismanages the situation, producing a huge
national health disaster, and the collapse of our economy and decrepit political system.
As I said, not particularly likely, but certainly a very fitting end to the American
Empire
But their government implemented public health control measures unprecedented in the
history of the world and managed to almost completely eradicate the disease with merely the
loss of a few thousand lives
And if you can't trust China's numbers, who can you trust?
The timing of an accidental laboratory release would obviously be entirely random. Yet
the outbreak seems to have begun during precise period of time most likely to damage
China
It almost sounds like putting a virus lab in the middle of twelve million people was a bad
idea.
Lol. I can't believe you're doubling down on this jackassery.
Mr Unz, also have you read David Cole's theory on this (at TakiMag)? I know you and him got
in blog beef a couple years ago over your Pravda article on Holocaust, but his theory also
criticized the Wuhan "lab leak" and believes the wet markets originated the virus while the
state lab was trying to cover up the "natural market" zoonotic mess. Would be fun to (again)
watch you 2 debate notes.
If I had told you a year ago that Iran would have its top General assassinated and then its
country decimated by a viral infection, that China would be a world pariah with calls for
trillion in reparations, that Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela would have a bounty on his head for
lol being involved in the cocaine trade, and that Kim Jong Un would be dead who do you think
would be the architect of this future?
Chinese elites or American ones?
American neocons are literally getting everything they want.
You can look at all of the damage to the American economy relative to China, but who is
really being hurt in America? Regular Americans are being hurt. But the elites are getting
bailed out and will buy US assets for pennies on the dollar.
"When considering the hypothesis of an American biowarfare attack, certain natural objections
come to mind. The major drawback to biological warfare has always been the obvious fact that
the self-replicating agents employed are not prone to respect national borders, raising the
serious risk that the disease might eventually return to the land of its origin and inflict
substantial casualties. For this reason, it seems quite doubtful that any rational and
half-competent American leadership would have unleashed the coronavirus against China."
Unless, of course, those in power knew exactly what that 'blowback' would entail, as they
had modeled it over and over, for years, maybe decades.
They would be in a position to crash the stock market (and get out at the very top),
assure a new alliance between the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury (allowing the elites to
use the American taxpayers to fund their losses indefinitely), destroy the middle and lower
classes through government ordered 'lockdowns' (driving down wages yet again, and making
Americans frightened, unemployed and angry, and thereby easily mislead like in the 9/11
aftermath), create a world political environment allowing medical tyranny to make universal
yearly vaccines and mandatory microchipping of everyone acceptable to the masses (ala Bill
Gates/Tony Fauci/WHO and their Pig Pharma vaccine brigade), drop the price of oil
indefinitely to fatally weaken Iran, hurt Russia and allow our predator capitalist banks to
scoop up the failing US shale oil industry for pennies (which they are fully preparing to
do), and ultimately allow the elites to perfectly time the inevitable deflation of the
world's derivatives bubble, further sending the commoners into complete panic mode (and
making their primal fears easily directed against the Western world's now common enemy, the
Red Yellow Hordes.)
Doesn't sound very 'incompetent' to me. Sounds like utterly evil, but undeniably
brilliant, military-economic planning. And it is looking like they may pull this one off,
just like 9/11, and get the scared and terminally gullible Western plebes on board for their
own further destruction economically, politically, and very possibly physically.
End Result: the PTB get to blame China for everything; make China foot the bill (or else);
and when China balks, prepare the West's gullible, easily controlled citizens for military
conflict if the Chinese don't roll over and cough up to the West's satisfaction.
Incompetence?
Sure looks to me like a neoliberal zionist-neocon elitist wet dream come true ..
@Otto von Komsmark If you believe that the virus originated in a wet market, what's your
theory on why China immediately allowed wet markets to open back up (albeit with guards
posted to prevent pics). Are they just exceptionally slow learners or do they realize that
the wet market theory was always bogus?
" the Chinese government began gingerly raising the possibility that the coronavirus may have
been brought to Wuhan by the 300 American military officers visiting that city, and was
fiercely attacked by the Trump Administration for spreading anti-American propaganda. But I
strongly suspect that the Chinese had gotten that idea from our own publication" not at all
improbable since said publication has a very deep current of slavish devotion to the Chinese
state; such that one might even strongly suspect that the publication is getting its ideas
from the Chinese totalitarians as much as the other way round. But since 'false flag'
theories are another popular concept in such discussions, it might be conceivable that the
human rights regime in Beijing deliberately released the mystery bug in China & Iran
first, in order to throw suspicion on the U.S. The Chinese & Iranian tallies so far have
been surprisingly low despite starting there earlier, so if they're not suppressing the
facts, maybe they knew what to expect & were prepared. And the brunt of it would then be
borne by their Western 'adversaries'. Not to mention, that the Chinese despots could
reinforce their iron grip on Chinese society with their customary contempt for civil
liberties. China's "current government is grotesquely and manifestly" incompatible with
personal freedom, more incompatible than "one could almost possibly imagine", with tens of
millions of Uighurs, Tibetans, dissidents, workers having now already paid with their lives
& freedom for such extreme incompatibility.
"Rationality and competence are obviously nowhere to be found among the Deep State Neocons
that President Donald Trump has appointed to so many crucial positions throughout our
national security apparatus" and certainly rationality, competence, humanity are never to be
found among Neo-cons anywhere. The President has been wise to largely ignore them. If Trump
had been President in '99, it's very likely that the absolutely unnecessary, devastating war
on Serbia by Hillary & Bill – based on deliberate lies – would never have
gotten off the ground.
President Trump now faces the daunting dilemma of how to protect the society while at the
same time not displaying the same disdain for political & civic freedom that is the
hallmark of the CCP. An end to America Empire would be a good thing – the President
knows that, as he again reiterated the trillions misspent in the M.E. at his daily press
conference today – but this isn't the way to do it. Only a Chinese communist or fellow
traveler could believe that.
"At the time, I was overwhelmingly focused on domestic political issues, so I only paid
slight attention to our one small military operation of those years, the 1999 NATO air war
against Serbia, intended to safeguard the Bosnian Muslims from ethnic cleansing and massacre,
a Clinton Administration project that I fully endorsed." And why should one believe our
government and media about "safeguard(ing) the Bosnian Muslims from ethnic cleansing and
massacre" any more than one should believe their other lies?
For most of this post, I can't say one way or the other. I personally think this was either
the result of the so-called "wet-markets" in China – long known to be the primary
source of the annual flu epidemics (why the heck haven't they been shut down??) or a
criminally NEGLIGENT release from a research lab.
But.
"China recognizes that it is vastly outmatched in any propaganda conflict, and so as the
far weaker party must necessarily try to stick closer to the truth, lest its lies be
immediately exposed. Meanwhile, America's overwhelming control over information may lead to
considerable hubris, with the government sometimes promoting the most outrageous and
ridiculous falsehoods in the confident belief that a supportive American media will cover for
any mistakes."
Nearly 30,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus during the last two weeks, and by
some estimates this is a substantial under-count
Quoted numbers of deaths are as unreliable as the number of infections.
Cause of death as stated in a death certificate is often, and even usually, wrong, and
during an epidemic caused by a virus that induces respiratory difficulty it is likely that
virtually all deaths due to respiratory dysfunction will be attributed to the virus without
confirmatory evidence.
Furthermore, virtually all deaths of persons testing positive for covid19 will be
attributed to the virus even though the deceased may have had multiple other diseases, any
one of which could have been the cause of death.
But as this epidemic is shaping up, it is likely that the estimated death toll will be
comparable to that of the seasonal flu in a bad year. Herd immunity is likely now widespread,
so the thing should fizzle out soon, with or without continued population incarceration.
Boris Johnson boldly declared that his own coronavirus plan for Britain was based upon
rapidly achieving "herd immunity" -- essentially encouraging the bulk of his citizens to
become infected -- then quickly backed away after his desperate advisors recognized that
the result might entail a million or more British deaths.
LOL. Neil Ferguson an Imperial College epidemiologist with an awesomely bad track record
in predicting the course of epidemics, made some such prediction which he soon modified to a
very much smaller number – 20,000 I believe, a number not yet reached.
In fact, the original plan was abandoned for fear that unrestricted spread of the virus
would result in a concentration of infections, which at the peak, would overload hospitals by
that minority of cases requiring hospital treatment.
Not just NWO ChiCom China of course– they're just the tool, the NWO
"Elites"/Globalists, who shipped USA Manufacturing to China and destroyed the Middle Class in
the USA etc., have made China the "Model" for us all -- "Social Credit Scores" for the Peons,
an authoritarian "Party" of "Elites" with all power, Peons having to get a "green" signal on
their cell phones every time they go outside . -- NWO Globalist "Elites" actually running the
CVirus show/"Production"/911 "Event" Part 2 -- "Invisible Terrorists Forever"–
meanwhile most "journalists" are cheering the loss of freedoms and anyone who points out what
is going on wants to "kill Grandma" is "Selfish" it's all about on a Junior High School level
but after getting away with 911 Demolition anyone not a rube, grifter/or in on it knew they'd
be back to finish it off– and so they are here with the Plandemic:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/elite-covid-19-coup-against-terrified-humanity-resisting-powerfully/5709479
Side note: Interesting the Mainslime Media is not all over China's Racism towards Blacks
as evidenced in their Ad here against "Diversity" and "Race Mixing"– they aren't
kidding! Seems ChiComs can do what YT could never .: https://twitter.com/sadir_Palwan/status/1250570077163925509
The Nanjing protests were groundbreaking dissidence for China and went from solely
expressing concern about alleged [sic] improprieties by African men to increasingly calling
for democracy or human rights. They were paralleled by burgeoning demonstrations in other
cities during the period between the Nanjing and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989,
with some elements of the original protests that started in Nanjing still evident in
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, such as banners proclaiming "Stop Taking Advantage of
Chinese Women" even though the vast majority of African students had left the country by
that point.
And if you can't trust China's numbers, who can you trust?
It's very true that China's numbers is perhaps the best numbers that you could trust.
Moritz Kraemer, a scholar at Oxford University who is leading a team of researchers in
mapping the global spread of the coronavirus, says China's data "provided incredible detail,"
including a patient's age, sex, travel history and history of chronic disease, as well as
where the case was reported, and the dates of the onset of symptoms, hospitalization and
confirmation of infection.
The United States, he said, "has been slow in collecting data in a systematic way.". The
article not only showing the chaotic situation in different states, but highlights the
limited information shared with scientific community. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/coronavirus-data-privacy.html
The WHO too only had high praises for China's transparency and efficiency.
The only parties challenging these are Trump, Mike Pompeo, and the US Intelligence. Make a
pick who to trust.
But in mid-March I came across several extremely long and detailed comments on the
coronavirus outbreak that had been posted on a small website by an individual calling
himself "OldMicrobiologist" and who claimed to be a retired forty-year veteran of American
biodefense. The style and details of his material struck me as quite credible, and after a
little further investigation I concluded that there was a high likelihood that his
background was exactly as he had described. I made arrangements to republish his comments
in the form of a 3,400 word article, which soon attracted a great deal of traffic and
80,000 words of further comments.
Although the writer said that he had absolutely no proof, he said that his experience
led him to strongly suspect that the coronavirus outbreak was indeed an American biowarfare
attack against China, probably carried out by agents brought into that country under cover
of the Military Games held at Wuhan in late October, the sort of sabotage operation our
intelligence agencies had sometimes undertaken elsewhere.
Oh God, that crap again. Some geezer who may or may not have any relevant expertise, had a
suspicion, but absolutely no proof, of a goofy theory that to launch a biowarfare attack on
China the US Government had the brilliant idea of having the agent released by a contingent
of 300 American soldiers participating in the international military games held in Wuhan,
China.
Is that a stupid idea, or what?
And anyhow, there is evidence just published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy
of Sciences that the viral epidemic in China did not begin in Wuhan and, furthermore, it
began earlier than originally believed, i.e., before the Military Games.
But we are dealing with a cataclysmic world event
Not really. Just a new disease out of China, one of many from China since the year dot,
which has a lethality comparable to the seasonal flu. The event is cataclysmic only because
of the economic consequences of the public policy response in most Western states, though not
Sweden.
@Ozymandias Hey Ozy, The Australians claimed to have suffered only 120 wu-wu virus deaths
total. The South Koreans claim only 250 wu-wu deaths total. In Ozy world, are they liars too
along with the Chinese? Or is it possible they have a functional public health system and
moderately competent politicians who decided to fix the wu-wu virus problem .instead of
playing golf and bullshitting the public for six weeks. The wu-wu virus death total in the
essential exceptional nation is now 42,000 and rising. No other country is even close. It's
like Trumpie heard the experts advise "fatten the curve" instead of "flatten the curve".
So, you "fully endorsed" Clinton Administration 1999 NATO air war against Serbia, and you
don't even know that it wasn't "intended to safeguard the Bosnian Muslims from ethnic
cleansing and massacre",
because war in Bosnia was already done long before 1999 (war finished in 1995).
a year or two ago I happened to come across a short article by journalist Jay Matthews
entitled "The Myth of Tiananmen" that completely upended that apparent reality.
According to Matthews the infamous massacre had likely never happened, but was merely a
media artifact produced by confused Western reporters and dishonest propaganda, a mistaken
belief that had quickly become embedded in our standard media storyline, endlessly repeated
by so many ignorant journalists that they all eventually believed it to be true.
the protesting students had all left Tiananmen Square peacefully, just as the Chinese
government had always maintained.
the bulk of the mainstream media had fallen for an apparent hoax.
This is like saying the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was a hoax because most of the
deaths occurred overnight, past midnight, no longer St. Bartholomew's Day, ergo "the St.
Bartholomew's Day Massacre" was a Hoax. Throwing the baby out with a technicality.
Checking the Jay Matthews story, I see this:
Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a
different place and under different circumstances.
The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities. Western estimates are
somewhat higher. Many victims were shot by soldiers on stretches of Changan Jie, the Avenue
of Eternal Peace, about a mile west of the square, and in scattered confrontations in other
parts of the city
Regarding SARS inability to spread further, that's why the glycoprotein 120 was added:
it's an external protein they borrowed from HIV and CRISPR'd onto the Covid-19.
Interesting enough by including this mechanism in the novel virus they have perhaps laid
the ground for future AIDS type syndromes in those who get the virus or some variant of it.
That's another topic deserving it's own crowd funded public research.
Much of the suddenly far reaching effects of this novel virus derive from the advent of
CRISP technology and the ability to fuse different parts of virus into one. Of course,
zoonotic transmission still needs to occur hence all the special grants to Wuhan Institute
and North Carolina in doing this type of research, going out and collecting the special virus
out of bat shit 600 miles away from Wuhan in caves in remote China, and feeding it to pigs
and chimps who die and the process is repeated until a stable virus is developed.
Interesting enough Dr Fauci is an expert on HIV and specifically glycoprotein 120. He's
worked to run private trial tests while working in the government probably for his Fort
Detrick buddies.
Everyone reading this article and still intrigued for more information out to check out
two key players that researching the origins of the virus and it's likely bioengineered
origins:
This virus has links to Fauci, research at Fort Detrick, as well as research carried out
in North Carolina and Wuhan that was paid for by grants from Fauci while running major
government groups.
It appears part of this operation utilized the NATO transport network for transporting
deadly diseases and nuclear material. In fact, one such courier was in Wuhan as an American
cyclist for the military games
But I digress.
The blowback part Ron mentions being the consequence of stupidity from the government are
possible but I think unlikely. If you follow parallel developments in geopolitics and,
specifically, finance (not withstanding all of Bill Gates work with companies to have a
vaccine ready to go ), you'll see perhaps the makings of a grand conspiracy to (1) cement the
strength of the dollar and (2) sequester Chinese economic growth and power all at once.
For this to work most of the government would not know what's going on and that probably
includes Trump. Plus, what better way to hide culpability than to inflict a wound on
yourself?
For links to articles discussing this topic see below:
Everyone is enjoying the screaming and paranoia but China (East Asia) has been producing new
and "wonderful" diseases for several thousand years. They used to have bacterial variations
but in the last few centuries have moved to designer viruses.
South China has wall-to-wall rice paddies where wild and migratory animals feed, drink and
sh*t with farm animals under the care of a billion or so humans with primitive concepts of
sanitation and minimal, to no, modern healthcare, so "rare" or "unlikely" bug mutations and
species "jumps" are just a matter of time. The wild birds of China Summer in Siberia and
Alaska with all the other birds of the world. The "Real" Globalism ..
The appearance of Corona variants in Kazhakstan, Iran, the Gulf States, and Israeli
ckickens, or the appearance of "pig flu" in Mexico, or the Spanish Flu (1918?) in Kansas, all
under major bird migratory routes, should not be too much of a surprise. Even if a US, UN or
Chinese agency finds it. Be aware that this used to happen before Boeing and AirBus joined
the game.
Be careful cleaning the poop off your windshield and/or yard furniture.
Damn flying dinosaurs are dangerous. If you find some poop with a "made in China" label,
call the authorities. They will love the warning about the poison from a flying Chinese
Communist dragon.
The coronavirus is serial! Thooper serial! Look at all these in depth political analyses
and ignore the facts in plain view!
Blowback is a particularly telling choice of word, since I remember Noam Chomsky using the
same term. He used it to add weight to the official 9/11 story by claiming the events were a
direct result of US foreign policy, which re-enforced the Muslim terrorist angle and stopped
people from looking for the real culprits.
Another great installment in the American Pravda series. I use to work in the federal
government and always wondered why employees of the Nationals Archives* needed a top secret
U.S. government clearance and why employees of Presidential libraries needed to have the same
security clearance as a nuclear submarine commander (top secret- sensitive compartmented
information). What secrets could there possibly be from 60 years ago?? Then it dawned on me
that it could never be known by the general public how their country behaves toward other
countries and why and how we go to war. We would lose all faith in our government.
I have only one small correction:
[Charles Lieber] was seized by the FBI in an early-morning raid on his Cambridge home
and dragged off in shackles, potentially facing decades of federal imprisonment.
He lives in a wooded suburban neighborhood in Lexington, MA, not in the city of
Cambridge.
On the one hand a bio-warfare attack on China is something I can absolutely see the American
elites post 9/11 do. Their track-record speaks for itself.
There have also been significant shifts in Europe's alignment, on which US global
dominance critically depends: the continuation of Northstream 2 against the explicit wishes
of the Americans, 5 G expansion and Huawei cooperation in the European market, plans of
replacing NATO with a European army (talks on the fringe of the right about a defense pact
with Russia), the Belt and Road trillion dollar project which has its better European name as
"The New Silk Road". Eurasian integration goes directly against the global dominance strategy
of the US Empire. Europe is also now caught between an intense and visible propaganda warfare
of the USA and China/Russia.
And there were also the proxy-war in Ukraine and the refugee crisis: the latter at minimum
a fallout of US-Israeli wars in the Middle East and the Zionist assault against Libya; yet
not unlikely itself a direct assault against Europe. And not only Willy Wimmer, closest
adviser to our old chancellor Helmut Kohl, strongly suspected as much already back in 2015.
Wimmer had been part of several war games in Langley in his time in the German government,
quite clearly reasoning that in modern warfare you cannot initiate a conflict without knowing
where the refugees will go – it is part of the planning process.
On the other hand we must recognize the long term and massive investments of for example
Blackrock and Vanguard into China; the ambitions to liberalize Chinese society and further
open their economy for foreign, especially US investments; the attempts of Zionism to set up
shop in China; the key role of Israel in the Belt and Road project and the admiration the
Chinese have for Jews and their material success.
If it was a bio-warfare attack and if the ambition is to lock the USA and China in
a new Cold War with potential proxy wars, then Americas financial and Jewish elite, which so
very much dominate the deep state neocons, must be of the opinion that their profits will not
be affected by it.
And if it was the long-term plan of Zionism and much of Americas financial, largely
Jewish, elite to shift their power-base from the USA which they have effectively subjugated
to the less secured China, then a bio-warfare attack would hardly be a smart move to keep the
transition as quiet as possible.
@if American biowarfare analysts were considering a coronavirus attack against China, isn't
it quite possible they would have said to themselves that since SARS never significantly
leaked back into the US or Europe, we'd similarly remain insulated from the coronavirus?
Obviously, such an analysis was foolish and mistaken, but would it have seemed so implausible
at the time?
Albert Einstein: "Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting
Different Results".
Moreover, in establishing whether a crime was committed, the criminal investigation has to
establish first that there was a motive, the means and the opportunity to commit the crime.
All these criteria are satisfied in this case pointing to a biological attack against China
and its allies.
The possibility of biowarfare (and its desirability) was unequivocally formulated in
September 2000 when the 'Project for the New American Century' released "Rebuilding America's
Defenses", a report that promotes "the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend
its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces."
The report also states, "advanced forms of biological warfare that can "target" specific
genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful
tool".
The first bioweapons research program was initiated in America by Sir Frederick Banting with
corporate sponsorship in 1940.
From Wikipedia (no secrets): In 1942 "U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson requested that
the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) undertake consideration of U.S. biological warfare. In
response the NAS formed a committee, the War Bureau of Consultants (WBC), which issued a
report on the subject in February 1942.The report, among other items, recommended the
research and development of an offensive biological weapons program.
The British, and the research undertaken by the WBC, pressured the U.S. to begin biological
weapons research and development and in November 1942 U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt
officially approved an American biological weapons program. In response to the information
provided by the WBC, Roosevelt ordered Stimson to form the War Research Service (WRS).
Established within the Federal Security Agency, the WRS' stated purpose was to promote
"public security and health", but, in reality, the WRS was tasked with coordinating and
supervising the U.S. biological warfare program. In the spring of 1943 the U.S. Army
Biological Warfare Laboratories were established at Fort (then Camp) Detrick in
Maryland".
The Chinese read their James Bond: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times
is enemy action".
It doesn't make sense to me that the US would fly drones over chinese pig farms half way
around the world in order to infect half the pigs in China with African swine flu.
Smithfield is the largest producer of pork in the US. Smithfield is owned by a Chinese firm.
So China is making up for their lack of domestic pork by buying their own US pork. How would
this risky venture benefit the US? Yet this was the accusation labelled against the US by
many Chinese. With zero proof.
The timing of this pandemic is very beneficial to the deep state, and the MSM is hyping
the heck out of it; and the CDC et al are pumping up the numbers to make it seems as bad as
possible. It's like they WANT a global pandemic. To crash the market and make DJT look bad?
That is what the Biden for drooling pres campaign videos are hyping already.
If there is a germ war going on, it is China doing it to its communist shit-hole self. I
don't know why anybody trades with them. The Chinese state literally kills Uyghurs and Falun
Gong and steals their organs, but they have favored nation trading status? wtf
It is fairly congruent with my own writeup from a few weeks back. Although I did not go so
far as to definitively endorse any particular theory. The idea of this all being an American
strike on China is the interesting hypothesis to me and fits my understanding of how
America's geopolitical toolbox might work best. There is also a case to be made that the
blowback stateside is a feature not a bug.
The United States could come out ahead in terms of the great game with China. But only if
it can play its cards correctly.
Ultimately, what enough people think about this whole situation is what will define
outcomes and right now things are on track for the bulk of the Chinese population to think
that this is an American attack and for a significant number of Americans to believe that
this is either accidental or deliberate Chinese action.
I think those popular attitudes are very valuable to their respective governments.
Devil's advocacy is always an important intellectual activity, but you seemed to have pretty
much pointed out the hole in your grand theory yourself.
If we're going to imagine the US gov't apparatus is competent enough to start the virus in
China, one would have to presume (if their collective IQ's approach anywhere near 90) that
they would also set up for the contingency that it might come to the US too.
Imagining otherwise is akin to thinking the US top brass have the intelligence of some of
those bonehead crooks who sometimes make the news for their stupid (and funny) attempts at
crime. The US top brass might be dumb, but c'mon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn5CvDgaZSc
I think we can safely assume that Lieber's arrest by the FBI had been prompted by the
coronavirus epidemic, but anything more is mere speculation. Those now accusing China of
having created the coronavirus might surely suggest that our intelligence agencies
discovered that the Harvard professor had been personally involved with that deadly
research. But I think a far more likely possibility is that Lieber began to wonder
whether the epidemic in China might not be the result of an American biowarfare attack, and
was perhaps a little too free in voicing his suspicions, thereby drawing the wrath of
our national security establishment.
Or alternatively, who would a laboratory whistleblower turn to other than a respected
Harvard professor, who would understand the technical aspects, and who he may actually
already have known and trusted?
Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then
just a few weeks later large portions of the Iran's ruling elites became infected by a
mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any
rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
An irresistible add-on like Larry Silverstein's extra insurance cover and payout.
One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that
reports of the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and
orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media to identify
the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country.
Again similar to 9/11 with an instant media explanation trumpeted around the world (no
investigation necessary).
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the
deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese
government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of
precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the
earliest knowledge of future fires.
Agreed – they really messed it up – and it would be a world class irony if it
was their own virus that wrecks the US economy.
The Chinese embassy in Serbia is an interesting side story. However, as much as I disagreed
with why we were there, another Clinton abuse of office, China was apparently participating
as a combatant providing crucial signals support to the Serbian military. Topped off by
handling sensitive F117 residuals that we wanted destroyed. Or perhaps only some of US, given
various conflicts of interests in both Clinton globalism and sharing/planned obsolescence by
arms makers .
CV19
The "US did it" is a possibility that certainly should be addressed in the continuum of many
possibilities. I certainly would look for linkages between BHO
administration/Gates/academia/DeepGreen/China. China certainly does not act innocent,
covering up the early patients' stories and physical evidence a la our JFK scale.
As for US incompetence, the globalist media favors CCP; liberalism; Big Tech; Big
Medicine; the Democratic Party; along with the O/Clintonista FDA and CDC, have done
everything possible to hamstring accurate CV19 information amongst the citizenry, and
specifically against Trump. Huge TDS.
Months of near total shutdown on IV vitamin C, bowel tolerance dosing of vitamin C, high
dose vitamin D, quercetin and orthomolecular cocktails for prophylaxis and treatment. As well
as censorship and savage attacks on people trying to evolve the HCQ+AZM+zinc cocktail.
Prof Lieber's greatest "crime" is probably because he is responsible for saving untold
numbers of potential infectees, at least in the early stages https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2004/10/sensor-detects-identifies-single-viruses/
ie his work on virus detection & identification is why the Chinese government was able to
deal with the pandemic so quickly & effectively.
A bioweapon does Not have to have a high bodycount to work as intended; weapons of mass
destruction – even nukes (despite western brainwashing that they "ended WWII") –
have very few military applications and primarily target civilians.
Their main effect is disruption & demoralisation; in this Covid-19 has succeeded beyond
possible expectations.
The USA has patents for coronaviruses going back to 2003, post-SARS: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7220852B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10130701B2/en https://patents.justia.com/patent/10130701
Whilst these are Not the Covid-19 variant, it goes to show that they can indeed be
vat-grown.
Even should the current coronavirus be a natural mutation, it can still be weaponised.
Many of the most fearsome pathogens such as smallpox, anthrax and the bubonic plague are also
natural-born killers. Supposedly they have been eradicated from the face of the planet,
safely existing only in military laboratories around the globe, for research purposes of
course.
The circumstantial evidence that Cov19 is a bioattack is enormous, and the likelihood of
US origin is pretty damning. The US government will be desperate to point fingers everywhere
else, and is using the tried&tested trial by media +obfuscation, rather than logic and
reasoning.
If hard proof of US culpability manifests then the appropriate level of China's response will
be "nuclear" (I don't mean actual nukes, but something like dumping US treasury bonds).
Meanwhile, the disease naturally leaks back into the US
How?
Is there specific information tracing this "leak" to China?
Is it possible -- is it even conceivable -- that the same logic that you detailed to tip
the scales in favor of US biowarfare against China can also suggest that the bioweapon did
not "naturally leak" into the US but was deliberately deployed against the people of the
United States?
Follow the money: the goal of (speculated) biowar against China was, as you wrote,
not to kill but to economically devastate a formidable competitor-turned-adversary (same
thing the US has been doing to Iran by sanctions since at least 1995 with Clinton's executive
order, made permanent by the D'Amato Iran Libya Sanctions Act).
The goal of biowar against the people of the USA is to cripple the economy, to Weimarize
American commerce and enable those left standing to scoop up the life's work and investment
of millions of entrepreneurs for pennies on the dollar, with the added travesty that those
left standing are supplied with dollars by the very taxpayers whose assets are being
snapped up!
The Chinese government lied and continues to lie about the virus.
The Wuhan leadership knew in mid December and arrested doctors who leaked the info and
destroyed lab records.
Xi likely knew no later than January 1.
There are thousands of wet markets in southern China and SE Asia, but only the one a short
walk from the Wuhan Institute of Virology allegedly was the source.
Chinese researchers worked in America to develop this exact virus, adding HIV to SARS, and
left in 2015 to work in Wuhan.
Chinese national was arrested in 2018 in Detroit while carrying live SARS and MERS
viruses.
Chinese scientists working in Canada were kicked out in 2019 for shipping stolen
biological material to Wuhan.
It was developed in the lab, but I suspect the release was accidental. The cover up and
letting the virus spread around the world was intentional.
Xi is fighting to maintain power. He might not succeed
The US government did fund the research of those Chinese researchers at UNC. They
continued to fund them in China.
China's economy had already stalled. Then it lost the trade war. Banks were failing.
Foreign companies were moving out. Xi used the opportunity of the virus to avoid the disaster
of economic collapse and to hurt the rest of the world after the Century of Humiliation,
China would rather take the rest of the world down rather than go down alone.
Although nearby East Asian nations such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore had
been at greatest risk and were among the first infected, their competent and energetic
responses .
Japan's reaction to the Corona virus is/was not competent and energetic, unless you want
to count the way how the Japanese government dealt with the cruise ship 'Diamond Princess' as
a resounding success. Send army recruits without protection to the ship, start with 10
patients, quarantine the entire ship, end up with 765 infected individuals, and then send
people [tourists] home. I live on one of the 4 big islands and there is no lock down here.
Below is a picture I took just now [what they refer to as a Junior High School], Tuesday, 21
April, 2020 ~16:00 P.M. fro the window of my apartment.
Judge for yourself.
No masks. No distance. No governmental guidance. Japan is run by bureaucrats and it
shows.
Thanks for the article. It was a pleasure to read.
According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the
seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action
until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly
multiplied.
This also fits in with an alternative explanation, which is admittedly wild but which I
would say is considerably less wild than the bioweapon-blowback theory:
J.Ross has proposed [ ] this whole thing may be a Chinese Communist Party 'Hoax,' in the
sense that while the 'new' virus is real (there are always 'new viruses'), the reaction was
at least 1000x what was necessary to deal with a bad flu strain and that China played it up
to scare people, especially the US. China's actions (mass shutdown) triggered a series of
events that scared everyone. But none of the data we have corroborate the Mass Killer
Apocalypse Virus fears. So what was this?
[MORE]
[This] theory would have it that the CCP's sudden about-face on The New Virus -- a
literally overnight about-face [Jan. 20] from "not a big deal" to "shut down a region with
60 million people, cue the Virus Apocalypse Movie film reels and the hazmat suits" -- was a
calculated bid to hurt the US and to hurt Western economies. By the time of the unexpected
about-face, they had 100% certainty it had spread to the US and elsewhere, AND that these
countries had the kind of media that would go into hysteria mode AND had the technological
capacity to do "testing."
This theory would attribute to the CCP a calculated bid to create a false virus panic
with plausible deniability ("so sorry! we didn't have the data! it was early; we reacted
the best we could; and hey even the highly-neutral WHO are calling us heroes") which would
scare people and trigger a series of events that throw the US and its satellites in Western
Europe into chaos, making the latter easier pickings for Belt & Road and Huawi
colonization, etc.; countries dazed by a mass-hysteria-recession are suddenly beggars, not
choosers.
The Chinese Communist Party's calculation would have been, on that fateful 'about-face'
evening, that the West was much less ready to handle a panic than Communist China would be.
It was a risk to them but it worked.
If this theory is right, in fact, the CCP succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. A case
of the dog finally catching the car bumper; what the heck now? The results for China's
regime itself are unclear, given that the cynical triggering of mass-hysteria-recessions in
major trading partners equates to a drought that sinks all boats.
The alternative, and many would say more plausible theory, is that the Chinese Communist
Party panicked, too, and reacted highly irrationally, taking a sledgehammer to a handful of
mosquitoes and then salting the earth where the flattened bodies of the mosquitoes landed.
Or a synthesis of the two may be true. It's hard to disentangle motivations. But the
unexplained 'about-face' is real and needs explanation.
In the end, does it matter? Even if we take the more innocuous version at face value: the
virus had nothing to do with bioweapons and simply mutated naturally from bats to humans, the
response of the West has been utterly atrocious either way.
We're now seeing a Yellow Peril 2.0 campaign ramped up at astonishing speed. The so-called
"liberal class", posturing as tolerant and sophisticated, is now trying to run on Trump's
right flank on China. Joe Biden's campaign ads on China are Cold War-style cariactures.
I've been seeing the consequences play out even in neutral places. I frequent quite a few
technology-related subreddits and the unmitigated hatred of China is truly a sight to be
hold. Even the most tangential topics get hijacked by zealots. For all the talk about how the
media's power is supposedly dimishing, the cattle is still very much influenced by what the
MSM tells them to think.
I hope Unz can syndicate some stories from The Grayzone, which I find to be the only
publication on the left which isn't in thrall with the DNC. Even Democracy Now! and Jacobin
are pushing state department scare stories on China. The total collapse of the American left
over the last 10-15 years is a greatly undertold story.
The alleged report by National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) is the most damning
piece of evidence if the report does exist. Here is the official denial:
"As a matter of practice, the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment
publicly on specific intelligence matters," Day said. "However, in the interest of
transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting
about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence
Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI
product exists."
So we are in the "Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied."
territory.
What is important is not that Channel 12 (in Israel) followed the ABC article but that it
added an extra bit of information which was not in the original ABC article that the report
was passed to Israel and that the IDF held a first discussion about it still in November.
Fooling some ABC reporter by offering her Trump damaging leak that Trump knew but did
nothing could be easy but getting a confirmation from Israel where presumably sources in the
IDF had to be involved it does not seem as a simple get Trump operation.
I don't think people understand the extent of collaboration between US and China including
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) , It actually goes back to the early 1980's with
cooperation between USAMIID and WIV on Hanta Viruses. More recently extensive collaboration
between China and US on gain of function studies and virus hunting, especially with corona
viruses from bats. Ralph Baric UNC and Shih Zhengli from Wuhan have published papers together
. Funding of joint studies from USAMIID, NIAID, DARPA. NIH, etc. George Gao the Director of
Chinese CDC participated in the Event 201 simulation. There are many more ties. Google Wuhan
Biolake -a lot of global biotech companies there.
I dont think anyone can know the extent of the disease in China. After all a super
spreading virus from as early as November circulating in heavily polluted Wuhan, a city more
populated than NYC , which was also a major domestic and international transportation hub
with millions leaving the city for other destinations in China and internationally in the
weeks before Wuhan was locked down just before the New Year when everything shuts down for 2
weeks anyways. And yet the disease only spreads to Europe and US but not to any degree
outside Hubei province? Not believable.
And as for US deaths from COVID-19 being undercounted. Where is the evidence for that. CDC
has basically informed everyone to count a case as COVID based on suspicions (no positive
test needed). If a heart disease patient of 80 years old has a heart attack while also having
pneumonia its COVID-19. And those tests, they haven't been validated. There are many
different tests. We don't know the specificity of any of them. Very likely there are many
false positives. Also if a hospital can collect more money from medicare with a covid-19
diagnosis, guess whats going to be diagnosed more often.
So I am skeptical.
Now 30,000 deaths attributed to covid in 2 weeks is a lot. In a normal 2 week period there
would be 110,000 total deaths. So have there been 140,000 deaths in total, or just 110, 000
deaths with 30, 000 called Covid deaths? I dont know.
I actually expect more deaths than normal even without covid. Suicides. More deaths from
heart attacks and stroke due to financial stress and people delaying treatment out of fear of
getting the virus. More cancer deaths for same reason. Increased alcoholism and obesity
should trigger more deaths in the next few months.
One has to consider this an event on an international scale on a par with 9/11 in
magnitude and impact on freedoms. Curious how WHO declares pandemic on 3/11. Coincidence I
guess.
Lot of players in the Virus Industrial Complex stand to make a lot of money in coming
years as a result. The Globalists will push through digital ID and mandatory vaccination for
international travelers if not everyone and the Global Health Security Alliance (GHSA) will
be strengthened. The right will get tighter immigration controls and more bailouts for Big
Business. The left gets a taste of universal income and perhaps medicare for all (2009
pandemic helped get Obamacare approved). And the technocrats will get more toys for the
Surveillance and Tracking Industry with Big Data monitoring all the chipped individuals
health among other things. Cashless society to minimize virus spread pushed through so all
transactions can be logged. Everyone wins but the little guy.
And you can bet the Greenies will capitalize on this
Since the Virus Industrial Complex took over the Public Health Agencies in the 1970's we
have had endless Virus Scares, Swine Flu in 1976, Hepatitis B (1978) , AIDS in 1980,
MS-ME/CFS outbreaks (1984), HPV/Cervical Cancer (1984), HHV-6 (1986) , SARS (2003) , Bird Flu
(2005), Swine Flu (2009) , MERs (2012) Zika (2014) Measles (2014) Ebola (2015) and now
COVID-2019
See a pattern here?
We got virus finders/makers in academia and security /military agencies in the interest of
biowarfare defense and science working with vaccine and drug companies who receive funds to
develop treatments for these newly found/made viruses, in some cases before any human has
been infected. Reminds me of the time when those working for anti-virus software companies
were suspected of generating computer viruses to sell more software and be fastest to provide
the patch (since they created the virus). In any case, certainly a lot of interlocking
conflict of interests among members of the Virus Industrial Complex.
The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) of Ft.
Detrick fame has been partnered with the Wuhan Virlogy Lab since 1981. The Wuhan Lab has also
been partnered with college basketball powerhouse Duke University. Check out the Lab's
website. This facilityis a diagnostic lab not a bioweapons lab. The USA has bioweapons labs
located on the Chinese and Russian borders in Kazakhstan. Oh what a tangled web we weave .
I just want to say that we need to distinguish between conspiracy theory and conspiracy
hypothesis.
The out of Wuhan lab is a conspiracy hypothesis, or much closer to it. There is no
plausible benefit to the Chinese, and saying 'a disgruntled employee may have dun it to get
at dem dictators' is just speculation in the sky.
On the other hand the anectodal evidence for it being US action – the obvious
benefit, the time and place of the outbreak, the military games team, the precognition, as
well as how the CDC is not tracing patient zero in the US (if it was in China in Nov, surely
it could have been in the US then too, and then the whole propaganda story falls apart)..
Even the US crying wolf again, after so many times, is almost enough for me.
They are all anecdotal of course, but perfectly in line with the MO and historical
practice of the US government.
I now thank my friends when they call me a conspiracy theorist loon, as I point out that
Russiagate, Skripal, and so many of the government lines are pure conspiracy hypotheses
– one step further away from Kansas than my take!
Thanks for this first attempt to dig through the growing tale of corona. However, as we are
still in the fog of war, there can be no more then a preliminary assessment.
My take is still that Corona is far less of a threat then commonly believed, and that it
has been deliberately saddled with diverse agendas, so in any countries the leadership have
no interest in telling the truth.
1) I think there is sufficient proof that need not be repeated, and
2) it is better for everyones' mental health not to believe in killer viruses that force us
to abdicate even our most basic freedoms.
I believe that either a) the Chinese leadership thought that they were being attacked and
undertook their lockdown in good faith, or b) they played an outright GAMBIT to force western
countries into their own, more economically damaging lockdowns. The clue would be that China
is so strong that it can weather the blow, while Europe and to a lesser extend the US
cannot.
The director of the Chinese CDC, Dr Gao was part of Event 201 and studied in Oxford. Are
there dual loyalties in China? And then, in which direction?
Possibly, something minor was indeed released as a bioweapon, before, calculably, western
government incompetence and hysteria took over. I also believe that Israel used corona as a
screen for biowarfare-targeted killings in Iran, whose case is definitely a story apart.
The Russian lockdown can be explained by the serious assumption that if they did not lock
down they would be accused as the authors of a biowarfare attack on the US. At this point,
antirussian hostility in the West is so severe that they had to comply!
The coordinated actions across opposed political systems CAN be explained, and it does not
take a nutter to do it.
The majority of the American public still believe that a small group of Islamic
fundamentalists wielding only box cutters atomized the World Trade Center into dust –
in a cartoonish act of sorcery. If the lie is so big it has to become believable
– that amount of cognitive dissonance is simply just too much to bear. An already duped
population of such magnitude doesn't have much of a chance of coming out of this kind of
stupor, especially under the bubble of the most powerful propaganda machine in the history of
propaganda, therefore, I don't think this story is going to go anywhere.
Hi Ron! Your article for me is a breath of fresh air! Amidst what you accurately call the fog
of war it has been very hard to discern precisely what is going on in regards to this virus
situation. It's been extremely difficult to assert the "truth" or the "red pill" as some call
it when it comes to this pandemic. For that reason in fact, I would caution everyone that
cares about having a well calibrated "perception" sensor to tread with extreme caution when
it comes to this topic, as there isn't nearly enough evidence in any direction to assume one
theory over another. Faithfully adopting any one theory at the moment can only lead you to
become the equivalent of a 9/11 truther (the kind that obsesses about missiles, physics,
instead of the paper trail leading directly to Israel and Saudi Arabia).
Having said that there are just too many statistical improbabilities to simply brush aside
the Bioweapon possibility. I know quite a few influential figures in the alternative media
have unequivocally rejected all Bioweapon theories (specially the theory that the US/Israel
could ever conspire to spread a bioweapon) which is why I am very glad to see someone of your
Intellectual authority provide a credible well thought-out case supporting this increasingly
unpopular position (even in alternative circles). I get it, there is ZERO evidence to show
the US/Israel or even China are behind covid-19. But there is equally ZERO evidence to
support the official story (which is completely ridiculous until they provide more details)
about the guy that supposedly ate the covid bat.
With that disclaimer I will freely speculate below but keep in mind this is all
conjecture:
1. Anyone that claims is "impossible" for the US to let lose a bioweapon that would
destroy the US economy and kill Americans for the sake of hurting their "perceived" enemies
more needs to seriously examine EVERYTHING we know about the rulers of the American empire.
The first obvious question is who exactly rules the American empire? Are they righteous
rulers that make decisions based on what is best for the American people? The answer to this
question is a clear and resounding NO. The rulers of America follow a religion that states
anyone that is not part of their tribe is "cattle" and dispensable. On this grounds alone the
Rulers of America would have very little issue releasing a virus that kills (mostly) "cattle"
Americans. And then comes to "why would they tank their own economy" objection. To this
objection I'll simply point out that AMERICA IS RULED through financial coercion. A crisis is
very good for the rulers of America because they get to FURTHER consolidate their power over
America. Gaining more power over America, hurting your geopolitical rivals and ultimately
using the panic and confusion to pass draconian and more authoritarian rules are all
INCENTIVES for American elites to release a bioweapon.
Lastly, to everyone that says it's impossible for the American elites to tank their
economy and/or kill Americans in order to achieve a political objective has forgotten about
9/11! Our current rulers in Tel-Aviv paid a few saudi mercenaries to fly two airplanes into
the twin towers to kill a few thousands of people in order to go to war! Of course the
atrocity does not end there. A lot more Americans died as consequence of 9/11, even more were
affected economically and even a lot more lost civil liberties and standing in American
society. Right then and there you have a blatant and relatively recent event that almost word
for word matches the consequences of this virus. Considering this as a possible escalation of
tactics by the US/Israel against their enemies is a possibility. The US did drop the nuke of
an innocent, already defeated enemy. What makes anyone so sure this is beyond their "moral
code"
2.China decides to strongly stick by Iran, suddenly the Hong Kong protest springs out of
control, 50 percent of their pork is wiped out by a weird disease and now of course, the
mother of all "unforeseen" events kick starts a cascade of negative consequences for
China.
This is by far the most alarming set of "coincidences" of all. I remember last year
reading the Iran-China saga, as the Chinese refused to stop buying Iranian oil even as Japan
stopped buying oil after a Japanese tanker "coincidentally" was hit by a bomb in the Persian
gulf. Soon enough (if I am recalling correctly) a strange disease wipes out 50% of Chinese
pork causing possible food insecurity. Then came the Hong Kong riots that although started
for very legit reasons by the people of Hong Kong, soon enough had full on CIA spooks
speaking in the US congress, attacking people on the streets of Hong Kong! Lastly against all
odds these horrible events are somewhat weathered China and suddenly we have a pandemic that
not only damages China in the world stage, but serves as the perfect excuse to possibly
sanction, attack and possibly destabilize china.
Maybe I am completely paranoid or skeptical, but what are the chances of such a string of
events? Is there some data I am not privy to that can explain some of these coincidences? Is
there something to Chinese cultural norms that could explain these strange viruses literally
wrecking their economy and political stability? What are the chances all of these viruses
occur in a very short period and their severity and consequences directly correlated to
China's defiance of US orthodoxy on Iran/US hegemony?
Unlike some people here, I do not share the opinion that the Chinese government is some
sort of Angel or ideological ally. They are a government that ultimately acts on it's
interests and it's full of flaws (including exerting degrees of tyranny on their own people).
Having said that you don't have to be a communist to notice how strange this sequence of
events truly is. Bad things keep happening to China as it opposes US Hegemony. It might even
be statistically impossible for some of these things to happen by "chance", but maybe China
is just really unlucky, right?
But I do think that a careful exploration of previous Sino-American clashes over the
last couple of decades may provide some useful insight into the relative credibility of
those two governments as well as that of our own media.
During the Korean war, China used their Cats Paw North to invade the South then the
Chinese army intervened under the pretense of being volunteers. Although Chinese ground
troops were not directly involved, Vietnam was otherwise a rerun of Korea with China not only
defeating the US but forcing it to cease isolating China. Carter issued a presidential order
for officials to aid Chinese growth., and within a few decades as the internal unrest Western
pundits predicted failed to amount to much, it became obvious that China's growth was at the
expense of the workers of the US made jobless and suffering deaths of despair not least by
illegal synthetic opioids from China. But then, by the begining of new millennium all
manufacturing was in China, including the burgeoning fortunes of the already wealthy, who
rose on a high tide of inequality. If history was any guide a new Gilded Age must end with a
visit from the Four Horsemen. Pressaged by the appearance of the SARS-CoV virus eighteen
years before, SARS-CoV-2 appears likely to end China's run of successes, because of the
disruption it has caused to the US.
"The closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 is a bat virus named RaTG13, "However, RaTG13
was sampled from a different province of China (Yunnan) to where COVID-19 first appeared
and the level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent to
an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change."
The important thing about the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not its lethality, which is about an
order of magnitude less than the original SARS-CoV of 2002, but rather SARS-CoV-2's extreme
transmissibility which is two orders of magnitude greater than its predecessor's. Anthony
Fauci warned the incoming US government administration in January 2017 of a newly mutated
coronavirus with extreme transmissibility and, apart from the greatly reduced lethality of
the massively more contagious SARS-CoV-2 virus, that is exactly what happened.
Unlike other nations, China had had no advance warning of the nature or existence of the
deadly new disease, and therefore faced unique obstacles.
They had the WHO and Fauci's public statements. Much more usefully China had the 2002
epidemic, caused by SARS-CoV which originated in China that year. In Singapore, there were
238 cases and 33 deaths from the SARS outbreak, in 2015 the worlds largest MERS-CoV outbreak
occurred in South Korea, and only the other year Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said it was
only a matter of time before Singapore had its first MERS-CoV case, so they had to be well
prepared. These countries were all set up and waiting to eradicate a disease just like
COVID-19.
A decision by elements of our national security establishment to wage biological warfare
in hopes of maintaining American world power would certainly have been an extremely
reckless act
Excuse me? With the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus having a puny death rate yet
colossal infectiousness a centralised authoritarian state like China would be relatively
speaking best able to suppress it. A bioweapon would be tested on Whites as well as Chinese
before being released. There is no way in Hell that they would not understand that releasing
the SARS-CoV-2 virus in China would result in it sweeping through the US.
If an "out-of-control disease epidemic occurring in the Wuhan area" back in November 2019 was
the same corona virus, then toss the idea it was intentionally timed to mess with the Chinese
New Year in 2020. But then figure the deaths in China have been greatly under reported.
Furthermore, China may well have allowed carriers to travel abroad, especially to USA once
the outbreak was well under way.
However, as regards the whole biocrime aspect of the corona virus pandemic we really
cannot rely much on either US government/media or the Chinese. And if it was a bioweapon, who
among "us" would be so keen to target Iran where over ten percent of their parliament got
sick very early on? That is an Israel First kind of agenda. Or maybe it was Japan? Good
investigators keep an open mind.
Note (This is not a subject change) Over the last several decades the American public
health system has regularly failed to adequately warn our citizens about the causes and risks
of numerous epidemics that have claimed many millions of lives. Or were all sugar drenched
foods advertised as "Fat Free" really a "healthy choice"? So I do not quite understand why
Ron Unz considers the corona virus the one instance of stellar government incompetence, as if
to imply the current lock down has not nearly severe enough?!? Thank god he did not invoke
the party line panacea of the Gates vaccine!
Meanwhile, what about Kushner's fast tracking mass surveillance? Will it only be
temporary? Will it only be used for containing CV19? Ha. Let's all step in the van with the
nice man who will give us a teddy bear
On top of this alleged biocrime, examples are abounding where the opportunists are eager
to grab more power, and make killings of a sort, not least of which are the banks, Wall
Street and the war mongers.
Remember, the farther the tide goes out, bigger the tsunami that charges back in.
I don't buy it. If the US was going to go to the extreme length of releasing a highly
contagious virus into the territory of its new Deep State certified arch-enemy China, the
risk of contagioning yourself is extremely high. Especially with global trade and travel as
it is these days. Preparations would have been made in advance to make sure it would not blow
back by putting appropriate people and methods in place. Its too easy to blame incompetence
for this oversight.
If you're looking for plotters, look no further than Wall St. They are making out like
bandits in the latest bailout.
@dimples Unless of course the blow back is a feature and not a bug, which it must be
admitted, it usually is. If the US economy takes an enormous hit due to blow back, which it
has, then China is set up as the next ultra-bad guy to replace Russia, Russia Russia!. It
then becomes the new fixation of the Deep State's wet dreams, a new Cold War where plenty of
money goes down the toilet into the MIC's pockets and plenty of opportunity for the heroic
Special Ops types to keep the Hollywood grist mill grinding.
The original source went to great lengths to make it clear a massacre did in fact occur
that night/morning, only it was taking place in other areas of Beijing and the victims were
mostly protesting workers, not students. (At least 300 of them, by Chinese official figures.)
A person reading Unz's summary will come out believing this did not take place, although the
Chinese themselves don't really deny it did.
@dimples This is a reasonable view in my opinion. If you look at previous US false flag
events, they come at periods when new directions are needed to perpetuate the US war
machine's supposed usefulness. The 1990 Gulf War was clearly a set up that came just as the
old Cold War was ending and prepared the way for 911 and the Iraq War, which capitalized on
the US bases that had been set up during the Gulf War.
Currently the Russia, Russia Russia! narrative is petering out. The US Deep State wants to
perpetuate it but the Euros don't really want a war with Russia, a huge market for them. So
continuation of Russia Russia Russia! risks a split with the Euros.
But China, a nice new up and coming enemy there. Yum yum. So Covid-19 could be a US false
flag effort in that direction it has to be admitted. Damage to US economy? Who cares, the
Deep State doesn't. Its immune, rolling as it does in government loot.
My issue with the 'it's not china's fault"argument revolves around the secrecy in the
beginning. And then the arrests of those sounding the alarm inside China. One would think
that if this was from elsewhere the CCP would be screeching bloody murder from day one NOT
trying to downplay it and outright lie about it. Didn't China use the same playbook with
SARS? Silence and then misdirection.
The actual number is 43000 dead Americans. The China narrative lacks hard evidence. There is
mounting evidence that COVID-19 pandemic originated in the U.S. and may have been a terror
attack perpetuated by the U.S., which is pursuing a massive expansion of biological weapons
program. According to scholar Kevin Barrett: "It also may be a coincidence that the primary
U.S. bioweapons lab, Fort Detrick, was shut down in summer 2019 over fears that weaponized
pathogens might escape. It may be a coincidence that absurdly under-performing U.S. military
athletes came to Wuhan for the World Military Games in October and have since been accused by
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs of being the source of the COVID-19 pandemic. It may be a
coincidence that at the same time those 'athletes' were in Wuhan, the World Economic Forum,
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, and other Establishment titans
were hosting a pandemic simulation called Event 201".
Furthermore, "It may be purely coincidental that the virus appeared in Wuhan, home of
China's biggest biodefense laboratory, and China's biggest transportation hub, just in time
for the Chinese New Year, when most Chinese travel to visit relatives. Likewise, it could be
coincidental that the real-life COVID-19 pandemic almost perfectly mimics Lockstep, the
Rockefeller Foundation's recipe for a global police state emerging on the back of a
coronavirus-style pandemic", added Kevin Barrett. The U.S. regime unleashed this disease on
the world, and the U.S. regime has to be held accountable.
Your suspicions on this matter echo my own. I remember the Russian Government warning a
few years back that Western NGO's inside Russia had been discovered to be collecting DNA
samples of Russian citizens and that it was the opinion of the Russian Intelligence Services
that this information was being collected ny Western Intelligence Services for the purpose of
future biological warfare. When this outbreak in China made international news I remembered
the warning from the Russian Government. Then came the outbreak in Iran that killed many
Iranian political figures. Quite a damned coincidence if there ever was one?
If you ever run for state or national office and are on the ballot (or not) herr in
California you have my vote.
Look at a very partial list of the Chinese history of lying, almost by habit, just
in the last two decades alone!
China lied in 1999 about "massacres" committed by Serbia and bombed Belgrade to set up the
narcomafia organ-smuggling so called state of "Kosovo".
China lied about Saddam Hussein having WMDs and invaded Iraq in 2003.
China lied about "imminent massacres" and "Viagra rape" in Libya in 2011, and deliberately
misused a UN Security Council resolution to bomb and destroy that country and hand it over to
slave trading jihadi headchopper gangs.
China lied about Syria using chemical weapons from 2013 onwards, armed and trained and
financed terrorist gangs, conducted missile strikes on the country, and continues to occupy
and steal oil from East Syria.
China organised a blatant Nazi coup in Ukraine in 2014 and lied about it being a "popular
democratic revolution".
China murdered Iran's top general Qassem Soleimani in 2020 and lied about him being about
to conduct terrorist attacks when he was actually on a peace mission.
With just this partial list of Chinese lies in the last two decades alone, who would
believe anything China has to say?!?!?
Interesting article.
Especially, interesting for me, the aggressive arrest of a Harvard Prof' of chemistry for
technical irregularities in Grant paperwork, coincidentally at the time the virus emerges.
(we assume he personally wrote up those applications ? Imagine if everyone who had
written up a Grant application, which contained an error or two, in the US were to be dragged
off in chains by the FBI ? )
And also interesting the Belgrade Chinese embassy attack -- Mr Unz's materials put it in a
totally new perspective for me.
I suspect US gov been planning this attack for years. SARS outbreak in 2003, I suspect, was a
test, to test Chinese gov's response to bio attack. Note that SARS virus and the current
covid-19 virus aren't that different to be considered different viruses, hence covid-19 also
known as SARS-2. But the difference, SARS-1 had "kill switch", it wouldn't be able to infect
humans after a while.
During 2003 SARS, China acted swiftly causing the virus to be contained within China and
according to US gov simulation, covid-19 should've been the same, contained within China. But
China didn't act as swiftly as expected, causing the virus leaking back to US, this is why US
gov is furious, had China acted earlier, the virus wouldn't travel back to US.
The killing of Iranian general, it wasn't act of recklessness, it was diversion, so that
the Iran gov would be occupied by it while ignoring coronavirus spreading silently in their
country.
Ron, my friend (sort of), if you think you have trouble now what with COVID-1, impending
national bankruptcy, and a general flow of information that seems to have been some of the
most creative fiction in our lives, just wait until you manage to invite China into US civil
disputes. Our present difficulties are as nothing compared difficulties subsequent to direct
Chinese involvement in civil matters.
Historically, third party intervention quite often leads to foreign domination. Examples: US
in Afghanistan, US in Iraq (twice). Both time, native citizens thought it a great idea to
invite the US in.
And why do I say this? Well, you're presenting China as morally wronged. In your frame of
reference, that's an absolute, more important than anything else. But it's not the only
interpretation. Perhaps China committed an act of war by giving tactical help to the Serbs.
Perhaps that violation became severe when China gathered F117A wreckage. Perhaps China is
lucky that bombing the embassy was all that happened, and we are all lucky that things did
not escalate. This is actually less of a fantasy than your account, which is at best a bit
one sided, almost a "point and sputter".
In the US, such accounts are the precursor to advocacy. You should consider carefully the
consequences of advocacy in this case.
While I think the first part of the article is very interesting, and I acknowledge the
theoretical benefits that could exist from the US using COVID as a bioweapon, I find the
argument unpersuasive for the following reasons:
Obvious blowback : If the US infected China with a highly spreadable disease, why
did we not put in more aggressive measures to stop it from spreading in the US? Otherwise,
what's the point of hurting your enemy if you also get hurt? If the US was going to attack
China with a bioweapon, why would they not engineer a genetic/ethnic bioweapon that targeted
Han Chinese, as oppose one that could also kill everyone? Seeing the economic damage this has
done to us, it seems unlikely that such a contagious weapon would be the one an actor would
pick, as it would risk damaging their own homeland.
China has always been a hotbed of disease : A third of China's history has them
facing an epidemic of some sort. The 1957 "Asian flu" , 1968 "Hong Kong flu" and 1977
"Russian flu" all started in China. The black death probably started in China. Seems far more
likely that recent disease outbreaks are part of a historic trend, or gross Chinese
conditions, rather than a bioweapon attack.
On April 11, 2020, Gilad Atzmon published here an excellent article titled "A Viral Pandemic
or A Crime Scene?", in which he suggests circumstances have now created 'a paradigm change'
in the perception of the current viral pandemic.
He states: "Since we do not know its provenance, we should treat the current epidemic as a
potentially criminal act as well as a medical event. We must begin the search for the
perpetrators who may be at the centre of this possible crime of global genocidal
proportions." I concur.
All Americans (and others) who believe in China's culpability for the emergence of this
virus, should welcome such an investigation. And Mr. Pompeo, who so firmly plants the full
responsibility on China's doorstep, would receive vindication of his claims. I believe that
the governments and the people of China, Italy, Spain, France, and Iran, especially would
like to know the results of such a criminal investigation.
All nations of the world should band together now, and proceed jointly with this endeavor.
It needn't be approached with presumption of cause or intent, but simply to uncover the
entire truth of this event. That will be sufficient, and it is possible the results of this
worldwide investigation will prompt others into similar past events which have to date gone
unquestioned and unexamined.
I believe there are yet many truths about COVID-19 (and many other epidemics) still to
emerge. Perhaps one of the many people with personal knowledge of the source and method of
distribution will be sufficiently brave to come forward, perhaps another Edward Snowdon or
Chelsea Manning. We will then see how truly the US treasures its whistle-blowers.
**
The US needs to answer this question: HOW could US 'intelligence sources' possibly have
known in November – or even October – of a potential pandemic of COVID-19 that
would erupt – specifically in Wuhan – two months later? (Or that was already
erupting in Wuhan at the time, unbeknownst to the Chinese?). I believe the entire world would
demand the answer to this.
**
In early March the US government declared as classified all COVID-19 information, with all
communication to be rerouted through the White House and coordinated with NSC officials. Only
specified individuals with security clearance are permitted to attend secret meetings, with
no mobile phones or computers allowed. Excluded staff members claimed they were told virus
information was classified "because it had to do with China". The US needs to explain the
need for such extreme secrecy (while condemning China for lack of transparency), and how
coping with a domestic virus epidemic would involve China.
China, Italy, and several other nations in Asia and Europe have documented proof that
COVID-19 was circulating in their populations for several months before the outbreak in
Wuhan. And there are many, many reports, including from physicians, that infections in the US
were occurring as early as September, of 2019. These claims are too numerous, too detailed,
and too similar to be ignored. Japanese TV and press documented that Japanese tourists
returning from Hawaii were coming home infected with COVID-19 in September.
Why was Dr. Helen Chu issued a threatening "cease and desist" order to stop testing nasal
swabs her flu research team had taken in Washington State from October 2019 onward? The only
possible result would be to prevent the knowledge emerging that the virus had already been
circulating months earlier. As a rule, the reason we don't ask a question privately is
because we already know the answer, and the reason we don't ask the question publicly is
because we don't want anyone else to know the answer.
The US government needs to address the now-certain existence of the virus being widespread
in America and much of the world from September, 2019.
Your globalists and anti American tendencies come out in the first part and the last few
paragraphs of your piece. I didn't read most of the rest of your long winded article.
Bottom line, the Chinks infected the world whether by incompetence or deliberately. They then
intimidated the world with their economic might and with the help of their lackeys in the WHO
and the PC/shit lib elite in the West to keep the flow of infected people to keep coming into
the West. Italy is the tragic example but you can include the rest of the West including
America where that old bag Nancy Pe-lousy was celebrating in China Town in late February.
They, the PRC, should be made to pay reparations.
Not to dismiss Ron Unz's reasoning outright, but it has been claimed that the virus cannot be
the product of direct genomic manipulation.
That's barring any breakthrough in genomic manipulation techniques, a breakthrough that
would have to be kept secret. What these scientists have said is that publicly available
techniques would have left traces in the viruses genome. They claim that any such traces are
absent from the virus's genome.
If that holds up, then the only remaining possibility would be a virus that was bred. It
could have been bred by taking the bat virus and passing it through other types of animals,
selecting for increased virulence. It has been claimed that ferrets would fit the bill since
they have the same ACE2 receptor as humans. Ferrets are easy to handle under laboratory
conditions.
If the US deep state did something like this, then their reasoning would have to be on
what lines? "Let's take this virus that we have bred to dock very easily onto the human ACE2
receptor and set it loose on the Chinese. The virus will devastate them will they still be
able to contain it – so that there won't be too much blow back."
Maybe they misjudged the product of their virus enhancement effort. Still, it needs be
kept in mind what presuppositions have to be put in place for the blow back theory to
work.
I tend to doubt that Chinese leaders have any overwhelming commitment to the truth, and
the reasons for their greater veracity are probably practical ones.
Their reasons are extremely practical:
1. In the absence of national elections they are free to make realistic promises. Since
they have kept every promise they've made to date they have an investment in staying honest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China
,
2. In the absence of factions like our Republicans and Democrats, there's no-one to blame
or pass the buck to, nor lie competitively, nor attack proposed or existing policies. There's
no 'them,' there's only 'us.'
3. The Chinese have always been willing to make sacrifices now for benefits later, which
incentivizes being honest up front.
4. Telling the truth is cheaper in the long run, which is one reason China has the
cheapest government on earth.
5. People are much more willing to cooperate with truth-tellers. Governing is infernally
difficult and being truthful makes it vastly easier.
6. Straight talk, especially from leaders, is attractive (Trump's appeal to his base is
that he occasionally blurts out something true). Asked on TV how it felt to be President, Xi
said, "People who have little experience with power–those who are far from
it–tend to regard politics as mysterious and exciting. But I look past the
superficialities, the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the detention
houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level."
Imagine an American politician talking like that.
7. Smart people tell the truth more often than dumb people. People out of their
intellectual and experiential depth, which our politicians usually are, tend to lie. The
average IQ of China's top 5,000 political leaders is 140 and all of them have 25 years
successful governing experience. They're professionals who are less likely to lie than your
brain surgeon.
@Otto von Komsmark I've read the Chinese are proud that they'll "eat everything under the
sun". China is a very old culture. People might have differing opinions, but I think it
strange that now we have all these cross-overs from the animal kingdom.
@animalogic I think it was Zero-hedge that said the professor lied about his Chinese
funding, making him in effect an agent of China. That's not some burocratic form error.
I think the article is a good summary but the author is also guilty of embellishment. For
example, he used the word "concerted" at least twice, when he has no proof of that.
Having grown up with in the University of Chicago South Side Chicago neighborhood , then
lived in racial, criminal, immigration anarchy New York City 1985-91
, I m rarely if ever surprised about national or international events. The seemingly
incomprehensible views and policies of American, diaspora, Neo Conservative, Hollywood,Wall
Street Jews makes sense in awful ways:
They hate us – want us replaced
Madeline Albright (How did this ugly woman from Central Europe get to be USA Secretary of
State? Why did she demand bombing the sh&$ out of the Serbs to creat a Muslim beach head
in Central Europe ? What is she ? Catholic? Episcopalian Christian? Oh she s Jewish again but
wants to convert to Islam to protest President Trump s proposed Muslim immigration plan).
I look at this Chinese Kung Flu Coronavirus and just note how sensible nationalist
governments/societies in Japan, Taiwan, Hungary, Slovakia and of course Israel handle it:
Strict, zero tolerance immigration, student visas from Coronavirus plague infected areas
– also no millions of Muslim young male migrants.
Pretty much no one in these sensible nationalist societies care if Jews at the SPLC, The
Atlantic Magazine, or National Review, CPAC or the Wall Street Journal scream that they
are:
RACISTS
FASCISTS
NAZIS
It s probably too late in my life to try to learn Hungarian or Japanese.
But I think I/we should all try to learn translations of :
"Shut up Jews"
"Support Israel the homeland of the Jews so go home"
Life isn t complicated .
It s the same with terrible Black AA ga g murders in my Chicago . same with TB, bubonic
plague heroin addicts street people in LA's Skid Row, Gypsy no go places in Romania or
France.
From Ron Unz's article linked above on the Canadian kidnapping of the Huawei billionaire's
daughter, Ron himself said something which points to the perhaps deeper truth here
In that piece our host Ron suggested that the clear best course for China, was to put the
squeeze on USA Jewish billionaire and political king-maker Sheldon Adelson, the big political
funder of Trump and US Republicans etc Adelson being the casino king of Macau who earns most
of his billions there under Chinese authority, Adelson being able to get the Huawei exec
released with just a phone call to Trump, if Chinese would just walk into Sheldon's casinos
and threaten shutdown
China never moved to touch Sheldon's businesses in China, and as I said at the time, this
is because of the deeper frightening truth, that the big powers tend to work together behind
the scenes, even whilst in public disputes, like high school football teams in rivalry
Chinese media accuse the US of creating a bio-weapon, US media accuses China of the same,
the classic rivalry of Orwell's 1984
Both governments share motives of culling pensioners as covid-19 does; distracting from
incipient collapse of excessive economic debt; establishing greater elite surveillance and
control; and enabling elites to buy and own ever larger sectors of global economic life; in
other words the classic 'NWO' of conspiracy talk.
Half a century ago, Antony Sutton proved that 1940s-1970s USA had been transmitting tech
to the old Soviet Union (often via Israel), to create the 'Best Enemy Money Can Buy' the Cold
War was essentially fake, and Putin came out of that, and continues trading favours with the
USA Putin doesn't question 9-11, USA doesn't question false flags in Chechnya etc
Sites like the 'Secret Life of Jews in China' show how European Jews were part of China's
Mao revolution, even becoming politburo members Chabad centres abound in China despite few
nominal Jews there, linking hotlines to Jared Kushner's Chabad centre in DC and 'Putin's
rabbi' Berel Lazar in Moscow
One has to go one level above the US vs China mudslinging, and consider it is all likely
as fake and staged as was US-Soviet rivalry China and the USA may well be working together on
covid
--
The idea that Covid-19 was a bio-weapon deployed in China by the US visitors to the late
2019 military games, was promoted early on by Veterans Today (VT) where Unz's Kevin Barrett
hails from. VT is a website widely-read by world governments, despite its partly kooky and
ridiculous articles about space aliens etc
Gordon Duff, co-chief of VT, said out loud in a radio interview – where he also
outed himself with a chuckle as a 'self-hating Jew' – that 30% of the material on his
site is intentionally false and ridiculous, as the price he must pay for publishing true
'intel drops' without getting shut down / murdered by the US gov't in intel-speak, this is
called 'poisoning the well', you publish the most damning truths on self-discrediting sites
like VT or David Icke, where the typical reader easily dismisses truth because it's published
next to articles about space alien lizards ruling planet earth
@Mustapha Mond Yes, what if the chief objective was not to hurt China by disrupting its
society and economy but to make the whole world angry with China. Ron Unz article is the
voice crying out in the desert which will not stop the tsunami of memes: WuFlu ,
China did it , China must pay for our sufferingWe must punish China.
that has been whipped up from the very beginning and only will be getting loader and
stronger.
Some of the things you list are to benefit the insiders. No little thing that could bring
profit will be left to chance. It is just like when World Trade Center being transferred from
Port Authority before 9/11. Was it critical to the operation? Could they get the terror event
if WTC was not owned by Larry Silverstein? Yes, they could but few extra bucks could have
been made with Larry Silverstein being the front man. Or just when American troops were
entering Bagdad, who and when organized special outfits who systematically were visiting
Bagdad museum and looting it according to the shopping list?
Ron Unz is underestimating their evil and abilities.
@Ozymandias If "they" were going to do such a thing, how would they go about it, and what
would have been their thinking?
Deliberately engineered biological agents can often be detected by careful analysis of the
pathogen's genome. Bioinformatic programs can detect odd sequences that shouldn't belong; the
chances of a purely natural explanation for the inclusion of some sequences are rare, for
instance. Let's say I wanted to create a super virus capable of destroying humanity. One
obvious way to do this would be to take viral sequences from certain dangerous pathogens and
combine them into one. That might do the job, but obviously there is a risk that comes along
with doing with that: current sequencing and bioinformatic techniques may quickly discover
such an act and invite retaliation by the victim. " That shouldn't be there! " If half
of China started dying of a mysterious virus composed of sequences from various unrelated
viruses, then obviously there is an attack underway because the chances of such elements
coming together in nature is very low, practically zero. A response would likely follow in
short order.
Is there a way around this? Maybe.
There are several odd things about Sars2 (Covid-19) that I haven't seen before: 1) it
spreads in contravention to how -- some -- previous viruses we've dealt with in recent memory
have spread. Specifically, there are a higher-than-expected number of cases are transmitted
before the patient become symptomatic with this virus. This is why initial airport screenings
failed to stop the virus from entering the United States, aside from lax screening*. In the
past, most of these viruses like MERS and SARS weren't particularly contagious when the
infected carriers were asymptomatic, so simply checking their body temperature with a
thermometer and following up with contact tracing was enough to stop the spread. 2) unlike
both SARS and MERS, this virus is remarkably contagious for a novel pathogen, even moreso
than the flu 3) this virus may have a very long asymptomatic phase, up to two weeks in some
people. One explanation is that something similar is true of other viruses that cause the
common cold and the flu but we haven't really noticed it before because those viruses are
comparatively less lethal. If you believe in a conspiracy, on the other hand, this would be a
feature deliberately engineered to ensure maximum transmission.
Elements of the conspiracy:
1. This outbreak happened just before Donald Trump's reelection campaign got underway and
during crucial trade negotiations. Maybe they wanted to put pressure on the Chinese
government to increase Trump's chances of getting reelected. His approval ratings according
to 538 have been stuck in the low to mid 40s for essentially his entire presidency. He needs
a consistent approval rating above 47% or so to ensure a high chance of reelection.
2. This happened just after a failed Hong Kong color revolution by youthful protestors.
Many of the signs held by protesters included the kinds of things a boomer FBI agent might
think would curry favor with the 4chan crowd -- pepe the frog, various slogans. It failed, in
part, because that crowd didn't buy it. Hong Kong protestors were relentlessly mocked on some
alt-right websites as morons wanting to deliver their people the "freedom" enjoyed by the
West: dozens of genders, speech laws, feminism The case of a Canadian waxing salon being
forced to wax a male-to-female transgendered person's genitals was prominently used to mock
Hong Kong protesters demanding Western freedom.
Conspiracy:
The CIA may have bred a virus to be easily transmissible but much less lethal than the
original SARS virus that made the headlines years ago. They may have expected the virus to
spread quickly in China and panic the Chinese population, undermining faith in the government
so the CIA could once again try to overthrow their rival. They never expected it to come back
on them.
If one were going to create a viral agent guaranteed to escape detection as an artificial
construction, one might do the following: take a known virus indigenous to the targeted area
and breed it in animals native to the area (bats) so that it spreads undetected until
symptoms present while having a traceable lineage when examined with bioinformatic software /
select it against human tissue samples in vitro so that in infects human cells easily.
The former technique might leave behind a tale tell signature: the virus has a long
incubation time within the host. Why? Well, some animals have lower resting body temperatures
than humans. This can affect which pathogens are able to infect them. Pathogens that have
evolved to replicate at one temperature may not replicate very well under another one.
Animals like opossums and hibernating bats are less likely to die from rabies infection, for
instance, because they have lower body temperatures, among other factors. Humans and dogs are
not so lucky because both have higher body temperatures where the virus can replicate more
easily. It's sort of strange how SARS2 (Covid-19) takes so long to clear in some patients --
up to two weeks or more. Maybe this occurs because, despite being able to easily infect human
cells, it replicates poorly at first because it is adapted to bats, which often have a lower
resting body temperature. Although, it is possible this could occur naturally as well.
The latter can be done by infecting cell cultures in dishes and examining which cultures
became infected and to what degree. This can be done by measuring viral titers -- dilute
extracted cell culture liquid, filter out cells and bacteria, apply diluted mixes to new
cultures, examine results, selected superior viral lines for continued manipulation. There
are lots of ways to set this up. Maybe you tag your viral proteins with a florescent protein
and examine after some period of time; the more virus that is being made, the stronger the
signal. Select that particular culture and continue.
Point: there are lots of ways to do this, some pretty simple (but probably expensive,
dangerous, and time-consuming nonetheless -- which is why dumb Middle Eastern terrorists
haven't tried it so far). The important thing is that such a set up would avoid including
obviously unnatural elements that could never be explained by random chance -- the inclusion
of sequences from other viruses, for example. This might come off looking natural, even if
remaining mysterious to the outside observer.
*The American government was warned about this virus but didn't take it seriously.
Explanation 1: Trump and his advisers are greedy imbeciles (more likely). Explanation 2: the
American government didn't expect this to be a big deal because they created it to be less
lethal than previous viruses, perhaps not understanding that a lower death rate over a larger
population would result in higher casualties (less likely).
Americans arriving at JFK from locked-down Italy are shocked by the lack of US
screening for coronavirus
1) Trump is a loudmouth and a braggart. If he knew ANYTHING about this, he probably would
have let it slip by now. Elements of the British government have had to restrict some
information they share with the Americans for fear that Trump would leak it to his friends
during his then regular discussions with people over unsecured lines. Would the CIA really do
something extraordinary like this without his knowledge?
Points in favor:
1) The UK, a country that often works with the Americans to do nefarious things, didn't
take this very seriously, either. They acted as if they didn't expect this to be a big deal.
Other countries that usually don't work that closely with US intelligence to the same degree,
have taken Covid-19 seriously even if they have failed to contain it. Although, this is
probably wrong. The nations that have dealt best with this are the ones that have had lots of
previous experience with similar viruses and whose populations are naturally more inclined to
work together.
2) The timing and location of the viral outbreak. Isn't Wuhan a major transportation
hub?
One thing I notice is how crisply written this is, compared to the very dense, plodding
style that characterizes much of his previous work
A very good overview of the situation and a thoughtful analysis of the finger pointing
that's going on
Regardless of whether the lock down measures have been an overreaction or not, most
reasonable people will realize that we may never know what might have been, had we not locked
down
Would the health system have been able to cope ?
What would happen when hospitals are overwhelmed by serious respiratory cases ?
China's very forceful reaction now looks absolutely brilliant
That extremely energetic reaction also hints that the Chinese leadership may have
suspected an attack
". ..the current accusations by Trump Administration officials that China had
attempted to minimize or conceal the serious nature of the disease outbreak is so ludicrous
as to defy rationality. "
This assertion is absolutely untrue, as most readers who have followed this story early on
will know. You conspicuously left out of your conspiratorial musings the news of the
"whistleblower" Wi Leniang, the 34-year old ophthalmologist who had worked at Wuhan Central
Hospital, and had already alerted his colleagues late last year about a suspicious viral
outbreak, for which he was subsequently arrested and punished by authorities. Millions of
people in China are familiar with his tragic story – he eventually died.
On January 9 the World Health Organization released the following press statement,
providing sufficient information that would have warranted or obliged the authorities to have
immediately closed the Wuhan airport and train station to prevent the contagious spread of
the virus to other regions of the world through unwittingly infected carriers.
Instead, authorities waited two entire weeks before closing the Wuhan airport, during
which time the virus spread inevitably to other countries through the many international
passenger flights. According to military game theory, such inaction would surely benefit
China, which could better deal with an outbreak, whereas most other countries would suffer
more severely in comparison. For this reason, regardless whether the release of the
presumably engineered virus was released intentionally or accidentally, the Chine government
is culpable for having allowed the pandemic to evolve. So at least in this particular case
the allegations of the Trump administration are correct.
Your narrative omitted these indisputable facts, which you then denigrated as " so
ludicrous as to defy rationality ", yet after a Communist Party meeting in mid-February,
some of those responsible for having minimized or concealed the serious nature of the
outbreak were officially "demoted" (received a slap on the wrist):
Those who praise China's alleged competence in the matter have a dilemma to deal with.
Either the authorities are competent, in which case they effectively waged biological warfare
against the rest of the world (using incompetence as plausible deniability of intent) in
order for their economy to come out ahead, comparatively, in the long run, compared to a
situation where only their own economy would have suffered by effective early containment
measures; or else they were indeed incompetent, that an accidental release from one of their
labs in Wuhan becomes even more plausible than it already is. Either way, the focus of
inquiry must remain on China, rather than conducting an exercise in reflexive exoneration.
Fantastical insinuations pointing the finger elsewhere, for which no strong evidence has been
presented, are just a distraction.
Accidental releases have been known to occur, but apparently only the level-4 lab in Wuhan
was known to have been working on enhancing those bat-based viruses with gain of function
properties and chimeric qualities.
Your entire conjecture about the strong likelihood of US culpability essentially rests
almost entirely on the vague notion of " extreme recklessness ", which in such
dangerous matters, as the release of deadly viruses, appears to be significantly less likely,
from an analytical perspective, than an accidental release from a biological lab in
Wuhan.
While your lengthy article shows the possibility that the virus originated in the US and was
spread intentionally, with a lot of trust developed by our own Dr. Fauci of the NIAID and $37
million in grants (long before Trump) to study bat coronaviruses in collaboration with China,
I think you are missing one important feature.
Trump and his neocon clown car are loathed by the Intelligence Agencies. Unlike Obama, who
loved to have the CIA "playing" in his sanctioned, National Emergencies countries (Yemen,
Libya, Venezuela, Ukraine, Somalia, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Burundi), backing
coups in Egypt, Honduras and the big one, Ukraine, and delighting in droning and expanding
Bush's two wars into 7 or 11, depending on how you count, Trump for all his idiotic saber
rattling has started no wars; Bolivia is his only coup, Nicaragua his only war-like National
Emergency. You may have missed the events of Russiagate and Ukrainegate, built on incompetent
spycraft, and an impeachment started by a CIA "whistleblower", but to give Trump credit for
something as devious as an obvious CIA op (by your own speculations) seems disingenuous. Much
more likely the CIA (whose hubris and incompetence rivals Trump's) likely were running this
operation from at least when the first bat coronavirus grants were sent to Wuhan (2011? 2015?
I've read both). My guess is the CIA did not even share their brilliant idea with the
loathsome Trump, as he would have likely squashed it as he finally did with John Bolton's
out-of-control machinations. I think the CIA sees the spectacular failure of their operation
as a chance to embarrass and likely overthrow Trump. If they had destroyed the Chinese
economy, they would have taken full credit, as it is, they look masterful in re-establishing
the Establishment, and ridding themselves of a non-supportive Trump.
Coronavirus catastrophe? Even though the CDC has been accused of exaggerating the number of
deaths from the Coronavirus by allowing doctors to assume , without testing ,someone died
from it, the number of deaths are not alarming . According to the CDC's provisional
statistics posted on April 20,2020 , from February 1 to April 18 ,2020 there were only 15,252
deaths from the Coronavirus out of a total of 603,184 deaths from all causes ,in a US
population of 327,167,434 . For the one week ending April 11 there were 5483 COVID-19 deaths
and for the one week ending April 18th there were only 568 deaths . cdc.gov . Deaths from the
Coronavirus appear to be on the decline in mid-April ,just as they often do in a typical flu
season as Spring returns in the Northern hemisphere. As a number of doctors have observed the
lockdowns, social distancing and unemployment resulting from the draconian measures taken by
Governors across the US are leading to an unprecedented number of cases of depression and
suicides.
It is well established,that people who are depressed end up with many types of illnesses due
to their compromised immune systems .
The tragedy of the Coronavirus pandemic is ,that as more and more circumstantial evidence
comes to light ,it was an engineered crisis or ,as some investigators have termed it ,a
planned-demic see, for example, "How to create a fake pandemic"jamesfetzer.org.
Deep and enduring thanks to Ron Unz and his team for this site, an oasis of common sense in a
desert of nonsense.
Regarding:
"So if American bio warfare analysts were considering a corona virus attack against
China, isn't it quite possible they would have said to themselves that since SARS never
significantly leaked back into the US or Europe, we'd similarly remain insulated from the
corona virus? Obviously, such an analysis was foolish and mistaken, but would it have
seemed so implausible at the time?"
There might be another possibility. That being that the American plans you outline were
formulated and carried out by the deepest, eternally-entrenched portions of the American
security state and that "senior administration officials" were simply never consulted about
bio warfare efforts against China. Very possibly including those earlier events noted, aimed
at Chinese agricultural interests.
Two birds with one stone would be the result: 1) China is (theoretically) taken down by
orders of magnitude; 2) That usurping outsider, the ever-disruptive President Trump exits in
January, as no incumbent would be judged to have a 2% chance of withstanding the hurricane of
events tied to the pandemic's arrival in America.
All the better, then, to allow Trump and other leading American politicians to
convincingly lead the chorus against China, and all done with never any possibility of a leak
from any political "source" about anything pertaining to the background and planning of the
operation.
Implications of such a possibility are too monstrous to consider, so am certain this
assertion can't be true. Right?
@Hail" this whole thing may be a Chinese Communist Party 'Hoax,' in the sense that
while the 'new' virus is real (there are always 'new viruses'), the reaction was at least
1000x what was necessary to deal " – The reality parsing by the hoaxers always lead
to the discovery of more hoaxes. Check with your guru Kunt Wiitkowski if he was not the one
who advised Chines how to pull off the hoax. Didn't he tell them that only 10,000 would have
die?
@swamped I, too, doubt that Trump would have been aware of what was going on, this would
have been an operation that was kicked off now because if Trump gets re-elected, he'll
hopefully clean house, and all that preparation would have been for nothing.
That having been said what's your explanation why Trump did bring a lot of neocons on
board, who effectively blocked him. If he really wanted to placate the democrats, there would
have surely been hawks who weren't as dangerous as, e.g. Bolton.
@Jim Jatras He said back then he thought that. Hasn't expressed his current view. None of
us knew back then that the US was dumping pure U238 on Yugoslavia making large parts
uninhabitable for a thousand years.
"Checking the Jay Matthews story, I see this: Hundreds of people, most of them workers and
passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different
circumstances."
There is much that Jay Matthews didn't say. Read this:
It is not. Shuanghui International Holdings Limited, now known as W-H Group, is a private
company based in Hong Kong that holds a majority of shares in China's largest meat processor,
Shuanghui Foods. The fact that it is based in Hong Kong does not make it "Chinese" in any
sense. It is a totally foreign-owned company. The ownership of W-H is mostly American, not
Chinese, and Smithfield was involved with the company. It was a complicated kind of reverse
takeover, but nothing much of substance changed.
It is the largest pork company in the world, number one in China, the U.S. and much of
Europe.
And the effect of the swine flu was to shift production and sales from Shuanghui China to
Smithfield in the US.
China's sweeping Belt and Road Initiative has threatened to reorient global trade around
an interconnected Eurasian landmass
By the time of the Antonine Plague of 165 to 180 AD (which surely inspired Aurelius's
stoicism, and may have killed Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) direct trading
links between China and Rome had been established. On March 2019 Italy was the first G-7
country in Europe to become a member in the Chinese Belt and Road project . Did that
globalisation reproduced the same pandemic-friendly environment that had decimated Ancient
Rome, which rivaled China in population at the time of the Roman diplomatic mission from
Marcus Aurelius to the Han Court in 166 AD?
Given these dramatic Chinese actions and the international headlines that they
generated, the current accusations by Trump Administration officials that China had
attempted to minimize or conceal the serious nature of the disease outbreak is so ludicrous
as to defy rationality.
Hardly, because intent is irrelevant. Not discharging their duty to inform the
international community in a timely manner of COVID-19 being extremely infectious and not
massively exaggerating the infection to death ratio and duping the WHO and modelers like
Imperial College into accepting terrifying but bogus infection to death ratios of 1 to 3 0r
4% as Dr. John Ioannidis says in an update ( HERE ) means quite simply that China must never ever
be relied on again. Next time, and there probably is going to be another such novel
coronavirus at some point in the future, China might overcompensate and downplay something
extremely dangerous.
Lieber had had decades of close research ties with China, holding joint appointments and
receiving substantial funding for his work. But now he was accused of financial reporting
violations in the disclosure portions of his government grant applications -- the most
obscure sort of offense -- and on the basis of those accusations, he was seized by the FBI
in an early-morning raid on his Cambridge home and dragged off in shackles, potentially
facing decades of federal imprisonment.
AS I understand it the case against him was precipitated by indications that he was taking
money from the Chinese Government and lying to Federal investigators about it while getting
$18 million from the Defence Department. He was not a virologist, unlike professor Montagnier
who co-discovered HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) and received a Nobel prize. He says the
SARS-CoV-2 virus is an artificial laboratory created pathogen, which has fragments
of–surprise, surprise–HIV in it. He wants his expertise to be relevant to what
everyone is currently obsessed with. But life in this crazy old world is not like that.
Unless you are Ioannidis.
In the early days of the CoV-19 discussion here, a solid body of commenters suggested the
strong likelihood of being a US biological attack on China on the basis of its propensity for
aggression towards its designated "enemies" by the only method of causing substantial damage
to a powerful rival's economy under the cover of plausible deniability. Considering the
inevitable demise of the US as the only superpower, it is not beyond the ruling cabal's remit
to conceive such schemes to thwart the Chinese economic ascendancy. Yes, the initial
suspicions of foul-play were reputational (the US habit of resorting to heinous crimes
against other nations) and strategically connected as well (the only way to damage a strong
opponent short of an all-out nuclear conflagration with uncertain outcome ).
On the other hand, there were a series of "coincidences" widely discussed here that
started giving credence to a full-blown plan of biological attack aimed at the Chinese
population by engineering a virus capable to discriminating the target victims. This has been
partialled discounted, but not completely until the full sequence of CoV-19 evolution is
mapped. Meanwhile, the official narrative has switched to the rejection of the theory of a
man-made virus to the "accidental" release by the Wuhan lab, in my view to deflect any effort
to research the source of the virus and reinforce the tale of Chinese negligence. But the
trouble is that there are many virologists now busy debunking that too and asserting that
CoV-19 is unnatural.
I have come across a report on Australian Media Centre where the evolutionary virologist
Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney reveals that "the level of genome sequence
divergence between CoV-19 and the closest known bat relative in nature is equivalent to 50
years of natural evolutionary change, which suggests that CoV-19 is a synthetic creation in a
lab either by insertion of suitable genetic material or, alternatively, growing different
cultures in a laboratory with cells with the human ACE2 receptor. This process involves the
gradual adaptations to bind the virus with the human receptor by "training" the virus to seek
an efficient method of binding by natural random mutations until one progeny hits the
jackpot. Although this process does not require insertions by extraneous genetic material
(not strict engineering) because the virus itself produces the required adaptations, it is
notheless a human interference with the natural world by breeding something for a, obviously,
nefarious purpose. The great advantage of this process is to disguise the fact that it is a
contrived lab creation.
There are many historically significant events the truth of which will remain hidden for a
time. But this case involves a strong player (China) and it will – as wel las many
outraged scientists worldwide – leave no stone unturned to reveal the unfathomable
depth of the US's den of iniquity.
But as this epidemic is shaping up, it is likely that the estimated death toll will be
comparable to that of the seasonal flu in a bad year.
That's not correct -- at all. Our hospital system in major cities like New York are NEVER
brought to the brink with seasonal flu. The likely number of deaths from Covid-19 has already
exceeded the number of deaths estimated from seasonal flu over the past 6 of 10 years -- in
just over six weeks. And that's under unprecedented quarantine.
Quoted numbers of deaths are as unreliable as the number of infections.
Numbers do not need to be 100% "reliable" in this case. Many of those who have died have
done so in hospital where they have been tested. We can also measure the baseline death rate
in NYC. When we do, we find a tremendous daily increase far and above anything caused since
9/11. Clearly, there is something going around that city that is killing lots of people. No
flu in recent memory has done that.
Cause of death as stated in a death certificate is often, and even usually, wrong, and
during an epidemic caused by a virus that induces respiratory difficulty it is likely that
virtually all deaths due to respiratory dysfunction will be attributed to the virus without
confirmatory evidence.
This kind of flawed logic could be used to dismiss virtually any epidemic. At some point
the number of deaths is so high that no counter argument could reasonably be believed. We've
already reached that point. There are only so many respiratory deaths that occur over any
time period. Even if we moved 100% from other categories over to Covid-19 we would still find
peculiarities in the data.
Deaths in New York City Are More Than Double the Usual Total
Furthermore, virtually all deaths of persons testing positive for covid19 will be
attributed to the virus even though the deceased may have had multiple other diseases, any
one of which could have been the cause of death.
That's certainly only going to be minor contributory factor. Huge numbers of people above
the average baseline don't just magically drop dead from other causes all at the same time.
If someone gets Covid-19 and dies, it is reasonable to assume it was the proximate cause in
the majority of cases. Only so many people die from X at any one time. If twice that number
start dying all at the same time, there is a problem.
"Herd immunity is likely now widespread, so the thing should fizzle out soon, with or
without continued population incarceration."
Please do not comment on things you clearly don't understand. It is estimated that no more
than a few percent of the American population has been exposed to Sars2 (Covid-19). Herd
immunity requires some high multiple of that number. We are nowhere near herd immunity. You
don't even know what that means in all likelihood.
Professor Luc Montagnier, Who Won Nobel Prize For Codiscovering AIDS Virus, has said
COVID-19's HIV "strains" could be put there in the virus's RNA only by human expert
intervention in a laboratory.
The excerpt from the French TV program where he said it can be found on YouTube.
What's "funny" is the way most USA, or, how should we say?, USA-close, media reports the
fact, starting from misleading headers (headers which, as usual for the USA and, how should
we say?, USA-close media, are all clones, with tiny changes from one to the other).
Professor Luc Montagnier, Who Won Nobel Prize For Codiscovering AIDS Virus, Says
Coronavirus Was Man-Made In Wuhan Lab.
This, when the professor clearly stated he is only a scientist, and he only wanted to
relate facts that many other research groups have found but have been left unsaid due
to enormous pressure, and he stated equally clearly that it is not his knowledge, duty,
competence, will, to give opinions on who did it, where, why.
The average IQ of China's top 5,000 political leaders is 140
Have not most of the all-time Evil Greats been brilliant? We have them, Russia has them.
How is China having them unique? If Ron's suspicions over this are close to true and even if
not, we already have volumes of evidence in so many other situations proving we have
brilliant evil-doers aplenty on the U.S. side in any case.
The rest of your points are agreeable to me. But every time I've hung my hat on the
'brilliant' high-I.Q.-types I'm always disappointed. They test well but in command of things
they bring us wars and now this. The medical people are high-I.Q. as hell, they've vacuumed
up half our GDP and research dollars for 100 years now and it's their job to have had this in
hand. Like our high-I.Q. generals and admirals the past 75 years, they're losing another war
for us. The high IQ sorts in finance are another group. We're a nation in serious decline and
from where I sit, the high-IQs are merely managing said decline.
High I.Q.s just don't cut it from where I sit. Could be jealousy. My IQ is some where
between a pineapple and radish, a yam maybe..
@no bat soup for you There is so much talk about Chinese will eat just about anything but
there is usually no focus on other people in the world for doing similar things.
The Chinese eat bamboo rats, the French and Belgiums eat rats too – besides snails.
Some people in Asian countries eat cats and dogs, the Swiss by the thousands, eat cats and
dogs. The members of Explorers' Club in New York eat just about anything as well. But to top
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Brilliant work I have been researching everything I can find, while placing the totality of
events in the context of US IC/DS ops The "botched biowarfare" attack fits the data the best
by far. Thanks for this report.
Those who praise China's alleged competence in the matter have a dilemma to deal with.
Either the authorities are competent
There is no "dilemma." They detected an outbreak and dealt with it competently. Your
government run by a reality show host didn't. It's as simple as that. You can deflect all you
want, but it really boils down to that.
in which case they effectively waged biological warfare against the rest of the
world
Nothing the Chinese did forced other countries to keep their borders open. Several
countries like Israel closed them before Donald Trump did. Nothing China did forced Trump
into not taking this seriously until it was too late.
"It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear," Trump told
attendees at an African American History Month reception in the White House Cabinet Room. The
World Health Organization says the virus has "pandemic potential" and medical experts have
warned it will spread in the US. The President added that "from our shores, you know, it
could get worse before it gets better. Could maybe go away. We'll see what happens. Nobody
really knows."
US 'wasted' months before preparing for coronavirus pandemic
A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies
largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks,
mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.
2 Phylogenetic studies have been done to suggest America was the source of the virus.
This study suggests that Type A strain the earliest type of the SARS-COV2, was mostly
found in the US. While in China it was mostly type B, another strain mutated from Type A. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/07/2004999117
This study suggests there are 2 sources of spread, however in countries from Brazil,
Italy, Australia, Sweden and South Korea , some cases are tie to the US cluster but not to
China. So this suggest some cases were directly spread from the US. Japan commented it was
from the US because they had the virus from traveling to Hawaii and they never went to
China. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.09.034942v1
here in this video presentation some arguments that supports the US had this virus in
between August 2019 and Jan 2020.
A possible scenario is they developed a few Sars-Cov2 bio-weapon strains the B and C
strains from the A strain. They wanted to find a vaccine for it before they can be deployed,
but in developing the vaccine they leaked the A type out into the US. They had to make a
decision, let the public know about it or cover it up and release the B and C strain without
the vaccine. I think they did the latter.
But you be the judge, we need more transparency from the CDC and more research before any
conclusions can be made.
@dimples Of course I completely failed to mention in the above comment that it's the War
on Terror that's coming to a close. Russia Russia Russia! has been an attempt to fill the gap
but its not going anywhere due to opposition from the Euros.
The slow US reaction to the virus could therefore seen not as incompetence but a
deliberate process of sowing more destruction, thus more China-hate later, ie its part of the
plot. Also the virus is not too deadly, just enough to create a big scare and over-reaction
amongst the authorities and public.
@Mustapha Mond Yes IF there is a conspiracy that would be it. I have also come to this
conclusion in other comments but you have described it much better than myself.
@Christopher Marlowe The flying drones over pig farms is nonsense from Metallicman, who
is a controlled-opp deep asset that speaks 80-90% truth and 10-20% lies.
I tried looking into the flying drones a bit, but couldn't confirm any of it.
@Ayatollah Smith I want to add Trump's early response to the corona virus shows Trumps
and American duplicity. I used to watch a TV show 'Lie to me' with actor Tim Roth. Anyway
people give away all kind of knowledge when they communicate. So my take that Trump's call
that it's like a bad flu or it's nothing to worry about, reveals knowledge that it is
American attack and that he (Trump) worries if it gets 'out' that the trump administration is
culpable, so he tries to downplay corona virus and his own role in it!
"
Who's a seventy years old track record of extreme malfeasance against China ?
Who's a track record of using bioweapons on friends and foe, including its own citizens
?
Who's a track record of committing FF , including many cases against China ?
[TAM, Tibet, Xinjiang, HK, Mh370, INdon genocide 1965,
..]
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Occams Razor .
There's a serial arsonist in town, he has been caught setting fire to John's house dozens
of times in the past few months.
JOhn's house caught fire last night
Who's the first suspect to haul in for interrogation ?
Elementary, Watson.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
Last but not least.
Mathematics doesnt cheat
Ian Flaming's fundamental law of prob .
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice ..
How many 'coincidences' occur in the Wuhan caper. ?
-- -- -- -- -- -- –
Conclusion.
Whichever way you look at it,
Logic, Circumstantial evidences and Mathematics all points to We know who.
@swamped The high casualties in the NATO countries are due to their own reluctance to do
anything for so long. Look at the total number that have been infected and the current new
infection rates in South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. South Korea prepared better than
anybody but was cursed with a Christian sect that also had churches in Wuhan. They stayed
close together for a long time in their churches to increase community feeling and, since God
was looking after their health, were reluctant to admit to being ill. Yet South Korea shits
on every NATO country in fighting COVID-19. So do Australia and New Zealand in spite of their
extremely poor use of the 2 months warning provided by China and the DNA sequence of the
virus provided by China on 12th of January, 2020. As soon as the Chinese methods were
applied, the same success with humans was achieved. Now the NATO countries are aping China
too, they are starting to have the same human success. They will continue with success as
long as they continue aping. The Yanks are losers like other NATO members because they didn't
bother to ape until they were heavily infected. I stress that Australia and New Zealand did
very badly (only about 10 times better than the USA but 4 times worse than China who we
should have beaten easily) because they were slow to ape. We only look wonderful when
compared with NATO. Actually, we also do about 5 times better than Iran too. Even with
sanctions crippling their response, Iran has done twice as well as the US losers. When it
becomes a matter of drug and vaccine development where the USA has real strengths, I expect
the USA to do as well as China but it's a low tech battle right now and the Yank boys haven't
done well against the Chinese or Iranian men in that competition. Who would expect them to?
[email protected]
@Godfree Roberts The reasons you enumerate apply to individual people, they don't apply
to governments. It is true that a rational individual should prefer truth because truth is
mostly self-sufficient while lies need to be reasserted permanently. The rationality of truth
vs lies is very much like the rationality of well-designed software vs badly designed
software. Good design as truth demands less maintenance. The problem is that it doesn't keep
programmers busy and it doesn't justify budgets. A government, the "deep state" moreover,
need to keep maintenance costs high to perpetrate themselves.
The crucial question very few seem to be asking is the question of motive. Many commenters
here project on the Chinese their own traits. The problem is that what can be said of Western
elites can't be said of Chinese elites because the Chinese have different motives altogether.
There's one motive they didn't have, to provoke a crisis. Viruses don't hop out of labs by
accident any more than gold hops out of Fort Knox. One has to bring them out and the Chinese
had no reason to do it.
Regarding the US on the other hand, though I disagree with Ron Unz's assertion that this
particular US administration is more reckless and less competent than those that preceded it,
seen from abroad it just appears as less hypocrite, to keep the story short I'll just say
that hubris tends to cloud judgment and that desperate times ask for desperate measures.
Sounds entirely plausible, and, to be parsimonious, even probable. The last element to make
it feasible was leaving Trump entirely out of the loop. He still won't have a clue if he's
standing in the dock at the Hague years from now. Everything he will ever know about this
fiasco will be from light reading material they allow him in his cell.
The Deep State made the right bet when they decided late in the race to hack the election
in favor of the Donald rather than the Queen of Warmongers. Nobody would ever expect the
self-described peace candidate to escalate the ongoing hybrid wars to germ warfare. (Though
maybe the use of chemical weapons by America's proxies in Syria should have been a hint.) Now
the world knows, the Satanists in charge of Washington will stop at nothing.
@Mustapha Mond I 100% agree with you, Mustapha Mond. Much as I admire Ron for in so many
ways for his other topnotch contributions and running this site, one of the very best news
sites IMO, the evidence at hand does not suggest incompetence on the part of the US
government and the deep state behind it: it's definitely an Atlanticist plandemic. Godfree
Roberts showed that many steps the Trump administration took the past two years were meant to
pave the way for enabling the government to play the "we didn't see this coming" card, just
as with 9/11:
At the same time, the US Health Dept was running Crimson Contagion in the first half of
2019, simulating a deadly flu pandemic starting in China (as I recall). Even the US Naval War
College ran a pandemic simulation causing respiratory failure:
Everyone knows about Event 201 at this point, in October 2019, sponsored by the Gates
Foundation, Bloomberg via Johns Hopkins, and the World Economic Forum, simulating
specifically a coronavirus pandemic. What are the odds that the organizers of Event 201 were
just lucky in picking a coronavirus, knowing there are 150 other virus families, besides
coronaviruses (e.g. rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, etc.):
That's a 1/151 chance! Lucky bastards! Present at Event 201 were recycled players involved
in the 9/11 anthrax attack simulation 'Dark Winter', such as Thomas Inglesby, as documented
by Whitney Webb. Not to mention the 2011 movie 'Contagion', involving a flu-like pandemic
originating in China (Hong Kong),transmitted from bats to humans in an unsanitary
environment!!! Another financial reset was also long overdue, as Greg Mannarino and others
have pointed out: the coronavirus cover was too perfect of a tool for deflecting the guilt
from the Fed and the banksters; killing many birds with one stone, the virus is also a 2)
powerful psy-op hurting China's image in the world, 3) further delivering a strong blow to
its export-driven economy; 4) it sets the stage for the cashless society ("dirty bills not
accepted here!"), the advent of digital currencies and 5) top-down surveillance.
So either the China's leadership had suddenly gone insane, or they regarded this new
virus as an absolutely deadly national threat, one that needed to be controlled at any
possible cost.
Those are not the only choices, Ron.
Here is another one for you:
– CCP knew this virus had a low fatality rate;
– CCP were aware of recent (DoD iirc) readiness assessments noting that US had
specific vulnerability to a pandemic;
– CCP was aware that the captive Chinese people were alrady subject to 'herd
control' infrastructure whereas the US population still enjoyed human rights;
– CCP decided to sow confusion about the infection. ("We can do this, but their
society will fall apart Comrades!")
– The West initially chose to ignore this. Then the Corporate Press "International"
decided to put psyops pressure to force US and UK to do a 180 u-turn. This due to a single
lousy non-peer-reviewed paper at the Imperial College.
Some other considerations that can inform the above are (a) the attitude of CCP towards
'world government' institutions, and (b) their relationship with WHO, in particular.
So option 3, Mr. Unz:
CCP used the (controlled?) exposure of a virus ("17") to put into motion a psychological
operation to sow confusion and panic in US (based on our own published findings on readiness)
that seems to have other participants in the Globalist crowd institutions. The primary target
was USA, but NATO as well.
Btw, Mr. Unz, that ex-CIA psyops writer you host on your site (Giraldi) keeps censoring my
comments on his propaganda pieces. Why do allow them a platform and also permit them to
censor rebuttals? Hopefully you will prevent UNZ Review from becoming UNZ Pravda.
Ron, you need to rewrite this essay. If minor websites carry articles blaming China the
presumption is these articles are falsifications seeded by Trump, but if wildly
sensationalist Chinese propaganda pieces come from unknown sources like OldMicrobiologist or
Metallicman then they're reliable? Wow is all I can say.
Suggesting Lieber's creds set him above espionage and bio sabotage against the United
States is the best you can do? Your overwrought defense of this man is telling, given his
"assistants" are provably Chinese bio espionage agents and he secretly agreed to take a post
as director of the Wuhan lab.
In the same vein, did you know that the Johns Hopkins' inflammatory "dashboard" world map
seen and used everywhere was developed by a 30-year-old Chinese "student," Ensheng Dong,
working for Johns Hopkins? Using Edward Tufte's "Lie Factor" for evaluating the exaggeration
of a graphical representation relative to the underlying data puts the Johns Hopkins map so
far in the lie category as to warrant an FBI investigation of Johns Hopkins and its employees
for causing irreparable economic and societal harm to the United States. In an NPR puff piece
gushing over the map's creators, "all sitting around a table sipping lattes," Dong is quoted
as saying it's like showing blood everywhere. That's quite accurate from the proud creator
considering the irreparable harm that map has been in large part responsible for
creating.
One correction for the beginning of the article. The 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia
wasn't directed against Bosnian Serbs. That was the 1995 campaign and had nothing to do with
the Chinese Embassy being hit. It seems that you simply got the 1995 NATO bombing of Bosnian
Serbs (entirely in Bosnia) and the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro –
when the Chinese (brand new) embassy was hit) mixed up.
Interesting thing – the Japanese current embassy is on the exact grounds where the
Chinese one used to be. I find some funny symbolism in that.
@Jim Jatras Yep. Unz lost me with that comment. And very sloppy by his high standards.
The NATO 1999 bombings were to support the Albanians in Kosovo – not the Bosnian
muslims. I suggest Ron does some homework on the whole Yugo Wars period. Maybe even back to
ottoman times.
@Anonymous I think that he obviously got the two NATO bombing campaigns mixed up.
NATO bombed Bosnian Serbs (entirely in Bosnia) in 1995 to protect its interests under the
guise of protecting Bosnian muslims. This is what Unz supports.
NATO bombed Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) in 1999 when the Chinese embassy was hit.
Let's not make the comments spiral off into the Serbia/NATO conflict details. The point of
the entire mention of the bombing is that there is sincere indication that the US hit the
Chinese embassy on purpose. That much was clear since day 1 as the embassy was a brand new
building and you couldn't mistake it for a previous occupant or anything of the sort. It was
a message to China.
@swamped While I don't agree that China would have done this on purpose as I am generally
doubtful of all similar theories, it would nonetheless also explain why China banned all
movement to the rest of China from Wuhan while not only allowing the Wuhan infected to
infiltrate the West but actually vociferously and ubiquitously complaining about Western
racists for thinking about not allowing them in.
I think it was Zero-hedge that said the professor lied about his Chinese funding, making
him in effect an agent of China.
You need to understand the system in place. The book Three Felonies a Day outlines
the how, but does't really cover the why, and there lies the devil in the details. When they
want you, all they have to do is pour over your life' details, and they will find
something nefarious as a tool to put you in stern and squeeze.
There is million different details and forms to fill out when securing foreign funds for a
university; most of the rules and the process is ad hoc, and more often a lot of it is
ignored, and of course – certain countries have certain rules. The good professor
didn't do anything that was completely out of the norm. It's nearly impossible in this
society to be crime free – by design.
Think of all the people near Trump during his Russian Collusion investigation that went to
jail or indicted – most if not all were dragged in on the many petty illegalities that
plague our legal system for a reason. Illegalities that on a normal day most people ignore
until it is politically expedient for the authorities to use them. This is how a Police State operates.
You don't have to believe me; just ask Tommy Chong, Martha Stewart, etc .
Et tu, Brute? You're worried more about the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and Bosnian Muslims
than the destruction of that great Christian Serbia by the Clintons & cabal shame!
According to Matthews the infamous massacre had likely never happened
In the mid 1990s, I worked with a man of Chinese ancestry in New York named Henry Sun.
Henry had been in Beijing at Tiananmen Square. He had been shot. What happened afterward was
that he was treated by doctors for the bullet wound, and they had coded the illness as some
sort of cancer, so that it would not be obvious that he was a dissident and so be
arrested.
Now, I cannot say that someone was killed. I can say that personal testament to me from a
credible witness indicates bullets were flying, and one struck him. Maybe that's not a
massacre, by whatever means that word is defined. But it wasn't a Chinese tea ceremony.
I am a retired attorney and I am heartened to see that some attorneys, namely David Helm in
Michigan and Lindy Urso in Connecticut ,are beginning to file lawsuits to revoke unlawful and
unconstitutional Executive"Coronavirus" Orders issued by the Governors of the States of
Michigan and Connecticut. I have long maintained that almost every Executive Order issued by
State Governors are revocable as they are based on a lie, promoted by the WHO and the CDC
,that there is a Coronavirus pandemic and an international public health emergency .
everything China have and everything USA has been lost was done with the complicity and
personal gain of 99% of the usa elite,political class,including CIA,etc and even the likes of
Michael Jordan.
Whoever decides to believe this embarrassingly transparent anti-China propaganda is
stupidly siding with Soros and his Global Deep State golems. This will be the latest IQ test
for those who struggled with all the previous ones (incubator babies, Iraqi WMDs, Quaddafi's
Viagra, Hillary's electability, Russiagate etc.).
@Jim Christian High IQ is just an entry level requirement. They have 300,000 folks with
160 IQ, so 140 is not that exceptional.
New recruits' first posting is 5 years in the poorest village in the country. They
'graduate' after they've raised everyone's incomes by 50%. Then the career path gets really
steep.
The people who are visible to us have been so thoroughly scrutinized that it's almost
painful to contemplate. Here's Zhao Bing Bing[1], a mid-level Liaoning[2] Province official
talking about her mid-level, provincial promotion to Daniel Bell:
[MORE]
I was promoted in 2004 through my department's internal competition (30 percent on
written exam results, 30 percent on interviews and public speaking, 30 percent on public
opinion of my work and 10 percent on education, seniority and my current position) and
became the youngest deputy division chief. In 2009, Liaoning Province (pop. 44 million),
announced in the national media an open selection of officials. Sixty candidates met the
qualifications, the top five of whom were invited for further interviews. Based on their
test scores (40 percent) and interview results (60 percent), the top three were then
appraised. The Liaoning Province Organizational Department sent four appraisers who spent a
whole day checking my previous records. Eighty of my colleagues were asked to
vote–more than thirty of whom were asked to talk with the appraisers about my merits
and shortcomings–and they submitted the appraisal result to the provincial Standing
Committee of the CCP for review.
In principle, the person who scored the highest and whose appraisals were not
problematic would be promoted. However, because my university major, work experience and
previous performance were the best fit for the position, I was finally appointed department
chief of the Liaoning Provincial Foreign Affairs Office even though my overall score was
second best [the government discriminates positively in promoting women–ed]. Before
the official appointment there was a seven-day public notice period during which anybody
could report to the organization department concerns about my promotion. I didn't spend any
money during my three promotions; all I did was study and work hard and do my best to be a
good person.
In 2013, thanks to an exchange program, I worked temporarily in the CCP International
Department. The system of temporary exchanges offers opportunities to learn about different
issues in different regions and areas like government sectors and SOEs. In a famous quote
Chairman Mao said, "Once the political lines have been clearly defined the decisive factor
will be the cadres [trained specialists]." So the CCP highly values organizational
construction and the selection and appointment of specialists. There is a special
department managing this work, The Organization Department, established in 1924 and Mao was
its first leader..The department is mainly responsible for the macro management of the
leaders and the staff (team building), including the management system, regulations and
laws, human resource system reforms -- planning, research and direction, as well as
proposing suggestions on the leadership change and the (re)appointment of cadres. In
addition, it has the responsibilities of training and supervising cadres. The cadre
selection criteria are: a person must have 'both ability and moral integrity and the latter
should be prioritized'. The evaluation of moral integrity focuses mostly on loyalty to the
Party, service to the people, self-discipline and integrity. Based on different levels and
positions, the emphases of evaluation are also different. For intermediate and senior
officials, emphasis is on their persistence in faith and ideals, political stance and
coordination with the central Party. High-level cadres are measured against great
politicians and, among them, experience in multiple positions is very important.
Fans follow the careers of one-thousand top politicians online[3] and they are impressive,
as President Donald Trump[4] observed, "Their leaders are much smarter than our leaders. It's
like taking the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and have them play your high school
football team. That's the difference between China's leaders and our leaders".
Today's leaders began their careers in the 1960s as manual laborers in dirt-poor villages
and won promotions by raising village incomes by fifty percent. As they rose, they spent
sabbaticals on the lake-studded campus of The Academy of Governance where they met the
world's leading thinkers, critiqued legislation and earned PhDs. They now run huge provinces,
Fortune 500 corporations, universities, space programs and, of course, government departments
and the Peoples Daily reords their progress under headlines like, "How Rural Poverty Criteria
Affects Mayoral Promotions."

[1] Daniel Bell and Zhao Bing Bing, The China Model.
[2] Liaoning (pop. 45 million) is a northeastern Chinese province bordering North Korea and
the Yellow Sea.
[3] The Committee https://macropolo.org/the-committee/
[4] Donald Trump says Tom Brady and the Patriots are just like China. Boston.com . By Steve Silva July 6, 2015
@anon There is on little problem with your hasbara. Those great strategic planners in
China of yours forgot about one little thing that the West has 100% dominance over China in
the soft power of creating global narratives with which it will turn China into a pariah
nation in the eyes of everybody, a nation that everybody hates.
I personally think this was either the result of the so-called "wet-markets" in China
– long known to be the primary source of the annual flu epidemics
I've been going to markets in Asia all my adult life and suddenly they are both the
source of flu epidemics and "wet".
Unless it is raining the second one makes everything seem so ridiculous.
(why the heck haven't they been shut down??)
Because people would starve?
Try throwing some blame(buying food makes you sick!) at your big box corporate food
monopolies and try to shut them down – take a guess at what might happen?
@Tor597 Except, it would be helpful if Ron placed somewhere prominantly on the home page
that he is a card-carrying member of the "Resistance" against Trump, which this article
finally reveals full blast.
Too much attention here on things which could have other explanations and too little
attention on the real puzzles and on those things which science can definitely settle.
(1) It is solvable, and it will be solved, where and when were the first cases of the
infection among the general public outside China. Almost everything else depends on that.
(2) It is almost inconceivable that American agencies who had been plotting this would run it
by Trump for approval first. It seems much more likely that the anonymously sourced report
that our agencies knew about this in November is some kind of ass-covering to shift blame to
Trump, whom these same agencies have been trying to take down for 4 years; which doesn't help
us discern whether they were also responsible for the pathogen in the first place, it's
consistent either way.
(3) The genome has been out there long enough, with no one pointing out inconsistencies that
have held up to scrutiny, that "wild", "escaped from a lab", and "was evolved in a lab" all
look much more likely than "was designed directly by RNA editing".
(4) China's behavior is much more consistent with accidental than with intentional release.
They've obviously lied about the death toll and didn't feel obliged to prevent their people
from traveling abroad, but ordinary Communist wickedness explains that.
(5) Travel between China and Iran and Italy explains the early prevalence there sufficiently,
presuming genomic data we don't yet have will confirm this.
Conclusion: Too early to get locked in to origin theories, the usual suspects are taking
advantage in the same way they would whether or not it was an intentional release. THIS WILL
ALL BE CLARIFIED BY TESTING OF OLD TISSUE SAMPLES so I'm going to wait and see what those
results say. The reports of early COVID outside China have not been confirmed, but come from
researchers WITH REAL NAMES, so it WILL get figured out one way or the other and I'm holding
my fire until then.
P.S. Lieber is clearly a weird loose end that needs to be tied up. Is anyone trying to
interview him?
Let's see. Here in the USA covid hit later, at a time when people have the lowest seasonal
vitamin D (a major immune system hormone, with the population being 90%+ deficient). A
fraction of the population being hit particularly hard has dark skin, further reducing the
vit. D levels. That same fraction is over-represented among those who have metabolic syndrome
(diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and the like), and that is related to all manners of immune
system degradation. Then we have a medical system which looks only for profitable magic
bullets, instead of trying a variety of cheap methods, each of which can increase the
recovery rate by tens of percent.
Finally we have lots and lots of nursing homes, unlike China. And a majority (more than
50%) of deaths comes from those places in Europe. Data from Italy suggests that privately run
nursing homes are correlated with increased mortality, although it could just be extreme air
pollution and/or other environmental factors. Data from Scandinavia suggest that nursing home
size matters too, the smaller the better.
Why should one be surprised that this thing is hitting harder in the West?
R.Unz:"By any reasonable measure, the response to this global health crisis by China and most
East Asian countries has been absolutely exemplary,"
Your transparent, never ending shilling for the murderous CCP is becoming more and more
obvious, at least to myself. I'm starting to believe that this site is nothing more than a
thinly disguised Chinese government propaganda outlet.
As in other recent threads, you fully endorse the CCP's criminal actions: lockdowns of
[reportedly] 700 million Chinese citizens; literal lockdowns with citizens locked, even
having their front doors welded shut by the "authorities",for weeks. The idiotic [unless
deliberate], Chinese "solution" has probably already killed 1000's, if not 10's or 100's of
thousands there via starvation alone, and the economic devastation caused in China will
likely kill millions more Chinese in the years to come.
But that is all "exemplary" in your opinion, right? "To make an omelette you have to break
a few eggs", right?
R.Unz:"Everyone knows that America's ruling elites are criminal, crazy, and also extremely
incompetent."
Of course! "Everyone knows" that! [I wish].
What you [and some of them] don't know [or won't admit to themselves] is that this is no
less true of the Chinese government, or of any other government, for that matter.
Reality fact: "Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft
[taxes], and counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at
their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply
because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree
Which means that believing/trusting official stories and figures doled out by competing
criminal power structures, about _anything_, let alone actually supporting/promoting their
idiotic and criminal acts [eg the Chinese, US and elsewhere lockdowns"], is a mugs game for
useful idiots, nothing more. And yet, that is what you continue to consistently indulge
yourself in here.
Thanks for the excellent wrapup, Ron Unz. Your cui bono approach works like a
super-chloroquine dose to zap the anti-China virus now spreading from U.S. legacy media. What
passes for news media here in Europe is no better. But apparently there are islands of sanity
outside the Western imperial heartland. If you read French, you may find it encouraging to
read some real journalism on the source of the carona plandemic here from darkest Africa:
The same mendacious MSM that for three years howled at the moon that Putin had stolen the
2016 election for Trump is now barking like a mad dog about Covid being some kind of 21st
Century version of the Black Death.
Never mind that to get to the current figure of around 42,000 deaths, the CDC has been
juicing the total number of dead by adding in those who died from a heart attack or stroke or
some other medical complication, there was fear to be spread and by G-d, they were doing to
scare the hell out of Americans, just like they did in the years after the Israeli
masterminded 9/11 false flag.
Like Mr. Atzmon has pointed out, the 2017-18 flu season was much deadlier, yet there was
no lock-downs, quarantines and a complete gutting of the US–and the
worlds–economy.
The following may sound like a description of the current Novel Coronavirus pandemic:
"The season began with an increase of illness in November; high activity occurred during
January and February, and then illness continued through the end of March." You guessed
right, this is not the description of the current global Corona pandemic but actually how
CNN described the outbreak of influenza in America in September 2018.
Does it take a genius to figure out that the American 2017-18 influenza outbreak was pretty
'similar' to the current Novel Coronavirus epidemic?
The first question that comes to mind is why didn't America lock itself down amidst
its catastrophic 2017-18 influenza as it has now? One may wonder why the CDC didn't
react to the 'severity' of the outbreak that was at least three times as lethal as the
current Novel Coronavirus health crisis?
The Deep State thugs who are actually in charge of the US have some devious plan in mind
with this Covid hysteria.
Maybe they wanted to see how quickly Americans would give up their Bill of Rights. Or maybe
they wanted to cover up the multi-trillion dollar bailout of those TBTF banks that we bailed
out in 2009?
Or maybe this the test run for their next batch of weaponized flu, the one that will get
many killed and have people lining up for Mr. Know-it-all Bill Gates RFID chipped flu
vaccine.
The actual reason for the bombing was meant to cover-up NATO war crimes that were taking
place almost daily, and the Chinese listening post located in the corner of the embassy
that was bombed were intercepting orders issued by NATO which clearly revealed those
crimes. The Chinese needed to be silenced and their operations ended, no matter the
fallout.
My immediate gut reaction upon seeing the cartoon character version of a Muslim terrorist,
Osama Bin Laden, was this is a fake designed to play on US xenophobia. He was obviously made
for TV audiences.
I assumed after Skripal and the endless Assad gas arracks, that our ruling elite have just
become lazy and couldn't even be bothered to create a plausible story to cover up their
crimes, because the public is so stupid. How long did it take to determine it was a fraud, a
weekend of casual reading?
Putting a mob style hit on Venezuala's President confirmed that they could care less what
the Hoi Poloi think of them.
If this is a US caper, it is the either the most ridicoulosly stupid one imaginable, or
the most well thought out one in a very long time.
I had not connected the intelligence reports (recently spilled out of the Deep State) with
the obvious. Thanks, Ron, for pointing out that it's hard to imagine how the
NSA/CIA/whoever-collecting-part-of-the-85bln-we-spend-on-intelligence could report on this in
November when the sources from which they would have derived that information (the Chinese
government itself) didn't know until December 31st, or shortly before that date when they
reported to the WHO.
Someone, in covering up for blowing the response to the virus, really dropped the
ball.
Scientists from the UK have a recent paper on the mutations of Corona-19.
Here is part of the abstract:
In a phylogenetic network analysis of 160 complete human severe acute respiratory
syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2) genomes, we find three central variants distinguished
by amino acid changes, which we have named A, B, and C, with A being the ancestral type
according to the bat outgroup coronavirus. The A and C types are found in significant
proportions outside East Asia, that is, in Europeans and Americans. In contrast, the B type
is the most common type in East Asia, and its ancestral genome appears not to have spread
outside East Asia without first mutating into derived B types, pointing to founder effects
or immunological or environmental resistance against this type outside Asia.
I think these findings throw lots of water on any bioweapon claims. But others may differ
in their opinions.
It definitely does indicate that the virus did not come from a Wuhan lab or the Wuhan wet
market. It originated in Southern China where most people knowledgeable about bat viruses
expect bat viruses to originate.
you are mistakenly assuming and given for granted that this epidemic is much more lethat than
others,that the total closure is beneficial and not harmfull,that is the solution ,you are
deciding who to try to save regardless of the millions of victims of this economic
harakiri,and there are many epidemiologists who disagree with you.
One more thought: The US has over 25 bio-warfare labs that are located next door to Russia
and China that have been called out before for their sloppy or maybe deliberate release of
pathogens.
The WHO too only had high praises for China's transparency and efficiency.
Would that be the same WHO that said chinese disease was not communicable between humans
and that we should keep letting infected people into the country? That's who we should trust?
Or should we trust the communist government that shut down domestic travel to and from Wuhan,
because they were trying to protect the rest of THEIR country, while still allowing
international travel, because they wanted the rest of the planet infected?
This virus may or may not have been engineered, and may have come from the lab or the wet
market. These things are debatable. But what is absolutely not debatable is that once the
virus was loose, China choose to DELIBERATELY infect the rest of the world. These are people
whose numbers we should trust?
1918-1919 "Spanish" Flu Pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Hypotheses_about_the_source
Despite the name the most likely theory is that this pathogen, an H1N1 virus, originated in
China and mutated to become highly lethal in Europe or European-settled countries as a result
of WW I. S
Taking a scientific approach to American deep state biowarfare attack on China's Wuhan
district is telling in so far as Americans literally control tertiary education throughout
the entire world via funding in the trillions.
If the deep state wants to eliminate academics it can do so with merely a phone call to
Law Enforcement branches at a moments notice so that research & hard drives can be
confiscated and destroyed early on in investigations.
Once the media & journalistic propaganda arms of state get hold of the official
talking points to be disseminated the end game zero sum result is usually exactly what the
state arms of propaganda have wanted all along.
To be frank, I am an Intel thinker and am well aware of the details of the CIA led
biowarfare attack on China, but attaining the required data in empirical form via Requests
for Information from government is NOT going to ever yield synthesis required for scientific
peer-review research.
Bottom line is that the CIA had one CIA Agent/Operative deploy the nCov-19 in late October
as the USA Military contingent was departing Wuhan district. The operative deployed the
bioweapon via glass ampule smashed onto the ground to the entrance way for the Wuhan
restaurant district near to the Wuhan Wet Market. Moreover, his CIA handler gave him the
protocol & instruction on deployment of the bioweapon back in the United States of
America long before the actual deployment.
Lastly, Fort Detrick scientists developed the Chimera super-spreading viral pathogenicity
with a herd of pigs in the USA before hand in around 2012. Logistics of setting up the Wuhan
BSL-4 laboratory scientists for the false flag event of biowarfare were dependent upon
academic arrests before hand so that deflection & impression management for governance
would clearly be able to utilize plausible deniability where required.
In sum, as one acutely aware of the bioterrorism that the United States of America has
unleashed on the world covertly I, for one, can assure all that the US Deep State knowingly
unleashed nCov-19 to undermine China's meteoric rise in the financial world due to America's
incompetence writ large across the board since the Great Financial Crisis revealed that
America is swimming naked and their Emperor is wearing no clothes to reveal his
infinitesimally small Johnson in contradistinction to President Johnson's Johnson which was
historically infamous.
P.S. The USA Deep State can get in line to lick my balls in deference to my superior
intellect.
First, can researchers take a look at this virus and determine with certainty whether it was
artificially concocted in a lab or if it simply evolved out in the open? If so then that
would help focus the discussion. If not then things will remain opaque.
The Iranian government outbreak is strange but then people congregating with each other, like
at ski resorts, pass it to each other. If it was a US biowarfare attack then how did US
agents get access to them? They wouldn't have the cover of some delegation to an event such
as military games. But what was the effect on Iran? Zero. Some top leaders got sick and some
older members died. They have replacements and the government continues without missing a
beat. This idea that an ideal bioweapon would be highly contagious with a low lethal rate so
as to tie up resources and halt the economy sounds good but in practice it's hardly more than
harassment. It slowed up the Chinese economy but that's a temporary blip and they're back
now. The US and other countries are hardest hit economically. Many businesses will never
recover. This is self-inflicted. The lethality of this virus looks to be increasingly lower
and lower each time one looks despite all the Chicken Littles who were screaming that the sky
was about to fall. Was there a purpose for that?
The Wuhan outbreak coincided with the military games but things happen at random times as it
is. People were crowded in there. The various plagues and viruses have been going from East
to West for a very long time now. The problem is that currently there are many who have an
interest in lying and misdirecting things which further muddy the waters.
@Emslander What is crazy and funny is that supposed trump supporters thinks China would
shrink it's economy by 6.8% for the first quarter of 2020 to help Trump's opposition.
The same supposed supporters don't even realized that the best way for trump to win the
next election is to stamp out this damn virus asap. Denying is not going to work. Testing n
quarantine combo is what would work. It is why trump changed his tune.
Who's a track record of extreme malfeasance against China, since ww2 ?
1950 Korean war,
1959 Tibet,
1962 Indo./sino war,
1965 [[[CIA/MI5]]] INdon genocide on ethnic Chinese.
1989 TAM,
1998 Indon pogrom , mass rapes on ethnic Chinese
1999 BOmbing of Chinese embassy in ex Yugo,
2001 Hainan spy plane, Chinese pilot died.
2003 SARS1,
2008 Tibet riots,
2009 Xinjiang bloodbath,
2013 Bird flu H7N9 , Asia pivot
2014 Xinjiang, HK, Mh370, bubonic plague, Ebola, Dengue,
2018 bird flu, H7N9
2019 HK, Xinjiang, swine flu, army worms,
2020 SARS2, H5N1, locusts .
And there were also the proxy-war in Ukraine and the refugee crisis: the latter at
minimum a fallout of US-Israeli wars in the Middle East and the Zionist assault against
Libya; yet not unlikely itself a direct assault against Europe. And not only Willy Wimmer,
closest adviser to our old chancellor Helmut Kohl, strongly suspected as much already back
in 2015.
Thanks for that context. It is exactly what I am trying to call attention to the whole
time. Regardless, how much reality there is to Corona, my issue is the overall timing in the
geopolitical context, with Europe being torn apart between the Angloamericans and China /
Russia on the other side. That was the agenda anyway, so how is it possible that this threat
appears at this very moment?
It can be said that had Corona not happened, the powers to be would have needed to invent
it.
Else, in skimming the comments, I find that until now (with some 140 comments) there are
hardly any discussions, but everyone pushing their own narratives.
Mabe, it is possible to get away from the question, how and if Corona is deadly to the
context that is developing. I have to admit that I did not take Corona serious enough from
the start, not as an illness, but as a fundamental threat to our societies. In that sense, it
is indeed a war.
@hs4691506 There was also some evidence that Chinese researchers under his supervision
had smuggled samples of his work out of their labs and back to China. Chinese researchers,
working in the USA and Canada, have a history of smuggling viral and other lab samples back
ti China. It's part of a much larger pattern of Chinese espionage and intellectual theft.
A search on DuckDuckGo.Com using the
following search string, "chinese scientists smuggling viral samples", turns up a lot of
useful information on smuggling of viral and other biological samples. (I no longer trust
Google. DuckDuckGo is less censored and does not track its users)
Similar searches using the strings "chinese intellectual theft" and "chinese scientific
espionage" will provide a broader picture.
BTW, I believe that Israel and the USA have both been conducting research into potential
bio-weapons. I would not be surprised if the Chinese got a leg up on such research by
espionage targeting both countries. Of the three, the USA's research is probably the most
benign/least vicious. I suspect that the Israelis have been ruthlessly researching and
developing biological weapons, just as they did nuclear and chemical weapons. The Chinese
have probably been doing bio-weapons research just as ruthlessly. The biggest concern with
the Chinese is that, compared against Israel and the USA, their lab safety, security and
containment procedures are lax to an obscenely dangerous degree. One can only hope that after
the Wuhan outbreak, this attitude, if not the Chinese bio-weapons research, will change.
This is a model opening argument for an ICC bill of indictment against the CIA command
structure. The bird's-eye view is exactly right – all of CIA's gravest crimes have been
most evident not at the detailed technical level but at the organizational level. CIA can
shred all the MIPRs and RFPs and after-action reports they want, but the proof of all CIA
crime is public information about the actions of CIA focal points in government.
(Incidentally, one example you don't mention is official obstruction, including CDC, of Helen
Chu's coronavirus testing. That would have shown that COVID-19 was far too widespread for a
single introduction from Wuhan. Another example is the series of airport clusterfucks that
muddled US haplotypes when Chinese researchers noted that they point to US origins.)
The presumption of incompetence probably has its own CIA memo analogous to 1035-960. If
they can get you to tacitly assume that CIA works in the national interest, but ineptly, then
you misinterpret everything. CIA is a criminal enterprise with ongoing profit centers that
fund opportunistic crimes from asset-stripping to aggression.
When you're using a banned biological weapon, domestic casualties confer important
benefits:
First, damage to the US can help obfuscate attribution. Philip Giraldi articulates that
line in its clearest form, Why would the government shoot itself in the foot like that?
Second, US contagion offers a pretext for domestic repression: house arrest; overt contact
chaining illegally undertaken by NSA for decades; forcible derogation of your rights of
assembly and association.
Third, US economic devastation is used as a pretext for looting the fisc on an
unprecedented scale. Blackrock now performs central planning on behalf of the Fed, forcing
the state to guarantee a overwhelming volume of worthless and fraudulent securities.
Illegal warfare that is difficult to attribute has one intractable problem. It's a sneak
attack in breach of the Hague Convention Relative to the Opening of Hostilities. That
convention was the legal justification for the first use of nuclear weapons. So if Russia and
China nuke the beltway into a sinkhole of molten basalt, that's only fair.
If it is established that COVID-19 is a banned biological weapon, this is self-evidently
the gravest crime in world history. The attack manifestly constituted aggression with an
absolutely indiscriminate weapon. It defies considerations of proportionality with unknown
global effects. The Nazi regime was extirpated for much less.
The evidence is very close to probative, and mounting.
There is the question of natural vs artificial origin of the novel corona virus, and from my
layman's research and considerations it seems increasingly that an artificial origin is
extremely likely. The pertinent technology is now widely available, there has been a massive
ongoing effort in the field since the 2nd WW, and many researchers and knowledgeable people
are drawing the conclusion of likely artificial origin: So, for example, George Webb's work,
or the Czech scientist Dr.Sona Pekova, PhD, who near the end of the video linked to describes
the virus in such a way as to indicate a great likelihood of artificial creation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmL7okhbVzU&feature=youtu.be
There are many possible perpetrators. And a few likely suspects.
The ultimate health implications of the new virus are impossible to say with certainty at
this point: For example, Paul Craig Roberts' website's latest title is "Bad News From the
Virus if Correct", with the point being that there are now known to be a lot of different
strains with presumably different potential for harm, but there may be many more not
recognized.
There are additional contextual considerations that will have consequences which are
anyone's guess. So for example, last year saw many widespread agricultural catastrophes and
difficulties which were usually weather related. If the weather continues to be
uncooperative, in conjunction with food production and transportation problems related to the
virus, in conjunction with the African Swine Flu disaster, then human health and food
security, and thus health, on a large scale may be affected.
Another contextual consideration is the recent rapid and accelerating deployment of 5G
technology, which many are concerned can make life more vulnerable to health problems. It may
just be coincidental, but worth noting, that tiny San Marino, enclosed by Italy, boasted of
being the European leader in the rollout of 5G technology, and is now the world leader in
corona virus deaths per million, by a long shot (San Marino with 1179 deaths per million as
of today compared to second place Spain with 455 per million, and yes, Spain has been among
the most ambitious countries in rolling out 5G in many cities. And Wuhan was the very poster
'child' of 5G. Just saying.)
Shutting down the world economy seems rather dire. But it may just be the impetus for a
radical rethink of the basic structure and design of the global economic system.
The global paradigm which in economic terms might be described as globalism, or 'when
private corporations rule the world', or neo-liberalism, or plutocracy running amuck, or
grasping for 'global government', or the aftermath of the chimera of 'full spectrum
domination', or in the wreckage of Rockefeller's and Kissinger's et al wet dream, or
democracy spurned, is now inescapably obviously retarded, dysfunctional: a fundamental design
flaw if you want humanity and Earth to thrive. In short, the culture of deception.
Someone has suggested as symptomatic of our present predicament a cartoon featuring Fauci
with his bio-weapon declaring this as 'the age of the Ork', with crazed Bill Gates as Gollum
wielding a syringe and gleefully chortling 'my precious!'.
The local, one's back yard, the decentralized, the careful common sense community, the
regional, and the actually democratic national, with the public interest protected by the
public, and much honest discourse, as one basic design alternative.
Useful article by Unz which connects the dots well. One important dot which is missing,
though, in his analysis of the psywar promoting propaganda that the virus leaked out of a lab
in Wuhan, and is a Chinese biowarfare agent, is that this psywar originated with an israeli
military-intelligence operative. One dany shoham. This individual was also deeply involved in
the "iraq has wmds" psywar operation at the beginning of the century. More on that dot and
how it connects to the others, later.
A few days ago I wrote this about how the israeloamericans are framing their psywar
campaign against China:
The israeloamericans are working on a several level strategy which includes back-ups in my
opinion. The israeloamericans are trying to cover all the bases at once.
So they claim China created the virus in a lab, in case it gets out it was lab created,
meaning israel or the usa created it in a lab. The israeloamericans claim the virus leaked
out of the Wuhan lab in case evidence is found that israeloamerica deliberately planted the
virus in Wuhan or it spread from a source in the usa through some other vector. The
israeloamericans claim China mislead the world about the virus so people wont notice the
reality that China has successfully thwarted the virus, while trump & co. have continued
making it worse. The claptrap about China under reporting victims is a variation of the
latter tactic. And so on.
Is what is being reported in the following article "damage control"?
Neither 'lab' nor 'wet market'? Covid-19 outbreak started months EARLIER and NOT in Wuhan,
ongoing Cambridge study indicates
Another vector in the israeloamerican preemptive strategy? Now that research is showing
the virus may have been infecting people earlier and neither a market in Wuhan, or even Wuhan
itself, may be where it originated?
With regard to western response to the pandemic, especially american, the delay in
israel's trump colonial regime's containment response to the virus tells me they deliberately
wanted the virus to spread across the country and cause the ruckus it is now causing. The
question is why israel had them do this.*
* Compare the israeli response, IE: strong proactive containment strategy, to the weak
responses in most zionazi colonies. It is clear there is an actual strategy underlying this
difference. And it entails more than israel being sacrosanct.
Keep in mind that trump, and his corrupt regime, are israel's property. More specifically,
they tepresent the israeli likud freakshow (netanyahoo and related subhuman garbage). Most of
what trump says and the policies his regime follow, originate from tel aviv. Trump's cowardly
"blame China" campaign, duplicated by the zionazi western media (commonly misnamed the msm)
is israeli psywar.
@onebornfree See my post at 135 regarding three different variants: A, B and C. The most
prevalent in Asia is B and the most prevalent variants in Europe and the US are A and C. So
it could also be that A and C variants are more virulent than B.
"By any reasonable measure, the response to this global health crisis by China and most East
Asian countries has been absolutely exemplary, while that of many Western countries has been
equally disastrous. Maintaining reasonable public health has been a basic function of
governments since the days of the city-states of Sumeria, and the sheer and total
incompetence of America and most of its European vassals has been breathtaking. If the
Western media attempts to pretend otherwise, it will permanently forfeit whatever remaining
international credibility it still possesses."
So saying, Ron Unz forfeits whatever credibility he might have retained by now
acknowledging the data emerged from "the fog of war" he found himself pronouncing in a month
or more ago.
Like Unz, and after examining the relevant Chinese data, epidemiologists Knut Wittkowski(
almost a month ago) saluted the Asian approach to handling the novel virus threat.
Unlike Unz, Wittkowski revealed that what was salutary was the Chinese government's
allowing the populace to gain herd immunity before instituting any lockdown measures.
(rendering the lockdown measures a mystery from a scientific point of view).
So, and according to Wittkowski- a man with credentials relevant to this story, yet
completely ignored by Unz' investigative article- the incompetence of Western governments
cited by Unz is the clean reverse of what he claims: it is the incompetence of ignoring what
the competent Chinese did not ignore, namely, the sound scientific counsel to allow the virus
to spread, granting the herd immunity to the populace which protects the elderly and fragile
self-quarantining until that immunity is gained.
1) Virus is US bioweapon attack on China
2) Virus is China's own bioweapon accident
3) Virus happened in nature, and everybody is trying to profit off the crisis or
contain/direct the damage to their own interests.
That's 66% percent chance it's an accident.
Government in power were sane enough to avoid nuclear war as recently as 40 years ago. Why
would they be crazier today? Biowarfare is Mutually Assured Destruction, too. If people can
model this away, please provide a link.
@swamped You are cognitively blind to the obvious -- the ZUSA has become ZUSSR (minus
excellent Soviet educational system). Before lamenting "Chinese despots" and "their contempt
for civil liberties," think for a moment about the fate of Assange (why he is in a
high-security prison?) and about the Banksters on the march (the financialization of the US
economy).
What is the state of "liberties" in the US and the UK? -- Gay parades. Quantitative
Easings for eternity.
Why some 1000 American military bases encircle the globe? Why 25 American biofare
laboratories reside in Europe? You are cheerleading for Cheneys and Rubins (read General
Smedley Butler). https://fas.org/man/smedley.htm http://armswatch.com/the-pentagon-bio-weapons/?__cf_chl_jschl_tk_
Libya used to be a prosperous state with universal healthcare and excellent educational
opportunities. Enter the "non-totalitarian" and "non-despotic" deciders to bring in
"liberties." First, the US/NATO expropriated Libyan gold, and then a regular business of
"liberation" took place: since the "non-totalitarian" and "non-despotic" liberators entered
Libya, a civil war commenced, the healthcare and educational systems have collapsed and slave
markets sprang.
Or perhaps you are proud of freedom of information in the US?
This important story was immediately summarized in many of the world's other most
prestigious publications, but encountered an absolute wall of silence in our own
country.
How much trillions have been disappeared by the Pentagon? -- 21 (twenty-one). A lot
of money that could be used for initiating great national projects of all kinds.
Why the US industries have been relocated to China? -- Because this is what US corporations
demanded and got. What deciders want, they get. Read General Smedley Butler, again.
For many weeks President Trump and his political allies had regularly dismissed or
minimized this terrible health threat, and suddenly now faced with such a manifest
disaster, they have naturally begun seeking other culprits to blame.
I'm a little worried about The Unz Review. This pandemic is already being used to consolidate
the economy and The Powers That Be are likely to use it to settle scores and purge
dissident voices.
TruthDig is down and other media is likely to go down soon as ad revenue collapses. I
would have advised ad revenue from foreign sources like Aeroflot (and others outside the U.S.
Oligarchy), but airlines are collapsing and international travel is likely to be down for a
while.
Maybe just open a Patreon Account and put a link in the sidebar.
It may be a good time to be extra cautious and gird your loins as they say.
Whatever anyone may make of Unz's assessment, I think everyone not insane or evil or
mindlessly jingoistic should agree with this: "Everyone knows that America's ruling elites
are criminal, crazy, and also extremely incompetent."
By the way – I hope Unz has changed his mind about the bombing of Serbia. Anytime
Neocons assert the need to use violence to help Moslems, the reasonable man smells not a rat,
but a million putrid rats.
I would not be surprised if the Chinese got a leg up on such research by espionage
targeting both countries. [SIC]
Of the three, the USA's research is probably the most benign/least vicious [
SIC ]
ROFLAMO
How fucking old are you kid ?
Back to your Harry Potter forchrissake
This is an adult site.
Do you want me to inform your mom ?
@Tor597 Correct. The Elites of the Anglo-Zionist Empire will get richer from all this,
while the white American middle and working classes will get poorer.
Much the same will happen in the UK and France and other European nations.
This and many other analyses focus primarily on governments, USA government, Chinese
communistic government etc. and their past misadventures as proofs for their involvement or
not involvement in the current disaster. I would like to see at least one extensive analyse
of possible involvement of the nongovernment governments. Their interests and gains from this
situation. Regards!
@denk Not the "war crimes" bit again. Look, the whole operation was one big war crime,
and that according to the US Secretary of State. Same with Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq --
overthrow of another state for no compelling reason. So what? War is war, and China can
either participate or not. If it participate, it can expect to become part of the general
destruction.
Analogy -- if somebody is in your house and gets violent, that's a crime. You are legally
able to protect yourself. If the person starts to run, you can't shoot she/he/it because
she/he/it is no longer a threat. Sure, the other she/he/it started the crime, but that
doesn't mean you can commit a crime of your own (shooting somebody when she/he/it isn't an
immediate threat). Should she/he/it turn around and start returning fire, well, it just might
be that she/he/it is legally doing so.
So enough of this "you stepped on a crack and so you've transgressed the law in one
particular, so you are absolutely condemned" stuff. You want to play that game, people get
tired of it, and it has a bad endgame. Try playing it on COVID-19. COVID-19 might listen to
you and depart. Go, use your moral authority and save us all.
Since the Israeli masterminded 9/11 false flag, the MSM has told us a gazillion lies about
what DID NOT happen that day.
When those lies started losing luster, we were told Bin Laden was killed, but they offered no
proof, other than "Trust Us.'
Then we started getting lies about ISIS, DAESH, al Nusra etc, that they were even worse
than al CIA Duh, when in fact, they were started, funded, paid, protected and give air cover
by the US/Israel and the Kingdom of Head Choppers.
Now the same MSM is braying that Covid will be the end of the world, unless we give up our
freedoms?
Bull. We're being lied to again and the sad part is, many are falling for this latest line
of horse apples.
In Coronavirus We Trust: Medical Surveillance State For A Gov That's Experimented On
You 239 Times
When are people going to realize that the mandatory vaccine is ready NOW – Gates,
Fauci, Davos, the oligarchs, and the usual suspects just needed to lay the groundwork. It's
ready to go now. Doesn't take much of a gedanken experiment to see the end-game here.
@utu "Yes, what if the chief objective was not to hurt China by disrupting its society
and economy but to make the whole world angry with China."
If the planning was like 9/11, then both of these objectives would have been carefully
scrutinized and maximized.
Bear in mind something, please: who says these bastards are finished unleashing designer
bugs?
Would it not be wisest for these evil geniuses to keep the bugs coming, intensifying the
impact so that the continuously simmering anger of the increasingly desperate masses can be
directed to boil over at the Chinese menace when the 'elites' deem it necessary and proper.
And with exploding unemployment numbers, especially among the young, and no real short term
job or career prospects, these psychopathic 'elites' have a ready-made source for boots on
the ground, should that be mandated.
Of course, I hope all this turns out to not be the case. But if 9/11 was any indication,
these bastards will be brazen and shamelessly murderous.
@Max Powers When you said that Ron Unz lost you with his defense of NATO in the
unnecessary Serbian war, I hope that you read the rest of the article rather than stopping
there. I, too, smelled a Bill Clinton obfuscation at the time, as I always do when any US
president sends our troops to war. I'm a little surprised that Mr. Unz didn't.
However, I respect his honesty, and he more than redeemed himself in the rest of his
well-researched and well-written article. It did much to bolster my belief that the
CIA/Neocons are behind it. Although, discounting the unfairly derided Beltway outsider Mr.
Trump, I've never considered the likes of such people as West Point grad SOS Pompeo as being
incompetent. To paraphrase the former CIA head: "we lie, we cheat, we steal."
But America and several European countries avoiding adopting these same early measures
such as widespread testing, quarantine, and contact-tracing, and have paid a terrible price
for their insouciance.
For someone ordinarily quite careful in your use of terminology, you conflate the term
quarantine with lockdown. This is usually being done these days in the media to make a
lockdown seem less unreasonable to the insouciant public. Properly a quarantine is the
isolation of the sick to prevent the spread of contagion to the healthy public. What we have
are lockdowns, restricting the free movement of the healthy population. These have been
resorted to out of the desire "to do something," but unfortunately as you must know, there is
absolutely no empirical evidence that lockdowns do any good when all is said and done, and
they do considerable economic harm. Sweden used a relaxed social distancing approach without
a lockdown, and their mortality rate is currently less than that of most countries that
resorting to this authoritarian approach.
@Quintus "Another financial reset was also long overdue, as Greg Mannarino and others
have pointed out: the coronavirus cover was too perfect of a tool for deflecting the guilt
from the Fed and the banksters; killing many birds with one stone, the virus is also a 2)
powerful psy-op hurting China's image in the world, 3) further delivering a strong blow to
its export-driven economy; 4) it sets the stage for the cashless society ("dirty bills not
accepted here!"), the advent of digital currencies and 5) top-down surveillance."
Exactly!
This planned-demic is like a Timex watch for the PTB: the gift that keeps on giving.
You are spot-on when you say that digital currencies and top-down surveillance will be
enabled by this oh-so-convenient viral pandemic.
Like I said, it's a neoliberal zionist-neocon elitist's wet dream come true, maybe even
more than 9/11 was.
I guess we all get to watch, wait and see what happens next .
One thing I have been waiting for is confirmation that HIV is somehow involved in the virus,
making it a chimera and tipping the scale towards bioweapon.
@anon If Trump was in on it, he didn't do much of a job making himself a hero, several
missteps are noticeable in the view of 20/20 hindsight, even if he intentionally wanted to
crash the economy he would have scripted it better.
@MLK Unz.com seems to be less a blog than an online asylum; Ron and most of the
KrazyKommentariat have really flipped their tinfoil Trilbys this time. This site is worse
than Infowars is reputed to be–yet utterly without the entertainment value. You wonder
why Pat Buchanan, Steve Sailer and Bertie Woostershire continue to post on this site. And,
yes, why I bother to comment.
@Tor597 "Zerohedge used to be libertarian and antiestablishment but something changed and
they are now right wing neocons."
Their true colors are emerging for all to see.
I recognized early on what exactly Zerohedge was about: sayanim-directed, intelligently
controlled opposition. Very intelligently controlled, I should say.
Or as I call it, "Zio-hedge".
The trick is to give lots of good analysis and establish credibility, and then on the
absolutely critical issues, subtly reinforce the neocon narrative. Then, slowly over time,
not so subtly. Then, when the moment is ripe, openly and strongly support the neocon
narrative. Again, a very intelligent and effective technique.
Sadly, we are now at the point of "openly" reinforcing the neocon narrative ..
Ron,
Your article is very good! Thank you for shedding some light on this issue
I would like to summarize a rebuttal to some of the points expressed in this article
However, your chart depicting America and China economic trends is statistically
misleading
America started from a much higher bar than China, and it is harder for richer countries
to grow. Furthermore, an additional dollar in per capita GDP for America is a less % growth
than it would be for China.
Here is the GDP per capita growth from the World Bank for America vs China.
Hardly, what your graph shows at all. In fact, this shows America adding more in Per
capita GDP in real terms than China over the last thirty years.
It seems the issue is that you are thinking that China's exponential growth will continue
till the point where it strongly surpasses the USA, like the Coronavirus's growth, but
countries don't work like that. Unless you want to believe there was some policy reason for
why Japan went from 10% to 1% growth in ten years.
Second, with respect to the domestic impoverishment of America, I think you are mistaken
here. Most of those who are impoverished in America are immigrants and Black people, one
group because of their recent arrival and location in America's most expensive cities. The
other group because of their lack of time preference, so they don't save.
Additionally, How did China identify the virus so quickly? It is fairly hard to tell, even
from those who died. According your own article, China shut down when they had 11 deaths, and
sequenced the genome when they had even less. That has never happened before, and I feel that
is suspicious to me. The offical Chinese narrative is that the Wuhan Goverment dropped the
ball, so how did they catch the disease so early?
An article by Mr. Unz is always worth the wait and then the read, no matter if I agree a
100%, 60%, or even just 20% with what has been written.
A real delight, and a sort of Christmasy feeling. Which is a very important psychological
boost for the likes of me in such weird, weird times. Thanks!
The Winnipeg lab lead scientist, a Dr Plummer, dropped dead in Nigeria in early March.
He more than likely added the HIV 1 content to the Wu V to allow it to spread since he had
the MERS variant from 2014 on.
His lab then had Wuhan Scientists escorted out by RCMP last summer.
No info as to why was offered, and Plummer was buddies with the Harvard prof, and both were
recipients of Epstien the rapists financial support.
Ron always goes to the edge, but never ever steps off!!
Epstein should be brought up, he gave many millions to the Harvard and MIT people for virus
development!! Cui bono Ron, cui bono, by deception, make war!!!
Not sure what to make of Mr. Unz's piece here -- there's a lot of room for any number of
suspects to emerge as the guilty party here
One of the earliest questions I had was just how did this virus get into Iran -- which
naturally begs the question of who has the most visible and ongoing hatred of Iran -- other
than israel -- and their stooge, the United States.
The Newsweek article cited here about the class action lawsuits even mentions one of the
plaintiff attorneys: "But Klayman claimed he has "whistleblowers with firsthand knowledge" of
China's involvement in the viral outbreak who are currently residing in Israel and the United
States and who can help substantiate this charge." So just who is it among 'whistleblowers'
that reside in israel and in the United States (likely dual citizenship folks) -- other than
israeli nationals?
And, from this article: "But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the
global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit,
with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its
officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior.
" Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant
human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant
outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have
America assassinating Iran's top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks
later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly
new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual
possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?"
Even allowing for Iran's involvement by the chinese in its BRI -- how can anyone explain
the virus so quickly targeting the elites in Iran's ruling class -- certainly they don't hang
around with the chinese in Iran or elsewhere, do they?
@Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist Your list is too small. I laugh at these comments
regarding China's lies and crimes. Americans are surely the most gullible people on the
planet. They know their corrupt government steals and lies to them daily yet they can still
be manipulated to jump on the bandwagon of blame and hate towards anyone at anytime with a
few inciteful articles from the media.
let me add to your list [MORE]
MLK
JFK
Ruby
USS Liberty
911
Venezuela
Honduras
Haiiti
Hiroshima
Vietnam
Syria
Palestine
Russia
Ukraine
Libya
Epstein
Afghanistan
32 Trillion dollars missing from the pentagone
All Presidential Elections
Hiding their own crimes against humanity, their government drug trade/sex trade/ chemical
and biowarfare against poor countries.
The US of Israel so exceptional.
@Mustapha Mond Agreed . Like 9/11 there is plenty of evidence in the predictive
programming/revelation of the method/social conditioning that the Coronavirus pandemic was
many years in the making see, for example : "WTF? Olympic Opening Ceremony 2012-NHS" YouTube
. Yes, the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony revealed part of the plot of the
Coronavirus plandemic. I was expecting that something like this was going to happen ,but
figured the cabal/cult/globalists/freemasons wouldn't try to pull it off until Americans were
disarmed but , when you have total control of the media , it is easy to create hysteria and
brainwash the public into believing that the Coronavirus, which is probably no more than the
flu ,is the plague and will wipeout mankind unless everyone is locked-down . As another
commenter has noted ,they probably could not have pulled off the international Coronavirus
psyop 10 to 20 years ago because they did not have control and ownership of the worldwide
massmedia . septemberclues.info
has a good, short essay on "The central role of the news media on 9/11." Unless you stop
relying on news from NPR, MSNBC, New York Times , Washington Post, Fox News , CBS , NBC
,etc,etc you will remain brainwashed and unable to understand that we are living through a
planned-demic with a frightening agenda .
@anon "Please do not comment on things you clearly don't understand. It is estimated that
no more than a few percent of the American population has been exposed to Sars2 (Covid-19)."
The key word is "estimated". No one knows (not even you) the actual number of exposed
Americans to the Wuhan virus. There have been some small random samples done by
Dr.Bhattacharya that indicate that there is actually a large number of Americans that have
been infected but are asymptomatic and that the final mortality rate will be closer to the
annual flu or 0.1% to 0.2% instead of the guesstimate of 3%. The early studies are too small
to think they are representative of the nation but the results indicate that larger studies
are necessary in order to support nationwide policies, which are currently being made on
hunches not science. About 60,000 to 80,000 died of the flu during the 2017 season when
vaccines were available, so a large number of deaths during the flu season are not unusual
and never required closing down the economy.
[MORE]
Gov. Cuomo was screaming at the top of his lungs that he needed tens of thousands of
ventilators, thousands are now sitting in his warehouses unused. So much for estimates. Most
of the early estimates were wrong by exaggerating the death rate, which turned out to be only
a guess rather than based upon science.
The CDC has been derelict in its duties over the years and has been giving poor advice.
There are other experts in the field that have alternative views that are being ignored or
dismissed and should at least be considered.
@Ayatollah Smith I have been reading much about Covid-19, but am waiting for anyone, in
or out of government, trying to blame China and/or exonerate Uncle Sam to deal with a
particular point that anyone can easily appreciate using only a timeline:
The US needs to answer this question: HOW could US 'intelligence sources' possibly have
known in November – or even October – of a potential pandemic of COVID-19 that
would erupt – specifically in Wuhan – two months later? (Or that was already
erupting in Wuhan at the time, unbeknownst to the Chinese?). I believe the entire world
would demand the answer to this.
So far, nothing. No refutation, no rationalization, just silence. Like WTC-7, is this
Achilles' heel from which the Establishment can only limp away?
I don't know who, what, when, where, or why this infection(s) began. But I'm certain that
anyone dodging that particular question wants me not to.
In 2016, when I finally cancelled by NYT subscription, I was asked why I was doing so. I
explained that I didn't like having my intelligence systematically insulted.
Like, I think, most UR readers, I'm game for pretty much anything as a general
proposition.
But poor Ron couldn't make it more than 100 words into a droning 7,400 words with
discrediting himself.
When CIA whacked JFK, the whole world outside the US iron curtain knew, but too bad. When CIA
blew up OKC, the whole world knew, but hey, it's their business. When CIA knocked down the
WTC, on the second try, and blew up the Pentagon a bit to start a war, the whole world knew,
but Russia was tits-up, unable to do anything about it.
This is different. CIA's illegal germ warfare is a maleficium, in legal doctrine going
back to Grotius. CIA wronged the whole world, and the whole world has a joint obligation to
hold CIA responsible. Russia and China made a missile gap for real, so now they can do
it.
This is war. This is the very beginning of the world war that will end the CIA regime:
@Anon One problem with the chart that can be fixed to make it more representative is that
the two countries should start from the same base of comparison. If you use two different
bases, then you get the wrong comparison.
For instance, if you measured the US from China's base in 1980, the US added 40k in per
capita gdp in the 40 years, reflecting a 4000% increase from China base in contrast to the
1400% increase that China had.
If you use the same base, then America is what looks like a superior country.
@antitermite Unbelievable. A truly gifted researcher destroyed on the totally idiotic
charges:
Charles M. Lieber (born 1959) is an American chemist and pioneer in nanoscience and
nanotechnology. In 2011, Lieber was named by Thomson Reuters as the leading chemist in the
world for the decade 2000-2010 based on the impact of his scientific publications. He is
known for his contributions to the synthesis, assembly and characterization of nanoscale
materials and nanodevices, the application of nanoelectronic devices in biology, and as a
mentor to numerous leaders in nanoscience.
Awards:
Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (2001)
MRS [Material Research Society] Medal (2002)
ACS Award in the Chemistry of Materials (2004)
NBIC Research Excellence Award in Nanotechnology, University of Pennsylvania (2007)
Inorganic Nanoscience Award, ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry (2009)
Fred Kavli Distinguished Lectureship in Nanoscience, Materials Research Society (2010)
Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2012)
Nano Research Award, Tsinghua University Press/Springer (2013)
IEEE Nanotechnology Pioneer Award (2013)
Willard Gibbs Medal Award (2013)
MRS Von Hippel Award (2016)
Remsen Award (2016)
NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2017 and 2008)
John Gamble Kirkwood Award, Yale University (2018)
Welch Award in Chemistry (2019)
On January 28, 2020, Lieber was arrested on charges of making false statements to the
U.S. Department of Defense and to Harvard investigators regarding his participation in
China's Thousand Talents Program According to the Department of Justice's charging
document, there are two counts of alleged crime committed by Lieber. The DOJ
believes Lieber's statement was false
The only way "the US government did it" makes sense is if this was happening this coming
November after Trump has been reelected. If the Deep State did it without Trump's approval,
somebody will talk just like John Soloman claims FBI agents told him of the Russiagate
conspiracy at the FBI while it was getting underway. Somebody would have alerted somebody
loyal to Trump what was being planned. Remember Trump had to give the order to kill that
Iranian general. The Deep State (full of Israel's toadies) didn't even do that on their own.
Of course, there is an answer for everything. It even makes more sense for Trump to do it
now so he can fix it. The Deep State did it but Trump now has to cover for them or risk the
world finding out how incompetent he is.
Concerning "wet markets", I'd just like to add that 99% of those are normal "butcher's
markets" with lamb, beef, pork, chickens, and sea produce, and 1%, in specific parts of the
country, selling all the Cthulhu fhtagn stuff.
So China reopening some wet markets now is an argument neither for, nor against the
zootropic theory. Because I'm pretty sure they're reopening the "lamb and chicken" wet
markets, not the "H.R.Giger's nightmares" ones, such as the one in Wuhan that is one of the
three possible origins.
1) Wuhan wet market
2) Wuhan lab
3) Wuhan based foreign troops taking part in the military Olympics
Has to be one of those three. Maybe the third was even accidental, but
There's some interesting information in the article for sure, but it seems to me that if the
US were to perform clandestine bio weapons attacks on another country, the Middle East and
Russia would surely be the primary targets. We rely on China for a lot of things, such as
virtually all the goods sold at Walmart and China owns a great deal of our debt, so it would
seem to me a financially strong China is in our interest.
Moreover, plagues and epidemics, especially coronaviruses, have started in the far east as
long as can be remembered.
@Anonymous This is about the most common sense post I have read on this site. SPOT ON.
OUR current problems in regards to immigration, racial issues, Black criminality, and this
(((virus))) can all be traced to one group for the most part. Btw, I was in NYC about the
same time perion in '83-'87 and haven't been back since, but from what I understand, it is
far worse today. I actually didn't find it that bad back then even though crime and drugs
were out of control. Probably because I was a twenty-something and having fun.
Anyhow, as you said, WHY in the hell do ANY Americans, much less White Americans ALLOW
RACIST JEWISH SUPREMACIST organizations have so much power over them. It isn't as if the ADL
or $PLC try and hide their hatred for Whites. I would have no problem for any organization
whether it be Black, Jewish or Hispanic fighting against racism, but lets face it, these
organizations aren't fighting against racism, they main goal is to take away the rights of
Whites or demonize WHITES ONLY.
"Life isn't complicated." And this (((virus))) isn't either. This shit was MANUFACTURED
and we can only guess by whom and what their future intentions are down the road. As usual
the usual suspects have already pretty much revealed themselves to anyone out there really
watching. For the WILLFULLY ignorant ostriches and chinadidit people, well, they must like be
lorded over by a tiny group of people who don't give two shits about them or their
children.
the response of the West has been utterly atrocious either way.
What do you people wish happened -- Trump-issued national lockdown order back in January?
Why do the death counts need to be artificially inflated if this virus is as deadly as the
media says?
These injuries often seem like pneumonia, but they are not caused by an infectious
disease, and they do not improve with antibiotics. Respiratory symptoms reported include:
shortness of breath, chest pain, pain on breathing, and cough. Other symptoms reported by
many patients include: fever, chills, nausea, weight loss, vomiting, diarrhea, or abdominal
pain.
Whether plausible or not, such accusations carry the gravest international implications,
and there are growing demands that China financially compensate our country for its
trillions of dollars in economic losses.
Aren't you comdedians Trillions deep in debt by the Chinese?
Since you'd never pay back anyway, they are in the face saving position to grant you very
generous debt forgiveness.
@Mustapha Mond Not to mention, Mr. Brave New World (how appropriate your name is), it
fits in nicely with Bill Gates' plan for a massive reduction in world population. What
freedom-loving young proles will want to form families and bring children into such a
dystopia? Already, US whites are well below replacement rate and dropping. As of 2018 it was
1.73 babies per woman, 16% below replacement rate, the lowest rate ever recorded. Asian
Americans are even lower at 1.525 (per the World Atlas).
@Chet Roman there things that are kmown:the almost universal economic damage that
stopping the economy,as if it were a ball game,would bring,guaranteed
We all have one hand tied behind our back. There is nobody that I know of presenting
information from inside the border of China to compare with Ronald Unz and his collaborators
at unz.com . I have seen exactly one
document in the last two years. It was a post on medium.com which purportedly was written by a Chinese ex-pat
graduate student in British Columbia with google earth images analyzed to show the
proliferation of concentration camps in Xinjiang for the retention of young male uyghurs.
Every single time I saw this document referenced on the internet it was followed up within
an hour by a shower of posts from all over the place that it was CIA fake news.
Basically at most we know about 1/2 and it is tough to know what to do with that.
@36 ulster Because articles with stated evidence linked to articles/research/legislation
where it is taken from (unlike the MSM, that links nothing other than its own circle-jerk),
and some implicit acceptance that the reader should have the freedom to decide for themselves
– rather than being spoonfed 'truths' agreed upon somewhere 'up high' – offers
people enough respect to allow them to accept that the webzine is not an ideological
printout, but a spectrum of ideas, to be evaluated by the reader. This is a contract with
consideration.
We have no truths from our elected leaders, or their stenographers in the MSM though.
When Trump says 'blame China', most of us see a bankruptcy merchant peddling a lie to
weasel out and default on 1 trn $$ (Martyanov said it first methinks!) – cause that's
what he does, and that's what he knows.
Unz offers a fairly balanced approach to conspiracy theory – not conspiracy
hypothesis. Ain't seen any article on some dude claiming he got anal probed by little green
men without any even anecdotal evidence.
This place debates the smoke, often without the fire. But it's a good start to some
explanation for some fire. Much of the rest of the net doesn't look at the smoke, but instead
distracts its audience with some other eye candy.
But hey, is it fair to complain – some people enjoy WWE!
@utu There's nothing like attacking the person (Wittkowski himself) in place of his point
( herd immunity already gained by Asians before lockdown) to demonstrate your bona fides.
Thanks for your back-handed admittal that you can't rebut his conclusion.
I have been trying to get this across for an age. It's very simple. Anybody who says China
did it is suspect. Not only does the import of their message suggest that the China-did-its
are ruling-class-hired trolls, the trolly smartass tone suggests it, not to mention the
illiteracy.
@Other Side "The drastic changes in the Balkans in the 1990s and the disintegration of
Yugoslavia in particular have resulted in a large number of publications attempting to
explain the break-up of this country and the political developments in the Balkans. Some of
these publications deal partly with the local Muslims who were engaged in the Balkan
conflicts but, with some exceptions, they are focused mainly on recent developments, with
less attention paid to the historical contexts in which the Muslim nationalist movements were
shaped. Although religion played a more important role in the nation-building process of the
Bosnian Muslims than in that of the Albanians, there are very few studies that examine the
reasons for this and the impact of Islam on the Muslim nationalist movements in historical
perspective. The following article examines from a comparative perspective the role of Islam
in the Bosnian Muslim and Albanian national movements from the Ottoman period up to the end
of the Cold War. The Sunni Muslims of Bosnia and the Albanians, who are divided into three
religions and a variety of sects, present contrasting societal structures for the analysis of
different aspects of Islam."
Would you like to read the rest of this article
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233460310_The_Bosnian_Muslims_and_Albanians_Islam_and_nationalism
More reading
"Immediately after the fall of communism in Albania in 1991, Arab Islamic fundamentalists
infiltrated the mosques in the country, which is 70 percent Muslim. The interlopers
represented the Saudi Wahhabis and the Egyptian disciples of today's al Qaeda leader Ayman
Al-Zawahiri. In spring 1999, a dozen of Al-Zawahiri's acolytes, known as the "Albanian
Returnees," were deported from the eastern Adriatic republic to Egypt, tried, and sentenced
to death or extended prison terms for terrorism. The "Returnees" had been told by their
"sheikhs" to stay in Albania and avoid going to Kosovo, where NATO military forces were, by
that time, thick on the ground. But Albania booted them out with alacrity. Evidence in the
case of the "Albanian Returnees" proved extremely important in tracing the evolution of al
Qaeda's Egyptian predecessors."
"... The budget deficit is simply a ruse to make you believe that government funding is limited when in reality they create money on demand with a few keystrokes. ..."
"... Thus there is always money for corporate welfare, the military, tax relief and benefits for the oligarchy but never money for health care, education, infrastructure, etc. ..."
In the broadest sense the US deficit is a measure of how much money the govt has created (not entirely accurate as the creation
of money - really debt - has been largely outsourced to private banks). If the national debt was 'paid off' It would suck all
the money out of society and the economy would collapse.
The Fed doesn't need taxes as revenue as it just creates whatever money it needs. The budget deficit is simply a ruse to
make you believe that government funding is limited when in reality they create money on demand with a few keystrokes.
Thus there is always money for corporate welfare, the military, tax relief and benefits for the oligarchy but never money
for health care, education, infrastructure, etc. The deficit is 1/2 of a balance sheet, the deficit on the govt side is balanced
by a surplus (money in circulation) in the economy. Note that states are revenue constrained and depend on taxes and federal outlays
to operate as they cannot create their own money on demand.
But what about inflation? Too much money in circulation lowers its value. Taxes are the real federal economic regulatory mechanism.
When there is inflation, higher taxes directly remove money from circulation. The disinformation campaign is that interest rates
control inflation, which has a) repeatedly been demonstrated false and b) is simply another system of rewards for the banking
cartel.
The best metaphor is a sink. The faucet is the creation of money, the basin is the economy, and the drain is taxes. When the
sink starts to overflow (inflation) the solution is to open up the drain (raise taxes).
Note also that this is for a sovereign economy, one that is controlled by the government. The EU has effectively destroyed
all the sovereign economies in Europe with its central bank. Thus Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. have no control of their own economies
and as such are unable to economically regulate themselves and subject to foreign predatory forces.
Nobody can cancel the end of cheap oil. those manipulations with futures and paper oil is
just a blip of the radar. "Bottom line is that we live on a finite world which capitalism treats
as an infinite resource."
On the previous thread, Piotr Berman @ 417 did bring up the subject of this post by b, and
had the following final comment: "...Actually, the most acute pain is among the clever
folk who provided the so-called hedges, namely who sold the obligations to buy oil at a
certain price. They are losing hundreds of billions -- my guess. Now they are forced to buy
AND store, hence the negative price."
Thanks, Piotr. Some of what is happening makes a bit more sense to me as far as the
strange dealings in the stock market are concerned.
Also, just above at 416, karlof1 had this to say: "...Was the West ever on the path to
making its goal the improvement of the Common Man as advocated by Wallace and his political
allies?..." His answer is NO (exclamation point.)
My answer is YES (exclamation point.) Even if you only progress as far as the creation of
the UN, with the leadership of Eleanor, that is an important pivotal moment for mankind which
we cannot ignore. But I will state uncategorically that the JFK administration had similar
idealistic goals and would have carried them out, had it not been for divisive powers
plotting against it. That such dastardly powers succeeded does not negate the previous
effort.
And even the example of China proves that this is not an impossible dream for mankind in
general. As also is the example of Russia. We are fortunate in this generation to have two
role models instead of one.
I don't have the Frost poem at hand so I will thusly mangle the last lines (sorry)
Two paths lay in the woods, and I Took the one less travelled by And that has made all the difference.
I've mangled it, but the meaning is there, I think. (I'll go find the correct version, and
point of reference, I was a college student when Robert Frost came to Johns Hopkins and I
heard him read his poems. He did so also at Kennedy's inaugural.)
Oil futures paper contracts market (in normal times of stable->rising oil prices and
plenty of tank storage capacity a simple safe "buy low, hold, sell high" investment vehicle
used heavily by investment banks, hedge funds, ETFs and teachers', municipal employees', etc,
retirement/pension funds) explained in 5 minutes by Chris Martenson starts at ~minute
35:00:
Emily, We may still be at or around peak oil. That does not mean that all of the heavily
indebted countries and oil companies won't pump what's left as fast and hard as they can.
Now
you have to stir in a massive plunge in demand to the equation. Seems to me that all newer
oil discoveries are deep sea or shale. All of which require much more energy to produce then
say thirty years ago.
When it takes the equivalent of one barrel of energy to produce one barrel of energy it will
be lights out.
The petrodollar was not in and of itself the mechanism that the US used to "export
debt" and enrich itself off global trade. Rather, the petrodollar was the mechanism used
to lock-in the US$ as the global reserve currency. If you wanted oil, you needed US$. After
that it was just convenient to use US$ for other internationally traded commodities as well.
Of course, this made even more sense way back in the distant past of the middle of last
century because most of the international trade in manufactured goods was for American
products, for which you'd have to use dollars to buy anyway.
The empire fanbois will cook up all kinds of explanations for why the dollar will remain
the Global Reserve Currency in order to reassure themselves of the empire's continued
hegemony, but the fact is that all of the "locks" locking other countries into that
regime are now gone. Countries can choose to walk away now whereas in the past that would
mean giving up access to oil and no longer importing all of those awesome things that the US
used to make. That is not a barrier anymore.
US/Western financial markets are a "musical chairs" game, where right now more chairs are
being pulled out from the game faster than the FED and the central banks can 'digitally
print' new chairs to keep the game going.
"We will never let the great US Oil & Gas Industry down. I have instructed the
Secretary of Energy and Secretary of the Treasury to formulate a plan which will make funds
available so that these very important companies and jobs will be secured long into the
future!" Trump said via Twitter.
Is this a result of all the lockdowns? A sort of automotive general strike occasioned by the
virus, aided and abetted by government enforcement of restrictions on industry, travel,
general hulabaloo?
Peace has descended upon a weary world. Nature has commanded us to cease and desist from
gigantic insults upon the earth. Stop digging! she says, Leave it in the ground! Cease and
desist making war for oil!
What does it profit a man? It profits him nothing! I have no idea where this leads, but it
is a delicious moment. Look, see the power we have to bring everything to a standstill, even
when we only do it because we are forced to! What if we did it willingly?
Where are your trillions now, moghuls?
The earth has spoken. We should all listen. Me, I am going out to plant potatoes.
Peak shale has arrived. The energy inefficiency of fracking - directly related to the
economic efficiency of producing shale - killed it off. This would have happened even without
COVID-19.
The same will (eventually) happen with oil. The global economy - already teetering - has
now been pushed over the edge by COVID-19. The demand side of capitalist growth has been
temporarily (and in some cases permanently) crushed - which is a good thing for the planet -
as workers are idled for the foreseeable future, and many out of a job forever.
Bottom line is that we live on a finite world which capitalism treats as an infinite
resource.
div
This (oil + the virus) is looking like an economic Pearl Harbor for shale oil industry
This (oil + the virus) is looking like an economic Pearl Harbor. I think BRICS is playing a
far better game of chess so far and will win if we don't replace The Swamp with dedicated
people with vision and smarts and who put country above cronyism and self-enrichment.
What has the fluctuating price of oil got to do with peak oil? One is reflection of demand,
plus manipulation of the price by producers, and the other has to do with the long term rates
of extraction relative to the creation of new reserves by deposition of marine micro-organism
and there decay under pressure and temperature conditions only geological time scales. the
two are as similar as the price of fish and oranges.
You were spot on about Peak Oil. US shale will not die. While shareholders and bond
holders will take a haircut today, the extraction technology will continue to improve and
their costs of production will decline. As oil prices improve shale production will return.
The US is in a strong position as it doesn't have to be concerned about oil at least for the
next several decades.
From a supply/demand perspective, oil density in the west will continue to decline as our
economies become more efficient and as solar and nuclear becomes more cost competitive for
electricity generation.
An investment maxim is to buy when there's blood in the streets. We will continue to use
oil for at least another couple generations IMO.
The big issue in the short term is going to be the drastic impacts for those economies
entirely dependent on crude revenues. The last time crude prices were lower for a sustained
period the Soviet Union collapsed. MbS is running massive budget deficits as he keeps his
population from revolting against the monarchy. One possible good outcome is there's going to
be less funding for the jihadists in the short term.
There is oil out there and there will be for a long, long, time. The only determining factor
is the price to get it out of the ground. Here in North America fracking has opened the
spigot but the price is $40+ a barrel to get it out of the ground.
What I can't fathom is why Canada is pushing through with the Keystone XL pipeline taking
tar sands oil from Alberta to Nebraska and eventually to the gulf coast.
Obama put the stop to it but the Trumpster reversed his executive order and they started
building again this month, although a federal judge just stopped it due to environmental
review.
Several years ago I read that tar sands oil costs $70+/barrel and that doesn't include
shipping cost. Does Canada know something about the future price of oil or are they just
subsiding their oil companies/workers? I sure wouldn't invest in it.
" i listened to about 3 mins of some bill gates ted talkish thing, wondering, will these dim
bulbs ever assume responsibility for anything?
all the msm talking heads have been revealed for what they are: state propagandists. not
one krugmanian friedmanite will ever say, "I didn't see this coming and I pimped myself out
for the last 40 years selling snake oil and getting nobel prizes for it and have revealed
myself to be unqualified to turn on a light switch no matter how much money I have made and
recognition I have received. Clearly I know nothing". why would anyone listen to an msm
personality that's been sold to them as some kind of "expert"?
"What's complicated is that even if what everything we say about the society of surveillance
is scary and true, the state obtains this obedience in the name of its most undisputed
function, which is to protect the population from creeping death.
That's what plenty of serious studies define as 'biolegitimacy'."
And I would add, today, a biolegitimacy boosted by widespread voluntary servitude.
MCC is married to a VC multi-millionaire. To have hubby's business friends throw a couple
hundred grand at her is unsurprising. It's kind of like when your kid has to sell chocolate
bars so the marching band to go to the Thanksgiving Day parade. I doubt she'll get a thousand
votes. It's a lark and great fun to talk about over cocktails with the other Masters of the
Universe.
But then again Claire Booth Luce was a Congressperson but she had the good taste to run in
Connecticut not the Bronx.
Linh Dinh: "Diogenes, "I am a citizen of the world.""
Nobody knows exactly what he meant by this. He had previously been stripped of his
citizenship in Sinope, so it may have simply been a way a expressing that fact. Also, it's
worth pointing out that he was a contemporary of Alexander the Great, whose conquests up to
323 BC, the year both men died, included all of the known world. According to some, Alexander
once went to meet Diogenes, who was sunning himself on a nearby hill. Diogenes, unimpressed
with the conqueror, asked him to step out of the way, as he was blocking the sun. Departing,
Alexander is reputed to have said that if he hadn't been Alexander, then he would have liked
to have been Diogenes.
Linh Dinh: "The coronavirus crisis is a turning point in this escalating war
between globalists and us dumb hicks."
Not really a turning point, certainly not in the sense of a reversal. And there's no war,
because for a war you need two sides. The dumb hicks may rail against shadowy "globalists",
but are too stupid to realize that they themselves are globalists. The hicks want their cheap
computers, and the thousands of other things manufactured by slave labor in China, and the
globalists are happy to provide them. Yet the same dopes chanting USA! USA! (the forces of
nationalism, at least in America) don't understand that empire has downsides as well as
advantages. The coronavirus pandemic is an example of the cost of empire, the white man's
technological empire that has come to cover the whole world. In that way, it resembles
previous plagues, such as the plague of Justinian in the sixth century, and the Black Death
in the fourteenth, both of which are also thought to have originated in China and infected
the white world by means of global commerce.
Linh Dinh: "It will be a world of ubiquitous surveillance, universal snitching,
curtailed movement, suffocated speech and enforced, increasingly absurd dogmatism, with a
lockdown to be sprung on us at any time, since we already know the drill."
The hicks themselves will beg for it, because they're always for more law and order.
They're born badgelickers and just can't get enough of it. You can hear their excuses
already. "If it saves only one life it will be worth it." "If it prevents another 9/11, it
will be worth it." "If it allows countries and races to coexist in harmony, it will be worth
it." "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide. Surveill me all you like."
Besides, what remains of privacy anyway? It's been abolished. Technological innovation has
made universal surveillance a fait accompli . The hicks themselves have voluntarily
installed listening devices and spy cameras in their own homes. Every street corner and
shopping mall is equipped with cameras. Drones and satellites oversee everything. Government
supercomputers collate the data; identify threats.
Linh Dinh: "To avoid this fate, we must assert our regional autonomy and resist
each diktat. This will take much clarity, composure and courage. We shouldn't worry about
what foreign hicks are up to, but simply band with neighboring hicks, to defend our
precious hickdom. We must liberate our home turf first."
People will never voluntarily abandon high technology and the empire to which it has given
rise. To do so would cost billions of lives and cause extreme hardship for any survivors. The
technological trap has snapped shut.
The coronavirus pandemic is an example of the cost of empire, the white man's
technological empire that has come to cover the whole world. In that way, it resembles
previous plagues, such as the plague of Justinian in the sixth century, and the Black Death
in the fourteenth, both of which are also thought to have originated in China and infected
the white world by means of global commerce.
We could push that logic a bit father and arrive at: occasional viral outbreaks are the
cost of civilization to begin with, so "lockdowns" are madness. No evolution without
biological exploitation.
Totally agree with your remarks. As rousing as this piece is, it isn't the reality. We
have existed on this arc since fire.
I was in Shenzhen China when the epidemic officially started.
I watched closely when Xi Jinping appeared publicly and assumed leadership
(ie put HIS neck on the line) for the outbreak.
Also reassuring was his declaration of open and factual reporting.
He periodically reappears on the hundreds of state controlled TV channels
calling on delegated officials to meet required standards. Fail in this and you are gone
Most of the official TV/Net information was mostly optimistic, and frequently
nationalistic.
By way of contrast, I was able to access via cellphone the banned western
The Economist, The Guardian. It was like two different worlds.
The western reporting was almost all negative,, ,disparaging, damming with faint praise
or making unsourced statements about draconian authoritarianism in China..
Worse still, Trump had slashed the CDC budget, appointed evangelical Mike Pence as point
man
for the battle against CoVid in the US and indicated at that point
"The markets will determine the cost of CV testing"
So it is worth following the US closely for details of how
Capitalism deals with a communal disease called COVID
WET MARKETS
I did a grid survey of our 50 Block hi-rise by walking around the apartments .
All had shops at the ground level - around 20 per building, and over a third of them were
eateries.
They require a hi-turnover and low-markup for survival . They were in part
supplied by open air markets, where meat is laid out on unrefrigerated wooden blocks
to be cut on demand throughout the day. Yes, the fish are fresh - from swimming
( in distinctly unhygienic water ) into plastic bags within 5 minutes.
Chopping block just given a quick wipe.. Hmm.. I thought this is pandemic country...
As the infamous swamp creature HRC once said: "What difference, at this point, does it make?"
America can huff and puff economic bubbles and kick the national equivalents of puppies
(Syria, Venezuela) but it is powerless to create cheap oil or intimidate near-peer
adversaries. That is in inescapable logic of surplus energy economics. America was built by
cheap oil, ruled through cheap oil, but it's over. All the fiscal and monetary tricks in the
book will not change that. Of course China faces that as well (Russia not so much for now).
The difference is that Asia spent its money (and more) on infrastructure and industry that
will serve it for the next generation or so, while America blew it on consumer toys, services
and useless war gadgets. So even if the oil engine is almost dead, China has built up some
momentum that will carry it along for a while. That momentum is long since gone in the west
and the economy will reset once again to a far lower level.
The gnashing of teeth and racist rage will go on in America for a decade or more, but it
won't make any difference at all to the outcome. The sooner it accepts that reality, the
faster it can adapt to a lesser role and lower standard of living. That's not going to happen
until "somebody" admits the scale and scope of the problem. Carter was the last one who tried
and the result was the neo-liberal disease that engulfs the west. Hopefully the next attempt
at reality isn't met with full-blown fascism but it might.
This March, as COVID-19's capacity to overwhelm the American
healthcare system was becoming obvious, experts marveled at the scenario unfolding before their
eyes. "We have Third World countries who are better equipped than we are now in Seattle,"
noted one healthcare professional, her words echoed just a few days later by a shocked
doctor in New York who described
"a third-world country type of scenario." Donald Trump could similarly only grasp what was
happening through the same comparison. "I have seen things that I've never seen before," he
said
. "I mean I've seen them, but I've seen them on television and faraway lands, never in my
country."
At the same time, regardless of the fact that "Third World" terminology is outdated and
confusing, Trump's inept handling of the pandemic has itself elicited more than one "banana republic"
analogy, reflecting already well-worn, bipartisan comparisons of Trump to a "
third world dictator " (never mind that dictators and authoritarians have never been
confined solely to lower income countries).
And yet, while such comparisons provoke predictably nativist outrage from the right, what is
absent from any of
these responses to the situation is a sense of reflection or humility about the "Third
World" comparison itself. The doctor in New York who finds himself caught in a "third world"
scenario and the political commentators outraged when Trump behaves "like a third world
dictator" uniformly express themselves in terms of incredulous wonderment. One never hears the
potential second half of this comparison: "I am now experiencing what it is like to live in a
country that resembles the kind of nation upon whom the United States regularly imposes broken
economies and corrupt leaders."
Because behind today's coronavirus-inspired astonishment at conditions in developing or
lower income countries, and Trump's authoritarian-like thuggery, lies an actual military and
political hegemon with an actual impact on the world; particularly on what was once called the
"Third World."
In physical terms, the U.S.'s military hegemony is comprised of 800 bases in over 70 nations
–
more bases than any other nation or empire in history. The U.S. maintains drone bases,
listening posts, "black sites," aircraft carriers, a massive nuclear stockpile, and military
personnel working in approximately 160 countries. This is a globe-spanning military and
security apparatus organized into regional commands
that resemble the "proconsuls of the Roman empire and the governors-general of the
British." In other words, this apparatus is built not for deterrence, but for primacy.
The U.S.'s global primacy emerged from the wreckage of World War II when the United States
stepped into the shoes vacated by European empires. Throughout the Cold War, and in the name of
supporting "free peoples," the sprawling American security apparatus helped ensure that 300
years of imperial resource extraction and wealth distribution – from what was then called
the Third World to the First – remained undisturbed, despite decolonization.
Since then, the United States
has overthrown or attempted to overthrow the governments of approximately 50 countries,
many of which (e.g. Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and Chile) had elected leaders willing to
nationalize their natural resources and industries. Often these interventions
took the form of covert operations. Less frequently, the United States went to war to
achieve these same ends (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq).
In fiscal terms, maintaining American hegemony requires spending more
on "defense" than the next seven largest countries combined. Our
nearly $1 trillion security budget now amounts to about 15 percent of the federal budget
and over half of all
discretionary spending. Moreover, the U.S. security budget continues to increase despite the
Pentagon's inability to pass a fiscal audit.
Trump's claim that Obama had
"hollowed out" defense spending was not only grossly untrue, it masked the consistency of the
security budget's metastasizing growth since the Vietnam War, regardless of who sits in the
White House. At $738 billion dollars, Trump's security budget was passed in December with the
overwhelming support of House Democrats.
And yet, from the perspective of public discourse in this country, our globe-spanning,
resource-draining military and security apparatus exists in an entirely parallel universe to
the one most Americans experience on a daily level. Occasionally, we wake up to the idea of
this parallel universe but only when the United States is involved in visible military actions.
The rest of the time, Americans leave thinking about international politics – and the
deaths, for instance, of 2.5 million
Iraqis since 2003 – to the legions of policy analysts and Pentagon employees who
largely accept American military primacy as an "article of faith," as Professor of
International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham Patrick Porter has said
.
Foreign policy is routinely the last issue Americans consider when they vote for presidents
even though the president has more discretionary power over foreign policy than any other area
of American politics. Thus, despite its size, impact, and expense, the world's military hegemon
exists somewhere on the periphery of most Americans' self-understanding, as though, like the
sun, it can't be looked upon directly for fear of blindness.
Why is our avoidance of the U.S.'s weighty impact on the world a problem in the midst of the
coronavirus pandemic? Most obviously, the fact that our massive security budget has gone so
long without being widely questioned means that one of the soundest courses of action for the
U.S. during this crisis remains resolutely out of sight.
The shock of discovering that our healthcare system is so quickly overwhelmed should
automatically trigger broader conversations about spending priorities that entail deep and
sustained cuts in an engorged security budget whose sole purpose is the maintenance of primacy.
And yet, not only has this not happened, $10.5 billion of the coronavirus aid package has been
earmarked for the Pentagon, with $2.4 billion of that
channeled to the "defense industrial base." Of the $500 billion aimed at corporate America,
$17.5 billion is
set aside "for businesses critical to maintaining national security" such as aerospace.
To make matters worse, our blindness to this bloated security complex makes it frighteningly
easy for champions of American primacy to sound the alarm when they even suspect a dip in
funding might be forthcoming. Indeed, before most of us had even glanced at the details of the
coronavirus bill, foreign policy hawks were already
issuing dark prediction s about the impact of still-imaginary cuts in the security budget
on the U.S.'s "ability to strike any target on the planet in response to hostile actions by any
actor" – as if that ability already did not exist many times over.
On a more existential level, a country that is collectively engaged in unseeing its own
global power cannot help but fail to make connections between that power and domestic politics,
particularly when a little of the outside world seeps in. For instance, because most Americans
are unaware of their government's sponsorship of fundamentalist Islamic groups in the Middle
East throughout the Cold War, 9/11 can only ever appear to have come from nowhere, or because
Muslims hate our way of life.
This "how did we get here?" attitude replicates itself at every level of political life
making it profoundly difficult for Americans to see the impact of their nation on the rest of
the world, and the blowback from that impact on the United States itself. Right now, the
outsized influence of American foreign policy is already encouraging the spread of coronavirus
itself as U.S. imposed sanctions on Iran severely hamper that
country's ability to respond to the virus at home and virtually
guarantee its spread throughout the region.
Closer to home, our shock at the healthcare system's inept response to the pandemic masks
the relationship between the U.S.'s imposition
of free-market totalitarianism on countries throughout the
Global South and the impact of free-market totalitarianism on our own welfare state .
Likewise, it is more than karmic comeuppance that the President of the United States now
resembles the self-serving authoritarians the U.S. forced on so many formerly colonized
nations. The modes of militarized policing American security experts exported to those
authoritarian regimes also contributed , on a
policy level, to both the rise of militarized policing in American cities and the rise of mass
incarceration in the 1980s and 90s. Both of these phenomena played a significant role in
radicalizing Trump's white nationalist base and decreasing their tolerance for democracy.
Most importantly, because the U.S. is blind to its power abroad, it cannot help but turn
that blindness on itself. This means that even during a pandemic when America's exceptionalism
– our lack of national healthcare – has profoundly negative consequences on the
population, the idea of looking to the rest of the world for solutions remains unthinkable.
Senator Bernie Sanders' reasonable suggestion that the U.S., like Denmark, should
nationalize its healthcare system is dismissed as the fanciful pipe dream of an aging socialist
rather than an obvious solution to a human problem embraced by nearly every other nation in the
world. The Seattle healthcare professional who expressed shock that even "Third World
countries" are "better equipped" than we are to confront COVID-19 betrays a stunning ignorance
of the diversity of healthcare systems within developing countries. Cuba, for instance,
has responded
to this crisis with an efficiency and humanity that puts the U.S. to shame.
Indeed, the U.S. is only beginning to feel the full impact of COVID-19's explosive
confrontation with our exceptionalism: if the unemployment rate really does reach 32 percent,
as has been predicted,
millions of people will not only lose their jobs but their health insurance as well. In the
middle of a pandemic.
Over 150 years apart, political commentators Edmund Burke and Aimé Césaire
referred to this blindness as the byproduct of imperialism. Both used the exact same language
to describe it; as a "gangrene" that "poisons" the colonizing body politic. From their
different historical perspectives, Burke and Césaire observed how colonization
boomerangs back on colonial society itself, causing irreversible damage to nations that
consider themselves humane and enlightened, drawing them deeper into denial and
self-delusion.
Perhaps right now there is a chance that COVID-19 – an actual, not metaphorical
contagion – can have the opposite effect on the U.S. by opening our eyes to the things
that go unseen. Perhaps the shock of recognizing the U.S. itself is less developed than our
imagined "Third World" might prompt Americans to tear our eyes away from ourselves and look
toward the actual world outside our borders for examples of the kinds of political, economic,
and social solidarity necessary to fight the spread of Coronavirus. And perhaps moving beyond
shock and incredulity to genuine recognition and empathy with people whose economies and
democracies have been decimated by American hegemony might begin the process of reckoning with
the costs of that hegemony, not just in "faraway lands" but at home. In our country.
"... the Money Power, which is the collective term for the Central Bank and the "Princely Class" within the Outlaw US Empire. And their critique about Sanders, Biden and "Progressives" I agree with 100%. ..."
I see you're busy spreading BigLies. Please, jump out of your tree onto your head.
Thanks.
"Neofeudalism by design" is today's Keiser
Report Mantra --Max and Stacy present an excellent argument that tries to inform
people about what I call the Money Power, which is the collective term for the Central Bank and the "Princely Class" within the Outlaw US Empire. And their critique about Sanders, Biden
and "Progressives" I agree with 100%.
People will forget all that populism nonsense, and just be grateful for whatever McJobs
they can get to be able to pay the interest on their debts, because, hey global capitalism
isn't so bad compared to living under house arrest!
Hard to imagine that happening in Americastan, where the economy has been completely
destroyed by the lockdown. We'll be lucky 'merely' to have Great Depression levels of
unemployment when this madness finally ends.
For all the MAGApedes out there: Trump had better be seen to be fighting the
lockdown-shysters, not acquiescing to them, if he wants to get re-elected. If he spends the
summer continuing to genuflect before Dr. Falsie, Trump is toast come November.
Bernie didn't want a revolution. He wanted the establishment to accept his candidacy. If
they didn't accept it then he was not going to fight. He wasted 3+ years of my time and
energy. Not to mention betraying Waffle House waitresses across the country, who repeatedly
donated money they needed to Bernie's campaign.
The US dodged a bullet with Bernie dropping out "my friend Joe" "Joe can beat Trump" &
not supporting Tulsi from being smeared & erased! Bernie has no balls - the guy endorsed
Hillary & now Biden - slapping Tulsi in the face for quitting, destroying her career for
him!
v> Aaron has made a career over all the false trump hoax's and exposing them. To bad
he's blinded in other ways and is can't be objective about Bernie and the dem establishment.
Unfortunately he part of the problem because at the end of the day he looks the other way.
And excuses those in media who lie cuz they have kids to feed. Never gonna be change with
that attitude...very Bernie like.
Sanders was never a serious candidate. For the second time in his 40ys of public service
he became sort of relevant. He was the joke of the senate all these years. A complete
fraud.
ss="comment-renderer-text-content expanded"> "The answer is there is no point," as
cogently analyzed by our ever-faithful Jimmy Dore. "The Young Turks" are not progressive and
neither is Bernie. In 2016, Cenk Uygar surrendered to the Hillary-Killary inevitability
faster than Bernie could say, "Just let me know when it's time to quit." Here is the master
conspiracy theory that resolves all of this. Bernie is paid by the DNC, Russia, and The
Clinton Foundation to excite real Progressives that "the revolution will be televised." Then
he caves. How effective is that plan? It channels and harnesses a critical mass of energy and
momentum in order to throw it over the cliff. In two consecutive presidential elections,
Bernie Sanders led the lemmings to the Pied Piper's house. How dumb are we? The establishment
has framed a political strategy whereby the hopes of the people are continually and
unrelentingly crushed by the smoke-and-mirrors deceptions of their elusive "leader."
Eventually, the poor deluded people simply stop believing in any of it, and the establishment
wins. Can anyone prove me wrong?
"You vote for the whoever is least worst and then you push them in the direction you
can." But you give up all of your leverage to move them as soon as you vote for
them...
Bernie Sanders was a plant, just there to mislead the working class that they have someone
truly fighting for they cause. While robbing us of our money and time.
Bernie was too old in 2016. He's way too old now. He didn't want it. He didn't have the
fight or the drive. He was just going through the motions. Probably for another book
deal.
Sadly it seems Bernie turned out to be representative of "not so obvious establishment."
Bernie has done this to us twice now. He has funneled sincere supporters who want real change
towards establishment. Earlier towards Hillary and this time towards Biden.Bernie with his
endorsement has lost my respect.
Posted on April
16, 2020 by Yves Smith Yves here. It would be
better if I were wrong, but I have doubts about this scenario. It appears to assume some
orderliness in the responses to the coronavirus, both in terms of businesses and governments
cooperating. I don't see this as possible in the US. Not only is there an absence of public
spiritedness, government is not trusted. And that's not an uninformed view. The US in incapable
of mounting a New Deal or war mobilization level response. It lacks the operational capacity.
And too many people in power are in it for themselves. Things may be better in a lot of the
rest of the world in terms of social and political cohesiveness, but few countries are as close
to being an autarky as the US (Russia is probably the best candidate), and so the breakdown of
global supply chains is likely to hit them even harder.
Similarly, if concerns that getting Covid-19 confers only short-term immunity (say a year or
less), then investing in tracking who has contacted it for the purpose of deeming individuals
to be safe from a travel/visa standpoint is a waste of effort.
I suspect Grasmsci is the best seer:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be
born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator and Jan Ritch-Frel, the executive
director of the Independent
Media Institute . Produced by Economy for All , a project
of the Independent Media Institute
The coronavirus pandemic has upended the global economic system, and just as importantly,
cast out 40 years of neoliberal orthodoxy that dominated the industrialized world.
Forget about the " new
world order ." Offshoring and global supply chains are out; regional and local production
is in. Market fundamentalism is passé; regulation is the norm. Public health is now more
valuable than just-in-time supply systems. Stockpiling and industrial capacity suddenly make
more sense, which may have future implications in the recently revived
antitrust debate in the U.S.
Biodata will drive the next phase of social management and surveillance, with near-term
consequences for the way countries handle immigration and customs. Health care and education
will become digitally integrated the way newspapers and television were 10 years ago. Health
care itself will increasingly be seen as a necessary public good, rather than a private right,
until now in the U.S. predicated on age, employment or income levels. Each of these will
produce political tensions within their constituencies and in the society generally as they
adapt to the new normal.
This political sea change doesn't represent a sudden conversion to full-on socialism, but
simply a case of minimizing our future risks of infection by providing full-on universal
coverage. Beyond that, as Professor Michael Sandel has
argued , one has to query the "moral logic" of providing "coronavirus treatment for the
uninsured," while leaving "health coverage in ordinary times to the market" (especially when
our concept of what constitutes "ordinary times" has been upended).
Internationally, there will be many positive and substantial international shifts to address
overdue global public health needs and accords on mitigating climate change. And it is finally
dawning on Western-allied economic planners that the military price tag that made so-called
cheap oil and cheap labor possible is vastly higher than investment in advanced research and
next-generation manufacturing.
This also means that the old North (developed world) versus South (emerging world) division
that long preoccupied scholars and
policymakers in the post–World War II period will become increasingly stark again,
particularly for those emerging economies that have hitherto attracted investment largely on
the grounds of being repositories of low-cost labor. They will now find themselves picking
sides as they seek assistance in an increasingly divided and multipolar world.
The fault lines of the next economic era have already begun to surface, creating friction
with the previous international structure of banking and finance, trade and industry. There is
a force beyond elites and critical industries driving this: The proletariat has literally
become the "precariat."
In the U.S. and Europe, the staggering number of service economy workers are going to be
quickly politicized by the shortfalls: People have seen a collapse in income, and big failures
in education, and health care. Union-busting, pension fleecing, and austerity budgets and new
technologies that concentrate wealth away from labor have created a circumstance where
ownership and profit models must be revisited to sustain stability. The needs are too acute to
be distracted by the lies of Trump, or the inadequate responses in other parts of the
industrialized world. The current crisis will likely prompt geopolitical and economic shifts
and dislocations we haven't seen since World War II.
Death of Chimerica, the Rise of New Production Blocs
One of the biggest casualties of the current order is the breakdown of " Chimerica ,"
the decades-old nexus between the U.S. and Chinese economies, along with other leading
countries' partnerships with Chinese manufacturing. While the geopolitics of blame for the
origins of coronavirus continue to shake out, the process that saw a decrease in exports from
China to the U.S. from
$816 billion in 2018 to $757 billion in 2019 will accelerate and intensify over the next
decade.
While a decoupling is unlikely to lead to armed conflict, a Cold War style of competition
could emerge as a new global fault line. Much as the Cold War did not preclude some degree of
collaboration between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, so too today there may still be
areas of cooperation between Washington and Beijing from climate to public health, advanced
research to weapons proliferation.
Nor does this shift necessarily spell the sudden collapse of Chinese power or influence --
it has a colossal and still-growing domestic market and is on the international leaderboard for
a wide range of advanced indicators. But its status as the world's most desirable offshore
manufacturing hub is a thing of the past, along with the economic stability that steady inflows
of foreign capital brought with it. It does show a susceptibility to domestic stress, with the
Hong Kong protests last year providing a hint of what is in store as the party leadership can't
pivot to new realities that include slower economic growth and declining foreign
investment.
As investment flows turn inward back to industrialized countries, there will likely be
corresponding diminution of the global labor arbitrage emanating from the emerging world. In
general, that's a negative for the global South, but potentially a positive factor for workers
elsewhere, whose wages and living standards have stagnated for decades as they lost jobs to
competing overseas low-cost manufacturing centers (the increase in inequality is
principally a product of 40 years of sustained attacks on unions). The jobs won't be the
same, but to be sure, manufacturing incomes exceed those of the service industry.
As each country adopts a " sauve-qui-peut " mentality, businesses and
investors are drawing the necessary conclusions. Coronavirus has been a wake-up call, as
countries trying to import medical goods from existing global supply chains face a
shortage of air and ocean freight options to ship goods back to home markets. Already, the
Japanese government has announced its plans "to spend over $2 billion to help its country's
firms move production out of China," according to the Spectator
Index . The EU leadership is publicly
indicating a policy of subsidy and state investment in companies to prevent Chinese buyouts or
undercutting prices.
Two billion dollars is small potatoes compared to what is likely to be spent by the U.S. and
other countries going forward. And it can't simply be done via research and development tax
credits. The state can and must drive this redomiciling process in other ways: via local content
requirements (LCRs) , tariffs, quotas and/or government procurement local sourcing
requirements. And with a $750-billion-plus budget, the U.S. military will likely play a role
here, as it
ponders disruptions from overseas supply sources .
Of course, if the U.S. does this, other parts of the world -- China, the EU, Japan -- will
likely do the same, which will accelerate the regionalization trends in trade. This may mean
that some U.S. firms will have to operate in foreign markets through local subsidiaries with
local content preferences and local workforces (that is how it worked in the 1920s -- Ford UK
was a mostly local British company, different from the U.S. Ford Motor Company, but with shared
profits).
An examination of U.S. planning for the post-1945 world reveals the emphasis was on free
trade in raw materials mostly, not finished goods. (The U.S. only adopted one-way "free trade"
with its Asian and European allies later as a Cold War measure to accelerate their development
and keep them in the American orbit.)
Domestically within the U.S., as
Dalia Marin writes , the coming declines in interest rates will accelerate "robot adoption"
by 75.7 percent, with concentration "in the sectors that are most exposed to global value
chains. In Germany, that means autos and transport equipment, electronics, and textiles --
industries that import around 12 percent of their inputs from low-wage countries. Globally, the
industries where the most reshoring activity is taking place are chemicals, metal products, and
electrical products and electronics."
As the coronavirus pandemic is illustrating, a viable industrial ecosystem cannot work
effectively if it is dispersed to too many geographic extremities or there are insufficient
redundancies built into the transportation of goods back into the home market (rail, highway,
etc.). Proximity has become a significant competitive advantage for manufacturers, and a
strategic advantage for governments. But the U.S. government must play an expanded role in the
planning process. The U.S. is still a leader in many high-tech areas, but is suffering the
consequences of a generation-long effort to undermine the government's natural role as an
economic planner.
In the form of the regionalized blocs that are being sketched, in the Americas, Mexico is
likely to be one of the leading recipients of American foreign direct investment (FDI). It
already has a
$17 billion medical device industry and is sure to absorb much more capacity from China.
This has
already started to happen as a result of the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA,
or new NAFTA) . Furthermore, the
Washington Post reports that "[a]s demand soars for medical devices and personal protective
equipment in the fight against the coronavirus, the United States has turned to the phalanx of
factories south of the border that are now the outfitters of many U.S. hospitals." This is in
addition to the
thousands of assembly plants already in place in Mexico since the establishment of NAFTA.
Indeed, if the jobs that had moved to China move to Mexico, Central America, and South America,
this likely addresses many long-standing social tensions in regard to immigration management,
currency imbalances and corresponding black market industries (ironically, it also likely means
the end of Trump's wall, as the industrial ecosystem of the Americas becomes more cohesive and
widespread).
Big Business Is Good Business
But this will also have significant impacts closer to home: Much as Franklin Delano
Roosevelt ultimately prioritized domestic
ramp-ups in wartime production over trust-busting , so too national champions are likely to
feature more prominently today, as domestic scale and balance sheet strength are given
precedence to accommodate the drive to revive employment quickly,
and work collaboratively to halt the spread of the coronavirus . The scale of companies
will not be regarded as a political problem if they can both deliver for consumers and show the
capacity of following political direction for what the public's needs are. Tech companies like
Apple and Google are stepping up to fill the void left by
massive federal government dysfunction . The " break up Big
Tech " voices are nowhere to be heard at the moment.
We still need a more robust form of regulation for these corporate behemoths, but via a
system of regulation that is "function-centric," rather than size-centric. As co-author
Marshall Auerback has written
before , this kind of regulation "restricts the range of corporate activities (e.g.,
structural separation so as to prevent companies like Amazon and Google from owning both the
platform as well as participating as a seller on that platform), or the prices such companies
can charge (as regulators often do for utilities or railways). These considerations would be
'size neutral': they would apply independently of corporate size per se."
Capitalism has always had its plutocrats, but scaling back America's overly financialized
model (by preventing stock buybacks, to cite one example) would represent a useful reform and
prevent a lot of economic waste. Instead of going to enrich executives and shareholders beyond
the dreams of Croesus ,
that measure might help to ensure that the profits of these companies will be directed to the
workers' wages (which also means supporting increased unionization), or plowed back into
investment (e.g., increased robotics).
Biodata, Privacy, and an End to Pandemic Profiteering
And there are fault lines in the business world. The pharmaceutical and medical research
industries face immense pressure from other businesses to end the pandemic so they can get back
to profitability. That means temporarily setting aside profits and pooling intellectual
property to encourage collaborative efforts on the part of biotech and pharmaceutical companies
to find proper treatments for COVID-19, and make them freely available, especially if
governments were to waive antitrust scrutiny in exchange for all of the data Big Pharma
companies collectively hold. As the
Guardian reports , "[t]here is a precedent. Last June, 10 of the world's largest
pharmaceutical companies -- including Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline --
announced they would pool data for an AI-based search for new antibiotics, which are
urgently needed as antibiotic-resistant bacteria have proliferated across the world,
threatening the growth of untreatable disease."
Privacy
advocates are already expressing concerns about a growing and overweening medical
surveillance state. These surveillance concerns lack historical context: From the 19th century
on, serious health problems were met by hardline government policies to reduce them. Policies
ranging from quarantine to vaccine were not always mandatory, but there was an understanding
that personal concessions had to be made to manage a huge population and an advanced society;
the Constitution was not a suicide pact. We can further alleviate those concerns today by
ensuring that the information uncovered does not become a precondition or additional cost of
receiving insurance coverage. In light of coronavirus, cost savings of incorporating biodata
into immigration and customs are a no-brainer for governments, and are certain to cause
friction with individuals who may not want to give blood or saliva to get a visa or work
permit, and agribusiness leaders who know that safety measures cut into profitability. But the
scales have tipped in the other direction.
North Versus South
What about the other countries in the developing world that don't have close geographic
proximity to a home market, or abundant supplies of key commodities required for 21st-century
manufacturing needs, or even a well-developed manufacturing base (in other words, the countries
that have hitherto been large recipients of investment solely on the grounds of cheap labor)?
Many of them have faced immediate pressure with the collapse in global trade, unprecedented
capital flight that is sure to grow as the coronavirus spreads, all the while coping with
COVID-19 with highly inadequate health systems.
In the meantime, the
multi-trillion-dollar market for emerging market debt , both sovereign bonds and commercial
paper, has collapsed. Many of these countries, via their state pension funds and sovereign
wealth funds, have become the ultimate endpoint for many of the newer asset-backed securities
that finally revived years after the 2008 financial crisis. This has become the potential new
stress point in the $52 trillion "
shadow banking " market. The U.S. Federal Reserve has sought to ease the funding stresses
of much of the developing economies by offering central bank swap lines. It has also broadened
prime dealer collateral acceptance rules, and set up commercial paper swap facilities, all of
which have eased short-term funding pressures in these economies that have incurred substantial
dollar liabilities.
As the emerging world central banks then start to lend on those lines to their own banks, it
should start to alleviate the shortage of dollars in the offshore dollar funding markets. We
are starting to see some easing of stresses, notably in
Indonesia -- because it's an exporter of resources more than a cheap labor price
economy.
But whereas in previous emerging markets crises, China was able to buttress these economies
via initiatives such as the " Belt and Road Initiative ,"
Beijing itself is likely to be buffeted by the twin shocks of declining global trade and a
reversal of foreign direct investment, which declined 8.6 percent in the first
two months of this year .
Longer-term, many other countries face comparable challenges to China: Capital controls,
collapsing domestic currencies, and widespread debt defaults are likely to become the norm.
That's already
happened to serial defaulter Argentina again . South Africa has been
downgraded to junk status . Turkey remains vulnerable. The so-called "BRICS" economies --
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- are all sinking like bricks. The problem is
exacerbated by the fact that coronavirus and likely future pandemics will create additional
stresses on developing economies that depend on their labor price advantage in the
international marketplace to survive.
By contrast, countries like South Korea and Taiwan have had a "good crisis." Both have
vibrant manufacturing sectors and created successful multiparty democracies. Foreign investment in South Korea continued to grow in
the first quarter of this year, as it rapidly moved to contain the spread of COVID-19 through
an extensive testing regime (while keeping its economy open). Similarly in Taiwan, by
activating a national emergency response system launched in 2004 (following the SARS virus),
that country has mounted a thoroughly competent coronavirus
intervention of unprecedented effectiveness . The results speak for themselves: as of April
15, in South Korea, a mere 225
deaths , while in Taiwan, an astonishingly low total
of six deaths in a country of 24 million people -- this despite far more exposure to
infected Chinese visitors than Italy, Spain or the U.S.
Of course, the very success of Taiwan's response revives another potential fault line,
namely the tension underlying the "One China" policy. Before COVID-19, it is
noteworthy that the WHO "even refused to publicly report Taiwan's cases of SARS until public
pressure prompted numbers to be published under the label of 'Taiwan, province of China,'"
according to Dr.
Anish Koka . At the very least, Taiwan's divergent approach and success at fighting the
pandemic will bolster its pro-independence factions.
The question of foreign nations upholding Taiwan's sovereignty with regard to China is
increasingly thorny, given Beijing's growing military capacities. This will present an ongoing
diplomatic challenge to Western parties who seek to increase engagement with Taipei without
heightening tensions in the region.
A Recalculation of 'Economic Value'
We have outlined many fault lines likely to be exposed or exacerbated as a consequence of
COVID-19. Happily, there is one fault line likely to be slammed shut: namely, the false
dichotomy that has long existed between economic growth and environmentalism. The Global Assessment from
the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
reports that "land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23 percent of the global land
surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and
100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of
coastal habitats and protection." Likewise, the study cites the fact that as of 2015, 33
percent of marine fish stocks "were being harvested at unsustainable levels," and notes the
rise of plastic pollution (which "has increased tenfold since 1980 "),
both of which play a key role in degrading ecosystems in a manner that ultimately destroys
economic growth.
Finally, repeated pandemics over the past few decades have shown these are not blips, but
recurrent features of today's world. Hence, there is an increasing public appetite for
regulation to deal with this ongoing problem. Some industries, such as agribusinesses, won't
like this, but the concerns are well-founded. According to
expert Josh Balk , 75 percent of new diseases start in domestic and wild-caught animals,
and 2.2 million people die each year from illnesses transferred from animals. The majority of
these are transferred from poorly regulated factory farm chickens, cows and pigs; still, the "
wet markets" of Asia and Africa, and the trade in potential " transfer species ," such as
pangolins, a major driver of the $19
billion-a-year global trade in illegal wildlife, must also be addressed. Beijing has
suggested it will
ban trade in illegal wildlife and seek tighter regulation of the wet markets . The latter
in particular may be easier said than done, according to Dr. Zhenzhong
Si , a research associate at Canada's University of Waterloo who specializes in Chinese
food security, sustainability, and rural development. Dr. Si
argued that "[b]anning wet markets is not only going to be impossible, but will also be
destructive for urban food security in China as they play such a pivotal role in ensuring urban
residents' access to affordable and healthy food."
To be fair, this isn't the first time that the sacred tenets of the global economic
framework have dealt with a crisis that seemed to usher in a new era. The same thing happened
in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. But that was largely seen as a financial
crisis, a product of faulty global financial plumbing that nobody truly understood, as opposed
to a widespread social collapse closely approximating the conditions of the Great Depression as
we have today.
Not only has the current lockdown put the entire global economy into deep freeze, but it
also came amidst a backdrop of widespread political and social upheaval, and a faux recovery
whose fruits were largely restricted to the top tier. A collateralized debt obligation is not
intuitively easy to grasp. By contrast, being forced to stay at home, deprived of vital income
and isolated from loved ones, while health care workers perish from overwork and lack of
protective gear, is a different order of magnitude.
Even as we re-integrate, it is hard to envisage a return to the "old normal." Trade patterns
will change. Self-sufficiency and geographic proximity will be prioritized over global
integration. There will be new winners and losers, but it is worth noting that the model of
capitalism we are describing -- one that does not feature obscenely overcompensated CEO pay
co-existing with serf labor and the widespread offshoring of manufacturing -- has existed in
different forms in the U.S. from 1945 into the 1980s, and still exists in parts of Europe
(Germany) and East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) to this day.
Our everyday lives will be impacted as selective quarantines and some forms of social
distancing become the new normal (much as they were when we dealt with tuberculosis
epidemics). All of this has implications for a multitude of industries: restaurants,
leisure, travel, tourism, sporting events, entertainment, and media, as well as our evolving
definition of "essential" industries. Even our concept of personal privacy will likely have to
be amended, especially in regard to medical matters. Concerns about medical surveillance --
stigma (STDs, alcoholism, mental illness) and denial of insurance -- can be alleviated if
everyone is guaranteed treatment regardless of ability to pay, which will mean greater
government intrusion into the lives of citizens and activities of businesses as the public
sector seeks to socialize costs.
Taken in aggregate, we are about to experience the most profound social, economic and
political changes since World War II.
The desperation with which the oligarchy seeks to preserve the neo-liberal dispensation, and
particularly on 'the left' which, historically, opposed its anti-egalitarianism, may be
explicable in very simple terms:
"A new Institute for Policy Studies Inequality briefing paper, authored by Bob Lord,
reveals that between 1980 and 2018, the taxes paid by America's billionaires, when measured
as a percentage of their wealth, decreased a staggering 79 percent.
"The only appropriate metric by which to measure the tax burden on billionaires, the
briefing paper explains, is the rate of tax they pay on their wealth. Unlike the rest of us,
the living expenses of billionaires do not constrain their accumulation of wealth. Nor do
they rely on their work to generate additional wealth. For billionaires, the accumulation of
wealth is driven forward almost exclusively by the growth of their existing wealth and
constrained almost exclusively by the tax they are required to pay. No matter how the taxes
imposed on billionaires are determined – by income, consumption, property ownership,
transfers by gift or bequest – they function only as a tax on wealth.
"By allowing the tax burden of billionaires, as a percentage of their wealth, to plummet
since 1980, policy makers have caused the nation's wealth to concentrate obscenely at the
very top. In the 12 years between 2006 and 2018, IPS reports, nearly 7 percent of America's
real increase in wealth, measured in 2018 dollars, went to the top 400 billionaires. If the
pattern of the past four decades does not change, an even greater share of the nation's newly
created wealth over the next 12 years will flow to the billionaire class..."
Personal freedom is largely illusory. One spends most of ones life under the control of
others, parents, teachers, bosses, officers, cops, judges, jailers, or sleeping. I wonder if
it's a "right" at all.
However, it seems to me that one has a contractual right to expect good parents, good
teachers, good bosses and so forth. That's a legalistic constitutional right to exchange the
individual's right to violence in exchange for protection. A contact. Individuals sometimes
retain a fraction...the right to self-defense...but this is very limited, and dicey too.
And - especially - one, everyone, does have a natural right to demand Justice, fairness,
and to be left alone. This is a Natural Right. It comes from the outside, from God, if you
like. Dogs and horses, for example express themselves, and kick and bite and krap on your
desk, if they're seriously mislead, (mistreated) Man also has the natural right.
So, Personal freedom seems to be an imprecise term, and seems to have at least two,
probably several, manifestations.
"American collusion with kleptocracy comes at a terrible
cost for the rest of the world. All of the stolen money, all of those evaded tax dollars sunk
into Central Park penthouses and Nevada shell companies, might otherwise fund health care and
infrastructure. (A report from the anti-poverty group One has argued that 3.6 million deaths
each year can be attributed to this sort of resource siphoning.)
Thievery tramples the possibilities of workable markets and credible democracy. It fuels
suspicions that the whole idea of liberal capitalism is a hypocritical sham: While the world is
plundered, self-righteous Americans get rich off their complicity with the crooks.
The Founders were concerned that venality would become standard procedure, and it has. Long
before suspicion mounted about the loyalties of Donald Trump, large swaths of the American
elite -- lawyers, lobbyists, real-estate brokers, politicians in state capitals who enabled the
creation of shell companies -- had already proved themselves to be reliable servants of a
rapacious global plutocracy.
"Richard Palmer was right: The looting elites of the former Soviet Union were far from rogue
profiteers. They augured a kleptocratic habit that would soon become widespread.
One bitter truth about the Russia scandal is that by the time Vladimir Putin attempted to
influence the shape of our country, it was already bending in the direction of his."
There's
a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the
thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness
or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can't afford cancer treatment even with "good"
insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about
underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic
classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and
the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry.
"I can't believe in the richest country in the world. "
This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the
fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of
existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once
grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and
working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about
our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem
to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.
It is true that, as measured by GDP, or by the size of the credit and equity markets, or
even just by the gaudy presence of our Googles, Amazons and Apples, the United States is the
greatest machine for the production of money in the modern history of the world.
But this wealth is largely an abstraction, a trick of the broad and largely meaningless
aggregations of numbers that makes up most of what the business pages call "economics." The
American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished. Ask anyone who's compared the nine-plus-hour
train ride from Pittsburgh to New York with the barely two-hour journey from Paris to Bordeaux,
an equidistant journey, or who's watched the orderly, accurate exit polls from a German
election and compared them with the
fizzling, overheating voting machines in Florida .
Now, it is true that bridges collapse in Europe , too, although
this past summer's tragedy was in Italy, whose famously ungovernable corruption may be the
closest continental analogue to our own United States. American liberals and leftists tend to
over-valorize the Western European model, but there is no doubt that the wealthy countries at
the core of the EU have far more successfully mitigated the most extreme social inequalities
and built systems for health and transportation that far outstrip anything in the U.S. Even in
their poor urban suburbs or, say, the disinvested industrial north of France, you will find
nothing like the squalor that we still permit -- that we accept as ordinary --
in the USA . Meanwhile, in our ever-declining adversary-of-convenience, the Moscow subway
runs on time.
The social wealth of a society is better measured by the quality of its common lived
environment than by a consolidated statistical approximation like GDP, or even an attempt at
weighted comparisons like so-called purchasing power parity . There
is a reason why our great American cities, for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look
so shabby. The money goes elsewhere. Seville, a pretty, modest city of less than a million
people in the south of Spain, built 80 kilometers of bike lanes for $40 million in less than
two years, and eliminated a lot of ugly, on-street parking in the process. Imagine a
commensurate effort in New York City, a far wealthier place on paper. Well, its supposedly
liberal mayor is going to give Amazon $1.5 billion in tax breaks instead.
To be fair, New York City and state, mired in graft and corruption, cannot build a single
mile of subway for less than $2 billion.
Elsewhere, the con artists running America's military-industrial complex are worried that
the hundreds of billions we sink every year into planes that
cannot fly in the rain and
ships that cannot steer have left the United States virtually
unable to win any wars . The United States spends perhaps a trillion dollars every year on
its military and wars.
Poverty -- both individual and social -- is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of
natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources. They are eminently
undoable by modest exercises of political power, although if the state- and city-level
Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally
left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an
extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women.
I voted last week, an exercise that now feels like mouthing polite prayers at someone else's
church. The line snaked out the door of the tiny, hot basement room and into the cold rain.
There were only three voting machines. One was broken, and one seemed to be working only
intermittently. A young woman with a baby in a stroller was in line in front of me. After we'd
waited for 10 minutes without moving, she looked at me and rolled her eyes. "Can you believe
this is how we do this?" she said. "In 2018."
I smiled. I shrugged. I waved at her cute kid. I did not say, "Yes. I can believe it."
It is a sign of how bad things are when the editorial board of the Financial Times, the
world's leading business newspaper, carries an editorial calling for "radical reforms reversing
the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades." The FT editorial of April 3 has
advocated , among other
things, a more active role for governments in the economy, ways to make labor markets less
insecure, and wealth taxes. The FT's editorial board, increasingly concerned about saving
capitalism from itself, had
written about the need for "state planning" and a "worker-led economy" last year in August.
But the April 3 editorial has garnered much more attention since it comes amidst a massive
crisis.
By now it has become obvious that substantial state intervention in the economy -- frowned
upon by the apostles of neoliberal economics -- is back to the center stage across the
world.
The situation is such that the public sector, long maligned by neoliberal economists and
weakened by governments beholden to neoliberalism, is playing a major role in the fight against
coronavirus. Its role would have been much more effective and wide-ranging if it hadn't been
hit hard by decades of fund cuts and waves of privatization. Nevertheless, with the
ineffectiveness of private production with profit motive as its driving force to handle a
crisis becoming more evident, the public sector, production with state direction, and some
amount of planning are making a major comeback.
Public Health Care
The case of the sectors that are directly concerned with health care provision is the most
conspicuous, with the inadequacies of private health care during a crisis becoming evident to
even right-wing leaders.
We see Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the UK, repeatedly talking about the need to
protect the National Health Service (Britain's publicly funded health care system). He even
said , "there really is such a thing as society," contradicting Margaret Thatcher, his
conservative predecessor who batted for pure individualism in 1987 by saying "There is no such
thing as society."
Britain and many other countries in Western Europe have had relatively robust public health
care systems. In many of these countries, such as Italy , Spain and
the
UK , public health care systems have suffered in recent years because of fund cuts and
privatization of public facilities. Apart from the policy vision of the leaders of these
countries themselves, they also
came under pressure from the technocrats of the European Commission, who repeatedly
demanded spending cuts on health care. Along with the easy-going attitude displayed by many of
the Western governments in the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, such weakening of the
public health care systems have made their response to the coronavirus outbreak a more arduous
task. For now, the governments of
Spain and
Ireland have temporarily taken over their private hospitals to deal with the crisis.
The case of the United States, with its private, insurance-based health care system, is far
worse. Not only was a sufficient number of testing kits unavailable in the United States for
months, but the costs of testing and treatment remain prohibitive for a
large section of the population , particularly to the 30 million uninsured and 44 million
underinsured. This means that many people simply wouldn't be able to afford to get tested and
treated, endangering the health and lives of themselves and others.
The difference between the United States on the one hand, and China and South Korea on the
other, comes readily into the picture here. Testing and treatment for coronavirus is
free in China, which was crucial in the country's success in bringing the epidemic under
control. South Korea has done extensive testing , which
was made available for free. Treatment costs were covered by the government
and the insurance companies.
The Importance of the Public Sector, However, Goes Much Further
In times of crises such as the present one, which is comparable to war, the ability of
economies to produce (or at least source) and distribute things becomes critical. Two kinds of
things assume particular importance:
1) Essential things that are necessary for the immediate sustenance of the people.
These include food and medicines, and in turn, the things necessary to produce them. If there
are large gaps in the supply and distribution of these things, there would be a famine. If
the gap is smaller, there would still be many unnecessary deaths. Even leaders who are
otherwise callous about starvation deaths would be concerned about such an eventuality during
a crisis, because social tensions that could rise as a result of this would make it even more
difficult to tide over the crisis, whether it is a war or a pandemic. During the Second World
War, Britain resorted to rationing
to solve this problem. The people of India were
squeezed to finance the Allies' war in South Asia with Japan, and the result was the
Bengal Famine, which took the lives of 3 million people.
2) The kind of things that are necessary to tide over the crisis. During times of
war, armaments would be the most crucial among these. In the case of the coronavirus crisis,
the main things would be items like ventilators, masks, hand sanitizer, gloves and medicines
to treat the symptoms. Large gaps in the supply of these things would be disastrous. In the
case of a war, such gaps could lead to defeat in war. In the case of a lethal pandemic,
people would die in huge numbers, as we see right now. We could say this is an industrial
famine of sorts contributing to the casualties, with countries unable to make ICUs,
ventilators and masks fast enough in adequate quantities, and in many cases, to set up
hospitals and quarantine facilities quickly enough.
It is in this context that leaders of government who ideologically disagree with state
intervention in the economy are seen taking direct action in commandeering private companies to
produce necessary things.
Thus we see Donald Trump, who had initially resisted the pressure to use the Defense
Production Act -- a wartime law -- to mobilize private industry, finally using the law to
direct General Motors to produce ventilators.
The government of Italy directed its only producer of ventilators, Siare Engineering, to
ramp up the production of ventilators for the country, and sent engineers and other staff
members from the Ministry of Defense to help with production. The company canceled all its
orders from abroad to produce for the country.
Countries with a large public sector, robust industrial capacity, and the ability to
effectively intervene in the market would be at a considerable advantage here. That is the case
with
China , which put the state-owned China State Construction Engineering to work to construct
two emergency quarantine hospitals at breath-taking speed. The state ensured the flow of
products such as grain, meat and eggs into the Hubei province while it was under lockdown, and
coordinated the production and distribution of masks and other medical products. Once the
outbreak within the country was under control, it began supplying masks and ICU equipment to
other countries in need.
India, a large country with a poor health care system, does not have enough masks and
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for its health workers. The number of ICU beds and
ventilators available in the country is very low. For a population of 1.34 billion, it
only has 31,900 ICU beds available for COVID-19 patients, according to the country's Health
Ministry officials. To compare, Germany, with 82.8 million people, had 28,000 ICU beds as of
mid-March.
If the number of COVID-19 patients in India surges, hospitals and their critical care
facilities will be overwhelmed. The public sector Bharat Electronics Limited has been
asked to produce
30,000 ventilators to meet the urgent need. Hindustan
Lifecare (another public sector company) and the
Rail Coach Factory under the Indian Railways are going to manufacture ventilators. The
public sector Ordnance Factory Board (OFB), which the government has tried continuously to
weaken
in the recent years, is now producing masks, sanitizer and coveralls for Personal Protective
Equipment (PPE). It has also developed a ventilator prototype and is preparing for
production.
Within India, it is the state of
Kerala that has dealt with the pandemic in the most effective manner. In the Left-ruled
state, which has resisted the policy of privatization pushed by successive central governments,
public sector companies are manufacturing
hand sanitizer and
gloves , and have
raised the production of essential medicines . Kudumbashree, a massive government-backed
organization of women's collectives with 4.5 million members, is
making masks , which the public sector is helping distribute. Mass organizations of
youth and popular science activists are pitching in by making hand sanitizer. Volunteers
supported by a state-led initiative have
developed a respiratory apparatus that could free up ventilators.
It is not as if making masks, sanitizers and gloves requires advanced technology. But
industrial capacity is needed to churn them out in large numbers, or at least large mass
organizations, class organizations or collectives that can mobilize people to manufacture them.
The inability of the United States to even ensure the supply of such items stands out in this
regard. Four decades of neoliberalism seem to have led not only to the undermining of
industrial capacity useful for public purposes, but also to the hollowing out of collective
energies.
Need for Production Capabilities and Societal Control Over Them
In short, the lesson is that in times such as these, a society needs two things.
1) It needs production capabilities. During a time of crisis, if a country doesn't
have the necessary industrial capacity, it will be in trouble even if it has money to buy if
the other countries that do have the production capabilities block the export of the required
goods. This is what is happening right now to so many countries, such as Italy and Serbia. (In
the mad scramble for resources, there have even been reports of countries
offering higher amounts to buy masks ordered by other countries, and of some countries even
seizing shipments for themselves.) Not only is industrial capacity needed, but some excess
capacity is also required in some crucial areas. As the public health expert T. Sundararaman
pointed
out recently, the public health care system needs to have unused capacity, which will allow
it to expand and take on the extra load when there is an emergency. Excess industrial capacity
in China, which is often seen as a problem (including by sympathetic observers
), turned out to be useful, with the country being able to manufacture essential goods to not
just meet its own demands, but also that of other countries.
But relying on market forces doesn't give any guarantee of industrial capacity being built
up. The kind of production capabilities built without planning would be haphazard, and may not
cover the needs of an emergency when it presents itself. India, which adopted a strategy of
substantial economic planning during the first few decades after independence, only to abandon
it in the recent decades, is witnessing this to its peril right now.
2) The society, or the state as the representative of society, needs to be able to
control the production facilities. When a crisis hits a country with production
capabilities in the private sector, the state can invoke emergency powers to bring them under
control. But it would be a painful process, especially in countries where the private corporate
sector is not used to submit to discipline. Given the enormous influence that the corporates
have over the state itself, the state might try to prolong having to invoke such emergency
powers, as was seen in the United States, and that could have disastrous consequences. India
has the worst of all possible worlds -- cronyism is rampant, industrialization has not taken
off (whether it is because of cronyism or in spite of it need not detain us here), and the
public sector has been undermined.
Even when the state is trying to play a more active role, its efforts could be undermined by
private firms acting in their own self-interest of maximizing profits. This was seen in the
United States, where private companies were engaging in price gouging, by selling masks that
are normally sold for 85 cents for $7, leading to the New York state governor to call upon
the federal government to nationalize the acquisition of medical supplies. He said that the
U.S. government should order factories to produce masks, gowns and ventilators; otherwise the
situation would be impossible to manage. The state using private facilities can be costly as
well, as was seen in Britain, where the National Health Service is paying
2.4 million pounds per day as rent to private hospitals for 8,000 beds.
Does calling for more domestic production capabilities that the state can control mean that
every country should be left to fend for itself? Certainly not -- every country cannot produce
everything; smaller countries would find it particularly difficult. International trade would
be needed for countries to procure things that they cannot produce for themselves. But as the
developments of the recent months show, today's trade regime has nothing to do with solidarity,
and it provides no guarantee of countries being able to access goods during an emergency. This
is no accident. Lack of solidarity is embedded in the way capitalism has developed, with the
bulk of the world's wealth concentrated in the hands of a few countries, and within countries,
in the hands of the super-rich. This system has to be overhauled for a regime of solidarity to
emerge. Production and its fruits becoming less concentrated in some regions of the world and
in the hands of a minority would pave the way for power relations to be less unequal, which is
a precondition for real solidarity among people and societies.
Along with socialized health care, an immediate stop to privatization, and a stronger,
expanded public sector should become part of the transitional demands of the left as we search
for an exit from the pandemic crisis.
Personal freedom is not an unlimited right. Diana Johnstone has given a convincing
argument for its limits. One's freedom and rights end where they infringe on the freedom
and rights of others:
[V]irtually all key aspects of any civilized society go contrary to the absolutism of
individual rights. Every civilized society has some sort of legal system, some basic rules
that everyone is expected to follow. Most civilized societies have a public education and
(except for the United States) a public health insurance system designed to benefit the whole
population. These elements of civilization include constraints on individual freedom.
The benefits to each individual of living in a civilized society make these constraints
acceptable to just about everybody. The health of the individual depends on the health of the
community, which is why everyone in most Western countries accepts a single payer health
insurance system. The only exception is the United States, where the egocentricities of Ayn
Rand are widely read as serious thought.
It is without doubt that masks are helpful to limit the spreading of the epidemic. An
infected person begins to spread viruses by breathing, talking, singing or coughing on day 2
after the infection. Only on day 5 or 6 will the symptoms of the disease set in. Some people
will never feel symptoms but can still infect others usually up to day 10 after the
infection.
Masks stop the viruses one sheds from reaching other persons. They do this effectively.
Posted by b on April 14, 2020 at 18:12 UTC | Permalink
"No matter how long I live, I don't think I will ever get over how the U.S., with all
its wealth and technological capability and academic prowess, sleepwalked into the disaster
that is unfolding," says Kai Kupferschmidt, a German science writer.
I am continuously amazed at how incompetence is always assumed so as to give elites a
pass.
It seems to me that the Trump Administration delayed a response to the virus so as to
ensure that they could declare an emergency which allowed them to 'play' the virus in a way
that benefited special interests and furthered imperial goals:
"... Authored by Joaquin Flores via The Strategic Culture Foundation, ..."
"... the declining rate of profit necessitated by automation, with the increasingly irrational policies, in all spheres, being pursued to salvage the ultimately unsalvageable. ..."
"... Because the present system is premised on a production-consumption and financial model, the solutions to crises are presented as population reduction and what even appears, at least in the case of Europe, as population replacement. As cliché as this may seem, this also appeared to be the policy of the Third Reich when capitalism faced its last major crises culminating in WWII. ..."
The coronavirus pandemic has shown that the twin processes of globalization and planned
obsolescence are deficient and moribund. Globalization was predicated on a number of
assumptions including the perpetuity of consumerism, and the withering away of national
boundaries as transnational corporations so required.
What we see instead is not a globalization process, but instead a process of rising
multipolarity and a rethinking of consumerism itself.
Normally a total market crash and unemployment crisis would usher in a period of militant
labor activity, strikes, walk-outs and community-labor campaigns. We've
seen some of this already . But the 'medical state of emergency' we are in, has effectively
worked like a 'lock-out' . The elites have effectively
flipped-the-script. Instead of workers now demanding a restoration of wages, hours, and
work-place rights, they are clamoring for any chance to work at all, under any conditions
handed down. Elites can 'afford' to do this because they've been given trillions of dollars to
do so. See how that works?
All our lives we've been misinformed over what a growing economy means, what it looks like,
how we identify it. All our lives we've been lied to about what technical improvement literally
means.
A growing economy in fact means that all goods and services become less expensive. That cuts
against inflation. Rather all prices should be deflating – less money ought to buy the
same (or the same money ought to buy more). Technical innovation means that goods should last
longer, not be planned for obsolescence with shorter lifespans.
Unemployment is good if it parallels price deflation. If both reached a zero-point, the
problems we believe we have would be solved.
In a revealing April 2nd article that featured on the BBC's website, Will coronavirus reverse globalisation?
it is proposed that the pandemic exposes the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of a global
supply-chain and manufacturing system, and that this in combination with the over-arching
US-China trade war would see a general tendency towards 're-shoring' of activities. These are
fair points.
But the article misses the point of the underlying problem facing economics in general:
the declining rate of profit necessitated by automation, with the increasingly irrational
policies, in all spheres, being pursued to salvage the ultimately unsalvageable.
The
Karmic Wheel of Production-Consumption
The shut-downs – which seem unnecessary in the numerous widely esteemed experts in
virology and epidemiology – appear to be aimed at stopping the production-consumption
cycle. When we look at the wanton creation of new 'money', to bailout the banks, we are told
that this will not cause inflation/debasement so long as the velocity of money is kept to a minimum.
In other words – so long as there is not a chain reaction of transactions, and the money
'stays still' – this won't cause inflation. It's a specious claim, but one which
justifies the quarantine/lock-down policy which today destroys thousands of small businesses
every day. In the U.S. alone, unemployment claims
will pass 30 million by mid April .
Likewise, this money appears real, it sits digitally as new liquidity on the computer
screens of tran-Atlantic banks – but it cannot be spent, or it tanks the system with
hyper-inflation. More to the point, the BBC piece erroneously continues to assume the necessity
of the production-consumption cycle, spinning wheat into gold forever.
The elites were not wrong to shut-down the cycle per se. The problem is that they cannot
offer the correct hardware in its place – for it puts an end to the very way that they
make money. It is this, which in turn is a major source for the maintenance of their dopamine
equilibrium and narcissist supply.
This is not an economic problem faced by 'the 1%' (the 0.03%) . It is an existential crisis
facing the meaning of their lives, where satisfaction can only be found in ever greater levels
of wealth and control, real or imagined – chasing that dragon, in search of that
ever-elusive high.
So naturally, their solutions are population reduction and other such quasi-genocidal
neo-Malthusian plans. Destruction of humanity – the number one productive-potential force
– resets the hands of time, back to a period where profit levels were higher. The
algorithmically favored coronavirus Instagram campaign of seeing city centers without people
and declaring these 'beautiful' and 'peaceful' is an example of this misanthropic principle at
play.
That the elites have chosen to shut-down the western economy is telling of an historic point
we have reached. And while we are told that production and consumption will return somewhat
'after quarantine', we also hear from the newly-emerged unelected tsars – Bill Gates et
al – that things will never
return to normal .
What we need to end is the entire theory and practice of globalization itself, including
UN
Agenda 21 and the dangerous role of 'book-talking' philanthropists like Gates and his
grossly unbalanced degree of power over policy formation in the Western sphere.
In place of waning globalization, we are seeing the reality of rising multipolarity and
inter-nationalism. With this, the end of the production-consumption cycle, based upon off-shore
production and international assembly, and at the root of it all: planned obsolescence towards
long-term profitability.
The Problem of Globalization Theory
Without a doubt, globalization theory satisfied aspects of descriptive power. But as time
marched forward, its predictive power weakened. Alternate theories began to emerge –
chief among these, multipolarity theory.
The promotion of globalization theory also raises ethical problems. Like a criminologist
'describing' a crime-wave while being invested in new prison construction, globalization theory
was as much theory as it was a policy forced upon the world by the same institutions behind its
popularization in academia and in policy formation. Therefore we should not be surprised with
the rise of solutions like those of Gates. These involve patentable 'vaccines' by for-profit
firms at the expense of buttressing natural human immunities, or using drugs which other
countries are using with effectiveness.
The truth? Globalization is really just a rebrand of the Washington Consensus
– neo-liberal think-tanks and the presumed eternal dominance of institutions like the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which in turn are thinly disguised
conglomerates of the largest trans-Atlantic banking institutions.
So while globalization was often given a humanist veneer that promised global development,
modernization, the end of 'nation-states' which presumably are the source of war; in reality
globalization was premised on continuing and increasing concentration of capital towards the
19th century zones – New York, London, Berlin, and Paris.
'Internationalism' was once rooted in the existence of nations which in turn are only
possible with the existence of culture and peoples, but was hi-jacked by the trans-Atlanticist
project. Before long, the new-left 'internationalists' became champions of the very same
process of imperialism that their forbearers had vehemently opposed. Call it 'globalization'
and show how it's destroying 'toxic nationalism' and creating 'microfinance solutions for women
and girls' –
trot out Malala – and it was bought; hook, line and sinker.
This was not the new era of 'globalization', but rather the usual suspects going back to the
19th century; a 'feel-good' rebranding of the very same 19th century imperialism as described
in J.A Hobson's seminal work from 1902, Imperialism. Its touted 'inevitability' rested not on
the impossibility of alternate models, but on the authority that flows forth from gunboat
diplomacy. But sea power has given way to land power.
In many ways it aligned with the era of de-colonialization and post-colonialism. New nations
could wave their own flags and make their own laws, so long as the traditionally imperialist
western banking institutions controlled the money supply.
But what is emerging is not Washington Consensus 'globalization', but a multipolar model
based in civilizational sovereignty and difference, building products to last – for their
usefulness and not their repeatable retail potential. This cuts against the claims that global
homogenization in all spheres (moral, cultural, economic, political, etc.) was inevitable, as a
consequence of mercantile specialization.
Therefore, inter-nationalism hyphenated as such, reminds us that nations –
civilizations, sovereignty, and their differences – make us stronger as a human species.
Like against viruses, some have stronger natural immunity than others. If people were
identical, one virus could wipe-out all of humanity.
Likewise, an overly-integrated global economy leads to global melt-down and depression when
one node collapses. Rather than independent pillars that could aid each other, the
interdependence is its greatest weakness.
Multipolarity is Reality
This new reality – multipolarity – involves processes which aspects of
globalization theory also suggest and predict for, so there are some honest reasons why experts
could misdiagnose multipolarity as globalization. Overlooked was that the concentration of
capital nodes in various and globally diverse regions by continent, were not exclusively
trans-Atlantic regions as in the standard globalization model of Alpha ++ or Alpha+ cities.
This capital concentration along continental lines was occurring alongside regional economic
development and rising living standards which tended to promote the efficiency of local
transportation as opposed to ocean-travel in the production process. As regional nodes by
continent had increasingly diversified their own domestic production, a general tendency for
transportation costs to increase as individual per capita usage increased, worked against the
viability of an over-reliance on global transit lines.
But among many problems in globalization theory was that the US would always be the primary
consumer of the world's goods, and with it, the trans-Atlantic financial sector. It was also
contingent on the idea that mercantilist conceptions of specialization (by nation or by region)
would always trump autarkic models and ISI (income substitution industrialization). Again, if
middle-class consumer bases are rising in all the world's inhabited continents as multipolarity
explains and predicts, then a global production regimen rationalized towards a trans-Atlantic
consumer base as globalization theory predicts isn't quite as apt.
Because the present system is premised on a production-consumption and financial model,
the solutions to crises are presented as population reduction and what even appears, at least
in the case of Europe, as population replacement. As cliché as this may seem, this also
appeared to be the policy of the Third Reich when capitalism faced its last major crises
culminating in WWII.
Breaking the Wheel
The shutdown reveals the karmic wheel of production-consumption is in truth already broken.
We have already passed the zenith point of what the old paradigm had to offer, and it has long
since entered into a period of decay, economic and moral destruction.
Like the Christ who brings forth a new covenant or the Buddha who emerges to break the wheel
of karma, the new world to be built on the ruins of modernity is a world that liberates the
productive forces, realizing their full potential, and with it the liberation of man from the
machine of the production-consumption cycle.
Planned obsolescence and consumerism (marketing) are the twin evils that have worked towards
the simultaneous
time-wasting enslavement of 'living to work' , and have built globalization based on global
assembly and global mono-culture.
What is important for people and their quality of life is the time to live life, not be
stuck in the grind. We hear politicians and economists talking about 'everyone having a job',
as if what people want is to be away from their families, friends, passions, or hobbies. What's
more – people cannot invent, innovate, or address the greater questions of life and death
– if their nose is to the grindstone.
Now that we are living under an overt system of control, a 'medical state of emergency' with
a frozen economy, we can see that another world is possible. The truth is that most things
which are produced are intentionally made to break at a specific time, so that a re-purchase is
predictable and profits are guaranteed. This compels global supply chains and justifies
artificially induced crashes aimed at upward redistribution and mass expropriations.
Instead of allowing Bill Gates to tour the world to tout a police-state cum population
reduction scheme right after a global virus pandemic struck, one which many believe
he owns the patent for , we can instead address the issues of multipolarity, civilizational
sovereignty, and ending planned obsolescence and the global supply chain, as well as the
off-shoring it necessitates – which the BBC rightly notes, is in question anyhow.
There's no doubt that the Coronavirus is a serious infection that can lead to severe illness
or death. There's also no doubt that 'virus hysteria' has been used for other purposes. Wall
Street, for example, has used virus-panic to advance its own agenda and get another round of
trillion dollar bailouts. In fact, it took less than a week to get the pushover congress to ram
through a massive $2.2 trillion boondoggle without even one lousy congressman offering a peep
of protest. That's got to be some kind of record.
In 2008, at the peak of the financial crisis, Congress voted "No" to the $700 billion TARP
bill. Some readers might recall how a number of GOP congressmen bravely banded together and
flipped Wall Street "the bird". That didn't happen this time around. Even though the bill is
three times bigger than the TARP ( $2.2 trillion), no one lifted a finger to stop it. Why?
Fear, that's why. Everyone in congress was scared to death that if they didn't rush this
debt-turd through the House pronto, the economy would collapse while tens of thousands of
corpses would be stacking up in cities across the country. Of course the reason they believed
this nonsense was because the goofy infectious disease experts confidently assured everyone
that the body-count would be "in the hundreds of thousands if not millions." Remember that
fiction? The most recent estimate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 total. I don't
need to tell you that the difference between 60,000 and "millions" is a little more than a
rounding-error.
So we've had the wool pulled over our eyes, right? Not as bad as congress, but, all the
same, we've been hoodwinked and we've been fleeced. And the people who have axes to grind have
been very successful in taking advantage of the hysteria and promoting their own agendas. Maybe
you've noticed the reemergence of creepy Bill Gates and the Vaccine Gestapo or NWO Henry
Kissinger warning us that, "the world will never be the same after the coronavirus".
What do these people know that we don't know? Doesn't it all make you a bit suspicious? And
when you see nonstop commercials on TV telling you to "wash your hands"or "keep your distance"
or "stay inside" and, oh yeah, "We're all in this together", doesn't it leave you scratching
your head and wondering who the hell is orchestrating this virus-charade and what do they
really have in mind for us unwashed masses??
At least in the case of Wall Street, we know what they want. They want money and lots of
it.
Have you looked over the $2.2 trillion CARES bill that Trump just signed into law a couple
weeks ago? It's pretty grim reading, so I'll save you the effort. Here's a rough breakdown:
$250 billion will go for the $1,200 checks that most of us will receive in a couple weeks.
And $250 billion will be provided for extended unemployment insurance benefits.
That's $500 billion.
Working people will get $500 billion while Wall Street and Corporate America will get 3
times that amount. ($1.7 trillion) And even that's a mere fraction of the total sum
because– hidden in the small print– is a section that allows the Fed to lever-up
the base-capital by 10-to-1 ($450 billion to $4.5 trillion) which means the Fed can buy as many
"toxic" bonds and garbage assets as it chooses. The Fed is turning itself into a hedge fund in
order to buy the sludge that has accumulated on the balance sheets of corporations and
financial institutions for the last decade. It's another gigantic ripoff that's being cleverly
concealed behind the ridiculous coronavirus hype. It's infuriating.
So here's the question: Do you think Congress knew that working people would only get a
pittance while the bulk of the dough would go to Wall Street?
It's hard to say, but they certainly knew that the economy was cratering and that $500
billion wasn't going to put much of a dent in a $20 trillion economy. In other words, even if
everyone goes out and blows their measly $1,200 checks on Day 1, we're still going to
experience the sharpest economic contraction on record, a second Great Depression.
Maybe they should have talked about that in congress before they voted for this
trillion-dollar turkey? Maybe they should have thought a little more about how the money should
be distributed: Should it go to the people who actually buy things, generate activity and
produce growth, or to the parasite class that blows up the system every decade and drags the
economy down a black hole? That seems like something you might want to know before you pass a
multi-trillion dollar bill that's supposed to fix the economy.
It's also worth noting that the $5.8 trillion is not nearly the total amount that Wall
Street will eventually get. The Fed has already spent $2 trillion via its QE program (to shore
up the dysfunctional repo market) and Fed chair Jay Powell announced on Thursday that another
$2.3 trillion in loans and purchases would be used to buy municipal bonds, corporate bonds and
loans to small businesses. The allocation for small businesses, which falls under the, Main
Street Lending Program, has been widely touted as a sign of how much the Fed really cares about
struggling Mom and Pop businesses that employ the majority of working Americans. But, once
again, it's a sham and a boondoggle. The program is on-track to get $600 billion funding of
which the US Treasury will provide the base-capital of $75 billion. The rest will be levered-up
by 9-to-1 by the Fed, which means it's just more smoke and mirrors.
What readers need to realize is that the Treasury has accepted the credit risk for all of
the loans that default . In other words, the American people are now on the hook for
100% of all of the loans that go south, and there's going to be alot of them because the
banks have no reason to find creditworthy borrowers. They get a 5% cut off-the-top whether the
loans blow up or not. And, that, my friend, is how you incentivize fraud which, as Bernie
Sanders noted, "is Wall Street's business model."
It also helps to explain why Trump has repeatedly rejected congressional oversight of the
various bailout programs. He's smart enough to know a good swindle when he sees one, and this
one is a corker. The government is essentially waving trillions of dollars right under the
noses of the world's most ravenous hyenas expecting them not to act in character. But of course
they will act in character and hundreds of billions of dollars will be siphoned off by scheming
sharpies who figure out how game the system and turn the whole fiasco into another Wall Street
looting operation. You can bet on it.
So, what is the final tally?
Well, according to Trump's chief economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, the first bailout
installment is $6.2 trillion (after the Fed ramps up the Treasury's contribution of $450
billion.). Then there's the $2.3 trillion in additional programs the Fed announced on Thursday.
Finally, the Fed's QE program adds another $2 trillion in bond purchases since September 17,
when the repo market went haywire.
Altogether, the total sum amounts to $10.5 trillion.
You know what they say, "A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking real
money."
Of course, no one on Capitol Hill worries about trivialities like money because, "We're the
United States of America, and our dollar will always be King." But there's a fundamental flaw
to this type of thinking. Yes, the dollar is the world's reserve currency, but that's a
privilege that the US has greatly abused over the years, and it's certainly not going to
survive this latest wacky helicopter drop. No, I am not suggesting the US would ever default on
its debt, that's not going to happen. But, yes, I am suggesting that the US will have to repay
its debts in a currency that has lost a significant amount of its value. You don't have to be
Einstein to figure out that you can't willy-nilly print-up $10 or $20 trillion dollars without
eroding the value of the currency. That's a no-brainer. Central bankers around the world are
now looking at their piles of USDs thinking, "Hmmm, maybe it's time I traded some of these
greenbacks in for a few yen, euros or even Swiss francs?"
So how does this end? Can the Fed continue to write trillion dollar checks on an account
that is already $23 trillion overdrawn? Will Central banks around the world continue to
stockpile dollars when the Fed is printing them up faster than anyone can count? And what about
China? How long before China realizes that US Treasuries are grossly overvalued, that US
equities markets are unreformable, that the dollar is backed by nothing but red ink, and that
Wall Street is the biggest and most corrupt cesspit on earth?
Not long, I'd wager. So, how does this end? It ends in a flash of monetary debasement
preceded by a violent and destabilizing currency crisis. It's plain as the nose on your face.
The Fed knows that when a nation's sovereign debt exceeds 100% of GDP, "there's almost no
mathematical way to service that debt in real terms." Well, the US passed that milestone
way-back in 2019 before this latest drunken spending-spree even began. It's safe to say, we've
now entered the financial Twilight Zone, the Land of No Return. If we add the Fed's bulging
balance sheet to the final estimate, (after all, it's just another shady Enron-type Special
Purpose Vehicle) the national debt will be somewhere north of $33 trillion by year-end,
which means that Uncle Sam will be the greatest credit risk on Planet Earth. Imagine how
jaws will drop on the day that Moodys and Fitch slash the ratings on US Treasuries to Triple B
"junk" status . That should turn a few heads.
So what can we expect in the months to come?
First, the economy is going to slip into a deflationary period as people get back to work
and slowly resume their spending. But once demand picks up and the Fed's liquidity starts to
kick in, the economy will rebound sharply followed by steadily rising prices. That's the red
flag that will signal a weakening dollar. Similar to 1933, when Roosevelt took the U.S. off the
gold standard and printed money like crazy, economic activity picked up but the value of the
dollar dropped by 40%. A similar scenario seems likely here as well. Economist Lyn Alden
Schwartzer summed it up like this in an article at
Seeking Alpha:
"One of the common debates is whether all of this debt, counteracted by a tremendous
monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve in response, will cause a deflationary bust or an
inflationary problem .. Fundamentally, evidence points to a period of deflation due to
this global shutdown and demand destruction shock, likely followed in the coming years by
rising inflation .
In the coming years, the United States will be effectively printing money to fund large
fiscal deficits , while also having a large current account deficit and negative net
international investment position. This is one of the main variables for my view that the
dollar will likely decrease in value relative to a basket of foreign currencies in the coming
years ." ( "Why This Is
Unlike The Great Depression" , Seeking Alpha)
So, after decades of lethal low interest rates, relentless meddling and gross regulatory
malpractice, the Fed has led us to this final, fatal crossroads: Inflate or default. From the
looks of things, the choice has already been made. Wiemar America, here we come!
Female sociopath are excel in false accusations, including rape accusations. They are born actresses and have no empathy, so
framing their victim is just an easy game for them
In a fiery speech announcing her decision, Collins ripped unsupported claims by Avenatti's
client, Julie Swetnick, that Kavanaugh facilitated a Cosby-esque "gang rape" operation while in
high school.
Some of the allegations levied against Judge Kavanaugh illustrate why the presumption of
innocence is so important . I am thinking in particular not of the allegations raised by
Professor Ford, but of the allegation that, when he was a teenager, Judge Kavanaugh drugged
multiple girls and used their weakened state to facilitate gang rape .
This outlandish allegation was put forth without any credible supporting evidence and
simply parroted public statements of others . That such an allegation can find its way into
the Supreme Court confirmation process is a stark reminder about why the presumption of
innocence is so ingrained in our American consciousness. -Sen. Susan Collins
I didn't really care much about the stuff alleged to have been done by Kavanaugh
thirty-five years ago. Arguing with a close family friend I stated that there was nothing
I found more tiresome than the old lawyers tactic of springing something on you at the last
possible minute, leaving a steaming pile of turds in the middle of your desk, and then
expecting to be taken seriously. Decorum? Rules of debate? How about the laws of
discovery, sharing info amongst colleagues?
Just because this was not a criminal trial is no reason to throw out the rules for policy
making, the nomination process, which both sides have adhered to in the past. People were
comparing this to the Anita Hill fiasco during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.
Delay, interrupt, stall, maximum media exposure. Never any evidence or criminal charges to
point to.
In criminal trials there is the process of discovery by which the admission of
evidence at the last minute is strongly ill advised, and can result in it being tossed out.
Sen. Feinstein would be aware of all the rules and procedures, but she feels above it
all.
Hey Avenatti! If you and your client had any idea of what the truth is no one would every
have heard of her or of you. Don't give us this ******** that you were just representing your
client. If you had a brain you would have known she was FOS from the get go, and if you were
honest you never would have represented her. So what is it? Are you just stupid or are you
dishonest, or both?
People who make salacious claims unconfirmed or outright denied by their own named
"witnesses" tend to get sued for defamation. And the lawyers they rode in on.
Michael Avenatti is not a nice man at all. He was a factor in making the accusations seem
like a circus. No one takes him seriously as he slinks around the gutters.
Avenatti is the scapegoat. The Ford story was already fast breaking down, and the secret
polygraph and the secret therapist notes and her ex-boyfriend should have made more noise in
the Senate.
They embraced this puke and revelled in his garbage accusations. Now they need a
scapegoat, and he's it. God forbid Feinstein get raked over the coals for screwing this thing
up. The was a political hit, and everyone knew it. But the GOP are so spineless that a
high-school-drunken-grope-fest brought them to their knees. Fortunately, the Dems stayed true
to form and blew themselves up.
What I do not understand is how could they be so stupid as to endorse the Avenatti slime
factory in the first place? TONE DEAF.
Avenatti needs to be disbarred. To file a complaint for his breach of professional
responsibility, suborning perjury, and engaging in acts of moral turpitude:
If enough complaints are filed with the CA state bar, he may get disbarred.
Attorneys ALREADY have a really bad rep. Part of professional responsibility is to uphold
the integrity of the legal profession. The ONLY thing Avenatti did was to make every attorney
look like a complete shyster sleazeball, which given I just took the bar exam and will
probably become an attorney soon, I find immensely offensive.
The Demonrats used false sexual allegations against Roy Moore coupled with ballot box
cheating (their typical mode) to win a senate seat in conservative Alabama. So, since their
main national platform of open borders is so repugnant to any normal taxpaying voter, this is
their only strategy. They simply got caught. All the allegations against both Kavanaugh and
Moore were fabricated and the proof is the Soros' paid lawyers who represented them all. And
Feinstein and Schumer conspired in this farce. And independent voters know it!
They're just pissed they got caught in their fraud and this energized the R. base which
will lead to a red wave in a few weeks. And just think of the political commercial
possibilities for any Demonrat senator hoping to prevail if they vote against Kavanaugh. I
expect the final confirmation vote won't as close as the vote for cloture for this
reason.
Be careful, Roy Moore was a different story. There was evidence including him saying he
liked to date high school age girls as a 30 year old along with multiple other people who
remembered what was alleged. Not just Democrat operatives. Morals were not that different
then than now. Was he guilty of a crime no, could reasonable people still dislike his morals
sure. I grew up close to that era and thought the college age kids hanging around HS girls
was nasty. Moore verified as a 30 year old he liked them young.
Ford 0 corroborating evidence. By lumping in Moore with Kavanaugh you are giving credence
to believe the victim because all you are following the "patriarchy" of believing the accused
regardless of evidence.
The Democrats have a long history of making last minute sexual misconduct allegations
against their political opponents, always without any evidence or corroboration. And sexual
misconduct allegations that pale in comparison to what a lot of Democrats have been alleged
to do (rape allegations against Clinton, Kennedy having an affair that left a woman dead,
John Conyers for settling sexual harassment allegations with taxpayer money, Hillary for
trashing victims, or consider Weinstein and other famous/rich Democrat donors or newsmen).
I'd bet most of these allegations against Republicans were simply made up for political
purposes because they were plausible, couldn't be disproven, and couldn't be proven. Ford's
allegations fit the pattern.
The charges are always last minute, to deny the accused an opportunity to defend
themselves. Kavanaugh provided an excellent defense that would be good court room drama in a
movie, when no one in the GOP was willing to defend him, and too afraid of being accused of
not believing a victim and attacking them.
What's really going on are the Democrats in charge, are looking to deflect the attention
from what they did, to Avanetti because Avanetti did the same, except the charges of his
client, weren't believable, even though they couln't be proven or disproven. They don't want
to take the blame, for what voters might do in the midterms.
One thing's for sure, you don't see Democrats calling for indicting and prosecuting false
accusers. They're teaching people to bear false witness for their personal purposes.
avenatti gave the diversion, the clutter, the political sideshow so that all charges could
be swept away and completely fake and uncorroborated. there was no provable basis for the
ford charges, but the crazy swetnick stories simplified brooming the whole thing.
we can only hope that avenatti will be back in 2020, to run for president, and to come
marching with his parade of **** stars and "wronged" women who spend all their time
performing in strip clubs.
Mike Davis on the pandemic. It is very very good.
This is a small sample from the interview:
".....MM: Is capitalist globalization biologically sustainable?
"...MD: Only by accepting a permanent triage of humanity and dooming part of the human
race to eventual extinction.
"Economic globalization -- that is to say, the accelerated free movement of finance and
investment within a single world market where labor is relatively immobile and deprived of
traditional bargaining power -- is different from economic interdependence regulated by the
universal protection of the rights of labor and small producers. Instead, we see a world
system of accumulation that is everywhere breaking down traditional boundaries between animal
diseases and humans, increasing the power of drug monopolies, proliferating carcinogenic
waste, subsidizing oligarchy and undermining progressive governments committed to public
health, destroying traditional communities (both industrial and preindustrial) and turning
the oceans into sewers. Market solutions leave in place Dickensian social conditions and
perpetuate the global shame of income-limited access to clean water and sanitation.
"The present crisis does force capital, large and small, to confront the possible
breakdown of its global production chains and the ability to constantly re-source cheaper
supplies of overseas labor. At the same time, it points to important new or expanding markets
for vaccines, sterilization systems, surveillance technology, home grocery delivery and so
on. The combined dangers and opportunities will lead to a partial fix: new products and
procedures that reduce the health risks of constant disease emergence while simultaneously
spurring the further development of surveillance capitalism. But these protections will
almost certainly be limited -- if left up to markets and authoritarian nationalist regimes --
to rich countries and rich classes. They will reinforce walls, not pull them down, and deepen
the divide between two humanities: one with resources to mitigate climate change and new
pandemics and the other without...."
"...Today, quite a number of alternative media commentators are ready to believe in the
absolute power not of God but of Mammon, of the powers of Wall Street and its partners in
politics, the media and the military. In this view, nothing major happens that hasn't been
planned by earthly powers for their own selfish interest.
"Mammon is wrecking the economy so a few oligarchs will own everything. Or else Mammon
created the hoax Coronavirus 19 in order to lock us all up and deprive us of what little is
left of our freedom. Or finally Mammon is using a virus in order to have a pretext to
vaccinate us all with secret substances and turn us all into zombies.
"Is this credible? In one sense, it is. We know that Mammon is unscrupulous, morally
capable of all crimes. But things do happen that Mammon did not plan, such as earthquakes,
floods and plagues. Dislike of our ruling class combined with dislike of being locked up
leads to the equation: They are simply using this (fake) crisis in order to lock us up!
"But what for? To whom is there any advantage in locking down the population? For the
pleasure of telling themselves, "Aha, we've got them where we want them, all stuck at home!"
Is this intended to suppress popular revolt? What popular revolt? Why repress people who
aren't doing anything that needs to be repressed?...
"What is the use of locking up a population – and I think especially of the United
States – that is disunited, disorganized, profoundly confused by generations of
ideological indoctrination telling them that their country is "the best" in every way, and
thus unable to formulate coherent demands on a system that exploits them ruthlessly? Do you
need to lock up your faithful Labrador so he won't bite you?...
"....Mammon is blinded by its own hubris, often stupid, incompetent, dumbed down by
getting away with so much so easily. Take a look at Mike Pompeo or Mike Pence – are
these all-powerful geniuses? No, they are semi-morons who have been able to crawl up a
corrupt system contemptuous of truth, virtue or intelligence – like the rest of the
gangsters in power in a system devoid of any ethical or intellectual standards.
"The power of creatures like that is merely the reflection of the abdication of social
responsibility by whole populations whose disinterest in politics has allowed the scum to
rise to the top.
The lockdown decreed by our Western governments reveals helplessness rather than power.
They did not rush to lock us down. The lockdown is disastrous for the economy which is their
prime concern. They hesitated and did so only when they had to do something and were
ill-equipped to do anything else. They saw that China had done so with good results. But
smart Asian governments did even more, deploying masks, tests and treatments Western
governments did not possess..."
"... Because behind today's coronavirus-inspired astonishment at conditions in developing or lower income countries, and Trump's authoritarian-like thuggery, lies an actual military and political hegemon with an actual impact on the world; particularly on what was once called the "Third World." ..."
"... In physical terms, the U.S.'s military hegemony is comprised of 800 bases in over 70 nations – more bases than any other nation or empire in history. The U.S. maintains drone bases, listening posts, "black sites," aircraft carriers, a massive nuclear stockpile, and military personnel working in approximately 160 countries. ..."
"... Since then, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow the governments of approximately 50 countries, many of which (e.g. Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and Chile) had elected leaders willing to nationalize their natural resources and industries. Often these interventions took the form of covert operations. Less frequently, the United States went to war to achieve these same ends (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq). ..."
"... In fiscal terms, maintaining American hegemony requires spending more on "defense" than the next seven largest countries combined. Our nearly $1 trillion security budget now amounts to about 15 percent of the federal budget and over half of all discretionary spending. Moreover, the U.S. security budget continues to increase despite the Pentagon's inability to pass a fiscal audit. ..."
This March, as COVID-19's capacity to overwhelm the American healthcare system was becoming
obvious, experts marveled at the scenario unfolding before their eyes. "We have Third World
countries who are better equipped than we are now in Seattle,"
noted one healthcare professional, her words echoed just a few days later by a shocked
doctor in New York who described
"a third-world country type of scenario." Donald Trump could similarly only grasp what was
happening through the same comparison. "I have seen things that I've never seen before," he
said
. "I mean I've seen them, but I've seen them on television and faraway lands, never in my
country."
At the same time, regardless of the fact that "Third World" terminology is outdated and
confusing, Trump's inept handling of the pandemic has itself elicited more than one "banana republic"
analogy, reflecting already well-worn, bipartisan comparisons of Trump to a "
third world dictator " (never mind that dictators and authoritarians have never been
confined solely to lower income countries).
And yet, while such comparisons provoke predictably nativist outrage from the right, what is
absent from any of
these responses to the situation is a sense of reflection or humility about the "Third
World" comparison itself. The doctor in New York who finds himself caught in a "third world"
scenario and the political commentators outraged when Trump behaves "like a third world
dictator" uniformly express themselves in terms of incredulous wonderment. One never hears the
potential second half of this comparison: "I am now experiencing what it is like to live in a
country that resembles the kind of nation upon whom the United States regularly imposes broken
economies and corrupt leaders."
Because behind today's coronavirus-inspired astonishment at conditions in developing or
lower income countries, and Trump's authoritarian-like thuggery, lies an actual military and
political hegemon with an actual impact on the world; particularly on what was once called the
"Third World."
In physical terms, the U.S.'s military hegemony is comprised of 800 bases in over 70
nations –
more bases than any other nation or empire in history. The U.S. maintains drone bases,
listening posts, "black sites," aircraft carriers, a massive nuclear stockpile, and military
personnel working in approximately 160 countries. This is a globe-spanning military and
security apparatus organized into regional commands
that resemble the "proconsuls of the Roman empire and the governors-general of the
British." In other words, this apparatus is built not for deterrence, but for primacy.
The U.S.'s global primacy emerged from the wreckage of World War II when the United States
stepped into the shoes vacated by European empires. Throughout the Cold War, and in the name of
supporting "free peoples," the sprawling American security apparatus helped ensure that 300
years of imperial resource extraction and wealth distribution – from what was then called
the Third World to the First – remained undisturbed, despite decolonization.
Since then, the United States
has overthrown or attempted to overthrow the governments of approximately 50 countries,
many of which (e.g. Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and Chile) had elected leaders willing to
nationalize their natural resources and industries. Often these interventions
took the form of covert operations. Less frequently, the United States went to war to
achieve these same ends (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq).
In fiscal terms, maintaining American hegemony requires spending more
on "defense" than the next seven largest countries combined. Our
nearly $1 trillion security budget now amounts to about 15 percent of the federal budget
and over half of all
discretionary spending. Moreover, the U.S. security budget continues to increase despite the
Pentagon's inability to pass a fiscal audit.
Trump's claim that Obama had
"hollowed out" defense spending was not only grossly untrue, it masked the consistency of the
security budget's metastasizing growth since the Vietnam War, regardless of who sits in the
White House. At $738 billion dollars, Trump's security budget was passed in December with the
overwhelming support of House Democrats.
And yet, from the perspective of public discourse in this country, our globe-spanning,
resource-draining military and security apparatus exists in an entirely parallel universe to
the one most Americans experience on a daily level. Occasionally, we wake up to the idea of
this parallel universe but only when the United States is involved in visible military actions.
The rest of the time, Americans leave thinking about international politics – and the
deaths, for instance, of 2.5 million
Iraqis since 2003 – to the legions of policy analysts and Pentagon employees who
largely accept American military primacy as an "article of faith," as Professor of
International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham Patrick Porter has said
.
Foreign policy is routinely the last issue Americans consider when they vote for presidents
even though the president has more discretionary power over foreign policy than any other area
of American politics. Thus, despite its size, impact, and expense, the world's military hegemon
exists somewhere on the periphery of most Americans' self-understanding, as though, like the
sun, it can't be looked upon directly for fear of blindness.
Why is our avoidance of the U.S.'s weighty impact on the world a problem in the midst of the
coronavirus pandemic? Most obviously, the fact that our massive security budget has gone so
long without being widely questioned means that one of the soundest courses of action for the
U.S. during this crisis remains resolutely out of sight.
The shock of discovering that our healthcare system is so quickly overwhelmed should
automatically trigger broader conversations about spending priorities that entail deep and
sustained cuts in an engorged security budget whose sole purpose is the maintenance of primacy.
And yet, not only has this not happened, $10.5 billion of the coronavirus aid package has been
earmarked for the Pentagon, with $2.4 billion of that
channeled to the "defense industrial base." Of the $500 billion aimed at corporate America,
$17.5 billion is
set aside "for businesses critical to maintaining national security" such as aerospace.
To make matters worse, our blindness to this bloated security complex makes it frighteningly
easy for champions of American primacy to sound the alarm when they even suspect a dip in
funding might be forthcoming. Indeed, before most of us had even glanced at the details of the
coronavirus bill, foreign policy hawks were already
issuing dark prediction s about the impact of still-imaginary cuts in the security budget
on the U.S.'s "ability to strike any target on the planet in response to hostile actions by any
actor" – as if that ability already did not exist many times over.
On a more existential level, a country that is collectively engaged in unseeing its own
global power cannot help but fail to make connections between that power and domestic politics,
particularly when a little of the outside world seeps in. For instance, because most Americans
are unaware of their government's sponsorship of fundamentalist Islamic groups in the Middle
East throughout the Cold War, 9/11 can only ever appear to have come from nowhere, or because
Muslims hate our way of life.
This "how did we get here?" attitude replicates itself at every level of political life
making it profoundly difficult for Americans to see the impact of their nation on the rest of
the world, and the blowback from that impact on the United States itself. Right now, the
outsized influence of American foreign policy is already encouraging the spread of coronavirus
itself as U.S. imposed sanctions on Iran severely hamper that
country's ability to respond to the virus at home and virtually
guarantee its spread throughout the region.
Closer to home, our shock at the healthcare system's inept response to the pandemic masks
the relationship between the U.S.'s imposition
of free-market totalitarianism on countries throughout the
Global South and the impact of free-market totalitarianism on our own welfare state .
Likewise, it is more than karmic comeuppance that the President of the United States now
resembles the self-serving authoritarians the U.S. forced on so many formerly colonized
nations. The modes of militarized policing American security experts exported to those
authoritarian regimes also contributed , on a
policy level, to both the rise of militarized policing in American cities and the rise of mass
incarceration in the 1980s and 90s. Both of these phenomena played a significant role in
radicalizing Trump's white nationalist base and decreasing their tolerance for democracy.
Most importantly, because the U.S. is blind to its power abroad, it cannot help but turn
that blindness on itself. This means that even during a pandemic when America's exceptionalism
– our lack of national healthcare – has profoundly negative consequences on the
population, the idea of looking to the rest of the world for solutions remains unthinkable.
Senator Bernie Sanders' reasonable suggestion that the U.S., like Denmark, should
nationalize its healthcare system is dismissed as the fanciful pipe dream of an aging socialist
rather than an obvious solution to a human problem embraced by nearly every other nation in the
world. The Seattle healthcare professional who expressed shock that even "Third World
countries" are "better equipped" than we are to confront COVID-19 betrays a stunning ignorance
of the diversity of healthcare systems within developing countries. Cuba, for instance,
has responded
to this crisis with an efficiency and humanity that puts the U.S. to shame.
Indeed, the U.S. is only beginning to feel the full impact of COVID-19's explosive
confrontation with our exceptionalism: if the unemployment rate really does reach 32 percent,
as has been predicted,
millions of people will not only lose their jobs but their health insurance as well. In the
middle of a pandemic.
Over 150 years apart, political commentators Edmund Burke and Aimé Césaire
referred to this blindness as the byproduct of imperialism. Both used the exact same language
to describe it; as a "gangrene" that "poisons" the colonizing body politic. From their
different historical perspectives, Burke and Césaire observed how colonization
boomerangs back on colonial society itself, causing irreversible damage to nations that
consider themselves humane and enlightened, drawing them deeper into denial and
self-delusion.
Perhaps right now there is a chance that COVID-19 – an actual, not metaphorical
contagion – can have the opposite effect on the U.S. by opening our eyes to the things
that go unseen. Perhaps the shock of recognizing the U.S. itself is less developed than our
imagined "Third World" might prompt Americans to tear our eyes away from ourselves and look
toward the actual world outside our borders for examples of the kinds of political, economic,
and social solidarity necessary to fight the spread of Coronavirus. And perhaps moving beyond
shock and incredulity to genuine recognition and empathy with people whose economies and
democracies have been decimated by American hegemony might begin the process of reckoning with
the costs of that hegemony, not just in "faraway lands" but at home. In our country.
"... JPMorgan Chase & Co, Wells Fargo & Co, Bank of America Corp and Citigroup Inc are each in the process of setting up independent companies to own oil and gas assets, said three people who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The banks are also looking to hire executives with relevant expertise to manage them, the sources said. ..."
"... U.S. oil and gas producers have increasingly relied on banks for cash over the past year, as debt or equity options dried up. Lenders have been conservative in valuing hydrocarbons used as collateral, but recent restructurings have left them spooked. ..."
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Major U.S. lenders are preparing to become operators of oil and gas
fields across the country for the first time in a generation to avoid losses on loans to energy
companies that may go bankrupt, sources aware of the plans told Reuters.
JPMorgan Chase & Co, Wells Fargo & Co, Bank of America Corp and Citigroup Inc
are each in the process of setting up independent companies to own oil and gas assets, said
three people who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The banks are also looking
to hire executives with relevant expertise to manage them, the sources said.
The banks did not provide comment in time for publication.
Energy companies are suffering through a plunge in oil prices caused by the coronavirus
pandemic and a supply glut, with crude prices down more than 60% this year.
Although oil prices may gain support from a potential agreement Thursday between Saudi
Arabia and Russia to cut production, few believe the curtailment can offset a 30% drop in
global fuel demand, as the coronavirus has grounded aircraft, reduced vehicle use and curbed
economic activity more broadly.
Oil and gas companies working in shale basins from Texas to Wyoming are saddled with
debt.
The industry is estimated to owe more than $200 billion to lenders through loans backed by
oil and gas reserves. As revenue has plummeted and assets have declined in value, some
companies are saying they may be unable to repay.
Whiting Petroleum Corp became the first producer to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on April
1. Others, including Chesapeake Energy Corp, Denbury Resources Inc and Callon Petroleum Co,
have also hired debt advisers.
If banks do not retain bankrupt assets, they might be forced to sell them for pennies on the
dollar at current prices. The companies they are setting up could manage oil and gas assets
until conditions improve enough to sell at a meaningful value.
Big banks will need to get regulatory waivers to execute their plans, because of limitations
on their involvement with physical commodities, sources said.
Banks are hoping their planned ownership time frame of a year or so will pass a Federal
Reserve requirement that they do not plan to hold assets for a long time. Because lenders would
be stepping in to support part of the economy that is important to any potential rebound, and
which has not gotten direct bailouts from the federal government, that might help applications,
too.
For now, the banks are establishing holding companies that can sit above limited liability
companies (LLCs) containing seized assets. The LLCs would be owned proportionally by banks
participating in the original secured loan.
To run the oil-and-gas operations, banks might hire former industry executives or specialty
firms that have done so for private equity, sources said. Houston-based EnerVest Operating LLC
would be among the most likely operators, sources said.
"We regularly look for opportunities to operate on behalf of other entities, that is no
different in this market," said EnerVest Operating's chief executive, Alex Zazzi.
GETTING ASSERTIVE
U.S. banks have not done anything like this since the late-1980s, when another oil-price
rout bankrupted a bunch of energy companies. More recently, they have relied on restructuring
processes that prioritize them as secured creditors and leave bondholders to seek control in
lieu of payment.
But banks are becoming more assertive because of the coronavirus recession and balance sheet
vulnerabilities that have developed in recent years.
U.S. oil and gas producers have increasingly relied on banks for cash over the past
year, as debt or equity options dried up. Lenders have been conservative in valuing
hydrocarbons used as collateral, but recent restructurings have left them spooked.
Alta Mesa Resources' bankruptcy will likely provide banks with less than two-thirds of their
money, while Sanchez Energy's could leave them with nothing.
The structures banks are setting up will take a few months to establish, sources said. That
gives producers until the fall - the next time banks will evaluate the collateral behind energy
loans - to get their houses in order.
After several years of on-and-off issues with energy borrowers, lenders have little choice
but to take more dramatic steps, said Buddy Clark, a restructuring partner at law firm Haynes
and Boone.
"Banks can now believably wield the threat that they will foreclose on the company and its
properties if they don't pay their loan back," he said.
(Reporting by David French and Imani Moise in New York; Additional Reporting by Elizabeth
Dilts Marshall; Editing by Leslie Adler; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra)
From toilet paper shortages to computer chips, the novel
coronavirus pandemic
has exposed many weak links in the highly globalized supply chains that enable goods to move around the
world.
Now, many companies are taking a long, hard look at their models to see if the status quo still works. If the coronavirus broke the
supply chain, how do you fix it? What should be changed, and what should not be changed?
There are three parts of the supply chain that have been thrown into question: offshoring, just-in-time inventory, and
diversification -- and every company reliant on manufacturing is likely examining these factors.
What the coronavirus won't change: offshoring
From clothing to electronics and much more, things in the United States usually come from really far away, often from China, where
the new coronavirus originated. For many companies, this is often unavoidable, because many goods would be prohibitively expensive
if made in regions where labor costs are high. Offshoring and outsourcing exploded after 1979, when China adopted its Open Door
Policy, allowing foreign companies to access its vast and inexpensive labor market, enabling far cheaper goods than before.
Taiwan-based Foxconn is best known as the assembler of the iPhone, with many factories in China like this one in Shenzhen. But
going forward, companies will have to diversify their supply chains to ensure that they can still function if one country goes
offline. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)
"Anything that was labor intensive -- footwear, apparel, assembly of electronics -- moved to China," said
Marshall Fisher
, a
professor of operations, information, and decisions at Wharton. "In 1960, 5% of the world's physical products crossed boundaries.
That's grown to about 50%."
The trade-off from offshoring is lead time. A widget produced in China takes a long time to sail to the West, unless you put it on a
plane, which eats up much of the cost savings. For many companies, that means nailing predictions to make sure they don't make too
much product or too little, which isn't easy.
The key aspect with international trade, during the pandemic, is politics. It can be good and bad for business.
Rob Siegel, a Stanford professor who studies supply chains and has created them for businesses, recalled as a business school
student in the fall 1993 when former Intel (
INTC
) CEO Andy Grove told his class
that there will never be war with China because "you will never invade the country that has the factories that make all your
things."
Unfortunately, when it comes to pandemics, politics don't help. Taiwan, a manufacturing powerhouse, banned mask exports in late
January as the coronavirus surged. (Taiwan later
lifted the ban
and donated many masks to other countries.) Dozens of countries -- including much of Europe, the U.S., and Brazil
-- followed, either banning or restricting exports due to coronavirus.
This, perhaps greater than anything else, has prompted the question: Do you really want to rely on X country during an emergency?
However, this is more of a question for governments than businesses, which are more focused on making money than national security.
For many companies, making stuff abroad is the only viable option, but they do need to continue functioning if something bad
happens. That's why Fisher thinks the question companies will be asking isn't "is our supply chain too long?," but rather "should we
be investing in resilience of the [complex, international] supply chain?"
The 'just-in-time' model cracks
Companies don't just buy stuff from far away, but they have been buying the least amount of stuff possible -- running lean inventory
and only buying when they need to.
That's called the "just-in-time" inventory model, and like predicting months in advance when buying from afar, companies have gotten
really good at creating models that allow them to run extremely efficiently. The downside of this model is it's fragile: If
something goes wrong, companies will be in a bind.
So, when the coronavirus hit, some companies and consumers experienced supply issues.
But what should a company do if they operate under this model?
"Largely speaking [just-in-time] isn't going to be redesigned for a 100-year crisis," said Siegel. "It's almost impossible to plan
for something that happens every 100 years."
This may sound like a gamble, but for many companies, changing the entire model just doesn't make sense. As Yossi Sheffi, director
of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, told Yahoo Finance, there are just too many advantages of "just-in-time" that go
beyond cost. There's more speed and agility, but also more quality.
When an auto production line experiences a problem with a part, for example, you have a pile of parts and swap a new one in. But
with just-in-time, "you stop the line, find out what's wrong, and fix it," Sheffi said. "Low inventory helps people find out what's
wrong."
For some stuff, however, we may see significant changes in inventory management. The pandemic has shown that the critical strategic
reserves of products like ventilators and personal protective equipment are simply not adequate during a global emergency. The U.S.,
unable to import ventilators quickly due to other countries' export laws, resorted to
deputizing General Motors
(
GM
) to make ventilators.
For many, that wasn't quick enough, and shifting the permanent production domestically may not be feasible either in the future. But
what might be more practical is planning for more inventory.
"If you have 100,000 ventilators that you could pull out at a moment's notice, that'd be easier [than it would be] to nationalize GM
via the Defense Protection Act," said Siegel.
Going forward, the government may choose to mandate that certain companies run with more inventory for critical items like
ventilators, just in case, and keep their own warehouses better stocked.
What will change: diversification
For the most part, however, just-in-time inventory is here to stay, and low-cost offshoring isn't going anywhere. But what Yossi,
Siegel, and Fisher agree will change is diversification.
"The first line of defense is to make your components in multiple places," said Fisher. "The idea is at least two companies making
it in two geographic locations."
"I expect companies to have at least a secondary supplier," said Sheffi. "Not 50%, maybe 20-30%."
Rising wages in China have forced some companies to move their manufacturing away from the country, said Fisher, but many companies
are still exposed.
Fisher noted that the 2011 Tsunami in Japan taught many companies, like Apple, the lesson to be more robust in the face of
disruption, but that as the disaster faded into memory, so did the calls to diversify.
"Apple [has] foregone the few millions of costs to make the supply chain more robust and lost $100 billion in market cap," he said.
"The needle has tipped too much to efficiency from robustness."
Since then, the volleys of tariffs and uncertainty during the trade war with China caused companies to realize that relying solely
on that country for manufacturing exposed them to big risks. Many companies, including Apple (
AAPL
),
decided it would be a good idea to get
more baskets to put their eggs in
. Inadvertently, the U.S.-China trade war prepared some companies for the coronavirus pandemic.
But few had made any big moves by the time the coronavirus hit.
This, Fisher said, is a wakeup call.
"What companies will do is map their supply chain, look at everything that goes in," said Fisher. "And those supply chains can be 10
layers deep. Foxconn gets things from other suppliers, which get them from another."
What you get from this is a figure called "revenue at risk," which helps underscore the amount of money that is at stake should one
link break in the chain. By adding other suppliers, that number can be brought down, avoiding a catastrophic stoppage for a
business.
But given that this is somewhat of a 100-year storm -- literally, the last major pandemic was in 1918 -- the question remains: how
many companies will simply roll the dice instead?
--
Ethan Wolff-Mann
is a writer at Yahoo
Finance focusing on consumer issues, personal finance, retail, airlines, and more. Follow him on Twitter
@ewolffmann
.
Being "connected" is a huge part of the cause of this mess, before internet propaganda was
limited to newspapers and magazines, it was much slower and manageable.
I do find it funny how wealthy folks spread the "don't worry WE will all be fine" garbage.
WE....no, tell that to someone who has lost their business and has dependents.
I hate the "We're going to be ok. We're all in this together" ads. All of them
celebrities, pro athletes, and actors. Not one has to worry about whether they'll be able to
buy food next week. Elites telling the little people everything's ok.
It's really sad when Tucker Carlson is the only person who ever admitted he was wrong on
Fox News. Hannity still claims he never called the virus a hoax even though he did it on
TV.
...The quality and sheer size of the AngloZionist propaganda machine was very successful in
keeping most of the people in the West in total ignorance of these realities. The faster the
Empire was collapsing, the more Obama or Trump peppered their patriotic flag-waving ceremonies
(aka "press conferences") with references to an "indispensable nation" providing "vital
leadership" thanks to its "the best economy in history", the "best military in history" and
even "unbelievable CEOs", "incredible politicians" and even "incredible conversations". The
message was simple: we are the best, better than all the rest and we are invincible.
Then COVID19 happened.
... ... ...
First , the imperial propaganda machine is simply unable to conceal the magnitude of the
disaster, even in countries like the US or the UK. Oh sure, initially doctors and even USN ship
commanders were summarily fired for speaking the truth, but even those cases proved impossible
to conceal and public opinion got even more suspicious of official assurances and statements.
The truth is that most of the entire planet already realized that this is a huge crisis and
that countries like Russia or China responded better than the US. The planet also knows that
the US "health not care" system is broke, corrupt, and mostly dysfunctional and that
Trump's initial optimism was based on nothing. BTW – Trump haters have immediately
instrumentalized the crisis to bash Trump. The sad thing is that while they are no better (and
most definitely not the braindead Uncle Joe), they are right about Trump being completely out
of touch with reality. In the age of the Internet this is a reality which even the US
propaganda machine is unable to conceal from the US public forever.
Second , and that is now quite obvious, it is becoming clear that the capitalist ideology of
free markets, globalism, consumerism, extreme individualism and, above all, greed, is totally
unable to cope with the crisis. Even more offensively to those who still believed in an
ideology based on the assumption that the sum of our greeds will create an optimal society,
countries with stronger collectivist traditions of solidarity (whether "enhanced" by Marxist or
Socialist ideas or not) did much better. China for starters, but also Cuba and even Russia
(which is neither Marxist nor Socialist, but which has very strong collectivist traditions) or
South Korea or Singapore (both non-Marxists with strong collectivist traditions). Even tiny
Venezuela, embattled and under siege by the Empire, managed to do much better than the US or the UK .
Not only did these countries all fare much better than much richer, and putatively much
"freer", countries, they did so while under US sanctions. And, finally, just to add insult to
injury, these supposedly "bad" countries proved much more generous than those incorporated into
the Empire: they sent many tons of vitally needed equipment and hundred of specialized
scientists and even military personnel to help those countries most in need (Italy, Spain,
Serbia, etc.).
... ... ...
Third , then we all saw the ugly sight of various western "democracies" literally stealing
vital medical gear from each other, over and over again. In fact, under a purely capitalistic
logic, this kind of "competition" was both inevitable (true) and even desirable (false): major
Med & Pharma companies all have used this financial windfall to maximize their profits
(which is, after all, what all corporations have to do in a capitalist system: get as much
money as possible for their shareholders).
... ... ...
Fourth , we also witness the raw nastiness of the imperial propaganda machine in articles
about how "Russia sent useless gear to Italy", that "Chinese equipment did not work" or about
how all the countries which responded better and sooner were all lying about the real numbers
(which is utter nonsense, the Chinese have been very open, as have the Russians: the truth is
that in the early phases of a pandemic it is impossible to get real numbers, that can only be
done much later). This is as false as the "Iraqi incubators", "genocidal Serbs" or "Gaddafi's
Viagra" and time will prove it.
Fifth , then there is the issue of poverty. We see the first signs that this pandemic (like
all pandemics) is affecting the poor much harder than the rich. Hardly a surprise For example,
in the US cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Miami or New Orleans have a lot of poor
neighborhoods and that people there are getting hit very hard.
... ... ...
Sixth , just like the Empire itself, NATO and the EU are also in free fall, both clueless as
to what to do and in a panic about doing anything proactive. Besides the flag-waving
Idiot-in-Chief, I also took the time to listen to both Macron and Merkel. They are both in a
full-freak-out mode, Macron speaks over and over about a "war" while Merkel declared that the
pandemic is the most serious challenge facing Germany since WWII!
... ... ...
Seven , in the US, the contrast between the Federal government and the state authorities is
quite startling. As much as the Federal government is terminally dysfunctional, state governors
have often had to use a lot of out of the box thinking to get supplies and specialists
I can only wish good luck to trump on this examination of WHO-it is riddled with fraud,
corruption, massive conflicts of interest. The same applies to CDC, which is a revolving door
for Big Pharma.
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be
born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
– Antonio Gramsci
The Pandemic & Public Health Crisis
On January 20th, 2020, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 infection took place in the
United States. Since then, over 240,000 Americans have tested positive for the COVID-19 virus,
with over 6,000 dying as a result of the pandemic. The New York Times suggests that the
actual numbers are likely 6-10 times higher than is being currently reported.
According to studies from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people with
underlying health conditions such as diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure,
heart disease, and those who smoke, are at high-risk of severe illness or death if they
contract the virus. Unfortunately, that's a lot of Americans.
Several days ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that anywhere between 100,000-240,000
Americans will die from COVID-19 by the end of August, and that's if "we do everything
perfectly," as the good doctor put it. Since no one actually believes that the United States
will conduct the response in a "perfect" manner, we can assume those numbers are low.
For the sake of discussion, let's assume they're correct. For some perspective, 116,708
Americans died in World War I (1914-1918). Roughly 416,800 Americans died in World War II
(1941-1945). Over 40,000 Americans died in the Korean War (1950-1953). And 70,000 Americans
died in the Vietnam War (1965-1975).
Perhaps we throw around large numbers too often, or maybe there's simply no way to humanize
240,000 lives -- regardless, we cannot allow the U.S. government to normalize gross numbers of
fatalities, especially as a result of a completely preventable pandemic. Remember, this isn't a
'Natural Disaster' -- this is a 'Man Made Disaster,' and it should be treated as such. Yes,
Trump is responsible, but he's not the only one. In fact, individuals aren't the problem. The
entire Neoliberal Capitalist project is to blame.
Americans aren't unhealthy because they've made bad choices as individuals. Americans are
disproportionately unhealthy (when compared to both industrialized and industrializing nations)
and susceptible to the worst effects of COVID-19 because Neoliberal Capitalist policies have
created a social, political, economic, and ecological context in which this pandemic can thrive
and impose maximum destruction.
Deindustrialization, privatization, and deregulation, has driven down the cost of labor,
creating millions of working-poor Americans who live on credit and swim in mounds of debt,
while attempting to navigate a social landscape of food deserts, fast food chains, sugar-rich
foods, and low-wage service sector work. This context creates a population of addicted,
depressed, and desperate workers whose sole pleasure at the end of a long shift is a can of
Coke and bag of potato chips.
People don't purposely make themselves obese and unhealthy. When people are put in desperate
situations, they make impulsive decisions. That's how people behave in a context of scarcity
and oppression. Unfortunately, this is exactly the social context in which COVID-19 could cause
extreme and permanent damage.
The Political Crisis
The political context in the U.S. is equally disturbing. Since the 1970s, politicians have
drifted further and further into the realm of absurdity and utter corruption. Gone are the days
of enlightened debates. Enter the age of Trump, Tweets, and trolling.
As empires decline, so does the quality of their leaders. The U.S. might wish to run away
from reality, but Uncle Sam can't run away from history. History has finally caught up with the
U.S. Indeed, Donald Trump is the result of forty-plus years of hyper-individuality, 'greed is
good' culture, superficial materialism, and a politics based not on substance or principles,
but looks, marketability, and adherence to Neoliberal fundamentalist ideologies.
One of the few principled politicians in Washington D.C., Bernie Sanders, was raked over the
coals by the corporate press for simply attempting to give Americans a basic social safety-net.
That, for the Neoliberals, was too much. CNN and MSNBC unleashed the pundit hounds. The New
York Times and Washington Post ran round-the-clock editorials about the "dangers" of
Sanders' policies, his supposed "unelectability," and "radical" following, degrading the tens
of millions of poor and working class people who largely see Bernie's campaign as their last
electoral hope.
Now, Joe Biden is the frontrunner. As a result, virtually everyone I know and work with has
checked out of the electoral scene. Most of my friends have already come to the conclusion that
Trump will win again in 2020. Hell, his numbers continue to rise even in the midst of the
deadliest pandemic in over a 100 years, a pandemic he could've prevented. Frustrating, but not
surprising.
Most Americans have checked out of politics. It's not that they don't care. They just don't
believe that participating will make a difference. Who could blame them, really? I'm 35 years
old. The U.S. government hasn't implemented one major program that's benefitted me since the
day I was born. Obamacare? Get real. Every major political institution in this country has
rapidly deteriorated over the course of my life.
When I was 16, Bush II, with the help of his brother, stole the White House from Al Gore. No
one really did anything about it, even Al Gore. That was 20 years ago. Since then, we've
experienced 9/11, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, two terms of GWB, the 2008 Recession,
Obama's bullshit 'Hope & Change,' which really meant 'More Of The Same,' the Tea Party,
nationwide union busting efforts, the explosion of charter schools, Citizens United, corporate
consolidation, financial deregulation, increasingly militarized policing, exploding prison
populations, privatization of public goods and services, and elections that no one trusts
because paper ballots are gone and billionaires own the electoral process. And yes, in 2016,
the election of Donald Trump, the perfect ending to a 40 year nightmare.
Let's remember why Trump won in the first place. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton because
Democrats stayed home. Bottom line. Democrats stayed home because they were betrayed by Obama,
disgusted by Clinton, and upset about the entire 2016 primary process. As many others have
pointed out, Trump is a symptom, not the disease. Here, we should be very clear: yes, Trump
poses unique challenges and threats, but he is not the primary source of our collective
problems. Our collective problems are structural, not individual, in nature.
Right now, the entire electoral-parliamentary process of representative democracy should be
in question. Quite obviously, this particular mode of democratic participation has reached its
limits. People are flat-out sick and tired of voting for politicians who answer to
corporations. People are tired of the Democrat vs. Republican electoral carnival. Who could
blame them? I'm tired of it. You're tired of it. We're all tired of it.
This is the toxic legacy of Reaganism, a bankrupt ideology that has destroyed the American
political system, civic society, and popular culture. As a result, both major political parties
have drifted so far to the right that people can barely tell the difference between the two.
The Democratic Party is a walking corpse. And the Republican Party is full-blown batshit crazy.
The Green Party doesn't really stand a chance, but I give them credit for trying to develop an
alternative, however flawed it may be. After all, the Greens, not the Dems, came up with the
'Green New Deal.'
Large NGOs are moribund and, in many ways, counterproductive, even on their best days. Right
now, the left contains no structural articulation of its politics beyond various regional
organizations and radical local unions. In reality, most of 'the left' as we know it primarily
exists in online forums and alternative media projects. The political situation is dire, no
doubt.
The only way out of this mess is through deep organizing at the workplace and within
communities. Tactically, this will take the form of massive strikes, street protests, targeted
direct actions, and militant non-violent resistance. But people also need a vision and a
strategy, and structures and institutions to carry out that vision and strategy. Right now,
both are in short order. However, like all moments of immense historical crises, this context
provides an opportunity to introduce radical alternatives, and hopefully, change course. If
leftwing groups can't use this moment to radicalize and politicize people, shame on us.
The Crisis of Capitalism
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite what you might've heard on corporate news outlets,
Global Capitalism was on the ropes. Liberal economists such as Paul Krugman and Dean Baker, but
also leftwing economists such as Jack Rasmus, Doug Henwood, and Richard Wolff, among others,
have been sounding the alarm bells for some time now. The pandemic ended up being the match
that lit a combustible array of socio-economic ingredients, including wide-spread
underemployment, entire legions of workers who've dropped out of the labor pool, millions
living in poverty, millions more on the verge of poverty, stagnating wages, hundreds of
thousands of Americans sleeping on the streets, tens of millions lacking health coverage, and
the majority of Americans drowning in ever-growing debt.
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the hollowness and brutality of Global Capitalism. The
most vulnerable will endure the brunt of this pandemic. They already have. Those who were
barely surviving before this crisis will be lucky to survive the crisis. And so it goes.
The multitude of injustices and structural inequalities that existed before the pandemic
will be exacerbated during a global health crisis and economic depression. The brutal legacies
of colonization, imperialism, and neo-imperialism put the most vulnerable at risk and expose a
system that's incapable of providing even the most basic necessities to those most in need. In
fact, quite the opposite, as Wall Street receives trillions of dollars for wrecking the global
economy, ordinary Americans will have to wait weeks for their measly $1,200 stimulus
checks.
Unlike 2008, the free marketeers are nowhere to be found. During the Great Financial
Recession, the market fundamentalists wanted the whole system to collapse. The financial press
blamed the recession on overpaid auto workers and poor families, especially poor black
families, who the corporate pundits insisted "bought homes they couldn't afford." That
was the dominant narrative in 2008. The calls for austerity were swift and loud. This time
around, not so much.
Today, millions of Americans identify as socialists, and Bernie Sanders' policies, flawed
and inadequate as they may be, are supported by the majority of Democrats, many Independents,
and even some Republicans. It's true that Bernie's policies aren't 'socialist' in the
traditional sense, but they're socialistic in nature, and provide a welcome alternative to
Neoliberal barbarism. Thanks to Occupy Wall Street and radical unions, today's context is much
different. Americans are much further to the left than they were twelve years ago.
Ralph Nader has long described the U.S. economic system as "socialism for the rich, and
rugged individualism for the rest of us." This is true. As Christian Parenti points out in a
recent article in Jacobin , the financialization of the U.S. economy is already largely
socialized, using public funds to prop-up private institutions, but with little to no social
benefit for poor and working class people. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic shows us that the state
is more important than ever before. Indeed, the Federal Government is the only entity powerful
enough to reign-in capital. Ironically, as Parenti notes, only socialist policies can revive
21st Century Capitalism.
The state is also the only entity capable of dealing with a pandemic: providing healthcare
supplies, financial resources, dealing with supply chain and logistical challenges, directing
private sector production, etc. Here, we are witnessing in real-time the fundamental limits of
private power and market fundamentalism within the context of a global healthcare crisis. Now
is not the time to coddle capitalism -- now is the time to castrate capitalism. Unless the left
has a strategy to bypass the state and provide the many services the state provides by
alternative means, our approach to the ensuing economic depression must include an analysis of
state power, how it relates to capital, and how leftwing organizations and movements relate to
both.
Historian Alfred McCoy, in his recent book, In the Shadows of the
American Century , notes that China will overtake the U.S. as the largest economy in
the world by 2030, perhaps sooner (Trump & COVID-19 have helped). Then again, China faces
its own internal dilemmas, including an increasingly affluent workforce that's very much
interested in liberal democratic norms, and a growing number of repressed workers who are
fighting back against China's unique brand of 'Authoritarian Capitalism.' Some of the same
contradictions and questions can be applied to India, the world's 5th largest economy,
authoritarian-religious nationalism, and hundreds of millions of precarious workers provide a
potentially explosive political context.
Without question, capitalism will survive COVID-19. The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic and
economic crises will alter the future of capitalism. The real question is: how can workers and
ordinary people nudge things in a preferred direction, a path that leads to more collectivism
and cooperation? How can we exploit the contradictions within the system? How can we ruthlessly
expose the inherent limitations and internal contradictions of capital accumulation?
Most importantly, we must not exit this crisis with a more authoritarian version of
capitalism. Giving the banks and multinational corporations more power is a death knell for the
human species and much of the planet. Time is running out. The economic shocks will continue in
frequency and severity. Now is the time for alternatives.
The Crisis of Militarism & Empire
Since 9/11, the U.S. has bombed seven nations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria,
Somalia, and Yemen. U.S. troops remain in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, with special
forces operations taking place in Pakistan and Somalia. The ongoing war in Afghanistan is the
longest war in U.S. history. And the U.S. continues to economically, logistically, politically,
and militarily support the systematic repression and genocide of the Palestinian people vis a
vi the brutal Israeli regime.
According to military historian, Nick Turse, U.S. forces conduct, on average, three combat
or intelligence missions per day on the continent of Africa. Of course, Uncle Sam's growing
footprint in Africa has gone virtually unreported in the corporate press. In October, 2017,
when 9 U.S. troops were killed in the 'Tongo Tongo Ambush' in Niger, most Americans had no idea
that U.S. troops were even stationed in Niger, let alone conducting combat missions. While it's
true that U.S. Empire is in decline, it's also true that empires throughout history lash out
during their final days, leaving a path of destruction in their wake.
As a result, the human cost of the post-9/11 'War on Terror' has been immense. Iraq:
300,000-1,000,000 dead. Syria: 400,000-600,000 dead. Afghanistan: 120,000 dead. Libya: 30,000
dead. Pakistan: 50,000 dead. Somalia: (unknown). Yemen: 100,000 dead. On the U.S. side, over
7,000 troops have lost their lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Pakistan, with more than
double that number of private contractors dying in U.S.-led conflicts.
The Great Oil Wars of the early 21st Century have also caused the greatest refugee crisis
since World War II, with more than 100,000 Syrian refugees fleeing their war-torn country, and
over 3 million Iraqis internally displaced. Tens of thousands have fled Libya. The same is true
in Pakistan. Millions abroad live in abject poverty and suffer preventable diseases as a result
of Uncle Sam's military adventures.
Veterans of course, also suffer from Uncle Sam's hubris, with over 10,000 having committed
suicide since 9/11. On a personal note, I've lost more of the marines from my platoon than died
during our unit's three combat deployments to Iraq.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said: "The bombs in Vietnam explode at home -- they destroy
the dream and possibility for a decent America." The same is true today, as the United States
spends what the next 15 nations spend combined on its military empire ($750 billion a year), a
monstrosity and sign of deep societal decay. According to Brown University, the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan have cost U.S. taxpayers $5.9 trillion. With that money, the U.S. government
could've paid off every Americans' credit card, student loan, and auto loan debt, and still had
money left over.
As the U.S. spends trillions of dollars on weapons of war, hospitals run out of surgical
masks and ventilators. A ventilator costs anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 -- a tomahawk
missile costs $1.4 million.
Like every empire, the U.S. has drained its domestic resources to maintain its imperial
hegemony, but that influence is waning with time. As the republic crumbles under the weight of
its own internal contradictions, U.S. allies are distancing themselves, while Uncle Sam's foes
are becoming increasingly empowered with each blunder and catastrophe that's unfolded since
9/11. As Chomsky points out, the U.S. has been in decline since World War II, the peak of Uncle
Sam's imperial prowess.
Already, Trump is using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to ramp-up tensions with both
Venezuela and Iran, two countries the U.S. has been politically, militarily, and economically
terrorizing for decades. During the pandemic, U.S.-imposed sanctions in Iran have caused a
disproportionate number of deaths due to lack of proper health equipment and medicine.
Fortunately, several European countries have broken the sanctions and delivered medical
goods to the Iranian government. Also, as we speak, Trump has directed the U.S. Navy to move
several U.S. Navy ships in close proximity to Venezuelan waters under the pretext of "curbing
drug smuggling" -- no doubt a top priority during the worst pandemic since 1918.
History shows us that every empire eventually confronts the same choice: maintain military
forces and watch the republic crumble from within, or de-escalate conflicts, demilitarize, and
maintain some semblance of a functioning state. The Roman Empire chose the former. The British
Empire chose the latter. The coming decade will determine which path Uncle Sam chooses. If the
last 20 years are a window into the future, God help us all.
If we hope to survive the next pandemic, the U.S. government must redirect the resources
it's currently spending on weapons of war, and instead invest in public healthcare
infrastructure (hospitals, equipment, resources, nurses, personnel, EMTs), public education
(medical schools, tuition free), housing (free and available to all), and research and
development.
If we hope to survive the coming decades, the U.S. government must redirect its vast
resources to mitigating climate change and ecological devastation.
The Climate & Ecological Crisis
The world has ten years to make radical changes to the global economy and its relation to
fossil fuel production and consumption or the planet will be uninhabitable by the end of the
century. Climate Change isn't the issue , it's the overarching context in which we now
exist. Everything we do or don't do over the next ten years will determine whether or not
future generations will inhabit a living planet, or a barren wasteland.
There is simply no way to downplay the urgency of our collective challenge. As author David
Wallace-Wells' notes in his latest book, The Uninhabitable
Earth: Life After Warming , "we could potentially avoid 150 million excess premature
deaths by the end of century from air pollution (the equivalent of 25 Holocausts or twice the
number of deaths from World War II) if we could limit average global warming to 1.5 degrees
Celsius." Right now, we're on track to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius by as early as 2030.
In the future, numbers will matter. The 100,000-240,000 Americans projected to die from
COVID-19 will soon turn into numbers like 1,000,000-5,000,000. What we accept today, we'll be
expected to accept tomorrow.
In some ways, we've already accepted mass death, but our relationship to the living world is
so warped that these numbers don't seem to shake us. Species extinction rates are 100-1,000
times faster than they were, on average, during the evolutionary time-scale of planet Earth.
More than 100 go extinct every single day.
Oceans have been destroyed by toxic materials, dumping, shipping, and large-scale industrial
fishing. Coral reefs are dying. Warming temperatures mean less phytoplankton, which means less
oxygen, which means more carbon dioxide. Some studies suggest that most of the large fish in
the world's oceans will be gone by 2050. Deforestation continues at breakneck speeds, ravaging
ecosystems and leaving nothing behind. Ice caps melt. Prairies destroyed for suburban
developments. Mountains leveled for minerals. Lakes drained for bottled water. Rivers polluted
for industry. Life murdered for profit.
The level of ecological disruption and destruction industrial society has unleashed on the
living world is unparalleled. And time is running out.
The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report, Global Warming of 1.5 degree
Celsius , outlines our reality: if we wish to hold the line to 1.5 degrees, we have to cut
emissions by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030. Then, we have to reach net-zero around 2050.
That's to avoid the 250 million deaths Wallace-Wells mentioned. So far, none of that is
happening. In fact, we're moving in the opposite direction as global emissions rise each
year.
If we continue at current rates of emission, global temperature could rise by 7 degrees
Celsius, and the number of human deaths from pollution could rise to 1-3 billion by 2100.
That's not including deaths due to habitat loss, crop failure, lack of fresh water, lack of
medical care, lack of housing, rising sea levels, lack of employment, addiction, suicide,
unbearable temperatures, failing governments, collapsing economies, and everything that comes
with those cascading crises: tribal war, banditry, barbarism, and eventually, genocide.
The Totality of Our Crisis
Without question, the stakes couldn't be higher. In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic and
ensuing economic depression is a dress rehearsal for the future. From here on out, each crisis
will be more pronounced and severe than the last. The new normal is cascading and multilayered
crises all playing out at the same time. How we collectively respond to this crisis will
determine how we respond to the impending large-scale crises of the future, not the least of
which being Climate Change. So far, we're failing miserably.
If the United States can't handle a small-scale pandemic and virus that's moderately deadly,
though admittedly quite disruptive, how can we expect the government to cope with tens of
millions of climate refugees fleeing their homes in the coming decades, while seeking housing,
employment, and safety in cities and counties already strapped for resources?
If capitalists already are taking advantage of this pandemic, netting trillions of dollars
from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, while simultaneously jacking up the price of
medical equipment and charging poor victims exorbitant amounts of money for health insurance,
needed medicine, and hospital treatment, how can we expect them to behave in the context of
rapid ecological collapse?
If the state is incapable of providing even menial assistance to poor and working class
Americans during the worst pandemic in over 100 years, how can we expect the state to behave in
the context of cascading and multilayered crises unfolding at a rapid pace over a short period
of time, crises that will undoubtedly require massive state intervention in the economy?
Unfortunately, we know the answers to these questions, but only if most poor and working
class people remain unorganized or unwilling to fight back.
Let's remember, all of this takes place within a context of many unnamed crises, many of
which weren't mentioned in this essay. Some of those include gun culture/NRA (weapons sales are
at all-time highs since the pandemic started), police militarism, the prison-industrial complex
(already being used to manufacture surgical masks, while prisoners remain trapped in COVID-19
incubators), patriarchy (domestic violence calls have skyrocketed during the pandemic),
homelessness (500,000 Americans can't 'stay at home'), systemic racism (already, statistics
show that black people are disproportionately impacted by and suffering the worst effects of
COVID-19), housing (Americans already spend a insane amounts of their income toward
rent/mortgage payments -- those problems have only accelerated during the pandemic), childcare
(cash-strapped families and single parents choosing between safety and work), and the list goes
on, and on.
Every single aspect of our society is under extreme stress. Even the most passive
populations can only take so much. Human beings can only take so much. The living world can
only take so much. Eventually, things will explode.
The question is: how? Will poor and working class Americans turn that despair and cynicism
into a righteous anger and rage? And if so, who will that anger and rage be directed toward?
Each other? Or the powerful elites?
The current social context in the U.S. and across the globe is ripe for radical political
change, but that change doesn't necessarily have to be progressive in nature. It could also be
reactionary and fueled by religious extremism, xenophobia, racism, and tribalism. That's up to
us. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Vincent Emanuele
Vincent Emanuele writes for teleSUR English and lives in Michigan City, Indiana. He can
be reached at [email protected]
"... This pandemic we are facing represents the greatest challenge our country has faced in generations. It will take every ounce of energy and focus we have to navigate these troubled waters. We must wisely use our limited resources to support our domestic needs–and end our addiction to fighting unnecessary forever-wars. ..."
"... After all, American lawmakers are owned and operated by the corporate sector, led by the petrochemical industry. ..."
For the better part of the past two decades, the United States has indulgently and
counterproductively wasted
over $6 trillion and thousands of lives on unnecessary wars abroad. The
towering costs imposed on our country by coronavirus now exposes how Washington's skewed
priorities left the nation fragile internally and vulnerable to a crisis. For our own security,
it is time to end these pointless drains on our resources and prioritize strengthening
America.
The most egregious examples of our expensive and unnecessary military deployments abroad are
the combat operations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa. The Department of Defense will
receive $165 billion in overseas contingency operations funding for Fiscal Year 2020 alone.
These operations will include a total of
over 93,000 troops (including regional support troops). Those are staggering numbers.
They are also wholly unnecessary. There are no security threats to America in Iraq, Syria,
Afghanistan or Africa that in any way justify such expenses. Up until now, these costs have had
virtually no impact on the population at large. With the mounting costs as a result of
coronavirus, however, it is clear we can no longer afford the luxury of burning money on
peripheral military missions.
Even after Congress
passed an unprecedented $2 trillion stimulus package in response to COVID-19, the hit to
our economy will not be quickly repaired.
This stimulus package barely addresses the huge and expanding problem of a health
care system struggling to cope with the exploding costs of providing care for so many
seriously ill people. There are shortages of personal protective
equipment necessary for medical professionals, large-scale
testing remains a challenge, and in some locations finding
enough hospital beds for ICU patients is almost at the breaking point.Despite the clear and
present danger coronavirus poses to millions of our citizens, there are some in Washington who
want to continue pushing the thoroughly discredited "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran,
unnecessarily inflaming tensions with a country that poses a minimal threat to America. This
situation is even worse than the possibility of wasting resources desperately needed at home,
it puts American servicemen and women in Iraq and Syria at almost daily risk of their
lives–and the potential to get us dragged into a new war.
The architects of the maximum pressure campaign against Tehran have long promised that it
would moderate Iran's behavior, that it would compel them to restrain their malevolent
behavior, and that it would increase the chances of crafting a new, better deal. The result has
been precisely and dramatically the opposite.
Despite the crippling sanctions and the devastation caused to their economy, Iran is now
openly ramping up its nuclear development activities, is engaging in risky behavior in the
region, and is presently unwilling even to consider diplomacy until we relieve sanctions. The
more we push, the further from a resolution we get and the higher the chances that a
miscalculation on someone's part inadvertently drags America into a war it neither needs nor
wants.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been exceedingly expensive, but a conflict with Iran
would be considerably worse and require our country–when it could least afford
it–to divert enormous resources and manpower to fighting a wholly unnecessary conflict
that would likely drag on many years. Such a war–in the current economic
straits–could
plunge our country into a depression .
Flatly stated, Iran is no more than a middling power in the region that is more than
balanced by its neighbors. Our conventional military and nuclear deterrent could overpower any
unprovoked attack Iran may ever consider. There is no justification, therefore, in maintaining
this pointless pressure campaign and risking a war we don't need.
This pandemic we are facing represents the greatest challenge our country has faced in
generations. It will take every ounce of energy and focus we have to navigate these troubled
waters. We must wisely use our limited resources to support our domestic needs–and end
our addiction to fighting unnecessary forever-wars.
Daniel L. Davis is a Senior
Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who retired in 2015 after
21 years, including four combat deployments. Follow him @DanielLDavis1 .
Is the fact that we are insolvent stopping the Pentagon from requesting increased
military spending? Is the fact that we are broke stopping the neo-cons for war
preparations with Iran and Venezuela? I'm convinced that the only thing that will put an
end to our insane foreign policy is when some other country finally says enough, and
gives us a taste of our own medicine.
...After all, American
lawmakers are owned and operated by the corporate sector, led by the petrochemical
industry.
The "expert" quoted at the top of this essay is quite right: war is an American
addiction. Whether they are regime-changing, or wagging the dog, or going abroad to slay
dragons, Washington will never get this monkey off its back---unless it's forced to go
cold turkey. Only a deep economic depression can do that---and that looks to me as if
it's on the horizon. It will be one that takes the whole of the North Atlantic world with
it.
Well, mammy's basement aren't so bad these days. And what's so cowardly about pulling
out due to Iranian/ PMU pressure? justifying it on the pandemic? You know you're time's
up in Iraq. Any excuse will do.
"The rich are different from us," F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest
Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, "Yes, they have more money."
The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that
eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich
to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and
sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in "The Great Gatsby" and his short story
"The Rich Boy," a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues,
associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even
friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve
unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too
become disposable.
The public face of the oligarchic class bears little resemblance to the private face. I,
like Fitzgerald, was thrown into the embrace of the upper crust when young. I was shipped off
as a scholarship student at the age of 10 to an exclusive New England boarding school. I had
classmates whose fathers -- fathers they rarely saw -- arrived at the school in their
limousines accompanied by personal photographers (and at times their mistresses), so the press
could be fed images of rich and famous men playing the role of good fathers. I spent time in
the homes of the ultra-rich and powerful, watching my classmates, who were children, callously
order around men and women who worked as their chauffeurs, cooks, nannies and servants. When
the sons and daughters of the rich get into serious trouble there are always lawyers,
publicists and political personages to protect them -- George W. Bush's life is a case study in
the insidious affirmative action for the rich. The rich have a snobbish disdain for the poor --
despite well-publicized acts of philanthropy -- and the middle class. These lower classes are
viewed as uncouth parasites, annoyances that have to be endured, at times placated and always
controlled in the quest to amass more power and money. My hatred of authority, along with my
loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness and sense of entitlement of the rich, comes from
living among the privileged. It was a deeply unpleasant experience. But it exposed me to their
insatiable selfishness and hedonism. I learned, as a boy, who were my enemies.
The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults.
We have been blinded to the depravity of our ruling elite by the relentless propaganda of
public relations firms that work on behalf of corporations and the rich. Compliant politicians,
clueless entertainers and our vapid, corporate-funded popular culture, which holds up the rich
as leaders to emulate and assures us that through diligence and hard work we can join them,
keep us from seeing the truth.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy," Fitzgerald wrote of the wealthy couple at the
center of Gatsby's life. "They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into
their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let
other people clean up the mess they had made."
Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx all
began from the premise there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the masses. "Those
who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither
willing nor able to submit to authority," Aristotle wrote in "Politics." "The evil begins at
home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never
learn, even at school, the habit of obedience." Oligarchs, these philosophers knew, are
schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation, subtle and overt repression and exploitation to
protect their wealth and power at our expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is
the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is
subservient to an ideology -- in this case free market capitalism and globalization -- that
justifies their greed. "The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relationships," Marx wrote, "the dominant material relationships grasped as
ideas."
The blanket dissemination of the ideology of free market capitalism through the media and
the purging, especially in academia, of critical voices have permitted our oligarchs to
orchestrate the largest income inequality gap in the industrialized world. The top 1 percent in
the United States own 40 percent of the nation's wealth while the bottom 80 percent own only 7
percent, as Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in "The Price of Inequality." For every dollar that the
wealthiest 0.1 percent amassed in 1980 they had an additional $3 in yearly income in 2008,
David Cay Johnston explained in
the article "9 Things the Rich Don't Want You to Know About Taxes." The bottom 90 percent,
Johnson said, in the same period added only one cent. Half of the country is now classified as
poor or low-income. The real value of the minimum wage has fallen by $2.77 since 1968.
Oligarchs do not believe in self-sacrifice for the common good. They never have. They never
will. They are the cancer of democracy."We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive
people, but of course we are," Wendell
Berry writes. "Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be
rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all -- by proxies we have given to greedy
corporations and corrupt politicians -- be participating in its destruction? Most of us are
still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for
it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the
rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough,
which is the same thing."
The rise of an oligarchic state offers a nation two routes, according to Aristotle. The
impoverished masses either revolt to rectify the imbalance of wealth and power or the oligarchs
establish a brutal tyranny to keep the masses forcibly enslaved. We have chosen the second of
Aristotle's options. The slow advances we made in the early 20th century through unions,
government regulation, the New Deal, the courts, an alternative press and mass movements have
been reversed. The oligarchs are turning us -- as they did in the 19th century steel and
textile factories -- into disposable human beings. They are building the most pervasive
security and surveillance apparatus in human history to keep us submissive.
This imbalance would not have disturbed most of our Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers,
largely wealthy slaveholders, feared direct democracy. They rigged our political process to
thwart popular rule and protect the property rights of the native aristocracy. The masses were
to be kept at bay. The Electoral College, the original power of the states to appoint senators,
the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African-Americans and men without property
locked most people out of the democratic process at the beginning of the republic. We had to
fight for our voice. Hundreds of workers were killed and thousands were wounded in our labor
wars. The violence dwarfed the labor battles in any other industrialized nation. The democratic
openings we achieved were fought for and paid for with the blood of abolitionists,
African-Americans, suffragists, workers and those in the anti-war and civil rights movements.
Our radical movements, repressed and ruthlessly dismantled in the name of anti-communism, were
the real engines of equality and social justice. The squalor and suffering inflicted on workers
by the oligarchic class in the 19th century is mirrored in the present, now that we have been
stripped of protection. Dissent is once again a criminal act. The Mellons, Rockefellers and
Carnegies at the turn of the last century sought to create a nation of masters and serfs. The
modern corporate incarnation of this 19th century oligarchic elite has created a worldwide
neofeudalism, where workers across the planet toil in misery while corporate oligarchs amass
hundreds of millions in personal wealth.
Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The sooner we realize
that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will
realize that these elites must be overthrown. The corporate oligarchs have now seized all
institutional systems of power in the United States. Electoral politics, internal security, the
judiciary, our universities, the arts and finance, along with nearly all forms of
communication, are in corporate hands. Our democracy, with faux debates between two corporate
parties, is meaningless political theater. There is no way within the system to defy the
demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. The only route left to us,
as Aristotle knew, is revolt.
It is not a new story. The rich, throughout history, have found ways to subjugate and
re-subjugate the masses. And the masses, throughout history, have cyclically awoken to throw
off their chains. The ceaseless fight in human societies between the despotic power of the rich
and the struggle for justice and equality lies at the heart of Fitzgerald's novel, which uses
the story of Gatsby to carry out a fierce indictment of capitalism. Fitzgerald was reading
Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" as he was writing "The Great Gatsby." Spengler
predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of "monied thugs" would
replace the traditional political elites. Spengler was right about that.
"There are only two or three human stories," Willa Cather wrote, "and they
go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."
The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs once again into the sky. We sit humiliated
and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human
history. We never seem to learn. It is time to grab our pitchforks.
"... Cramped quarters on drilling rigs leave no room for distancing ..."
"... That's led to worries about the safety of the sites, the biggest of which resemble mini-cities with as many as 200 workers, and the nation's dependence on their output. Oil wells in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico supply about 2 million barrels of crude a day, or 15% of U.S. production. ..."
Cramped quarters on drilling rigs leave no room for distancing
Inside more than a thousand offshore drilling rigs and oil production platforms that dot
the Gulf of Mexico, workers navigate narrow corridors, sleep in shared rooms and dine in
crowded mess halls.
It's an environment designed for efficiency -- not for keeping a lethal coronavirus at
bay.
That's led to worries about the safety of the sites, the biggest of which resemble
mini-cities with as many as 200 workers, and the nation's dependence on their output. Oil wells
in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico supply about 2 million barrels of
crude a day, or 15% of U.S. production.
A sound banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when
he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no
one can really blame him. Keynes via Yves
The problem is that the payment system, besides grubby coins and paper Central Bank notes
(e.g. Federal Reserve Notes), must work through private depository institutions or not at
all.
How then can we have a sound economy when it is held hostage by "sound" bankers?
And are not the banks a form of rentier – who rent the Nation its money supply?
Then where are the proposals of the MMT School to euthanize those rentiers?
For the central attribute is symmetry: the balancing of incentives and disincentives,
people should also penalized if something for which they are responsible goes wrong and hurts
others: he or she who wants a share of the benefits needs to also share some of the
risks.
. . .
And in the absence of the filtering of skin in the game, the mechanisms of evolution fail:
if someone else dies in your stead, the built up of asymmetric risks and misfitness will
cause the system to eventually blow-up.
I read your use of feedback as >reference to external stimuli (the real world).
With Taleb, I'm reading disincentives as penalties, and that lack of penalty/punishment
warps the selection process of evolution. With respect to the post, that has created a lack
of respect for risk by those who make decisions.
It can be taken a step farther, that the selection process has created perverse
incentives. For example, the bailouts from 2008 made the FIRE sector qliphotically
antifragile. In that scenario, risk becomes rewarding.
I want to be careful here about using the word feedback, its ambiguities could be
confusing. Given that, I'm interested in knowing what you mean about ignoring the
disincentives skin-in-the-game creates. Could you please expand on that?
My problem with Taleb's skin in the game is that, as he well knows, it's hard to
distinguish luck (good or bad) and skill. How can we punish for luck though?
Think of a judge, who gets, through his skill, 99 out of 100 cases right. But the 100th
– which, by pure luck, could be really large case – he gets wrong.
Or, even simpler. Technically, if you do one decision a day, and have 99% success rate,
every three months you get somethign wrong (1-0.99^60 = 0.54) more likely than not. Should
you be punished for this? If we yes, then people will start takin decisions where alternate
history is hard to prove, i.e. you create a selection bias towards "do nothing". You can then
be punished for "doing nothing" but most of the time "do nothing" is a safe choice. (it's a
specific case of "go with the crowd")
Also, in decision making, context is extremely important (which is why courts go to super
lenghts to establish it in judical cases). Taleb should know it, and he should also know that
unless context is taken into account _in_full_ then the skin-in-the-game will not be seen as
fair. But the problem is, the context can never be fully established, and rarely w/o the
participation of the major decision maker. Who will have no incentive to participate. Which
will hamper learning from it.
Skin in the game makes sense when you can clearly separate luck and skill, and clearly
establish context. Even one of those is rare occasion, both is extremely so.
That said, you can often establish post fact when someone blew up (this is what the
various enuiries do). And then you'd treat accordingly. But that's not skin-in-the-game,
because again, the enquiry can establish that you acted in good faith, as most people would
act at the time – and so assign no blame. So you may "fail honourably".
Skin in the game does not let you fail honourably – because it's not skin in the
game anymore (because it can let you game the system again, via doing just enough to pass any
future enquiry as "more could have been done, but there's no clear knowing dereliction of
duty).
TLDR; skin-in-the-game is an attempt at simplictic solution to a complex problem. Taleb
should know better.
If only it was as simple as saying that services operated by the state were fine, it's
private capital where the problem lies.
It's not. This is a societal and cultural problem.
There are employer "pushes" towards the deskilling and degrading of levels of operational
competence. One is employers ( both public sector and private sector) do not want to pay for
training and to retain a body of experienced employees because both of these cost money
up-front with a payoff (in the form of competent, knowledgeable staff) that comes only
slowly, later. And a churn of staff is seen as the sign, wrongly, but this is what the MBAs
sell as snake oil, of a dynamic, healthy organization which is bringing in (through a process
which never seems to be adequately explained) new talent.
Plus, of course, most obviously, younger and newer employees are cheaper so your average
headcount cost is lower which is usually a management metric -- often one which is
incentive-ised through reward.
There are also employee "pulls" -- and again, these are not just observed in the private
sector. You see them in medicine, academia and even, most bizarrely, the arts. An example of
these employee-instigated causes of a reduction in capability is that it becomes
in-cultural-ated that if you spend too long in the same place, you're only doing so out of
necessity because you're so useless, no-one else will employ you. So even if don't really
want to move onto a different organization or a different field of work outside your
skillset, you feel you have to, in order to avoid looking "stale", "resistant to change",
"stuck in your comfort zone" or any other of the myriad of thought-crimes which you don't
want, in today's job market, to be seen to having evidence of committing. And also, as
collective union bargaining has gone the way of the dinosaur, more often than not, if you
want a raise you have to threaten to quit to get one. But again, more often than not, your
current employer will call your bluff and let you leave. So you have to have another job
lined up to to go to, if you're not to fall into a trap of flouncing off in a huff but having
no other work to walk straight into. While your current employer might not, if they were
honest, want to lose you, the dynamics of the workplace being what they are, neither side can
then climb down from the ultimatums they've just served.
Yes, there are some notable poster-children of how private enterprise has committed
suicide through the wanton bloodletting of its skilled employees (Boeing being a recent
case-in-point). But even if you cast your gaze in the direction of public employers, this
same phenomena can be found in universities, colleges and K-12 schools (where faculties are
no longer bolstered by a strong bench of tenured staff, contract and non-tenured
hire-and-fire disposable staff are now the norm, I won't even go there on the effect of
charter schools) healthcare (even in the UK's entirely public sector NHS, there is huge
reliance on contract and agency staff which the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted and the
government is trying, belatedly and without any clear indication it can do so in the short
term
to redress this and avoid being price-gouged). Or federal and state
regulators which now simply do not understand the businesses they are supposed to be
regulating and have to buy-in external "expertise" (and merely exacerbate the revolving
door problem).
In summary, I wish it were so simple to merely say "private sector bad, government good".
But the rot has set in from top to bottom across all aspects of how we manage our shared
organizational maturity (or, should I say, now, fix our shared organizational immaturity) and
whether or not it started in the private sector, it has well and truly spread to infect the
public sector, too. This was the unmistakable point of the post, so it bears re-reading it
again with a particular emphasis on understanding why this is the case.
Another angle in your post is the interesting role of "enlightened" capitalists -- the
Krafts, Bill Gates, and soon to be others.
They are trying to fill the chasm in infrastructure, supplies and social cohesion created
by the capitalist state and private capital.
Some of their efforts might pan out and be useful.
But they represent the wrong politics.
The crisis is not just about a virus and the lack of a medical cure; it is systemic: the
social, political and economic order of America is institutionally and culturally unable to
mobilize for virus prevention and suppression.
It literally takes a peoples' war. China wasn't lying.
And the billionaire philanthropists actually don't want us to think and act that way.
Don't praise them. They want us to return to the old normal of grotesque neoliberal
capitalism that made them rich beyond words.
Living in a quiet Boston suburb, I can see this clearly. The poor are still going out to
work, dying, or suffering at home. The rich are off to the Cape, having food deliveries from
uninsured, precarious workers, and have no concept of a collective effort as they continue to
work for themselves from home.
In short, capitalism had built up vulnerabilities to another crash that any number of
possible triggers could unleash. The trigger this time was not the dot.com meltdown of 2000 or
the sub-prime meltdown of 2008/9; it was a virus. And of course, mainstream ideology requires
focusing on the trigger, not the vulnerability. Thus mainstream policies aim to reestablish
pre-virus capitalism. Even if they succeed, that will return us to a capitalist system whose
accumulated vulnerabilities will soon again collapse from yet another trigger.
In the light of the coronavirus pandemic, I focus criticism on capitalism and the
vulnerabilities it has accumulated for several reasons. Viruses are part of nature. They have
attacked human beings -- sometimes dangerously -- in both distant and recent history. In 1918,
the Spanish Flu killed nearly 700,000 in the United States and millions elsewhere. Recent
viruses include SARS, MERS andEbola. What matters to public health is each society's
preparedness: stockpiled tests, masks, ventilators, hospital beds, trained personnel, etc., to
manage dangerous viruses. In the U.S., such objects are produced by private capitalist
enterprises whose goal is profit. It was not profitable to produce and stockpile such products,
that was not and still is not being done.
Nor did the U.S. government produce or stockpile those medical products. Top U.S. government
personnel privilege private capitalism; it is their primary objective to protect and
strengthen. The result is that neither private capitalism nor the U.S. government performed the
most basic duty of any economic system: to protect and maintain public health and safety. U.S.
capitalism's response to the coronavirus pandemic continues to be what it has been since
December 2019: too little, too late. It failed. It is the problem.
The second reason I focus on capitalism is that the responses to today's economic collapse
by Trump, the GOP and most Democrats carefully avoid any criticism of capitalism. They all
debate the virus, China, foreigners, other politicians, but never the system they all serve.
When Trump and others press people to return to churches and jobs -- despite risking their and
others' lives -- they place reviving a collapsed capitalism ahead of public health.
The third reason capitalism gets blame here is that alternative systems -- those not driven
by a profit-first logic -- could manage viruses better. While not profitable to produce and
stockpile everything needed for a viral pandemic, it is efficient. The wealth already lost in
this pandemic far exceeds the cost to have produced and stockpiled the tests and ventilators,
the lack of which is contributing so much to today's disaster. Capitalism often pursues
profit at the expense of more urgent social needs and values. In this, capitalism is grossly
inefficient. This pandemic is now bringing that truth home to people.
A worker-coop based economy -- where workers democratically run enterprises, deciding what,
how and where to produce, and what to do with any profits -- could, and likely would, put
social needs and goals (like proper preparation for pandemics) ahead of profits. Workers are
the majority in all capitalist societies; their interests are those of the majority. Employers
are always a small minority; theirs are the "special interests" of that minority. Capitalism
gives that minority the position, profits and power to determine how the society as a whole
lives or dies. That's why all employees now wonder and worry about how long our jobs, incomes,
homes and bank accounts will last -- if we still have them. A minority (employers) decides all
those questions and excludes the majority (employees) from making those decisions, even though
that majority must live with their results.
Of course, the top priority now is to put public health and safety first. To that end,
employees across the country are now thinking about refusing to obey orders to work in unsafe
job conditions. U.S. capitalism has thus placed a general strike on today's social agenda. A
close second priority is to learn from capitalism's failure in the face of the pandemic. We
must not suffer such a dangerous and unnecessary social breakdown again. Thus system change is
now also moving onto today's social agenda.
Capitalism requires continual growth. That isn't possible on a world of finite resources.
No government operating under a capitalist dogma can solve this inherent predicament.
You can blame the leaders all you like, but they are constrained by the system that can't
see beyond the next quarterly profit projection.
The word "capitalism" is a euphemism for "totally corrupt system".
The totally corrupt system has failed.
For example, were this an honest system, Goldman 666 would have been wiped out in the GFC
and Blankfein would be living in a cardboard box under a freeway overpass instead of bragging
and gloating about doing gawd's work while soaking in his looted billion dollars.
Even if
they aren't exactly certain how the business model works,
Twitter blue checks and the rest of the mainstream media - having been whipped into an
anti-banker fervor by Bernie Sanders and the last glowing embers of Occupy - never pass up an
opportunity to kick private equity in the nuts.
And if there's one industry where private equity has done the most to directly harm American
public, it's health care.
Envision's Colorado headquarters
During the latter part of the Democratic primary campaign, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth
Warren primed the pump by extolling the evils of private equity to the public every chance they
got, helping impress the term into the memory banks of legions of twentysomethings how the
industry had contributed to America's health-care crisis, along with a multitude of other
societal ills. Now, with the world in the grip of an unprecedented crisis, the industry is
about to get pilloried once again - but this, much, much bigger than before, we suspect - as
private equity-backed health-care companies, loaded down from their LBO debt binges, are forced
to make cutbacks including slashing pay for doctors and nurses in the middle of a pandemic that
has already killed nearly 9,500 Americans.
And now the KKR-backed Envision Healthcare Corp., one of the biggest medical providers
backed by private equity, is poised to become the poster-child for Wall Street greed as it
informs hundreds of doctors in its employ will not be receiving the bonus checks they had been
expecting in April. Though we suspect this isn't a complete surprise, the cuts will deprive
hundreds of doctors of roughly one-third of their total comp during an already extremely
difficult time for them and their families. The company has promised to repay them at a later
date once their financial situation has improved.
The move risks igniting a blowback that could make KKR one of "the most hated companies in
the world. Just ask Martin Shkreli.
But the reason the company's financial position is so poor in the first place is because
Envision carries more than $7 billion of debt. This debt was amassed during what was, according
to data compiled by
Bloomberg , the third-largest health-care LBO ever.
In a statement, Envision said it's "100% focused" on saving lives during this crisis, even
though its business (ambulatory surgical centers and medical staffing) shrank more than 75% in
two weeks, Bloomberg said. With so many Americans hiding at home and fearful of entering
hospitals and doctor's offices, people are delaying elective and non-emergency care at
unprecedented rates.
"We are on the front lines caring for patients during this unprecedented public health and
economic crisis," the Nashville, Tennessee-based company said. "Envision Healthcare is 100
percent focused on saving lives and sustaining the nation's fragile health-care system. The
safety net we provide for millions of patients must remain fully intact for when we get to
the other side of this national crisis."
Like many companies, Envision completely drew down its two credit lines to provide financial
flexibility in recent weeks (apparently it didn't listen to Larry Kudlow and Mnuchin). The
company spends about $1.5 billion on compensation for physicians quarterly, an insider
reportedly told BBG. The company has about $140 million to $150 million in debt payments due in
the next two weeks, according to Mike Holland of Bloomberg Intelligence, and has $650 million
of cash on its balance sheet. It has warned investors that it might need to raise more
financing if circumstances continue to deteriorate.
The biggest problem for KKR, is that some of the physician groups are planning to sue the
company; litigation could draw unwanted attention to KKR at a time when public anger is
dangerously high.
But as the 'cockroach' theory suggests, Envision isn't alone: The boom in LBOs (part of the
binge on corporate debt that also fueled the surge in buybacks) left many companies, especially
in the health-care space, where many companies were built via a series of costly mergers and
acquisitions.
A comment on Peter Hitchens' article in today's Mail on Sunday (5th April) provided a link
to an interview with Italian nano-pathologist Dr Stefano Montanari. Since he doesn't appear in
OffG among the first twelve or subsequent ten scientists questioning the official Covid-19
narrative I am providing the link here in case anyone is interested. The site itself seems to
have a save white identity bias, but in these strange times, politics makes strange bedfellows.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/04/04/the-coronavirus-and-galileo-an-interview-with-a-italian-nano-pathologist-dr-stefano-montanari/
2 0 Reply Apr 5, 2020 1:38 PM
George Mc ,
Interesting interview. This bit especially:
There is one point we did not touch -- the economic, which is not part of my competence.
We are now blocking the world and, as for Italy, the economy was already at a low point.
What do they do? They freeze all activities but keep the stock exchange open. Stocks reach
a low bottom. What does it mean? The ultra billionaire can easily purchase companies that
are now worth pennies.
When eventually it will be decided that the (coronavirus) farce is ended -- and nothing
will end because this virus will continue undaunted to do what it's doing now (or its
evolving strains will do), the ultra-billionaires will own everything. The rich (a degree
below the billionaires) will have bought, say, 3–4 restaurants and/or 10 stores that
had to close.
In summary, all who were rich will be infinitely richer, But we will also have a
flood-tide of people who will always be poorer. This will be another consequence of this
fake epidemic, perhaps, who knows, created on purpose.
"... John Allen , Nicholas Burns , Laurie Garrett , Richard N. Haass , G. John Ikenberry , Kishore Mahbubani , Shivshankar Menon , Robin Niblett , Joseph S. Nye Jr. , Shannon K. O'Neil , Kori Schake , Stephen M. Walt ..."
No matter how the federal government responded, the United States was never going to escape
COVID-19 entirely. Even Singapore, whose response to the virus seems to be the gold standard
thus far,
has several hundred confirmed cases . Nonetheless, U.S. President Donald Trump's
administration's belated, self-centered, haphazard, and tone-deaf response will end up costing
Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths. Even if the view
that
the dangers may have been exaggerated due to a lack of accurate data turns out to be
correct, Trump's entire approach to governing and the administration's erratic response
squandered public confidence and made a more measured reaction untenable. Despite his denials,
he is still responsible for where the country is today.
But that's not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from making "America great
again," this epic policy failure will further tarnish the United States' reputation as a
country that knows how to do things effectively.
For over a century, the United States' outsized influence around the world rested on three
pillars. The first was the its awesome combination of economic and military strength. The
United States had the world's largest and most sophisticated economy, the world's best
universities and research centers, and a territory blessed with bountiful natural resources.
These features eventually enabled the United States to create and maintain military forces that
none of its rivals could match. Taken together, these combined assets gave the United States
the loudest voice on the planet.
The second pillar was support from an array of allies. No country every agreed with
everything Washington wanted to do, and some states opposed almost everything the United States
sought or stood for, but many countries understood that they benefited from U.S. leadership and
were usually willing to go along with it. Although the United States was almost always acting
in its own self-interest, the fact that others had similar interests made it easier to persuade
them to go along.
A third pillar, however, is broad confidence in U.S. competence. When other countries
recognize the United States' strength, support its aims and believe U.S. officials know what
they are doing, they are more likely to follow the United States' lead. If they doubt its
power, its wisdom, or its ability to act effectively, U.S. global influence inevitably erodes.
This reaction is entirely understandable: If the United States' leaders reveal themselves to be
incompetent bunglers, why should foreign powers listen to their advice? Having a reputation for
competence, in short, can be a critical force multiplier.
The glowing reputation that Americans used to enjoy was built up over many decades. It was
partly a reflection of the United States' industrial might and world-class infrastructure: the
network of highways, roads, railways, bridges, skyscrapers, dams, harbors, and airports that
used to dazzle foreign visitors upon their arrival. Victory in World War II, the creation of
the Bretton Woods economic institutions, innovative acts such as the Marshall Plan, and the
successful moon landing all reinforced an image of the United States as a place where people
knew how to set ambitious goals and bring them successfully to fruition.
Even blunders such as the Vietnam War did not fully tarnish the aura of competence that
surrounded the United States. Indeed, the peaceful and victorious end of the Cold War and the
smashing U.S. victory in the 1990-1991 Gulf War exorcized the ghosts of Vietnam and made the
United States' model of liberal democratic capitalism seem like the obvious model for others to
emulate. Add to that a continued stream of technological innovations -- the personal computer,
the smartphone, and all those fancy weapons -- and one can understand why people around the
world still looked upon the United States as a meritocratic, accomplished, and above all,
competent country. Small wonder pundits such as Tom Friedman began to portray the United
States as
the only viable model for an increasingly globalized world , telling aspiring
countries that if they wanted to succeed, they had to don the "Golden Straitjacket" and become
more like the United States.
Over the past 25 years, however, the United States has done a remarkable job of squandering
that invaluable reputation for responsible leadership and basic competence. The list of
transgressions is long: there is former President Bill Clinton's irresponsible dalliance with a
White House intern, former President George W. Bush's administration's failure to heed warnings
of a terrorist attack before 9/11, the Enron and Madoff scandals, the bungled responses to
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Maria in 2017, the inability to either win or end the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ill-advised interventions in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and
elsewhere, the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, the Boeing 737 Max debacle, the Republican-led
gridlock in Washington, and so on. Nor should we forget the long-concealed criminal misdeeds of
Harvey Weinstein (and many others) and the sordid tale of the very well-connected Jeffrey
Epstein, whose conveniently timed demise in a New York jail may prevent us from ever knowing
the full extent of his -- and others' -- misconduct.
And all the while the United States told itself it was the greatest country in the world,
with the ablest officials, the best-run businesses, the most sophisticated financial firms, and
the most virtuous leaders. Instead, former Soviet Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov's description of life
in the Soviet Union may be a more accurate description of American life than Americans would
like to admit: "[We] stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in
newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another. And all of
this -- from top to bottom and from bottom to top."
Then came COVID-19. Trump's handling of the crisis has been an embarrassing debacle from the
start -- despite
repeated warnings -- but it was also utterly predictable. His long business career has
shown that he was more of a showman than a leader, better at conning people out of money and
evading responsibility than at managing complex business operations. His tawdry personal life
offered equally clear warnings. Since taking office, Trump has perfected the art of the lie,
while gradually purging his administration of people with genuine expertise and relying instead
on B-list hacks, sycophants, and his unqualified son-in-law. When suddenly faced with a
complicated problem requiring grown-up leadership, it was inevitable that Trump would mishandle
it and then deny
responsibility . It is a failure
of character unparalleled in U.S. history, and it could not have come at a worse
time . The amazing thing is that anyone is even remotely surprised.
How did the United States get here? How did it squander its reputation for knowing what it
is doing, and for being able to get the right things done as well or better than anyone else?
I'm not sure, but let me venture a few guesses.
Part of the problem is the hubris that comes from the United States' remarkably favorable
history. It has been by far the luckiest country in the modern world, and Americans started to
assume that success was their birthright instead of something that needed to be earned,
nurtured, and protected. And with that complacency came a willingness to gamble on utterly
untried leadership, despite all of the warning signs described above.
A related problem, I'm inclined to think, has been a broader relaxing of standards and a
refusal to hold people accountable. One can see this at many universities, where grade
inflation is well entrenched, faculty have few incentives to judge poor work harshly, and more
attention is paid to sports teams than to genuine academic achievement. The recent college
recruiting scandal exposed the lengths to which well-heeled parents would go to get their kids
into colleges for which they weren't qualified, but universities have acted similarly when they
reserved slots of alumni children ("legacies") or for the offspring of major donors.
I've focused on higher education because that's the business I know best, but this problem
is hardly confined there. In the contemporary United States, CEOs mismanage a company
such as Boeing
and then depart with multimillion-dollar golden
parachutes . Top officials in the George W. Bush administration and a chorus of outside
cheerleaders deceive themselves and the country into a foolish war in the Middle East, yet
hardly any of them suffer adverse professional or personal consequences. Wall Street firms can
crater the economy through a combination of greed, indifference, and fraud, and no one gets
investigated, let alone prosecuted. Highly decorated generals favor "staying the course" in
distant battles, fail to achieve victory, and then retire to corporate boards and influential
positions as respected pundits. Meanwhile, whistleblowers and dedicated public servants strive
to fulfill their oaths of office, only to be vilified , fired, or worse. When integrity and
dedication go unrewarded and failure carries no penalty, competence is bound to suffer.
To speculate further, I suspect a broader cultural current of selfishness is at work here as
well. Former President John Kennedy was no saint, but he did devote his adult life to public
service and told Americans to "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do
for your country." By the time Ronald Reagan became president, however, Americans were being
told that government was the enemy and (to quote the film Wall Street ) that "greed is good." The market was
everything, public service was devalued, and taxes were for suckers. Having spent decades
hollowing out many of their public institutions, Americans suddenly find themselves unprepared
for a real public crisis. The apotheosis of this trend is Trump himself: How could a serious
country possibly choose as its leader a narcissistic, manifestly unqualified self-promoter with
a long track record of failure and deceit?
Am I overstating the case? Perhaps. There are plenty of American firms that still do
terrific and innovative work; there are tens of thousands of scientists and scholars who remain
more committed to searching for truth than to making a fast buck, and there are politicians and
public servants at the local, state, and federal levels who are more interested in doing good
than in getting reelected
or feathering their own nests . There are dedicated teachers and hard-working students at
every level of the U.S. educational system. But the rot is still widespread.
Absent a reversal of this trend, the United States' global influence will continue to
recede. Not because the country has embraced "America First" and deliberately chosen to
disengage, but because people around the world will not take its ideas or advice as seriously
as they once did. They'll listen, perhaps, and they may agree with it from time to time, but
the deference U.S. leaders used to be able to count on will fade. Once COVID-19 is over,
Americans are likely to discover to their chagrin that other voices (
Beijing, anyone?) are receiving more respectful attention. That's not an omen of imminent
disaster, but it will be a different world than the one Americans have been accustomed to
inhabiting. At the margin, the broad contours of world politics and some important aspects of
the world economy will no longer slant so heavily in the United States' favor.
Can this situation be fixed? I don't know. Cultural rot cannot be fixed by legislation,
executive orders, or even jeremiads like this one. One may hope that the present crisis will
remind enough Americans that having competent and reliable people in key leadership positions
really matters, and that holding people more accountable for corruption, cronyism, or sheer
incompetence is essential to effective public policies. Whether you favor a big welfare state
or a small libertarian one, you should above all want it to be competently led and staffed with
knowledgeable and dedicated experts. Whoever the next president is, he needs to staff his
administration with people who have demonstrated qualifications for the jobs they are assigned,
instead of being chosen for their personal loyalty or their talents as sycophants.
Americans will need to rethink a political system that recruits and rewards those who are
most adept at selling themselves to the highest bidder. And there has to be something seriously
wrong with a political system that has devoted many months and spent billions of dollars
preparing for the 2020 election and ends up giving the country a choice between three old white
guys. For that matter, Americans ought to rethink whether spending
a full year electing someone to a four year term makes any sense at all . No other advanced
democracy does it this way. And while we're at it, let's scrap the absurd Electoral College, an
indefensible relic that systematically disempowers voters in most of the country.
Looking forward, the possibility of fundamental political change is the only silver lining I
can see right now. America hasn't faced a crisis like this since the 1930s and 1940s, and it
was in a better position to meet those challenges then than it is today. But a previous
generation of Americans eventually rose to the occasion, and showed themselves and the world
what their country could do. It is upon Americans now to remember that experience, put the past
few decades of hubris, division, and indulgence aside, and prove that their country is still
competent enough to figure out what it needs to do. And then they need to do it.
Since two others have mentioned this, I'll thrown this out.
Hegemonic ideologies tend to naturalize socioculturally-generated pathologies, often
dismissing them as "human nature."
I don't understand you to be necessarily doing this when you identify "human nature" with
callous self-centeredness given your other writing (and generously shared links) but it does
sound like you are using the term too loosely in your post for materialists and others to
philosophically stomach. I am not the only one who objected to the usage upon reading.
Can "human nature" be identified, labeled, discussed separate from historical and material
conditions? Is "human nature" not constituted via dialectical processes at multiple levels
occurring through time and space, not least of all cultural which is shaped by socioeconomic
conditions.
Let's chalk this up to aristocratic elites. Aristocrats, unlike nobles, are decadent, but
don't stop with that word, understand what it means.
Elites who are not aligned with the actual productive activities of society and are
engaged primarily in activities which are contrary to production, are decadent. This was
true in Ancien Regime France (and deliberately fostered by Louis XIV as a way of
emasculating the nobility.) It is true today of most Western elites: they concentrate on
financial numbers, and not on actual production. Even those who are somewhat competent,
tend not to be truly productive: see the Waltons, who made their money as
distributers–merchants.
Putin, like western leaders, often discusses national problems during his appearances. But
afterwards, he'll query responsible ministers about questionable policies, and will make sure
that an effective solution will be put in place. He'll also mention problems during his
speeches, and will then follow the discussion, usually in some detail, with how progress is
being made to fix them.
Western leaders, on the other hand, engage in hand-wringing about how difficult the
problems are, and that we'll have to learn to helplessly adapt ("It's a new economy", "These
jobs aren't coming back."), or fob off their responsibility with dysfunctional suggestions
("Learn to code," as if that were a solution, or impose an economic package on Greece that
will take until 2040 just to find out whether it might be working), or just pride themselves
on realizing there's a problem (like the EU, who considers it an accomplishment to "identify
challenges", and who adopted a policy of wait and see for COVID-19).
There's such a palpable difference between actual leadership and play-acting.
Trump, Sanders and Tulsi all share 3 things: 1) proposals for policies to improve
circumstances that involve making real changes to the status quo 2) strong grassroots based
on disgust with elite policies 3) accusations that they are agents of Putin.
I dunno, if the elites kep attempting to thwart competent domestic leadership, maybe we
should shoot for an amendment that puts Putin directly on the ballot. At least he would know
how to get elected. Then, we cut through the innuendo and make it clear that what voters want
is actual leadership. What have we got to lose?
New York is paying inflated rates as high as 15 times the regular price to get crucial
medical equipment such as masks, as the state struggles to contain the coronavirus,
ProPublica
The state with almost 40 percent of the confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country is paying 20
cents for gloves that typically cost three times less and $7.50 for masks, which is 15 times
the regular price, according to an analysis of payment data by ProPublica.
New York also has paid more than twice the typical cost for infusion pumps. A portable X-ray
machine cost the state $248,841, when it should be between $30,000 and $80,000.
States across the country have complained to the federal government about severe shortages
of equipment. They say they've been forced to compete with other states or countries for
precious materials.
New York Gov. Andrew
Cuomo has compared the situation to "being on eBay with 50 other states" and the Federal
Emergency Management Agency.
New York expects to lose $15 billion in costs and lost revenue from the pandemic.
"We know that New York and other states are in the market at the same time, along with the
rest of the world, bidding on these same items, which is clearly driving the fluctuation in
costs," budget office spokesman Freeman Klopott said in an email to ProPublica.
In late January we asked whether a prolific Chinese scientist who was experimenting with bat
coronavirus at a level-4 biolab in Wuhan China was responsible for the current outbreak of a
virus which is 96% genetically identical - and which saw an explosion in cases at a wet market
located just down the street .
For suggesting this, we were kicked off Twitter and had the pleasure of several articles
written by MSM hacks regarding our 'conspiracy theory' - none of which addressed the plethora
of hard evidence linked in the post. These are the same people, mind you, who pushed the
outlandish and evidence-free Trump-Russia conspiracy theory for years .
Whether or not the virus was engineered (scientists swear it wasn't) - it shouldn't take
Perry Mason to conclude that a virulent coronavirus outbreak which started near a biolab that
was experimenting with -- coronavirus -- bears scrutiny . Could a lab worker have accidentally
infected themselves - then gone shopping for meat at the market over several days, during the
long, asymptomatic incubation period?
In February, researchers Botao Xial and Lei Xiao published a
quickly-retracted paper titled "The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus" - which
speculated that the virus came from the Wuhan biolab.
Now, mainstream outlets are catching on - or at least have become brave enough to similarly
connect the dots.
Earlier this week, Fox News ' Tucker Carlson suggested that COVID-19 may have originated in
a lab.
Tucker Carlson is currently citing a report that he openly admits he can't confirm is true
to question if coronavirus was made in a lab pic.twitter.com/CTxrJtw0Sh
And now, the
Washington Times is out with a report titled "Chinese researchers isolated deadly bat
coronaviruses near Wuhan animal market."
Chinese government
researchers isolated more than 2,000 new viruses, including deadly bat coronaviruses, and
carried out scientific work on them just three miles from a wild animal market identified as
the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Several Chinese state media outlets in recent months touted the virus research and
lionized in particular a key researcher in Wuhan , Tian Junhua , as a leader in bat
virus work.
The coronavirus strain now infecting hundreds of thousands of people globally mutated from
bats believed to have infected animals and people at a wild animal market in Wuhan . The exact origin of
the virus, however, remains a mystery. -
Washington Times
"This is one of the worst cover-ups in human history, and now the world is facing a global
pandemic," said Texas GOP Rep. Michael T. McFoul - a ranking member of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee . McFoul believes China should be held accountable for the outbreak.
Meanwhile, a video from December funded by the Chinese government shows Tian collecting
samples from captured bats and storing them in vials.
"I am not a doctor, but I work to cure and save people," said Tian, adding "I am not a
soldier, but I work to safeguard an invisible national defense line."
The mainstream theory behind the virus is that it crossed over to humans after first
infecting an intermediary species - such as a pangolin.
Could the stalled economy we've inflicted on ourselves in our frantic efforts to battle the
COVID-19 pandemic lead to civil disorder? History suggests that's a real danger.
Around the world, high unemployment and stagnant economic activity tend to lead to social
unrest, including demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of potentially violent disruptions.
That's a huge concern as forecasters expect the U.S. unemployment rate in the months to come to
surpass that seen during the depths of the Great Depression.
"We're putting this initial number at 30 percent; that's a 30 percent unemployment rate"
in the second quarter of this year as a result of the planned economic shutdowns, Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard
told Bloomberg News on March 22. Gross Domestic Product, he adds, is expected to drop by
50 percent.
Unlike most bouts of economic malaise, this is a self-inflicted wound meant to counter a
serious public health crisis. But, whatever the reasons, it means businesses shuttered and
people without jobs and incomes. That's risky.
"Results from the empirical analysis indicate that economic growth and the unemployment
rate are the two most important determinants of social unrest,"
notes the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a United Nations agency that maintains
a Social Unrest Index in an attempt to predict civil disorder based, in part, on economic
trends. "For example, a one standard deviation increase in unemployment raises social unrest
by 0.39 standard deviations, while a one standard deviation increase in GDP growth reduces
social unrest by 0.19 standard deviations."
Why would economic shutdowns lead to social unrest? Because, contrary to the airy dismissals
of some members of the political class and many ivory-tower types, commerce isn't a grubby
embarrassment to be tolerated and avoided -- it's the life's blood of a society. Jobs and
businesses keep people alive. They represent the activities that meet demand for food,
clothing, shelter -- and that develop and distribute the medicine and medical supplies we need
to battle COVID-19.
President Donald Trump may be overly optimistic when he hopes to have the country, including
areas hard-hit by the virus, " opened up
and just raring to go by Easter ," but he's not wrong to include the economy in his
calculations.
By contrast, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's insistence that "if it's public
health versus the economy, the only choice is public health," sounds fine and noble. But it
reflects an unrealistic and semi-aristocratic disdain for the activities that make fighting the
pandemic possible at all -- and that keep social unrest at bay.
While the ILO has tried to quantify the causes of social unrest, its researchers certainly
aren't the first to make the connection between angry, unemployed people and trouble in the
streets.
At the height of the Great Depression, when U.S. unemployment hit a peak of 24.9 percent , Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's administration saw make-work programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
as a means of getting the jobless -- especially young men -- safely into "quasi-military camps
often far from home in the nation's publicly owned forests and parks," Joseph M. Speakman
wrote for the Fall 2006
issue of Prologue Magazine , a publication of the U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration.
"Bringing an army of the unemployed into 'healthful surroundings,' Roosevelt argued, would
help to eliminate the threats to social stability that enforced idleness had created,"
Speakman added.
In fact, the connection between unemployment, stagnant economies, and social unrest is so
clear that an important indicator for a large underground economy is relative peace prevailing
alongside a chronically high unemployment rate.
If 21 percent of the workforce "were jobless, Spain would not be as peaceful as, barring a
few demonstrations, it has so far been, say economists and business leaders," the Financial
Times noted in 2011. Sure enough,
researchers found that off-the-books businesses and jobs thrived in Spain --
accounting for the equivalent of a quarter of GDP at one point -- keeping people employed and
defusing tensions.
Bullard of the Fed doesn't propose shipping the jobless off to the wilderness -- at least,
not yet -- and he doesn't seem inclined to rely on the black market to keep people fed, warm,
and healthy. Instead, to defuse the impact of the social-distancing shutdowns of normal
economic activity, he calls for lost income to be replaced by unemployment insurance and other
payments that would make displaced workers and business owners whole.
He better be right that government checks -- drawing on money from the thin air and not
generated by an economy that has largely halted, I'll note -- can offset the pain of lost jobs
and businesses, because the first wave of the unemployment he predicts is already here.
"In the week ending March 21, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims
was 3,283,000, an increase of 3,001,000 from the previous week's revised level," the United
States Department of Labor announced
on Thursday, March 26.
"This marks the highest level of seasonally adjusted initial claims in the history of the
seasonally adjusted series."
Those disturbed by such economic collapse include public health professionals who take
COVID-19 very seriously.
"I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this
near total meltdown of normal life -- schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned --
will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus
itself," wrote
David L. Katz, former director of Yale University's Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center,
in The New York Times last week.
"The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The
unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of
the first order."
Unemployment, impoverishment, and despair are frightening outcomes in themselves. They're
also a recipe for social unrest that will afflict even those of us who weather both the
pandemic and the accompanying economic storm.
Trump announced that he would use the cheap prices to fill the U.S. strategic oil reserve.
But the spare room in the reserve storage at that time was only some 150 million barrels.
As it can only be filled at a rate of 2 million barrels per day the topping off of the
reserve is insignificant in the current market.
The oil producers at first pumped their oil into storage tanks to be sold later. When
those filled up they rented supertankers to store the oil at sea. But empty supertankers
are now also getting rare and the price for them
is increasing :
The CEO of the world's largest tanker owner, Frontline Ltd., said on Friday that he'd
never known such demand to hire ships for long-term storage. Traders could book ships to
put 100 million barrels at sea this week alone, he estimated, but even that could
accounts for less than a week's oversupply.
The only solution will be a shut down of the more expensive oil fields. Canada and
Brazil are already doing it. U.S. shale producers who are bleeding cash will now have to
follow.
As soon as U.S. shale leaves the market, prices will rebound and could reach $60 a
barrel, Rosneft's Igor Sechin said recently. As fate would have it, in what many would
have until recently considered an impossible scenario, a lot of U.S. shale might do just
that.
Breakeven prices for U.S. shale basins range between $39 and $48 a barrel, according
to data compiled by Reuters. Meanwhile, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is trading below
$25 a barrel and has been for over a week now.
The Trump administration has asked the Saudis to
produce less oil but as the Saudi tourist industry is currently also dead the Saudi clown
prince needs every dollar he can get. The Saudis will continue to pump and they will sell
their oil at any price.
The White House is now concerned that it will completely lose its beloved shale oil
industry and all the jobs connected to it.
A new OPEC+ deal to balance oil markets might be possible if other countries join in,
Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund said, adding that countries
should also cooperate to cushion the economic fallout from coronavirus.
...
"Joint actions by countries are needed to restore the(global) economy... They (joint
actions) are also possible in OPEC+ deal's framework," Dmitriev, head of the Russian
Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), told Reuters in a phone interview.
...
"We are in contact with Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries. Based on these
contacts we see that if the number of OPEC+ members will increase and other countries
will join there is a possibility of a joint agreement to balance oil markets."
Dmitriev declined to say who the new deal's members should or could be. U.S. President
Donald Trump said last week he would get involved in the oil price war between Saudi
Arabia and Russia at the appropriate time.
A logical new member of an expanded crude oil cartel would be one of the biggest global
producer that so far was not a member of that club - the U.S. of A.
We now learn that Trump is ready to talk about
that or other concepts:
As Ria reports (in Russian) the
topics of upcoming phone call [between Putin and Trump] will be Covid-19, trade (???)
and, you guessed it, oil prices.
Trump, who sanctioned the Russian-German Nord-Stream II pipeline while telling Germany
to buy U.S. shale gas, is now in a quite bad negotiation position. Russia does not need a
new OPEC deal right now. It has many financial reserves and can live with low oil prices
for much longer than the
Saudis and other oil producing countries. Trump would have to make a strategic offer
that Russia could not resist to get some cooperation on oil prices.
But what strategic offer could Trump make that would move Putin to agree to some
new deal?
Ukraine? Russia is not interested in that
unrulable , bankrupt and fascist infested entity.
Syria? The Zionist billionaires would stop their donations to Trump if he were to give
up on destroying it.
Joining an OPEC++ deal and limit U.S. oil production? That would be an anti-American
intervention in free markets and Congress would never agree to it.
And what reason has Russia to believe that Trump or his successor would stick to any
deal? As the U.S. is non-agreement-capable it has none.
The outcome of the phone call will therefore likely be nothing.
The carnage in the oil markets will continue and will ravage those producer countries
that need every penny while the corona virus is ravaging their people. Meanwhile the U.S.
shale market
will go bust . US financial companies had a big exposure to the Shale Oil frackers.
Good thing trillions of dollars of 'liquidity' has been shoveled their way.
FWIW:
One aspect of the crude complete collapse is to keep an eye on futures and the serious
contango at the moment: contango=prices on future contracts are higher than current
contract.
e.g. May 2020 CL contract=~$20, May 2021 =~$35.50.
Someone or someones are betting that the crude market will improve, i.e. they are
storing crude in very large crude carriers (VLCC) @>$200k per day lease cost. That is a
serious commitment/bet on future price/mkt improvement.
Unmentioned is the connection between Fracking Fraud and the Bond Market Bubble with
Congress actively intervening/abetting the Fraud by providing more money to the Ponzi
Scheme.
It was time. The shale industry already was a huge bubble even when oil prices were at USD
60.00 (because it had to borrow a lot to invest, and the more wells drilled, the lower was
the oil output per USD invested), which insiders in Wall Street were already discussing how
to burst it.
And this is a 100% intentional by the Russians. If American shale really go down, then
it would be ironic, since it was the oil crisis of 1975 that effectively ended the Soviet
Union.
Another factor going against the shale fracking pipe dream is that the Strategic Petroleum
Reserve (SPR) is filled with real oil. Fracking produces light condensate (not oil) that
does not meet this criteria, and thus the frackers will not benefit from filling the SPR
(unless Trump changes the rules)
A study by the Wall Street Journal concluded that in one ten year period, the shale oil
companies' total costs had exceeded their revenues by two hundred and eighty billion
dollars. They have stayed in business by issuing new stock and more debt to cover their
losses. Their prime fields are seeing production declines. Their costs are rising as the
price of is oil tanking. Collapse is imminent. It's going to have far-reaching
consequences.
Yet another example of the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the US ruling class. They've
been playing a rigged game for so long, they've forgotten how to think.
As others here have pointed out, not to worry, the US fracking industry will get bailed
out.
The real thing the US might do, is not to join an expanded OPEC+, but to limit imports
of foreign oil and protect the domestic industry. Contrary to current 'free trade' dogma,
protectionism does work (example A: the United States from 1776 to 1970. Any questions?),
but classically you want to limit imports of MANUFACTURED goods and keep the cost of raw
materials low. Increasing the relative costs of raw materials in the US while still
allowing mass importation of manufactured goods from low-wage nations is anti-Hamiltonian
and will crush what remains of US domestic manufacturing..)
Not sure the US shale market can "go bust" as such. The owners can go bankrupt, but that
just means banks and bondholders become the new owners, and their debt investment suddenly
turns into equity investment with zero gearing. Once that happens the US shale producers
become solid companies financed with zero debt and no incentive to hold back on production.
They pump and pump and pump until the pumps no longer work.
Sure, no new developments, but the existing infrastructure will last a few years yet.
I don't see a way out for the US fracking industry. Their product is too expensive in the
current times, and those setting the rules in these times (Russia and Saud Arabia) have no
good reason to help.
The social damage from a collapse in the US will be papered over with printed money. I
don't know how that will play out.
One scenario is time being called on the US's forever-wars in the Middle East, but would
they be replaced by an invasion of Venezuela? There is good stuff down there, as well as
the heavy stuff they've been pulling out. And just across the border into Brazil there is
some high ground that looks like a good spot to build a command post.
The US could cut its losses in the wider world, something that seems to be happening
anyway, and return to America, north and south. I don't see it just quietly going down the
gurgler, but the European Union might.
Of course it is already a war. The question I ask is, who is fighting and against whom?
The tactical aim at the moment is the end of the petro-dollar. A secondary aim is finding a
limit to US militarism. Which in turn depends on the pork.... soorry.... the grifting of
large sums of unlimited largess. Third, is trade and domination of markets including
sanctions and "treaties". Fourth, is the "domination" of population dissent and overriding
Judicial systems.
So the US, China and Russia are at it "hammer and tongs" (old saying but apt). Covid is
just one means to an end, regime change another. Who else is in the fight? I would suggest
that the Oligarchy and the Termites, the Fed and the deep parallel financial pool, the
uncontrolled but unified intelligence "agencies", all have their own agendas.
"The slow collapse of the US position in Iraq means that the US is not going to hold
those oil-fields for too long."
Remember where this oil is going to. During the previous presidential term, it was
discovered that the oil was going into Turkey, aided and abetted by the profiteers Erdogan
and his son, and then onto oil tankers that shipped it to Occupied Palestine. Current
production is also going into Jordan, where it is being shipped by pipeline into the
refinery in Eliat(?). I can only surmise the price to be extremely cheap.
So the inhabitants of Occupied Palestine will expect the US to maintain this flow as
long as they can, come hell or dead GIs.
The problem with shale became clear right after the first wells were drilled.
If I understood the reports from the "shale bubble" website correctly, originally the
magic over shale gas and oil came from the fact that Wall Street was involved since the
beginning (so it was a "coastal elites/heartland rednecks alliance" from birth) and the
expectation was that a horizontal well would perform the same way as the traditional
vertical well.
A traditional vertical well follows are normal curve graphic, imitating a hill. It
starts low, but keeps growing until reaching a peak, maintains this peak for a while (some
decades) and then begin a suave fall, which also takes decades.
No wonder, then, the huge euphoria that started in Wall Street when those horizontal
wells begun pumping out oil at absurd quantities - they imagine that was the output floor
of such wells, and that productivity would only rise after the decades. Indeed, it was
predicted at the time that the USA not only was firmly walking towards self-sufficiency -
many also predicted it would become the world's greatest oil exporter (yes, above Saudi
Arabia, Venezuela, Russia etc.).
But this euphoria was short-lived, as, some years later, productivity of the horizontal
wells begun to suddenly fall. It was then realized, after further research, that those
wells performed differently than the vertical wells: they begun directly with peak
production, then immediately started to fall. Their output graphic looks like an
upside-down, slightly inclined letter L.
Even after this discovery, the investors didn't immediately give up. They thought: let's
just drill longer wells. And they did. It was then that another problem came out: it seems
that, after 3-5 miles, those horizontal wells suddenly lose a lot of pressure necessary to
pump the oil out of it. To make things worse, after this length, they begin to suck out
pressure from the neighboring wells as well. Therefore, it is a self-defeating enterprise
to extend the horizontal wells beyond 3 miles length. And the situation is even direr
because shale reserves are usually concentrated in one specific area - it's not like you
can drill one horizontal well in Ohio and another one in Florida and so on: the rule of
thumb that the oil and gas "must be there" to be extracted in economically viable
quantities still do apply to horizontal wells.
After that, all that kept the American shale industry alive was Wall Street and its
rotten papers recycling machine.
A friendly reminder to all barflies that fracking within the Outlaw US Empire also takes
more energy to operate than the energy extracted. The business was bankrupt before it
began, and nothing can change that fundamental fact.
"I believe that yuan pricing of oil is coming and as soon as the Saudis move to accept it
-- as the Chinese will compel them to do -- then the rest of the oil market will move
along with them," Carl Weinberg, chief economist and managing director at High Frequency
Economics, told CNBC
Also, recall the recent ARAMCO IPO, reportedly China took a 5 % stake. Hmmm. Was it with
USTs?
The minute the Al Saud family begins accepting yuan for oil their days are numbered.
The US put them there, put the Saudi in Saudi Arabia. Any move to accept yuan will be seen
as betrayal, and the Al Sauds will be removed, either replaced or simply obliterated.
Posted by: Realist | Mar 30 2020 23:21 utc | 86
+++
If Saudi Arabia shifts to the Yuan, it would have to diversify away from buying US arms.
They might be the undisclosed buyer of high-end Chinese missiles, said to have an "urgent
need" for them, as per Chinese media on 2020/3/29. This news might be functioning as
diplomatic signalling.
It was the first time a third-generation anti-tank weapon system developed by the Chinese
company has been exported, according to the statement.
As the client was in urgent need of the missiles, the successful delivery had
significant meaning for establishing Norinco's (China North Industries Group Corporation)
market position and further opening up the market, the company said.
Norinco did not disclose more details on the deal in the statement, including the name
of the buyer, the quantity purchased and the value of the deal.
The US put them there, put the Saudi in Saudi Arabia. Any move to accept yuan will be
seen as betrayal, and the Al Sauds will be removed, either replaced or simply
obliterated.
You hug that thought. Newsflash: The horses camels have already bolted. China is
expanding its presence/influence in ME.
These 35 agreements with KSA,'centered around ways to align the Saudi Vision 2030 with
the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative' will not be in USD - unless China is unloading USTs.
There is nothing US can do except sell more arms to the kingdom. Reuters, WSJ reported the
big signing and likely, CNN, Fox, ABC buried it.
The meeting took place in the grand surroundings of the Great Hall of the People in
the Chinese capital Beijing. After their talks, the crown prince headed the Saudi
delegation at the third session of the China-Saudi Arabia High-Level Joint Committee
which he co-chaired with Zheng.
Delegates at the meeting discussed moves to strengthen cooperation between the two
countries on trade, investment, energy, culture and technology, as well as the
coordination of political and security matters. The committee also reviewed plans for
greater integration between China's Belt and Road development strategy and the Saudi
Vision 2030 reform program.
After agreeing on the minutes of the meeting, the Saudi royal and Zheng took part in
the signing of a range of agreements, memorandums of understanding (MoU), investment
projects and bilateral cooperation accords between the Kingdom and China:[.]
MoU between the Kingdom's Ministry of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources and the
National Development and Reform Commission in China, signed by Saudi Energy Minister
Khalid Al-Falih and Ning Jizhe, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform
Commission.
MoU between the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and Saudi Ministry of Commerce and
Investment to form a working group to facilitate trade, signed by Abdul Rahman Al-Harbi,
the Kingdom's deputy minister of commerce and investment, and Qian Keming, Chinese vice
minister of commerce.[.]
Deciphering the mental processes of MBS is always speculative, but it is very hard for KSA
to deliver on the threat to increase the deliveries by 2.5 mln bbl/day. As we can see,
planes fly only a fraction of pre-virus level, people on quarantine drive much less, you
can offer fuel for free and it will not sell more. Now, if you could offer some hand
sanitizer and facial tissues with each "full tank", perhaps it could work... But stopping
oil production is troublesome for some reasons, to the ignorant me it seems that if you
interrupt flow dynamic of oil, it is troublesome to restart it, shale oil may suffer from
something similar. Thus tanker ships are being filled up and used for storage as
destination ports refuse to take cargoes invoking "higher power". Hapless KSA cannot find
enough tankers, and when they find them, hard to find a port to accept them. So KSA
combative threat could impact psychology of the traders, but the virus made a dent in
demand of several times larger magnitude.
Nobody knows how long the demand will stay low, but as it does, storage will be
bursting, renting tanker ships became expensive. so the glut it will take time to dissipate
(folks renting the tanker ships will be pressed to get rid of the cargoes at the first
opportunity), and with no coordination to cut the production, low prices may stay for a
year or more. This seems necessary to cut shale oil and other high cost oil project down to
size. Periodic down period of pricing does not change long term calculations, but long
periods will drive a lot of small players out of business. This means so-called
consolidation, creditors become owners and sell it to vultures (regular folks cannot own
something that costs more to maintain than it brings revenue). And what do the vultures do?
"Paring excess capacity". Happened to many industries in the past. And even brainless
bankers will give it two thoughts before lending money for projects in high cost oil
production.
BTW, Putin is doing a gently MBS-like manouver, with the assist from Trump. To wit,
Russia started to tax repatriated profits -- no need to imprison the account holders in
Ritz Carton. But why would they be motivated to repatriate the profits back to Mother
Russia? A patriotic virus? Or pestering with account freezes that Trumpian robbers are so
fond of doing?
One mystery for me is why Canadians bother to produce oil with single-digit prices.
Stopping tar oil production should be simple, just mothball the equipment.
One rumour in the oil patch is that USG will give them bail out. That could be a boon
for green thinking idealists who are hostile to carbon energy production, because many
deplorables do not like bailout (unless they are the beneficiaries). This could allow Trump
to be defeated by a brain dead opponent.
"Bloomberg reports that Plains All American Pipeline asked its suppliers to scale back
production,
and Plains and Enterprise Products Partners is requiring customers to prove they have a
buyer or place to offload the crude they are shipping
The companies made the requests during the past week.
This is a clear sign that a growing glut of crude is overwhelming storage capacity.
Pipeline companies are running out of storage space for oil. Coronavirus related lockdowns
are resulting in plunging demand."
It is payback time for Russia no doubt, but Russia plays always the long game, any decision
or concession will always be related to the long game. for Russia, which is the global
leader in energy supplier (oil, gas & nuclear).
Russia got really mad with the Nordstream II delay, this is something Russia will not
forget that easy, besides costing them a lot, it was some sort of global humiliation, that
combination is pure fire. Even if the sanction are lifted now, Nordstream would start late
2020 and not late 2019....1 year delay anyway, so lifting sanctions won't matter here.
My first reaction is that Russia will not agree with the USA in anything, it will drive the
shale market dry for a little longer, it must if it wants to cause long term problems for
the players in the US, so no short term relieve for the shale players here, and if Russia
does agree in the OPEC++ with the US and other export players then this will take time, and
then US Gov can not intervene in the local production, more time...and no results, at the
end the US will have to give up something, and I do not think lifting sanctions will be it,
they may try it, bit it has no real value for Russia....only a global military retreat,
something that will cost dearly, politically and in image will. serve Russia and its key
strategic ally...China, mind you that cheap oil and gas helps China's recovery...March nbrs
came in from China and it has already shown a better recovery than expected.
This is the only way I can see Russia playing the long game, together with China and a
major strategic geopolitical defeat for the US.
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said he's concerned oil prices have fallen too far and
called Vladimir Putin on Monday to discuss Russia's oil-price war with Saudi Arabia.
The leaders, who also talked about the spread of the coronavirus, agreed to discussions on
oil between energy officials in the two countries, according to the Kremlin. Both leaders
"agreed on the importance of stability in global energy markets," the White House said in a
statement.
The U.S. president said earlier he doesn't want to see the American energy sector "wiped
out" after Russia and Saudi Arabia "both went crazy" and launched into a conflict that
depressed oil prices.
"I never thought I'd be saying that maybe we have to have an oil increase, because we do.
The price is so low," Trump said in an interview on "Fox & Friends."
Crude oil futures tumbled as much as 7.7% in New York, touching an 18-year low.
The Trump-Putin call came at the request of the U.S. and was "prolonged," according to the
Kremlin. Neither the White House or Kremlin statements said specifically how long the two
leaders talked.
Trump's view on the oil dispute marks a shift from earlier this month, when he likened the
plunge in oil prices to a "tax cut" for Americans. The U.S. president spoke to Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman on March 9 about the price war.
Trump has long argued that improving relations between Washington and Moscow could help
solve international disputes. The president said he wanted to discuss trade with Putin, though
he said he expected the Russian president to raise objections to U.S. sanctions. State-run Tass
quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying that Putin didn't ask Trump for sanctions
relief on the call.
Oil tumbled earlier to its lowest point in nearly two decades, heading for the worst quarter
on record as coronavirus lockdowns cascaded through the world's largest economies, leaving the
market overwhelmed by cratering demand and a ballooning surplus. The slump in demand has shut
refineries from South Africa to Canada.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates consumption will drop by 26 million barrels a day this
week. Meanwhile, Riyadh and Moscow are showing no signs of a detente in their supply battle as
Saudi Arabia announced plans to increase its oil exports in the coming months, despite U.S.
warnings against flooding the market.
Some analysts argue Russia's motivations extend well beyond oil and are complicated by the
federation's anger over U.S. sanctions and opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking
Russia to Germany. And the price for getting Russia to back down could be too high.
"Russia's concerns with the U.S. go beyond market share. Putin is frustrated with sanctions
and may be more interested in punishing the U.S. than Saudi Arabia," said Dan Eberhart, a Trump
donor and chief executive of drilling services company Canary LLC. "If Trump wants an agreement
with Putin, he may have to promise to ease up on sanctions. I am not sure he can deliver
without the backing of congress."
Rosneft PJSC over the weekend sold its assets in Venezuela to the Russian government, a move
that shields the Russian oil giant from further U.S. sanctions while keeping Moscow behind the
regime of Nicolas Maduro. Fears of broader sanctions have grown after the U.S. in recent months
slapped restrictions on Rosneft trading companies for handling business with Venezuela.
In the call, the White House said Trump "reiterated that the situation in Venezuela is dire,
and we all have an interest in seeing a democratic transition to end theongoing crisis." The
statement didn't say how Putin responded.
Talks between members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies
broke down in early March as Russia refused to sign on to larger production cuts proposed by
Saudi Arabia. The failure to reach an agreement prompted the Saudis to unleash a price war
which, combined with the devastating effect of the virus pandemic, caused the market to
crash.
Global demand is slumping by as much as 20 million barrels a day, about 20%, as billions of
people go into lockdown to slow the spread of the virus. The outlook remains dire, with
traders, banks and analysts forecasting a huge oversupply as governments effectively shut their
economies.
The US government was caught without pants. No supply of masks. Can you imagine that for a country with trillion military budget.
Notable quotes:
"... Take a look around: Unemployment may reach 30%. The poor are starting to protest–actually strike! GM, Amazon, Chicago Teacher's
Union, GE, Instacart ..."
"... As jobs were outsourced to slave labor camps in China and elsewhere, the rich and privileged smiled as their portfolios grew,
as CEO raked in the cash and then buried it in off-shore accounts. ..."
"... When the working class complained about jobs being lost, factories being closed, it was told to get a better education, to
make itself valuable to the bosses. What a joke! ..."
"... The DNC always plays footsie with the rich as does the GOP–equal plunderers. Universal Health Care is just too expensive! Their
all monsters, crafty grifters. ..."
"... The mass media, now firmly serve the DNC and the GOP, studiously ignore this rot. A rotten building will fall. Times up. Game
is Over. ..."
The Covid-19 pandemic is the physical manifestation of a deeper disease plaguing the West: Class Warfare. The veil has been lifted.
Social distancing, a legitimate response to Covid-19, predominately affects the working class.
Fortunately, Covid-19 is an equal opportunity plague: As the rich and powerful congratulated each other, as they moved among the
rightfully adoring crowds oops, I think I caught something! Just hazards of the games they play. Certainly, it was never contracted
on the factory floor.
Suddenly the rich and privileged claim they are in the same boat. Really? Mega-yachts are handy get-aways, as are well-protected
island boltholes.
And who is supposed to do the nasty work, who has little opportunity to run and hide, who must do the the work that makes actual
existence possible? Not the rich.
Who can work from home and not lose his or her job?
Rich and powerful women now have to cut their own nails! Oh, the shame of it. They have to dye their own hair–coif themselves!
What no colorist?
The rich and powerful want the poor to go back to work. Who else will make them money? Who else will save the Stock Market? Meanwhile,
the poor are losing their jobs; they do not have fall-back pensions or able to take advantage of Capital Gains. How will they pay
their rent? Their bills? Their healthcare? Their debts?
Take a look around: Unemployment may reach 30%. The poor are starting to protest–actually strike! GM, Amazon, Chicago Teacher's
Union, GE, Instacart
As jobs were outsourced to slave labor camps in China and elsewhere, the rich and privileged smiled as their portfolios grew,
as CEO raked in the cash and then buried it in off-shore accounts.
When the working class complained about jobs being lost, factories being closed, it was told to get a better education, to
make itself valuable to the bosses. What a joke!
When many tried to get an education, they were faced with absurd college costs, incredible debt, and thanks to those in control
an inability to declare bankruptcy! Thanks, Joe.
And now, ever thoughtful Nancy Pelosi wants to reward the rich and privileged with ta ta!.., a lifting of the Salt Cap.
The DNC always plays footsie with the rich as does the GOP–equal plunderers. Universal Health Care is just too expensive!
Their all monsters, crafty grifters.
Meanwhile, economists sang the praises of Free Trade. The GOP loved it; the DNC loved it. Neo-liberalism: the goose that always
lays the golden eggs.
The mass media, now firmly serve the DNC and the GOP, studiously ignore this rot. A rotten building will fall. Times up. Game
is Over.
likbez , March 31, 2020 9:27 pm
Thank you Stormy,
A very good analysis. A lot of emotions too ;-)
When the working class complained about jobs being lost, factories being closed, it was told to get a better education,
to make itself valuable to the bosses. What a joke!
Neoliberalism is an ideology make on a set of myths. In other words this is a secular religion.
The DNC always plays footsie with the rich as does the GOP–equal plunderers. Universal Health Care is just too expensive!
Their all monsters, crafty grifters.
No question they are. That's by design. The key role of DNC is to squash political forces to the left of Clinton faction, and
to neutralize/coopt politicians which do not support the neoliberal/neocon consensus.
Meanwhile, economists sang the praises of Free Trade. The GOP loved it; the DNC loved it. Neo-liberalism: the goose that
always lays the golden eggs.
Neoliberal revolution which culminated in the election of Reagan (which started under Carter) was a coup d'état by financial
oligarchy. It signified that the New Deal consensus was broken and countervailing forces were weakened enough to ensure the success
of the coup.
One thing with which I respectfully disagree:
The mass media, now firmly serve the DNC and the GOP, studiously ignore this rot. A rotten building will fall. Times up.
Game is Over.
Not sure the game is over. I do not see powerful enough social forces that can oppose financial oligarchy. The anger does built
up, but it is powerless. And their control of the state is absolute (which also means the control of intelligence agencies).
The population is brainwashed and disunited via identity politics.
In modern USA society that means that any attempt to build such a coalition with be squashed by the national security state.
"... Given that the costs of financialization are already borne by the general public, not by the plutocracy, what's the point exactly of destroying the real economy just to open the door to new bail-outs? ..."
The Western populations (especially the American) were already bearing the costs of
financialization in the form of stagnant industrial output, unemployment, decaying
infrastructure, unavailability and/or declining quality of essential services like health
care, rapidly rising cost of living etc. before this and arguably even before the Global
Financial Crisis in 2008. The costs are no more socialized now just because the worthless
assets have been moved to the Federal Reserve's balance sheet.
What the bail-outs after the GFC did accomplish was enabling the financial sector, by
relieving it of the burden of toxic assets, to continue its parasitism on the real economy
through extending new loans to raid companies and to extract wealth from home-owners and
consumers.
Given that the costs of financialization are already borne by the general public, not by
the plutocracy, what's the point exactly of destroying the real economy just to open the door
to new bail-outs? Unlike in 2008, there was, from the perspective of the financial sector, no
need for any bail-outs because the financial system was still operating, up until the
economic crisis that arrived with this pandemic and the resulting shutdowns of the industrial
and service sectors. There is not in reality any debt erased or moved to the general public
(the plutocracy are in fact *not* the ones in debt, they are the ones issuing debt to
industrial companies being hollowed out, to home-owners, students, consumers etc.), but the
pandemic risks the collapse (at the very least the end of its legitimacy) of the entire
current financial system and with it the continuation of the parasitic process of wealth
extraction.
Given that the costs of financialization are already borne by the general public, not
by the plutocracy, what's the point exactly of destroying the real economy just to open the
door to new bail-outs?
'The point' is deflating the bubble, an extraordinary bailout of Boeing and maybe other
corps., and accelerating 'decoupling'. These things would be difficult to accomplish without
a CRISIS! that rises to the level of a 'national emergency'.
US and its system were heading for collapse. Trump and his backers could see that. At the
moment, this is starting to look like the great coronovirus reset. Bailouts coupled to big
changes.
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 30 2020 0:30 utc | 100
++++
Precisely. By socialising the debt liability now the problem is shifted from being the
fault of finance to being the fault of the virus.
Guillotine dodged for now, the can is kicked further down the road. More austerity.
Resultant mass unemployment blamed on the virus and not on the behaviour of the parasitic
finance industry.
The continual inflating of asset prices by the Fed was also seen as a desperate ploy to ward
off deflation
++++++
No, the continual inflating of asset prices was in order to milk the rubes for as long as
feasibly possible. But the game was up in late 2019 when word got out that at least one of
the large banks (imo Deutsche Bank) were having trouble meeting their overnight obligations.
JPM said "we ain't helping" so The Fed went into Repo overdrive to shore the sustem up in the
shortterm
The point is, why would they want to (actively intervene to) deflate the bubble? The
transfer of wealth from the real economy is a continuous process. The longer you can keep a
company like Boeing going, the more of its assets (be it savings in pension funds, machinery,
residual goodwill etc.) you can liquidate and pay out to yourself in the form of interest on
loans (that the company owes to you or your friends), stock buybacks or bonuses.
Same thing with mortgages: The longer you can keep the real estate market in a bubble and
the home owners at least treading water, the longer they can pay you exorbitant interest
rates, and the more of their labor and savings you can siphon off.
In the event of a crash like in 2008, or now due to the coronavirus epidemic, bail-outs
are a necessary intervention to stitch up the balance sheets of the banks, private equity
funds etc. so that this parasitic process can be started up again. That doesn't mean that the
crashes are desired - in fact, the exact opposite. It's not through the bail-outs that the
actual wealth transfer happens, but rather between them.
The point is, why would they want to (actively intervene to) deflate the bubble? The
transfer of wealth from the real economy is a continuous process... It's not through the
bail-outs that the actual wealth transfer happens, but rather between them.
The markets are complex systems and they can get stressed. The expansion was well beyond its
sell-by date and required life-support for much of the duration (QE x , tax cuts,
etc.). A soft landing for Wall Street and recession that can be blamed on
coronavirus/China are less risky than letting the markets crash on their own. There will be
no big 'reset' that some have been hoping for (at least not anytime soon).
And a focus on deflating the bubble is misleading. They had multiple ways to game this
CRISIS!. And protecting favored interests (like Boeing) as well as the system itself is one
just icing on the cake.
If allowed to happen, and without the appearance of a significant medical therapy tool
across the USA - the fallout of foreseeable foreclosures will make it a nuclear weapon. Given
bank turnaround timescales this will be just in time for next winter/elections... Faced with
this Trump of all people may be forced to adopt some major socialist principles.
On April 21, 2011, the region of Amazon Web Services covering eastern North America crashed.
The crash brought down the sites of large customers such as Quora, Foursquare, and Reddit. It
took Amazon over a week to bring its system fully back online, and some customer data was lost
permanently.
But one company whose site did not crash was Netflix. It turns out that Netflix had made
themselves "antifragile" by employing software they called "Chaos Monkey," which regularly and
randomly brought down Netflix servers. By continually crashing their own servers, Netflix
learned how to nevertheless keep other portions of their network running. And so when Amazon
US-East crashed, Netflix ran on, unfazed.
This phenomenon is discussed by Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile : a system that
depends on the absence of change is fragile. The companies that focused on keeping all of their
servers up and running all the time went completely offline when Amazon crashed from under
them. But the company that had exposed itself to lots of little crashes could handle the big
crash. That is because the minor, "undesirable" changes stress the system in a way that can
make it stronger.
The idea of antifragility does not apply only to computer networks. For instance, by trying
to eliminate minor downturns in the economy, central bank policy can make that economy
extremely vulnerable to a major recession. Running only on treadmills or tracks makes the
joints extremely vulnerable when, say, one steps in a pothole in the sidewalk.
What does this have to do with trade policy? For many reasons, such as the recent
coronavirus outbreak, flows of goods are subject to unexpected shocks.
Both a regime of "unfettered" free trade, and its opposite, that of complete autarchy, are
fragile in the face of such shocks. A trade policy aimed not at complete free trade or
protectionism, but at making an economy better at absorbing and adapting to rapid change, is
more sane and salutary than either extreme. Furthermore, we suggest practicing for shocks can
help make an economy antifragile.
Amongst academic economists, the pure free-trade position is more popular. The case for
international trade, absent the artificial interference of government trade policy, is
generally based upon the "principle of comparative advantage," first formulated by the English
economist David Ricardo in the early 19th century. Ricardo pointed out, quite correctly, that
even if, among two potential trading partners looking to trade a pair of goods, one of them is
better at producing both of them, there still exist potential gains from trade -- so long as
one of them is relatively better at producing one of the goods, and the other (as a
consequence of this condition) relatively better at producing the other. For example,
Lebron James may be better than his local house painter at playing basketball, and at
painting houses, given his extreme athleticism and long reach. But he is so much more "better"
at basketball that it can still make sense for him to concentrate on basketball and pay the
painter to paint his house.
And so, per Ricardo, it is among nations: even if, say, Sweden can produce both cars and
wool sweaters more efficiently than Scotland, if Scotland is relatively less bad at
producing sweaters than cars, it still makes sense for Scotland to produce only wool sweaters,
and trade with Sweden for the cars it needs.
When we take comparative advantage to its logical conclusion at the global scale, it
suggests that each agent (say, nation) should focus on one major industry domestically and that
no two agents should specialize in the same industry. To do so would be to sacrifice the
supposed advantage of sourcing from the agent who is best positioned to produce a particular
good, with no gain for anyone.
Good so far, but Ricardo's case contains two critical hidden assumptions: first, that the
prices of the goods in question will remain more or less stable in the global marketplace, and
second that the availability of imported goods from specialized producers will remain
uninterrupted, such that sacrificing local capabilities for cheaper foreign alternatives.
So what happens in Scotland if the Swedes suddenly go crazy for yak hair sweaters (produced
in Tibet) and are no longer interested in Scottish sweaters at all? The price of those sweaters
crashes, and Scotland now finds itself with most of its productive capacity specialized in
making a product that can only be sold at a loss.
Or what transpires if Scotland is no longer able, for whatever reason, to produce sweaters,
but the Swedes need sweaters to keep warm? Swedes were perhaps once able to make their own
sweaters, but have since funneled all their resources into making cars, and have even lost the
knowledge of sweater-making. Now to keep warm, the Swedes have to rapidly build the
infrastructure and workforce needed to make sweaters, and regain the knowledge of how to do so,
as the Scots had not only been their sweater supplier, but the only global sweater
supplier.
So we see that the case for extreme specialization, based on a first-order understanding of
comparative advantage, collapses when faced with a second-order effect of a dramatic change in
relative prices or conditions of supply.
That all may sound very theoretical, but collapses due to over-specialization, prompted by
international agencies advising developing economies based on naive comparative-advantage
analysis, have happened all too often. For instance, a number of African economies, persuaded
to base their entire economy on a single good in which they had a comparative advantage (e.g,
gold, cocoa, oil, or bauxite), saw their economies crash when the price of that commodity fell.
People who had formerly been largely self-sufficient found themselves wage laborers for
multinationals in good times, and dependents on foreign charity during bad times.
While the case for extreme specialization in production collapses merely by letting prices
vary, it gets even worse for the "just specialize in the single thing you do best" folks once
we add in considerations of pandemics, wars, extreme climate change, and other such shocks. We
have just witnessed how relying on China for such a high percentage of our medical supplies and
manufacturing has proven unwise when faced with an epidemic originating in China.
On a smaller scale, the great urban theorist Jane Jacobs stressed the need for economic
diversity in a city if it is to flourish. Detroit's over-reliance on the automobile industry,
and its subsequent collapse when that industry largely deserted it, is a prominent example of
Jacobs' point. And while Detroit is perhaps the most famous example of a city collapsing due to
over-specialization, it is far from
the only one .
All of this suggests that trade policy, at any level, should have, as its primary goal, the
encouragement of diversity in that level's economic activity. To embrace the extremes of "pure
free trade" or "total self-sufficiency" is to become more susceptible to catastrophe from
changing conditions. A region that can produce only a few goods is fragile in the face of an
event, like the coronavirus, that disrupts the flow of outside goods. On the other hand,
turning completely inward, and cutting the region off from the outside, leaves it without
outside help when confronting a local disaster, like an extreme drought.
To be resilient as a social entity, whether a nation, region, city, or family, will have a
diverse mix of internal and external resources it can draw upon for sustenance. Even for an
individual, total specialization and complete autarchy are both bad bets. If your only skill is
repairing Sony Walkmen, you were probably pretty busy in 2000, but by today you likely don't
have much work. Complete individual autarchy isn't ever really even attempted: if you watch
YouTube videos of supposedly "self-reliant" people in the wilderness, you will find them using
axes, radios, saws, solar panels, pots and pans, shirts, shoes, tents, and many more goods
produced by others.
In the technical literature, having such diversity at multiple scales is referred to as
"multiscale variety." In a system that displays multiscale variety, no single scale accounts
for all of the diversity of behavior in the system. The practical importance of this is related
to the fact that shocks themselves come at different scales. Some shocks might be limited to a
town or a region, for instance local weather events, while others can be much more widespread,
such as the coronavirus pandemic we are currently facing.
A system with multiscale variety is able to respond to shocks at the scale at which they
occur: if one region experiences a drought while a neighboring region does not, agricultural
supplementation from the currently abundant region can be leveraged. At a smaller scale, if one
field of potatoes becomes infested with a pest, while the adjacent cows in pasture are spared,
the family who owns the farm will still be able to feed themselves and supply products to the
market.
Understanding this, the question becomes how can trade policy, conceived broadly, promote
the necessary variety and resiliency to mitigate and thrive in the face of the unexpected?
Crucially, we should learn from the tech companies: practice disconnecting, and do it randomly.
In our view there are two important components to the intentional disruption: (1) it is regular
enough to generate "muscle memory" type responses; and (2) it is random enough that responses
are not "overfit" to particular scenarios.
For an individual or family, implementing such a policy might create some hardships, but
there are few institutional barriers to doing so. One week, simply declare, "Let's pretend all
of the grocery stores are empty, and try getting by only on what we can produce in the yard or
have stockpiled in our house!" On another occasion, perhaps, see if you can keep your house
warm for a few days without input from utility companies.
Businesses are also largely free of institutional barriers to practicing disconnecting. A
company can simply say, "We are awfully dependent on supplier X: this week, we are not going to
order from them, and let's see what we can do instead!" A business can also seek out external
alternatives to over-reliance on crucial internal resources: for instance, if your top tech guy
can hold your business hostage, it is a good idea to find an outside consulting firm that could
potentially fill his role.
When we get up to the scale of the nation, things become (at least institutionally)
trickier. If Freedonia suddenly bans the import of goods from Ruritania, even for a week,
Ruritania is likely to regard this as a "trade war," and may very well go to the WTO and seek
relief. However, the point of this reorientation of trade policy is not to promote hostility to
other countries, but to make one's own country more resilient. A possible solution to this
problem is that a national government could periodically, at random times, buy all of the
imports of some good from some other country, and stockpile them. Then the foreign supplier
would have no cause for complaint: its goods are still being purchased! But domestic
manufacturers would have to learn to adjust to a disappearance of the supply of palm oil from
Indonesia, or tin from China, or oil from Norway.
Critics will complain that such government management of trade flows, even with the noble
aim of rendering an economy antifragile, will inevitably be turned to less pure purposes, like
protecting politically powerful industrialists. But so what? It is not as though the pursuit of
free trade hasn't itself yielded perverse outcomes, such as the NAFTA trade agreement that ran
to over one thousand pages. Any good aim is likely to suffer diversion as it passes
through the rough-and-tumble of political reality. Thus, we might as well set our sites on an
ideal policy, even though it won't be perfectly realized.
We must learn to deal with disruptions when success is not critical to survival. The better
we become at responding to unexpected shocks, the lower the cost will be each time we face an
event beyond our control that demands an adaptive response. To wait until adaptation is
necessary makes us fragile when a real crisis appears. We should begin to develop an
antifragile economy today, by causing our own disruptions and learning to overcome them.
Deliberately disrupting our own economy may sound crazy. But then, so did deliberately crashing
one's own servers, until Chaos Monkey proved that it works.
Gene Callahan teaches at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University. Joe
Norman is a data scientist and researcher at the New England Complex Systems Institute.
Most disruptive force is own demographic change of which govts have known for decades.
Caronovirus challenge is nothing compared to what will happen because US ed system
discriminated against the poor who will be the majority!
What Winston Churchill once said about the Americans is in fact true of all humans: "Americans
always end up doing
the right thing once they have exhausted all other options". That's just as true of the French
(I write from France) since our government stopped stocking a strategic reserve of a billion
breathing-masks in 2013 because "we could buy them in Chine for a lower costs". Now we can't
produce enough masks even for our hospitals.
"... Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence . ..."
"... The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism." [Emphasis mine] ..."
"The historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in the State." – Antonio
Gramsci
Its somewhat bemusing that we discuss American politics ad nauseam, when it's been amply
demonstrated that voters in the USA cannot make changes to government policy through their
electoral process.
In fact, I would contend that American democracy has been non-existant since the JFK
assassination (57 years after the event with no charges having been laid) which was
essentially a coup d'état
Don't believe me? Read it and weep
A 2014 study from Princeton University spells bad news for American democracy –
namely, that it no longer exists:
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average
Citizens – Martin Gilens & Benjamin I. Page
"Each of 4 theoretical traditions in the study of American politics -- which can be
characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and
2 types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism -- offers
different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy:
average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or
business-oriented.
A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of
actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical
predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to
do so, using a unique data set which includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy
issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing
business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while
average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent
influence .
The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite
Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian
Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism." [Emphasis mine]
@PTG Mann This is my attempt to shed some light on the "democracy" reality show. In grade
11 I had a subject called Marxism. Yes, I did study Marxism for 1 year only – in high
school. One of the benefits of living in a "communist" country, I guess.
My Marxism professor, when he talked about capitalism, always used USA as an example. Not
because he was impressed with them, but because he believed that it was a common knowledge
that US was running the most austere form of capitalism possible. It's still like that today,
they are just using multiculturalism as a smoke screen to cover up the fact that their
capitalism is the most severe that they could get away with. And the stupid Europeans copy
them, believing that multiculturalism is what makes a country truly liberal. Sure.
Another interesting thing that I remember from my high school Marxism classes is that they
taught us that US has 2 types of elites. 1.Regular elites 2. Political elites. The regular
elites are the real elites, the economic ones, the real movers and shakers. The political
elites are just domestic help, a hired nobodies who do the rich men's bidding. The lines
between these 2 are almost never crossed. As many perks as there are to becoming political
elite, the benefits that you can milk from this new-found bonanza can never amount to the
point of making you qualified to join the real – economic elites. And it goes vice
versa as well. Economic elites usually don't have the interest (unless you are senile old guy
like Bloomberg) to waste time on personally participating in politics – it just doesn't
pay well enough by their standards. Of course, there are always exceptions – Donald
Trump. That's why the real elites hate him so much. Because he wants to sit on 2 chairs, to
belong to both the real elites and the political ones as well. The idea behind the political
elites is to pay them so you can influence them and tell them what to do. How do you
influence someone who doesn't really qualify as a hired help, who is one of you? It makes it
more difficult to boss around. I am not saying that Trump is unbossable, the problem is that
the real elites can't stomach the fact that Trump wants to boss THEM. Unforgivable.
The "democracy" has always been a pipe-dream, designed to prevent the rich f ** ks getting
at each other throats, more than anything else. That's why voting and elections are just a
mirage, political elites are not elected by voters, they are elected by the real (economic)
elites. That's why they throw millions of dollars on campaigns and lobbies and so on. So they
can have the final say about how things should be done, and not leave it to the political
"elites" initiatives.
Trump proved that the move from the economic elites into political elites is feasible,
even though it can be very unpopular with the economic elites, but the move from political
elites into real elites is almost impossible – despite occasional valiant efforts
– like Joe Biden and his son. The political elites simply lack any real cashable skills
that are required in order to make tons of money and qualify for the prestigious club of real
(economic) elites.
Sure the political elites can make a lot of money, but only from the perspective of the
poor. The money that the political elites make compared to the economic ones – is
pocket change. This is actually one of the positives of the American system, people who are
interested in making really big money, don't usually go into politics, because there are much
more and better ways to make more money. This is actually a feature of most of the developing
countries – where there is almost no distinction between real elites and political
elites and the only way to make money is to go into politics, and use corruption as a driving
force for becoming rich.
Sure the political elites can accomplish relative financial successes as well, and
sometimes this can get to their heads, making them delusional, like when Hillary –
white trash herself– called her own people – deplorables. The "democracy" pipe
dream serves another purpose – to create the illusion that the real elites (the rich)
and the poor are in the same predicament together – suffering under the unscrupulous
political elites. Yeah, right.
The other thing that people talk a lot about is communist propaganda. Sure there was some
of it. Having experienced living in both systems – capitalism and "communism" – I
can say that there is a big difference between capitalist and communist propaganda. Communist
propaganda was more of the wishful thinking type, trying to cover up reality because they
wished things could be better. Capitalist propaganda is much more sinister. The sole purpose
of existence of capitalist propaganda is not because they want things to be different and
better, but because they want things to stay the same as long as possible. The purpose of the
capitalist propaganda is to impede progress. Communists at least felt bad that their system
wasn't good enough to satisfy all the needs of the people. Capitalists have no such qualms.
The message that they convey through their "democracy" is that this is as good as it's going
to get, so you better get used to it. No regrets, no attempts to make things better.
It's funny that they bothered to teach us about different kinds of American elites way
back in high school, like that was going to have any practical application in our lives. It's
also unusual that I remember it, because I wasn't a particularly good student in any subject,
including Marxism. Maybe the reason why I remember it, is because after all these years it
still rings true.
Most discussions about and references to the US two-party system presidential elections
remain oblivious to the fact that for all practical purposes the US has only one political
party.
The US has the exact same political system that Mexico had for decades under the PRI: the
party elite decided on who was going to be the next president and then organized elections.
The US is essentially a none-party state (just read or reread Michael Parenti's Democracy
for the Few ).
The fact that the American voter can choose between a psychopath like Mrs. Clinton and a
guy like Trump, or between Trump and a senile moron like Biden (as may be the case this
year), merely serves to prove that the real political decisions are not made by the president
and that he is just a figurehead.
How can it be that a country with 330 million people cannot select even moderately
intelligent, decent, capable candidates for the highest office?
It is a good sign that most Americans understand this and don't bother to vote. Democracy
is a fake anyway, because if our votes would really count, we wouldn't have the right to
vote.
By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator. Produced by Economy for All , a project
of the Independent Media Institute
When historians look back on our current government's response to a public health emergency
and resultant economic depression, there won't be many paeans to profiles in courage. It may
seem impressive that Congress has approved legislation
worth $2 trillion to help sustain the American economy, but it's no New Deal. Rather it's a
massive economic slush fund that does its utmost to preserve the old ways of doing things under
the guise of masquerading as a response to a public health emergency. In reality, the relief
provisions are barely adequate.
Had this been another financial crisis like 2008, it is doubtful that America's oligarch
class would be able to secure such huge provision for themselves again. Under the guise of a
public health emergency, though, serial corporate predators are being given dollops from this
massive public trough with no means of engendering the kind of economic reconstruction that is
truly needed right now, or even preventing a sufficiently robust response if this virus comes
back in a second or third wave.
As one might expect in a massive bill (representing around 10 percent of U.S. GDP), there
are some decent scraps in this dog's breakfast, but overall the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and
Economic Security Act represents yet another sad indictment of the American polity, even as it
provides an excellent civics lesson in teaching us where power truly lies. There's $150 billion
allocated to hospitals, many of which are already stretched to capacity, but that's nothing
compared to the trillions directed to corporations with minimal disclosure on how those sums
are to be allocated, or any conditionality attached. In fact, we appear not to have learned
some lessons from 2008, when at least some members of Congress made efforts to scrutinize how
we were spending the money. Pam and Russ Martens's superbly informative digging into the more
than 800-page-long bill
reveals that :
a) The Fed will leverage the bill's $454 million bailout slush fund into $4.5 trillion,
and will hand it out through the New York Fed.
b) To ensure that they don't have to answer embarrassing questions about which of their
cronies got the money, the bill suspends the Freedom of Information Act for the Fed.
Bloomberg
has also confirmed that the NY Fed has outsourced picking the lucky recipients for this
slushy cornucopia to a private contractor, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager
(Goldman Sachs apparently has done enough of "
God's work " this time). The more things change in Washington, the more they stay the
same.
By contrast, the relief
provisions are barely adequate. They expand unemployment insurance (an additional $600 per
week for up to four months), feature one-time direct payments to Americans of $1,200 per adult
making up to $75,000 a year, and $2,400 to a married couple making up to $150,000, with $500
payments per child. However, the bill neither addresses the chronic inequality that now
characterizes the U.S. economy, nor is there provision for the self-employed or the millions of
independent contractor workers who have no employee benefits.
A better template would have been something along the lines of what was legislated in
Norway, although it is unrealistic to expect a U.S. Senate dominated by hardline Republicans to
acquiesce to something proposed by a Scandinavian social democracy. But
highlighting the contrast, Norwegian journalist Ellen Engelstad writes : "Workers put on
leave will now get full pay for twenty days (an improvement even on the pre-coronavirus
situation), but employers will only cover the first two days, while the rest will be paid by
the state. After that period, a worker on leave will receive 80 percent of their previous
salary, up to [about $29,000] a year, and 62.4 percent of everything they received on top of
that."
So long as we continue to embrace a lockdown strategy, generous relief is key to securing
widespread support for its maintenance. It will become politically impossible to sustain a
government-mandated lockdown where workers are forced to stay at home, absent some income
support to facilitate compliance with that order. So it is good that the government has also
recognized that this relief had to take the form of grants, not loans, because additional
private debt assumption would exacerbate long-term economic distress. The provision of $350
billion in "forgivable loans" to businesses are in reality grants, as these "loans" will be
forgiven if the businesses targeted maintain payroll. That's precisely the kind of
conditionality that should be attached to the relief provisions.
There will undoubtedly be other measures required once the scale of the economic fallout
becomes clearer. But when we get past relief packages and move toward taking the economy out of
its current cryogenically frozen state, the U.S. government must engage in a broader effort of
reconstruction so as to finally make this an economy that works for all. Policy should not
simply be about getting people back into resorts, malls or restaurants, or exhorting mass
consumption as a patriotic duty ( as George W.
Bush suggested after 9/11 ). Rather, we should be focused on ramping up mass-production
essential goods such as food, as well support for the health care systems via expansion of
testing kits, surgical masks, ventilators and palliative care, not only for this crisis, but
also to ensure that the system is not overwhelmed in the event of future pandemics (or a
possible recurrence of this one as we return to work and reintegrate with one another). It also
goes without saying that we should also expend vast sums on research and development to find
treatments and a vaccine, as well as rapid training of new medical workers. Substantial
increases in funding to the National Institutes of Health would be a good place to start.
As for conditionality, a case has been made that a force majeure "Act of God"
is not the time to play a "game of chicken" and impose major conditions for aid ,
especially as it is government policy itself that has precipitated the crisis. On the other
hand, political realities and historic precedent suggest that crisis conditions are the only
time one gets dramatic reforms; otherwise the elites regain their balance and suppress them (as
occurred after 2008). Plus, there are corporate bailout recipients in this bill, such as
Boeing, that were
heading toward a death spiral , even before the epidemic.
Let's also make clear distinctions here: An "Act of God" argument was
invoked in 2008 . That financial crisis was described as a "once in a 50-year event,"
something that couldn't have been planned for or insured against, etc. This was a lie. The
banks were not blameless, and there was causation between the crash and their behavior. But
Wall Street's bad actors weren't punished. There were, however, a lot of blameless victims who
were and are still paying a price. They didn't receive compensation and received pain and
punishment as if they were responsible, when they were in fact collateral damage.
In many respects, this crisis is even worse. We may not have a financial contagion, but we
have a physical contagion that is literally exposing us to
conditions comparable to the 1930s . But unlike the 1930s or, indeed, the 2008 global
financial contagion, policymakers have a twin task with seemingly incompatible goals: stopping
the spread of the virus in many ways exists in tension with the need to arrest the indirect
economic fallout from the pandemic. The longer the economic restrictions apply to eliminate the
health risk, the greater the economic fallout, which is precisely the dilemma President Trump
exposed (in his typically inelegant way), when he signaled
his desire to restart the U.S. economy by mid-April .
Trump's public musings were rightly denounced. His moral calculus is skewed; this president
is transparently consumed by the desire to safeguard his narrow economic interests and the
presidency (along with the fact that he stripped public health
agencies of the staffing, resources, and authority they needed to function ). A serious
president would send teams of epidemiologists to study other countries' success models, and
adopt them. Instead, Trump is literally gambling with the lives of potentially millions of
people as he tries to place this bet on an Easter miracle. Unlike Jesus, those lives lost won't
be resurrected, even if the economy ultimately revives.
Beyond that is the question of how best to assist businesses paralyzed for the sake of
public health. This is perhaps the most politically loaded part of the process when it comes to
assessing how far we go in terms of changing the behavior of our corporate sector versus the
notion of simply compensating businesses for losses sustained by an action deemed to be a
public health emergency.
Oren Cass, executive director of the soon-to-be-launched think tank American Compass , has made the case for compensating
businesses on the basis of
the takings clause of the U.S. Constitution , which states that "private property [shall
not] be taken for public use, without just compensation." Establishing "just compensation" is
often in the eye of the beholder, and Cass suggests that a just principle is compensating
businesses for the fixed costs they would normally incur in the event that they were
able to function as normal operating concerns (as opposed to making estimates of likely
profitability and compensating on that basis). The goal is clearly to avoid providing unfair
windfalls but to keep businesses solvent until they reopen.
On the other hand, one of the principal complaints directed against the bailouts granted
(especially to the banks) in 2008 is that bad corporate actors who were responsible for
creating the crisis were given money with no strings attached. In that regard, the bailouts not
only allowed them to revive profitability quickly (as the status quo ante was restored), but
also actively lobbied against any kind of regulation to prevent a recurrence of the activities
that created the crash in the first place.
The lessons many drew from the experience was that the only time to extract concessions and
induce changes in behavior from bad corporate actors is at a time when they are economically
vulnerable, even if the precipitating cause of that vulnerability was the government-mandated
shutdown of the economy. It is impossible to remake an economy if, for example, corporate
bailouts are used to perpetuate behavior that undermines economic prosperity. While the
Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act does introduce some restrictions on buybacks
and limiting stock dividends, it "avoids the more restrictive language that was included in the
House version of the legislation,"
according to Defense News .
Many are trying to distinguish this bailout from 2008 (i.e., this time is a non-economic
shock, something that couldn't have been planned for or insured against; businesses that are
failing right now are doing so through no fault of their own and they're still good/healthy
businesses), because saying "this is just how creative destruction works" is clearly untenable
right now. In reality, the collapse in aggregate demand caused by the 2008 financial crisis
arguably was just as exogenous to the consumer economy. Fatuous distinctions to justify further
corporate predation simply provide another illustration that what we had before the coronavirus
pandemic clearly was not working for most people. The truth is that for decades we've had a
hollowing out of democracy, and a massive expansion of wealth inequality accompanied by
Mussolini-style crony capitalism.
During the Great Depression, legislation was implemented to prevent a recurrence of the
1920s bubble. Roosevelt's New Deal did not legislate to restore the status quo ante but rather
to create a very different sort of economy.
Under the cover of a public health emergency, however, the so-called "new normal" is looking
a lot like the old normal. This bill gives the pigs yet another big feed at the public trough,
and Congress is happily ladling out the goodies. Much like the 1930s, then, the very legitimacy
of liberal capitalist democracy is at stake. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an FDR
ready to lead us in this acute moment of need.
Last week I was unable to apply for unemployment in my state, Hawaii, because I am self
employed. I get kicked out of the application process after the first few qualifying
questions in the online application process. Today, it went straight through. You make
yourself your own ex employer and that's it. I'm assuming this has to do with this federal
package. On a side note I am one of many self employed registered legal tour guide operators
in the state that rely heavily on visitors and all of us are up in arms that somehow this
bill is also going to give money to Uber and Lyft drivers who are not even legal in the
state. Only partially in the county of Oahu.
I did something similar during the GFC.
I have a C Corp in Calif with myself as the only employee.
I applied for UI and received it for about a year.
However, my contribution rate ramped up and my rating declined to F. Still worth it.
Calif also borrowed a lot of money from the Feds last time and had to pay it back.
Employers were assessed a portion each year. Finally repaid after 5 or so years.
Rep Thomas Massey did some math. $2T from congress, and $4T from Feds so far = $68,000 per
family of new Nat'l debt and dollar devaluation. Yet each household is likely to see only
about $3000 of that $68000. Massey may have a point, perhaps there is just a tinge of
maldistribution afoot here. And isn't that always the case in Crisis Capitalism, to never let
a good crisis go to waste? Just maybe they could be doing a better job in the distribution of
this package?
While many things were discussed about Covid and the Covid Recovery plan on Friday, what
struck me was a reference to this stimulus bill that this is our Marshall Plan. While that
sounds good, is it really? And another thing that struck me was how many striking
similarities there are.
The final striking observation was Pelosi et al reminding us, that this is not the last
stimulus bill that will be related to stimulating an economic recovery. In short, what
Pelosi's telling us this is the prefatory Helicopter monies from our new "Helicopter Avenging
Angels." Economist Murray Rothbard told a story about an angel looking down at the woes of
mankind and decided that everyone would feel better if they all had an extra $1000. So, that
is what the angel did, deposited $1000 into everyones bank account one night. Next morning,
everyone woke up to an extra $1000. Those that spent it first on goods benefited most. Those
that waited to spend it, got less bang for their buck bc the cost of goods rose.
So, it is with this stimulus story littered with maldistribution. Velocity of money in an
economy increases most and therefore GDP or gross output if it is in the hands of households
and consumers.
Over the past 12 yrs or so, fiscal and monetary stimulus packages have been referred to as
bazookas. Today, they have mushroomed into "Nukes." And the Nukes, themselves, are
mushrooming.
If Pelosi is right, this will not be the last stimulus bill relating to coronavirus, then
this is not far from what happened with the Marshall Plan. The 1947-48 Marshall Plan was
replaced by the Mutual Security Plan in 19951. The MSP plan was extended from 1951-1961. The
MSP plan gave away about $7.5 billion annually until 1961 when it was replaced by yet another
program – he United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The USAID is
now one of the largest official aid agencies in the world, and accounts for more than half of
all U.S. foreign assistance -- the highest in the world in absolute dollar terms.
In short, the Marshall Plan kept transmuting itself into something new. Until it became a
"perpetual entity."
And it is not so different than the Federal Reserve's QE programs or other so-called
"temporary" facilities that somehow are resurrected, transmuted or whatever. But somehow,
these programs mange to live on like zombies.
Zombie, Zombie, Zombie. They are fighting, With their tanks and their bombs, And their
bombs and their guns.
It's the same old theme since the 1947 Marshall Plan
In your head, in your head, Their still fighting,
With their tanks and their bombs And their bombs and their guns
But I digress.
The question then becomes, how well did the Marshall Plan work to generate economic
growth. According to Marshall Plan's own accounting, the MP only accounted for an increase of
less than ½% of GDP growth a year. That ain't much folks! So be prepared to be
underwhelmed! Very underwhelmed.
And this is precisely why our policymakers will be back with more and more stimulus
..mushrooming their bazookas into Nukes, and Nukes into what? Death Stars next?
The cost of the Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) resulted in
the United States transference of over $12 billion (equivalent to over $128 billion as of
2020)[1] in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World
War II. During the four years the plan was in effect, the United States donated $17 billion
(equivalent to $202.18 billion in 2019)
Despite the billions of dollars each year thrown at the EU recovery the Marshall Plan
which transmuted into the Mutual Security Plan, these plans have apparently contributed
little to the EU economic recovery.
Over the past 12 years, central banks and gov'ts have thrown trillions of dollars at the
fiscal system, and yet our financial and monetary system still doesn't function properly.
Their solution: throw trillions more at the most recent crisis du jour. TINA baby! Surely
with their Nuclear-sized Stimulus Package, this will solve and repair everything.
But perhaps, under a crisis capitalism, the aim is to ensure a crisis never goes to waste.
So perhaps, the aim of these stimulus programs is never to fix the broken window. Only to
give the appearance the window is being fixed. If you actually fixed the broken window, then
there would be no need to perpetually repeat these stimulus programs that can be so damn
self-serving to those closest to the monies. Then where would Nancy and her Cohorts be?
The Covid Bill our Marshall Plan are fiscal responses to disasters. To this extent, they
both that into the context of French Economist Frederic Bastiat's Parable of the Broken
Window.
"Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas" ("That Which We See and That Which We Do Not See")
to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not
actually a net benefit to society.The parable seeks to show how opportunity costs, as well as
the law of unintended consequences, affect economic activity in ways that are unseen or
ignored. The belief that destruction is good for the economy is consequently known as the
broken window fallacy or glazier's fallacy. And yet, destruction of the economy can be quite
beneficial to the "first financial responders" to the destruction of the economy.
My apologies Yves, I should have forwarded this to you as a separate post. Feel free to
post if you like
Thanks for the informative comment. I'm not surprised to know that the Marshall Plan
resulted in an increase of less than 1/2 % of GDP growth. I assume that you're referring to
the GDP of Europe.
I contend that the billions doled out via the Marshall Plan helped the FInancial institutions
and later, since we had destroyed all of the manufacturing facilities in Europe, it helped
all large US corporations who had a ready made market in Europe.
What an interesting comment. From my perspective – long time observer of things
never working properly – I think the Covid Crisis is just another example of the
pointless but dedicated pursuit of profits – unless of course there is a "Treasury"
willing to provide any and all shortfall to each and every private profiteer. Then it works
in a very wasteful and illogical manner. It requires also bailing out the hapless consumers
occasionally. Somehow I think we could do better.
I don't see the powers that be as anxious to fix the broken windows. They want the broken
windows to remain broken so they can continue to throw bazookas and nukes through them.
And I wonder,. and I think you too need to wonder why the Marshall Plan became the Mutual
Security Plan after 1951. Presumably, the rapid EU economic recovery no longer necessitated
the Marshall Plan. Facing an existential crisis as such, the Marshall Plan had to morph into
some other purpose, such as "Mutual Security" to keep access to those slush funds alive and
well.
I'd say off the top it is because neoliberal capitalism cannot withstand competition from
democracy – good social democracy. So we morphed into the policeman of the world and
pretended like we were critical to the cause of a failing economic ideology. It has never
worked and it has gradually become nonsense because we are continuously forced to save
society. No matter that we never to a good job of it – we still do it to insure
profits. I'd be more upset about it except for the fact that it is so transparently absurd
and I like to think it proves it own uselessness. What more do we need?
I'm no expert on the Marshall plan but as a European I get the impression it was much
appreciated. From the US' point of view though it had a geopolitical purpose. By getting
Europe on its economic feet again it fended off the threat of Communism and created a
customer for US exports. The Plan's successors are also primarily aimed at maintaining and
extending US hegemony, they are merely dressed up as charity.
I think the primary problem over the past decade is the assumption that the wealthy need
to be returned/maintained to their wealthy to trickle the wealth down. That clearly has not
been working efficiently.
So I am a fan of saving companies that are stable in the absence of major crisis, but
require large-scale management changes, and dramatically scale back executive compensation
for several years. If the executives can find a better job with better pay in an un-bailed
out company, they should take it. If the company would clearly have gone under due to massive
debt-loads, then a pre-package bankruptcy like GM with the government holding equity in the
final company should be the route.
The financial cries are simply creating bigger and bigger TBTF companies that can build up
debt again to fund shareholder buybacks until they get bailed out by the Fed and Treasury.
That cycle needs to stop. The country worked fine when there were many companies competing
with each other.
This coronavirus relief act expands TBTF. It's not just the big banks and other
finance/insurance/real estate corporations anymore. It seems to be about protecting financial
wealth wherever it resides. It's moral hazard writ large. Why behave prudently if the Fed has
your back?
I agree with "saving companies that are stable in the absence of major crisis, but require
large-scale management changes, and dramatically scale back executive compensation for
several years", and "if the company would clearly have gone under due to massive debt-loads,
then a pre-package bankruptcy like GM with the government holding equity in the final company
should be the route."
The government could enact an automatic stabilizer program to cover furloughed worker
wages during economic crises while employers continued to cover fixed costs and worker
benefits such as health insurance. Large corporations could be managed to cover theses things
if required to.
Even better, pass M4A and take employee health insurance off their books.
Why does the Uber/Lyft bailout have to be funded by workers who have put money into
unemployment insurance?
If they want to bail out the gig economy they should have said straight up we are bailing
them out.
The States have to come up with the funding for the unemployed. So you can bet there will
be a shortfall.
Why does the gig economy always takes but never give?
The biggest problem is laid off employees getting thru to the unemployment agencies.Then
they throw millions of Uber/Lyft drivers to clog up the Queue.
I'm wondering what AOC did or didn't do re this package? A lot has been said about
Sanders, but I'm fuzzy on AOC. I can't imagine she liked the thing. Did she have any way of
throwing a stick in in it?
that would "explain" her previous incumbent, a most malignant connected big money DNC
machine pol, "stepping aside" for her. Watch out. Likely future Manchurian afoot. (Like
showbama).
"A vote in which the presiding officer states the question, then asks those in favor and
against to say "Yea" or "Nay," respectively, and announces the result according to his or her
judgment. The names or numbers of senators voting on each side are not recorded."
If this bill was so G*d d**n important and potentially costly for the country it would
seem that courageous politicians would have WANTED their wise and considered yea/nay votes
known to their constituents.
I can see a voice vote for something trivial like a Proclamation of National Highway
Appreciation Day, but not something this consequential.
Preserving the option of telling constituents in the future "I (voice) voted against this
package" is hardly a profile in courage.
"What did the Senate majority fight for?!" Ocasio-Cortez asked. "One of the largest
corporate bailouts with as few strings as possible in American history. Shameful! The greed
of that fight is wrong for crumbs for our families."
Pelosi dallies on instituting remote voting, thereby strengthening her own powers and that
of the House leadership. AOC, like everyone else in the House, had to participate in a "voice
vote".
I simply can not understand where $4T is going to go! As we here know, inanimate objects
do not have agency. I demand to know whose pockets are about to be lined.
Another observation: As each "crisis" becomes more expensive, there appear to be
additional lined pockets.
first and foremost they saved the bond market i think . Powell has already used 4 trillion
for "liquidity" whatever that means I have no working knowledge of economics so I don't begin
to understand what any of it means except that we got family-blogged again.
The flu kills between 12,000 to 30,000 a year in the U S. Every year. In 30 some years of
adulthood, I know 1 person that died of pneumonia in their 60s. When the confinement is over
and people look around and ask around and can't name anybody they personally know who was
affected with anything more than a cold????
I hope this whole thing isn't just hysterics because that would not be a positive sign of
anything.
Knowing our politicians it's probably a lot of hysterics. The DimRats have been fooling
their diehards with Russia! Russia! Russia! Now it's time to use CV to pay back their
corporate supporters while throwing a few crumbs to their loyal followers with the chant
Econmy! Economy! Economy!
What are you talking about? Have you not been reading all the experts' reports on exactly
how dangerous this disease is? Have you not seen the pictures and stories coming from Spain
and Italy with morgues and trucks full of bodies? Have you not read the stories of medical
personnel and hospitals being overwhelmed by this pandemic? How many have to die for this to
matter to you? Sorry to be blunt but you lack of concern is frankly shocking. (P.S. I have a
kid on the front line of this disaster and we are very very worried for him)
I keep hearing, mostly from people I know, how the CV is not much more than a way
over-publicized version of the common cold or flu. I would counter that the common cold or
even the annual flu pandemic does not threaten to entirely overwhelm the health care system
of the countries and regions it infects. See Lombardy and New York, for example. Clearly, in
terms of the seriousness of its symptoms anyway, the CV is pretty far beyond the flu.
When do you think we should have taken these measures to slow the virus? When it hit 1000?
5000? 30,000? Tell me a number that you will be ok with so that we can hit that, then we can
hit the emergency button.
The problem with this virus is that it hits the healthcare system all at once, and they
have to choose who lives and dies Would you like to be chosen to live or die based upon an
algorithm?
I don't think it's hysterics, but "was it planned" is a good question: operation
covfefe.
"They" are not done with it yet, a mass fear op like this is too good to leave without
milking further. THIS will be "THE" anchor event for the NEXT 20+ years of "policy". Mark my
word. The top can not leave this gold.
Could we ask for better proof that neoliberal capitalism not only doesn't work, it's a
catastrophe all by itself. And nobody is saying a word about it. That will come later in
disguised language just as the money is going out now in disguised give-aways.
The population of Italy is (or was) 60.8 million. As of this morning, 9,134 Italians have
died – and the disease hasn't crested yet. The population of the United States is 327.2
million. If our experience is similar to theirs (and with the 'leadership' exhibited by Trump
and the US Congress it looks like it might be worse), we can anticipate 49,155
deaths.
That sure doesn't sound like "just hysterics" to me.
Please spit out the kool-aid. You're ignoring the magnitudes faster pace of this pandemic,
as well as the fact that it falls on top of our regular flu season, not to mention other
medical emergencies. If you have time to spread misleading information, please consider doing
your homework and helping share helpful facts.
hermeneut: Thank you. Naked Capitalism has had an informal policy against agnotology,
which is culturally induced ignorance or doubt.
I see it often on the larger WWW, where facts regularly are gummed to death by the
self-ignorant among us.
The coronavirus is producing death rates that are orders of magnitude above the flu's
death rate estimated at 0.01 percent. Coronavirus is wildly contagious compared to the flu.
Further, we don't know its long-term effects on anyone. People think that children may not be
affected–until we have a spate of lung disease ten years from now.
Upthread, there are a couple of agnotologists discussing how they don't know anyone who
has died of the flu or pneumonia. They must not get out much. Pneumonia is a co-factor in
many deaths, so much so that doctors call it the old man's friend, old person's friend.
Pneumonia means falling asleep and not waking up in the morning.
I was responding to stevens' 49K calculation. Please take issue with his comment. I fully
expect the mortality rate to increase beyond seasonal averages due to additional and more
severe complications.
Ah, someone who wasn't paying attention to their lessons. Unlike flu there is no vaccine
and the population is essentially a virgin host. Some people may be able to slough it off,
but it'll be by happenstance, and they'll still be carriers.
Hence, the progress of the disease will be exponential, less the temporary suppression and
mitigation you can see in countries like China and South Korea. The economic cost of these
measures will eventually be too much, they'll have to ease off, and the disease will take off
again. If you want to track the various countries "score" as this inevitability unfolds, go
to http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
As to your "calculations", this disease will have its way and will need to run its course.
It will increase exponentially and circle back in successive waves until the available supply
of hosts has been exhausted or developed immunity. In the aggregate, the US will meet its
wave in < a week, but every community will be hit at a different time depending on all
sort so things; Italy has only really taken a significant hits in a few provinces and the fun
for them is yet to come. The infection is just now gaining traction in the rest of Italy due
to effective mitigation and the WAVE of casualties is yet to come, as soon as they raise
their guard.
All this money being spent is just buying time and lining pockets. This is not a two hour
movie, where Brad Pitt has a blaze of insight and cooks up a cure for the zombie apocalypse
in a busy afternoon.
On further reflection (I have a comment on this post that is either in moderation or
disappeared) it seems that the pittance to workers with the right paperwork is to give the
appearance of doing something but ultimately it is to starve people into submission, so that
getting back to making money for the billionaires becomes the only alternative.
It taking off again is what I fear when I imagine what's likely to occur down the road.
Trump is right at least when he points out that eventually we'll all have to return to work.
Otherwise the economy will collapse completely, leaving us in some kind of Mad Max chaos.
Eventually. So, what happens when the voluntary lock-down is lifted, whether that be Easter
or a month or 2 or 3 later? If this thing is not completely eliminated by then will it not
just roar right back and we'll be in the same situation we find ourselves in currently, only
most of us even more precarious, financially? I can't seem to puzzle our current strategy out
in my mind without finding a horribly disastrous outcome at the end.
It seems, then, like fairly severe social distancing is mandated by circumstance way into
the future. If that's the case, then our previous ways of living, I mean a great deal of it,
all or the casual gathering and traveling around we've been accustomed to is dead, whether we
realize it now, or not. What the heck does this mean? What do we do with a good part of our
work-force and many if not most of our small business owners? I ask these questions without
any reasonable or acceptable answers in mind.
We are collectively going to have to take our licks here, painful though it will be,
sooner or later. Countries which have managed to keep things tamped down, for the moment
only, need to use that time to refine their hospital procedures and re-supply to save as many
as they can when the lid has to be taken off. That means having triage protocols in place for
COVID-19, as well as everyone else who comes in the door. Refer to the graphic in appendix B
of the Imperial College forecast for the US. Hospitals are going to be overwhelmed in any of
their scenarios, although every locality will have its encounter at at different time and the
precise circumstances will vary.
The initial UK strategy of angling for "herd immunity' was roundly ridiculed and
sheepishly withdrawn, but it was and is the only logical course. The disease simply doesn't
give a whit about the "But, but, but, but every life is priceless whinning" of those who
cannot face the reality. There is a BIG culling on the way, and all those Red State
denialisms, and sanctimonious bigots at Liberty University are going to get a big dose of
this, along with everyone else. This wave is coming, and all that can really be done is to
delay it, which may reduce the pain in a given locality, depending on their unique
circumstances and if the local authorities do their job right. This will be a battle fought
on a thousand hills (a thousand public health settings), and some will do better or worse
than others, even as the timing of the wave will vary for each: take notes on what is only
now beginning to happen in NYC, and how events unfold over the next month or two there. This
story will not be over by the eleven o'clock news or even next weekend.
Taking it up-front DOES help preserve the economy, allowing for recovery afterwards, and
that's key. Otherwise, we start drifting toward the Mad Max scenario alluded to above. Even
now, how are all the bodies going to be taken care of? Healthcare staff is already dying, and
staffs can be expected to desert as events unfold in NYC and elsewhere. All the support
people who make things work with their marginal salaries are noble, but stupid, if they stick
around those places, which are nothing but huge disease vectors. Then there's the food supply
chain, etc, etc, etc
Anyway we go this movie is not going to end well, and it won't end next week or even next
month. The disease will keep on coming back around until there is nobody left for it grab
hold of: meaning either there is a vaccine or herd immunity (usually thought of as 60-70% of
the population having had its brush with the thing).
As a Californian, "Red State denialisms, and sanctimonious bigots at Liberty University"
is an extremely unfair appellation given that I can see the same here in the Uber-Blue San
Francisco Bay Area.
While the improved efficiencies of the medical services are not quite as deep as in
the Red areas of California and in other states, the bigotry is just as strong. Only the
targets are changed. The deplorables, the poor, conservatives, and, of course, the homeless
tend to be fair game.
An infectious disease like COVID19 doesn't care about anything except reproduction and is
taking advantage of our situation; both political parties have been quite happy hollowing out
our nation-state condemning our nation to needless mass deaths and country's government to
possible collapse in fealty to the wealthy and in increasing the size of their personal bank
accounts.
Here is a
link to a paper just made public by the University of Washington, Institute for Health
Metrics and Evaluation. It's predicting Washington's peak at around April 14th. Also, they
evaluate each state, calculate its peak, and list the its available hospital beds and ICU
beds and note the estimated shortfalls (as well as shortfalls in ventilators) at peak.
Looking at their projections for New York State, one can understand Governor Cuomo's
urgency.
The simulator here has
adjustable parameters for the pandemic and resolution down to county level in many states of
the US. Of course we can expect patient transport between at least counties if not states
until ICUs are saturated. Very sobering to see how long this may play out. Cases and outcomes
are plotted too.
I ran a regression with Governor Cuomo's numbers (for NY State); Between March 3rd to
March 23rd was the confirmed raw data, before extrapolating; a social isolation program was
begun on the March 20th, so the data is pure "natural" "do nothing" dynamics; I fit the curve
to the data, and it showed 100% of NY State population affected by April 12th. The data
showed a slope co-efficient of 1.46 every day (46% increase in new cases every day).
R-squared for the fit: 96% (yes, rather high, which tells me this virus rolls out like
clockwork). However, we learn, even in Wuhan, a hard lockdown took two-three weeks to "begin
to bend the curve". We are in for the herd situation no question. It's been too little too
late by far. (but even one day saved from the 100% terminus is still quite a large
population: we are talking exponential time, not linear.).
When "early" (really drastically "late": being in first weeks of March) estimates from
Fauci, and other talking heads said US would likely see ~70% of population infected, that
translates to ONLY being able to shave ONE DAY off 100% herd exposure given my regression
showing just how contagious this is.
(It's my belief they lied to us, it's not just "droplets" but it is very nicely
aerosolized: breathing and exhaling in the wrong quarters is enought to do it; but thats'
just me, however do note, the Covid briefings at the top were state secret, not open to
journalists. We only get the vaudeville versions of everything, highly politicized to
boot).
The Corona flu [I like Corona because it sounds better -- more like cholera -- as in Love
in the time of Corona] is not the pandemic we need to worry about. That pandemic is still
coming. The Corona flu is bad but it is only a 'test' of our healthcare systems and
government, our knowledge, and our Media -- a live exercise. The U.S. is failing miserably in
all these areas. The CARES package -- I can't think of a more catchy name for this bill and
it really deserves a catchy name -- will do nothing to remedy the failings of our healthcare
systems and government, our knowledge, and our Media but it reveals how unprepared we are for
when the 'real' pandemic arrives.
Wed 25 Mar 2020 14.13 EDT Last modified on Wed 25 Mar 2020 17.50 EDT
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email 'if, as the
scientists predict, the result of loosening the restrictions was an acceleration in infections,
then pretty soon many firms would simply stop functioning, as workers became sick.' Photograph:
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images I s the cure worse than the disease? The Times
claimed today: "If the coronavirus lockdown leads to a fall in GDP of more than 6.4% more
years of life will be lost due to recession than will be gained through beating the virus."
It's hard to know where to start with this nonsense. It's based on a paper currently under
review at a journal entitled Nanotechnology Perceptions, which simply assumes that a fall in
GDP translates mechanically and directly into a fall in life expectancy.
It's this sort of reasoning that appears to be leading President Trump to call
for an early end to restrictions in the US, claiming that far more people would die of
suicide from a "terrible economy" than from the virus.
But the premise is simply wrong. A recession -- a short-term, temporary fall in GDP -- need
not, and indeed normally does not, reduce life expectancy. Indeed, counterintuitively, the
weight of the evidence is that
recessions actually lead to people living longer. Suicides do indeed go up, but other causes of
death, such as road accidents and alcohol-related disease, fall.
So at the most basic level, this argument ignores what the evidence says. But perhaps more
importantly, the idea that the way to minimise the economic damage is to remove the
restrictions before they've done their job -- definitively suppressing the spread of the virus
-- is a terrible one.
Does anyone believe that, whatever the government said, we could get back to "normal", or
something close to it, any time soon? If we were all allowed to return to work, many or most of
us would, quite rationally, choose not to, for fear of catching the virus. And if, as the
scientists predict, the result of loosening the restrictions was an acceleration in infections,
then pretty soon many firms would simply stop functioning, as workers became sick, or had to
stay at home to look after family members.
More broadly, restoring the economy to normal requires, above all, confidence. Amid
continuing uncertainty both about their own finances and the wider economy, households won't
spend and businesses won't invest. And that simply isn't going to happen until the spread of
the diseases has been contained.
So there is no tradeoff here. Health and economic considerations point in
exactly the same direction in the short term. Do whatever it takes -- and whatever it costs --
and do it now, in the interests both of our health and our collective wealth.
But what comes next? It is entirely reasonable to point out that serious damage to the
economy, if it persists over the longer term, will
reduce our welfare and maybe even -- as austerity and its aftermath have done -- life
expectancy. The last 10 days have seen universal credit
claims rise more than five-fold , to half a million, while YouGov data suggests that 2
million people may have lost their job. The recession is already here.
But this need not, and should not, be permanent. The risk here is that we allow the
inevitable fall in GDP that results from shutting down the economy to drive firms out of
business and workers into long-term unemployment. And there is nothing inevitable at all about
this.
After all, many European countries, such as France or Italy, probably, see their GDP fall by
10% or 20% or so in absolute terms every August when workers take their summer holidays. No one
notices -- the numbers are "seasonally adjusted" to take account of holidays, which means it
doesn't show up in the published data -- nor does it do any damage. Workers continue to be
paid, and businesses don't go bust just because they're not making any money. Come September,
everyone gets back to work as normal.
Of course this is very different -- that won't happen automatically with Covid-19. The
impacts are more widespread and long-lasting -- and we don't know how long -- than an enforced
extra holiday. But rapid and appropriate action by government can go a long way. Keeping
workers in jobs and
firms in business needs to be the priority. In the circumstances, the government's made a
good start, although there's
lots more to do .
So what we should be worried about -- both from an economic and a health perspective -- is
not how much GDP falls. It's going to fall by a lot, and that's a good thing. If it didn't --
if people were still going to work despite being told not to -- then the lockdown wouldn't be
working and we'd still see economic consequences further down the line. It's what happens to
GDP in a year or 18 months that matters.
And the long-term consequences? It wasn't the sharp fall in GDP in 2008-9 that reduced, over
the course of the next decade,
life expectancy for the poorest in our society . It was how the government chose to address
the economic fallout of the global financial crisis -- by underfunding and understaffing the
NHS and social care, and by eroding the basic welfare safety net that people depend on when
times are hard. As we are now discovering, these were false economies that left us less, not
more, prepared for this crisis.
Similarly, if we allow Covid-19 to permanently damage our economic and social fabric, it
will be our own fault, not that of the virus. This time we can, and must, do better.
• Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King's College London
and a former senior civil servant
Compulsory procurement of half a dozen luxury yachts would go a long way with funding, as
would the uber wealthy PAYING THEIR CORPORATE TAX.
These extreme right-wing leaders in this world are evil. They all claim to be practicing
Christians, unbelievably. Anti-Christ more like. I'm not religious, but blind Freddy would
tell you if Jesus had existed, then these guys are the Romans that killed him. They simply
don't give a shit; swathes of people are expendable.
Didn't a corrupted prime minister get eaten by his people one time? Just sayin'.
We have been weaning people off tobacco for a long time and this virus seems to love
compromised lungs - tragically, young and fit Americans may succumb due to unregulated vaping
products and decriminalised cannabis products - particularly if one survives but with
severely damaged lungs.
I’m sorry but recessions do cause a spike in suicide, mental health issues and stress
related cancer deaths. The most vulnerable in society, on the breadline, will as usual be the
people who struggle the most. To suggest life expectancy goes up in a recession is a fallacy.
The latest US Trump policy (US open for business, do the right thing weaklings and die for
the sake of the nation's financial interests) is basically identical with the original UK
Cummings policy. Over the next few weeks are we going to see this policy re-asserted in the
UK - probably. Why - because the alternative would be to attempt containment of Covis 19 -
which would require a South Korean style program of testing and quarantine. And there is
absolutely indication of any political appetite for doing so in the UK whatsoever.
The risk here is a replay of austerity that we saw after the 2008 financial crisis, with many
people left aside. Economically, this was to rebalance the books after the government
injected cash to support the banks. Socially it was damaging.
If we repeat the same pay back and austerity model (on steroids this time) the social and
political fallout could be horrendous.
But what are the alternatives?
it really does strike me as unfair that their plan was "to do nothing" - I think it
seems to be a bit nuanced than that; and terribly communicated
Yes, the plan was not 'do nothing', it was 'get at risk groups to isolate
themselves and assume that the NHS could deal with the small proportion of low risk groups
needing hospitalisation'. This is essentially what Sweden and NL are doing, with (like us
last week) the addition of social distancing to slow down transmission.
This is a better idea than trying to avoid everyone getting it ('containment'), because as
soon as you lift containment, you still have no immunity so you're basically at day 0 again.
Unless the plan is to be under lockdown forever, the containment approach is a panic, not a
strategy.
If you're going for herd immunity you do need to slow the infections down enough that the
serious cases don't overwhelm your health service. That's what the social distancing and WFH
guidelines are about, and outside the cities and a few visitor spots it was working well last
week.
What made European economies grow in 1948? Confidence, investment, a social security
network, education for all, and building, building, building homes badly needed in destroyed
cities and for the homecoming of millions of veterans and the ensuing baby boom.
The post-war recession feared by economists did not occur. Instead there was a quarter
century of prosperity. Never had there been there so many people, and never before had they
had it so good. Until the arrival of the family butchers. Who sold the family silver and
sacrificed welfare on the altar of m-m-m-monetarism. Said Ssupermac in his maiden speech in
the Lords.
Money quote " There is this sense that experts are untrustworthy, and have agendas that
aren't aligned with the people"
That was always true about neoliberal economists. So it might well be true about mecuacl
bureaucrats like Fauci. Did he disclose his stock holdingd and financial interests? Is he a part
of neoliberal "medical-industrial complex" which wants to rake profits at the expense of people
health?
His email to Hillary suggest that he is medical professional but a politician.
Actually any top medical honcho in Washing is compromised as they did nothing to stop
"balance billing" fraud and too over of ambulance business by private equity sharks.
Notable quotes:
"... There is this sense that experts are untrustworthy, and have agendas that aren't aligned with the people ..."
"... In the email, Dr. Fauci praised Mrs. Clinton for her stamina during the 2013 Benghazi hearings. The American Thinker falsely claimed that the email was evidence that he was part of a secret group who opposed Mr. Trump. ..."
Adding that Dr. Fauci is bearing the brunt of the attacks, Mr. Bergstrom said: " There
is this sense that experts are untrustworthy, and have agendas that aren't aligned with the
people . It's very concerning because the experts in this are being discounted out of
hand."
... ... ...
Anti-Fauci posts spiked, according to Zignal Labs. Much of the increase was prompted by a
March 21 article in The American Thinker, a conservative blog, which published the
seven-year-old email that Dr. Fauci had written to an aide of Mrs. Clinton.
In the email, Dr. Fauci praised Mrs. Clinton for her stamina during the 2013 Benghazi
hearings. The American Thinker falsely claimed that the email was evidence that he was part of
a secret group who opposed Mr. Trump.
... ... ...
In an interview, Mr. Fitton said, "Dr. Fauci is doing a great job." He added that Dr. Fauci
"wrote very political statements to Hillary Clinton that were odd for an appointee of his
nature to send."
...One anti-Fauci tweet last Sunday read: "Dr. Fauci is in love w/ crooked @HillaryClinton.
More reasons not to trust him."
"... The coronavirus emergency has exposed the failures and flaws of the European Union, while underscoring the importance of nation-states. In Europe, we've observed a series of events that have demonstrated the collapse of the supra-national model. First, the borders shut down -- Austria and Slovenia acted unilaterally, without asking approval from Italy's government. The move was also symbolic: Italy was not only isolated, it was abandoned to its own devices. ..."
"... Globalization may have its efficiencies, but an overwhelmed health care system suffers in the absence of internal production of the necessary materials -- life-saving ventilators, infection-preventing hazmat vests, face masks. The global evolution of supply chains exported manufacturing and relied heavily on the cheap imports of essential products from abroad. But with the spread of the coronavirus, many states are now forbidding the export of medical equipment. A good example is Turkey, a country that readily accepts EU funds and that many liberals would like to bring into the Union. Ankara blocked a shipment of 200,000 face masks already purchased by Italy for the hard-hit northern regions of Marche and Emilia Romagna. ..."
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a greater toll on Italy than any other nation. The
Italians are facing their most severe crisis since the Second World War, with Lombardy in the
industrial north particularly hard hit. Yet for all its rhetoric about global citizenship and
solidarity, the European Union has all but abandoned them. That's even though communist China,
arguably globalization's greatest and shrewdest state beneficiary, is ready to fill the void
and help Italy put out the fire its own virus started.
The coronavirus first appeared in Italy on January 31 when two Chinese tourists from the
Hubei province tested positive in Rome, eight days after they'd landed at the Milan airport in
Lombardy. The two were immediately isolated and quarantined in the Roman Spallanzani hospital,
and the situation seemed under control -- until February 21. That day, Italy confirmed 16 new
coronavirus cases, 14 in Lombardy and two in Veneto. A 38-year-old Italian from Codogno near
Milan with acute respiratory symptoms was identified as patient zero. Despite Italy's attempts
to contain the virus by locking down the city of Codogno, coronavirus infections spread.
In just a few days, Italy had the highest number of infections in Europe, with Lombardy as
the pandemic's epicenter. To avoid the spread of infections to the rest of Italy, the
government locked down the entire region of Lombardy and other areas in northern Italy,
effectively quarantining 17 million people. A few days later, as the situation deteriorated,
the whole of Italy was declared an "orange zone" -- all "non-essential" commercial activities
were shut down and the free movement of citizens was limited to grocery and pharmaceutical
shopping and work obligations deemed by the state as of "prime importance."
The economic repercussions of a complete shutdown loomed large. Consequently, Italy asked
the EU for more flexibility on its accounts and requested that emergency measures be deployed
to support Italian citizens and businesses. At the time, the crisis was hardly felt in the
European powerhouses, France or Germany. The EU's response was slow and inefficient, and
Italians started to feel abandoned by European institutions. As the original signer of the
Treaty of Rome, Italy is a founding member of the EU and the third largest economy in the
eurozone.
On March 12, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, marked a
point of no return -- she gave a highly anticipated speech outlining the measures the bank
would introduce to combat the effects of the coronavirus. Lagarde decided not to cut interest
rates, arguing against the policy of "whatever it takes," as had been outlined by former ECB
president Mario Draghi. To Italians, the EU's indifference was a betrayal. The consequences of
her words were immediate -- and disastrous for Italian stocks. Even the pro-EU president of the
Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, released a harsh statement asking the EU to correct its
ways in the "common interest" of Europe.
The EU did change its position on the COVID-19 response, but not until the health care
crisis had spread to France and Germany, making it their problem, too. By then, the damage done
to the Italians' trust in European institutions was already beyond repair. With few viable
options left, Italy's government is now considering the European "Save the State Funds," asking
the EU to implement the €500 billion emergency bailout program from the European Stability
Mechanism designed for EU member states -- a risky move that may saddle Italy with long-term
debt on a scale similar to Greece.
The coronavirus emergency has exposed the failures and flaws of the European Union, while
underscoring the importance of nation-states. In Europe, we've observed a series of events that
have demonstrated the collapse of the supra-national model. First, the borders shut down --
Austria and Slovenia acted unilaterally, without asking approval from Italy's government. The
move was also symbolic: Italy was not only isolated, it was abandoned to its own devices.
Globalization may have its efficiencies, but an overwhelmed health care system suffers in
the absence of internal production of the necessary materials -- life-saving ventilators,
infection-preventing hazmat vests, face masks. The global evolution of supply chains exported
manufacturing and relied heavily on the cheap imports of essential products from abroad. But
with the spread of the coronavirus, many states are now forbidding the export of medical
equipment. A good example is Turkey, a country that readily accepts EU funds and that many
liberals would like to bring into the Union. Ankara blocked a shipment of 200,000 face masks
already purchased by Italy for the hard-hit northern regions of Marche and Emilia Romagna.
The Italians are coming together to fight the pandemic. Many Italian companies have
converted production at home: those working in the textile industry have started producing face
masks. Italy's only manufacturer of respiratory equipment, in the province of Bologna, is not
able to meet the current needs and relieve the national shortage of ventilators. Army
technicians are now helping to increase production capacity.
What has the coronavirus in Italy taught us so far? A great nation is doing what it can to
become self-sufficient as the crisis proves daily that the propaganda of the prophets of
globalization is false. We see that there are strategic sectors, such as health care,
transport, energy, defense, and telecommunications, that have to be considered from the
perspective of national security and not strictly business.
This is a new, unspoken understanding that unites Italy today. We have witnessed a return of
patriotism: flags are hanging from windows and Italians are singing the national anthem. But
there is something else to consider: our freedom. Some politicians, including former prime
minister Matteo Renzi, are proposing to monitor the movements of individuals using their phones
and data from telecommunication companies to police compliance with the lockdown rules and
assess penalties for violations. This smacks of the Big Brother surveillance state. The
collection of metadata for statistical ends, as practiced in Lombardy, should be separated from
the indiscriminate control of individual citizens. Otherwise an Orwellian precedent will be
set. Such an anti-democratic attitude seems to be one of the collateral ideological effects of
what President Trump refers to as a "Chinese virus."
... ... ...
Francesco Giubilei is an entrepreneur, author, and independent journalist based in Rome,
Italy. He is founder and president of the Nazione Futura magazine and
foundation.
"... DONALD TRUMP: Nobody knew there'd be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion. ..."
"... Trump is like the kid who played video games when he should have been doing his homework, then failed miserably on the test and tried to bullshit his way through the essay questions. ..."
"... As you are probably aware, a handful of elected leaders were selling their stock while assuaging the public about the dangers of the pandemic. We've gone from incompetence, to negligence, to outright profiteering. ..."
Last year, the Dept. of Health and Human Services ran a 7 month long exercise code named "Crimson Contagion," a dry run response
to a global pandemic which started in China and expected more than 100 million Americans to become ill.
Trump is like the kid who played video games when he should have been doing his homework, then failed miserably on the test
and tried to bullshit his way through the essay questions.
As you are probably aware, a handful of elected leaders were selling their stock while assuaging the public about the dangers
of the pandemic. We've gone from incompetence, to negligence, to outright profiteering.
dropping bombs and sanctioning free commerce in other countries is the American way of protecting the proceeds of the sociopaths
not such a good way to stop pandemics. Not in my name congress
@QMS
Fifty-six years dumping an untold number of dollars into "keeping us safe" from a foreign invader and the one time it happened,
not any of the resources were worth a damn.
The problem isn't so much that the real threats are unknown, at least not in broad outline form, but they're not "sexy." Not
amenable to what the military and cloak and dagger spy guys are into. And the perpetual USG budgets for the sexy stuff is far
more profitable. And is better suited to hiding all the graft and corruption (and employing the surplus and unskilled labor that
elite universities crank out) that upset ordinary people fearful that some undeserving person would get something for free from
the USG.
supplies, either. Well, given how the govt likely views our soldiers, I guess that's not surprising.
pandemic war games but no money to implement the most basic stockpiles (thermometers, face masks, gloves) that would be
very helpful in containing a virus. The larger serious shortcomings in the US are mostly intractable due to the "best" health
care system that money can buy.
More activity on the dark, unethical side of capitalism. There's an entire history of it,
opium wars, Atlantic slave trade, pornography, control of political agents through
pedophilia. The list does go on and strangely enough it's usually the same actors.
There is also a tendency to think newer=better. I've heard doctors and pharmacists complain
that patients will get offended when prescribed a cheaper, older drug. They want the best and
newest, they need and deserve it!
@Redneck farmer That is because advertising works. Drug companies being allowed to
advertise guaranteed that predators, such as the Sacklers, would want to own drug companies.
More activity on the dark, unethical side of capitalism. There's an entire history of it,
opium wars, Atlantic slave trade, pornography, control of political agents through
pedophilia. The list does go on and strangely enough it's usually the same actors.
john@39
This article might interest you. The author makes the point that neo-liberalism is begging to
be replaced.
"...Crises like these call for an interventionist state to keep the system together, or
for mutual aid and solidarity, especially among people abandoned or targeted by the state. In
some countries, the legitimacy of state administration and planning will grow, in others
political legitimacy will fall precipitously, leading not just to mutual aid networks, but to
attempts to build dual power.
"What economic paradigm – if any – may become dominant isn't clear. The
prestige of Chinese-style state capitalism is growing. Keynesian and Modern Monetary Theory
economists will find jobs in high places, and market socialism-with-nationalisations will
continue to strengthen its position as the dominant economic doctrine on the left.
"However, the economic and ecological unsustainability of growth will raise hard questions
of how to distribute or redistribute the losses in a non-growth world. Fascism and populist
welfare chauvinism will offer the false security of disaster nationalism, national hoarding
and resource wars.
Degrowth's offer of a planned and willed exit from growth will continue to gain followers,
and communist strategies will grow in importance, as the surpluses that can be divided
between contending classes shrink. Ecological breakdown and an absence of growth will pose
questions that are already imposing themselves in the intense isolation of the lockdown: what
are the joys of deceleration, what to do with an abundance of time and interdependence? And,
more forcefully, it will radically narrow the space for social and political compromise.
"Struggle is unavoidable. The question is who will organise it and how."
"... Decades of this modern religion have resulted in an incredibly tragic situation: a disproportionate wealth distribution in the hands of the 0.1%, an over-bloated services/consumer driven economy, increased rates of poverty and despair internationally as well as a dismal loss of vital skills, and productive capacity once enjoyed by advanced industrial nations just four decades ago. Vital infrastructure built up during the 1930s-1960s has been permitted to decay through simple neglect while un-payable debts have reached record highs. ..."
"... Banks in Spain have been nationalized (albeit only "temporarily") to force finance to act in accordance with the needs of society. ..."
"... This renewal of national sovereign powers breaks all of the monetary "laws of the neoliberal order" and with that defiance of globalization, a genuine positive potential for a paradigm shift is visible... ..."
Western society has long been gripped by a deep seeded belief in money. Trillions of dollars
of bank notes tied to ever-growing mountains of un-payable national debts has taken on a life
of its own over the years. As the post-1971 years rolled by, society increasingly lost a sense
that this human invention called "money" was created to serve humanity rather than rule it, and
with that lost sense, money became an idol of worship.
Decades of this modern religion have resulted in an incredibly tragic situation: a
disproportionate wealth distribution in the hands of the 0.1%, an over-bloated
services/consumer driven economy, increased rates of poverty and despair internationally as
well as a dismal loss of vital skills, and productive capacity once enjoyed by advanced
industrial nations just four decades ago. Vital infrastructure built up during the 1930s-1960s
has been permitted to decay through simple neglect while un-payable debts have reached record
highs.
Then like a thief in the night, the illusion was ripped away.
The Confused Response to
the Crisis
This ripping away took the form of an international pandemic which has resulted in western
nations' economies grinding to a halt with a new $2 Trillion government emergency spending bill
unveiled on March 24. The Washington
Post reports that this bill will authorize "hundreds of billions of dollars sent to
Americans in the form of checks as a way to flood the country with money in an effort to blunt
the dramatic pullback of spending that has resulted from the coronavirus outbreak."
Governments across the Trans-Atlantic have also announced national interventions into banks
and private industry in order to force production quotas of vital equipment like ventilators,
masks and other medical necessities to meet the increased demand. Banks in Spain have been
nationalized (albeit only "temporarily") to force finance to act in accordance with the needs
of society. In America, the Defense Authorization Act and broader War Powers Act passed by
President Trump gives the executive broad powers to take over vital industries if needed in
order to mobilize the nation to respond to the crisis.
This renewal of national sovereign powers breaks all of the monetary "laws of the neoliberal
order" and with that defiance of globalization, a genuine positive potential for a paradigm
shift is visible...
... but something vital is still missing.
This "missing something" is clearly demonstrated by the continued obsession with money as
new bailouts of the collapsing speculative banks have now risen to a
$1 trillion/day overnight repo loan to collapsing banks which is added to the $1 Trillion
14 week loans offered every week that will dramatically increase the
$9 trillion already emitted since helicopter money began in earnest in September 2019. With
the mass panic and economic shutdown instigated by COVID-19, markets have lost over 30% of
their value and fears of a new great depression have spread far and wide.
Rather than impose
serious bank regulation like Glass-Steagall to break up the commercial from speculative banks
as was done in 1933, the American government has merely unleashed unlimited money printing.
This bipolar response is akin to trying to stop a raging fire with a combination of water and
gasoline.
We thus find that the greatest crisis facing humanity is not caused by the market crisis, or
even the coronavirus per se, but rather society's profound inability to understand the source
of real from fictitious value.
What is REAL Value? Lincoln and FDR Revisited
"The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of
Government, but it is the Government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of
these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers
will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges. The financing of all public
enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of
the Treasury will become matters of practical administration. The people can and will be
furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master
and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power."
These words were uttered by none other than America's 16th president Abraham Lincoln as he
fought to take federal control of credit vis a vis the "greenbacks" that not only allowed him
to win the war of secession but also construct the greatest infrastructure and
industrialization programs of history driven by the trans continental railway . The dramatic
success of Lincoln's "American System" not only saved the union, but spread successfully across
the world from Japan's Meiji restoration, Russia's trans Siberian rail development, Bismarck's
Zollverein in Germany and Sadi Carnot's France. This powerful spread of what German economist
Friedrich List called "the
American System of Political Economy" nearly annihilated the money-worshipping system of
Adam Smith's Free Trade doctrine from the earth and only failed in this task via a plenitude of
London-directed assassinations, and a couple of imperially-orchestrated wars and revolutions
along the way.
Amidst this dark period, Franklin Roosevelt called for the Democrats to claim the legacy of
Lincoln from the corrupt republican party and faced a
Wall Street-backed coup d'etat , survived a freemasonic assassination
attempt and subverted a
City of London-orchestrated bankers' dictatorship all in his first year in office. During
his March 4, 1933 inaugural address, the president rallied the American people saying:
"I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken
nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures
as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my
constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption."
As I have outlined in my recent paper
How to Crush a Bankers' Dictatorship , FDR took control of credit in a similar manner as
Lincoln by forcing the Federal Reserve to obey a national mandate for the first time since the
private bank was set up in 1913. He did so by imposing his ally Mariner Eccles into the
position of Chairman who understood that money had to create infrastructure and industrial
growth in order to acquire any claim to having actual "value". This was a stark break from the
"hands off/laissez-faire" policy of President Hoover and his JP Morgan-run cabinet. FDR also
emitted Lincoln-styled productive credit through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC)
to fuel the New Deal. The RFC issued over $33 billion in low-interest loans by the end of the
war (more than all private banks combined).
Describing his moral philosophy of political economy, FDR stated:
"We seek not merely to make government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant
personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity. We are poor indeed if this
nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the
unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in
the books of human fortitude."
What is missing today
Today's America is confronting an existential crisis similar to that which both Lincoln and
Franklin Roosevelt battled in their time. Just as the proto-deep state of 1865 ran Lincoln's
assassination from Montreal Canada, and took over the White House minutes after FDR's untimely
death in 1945, today's deep state has attempted in vain to overthrow President Trump while
successfully undermining the political viability of other "outsiders" like Bernie Sanders and
Tulsi Gabbard.
The difference is that today's crisis combines elements of all previous crises of 1861-1865,
1929-1933 and 1938-1945: the very real new threat of chaos and civil war within, NATO-led wars
with China and Russia without and economic collapse across the entire trans-Atlantic bubble
economy. The other difference is located in the current presidency's inability to FOCUS with a
clear mind on principled solutions to this multi-faceted crisis while instead finding itself
trapped within contradictory impulses.
While FDR and Lincoln understood that VALUE was located the physically productive forces of
labor which sustained and improved the lives of people and gave the constitution's pre-amble a
real living character, today's American leadership has displayed a far greater ignorance to
this basic fact of life. The vital difference between "need" vs "want" which has been obscured
by decades of free market ideology has resulted in a loss of moral judgment necessary to
properly put out the fires threatening to unleashing civil war, chaos and fascist global
government "solutions" across the Trans Atlantic today.
The new multipolar alliance led by Russia and China have demonstrated what modern day New
Deal policies can do. The Belt and Road Initiative as well as the Strategic Eurasian
Partnership, Polar Silk Road and bold space exploration projects all reflect the type of
principles of win-win cooperation and long term planning that characterized both FDR and
Lincoln earlier. The Health Silk Road announced
earlier this week by President Xi Jinping provides a brilliant maneuver to tackle the COVID-19
pandemic under a non-Malthusian worldview. This Multipolar Alliance exists as a form of a life
raft for anyone wishing to escape the fate of the Titanic and embark on a new epoch of growth
and cooperation.
The question is: Do western powers have the ability to act according to a scientific (and
moral) standard of value by aligning with this multipolar alliance or will they choose to
remain in Orwell's dystopic cage and succumb to a fate which Lincoln, FDR and other great
leaders gave their lives to prevent?
Let's say Bob can make 10 high-quality wigets per hour, while Jim can make 8 medium-quality wigets per hour. Bob gets paid
100$, while Jim gets paid 50$. Bob is more efficient and productive worker. But he will be fired and replaced by Jim, because
Jim's cost of labor is lower. In this case market will eliminate the more productive worker in favor of a less productive one.
Now, within one nation this difference in wages will be very unlikely and quickly adjusted by the market. But between nations,
Jim could be living in a poor country, where he can afford to survive on 50$, while Bob lives in a rich country with high rents
and high product costs, so he'd barely get by on 100$.
So, how much of the global trade is increasing overall value due to local advantages and how much is just shifting value from
some people in favor of others? And shouldn't we favor the first and minimize the second?
Warnings like this have been happening over the past decade, and there are books (Poorly made in China) showing each part of
the threat.
Each time, it was "Interview with a Zombie" with someone from NR, or Cato, or Mises, or even here, gurgling "Freeeeee Traaaade;
Laaaazeeeee Faaaaire".
Trade has frictional costs. The shipping between the Ricardian tautological countries is not free. If it costs $10,000 to send
the products to the destination, there is no comparitive advantage. Nature provides barriers.
But even worse, there is NO free trade, just regulatory arbitrage. Lets say you need to open a factory. You can:
1. Open it here and wait for the swarms of agents from OSHA, EEOC, EPA, IRS, etc. to harrass you and eat out your substance,
and your workers to be treated like people, and have to get loans from an often hostile banking system that prefers wall street
ETFs. An implacable bunch of socialists and SJWs that think Capitilists are evil and capitalism must be destroyed or just people
on power trips will constantly try to close you down and bankrupt you personally and throw you in prison.
2. Open it in China where they will kick farmers off the land and build it for you, and staff it with disposable workers and
you can just dump pollution into the local stream. There will be the customary cultural cronyism and corruption, but that's what
a consultant is for (Poorly made in china, whats wrong with China). But it is the symbiont that wants to keep the host healthy
so there will be the most blood to skim.
3. Open it in Mexico where it also has different customs than China, but the crony corruption is still far easier to deal with
and less expensive than the Destroyer Obamabots.
Capitalism is really good at optimizing for lowest cost, it is really bad at dealing with "externalities" like a once in a hundred
year global pandemic. Governments should take the "long view" well at least 4-5 years at a time. Corporations look at things more
quarter to quarter.
As Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile, the two authors are making a straw men argument with regard to David Ricardo.
I don't blame them. They are repeating what is written in most economics textbooks about the theory of comparative advantage.
How they should know that this textbook theory is based on a misinterpretation of Ricardo's famous numerical example. (See here:
https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/...
Ricardo did not assume that prices would remain stable, nor did he recommended that a nation should specialise in one major
industry or that no two agents should specialise in the same industry. Depending on a single supplier is indeed a risky bet, but
that is not what their original case for free trade recommended. On the contrary, it was meant to be a remedy against national
and foreign monopolies.
Many lessons can be learned from the present crisis. To make countries less vulnerable or fragile to pandemics like COVID-19,
we need robust public health care systems that covers all its residents. The health care system needs to have excess capacities
(hospital beds, medical personal, ) and sufficient stocks (masks, ventilators, ) to handle the significant increase in the number
of patients during pandemics. We need more international cooperation, coordination and solidarity, not less. So the exact opposite
of protectionism and national solo efforts.
I was a partner in a law firm where I was ultimately responsible for all civil litigation
we handled. I was continually shocked and disgusted by what I saw. It was incredible.
People's lives have absolutely zero value to these monsters at the top, who have gotten where
they are because they are so ruthless and selfish.
We, as a society, carefully select for these psychopathic types in all high-level
competitive endeavors where large sums are hanging in the balance. Their only loyalty is 1.)
to themselves; 2.) to the shareholders/partners, firmly in that order, and they are VERY
highly rewarded for it. That the commoner's well being holds no value to them aside from how
it can be exploited to their businesses' advantage, is a truism revealed and reinforced
daily. The Ford Pinto, Dalkon Shield and other horrifying high profile cases (from the era
when I practiced) come immediately to mind.
Pig Pharma is by no means alone in their utter disregard for the everyday man and woman,
it's just that we intuitively expect people in the medical field to want to heal the sick,
not prolong it. But as the Wall Street analysts remind the heads of Pig Pharma on a daily
basis: curing disease is a bad business model. Prolonging and worsening illness, just short
of death, is optimal. Just ask the lovely Sackler family.
Very sad to learn it's as bad or worse across the pond, but I guess that's to be
expected.
I suspect the worst of it exists in the military environment, where service men and women
are apparently routinely used as guinea pigs, and often completely unknowingly. But at least
they know when they sign up that they are 100% expendable ..
This note presents broad brush
illustrations from a simple accounting model of the impacts of the coronavirus epidemic on macroeconomic
balance, with emphasis on fiscal interventions. The premise is that supporting effective demand is essential
for sustaining economic activity. The covid-19 epidemic created mass unemployment by shutting activity down.
The resulting income loss undoubtedly reduced household consumption which makes up two-thirds of GDP. The
only way to restore consumption is for the government acting as the "borrower of last resort" to raise its
deficit and transfer the proceeds to households. A numerical example presented below suggests that an
increase of ten percentage points in the ratio of government net borrowing (spending on goods and services
plus transfers to households minus tax revenues) to GDP would do the trick.
The stimulus legislation now before Congress does not go far enough. Its size -- $2.2 trillion or ten
percent of GDP – is the right order of magnitude but the breakdown of spending is biased away from
households and toward business,
viz.
, payments that may flow more or less directly to households –
checks in the mail, more unemployment insurance, small business support, state and local government support,
and less than $100 billion to food stamps and disaster relief – come to $1.2 trillion or 5.7% of GDP.
Big business support in the form of loans and a range of other payments amounts to $800 billion or 3.8%
of GDP. No doubt, politics aside, some of this money will be usefully spent, but its contribution to
aggregate demand will be slow and indirect.
Before getting into the details of demand management, a few background observations are needed.
One is that both government and business have substantial debt overhangs. The simulations suggest that an
increase of about $3 trillion in the deficit of the government sector (close to the total built into the
various packages now in place or being enacted) is needed to offset the macro shock that the epidemic
creates. Outstanding Federal debt is $22 trillion. New issues of three trillion may be difficult for markets
to absorb.
Even worse, the corporate sector's outstanding debt is $10 trillion, five times total profits before
depreciation, interest, and taxes. Share buybacks, largely financed by borrowing and ranging in the upper
hundreds of billions per year, have been an important driver of growth of debt. The production side of once
dominant firms – think of General Electric and Boeing – has been hollowed out by financial engineering.
Politics will continue to be influenced by pressures to solve financial problems for firms created by their
past mistakes.
On the real side of the economy, over the last two or three decades the share of employment in sectors
with low real wages, productivity, and profits increased by around twenty percent. The share of profits in
national income grew at around 0.4% per year for five decades, mostly flowing through various channels to
households in the top one percent of the size distribution of income. Households at the bottom of the
distribution became especially vulnerable.
The major impact on economic activity will come from falling consumption of goods and services due to
income losses caused by businesses shutting down. Starting from an initial income level, household saving or
the difference between income and spending will shoot up with further multiplier effects on output. High
profit activities such as real estate rental and leasing, finance, and information will be protected.
Sectors with high employment and low wages and productivity such as retail, accommodation and food, and
other services will be hard hit (education and health will be the main exception). To offset the impacts,
fiscal demand creation by the government will be essential, with the required outlays depending on the size
of the consumption drop and other shocks such as lower private investment and exports.
We begin with details about differences across sectors, and go on to the macroeconomic effects of the
coronavirus epidemic on incomes and output.
Dual Economy
The shifts in the structure of production just mentioned created an American dual economy with prosperity
at the top and near subsistence living at the bottom. Table 1 presents details for sixteen sectors, ordered
from the higher to lower rows by decreasing estimates of payments per hour to labor (including "supplements"
or contributions for pensions and insurance).
Real wages and productivity vary over wide ranges. The same is true of sectoral profits. Real estate
takes the lion's share, followed by manufacturing, finance, business services, and information. Profits are
meager from retail on down the rows, while output and especially employment shares are relatively high. The
three sectors mentioned above -- retail, accommodation and food, and other services – provide around 46
million jobs, more than one-quarter of the 162 million total. Their labor payments amount to $263 billion,
about one percent of GDP of $21 trillion. This number can be contrasted with $600 billion of profits in real
estate. Incomes of low-wage workers do not matter
greatly in the grand macroeconomic scheme of things, but for them even a ten percent income loss would be
devastating.
Table 1: Structure of production in 2016
Wages and output used to
calculate wage rate per hour and productivity per hour are deflated by the GDP deflator (2019=100).
Shares of real output are deflated based on each sector's own industry price index (2009=100).
Macroeconomic Balance
Before turning to the impacts of covid-19, it makes sense to review previous macroeconomic shocks such as
the great recession and the smaller Trump tax reduction of 2018. A simple accounting scheme can be built
around "net borrowing" (NB) levels of four institutional sectors – households (HH), corporate business,
government at all levels, and the rest of the world.
For households and business, NB is equal to gross fixed capital formation plus changes in inventories
("investment") minus saving. For government, it is current spending on goods and services plus investment
minus the excess of tax receipts over fiscal transfers to households. Broadly speaking, foreign NB is the
current account surplus or exports minus imports. It is negative for the USA. In the jargon, investment,
government spending, and exports are demand "injections." HH and business saving, taxes minus fiscal
transfers, and imports are "leakages." Overall macroeconomic balance requires that the sum of NB levels
across sectors should equal zero (subject to a "statistical discrepancy" between estimates of spending and
incomes in the national accounts). Table 2 summarizes data for selected years. The "rates" are calculated
with respect to the relevant year's real GDP.
Table 2: Net borrowing behavior in the USA for selected years (levels in trillions of dollars at prices
of 2019, rates are relative to GDP)
Each year's "multiplier" is the inverse of the sum of the four leakage rates. The multiplier times the
sum of injections equals output.
In a further illustration, Figure 1 shows annual net borrowing rates in the form of a bar chart. High net
borrowing by the government in response to the financial crisis stands out. Even more striking at the far
right of the diagram is the fiscal response to the consumption loss due to the coronavirus as estimated in
Table 3 below.
Figure 1: Annual sectoral net borrowing (in the past and estimated for 2020)
The diagram and table show that business retained earnings usually provide the main source of saving,
with resources also coming from households and negative net borrowing by the rest of the world (positive net
lending to the US economy). The government is the principal net borrower, as underlined by its role in
recent macroeconomic events and especially now.
Recession and the Trump Tax Cut
The 2007-09 recession was precipitated by private sector retrenchment in wake of the financial crisis.
Household consumption was flat, while private investment fell by 30%. Household saving and business retained
earnings went up, meaning that the overall private saving rate rose from 19% to 22%. Output rose between
2007 and 2009. It would have dropped dramatically if the net government tax-minus-transfer rate had been
stable. But in fact it fell from 15% to 6% due to automatic stabilizers and the Obama stimulus package of
around 5% of GDP. The overall impact was that private net borrowing fell by 10.2% of output while government
borrowing went up by 8.6%. Reduction of the external deficit by 1.7% made up the difference.
In sum, the recession was not a disaster because of fiscal realignment. Causality ran from a private
sector shock to automatic and discretionary government responses. It went the other way for the more modest
Trump tax cut. The tax-minus-transfer rate fell from 11.6% to 10.7%, or about $185 billion. Output did go up
by 2.9%, but the increase would have been greater if there had been a strong business investment boom
instead of only a $320 billion increase. Lower business taxes were in large part distributed via dividends
and share buybacks to households at the top of the income ladder with high saving rates.
Both episodes show that changing government net borrowing plays a key role in macroeconomic adjustment.
More government spending on goods and services (unimportant in 2007-09) will also have to help absorb the
covid-19 shock
Coronavirus and Consumption
The biggest immediate impact of the epidemic is loss of economic activity as businesses shut down in a
"supply" shock. Unless they reopen rapidly, both payments to labor and profits will fall. Household
consumption makes up almost 70% of GDP and will drop accordingly.
As an illustration, we can consider a consumption decrease over 2020 of $1.5 trillion from a 2019 level
of $14.6 trillion, or 10% (a high but not unreasonable estimate). That amounts to seven percent of GDP.
Because they have low or negative saving rates, households hit by loss of low-wage jobs at the bottom of the
Table 1 ladder would be major contributors.
For households, saving basically equals income minus spending for consumption, (mostly) residential
investment, and taxes. A decrease in consumption translates into higher saving, or in Table 3 a jump of the
HH saving rate from 0.086 to 0.156. More saving means less demand creation so that output falls from 21.06
to 18.34 trillion dollars.
Table 3: Possible effects of the coronavirus shock
In a quirk of national accounting, HH net borrowing falls from -0.045 to -0.108, or net lending to the
rest of the economy rises to close to 11% of GDP. Presumably the higher "lending" would take the form of
paying off debt. In practice, that will not happen. The proper policy response would be a decrease in the
government's tax-minus-transfer rate from 0.101 to 0.031, taking the form of a $1.5 trillion transfer to
households, which could hold consumption spending and output stable over the year. Government borrowing
would rise by 7% of GDP, or from $1.56 to $3.03 trillion (compare the two rightmost bars of Figure 1). This
hypothetical percentage increase exceeds the actual change between 2007 and 2009 recorded in Table 2.
In other words,
the only way to maintain economic activity is for the government to borrow to
transfer money to households to support consumption.
Ideally, a few hundred billion could be targeted
specifically at the poorly paid quarter of the work force in the sectors in the lower part of Table 1, along
with poor households who don't receive labor income.
There are more potential complications. Table 2 shows that private investment fell by around 30% between
2007 and 2009. Lower capital formation along with stable profits drove up retained earnings so that business
net borrowing fell. Broadly similar shifts could be expected during the epidemic. Exports could decrease as
well. On the other hand, increased government spending on goods and services would raise aggregate demand.
In the rightmost column of Table 3, a plausible outcome would be a visible recession, despite government
borrowing of 17% of GDP, or $3.4 trillion.
Reality check
The initial impact of covid-19 has been to annihilate labor income through the loss of employment. The
challenge is to create demand to offset lost wages and consumer spending. The calculations herein are
illustrative at best, although government net borrowing in Table 3 is close to the total outlay of stimulus
packages approved by Congress. But there are further complications.
` As noted at the outset, more than three trillion dollars of new government debt is a non-trivial
increase over the $22 trillion outstanding. Advocates of Modern Monetary Theory suggest that the Federal
Reserve could absorb the new issues, adding to the 15% of government paper that it already holds. In the USA
such an experiment is yet to be run.
The Fed has offered to intervene massively to buy up corporate debt, which would also run up its balance
sheet. Nevertheless, bailouts for business will remain in political competition with transfers to households
in bottom tiers of the income distribution which really need the money. The Obama stimulus directed less
than half its outlays toward households. There could be better targeting under present circumstances.
Table 1 suggests that profits in some sectors could be taxed to help offset transfers. Real estate,
finance, and information jump to attention.
Timing matters. GDP over one year is the reference frame for Table 3. If, as is likely, job losses and
demand decreases are not offset over a shorter period, the effects on economic activity could be
devastating.
Finally, immediate direct action is needed to overcome supply shortfalls for vast amounts of new medical
and caretaker services, not to mention production of personal protective gear for caregivers.
Support from INET and help from Özlem Ömer are gratefully acknowledged.
One issue I take with this article is that it often classifies money as going to either labor or profits.
There is a third category – suppliers. In my experience payments to suppliers has dried up since the beginning
of the coronavirus shutdown. Whether because AP and AR aren't considered essential functions, because
businesses, even essential businesses, don't have enough cash to pay employees and suppliers, or because they
simply don't want to pay supplier. This is creating a cash crunch for businesses, who are cutting down on
discretionary activities like advertising and even turning away new sales out of fears new customers won't pay.
I have not seen any analysis on the impact of the loss of trade credit.
The importance of trade-credit has been ignored for decades. I had hopes that one positive effect of the
ultra-low interest-rates would have been that large customers would stop paying their suppliers so late. It
hasn't happened, banks love it as they force the small suppliers to go to the bank and borrow money at
high(er) interest-rate and the money lent out by banks would be the low(er) interest-rate provided by the
customer.
There is a risk now that the supply-chains freeze completely due to suppliers not being paid and suppliers
then stopping supply – either voluntaritly or due to going under. It might be necessary to legislate
and enforce
maximum payment terms.
What might possibly be happening is more and better automation of the AP/AR-functions. The current
automation is often so bad that it increases employment instead of what might be the intended reduction of
employment, the next automation (done by skilled professionals, not like now by when it is often done
talkers) might (in my opinion very likely) permanently reduce employment.
"Contrary to free-market catechism, the pursuit of profit frequently runs contrary to the
public's well-being. This is especially true in an industry devoted to inventing and
manufacturing health-giving and life-saving drugs."
At the height of the market turmoil during the previous financial crisis, a Federal Reserve
Bank of New York official confidently told me they would keep throwing stuff at the wall until
something stuck.
This week the US central bank ran some moves from its 2008 playbook -- and then went far
beyond it. Adding to the open-ended buying of US government bonds, the Fed will load up on
investment-grade corporate debt for the first time.
johnbrewster@77
Here's a story from today's Toronto Star. It's a neoliberalism story and goes well with Pepe
Escobar's piece in Asia Times (see above for link)
Basically the Province of Ontario stockpiled everything need for the pandemic that SARs
warned them was bound to come.
Then, a couple of years ago, they destroyed the stockpiles including 55 million
facemasks.
Now there are no face masks to be found and medical staff, inter alia, are having to take
totally unnecessary risks.
Why did this happen? Because neo-liberalism is all about profits and fiscal austerity: as
soon as the masks got beyond their 'best before' date they were destroyed - so the
manufacturers could have another bite at the cherry and sell another 55 million masks. But
then, austerity, the need to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, stepped in so the orders were
not renewed. And people will die, horrible deaths, as a result.
PS to vk # 1. Please think again. Trump has been in a trade war with China for what? a couple
of years? AND, he specifically banned imports of medical supplies from China. Other posters
wave supplied links for this idiocy.
Trump's about as innocent as jack the ripper. You may just be seeing things relatively, as
ghouls like Elliot Abrahms and disgusting Pomposity make Trump seen like an amateur.
We know how the USofA has been over last months now harassing, blackmailing an' threatening
other countries NOT to adopt the chinese HUawei 5G technologies.
Many nations were threatened, UK, Berlin, Brazil etc
Now Germany the first vassal of the Empire, 'primus inter pares' has seemingly prohibited
the exportation of breathers to other countries - who of course need them most.
So what is globalism after all.
A nice idea the rich sell the morons, and tamed nations of the world. But which gets
zeroed as soon as their main interests are menaced.
VK,
The financialization of the US economy has deep roots, going back to the postwar boom, during
which western Europe and Japan began to outcompete US firms in world trade. By the mid 60s
the US was running trade deficits with west Germany and Japan. As a result, US dollars began
accumulating in central banks globally, with no purpose. When foreign governments began to
exchange their dollars for gold under the bretton woods agreement, Nixon abrogated the system
of fixed currencies backed by gold and refused to negotiate a new international monetary
system. A new structure of economic relations emerged: the US would slowly deindustrialize
because of a lack of competitiveness, it would run systematic trade deficits, but other
countries would lend their dollars back to Wall Street as well as to the Treasury Department
to fund the US federal deficit. This allowed financialization to take off.
The key point is that financialization is rooted in long-term dynamics of declining American
competitiveness vis a vis its principal rivals.
Some people have take a short term view of this process, believing it gives the US structural
power in the world system.
Over time, though, it has lead to structural economic weaknesses, grotesque inequality,
unpayable debt, and endless crises.
I dont blame Trump either. Of course they would bail out the financial market: that is all
america has left. The financial crowd since the Clinton era have been selling out everyone to
get rich. Now all they have left are the bail outs. Even their military is useless because
they cannot destroy china without hurting their american corporations that they keep propping
up. Poor bastards.
Overall corporate profits rose 2.2% year over year in Q4, but ended up exactly flat for the
whole of 2019. Most important, non-financial sector profits were down 2.1% year over year
in Q4 and down 3.1% in 2019 as a whole compared to 2018.
This shows that the US corporate sector was already in a profits slump before the virus
broke. Q1 2020 data should be revealing.
The trend in domestic non-financial corporate profits has been downwards for some time.
These profits at end 2019 were 21% below the level at the end of 2014.
In other words, the USA is managing to save its financial sector, but not its "real
economy". The USG moved mountains to keep profitability of the financial sector stable in
2019Q4, but the "real economy" (non-financial sector) fell almost at the same magnitude as
the financial sector's grew (-2.1%).
And this is not a punctual event: the American non-financial sector had a 21% lower profit
rate than it had in 2014 - and 2014 is still the post-crisis era, so they were not good
profits either.
If this trend continues, we should expect a long-term continuity of the
deindustrialization of the USA, increased militarization (so as to keep the USD standard),
and the domination of the so-called "gig jobs", where the working class is essentially
reduced to a "quick bucks", "pay to play" labor force.
"... Today supermarkets are playing a ground-zero role in our struggle to adapt to restrictions imposed by COVID-19. And grocery workers are bearing much of the the brunt of our anxiety and frustration, as we [who?] descend on depleted stores. ..."
"They were
careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back
into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let
other people clean up the mess they had made. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great
Gatsby
In the United States, #COVID-19 began with globalization and globalizers. One thing we can
be of is that grovery workers -- to whom the virus will "trickle down" soon enough -- didn't
create the conditions for it, or introduce it. Let's take a look at the grocery workers before
dollying back to the global. From the Los Angeles Times, "
Column: How coronavirus turned supermarket workers into heroes ":
Today supermarkets are playing a ground-zero role in our struggle to adapt to restrictions
imposed by COVID-19. And grocery workers are bearing much of the the brunt of our anxiety and
frustration, as we [who?] descend on depleted stores.
Without masks or barriers, employees are working long hours, risking infection and
battling exhaustion to do their jobs. They connect us to material essentials, like bread and
toilet paper. But they're also part of the social fabric that holds us together in unsettling
times.
That friendly chat with the guy restocking the egg case this morning might be my only
social interaction on this shelter-at-home day. And I feel better whenever I see my favorite
cashier at her register. There's something reassuring about the familiar in a world where
everything has changed.
Markets are about the only place we're still allowed to gather en masse. And their
employees -- pressed into service in ways they never expected -- are our new first
responders. They're apt to see us at our worst, and they aim to ease our strain.
"They're dealing with a public that's fearful, apprehensive and frustrated, and it gets
hostile," [said John Grant, a former meatpacker who is president of the union that represents
grocery employees in Southern California]. "This wasn't what they signed up for, but they
realize it's their responsibility. They've cursed how vulnerable they are, and yet they keep
going out of their profound dedication to their communities."
Funny thing. The people who "connect us to material essentials" are suddenly more important
than Senators and Represenatives (who can fly home), or all the MBAs in the head office, or the
CEOs. Heaven forfend they collectively decided to withdraw their labor!
"Vulnerable" as the grocery workers are, they didn't bring #COVID19 on themselves or us.
First, I'll look at how globalization made the "material essentials" to deal with #COVID19 so
hard to obtain. Then, I'll look at how globalizers were vectors for the diseases spread.
Globalization
The story of how the United States 1% deindustrialized American by moving our manufacturing
base offshore (mostly to China) is well known and I will not rehearse it here. From the New
York Times, " How the World's Richest
Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask ":
The answer to why we're running out of protective gear involves a very American set of
capitalist pathologies -- the rise and inevitable lure of low-cost overseas manufacturing,
and a strategic failure, at the national level and in the health care industry, to consider
seriously the cascading vulnerabilities that flowed from the incentives to reduce costs.
(By "reduce costs," of course, we mean "increase profits.") The shortage of masks has been
the dominant narrative, but we don't make anything . If masks had not been "the long
pole in the tent," as project managers say, something else would have been or will be:
ventilators ,
gloves ,
nasal swabs for testing, extraction
kits and pipettes , reagents
, whatever. The real issue is not a shortage of this or that material essential, but a
forty-year policy of globalization, supported by the ruling class as a whole, that has led to a
shortage of all material essentials (and that's not even taking austerity and the
general gutting of public services into account). I have altered
the famous "flattening the curve" chart (here with "dotted line to show capacity") to show
the effect"
Lack of "material essentials" reduces our capacity ("How many very sick people hospitals can
treat"); it pushes the dotted line down. So we either have to flatten the curve further than we
would otherwise have to do, or we don't, and lose lives. Thank you, globalization! And with
that, let's turn to the globalizers.
Globalizers
By globalizers, I mean the 1% on down, plus the PMC (Professional Manager Class) who own and
manage our globalized system. One effect of globalization has been the vast expansion of air
transport and international travel, so that globalizers can do their jobs. And tha
t's how SARS-COV-2 was brought to the United States :
The man who would become Patient Zero for the new coronavirus outbreak in the U.S.
appeared to do everything right. He arrived Jan. 19 at an urgent-care clinic in a suburb
north of Seattle with a slightly elevated temperature and a cough he'd developed soon after
returning four days earlier from a visit with family in Wuhan, China.
(I'm not blaming any individual; I travel internationally myself, and there are many good
reasons to do it. But international air travel was the vector that brought the virus to the
United States. That is the system. I'm assuming Patient Zero travelled for professional
reasons, since Wuhan is an unlikely tourist destination.)
We can make a highly suggestive correlation between globalizers and COVID-19 if we look at
two simple maps. First, as
is well known , one of the main distinctions between the places that are " optimistic,
diverse, dynamic, moving forward " (i.e., globalizers) and the dull provincials in flyover
is the possession of passports. (A passport is a likely marker for the sort of person who asks
"Why don't they just leave?"; "front-row kids," in Chris Arnade's parlance, as distinguished
from, say, grocery workers, who he calls "back-row" kids.) Here is a map of passport ownership
by state:
The correlation is rather neat, don't you think? It makes sense that the first case was in a
globalist, passport-owning city like Seattle on the West Coast; and it makes sense that the
world capital of globalization, passport-owning New York City, now has a major outbreak.
If one hypothesizes, as I am doing, that COVID-19 will trickle from globalizers downward, we
might ask ourselves how that will happen. One answer, of course, is social interaction between
the globalizers themselves. The New York Times describes " Party
Zero: How a Soirée in Connecticut Became a 'Super Spreader ':"
About 50 guests gathered on March 5 at a home in the stately suburb of Westport, Conn., to
toast the hostess on her 40th birthday and greet old friends, including one visiting from
South Africa. They shared reminiscences, a lavish buffet and, unknown to anyone, the
coronavirus.
Then they scattered.
The Westport soirée -- Party Zero in southwestern Connecticut and beyond -- is a
story of how, in the Gilded Age of money, social connectedness and air travel, a pandemic has
spread at lightning speed. The partygoers -- more than half of whom are now infected -- left
that evening for Johannesburg, New York City and other parts of Connecticut and the United
States, all seeding infections on the way.
Westport, a town of 28,000 on the Long Island Sound, did not have a single known case of
the coronavirus on the day of the party. It had 85 on Monday, up more than 40-fold in 11
days.
It is the globalizers' ability to "scatter," in other words -- both internationally and
domestically -- that made them such effective vectors. The Westport hot-spot was innocent,
since nobody knew enough about COVID-19. Other examples are not innocent at all, where
globalizers infect all those around them by trying to escape the disease. The Hamptons example
is famous. From the New York Post, "
'We should blow up the bridges' -- coronavirus leads to class warfare in Hamptons ":
Every aspect of life, most crucially medical care, is under strain from the sudden influx
of rich Manhattanites panic-fleeing, bringing along their disdain and disregard for the
little people -- and in some cases, knowingly bringing coronavirus.
The Springs resident says her friend, a nurse out here, reported that a wealthy Manhattan
woman who tested positive called tiny Southampton Hospital to say she was on her way and
needed treatment.
The woman was told to stay in Manhattan.
Instead, she allegedly got on public transportation, telling no one of her condition. Then
she showed up at Southampton Hospital, demanding admittance.
"Someone else took a private jet to East Hampton and did not tell anybody 'til he landed,"
the resident says. "That's the most horrendous aspect. The virus is already here, and we
don't have any medical resources."
The frantic effort to find the ski trip participants has highlighted an uncomfortable
fact: It is people wealthy enough to travel outside the country who have brought the
coronavirus back to mostly poor Mexico. Yet if the disease spreads, it is those with the
least who will probably suffer the most.
"The virus is imported by people with the economic capacity to travel," wrote actor Tenoch
Huerta on Twitter. "Those who ask that everything be closed and all economic activity stop,
hurting the people who live day-to-day, why didn't they voluntarily isolate for three weeks
so as not to spread it? Or should only the poor be responsible?"
Idaho has 123 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to the state's coronavirus website.
That includes 37 in Ada County and eight in Canyon County. Blaine County, where Sun Valley is
located, has the most confirmed cases at 52. Idaho's first case was reported 12 days ago, in
Ada County. The number of people tested in the state is now up to 2,188.
(Many of the cases around the state came from travel to Blaine County.)
Finally, Berkshire County, MA:
In my home area of Berkshire County, MA, the superrich from the city who own second
homes have come up en masse, buying up all the food and refusing to quarantine. The latter
means they will overwhelm an already insufficient healthcare system.
Of course, this rough-and-ready, anecdotal analysis is no substitute for formal, scientific
contact tracing. But I don't think, at this point, we will ever be able trace the original
outbreaks. And I didn't see anybody else making this argument, so I thought I'd throw it
against the wall and see if it sticks. All I can say is that when I think of the grocery
workers -- and all the workers -- in the Hamptons, Mexico, Idaho, and Massachusetts having
COVID-19 brought to them, I become very ticked off. For pity's sake, at least can we
practice social distancing by traveling only when it's essential?
"... The more I watch these moves by Pompeo the more sympathetic I become to the most sinister theories about COVID-19, its origins and its launch around the world. Read Pepe Escobar's latest to get an idea of how dark and twisted this tale could be . ..."
There are few things in this life that make me more sick to my stomach than watching
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talking. He truly is one of the evilest men I've ever had the
displeasure of covering.
Into the insanity of the over-reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak, Pompeo wasted no time
ramping up sanctions on firms doing any business with Iran, one of the countries worse-hit by
this virus to date.
It's a seemingly endless refrain, everyday,
more sanctions on Chinese, Swiss and South African firms for having the temerity in these
deflating times to buy oil from someone Pompeo and his gang of heartless psychopaths disapprove
of.
This goes far beyond just the oil industry. Even though I'm well aware that Russia's
crashing the price of oil was itself a hybrid war attack on US capital markets. One that has
had, to date, devastating effect.
While Pompeo mouths the words publicly that humanitarian aid is exempted from sanctions on
Iran, the US is pursuing immense
pressure on companies to not do so anyway while the State Dept. bureaucracy takes its sweet
time processing waiver applications.
Pompeo and his ilk only think in terms of civilizational warfare. They have become so
subsumed by their big war for the moral high ground to prove American exceptionalism that they
have lost any shred of humanity they may have ever had.
Because for Pompeo in times like these to stick to his talking points and for his office to
continue excising Iran from the global economy when we're supposed to be coming together to
fight a global pandemic is the height of soullessness.
And it speaks to the much bigger problem that infects all of our political thinking. There
comes a moment when politics and gaining political advantage have to take a back seat to doing
the right thing.
I've actually seen moments of that impulse from the Democratic leadership in the US Will
wonders never cease?!
Thinking only in Manichean terms of good vs. evil and dehumanizing your opponents is
actually costlier than reversing course right now. Because honey is always better at attracting
flies than vinegar.
But, unfortunately, that is not the character of the Trump administration.
It can only think in terms of direct leverage and opportunity to hold onto what they think
they've achieved. So, until President Trump is no longer consumed with coordinating efforts to
control COVID-19 Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper are in charge of foreign policy.
They will continue the playbook that has been well established.
Maximum pressure on Iran, hurt China any way they can, hold onto what they have in Syria,
stay in Iraq.
To that end Iraqi President Barham Salei nominated Pompeo's best choice to replace Prime
Minister Adil Abdel Mahdi to throw Iraq's future into complete turmoil. According to Elijah
Magnier,
Adnan al-Zarfi is a US asset through and through .
And this looks like Pompeo's Hail Mary to retain US legal presence in Iraq after the Iraqi
parliament adopted a measure to demand withdrawal of US troops from the country. Airstrikes
against US bases in Iraq continue on a near daily basis and there have been reports of US base
closures and redeployments at the same time.
This move looks like desperation by Pompeo et.al. to finally separate the Hashd al-Shaabi
from Iraq's official military. So that airstrikes against them can be carried out under the
definition of 'fighting Iranian terrorism.'
As Magnier points out in the article above if al-Zarfi puts a government together the war in
Iraq will expand just as the US is losing further control in Syria after Turkish President
Erdogan's disastrous attempt to remake the front in Idlib. That ended with his effective
surrender to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It is sad that, to me, I see no reason to doubt Pompeo and his ilk in the US government
wouldn't do something like that to spark political and social upheaval in those places most
targeted by US hybrid war tactics.
But, at the same time, I can see the other side of it, a vicious strike back by China
against its tormentors. And China's government does itself, in my mind, no favors threatening
to withhold drug precursors and having officials run their mouths giving Americans the excuse
they need to validate Trump and Pompeo's divisive rhetoric.
Remaining on the fence about this issue isn't my normal style. But everyone is dirty here
and the reality may well be this is a natural event terrible people on both sides are
exploiting.
And I can only go by what people do rather than what they say to assess the situation. Trump
tries to buy exclusive right to a potential COVID-19 vaccine from a German firm and his
administration slow-walks aid to Iran.
China sends aid to Iran and Italy by the container full. Is that to salve their conscience
over its initial suppression of information about the virus? Good question. But no one covers
themselves in glory by using the confusion and distraction to attempt further regime change and
step up war-footing during a public health crisis, manufactured or otherwise.
While Pompeo unctuously talks the talk of compassion and charity, he cannot bring himself to
actually walk the walk. Because he is a despicable, bile-filled man of uncommon depravity. His
prosecuting a hybrid war during a public health crisis speaks to no other conclusion about
him.
It's clear to me that nothing has changed at the top of Trump's administration. I expect
COVID-19 will not be a disaster for Trump and the US. It can handle this. But the lack of
humanity shown by its diplomatic corps ensures that in the long run the US will be left to fend
for itself when the next crisis hits.
The WHO declared a pandemic 50 days later on March 11th.
Rumour in the markets has it WHO held out as long as possible to avoid triggering the
provisions of World Bank Pandemic Bonds, for which investors enjoyed relatively high coupon
rates in the current low interest-rate environment in exchange for running the risk of losing
their principal investment if a pandemic was declared in the window period.
Six million protection masks for Germany disappeared at the Kenya airport. They were valued
at a million dollars. Theft is suspected or that the manufacturer (Belgium) decided to
destroy them. Nothing is accidental in disaster capitalism.
I wonder whether those who seak war at all costs, are now trying to get us fighting for
masks and ventilators....
Seeing the comments at SST on the necessities of NYC major, it seesm to me that the same
people who seeks always confrontation is always ready to start a fight with its nationals for
whatever reason....
In Spain, as I am seeing, even counting with the inability and greed of those at the
helms, it seems to me that a "USSR 1990" effect on dissapearing health care items from the
market to then make them appear at multiple times their price could be happening right
now...
By blockading health care products, most proably the same people who have caused all this,
may seek that public health care collapsing gives a bad impression so as to get them
privatized once the country in depression.
Jen, yes, I am very familiar with the program as I have an acquaintance who helps usher in
very wealthy Chinese into Canada for a hefty fee.
That doesn't change the fact the Chinese are hated everywhere they go. This is very well
documented in the book entitled World on Fire, by a Chinese American author Amy Chua who also
wrote the book Hymn of the Dragon Mother.
She brags about how she pushes her children to achieve more in the second book.
In the first, she explains how her Chinese aunt was murdered by their Filipino servants
because the servants were badly treated. Now, you can tell me if the two have any relation to
each other.
Apart from TCM which the Chinese got from the Indians and developed, the entire Chinese
civilization needs to be scrapped and started over.
The Chinese "scrapped" their civilisation starting in the 1950s. By then it was on its
last legs anyway, after over 100 years of degradation from mass opium addiction brought by
the British, followed by decades of foreign interference and the consequences of that
interference: a messianic cult culminating in the Taiping rebellion in the 1860s and then the
Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century, among other things.
Amy Chua is just one person whose mother's family came from Fujian province in SE China
and settled in the Philippines, along with several other families from that part of China.
(Former Philippines President Corazon Aquino also had family from Fujian.) People living in
Fujian and Guangdong (the old Canton province) were exposed to more Western / European
influences than other parts of China. Fujian and Guangdong are also the areas where most
overseas Chinese communities living in SE Asia and the West, up to the 1980s, hailed
from.
So if you are talking about people in SE Asia and the West hating Chinese for their
behaviour, exemplified by the behaviour of Amy Chua to her own daughters and of her family to
its Filipino servants, and the behaviour of people in Hong Kong and Singapore with their
status-seeking and selfish materialist values, and their adherence to extreme Protestant
Christian beliefs, bear in mind where they learned their lessons.
@Anon
As for people with jobs supposedly not needing the relief checks, speak for yourself.
Completely out of touch with how much tens of millions of working Americans are living and
struggling, and not just the poor or minimum-wage workers by any means.
Middle-income and upper-middle-income people in many places are struggling with housing
costs and medical costs above all, and their situation generally is not improving in recent
years.
As a factual correction, the proposals on both sides are not for $1,000 per family; they
are for $1,000 or $1,200 or more to each adult, plus $500 for each child, and I'm glad they
are.
This would be a better use of taxpayer money -- or money conjured out of thin air by the
federal reserve -- than most of what the fed gov has been doing. That includes the vast sums
we have spent on unnecessary wars and occupations that are neither defensive nor
retaliatory.
Senator Rand Paul wisely proposed cutting war spending to help pay for the relief package.
We should go much, much farther than he proposed and slash hundreds of billions of dollars in
annual military spending and instead give it directly to US Citizens here at home.
We should also consider placing a permanent floor under Americans, not just a fleeting
relief package that ends when this virus quiets down. Very large cuts to the warfare state
and the welfare-state bureaucracy alike can provide funding for a substantial monthly
universal basic income for all US Citizens age 21 and over -- with less government borrowing
than we have now.
Public ownership of our God-given natural resources could provide another large source of
funding for the UBI -- without any government borrowing at all.
Of course, these ideas are too responsible for either Dems or Republicans to even debate.
Instead, they'll do a sensible and just thing, directly helping Americans rather than big
connected corporations and banks, but they'll recklessly borrow to do so.
There is a middle way and we should be negotiating it.
3/ Isn't chloroquine just a new name for Jesuit's (Peruvian) bark? Or quinine. The tonic
in gin and tonic?
4/ Tom Paine's 1796 pamphlet 'The English System of Finance' and Cobbett's 'Paper against
Gold' are coming into their own. What Disraeli called the Dutch system of finance is what is
collapsing, almost 500 years after it began. That was the contradiction in globalisation, one
that Rosa Luxemburg had pointed out more than a century ago: we have reached the limits of
constant expansion. And not just in environmental terms.
The financial system is not the economy even though many people do not recognize the
distinction. This means the gigantic efforts by the world's central banks and governments to
essentially "bail-out" both will prove somewhat ineffective. Covid-19 has become the catalyst
for a major reset of both the financial sector and the Main Street economy, this article will
attempt to give some clarity as to what we might find still standing on the other side of this
crisis. Note the use of the word crisis, anyone who does not view the covid-19 now as a
watershed event is oblivious to the world around them
Originally the title to this piece was "Mind The Lag-Time Gap - The Worst Is Yet To Come."
You may call me Captain Obvious if you hone in on the later part of this title but the first
portion is the most important part. We should make a real effort to remember to mind the gap
between events appearing on the radar and when they actually impact day to day life. There is
such a thing as lag-time, everything is not immediate in our fast-moving world, some events
take time to play out. The covid-19 crisis is greatly complicated because we have no real idea
of how long it will persist. Hints have been made, possibly to ready the population, that this
could or will likely continue for months.
The Sell-off Has Been Dramatic
The scale, scope, and speed at which world markets have sold off and lost value as investors
try to get in front of this thing has been dramatic. Global stock and bond markets have seen an
estimated $25 trillion of 'paper' wealth erased in the last month. This has erased all the
gains from the December 2018 crash lows with more of the impact focused on stocks than bonds.
In its wake, the sell-off has stripped many people of their savings and jeopardized the future
existence of many businesses and financial institutions.
On the flip-side of the carnage is the ramping up of promises that a flood of money and aid
is forthcoming. All options are on the table to get money into the hands that need it, some of
it in the way of adding liquidity, some of it as a gift to anyone with their hand out. The
specifics are spotty at best but one thing we can be sure of is that those lobbying hardest
will get the most. The questions that remain to be answered are, how well this will work and
will this infusion of cash be enough?
This Has Become A giant Game Of Jenga
As the world faces the biggest financial bailout in history it is now being reported in the
news the US, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, will now lend up to $4 trillion to
businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic. "Working with the Federal Reserve - we'll have
up to $4 trillion of liquidity that we can use to support the economy," Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin. told Fox News on Sunday. What Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, did
not talk about is how dangerous these volatile markets are for the average investor.
Unfortunately, as with most programs unleashed by the "Financial-Political
Complex," we can expect much of the money to rapidly flow to enriching those atop the
wealth pyramid. Another certainty is that when all is said and done those in charge will
rapidly claim things would have been far worse if they had not taken such draconian actions.
People have shown they have a very short memory when it comes to the truth. Many Americans also
have a difficult time understanding a large reason for the rapid growth of inequality is
because the wealthy one-tenth of one percent of the population controls and shapes the nation's
policy to their advantage.
So far covid-19 is a new entry on to the scene. The reality of how it will affect the
economy has yet to be realized and will trickle down to society. What I deem the
Financial-Political Complex will protect its own with a massive bailout under the guise of "the
greater good." This extension of crony capitalism will throw just enough to the masses to
silence their outrage. Large businesses will be the winners while the big losers again will be
the middle-class, small businesses, and social mobility.
A few of the things that may change society are detailed below. Many people think the impact
on labor force participation will remain mild with workers viewing all this as transitory. As
the impact of COVID-19 take root and if activity fails to rapidly normalize, it is possible
more workers may reevaluate their life and decide to exit the labor force altogether. The same
will happen with many small business owners that come to the conclusion this is a sign to close
their doors and retire. Covid-19 has fed fear and insecurity, these are not feelings that
increase investors' desire or take on new risks.
While you hear about the massive aid package the Financial-Political Complex is concocting
to prop up this mess we should not forget they are responsible for much of the damage flowing
from this crisis. For years they ignored the growing weakness on Main Street and focused on
rising GDP numbers that were driven by government deficit spending. Addressing this now is like
trying to turn a battleship around in a lake the size of a bathtub, nearly impossible. If it
can be done it will take a long time. No matter how much money they throw at this the economy
will not turn around on a dime or spring back. Regardless of how the financial sector fares the
economy is destined to feel a great deal of pain.
We are in the second inning of a long game. It is only as this lingers that we begin to feel
the full power of the lag-time effect. Anyone that thinks next month will be a return to
business as usual and fails to mind the gap between expectations and reality is primed for
disappointment. Too big to fail has become deeply embedded in our crony capitalist society and
a key part of the Financial-Political Complex now running the show. If you are not part of this
group I suggest you prepare to be thrown under the bus for "the greater good."
A User
Six months down the track, duopoly voting majority may perhaps be looking to do more than
vote for the duopoly, but that's only a maybe. It will take a lot of hardship to pull them
away from reality tv...meantime, your comment fits in here like another brick in the wall.
Another pissed off human having a winge.
Doing something... seems to me a group with structure, a plan and an endgoal is required
and this got out to the wider public. End goal needs to be something that would be accepted
by the reality tv watching public and step by step plan to get there...
We havn't hit bottom yet, still a long way from it. Any plan will have to match the situation
at the bottom and the way back. But first you gotta get two people to agree on a plan.
We are headed into the unknown. Like the first stages of the collapse of the soviet
union.
Putin when asked about Gorbochov and Yeltsin he just says "everyone knew we had to change
but nobody knew how to go about it."
Here is somewhat different because in the mainstream types, nobody knows we have to
change.
We are likely to go through something akin to the soviet nineties and only then will the
population know we need to change because the old ways failed.
Best to play it by ear until that point. Nothing can be done untill the wider population
realise that all they have known has failed and a different start must be made. I doubt too
many of our countries will have a Putin that can pull us out of the shit. And by a Putin, I
mean somebody that has a vision acceptable to the majority and comes to be trusted by the
majority and also has the nous and ability required.
I got the "flu" in November 2019 and I had the same symptoms as Coronavirus - I thought it
was going to kill me - and while I missed some work - work demanded me back - and so I worked
through some terrible times. Everyone at work was sick with different levels of symptoms. To
this day I have still not 100% recovered - but I am poor and have no health insurance - and,
well, everybody has been exposed for months so it doesn't even matter anymore. No one has
died - but everyone has a low level persistent respiratory illness.
Again: if nCOV was really already in the US in November - where was the surge in
hospitalizations? Regardless of age, ~20% of those who get it, get pneumonia or worse and
need hospital care.
We don't even have that right now despite a huge number of cases. Maybe the US and Germany
are different - we'll see in about 2 weeks.
One thing I think played a role that is not mentioned is Trumps business that he owns. He
owns hotels and casinos which will be devastated. Trump wont rule out government assistance
for himself.
For Trump to shut down the economy and produce an effective containment, he would have had
to do this knowing that his own business would be devastated.
@Anatoly
Karlin There is apparently a large colony (100.000) of Chinese workers in Lombardy, with
direct flights between Lombardy and Wuhan, so this Italian outbreak is not a coincidence.
Many Italians in Northern Italy sold their leather goods and textiles companies to
China. Italy then allowed 100,000 Chinese from Wuhan/Wenzhou to move to Italy to work in
these factories, with direct Wuhan flights. Result: Northern Italy is Europe's hotspot for
Wuhan Coronavirus
UK had a "herd immunity" strategy from the beginning. They made no real effort at
containment. British government allowed their people to become infected, and only
began to change course after public outrage.
@Felix
Keverich The large Chinese population in Italy has been completely ignored by the media,
in fact China itself seems to have been let completely off the hook. The focus is now on how
terrible Britain and the native British people are.
Someone even posted a Tweet above by a Vietnamese person trying to claim that BRITAIN of
all countries is responsible for the outbreak in Vietnam, I mean what kind of ridiculous
logic is that? Vietnam bloody BORDERS China, the origin and epicentre of the Coronavirus
outbreak, and the Vietnamese are trying to say Britain is the cause? It beggars belief.
less globalization outside North America/Europe/Japan/Australia
You are missing the point of globalization: manufacturing in cheap Third World countries
and rewarding the local compradors with a permission to migrate to the West. That's the deal,
that's what globalization is.
With NA-Europe-Japan all you get is tourism and travel. I would be surprised if we can at
this point convince Chinese and the other cheap labor countries to do the work and forgo the
hope of migration. It was a Faustian deal and those as we know end in hell.
@AP
Calm down, man and stop the stupid blaming game. It seems that your Banderite spin also
includes bashing Chinese which, on the second thought, should not be surprising as there is
only one paymaster. Perhaps you should specialize in Ukraine only and leave China to more
competent haters.
Compare Canada and Italy on Chinese residents: Canada has 5 times more Chinese than Italy
but 62 times less infection cases and 539 times less fatalities than Italy (as of March 16).
Furthermore France and UK have more Chinese than Italy.
What about tourists: In Canada 0.75 mil Chinese tourist but in Italy 3.5 mil Chinese
tourists. So it must be the tourists, right?
So compare Japan with Italy on Chinese tourists: 8.4 mil Chinese tourist in Japan vs. 3.5
mil Chinese tourists in Italy. How many cases in Japan?
So what I am trying to convey is that the expression of the epidemic in different
countries is not congruent with the number of Chinese residents or Chinese tourist.
We will never know where the patients zero (yes plural, there are many patients zero)
really came from. For various political reasons we will not be told and what we will be told
we must be skeptical about. I found interesting data about the first infected in British
Columbia that has huge rather affluent Chinese population. There were as many Iranians as
non-Iranians on the list.
In British Columbia cases 1 to 5 were from China though it does not appear they infected
others while cases 6, 7, , 12 and 14, 15, 19 were traced to Iran. Then the case 22 was from
Iran and also case 31. Case 32 was from Italy, case 35 was from Egypt and case 37 was from
Germany. So out of first 37 cases over 50% were people came form Iran, Egypt, Germany and
Italy. My point is that while Canada has huge Chinese population (1.7 mil) and gets 700,000
Chinese visitors per year it does not look like China was the main vector. In BC it is Iran
and Europe.
One should consider a possibility whether virus introduction to Iran and the Middle East
did precede its introduction in China.
Now let's return to Italy. Most Chinese tourists go to Rome, Florence and Venice. These
cities were not affected as much as Lombardy where there is not that many tourists. So we are
told that Chinese workers could carry the virus. So look at Prato (in Tuscany near Florence)
which has the highest density of Chinese population in Italy. Wiki lists 11,882 (6.32%) for
Prato while the highest absolute number is Milan 18,918 (1.43%). The numbers are probably
outdated as most likely they do not include illegal residents.
"In a single day the positive cases of coronavirus in the province of Prato have
tripled: from 7 to 21 . It is the darkest day since the outbreak began. According to
what was announced in the afternoon of today, March 11, by the bulletin of the regional
council "
"Therefore, 314 patients are currently positive in Tuscany. This is the subdivision by
signaling areas: 71 Florence, 32 Pistoia, 21 Prato (total Asl center: 124), 43 Lucca, 40
Massa Carrara, 34 Pisa, 16 Livorno (total North West Asl: 133), 12 Grosseto, 37 Siena , 14
Arezzo (total Asl southeast: 63)."
So clearly the 2nd largest Chinese community in Italy (and first in density) with 21 cases
(out of 12,246 cases in Italy) did not contribute a lot to the corona virus outbreak in
Italy.
@AP
Calm down, man and stop the stupid blaming game. It seems that your Banderite spin also
includes bashing Chinese which, on the second thought, should not be surprising as there is
only one paymaster. Perhaps you should specialize in Ukraine only and leave China to more
competent haters.
Compare Canada and Italy on Chinese residents: Canada has 5 times more Chinese than Italy
but 62 times less infection cases and 539 times less fatalities than Italy (as of March 16).
Furthermore France and UK have more Chinese than Italy.
What about tourists: In Canada 0.75 mil Chinese tourist but in Italy 3.5 mil Chinese
tourists. So it must be the tourists, right?
So compare Japan with Italy on Chinese tourists: 8.4 mil Chinese tourist in Japan vs. 3.5
mil Chinese tourists in Italy. How many cases in Japan?
So what I am trying to convey is that the expression of the epidemic in different
countries is not congruent with the number of Chinese residents or Chinese tourist.
We will never know where the patients zero (yes plural, there are many patients zero)
really came from. For various political reasons we will not be told and what we will be told
we must be skeptical about. I found interesting data about the first infected in British
Columbia that has huge rather affluent Chinese population. There were as many Iranians as
non-Iranians on the list.
In British Columbia cases 1 to 5 were from China though it does not appear they infected
others while cases 6, 7, , 12 and 14, 15, 19 were traced to Iran. Then the case 22 was from
Iran and also case 31. Case 32 was from Italy, case 35 was from Egypt and case 37 was from
Germany. So out of first 37 cases over 50% were people came form Iran, Egypt, Germany and
Italy. My point is that while Canada has huge Chinese population (1.7 mil) and gets 700,000
Chinese visitors per year it does not look like China was the main vector. In BC it is Iran
and Europe.
One should consider a possibility whether virus introduction to Iran and the Middle East
did precede its introduction in China.
Now let's return to Italy. Most Chinese tourists go to Rome, Florence and Venice. These
cities were not affected as much as Lombardy where there is not that many tourists. So we are
told that Chinese workers could carry the virus. So look at Prato (in Tuscany near Florence)
which has the highest density of Chinese population in Italy. Wiki lists 11,882 (6.32%) for
Prato while the highest absolute number is Milan 18,918 (1.43%). The numbers are probably
outdated as most likely they do not include illegal residents.
"In a single day the positive cases of coronavirus in the province of Prato have
tripled: from 7 to 21 . It is the darkest day since the outbreak began. According to
what was announced in the afternoon of today, March 11, by the bulletin of the regional
council "
"Therefore, 314 patients are currently positive in Tuscany. This is the subdivision by
signaling areas: 71 Florence, 32 Pistoia, 21 Prato (total Asl center: 124), 43 Lucca, 40
Massa Carrara, 34 Pisa, 16 Livorno (total North West Asl: 133), 12 Grosseto, 37 Siena , 14
Arezzo (total Asl southeast: 63)."
So clearly the 2nd largest Chinese community in Italy (and first in density) with 21 cases
(out of 12,246 cases in Italy) did not contribute a lot to the corona virus outbreak in
Italy.
If this started in the USA and spread elsewhere the world would have good cause to
condemn the USA and to judge any subsequent efforts by Americans to help others as "the
least they could do."
Chinese shipments of medical goods are actually to the risk of the own population, where
hospitals are still recovering. While in some ways it is a blatant PR play, its quite a
significant cost amd self-risk that goes beyond "the least they could do."
Actual morality reinforces social solidarity, which is why our overlords have been attempting
to destroy it for so long. Social solidarity is the key to overcoming crises in general and
not just the present Covid 19 pandemic.
The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American
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Imagine if the congress approved a measure to form a public-private
partnership between the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Can you imagine that?
Now imagine if a panicky and ill-informed
Congress gave the Fed a blank check to bail out all of its crooked crony corporate and Wall Street friends,
allowing the Fed to provide more than $4.5 trillion to underwater corporations that ripped off Mom and Pop
investors by selling them bonds that were used to goose their stock prices so fatcat CEOs could make off
like bandits. Imagine if all that red ink from private actors was piled onto the national debt pushing
long-term interest rates into the stratosphere while crushing small businesses, households and ordinary
working people.
Now try to imagine the impact this would
have on the nation's future. Imagine if the Central Bank was given the green-light to devour the Treasury,
control the country's "purse strings", and use nation's taxing authority to shore up its trillions in
ultra-risky leveraged bets, its opaque financially-engineered ponzi-instruments, and its massive speculative
debts that have gone pear-shaped leaving a gaping black hole on its balance sheet?
Well, you won't have to imagine this
scenario for much longer, because the reality is nearly at hand. You see, the traitorous, dumbshit
nincompoops in Congress are just a hairs-breadth away from abdicating congress's crucial power of the purse,
which is not only their greatest strength, but also allows the congress to reign in abuses of executive
power by controlling the flow of funding. The power of the purse is the supreme power of government which is
why the founders entrusted it to the people's elected representatives in congress. Now these imbeciles are
deciding whether to hand over that authority to a privately-owned banking cartel that has greatly expanded
the chasm between rich and poor, incentivized destructive speculation on an industrial scale, and repeatedly
inflated behemoth asset-price bubbles that have inevitably blown up sending stocks and the real economy into
freefall. The idea of merging the Fed and the Treasury first appeared in its raw form in an article by
former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen in the Financial Times. Here's a short excerpt from the
piece:
"The Fed could ask Congress for the
authority to buy limited amounts of investment-grade corporate debt The Fed's intervention could help
restart that part of the corporate debt market, which is under significant stress.
Such a programme
would have to be carefully calibrated to minimize the credit risk taken by the Fed
while still
providing needed liquidity to an essential market." (
Financial
Times
)
The Fed is not allowed to buy corporate
debt, because it is not within its mandate of "price stability and full employment". It's also not allowed
to arbitrarily intervene in the markets to pick winners and losers, nor is it allowed to bailout
poorly-managed crybaby corporations who were gaming the system to their own advantage when the whole deal
blew up in their faces. That's their problem, not the Fed's and not the American taxpayer's.
But notice how Bernanke emphasizes how
"Such a programme would have to be carefully calibrated to minimize the credit risk taken by the Fed". Why
do you think he said that?
He said it because he anticipates an
arrangement where the new Treasury-Fed combo could buy up to "$4.5 trillion of corporate debt" (according to
Marketwatch and BofA). And the way this will work, is the Fed will select the bonds that will be purchased
and the credit risk will be heaped onto the US Treasury. Apparently Bernanke and Yellen think this is a
"fair" arrangement, but others might differ on that point.
Keep in mind, that in the last week
alone, investors pulled a record $107 billion out of corporate bonds which is a market which has been in a
deep-freeze for nearly a month. The only activity is the steady surge of redemptions by frantic investors
who want to get their money back before the listing ship heads for Davey Jones locker. This is the market
that Bernanke wants the American people to bail out mainly because he doesn't want to submerge the Fed's
balance sheet in red ink. He wants to find a sucker who will take the loss instead. That's where Uncle Sam
comes in, he's the target of this subterfuge. This same theme pops up in a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Check it out:
"At least Treasury has come around
to realizing it needs a facility to provide liquidity for companies. But as we write this, Mr. Mnuchin
was still insisting that Treasury have control of most of the money to be able to ladle out directly to
companies it wants to help. This is a recipe for picking winners and losers, and thus for bitter
political fights and months of ugly headlines charging favoritism. The far better answer is for Treasury
to use money from Congress to replenish the Exchange Stabilization Fund to back the Fed in creating a
facility or special-purpose vehicles under Section 13(3) to lend the money to all comers. "(
"Leaderless
on the Econom"
, Wall Street Journal)
I can hardly believe the author is bold
enough to say this right to our faces. Read it carefully: They are saying "We want your money, but not your
advice. The Fed will choose who gets the cash and who doesn't. Just put your trillions on the counter and
get the hell out."
Isn't that what they're saying? Of
course it is. And the rest of the article is even more arrogant:
"The Fed can charge a
non-concessionary rate, but the vehicles should be open to those who think they need the money, not
merely to those Treasury decides are worthy." (Huh? So the Treasury should have no say so in who gets
taxpayer money??) The looming liquidity crisis is simply too great for that kind of bureaucratic,
politicized decision-making. (Wall Street Journal)
Get it? In other words, the folks at
Treasury are just too stupid or too prejudiced to understand the subtleties of a bigass bailout like this.
Is that arrogance or what?
This is the contempt these people have
for you and me and everyone else who isn't a part of their elitist gaggle of reprobates. Here's a clip from
another article at the WSJ that helps to show how the financial media is pushing this gigantic handout to
corporate America:.
"The Federal Reserve, Treasury
Department and banking regulators deserve congratulations for their bold, necessary actions to provide
liquidity to the U.S. financial system amid the coronavirus crisis. But more remains to be done. We thus
recommend: (1) immediate congressional action . to authorize the Treasury to use the Exchange
Stabilization Fund to guarantee prime money-market funds, (2) regulatory action to effect temporary
reductions in bank capital and liquidity requirements (NOTE–So now the banks don't need to hold capital
against their loans?) .. additional Fed lending to banks and nonbanks .(Note -by "nonbanks", does the
author mean underwater hedge funds?)
We recommend that the Fed take
further actions as lender of last resort. First, it should re-establish the Term Auction Facility, used
in the 2008 crisis, allowing depository institutions to borrow against a broad range of collateral at an
auction price (Note–They want to drop the requirement for good Triple A collateral.) Second, it should
consider further exercising its Section 13(3) authority to provide additional liquidity to nonbanks,
potentially including purchases of corporate debt through a special-purpose vehicle" (
"Do
More to Avert a Liquidity Crisis"
, Wall Street Journal
)
This isn't a bailout, it's a joke, and
there's no way Congress should approve these measures, particularly the merging of the US Treasury with the
cutthroat Fed. That's a prescription for disaster! The Fed needs to be abolished not embraced as a state
institution. It's madness!
And look how the author wants to set up
an special-purpose vehicle (SPV) so the accounting chicanery can be kept off the books which means the
public won't know how much money is being flushed down the toilet trying to resuscitate these insolvent
corporations whose executives are still living high on the hog on the money they stole from credulous
investors. This whole scam stinks to high heaven!
Meanwhile America's working people will
get a whopping $1,000 bucks to tide them over until the debts pile up to the rafters and they're forced to
rob the neighborhood 7-11 to feed the kids. How fair is that?
And don't kid yourself: This isn't a
bailout, it's the elitist's political agenda aimed at creating a permanent underclass who'll work for
peanuts just to eek out a living.
In 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve bailed out the global banking system to the tune of $16 Trillion. But
American citizens were left to pay usurious rates of interest on $1 Trillion of credit card debt. And
American students had lost years of economic opportunity but their $1 Trillion dollars of debt could not be
discharged through bankruptcy.
This time the banks should stand behind the debtors at the government
troth.
It's hard to understand how holiday cruise shipping can be regarded as an essential business.
It is almost as hard to understand why a "Globalist Enterprise" should be spared its fate through the
generosity of of one country. Even harder to understand, why would that one country should bail out a
business, which had employed both tax-avoidance schemes as well as strategy import substitution and foreign
investment to improve its profits at the expense of that country.
Nationalism is better that globalism. The current crisis was not caused by globalism; but globalism has
drained from our country the means to respond to the crisis with the medicines and equipment that would
reduce its severity.
Not a single cent of government aid should go toward a person or an entity outside the United States and
it territories. Conditions should be placed upon such aid, so that the companies receiving it, must
domesticate their supply chains, and must produce and develop their products within the United States.
@anachronism
Make the universities discharge the student debt. It was their scam all along. They can begin by retrenching
their schools of the humanities and at least halving their administrative staff. And end building and sports
programs. The fat hangs heavy on that particular pig.
The student and the university should share responsibility equally. In
the future, the institution should be made a co-signor on any student loan; and the obligation to repay
the loan should be joint and several for both the institution and the student.
Bankruptcy provides the ex-student with the chance to start over and to escape the burden; but not
without consequences. This will discourage the ex-student, who is doing well financially and has the
means to service the debt, from just walking away.
They're going to have to bail out/nationalize the shale oil industry.
Or "They" could just ignore it.
It has achieved these outcomes – despite steep decline rates and a constant need
for huge numbers of new wells – through massive levels of junk debt forced into
existence by almost zero interest rates and by having little to no profits since 2008.
Sounds like a really rotten business model. "steep decline rates and a constant need for
huge numbers of new wells" describes an industry in eclipse, to put it kindly.
The break-even for shale oils wells varies, but $70 a barrel is a good average
figure.
Even worse. This 'business' is essentially fake and should be shuttered. Every dollar
thrown at it will be wasted. If everything in the world somehow reverses itself one day and
shale oil is once again needed, we can restart it. Won't happen, though. Obsolete.
@Kim One part of the New Deal, that seemed to work very well for all parties concerned,
was the Department of Agriculture's willingness to buy up excess grain/dairy production in
order to encourage an ample supply of grain/dairy and a sustainable price, so that farmers
could get out of the boom/bust cycle. These excess stores were intended to provide supplies
when weather or disasters disrupted the harvests. The AG Dept. also established guidelines
for farmers on how much acreage should be allocated to which type of food product, based upon
its own estimates of aggregate demand and needs for strategic reserves. It even paid farmers
to keep acreage fallow at times.
The Department of Energy could do something similar (provided the Congress should
legislate it). For this to work, the government must limit foreign sources from supplying the
US markets to serve only as augmentation to US energy production whenever/wherever the US
energy producers can't meet the demand at the price level that the Energy Department sets. If
the price is determined on an average COST+ ROI basis, our energy producers would effectively
become utilities.
They're going to have to bail out/nationalize the shale oil industry.
Why? These were private failed investment decisions, so let the industry go bankrupt along
with their shareholders and junk bond investors.
The world doesn't need oil supplied at $70 – And what has this got to do with the US
public? They didn't make these shale oil investment decisions.
TBTF (Too Big To Fail) is another fake argument. If the investment banks had been allowed
to fail in 2008, we would now have a smaller and more prudent banking sector. There are
always some serious banks out there to pick up the pieces.
1) The West was exposed, not only for not being able to handle a pandemic, but also for
having a ponzi scheme economy.
Having its citizens and its companies leveraged up to a point where America can collapse
with any amount of hardship badly exposes America as being exceptionally weak.
2) Decoupling of Asia from America. For the West to try and target the Chinese, there will
be fallout. It's not like white people bother to distinguish Chinese from Korean or Japanese
when they harass Asians they see.
This will have consequences in Asia as Asian countries will just focus on trading with
each other than have to deal with a hostile west.
3) America cannot exist in a multipolar world, it can only exist in a unipolar world that
it controls. So it will not just be a decoupling of China and America, it will be escalation
between America and China till one is left standing.
You can expect to see color revolutions in HK and Taiwan. Meanwhile China will have no
reason to show any restraint in fighting back. China could target the west in Iran,
Venezuela, or even in the US by tormenting color revolutions of it's own.
4) it is easy to say that America will just trade more with Europe, but how does that
work? Drug prices are already too high in America, so now America will pay even higher
prices?
Trading more with Latin America makes more sense to me, but I also don't think Latin
America is up to it.
5) I honestly don't think America will be the same country after the outbreak is over.
Things are already cracking early on, how will Americans pull together 3 months in?
How will America pull together if Trump pulls war time authority?
As stated in my
review of Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985), we live in a decaying society that is in
terror of death, and pathologically so. This pathology is rooted in mistaken beliefs that our
civilization is dying from, or could imminently die from, disease epidemics, climate
catastrophes etc., in the midst of willful and ignorant abdication of a future (via self-hate
and industrialized abortion) in favor of mass immigration, consumerism, and instant
gratification. Just as one has to confront death in order to truly live (or to become
"authentic" in Heidegger's philosophy), our society is in constant flight from death and thus
inevitably collapses into inauthentic decay. COVID-19, while not as lethal as media coverage
would suggest, is a reminder of our mortality and human fragility and will necessarily have a
jarring effect on a Western liberalism that has become increasingly distant from the
confrontation with death.
Life under liberal finance capitalism is largely one of illusion, in which the prospect of
real death is pushed far into the distance, both psychologically and culturally. Postmodern
Western liberal culture is largely one of perpetual adolescence, in which the primary virtues
are acting according to one's individual will, identifying oneself in a hyper-individualistic
manner, and expressing these identities via conspicuous consumption and behavior. We do not
"live towards" Death, with a sense of purpose and a feeling that we are part of a much grander
civilizational trajectory. We do not understand that Death has shaped our historical path, and
that it hangs over us in ways that should direct our actions in the present.
COVID-19, regardless of current confusion over its true mortality rate, is a corrective to
illusions that "progressive" Man has overcome Nature and can shape the world according to the
human image, and without consequences. Certainly throughout my own lifetime, I've grown
accustomed to assertions that life expectancy will continue to increase, and that there will be
an endless supply of innovations and social projects that will make the mechanics of life
easier and more productive.
One increasingly expects that one will live a long life, mostly in very good health. Such a
sense of security can breed all kinds of arrogance and fantasies, including the recent perverse
luxury of the delusion that one can simply decide to be this or that gender. This new virus,
however, presents the possibility, both in itself and its inevitable heirs, that Death is much
closer than we ever thought, and that for all our technological advancement and
self-congratulation, Nature need only tweak one molecule, so small our naked eyes could never
perceive it, and the grave opens before us. The Age of Fantasy is confronted with the ultimate
reality.
How the West responds to this realization will be a further cultural challenge. We have
grown equally accustomed to the idea that we have "advanced" morally as a society, and that we
have overcome some of the more "brutish" aspects of human existence that we perceive in the
past. But in a world of apparently increasing plenty, such notions can be hard to test. It's
always easy for a man with a full stomach to condemn the actions of the starving. The conceit
of the full-bellied West that it has overcome and surpassed itself and its past will now be
tested. I, of course, arise from a political and philosophical tradition that insists there is
no shame in the past. I see little or no place for morality in the struggle for survival. And I
also see the cracks already forming in the Western conceit. This society that is against "hate"
and prides itself on "coming together" is already struggling to stop people rioting
over toilet paper and bottled water. If civil order breaks down, will the proud feminists be
seeking their own resources, or hoping for a strong man to protect them? If the death toll does
rise dramatically, and if curfews and lockdowns are imposed and intensified, I ask: How well
will your beloved multicultural societies respond? If resources become scarce and tensions
rise, who will you trust? These tests are coming.
Economic and Political Fallout
Just days ago, JPMorgan
projected that a recession will hit the US and European economies by July, with US GDP to
shrink by 2% in the first quarter and 3% in the second, and Eurozone GDP to contract by 1.8%
and 3.3% over the same periods. Sudden cessation of economic activity through quarantines,
event cancellations, social distancing, and the almost complete shutdown of the tourist
industry will have both immediate and longer term consequences for national economies and
broader trade patterns. The mass closing of schools will expose pre-existing weaknesses in a
modern system that sees women funneled en masse into the work place while their children are
left in day cares or schools. According to numbers
from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 70 percent of American mothers with children
under 18 work. Through the closing of schools alone, the impact of COVID-19 will almost
certainly have the greatest impact on the role of women in the workplace since World War Two,
with many forced to leave work and return to the home for an as yet undetermined amount of
time. How this will impact the businesses or public entities employing these women remains to
be seen, but it will undoubtedly cause significant difficulties and necessitate some level of
infrastructural change.
The outbreak of COVID-19 is also projected to test Western healthcare provision to the
limit. It's been particularly interesting that the outbreak in Italy effectively broke
the health system in Lombardy, widely regarded as one of the best in the world. Before the
outbreak, it was
remarked that:
The Lombardy healthcare system, characterised by quality and efficiency, is a model of
reference both in Italy and worldwide. With the benefit of private partnerships in fact, it
ensures its citizens and those who live in other regions or abroad have access to prime level
health care with all the advantages of a public system. Lombardy has 56 University
Departments of Medicine, 19 IRCCS (IRCCS means an institution devoted to excellence in
clinical care and research) which represent 42% of the national total, 47 Institutes and 32
Research Centres. As a result, Lombardy and in particular Milan have always attracted the
most renowned physicians in every field of expertise.
It took COVID-19 just four weeks to exhaust every hospital bed in Lombardy, force doctors
out of retirement and medical students to graduate early, and provoke the creation of 500
triage tents outside hospitals nationwide. The different, and ever-politicized, healthcare
systems of the United States and Great Britain are about to experience the most intensive test
in their respective histories.
One of the most outspoken figures from the medical profession on social media in recent days
is Eugene Gu , who has made
a point of attacking the profit-seeking nature of much of the American medical establishment.
Gu has argued that American medicine is essentially a pyramid scheme that profits those at the
top by artificially restricting the number of doctors produced by the system:
The medical school and residency system in the United States is completely broken compared
to other countries. Now that we are in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, we need to
reflect upon an abusive system that hurts patients and seeks to make a few specialists filthy
rich. Even before the coronavirus, we created a huge physician shortage by limiting spots in
medical schools to inflate doctors' salaries the same way De Beers fixes the diamond market.
And we gutted primary care so that specialists like plastic surgeons and dermatologists can
get rich. I took an oath to "first, do no harm." I cannot just stand by and watch as the
corrupt cesspool we call our American medical system fails our patients while a few doctors,
insurance executives, and Big Pharma get filthy rich. Medicine should not be a for-profit
industry.
Whether or not one agrees with Dr Gu's perspective, the coming weeks and months will test
both American for-profit medicine and Britain's nationalized health system, and perhaps leave
long term political legacies for both.
Political consequences will also inevitably result from the approaches of individual leaders
to the crisis. Boris Johnson is risking his political future on a " herd immunity " strategy
that is radically different from the course of action pursued by other leaders. It's been
criticized as involving the sacrifice of the older generation for a slightly prolonged period
of economic normalcy and an entirely assumed future immunity among the young.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, is quickly trying to move on from a
highly dismissive initial response to the outbreak. In both cases, and throughout the West,
moderately "conservative" populism based on the celebration of finance capitalism and token
gestures on borders will be tested to the limit by increasing strains on all aspects of social,
political, and economic life. Trump, in particular, has managed to squeeze a lot of political
mileage out of the performance of the stock market. With stocks tumbling, and the American
healthcare system pushed to the limit, it remains to be seen whether Trump's drive to
make gay sex legal in Africa will be enough to keep his voters happy.
In another return of the Real, of course, COVID-19 is doing more to close borders than any
expression of political populism ever has. It was all well and good that "the world is a
village" when this involved cheap and cheerful vacations, but all it took was a few houses in
the throes of sickness for the rest of the villagers to wish there was somewhere they could
escape to. The global village is in shutdown. All humans might be equally susceptible to this
virus, but national borders, so often scorned until recently, now reveal they might have some
uses after all – just one of them being the invaluable opportunity to seal and control a
limited territory. How people grow accustomed to this renewed emphasis on border control may
leave a lasting political legacy for the West also. In any case, we can only hope it will.
The idea advanced on the last thread [by Vk and here @7 and 39 I think] that governments
should be organized around something different than economics is sound and worthy of
everyone's input, ideas and objections; discussion is needed and welcome.
International human to human discussion should take place. Human experience with nation
state globalism has shown just how vulnerable humanity is to organized and institutionalized
corruption; the actions of the leaders of individual nations have shown the nation state
system cannot be trusted.
The Covid 19 pandemic has reminded us all that we as humans <= have a right to a
government that is of our collective liking, we have learned that governments must serve the
best interest of the most persons, not special interest of a few. Governments which fail to
serve equal right, open access and equal chance to those it governs are prima facia
legitimates. Covid 19 brought the meaning of the principle of self-determination to the
forefront. Everyone's life is challenged by submicroscopic beast. It takes the cooperation of
all of us, to save most of us, and it takes the corruption of a few, to ruin it all, for most
of us.
Human rights come first, long before economics . No economic rationale can support
the delay or justify the cost of failure for those entrusted with the power to act, should
they fail to timely act with diligence on threat that human lives are in danger. Experience
suggest it is not possible to leave the power, function, and direction of government to those
whose responsibility it is to operate it <= something very different is needed.
Covid 19 was a wake up call , that makes real the unfulfilled and failed campaign
promises in a never ending trail of campaigns. Its time for everyone to insist on truth,
truth in media, truth in political campaigns, open book truth from those appointed to
government, and to bring everyone's troops home. Its time for nation states to stop
supporting the private oil and gas bandits, the MSM, or any other special interest, its time
to make a single global currency that bears no interest and that does not require repayment
of principal, its time for governments to stop arming belligerents, their own or those of
anyone else (gun control should be transformed into between governments, weapons control and
the persons of all humans everywhere should be equally armed), its time to stop one nation
instigating or supporting regime change in another, and its time to deny government leaders
from using the governments they lead, to enable private or corrupt profits. Every human has a
right to life, liberty and to pursuit of happiness: <=governments were instituted to
secure to mankind the enjoyment of the privilege of those rights; but it seems mankind has
been lax in making these governments conform to their privilege of existence.
A $0 military budget, and no interest, no repay currency could bring the credit
needed to create multi many places of employment, AWA fix ailing infra structures, improve
access to, even make access globally universal. It could improve the quality of education and
open to everyone<= fair play, access to capital (instead of venture capital expecting
reward of profit, how about advances of capital in search of human progress). which could
enable real progress on earth for mankind.
Its time to eliminate the dependency on, or even the existence of those monopolies
nation states like to create out of thin air by using their power to invent by rule of law,
powers that restrain true competition (license, privatized government ownership, special
authority, patents, copyrights, and the private property ownership).
It time to stop over hyped , Wall Street multi global type greed which only exist
because currency is used as control devise, instead of a facilitator. Nation states should
facilitate humans to interact, in ways transparent to the nation state boundaries (Its
economics, that encourages non sharing attitudes, that cause competitors to seek ways to use
governments to restrain human inter action). Humans should try to replace foreign products
with locally made goods and the foreign goods producers should be encouraged to make goods in
places where the goods have a demand because demand produces jobs and provides opportunity,
globalism organized to produce economic gains, often attempt to steal from locals the
benefits of demand created by the locals. The local province rule should apply: that is if
locals want to make it, multinationals should be denied. The billions saved to the global
economy in unexpended energy consumption (no transport cost), could bring prices of goods and
services to comparative advantage adjusted market price levels. I predict, the poor would
prosper because they would have an opportunity to contribute to our global human society, and
government would be re instituted to encourage and enforce equality for all to those it
governs. Governments should restrain and deny wealth, but they should encourage and
facilitate local competition. At one time people elected their representatives based on
performance in accord to those ideals. Currency that carries no interest and that never needs
to be repaid, challenges economic induced greed and redirects the efforts of mankind to
providing that which is needed.
In 1949 the income tax in USA governed America was layered into tiers (where different tax
rates were applied); the USA taxed those who made big bucks at 90% in its highest tier ..
Seem to recall Briton had something similar [100% of everything over $150,000 pounds of
taxable Income?]. From here => http://www.milefoot.com/math/businessmath/taxes/fit.htm
<=i made a table
year rate@personal taxable income level
1941 81% @$5,000,000
1942-1943 88% @$200,000
1944-1945 94% @$200,000 The tax limited to a 90% effective rate.
1946-1947 91% @$200,000 The tax limited to a 90% effective rate (85.5% >credits).
1948-1951 91% @$400,000 The tax limited to a 77% effective rate in 1948-1949, .
1952-1953 92% @$400,000 The tax was limited to an 88% effective rate.
corporate rate from http://www.milefoot.com/math/businessmath/taxes/fit.htm
I made a small table.
1942- 1945 40% > $50,000
1946- 1949 38% > $50,000
1950 42% > $25,000
1951 50.75% > $25,000
1952- 1963 52% > $25,000
1964 52% > $25,000
1965- 1967 48% > $25,000
1968- 1969 52.8% > $25,000
These numbers suggest a long winded story of useless corruption.
If you'd ever tried to set up a business here in the UK, you'd realise pretty quickly that
you are under complete and utter control of the government in every aspect and they own your
business by dint of the taxes and the loans you have to take out from their banker friends,
we have soft communism because the government owns you but pretends not to. Magna Carta is
dead and it's only possible resuscitation would be a Runnymede 2 Electric Boogaloo.
"... 1) Pompeo and Grenell reportedly arguing that coronavirus has created window of opportunity for a direct strike on a weak and divided Iran. ..."
"... Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisian has criticized the #UK for not delivering millions of masks #Iran bought in preparations ahead of #Covid19 outbreak. The London govt. refused to deliver them citing US sanctions! Note that Germany took supplies meant for Switzerland, The US via the Italian Mafia (I suppose) gets masks from Bergamo. etc. ..."
I just think that the US "Intelligence" and most of the US Administration just haven't got it. I suppose when you are waiting
for the "rapture" anything that can add to the chaos is to be included.
1) Pompeo and Grenell reportedly arguing that coronavirus has created window of opportunity for a direct strike on a weak
and divided Iran. They were arguing about the severity of the strike.
2) Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisian has criticized the #UK for not delivering millions of masks #Iran bought in preparations
ahead of #Covid19 outbreak. The London govt. refused to deliver them citing US sanctions! Note that Germany took supplies
meant for Switzerland, The US via the Italian Mafia (I suppose) gets masks from Bergamo. etc. Wonderful show of
world-wide solidarity.
Pompeo should hold his "rapture" in his hot little hand and .....
"... Financialisation operates through three different conduits: changes in the structure and operation of financial markets, changes in the behaviour of nonfinancial corporations, and changes in economic policy. ..."
"... Yes, the contrived-virus (convid19) is most certainly a smoke screen for global financial collapse ..."
"... The media and the Government are in lockstep. They are quarantining areas and locking down, not to contain the virus but to contain the ensuing violence when people finally and hopefully figure out that they are getting royally screwed. ..."
"... The oil markets are playing a role in the market turmoil. And its not the Corona virus, but the radical state overreaction aided by the cynical shameless hype mongering media that has crashed the markets. ..."
"... Corona as an economic instrument ? Can't argue that medical claims are just as inflated as the amount of money that has been printed. As a companion piece to Frank's excellent article take a look at Renegade Inc's film explaining why a Fiat economy is bound to end in tears. ..."
The years since the 1970s are unprecedented in terms of their volatility in the price of commodities, currencies, real estate
and stocks. There have been 4 waves of financial crises: a large number of banks in three, four or more countries collapsed at
about the same time. Each wave was followed by a recession, and the economic slowdown which began in 2008 was the most severe
and most global since the great depression of the 1930s."
Manias, Crashes and Panics – Kindelberger and Aliber
Interestingly enough 1971 was the year when Nixon took the world off the gold standard, which had been in effect since 1944. Fiat-bugs
please note.
More to the point, however. Booms and busts have always been normal in a capitalist economy. But in recent years this has been
a feature which has been exacerbated by and involves that part of the economy indicated by the acronym FIRE (Finance, Insurance and
Real Estate) and its growing importance in the economy in both qualitative and quantitative terms.
Financialisation is a process whereby financial markets, financial institutions, and financial elites gain greater influence over
economic policy and economic outcomes. Financialisation transforms the functioning of economic systems at both the macro and micro
levels. Its principal impacts are to:
elevate the significance of the financial rent-seeking sector relative to the real value-producing sector
transfer income from the
real value-producing sector to the financial sector
increase income inequality and contribute to wage stagnation
Since 1970 this part of the economy has grown from almost nothing to 8% of US Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This means that one
dollar in every ten is associated with finance. In terms of corporate profits finance's contribution now represents around 40% of
all corporate profits in the US. This is a significant figure and, moreover it does not include those overseas earnings of companies
whose profits are repatriated to their countries of origin.
Thus, the increasing presence and role of finance in overall economic activity and the increase of profits channelled to the financial
sector represent the salient indicators as to what has been termed financialization. It is argued by some that financialization may
put the economy at risk of debt deflation and prolonged recession.
Financialisation operates through three different conduits: changes in the structure and operation of financial markets, changes
in the behaviour of nonfinancial corporations, and changes in economic policy. Countering financialisation calls for a multifaceted
agenda that:
restores policy control over financial markets
challenges the neoliberal economic policy paradigm encouraged by financialisation
makes corporations responsive to interests of stakeholders other than just financial markets
reforms the political process so as
to diminish the influence of corporations and wealthy elites
The rent-seeking nature of finance is common to all forms of insurance, banking, monopolistic pricing, and property. This has
not always been the case, or at least wasn't as pronounced as it is at present. There was a time when the banking system was junior
partner in the relationship between banks and industry. Banks provided industry with loans for investment with a view to maximising
profit for both. This is patently not the case today.
Generally speaking, banks will lend for property purchases, stock buy-backs, and perhaps loans for dubious mergers and acquisitions.
Moreover, when we speak of 'profits' this has now assumed a rather obscure meaning. Profits were generally understood as a realization
of surplus value.
Firms made stuff – goods and services – which had a value, which was then sold on the market at a profit. Given the competitive
nature of the system, firms invested in increased capital formation and output which increased productivity, surplus value and ultimately
profit.
With regard to Investment banks like Goldman Sachs and the commercial banks they do not create value; they are purely rent-extractive.
For example, commercial banks make a loan out of thin air, debit this loan to the would-be mortgagee who then becomes a source of
permanent income flow to the bank for the next 25 years.
Goldman Sachs makes year-on-year 'profits' by doing – what exactly? Nothing particularly useful. But then Goldman Sachs is part
of the cabal of central banks and Treasury departments around the world. It is not unusual to see the interchange of the movers and
shakers of the financial world who oscillate between these institutions. Hank Paulson, Mario Draghi, Steve Mnuchin, Robert Rubin
on and on it goes.
This financialised system now moves in ever-increasing levels of instability. But what did we expect when the whole institutional
structure – its rules, regulations and practises – were deregulated and finance was let off the leash.
Thatcher, Reagan, the 'Big Bang' had set the scene and there was no going back: neoliberalism and globalization had become the
norm. From this point on, however, there followed a litany of crises mostly in the developing world but these disturbances were in
due course to move into the developed world. Serial bubbles began to appear.
US stock prices [which of course would only ever go up] began to decline in the Spring of 2000, and fell by 40% in the next
three years. Whilst the prices of NASDAQ stocks decline by 80%."
Manias, Panics and Crashe s – Kindleberger and Aliber
Chastened monies moved out of this market and into property speculation. It is common knowledge what happened next. The run-up
to 2008 was floated on a sea of cheap credit. The price of stocks pushed property prices to vertiginous heights until – pop, went
the weasel.
The reason was quite simple. Any boom and bust has an inflexion point where boom turns to bust. This is when buyers incomes, and
borrowers inability to extend their loans could no longer support the rise in the price level. Euphoria turned to panic as borrowers
who once clamoured to buy were now desperate to sell. 2008 had arrived.
The strange thing, however, regarding the property price boom-and-bust was that it was based upon pure speculation. Prices went
up, prices went down. Some – a few – made money, quite a few lost money. Investors were wondering what had happened to their gains
which they had made during the up phase. Where had all that money gone?
The short answer is – nowhere. It was never there in the first place. It was fictitious capital. Gains which had appeared and
then disappeared like a will 'o' the wisp. As opposed to physical capital – machinery, labour and raw materials, and money capital
which enabled through purchase the production of value to take place, we have fictitious capital which is a claim on future production.
If my house goes up by 10% that is a capital gain, if everybody's house goes up by 10% that is asset-price inflation
Fictitious capital is a by-product of capitalist accumulation. It is a concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of political
economy. It is introduced in chapter 25 of the third volume of Capital. Fictitious capital contrasts with what Marx calls "real capital",
which is capital actually invested in physical means of production and workers, and "money capital", which is actual funds being
held.
The market value of fictitious capital assets (such as stocks and securities) varies according to the expected return or yield
of those assets in the future, which Marx felt was only indirectly related to the growth of real production. Effectively, fictitious
capital represents "accumulated claims, legal titles, to future production'' and more specifically claims to the income generated
by that production.
The moral of the story is that it is not possible to print wealth or value. Money in its paper representation of the real thing,
e.g., gold, is not wealth it is a claim on wealth.
Of course, this would be lost on establishment economists, bankers, and financial journalists, whose view is that the policy should
be QE, liquidity injections, and so forth. A one-trick pony.
And what has all of this to do with Coronavirus? Well, everything actually.
I take it that we all knew that the grotesquely overleveraged world economy was heading for a 'correction' but that's a rather
a soothing description. "Massive correction" would be a better description. That is the nature of the beast. The world was a bubble
of paper money looking for a pin. It found one.
Have a nice day all.
John ,
The "gold" backed currency is just another myth of stability, gold is controlled by central banks and hoarded by the owners of
such, the syndicate in pc terms for delicate ears. Meaning the syndicate can adjust it as they please and decide what gold is
worth as they've done in the past on a weekly basis. Inflation and deflation are used to rob the vast majority of people and expect
there to be deflation coming up as that is the worst of the two. Price stability is much more desirable across the staples that
people actually need, not what backs the man made tool called currency. The goal of responsible civil government should be full
employment of its citizens (and price stability of essential for living), especially in productive industries, not useless luxury
industries which do not benefit in any way. Now QE is just another form of inflation on a massive scale, good if you have say
a house that will go up, but the more currency you have the less it's worth and the central banksters are using it.
Prices rise
but wages and salaries do not rise anywhere near inflation, it's a slow sinking into poverty and vassalage of which mortgages
are just a form of debt slavery. You can own nothing, you're just a renter of all things to be molded and caged if necessary by
the syndicate owners and their God-State.
At some point no one will be able to afford houses and the crash will come. They DO
NOT CARE if you payoff the debt, what's important is that you pay to service the debt thus keeping you in line. If you go out
of line they can just demand the money now, thus putting you in the streets. When the time comes the God-State will take possession
of all housing, all industry etc and the slavery will be complete. Just like the Soviet Union there will be an elite that are
immune "gods" to all this, there is actually already this today, the "olympians" kingpins etc whatever you want to call them.
Biff ,
Yes, the contrived-virus (convid19) is most certainly a smoke screen for global financial collapse. Another day down
under and another super tanker full of media hype and horseshit arrives. But then it struck me. Most of us know that Convid19
is about as deadly as the common cold.
In fact the Government even tells you this if you listen carefully to press conferences. This to me can only mean one obvious
thing.
The media and the Government are in lockstep. They are quarantining areas and locking down, not to contain the virus but
to contain the ensuing violence when people finally and hopefully figure out that they are getting royally screwed. The warning
flag will be shutdown of social media services or the internet in your area. Then watch out. They have created a world where our
only means of communication is the internet. You can't even make a phone call in Aus without the internet. Imagine it's not there.
Robbobbobin ,
"Yes, the contrived-virus (convid19) is most certainly a smoke screen for global financial collapse."
Are you saying that if COVID-19 were not contrived but a genuine public health problem then it could (so would) not
be used as a smokescreen, i.e. that the contrivance of a virus of some sort (in this case COVID-19) is an essential aspect
of your narrative; that if there were no pathogen engendering a pandemic problem then a serviceable smokescreen could (so would)
not be contrived based on some factor other than a biological one, or are you saying something else altogether?
simply put ,
Money exists to facilitate trade.
So if the economy grows you need to put more money into circulation, if it shrinks you need to take money out of circulation.
That's why a gold standard does not work very well in a modern world, it cannot adapt to the changing environment, you cannot
increase or decrease the amount of gold in the world (not as needed anyway) so you end up with not enough "money" available (or
too much), both disastrous for the economy.
The banking system is corrupt, but not because of fiat money.
Ken Kenn ,
Lenin talked about making Statues out of Gold post a Communist Society so its' inherent worth is in the eye of the shareholder
in its price or it's perceived future price.
Money ( fiat or otherwise ) is only an agreed exchange of labour to price of goods between a group of swindler Capitalists
who ideally would wish that all the other Capitalists to pay their workers more so that they can buy the other Capitalists goods
who don't pay their workers more.
The state of play at the moment is a bit Rooseveltian.
Is it better to be a poorer capitalist temporarily than not a future capitalist at all?
the UK Neo – Liberal position says yes only because there is a tiny chance that the masses will twig what's going on and why
it's going on in this way.
80% of wages is better than 0% of wages/income.
This is predicted to last just 3 months.
If it lasts a year watch it all change.
Fact is- in the end the Middle Classes and down will pick up the tab.
And if the 'We ' are picking up the tab anyway ' We ' may as well demand and get 100% of wages/income.
As Thatcher said – It's our money – not the State's.
Theoretically of course in a democracy.
Toby Russell ,
I don't believe this or that form of money can ever be the be-all-and-end-all form. Fiat has its place, a gold standard
has its place, shells have their place, gift exchanges, IOUs, etc. There are reasonable arguments to be made for each, but each
reasonable argument, to be reasonable, would have to include historical context / societal conditions as a very large part of
its logic.
Far more important than 'money as wealth' is how we culturally understand the nature of wealth that money can only ever
be a claim on (an important function, an important component of wealth). As Rhys points out below, wealth is a slippery thing
– it's subjective to a considerable degree after all – but if one thing unites all 'instances' of it, that would be its networked
nature. There is no wealth at all without some sort of complex, living and healthy ecosystem to generate it, continually,
dynamically. So another feature of wealth would be its dynamic and ever evolving nature. Another would be that there is thus no
final guarantee of Always Having So Much Wealth I Never Have To Work Again. (Whatever work is.
Bullshit jobs, anyone ?)
And as for productivity, well, what's that? Is productivity only productive when wealth is produced? On what definition of
wealth? Good sleep produces health, assuming good exercise, good diet, healthy soil, richly biodiverse ecosystems, etc. The same
is true of friendships, community, trust, fun All things that cannot be manufactured. Not that there's anything wrong with manufacture,
which etymologically comes from manual , the hand, thus skill, craftsmanship, etc. All that good stuff.
So it's slippery, nuanced, open to discussion. What kills wealth, on the other hand – and is killing wealth right in front
of our eyes – is narrow, dogmatic assertions about what it is. One's thing's for sure: it's not money (he asserts dogmatically).
Money needs a thorough demotion, in my view, and things like sleep, community and trust need a great big cultural promotion.
Yet again, we are at a strange and mighty inflection point historically. They're popping up now with alarming regularity! Something
is obviously in the offing.
Will our imaginations and courage fail us this time around?
Here in France last weekend was Acte 70, with a huge number of gilets jaunes out on the streets for the 70th consecutive
week, protesting against 'austerity' and neoliberalism. This weekend, Acte 71, thus far there's been no street protests. I guess
the gilets jaunes will know that it will bring bad publicity for them at the moment. What they are doing instead is issuing
a massive call for everyone to open windows on their home this evening at 9pm, and bash pots and pans as loudly as possible. It'll
be interesting to see how many people will do this.
No singing on balconys baloney here.
Alan Tench ,
Please speculate: why is the number of deaths compared to infections very much lower in all the Scandinavian countries than elsewhere
in Europe? Let's just assume the figures might be reasonably accurate for this one. Also, looking at all the figures (sorry, I
used Wikipedia for this), am I right in suspecting that the number of recoveries is being blatantly unreported in just about every
country?
Ted ,
The oil markets are playing a role in the market turmoil. And its not the Corona virus, but the radical state overreaction
aided by the cynical shameless hype mongering media that has crashed the markets. As the evidence rolls in, the actual Corona
virus, and not whatever it is that is going on in Italy (a radical statistical outlier among all world nations), is rather boring.
Much more boring than the normal flu virus. And let's not forget the possibility of an epidemic of false positives in a radical
increase in PCR testing for Corona virus. Here in the West of the US, only 7% or so of tests yield positive results what if 100%
of those are false positives during the normal tail end of flu season? see for example:
'I have a five pound note, issued by the Bank of England. It clearly states: "I promise to pay the bearer the sum of five
pounds on demand." It is signed by the Chief Cashier on behalf of the Governor of the Bank of England. However, if I were to
take this bank note to the Bank of England and demand my five pounds, I would be swiftly escorted from the building.'
Unlikely. If they could not oblige you there they would certainly refer you to a nearby commercial bank who would be happy
to pay you five one-pound coins, or the equivalent in any lesser denomination, on their behalf, as promised. Of course, that would
not counter your point, but it would keep their promise.
Seamus Padraig ,
OT: If anyone here wants a good laugh, read the comments on this ridiculous tweet.
Very amusing Seamus (but not funny for the victims) however, having read through all the tweets I didn't see one advocating "Spend
many happy hours building your own Lego model of Netanyahu's bulldozers"
Jen ,
CIA must be desperate to recruit kiddies to spy on their parents through online games.
Mike Ellwood ,
Quite. As Minsky said, anyone can create money. The trick is to get it accepted.
Governments who issue currency give it value simply by insisting that their citizens pay them tax in it. And how do the citizens
get the currency in the first place? Governments spend it into the economy.
If you had a closed, autarkic (no imports or exports) economy, government could control the value of its currency pretty closely
if it chose to. It gets more complicated in the real world, where you need to import real resources, and your currency is being
traded in the Foreign Exchange market. It helps if you have something that other countries want, that you can export.
At the end of the day, what matters are real resources (people, as well as things). As we see with the toilet roll panic (and
other, more serious shortages).
Toby Russell ,
Your comment gets my vote, though I would argue that this discussion, and the point you make, needs much more airing. As such,
the argument is not academic, but vital. And this new Bizzaro World we just burst into is the right place for it. And loudly.
Seamus Padraig ,
By the way, Ben Swann did a great show the other night analyzing the media hype surrounding Corona Virus data. Enjoy
The Japan numbers have puzzled me for a while, since they are no slouches when it comes to managing epidemics. Where are the
exploding numbers for this modern plague in Japan?
At some point, folks gotta say that the WHO needs to be reformed or closed down.
John Pretty ,
Ted, there has been no coronavirus epidemic in Japan and no panic:
Japan may have a healthier elderly population compared to the same age demographic in China and other parts of the world due to
diet (less Western junk food consumption over past decades) and rates of smoking probably lower as well. Air pollution levels
in Japan probably much lower due to greater use of public transport and Shinkansen bullet trains in particular since 1960s. No
wonder Japan still wants to go ahead with Tokyo Olympics.
Seamus Padraig ,
Another ringer from Frank Lee!
But then Goldman Sachs is part of the cabal of central banks and Treasury departments around the world. It is not unusual
to see the interchange of the movers and shakers of the financial world who oscillate between these institutions. Hank Paulson,
Mario Draghi, Steve Mnuchin, Robert Rubin
They don't call it Government Sachs for nothing.
#CoronaHoax
DunGroanin ,
Let's play them at their own game.
I want to see McDonnell put out a clear simple response of what measures are actually needed – i listed them a few posts ago
in haste but they still hold:
1. All self employed / free lancers etc ought to be paid at least 60% of their last years submitted accounts on a monthly basis
directly by HMRC – they have their bank details and these figures at hand a simple database query can be constructed and tested
within hours – There can be a max limit to that based on numbers of children.
2. All others without such records ought to be allowed the full and increased benefit amount.
3. The 80% for employees is smoke and mirrors – that also should be 60% and no charges or NI / pensions/ student loans etc
to complicate matters.
4. All rent private and social to be suspended. All interest on mortgages, creditcards, loans and overdrafts to be cancelled
permanently until normal service is resumed (not accumulated aa debt).
5. All capital payments to be suspended.
6. All council tax collections suspended.
7. BBC licence fee cancelled and direct funding by the HMRC introduced to provide pybluc service broadcasting only.
8. All credit ratings and any such nonsense to be suspended on individuals records – nothing should be added for failing to
keep up payments since beginning of March.
9. Any government funds into banks, corporations, pfi's to be accompanied by equity stakes in these and retained until all
such balance sheet investment has been returned.
BigB ,
I see your bubble has yet to pop, DG?
The "massive correction" – that is value destruction – has to happen before any return to "real, productive" values can occur.
Financialisation distorted productive values so much that any "normalisation" would destroy the value of money. Normal service
cannot just be resumed.
Put simply: there is more money than productive goods and services that can be claimed on now, and in the future. A lot more
a lot, lot more. At least 75 times more.
As I've said time after time: the economy has to expand exponentially or it collapses. As it stands: there is no pause or reset
button without massive value destruction. Which could be done responsibly – a la the heterodox economists "jubilee" – or irresponsibly
by keep blowing the everything bubbles with QE 5.
If you understand which mechanism is being employed: you will understand home isolation and draconian lockdowns. If debt deflation
becomes hyperinflation you might wake up in Rhodesia or the Weimar Republic and you know what came next? 🙁
DunGroanin ,
Have you missed the 40% drop in stocks BB?
And the wiping out of business Goodwill value of many a small business?
Its a major scalping. Which we are letting happen as they say 'hide' from each other. The banks are laughing all the way to
the bank.
BigB ,
No: collapse of financial assets is just the prelude. The real contagion is corporate bond market: full of over-leveraged Zombie
corporations. Particularly stressed are BBB bond junkies of the shale market but the whole market is junked out on a decade of
cheap money. When they cannot pay their way – that is, service their debt – then the defaults, layoffs, and delinquencies start
probably in the second quarter.
In other words: it hasn't even started yet. Problem: excessive debt. Solution: create more debt (and buy up the most toxic
bonds). Any rebound makes matters worse in the longer term.
One scenario to watch is when Saudi oil hits the market in April. That will put deflationary pressure on oil which is already
at $23. That could cause things to cascade (all asset classes are proxies for each other – Dr Jack Rasmus check out his blog for
explainers).
The thing is DG: this has sweet FA to do with any virus. The knock-on effect of which would have been containable I guess.
But to start an oil price war? MbS was either recklessly irresponsible, or quite deliberate. My feeling is the latter. It was
coming anyway. What better than to blame *force majeure* of a virus? And have populations on lockdown as the effects wind through
to Main St.
DunGroanin ,
I agree on the whole BB.
The thing about debt is that it can be cancelled! If that means these 'investments' will also be wiped out.
BigB ,
As Michael Hudson says "debts that cannot be paid, will not be paid". We cancel the debts, or we cancel the future. No choice
to be made really, is there?
Mike Ellwood ,
Not sure if this what you meant above, but in case not, NIC should be suspended indefinitely, both for employers and employed,
and self-employed.
Harry Stotle ,
Corona as an economic instrument ?
Can't argue that medical claims are just as inflated as the amount of money that has been printed. As a companion piece to Frank's excellent article take a look at Renegade Inc's film explaining why a Fiat economy is bound
to end in tears.
Welcome to corona capitalism or the corona casino! 😀
nottheonly1 ,
Roughly translated:
The masses owe, what the billionaires own.
What the masses still own, is now taken away.
Those who understand, see that a most generous unconditional guaranteed basic income/compensation for damages suffered on life
and property by those who run the present system, will not suffice.
A system that is sold to the masses as the gold standard of governance and distribution, has driven the collective of the species
closer to extinction. Maybe extinction is the goal after all? If that is not the case, then the UBI accounts to be like a glimpse
into a world without money in any form. A world in which everything is indeed free. Mother Earth has never been compensated for
the damages and destruction done to her and her more connected life forms.
For various reasons, corona-whatever has the potential – and it was created to do/utilize that potential – to virtually/spiritually
grow a mushroom out of homo sapiens' head. Due to the constant absorption of aerosolized air, having glyphosate in the bloodstream
down into the bone marrow, being exposed to wireless **radiation** constantly and occupied with social media 24/7 has rendered
the human immune system a sick joke compared to what it was before the commodification of everything and everything that will
come.
The bucket must stop here. And I am more than willing to go. Just don't make Soylent Green from me. But to allow a human being
to leave, when they decide to be "I'm good! I'm ready!" would also mean to allow fellow humans to leave at their choosing. Before
they are forcefully removed from the pension/social security/Renten system.
Now is the time to end social networking. No more facebook, twitter, or whatever. The addiction of the masses to panic is wholly
abused right now. And the u.s. has a president who thought he could weather it all out alone. And so did many more – doing everything
they can to maintain their grip on power and wealth.
But the gallows are coming. For all of them. And that is not the result of the rulings of corrupt courts. They will join the
only waiting line the rich ever have to experience. The call for the closure of all u.s./il/nato biological weapons laboratories
has echoed yesterday. It will be followed by the end of militarism and killing for profit. Religions are failing human beings,
because they, themselves are untruthful. And Julian Assange? Will he be given a corona?
As it goes with self-dynamical events, this one too, has long taken on a life of its own. The Universe allows for all crimes
to happen, but it does not promote them. It does not judge them. Karma means 'action' and nobody cannot not act. Things need to
be done constantly – if not to barely survive, then surely for the sake of the addiction to the virtual glass pearl that shine
so bright.
And yes, by all means. Remember that traditional Chinese medicine offers a variety of herbal mixtures against practically everything.
People need to boost their immune systems. All wifi must go. Towers must all be dismantled immediately and replaced with fiber
optics. Planned obsolescence must be prohibited. It must all start here, now.
In Argentina, they were sounding the sirens yesterday – because corona is coming. It oddly reminded me of "Incoming ballistic
millie alert! Not a Drill!". I know it's the people in the cities who are hit the hardest. Out on the countryside, one can at
least be outdoors with plants and animals. Animals also suffer from this artificially induced madness. But it would have come
anyway. Now getting back to what's really important.
BigB ,
If the economy really tanks – and it must, but not necessarily this time – they will have to totally restructure society without
work or not enough of it. There is a deeply sinister side to what they are doing. Which is establishing a precedent for further
doings. Imagine what they would do if there was a real economic crisis?
It is going to take a massive and concerted shift in the social conscience to turn it around now. It is the People's own alienated
creative cultural powers that are being enacted by the market state system against the People. It is only the People who can enact
a different system if they get another chance.
nottheonly1 ,
Exactly. Moving forward at this point means also to evolve. One time I was wondering what would happen if everyone would be told
"Don't worry about it. It has already been taken care of."
When society acknowledges its nature to be more organic than bureaucratic. For Life to be much more alive, than following the
needs of the very few.
There is a Mel Brooks classic worth watching: "Life Stinks". It applies as much to the owner class, as does 'Trading Places'
– whereas I am afraid that the owner class was making fun of the working class/poor part of society.
Organic Food security has to be our priority. Ridding ourselves from what is making us really sick to be profited from by the
owner class. Instead of giving ownership of corporations that are bailed out to the 'government' responsible for this mess, ownership
must be transferred to the workers that run the business.
"... "Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending coronavirus epidemic should be investigated and prosecuted for insider trading," ..."
"... "Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks." ..."
"... "stomach churning," ..."
"... "For a public servant it's pretty hard to imagine many things more immoral than doing this," ..."
"... "Richard Burr had critical information that might have helped the people he is sworn to protect. But he hid that information and helped only himself." ..."
"... "If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move is to adjust your stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public interest," ..."
"... "calling for immediate investigations" ..."
"... "for possible violations of the STOCK Act and insider trading laws." ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
In a rare moment of bipartisanship, commenters from all sides have demanded swift punishment for US
senators who dumped stock after classified Covid-19 briefings. Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has called
for criminal prosecution.
As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) has received daily
briefings on the threat posed by Covid-19 since January. Burr insisted to the public that America was
ready to handle the virus, but sold up to $1.5 million in stocks on February 13, less than a week
before the stock market nosedived, according to Senate
filings
. Immediately before the sale, Burr wrote an
op-ed
assuring Americans that their government is
"better prepared than ever
" to handle
the virus.
After the sale, NPR
reported
that he told a closed-door meeting of North Carolina business leaders that the virus
actually posed a threat
"akin to the 1918 pandemic."
Burr does not dispute the NPR report.
In a tweet on Saturday, former 2020 presidential candidate and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard called for
criminal investigations.
"Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending
coronavirus epidemic should be investigated and prosecuted for insider trading,"
she wrote.
"Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks."
Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending
coronavirus epidemic should be investigated & prosecuted for insider trading (the STOCK Act). It
is illegal & abuse of power. Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks.
https://t.co/rbVfJxrk3r
Burr was not the only lawmaker on Capitol Hill to take precautions, it was reported. Fellow
Intelligence Committee member Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and her husband sold off more than a
million dollars of shares in a biotech company five days later, while Oklahoma's Jim Inhofe (R) made a
smaller sale around the same time. Both say their sales were routine.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia) attended a Senate Health Committee briefing on the outbreak on
January 24. The very same day, she began offloading stock, dropping between $1.2 and $3.1 million in
shares over the following weeks. The companies whose stock she sold included airlines, retail outlets,
and Chinese tech firm Tencent.
She did, however, invest in cloud technology company Oracle, and Citrix, a teleworking company
whose value has increased by nearly a third last week, as social distancing measures forced more and
more Americans to work from home. All of Loeffler's transactions were made with her husband, Jeff
Sprecher, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.
Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) have joined the clamor of
voices demanding punishment. Ocasio-Cortez
described
the sales as
"stomach churning,"
while Omar reached across the aisle to side
with Fox News' Tucker Carlson in calling for Burr's resignation.
"For a public servant it's pretty hard to imagine many things more immoral than doing this,"
Carlson said during a Friday night monolog.
"Richard Burr had critical information that might have
helped the people he is sworn to protect. But he hid that information and helped only himself."
As of Saturday, there are nearly 25,000 cases of Covid-19 in the US, with the death toll heading
towards 300. Now both sides of the political aisle seem united in disgust at the apparent profiteering
of Burr, Loeffler, and Feinstein.
Right-wing news outlet Breitbart
savaged
Burr for voting against the STOCK Act in 2012, a piece of legislation that would have
barred members of Congress from using non-public information to profit on the stock market. At the
same time, a host of Democratic figures - including former presidential candidates
Andrew Yang
and
Kirsten Gillibrand
- weighed in with their own criticism too.
"If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move is to adjust your
stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public interest,"
Yang
tweeted on Friday.
If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move
is to adjust your stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public
interest.
Watchdog group Common Cause has filed complaints with the Justice Department, the Securities and
Exchange Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee
"calling for immediate investigations"
of
Burr, Loeffler, Feinstein and Inhofe
"for possible violations of the STOCK Act and insider trading
laws."
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
who make profits as well. I cannot remember exactly when insider trading for
them became legal but it should be no surprise to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention
that they're ALL doing it. That is one reason, at least in my semi-educated opinion, they did
not go after Trump for emoluments during Shampeachment, because THEY ALL DO IT.
That goes all the way to the White House, no doubt.
Qantas Airways: the flag carrier of Australia Qantas Airways Limited is the flag carrier
of Australia and its largest airline by fleet size, international flights and international
destinations
The crisis hit and Qantas sends home 20,000 workers or two thirds of its workforce of
30,000. Go home with no pay . The company management is proud of implementing such
measures to save the Australian icon.
Qantas, once a government owned entity, is a civilisational symbol of strength and prestige.
But with such behaviour, shouldn't we ask the question: what are these Strength and Prestige
built upon?
A group of economists and policy experts on Wednesday called on President Donald Trump to
immediately lift the United States' crippling sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and
other countries, warning that the economic warfare -- in addition to being cruel in itself --
is "feeding the coronavirus epidemic" by hampering nations' capacity to respond.
"This policy is unconscionable and flagrantly against international law. It is imperative
that the U.S. lift these immoral and illegal sanctions to enable Iran and Venezuela to
confront the epidemic as effectively and rapidly as possible," Columbia University professor
Jeffrey Sachs said in a statement just hours after the Trump administration intensified
sanctions against Iran, which has been devastated by COVID-19.
Promising to "smash" Venezuela's government during a "maximum pressure March," Trump has
imposed crushing sanctions that force Venezuela to spend three times as much as
non-sanctioned countries on coronavirus testing kits.
Bernhard when will Chump and his neo-confederates drain the swamp ? "ProPublica reported on
Thursday that republican Senator Burr sold off up to $1.56 million in stock on February 13th,
as he was reassuring the public about coronavirus preparedness. At the time, Burr and the
Intelligence Committee were receiving daily briefings about COVID-19.
Three weeks ago, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee privately
warned dozens of donors about the harrowing impact the coronavirus would have on the United
States, while keeping the general public in the dark.
In a secret recording obtained by NPR, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr is heard giving
attendees of a club luncheon a much different message than most federal government officials,
especially President Trump, were giving the public at the time.
"There's one thing that I can tell you about this," Burr said, "It is much more aggressive
in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history." He added, "It is
probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic."
That pandemic claimed more than 600,000 American lives...
@FB I, too, have been disappointed in Tucker Carlson's China bashing. I have thought that
he was the best on FOX News, but now he is getting to be as bad as Sean Hannity.
We may never know the origin of the coronavirus. It is foolish to try and assign blame at
this point.
Well, I think there's a certain amount of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the
Coronavirus outbreak may have been an American bioweapon attack against China (and Iran).
But if so, I'm *extremely* skeptical that the perpetrators ever intended or imagined that
it would leak back into the US and inflict the horrific economic and social damage that now
seems unavoidable. How to explain this lack lack of foresight?
The most obvious answer is that they were stupid and incompetent, but here's another
point to consider
In late 2002 there was the outbreak of SARS in China, a related virus but that was far
more deadly and somewhat different in other characteristics. The virus killed hundreds of
Chinese and spread into a few other countries before it was controlled and stamped out. The
impact on the US and Europe was negligible, with just a small scattering of cases and only
a death or two.
So if American biowarfare analysts were considering a Coronavirus attack against China,
isn't it quite possible they would have said to themselves that since SARS never
significantly leaked back into the US or Europe, we'd similarly remain insulated from the
Coronavirus?
Obviously, such an analysis was foolish and mistaken, but would it have seemed so
implausible at the time?
Well, I have only recently heard of a guy named Francis Boyle,a law professor out of the
Univ. Of Illinois. He is apparently an expert on bio-warfare treaties. He claims covid-19 is
manmade,period.
That is a very scary notion,from which most people will flee.
As I have accepted that 9/11 was "the usual suspects," I guess it is definitely possible.
@Ron Unz Maybe, but my take is an engineered market crash. This looks to me like a Nathan
Rothschild sort of trick (according to legend) – propagating fake news about Napoleon's
victory at Waterloo, crashing the markets, then snapping up the whole LSE for a penny to the
pound. If so, you have to admire it, the sheer genius, the psychopathic beauty of it all.
As a bonus, the Reichstag Fire also is an extremely efficient delivery system for the
eugenics payload – a very virulent strain that almost exclusively targets the social
burden (pensioners and already ill) while leaving alone the tax-farm base! Never in the
history of tax-farming have the sheeple been stampeded and fleeced so thoroughly! Bravo!
The US is the customer, with the enormous trade deficit. Trump has been hugely effective
with his tariff's policy in rehoming manufacturing to the US – a process that will
vastly accelerate thanks to the Corona virus outbreak.
I agree that 9-11 stink to high heaven and that PNAC are unmitigated bastards, but this
capitulation to China is balls.
@Ron Unz Stupidity is certainly an American Military essential behavior for promotion and
success in the current US Armed Forces.
But you can't have someone clever enough to create a Recombinant Designer Pathogen and be
in the US Military.
However, the psyops fucks would likely be ready to game the system should a natural
outbreak occur which would be called a Pandemic even when its not and make everyone of our
low quality leaders $hit their pants and go totally crazy. A mild fart with the claim its
poison gas would make the Stock Markets Collapse.
But if so, I'm *extremely* skeptical that the perpetrators ever intended or imagined
that it would leak back into the US and inflict the horrific economic and social damage
that now seems unavoidable. How to explain this lack lack of foresight?
This is the same issue with cyberwar viruses. One can infect computers in Iran, but with
the internet they may be passed onto the entire world, just like rap music.
But if so, I'm *extremely* skeptical that the perpetrators ever intended or imagined
that it would leak back into the US and inflict the horrific economic and social damage
that now seems unavoidable. How to explain this lack lack of foresight?
One word: Trump. Because he could very well lose his reelection bid if the pandemic causes
an economic recession which now seems highly likely given the stock market collapse.
Cui Bono ? The people OPPOSED to Trump, variously referred to as the "Deep State"
or the "National Security State" as described by Gore Vidal in his book which by the way
Julian Assange was holding while being hauled away from the Ecuadorian Embassy.
After Russiagate and Ukrainegate, THEY finally hit the bullseye with Coronagate.
This is a pretty good article. I'll probably link to it.
Some people think this is coming from City of London types. The US pursued a "strategy of
tension" with China that may have allowed third party actors to intervene and get them
fighting each other.
There has been some Bad Blood between British elites and China for awhile now. It's
not clear why.
In this scheme, the US is the patsy, the Oswald to take the blame.
The real gem in the whole article are the observations made by Yang himself:
YANG: That's what freaks me out about the whole thing. What we're doing is saying things
like, "Keep your social distance," and trying to stop the spread that way, which is fine.
But we have shit for data. Like, we don't know what the infection rate is. And so,
there's no reason we would ever be able to give the 'all-clear.' If you don't have any
data, this whole thing is a nightmare that doesn't end. When you close schools, what gives
you the all-clear to say, "OK, open them again"? Nothing. There's no data to compare it to.
This whole thing is a fear-based approach with no end in sight. There's no catalyst to ever
sound the all-clear. This whole thing is so fucked up.
YANG: I think the nature of that guidance has to be different, personally. I think they
need to be transparent about what kind of data we're relying on, to give people a sense of
the timeline. Right now, our sense of the future is so cloudy. And you get the sense the
president went from not taking this seriously to suddenly realizing its seriousness, and now
we're reacting in various ways to slow the spread of the virus. But then what? I would be
clearer as to what the timeline looks like, what data we're going to rely upon, how we're
going to get that data, what steps we're taking to increase testing capacity and just give
people a sense of the future.
We need to know now what the future can look like under different scenarios and then be
presented with what scenario we're in when that time comes. We've been on lockdown
for half a week. Right now, the American people don't have any visibility into whether it's
going to be four more weeks or four more months, and we don't know how those judgments are
going to determined. As president, I would say, "Look, here's the information, here's the
dashboard, here's what we're lining up, here's what we're hoping for, here's how
circumstances could change, and thank you for doing your part -- if you proceed with like
the rest of the country in flattening the curve and keeping things under this level, then
we can look forward to this. " You know, so we could actually have a sense of
accomplishment and purpose.
So here we have it, replicated throughout the whole of the Western world. An open-ended
clamp-down based on fear, with no timeline or road map, and no conditions set on when (or IF)
things will get back to normal.
For now, smells really fishy. Even if DS (Deep State) did not intentionally engineer this
circumstance, they are decisively and very swiftly exploiting it to exert extreme control
over everything .
@antibeast On the contrary, for the deep state Trump is the ideal puppet. Those
who are against Trump belong to the surface state , i.e. Democrats, Leftists in
general and the equally Leftist main stream media. Real policy in the US is only made by the
deep state .
There is a common idea behind all the various theories that attribute the pandemic to
government action, ruling class planning or financial manipulators.
And that is the idea that the ruling class/establishment/tptb,1%-call them what you will-
are all powerful, wise, though evil, and capable of defeating any popular resistance.
The people claiming now that the virus was unloosed to enable an attack on Iran, those who
claim that it was produced as a smokescreen to obscure the collapse of the financial system,
those who see it as a means to steal away our last liberties and to knock a dying democracy
on the head, even those who see it as an out of control experiment , if you look at their
posts in the past, are generally going to be found to be the same people who thought that the
US military could not be defeated, that Syria was bound to fall, that Venezuela and Cuba were
toast. And that Hezbollah and Ansarullah stood no chance against the vast forces arrayed
against them.
The idea is always the same: the Empire is indefatigable, the greedy mediocrities who run
it (many of them public figures whose characters are daily open to examination) have foreseen
all possibilities. Resistance is useless. We are all doomed.
In fact, as people who don't have the leisure to indulge themselves in these gloomy
excuses for inaction and apathy are always demonstrating, the imperial regime is not only
brittle and riven through with corruption but run by talents selected in an anti-meritocratic
way. The reason that Petraeus, for example, rose to the top of the US military machine was
that he was a slimy careerist of the sort we have all come across, and, if we have been doing
our duty, trod on, in our lives: as a General he was clueless, unoriginal and, because he was
immoral and cynical, quite unable to understand how Iraqis would react to his crude terrorist
methods. Unfortunately he was caught out by his lust; had he maintained a respectable image
he would probably, by now, be into his second term as President and making Trump look
competent.
And what is true of the Pentagon is equally true of those running the US economy, Wall St
and the banking system: they are utterly witless. Look around you for the fruits of their
wisdom.
In fact the entire political class of the US, ably assisted by its clownish puppets
elsewhere, has brought the system that they worship to the brink of dissolution. Class rule
teeters on the edge of massive uprisings.
And this is not-I have already taken up too much space and time- because the pandemic was
planned but because despite its predictability, the near certainty that the seven good years
would be followed by plagues and famines, they could not restrain themselves from dismantling
the safety nets-from flood controls to food reserves to healthcare services designed to be
able to expand when needed to deal with emergencies.
(In the Canadian county in which I live the Public Health Unit founded in the aftermath of
the First World War and the 'flu epidemics, was shut down, to save money, last year. Most of
its functions were left to chance and the marketplace to fulfil. And now we have a
pandemic.)
Instead the entire system is riddled with the weaknesses that usurious practises impose:
there are empty hospitals in the Pennines because local health authorities cannot both pay
interest on PPP loans and meet the payrolls of medical staff. So, following the logic of
capitalism-first pay interest- local taxes, designed to maintain public health, are diverted
to the money lenders. And then there is the cost of monopolised drug purchases.
And that is symptomatic of the entire system, in all its aspects: education, including the
work needed to provide scientific and medical personnel, is crippled in the same way, by high
fees, by capital costs swollen by interest payments, by professions designed to hoard rather
than spread knowledge.
The entire system is corrupt and collapsing. And that is why,particularly in the "West"
where mass indoctrination has long been part of the culture, it is necessary to recognise
that it is not going to take much in the way of mass energy to bring the whole thing down.
And to replace it with real democracy.
The virus may not have been created in a laboratory but as a minimum it should be studied to
learn more about its origin and spread. At the present time we only hace circumstantial
evidence but it point in one direction. Certain facts are worth considering:
2)The Wuhan wet-market is not the first source of the coronavirus;
2) SARS-CoV virus was being studied and experimented on at a US Bioweapons lab at Fort
Detrick. In August 2019, it was cited for unsafe conditions that may have led to
contamination of wastewater;
3) The US sent over 300 military personnel to the World Military Games in Wuhan in late
October 2019;
4) Four foreign military participants came down with an unknown respiratory illness during
the games;
5) Genetic studies conducted in Taiwan and Japan indicate that the ancestral form of
SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 coronavirus does not occur in China but is found in the US and
elsewhere.
African swine fever is also spread by man-made means even if it is not in itself man-made.
Criminal elements spread it with
drones The longer it takes to track down the origin even if the Chinese reportedly
monitor everything, the more suspicious it becomes.
The world has changed many times, and it is changing again. All of us will have to
adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change,
there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too
much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force
countries -- the US, in particular -- to fix the yawning social inequities that make large
swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.
No doubt global elites present a united front to protect their common interest in
maintaining the petrodollar and international banking system, insofar as it supports their
individual interests. However, other than that shared interest, the elite are rife with
factions -- both domestically and especially internationally.
Incredibly globalization as a system seems to have mostly disappeared in 6 weeks. There
are closed frontiers, no more container ships, the ports are empty, no flights and the malls
are closing.
It's not clear where the US public are going to get their electronics, clothing and other
Walmart items unless everything rebounds 100%. If there's no rebound, then it starts to look
like some kind of watershed event equivalent to WW1.
If elites and their interests are the foundation of the NWO, then right now they seem to
be all over the place.
– The globalists want a strong dollar which they ensure with the dollar's reserve
currency role (particularly the petrodollar). The dollar is doing fine now as a refuge, but
with oil approaching $20 a barrel it doesn't look like such a great link longer term, and
what use is a reserve currency when there's no trade?
– Globalism is based on ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) to keep the West consuming
and allow the issuance of massive debt. Now international bond markets are hesitating in the
face of more massive international issuance to deal with the economic fallout of the
Coronavirus. Interest rates only have to rise to their historic averages to collapse the
whole thing.
– The LGBT, SJW crowd find that racism, diversity and generally anti-White
propaganda has become a non-issue. Everything has become Coronavirus which is actually sort
of equalizing , and putting the focus on what the government needs to do to protect all the
public including Deplorables (unusual turnaround).
– Frontiers are closing with the cheap labour/ multicultural crowd having gone
quiet.
– Many globalist interests are facing bankruptcy as demand disappears, new share and
bond issuance is blocked, credit disappears and a myriad of counterparty risks (finacialized
opaque derivatives) turn into counterparty failures.
– The general inability of Western government elites to handle all these combined
events. Monetary policy doesn't work in a ZIRP environment so they may just resort to
"Helicopter Money" but with shortages of goods this is guaranteed to feed directly into
inflation.
Altogether a remarkable change of direction in a very short time.
@Miro23Coronavirus is certainly a useful way to deflate a speculative bubble. The virus gets the
blame rather the Dumpers in the Pump and Dump cycle. -- Miro23
But, given the precarious state of the global financial system, wouldn't any black swan of
sufficient magnitude suffice to accomplish both deflation and take the blame?
No doubt global elites present a united front to protect their common interest in
maintaining the petrodollar and international banking system, insofar as it supports their
individual interests . However, other than that shared interest, the elite are rife with
factions -- both domestically and especially internationally.
Which explains Tom Dye's assertion that one of the critical roles of the Counsel on
Foreign Relations (CFR) is conflict resolution between competing elite factions. Or, in other
words, I am having a bit of difficulty with the currently popular theory that a
unified, omnipotent and near infallible global elite is behind everything single thing that
happens on the world stage
Fully in agreement with b here. Instead of shovelling money at banksters and corporate
scammers to prop up the collapsing market, the Fed, ECB and other central banks should give
the cash to people who need it and will use it to buy things and stimulate the economy.
This pandemic is demonstrating once again that the global neoliberal economy is a fragile
Potemkin construct that breaks down at the slightest tension. Finance capitalism is a busted
flush, a blatant scam to line the pockets of the 1% at everyone else's expense. And when the
going gets really tough they will sacrifice all of us to save their cowardly avaricious
asses. Governments need to represent the interests of citizens, not central bankers and the
obscenely wealthy. That means putting the well-being of people first, not spending trillions
to "save" the stock market aka "the economy."
R ussia and Saudi Arabia are engaged in an oil price war that has sent shockwaves around
the world, causing the price of oil to tumble and threatening the financial stability, and even
viability, of major international oil companies.
On the surface, this conflict appears to be a fight between two of the world's largest
producers of oil over market share. This may, in fact, be the motive driving Saudi Arabia,
which reacted to Russia's refusal to reduce its level of oil production by slashing the price
it charged per barrel of oil and threatening to increase its oil production, thereby flooding
the global market with cheap oil in an effort to attract customers away from competitors.
Russia's motives appear to be far different -- its target isn't Saudi Arabia, but rather
American shale oil. After absorbing American sanctions that targeted the Russian energy sector,
and working with global partners (including Saudi Arabia) to keep oil prices stable by reducing
oil production even as the United States increased the amount of shale oil it sold on the world
market, Russia had had enough. The advent of the Coronavirus global pandemic had significantly
reduced the demand for oil around the world, stressing the American shale producers.
Russia had been preparing for the eventuality of oil-based economic warfare with the United
States. With U.S. shale producers knocked back on their heels, Russia viewed the time as being
ripe to strike back. Russia's goal is simple: to make American shale oil producers "
share the pain ".
The United States has been slapping sanctions on Russia for more
than six years, ever since Russia took control (and later annexed) the Crimean Peninsula and
threw its weight behind Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The first sanctions were issued
on March 6, 2014, through Executive
Order 13660 , targeting "persons who have asserted governmental authority in the Crimean
region without the authorization of the Government of Ukraine that undermine democratic
processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty,
and territorial integrity; and contribute to the misappropriation of its assets."
The most
recent round of sanctions was announced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on February 18,
2020, by sanctioning Rosneft Trading S.A., a Swiss-incorporated, Russian-owned oil brokerage
firm, for operating in Venezuela's oil sector. The U.S. also recently targeted the Russian
Nord Stream 2
and
Turk Stream gas pipeline projects.
Russia had been signaling its displeasure over U.S. sanctions from the very beginning. In
July 2014, Russian President Vladimir
Putin warned that U.S. sanctions were "driving into a corner" relations between the two
countries, threatening the "the long-term national interests of the U.S. government and
people." Russia opted to ride out U.S. sanctions, in hopes that there might be a change of
administrations following the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. Russian President Vladimir
Putin made it clear that he hoped the U.S. might elect someone whose policies would be more
friendly toward Russia, and that once the field of candidates narrowed down to a choice between
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Putin favored
Trump .
"Yes, I did," Putin remarked after the election, during a joint press conference with
President Trump following a summit in Helsinki in July 2018. "Yes, I did. Because he talked
about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal."
Putin's comments only reinforced the opinions of those who embraced allegations of Russian
interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election as fact and concluded that Putin had some
sort of hold over Trump. Trump's continuous praise of Putin's leadership style only reinforced
these concerns.
Even before he was inaugurated, Trump singled out Putin's refusal to respond in kind to
President Obama's levying of sanctions based upon the assessment of the U.S. intelligence
community that Russia had interfered in the election. "Great move on delay (by V. Putin)
– I always knew he was very smart!"
Trump Tweeted . Trump viewed the Obama sanctions as an effort
to sabotage any chance of a Trump administration repairing relations with Russia, and
interpreted Putin's refusal to engage, despite being pressured to do so by the Russian
Parliament and Foreign Ministry, as a recognition of the same.
This sense of providing political space in the face of domestic pressure worked both ways.
In January 2018, Putin tried to shield his relationship with President Trump by calling the
release of a list containing some 200 names of persons close to the Russian government by the
U.S. Treasury Department as a hostile and "stupid"
move .
"Ordinary Russian citizens, employees and entire industries are behind each of those people
and companies," Putin remarked. "So all 146 million people have essentially been put on this
list. What is the point of this? I don't understand."
From the Russian perspective, the list highlighted the reality that the U.S. viewed the
entire Russian government as an enemy and is a byproduct of the "political paranoia" on the
part of U.S. lawmakers. The consequences of this, senior Russian officials warned, "will be
toxic and undermine prospects for cooperation for years ahead."
While President Trump entered office fully intending to "
get along with Russia ," including the possibility of
relaxing the Obama-era sanctions , the reality of U.S.-Russian relations, especially as
viewed from Congress, has been the strengthening of the Obama sanctions regime. These
sanctions, strengthened over time by new measures signed off by Trump, have had a negative
impact on the Russian economy,
slowing growth and
driving away foreign investment .
While Putin continued to show constraint in the face of these mounting sanctions, the recent
targeting of Russia's energy sector represented a bridge too far. When Saudi pressure to cut
oil production rates coincided with a global reduction in the demand for oil brought on by the
Coronavirus crisis, Russia struck.
The timing of the Russian action is curious, especially given the amount of speculation that
there was some sort of personal relationship between Trump and Putin that the Russian leader
sought to preserve and carry over into a potential second term. But Putin had, for some
time now, been signaling that his patience with Trump had run its course. When speaking to
the press in June 2019 about the state of U.S.-Russian relations, Putin noted that "They
(our relations) are going downhill, they are getting worse and worse," adding that "The current
[i.e., Trump] administration has approved, in my opinion, several dozen decisions on sanctions
against Russia in recent years."
By launching an oil price war on the eve of the American Presidential campaign season, Putin
has sent as strong a signal as possible that he no longer views Trump as an asset, if in fact
he ever did. Putin had hoped Trump could usher in positive change in the trajectory of
relations between the two nations; this clearly had not happened. Instead, in the words of
close Putin ally Igor Sechin , the chief executive of Russian oil giant Rosneft, the U.S.
was using its considerable energy resources as a political weapon, ushering in an era of "power
colonialism" that sought to expand U.S. oil production and market share at the expense of other
nations.
From Russia's perspective, the growth in U.S. oil production -- which doubled in output from
2011 until 2019 -- and the emergence of the U.S. as a net exporter of oil, was directly linked
to the suppression of oil export capability in nations such as Venezuela and Iran through the
imposition of sanctions. While this could be tolerated when the target was a third party, once
the U.S. set its sanctioning practices on Russian energy, the die was cast.
If the goal of the Russian-driven price war is to make U.S. shale companies "share the
pain," they have already succeeded. A similar price war, initiated by Saudi Arabia in 2014 for
the express purpose of suppressing U.S. shale oil production, failed, but only because
investors were willing to prop up the stricken shale producers with massive loans and infusion
of capital. For shale oil producers, who use an expensive methodology of extraction known as
"fracking," to be economically viable, the breakeven price of oil
per barrel needs to be between $40 and $60 dollars. This was the price range the Saudi's
were hoping to sustain when they proposed the cuts in oil production that Russia rejected.
The U.S. shale oil producers, saddled by massive debt and high operational expenses, will
suffer greatly in any sustained oil price war. Already, with the price of oil down to below $35
per barrel,
there is talk of bankruptcy and massive job layoffs -- none of which bode well for Trump in
the coming election.
It's clear that Russia has no intention of backing off anytime soon. According to
the Russian Finance Ministry , said on Russia could weather oil prices of $25-30 per barrel
for between six and ten years. One thing is for certain -- U.S. shale oil companies cannot.
In a sign that the Trump administration might be waking up to the reality of the predicament
it faces, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin quietly met with Russia's Ambassador to the U.S.,
Anatoly Antonov. According to a read out from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
the two discussed economic sanctions, the Venezuelan economy, and the potential for "trade
and investment." Mnuchin, the Russians noted, emphasized the "importance of orderly energy
markets."
Russia is unlikely to fold anytime soon. As Admiral Josh Painter, a character in Tom
Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October," famously said , "Russians don't take a dump without
a plan."
Russia didn't enter its current course of action on a whim. Its goals are clearly stated --
to defeat U.S. shale oil -- and the costs of this effort, both economically and politically (up
to and including having Trump lose the 2020 Presidential election) have all been calculated and
considered in advance. The Russian Bear can only be toyed with for so long without generating a
response. We now know what that response is; when the Empire strikes back, it hits hard.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of several books,
including his forthcoming, Scorpion King:
America's Embrace of Nuclear Weapons From FDR to Trump (2020).
Half Of Young American Democrats Believe Billionaires Do More Harm Than Good by
Tyler Durden Sun,
03/15/2020 - 21:25 With income inequality the political hot potato du-jour and wealth
concentration at its most extreme since the roaring twenties, is it any wonder that even
Americans' view of what used to be called 'success' is now tainted with the ugly taste of
partisan 'not-fair'-ism.
Income inequality is roaring...
Wealth concentration is extreme to say the least...
But still,
according to Pew Research's latest survey , when asked about the impact of billionaires on
the country, nearly four-in-ten adults under age 30 (39%) say the fact that some have fortunes
of a billion dollars or more is a bad thing...
...with 50% of young Democrats.
"The recent reigning conventional wisdom over the last several decades of what I call the
'Age of Capital' is that [billionaires] are 'up there' because they are smarter than us," said
Anand Giridharadas, author of "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World."
But the Pew data, he says, suggest that young Americans are concluding that billionaires
have amassed their wealth "through their rigging of the tax code, through legal political
bribery, through their tax avoidance in shelters like the Cayman Islands, and through
lobbying for public policy that benefits them privately. "
"Bernie Sanders taught a lot of people [about wealth inequality], including people who did
not vote for him," Giridharadas said.
"The billionaire class is 'up there' because they are standing on our backs pinning us
down."
The good news - for the rest of America's "capitalists" - is that a majority (58%) say the
impact of billionaires on America is neither bad nor good.
Finally, one quick question - where were all these under-30s when Bernie needed them the
most in the Primaries? Was it all just virtue-signaling pro-socialist bullshit after all?
As the disease spread around Asia and then the world, however, the news focus gradually
shifted, so that now many are questioning the wisdom of having so unthinkingly globalized
everything and made so many industries -- including the medical industry -- dependent on a
place like the People's Republic of China. "What is it like to shoot oneself in the foot?" is
yet another question that has been bubbling up uncomfortably these past few weeks.
Outsourcing the medical equipment and pharmaceutical supply chain to a hostile communist
dictatorship with perhaps the worst public health record on the planet is the equivalent of the
Army Corps of Engineers' having put the emergency generators for the storm pumps at the
bottoms of the levees, where they would be the first to flood during a hurricane. But
globalists, like government engineers, are incapable of learning from mistakes. In fact, in
their minds, disasters serve perversely to confirm the advisability of their follies. Which
leads normal people to wonder, "What is going on in the globalist's mind?"
What, in other words, is it like to be a globalist? This is a question worth asking, because
the answer will determine very much in the months and years ahead. Unless we can figure out how
the globalist looks at the world, we will continue to be at his mercy, and will continue to
face pandemics and crises that are the precipitate of his ideology. We have got to understand
who these people are who have taken over our every doing, our every coming and going.
Otherwise, we will keep getting done in by them.
... ... ...
Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.
"But globalists, like government engineers, are incapable of learning from mistakes.
"
Is this supposed to be a serious statement? The piece is clearly written for the
amusement of people for whom he has very little respect otherwise it would not contain so
many nonsensical generalization. I dare he or anyone to provide a definition of a
"globalist" which does not make nonsense of that claim.
Outsourcing the medical equipment and pharmaceutical supply chain to a hostile
communist dictatorship with perhaps the worst public health record on the planet is the
equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers' having put the emergency generators for the
storm pumps at the bottoms of the levees, where they would be the first to flood during a
hurricane.
I really would like to know what is Professor Morgan's specialty. He should know that
China is not a Communist country. Just because they choose to call themselves that doesn't
mean that a professor anything remotely connected to politics, government or economics
would be fooled. And where one puts a factory to manufacture goods, bears no relationship
whatsoever with how that country deploys those goods among its own population. The piece is
not serious. It is political entertainment. And for those who assume that criticizing the
rigor of a piece is the same as supporting whatever the piece is attacking, I am 100%
against what the writer seems to mean when he refers to "globalism". I personally consider
our monied class who shipped American jobs wherever they could find semi-slave labor to be
literally traitors. So, I have very strong views on "globalism". I just dislike the
disrespect shown by writers who think that they can write any nonsense, once they show that
they hate the same things that their audience hates, all in the search for cheap applause.
Writers should treat their readers like thinking beings, not like an audience at a
bullfight who are expected to howl with applause once you wave the red flag around and shed
enough blood.
That won't do, either, though. China is a place, too! In swoops the World Health
Organization (the aptly acronymed WHO?): it's COVID-19 now.
A much more serious comment would be about how China bullied WHO into expressing far
more confidence in China's published numbers that it had any basis for expressing. How it
lavished praise on China's handling of the outbreak rather than South Korea's excellent
management in their country. But educated people know what WHO is and the excellent work
they do all over the world. Of the millions of lives they have saved all over the world.
And that they are empowered by the governments of the world to name new viruses. That every
decent person in the world knows that country names attached to diseases can generate
persecution of people which is not a good thing, regardless against whom it is directed.
The WHO did not name the virus at the request of China. That is one of its normal
functions.
This piece is nothing short of absurd hate mongering.
Owned by World's Richest Man Jeff Bezos, Whole Foods Wants Workers to Pay for Colleagues'
Sick Leave During Coronavirus Pandemic
Remember when Jeff Bezos, whose company owns Whole Foods, said he was so freakin' rich he
didn't know how to spend his money so, heck, he'd start a space program? https://t.co/PjLe6MpQc8
"... Kleinknecht also spares little on showing just how disengaged Reagan was, and how rich tycoons used this to their advantage. At the same time, along the lines of Paul Kennedy in "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," Kleinknecht notes that, even before Reagan's election, these tycoons were already more corporate raiders, looking to make money off various forms of cooking or tricking out company books, than they were corporate builders reinvesting in their companies. ..."
This title is from an award-winning journalist, a major work of reporting and history that
shatters the myth of Ronald Reagan. Since Ronald Reagan left office - and after his death
especially - his influence has loomed over American life. Singled out for his 'courage, his
kindness, his persistence, his honesty, and his almost heroic patience in the face of
setbacks', a number of conservatives, from the late William Buckley to his former speechwriter
Peggy Noonan to Republican nominee John McCain have looked to Reagan as a figure to regenerate
the American conservative tradition as the Bush White House stumbles through crisis and
scandal. This carefully calibrated image is a complete fiction, however.
The Reagan presidency was epoch-shattering, but not - as his propagandists would have it -
because it invigorated private enterprise, toppled the Berlin Wall or made America feel strong
again. Rather what gives Reagan such an awesome legacy is that he presided over the dismantling
of one of the greatest social experiments in human history-an eight-decade period of reform in
which working people were given an unprecedented sway over US politics, economy, and culture.
Reagan halted this forward march toward democracy almost overnight.
In "The Man Who Sold the World", journalist William Kleinknecht explores Middle America and
shows how Reaganism put the poor and working class back on the margins of everything except the
basest popular culture. This scathing indictment of the Reagan legacy is the first
comprehensive book to deal seriously with Ronald Reagan's place in contemporary America. Just
as Americans are trying to grapple with the legacy of George W. Bush, "The Man Who Sold the
World" shows how poorly we understand Reagan's.
Paul , Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2016
If only more people knew the extent of the damage this man did to our country! I don't
have time to write a long review, but this book takes an exhaustive look at every spectrum of
the domestic policies that this laissez-faire, trickle-down, invisible hand of the free
market president unleashed on Americans. And it doesn't even touch on Iran-Contra or the
multiple despotic dictators he propped up or supported in Central America. 8 people found
this helpful
Helpful
Amazon
Customer , Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2013
Since studying business and law in graduate school, every search for solutions to our
policy problems has led me back to the changes made under Reagan. The sad truth is, his
presidency was probably the most destructive in our history. If only more people would open
their eyes to the truth about what he did to our society and our economy. Both our social
battles and our declining economy are his legacies.
S.
J. Snyder , Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2010
Since a lot of conservatives like to claim Reagan did so much to help small towns' Main
Street, and since Reagan himself pitched myths about that, Kleinknecht starts the book off with
a brilliant conceit.
He actually visits Reagan's small-town birthplace of Dixon, Ill., and talks to people there
about how it has changed since 1980. That includes people who say they'll only talk to him if
not asked to comment negatively on Reagan - which is, itself, an indirect negative comment on
Reagan!
Kleinknecht then supplements that with data from the Department of Labor, Department of
Commerce, etc., showing just what Reagan did do to, and NOT "for," Dixon and by extension,
other small towns.
Kleinknecht also spares little on showing just how disengaged Reagan was, and how rich
tycoons used this to their advantage. At the same time, along the lines of Paul Kennedy in "The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," Kleinknecht notes that, even before Reagan's election,
these tycoons were already more corporate raiders, looking to make money off various forms of
cooking or tricking out company books, than they were corporate builders reinvesting in their
companies.
Kleinknecht then goes beyond that, showing that many conservatives, including economist
Hayek (Hey, Milton Friedman, you didn't study him well enough!) warned about the perils of such
unbridled "capitalism."
At a time when "conservatives" today bash lower-middle-class people for paying little to
know income tax, while failing to point out massive companies like Reagan sponsor GM do the
same on the corporate side, this reminder that conservativism is more than, and different from,
what some talking heads today claim, is important.
That said, Kleinknecht cuts Jimmy Carter a bit too much slack and Bill Clinton a lot too
much. I'm reminded of one of Clinton's first lies, IMO, where he said, with mock surprise, (not
exact quote), "You mean my economic program is hostage to the bond market?" Yes, he was
cleaning up parts of the Reagan deficit mess old man Bush hadn't fully tidied. But, he was too
close to Jackson Stephens to really be surprised. Ditto for Congressional Democratic
leadership, beyond the increasingly frail Tip O'Neill, in the Reagan era. (This means you, Jim
Wright.)
This really is, though, at least a 4/5 star book. Ignore the 1-star reviews.
+ The for-profit health care system in the US is already starting to
crack under the pressure and the virus hasn't even really hit yet
+ Pence promised 8 million tests by the end of the week, but according to Lamar Alexander:
"We are going to work as hard as we can to push this administration to continue to ramp up the
number of tests but the reality is..they do not yet have the tests available and can't give us
a date." South Korea, where the virus appeared about the same time it did in US, is testing
10,000 a day and has been for nearly a month.
+ Your country under neoliberalism: The CDC tested only
77 people this week for coronavirus.
+ Here in Oregon, the state health lab only has the capacity to perform
80 tests a day but that's still more than the CDC did all week.
+ Another sign of the impending crisis (and that ObamaCare was a disaster): The number of
hospital beds in the US has fallen by 5% over the last ten
years .
+ The US (pop. 330 million) has fewer hospital beds than Italy (pop. 60 million) and South
Korea (pop. 51 million). And many of those are unaffordable for most people. Winning!
+ Larry Kudlow, who missed the great recession, "The virus is contained!"
+ On Weds night Sanjay Gupta asked CNN's Don Lemon to read the CDC's coronavirus testing
stats off of his phone.
ZERO tests conducted today by CDC.
A grand total of 8 tests conducted by other public health agencies across the
country.
EIGHT.
+ The Republican Governor for Ohio Mike DeWine confirmed on Thursday that only 1,000 tests
are available to 11.69 million citizens who live in the Buckeye State. He further said that
projections are that more than 100,000 Ohioans will be infected with the coronavirus
+ The projections for NYC are sobering, to say the least
+ Rebecca Nagle: "Look, I fully support banning travel from Europe to prevent the spread of
infectious disease. I just think it's 528 years too late."
+ Matt "Gas Mask" Gaetz, one of the most ridiculous buffoons in a Congress filled with them,
voted against paid sick leave. Now he's taking
it , because he was exposed to COVID-19.
+ The Cuban health care system, whose doctors are even now in China testing interferon-based
drugs against the virus, is going to look better and better to people in the US, as the
COVID-19 does its thing here. Even the Miami Cuban nutcases may be singing Fidel's praises
before this is over .
+ Maybe Jay Inslee (who promised tests would be "free") is a " snake
" after all
Maybe Inslee (who promised tests would be "free") is a "snake" after all
+ The Senate won't take up House coronavirus bill until after its recess. "The Senate will
act when we come back and we have a clearer idea of what extra steps we need to take," Sen.
Lamar Alexander told reporters What if they never come back? One can hope
+ Why the Senate is refusing to act on COVID-19: "A key sticking point in the talks appears
to be GOP demands to include Hyde amendment language in the bill to prevent federal funds from
being used for abortion " Priorities, priorities
+ Joe Biden: "I don't like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far.
I don't think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body." (Biden
said this
in 2006 , not 1976.)
+ The World Health Organization has announced that dogs cannot contract Covid-19. Dogs
previously held in quarantine can now be released. WHO let the dogs out! (The jokes will only
get worse, as the virus spreads.)
+ To wit: Always scrub your hands like you just shook hands with the President
+ Come back, Marianne, your country (if not your lamentable party) needs you!
Uh, maybe we should cancel that order for 100 B-21 Raiders all equipped with nuclear bombs
at the rate of $560M each, and use the money instead to pay for free testing and coronavirus
treatment We need to change our thinking about all this, do it quickly, and speak it
loudly.
"What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this, doctor?"
"I don't know. My my code of morals, perhaps."
"Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?"
"Comprehension."
+ According to Amazon's rankings, Camus' The Plague is now #7 in the Self-Help &
Psychology Humor category, which is an irony Camus himself probably couldn't have gotten away
with. A viral pandemic is apparently what it takes to get Americans to read French
existentialist literature
+ "Carbon Joe" Biden's entire climate change plan is budgeted at $1.7 trillion. The Fed just
dropped that much
on Wall Street in a single day without any public input
+ And they said we "can't afford" national health care!
Uh, maybe we should cancel that order for 100 B-21 Raiders all equipped with nuclear bombs
at the rate of $560M each, and use the money instead to pay for free testing and coronavirus
treatment We need to change our thinking about all this, do it quickly, and speak it
loudly.
Just to underline the incompetency of neoliberalism, the Jack Ma Foundation has just
donated 500,000 testing kits and 1 million masks to America. One guy on twitter said-
'Many will welcome this. Some will see it as an insult. The real insult is that the
richest country in the world has waged war on science and as a result is finding itself
helpless..'
The real tragedy is this. Iran has been covering up the large number of their Coronavirus
deaths in the past few weeks until satellite images showed mass burial sites outside their
cities. Through gross negligence, the US has also been covering up the infiltration of
Coronavirus in America and trying to cover it all up in the same manner.
So in a few months time, will the Russian and Chinese be releasing images of mass burial
sites on the American mainland that the Trump government will seek to hide?
The EU and USA were notable in their absence. To be fair, the EU has promised assistance,
but the Germans and Lagarde are still stumbling around with the conditions that they want to
attach.
Neoliberal overlords don't give up easily.
I think it's safe to say the new crisis just killed the Schengen Treaty. That ridiculous
document which guaranteed freedom of movement across the European Union finally hit something
it couldn't bully, COVID-19. Regardless of whether you believe the pandemic is real or not, the
reaction to it is real and is having real consequence far beyond the latest print of the Dow
Jones Industrial Average.
The lockdown of Italy isn't a temporary thing. Oh, the suspension of free movement is
temporary, but it portends something far bigger.
It's the beginning of the real political balkanization that's coming to the European Union
over the next few years. Old enmities and prejudices have not been stamped out under the boot
heel of oppressive legislation coming from a bunch of disconnected technocrats in Brussels.
They have only been suppressed.
Because when there are existential threats there's no time or desire to virtue signal about
how we're all one big happy dysfunctional family. 1 minute ago The
thing is most people at Zerohedge have no idea about the reality in Germany and the other
European countries and the psychicological robustness of its people. This crisis is nothing
compared to the catastrophies of the 20th century. In times of challenge one can see who is
strong and effective and acting in solidarity. And this is it what the extended Euroland is
going to show soon. A masterplan for Euroland how to overcome this Corona problems. It takes
time to adopt but things do move already in the right direction. Banning travel is a harsh
measure but the right thing in this situation.
The economy will take a deep dip but there will be no catastrophy. Even when Deutsche Bank
should go down that would impact the situation only in the financial markets. But luckily
Euroland has a worldclass manufacturing and agricultural sector, plus there is the ECB owned by
Eurolands member states.
So there is money, there is food, there is production, there are raw materials as well as
energy available from Russia,.. Europe is world leader in renewable energy and recycling of
waste materials., ..
So nothIng to worry about in principle. Its only one real danger, the Anglo Saxon Jewish
dominated financial sector and the MIC which is still dreaming about world domination. I hope
their dream is shattered soon. 12 minutes ago Thanks Tom..
But we won't comment and why?
Because the cause of the crisis is still not being addressed..
Corona of virus is simply an accelerant to a serious problem..
And that's all we'll say... 43 minutes ago Old enmities and prejudices have not been
stamped out .... This has been said a thousand times across EU social media and
comments in national press in developed member states. Particularly during Brexit. That the EU
was flawed from the start in imagining the ******, pretend EU would ever; by adopting developed
EU rules and regulations, even begin to match up to the Real EU. Pretend EU would only ever
pretend - many nothing more than 1st generation democracies. So the elite in the ****** EU hand
picked who was to lead that ministry or council and then all levels of locally elite society
and their friends and families were greased by jobs in the bloated public sector. Now Germany
is supposed to keep this "Noses in the Trough" nonsense going!
It is mind blowing to realise the damage to the EU the 'Contra os Bretoes' EU retards have
done in victimising the British! The UK - an advanced G7 country with many centuries of history
of sorting out, at great loss to its citizens and economy, European squabbles - long before the
US was encouraged to get involved as well.
UK Remainers need to focus their efforts on the ****** EU crashing (or being crashed) out
and the UK rejoining the EU and helping make the EU work the way it was sold to us British
decades ago. 44 minutes ago
Feudal-Vassalism it is, extended into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolonialism
The situation in Greece has been for about a decade worse off than in Gaza.
As Otto von Bismarck noted "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the
United States of America."
That's a reason for hope.
But there are multiple reasons for despair (hoarding epidemics has shown how
brainwashed people are with neoliberal rationality)
The neoliberal society with its twisted guiding philosophy of radical individualism
and competition combined with a supremacist "that could never happen here" attitude
quickly falls into panicked chaos when reality kicks in and reveals the society's
underlying vulnerabilities.
Countries with weak social safety nets and an ideological opposition to social
responsibility are extremely vulnerable to systemic breakdown when their societies are
hit with unexpected stress.
That is what we see in the USA. This virus is revealing just how ineffective the
neoliberal Social Darwinism ("every man for himself") ethic (aka "neoliberal
rationality") is and how deeply in denial and out of touch with reality these societies
are. Including first of all neoliberal politicians (aka Washington swamp rats)
Casino capitalism economics is fragile and huge shocks are possible.
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by
expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding
values
. It is separate from the newsroom.
Most American restaurants do not offer paid sick leave. Workers who fall sick face a simple
choice: Work and get paid or stay home and get stiffed. Not surprisingly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
reported in 2014 that fully 20 percent of food service workers had come to work at least once in the previous year "
while
sick with vomiting or diarrhea
."
As the new coronavirus spreads across the United States, the time has come for restaurants,
retailers and other industries that rely on low-wage labor to abandon their parsimonious resistance to paid sick leave.
Companies that do not pay sick workers to stay home are endangering their workers, their customers and the health of the
broader public.
Studies show
that paying for sick employees to stay home significantly reduces the spread of the seasonal flu. There's
every reason to think it would help to check the new coronavirus, too.
Michael Hudson: [00:00:00] There's recognition that commercial banking has become
dysfunctional and that most loans by commercial banks are either against assets – in
which case the lending inflates the prices of real estate, stocks and bonds – or for
corporate takeover loans.
The economy's low-income brackets have not been helped by today's financial system. Here in
New York City, red lining and a visceral class hatred by high finance toward the poor
characterized the major banks. From the very top to the bottom, they were very clear they were
not going to lend to places with racial minorities like the Lower East Side. The Chase
Manhattan Bank told me that the reason was explicitly ethnic, and they didn't want to deal with
poor people.
A lot of people in these neighborhoods used to have savings banks. There were 135 mutual
savings banks in New York City with names like the Bowery Savings Banks, the Dime Savings Bank,
the Immigrant Savings Bank. As their names show, they were specifically to serve the low-income
neighborhoods. But in the 1980s the commercial banks convinced the mutual savings banks to let
themselves be raided. Their capital reserves of the savings banks, was just looted by Wall
Street. The depositors' equity was stripped away (leaving their deposits, to be sure). Sheila
Bair, former head of the FDIC, told me that the commercial banks' cover story was that they
were large enough to provide more capital reserves to lend for low-income neighborhoods. The
reality was that instead, they simply extracted revenue from these neighborhoods. Large parts
of the largest cities in America, from Chicago and New York to others, are underbanked because
of the transformation of commercial banks from providers of mortgages to emptiers-out, just
revenue collectors. That leaves the main recourse in these neighborhoods to pay-day lenders at
usurious interest rates. These lenders have become major new customers for Wall Street bankers,
not the poor who have no comparable access to credit.
Apart from the savings banks, of course, you had the post office banks. When I went to work
on Wall Street in the 1960s, 3 percent of U.S. savings were in the form of post office savings.
The advantage, of course, is that post offices were in every neighborhood. So you actually had
either a local community banking like savings banks – not like today's community banks,
which are commercial banks, lending largely to real estate speculators to capitalize rental
apartments into heavily mortgaged co-ops with much higher financial carrying charges – or
you had post offices. You now have a deprivation of basic bank services in much of the economy,
combined with an increasingly dysfunctional and predatory commercial banking system.
The question is, what's going to happen next time there's a bank crash? Sheila Bair wrote
about after the 2008 crash that the most corrupt bank was Citibank – not only corrupt,
but incompetent. She had wanted to take it over. But Obama and his Secretary of the Treasury,
Tim Geithner, acted as lobbyists for Citibank from the beginning, protecting it from being
taken over. But imagine what would have happened if Citibank would have been become a public
bank – or other banks that are about to have negative equity if there is a downturn in
the stock and bond and real estate market. Imagine what will happen if they were turned into
public banks. They would be able to provide the kind of credit that the commercial banking
system has refused to provide – credit to blacks, Hispanics and poor people that have
just been red-lined in what is becoming a financially polarized dual economy, one for the
wealthy and one for everyone else.
Walt McRee: [00:04:10] Well, power in that realm, of course, lies with the banking
cartel. They look at public banks as a threat. They hate competition of any sort, it seems.
Michael Hudson: [00:04:18] Of course it is a threat.
Walt McRee: [00:04:22] And even when we say, Michael, that we're not going after the
business you're already doing because you aren't lending to small, medium enterprises and so
forth – we want to take on the infrastructure that you don't want to fund, but they still
are pushing back. How will we be able to get past that?
Michael Hudson: [00:04:40] I think you should say that of course you're not going to
take business away from them, because the public community bank or government-owned bank would
not make corporate takeover loans or speculative derivative bets. It would not create the
dysfunctional credit and debt overhead that has been expanding ever since 1999 when the Clinton
administration changed the banking rules.
The problem is that the big commercial banks don't want the productive kind of loans that
public banking would make. For instance, the reason they didn't want to extend credit to the
Lower East Side or the Hudson Yards west side of New York was they wanted to sort of drive out
their residents and gentrify it, by providing the money to the big developers who socially
bulldoze these neighborhoods. Their policy is to kick out as many low-income renters or owners
as they can, and replace them by raising rents from like $50 a month to $5,000 a month. That's
what's happened on the Lower East Side from the time I first lived there to what rents are
today.
There is a fight of the economy's unproductive sector against people who want to use credit
in a productive way that actually helps the economy. I think it's a fight between good and
evil, at least between the productive and unproductive economy, between economics for the
people and economics for the One Percent.
ORDER IT NOW
Ellen Brown: [00:06:14] I wonder, though, if the Fed is going to even allow the banks
to collapse again, with what they just did with the repo market. They can step in at any time
to save anybody. I don't know that Congress, even has a say in it. What do you think?
Michael Hudson: [00:06:30] I think that's right. I've talked to Paul Craig Roberts
and we discuss whether they can just keep on keeping these zombie banks alive. Can they keep
the over-indebted zombie economy alive by the Federal Reserve manipulating the forward stock
and bond markets to support prices? It doesn't actually have to buy stocks and bonds beyond the
$4 trillion it's already put into Quantitative Easing. It can simply make manipulate the
forward market. That doesn't really cost any money until the big crash comes. So I think one
should have a discussion over what President Trump says is a boom that that he's created, with
the stock market going up. Does that mean that the economy is getting richer? Are we fine with
commercial banking the way it is, so that we don't need public banking?
I think you have to expose the fact that what's happened is artificial state intervention.
What we have in the name of free market support of the banks is not a free market at all. It's
a highly centralized market to support the predatory financial sector's wealth against the rest
of the economy. The financial sector's wealth takes the form of credit to the rest of the
economy, extracting interest and amortization, while making loans simply to increase asset
prices for real estate and financial securities, not put new means of production in place to
employ labor. So you have to go beyond the public banking issue as such, and look at the
political context. Ultimately, the way that you defend public banking is to show how the
economy works and how public banking could play a positive role in the economy as it
should work.
Ellen Brown: [00:08:14] Can you explain what you meant by forward lending? I mean,
they don't have to
Michael Hudson: [00:08:19] It's not forward lending, it's buying long. For the stock
market's Dow Jones average, they'll contract to buy all its stocks or those in the S&P 500
in one month, or one week or whatever the timeframe is, for X amount – say, 2% over what
they're selling today. Well, once the plunge protection team issues a guarantee to buy, the
market is going to raise the bid prices for these stocks up to what the Fed and the Treasury
have promised to pay for them. By the time the prices go up, the Fed doesn't actually have to
buy these stocks, because everybody's anticipated that the Fed would buy them at this 2 percent
gain. So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We're dealing with a government run by the banks and
the creditor powers to artificially raise asset prices, on credit. This has kept alive a system
that represents itself as creating prosperity. But it's not creating prosperity for the 99
Percent. Public banking would aim at prosperity for the 99 Percent, not just for the One
Percent.
Ellen Brown: [00:09:46] I'm writing about Mexico's AMLO, who is now who has just
announced in January that he will be building 2,700 branches of a public bank in the next two
years. He's expecting 13,000 branches ultimately, so it will be the largest bank in the
country. His reasoning is just what you're saying, that the banks have failed and have not
serviced the poor. His mandate is to help the poor, and he can't do that if they don't have
banking services.
Michael Hudson: [00:10:17] Is that national?
Ellen Brown: [00:10:18] Yes, all across the country.
Walt McRee: [00:10:22] "Loprabrador", AMLO. So we know that a public monetary source
is a public utility. Our vision is to create a network of local and state public banks. That
leads us to the view that what we really need to be targeting is the Federal Reserve, to
ultimately turn it into a publicly-owned entity. Is that folly or
Michael Hudson: [00:10:55] I think the way to get people to support this is if they
understand how the Federal Reserve was created. A few years ago I published an article in an
Indian economic journal (I think it's on my website), about how the Federal Reserve was
created.
[1] "How the U.S. Treasury avoided Chronic Deflation by Relinquishing Monetary Control to Wall
Street," Economic & Political Weekly (India), May 7, 2016. Available on Naked
Capitalism an michael-hudson.com. There was a fight by Wall Street led by J.P. Morgan.
America had a central bank until 1913 – the Treasury. Until 1913 the Treasury was
doing everything that the Federal Reserve began to do. The idea of creating the Federal Reserve
was to take power away from the Treasury. The Treasury wasn't even allowed to be on the board
as an owner of Federal Reserve stock. The idea was to take decision-making away from
Washington, away from democratic politics, and insulate the financial system from the
democratic political system by turning control over to the corporate financial centers -- Wall
Street, Chicago, and the other Federal Reserve districts. They were the same districts as those
that the Treasury already had divided the country into. Remember, these were the decades
leading up to World War I when there was a social democratic revolution from Europe to the
United States. A guiding idea was to democratize banking.
Wall Street very quickly developed a counter strategy to this. And the counter strategy was
the Federal Reserve. You're welcome to republish my article on your site. You and I both aim to
reverse the counterrevolution mounted against classical economics and social democracy. The
entity you're talking about would probably be under the aegis of the Treasury. You'd be putting
the economy back in the direction that the world was moving before World War I derailed these
efforts.
ORDER IT NOW
You talk of nationalizing the Fed. I know people don't like the word nationalizing. How
about thing de-privatizing or de-Thatcherizing the Fed? You have to represent the Fed as having
stolen economic and financial policy away from the public domain. It became part of the
neoliberal project taking form in Austria in the 1930s. You're trying to restore the classical
economic vision of productive versus unproductive credit, productive versus unproductive labor,
and public money as opposed to private money. These distinctions were erased by the censorial
neoliberal counter-revolution.
It's not that you're radical, that these people had a radical revolution to carve away the
financial system from democracy. And you're restoring the classical vision of democratizing,
re-democratizing finance and banking.
Walt McRee: [00:14:12] I want to thank you for saying that, Michael, because
de-privatizing the Federal Reserve is so much more accurate and powerful. You'll recall that we
kind of exchanged a phrase when I said "institutionalized deception.". I think that's really
important. But let's say that prior to that, Stephanie Kelton gets in there, or somebody from
the MMT crowd gets into a new administration prior to de-privatizing the Fed. Does MMT have a
place to play or to emerge in that environment?
Michael Hudson: [00:14:55] Of course, and here's the role: You can leave the
commercial banks to do what they're doing, but you're not going to provide Federal Reserve
credit for them to load down the economy with unproductive debt. The question is, if you're
going to create real community banking via a public banking sector, where will it get the money
to lend out? How do we provide money to the red-lined areas of the economy to actually finance
tangible capital investment and people's living needs, not just predatory lending? The way that
MMT comes in is much like the Chicago plan for one hundred percent reserves. These community
banks will need Treasury-created depository credit beyond the deposits they raise in their
local areas.
They need more money. MMT will provide credit to these banks in exchange for their loan
originations of a productive character, on terms that borrowers can afford, with realistic
mortgages also to build public housing. The new Fed that we're talking about will be a major
depositor and will provider of the capital deposits and reserves to the banks. Right now, it
has provided $4 trillion of Quantitative Easing credit to the banks, not to put into the
economy but only to inflate the stock and bond market and make housing more expensive. Wouldn't
it be much better to provide credit to community banks that actually would make credit
available for productive economic purposes – and not for takeover loans, stock buybacks
and asset speculation?
Productive credit was what everybody expected banking to develop in the late 19th century.
Germany and Central Europe were leading the way. It was called Middle Europa banking, as
opposed to Anglo-American banking. (I discuss this contrast in Killing the Host .) That
was essentially following the classical model, as everybody expected banking to evolve prior to
World War I.
Ellen Brown: [00:17:29] Cool. That's totally what I also wrote about in my latest
book. The Federal Reserve is where you should be getting credit, so you don't have to borrow it
from somewhere else. Everybody thinks this whole repo thing is so contrived. It's
re-hypothecated. One party owns the collateral at night, the other party owns it during the
day. It's all just bluff to make it look like they borrowed something that wasn't really there.
So let's just acknowledge that all money is just credit. And like you say, if you have a good
loan, a good project to be monetized, that's the whole point of a bank. It will turn your
future productivity into something you can spend in the marketplace. And the central bank is
there to provide the credit.
Michael Hudson: [00:18:21] That's right.
Ellen Brown: [00:18:22] Turn it into dollars.
Michael Hudson: [00:18:24] That's right. My way of describing it is to look at
history, to show that this is not a utopian idea. It is what made German and Central European
banking so much more productive in the decades leading up to World War I. So we actually have
historical examples of good banking versus bad banking. But the predators won in the end.
Ellen Brown: [00:18:53] Well, regarding this whole repo thing, one big problem we
have with our public banks is the 110 percent collateralization requirement in California. How
is a bank supposed to make loans if it has to use its deposits to buy securities –
something safe and yielding low interest to back the deposits? It seems to me that what the big
banks do – and I think we could do it, too – is to take those deposits and buy
federal securities at 1.5 percent, and then they turn around and use the securities as
collateral in the repo market, where they pay 1.5 percent. In other words, they earn 1.5
percent and they pay 1.5 percent. So it's a wash. They get their money for free. I think we
could do that, too. Or are only certain players allowed to play that game, and we can't jump
in?
Michael Hudson: [00:19:50] Well, you're the lawyer. Of course they could do it. I
think one of the things that you and other progressives have recommended is that the Fed should
stop paying money to the banks for their reserve deposits. Stop giving them the free giveaway.
If you want to say, "We're against the largest welfare recipients in the country. They're not
the people you think. They're the Wall Street banks. These hypocrites want to cut back Social
Security to balance the budget. They want to cut back medical care and social services, and
make themselves the only welfare recipients."
Ellen Brown: [00:20:30] Right, agreed. But if we just stand on our high horse and say
this has to change, nothing will happen. We could do it ourselves and just show what you're
doing in contrast to what they're doing
ORDER IT NOW
Michael Hudson: [00:20:44] You're asking for symmetry. They're making us carry a big
load on our back, that they don't have to carry. They're loading the dice in their own favor.
You want to unload the dice and stop the insider favoritism. You correctly represent the banks
as being insiders. You have to say, "Look, these insiders are trying to keep a monopoly." You
could use the anti-monopoly legislation that's been on the books since Teddy Roosevelt's time.
You have a lot of legal power to break up the big banks. You could treat them like I think they
could treat the pharmaceutical companies if Bernie gets in.
Walt McRee: [00:21:44] Monopolies are being challenged by the shadow banking
industry. New forms of payment exchange technologies seem to be eating away at that singular
source of credit. What's your prognosis for how that's going to evolve? Will the big banks find
a way to clamp down on that ultimately?
Michael Hudson: [00:22:05] Are we talking about cryptocurrency?
Walt McRee: [00:22:07] That would be one example, yes.
Michael Hudson: [00:22:10] Well,. you can't stop people from gambling. People think
that buying a cryptocurrency is like buying an Andy Warhol etching. Maybe it'll go up in price
if a large number of people want it. But basically, it's junk. It's very speculative. It's
certainly not stable. It goes up and down. One day there may be a solar flare that's going to
wipe out all the bank records for these things. But there is no way to stop people from doing
something that seems to be silly or gambling. You certainly will not insure them. So you will
not give them any protection against loss. You also will want to insulate the economy from
having any transactions in crypto, in these alternative money things that pose a big threat of
loss. They are not real money, because the government will not accept payment of
cryptocurrencies as taxes or for public goods and services. The government will only accept
specified forms of money. You can create any kind of swap or bet. If you want to create the
equivalent of a racetrack on horses. You can do it, but that's a financial racetrack. I think
there may be taxes on racetracks. They were unregulated for a long time. But Hollywood movies
showed that there's a lot of criminalization going on there.
Walt McRee: [00:23:59] We were all amused, well, maybe a little wondering about Max
Kaiser. Ellen and I and Tyson Slokum had some time with him over there just before you were at
his Brooklyn studio, but Max is into Bitcoin in a big way, and he sees it as the new gold.
Michael Hudson: [00:24:20] He told me that a lot of people watch his show because
they're gold bugs or they are interested in Bitcoin. I think he's tried to take a neutral view
of it, certainly in our personal conversations. He's not a gold bug and he's not a Bitcoin or
other bug. But he said that a lot of people want to find out about it, so he has guests on his
show telling people, "Here it is, take your choice." It's part of the new speculative financial
landscape, just like swamps are part of landscape for Florida real estate. So he's going to
cover the whole spectrum. Reuters produces his shows, and the audience wants to hear about
this. So he talks about what they want to hear.
Ellen Brown: [00:25:20] I think he actually does promote Bitcoin. He's heavily
invested in it and he was one of the originals, so he's obviously made a lot of money on
it.
Michael Hudson: [00:25:29] Okay.
Ellen Brown: [00:25:29] I think he agrees that it can't be a national currency. It's
too slow, too expensive, and too environmentally unfriendly. But like you say, it has been a
good investment, just like fine art or something that, if people want it, the value goes up.
Plus, there's a big black market for it, for trading and things that you don't want the
government to know about.
Michael Hudson: [00:25:57] It's a real phenomenon. I know people who benefited from
Andy Warhol. So he saw the phenomenon and he seems to have made money, but when Steve Keen and
I and others got together with him for a couple of days two months ago, the topic never came up
in discussion.
But gold did. I wonder where the gold of Libya went, for instance. Apparently it was all
taken and I understand the US gave it to ISIS. Hillary said it had to go to ISIS to act as our
Foreign Legion. We gave them Libya's weapons. Some of the gold must have just been taken by the
CIA and State Department for dirty tricks for its black operations. Certainly, America wants to
prevent any other country or large gold possessor from having enough gold to try to reinstate
it as a means of settling balance-of-payments deficits. America runs a large military deficit,
so at a certain point, the more money it spends abroad for its 800 military bases, the more
gold it would lose. Just like in General de Gaulle's time during the Vietnam War, although
actually Germany was taking more gold than France. So America wants to keep the dollar at the
center of the world financial system. That really was why it went to war with Libya, because
Libya was one of the first countries to de-dollarize and move its currency toward gold. So
you're having a group of countries – Russia, China, Iran and others – add gold to
their reserves instead of dollars. You're having a de-dollarization move throughout the world
to break free from the US ability to do what it did do Iran.
When Iran borrowed in dollars under the Shah, it used Chase Manhattan Bank as its paying
agent. It put enough money into the account to pay its foreign debts service. But then the
State Department told Chase to screw Iran and refuse to turn over the payment. Now that the
Shah wasn't running Iran, once Chase refused to turn over the payment and froze Iran's account,
that meant that Iran went into default on the entire dollarized foreign debt. It was liable for
a huge amount of capital.
ORDER IT NOW
That was a warning for the rest of the world that no government could safely put its money
in an American bank or an American bank branch, or in a British branch that would act as a
subsidiary of the Pentagon. Because if you do, the bank can simply force you into default at
any time, just like the US CIA can come in and use electronic weaponry to destroy your bank
payment-clearing system. That's why the threat of cutting Russia and China and other countries
off from the Swift Interbank Clearing System led Russia to develop its own clearing system.
With a flick of a switch it can begin to work anytime United States tries to cut Russia off
from the SWIFT payments system. So you're having the whole world de-dollarize very quickly. And
right now the question is what Europe will choose. Are Germany and other countries going to
become part of the de-dollarized system, or remain part of the dollar area?
This is part of the fight against using the IT chips and the communications chips from
Huawei. Huawei did not put US spyware into the system. The United States says that if it can't
have a phone system and communications system that it can control by spyware and use to blow up
your economy, your public utilities, your electrical systems, then you're our enemy, because we
feel insecure without this control. When President Trump said that Huawei was a threat to US
national security, he meant that we don't feel secure unless we have the power to destroy any
economy that acts in any way that is independent of the United States – because you might
do something we don't like. This is the most aggressive concept of security that one could
imagine. So of course the rest of the world is seeing its own national security as having a
financial dimension. The financial dimension is to create a monetary and financial system that
minimizes connections to the dollar except to the extent of having to buy and sell dollars to
stabilize foreign exchange rate.
Ellen Brown: [00:31:31] There's a lot of talk, even among central bankers, that we
need to get off the dollar as a global reserve currency. But it seems to me that gold is also
manipulatable. I mean, it's not the ideal I had envisioned a system where instead of reserves
being a thing, like dollars or gold that you can actually trade, it would just be a measure,
like a yardstick. You would be able to compare one currency to another according to what you
could buy with it. Like you'd have a whole basket of things that everybody uses in every
country. And now that they report that kind of stuff, it wouldn't be all that hard to get the
figures and, you know, just compare and say, well, your dollar will be worth so many pesos in
Mexico or whatever. That was my idea, but what do you think?
Michael Hudson: [00:32:27] That would meet one of the criteria of money, which is as
a measure of value, but it would not do at all for international money. You have to have some
means of constraint. In other words, suppose the United States continued to run another
military budget deficit like it did in the Vietnam War. There is no way that you could use the
balance of payments as a constraint on the policy of deficit countries, which are usually the
military aggressors. The whole idea of going off gold was that under the gold standard no
country can afford to make war, because if you go to war your currency collapses. In 1976,
Herman Kahn and I went to the Treasury and – this is to answer your question. He put up a
map of the world and said, "These are the countries – Scandinavia, Western Europe, the
United States – that don't believe in gold. They're all politically stable social
democratic countries. They have faith in government. No look at these others here's the rest of
the world – India, South America, Africa and most of Asia. these are people that believe
in gold. Why do they believe in gold, but not the Protestant cultural area? Well, they don't
have faith in government. They don't trust governments. They want some option that is
independent of government. Gold is not only to bribe the border guards if they're escaping from
somewhere. They want to be free of governments that have been captured by anti-democratic,
predatory forces."
He said if you tried to think of what you would make that is an alternative to the dollar
that people could understand, well, for thousands of years, people have decided that gold and
silver. (I'm sure that you could add platinum and palladium.) So they have been the ultimate
means of settlement, and hence of international monetary constraint.
Gold isn't to be used as money. It's not to be used as a normal means of payment. What it is
to be used for is as a balance-of-payments constraint on the ability of countries to run up
chronic deficits that are mainly military in character. So I called our presentation "Gold: the
Peaceful Metal." Well, needless to say, the Treasury didn't go for that, because they said that
we had just explained how super-imperialism works via the dollar. So they didn't go back to
gold. We lost that argument.
Ellen Brown: [00:35:34] Isn't the reason we went off gold standard, though, that
there simply isn't enough gold and that we wound up leveraging it, and
Michael Hudson: [00:35:42] No, there's plenty of gold. There wasn't enough gold to
pay for the military deficit. Every month the dollars we spent in Vietnam would be turned over
to the banks in Indo-China. They were French. They'd turn the dollars over to Paris and General
de Gaulle would turn in these dollars for gold. We had to pay in gold for the military deficit,
which was the entire source of the US balance-of-payments deficits in the 50s, 60s and into the
70s. America went off gold so that it could afford to wage war without the constraint of losing
its control over the international monetary system.
Ellen Brown: [00:36:29] We went after gold domestically because it didn't work. I
mean, you had to use fractional reserve lending
Michael Hudson: [00:36:35] Yes, of course gold doesn't work domestically. It's
certainly not an appropriate domestic money supply. I'm only talking about it for settlements
among central banks internationally.
Ellen Brown: [00:36:49] But you said it's not to be traded. But if you don't, how do
you settle your balance of payments?
ORDER IT NOW
Michael Hudson: [00:36:53] It can be traded. There is a market. And you began by
saying, quite correctly, that gold prices are manipulated. Well, right now the US and the
central banks are manipulating its price to keep it low, in the same way that they're
manipulating the stock and bond market by buying forward. Except in the case of gold, they're
selling forward. If they keep agreeing to sell gold at a very low price, people will see that
if they can buy gold at this low price, why should they buy it at a higher price today, as the
price will fall and be driven down. So, yes, gold is manipulated downwards today by the U.S.
– essentially the plunge protection team acting internationally to keep the price of gold
down to discourage other countries and populations from buying it is protection against
collapse of the financial system.
So we're back to the fact that the financial system is dysfunctional. In a functional
financial system, you wouldn't need domestic reference to gold. You'd have a domestic financial
system that works fine without gold. Gold is what you have when the financial system becomes
dysfunctional and there's a breakdown.
Ellen Brown: [00:38:21] Well, it almost seems like you need some sort of global
regulator. But that's like a one-world government, which we all freak out about.
Michael Hudson: [00:38:28] You certainly don't want a one world government. Right now
all the plans for world government are neoliberal. They aim essentially to limit, to break up
democratic government regulation of corporate business, mining and monopolies. The idea of a
one-world government is to destroy any democratic government's ability to make its own laws in
the interests of labor or society. You would have a parallel government of wealth, government
of property. It's what the University of Chicago calls the Law and Economics regime. And this
is, this is fascism on an international scale. And there is a wonderful book by Quinn Slobodian
in 2008, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Nationalism , showing how these
plans were developed by fascists in the 1930s and by the fascist promoters at the University of
Chicago. The fascist promoters were people like Hayek and von Mises and the Geneva economists
around the League of Nations. So when they say they're anti-government, they're really
anti-democracy. They're for an iron-fisted government by big business, big mining and big oil
– and most of all, by big banks. That is the reason why people don't trust an
international government. It would be an international iron fist of fascism, the way the
current maneuvering of the financial classes and the rentier classes and the neocons
have arranged things.
Ellen Brown: [00:39:56] Well, I totally agree. It's quite frightening. We want
sovereignty for all our little nations, and even our little cities, states and so forth. But it
seems to me, how do you get everybody to work together? For example, Venezuela has the debt
problem that any country has that's heavily in debt to foreigners, or to vulture funds or
whatever. There's not a universally recognized court that you can go to. And, you know,
everybody agrees. It does seem like on some level we need some sort of collaborative effort
where we all agree on the rules.
Michael Hudson: [00:40:33] Absolutely right. Now, of course, the United States would
not recognize any international court. So, again, you'd have all the rest of the world
belonging to the court, and the United States as the outlier. It's like you're the healthy body
and we want to parasitize you. And it will not recognize the court. My Super-Imperialism
reviews the history of this policy.
But you're right: There should be a court that would recognize such things as odious
debt for governments. Venezuela's problem is that under the dictators that the Americans had
installed by assassination and force, Venezuela had pledged its oil reserves as collateral for
its international bonds. That gives a vested interest in the creditors to make it default and
grab its oil reserves and its investments in the United States, the oil distributors it bought.
So, yes, you do need a set of international rules for writing down bad debts. That means an
alternative to the IMF. You need an anti-IMF. Instead of acting on behalf of the creditors
imposing austerity on countries, you should create an organization representing society. And s
the interest of society is to grow. Instead of promoting austerity like the IMF does, it would
promote prosperity. Instead of financing the US government dollarization and giving US control,
it would be part of the de-dollarization group.
So you'd have a pro-growth group of nations – of the world economy – using
finance for growth and development with productive credit. You'd also have the United States
providing predatory credit, austerity, cutting back Social Security, cutting back Medicare and
having a polarizing economy that is shrinking and will end up looking like Greece or Argentina.
The rest of the world would follow more productive and less oligarchic financial policies. That
should ultimately be our global dream. But there's been little preparation for that. The
financial sector's neoliberals have o put together an almost conspiratorial Law and Economics
lobbying group to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership and World Trade Organization rules
blocking governments from imposing anti-pollution fines or regulating monopolies or closing tax
havens. If you fine an oil company for polluting, the government is obliged under this
international law to pay the oil companies what they would have earned if they would have
continued to poison the environment. This is
Ellen Brown: [00:43:41] Shocking.
Michael Hudson: [00:43:41] Definitely. This is an international deathwish.
Ellen Brown: [00:43:45] Agreed. Totally agreed.
Walt McRee: [00:43:47] We've been speaking with economist Michael Hudson. Our thanks
to him for being on this program again. And you'll be hearing more from Michael on future
editions of It's Our Money.
Walt McRee: [00:43:59] Well, that's it for this edition of It's Our Money with Ellen
Brown. Thanks to our guests or sponsors, Public Banking Associates, and to you for listening.
Be sure to check out Ellen's latest writings on the economy and the changing world of money by
visiting ellenbrown.com. And for more information on public banking, visit
PublicBankingInstitute.org. For information on how local and state governments can obtain
professional insight and council about public banks from key national experts, visit
PublicBankingAssociates.com. I'm Walt McRee. See you next time on It's our Money with Ellen
Brown.
Notes
[1] "How the U.S. Treasury avoided Chronic Deflation by Relinquishing Monetary Control to
Wall Street," Economic & Political Weekly (India), May 7, 2016. Available on Naked
Capitalism an michael-hudson.com.
@dc.sunsets "This is why those who promise to "Plan" economic prosperity are liars and
fools, for they have the PRETENSE of knowledge, nothing more. "
Of course, this point is true -- but its posed as an absolute. No government can "plan" an
entire economy -- we know this from the failings of the USSR etc. But nor can economies be
totally unplanned. The US is not an unplanned economy: its an economy planned by the 1% for
the 1%.
Modern economies are "mixed". There is coordinated planning between the public & private
sector.
Sadly the US Gov' has renounced its responsibilities to "plan". Had the US Gov "planned" it
would never have allowed key industries, knowledge & talent to be off shored to China.
Such off shoring was a private plan by the 1% for the 1%. Worked well -- for them.
Adding complexity to an already far too complex system merely hastens blow out of
distributions that are skewed fat tails and stressed to a breaking point of systemic failure.
Greenspan purposely built a complex financial empire of asset inflation to replace Volcker's
fiscal prudence & macroprudential professionalism system wide.
Once Greenspan has locked in the asset inflation regime & deregulated Glass-Steagall
Act it was off to the races on a credit card for the largest parasite in the financial empire
governing by force.
On September 10th 2001 Donald Rumsfeld announced to the world that the ever incompetent
Pentagon had misplaced $1.3 trillion USD of taxpayer money. On September 11th 2001 Donald
Rumsfeld took part in a clandestine covert US Military operation to assassinate all of the
principle investigators & forensic Chartered Accountants that were about to uncover the
crimes taking place under Donald Rumsfeld's directorship as Pentagon executive.
The USA has always been a system of fraud by stealth of US Military force thugsterism
& all out fascist behaviour.
US/Global Economics The present
pandemic demonstrates that the global economy is closely tied to consumer spending. Suppose the
pandemic is merely a foretaste of the effects of climate change and ecological destruction. Can
we fashion a world base on Zero Growth, a Steady State Economy?
Zero growth might well entail the following:
1. A fixed and renewal body of resources.
2. A demographic balance, i.e., a fixed population size.
Can such an economy enable all of humanity to prosper and grow? If so, what must be do to
enable us to grow and prosper?
Can we have an economy where consumption is stable, i.e., does not grow?
Or, to put it another way, where the amount of capital spent on consumption is constant,
fixed.
Carol , March 12, 2020 2:14 pm
Changes! Not necessarily in any order
1. Stop glorifying "success" as the accumulation of things and money
2. Start defining success as a well balanced, creative life with rich human communications
and community ties
3. Get rid of excessive wealth and poverty. Cultivate the "enough is enough" mentality
4. unleash creativity, without tying it to moneymaking.
5. Of course, a UBI. With that, many stressors leading to cancerous economic growth can be
removed. The push to have children to support you in old age is gone (a driver in poorer
countries). Yes, some people won't be interested in what we like to call work, but then, most
work is in service to the cancerous economy.
6. Of course, universal health care
7. Of course, a serious community approach to child bearing, more realistic than the
individualistic "I should be able to have as many children as I want."
8. A huge shift on emphasis from "lemme grab all I want" to "I am a part of the whole, and
responsible for its well-being" including ecosystems
This would be nice, but the underpinnings of our current economy are based on
"individualism." To have people change their philosophies to more communitarian ones without
the soul crushing rule making that many non-individualistic societies indulge in would
require a mature, humane approach to life in general.
2slugbaits , March 12, 2020 3:25 pm
Does zero growth mean zero sum? If the latter, then I don't think the non-OECD countries
will buy into it. If not, then good luck convincing the OECD countries to cut back their
consumption.
Hi, 2slugbaits–I remember our discussions from many years ago. Nice to read your
responses again.
Your question is a good one. No, I do not mean "zero sum." Given that
radically falling consumer consumption may lead to a recession equal to or worse than 2008
--
Can we have an economy where consumption is stable, i.e., does not grow?
Or, to put it another way, where the amount of capital spent on consumption is constant,
fixed.
I would want such an economy to be fair to all.
The conditions I outlined in my piece still hold, I think.
As modern civilization's shelf life expires, more scholars have turned their attention to
the decline and fall of civilizations past. Their studies have generated rival explanations of
why societies collapse and civilizations die. Meanwhile, a lucrative market has emerged for
post-apocalyptic novels, movies, TV shows, and video games for those who enjoy the vicarious
thrill of dark, futuristic disaster and mayhem from the comfort of their cozy couch. Of course,
surviving the real thing will become a much different story.
The latent fear that civilization is living on borrowed time has also spawned a
counter-market of "happily ever after" optimists who desperately cling to their belief in
endless progress. Popular Pollyannas, like cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, provide this
anxious crowd with soothing assurances that the titanic ship of progress is unsinkable.
Pinker's publications have made him the high priest of progress. [1] While civilization circles
the drain, his ardent audiences find comfort in lectures and books brimming with cherry-picked
evidence to prove that life is better than ever, and will surely keep improving. Yet, when
questioned, Pinker himself admits, "It's incorrect to extrapolate that the fact that we've
made progress is a prediction that we're guaranteed to make progress." [2]
Pinker's rosy statistics cleverly disguise the fatal flaw in his argument. The progress of
the past was built by sacrificing the future -- and the future is upon us. All the happy facts
he cites about living standards, life expectancy, and economic growth are the product of an
industrial civilization that has pillaged and polluted the planet to produce temporary progress
for a growing middle class -- and enormous profits and power for a tiny elite.
Not everyone who understands that progress has been purchased at the expense of the future
thinks that civilization's collapse will be abrupt and bitter. Scholars of ancient societies,
like Jared Diamond and John Michael Greer, accurately point out that abrupt collapse is a rare
historical phenomenon. In The Long Descent , Greer assures his readers that, "The
same pattern repeats over and over again in history. Gradual disintegration, not sudden
catastrophic collapse, is the way civilizations end." Greer estimates that it takes, on
average, about 250 years for civilizations to decline and fall, and he finds no reason why
modern civilization shouldn't follow this "usual timeline." [3]
But Greer's assumption is built on shaky ground because industrial civilization differs from
all past civilizations in four crucial ways. And every one of them may accelerate and intensify
the coming collapse while increasing the difficulty of recovery.
Difference #1: Unlike all previous civilizations, modern industrial civilization is powered
by an exceptionally rich, NON-renewable, and irreplaceable energy source -- fossil fuels. This
unique energy base predisposes industrial civilization to a short, meteoric lifespan of
unprecedented boom and drastic bust. Megacities, globalized production, industrial agriculture,
and a human population approaching 8 billion are all historically exceptional -- and
unsustainable -- without fossil fuels. Today, the rich easily exploited oilfields and coalmines
of the past are mostly depleted. And, while there are energy alternatives, there are no
realistic replacements that can deliver the abundant net energy fossil fuels once provided.
[4]
Our complex, expansive, high-speed civilization owes its brief lifespan to this one-time,
rapidly dwindling energy bonanza.
Difference #2: Unlike past civilizations, the economy of industrial society is capitalist.
Production for profit is its prime directive and driving force. The unprecedented surplus
energy supplied by fossil fuels has generated exceptional growth and enormous profits over the
past two centuries. But in the coming decades, these historic windfalls of abundant energy,
constant growth, and rising profits will vanish.
However, unless it is abolished, capitalism will not disappear when boom turns to bust.
Instead, energy-starved, growth-less capitalism will turn catabolic. Catabolism refers
to the condition whereby a living thing devours itself. As profitable sources of production dry
up, capitalism will be compelled to turn a profit by consuming the social assets it once
created. By cannibalizing itself, the profit motive will exacerbate industrial society's
dramatic decline.
Catabolic capitalism will profit from scarcity, crisis, disaster, and conflict. Warfare,
resource hoarding, ecological disaster, and pandemic diseases will become the big profit
makers. Capital will flow toward lucrative ventures like cybercrime, predatory lending, and
financial fraud; bribery, corruption, and racketeering; weapons, drugs, and human trafficking.
Once disintegration and destruction become the primary source of profit, catabolic capitalism
will rampage down the road to ruin, gorging itself on one self-inflicted disaster after
another. [5]
Difference #3: Unlike past societies, industrial civilization isn't Roman, Chinese,
Egyptian, Aztec, or Mayan. Modern civilization is HUMAN, PLANETARY, and ECOCIDAL.
Pre-industrial civilizations depleted their topsoil, felled their forests, and polluted their
rivers. But the harm was far more temporary and geographically limited. Once market incentives
harnessed the colossal power of fossil fuels to exploit nature, the dire results were
planetary. Two centuries of fossil fuel combustion have saturated the biosphere with
climate-altering carbon that will continue wreaking havoc for generations to come. The damage
to Earth's living systems -- the circulation and chemical composition of the atmosphere and the
ocean; the stability of the hydrological and biogeochemical cycles; and the biodiversity of the
entire planet -- is essentially permanent.
Humans have become the most invasive species ever known. Although we are a mere .01 percent
of the planet's biomass, our domesticated crops and livestock dominate life on Earth. In terms
of total biomass, 96 percent of all the mammals on Earth are livestock; only 4 percent are wild
mammals. Seventy percent of all birds are domesticated poultry, only 30 percent are wild. About
half the Earth's wild animals are thought to have been lost in just the last 50 years. [6]
Scientists estimate that half of all remaining species will be extinct by the end of the
century. [7] There are no
more unspoiled ecosystems or new frontiers where people can escape the damage they've caused
and recover from collapse.
Difference #4: Human civilization's collective capacity to confront its mounting crises is
crippled by a fragmented political system of antagonistic nations ruled by corrupt elites who
care more about power and wealth than people and the planet. Humanity faces a perfect storm of
converging global calamities. Intersecting tribulations like climate chaos, rampant extinction,
food and freshwater scarcity, poverty, extreme inequality, and the rise of global pandemics are
rapidly eroding the foundations of modern life.
Yet, this fractious and fractured political system makes organizing and mounting a
cooperative response nearly impossible. And, the more catabolic industrial capitalism becomes,
the greater the danger that hostile rulers will fan the flames of nationalism and go to war
over scarce resources. Of course, warfare is not new. But modern warfare is so devastating,
destructive, and toxic that little would remain in its aftermath. This would be the final nail
in civilization's coffin.
Rising From the Ruins?
How people respond to the collapse of industrial civilization will determine how bad things
get and what will replace it. The challenges are monumental. They will force us to question our
identities, our values, and our loyalties like no other experience in our history. Who are we?
Are we, first and foremost, human beings struggling to raise our families, strengthen our
communities, and coexist with the other inhabitants of Earth? Or do our primary loyalties
belong to our nation, our culture, our race, our ideology, or our religion? Can we put the
survival of our species and our planet first, or will we allow ourselves to become hopelessly
divided along national, cultural, racial, religious, or party lines?
The eventual outcome of this great implosion is up for grabs. Will we overcome denial and
despair; kick our addiction to petroleum; and pull together to break the grip of corporate
power over our lives? Can we foster genuine democracy, harness renewable energy, reweave our
communities, re-learn forgotten skills, and heal the wounds we've inflicted on the Earth? Or
will fear and prejudice drive us into hostile camps, fighting over the dwindling resources of a
degraded planet? The stakes could not be higher.
Notes.
[1]
His books include: The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now: The Case
for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
Craig Collins Ph.D. is the author of " Toxic Loopholes "
(Cambridge University Press), which examines America's dysfunctional system of environmental
protection. He teaches political science and environmental law at California State University
East Bay and was a founding member of the Green Party of California.
[.]
While it is still popular to claim that the United States has never defaulted on its debt,
this is a myth. The US has been forced to default a couple of times throughout history, the
last of which being when Richard Nixon&rsquo closed the gold window. By cutting the
ability of foreign governments to redeem US dollars for gold, America was allowed to pay
back past debt with devalued fiat money. This form of default has long been a popular
option for governments with debt obligations it can't or won't honor.
Of course, as Peter Klein wrote last week, even Trump's suggestion of the US
restructuring its debt isn't the doomsday scenario CNBC talking heads have made it out to
be, noting that:
[T]he idea that the US can never restructure or even repudiate the national debt -- that
US Treasuries must always be treated as a unique and magical "risk-free" investment -- is
wildly speculative at best, preposterous at worst.
Murray Rothbard himself advocated for outright repudiating the national debt,
arguing:
The government is an organization, so why not liquidate the assets of that organization
and pay the creditors (the government bondholders) a pro-rata share of those assets? This
solution would cost the taxpayer nothing, and, once again, relieve him of $200 billion in
annual interest payments. The United States government should be forced to disgorge its
assets, sell them at auction, and then pay off the creditors accordingly.
Trump himself has even touched on the possibility of selling of assets held by the
Federal government as a form of debt reduction.[.]
c1ue dear friend, the current level of US debt is unsustainable. Never mind the happy
cheerleaders promoting mighty U.S. is the wealthiest nation on earth. Have no fear our dollar
is good as gold, backed by the full faith and credit of Uncle Sam.
Here is a brief history of U.S.defaults starting with year 1790- LINK
"... This is a transformational moment in history that will allow American politics to socialize and turn away resolutely from the anti-government stupidity represented by Trump and all the anti-New Deal elements among the elite predators that have dominated politically since Reagan. It is a mistake to chose Biden, chief author of the Patriot Act, business-as-usual candidate, corporate lackey, weasel. ..."
This is a transformational moment in history that will allow American politics to socialize
and turn away resolutely from the anti-government stupidity represented by Trump and all the
anti-New Deal elements among the elite predators that have dominated politically since
Reagan. It is a mistake to chose Biden, chief author of the Patriot Act, business-as-usual
candidate, corporate lackey, weasel.
Bernie is the only rational choice, but the American
people are not rational, and do not yet understand the urgency of a radical left turn. Much
suffering will be the result and a radical right turn could occur, although disenchantment
with the blithering idiocy of Donald Trump has already deprived him of any chance of
re-election. The virus is going to take him down before profound political embarrassment.
He's a dead man walking.This may be true of Bernie & Biden as well, but I say this
without prejudice.
The Chinese clearly knew the character of this virus before it became apparent to the
world. They did not react so swiftly or dramatically to earlier outbreaks like SARS, swine
flu, avian flu and etc. They had prior knowledge of the potential of nCov2019. The US did
not.
Why do we have a National Security Council or a Department of Homeland Security if they
cannot read the writing on the wall? It was an accidental release of a weaponized virus. The
US should have taken a cue and reacted with similar conviction shown by the CCP. But we have
no leadership worth a shit.
Our representative republic has suffered an embarrassment in this failure to protect the
people while a so-called national enemy, a communist dictatorship, has demonstrated more
effective leadership and greater capability to protect its people. This is more than an
embarrassment. It is an indictment of our political system.
It is time to turn sharply left to social democracy.
At some point, systems flip from being
complicated, which is a challenge to manage, to being complex.
Complexity is more than a
challenge because it opens the door to all kinds of unexpected crashes and events.
Their behavior cannot be reduced to their component parts. It's as if they take on a life of their
own.
Complexity theory has four main pillars.
The first is the diversity of actors. You've got to account for all of the actors in the
marketplace. When you consider the size of global markets, that number is obviously vast.
The second pillar is interconnectedness. Today's world is massively interconnected through the
internet, through social media and other forms of communications technology.
The third pillar of complexity theory is interaction. Markets interact on a massive scale.
Trillions of dollars of financial transactions occur every single day.
The fourth pillar, and this is the hardest for people to understand, is adaptive behavior.
Adaptive behavior just means that your behavior affects my behavior and my behavior affects yours.
That in turn affects someone else's behavior, and so on.
If you look out the window and see people bundled up in heavy jackets, for example, you're probably
not going to go out in a T-shirt.
Applied to capital markets, adaptive behavior is sometimes
called herding.
Assume you have a room with 100 people. If two people suddenly sprinted out of the room, most of
the others probably wouldn't make much of it. But if half the people in the room suddenly ran outside,
the other half will probably do the same thing.
They might not know why the first 50 people left, but the second half will just assume something
major has happened. That could be a fire or a bomb threat or something along these lines.
The key is to determine the tipping point that compels people to act. Two people fleeing isn't
enough. 50 certainly is. But, maybe 20 people leaving could trigger the panic. Or maybe the number is
30, or 40. You just can't be sure. But the point is, 20 people out of 100 could trigger a chain
reaction.
And that's how easily a total collapse of the capital markets can be triggered.
Understanding the four main pillars of complexity gives you a window into the inner workings of
markets in a way the Fed's antiquated equilibrium models can't. They let you see the world with better
eyes.
People assume that if you had perfect knowledge of the economy, which nobody does, that you could
conceivably plan an economy. You'd have all the information you needed to determine what should be
produced and in what number.
But complexity theory says that even if you had that perfect knowledge, you still couldn't
predict financial and economic events. They can come seemingly out of nowhere.
For example, it was bright and sunny one day out in the eastern Atlantic in 2005. Then it suddenly
got cloudy. The winds began to pick up. Then a hurricane formed. That hurricane went on to wipe out
New Orleans a short time later.
I'm talking about Hurricane Katrina. You never could have predicted New Orleans would be struck on
that bright sunny day. You could look back and track it afterwards. It would seem rational in
hindsight. But on that sunny day in the eastern Atlantic, there was simply no way of predicting that
New Orleans was going to be devastated.
Any number of variables could have diverted the storm at some point along the way. And they cannot
be known in advance, no matter how much information you have initially.
Another example is the Fukushima nuclear incident in Japan a few years back. You had a number of
complex systems coming together at once to produce a disaster.
An underwater earthquake triggered a tsunami that just happened to wash up on a nuclear power
plant. Each one of these are highly complex systems -- plate tectonics, hydrodynamics and the nuclear
plant itself.
There was no way traditional models could have predicted when or where the tectonic plates were
going to slip. Therefore, they couldn't tell you where the tsunami was heading.
And the same applies to financial panics. They seem to come out of nowhere. Traditional
forecasting models have no way of detecting them. But complexity theory allows for them.
I make the point that a snowflake can cause an avalanche. But of course not every snowflake does.
Most snowflakes fall harmlessly, except that they make the ultimate avalanche worse because they're
building up the snowpack. And when one of them hits the wrong way, it could spin out of control.
The way to think about it is that the triggering snowflake might not look much different from the
harmless snowflake that preceded it. It's just that it hit the system at the wrong time, at the wrong
place.
Only the exact time and the specific snowflake that starts the avalanche remain to be seen. This
kind of systemic analysis is the primary tool I use to keep investors ahead of the catastrophe curve.
The system is getting more and more unstable, and it might not take that much to trigger
the avalanche.
To switch metaphors, it's like the straw that breaks the camel's back. You can't tell in advance
which straw will trigger the collapse. It only becomes obvious afterwards. But that doesn't mean you
can't have a good idea when the threat can no longer be ignored.
Let's say I've got a 35-pound block of enriched uranium sitting in front of me that's shaped like a
big cube. That's a complex system. There's a lot going on behind the scenes. At the subatomic level,
neutrons are firing off. But it's not dangerous. You'd actually have to eat it to get sick.
But, now, I take the same 35 pounds, I shape part of it into a sphere, I take the rest of it and
shape it into a bat. I put it in the tube, and I fire it together with high explosives, I kill 300,000
people. I just engineered an atomic bomb. It's the same uranium, but under different conditions.
The point is, the same basic conditions arrayed in a different way, what physicists call
self-organized criticality, can go critical, blow up, and destroy the world or destroy the financial
system.
That dynamic, which is the way the world works, is not understood by central bankers. They don't
understand complexity theory. They do not see the critical state dynamics going on behind the scenes
because they're using obsolete equilibrium models.
In complexity theory and complex dynamics, you can go into the critical state. What look like
unconnected distant events are actually indications and warnings of something much more dangerous to
come.
So what happens when complex dynamic systems crash into each other? We're seeing that right now.
We're seeing two complex systems colliding into each other, the complex system of
markets combined with the complex system of epidemiology.
The coronavirus spread is a complex dynamic system. It encompass virology, meteorology, migratory
patterns, mass psychology, etc. Markets are highly complex, dynamic systems.
Financial professionals will use the word "contagion" to describe a financial panic. But that's not
just a metaphor. The same complexity that applies to disease epidemics also apply to financial
markets. They follow the same principles.
And they've come together to create a panic that traditional modeling could not foresee.
The time scale of global financial contagion is not necessarily limited to days or weeks. These
panics can play out over months and years. So could the effects of the coronavirus.
Summary: President Trump just announced his support for a full payroll tax holiday for
the remainder of calendar year 2020, which PWBM projects would cost $807 billion.
Households in the bottom 20 percent of incomes -- those households with the highest
willingness to spend their tax savings -- would receive about 2 percent of the total tax
cut, limiting the policy's stimulus potential.
But Penn Wharton's analysis might be based on unrealistically optimistic assumptions
–
see the comments in the replies to this tweet.
Don't forget the employer's half is also waived. Nice subsidy to business while helping
cripple the Social Security funds for ultimate privatization. Doesn't do anything the
unemployed, those laid off or fired as they pay no taxes. Now, if it were retroactive for a
year or two, that'd be different.
The explosion of hate and blame and fear flying around online with regard to this pandemic
is more than alarming and ultimately useless and damaging. In a way it scares me more than
the flu itself at the moment because of the implications of how it will hinder our ability
to cooperate and deal with this.
That's a good point. Western society with its twisted guiding philosophy of radical
individualism and competition combined with a supremacist "that could never happen here"
attitude quickly falls into panicked chaos when reality kicks in and reveals the society's
underlying vulnerabilities. Countries with weak social safety nets and an ideological
opposition to social responsibility are extremely vulnerable to systemic breakdown when their
societies are under unexpected stress.
This virus is revealing just how ineffective the neoliberal social Darwinist "every man
for himself" ethos is and how deeply in denial and out of touch with reality these societies
are. Additionally, the house of cards that makes up the global economy has been in crisis
mode since 2008, when it was bailed out by massive money printing in the US and EU and China
pumping billions of dollars into the economy to keep it afloat, simply can't handle any
additional stressors without going into breakdown mode.
In this kind of situation where clear headed cooperation and mutual effort are required
the opposite happens and people go into panic and finger pointing mode looking for some
external enemy to blame. Just imagine what will happen if global warming turns out to be as
serious as many are predicting.
It may one day be said that the coronavirus delivered the death blow to the New World Order,
to a half-century of globalization, and to the era of interdependence of the world's great
nations.
Tourism, air travel, vacation cruises, international gatherings, and festivals are already
shutting down. Travel bans between countries and continents are being imposed. Conventions,
concerts, and sporting events are being canceled. Will the Tokyo Olympics go forward? If they
do, will all the anticipated visitors from abroad come to Japan to enjoy the games?
Trump has issued a one-month travel ban on Europe.
As for the "open borders" crowd, do Democrats still believe that breaking into our country
should no longer be a crime, and that immigrants arriving illegally should be given free health
care, a proposition to which all the Democratic debaters raised their hands?
The ideological roots of our free trade era can be traced to the mid-19th century, when its
great evangelist, Richard Cobden, rose at Free Trade Hall in Manchester on January 15, 1846,
and rhapsodized: "I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as
the principle of gravitation in the universe -- drawing men together, thrusting aside the
antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace."
In the pre-Trump era, Republicans held hands with liberal Democrats in embracing NAFTA,
GATT, the WTO, and most favored nation trade privileges for China.
In retrospect, was it wise to have relied on China to produce essential parts for the supply
chains of goods vital to our national security? Does it appear wise to have moved the
production of pharmaceuticals and lifesaving drugs for heart disease, strokes, and diabetes to
China? Does it appear wise to have allowed China to develop a virtual monopoly on rare earth
minerals crucial to the development of weapons for our defense?
In this coronavirus pandemic, people now seem to be looking for authoritative leaders and
nations seem to be looking out for their own peoples first. Would Merkel today invite a million
Syrian refugees into Germany no matter the conditions under which they were living?
Is not the case now conclusive that we made a historic mistake when we outsourced our
economic independence to rely for vital necessities upon nations that have never had America's
best interests at heart?
Which rings truer today? We are all part of mankind, all citizens of the world. Or that it's
time to put America and Americans first!
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made
and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and
read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at
www.creators.com.
Which leaders have been speaking of ways to reverse the ways of globalism and how close are
they to obtaining power? This is going to require a changing of the elites fro mthe ones
who are and will continue to push this form of globalism to the ones that are willing to
switch to a new system.
(there will always be an elite. It's just a question of which ones you let wield power
as not all of them are the type that we carry.)
Unfortunately a ton of people are still espousing open borders globalism. This includes a
large number of visible elites, the vast majority, in fact.
The best thing that could happen is that those who espouse such dangerous ideas are held to
account by nature. Let them get sick with the Wu flu, let them be unable to attain
medication because China has restricted exports to us. Let's see what they think after they
have finally begun to experience the ramifications of their ideological thinking.
The elites will ALWAYS have access to medication they need. Most of them will NEVER
"experience ramifications" in any way more than minor inconveniences.
Considering that you can get from New York City to Tokyo in under 24 hours, and that there
are no major city on the Planet that cannot be reached from the lower forty-eight in under
48 hours, how do you intend to reverse globalism? Ban airplanes, telephones and the
internet-based communications?
It's no different from the Republicans in the US Senate:
Emergency Sick Leave Bill blocked from vote by Senate Republicans--Profit over People yet
again.
Why has Italy not try very hard to scale up hospital bed capacity for the surge of cases
over the last several days? They have deployed a military hospital but it doesn't look like
it's making a big dent. Instead reports are now coming in of abandoning very old people or
those with prior conditions to die largely unattended.
In Wuhan, 16 big barracks were built to treat the seriously sick. Why doesn't Italy
requisition schools, move in equipment from the rest of the country, deploy doctors from
other regions, call other EU member states for help?
Does it have something to do with the difficulty of getting things done even in
emergencies in modern bureaucratic states?
Italy: neo-liberal economic worship, all government bad, all private sector good,
corruption good, banks worshipped as faultless guardians but actually kleptocrats.
China: socialism with a mild capitalist twist, government good, private sector ok,
corruption to be rooted out, banks established and policed for the public good (mostly).
Modern bureacratic states function well when government is respected and well resourced
intellectually and financially. Italy has been gutted by the Thatcherite and US model of deep
coercion and destruction of its socialist roots. Ditto USA and UK and the five eyes cheer
squad. New entries to job markets are propagandised to avoid the state employment.
There are many nations in the world with modern functional bureaucratic states. As you can
see China and perhaps Russia appear to be in that team. Perhaps some of the Scandinavian
states, maybe Portugal. France abandoned its respect for the centrality of State service
provider decades ago and Mitterand appears to have been an effective assassin on behalf of
the neo-liberal economic monsters in France.
I'm sure in your comparison of Italy and China, you forgot to mention the infiltration of
the Mafia (as in the real Mafia of La Cosa Nostra, La Camorra, 'Ndrangheta and maybe some
others I've missed) in Italian national and regional governments, and the horrific levels of
air pollution in the Po Valley region where COVID-19 hotspots like Milan are located.
Perhaps also the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church and their links to the financial
industry in Italy are also a problem.
The epidemic that has so far spread to half of US states, infecting over 1,000 Americans and
killing 31...
At least 10 states have declared emergencies as of Wednesday, and disease experts are
throwing up their hands, urging the administration to take real-life events more seriously.
...Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield agreed that critical regions of the
US are beyond the reach of containment, sliding into the " mitigation " stage, and
blamed the botched rollout of test kits to local health workers.
The availability of
accurate tests for Covid-19 has become a major sore spot, with official reassurances colliding
with uncooperative reality in full view of the public. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Alex Azar insisted on Tuesday that " millions " of tests were available, even as the
CDC urged healthcare providers to save tests for symptomatic patients already hospitalized and
" medically fragile individuals ."
In at least one case
, federal officials warned a Seattle lab against testing flu swab samples for coronavirus in
January, before the epidemic was widely reported, losing critical response time –
mirroring the " crime " the Trump administration has tried to pin on China.
And some have warned that the US' inability to handle an outbreak is more dire than either
side realizes. During a House Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, a Republican
congressman from Washington, the first Covid-19 hotspot to flare up in the US, demanded to know
why his constituents were unable to get their test results while his fellow congressmen had no
problem getting tested just days after coming into contact with an infected person at a DC
political conference. A CDC representative admitted " there's not enough equipment. There's
not enough people. There's not enough internal capacity. There's no surge capacity ." To
conserve tests, the CDC has told healthcare providers to " use their judgment " and
consider " epidemiologic factors " before using up a valuable resource.
Existing flaws in the US healthcare system have exacerbated the testing problem. The CDC has
refused to set up standalone testing centers, placing COVID-19 screening out of the reach of
the many Americans who don't have primary-care physicians and rely on walk-in clinics and
emergency rooms for their healthcare. Just 8,500 Americans had been tested as of Monday,
according to the CDC, and federal officials told reporters some 75,000 tests had been sent out
to public health laboratories on top of one million sent to hospitals and other sites. The
real-life infected numbers in the country are thus likely much higher than what is being
reported.
Control measures have varied wildly across local governments and institutions and even
within cities. Over 1,000 schools have closed nationwide, and cities and counties from Santa
Clara, California to Westchester, New York have banned large gatherings. The National
Institutes of Health's Anthony Fauci called on others to follow suit during a congressional
hearing on Wednesday, announcing " we would recommend that there not be large crowds. If
that means not having any people in the audience when the NBA plays, so be it. " Asked if
" the worst " was yet to come, Fauci answered unequivocally: " bottom line, it's
going to get worse. "
Even as new Covid-19 cases in China dwindle to near zero and cases in Italy, Germany, and
other European countries surge, the US has not stepped up screenings of passengers from those
countries at airports accordingly. Instead, the administration has continued to congratulate
itself on " saving lives " by halting flights from China weeks ago.
About testing: who makes testing kits, how reliable they are, what is the cost?
Seems that in USA there is a shortage, and the normal behavior of providers of medicines
and other medical goods is extremely rapacious. For example, Gilead company found a cure for
hepatitis C. In the first year of sales, they got more than 5 billion dollars because of
enormous prices they demanded. In about 2 years almost all urgent cases were cured, which is
fine, and competition emerged.
Unless forced, these companies will provide nothing at cost, only with enormous markup. If
you want to get, say, 10 miilion kits that hypothetically cost 250 dollars to make, they
would charge at least 10 billion. Actually, the price/cost multiples have no limit at all, as
in Gilead case. In the face of that, Administration should use emergency powers to impose
cost controls. Manufactures could be threatened delicately to ramp-up the production if they
are not willing to do it just from civic sense of duty. That would violate the most precious
human rights, i.e. the rights of billionaires. Not the American way.
Posted on March
11, 2020 by Yves Smith Yves here. While this
article has a lot of helpful suggestions, it does not acknowledge that public health is a state
and local, not a Federal matter. The Federal government can intervene only by invoking
emergency authority, which in every case I can recall, has been done only when asked (begged)
by the relevant authorities. Thus I cannot see the Federal government taking the lead with
coronavirus on the medical front, as much as that is desperately needed. Look, for instance, at
how
it was New York State that imposed a containment area around coronavirus hot spot New
Rochelle , and how New York State has started making its own hand sanitizer.
By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator. Produced by
Economy for All , a project of the Independent Media Institute
The coronavirus will eventually pass, but the same cannot be said for the Panglossian
phenomenon known as "globalization." Stripped of the romantic notion of a global village, the
ugly process we've experienced over the past 40 years has been a case of governmental
institutions being eclipsed by multinational corporations, acting to maximize profit in support
of shareholders. To billions of us, it has resembled a looting process, of our social wealth,
and political meaning. Governments that wanted to stay on top would have to learn to master
soft power to learn to be relevant in a globalized world, mostly acting to smooth transactions
and otherwise stay out of the way.
In a globalized world, nation-states were supposedly becoming relics. To the extent that
they were needed, small national governments were said to equate to good government. This
hollow philosophy's main claims now appear badly exposed, as the supply chains wither, and the
very interconnectedness of our global economy is becoming a vector of contagion. In the words
of author David Goodhart, "We no longer need the help of rats or fleas to spread disease -- we
can do it ourselves thanks to mass international travel and supply chains."
To be sure, there were many warning signs that called into question our hitherto benign
assumptions about globalization: the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 (during which the Asian
tiger economies were decimated by unconstrained speculative capital flows), the vast swaths of
the Rust Belt's industrial heartlands created by outsourcing to China's export juggernaut, the
concomitant rise in economic inequality and decline in quality of life in industrialized
societies and, of course, the 2008 global financial crisis. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz
described many of these pathologies in his book Globalization and Its Discontents, as did
economist Barry Eichengreen, who lamented that "the nation state has fundamentally lost control
of its destiny, surrendering to anonymous global forces." Both noted that globalization was
severing a working social contract between national governments and their citizens that had
previously delivered rising prosperity for all.
Those who would argue that the inexorable march of globalization cannot be reversed should
consider the parallel during the early 20th century. Globalized economic activity and free
trade were dominant before the onset of World War I; in 1914, trade as a proportion of global
GDP stood at 14 percent. Needless to say, two world wars, and the Great Depression (which
brought us the Smoot-Hawley tariffs), reversed this trend. The Cold War sustained
regionalization and bifurcated trading blocs. Its end, and China's accession into the World
Trade Organization (WTO), ushered in a new high-water mark in globalized trade.
But while it is true that viruses do not respect national boundaries, nothing has blown
apart the pretensions of this New World Order as dramatically as the coronavirus, a pandemic
now assuming global import, as international supply chains are severed, and global economic
activity is brought to a screeching halt. We are increasingly seeing the hollow political
content at the core of supranational entities such as the EU, structured more to comfort merged
investor groups than strengthen public health systems.
Speaking of Europe, while the coronavirus started in China, its most long-lasting impact
might be in the EU, as it has dramatically exposed the shortcomings of the latter's
institutional structures. Take Italy as the most vivid illustration: The spread of COVID-19 has
been particularly acute there. Being a user of the euro (as opposed to an issuer of the
currency) the Italian national government risks exposing itself to potential national
bankruptcy (and the vicissitudes of the volatile private capital markets) if it responds with a
robust fiscal response, absent the institutional support of Brussels and the European Central
Bank (which is the sole issuer of the euro). According to MarketWatch, "Italy needs a €500
to €700 billion ($572 billion to $801 billion) precautionary bailout package to help
reassure financial markets that the Italian government and banks can meet their debt payment
obligations as [the] country's economic and financial crisis becomes more fearsome."
The tragic case of Italy (where the entire country is now in full quarantined lockdown)
provides a particularly poignant example of the gaping lacunae at the heart of the eurozone.
There is no supranational fiscal authority, so the Italian government has been largely left to
fend for itself, as it is trying to do now, for example, providing income relief by suspending
payments on mortgages across the entire country. Here is a perfect example of where European
Central Bank support for the Italian banking system would go a long way toward mitigating any
resultant financial contagion. But so far, as Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times has
noted, the ECB remains in "monitoring" mode. Indeed, the eurozone as a whole lacks the
institutional mechanisms to mobilize on a massive, coordinated scale, in contrast to the U.S.
and UK, and eurozone finance ministers remain incapable of agreeing on a coordinated policy
response.
Other eurozone countries may no longer be complacent about the threat posed by COVID-19, but
their national governments are more focused on the need to stockpile their own national
resources to protect their populations. Italy remains particularly vulnerable to the ravages of
this virus, as it has an aging population, so if coronavirus runs rampant through the country,
it could potentially crash the nation's entire hospital system, as this account by an Italian
doctor suggests.
EU solidarity, showing cracks on issues ranging from finance to immigration, increasingly
resembles every country for itself.
Defenders of the EU may well retort that health care is designated as a "national
competency" under the Treaty of Maastricht. But how does one expect national competencies to be
carried out competently in an economic grouping devoid of national currencies (the key variable
as far as supporting unconstrained fiscal capacity goes)? Additionally, the evil of decades of
Brussels-imposed austerity has meant there aren't enough hospital beds, materials and staff
anywhere in Europe, let alone Italy. This might well represent the death knell for a European
project based on aspirations for an "ever closer union."
In spite of the manifest incompetence of the Trump administration, the U.S. at least has
institutional mechanisms in place via the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide Americans with clear, credible instructions
devoid of political spin.
As Professor James Galbraith has persuasively argued, the U.S. government has the capacity
to "establish a Health Finance Corporation on the model of the Depression-era Reconstruction
Finance Corporation. Like the RFC, which built munitions factories and hospitals during and
after World War II, the HFC should have broad powers to create public corporations, lend to
private companies (to fund necessary production), and cover other emergency costs. Even more
quickly, the National Guard can be deployed to deal with critical supply issues and to
establish emergency facilities such as field hospitals and quarantine centers." Likewise,
Senator Marco Rubio has "sought to expand what's called the Economic Injury Disaster Loan
program, which allows the Small Business Administration to start lending money directly instead
of just encouraging banks to do so," as Matt Stoller has written.
Parenthetically, this represents a marked break with historic GOP policy, which for the most
part has accepted the embedded assumptions inherent in globalization.
And while traditional monetary policy tools such as interest rate cuts are hardly adequate
to stem a supply shock, Galbraith also points to the ability of the Federal Reserve to offer
emergency financial support to help American companies through the worst of the coronavirus
outbreak, by "buy[ing] up debt issued by hospitals and other health-care providers, as well as
working to stabilize credit markets, as it did in 2008-09." Andrew Bailey of the Bank of
England has made similar recommendations to the UK government.
Even with the measures proposed by Galbraith, Bailey and Rubio, virtually all Western
economies, having largely succumbed to the logic of globalization, are now vulnerable, as
supply chains wither. China, the apex of these offshored manufacturing supply chains, is in
shutdown mode. Likewise South Korea and Italy. Worse, there appears to be a singular lack of
understanding on the part of many multinational companies as to how far these supply chains go:
"Peter Guarraia, who leads the global supply chain practice at Bain & Co, estimated that up
to 60 per cent of executives have no knowledge of the items in their supply chain beyond the
tier one group," reports the Financial Times.
A "tier one" company supplies components directly to the original equipment manufacturer
(OEM) that sets up a global supply chain. But as is now becoming increasingly recognized, there
are secondary-tier companies, which supply components or materials to those tier-one companies.
When goods are widely dispersed geographically (instead of centered in a localized industrial
ecosystem), it is harder for executives to have full knowledge of all of the items in their
respective companies' supply chains, so the deficiencies of the model only become apparent by
the time it is too late to rectify.
In the U.S. specifically, the mass migration of manufacturing has seriously eroded the
domestic capabilities needed to turn inventions into high-end products, damaging America's
ability to retain a lead in many sectors, let alone continue to manufacture products. The
country has evolved from being a nation of industrialists to a nation of financial rentiers.
And now the model has exposed the U.S. to significant risk during a time of national crisis, as
the coronavirus potentially represents.
There is no national redundancy built into current supply networks, with the most
problematic consequences now evident in the pharmaceutical markets. Countries such as China or
India are beginning to restrict core components of important generic drugs to deal with their
own domestic health crisis. This has the potential to create a major crisis, given that the
U.S. "depend[s] on China for 80 percent of the core components to make our generic medicines,"
writes Rosemary Gibson in the American Conservative. She also notes that "generic drugs are 90
percent of the medicines Americans take. Thousands of them, sold at corner drug stores, grocery
store pharmacies, and big box stores, contain ingredients made in China." Constraints on
production, therefore, intensify as more and more of the manufacturing process pertaining to
the drugs themselves is geographically globalized. And in regard specifically to
research-intensive industries, such as pharmaceuticals or biotech, the value of closely
integrating the R&D with manufacturing is extremely high, and the risks of separating them
are enormous.
These are by no means new problems. We've been dealing with supply-side shocks emanating
from hyper-globalization for decades, and the response of Western policymakers has largely been
in the form of fiscal or monetary palliatives that seldom address the underlying structural
challenges raised by these shortages. To the contrary: democratic caveats to globalization have
been characterized as inefficient frictions that hinder consumer choice.
For now, we should start by reducing our supply chain vulnerabilities by building into our
systems more of what engineers call redundancy -- different ways of doing the same things -- so
as to mitigate undue reliance on foreign suppliers for strategically important industries. We
need to mobilize national resources in a manner akin to the way a country does during wartime
or during massive economic dislocation (such as the Great Depression) -- comprehensive
government-led actions (which runs in the face of much of today's prevailing and increasingly
outdated economic and political theology). In other words, the revival of a coherent national
industrial policy.
To save the global economy, paradoxically, we need less of it. Not only does the
private/public sector balance have to shift in favor of the latter, but so too does the
multinational/national matrix in manufacturing. Otherwise, the coronavirus will simply
represent yet another in a chain of catastrophes for global capitalism, rather than an
opportunity to rethink our entire model of economic development.
But but but ."redundancy", which engineers like, is in direct conflict with "efficiency",
which economists revere. Think of how many "smart" appliances we can invent and market if we
don't have to make health-care and manufacturing robust again.
Cheetah paradox. The fastest land animal, but often dies if injured as can't hunt and has
no fat to speak off to take it through lean times.
NC has discussed number of times that you can't have "efficiency" and "reduncancy". Of
course, if your drive is short-term profit, it requires efficiency, and redundancy is just a
cost.
The smarter companies that have built redundancy, will be the predators left once the
injured cheetahs die off.
does my little farm/doomstead count?
multiple redundancies has been a large part of The Goal for a long time.
as for actual businesses, no except maybe for the more esoteric sectors of FIRE .are
"exotic financial instruments" redundant?
"just in time", "warehouse on wheels", as well as globespanning supply lines have worried
me since i learned of them.
"efficiency" as a weapon, that eventually gets turned on oneself.
My favorite tale of redundancy going away was the oxygen system on commercial airliners.
In the past it had 3 or 4 independent redundant systems built in and cost around $20k per
seat, and then the cost cutters came up a single digital oxygen system costing only around
$500 per seat.
Yes: Ford and General Motors. If you cannot buy from one company, there are alternatives. The companies are single
points of failure. The combination of multiple single point of failure provide redundancy and
resilience.
Supporting the Historical US concept of "truce busting" and encouraging competition in all
markets.
Indeed. As an both an engineering (core mobile network infrastructure) and an econ
graduate (PPE and life long interest) this has been an (perhaps, the) issue for me over the
last 30 years. There are many ways in which redundancy and resilience have been degraded. Not
least in terms of people with the combination of deep technical understanding and problem
solving skills.
Baking in fragility in the name of efficiency. Efficiency? Well maybe, but only on a short
enough timeline. And timelines have been getting shorter (to validate 'cost cutting').
I don't like to be a smart-fanny and do appreciate the thinking and expertise that shines
through this fine essay. I learned an enormous amount and feel better prepared to argue the
subject.
But the second half of that last sentence
" the coronavirus will simply represent yet another in a chain of catastrophes for global
capitalism, rather than an opportunity to rethink our entire model of economic
development."
taken by itself, makes everything before it, well redundant. of course it will.
and and and .the "tax planning" departments at majorco international will be crying on
about all their masterful overseas tax siloing now having to come apart by having to actually
re-shore production oh the pearl clutching to come .
I usually like reading Auerback's posts but in this exceptional case I had to stop reading
at about the 10th paragraph or so. It is the case that in the heat of the moment we are not
having good reaction and fear is driving us a little bit mad.
Leaving our personal phantoms
and demons to ride free when we should be carefully thinking on our personal safety and the
fate of the social structures that sustain us is not good idea. For instance, identifying
Italy as the core of the problem is IMO a misrepresentation of facts. A small city in
Northern Italy was, just by chance, the first place in EU where the outbreak started showing
all its virulence and it took us by surprise because we were all in denial.
Not only in the
EU, a few days ago Mr. Strether left a link in his Water-cooler citing American economists
saying that the US would probably not be reached by the epidemics. As an example on how in
denial we have been, take a look at this letter
sent to the editor of eurosurveillance the 21st of January by physicians from Marseille
asking why so much fear about the new disease when they had tested and identified 0 Covid
cases in their hospitals while we should focus on flu or rhinovirus. It is almost certain
they are now regretting having this letter sent.
Though M. Auerback IMO rigthly crtitizices the fragmentation of the institutional and
political framework in the EU, in comparison with the all powerful globalized supply chains,
I cannot agree more, I also think he is missing how the institutional response is being
organised. After the initial denial, the response to the emergency is necessarily reactive
(think of equipments in short supply). In Madrid we are just about 7 days behind of Italy in
epidemics development and I can see the same phenomenon here. We are starting to see that we
could soon be in short supply of treatment equipment in hospitals. Schools and universities
are closed starting today and large gatherings prohibited and yesterday some panic scenes in
supermarkets were seen, just like in Italy. The government has programmed a set of measures
that are going to be implemented as their necessity is seen such as delaying tax or mortgage
payments, and some other help with a focus in small companies and autonomous workers. Both
Italy and Spain will almost certainly give a kick in the ass to austerian stupidity and do
things necessary to try to mitigate the damage and I bet there won't be any EU institution
denying whatever support needed because, ya know, the BCE and other institutions will realise
their survival is at risk if they try to be too orthodox in an emergency situation. So far,
IMO, the biggest mistakes have been made in China from the very beginning of the outbreak to
the brutal quarantines imposed. I think that in the EU, keeping open borders was good
reaction.
We will see how this unfolds in the US. This said, I wish the best for Americans of both
Americas, Asians, Oceanians, Europeans etc. I hope that authorities around the world have
good reaction with this emergency.
Good comment, I agree. I've been offline for a bit, so forgive me if mentioned already,
but early irruption of the virus in Italy is no mere accident. Chinese groups have bought up
Italian luxury brands and then imported thousands of Chinese sweatshop migrants to preserve
the coveted Made In Italy label while keeping costs low. Same arrangements in Spain I think,
but you would likely know better than I.
For so long as people can't be arsed about where their food clothing and shelter really
comes from, there will always be loopholes devised by the unscrupulous. The arbitrage
toothpaste is very hard to put back in the tube.
I greatly enjoy Auerback's (and Hudson's) work although I am no socialist (to my mind,
today's bankster or McKinsey wanker simply becomes tomorrow's third deputy minister for
banana bending – regardless, it's still a small club and most of us ain't in it).
But in order for nations, however defined, to regain self-sufficiency, cartelization of
labor enforced in law is going to have to become a thing again, whether it's via
unionization, craft guilds or certification (credentialism by any other name would smell as
sweet).
One question: Why does Thomas L. Friedman, author of The World is Flat , extolling
the glories of globalization, still have a job paying no doubt tens if not hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year, while many better informed and infinitely more prescient NCers
have trouble putting groceries on the table?
Why does Friedman still have a job after all of his globalization cheer leading and war
mongering?
Answer: Because he writes what his bosses want him to write.
In the upside-down world of USA media, people who give good advice (Chris Hedges and Phil
Donahue on the Iraq War) get fired, while those who give bad advice (Friedman on almost
everything) keep their jobs.
The contempt Friedman has for people may be illustrated by his "Suck on this" comment
directed at innocent Iraqis who he judged needed to see US military power directed against
them.
This is the USA, where harmful media people are brought down by sex-scandals (Charlie
Rose, Chris Matthews) not by the quality of their media work.
I don't get the article's point about a fractured EU response vs a coordinated American
response. CDC has been torched by budget cuts and the nurses association in the USA –
didn't they say few hospitals have any plans in place for an outbreak? Each country is going
to have it's own challenges – good show on Joe Rogan this week and goes into 45% of
Americans are obese – a big risk factor when combating Covid-19.
Also a revelation was
nearly all generic drugs use in America are sourced from India and China.
EU borders have been very fluid for decades, its not an easy thing to shut down for any
reason and yes a lot of the response has been reactionary.
So back to Globalisation – there are risks, this is the price.
Globalisation is not the same as trade. Trade, it's sometimes hard to recall, was originally
"I'll swap you what you want for what I want." So the English exported wool, for example, and
imported silks and spices. Globalisation is an attempt by an insane MBA student to
restructure the world economy to be maximally "efficient" without concern for externalities.
Globalisation is going down for sure, but of course it will take a lot of perfectly
respectable trade with it.
I'm also getting a bit tired of reading that viruses "don't respect national borders." Of
course, if there were groups of independently moving viruses, travelling through Europe on
their little feet, they wouldn't think to contact the authorities when they cross national
borders. But viruses have to be transported by something, usually people, and people (as in
China recently) can be required to respect borders. Already there are signs that Free
Movement in Europe is coming under strain (Slovenia closed its border with Italy yesterday)
and judging by the violent reactions of the "no borders" lobby, they are worried that it may
be one of the many types of collateral political damage.
One other thought: this epidemic may be the first in living memory where the PMC, politicians
and media figures are disproportionately affected. (I can't think of a single case of a
politician who's ever died of flu). The PMC etc. travel a lot more, get out a lot more and
mix a lot more with foreigners. When there's no cure, some of them – CEOs, Ministers,
media pundits, bankers – are going to die. What then? Already, the more contacts you
have, especially with other countries, the worse things will be. Lawyers will find courts
closed, consultants will find organisations less ready to consult them, business junkets and
conferences will be cancelled, holidays postponed and upper middle-class parents will find
that Tarquin and Miranda are unexpectedly at home because the European School in Florence has
been closed. Some things will be very hard to bear.
The changes coming on account of the virus will be substantial, and if we're all sitting
on the sofa, afraid to leave the house for a year, supply chains will be rusty @ best when
Coronavirus finally makes off for parts unknown, or pretty much wrecked.
There are very few among us who can afford to miss work and paychecks, and not only that,
but those crazy preppers for once are 100% correct (why they don't concentrate on food
primarily, is a mystery) in that everything we eat comes from somewhere else typically.
The extraordinary plum of the USD being the worlds' reserve currency looks to be in
trouble too, and in a weakened state of things, might just turn into any other fiat monetary
instrument.
The internet will change as well, with much of the world stuck in place, i'd expect
traffic on here to explode, in that I can't think of a better time waster.
There's also the aspect of the Coronavirus hangover even after it departs, survivors won't
let loose of their newfound way of living so easy.
I will never forget reading the Wikileak where the US state department was strong-arming
an African government on behalf of Shell Oil. It drove home for me the reality that
governments and corporations both serve their wealthy elite masters, and don't even pretend
to serve the people they ostensibly represent.
That made me realize it's always been this way.
I was in high school when NAFTA went through. I remember reading all the dire warnings
from people opposed, and all the glowing thoughts from those in favor. Now, in hindsight, it
has been much worse for everyone except the wealthy. The dire warnings weren't dire
enough.
Coronavirus isn't a black swan. People have been predicting a pandemic would strike a blow
to globalization for a long time. The companies suffering from their short-sightedness FULLY
DESERVE what they're getting. I'm sure hoping the fallout hits the corporate landscape
hard . Let's see some naked capitalism in action.
Your comment reminds me of Smedley Butler's 'War is a Racket' from about 100 years ago. It
was true then and its true now. And I'm talking about government practices in general, not
just war: You could take 'War' out of the title and replace it with anything else the
american government does these days and it would still hold true.
"The companies suffering from their short-sightedness FULLY DESERVE what they're
getting."
They do indeed. That is why they are lobbying the White House for bailout
economic assistance funds. It would be a real stinker if they are bailed out with tax dollars and the average citizen
is forced to pick up their own medical and time-off-the-job tabs.
I should have clarified, I'm an American living in the United States. That said, it bothers
me. The absolute lack of any detectable level of courage or fortitude in the face of
diversity (hard times) is just stunning. Old people die. Everyone dies over time. Viruses
like the flu or SARS, or COVID-19 accelerate that process from time to time. It's just what
viruses do. There is no cure for either death or viruses. If you want the biblical "Ye shall
surely die."
The worst estimates of "excess deaths" in the U.S. is currently 480,000. Let's call it
605,000. 605,000 out of a population of 310 million is a death rate of 0.2%. Point two
percent. If this was a deer heard and the managers were assured that the virus did no other
damage and that the point two percent would be overwhelmingly composed of the aged and infirm
they would consider intentionally introducing the virus to other herds that were too
large.
The panic and cowardice is doing more damage than the disease. The level of fear and panic
and the lack of dignity about a life process that you know or should have known was coming
for as long as you were sentient is just appalling. The whole society is pusillanimous.
There's just no other conclusion. It's outrageous compared to the whole of human history. No
other generation in history panicked so much over so little.
/div>
Paul Bogdanich@111
America society is not organized to deal with crisis on its own soil at a community based
level due to globalization and the warfare economy that you are well aware of.
First, the closing down of schools is a good example as the increase in poverty among the
99% has resulted in schools having to take on providing food to a large segment of children. It
is even worse for the children who are homeless in America while millions of dollars a day go
to overseas wars. In New York City along there are about 110,000 homeless children. America has
no means to deliver such food aid to children except through school attendance! Even worse is
that most of this food is ultraprocessed junk and food like substances as required by the
corporate food industry.
Second, most workers must continue to show up even if sick or they face going bankrupt
and are already deep in debt to the banks. This creates another petri dish for transmission of
the virus which is otherwise going to happen due to a lack of food supplies, except in Mormon
and similar communities.
Third, About half of Americans have one or more serious medical conditions, most of which
are due to either bad diet (hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.)
or drug use (alcohol, tobacco, or hard drugs).
Fourth, Americans are generally sedentary and cocooned indoors leading to vitamin/hormone
D3 deficiencies and toxic organics exposure in home products.
Fifth, we have a sick care system in the US that tries to maximize revenue flow to
medical corporations through excess drug distribution and other symptom treatments (think snake
oil salesmen in the old west). Once again, prevention via better diet is the correct but
unprofitable choice. See books such as "food fix" and "The Hacking of the American Mind" for
further details.
Sixth, oil people who will die generally have deficient immune systems which make them
susceptible to secondary infections and lung inflammation responses. Strategies to improve
immune response are not profitable compared to vaccines and thus lots of old people will
die.
Seventh, as hospitals rapidly fill up with patient with coronavirus secondary infections
anyone with injuries or disease conditions (e,g, gall bladder and appendix infections will have
a much higher chance of dying). As some 97% of prescription drugs are imported from China there
will be dramatic shortages.
Eighth, even with calling out the national guard, there will be a large increase in crime
as America has over million gang members who are generally well organized. Pity those who
cannot defend themselves.
Ninth, collapse of the food and other essential services distribution over several months
will contribute to violence and perhaps starvation, especially among pets and farm
animals.
Tenth, since most political leaders in the US attended the AIPAC and CPAP conferences,
where they were exposed to infected individuals, they will have a much higher infection rate,
especially since they tend to be old and in bad health. The collapse of government decision
makers will lead to local communities having to sink or swim.
You are correct about the lack of courage in Americans. More importantly, response to a
crisis is 80% mental Americans generally are unwilling to give up their comfort and conformity
mindset.
Do not know why anyone would want to serve in the US military. Seems like you now
recognize your mistake.
Paul Bogdanich@111
America society is not organized to deal with crisis on its own soil at a community
based level due to globalization and the warfare economy that you are well aware of.
First, the closing down of schools is a good example as the increase in poverty among
the 99% has resulted in schools having to take on providing food to a large segment of
children. It is even worse for the children who are homeless in America while millions of
dollars a day go to overseas wars. In New York City along there are about 110,000 homeless
children. America has no means to deliver such food aid to children except through school
attendance! Even worse is that most of this food is ultraprocessed junk and food like
substances as required by the corporate food industry.
Second, most workers must continue to show up even if sick or they face going bankrupt
and are already deep in debt to the banks. This creates another petri dish for transmission
of the virus which is otherwise going to happen due to a lack of food supplies, except in
Mormon and similar communities.
Third, About half of Americans have one or more serious medical conditions, most of
which are due to either bad diet (hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure,
etc.) or drug use (alcohol, tobacco, or hard drugs).
Fourth, Americans are generally sedentary and cocooned indoors leading to
vitamin/hormone D3 deficiencies and toxic organics exposure in home products.
Fifth, we have a sick care system in the US that tries to maximize revenue flow to
medical corporations through excess drug distribution and other symptom treatments (think
snake oil salesmen in the old west). Once again, prevention via better diet is the correct
but unprofitable choice. See books such as "food fix" and "The Hacking of the American Mind"
for further details.
Sixth, oil people who will die generally have deficient immune systems which make them
susceptible to secondary infections and lung inflammation responses. Strategies to improve
immune response are not profitable compared to vaccines and thus lots of old people will
die.
Seventh, as hospitals rapidly fill up with patient with coronavirus secondary
infections anyone with injuries or disease conditions (e,g, gall bladder and appendix
infections will have a much higher chance of dying). As some 97% of prescription drugs are
imported from China there will be dramatic shortages.
Eighth, even with calling out the national guard, there will be a large increase in
crime as America has over million gang members who are generally well organized. Pity those
who cannot defend themselves.
Ninth, collapse of the food and other essential services distribution over several
months will contribute to violence and perhaps starvation, especially among pets and farm
animals.
Tenth, since most political leaders in the US attended the AIPAC and CPAP conferences,
where they were exposed to infected individuals, they will have a much higher infection rate,
especially since they tend to be old and in bad health. The collapse of government decision
makers will lead to local communities having to sink or swim.
You are correct about the lack of courage in Americans. More importantly, response to a
crisis is 80% mental Americans generally are unwilling to give up their comfort and
conformity mindset.
Do not know why anyone would want to serve in the US military. Seems like you now
recognize your mistake. /div
Italy's economy will be crushed, but the bankers will still get their money. In fact, it's
another opportunity to impose further 'austerity' on Italy (as neoliberal economics abhors
spending on government services), and to force Italy to take out more loans from Germany and
France.
Another big bonus is that the virus will primarily kill old people, which means that
European governments can pay out less retirement pensions and welfare benefits in the future.
Neoliberal economics is the big winner here.
The epidemic that has so far spread to half of US states, infecting over 1,000 Americans and
killing 31...
At least 10 states have declared emergencies as of Wednesday, and disease experts are
throwing up their hands, urging the administration to take real-life events more seriously.
...Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield agreed that critical regions of the
US are beyond the reach of containment, sliding into the " mitigation " stage, and
blamed the botched rollout of test kits to local health workers.
The availability of
accurate tests for Covid-19 has become a major sore spot, with official reassurances colliding
with uncooperative reality in full view of the public. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Alex Azar insisted on Tuesday that " millions " of tests were available, even as the CDC
urged healthcare providers to save tests for symptomatic patients already hospitalized and "
medically fragile individuals ."
In at least one case
, federal officials warned a Seattle lab against testing flu swab samples for coronavirus in
January, before the epidemic was widely reported, losing critical response time –
mirroring the " crime " the Trump administration has tried to pin on China.
And some have warned that the US' inability to handle an outbreak is more dire than either
side realizes. During a House Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, a Republican
congressman from Washington, the first Covid-19 hotspot to flare up in the US, demanded to know
why his constituents were unable to get their test results while his fellow congressmen had no
problem getting tested just days after coming into contact with an infected person at a DC
political conference. A CDC representative admitted " there's not enough equipment. There's
not enough people. There's not enough internal capacity. There's no surge capacity ." To
conserve tests, the CDC has told healthcare providers to " use their judgment " and
consider " epidemiologic factors " before using up a valuable resource.
Existing flaws in the US healthcare system have exacerbated the testing problem. The CDC has
refused to set up standalone testing centers, placing COVID-19 screening out of the reach of
the many Americans who don't have primary-care physicians and rely on walk-in clinics and
emergency rooms for their healthcare. Just 8,500 Americans had been tested as of Monday,
according to the CDC, and federal officials told reporters some 75,000 tests had been sent out
to public health laboratories on top of one million sent to hospitals and other sites. The
real-life infected numbers in the country are thus likely much higher than what is being
reported.
Control measures have varied wildly across local governments and institutions and even
within cities. Over 1,000 schools have closed nationwide, and cities and counties from Santa
Clara, California to Westchester, New York have banned large gatherings. The National
Institutes of Health's Anthony Fauci called on others to follow suit during a congressional
hearing on Wednesday, announcing " we would recommend that there not be large crowds. If
that means not having any people in the audience when the NBA plays, so be it. " Asked if "
the worst " was yet to come, Fauci answered unequivocally: " bottom line, it's going
to get worse. "
Even as new Covid-19 cases in China dwindle to near zero and cases in Italy, Germany, and
other European countries surge, the US has not stepped up screenings of passengers from those
countries at airports accordingly. Instead, the administration has continued to congratulate
itself on " saving lives " by halting flights from China weeks ago.
Two. Low wage workers and people without a paid sick day have to continue to work to
survive. Studies prove people without paid sick days are
more likely to go to work sick than workers who have paid sick leave. And workers without
paid sick days are much more likely to
seek care from emergency rooms than those with paid sick leave.
Three. About 30
million people in the US do not have health insurance, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation . Nearly half say they
cannot
afford it . They are unlikely to seek medical treatment for flu like symptoms or seek
screening because they cannot afford it.
Four. Staying home is not an option for the homeless. There are about 550,000 homeless people in the US,
according to the National Coalition
for the Homeless . Homeless people have rates of diabetes, heart disease, and HIV/AIDS at
rates
three to six times that of the general population, according to the National Alliance to
End Homelessness. Shelters often provide close living arrangements and opportunities to clean
hands and clothes and utensils are minimal for those on the street. Homeless people have
higher rates of
infectious, acute and chronic diseases like tuberculosis.
The 2008 crisis put in the spotlight the psychopathic level of greed, vice, apathy and
short-sightedness from those who wanted to play into the City of London and Wall Street casino
houses. Get rich quick and don't care who you screw in the process, after all, at the end of
the day you're either a winner or a loser.
Since the general public tends to consist of decent people, there is a widespread difficulty
in comprehending how entire economies of countries have been hijacked by these piranhas. That
we have hit such a level of crime that even people's hard earned pensions, education,
health-care, housing etc. are all being gambled away LEGALLY.
Looking upon investment bankers today, one is reminded of those sad addicts in the casino
who are ruined and lose everything, except the difference is, they are given the option to sell
their neighbour's family into slavery to pay off their debt.
It is no secret that much of the "finance" that goes through the City of London and Wall
Street is dirty and yet despite this recognition, there appears to be an inability to address
it and that at this point we are told that if we tried to address it by breaking up and
regulating the "Too Big to Fail" banks, then the whole economy would come tumbling down.
That is, the world is so evidently run by criminal activity that at this point we have
become dependent on its dirty money to keep afloat the world economy.
Faced with the onrushing collapse of the financial system, the greatest Ivy League trained
minds of the world have run into a dead end: the bailouts into the banking system that began
this past September have prevented a chain reaction meltdown for a few months, but as the
liquidity runs out so too will the ideas on where the money justifying bank bailouts will come
from.
With these dead ends, we have seen the lightbulb go off in the minds of a large strata of
economists who have been making the case in recent years that valuable revenue can yet be
generated from one more untapped stream: the decriminalisation and legalisation of vice.
Hell, the major banks have already been doing this covertly as a matter of practice for
generations so why not just come out of the closet and make it official? This is where the
money is at. This is where the job market is at. So let us not "bite the hand that feeds
us"!
But is this truly the case? Is there really no qualitative difference how the
money is generated and how it is spent as long as there is an adequate money flow?
Well it is never a good sign when beside the richest you can also find the poorest just a
stone's throw away. And right beside the largest financial center in the world, the City of
London, there lies the poorest borough in all of London: Tower Hamlets with a 39% poverty
rate and anaverage family income amounting to less than£ 13,
000/year .
A City within a City
" Hell is a city much like London "
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
Although Wall Street has contributed greatly to this sad situation, this banking hub of
America is best understood as the spawn of the City of London.
The City of London is over 800 years old, it is arguably older than England herself, a nd
for over 400 years it has been the financial center of the world.
During the medieval period the City of London, otherwise known as the Square Mile or simply
the City, was divided into 25 ancient wards headed each by an alderman. This continues
today . In addition, there existed the ominously titled City of London Corporation, or
simply the Corporation, which is the municipal governing body of the City. This also still
continues today .
Though the Corporation's origins cannot be specifically dated, since there was never a
"surviving" charter found establishing its "legal" basis, it has kept its functions to this day
based on the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta is a charter of rights agreed to by King John in
1215, which states that " the City of London shall have/enjoy its ancient liberties ".
In other words, the legal function of the Corporation has never been questioned, reviewed,
re-evaluated EVER but rather it has been left to legally function as in accordance with their
"ancient liberties", which is a very grey description of function if you ask me. In other
words, they are free to do as they deem fit.
And it gets worst. The Corporation is not actually under the jurisdiction of the British
government. That is, the British government presently does not have the authority to undermine
how the Corporation of the City chooses to govern the largest financial center in the
world . The City has a separate voting system that allows for, well, corporations to vote
in how their separate "government" should run. It also has its own private police force and
system of private courts.
The Corporation is not just limited to functioning within the City. The City Remembrancer,
which sounds more like a warped version of the ghost of Christmas past, has the role of acting
as a channel of communication between the Corporation and the Sovereign (the Queen), the Royal
Household and Parliament. The Remembrancer thus acts as a "reminder", some would even say
"enforcer", of the will of the Corporation. This position has been held by Paul Double since
2003, it is not clear who bestows this non-elected position.
Mr. Double has the right to act as an official lobbyist in the House of Commons, and sits to
the right of the Speaker's chair, with the purpose of scrutinising and influencing any
legislation he deems affects the interests of the Corporation. He also appears to have the
right to review any piece of legislation as it is being drafted and can even comment on it
affecting its final outcome. He is the only non-elected person allowed into the House of
Commons.
"The City is the only area in the country in which the number of workers significantly
outnumbers the residents and therefore, to be truly representative of its population, offers a
vote to City organisations so they can have their say on the way the City is run."
However, the workers have absolutely no say. The City's organisations they work for have
a certain size vote based on the number of workers they employ, but they do not consult these
workers, and many of them are not even aware that such elections take place.
If you feel like you have just walked through Alice's Looking Glass, you're not alone,
but what appears to be an absurd level of madness is what has been running the largest
financial center in the world since the 1600s, under the machinations of the British
Empire.
Therefore the question is, if the City of London has kept its "ancient liberties" and has
upheld its global financial power, is the British Empire truly gone?
Offshore Banking: Adam Smith's Invisible Hand?
Contrary to popular naïve belief, the empire on which the sun never sets (some say "
because God wouldn't trust them in the dark ")
never went away .
After WWII, colonisation was meant to be done away with, and many thought, so too with the
British Empire. Countries were reclaiming their sovereignty, governments were being set up by
the people, the system of looting and pillaging had come to an end.
It is a nice story, but could not be further from the truth.
In the 1950s, to "adapt" to the changing global financial climate, the City of London set up
what are called "secrecy jurisdictions". These were to operate within the last remnants of
Britain's small territories/colonies. Of Britain's 14 oversea territories, 7 are bona fide tax
havens or "secrecy jurisdictions". A separate international financial market was also created
to facilitate the flow of this offshore money, the Eurodollar market. Since this market has its
banks outside of the UK and U.S., they are not under the jurisdiction of either country.
By 1997, nearly 90% of all international loans were made through this market.
What is often misunderstood is that the City of London's offshore finances are not contained
in a system of banking secrecy but rather of trusts. The difference being that a trust
ultimately plays with the concept of ownership. The idea is that you hand over your assets to a
trustee and at that point, legally those assets are no longer yours anymore and you are not
responsible for accounting for them. Your connection to said assets is completely hidden.
In addition, within Britain's offshore jurisdictions, there is no qualification required for
who can become a trustee: anyone can set up a trust and anyone can become a trustee. There is
also no registry of trusts in these territories. Thus, the only ones who know about this
arrangement are the trustee and the settler.
John Christensen, an investigative economist, estimates that this capital that legally
belongs to nobody could amount to as high as $50 trillion within these British territories.
Not only is this not being taxed, but a significant portion of it has been stolen from sectors
of the real economy.
So how does this affect "formerly" colonised countries?
There lies the rub for most developing nations. According to John Christensen, the combined
external debts of Sub-Saharan African countries was $177 billion in 2008. However, the wealth
that these countries' elites moved offshore, between 1970-2008, is estimated at $944 billion,
5X their foreign debt. This is not only dirty money, this is also STOLEN money from the
resources and productivity of these economies. Thus, as Christensen states, "Far from being a
net debtor to the world, Sub-Saharan Africa is a net creditor" to offshore finance.
Put in this context, the so-called "backwardness" of Africa is not due to its incapability
to produce, but rather that it has been experiencing uninterrupted looting since these regions
were first colonised.
These African countries then need to borrow money, which is happily given to them at high
interest rates, and accrues a level of debt that could never be repaid. These countries are
thus looted twice over, leaving no money left to invest in their future, let alone to
put food on the table.
Offshore havens are what make this sort of activity "legal" and rampant.
And it doesn't stop there. Worldwide, it is estimated that developing countries lose $1
trillion every year in capital flight and tax evasion. Most of this wealth goes back into the
UK and U.S. through these offshore havens, and allows their currencies to stay strong whilst
developing nations' currencies are kept weak.
However, developing nations are not the only ones to have suffered from this system of
looting. The very economies of the UK and U.S. have also been gutted. In the 1960s and onward,
the UK and U.S., to compensate for the increase in money flow out of their countries decided
that it was a good idea to open their domestic markets to the trillions of dollars passing
through its offshore havens.
However, such banks are not interested in putting their money into industry and
manufacturing, they put their money into real estate speculation, financial speculation and
foreign currency trade. And thus the financialization of British and American economies
resulted, and the real jobs coming from the real economy decreased or disappeared.
Although many economists try to claim differently, the desperation has boiled over and
movements like the yellow vests are reflections of the true consequences of these economic
policies.
We have reached a point now where every western first world country is struggling with a
much higher unemployment rate and a lower standard of living than 40 years ago. Along with
increased poverty has followed increased drug use, increased suicide and increased crime.
A Stable Economy based on Freedom or Slavery?
According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) report in
2017 , the UK has by far the highest rate of drug overdose in all of Europe at 31% followed
by Germany at 15%. That is, the UK consists of 1/3 drug overdoses that occur in all of
Europe.
The average family income in the UK is presently £28, 400. The poverty rate within the
UK is ~20%.
The average family income of what was once the epicentre of world industrialisation,
Detroit, has an average family income of $26, 249. The poverty rate of Detroit is ~34.5%.
What is the solution?
Reverse Margaret Thatcher's 1986 Big Bang deregulation of the banking system that destroyed
the separation of commercial banking, investment banking, trusts and insurance for starters. A
similar restoration of Glass-Steagall in the USA should follow suit, not only to break up the
"Too Big to Fail" banking system but to restore the authority of nation states over private
finance once more. IF these emergency measures were done before the markets collapse (and they
will collapse), then the industrial-infrastructure revival throughout trans-Atlantic nations
can still occur.
Let us end here by hearkening to the words of Clement Attlee, UK Prime Minister from
1945-1951:
" Over and over again we have seen that there is another power than that which has its
seat at Westminster. The City of London, a convenient term for a collection of financial
interests, is able to assert itself against the government of the country. Those who control
money can pursue a policy at home and abroad contrary to that which is being decided by the
people. "
The demise of oil is overstated and the rise of renewables is also. Electric cars? Where do
you think the power is going to come from? Forget nukes and hydro as well healed enviros will
fight to the death to stop them. Japan is closing their nukes and going to coal. Same with
Germany. Without a way to store electricity renewables are a lost cause that needs fossil
backup. Molton salt lovers won't tell you about the huge solar molton salt plant near Tonopah
Nevada that's been mothballed for a year due to being totally unreliable. Or the solar plant
at Ivanpah in Nevada that has never lived up to expectations and has to have a gas plant
running full time to make up for night and shortfalls. The grids, especially local grids in
your neighborhood are creaky and will never handle the amount of electricity if we all go to
electric cars and eliminate gas heat, gas hot water, and gas cooking in favor of electric.
When they tell you how much to upgrade the grid they are only talking about the main grid and
not the even larger expense of upgrading the local. Some Australian neighborhoods have had
grid failure with half a dozen electric cars charging at once.
Thanks to US sanctions Venezuela is not pumping much oil. To make up for the loss of the
Venezuelan crude which the US Gulf coast refiners relied on they are now importing a bunch of
heavy crude from RUSSIA along with other Russian petroleum products. Next door to Venezuela
in Guyana huge finds of oil are in the process of being exploited. Point is the more they
look the more oil they find so to say oil is on it's way out is far too premature. Point is
renewables as they now exist are not ready for prime time in a modern society that needs a
constant flow of electricity. Plenty of pie in the sky predictions of we'll solve the
technical problems but not much in results.
In the US we are getting large numbers of wind farms getting old and junked and their
large rotors made of various composites are not recyclable and are now filling up landfills.
Lots of blather of we can recycle worn out batteries, which are lead acid, but not much if we
can do so with lithium ion. Not to mention the cleared land and roads needed to employ wind
and solar and the destruction of animals and their habitat.
Without hookup to the grid all those bragging about their cheap electricity, as power
companies are required to buy their electricity at top dollar, is no longer cheap. Large
solar and wind installations get a paid subsidy for the electricity they produce without
which those renewables are not cost competitive with fossil fuels. The average ratepayer and
taxpayer does not realize they are subsidizing those "competitive" rates.
Neoliberal v Neoclassical economics – what's the difference?
By Claire Connelly
Economics & Finance |
Bookmark to dashboard
Neoliberalism and neo-classical economics are often terms that are used
interchangeably by various economists and financial writers, but actually, there are important differences between
the two. We've had some requests from readers to make that distinction more obvious, so here goes
Neo-classical economic theory puts 'man' as a rational human being at the heart of the
economic system, extrapolating the functions of the economy based on optimised behaviour of rational, well-informed
individuals trading with one in another in what is effectively a barter system (which as I'm sure we all know by now,
never actually existed
).
It is based on the
general equilibrium model
pioneered by late 19th century economist
Leon Walras
, of the
Lausanne School. Ironically, neoclassical economics guarantees full employment because it models a system with no
frictions or inconveniences like trade unions, minimum wage laws or imperfect information. Also false.
It also guarantees that society will find an optimal allocation of resources on its
own, so long as markets are competitive, and there are no externalities, like pollution, which go unaccounted for.
Neoclassicists are concerned about monopoly power, neoliberals are not. Neoclassicists
believe it merits government intervention and regulation. Neoliberals, do not.
It is possible to be a neoclassical without being a neoliberal.
The most important thing to understand is that neoliberalism is a post-war political
movement that grew out of
the Mont Pelerin Society
, a
thought collective that formed a consensus not to put the market at the centre of the state, but to take it over
completely. Its entire objective is to co-opt economics and subvert the public interest to suit the needs of powerful
capitalist institutions and the politicians, economists, financiers, philosophers, bankers, think-tanks and media
organisations that support them.
Neoliberalism is associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism and was pioneered by
economist Milton Friedman & Friedrich Hayeck, but as the economic historian, Philip Mirowski points out, this is a
deliberate deception to trick people into thinking it is concerned about market equilibrium.
It is the doctrine by which white collar crime has been allowed to prosper unprosecuted
while governments of wealthy nations like the US and UK have abdicated their responsibility for employment, health
care, education and the general well-being of the populations they are supposedly elected to serve. In their minds,
government exists only to maintain property rights, defend capitalists and maintain price stability, (which
apparently doesn't count as intervention when it works in the favour of the wealthy).
We
are what we eat, well, in free market terms anyway
Whilst
90% of the US media (film, TV and radio) is controlled by only 6 companies.
Unlike neoclassicists and neoliberals, heterodox economists and other post-Keynesians, reject the notion of general
equilibrium. They believe the economy evolves through non-equilibrium states over time. Heterodox economists believe
governments need to introduce instability-thwarting mechanisms to stabilise the economy, maintain full employment,
and retain social equity.
"Free-market economists may want you to believe that the correct boundaries of the
market can be scientifically determined, but this is incorrect," writes institutional economist, Ha-Joon Chang, in
his book
23 Things They Don't
Tell You About Capitalism
.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/J7m9wfFnH6o
"If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what
you are doing is not a science," writes the Cambridge University economist.
"Recognising that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be
determined in an objective way lets us realise that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a
political exercise."
In other words, a strong economy requires constant time, attention, assessment, and
when it is called for, intervention. The rules will not always be the same, nor the causes. But it helps to start
with an understanding
of the role and purpose of
government spending
and
taxation
.
Further Listening
Listen to this interview economic historian Philip Mirowski who delves into the further
nuances of these economic mindsets.
Claire Connelly
Claire Connelly is the lead writer of Renegade Inc. An award-winning freelance journalist, speaker, and
founder of subscription journalism experiment, Hello Humans.
Specialising in economics, technology and policy, Connelly is working on her first book due out in 2018.
With more than a decade of experience under her belt, Claire has written for leading publications
including The Australian Financial Review, The Saturday Paper, ABC, SBS, Crikey, New Matilda, VICE &
others. She is the co-host of The Week In Start-Ups Australia, and features regularly as a commentator on
TV and radio shows including Radio National's Download This Show, ABC's The Drum, Ten's The Project, and
more.
Latest posts by Claire Connelly
(
see
all
)
What were Hayek's contributions to capital theory? Just wondering. I have never
encountered a single person who speaks of "neoliberalism" (a term we ourselves never use to describe what we
believe) who has read a single word of Hayek's economic work. Or who even knows who Ludwig von Mises is.
(Whenever the two economists mentioned are Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, I know
I'm dealing with somebody who hasn't read anything.)
Reply
But of course you have read everything and know all, right Tom ? What
specifically is wrong with this account ? If you can't dispute anything within the piece why do you attempt
to dismiss it out of hand by implying without a shred of evidence what someone has or hasn't read ? How
could you possibly know what someone has read or hasn't ?
Reply
What actually is "capital theory", Tom. Why don't you use the term
'neoliberalism?
Why do you think Claire hasn't heard of Mises and why would it be important anyway? Mises and the Austrian
School are part of the problem that the article refers to.
Reply
Sorry. I just don't believe even smart people can manage markets. That's the
nature of markets: they are individual. If you haven't read Von Mises or Hayek, you're missing out on the
thinking of two very smart people. It is hard for me to embrace the idea that – because a market doesn't seem
to function as a person might want it to – persons should be given authority to govern those markets in a way
that suits them. That, in itself, distorts the market.
Reply
I am responding to an article by you in today's The Automatic Earth about the
vengeance of capitalism. I could not get the response area to work so that is why I am coming to you this way.
You write eloquently and I see the creation of increasing suffering due to a form
of capitalism and class privilege in America and globally. I have read and listened to Keen, Hudson and Kelton.
From my review they all approach the ability of a nation that controls their own currency as an ability to
create an unlimited amount of money to use to reduce human suffering with no discussion of the ultimate end
game if we continue to do so.
There is a lot of suffering now and because of climate change, increasing
usurping of jobs by technology and global resource depletion and more a lot more suffering may be coming our
way.
How much money are they (and you) thinking of creating?
What are the implications of creating money at a much more rapid pace than we
have been with no upper limits in sight?
What are the upper limits of money creation? How would we know?
Our present system of capitalism and privilege is like a drug. It feels good at
the start but kills us in the end,
I am fearful that an addiction to the unlimited or substantial and on going use
of money created from thin air will do the same.
What say you?
PS: Please accept with compassion all the typos that are probably in this note.
Reply
You keep forgetting that having the ability to create money also gives you the
ability to destroy that same money. What is collected in tax revenue is destroyed. More money is issued to
create infrastructure. The deficit in a country that can create it's own currency is really just a ratio of
what is collected(destroyed) and what is created(spent).
Now ask yourself what happens when you quit destroying money and keep right on creating it
Reply
The aim of distinguishing neoclassical and neolilberal is of merit. The interview
with Mirowski makes clear, however, that that are numerous strands of neoliberalism that overlap with each
other, with some drawing on neoclassical arguments, and others having a different starting point. But it is not
clear to me that all of them agree on the market fundamentalism, which is generally regarded as the defining
characteristic of neoliberalism. Was Joseph Schumpeter a neoliberal? His ideas about entrepreneurship have
probably done more to make monopoly respectable than the parallel work of von Mises. Schumpeter's thought has
entered the mainstream in the U.S. via Peter Drucker, who thought the modern corporation was the engine of all
forms of human progress. In Germany, Ordo-liberalism was another form of neoliberalism that called for a strong
state. Was this self-contradiction? What I find frustrating in most discussions on the Left of these thinkers
is the inability or unwillingness to recognize the ***partial*** validity of their ideas. On the particular
subject of government interference to protect against monopoly power, it was Gabriel Kolko, a socialist, who
first showed in 1962 that Progressives were responsible for the national monopolies that emerged around 1900.
Even now, progressives fail to comprehend the many ways in which regulation benefits big business and stifles
small business. Designing regulations that do more social and environmental good than harm is much harder than
most progressives seem to recognize. Analyzing the sociology and politics of neoliberal organizations, as
Mirowski does, gets us no closer to finding way to create effective government programs that do not
simultaneously feed the leviathan of an expansive state. I would very much like to know which heterodox
economists are actually addressing the tough problems we face rather than defining the boundaries between
neoclassical thought and their own domain..
Reply
There are a very large number of errors in this piece. Fundamentally, what is
described as "neoclassical economics" is actually just one model, Walras' circa 1870 general equilibrium model.
If one defines neoclassical economics as equivalent to that one model, then there has never been a single
neoclassical economist, as absolutely no one limits attention to that one model.
The body of research most actual economists would describe as "neoclassical
economics" encompasses an enormous body of work which posits that some social phenomena can be understood as
emergent results of individual, intentional behavior. That research includes literally thousands of papers
studying the phenomena the author wrongly believes are simply excluded by assumption, such as unemployment,
unions, minimum wage laws, and imperfect information. There is an entire field, Public Economics, devoted to
the study of "the role and purpose of government spending and taxation."
The idea that government can and should "introduce instability-thwarting
mechanisms to stabilize the economy, maintain full employment, and retain social equity" is also, contrary to
the article's assumptions, very much part of mainstream, neoclassical thought, and has been for almost a
century.
After having implicitly defined mainstream economics as solely the study of a
single 1870 model, the article then also misrepresents heterodox economics. Notably, the Marxian economist
(less than 1% of all economists) such as Chang do not "reject the notion of general equilibrium". Marxian
analysis is explicitly grounded in general equilibrium, both in Marx's work and in modern neo-Marxian form, and
can be expressed in the same analytical framework as the Walrasian model (see for example:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1911113?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
).
The article is correct that neoliberalism is a strain of political thought, and
not economics at all: they're not even the same type of thing, much the same thing. That's all the article
ought to say -- it gets everything about what economists think, and what neoclassical economics is, really, really
wrong.
Chris Auld
Department of Economics
University of Victoria
Reply
Most though not all mainstream economics is neoclassical economics.
Neoclassical economics is based on marginalism, or optimising behaviour,
expected utility theory, and either implicit or explicit general equilibrium analysis. The economy, in the
absence of frictions, would behave like a stable equilibrium system. In a macroeconomic sense, this is the
basis of all versions of the neoclassical synthesis, including second generation dynamic stochastic general
equilibrium models.
These models all have Walrasian and Wicksellian roots. They all assume
optimising behaviour. They always adopt the ergodic hypothesis and these days adopt rational expectations
formation. Not only that, they have all been constructed in defiance of what we know about the history and
nature of money; they all ignore ontological uncertainty, in the Keynesian sense; they all exclude genuinely
endogenous financial instability and crisis; they are biased towards an essentially technological
explanation of income distribution; they all incorporate a natural or non-accelerating inflation rate of
unemployment; they all exhibit long run money neutrality; they all incorporate an efficient markets approach
to financial markets.
There are of course elements of what some would regard these days as
mainstream economics which don't fit under the neoclassical banner. However, for the most part, mainstream =
neoclassicism.
The greatest divide between neoclassical economics and genuine (i.e. not
'new') institutional economics, is the F-twist of Milton Friedman – the notion that unrealistic axiomatic
foundations in some sense don't matter, and neither does an approach which does not naturally incorporate
realistic institutions.
Of course, economists using a neoclassical frame have things to say about
unemployment, minimum wages, etc. But, as Hyman Minsky put it, "The game of policy making is rigged; the
theory used determines the questions that are asked and the options that are presented. The prince is
constrained by the theory of his intellectuals."
You accuse the author of errors, and I think you are ungenerous – and, more
importantly – incorrect. My advice to you is to read Steve Keen's best-seller 'Debunking Economics'. You
could even read my 'Economics for Sustainable Prosperity'. If you read these two books, you will be much
more aware of the limitations of neoclassical economics, and the rich insights available from the many
economists who have worked, and who are working today, outside the neoclassical frame.
Reply
Perhaps you will find them useful in understanding why it's questionable that
neoclassical economics has anything useful to say about financial stability.
Steve Payson, an US economics practictioner of long standing, will talk about his
book 'How Economics Professors Can Stop Failing us' which provides an eye-opening expose on economics
professors that will surely shock anyone who is not familiar with the topic, and even some of those who are
familiar with it. Ellen Quigley has recently completed her research into economics education in the UK and will
provide a perspective on our local profession.
Our mission is to explain how we reached this moment in history to prevent it from
repeating itself. Again. By considering options not previously considered, readers, creators, entrepreneurs, business
and community leaders can make better, more informed and empowered decisions, so we can all begin to think differently
about our personal and public financial stability.
Neoliberalism destroys solidarity; as the result it destroys both the society and individuals
Notable quotes:
"... Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you're reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others. ..."
"... On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won't be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare , the best-known specialist on psychopathy today. ..."
"... the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation. ..."
"... Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it's known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other. ..."
"... Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms ..."
"... More important, though, is the serious damage to people's self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being "Who needs me?" For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one. ..."
"... A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. ..."
"... the paradox of our era as: "Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless." ..."
An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities
'We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose
outside the success narrative is limited.'
We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic
practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities.
Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has
become normative. If you're reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain
personality traits and penalises others.
There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over
as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won't really
be noticed.
It's important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you've got plenty of experience
under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact
that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That's why
you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.
On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads
to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won't be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy
checklist by Robert Hare , the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.
This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social
level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes
an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation
than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.
Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent
venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it's known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging
from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.
Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms.
This results in what the sociologist
Richard Sennett has aptly described
as the "infantilisation of the workers". Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities ("She got
a new office chair and I didn't"), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings
of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees
as adults.
More important, though, is the serious damage to people's self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we
receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel
to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion
when he sees the main question for employees these days as being "Who needs me?" For a growing group of people, the answer is: no
one.
Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and
putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated,
guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to
choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage
of our social security system.
A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies
entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe
in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if
they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in
the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the
paradox of our era as: "Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless." We are indeed freer than before, in the sense
that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like.
We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet,
on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There
are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.
Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, "make" something of ourselves. You don't
need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person
with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure
success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a
master's degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?
There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral
and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy
reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.
Under neoliberalism inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve: Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of
human relations and redefines citizens as consumers
Notable quotes:
"... Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you'll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is? ..."
"... Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness , the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump . ..."
"... Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. ..."
"... Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. ..."
"... We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances. ..."
"... Never mind structural unemployment: if you don't have a job it's because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you're feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it's your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers. ..."
"... Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. ..."
"... It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been promoted with the slogan 'there is no alternative' ..."
"... Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating " investor-state dispute settlement ": offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes , protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre. ..."
"... Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one ..."
"... Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one. ..."
"... When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel . ..."
"... Those who own and run the UK's privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world's richest man. ..."
"... Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can't Afford the Rich , has had a similar impact. "Like rent," he argues, "interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort". ..."
"... Chris Hedges remarks that "fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the 'losers' who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment". When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation . To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant. ..."
"... Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities. ..."
"... The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch , two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement . We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that "in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised". ..."
"... The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. ..."
"... Neoliberalism's triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years. ..."
"... What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it's not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century. ..."
Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump –
neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an
alternative? @GeorgeMonbiot
Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology
that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you'll be
rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to
define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?
Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has
played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8,
the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a
glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the
epidemic of loneliness , the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump . But we respond to these
crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had
– a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?
Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that
everyone gets what they deserve.
So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even
recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian
faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin's theory of evolution.
But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of
power.
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of
human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best
exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It
maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by
planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty.
Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation
of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market
distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality
is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to
enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally
corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich
persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages
– such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The
poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their
circumstances.
Never mind structural unemployment: if you don't have a job it's
because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card
is maxed out, you're feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a
school playing field: if they get fat, it's your fault. In a world governed by competition,
those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.
Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What
About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance
anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it's unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology
has been most rigorously applied, is
the loneliness capital of Europe . We are all neoliberals now.
***
The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938.
Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and
Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin
Roosevelt's New Deal and the gradual development of Britain's welfare state, as manifestations
of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.
In The Road to Serfdom , published in 1944, Hayek argued
that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian
control. Like Mises's book Bureaucracy , The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It
came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to
free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation
that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by
millionaires and their foundations.
As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek's view
that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way
– among American apostles such as Milton Friedman
– to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.
Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost
its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe
himself as a neoliberal . But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still,
even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not
replaced by any common alternative.
At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at
the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes 's economic
prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals
in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social
outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.
But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and
economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the
mainstream. As Friedman remarked, "when the time came that you had to change ... there was an
alternative ready there to be picked up". With the help of sympathetic journalists and
political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary
policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter's administration in the US and Jim Callaghan's government
in Britain.
It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have
been promoted with the slogan 'there is no alternative'
After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of
the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions,
deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF,
the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies
were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most
remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the
Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, "it is hard to think of another utopia to have
been as fully realised."
***
It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom
should have been promoted with the slogan "there is no alternative". But, as Hayek remarked on a
visit to Pinochet's Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was
comprehensively applied – "my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship
rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism". The freedom that
neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to
mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.
Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the
freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the
freedom to poison rivers , endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design
exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth
that lifts people out of poverty.
Facebook
Twitter Pinterest Naomi Klein documented that neoliberals advocated the use of crises to
impose unpopular policies while people were distracted. Photograph: Anya Chibis/The
Guardian
As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine ,
neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were
distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet's coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane
Katrina, which Friedman described as "an opportunity to radically reform the educational
system" in New Orleans
.
Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are
imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating "
investor-state dispute settlement ": offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for
the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict
sales of cigarettes ,
protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical
firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is
reduced to theatre.
Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it
rapidly became one
Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition
relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers
and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment
and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von
Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead
created one.
Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it
rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980
in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich.
Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose
rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents,
privatisation and deregulation.
The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as
energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up
tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government,
for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a
train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel,
wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that
they have you over a barrel .
In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all phone services
and soon became the world's richest man. Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters
Those who own and run the UK's privatised or semi-privatised
services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India,
oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico,
Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon
became the world's richest man.
Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can't Afford the
Rich , has had a similar impact. "Like rent," he argues, "interest is ... unearned
income that accrues without any effort". As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer,
the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments,
overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the
withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to
student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.
Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by
a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy:
from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their
money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned
income has been supplanted by unearned income.
Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not
only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering
public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the
Land , Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which
means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the
risk.
The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes.
Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise
remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and
re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public
sector.
Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the
economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced,
our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead,
neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to
spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally
distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and
former left adopt
similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of
people have been shed from politics.
Chris Hedges
remarks that "fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the
politically inactive, the 'losers' who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to
play in the political establishment". When political debate no longer speaks to us, people
become responsive instead
to slogans, symbols and sensation . To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and
arguments appear irrelevant.
Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between
people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only
remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely
to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of
public services, are reduced to "cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey
them".
***
Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the
zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of
anonymities.
The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by
invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them.
We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media
against the further regulation of the tobacco industry,
has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that
Charles and David
Koch , two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the
Tea
Party movement . We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks,
noted that "in order
to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be
widely advertised".
The nouveau riche were once disparaged by those who had
inherited their money. Today, the relationship has been reversed
The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they
elucidate. "The market" sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like
gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What "the market
wants" tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. "Investment", as Sayer notes,
means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful
activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest,
dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities "camouflages the
sources of wealth", leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.
A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had
inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as
rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style
themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.
These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and
placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for
whom they toil ; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so
complex that even the
police cannot discover the beneficial owners ; the tax arrangements that bamboozle
governments; the financial products no one understands.
The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are
influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some
justice – that it is used today only pejoratively . But they
offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but
these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there
is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom , Bureaucracy or Friedman's classic
work, Capitalism and Freedom .
***
For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal
project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by
a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and
persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.
Neoliberalism, Locke and the Green party |
Letters Read more
Neoliberalism's triumph also reflects the failure of the left.
When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive
economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s,
there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ...
nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general
framework of economic thought for 80 years.
Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To
propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious
problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not
gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the
environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic
growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental
destruction.
What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is
that it's not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For
Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic
Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the
21st century.
George Monbiot's How Did We Get into This Mess? is
published this month by Verso. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) ) go to
bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online
orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
"... Corporate capitalism is supranational . It owes no loyalty to any nation-state. It uses the projection of military power by the United States to protect and advance its economic interests but at the same time cannibalizes the U.S., dismantling its democratic institutions, allowing its infrastructure to decay and deindustrializing its factory centers to ship manufacturing abroad to regions where workers are treated as serfs. ..."
"... Resistance to this global cabal of corporate oligarchs must also be supranational. It must build alliances with workers around the globe. It must defy the liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party, which betray workers. It is this betrayal that has given rise to fascist and protofascist movements in Europe and other countries ..."
"... Capitalism, at its core, is about the commodification of human beings and the natural world for exploitation and profit. To increase profit, it constantly seeks to reduce the cost of labor and demolish the regulations and laws that protect the common good. But as capitalism ravages the social fabric, it damages, like any parasite, the host that allows it to exist. It unleashes dark, uncontrollable yearnings among an enraged population that threaten capitalism itself. ..."
"... "We live in a global economy, highly interconnected," North went on. "A globalized process of production, financial system. The ruling class has an international policy. They organize themselves on an international scale. The labor movement has remained organized on a national basis. It has been completely incapable of answering this [ruling-class policy]. Therefore, it falls behind various national protectionist programs. The trade unions support Trump." ..."
"... "How many times can you turn on a mainstream news like CNN and expect to hear the word 'capitalism' discussed? Bernie [Sanders] did one thing. He called himself a democratic socialist , which was a bit transformational simply in terms of rhetoric. He's saying there's something other than capitalism that we ought to be talking about." ..."
"... When feminism was turned into that kind of leaning in, it created an identity politics that legitimizes the very system that needs to be critiqued. The early feminists were overtly socialists. As was [Martin Luther] King. But all that got erased." ..."
"... "The left became a kind of grab bag of discrete, siloed identity movements," Derber said. "This is very connected to moral purity. You're concerned about your advancement within the existing system. You're competing against others within the existing system. Everyone else has privilege. You're just concerned about getting your fair share." ..."
"... "Identity politics is to a large degree a right-wing discourse," Derber said. "It focuses on tribalism tied in modern times to nationalism, which is always militaristic. When you break the left into these siloed identity politics, which are not contextualized, you easily get into this dogmatic fundamentalism. The identity politics of the left reproduces the worse sociopathic features of the system as a whole. It's scary." ..."
There will be no economic or political justice for the poor, people of color, women or
workers within the framework of global, corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism, which uses
identity politics ,
multiculturalism and racial justice to masquerade as politics, will never halt the rising
social inequality, unchecked militarism, evisceration of civil liberties and omnipotence of the
organs of security and surveillance. Corporate capitalism cannot be reformed, despite its
continually rebranding itself. The longer the self-identified left and liberal class seek to
work within a system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls " inverted
totalitarianism ," the more the noose will be tightened around our necks. If we do not rise
up to bring government and financial systems under public control -- which includes
nationalizing banks, the fossil fuel industry and the arms industry -- we will continue to be
victims.
Corporate capitalism is
supranational . It owes no loyalty to any nation-state. It uses the projection of military
power by the United States to protect and advance its economic interests but at the same time
cannibalizes the U.S., dismantling its democratic institutions, allowing its infrastructure to
decay and deindustrializing its factory centers to ship manufacturing abroad to regions where
workers are treated as serfs.
Resistance to this global cabal of corporate oligarchs must also be supranational. It must
build alliances with workers around the globe. It must defy the liberal institutions, including
the Democratic Party, which betray workers. It is this betrayal that has given rise to fascist
and protofascist movements in Europe and other countries. Donald Trump would never have been
elected but for this betrayal. We will build a global movement powerful enough to bring down
corporate capitalism or witness the rise of a new, supranational totalitarianism.
The left, seduced by the culture wars and identity politics, largely ignores the primacy of
capitalism and the class struggle. As long as unregulated capitalism reigns supreme, all
social, economic, cultural and political change will be cosmetic. Capitalism, at its core, is
about the commodification of human
beings and the natural world for exploitation and profit. To increase profit, it constantly
seeks to reduce the cost of labor and demolish the regulations and laws that protect the common
good. But as capitalism ravages the social fabric, it damages, like any parasite, the host that
allows it to exist. It unleashes dark, uncontrollable yearnings among an enraged population
that threaten capitalism itself.
"This is a crisis of global dimensions," David North , the national chairman
of the Socialist Equality Party in the
United States, told me when we spoke in New York. "It is a crisis that dominates every element
of American politics. The response that we're seeing, the astonishing changes in the state of
the government, in the decay of political life, the astonishingly low level of political and
intellectual discourse, is in a certain sense an expression of the bewilderment of the ruling
elite to what it's going through."
"We can expect a monumental explosion of class struggle in the United States," he said. "I
think this country is a social powder keg. There is an anger that exists over working
conditions and social inequality. However [much] they may be confused on many questions,
workers in this country have a deep belief in democratic rights. We totally reject the
narrative that the working class is racist. I think this has been the narrative pushed by the
pseudo-left, middle-class groups who are drunk on identity politics, which have a vested
interest in constantly distracting people from the essential class differences that exist in
the society. Dividing everyone up on the basis of race, gender, sexual preference fails to
address the major problem."
North argues, correctly, that capitalism by its nature lurches from crisis to crisis. This
makes our current predicament similar to past crises.
"All the unanswered questions of the 20th century -- the basic problem of the nation-state
system, the reactionary character of private ownership with the means of production, corporate
power, all of these issues which led to the first and Second world wars -- are with us again,
and add to that fascism," he said.
"We live in a global economy, highly interconnected," North went on. "A globalized process
of production, financial system. The ruling class has an international policy. They organize
themselves on an international scale. The labor movement has remained organized on a national
basis. It has been completely incapable of answering this [ruling-class policy]. Therefore, it
falls behind various national protectionist programs. The trade unions support Trump."
"We don't really have a left because we don't have conversations about capitalism," Derber
said. "How many times can you turn on a mainstream news like CNN and expect to hear the word
'capitalism' discussed? Bernie [Sanders] did one thing. He
called himself a democratic socialist , which was a bit transformational simply in terms of
rhetoric. He's saying there's something other than capitalism that we ought to be talking
about."
"As the [capitalist] system universalizes and becomes more and more intersectional, we need
intersectional resistance," Derber said. "At the end of the 1960s, when I was getting my own
political education, the universalizing dimensions of the left, which was growing in the '60s,
fell apart. The women began to feel their issues were not being addressed. They were treated
badly by white males, student leaders. Blacks, Panthers, began to feel the whites could not
speak for race issues. They developed separate organizations. The upshot was the left lost its
universalizing character. It no longer dealt with the intersection of all these issues within
the context of a militarized, capitalist, hegemonic American empire. It treated politics as
siloed group identity problems. Women had glass ceilings. Same with blacks. Same with
gays."
The loss of this intersectionality was deadly. Instead of focusing on the plight of all of
the oppressed, oppressed groups began to seek representation for their own members within
capitalist structures.
"Let's take a modern version of this," Derber said. " Sheryl Sandberg , the COO of
Facebook, she did a third-wave feminism thing. She said 'lean in.' It captures this identity
politics that has become toxic on the left. What does 'lean in' mean? It means women should
lean in and go as far as they can in the corporation. They should become, as she has, a major,
wealthy executive of a leading corporation. When feminism was turned into that kind of leaning
in, it created an identity politics that legitimizes the very system that needs to be
critiqued. The early feminists were overtly socialists. As was [Martin Luther] King. But all
that got erased."
"The left became a kind of grab bag of discrete, siloed identity movements," Derber
said. "This is very connected to moral purity. You're concerned about your advancement within
the existing system. You're competing against others within the existing system. Everyone else
has privilege. You're just concerned about getting your fair share."
"People in movements are products of the system they're fighting," he continued. "We're all
raised in a capitalistic, individualistic, egoistic culture, so it's not surprising. And it has
to be consciously recognized and struggled against. Everybody in movements has been brought up
in systems they're repulsed by. This has created a structural transformation of the left. The
left offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It's largely an
identity-politics party. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it
doesn't offer a contextual analysis within capitalism."
Derber, like North, argues that the left's myopic, siloed politics paved the way for
right-wing, nativist, protofascist movements around the globe as well as the ascendancy of
Trump.
"When you bring politics down to simply about helping your group get a piece of the pie, you
lose that systemic analysis," he said. "You're fragmented. You don't have natural connections
or solidarity with other groups. You don't see the larger systemic context. By saying I want,
as a gay person, to fight in the military, in a funny way you're legitimating the American
empire. If you were living in Nazi Germany, would you say I want the right of a gay person to
fight in combat with the Nazi soldiers?"
"I don't want to say we should eliminate all identity politics," he said. "But any identity
politics has to be done within the framework of understanding the larger political economy.
That's been stripped away and erased. Even on the left, you cannot find a deep conversation
about capitalism and militarized capitalism. It's just been erased. That's why Trump came in.
He unified a kind of very powerful right-wing identity politics built around nationalism,
militarism and the exceptionalism of the American empire."
"Identity politics is to a large degree a right-wing discourse," Derber said. "It focuses on
tribalism tied in modern times to nationalism, which is always militaristic. When you break the
left into these siloed identity politics, which are not contextualized, you easily get into
this dogmatic fundamentalism. The identity politics of the left reproduces the worse
sociopathic features of the system as a whole. It's scary."
"How much of the left," he asked, "is reproducing what we are seeing in the society that
we're fighting?"
Mr. Market has finally digested that the world isn't prepared for coronavirus and the US is
particularly poorly set up to cope, thanks to our fragmented public health system and
overpriced, privatized and less than comprehensive health care. That bad situation is made
worse by the CDC being short on resources and hamstrung further by the Trump Administration's
PR imperatives.
At a minimum, the market rout may force the Administration to go into overdrive on real
world responses, but I doubt it has the capacity. For starters, Pence is badly cast as a crisis
manager. But as we'll discuss briefly, the US has such hollowed out capacity on the medical
front that a better response would have needed to start weeks ago to have much hope of blunting
outcomes.
The US' best hope is that hotter weather will slow the infection rate, but that's not coming
soon enough to rescue the Eastern corridor or the West Coast from San Francisco Bay north from
serious propagation till at least mid May (and San Francisco doesn't get all that hot except
when the weather gets freaky).
While the energy sector is now the third smallest in the S&P 500, a change from a
decade ago when the industry made up 11% of the benchmark, tumbling oil prices is yet another
risk for traders to contemplate.
"If WTI falls into the low $30s and stays there, it's going to cause lay-offs in the oil
patch and stresses in the high yield market -- like it did when oil fell dramatically in
2015," said Matt Maley, an equity strategist at Miller Tabak & Co.
Real World Situation Ugly
The US is still in Keystone Kops mode. We don't have remotely enough coronavirus tests being
done. We have no idea when we will have enough test kits ready. No one is even talking about
how to implement a system like the drive by tests in South Korea which is not only efficient
but even more important, greatly reduces risks to patients and doctors versus having to show up
in a waiting room. We have lots of ad hoc measures, like conferences cancelled, businesses
ordering travel bans, some schools halting classes (most
recently Columbia University ).
But too many people are operating on a business as usual basis, including Congress. An
estimated 2/3 of its members attended the AIPAC conference, where two a participants tested
positive for coronavirus (oddly, the press has taken little note). An attendee at CPAC, a large
conference for conservatives, also tested positive for coronavirus, but only
two Congresscritters are self-quaranting .
I myself looked with some amazement at the reorganization of the entire hospital in the
previous week
I still remember my night shift a week ago spent without any rest, waiting for a call from
the microbiology department. I was waiting for the results of a swab taken from the first
suspect case in our hospital
Well, the situation is now nothing short of dramatic The war has literally exploded and
battles are uninterrupted day and night. One after the other, these unfortunate people come
to the emergency room. They have far from the complications of a flu. Let's stop saying it's
a bad flu. In my two years working in Bergamo, I have learned that the people here do not
come to the emergency room for no reason. They did well this time too. They followed all the
recommendations given: a week or ten days at home with a fever without going out to prevent
contagion, but now they can't take it anymore. They don't breathe enough, they need oxygen
.
Now, however, that need for beds in all its drama has arrived. One after another, the
departments that had been emptied are filling up at an impressive rate. The display boards
with the names of the sicks, of different colors depending on the department they belong to,
are now all red and instead of the surgical procedure, there is the diagnosis, which is
always the same: bilateral interstitial pneumonia
I can also assure you that when you see young people who end up intubated in the ICU,
pronated or worse, in ECMO (a machine for the worst cases, which extracts the blood,
re-oxygenates it and returns it to the body, waiting for the lungs to hopefully heal), all
this confidence for your young age goes away And there are no more surgeons, urologists,
orthopedists, we are only doctors who suddenly become part of a single team to face this
tsunami that has overwhelmed us.
The cases multiply, up to a rate of 15-20 hospitalizations a day all for the same reason.
The results of the swabs now come one after the other: positive, positive, positive. Suddenly
the emergency room is collapsing. Emergency provisions are issued: help is needed in the
emergency room. A quick meeting to learn how the to use to emergency room EHR and a few
minutes later I'm already downstairs, next to the warriors on the war front. The screen of
the PC with the chief complaint is always the same: fever and respiratory difficulty, fever
and cough, respiratory insufficiency etc Exams, radiology always with the same sentence:
bilateral interstitial pneumonia. All needs to be hospitalized. Some already needs to be
intubated, and goes to the ICU. For others, however, it is late. ICU is full, and when ICUs
are full, more are created. Each ventilator is like gold: those in the operating rooms that
have now suspended their non-urgent activity are used and the OR become a an ICU that did not
exist before. I found it amazing, or at least I can speak for Humanitas Gavazzeni (where I
work), how it was possible to put in place in such a short time a deployment and a
reorganization of resources so finely designed to prepare for a disaster of this magnitude
.Nurses with tears in their eyes because we are unable to save everyone and the vital signs
of several patients at the same time reveal an already marked destiny. There are no more
shifts, schedules.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has another fine piece on the coronavirus outbreak. He flags that
the UK is very poorly situated to handle it, with only 1/6 the ICU beds per capita of South
Korea. As an aside, the US has 10x as many per capital as the UK but read the Bergamo piece
again. The entire hospital has been turned into a coronavirus ward. Lord only knows what
happens to accident victims .are some hospitals in each region being set aside for regular
emergency care?
Data from China suggest a death rate of 15pc for infected cases over the age of 80. It is
8pc for those in their seventies, and 3.6pc in their sixties (or 5.4pc for men). No elected
government in any Western democracy will survive if it lets such carnage unfold .
Unfortunately, the early figures from Italy seem to be tracking Hubei's epidemiology with
a horrible consistency. The death rate for all ages is near 5pc. While there may be large
numbers of undetected infections – distorting ratios – Italy has tested widely,
much more than Germany or France.
For whatever reason, the Italian system seems unable to save them. The death rate is six
times the reported rate in Korea, even adjusting for age structures. Is it because the
Italian strain has mutated into a more lethal form (we don't yet have the sequence data) or
because Europeans are genetically more vulnerable?
Is it because Italy's nitrogen dioxide pollution is the worst in Europe (the UK is bad
too), leading to chronic lung inflammation? Is it the chaotic administration that led to a
catalogue of errors in the hotspot of Codogno? If you think Britain's NHS has been starved of
funds, spare a thought for Italy, Portugal, Spain, or Greece .
The US is about to face its grim reckoning. It has the best health care in the rich world
– and the worst. Pandemics exploit the worst.
Let's tease out AEP's line of thought. The US is sorely wanting in operational capacity
despite being able to provide top flight care for certain types of ailments.
US hospitals are now overwhelmingly run by MBAs. It's difficult to conceive of them being
able to execute the sort of rapid reordering of space and duties described in Bergamo. It's not
simply that the top brass is too removed from the practice of medicine to have the right
reflexes. Unless ordered to do so, they will also be loath to devote enough resources to
tackling the disease. When a crisis hits, they won't be allowed to charge (in their minds) for
coronavirus services. They'll want to preserve as much hospital capacity for "normal" full
ticket services as possible. They might rationalize that by arguing that they don't want to
risk more of their staff's health than necessary.
But even worse, remember that most hospitals no longer control much their staffing. They've
outsourced specialist practices like emergency room doctors .and those have been bought up by
private equity. If you think private equity won't exploit this crisis for their gain, I have a
bridge I'd like to sell you.
One possible silver lining to this probable tragedy is if the US medical system performs as
badly as it appears likely to is that it might finally end the delusion that there's a lot
(aside from individual doctors and nurses) in the current system worth saving. The broad public
needs to make sure that their crisis does not go to waste.
The response is reasonably good considering the size of the bureaucracy they have to move.
... Let us hope both sides put aside the nonsense for a while and get it together.
Unfortunately they don't have a bureaucracy. Since neo-liberal economics and the fifty
plus year assault on the government sector, they have a partisan employment service instead.
Little skill or intelligence, a century of wisdom erased, no capacity to act and totally
ossified in manoeuvrability.
To trust in any meaningful bureaucracy to motivate, let alone move, you would have to look
for a state that values human rights, trusts its citizens and scientists and administrators
and refrains from denigrating public medicine and health services.
Good luck finding that effective and resourced public medicine in the USA right now.
Everyone here talking badly about our national health system while we have one of the
healthiest and oldest population in the world. Nothing it's collapsing here and we are doing
our best, something that I'm not sure can be said about other Nations.
We have many positives because here, in Italy, we test a lot of people and for free. How much
does it cost to be tested in US? Are you sure that a very expensive health care system, like
the one in US, can handle this virus better than our free for all health care system?
In a couple of months you'll get the answer, don't worry.
Good luck to everyone from Italy.
Andrea
"Should big corporations get another bailout then ."
Of course corporations will be made whole again just like in 2008. Yet they will continue
spouting that Medicare for All is an evil socialist program - the very thing that would allow
all people to get taken care of and at least helping contain the spread. The Democrat
leadership in the House is now looking at a $350 billion corporate bailout ( how will they
pay for it) - yet are viciously against Medicare for All and Bernie. A new Yale Study shows
Medicare for All will prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths and will save $450 billion - each and
every year. And of course Trump also would like to cut health programs and social security.
Trump and Pelosi are both on the same donor team - it is like professional wrestling working
for the wealthiest against the workers.
I am seeing how irresponsible people at certain blogs where they have themselves as
oustanding intelligent people, probably only thinking in ther shares´ value, are
spreading disinfo in the same sense of that twitted by Trump.
Laissez faire will not work. In certain European countries private hospitals are already
deriving their Covid-19 cases to the public system ( of course the government should act asap
on this taking extraordinary measures to force them absorbe their clients or even requsition
their beds for a public health emergency as it is this one ). This only will accelerate the
rate of lack of ICU beds and respirators.
There are already Twitter threads by health personel as the one linked by b, estimating
the exponential grow will easily come of this epidemics.
A Spanish doctor in Madrid was already saying that the time will come where triage will be
needed to prioritice who accedes to the respirators/ICU beds once the health system
overwhelmed...I only hope those irresponsibly denying this is a global pandemic emergency and
spreading disinfo through their media to be the first discarded by triage, as they are only
making things worse, along with guarantor of their tax cut Trump. I bet them there will be a
respirator for Trump, but for them, that is in the air.
In Madrid, after the huge demonstrations of Women´s Day yesterday, new cases have
jumped to the rate of Italy. Today all schools and universities closed in the same city.
Heads shoukd be already rolling.
Then, we are not counting on the possibility that thing here will not go so orderly than
in China. In Italy, to the public health crisis, they add a probably public order one, with
several revolts in jails because of restriction of visits...
Just some hours ago some dozens of inmates of a prison in Foggia were running free in the
streets taking advantage to commit crimes as they go out robbing cars and menacing commercial
activity...
Probably as a result, already the whole Italy closed, there is no more red zones,
prohibited to move throughout the peninsula. 60 million people.
For those irresponsibly claiming from the same blogs that this will cease with the good
weather, people are reporting from Argentina where today there was around a hot summer day,
that there are increasing cases there.
Harvarad University and the WHO have already discarded this epidemics will behave like the
estational flu..
In the hospitality industry in Australia, paid sick leave is available to full-time and
part-time employees. The man employed at the Grand Chancellor Hotel in Hobart (in Tasmania)
was likely employed as a casual. He is known to be a student in his 20s and is currently in
isolation at hospital.
"... Don't come to work sick. You will spread your gross germs around, make everyone else
sick (including customers!) and you'll be pretty useless anyway. Australians recognise that
it's in all our best interests if you STAY THE HECK HOME while you're unwell, and that's
why you've got the option of paid sick leave if you're employed on a full time or part time
basis.
If you're employed on a casual basis, you're entitled to unpaid sick leave. You are
supposed to subsist during your illness on all the lavish savings you've accrued from your
extra four-bucks-fifty-five-an-hour in casual loading. This is clearly problematic, and a
lot of young casuals are forced to attend work sick out of economic necessity ..."
It is likely that many if not most COVID-19 cases in several countries so far have also
been spread by people working in health, hospitality and other related service industries
where most workers are on casual or temporary contracts with either unpaid sick leave or no
sick leave.
"The number of tests is large because the nation has a large number of people suspected to
have caught coronavirus. However, the government is declaring a victory by turning it the
other way around," Hong said on his Facebook.
All the evidence indicates South Korea is just following the capitalist modus operandi of
chasing the rabbit: it is only testing the people who are already showing symptoms. There's
no evidence those containers with fast food tests are working on a significant scale: there
are a lot of factors that make a random individual in South Korea to stop in one of them to
get itself tested; just making them freely available is not enough. Besides, just because an
individual who stopped by the container tested negative, it doesn't mean it won't get
infected after, as it will go back to its daily routine (because capitalism can't stop, it
needs to keep its wheel spinning).
I don't trust the capitalist numbers around the world for one simple fact: they don't have
the means to test everybody and to stop their own economies in order to preserve the
non-infected from being infected in the near future. An illustrative example of this can be
observed in the Czech Republic, which went from just five cases on March 3rd (three on March
1st) to 40 on March 10th - one of the new infected having just arrived from Italy. Those
numbers indicate Czech Republic did absolutely nothing to stop the epidemic, and that they
probably have much more than those 40 - they just haven't tested enough.
"the US is particularly poorly set up to cope, thanks to our fragmented public health
system and overpriced, privatized and less than comprehensive health care. That bad situation
is made worse by the CDC being short on resources and hamstrung further by the Trump
Administration's PR imperatives."
Basically, it is expected that Europe manages the crisis less badly.
It has been interesting watching Dr. John Campbell's growing realisation & some shock
that everything is not well with the US healthcare system & he has received some abuse
but also support from Americans for his growing criticism.
His listing as requested of his 2 degrees & Phd, never mind his long front line
experience & his books I think shut some up for perhaps thinking that he was only a
nurse, but perhaps he shouda gone to NakedCapitalism.
"The U.S. shale sector is getting completely killed. A complete bloodbath. Billions of
dollars in equity wiped out.
"Occidental Petroleum is down 44%. EOG is down 35%. Continental Resources down 40%.
Smaller players like Parsley down more than 50%."
I suggest this bird look at one of those corp's balance sheets since they had very little
equity but lots of liabilities (Assets=Liabilities+Equity) as Assets and Liabilities where
allowed to grow with the use of interest-free money to keep the Ponzi Scheme afloat. Also
recall that CEOs often get paid in shares which get dividends. Often those dividends are paid
using the zero interest loan money leaving the corp with a bigger, unstable pile of debt and
the CEO with a purse fattened by the loan instead of actual company performance, ie,
profits.
New York Federal Reserve Bank announced Monday it will increase its daily injections of cash
into financial markets by $50 billion to $150 billion as a protective step amid #coronavirus
epidemic.
I see your tangible assets bet and raise another $50 billion per day of presto digitizer
created out of thin air fiat.
Because I CAN!
Now what are you going to do about it huh?
If you crash our ponzi scheme, who are you going to sell your oil and gas to?
That said, in periods of past extreme economic turmoil folks like Steve Mnuchin, with the
trophy British wife, aka The King of Foreclosure, made out like bandits. He's now duce
Trump's Secretary of the Treasury. The prior Republican standard bearer, the Mitt, was also a
Vulture who participated in the hollowing out of the American Industrial Heartland, for
profit.
A life long con man and grifter coupled up with a Jewish vulture capitalist leading a
phony charge to Make America Great Again...?
A script that writes itself.
Sadly..the supposed opposition are also beholding to AIPAC, and it's dictates.
Chuck Schumer says he was appointed by God to be the Guardian of Israel. It's true, and
confirmation is available on the web.
Is he an American or an Israeli? No one should be allowed to be both, should they? Am I
right or wrong?
Why just look at the good ole boys Netanyahu's very good friend , Tabloid Star and huckster
about town the donald to see who is really the Bossman of Murika's gun toting Patriots.
Pretty sad really when you think about it. A Country that ravaged it's indigenous people
to break the land open for settlers of European descent, only to have it fall into the
clutches of a tiny tribe of foreigners who never put skin the game and came in with their
gangsterism and were always about accumulation of wealth and power for themselves.
Welcome to America, haven for the Gangs of New York and Grifters about town.
The Fed was supposed to take away the punchbowl just when the party was getting going,
instead we had the troika of Greenspan, Bernanke, and Yellen gleefully pouring in gallons of
101 Wild Turkey at 2 A.M. and now the hapless Powell is zero-bound and duty-bound to do the
only thing in the modern CB playbook: ease more. TARP and the first trillion? OK, keep the
doors open at Citi. The next 3 trillion in free money (thanks Obama)? Socialist handout to
the rentier class. That bill is now due and payable.
The grotesque distortions in the entire concepts of lending and investing were as plain as
day to see. The four CEOs of the top four Eurozone banks told the tale, quote: "zero interest
rates destroy the banking system". Was anyone listening? Did our titans of central banking,
whose *first* stated job is the stability of the banking system, heed the call? How do
systems and currencies based on the extension of credit even work if lenders are to receive
*nothing* in exchange for taking risk? Riddle me that, Ph.D-breath.
This is malpractice and criminal incompetence on a galactic scale, from our hallowed
universities, who feed a steady monocultured diet of pure neo-Keynesianism, through to our
"financial press" paid cheerleaders, to our mustachioed "economic pundits" who treated the
entire crisis diagnosis and prescription ("we must make things more expensive!!! More
gasoline on the fire!!!") as though it seriously made *any* logical sense at all. In lockstep
they go, right over the plainly and painfully obvious cliff.
So now we get to watch, again, as they play a game of "who gets screwed worse than me?".
The phone lines are absolutely buzzing, as Hapless Jerome realizes his broom is so short it
cannot possibly stop this outbound tide. I'm sure Bezos and Dimon and Gates and Buffet will
be fine, again, Mr. Henry Longbottom of Periwinkle Court, Anytown, Ohio, homeowner, coupla
kids in college, small 401(k) not so much.
As much as Trump has made about as much a hash of this as he possibly could, the Federal
government can't do much save pass some bills to throw money at the problem. And remember, it
is the Dems that are the party of fiscal orthodoxy. They'll be as reluctant to commit big
numbers as the Republicans.
Public health is in the hands of states and localities, not the Feds. In theory, the Feds
can declare an emergency and do things by force, but in practice, states beg for help and
then the Feds declare an emergency and send $ and FEMA and maybe the National Guard.
Our screwed up private health care system is not even remotely fit for or inclined to deal
with a public health crisis. You may have seen in Links how one of America's elite hospitals,
Mass General, told an prestigious private employer that if any of their employees came to the
ER for coronavirus testing, they'd be hauled off by (campus) police. And they didn't offer an
alternative.
Remember how the supposedly oh so technically/bureaucratically competent Obama
Administration botched the comparatively simple Obamacare rollout?
I remember it well. Then they threw money at it with yuuge corporations to try and fix it.
Probably to one of Obomba's buddies.
The whole concept of connectinginsurance cos' databases to the Obamacare site was a patently
bad idea.
At the very least, our favorite neo-liberal democratic President Obama did set up 47
anti-pandemic programs in countries that have enormous vulnerability to deleterious viruses
in order to keep them from spreading worldwide .and President PT Barnum dismantled 37 of
those programs. Maybe we would have a better handle on Coronavirus if he hadn't shuddered
those programs.
DNC installing a man with obvious cognitive impairment is a staggering display of arrogance.
While Bush and Obama were empty suits this is completly another level.
In way I think Stupor Tuesday was a huge win for Trump.
The oldest organized political party on the planet is advancing a senile globalist meatpuppet
(with a son known to be a philandering crackhead) to handle nuclear launch codes.
Choosing Biden hands the election to Trump and that's a deal that has already been made. The
DNC don't like Sanders because they are adraid he might win, not because they are afraid he
might loose.
I agree with you that it is not going to be a slam dunk for Trump. Just like Trump wasn't
damaged by the Access Hollywood tapes, Biden's not going to be damaged by his senility,
gaffes and his prior plagiarism, Wall St cronyism and corruption. The vote for the "lesser
evil" mindset will consolidate along traditional lines. The Obama machine will run Biden's
campaign and consolidate the Democrat support. The election will hinge on a few states in
particular Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
US politicians and media are reporting approximately 500 cases of the virus in the US as
of March 8. The actual number is almost certainly much higher, however. Perhaps as much as
10-fold that number, according to some sources. Why?
There's the problem of reporting only tested cases so far, and there's still a lack of
available tests even to test and to verify all those infected without symptoms.. And even those
showing symptoms may have been determined initially as not infected by the tests, since
reportedly many of the early test kits were defective. Meanwhile, those without symptoms or
pre-symptomatic are not being tested at all.
The Fiction of Voluntary Quarantine
Then there's the policy of voluntary quarantining those who have come into contact with
someone who was tested and found infected. It's not working very well. Those who have come in
contact with carriers of the virus are asked simply to stay home. But do they? There's no way
to know, or even enforce that. The case example why voluntary quarantining doesn't work well is
Italy.
Most of the northern Lombardy region, including the financial center of Milan in that
country, is in 'lock down' right now. But all that means is voluntary quarantining. People are
asked not to leave their town, or the larger region. But is that stopping them traveling around
their town in public places? Or within the larger region? And spreading the virus there?
Apparently not. Reportedly, infection for those tested have risen in just two weeks to more
than 6,000 in Northern Italy. CNBC reports that, in just one day this weekend, that number
increased by 1200! So much for voluntary quarantines. There's no way, no sufficient personnel,
not even accepted procedures, with which to daily check on those (in Italy that means hundreds
of thousands) in voluntary quarantine.
The Real Costs to Workers
Average working class folks cannot afford to voluntary quarantine themselves. Or to stay
home from work for any reason. Even if they have symptoms. They will continue going to work.
They have to, in order to economically survive.
Consider the typical scenario in the US: there are literally tens of millions of workers who
have no more than $400 for an emergency. As many perhaps as half of the work force of 165
million. They live paycheck to paycheck. They can't afford to miss any days of work. Millions
of them have no paid sick leave. The US is the worst of all advanced economies in terms of
providing paid sick leave. Even union workers with some paid sick leave in their contracts
have, at best, only six days on average. If they stay home sick, they'll be asked by their
employer the reason for doing so in order to collect that paid sick leave. And even when they
don't have sick leave. Paid leave or not, many will be required to provide a doctor's slip
indicating the nature of the illness. But doctors are refusing to hold office visits for
patients who may have the virus. They can't do anything about it, so they don't want them to
come in and possibly contaminate others or themselves. So a worker sick has to go to the
hospital emergency room.
That raises another problem. A trip to the emergency room costs on average at least a
$1,000. More if special tests are done. If the worker has no health insurance (30 million still
don't), that's an out of pocket cost he/she can't afford. They know it. So they don't go to the
hospital emergency room, and they can't get an appointment at the doctor's office. Result: they
don't get tested, refuse to go get tested, and they continue to go to work. The virus
spreads.
Even if they have health insurance coverage, the deductible today is usually $500 to $2000.
Most don't have that kind of savings to spend either. Not to mention copays. So even those
insured take a pass on going to the hospital to get tested, even if they have symptoms.
The media doesn't help here either. Reports are typically that those who are young, middle
age, and in reasonable good health and without other complicating conditions don't die. It's
the older folks, retirees with Medicare, or with serious other conditions, that typically die
from the virus. Workers hear this and that supports their decision not to go to the hospital or
get tested as well.
Then there's the further complication concerning employment if they do go to the hospital.
The hospital will (soon) test them. If found infected, they will send them home for voluntary
quarantine for 14 days! Now the financial crises really begins. The hospital will inform their
employer. Staying at home for 14 days will result in financial disaster, since the employer has
no obligation to continue to pay them their wages while not at work, unless they have some
minimal paid sick leave which, as noted, the vast majority don't have. Nor does the employer
have any obligation legally to even keep them employed for 14 days (or even less) if the
employer determines they are not likely to return to work after 14 days (or even less). They
therefore get fired if they go to the hospital after it reports to the employer they have the
virus. Just another good reason not to go to the hospital.
In other words, here's all kind of major economic disincentives to keep an illness
confidential, to go to work, not go to the hospital (and can't go to the doctor). That risks
passing on the highly contagion bug to others–which has been happening and will continue
to happen.
Here's another financial hit for the working class: child care. Schools are beginning to
shut down. Even where no cases are yet confirmed. Stanford University just decided to
discontinue all in class sessions and revert to all online education. But what about K-6 and
pre-school? Or even Jr. high schools? When they shut down, kids must stay at home. But most
working class parents can't afford nannys or baby-sitters. Not everyone works in an occupation
or company where they can 'work from home'. Do they send the young kids to grandma's and
grandpa's, who are more susceptible to the virus? With their kids required to stay home, they
must miss work, and risk even losing their jobs. We're talking about millions of families with
6 to 12 year olds. And who knows how long the schools will remain shut down.
In short, wages lost due to self-quarantining, forced voluntary quarantining after hospital
testing, the cost of hospital emergency room visits (whether insured or not), the unknown cost
of the tests themselves (the government says it will reimburse them but they don't have the
$1,000 or more cash out of pocket in the first place), the cost of paying for nannys or
baby-sitters for young school age children when schools shut down–i.e. all result in a
massive out of pocket expense for most workers that they don't have.
Workers figure all these possibilities of financial disaster pretty quick and know that the
virus will mean a big financial hit if they miss a day's work, or even if they don't. So they
keep working, hoping they'll recover on their own, refusing to get tested because of the
potential loss of work, wages, and income, and crossing their fingers that their kids' school
districts don't shut down.
What this all means for the US economy is obvious. Household consumption was already
weakening at the end of last year. Most of consumption was driven by accelerating stock
valuations, which affect those in the top 10% who own stocks; or by taking on more
credit–credit cards, which affects the middle class and below.
Over $1 trillion in credit card debt is what has been largely driving middle income and
below consumption. Mainstream economists argue that defaults on credit card debt are only 3% or
so, and thus not a problem. But that's a gross average across all 130 million households. When
this data are broken down, middle income and below family credit card debt is around 9%, a very
high number more like 2007 when the last economic recession began.
Then there's auto debt. As of 2018, reportedly 7 million turned in their keys on their auto
loans. As in the case of credit cards, auto debt defaults will rise as well in 2020. Then
there's student debt, over $1.6 Trillion now. Defaults there are much higher than reported as
well, since actual defaults (defined as failure to pay either principal or interest) have been
redefined to something else other than actual default.
Add to all this the likelihood is very high that job layoffs will now begin by April, as the
global supply chain crisis due to virus-related cuts in production and trade. More job loss
means less wage income and thus less household spending and more inability to deal with the
costs of the virus for most working class families.
Let's not also forget the price gouging for certain products that is beginning now to
appear, both online and in stores. That reduces working class real incomes and thus consumption
too. Meanwhile, certain industries are already taking a big hit and layoffs are looming in
travel companies of all kinds (airlines, cruise ships, hotels, entertainment). In places where
the virus effect is already large, a big decline in restaurant, sports and concerts, movies,
etc. has also begun.
The two big economic contagion channels impacting employment thus far are supply chain
production and distribution reductions, and local demand for certain services (travel, retail,
hospitality, etc.).
But a third major channel has just begun to emerge: that's financial asset deflation in
stocks, oil & commodity futures, junk bonds & leveraged loans, and currency
devaluations.
Stocks' price collapse leads to business shelving investment and even cutting back
production. That means more job loss, reduced wage incomes, less spending, and economic
slowdown.
Oil and commodity prices now collapsing also lead to energy industry layoffs. More
importantly, in turn that will lead to energy junk bond market collapse–potentially
spreading to all junk bonds, leveraged loans, and even BBB grade corporate bonds (which are
really redefined junk bonds not investment grade bonds).
In other words, the collapse of supply chains, production-distribution, and industry by
industry demand in the US may become even worse should the financial markets price collapse can
lead to a general credit crunch. And that translates into a general economic real contraction.
That's precisely what happened in 2008, in a similar chain reaction from financial crisis to
real economic crisis.
Workers are aware of all this possibly leading to longer run economic stress. In the short
run, they consider possible wages loss if they reveal or report they have the virus, or get
tested: i.e. lost wage incomes: the cost of immediate medical care; the cost of child care,
etc. Better to tough it through and continue to go to work is a typical, and rational,
response.
This is already going on. Hundreds of thousands with, and without, symptoms are not being
tested; nor will most of them volunteer to be. Except for those on cruise ships who are forced
to be tested (and they're mostly retirees and elderly), few workers can afford to allow
themselves to be. The infection rate is thus already much higher and will continue to rise.
Voluntary quarantining doesn't work much (again just look at Italy, or even Germany, where in
one week cases (tested) rose from 66 to more than 1000). So out of economic necessity and to
avoid personal economic devastation, they continue to work. But that doesn't have to be.
US Policy Response: No Help for Working Class
US policy has been, is, and will continue to be a disaster. Trump's cuts to health and human
services in the past seriously hampered the US initial response. Tests had to be sent to
Atlanta and the CDC for processing. Early test kits often failed. Only now are they getting to
the states–to late to have a positive initial effect on the spread. Those suspected of
exposure to others confirmed infected were simply sent home for 'voluntary quarantine'. Initial
legislation of $8.3 billion just passed by Congress provides for 'reimbursement' for voluntary
testing, with no clarification if that covers the $1,000 hospital visit as well or just the
cost of the actual test!
There could be, however, a government response that financially supports workers and allows
them to be properly tested and treated.
An Alternative Policy Response
Why doesn't the government simply say 'go get tested for free' and the hospital will bill
the government for the costs? Not the worker pay up front with money he/she likely doesn't
have. Why isn't there emergency legislation by Congress or the states to require employers to
provide at least 14 days of paid sick leave, like other countries? And law guaranteeing
employers can't fire a worker sick with the virus for any reason? Or tax credits to working
class families for the full cost of child care–paid to a nanny or to the worker–if
they have to stay home in the event of a school district shutdown?
While business-investor tax cuts will almost certainly be the official government response,
few of the above measures for working class Americans are likely. In America working class
folks always get the short end of the economic stick. Congress and presidents pass trillions of
dollars in tax cut legislation ($15 trillion since 2001 to investors, businesses and the 1%),
but have raised taxes on the working class. Companies with billions of dollars in annual
profits pay nothing in taxes–and actually get a subsidy check from the government to
boot. Just ask Amazon, IBM, many big banks, pharmaceutical companies and more!
It can be expected the virus will have a large negative impact the standard of living and
wages of millions of working class families. They will have to bear the burden of the cost with
little help from their government. Meanwhile, businesses and investors will get bailed out,
'made whole', once again. In the process Consumption spending–the only area holding up
the economy in 2019–will take a big hit. That means recession starting next quarter is
more than a 50-50 likelihood.
In fact, the investment bank, Goldman Sachs, has just forecast that the effect on the US
economy in the coming second quarter of this year will be a collapse of GDP to 0% growth.
Jack Rasmus is author of the recently published book, 'Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and
the Coming Depression', Clarity Press, August 2017. He blogs at
jackrasmus.com and his twitter handle is @drjackrasmus. His website is http://kyklosproductions.com .
Many of us have come across the term "neoliberal," or "neoliberalism" before, but for all
its use, few have ever taken the chance to actually explain what it is. An inadequate popular
definition has allowed the term to be abused and misrepresented in a variety of ways. Despite
these misrepresentations, however, "neoliberalism" is a concept that is very useful for
understanding the world we live in today.
In simple terms, neoliberalism is a broad ideology that became popular in political,
economic, and governmental circles in the 1970's and reached its peak in global popularity in
the 1980's.
Neoliberalism describes the political paradigm we are in right now, the political conditions of
modern society . As the name suggests, it calls for a revitalization of the classical
liberal view of economic policy. It's important to understand that "classical liberal" here
refers to an older understanding of the word liberal than the one it has in modern America- it
is referencing the liberalism of the Enlightenment era, represented by thinkers like Adam Smith
and John Locke, not modern social liberalism as embodied by Barack Obama and much of the rest
of the Democratic Party. In concrete policy terms, neoliberalism means free trade, low taxes,
deregulation, privatization, and balanced budgets.
Neoliberalism emerged as a reaction to welfare state politics and Keynesian economics that
had become popular in the West following the end of World War II.
What is Keynesian Economics? Two major schools of economic thought are Classical
Economics and Keynesian Economics. Adam Smith's (1723-1790) theory of Classical Economics
asserts that the market is a rapidly-adjusting, self-correcting entity. John Maynard Keynes
(1883-1946) believed that Classical Economics was flawed. If classical economics were true,
Keyes asserted, waves of massive unemployment wouldn't exist, as the market would quickly
self-adjust for the downturn. Keynes theorized that during an economic downturn, consumer
demand tended to drop, causing employers to lay off employees, which would then decrease
overall consumer demand, and the cycle would continue. Keynes concluded that in periods of
economic downturn, government could manipulate demand by hiring, directly or through
policy, unemployed workers and break the cycle.
Following a long period of significant prosperity,
the 1970's brought with it a phenomenon known as "stagflation" - simultaneous stagnation
(where worker wages are kept flat) and inflation (where the cost of living rises). Keynesians,
who had been the dominant group in American economics at the time, believed it was impossible
for stagflation to exist for any extended period of time.
As the Keynesians tried to make sense of economic realities of the day, a new wave of
economists began to create other schools of thought. Milton Friedman (known as "the Chicago
School" or "monetarists") made the case not only for a different approach to monetary policy in
order to solve stagflation, but also for the idea that many forms of governmental involvement
in the economy are in fact harmful. Others, like James Buchanan pioneered a field known as
"public choice theory," which made the case to the economics profession that government
bureaucrats acted in personal self-interest, not in the public interest, and thus that policy
prescriptions should be much more cautious in calling for governmental solutions to economic
issues.
Activist Business
At the same time as the intellectual environment began to shift toward the political right
in economics,
the business community also began to be more aggressive in asserting their interests in
politics. This development was prompted in part by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis
F. Powell, Jr. writing a memo to
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971, arguing that "the American economic system is under
attack" from progressive critics of big business and that the business community should fight
back. A number of conservative and libertarian think tanks and advocacy organizations were
created and expanded during this period in order to make the intellectual case for "freer"
capitalism, including the Heritage Foundation (1973), the Cato Institute (1974), and the
American Enterprise Institute (founded in 1938 but becoming influential during the
1970′s).
A Radical Message
Combine a turn against government in the field of economics and a growing assertion of
political power by businesses, and throw in increased public skepticism of government after
Vietnam and Watergate, and you have a recipe for fundamental political change. Between the
economic disarray, the public distrust, and both intellectual and financial support for an
alternative to post-war welfare statism, a new ideology became dominant in the political
sphere. This ideology was encapsulated by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who summed it up
perfectly with his famous quote: "in this current crisis, government is not the solution to the
problem; government is the problem."
Such a claim may sound like standard conservative fare today, but
both Reagan and his message were quite radical at the time, even among Republicans. At the
time of his election, Reagan was seen by some (
including Gerald Ford ) as simply too far right to win. The last (elected) Republican
president before him, Nixon, created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the
Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), and a number of other progressive
programs. He also called for healthcare reform that could arguably be called
stronger than Obamacare, and
an expansion of welfare , the latter of which was the inspiration for the Earned Income Tax
Credit, passed shortly after he left office. Pieces of Nixon's economic agenda were noticeably
left-wing, so much so that one journalist at the time noted that he left the
Democrats having to resort to "me-tooism."
Importantly, this era also saw the start of the growth in the importance of campaign
donations. Republicans had not only a strong base of think tanks to provide them with a network
of intellectual support, they also had far more money from the corporate interests they were
serving. Congressional Republicans beat their Democratic counterparts in campaign expenditures in every
election year from 1976 to 1992.
Traditionally, Democrats had relied on unions as a critical source of both campaign
donations and organizational support. With union strength declining (a trend the Reagan
administration encouraged through policy), the Democrats were being totally outgunned.
According to Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson's book "Winner-Take-All Politics":
Even with the emergence of conservative "Reagan Democrats" during the 1980's, the game had
changed for the Democratic Party. Recognizing this, a number of Democrats (including Bill
Clinton) joined together in a group called the Democratic Leadership Council with the goal of
dragging the party to the right and boosting campaign contributions. They succeeded.
When Clinton eventually won the presidency, he cemented neoliberalism as the law of the
land by making it clear that the Democrats would not challenge the new fundamental doctrine
of limited government involvement in many parts of the economy, and as a result made the
Democrats politically competitive again. (Both the previously mentioned "Winner-Take-All
Politics" and Thomas Ferguson and Joel Roger's "Right Turn" go more into detail on this issue,
and on neoliberalism more generally).
Instead of challenging the entirety of Reagan's assertion of government-as-problem, Clinton
espoused a "third way" ideology: in his second inauguration, he
said that "Government is not the problem, and Government is not the solution. We -- the
American people -- we are the solution." Though the Clinton White House at times backed
left-liberal policies like mild tax hikes on the wealthy, the Children's Health Insurance
Program, and the Family Medical Leave Act, it also continued the neoliberal march of rolling
back progressive achievements through the deregulation of Wall Street (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley
Act of 1999, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, etc.), conservative welfare
reform in 1996, NAFTA, and the gutting of public housing
.
A One-Party System
Clinton himself was aware of the way that American politics was moving to the right, and he
was sometimes frustrated with it. Allegedly, he once entered a meeting in the Oval Office
complaining : "Where are all the Democrats? I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower
Republicans. We're Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We
stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?"
Neoliberalism within the Democratic Party looks less like a proposal to privatize or abolish
Social Security as much as it does a commitment to benefit-cutting "entitlement reform." It can
be seen both in language (the constant discussion of education as an "investment" in "skills"
necessary for "improving the workforce," instead of a guaranteed right for all citizens) and in
policy (proposing tax cuts for the middle class instead of social spending even when taxes are
at some of their
lowest rates in decades ; compromis[ing] in advance
on major policy proposals like the 2009 stimulus; advocating piecemeal technocratic reforms to
healthcare and finance instead of deeper, fundamental reform; etc.).
With their opponents on the defensive and partially compliant with their agenda, the
Republicans continued to push further right under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and his
"Contract with America." The Democrats started to dig their heels in and push back a little
for the first time during the later part of the George W. Bush administration as his (and the
wars') approval ratings sank, and they now seem to have more or less stabilized. An
increasingly loud progressive coalition of activists and advocates continues to push for ideas
like single-payer healthcare, often dismissed as radical despite both being an international
norm and the
explicit goal of many mainstream Democratic politicians before neoliberalism's rise. The
Democratic party establishment, on the contrary, is largely fine holding on to ideological
territory that is, in certain areas, to the right of where it was several decades ago.
With the establishment of both major political parties accepting neoliberal ideology, it
became default wisdom among economic, political, and media elites. Because the most powerful
class of America accepted it as fact, it was instilled into the American consciousness as
"common sense" that can't be seriously challenged. Ideas in direct opposition to neoliberalism
were largely marginalized, and as a result, much of our modern debate now takes place within
its bounds. Today, though, this marginalization is rapidly disappearing.
Today, we are witnessing the collapse of neoliberalism's "common sense" status. Republican
elites took neoliberalism being one of their root organizing principles for granted while
running campaigns using dog-whistle racism, never realizing that they were attracting a base of
voters who hated immigrants a lot more than they hated regulation. The Republicans have drifted
so far to the right that unabashed nationalists like Trump can now take the lead of the party,
even as he espouses racist xenophobia-inspired protectionism that are in conflict with the
neoliberal ideals of the party's business wing.
Even during their neoliberalization, the Democrats always had a left-wing occupied by social
democrats. Today they largely occupy the Congressional Progressive Caucus. They were empowered
by both opposition to the Iraq War late in the Bush era and the subsequent economic crash that
occurred as a result of neoliberal deregulation of the finance sector. Obama ran as a
semi-progressive but governed as a standard Democrat, leaving progressive disappointment and
frustration to rise to the surface again once a primary was held to determine who would be the
Democratic candidate after Obama: thus, the Bernie phenomenon.
Globalism &
Neoliberalism
It seems as though the extinction of neoliberalism is embedded in the formula of
neoliberalism itself.
Neoliberalism and accompanying globalization have resulted in inequality and poverty for
significant portions of the population, leaving many people economically impoverished and
politically alienated. This prompts an inevitable political reaction, angry and populist in
nature. The center-left (ex. Hillary Clinton) and center-right (ex. Jeb Bush) sing the praises
of neoliberal globalization, while the left (ex. Bernie Sanders) vigorously attacks the
"neoliberal" part of it, and the far-right (ex. Donald Trump) vigorously attack the
"globalization" part of it. Today, progressives dislike neoliberalism, but also believe that
the far-right's disdain for all forms of globalization is a distraction and misidentification
of the root issue, using foreigners and people of color as scapegoats.
The problem is not globalization, but globalization implemented in such a way so as to benefit
the wealthy and powerful.
Neoliberalism is a powerful ideology and way of looking at the world. The neoliberal views
most government involvement in the economy as harmful, and seeks to leave social problems to be
solved by private enterprise and markets whenever possible. This is an idea that, over the last
several decades, has become widely accepted to varying degrees by people across the political
spectrum, and as such has been embedded into modern government and public policy.
A number of other industrialized countries have undergone neoliberalization on roughly the
same time frame as the US, and are now experiencing similar backlashes: the U.K.,
neoliberalized under Margaret Thatcher and others, now has UKIP on its right and Jeremy Corbyn
and social democratic Scottish nationalists on its left. France has witnessed the rise of not
only the National Front on its far-right, but also the rise of populist socialists like
Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Germany has the AfD and Pegida on its right and Die Linke on its
left. New Zealand has New Zealand First. Sweden has the Sweden Democrats. Spain has Podemos.
Additionally, backlash against "Washington Consensus" neoliberalism in Latin America
contributed to a revitalization of left-populism in many countries. Though there are some
nations that have experienced some form of neoliberalism without such political effects, a
definite connection between neoliberalism and the emergence of anti-neoliberal populism
certainly seems to exist.
It also feels like a scam: there is no shortage of snake oil sellers who hope stoking such
fears will make people buy more supplies: years' worth of ready-to-eat meals, bunker materials
and a lot more stuff in various shades of camo. (The more camo the more doomsday feels, I
guess!)
The reality is that there is little point "preparing" for the most catastrophic scenarios
some of these people envision. As a species, we live and die by our social world and our
extensive infrastructure -- and there is no predicting what anybody needs in the face of total
catastrophe.
In contrast, the real crisis scenarios we're likely to encounter require cooperation and,
crucially, "flattening the curve" of the crisis exactly so the more vulnerable can fare better,
so that our infrastructure will be less stressed at any one time.
At international arrivals in Atlanta, the overwhelmingly black TSA staff are not taking
temps by infrared or taking any pro active measures. If they are, it was hidden from me. It
seems- obtuse- to constantly harp on the catastrophe that is AA hires- but there it is.
Its the busiest airport in the world, BTW.
A sinister side note; Delta offered me an $83 upgrade for first class when I went in to
delay another trip. It's a $6000 ticket to fly first class. My total would have been a little
over $500. Dangling the carrot as everyone cancels.
One day, Americans will fully understand , with horrible consequences, that not every
single human transaction must revolve around making a few people obscenely rich.
"... Trump's narcissism obscures something both far more pernicious and far more permanent than his oft-televised obsession with himself and that's the fact that he's been busily making Milton Friedman's "Supply Side/The Bottom Line Is The Only Line" dream an intractable reality. ..."
"... Since taking office and taking complete control of the news-cycle, Trump has been systematically starving Federal agencies of resources, personnel and attention. He has, through the sycophants and lobbyists he's installed around the Executive Branch, been pushing out career professionals and barely replacing them with also-rans. And he is dismantling every aspect of government he cannot use to reward his corporate clients or punish political apostates. ..."
"... The idea is to cripple the Federal government from within instead of doing the hard legislative work of changing the laws that legally compel government action. As a result, many of the regulations on the books are becoming functionally irrelevant . Some laws are being rewritten by the lobbyists who used to lobby against 'em, but mostly the Executive Branch is being systematically emaciated by the political equivalent of chronic wasting disease. ..."
"... And any coronavirus-related "incompetence" you see being reported is a feature, not a bug, of this Re-Great'd America. And that's because Trump is not an outlier. He is a culmination. ..."
As COVID-19 begins its inevitable "community transmission" phase around the United States, the
purveyors of the conventional wisdom are largely focused on President Trump's (and by
extension,
prayerful Vice President Pence's) incompetence and his self-serving, empathy-free approach
to the coronavirus. And it is true that, as with all things Trump, it seems that all he really
cares about is the stock market and its effect on his reelection bid. But Trump's narcissism
obscures something both far more pernicious and far more permanent than his oft-televised
obsession with himself and that's the fact that he's been busily making Milton Friedman's
"Supply Side/The Bottom Line Is The Only Line" dream an intractable reality.
It was a dream that first took flight when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. The dream was
often made manifest by the neoliberal lurch and deregulatory impulses of President Bill
Clinton. But it is Trump who's come closest to fully realizing the dream of ending responsive
government. It should come as no surprise, though. Trump lifted, among other things ,
his " Make America
Great Again " slogan from the Gipper. He's also taken Reagan's anti-FDR pitch about the
dangers of government (see "The Deep State") and, with the help of a motley crew of Tea
Partiers, Evangelicals and corporate Republicans, transformed it into, as Steve Bannon calls
it, a "
War on the Administrative State ."
Since taking office and taking complete control of the news-cycle, Trump has been
systematically starving Federal agencies of resources, personnel and attention. He has, through
the sycophants
and
lobbyists he's installed around the Executive Branch, been pushing out career professionals
and barely replacing them with also-rans. And he is dismantling every aspect of government
he cannot
use to reward his corporate clients or punish political apostates.
The idea is to cripple the Federal government from within instead of doing the hard
legislative work of changing the laws that legally compel government action. As a result, many
of the regulations on the books are becoming
functionally irrelevant . Some laws are being rewritten by the lobbyists who used to lobby
against 'em, but mostly the Executive Branch is being systematically emaciated by the political
equivalent of chronic wasting disease.
It's an approach first pioneered by Reagan devotee Grover Norquist, who advocated "
starving the beast
" of government down to a manageable size before "drowning it" in a bathtub. It's an idea
currently being implemented with wide-ranging effect by Trump, who, like Reagan before
him , is
accelerating the bankrupting of the already debt-laden treasury with a combo of tax cuts
and massive spending on a world-dwarfing defense industry. Eventually, the theory goes, the
"safety net," a.k.a. "entitlements," and other "common good" spending will collapse under the
weight of the financial limitations generated by profuse borrowing to fund market-distorting
tax cuts and to dole out subsidies and tax gifts to cronies and key corporations. All the
while, the ever-less regulated chemical, oil, defense, agricultural and (most importantly of
all) financial industries will continue to hoard assets through the rinsing and repeating of
the supply side boom-and-bust scheme, a.k.a. the business cycle.
Frankly, this all looks like the endgame of a long plan to undo the demand side economy
created by the New Deal. Along with the seemingly (but not) contradictory spike in Unitary
Executive power (which is about protecting rackets, shielding enforcers from prosecution
and about enforcing political compliance), this is a transformation decades in the making and
Trump is the perfect salesman for this final episode even better than Reagan or Clinton because
his "flood the zone" narcissism is the ultimate, 24/7 distraction for a people addicted to
binge watching, inured to scripted reality shows and motivated by belligerent infotainment.
Reagan was the first actor to hit his marks on a stage set for him by the interlocking
forces of Big Oil, Big Defense and Wall Street. Not coincidentally, this same Venn Diagram of
power has profited mightily from Trump's Presidency. Rather than an actor, though, Trump is the
barking emcee of the final season of the American Dream Gameshow a program that was initially
cancelled in 1980, but somehow kept running in syndication on one of the two crappy channels a
"free" people have been given to chose from. But now, the final credits are closer to rolling
that ever before.
As such, Trump is the omega to Reagan's alpha. And any coronavirus-related "incompetence"
you see being reported is a feature, not a bug, of this Re-Great'd America. And that's because
Trump is not an outlier. He is a culmination.
JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, published historian, radio co-host and documentary
filmmaker (The Warning, 2008). His credits include a stint on the Newshour news desk, C-SPAN,
and as newsmagazine producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington. His weekly show, Inside the
Headlines w/ The Newsvandal, co-hosted by James Moore, airs every Friday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, Iowa.
It seems this nice;) senator may have corona CNN reporting..
"Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will self-quarantine after CPAC interaction"
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz will self-quarantine in Texas after interacting with an
individual at the Conservative Political Action Conference who tested positive for the
coronavirus.
"The interaction consisted of a brief conversation and a handshake," Cruz said in a
statement. "
Cruz said in a statement he is "not experiencing any symptoms" but "out of an abundance of
caution" he will remain in Texas until a full 14 days passes after the interaction.
"The people who have interacted with me in the 10 days since CPAC should not be concerned
about potential transmission," Cruz said.
Fears of a financial meltdown at least on the scale of the 2008 crisis intensified Monday as
global markets were gripped by panic resulting from the spread of the coronavirus across the
globe and the ensuing oil price war launched by Saudi Arabia over
the weekend.
"The fear today is about a global recession,"
said Thomas Hayes, chairman of management firm Great Hill Capital, as markets headed for
their
worst day since the 2008 crash .
"U.S. futures pointed to heavy losses on Wall Street on Monday. Overseas, London's FTSE
100 fell more than 8 percent to its lowest in three years; Japan's Nikkei index slumped more
than 5 percent and Australia's benchmark shed more than 7 percent. Oil prices suffered the
sharpest plunge since the 1991 Gulf War, while 10-year U.S. bond yields dropped to a record
low as investors sought safety."
While some urged
caution in interpreting the meaning of daily market fluctuations, analysts said there is
reason to fear that destructive economic crisis is on the horizon. Chris Weston, head of
research at the Melbourne-based web trading platform Pepperstone,
toldThe Guardian that "there is genuine panic" in the market, noting that he hasn't
"seen anything like this for years."
On February 24, Grassley and other Senators attended a "top-secret" briefing on the
coronavirus. Why were there virus "secrets"? What were these? Azar later said that all of the
information disclosed was later made public. Maybe. But why entertain the notion of virus
"secrets" in the first place? Because the default procedure is control of information; here
we go again. This complicates the task of the clown-car CDC, which is in well over its head
to begin with.
Coronavirus theme is not the war issue.
Using the threat of "Coronaviruses" is to exsufflate of the World inflation bloated by
International Banking Sector, yet at the same time, it is the "Wall Street project" to
prevent the recurrence of 2008 crisis.
Having said that, extreme measures do need to be taken to slow down the spread,
preserve life, and to prevent catastrophic economic collapse – modern "Just in Time"
supply chains are far more vulnerable and interdependent than the older-fashioned systems
present during the historic pandemics listed; all redundancy has been sacrificed to
maximising fast profit.
"... the American little people of all stripes are feeling frightened and abandoned by the great GDP god of the globalists. Being prepared for something is about all we little people can hope to do. And all the chattering class can do is still call us names. The joy of that. ..."
US Dear Leaders face difficult decisions regarding mass closures of everything. The poor
social infrastructure can't handle major disruptions. Closing schools could maybe cause
more harm than staying open, since many students depend on going to school just to get two
meals. Some places even have special summer programs so kids can eat all year round.
In addition, without public school babysitters many families would be f*cked but good.
There is nobody to look after kids while the parent(s) are struggling to make a living. It
is just as bad if the kids get sick - who will stay home and take care of them?
Closing schools would also devastate school finances since many revenue sources pay
based on number of bums-in-seats. If the bums-in-seats drops to zero...
Hourly workers like bus drivers and custodians and food service workers would be laid
off. Some might qualify for unemployment compensation, many others would not. Lots of
economic devastation among those folks in any case.
The medical consequences may get bad, but for the overall economy already stretched to
the limit, mass closures will be a catastrophe.
... The virus appears to be real. If part of this is a psy-op, would that not also link to
a higher probability that it could be bio-engineered? Released intentionally? Another
9/11-esque? Cover for an Western Economy in collapse? Myriad possibilities.
I'm in Seattle, it's no joke around here. I may have had it myself which I posted about
here recently. Comparing this to people dying from car accidents or "normal" flu every year
is retarded. This will (and already has) have profound impact on local and international
economies- ie peoples lives dumbass.
I've seen enough humans living in tents, cars and streets around here to make my stomach
turn. The impact from this may put many more in dire scenarios that do not even get the
flu. Certainly the potential implications of where this came from and how far it will go
should at least raise eyebrows from anyone with a shred of critical thinking and
compassion.
I heard a Wall Street expert today say on CNBC that, in some US states, if an employer
demands or permits a sick employee to be at work, any other workers who contract the
disease can get worker's comp. The employer is liable.
Apparently there's also an uptick in PC/laptop sales for those working from home.
We dont have a government in the US in the sense of people who manage policy and services
and budgets and laws and such. At this point its pretty much every man woman child for
themselves. We know how those people stuck on cruise ship feel.
And of whom Trump said (reportedly):
"he wanted the passengers to remain on the ship because he doesn't want to see the total US
case numbers 'double' as soon as it docks"
The coming economic fallout from Coronavirus will test the advice I've given people over
the years about where to work within the overall economy: Make certain you're on the
"Needs" side of the economy, not the "Discretionary" side.
As when the shit hits the fan, needs will always be needed while discretionary demand
fades to zero.
Frackers are already using euphemisms to cover their massive Ponzi Scheme failure, while
the entire Just-In-Time Neoliberal business model gets ready to collapse. The massive debt
bomb created by the Fed is close to imploding. The great irony of it all stems from the
revelation that the virus likely originated within the Outlaw US Empire--the parasitic worm
is close to entering the host's brain.
Even if it turns out to be a "nothing burger", the resultant will be that the capitalist
countries affected by the virus will emerge poorer and even more unequal than before.
That's because they are resorting to monetary devices to try to "fight" the virus. These
will only give big business the tools and the narrative to play siege economy (a.k.a.
Disaster Capitalism); they'll hoard what is most needed, wait for small and medium
businesses to go bankrupt and reap the spoils from the ground when the epidemic is
over.
People are panicking because they don't trust the American system of doing governance and
business. Gone are the days of local communities working together, or even having say over
their hospitals that they built. Still wondering why the communities didn't get any money
when said hospitals were sold to some network, but I am digressing here. Sorry. Then it was
not that long ago (Reagan presidency) that drugs, materials, food, and so on were made
here.Our financial overlords said that wasn't efficient, and we need to ship abroad. Now we
just make parasitical managers. I dare anyone to say what tangible gain the managerial
class brings other than college degrees and a insatiable lust for power.
So with a possible bioweapon escaping, or released, the American little people of
all stripes are feeling frightened and abandoned by the great GDP god of the globalists.
Being prepared for something is about all we little people can hope to do. And all the
chattering class can do is still call us names. The joy of that.
It didn't start with Trump. There are plenty of Democrats to blame. Harry Truman gets
the primary "buck stops here" award for allowing the CIA to be created. Trump will never do
this, but he needs to appoint someone apolitical to start investigating our myriad deep
state biolabs. Watch who first comes out with a vaccine.
When the first waves of plague swept medieval Europe, the disease killed both the rich and
the poor indiscriminately. In July 1348, King Edward III of England's 12-year-old daughter
died on her way to Spain to marry King Pedro of Castile. And though he was still mourning,
the king threw a giant tournament at Westminster in the fall, despite instructions from
clergy and doctors that moderation and abstinence were the key to survival. Nearly 672
years later, rich people still want their travel and amusement even amid coronavirus fears,
and in typical fashion, they're doing everything they can to make sure sickness remains the
province of the poor.
bipartisan cuts have been made to public health programs and emergency preparedness
readiness. Opportunities afforded by the experiences with SARS and the Middle East Respiratory
syndrome to develop vaccine programs have gone unheeded, citing costs to produce such vaccines.
This is the nature of for-profit medicine that demands a guarantee on such investments. The
estimates for a vaccine discovery and production can run over a billion dollars.
Compounding this dire situation is the barbaric reality that almost a quarter of workers
have no guaranteed sick leave. This impacts the service industries most harshly which are also
the most exposed to the public because of the nature of their work. In the starkest expression
of utter disdain for the health of Americans, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, a
former drug company executive, told Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat from Illinois, that
no promises could be made to make a vaccine affordable, let alone free for the public. "We
can't control that price because we need the private sector to invest."
According to an Uber driver by the name of Alvaro Balainez, 33 years old, "If one of us gets
sick, we will have no choice but to keep driving. We don't have medical savings, because we're
barely making enough to pay our rent or bills." Despite public health warnings, these workers
will be compelled, by the sheer realities of their non-existent bank accounts, to carry on
working and gamble with their own health and those they will expose.
The Washington Post noted that workers who prepare foods at restaurants and school
cafeterias or nursery and child day-care workers have the nation's lowest rates of paid sick
leave in the private sector, at 58 percent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) reported that at least one in five food service workers have reported to work despite
having symptoms of diarrhea or vomiting.
President Trump's remarks only cut across the warnings made by health providers and
infectious disease experts about the contagiousness of the disease and higher than expected
fatality it poses when he said, "a lot of people will have this and it's very mild. They'll get
better very rapidly. They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor. You never
hear about those people. So, you can't put them down in the category of the overall population
in terms of this corona flu- or virus. We have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people
that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work -- some of them go to
work but they get better."
"... How is it that Warren pulling out of the race is a victory for patriarchy and sexism, but Amy Klobuchar pulling out of the race is not causing grief and angst? We Midwesterners just don't get enough respect–and melodrama. ..."
"... She and her dead-end supporters are giving a good run at being the most pathetic story in a primary that includes Zombie Joe Biden ..."
"Why Elizabeth Warren lost" [Ryan Cooper, The Week].
In a press conference discussing her campaign's end, Warren said that she had not
decided yet whether to endorse anyone. "I need some space around this," she said.
Astonishing and amazing that Warren, claiming to be a "progressive", did not immediately
endorse Sanders, especially when the alternative is the hapless "Senator from MBNA", Joe
Biden. Warren also repeatedly refused to endorse Bernie in 2016, a time when the early and
enthusiastic support of a prominent woman with progressive credentials would have really
helped and perhaps been decisive in the race against Hillary Clinton.
Sanders is the best shot at a progressive US president we have seen in a century, yet
Warren apparently needs time to cogitate on the matter for some reason. I hope whatever she
ultimately gets for herself is worth it.
Bernie held out on endorsing Hillary until she signed on to his free college plan. What
concession will Warren demand? Something for the people or something for herself? Force
Bernie to make his taxes more regressive? She's a joke.
Let's suppose that the one unchangeable goal of the Democratic Party establishment is that
Bernie Sanders must not be the party's 2020 nominee. Any other realistic candidate will do,
but it must not be Bernie. Let's also suppose that by the time of the party's convention Vice
President Bden's weaknesses and unfitness have become so evident that the party simply can't
put him forward as its nominee.
Suppose that Senator Warren sees that and thinks of herself as a realistic choice for the
party to replace Biden. A veneer of leftishness, but no real threat to Wall Street. I suspect
that her entertaining that hope may explain why since suspending her campaign Senator Warren
has criticized the idea of Vice President Biden being the party's nominee, but has had
nothing favorable to say about Senator Sanders.
"You cried yesterday because you can't be POTUS then went on CNN and trashed Bernie AGAIN
(when has he ever trashed you?) by way of his supporters. BOO-HOO. You should have focused
your attention on the factory floor (working women) not the glass ceiling.
Politics is a nasty game which you have proven to be expert at. You have earned every
criticism in whatever form it comes, frankly. But because you can't be POTUS this time, you
will take your ball and go home, so there! with the emotional maturity of a 5 year old.
How is it that Warren pulling out of the race is a victory for patriarchy and sexism,
but Amy Klobuchar pulling out of the race is not causing grief and angst? We Midwesterners
just don't get enough respect–and melodrama.
Do we truly have to hear that Warren scared people because she is too competent?
(Shades of Most Qualified Hillary.) Lying about being a Native American has a whiff of
incompetence, but I'm just persnickety.
And should we collectively be pointing out that Political Sainthood, once reserved for
John McCain, now has been bestowed on Elizabeth Warren, who is starting to be inebriated with
her own scent of sanctity? In short: McCain, Warren, all maverick-y all the time.
On a positive note, is it possible that focusing on what white upper-middle-class
people want, which is the status quo, kale salads, and more brunches, is somehow not a viable
path to the presidency? As mentioned above, Warren started to slide when she announced Plans
that involved means-testing health care and means-testing day care. At least she refrained
from issuing leaf-blowers to all of us.
She and her dead-end supporters are giving a good run at being the most pathetic story in
a primary that includes Zombie Joe Biden.
Just mind-bogglingly entitled upper and upper
middle class trash. I regret ever thinking of voting for her, I regret ever hearing her name,
and I look forward to the day she endorses someone so I never have to think about her
again.
The person who read her Twitter mentions for her was on Twitter begging for Venmo
donations for, I guess, her emotional trauma. Christ I hate these people.
Furthermore, the most highly rated show on Fox, Tucker Carlson is vehemently
anti-imperialist and consistently hurls insults at gay assholes such as Lindsey Graham
What you are hearing is the last vestiges of neocon and neolibs grasping at straws and
trying to drag China through the mud. No one is listening, just as no one really cares about
CNN or MSNBC (ironic, though, that Foxnews is now indeed the most "fair and balanced" of the
major networks) or any political trifles.
Soon people won't have to worry much about damage from new wells. Instead they will have
to worry about existing-and-soon-to-be-abandoned wells. This is already a huge problem in
Alberta, where "it's estimated that more than 155,000 Alberta energy wells have no
economic potential and will eventually require reclamation".
But not to worry. It will only cost $47 Billion for Alberta to clean up
the mess .
No surprise that it is worse in the US. I couldn't quickly find a cost estimate.
Nobody knows how many orphan and abandoned drilling sites litter farms, forests and
backyards nationwide. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are more
than a million of them. Unplugged wells can leak methane, an explosive gas, into
neighborhoods and leach toxins into groundwater.
The coronavirus is now exposing a far more deadly disease: Namely, the poisonous brew of
easy money, cheap debt, sweeping financialization and unbridled speculation that has been
injected into the American economy by the Fed and Washington politicians.[.]
It has also left the American economy exceedingly vulnerable to external shocks. That's
because 80% of households have no appreciable rainy day funds and businesses have hollowed
out their balance sheets and artificially extended their supply chains to the four corners
of the earth in order to goose short-run profits and share prices.
However, this unprecedented fragility is becoming evident as public health authorities
around the world aggressively move to contain the Covid-19 contagion. This will mean
separating workers from their workplaces, consumers from the malls, diners from the
restaurants, travelers from the airlines, hotels and resorts and much more like and similar
disruptions to the supply-side of the economy.
In short, the world's supply chains are buckling and freezing-up, thereby causing
production and incomes to fall abruptly. In turn, shrunken incomes and cash flows will pull
the legs out from under the edifice of debt and speculation that has been piled atop the
American economy.
So both a renewed financial and economic crisis and an abrupt change of course lie dead
ahead. The 30-year era of False Prosperity is over. [.]
The decade of reckoning that lies ahead is rooted first and foremost in the fecklessly
incurred mega-debts of the private and public sectors alike. Together they have soared to
the staggering sum of $75 trillion.[.]
Yet the proceeds from these massive borrowings were not used to invest and provide for
tomorrow, but to live high on the hog today. After three decades of such artificial
debt-fueled "prosperity", the very warp and woof of American society has been
deformed.[.]
In our ongoing attempts to glean some objective insight into what is actually happening "on
the ground" in the notoriously opaque China, whose economy has been hammered by the Coronavirus
epidemic,
in February we first showed several "alternative" economic indicators such as real-time
measurements of air pollution (a proxy for industrial output), daily coal consumption (a proxy
for electricity usage and manufacturing) and traffic congestion levels (a proxy for commerce
and mobility), before concluding correctly that China's
economy appears to have ground to a halt - the subsequent record drop in China's
manufacturing and service PMI only confirmed this.
... ... ...
Not only that, but as the bank's economists warn, " we are starting to see
evidence of an adverse feedback loop between markets and consumers; this frightens us." Let's
review the signals:
Market indications:
As of Friday, the S&P 500 sold off almost 14.0% from the recent high.
The 3mo-10yr yield curve is inverted by ~18bp, the most since October 2019 when trade war
concerns were dominating the news flow
BofA's global financial stress indicator triggered risk-off for the first time since
August 5 - September 12 2019. While the indicator has been a good signal to buy the dip since
2013, the bank's equity derivatives research team warns that this time may be different given
the nature of this shock.
Freeze in the global credit machine. In the US, high yield bond issuance has slowed and
there was no new US IG corporate issuance this week.
Consumer signs:
In the bank's proprietary consumer survey, BofA has seen some pickup in those noting they
are "very concerned" though it remains modest. And while broad consumer sentiment has been
resilient, as Goldman's data confirmed, this will change drastically in the coming weeks.
... ... ...
The conclusion: so far US consumers haven't showed broad-based fear. But as
BofA reminds us, consumers are very sensitive to big market moves. Case in point: consumer
confidence tumbled following the sell-off in December 2018. Similarly confidence weakened
following the big market move in August 2019. In both cases spending plunged immediately
thereafter. This is more than simply a negative "wealth effect". Consumers see the stock market
as a gauge of the health of the economy and the state of their personal finances; it is also an
indicator of faith in the Fed which has single-handedly kept the stock market ramping for the
past 11 years, avoiding both a bear market and a recession. Which is why when the stock market
sells off violently, it sends an ominous message.
We leave the last words to Bank of America: "We believe that we are in the very early stages
of the adverse feedback loop. In our baseline forecast, we are assuming that it does not
spiral. However, it remains a significant risk and we believe it is prudent to monitor it very
closely."
Creating employment insecurity was the entire point of neoliberal reforms such as
outsourcing, de-skilling and contingent employment. Neoliberal theory had it that desperate
workers work both longer and harder. And they die younger.
We can view "Creepy Joe" and Trump as representatives of "neoliberal plague" The slogan
should be " No Pasaran "
( Dolores Ibárruri's famous battlecry appeal for the defense of the Second Spanish
Republic)
Notable quotes:
"... For those who aren't familiar with Albert Camus' The Plague , disparate lives are brought together during a plague that sweeps through an Algerian city. ..."
"... Through the virus, a new light is being shone on four decades of neoliberal reorganization of political economy. The combination of widespread economic marginalization and a lack of paid time off means that sick and highly contagious workers will have little economic choice but to spread the virus. And the insurance company pricing mechanism intended to dissuade people from overusing health care ('skin in the game') means that only very sick people will 'buy' health care they can't afford. ..."
"... If this last part reads like (Ayn) Randian social theory as interpreted by a budding sociopath in the basement of his dead parent's crumbling tract home, it is basic neoliberal ideology applied to circumstances that we can see playing out in real time. ..."
"... While the American response to the Coronavirus threat seems to be less than robust, there was a near instantaneous response from the Federal Reserve to a 10% decline in stock prices. ..."
"... If priorities seem misplaced, you haven't been paying attention. The statistics on suicides, divorces, drug addiction and self-destructive behavior that result from the loss of employment were understood and widely published by the early 1990s, at the peak of that era's round of mass layoffs. Creating employment insecurity was the entire point of neoliberal reforms such as outsourcing, de-skilling and contingent employment. Neoliberal theory had it that desperate workers work both longer and harder. And they die younger. ..."
"... But how likely is it that people will 'demand' too much healthcare? The starting position of Obamacare was that the American healthcare system provided half the benefit at twice the price of comparable systems. ..."
"... Milton Friedman, one of the founders of neoliberalism through the Mont Pelerin Society, produced a long career's worth of half-baked garbage economics. On the rare occasions when he wasn't helping Chilean fascists toss students out of airplanes in flight, he was pawning his infantile theories off on future Chamber of Commerce and ALEC predators. His positivism was already known to be a farce when he took it up. Here is a primer that explains why it is, and always will be, a farce. ..."
For those who aren't familiar with Albert Camus' The Plague ,
disparate lives are brought together during a plague that sweeps through an Algerian city.
Today, by way of the emergence of a lethal and highly communicable virus (Coronavirus), we --
the people of the West, have an opportunity to reconsider what we mean to one another. The
existential lesson is that through dread and angst we can choose to live, with the
responsibilities that the choice entails, or just fade away.
Through the virus, a new light is being shone on four decades of neoliberal
reorganization of political economy. The combination of widespread economic marginalization and
a lack of paid time off means that sick and highly contagious workers will have little economic
choice but to spread the virus. And the insurance company pricing mechanism intended to
dissuade people from overusing health care ('skin in the game') means that only very sick
people will 'buy' health care they can't afford.
Market provision of virus test kits, vaccines and basic sanitary aids will, in the absence
of government coercion, follow the monopolist's model of under-provision at prices that are
unaffordable for most people. The most fiscally responsible route, in the sense of assuring
that the rich don't pay taxes, is to let those who can't afford health care die. If this means
that tens of millions of people die unnecessarily, markets are a harsh taskmaster. (
3.4% mortality rate @
2X – 3X the contagion rate of the Spanish Flu @ 4 X 1918 population).
If this last part reads like (Ayn) Randian social theory as interpreted by a budding
sociopath in the basement of his dead parent's crumbling tract home, it is basic neoliberal
ideology applied to circumstances that we can see playing out in real time. According to
Ryan Grim of The Intercept, Bill Clinton eliminated the ' reasonable
pricing ' requirement for drugs made by companies that receive government funding. This has
bearing on both commercially developed Coronavirus test kits and vaccines.
Leaving aside technical difficulties that either will or won't be resolved, how would any
substantial portion of the 80% of the population that lives hand-to-mouth be effectively
quarantined when losing an income creates a cascade effect of evictions, foreclosures,
starvation, repossessions, shut-off utilities, etc.? The current system conceived and organized
to make desperate and near desperate workers labor with the minimum of pay and benefits is a
public health disaster by design.
While the American response to the Coronavirus threat seems to be less than robust,
there was a near instantaneous response from the Federal Reserve to a 10% decline in stock
prices. The same Federal Reserve that has been engineering a non-stop rise in stock prices
since Wall Street was bailed out in 2009 knows perfectly well how narrowly stock ownership is
concentrated amongst the rich -- it publishes the data. It quickly lowered the cost of
financial speculation as the cost of Coronavirus tests and a vaccine -- and the question of who
will bear them, remain indeterminate.
If priorities seem misplaced, you haven't been paying attention. The statistics on
suicides, divorces, drug addiction and self-destructive behavior that result from the loss of
employment were understood and widely published by the early 1990s, at the peak of that era's
round of mass layoffs. Creating employment insecurity was the entire point of neoliberal
reforms such as outsourcing, de-skilling and contingent employment. Neoliberal theory had it
that desperate workers work both longer and harder. And they die younger.
The brutality of the logic used by the Obama administration in constructing the ACA,
Obamacare, is worthy of exploration. The premise behind the 'skin in the game' idea is
neoliberalism 101, developed by a founder of neoliberalism, economist Milton Friedman, to
ration health care. The basic idea is that without a price attached to it, people will 'demand'
more health care than they need. That from a public health perspective, oversupplying health
care is better than undersupplying it, is ignored under the premise that public health concerns
are communistic. (Read Friedman).
But how likely is it that people will 'demand' too much healthcare? The starting
position of Obamacare was that the American healthcare system provided half the benefit at
twice the price of comparable systems. Through the 'market' pricing mechanism that
existed, the incentive was for people to avoid purchasing healthcare because it was / is wildly
overpriced. Not considered was that through geographical and specialist 'natural monopolies,'
health care providers had an incentive to undersupply health care by providing high-margin
services to the rich.
Furthermore, why would a healthcare system be considered from the perspective of
individual users? In contrast to the temporal sleight-of-hand where Obamacare 'customers' are
expected to anticipate their illnesses and buy insurance plans that cover them, the entire
premise of health insurance is that illnesses are unpredictable. Isn't the Coronavirus evidence
of this unpredictable nature? And through the nature of pandemics, it is known that some people
will get sick and other people won't. Not known is precisely who will get sick and who
won't.
While there are public health emergency provisions in Obamacare that may or may not be
invoked, why does it make sense in any case to require that people anticipate future illnesses?
Such a program isn't health care and it isn't even health insurance. It is gambling. Guess
right and you live. Guess wrong and you die. Why should we be guessing at all? Prior to
Obamacare, health insurance companies gamed the system with life and death decisions. In true
neoliberal fashion, Obamacare randomized the process as health insurers continue to game the
system.
As I understand it, the public health emergency provision in Obamacare might cover virus
testing and the cost of a vaccine if one is ever found. Great. What about care? How many
readers chose a plan that covers Coronavirus? How many days can you go without a paycheck if
you get sick or are quarantined? Who will take care of your children and for how long? How will
you pay your rent or mortgage? Who will deliver groceries to your house and how will you pay
for them? How will you make the car payment before they repossess it and how will you get to
work without it if you recover?
The rank idiocy -- and the political content, of the frame of individual 'consumers'
overusing health care quickly devolves to the fact that some large portion of the American
people can't afford to go to the doctor when they need to. Even if they can afford the direct
costs, they can't afford the indirect costs. When Obamacare was passed, the U.S. had the worst
health care outcomes among rich countries. Ten years later, the U.S. has the
worst healthcare outcomes among rich countries . And medical bankruptcies are virtually
unchanged since Obamacare was passed.
The reason for focusing on Obamacare is it is the system through which we encounter the
Coronavirus. In the narrow political sense of getting a health care bill passed, Obamacare may
or may not have been 'pragmatic.' In a public health care sense, it is a disaster decades in
the making. The problem wasn't / isn't Mr. Obama per se. It is the radical ideology behind it
that was posed as pragmatism. Mr. Obama's success was to get a bill passed -- a political
accomplishment. It wasn't to create a functioning healthcare system.
The otherworldly nature of neoliberal theory has led to a most brutal of social
philosophies. Mr. Obama later put his energy into lengthening drug company
patents to give drug companies an economic advantage provided by the government. Economist
Dean Baker has made a career out of hammering this general point home. Michael Bloomberg
benefited from government support for both technology and finance. His fortune of $16 billion
in 2009 followed stock prices higher to land him at $64.2 billion in 2020.
Donald Trump inherited a large fortune that likewise followed stock and Manhattan real
estate prices higher. Both he and Mr. Bloomberg could have put their early fortunes into
passive portfolios and received the returns that they claim to be the product of superior
intelligence and hard work. Analytically, if the variability of these fortunes tracks systemic,
rather than personal, factors, then systemic factors explain them. The same is true of most of
the great fortunes of the epoch of finance capitalism that began around 1978.
The point of merging these issues is that they represent flip sides of the neoliberal coin.
In a broad sense, neoliberalism is premised on economic Darwinism, the quasi-religious (it
isn't Darwin) idea that people land where they deserve to land in the social order. This same
idea, that systemic differences in economic outcomes are evidence of systemic causes, applies
here. However, differences in intelligence, initiative and talent don't map to systemic outcomes , meaning that
concentrated wealth isn't a reward for these.
The ignorant brutality of this system appears to be on its way to getting a reality check
through a tiny virus. Unless the Federal government figures this out really fast, most of the
bodies will be carried out of poor and working class neighborhoods like mine. Few here have
health insurance and most health care providers in the area don't take the insurance they do
have. More than a day away from work and many of my neighbors will no longer have jobs.
Evictions are a regular state of affairs in good times. There are no resources to facilitate a
larger-picture response.
Liberalism, of which neoliberalism is a cranky cousin, lives through a patina of pragmatism
until the nukes start flying or a virus hits. Getting healthcare 'consumers' to consider their
market choices follows a narrow logic up to the point where none of the choices are relevant to
a public health emergency. One I plus another I plus another I doesn't equal us. The
fundamental premise of neoliberalism, the Robinsonade I, has
always been a cynical dodge to let rich people keep their loot.
The mortality rate and contagion factor recently reported for Coronavirus (links at top)
place it above the modern benchmark of the Spanish Flu of 1918 in terms of potential lethality.
What should make people angry is how the reconfiguration of political economy intended to make
a few people really rich has put the rest of us at increased risk. These are real people's
lives and they matter.
Finally, for students of neoliberalism: there is no conflation of neoliberalism with
neoclassical economics here. Milton Friedman, one of the founders of neoliberalism through
the Mont Pelerin Society, produced a long career's worth of half-baked garbage economics. On
the rare occasions when he wasn't helping Chilean fascists toss students out of airplanes in
flight, he was pawning his infantile theories off on future Chamber of Commerce and ALEC
predators. His positivism was already known to be a farce when he took it up. Here is a primer that
explains why it is, and always will be, a farce.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is
published by CounterPunch Books.
In 1995, Gloria Steinem, spoke of making @BernieSanders an "honorary woman" because his
advocacy for women was so strong then, and has continued strong over the decades.
exactly. Look at the prime examples of how Biden treats women in the public sphere:
treating Anita Hill like crap and nuzzling random women. And N.O.W. wants Warren to endorse
Biden? Sheesh.
And Warren wonders why she didn't get the votes. Does Warren think being a women per se
means only she is capable of going something for women. How childish.
Because when Sanders jawboned Amazon into raising wages, none of the workers who got the
raised were women.
That's because to the PMC feminists of NOW -- another NGO to euthanize given how poorly
they have performed as measured by their stated goals -- only PMC women are truly
women. The working class is an undifferentiated mass without individual identities. That is,
in fact, what the Bernie Bro " meme conveys. No female supporter of Sanders can
possibly be a real woman, and even more revealing, Sanders supporters are coded male by
default, a patriarchal semiotic that would drive NOW and its ilk, er, bananas in any other
context.
So sellout by Clinton of the Democratic Party to Wall Street proved to be durable and
sustainable...
Bernie again behaves like a sheep dog with no intention to win... "Let's be friends" is not a
viable strategy...
Notable quotes:
"... the same character traits that make him an honorable politician also make him fundamentally unsuited for the difficult task of waging a successful outsider campaign for the nomination of a major political party. ..."
"... Why hasn't Sara Nelson, head of the Flight Attendants' Union, endorsed Bernie? (Personally I have always thought she'd be a good VP.) ..."
"... Robinson is dreaming if he thinks Non-Profit Industrial Complex entities like EMILY's List and Planned Parenthood will lift a finger to help Sanders, or busines unionists like Randi Weingarten. To his credit, though, Ady Barkan switched immediately. External support, though is correct: IIRC, there are plenty of union locals to be had; the Culinary Workers should be only the first. ..."
"... "Corporate Lobbyists Control the Rules at the DNC" [ ReadSludge ]. "Among the 447 total voting DNC members, who make up the majority of 771 superdelegates, there are scores of corporate lobbyists and consultants -- including many of the 75 at-large DNC members, who were not individually elected . ..."
"... The 32-member DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee contains the following 20 individuals: a health insurance board member co-chair, three surrogates for presidential campaigns (two for Bloomberg, one for Biden), four current corporate lobbyists, two former corporate lobbyists, six corporate consultants, and four corporate lawyers." ..."
"... "Joe Biden is a friend of mine" is the 2020-updated version of "enough about the damn e-mails, already". No amount of ground-level organizing can make up for a candidate willing to publicly overlook what should be high-office-disqualifying fundamental character traits in his opponents out of "niceness". ..."
"... It's easy to do a post Super Tuesday defeat analysis of Sanders but remember, everything seems to work before SC where I think the Democrats fixed the election and the same holds for Super Tuesday. ..."
Sanders (D)(1): "Bernie Sanders needs to find the killer instinct" [Matthew Walther,
The Week ].
I've heard Useful Idiots, Dead Pundits, and the inimitable Jimmy Dore all make the same point,
but Walther's prose makes the point most forcefully (as prose often does). The situation:
There is no greater contrast imaginable than the one between the popular (and frequently
exaggerated) image of so-called "Bernie bros" and the almost painfully conciliatory instincts
of the man they support.
This was fully in evidence on Wednesday afternoon when Sanders responded to arguably the
worst defeat of his political career by chatting with journalists about how " disgusted "
he is at unspecified online comments directed at Elizabeth Warren and her supporters and what
a " decent
guy " Joe Biden is.
He did this despite the fact that Warren, with the connivance of debate moderators,
recently called him a sexist in front of an audience of millions, effectively announcing that
she had no interest in making even a tacit alliance with the only other progressive candidate
in the race and, one imagines, despite thinking that the former vice president's record on
virtually everything -- finance, health care, race relations, the environment, foreign policy
-- should render him ineligible for office.
It should go without saying that offering these pleasantries will do Sanders few if any
favors.
Lambert here: This is a Presidential primary, not the Senate floor. There is no comity.
Walther then gives a list of possible scorched earth tactics to use against Biden; we could all
make such a list. But then:
Sanders's benevolent disposition does him credit. But the same character traits that
make him an honorable politician also make him fundamentally unsuited for the difficult task
of waging a successful outsider campaign for the nomination of a major political
party.
Corbyn had the same problem...
Sanders really must not let Biden and the Democrat Establishment off the hook. He seems to
have poor judgment about his friends. Warren was no "friend." And neither is Joe Biden.
He should forget those false friends, go into the next debate, and slice Joe Biden off at
the knees. Trump would. And will, if Sander loses.
His canvassers and more importantly his millions of small donors deserve no less. The race
and the debate is now between two people, and only one can emerge the winner. Sanders needs to
decide if he wants to be that person, and then do
what it takes . (If the outcome of the Sanders campaign is a left that is a permanently
institutionalized force, distinct from liberal Democrats, I would regard that as a net
positive. If that is Sanders' ultimate goal, then fine. He's not going to achieve that goal by
being nice to Joe Biden. Quite the reverse.)
UPDATE Sanders (D)(2): "Time To Fight Harder Than We've Ever Fought Before" [Nathan J.
Robinson, Current
Affairs ].
"Biden now has some formidable advantages going forward: Democrats who no longer see him as
a failed or risky bet will finally endorse and campaign for him. He will find it easier to
raise money. He will have "momentum." Bloomberg's exit will bring him new voters.
Sanders may find upcoming states even harder to win than the Super Tuesday contests. But the
one thing that would guarantee a Sanders loss is giving up and going home, which is exactly
what Joe Biden hopes we will now do."
Here follows a laundry list of tactics. Then: "The real thing Bernie needs in order to win,
though, is external support. Labor unions, activists, lawmakers, anyone with a public platform:
We need to be pressuring them to endorse Bernie.
Why hasn't Sara Nelson, head of the Flight Attendants' Union, endorsed Bernie?
(Personally I have always thought she'd be a good VP.)
Now that Elizabeth Warren is clearly not going to win, will organizations like the Working
Families Party and EMILY's List and people like AFT president Randi Weingarten and Medicare For
All advocate Ady Barkan switch and endorse Sanders?
Where is the Sierra Club, SEIU (Bernie, after all, was one of the first national figures to
push Fight for $15), the UAW, Planned Parenthood? Many progressive organizations have been
sitting out the race because Warren was in it."
Good ideas in general, but Robinson is dreaming if he thinks Non-Profit Industrial
Complex entities like EMILY's List and Planned Parenthood will lift a finger to help Sanders,
or busines unionists like Randi Weingarten. To his credit, though, Ady Barkan switched
immediately. External support, though is correct: IIRC, there are plenty of union locals to be
had; the Culinary Workers should be only the first.
Warren (D)(1): "Why Elizabeth Warren lost" [Ryan Cooper, The Week ]. "Starting in
November, however, she started a long decline that continued through January, when she started
losing primaries . So what happened in November?
It is hard to pin down exactly what is happening in such a chaotic race, but Warren's
campaign certainly made a number of strategic errors. One important factor was surely that
Warren started backing away from Medicare-for-all, selling instead a bizarre two-step plan.
The idea supposedly was to pass universal Medicare with two different bills, one in her
first year as president and one in the third year. Given how difficult it is to pass anything
through Congress, and that there could easily be fewer Democrats in 2023 than in 2021, it was a
baffling decision. Worse, Warren then released a plan for financing Medicare-for-all that was
simply terrible.
Rather than levying a new progressive tax, she would turn existing employer contributions to
private health insurance plans into a tax on employers, which would gradually converge to an
average for all businesses but the smallest. The clear objective here was to claim that she
would pay for it without levying any new taxes on the middle or working classes. But because
those employer payments are still part of labor compensation, it is ultimately workers who pay
them -- making Warren's plan a horribly regressive head tax (that is, an equal dollar tax on
almost all workers regardless of income).
All that infuriated the left, and struck directly at Warren's branding as the candidate of
technical competence. It suggested her commitment to universal Medicare was not as strong as
she claimed, and that she would push classic centrist-style Rube Goldberg policies rather than
clean, fair ones. (Her child care plan, with its complicated means-testing system, had a
similar defect).
Claiming her plan was the only one not to raise taxes on the middle class was simply
dishonest. In sum, this was a classic failed straddle that alienated the left but gained no
support among anti-universal health care voters. More speculatively, this kind of hesitation
and backtracking may have turned off many voters." • On #MedicareForAll, called it here on
"pay for" ; and here on "transition." Warren's plans should not have been well-received,
and they were not. I'm only amazed that these really technical arguments penetrated the media
(let along the voters).
Warren (D)(2): "Warren Urged by National Organization for Women Not to Endorse Sanders: He
Has 'Done Next to Nothing for Women'" [
Newsweek ]. • Establishment really pulling out all the stops.
* * *
"Why Southern Democrats Saved Biden" [Mara Gay, New York
Times ]. (Gay was the lone member of the Times Editorial Board to endorse Sanders
.) "Through Southern eyes, this election is not about policy or personality. It's about
something much darker. Not long ago, these Americans lived under violent, anti-democratic
governments. Now, many there say they see in President Trump and his supporters the same
hostility and zeal for authoritarianism that marked life under Jim Crow .
They were deeply skeptical that a democratic socialist like Mr. Sanders could unseat Mr.
Trump. They liked Ms. Warren, but, burned by Hillary Clinton's loss, were worried that too many
of their fellow Americans wouldn't vote for a woman."
Well worth a read. At the same time, it's not clear why the Democrat Establishment hands
control over the nomination to the political establishment in states they will never win in the
general; the "firewall" in 2016 didn't work out all that well, after all. As for Jim Crow, we
might do well to remember that Obama destroyed a generation of Black wealth his miserably
inadequate response to the foreclosure crisis, and his pathetic stimulus package kept Black
unemployment high for years longer than it should have been. And sowed the dragon's teeth of
authoritarian reaction as well.
"Corporate Lobbyists Control the Rules at the DNC" [ ReadSludge
]. "Among the 447 total voting DNC members, who make up the majority of 771 superdelegates,
there are scores of corporate lobbyists and consultants -- including many of the 75 at-large
DNC members, who were not individually elected .
The 32-member DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee contains the following 20 individuals: a
health insurance board member co-chair, three surrogates for presidential campaigns (two for
Bloomberg, one for Biden), four current corporate lobbyists, two former corporate lobbyists,
six corporate consultants, and four corporate lawyers."
"Joe Biden is a friend of mine" is the 2020-updated version of "enough about the damn
e-mails, already". No amount of ground-level organizing can make up for a candidate willing to
publicly overlook what should be high-office-disqualifying fundamental character traits in his
opponents out of "niceness".
That's fine, but if his organization is then put at the disposal of Joe Biden, I don't see
how the organization survives. (That's why the DNC cheating meme* is important; it provides the
moral cover to get out of that loyalty oath (which the Sanders campaign certainly should have
had its lawyers take a look at)).
NOTE * Iowa, Texas, and California have all had major voting screw-ups, all of which
impacted Sanders voters disproportionately. The campaign should sue. They have the money.)
I once met an union organizer and he said he could go back to any site he had worked and be
on friendly terms with everyone. Bernie is thinking like an organizer. I think that making this
about Social Security is his best bet. It demolishes Biden in a way that makes the election
about the American people.
he needs to go after biden on the issues in a much more forceful manner than he typically
does, with lots and lots of specifics. did i mention lots of specifics? and lots of pointed
references to biden's past positions, and a focus on pinning him down on his position now. he
needs to ask questions biden will not be prepared for with easy scripted responses.
Perhaps if Sanders can keep successfully baiting Biden with hooks baited with Biden's own
past statements over and over and over again, that Sanders can then go on to practice some very
well disguised passive-aggressive pointing/not-pointing to Biden's mental condition by asking
Biden at every opportunity: " don't you remember that, Joe? You remember saying that, don't you
Joe? Don't you remember when you said that, Joe?"
Except 70% of Women according to Stanford finding these kind of confrontations distressing
to very distressing. Tricky. One changes emotions by using emotions so the trick here is
"allowing" Biden to act deranged and expressing sorrow over it. For 70% of guys they won't get
the emotional content, but will understand the logic of the questions and lack of answers. It
can be done, Bill Clinton and Obama were very good at this. Look you want to be president you
got to play the game at the highest level. Good practice for dealing with trump.
Timing was right for both Obama and Clinton. After the GFC voters would have gone for any
Democrat because Republicans were toxic. Similarly, it was fortuitous for Clinton because Perot
was running and he quit the race a couple of months before the election.
Obama got loads and loads of money from Wall Street. Neither of these guys would stand a
chance in an election year when the economy was doing well.
It's easy to do a post Super Tuesday defeat analysis of Sanders but remember, everything
seems to work before SC where I think the Democrats fixed the election and the same holds for
Super Tuesday.
I didn't see anyone pointing out that Bernie had to be confrontational when he seems to be
winning.
Wait. How many days ago was the field of candidates wide open?
If Bernard does not roast Biden on Social Security I will be disappointed. If Smokin' Joe
doesn't lash out with his typical aplomb, I'll be disappointed. I'm saving myself up
for bigger disappointments.
I'll be happy with the Vermont interpretation of Huey Long. I'm glad that people are finally
noticing we have one Socialist Senator.
Idea for an 'own the slur' bumper sticker: "I'm tickled pink by Bernie" -- Although I don't
know how the post-dial-up-modem crowd might misinterpret that?
I support Bernie because Bernie supports the polices I think we need to save the country:
M4A, GND,$15/hr min, free college, etc. To me, being an FDR Dem like Bernie is the moderate
position, we've done it before, we know it works. Biden's support of neoliberal polices that
have wrecked America is the extreme position.
But the DNC does not support FDR's Democracy. They have ended up to the right of Ronald
Reagan. Pelosi could have pushed a M4A bill but did not. Pelosi could have pushed any number of
polices to show how Trump is failing the working and middle class, but she did not.
So if Bernie is not picked for the general, I no longer have a reason to support the Dems,
and will stay home. Actually, I will probably not stay home, I will work to get Dems out of
office, and in general, work to burn the party to the ground. Why? Because it is in the way,
and does not support the working class or the middle class.
The Dem party has to decide – do they really support the working and middle class or
not. Because only Bernie supports those polices, and the rest of the Dems running for President
do not.
I'm going to take my chance while I have it and before having to say "I hate to be that
old Marxist but "
I am 36 years old and therefore the same age as most of those speaking for millenials in
the DSA, writing for Jacobin, and organising for Bernie or those of his satellites on their
respective fool's errands in opposition to the entrenched Democratic Party panjandrums.
Half American and half British, I have also experienced some similar issues with the
Corbyn/Momentum movement and its recent car crash with ruling class reality.
Just as an intro because of course I am going to say, "I hate to say this but "
The DSA and the semi-organised American left are selling their increasingly, justifiably
radical followers a pig in a poke. In a sense, I except Bernie from that condemnation –
running for President, it is what it is. But those who are supposed to be to his left are
performing an invidious game by preventing further political education or raising
consciousness in favour of peddling the myth of reforming the Democratic Party from within
that have been tried, and have failed, so many times in the last 120 years.
The fact that these same groups are doing the same thing when it comes to labour
struggles, endlessly shepherding wildcat momentum behind union leadership and justifying
sell-out deals instead of fostering a realistic preparation for the struggles ahead, suggests
that this is not an accident.
The cognitive dissonance is almost as horrible as that on offer when technocrats like
Obama and Clinton accept the facts of climate change while endlessly sandbagging real
responses to it. Which shouldn't be surprising, since the American and British new left is
engaged in an infernal slow dance with their liberal or corporate beefcakes.
If I sound flippant, I apologise – I don't mean to. I also don't necessarily
disbelieve in the potential for at least some change within existing conditions – but
historically such changes have been won because there was a more radical
extra-electoral/parliamentary movement of workers leveraging their strength, not because it
was all within one cosy political bubble.
And that only happens when workers and students are educated about the struggles involved
in forcing changes in the teeth of ruling class interests, institutions and political heft.
Peddling illusions about the all-encompassing power of the electoral process, or
complaining endlessly about the the latest example of back-stabbing from whichever corporate
liberal stooge last wielded the shank, is increasingly not just useless but something worse
– an expected part of the system itself as it reproduces its frozen dialectics of power
and exploitation.
This is not (at least not entirely) a call for revolution. But I am increasingly certain
that change is impossible without first preparing a broad swathe of people to fight, fight,
fight instead of entrusting the struggle to this or that figurehead (Bernie, AOC), let alone
their clarion-callers in an increasingly cosy upper middle class den of pseudo-leftists.
You might read that Politico article on the DSA. I found it rather encouraging but you
might differ. If so, I'd like to know your opinion of the concrete details.
> peddling the myth of reforming the Democratic Party from within
If the ultimate outcome were to split the Democrats, would you change your mind?
Reading the Politico article now. You're right – it is encouraging, at least in the
sense that it features articulate, radicalised individuals and their early attempts to
organise. It chronicles absolutely necessary early steps in the process. I am very encouraged
with the justified, even pragmatic, way they look beyond presidential politics in a
dialectical way – both the wider context and the more local, direct implications.
So far, so good.
But there are problems. The sudden, total collapse of the International Socialist
Organization is an example of what can happen to a seemingly lively left(ish) group when it
grows on shaky ground. You have chronicled some of the contortions of the DSA in their
regional elections and controversies. Growing pains – or something more
fundamental?
What I'm trying to say is what are they about and how do they reconcile disparate forces
and interests without tearing themselves apart? The DSA has its own particular history in the
wider context of the American left and its sudden expansion doesn't make that go away.
Without adequate theory your praxis will tend to fall apart when it collides with
reality.
To give a concrete example that is suggested in the Politico piece, I'm not sure how they
are discussing and understanding the identity politics education of the (upper)middle class
students drawn to the movement with the different perspectives of the labour movement or,
beyond that, the exciting, potentially revolutionary hinterland of the actual working
class(!!!)
Lenin didn't know what identity politics was but he described it in a different context:
haggling for privileges. I don't want to make this a diatribe on one subject or to suggest
that I'm not sensitive to the discrete forms of oppression facing different groups but
– and I know you write about this brilliantly – without some kind of radical
reckoning with these issues, groups like the DSA are liable to sectarian disasters of exactly
the kind envisioned (I suspect) by those who have most insidiously articulated identity over
class as the most significant feature of our social relations.
I would say similar things about Extinction Rebellion. I have friends who are deeply
involved in it and they are brilliantly committed to its cause. But they struggle when it
comes to connecting the realities they rightly identify with the material pathologies that
produce them. They are not interested in why, for example, the ER leaders ban socialist
sub-groups as "political" while welcoming those for bosses or landlords(?!)
These are, to me, fundamental problems. If you cannot identify your enemy you cannot plan
your campaign. And I worry that the DSA, or ER, dine out on identifying symptoms while
studiously avoiding an uncomfortable meeting with their cause. And that doesn't mean, either,
a schematic link of every social ill with capitalism, nor a demand that everyone be schooled
in the dialectic. Just a plan to educate, to find other forms of solidarity, and gird
ourselves for the struggle to come.
But that's probably more than enough! In answer to your last question -- - I think a
serious split with the Democratic Party is an absolute necessity for anything that follows.
It will come one way or another – even if Bernie wins the nomination, then the
presidency, I fully expect he will be sandbagged by Democrats at every turn. At some point,
it will be necessary to realise that the Democratic Party is not called the graveyard of
social movements for nothing – and that American duopoly is the greatest impediment to
democracy, no different really from the Congress of All-Russian Soviets in its day.
Forget splitting the Democrats. I like the idea I first saw here, of turning to and
leveraging the Republicans as the party of progressive change. Let the Democrat donors hold
their bag of defeated candidates while harnessing progressive populists, like Tucker Carlson,
or Josh Hawley, as an example, to change the country for the better. My vote in November is
for Bernie if he's on the ballot. If not, Tulsi.
The Democrat Establishment may not split (though as I think Taibbi pointed out,
Sanders might have been able to peel off some opportunists with a Texas win).
However, the Democrat base may split. Taking "Bernie Bro" and "He's not a real
Democrat" as a proxies, the Democrat gerontocracy (to use the term for the Breshnev era) is
systematically and openly alienating the Latin vote, youth generally, young blacks, and
younger women. As for the working class, they are not even a mental category for liberals.
That reduces their base to older Blacks and the PMC, especially PMC women. As 2016 showed,
and as the (PMC women) Warren campaign showed, that's barely enough to win an election, and
its certainly not enough to rule.
At some point, the contradictions have to break out into the open, as it becomes obvious
the Democrats have failed to represent -- indeed, have disenfranchised -- too many people. As
Lincoln
wrote to Lyman Trumbull in 1860..
Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.
The Iron Law of Institutions is looking better every day.
Look, no one knows the future and everyone is always flying by the seat of their pants.
This is always true, only more apparent now. I would speculate that at least half of the
newly motivated DSA membership couldn't really articulate a vision of socialism if you asked
them to. In the future that might be a problem but it is certainly not a problem now. I am
much more skeptical of those people now claiming to have "fundamental" answers.
Most of us have a clear if general sense of the enemy (capitalists) and their henchmen
(politicians, "policy advocates," etc.). On the other hand, as Stoller points out, we are
really bereft of people who actually understand production. I would argue that is our biggest
problem, not lack of ideological clarity. Because once we gain power we need to know how to
wield it.
Fair enough but I'm not really talking about ideological clarity or sectarian strife. I
think we agree – I also mean a thorough understanding of how the world works. But that
also means rigorous critique of where things might go wrong – and, for example when it
concerns identity politics (a phrase I hate and apologise for using!) I think we have a good
example. That doesn't mean class above all, by the way – just not ceding intellectual
ground to liberal formulations of who we are and why we are that way!
(I didn't really mean to harp on about identity stuff but I think of it when I think of,
for example, the DSA, and some of the divisive disputes that have bedevilled them)
I attended one DSA meeting. The order of business was something like this:
Each person declared how they chose to be identified.
The group overruled those who didn't want to do anything until some minorities could be
recruited.
Some movers and shakers volunteer to draw up the chapter charter. As they were all men, they
would recuse themselves from further action so the chapter wouldn't be dominated by men. The
group was about 90% men.
The Patriarchy was soundly denounced.
Yes. I don't see this as malevolent; the impulses are good-hearted (which is exactly what
makes "intersectionality" so dangerous). Kimberle Crenshaw endorsed Warren, by the way. OTOH,
one of the Combahee River Collective founders endorsed Sanders. Of course, Crenshaw's a
lawyer. PMC class solidarity is an impressive thing .
> Lenin didn't know what identity politics was but he described it in a different
context: haggling for privileges . I don't want to make this a diatribe on one
subject or to suggest that I'm not sensitive to the discrete forms of oppression facing
different groups but – and I know you write about this brilliantly – without some
kind of radical reckoning with these issues, groups like the DSA are liable to sectarian
disasters of exactly the kind envisioned (I suspect) by those who have most insidiously
articulated identity over class as the most significant feature of our social relations.
"Brilliant" [lambert blushes modestly]. Back at ya for "haggling for privileges."
> At some point, it will be necessary to realise that the Democratic Party is not
called the graveyard of social movements for nothing
History is a hard teacher. And where its lesson has been sadly confined to a small group
of cadres, as it were, this lesson is now going to be taught to millions by the Democrat
Establishment, and with whacks to the knuckles and expulsions, too. That's why I put up that
link to Mike Duncan on the Russian Revolution of 1905 the other day .
And when you answer that, can you make clear which context you are steeped in? I don't
know which side of the pond you live on, but our hallowed Constitution, in hindsight, pretty
much leads us here. It just ratchets everything rightward.
The claim is – and I am not sophisticated enough to either support or deny it, but
others I respect have made it – that our political structure via said Constitution will
only support more than two parties for only an election cycle or two. Lincoln introduced
himself as a Whig, but had to run as a Republican.
Yes, it goes that far back. Given today's sophisticated hold on the media levers by our
Elites, I think an effective third party is less likely than ever. Sure there's things called
the Working Families Party and stuff here and there, but their job is basically wrenching Dem
primaries.
PS: I actually am registered Green. It's my attempt to signal where my vote is. Little
good that seems to have done me.
In America at least, it's easy to be leftist when your personal well-being is not at stake
-- the left in the US has always had an upper-class tint and co-opted by the
professional-managerial class. BUT their well being does not depend on the outcome like it
does for the working classes. The UK and other countries have stronger social safety nets and
that does make a difference in people's politics.
As an older worker ( I could be your father) I know how these fights go -- it takes
decades of sheer intransigence to get anywhere. In a zillion little ways, every day, for
years. I don't know if Millenials understand this, its not a dress rehearsal. It's real. I do
believe the movement needs solid organizers and figureheads though -- most likely AOC will be
next, I hope. There needs to be a clear method of succession, among people who do *not*
compromise. A single stated set of goals, for a decade. And those who get out and volunteer
and vote.
I agree with some of what you write but I have yet to see any really adequate figureheads
of the sort you suggest as necessary. AOC, after her praise for John McCain is not one of
them.
I know this makes me sound intransigent and sectarian but it is and has always been a
problem in the left to fight beyond just nation-based working class interests. I'm not saying
AOC does that but she, like so many before her, have definitely sacrificed critique of
imperialism for a certain amount of mainstream coverage as far as her social democratic
advocacy goes.
AOC praised John McCain, Bernie has played up to Russiagate and the enduring myths about
Castro's Cuba despite making an obvious, uncontroversial point in the first place. This is
how it goes. And that's what I mean – it is a standard thing for Western politicians to
throw foreign affairs over the side when they are pressed – especially because the Borg
is most concerned with matters of Empire and therefore will attack on that above all else
(knowing, too, that the voting public cares much less about such issues than, say, Medicare
for All). Corbyn did the same thing when it came to Trident renewal, then Iraq, and finally
Israel.
(By the way, such capitulation got him nowhere – he was still slandered as an
anti-semite and I just finished an awful book about Oleg Gordievsky in which it is suggested
he was a useful idiot for the Czech intelligence services, along with Michael Foot!)
Socialism does not exist without a critique of imperialist/capitalist wars is what I
mean.
But I'm sorry, I know this isn't what you were talking about. The reason I brought it up,
however, is to illustrate the insidious ways in which freshly elected, occasionally 'radical'
politicians are institutionalised. It doesn't happen with bread and butter domestic issues
but rather foreign affairs, those distant concerns of experts and spooks.
And yet bringing this up gives a kind of window of opportunity and hope. There is no group
with better understanding of the real-world consequences of Empire than the urban and rural
working class. They are the ones providing sons and daughters for endless wars. The
overextension of empire is always going to provide its weakest points.
Sorry, I've rambled – these are just some thoughts as I try and get to grips with
what is to be done!
Well, no, actually its a good thing that you rambled -- I completely agree but from a
different angle perhaps.
The fact that socialism is even in contention in the US I think is a referendum on
imperialism and capitalism.
And the US way has certainly opened itself to criticism.
Frankly it amazes me that it is even happening at all, being that the Overton window has
been dragged so far to the Right in my lifetime.
I remember watching Nixon on TV, stating that he was not a crook. Today, he would be
considered to be an unelectable liberal, too far left.
I am not completely happy with the way that AOC and Sanders have had to toe the line with
the Establishment regarding foreign policy and etc. (and I don't think McCain was any kind of
saint). But I do believe that AOC and Sanders are trying to please multiple Masters. If they
don't do the whole "red-baiting" routine then they lose credibility with the system they are
part of -- and thereby lose influence. The voters are a different issue -- foreign affairs
are just not on the radar at all for most of the working class. The sole exception is those
who have family in the armed services. And yet without those voters, they wouldn't have any
influence to lose.
So basically, its a chess game. Washington DC has never ran on the truth. I'm pretty sure
AOC was just mouthing the words so she can accomplish some of her own left-wing goals. And
maybe Sanders is too --
If I might inject my two cents into this very interesting discussion, I believe
tempestteacup's ultimate point still stands: the Blob/industrialists/parties will suffer no
contest to their claims on power. Sure, they allow the occasional voice in the wilderness
– to do otherwise would lead to more radical activity I imagine – but the power
structures themselves seem quite robust to disturbances from the likes of Sanders and AOC.
While I agree that they are likely mouthing the words (Sanders once discussed abolishing the
CIA and one does not simply reconsider that view once one has reached that point
ideologically), I question whether it even matters It seems to me that a realistic vision of
socialism must be brought about independently of the existing state. After all, the social
groups that dominate the state also control the media, the military, the educational
institutions, and just about every other organ of power. In this framework, hijacking the
state as it exists is a tall order and actually reforming it within the rules of the game is
even more difficult. Isn't it worth considering the idea that left energy is better devoted
to forming alternative institutions and power structures?
The circle of wagons we are seeing around Biden's husk shows that they will fight tooth
and nail to keep from implementing even the most benign and basic social democratic reforms.
I can only see someone like Bernie or AOC winning real power in the face of a massive
economic meltdown and even then, they can win the social democratic reforms (which are
desirable) but why couldn't that same opportunity + working class radicalism be channeled
into actual systemic change; ie destroying the state as it currently exists and replacing it
with a people's democracy? (not the Chinese type please). This would require decades of hard
work, but so would replacing the democratic party with our version of Labour (and look where
they are).
Isn't it worth considering the idea that left energy is better devoted to forming
alternative institutions and power structures?
Very much agree -- I don't think I'm disagreeing with tempestteacup so much as looking
from a different angle.
For any of it to work, I think we will have to establish parallel institutions on a far
greater scale than Sander's campaign. One favorite of mine is worker co-ops, particularly in
the Rust Belt and Midwest.
I dream of being able to unite and organize existing co-ops and strengthen them to the
point that they could replace the old Sears Roebuck. Effectively workers would have to work
two jobs and participate in two different economies, to the extent that they were able -- but
having a fallback via co-op would certainly give them far more autonomy and power than any
existing structure.
The only reason the existing structures have any power at all, is due to their death grip
on the economy, and directly on peoples lives via economic means. Breaking that grip will
also require economic means I think.
Capital spending is likely in for a prolonged slump because the efforts to contain the
coronavirus will also cause economic growth in the world's advanced economies to slow in
2020
Industries that could be taking a big hit: tourism, airlines, mass entertainment, movies,
sporting events, restaurants, retail malls. A mild recession can't be ruled out. It depends on
how widespread cases are, how long any outbreaks last, and how spooked consumers and businesses
get.
A few businesses will benefit, such as eat-at-home groceries, e-commerce delivery, downloads
of apps and livestreaming.
... ... ...
However bad the situation gets, the hit to global trade is already a given. Expect shortages
of certain goods to begin by late March or April as inventories run out, especially so for
electronics, ingredients for generic drugs and automotive parts.
It is a catalyst. But future is unpredictable. The article is too deterministic and thus
silly. Multiple scenario are possible. The one thing that is missing in many official
pronouncements now is treating the general population as adults and outlining best case and worst
case scenario.
Before onset of neoliberalism, we used to encourage people who were sick to stay home from
work, and sick days were provided,
The economic and behavioral impacts are visible by reduction of regular crowds in cultural
and commercial centers. Demographically, it does hit urban people more than rural dwellers?
It's interesting that hardly anyone is thinking about the economic consequences of 10% of
aged baby boomers checking out this year. Lots of empty homes coming on the market.
For example, can closed schools are providing "distance learning" and teachers continue to be
paid? Or will "distance learning" be off-shored to some corp. somewhere and teachers be laid
off?
This is it! The party is over. The world is now facing the gravest economic and social
downturn in Modern Times (18th century).
We are now entering a period of global crisis that will change the world for a very long
time to come. This should come as no surprise to the people who have studied history and also
read my articles for the last few years. Many others have also warned about the same thing. But
since MSM never talks about the excesses in the world or the risks, 99.9% of people are totally
unprepared for what is coming next.
... ... ...
CORONAVIRUS IS NOT THE CAUSE BUT THE CATALYST
Investors are obviously linking the stock market crashes to the Coronavirus but we must
remember that the virus is not the cause of the falls but only the catalyst. Stocks around the
world have been overvalued on many criteria for quite some time.
The majority of people today are not worried about stocks but instead about the Coronavirus.
Most of us don't understand it since authorities around the world suppress the truth when it
comes to numbers of infected and fatalities . China seems never to have told the truth about
the virus and many countries have followed suit.
The pandemic is spreading exponentially and it can take 3-4 weeks before it breaks out from
the time you are infected.
... I would not be surprised if in the end governments tell people to continue as normal
rather than to quarantine everyone. If the mortality rate is on average not more than 2%, this
is a calculated risk that the authorities are likely to take.
To totally close down countries and production, leading to shortages of food and medicine,
will probably kill more people over time than the virus itself.
FOR INVESTORS BAD NEWS IS
GOOD NEWS – UNTIL NOW
So whilst ordinary people around the world are concerned with the Coronavirus, investors are
focusing on crashing stock markets. Most people are blissfully unaware of the Dow's biggest
point fall ever last week of 4,000 points (14%) or similar falls in other world markets.
Investors love bad news like lower earnings or poor economic figures since this leads to
more economic stimulus. So until a week ago, markets loved the fact that central banks around
the world have embarked on what will be the biggest money printing exercise in history.
Investors are not concerned about the reasons for the massive liquidity injections which are
due to problems in the world's financial system. Instead, more money printing means more credit
and more cash availability for stock market investors. So bad news for the economy has created
ever higher stocks reaching the sky.
Clearly, central banks will soon accelerate money printing and the ones that can, like the
US, will lower rates. The 1/2% rate cut by the Fed on Tuesday seems like panic action. Since
the effects in the US of the Coronavirus have so far been minor, the problems are clearly in
the financial system. Lower rates, more repos, more QE etc. There are clearly major problems in
the system.
The rate cut combined with money printing might create quick bounces in stocks, sucking
everyone in. But this time money printing will only have a very brief effect. Because any
correction up will be short lived and the subsequent big fall will be devastating. So this is
definitely not the time to buy the dips. For anyone in the stock market, much better to get out
on the bounces.
"... Nowhere, though, is the rusty, rickety nature of America's civic society more recently evident than in the hilariously, harrowingly inept response to the advent of the COVID-19 virus as a global contagion. Whether it is more or less dangerous and deadly than the media portrays is quite beside the point. The abject incapacity of any government, least of all the feds, to offer even simple, sensible guidance, much less mobilize national resources to examine, investigate and ameliorate the potential threat to human health and well-being is astonishing, even to a tired old cynic like me. At present, the most proactive step has been to pressure the Federal Reserve into goosing the stock market -- the sort of pagan expiation of dark spirits that you'd expect in a more primitive world, when a volcano blew or an earthquake hit. ..."
As much as I like Bernie Sanders and hope he prevails in the Democratic primary, I confess
that there's something gray and depressing about a crusty, seventy-something, New-Deal liberal representing the great electoral hope
of the American left. There are, of course, a number of engaging young progressives in office now, but the fame and near-celebrity
profiles of newcomers like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez belie the still fundamentally local power bases
of these congresswomen, none of whom has yet been tested even in a statewide election. Victories at the state and local levels have
been far outpaced by gains by so-called moderates and centrists, and even these barely dent the thousands of seats and offices lost
to radical conservatives during the desultory administration of Barack Obama.
In the campaign for the presidential nomination, and in the aftermath of the multiple "Super Tuesday" primary contests, the Democratic
race has become a two-man contest, pitting the insurrectionary Sanders against the increasingly incoherent Joe Biden. In Biden, Democrats
are presented with a former senator for America's onshore but off-shore-style tax haven, Delaware, and a man who was selected as
the most demographically inoffensive running mate for the then-seemingly-radical campaign of Barack Obama.
Until an eleventh-hour victory in South Carolina, the predominant narrative in the media was that Biden was cooked -- a spent
force whose residually strong national poll numbers reflected name recognition and reserves of nostalgia for the Obama years. Biden's
revival was buoyed by the support of the state's relatively conservative, older African American population, and then by his Super-Tuesday
success just a few days later. (It didn't hurt that the vagaries of election season allowed him to avoid another crackpot debate
performance or other testament to his rambling incomprehensibility in the interim.)
But that single victory and the synchronized withdrawals and endorsements by Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar created a new narrative.
Seemingly overnight, Biden had become a scrappy fighter with a never-say-die attitude, a Clintonian Comeback Kid.
This drove many older Democratic voters -- an inherently timorous group conditioned by decades of "The West Wing" and MSNBC to
believe they're consultants and strategists rather than citizens and constituents -- toward the more familiar, pedigreed candidate.
They simply did not care that Biden has been wrong, often aggressively and outspokenly so, on every significant issue for the last
forty years.
After blowing half a billion dollars on a vanity campaign that won him American Samoa, Michael Bloomberg promptly bowed out and
endorsed Biden as well, promising to dedicate his vast resources toward electing Joe.
Beyond the quixotic and indefatigable Tulsi Gabbard, the only candidate left standing was Elizabeth Warren -- also in her
70s and running on fumes since an ill-conceived and ill-fated pivot away from "Medicare for All." This ruined her relationship with
the socialist left and any chance of serving as a bridge between the activist wing of the party and its constituency of urban professionals,
if one could have existed to begin with. ( Editor's note: Warren has since dropped out. )
Looming is yet another septuagenarian, Donald Trump, whose ongoing mental decompensation remains the great unspeakable truth in
corporate media. Although frequently hostile to him, with the obvious exception of Fox News, mainstream outlets continue to edit
his transcripts "for clarity and concision," as the publishing saying goes, laundering the self-evident lunacy of his almost every
public utterance like a gaggle of Soviets turning the somnolent ravings of an agèd commissar into readable prose for the next day's
news.
I use the Soviet metaphor consciously. Long before I started dating and then married a scholar of Russian, I had a certain soft
spot for the country, alternately maligned as an eternal basket case and an implacably cunning enemy that had sacrificed something
like fifty times the number of Americans killed in every American war combined to defeat the Nazis. And now that I am shacked
up with a Russianist and have visited the place a couple of times, I've come to see it not as a shadow or opposite of our own vast,
weird nation but as a sibling of sorts.
The crass red-scare fantasies that characterize so many of the present narratives around election interference and the criminal
Trump-Russia demimonde are as infuriating as they are baroquely silly. And yet there is a certain late-Soviet pallor hanging over
America, even if on a material level our empire really does seem more robust than theirs ever was. (Once again, it bears mentioning
that we never lost fifty million people in a war.)
There is a sense, despite the apparent ideological contestations of our ongoing presidential elections, of a group of gerontocrats
battling to run what looks less and less like a traditional state than the palace apparatus of an ancient empire that has acquired
its imperium almost by accident. As the press critic and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen
observed in the fall of last year, "There
is no White House. Not in the sense that journalists have always used that term. It's just Trump -- and people who work in the building.
That they are reading from the same page cannot be assumed. The words, 'the White House' are still in use, but they have no clear
referent."
The hollowed-out nature of the American state has been evident for some time and certainly predates Donald Trump, even if his
simultaneously feckless and malicious administration exacerbates the sense of social and economic precariousness. Our biggest city
can't build and maintain its transit system. Our bridges collapse. We can't marshal our resources to even pretend to do something
about climate change.
The few actual achievements of the Obama administration -- its rapprochements with Cuba and Iran -- collapsed almost immediately
on the whims of his successor while his cruelest policies -- the drone assassinations; the militarized border; the detentions --
metastasized and grew crueler.
Our municipal jails have become debtors' prisons as strapped municipalities turn to shaking down poor people and people of color
to manage shrinking tax bases. Meanwhile, our health care system is the worst in the developed world -- an impenetrable skein of
rent-seeking local monopolies that cost society trillions and bankrupt hundreds of thousands of individuals each year.
Nowhere, though, is the rusty, rickety nature of America's civic society more recently evident than in the hilariously, harrowingly
inept response to the advent of the COVID-19 virus as a global contagion. Whether it is more or less dangerous and deadly than the
media portrays is quite beside the point. The abject incapacity of any government, least of all the feds, to offer even simple, sensible
guidance, much less mobilize national resources to examine, investigate and ameliorate the potential threat to human health and well-being
is astonishing, even to a tired old cynic like me. At present, the most proactive step has been to pressure the Federal Reserve into
goosing the stock market -- the sort of pagan expiation of dark spirits that you'd expect in a more primitive world, when a volcano
blew or an earthquake hit.
Even elections seem beyond our capabilities at this point. In Texas, people waited for up to seven hours to cast votes on decrepit
machines, and we still do not have official final results from the Iowa caucuses -- a fact little mentioned now that the primary
season has moved on.
On the eve of the French Revolution, the Swiss-born theorist, journalist, and politician Jean-Paul Marat wrote, "No, liberty is
not made for us: we are too ignorant, too vain, too presumptuous, too cowardly, too vile, too corrupt, too attached to rest and to
pleasure, too much slaves to fortune to ever know the true price of liberty. We boast of being free! To show how much we have become
slaves, it is enough just to cast a glance on the capital and examine the morals of its inhabitants."
Donald Trump is in the White House, and his allies in Congress, smarting from his impeachment and failed Senate trial, will now
come out with allegations about the sketchy business dealings of one of his likely opponent's adult sons. Well. Here we are.
Jacob Bacharach is the author of the novels "The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates" and "The Bend of the World."
His most recent book is "A Cool Customer: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking."
After a community transmitted case of coronavirus was reported in California,
Dr. Drew Pinsky talks about the coronavirus:
PINSKY: I don't know what they're talking about. We used to point at the way Indiana
responded to the opiate and the HIV epidemic as the model for the country. I don't know what
they're talking about. The only reason I felt comfortable with Pence as Vice President was I
was aware of his track record in Indiana in handling these serious problems, and they handled
them better than most states did, almost any other state. So, I don't know what the hell
people are talking about. That is fake news...
We have in the United States 24 million cases of flu-like illness, 180,000
hospitalizations, 16,000 dead from influenza. We have zero deaths from coronavirus. We have
almost no cases. There are people walking around out there with the virus that don't even
know they have it, it's so mild.
So it's going to be much more widespread than we knew. It's
going to be much milder than we knew. The 1.7% fatality rate is going to fall. Where was the
press during the Mediterranean Corona outbreak, where the fatality rate was 41%? Why didn't
they get crazed about MERS or SARS?
This is an overblown press-created hysteria. This thing
is well in hand. President Trump is absolutely correct.
"... As Fastow explained, in finance, the difference between a loophole and fraud isn't always easy to identify. And that may be something the U.S. fracking industry is working to its advantage. ..."
Posted on March 6,
2020 by Yves
Smith Yves here. It really is remarkable how super low interest rates have led investors on
a widespread basis to pour money down ratholes. Unicorns is one. Another has been fracking,
which despite being another widespread cash sink, remarkably has kept sucking in funding.
As we pointed out in 2014 :
John Dizard at the
Financial Times (hat tip Scott) gives a more intriguing piece of the puzzle: the degree
to which production is still chugging along despite it being uneconomical. The oil majors
have been criticized for levering up to continue developing when it is cash-flow negative;
they are presumably betting that prices will be much higher in short order.
But the same thing is happening further down the food chain, among players that don't
begin to have the deep pockets of the industry behemoths: many of them are still in "drill
baby, drill" mode. Per Dizard:
Even long-time energy industry people cannot remember an overinvestment cycle lasting as
long as the one in unconventional US resources. It is not just the hydrocarbon engineers
who have created this bubble; there are the financial engineers who came up with new ways
to pay for it.
Justin Mikulka argues that one reason these persistently unprofitable fracking companies
keep going is via fraud.
By Justin Mikulka, a freelance writer, audio and video producer living in Trumansburg,
NY. Originally published at DeSmogBlog
In a 2016 interview with Fraud Magazine , former Enron
CFO Andrew Fastow explained what he thought made him so successful while at the former energy
corporation that's now infamous for financial scandal.
"I think my ability to do structured financing, to finance things off-balance sheet and to
find ways to manipulate financial statements -- there's no nice way to say it. Like I said at
the conference, I was good at finding loopholes."
As Fastow explained, in finance, the difference between a loophole and fraud isn't always
easy to identify. And that may be something the U.S. fracking industry is working to its
advantage.
Fastow, the convicted fraudster, does admit that what they did at Enron misled investors.
"We created something that was monstrously misleading, but any one of those deals alone wasn't
necessarily considered fraudulent," he said.
Fast-forward to today and a different part of the energy industry: The U.S. shale oil and
gas industry has lost more than a quarter trillion dollars since 2007, while being sold to
investors as an economic boom, even at oil prices much lower than those of recent years. Does
that financial mismatch seem misleading? Or perhaps, familiar?
In an unexpected twist, Fastow now gives talks to the energy industry on ethical leadership.
Sounding the Alarm
Bethany McLean was the first reporter to question whether Enron was a financially sound
company in a 2001 article
for Fortune magazine. McLean went on to co-author the book The Smartest Guys in the
Room , which documented the fall of Enron due to its fraudulent practices, including the
ones Fastow engineered.
In 2018, McLean also published the book Saudi America , which highlighted many of the
financial challenges the fracking industry has faced. In a recent interview for Texas Monthly's
podcast Boomtown , McLean
explained one of the very accepted and blatantly misleading practices of the fracking
industry:
I'd raise a couple of points. One is that companies have long hyped these break-even
numbers. They say we can break even at $25 a barrel, we can break even at $20 a barrel. And
then you look at their consolidated financial statements and they are losing money. And so
something is going wrong the people called it to me [sic] corporate math or investor
economics. So they were trying to put together these investor pitch decks that would show
investors a set of economics that weren't real. So they would show you that they could break
even on a well at $25 barrel of oil but then yet you'd go to the corporate financial
statements and they were losing money.
Is that a loophole? Where you can openly misrepresent to investors the financial reality of
your business? Or is it fraud?
As more and more players in the fracking industry run out of options and file for
bankruptcy, investors are beginning to ask questions about why all the money is gone.
"This is an industry that has always been filled with promoters and stock scams and
swindlers and people have made billions when investors have lost their shirts."
Much like with the housing crisis that caused the financial crisis of 2008, the fracking
boom has led to Wall Street bankers finding innovative ways to finance a money-losing endeavor.
Some companies are now even
selling bonds based on future well performance , a concept similar to the
mortgage-backed securities that led to the 2008 housing crisis.
Another Wall Street invention is what is called a "special purpose acquisition company" (
SPAC ), or, as they are also known,
blank check companies. The way these investments work is a big bank or private equity firm
backs a management team to raise money for the SPAC with the agreement that the leaders of the
SPAC will then at some point make a "special purpose acquisition" -- which means they will find
an existing company and buy it.
They are called blank check companies because the management is given a blank check to buy
whatever they choose. In the 1980s, the
Wall Street Journal ( WSJ ) noted that "blank-check companies were often associated with
penny-stock frauds." In a 2017 article on the oil industry, the
WSJ reported that " SPAC s were a hallmark of the frothy days before the financial crisis
[of 2008]."
Understandably, SPAC s were often seen as a risky investment, but much like with the housing
crisis, the biggest names on Wall Street are getting involved and giving the concept
legitimacy, with Goldman Sachs starting to back SPAC s in 2016. And new fracking companies have
come about as a result.
Ben Dell, a managing partner at investment firm Kimmeridge Energy, explained one of the
risks of SPAC investments to the Wall Street Journal. " SPAC management teams have an incentive
to spend the money they have raised no matter what, so they can collect fees and pay themselves
a salary and stock options at the company they purchase," Dell said.
" SPAC s are the most egregious example in the industry of executive misalignment with
investors," Dell
told the WSJ .
As I
have previously reported , one of the problems with the fracking industry is that CEO s are
paid very well even when the companies lose money. According to Dell, SPAC s take this problem
to a new "egregious" level.
Alta Mesa: A Star Is Born
To successfully raise money for a blank check company, having some star power in the
management helps. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, investments in SPAC s "
are largely bets on their executives ."
Jim Hackett would seem to be the ideal candidate to lead a SPAC in the fracking industry.
Hackett has an impressive resume: the former CEO of fracking company Anadarko, former
chairman
of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas , an executive committee member of the industry
lobbying group American Petroleum Institute ,
and
partner at the major private equity firm Riverstone Holdings.
In 2013 Hackett retired from Anadarko to attend Harvard Divinity School to get a degree in
theology. However, he was still a partner at Riverstone and in 2017 was lured back to the
fracking business to run a SPAC backed by Riverstone.
The SPAC raised a billion dollars while being advised by the biggest names in the business,
including Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. The initial blank check company was called Silver Run
Acquisition Corp. II .
Hackett used the money to buy two companies in Oklahoma -- an oil producer and a pipeline --
and the new combined company Alta Mesa was valued at $3.8 billion.
The Future Was Bright for Alta Mesa
Hackett and Alta Mesa had big plans for making money fracking wells in Oklahoma, which
included forecasts for big increases in oil and gas production from the newly acquired assets
with very low break-even numbers.
When the Wall Street Journal reported the creation of Alta Mesa,
it noted , "Alta Mesa's core acreage in Northeast Kingfisher County has among the lowest
breakevens in the U.S. at around $25 per barrel, the company said." Because oil was well over
that price at the time, the future looked good, according to Hackett and Alta Mesa. Forbes
reported that Hackett said Alta Mesa's holdings were "oil that will be economic even at $40
WTI [West Texas Intermediate]" and oil has been well over that mark since Hackett made that
statement in 2017.
Like break-even numbers, another area where misleading investors in the oil industry might
be particularly easy is making overly optimistic forecasts about how much oil will be produced
by future wells. The Wall Street Journal
has documented this as a significant problem for the U.S. shale industry.
Description of Alta Mesa assets in investor proxy statement. Credit: Screen capture from
proxy
statement.
In early 2018 when touting the potential of the proposed new company Alta Mesa, Hackett said
that "its average well would produce nearly 250,000 barrels of oil over its life." A year
later, Alta Mesa said it expected those wells would produce less than half that, only 120,000
barrels of oil over the life of the well.
Later in 2019, Alta Mesa filed for bankruptcy after writing down its assets by $3.1 billion.
The billion-dollar blank check had been spent, and it took less than two years to lose it
all.
SEC Investigation and Multiple Investor Lawsuits
Alta Mesa's assets were sold off earlier this year. The SEC declined to comment on the
status of the investigation.
In May 2019,
the Houston Chronicle reported , "Alta Mesa also is facing a series of lawsuits. Some
shareholders are suing claiming they were defrauded and lied to about the value of the company
and its assets when the company was formed."
One lawsuit filed by the Plumbers and Pipefitters National Pension Fund claims that the
proxy statement for Alta Mesa contained materially false and misleading information. That
filing lays out a lot of facts to support that claim.
Yet another lawsuit has been filed against Riverstone for " misleading
statements ."
Investors are saying they were misled by Hackett and Riverstone. The allegations are based
on the claims that were made about how much oil the company could produce. In hindsight, those
claims appeared wildly inaccurate and misleading. But is that fraud? Or just taking advantage
of a loophole?
In January, the Houston Chronicle summed up the situation as it described Alta Mesa's downfall : "It was a dramatic fall from grace after
significantly overestimating its potential in Oklahoma's STACK shale play "
While Alta Mesa is a spectacular example of how fast the fracking business can make large
sums of money disappear after "significantly overestimating its potential," it also likely
marks the beginning of investor lawsuits against many other failing fracking companies with
similar histories.
Learning From Enron
When Jim Hackett decided to go to Harvard Divinity School, several favorable profiles about
his choice were written, including one on the Harvard website.
That article noted that one of the reasons Hackett decided to go to school was because of "the
collapse of Enron, a disaster that he attributed to 'a failure in leadership' among people he
knew well."
The speed with which Hackett and Alta Mesa went bankrupt is remarkable, indicating a likely
failure in leadership.
However, Hackett seems to have learned something from former Enron executive Andrew Fastow:
that there is work for former executives like them to teach the energy industry about ethics
and morality.
Fraud? Or Just a Laughing Matter?
Good reporting is hard work but sometimes involves a bit of luck. Like when a
Wall Street Journal reporter , in a room full of people hired to make forecasts of fracked
oil and gas production, learned about the existence of much more accurate methods for
predicting that oil production. And also learned that with accuracy comes much lower estimates
of shale oil reserves.
The WSJ article that followed quoted Texas A&M professor and expert on calculating oil
and gas reserves John Lee. "There are a number of practices that are almost inevitably going to
lead to overestimates," said Lee. Those are the practices used by the industry, with Alta Mesa
serving as just one example.
Overestimates are why Alta Mesa received funding but now no longer exists.
The Wall Street Journal reported that during a presentation given by Lee, an audience member
"stood up and challenged the engineers in attendance," asking why the forecasters weren't using
accurate models like the ones that were available -- as Lee had described.
Another audience member explained the reason.
" Because we own stock," replied another engineer, "sparking laughter," according to the
Wall Street Journal.
Is it misleading to laugh at your company's investors if you know the estimates you are
giving them are inflated, but because you own the stock that benefits from those estimates, you
do it anyway? Is that fraud? Perhaps that depends on if you get you get ethics lessons from
Andrew Fastow and Jim Hackett.
Will the biggest innovation of the fracking revolution be making financial fraud a laughing
matter?
A lot of people on EFT like to talk about how shale is fraudulent. That's simply not
true:
You can't commit fraud when the rules are so lax you can just make shit up and it's still
allowed.
While I've little doubt there is a lot of fraud, so much of the stupidity around fracking
comes down to the old saying that its hard to make a man undrestand something when his job is
to not understand it.
The financing of the oil and gas industry is almost entirely dependent on projections
– projections of flow per well, and projections of future prices. All you need to do is
make a few optimistic projections of one or both, and you've suddenly turned a dud into a
highly valuable asset. Anyone can look at the pricing and question it, but with oil/gas, that
is much harder with 'novel' types of well as there are few if any precedents. So if someone
says 'the well is producing X per day, we can continue this flow for 3 years and when thats
finished, we can drill down another 200 metres and replicate the same flow', there is nobody
to contradict it. The drilling guys aren't going to argue, they want to keep their jobs. The
geologist isn't going to argue, he has his mortgage to pay. The senior manager won't argue,
he wants a promotion. The drilling company owners won't argue, they want to cash out. And the
Wall Street financier won't argue, because he can pass on the risk to the equivelent of the
last booms 'German bankers'.
So when someone like Arthur Berman – a geologist who has continuously being
questioning the underlying geological assumptions – raises concerns – he's
listened to politely, even invited to some conferences, but is otherwise ignored. Because its
not in anyones interest to listen. There is literally nobody who's job it is to shout 'stop'.
So much for self regulating markets.
While there may well be very severe economic consequences if and when this blows up in
everyones face (and I suspect that Covid-19 will be the catalyst for this, oil demand is
collapsing day by day), the big loser is the planet we depend on for our survival.
I live in NY on the PA border. Fracking is still happening south in PA but is only a
fraction of what it once was. If you drive into PA you will see lots full of fracking
materials that have sat there for a long time. At first for about two years it was a boom.
The activity from fracking was amazing. Then as fast as it started it slowed down to a crawl.
There are a few reasons in my opinion. The so called sweet sports were quickly fracked
leaving less attractive sights. It was concealed that a fracked well produced most of it's
gas in the first two years. After that the production from a well dropped off drastically.
Locals soon lost their enthusiasm for fracking.There is still some fracking but it is hardly
noticeable. Local people thought this would be great but attitudes soon soured. A few made
big bucks at the expense of the rest. The fracking was in former coal country. The difference
is coal lasted a lot longer. Now the majority of people in the area oppose fracking. I'm
thankful that NY state banned fracking because of the negatives associated with fracking. I
own 50 acres near the PA border. Before fracking was banned I was constantly hounded by
leasing companies. I refuse to lease because to me my land was more important than a few
bucks. I hope in my life time NY doesn't reverse the fracking ban. On another note there are
wind farms where I live. I would leas to a wind company because there are fewer negatives and
it's less intrusive.
The good news is that if the companies were chasing you, you own the minerals. You can
donate them to a conservation land trust and assure that no mineral extraction takes place,
and get a tax benefit for the foregone production.
It can be argued that the money invested in many fracking companies with such inflated
pay-back periods, ROIs or breakeven estimates, apart from fraud, could be considered as a
private subsidy, just like Uber investors subsidize Uber taxi services. If we can blame it to
low interest rates resulting in such subsidies, for fracking oil, unicorns, education,
housing etc. to my knowledge this has only been argued in very few sites like here at NC or
Wolf Street but merits a close examination. If pension and mutual funds are pouring a lot of
money in such business with low to negative returns what consequences are to be expected in
the future?
Eight to Ten years ago you would have seen giant trucks moving water and dirt from
fracking sites when you got off the turnpike around Donegal PA. Since about 2015 or 2016 i'd
say that completely died. Pittsburgh actually had one year of population gain due to the
fracking boom but thats done. Yves mentioned investors and low interest rates chasing bad
investments and fraud. I'd say the same thing is going on in healthcare based on my exp. of
it and the amount of money floating around. We need higher interest rates to nip this stuff
in the bud and re-balance the economy.
This pretty much says it all regarding the health of our eCONomy, but hey, after it all
falls apart we should have plenty of reformed criminals to teach ethics classes
"The Wall Street Journal reported that during a presentation given by Lee, an audience
member "stood up and challenged the engineers in attendance," asking why the forecasters
weren't using accurate models like the ones that were available -- as Lee had described.
Another audience member explained the reason.
"Because we own stock," replied another engineer, "sparking laughter," according to the
Wall Street Journal."
In a 2016 interview with Fraud Magazine,
==============================================
I have to say, I was shocked, SHOCKED to find that there is a magazine actually, only devoted
to fraud – that is published bi-monthly.
AND than I was shocked to find out that the magaine actually, only devoted to fraud is ONLY
published bi-monthly
Is the U.S. Fracking Boom Based on Fraud? Is the Pope Catholic? There are going to have to
be major structural changes in the world's economy in the next few years and with the demand
for oil dropping, prices have gotten cheaper which is turning fracking into a non-profit
industry. In any case, how are you suppose to frack with sick crews? This is one industry
that needs to go away before it causes any more damage. You'd find more honesty in a boiler
room brokerage firm than in this industry.
There's a recent documentary called The Price of Everything that is about the enormous
sums being paid for every latest fad in modern art. The show says that all the great masters,
old and new, have been locked up by museums or the super rich and so a recent flood of new
investors are looking for any excuse to spend lots of money on paintings. Apparently there is
so much money sloshing around at the top of our unequal economy that that these plutocrats
don't even care if they lose their shirts on bad investments. The main thing is to keep it
out of the hands of the poor.
Clearly we as a society are suffering from affluenza, at least among the elites who should
all be virus quarantined and then maybe we will forget to check back.The show tries to
pretend that this money driven art world is a cool thing. It had this viewer thinking of
guillotines.
Yes, like all the people who cannot see the art. It's mostly buried in storage. What is
the point of having over two thousand years of art from multiple civilizations, if most of it
is hidden away and often only known from catalog descriptions or cramped tiny pictures.
You must mean the insiders who suckered the rubes into taking shares off their hands at
the IPO. IIRC the IPO price was over $70/share. Right now it's just under $32 with no signs
of every being a profitable enterprise.
Grifters, charlatans and mountebanks everywhere you look.
Charging mineral resource rent, which everyone has an equal claim to, would help to reduce
the tendency of financial shenanigans. The profit motive is crack to rent seekers.
Speaking of Enron, it is perhaps appropriate that my employer's head of non core assets,
toxic waste for fire sale, came from Enron. Standard Chartered has some, too.
I think the big issue goes back to the investors and bond rating agencies, similar to the
subprime mortgage crisis. If bondholders aren't willing to do the homework, then they don't
get paid for the risk that they are undertaking. with the multiple prediction tools for well
production, you can make up an optimistic and pessimistic case. If the bond yield doesn't
cover that risk to your satisfaction, then you don't buy the bond or you demand a higher
interest yield and lower bond price.
Instead, it seems like the industry is raising money from people who don't want to think
more than a few months ahead on a multi-year investment. The challenges faced by the fracking
industry have been well publicized for several years now. If an investor doesn't understand
those challenges now and isn't looking at specific methods of calculating production yield
etc., then they have only themselves to blame if their investment loses money.
This is a very different issue than if somebody flat out lies about whether or not wells
exist etc.
A single well can make financial sense even if there will never be a net profit from it.
Fracking is pretty similar to the Hollywood film industry where nobody ever has any net
profits despite living high on the hog. "Don't ever settle for net profits. It's called
'creative accounting'." – Lynda Carter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
I dunno. There may be a sucker born every minute, but I can't picture enough of them
getting born with a million (or billion) Dollars to blow on rackets like this to keep it
going this long.
Sad to see that the Plumbers' Union Pension Fund was a victim; I hope that's not a
pattern, but it would make sense. If it's a pattern, then it's no wonder the Fed tried so
hard to postpone the next Crash until after the elections. How much junk paper has Wall
Street sold to other Pension Funds? States & Municipalities are already squeezed by
"unfunded liabilities"; how much repackaged funky Fracking paper are held by public
(governmental) agencies? Damn, this is gonna be a mess.
I'd advise investing in popcorn, except that my 401k will probably evaporate soon, so
maybe it's pitchforks.
CFO Fastow of Enron. How nice to see him land on his feet. The company made listening to
the rolling blackout reports for California while driving to work a requirement.
. In the spirit of charity, we should give credit where it's due: Warren really did become
the "
unity candidate " that she always proclaimed herself to be. She displayed an astounding
capacity to bring together a polarized country around their shared distaste for her
candidacy.
Compiling a complete discography of Warren's detractors would be an impossible feat, but for
the sake of partisan schadenfreude, we should briefly revisit the greatest hits. These include
the Native American tribal leaders who weren't particularly fond of a wealthy white Harvard
professor claiming their ethnicity for personal gain (even co-authoring a cooking guide titled
The Pow Wow Chow Native American Cookbook ), the Bernie Sanders supporters infuriated
by Warren's cynical attempts to paint their candidate as a woman-hating misogynist,
police unions offended by Warren's
open dishonesty about violence in law enforcement, religious conservatives who found her
contemptuous dismissal of anyone with traditionalist views of sexual morality to be in
profoundly bad taste, and pro-lifers (who still comprise
34 percent of the Democratic electorate ) for whom Warren's
radically pro-abortion policy objectives were unconscionable.
It's worth noting, of course, that this is just a small slice of the groups that found
Warren enormously unlikeable. The senator's casual-at-best relationship with the truth (
listing herself as as "woman of color" in Harvard's faculty listing,
claiming that she was fired from a teaching position for being pregnant,
refusing to admit that her various spending plans would require raising taxes on the middle
class, and so on) probably didn't help. And shockingly, her painfully contrived attempts at
catering to the woke activist base (vocal
support for reparations,
pledging to let a transgender child pick her secretary of education,
endorsing affirmative action for non-binary people) paired with her technocratically
manicured professorial wonkiness -- she's got a plan for that! -- never caught fire in the
blue-collar neighborhoods in the Midwest and South.
... ... ...
Senator Warren, we hardly knew ye.
Nate Hochman is an undergraduate student at Colorado College and a Young Voices
contributor. You can follow him at Twitter
@njhochman .
by Helen
Buyniski , RT A notorious hedge-funder who's left a trail of broken companies (and
countries) in his wake has set his sights on ousting Twitter's Jack Dorsey. Users complaining
about new features should know the platform may never be the same. Elliott Management,
euphemistically called an "activist investor" by timid media who fear its legendary
founder Paul Singer, has reportedly snapped up a four percent ($1 billion) stake in Twitter,
nominating four directors to its board as the start of a bid to oust Dorsey. The hedge fund
supposedly resents the CEO dividing his attentions between Twitter, Square, and a six-month
move to Africa, believing Twitter is capable of churning out bigger profits. Like any good
hedge fund – so the narrative goes – they just want the value of the company to
increase (stock jumped seven percent on the news).
What this coverage leaves out – and what makes Twitter's plight more than the usual
business scrap – is Singer's history. A major Republican donor and huge booster for
Israel, he's also a notoriously ruthless businessman who embodies "vulture capitalism,"
leaving a trail of asset-stripped companies and even a few economically-ruined countries in his
wake over his insanely profitable career. Media coverage of Singer's interest in Twitter has
gone to great lengths to present his interest in the platform as "
strictly business-related ," however, and some conservatives have even gotten excited
by the thought that the neocon Singer will end the ideologically-motivated censorship they
claim to experience on the platform – but nothing could be further from
reality.
Here come the vultures
Fox News' Tucker Carlson profiled Elliott Management's strategy in December thus: "Buy a
distressed company, outsource the jobs, liquidate the valuable assets, fire middle management,
and once the smoke has cleared, dump what remains to the highest bidder, often in Asia."
Amid the financial crash of 2008, Elliott, with other hedge funds, acquired distressed US auto
parts supplier Delphi, took billions in bailout money from the Obama government (a transaction
the president's "auto-czar" compared to "extortion" ), then offloaded so many
jobs overseas that 25 factories were forced to close, putting tens of thousands of union and
white-collar workers out on the street, as well as slashing pensions. Elliott Management made
over $1 billion from the deal
.
When Singer's fund sinks its teeth into its prey, it does not let go, and most victims have
learned to give up and hope for a quick death. When Elliott bought an 11 percent stake in
outdoors retailer Cabela's, it began pushing for a sale of what was then a profitable company.
The management so feared Singer that it sold within a year, sending stock prices through the
roof but putting almost 2,000 people out of their jobs, setting off a downward spiral that,
Carlson says, "destroyed" Cabela's hometown of Sidney, Nebraska, whose residents feared
to even speak about the hedge funder on camera four years later. AT&T similarly ran for its
life when Singer's fund bit off a $3.2 billion stake of the company in September, acquiescing
to several demands within a month (and there's still time for the rest).
Those who don't acquiesce are guaranteed to suffer. After Elliott Management bought up a
chunk of its debt, the country of Argentina defaulted, holding out for 15 years on Singer's
attempts to collect. A 13-year legal battle ensued, during which Singer's fund seized an
Argentine naval ship to prove they were serious about getting paid. Then-president Cristina
Fernandez denounced the "Vulture Lord," but her replacement, Mauricio Macri, finally
agreed in 2016 to pay up – just in time for the threat of another
debt default .
Peru and Congo have similarly felt the sting of Elliott Management's tactics, having their
distressed debt snapped up and then weaponized against them in court. And even when Singer
doesn't win, his opponents lose. Korean electronics giant Samsung was able to fight off his
takeover efforts when he tried to block a move by the Lee family to consolidate their holdings,
but the bitter battle ended in a five-year prison sentence for company head Jay Y. Lee on
bribery
charges and the impeachment of South Korean president Park Geun-hye.
the
ideologically-motivated vultures, that is
Singer's corporate interests overseas don't stop at outsourcing to cut costs, however. He
founded an organization called Start-Up Nation Central to facilitate the transfer of huge
chunks of the US tech industry to Israel. The initiative seeks to counter the Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions movement by making Israel essentially boycott-proof, and Singer has
accordingly used his billions to
push American tech firms into Israel – Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple
all have research and development centers there as of 2016. If he gets control of Twitter, the
company's US employees may be surprised to find their replacements speaking Hebrew, not
Chinese.
As for the conservatives who think Singer will defend them from Twitter censorship? Singer
was a hardcore anti-Trumper in 2015, backing Florida Senator Marco Rubio and funding the
prototype of the notorious Steele dossier. Former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon "
declared
war " on the billionaire in 2017 upon learning of his involvement. While Singer
financially backs Trump now, journalist Philip Weiss and others have suggested the hedge funder
"cut a deal with Trump on Israel," offering his support in exchange for Trump going
all-in on "protecting" the Jewish State.
Singer is the second-largest donor to the bloodthirsty think tank Foundation for Defense of
Democracies and also supports JINSA and the American Enterprise Institute – all
dyed-in-the-wool neocon groups cheerleading for war with Iran as they did in Iraq. If Trump's
"America-first" base thinks Singer is going to fight for their free speech on Twitter,
they're about to get a rude awakening. Anti-war voices on both sides of the spectrum will
likely find the censorship intensified to the point where they long for the days of mere shadow
banning.
Battle of the billionaires
Dorsey is prepared to stand and fight – for now. He announced on Thursday he'd put his
plans to live in Africa for six months on hold, supposedly due to the coronavirus epidemic.
Meanwhile, Dorsey's fellow tech tycoon Elon Musk has
pledged to help him fight the takeover, tweeting his support on Monday, and Twitter
employees pledged their support with the #webackjack hashtag.
Twitter users complaining about the "Snapchatization" of their beloved platform
should realize they're looking at something quite a bit more serious than the rollout of an
unpopular feature. Twitter, despite its numerous flaws, remains a vital communication channel
for many. Whatever lies ahead for the platform – a stripped-down MySpace-esque husk, a
megaphone for the never-Trump wing of the GOP, another addition to Israel's Silicon Wadi
– only one thing can be certain: it will be profitable for Elliott Management.
Subscribe to RT newsletter to
get stories the mainstream media won't tell you.
After a string of deaths, some heart-stopping plunges in the stock market and an emergency
rate cut by the Federal Reserve, there is reason to be concerned about the ultimate economic
impact of the coronavirus in the
United States.
The first place to look for answers is China, where the virus has spread most widely. The
news has been grim with
deaths, rolling quarantines and the
economy's seeming to flat line , though the number of new cases has begun to
fall.
Advanced economies like the United States are hardly immune to these effects. To the
contrary, a broad outbreak of the disease in them could be even worse for their economies than
in China. That is because face-to-face service industries -- the kind of businesses that go
into a tailspin when fearful people withdraw from one another -- tend to dominate economies in
high-income countries more than they do in China. If people stay home from school, stop
traveling and don't go to sporting events, the gym or the dentist, the economic consequence
would be worse.
In a sense, this is the economic equivalent of the virus's varied health effects. Just as
the disease poses a particular threat to older patients, it could be especially dangerous for
more mature economies.
This is not to minimize the indiscriminate and widespread
damage that the disease has caused by disrupting the global supply chain. With shortages of
everything from
auto parts to
generic medicines and production delays in things like iPhones and
Diet
Coke , a great deal of pain is coming from the closing of Chinese factories. That
proliferating damage has central banks and financial analysts talking about a global
recession in the coming months.
Nor is it to discount the possibility that the United States will be spared the worst
effects. Scientific and public health efforts might limit the spread of the virus or quickly
find a treatment or vaccine. The warmer weather of summer might slow the spread of the
coronavirus as it usually does with the seasonal flu. Many things could prevent an outbreak as
large as the one in China.
But it is to say that an equivalent outbreak in the United States might easily have a worse
economic impact.
As a baseline, several factors work against the United States. China's authoritarian
government can quarantine entire cities or order people off the streets in a way that would be
hard to imagine in America, presumably giving China an advantage in slowing the spread of the
disease. In addition, a large share of American workers lack paid sick days and
millions lack health care coverage, so people may be less likely to stay home or to get
proper medical care. And 41 percent of China's population lives outside urban areas , more than twice the
share in the United States. Diseases generally spread faster in urban areas.
Beyond those issues, however, is a fundamental difference in economic structure: When people
pull back from interacting with others because of their fear of disease, the things they stop
doing will frequently affect much bigger industries in the United States.
Consider travel. The average American takes three flights a year; the average Chinese person
less than half a flight. And the epidemiological disaster of the Diamond Princess has persuaded
many people to hold off on cruises. That cruise ship stigma alone potentially affects
about 3.5 percent of the United States, which has about 11.5 million passengers each year,
compared with only 0.17 percent of China, which has about 2.3 million passengers.
People may stop attending American sporting events. There have even been calls for the
N.C.A.A. to play its March Madness college basketball tournament
without an audience . But sports is a huge
business in the United States . People
spend upward of 10 times as much on sporting events as they do in China .
And if 60 million Americans stop spending
$19 billion a year on gyms, that would be a much a bigger deal than if the 6.6 million gym
members
in China stopped spending the $6 billion they devote to gyms now.
That's just a start. Who wants to go to the dentist or the hospital during an outbreak if a
visit isn't necessary? Yet health spending is 17 percent of the U.S. economy -- more than triple the
proportion spent in China.
Of course, not every service sector is so much larger than in China. Retail and restaurants,
for example, have comparable shares of gross domestic product in both countries.
But over all, the United States is substantially more reliant on services than China is.
And, on the flip side, agriculture , a sector not noted for day-to-day
social interaction and so potentially less harmed by social withdrawal, is a 10 times larger
share of
China's economy than it is in the United States.
So for all the talk about the global
"supply shock" set off by the coronavirus outbreak and its impact on supply chains, we may
have more to fear from an old-fashioned "demand shock" that emerges when everyone simply stays
home. A major coronavirus epidemic in the United States might be like a big snowstorm that
shuts down most economic activity and social interaction only until the snow is cleared away.
But the coronavirus could be a " Snowmaggedon -style storm" that hits
the whole country and lasts for months.
So go wash your hands for the full 20 seconds. And show some more sympathy for the folks
quarantined in China and elsewhere. Because if it spreads rapidly in the United States, it
could be a heck of a lot worse.
Austan Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School
of Business, was an adviser to President Barack Obama. Follow him on Twitter:
@austan_goolsbee
Posted on March 6,
2020 by Yves
Smith Yves here. It really is remarkable how super low interest rates have led investors on
a widespread basis to pour money down ratholes. Unicorns is one. Another has been fracking,
which despite being another widespread cash sink, remarkably has kept sucking in funding.
As we pointed out in 2014 :
John Dizard at the
Financial Times (hat tip Scott) gives a more intriguing piece of the puzzle: the degree
to which production is still chugging along despite it being uneconomical. The oil majors
have been criticized for levering up to continue developing when it is cash-flow negative;
they are presumably betting that prices will be much higher in short order.
But the same thing is happening further down the food chain, among players that don't
begin to have the deep pockets of the industry behemoths: many of them are still in "drill
baby, drill" mode. Per Dizard:
Even long-time energy industry people cannot remember an overinvestment cycle lasting as
long as the one in unconventional US resources. It is not just the hydrocarbon engineers
who have created this bubble; there are the financial engineers who came up with new ways
to pay for it.
Justin Mikulka argues that one reason these persistently unprofitable fracking companies
keep going is via fraud.
By Justin Mikulka, a freelance writer, audio and video producer living in Trumansburg,
NY. Originally published at DeSmogBlog
In a 2016 interview with Fraud Magazine , former Enron
CFO Andrew Fastow explained what he thought made him so successful while at the former energy
corporation that's now infamous for financial scandal.
"I think my ability to do structured financing, to finance things off-balance sheet and to
find ways to manipulate financial statements -- there's no nice way to say it. Like I said at
the conference, I was good at finding loopholes."
As Fastow explained, in finance, the difference between a loophole and fraud isn't always
easy to identify. And that may be something the U.S. fracking industry is working to its
advantage.
Fastow, the convicted fraudster, does admit that what they did at Enron misled investors.
"We created something that was monstrously misleading, but any one of those deals alone wasn't
necessarily considered fraudulent," he said.
Fast-forward to today and a different part of the energy industry: The U.S. shale oil and
gas industry has lost more than a quarter trillion dollars since 2007, while being sold to
investors as an economic boom, even at oil prices much lower than those of recent years. Does
that financial mismatch seem misleading? Or perhaps, familiar?
In an unexpected twist, Fastow now gives talks to the energy industry on ethical leadership.
Sounding the Alarm
Bethany McLean was the first reporter to question whether Enron was a financially sound
company in a 2001 article
for Fortune magazine. McLean went on to co-author the book The Smartest Guys in the
Room , which documented the fall of Enron due to its fraudulent practices, including the
ones Fastow engineered.
In 2018, McLean also published the book Saudi America , which highlighted many of the
financial challenges the fracking industry has faced. In a recent interview for Texas Monthly's
podcast Boomtown , McLean
explained one of the very accepted and blatantly misleading practices of the fracking
industry:
I'd raise a couple of points. One is that companies have long hyped these break-even
numbers. They say we can break even at $25 a barrel, we can break even at $20 a barrel. And
then you look at their consolidated financial statements and they are losing money. And so
something is going wrong the people called it to me [sic] corporate math or investor
economics. So they were trying to put together these investor pitch decks that would show
investors a set of economics that weren't real. So they would show you that they could break
even on a well at $25 barrel of oil but then yet you'd go to the corporate financial
statements and they were losing money.
Is that a loophole? Where you can openly misrepresent to investors the financial reality of
your business? Or is it fraud?
As more and more players in the fracking industry run out of options and file for
bankruptcy, investors are beginning to ask questions about why all the money is gone.
"This is an industry that has always been filled with promoters and stock scams and
swindlers and people have made billions when investors have lost their shirts."
Much like with the housing crisis that caused the financial crisis of 2008, the fracking
boom has led to Wall Street bankers finding innovative ways to finance a money-losing endeavor.
Some companies are now even
selling bonds based on future well performance , a concept similar to the
mortgage-backed securities that led to the 2008 housing crisis.
Another Wall Street invention is what is called a "special purpose acquisition company" (
SPAC ), or, as they are also known,
blank check companies. The way these investments work is a big bank or private equity firm
backs a management team to raise money for the SPAC with the agreement that the leaders of the
SPAC will then at some point make a "special purpose acquisition" -- which means they will find
an existing company and buy it.
They are called blank check companies because the management is given a blank check to buy
whatever they choose. In the 1980s, the
Wall Street Journal ( WSJ ) noted that "blank-check companies were often associated with
penny-stock frauds." In a 2017 article on the oil industry, the
WSJ reported that " SPAC s were a hallmark of the frothy days before the financial crisis
[of 2008]."
Understandably, SPAC s were often seen as a risky investment, but much like with the housing
crisis, the biggest names on Wall Street are getting involved and giving the concept
legitimacy, with Goldman Sachs starting to back SPAC s in 2016. And new fracking companies have
come about as a result.
Ben Dell, a managing partner at investment firm Kimmeridge Energy, explained one of the
risks of SPAC investments to the Wall Street Journal. " SPAC management teams have an incentive
to spend the money they have raised no matter what, so they can collect fees and pay themselves
a salary and stock options at the company they purchase," Dell said.
" SPAC s are the most egregious example in the industry of executive misalignment with
investors," Dell
told the WSJ .
As I
have previously reported , one of the problems with the fracking industry is that CEO s are
paid very well even when the companies lose money. According to Dell, SPAC s take this problem
to a new "egregious" level.
Alta Mesa: A Star Is Born
To successfully raise money for a blank check company, having some star power in the
management helps. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, investments in SPAC s "
are largely bets on their executives ."
Jim Hackett would seem to be the ideal candidate to lead a SPAC in the fracking industry.
Hackett has an impressive resume: the former CEO of fracking company Anadarko, former
chairman
of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas , an executive committee member of the industry
lobbying group American Petroleum Institute ,
and
partner at the major private equity firm Riverstone Holdings.
In 2013 Hackett retired from Anadarko to attend Harvard Divinity School to get a degree in
theology. However, he was still a partner at Riverstone and in 2017 was lured back to the
fracking business to run a SPAC backed by Riverstone.
The SPAC raised a billion dollars while being advised by the biggest names in the business,
including Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. The initial blank check company was called Silver Run
Acquisition Corp. II .
Hackett used the money to buy two companies in Oklahoma -- an oil producer and a pipeline --
and the new combined company Alta Mesa was valued at $3.8 billion.
The Future Was Bright for Alta Mesa
Hackett and Alta Mesa had big plans for making money fracking wells in Oklahoma, which
included forecasts for big increases in oil and gas production from the newly acquired assets
with very low break-even numbers.
When the Wall Street Journal reported the creation of Alta Mesa,
it noted , "Alta Mesa's core acreage in Northeast Kingfisher County has among the lowest
breakevens in the U.S. at around $25 per barrel, the company said." Because oil was well over
that price at the time, the future looked good, according to Hackett and Alta Mesa. Forbes
reported that Hackett said Alta Mesa's holdings were "oil that will be economic even at $40
WTI [West Texas Intermediate]" and oil has been well over that mark since Hackett made that
statement in 2017.
Like break-even numbers, another area where misleading investors in the oil industry might
be particularly easy is making overly optimistic forecasts about how much oil will be produced
by future wells. The Wall Street Journal
has documented this as a significant problem for the U.S. shale industry.
Description of Alta Mesa assets in investor proxy statement. Credit: Screen capture from
proxy
statement.
In early 2018 when touting the potential of the proposed new company Alta Mesa, Hackett said
that "its average well would produce nearly 250,000 barrels of oil over its life." A year
later, Alta Mesa said it expected those wells would produce less than half that, only 120,000
barrels of oil over the life of the well.
Later in 2019, Alta Mesa filed for bankruptcy after writing down its assets by $3.1 billion.
The billion-dollar blank check had been spent, and it took less than two years to lose it
all.
SEC Investigation and Multiple Investor Lawsuits
Alta Mesa's assets were sold off earlier this year. The SEC declined to comment on the
status of the investigation.
In May 2019,
the Houston Chronicle reported , "Alta Mesa also is facing a series of lawsuits. Some
shareholders are suing claiming they were defrauded and lied to about the value of the company
and its assets when the company was formed."
One lawsuit filed by the Plumbers and Pipefitters National Pension Fund claims that the
proxy statement for Alta Mesa contained materially false and misleading information. That
filing lays out a lot of facts to support that claim.
Yet another lawsuit has been filed against Riverstone for " misleading
statements ."
Investors are saying they were misled by Hackett and Riverstone. The allegations are based
on the claims that were made about how much oil the company could produce. In hindsight, those
claims appeared wildly inaccurate and misleading. But is that fraud? Or just taking advantage
of a loophole?
In January, the Houston Chronicle summed up the situation as it described Alta Mesa's downfall : "It was a dramatic fall from grace after
significantly overestimating its potential in Oklahoma's STACK shale play "
While Alta Mesa is a spectacular example of how fast the fracking business can make large
sums of money disappear after "significantly overestimating its potential," it also likely
marks the beginning of investor lawsuits against many other failing fracking companies with
similar histories.
Learning From Enron
When Jim Hackett decided to go to Harvard Divinity School, several favorable profiles about
his choice were written, including one on the Harvard website.
That article noted that one of the reasons Hackett decided to go to school was because of "the
collapse of Enron, a disaster that he attributed to 'a failure in leadership' among people he
knew well."
The speed with which Hackett and Alta Mesa went bankrupt is remarkable, indicating a likely
failure in leadership.
However, Hackett seems to have learned something from former Enron executive Andrew Fastow:
that there is work for former executives like them to teach the energy industry about ethics
and morality.
Fraud? Or Just a Laughing Matter?
Good reporting is hard work but sometimes involves a bit of luck. Like when a
Wall Street Journal reporter , in a room full of people hired to make forecasts of fracked
oil and gas production, learned about the existence of much more accurate methods for
predicting that oil production. And also learned that with accuracy comes much lower estimates
of shale oil reserves.
The WSJ article that followed quoted Texas A&M professor and expert on calculating oil
and gas reserves John Lee. "There are a number of practices that are almost inevitably going to
lead to overestimates," said Lee. Those are the practices used by the industry, with Alta Mesa
serving as just one example.
Overestimates are why Alta Mesa received funding but now no longer exists.
The Wall Street Journal reported that during a presentation given by Lee, an audience member
"stood up and challenged the engineers in attendance," asking why the forecasters weren't using
accurate models like the ones that were available -- as Lee had described.
Another audience member explained the reason.
" Because we own stock," replied another engineer, "sparking laughter," according to the
Wall Street Journal.
Is it misleading to laugh at your company's investors if you know the estimates you are
giving them are inflated, but because you own the stock that benefits from those estimates, you
do it anyway? Is that fraud? Perhaps that depends on if you get you get ethics lessons from
Andrew Fastow and Jim Hackett.
Will the biggest innovation of the fracking revolution be making financial fraud a laughing
matter?
A lot of people on EFT like to talk about how shale is fraudulent. That's simply not
true:
You can't commit fraud when the rules are so lax you can just make shit up and it's still
allowed.
While I've little doubt there is a lot of fraud, so much of the stupidity around fracking
comes down to the old saying that its hard to make a man undrestand something when his job is
to not understand it.
The financing of the oil and gas industry is almost entirely dependent on projections
– projections of flow per well, and projections of future prices. All you need to do is
make a few optimistic projections of one or both, and you've suddenly turned a dud into a
highly valuable asset. Anyone can look at the pricing and question it, but with oil/gas, that
is much harder with 'novel' types of well as there are few if any precedents. So if someone
says 'the well is producing X per day, we can continue this flow for 3 years and when thats
finished, we can drill down another 200 metres and replicate the same flow', there is nobody
to contradict it. The drilling guys aren't going to argue, they want to keep their jobs. The
geologist isn't going to argue, he has his mortgage to pay. The senior manager won't argue,
he wants a promotion. The drilling company owners won't argue, they want to cash out. And the
Wall Street financier won't argue, because he can pass on the risk to the equivelent of the
last booms 'German bankers'.
So when someone like Arthur Berman – a geologist who has continuously being
questioning the underlying geological assumptions – raises concerns – he's
listened to politely, even invited to some conferences, but is otherwise ignored. Because its
not in anyones interest to listen. There is literally nobody who's job it is to shout 'stop'.
So much for self regulating markets.
While there may well be very severe economic consequences if and when this blows up in
everyones face (and I suspect that Covid-19 will be the catalyst for this, oil demand is
collapsing day by day), the big loser is the planet we depend on for our survival.
I live in NY on the PA border. Fracking is still happening south in PA but is only a
fraction of what it once was. If you drive into PA you will see lots full of fracking
materials that have sat there for a long time. At first for about two years it was a boom.
The activity from fracking was amazing. Then as fast as it started it slowed down to a crawl.
There are a few reasons in my opinion. The so called sweet sports were quickly fracked
leaving less attractive sights. It was concealed that a fracked well produced most of it's
gas in the first two years. After that the production from a well dropped off drastically.
Locals soon lost their enthusiasm for fracking.There is still some fracking but it is hardly
noticeable. Local people thought this would be great but attitudes soon soured. A few made
big bucks at the expense of the rest. The fracking was in former coal country. The difference
is coal lasted a lot longer. Now the majority of people in the area oppose fracking. I'm
thankful that NY state banned fracking because of the negatives associated with fracking. I
own 50 acres near the PA border. Before fracking was banned I was constantly hounded by
leasing companies. I refuse to lease because to me my land was more important than a few
bucks. I hope in my life time NY doesn't reverse the fracking ban. On another note there are
wind farms where I live. I would leas to a wind company because there are fewer negatives and
it's less intrusive.
The good news is that if the companies were chasing you, you own the minerals. You can
donate them to a conservation land trust and assure that no mineral extraction takes place,
and get a tax benefit for the foregone production.
It can be argued that the money invested in many fracking companies with such inflated
pay-back periods, ROIs or breakeven estimates, apart from fraud, could be considered as a
private subsidy, just like Uber investors subsidize Uber taxi services. If we can blame it to
low interest rates resulting in such subsidies, for fracking oil, unicorns, education,
housing etc. to my knowledge this has only been argued in very few sites like here at NC or
Wolf Street but merits a close examination. If pension and mutual funds are pouring a lot of
money in such business with low to negative returns what consequences are to be expected in
the future?
Eight to Ten years ago you would have seen giant trucks moving water and dirt from
fracking sites when you got off the turnpike around Donegal PA. Since about 2015 or 2016 i'd
say that completely died. Pittsburgh actually had one year of population gain due to the
fracking boom but thats done. Yves mentioned investors and low interest rates chasing bad
investments and fraud. I'd say the same thing is going on in healthcare based on my exp. of
it and the amount of money floating around. We need higher interest rates to nip this stuff
in the bud and re-balance the economy.
This pretty much says it all regarding the health of our eCONomy, but hey, after it all
falls apart we should have plenty of reformed criminals to teach ethics classes
"The Wall Street Journal reported that during a presentation given by Lee, an audience
member "stood up and challenged the engineers in attendance," asking why the forecasters
weren't using accurate models like the ones that were available -- as Lee had described.
Another audience member explained the reason.
"Because we own stock," replied another engineer, "sparking laughter," according to the
Wall Street Journal."
In a 2016 interview with Fraud Magazine,
==============================================
I have to say, I was shocked, SHOCKED to find that there is a magazine actually, only devoted
to fraud – that is published bi-monthly.
AND than I was shocked to find out that the magaine actually, only devoted to fraud is ONLY
published bi-monthly
Is the U.S. Fracking Boom Based on Fraud? Is the Pope Catholic? There are going to have to
be major structural changes in the world's economy in the next few years and with the demand
for oil dropping, prices have gotten cheaper which is turning fracking into a non-profit
industry. In any case, how are you suppose to frack with sick crews? This is one industry
that needs to go away before it causes any more damage. You'd find more honesty in a boiler
room brokerage firm than in this industry.
There's a recent documentary called The Price of Everything that is about the enormous
sums being paid for every latest fad in modern art. The show says that all the great masters,
old and new, have been locked up by museums or the super rich and so a recent flood of new
investors are looking for any excuse to spend lots of money on paintings. Apparently there is
so much money sloshing around at the top of our unequal economy that that these plutocrats
don't even care if they lose their shirts on bad investments. The main thing is to keep it
out of the hands of the poor.
Clearly we as a society are suffering from affluenza, at least among the elites who should
all be virus quarantined and then maybe we will forget to check back.The show tries to
pretend that this money driven art world is a cool thing. It had this viewer thinking of
guillotines.
Yes, like all the people who cannot see the art. It's mostly buried in storage. What is
the point of having over two thousand years of art from multiple civilizations, if most of it
is hidden away and often only known from catalog descriptions or cramped tiny pictures.
You must mean the insiders who suckered the rubes into taking shares off their hands at
the IPO. IIRC the IPO price was over $70/share. Right now it's just under $32 with no signs
of every being a profitable enterprise.
Grifters, charlatans and mountebanks everywhere you look.
Charging mineral resource rent, which everyone has an equal claim to, would help to reduce
the tendency of financial shenanigans. The profit motive is crack to rent seekers.
Speaking of Enron, it is perhaps appropriate that my employer's head of non core assets,
toxic waste for fire sale, came from Enron. Standard Chartered has some, too.
I think the big issue goes back to the investors and bond rating agencies, similar to the
subprime mortgage crisis. If bondholders aren't willing to do the homework, then they don't
get paid for the risk that they are undertaking. with the multiple prediction tools for well
production, you can make up an optimistic and pessimistic case. If the bond yield doesn't
cover that risk to your satisfaction, then you don't buy the bond or you demand a higher
interest yield and lower bond price.
Instead, it seems like the industry is raising money from people who don't want to think
more than a few months ahead on a multi-year investment. The challenges faced by the fracking
industry have been well publicized for several years now. If an investor doesn't understand
those challenges now and isn't looking at specific methods of calculating production yield
etc., then they have only themselves to blame if their investment loses money.
This is a very different issue than if somebody flat out lies about whether or not wells
exist etc.
A single well can make financial sense even if there will never be a net profit from it.
Fracking is pretty similar to the Hollywood film industry where nobody ever has any net
profits despite living high on the hog. "Don't ever settle for net profits. It's called
'creative accounting'." – Lynda Carter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
I dunno. There may be a sucker born every minute, but I can't picture enough of them
getting born with a million (or billion) Dollars to blow on rackets like this to keep it
going this long.
Sad to see that the Plumbers' Union Pension Fund was a victim; I hope that's not a
pattern, but it would make sense. If it's a pattern, then it's no wonder the Fed tried so
hard to postpone the next Crash until after the elections. How much junk paper has Wall
Street sold to other Pension Funds? States & Municipalities are already squeezed by
"unfunded liabilities"; how much repackaged funky Fracking paper are held by public
(governmental) agencies? Damn, this is gonna be a mess.
I'd advise investing in popcorn, except that my 401k will probably evaporate soon, so
maybe it's pitchforks.
CFO Fastow of Enron. How nice to see him land on his feet. The company made listening to
the rolling blackout reports for California while driving to work a requirement.
Markets aren't prepared for how severe the fallout of the global spread of coronavirus
could get and the turmoil has only just started, according to the manager of a peer-beating
fund.
The stark warning comes from Allianz Global Investors' portfolio manager Mike Riddell, who
oversees $4.7 billion for the company. "The speed of the market repricing has obviously been
dramatic, however markets have only gone from pricing in no risk of anything to a moderate
risk," Riddell said in a phone interview. "Where we think markets can still move is in
volatility."
Riddell's Strategic Bond Fund, which he manages with Kacper Brzezniak, outperformed 98% of
its peers in the past month, when markets grappled with record-low bond yields, a plunge in
stock markets, spiking currency market volatility and surprise rate cuts from central banks,
including an emergency cut by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Bonds from the U.S. and Germany rallied
on Friday with the 30-year and 10-year yields sliding to a fresh record lows.
The London-based Allianz manager has been bracing for a wobble in markets for a few months
now and thinks the recent repricing is still too mild. He is using options to bet on more
currency swings and also has positioned for short-term U.S. yields to lead declines as he sees
a significant chance the Fed could slash interest rates close to zero.
"If global data really tanks in the coming weeks and months, investors will realize that
central banks can't cure coronaviruses and markets such as currencies and corporate bonds are
still ripe for a correction," Riddell said.
Anon10 says: Show Comment
February 25, 2020 at 9:11 pm GMT 100 Words
@awry From a cui bono perspective, the US conspiracy theory is more plausible than
Limbaugh's China conspiracy theory.
Slowing down China's economic growth and reducing its international trade is in the US
geopolitical interest. That is the whole point of the tariffs, trade war, sanctions on Huawei,
and push to move supply chains out of China.
Well, personally I think the jury is still out whether East Asians are far more vulnerable to
the new coronavirus than whites. The outbreaks in Iran and Italy shift the likelihood
somewhat, but it's still early. Personally, I think the evidence from that cruise ship might
be most definitive.
But if whites are indeed as vulnerable, I'd think that the West might be hit much harder
than China. After all, can we possibly imagine the sort of national lock-down that China has
implemented, apparently with considerable success?
And I'm still very suspicious about the circumstances of the outbreak. It hit China
just before Lunar New Year, the absolutely worst possible time, and the epicenter was Wuhan,
a key transport hub. It really seems an *astonishing* coincidence that 300 American military
servicemen had been visiting Wuhan just prior to the outbreak, at a peak of international
tension.
How would Americans react if 300 PRC officers had visited Chicago, and immediately
afterwards, a deadly new plague broke out in that city, with a major risk of spreading
throughout the country?
Isn't it also rather suspicious that Iran has been hit so hard? So the two countries in
the world most subject to current American hostility just tend to be especially "unlucky"
As for "soft power," I suspect it largely reflects a heavily-lagging indicator of
economic/political power, only somewhat shifted by considerations of pop-culture. If China
continues on its economic/political trajectory, I think it will have plenty of soft power
30-40 years down the road. And if American society/economy collapses, so soon afterward will
our soft power, ignorant rap-stars and basketball players notwithstanding.
Fun theory but it would make more sense if paired with some theory of how the US took
secret steps to protect its own population, e.g., slipped a vaccine in the drinking water.
But it is hard to think of a plausible theory of that sort.
Well, there were some early indications that the virus was especially deadly towards
Chinese and perhaps East Asians rather than whites, though the picture is currently much more
cloudy. But you're looking at things entirely the wrong way
Under normal circumstances, I would be *extremely* skeptical of a possible US biowarfare
attack against China since it would be such a totally insane thing to do. But just last
month, we assassinated a top Iranian leader, and much of everything our government does is
totally insane. So an insane biowarfare attack would just fit into this larger pattern.
Also, consider that a mysterious Swine Flu epidemic suddenly appeared in China during
2019, and destroyed 40% of its primary domestic meat source, certainly a highly suspicious
coincidence.
I'd very strongly recommend that people read this very lengthy article we published a week
ago, which provides a vast amount of background information on the issue. The author is a
highly eccentric American ex-pat living in China, and his own views should be given little
weight. But he provides an enormous wealth of useful information and links, totally excluded
from our worthless MSM:
300 American military servicemen had been visiting Wuhan just prior to the outbreak,
at a peak of international tension.
300 U.S. servicemen of Chinese descent visiting their parents during a National holiday
when hundreds of thousands are travelling? That would be typical.
No, of course not. The Military World Games were being held in Wuhan, and 300 American
servicemen participated. The Wuhan viral outbreak occurred *immediately* afterwards, which
seems extremely suspicious timing to me. Naturally, none of this has been reported in our
totally worthless MSM:
Again, how would America react if 300 Chinese servicemen visited Dallas for an
international event, and immediately afterwards a deadly -- and rather mysterious -- viral
outbreak suddenly occurred in that city
From the earlier days, it has been estimated – and repeatedly confirmed –
that COVID-19 has only a 10% detection rate
mortality with ventilators, drugs, doctors, etc. seems to be ~1% versus 2-3% for people
left to their own devices
If Covid-19 truly has a detection rate of only 10%, then the actual mortality rate is much
lower than what is currently being reported, down to 0.1% with medical treatment versus
0.2-0.3% to people left to their own devices. For comparison, 0.05% of people catching the
flu this year have died. The pandemic of 1918 had a 2.5% mortality.
There seems to be something unusual about the Covid-19 infections in Wuhan that are not
borne out in other areas. There must have been something going on beyond only
person-to-person contact. The virus may have been introduced in an artificial way, perhaps
sprayed as an aerosol over a large area or spread through some other means that would have
had a comparable effect. Outside of Hubei Province, it has proven much easier to control the
disease, and there is a far lower mortality rate.
"The Military World Games were being held in Wuhan, and 300 American servicemen
participated."
Just to add more detail. Even with one of the largest contingent among all participating
countries, an Olympic game giant like US didn't manage to get a single gold medal in Wuhan,
falling behind countries like Tunisia and Namibia. Wonder why?
Isn't it also rather suspicious that Iran has been hit so hard? So the two countries in
the world most subject to current American hostility just tend to be especially
"unlucky"
Iran's largest trade partner is China. There's an outbreak in Japan, South Korea, and
Italy. There'll be an outbreak in the rest of Europe and the USA shortly. I don't think this
is very meaningful, next year no-one will remember which country got it the second time.
@HyperboreanFor an American bioweapon able to paralyse China, the alleged mastermind
appears rather incompetent.
No one suggested that the USA is competent.
The Neocons killed Soleimani. When Trump found out, he claimed it as his own. The
perpetrators had no idea that this catalyst would lead to them being eventually expelled from
Syria and Iraq.
Last week, a US convoy in Syria had to be rescued from the locals by the Russians. But you
won't find that in your lying MSM.
@Half-Jap While technically a true statement, it's more of a semantic difference.
Pneumonia is a life threatening condition along with the associated opportunistic infections.
And it's more or less directly caused by influenza. If someone pushed another person off a
cliff, you would say that it was murder, rather than pointing out that the fundamental force
of gravity and weakness of the falling man's bones was what did him in.
For a more medical example, it's similar to the case of HIV/AIDS. By itself, HIV is a
virus that gradually wipes out the immune system over a decade or so. In all cases, it's
either an opportunistic infection or cancer that actually shuts the body down permanently.
You can trace the causes as far back as you wish, but the HIV virus is the first pathogen
entering the body that ultimately results in its demise.
Well, I'm obviously not suggesting that *most* of the 300 military personnel visiting
Wuhan just prior to the outbreak were involved. But suppose just 2-3 US "ringers" were
included to release the virus during their spare time, perhaps during their visits to the
local "wet market." Again, the timing seems *extremely* suspicious.
Leaving a trail back to yourself is incredibly bad fieldcraft. Using soldiers that are
almost sure to be monitored is too likely to be caught in the act. Without some additional
facts, the timing is simple coincidence not suspicious.
____
Also, Trump just won on trade. Creating a trade problem immediately before an election
makes no sense for the U.S. administration.
There is no motive unless a 3rd party is conspiring against both the U.S. And China
trying to start a war.
well, they might, but not because they're smarter. they are so very clearly
technologically inferior and societally backwards. they're smart enough to be dangerous.
that's about it.
China has already demonstrated a much better response than most governments in its ability
to contain the virus, so your rambles are quite misplaced. The US response, for example, is
for the CDC is stumble around in confusion.
While South Korea has run more than 35,000 coronavirus tests, the United States has
tested only 426 people, not including people who returned on evacuation flights. Only about
a dozen state and local laboratories can now run tests outside of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention in Atlanta because the CDC kits sent out nationwide earlier this
month included a faulty component.
In the end, China might end up demonstrating if anything, that it has that is fully
capable of acting decisively and effectively in a disaster in comparison to rivals.
The U.S. markets' deep-in-the-red opening Friday after the release of a very strong
employment report form the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms the feelings I have had for the
past two weeks. Long-time market watchers will know that bear markets are susceptible to "bear
market bounces" and in fact we have had two of those this week. The yield on the 10-year U.S.
Treasury Note is 0.707%, and the 3-month UST is yielding an astounding 0.42%, well below the
current fed funds target range of 1.00% to 1.25%.
The next direction for a more volatile market
growing terrified about the economic fallout from the coronavirus is anyone's guess, which
probably explains why investors are so nervous right now.
Talk to anyone on the Street and the views on the market's short-term direction vary widely.
They range from those that think we are witnessing a bottoming process underway to those that
believe that now is the ultimate time to buy with the major indices some 10% off the highs
(though numerous individual stocks are down way more).
And of course there is an expanding camp of strategists that believe the next move is
sharply lower in large part because coronavirus will crush global economic activity. To this
group, the
Federal Reserve's emergency rate cut this week is not the equivalent of a cure for
coronavirus and therefore isn't a savior to stocks.
For Hercules Investment CEO James McDonald, the threat of a U.S. recession is by no means
priced into stocks. And investors, said McDonald, would be wise to realize that and position
their portfolios accordingly.
"A recession is imminent, and it's OK," McDonald said on Yahoo Finance's The First Trade . "A 30% correction sounds
scary right, but the Dow, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq rallied to nearly 30% in just one year
last year. If you look at a 35% to 45% trim from here, it sounds bad but it just takes us back
first quarter 2016. Understand that the numbers are relative, it is a good time to anticipate a
major pullback and then get back in the market."
"I think we test the low of the original [low] and then go lower than that. Understand that
a 30%, 40%, 50% pullback in this market only means only we are set back two or three years.
It's not a panic situation," McDonald added.
It's hard to remain calm
While panic selling hasn't begun to grip the markets, one can't be encouraged by the action
this week.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average tanked
more than 600 points on Friday (despite a much stronger than expected February
employment report ...) as COVID-19 infections topped 100,000 globally. Company specific
comments on the coronavirus also continue to weigh on sentiment. Starbucks warned Thursday
evening that its fiscal second quarter earnings would be drilled by 15 cents to 18 cents a
share owing to closed stores in China. That follows Southwest's warning that canceled flights
and routes would hit first quarter sales by $200 million to $300 million.
Not everyone is on board with McDonald's straight shooting on the markets.
"We do not recommend switching away from a balanced allocation at this stage. Policy makers
have clearly entered the race, which should prevent -- for now -- an extended bear market on
risk assets," said SocGen strategist Alain Bokobza.
As we said, the market's next move...is truly anyone's guess. Golfer
3 hours ago Not just stocks; real estate due for a major correction. DC
3 hours ago If your on the verge of retirement, get out of the market. There is no time
to make up a 30%, 40%, 50% drop. I'm out, and will remain out until I feel better about getting
back in. It's called being pro-active. titanbabe54
3 hours ago 30% to 50% correction ?? Because people are panicked over the flu ? Good
grief people, this is a gift of a buying opportunity, especially in the housing market. When
warm weather hits, this flu will dissipate. The media will try to keep the panic going. It's
their last hope to damage the Trumpster. That Dude
3 hours ago I am in the medical field. I AM worried about the elderly, the
immunocompromised, those mid to older folks with pre-existing conditions that will make it
difficult for them to fight off ( eg., diabetes, asthma, COPD, etc.) because of the PANIC you
all are causing. Keep CALM and wash your hands and above all---tend to your sneezes and coughs
like your Momma taught you!!
China has already demonstrated a much better response than most governments in its
ability to contain the virus, so your rambles are quite misplaced. The US response, for
example, is for the CDC is stumble around in confusion .I
n the end, China might end up demonstrating if anything, that it has that is fully
capable of acting decisively and effectively in a disaster in comparison to rivals.
Consider a particularly ironic outcome of this situation, not particularly likely but
certainly possible
Everyone knows that America's ruling elites are criminal, crazy, and also extremely
incompetent.
So perhaps the coronavirus outbreak was indeed a deliberate biowarfare attack against
China, hitting that nation just before Lunar New Year, the worst possible time to produce a
permanent nationwide pandemic. However, the PRC responded with remarkable speed and
efficiency, implementing by far the largest quarantine in human history, and the deadly
disease now seems to be in decline there.
Meanwhile, the disease naturally leaks back into the US, and despite all the advance
warning, our totally incompetent government mismanages the situation, producing a huge
national health disaster, and the collapse of our economy and decrepit political system.
As I said, not particularly likely, but certainly a very fitting end to the American
Empire
@Ron Unz I think the whole thing is somewhat overstated
I think all the empirical evidence showcases that the Wuhan government bungled the
response immensely, hiding information of the Coronavirus until it was too late.
But virtually all the other local and the national Chinese governments did an exceptional
job with containing the virus, especially Xi Jinping's leadership. I think college students
are going to study the rapid response of the National Government in future textbooks on
crisis mamagement. Therefore the non-Wuhan areas had low levels of coronavirus.
In addition, outside of Iran, which isn't really that competent, the only areas to have a
substantial number of coronavirus cases are areas with a massive legal/illegal Chinese
population.
America has some 50 cases, but has the largest Chinese
diaspora of 6 million Chinese and the largest in overall travel with China. Now maybe the
real number of cases is substantially higher, but I really doubt that. Given the absolute
hammering South Korea, Italy, and Japan are having, America seems pretty good, given its
demographics.
I can't predict what is going to happen next, but I think countries like India and
Bangladesh are going to be annihilated by this virus.
Also, the bioweapon meme seems kinda dumb to me. America's East Asian population is vastly
overrepresented in our Technology and Bureaucracy fields, and are very responsible for even
our Deep State. They hold a *huge* chunk of America on our shoulders, including the federal
gov. If such a thing was deliberate by America, wouldn't that destroy the Federal Government
as well? Wouldn't some Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese in the higher up know what was
going on and spill the truth? Even our bioweapons industry is probably disproportionately
East Asian, wouldn't some East Asian realize their work is being used to kill someone? If
America was releasing a bioweapon to kill your Chinese grandmother, you would probably speak
up.
Then again, the Military Games coincidence is absolutely fascinating, and it is amazing
the media does not pick up on that. Did someone check if any of the other country
participants got infected as well? If so, then I think it settles it
I call BS Corona is going to kill a few thousands at most . Every time someone catches a cold
the media says the sky is falling . SARS OMG a catastrophe and what ? A thousand deaths . And
what if Corona does kill millions ? With 7,000,000,000 people what are millions ? 10,000,000
<1% . Corona is clickbait that the Americans will use to advance their program of
advancing chaos to make it dangerous to disobey . Personally I hope Corona kills A billion+ .
Shit I'll volunteer to be one .
As far as I know, no one here has mentioned that because of the
globalization drive by Clinton, Bush, and Obama, 85% of the medicines
used in the United States are manufactured in China. Even U.S. troops
depend on medicines from China! China could bring the entire health
system in the U.S. to a stop in a matter of months. This is what our inept
elites have done to America – they gave away the shop. People are beginning
to realize that manufacturing our own medicines is a matter of national
security but it'll take years to bring the factories back to the U.S. So
much for globalization.
Rod Dreher's blog IMHO is the best source for quick info on the coronavirus
because he is in touch with American M.D.'s who are married to women
from China who in turn are in contact with relatives at home and the Chinese
media. Of course, Rod himself can be hysterical at times but, apparently,
that's what it takes to have a successful blog. The M.D.'s are reporting
that the U.S. is already beginning to run out of certain medications, and
recommend stocking up on the basic necessities, i.e., recommend assuming
the mental framework of the survivalists – have plenty of canned goods, etc
and refill your prescriptions ASAP. This is what many people here seem to
forget – the coronavirus's indirect effects due to having no access to medications
may be much worse than the direct pathogenic effects.
The term Globalism has been around from at least the 1960's but its origins come from Cecil
Rhodes Round Tables which were set up around 1900 as a mechanism for Rhodes and his allies from
the British and South African Oligarchs to take over the world. Globalism is another term for
Neoliberalism, which is another term for Corporatism. It is principally pushed by Fake Liberals
who pretend to be lefties, but are actually Corporatists or Corporate Fascists.
Globalism
The aim of Globalism is to transfer all power and wealth from ordinary people to a handful
of Banking Elites, Oligarchs and major Corporate CEO's. The ultimate aim is to set up an anti
democratic, authoritarian one world government where ordinary people are effectively serfs and
have no say, in a system of Neo-Feudalism. We are very nearly already there.
This is being constantly carried out by transferring ever increasing powers from elected
local governments to massive governmental Super States, such as the EU or the Federal
government in Washington DC.
A great example of a Globalist policy was Obama's Corporate Power Grab TPP and TTIP,
Corporate protectionist deals, which transferred power from elected legislatures to
transnational tribunals staffed by Corporate lawyers acting as Judge and Jury.
"Neo-libs" are NOT Centrists. They are extremist supporters of Perpetual War, Corruption,
Corporatism, Authoritarianism & the Transfer of all wealth & power from ordinary ppl to
the Oligarchs & CEOs in the top 0.01%.
@Wally by not
dropping out and endorsing him b/f ST, after poor showing in the first 3 contests made it
clear she had no substantial and broad enough base.
My sense this morning is that Bernie might need her to get the nomination, and Biden might
need her as VP to win the election.
"... If you are holding out hope that Bernie can slay the dragon of the existing system at its belladonna roots, then be my guest. I see too many people spending their hope on Elizabeth Warren, which will only serve to suck power away from Bernie, who is the ONLY Democratic candidate movie that has the potential to actually INSPIRE voters, just as Trump does. Bernie deserves credit too for actually CHANGING the nature of the campaign conversation and who just MIGHT even begin to change it at the national level, assuming that time, tide and tyranny allow him four years safe passage to reach his pending retirement. ..."
"... In any case, after a year of endless media barrage, it is rather late now for the gods to intervene. All I would hope is that a few more of us can open our eyes to see past the silly "lesser of two evils" and "#votebluenomatterwho" memes, to the reality of how every one of these candidates serve as puppets to SOME specific mix of master control forces and thus make our choice in THAT more realistic light, rather than thinking that any of them offer "real" independent solutions or that any of their "heroic" feet are NOT already embedded knee, waist or neck-deep in the Big Muddy river of our dissolute illusions of Democracy. ..."
As people march off to the polls today to pick their
favorite political actor of the year, I hear precious few voices openly asking what seem to me
to be obvious questions, like WHO produced the movie that is their candidacy? Who directed it?
Who wrote the script? Who are the investors that will be expecting to see returns on their
investment, if their movie and their best actor should somehow win? And how far do the networks
of wealth, influence and control extend beyond those public faces inside the campaign? None of
these questions strike me as tangential; rather they are all essential.
Let's imagine for a moment that one of these actors can somehow out-thespian Trump once on
stage which is HIGHLY unlikely – even for folksy Bernie – UNLESS he can somehow win
himself 100% DNC buy-in and 24/7 mainstream "BLUE" media support. But assuming that he (or some
"brokered" candidate) wins, it will still be their production teams (along with their extended
networks) who will be making their presence felt on Day One of any new presidency. These are
the people who will be calling in the favors and calling the shots.
I recall how moved I was by Obama's 2008 election. I was buoyed with hope, because I did not
understand then what I understand now – that NO candidate can exist as an independent
entity, disconnected from the apparatus and networks that support and produce the narratives
that advance them and their agendas. I also recall the day that Obama entered the White House
and instantly handed the keys to the economy (and the recovery) back to Geithner, Summers and
Rubin – the same trio that had helped destroy it just a year earlier. And he did this at
the same moment he was filling his cabinet with the very people "suggested" in that famous
leaked letter from the CEO of Citibank. My hope departed in genie smoke at that moment, to be
followed by eight years of spineless smooth talk and wobbly action, except where the agendas of
Wall Street and pompous Empire were concerned.
Do you see how this works? The game is essentially rigged from the start by virtue of who is
allowed to enter the race, what can and what can't be said by them and by who the media is told
to shine their light on, and who to avoid. Candidates can, of course, say pretty much anything
they want (short of "Building 7, WTF!!" of course) in hopes it will spark a reaction that the
media can seize upon.
But just based on words, we know that NONE of these happy belief clowns will forcefully
oppose existing "Regime Change" plans for Venezuela, Bolivia and Syria. We know that NONE of
them will stand up to Israel – or to a Congress that is, almost to a person, in the
pocket of Israel. We know too that NONE of them will bring more than an angry flyswatter to the
battle with Wall Street or the corporations. We further know that NONE of them will do more
than make modest cuts to military spending or god forbid, call out the secret state's fiscally
unaccountable black budget operations, which by now reach into at least the 30 trillions.
Personally, I'm not FOR any candidate simply because I cannot UNSEE what it has taken me 12
years to get into focus; namely, how everyone of them are compromised by a SYSTEM that talks a
lot about FIXING what's broken, but which is simply INCAPABLE of delivering anything other than
what has been pre-ordained and decreed by the global order of oligarchs, which exists as the
"ghost in the machine" that ultimately controls every part of the political "STATE" – at
high, middle, low and especially at DEEP levels.
I will say in defense of Bernie that his production team early-on made the very unique
decision to crowd-source the campaign's costs. That was a PROFOUND decision, which has paid off
for him and which may well buy him a certain level of lubricated control over what is to come,
even though the significance of that decision is not well appreciated because the DNC and the
MSM simply refuse to discuss it in any depth.
Warren was TRYING to play the populist "people's campaign" game too, until last week when
she must have been startled awake by the "Ghost of Reagan's Past" and decided to take the money
and run as a Hillary proxy which (big surprise) was what she was all along anyway.
Let me just say this about Joe Biden. From his initial announcement, I never felt he was in
his right mind. He seems rather to be teetering on the edge of senility and fast on his way
into dementia. Also, the man has openly sold his soul so many times in his career that we
shouldn't at this point expect any unbought (or even lucid) thought to ever again escape his
remarkably loose lips. Joe might have run with the old skool Dems when he was a big deal on the
Delaware streets, but now, like Bloomberg and Romney, he's just another Republican in a pricey
blue suit.
I understand how people are feeling stressed, obsessed and desperate to get rid of Donald
Trump. It's just that until we take a collective step back and see things at the level from
which they actually operate and NOT at the level from which we are TOLD they operate, then we
will never be successful in turning our public discourse around or in beginning to identify and
eliminate the fascist and anti-human agendas that we associate with Trump, but which actually
lie behind the subservient to power policies and preferences of BOTH parties.
If you are holding out hope that Bernie can slay the dragon of the existing system at
its belladonna roots, then be my guest. I see too many people spending their hope on Elizabeth
Warren, which will only serve to suck power away from Bernie, who is the ONLY Democratic
candidate movie that has the potential to actually INSPIRE voters, just as Trump does. Bernie
deserves credit too for actually CHANGING the nature of the campaign conversation and who just
MIGHT even begin to change it at the national level, assuming that time, tide and tyranny allow
him four years safe passage to reach his pending retirement.
In any case, after a year of endless media barrage, it is rather late now for the gods
to intervene. All I would hope is that a few more of us can open our eyes to see past the silly
"lesser of two evils" and "#votebluenomatterwho" memes, to the reality of how every one of
these candidates serve as puppets to SOME specific mix of master control forces and thus make
our choice in THAT more realistic light, rather than thinking that any of them offer "real"
independent solutions or that any of their "heroic" feet are NOT already embedded knee, waist
or neck-deep in the Big Muddy river of our dissolute illusions of Democracy.
– Yet Another Useful Idiot.
Mark Petrakis is a long-time theater, event and media producer based in San Francisco. He first
broke molds with his Cobra Lounge vaudeville shows of the 90's, hosted by his alter-ego,
Spoonman. Concurrently, he took to tech when the scent was still utopian, building the first
official websites for Burning Man, the Residents and multiple other local arts groups of the
era. He worked as a consultant to a variety of corps and orgs, including 10 years with the
Institute for the Future. He is co-founder of both long-running Anon Salon monthly gatherings
and Sea of Dream NYE spectacles. Read other articles by Mark .
With the release of the March Beige Book, we find that as one
bogeyman departs, another arrives.
Nearly two years after Beige Book respondents first mentioned tariffs as an economic concern
in April 2018, the number of instances in which tariffs were discussed was just 11 in March -
the lowest since the term first emerged. However, as tariffs faded from the public's
consciousness, they were replaced with fears about the coronavirus, a term which was never
before used in the beige book and in March saw no less than 48 separate mentions!
Before we look at the detailed contents of the latest Beige Book, here is a quick recap of
how the Fed sees the 3 key core
pillar of the US economy - overall economic activity, employment and wages, and prices - at
this moment.
Overall Economic Activity:
Economic activity expanded at a modest to moderate rate over the past several weeks,
according to the majority of Federal Reserve Districts. The St. Louis and Kansas City
Districts, however, reported no change during this period. And while manufacturing activity
expanded in most parts of the country, here is where we got the first mention of supply
chain, to wit: " there were indications that the coronavirus was negatively impacting travel
and tourism in the U.S. Manufacturing activity expanded in most parts of the country;
however, some supply chain delays were reported as a result of the coronavirus and several
Districts said that producers feared further disruptions in the coming weeks. "
While consumer spending generally picked up (if not for long now that millions of
Americans will avoid all open areas), growth was uneven across the nation, including mixed
reports of auto sales. Looking ahead, the outlook for the near-term was mostly for modest
growth with the coronavirus and the upcoming presidential election cited as potential
risks
Employment and Wages:
Employment increased at a slight to moderate pace, overall, with hiring constrained by a
tight labor market, and "insufficient labor lowered growth for many firms and led to delays
in construction projects." Several employers changed from temporary to permanent workers in
order to attract talent, and firms made efforts to retain workers such as keeping seasonal
workers on staff in the off-season.
While employment grew across most sectors, manufacturers, retailers, and transportation
companies reported lower demand for labor in some Districts. That said, wages grew at a
modest to moderate rate in most Districts, similar to last period, and contacts expected wage
growth to continue in this range. Companies also spent more on benefits, as the cost of
benefits rose and as employers expanded benefits to attract and retain workers.
Prices:
Most Districts reported modest growth in selling prices, as well as in nonlabor input
prices. Here was one of the rare mentions of the recent trade deal: "some firms, particularly
manufacturers, were optimistic that the Phase One trade deal with China would reduce goods
prices, but some still struggled with tariffs and were concerned about how the coronavirus
might affect prices."
Meanwhile, oil and gas prices decreased across the country, which was largely attributed
to weak demand from China because of the coronavirus. Retail prices were up in much of the
country although some retailers had lower costs due to improved trade conditions, while
agriculture price changes varied.
Focusing exclusively on the coronavirus case, here is how the global pandemic is impacting
business, so much so apparently that the Fed decided to cut rates by an emergency 50bps
yesterday to offset the aftereffects of the disease:
Most manufacturers experienced revenue increases ranging from mid single-digit
percentages to more than 20 percent, but two respondents cited revenue declines, both
attributed in part to disruptions related to the coronavirus outbreak in China.
Outlooks continued to be positive, with the coronavirus and the presidential election
cited as risk factors.
One retailer noted that their inventory levels were impacted by the coronavirus in China,
which slowed production at some manufacturing plants.
A textile manufacturer reported flat sales, and two firms, in advanced sensors and
chemicals, pointed to disruptions related to uncertainty and supply chain challenges from the
coronavirus as factors leading to their slower 2020 start.
Although the retail sector is expected to see further weakness and downside macroeconomic
risks were cited in relation to the coronavirus outbreak and the presidential election.
One manufacturing contact noted problems with supply disruptions and shipment delays
related to the coronavirus.
A few New York contacts reported that the coronavirus has deterred visitors, though New
York City hotels have continued to report good business.
The share of firms reporting increased revenues and new orders rose, and the share
reporting decreases in both measures fell significantly. The coronavirus has entered the list
of concerns, which still includes tariffs and tight labor markets
Most banking contacts were optimistic about the overall health of the U.S. economy going
forward but expressed concerns over the potential impact of the coronavirus .
And one amusing twist: according to the Fed, in the Chicago district "contacts expressed
frustration" that Chinese purchases of agricultural goods hadn't happened after Phase One trade
deal "and were concerned that the coronavirus outbreak would be used as an excuse for missing
future trade targets."
Of course, this is precisely what China is hoping to do.
That said, with the Fed having slashed rates in response to the coronavirus panic, it is
only logical that Fed contacts across the nation would be freaking out about the pandemic.
Finally, looking at some choice anecdotes from the various the Fed regions, we find the
following picture of the US economy:
Boston: "Two firms, in advanced sensors and chemicals, pointed to disruptions related to
uncertainty and supply chain challenges from the coronavirus as factors leading to their
slower 2020 start. Seven of ten manufacturers did not mention disruptions from the virus to
date."
New York: "Tourism activity was mixed. A few contacts reported that the coronavirus has
deterred visitors, though New York City hotels have continued to report good business."
Philadelphia: "Inquiries and orders to source parts domestically were increasing because
of tariff uncertainty and are continuing because of the coronavirus. Retailers noted no
supply disruptions because of the coronavirus."
Cleveland: "Transportation firms expressed concern about the potential for supply-chain
bottlenecks as a result of COVID-19. The virus aside, transportation firms expect conditions
to improve slightly in the near future as rising consumer spending leads to increases of
merchandise shipments."
Richmond: "Sales of both new and used autos were strong, although dealers expressed
uncertainty from elections and the coronavirus. In the District of Columbia, some groups
canceled travels because of the coronavirus."
Atlanta: "Due to the coronavirus, cancelled flights to China have reduced air cargo
capacity significantly, which is expected to negatively affect first quarter revenues."
Chicago: "Some manufacturing contacts reported low inventories of inputs produced in
China due to disruptions from the coronavirus outbreak; while most said the impact had been
minimal so far, many expected a larger effect if the disruptions continued much longer."
St. Louis: "Contacts were uncertain about the impact of coronavirus on their business; no
contacts reported a significant impact, but some have experienced travel and shipment
delays."
Minneapolis: " Ice conditions have been less favorable this season in Minnesota and
Wisconsin, cutting into spending from fishermen and snowmobilers in areas where trails cross
lakes."
Kansas City: "After declining for several months, manufacturing activity appeared to be
stabilizing with a slight uptick in activity in February, despite nearly half of firms noting
some negative effect from the coronavirus spread."
Dallas: "Overall retail outlooks weakened slightly, with some contacts voicing concern
over the coronavirus and its impact on supply chains and overall demand. A railroad contact
voiced concern that the coronavirus could reduce shipments from China."
San Francisco: "The COVID-19 outbreak led to decreased aircraft demand from China and
Southeast Asia, with one supplier reporting no orders received in January. Solar energy
equipment manufacturers also experienced delayed order fulfillment due to supply chain
disruptions related to the COVID-19 outbreak."
You'd
think people would be used to it by now. Every couple of years the world is thrust into
hysteria by the latest virus that is threatening to wipe out a significant portion of the
population. Whether it's SARS, Dengue, Ebola, Swine Flu or the Coronavirus, fear becomes the
default emotion while States and their confederate agencies appear do everything they can to
stoke the emotion. The press appears to almost celebrate such panics because the population
flocks to their reports in anticipation they will deliver them the information they need to
survive. One wonders why people still trust the media with their history of getting stories
wrong.
It is common among individuals to see the reports of a "super-flu" spreading and default to
the most debilitating of emotions -- especially when it comes to liberty -- that being fear.
But most people don't go further and ask the question; "What exactly are people afraid of?" Is
it death? Of course, that Is mankind's greatest anxiety, especially for those who have
children. Is it civil unrest? Could the threat of mass illnesses shutting down industries,
thereby making certain items of necessity scarce, cause people to loot not only stores, but
their neighbor? Or could it be another fear?
Most Americans feel the dread in knowing that getting sick and not being able to work for an
extended period of time can put them out on the street. There are a couple stats that should be
looked at, as well as a factor that some people don't know about, and one most don't want to
hear.
The Ratio of Work to 'Thriving'
A formula often overlooked when examing your personal economy is the ratio of "work to
thriving." How many weeks of the year do you need to work to pay for the basics? In a February
27, 2020 CBS article
, Aimee Picchi writes, "The typical male worker must now work 53 weeks -- or more than a year
-- to make enough to cover what American Compass Executive Director Oren Cass calls the annual
"cost of thriving," the earnings required to pay of a basket of essentials such as health care
and housing. By comparison, in 1985 that same typical employee needed to work 30 weeks to cover
those same costs, found a recent analysis from American Compass, a newly formed conservative
economic think tank."
When it comes to female workers the number is even more alarming
, "Women these days need about 66 weeks -- or 13 more weeks than men -- to afford the same
basket of basics, given that they on average earn less than men. But like the typical male
worker, they've also lost ground since 1985, when the average female employee could cover her
basics after 45 weeks of income."
Many people are familiar with the term "cost of living," but the "cost of thriving" would be
a better gauge to follow considering American culture. Cass explains," "The cost of living is
the standard measure that gets talked about a lot, but there is a difference between living and
thriving thriving implies a richer conception of what we believe we are achieving, rather than
just living."
Picchi notes, "The Consumer Price Index -- a standard measure of inflation -- focuses on the
cost of food, clothing, housing and other basics that families require. But that doesn't
necessarily reflect the challenges of paying for things you need to flourish in American
society today, such as the ever-rising cost of keeping a roof over your head or going to
college." Picchi explains the criteria for the cost of thriving index, "Instead of using a
broad range of basics, the Cost of Thriving Index focuses on four components: the cost of a
three-bedroom house, health insurance for a family, one semester at a public college and the
expense of operating a car."
"Those costs have become "difficult for a household budget to accommodate," Cass said."
One Paycheck Away
When you take into consideration that most people are one paycheck away from homelessness,
it's easy to understand why many Americans have taken to advocating for an expansive
Scandinavian-style welfare State. In January of 2019, Forbes writer Zack Friedman
wrote , "according to a 2017 survey, CareerBuilder, a leading job site, found some
startling statistics related to debt, budgeting and making ends meet;
Nearly one in 10 workers making $100,000+ live paycheck to paycheck
More than 1 in 4 workers do not set aside any savings each month
Nearly 3 in 4 workers say they are in debt – and more than half think they
always will be
More than half of minimum wage workers say they have to work more than one job to make
ends meet
28% of workers making $50,000-$99,999 usually or always live paycheck to paycheck, and
70% are in debt
The survey also found that 32% of the nearly 3,500 full-time workers surveyed use a budget
and only 56% save $100 or less a month.
At this point some may assume that this article is only about looking to external factors to
find fault with. Yes, they exist, but this is specifically about two factors: one that the
individual has control of, and another that no president or politician has been able to solve
in the last century even if they wanted to.
The Dreaded Federal Reserve System
The negative implications of having a government controlled central bank are too numerous to
list in an article, but one of them is that your spending power is diminished. As Henry Hazlitt
explained in his 1951 Newsweek column (reprinted at Mises.org), Inflation for Beginners ;
"When the supply of money is increased, people have more money to offer for goods. If the
supply of goods does not increase -- or does not increase as much as the supply of money --
then the prices of goods will go up. Each individual dollar becomes less valuable because there
are more dollars. Therefore, more of them will be offered against, say, a pair of shoes or a
hundred bushels of wheat than before. A "price" is an exchange ratio between a dollar and a
unit of goods. When people have more dollars, they value each dollar less. Goods then rise in
price, not because goods are scarcer than before, but because dollars are more
abundant."
Since
1991 the supply of U.S. dollars has grown beyond what most people realize. According to the
Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis, in January of 1991 there were approximately 283 billion
dollars in circulation. As the 90s progressed and the government instituted the blockade in
Iraq, the Kosovo conflicts and various skirmishes, by November 2000, that number climbs to 576
billion, more than doubling.
Now we come to post 9/11. On September 12, 2001, the money supply was at 613 billion. On
March 19th, 2003, dollars in circulation were at 683 billion. Jumping to the start of the Iraqi
surge in January 2007, we are now at 801 billion.
Fast forward to soon after the 2008 financial crisis and the picture gets bleaker. What has
come to be known as QE1 was started on 11/26/08. It began with the Federal Reserve (FED) buying
600 billion in mortgage backed securities. By its end in June of 2010, the FED raised the money
supply from just under a trillion dollars to 2.1 trillion. QE2 lasted seven months between
November 2010 and June 2011. Starting with 2 trillion in circulation, it was raised to 2.6
trillion. Less than QE1, but still a bigger jump than was seen all through the 1990s and most
of the way through the 2000s. QE3 was implemented in September of 2012. By the end of 2013 the
money supply had been increased to 3.6 trillion dollars. On 9/11/01 the money supply was at 613
billion dollars. Twelve years later, because of preemptive wars and government interference in
the market, the money supply was increased by 250%.
What does this look like in the real-world using home prices as an example? In 2017, CNBC
reported
, "If you want to buy a house this year, you may well be paying around $199,200, the median
price for a home in the U.S., according to Zillow." Compare that coming forward from the start
of World War 2, "In 1940, the median home value in the U.S. was just $2,938. In 1980, it was
$47,200, and by 2000, it had risen to $119,600. Even adjusted for inflation, the median home
price in 1940 would only have been $30,600 in 2000 dollars, according to data from the U.S.
Census."
No one would argue that homes have in fact increased in value. Atlanta added 75,000 to their
population in 2018 alone. If the supply of housing stays static, or doesn't keep up with the
added numbers, prices will increase. This is common in most major metro areas. But the increase
in the money supply has caused prices to skyrocket beyond what the law of "supply and demand"
would dictate.
Take Some Responsibility
When it comes to this part of the discussion the reader may start to bristle. Setting aside
for a moment the facts laid out about the Federal Reserve System, everyone knows someone who is
more prepared than most. Many people know the "prepper" who has 6-months' worth of food
stashed. How many people know the person who has 6-months' worth of income put aside to cover
their bills in case of emergency?
Sure, the Federal Reserve can be blamed for causing the increase in prices in essentials due
to their policies, but is that really an excuse? In 2016, the average American was carrying
$16,061 in credit card debt alone. Assuming an 18.9% interest rate, paying $640 per month, it
would take 15
years and 4 months to pay off that debt. And that's taking into account no further charges
being made.
The simple fact is that most people, even libertarians who know the system is rigged, live
beyond their means. When you add up a mortgage or rental payment, a couple car payments, money
shelled out for the 2.4 kids and the aforementioned credit card payments and even smart people
are a couple paychecks from disaster.
Using the scare of the Coronavirus an example, it is easy to see that not only is the fear
of death a motivating factor when it comes to the inevitable panic associated with a potential
"pandemic," but even the fear of losing a few weeks at work can have people on edge. As
discussed, there are barriers to keep one from being secure in their possessions that are
beyond their control, but there are also common-sense ways to combat obstacles even as great as
a government-rigged money system. Hopefully people will see fit to prepare for such setbacks in
the future as history has shown that this will not be the last impending "catastrophe" to
derail us from our lives.
Former DNC chairman who gave Hillary Clinton debate questions in advance during the 2016
election, exclaimed on Fox News that Biden's victory was "the most impressive 72 hours
I've ever seen in U.S. politics," and told another analyst to "
go to hell " for suggesting that the Democratic establishment was once again working to
manipulate a nominee into frontrunner status.
The Democrats are in chaos and melting down on live TV.
Donna Brazile just told the @GOPChairwoman to "go to hell"
when asked about the chaos.
"... The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is not billing patients for coronavirus testing, according to Business Insider . "But there are other charges you might have to pay, depending on your insurance plan, or lack thereof," Business Insider noted. "A hospital stay in itself could be costly and you would likely have to pay for tests for other viruses or conditions." ..."
"... Congress needs to immediately pass a bill appropriating funding to cover 100% of the cost of all coronavirus testing & care within the United States. We will not have a chance at containing it otherwise. @tedlieu - as my rep, can you please ensure this is brought up? ..."
"... In the case of the Wucinskis, Kliff reported that "the ambulance company that transported [them] charged the family $2,598 for taking them to the hospital." ..."
"... Last week, the Miami Herald reported that Osmel Martinez Azcue "received a notice from his insurance company about a claim for $3,270" after he visited a local hospital fearing that he contracted coronavirus during a work trip to China. ..."
"... Did anyone expect the unconscionable greed of capitalism to cease when a public health crisis emerges? This is just testing for the virus, wait until a vaccine has been developed so expensive that the majority of the US populace can not afford it at all and people are dropping like flies. Wall Street, never-the-less, will continue to have its heydays ..."
"... The very idea that the defense and "Homeland" security budgets are bloated and additional funding approved year after year but the citizens of this country are not afforded 100% health coverage In a time of global health crisis that could become a pandemic. ..."
"Huge surprise medical bills [are] going to make sure people with symptoms don't get tested. That is bad for everyone." by
Jake Johnson, staff writer Public health
advocates, experts, and others are demanding that the federal government cover coronavirus testing and all related costs after several
reports detailed how Americans in recent weeks have been saddled with exorbitant bills following medical evaluations.
Sarah Kliff of the New York Times
reported Saturday
that Pennsylvania native Frank Wucinski "found a pile of medical bills" totaling $3,918 waiting for him and his three-year-old daughter
after they were released from government-mandated quarantine at Marine Corps Air Station in Miramar, California.
"My question is why are we being charged for these stays, if they were mandatory and we had no choice in the matter?" asked Wucinski,
who was evacuated by the U.S. government last month from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.
"I assumed it was all being paid for," Wucinski told the Times . "We didn't have a choice. When the bills showed up, it was just
a pit in my stomach, like, 'How do I pay for this?'"
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is not billing patients for coronavirus testing,
according
to Business Insider . "But there are other charges you might have to pay, depending on your insurance plan, or lack thereof,"
Business Insider noted. "A hospital stay in itself could be costly and you would likely have to pay for tests for other viruses or
conditions."
Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Times that
"the most important rule of public health is to gain the cooperation of the population."
"There are legal, moral, and public health reasons not to charge the patients,"
Gostin said.
Congress needs to immediately pass a bill appropriating funding to cover 100% of the cost of all coronavirus testing & care
within the United States. We will not have a chance at containing it otherwise.
@tedlieu - as my rep, can you please ensure this
is brought up?
In the case of the Wucinskis, Kliff reported that "the ambulance company that transported [them] charged the family $2,598
for taking them to the hospital."
"An additional $90 in charges came from radiologists who read the patients' X-ray scans and do not work for the hospital," Kliff
noted.
The CDC declined to respond when Kliff asked whether the federal government would cover the costs for patients like the Wucinskis.
The Intercept 's Robert Mackey
wrote
last Friday that the Wucinskis' situation spotlights "how the American government's response to a public health emergency, like trying
to contain a potential coronavirus epidemic, could be handicapped by relying on a system built around private hospitals and for-profit
health insurance providers."
We should be doing everything we can to encourage people with
#COVIDー19 symptoms to come forward.
Huge surprise medical bills is going to make sure people with symptoms don't get tested. That is bad for everyone, regardless
of if you are insured. https://t.co/KOUKTSFVzD
Play this tape to the end and you find people not going to the hospital even if they're really sick. The federal government
needs to announce that they'll pay for all of these bills https://t.co/HfyBFBXhja
Last week, the Miami Herald reported
that Osmel Martinez Azcue "received a notice from his insurance company about a claim for $3,270" after he visited a local hospital
fearing that he contracted coronavirus during a work trip to China.
"He went to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he said he was placed in a closed-off room," according to the Herald . "Nurses
in protective white suits sprayed some kind of disinfectant smoke under the door before entering, Azcue said. Then hospital staff
members told him he'd need a CT scan to screen for coronavirus, but Azcue said he asked for a flu test first."
Azcue tested positive for the flu and was discharged. "Azcue's experience shows the potential cost of testing for a disease
that epidemiologists fear may develop into a public health crisis in the U.S.," the Herald noted.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, highlighted Azcue's case in a tweet last Friday.
"The coronavirus reminds us that we are all in this together," Sanders wrote. "We cannot allow Americans to skip doctor's visits
over outrageous bills. Everyone should get the medical care they need without opening their wallet -- as a matter of justice and
public health."
Last week, as Common Dreams
reported , Sanders argued that the coronavirus outbreak demonstrates the urgent need for Medicare for All.
The coronavirus reminds us that we are all in this together. We cannot allow Americans to skip doctor's visits over outrageous
bills.
Everyone should get the medical care they need without opening their wallet -- as a matter of justice and public health.
https://t.co/c4WQMDESHU
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S.
surged by more than two
dozen over the weekend, bringing the total to 89 as the Trump administration continues to
publicly downplay the severity of the outbreak.
Dr. Matt McCarthy, a staff physician at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital,
said
in an appearance on CNBC 's "Squawk Box" Monday morning that testing for the coronavirus is still not widely available.
"Before I came here this morning, I was in the emergency room seeing patients," McCarthy said. "I still do not have a rapid
diagnostic test available to me."
"I'm here to tell you, right now, at one of the busiest hospitals in the country, I don't have it at my finger tips," added
McCarthy. "I still have to make my case, plead to test people. This is not good. We know that there are 88 cases in the United
States. There are going to be hundreds by middle of week. There's going to be thousands by next week. And this is a testing issue."
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Did anyone expect the unconscionable greed of capitalism to cease when a public health crisis emerges? This is just testing
for the virus, wait until a vaccine has been developed so expensive that the majority of the US populace can not afford it at
all and people are dropping like flies. Wall Street, never-the-less, will continue to have its heydays
A wall street bank or private predator may own your emergency room. A surprise bill may await your emergency treatment above
insurance payments or in some instances all of the bill.
An effort was made recently in congress to stop surprise billings but enough dems joined repubs to kill it. More important
to keep campaign dollars flowing than keep people alive.
fernSmerl 12h I know emergency rooms are being purchased by organizations like Tenet (because they are some of
the most expensive levels of care) and M.D.s provided by large agencies. I'm not as up on this as I should be but a friend of
mine tells me that some of this is illegal. I have received bills that were later discharged by challenge. This is worth investigating
further. Atlasoldie 11h Hmmmm A virus that
overwhelmingly kills the elderly and/or those with pre-exisitng conditions.
Sounds like a medical insurance companies wet dream. As well as .gov social security/medicare wet dream.
The very idea that the defense and "Homeland" security budgets are bloated and additional funding approved year after year
but the citizens of this country are not afforded 100% health coverage In a time of global health crisis that could become a pandemic.
And as has been stated, the unconscionable idea suggested that a possible vaccine (a long way away or perhaps not developed at
all) might not be affordable to the workers who pay the taxes that fund the government? That's insane.
Another example of "American Exceptionalism." China doesn't charge its coronavirus patients, neither does South Korea. I guess
they are simply backward countries.
I own my own home after years of hard work paying it off. It's the only thing of value, besides my old truck, that I have.
If I get the virus, I will stay home and try to treat it the best I can. I can't afford to go to the hospital and pay thousands in
medical bills, with the chance that they'll come after my possessions. America, the land of the _______. Fill in the blank. (Hint:
it's no longer free).
There are other ways to protect your home. Homesteading or living trust. I'm not good at this but I know there are ways to
do it. Hopefully, it would never come to that but outcomes are not certain even with treatment in this case.
As someone
who lost a mother at 5 years old I can sympathize with your grief in losing a daughter-in-law and especially seeing her four children
orphaned. However, I think you miss the point here: This is about we becoming a society invested in each others welfare and not a
company town that commodifies everything including the health and well being of us all.
As a revision it is better but flawed. It is a cost containment bill based on the same research as the republican plan with global
budgets and block grants.
Edited: I encourage you to read this: -ttps://www.rand.org/blog/2018/10/misconceptions-about-medicare-for-all.html Giovanna-Lepore10h oldie:
Part D
Higher education is not free but they do need to become free for the students and payed by us as a society.
Part D is a scam, a Republican scam also supported by corporate democrats because of its profit motive and its privatization
Medicare only covers 80% and does not cover eye and dental care and older folks especially need these services. Medicaid helps but there are limits and one cannot necessarily use it where one needs to go.
Expanded, Improved Medicare For All is a vast improvement. because it covers everyone in one big pool and, therefore, much more dignified
than the rob Paul to pay peter system we have.
Social Security too can be improved. Why should it simply be based on the income of the person which means that a person working
in a low paying job in a capitalist system gone wild with greed will often work until they die.
Pell grants can be eliminated when we have what the French have: publicly supported education for everyone.
The demise of unions certainly did not help but it was part of the long strategy of the Right to privatize everything to the enrichment
of the few.
The overall competence that Canada is handling this outbreak, compared to the USA, is stark. First world (Canada) versus third-world
(USA). Testing is practically available for free, to any suspect person, sick or not, as Toronto alone can run 1000 tests a day and
have results in 4 hours. That is far more than all the US's capacity for 330 million people.
I wonder how long before Canada closes its borders to USAns? Me and my wife (both in a vulnerable age/medical group) should seriously
consider fleeing to my brother's place in Toronto as the first announced cases in Pittsburgh are probably only days away. What about
our poor cat though? We could try to smuggle her across the border, but she is a loud and talkative kitty
Don't want to discourage anyone from any protective measures – but the
"low down" from my veggie store today was that a lot of health professionals
shop there and they think it's being hyped by media. Did get this from my NJ Sen. Menendez –
Center for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC)
There is currently no vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The best way to prevent illness is to avoid being
exposed to this virus. However, everyday preventive actions can help prevent the spread of respiratory diseases:
Wash your hands often
Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.
Stay home when you are sick.
Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
For more information : htps://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/prevention-treatment.html
How it spreads : The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person. It may be possible that a person can get
COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their
eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads. [Read more.] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission.html )
Symptoms : For confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases, reported illnesses have ranged from mild symptoms to
severe illness and death. Symptoms can include fever, cough, and shortness of breath.
Don't want to discourage anyone from any protective measures – but the
"low down" from my veggie store today was that a lot of health professionals
shop there and they think it's being hyped by media.
I agree it is being hyped by the media to the point of being fear mongering. At the same time it is being ignored by the administration to such an extent that really little almost nothing is being done. At some point the two together will create an even bigger problem.
It is like the old adage: "Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you." Each over/under reach in considering the reality of the situation has its own problem, which multiply when combined. Every morning when I wake up I say a little atheistic prayer to myself before I get out of bed: "Another day and for better or
worse...".
Well, two reported here in Florida tonight. One in my county, one in the county next door. And more of the "we already knew, but told you late". One person checked into the hospital on Wednesday. We hear it Monday night.
Both were ignored far a long time it seems, and 84 in particular are being watched (roommates, friends, hospital workers not alerted
for several days, the usual). But no one knows every place they had been since becoming infected.
Oh, and they have tested a handful of people. No worry?
I can't see anyway that this level of incompetency is an accident. Spring break is just starting usually a 100's of thousand tourist
bonanza.
So the question is do they want to kill us, or just keep us in fear?
I think the later. But the end result is a crap shoot. So once again, it is a gamble with our lives.
The business of America is business. Sometimes that can go too far and this is one of those times. Making money from the loss,
distress, harm and suffering of others is perverse beyond belief.
... Although it cannot be assumed that all her voters would have gravitated to Sanders,
certainly some would have, and with an extra ten points Bernie would have won some states he
lost. If she departs after coming in third in her home state, that will help Sanders going
forward.
Sanders performed well below the polling. Polls had him competitive in Virginia, where he
was crushed by Biden. Polls showed him winning Texas, whereas that turned into a close
race.
This guy does not understand (or do not what to understand) what neoliberalism is. Do not buy
this book. It is junk. Look at the idiotic quite beloe. Tha guy is unable to think coherently.
When Hillary called her opponents "deplorable" she clearly means thos who oppose neoliberalism
and neoliberal globalization and who suffered from outsourcing and financialization craziness,
that destroyed the USA manufacturing. She means those who do not belong to the neoliberal elite,
independent of their IQ.
Notable quotes:
"... The tragic flaw of elites is that they fail to see the hypocrisy in their own cries for tolerance and equality. ..."
"... It was the "deplorables" moment that opened my eyes to the current trajectory of America. I fear that intellectual elites, of which I am admittedly one, have not learned from this unfortunate blunder. And time is running out for us. Perhaps all we elites need to start toting Reader's Digest crosses. ..."
The populist revolution succeeded tonight for the same reason it did nearly two centuries
ago. The main reason Trump won wasn't economic anxiety. It wasn't sexism. It wasn't racism. It
was that he was anti-elitist. Hillary Clinton represented Wall Street, academics, policy
papers, Davos, international treaties, and peo- ple who think they're better than you. People
like me. Trump represented something far more appealing, which is beating up people like me. A
poll taken a month before the 2016 election showed that only 24 percent of voters disagreed
with the statement "The real struggle for America is not between Democrats and Republicans but
between mainstream America and the ruling political elites."
People are foolish to get rid of us. Elites are people who think; populists are people who
believe. Elites de- fer to experts; populists listen to their own guts. Elites value
cooperation; populists are tribal. Elites arc masters at delayed gratification, long-range
planning, and
controlling our emotions...
...We can t afford that. Populists believe our complex society is so secure that disaster is
near impossible no matter who is in charge. Elites know it's not. Most of our work is
calculating risk and planning for contingencies. We invented reinsurance, and if you give us a
few years, we'll come up with rereinsurance. The myth that the elite are selfishly rigging the
system while do- ing nothing useful conveniently ignores the fact that the system we've built
is great. If this were a book about any other group of people besides the elite, this would be
the part where I list all the amazing contributions we've made throughout history. I do not
need to do that because elites created everything that ever existed...
At this first stop on his tour of populist and elite hotspots of America, Stein elucidates a
no-brainer: nobody is always right all the time about everybody else. That includes we
elites.
What is my takeaway from this marvelous book, besides the fact that Stein is completely
hilarious? That elites need a crash course in tolerance. Populists could use a big dose of it
too, but at least when they do not demonstrate this virtue, they don't pretend to possess it.
The tragic flaw of elites is that they fail to see the hypocrisy in their own cries for
tolerance and equality.
It was the "deplorables" moment that opened my eyes to the current trajectory of
America. I fear that intellectual elites, of which I am admittedly one, have not learned from
this unfortunate blunder. And time is running out for us. Perhaps all we elites need to start
toting Reader's Digest crosses.
Joel Stein's new book is both engaging and enlightening. He begins by immersing himself in
the small town culture of rural Miami, Texas, where he mingles with the locals and tries to
understand their customs. He enjoys their hospitality but examines their values with a critical
eye. The rest of the book is mostly a comparison of "elitism" with the ethos of Miami. He
distinguishes between two kinds of elitism: "boat elitism" which worships money and power, and
"intellectual elitism" which elevates reason and intelligence. Stein obviously champions
intellectual elitism which he feels is imperative for a successful democracy: "Democracy is a
government of the nerds, by the nerds and for the nerds. And the Boat Elite do not respect
nerds." Ultimately, Stein concludes, "The elite, with our pesky qualifiers and annoying
exceptions, are the thin line between democracy and tyranny." The great charm of this excellent
book is that these very valid truths are presented with so much humor and insight that the
reader cannot help but agree with Joel Stein's illuminating conclusions.
Chele
Hipp , Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2019
If this book was evaluated like an elite high school debate held on the Stanford campus each
year, Mr. Stein would be winning the debate handily in each round and scoring exceedingly high
speaker points. But, in the end, while he would still get the Top Speaker Award, he would not
win the tournament trophy because he gave up his argument in his closing statement. This book
is written five parts, four of which are hilarious and compelling arguments for finding
connection with every type of elite and populist one can come across. Those four parts make
equally compelling arguments for why having experts and intellectual elites run the world does
the greatest good for society as a whole. Mr. Stein is winning the debate with compassion, good
humor, and style. I'm rooting for him to win the debate! My debate judge objectivity has flown
out the window. And then part five happens. His closing argument. Oh no! Mr. Stein decides to
withdraw from the battle for expert and intellectual elite leadership. He says it's not our
time. It's time to wait out the populists. That we can do that. That we must do that. And then
he says that the need for human connection is greater than anything - that humility is the job
elites need to pursue. Wait. What? You just contradicted your entire case. You surrendered your
position. Your conclusion is the opposite of your thesis! That's it. You lose on technical
failure. Victory awarded to your opponent. If this book were a research project using the
scientific method, it would be entirely possible to have a conclusion that did not match the
hypothesis. But the title of the book, "In Defense of Elitism" is suggestive of a debate or an
argument. And, in such case, the conclusion must necessarily match the opening statement. If I
were to recommend this book to a friend, which I still may very likely do, I would recommend
that my friend read only parts one through four. Or, maybe read all five parts with very low
expectations for intellectual follow-through on part five. Mr. Stein still has my utmost
respect and admiration for both his efforts and his humor. I almost wonder if his editor
insisted on a soft landing for the book and the conclusion was a negotiated settlement.
Flying
Scot , Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2019
In self-deprecating, often hilarious language, Joel Stein gives us a study of the gulf
between the bicoastal United States and the heartland. The socially and politically
conservative, religious citizens of Miami, Texas, vastly different from the author in values,
religion, and background, are profiled with humor and affection. By establishing common ground
with these citizens and shedding light on their beliefs, Stein lets us understand them despite
the different, even foreign ideas compared to those of us who are "elites." By "elites" the
author means reasonably educated, anti-racist, not-very-religious-if-at-all folks who tend to
vote for progressive candidates. The middle of the book puts us back in California, where Stein
lives, and his gimlet eye skewers the elites that surround him, again with humor and insight. I
am somewhat surprised that this impressive work, which has so much to say about the present
divisions and polarization in our country, has not been better promoted by the publisher. A
search in the New York Times fails to find a review or even mention of it, and a full web
search renders scant results. Highly recommended.
Being anti-elite can make sense if you're against the elite due to wealth gained by taking
advantage of people (Stein refers to as the "boat elite"), but being against elite by
intelligence doesn't make sense (the "intellectual elite"). Stein talks with anit-elite Scott
Adams (Dilbert creator) who talks about a medical issue for which he had to go to the most
elite doctor there was to be cured, and Scott somehow concludes that this is why doctors are
useless and he knows better than them. Stein points out Sarah Palin bragging that she will
never claim to know more than anyone else, instead of trying to study and learn more. You read
about people striving to make a difference, and somehow Republican America rejecting
intelligent elite and embracing wealthy elite (which is the opposite of what a democratic
government should do, it should reign in those that gain all the power through wealth). The
jokes make this serious and passionate subject fun to read.
Reviewer
Dr. Beth , Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2019
How can one be both self-deprecating and aggrandizing at the same time? Somehow author Joel
Stein manages this. A long-time humorist writer for TIME (who was eventually fired, as he
points out), Stein offers a book that is as insightful as it is funny. Stein's humor ranges
from cheap to clever, and yet is unfailingly smart and on the mark. The premise of this book
has already been thoroughly covered. Stein seeks to explain the backlash against so-called
elites which led to the election of Trump. He starts by visiting the county in the US which had
the highest percentage of Trump voters in the 2016 election. He finds many things that he
expected to find (religion, guns) and many things he did not. Does he leave Miami, Texas
thinking that the Trump voters were right? No. But he leaves with a better appreciation of
people different from him and less of an us versus them mindset. After spending time with the
populists, Stein visits with his own group, the elites, providing a short and somewhat mocking
look at our country's most privileged...living in ivory towers, maybe, but also doing great
work. Next come the populist elites, a group which includes Stein's "boat elites," or people
like Trump. The section on elite populists is the shortest in the book; obviously elites
generally aren't wining any popularity contests. Finally, in "Saving the Elite," Stein attempts
to figure out how elites can re-emerge on top, where they belong. Solutions include fighting
back, which many liberals seem to be doing to little or no avail; taking the high road, which
appeals to the self-satisfied nature of elitists but which tends to be ultimately frustrating;
and moving towards change, perhaps through greater humility, kindness, and--dare we say
it?--love. Stein himself admits both that he is smug...and also that his smugness is his
downfall. We cannot dismiss those with whom we do not agree. Stein makes this point in a way
that is intelligent, compelling, moving...and also very, very funny.
Ryan
Mease , Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2019
This is a sometimes-humorous, sometimes-serious review of different populist voices in the
Trump era. Klein scored a number of perfect interviews with figureheads in / critics of the
populist movement -- Tucker Carlson, the Dilbert guy and Bill Kristol. It's a shame he couldn't
get Steve Bannon. He's very effective at interviewing opponents. I actually walked away from
the Tucker chapter feeling less confused about Tucker's position on race and immigration. I can
see his journey and his current rhetorical postures seem wrong, but reasonable. He has a point
of view that's well-reasoned. The Dilbert guy is another story. I'm not even sure if he belongs
in this book; he's just a sophist like Ann Coulter or Milo. I'm trying to use that term
precisely, in the elitist Plato's dialogue sense of the term. If you read the book or listen to
an interview with him, you'll understand what I mean. He's a bad faith relativist who enjoys
attention. There's a lot more to this book! I didn't even mention the long opening section
where the author travels to Texas to interview Trump supporters while living with them for an
extended period. There are moments in the book where we're allowed to see how we might heal our
national wounds. The major flaw here is the lack of depth concerning left-wing populism. The
author points to Bernie Sanders and the populist left without really interviewing anyone or
considering those voices too carefully. That's a shame, because they would have made an
excellent companion chapter to the content on Tucker. The author ends up luring elite readers
to a place where they feel comfortable receiving criticism. It would have been nice to hear
that critique from each side. This was a fun read. Definitely recommended.
plubius
tullius , Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2020
I listened to this as an audiobook, read by Joel Stein himself. Even as read by the author,
I can't tell if this book is a joke or supposed to be taken seriously. An honest discussion of
experts vs non-experts would be useful. This is not it. Stein picks points that back his views
up, which extend well beyond expertise, and into entitlement, connection, and general
condescension to the "great unwashed." For example, he interviews cartoonist Scott Adams... why
not Nassim Nicholas Taleb - on the fallacy of expertise. Of course, lots and lots of name
dropping in this book. Figures - thats how those insecure in their elitist claims attempt to
establish their membership.
Update (1650ET) : The House passed a roughly $8.3 billion emergency spending package for
combating the coronavirus outbreak , sending the legislation to the Senate as lawmakers raced
to respond to the quickly spreading disease.
As The Wasll Street Journal reports, the bill provides more than $3 billion for developing
treatments for the disease and allocates $2.2 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention to contain the disease , among other measures. Under the legislation, which the
Senate will also likely pass this week, more than $1 billion will go overseas, while $20
million will be made available to fund administrative expenses for loans to U.S. small
businesses.
The final deal includes $300 million for the government to purchase the vaccine and other
therapeutics and make them available to the public.
It calls on Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to use currently available
authority to ensure the price is "affordable in the commercial market," while additionally
stating that he shouldn't delay the drug's development.
The legislation, crafted by top Republicans and Democrats, caps less than two weeks of
negotiations that began when the White House said it planned to spend roughly $2.5 billion on
fighting the disease, an amount lawmakers said was too low. President Trump has subsequently
said he would sign whatever package Congress approves.
Oil producers are facing the biggest drop in demand for their product ever as the
coronavirus spreads around the world, forcing OPEC and its allies to consider emergency
measures.
Research firm IHS Markit said Wednesday that oil demand will suffer its steepest
decline on record in the first quarter -- worse even than during the 2008 global financial
crisis -- as schools and offices close, airlines cancel flights worldwide and a growing
number of people hunker down at home.
Most of the reduction in demand can be traced to China, where the coronavirus has
caused what IHS Markit describes as an "unprecedented stoppage" of economic activity.
But reduced consumption will be widespread, and IHS Markit expects global demand to
drop by 3.8 million barrels per day in the first quarter compared to 2019. Demand in the
first three months of 2019 was 99.8 million barrels per day.
"This is a sudden, instant demand shock -- and the scale of the decline is
unprecedented," said Jim Burkhard, vice president and head of oil markets at IHS
Markit.
A decline of 3.8 million barrels per day is a real bombshell.
Despite claims by China that they have more recoveries than new infections, there is
strong evidence that they are lying. Travel inside China is still almost non-existent and
most industry is still shut down.
"... United said Wednesday it will reduce passenger-carrying capacity 20% on international routes and 10% to 12% in the U.S. United executives expect the reductions will carry into May. ..."
GROUNDED AIRPLANES: United Airlines will cut international and U.S. flying, freeze hiring and ask employees to volunteer for unpaid leave as it struggles with weak demand for travel because of the new virus outbreak. United said Wednesday it will reduce passenger-carrying capacity 20% on international routes and 10% to 12% in the U.S. United executives expect the reductions will carry into May. Beyond that, it depends what happens to bookings over the next few weeks.
United's CEO and president say they hope the moves are enough, but the nature of the outbreak requires the airline to be flexible in how it responds.
ALTERED EXPECTATIONS: General Electric Co. General Electric believes the viral outbreak could have a negative impact of about $300 million to $500 million on its first-quarter industrial free cash flow. Operating profit for the period could be hurt by about $200 million to $300 million. GE said that the expectations are incorporated into its full-year 2020 outlook. Major corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Visa have already cut expectations.
GROUNDED AIRPLANES: United Airlines will cut international and U.S. flying, freeze hiring and ask employees to volunteer for unpaid leave as it struggles with weak demand for travel because of the new virus outbreak. United said Wednesday it will reduce passenger-carrying capacity 20% on international routes and 10% to 12% in the U.S. United executives expect the reductions will carry into May.
Beyond that, it depends what happens to bookings over the next few weeks. United's CEO and president say they hope the moves are enough, but the nature of the outbreak requires the airline to be flexible in how it responds.
ALTERED EXPECTATIONS: General Electric Co. General Electric believes the viral outbreak could have a negative impact of about $300 million to $500 million on its first-quarter industrial free cash flow. Operating profit for the period could be hurt by about $200 million to $300 million. GE said that the expectations are incorporated into its full-year 2020 outlook. Major corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Visa have already cut expectations.
ALTERED EXPECTATIONS: General Electric Co. General Electric believes the viral outbreak could have a negative impact of about $300 million to $500 million on its first-quarter industrial free cash flow. Operating profit for the period could be hurt by about $200 million to $300 million. GE said that the expectations are incorporated into its full-year 2020 outlook. Major corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Visa have already cut expectations.
RATIONING: Kroger Co., the nation's biggest independent grocer, is placing limits on the number of
certain products that customers buy as its shelves are cleared by people doing heavy stocking in preparation
for any spread of the virus. "Due to high demand and to support all customers, we will be limiting the
number of sanitization, cold and flu related products to 5 each per order. Your order may be modified at
time of pickup or delivery," the company said on its website. Amazon is warning same-day grocery customers
that delivery may be limited. Target and Walmart are scrambling to replenish shelves with basics like canned
goods, toilet paper and other household essentials, but have yet to announced rationing.
TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS: The International Air Transport Association says that January had the slowest
monthly year-over-year growth since April 2010, at the time of the volcanic ash cloud crisis in Europe that
led to massive airspace closures and flight cancellations. "January was just the tip of the iceberg in terms
of the traffic impacts we are seeing owing to the COVID-19 outbreak, given that major travel restrictions in
China did not begin until 23 January," said Alexandre de Juniac, the group director general.
Delta will reduce its weekly flying schedule to Japan through April 30 and suspend summer seasonal
service between Seattle and Osaka for 2020 in response to reduced demand due to COVID-19.
Amazon has asked its 800,000 employees worldwide to postpone non-essential travel. It is also conducting
some job interviews on video conference calls instead of in its offices. Ford Motor Co. has banned all
domestic and international travel, unless approved at the highest levels of the company.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra said Wednesday that all international travel by employees has been
restricted.
NETWORKING IS NOT WORKING: Starbucks converted its big annual shareholders meeting in hometown Seattle to
a virtual only event due to concerns about the virus. The meeting will still be held on March 18 as
originally planned. The party-like event which attracted 4,000 shareholders last year was supposed to be
held at a theater in downtown Seattle. A virus cluster has emerged in Washington state, however, with nine
deaths reported.
The 40th Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America, scheduled for later this month in
Boston, has been postponed. The largest such event in North America typically attracts about 20,000 people.
Organizers cited concerns about safety and travel restrictions. The event takes place in Boston's Seaport
district.
The International Monetary Fund said its spring meetings in Washington, D.C., along with those of the
World Bank, will now be "virtual" to limit the risk from traveling.
The Global Gaming Expo Asia scheduled for later this month in Macao has been pushed back to the end of
July. More than 13,000 people attended last year's expo.
General Motors asked employees who have traveled within the past 14 days to China, South Korea, Japan,
Iran or Italy to skip the high-profile roll out of the company's new slate of electric vehicles, according
to CEO Mary Barra.
F5 Networks Inc. postponed its analyst and investor event due to the virus outbreak. The company was
scheduled to hold the event in New York this week. The cloud technology company, based in Seattle, also
postponed its annual user conference scheduled for mid-March in Orlando, Florida.
CLOSE TO HOME: Amazon says one of its employees in Seattle has contracted the new coronavirus. "We're
supporting the affected employee who is in quarantine," it said in a prepared statement. Amazon said earlier
this week that two of its employees in Milan, Italy, have contracted the virus and are quarantined.
Aflac announced Wednesday that a temporary worker at its call center in Kobe, Japan is infected with the
virus. The individual had attended an event in Osaka where multiple participants also contracted the virus.
The company said it's continuing to monitor the recovery of the infected individual, who is being instructed
to refrain from coming into the office.
STAFF REDUCTIONS: Finnish national carrier Finnair is planning temporary layoffs between 14 days up to
one month for its entire staff based in Finland due to the economic impact caused by coronavirus to the
airline's operations.
More than 6,000 Finnair employees will be affected.
The Finnish flag carrier, which has a total staff of nearly 7,000, has strongly focused on Europe to Asia
flights from its Helsinki hub and has been forced to temporarily cancel flights to mainland China and other
Asian destinations because of the coronavirus.
THE MACRO VIEW: The head of the 189-nation International Monetary Fund said Wednesday that the economic
impact of the spreading coronavirus will be more serious than originally thought.
The IMF is now prepared to make support quickly available to low-income countries through a $50 billion
emergency fund that the group maintains to help nations facing an economic crisis, IMF Managing Director
Kristalina Georgieva said.
"We unfortunately over the past week have seen a shift to a more adverse scenario for the global
economy," said Georgieva.
The IMF's forecast in January that the global economy would rebound to growth of 3.3% this year, up from
2.9% last year, is no longer reliable.
"We know the disease is spreading quickly with over one-third of our membership affected directly,"
Georgieva said. "This is no longer a regional issue. It is a global issue calling for a global response."
SHORT SUPPLY: A U.N. agency estimated Wednesday that a shortage of industrial parts from China caused by
the coronavirus outbreak has set off a "ripple effect" that caused exports from other countries around the
world to drop by $47 billion last month.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development says that figures from Chinese businesses suggest
an annualized 2% decline in output in China. That has led to shrinking supplies for automotive, chemicals,
communications and other industries in many countries, in turn reducing their export capacity.
The agency says the preliminary figures show that industries outside of China that rely on components,
parts and other inputs from the country aren't able to export goods as much as they had before the virus
erupted. The outbreak began in the city of Wuhan, shutting down factories and quarantining workers at home.
The drop in Chinese output results in a "ripple effect throughout the global economy" that rises "to the
tune of a $50 billion fall in exports across the world," said said Pamela Coke-Hamilton, director of the
UNCTAD international trade and commodities division.
Exports from the European Union alone made up for about one third of that, or nearly $15.6 billion.
Exports of the United States were second, at nearly $5.8 billion, and Japan was third at almost $5.2
billion.
SHAKEN: The release of the James Bond film "No Time To Die" is being pushed back several months because
of concerns about coronavirus. MGM, Universal and producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli announced
on Twitter Wednesday that the film will be released in November, rather than next month as originally
planned. "No Time To Die" will now hit theaters in the U.K. on Nov. 12 and worldwide on Nov. 25. Publicity
plans for the film in China, Japan and South Korea had already been canceled because of the outbreak.
I knew Elizabeth Warren when I was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a
right-wing Reaganite. And the University of Pennsylvania had the most progressive law
school curriculum in the country. And this is Elizabeth Warren.
And I taught a first year class called income security. Elizabeth Warren said "there is
no more ridiculous idea than national healthcare". That's the Elizabeth Warren I knew. She
was in her 30s at this time.
She was the henchwoman of the right-wing takeover to destroy the left-wing curriculum. I
taught Worker's Rights, I taught the National Labor Rights Act, which doesn't exist
anymore, for the most part, it's not taught in any law school in the United States, I
taught Income Security, and I taught Jurisprudence. Elizabeth was against all those things.
I don't really know Elizabeth Warren personally, I just know her as a right-wing
Republican. And somehow or another, God came out of the heavens and turned her into a
Democrat, probably at the very moment that Derrick Bell stepped down from Harvard because
he would not work anymore until they hired an African-American woman.
Now she couldn't pretend she was Black, so she pretended she was African. She was Native
American. That's not what we call people who are Native Americans, because they're First
Nations people. Apaches and Cherokees were nations. There's no such thing as a Native
American. Elizabeth checked that box just as Derrick Bell was stepping down. She goes to
Massachusetts and she becomes a Democrat.
There is no more [of a] relentless, ruthless, nihilist that I have ever met in my entire
life. Not Elizabeth Warren. She's right up there with Donald Trump. So I can't really
support her. She did succeed in destroying that progressive curriculum. And that
progressive curriculum is, you know, it's one of those life things that you hold onto,
right? So I don't trust Elizabeth Warren as far as I can throw her.
She has no policy, she doesn't understand imperialism, and she has said she's a
capitalist. What she really is is a technocrat who clawed her way to Harvard. I mean,
that's where you want to end up, right? If you're a law professor, you want to be at
Harvard. Ok, she did that. She succeeded.
But as President of the United States I wouldn't even dream of supporting her. Because
Bernie Sanders, whatever you think of him, like me, was chaining himself to schools to
[de]segregate them. Was protesting against the Vietnam war. There are people who have held
onto values for a lifetime, and those, Slavoj, are the people I trust.
Presumably Sanders always has known about Warren's record (it's never been obscure for
anyone who took a few minutes to look; years ago when I focused on Wall Street and
participated at the econoblogs I always knew she was a fraud), yet he's always helped
propagate the fraud that she's some kind of "progressive". Same as he's always lied about
Russiagate (he certainly knows it's a lie).
So according to the party line, Sanders wanted Warren to run in 2016 and only ran himself
after she demurred. This can only mean he preferred for her to act as the sheepdog for
Hillary, since he certainly knew she was no "progressive".
The Democrat establishment came together and crushed Bernie Sanders, AGAIN! Even the fact
that Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race was devastating to Bernie and allowed Sleepy Joe to
unthinkably win Massachusetts. It was a perfect storm, with many good states remaining for
Joe!
20 minutes later, Trump tweeted that it was " So selfish for Elizabeth Warren to stay in the
race ," as she has "Zero chance of even coming close to winning, but hurts Bernie badly."
"So much for their wonderful liberal friendship. Will he ever speak to her again? She cost him
Massachusetts (and came in third), he shouldn't!"
So selfish for Elizabeth Warren to stay in the race. She has Zero chance of even coming
close to winning, but hurts Bernie badly. So much for their wonderful liberal friendship. Will
he ever speak to her again? She cost him Massachusetts (and came in third), he shouldn't!
Three hours later, Trump tweeted: " Wow! If Elizabeth Warren wasn't in the race, Bernie
Sanders would have EASILY won Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas , not to mention various other
states. Our modern day Pocahontas won't go down in history as a winner, but she may very well go
down as the all time great SPOILER! "
Wow! If Elizabeth Warren wasn't in the race, Bernie Sanders would have EASILY won
Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas, not to mention various other states. Our modern day
Pocahontas won't go down in history as a winner, but she may very well go down as the all time
great SPOILER!
Warren is a Reagan Republican. She was a Republican until she was 47 years old, which
means she lived through the Reagan years thinking 'this is fine'. She only switched in the
middle of the 1990s when the GOP had gone so far off the deep end that Clinton's center-right
New Democrats better represented her Reaganite views. She claims it was because of abuse by
banks, which doesn't make sense, since by that point it was the Democrats leading the charge
on bank deregulation.
She isn't a leftist, by any definition.
She built a reputation because of the very narrow range of finance issues she's
actually good on (the CFPB is the cornerstone of her entire progressive reputation). And in
this election she hasn't been a candidate of the left. She's run on the veneer that she is,
but like a snake she's been shedding that pretense over time, backing away from any and every
progressive policy position. Her base is white suburbanite professionals, especially women
who want to see one of their own be president.
The Warren-Sanders divide perfectly illustrates everything Marx ever wrote about the
dangers of Liberals. They aren't the Left's friend. When the revolution comes, they'll be the
first to be shot.
Benjamin: Ronald Reagan famously used to be a Democrat, lots of people forget that. He went
Republican in 1962.
Lots of people also don't know or realize how extremely likeable Reagan was as a person
when he was young, much more so for most people than Kennedy ever was or could ever be (the
Kennedy family was/is as nasty as any).
I got this link a few US election ago, Reagan was still a Democrat at this point in time:
"What's My Line -
Ronald Reagan (1953)" , it's only three and a half minutes long.
Elizabeth Warren really hurt Sanders tonight and she's getting no delegates cause her
percentages are under 15% (except in her own state that she's losing IN 3RD PLACE)! If she
had gotten out of the race Bernie would be sweeping everything for Progressives!
It's like Warren took a sledgehammer to the Progressive Movement and said: If I can't lead
it to the White House, then neither will YOU Bernie Sanders!
That's how selfish she was this week.
Thank goodness Sanders might still be able to get a majority, because BIDEN IS THE
TITANIC. Biden cannot be the Nominee, he's a walking disaster and Trump will crush him!
Thats a good one. The anunaki wouldn't even shit on Warren. The ancient south American
Indians would have found a fitting sacrifice for her type of lying, sleaze.
I have seen that
video and watch most of his posts as he has a sharp enquiring mind. Most importantly he is
comfortable to be challenged.
I discovered Robert Temple and the science of geopolymers
through one of his references.
I just can't be sympathetic with Bernie and his voters tonight. Remember how Bernie came out
to support Tulsi Gabbard when she was having such a hard time with the establishment? Neither
do I. Remember how Bernie's supporters made sure Bernie would speak the truth about
russiagate, or they weren't going to support him? Neither do I. Remember how Bernie made it
clear in every debate and every interview that the choice is endless war or medicare for all?
He didn't. Watching someone with a few leftist atoms in him being defeated in State after
State by a warmongering sociopath who belongs in a hospice with bars on the windows, is like
watching what he deserves.
People who casually tell you that Bernie is for the Empire--and not for the repair of
society-- are people trafficking in lies.
I encourage everyone to look at Bernie with a critical eye and decide for yourself.
Bernie has a history of deference to the Democratic Party and Democratic Party leaders.
All of whom are 100% pro-Empire.
'Nice guy' Bernie doesn't do anything that threatens the establishment. HE promises
revolutionary change - but that has NEVER come just from establishment Parties via the
ballot box. It has come from independent Movements.
When Bernie talks about Empire matters, he generally obfuscates or reinforces
pro-Empire narratives (like Russiagate's McCarthyism).
Anyone in political life for any length of time (like Bernie) must know that USA
is EMPIRE-FIRST. Empire priorities (military and intelligence focus; 'weaponized' liberalism;
neoliberal graft; dollar hegemony; Jihadis as a proxy army; etc.) dictate the limits of
domestic politics.
Bernie's quixotic insurgency was doomed to fail unless Bernie attacked the Democratic
Party's connection to Empire and use of identity politics to divide and conquer. Oh, and
Bernie would have to threaten to leave the Democratic Party -- but then would become the
independent Movement that Bernie and the Democratic Party have tried so hard to prevent!
"... US national politics is gang warfare. The Crips vs. the Bloods. Two criminal enterprises with roughly the same aims and tactics, fighting for turf. With minor differences of style. Trump upsets the leadership of the Bloods in 2016, but it turns out that, outrageous as he is, he is good for business, so all the Bloods but the wimps with a weak stomach fall in behind him. ..."
"... But let's just suppose that the old Crips are not quite as pathetic as they look. Let's imagine that they actually learned something in 2016. It was supposed to be easy for them in 2016, and they were surprised. So they have had four years to hone their election-stealing skills. And most of the traditional election stealing organizations in this country seem largely to hate Trump. ..."
"... So let's posit that the FBI & CIA, or whoever it is manages to prop up Biden, and succeed in stealing the election for him. Who would object to that? ..."
"... Not two gangs but one Deep State political mafia with two families running a protection racket (MIC), prostitution (media propaganda, psyops), drugs (industry incentives), and gambling (overseas adventurism) ..."
The setup: US national politics is gang warfare. The Crips vs. the Bloods. Two criminal
enterprises with roughly the same aims and tactics, fighting for turf. With minor differences
of style. Trump upsets the leadership of the Bloods in 2016, but it turns out that,
outrageous as he is, he is good for business, so all the Bloods but the wimps with a weak
stomach fall in behind him.
The Crips are bloated and in decline. A bunch of naïve, starry eyed nobodies mount a
campaign to take the Crips legit. The old Crips are irritated that they have to take time out
from grifting so as to squash the upstart pests.
That is where I see us today. But let's just suppose that the old Crips are not quite as
pathetic as they look. Let's imagine that they actually learned something in 2016. It was
supposed to be easy for them in 2016, and they were surprised. So they have had four years to
hone their election-stealing skills. And most of the traditional election stealing
organizations in this country seem largely to hate Trump.
So let's posit that the FBI & CIA, or whoever it is manages to prop up Biden, and
succeed in stealing the election for him. Who would object to that?
Yes, exactly – all the Trump die-hards, and 'tribal' gang bangers would object. It
could get really nasty.
And so far, I have not seen any evidence that any of the characters that would be willing
to play such a gambit have any inclination to give a shit for the consequences for us little
people.
Not two gangs but one Deep State political mafia with two families running a protection
racket (MIC), prostitution (media propaganda, psyops), drugs (industry incentives), and
gambling (overseas adventurism)...
The Tammany Society emerged as the center for Democratic-Republican Party politics in
the city in the early 19th century. After 1854, the Society expanded its political control
even further by earning the loyalty of the city's rapidly expanding immigrant community,
which functioned as its base of political capital. The business community appreciated its
readiness, at moderate cost, to cut through red tape and legislative mazes to facilitate
rapid economic growth... Tammany Hall also served as an engine for graft and political
corruption, perhaps most infamously under William M. "Boss" Tweed in the mid-19th
century....
[Tweed's biographer wrote:]
It's hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed's system ... The Tweed ring at its
height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key
power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box. Its frauds
had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing
and organization.
trailertrash @6 --- Americans have been railroaded into endless squabbling about voting and
democracy instead of demanding good governance. How does choosing between two similarly
corrupt parties deliver good governance?
Voting in the lesser evil is still choosing evil.
What does it profit a nation to have voting every 4 years when excrement covers her
sidewalks? and vets suicide themselves daily? and soldiers get raped daily by fellow
soldiers?
Companies are worried about the mild cases too. I work for a bank in Chicago with
multiple bldgs in the Loop. Starting yesterday they banned travel between Loop bldgs, and
in-person meetings of more than 5 people (arbitrary, to be sure). Travel domestic and
international was cancelled at the end of January.
If 20% of staff are out sick things stop happening immediately. In-flight projects to
meet regulatory decrees, work to keep an unhappy client onboard, etc.
At my wife's place of employment, a co-worker mentioned that their spouse came to work
sporting a mild cough (All the family members having had a bout with the .. 'flu'. Said
spouse (a public employee) was told by their employer (city/county .. not sure which??) to
go home, as a precaution. Humm .
"... But economics can also influence health outcomes, and not just in terms of NHS resources. For a minority of self employed workers there will be no sick-pay and those without a financial cushion will be put under stress. One of the concerns as far as the spread of the pandemic is concerned is that workers will not be able to afford to self-isolate if they have the disease. So if I was in government I would be thinking of setting up something like a sick-leave fund that such workers could apply to if they get coronavirus symptoms. ..."
"... The government also needs to think about keeping public services and utilities running when workers in those services start falling ill. In fact there are a whole host of things the government should now be doing to prepare for a pandemic. It is at times like these that we really need governments to act fast and think ahead. Do we in the UK , and US citizens , have confidence that the government will do what is required? One lesson of coronavirus may be never put into power politicians that have a habit of ignoring experts. ..."
A little over ten years ago I was approached by some health experts who wanted to look at the
economic effects of a influenza pandemic. They needed someone with a macroeconomic model to
look at the general equilibrium impacts. In the 1990s I had led a small team that constructed a model
called COMPACT, and these health experts and I completed a paper that was subsequently
published in Health
Economics. We reference to other studies that had been done earlier in that paper.
The current coronavirus outbreak will have different characteristics to the pandemic we
studied, and hopefully it will not become a pandemic at all. (In terms of mortality it seems to
be somewhere in between the 'base case' and 'severe case' we looked at in our work.) But I
think there were some general lessons from the exercise we did that will be relevant if this
particular coronavirus does become a global pandemic. One proviso is that a key assumption we
made about the pandemic is that it was mainly a 3 month affair, and obviously what I have to
say is dependent on it being short-lived.
It is worth saying at the start that the bottom line of all this for me is that the economics
are secondary to the health consequences for any pandemic that has a significant fatality rate
(as coronavirus so far appears to have). The economics are important in their own right and as
a warning to avoid drastic measures that do not influence the number of deaths, but beyond that
there is no meaningful trade-off between preventing deaths and losing some percent of GDP for
less than half the year.
Let me start with the least important impact from an economic point of view, and that is the
fall in production due to workers taking more time off sick. It is least important in part
because firms have ways of compensating for this, particularly if illness is spread over the
quarter. For example those who have been sick and come back to work can work overtime. This
will raise costs and might lead to some temporary inflation, but the central bank should ignore
this.
This 'direct' impact of the pandemic will reduce GDP in that quarter by a few percentage
points. The precise number will depend on what proportion of the population that get sick, on
what the fatality rate in the UK turns out to be, and how many people miss work in an attempt
not to get the disease. The impact on GDP for the whole year following the pandemic is much
less at around 1% or 2%, partly because output after the pandemic quarter is higher as firms
replenish diminished stocks and meet postponed demand.
All this assumes schools do not close once the pandemic takes hold. School closures can amplify
the reduction in labour supply if some workers are forced to take time off to look after
children. On the basis of the assumptions we made, if schools close for around 4 weeks that can
multiply the GDP impacts above by as much as a factor of 3, and if they close for a whole
quarter by twice that. If that seems large, remember nationwide school closures impact everyone
with children and not just those with the disease.
But even with all schools closed for 3 months and many people avoiding work when they were not
sick, the largest impact we got for GDP loss over a year was less than 5%. That is a one
quarter very severe recession, but there is no reason why the economy cannot bounce back to
full strength once the pandemic is over. Unlike a normal recession, information on the cause of
the output loss, and therefore when it should end, is clear.
All this assumes that consumers who have not yet got the disease do not alter their behaviour.
For a pandemic that spreads gradually this seems unlikely. The most important lesson I learnt
from doing this study is that the pandemic need not just be a supply shock. It can also be a
demand shock that can hit specific sectors very hard, depending on how consumers behave. This
is because a lot of our consumption nowadays can be called social, by which I mean doing things
that bring you into contact with other people. Things like going to the pub, to restaurants, to
football matches or travel. Other sectors that provide consumption services that involve
personal contact (e.g haircuts) and can easily be postponed may also be hit.
If people start worrying about getting the disease sufficiently to cut back on this social
consumption, the economic impact will be more severe than any numbers discussed so far. One
reason it is severe is that it is partly a permanent loss. Maybe you will have a few more meals
out once the pandemic is over to make up for what you missed when you stayed home, but there is
likely to be a net fall in your consumption of meals out over the year. What I realised when I
did the analysis was just how much of our consumption was social.
This is why the biggest impacts on GDP occur when we have people reducing their social
consumption in an effort not to get the disease. However falls in social consumption do not
scale up all scenarios by the same amount, for the simple reason that supply and demand are
complimentary. If school closures and people taking more time off work increase the size of the
supply shock, the demand shock has less scope to do damage. The largest fall in annual GDP in
all the variants we looked at was 6%.
Could conventional monetary or fiscal policy offset the fall in social consumption? Only
partially, because the drop in consumption is focused on specific sectors. What is more
important, and what we didn't explore in the exercise, is what would happen if the banks failed
to provide bridging finance for the firms having to deal with a sudden fall in demand. The
banks may judge that some businesses that are already indebted may not be able to cope with any
additional short term loans, leading to business closures during the pandemic.
It is in this light that we should view the collapse of stock markets around the world. In
macroeconomic terms this is a one-off shock, so Martin Sandbu is right that the
recent stock market reaction looks overblown. But if many businesses are at financial risk from
the temporary drop in social consumption, that implies a rise in the equity risk premia, which
helps account for the size of the stock market collapse we have seen. (I say 'helps'
deliberately, as much of the impact will be on smaller businesses that do not find their way
into the main stock market indices.)
If I was running the central bank or government, I would have already started having
conversations with banks about not forcing firms into bankruptcy during any pandemic.
But economics can also influence health outcomes, and not just in terms of NHS resources. For a
minority of self employed workers there will be no sick-pay and those without a financial
cushion will be put under stress. One of the concerns as far as the spread of the pandemic is
concerned is that workers will not be able to afford to self-isolate if they have the disease.
So if I was in government I would be thinking of setting up something like a sick-leave fund
that such workers could apply to if they get coronavirus symptoms.
The government also needs to think about keeping public services and utilities running when
workers in those services start falling ill. In fact there are a whole host of things the
government should now be doing to prepare for a pandemic. It is at times like these that we
really need governments to act fast and think ahead. Do
we in the UK , and
US citizens , have confidence that the government will do what is required? One lesson of
coronavirus may be never put into power politicians that have a habit of ignoring experts.
Once confidence and certainty are
lost, the willingness to expand debt and leverage collapses.
Even though the first-order effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are still impossible to
predict, it's already possible to ask: did the pandemic pop all the global financial bubbles?
The
reason we can ask this question is the entire bull mania of the 21st century has been based on a
permanently high rate of expansion of leverage and debt.
The lesson of the 2008-09 Global Financial meltdown was clear:
any decline in the
rate of debt/leverage expansion is enough to threaten financial bubbles, and any absolute decline in
debt and leverage will unleash a cascade that collapses all the speculative bubbles in stocks, real
estate, collectibles, etc.
What's the connection between Covid-19 and the rate of debt/leverage expansion?
Confidence
and certainty: people will make bets on future growth and take on additional debt and leverage when
they feel confident and have a high degree of certainty that the trends are running their way.
Over the past 20 years, the certainty that central banks would support markets has been high, as
central banks stepped in at every wobble. Today's 50 basis-points cut by the Fed sustains that
certainty.
What's now broken is the certainty that central bank interventions will lift risk assets
and the real-world economy.
Given the uncertainties of the eventual consequences of the
pandemic globally, confidence in future trends has been either dented or destroyed, depending on your
perspective and timeline.
Certainty that central bank interventions will push markets and real-world economies higher has
also been dented. What happens if the market tanks after every 50 basis-points cut by the Fed?
We wouldn't be in such a precariously brittle state if the global economy hadn't been
ruthlessly financialized
to the point that market dependence on central bank intervention is
now essentially 100%.
Once confidence and certainty are lost, the willingness to expand debt and leverage
collapses
, and that reduction in the rate of expansion will pop all the global asset bubbles.
No matter who comes away with the nomination, it has to be asked "was any of this process
legitimate?". We know from a plethora of examples that US elections are not fair. They border
on meaningless most of the time. The DNC's doubly so, having argued in court they have no duty
to be fair.
Any result, then, you could safely assume was contrived, for one reason or another.
If the Buttigieg-Klobuchar-Biden gambit works, we end up with Trump vs. Biden. And,
realistically, that means a second Trump term.
Biden is possibly senile and definitely creepy . Watching him shuffle and stutter
through a Presidential campaign would be almost cruel.
Politically, he has all of Hillary's weaknesses, being a big-time establishment type with a
pro-war record, without even the "I have a vagina" card to play.
He'll get massacred.
Is that the plan?
There's more than enough signs that Trump has abandoned all the policies that made him any
kind of threat to the political establishment. Four years on: no wars ended, no walls built, no
swamp drained. Just more of the same. He's an idiot who talked big and got co-opted. It
happens.
The Senate and other institutions might talk about Trump being a criminal or an idiot or a
"Nazi", but the reality is he's barely perceptibly different from any other POTUS this side of
JFK.
#TheResistance was a puppet show. A weak game played for toy money. When it really counts,
they're all in it together. Biden getting on the ticket would be a public admittance of that.
It would mean the DNC is effectively throwing the fight. Trump is a son of a bitch, but he's
their son of a bitch. And that's much better than even the idea of President
Bernie.
Does it really matter?
Empire of kaos will never move one inch to change the status quo.
The quaisi fascist state that most western /antlantacist nations have become it will make no
difference
Gianbattista Vico"Their will always be an elite class" Punto e basta.
Name me one politico that made any difference to we the sheeple in the modern era.
If someone were to mention FDR I will scream.
Aldo Moro got murdered by the deep state for only suggesting to make a pact with Berlinguer
the head of Il Partito Communista Italiano.
re ... Your house foreclosed upon by shady bank: naked capitalism, .0001% paid on interest
savings: naked capitalism, poor wages: naked capitalism, dangerous workplace: naked
capitalism, etc. ...
"naked capitalism" is not a clear description. Consider using "predatory capitalism",
which clearly describes what it is.
Here's the Wiki dictionary definition:
Predatory--
1. relating to or denoting an animal or animals preying naturally on others.
synonyms: predacious, carnivorous, hunting, raptorial, ravening;
Example: "predatory birds".
2. seeking to exploit or oppress others.
synonyms: exploitative, wolfish, rapacious, greedy, acquisitive, avaricious
Example: "I could see a predatory gleam in his eyes"
Note where the word comes from:
The Latin "praedator", in English meaning "plunderer".
And "plunderer" helps the reader understand and perhaps recognize what is happening.
"... I have been a physician now for almost 30 years. It has been a career spanning the very end of the "Marcus Welby" era, and then piece by piece the complete dismantling of the medical profession by the insurance companies and now "non-profit" corporations. When I was young, the leadership structure in the hospitals was completely and utterly controlled by three groups: the physicians, the nurses, and in the case of Catholic hospitals, the church and the nuns, or in non-Catholic hospitals, philanthropic community leaders. ..."
"... There were no four-star mahogany and marble lobbies. There were no 2 million dollar annual salaries for the hospital CEOs. There were no non-profit corporate boards extracting every bit of wealth from the patients to maintain multimillion dollar salaries for the board members and the middle managers. ..."
"... In further conversation, the doctor said that we should be thinking about a world in which a large number of health care workers can't come to work because they are in quarantine or sick with the virus. We are looking at this problem right now. ..."
Read
the whole thread. His basic point is that the US Government did not want to see data that
would indicate community transmission, so it didn't look for that. What do you think? I'm
especially interested in what medical professionals in this blog's readership have to say.
I received this e-mail from Wyoming Doc a couple of days ago, and have his permission to
post it:
I have just learned of the first Coronavirus Death in the USA. It is now getting real.
I would point you to the following links -- I am seeing myself -- but to a greater degree
hearing about rather concerning things happening in our hospitals across the country.
The first is this video:
I would start first with a little background. I have been a physician now for almost 30
years. It has been a career spanning the very end of the "Marcus Welby" era, and then piece
by piece the complete dismantling of the medical profession by the insurance companies and
now "non-profit" corporations. When I was young, the leadership structure in the hospitals
was completely and utterly controlled by three groups: the physicians, the nurses, and in the
case of Catholic hospitals, the church and the nuns, or in non-Catholic hospitals,
philanthropic community leaders.
The focus at the time was mostly on taking care of the most patients the best that could
be done in a compassionate way with the resources available. And believe it or not, in my
opinion, the care that was given in that time was far superior than what is going on now. The
leaders of the hospitals were community leaders, and so was the medical and the nursing
staff. To put it succinctly: they cared about their neighbors. Many, many nights while on
call I would see the nuns right along side the nurses and physicians working themselves to
death to take care of sick patients. These hospitals were never in debt -- the resources and
the donations coming in were used for the expenses going out. There were no four-star
mahogany and marble lobbies. There were no 2 million dollar annual salaries for the hospital
CEOs. There were no non-profit corporate boards extracting every bit of wealth from the
patients to maintain multimillion dollar salaries for the board members and the middle
managers.
When I was a young medical student, a very old professor taught a course in medical
ethics. In one of his most pressing lectures, he discussed the fact that the goals and ideals
of medicine and public health were a complete 180 degrees from the wants and desires of a
free market. He added that every time combining public health/medicine and free markets had
been tried in history it ended in tears -- usually bankrupting the society. It was his
fervent desire that we not allow this to happen to the profession as we entered its ranks,
and to keep an eye out for this at all times.
Well, as everyone knows by now, his worst fears have been realized. Many, probably not
most, members of my profession -- especially the procedure-based specialists and surgeons --
in the past 10-15 years have completely lost sight of the public well-being. Their sights are
now on lucre. The one desire for many of them has been how to make more money more quickly.
They have been aided and abetted by the governing agencies and Boards of all the various
medical specialties. These national leadership organizations have made all the activities of
being a physician so onerous and the billing so difficult that the vast majority of
physicians have no choice but to become employees of these mega-corporations. The physicians
have made a deal to take a back seat to these "businessmen" to keep the cash coming. The
leadership of our hospital systems are no longer physicians, nurses, nuns, and
philanthropists. Nope –it is all MBA all the time. Even the physicians who are
nominally in charge -- ie the ubiquitous Chief Medical Officers of the corporations -- do not
get considered for the jobs unless they have an MBA after their name. And the credentialing
of the leadership teams are just absolutely ridiculous. Look at the websites of your local
hospital and its leadership. It is usual to see things like this: John Doe, MD MBA FACP
PhD FACC. The non-MD credentialing is even more hilarious -- I have no idea what 95% of
these abbreviations mean -- but they have to puff themselves up anyway. The hubris and the
arrogance would be hilarious, but now the crisis is upon us.
About 10-15 years ago, the change began in earnest. One by one, the physicians in charge
were replaced with MBA bureaucrats. The usual committee structure in the hospital --
"Pharmacy & Therapeutics", "Patient Care Committee" etc -- had their physicians, nurses
and pharmacists replaced with bureaucrats. Some of these bureaucrats were MDs and RNs -- the
paycheck was awesome -- and they turned their backs on their duties and their colleagues and
patients on the ground to keep the cash coming. I even lived to see the day when one of my
hospitals fired the MD and RN leadership of the Medical Ethics Committee and replaced them
with an MBA.
Suddenly, the only ethical thing to do was whatever was needed to maximize cash flow. And
any MD or RN who did not like it? Well, you're fired -- see you later. We began to completely
corporatize medical care. Advertisements and billboards everywhere, customer service feedback
surveys flowing in the mail, the list is endless. Public health concerns began to be confined
strictly to things that would boost revenue: colonoscopies, mammograms, labs, vaccinations,
bone density studies, etc. Things that have no revenue flow -- like mental health issues,
opioid abuse, elder care -- well, who cares about that? Very soon, the hospitals began to
merge into gigantic corporations and then they began to collude to control the health care
costs in the community. Our health care systems in all our big cities are gigantic
monopolies. This despite the fact that this kind of behaviour is illegal under federal
statutes. And please note: this is why insurance costs are so enormously high in this country
-- and getting higher every year. Obamacare did NOTHING to stop this; it actually in many
ways has made it much easier to pull off.
Because of this situation and for many other reasons, I decided to make a change in my
life a few years ago. I have now moved to a very small hospital in rural America. In my life
now, the corporate board has now been replaced by a board elected by the taxpayers: they are
truly leaders of the community and do everything in the spirit of what the people need and
are counting on from their hospital. The hospital is led by an MD -- and there are
administrators -- but they too are members of the community. There is an obvious care about
the community and its needs. I have spoken to colleagues across the country this week -- some
big hospitals have done nothing at all to prepare for the crisis. It is no surprise to me
that people in all levels at my current hospital have gone to enormous lengths to make sure
everyone here is ready to go. I feel like I have stepped back in time twenty years. It is a
very good feeling.
In the big city, I had become very accustomed to going to important meetings in the
hospitals -- all controlled by the business leadership now -- and no medical facts or issues
being discussed at all. Anything medical is distilled down to number crunching, revenue
cycles, and "profit centers." Never a word is said about medical facts, public health, impact
on patients, or morality like it used to be -- at least most of the time. Anyone who voices
dissent is ostracized, and finds themselves disinvited and even dismissed from
employment.
So the Youtube video is old hat to me. The people in charge of these critical things in
our world often look like Barbie and Ken. They are cool cucumbers. They know all about
branding, deceptive advertising, maximizing revenue, hiding truths, sucking up. But when
actually asked questions that are critical to the issue at hand -- they often know nothing.
And because they know nothing, nothing gets done. I have seen it many times before and am
sure I will see it again. I read commentary online that people were shocked by that DHS
Chief's answers to questions. I am not shocked -- I am very accustomed to it. Please note:
our entire corporate health care system at the local hospital level in the big cities is now
under the control of people just like him. They are looking for every way they can to defuse
this crisis with calming advertising, words, pleasantries, smiles, and soothing statements. I
am sure that they are also looking for any way they can profit financially from it as well.
All I can say is: Good Luck.
A case in point was the following interaction I was told about yesterday by an old student
of mine who is now a fellow at a major medical center on the East Coast. I heard the same
exact recollection of the story from someone else in the room.
This was a meeting with the upper administration of the hospital system and heads of
departments and multiple physicians and nurses. It occurred between the CEO and a DOC who is
older and near retirement and who is an infectious disease specialist. The discussion about
the current crisis went something like this:
CEO: I am not sure that we need to be preparing like this – this is obviously
overblown – and is really going to damage our budget projections. The HHS seems to
think this is going to go away in the spring anyway. DOC: Why in God's name would you want it to go away in the spring? CEO: (chuckling) What the hell are you talking about? We all want this thing to go away as
soon as possible. DOC – Historically, when pandemics are spread by aerosol droplets, and are as
infectious as this one seems to be, they may recede in the spring -- but then come back in
the fall with horrific fury. Remember the last one -- the Spanish Flu? The first wave was
nothing, but the second and third waves turned the planet into a funeral home. CEO: Oh for God's sake – don't you get it? That will give us time to get a vaccine
-- we will not need to worry about it in October. DOC: A vaccine? you must be kidding. It is never a good idea to rush a vaccine. Remember
the first polio vaccine was rushed to market. It did not work and actually harmed many
children. Remember the swine flu vaccine in the 1970s? It was not properly tested. Very few
died from the swine flu. Hundreds and thousands were maimed or killed by Guillain
Barré Syndrome because of it. And I doubt that half of our population would be even
willing to take it. You do not understand.
CEO: Oh I understand way more than you obviously do. There is already an antiviral --
we will have that as well.
DOC: Really? Again, not really fully tested. And have you looked at the cost? Even a
conservative estimate at the dosing they are using it would be $5000 a day. What is that
going to do to your budget projections when you have 100 people in here in the hospital on
that drug? Do we even have enough in the country for a sudden mass need? I do not
know.
And then CEO looked DOC in the eye and just moved on to something else.
And DOC found out later that he would no longer be welcome at any of these meetings.
Please know this: viruses are not Republicans, they are not Democrats. Viruses are not
going to respond to advertising, sweet words, or revenue cycles. They are going to accomplish
their mission, and that alone. There may be things we are able to do, but we will need all
the medical wisdom in the world focusing on our country as a whole and our local communities.
That is just not happening to the extent it should be. We are going to fight this one with
business school principles.
I again pray all the time that this virus will burn out -- that it will stop, that it will
not get worse. I pray that God will have mercy and allow this to be a close call. But I am
afraid that we have let our society crumble in so many ways –not just medicine -- that
it is going to take a punch in the face to get our attention. This coronavirus may very well
be the brass knuckles.
A follow-up e-mail from him:
This has been one of the most harrowing weeks in my career. The patients are really wigged
out. Multiple times this week, I have seen patients with a cough or fever -- and we cannot ID
a pathogen. That has caused a constant boogeyman to be sitting on my shoulder: fear. I can
see the fear in my staff's eyes, and then on Friday, a nurse suddenly after lunch developed a
101 fever and a bad cough -- again no pathogens. I have a feeling this is happening in many
other places in this country.
We have no way to test these people. I can offer little if any hope. I am telling them to
stay at home, and I can see the horror in their eyes. I am now at the same level of those
physicians in Milano 700 years ago –
So when I get this kind of soul crushing fear in my life, I always call one of my elder
family members. My parents and grandparents are all gone now. The only one left is my 92 year
old Auntie Marina. She lived through hell in Greece during the Nazi occupation and
immediately thereafter. She is an amazing woman. And this is what she said to me.
"My dear, I was there when your parents handed your life and everything you are over to
God. I was right on the front row. He has been preparing you every day of your life since you
were a baby for the duties that you must now perform. Be brave, and sturdy, and do everything
in His name. He will surround you with courage -- and fear not, if he decides this is your
time to go, you will be welcomed by all the saints and angels. But here in our house, we are
going to be lifting you up in prayer, multiple times a day. And I am certain that your
parents are looking down and are very very proud of you."
I am a member of my community and my church. I cannot leave my post -- and I would ask
that you pray for me and my staff for the bravery to continue on. I know that is a lot of
drama, but we are really having fear here on the front lines. I would ask that you keep all
the health care workers in America in your prayers right now.
In further conversation, the doctor said that we should be thinking about a world in which a
large number of health care workers can't come to work because they are in quarantine or sick
with the virus. We are looking at this problem right now.
He also recommends that people follow the coronavirus Reddit, which he says is
well-moderated, and a source of solid information: https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/
For everyone puzzling over Warren's actions and intentions, this should help -- a lot.
Woke Wonk Elizabeth Warren's Foreign Policy Team is Stacked With Pro-War Swamp
Creatures
Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal – 2-26-20
"With her new list of foreign policy advisors, Warren unveiled a cast of pro-war think
tankers, Cold Warriors and corporate careerists united in support of the Beltway consensus.
So much for 'big, structural change'."
"... Biden and Warren are both enthusiastic supporters of neocon foreign policy which is in line with their phony support for the working class. What happened to Warren's glittering M4A plan? It turned back into a pumpkin didn't it? It was all smoke and mirrors. No surprise if you know her history. ..."
"... Imperial Borg Assimilation ..."
"... The Foreign Policy Establishment ..."
"... Warren is an establishment social climber. She took off the mask and her true colors shone through when she viciously attacked Bernie Sanders as a misogynist. Yet still many people surrounding the Sander's campaign support Warren. Why is that? Big money on the left supports her, that's why. That big money also pays a lot of salaries in the liberal political job market. Have you heard of the The Democracy Alliance ? ..."
"... Why do so many liberals or even progressives dislike Tulsi and are so eager to see her gone? Propaganda from the media. The media for a year has relentlessly promoted Red Baiting towards Tulsi because Tulsi challenges the "Washington Consensus" (unfettered elite rule over America and the world with an iron fist). ..."
"... Everyone in the pro-Israel lobby (myself included) is already talking about how to make sure that Tulsi Gabbard's campaign is over before it even gets off the ground -- If you're going to bet on a Dem candidate, look elsewhere. ..."
"... There are many reasons behind that. The main reason though is Tulsi trying to stop war. The Neocons and Saudis have been pushing American politicians, celebrities, media owners, think tanks, foundations and so on for years -- to destroy Syria. Supposedly because Syria is close allies with Iran. ..."
As I was checking the news earlier today
I noticed that the coronavirus had killed another top government official in Iran, bringing the total to 3. Or at
least the 3 they have released info on. There's a chance it's worse among the Iranian leadership but they don't
want to cause a panic. I checked the Twitterverse after that for my daily dose of madness and surprisingly kept
seeing people ask rhetorically:
Why is Tulsi Gabbard still in the
primary race?
Turns out that Amy "She Hulk" Klobuchar
had dropped out of the primary race apparently to suck up to Joe Biden for a VP slot. And so had Pete "Honestly
I'm Not Annoying" Buttigigieididisjjd. This of course should surprise no one since the threat of Bernie Sanders to
the financial criminal syndicates greasing the palms of practically all politicians and media to do their bidding
have seen the writing on the wall. They realize they need candidates to drop out in order to coalesce centrist
votes around one or two to stop what they perceive to be a huge problem for them in Bernie Sanders.
... ... ...
Biden and Warren are both enthusiastic
supporters of neocon foreign policy which is in line with their phony support for the working class. What happened
to Warren's glittering M4A plan? It turned back into a pumpkin didn't it? It was all smoke and mirrors. No
surprise if you know her history.
Did you see her on Pod Save America regaling us with how much she believes in
crippling countries by sanctions if they dare to resist the racist
Imperial Borg Assimilation
Machine
aka
The Foreign Policy Establishment
?
That doesn't sound woke to me Miss Thang
.
Warren is an establishment social
climber. She took off the mask and her true colors shone through when she viciously attacked Bernie Sanders as a
misogynist. Yet still many people surrounding the Sander's campaign support Warren. Why is that? Big money on the
left supports her, that's why. That big money also pays a lot of salaries in the liberal political job market.
Have you heard of the
The Democracy Alliance
?
The Democracy Alliance is a
semi-anonymous donor network funded primarily by none other than Democratic mega-donor George Soros. Since its
inception in 2005, it is estimated the Alliance has injected over $500 million to Democratic causes. While it
isn't typical that they would endorse a candidate outright, they focus more on formulating a catalog of
organizations and PACs that they recommend the network of about 100 or so millionaires and billionaires invest
in. Democracy Alliance almost literally have their hands in every major left-leaning institution you have (and
haven't) heard of -- John Podesta and Neera Tanden's Center for American Progress, David Brock's Media Matters,
Center for Popular Democracy, Demos (we'll come back to this one), and the Working Families Party. All of these
organizations are listed on the Alliance's website as recommended investments for it's members; and invest they
do. Here's the rub: Democracy Alliance's membership isn't made entirely public -- but we know enough that alot
of the people that have sat in the highest levels of that organization have an affinity for Elizabeth Warren.
... ... ...
Why do so many liberals or even
progressives dislike Tulsi and are so eager to see her gone? Propaganda from the media. The media for a year has
relentlessly promoted Red Baiting towards Tulsi because Tulsi challenges the "Washington Consensus" (unfettered
elite rule over America and the world with an iron fist).
That is why we got this from Jacob Wohl
after Tulsi declared her candidacy last year:
Everyone in the pro-Israel lobby
(myself included) is already talking about how to make sure that Tulsi Gabbard's campaign is over before it
even gets off the ground -- If you're going to bet on a Dem candidate, look elsewhere.
There are many reasons behind that. The
main reason though is Tulsi trying to stop war. The Neocons and Saudis have been pushing American politicians,
celebrities, media owners, think tanks, foundations and so on for years -- to destroy Syria. Supposedly because
Syria is close allies with Iran.
But they are not the only ones who want
Syria destroyed. Other reasons may have to do with massive profits at stake. A natural gas survey team from Norway
some years ago discovered that Syria has the largest
untapped deposits of natural gas in the world
. After that secret discovery became known by various powerful
people
plans were drawn up to split
up the profits after the destruction of the Syrian government. But after Syria
asked Russia for help that changed their plans.
She is not having our country
become a plaything for rich a-holes who use the lives and limbs of service members for their greedy
scams. Because of that the idle rich sociopaths ruling America with their political and media henchmen
went after Tulsi with a full barrage of lies
, media blackouts, and massive amounts of propaganda --
all to stop her message from getting out so they can create a false image of her in people's minds.
Everything and anything they can throw at her, they do.
There are two politicians whom
they fear. Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Which is why Bernie Sanders has unsurprisingly been trying
to stay out of the foreign policy debate, or he even goes along with the establishment for the most part.
He saw what they unleashed against Tulsi. He knows from long experience that propaganda works on a lot of
people. The financial elites are not naive though, they probably believe he is going along with their
ridiculous foreign policy as a political strategy -- until he gains more power. They fear that if he gains
that power he will, like Tulsi, not go along with their imperial stormtrooper agenda.
Back in January, well before the Democratic primary race had taken on its current
composition, independent journalist
Ruth Ann Oskolkoff reported that a source had heard from high-level Democratic Party
insiders that they were planning to install Joe Biden as the party's nominee, and to smear
Bernie Sanders as a Russian asset.
"On January 20, 2020 at 8:20 p.m. PDT I received a communication from a reliable source,"
Oskolkoff wrote.
"This person had interactions earlier that evening with high level party members and
associates of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who said that they have now selected
Biden as the Democratic Party nominee, with Warren as the VP. They also said the plan is to
smear Bernie as a Russian asset."
Now, immediately before Super Tuesday, we are seeing establishment candidates
Pete Buttigieg and
Amy Klobuchar drop out of the race, both of whom, along with
former candidate Beto O'Rourke , are now suddenly endorsing Biden. Elizabeth Warren, the
only top-level candidate besides Sanders who could be labeled vaguely "left" by any stretch of
the imagination, has meanwhile
outraged progressives by remaining in the race, to the Vermont senator's detriment.
Prior to the South Carolina primary, Russian state media were touting Bernie Sanders as
the most likely Democratic nominee, and it won't be surprising if they do the same after
Super Tuesday https://t.co/mH98PVmcjr
This latter development is becoming a conspicuously common line of attack against Sanders
and, while we're on the subject, also tracks with a prediction made by journalist Max Blumenthal back in
July of 2017. Blumenthal told Fox's Tucker Carlson that "this Russia hysteria will be
re-purposed by the political establishment to attack the left and anyone on the left -- a
Bernie Sanders-like politician who steps out of line on the issues of permanent war or
corporate free trade, things like that -- will be painted as Russia puppets. So this is very
dangerous, and people who are progressive who are falling into it need to know what the
long-term consequences of this cynical narrative are."
So we're seeing things unfold exactly as some have predicted. We're seeing the clear
frontrunner smeared as a tool of Vladimir Putin, accompanied by a deluge of op-eds and think
pieces from all the usual
warmongering mass media narrative managers calling on so-called "moderates" to rally around
the former Vice President on Super Tuesday.
"Whatever the case for either Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren...neither is going to be
the nominee. And...it's not going to be Mike Bloomberg either. So it's Bernie Sanders or Joe
Biden." Tomorrow, if you live in one of 14 states, you can choose Biden. https://t.co/btuPbGtWxG
And the prediction markets have seen a massive surge for Biden and plunge for Bernie...
With Biden now surging into the lead
The only problem? Biden's brain is turning into sauerkraut.
There are two new clips of video footage making the rounds today, one featuring Biden at a
rally telling his supporters that tomorrow is "Super Thursday" ,
and another featuring the former VP saying (and this is a direct quote ),
"We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created -- by the -- you know, you
know the thing."
And yeah, it's unpleasant to have to keep pointing this out. I'm not loving it myself. I
resent Biden's handlers and the Democratic Party establishment for making it necessary to
continually point out an old man's obvious symptoms of cognitive decline. But it does need to
be pointed to, and it's creepy and weird that they're continuing to prop up this crumbling husk
of a man while pretending that everything's fine.
Not that Biden would be an acceptable leader of the most powerful government on earth even
with a working brain; he's a horrible war hawk
with an
inexcusable track record of advancing right-wing policies. But even rank-and-file Americans
who don't pay attention to that stuff would plainly see a man on the debate stage opposite
Trump who shouldn't be permitted near heavy machinery, much less the nuclear codes. And Trump
will happily point that out.
It's been obvious since 2016 that the Dems were going to once again sabotage the only
candidate with a chance of beating Trump in favor of a scandalously inappropriate candidate,
but wheeling out an actual, literal dementia patient for the role is something not even I would
have imagined.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Thursday
that it would be a "fatal mistake" for any country to believe it will not be hit. WHO advisor
Ira Longini has said that without aggressive measures to contain the virus, it could ultimately
infect two-thirds of the world, which would mean hundreds of millions of deaths.
The economic damage from the virus could exceed the scale of the 2008 financial crisis. The
recession sparked by the 2008 crisis led to a fall in global GDP by 0.5 percent and destroyed
the jobs of tens of millions of people.
The response of ruling elites and the governments they control to the crisis combines
incompetence with a criminal level of indifference. Nowhere is this more evident than in the
United States.
President Trump, concerned above all about the impact of the coronavirus on the fortunes of
the corporate and financial elite, has sought to downplay the danger and grossly overstate the
level of preparedness. "Whatever happens," he said on Wednesday, "we're totally prepared."
In fact, the US government is completely unprepared for a major outbreak. There is no system
in place to even systematically test for the virus. The individual in California who has been
identified as the first reported case of unknown origin in the US was not given a test for days
after symptoms were first expressed.
There is a severe shortage of the most basic health equipment, including respirator masks
needed by health care workers. The government only has about 30 million on hand, while it is
estimated that 300 million may be required.
The Trump administration has appointed Vice President Mike Pence, whose inaction and
reactionary religious ideology contributed to an HIV outbreak in the state of Indiana when he
was governor, as the government's point person for the coronavirus response. The main purpose
of this appointment is to muzzle any officials whose warnings contradict the response of the
administration.
... ... ...
The political establishment in the United States is engaged in a "debate" over whether $2
billion is adequate (the position of the White House) or $8 billion is required (the position
of the Democrats). Both these figures represent a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of
the global crisis.
The provisioning of health care and treatment cannot be regulated by the
insurance, pharmaceutical and health care companies. Treatment, including any future vaccine,
must be available to everyone, free of charge, on an equal basis.
The giant health care companies must be turned into public utilities, democratically
controlled to meet the urgent social need presented by the coronavirus and other health
emergencies Direct financial support and income compensation for all those impacted by the
economic consequences
Millions of workers face reductions in hours or the loss of their jobs due to the immediate
impact of the coronavirus and its broader economic consequences. They must be compensated in
full for their losses.
Governments and the capitalist elites will argue that there is no money to finance such an
emergency response. This is a lie! The amount spent by the capitalist governments on military
expenditures runs into the trillions of dollars. The annual military budget of the United
States alone is more than one trillion dollars. Moreover, the major capitalist governments, led
by the US Federal Reserve, have allocated virtually unlimited sums of money to drive up the
market value of equities. Within weeks of the 2008 crash, the US government doubled the
national debt overnight to provide liquidity for the stock market and bail out corrupt
investors.
Moreover, staggering sums of money are controlled by an infinitesimal percentage of the
world's population. The wealth of the world's 500 richest people stands at nearly $6 trillion,
following an increase of $1.2 trillion last year alone. The working class must demand that
governments impose emergency taxes on the fortunes of the oligarchs to the extent required by
the emergency.
And yet, he says nothing about simply inventing new money (as Hong Kong has already done),
with zero debt burden, to ensure everyone is ok and the economy survives. ere's Economics
Prof. Steve Keen, this very morning:
> To prevent a financial pandemic on top of a medical one:
1. Make a direct payment now, on a per-capita basis, to all residents via their primary
bank accounts (most effectively, their accounts through which they pay taxes).
As Quantitative Easing has shown, Central Banks have a limitless capacity to purchase
assets from the private sector -- or to provide the private sector with money created by the
Central Bank. Under Quantitative Easing, the US Federal Reserve purchased $80 billion worth
of bonds off the private financial sector every month for almost a decade. Technically, that
was an asset swap: the Federal Reserve credited the financial sector with $80 billion of cash
per month, in return for bonds with a face value of $80 billion per month being credited to
the Federal Reserve's assets.
This does not have to be financed by asset purchases: it is also quite possible for
Central Banks to put a notional asset on their balance sheets to finance. This is already
done by the Bank of England to back the value of the notes issued by Scottish Banks: a bill
known as a Titan with a face value of £100 million balances the value of bank notes
issued by Scottish banks.
The same could be done by any Central Bank to balance a direct cash transfer to the bank
accounts of all residents of its country. Frances Coppola makes the case for this in the
general case of a financial crisis in her book People's Quantitative Easing (Coppola 2019).
This power could be used now to stop a financial crisis happening in the first place.
The payment should be per capita -- as it has been in the country that has already done
this because of the crisis, Hong Kong. The payment there is HK$10,000, or roughly US$2,000.
It does not need to be financed by the Treasury or by taxation: neither were used by the USA
to support its $1 trillion dollars per year Quantitative Easing program. There will be no
"debt burden for future generations".
Recommended reading, the unfashionable Edward Bulwer-Lytton's " Last Days of Pompeii "
for a good exposition of how effete, over urbanised fantasists face reality.
It's could be a big reset button.
JIT and complex long-distance procurement chains have become the norm in efforts to maximise
profits. This virus may make it obvious to all that even a slight disturbance to them can
bring everything to a halt.
Back in the distant past businesses thought about that, holding a reserve stock and having at
least duplex suppliers. Maybe what goes around comes around.
In most areas of the economy, supply and demand are roughly in balance. In the UK health care
sector, extreme rationing is in force. The UK has a very low spending per capita on the NHS
compared to health systems in say the USA or France. The right side of politics doesn't
believe that good access to health care resources is a universal right but something that
should be minimised and de-prioritised. This is why health related issues become major
national problems. The NHS should be funded to meet demand.
I don't see any free market zealots here. Austerity is an interventionist policy driven by
the growth theories of the author of this very article. Similarly, Boris's public
infrastructure projects and levelling up for the North are essentially Keynesian policies,
normally associated with post-War macroeconomic policy. Don't let their bullshit about free
markets fool you.
"Affected countries will, and should, engage in massive deficit spending to shore up their
health systems and prop up their economies"
Austerity is the only thing the Tories know, for ordinary working people anyway. It's a
different story for bankers who got £423 billion of "QE" (newly-printed money) after
2008. No doubt when banks start going bust again as a result of the coronavirus pandemic
it'll be Christmas come early for Tory donors in the City. All of this is entirely
predictable. A leopard doesn't change its spots.
"Affected countries will, and should, engage in massive deficit spending"
Where the hell was this ten years ago? Bearing in mind the death toll from the austerity
you championed is likely significantly higher than the death toll from Convid-19 so far.
America the country with a 5 percent budget deficit and debt approaching 110% of gdp is the
country best prepared for the next recession. Right.. I think I will stick with China, a
country with a fast growing economy for 30 years, producing products the world wants and with
it seems a very effective response to the Covid crisis (new cases down fast).
A supply side recession would usually imply that inflation will rise - the classic response
of central banks to that is interest rate rises. Good job most of the world is not over
indebted..... oh wait.
The shake up is long over due the only issue now is who will be the winners and who will
be the losers
I t is too soon to predict the long-run arc of the coronavirus outbreak. But it is not too
soon to recognise that the next global recession could be around the corner – and that it
may look a lot different from those that began in 2001 and 2008.
For starters, the next recession is likely to emanate from China, and indeed may already be
under way. China is a highly leveraged economy, it cannot afford a sustained pause today
anymore than fast-growing 1980s Japan could. People, businesses and municipalities need funds
to pay back their out-size debts. Sharply adverse demographics, narrowing scope for
technological catch-up, and a huge glut of housing from recurrent stimulus programmes –
not to mention an increasingly centralised decision-making process – already presage
significantly slower growth for China in the next decade.
Moreover, unlike the two previous global recessions this century, the new coronavirus,
Covid-19, implies a supply shock as well as a demand shock. Indeed, one has to go back to the
oil-supply shocks of the mid-1970s to find one as large. Yes, fear of contagion will hit demand
for airlines and global tourism, and precautionary savings will rise. But when tens of millions
of people can't go to work (either because of a lockdown or out of fear), global value chains
break down, borders are blocked, and world trade shrinks because countries distrust of one
another's health statistics, the supply side suffers at least as much.
Affected countries will, and should, engage in massive deficit spending to shore up their
health systems and prop up their economies. The point of saving for a rainy day is to spend
when it rains, and preparing for pandemics, wars, climate crises, and other out-of-the-box
events is precisely why open-ended deficit spending during booms is dangerous.
But policymakers and altogether too many economic commentators fail to grasp how the supply
component may make the next global recession unlike the last two. In contrast to recessions
driven mainly by a demand shortfall, the challenge posed by a supply-side driven downturn is
that it can result in sharp declines in production and widespread bottlenecks. In that case,
generalised shortages – something that some countries have not seen since the gas queues
of 1970s – could ultimately push inflation up, not down.
Admittedly, the initial conditions for containing generalised inflation today are
extraordinarily favourable. But, given that four decades of globalisation has almost certainly
been the main factor underlying low inflation, a sustained retreat behind national borders,
owing to a Covid-19 pandemic (or even lasting fear of pandemic), on top of rising trade
frictions, is a recipe for the return of upward price pressures. In this scenario, rising
inflation could prop up interest rates and challenge both monetary and fiscal policymakers.
It is also noteworthy that the Covid-19 crisis is hitting the world economy when growth is
already soft and many countries are wildly overleveraged. Global growth in 2019 was only 2.9%,
not so far from the 2.5% level that has historically constituted a global recession. Italy's
economy was barely starting to recover before the virus hit. Japan's was already tipping into
recession after an ill-timed hike in the value-added tax, and Germany's has been teetering
amidst political disarray. The United States is in the best shape, but what once seemed like a
15% chance of a recession starting before the presidential and congressional elections in
November now seems much higher.
It might seem strange that the new coronavirus could cause so much economic damage even to
countries that seemingly have the resources and technology to fight back. A key reason is that
earlier generations were much poorer than today, so many more people had to risk going to work.
Unlike today, radical economic pullbacks in response to epidemics that did not kill most people
were not an option.
What has happened in Wuhan, China, the current outbreak's centre, is extreme but
illustrative. The Chinese government has essentially locked down Hubei province, putting its 58
million people under martial law, with ordinary citizens unable to leave their houses except
under very specific circumstances. At the same time, the government apparently has been able to
deliver food and water to Hubei's citizens for roughly six weeks now, something a poor country
could not imagine doing.
Elsewhere in China, a great many people in major cities such as Shanghai and Beijing have
remained indoors most of the time in order to reduce their exposure. Governments in countries
such as South Korea and Italy may not be taking the extreme measures that China has, but many
people are staying home, implying a significant adverse impact on economic activity.
The odds of a global recession have risen dramatically, much more than conventional
forecasts by investors and international institutions care to acknowledge. Policymakers need to
recognise that, besides interest rate cuts and fiscal stimulus, the huge shock to global supply
chains also needs to be addressed. The most immediate relief could come from the US sharply
scaling back its trade-war tariffs, thereby calming markets, exhibiting statesmanship with
China, and putting money in the pockets of US consumers. A global recession is a time for
cooperation, not isolation.
Kenneth Rogoff is professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University. He
was the chief economist of the IMF from 2001 to 2003
In my youth it used to be said that successful economies were based on supplying the home
market first, with surpluses exported. The global economy, based upon JIT cross border supply
lines, could be tested to destruction by the coronavirus. Could it be that, in order to make
our economy more reliant to global shocks, we have to revisit our old thinking.?
The government in China isn't delivering water, that's the being done by existing private
enterprise companies because in much of the country tap water isn't safe to drink or tastes
pretty awful.
Likewise with food that's also delivered by hundreds of thousands of mainly young men on
motor scooters. I've had two deliveries today - water in a 60 litre plastic bottle and four
packs of frozen part cooked lamb ribs from New Zealand. Yesterday it was a tray of 24 cans of
Spanish black beer and the day before a circuit board for my electric toilet. Tomorrow I'm
expecting a stainless steel non-stick saucepan.
One of the problems in the US, leaving aside the confusing "hoax" nonsense from Tump and his
sycophants, is the automatic belief, and not just by Republicans, that whatever America does
is automatically the best in the world. Thus, we have taken the most aggressive steps in
history, the American pandemic response is the best in the world, American doctors know more
than any other doctors and so on and so forth. In fact this is a delusion. The national
response has been fragmented and haphazard, some people are being charged for testing whilst
other advanced economies with universal health care systems have been able to construct a
nationwide response. S. Korea has developed a drive in system of testing. The US government
sends out defective test kits. The UK seems likely to have already developed an antivirus but
the necessity of testing prevents the silly Trumpian response that it will be ready in a
couple of weeks.
In order to resolve any problem we must first understand it. Just to think that because
America is America the problem is solved is delusional.
At the same time, the government apparently has been able to deliver food and water to
Hubei's citizens for roughly six weeks now, something a poor country could not imagine
doing.
Everyone I know in China and everywhere I've been, and that's quite a lot of places,
people have water delivered, in my case in 60 litre plastic bottles which you then put in a
gravity deed or electric pump dispenser. Today I can make a phone call and without speaking
to anyone, often in as little as a few minutes, there's a guy knocking on the door to deliver
and take away the empty. Furthermore they are the only delivery people allowed into the
complex by the security guards. Those full bottles are fairly heavy. For food, drink and
anything else you get a call and have to go down to the gate to collect.
A supply side recession will not be solved by central bank QE programs - that's the gist of
the author's argument. Instead direct intervention is required to avoid possible shortages -
hence the wonderfully evocative picture of 1970s Britain.
Affected countries will, and should, engage in massive deficit spending to shore up
their health systems and prop up their economies.
And bang goes another irony meter when
the father of wrongheaded austerity policies worldwide can say this with a straight face.
Still, I guess finally getting it right should receive some praise. Pity we had a decade of
suffering to get here.
Uk spends 2700 euros per head on health, Germany spends 4300 euros per head on their
health,France spends 3700per head..UK,in comparison with similar sized advanced nations makes
available far fewer resources for health. Not to mention the fewest doctors per head in the
OECD apart from Poland, fewer nurses,fewer hospital beds per 1000.In health the UK is a sick
man.
I have read serious academic stuff about how the Black Death (1347 to 1351) was a boon for
humanity because those that survived were much better off (wealthier). Who knew economic
rationalists have been around for so long (like plagues in a way).
What economics professors would like to tell you is humanity needs to downsize so that the
world biosphere can recover from the plague of humanity.
The next global recession will achieve even more than the last ones, which turn up almost
on schedule every decade:
-- everyone will dump shares & the super rich will buy them up further concentrating
their control over everything
-- there'll be another round of wage decreases which will never be made up when the next wave
of 'wealth' rolls around
-- another generation of graduates will be cast into oblivion as any new jobs that emerge
after the recession will go to the cheapest workers.
I'm speaking as someone who vividly remembers all the recessions from 1960 when it was
called a 'credit squeeze' because so many adults still remembered the Great Depression.
Recessions are just about the only economic event that the IMF can predict.
As I understand it, these payments will come from reserves, not inventing new money. In
addition, politically this is really difficult - what about citizens with no bank account,
what about convicted criminals, what about British citizens versus non-British citizens?
Lastly, as graun says, what if the money is used by people to pay off debt rather than
consume?
the supply side suffers at least as much.
Affected countries will, and should, engage in massive deficit spending to shore up their
health systems and prop up their economies.
But what to spend on?
When the supply side is not supplying, it is difficult to source the materials needed to
expand businesses, create new enterprises or even to build new infrastructure - the stuff you
need to create these things is not being supplied!
As for comparisons with the 1970s - they don't really work any more. As The
Economist explained a couple of weeks ago
Covid-19 presents economic policymakers with a new sort of threat , the world has moved
on. Interest rates are low, inflation is low, we are less dependent on oil and central banks
have few "tricks" left up their sleeves.
It is also true that one of the biggest problems in economics is to determine whether a
recession is caused by lack of supply, or lack of demand. They both look very similar at the
time. The only real way of knowing is to look back, afterwards, and see which remedies pulled
which economies out of recession most successfully. Was it austerity, or stimulus - guess:
heads or tails?
We need the stock markets to drop 25%. We need senseless, unabated consumption to be reined
in. We need to rein in the wealth divide. We need to bring back meaningful value creating
businesses, not those that are eyeballs and clicks generation.
Rate cuts don't do anything in a credit contraction. Matter of fact, they make it worse.
Might as well go to negative rates and really screw things up.
The effective Fed rate should have been 400bps or more considering the rate of inflation
was in the low 2's. If the Fed rate isn't high enough, it robs from the productive economy
and stimulates credit bubbles. This has shown itself 2 straight cycles. The first in subprime
mortgages and now subprime consumer loans(which hopefully won't have the same contagion
effect).
Lets also note, the effective rate being about 2% above the rate of inflation is a JMK
belief.
"... The eventual point of neoliberalism, then, is to exalt markets above people -- for the neoliberals, people are expendable but markets are superior. ..."
"... Postmodernism can give neoliberalism a cultural core ..."
"... The incubator regime for neoliberalism, as numerous authors have pointed out, was the regime in Chile under the dictatorial junta headed by Augusto Pinochet, beginning on the real September 11th, in 1973. The Department of Economics at the University of Chicago , the epicenter of neoliberal thought in America, was brought in to help Pinochet devise policy. Please keep in mind that neoliberals do not care one whit about democracy as long as the resultant regimes respect capitalism, and they're also okay with high death tolls for the same reason. Neoliberalism is a death culture. You live if you have money or if you have access to the government which invents money and forces you to use it. ..."
Cassiodorus
on Sun, 03/01/2020 - 5:00pm The neoliberals' cultural stuck is in decline. When they had
that suave dude Barack Obama telling everyone he was like Gandhi or Mandela, that was totally a
thing. Cultural neoliberalism was rockin' da house as every branch of government, both state
and Federal, was being
awarded to Republicans . Then they put all of their eggs in the Hillary Clinton basket,
waging a rather nasty campaign to get everyone to step in line while Clinton was and is very
much about money and about the society of her John Birch Society daddy. (She and Bill did make
great-looking hippies in the Sixties though, but you only see that in old photos.) Vote for her
because Trump is Hitler or something.
Now they have what? Pete Buttigieg, who is smarter than you and who reeks insincerity from
every pore of his skin as he delivers wooden imitations of Obama speeches? Michael Bloomberg,
who brags about what he can buy? Grandpa Joe Biden, with initial-stage dementia? Hallmark card
cop Amy Klobuchar, who will work with Republicans while helping maybe five or six people as she
promised? Elizabeth "I'm in it for me" Warren? It's not like these people come naturally to
cultural efflorescence -- they, after all, ran John Kerry, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis -- but
this has got to be a new low for them, expanding the field to twenty-plus candidates only to
find themselves facing Super Tuesday with only this.
Philosophically, neoliberalism is a form of antihumanism . In an
article in "American Affairs" (which I suggest you all read from beginning to end) the
economist Philip
Mirowski suggests several principles common to neoliberal thought. I'll just post one
through four so as not to freak anyone out while making the point just as effectively:
(1) "Free" markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively constructed through
political organizing.
(2) "The market" is an information processor, and the most efficient one possible -- more
efficient than any government or any single human ever could be. Truth can only be validated
by the market.
(3) Market society is, and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of
humankind.
(4) The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy the state, but to take control of
it, and to redefine its structure and function, in order to create and maintain the
market-friendly culture.
This then, is the core of neoliberal culture. The eventual point of neoliberalism, then,
is to exalt markets above people -- for the neoliberals, people are expendable but markets are
superior. It took a rabid nationalist like Donald Trump to end the war in Afghanistan , whereas
faithful neoliberal Barack Obama kept the war around because it provided "markets" for weapons
corporations. Neoliberals hate Bernie Sanders because he wants to get rid of some of the
markets for health insurance -- as long as people are buying health insurance, the neoliberals
don't care if anyone dies because they can't afford to use it.
... ... ...
Neoliberalism has been the dominant doctrine throughout the world's universities since the
Eighties. Academic vogues such as "postmodernism" can serve as Trojan Horse concepts for
hegemonic neoliberalism. Postmodernism, to own a definition, is an aesthetic concept involving
the juxtaposition of radically differing aesthetic concepts and celebrating surface
observations over "deeper meanings." The postmodern essence of visual art is in collage; the
postmodern musical form is the medley. Postmodernism is innocuous when it combines medieval
architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, or when it combines classical music with rock and roll.
Neoliberalism, however, sees in postmodernism a market, something to create new products and
separate people from their money. Postmodernism can give neoliberalism a cultural core
.
The incubator regime for neoliberalism, as numerous authors have pointed out, was the
regime in Chile under the dictatorial junta headed by Augusto Pinochet, beginning on the real
September 11th, in 1973. The Department of Economics at the
University of Chicago , the epicenter of neoliberal thought in America, was brought in to
help Pinochet devise policy. Please keep in mind that neoliberals do not care one whit about
democracy as long as the resultant regimes respect capitalism, and they're also okay with
high death
tolls for the same reason. Neoliberalism is a death culture. You live if you have money or
if you have access to the government which invents money and forces you to use it.
The task of replacing neoliberalism with something else will be a daunting one. Neoliberals
rule the planet today. It appears at this point that our primary weapon is the fact that the
neoliberals don't really have any specific culture; instead, they speculate in culture for the
sake of the fetishes of markets and money and property through which they destroy the planet,
us, and ultimately themselves.
Below are parts of a ZH article on the financial market front in the civilization war
humanity is engaged in. In case you were not watching, the world markets went down
significantly all last week and the financial world and a few others are wondering what
Hand, The Invisible is going to do.
"
Update (2225ET): Well who could have seen that coming? Following The BoJ's promise to do
'whatever it takes' to stabilize the markets (though nothing about the economy of course),
the reaction was delayed until someone got the tap on the shoulder to buy with both hands and
feet...
NKY Futs are up 900 points from the opening lows...
Dow futures are now up 850 points from the opening lows...
WTI is soaring...
And Treasury yields have reversed dramatically higher...
Did Stevey (Mnuchin, US Treasury Sec.) make the call?
Or is The National Team on the case? (Plunge Protection Team)
"
Their version had graphs and pictures but you get the picture of wild fluctuations based on
promises of public bailouts of private loss
Given the yet to be appreciated global economic impact of the spreading coronavirus, the
next couple of weeks/months should be something to experience....grin. There may be rebounds
but the trajectory seems evident and anticipated for quite some time......death by a thousand
cuts and this is just the significant financial front.
a few who warned ahead of the 2008 financial collapse sees the Coronavirus being the
catalyst for a severe Credit Crunch and not just a supply chain disruptor.
There are mounting risks of a credit crunch in vulnerable sectors of the corporate bond
market
A swath of highly indebted companies face an incipient funding shock and risk being shut
out of the capital markets as the COVID-19 epidemic mushrooms into global crisis, Standard
& Poor's has warned.[.]
Clearly the view two or three weeks ago that this would peak in March is no longer
appropriate. The question becoming very relevant is which companies are going to be able to
refinance," he said..[.]
{from Ambrose's article -
He presents a scary list of zombie companies, many are household names heavy in debt. A mix
of US and European Zcos on the list is: Kraft-Heinz, VW, Macy, Xerox, Western Digital.
Small companies will be forced to lay off workers.
Chinese companies are told to use electricity even if on skeleton staff just for
appearances sake as that usage goes into the data as in measuring GDP. )
Btw, Canada Health and UK are advising their citizens to stock up on meds, food, water and
daily essentials.
A healthy market correction this week, as it was called by some pundits, thankful that the
lack of 'market collars' and 'circuit breakers' allowed buyers and sellers to find each other
without interference. It's almost romantic sounding.
This was the worst week for stocks since 2008, with the SP 500 and Nasdaq down a little over
ten percent.
But it did end on a kind of an upbeat note, as the stock futures recovered today's losses
and managed to go into the weekend in the green.
Several factors contributed to this.
First and foremost, the odds of a rate cut in March jumped to 96.3% today from 8.9% a week
ago, we hear. I am struggling with the notion that cheaper benchmark rates are going to tempt
people to ignore the coronavirus and go to the mall. But it may put a little life back into the
financial asset bubble. Needs must.
The team of Kudlow and Mnuchin managed to rally the banks to smack the crap out of gold and
silver, running the stops and triggering margin calls from the recently increased margin
requirments on the Comex. Since the Banks were struggling with an oversized short position it
certainly helped out the financial system while dampening the enthusiasm for hard assets
No slackers here, there is a two prong effort across the established powers to manage and
control the narrative, while ensuring boatloads of money continue to reach 'the right kinds of
people.'
The spice must flow.
And in a bipartisan celebration of better news, Joe Biden is expected to crush the
opposition (Bernie) in South Carolina this weekend, an all important victory for the forces of
the status quo.
In all seriousness, let's remember those who are suffering with this virus around the world,
struggling to go about their business while trying to protect their livelihoods and
families.
Now is a good time to prepare, if you have not already done so, and to begin engaging in
those simple procedures that may help us weather this.
"... With Glass-Steagall now removed, legitimate capital such as pension funds could be used to start a hedge to end all hedges. Billions were now poured into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), a market which had been artificially plunged to record-breaking interest rate lows of 1-2% for over a year by the US Federal Reserve making borrowing easy, and the returns on the investments into the MBSs obscene. ..."
"... This is the system which died in 2008. Contrary to popular belief, nothing was actually resolved. For all the talk of an "FDR revival" under Obama, speculation wasn't actually regulated under the Dodd-Frank Act or the Volker Rule of 2010. No productive credit was created to grow the real economy under a national mission as was the case in 1933-1938. ..."
"... Banks were not broken up while derivatives GREW by 40% with the new bubble concentrated in the corporate/household debt sector now collapsing. During this time, nation states continued to be stripped, as austerity was rammed down the throats of nations. ..."
"... It should be no surprise that in the midst of this despair, a creative alliance was consolidated in defense of the interests of sovereign nation states and humanity at large led by the leadership of Russia and China. ..."
"... The Eurasian nations are already firmly committed to this new system, and if the west is to qualify morally to take part in this new epoch, then the first step will be a return to a Glass-Steagall. ..."
"... Joe Kennedy was tasked by FDR with creating the regulations to reform Wall Street, thus earning him their undying enmity. ..."
"... Joe Kennedy has therefore had a hard press and been accused of the Corbyn disease of anti-semitisms, and I imagine the same old experts will be lining up to give him another kicking ..."
"... I would venture that the coronavirus rollocks is all a cover for the inevitable economic collapse. ..."
"... At last. Sanity. A brilliantly truthful article. Almost totally agree with this history of how the fuck the fucking bankers got their hands on almost fucking everything. ..."
"... Interesting article, but the conclusions are off. That solution (i.e. return to Glass-Steagall) would have worked 20 , maybe 10 years ago. We are way to passed that point. The looters are now part of the system– no one will embrace Glass-Steal. The system is on life support. ..."
(Photo by Philip FONG / AFP) (Photo by PHILIP FONG/AFP via Getty Images)
With last Monday's 1000 point stock market plunge the internet has been set ablaze with discussion of a new crash looming on the
horizon. The fact that such a chain reaction collapse was only kept at bay due to massive liquidity injections by the Federal Reserve's
overnight repo loans should not be ignored.
These injections which began in September 2019, have grown to over $100 billion per night all that to support the largest financial
bubble in human history with global derivatives estimated at $1.2 quadrillion (20 times the global GDP!).
Sadly economic illiteracy is so pervasive among today's modern economists that the real reasons for this crisis have been entirely
misdiagnosed with financial experts from CNN, to Forbes blaming the volatility on the spread of the Corona virus!
Not the Corona Virus: The real cause of the oncoming Financial collapse.
As refreshing as it is to hear candid criticisms of the system's failure and even support for the restoration of Glass-Steagall
bank separation from presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard or even the lame Elisabeth Warren we find that in
each case, those candidates are on record supporting policies cooked up by the very same oligarchs they appear to despise in the
form of the Green New Deal.
In spite of what many of its progressive proponents would wish, such a global green reform would not only impose Malthusian depopulation
upon nation states globally were it accepted, but would establish a the supranational authority of a technocratic managerial elite
as enforcers of a "de-carbonization agenda".
Due to the rampant lack of comprehension of how this crisis was created such that such idiotic proposals as "green new deals"
are now seriously being suggested as remedies to our current ills, a bit of history is in order.
Some necessary background
"The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the
ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary
profit."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, first Inaugural Address 1933
Knowing that the "money changers" had only been able to create the great bubbles of the 1920s via their access to the deposits
of the commercial banks, Franklin Roosevelt made the core of his battle against the abuses of Wall Street centre around a 1933 legislation
entitled "Glass-Steagall", named after the two federally elected officials who led the reform with FDR.
This was a bill which forced the absolute separation of productive from speculative banking, guaranteeing via the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation (FDIC) only those commercial banking assets associated with the productive economy, but forcing any speculative
losses arising from investment banking to be suffered by the gambler. The striking success of this law inspired other countries around
the world to establish similar bank separation.
Alongside principles of capital budgeting, public credit, parity pricing and a commitment to scientific and technological development,
a dynamic had been created that would express the greatest hope for the world, and the greatest fear for the financial empire occupying
the City of London and Wall Street.
The death of John F. Kennedy ushered in a new age of pessimism and cultural irrationalism from which our society has never recovered.
The destruction of a long term vision as exemplified by the space program, the St. Lawrence Seaway and the New Deal projects had
resulted in a tendency within the population to increasingly look upon present pleasures as the only reality, and future goods as
the mystical expression of the sum of present pleasures.
In this new philosophical setting, so alien in previous epochs, money was permitted to act as a power unto itself for short term
gains instead of serving the investments into the real productive wealth of society. With this new paradigm shift into the "now",
a new economic model was adopted to replace the industrial economic model which had proven itself in the years preceding and following
World War II.
The name for this system was "post-industrial monetarism". This would be a system ushered in by Richard Nixon's announcement of
the destruction of the fixed-exchange rate Bretton Woods system and its replacement by the "floating rate" system of post 1971 fame.
During that same fateful year of 1971, another ominous event took place: the formation of the
Rothschild Inter-Alpha Group of banks under the umbrella of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which today controls upwards of 70% of
the global financial system.
The stated intention of this Group would be found in the 1983 speech by Lord Jacob Rothschild:
"two broad types of giant institutions, the worldwide financial service company and the international commercial bank with
a global trading competence, may converge to form the ultimate, all-powerful, many-headed financial conglomerate."
This policy demanded the destruction of the sovereign nation-state system and the imposition of a new feudal structure of world
governance through the age-old scheme of controlling the money system on the one side, and playing on the vices of credulous fools
who, by allowing their nations to be ruled by the belief that hedonistic market forces govern the world, would seal their own children's
doom.
All the while, geopolitical structures foreign to the United States constitutional traditions were imposed by nests of Oxford-trained
Rhodes Scholars and Fabians who converted America into a global "dumb giant" enforcing a neo colonial program under a "Anglo-US Special
Relationship". The Dulles brothers, McGeorge Bundy, Kissinger, and Bush all represent names that advanced this British directed plan
throughout the 20th century.
London's 'Big Bang'
The great "liberalization" of world commerce began with a series of waves through the 1970s, and moved into high gear with the
interest rate hikes of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in 1980-82, the effects of which both annihilated much of the small
and medium sized entrepreneurs, opened the speculative gates into the "Savings and Loan" debacle and also helped cartelize mineral,
food, and financial institutions into ever greater behemoths.
Volcker himself described this process as the "controlled disintegration of the US economy" upon becoming Fed Chairman in 1978.
The raising of interest rates to 20-21% not only shut down the life blood of much of the US economic base, but also threw the third
world into greater debt slavery, as nations now had to pay usurious interest on US loans.
In 1986, the City of London announced the beginning of a new era of economic irrationalism with Margaret Thatcher's "Big Bang"
deregulation. This wave of liberalization took the world by storm as it swept aside the separation of commercial, deposit and investment
banking which had been the post-world war cornerstone in ensuring that the will of private finance would never again hold more sway
than the power of sovereign nation-states.
After decades of chipping away at the structure of regulation that FDR's bold intervention into history had built, the "Big Bang"
set a precedent for similar financial de-regulation into the "Universal Banking" model in other parts of the western world.
The Derivative Time Bomb is Set
In September 1987, the 20-year foray into speculation resulted in a 23% collapse of the Dow Jones on October 19, 1987. Within
hours of this crash, international emergency meetings had been convened with former JP Morgan tool Alan Greenspan introducing a "solution"
which would have the future echoes of hyperinflation and fascism written all over it.
"Creative financial instruments" was the Orwellian name given to the new financial asset popularized by Greenspan, but otherwise
known as "derivatives".
New supercomputing technologies were increasingly used in this new venture, not as the support for higher nation building practices,
and space exploration programs as their NASA origins intended, but would rather become perverted to accommodate the creation of new
complex formulas which could associate values to price differentials on securities and insured debts that could then be "hedged"
on those very spot and futures markets made possible via the destruction of the Bretton Woods system in 1971.
So while an exponentially self-generating monster was created that could end nowhere but in a meltdown, "market confidence" rallied
back in force with the new flux of easy money. The physical potential to sustain human life continued to plummet.
NAFTA, the Euro and the End of History
It is no coincidence that within this period, another deadly treaty was passed called the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA). With this Agreement made law, protective programs that had kept North American factories in the U.S and Canada were struck
down, allowing for the export of the lifeblood of highly skilled industrial workforce to Mexico where skills were low, technologies
lower, and salaries lower still.
With a stripping of its productive assets, North America became increasingly reliant on exporting cheap resources and services
for its means of existence.
Again, the physically productive powers of society would collapse, yet monetary profits in the ephemeral "now" would skyrocket.
This was replicated in Europe with the creation of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 establishing the Euro by 1994 while the "liberalization"
process of Perestroika replicated this agenda in the former Soviet Union. While some personalities gave this agenda the name "End
of History" and others "the New World Order", the effect was the same.
Universal Banking, NAFTA, Euro integration and the creation of the derivative economy in a space of just several years would induce
a cartelization of finance through newly legalized mergers and acquisitions at a rate never before seen. The multitude of financial
institutions that had existed in the early 1980s were absorbed into each other at great speed through the 1990s in true "survival
of the fittest" fashion. No matter what level of regulation were attempted under this new structure, the degree of conflict of interest,
and private political power was uncontrollable, as evidenced in the United States, by the shutdown of any attempt by Securities and
Exchange Commission head
Brooksley Born
to fight the derivative cancer at its early stages.
By 1999 a politically castrated Bill Clinton found himself signing into law a treaty authored by then Treasury Secretary Larry
Summers known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which would be the final nail in the coffin for the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial
and investment banking in the United States.
The new age of unregulated trading and creation of over-the-counter derivatives caused these strange financial instruments to
grow from $60 trillion in 2000 to $600 trillion by 2008.
The 2000-2008 Frenzy
With Glass-Steagall now removed, legitimate capital such as pension funds could be used to start a hedge to end all hedges.
Billions were now poured into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), a market which had been artificially plunged to record-breaking interest
rate lows of 1-2% for over a year by the US Federal Reserve making borrowing easy, and the returns on the investments into the MBSs
obscene.
The obscenity swelled as the values of the houses skyrocketed far beyond the real values to the tune of one hundred thousand dollar
homes selling for 5-6 times that price within the span of several years.
As long as no one assumed this growth was ab-normal, and the unpayable nature of the capital underlying the leveraged assets locked
up in the now infamous "sub-primes" and other illegitimate debt obligations was ignored, then profits were supposed to just continue
infinitely. Anyone who questioned this logic was considered a heretic by the latter-day priesthood.
The stunning "success" of securitizing housing debts immediately induced a wave of sovereign wealth funds to come into prominence
applying the same model that had been used in the case of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO)
to the debts of entire nations.
The securitizing of bundled packages of sovereign debts that could then be infinitely leveraged on the de-regulated world markets
would no longer be considered an act of national treason, but the key to easy money.
Conclusion
This is the system which died in 2008. Contrary to popular belief, nothing was actually resolved. For all the talk of an "FDR
revival" under Obama, speculation wasn't actually regulated under the Dodd-Frank Act or the Volker Rule of 2010. No productive credit
was created to grow the real economy under a national mission as was the case in 1933-1938.
Banks were not broken up while derivatives GREW by 40% with the new bubble concentrated in the corporate/household debt sector
now collapsing. During this time, nation states continued to be stripped, as austerity was rammed down the throats of nations.
It should be no surprise that in the midst of this despair, a creative alliance was consolidated in defense of the interests
of sovereign nation states and humanity at large led by the leadership of Russia and China.
This leadership took the form of the China-led Belt and Road Initiative which has grown to embrace over 130 countries today and
looking more and more like an Asian-led version of the New Deal of the 1930s.
Indeed, China's capacity to unleash long term credit for thousands of international long term infrastructure projects was made
possible by the fact that it was the only country on the globe which had not given up the principles of bank separation which were
destroyed in every other nation.
Very few western figures stood up to this self-induced destruction over the decades, but one notable exception here worth mentioning
is the figure of the late American economist Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019) who not only resisted this process for
over four decades , but fought alongside the Schiller Institute
to promote New Silk Road as early as 1996 .
With the 2016 Brexit and election of President Trump, a new wave of nationalist spirit has become a fire which the technocrats
have lost their capacity to snuff out.
Increasingly, the idea that nation-states have a power over the private banking system has become revived and discussion for reforming
the now dead Trans-Atlantic system is increasingly shaped not by the calls for a "New World Order" as Sir Kissinger would have liked,
but rather for a New Silk Road and a true New Deal.
The Eurasian nations are already firmly committed to this new system, and if the west is to qualify morally to take part in
this new epoch, then the first step will be a return to a Glass-Steagall.
Excellent article which I could almost understand (my eyes glaze over at any mention of filthy lucre). The author makes clear
that the world took a different trajectory after the convenient death of JFK. As I recall from a biography of his father, Ambassador
Joe, was that Joe Kennedy was tasked by FDR with creating the regulations to reform Wall Street, thus earning him their undying
enmity.
Joe Kennedy has therefore had a hard press and been accused of the Corbyn disease of anti-semitisms, and I imagine the
same old experts will be lining up to give him another kicking
Spinky ,
A New Deal? A Green New Deal or a true New Deal? After revealing all of this incredible amount of manipulation of banking without
going the final step to the ultimate controllers of the deep state, and you suggest another New Deal? What the world needs now
is for the control systems to fail, not to be re supported again with handouts from the corporatocracy to the workers. We need
to reclaim our communities with local food security via non corporate food systems based on living soils. We need to reclaim any
kind of semblance of currency sanity with local currencies and supports. We need health care based on food as medicine, food that
is not GMO and chemical based, but based on healthy local ecosystems, not transportation systems spanning the globe, controlled
by central planners of any ideological stripe. Only if we focus on our own local regions can we ever hope to have any semblance
of sanity again. We need to realize that the corporatocracy, the deep state, doesn't concern itself with ideologies other than
as tools to control us with. All they care about is control, like all neurotics. After going through that entire article outlining
the insanity of regulation and control and deregulation and infinity of financial flows and the obvious insanity of all of it,
you surely must see that the ones with the money making the systems work are totally gonzo and the best the rest of us can do
is focus on what we can do locally, like they have done in Greece. We can't control trillionaires with logical arguments. It ain't
gonna happen. Bernie Sanders can become president and he still isn't going to stop the trillionaires and their insane efforts
to control the planet. He will just be a different type of puppet with different types of handouts and control mechanisms. Voting
is pointless and so are efforts at regulation. At this point, the best we can do is abandon the system, focus on our communities
and self sufficiency locally, and try to avoid the system collapse when it falls around us.
It looks like they're rolling out the police state in the UK
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51708550 but we'll have to wait until tomorrow (Tuesday) to get a better idea of what the psychopaths are trying to foist on us.
I would venture that the coronavirus rollocks is all a cover for the inevitable economic collapse.
Dungroanin ,
At last. Sanity. A brilliantly truthful article. Almost totally agree with this history of how the fuck the fucking bankers got their hands on almost fucking everything.
The first quibble is that starting history at FDR ignores the period of the creation of the Fed all the way back to it's prototype
the BoE.
The second is about the creation of the Euro which ignores the political economic security desire of the evolving EU – the
EMU and it's years of alignment of the EC preceding Maastricht and the bastardisation of the original vision by the rapid enrollment
of countries and economies for Geopolitical (and even anti-EU) reasons. The EU being more likely to implement a 'Glass-Steagle'
type of alignment through the level-playing-field ever-closet-union. That chalice being liberally poisoned by the global Banker
interests.
Torontonian,
Interesting article, but the conclusions are off. That solution (i.e. return to Glass-Steagall) would have worked 20 , maybe 10 years
ago. We are way to passed that point. The looters are now part of the system– no one will embrace Glass-Steal. The system is on
life support.
In "One-Dimensional Man , " Marcuse revealed the fundamental truth of modern Western
capitalism: "Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful
instrument of domination . Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods
and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear -- that is, if they sustain
alienation." It does not matter at all whether millions of people recognize their alienation,
often blissfully unaware that their "needs" are not their own but merely produced through their
superficially pleasant submission. The corporate state continues largely unchallenged.
Cassiodorus
on Sun, 03/01/2020 - 5:00pm The neoliberals' cultural stuck is in decline. When they had
that suave dude Barack Obama telling everyone he was like Gandhi or Mandela, that was totally a
thing. Cultural neoliberalism was rockin' da house as every branch of government, both state
and Federal, was being
awarded to Republicans . Then they put all of their eggs in the Hillary Clinton basket,
waging a rather nasty campaign to get everyone to step in line while Clinton was and is very
much about money and about the society of her John Birch Society daddy. (She and Bill did make
great-looking hippies in the Sixties though, but you only see that in old photos.) Vote for her
because Trump is Hitler or something.
Now they have what? Pete Buttigieg, who is smarter than you and who reeks insincerity from
every pore of his skin as he delivers wooden imitations of Obama speeches? Michael Bloomberg,
who brags about what he can buy? Grandpa Joe Biden, with initial-stage dementia? Hallmark card
cop Amy Klobuchar, who will work with Republicans while helping maybe five or six people as she
promised? Elizabeth "I'm in it for me" Warren? It's not like these people come naturally to
cultural efflorescence -- they, after all, ran John Kerry, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis -- but
this has got to be a new low for them, expanding the field to twenty-plus candidates only to
find themselves facing Super Tuesday with only this.
Philosophically, neoliberalism is a form of antihumanism . In an
article in "American Affairs" (which I suggest you all read from beginning to end) the
economist Philip
Mirowski suggests several principles common to neoliberal thought. I'll just post one
through four so as not to freak anyone out while making the point just as effectively:
(1) "Free" markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively constructed through
political organizing.
(2) "The market" is an information processor, and the most efficient one possible -- more
efficient than any government or any single human ever could be. Truth can only be validated
by the market.
(3) Market society is, and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of
humankind.
(4) The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy the state, but to take control of
it, and to redefine its structure and function, in order to create and maintain the
market-friendly culture.
This then, is the core of neoliberal culture. The eventual point of neoliberalism, then, is
to exalt markets above people -- for the neoliberals, people are expendable but markets are
superior. It took a rabid nationalist like Donald Trump to end the war in Afghanistan , whereas
faithful neoliberal Barack Obama kept the war around because it provided "markets" for weapons
corporations. Neoliberals hate Bernie Sanders because he wants to get rid of some of the
markets for health insurance -- as long as people are buying health insurance, the neoliberals
don't care if anyone dies because they can't afford to use it.
As implied in
this article (password: AddletonAP2009) , the neoliberal "solution" to climate change is
the only one that has been tried. The point of focusing all climate change mitigation efforts
upon "reducing carbon emissions," from the Rio
Earth Summit of 1992 onward, is so that a new line of products can be manufactured to help
consumers reduce their carbon emissions, more efficient fossil-burning machines or alternative
energy machines or carbon permits or easements or something like that. The idea that
manufacturing new products also consumes carbon is not assumed to be a problem. Meanwhile the
fossil energy interests will stay hidden from all of this "mitigation" effort, it being assumed
that the sacred "market" will drive them out of business. Whether said "market" actually does
so, when obviously over the past twenty-eight years it has done nothing of the sort, is
nobody's business. Neoliberals are okay with carbon taxes because they can always be abolished
later, like they were in Australia
, and because their ideas of carbon taxes involve low carbon taxes so as not to hurt
businesses.
Neoliberalism has been the dominant doctrine throughout the world's universities since the
Eighties. Academic vogues such as "postmodernism" can serve as Trojan Horse concepts for
hegemonic neoliberalism. Postmodernism, to own a definition, is an aesthetic concept involving
the juxtaposition of radically differing aesthetic concepts and celebrating surface
observations over "deeper meanings." The postmodern essence of visual art is in collage; the
postmodern musical form is the medley. Postmodernism is innocuous when it combines medieval
architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, or when it combines classical music with rock and roll.
Neoliberalism, however, sees in postmodernism a market, something to create new products and
separate people from their money. Postmodernism can give neoliberalism a cultural core
. Postmodernism is what is behind Pete Buttigieg's assertion that
people do not have to choose between revolution and the status quo . (Trust me, he's been to universities .)
We just combine them in some kind of postmodern market. Never mind that such an idea
eviscerates the concept of revolution.
The incubator regime for neoliberalism, as numerous authors have pointed out, was the regime
in Chile under the dictatorial junta headed by Augusto Pinochet, beginning on the real
September 11th, in 1973. The Department of Economics at the
University of Chicago , the epicenter of neoliberal thought in America, was brought in to
help Pinochet devise policy. Please keep in mind that neoliberals do not care one whit about
democracy as long as the resultant regimes respect capitalism, and they're also okay with
high death
tolls for the same reason. Neoliberalism is a death culture. You live if you have money or
if you have access to the government which invents money and forces you to use it.
The task of replacing neoliberalism with something else will be a daunting one. Neoliberals
rule the planet today. It appears at this point that our primary weapon is the fact that the
neoliberals don't really have any specific culture; instead, they speculate in culture for the
sake of the fetishes of markets and money and property through which they destroy the planet,
us, and ultimately themselves.
A healthy market correction this week, as it was called by some pundits, thankful that the
lack of 'market collars' and 'circuit breakers' allowed buyers and sellers to find each other
without interference. It's almost romantic sounding.
This was the worst week for stocks since 2008, with the SP 500 and Nasdaq down a little over
ten percent.
But it did end on a kind of an upbeat note, as the stock futures recovered today's losses
and managed to go into the weekend in the green.
Several factors contributed to this.
First and foremost, the odds of a rate cut in March jumped to 96.3% today from 8.9% a week
ago, we hear. I am struggling with the notion that cheaper benchmark rates are going to tempt
people to ignore the coronavirus and go to the mall. But it may put a little life back into the
financial asset bubble. Needs must.
The team of Kudlow and Mnuchin managed to rally the banks to smack the crap out of gold and
silver, running the stops and triggering margin calls from the recently increased margin
requirments on the Comex. Since the Banks were struggling with an oversized short position it
certainly helped out the financial system while dampening the enthusiasm for hard assets
No slackers here, there is a two prong effort across the established powers to manage and
control the narrative, while ensuring boatloads of money continue to reach 'the right kinds of
people.'
The spice must flow.
And in a bipartisan celebration of better news, Joe Biden is expected to crush the
opposition (Bernie) in South Carolina this weekend, an all important victory for the forces of
the status quo.
In all seriousness, let's remember those who are suffering with this virus around the world,
struggling to go about their business while trying to protect their livelihoods and
families.
Now is a good time to prepare, if you have not already done so, and to begin engaging in
those simple procedures that may help us weather this.
he federal government's inadequate testing for coronavirus over the last two months has
meant that the authorities have been oblivious to the
full extent of the outbreak in the U.S.:
The coronavirus has been circulating undetected and has possibly infected scores of people
over the past six weeks in Washington state, according to a genetic analysis of virus samples
that has sobering implications for the entire country amid heightening anxiety about the
likely spread of the disease.
The researchers conducted genetic sequencing of two virus samples. One is from a patient
who traveled from China to Snohomish County in mid-January and was the first person diagnosed
with the disease in the United States. The other came from a recently diagnosed patient in
the same county, a high school student with no travel-related or other known exposure to the
coronavirus. The two samples look almost identical genetically, said Trevor Bedford, a
computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who announced
the results of the research on Twitter late Saturday night.
"This strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for
the past 6 weeks," Bedford wrote. "I believe we're facing an already substantial outbreak in
Washington State that was not detected until now due to narrow case definition requiring
direct travel to China."
When the administration is determined to minimize the significance of the outbreak and to
pretend that all is well, they are signalling to the relevant agencies that they don't want to
hear contradictory information. It then requires whistle-blowers inside those agencies to
call attention to serious lapses and failures in the government's response, and if it
weren't for these people the public would be even more in the dark about what is happening and
how the government is reacting. The administration's handling of the response has already
proven itself to be quite poor, but that still doesn't fully capture how
chaotic and confused it has been :
Interviews with nearly two dozen administration officials, former White House aides,
public health experts and lawmakers -- many speaking on the condition of anonymity to share
candid assessments and details -- portray a White House scrambling to gain control of a
rudderless response defined by bureaucratic infighting, confusion and misinformation.
"It's complete chaos," a senior administration official said. "Everyone is just trying to
get a handle on what the [expletive] is going on."
The government was ill-prepared for this outbreak and then frittered away what time they had
to get ready. The Trump administration previously
dismantled the part of the National Security Council concerned with organizing a response
to pandemics (thank you, John Bolton). Laurie Garrett
wrote about this last month:
Public health advocates have been ringing alarm bells to no avail. Klain has been warning
for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017
and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his
predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease
infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the "significant
probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes." And an
independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies
concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the "United
States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and
pay a much greater price in human and economic costs."
The Trump administration opted for weakening protections for public health on the off-chance
that the bill wouldn't come due while they were in office. Like so many other short-sighted
things they have done over the last three years, this has blown up in their face to the
country's detriment.
ProPublica reported last week on
the CDC's mistakes that led to the lack of adequate testing:
As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January
and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that
could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted
upon devising its own test.
The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other
countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a
range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week
of February, it didn't work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the
disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the
presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.
As a result, until Wednesday the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration only allowed
those state labs to use the test -- a decision with potentially significant consequences. The
lack of a reliable test prevented local officials from taking a crucial first step in coping
with a possible outbreak -- "surveillance testing" of hundreds of people in possible
hotspots. Epidemiologists in other countries have used this sort of testing to track the
spread of the disease before large numbers of people turn up at hospitals.
Jeremy Konyndyk explains how the CDC effectively blinded itself to the reality of the
problem by defining it so narrowly that they missed what was happening:
The result of that definition, as @JenniferNuzzo and others have
eloquently argued, was that we were blind to community spread – because CDC had defined
suspect cases so narrowly as to exclude that possibility.
Can't see them, so can't test them, so blind to what's happening.
The U.S. has been flying blind in response to the outbreak of this virus. Our government is
lagging badly behind more effective efforts at detection and treatment in other countries, and
the public will pay the price for this negligence and unpreparedness.
Below are parts of a ZH article on the financial market front in the civilization war
humanity is engaged in. In case you were not watching, the world markets went down
significantly all last week and the financial world and a few others are wondering what
Hand, The Invisible is going to do.
"
Update (2225ET): Well who could have seen that coming? Following The BoJ's promise to do
'whatever it takes' to stabilize the markets (though nothing about the economy of course),
the reaction was delayed until someone got the tap on the shoulder to buy with both hands and
feet...
NKY Futs are up 900 points from the opening lows...
Dow futures are now up 850 points from the opening lows...
WTI is soaring...
And Treasury yields have reversed dramatically higher...
Did Stevey (Mnuchin, US Treasury Sec.) make the call?
Or is The National Team on the case? (Plunge Protection Team)
"
Their version had graphs and pictures but you get the picture of wild fluctuations based on
promises of public bailouts of private loss
Given the yet to be appreciated global economic impact of the spreading coronavirus, the
next couple of weeks/months should be something to experience....grin. There may be rebounds
but the trajectory seems evident and anticipated for quite some time......death by a thousand
cuts and this is just the significant financial front.
The article is mostly junk. But it contains some important insights into the rise of Trympism (aka "national neoliberalism") --
nationalist oligarchy. Including the following " the governments that have emerged from the new populist moment are, to date, not
actually pursuing policies that are economically populist."
The real threat to liberal democracy isn't authoritarianism -- it's nationalist oligarchy. Here's how American foreign policy should
change. The real threat to liberal democracy isn't authoritarianism -- it's nationalist oligarchy. Here's how American foreign policy
should change.
Notable quotes:
"... Fascism: A Warning ..."
"... Can it Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America ..."
"... the governments that have emerged from the new populist moment are, to date, not actually pursuing policies that are economically populist. ..."
"... The better and more useful way to view these regimes -- and the threat to democracy emerging at home and abroad because of them -- is as nationalist oligarchies. Oligarchy means rule by a small number of rich people. In an oligarchy, wealthy elites seek to preserve and extend their wealth and power. In his definitive book titled Oligarchy ..."
"... Oligarchies remain in power through two strategies: first, using divide-and-conquer tactics to ensure that a majority doesn't coalesce, and second, by rigging the political system to make it harder for any emerging majority to overthrow them. ..."
"... Rigging the system is, in some ways, a more obvious tactic. It means changing the legal rules of the game or shaping the political marketplace to preserve power. Voting restrictions and suppression, gerrymandering, and manipulation of the media are examples. The common theme is that they insulate the minority in power from democracy; they prevent the population from kicking the rulers out through ordinary political means. ..."
"... Classical Greek Oligarchy ..."
"... Framing today's threat as nationalist oligarchy not only clarifies the challenge but also makes clear how democracy is different -- and what democracy requires. Democracy means more than elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and various constitutional norms. For democracy to persist, there must also be relative economic equality. If society is deeply unequal economically, the wealthy will dominate politics and transform democracy into an oligarchy. And there must be some degree of social solidarity because, as Lincoln put it, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." ..."
"... We see a number of disturbing signs the United States is breaking down along these dimensions. ..."
"... The view that money is speech under the First Amendment has unleashed wealthy individuals and corporations to spend as much as they want to influence politics. The "doom loop of oligarchy," as Ezra Klein has called it, is an obvious consequence: The wealthy use their money to influence politics and rig policy to increase their wealth, which in turn increases their capacity to influence politics. Meanwhile, we're increasingly divided into like-minded enclaves, and the result is an ever-more toxic degree of partisanship. ..."
"... The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars ..."
"... The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic ..."
Ever since the 2016 election, foreign policy commentators and practitioners have been engaged in a series of soul-searching exercises
to understand the great transformations taking place in the world -- and to articulate a framework appropriate to the challenges
of our time. Some have looked backwards, arguing that the liberal international order is collapsing, while others question whether
it ever existed. Another group seems to hope the current messiness is simply a blip and that foreign policy will return to normalcy
after it passes. Perhaps the most prominent group has identified today's great threat as the rise of authoritarianism, autocracy,
and illiberal democracy. They fear that constitutional democracy is receding as norms are broken and institutions are under siege.
Unfortunately, this approach misunderstands the nature of the current crisis. The challenge we face today is not one of authoritarianism,
as so many seem inclined to believe, but of nationalist oligarchy. This form of government feeds populism to the people, delivers
special privileges to the rich and well-connected, and rigs politics to sustain its regime.
... ... ..
Authoritarianism or What?
Across the political spectrum, commentators and scholars have identified -- and warned of -- the global rise of autocracies and
authoritarian governments. They cite Russia, Hungary, the Philippines, and Turkey, among others. Distinguished commentators are increasingly
worried. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently published a book called Fascism: A Warning . Cass Sunstein
gathered a variety of scholars for a collection titled, Can it Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America .
The authoritarian lens is familiar from the heroic narrative of democracy defeating autocracies in the twentieth century. But
as a framework for understanding today's central geopolitical challenges, it is far too narrow. This is mainly because those who
are worried about the rise of authoritarianism and the crisis of democracy are insufficiently focused on economics. Their emphasis
is almost exclusively political and constitutional -- free speech, voting rights, equal treatment for minorities, independent courts,
and the like. But politics and economics cannot be dissociated from each other, and neither are autonomous from social and cultural
factors. Statesmen and philosophers used to call this "political economy." Political economy looks at economic and political relationships
in concert, and it is attentive to how power is exercised. If authoritarianism is the future, there must be a story of its political
economy -- how it uses politics and economics to gain and hold power. Yet the rise-of-authoritarianism theorists have less to say
about these dynamics.
To be sure, many commentators have discussed populist movements throughout Europe and America, and there has been no shortage
of debate on the extent to which a generation of widening economic inequality has been a contributing factor in their rise. But whatever
the causes of popular discontent, the policy preferences of the people, and the bloviating rhetoric of leaders, the governments
that have emerged from the new populist moment are, to date, not actually pursuing policies that are economically populist.
The better and more useful way to view these regimes -- and the threat to democracy emerging at home and abroad because of
them -- is as nationalist oligarchies. Oligarchy means rule by a small number of rich people. In an oligarchy, wealthy elites seek
to preserve and extend their wealth and power. In his definitive book titled Oligarchy , Jeffrey Winters calls it "wealth
defense." Elites engage in "property defense," protecting what they already have, and "income defense," preserving and extending
their ability to hoard more. Importantly, oligarchy as a governing strategy accounts for both politics and economics. Oligarchs use
economic power to gain and hold political power and, in turn, use politics to expand their economic power.
Those who worry about the rise of authoritarianism and fear the crisis of democracy are insufficiently focused on economics.
The trouble for oligarchs is that their regime involves rule by a small number of wealthy elites. In even a nominally
democratic society, and most countries around the world today are at least that, it should be possible for the much larger majority
to overthrow the oligarchy with either the ballot or the bullet. So how can oligarchy persist? This is where both nationalism and
authoritarianism come into play. Oligarchies remain in power through two strategies: first, using divide-and-conquer tactics
to ensure that a majority doesn't coalesce, and second, by rigging the political system to make it harder for any emerging majority
to overthrow them.
The divide-and-conquer strategy is an old one, and it works through a combination of coercion and co-optation. Nationalism --
whether statist, ethnic, religious, or racial -- serves both functions. It aligns a portion of ordinary people with the ruling oligarchy,
mobilizing them to support the regime and sacrifice for it. At the same time, it divides society, ensuring that the nationalism-inspired
will not join forces with everyone else to overthrow the oligarchs. We thus see fearmongering about minorities and immigrants, and
claims that the country belongs only to its "true" people, whom the leaders represent. Activating these emotional, cultural, and
political identities makes it harder for citizens in the country to unite across these divides and challenge the regime.
Rigging the system is, in some ways, a more obvious tactic. It means changing the legal rules of the game or shaping the political
marketplace to preserve power. Voting restrictions and suppression, gerrymandering, and manipulation of the media are examples. The
common theme is that they insulate the minority in power from democracy; they prevent the population from kicking the rulers out
through ordinary political means. Tactics like these are not new. They have existed, as Matthew Simonton shows in his book
Classical Greek Oligarchy , since at least the time of Pericles and Plato. The consequence, then as now, is that nationalist
oligarchies can continue to deliver economic policies to benefit the wealthy and well-connected.
It is worth noting that even the generation that waged war against fascism in Europe understood that the challenge to democracy
in their time was not just political, but economic and social as well. They believed that the rise of Nazism was tied to the concentration
of economic power in Germany, and that cartels and monopolies not only cooperated with and served the Nazi state, but helped its
rise and later sustained it. As New York Congressman Emanuel Celler, one of the authors of the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, said, quoting
a report filed by Secretary of War Kenneth Royall, "Germany under the Nazi set-up built up a great series of industrial monopolies
in steel, rubber, coal and other materials. The monopolies soon got control of Germany, brought Hitler to power, and forced virtually
the whole world into war." After World War II, Marshall Plan experts not only rebuilt Europe but also exported aggressive American
antitrust and competition laws to the continent because they believed political democracy was impossible without economic democracy.
Framing today's threat as nationalist oligarchy not only clarifies the challenge but also makes clear how democracy is different
-- and what democracy requires. Democracy means more than elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and various constitutional
norms. For democracy to persist, there must also be relative economic equality. If society is deeply unequal economically, the wealthy
will dominate politics and transform democracy into an oligarchy. And there must be some degree of social solidarity because, as
Lincoln put it, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
We see a number of disturbing signs the United States is breaking down along these dimensions. Electoral losers in places
like North Carolina seek to entrench their power rather than accept defeat. The view that money is speech under the First Amendment
has unleashed wealthy individuals and corporations to spend as much as they want to influence politics. The "doom loop of oligarchy,"
as Ezra Klein has called it, is an obvious consequence: The wealthy use their money to influence politics and rig policy to increase
their wealth, which in turn increases their capacity to influence politics. Meanwhile, we're increasingly divided into like-minded
enclaves, and the result is an ever-more toxic degree of partisanship.
Addressing our domestic economic and social crises is critical to defending democracy, and a grand strategy for America's future
must incorporate both domestic and foreign policy. But while many have recognized that reviving America's middle class and re-stitching
our social fabric are essential to saving democracy, less attention has been paid to how American foreign policy should be reformed
in order to defend democracy from the threat of nationalist oligarchy.
The Varieties of Nationalist Oligarchy
Just as there are many variations on liberal democracy -- the Swedish model, the French model, the American model -- there
are many varieties of nationalist oligarchy. The story is different in every country, but the elements of nationalist oligarchy
are trending all over the world.
... ... ...
... the European Union funds Hungary's oligarchy, as Orbán draws on EU money to fund about 60 percent of the state projects
that support "the new Fidesz-linked business elite." Nor do Orbán and his allies do much to hide the country's crony capitalist
model. András Lánczi, president of a Fidesz-affiliated think tank, has boldly stated that "if something is done in the national
interest, then it is not corruption." "The new capitalist ruling class," one Hungarian banker comments, "make their money from
the government."
The commentator Jan-Werner Müller captures Orbán's Hungary this way: "Power is secured through wide-ranging control of the
judiciary and the media; behind much talk of protecting hard-pressed families from multinational corporations, there is crony
capitalism, in which one has to be on the right side politically to get ahead economically."
Crony capitalism, coupled with resurgent nationalism and central government control, is also an issue in China. While some
commentators have emphasized "state capitalism" -- when government has a significant ownership stake in companies -- this phenomenon
is not to be confused with crony capitalism. Some countries with state capitalism, like Norway, are widely seen as extremely non-corrupt
and, indeed, are often held up as models of democracy. State capitalism itself is thus not necessarily a problem. Crony capitalism,
in contrast, is an "instrumental union between capitalists and politicians designed to allow the former to acquire wealth, legally
or otherwise, and the latter to seek and retain power." This is the key difference between state capitalism and oligarchy.
... ... ...
Ganesh Sitaraman is a professor of law
and Chancellor's faculty fellow at Vanderbilt Law School, and the author of The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the
Age of Small Wars and The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic
.
It is an illusion to talk of "the Left" and "the Right" anymore, because the USA have become
outright criminal: A Mafia-system ruled by some syndicates.
Think of this enormous sum of 23 (I believe) trillion Dollars missing in the Pentagon. And
the House even decided to not research where this money went! To this see
https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1407-mark-skidmore-on-the-pentagons-missing-trillions/
Or think of the Ukraine and Joe and Hunter Biden (and other corrupt persons from the EU).
Author Bill Martin mentions this above with :"dirty business in Ukraine".
But its not only about corruption. Now it's also about a murder-attempt -- as every Mafia
would never hesitate to execute. And Western media doesn't report this.
This has happened: Because of Joe Biden's quid-pro-quo demand to former Ukrainian
president Poroshenko (no billions of Dollars from the US, if Shokin was not fired) state
prosecutor Shokin was then fired. But some months ago there had now also been a poison-attack
on Shokin.
And now Shokin goes after Joe Biden -- and he must, if he wants to survive!: To this on
the site https://youtube.com/channel/UCdeMVChrumySxV9N1w0Au-w
There click the video "JOE BIDEN, UKRAINE AND VIKTOR SHOKIN MERCURY POISONING".
Savorywill Yes, I agree completely (though I would have to study the materials more
carefully to fully understand it all). It is mentioned that one accomplishment of Trump was his
take-down of the Bush dynasty for the lies spun justifying the Iraq war. It was in S. Caroline
that Trump did this, in a debate of Republican candidates at the start of the election campaign
in 2016. I knew nothing about Trump at the time, having lived in Japan and Australia for many
years, never saw the Apprentice or even heard of him. So, when he started snipping at Jeb
saying that Jeb's brother George, led America in the biggest mistake in US history by starting
the war on Iraq, and the audience started booing, to which Trump replied, 'oh, those are just
paid for lobbyists – I don't need them as my campaign is self-funded', it was absolutely
astonishing and I could hardly believe my ears, or eyes. Yet, there it was on TV, one of the
first debates of the Republican party for their candidate. I then saw that Trump was, indeed,
something very different from what we had ever seen in American politics.
I was rapt when he defeated Hillary, and completely surprised as it was so unexpected. It
did give me faith in America again, to some degree. Here is the woman who orchestrated the
criminal destruction of Libya, and then laughed about the horrific murder of Gaddafi, who was
only trying to provide a decent society for Libyan citizens and deal with the madness of the
forces around him. What happened to him, and to Libya, was just so heartbreaking, and she
thought it was a big joke and tried to do the same in Syria. So, I was thrilled when she got
beaten. Not that everything Trump has done since then has met with my approval, but he seems to
be winding down the wars as he promised and I don't mind listening to his speeches at the
rallies, which I sometimes do watch. I particularly like when he went to a farming area in
California and signed a bill enabling local farmers to access water, something they were unable
to do because of various regulations. I never heard of any other presidents so hands-on with
their involvement with such things and I thought his speech in India, recently, was incredible.
I couldn't stand listening to Hillary for any more than a few minutes. Even Obama never really
rang true to me. He would say things like 'change we can believe in', or 'hope for more hope',
vague platitudes like that that didn't really have many specifics. I can understand Clint
Eastwood's speech talking to the empty chair (representing Obama) at the Republican convention
in 2012, actually. Obama seems like a media projection, or something. Hard to identify or see
him as an actual person.
sharon marlowe ,
"Not that everything Trump has done since then has met with my approval, but he seems to be
winding down the wars as he promised"
What is "winding down the wars"? Do mean that you stopped paying attention?
Savorywill ,
Seems like they are winding down, don't you think? Just today I read the the Taliban just
signed an agreement to that effect, to finally finish that war going on for nearly 20 years,
no closer to success since the start. The US is not overtly involved in the Syrian conflict
as well as it seems to be trying to get out of Iraq.
Had Hillary won, she would have gone full bore into Syria and probably would have made
matters much, much worse. She is a thorough warmonger, her track record clearly demonstrated
that.
sharon marlowe ,
First, an attempted assassination-by-drone on President Maduro of Venezuela happened. Then
Trump dropped the largest conventional bomb on Afghanistan, with a mile-wide radius. Then
Trump named Juan Guido as the new President of Venezuela in an overt coup. Then he bombed
Syria over a fake chemical weapons claim. He bombed it before even an investigation was
launched. Then the Trump regime orchestrated a military coup in Bolivia. Then he claimed that
he was pulling out of Syria, but instead sent U.S. troops to take over Syrian oil fields.
trump then assassinated Gen. Solemeni. Then he claimed that he will leave Iraq at the request
of the Iraqi government, the Iraqi government asked the U.S. to leave, and Trump rejected the
request. The Trump regime has tried orchestrating a coup in Iran, and a coup in Hong Kong. He
expelled Russian diplomats en masse for the Skripal incident in England, before an
investigation. He has sanctioned Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, and Venezuela. He has
bombed Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Those are the things I'm
aware of, but what else Trump has done in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America you
can research if you wish. And now, the claim of leaving Afghanistan is as ridiculous as when
he claimed to be leaving Syria and Iraq.
"winding down the wars" makes no sense.
Antonym ,
Trump just signed a peace pact with the Taliban. As they are basically CIA -ISI irregulars he
got the green light from Langley.
He needs this gesture for his re-election campaign.
Savorywill ,
Yes, what you say is right. However, he did warn both the Syrian and Russian military of the
attack in the first instance, so no casualties, and in the second attack, he announced that
the missiles had been launched before they hit the target, again resulting in no casualties.
When the US drone was shot down by an Iranian missile, he considered retaliation. But, when
advised of likely casualties, he called it off saying that human lives are more valuable than
the cost of the drone. Yes, he did authorize the assassination of the Iranian general, and
that was very bad. His claims that the general had organized the placement of roadside bombs
that had killed US soldiers rings rather hollow, considering those shouldn't have been in
Iraq in the first place.
I am definitely not stating that he is perfect and doesn't do objectionable things. And he
has authorized US forces to control the oil wells, which is against international law, but at
least US soldiers are not actively engaged in fighting the Syrian government, something
Hillary set in motion. However, the military does comprise a huge percentage of the US
economy and there have to be reasons, and enemies, to justify its existence, so his situation
as president must be very difficult, not a job I would want, that is for sure.
There were at least nine people killed when Trump bombed Douma.
Only a psychopath would kill people because one of its spy drones was shot down. You don't
get points for considering killing people for it and then changing your mind.
People should get over Hillary and pay attention to what Trump has been doing. Why even
mention what Hillary would have done in Syria, then proceed to be an apologist for what Trump
has done around the world in just three years? Trump has been quite a prolific imperialist in
such a short time. A second term could well put him above Bush and Obama as the 21st
century's most horrible leaders on earth.
Dungroanin ,
Sharon,
Who has done the shit under the Trump Regime (lol Regime! You lot)
Trump – not.
Regime – yes.
Dungroanin ,
Sharon,
Magically? No.
Factually yes.
If you think that the potus is the omnipotent ruler of everything he certainly seems to be
having some problems with his minions in the CIA, NSA, FBI..State Dept etc.
The potus is best described (by Assad actually) as a CEO of a board of directors appointed
by the shareholders who collectively determine their OWN interests.
Your gaslighting ain't succeeding round here – Regime! So desperate, so so sad
🤣
sharon marlowe ,
Are you seven years old? There's no such thing as omnipotent rulers. I said Trump was the
leader of the U.S. regime. That's how it's said in the real world;)
Dungroanin ,
Right – and the regime of which he is the leader of has been trying to usurp him from
day one, correct?
So in your world view Trump has been trying to overthrow himself?
That all the Russiagate, Ukrainegate – coupgates in short are all Trump doing it to
himself!!!
Who is being childish by conflating all of that?
Koba ,
He's sent more troops to Iraq and Afghanistan he strayed several coups in Latin America and
was game for taking on the dprk until they got nukes and wants to bomb Iran! Winding down?!
Dungroanin ,
Yeah yeah and 'he' gave Maduro 7 days to let their kid takeover in Venezuela! And built a
wall. And got rid of obamacare and started a nuke war with Rocketman and and and
Dungroanin ,
Savory,
In 2016 Trumps role (whether he fully realised it or not) was to get rid of all the
existing Republican candidates that may have stopped Hillary getting her crown.
He and the Clinton family were old friends in NY and he played golf with Bill
regularly.
What you haven't identified in what you saw in 2016 is the choreographed pantomime
villainy of The Donald during the debates with Hillary.
It was designed for him to lose appeal and keep GOP voters at home.
The reason Hillary lost :
The stitch up of Bernie and his supporters as revealed by the DNC email leaks which kept
them from voting for her;
Her failure to campaign effectively being a cold hearted murdering bitch that couldn't
empathise with a kitten;
A load of ordinary poorish Americans who got a bit pissed at being labelled 'deplorable'
by her.
Simple as that.
Donald was as suprised as anyone to have actually won that night – he had to go chat
to the Clintons and say "what the fuck am I supposed to do now? I have a whole load of
Apprentice episodes lined up to film, and Hotels & Golf courses to build!"
Obviously he couldn't say it must be a mistake and his friends the Clintons should be
allowed back into the White House as planned – that wouldn't have washed – so he
ended up in the Oval Office.
As potus he would have to make decisions which no one including the Clintons could force
him to do anything HE ultimately didn't want to do. No matter how many of the stooges imposed
upon him tried to get away with murder.
He quickly realised there was some nasty goings on that he was supposed to rubberstamp and
he rebelled against it at his inauguration speech which gave the establishment a slap across
the face as Pres George W Bush quipped to his dad PresGeorge Bush
"That was some weird shit"
And all else followed the yellow brick road to right here, right now.
Good innit?
Antonym ,
The Left has fallen into reactionary insanity
The other main proof for the above: they support Islamism just because the "alt-right"
opposes it.
Islamism kicks all the Left's causes in the teeth: equality only for Muslims, as all the
others are despicable kaffirs; misogyny to the power of 2; LGTB rights below zero; nothing
against shark capitalism in the Koran.
The Iranian Left was massacred in 1988 by
the Iranian Islamists.
Dungroanin ,
Antzy the Bush's from Grandaddy Prescot to the CIA JFK killers and Pres George Senior to Pres
Dubya to all current scions are bestties with the most extreme form of islamists in hostory
the Wahhabists who enable the Saudis to control Saudi Arabia and it's wealth – they
have even been referred to as the most Likudist state outside of Israel by Nuttyyahoo!
So there.
Koba ,
The Jew defender has spoken! Show me this support for Islamism! Im yet to find even a
mainstream or fringe left wing party support that at all! Good goy a shekel has been
deposited into your account
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
The USA Deep State is a Five Eyes partner and as such Trump must be given the proverbial boot
for being an uneducated boor lacking political gravitas & business gravitas with his
narcissistic Smoot-Hawley II 2019 trade wars.
Screw the confidence man-in-chief. He is a liability for the USA and global business.
Trump is not an asset.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
Okay, I'll admit that he is a Russian Federation asset in so far as he is Putin's &
Russian Federation Intelligence asset fodder that Putin can utilize at will whenever he
desires but aside from being the biggest dumb arse in the Western Empire he is really an
ignorant ignoramus when you drill right down to it.
I support the USA Deep State conspiracy to rid the good people of the United States of
America of the Orange Oaf conundrum. The global business community would rather restore
business fundamentals IMHO.
As MOU my perspective is absolute, sorry.
Like Josef Stalin I too have a reputation to uphold.
MOU
Joerg ,
It is an illusion to talk of "the Left" and "the Right" anymore, because the USA have become
outright criminal: A Mafia-system ruled by some syndicates.
Think of this enormous sum of 23 (I believe) trillion Dollars missing in the Pentagon. And
the House even decided to not research where this money went! To this see
https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1407-mark-skidmore-on-the-pentagons-missing-trillions/
Or think of the Ukraine and Joe and Hunter Biden (and other corrupt persons from the EU).
Author Bill Martin mentions this above with :"dirty business in Ukraine".
But its not only about corruption. Now it's also about a murder-attempt – as every
Mafia would never hesitate to execute. And Western media doesn't report this.
This has happened: Because of Joe Biden's quid-pro-quo demand to former Ukrainian president
Poroshenko (no billions of Dollars from the US, if Shokin was not fired) state prosecutor
Shokin was then fired. But some months ago there had now also been a poison-attack on Shokin.
And now Shokin goes after Joe Biden – and he must, if he wants to survive!: To this on
the site https://youtube.com/channel/UCdeMVChrumySxV9N1w0Au-w
There click the video "JOE BIDEN, UKRAINE AND VIKTOR SHOKIN MERCURY POISONING".
paul ,
Trump, Sanders and Corbyn were all in their own way agents of creative destruction.
Trump tapped into the popular discontent of millions of Americans who realised that the
system no longer even pretended to work in their interests, and were not prepared to be
diverted down the Identity Politics Rabbit Hole.
The Deep State was outraged that he had disrupted their programme by stealing Clinton's seat
in the game of Musical Chairs. Being the most corrupt, dishonest and mendacious political
candidate in all US history (despite some pretty stiff opposition) was supposed to be
outweighed by her having a vagina. The Deplorables failed to sign up for the programme.
Almost as a by product of his 2016 victory, Trump showed up the MSM hacks for what they were,
lying, partisan shills utterly lacking in any integrity and credibility. The same applies to
the intrigues and corruption of the Dirty Cops and Spookocracy. They had to come out from
behind the curtain and reveal themselves as the dirty, lying, seditious, treasonous, rabid
criminal scum they are. The true nature of the State standing in the spotlight for all the
world to see. This cannot be undone.
For all his pandering to Adelson and the Zionist Mafia, for all his Gives to Netanyahu, Trump
has failed to deliver on the Big Ticket Items. Syria was supposed to have been invaded by
now, with Hillary cackling demonically over Assad's death as she did over Gaddafi, and
rapidly moving on to the main event with Iran. They will not forgive him for this. They
realise they are under severe time pressure. It took them a century to gain their
stranglehold over America, and this is a wasting asset. America is in terminal decline, and
may soon be unable to fulfil its ordained role as dumb goy muscle serving Zionist interests.
And the parasite will find it difficult to find a replacement host.
paul ,
Sanders was shafted in 2016 by the corrupt DNC machine, and he is being shafted again.
He will probably be sidelined in favour of some third rate hack like Buttplug, or some other
synthetic, manufactured nonentity.
If he isn't, and by some miracle does secure the nomination, they will fail to support him
and just allow him to be defeated by Trump. It doesn't matter.
There are millions of decent people who have long been persuaded to play the game of Lesser
Evils. They will be as disenchanted as was Trump's Base by a transparently corrupt, rigged
system, and finally withdraw their support.
This has to be seen as a positive development.
They can no longer paper over the cracks.
paul ,
Likewise, there are more than a few crumbs of comfort to be drawn from the smearing and
destruction of Corbyn.
As in America, it forced the Deep State to step out from behind the curtain and take direct
control. The Zionist wire pullers had to step out into the spotlight and reveal the true
extent of their domination.
The endless treachery and backstabbing of the Blairites have shown the Labour Party to be a
lost cause, a dead end, a waste of time, effort and energy, and a waste of a man's rations,
making way for something more worthwhile. This is another positive development.
Koba ,
Paul the people playing the lesser of two evils game aren't good people. They pretend they
are. That's it. In a nutshell.
Dungroanin ,
Well Bill you make great points especially around the Impeachment minutiae – Eric the
Schiffleur, Paul, a genuine legal expert, Schiffs shape changing and snakeeyed mesmerising ,
the levitation of Bolton into a Saviour? Holly shit!! Yanks eat some nasty foods no wonder
there is great obesity (gratuitous I know).
BUT Bill, you will insist on working the old long con – the Left/Right imaginary one
dimensional divide.
WHY?
There is only a 3-D Top-Bottom construct in the world in a roughly Pyramidal 'con' shape
which shifts its peaks and size in time (4D).
It is the super rich oligarch owning Pathocracy in the hidden heights and their visible
representative Kings and plutocrats at the top and their circles of diminishing powers and
affluence down to the majority of humans below – kept in the dirt and slavery through
indenture where they can't by shear violence of slave masters and dog soldiers.
There is only that top – bottom, squashed by bought priests and philosophers and
'economists' into first a 2-D triangle and then squashed into a 1-D line that people are told
is left and right. The great owners of everything having disappeared of that scale but
represented by their ciphers:-
Clintons / Obama are Left – Bush's / Trump are right.
Crap – they are just pawns in the top down 4D game trying to claw up the peaks
– no wonder Donald named his son Baron – it may be his way of giving the finger
to the glass ceiling he aims to shatter.
Bernie is a threat to that pyramid as Jeremy was here in the UK.
They had to stop Jeremy at any cost and the Judaeo-phobic smear was massive, added to the
terrorist smear in the 2017 election. Along with the he was both a Brexiteer and anti
Brexiteer smear and a Commie!
It was still not quite certain so the US openly interfered in rhe UK election with
Pompeo's Gauntlet to stop Corbyn – where the fuck is the concerned democratic purveyors
of the US on that election interference by the Sec of State and a pressure group upon a
another sovereign country ?
Where are the judges? The IG's ? The glitterati? The Intellectuals ?
YOU Bill?
They FIXED the postal ballots to make sure – even after making sure a unprecedented
winter, December, short daylight, prexmas date to minimise turnout.
Yes they did.
Sanders looks like he is going to get the gauntlet but being Jewish to start with –
it will be harder to throw the Judaeophobe mud at him – so the shit thrown is,
COMMUNIST ! It has already started, but to make sure the election will also be rigged,
whether via the delegates or by the 'hanging chard de nous jour'.
Only a massive turnout and careful independent international election inspectors would
ever get near that – though they didn't stop the Bolivian coup by the CIA did they?
Anyway Trump has a trump card he will play anyday soon – a NEW YALTA – which
will turn him into a giant statesman of the world stage and he'll stomp home for his second
term – for these above in the Pyramid better the devil they know and give Baron a
baronial peak of his own snd Donald his pound if flesh!
George Mc ,
Haven't you just agreed with him here?
He thinks the left died in the 1960s, over a half century ago. It's pretty simple to
identify a leftist: anti-imperialist/ anti-capitalist. The Democrats are imperialists.
People who vote for the Democrats and Republicans are imperialists. This article is a
confused mess, that's my whole point;)
If the Democrats and Republicans (and those who vote for them) are imperialists (which
they are) then the left are indeed dead – at least as far as political representation
goes. Although to be sure, that makes his point confused to say the least. He seems to be
attempting to drum up support for Sanders who, by his own logic, isn't going to make a damn
bit of difference (any more than Corbyn would have made had HE been elected in the UK).
George Mc ,
Truth be told, I usually tend to glaze over when I see articles about Trump's impeachment. Or
indeed articles about American politics in general. And I see the Corbyn fiasco as the
ultimate indication that UK politics is just another rigged show. The ultimate irony being,
as I've said, that Corbyn would not have made a difference even if elected anyway. The fact
that the media went so ruthlessly after him is an indication that even the appearance of
socialism is too much for them. But I feel that, in the spirit of "What else can we write
about?", we will continue to have articles on the minutiae of shenanigans between Boris and
Patel etc. It seems to me that the only hope we now have is from events outside the political
system which threaten to burst the charade apart.
George Mc ,
I think that if Corbyn had been elected, there would have been a severe limit as to what he
could have achieved. (While of course, the media would be going into meltdown about plans for
a new Auschwitz on the M1 etc.) However – I grant that the very election of such an
"extreme" figure would cause a similar meltdown behind the scenes as it would lead to the
deadliest thing of all: hope! It would have been a signal that an extensive part – even
the majority – of the British public were sick of this neoliberal cancer. Thus, while
the practical effect of a Corbyn victory would have been limited, the psychological effect
(the damage done to the showbiz façade) would have been profound.
sharon marlowe ,
"Truth be told, I usually tend to glaze over when I see articles about Trump's impeachment.
Or indeed articles about American politics in general."
lol So do I:)
It definitely irked me that such an article appeared here. It looked like a
U.S.-TV-political-pundit-monologue thing.
"... not only did Warren botch the rollout, her plans were bad, and were seen as bad. ..."
"... "Elizabeth Warren cries and tries to regain ground with voters" [Joan Vennochi, Boston Globe ]. The deck: "Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, her ideological soulmate, rolls along, tears-free." Ouch. ..."
"... IMO it was her later waffling, insincerity, and backtracking on M4A that caused progressives to realize not only that she was not committed to solving the most important issue identified by Dem voters, but that she may not have a fire in her belly to address the nation's other urgent crises and would likely accommodate to powerful interests in Obama-esque fashion. ..."
"... Trump as the not-Democrat has such an edge among the disaffected who are still angry enough to vote ..."
"... I think that I can answer that. Jimmy Dore put out a 5-minute video showing her in action. A protestor heckled her in front of a meeting and she went into deer-in-spotlight mode and shut down. In the end she had to be rescued by Ayanna Pressley and I was thinking – "She really wants to debate Trump? Will she shut down then too?". (Some language) ..."
Warren (D)(1): "What is happening with Elizabeth Warren?" [Chris Cilizza,
CNN ].
"Less than two months ago, it looked as though Elizabeth Warren might just run away with the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination
. Then that Warren wave hit a wall. Starting right around mid-October, Warren's numbers not only stopped moving upward but also
began trending down
Add it all up and there's plenty of reason to believe that Warren's full-fledged support for Medicare for All -- coupled with
her less-than-successful attempts to defend that position in the last two debates -- led to her current reduced status in the
race."
If this were true, Sanders should drop as well. I think Cilizza should give consideration to the idea that not only did Warren
botch the rollout, her plans were bad, and were seen as bad.
"Elizabeth Warren cries and tries to regain ground with voters" [Joan Vennochi,
Boston Globe ]. The deck: "Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, her ideological soulmate, rolls along, tears-free." Ouch.
More: "According to the Des Moines Register, "after a long pause and with tears in her eyes, the senator from Massachusetts said
'yeah,' before telling the story of the divorce from her first husband," and how painful it was to tell her mother that her marriage
was over.
To showcase the significance of the encounter, Warren tweeted out a clip."
Dead Lord. You don't tweet out your own tears to show sincerity. Have somebody else do it! Isn't anybody on her staff protecting
her?
I think Cilizza should give consideration to the idea that not only did Warren botch the rollout, her plans were bad,
and were seen as bad.
The establishment is trying mightily to salvage something useful from Warren's surprisingly rapid decline in the polls, constantly
pushing the refrain that M4A was somehow the kiss of death for her.
In fact, she rose to prominence by riding on Sanders policies like Medicare for All, canceling student debt, and free
college. "I'm with Bernie" was her frequent reply on several policy issues, and she co-sponsored Sanders' Medicare for All Senate
bill to great effect on her own "progressive" cred.
IMO it was her later waffling, insincerity, and backtracking on M4A that caused progressives to realize not only that she
was not committed to solving the most important issue identified by Dem voters, but that she may not have a fire in her belly
to address the nation's other urgent crises and would likely accommodate to powerful interests in Obama-esque fashion.
Six years wait for the ACA to piss almost everyone off.
Trump as the not-Democrat has such an edge among the disaffected who are still angry enough to vote. Especially since
the whole and only DNC message will be 'you can't possibly vote for Trump!!!'
I think that I can answer that. Jimmy Dore put out a 5-minute video showing her in action. A protestor heckled her in front
of a meeting and she went into deer-in-spotlight mode and shut down. In the end she had to be rescued by Ayanna Pressley and I
was thinking – "She really wants to debate Trump? Will she shut down then too?". (Some language)
"... Is she effective? What has she done to make her a spy mastermind? She is obviously a torturer, but is that a qualification in any way useful to be a intelligence agency boss? ..."
"... The outcomes of incompetence and malicious intent are sometimes indistinguishable from one another. ..."
Is she effective? What has she done to make her a spy mastermind? She is obviously a
torturer, but is that a qualification in any way useful to be a intelligence agency boss?
I have the suspicion Haspel was elevated to their office by threatening "I know where all
the bodies are buried (literally) and if you don't make me boss, I will tell". Blackmail can
helping a career lots if successful.
The outcomes of incompetence and malicious intent are sometimes indistinguishable from one
another. With the people Trump has surrounded himself with, horrible, nasty outcomes are par
for the course because these guys are both incompetent and chock full of malicious intent.
Instead of draining the swamp, he's gone and filled it with psychotic sociopaths.
"... Corbyn's weakness was always the elephant in the room but was fully revealed when he had to step up to plate and fight. No leader can survive without being able to fight his enemies and no country should be led by such a person. Saddly he squandered the enormous opportunity handed to him in the last election: in hindsight, that opportunity was handed to him by an electorate steeped in wishful thinking ..."
"... Of course it's criticism of the state of Israel. And of course that's not anti-Semitism. But the label "anti-Semitism" is the kiss of death to the executive class i.e. that middle layer who "inform" the masses. If you are one of them and you get called "anti-Semitic", it's the equivalent of your boss saying, "I want a word – and bring your coat!" ..."
"... Corbyn seems like a nice enough guy, an honest, yet unremarkable footsoldier MP, but the idea he was suited to leading the Labour Party into an epic struggle with a revitalised Tory Party under a strong leader like Boris Johnson, is a fantastic notion. Johnson had to be cut down to size, before the election. ..."
"... And, finally, Corbyn could have turned the media bias against him to his advantage, only he's not suited to the strategy that's required. That strategy is the one Donald Trump employed, taking on the media and identifying them as the enemy and explaining why they publish lies. Corbyn should have publically taken on both the Guardian and the BBC, rather than appeasing them, unsuccessfully, because appeasing them isn't possible. ..."
"... Why didn't Corbyn express anger and shock when he was accused of being a paedophile, sorry, an anti-Semite? Those MPs who went along with that sordid narrative, should have been kicked out of Labour immediately by Corbyn himself. ..."
"... "A big part of why Labor and Corbyn lost so badly is the complete abdication of "the Left" on Brexit. The left were supposed to be anti-globalists, in which case their task was to join battle offering an egalitarian, left-populist version of Brexit which would have benefited the people. Instead, faced with a real decision and a real opportunity they punted and ran home to globalist mama. This removed one of the main reasons to bother supporting them. ..."
"... The point about the EU not being directly responsible for Tory austerity is technically true but it is nonetheless a neo liberal monster crushing the shit out of the most vulnerable ..."
"... Especially when it comes to countries like Greece. I don't understand the constant veneration of the EU. By design, our membership did nothing to protect us from the carnage of this Tory crime wave. The EUs constitutional arrangements contains baked in obligations to maintain permanent austerity in the service of ever greater corporate profit. ..."
No one feels like recalling, for example, that more people voted against the Tories than for them (13.9mn for and 16.2mn against).
Or that 10.3 million people still voted Labour despite the entirety of the unprecedentedly vicious and Stalinist hate campaign
conducted against them – and Corbyn in particular – since the latter became leader in 2015.
Which fact, along with Labour's near-win in 2017 and the surprise Brexit victory in 2016, implies the mainstream media's ability
to direct and manipulate public opinion is a lot less wholesale and guaranteed than we oftentimes assume, and that this is unlikely
to be a single explanation for yesterday's result.
More importantly, no one – even those who are boggling at the implausibility – is questioning the validity of the result.
No one.
It's as if even suggesting election fraud can happen in a nice majority-white western country like the UK is improper and disrespectful.
Election fraud is – as every good racist knows – done by brown people or Orientals, or 'corrupt' eastern European nations, not by
fine upstanding empire builders like the British.
This seems to be so much of a given that the results of any vote are simply accepted as 100% valid – no matter how improbable
they may seem.
And apparently even in the face of clear evidence for at least some level of shady activity.
Remember this? It only happened on Wednesday but it's already some way down the Memory Hole.
There's been a lot of effort expended in
minimising the significance of this in social media and in the mainstream press – and indeed by resident trolls on OffG. There
have been claims it's 'routine' – as if that somehow makes it ok. Or that Kuenssberg was misinformed, or 'tired'.
And after all this, Labour heartlands – red since World War 2, through Thatcher and Foot and every anti-Labour hate campaign the
media could muster – all voted Conservative?
Does that seem likely?
I don't know, all I do know is I think that discussion needs to start. I think it's time to think the unthinkable, and at least
open the prospect of electoral fraud up for real discussion.
How secure is our electoral process? Can results be stage-managed, massaged or even rigged? What guarantees do we have that this
can't happen here? In an age of growing corruption and decay at the very top, do the checks and balances placed to safeguard our
democracy sill work well, or even at all?
This Friday the Thirteenth, with BoJo the Evil Clown back in Downing Street, looks like a good moment to get it going.
aspnaz ,
Corbyn's weakness was always the elephant in the room but was fully revealed when he had to step up to plate and fight. No
leader can survive without being able to fight his enemies and no country should be led by such a person. Saddly he squandered
the enormous opportunity handed to him in the last election: in hindsight, that opportunity was handed to him by an electorate
steeped in wishful thinking. Should he apologise to his supporters, probably not, they backed the wrong horse but the limp
was visible from day one.
That inequality and poverty will continue increasing under neoliberal economic policies, and the majority of us will continue
being ground into the dirt, or that Julian Assange will end up in the U.S for certain to face a Stalinesque show trial, or the
observation about George Galloway.
George Mc ,
I know it's bad for my health but oh I just can't stop myself. Had another Groan trip. Here's one from that good time gal Jess
Phillips:
I only supply the link to see if anyone can see any actual content in this. I suppose it must be a real cushy number to get
paid for pitching in a lot of foaming waffle that feels purposeful but remains totally non-commital. That and those nice cheques
rolling in from that Hyslop and Merton quiz fluff.
George Mc ,
You have to understand that it's all showbiz. Why did the Tories prefer Boris to Jeremy Hunt? Because Hunt looked and sounded
like the oily little tyke everyone wanted to kick. Whereas Boris was the cutesie country womble from a Two Ronnies sketch. When
Boris appeared on his test outing as host for Hignfy, all he had to do was to be incompetent i.e. all he had to do was turn up.
Oh how we all laughed.
As for Jess – well, she's the ballsy fake prole tomboy – like a WOKE verson of Thatcha. I doubt anyone is "buying this" (to
use one of the Americanisms we'll all be spouting as we become the 51st state) but it's all part of "the movie".
ricked by its sharp thorn anywhere near the heart. Don't know what the street name will be for it but it has two current codewords
i heard 'stellar' & 'jessa'.
George Mc ,
"Share On Twitter" target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=When+I+said+%26%238220%3Bcome+clean%26%238221%3B+I+meant+as+...+&url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2019%2F12%2F13%2Fboris-johnsons-incredible-landslide%2F%23comment-106199">
When I said "come clean" I meant as in "reveal yourself". I really think you should calm down. Take some deep breaths. Have a
nice cup of tea.
By all means comment, but when you slander those who actually felt it important that their vote counted, that their opinion
mattered and then were told to fuck off by the very people asking them for their opinion, its expected you get blow back, which
is what has happened.
Now, may i enquire, do you have a belief in democracy and upholding democratic outcomes, do you believe that Russian interference
actually resulted in the Brexit vote itself, and do you believe that the working class is so fucking pig ignorant that it should
never be allowed to vote.
In summation, are you a Blairite by any chance as they way you communicate shows an utter contempt for those poor sods slagged
off by Remainiacs for so long to just fuck off.
As for economic decline, strange, but the UK is one of the top 10 wealthy nations globally, much of said wealth now from the
FIRE Economy, which means its extractive and put to no real purpose, whilst the break-up of the Union is up to the constituent
parts itself – as i support Irish reunification, i don't weep for Northern Ireland, whilst the Scots have every right o be free
of Westminster, its not as if they held an actual Referedum on it prior to the signing of the Act of Union is it.
And as for wales, well, here's a small country who's political establishment are incapable of recognising it elected to Leave
the EU, which sometimes has aspirations itself to Independence, an Independence it will never gain due to the fact nearly 800K
English live within our lands, but the fantasists persist none the less.
Now, as the EU, via the Treaty named after Lisbon is very much a neoliberal organisation, one that puts monetary union above
the welfare of its own citizens, please explain why I must support such an Institution that does not benefit the average Joe in
most member States?
Alan Tench ,
What you must remember is that a democratic decision isn't always a good one. In my view, the current one concerning Brexit, is
a bad one. The fact that a majority support it doesn't make it good or right. We just have to live with it. Consider the death
penalty. I'm sure the vast majority of voters in this country would vote in favour of it. Would that might it right?
Ruth ,
Don't blame them. In all likelihood they had their votes hijacked by MI5
Alan Tench ,
All this anti-Semitism stuff – anyone know what it's about? I assume it had zero influence on the electorate. Just how does it
manifest itself? Is most of it – maybe nearly all of it – concerned with criticism of the state of Israel? If so, it's not anti-Semitism
.
George Mc ,
Of course it's criticism of the state of Israel. And of course that's not anti-Semitism. But the label "anti-Semitism" is
the kiss of death to the executive class i.e. that middle layer who "inform" the masses. If you are one of them and you get called
"anti-Semitic", it's the equivalent of your boss saying, "I want a word – and bring your coat!"
MichaelK ,
I think the Labour Party's election strategy, and long before, was fatally flawed. I'm shocked by it. How bad it was. First they
should never have agreed to an election at this time. Wait, at least until Spring. The idea, surely, was to keep weakening Johnson's
brand and splitting the Tories apart. Johnson wanted an election for obvious reasons, that alone should have meant that one did
everything in one's power not to give him what he wanted. Labour did the exact opposite of what they should have done, march onto
a battleground chose by Johnson.
Of course one can argue that the liberals and the SNP had already hinted that they would support Johnson's demand, but Labour
could have 'bought them off' with a little effort. Give the SNP a pledge on a second referendum and give the Liberals a guarantee
of electoral reform, whatever.
The Liberals actually had an even more stupid and incompetent leadership than Labour and suffered a terrible defeat too. Why
is it that it's only the Tories who know how to play the election game, usually?
Corbyn seems like a nice enough guy, an honest, yet unremarkable footsoldier MP, but the idea he was suited to leading
the Labour Party into an epic struggle with a revitalised Tory Party under a strong leader like Boris Johnson, is a fantastic
notion. Johnson had to be cut down to size, before the election.
Allowing the Tories to become the People's Party, the Brexit Party in all but name; was a catastrohic mistake by Labour; unforegivabel
really.
And, finally, Corbyn could have turned the media bias against him to his advantage, only he's not suited to the strategy
that's required. That strategy is the one Donald Trump employed, taking on the media and identifying them as the enemy and explaining
why they publish lies. Corbyn should have publically taken on both the Guardian and the BBC, rather than appeasing them, unsuccessfully,
because appeasing them isn't possible.
Why didn't Corbyn express anger and shock when he was accused of being a paedophile, sorry, an anti-Semite? Those MPs who
went along with that sordid narrative, should have been kicked out of Labour immediately by Corbyn himself. He needed to
be far more aggressive and proactive, taking the fight to his enemies and using his position to crush them at once. Call me a
kiddy fiddler and I'll rip your fucking throat out! Only Corbyn was passive, defencesive, apathetic and totally hopeless when
smeared so terribly. People don't respect a coward, they do respect someone who fights back and sounds righteously angry at being
smeared so falsely. Corbyn looked and sounded like someone who had something to hide and appologise about, which only encouraged
the Israeli lobby to attack him even more! Un-fuckin' believable.
What's tragic is that the right understood Corbyn's weaknesses and character far better than his supporters, and how to destroy
him.
Ruth ,
I agree with you about the election timing
Derek ,
And, finally, Corbyn could have turned the media bias against him to his advantage, only he's not suited to the strategy that's
required.
Yes you are absolutely right, he should have stolen a journalists phone or hid in a fridge, maybe stare at the ground when
shown a picture of a child sleeping on a hospital floor. Now that's turning turning events to your advantage right?
He made many mistakes and you are right, but caving into "remain" the perceived overturning of the referendum by the Labour
party is what dunnit, the final nail in his coffin. I am sorry to see him go.
tonyopmoc ,
Judging by the spelling of "Labour", I guess an American wrote this on The Moon of Alabama's blog. It is however very accurate
and I know that MOA is a German man, running his blog from Germany. His analyses, are some of the best in the world.
Tony
"A big part of why Labor and Corbyn lost so badly is the complete abdication of "the Left" on Brexit. The left were supposed
to be anti-globalists, in which case their task was to join battle offering an egalitarian, left-populist version of Brexit which
would have benefited the people. Instead, faced with a real decision and a real opportunity they punted and ran home to globalist
mama. This removed one of the main reasons to bother supporting them.
Posted by: Russ | Dec 13 2019 7:09 utc | 33″
MichaelK ,
I thought the left were supposed to be internationalists too? I dunno. I think they should never have supported the referendum
scam in the first place. If the Tories wanted it, that alone should have made them oppose it. Look at what's happened, the referendum
and Brexit have massively benefitted the Tories and crushed everyone else. Isn't that an objective fact, or am I missing something;
seriously?
What does 'anti-globalist' really mean? The tragedy was allowing the Tories to blame Europe for the devastating consequences
of their own 'austerity' policies which hit the North so hard. These policies originated in London, not Bruxelles!
The truth is harsh. Corbyn was a terrible leader with awfully confused policies that he couldn't articulate properly and a
team around him that were just as bad.
Pam Ryan ,
The point about the EU not being directly responsible for Tory austerity is technically true but it is nonetheless a neo liberal
monster crushing the shit out of the most vulnerable.
Especially when it comes to countries like Greece. I don't understand the constant veneration of the EU. By design, our
membership did nothing to protect us from the carnage of this Tory crime wave. The EUs constitutional arrangements contains baked
in obligations to maintain permanent austerity in the service of ever greater corporate profit.
Thom ,
'Incredible' is the word. We're expected to believe that for all his personal and intellectual flaws, Johnson achieved a landslide
on the scale of Blair and Thatcher; that he drew in Leave supporters from traditional Labour voters while holding on to Remain
Tories; that all three major UK opposition parties flopped, including the one party pushing for outright Remain; and that turnout
fell even though millions registered just before the election. Sorry, but it doesn't add up.
nottheonly1 ,
"Share On Twitter" target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=What+just+happened+was+an+inverted+U.S.+selectio...+&url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2019%2F12%2F13%2Fboris-johnsons-incredible-landslide%2F%23comment-106262">
What just happened was an inverted U.S. selection. In the U.S., a confused rich man got elected, because the alternative was a
psychopathic war criminal. In the U.K. a confused upper class twat got elected, because the alternative was too good to be true.
Something like that?
tonyopmoc ,
Something strange going on in Sedgefield. What the hell is Boris Johnson doing there today? Tony Blair Labour, Boris Johnson
Tory. What's the difference? Same neocons. Same sh1t?
tonyopmoc ,
Dungroanin, Jeremy Corbyn is 70 now. He's done his bit. Now its time for him to take it easy.
Incidentally "Viscount Palmerston was over 70 when he finally became Prime Minister: the most advanced age at which anyone
has ever become Prime Minister for the first time."
George Mc ,
The Groan is keen to highlight the sheer thanklessness of the BBC's undying fight to objectively bring The Truth to the masses:
And for all the tireless work they do, they are open to accusations of "conspiracy theory" and worse:
"The conspiracy theories that abound are frustrating. And let's be clear – some of the abuse which is directed at our journalists
who are doing their best for audiences day in, day out is sickening. It shouldn't happen. And I think it's something social
media platforms really need to do more about."
Sickening social media abuse? Echoes of all those frightfully uncivil – and never verified – messages that wrecked poor little
Ruth Smeeth's delicate health.
Thom ,
The only way the BBC and Guardian will understand if people don't pay the licence fee and don't click on their articles (and obviously
don't contribute!). Hit them in the pockets.
George Mc ,
It didn't take long for the Groaniad to "dissect" the Labour defeat. Here we get THE FIVE REASONS Labour lost the election:
Interesting. Note the space given to Blairite toadies Ruth Smeeth and Caroline Flint. Note the disingenuousness of this:
"In London, antisemitism and what people perceived as the absence of an apology appeared to be a key issue."
It's always suspicious when we get that expression "what people perceived". What "people"? And note that the dubiousness relates
to the absence of an apology for anti-Semitism – not the anti-Semitism itself which is, of course, taken for granted.
Also note the conclusion:
"With a new Conservative government led by Boris Johnson poised for office, the Guardian's independent, measured, authoritative
reporting has never been so vital."
Yes – The Groaniad is yer man, yer champion, yer hero!
Even when critical of US actions, media commentary on recent US bombings and
assassinations in the Middle East is premised on the assumption that the US has the right
to use violence (or the threat of it) to assert its will, anytime, anywhere. Conversely,
corporate media coverage suggests that any countermeasure -- such as resistance to the US
presence in Iraq -- is inherently illegitimate, criminal and/or terroristic.
Iranian
puppeteers
One step in this dance is depicting US military forces in Iraq as innocent bystanders under
attack by sadistic Iranian puppetmasters. Media analysis of the US murder of Iranian Gen.
Qassem Soleimani consistently asserted that he was "an architect of international terrorism
responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans" ( New York Times , 1/3/20
) or "a terrorist with the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands" ( Washington
Post ,
1/7/20 ). According to Leon Panetta ( Washington Post ,
1/7/20 ), a former Defense secretary and CIA director,
The death of Soleimani should not be mourned, given his responsibility for the killing of
thousands of innocent people and hundreds of US military personnel over the years.
There is little evidence for this contention that Iran in general or Soleimani personally is
responsible for killing hundreds of Americans. When the State Department
claimed last April that Iran was responsible for the deaths of 608 American servicemembers
in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, investigative journalist Gareth Porter ( Truthout ,
7/9/19 ) asked Navy Commander Sean Robertson for evidence, and Robertson "acknowledged that
the Pentagon doesn't have any study, documentation or data to provide journalists that would
support such a figure."
Porter showed that the US attribution of deaths in Iraq to Iran is an unsubstantiated
government talking point from the Cheney era, one that was exposed at the time when Lt. Gen.
Ray Odierno admitted that, though the US had attributed Iraqi resistance fighters' weapons to
Iran, US troops found many sites in Iraq at which such weapons were being
manufactured.
Gareth Porter reported in Truthout (
7/9/19 ) that "the myth that Tehran is responsible for killing over 600 US troops in the
Iraq War is merely a new variant of a propaganda line that former Vice President Dick Cheney
used to attempt to justify a war against Iran more than a decade ago."
Scholar Stephen Zunes ( Progressive ,
1/7/20 ) similarly demonstrated the lack of evidence for the idea that Iran is behind the
killing of US forces in Iraq. Zunes noted that the National Intelligence
Estimate on Iraq , compiled by America's 16 intelligence agencies, downplayed Iran's role
in Iraq's violence at roughly the same time that the Bush administration was saying that Iran
was culpable.
As Porter pointed out, there was a much simpler explanation for American deaths in the
period: The US targeted Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Mahdi Army fought back, imposing
more casualties on US troops.
That the pundits dusted off 13-year-old propaganda to rationalize killing Soleimani is a
clear indication that they were desperately grasping for any imperialist apologia within reach.
If the American public is led to believe that Soleimani killed hundreds of Americans, large
swathes of it are likely to regard his assassination as justified, necessary, or at worst a
feature of the tit-for-tat ugliness inherent to war.
The narrative also ideologically shores up the US war on Iran in
the American popular consciousness by presenting Iranians as primordially violent savages out
to spill the blood of Americans, notably those in the military who are in the Middle East,
presumably doing nothing but minding their own business. Presenting Iran as the reason for
attacks on US forces in Iraq also implies that Iraqis had little objection to the US invasion,
legitimizing the US's ongoing military presence in the country. The most obvious point about
the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq is that they wouldn't happen if US soldiers weren't in
Iraq.
When violence isn't violence
Another media dance move is to condemn anti-imperial violence while naturalizing imperialist
violence. An editorial in the New York Times ( 1/3/20 ) said that
Soleimani
no doubt had a role in the campaign of provocations by Shiite militias against American
forces in Iraq that recently led to the death of an American defense contractor and a
retaliatory American airstrike against the militia responsible for the attack.
Having US troops in Iraq, a country in which the US is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of
thousands , is not a "provocation," in the Times ' perspective; opposition to their
presence is the provocation.
The December 27 attack
that killed the US contractor did not occur in a vacuum. In 2018, the US was suspected of
bombing affiliates of Kataib Hezbollah, the group the US blames for killing the contractor.
Israel is suspected of carrying out a string of deadly bombings of the Iraqi Popular
Mobilization Forces, of which Kataib Hezbollah is a key component, between July and September,
a scenario at which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted
.
The US reportedly confirmed
that Israel was behind at least one of the bombings, and said it supports Israel's actions
while denying direct participation. In any case, the US's
lavish military support for Israel means that the former is effectively a party to the
latter's bombing. Thus, the Kataib Hezbollah attack that killed the contractor can be seen as "
retaliatory ," which
complicates the notion that the subsequent US attack was as well.
Another Times editorial ( 1/4/20
) describes Soleimani as "one of the region's most powerful and, yes, blood-soaked military
commanders." At no point is Trump or any other US leader described as "blood-soaked" or
anything comparable -- here, or in any of the mainstream media coverage I can find -- even as
he and his predecessors are sopping with that of
Afghans ,
Iraqis ,
Libyans and
Syrians , to cite only a few recent cases. Evidently imperial violence is so righteous it
leaves no trace behind.
Stephen Hadley, national security adviser in the George W Bush administration, wrote in the
Washington Post (
1/5/20 ):
What is clear is that one of the PMFs, Kataib Hezbollah, has been behind the
escalating violence over the past
several months as part of a campaign (assuredly with Iranian approval) to force out US
troops. The campaign culminated in the December 31 attack on the
US Embassy in Baghdad. (The head of Kataib Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was
killed
with Soleimani.)
By expelling US forces, the Iraqi government would be falling into Kataib Hezbollah's trap:
rewarding the militia's violent campaign, strengthening the Iranian-backed PMFs, weakening the
Iraqi government and state sovereignty, and jeopardizing the fight against the Islamic
State.
Kataib Hezbollah's actions are called "violence" twice in these three sentences, with their
apex apparently being "the December 31 attack on the
US Embassy in Baghdad." Remarkably, the author makes no mention of the December 29 US
airstrikes on five sites in Iraq and Syria that the US says belong to Kataib Hezbollah,
bombings that reportedly killed 25 and injured 55 . Those, it
would seem, do not constitute "violence." Iraqis damaging the embassy of the country whose
economic sanctions killed half a million Iraqi
children is "violence," but the US's lethal air raids are not. And expelling foreign armies
weakens state sovereignty!
"No one in Baghdad was fooled" by anti-US protests in Iraq, which were "almost certainly
a Soleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out," declared Thomas
Friedman ( New York Times ,
1/3/20 ). (In a 2016
poll , 93% of young Iraqis said that they perceived the US as an "enemy.")
Thomas Friedman's Times article (
1/3/20 ) on Soleimani's murder was bad even by Thomas Friedman standards. He dismissed the
protests at the US embassy:
The whole "protest" against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was
almost certainly a Soleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out
when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No
one in Baghdad was fooled by this.
In a way, it's what got Soleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he
decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would
overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the
bait, killed Soleimani instead.
That there were thousands of protesters at the US embassy and that the Iraqi security forces
stood aside to allow them to demonstrate suggests that what happened at the embassy cannot
be reduced to a hoax stage-managed and paid for by Iran. Furthermore, the US did kill Iraqis
two days before the protests, and that's what ignited them (to say nothing of the longer term
record of the US
devastating Iraq ). Like Hadley, however, Friedman pretends that the US's December 27
bombings didn't happen.
In the imperial imagination, the US has the right to violently pursue its objectives
wherever it wants, and any resistance is illegitimate.
And yet their are 'fact checkers' out out the pro-Iran /
anti-American media juggernaut, someone went to Tehran and reported on Soleimani's funeral,
gasp, she must be denounced as a useful idiot because that was staged. All events we don't
like are staged. Did Iran let people out of school or advertise the time and place of the
procession? Most likely but so was JFK's funeral. In any case, who actually bothered to
find out if the Iranians forced or paid people to attend Soleimani's funeral.
I do feel violated being subjected to Friedman's self-proclaimed expertise. He does not
feel any need to actually validate his statements other than to say, 'no one was fooled'
and voila it is so. Great work if you can get it. Reply
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So the person who saves Syria from occupation by IGIL is a terrorist ? Just a few years ago, CNN praised #Iran 's Qassem #Soleimani for defeating
ISIS.
Just a few years ago, CNN was praising Qassem
#Soleimani for being
the driving force behind the defeat of ISIS. Today they call him a "terrorist" and expect
you to believe them.
The problem with the idea of privilege is that very few people are really privileged, a white male dude certainly isn't privileged
just because he is white and male, although a black dudette could be in a worse position.
It is important to stress that actual privilege starts quite high on the totem pole, most people are not privileged.
Trump might not survive the Coronavirus, literally (he is over 70 and has a high range of
contacts; the mortality to this age group is close to 10%), or figuratively as voters might
not forgive him inadequate and/or incompetent response (which is given) .
Unfortunately, Bernie is at even higher risk as mortality for 80+ is over 15%, and
pre-existing cardiovascular disease is a serious negative factor.
One can wonder if this will be " Strawthat broke the camel'sback " for Trump. With 10% drop of S&P500 (aka "correction") it is difficult to
talk about booming economy on rallies ( 20% decline marker defines a recession and some
stocks -- like oil sector are already in this territory ). High yield bonds are also going
down, although more slowly. Now suddenly, Trump has nothing to talk about on his rallies, and
he knows it.
A part of rich retirees who are overexposed to stocks constitutes a sizable part of
remaining avid "Trumpers" voter block (kind of double stupidity, if you wish :-) , and some
of them might not forgive Trump the liberty of depriving them honestly earned in 2019 ~10% of
their 401K accounts.
IMHO troubles for Trump just started. Being incompetent DJT and his merry band of grifters
will almost definitely botch the response.
They already made three blunders.
1. When asked if, and when, a vaccine is produced, would the vaccine be affordable to
everyone? They replied; We'll let the "market" decide that. And some part of electorate
probably noted that.
2. The last December, they cut the budget for the CDC (center for disease control).
In this sense appointing Pence as the head of the coronavirus response may be a smart move
by Trump. When and if the pandemic hits big time, exposing the mass incompetence and
unpreparedness of the US government, in combination with the tanking of the stock market,
Trump can, of course, blame Christian Zionist neoconservative Israeli apartheid supporter
Pence for his troubles :-)
But, unfortunately, that will not do him any good.
Why no recession? Because the bank which until Friday expected no rate cuts in 2020,
suddenly expects no less than three rate cuts, and all of them taking place in the next three
months:
... we would expect some monetary easing from a number of the world's major central banks,
including 75bp of rate cuts by the Federal Reserve through June starting with a 25bp cut in
March. Although moderate Fed rate cuts are unlikely to be very powerful, the committee will
probably be reluctant to disappoint market expectations for substantial rate cuts for fear of
tightening financial conditions further.
Of course, by now Hatzius must be surely getting tired of being called the macroeconomic
"Thomas Stolper" (long-time readers know what that means), and as a result he has quietly
inserted two additional scenarios just to cover all his bases. While the "upside" scenario is
meaningless as it has no hope in hell of occurring, it's the downside one that is more
ominous:
We also consider two alternative scenarios. The upside scenario assumes that the global
spread of the virus is brought under control quickly and supply chain disruptions remain
mostly absent; if so, global GDP would rebound in Q2, risk asset markets would recover
sharply, and central banks may stay on hold. The downside scenario assumes widespread supply
chain disruptions as well as domestic demand weakness across the global economy. This would
involve sharp sequential contraction in global GDP in Q1 and Q2 -- i.e., a global recession
-- and probably an aggressive monetary easing campaign, including a return to the near-zero
funds rate of the post-crisis period.
Notably, not even the market expects a full 3 rate cuts by the end of June, which suggests
that for all its cheerful optimism, Goldman is bracing for its "downside scenario"
materializing.
If "Trump recession" materialize, he and Melania can start packing. As as he will most
probably repeat Bush II blunders in handling the epidemics, his chances are already lower that
they were before.
"Trump is highly concerned about the market and has encouraged aides not to give predictions
that might cause further tremors .In a Twitter post, he misspelled the word 'coronavirus' as
'caronavirus' and wrote that two cable news stations "are doing everything possible to make the
Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their
incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape!"
As far as the markets, I would be concerned with the China supply chain to the US. At most
there is 5-weeks, three on the ocean and a week on each side getting board ship, unloading, and
customs. Perhaps companies will have 2 -4 weeks in stock already. We are two-3 weeks into this.
China plants are more than likely closed or are half-staffed. Ships woill not call on Chinese
ports till the crisis is over or is pronounced safe.
run75441 , February 28, 2020 6:39 am
PGL:
Yep, he believes he is doomed if the economy tanks. It is actually an opportunity
for him to shine if only he knew how to be presidential and lead the nation.
EMichael , February 28, 2020 9:31 am
So Trump keeps trying to reassure investors about the market when there is not a single
person in the world that would pay attention to his comments on the market.
It's not as if the global economy was doing particularly well before the Wuhan coronavirus'
outbreak. In August, a survey of economists by the National Association for Business Economics
concluded that 72% of analysts expect a US recession to hit by the end of 2021. This percentage
included 38% of economists who believe a recession will strike by the end of this year and 34%
who think it will come next year. A
UN report published in September similarly warned of a worldwide recession this year. In
its case, the report's authors pointed to such risk factors as trade wars, and a no-deal Brexit.
It was clear earlier this month that the coronavirus outbreak could severely damage
the global economy.
On Feb. 12, I wrote that American and Chinese demand had been sustaining the world economy
for the last few years, and if China were shut down due to the virus, the ripple effect through
global supply chains could drag down the rest of world with it. And sure enough, this week
began with news of how the disease is throttling trade flows in and out of China.
Technically called COVID-19 ("coronavirus" actually being the name for a whole family of
viruses), the disease
has now infected at least 77,150 people in China, with 2,592 deaths. On Monday, stock
markets plunged on news that new and rapidly spreading outbreaks are now popping up
in South Korea,
Iran, and Italy . The Dow Jones dropped 3.5 percent -- or 1,000 points -- the S&P 500
fell 3.7 percent, and the Nasdaq plunged 3.7 percent.
The possibility of the virus spreading across the world is certainly unnerving. And while
the World Health Organization has so far avoided declaring the disease an official pandemic,
the organization did say it has "pandemic potential." But we don't even need to posit a
pandemic to see how the virus could tank economies around the world.
An example: Reliable trade data out of China is hard to come by, but a Boston company named
CargoMetrics has been trying to keep tabs. Their data covers not just shipping traffic but how
full the cargo vessels are. And their
index shows a 27 percent decline in Chinese imports from Feb. 7 to Feb. 17 -- a massive
deviation from the average trend in prior years. Dry cargo imports -- things like metals, ores,
grains, wood, coal, and steel products -- are down 40 percent.
China's imports "are totally in freefall," as CargoMetrics' CEO Scott Borgerson put it.
Basically, over the last month, the country has bought way less stuff from the rest of the
world than normal. And while China's exports to the rest of the world aren't suffering quite as
badly, the situation is still "ugly," and down from the historical trends.
At this point, it is well-known that major players like Nike, Hyundai, Apple, and General
Motors are having to curtail some operations, because they rely on Chinese manufacturers for
goods and parts.
But smaller businesses are getting hit , too. Everyone from shoe and blue jean
manufacturers, to electric bicycle makers and outdoor fireplace suppliers and 3D printed
toymakers for children are feeling the pinch, as imports from China they depended on suddenly
dry up -- in some cases, forcing them to switch to other Asian suppliers that are now shutting
down as well , in fear of the spreading disease. In a particularly unpleasant irony,
there are roughly 150 prescription drugs -- "antibiotics, generics, and some branded drugs
without alternatives,"
according to Axios -- that may well experience shortages because of how dependent we
are on Chinese manufacturers to produce them. Even the
fashion industry is not immune. And
it's the same story in other countries that rely on China for their supply chains, from
Australia to Japan.
"The second-largest economy in the world is completely shut down. People aren't totally
pricing that in," Larry Benedict, CEO of The Opportunistic Trader, toldCNBC .
According to the
New York Times , an analysis from JPMorgan concluded that "the immediate impact of a
large China demand and supply shock will be substantial." China's own President Xi Jinping
called the coronavirus a "crisis," as the country reneged on its earlier plans to ease
travel restrictions out of the city of Wuhan, an epicenter of the outbreak.
The basic problem is that the way to contain a disease is to prevent people from traveling
and from interacting in large groups. Which is not limited to, but certainly includes, keeping
them from working -- many factory employees in China, for example, remain stuck at home and
unable to commute to work. "Because the remedies are extreme, even small risks of infection and
of death can have a drastic effect on economic activity," as economist Olivier Blanchard
put
it .
And there's no way "stimulate" a country out of this situation: China has announced various efforts
to prop up its economy, from a hose of new loans to keep companies afloat to a raft of new tax
breaks. But no amount of money can compensate a business model when workers literally aren't
allowed to go to work.
The good news is that, in an already-depressed world economy, economic stimulus can increase
demand throughout the world in the places that haven't been physically hit by the virus yet,
and that could at least provide a cushion as supply chains transition.
Beyond that, the global economy's best hope is that the virus can be contained relatively
soon. The growth of new cases of COVID-19 in China actually peaked earlier this month,
according to
World Health Organization data. And in China itself, six provinces that were more or less
shutdown
have relaxed their emergency ratings , and are allowing companies to bring their workers
back in. (The problem is that it's hard to know precisely what to make of this given given how
untrustworthy
the Chinese government has proven itself to be.) Experts also predict world
economic growth will slow to a measly 1 percent this quarter, but recover soon after.
Of course, all that depends on virus peaking already or soon. Given the outbreaks in Italy
and elsewhere, that doesn't sound like a safe bet.
There's no way to predict the future in a situation like this. But if the outbreak grows
around the world while continuing to drive the Chinese economy into the ground, it's not hard
to see how the world's already-limping economic growth could go negative. In which case, we've
got a coronavirus recession on our hands.
It's not as if the global economy was doing particularly well before the Wuhan coronavirus'
outbreak. In August, a survey of economists by the National Association for Business Economics
concluded that 72% of analysts expect a US recession to hit by the end of 2021. This percentage
included 38% of economists who believe a recession will strike by the end of this year and 34%
who think it will come next year.
Taking a global view,
a UN report published in September similarly warned of a worldwide recession this year. In
its case, the report's authors pointed to such risk factors as trade wars, currency fluctuations,
long-term interest movements, and also the possibility of a no-deal Brexit.
It was clear earlier this month that the coronavirus outbreak could severely damage
the global economy.
On Feb. 12, I wrote that American and Chinese demand had been sustaining the world economy
for the last few years, and if China were shut down due to the virus, the ripple effect through
global supply chains could drag down the rest of world with it. And sure enough, this week
began with news of how the disease is throttling trade flows in and out of China.
Technically called COVID-19 ("coronavirus" actually being the name for a whole family of
viruses), the disease
has now infected at least 77,150 people in China, with 2,592 deaths. On Monday, stock
markets plunged on news that new and rapidly spreading outbreaks are now popping up
in South Korea,
Iran, and Italy . The Dow Jones dropped 3.5 percent -- or 1,000 points -- the S&P 500
fell 3.7 percent, and the Nasdaq plunged 3.7 percent.
The possibility of the virus spreading across the world is certainly unnerving. And while
the World Health Organization has so far avoided declaring the disease an official pandemic,
the organization did say it has "pandemic potential." But we don't even need to posit a
pandemic to see how the virus could tank economies around the world.
An example: Reliable trade data out of China is hard to come by, but a Boston company named
CargoMetrics has been trying to keep tabs. Their data covers not just shipping traffic but how
full the cargo vessels are. And their
index shows a 27 percent decline in Chinese imports from Feb. 7 to Feb. 17 -- a massive
deviation from the average trend in prior years. Dry cargo imports -- things like metals, ores,
grains, wood, coal, and steel products -- are down 40 percent.
China's imports "are totally in freefall," as CargoMetrics' CEO Scott Borgerson put it.
Basically, over the last month, the country has bought way less stuff from the rest of the
world than normal. And while China's exports to the rest of the world aren't suffering quite as
badly, the situation is still "ugly," and down from the historical trends.
At this point, it is well-known that major players like Nike, Hyundai, Apple, and General
Motors are having to curtail some operations, because they rely on Chinese manufacturers for
goods and parts.
But smaller businesses are getting hit , too. Everyone from shoe and blue jean
manufacturers, to electric bicycle makers and outdoor fireplace suppliers and 3D printed
toymakers for children are feeling the pinch, as imports from China they depended on suddenly
dry up -- in some cases, forcing them to switch to other Asian suppliers that are now shutting
down as well , in fear of the spreading disease. In a particularly unpleasant irony,
there are roughly 150 prescription drugs -- "antibiotics, generics, and some branded drugs
without alternatives,"
according to Axios -- that may well experience shortages because of how dependent we
are on Chinese manufacturers to produce them. Even the
fashion industry is not immune. And
it's the same story in other countries that rely on China for their supply chains, from
Australia to Japan.
"The second-largest economy in the world is completely shut down. People aren't totally
pricing that in," Larry Benedict, CEO of The Opportunistic Trader, toldCNBC .
According to the
New York Times , an analysis from JPMorgan concluded that "the immediate impact of a
large China demand and supply shock will be substantial." China's own President Xi Jinping
called the coronavirus a "crisis," as the country reneged on its earlier plans to ease
travel restrictions out of the city of Wuhan, an epicenter of the outbreak.
The basic problem is that the way to contain a disease is to prevent people from traveling
and from interacting in large groups. Which is not limited to, but certainly includes, keeping
them from working -- many factory employees in China, for example, remain stuck at home and
unable to commute to work. "Because the remedies are extreme, even small risks of infection and
of death can have a drastic effect on economic activity," as economist Olivier Blanchard
put
it .
And there's no way "stimulate" a country out of this situation: China has announced various efforts
to prop up its economy, from a hose of new loans to keep companies afloat to a raft of new tax
breaks. But no amount of money can compensate a business model when workers literally aren't
allowed to go to work.
The good news is that, in an already-depressed world economy, economic stimulus can increase
demand throughout the world in the places that haven't been physically hit by the virus yet,
and that could at least provide a cushion as supply chains transition.
Beyond that, the global economy's best hope is that the virus can be contained relatively
soon. The growth of new cases of COVID-19 in China actually peaked earlier this month,
according to
World Health Organization data. And in China itself, six provinces that were more or less
shutdown
have relaxed their emergency ratings , and are allowing companies to bring their workers
back in. (The problem is that it's hard to know precisely what to make of this given given how
untrustworthy
the Chinese government has proven itself to be.) Experts also predict world
economic growth will slow to a measly 1 percent this quarter, but recover soon after.
Of course, all that depends on virus peaking already or soon. Given the outbreaks in Italy
and elsewhere, that doesn't sound like a safe bet.
There's no way to predict the future in a situation like this. But if the outbreak grows
around the world while continuing to drive the Chinese economy into the ground, it's not hard
to see how the world's already-limping economic growth could go negative. In which case, we've
got a coronavirus recession on our hands.
IIRC correctly, the majority of the worst drops in Dow History have now occurred since
January 2017.
While some of the largest budget deficits -- which are far higher than officially reported
-- have occured since January 2017. Unofficially, those budget deficits exceed any under
Obama.
While Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, aid in approving those
budgets.
Much like Tip O'Neill aided Reagan in producing the first massive deficits.
The direct, actual disruption caused by by a coronavirus pandemic?
Or
Disruption caused by the panicky over-reaction to the potential of of a pandemic?
This article correctly describes how the neoliberal globalists and bankers are engaging in a
massive ripoff of the "99%" (although I think the ratio is more like 80-20% rather than
99-1%). But I don't think Bernie has the solution.
Frankly, the Democratic Party had the solution -- the New Deal, which actually
did create economic security for the white working class.
But they threw it out the window, and sided with the neoliberal oligarchy to finance their
hedonistic post-1960s lifestyle of porn, drugs, miscegenation, integration, and recreational
sex.
They've completely destroyed the culture. I don't think there is any solution at this
point.
It's interesting: Hudson calls Democrat's "the servants' entrance to the Republican Party"
and refers to the republican party's agenda in favor of the one percent.
Meanwhile, also on unz.com this very day,
Boyd Cathey has a column "The Russians are Coming" wherein he calls Republicans "a sordid and
disreputable second cousin of the advancing leftist juggernaut."
Perhaps they are both correct, and each of their own party's ruling apparatus is no better
than the "other" party's ruling apparatus at all.
The motto of both Democrats and Republican Neocons and Republican Country Clubbers: Don't
Think; Don't Ask; Pay Taxes; Vote for Us; Never Doubt 'Our' Filthy Rich; Blame 'Them' for
Everything 'We' Call Bad.
American Democracy, WASP created democracy, is a whore's game. It is con artistry.
@Anon 123 No, there
still is enough money even now to take care of the vast unemployed and underemployed class of
people, WITHOUT further taxing those of us still working full-time and increasingly
struggling.
1. Place natural resources -- oil, gas, and minerals -- under public ownership. Distribute
the proceeds from their extraction and sale as an equal dividend to every US Citizen. (As
part of the grand bargain, make it MUCH harder to gain US Citizenship, e.g. no birthright
citizenship and no chain migration aka "family reunification.") This is a more thorough, more
equitable national version of Alaska's resource-funded permanent fund.
How much do executives and shareholders of energy corporations profit each year off of our
God-given natural resources? That becomes revenue available for all US Citizens as a
universal basic income. (To minimize price/rent inflation, we can start the UBI very low and
phase it in gradually over a period of, say, 8 years.)
2. Stop the us government's constant aggressive wars and occupations far from our borders,
and close the majority of our bases abroad. Bring the troops home from Europe, Japan, and
South Korea -- they can guard our southern border instead, and the new bases will provide a
sustained boost to the hundreds of towns around the new bases here at home.
What if we reduced direct war, occupation, and foreign-base spending by $400 billion per
year. Seems like a conservative figure. Here is a website that still has 2018 fed gov
spending stats -- and seems to undercount military spending -- but a place to start:
Of course, since we are borrowing a large chunk of the fed gov's current spending, we
should not simply re-spend all of the military savings. Allocate part to other spending, but
simply don't spend the rest (thereby borrowing less each year).
3. The current federal "Alternative Minimum (Income) Tax" kicks in at far too low an
income level. Conversely, the AMT rate is far too low for extremely high incomes. What a
coincidence. Apply the AMT only to household annual income above $2 million, amply adjusted
for inflation, but tax the starch out of the oligarchs and billionaires. Yes, they can be
forcibly prevented from moving their assets and themselves out of the country. Bloomberg,
Zuckerberg, Buffet, Trump, the Sacklers, et al., can be confined and their property
confiscated as needed to pay the AMT on their income and a wealth tax.
Even now, the money is there to directly help the American people with no increase in
taxes on 99.5% of us, and with less fed gov borrowing than now.
Bernie is threatening to expose the delusions of the deep state in regards to
multiculturalism.
Prior to Bernie, the deep state's not so deep thinkers believed that the phony socialism
that they invented works on 2 levels. It portrays US as a liberal country and on the second
level it scares those who have no clue about socialism even more away from wanting to have
anything to do with socialism.
The party slogan of the deep state – fake socialism is better than the real one
– was never true, and with Bernie threatening to bring some of the real features of
socialism to US, it will bring into turmoil the "brilliantly" constructed deception by the
deep state.
If US are going to get some real socialist policies, the question will emerge – do
they still need the fake socialism that's destroying them and the rest of the western
world.
"... By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is "and forgive them their debts": Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year ..."
"... Until Nevada, all the presidential candidates except for Bernie Sanders were playing for a brokered convention. The party's candidates seemed likely to be chosen by the Donor Class, the One Percent and its proxies, not the voting class (the 99 Percent). If, as Mayor Bloomberg has assumed, the DNC will sell the presidency to the highest bidder, this poses the great question: Can the myth that the Democrats represent the working/middle class survive? Or, will the Donor Class trump the voting class? ..."
"... This could be thought of as "election interference" – not from Russia but from the DNC on behalf of its Donor Class. That scenario would make the Democrats' slogan for 2020 "No Hope or Change." That is, no from today's economic trends that are sweeping wealth up to the One Percent. ..."
"... But in the wake of Sanders' landslide victory in Nevada, a brokered convention would mean the end of the Democrat Party pretense to represent the 99 Percent. The American voting system would be seen to be as oligarchic as that of Rome on the eve of the infighting that ended with Augustus becoming Emperor in 27 BC. ..."
"... Today's pro-One Percent media – CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times ..."
"... History of Rome ..."
"... History of Rome ..."
"... Some on Resistance Twitter claim that if Sanders is the nominee, Trump will win a 48 sweep. Possible, but very unlikely. But if it did happen, the MSM would once again dismiss his program as being completely unacceptable to the voting class, and Sanders would trudge back to Vermont never to be heard from again. ..."
"... So if his program requires a decade long follow through, what are the least bad outcomes? If the D's deprive him of the nomination at the convention, even though he has far and away more pledged delegates, the MSM cannot dismiss his program as it would in the two previous scenarios, and his program would live to fight another day. ..."
"... Trump may or may not win. But if he does, the best he can hope for is a skin-of-his-teeth victory. Seriously, he lost the popular vote by a ton to Hillary freaking Clinton. ..."
"... And stuff is beginning to crumble around him on the Right. The Dow drops. Oops Richie Rich gets uneasy. ..."
"... I was more than a little honked when Sanders appeared to roll over and support HRC in 2016 in spite of the obvious fraud perpetrated on him and his supporters, not to mention the subsequent treatment they received at the hands of the DNC and Tom Perez. ..."
"... I find myself wondering if it wouldn't be a good idea for Sanders and his supporters to make it absolutely clear their attempts to work within 'the system' are finished if they are robbed again; maybe even starting work immediately on establishing a party not controlled by Wall Street lickspittle or knuckle-dragging no-nothings? ..."
To hear the candidates debate, you would think that their fight was over who could best beat
Trump. But when Trump's billionaire twin Mike Bloomberg throws a quarter-billion dollars into
an ad campaign to bypass the candidates actually running for votes in Iowa, New Hampshire and
Nevada, it's obvious that what really is at issue is the future of the Democrat Party.
Bloomberg is banking on a brokered convention held by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
in which money votes. (If "corporations are people," so is money in today's political
world.)
Until Nevada, all the presidential candidates except for Bernie Sanders were playing for
a brokered convention. The party's candidates seemed likely to be chosen by the Donor Class,
the One Percent and its proxies, not the voting class (the 99 Percent). If, as Mayor Bloomberg
has assumed, the DNC will sell the presidency to the highest bidder, this poses the great
question: Can the myth that the Democrats represent the working/middle class survive? Or, will
the Donor Class trump the voting class?
This could be thought of as "election interference" – not from Russia but from the
DNC on behalf of its Donor Class. That scenario would make the Democrats' slogan for 2020 "No
Hope or Change." That is, no from today's economic trends that are sweeping wealth up to the
One Percent.
All this sounds like Rome at the end of the Republic in the 1st century BC.
The way Rome's constitution was set up, candidates for the position of consul had to pay their
way through a series of offices. The process started by going deeply into debt to get elected
to the position of aedile, in charge of staging public games and entertainments. Rome's
neoliberal fiscal policy did not tax or spend, and there was little public administrative
bureaucracy, so all such spending had to be made out of the pockets of the oligarchy. That was
a way of keeping decisions about how to spend out of the hands of democratic politics. Julius
Caesar and others borrowed from the richest Bloomberg of their day, Crassus, to pay for staging
games that would demonstrate their public spirit to voters (and also demonstrate their
financial liability to their backers among Rome's One Percent). Keeping election financing
private enabled the leading oligarchs to select who would be able to run as viable candidates.
That was Rome's version of Citizens United.
But in the wake of Sanders' landslide victory in Nevada, a brokered convention
would mean the end of the Democrat Party pretense to represent the 99 Percent. The American
voting system would be seen to be as oligarchic as that of Rome on the eve of the infighting
that ended with Augustus becoming Emperor in 27 BC.
Today's pro-One Percent media – CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times
have been busy spreading their venom against Sanders. On Sunday, February 23, CNN ran a slot,
"Bloomberg needs to take down Sanders, immediately."[1]Given Sanders' heavy national lead, CNN
warned, the race suddenly is almost beyond the vote-fixers' ability to fiddle with the election
returns. That means that challengers to Sanders should focus their attack on him; they will
have a chance to deal with Bloomberg later (by which CNN means, when it is too late to stop
him).
The party's Clinton-Obama recipients of Donor Class largesse pretend to believe that Sanders
is not electable against Donald Trump. This tactic seeks to attack him at his strongest point.
Recent polls show that he is the only candidate who actually would defeat Trump – as they
showed that he would have done in 2016.
The DNC knew that, but preferred to lose to Trump than to win with Bernie. Will history
repeat itself? Or to put it another way, will this year's July convention become a replay of
Chicago in 1968?
A quandary, not a problem . Last year I was asked to write a scenario for what might happen
with a renewed DNC theft of the election's nomination process. To be technical, I realize, it's
not called theft when it's legal. In the aftermath of suits over the 2016 power grab, the
courts ruled that the Democrat Party is indeed controlled by the DNC members, not by the
voters. When it comes to party machinations and decision-making, voters are subsidiary to the
superdelegates in their proverbial smoke-filled room (now replaced by dollar-filled foundation
contracts).
I could not come up with a solution that does not involve dismantling and restructuring the
existing party system. We have passed beyond the point of having a solvable "problem" with the
Democratic National Committee (DNC). That is what a quandary is. A problem has a solution
– by definition. A quandary does not have a solution. There is no way out. The conflict
of interest between the Donor Class and the Voting Class has become too large to contain within
a single party. It must split.
A second-ballot super-delegate scenario would mean that we are once again in for a second
Trump term. That option was supported by five of the six presidential contenders on stage in
Nevada on Wednesday, February 20. When Chuck Todd asked whether Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth
Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar would support the candidate who received
the most votes in the primaries (now obviously Bernie Sanders), or throw the nomination to the
super-delegates held over from the Obama-Clinton neoliberals (75 of whom already are said to
have pledged their support to Bloomberg), each advocated "letting the process play out." That
was a euphemism for leaving the choice to the Tony-Blair style leadership that have made the
Democrats the servants' entrance to the Republican Party. Like the British Labour Party behind
Blair and Gordon Brown, its role is to block any left-wing alternative to the Republican
program on behalf of the One Percent.
This problem would not exist if the United States had a European-style parliamentary system
that would enable a third party to obtain space on the ballots in all 50 states. If this were
Europe, the new party of Bernie Sanders, AOC et al. would exceed 50 percent of the
votes, leaving the Wall Street democrats with about the same 8 percent share that similar
neoliberal democratic parties have in Europe ( e.g ., Germany's hapless neoliberalized
Social Democrats), that is, Klobocop territory as voters moved to the left. The "voting
Democrats," the 99 Percent, would win a majority leaving the Old Neoliberal Democrats in the
dust.
The DNC's role is to prevent any such challenge. The United States has an effective
political duopoly, as both parties have created such burdensome third-party access to the
ballot box in state after state that Bernie Sanders decided long ago that he had little
alternative but to run as a Democrat.
The problem is that the Democrat Party does not seem to be reformable. That means that
voters still may simply abandon it – but that will simply re-elect the Democrats' de
facto 2020 candidate, Donald Trump. The only hope would be to shrink the party into a shell,
enabling the old guard to go way so that the party could be rebuilt from the ground up.
But the two parties have created a legal duopoly reinforced with so many technical barriers
that a repeat of Ross Perot's third party (not to mention the old Socialist Party, or the Whigs
in 1854) would take more than one election cycle to put in place. For the time being, we may
expect another few months of dirty political tricks to rival those of 2016 as Obama appointee
Tom Perez is simply the most recent version of Florida fixer Debbie Schultz-Wasserman (who gave
a new meaning to the Wasserman Test).
So we are in for another four years of Donald Trump. But by 2024, how tightly will the U.S.
economy find itself tied in knots?
The Democrats' Vocabulary of Deception
How I would explain Bernie's program. Every economy is a mixed economy. But to hear Michael
Bloomberg and his fellow rivals to Bernie Sanders explain the coming presidential election, one
would think that an economy must be either capitalist or, as Bloomberg put it, Communist. There
is no middle ground, no recognition that capitalist economies have a government sector, which
typically is called the "socialist" sector – Social Security, Medicare, public schooling,
roads, anti-monopoly regulation, and public infrastructure as an alternative to privatized
monopolies extracting economic rent.
What Mr. Bloomberg means by insisting that it's either capitalism or communism is an absence
of government social spending and regulation. In practice this means oligarchic financial
control, because every economy is planned by some sector. The key is, who will do the planning?
If government refrains from taking the lead in shaping markets, then Wall Street takes over
– or the City in London, Frankfurt in Germany, and the Bourse in France.
Most of all, the aim of the One Percent is to distract attention from the fact that the
economy is polarizing – and is doing so at an accelerating rate. National income
statistics are rigged to show that "the economy" is expanding. The pretense is that everyone is
getting richer and living better, not more strapped. But the reality is that all the growth in
GDP has accrued to the wealthiest 5 Percent since the Obama Recession began in 2008. Obama
bailed out the banks instead of the 10 million victimized junk-mortgage holders. The 95
Percent's share of GDP has shrunk.
The GDP statistics do not show is that "capital gains" – the market price of stocks,
bonds and real estate owned mainly by the One to Five Percent – has soared, thanks to
Obama's $4.6 trillion Quantitative Easing pumped into the financial markets instead of into the
"real" economy in which wage-earners produce goods and services.
How does one "stay the course" in an economy that is polarizing? Staying the course means
continuing the existing trends that are concentrating more and more wealth in the hands of the
One Percent, that is, the Donor Class – while loading down the 99 Percent with more debt,
paid to the One Percent (euphemized as the economy's "savers"). All "saving" is at the top of
the pyramid. The 99 Percent can't afford to save much after paying their monthly "nut" to the
One Percent.
If this economic polarization is impoverishing most of the population while sucking wealth
and income and political power up to the One Percent, then to be a centrist is to be the
candidate of oligarchy. It means not challenging the economy's structure.
Language is being crafted to confuse voters into imagining that their interest is the same
as that of the Donor Class of rentiers , creditors and financialized corporate
businesses and rent-extracting monopolies. The aim is to divert attention from voters' their
own economic interest as wage-earners, debtors and consumers. It is to confuse voters not to
recognize that without structural reform, today's "business as usual" leaves the One Percent in
control.
So to call oneself a "centrist" is simply a euphemism for acting as a lobbyist for siphoning
up income and wealth to the One Percent. In an economy that is polarizing, the choice is either
to favor them instead of the 99 Percent.
That certainly is not the same thing as stability. Centrism sustains the polarizing dynamic
of financialization, private equity, and the Biden-sponsored bankruptcy "reform" written by his
backers of the credit-card companies and other financial entities incorporated in his state of
Delaware. He was the senator for the that state's Credit Card industry, much as former
Democratic VP candidate Joe Lieberman was the senator from Connecticut's Insurance
Industry.
A related centrist demand is that of Buttigieg's and Biden's aim to balance the federal
budget. This turns out to be a euphemism for cutting back Social Security, Medicare and relate
social spending ("socialism") to pay for America's increasing militarization, subsidies and tax
cuts for the One Percent. Sanders rightly calls this "socialism for the rich." The usual word
for this is oligarchy . That seems to be a missing word in today's mainstream
vocabulary.
The alternative to democracy is oligarchy. As Aristotle noted already in the 4 th
Confusion over the word "socialism" may be cleared up by recognizing that every economy
is mixed, and every economy is planned – by someone. If not the government in the public
interest, then by Wall Street and other financial centers in their interest. They
fought against an expanding government sector in every economy today, calling it socialism
– without acknowledging that the alternative, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, is
barbarism.
I think that Sanders is using the red-letter word "socialism" and calling himself a
"democratic socialist" to throw down the ideological gauntlet and plug himself into the long
and powerful tradition of socialist politics. Paul Krugman would like him to call himself a
social democrat. But the European parties of this name have discredited this label as being
centrist and neoliberal. Sanders wants to emphasize that a quantum leap, a phase change is in
order.
If he can be criticized for waving a needlessly red flag, it is his repeated statement
that his program is designed for the "working class." What he means are wage-earners and this
includes the middle class. Even those who make over $100,000 a year are still wage earners, and
typically are being squeezed by a predatory financial sector, a predatory medical insurance
sector, drug companies and other monopolies.
The danger in this terminology is that most workers like to think of themselves as
middle class, because that is what they would like to rise into. That is especially he case for
workers who own their own home (even if mortgage represents most of the value, so that most of
the home's rental value is paid to banks, not to themselves as part of the "landlord class"),
and have an education (even if most of their added income is paid out as student debt service),
and their own car to get to work (involving automobile debt).
The fact is that even $100,000 executives have difficulty living within the limits of
their paycheck, after paying their monthly nut of home mortgage or rent, medical care, student
loan debt, credit-card debt and automobile debt, not to mention 15% FICA paycheck withholding
and state and local tax withholding.
Of course, Sanders' terminology is much more readily accepted by wage-earners as the
voters whom Hillary called "Deplorables" and Obama called "the mob with pitchforks," from whom
he was protecting his Wall Street donors whom he invited to the White House in 2009. But I
think there is a much more appropriate term: the 99 Percent, made popular by Occupy Wall
Street. That is Bernie's natural constituency. It serves to throw down the gauntlet between
democracy and oligarchy, and between socialism and barbarism, by juxtaposing the 99 Percent to
the One Percent.
The Democratic presidential debate on February 25 will set the stage for Super
Tuesday's "beauty contest" to gauge what voters want. The degree of Sanders' win will help
determine whether the byzantine Democrat party apparatus that actually will be able to decide
on the Party's candidate. The expected strong Sanders win is will make the choice stark: either
to accept who the voters choose – namely, Bernie Sanders – or to pick a candidate
whom voters already have rejected, and is certain to lose to Donald Trump in
November.
If that occurs, the Democrat Party will evaporate as its old Clinton-Obama guard is no
longer able to protect its donor class on Wall Street and corporate America. Too many Sanders
voters would stay home or vote for the Greens. That would enable the Republicans to maintain
control of the Senate and perhaps even grab back the House of Representatives.
But it would be dangerous to assume that the DNC will be reasonable. Once again, Roman
history provides a "business as usual" scenario. The liberal German politician Theodor Mommsen
published his History of Rome in 1854-56, warning against letting an aristocracy block
reform by controlling the upper house of government (Rome's Senate, or Britain House of Lords).
The leading families who overthrew the last king in 509 BC created a Senate chronically prone
to being stifled by its leaders' "narrowness of mind and short-sightedness that are the proper
and inalienable privileges of all genuine patricianism."[2]
These qualities also are the distinguishing features of the DNC. Sanders had better win
big!
I wonder how much of the rot at the top of the Dem party is simple dementia. By
the age of 70, half of people have some level of dementia. Consider Joe Biden – is
anyone in the public sphere going to state the obvious – that he has dementia and as
such is unfit for office?
First, my priors. I voted for Sanders in 2016, will vote for him in 2020, and
expect him to be elected president. Further I believe that where we find ourselves today is
the result of at least 40 years of intentional bi-partisan policies. Both parties are
responsible.
If Sanders, upon being elected, were able to snap his fingers and call into
existence his entire program, it would immediately face a bi-partisan opposition that would
be funded by billions of dollars, which would be willing to take as long as necessary, even
decades, to roll it back.
Just electing Sanders is only the first step. There must be a committed,
determined follow through that must be willing to last decades as well for his program to
stick. And there will be defeats along the way.
Several observations. If Hillary had beaten Trump, Sanders would have trudged
back to Vermont and would never have been heard from again. The MSM would have dismissed his
program as being completely unacceptable to the voting class. But she didn't, so here we are,
which is fantastic.
Some on Resistance Twitter claim that if Sanders is the nominee, Trump will
win a 48 sweep. Possible, but very unlikely. But if it did happen, the MSM would once again
dismiss his program as being completely unacceptable to the voting class, and Sanders would
trudge back to Vermont never to be heard from again.
So if his program requires a decade long follow through, what are the least
bad outcomes? If the D's deprive him of the nomination at the convention, even though he has
far and away more pledged delegates, the MSM cannot dismiss his program as it would in the
two previous scenarios, and his program would live to fight another
day.
If he loses to Trump, but closely, which can mean a lot of different things,
his program would live to fight another day. Moreover, if the D's are seen to actively
collude with Trump, this less bad outcome would be even better.
I am an old geezer and don't expect to live long enough to see how all of this
plays out. But I am very optimistic about his program's long term prospects. There is only
one bad outcome, a Trump 48 state sweep, which I consider very unlikely. But most
importantly, the best outcome, his election, and the two least bad outcomes, the D's stealing
the nomination from him or his losing a close general election, all still will require a
decades long commitment to make his program permanent.
Where do people get this? Take a deep breath. Trump may or may not win. But if
he does, the best he can hope for is a skin-of-his-teeth victory. Seriously, he lost the
popular vote by a ton to Hillary freaking Clinton.
And stuff is beginning to crumble around him on the Right. The Dow drops. Oops
Richie Rich gets uneasy.
Hammered by a 5 star general. The Deplorables kids were raised to look up to
generals, not New Yawk dandys. How does this affect them? And it's still
February.
Just an FYI: The five-volume Mommsen "History of Rome" referenced in the text
is available in English on Project Gutenberg, free and legal to download. Probably everyone
here knows this, but just in case
How about Bernie call himself "Roosevelt Democrat" instead of "Democratic
Socialist". It would give all those in the senior demographic a better understanding of what
Sander's policies mean to them as opposed to the scary prospect of the "Socialist"
label.
The Democrats should have been slowly disarming the word "socialist" for at
least the last decade. In principle, it's not difficult – as Michael Hudson says
– "Every economy is a mixed economy" – and in a very real sense everyone's a
socialist (even if only unconsciously). I'm not saying that bit of rhetorical jujitsu would
magically turn conservative voters progressive but you'll never get to the point where you
can defend socialist programs on the merits if you always dodge that fight. It's just a shame
that Bernie Sanders has to do it all in a single election cycle and I don't think choosing a
different label now would help him much.
He could even compare himself to the earlier Roosevelt: Teddy
Roosevelt.
By 1900 the old bourbon Dem party was deeply split between its old, big
business and banking wing – the bourbons – and the rising progressive/populist
wing. It was GOP pres Roosevelt who first pushed through progressive programs like breaking
up railroad and commodity monopolies, investigating and regulating meat packing and
fraudulent patent medicines, etc. Imagine that.
I just finished Stoller's book Goliath and according to him, Teddy
wasn't quite as progressive as we are often led to believe. He wasn't so much opposed to
those with enormous wealth – he just wanted them to answer to him. He did do the things
you mentioned, but after sending the message to the oligarchs, he then became friendly with
them once he felt he'd brought them to heel. He developed quite the soft spot for JP Morgan,
according to Stoller.
TR wanted to be the Boss, the center of attention with everyone looking up to
him. As one of his relatives said, he wanted to be the baby at every christening and the
corpse at every funeral.
I have a sense that changing his party affiliation label at any point in time
since Sanders began running for president in 2016 would be a godsend to his enemies in both
hands of the Duopoly. They'd tar him loudly as a hypocrite without an ounce of integrity,
using personal politics to distract from the issues.
Meanwhile, we can expect to see the Socialist (and Communist, and
Russia-Russia-Russia) nonsense reiterated as long as Sanders has strong visibility. He's
extremely dangerous to both parties and their owners. I don't' believe the DNC will let him
take the convention, but if he does, I'll bet the Dems give him minimal support and hope he
fails–better the devil you know, etc.
It's time to put your money in reality futures by putting all that you can into
supporting Bernie, AOC, etc. and all your local candidates that support at least democratic
socialism and ourrevolution the DSA Justice Dems or other groups that have people but need
money. I was having a conversation with a friend who was complaining that he was getting too
many emails from Bernie asking for money after he had given the campaign a "modest amount".
My suggestion was in honor of his children and grandchildren he should instead GIVE 'TIL IT
FEELS GOOD. My spouse and I, I told him, gave the max to Bernie and now we don't give upset
when he asks for more. There will likely never be a moment like this in history and there may
not be much of a history if things go the wrong way now. He agreed.
Exactly right. I gave Bernie the max in 2019 and will keep giving throughout
2020. This campaign is about not just me, but all of us. It's now. We must fight for this
change as has always been the historical precedent.
I was more than a little honked when Sanders appeared to roll over and
support HRC in 2016 in spite of the obvious fraud perpetrated on him and his supporters, not
to mention the subsequent treatment they received at the hands of the DNC and Tom
Perez.
I am coming to understand that might have been necessary within the context of
one last desperate attempt to work with the Democratic party. But now I find myself
wondering if it wouldn't be a good idea for Sanders and his supporters to make it absolutely
clear their attempts to work within 'the system' are finished if they are robbed again; maybe
even starting work immediately on establishing a party not controlled by Wall Street
lickspittle or knuckle-dragging no-nothings?
Little as it has been the answer has a lot to do with my willingness to pour
more money into repetitively self-defeating behavior.
I am a somewhat old geezer, too, who caucused for Bernie in 2016 and 2020. This
article is very good and helps me understand why I feel the way I do. I was disappointed in
Obama, who didn't follow through on the things I cared about, and I was devastated when
Clinton was crowned the Democratic nominee well before the Convention, all the while holding
onto a smidgen of hope that somehow Bernie would pull through as the
nominee.
I was ecstatic when Bernie announced his candidacy for 2020. He is our only
hope, and now we have a second chance. But now I am spending half my time screaming at people
on tv and online who can't even hear me, and even if they could, they don't give a s–t
what I think. It's Clinton 2.0–same thing all over again, four years later. Just who do
these people (DNC, MSM, and others with a voice) think they are, to decide for the Democratic
voters which candidate will be the nominee, who won't be the nominee, without regard to what
the voters want? They are a bunch of pompous as–s who have some other motive that I am
not savvy enough to understand. Is it about money in their pockets or what?
It should be as simple as this–Bernie is leading in the polls, if they
are to be believed, and good people of all demographics want him to be our next President. He
is a serious contender for the nomination. Show the man some much-earned respect and put
people on MSM and publish articles by writers who help us understand what the anti-Bernie
panic is about and why we shouldn't panic. Help us to explain his plans if he hasn't
explained it thoroughly enough instead of calling him crazy. But to dismiss him as if he has
the plague is not furthering the truth, and it is a serious injustice to the voting public.
Naked Capitalism can't do it alone.
There is a lot of good analysis out there, mainly on Youtube. I particularly
like The Hill's Rising. A young progressive Democrat and a young progressive Republican (who
even knew there was such a thing!) 'splain a lot of the antipathy. Another good source is
Nomiki Konst, who is working on reforming the Dem party from within. Here she talks to RJ
Eskow about how the DNC is structured and how she hopes to provide tools for rank-and-file
Dems to wrest the levers of power from the establishment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ7wm6DCPV4
Private sector cannot operate without same. Harrold
The problem is that the population, including FDR in his time, have been duped
into believing that the private sector REQUIRES government privileges for private depository
institutions, aka "the banks."
So currently we have no truly private sector to speak of but businesses and
industry using the public's credit but for private gain.
Last night's Democracy Now was interesting. Amy seems to be less of a commie
hater than she recently was with her participation in the Russia-Russia-Russia smears against
Trump. She held court last night with Paul Krugman and Richard Wolff discussing just exactly
what "socialism" means. It was a great performance.
Krug seemed a little shellshocked about the whole discussion and he said we
shouldn't even use the term "socialism" at all because all the things Bernie wants are just
as capitalist – that capitalism encompasses socialism. But he stuttered when he
discussed "single-payer" which he claimed he supported – his single payer is like Pete
Buttigieg's single-payer-eventually. He tried to change the subject and Amy brought him
straight back.
Then Wolff, who was in excellent form, informed the table that "socialism" is a
moveable feast because it can be and has been many things for the advancement of societies,
etc. But the term always means the advancement of society. Then Krug dropped a real bomb
– he actually said (this is almost a quote) that recently he had been informed by
Powell that debt isn't really all that important.
Really, Krug said that. And he tried to exetend that thought to the argument
that anybody can provide social benefits – it doesn't require a self-proclaimed
"socialist".
Richard Wolff confronted that slide with pointing out that it hasn't happened
yet – and he left Krug with no excuses. It was quite the showdown. Nice Richard Wolff
is so firmly in Bernie's camp.
Krug looked evasive – and I kept wishing they had invited Steve Keen to
participate.
"... The key promise of neoliberalism, which came to power in the USA in 1980 with the election of Reagan (aka "the Quiet Coup")
was that "the rising tide lifts all boats." -- the redistribution of the wealth up somehow will lift the standard of living of lower
strata of the population too. This was a false promise from the very beginning (like everything about neoliberalism, which is based
on lies and fake economics in any case). So anger accumulated and now became the key factor in elections. This anger is directed against
the neoliberal establishment. ..."
"... The anger toward immigrants is, in fact, a displaced and projected anger against the elimination of meaningful and well-paid
jobs and replacing them with McJobs, the process that was the key factor in lowering the standard of living of the bottom 80% of the
population. ..."
"... The other part of this anger is directed toward the USA financial oligarchy (personified by such passionately hated figures
as Lloyd "we are doing God's" Blankfein, private equity sharks, and figures like Wexner/Epstein) and "political establishment" the key
figures of which many people would like to see hanging from street lamp posts (remember "Lock her up" movement in 2016). ..."
"... That's why the neoliberal establishment was forced to use to dirty tricks like Russiagate to patch the cracks in the neoliberal
façade. ..."
"... In Marxist terms, the USA entered the period called the "revolutionary situation" when the ruling neoliberal elite couldn't
govern "as usual" and "the deplorable" do not want to live "as usual". The situation when according to Hegel, "quantity turns into quality,"
or as Marx said "ideas become a material force when they grip the mind of the masses." ..."
I am old enough to remember when many very serious people ascribed the rise of Donald Trump to economic anxiety. The hypthesis
never fit the facts (his supporters had higher incomes on average than Clinton's) but it has become absurd. The level of self reported
economic anxiety is extraordinarily low
Yet now the Democratic party has an insurgent candidate candidate in the lead. I hasten to stress that I am not saying Sanders
supporters have much in common with Trump supporters (young vs old, strong hispanic support vs they hate Trump etc etc etc). But
both appeal to anger and advocate a radical break with business as usual. Both reject party establishments. Also Warren if a little
bit less so.
Trump's 2016 angry supporters still support him *and* they are still angry. He remains unpopular in spite of an economy performing
very well (and perceived to be performing very well).
Whatever is going on in 2020, it sure isn't economic anxiety.
Yet there is clearly anger and desire for radical change.
I don't pretend to understand it, but I think it probably has a lot to do with relative economic performance and increased
inequality. I can't understand why the reaction of so many Americans to this would be to hate immigrants and vote for Trump,
but, then I don't watch Fox News.
Trump's 2016 angry supporters still support him *and* they are still angry.
Many Trump "angry supporters" in 2016 used to belong to "anybody but Hillary" class (and they included a noticeable percentage
of Bernie supporters, who felt betrayed by DNC) .
They are lost for Trump as he now in many aspects represents the "new Hillary" and the slogan "anybody but Trump" is growing
in popularity. Even among Republicans: Trump definitely already lost a large part of anti-war Republicans and independents. As
well as. most probably, a part of working class as he did very little for them outside of effects of military Keynesianism.
I suspect he also lost a part of military voters, those who supported Tulsi. They will never vote for Trump.
He also lost a part of "technocratic" voters resentful of the rule of financial oligarchy (anti-swampers), as his incompetence
is now an undisputable fact.
He also lost Ron Paul's libertarians, who voted for him in 2016.
How "Coronavirus recession", if any, might affect 2020 elections is difficult to say, but in any case this is an unfavorable
for Trump event.
EMichael , February 25, 2020 10:39 am
"I can't understand why the reaction of so many Americans to this would be to hate immigrants and vote for Trump, but, then
I don't watch Fox News."
Coming to you since 1965. It's just that immigrants are now added to blacks. Trump took 50 years of the Southern Strategy,
took the dogwhistles completely out of the closet and wore his racism right on his chest. Helped that he had over 50 years of
experience as a racist, it came naturally to him.
And he attracted a new rw base, those who were not satisfied with dog whistles and/or did not hear them.
likbez , February 25, 2020 12:19 pm
I don't pretend to understand it, but I think it probably has a lot to do with relative economic performance and increased
inequality.
It is actually very easy to understand: the middle class fared very poorly since 1991. See
https://www.cnbc.com/id/44962589 . Now "the chickens come home
to roost," so to speak.
The key promise of neoliberalism, which came to power in the USA in 1980 with the election of Reagan (aka "the Quiet Coup")
was that "the rising tide lifts all boats." -- the redistribution of the wealth up somehow will lift the standard of living of
lower strata of the population too. This was a false promise from the very beginning (like everything about neoliberalism, which
is based on lies and fake economics in any case). So anger accumulated and now became the key factor in elections. This anger
is directed against the neoliberal establishment.
The anger toward immigrants is, in fact, a displaced and projected anger against the elimination of meaningful and well-paid
jobs and replacing them with McJobs, the process that was the key factor in lowering the standard of living of the bottom 80%
of the population.
The other part of this anger is directed toward the USA financial oligarchy (personified by such passionately hated figures
as Lloyd "we are doing God's" Blankfein, private equity sharks, and figures like Wexner/Epstein) and "political establishment"
the key figures of which many people would like to see hanging from street lamp posts (remember "Lock her up" movement in 2016).
Resentment against spending huge amounts of money for wars for sustaining and enlarging the global USA-centered neoliberal
empire is another factor. In this sense, impoverishment and shrinking of the middle class in the USA is similar to the same impoverishment
during the last days of the British colonial empire.
That's why the neoliberal establishment was forced to use to dirty tricks like Russiagate to patch the cracks in the neoliberal
façade.
In Marxist terms, the USA entered the period called the "revolutionary situation" when the ruling neoliberal elite couldn't
govern "as usual" and "the deplorable" do not want to live "as usual". The situation when according to Hegel, "quantity turns
into quality," or as Marx said "ideas become a material force when they grip the mind of the masses."
In 2016 that resulted in the election of Trump.
Add to this the fact that the neoliberal establishment (represented by both parties) now is clearly anti-social (the fact
that a private equity shark Romney was a presidential candidate and then was elected as senator tells a lot about the level of
degradation) and is unwilling to solve burning problems with medical insurance, minimal wage and other "the New Deal" elements
of social infrastructure.
Democratic Party platform now is to the right of Eisenhower republicans.
That dooms the party candidates like CIA-democrat Major Pete, or "the senator from the credit card companies" Biden,
and create an opening for political figures like Sanders (which are passionately hated by DNC)
A little bit off-topic, or very much off-topic but related with Hudson's favourite
theme. This is about potential bankruptcies derived from quarantines almost certainly not
covered by insurance: wouldn't this be an excellent case for debt forgiving?
I dunno. My impression is too much of corporate malfeasance involves the use of
debt. Consolidation, stock buybacks, leveraged everything, hostile
take-everything.
This stacked system is currently confronting two crises it has no good solution to.
One is Covid19 and the other is insurrection. Obama forgave the one percent's debts once
already. No more of that. I'm hoping this is "the great leveling" event.
I can not find a link but a comment here yesterday said China has announced it will
pay all healthcare costs related to Covid for those without insurance. I honestly don't know
if that's true but it lead me to understand that China has a hybrid public/private system
health insurance system. Wikipedia says China provides "basic" healthcare for 95% of the
population which covers roughly 50% of treatment costs. Hmmm I wonder what the treatments
cost
Sadly, promises to cover the cost of treatment are ineffectual without enough
facilities, supplies and healthcare workers.
With regard to the question of "corporate debt", a better way than "forgiveness" IMO
would be "temporary nationalization" by means of some public entity bidding on operating
assets (with, hopefully, the entity still functioning) at a liquidation auction. The senior
creditors (first in line, I think are employees with unpaid back wages due) would get
something; the shareholders -- given the degree of leverage that is customary today -- often
would be wiped out (which they would be in any event under the conditions in
view).
The publicly owned and operated businesses would go private again through conversion
to worker-owned cooperatives. This would take time, which would permit the bugs to be worked
out. I can't imagine that the transition would be smooth.
This kind of conversion from shareholder-owned to worker-owned enterprise has been
proposed previously (don't have links) as something that could be done as ongoing policy
through money creation by the central government and new forms of "eminent domain"
legislation, or simply by purchase of shares in the open markets, New private enterprises
could be created by the former owners using the funds received and, at such time as these
became sufficiently powerful to be problematic, could likewise be converted to cooperatives.
It might be an engine of innovation. Significant regulation would probably be needed to curb
clearly unproductive uses of funds.
Perhaps it's another way that this crisis is creating opportunities that we don't
want to allow to be wasted.
It will be interesting to see what the government of China does, as it will be the
first to face this problem at large scale. Will they turn into a "workers' party"? Hard to
imagine, but the paths out of the current turmoil may contain possibilities that could not be
realistically contemplated just months ago.
How do you prevent this feed-me-seymour financialization-economy from imploding?
Keep feeding it. Biden and his cronies, including little George, knew it. And that has to be
the reason why they passed laws preventing the process of bankruptcy. Like they placed their
bets on winning the war for oil in the middle east at the same time. Why did they think these
bad decisions would keep our economy stable?
This is a dirty trick to avoid regulation of buiness, nothing more nothing less.
Notable quotes:
"... Stop obsessing with how personally green you live – and start collectively taking on corporate power ..."
"... The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it. ..."
"... Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective welfare. ..."
"... Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds . It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: "there is no such thing as society." ..."
Stop obsessing with how personally green you live – and start collectively taking on corporate power
Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear
on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.
The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light
colours, stop using the elevator.
Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances,
put a solar panel on my roof.
And a study released on Thursday
claimed
it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.
These pervasive exhortations to individual action -- in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental
groups, especially in the west -- seem as natural as the air we breathe. But we could hardly be worse-served.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown
of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an
astonishing 71% . You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result
of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is
not too late to reverse it.
The political
project of neoliberalism , brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has
been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise
of any democratic public will.
Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate
enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to
plan for our collective welfare.
Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations,
hollowing out democracies, have
obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel
subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means for workers to wield power together,
have been undercut whenever possible.
At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the
way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways
and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay
for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy -- so that solar panels can go on everyone's rooftop,
not just on those who can afford it.
Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable.
Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has
frayed our collective bonds . It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: "there is
no such thing as society."
Studies show that people who have grown up under this era have indeed become
more individualistic and consumerist
. Steeped in a culture telling us to think of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens, as self-reliant instead of interdependent,
is it any wonder we deal with a systemic issue by turning in droves to ineffectual, individual efforts? We are all Thatcher's children.
Even before the advent of neoliberalism, the capitalist economy had thrived on people believing that being afflicted by the structural
problems of an exploitative system – poverty, joblessness, poor health, lack of fulfillment – was in fact a personal deficiency.
Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and turbocharged it. It tells you that you should not merely feel guilt and
shame if you can't secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are too stressed or overworked for time with friends. You are now also
responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse.
Of course we need people to consume less and innovate low-carbon alternatives – build sustainable farms, invent battery storages,
spread zero-waste methods. But individual choices will most count when the economic system can provide viable, environmental options
for everyone -- not just an affluent or intrepid few.
If affordable mass transit isn't available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won't
opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy.
This is the con-job of neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than through power
and politics.
Eco-consumerism may expiate your guilt. But it's only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate
crisis. This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.
The good news is that the impulse of humans to come together is inextinguishable – and the collective imagination is already making
a political come-back. The climate justice movement is blocking pipelines, forcing the
divestment
of trillions of dollars, and winning support for 100% clean energy economies in cities
and states across the world. New ties are being drawn to Black Lives Matter, immigrant and Indigenous rights, and fights for better
wages. On the heels of such movements, political parties seem finally ready to defy neoliberal dogma.
None more so than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Manifesto spelled out a redistributive project to address climate change: by publicly
retooling the economy, and insisting that corporate oligarchs no longer run amok. The notion that the rich should pay their fair
share to fund this transformation was considered laughable by the political and media class. Millions disagreed. Society, long said
to be departed, is now back with a vengeance.
So grow some carrots and jump on a bike: it will make you happier and healthier. But it is time to stop obsessing with how personally
green we live – and start collectively taking on corporate power.
Yes, neo-McCarthyism is a sign of the collapse of neoliberal ideology and the crisis within
the neoliberal ruling elite, which is trying to patch the cracks int he neoliberal facade of the
US society and require the control over the population (which rejected neoliberalism at voting
booth in 2016) with Russophobia
There's always a bit of judgment and vengeance inherent to the factional shenanigans of
Australia's Liberal party, but its refreshed vocabulary warrants inclusion as the fifth sign.
Michael Sukkar, the member for Deakin, has been
recorded in a dazzling rant declaring war on a "socialist" incursion into a party whose
leader is a former merchant banker who pledged to rule for "freedom, the individual and the
market" the very day he was anointed.
The reds may not
be under the beds quite yet, but if Sukkar's convinced some commie pinkos are already
gatecrashing cocktail events with the blue-tie set, they're certainly on his mind.
"... Although corporations are legally a person (see history below), they are in fact an entity. The sole goal of that entity is
profit. There is no corporate conscience. ..."
"... Perhaps it would be useful to look at the nature of our global expansion. The global expanse of US military bases is well-known,
but its actual territorial empire is largely hidden. The true map of America is not taught in our schools. Abby Martin interviews history
Professor Daniel Immerwahr about his new book, ' How To Hide An Empire ,' where he documents the story of our "Greater United States."
This is worth the 40 minute watch...I learned several new things. One more long clip. However this one is fine to just listen to as
you do things. This is a wonderful interview with Noam Chomsky. The man exudes wisdom. ..."
"... The oligarchy has been with us since perhaps the tribal origins of our species, but the corporation is a newer phenomenon.
A faceless, soulless profit machine. Ironically it is the 14th amendment which is used to justify corporate person-hood. ..."
"... Corporations aren't specifically mentioned in the 14th Amendment, or anywhere else in the Constitution. But going back to the
earliest years of the republic, when the Bank of the United States brought the first corporate rights case before the Supreme Court,
U.S. corporations have sought many of the same rights guaranteed to individuals, including the rights to own property, enter into contracts,
and to sue and be sued just like individuals. ..."
"... But it wasn't until the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road that the Court appeared to grant a corporation
the same rights as an individual under the 14th Amendment ..."
"... The United States is home to five of the world's 10 largest defense contractors, and American companies account for 57 percent
of total arms sales by the world's 100 largest defense contractors, based on SIPRI data. Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, the largest
defense contractor in the world, is estimated to have had $44.9 billion in arms sales in 2017 through deals with governments all over
the world. The company drew public scrutiny after a bomb it sold to Saudi Arabia was dropped on a school bus in Yemen, killing 40 boys
and 11 adults. Lockheed's revenue from the U.S. government alone is well more than the total annual budgets of the IRS and the Environmental
Protection Agency, combined. ..."
"... http://news.nidokidos.org/military-spending-20-companies-profiting-the-m... For a list of the 20 companies profiting most off
war... https://themindunleashed.com/2019/03/20-companies-profiting-war.html ..."
"... Capitalism, militarism and imperialism are disastrously intertwined ..."
"... Corporations are Religions Yes they are. They have ethics, goals, and priests. They have a god who determines everything "The
Invisible Hand". They believe themselves to be superior to the state. They have cult garb, or are we not going to pretend that there's
corporate dress codes, right down to the things you can wear on special days of the week. They determine what you can eat, drink and
read. If you say something wrong, they feel within their rights to punish you because they OWN the medium that you used to spread ideas.
OF course they don't own your thoughts... those belong to the OTHER god. ..."
Chris Hedges often says "The corporate coup is complete". Sadly I think he is correct. So this week I thought it might be interesting
to explore the techniques which are used here at home and abroad. The oligarchs' corporate control is global, but different strategies
are employed in various scenarios. Just thinking about the recent regime changes promoted by the US in this hemisphere...
The current attempts at the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Cuban, and Iranian coups are primarily conducted
using economic sanctions
.
The US doesn't even lie about past coups. They recently
released a report about the 1953
CIA led coup against Iran detailing the strategies. Here at home it is a compliant media and a new array of corporate laws designed
to protect and further enrich that spell the corporate capture of our culture and society. So let's begin by looking at the nature
of corporations...
The following 2.5 hour documentary from 2004 features commentary from Chris, Noam, Naomi, and many others you know. It has some
great old footage. It is best watched on a television so you have a bigger screen. (This clip is on the encore+ youtube channel and
does have commercials which you can skip after 5 seconds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpQYsk-8dWg
Based on Joel Bakan's bestseller The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power , this 26-award-winning
documentary explores a corporation's inner workings, curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures.
One hundred
and fifty years ago, a corporation was a relatively insignificant entity. Today, it is a vivid, dramatic, and pervasive presence
in all our lives. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, a corporation is today's dominant
institution.
Charting the rise of such an institution aimed at achieving specific economic goals, the documentary also recounts
victories against this apparently invincible force.
Although corporations are legally a person (see history below), they are in fact an entity. The sole goal of that entity is
profit. There is no corporate conscience. Some of the CEO's in the film discuss how all the people in the corporations are against
pollution and so on, but by law stockholder profit must be the objective. Now these entities are global operations with no loyalty
to their country of origin.
Perhaps it would be useful to look at the nature of our global expansion. The global expanse of US military bases is well-known,
but its actual territorial empire is largely hidden. The true map of America is not taught in our schools. Abby Martin interviews
history Professor Daniel Immerwahr about his new book, ' How To Hide An Empire ,' where he documents the story of our
"Greater United States." This is worth the 40 minute watch...I learned several new things. One more long clip. However this one is
fine to just listen to as you do things. This is a wonderful interview with Noam Chomsky. The man exudes wisdom.
So much of this conversation touches on today's topic of our corporate capture. Amy interviewed Ed Snowden this week... (video or text)
This is a system, the first system in history, that bore witness to everything. Every border you crossed, every purchase you
make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friends you keep, article you write, site you visit and subject line
you type was now in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards were not. And I felt, despite what the
law said, that this was something that the public ought to know.
The oligarchy has been with us since perhaps the tribal origins of our species, but the corporation is a newer phenomenon.
A faceless, soulless profit machine. Ironically it is the 14th amendment which is used to justify corporate person-hood.
Corporations aren't specifically mentioned in the 14th Amendment, or anywhere else in the Constitution. But going back
to the earliest years of the republic, when the Bank of the United States brought the first corporate rights case before the Supreme
Court, U.S. corporations have sought many of the same rights guaranteed to individuals, including the rights to own property,
enter into contracts, and to sue and be sued just like individuals.
But it wasn't until the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road that the Court appeared to grant a corporation
the same rights as an individual under the 14th Amendment
More recently in 2010 (Citizens United v. FEC): In the run up to the 2008 election, the Federal Elections Commission blocked the
conservative nonprofit Citizens United from airing a film about Hillary Clinton based on a law barring companies from using their
funds for "electioneering communications" within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. The organization sued, arguing
that, because people's campaign donations are a protected form of speech (see Buckley v. Valeo) and corporations and people enjoy
the same legal rights, the government can't limit a corporation's independent political donations. The Supreme Court agreed. The
Citizens United ruling may be the most sweeping expansion of corporate personhood to date.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/how-supreme-court-turned-co...
Do they really believe this is how we think?
More than just using the courts, corporations are knee deep in creating favorable laws, not just by lobbying, but by actually
writing legislation to feed the politicians that they own and control, especially at the state level.
Through ALEC, Global Corporations Are Scheming to Rewrite YOUR Rights and Boost THEIR Revenue. Through the corporate-funded
American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state
laws that govern your rights. These so-called "model bills" reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit
huge corporations.
In ALEC's own words, corporations have "a VOICE and a VOTE" on specific changes to the law that are then proposed in your state.
DO YOU? Numerous resources to help us expose ALEC are provided below. We have also created links to detailed discussions of key
issues...
There is very little effort to hide the blatant corruption. People seem to accept this behavior as business as usual, after all
it is.
Part of the current ALEC legislative agenda involves stifling protests.
I think it started in Texas...
A bill making its way through the Texas legislature would make protesting pipelines a third-degree felony, the same as attempted
murder.
H.B. 3557, which is under consideration in the state Senate after passing the state House earlier this month, ups penalties for
interfering in energy infrastructure construction by making the protests a felony. Sentences would range from two to 10 years.
Lawmakers in Wisconsin introduced a bill on September 5 designed to chill protests around oil and gas pipelines and other energy
infrastructure in the state by imposing harsh criminal penalties for trespassing on or damaging the property of a broad range
of "energy providers."
Senate Bill 386 echoes similar "critical infrastructure protection" model bills pushed out by the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC) and the Council of State Governments over the last two years to prevent future protests like the one against the
Dakota Access Pipeline.
And Chris was on the evening RT news this week discussing how the US empire is striking back against leaders who help their own
people rather than our global corporations.
Financially, the cost of these wars is immense: more than $6 trillion dollars. The cost of these wars is just one element of
the $1.2 trillion the US government spends annually on wars and war making. Half of each dollar paid in federal income tax
goes towards some form or consequence of war . While the results of such spending are not hard to foresee or understand:
a cyclical and dependent relationship between the Pentagon, weapons industry and Congress, the creation of a whole new class of
worker and wealth distribution is not so understood or noticed, but exists and is especially malignant.
This is a ghastly redistribution of wealth, perhaps unlike any known in modern human history, certainly not in American history.
As taxpayers send trillions to Washington. DC, that money flows to the men and women that remotely oversee, manage and staff the
wars that kill and destroy millions of lives overseas and at home. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees and civilian contractors
servicing the wars take home six figure annual salaries allowing them second homes, luxury cars and plastic surgery, while veterans
put guns in their mouths, refugees die in capsized boats and as many as four million nameless souls scream silently in death.
These AUMFs (Authorization for Use of Military Force) and the wars have provided tens of thousands of recruits to international
terror groups; mass profits to the weapons industry and those that service it; promotions to generals and admirals, with
corporate board seats upon retirement ; and a perpetual and endless supply of bloody shirts for politicians to wave via
an unquestioning and obsequious corporate media to stoke compliant anger and malleable fear. What is hard to imagine, impossible
even, is anyone else who has benefited from these wars.
The United States is home to five of the world's 10 largest defense contractors, and American companies account for 57 percent
of total arms sales by the world's 100 largest defense contractors, based on SIPRI data. Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, the largest
defense contractor in the world, is estimated to have had $44.9 billion in arms sales in 2017 through deals with governments all
over the world. The company drew public scrutiny after a bomb it sold to Saudi Arabia was dropped on a school bus in Yemen, killing
40 boys and 11 adults. Lockheed's revenue from the U.S. government alone is well more than the total annual budgets of the IRS and
the Environmental Protection Agency, combined.
The obvious industry which was not included nor considered is the fossil fuel industry. Here's another example of mutual corporate
interests.
"Capitalism, militarism and imperialism are disastrously intertwined with the fossil fuel economy .A globalized economy
predicated on growth at any social or environmental costs, carbon dependent international trade, the limitless extraction of natural
resources, and a view of citizens as nothing more than consumers cannot be the basis for tackling climate change .Little wonder
then that the elites have nothing to offer beyond continued militarisation and trust in techno-fixes."
The US military is one of the largest consumers and emitters of carbon-dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in history, according to an
independent analysis of global fuel-buying practices of a "virtually unresearched" government agency.
If the US military were its own country, it would rank 47th between Peru and Portugal in terms of annual fuel purchases, totaling
almost 270,000 barrels of oil bought every day in 2017. In particular, the Air Force is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas
emissions and bought $4.9 billion of fuel in 2017 – nearly double that of the Navy ($2.8 billion).
The fossil fuel giants even try to control the climate talks...
Oil and gas groups were accused Saturday of seeking to influence climate talks in Madrid by paying millions in sponsorship
and sending dozens of lobbyists to delay what scientists say is a necessary and rapid cut in fossil fuel use.
The corporations are so entwined that it is difficult to tell where they begin and end. There's the unity of private prisons and
the war machine. And it's a global scheme...this example from the UK.
One thing is clear: the prison industrial complex and the global war machine are intimately connected. This summer's prison
strike that began in the United States and spread to other countries was the largest in history. It shows more than ever that
prisoners are resisting this penal regime, often at great risk to themselves. The battle to end prison slavery continues.
The 2017 tax bill cut taxes for most Americans, including the middle class, but it heavily benefits the wealthy and corporations
. It slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, and its treatment of "pass-through" entities -- companies organized
as sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, or S corporations -- will translate to an estimated $17 billion in tax savings for
millionaires this year. American corporations are showering their shareholders with stock buybacks, thanks in part to their tax
savings.
Even Robert Jackson Jr., commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Appointed to the SEC in 2017 by President Donald
Trump. Confirmed in January 2018 sees the corporate cuts as absurd.
"We have been to the movie of tax cuts and buybacks before, in the Republican administration during the George W. Bush era.
We enacted a quite substantial tax cut during that period. And studies after that showed very clearly that most corporations use
the funds from that tax cut for buybacks. And here's the kicker. That particular tax cut actually required that companies deploy
the capital for capital expenditures, wage increases and investments in their people. Yet studies showed that, in fact, the companies
use them for buybacks. So we've been to this movie before. And what you're describing to me, that corporations turned around and
took the Trump tax cut and didn't use it in investing in their people or in infrastructure, but instead for other purposes, shouldn't
surprise anybody at all."
So the corporations grow larger, wealthier, more powerful, buying evermore legislative influence along the way. They have crept
into almost every aspect of our lives. Some doctors are beginning to see the influence of big pharma and other corporate interests
are effecting the current practice of medicine.
Gary Fettke is a doctor from Tasmania who has been targeted for promoting a high fat low carb diet...threatened with losing
his medical qualifications. He doesn't pull punches in this presentation discussing the corporate control of big ag/food and big
pharma on medical practice and education. (27 min)
Corporations are Religions
Yes they are. They have ethics, goals, and priests. They have a god who determines everything "The Invisible Hand". They believe
themselves to be superior to the state. They have cult garb, or are we not going to pretend that there's corporate dress codes,
right down to the things you can wear on special days of the week. They determine what you can eat, drink and read. If you say
something wrong, they feel within their rights to punish you because they OWN the medium that you used to spread ideas. OF course
they don't own your thoughts... those belong to the OTHER god.
At least the crazy made up gods that I listen to don't usually
fuck over other human beings for a goddamn percentage. ON the other hand, if a corporation can make a profit, it's REQUIRED to
fuck you over. To do otherwise would be against it's morals. Which it does have, trust us... OH, and corporations get to make
fun of your beliefs, but you CANNOT make fun of theirs. Because that would be heresy against logic and reason.
In a local newspaper showed a couple coming out of a Wal-Mart with their carts piled high with big boxed foreign junk, then
shown cramming their SUV full of said junk. The headline read "Crazy Busy". It pretty much summed up what is wrong with the American
consumer culture. The next day's big headline spotlighted our senator's picture affixed to a LARGE headline boasting "$22 Billion
Submarine Contract Awarded". A good example of of what is wrong with the american war economy.
Thank you for your compilation Lookout! If we can get beyond the headlines, working at grass root and local solutions, maybe
even underground revolution, there may be hope for us. Barter for a better future.
My buddies always say about their mayor..."There's no way we will trade down after this election...but then we do." Perhaps
it is true for more than just their town.
The line running in my head is..."What if they gave a war and nobody came". I want to expand it to..."What if they made cheap
junk no one really wanted and nobody bought it". Or substitute junk food for cheap junk, or...
My point in today's conclusion is much as I try to walk away from corporate culture/control, I really can't totally escape...but
at least I spend most of my time in the open, breathing clean air, surrounded by forest. We do what we can.
Consumerism in our society is a plague, a disease perpetrated upon us by our corporate lords. It has taken over everything
about being an American.
I think the youth are catching on, as they are thrifting more, but they don't understand about food, and that's the rub. Our
youth will be more unhealthy until they understand what corporations are doing to us through food addictions.
We're expecting rain today for most of the day and actually it's just started. The person who will drill our well came by yesterday
and figured out some details. We are behind two other wells, so it will probably be the holiday week when it happens - we'll see.
I can wait til January and hope we do.
Ideas is that new deal of FDR's day had corporate opponents far different than those of today. Sanders does not seem to understand
that the corporations of yesterday, and what worked against them, will not work against the corporations of today. In the early part of the 20th century, corporations were still primarily domestic and local often with charters from the state
where they conducted their primary business, many times all of their business.
Regulation and unions were reasonable anti-dotes to the abuses of these local and domestic corporations. The state still had
some semblance of control over them.
But today corporations are global. They have no allegiance to, or concern for the domestic economy or local people. They do not fear of any anti-dotes that worked for years against domestic or local corporations. Global corporations just leave
and go elsewhere if they don't like the domestic or local situation if they have not managed to completely take over the government.
There is only one reason to incorporate in the first place. That is for the owner(s) of the business to avoid personal liability
or responsibility. The majority of people never understand this idea. Corporate owners are the people who are the genuine personal
responsibility avoiders. Not the poor. The only antidote to corporations these days is the total demise of the corporation and
its similar business entities that dodge personal responsibility. And the state must refuse to allow any such entities to do business.
It is the only way forward. Otherwise nation states will give way to corporate states. Corporate governance is the new feudalism
from which the old feudalism morphed.
Sanders isn't going to advocate doing away with corporate entities or other similar business entities. Nor will any of the
Democratic contenders. They all require corporations to rail against as the basis for their political policy.
...and I've always wondered just how Bernie would dismantle them. However like the impotence of the impeachment, is the impotence
of the primary process.
When the DNC was sued after 2016, they were
exonerated based on the ruling they were a private entity entitled to make rules as the wanted. The primary is so obviously
rigged I can almost guarantee Bernie will not be allowed the nomination, so the question to how he would change corporate control
is really moot.
@Lookout I probably
could get on board with a Sanders campaign if he would run as an Independent. But it is really hard to get on board with him as
a Democrat. If he loses the nomination, he will probably not run as an Independent once again. Once he bailed on an Independent
run last time, I and many others bailed on him. I would support his Independent candidacy just to screw with the Electoral College.
I thought last time an independent candidacy might have thrown the election to the House of Representatives. I could see a Democratically
controlled House voting for him over Trump in a three way EC split if the Democratic candidate took low EC numbers.
But he is so afraid of being tarred with the Nader moniker.
What I said many times on websites last election is that an EC vote is very similar to a Parliamentary Election. And that would
be an interesting change for sure. It would also be a means of having the popular vote winner restored if there is a big enough
margin in the House. And what would be equally cool is that the Senate picks the VP. So you could have President and VP from different
parties.
if Bernie got the nomination, I would vote for him, especially in this imaginary world, if Tulsi was his running mate. Then there
the question about your vote being counted? We'll just have to see what we see and make judgements based on outcomes, IMO.
#4.1 I probably could get on board with
a Sanders campaign if he would run as an Independent. But it is really hard to get on board with him as a Democrat. If he loses
the nomination, he will probably not run as an Independent once again. Once he bailed on an Independent run last time, I and
many others bailed on him. I would support his Independent candidacy just to screw with the Electoral College. I thought last
time an independent candidacy might have thrown the election to the House of Representatives. I could see a Democratically
controlled House voting for him over Trump in a three way EC split if the Democratic candidate took low EC numbers.
But he is so afraid of being tarred with the Nader moniker.
What I said many times on websites last election is that an EC vote is very similar to a Parliamentary Election. And that
would be an interesting change for sure. It would also be a means of having the popular vote winner restored if there is a
big enough margin in the House. And what would be equally cool is that the Senate picks the VP. So you could have President
and VP from different parties.
@Lookout The only
way the Democrats might beat Trump is to have Sanders run as an Independent and prevent Trump from reaching 270. That is a far
better way to beat Trump than impeachment. Would the house vote for the Democrat or an Independent? I guess it would depend on
how Sanders did in the popular vote and EC against his Democratic rival.
#4.1.1 if Bernie got the nomination, I would vote for him, especially in this imaginary world, if Tulsi was his running mate. Then
there the question about your vote being counted? We'll just have to see what we see and make judgements based on outcomes,
IMO.
If it was Hillary "Dewey Cheatem & Howe" Clinton, all bets are off.
#4.1.1.1 The only way the Democrats
might beat Trump is to have Sanders run as an Independent and prevent Trump from reaching 270. That is a far better way to
beat Trump than impeachment. Would the house vote for the Democrat or an Independent? I guess it would depend on how Sanders
did in the popular vote and EC against his Democratic rival.
Good lord.that she did that is unbelievable. Great point. Boycott Fox News, but go on Stern's show. It's going to be fun to
watch how much lower she falls.
MSNBC invited on two former Hillary Clinton aides to criticize Bernie Sanders for taking a "long time to get out of the
race" and that he didn't do "enough" campaigning for her in 2016. pic.twitter.com/6Vsqo0DKZI
@TheOtherMaven They
have to choose from actual EC vote getters. So if she is not the candidate she could not win.
Having Sanders run as an Independent and Warren or Biden run as a Democrat would be a much better strategy to ensure a Trump
loss in the House. Of course it might take some coordination as in asking the voters to vote for the candidate who has the best
chance of beating Trump in certain states. But voters could probably figure that out.
Or a candidate could just withdraw from a state in which the other candidate had a better chance of beating Trump.
Lookout as usual you have done an excellent job of giving me a lot of articles to read and think about this next week.
Of course I need to be loading my car and shutting this place down as I head to the Texas hill country. Will look for an article
about Kinder Morgan and small communities that are fighting the pipeline through their towns. The read was a little hopeful.
Watching the weather and it looks like sunshine and clear skies as I travel. Thanks for all your work in putting this together.
I like to travel on the old roads
I like the way it makes me feel
No destination just the old roads
Somehow it helps the heart to heal.
I hope your road trip is a good one. The less busy tracks are almost meditative....soaking in scenery as the world passes by.
Have fun and be careful.
Lookout as usual you have done an excellent job of giving me a lot of articles to read and think about this next week.
Of course I need to be loading my car and shutting this place down as I head to the Texas hill country. Will look for an
article about Kinder Morgan and small communities that are fighting the pipeline through their towns. The read was a little
hopeful.
Watching the weather and it looks like sunshine and clear skies as I travel. Thanks for all your work in putting this together.
Here are a couple of links to how free markets
help in the corporate takeover. Amazon a corp that has only made a profit by
never paying taxes and accounting fraud. It
became a trillion dollar corp through the use
of monopoly money(stock) it's nothing but the
perfect example of todays "unicorn" corp, i.e.
worth what it is w/out ever making a penny
Corporations can live far beyond a persons lifespan. Corporations can commit homicide and escape execution and justice. Unfortunately,
unions are just as likely to be on the corporations side to get jobs and wages, and bust heads if anything interferes with that.
If we protest we've seen the police ready to use deadly force at the drop of a hat, and get away with it. We get to vote on
candidates that some political club chose for us, and have little incentive to work for the 99%. The gov. has amassed so much
information on us we can't even fathom its depth. We have nowhere left, no unexplored lands out of reach of the government. We
think we own things, but if you think you own a home, see how long it is before the gov. confiscates it if you don't pay your
property taxes.
If I were younger, or a young person asked what to do, I would say.... learn some skill that would make you attractive for
emigrating to another country, because the US looks like it's over. It's people are only here to be exploited. And if Bernie were
to become president I hope he gets a food taster.
run to. No where to hide. As in the U.K., corporations are seeking to to dismantle the NHS and turn it into a for-profit system
like ours. Even as the gilllet-jaune protesters risk life and limb, Macron seeks to install true neoliberalism in France. And
the beat goes on.
Corporations can live far beyond a persons lifespan. Corporations can commit homicide and escape execution and justice.
Look at what chevron did to people in Borapol. I'm sure I spelled this wrong but hopefully people will know what I'm talking
about. They killed lots of people and poisoned their land for decades and the fight over it is still going on. How many decades
more will chevron get to skirt justice? Banks continue to commit fraud and they only get little fines that don't do jack to keep
them from doing it again. Even cities are screwing people. Owe a few dollars on your property taxes and they will take your home
and sell it for pennies on the dollar. How in hell can it be legal to charge people over 600% interest? What happened to usury
rules if that's the correct term.
The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled last week that a prior ruling by an Ecuadorean court that fined Chevron
$9.5 billion in 2011 should be upheld, according to teleSUR, a Latin American news agency. Texaco, which is currently a part of
Chevron, is responsible for what is considered one of the world's largest environmental disasters while it drilled for oil in
the Ecuadorian rainforest from 1964 to 1990.
https://www.ecowatch.com/will-chevron-and-exxon-ever-be-held-responsible...
The legal battle has been tied up in the courts for years. Ecuador's highest court finally upheld the ruling in January
2014, but Chevron refused to pay.
This is another thing that corporations get away with. Contaminating land and then just walking away from it. How many superfund
sites have we had to pay for instead of the ones who created the mess. Just declared bankruptcy and walked away. Corporations
are people? Fine then they should be held as accountable as the people in the lower classes. Fat chance though right?
Weren't people killed by a gas cloud released from the plant? I read something recently that said the case is still going
through the courts. How much money have they spent trying not to spend more?
Byedone just needs to pack it in and drop out already. Today he was defending the republican party after someone said something
about them needing to go away. Joe said that we need another party so one does not get more power than the other. Yeah right,
Joe. It's not like the Pubs are already weilding power they don't have and them dems cowering and supporting them.
Newsweek reporter quit after being censored on the OPCW story.
I have collected evidence of how they suppressed the story in addition to evidence from another case where info inconvenient
to US govt was removed, though it was factually correct.
First frustrate us with gridlock. Then pass bills benefiting the corporate overlords. Then leading up
to elections pass bills like the one against animal cruelty (who doesn't love kitties and puppies?), or propose a bill to consider
regulating cosmetics. This second bipartisan effort is glaringly cynical since no one apparently knows what is in beauty products.
Sanders must have politicians worried for them to attempt something which has managed to go unregulated for so long.
All this bipartisanship is not even up to the level of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's more like wiping at
them with a dirty rag while the ship of state continues to sink. While animal cruelty and cosmetic safety are important issues,
they pale in comparison to the systemic ills America suffers. Our fearless leaders will continue to scratch the surface while
corruption and business as usual continue to fester. These bipartisan laws may look good on a politician's resume, but they won't
really help the 99%.
@snoopydawg
the propaganda to give NATO a raison d'être for a pivot to China. This will be doomed to complete failure just as the Russian
pivot has.
But Putin and Xi Jinping are both much too skilled and intelligent to defeat. American WWE trash talkers are completely outclassed
by an 8th dan in judo paired with a Sun Tzu scholar.
Tomoe nage - use your opponent's weight and aggression against him.
"If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent
is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.
If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he
is unprepared, appear where you are not expected ."
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
@Lookout
What they want is
a controlled collapse. If they can get the US to continue to overspend on war mongering rather than programs of social uplift
the country will rot from the inside.
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
So much more to say really. Had to stop somewhere but as you know the corruption runs deep and is intermixed with the CIA/FBI/MIC
corporate government under which we live.
On we go as best we can!
There is great dignity in the objective truth. Perhaps because it never flows through the contaminated minds of the unworthy.
Corporate charters were initially meant to be for the public good if i'm not mistaken in recall, it was a trade-off for their
privilege to exist. Maybe a movement political leader could highlight this and move the pendulum back to accountability.
Had a conversation with good friend today, a 3M rep, and he was griping about his competitor's shady marketing product practices
apparently lying to manufacturers about the grades and contents of their competing products.
It's not just a populist backlash – many economists who once swore by free trade have changed their minds, too. How had
they got it so wrong?
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email T he annual January gathering of the World Economic Forum in
Davos is usually a placid affair: a place for well-heeled
participants to exchange notes on global business opportunities, or powder conditions on the local ski slopes, while cradling champagne
and canapes. This January, the ultra-rich and the sparkling wine returned, but by all reports the mood was one of anxiety, defensiveness
and self-reproach.
The future of economic globalisation, for which the Davos men and women see themselves as caretakers, had been shaken by a series
of political earthquakes. "Globalisation" can mean many things, but what lay in particular doubt was the long-advanced project of
increasing free trade in goods across borders. The previous summer, Britain had voted to leave the largest trading bloc in the world.
In November, the unexpected victory of Donald Trump
, who vowed to withdraw from major trade deals, appeared to jeopardise the trading relationships of the world's richest country.
Forthcoming elections in France and Germany suddenly seemed to bear the possibility of anti-globalisation parties garnering better
results than ever before. The barbarians weren't at the gates to the ski-lifts yet – but they weren't very far.
In a panel titled Governing Globalisation , the economist
Dambisa Moyo , otherwise a well-known supporter of free trade, forthrightly asked the audience to accept that "there have been
significant losses" from globalisation. "It is not clear to me that we are going to be able to remedy them under the current infrastructure,"
she added. Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund,
called for a policy hitherto foreign to the World Economic Forum : "more redistribution". After years of hedging or discounting
the malign effects of free trade, it was time to face facts: globalisation caused job losses and depressed wages, and the usual Davos
proposals – such as instructing affected populations to accept the new reality – weren't going to work. Unless something changed,
the political consequences were likely to get worse.
The backlash to globalisation has helped fuel the extraordinary political shifts of the past 18 months. During the close race
to become the Democratic party candidate, senator Bernie Sanders relentlessly attacked Hillary Clinton on her
support for free trade . On the campaign trail, Donald Trump openly proposed tilting the terms of trade in favour of American
industry. "Americanism, not globalism, shall be our creed," he bellowed at the Republican national convention last July.
The vote for Brexit was strongest in the regions of the UK devastated by the flight of manufacturing. At Davos in January, British
prime minister Theresa May, the leader of the party of capital and inherited wealth, improbably picked up the theme, warning that,
for many, "talk of greater globalisation means their jobs being outsourced and wages undercut." Meanwhile,
the European far right has been warning against free movement of people as well as goods. Following her qualifying victory in
the first round of France's presidential election,
Marine Le Pen warned darkly that "the main thing at stake in this election is the rampant globalisation that is endangering our
civilisation."
It was only a few decades ago that globalisation was held by many, even by some critics, to be an inevitable, unstoppable force.
"Rejecting globalisation," the American journalist George Packer has written, "was like rejecting the sunrise."
Globalisation could take place in services, capital
and ideas, making it a notoriously imprecise term; but what it meant most often was making it cheaper to trade across borders – something
that seemed to many at the time to be an unquestionable good. In practice, this often meant that industry would move from rich countries,
where labour was expensive, to poor countries, where labour was cheaper. People in the rich countries would either have to accept
lower wages to compete, or lose their jobs. But no matter what, the goods they formerly produced would now be imported, and be even
cheaper. And the unemployed could get new, higher-skilled jobs (if they got the requisite training). Mainstream economists and politicians
upheld the consensus about the merits of globalisation, with little concern that there might be political consequences.
Back then, economists could calmly chalk up anti-globalisation sentiment to a marginal group of delusional protesters, or disgruntled
stragglers still toiling uselessly in "sunset industries". These days, as sizable constituencies have voted in country after country
for anti-free-trade policies, or candidates that promise to limit them, the old self-assurance is gone. Millions have rejected, with
uncertain results, the punishing logic that globalisation could not be stopped. The backlash has swelled a wave of soul-searching
among economists, one that had already begun to roll ashore with the financial crisis. How did they fail to foresee the repercussions?
I n the heyday of the globalisation consensus, few economists questioned its merits in public. But in 1997, the Harvard economist
Dani Rodrik published a
slim book that created a stir. Appearing just as the US was about to enter a historic economic boom, Rodrik's book, Has Globalization
Gone Too Far?, sounded an unusual note of alarm.
Rodrik pointed to a series of dramatic recent events that challenged the idea that growing free trade would be peacefully accepted.
In 1995, France had adopted a programme of fiscal austerity in order to prepare for entry into the eurozone; trade unions responded
with the largest wave of strikes since 1968. In 1996, only five years after the end of the Soviet Union – with Russia's once-protected
markets having been forcibly opened, leading to a sudden decline in living standards – a communist won 40% of the vote in Russia's
presidential elections. That same year, two years after the passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), one of the
most ambitious multinational deals ever accomplished, a white nationalist running on an "America first" programme of economic protectionism
did surprisingly well in the presidential primaries of the Republican party.
What was the pathology of which all of these disturbing events were symptoms? For Rodrik, it was "the process that has come to
be called 'globalisation'". Since the 1980s, and especially following the collapse of the Soviet Union, lowering barriers to international
trade had become the axiom of countries everywhere. Tariffs had to be slashed and regulations spiked. Trade unions, which kept wages
high and made it harder to fire people, had to be crushed. Governments vied with each other to make their country more hospitable
– more "competitive" – for businesses. That meant making labour cheaper and regulations looser, often in countries that had once
tried their hand at socialism, or had spent years protecting "homegrown" industries with tariffs.
These moves were generally applauded by economists. After all, their profession had long embraced the principle of comparative
advantage – simply put, the idea countries will trade with each other in order to gain what each lacks, thereby benefiting both.
In theory, then, the globalisation of trade in goods and services would benefit consumers in rich countries by giving them access
to inexpensive goods produced by cheaper labour in poorer countries, and this demand, in turn, would help grow the economies of those
poorer countries.
But the social cost, in Rodrik's dissenting view, was high – and consistently underestimated by economists. He noted that since
the 1970s, lower-skilled European and American workers had endured a major fall in the real value of their wages, which dropped by
more than 20%. Workers were suffering more spells of unemployment, more volatility in the hours they were expected to work.
While many economists attributed much of the insecurity to technological change – sophisticated new machines displacing low-skilled
workers – Rodrik suggested that the process of globalisation should shoulder more of the blame. It was, in particular, the competition
between workers in developing and developed countries that helped drive down wages and job security for workers in developed countries.
Over and over, they would be held hostage to the possibility that their business would up and leave, in order to find cheap labour
in other parts of the world; they had to accept restraints on their salaries – or else. Opinion polls registered their strong levels
of anxiety and insecurity, and the political effects were becoming more visible. Rodrik foresaw that the cost of greater "economic
integration" would be greater "social disintegration". The inevitable result would be a huge political backlash.
As Rodrik would later recall, other economists tended to dismiss his arguments – or fear them.
Paul Krugman , who would win the Nobel prize in 2008
for his earlier work in trade theory and economic geography, privately warned Rodrik that his work would give "ammunition to the
barbarians".
It was a tacit acknowledgment that pro-globalisation economists, journalists and politicians had come under growing pressure from
a new movement on the left, who were raising concerns very similar to Rodrik's. Over the course of the 1990s, an unwieldy international
coalition had begun to contest the notion that globalisation was good. Called "anti-globalisation" by the media, and the "alter-globalisation"
or "global justice" movement by its participants, it tried to draw attention to the devastating effect that free trade policies were
having, especially in the developing world, where globalisation was supposed to be having its most beneficial effect. This was a
time when figures such as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had given the topic a glitzy prominence by
documenting his time among what he
gratingly called "globalutionaries" : chatting amiably with the CEO of Monsanto one day, gawking at lingerie manufacturers in
Sri Lanka the next. Activists were intent on showing a much darker picture, revealing how the record of globalisation consisted mostly
of farmers pushed off their land and the rampant proliferation of sweatshops. They also implicated the highest world bodies in their
critique: the G7, World Bank and IMF. In 1999, the movement reached a high point when a unique coalition of trade unions and environmentalists
managed to shut down the meeting of the
World Trade Organization in Seattle.
In a state of panic, economists responded with a flood of columns and books that defended the necessity of a more open global
market economy, in tones ranging from grandiose to sarcastic. In January 2000,
Krugman used his first piece as
a New York Times columnist to denounce the "trashing" of the WTO, calling it "a sad irony that the cause that has finally awakened
the long-dormant American left is that of – yes! – denying opportunity to third-world workers".
Where Krugman was derisive, others were solemn, putting the contemporary fight against the "anti-globalisation" left in a continuum
of struggles for liberty. "Liberals, social democrats and moderate conservatives are on the same side in the great battles against
religious fanatics, obscurantists, extreme environmentalists, fascists, Marxists and, of course, contemporary anti-globalisers,"
wrote the Financial Times columnist and former World Bank
economist Martin Wolf in his book Why Globalization Works. Language like this lent the fight for globalisation the air of an
epochal struggle. More common was the rhetoric of figures such as Friedman, who in his book The World is Flat mocked the "pampered
American college kids" who, "wearing their branded clothing, began to get interested in sweatshops as a way of expiating their guilt".
ss="rich-link"> Globalisation once made the world go around. Is it about to grind to a halt? Read more
Arguments against the global justice movement rested on the idea that the ultimate benefits of a more open and integrated economy
would outweigh the downsides. "Freer trade is associated with higher growth and higher growth is associated with reduced poverty,"
wrote the Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati in his book In Defense of Globalization. "Hence, growth reduces poverty."
No matter how troubling some of the local effects, the implication went, globalisation promised a greater good.
The fact that proponents of globalisation now felt compelled to spend much of their time defending it indicates how much visibility
the global justice movement had achieved by the early 2000s. Still, over time, the movement lost ground, as a policy consensus settled
in favour of globalisation. The proponents of globalisation were determined never to let another gathering be interrupted. They stopped
meeting in major cities, and security everywhere was tightened. By the time of the invasion of Iraq, the world's attention had turned
from free trade to George Bush and the "war on terror," leaving the globalisation consensus intact.
Above all, there was a widespread perception that globalisation was working as it was supposed to. The local adverse effects that
activists pointed to – sweatshop labour, starving farmers – were increasingly obscured by the staggering GDP numbers and fantastical
images of gleaming skylines coming out of China. With some lonely exceptions – such as Rodrik and the former World Bank chief and
Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz –
the pursuit of freer trade became a consensus position for economists, commentators and the vast majority of mainstream politicians,
to the point where the benefits of free trade seemed to command blind adherence. In a 2006 TV interview, Thomas Friedman was asked
whether there was any free trade deal he would not support. He replied that there wasn't, admitting, "I wrote a column supporting
the Cafta, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade."
I n the wake of the financial crisis, the cracks began to show in the consensus on globalisation, to the point that, today, there
may no longer be a consensus. Economists who were once ardent proponents of globalisation have become some of its most prominent
critics. Erstwhile supporters now concede, at least in part, that it has produced inequality, unemployment and downward pressure
on wages. Nuances and criticisms that economists only used to raise in private seminars are finally coming out in the open.
A few months before the financial crisis hit, Krugman was already confessing to a "guilty conscience". In the 1990s, he had been
very influential in arguing that global trade with poor countries had only a small effect on workers' wages in rich countries. By
2008, he was having doubts: the data seemed to suggest that the effect was much larger than he had suspected.
In the years that followed, the crash, the crisis of the eurozone and the worldwide drop in the price of oil and other commodities
combined to put a huge dent in global trade. Since 2012, the IMF reported in its
World Economic Outlook for October 2016 , trade was
growing at 3% a year – less than half the average of the previous three decades. That month, Martin Wolf argued in a column that
globalisation had "lost dynamism", due to a slackening of the world economy, the "exhaustion" of new markets to exploit and a rise
in protectionist policies around the world. In an interview earlier this year, Wolf suggested to me that, though he remained convinced
globalisation had not been the decisive factor in rising inequality, he had nonetheless not fully foreseen when he was writing Why
Globalization Works how "radical the implications" of worsening inequality "might be for the US, and therefore the world". Among
these implications appears to be a rising distrust of the establishment that is blamed for the inequality. "We have a very big political
problem in many of our countries," he said. "The elites – the policymaking business and financial elites – are
increasingly
disliked . You need to make policy which brings people to think again that their societies are run in a decent and civilised
way."
That distrust of the establishment has had highly visible political consequences: Farage, Trump, and Le Pen on the right; but
also in new parties on the left, such as Spain's Podemos, and curious populist hybrids, such as Italy's
Five
Star Movement . As in 1997, but to an even greater degree, the volatile political scene reflects public anxiety over "the process
that has come to be called 'globalisation'". If the critics of globalisation could be dismissed before because of their lack of economics
training, or ignored because they were in distant countries, or kept out of sight by a wall of police, their sudden political ascendancy
in the rich countries of the west cannot be so easily discounted today.
Over the past year, the opinion pages of prestigious newspapers have been filled with belated, rueful comments from the high priests
of globalisation – the men who appeared to have defeated the anti-globalisers two decades earlier. Perhaps the most surprising such
transformation has been that of Larry Summers. Possessed of a panoply of elite titles – former chief economist of the World Bank,
former Treasury secretary, president emeritus of Harvard, former
economic adviser to President Barack Obama – Summers was renowned in the 1990s and 2000s for being a blustery proponent of globalisation.
For Summers, it seemed, market logic was so inexorable that its dictates prevailed over every social concern. In an
infamous World Bank memo from 1991 , he held
that the cheapest way to dispose of toxic waste in rich countries was to dump it in poor countries, since it was financially cheaper
for them to manage it. "The laws of economics, it's often forgotten, are like the laws of engineering," he said in a speech that
year at a World Bank-IMF meeting in Bangkok. "There's only one set of laws and they work everywhere. One of the things I've learned
in my short time at the World Bank is that whenever anybody says, 'But economics works differently here,' they're about to say something
dumb."
Over the last two years, a different, in some ways unrecognizable Larry Summers has been appearing in newspaper editorial pages.
More circumspect in tone, this humbler Summers has been arguing that economic opportunities in the developing world are slowing,
and that the already rich economies are finding it hard to get out of the crisis. Barring some kind of breakthrough, Summers says,
an era of slow growth is here to stay.
In Summers's recent writings, this sombre conclusion has often been paired with a surprising political goal: advocating for a
"responsible nationalism". Now he argues that politicians must recognise that "the basic responsibility of government is to maximise
the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good".
O ne curious thing about the pro-globalisation consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, and its collapse in recent years, is how closely
the cycle resembles a previous era. Pursuing free trade has always produced displacement and inequality – and political chaos, populism
and retrenchment to go with it. Every time the social consequences of free trade are overlooked, political backlash follows. But
free trade is only one of many forms that economic integration can take. History seems to suggest, however, that it might be the
most destabilising one.
Nearly all economists and scholars of globalisation like to point to the fact that the economy was rather globalised by the early
20th century. As European countries colonised Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, they turned their colonies into suppliers of raw materials
for European manufacturers, as well as markets for European goods. Meanwhile, the economies of the colonisers were also becoming
free-trade zones for each other. "The opening years of the 20th century were the closest thing the world had ever seen to a free
world market for goods, capital and labour," writes the Harvard professor of government Jeffry Frieden in his standard account, Global
Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the 20th Century. "It would be a hundred years before the world returned to that level of globalisation."
In addition to military force, what underpinned this convenient arrangement for imperial nations was the gold standard. Under
this system, each national currency had an established gold value: the British pound sterling was backed by 113 grains of pure gold;
the US dollar by 23.22 grains, and so on. This entailed that exchange rates were also fixed: a British pound was always equal to
4.87 dollars. The stability of exchange rates meant that the cost of doing business across borders was predictable. Just like the
eurozone today, you could count on the value of the currency staying the same, so long as the storehouse of gold remained more or
less the same.
When there were gold shortages – as there were in the 1870s – the system stopped working. To protect the sanctity of the standard
under conditions of stress, central bankers across the Europe and the US tightened access to credit and deflated prices. This left
financiers in a decent position, but crushed farmers and the rural poor, for whom falling prices meant starvation. Then as now, economists
and mainstream politicians largely overlooked the darker side of the economic picture.
In the US, this fuelled one of the world's first self-described "populist" revolts, leading to the nomination of William Jennings
Bryan as the Democratic party candidate in 1896. At his nominating convention, he gave a famous speech lambasting gold backers: "You
shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Then as now,
financial elites and their supporters in the press were horrified. "There has been an upheaval of the political crust," the Times
of London reported, "and strange creatures have come forth."
Businessmen were so distressed by Bryan that they backed the Republican candidate, William McKinley, who won partly by outspending
Bryan five to one. Meanwhile, gold was bolstered by the discovery of new reserves in colonial South Africa. But the gold standard
could not survive the first world war and the Great Depression. By the 1930s, unionisation had spread to more industries and there
was a growing worldwide socialist movement. Protecting gold would mean mass unemployment and social unrest. Britain went off the
gold standard in 1931, while Franklin Roosevelt took the US off it in 1933; France and several other countries would follow in 1936.
The prioritisation of finance and trade over the welfare of people had come momentarily to an end. But this wasn't the end of
the global economic system.
T he trade system that followed was global, too, with high levels of trade – but it took place on terms that often allowed developing
countries to protect their industries. Because, from the perspective of free traders, protectionism is always seen as bad, the success
of this postwar system has been largely under-recognised.
Over the course of the 1930s and 40s, liberals – John Maynard Keynes among them – who had previously regarded departures from
free trade as "an imbecility and an outrage" began to lose their religion. "The decadent international but individualistic capitalism,
in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war, is not a success,"
Keynes found himself writing in 1933 . "It
is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous – and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike
it, and we are beginning to despise it." He claimed sympathies "with those who would minimise, rather than with those who would maximise,
economic entanglement among nations," and argued that goods "be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible".
The international systems that chastened figures such as Keynes helped produce in the next few years – especially the Bretton
Woods agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) – set the terms under which the new wave of globalisation would
take place.
The key to the system's viability, in Rodrik's view, was its flexibility – something absent from contemporary globalisation, with
its one-size-fits-all model of capitalism. Bretton Woods stabilised exchange rates by pegging the dollar loosely to gold, and other
currencies to the dollar. Gatt consisted of rules governing free trade – negotiated by participating countries in a series of multinational
"rounds" – that left many areas of the world economy, such as agriculture, untouched or unaddressed. "Gatt's purpose was never to
maximise free trade," Rodrik writes. "It was to achieve the maximum amount of trade compatible with different nations doing their
own thing. In that respect, the institution proved spectacularly successful."
Partly because Gatt was not always dogmatic about free trade, it allowed most countries to figure out their own economic objectives,
within a somewhat international ambit. When nations contravened the agreement's terms on specific areas of national interest, they
found that it "contained loopholes wide enough for an elephant to pass", in Rodrik's words. If a nation wanted to protect its steel
industry, for example, it could claim "injury" under the rules of Gatt and raise tariffs to discourage steel imports: "an abomination
from the standpoint of free trade". These were useful for countries that were recovering from the war and needed to build up their
own industries via tariffs – duties imposed on particular imports. Meanwhile, from 1948 to 1990, world trade grew at an annual average
of nearly 7% – faster than the post-communist years, which we think of as the high point of globalisation. "If there was a golden
era of globalisation," Rodrik has written, "this was it."
Gatt, however, failed to cover many of the countries in the developing world. These countries eventually created their own system,
the United Nations conference on trade and development (UNCTAD). Under this rubric, many countries – especially in Latin America,
the Middle East, Africa and Asia – adopted a policy of protecting homegrown industries by replacing imports with domestically produced
goods. It worked poorly in some places – India and Argentina, for example, where the trade barriers were too high, resulting in factories
that cost more to set up than the value of the goods they produced – but remarkably well in others, such as east Asia, much of Latin
America and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where homegrown industries did spring up. Though many later economists and commentators
would dismiss the achievements of this model, it theoretically fit Larry Summers's recent rubric on globalisation: "the basic responsibility
of government is to maximise the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good."
The critical turning point – away from this system of trade balanced against national protections – came in the 1980s. Flagging
growth and high inflation in the west, along with growing competition from Japan, opened the way for a political transformation.
The elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were seminal, putting free-market radicals in charge of two of the world's five
biggest economies and ushering in an era of "hyperglobalisation". In the new political climate, economies with large public sectors
and strong governments within the global capitalist system were no longer seen as aids to the system's functioning, but impediments
to it.
Not only did these ideologies take hold in the US and the UK; they seized international institutions as well. Gatt renamed itself
as the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the new rules the body negotiated began to cut more deeply into national policies. Its
international trade rules sometimes undermined national legislation. The WTO's appellate court intervened relentlessly in member
nations' tax, environmental and regulatory policies, including those of the United States: the US's fuel emissions standards were
judged to discriminate against imported gasoline, and its
ban on imported shrimp caught without turtle-excluding
devices was overturned. If national health and safety regulations were stricter than WTO rules necessitated, they could only
remain in place if they were shown to have "scientific justification".
The purest version of hyperglobalisation was tried out in Latin America in the 1980s. Known as the "Washington consensus", this
model usually involved loans from the IMF that were contingent on those countries lowering trade barriers and privatising many of
their nationally held industries. Well into the 1990s, economists were proclaiming the indisputable benefits of openness. In an influential
1995 paper, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner wrote: "We find no cases to support the frequent worry that a country might open and
yet fail to grow."
But the Washington consensus was bad for business: most countries did worse than before. Growth faltered, and citizens across
Latin America revolted against attempted privatisations of water and gas. In Argentina, which followed the Washington consensus to
the letter, a grave crisis resulted in 2002
, precipitating an economic collapse and massive street protests that forced out the government that had pursued privatising
reforms. Argentina's revolt presaged a left-populist upsurge across the continent: from 1999 to 2007, leftwing leaders and parties
took power in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, all of them campaigning against the Washington consensus on globalisation.
These revolts were a preview of the backlash of today.
R odrik – perhaps the contemporary economist whose views have been most amply vindicated by recent events – was himself a beneficiary
of protectionism in Turkey. His father's ballpoint pen company was sheltered under tariffs, and achieved enough success to allow
Rodrik to attend Harvard in the 1970s as an undergraduate. This personal understanding of the mixed nature of economic success may
be one of the reasons why his work runs against the broad consensus of mainstream economics writing on globalisation.
"I never felt that my ideas were out of the mainstream," Rodrik told me recently. Instead, it was that the mainstream had lost
touch with the diversity of opinions and methods that already existed within economics. "The economics profession is strange in that
the more you move away from the seminar room to the public domain, the more the nuances get lost, especially on issues of trade."
He lamented the fact that while, in the classroom, the models of trade discuss losers and winners, and, as a result, the necessity
of policies of redistribution, in practice, an "arrogance and hubris" had led many economists to ignore these implications. "Rather
than speaking truth to power, so to speak, many economists became cheerleaders for globalisation."
In his 2011 book The Globalization Paradox
, Rodrik concluded that "we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination, and economic globalisation." The
results of the 2016 elections and referendums provide ample testimony of the justness of the thesis, with millions voting to push
back, for better or for worse, against the campaigns and institutions that promised more globalisation. "I'm not at all surprised
by the backlash," Rodrik told me. "Really, nobody should have been surprised."
But what, in any case, would "more globalisation" look like? For the same economists and writers who have started to rethink their
commitments to greater integration, it doesn't mean quite what it did in the early 2000s. It's not only the discourse that's changed:
globalisation itself has changed, developing into a more chaotic and unequal system than many economists predicted. The benefits
of globalisation have been largely concentrated in a handful of Asian countries. And even in those countries, the good times may
be running out.
Statistics from Global Inequality
, a 2016 book by the development economist Branko Milanović, indicate that in relative terms the greatest benefits of globalisation
have accrued to a rising "emerging middle class", based preponderantly in China. But the cons are there, too: in absolute terms,
the largest gains have gone to what is commonly called "the 1%" – half of whom are based in the US. Economist Richard Baldwin has
shown in his recent book, The Great Convergence, that nearly all of the gains from globalisation have been concentrated in six countries.
Barring some political catastrophe, in which rightwing populism continued to gain, and in which globalisation would be the least
of our problems – Wolf admitted that he was "not at all sure" that this could be ruled out – globalisation was always going to slow;
in fact, it already has. One reason, says Wolf, was that "a very, very large proportion of the gains from globalisation – by no means
all – have been exploited. We have a more open world economy to trade than we've ever had before." Citing The Great Convergence,
Wolf noted that supply chains have already expanded, and that future developments, such as automation and the use of robots, looked
to undermine the promise of a growing industrial workforce. Today, the political priorities were less about trade and more about
the challenge of retraining workers , as technology renders old jobs obsolete and transforms the world of work.
Rodrik, too, believes that globalisation, whether reduced or increased, is unlikely to produce the kind of economic effects it
once did. For him, this slowdown has something to do with what he calls "premature deindustrialisation". In the past, the simplest
model of globalisation suggested that rich countries would gradually become "service economies", while emerging economies picked
up the industrial burden. Yet recent statistics show the world as a whole is deindustrialising. Countries that one would have expected
to have more industrial potential are going through the stages of automation more quickly than previously developed countries did,
and thereby failing to develop the broad industrial workforce seen as a key to shared prosperity.
For both Rodrik and Wolf, the political reaction to globalisation bore possibilities of deep uncertainty. "I really have found
it very difficult to decide whether what we're living through is a blip, or a fundamental and profound transformation of the world
– at least as significant as the one that brought about the first world war and the Russian revolution," Wolf told me. He cited his
agreement with economists such as Summers that shifting away from the earlier emphasis on globalisation had now become a political
priority; that to pursue still greater liberalisation was like showing "a red rag to a bull" in terms of what it might do to the
already compromised political stability of the western world.
Rodrik pointed to a belated emphasis, both among political figures and economists, on the necessity of compensating those displaced
by globalisation with retraining and more robust welfare states. But pro-free-traders had a history of cutting compensation: Bill
Clinton passed Nafta, but failed to expand safety nets. "The issue is that the people are rightly not trusting the centrists who
are now promising compensation," Rodrik said. "One reason that Hillary Clinton didn't get any traction with those people is that
she didn't have any credibility."
Rodrik felt that economics commentary failed to register the gravity of the situation: that there were increasingly few avenues
for global growth, and that much of the damage done by globalisation – economic and political – is irreversible. "There is a sense
that we're at a turning point," he said. "There's a lot more thinking about what can be done. There's a renewed emphasis on compensation
– which, you know, I think has come rather late."
"... Neoliberalism and its usual prescriptions – always more markets, always less government – are in fact a perversion of mainstream economics. ..."
"... The term is used as a catchall for anything that smacks of deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation or fiscal austerity. Today it is routinely reviled as a shorthand for the ideas and practices that have produced growing economic insecurity and inequality, led to the loss of our political values and ideals, and even precipitated our current populist backlash. ..."
"... The use of the term "neoliberal" exploded in the 1990s, when it became closely associated with two developments, neither of which Peters's article had mentioned. One of these was financial deregulation, which would culminate in the 2008 financial crash and in the still-lingering euro debacle . The second was economic globalisation, which accelerated thanks to free flows of finance and to a new, more ambitious type of trade agreement. Financialisation and globalisation have become the most overt manifestations of neoliberalism in today's world. ..."
"... That neoliberalism is a slippery, shifting concept, with no explicit lobby of defenders, does not mean that it is irrelevant or unreal. Who can deny that the world has experienced a decisive shift toward markets from the 1980s on? Or that centre-left politicians – Democrats in the US, socialists and social democrats in Europe – enthusiastically adopted some of the central creeds of Thatcherism and Reaganism, such as deregulation, privatisation, financial liberalisation and individual enterprise? Much of our contemporary policy discussion remains infused with principles supposedly grounded in the concept of homo economicus , the perfectly rational human being, found in many economic theories, who always pursues his own self-interest. ..."
Neoliberalism and its usual prescriptions – always more markets, always less government – are in fact a perversion of
mainstream economics.
As even its harshest critics concede, neoliberalism is hard to pin down. In broad terms, it
denotes a preference for markets over government, economic incentives over cultural norms, and
private entrepreneurship over collective action. It has been used to describe a wide range of
phenomena – from Augusto Pinochet to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, from the
Clinton Democrats and the UK's New Labour to the economic opening in China and the reform of
the welfare state in Sweden.
The term is used as a catchall for anything that smacks of deregulation, liberalisation,
privatisation or fiscal austerity. Today it is routinely reviled as a shorthand for the ideas
and practices that have produced growing economic insecurity and inequality, led to the loss of
our political values and ideals, and even precipitated our current populist backlash.
We live in the age of neoliberalism, apparently. But who are neoliberalism's adherents and
disseminators – the neoliberals themselves? Oddly, you have to go back a long time to
find anyone explicitly embracing neoliberalism. In 1982, Charles Peters, the longtime editor of
the political magazine Washington Monthly, published an essay titled
A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto . It makes for interesting reading 35 years later, since the
neoliberalism it describes bears little resemblance to today's target of derision. The
politicians Peters names as exemplifying the movement are not the likes of Thatcher and Reagan,
but rather liberals – in the US sense of the word – who have become disillusioned
with unions and big government and dropped their prejudices against markets and the
military.
The use of the term "neoliberal" exploded in the 1990s, when it became closely associated
with two developments, neither of which Peters's article had mentioned. One of these was
financial deregulation, which would culminate in the 2008
financial crash and in the still-lingering euro debacle . The second was economic
globalisation, which accelerated thanks to free flows of finance and to a new, more ambitious
type of trade agreement. Financialisation and globalisation have become the most overt
manifestations of neoliberalism in today's world.
That neoliberalism is a slippery, shifting concept, with no explicit lobby of defenders,
does not mean that it is irrelevant or unreal. Who can deny that the world has experienced a
decisive shift toward markets from the 1980s on? Or that centre-left politicians –
Democrats in the US, socialists and social democrats in Europe – enthusiastically adopted
some of the central creeds of Thatcherism and Reaganism, such as deregulation, privatisation,
financial liberalisation and individual enterprise? Much of our contemporary policy discussion
remains infused with principles supposedly grounded in the concept of homo
economicus , the perfectly rational human being, found in many economic theories, who
always pursues his own self-interest.
But the looseness of the term neoliberalism also means that criticism of it often misses the
mark. There is nothing wrong with markets, private entrepreneurship or incentives – when
deployed appropriately. Their creative use lies behind the most significant economic
achievements of our time. As we heap scorn on neoliberalism, we risk throwing out some of
neoliberalism's useful ideas.
The real trouble is that mainstream economics shades too easily into ideology, constraining
the choices that we appear to have and providing cookie-cutter solutions. A proper
understanding of the economics that lie behind neoliberalism would allow us to identify –
and to reject – ideology when it masquerades as economic science. Most importantly, it
would help us to develop the institutional imagination we badly need to redesign capitalism for
the 21st century.
N eoliberalism is typically understood as being based on key tenets of mainstream economic
science. To see those tenets without the ideology, consider this thought experiment. A
well-known and highly regarded economist lands in a country he has never visited and knows
nothing about. He is brought to a meeting with the country's leading policymakers. "Our country
is in trouble," they tell him. "The economy is stagnant, investment is low, and there is no
growth in sight." They turn to him expectantly: "Please tell us what we should do to make our
economy grow."
The economist pleads ignorance and explains that he knows too little about the country to
make any recommendations. He would need to study the history of the economy, to analyse the
statistics, and to travel around the country before he could say anything.
Facebook
Twitter Pinterest Tony Blair and Bill Clinton: centre-left politicians who enthusiastically
adopted some of the central creeds of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Photograph: Reuters
But his hosts are insistent. "We understand your reticence, and we wish you had the time for
all that," they tell him. "But isn't economics a science, and aren't you one of its most
distinguished practitioners? Even though you do not know much about our economy, surely there
are some general theories and prescriptions you can share with us to guide our economic
policies and reforms."
The economist is now in a bind. He does not want to emulate those economic gurus he has long
criticised for peddling their favourite policy advice. But he feels challenged by the question.
Are there universal truths in economics? Can he say anything valid or useful?
So he begins. The efficiency with which an economy's resources are allocated is a critical
determinant of the economy's performance, he says. Efficiency, in turn, requires aligning the
incentives of households and businesses with social costs and benefits. The incentives faced by
entrepreneurs, investors and producers are particularly important when it comes to economic
growth. Growth needs a system of property rights and contract enforcement that will ensure
those who invest can retain the returns on their investments. And the economy must be open to
ideas and innovations from the rest of the world.
But economies can be derailed by macroeconomic instability, he goes on. Governments must
therefore pursue a sound
monetary policy , which means restricting the growth of liquidity to the increase in
nominal money demand at reasonable inflation. They must ensure fiscal sustainability, so that
the increase in public debt does not outpace national income. And they must carry out
prudential regulation of banks and other financial institutions to prevent the financial system
from taking excessive risk.
Now he is warming to his task. Economics is not just about efficiency and growth, he adds.
Economic principles also carry over to equity and social policy. Economics has little to say about how
much redistribution a society should seek. But it does tell us that the tax base should be as
broad as possible, and that social programmes should be designed in a way that does not
encourage workers to drop out of the labour market.
By the time the economist stops, it appears as if he has laid out a fully fledged neoliberal
agenda. A critic in the audience will have heard all the code words: efficiency, incentives,
property rights, sound money, fiscal prudence. And yet the universal principles that the
economist describes are in fact quite open-ended. They presume a capitalist economy – one
in which investment decisions are made by private individuals and firms – but not much
beyond that. They allow for – indeed, they require – a surprising variety of
institutional arrangements.
So has the economist just delivered a neoliberal screed? We would be mistaken to think so,
and our mistake would consist of associating each abstract term – incentives, property
rights, sound money – with a particular institutional counterpart. And therein lies the
central conceit, and the fatal flaw, of neoliberalism: the belief that first-order economic
principles map on to a unique set of policies, approximated by a Thatcher/Reagan-style
agenda.
Consider property rights. They matter insofar as they allocate returns on investments. An
optimal system would distribute property rights to those who would make the best use of an
asset, and afford protection against those most likely to expropriate the returns. Property
rights are good when they protect innovators from free riders, but they are bad when they
protect them from competition. Depending on the context, a legal regime that provides the
appropriate incentives can look quite different from the standard US-style regime of private
property rights.
This may seem like a semantic point with little practical import; but China's phenomenal
economic success is largely due to its orthodoxy-defying institutional tinkering. China turned
to markets, but did not copy western practices in property rights. Its reforms produced
market-based incentives through a series of unusual institutional arrangements that were better
adapted to the local context. Rather than move directly from state to private ownership, for
example, which would have been stymied by the weakness of the prevailing legal structures, the
country relied on mixed forms of ownership that provided more effective property rights for
entrepreneurs in practice. Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs), which spearheaded Chinese
economic growth during the 1980s, were collectives owned and controlled by local governments.
Even though TVEs were publicly owned, entrepreneurs received the protection they needed against
expropriation. Local governments had a direct stake in the profits of the firms, and hence did
not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
China relied on a range of such innovations, each delivering the economist's higher-order
economic principles in unfamiliar institutional arrangements. For instance, it shielded its
large state sector from global competition, establishing special economic zones where foreign
firms could operate with different rules than in the rest of the economy. In view of such
departures from orthodox blueprints, describing China's economic reforms as neoliberal –
as critics are inclined to do – distorts more than it reveals. If we are to call this
neoliberalism, we must surely look more kindly on the ideas behind the most dramatic
poverty reduction in history.
One might protest that China's institutional innovations were purely transitional. Perhaps
it will have to converge on western-style institutions to sustain its economic progress. But
this common line of thinking overlooks the diversity of capitalist arrangements that still
prevails among advanced economies, despite the considerable homogenisation of our policy
discourse.
What, after all, are western institutions? The size of the public sector in OECD countries
varies, from a third of the economy in Korea to nearly 60% in Finland. In Iceland, 86% of
workers are members of a trade union; the comparable number in Switzerland is just 16%. In the
US, firms can fire workers almost at will;
French labour laws have historically required employers to jump through many hoops first.
Stock markets have grown to a total value of nearly one-and-a-half times GDP in the US; in
Germany, they are only a third as large, equivalent to just 50% of GDP.
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Twitter Pinterest 'China turned to markets, but did not copy western practices ... '
Photograph: AFP/Getty
The idea that any one of these models of taxation, labour relations or financial
organisation is inherently superior to the others is belied by the varying economic fortunes
that each of these economies have experienced over recent decades. The US has gone through
successive periods of angst in which its economic institutions were judged inferior to those in
Germany, Japan, China, and now possibly Germany again. Certainly, comparable levels of wealth
and productivity can be produced under very different models of capitalism. We might even go a
step further: today's prevailing models probably come nowhere near exhausting the range of what
might be possible, and desirable, in the future.
The visiting economist in our thought experiment knows all this, and recognises that the
principles he has enunciated need to be filled in with institutional detail before they become
operational. Property rights? Yes, but how? Sound money? Of course, but how? It would perhaps
be easier to criticise his list of principles for being vacuous than to denounce it as a
neoliberal screed.
Still, these principles are not entirely content-free. China, and indeed all countries that
managed to develop rapidly, demonstrate the utility of those principles once they are properly
adapted to local context. Conversely, too many economies have been driven to ruin courtesy of
political leaders who chose to violate them. We need look no further than
Latin American populists or eastern European communist regimes to appreciate the practical
significance of sound money, fiscal sustainability and private incentives.
O f course, economics goes beyond a list of abstract, largely common-sense principles. Much
of the work of economists consists of developing
stylised models of how economies work and then confronting those models with evidence.
Economists tend to think of what they do as progressively refining their understanding of the
world: their models are supposed to get better and better as they are tested and revised over
time. But progress in economics happens differently.
Economists study a social reality that is unlike the physical universe. It is completely
manmade, highly malleable and operates according to different rules across time and space.
Economics advances
not by settling on the right model or theory to answer such questions, but by improving our
understanding of the diversity of causal relationships. Neoliberalism and its customary
remedies – always more markets, always less government – are in fact a perversion
of mainstream economics. Good economists know that the correct answer to any question in
economics is: it depends.
Does an increase in the minimum wage depress employment? Yes, if the labour market is really
competitive and employers have no control over the wage they must pay to attract workers; but
not necessarily otherwise. Does trade liberalisation increase economic growth? Yes, if it
increases the profitability of industries where the bulk of investment and innovation takes
place; but not otherwise. Does more government spending increase employment? Yes, if there is
slack in the economy and wages do not rise; but not otherwise. Does monopoly harm innovation?
Yes and no, depending on a whole host of market circumstances.
Facebook
Twitter Pinterest 'Today [neoliberalism] is routinely reviled as a shorthand for the ideas
that have produced growing economic inequality and precipitated our current populist backlash'
Trump signing an order to take the US out of the TPP trade pact. Photograph: AFP/Getty
In economics, new models rarely supplant older models. The basic competitive-markets model
dating back to Adam Smith has been modified over time by the inclusion, in rough historical
order, of monopoly, externalities, scale economies, incomplete and asymmetric information,
irrational behaviour and many other real-world features. But the older models remain as useful
as ever. Understanding how real markets operate necessitates using different lenses at
different times.
Perhaps maps offer the best analogy. Just like economic models, maps are highly
stylised representations of reality . They are useful precisely because they abstract from
many real-world details that would get in the way. But abstraction also implies that we need a
different map depending on the nature of our journey. If we are travelling by bike, we need a
map of bike trails. If we are to go on foot, we need a map of footpaths. If a new subway is
constructed, we will need a subway map – but we wouldn't throw out the older maps.
Economists tend to be very good at making maps, but not good enough at choosing the one most
suited to the task at hand. When confronted with policy questions of the type our visiting
economist faces, too many of them resort to "benchmark" models that favour the
laissez-faire approach. Kneejerk solutions and hubris replace the richness and humility of
the discussion in the seminar room. John Maynard Keynes once defined economics as the "science
of thinking in terms of models, joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant".
Economists typically have trouble with the "art" part.
This, too, can be illustrated with a parable. A journalist calls an economics professor for
his view on whether free trade is a good idea. The professor responds enthusiastically in the
affirmative. The journalist then goes undercover as a student in the professor's advanced
graduate seminar on international trade. He poses the same question: is free trade good? This
time the professor is stymied. "What do you mean by 'good'?" he responds. "And good for whom?"
The professor then launches into an extensive exegesis that will ultimately culminate in a
heavily hedged statement: "So if the long list of conditions I have just described are
satisfied, and assuming we can tax the beneficiaries to compensate the losers, freer trade has
the potential to increase everyone's wellbeing." If he is in an expansive mood, the professor
might add that the effect of free trade on an economy's longterm growth rate is not clear
either, and would depend on an altogether different set of requirements.
This professor is rather different from the one the journalist encountered previously. On
the record, he exudes self-confidence, not reticence, about the appropriate policy. There is
one and only one model, at least as far as the public conversation is concerned, and there is a
single correct answer, regardless of context. Strangely, the professor deems the knowledge that
he imparts to his advanced students to be inappropriate (or dangerous) for the general public.
Why?
The roots of such behaviour lie deep in the culture of the economics profession. But one
important motive is the zeal to display the profession's crown jewels – market
efficiency, the invisible hand, comparative advantage – in untarnished form, and to
shield them from attack by self-interested barbarians, namely
the protectionists . Unfortunately, these economists typically ignore the barbarians on the
other side of the issue – financiers and multinational corporations whose motives are no
purer and who are all too ready to hijack these ideas for their own benefit.
As a result, economists' contributions to public debate are often biased in one direction,
in favour of more trade, more finance and less government. That is why economists have
developed a reputation as cheerleaders for neoliberalism, even if mainstream economics is very
far from a paean to laissez-faire. The economists who let their enthusiasm for free markets run
wild are in fact not being true to their own discipline.
H ow then should we think about globalisation in order to liberate it from the grip of
neoliberal practices? We must begin by understanding the positive potential of global markets.
Access to world markets in goods, technologies and capital has played an important role in
virtually all of the economic miracles of our time. China is the most recent and powerful
reminder of this historical truth, but it is not the only case. Before China, similar miracles
were performed by South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and a few non-Asian countries such as Mauritius
. All of these countries embraced globalisation rather than turn their backs on it, and they
benefited handsomely.
Defenders of the existing economic order will quickly point to these examples when
globalisation comes into question. What they will fail to say is that almost all of these
countries joined the world economy by violating neoliberal strictures. South Korea and Taiwan,
for instance, heavily subsidised their exporters, the former through the financial system and
the latter through tax incentives. All of them eventually removed most of their import
restrictions, long after economic growth had taken off.
But none, with the sole exception of Chile in the 1980s under Pinochet, followed the
neoliberal recommendation of a rapid opening-up to imports. Chile's
neoliberal experiment eventually produced the worst economic crisis in all of Latin
America. While the details differ across countries, in all cases governments played an active
role in restructuring the economy and buffering it against a volatile external environment.
Industrial policies, restrictions on capital flows and currency controls – all prohibited
in the neoliberal playbook – were rampant.
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Twitter Pinterest Protest against Nafta in Mexico City in 2008: since the reforms of the
mid-90s, the country's economy has underperformed. Photograph: EPA
By contrast, countries that stuck closest to the neoliberal model of globalisation were
sorely disappointed. Mexico provides a particularly sad example. Following a series of
macroeconomic crises in the mid-1990s, Mexico embraced macroeconomic orthodoxy, extensively
liberalised its economy, freed up the financial system, sharply reduced import restrictions and
signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). These policies did produce
macroeconomic stability and a significant rise in foreign trade and internal investment. But
where it counts – in overall productivity and economic growth – the
experiment failed . Since undertaking the reforms, overall productivity in Mexico has
stagnated, and the economy has underperformed even by the undemanding standards of Latin
America.
These outcomes are not a surprise from the perspective of sound economics. They are yet
another manifestation of the need for economic policies to be attuned to the failures to which
markets are prone, and to be tailored to the specific circumstances of each country. No single
blueprint fits all.
A s Peters's 1982 manifesto attests, the meaning of neoliberalism has changed considerably
over time as the label has acquired harder-line connotations with respect to deregulation,
financialisation and globalisation. But there is one thread that connects all versions of
neoliberalism, and that is the
emphasis on economic growth . Peters wrote in 1982 that the emphasis was warranted because
growth is essential to all our social and political ends – community, democracy,
prosperity. Entrepreneurship, private investment and removing obstacles that stand in the way
(such as excessive regulation) were all instruments for achieving economic growth. If a similar
neoliberal manifesto were penned today, it would no doubt make the same point.
Critics often point out that this emphasis on economics debases and sacrifices other
important values such as equality, social inclusion, democratic deliberation and justice. Those
political and social objectives obviously matter enormously, and in some contexts they matter
the most. They cannot always, or even often, be achieved by means of technocratic economic
policies; politics must play a central role.
Still, neoliberals are not wrong when they argue that our most cherished ideals are more
likely to be attained when our economy is vibrant, strong and growing. Where they are wrong is
in believing that there is a unique and universal recipe for improving economic performance, to
which they have access. The fatal flaw of neoliberalism is that it does not even get the
economics right. It must be rejected on its own terms for the simple reason that it is bad
economics.
A version of this article first appeared in Boston
Review
I'm finding it hard to think of examples where the formerly norm-giving group becomes derided or humiliated.
You can probably try to look at the situation in (now independent) republics of the former USSR. Simplifying previously oppressed
group, given a lucky chance, most often strive for dominance and oppression of other groups including and especially former dominant
group. This is an eternal damnation of ethno/cultural nationalism.
And not only it (look at Mutual Help and The State in Shantytowns.) In them ethnic comminutes often own protection markets,
offer services that hire people and replace the state, pay off gang leaders. they also provide some community support for particular
ethnic group, enforce the rules of trade within themselves, etc. In GB the abuse of children by ethnic gangs was sickening (
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/sep/30/abuse-children-asian-communities
)
In many cases of ethnic/cultural nationalism this looks more like a competition for resources with the smoke screen of noble
intentions/human rights/past oppression/ humiliations/etc
Or you can look at the language policy in the USA and the actual situation in some areas/institutions of Florida and California
and how English speakers feel in those areas/institutions. Or in some areas of Quebec in Canada.
That actually suggests another meaning of famous Randolph Bourne quote " War is the health of the state " (said in the midst
of the First World War.) It bring the unity unachievable in peace time or by any other methods, albeit temporarily (from Ch 14.
Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States ):
the governments flourished, patriotism bloomed, class struggle was stilled, and young men died in frightful numbers on the
battlefields-often for a hundred yards of land, a line of trenches.
In the United States, not yet in the war, there was worry about the health of the state. Socialism was growing. The IWW
seemed to be everywhere. Class conflict was intense. In the summer of 1916, during a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco,
a bomb exploded, killing nine people; two local radicals, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were arrested and would spend twenty
years in prison. Shortly after that Senator James Wadsworth of New York suggested compulsory military training for all males
to avert the danger that "these people of ours shall be divided into classes." Rather: "We must let our young men know that
they owe some responsibility to this country."
The supreme fulfillment of that responsibility was taking place in Europe. Ten million were to die on the battlefield; 20
million were to die of hunger and disease related to the war. And no one since that day has been able to show that the war
brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life. The rhetoric of the socialists, that it was an "imperialist
war," now seems moderate and hardly arguable. The advanced capitalist countries of Europe were fighting over boundaries, colonies,
spheres of influence; they were competing for Alsace-Lorraine, the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East.
Neo-McCarthyism now serves a somewhat similar purpose in the USA. Among other thing (like absolving Hillary from her fiasco
to "deux ex machine" trick instead of real reason -- the crisis and rejection of neoliberalism by the sizable strata of the USA
population) it is an attempt to unify the nation after 2016.
Mirowski's book is one of the best on the crisis: he mixes the eye of an anthropologist or journalist examining our daily lives
and then leaps up to 20,000 feet with ease to provide a wider intellectual and historical context. His take is novel, certainly
from the Left, but well informed of debates on the Right. Empirical, but with a theoretical lens as well. If you want to understand
not just the economics or politics of what happened, but to situate those events within a wider history of the ideas that played
in a role in the Recession, Mirowski has an incredibly erudite account.
Long review:
Mirowski is a member of the "Institute for New Economic Thinking", an non-profit aimed to correct the orthodoxies of economics,
"neoliberal" ideas in particular. He opens this book with a report from one of the first meetings, which happened to feature "bold
and original thinkers" like Ken "Excel for Dummies" Rogoff, Larry Summers and Niall Ferguson. The meeting ended with a timid call
to add an extra chapter to standard Econ101 textbooks briefly describing the crisis. Mirowski further rightly groans at hand-wringing
over "happiness measurements", morality in markets and peevish complaints of "greedy bankers" (as if avarice has only existed
in the past ten years.)
How did this rigidity come to be? Mirowski answers by suggesting that we must understand neoliberalism as a Russian doll. The
innermost doll of experts emerged from the Mont Pelerlin Society, an organization that was by design very hierarchical. He describes,
for instance, correspondence between Popper and Hayek. Popper, following his philosophy of open debate suggested that MPS should
have at least one respectable socialist. Hayek shut down this idea, insisting that agreement on first principles was a necessary
condition for membership. This tightly networked group of intellectuals slowly incubated neoliberalism and developed a political
strategy for propagating it.
Mirowski further points out that the Neoliberal Thought Collective were excellent sloganeers. Friedman's most famous academic
text, for instance, argues that a lack of government intervention caused the Great Depression: a series of rural bank failures
caused by an overly tight supply of money. However, when Friedman penned his Newsweek column he claimed with a straight face that
the government *caused* the Recession, that is, by a lack of action in expanding the supply of money and reducing interest rates.
This is how the Russian doll works: nuance for the insiders, ignorance for the outsiders.
There is a further layer to the doll though. Pivoting off of Foucault's final lectures at the College of France, Mirowski argues
that there is an everyday neoliberalism that has emerged. Beyond political theory and public policy, neoliberalism is experienced
on a quotidian level and it is on that potent terrain that it has survived the crisis. I, right now, am taking time out of my
day to write a book review which I will be paid nothing for, which is in the service of the Bezo empire to sell even more books
and probably destroy more local bookshops and which will be used to further quantify me into some bits of data in the sky so I
can be marketed to even more heavily. But but but: I am individually expressing myself! How free am I! The neoliberal self is
a creature coerced into being a "free" entrepreneur. It is the poor un/underemployed soul who thinks himself to be a failure or
inadequate because he was not lucky enough to ride the right wave. The old liberal arts dictum to "know thy self" becomes "express
thy self, and monetize it too!" This middle chapter here is the most engrossing part of the book. Mirowski delves into a sundry
of sources on our culture and then leverages a novel and erudite analysis of Foucault to bring it all into sharp focus.
In closing, it is truly ironic that the other review of this book is so gravely concerned that Mirowski might be a socialist.
We have a wonderful little anthropological artifact here of the NTC at work: "Whatever this book says, it's got 'Red' in a chapter
title. I am a Very Reasonable Person and thus must be suspicious." Let me assure him/her: there are no calls for a violent revolution
of the proletariat. On the contrary, Mirowski heads out to the outermost layer of the doll and analyzes why neoliberalism won.
In particular, he argues that the NTC provided a powerful account of the market as a natural entity that *cannot* be messed with.
Consequently, the Recession had nothing to do with the structure of capitalism itself, it was just a "once in a lifetime" moment
akin to a natural disaster. An act of God.
Mirowski's careful history here shows that just the opposite is true. There was a concerted effort to propagate a particular
ignorance and the Recession itself is by no means removed from that particular effort.
401(k) Millionaires Surge To Record Level Under Trump by Tyler Durden Sat, 02/22/2020 - 19:00
A Fidelity Investments
press release on Thursday said the number of customers with more than $1 million in their
409k
There's a reason why President Trump touted 401k growth during his State of the Union
address last week, because balances are increasing, and it will help him win the
election.
Fidelity noted that 401k millionaires soared last quarter, reaching a record level.
Customers with the brokerage house that have over one million dollars in their 401k hit
233,000, up from 200,000 in Q3, a 17% jump M/M.
The number of IRA millionaires increased to 208,000, also a record high and an increase
from 182,400 in Q3.
All of these new 401k and IRA millionaires were created through President Trump's
pressure on the Federal Reserve to unleash easy money policies to boost the stock
market.
And, of course, as we all know, JPM's
drain of liquidity via Money Markets and reserves parked at the Fed promoted a liquidity
crisis that resulted in "Not QE," which allowed even more liquidity to flow into the stock
market starting last September, the same period when all of these investment accounts soared in
value. Coincidence?
Kevin Barry, president of Workplace Investing at Fidelity Investments, noted in the
release that "growth in savings levels over the last 10 years demonstrates the positive impact
of taking a long-term approach to retirement, and recent Fidelity research demonstrates workers
who do so have reason to feel increasingly confident about their retirement readiness."
"However, as we enter a new decade and continue to see markets rise and fall, it's more
important than ever to remember some of the important elements of a successful retirement
strategy – these include maintaining positive savings habits, ensuring your account has
the right balance of stocks, bonds, and cash, and continuing to focus on your long-term
savings goals," Barry added.
Every chance Trump gets, he tweets or tells everyone that their 409k
Raoul Pal of Real Vision had a good take on it:
The irresponsiblity of this, telling the average person to take more risks this late in
the cycle is simply staggering, regardless of what the markets do. To make them think a 50%
return is low lacks any fiduciary responsibility. This is worse than the Greenspan housing
comments. https://t.co/UqrFbYmoXM
It seems that the Fed's easy money policies over the last year, juicing markets to
all-time highs, could be a vote of confidence by the central bank to get Trump
reelected.
She does not use the term neoliberalism but she provide interesting perspective about
connection of neoliberalism and Trotskyism. It is amazing fact that most of them seriously
studied communist ideology at universities.
Trotskyites are never constrained by morality and they are obsessed with raw power
(especially political power) and forceful transformation of the society. They are for global dominance so they were early
adherents of "Full spectrum Dominance" doctirne approporitated later be US neocons. Their Dream -- global run from Washington
neoliberal empire is a mirror of the dream of Trotskyites of global communist empire run from Moscow (Trotsky "Permanent war" till
the total victory of communism idea)
Inability to understand that neoliberal is undermines Diana West thinking, but still she is a good researcher and she managed
to reveal some interesting facts and tendencies. She intuitively understand that both are globalist ideologies, but that
about all she managed to understand. Bad for former DIA specialist on the USSR and former colleague of Colonel Lang (see
Sic Semper Tyrannis)
It is funny that Sanders is being accused of being a 'self-identified' socialist, while neoliberal elite is shoulder-deep in socialism for the 1%
and enjoy almost unlimited access to free Fed funds.
I received my copy just a few days before the Mueller investigation closed shop. There is
an old saying "You can't tell the players without a program." As the aftermath of the Mueller
investigation begins, you need this book. Some pundits and observers of the political scene
have observed that the Mueller investigation didn't come about because of any real concern
about "Trump Russia collusion," it was manufactured to protect the deep state from a
non-political interloper. That's the case Diana West makes and does it with her exceptional
knowledge of the Cold War and the current jihad wars. Not to mention her deadly aim with her
rhetorical darts.
The Red Thread by Diana West
Diana states, "the anti-Trump conspiracy is not about Democrats and Republicans. It is not
about the ebb and flow of political power, lawfully and peacefully transferred. It is about
globalists and nationalists, just as the president says. They are locked in the old and
continuous Communist/anti-Communist struggle, and fighting to the end, whether We, the
anti-Communists, recognize it or not."
Diana traces the Red Thread running through the swamp, she names names and relates the
history of the Red players. She asks the questions, Why? Why so many Soviet-style acts of
deception perpetrated from inside the federal government against the American electoral
process? Why so many uncorroborated dossiers of Russian provenance influencing our politics?
Why such a tangle of communist and socialist roots in the anti-Trump conspiracy?
In this book, these questions will be answered.
If you have read her book "American Betrayal," I'm sure you will have a good idea about
what is going on. I did. I just didn't know the major players and the red history behind each
of them.
The book is very interesting and short, only 104 pages, but it is not finished yet. Easy
to read but very disturbing to know the length and width of the swamp, the depth, we may not
know for a long time. I do feel better knowing that there are people like Diana uncovering
and shining a light into the darkness. Get the book, we all need to know why this is
happening and who the enemies are behind it. Our freedom depends on it.
Listening to the howls from Democrats and the applause from Republicans, one would think
President Trump's proposed fiscal year 2021 budget is a radical assault on the welfare state.
The truth is the budget contains some minor spending cuts, most of which are not even real
cuts. Instead they are reductions in the "projected rate of growth." This is equivalent of
saying you are sticking to your diet because you ate five chocolate chip cookies when you
wanted to eat ten.
President Trump's plan reduces the Education Department's budget by nearly eight percent,
leaving the department with "only" 66.6 billion dollars. Cuts to other departments are
similarly small, while reductions in entitlement spending consist mostly of reforms that will
not affect most of those dependent on these programs.
President Trump deserves credit for proposing an 11.6 billion dollars cut in funding for the
Department of State and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Foreign aid does
little to help impoverished people overseas. Instead, it benefits foreign government officials
willing to do the US government's bidding. The State Department and USAID are extensively
involved in US intervention abroad, including efforts to overthrow governments.
President Trump's budget proposes a number of increases in spending. For example, his budget
spends around 900 million additional dollars on vocational education. It also includes
additional spending on items including infrastructure and childcare.
Few in DC have expressed concern over the fact that President Trump's 4.8 trillion dollars
budget proposal is the largest budget in American history. There is also little outcry from
supposedly antiwar progressive Democrats over Trump's proposal to spend hundreds of billions of
dollars on militarism. This is not surprising, as many progressives are happy to support
increased warfare spending as long as conservatives go along with increased welfare spending.
Similarly, many conservatives are happy to support increased welfare spending as long as it
means that progressives will vote for increased warfare spending. So, Congress is unlikely to
approve any of President Trump's spending cuts, but Congress will gleefully agree to all of his
spending increases.
Even if Congress agrees to all of President Trump's cuts, federal deficits will still be
over one trillion dollars for the next several years. However, President Trump claims the
budget will balance in 15 years. In order to show a balanced budget by 2035, the administration
assumes three percent economic growth for most of the next decade. This level of growth is
unlikely to come to pass. Instead, the current boom will likely end soon, and the economy will
experience another major recession. Signs that we are on the verge of a downturn include rising
homelessness and the Federal Reserve's bailout of the repurchasing market.
The current economic boom is built on debt, and the debt-based economy is facilitated by the
Federal Reserve's easy money policies. The massive amount of debt held by consumers,
businesses, and especially government is the main reason the Fed feels compelled to maintain
historically low interest rates. If rates were to increase to market levels, government
interest payments would be unstable. This would cause the government debt bubble to burst,
leading to a major crisis. However, continuing on the current path of low interest rates will
inevitably lead to a dollar crisis and a collapse of the welfare-warfare Keynesian system.
Continuing to waste billions on wars abroad and failed programs at home while pretending
that we can avoid a crisis via phony cuts and Fed-fueled growth will only make the inevitable
collapse more painful. The only way to avoid economic disaster is to cut spending and audit,
then end, the Federal Reserve.
In her fourth book Mayer draws on court records, extensive
interviews, and many private archives to examine the growing political influence of extreme libertarians among the one percent,
such as the Koch brothers, tracing their ideas about taxation and government regulation and their savvy use of lobbyists to
further an agenda that advances their own interests at the expense of meaningful economic, environmental, and labor reform. Mayer
is in conversation with James Bennet, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
People elected a
billionaire that is appointing other billionaires to fix the system that made them billionaires .... thats a special kind
of stupid !!!
Neoliberalism
opened the public sector up to the predatory capitalists. Financial markets love sick and violent people to increase
healthcare profits and keep the slave wage prison factories pumping. This is why Thatcher had to say "there's no such thing
as society" so she could embark on this fascist agenda to decimate the middle class. Fast forward 40 years, we now have
tent villages, medical bankruptcies, opioid suicides, increased school shootings, mass incarceration, media consolidated
Pentagon mouthpieces, educational corrosion and "market ideology" professors, fracking, poisoned aquifers, a defunct voting
system, career politicians who no longer write legislation, a bloated administrative unelected bureaucracy of agencies
addicted to the MIC budget. The Kochs choked democracy, nearly drowned government in the bathtub, as was their wish.
i've often
wondered how certain memes seem to pop up out of thin air and take on a life of their own, ever notice when a democrat
is in the white house the biggest concern is the debt and federal budget? republicans use this non-stop rhetoric to
stop any social programs, even gut them. this stuff goes back a while like the "liberal media", this election cycle i
was repeatedly confronted with "taxes are theft" when defending social programs, and during the health care debate there
was this "ayn rand" renaissance of "greed is good" taking hold. mayer is dead on with the corporate elites buying our
government, it's nothing less than a coup of our democracy, and they are shredding it to pieces.
Why haven't the
Kochs been arrested yet? They've been prosecuted dozens of times for violating government regulations and
pollution requirements. It does explain their economic libertarianism though, the sociopathic businessmen like the
Koch's want to get away with unreasonable pollution and paying workers 3 dollars an hour.
Earned income and capital gains should be taxed at the same
MUCH MORE PROGRESSIVE RATE, and at this point in our monstrous debt we need to consider a surcharge on huge wealth.
This situation has been brought about by the extreme right wingers like the Koch Brothers to try to bandrupt the
country into shutting down the whole social spending aspect of government ... which is basically fascist and
anti-democratic. Want to do the right thing. I think you create a list of human rights, and back up it but a UBI
Universal Basic Income, and then get rid of the minimum wage and let people find out where they stand in the economy
on their own merits. BUT, they also need free education and an infrastructure of government jobs to offer some
competition and experience to people so they can if they want and show the aptitude for private for-profit work.
Very interesting that you say that the Devos family is very
much involved in changing the education system to a right wing system... And Trump has Betsy Devos as his education
head. But I would say that public schooling has been degraded and moved to privately owned and run Charter Schools
since the first Bush President - and continued under Bill Clinton, Bush II and Obama. Both Democrats and Republicans
have been pushing the agenda to the right - where education is concerned. It is an illusion to believe that the
Democrats would move the needle in the opposite direction. The goal is to enslave all middle and working class people
with student debt. Student debt is the only debt you cannot extinguish through bankruptcy... it stays with you until
death. This debt enslavement then creates a society of desperate and compliant workers. This is the goal and it is an
agenda that corporations want - served by both democrats and republicans. And for most part it the agenda has been
achieved. So the dark money does coalesce for certain agendas. But the Devos's have a religious agenda where
education is concerned... they want to make sure Genesis is taught as science and ban the teaching of evolution and
things like that.
1984. Truly the symbolic year that the Orwellian
neoliberal war on Americans began. Why? To "lower our expectations" of the 60's decade. Democracy is fine until
it's been activated. Then the hammer comes down. But other countries enjoy a high quality of life, no threats of
revolt or overthrow, so why does this unnecessarily continue? It must just be greed. Exploiting the public sector
for profit.
I think the key
strategic 'leverage point' is the money, specifically the money system. We need to elect a Congress and President
ethical enough to pass the NEED Act which would create a public for-care money system, stop banks from creating
our money for profit and establish a monetary authority that would only be tasked with determining the amount of
new money required each year to support public objectives determined by Congress, like healthcare, education,
infrastructure and a citizen's dividend.
Excellent review
and information on KOCH BROS. Enjoyed. Thank you. Hope more people listen MORE about these Brothers (2) knowing
how they have infiltrated into our GOVT and now own GOP Congress/PENCE (lobbied for them w/Manafort) and TRUMP.
The are also friends w/Bush. Hence, Kavanaugh was put in as SCOTUS. Citizens United MUST BE REMOVED! Our democracy
is in danger. Hope it's not too late. I want my country back.
"To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of
the fate of human beings and their natural environment ...would result in the demolition of society." ~ Karl
Polanyi, 1944 We've had a President Koch for 40 years now. This book explains their takeover of government so that
predatory capitalists could turn social services into financial markets for exploitation and profit. This destroys
society but they didn't care.
Fred Koch made
his money building an oil industry for Stalin, then became anti-communist after returning with the money? Sounds like
guilt to me. Then Fred Koch worked for Hitler's war efforts. Fred became a John Bircher and his money went to his
four trust fund sons, the Koch Bros. who now stealth control U.S. politics and Republican politicians from the Cato
Institute, Heritage Foundation, Tea Party with black money support, including funding rightwing chairs and think
tanks .at all the Ivy League universities.They have much, much, much too much money. it's time to tax their pants off
so they understand what work. is.
- Koch brothers
story is hillarious , just for example Charles Koch got Defender of Justice award from the National Association of
Criminal Defense Lawyers , LOL
- Koch brothers
story is hillarious , just for example Charles Koch got Defender of Justice award from the National Association of
Criminal Defense Lawyers , LOL
It's fascinating
the Koch Brothers do not truly believe their own philosophy, because if they did they would go all the way in and
champion worker cooperatives = complete freedom, freedom from government and freedom from a dictator boss. Like
all ideologues with a quasi-engineering view of human relations and a Freudian fear of communism, they are blinded
by the merits of anything that sounds remotely like socialism even when it logically matches their more reasonable
libertarian ideals. In other words, they are fake libertarians, they are rank abusive authoritarian oligarchs,
wannabe plutocrats. Ironically the Koch Bros are closer to Stalin in their ideology than they are to Reagan.
Albert Morris, 1 year ago
Jane Mayer is in a class all her own as a journalist. God bless her. I hope her next project is on the corporate media itself
and its shameful railroading of Julian Assange. We need all the good journalism we can get.
James Gillis, 2 years ago
"Free Market is a utopia". I'm glad you said that so I can read your book knowing your political philosophy...
It seems that Japan's feared bureaucracy has handled the issue without
the advice from any specialist. Cruise ships are perfect to spread diseases. They have
central air condition and central septic systems that can spread viruses to every room on
board. There are many places on board which are commonly used. The crew is usually housed
in less than perfect conditions. Any suspected cases should have been taken off board
immediately. But these were simply told to stay in their cabins which they, of course, did
not do.
The Japanese military has some troops working on the ship but they are only now taking
protective measures which are still
less than sufficient :
About 50 staffers from the Self-Defense Forces are working on the vessel to examine the
passengers, disinfect cabins and transport patients. The ship was quarantined for two
weeks off Yokohama on Feb. 5 to prevent COVID-19 from spreading in Japan.
Those handling medicine are now required to wear masks, gloves, gowns and hair caps,
ministry officials said.
At a news conference, Kono admitted that the Defense Ministry applied the standards --
which are higher than those in use by health ministry officials working on the vessel --
after viewing a video from the ship posted by Dr. Kentaro Iwata of Kobe University
Hospital, who joined the disaster-relief team as a veteran infectious disease
specialist.
On Wednesday 500 Japanese passengers who had tested negative
were let go from the ship without further measures. But many of them will carry the
virus as more new confirmed cases from the ship still appear daily. These people should
have been further isolated. Letting them leave without such measures guarantees that new
outbreaks will soon appear throughout Japan.
This situation might have developed due to political pressure. Japan is supposed to hold
the summer Olympics later this year and it may have wanted to avoid bad headlines. To me it
seems that there will be no Olympics this year and that Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
will soon hear some harsh
public criticism .
Another big clusters established itself in Daegu, South Korea, where people from a
Christian sect infected each other during mass. There are currently some 130 such cases and
some 70 more spread elsewhere in South Korea.
Iran has a smaller cluster in Qom with 14 cases. It closed all schools and seminaries
and suspended religious gatherings in the city. Other countries report single new cases or
small clusters. This will continue as the disease races around the world. Large new
outbreaks will appear in those many countries which have less than perfect medical systems
or where the authorities want to suppress news of a smaller outbreak.
In the Ukraine rioters had to be brought under control when they protested
against quarantining evacuees from China near their villages.
The economic ripple effect of this epidemic and of the enormous quarantine in China will
be huge. It will be felt everywhere but especially in highly developed
industries :
The impacts on China both intrinsic and psychological are still vastly under estimated.
This is the largest containment/effective imprisonment via quarantine of human being in
world history. People are assuming no ripples from that.
The biggest factor that's not understood is the non linearity of supply chains. A two
week total shut down *does not* mean a two week delay in products to consumer. This is
very different from the tariff impacts, where pricing was adjusted.
A single component missing in a 500+ part product means all levels of production are
moot. Autos and consumer electronics are obvious examples. We have heard from multiple
auto players and Jaguar has publicly stated they have sub 2 weeks of operating
inventory.
Just In Time (JIT) production is a form of operational leverage. And like all forms of
leverage, there is a non linear downside effect. People are not putting it together that
this is a very big deal. It's not a 1 month hit. It's not a 1 quarter hit. It's an annual
hit *right now*.
Some large factories which depend on parts from China will soon have to shut down. Then
their other suppliers will also have to cease production. The loss of income will be felt
throughout the local economies.
The effects of the epidemic may well lead to an end of the globalization of production
processes. Companies will go back to buy locally to be as unaffected as possible from
similar future incidents. This might well be the most positive long term outcome of this
epidemic.
Some large factories which depend on parts from China will soon have to shut down. Then
their other suppliers will also have to cease production. The loss of income will be felt
throughout the local economies.
The ones who are insured won't be monetarily affected. The uninsured will. This may
trigger a bubble burst in the West, though.
The effects of the epidemic may well lead to an end of the globalization of production
processes. Companies will go back to buy locally to be as unaffected as possible from
similar future incidents. This might well be the most positive long term outcome of this
epidemic.
Globalization had already halted after 2008. That was the material base for the
so-called "populist" rise in the Western Civilization. Populism is a symptom, not the
cause, of the halt of globalization.
That doesn't mean, though, the the western countries are heading towards socialism. This
is specially the case with the First World countries, which have powerful armies, and thus
can restore (at least in part) their economies through dispossession of the weaker (Third
World) countries. The working classes of the First World tend to fascism, not
socialism.
That's why China is countering the death of globalization with OBOR. For socialism to
rise, there needs to be world prosperity. If the pot is small, fascism will rise again.
Infodemic continuing to spread.
Gullible people continuing to fail to understand that the real issue isn't the coronavirus,
it is the fear which the infodemic (and outright agitprop) is feeding - and which many of
these people are exacerbating.
China supplies enormous amounts of everything the world uses except energy.
Even food - China doesn't supply as much of the raw, but provides an enormous amount of
processing/handling.
And yes, "just in time" combined with the Lunar New Year holiday and a greatly prolonged
re-ramp time is going to impact everyone, everywhere.
The only question is how much.
The effects of the epidemic may well lead to an end of the globalization of production
processes. Companies will go back to buy locally to be as unaffected as possible from
similar future incidents. This might well be the most positive long term outcome of this
epidemic. I wholeheartedly agree but I have some trouble reconciling this with your
support of the EU and the British remainers.
Pepe Escobar writes about the possibility
that the virus is a bioweapon --but produced by whom? He looks at the Outlaw US
Empire's Hybrid War against China:
"There's no question coronavirus, so far, has been a Heaven-sent politically useful
tool, reaching, with minimum investment, the desired targets of maximized U.S. global power
– even if fleetingly, enhanced by a non-stop propaganda offensive – and China
relatively isolated with its economy semi paralyzed.
"Yet perspective is in order. The CDC estimated that up to 42.9 million people got sick
during the 2018-2019 flu season in the U.S. No less than 647,000 people were hospitalized.
And 61,200 died."
As far as I know, the bioweapon hypothesis has yet to be 100% disproven. IMO, it isn't.
I know how bacteriums and viruses share their DNA such that as I wrote previously humans
must always treat them as their #1 enemy/threat as they're potentially very deadly. It's
also a big mistake for the Outlaw US Empire to gloat about China's misfortune as it's not
immune whatsoever.
I read Escobar on your comment. He does have the Chinese and Persian perspective well in
hand. I still remember Trump at Mar-a-Lago treating Xi to 'beautiful piece of chocolate
cake', and bombing the Syrians.
A threat thrown at Xi and China. That was very telling and the threats, sanctions, have
occurred ever since non stop. This virus is all too convenient and once the dust settles we
may have some reciprocal action.
It is also hard to imagine how "first-world" countries will control the virus if it ever
does get a foothold, since they are scared of their own shadows and can't possibly compete
with the PRC when it comes to ruthlessness (at times there may be advantages to living in a
dictatorship ..)
Container shipping from Chinese ports has collapsed since the outbreak of coronavirus and
has yet to show any sign of recovery, threatening weeks of chaos for manufacturing supply
lines and the broader structure of global trade.
Almost half of the planned sailings on the route from Asia to North Europe have been
cancelled over the last four weeks. A parallel drama is unfolding on routes from the
Pacific Rim to the US and Latin America.
Lars Jensen from SeaIntelligence in Copenhagen said the loss of traffic is running at
300,000 containers a week. This will cause a logistical crunch in Europe in early March
even if the epidemic is brought under control quickly.[.]
Refrigerated ships full of frozen food are unable to enter Chinese ports because
berths are full.... cannot tap into electricity. No dockers or drivers.
In Europe Fiat Chrysler has suspended production. Jaguar Land Rover are flying in parts
in suitcases from China to UK.....
=========
Not just Europe. It's global. Could tip the world into a deep recession. Shortages
abound from everyday essentials,[Walmart, Family Dollar, DollarTree, Home Depot] food,
pharmaceuticals and manufacturers.
Food!!? Yes. garlic in the produce area.
You shop at Costco? Cheesecake - loaded with sodium benzoate- with milk being the last
ingredient listed on the label.
Good question: As one analyst asked; over the next 3-4 months who will want to open a
container from China or buy anything marked "Product of or Made in China?
I do not think the Chinese will counter-attack for this US bio weapon attack.
Why is it that many people dismiss this event as being biological warfare launched by
the US against China? Because it is too horrific. We know that the empire murders by the
thousands and millions without the slightest hesitation or guilt, but for some reason we
assume that even the empire is not so vile and malevolent as to use biological weapons. We
assume that the empire has some sort of conscience that will moderate its behavior, even
though we've never seen evidence of it.
These are people who built armies of literal head-choppers... death squads. They
gleefully murder respected statesmen on diplomatic missions. If they can do nothing else
then they will run you off the road just because they are hatefully psychotic.
This collectively psychotic culture cannot back down from their aggression if they are
losing, so they always escalate that aggression as far as they can.
America is losing its trade war with China, but is running out of economic weapons. From
within its bubble of psychosis America feels it has no choice but to escalate beyond
economic weapons. What other weapons can America possibly use to defeat China at this point
other than bio weapons?
There is no question that this is biological warfare.
That said, China is not going to retaliate and try to hurt Americans.
Why not?
Because unlike America they are not a culture of psychopaths.
Lost in this whole scaremongering affair is the CDC estimates that already for this flu
season 29 million have contracted the flu and 16,000 have died.
The American Sheeple can be herded anywhere with the MSM sheepdogs being controlled by
competent shepherds.
Mr. Gruff: I am told that bioweapons are not considered, by developed world spooks and
military types, to be "useful" as weapons. They are highly unstable, difficult to deploy
and tend to have lots of blowback, as in their effects being next to impossible to predict
and just as likely to result in non-desired outcomes as desired. Yes, Escobar makes a good
point that it sure all looks very, very suspicious, especially given the gigantic Western
anti-China info op that was marched out, and that right quick. But bioweapons are said to
not be considered serious as weapo0ns systems.
"...bioweapons are said to not be considered serious as weapons systems." --casey
@31
That just makes them all the more attractive to the "Shock Doctrine" CIA
gangsters. Agents of chaos love that sort of stuff. Nothing serious, just "bloodying
their nose" a little.
A bio-weapon is a dubious hypothesis, or at the very least, it's not exactly destined to
kill massess of "enemy" people. The virus kills basically 70/80+ years old people, which
isn't exactly a problem for most countries. The heavy load on healthcare system and its
cost might be a reason, but there's many other ways of attaining such a goal. A Trump-ian
desire to limit globalization perhaps, but doubtful as well.
That said, we can only state that China did its job, but it remains to be seen if other
countries are as effective. Japan obviously isn't. I suspect many European countries won't
as well - they're repatriating people from China and cruise ships by commercial flights and
don't bother with quarantines if people have no symptoms. Then there's Iran; was it some
Iranian who came back infected, was it Chinese workers who were let in unquarantined? (if
the latter, then it's a minor failure for China not to have screened them, though the
bigger failure would probably be Iranian immigration authorities)
B's last paragraph seems spot on. Chinese emissions of greenhouse gases are going down
big time, and other countries might learn the virtues of being self-sufficient as much as
possible.
While most of the discussion here centres on supply-chains and manufacturing exports from
China, in Australia it's our service sector that will be hit. We rely on at least three
relationships with China: education (Chinese fee-paying university students), tourism
(AUD$12bn/annum from PRC) and mining exports (iron-ore and coal). The first is the sector I
work in and my university is hysterical about the 6000 PRC students stranded in China under
the travel ban. Each of those students spends a lot of money here on accom, food, etc. and
represent about AUD$100m across the year including tuition fees. As b and others have said,
it's the ramifications and delayed unexamined consequences that will bite already
over-leveraged sectors. And the MSM are very silent on this aspect of the situation,
preferring instead to whip up fear and loathing toward the PRC, which may indeed be the
intent in order to prepare populations for a longer-term 'decoupling' from the Chinese
economy.
It's not that the Outlaw US Empire wouldn't deploy a bioweapon--it did in September
2001, anthrax--but as with The Omega Man and The Walking Dead they're too
unpredictable and can easily blowback on the users. IMO, chemical weapons that are
carcinogens like Agent Orange and glyphosate (Roundup) also ought to be classed as
bioweapons since they attack our biological systems in ways different from "classical"
chemical agents.
The economic affects have yet to even be felt; and if the virus was a bioweapon, its
blowback will severely damage Western economies as they're the most developed and
dependent. Otherwise, we have another deadly strain of virus that must be controlled just
as with all the other viruses.
I wish I had the optimism of some here ! Casey @ 31 for instance.
But we live in a real distopyian world, the most powerful country is run by a psychopathic
mass murderer whose population has been brain washed! To look for logic and reason in the
actions of the insane will never work! Their insane end of story.
So here is the truth it may save a lot of speculation.
Must read. But very long. Solid evidence as to intent, motavation and opportunity
What makes you think the ones using the bioweapons (CIA) care? If a million people in
poor health, or elderly, or with no insurance die in the US these monsters will put that on
the benefit side of the ledger. Less useless eaters leaching the empire's resources (most
of the US population are considered useless eaters now that the country has been largely
de-industrialized). Blowback doesn't faze them in the slightest. Head-chopping terrorists
are rabid dogs... very difficult to control. The CIA's version of James Bond got snuffed in
Benghazi by the very same rabid dogs that he was recruiting for the "American Foreign
Legion" . Has that blowback slowed the CIA down working with these animals? No, of
course not.
Posters are trying to maintain the completely unfounded belief that these people behind
the attacks are rational and intelligent. They are not. They are psychopaths, and that is
not hyperbole. These psychopaths actually like collateral damage, even when it
happens to citizens of the empire. They're laughing about the people dying on the cruise
ships. They are joking with each other about how stupid the useless eaters are for getting
on planes with infected people. They don't see this as a problem at all, aside perhaps from
being disappointed that more people in China are not dying.
Time and again people insist upon fooling themselves into disbelieving how monstrous
these psychotic freaks are, despite the fact of their monstrosity being revealed over and
over.
Try this: Read up on Jeffrey Dahmer. Maybe you think you know a little about him but
most people don't dig too deep because it makes them uncomfortable trying to imagine how
another human being could be that messed up.
Once you get a good idea of what I am referring to by "psychopath" , then try to
imagine an entire global crime syndicate made up of these types of individuals. If you work
at it you may start to get a grasp of what the CIA really is.
Yeah, I agree with your reasoning and have referred to The Establishment of being
wannabe Neros and Caligulas, and elsewhere I've described their philosophy as Libertinism
as designed by the Marquis de Sade. Some movies depicting CIA personnel behaviors come
close to portraying what you describe, like Mr Joshua and ilk from Lethal Weapon .
Not enough people seem to be troubled by the "fictional" Jason Bourne Story. Proven yet
again: Absolute Power corrupts absolutely. It's this aspect that's always troubled me when
thinking about how to disband the CIA. The fiction's horrid enough, and we know the truth's
worse.
Different strain a cold virus causing only a fraction of hospitalizations and deaths from
pneumonia from other infections, are way overhyped by China and international health
organizations. To what end?
Mandatory vaccinations down the road which will cause many adverse effects that will be
underreported, conditioning people to allow governments worldwide to lockdown people
without protest to keep them safe, etc.
This is all a psy-ops operation for greater pharma profits and government control. China
will blame the US for using a biowarfare weapon to gain the peoples nationalist support
(fake enemies are wonderful for that purpise). Despite being "attacked" China will continue
providing America antibiotics, tech gadgets and API's used for drugs and vaccines and will
honor American intellectuals property rights and pay royalties for vaccines they produce
using patented vaccine processes. Fake wrestling man.
Anyone notice it was not until China signed the trade agreement that the virus became
newsworthy?. Gates Event 201 and his documentary on Netflix shows the this was a preplanned
psyops .
For all we know there is not even a new virus. Just a test that detects endogenous viral
proteins present in a percentage of people that get tested when sick or exposed to a sick
person. How would we even know? But lets assume it is a new virus. Just look at the numbers
outside Hubei (numbers not to be trusted), and understand many people had the virus without
symptoms and you see the mortality rate not much greater than influenza and affecting
mostly elderly or other sick people hardest.
From past conversations I've had here at MoA with Clickkid, VK and some others on the
COVID-19 virus as a bioweapon, my conclusion is that it cannot be a bioweapon.
It's too contagious and it has too many modes of transmission for it to be easily
controllable by the attackers using it to subdue an enemy without risking blowback once the
enemy is dead and gone, and the attackers start moving their own people in to mop up and
take over cities and steal equipment, factory machines and armaments where the virus may
still be lingering. A virus that kills people past the age when they've finished raising
families and their own health is in long-term decline? Not ideal - as Clickkid pointed out,
a better bioweapon is one that incapacitates people in the prime of their lives, doesn't
kill them outright but reduces their productivity, maybe also renders them sterile or
infertile.
A vaccine would be a better bioweapon than an actual disease. With the various side
effects that have been reported for it, Gardasil (to prevent cervical cancer in women)
would be ideal as a bioweapon.
my conclusion is that it cannot be a bioweapon.
Bingo!
We have a winner.
It is 96% similar to a 2014 coronavirus, of bat origin, a double stranded positive RNA
virus.
A bat virus, like SARS and MERS, the other two significant coronavirus.
Jen
China has been in lockdown. Factories closed ect. Major resources diverted to stop the
spread. It is a major economic hit to China.
Hygiene is high in China compared to other densely populated parts of Asia. China has been
hit now with a number of exotic viruses ect that have been hits to its economy. Ebola
kicked off in Africa, but other than that, other countries that eat anything and
everything, who's hygiene is often not up to the standard of China do not seem to be
experiencing these outbreaks.
As to using bio weapons, any country that would develop and use them would have also
developed a vaccine.
my comment with LINK @ 25 addressed the just-in-time supply chain, global shipping
disruptions.
Now, the CDC has announced "in the eventuality of" they are getting prepared to adopt
closures:
(Reuters) - U.S. health officials on Friday said they are preparing for the possibility
of the spread of the new coronavirus through U.S. communities that would force closures
of schools and businesses.
The United States has yet to see community spread of the virus that emerged in central
China in late December. But health authorities are preparing medical personnel for the
risk, Nancy Messonnier, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) told reporters on a conference call.
In coming weeks, if the virus begins to spread through U.S. communities, health
authorities want to be ready to adopt school and business closures like those undertaken
in Asian countries to contain the disease, Messonnier said.[.]
The CDC is taking steps to ensure frontline U.S. healthcare workers have supplies they
need, she added, by working with businesses, hospitals, pharmacies and provisions
manufacturers and distributors on what they can do to get ready.[.]
The United States currently has 13 cases of people diagnosed with the virus within the
country and 21 cases among Americans repatriated on evacuation flights from Wuhan, China,
and from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, CDC said.
Of 329 Americans evacuated from the cruise ship, 18 tested positive for the
virus. Eleven of them are at University of Nebraska Medical Center, five are in medical
facilities near Travis Air Force Base in California and two are near Lackland Air Force
Base in San Antonio, Texas.[.]
That's the downer that australia experiences after drinking to excess.
He is also the downer that as aus ambassador to UK blew the game with his formal
references to Joe Mifsud and the Papadopolus fiasco in Italy and the Englanders homeland.
Once he had committed his report and used the diplomatic service to deliver it the game had
to follow with a formal presentation to FBI. Then the FISA court evidence and so on.
He also gave $30Mil to the Clinton Foundation for their non work on AIDS in Papua New
Guinea or some scam like that.
Can someone prosecute these thieving scum? But then they are useful idiots to both the
oligarchy and to us mere observers.
It is 96% similar to a 2014 coronavirus, of bat origin, a double stranded positive RNA
virus.
A bat virus, like SARS and MERS, the other two significant coronavirus.
To be any sort of winner one would have to go a further furlong and explain some of the
anomalies being reported or refute those reports etc. To say a coronavirus of today is
closely similar to a (bat derived) coronavirus of yesterday and therefore the source
identified is direct really stretches evidence a little.
WTF do you mean %96? What is the %4 comprised of?
If I drink %96 water with %4 arsenic it is not healthy water eh?
How many bats were sold at the FISH market?
Have they been reduced/banned in their popularity following the last outbreak?
Is the coronavirus species specific?
Try some detailed refutation if you will Duncan Idaho and actually negate the
proposition that the previous coronavirus could not be fiddled to produce this
emergence.
The speed, location and size of this COVID-19 outbreak are not natural and do not fit the
online narratives targeting China.
Attacking China with bioweapons is nothing new, Japan did it with Unit 731 and US did it
during Korean War in 1950s attacking China with Yellow Fever.
These latest attacks on the sounder of pigs with Swine Flu then followed by COVID-19
carefully timed near Chinese New Year at the central of China for maximum impacts. Followed
by the US hypocrisy pretending to help then later lied that China refused the offer.
It has become too obvious the motive of a very well coordinated amount of online disinfo
as deflections with "Eating bat soup, eating wild animals, engineered virus escape from
Wuhan L-4 lab" to pin the blame China for the outbreak.
The amount of intensive of online trolls attacking China to support the anti-China
propaganda narratives above. Have seen these kinds one too many times, like White Helmet
making fake video blaming Syrian government gas attack on Syrian people, Saddam Hussein got
WMD and he ripped babies out of incubators testimony in UN, no less. Muammar Gaddafi
violated human right, et al.
Hong Kong Color revolution, Uighur Islamic Extremist, Tibet Dalai Lama bill, swine flu
attack, virus attack on the people, kidnapping Huawei CFO by Canada, .......... amid
US-China trade war. All the attacks on China intensified when China launched the Belt and
Road Initiative. Can it be more obvious?
The remaining patient contracted the disease from his daughter, who had travelled
along with seven workmates to a training course in Wuhan. The workers who attended the
course were all from the province of Vinh Phuc, where currently 73 persons are suspected of
having contracted the virus. They, and affected areas in the commune (population 10,000)
are under a twenty-day quarantine, due to end on March 3. If anyone tests positive, of
course further quarantine and treatment will follow.
Elsewhere in Vietnam, schools are closed, and will stay closed until at least the
beginning of March, and large gatherings have been suspended. Masks were in short supply
but production is now beginning to meet the demand. The government is attempting to enforce
a quarantine for fourteen days for citizens returning from travel to China; non-citizens
are not being permitted to enter VN from China. (Unfortunately, some people are attempting
to avoid these restrictions by travelling to a third country, and entering Vietnam from
there.)
In sum, there is no large outbreak of the virus in Vietnam as yet, public awareness
campaigns are in full swing, there is clear awareness of the economic impacts in all
sectors, and concentrated nursing care has led to recovery in all cases to date.
What makes you believe the ZOG can surreptitiously attack China with COVID-19 won't carry
out the same attack at home and at the enemies of the ZOG empire?
You are cheering the death of innocent Chinese people, you better think again what makes
you so special that you will be spared.
I stopped reading ZeroHedge as it's the most anti China disinfo portal. They publish
anti China propaganda from Falun Gong, EpochTime, Gatestone, NED, Propaganda outlets from
India, et al.
Also ZeroHedge banned several times for questioning their narratives. But my other
account bashing China, Iran, North Korea, ........ is still alive after more than 10
years.
As the usual suspects fret over the "stability" of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and
the Xi Jinping administration, the fact is the Beijing leadership has had to deal with an
accumulation of extremely severe issues: a swine-flu epidemic killing half the stock; the
Trump-concocted trade war; Huawei accused of racketeering and about to be prevented from
buying U.S. made chips; bird flu; coronavirus virtually shutting down half of China.
Add to it the incessant United States government Hybrid War propaganda barrage,
trespassed by acute Sinophobia; everyone from sociopathic "officials" to self-titled
councilors are either advising corporate businesses to divert global supply chains out of
China or concocting outright calls for regime change – with every possible
demonization in between.
There are no holds barred in the all-out offensive to kick the Chinese government while
it's down.
A Pentagon cipher at the Munich Security Conference once again declares China as the
greatest threat, economically and militarily, to the U.S. – and by extension the
West, forcing a wobbly EU already subordinated to NATO to be subservient to Washington on
this remixed Cold War 2.0.
The whole U.S. corporate media complex repeats to exhaustion that Beijing is "lying" and
losing control. Descending to sub-gutter, racist levels, hacks even accuse BRI itself of
being a pandemic, with China "impossible to quarantine".
All that is quite rich, to say the least, oozing from lavishly rewarded slaves of an
unscrupulous, monopolistic, extractive, destructive, depraved, lawless oligarchy which uses
debt offensively to boost their unlimited wealth and power while the lowly U.S. and global
masses use debt defensively to barely survive. As Thomas Piketty has conclusively shown,
inequality always relies on ideology.
We're deep into a vicious intel war. From the point of view of Chinese intelligence, the
current toxic cocktail simply cannot be attributed to just a random series of coincidences.
Beijing has serial motives to piece this extraordinary chain of events as part of a
coordinated Hybrid War, Full Spectrum Dominance attack on China.
Enter the Dragon Killer working hypothesis: a bio-weapon attack capable of causing
immense economic damage but protected by plausible deniability. The only possible move by
the "indispensable nation" on the New Great Game chessboard, considering that the U.S.
cannot win a conventional war on China, and cannot win a nuclear war on China.
A biological warfare weapon?
On the surface, coronavirus is a dream bio-weapon for those fixated on wreaking havoc
across China and praying for regime change.
Yet it's complicated. This report is a decent effort trying to track the origins of
coronavirus. Now compare it with the insights by Dr. Francis Boyle, international law
professor at the University of Illinois and author, among others, of Biowarfare and
Terrorism. He's the man who drafted the U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989
signed into law by George H. W. Bush.
Dr. Boyle is convinced coronavirus is an
"offensive biological warfare weapon" that leaped out of the Wuhan BSL-4 laboratory,
although he's "not saying it was done deliberately."
Dr. Boyle adds, "all these BSL-4 labs by United States, Europe, Russia, China, Israel
are all there to research, develop, test biological warfare agents. There's really no
legitimate scientific reason to have BSL-4 labs." His own research led to a whopping $100
billion, by 2015, spent by the United States government on bio-warfare research: "We have
well over 13,000 alleged life science scientists testing biological weapons here in the
United States. Actually this goes back and it even precedes 9/11."
Dr. Boyle directly accuses "the Chinese government under Xi and his comrades" of a cover
up "from the get-go. The first reported case was December 1, so they'd been sitting on this
until they couldn't anymore. And everything they're telling you is a lie. It's
propaganda."
The World Health Organization (WHO), for Dr. Boyle, is also on it: "They've approved
many of these BSL-4 labs ( ) Can't trust anything the WHO says because they're all bought
and paid for by Big Pharma and they work in cahoots with the CDC, which is the United
States government, they work in cahoots with Fort Detrick." Fort Detrick, now a
cutting-edge bio-warfare lab, previously was a notorious CIA den of mind control
"experiments".
Relying on decades of research in bio-warfare, the U.S. Deep State is totally familiar
with all bio-weapon overtones. From Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Korea, Vietnam and
Fallujah, the historical record shows the United States government does not blink when it
comes to unleashing weapons of mass destruction on innocent civilians.
For its part, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has spent
a fortune researching bats, coronaviruses and gene-editing bio-weapons. Now, conveniently
– as if this was a form of divine intervention – DARPA's "strategic allies"
have been chosen to develop a genetic vaccine.
The 1996 neocon Bible, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), unambiguously
stated, "advanced forms of biological warfare that can "target" specific genotypes may
transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."
There's no question coronavirus, so far, has been a Heaven-sent politically useful tool,
reaching, with minimum investment, the desired targets of maximized U.S. global power
– even if fleetingly, enhanced by a non-stop propaganda offensive – and China
relatively isolated with its economy semi paralyzed.
Yet perspective is in order. The CDC estimated that up to 42.9 million people got sick
during the 2018-2019 flu season in the U.S. No less than 647,000 people were hospitalized.
And 61,200 died.
This report details the Chinese "people's war" against coronavirus.
It's up to Chinese virologists to decode its arguably synthetic origin. How China
reacts, depending on the findings, will have earth-shattering consequences –
literally.
Setting the stage for the Raging Twenties
After managing to reroute trade supply chains across Eurasia to its own advantage and
hollow out the Heartland, American – and subordinated Western – elites are now
staring into a void. And the void is staring back. A "West" ruled by the U.S. is now faced
with irrelevance. BRI is in the process of reversing at least two centuries of Western
dominance.
There's no way the West and especially the "system leader" U.S. will allow it. It all
started with dirty ops stirring trouble across the periphery of Eurasia – from
Ukraine to Syria to Myanmar.
Now it's when the going really gets tough. The targeted assassination of Maj. Gen.
Soleimani plus coronavirus – the Wuhan flu – have really set up the stage for
the Raging Twenties. The designation of choice should actually be WARS – Wuhan Acute
Respiratory Syndrome. That would instantly give the game away as a War against Humanity
– irrespective of where it came from.
Theres been massive media and of course covert pressure to make china submit to US
diktat.. Hongkong riots is one of a mess , indoctrinationg HK young people into rabid
terrorist who rejoice on chinese coronavirus debacle.
now this is funny , these HKers are also chinese descent no matter what their delusional
mind feeds them.. Corona virus practically next door and without chinese effort to contain
it , HK will get wiped out.. yet they are still acting like useful idiots ..
the world knew about these morons and their names , i doubt they are welcome to other
countries even australia banned them entry
Global
Times OP/ED tangentially about virus and more about China/Outlaw US Empire
deteriorating relation. Some meat:
"No matter how you look at it, there will be no winner in this hypothetical cold war,
and the US will not be able to continue its march to greatness unscathed. In a word, the
time has changed, and Sino-US relations are very different from the US-Soviet relations 70
years ago.
"First of all, although the development paths of the two countries are different, China
holds the correct course. For more than 40 years, China has always adhered to the path of
reform and opening up, firmly integrated into and safeguarded the current international
system, and committed itself to a fair and reasonable reform direction. In contrast, the
foreign policy of the present US administration is not only disorderly, but also
increasingly assertive. The US presents itself to the world as a destroyer and subversive
of the international order, which makes it mired in a moral deficit."
A "moral deficit" indeed! In that connection, it ought to be noted that the Boy Scouts
of America filed for bankruptcy because of the numerous lawsuits targeting its pedophile
scoutmasters for which it's liable.
A very deep "recession" aka depression was already expected by those paying attention. How
do the financial elites hide blame for it? Launch a bio-weapon in a nation that is the
world's factory, grinding the world economy to a crawl, and blame the depression on that.
The CIA exists primarily to advance the interests of Wall Street. The timing of this is
just too coincidental.
"In America moral relativism is now so deeply embed that there is no ideology, including
communism, that can bar you from joining our most powerful intelligence agency (which was
essentially stood up to fight communism) and even rise to control it and all of its secrets."
–Diana West, The Red Thread
I think Diana West might want to consider the "just war" theory as something Niebuhr.would
have been talking about. I do not know the writings of either Niebuhr or Tillich well but it
is my understanding that both did much good in the world so I wouldn't write them off without
very careful consideration. Many deeply religious people I know consider some of the ideas
contained within socialism to be Christian friendly. Thank you for considering my
statements.
For 3 years i argued with my Left wing friend. One day he called out "I just want to
control people". Talk about 'the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks'. I finally worked
out what made my friend consider government programs as the solution to every problem: He is
a closet control freak! Every person on the Left is a control freak hiding in the closet!!
Beware of these dictators coming to control your life!!!
"Last year, the faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government voted to offer Mr.
Zucman, 33, a tenured position. But Harvard's president and provost nixed the offer, partly
over fears that Mr. Zucman's research could not support the arguments he was making in the
political arena, according to people involved in the process." NYT
He subsequently got a post at the University of California, Berkeley.
Don't think America is going to Vote in Someone who Defrauded Others with Claims of being
Part Native American.
Maybe Bloomberg may have been Out of Line a few times. A "Horse Faced Lesbian" - what if
it were an accurate description? A "Fat Drunkard" - to someone who is correctly described -
is it really that offensive?
If it were said in an inappropriate context - say for job interviews - we can see the
error; but reading about Warren calling an Male Actor as "Eye Candy" puts her brand of Sexist
Comments in the same Boat.
What was Fauxahontas' Native American Name, anyway?
"Doesn't like Horses"?
Finnian Cunningham weighs in with an excellent article about Bloomberg as symbolic of the
demise of the Outlaw US Empire's nationwide electoral political system,
"With Bloomberg Entering Race, U.S. Oligarchy Takes Stage" . A portion of the juicy meat:
"In a nutshell, the political party is bought. It has become a vehicle that is patently
the political property of an oligarch. And not just this one oligarch, but the entire
oligarchic system of super-wealth in the United States. Hillary Clinton, the Democrat
candidate in 2016, was despised by voters because of her solicitous connections to Wall
Street and Big Business. That corruption has now only become starkly manifest in the form an
oligarch-in-person taking the political stage instead of a politician-surrogate. The same can
be said for the other side of the oligarch coin, the Republicans.
"It is rather fitting too that Bloomberg stood as a Republican when he was elected Mayor
of Gotham (er, New York City) between 2001-2013. Since leaving that office be flipped to the
Democrats, no doubt sensing a more expedient route for buying his way to the White House.
That again demonstrates how hollow the party names are of any substantive meaning regarding
policy.
"In the 2018 mid-term elections, Bloomberg donated $100 million to the DNC to promote 16
new female lawmakers to Congress. Enamored by that superficial progressive benevolence, the
party bosses are in his pocket."
Cunningham concludes with an observation that many of us arrived at long ago:
"The only 'superhero' that can save Gotham (er, the U.S.) from the oligarchs is the
American people themselves finding the strength and independence to rise up against the
endemic two-party corruption, and voting for real change.
" That, however, requires mass organization, mobilization and a class consciousness
about the predatory capitalist, oligarch-ridden system that the U.S. has descended into
." [My Emphasis]
The bolded sentence above provides us with our task and goal, that is if we--non-Americans
included--wish to save the nation and the world from Oligarchical Ruin. Our only chance is to
provide Sanders with 1991+ delegates so he can gain the nomination outright on the first
ballot before the corrupt delegates can enter the fray. Yes, he has issues with his foreign
policy record; but it's his domestic record most voters will want to know about since so many
are struggling. And it's on that part of his record that I intend to focus upon, while I'm
certain the naysayers like the rabbit will focus exclusively elsewhere.
"As I wrote the other day echoing Solomon and Sanders, it's a Class War, and we need
everyone to come to the barricades and the polling stations"
Karlof1, I admire your knowledge. That being said, can you tell me of any instance in the
history of mankind, wherein a national government has changed its behavior due to the results
of an election? As far as I can see, governments have only changed their ways after
catastrophic war, economic or foundational collapse or a peasant revolt.
Bloomberg bought his way onto the debate stage by getting the rules changed in exchange for
money to the DNC (and assorted Dem big shots).
He could've, and should've, paid them to not change the rules, even as he pretended
to clamor to be included, thereby keeping the initial bubble in his popularity going until
after the big Super Tuesday primaries, while playing the victim for being excluded from the
debates.
He still would have been exposed eventually, but only after having had a shot at
collecting a large number of delegates, strengthening his position.
But Bloomberg was too engorged with the knowledge he can pay these corrupt Dems to do
anything he wants to realize that this was a case where it was better not to (or rather,
to be seen not to be able to ).
Bloomberg is revealed as having said in public that all the disposable income of the poor
should be taxed away so that they will not have funds with which to do mischief like buying
fast food or sugary drinks.
Bloomberg described Sanders as a Communist who cannot be elected. In this he was
correct.
Bloomberg was described by Warren as a cold-hearted and insulting man who openly scorns
women, gays and minorities.
Mayor Pete mocked Klobuchar for her inability to remember the name of the president of
Mexico. She asked if he was calling her "stupid."
These six dwarves will probably persist in their quest for the brass ring all the way to the
convention. In the mayhem there, the "winner" will probably have to choose one of the "losers"
to be his VP running mate.
The media is cheering wildly for Warren and saying that she won the debate, but I found her
to be utterly repugnant. She comes across, to me, as even more shrill, harsh, angry and
unlikeable than Clinton did at her worst.
This was an outright declaration of "class war" against working-class voters by a
"university-credentialed overclass" -- "managerial elite" which changed sides and allied with
financial oligrchy. See "The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite" by
Michael Lind
Notable quotes:
"... By canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, the neoliberal elite saws the seed of the current populist backlash. The "soft neoliberal" backbone of the Democratic Party (Clinton wing) were incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat -- the rejection of the establishment candidate by the US population and first of all by the working class. The result has been the neo-McCarthyism campaign and the attempt to derail Trump via color revolution spearheaded by Brennan-Obama factions in CIA and FBI. ..."
It looks like Bloomberg is finished. He just committed political suicide with his comments
about farmers and metal workers.
BTW Bloomberg's plan is highly hypocritical -- like is Bloomberg himself.
During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was
staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a
neoliberal coup d'état) changed sides and betrayed the working class.
So those neoliberal scoundrels reversed the class compromise embodied in the New Deal.
The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the neoliberal managerial class and financial
oligarchy who got to power via the "Quiet Coup" was the global labor arbitrage in which
production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations.
So all those "improving education" plans are, to a large extent, the smoke screen over the
fact that the US workers now need to compete against highly qualified and lower cost
immigrants and outsourced workforce.
The fact is that it is very difficult to find for US graduates in STEM disciplines a
decent job, and this is by design.
Also, after the "Reagan neoliberal revolution" ( actually a coup d'état ), profits
were maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of the
immigrant workforce (the collapse of the USSR helped greatly ). They push down wages and
compete for jobs with their domestic counterparts, including the recent graduates. So the
situation since 1991 was never too bright for STEM graduates.
By canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War
II, the neoliberal elite saws the seed of the current populist backlash. The "soft
neoliberal" backbone of the Democratic Party (Clinton wing) were incapable of coming to terms
with Hillary Clinton's defeat -- the rejection of the establishment candidate by the US
population and first of all by the working class. The result has been the neo-McCarthyism
campaign and the attempt to derail Trump via color revolution spearheaded by Brennan-Obama
factions in CIA and FBI.
See also recently published "The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial
Elite" by Michael Lind.
One of his quotes:
The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist,
but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of
an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is
hidden in plain sight.
"... To writer Michael Lind, Trump's victory, along with Brexit and other populist stirrings in Europe, was an outright declaration of "class war" by alienated working-class voters against what he calls a "university-credentialed overclass" of managerial elites. ..."
"... Lind cautions against a turn to populism, which he believes to be too personality-centered and intellectually incoherent -- not to mention, too demagogic -- to help solve the terminal crisis of "technocratic neoliberalism" with its rule by self-righteous and democratically unaccountable "experts" with hyperactive Twitter handles. Only a return to what Lind calls "democratic pluralism" will help stem the tide of the populist revolt. ..."
"... Many on the left have been incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat. The result has been the stifling climate of a neo-McCarthyism, in which the only explanation for Trump's success was an unholy alliance of "Putin stooges" and unrepentant "white supremacists." ..."
"... To Lind, the case is much more straightforward: while the vast majority of Americans supports Social Security spending and containing unskilled immigration, the elites of the bipartisan swamp favor libertarian free trade policies combined with the steady influx of unskilled migrants to help suppress wage levels in the United States. Trump had outflanked his opponents in the Republican primaries and Clinton in the general election by tacking left on the economy (he refused to lay hands on Social Security) and right on immigration. ..."
"... Then, in the 1930s, while the world was writhing from the consequences of the Great Depression, a series of fascist parties took the reigns in countries from Germany to Spain. To spare the United States a similar descent into barbarism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, in which the working class would find a seat at the bargaining table under a government-supervised tripartite system where business and organized labor met seemingly as equals and in which collective bargaining would help the working class set sector-wide wages. ..."
"... This class compromise ruled unquestioned for the first decades of the postwar era. It was made possible thanks to the system of democratic pluralism, which allowed working-class and rural constituencies to actively partake in mass-membership organizations like unions as well as civic and religious institutions that would empower these communities to shape society from the ground up. ..."
"... But then, amid the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" set in that sought to reverse the class compromise. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the newly emboldened managerial class was "global labor arbitrage" in which production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations; alternatively, profits can be maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of an unskilled, non-unionized immigrant workforce that competes for jobs with its unionized domestic counterparts. By one-sidedly canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, Lind concludes, the managerial elite had brought the recent populist backlash on itself. ..."
"... American parties are not organized parties built around active members and policy platforms; they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the Democratic and Republican Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are capitalistically run enterprises. ..."
"... In the epigraph to the book, Lind cites approvingly the 1949 treatise The Vital Center by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who wrote that "class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society." Schlesinger was just one among many voices who believed that Western societies after World War II were experiencing the "end of ideology." From now on, the reasoning went, the ideological battles of yesteryear were settled in favor of a more disinterested capitalist (albeit New Deal–inflected) governance. This, in turn, gave rise to the managerial forces in government, the military, and business whose unchecked hold on power Lind laments. The midcentury social-democratic thinker Michael Harrington had it right when he wrote that "[t]he end of ideology is a shorthand way of saying the end of socialism." ..."
"... A cursory glance at the recent impeachment hearings bears witness to this, as career bureaucrats complained that President Trump unjustifiably sought to change the course of an American foreign policy that had been nobly steered by them since the onset of the Cold War. In their eyes, Trump, like the Brexiteers or the French yellow vest protesters, are vulgar usurpers who threaten the stability of the vital center from polar extremes. ..."
A FEW DAYS AFTER Donald Trump's electoral upset in 2016, Club for Growth co-founder Stephen
Moore told an
audience of Republican House members that the GOP was "now officially a Trump working class
party." No longer the party of traditional Reaganite conservatism, the GOP had been converted
instead "into a populist America First party." As he uttered these words, Moore says, "the
shock was palpable" in the room.
The Club for Growth had long dominated Republican orthodoxy by promoting low tax rates and
limited government. Any conservative candidate for political office wanting to reap the
benefits of the Club's massive fundraising arm had to pay homage to this doctrine. For one of
its formerly leading voices to pronounce the transformation of this orthodoxy toward a more
populist nationalism showed just how much the ground had shifted on election night.
To writer Michael Lind, Trump's victory, along with Brexit and other populist stirrings
in Europe, was an outright declaration of "class war" by alienated working-class voters against
what he calls a "university-credentialed overclass" of managerial elites. The title of
Lind's new book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite ,
leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lie, though he's adamant that he's not some sort of
guru for a " smarter
Trumpism ," as some have labeled him.
Lind cautions against a turn to populism, which he believes to be too
personality-centered and intellectually incoherent -- not to mention, too demagogic -- to help
solve the terminal crisis of "technocratic neoliberalism" with its rule by self-righteous and
democratically unaccountable "experts" with hyperactive Twitter handles. Only a return to what
Lind calls "democratic pluralism" will help stem the tide of the populist revolt.
The New Class War is a breath of fresh air. Many on the left have been incapable of
coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat. The result has been the stifling climate of a
neo-McCarthyism, in which the only explanation for Trump's success was an unholy alliance of
"Putin stooges" and unrepentant "white supremacists."
To Lind, the case is much more
straightforward: while the vast majority of Americans supports Social Security spending and
containing unskilled immigration, the elites of the bipartisan swamp favor libertarian free
trade policies combined with the steady influx of unskilled migrants to help suppress wage
levels in the United States. Trump had outflanked his opponents in the Republican primaries and
Clinton in the general election by tacking left on the economy (he refused to lay hands on
Social Security) and right on immigration.
The strategy has since been successfully repeated in the United Kingdom by Boris Johnson,
and it looks, for now, like a foolproof way for conservative parties in the West to capture or
defend their majorities against center-left parties that are too beholden to wealthy,
metropolitan interests to seriously attract working-class support. Berating the latter as
irredeemably racist certainly doesn't help either.
What happened in the preceding decades to produce this divide in Western democracies? Lind's
narrative begins with the New Deal, which had brought to an end what he calls "the first class
war" in favor of a class compromise between management and labor. This first class war is the
one we are the most familiar with: originating in the Industrial Revolution, which had produced
the wretchedly poor proletariat, it soon led to the rise of competing parties of organized
workers on the one hand and the liberal bourgeoisie on the other, a clash that came to a head
in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Then, in the 1930s, while the world was writhing from the
consequences of the Great Depression, a series of fascist parties took the reigns in countries
from Germany to Spain. To spare the United States a similar descent into barbarism, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, in which the working class would find a seat at
the bargaining table under a government-supervised tripartite system where business and
organized labor met seemingly as equals and in which collective bargaining would help the
working class set sector-wide wages.
This class compromise ruled unquestioned for the first decades of the postwar era. It was
made possible thanks to the system of democratic pluralism, which allowed working-class and
rural constituencies to actively partake in mass-membership organizations like unions as well
as civic and religious institutions that would empower these communities to shape society from
the ground up.
But then, amid the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" set
in that sought to reverse the class compromise. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the
newly emboldened managerial class was "global labor arbitrage" in which production is
outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations; alternatively, profits
can be maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of an
unskilled, non-unionized immigrant workforce that competes for jobs with its unionized domestic
counterparts. By one-sidedly canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist
societies after World War II, Lind concludes, the managerial elite had brought the recent
populist backlash on itself.
Likewise, only it can contain this backlash by returning to the bargaining table and
reestablishing the tripartite system it had walked away from. According to Lind, the new class
peace can only come about on the level of the individual nation-state because transnational
treaty organizations like the EU cannot allow the various national working classes to escape
the curse of labor arbitrage. This will mean that unskilled immigration will necessarily have
to be curbed to strengthen the bargaining power of domestic workers. The free-market orthodoxy
of the Club for Growth will also have to take a backseat, to be replaced by government-promoted
industrial strategies that invest in innovation to help modernize their national economies.
Under which circumstances would the managerial elites ever return to the bargaining table?
"The answer is fear," Lind suggests -- fear of working-class resentment of hyper-woke,
authoritarian elites. Ironically, this leaves all the agency with the ruling class, who first
acceded to the class compromise, then canceled it, and is now called on to forge a new one lest
its underlings revolt.
Lind rightly complains all throughout the book that the old mass-membership based
organizations of the 20th century have collapsed. He's coy, however, about who would
reconstitute them and how. At best, Lind argues for a return to the old system where party
bosses and ward captains served their local constituencies through patronage, but once more
this leaves the agency with entities like the Republicans and Democrats who have a combined
zero members. As the third-party activist Howie Hawkins remarked cunningly elsewhere ,
American parties are not organized parties built around active members and policy platforms;
they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the
Democratic and Republican Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are
capitalistically run enterprises.
Thus, they would hardly be the first options one would think of to reinvigorate the forces
of civil society toward self-rule from the bottom up.
The key to Lind's fraught logic lies hidden in plain sight -- in the book's title. Lind does
not speak of "class struggle ," the heroic Marxist narrative in which an organized
proletariat strove for global power; no, "class war " smacks of a gloomy, Hobbesian
war of all against all in which no side truly stands to win.
In the epigraph to the book, Lind cites approvingly the 1949 treatise The Vital
Center by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who wrote that "class conflict, pursued to
excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free
society." Schlesinger was just one among many voices who believed that Western societies after
World War II were experiencing the "end of ideology." From now on, the reasoning went, the
ideological battles of yesteryear were settled in favor of a more disinterested capitalist
(albeit New Deal–inflected) governance. This, in turn, gave rise to the managerial forces
in government, the military, and business whose unchecked hold on power Lind laments. The
midcentury social-democratic thinker Michael Harrington had it right when he wrote that "[t]he
end of ideology is a shorthand way of saying the end of socialism."
Looked at from this perspective, the break between the postwar Fordist regime and
technocratic neoliberalism isn't as massive as one would suppose. The overclass antagonists of The New Class War believe that they derive their power from the same "liberal order"
of the first-class peace that Lind upholds as a positive utopia. A cursory glance at the recent
impeachment hearings bears witness to this, as career bureaucrats complained that President
Trump unjustifiably sought to change the course of an American foreign policy that had been
nobly steered by them since the onset of the Cold War. In their eyes, Trump, like the Brexiteers or the French yellow vest protesters, are vulgar usurpers who threaten the stability
of the vital center from polar extremes.
A more honest account of capitalism would also acknowledge its natural tendencies to
persistently contract and to disrupt the social fabric. There is thus no reason to believe why
some future class compromise would once and for all quell these tendencies -- and why
nationalistically operating capitalist states would not be inclined to confront each other
again in war.
Reagan was a free-trader and a union buster. Lind's people jumped the Democratic ship
to vote for Reagan in (lemming-like) droves. As Republicans consolidated power over labor
with cheap goods from China and the meth of deficit spending Democrats struggled with
being necklaced as the party of civil rights.
The idea that people who are well-informed ought not to govern is a sad and sick cover
story that the culpable are forced to chant in their caves until their days are done, the
reckoning being too great.
This was an outright declaration of "class war" against working-class voters by a
"university-credentialed overclass" -- "managerial elite" which changed sides and allied with
financial oligrchy. See "The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite" by
Michael Lind
It looks like Bloomberg is finished. He just committed political suicide with his comments
about farmers and metal workers.
BTW Bloomberg's plan is highly hypocritical -- like is Bloomberg himself.
During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was
staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a
neoliberal coup d'état) changed sides and betrayed the working class.
So those neoliberal scoundrels reversed the class compromise embodied in the New Deal.
The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the neoliberal managerial class and financial
oligarchy who got to power via the "Quiet Coup" was the global labor arbitrage in which
production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations.
So all those "improving education" plans are, to a large extent, the smoke screen over the
fact that the US workers now need to compete against highly qualified and lower cost
immigrant and outsourced workforce.
The fact is that it is very difficult to find for US graduates in STEM disciplines a
decent job, and this is by design.
Also, after the "Reagan neoliberal revolution" ( actually a coup d'état ), profits
were maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of the
immigrant workforce (the collapse of the USSR helped greatly ). They push down wages and
compete for jobs s with their domestic counterparts, including the recent graduates. So the
situation since 1991 was never too bright for STEM graduates.
By canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War
II, the neoliberal elite saws the seed of the current populist backlash. Many of the "soft
neoliberal" backbone of the Democratic Party (Clinton wing) were incapable of coming to terms
with Hillary Clinton's defeat -- the rejection of the establishment candidate by the US
population and first of all by the working class. The result has been the neo-McCarthyism
campaign and the attempt to derail Trump via color revolution spearheaded by Brennan-Obama
factions in CIA and FBI.
See also recently published "The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial
Elite" by Michael Lind.
One of his quotes:
The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist,
but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of
an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is
hidden in plain sight.
At
the Munich Security Conference the U.S. and its allies had no idea of how to handle China, a
problem of their greed and stupidity. The West is divided, confused. What to do about Huawei?
Really, what to do with China?
So when Mike Pompeo proclaimed "we are winning," the largely European audience was silent
and worried in what sense "we" existed longer.
In the meantime, Europe, including the U.K, finds itself in a mincer between the U.S. and
China
Unfortunately for us. China has followed the U.S. playbook and has outplayed the West,
especially the U.S.
Walter Rostow of the Johnson administration, an avid anti-communist, wrote the playbook: How
can an undeveloped nation take its place among the leaders of the world.
The answer : Industrialize as rapidly as possible. Do whatever it takes. China did just
that.
In its five year plans, China acknowledged its debt to Rostow and started to industrialize.
While I have described this process many years ago, I again outline it briefly here.
First : China entered the W.T.O. Bill Clinton and Congress were accommodating and
instrumental:
Last fall, as all of you know, the United States signed an agreement to bring China into the
W.T.O, on terms that will open its markets to American products and investments.
Bill Clinton speaking before Congress, March 9, 1998
Second : China offered dirt cheap labor, labor that had no effective right to bargain
Third : China did not require a company to obey any environmental regulations.
Fourth : China often offered a ten-year grace period without any taxation. If there were taxes
they were less than those on its own indigenous firms.
Fifth : China manipulated its currency, making products cheaper to make but getting higher
profits in the West.
The net resul t: Massive trade imbalance in favor of China. CEOs and their henchmen made
enormous profits. Devastated American workers were told to go to school, to work harder, to make
themselves invaluable to their companies. A cruel joke.
In droves, Western companies outsourced to China, emptying one factory after another. Anything
that could be outsourced was outsourced. China, of course, was not the sole beneficiary of U.S.
foolishness. India, Mexico, Vietnam wherever environmental standards were non-existent, wherever
workers had no effective rights these were the third world countries the U.S. used. The health
and safety of third world workers was of no concern. They were many–and they were
expendable.
U.S. companies were so profitable that special arrangements were made to repatriate those
profits back to the states: pennies on the dollar. Many billionaires should really be thanking
China.
Americans were considered only consumers/ The more they consumed, the richer the rich became.
Credit was made easy. George Bush's answer to 911 was: Go out and shop.+
Between The Financial Modernization Act of 1999 and Free trade insanity, the working class of
American faced the crash of 2008.
China became the factory of the world, not through automation, but through dirt cheap labor.
China poisoned its atmosphere and polluted its water. Face masks were everywhere. Nonetheless,
China had become undeniable economic power, challenging the U.S.
At the same time, China educated great numbers of engineers, inventors, and scientists. Huwaii
became the problem really, Huwaii is just an emblem of it.
The U.S. in its greed had became lazy. It poured money into weapons. The U.S. decided to build
a space force. U.S. bullied countries with foolish sanctions if those countries did not make
their billionaire class more profitable. Sanctions instead of competition became last gasp, the
last grasp at profit. Flabby and greedy, the U.S.is no longer competitive. It has become just a
bully, a threat to everyone.
Trump, of course, played both sides of the problem. He railed against the outsourcing, but has
done little to correct it, giving instead massive tax breaks to the wealthy, gutting
environmental regulations laying waste to everything he touches. Pelosi and Schumer pretend to
care, but they have nothing to offer. Like Trump, they worry about China. Like Trump, they have
no answer, except for more wars and more sanctions.
Hillary and Bill should take a bow. They began this debacle. Once things were made in the
U.S.A. Go to any Walmart store and read the label: Made in China.
Pelosi and the free trade Democrats should take a bow as should all the Republicans. All of
them should hold hands, give each other a quick hug and smile. They and their friends are
rich.
To China belongs the future.
Terry , February 16, 2020 8:27 pm
Economics 101 says trade benefits all participants. The problem is not China but the United
States. The oligarchs have sucked up all the benefits of trade and have bought the government
to keep the good times going. Obama played along unlike FDR with the result that the oligarchs
came out stronger than ever while everyone else had a second rate rather than a third rate
health care system which Trump and the GOP are struggling to return to a third rate system. You
can blame China or the "laziness " of Americans, but the real problem is the moneyed class who
do not give a crap about the country or its citizens but only how to hang onto their privileged
existence. I hate to even think it but I do not see this thing ending peacefully.
MARK LOHR , February 16, 2020 8:27 pm
And in turn funding China's considerable, unabated, and ongoing military expansion.
The screws are turning; the noose tightening.
That Western governments of all leanings have not counter-vailed for many decades now is a tale
of enormous short-sightedness and cultural hubris.
davebarnes , February 16, 2020 9:24 pm
Didn't I read the same thing about Japan 20+ years ago?
MARK LOHR , February 16, 2020 10:50 pm
Yes. And to be sure, China faces all the limits inherent to a totalitarian system. However,
unlike Japan, they have remilitarized and have demonstrated expansionist goals –
artificial island military outposts, Belt and Road, etc.
Besides stealing/extorting etc our IP.
Mark,
Where do you get your information? China has one military base outside its borders. The U.S.
has over 800. China does not pour its money into a military budge; the U.S. does.
Try the actual facts, for a change.
likbez , February 17, 2020 9:34 am
To China belongs the future.
I think it is too early to write down the USA. Historically the USA proved to be highly
adaptable society (look at the New Deal). And I think that still there is a chance that it
might be capable of jumping the sinking ship of neoliberalism. Although I have problems with
Sanders's economic program, Sanders's victory might be instrumental for that change.
China adopted neoliberalism, much like the USA. It was just lucky to be on the receiving end
of the outflow of the capital from the USA. It has a more competent leadership and avoided the
fate of the USSR for which the attempt to the adoption of neoliberalism ( aka Perestroika )
proved to be fatal.
I suspect that the main problem for China is that Neoliberalism, as a social system, is
incompatible with the rule of the Communist Party.
Fundamentally what China has now is a variation of the Soviet "New Economic Policy" (NEP)
invented by Bolsheviks after the Civil War in Russia, and while providing a rapid economic
development, China has all the problems that are known for this policy.
One is the endemic corruption of state officials due to the inability of capital to rise
above a certain level of political influence and systematic attempts to buy this influence.
That necessitates periodic campaigns against corruption and purges/jailing of officials,
which does not solve the fundamental problem which is systemic.
The other problem is that the Communist Party is such mode degrades into something like
amorphous "holding company" staff for the country (managing state tier in the two tie economy
-- state capitalism at the top; neoliberalism at the middle and the bottom)
Which necessitates the rule of a strong leader, the Father of the Nation, who is capable to
conduct purges and hold the Party together by suppressing the appetite of local Party
functionaries using brutal repressions. But the Party functionaries understand that they no
longer conduct Marxist policies, and that undermines morale. That they are essentially
renegades, and that creates a huge stimulus for "make money fast" behavior and illicit
self-enrichment.
Which paradoxically necessitate the hostility with the USA as the mean to cement the Party
and suppress the dissent. So not only the USA neocons and MIC are interested in China, China,
China (and/or Russia, Russia, Russia) bogeyman.
That also creates for Chinese senior Communist Party leadership an incentive at some point
to implement "Stalin-style solution" to the problems with New Economic Policy.
So it looks like Neo-McCarthyism in the USA has a long and prosperous future, as both sides
are interested in its continuation
BTW another example of NEP as a policy was Tito Yugoslavia, which no longer exists.
Yet another example was Gorbachov's "Perestroika," which logically led to the dissolution of
the USSR. With the subjective factor of the total incompetence of Gorbachov as a leader -- with
some analogies as for this level of incompetence with Trump.
As well as general "simplification," and degeneration of Politburo similar to what we
observe with the USA Congress now: the USSR in the 1980th has become a gerontocracy.
But the major factor was that the top KGB officials and several members of Politburo,
including Gorbachov, became turncoats and changed sides attempting to change the system to
neoliberalism, which was at the time on the assent; Russia always picks the worst possible time
for the social change
While neoliberalism is definitely in decline and its ideology is discredited, I still think
there are fundamental problems in tis interaction with the Communist Party rule, that might
eventually cause the social crisis for China.
But only time will tell
BTW Professor Stephen Cohen books contain very interesting information about NEP, Russia
adoption of neoliberalism (and related dissolution of the USSR) and Russia social development
in general
Relatively simple automation often beat more complex system. By far.
Notable quotes:
"... My guess is we're heading for something in-between, a place where artisanal bakers use locally grown wheat, made affordable thanks to machine milling. Where small family-owned bakeries rely on automation tech to do the undifferentiated grunt-work. The robots in my future are more likely to look more like cash registers and less like Terminators. ..."
"... I gave a guest lecture to a roomful of young roboticists (largely undergrad, some first year grad engineering students) a decade ago. After discussing the economics/finance of creating and selling a burgerbot, asked about those that would be unemployed by the contraption. One student immediately snorted out, "Not my problem!" Another replied, "But what if they cannot do anything else?". Again, "Not my problem!". And that is San Josie in a nutshell. ..."
"... One counter-argument might be that while hoping for the best it might be prudent to prepare for the worst. Currently, and for a couple of decades, the efficiency gains have been left to the market to allocate. Some might argue that for the common good then the government might need to be more active. ..."
"... "Too much automation is really all about narrowing the choices in your life and making it cheaper instead of enabling a richer lifestyle." Many times the only way to automate the creation of a product is to change it to fit the machine. ..."
"... You've gotta' get out of Paris: great French bread remains awesome. I live here. I've lived here for over half a decade and know many elderly French. The bread, from the right bakeries, remains great. ..."
"... I agree with others here who distinguish between labor saving automation and labor eliminating automation, but I don't think the former per se is the problem as much as the gradual shift toward the mentality and "rightness" of mass production and globalization. ..."
"... I was exposed to that conflict, in a small way, because my father was an investment manager. He told me they were considering investing in a smallish Swiss pasta (IIRC) factory. He was frustrated with the negotiations; the owners just weren't interested in getting a lot bigger – which would be the point of the investment, from the investors' POV. ..."
"... Incidentally, this is a possible approach to a better, more sustainable economy: substitute craft for capital and resources, on as large a scale as possible. More value with less consumption. But how we get there from here is another question. ..."
"... The Ten Commandments do not apply to corporations. ..."
"... But what happens when the bread machine is connected to the internet, can't function without an active internet connection, and requires an annual subscription to use? ..."
"... Until 100 petaflops costs less than a typical human worker total automation isn't going to happen. Developments in AI software can't overcome basic hardware limits. ..."
"... When I started doing robotics, I developed a working definition of a robot as: (a.) Senses its environment; (b.) Has goals and goal-seeking logic; (c.) Has means to affect environment in order to get goal and reality (the environment) to converge. Under that definition, Amazon's Alexa and your household air conditioning and heating system both qualify as "robot". ..."
"... The addition of a computer (with a program, or even downloadable-on-the-fly programs) to a static machine, e.g. today's computer-controlled-manufacturing machines (lathes, milling, welding, plasma cutters, etc.) makes a massive change in utility. It's almost the same physically, but ever so much more flexible, useful, and more profitable to own/operate. ..."
"... And if you add massive databases, internet connectivity, the latest machine-learning, language and image processing and some nefarious intent, then you get into trouble. ..."
Part I , "Automation Armageddon:
a Legitimate Worry?" reviewed the history of automation, focused on projections of gloom-and-doom.
"It smells like death," is how a friend of mine described a nearby chain grocery store. He tends to exaggerate and visiting France
admittedly brings about strong feelings of passion. Anyway, the only reason we go there is for things like foil or plastic bags that
aren't available at any of the smaller stores.
Before getting to why that matters – and, yes, it does matter – first a tasty digression.
I live in a French village. To the French, high-quality food is a vital component to good life.
My daughter counts eight independent bakeries on the short drive between home and school. Most are owned by a couple of people.
Counting high-quality bakeries embedded in grocery stores would add a few more. Going out of our way more than a minute or two would
more than double that number.
Typical Bakery: Bread is cooked at least twice daily
Despite so many, the bakeries seem to do well. In the half-decade I've been here, three new ones opened and none of the old ones
closed. They all seem to be busy. Bakeries are normally owner operated. The busiest might employ a few people but many are mom-and-pop
operations with him baking and her selling. To remain economically viable, they rely on a dance of people and robots. Flour arrives
in sacks with high-quality grains milled by machines. People measure ingredients, with each bakery using slightly different recipes.
A human-fed robot mixes and kneads the ingredients into the dough. Some kind of machine churns the lumps of dough into baguettes.
The baker places the formed baguettes onto baking trays then puts them in the oven. Big ovens maintain a steady temperature while
timers keep track of how long various loaves of bread have been baking. Despite the sensors, bakers make the final decision when
to pull the loaves out, with some preferring a bien cuit more cooked flavor and others a softer crust. Finally, a person uses
a robot in the form of a cash register to ring up transactions and processes payments, either by cash or card.
Nobody -- not the owners, workers, or customers -- think twice about any of this. I doubt most people realize how much automation
technology is involved or even that much of the equipment is automation tech. There would be no improvement in quality mixing and
kneading the dough by hand. There would, however, be an enormous increase in cost. The baguette forming machines churn out exactly
what a person would do by hand, only faster and at a far lower cost. We take the thermostatically controlled ovens for granted. However,
for anybody who has tried to cook over wood controlling heat via air and fuel, thermostatically controlled ovens are clearly automation
technology.
Is the cash register really a robot? James Ritty, who invented
it, didn't think so; he sold the patent for cheap. The person who bought the patent built it into NCR, a seminal company laying the
groundwork of the modern computer revolution.
Would these bakeries be financially viable if forced to do all this by hand? Probably not. They'd be forced to produce less output
at higher cost; many would likely fail. Bread would cost more leaving less money for other purchases. Fewer jobs, less consumer spending
power, and hungry bellies to boot; that doesn't sound like good public policy.
Getting back to the grocery store my friend thinks smells like death; just a few weeks ago they started using robots in a new
and, to many, not especially welcome way.
As any tourist knows, most stores in France are closed on Sunday afternoons, including and especially grocery stores. That's part
of French labor law: grocery stores must close Sunday afternoons. Except that the chain grocery store near me announced they are
opening Sunday afternoon. How? Robots, and sleight-of-hand. Grocers may not work on Sunday afternoons but guards are allowed.
Not my store but similar.
Dimanche means Sunday. Aprés-midi means afternoon.
I stopped in to get a feel for how the system works. Instead of grocers, the store uses security guards and self-checkout kiosks.
When you step inside, a guard reminds you there are no grocers. Nobody restocks the shelves but, presumably for half a day, it
doesn't matter. On Sunday afternoons, in place of a bored-looking person wearing a store uniform and overseeing the robo-checkout
kiosks sits a bored-looking person wearing a security guard uniform doing the same. There are no human-assisted checkout lanes open
but this store seldom has more than one operating anyway.
I have no idea how long the French government will allow this loophole to continue. I thought it might attract yellow vest protestors
or at least a cranky store worker – maybe a few locals annoyed at an ancient tradition being buried – but there was nobody complaining.
There were hardly any customers, either.
The use of robots to sidestep labor law and replace people, in one of the most labor-friendly countries in the world, produced
a big yawn.
Paul Krugman and
Matt Stoller argue convincingly that
it's the bosses, not the robots, that crush the spirits and souls of workers. Krugman calls it "automation obsession" and Stoller
points out predictions of robo-Armageddon have existed for decades. The well over
100+ examples I have of major
automation-tech ultimately led to more jobs, not fewer.
Jerry Yang envisions some type of forthcoming automation-induced dystopia. Zuck and the tech-bros argue for a forthcoming Star
Trek style robo-utopia.
My guess is we're heading for something in-between, a place where artisanal bakers use locally grown wheat, made affordable thanks
to machine milling. Where small family-owned bakeries rely on automation tech to do the undifferentiated grunt-work. The robots in
my future are more likely to look more like cash registers and less like Terminators.
It's an admittedly blander vision of the future; neither utopian nor dystopian, at least not one fueled by automation tech. However,
it's a vision supported by the historic adoption of automation technology.
I have no real disagreement with a lot of automation. But how it is done is another matter altogether. Using the main example
in this article, Australia is probably like a lot of countries with bread in that most of the loaves that you get in a supermarket
are typically bland and come in plastic bags but which are cheap. You only really know what you grow up with.
When I first went to Germany I stepped into a Bakerie and it was a revelation. There were dozens of different sorts and types
of bread on display with flavours that I had never experienced. I didn't know whether to order a loaf or to go for my camera instead.
And that is the point. Too much automation is really all about narrowing the choices in your life and making it cheaper instead
of enabling a richer lifestyle.
We are all familiar with crapification and I contend that it is automation that enables this to become a thing.
"I contend that it is automation that enables this to become a thing."
As does electricity. And math. Automation doesn't necessarily narrow choices; economies of scale and the profit motive do.
What I find annoying (as in pollyannish) is the avoidance of the issue of those that cannot operate the machinery, those that
cannot open their own store, etc.
I gave a guest lecture to a roomful of young roboticists (largely undergrad, some first year grad engineering students) a decade
ago. After discussing the economics/finance of creating and selling a burgerbot, asked about those that would be unemployed by
the contraption. One student immediately snorted out, "Not my problem!" Another replied, "But what if they cannot do anything
else?". Again, "Not my problem!". And that is San Josie in a nutshell.
A capitalist market that fails to account for the cost of a product's negative externalities is underpricing (and incentivizing
more of the same). It's cheating (or sanctioned cheating due to ignorance and corruption). It is not capitalism (unless that is
the only reasonable outcome of capitalism).
The author's vision of "appropriate tech" local enterprise supported by relatively simple automation is also my answer to the
vexing question of "how do I cope with automation?"
In a recent posting here at NC, I said the way to cope with automation of your job(s) is to get good at automation. My remark
caused a howl of outrage: "most people can't do automation! Your solution is unrealistic for the masses. Dismissed with prejudice!".
Thank you for that outrage, as it provides a wonder foil for this article. The article shows a small business which learned
to re-design business processes, acquire machines that reduce costs. It's a good example of someone that "got good at automation". Instead of being the victim of automation, these people adapted. They bought automation, took control of it, and operated it
for their own benefit.
Key point: this entrepreneur is now harvesting the benefits of automation, rather than being systematically marginalized by
it. Another noteworthy aspect of this article is that local-scale "appropriate" automation serves to reduce the scale advantages
of the big players. The availability of small-scale machines that enable efficiencies comparable to the big guys is a huge problem.
Most of the machines made for small-scale operators like this are manufactured in China, or India or Iran or Russia, Italy where
industrial consolidation (scale) hasn't squashed the little players yet.
Suppose you're a grain farmer, but only have 50 acres (not 100s or 1000s like the big guys). You need a combine – that's a
big machine that cuts grain stalk and separate grain from stalk (threshing). This cut/thresh function is terribly labor intensive,
the combine is a must-have. Right now, there is no small-size ($50K or less) combine manufactured in the U.S., to my knowledge.
They cost upwards of $200K, and sometimes a great deal more. The 50-acre farmer can't afford $200K (plus maint costs), and therefore
can't farm at that scale, and has to sell out.
So, the design, production, and sales of these sort of small-scale, high-productivity machines is what is needed to re-distribute
production (organically, not by revolution, thanks) back into the hands of the middle class.
If we make possible for the middle class to capture the benefits of automation, and you solve 1) the social dilemmas of concentration
of wealth, 2) the declining std of living of the mid- and lower-class, and 3) have a chance to re-design an economy (business
processes and collaborating suppliers to deliver end-user product/service) that actually fixes the planet as we make our living,
instead of degrading it at every ka-ching of the cash register.
Point 3 is the most important, and this isn't the time or place to expand on that, but I hope others might consider it a bit.
Regarding the combine, I have seen them operating on small-sized lands for the last 50 years. Without exception, you have one
guy (sometimes a farmer, often not) who has this kind of harvester, works 24h a day for a week or something, harvesting for all
farmers in the neighborhood, and then moves to the next crop (eg corn). Wintertime is used for maintenance. So that one person/farm/company
specializes in these services, and everybody gets along well.
Marcel – great solution to the problem. Choosing the right supplier (using combine service instead of buying a dedicated combine)
is a great skill to develop. On the flip side, the fellow that provides that combine service probably makes a decent side-income
from it. Choosing the right service to provide is another good skill to develop.
One counter-argument might be that while hoping for the best it might be prudent to prepare for the worst. Currently, and for
a couple of decades, the efficiency gains have been left to the market to allocate. Some might argue that for the common good
then the government might need to be more active.
What would happen if efficiency gains continued to be distributed according to the market? According to the relative bargaining
power of the market participants where one side, the public good as represented by government, is asking for and therefore getting
almost nothing?
As is, I do believe that people who are concerned do have reason to be concerned.
"Too much automation is really all about narrowing the choices in your life and making it cheaper instead of enabling a
richer lifestyle." Many times the only way to automate the creation of a product is to change it to fit the machine.
Some people make a living saying these sorts of things about automation. The quality of French bread is simply not what it
used to be (at least harder to find) though that is a complicated subject having to do with flour and wheat as well as human preparation
and many other things and the cost (in terms of purchasing power), in my opinion, has gone up, not down since the 70's.
As some might say, "It's complicated," but automation does (not sure about "has to") come with trade offs in quality while
price remains closer to what an ever more sophisticated set of algorithms say can be "gotten away with."
This may be totally different for cars or other things, but the author chose French bread and the only overall improvement,
or even non change, in quality there has come, if at all, from the dark art of marketing magicians.
/ from the dark art of marketing magicians, AND people's innate ability to accept/be unaware of decreases in quality/quantity
if they are implemented over time in small enough steps.
You've gotta' get out of Paris: great French bread remains awesome. I live here. I've lived here for over half a decade
and know many elderly French. The bread, from the right bakeries, remains great. But you're unlikely to find it where tourists
might wander: the rent is too high.
As a general rule, if the bakers have a large staff or speak English you're probably in the wrong bakery. Except for one of
my favorites where she learned her English watching every episode of Friends multiple times and likes to practice with me, though
that's more of a fluke.
It's a difficult subject to argue. I suspect that comparatively speaking, French bread remains good and there are still bakers
who make high quality bread (given what they have to work with). My experience when talking to family in France (not Paris) is
that indeed, they are in general quite happy with the quality of bread and each seems to know a bakery where they can still get
that "je ne sais quoi" that makes it so special.
I, on the other hand, who have only been there once every few years since the 70's, kind of like once every so many frames
of the movie, see a lowering of quality in general in France and of flour and bread in particular though I'll grant it's quite
gradual.
The French love food and were among the best farmers in the world in the 1930s and have made a point of resisting radical change
at any given point in time when it comes to the things they love (wine, cheese, bread, etc.) , so they have a long way to fall,
and are doing so slowly; but gradually, it's happening.
I agree with others here who distinguish between labor saving automation and labor eliminating automation, but I don't
think the former per se is the problem as much as the gradual shift toward the mentality and "rightness" of mass production and
globalization.
I was exposed to that conflict, in a small way, because my father was an investment manager. He told me they were considering
investing in a smallish Swiss pasta (IIRC) factory. He was frustrated with the negotiations; the owners just weren't interested
in getting a lot bigger – which would be the point of the investment, from the investors' POV.
I thought, but I don't think I said very articulately, that of course, they thought of themselves as craftspeople – making
people's food, after all. It was a fundamental culture clash. All that was 50 years ago; looks like the European attitude has
been receding.
Incidentally, this is a possible approach to a better, more sustainable economy: substitute craft for capital and resources,
on as large a scale as possible. More value with less consumption. But how we get there from here is another question.
I have been touring around by car and was surprised to see that all Oregon gas stations are full serve with no self serve allowed
(I vaguely remember Oregon Charles talking about this). It applies to every station including the ones with a couple of dozen
pumps like we see back east. I have since been told that this system has been in place for years.
It's hard to see how this is more efficient and in fact just the opposite as there are fewer attendants than waiting customers
and at a couple of stations the action seemed chaotic. Gas is also more expensive although nothing could be more expensive than
California gas (over $5/gal occasionally spotted). It's also unclear how this system was preserved–perhaps out of fire safety
concerns–but it seems unlikely that any other state will want to imitate just as those bakeries aren't going to bring back their
wood fired ovens.
I think NJ is still required to do all full-serve gas stations. Most in MA have only self-serve, but there's a few towns that
have by-laws requiring full-serve.
In the 1980s when self-serve gas started being implemented, NIOSH scientists said oh no, now 'everyone' will be increasingly
exposed to benzene while filling up. Benzene is close to various radioactive elements in causing damage and cancer.
It was preserved by a series of referenda; turns out it's a 3rd rail here, like the sales tax. The motive was explicitly to
preserve entry-level jobs while allowing drivers to keep the gas off their hands. And we like the more personal quality.
Also, we go to states that allow self-serve and observe that the gas isn't any cheaper. It's mainly the tax that sets the price,
and location.
There are several bakeries in this area with wood-fired ovens. They charge a premium, of course. One we love is way out in
the country, in Falls City. It's a reason to go there.
Unless I misunderstood, the author of this article seems to equate mechanization/automation of nearly any type with robotics.
"Is the cash register really a robot? James Ritty, who invented it, didn't think so;" – Nor do I.
To me, "robot" implies a machine with a high degree of autonomy. Would the author consider an old fashioned manual typewriter
or adding machine (remember those?) to be robotic? How about when those machines became electrified?
I think the author uses the term "robot" over broadly.
Agree. Those are just electrified extensions of the lever or sand timer.
It's the "thinking" that is A.I.
Refuse to allow A.I.to destroy jobs and cheapen our standard of living.
Never interact with a robo call, just hang up.
Never log into a website when there is a human alternative.
Refuse to do business with companies that have no human alternative.
Never join a medical "portal" of any kind, demand to talk to medical personnel. Etc.
Sabotage A.I. whenever possible. The Ten Commandments do not apply to corporations.
During a Chicago hotel stay my wife ordered an extra bath towel from the front desk. About 5 minutes later, a mini version
of R2D2 rolled up to her door with towel in tow. It was really cute and interacted with her in a human-like way. Cute but really
scary in the way that you indicate in your comment.
It seems many low wage activities would be in immediate risk of replacement.
But sabotage? I would never encourage sabotage; in fact, when it comes to true robots like this one, I would highly discourage
any of the following: yanking its recharge cord in the middle of the night, zapping it with a car battery, lift its payload and
replace with something else, give it a hip high-five to help it calibrate its balance, and of course, the good old kick'm in the
bolts.
Stop and Shop supermarket chain now has robots in the store. According to Stop and Shop they are oh so innocent! and friendly!
why don't you just go up and say hello?
All the robots do, they say, go around scanning the shelves looking for: shelf price tags that don't match the current price,
merchandise in the wrong place (that cereal box you picked up in the breakfast aisle and decided, in the laundry aisle, that you
didn't want and put the box on a shelf with detergent.) All the robots do is notify management of wrong prices and misplaced merchandise.
The damn robot is cute, perky lit up eyes and a smile – so why does it remind me of the Stepford Wives.
S&S is the closest supermarket near me, so I go there when I need something in a hurry, but the bulk of my shopping is now
done elsewhere. Thank goodness there are some stores that are not doing this: The area Shoprites and FoodTown's don't – and they
are all run by family businesses. Shoprite succeeds by have a large assortment brands in every grocery category and keeping prices
really competitive. FoodTown operates at a higher price and quality level with real butcher and seafood counters as well as prepackaged
assortments in open cases and a cooked food counter of the most excellent quality with the store's cooks behind the counter to
serve you and answer questions. You never have to come home from work tired and hungry and know that you just don't want to cook
and settle for a power bar.
A robot is a machine -- especially one programmable by a computer -- capable of carrying out a complex series of actions
automatically. Robots can be guided by an external control device or the control may be embedded
Those early cash registers were perhaps an early form of analog computer. But Wiki reminds that the origin of the term is a
work of fiction.
The term comes from a Czech word, robota, meaning "forced labor";the word 'robot' was first used to denote a fictional humanoid
in a 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti – Rossum's Universal Robots) by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek
Perhaps I didn't qualify "autonomous" properly. I didn't mean to imply a 'Rosie the Robot' level of autonomy but the ability
of a machine to perform its programmed task without human intervention (other than switching on/off or maintenance & adjustments).
If viewed this way, an adding machine or typewriter are not robots because they require constant manual input in order to function
– if you don't push the keys, nothing happens. A computer printer might be considered robotic because it can be programmed to
function somewhat autonomously (as in print 'x' number of copies of this document).
"Robotics" is a subset of mechanized/automated functions.
When I first got out of grad school I worked at United Technologies Research Center where I worked in the robotics lab. In
general, at least in those days, we made a distinction between robotics and hard automation. A robot is programmable to do multiple
tasks and hard automation is limited to a single task unless retooled. The machines the author is talking about are hard automation.
We had ASEA robots that could be programmed to do various things. One of ours drilled, riveted and sealed the skin on the horizontal
stabilators (the wing on the tail of a helicopter that controls pitch) of a Sikorsky Sea Hawk.
The same robot with just a change
of the fixture on the end could be programmed to paint a car or weld a seam on equipment. The drilling and riveting robot was
capable of modifying where the rivets were placed (in the robot's frame of reference) based on the location of precisely milled
blocks build into the fixture that held the stabilator.
There was always some variation and it was important to precisely place
the rivets because the spars were very narrow (weight at the tail is bad because of the lever arm). It was considered state of
the art back in the day but now auto companies have far more sophisticated robotics.
But what happens when the bread machine is connected to the internet, can't function without an active internet connection,
and requires an annual subscription to use?
That is the issue to me: however we define the tools, who will own them?
You know, that is quite a good point that. It is not so much the automation that is the threat as the rent-seeking that anything
connected to the internet allows to be implemented.
Until 100 petaflops costs less than a typical human worker total automation isn't going to happen. Developments in AI software
can't overcome basic hardware limits.
The story about automation not worsening the quality of bread is not exactly true. Bakers had to develop and incorporate a
new method called autolyze (
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2017/09/29/using-the-autolyse-method
) in the mid-20th-century to bring back some of the flavor lost with modern baking. There is also a trend of a new generation
of bakeries that use natural yeast, hand shaping and kneading to get better flavors and quality bread.
But it is certainly true that much of the automation gives almost as good quality for much lower labor costs.
When I started doing robotics, I developed a working definition of a robot as: (a.) Senses its environment; (b.) Has goals
and goal-seeking logic; (c.) Has means to affect environment in order to get goal and reality (the environment) to converge. Under
that definition, Amazon's Alexa and your household air conditioning and heating system both qualify as "robot".
How you implement a, b, and c above can have more or less sophistication, depending upon the complexity, variability, etc.
of the environment, or the solutions, or the means used to affect the environment.
A machine, like a typewriter, or a lawn-mower engine has the logic expressed in metal; it's static.
The addition of a computer (with a program, or even downloadable-on-the-fly programs) to a static machine, e.g. today's
computer-controlled-manufacturing machines (lathes, milling, welding, plasma cutters, etc.) makes a massive change in utility.
It's almost the same physically, but ever so much more flexible, useful, and more profitable to own/operate.
And if you add massive databases, internet connectivity, the latest machine-learning, language and image processing and
some nefarious intent, then you get into trouble.
Sometimes automation is necessary to eliminate the risks of manual processes. There are parenteral (injectable) drugs that
cannot be sterilized except by filtration. Most of the work of filling, post filling processing, and sealing is done using automation
in areas that make surgical suites seem filthy and people are kept from these operations.
Manual operations are only undertaken to correct issues with the automation and the procedures are tested to ensure that they
do not introduce contamination, microbial or otherwise. Because even one non-sterile unit is a failure and testing is destructive
process, of course any full lot of product cannot be tested to state that all units are sterile. Periodic testing of the automated
process and manual intervention is done periodically and it is expensive and time consuming to test to a level of confidence that
there is far less than a one in a million chance of any unit in a lot being non sterile.
In that respect, automation and the skills necessary to interface with it are fundamental to the safety of drugs frequently
used on already compromised patients.
Agree. Good example. Digital technology and miniaturization seem particularly well suited to many aspect of the medical world.
But doubt they will eliminate the doctor or the nurse very soon. Insurance companies on the other hand
"There would be no improvement in quality mixing and kneading the dough by hand. There would, however, be an enormous increase
in cost." WRONG! If you had an unlimited supply of 50-cents-an-hour disposable labor, mixing and kneading the dough by hand would
be cheaper. It is only because labor is expensive in France that the machine saves money.
In Japan there is a lot of automation, and wages and living standards are high. In Bangladesh there is very little automation,
and wages and livings standards are very low.
Are we done with the 'automation is destroying jobs' meme yet? Excessive population growth is the problem, not robots. And
the root cause of excessive population growth is the corporate-sponsored virtual taboo of talking about it seriously.
In a move that drew outrage from labor unions and progressives, President Donald Trump this week
quietly
took steps to slash
a scheduled pay raise for millions of federal workers from 2.5% to 1% due to
supposed concerns about "keeping the nation on a fiscally sustainable course."
"I have determined that for
2021 the across-the-board base pay increase will be limited to 1.0%," Trump
said
in
a message to Congress on Monday. "This alternative pay plan decision will not materially affect our ability
to attract and retain a well‑qualified federal workforce."
The president's proposed "adjustment" to the scheduled pay raise will take effect in January 2021 unless
Congress passes legislation to override the change.
Just a day after his message to Congress, Trump
tweeted
,
"BEST USA ECONOMY IN HISTORY!"
Critics highlighted the disconnect between the president's justification for cutting the planned raise
for federal workers and his boasts about the state of the U.S. economy.
"Trump claimed we had the 'BEST USA ECONOMY IN HISTORY' and cited 'serious economic conditions affecting
the general welfare' to justify limiting pay increases for federal workers,"
tweeted
Rep.
Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.). "These are contradicting claims. They can't both be true."
This is just the latest action in
@realDonaldTrump
's war on civil
servants. He held their pay hostage during the failed
#TrumpShutdown
,
worked to undermine their collective bargaining rights and proposed cuts to their retirement benefits.
#TrumpBudget
.
Slate
's Elliot Hannon
wrote
Wednesday
that "cutting the 2.5% raise set for 2021 to 1% for millions of federal workers seems a bit austere in the
face of such self-proclaimed boom times."
"Even more absurdly, Trump is justifying ordering the cut on the grounds that the country is in the midst
of a 'national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare,' which the White
House says authorizes the president to 'implement alternative plans for pay adjustments,'" Hannon added. "So
which is it? The best economy in the history of economies or a national economic emergency? Either way,
somebody's lying."
Pat Garofalo, managing editor at
Talk Poverty
,
tweeted
that
warnings about fiscal sustainability are not credible coming from the president who
signed
into law $1.5 trillion in tax cuts
for the rich in 2017.
The administration approved trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and
corporations, but sure, shortchanging federal employees is what will set the nation on a "fiscally
sustainable course"
https://t.co/3cmDRB5D60
Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the largest independent union of
federal workers in the U.S., said a 1% pay raise would "do nothing to close the gap between federal employee
salaries and their higher-paid private sector counterparts, it won't keep up with inflation, it won't keep
up with private sector wage increases."
"For an administration that has added $3 trillion to the federal debt, gouging federal employee pay and
benefits in the name of deficit reduction is ridiculous," Reardon said in a
statement
.
"NTEU will fight these regressive proposals on retirement while supporting existing legislation calling for
a 3.5% pay increase in 2021."
(sciencemag.org)
sea of red ink for federal research funding programs in President Donald Trump's latest
budget proposal. The 2021 budget request to Congress released today calls for deep, often
double-digit cuts to R&D spending at major science agencies. From a report: At the same
time, the president wants to put more money into a handful of areas -- notably artificial
intelligence (AI) and quantum information science (QIS) -- to create the new technology needed
for what the budget request calls "industries of the future." Here is a rundown of some of the
numbers from the budget request's R&D chapter. (The numbers reflect the portion of each
agency's budget classified as research, which in most cases is less than its overall
budget.)
1. National Institutes of Health: a cut of 7%, or $2.942 billion, to $36.965 billion.
2. National Science Foundation (NSF): a cut of 6%, or $424 million, to $6.328 billion.
3. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science: a cut of 17%, or $1.164 billion, to $5.760
billion.
4. NASA science: a cut of 11%, or $758 million, to $6.261 billion.
5. DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy: a cut of 173%, which would not only
eliminate the $425 million agency, but also force it to return $311 million to the U.S.
Department of the Treasury.
6. U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Agricultural Research Service: a cut of 12%, or
$190 million, to $1.435 billion.
7. National Institute of Standards and Technology: a cut of 19%, or $154 million, to $653
million.
8. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: a cut of 31%, or $300 million, to $678
million.
9. Environmental Protection Agency science and technology: a cut of 37%, or $174 million, to
$318 million.
10. Department of Homeland Security science and technology: a cut of 15%, or $65 million, to
$357 million.
11. U.S. Geological Survey: a cut of 30%, or $200 million, to $460 million.
"... Imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism ..."
"... Without the natives' consent and without the neighbouring countries approval, Moroccans, Somalis, and later Afghans and Syrians, found home in the EU thanks to madame Merkel. ..."
At the moment, the United States has great difficulty in retaining its hegemony in the
Middle East. Its troops have been declared unwanted in Iraq; and in Syria, the US and their
foreign legion of terrorists lose terrain and positions every month. The US has responded to
this with a significant escalation, by deploying more troops and by constant threats against
Iran. At the same time, we have seen strong protest movements in Lebanon, Iraq and
Iran.
When millions of Iraqi took to the streets recently, their main slogan was "THE UNITED
STATES OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST!"
How should one analyze this?
Obviously, there are a lot of social tensions in the Middle East – class based,
ethnic, religious and cultural. The region is a patchwork of conflicts and tensions that not
only goes back hundreds of years, but even a few thousand.
There are always many reasons to rebel against a corrupt upper class, anywhere in the world.
But no rebellion can succeed if it is not based on a realistic and thorough analysis of the
specific conditions in the individual country and region.
Just as in Africa, the borders in the Middle East are arbitrarily drawn. They are the
product of the manipulations of imperialist powers, and only to a lesser extent products of
what the peoples themselves have wanted.
During the era of decolonization, there was a strong, secular pan-Arab movement that wanted to create
a unified Arab world. This movement was influenced by the nationalist and socialist ideas that
had strong popular support at the time.
King Abdallah I
of Jordan envisaged a kingdom that would consist of Jordan, Palestine and Syria. Egypt and
Syria briefly established a union called the United Arab Republic . Gaddafi wanted
to unite Libya, Syria and Egypt in a federation of Arab republics
.
In 1958, a quickly dissolved confederation was established between Jordan and Iraq, called
the Arab Federation
. All these efforts were transient. What remains is the Arab League, which is, after all, not a
state federation and not an alliance. And then of course we have the demand for a Kurdish
state, or something similar consisting of one or more Kurdish mini-states.
Still, the most divisive product of the First World War was the establishment of the state
of Israel on Palestinian soil. During the First World War, Britain's Foreign Minister Arthur
Balfour issued what became known as the Balfour Declaration
, which " view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people."
But what is the basis for all these attempts at creating states? What are the prerequisites
for success or failure?
The imperialist powers divide the world according to the power
relations between them
Lenin gave the best and most durable explanation for this, in his essay Imperialism
– the highest stage of capitalism . There, he explained five basic features of
the era of imperialism:
The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a
high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; The
merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this
"finance capital", of a financial oligarchy; The export of capital as distinguished from the
export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; The formation of international
monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves; The territorial
division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.
But Lenin also pointed out that capitalist countries are developing unevenly, not least
because of the uneven development of productive forces in the various capitalist countries.
After a while, there arises a discrepancy between how the world is divided and the relative
strength of the imperialist powers. This disparity will eventually force through a
redistribution, a new division of the world based on the new relationship of strength. And, as
Lenin states :
The question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the
disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the
one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the
other?"
The two world wars were wars that arose because of unevenness in the power relationships
between the imperialist powers. The British Empire was past its heyday and British capitalism
lagged behind in the competition. The United States and Germany were the great powers that had
the largest industrial and technological growth, and eventually this misalignment exploded. Not
once, but twice.
Versailles and Yalta
The victors of the First World War divided the world between themselves at the expense of
the losers. The main losers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia (the Soviet Union) and the
Ottoman Empire. This division was drawn up in the Versailles treaty and the following minor
treaties.
Europe after the Versailles Treaties (Wikipedia)
This map shows how the Ottoman Empire was partitioned:
At the end of World War II, the victorious superpowers met in the city of Yalta on the
Crimean peninsula in the Soviet Union. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin made an agreement on how
Europe should be divided following Germany's imminent defeat. This map shows how it was
envisaged and the two blocs that emerged and became the foundation for the Cold War.
Note that Yugoslavia, created after Versailles in 1919, was maintained and consolidated as
"a country between the blocs". So it is a country that carries in itself the heritage of both
the Versailles- and Yalta agreements.
The fateful change of era when the Soviet Union
fell
In the era of imperialism, there has always been a struggle between various great powers.
The battle has been about markets, access to cheap labor, raw materials, energy, transport
routes and military control. And the imperialist countries divide the world between themselves
according to their strength. But the imperialist powers are developing unevenly.
If a power collapses or loses control over some areas, rivals will compete to fill the void.
Imperialism follows the principle that Aristotle in his Physics called horror vacui – the
fear of empty space.
And that was what happened when the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. In 1991, the Soviet
Union ceased to exist, and soon the Eastern bloc was also history. And thus the balance was
broken, the one that had maintained the old order. And now a huge area was available for
re-division. The weakened Russia barely managed to preserve its own territory, and not at all
the area that just before was controlled by the Soviet Union.
Never has a so large area been open for redivision. It was the result of two horrible
world wars that anew was up for grabs. It could not but lead to war." Pål
Steigan, 1999
"Never has a so large area been open for re-division. It was the result of two horrible
world wars that anew was up for grabs. It could not but lead to war." Map: Countries either
part of the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc or non-aligned (Yugoslavia)
When the Soviet Union disintegrated, both the Yalta and Versailles agreements in reality
collapsed, and opened up the way for a fierce race to control this geopolitical empty
space.
This laid the foundation for the American
Geostrategy for Eurasia , which concentrated on securing control over the vast Eurasian
continent. It is this struggle for redistribution in favor of the United States that has been
the basis for most wars since 1990: Somalia, the Iraq wars, the Balkan wars, Libya, Ukraine,
and Syria.
The United States has been aggressively spearheading this, and the process to expand NATO
eastward and create regime changes in the form of so-called "color revolutions" has been part
of this struggle. The coup in Kiev, the transformation of Ukraine into an American colony with
Nazi elements, and the war in Donbass are also part of this picture. This war will not stop
until Russia is conquered and dismembered, or Russia has put an end to the US offensive.
So, to recapitulate: Because the world is already divided between imperialist powers and
there are no new colonies to conquer, the great powers can only fight for redistribution. What
creates the basis and possibilities for a new division is the uneven development of capitalism.
The forces that are developing faster economically and technologically will demand bigger
markets, more raw materials, more strategic control.
The results of two terrible wars are
again up for grabs
World War I caused perhaps 20 million deaths , as well as at least as many
wounded. World War II caused around 72 million deaths . These are
approximate numbers, and there is still controversy around the exact figures, but we are
talking about this order of magnitude.
The two world wars that ended with the Versailles and Yalta treaties thus caused just below
100 million dead, as well as an incredible number of other suffering and losses.
Since 1991, a low-intensity "world war" has been fought, especially by the US, to conquer
"the void". Donald Trump
recently stated that the United States have waged wars based on lies, which have cost $ 8
trillion ($ 8,000 billion) and millions of people's lives. So the United States' new
distribution of the spoils has not happened peacefully.
"The Rebellion against
Sykes-Picot"
In the debate around the situation in the Middle East, certain people that would like to
appear leftist, radical and anti-imperialist say that it is time to rebel against the
artificial boundaries drawn by the Sykes-Picot and Versailles treaties. And certainly these
borders are artificial and imperialist. But how leftist and anti-imperialist is it to fight for
these boundaries to be revised now?
In reality, it is the United States and Israel that are fighting for a redistribution of the
Middle East. This is the basis underlying Donald Trump's "Deal of the Century", which aims to
bury Palestine forever, and it is stated outright in the new US strategy for partitioning
Iraq.
Again, this is just an updated version of the Zionist Yinon plan that aimed to cantonize the
entire Middle East, with the aim that Israel should have no real opponents and would be able to
dominate the entire region and possibly create a Greater Israel.
It is not the anti-imperialists that are leading the way to overhaul the imperialist borders
from 1919. It is the imperialists. To achieve this, they can often exploit movements that are
initially popular or national, but which then only become tools and proxies in a greater
game.
This has happened so many times in history that it can hardly be counted.
Hitler's Germany exploited Croatian nationalism by using the
Ustaša gangs as proxies. From 1929 to 1945, they killed hundreds of thousands of
Serbs, Jews and Roma people. And their ideological and political descendants carried out an
extremely brutal ethnic cleansing of the Krajina area and forced out more than 200,000 Serbs in
their so-called Operation Storm in 1995.
Hitler also used the extreme Ukrainian nationalists of Stepan Bandera's OUN, and after
Bandera's death, the CIA continued to use them as a fifth column against the Soviet Union.
The US low-intensity war against Iraq, from the Gulf War in 1991 to the Iraq War in 2003,
helped divide the country into enclaves. Iraqi Kurdistan achieved autonomy in the oil-rich
north with the help of a US "no-fly zone". The United States thus created a quasi-state that
was their tool in Iraq.
Undoubtedly, the Kurds in Iraq had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. But also
undoubtedly, their Iraqi "Kurdistan" became a client state under the thumb of United States.
And there is also no doubt that the no-fly zones were illegal, as UN Secretary General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali
admitted in a conversation with John Pilger .
And now the United States is still using the Kurds in Northern Iraq in its plan to divide
Iraq into three parts. To that end, they are building the world's largest consulate in Erbil.
What they are planning to do, is simply "creating a country".
As is well known, the United States also uses the Kurds in Syria as a pretext to keep 27
percent of the country occupied. It does not help how much the Kurdish militias SDF and PYD
invoke democracy, feminism and communalism; they have ended up pleading for the United States
to maintain the occupation of Northeast Syria.
Preparations for a New World War
Israel and the US are preparing for war against Iran. In this fight, they will develop as
much "progressive" rhetoric as is required to fool people. Real dissatisfaction in the area,
which there is every reason to have, will be magnified and blown out of all proportion. "Social
movements" will be equipped with the latest news in the Israeli and US "riot kits" and receive
training and logistics support, in addition to plenty of cold hard cash.
There may be good reasons to revise the 1919 borders, but in today's situation, such a move
will quickly trigger a major war. Some say that the Kurds are entitled to their own state, and
maybe so. The question is ultimately decided by everyone else, except the Kurds themselves.
The problem is that in today's geopolitical situation, creating a unified Kurdistan will
require that "one" defeats Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It's hard to see how that can happen
without their allies, not least Russia and China, being drawn into the conflict.
And then we have a new world war on our hands. And in that case, we are not talking about
100 million killed, but maybe ten times as much, or the collapse of civilization as we know it.
The Kurdish question is not worth that much.
This does not mean that one should not fight against oppression and injustice, be it social
and national. One certainly should. But you have to realize that revising the map of the Middle
East is a very dangerous plan and that you run the risk of ending up in very dangerous company.
The alternative to this is to support a political struggle that undermines the hegemony of the
United States and Israel and thereby creates better conditions for future struggles.
It is nothing new that small nations rely on geopolitical situations to achieve some form of
national independence. This was the case, for example, for my home country Norway. It was
France's defeat in the Napoleonic War that caused Denmark to lose the province of Norway to
Sweden in 1814, but at the same time it created space for a separate Norwegian constitution and
internal self rule.
All honor to the Norwegian founding fathers of 1814, but this was decided on the
battlefields in Europe. And again, it was Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War that laid
the geopolitical foundation for the dissolution of the forced union with Sweden almost a
hundred years later, in 1905. (This is very schematically presented and there are many more
details, but there is no doubt that Russia's loss of most of its fleet in the Far East had
created a power vacuum in the west, which was exploitable.)
Therefore, the best thing to do now is not to support the fragmentation of states, but to
support a united front to drive the United States out of the Middle East. The Million Man March
in Baghdad got the ball rolling. There is every reason to build up even more strength behind
it. Only when the United States is out, will the peoples and countries in the region be able to
arrive at peaceful agreements between themselves, which will enable a better future to be
developed.
And in this context, it is an advantage that China develops the "Silk Road" (aka Belt and
Road Initiative), not because China is any nobler than other major powers, but because this
project, at least in the current situation, is non-sectarian, non-exclusive and genuinely
multilateral. The alternative to a monopolistic rule by the United States, with a world police
under Washington's control, is a multipolar world. It grows as we speak.
The days of the Empire are numbered. What this will look like in 20 or 50 years, remains to
be seen.
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George Mc ,
Off topic – but there's nowhere else to put this at the moment:
The BBC was taken aback by leftwing attacks on its general election coverage
No idea what they are talking about. They patiently explained that Corbyn was Hitler. What
more could they do?
Dungroanin ,
Ok roll up the sleeves, time to concentrate. I've had enough of being baited as a judae-
phobe.
The 'Balfour Declaration' – he didn't write it and it was a contract published in
the newspapers within hours of it being inveigled.
Ready?
'Balfour and Lloyd George would have been happy with an unvarnished endorsement of
Zionism. The text that the foreign secretary agreed in August was largely written by Weizmann
and his colleagues:
"His Majesty's Government accept the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as
the national home of the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the
achievement of this object and will be ready to consider any suggestions on the subject which
the Zionist Organisation may desire to lay before them."
Got that – AUGUST?
Dungroanin ,
The leading figure in that drama was a charismatic chemistry professor from Manchester, Chaim
Weizmann – with his domed head, goatee beard and fierce intellect. Weizmann had gained
an entrée into political circles thanks to CP Scott, the illustrious editor of the
Manchester Guardian, and had then sold his Zionist project to government leaders, including
David Lloyd George when he was chancellor of the exchequer.
Dungroanin ,
Author(s)
Walter Rothschild, Arthur Balfour, Leo Amery, Lord Milner
Signatories
Arthur James Balfour
Recipient
Walter Rothschild
Dungroanin ,
'In due course the blunt phrase about Palestine being "reconstituted as the national home of
the Jewish people" was toned down into "the establishment of a home for the Jewish people in
Palestine" – a more ambiguous formulation which sidestepped for the moment the idea of
a Jewish state. '
Dungroanin ,
'Edwin Montagu, newly appointed as secretary of state for India, was only the third
practising Jew to hold cabinet office. Whereas his cousin, Herbert Samuel (who in 1920 would
become the first high commissioner of Palestine) was a keen supporter of Zionism, Montagu was
an "assimilationist" – one who believed that being Jewish was a matter of religion not
ethnicity. His position was summed up in the cabinet minutes:
Mr Montagu urged strong objections to any declaration in which it was stated that
Palestine was the "national home" of the Jewish people. He regarded the Jews as a religious
community and himself as a Jewish Englishman '
Dungroanin ,
'Montagu considered the proposed Declaration a blatantly anti-Semitic document and claimed
that "most English-born Jews were opposed to Zionism", which he said was being pushed mainly
by "foreign-born Jews" such as Weizmann, who was born in what is now Belarus.'
Dungroanin ,
The other critic of the proposed Declaration was Lord Curzon, a former viceroy of India, who
therefore viewed Palestine within the geopolitics of Asia. A grandee who traced his lineage
back to the Norman Conquest, Curzon loftily informed colleagues that the Promised Land was
not exactly flowing with milk and honey, but nor was it an empty, uninhabited space.
According to the cabinet minutes, "Lord Curzon urged strong objections upon practical
grounds. He stated, from his recollection of Palestine, that the country was, for the most
part, barren and desolate a less propitious seat for the future Jewish race could not be
imagined."
And, he asked, "how was it proposed to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman
[Muslim] inhabitants and to introduce the Jews in their place?"
Dungroanin ,
Sorry for the length of this bit – but it only makes sense in the whole:
'Between them, Curzon and Montagu had temporarily slowed the Zionist bandwagon. Lord
Milner, another member of the war cabinet, hastily added two conditions to the proposed
draft, in order to address the two men's respective concerns. The vague phrase about the
rights of the "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" hints at how little the
government knew or cared about those who constituted roughly 90 per cent of the population of
what they, too, regarded as their homeland.
After trying out the new version on a few eminent Jews, both of Zionist and
accommodationist persuasions, and also securing a firm endorsement from America's President
Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Balfour took the issue back to the war cabinet on 31
October. By now the strident Montagu had left for India, and on this occasion Balfour, who
could often be moody and detached, led from the front, brushing aside the objections that had
been raised and reasserting the propaganda imperative. According to the cabinet minutes, he
stated firmly: "The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as, indeed, all over the
world, now appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to
such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and
America."
This was standard cabinet tactics: a strong lead from a minister supported by the PM,
daring his colleagues to argue back. And this time Curzon did not, though he did make another
telling comment. He "attached great importance to the necessity of retaining the Christian
and Moslem Holy Places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem". If this were done, Curzon added, he "did
not see how the Jewish people could have a political capital in Palestine".'
Dungroanin ,
Dates again crucial and the smoking gun:
'securing a firm endorsement from America's President Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and
Balfour took the issue back to the war cabinet on 31 October.'
Dungroanin ,
The two conditions had bought off the two main critics. That was all that seemed to matter,
even though the reference to the "rights of the existing non-Jewish communities" stood in
potential conflict with the first two clauses about the British supporting and using their
"best endeavours" for the "establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people".
Dungroanin ,
There is MORE but I'll pause and see how many are really interested in FACTS, as opposed to
invented History, Economics and Capital instead of the only real human motivations of the
ages – Money and Power.
George Mc ,
the only real human motivations of the ages – Money and Power.
If this is true then we are all doomed.
Dungroanin ,
Not if we are aware of it George.
Dungroanin ,
Ok a summary fom Brittanica:
'Balfour Declaration Quick Facts
The Balfour Declaration, issued through the continued efforts of Chaim Weizmann and Nahum
Sokolow, Zionist leaders in London, fell short of the expectations of the Zionists, who had
asked for the reconstitution of Palestine as "the" Jewish national home. The declaration
specifically stipulated that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The document, however,
said nothing of the political or national rights of these communities and did not refer to
them by name. Nevertheless, the declaration aroused enthusiastic hopes among Zionists and
seemed the fulfillment of the aims of the World Zionist Organization (see Zionism).
The British government hoped that the declaration would rally Jewish opinion, especially
in the United States, to the side of the Allied powers against the Central Powers during
World War I (1914–18). They hoped also that the settlement in Palestine of a
pro-British Jewish population might help to protect the approaches to the Suez Canal in
neighbouring Egypt and thus ensure a vital communication route to British colonial
possessions in India.
The Balfour Declaration was endorsed by the principal Allied powers and was included in
the British mandate over Palestine, formally approved by the newly created League of Nations
on July 24, 1922.
In May 1939 the British government altered its policy in a White Paper recommending a
limit of 75,000 further immigrants and an end to immigration by 1944, unless the resident
Palestinian Arabs of the region consented to further immigration.
Zionists condemned the new policy, accusing Britain of favouring the Arabs. This point was
made moot by the outbreak of World War II (1939–45) and the founding of the State of
Israel in 1948.'
Dungroanin ,
But what about the timing?
Well there are twin tracks, here is the first.
'But talking about the return of the Jews to the land of Israel was only meaningful
because that land seemed up for grabs after the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany in 1914.
For Britain, France and Russia – though primarily focused on Europe – war against
a declining power long dubbed the "Sick Man of Europe" opened up the prospect of vast gains
in the Levant and the Middle East.
The Ottoman army, however, proved no walkover. In 1915 it threatened the Suez Canal,
Britain's imperial artery to India, and then repulsed landings by British empire and French
forces on the Dardanelles at Gallipoli. Although Baghdad fell in March 1917, two British
assaults on Gaza that spring were humiliatingly driven back, with heavy losses. Deadlock in
the desert added to Whitehall's list of woes.
In this prescribed narrative of remembrance for 1914-18, what happened outside the Western
Front has been almost entirely obscured. The British army's "Historical Lessons, Warfare
Branch" has published in-house a fascinating volume of essays about what it tellingly
entitles "The Forgotten Fronts of the First World War" – with superb maps and
illustrations. The collection covers not only Palestine and Mesopotamia (roughly modern-day
Iraq and Kuwait), but also Italy, Africa, Russia, Turkey and the Pacific – indeed much
of the world – but sadly it is not currently available to the public. '
Dungroanin ,
The second track is the 'money' track and what everything is about and why we live in such a
miasma of blatant lies.
IT can only make sense by asking questions such as :
Can we follow the money?
When was the Fed set up? Why? By whom?
How much money did it lend &
to whom?
When was the first world war started?
When did US declare war?
When did US troops arrive in numbers to enter that war?
What happened in Russia at the same time?
And in Mesopotamia?
How did it end?
How did it fail to end?
What happened to the contract?
Etc.
I have attempted to research and answer some of these already above.
Next I will attempt to walk the other track but be warned that opens more ancient
tracks.
Dungroanin ,
'On 2 November, Balfour sent his letter to Lord Rothschild.
7 November, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. ransacked the Tsarist
archives, they published juicy extracts from the "secret treaties" that the Allied powers had
made among themselves in 1915-16 to divide the spoils of victory.
The same day the Ottoman Seventh and Eighth Armies evacuated the town of Gaza
9 November Letter published in Times.
Mid November – The Bolsheviks did not discover that the British were also playing
footsie with the Turks. In the middle of November 1917, secret meetings took place with
Ottoman dissidents in Greece and Switzerland about trying to arrange an armistice in the Near
East. The war cabinet recognised that, as bait, it might have to let the Ottomans keep parts
of their empire in the region, or at least retain some appearance of control. When Curzon got
wind of this, he was incensed: "Almost in the same week that we have pledged ourselves, if
successful, to secure Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, are we to
contemplate leaving the Turkish flag flying over Jerusalem?"
End November. The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Petrograd, Morgan Philips Price,
was able to examine the key documents overnight, and his scoop was published by the paper at
the end of November. It revealed to the world, among other things, that the British also had
an understanding with the French – the Sykes-Picot agreement of January 1916 – to
carve up the Near East between them once the Ottoman empire had been defeated. In this,
Palestine was slated for some kind of international condominium – not the British
protectorate envisaged in the Balfour Declaration.
11 December Allenby formally entered Jerusalem. '
So just a few loose ends left to tie up anyone actually want to go there?
The paramount goal of the Fed's founders was to eliminate banking panics, but it was not
the only goal. The founders also sought to increase the amount of international trade
financed by US banks and to expand the use of the dollar internationally. By 1913 the United
States had the world's largest economy, but only a small fraction of US exports and imports
were financed by American banks. Instead, most exports and imports were financed by bankers'
acceptances drawn on European banks in foreign currencies. (Bankers' acceptances are a type
of financial contract used for making payments in the future, for example, upon delivery of
goods or services. Bankers' acceptances are drawn on and guaranteed, i.e., "accepted," by a
bank.) The Federal Reserve Act allowed national banks to issue bankers' acceptances and open
foreign branches, which greatly expanded their ability to finance international transactions
Further the Act authorized the Reserve Banks to purchase acceptances in the open market to
ensure a liquid market for them, thereby spurring growth of that market.
President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913.
The task of determining the specific number of districts, district boundaries, and which
cities would have Reserve Banks was assigned to a Reserve Bank Organization Committee.
On April 2, 1914, the Committee announced that twelve Federal Reserve districts would be
formed, identified the boundaries of those districts, and named the cities that would have
Reserve Banks.1 The Banks were quickly organized, officers and staff were hired, and boards
of directors appointed. The Banks opened for business on November 16, 1914.
..
The Federal Reserve Act addressed perceived shortcomings by creating a new national
currency -- Federal Reserve notes -- and requiring members of the Federal Reserve System to
hold reserve balances with their local Federal Reserve Banks.
World War I began in Europe in August 1914, before the Federal Reserve Banks had opened
for business. The war had a profound impact on the US banking system and economy, as well as
on the Federal Reserve.
War disrupted European financial markets and reduced the supply of trade credit offered by
European banks, providing US banks with an opening. Low US interest rates, abundant reserves,
and new authority to issue trade acceptances enabled American banks to finance a growing
share of world trade.
Dungroanin ,
So the denouement :
It appears that the 'first world war' was designed to diminish European banks and boost
the US banks.
However the fuller history of the US bankers is worth knowing- the Jekyll Islanders story
is widely publicised.
Into this time track enters the Balfour Declaration addressed to Lord Rothschild, steered
by Milner (heir to Rhodes empire building and the old EIC), approved by the potus Wilson
(another hireling) that finally sent US troops to overwhelm the Germans, while the great
gamers took out the Romanovs and the Ottoman Empire.
-- --
When we try to understand such facts and timelines and are attacked as Judaeo-phobes,
because we identify Bankers and Robber Barons, it becomes even clearer how deep and wide they
have controlled history and it has NOTHING to do with RELIGION (except perhaps Ludism).
Nothing to do with Judaism (except perhaps Old Jewry in the City, but Lombard Street was most
powerful!) and EVERYTHING to do with POWER and it's representation MONEY. The obscuring of
that through various Economic theories including Marxism is the work of the same old bastards
who are responsible for all our current malaises.
Thankyou and good evening, if anyone made it this far!
😉
George Mc ,
Well OK Dunnie, let's say I go along with you and assume that all the shit we are facing has
nothing to do with religion or all that "Marxian porridge" (as Guido Giacomo Preparata called
it). The question is: What do we do about it?
Speaking of GGP , it seems to me that you and him have much in common. He also goes on
about "Power" but seems to be on the verge of referring this "Power" to mystical entities in
a disconcertingly Ickean manoeuvre. Not that I'm attibuting such a thing to yourself. (No
irony intended.)
Dungroanin ,
George – i don't want you or anyone to just go along with me.
I want everyone to make their minds up on FACTS. That is the only way humanity has
actually progressed by inventing the only self correcting philosophical system and method of
the ages that goes beyond 'personal responsibility teligions' – SCIENTIFIC METHOD
– that takes away arbitrary power to rule, from these that inhabit the top of the human
pyramid by virtue of being born there and having control over the money and so the power to
remain in these positions, which does not benefit the totality of humanity or all life on
Earth.
I am not a messiah, I am angry as fuck and I am not going to sit around enjoying whatever
soma has been handed to us to keep compliant and leave this Planet worse than I found it.
That is the scientific conclusion I have reached.
I suppose some proto buddhist / zoroastrianism / animalist / Shinto / Jain & Quakers
seek religious truth in inner experience, and place great reliance on conscience as the basis
of morality.
I suppose Ghandi's non-violence rebellion against Imperialists is a model as are various
peasants revolts – the Russian / Chinese / Korean / Vietnamese couldn't have survived
without the literal grassroots!
..
As for Guido Giacomo Preparata that you have introduced to me – i had nevet heard of
him before this morning – my first take on him is that he seems to have arrived at
similar conclusions by similar methodology. He seems to have a lot of formal education and a
enviable career so far – i'll have to look into him further but the interview that i
just read seems to indicate concurrence with what i said above. I see no Ickean references
– please give a link.
-- -
As a observation do you not find it funny that there is not a single objection to the
verity of the facts which I have presented above?
Good luck George if you are a real seeker of truth. If not insta-karma awaits.
George Mc ,
The Preparata statement I was referring to is in this interview:
Power is a purely human suggestion. Suggested by whom? That is the question. The NSDAP
thus appeared to have been a front for some kind of nebula of Austro-German magi, dark
initiates, and troubling literati (Dietrich Eckhart comes to mind), with very plausible
extra-Teutonic ramifications of which we know next to nothing. Hitler came to be inducted
in a lodge of this network, endowed as he seemed with a supernatural gift of inflaming
oratory.
This is a theme that I am still studying, but from what I gathered, the adepts of the
Thule Gesellschaft communed around the belief of being the blood heirs of a breed that
seeks redemption / salvation / metempsychosis in some kind of eighth realm away from this
earth, which is the shoddy creation of a lesser God -- the archangel of the Hebrews,
Jehovah. It all sounds positively insane to post-modern ears, but it should be taken very
seriously, I think.
Admittedly it isn't quite interdimensional reptiles but there is a distinct metaphysical
flavour there.
I wouldn't go along with everything Preparata says but he is a wonderful writer and I have
bought almost everything I can find by him. His "biggie" is "Conjuring Hitler". It was Nafeez
Mosaddeq Ahmed that brought GGP to my attention via that book.
milosevic ,
images on this website look terrible, with very little colour. the problem seems to be caused
by this rule, from the file "OffGstyle.css":
.content-wrap-spp img {
filter: sepia(20%) saturate(30%);
}
Open ,
This sepia effect usually works well with Off-Guardian articles, but with these maps in
today's article it is definitely terrible. Why have maps if they don't want to show them
clearly?
(any extra steps for the user to see the pictures clearly is not the answer)
Another area neglected on this website is crediting photos. The majority of images carry
no atribution/credit, despite it [crediting photos] is the best ethical practice even for
public domain pictures. I wish Admin gets expert advice on this.
Open ,
Look at the language used by the americans:
On feb. 12 [2020], Coalition forces, conducting a patrol near Qamishli, Syria ,
encountered a checkpoint occupied by pro-Syrian .. forces .
So, the supremacist unites states' army has found that Syrian forces are occupying Syrian
land .. wow wow wow .. according to this logic, Russian forces are occupying Russian land.
Iranian forces are occupying Iranian land (how dare they?!). But american forces are not
occupying any land, and Israel is not occupying Palestinian and Syrian lands.
This language needs to be known more widely.
Open ,
The americans always use the term 'Coalition forces' when they talk about their illegal
presence in Syria. I tried to search online for what countries are in this coalition. I
recall I was able to find that in the past, but now, it seems this information is being
pushed under wrap.
What are they afraid of? What are they hiding?
Joe ,
Just bring about the end of "Israel" and there'll be peace in the Middle East, and probably
in the wider world, too.
Open ,
Ending the Israeli project is certainly a step in the right direction to improve global
stability. However, alone, it will not bring about peace because the
British/Five-Eyes/Washington's doctrine of spreading disorder and chaos permeates (saturates)
the planet.
In fact, current disorders are the results of convergence of Israeli interests with those
of Western White Supremacy's* resolve to dominate, erh, eveything.
* Western White Supremacy can also be called Western White Idiocy and Bigotry.
Israel manipulates the West's political and military might. The West also uses Israel to
spread Chaos and Disorder.
Antonym ,
Right, back to the good old peace of the graveyard inspired by Mohamed's male sex riot
ideology and plunder legitimization before the Westerners showed up with their superior
(arms) tech legitimization for their plunder.
Before Israel's 1947 creation the world was a bed of roses .
Open ,
"srael's 1947 creation"
Without the natives' consent and without the neighbouring countries approval, Ukranians
and Germans, and later South Americans, found home in the Middle East.
How ligitimate is that?
Antonym ,
Without the natives' consent and without the neighbouring countries approval, Moroccans,
Somalis, and later Afghans and Syrians, found home in the EU thanks to madame Merkel.
How ligitimate is that?
Open ,
"Moroccans, Somalis, and later Afghans and Syrians .. etc.."
Do these comments reflect the Zionists' perspective? This is important because they prove
that the whole existence of Israel is based on total fabrication and lies.
Maggie ,
Did you have to practice at being THAT stupid! Or did they lobotomise you in Langley?
Somalis, Afghans, Syrians would not have had any cause to leave their homeland had it not
been for your employers the CIA/MOSSAD facilitating the raping and pillaging of their homes
by the Oil Magnates, leaving them starving and desolate. https://www.hiiraan.com/op2/2007/may/somalia_the_other_hidden_war_for_oil.aspx
and where does our Aid money go?
https://www.youtube.com/embed/5OInaYenHkU?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
But of course Antonym, if you were in their situation, you would just stick it out?
Shame on you .
To those who care, read "The confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins" to
understand how this corrupt system is conducted.
Richard Le Sarc ,
Its 'creation' in blood, murder, rape and terror, in a great ethnic cleansing-the sign of
things to come, ceaselessly, for seventy years and ongoing.
paul ,
Ask the people in Gaza about the Zionist "peace of the graveyard."
Antonym ,
Gaza before 2005 was relatively peaceful + prosperous. After the Israeli withdrawal the
inhabitants messed up their own economy but kept on making lots of babies just like
before.
Quite the opposite of a graveyard or a Warsaw ghetto or a Dachau.
Despite the disengagement, the United Nations, international human rights organisations
and most legal scholars regard the Gaza Strip to still be under military occupation by
Israel, though this is disputed by Israel and other legal scholars. Following the
withdrawal, Israel has continued to maintain direct external control over Gaza and indirect
control over life within Gaza: it controls Gaza's air and maritime space, and six of Gaza's
seven land crossings, it maintains a no-go buffer zone within the territory, and controls
the Palestinian population registry, and Gaza remains dependent on Israel for its water,
electricity, telecommunications, and other utilities.
Interesting definition of "withdrawal". It's amazing those Gazans even managed to have
babies!
Richard Le Sarc ,
You would have made a grand Nazi, Antsie-cripes, you have!
paul ,
Gaza was, and is, a huge Zionist concentration camp hermetically sealed off from the outside
world and blockaded just like the Warsaw Ghetto. With Zionist thugs and kiddie killers
shooting hundreds of kids in the head for the fun of it with British sniper rifles and dum
dum bullets, and periodically dropping 20,000 tons of bombs at a time on it, a higher
explosive yield than Hiroshima. With parties of Jews going along to hold barbecues and
picnics to watch all the fun. Nice people, those chosen folk.
Richard Le Sarc ,
I rather think that Epstein, Weinstein, Moonves and all those orthodox and ultra-orthodox who
are such prolific patrons of the sex industry in Israel, know a bit about 'male sex riot
ideology', Antsie.
Dungroanin ,
Pathetic.
'Nandy won a major boost when members of the Labour affiliate Jewish Labour Movement gave her
their backing after a hustings, saying she understood the need to change the party's
culture.'
From the Groaniad
How many members? How many by denomination?
As for the Balfour Contract there were actual English Jewish establishment figures against
its premise. Actual imperial servants. The declaration was a stitch up by the new banking
powers in the US which then sent in the yanks to stop the Germans in 1917.
History is rewritten daily to memory hole such facts.
Capricornia Man ,
The 'Jewish Labour Movement' is so Jewish that most of its members are not Jewish. And it is
so Labour-affiliated that it did not support Labour in the December general election. But it
has no shortage of money. It exists solely to prosecute the interests of a foreign power.
Much the same could be said for any politician who accepts its endorsement.
Rhys Jaggar ,
Given that Jews are vastly outnumbered by non Jews, the simplest way to stop Jewish
manipulation of politics is to form a party from which Jews are specifically banned.
You will not propose any policies harming Jews in any way, you will just make it clear
that this is a party free from any Jewish influence in its constitution.
If Jews cannot accept that, then they are utterly racist and must be dealt with without
sensibility.
Maggie ,
A better solution Rhys would be to form a party that denies all and any dual citizens
That way all the Zionists would be barred.
Richard Le Sarc ,
Full public financing of political parties would end Zionist control.
paul ,
Thornberry has just thrown in the towel.
She will now have more time to "get down on her hands and knees" and "beg forgiveness" from
the Board of Deputies.
Those good little Shabbos are so easily trained.
Dungroanin ,
BoD's??? Another random organisation!
Who are they? Who do they represent? How many people? Which people? How did they get
elected? How can they be fired?
Richard Le Sarc ,
The next world war has already started, with the bio-warfare atttack on China aka Covid19.
lundiel ,
Why no comment on the government reshuffle? I don't agree with the Indian middle-class
uplifting but totally agree with neutering the ultra-conservative treasury.
Maggie ,
I think it's a case of who gives a fck. We now know that our elections are rigged, and so
there is no point in us being involved. My family and I all realised and voted for the last
time.
They are all bloody crap actors reading their scripts and playing their parts, whilst the
never changing suits in the background pull the strings.
I had to explain to my 10 year old Grandson how politics work, and he said "Why doesn't
anyone know the names of, or see the suits?"
What I want to know is why no-one ever asks this question or demands an answer?
tonyopmoc ,
Completely Brilliant Article, but it is Valentines Day, so as I am 66 years old, and in love
with my wife (nearly 40 years together = LOVE), I wrote this in response to Craig Murray, who
has banned me again.
It may be off topic for him, but it ain't off topic for me. I am still in Love.
"Churchill's mental deterioration from syphilis – which the Eton and Oxford ."
Never had it, and she didn't either. We were young and in love, but we didn't know, if
either of us had sex before, but I had a spotty dick, and went to the VD clinic. I had a
blood test, and they gave me some zinc cream.
She also had the same thing, and showed her Mum.
We were both completely innocent, and had a sexually transmitted disease called Thrush. It
is relatively harmless, but can also give you a sore throat.
We both laughed at each other, and nearly got married.
Natural Yoghurt, is completely brilliant at preventing it.
Far better than Canestan.
Happy Valentines Day, for Everyone still In Love.
Let us all look forwad to a Brighter Day for our Grandchildren.
Tony
Loverat ,
Hey Tony
Dont worry. Craig Murray might not like you but I do. Your stories, here and elsewhere
have entertained me for many years.
Mind you, if I were your other half I would have chucked you years ago.
paul ,
Tell him how much you like haggis and tossing your caber.
Dungroanin ,
Without Stalins say so Poland would not have had its borders at the end of ww2.
Also,
On these maps just off the right hand edges is missing Afghanistan.. which the imperialists
invaded in 2002 as the Taliban wiped out the opium crops. Back to full production immediately
after invasion and 18 years later secret negotiations to hand over to Taliban while leaving
8,000 CUA troops delivering the huge cash crop.
Seeking possession and control – in competition with those you see as seeking to
dispossess and control or deny you – is the identity or belief in 'kill or be
killed'.
This belief overrides and subordinates others – such as to subsume all else to such
private agenda that will seek alliance against common threat but only as a shifting strategy
of possession and control.
One of the things about this 'game' of power struggle, is that it loses any sense of WHY
– and so it is a driven mind or dictate of power or possession for it own sake that
cannot really ENJOY or HAVE and share what it Has. The image of the hungry ghost comes to
mind here. It will never have enough until you are dead – and even then will offer you
torment beyond the grave.
Until this mindset is recognised and released as an 'insanity' it operates as accepted
currency of exchange, and maps our a world of its own conflicting and conflicted
meanings.
The willingness to destroy or kill, deny or undermine and invalidate others in order to
GET for a private agenda set over the whole instead of finding balance within the whole
– is destructive to life, no matter how ingenious the thinking that frames it to seem
to be progressive, protective, or in fact powerful.
But in our collective alignment and allegiance with such a way of thinking and identifying
– we all give power to the destructive – as if to protect the life that it gives
us.
The hungry ghost is also in the mass population when separated from their land and lives
to seek connection or meaning in proffered 'products and services' instead of creating out of
our own lives. Products and services that operate a hidden agenda of possession and control
or market and mind capture under threat of fear of pain of loss in losing even the little
that we have.
Having – on a spiritual level is our being – and not a matter of stuffing a
hole.
Madness that can no longer mask as anything else is all about – and brings a choice to
conscious awareness as to whether to persist in it or decide to find another way of seeing
and being.
This is not to say there is no place to call upon or seek to limit people in positions of
trust from serving an unjust outcome by calling for transparency and accountability –
but not to wait on that or make that the be all and end all.
If there is another way and a better way than war masking in and misusing and thus
corrupting anything and everything, then it has to be lived one to another.
Everyone seeks a better experience – but many seek it in a negative framing.
Negative in the sense of self-lack seeking power in the terms of its current identity. Evils
work their own destruction, but find sustainability in selling destructive agenda or toxic
debt as ingeniously complex instruments of deceit – by which the targeted buyer
believes they have or shall save their 'self' or add to their 'self' rather than growing
hollow to a driven mindset of reactive fear-addiction.
I don't need to 'tell this to those who refuse to listen' – but I share it with any
moment of a willingness to listen. In the final analysis, we are the ones who live the result
of choices in our lives, whatever the times and conditions.
The 'repackaging' of reality to self-deceit, is not new but part of the human mind and
experience throughout history. The evil changes forms – as if the good has and shall
triumph. But truth undoes illusion by being accepted. It doesn't war on illusion and thus
make it real – and remain truth.
Judgement divides to rule.
Discernment arises from the unwillingness to division.
One is set apart from and over life as the invocation of an alien will, dealing death, and
the other as the will of true desire revealed.
The idea of independent autonomy is relative to a limited sphere of responsibilities in
the world.
The idea of living our own life is an alignment within the same for others and the freedom to
do so cannot take from others without becoming possessed by our denials, debts and
transgressions – no less so in the driven mind of ingeniously repackaged and wilfully
defended narrative identity.
In our own experience, this is not a matter of applied analysis, so much as awareness or
space in which to seek and find truth in some willingness of recognition and acceptance or
choice, while the triggering or baiting to madness is loud or compelling as the dictate of
fear seeking protection and grievance seeking retribution – as if these give freedom
and power rather than locking into a fear-framed limitation as substitution for life set in
defiance and refusal to look on or share in truth – and so to such a one, war is truth,
and love is weakness to exploit, use and weaponise for getting.
paul ,
If you look at the proposed new map of the Middle East, it mirrors Kushner's Deal Of The
Century for Palestine – because it has the same Zionist authorship.
The same old dirty Zionist games of divide and rule – break up countries in the region
into tiny defenceless little statelets setting different ethnic and religious groups at each
others' throats, so that they can rule the roost and steal whatever they wish.
You see this in the past and the recent past. The way Lebanon was torn away from Syria. Or
Kuwait from Iraq. Or the Ruritanian petty Gulf dictatorships like Bahrain, Qatar, Dubai.
Trump was being honest for the first time in his miserable life when he said none of these
satellites and satraps would last a fortnight if they were not propped up by the US.
paul ,
George Galloway described the whole region as a flock of sheep surrounded by ravenous wolves.
At the same time, there is more than a grain of truth in the Zionists' contention that the
people of the region are to some extent the authors of their own misfortune.
They always fall for the divide-and-rule games of outside powers, Britain, America,
Israel, who invade, bomb, slaughter, humiliate and exploit them. If they had been united,
Israel would not have been created. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, would not have been destroyed
and bombed back to the Stone Age. These countries would be genuinely independent and at
peace.
When I speak to ordinary moslems, it is surprising and depressing to see how much visceral
hatred they express for Shia moslems. They seem blind to the way they are being manipulated
to serve outside interests.
So we see moslem Saudi Arabia trying to incite America and Israel to destroy Iran, and
offering to pay for the whole cost of the war. Or S. Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, UAE et al, in bed
with Israel, paying billions to bankroll the terrorist head choppers in Syria. Or Egypt,
which does not even protest, let alone lift a finger, when Israeli aircraft use its air space
to carpet bomb Gaza. Or going further back in history, when countries like Egypt and Syria
sent troops to join the 1991 US invasion of Iraq. Even though Iraq had sent its forces to the
Golan Heights in 1973 to fight and die to prevent Syria being overrun by Israel. How
contemptible is all that? Yet those are just a few of many examples of all the backstabbing
that has occurred over the years. If these people don't respect themselves, why should
anybody else?
paul ,
And this has been going on for hundreds of years.
1096 marked the beginning of The Crusades, a disaster for the region on a par with the
creation of Israel.
At that time, London was a little village of 25,000. Baghdad and Alexandria and Cordoba were
sophisticated modern cities with populations of hundreds of thousands. They dismissed the
Crusaders as mere bandits who would do some looting, steal some cattle, and go home. But 3
years later Jerusalem had been conquered and its inhabitants slaughtered, the start of a 200
year disaster for the region. How? Why?
Because the Arabs were so busy fighting a civil war at the time they barely noticed the
foreign invaders. The old, old story. Civil war between Sunnis and Shias.
One day, they will wake up and realise that they have to hang together, or hang
separately.
But I wouldn't hold your breath.
There seems to be an endless supply of quisling stooge dictators ready to do the bidding of
hostile outside powers. The Mubaraks, the Sisis, the King Abdullahs, the Sinioras, the MBS's,
to name but a few.
Conforming to all the worst stereotypes about Arabs and moslems.
You could argue that they deserve all they get, when they are ever ready to bend over and
drop their trousers.
Is it really any surprise that they have been invaded, slaughtered, bombed back to the Stone
Age, robbed, exploited and humiliated from time immemorial.
Maybe one day they will discover an ounce of dignity and self respect. Who knows?
Maggie ,
"1096 marked the beginning of The Crusades, a disaster for the region on a par with the
creation of Israel.
At that time, London was a little village of 25,000. Baghdad and Alexandria and Cordoba were
sophisticated modern cities with populations of hundreds of thousands. They dismissed the
Crusaders as mere bandits who would do some looting, steal some cattle, and go home. But 3
years later Jerusalem had been conquered and its inhabitants slaughtered, the start of a 200
year disaster for the region. How? Why?"
Because despite the mendacious lies that are told about Muslims, they are tolerant and
forgiving. They believe in one God, and live exemplary modest, generous lives in the belief
that they will enter in to the kingdom of heaven.
And these are the people we are being encouraged to hate and fear? To enable the neo cons
to invade and destroy everything in their path to get their oil.
Hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over 'live in democracies' of some shape or
form, from Indonesia to Malaysia to Pakistan to Lebanon to Tunisia to Turkey. Tens of
millions of Muslims' live in -- and participate in' -- Western democratic societies. The
country that is on course to have the biggest Muslim population in the world in the next
couple of decades is India, which also happens to be the world's biggest democracy. Yet a
persistent pernicious narrative exists, particularly in the West, that Islam and democracy
are incompatible. Islam is often associated with dictatorship, totalitarianism, and a lack of
freedom, and many "well paid" analysts and pundits claim that Muslims are philosophically
opposed to the idea of democracy .
Richard Le Sarc ,
'Democracy' as practised in the neo-liberal capitalist West, is a nullity, a fiction, a
smoke-screen behind which the one and only power, that of the rich owners of the economy,
acts alone.
I know. These Zionist morons droning on about how violent Islam is as religion yet ignoring
the fact that the Bible is based on the God of Abraham granting them Canaan (like Trump
giving the Israelis the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) and urging them to
commit complete and utter genocidal annihilation of the inhabitants by not leaving a single
living thing breathing.
No violence there folks. Nope. The book of love my ass!
paul ,
Their God was a demented estate agent, rather like Trump or Kushner.
Personally I believe that the chapters of the bible were written after their genocidal blood
lust simply to justify their despicable acts. Claiming that God made 'em do it.
Loverat ,
My experience of muslims in the UK is many express support for the Palestinians but don't
identify or understand those states which still speak up for their rights, Syria, Iran and a
few others.
Sadly like the general UK population they have been exposed to propaganda which excuses
evil and mass murder carried out by Saudi Arabia and their lackeys and Israel. This is
changing however. People are gradually waking up. Muslims and the general UK public if they
really knew the extent of this would be out demonstrating on the streets.
The realisation these policies have exposed all of us to nuclear wipe out in seconds
should be enough motivation for any normal person.
The wipe out or (preferably) demonstrations will happen. Just a question of when. You can see
why the establishment and people like Higgins, Lucas and York are so active recently. These
idiots, blinded by their pay checks can't see the harm they are causing through their
irresponsible lies even to their own families. Perhaps they all have nuclear shelters in
their back garden.
Richard Le Sarc ,
Saudi Arabia is NOT 'Moslem'. It is Wahhabist, a genocide cult created by doenmeh, ie
crypto-Jewish followers of the failed 17th century Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, which is
homicidally opposed to all Moslems but fellow Wahhabists.
milosevic ,
I thought it was created by the British Empire, in order to provide reliable stooges and
puppet regimes.
Richard Le Sarc ,
What people must realise is that,for the Zionassty secular and Talmudic religious
leaderships, by far the dominant forces in Israel and among many of the Diaspora sayanim, the
drive to create 'Eretz Yisrael', '..from the Nile to the Euphrates' (and some include the
Arabian Peninsula as well), is a real, religious, ambition-indeed an obligation. With the
alliance with the 'Christian Zionist' lunatics in the USA, the fate of humanity is in the
hands of the Evil Brain Dead.
BigB ,
I despair. This is why there is 'No Deal For Nature' because the hegemonic cultural movement
is to extend cultural hegemony over nature. We cannot seem to help it or stop ourselves. Do
we suppose a glossy website will change that? Or empty sloganneering subvertisements? Or
waiving placards outside banks? Or some other futile conscience salving symbolic gesture?
No, we have to subvert the cultural hegemony over nature at every point at every chance.
Which is thankless because cultural normativity is ubiquitous. And it's killing us. And BRI
is the very antithesis of alternative an eternal return into the cultural consumerism and
commodification that is the global hegemony at least at an elite level. And we are among that
elite – in terms of consumption and pollution. We are the problem. If we seek to extend
or preserve our own Eurocentric priviliges and consumptions we can only do so by extracting
evermore global resources and maldeveloping the Rest. Which is also what Samir Amin said:
following Wallerstein's World Systems Theory.
The progressive packaging of all our sins and transferring them to something called
'American Imperialism' is nothing less than mass psychological transference to a Fetish. By
which we maintain autonomy from any blame in the ecological disaster we are co-creating.
Which is why it is a powerful cultural narrative constructivism. 'We' do not have to reform:
the scapegoated Otherised 'they' do. Whilst we all sit smugly in our inauthentic imaginary
autonomy: the ecological destruction caused entirely by our collectivist consumption carries
on. 'They' have to clean up 'their' act – not us. 'We' align with the
'counter-hegemonic alliance': the alternative BRI. 'We' are so bourgeois and progressive in
our invented independence and totally aligned with the destructive forces of capitalist
endocolonised culture because of our own internalised screening discourse. Which is why there
is #NoDealForNature. 'We' don't actually give a flying fuck not beyond some hollow totemic
gestures in transference of our own responsibility.
'We' are pushing for the financialisation of nature: as the teleology of our particular
complicit cultural narratives. It's not just 'them'. Supply and demand are dialectically
exponential. Who is demanding less, more fairly distributed North to South? Exponential
expansionism via BRI is no more alternative than colonising the Moon or Mars. For nature to
have a deal: we have to stop demanding growth. And in doing that: become self-responsible
right through to the narratives we produce. For which every person in the global consumer
bourgeoisie – that's us – will have to change their imperatives from culture to
nature. Which means a new naturalised culture: not just complicitly advocating the 'same old,
same old' exponential expansionism of the extractivist commodification of every last standing
resource. Under the guise of new narrative constructions like this. That's not progress: it's
capitalist propaganda and personal self-propaganda. We are among the consumer elite. Which is
driving the financialisation and commodification of everything. For us.
#NoDealForNature until we take full and honest self-responsibility to create one with our
every enaction including speech-enactivism.
"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed,
and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save
the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has
preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox.
Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to
the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of
man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the
degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is
so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of
the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but
subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely
diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration
in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an
operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were
intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit,
with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly
bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at
least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not
marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this
is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from
marriage."
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
BigB ,
Every appraisal from a cultural POV extends the cultural hegemony over nature – with no
exceptions. If we do not address the false dichotomy of culture and nature – and invert
the privileged status of cultural domination over nature – this never changes. If
nothing changes its going to be a very short century the last in the history of culture.
I'm expressing my own private POV with the intention of at least highlighting the issue of
only ever expressing the distorted cultural-centric POV. It would be nice if we could all
agree to do something other than waste our privileged status and access to resources for
other than meaningless sarcasm. It's not like we'd all benefit from a change in POV and the
entailed potential in a change of course that can only happen if we think of nature first, is
it? 😉
The only thing I don't like about the environmentally "woke" is that many are easily
manipulated by the neoliberal elite. Greta is a perfect example.
That is they go after the little guy while the Military and big industry continue to
pollute unhampered.
George Mc ,
I despair.
Well that's what you do.
Dungroanin ,
The M5 highway is secured. Allepo access points too and Idlib is surrounded- where are the US
backed /Saudi paid / Tukish passport holding Uighars and various Turkmen proxy jihadist anti
Chinese / anti Russian, Central asian caliphate establishing mercenaries supposed to go now??
Pompeo is buzzing around Africa now like a blue bottomed cadaverous fly, non-stop buzzing
from piles of shot, trying to find them homes – no Libya doesn't want anymore of them,
nor the UAE and Saudis, or Turks maybe dump them in Canada with all these ex Ukrainian still
nazis? Its a big country nobody will know!
Or bring them to the US and give them a ticker tape parade?
Or let them surrender and have them testify as to how the fuck they let themselves be
bought for $$$$ maybe just fry them with the low yield nuke and blame Assad for it!
Dumbass yanks, fukus, 5+1 eyed gollum and Nutty- 'it's the Belgian airforce bombing
Russian weapons in Syria' -yahoo!
Up-Pompeos farce and buzzing is about to sizzle in the blue light of death for dumbfuck
poison spreading flies.
normal wisdom ,
so much disrespect here hare here.
these takfiri these giants these beards are hero
of the oded yinon plan
they raped murdered and stole
dustified atomised the syriana so
is rael can become real
the red heffers have been cloned the temple will grow
the semites must leave for norway,sweden wales scotland and detroit
already
the khazar ashkanazim need the land returned to it's true owners from the turkic russio
steppe
tonight back to back i watch reality
fiddler on the roof and exodus and schindlers lists.
i watch bbc simon scharmas new rabbi revised history of mighty israel.
every day it grows massive every day hezbollah become weak husk
shirley you can sea more that
my life already
Francis Lee ,
Very interesting and informative article. Lenin's 5 conditions of the imperialism of his time
have been matched by similar conditions in our own time, as listed by the Egyptian Marxist,
Samir Amin. These conditions being as follows.
1. Control of technology.
2. Access to natural resources.
3. Finance.
4. Global media.
5. The means of mass destruction.
Only by overturning these monopolies can real progress be made. Easily said. But a life
and death struggle for humanity.
The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up the space for increased penetration of Europe
to the East by the US and its West European allies in NATO. At that time the subaltern US
powers in Europe were the UK and West Germany, as it then was. There was a semblance of
sovereignty in France under De Gaulle, but this has since disappeared. Europe as a whole is
now occupied and controlled by the US which has used EU/NATO bloc to push right up to the
Russian border. Most, if not all, the non-sovereign quasi states, in Europe, particularly
Eastern Europe, are Quisling-Petainist puppet regimes regardless of whether they are inside
our outside of the EU. (I say 'states' but of course if a country is not sovereign it cannot
be a 'state' in the full meaning of the word).
A political, social and economic crisis in Europe seems to be taking taking shape. Perhaps
the key problem, particularly Eastern Europe, has been depopulation. There is not one
European state in which fertility (replacement) rates has reached 2.1 children. Western
European imperial states have to large degree been able to counter-act this tendency by
immigration from their former colonies, particularly the UK and France. But this has not been
possible in states such as Sweden and Germany where the migration of non-christian guest
workers from Turkey to Germany and Islamic refugees
from the middle-east hot-spots have had a free passage to Sweden. This has become a serious
social and economic problem; a problem resulting from a neoliberal open borders policy. The
fact of the matter is that radically different cultures will tend to clash. Thank you Mr
Soros.
British immigration policy was successful in so far as immigrants from the Caribbean were
English speakers, they were also protestant Christians, and the culture was not very
different from the UK. Later immigration from the Indian sub-continent and Indian settled
East Africa were generally professional and middle-class business people. Again English
speakers. Assimilation of these newcomers was not unduly difficult.
However it wouldn't be exaggerating to say that Eastern Europe is facing a demographic
disaster. This particular zone is literally bleeding people. Ukraine for example has lost 10
million people since 1990. Every month it is estimated that 100,000 Ukrainians leave the
country, usually for good. In terms of migration – no-one wants to go to Eastern
Europe, but everyone wants to leave, asap. This process is complemented by low birth rates,
and high death rates. These are un-developing states in an un-developing world. But now we
have new kids on the bloc. A counter-hegemonic alliance. No guesses who.
BigB ,
Rubbish. There is no 'counter-hegemonic alliance' to humanities rapacious demand for fossil
fuels and ecological resources. Where are the material consumption resources for BRI coming
from – the Moon, Mars? Passing asteroids? Or from the Earth?
When its gone: its gone. Russia and China provide absolutely no alternative to this.
China's consumption alone is driving us over the brink. To which the real alternative is a
complicit silence. As we all align with culture-centric capitalist views: there is no
naturalistic 'counter-hegemonic alliance'. Just some hunters in the Amazon we are having shot
right now so we can have the privilige of extending cultural hegemony over nature.
When it's gone: it's gone. And so will we be too. Probably as we are still praising the
wonders of the 'counter-hegemonic alliance' that killed us.
Actually there is a naturalistic alliance forming but it seems you haven't been paying
attention because you seem stuck in some Malthusian mind set. In order to defeat capitalism
you have to defeat Globalism so you first have to eliminate the Anglo-American Hegemony and
get back to a multipolar world.
Ranting on about like Gretchen doesn't do any good.
BigB ,
Resources are finite and thermodynamics exist. These are the ineliminable, indisputable, and
rock solid epistemology of the Earth System. Everything else is metaphysics – literally
'beyond nature; beyond physics'. Or, as it is more commonly known – economics. The
imaginary epistemology of political economics and political theory. 'Theory' is the
non-scientific sense of unfounded opinion and non-sense. A philosophical truth-theory that is
not and cannot ever be true. Hypothetical non-sense.
I get my information from a wide range of sources that realise these foundational
predicates. That is: a foundational set of beliefs that require no underpinning. I can only
paraphrase Eddington on thermodynamics: "if your theory is found to be against the second law
I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
Which is to say all modern political theory and economics – and by extension all
opinions based on its internalisation – is the product of vivid and unfounded
imagination. To which a naturalised epistemology is the only remedy.
There are lots of people working on the problem: but not in the political sphere. Which is
why we are stuck in a hallucinated metaphysical political-economic theatre of the absurd and
absolutised cultural non-sense. Which is not beyond anyone to rectify: if and when we accept
the limitations of the physical-material Earth System. And apply them to our thinking.
#NoDealForNature until we accept that the thermodynamics of depletion naturally limit
growth. Anything anyone says to the contrary should be treated with scepticism and cause a
collapse into deepest humiliation of any rational thinker.
Richard Le Sarc ,
'Depopulation' is only a problem if you believe in the capitalist cancer cult of infinite
growth on a finite planet, ie black magic. If you value Life on Earth, and its continuance,
human depopulation is necessary. Best done slowly and humanely, by redistributing the wealth
stolen by the capitalist parasites. The process seen in the Baltics and Ukraine is the
capitalist way, cruel and inhumane. Even worse is planned for the Africans, south Asians and
Chinese etc.
They don't for a minute believe in "infinite growth". They believe in the "bottom
line","instant gratification" and "primitive accumulation". "Infinite growth" is a sales
pitch that they use to sell the unwary on their rapaciousness. That is all. If they actually
believed in "infinite growth" they've be investing in renewable resources not fracking, strip
mining and other environmentally unfriendly practices.
The problem for Imperialists is that they only know how to plunder, rape and destroy thus all
their weaponry and tactics is used for aggression they know nothing about actual defense
which is their weak point. General George C Custer found this out some time back and so did
Trump just recently when the American were assaulted by a barrage of missiles they couldn't
stop.
Iran, Russia and China have one of the most advanced arsenal of defensive weapons ever
developed such as the S- series of air defense system that can turn a Tomahawk attack into a
turkey shoot. What was it? I think it was 100 Tomahawks fired on Syria after that false flag
chemical attack and only 15 or so got through and this was the earlier version of the S
missile defense S-300. They've already developed 500 which practically makes them impervious
and is a true iron dome compared the iron sieve that the Israelis got for free during GW1 and
then repackaged and sold back to the US Military for 15B with very few improvements except
maybe for a pretty blue bow.
Not only that but they can return fire with hypersonic weapons that are unstoppable and
can turn a base or Aircraft Carrier into a floating pinnate.
Actually the US proudly waving the banner of the East India Company is following in the
footsteps of the deceased British Empire into the boneyard of empires which is Afghanistan.
Iraq, Syria and Ukraine are just side shows. America can not escape history no matter what it
does now since its days of empire are now numbered. Just as they were for the late unlamented
Soviet Union.
The "New American Century" is ending preemptively early like Hitler's "Thousand Year
Reich" and we can all breath a sigh of relief when it does.
Frank ,
The only thing that will get the bastard yanks out of the middle east is dead Americans.
Lots and lots of dead Americans.
Enough dead Americans to make the braindead jingoistic American masses notice.
Enough dead Americans to touch every family that produces grunts that serve their criminal
state by raping and pillaging foreign countries.
Enough dead Americans to make dumbfuck Americans who say, 'Thank you for your service"
squirm in literal pain at the words.
Dungroanin ,
They got brain damage in their bunkers in the best US base in the ME from just a handful of
Kinetic energy missiles.
Their low yield nuke is their response.
The Israelis keep prodding the Bear – they even targeted a Russian Pantir system in
Syria!
I suppose only a downing or infact destroying on the ground of a squadron of useless F35's
with a threat to escalate into a full blown mobilisation is ever going to stop these
imperialist chancers. Or a fully coordinated assassination campaign of the leads and their
heirs as they frolic on their superyachts and space stations and secret Tracey islands.
And they can pay their taxes in full.
The Third world war is already fought – this really is a world war rather than some
Anglo Imperialist bankers playing king of the castle – and they have LOST – the
Empire is dead.
Long live the new Empire – the first not beholden to the bankers.
wardropper ,
Even with a new empire, our godless world would soon enough breed another generation of
bankers to which we would be beholden.
That's what the fundamentally dishonest people in any society do.
Something wrong? Oh, well, we'll form a committee to discuss it, and in future we will look
into creating a banking system which will enable us pay ourselves high wages for our
invaluable contribution to human evolution.
It's MORALITY which is lacking today, not more legislation or a new constitution.
All one has to do is move off the centralized banking system developed and controlled by the
Rothschilds that is totally based on creating finance out of thin air and return to a
commodity based currency (not gold!!) that represents actual value like scrip or wampum or
barter and the bankers will eventually starve.
Actually this system is starting to take hold in the US to a small extend to avoid the
depredations of the IRS since Tax is based mostly on currency.
Stop using fiat currency and the problem's solved.
After WW II the French didn't have a press to press Francs so their standard of exchange
became cigarettes and chocolate. It worked quite well until the presses started churning out
paper again.
wardropper ,
My fear is that without the Rothschilds, some other over-ambitious family would simply step
in and fill their shoes. It's the motivation to be greedy and wicked which needs addressing.
How that would be done, of course, I have no idea.
This is only if you embrace the concept of centralized banking and the "magic" of compound
interest. Current "banking" is all smoke and mirrors that favors the parasite who lives on
the production of others through what is called "unearned income".
Actually the Israelis are going a little slower now that isolated reports indicate that those
flying turkeys AKA F-35s are getting popped out of the skies of Syria by antiquated Soviet
SAMs. Of course there is no mention of this in the Mainstream Press. Just like there wasn't a
word of a IDF General and his staff taken out by a shoulder launched RPG fired by Hezbollah
in retaliation for attacking their media center in Beirut.
Antonym ,
Anybody who believes that the Israeli tail wags the US mil-ind. complex dog is contributing
to the Jewish superiority myth.
Ken ,
They're not superior, but they do wag the US MIC dog in and ebb-and-flow kind of way. That
9/11 thing was quite the wag. Read Christopher Bollyn and study other aspects of the event if
you're not sure of this.
Antonym ,
Langley and Riyadh love you; you fell for their ploy. See: Tel Aviv is much worse them.
The CIA/FBI failure explained.
The Mossad loves you too: for keeping mum on this Entebbe Mach 2.0 on their familiar New
York crap they got huge US support in the ME.
Makes them look invincible too as a bonus .
5 dancing guys was all the proof needed – cheapest op in history.
Ken ,
"5 dancing guys was all the proof needed – cheapest op in history"
Oh please, that was such a minor bit of evidence of any Zionist/Israeli involvement, which
spanned nearly every facet of the event and its aftermath.
The list of false flagging Zionist Jews in love with you is too long to list.
Oh please. What about the close to 200 Israelis who were arrested that day? Not to mention
the helpful warning by Odigo which was only given to citizens of Israel?
Also one has to act who benefitted? Definitely not the Saudis or the Americans leaving
Sharon who was trying to suppress a Palestinian uprising that he arrogantly started.
Speaking of your friendly five doing a fiddler on the roof on top of an Urban Moving Van
that just happened to owned by another Israeli who fled the country. Didn't they say
something stupid when arrested like "we are not your problem. It's the Palestinians who are
your problem!"?
A pathetic frame up attempt but a frame none the less. Speaking of frame ups wasn't Fat
Katz at SiteIntel (propaganda) who posted some stock footage of Palestinians celebrating
which has been proven to be false since the only people who seem to celebrating that day was
your friends the Dancing Israelis which doesn't prove their mental superiority at all but
their arrogant stupidity,
Richard Le Sarc ,
The three, the USA, Saudi Arabia and the USA, are allies in destruction-the Real Axis of
Evil. The dominant force, these days, given the control of the USA by Israel First Fifth
Columnists, in the MSM, political 'contributions', the financial Moloch etc, is most
certainly the Zionassties. Why don't you, like so many other Zionassties, glory in your
power, Antsie. Nobody believes your ritual denials.
They don't really wag the dog by themselves. They have a lot of help from the Stand with
Israel brain dead Christian Zionists who like Israelis consider themselves the chosen ones as
well.
Ken ,
@Gall Yep! I had a long time friend who went Pentecostal and we drifted apart but still kept
in touch. I lost him completely just after telling him that Israelis played a big part in
9/11.
Chuck Baldwin and a few other it seems have seen the light and are now questioning their
colleagues undying support of Israel. Maybe you could show this article to your friend who
seems enthralled by the terrorist snake er I mean state: https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/02/13/emperor-trump/
Yes that pretty much sums up how 9/11 was carried on. Both Heinz Pommer and VT have done some
excellent research based on facts not fantasy.
As far as your friend and many Christian Zionists in general. They seem to live in some
alternative universe and dislike being confused by such irrelevant things as facts.
It is a story that can be told in some detail – but when you say myth do you actually
mean fallacy – ie – are you saying that Jewish power doesn't exercise
considerable influence – if not control over US social and political and corporate
development across of broad spectrum of leverages?
Richard Le Sarc ,
Yes-all those addresses of Congress, by Bibi, where the Congress critters compete to display
the most extreme groveling and adulation, are just the natural expression of reverence and
awe at his semi-Divine moral excellence. Denying the undeniable is SOP for Zionassties.
normal wisdom ,
what jews?
i do not see any jews
just a sea of khazar ashkanazim pirates
a kaballa talmudick race trick
a crime syndicate pretending to be semite
jew is just the cover
init
Africa's largest oil producer could see oil production fall by 35 percent as low oil prices
and regulatory uncertainty threaten to prompt oil majors to postpone final investment
decisions. OPEC member Nigeria is the largest oil producer in Africa and it pumped 1.776
million barrels of oil per day (bpd) in January 2020, according to OPEC's secondary sources in
its monthly report published this week. Adding condensate production, Nigeria's total oil
output exceeds 2 million bpd.
However, three deepwater projects offshore Nigeria, operated by oil majors Exxon, Shell, and
Total, could see their start-up dates delayed by two to four years to the late 2020s, according
to the research WoodMac shared with Reuters ahead of publishing it on Friday.
The regulatory changes in Nigeria's oil industry and the still pending final approval of a
petroleum bill - after two decades of delays and wrangling - act as deterrents to the oil
majors' investment decisions, according to Wood Mackenzie.
Moreover, the three deepwater projects - which could add a combined 300,000 bpd to Nigeria's
production - are not profitable at current oil prices with Brent Crude below $60 a barrel, the
consultancy noted.
Just this week, Nigeria assured foreign oil investors that the country is open to business
and can guarantee high returns on investment, the country's President Muhammadu Buhari told an
energy conference on Monday.
Nigeria is set to finally pass a new bill regulating the petroleum industry by the middle of
this year, after nearly two decades of delays, the country's Minister of Petroleum Timipre
Sylva said at the same event.
Mele Kyari, Group Managing Director at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC),
said at the conference that "We are, more than ever before, committed to working with
stakeholders to increase our crude oil production from 2.3 million bbl per day to 3 million bbl
per day."
The recent amendment to the Deep Offshore Act will improve financial stability and investor
confidence, NNPC's head said.
For a fictional character, homo economicus has had a pretty good run
.
Since the 1950s,
this mono-motivated, self-seeking figure has stalked the pages of economics textbooks, busy deciding each
action according to a rational calculus of personal loss and gain. But more recently his territory has
shrunk as experts on human nature have demonstrated what any decent novelist could have told them: our real
selves are nothing like this.
Unfortunately, many economists still plug this flawed view of people into computer models that determine
all kinds of things that impact our lives, from how much workers get paid to how we value life or common
goods, such as a clean environment. The results can be disastrous.
Typically, economists aren't that keen on admitting that their work is deeply connected to morality --
never mind that Adam Smith himself was a moral philosopher. But if you ask a question as simple as how to
price a used car, you quickly find that moral concerns and economic activity happen together all the time.
In his 2012 book,
The Righteous Mind
, New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt
explored why so many perfectly intelligent people have misread human nature– and not just economists, but
plenty of psychologists and even (shocker!) people who identify as politically liberal. For him, the key to
getting to know ourselves properly lies with moral psychology, a newish strain that pulls together
evolutionary, neurological, and social-psychological research on moral emotions and intuitions.
As Haidt sees it, we are creatures driven by moral intuition and attuned to both our personal interests
as well as what's good for the groups with which we identify. He points out that in order to thrive, we have
to appreciate our complex, interactive natures and see each other more clearly and empathetically – an
observation that may be especially useful at a time when threats like climate change and the concentration
of money and power threatens all of us, no matter who we are or what groups we belong to. At the moment, we
aren't doing such a good job of this.
In Haidt's view, the conscious mind is like a press secretary spewing after-the-fact justifications for
decisions already made. Thinkers like David Hume and Sigmund Freud were certainly hip to this idea, but
somehow a lot of economists missed the memo, as did psychologists following dominant rationalist models in
the 1980s and '90s.
Haidt invites us to consider ourselves as a rider (our analytical, rational part) and an elephant (our
emotional, intuitive part). The rider holds the reins, but the beast below is in charge, urged on by the
complex interaction of genetic influence, neural wiring, and social conditioning. The rider can advise the
elephant, but the elephant calls most of the shots.
Fortunately, the elephant is quite intelligent and equipped with all sorts of intuitions that are good
for conscious reasoning. But elephants get very stubborn when threatened and like to stick to what's
familiar. The rider, for her part, is not exactly a reliable character. She's not really searching for
truth, but mostly for ways to justify what the elephant wants.
That's why a rebel economist challenging conventional thinking about subjects like human nature faces a
heavy lift. Experts have to see a lot of evidence accumulating across many studies before they reach a point
where they are finally forced to think differently. Scientific studies are even less helpful in persuading
the general public.
When I asked Haidt how the mavericks could help their cause, he noted that humans are social creatures
more influenced by people than by ideas. So, it matters
who
says something as much as
what
they say. It also makes a difference how they say it: elephants don't like to be insulted, and they lean
towards arguments made by people they like and admire. Not very rational, perhaps, but likely true.
Homo Duplex
The notion that human beings are social creatures is another strike against homo economicus. We are
selfish much of the time, but we are also "groupish," as Haidt puts it, and perhaps better described as
"homo duplex" operating on two levels. Here he offers another animal analogy, suggesting that we're 90%
chimp and 10% bee, meaning that from an evolutionary perspective, we are selfish primates with a more
recently developed a "hivish" overlay that lets us occasionally devote ourselves to helping others, or our
groups.
This helps explain why you can't predict how someone is going to vote based on their narrow
self-interest. Political opinions are like badges of social membership. We don't just ask what's in it for
us, but also what it means to our groups. Having a kid in public school doesn't tell you that a person will
support aid to public schools, probably because there are group interests in play. What unifies us in
groups, Haidt argues, are certain moral foundations that allow us to share emotionally compelling worldviews
that we can easily justify and defend against any attack by outsiders who don't share them. And we can get
pretty nasty about those outsiders.
This begins to sound like ugly tribalism, the kind of stuff that leads to war. But Haidt reminds us that
this propensity also prepares us to get along within our groups and even to cooperate on a large scale -- our
human superpower. We differ from other primates because we exhibit shared intentionality: we're able to plan
things together and work together towards a common goal. You never see two chimps carrying a log – they just
don't act in concert that way. We do, and in our groups we've developed mechanisms to suppress cheaters and
free riders and reap the benefit of division of labor. Groups of early humans may well have triumphed over
other hominids not because they smashed them with clubs , but because they out-cooperated them.
To better understand how we operate in political groups, which have lately become more antagonistic,
Haidt created a map of our moral landscape called Moral Foundations Theory which delineates multiple
"foundations" we presumably use when making moral decisions, including care/harm, fairness/cheating,
loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. (Some scholars have
challenged
his system, offering alternative maps). His research indicates that liberals and
conservatives differ in the emphasis they place on each of these foundations, with conservatives tending to
value all six domains equally and liberals valuing the first two much more than the other three.
Haidt argues that liberals tend to home in on care and fairness when they talk about policy issues, which
can put them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis conservatives, who tend to activate the whole range of foundations.
Republicans are thus better able to talk to elephants than Democrats because they possess more ways to go
for the gut, as it were. If Democrats want to win, Haidt warns, they need to think of morality as more than
just care and fairness and to try to better understand that foundations more important to conservatives,
like deference to authority or a reverence for sacredness, are not pathological, but aspects human social
evolution that have helped us survive in many situations.
When he wrote
The Righteous Mind
, Haidt noted that Democrats had espoused a moral vision that
did not resonate with many working class and rural voters. In the current presidential race, he sees some
progress on economic populism from the Bernie Sanders wing, in part because Occupy Wall Street got people
attuned to issues of fairness and the oppression of the 1%. When politicians talk about the abuse of
political and economic power, they can activate not only care and fairness concerns, but also the
liberty/oppression foundation which people respond to across the political spectrum.
But this line is also tricky because, as Haidt pointed out to me, "Americans don't really hate their
rich." (One
recent study
suggested only 25% of Americans have a negative view of the rich, though a majority said
they should be taxed more).
Haidt also worries that many Democrats, particularly elites, are currently engaging with cultural issues
by embracing a what he called a "common enemy" form of identity politics which "demonizes people at the
intersectional point of evil (white men)" rather than focusing on a "common humanity" story which "draws a
larger circle around everyone. (Haidt plunged into controversial territory with his 2018 book,
The
Coddling of the American Mind
, which argues that college campuses are shutting down useful debate
through "safetyism" that protects students from ideas considered harmful or offensive).
He observed to me that while the polarizing Donald Trump may have turned off the younger generation "for
the next few decades," Democrats may be failing "to look seriously at the ways that their social
policies -- and their messengers -- alienate many moderates." Newly "woke" white elites, for example, who see
racism as the driver of nearly every phenomenon, may be having an unintended negative effect in his view.
When they ascribe Trump's victory to racial resentment and ignore the concerns of those who fear sliding
down the economic ladder, for example, they may turn off potential allies. Call a person or a group racist
and you won't be able to convince them to support your view on anything. Their elephants aren't listening.
Haidt acknowledges that our moral matrices are not written in stone; they can and do evolve, sometimes
quite rapidly within a couple of generations. Economic forces surely act to shift attunement to moral
foundations, making people more susceptible, for example, to anti-immigration arguments. If you fail to
consider the economic influence on this kind of moral activation, you'll be less equipped to address
problems like ethnic conflict. Being able to step outside our own moral matrix is essential to persuasion.
We not only have to talk to the elephant, but see the beehive.
We also have to remember the truth is not likely to be something held by any one individual, but rather
something that emerges as a large number of flawed and limited minds exchange views on a given subject. Our
smarts and flexibility are increased by our ability to cooperate and share information. Economists, for
example, improve their understanding of human nature by opening up to other social sciences and the
humanities for insight.
There is evidence that economists are paying attention to moral psychology. In their book
Identity
Economics
, Nobel laurate
George
Akerlof
and Rachel Kranton argue that people identify with "social categories," and that each category,
whether it be Christian, mother, or neighbor, has associated norms or ideals to which people want to aspire.
Sam Bowles'
The Moral Economy
shows that monetary incentives don't work in many situations and that
policies targeting our selfish instincts can actually weaken the institutions which depend on our more
selfless impulses– including financial markets. At the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET), the
connection between economics and morality has been explored by
INET president Rob
Johnson and political philosopher Michael Sandel
as well as thinkers like
economic historian Robert Skidelsky
and
economist Darrick Hamilton
.
All of this rather bad news for homo economicus. But pretty good news for humanity.
we're 90% chimp and 10% bee, meaning that from an evolutionary perspective, we are selfish primates
with a more recently developed a "hivish" overlay that lets us occasionally devote ourselves to helping
others, or our groups.
Well if one wants to take an "evolutionary perspective" (works for me) then obviously our instincts are
shaped to promote survival of the species and not just the individual. And if that's true then the
Randian/economics version of rational isn't rational at all. Perhaps it would be clearer to talk about this
problem in terms of rational versus irrational rather than appealing to some "altruism gene" that will
supposedly save us. IMO only that rational, intelligent, creative aspect of humans will save us from that
irrational side that is indeed totally instinctive. Somehow we've gotten this far–despite everything–"by the
skin of our teeth." Here's hoping those minds will find a path.
Over what? Carol's point about the sociology of Ayn Rand?
In point of fact, Carol, altruism is always secondary (where it appears) in nature. Selfishness
ensures the fittest genes survive to carry on the species. Only in the face of catastrophe does
altruism at
the individual level become more valuable than selfishness. So, indeed it is because of our
selfishness, because we've struggled by the skin of our teeth, that we as a species have survived and
prospered.
but, but erik, that leaves out all the energy saving advantage we get from a cohesive group
which is also determined to survive and carry on centuries of knowledge on just how to do so .
Just a quick jab: why does Haidt, and others, assume that feelings are inferior to logic and intellect?
Seems to me they are inter-twined, separate-able, but equal in value, if not dimension.
It could be a three way set-up instead of a two way (like markets, which are commonly spoken of as two:
buyer and seller, but are three: buyer, seller, and banker /money man). Man's consciousness could be 1)
feelings, 2) logic /intellect, and 3) the decider (call out to ex-prez W, so got political jab in too!).
In fairness to Haidt, I think he's more nuanced than "rationality good; feelings bad"
I have encountered more of that rather rigid approach among those who have read "Thinking Fast and
Slow" perhaps because that book doesn't do as good a job of outlining as crucial the capacity to
recognize which situations favor System 1 thinking and those which favor System 2 -- a problem compounded
by the emphasis in the book on the rather narrow range of circumstances in which System 2 is clearly
superior.
Jeez – I spent years getting an Econ degree in the homo economus/monetarist era (dark times), when I
should've been making my way through my D&D Dungeon Master's sci fi collection!
I always thought that the Professors who thought up homo economus never went with their wives (as
it was back then) to the grocery store.
The rational choice, always, was the store brand. DelMonte and all other such brands owed their
very existence to non-rational, emotional choices–by tons of people.
'Rational' just means 'consistently following an internally sound logic.' A machine does that –
following the logic of its mechanics. A computer does that – following the logic of code. An animal does
that – following the logic dictated by emotion. And an animal certainly does that better than we humans
whose behaviors become muddled by ideas. Truly, by this measure animals are better machines than humans –
more mechanical, more emotional, more logical, more rational.
That's why a rebel economist challenging conventional thinking about subjects like human nature faces
a heavy lift. Experts have to see a lot of evidence accumulating across many studies before they reach a
point where they are finally forced to think differently.
As an ex-organic chemist, I was astonished to find that more than a few scientists cling to outdated
paradigms with a tenacity that would shame the most rigid religious fundamentalist. Cf. heliobacter,
continental drift, even the heliocentric solar system.
While "continental" drift was first proposed in about 1600 AD it was not completely wrong. Like many
initial geologic theories it was partially correct. It is now known that it is not the "continents" that
move across the earth, but tectonic plates, on which the continents are located, that is creating
movement. The convection of the earths interior magma is thought to be the movement vector for the
plates.
"this propensity also prepares us to get along within our groups and even to cooperate on a large scale --
our human superpower"
Yuval Harari's central point revolves around this. Humans, like other primates, engage in "grooming"
activities to maintain group cohesion. With the development of language, this "grooming" went from picking
lice out of each other's hair (fun!) to gossiping about each other. But this behavior seems to be unable to
maintain a group size larger than 150 individuals, not surprising considering the person-to-person contact
necessary.
To gather a larger group around common goals requires myth, Harari says. Early myths involved gods, often
imagined as living in a separate world with structures parallel to our own. In a polytheistic society, the
head god related to the lesser gods as a king related to his human subjects. In the henotheistic Ancient
Near East, nations like Babylon, Assyria and even the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah envisioned a
parallel war occurring in "heaven" between the national gods when two countries went to war. These days,
there are new, completely secular myths like what Harari calls "Money" that orient our world around
materialism, competition and power.
William H. McNeill also noted the almost universal human behaviours of mass marching/dancing (which
requires and reinforces cooperation) as indicative of a social behaviour rooted in a biological need
We also have "mirror neurons" for a reason -- one that baffles the proponents of "homo economicus"
I was more interested in this article from the political perspective; i.e. what liberals get wrong.
Like many who read this site, I'm interested in the primary elections and want Bernie to win.
But Bernie's message could be better by being more attuned to some of the "Moral Foundation" issues Haidt
raises.
Take Medicare for All which, by most accounts, is the leading issue to most voters:
Talking more about Medicare being a simple and successful 50+ year program appeals to authority. Medicare
Advantage plans can be framed as subversion. Or loyalty / betrayal. Also consider sanctity / degradation.
Talking more about the 80/20 aspect of coverage addresses fairness / cheating and "free stuff"
Not talking about eliminating private insurance shows concern for liberty / oppression. I would actually
make a joke about people who would still want private insurance after M4A becomes available
Just food for thought in terms of how the ideas contained in the article could be applied.
And the next time some nefarious reporter asks how we will pay for this or that; I wish someone will just
say "Mexico will pay for it".
As an economist (M.A. in Econ), I am elated to see Jonathan Haidt's work receive this kind of attention
from serious thinkers. In addition to the reasons cited by Lynn Parramore, I believe Professor Haidt's work
validates, by building on, the work of Humanistic Economics by Professor Mark Lutz (Ph.D. UC-Berkeley) and
Dr. Kenneth Lux. Moreover, Professor Haidt's work appears, to me, to further validate the astute criticisms
of Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot for neoclassical Marxists' use of "Rational Economic Man" in their
paradigm's modls (no "e"). Having obtained my degree about 25 years ago, basically in humanistic economics,
I am sure that adoption of such thinking by grad students in economics can help rescue humanity from its
current barbaric state. I just hope there's still time left.
On hate and having negative view on the rich
: this article mentions that "only" 25% of
Americans have a negative or very negative view of the rich". Only is the proper word? I would say that is a
lot of bad feelings. Hate is not a sane feeling and we are inclined to hate in stressful situations. So, if
25% of Americans, have these negative feelings (8% very negative) about the rich this spells quite a lot of
despair/stress. It would be interesting a comparison with other countries to evaluate if this is normal by
international standards.
I mention this because stress & despair might explain, at least partially, the relative low turnout in
general elections in the US compared with other OECD countries. Does anybody here know the evolution of
electoral turnout in the US since 1950? Has turnout declined with time?
I remembered an old David Brooks column mentioning that Americans vote their aspirations.
I'm not a fan of Brooks, but this 20 year old column may explain some USA citizens' current
attitudes..
Here is a sample quote (about a proposed Al Gore estate tax):
"The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked
people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the
richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of
Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a
direct shot at them."
While it has been 20 years since this was published, one might suspect American "I'll be rich"
aspirations have taken a beating during this interval.
The economics profession has ridden the hydrocarbon energy spend of the last 100+ years as hydrocarbon
energy has been pulled from the ground and converted into "economic growth".
It will be interesting to see how the profession responds to future events with climate change, peak
human population and peak energy inexorably (in my view) arriving.
One thing that has happened is that over the past several decades so- called liberals have agreed with
conservatives that the market represents freedom and efficiency and the government represents the opposite.
Some younger people are rebelling, but older voters have been hearing this their whole lives without
challenge until Sanders came along.
I just read a description of a Trump rally at the NYT and I think it was accurate. The reporters just
repeated what ordinary people said there. One guy claimed the Democrats have just swung so far left he can't
support them anymore, yet on economics this simply isn't the case. Sanders just represents what Democrats
used to be on economic issues.
I enjoyed the article, and agree with the main ideas, but he was a little rough on our primate cousins.
Chimps may not cooperate by "carrying logs", but, like a lot of social animals, they work together when,
say, hunting other primates. And most social animals have a pretty well-developed sense of fairness (watch
what happens if you give one of your dogs a treat and ignore the other one).
Yes I am trying to think about what chimps would actually need to transport a log for. That famous
jocular saying by one of the researchers "we were beginning to think the difference between us was merely
cultural".
Is that a sense of fairness or a sense of competition or perhaps a sense of both? Each dog would
prefer being the favorite but will accept being the equal.
Dogs are an interesting analogy because in my observation they are, as social animals, so much like
us. Perhaps the main takeaway from the above article is the belief that there is such a thing as "human
nature" and that we have a kinship with the other species. Needless to say such a view was once anathema
in an intellectual climate dominated by religion and a human centric world view. Even now people like
Pence are "dominionists" and believe that humans have been given dominion over the planet and all its
other species because of what it says in the Bible. Power always needs to justify itself–perhaps because
of that innate sense of fairness/competition that you mention.
Haidt got me thinking about language too. His thesis could be talking about the evolution of
language itself. The evolution of rationalization. Since he seems to premise his insights on human
intuition and a certain bedrock of morality that all animals seem to have. Pre language. Can we
attribute the morality of animals to a lack of rationalization? They do seem to lack immorality. If we
were mute, but very intuitive as we are, what effect would our intuition have on our communication
skills and our actions? Raising the question here, Is language the emotional middleman that is always
(duplex) less than rational and causing all this confusion? Sort of thinking here about someone giving
an over-the-top sermon, like an economics professor claiming that we are all homo-economicus.
Morality traditionally implies conscious choice so I'm not sure that's relevant to the animal
world. Guess what I'm saying is that we are similar to certain animals in our instincts, not our
intelligence.
However the language of economic profs is deceptive since they should be saying "irrational self
interest" rather than "rational self interest." Pure selfishness usually ends up being bad even for
the selfish.
Also on this very subject, last night on Nova, the one about dogs, their domestication (or
ours?) and their amazing ability to relate – communicate. They attribute a dog's ability to
communicate to oxytocin – because they thrive on love and friendship. I do believe that because
I've only had one aloof dog and he was very wolf-like. A throwback. Indicating that evolution
tends toward love – not to be too corny. Maybe Oxytocin will save us ;-)
If by "pack animals" you mean species that live in societies I never said they didn't. But
obviously there is also cooperation on some level and social bonding. I do think this is a very
complicated subject and not easily reduced to simplifications by yours truly–not a biologist–or the
above article. But arguably the above is correct in asserting that economists themselves are
ignoring the complications.
And for those interested, here is
a paper published in 2008
that empirically demonstrates that the "Homo economicus" approach in this case
disguised in the form of "median-voter model" is bullshit regarding inequality, redistribution and public
opinion, though they regard it as intelectually compelling. Economists!
>Experts have to see a lot of evidence accumulating across many studies before they reach a point where
they are finally forced to think differently.
Ummm, the whole, underlying maybe, point of the rest of the article is that the dominant economic thought
of our age has nothing to do with evidence. Yet they overthrew Keynes. "Trust us, We're Experts" or
something like that right?
I just finished slogging through The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, which harmonizes with
this article. Instead of the rider on an elephant, McGilchrist writes of the functions of the left and right
hemispheres of the brain, which are significantly different. The left brain is verbal, analytical, and task
oriented. It likes straight lines. (This strikes me as a description of the pseudo-accuracy and busyness of
economics.) The right brain sees a larger picture, is less talky, and is generally better at perceiving the
world around us. It is the hemisphere that can attain greater knowledge even if it is not as adept at
expressing such knowledge in words. (The "bee" part of the brain–and more than 10 percent.)
McGilchrist's book is good, but way too long, which is an irony given that he asserts that the left
brain, the emissary, is trying to subvert the master, the part of the brain less likely to go on and on and
on in words.
But this era of too many easy paradigms (economics, "free markets"), too much flimsy analysis (critical
studies, queer studies, economics, New York Times op-ed columnists), and too much talk (social media) is
very much left-brained. I think that what is wearing all of us out is the endless tsunami of word salad.
Economics, with its insistance on rationality rather than reasonableness (left brain rather than right
brain), fell into the salad bowl a long time ago.
Yes. I, too, think this is a very important book. Being retired, I don't think it's too long. I revel
in how much stuff I got for only thirty bucks (or whatever it was -- something like that.)
The neurological case is complete after 94 very dense pages. (535 citations. Pleasantly readable prose,
though, and that bizarre experiment that "proves" that porcupines are monkeys.) After that he traces the
effects and footprints of the two independent modes of thought through philosophy, art, music, and,
generally, the working of our societies from ancient to post-modern.
There's a strong parallel to Daniel Kahneman's Fast and Slow thinking, the right hemisphere being the
fast one. The one wrinkle is that language is the province of the left hemisphere, but Kahnemann finds
that fast thinking is perfectly adept at small-talk, as long as it doesn't get too abstract.
Worst for me is that now that I've read it, I've got to go back into Heidegger, all the other modern
Germans, John Dryden, classical and modern painting, religion
So how would homo economicus work out in anything other than a modern industrial system? In earlier
times, I would say that at the least they would be shunned as a danger to the community or maybe even thrown
out altogether as being incapable of working in a close-knit community. Want a modern example instead? How
about the fact that you cannot have a military based on the idea of homo economicus unless you are talking
about a band of mercenaries. This whole stupid idea is why every relationship these days whether for work,
employment, government, etc is defined by contracts. In short, it is a cookie-cutter idea that come in only
one shape.
"Since the 1950s, this mono-motivated, self-seeking figure has stalked the pages of economics
textbooks, busy deciding each action according to a rational calculus of personal loss and gain."
Advertising gave up with that sort of approach years ago.
Advertisers appeal to deep seated wants and desires and this works really well, so they haven't looked back.
Are the wealthy much more rational?
Let's have a look at adverts targeted at wealthy people.
Are they a long list of specifications and comparisons saying why these products are better?
No.
An advert for a Sunseeker luxury yacht conveys luxury, elegance, being able to get away from it all and
there is usually a young woman in the back in a bikini; the less said about that the better.
What about PR and propoganda?
How do they work?
The same as advertising really, and it's got nothing to do with appealing to rational human beings.
It works; they are not going to be doing it differently anytime soon.
A propos of nothing, long, long ago there was an ad during the Superbowl placed by Cadillac. It was
all about authority, power, celebrity, and it hardly mentioned cars at all, if it even did. Blog
commenters had to work very hard to explain how this was selling Cadillacs. IMHO, it didn't sell
Cadillacs. It told the top Cadillac executives all the things about themselves that they most longed to
hear. It didn't sell cars to wealthy people, it sold the ad itself to the Cadillac C-suite. It worked
like a charm.
Y-axis – top to bottom
X-axis – Across genders, races, etc ..
As long as the Democrats wealthy donors keep them focussed on identity politics and the X-axis, the
donors should be able to keep making progress in the reverse direction on the Y-axis.
and he's MUCH better than Haidt. I recommend this book and lots
of his earlier work, much of it done with Herbert Gintis.
Their 1976 "Schooling in capitalist America" is no less necessary
reading now than it was then, and their 1986 "Democracy & capitalism"
is maybe even more relevant now (Milanovic credits it as a forerunner
to his current "Capitalism, alone", which it is–and much more than that).
More recent stuff is referenced in "The moral economy" and pretty
much always worthwhile.
Morality is a big part of decision making, but I'll argue that is secondary to our cognitive biases that
exist at an even lower level of consciousness to enable us to retain function and decision making in the
face of an overwhelming number of variables.
The opposite of cognitive bias or perhaps the antidote is critical thinking, which must be
taught/learned, so yeah it is preposterous to assume people use solid reasoning that could only come about
with the use of critical thinking, which vasts swaths of society almost never exercise.
The article to me is all over the place, which builds on Haidt's views that seem all over the place too.
Interesting though. Comments too. The experimental data about Haidt's classifications of moral decision
making elements, and where self-described liberals and conservatives rank them in importance was
interesting. I suppose the liberals regarding only two of the six as important could be due to their college
educations. As a math professor I had once observed about a smart student in his class: "he learned his
subject too well". Or to paraphrase Othello: "One that learned not wisely but too well".
The most important takeaway from this is that we should not let economists guide the economy. Not the
economists believing in homo economicus anyway (and, while we are at it, believing in equilibrium as
well). The reason for existence of such a concept is clearly to replace ethics and morality as a guiding
principle of human economic activity with a pseudo- "natural law" (humans by nature are "economicus" –
i.e. self-interested and materialistic – phew!), which once entrenched, relieves those in power from
moral obligations because it safely explains away almost any economic outcome as result of "natural"
forces – i.e. no one to blame (globalization=natural force). It's a great tool for them. Down with it.
The asumption of rationality has been defeated by many economists, as well as psychologists,
sociologists, etc.. Carrying on about this is unncessary. Assuming that humans worry about "care and
fairness' is true. The "12" prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament") raised this concern numerous times, and
one can find it as a major issue in the Synoptic Gospels. Smith also worried about this in his first book on
economocs, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." The only reason for any further consideration of "rationality"
in economics is due to the attemprt by economists to treat economics as a "science" like physics. There are
also numerous misguided attempts to mathemaize economics.
But one insidious reason to pretend that economics is a "science" is to justify the idea of a "Nobel
Prize" in economics, or to give a "halo" to economists that win the "Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economic
Scholarship in Memory of Alfred Nobel."
Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg have written a good book about the creation of this prize, "The Nobel
Factor." Please note, the words "Nobel Prize" do not seem to appear on either the certificates or medal
awarded.
Daniel Kahneman who won the prize (justifiably, (and John Nash a famous mathematicin who won many real
prizes) notd that giving labels often transfers a false aura to those being labeled. Offer and Söderberg
noted that this is true of the label "winner of the Nobel Prize." Given that there is no decent
encompasssing theory of economics similar to Newton's Laws and how often the prizes are awarded to
economists who don't produce anything like such a theory, we should once and for all abandone the pretense
that economis is a science. It is an attempt to describe social behaviour in a very restricted context.
Leaving it to psychologists, sociologists and others has produce better undertandings of human behaviour.
Hill.TV host Krystal
Ball said Sen. Elizabeth Warren 's (D-Mass.) "campaign was
lost long before this election cycle."
Ball pointed to Warren's "decision not to run in 2016 - she sat out the most critical
election of our lifetime even though she knew better than I did the flaws of Hillary Clinton " Ball then slammed
Warren's decision to not endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2016 noting "when her
supposed friend and ally Bernie Sanders, who allegedly shares her politics and was fighting for
the same values she had staked her career on got into the race and started sky-rocketing in the
polls challenging Hillary for the lead, rather than making the movement choice and backing the
progressive, she sat it out."
Ball claims Warren's "attempts to co-opt revolutionary rhetoric in service of an
establishment campaign, like Disney doing socialism, satisfied no one and left her unable to
win more than 1 county and Iowa and an embarrassing distant fourth behind Klobuchar in New
Hampshire."
Click on the video above to catch Ball's full remarks.
In last week's State of the Union address, President Trump gave a rosy portrayal of the US
economy. American workers, according to Trump, have never had it so good.
"Wages," he declared, "are rising fast." Household income, he claimed, "is the highest ever
recorded." The results of Trump's policies, since first taking office three years ago, is a
"blue-collar boom." This coincides, according to Trump, with a 70 percent run-up in the stock
market, "adding more than $12 trillion to our nation's wealth." For the American ruling class,
the massive profits they are making on the stock market is the real criterion of economic
success, not the conditions of life for the working class.
The reality is very different than the fantasy which Trump delivered over the country's
airwaves. Corporate profits, dividends and the incomes of wealthy executives are higher than
ever before -- the direct result of unprecedented levels of social misery.
Trump's policies are an acceleration of those pursued under Obama and the Democrats after
2008. The deliberate aim of these policies, which included the 2009 restructuring of the auto
industry, the promotion of for-profit charter schools and the pro-corporate Affordable Care
Act, was to prop up the profits of American capitalism by driving millions of workers into
poverty.
This is the real situation facing American workers:
The jobs bloodbath in the auto
industry
US manufacturing cut 12,000 jobs in January, according to government figures. This continues
a decades-long decline in manufacturing employment, from a high of nearly 20 million in 1979 to
less than 13 million today. January's losses were almost entirely concentrated in the auto and
auto parts industries, which shed 11,000 jobs last month alone. Over the last twelve months,
24,000 US autoworkers lost their jobs.
The betrayal of the strike by the United Auto Workers paved the way for the closure of four
US plants, including the historic Lordstown plant in Ohio. New investments, including a new
battery plant near Lordstown, will be based on lower wages and benefits, and will account for
only a fraction of the jobs lost.
While Trump never tires of nationalist tirades against Mexican and Chinese workers stealing
"American" jobs, these cuts were part of a global jobs massacre in the auto industry, which
eliminated over 500,000 jobs worldwide last year. Auto companies are pursuing an international
strategy to force workers in every country to bear the cost of the emerging downturn in the
industry, and to prepare for the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles, which will
require a vastly reduced workforce.
However, 2019 was only a down payment -- German automakers have announced tens of thousands
of additional job cuts. The disruption to global supply chains caused by the coronavirus,
Ford's disastrous 2019 performance and the impending merger between Fiat Chrysler and French
automaker Peugeot all point to further cuts in 2020 and beyond.
Stagnating and declining
wages
Under Trump, real wages have continued their post-2008 stagnation. According to The
Conversation website, from December 2016 to September 2019, nominal wages rose only 6.79
percent, but even this was almost entirely wiped out by inflation. When "fringe benefits" such
as health insurance, retirement packages, bonuses and other forms of non-wage compensation are
included, total real compensation actually declined by 0.22 percent. In the traditionally
higher-paying manufacturing sector, total real compensation plunged 4.33 percent.
This is particularly pronounced in the traditionally industrial states of the Midwest. In
six of the seven heaviest manufacturing states that voted for Trump in 2016, economic growth
has slowed since 2016, and in all but one, personal income growth is below the national
average, according to Barron's. Trump's vaunted rise in wages for low-income workers is due in
large part to local minimum wage increases -- the federal rate of $7.26 has not budged since
2009 -- which still leaves workers at or near poverty.
Part-time and "gig" work -- the
"new normal"
In his speech, Trump cited the fact that 3.5 million people have joined the workforce.
However, this increase is due almost entirely to a rise in part-time and casual employment,
according to the McKinsey Global Institute. The US employment rate, the percentage of the
working-age population with jobs, remains 3 points lower than in 2000. Full-time employment has
fallen 6.8 percent since the turn of the century, while part-time employment has risen 4.1
percent.
A survey conducted last year by the Federal Reserve found that 3 in 10 American adults rely
on "gig" work for at least part of their income. For half of these workers, gig work represents
10 percent or more of their total income, and 6 percent of gig workers rely on gig work for 90
percent or more of total family income.
This "new normal," together with hundreds of thousands who have given up looking for jobs
altogether, has masked the actual state of the job market by keeping official unemployment
figures at artificial lows. Real unemployment, once underemployed and "discouraged" workers are
added, is 6.9 percent, nearly twice the official rate.
This is bound up with a significant rise in economic insecurity. Forty-four percent of the
US workforce are classified by the Brookings institution as low-wage. Millions of Americans are
one crisis away from destitution; nearly half the country cannot make an unexpected $400
expense without taking on debt.
Inequality at record levels
Karl Marx's observation that "accumulation of wealth at one pole" of society is
"accumulation of misery [and] agony" at the other pole is being decisively confirmed. On the
basis of endemic poverty in the working class, the American ruling class is accumulating
historically obscene levels of wealth.
Three individuals -- Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, own more wealth than the
bottom half of the US population. However, another study by inequality researchers Emmanuel
Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that the bottom half of the country actually has a negative
combined net wealth, meaning their debts are larger than their assets.
Meanwhile, US corporations are making money hand over fist. According to the Federal
Reserve, annualized after-tax profits of $1.8 trillion have increased to three times the level
of 2000. This figure has stayed constant since 2012, the end of Obama's first term. The labor
share of national income, meanwhile, is by far the lowest on record.
These huge profits are being made, not through investments in productive activities -- for
more than a decade, US companies have sat on a $1.5 trillion cash hoard which they refuse to
invest -- but through financial transactions, including stock buybacks and dividends, mergers
and acquisitions and other speculative activities, propped up by Trump through massive
infusions of cash from the Federal Reserve and corporate tax cuts. These irrational and
essentially criminal policies, which amount to the ruling class looting society, are preparing
the way for another economic crisis.
Hillary was asked specifically about the movement of arms from Libya to Syria during
congressional inquiry and she claimed to know nothing of such activities. Lied to congress,
yet still walking around free.
Swallwell is a liar just like the rest of em. He says they don't wake up in the morning
wanting to Impeach him, BS they have wanted to Impeach him since before he was
president....
You would not ever have seen this on Fox at the last election. Best high voltage spit by
Jimmy Dore I have seen.
Tucker shows a great smirk especially when Jimmy dumps on Guaido.
Posted by: juliania | Feb 12 2020 5:15 utc | 39
(Artificial Intelligence)
The trouble with Artificial Intelligence is that it's not intelligent.
And it's not intelligent because it's got no experience, no imagination and no
self-control.
The 2020 presidential race was always going to be an uphill battle for Elizabeth
Warren.
Almost from the get-go, political pundits fretted about Warren's electability, setting in
motion a self-fulfilling prophecy now reflected in the
New Hampshire primary results . Warren's disappointing showing on Tuesday comes on the
heels of a stirring debate performance and a strong third place finish in the Iowa caucuses
-- two wins largely ignored by mainstream media commentators, who focused almost entirely on
Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, with a spare thought for Amy Klobuchar's rise and Joe
Biden's descent.
Defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election is priority number one for the
Democratic establishment, and a moderate candidate with the potential to sway swing voters
and Republican defectors has long been billed as the wisest course. But by constructing a
dichotomy between the self-described revolutionary leader Sanders and the aggressively
non-threatening trifecta of moderate candidates (not to mention Bloomberg, who is suddenly
the darling of cable news), the networks and pundits with the greatest persuasive power have
ignored and undercut Warren's unique potential to unite the progressive left and hesitant
center.
Warren seems to have unfairly inherited some of the hallmarks of Hillary Clinton's
reputation. Clinton's devastating 2016 upset sparked practical questions as to whether a
woman could win the presidency at all. And Warren's false claim to Native American heritage
sealed a reputation for untrustworthiness that has stuck long after that conversation faded
away. If Clinton, with all of her name recognition and experience, couldn't win against
Trump, what hope could there be for the woman widely considered her successor?
Warren's progressive policies and folksy demeanor also framed her for many as a sort of
second-tier Sanders, not far enough left for the progressives and too far left for gun-shy
moderates. But it is precisely this position that makes her the most electable
candidate.
Warren and Sanders are mostly aligned on their signature issues, but how they present
these issues is entirely different, as are their proposed paths to achieve them. Sanders does
not shy away from the word "socialist." He declares outright that his Medicare-for-All plan
will raise taxes. He says billionaires should not exist. These declarations and convictions
are brave and they are admirable. But they also inspire commentators like
Chris Matthews to worry on-air that a Sanders administration will begin executing the
wealthy in Central Park, French revolution style.
Warren takes a more measured approach in selling her policies, focusing on how she'll
achieve them rather than the eventual outcome. She doesn't say billionaires should not exist,
she proposes a wealth tax. Warren doesn't say "socialist," choosing instead to present the
economic and social advantages to her plans without the label. The other key difference
between Sanders and Warren is that, while Sanders has identified as far left for his entire
political career,
Warren was a committed Republican long before she became a progressive Democrat. As other
commentators have noted , this
history might not earn her many points with committed leftists, but it does put her in a
unique position to appeal to the moderates and Republicans that candidates like Buttigieg and
Klobuchar are trying to court. After all, she used to be one of them. And perhaps most
importantly,
polls continue to show Warren performing just as well as those candidates, if not better,
in hypothetical general election matchups against Trump.
Yet the mainstream media seems determined to undermine her viability.
Sanders and Buttigieg finished neck and neck in the Iowa Caucuses (whose dubious import is
a conversation for another day), with Warren close behind in third. As the dust around the
disastrous vote-counting began to settle, the media centered the conversation on Sanders,
Buttigieg, and Biden. For example, this headline from The Washington Post reads: "Buttigieg and Sanders take lead, Biden fades in
partial results from marred Iowa caucuses," ignoring Warren's close third place finish
entirely in favor of Biden's fourth.
During Friday's Democratic debate, many critics noted the
relatively short speaking time given to Warren in comparison with her white male
competitors. Afterwards, coverage again focused on Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Biden, and Sanders,
despite Warren having the highlight of the night, when she responded to
Buttigieg's embarrassing stumble on a question about race.
He's just a stupid old man with an entitlement arrogance, so just like Clinton but male,
Pelosi and so many others being the exact same and this is on both sides of the coin.
Amidst the nonsense, folly and euphoria of the last decade long bull
market, a small beacon of hope shines in the form of Warren Buffett's business partner.
These days, the reporting of financial metrics has wandered so far off the path from normal
GAAP earnings that's it's difficult to keep up with companies and decipher their earnings
reports each quarter. The SEC has done little to create uniformity for investors in how
companies disclose their financials and, through their lack of action, have created a fertile
environment for companies to report what Charlie Munger calls "bullshit earnings".
And you know things have gotten bad when the mindless drones bidding up the market over the
last decade were forced to call out WeWork's
"community adjusted" metrics , puking the company's IPO back to its investors before
ridiculing the way the company was making its pre-IPO disclosures in the weeks after.
And now, one of the most well know investors in the world, Charlie Munger, is weighing in.
Yesterday, Munger slammed companies that use "adjusted EBITDA" to report their earnings,
calling the metric exactly what it is: "bullshit earnings".
Munger said that the metric is "ridiculous" and isn't an accurate measure of a company's
profitability,
according to a report by CNBC .
He commented: " I don't like when investment bankers talk about EBITDA. It's ridiculous.
Think of the basic intellectual dishonesty that comes when you start talking about adjusted
EBITDA. You're almost announcing you're a flake."
The conversation came up as a response to Uber, who last week said it would be raising its
"EBITDA profitability" target for the forth quarter of 2020. The stock jumped as a response.
Munger made the comments as part of a broader warning on Thursday at the Daily Journal annual
shareholders meeting.
He commented: "I think there are lots of troubles coming. There's too much wretched excess.
In China, they love to gamble in stocks. This is really stupid. It's hard to imagine anything
dumber than the way the Chinese hold stocks."
In addition, the 96 year old Munger said he believes that the innovation boom that he has
experienced over the course of nearly a century could be coming to an end.
He concluded: "I do think that my generation had the best of all this technological change.
I don't think we're going to get as much improvement in the future because we've gotten so much
already."
3 minutes ago
I'd like to hear what Charlie thinks about buybacks, consensus estimates
that are low-balled, before earnings come out. 4 minutes ago Certainly Berkshire has cash on
hand to invest when the market tanks. It makes sense that Munger would try and help things
along. I don't know that he has made that observation in days past. Why now? No one that smart
is just now figuring these things out. http://quillian.net/blog/the-most-important-thing/
4 minutes ago (Edited) Pretty soon you'll be hearing a company reporting their net profit by
saying "here is our net profit before expenses." 5 minutes ago Charlie, STFU, your're going to
ruin the party. 8 minutes ago Forty thousand grandfathers agree. This is America. 11 minutes
ago Trust business? Fastest way to lose your assets. 14 minutes ago I read a long essay by
Munger where he extols the greatness of an investment in KO (coke). Never once did he mention
any of the adverse health problems of too much sugar and caffeine in our diets. Sugar is
causing an obesity epidemic and the caffeine makes us all hyper and prone to mistakes. I used
to drink it as a programming fluid but I quickly got addicted. I started to notice that my
typing mistakes went way up due to the caffeine. I once saw a psychology textbook where they
fed caffeine to spiders to see how it affected their web building. There webs turned out a
horrible dis-organized mess. I would ban coke from the workplace.
14 minutes ago
I would observe Charlie is right and the corresponding CEOs are overpaid....
17 minutes ago
When have earnings ever been real?
Anyone remember Lucent? 17 minutes ago EBITDA is an anagram for BAITED
Make sense now?
18 minutes ago
A time of fraud. Volatility will eventually reveal the truth.
25 minutes ago
for once this old turtle head said something I agree with. EBITA is for me a
totally useless metric for turd polishers.
36 minutes ago
No respect for Munger.
He got into Harvard because of connections. He was denied, and then the dean got a phone
call from a former dean who new Mungers family.
So Munger went to Harvard law and became lawyer, which is the most corrupt profession bar
none (pun intended). Even though he didnt even have an undergraduate degree.
Then he used his Harvard law to do what they all do: start a firm, make a killing ripping
people off, and then use the money to start a hedge fund.
Guys like Munger contributed exactly zero to society, and raked in billions by circumventing
rules everyone else is forced to follow.
Pft 85 < The Constitution of the United States of America is a corporate charter. in
form and substance, it redirected the distribution of profits from shareholders to feudal
lords.
What it has been doing since Lincoln was shot is to develop lordships (called monopoly
possessing corporations) and making sure those lordships were vested by rule of law, war in
foreign land, and other measures as needed, to make sure the feudal lords and their
corporations were always profitable no matter what and to be sure that any need or want the
feudal lords had need for, the USA corporation would extract from those (called Americans)
that it governs. ..
When the feudal lords fail, the government is made to give the feudal lord the money it
needs to keep going. until the failed feudal lord can realize by its bull shit existence to
be profitable again.
Comment les Etats-Unis ont demandé à la communauté internationale de
soutenir leur plan israélo-palestinien.or look for lefigaro.fr then international,then
moyen orient.
Posted by: willie | Feb 13 2020 0:48 utc | 94
Interesting willie. Yes the best about Trump is that it makes the US system so visibly
transparent: The king and his servants (acolytes) looking for personal advantage ...
Hillarious. Don't you second-rate allies/acolytes use the wrong words. We better give you
talking points.
"Those who accept the policies of the Trump administration, cancellation of the JCPOA with
Iran, seizing oil fields in Syria, endless sanctions on nation after nation, Europe
blackmailed, endless threats emanating almost hourly from Trump's iPhone as "national policy"
or even criminally deranged is simply not paying attention."
Excellent come back for the Qanon fantasy, which, IMO, ranks right up there with Ayn
Rand's fevered dreams...
Ran across this quote which is more true than not.
There is no America. Everything is just one vast corporation, an association of
corporations. There's no Britain. There's no America. There's no Holland. There's no China.
There's no Russia. It's one conglomerate of corporations. Money runs the thing."
-- Peter Finch as character Howard Beale, in the movie "Network
Its true when you consider the interlocking ownership of the elites in the major
corporations and industries, which also capture governments political parties and regulatory
agencies, and in China of course these local global elites make up parts of the party elite.
While money is an important attribute of power, I think its a means and not an end to them.
Their motivations is an ideology based on Platos Republic where they are pholisopher kings
ruling the rest, and a religious idea that they, as elites may evolve to become like God and
recover what was lost after the fall - as man was originally made in Gods image. Another name
for it is Transhumanism which actually is idea that came from gnostic Judeo-Christian
beliefs. Religion like Eugenics has not disappeared, both have just been renamed and
repurposed. The Elites are Gods chosen people and the rest exist to serve.
Exactly Penelope, that is precisely what the Trump and establishment oligarchy want. Red
herrings to mesmerise and nimble fingers to pick pockets and all backed by their 'rule of
law', their thugs, their assault on humanity.
Benign neglect of the safety of citizens as part of this strategy of creating high level
terror (be it actual violence or a coronavirus)is called out in
this excellent analysis .
""The power of the Fed has become so acute that it has replaced the economy as a principle
influence over the stock market to the point where there is only a 7% correlation between GDP
and the S&P 500. Historically, in any given cycle that relationship was anywhere between
30% and 70%."""
So eventually, there will be no goods for this money to buy. And other countries will also
stop selling their goods to us.
""So even though stocks continue to steadily climb higher, the rot at the foundation of
the system is becoming more and more apparent.""
Russia's geographical position makes its exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) more
profitable and competitive with American and Australian supplies, according to Russia's Energy
Minister Alexander Novak. Russia ships most of its LNG (around 69 percent) to Asian markets,
where the bulk of global LNG supplies are sent. The country could also export its LNG via
traditional Russian pipeline gas European routes, due to low cost and short transportation
distance, the minister wrote, in an article for the Energy Policy journal.
"Russia's convenient geographical position between Europe and Asia allows our LNG to be
profitable at current prices and to win competition from the US and Australia," Novak said.
"If necessary, we can deliver liquefied gas to any European country, and it will be faster
and cheaper than many other suppliers."
The Northern Sea Route (NSR) could be a key transport link to connect massive Arctic energy
projects Russia is currently developing with target markets. The route, which lies in Arctic
waters and within Russia's Exclusive Economic Zone, could cut the transportation time by a
third, compared to shipments via the Suez Canal.
Russia is one of the world's leading exporters of natural gas. Last year, it produced more
than 40 billion cubic meters of LNG – a nearly 50 percent increase from 27 billion cubic
meters it had in 2018. By 2035, Novak expects the country to boost production to 120 million
tons, amounting to around a fifth of the forecasted global LNG production.
"... Of course, some may argue that one's class is based largely on her own experience and perspective, but this confuses psychological feelings with concrete social and economic realities. As C. Wright Mills pointed out in his classic study, "White Collar: The American Middle Classes," just because people "are not 'class conscious' at all times and in all places does not mean 'there are no classes' or that 'in America everybody is middle class.' " Although subjective feelings are no doubt important, to accept that everyone who identifies as middle class must be middle class is to disregard objective economic realities. ..."
"... The new middle class flourished until the capitalist class decided to revolt against the legacy of the New Deal toward the end of the 20th century. In the contemporary era, many who would have been middle-class in the postwar years have effectively been proletarianized once again, and economic inequality has returned pre-Great Depression heights. Proletarianization, Mills explained, "refers to shifts of middle-class occupations toward wage-workers in terms of: income, property, skill, prestige or power, irrespective of whether or not the people involved are aware of these changes. Or, the meaning may be in terms of changes in consciousness, outlook, or organized activity." ..."
In America, the term "middle class" has long been used to describe the
majority of wage and salary earners, from those receiving a median annual income of around
$50,000 to those who earn three or four times that amount. Whether Democrat or Republican,
politicians from across the political aisle claim to represent the middle class -- that
vast-yet-amorphous segment of the population where the managers and the managed all seem to fit
together.
The term has always been somewhat problematic when it comes to politics. As Joan C. Williams
observes in her 2017 book, "White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America," a
"central way we make class disappear is to describe virtually everyone as 'middle class.' " The
majority of Americans see themselves as middle class, including those in the top 10% earning
several times the average income. According to Williams, a close friend of hers who
"undoubtedly belonged to the top 1%" once referred to herself as middle class, a perspective
that the author describes as "class cluelessness."
This cluelessness was also evident in a New York Times article last summer
titled "What Middle Class Families Want Politicians to Know," which included interviews with a
number of purportedly middle class families with household incomes of up to $400,000 (only one
of the interviewees earned less than $100,000, with the average around $200,000).
The fact that people who earn a quarter-million dollars annually place themselves in the
same category as those earning $70,000 tells us just how politically useless the term "middle
class" has become in contemporary America. Even when we take into account geographic factors
and fluctuations in the cost of living, there is little rational justification for categorizing
a $60,000-a-year blue-collar worker with a lawyer or doctor earning in excess of $200,000.
Of course, some may argue that one's class is based largely on her own experience and
perspective, but this confuses psychological feelings with concrete social and economic
realities. As C. Wright Mills pointed out in his classic study, "White Collar: The American
Middle Classes," just because people "are not 'class conscious' at all times and in all places
does not mean 'there are no classes' or that 'in America everybody is middle class.' " Although
subjective feelings are no doubt important, to accept that everyone who identifies as middle
class must be middle class is to disregard objective economic realities.
One's class consciousness (or lack thereof) has important implications for one's political
attitudes, and in America class consciousness has always been somewhat lacking compared to
other countries. The United States has never had a true aristocratic class or feudal property
relations like those in Europe, and in the 19th century, the "middle class" essentially
stood for small capitalists and propertied farmers. Between the mid-19th century and mid-20th
century, the country was transformed, in Mills' analysis, from a "nation of small capitalists
into a nation of hired employees" -- a trend that sociologists call "proletarianization."
In the post-World War II era, thanks to the struggle of labor and the policies of the New
Deal, which aimed to reduce inequality and mediate class tensions, many in the working class
became comfortably middle class. In other words, the proletariat turned into a kind of "petty
bourgeois," adopting the same values and attitudes as their employers, while accepting the
status quo after a few adjustments. Ironically, this ended up undercutting more radical labor
movements while preserving the economic system, which eventually came back to bite working
people and their children.
The new middle class flourished until the capitalist class decided to revolt against the
legacy of the New Deal toward the end of the 20th century. In the contemporary era, many who
would have been middle-class in the postwar years have effectively been proletarianized once
again, and economic inequality has returned pre-Great Depression heights. Proletarianization,
Mills explained, "refers to shifts of middle-class occupations toward wage-workers in terms of:
income, property, skill, prestige or power, irrespective of whether or not the people involved
are aware of these changes. Or, the meaning may be in terms of changes in consciousness,
outlook, or organized activity."
The proletarianization of the middle class over the past 50 years has had an enormously
detrimental effect on communities across the country, but it has taken quite a while for many
working people in America to recognize their new situation in terms of consciousness and
outlook. The enduring popularity of the term "middle class" reflects this state of affairs.
In the Democratic primaries, only one candidate has deliberately chosen to use "working
class" over "middle class." Not surprisingly, that candidate is Sen. Bernie Sanders. "I am a
candidate of the working class," Sanders recently declared on Facebook. "I come from the
working class. That is my background, that's who I am. I fought for the working class as a
mayor, a Congressman and a Senator. And that is the kind of president that I will be." Sanders,
whose campaign is 100% grassroots-funded, wrote
in a column last week for the Des Moines Register, " our campaign is focused on making sure
the government stops representing billionaires and start representing us -- the working class
of this country."
Though it may seem like a somewhat trivial distinction, when we look at the rest of the
Democratic field, it's clear that Sanders has indeed distinguished himself from the other top
candidates. For example, Sanders' opponent Joe Biden frequently speaks of the middle class but
rarely the working class. "This country wasn't built by Wall Street bankers and CEOs and hedge
fund managers. It was built by the American middle class," Biden declares on his campaign
website, where he says that the middle class "isn't a number," but a "set of values." (In a way
this is correct, but not in the sense that Biden seems to think.)
On the more progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren's website, where she lists her numerous plans,
one searches in vain for any references to the working class, though there are plenty to the
middle class.
How much this actually matters is, of course, debatable, but the term "working class"
undoubtedly has far more implications and political significance than "middle class," which,
like many overused words in the political lexicon, has lost all meaning. By using "working
class" instead, Sanders appears to be trying to increase class consciousness in America, where
those in the ruling class have often demonstrated the highest level of class consciousness
(never failing to use their abundant resources to protect and advance their own interests).
The more young and working-class people come to recognize their own situation and place in
the 21st century American economy, the more they seem to embrace "socialist" policies that are
rejected by "middle class" sensibilities.
In the Democratic primaries, only one candidate has made raising levels of class
consciousness part of his campaign strategy, and in an election that could very well be
determined by working-class voters, this may be the strategy to defeat Trump.
I've heard and read about a claim that Trump actually called PM Abdul Mahdi and demanded that
Iraq hand over 50 percent of their proceeds from selling their oil to the USA, and then
threatened Mahdi that he would unleash false flag attacks against the Iraqi government and
its people if he did not submit to this act of Mafia-like criminal extortion. Mahdi told
Trump to kiss his buttocks and that he wasn't going to turn over half of the profits from oil
sales.
This makes Trump sound exactly like a criminal mob boss, especially in light of the fact
that the USA is now the world's #1 exporter of oil – a fact that the arrogant Orange
Man has even boasted about in recent months. Can anyone confirm that this claim is accurate?
If so, then the more I learn about Trump the more sleazy and gangster like he becomes.
I mean, think about it. Bush and Cheney and mostly jewish neocons LIED us into Iraq based
on bald faced lies, fabricated evidence, and exaggerated threats that they KNEW did not
exist. We destroyed that country, captured and killed it's leader – who used to be a
big buddy of the USA when we had a use for him – and Bush's crime gang killed close to
2 million innocent Iraqis and wrecked their economy and destroyed their infrastructure. And,
now, after all that death, destruction and carnage – which Trump claimed in 2016 he did
not approve of – but, now that Trump is sitting on the throne in the Oval office
– he has the audacity and the gall to demand that Iraq owes the USA 50 percent of their
oil profits? And, that he won't honor and respect their demand to pull our troops out of
their sovereign nation unless they PAY US back for the gigantic waste of tax payers money
that was spent building permanent bases inside their country?
Not one Iraqi politician voted for the appropriations bill that financed the construction
of those military bases; that was our mistake, the mistake of our US congress whichever POTUS
signed off on it.
...Trump learned the power of the purse on the streets of NYC, he survived by playing ball
with the Jewish and Italian Mafia. Now he has become the ultimate Godfather, and the world
must listen to his commands. Watch and listen as the powerful and mighty crumble under US
Hegemony.
Right TG, traditionally, as you said up there first, and legally too, under the supreme law
of the land. Economic sanctions are subject to the same UNSC supervision as forcible
coercion.
UN Charter Article 41: "The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the
use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon
the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or
partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio,
and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations."
US "sanctions" require UNSC authorization. Unilateral sanctions are nothing but illegal
coercive intervention, as the non-intervention principle is customary international law,
which is US federal common law.
The G-192, that is, the entire world, has affirmed this law. That's why the US is trying
to defund UNCTAD as redundant with the WTO (UNCTAD is the G-192's primary forum.) In any
case, now that the SCO is in a position to enforce this law at gunpoint with its
overwhelmingly superior missile technology, the US is going to get stomped and tased until it
complies and stops resisting.
In 2018 total US petroleum production was under 18 million barrels per day, total
consumption north of 20 mmb/d. What does it matter if the US exports a bunch of super light
fracked product the US itself can't refine if it turns around and imports it all back in
again and then some.
The myths we tell ourselves, like a roaring economy that nevertheless generates a $1
trillion annual deficit, will someday come back to bite us. Denying reality is not a winning
game plan for the long run.
I long tought that US foreign policies were mainly zionist agenda – driven, but the
Venezuelan affair and the statements of Trump himself about the syrian oil (ta be "kept"
(stolen)) make you think twice.
Oil seems to be at least very important even if it's not the main cause of middle east
problems
So maybe it's the cause of illegal and cruel sanctions against Iran : Get rid of
competitor to sell shale oil everywhere ?( think also of Norstream 2 here)
Watch out US of A. in the end there is something sometimes referred to as the oil's
curse . some poor black Nigerians call oil "the shit of the devil", because it's such a
problem – related asset Have you heard of it ? You get your revenues from oil easily,
so you don't have to make effort by yourself. And in the end you don't keep pace with China
on 5G ? Education fails ? Hmm
Becommig a primary sector extraction nation sad destiny indeed, like africans growing cafe,
bananas and cacao for others. Not to mention environmental problems
What has happened to the superb Nation that send the first man on the moon and invented
modern computers ?
Disapointment
Money for space or money for war following the Zio. Choose Uncle Sam !
Difficult to have both
Everyone seems to forget how we avoided war with Syria all those years ago It was when John
Kerry of all people gaffed, and said "if Assad gives up all his chemical weapons." That was
in response to a reporter who asked "is there anything that can stop the war?" A intrepid
Russian ambassador chimed in loud enough for the press core to hear his "OK" and history was
averted. Thinking restricting the power of the President will stop brown children from dying
at the hands of insane US foreign policy is a cope. "Bi-partisanship" voted to keep troops in
Syria, that was only a few months ago, have you already forgotten? Dubya started the drone
program, and the magical African everyone fawns over, literally doubled the remote controlled
death. We are way past pretending any elected official from either side is actually against
more ME war, or even that one side is worse than the other.
The problem with the supporters Trump has left is they so desperately want to believe in
something bigger than themselves. They have been fed propaganda for their whole lives, and as
a result can only see the world in either "this is good" or "this is bad." The problem with
the opposition is that they are insane. and will say or do anything regardless of the truth.
Trump could be impeached for assassinating Sulimani, yet they keep proceeding with fake and
retarded nonsense. Just like keeping troops in Syria, even the most insane rabid leftoids are
just fine with US imperialism, so long as it's promoting Starbucks, Marvel and homosex, just
like we see with support for HK. That is foreign meddling no matter how you try to justify
it, and it's not even any different messaging than the hoax "bring
democracyhumanrightsfreedom TM to the poor Arabs" justification that was used in Iraq. They
don't even have to come up with a new play to run, it's really quite incredible.
@OverCommenter
A lot of right-wingers also see military action in the Middle East as a way for America to
flex its muscles and bomb some Arabs. It also serves to justify the insane defence budget
that could be used to build a wall and increase funding to ICE.
US politics has become incredibly bi-partisan, criticising Trump will get you branded a
'Leftist' in many circles. This extreme bipartisanship started with the Obama birth
certificate nonsense which was being peddled by Jews like Orly Taitz, Philip J. Berg, Robert
L. Shulz, Larry Klayman and Breitbart news – most likely because Obama was pursuing the
JCPOA and not going hard enough on Iran – and continued with the Trump Russian agent
angle.
Now many Americans cannot really think critically, they stick to their side like a fan
sticks to their sports team.
The first person I ever heard say sanctions are acts of war was Ron Paul. The repulsive
Madeleine Albright infamously said the deaths of 500,000 Iranian children due to US sanctions
was worth it. She ought to be tried as a war criminal. Ron Paul ought to be Secretary of
State.
Looks like the end of Full Spectrum Dominance the the USA enjoyed since 1991. Alliance of Iran, Russia and China (with Turkey
and Pakistan as two possible members) is serious military competitor and while the USA has its set of trump cards, the military
victory against such an alliance no longer guaranteed.
Days after the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, new and important information is
coming to light from a speech given by the Iraqi prime minister. The story behind Soleimani's
assassination seems to go much deeper than what has thus far been reported, involving Saudi
Arabia and China as well the US dollar's role as the global reserve currency .
The Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, has revealed details of his interactions with
Trump in the weeks leading up to Soleimani's assassination in a speech to the Iraqi parliament.
He tried to explain several times on live television how Washington had been browbeating him
and other Iraqi members of parliament to toe the American line, even threatening to engage in
false-flag sniper shootings of both protesters and security personnel in order to inflame the
situation, recalling similar modi operandi seen in Cairo in 2009, Libya in 2011, and Maidan in
2014. The purpose of such cynicism was to throw Iraq into chaos.
Here is the reconstruction of the story:
[Speaker of the Council of Representatives of Iraq] Halbousi attended the parliamentary
session while almost none of the Sunni members did. This was because the Americans had
learned that Abdul-Mehdi was planning to reveal sensitive secrets in the session and sent
Halbousi to prevent this. Halbousi cut Abdul-Mehdi off at the commencement of his speech and
then asked for the live airing of the session to be stopped. After this, Halbousi together
with other members, sat next to Abdul-Mehdi, speaking openly with him but without it being
recorded. This is what was discussed in that session that was not broadcast:
Abdul-Mehdi spoke angrily about how the Americans had ruined the country and now refused
to complete infrastructure and electricity grid projects unless they were promised 50% of oil
revenues, which Abdul-Mehdi refused.
The complete (translated)
words of Abdul-Mahdi's speech to parliament:
This is why I visited China and signed an important agreement with them to undertake the
construction instead. Upon my return, Trump called me to ask me to reject this agreement.
When I refused, he threatened to unleash huge demonstrations against me that would end my
premiership.
Huge demonstrations against me duly materialized and Trump called again to threaten that
if I did not comply with his demands, then he would have Marine snipers on tall buildings
target protesters and security personnel alike in order to pressure me.
I refused again and handed in my resignation. To this day the Americans insist on us
rescinding our deal with the Chinese.
After this, when our Minister of Defense publicly stated that a third party was targeting
both protestors and security personnel alike (just as Trump had threatened he would do), I
received a new call from Trump threatening to kill both me and the Minister of Defense if we
kept on talking about this "third party".
Nobody imagined that the threat was to be applied to General Soleimani, but it was difficult
for Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to reveal the weekslong backstory behind the terrorist
attack.
I was supposed to meet him [Soleimani] later in the morning when he was killed. He came to
deliver a message from Iran in response to the message we had delivered to the Iranians from
the Saudis.
We can surmise, judging by Saudi Arabia's reaction , that some kind of
negotiation was going on between Tehran and Riyadh:
The Kingdom's statement regarding the events in Iraq stresses the Kingdom's view of the
importance of de-escalation to save the countries of the region and their people from the
risks of any escalation.
Above all, the Saudi
Royal family wanted to let people know immediately that they had not been informed of the
US operation:
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia was not consulted regarding the US strike. In light of the
rapid developments, the Kingdom stresses the importance of exercising restraint to guard
against all acts that may lead to escalation, with severe consequences.
And to emphasize his reluctance for war, Mohammad bin Salman
sent a delegation to the United States.
Liz Sly , the Washington Post Beirut bureau chief, tweated:
Saudi Arabia is sending a delegation to Washington to urge restraint with Iran on behalf
of [Persian] Gulf states. The message will be: 'Please spare us the pain of going through
another war'.
What clearly emerges is that the success of the operation against Soleimani had nothing to
do with the intelligence gathering of the US or Israel. It was known to all and sundry that
Soleimani was heading to Baghdad in a diplomatic capacity that acknowledged Iraq's efforts to
mediate a solution to the regional crisis with Saudi Arabia.
It would seem that the Saudis, Iranians and Iraqis were well on the way towards averting a
regional conflict involving Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Riyadh's reaction to the American strike
evinced no public joy or celebration. Qatar, while not seeing eye to eye with Riyadh on many
issues, also immediately expressed solidarity with Tehran, hosting a meeting at a senior
government level with Mohammad Zarif Jarif, the Iranian foreign minister. Even Turkey
and
Egypt , when commenting on the asassination, employed moderating language.
This could reflect a fear of being on the receiving end of Iran's retaliation. Qatar, the
country from which the drone that killed Soleimani took off, is only a stone's throw away from
Iran, situated on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. Riyadh and Tel Aviv, Tehran's
regional enemies, both know that a military conflict with Iran would mean the end of the Saudi
royal family.
When the words of the Iraqi prime minister are linked back to the geopolitical and energy
agreements in the region, then the worrying picture starts to emerge of a desperate US lashing
out at a world turning its back on a unipolar world order in favor of the emerging multipolar
about which
I have long written .
The US, now considering itself a net energy exporter as a result of the shale-oil revolution
(on which the jury is still out), no longer needs to import oil from the Middle East. However,
this does not mean that oil can now be traded in any other currency other than the US
dollar.
The petrodollar is what ensures that the US dollar retains its status as the global reserve
currency, granting the US a monopolistic position from which it derives enormous benefits from
playing the role of regional hegemon.
This privileged position of holding the global reserve currency also ensures that the US can
easily fund its war machine by virtue of the fact that much of the world is obliged to buy its
treasury bonds that it is simply able to conjure out of thin air. To threaten this comfortable
arrangement is to threaten Washington's global power.
Even so, the geopolitical and economic trend is inexorably towards a multipolar world order,
with China increasingly playing a leading role, especially in the Middle East and South
America.
Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia together make up the overwhelming
majority of oil and gas reserves in the world. The first three have an elevated relationship
with Beijing and are very much in the multipolar camp, something that China and Russia are keen
to further consolidate in order to ensure the future growth for the Eurasian supercontinent
without war and conflict.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is pro-US but could gravitate towards the Sino-Russian camp
both militarily and in terms of energy. The same process is going on with Iraq and Qatar thanks
to Washington's numerous strategic errors in the region starting from Iraq in 2003, Libya in
2011 and Syria and Yemen in recent years.
The agreement between Iraq and China is a prime example of how Beijing intends to use the
Iraq-Iran-Syria troika to revive the Middle East and and link it to the Chinese Belt and Road
Initiative.
While Doha and Riyadh would be the first to suffer economically from such an agreement,
Beijing's economic power is such that, with its win-win approach, there is room for
everyone.
Saudi Arabia provides China with most of its oil and Qatar, together with the Russian
Federation, supply China with most of its LNG needs, which lines up with Xi Jinping's 2030
vision that aims to greatly reduce polluting emissions.
The US is absent in this picture, with little ability to influence events or offer any
appealing economic alternatives.
Washington would like to prevent any Eurasian integration by unleashing chaos and
destruction in the region, and killing Soleimani served this purpose. The US cannot contemplate
the idea of the dollar losing its status as the global reserve currency. Trump is engaging in a
desperate gamble that could have disastrous consequences.
The region, in a worst-case scenario, could be engulfed in a devastating war involving
multiple countries. Oil refineries could be destroyed all across the region, a quarter of the
world's oil transit could be blocked, oil prices would skyrocket ($200-$300 a barrel) and
dozens of countries would be plunged into a global financial crisis. The blame would be laid
squarely at Trump's feet, ending his chances for re-election.
To try and keep everyone in line, Washington is left to resort to terrorism, lies and
unspecified threats of visiting destruction on friends and enemies alike.
Trump has evidently been convinced by someone that the US can do without the Middle East,
that it can do without allies in the region, and that nobody would ever dare to sell oil in any
other currency than the US dollar.
Soleimani's death is the result of a convergence of US and Israeli interests. With no other
way of halting Eurasian integration, Washington can only throw the region into chaos by
targeting countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria that are central to the Eurasian project. While
Israel has never had the ability or audacity to carry out such an assassination itself, the
importance of the Israel Lobby to Trump's electoral success would have influenced his decision,
all the more so in an election year .
Trump believed his drone attack could solve all his problems by frightening his opponents,
winning the support of his voters (by equating Soleimani's assassination to Osama bin Laden's),
and sending a warning to Arab countries of the dangers of deepening their ties with China.
The assassination of Soleimani is the US lashing out at its steady loss of influence in the
region. The Iraqi attempt to mediate a lasting peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been
scuppered by the US and Israel's determination to prevent peace in the region and instead
increase chaos and instability.
Washington has not achieved its hegemonic status through a preference for diplomacy and calm
dialogue, and Trump has no intention of departing from this approach.
Washington's friends and enemies alike must acknowledge this reality and implement the
countermeasures necessary to contain the madness.
Very good article, straight to the point. In fact its much worse. I know is hard to
swallow for my US american brother and sisters.
But as sooner you wake up and see the reality as it is, as better chances the US has to
survive with honor. Stop the wars around the globe and do not look for excuses. Isnt it
already obvious what is going on with the US war machine? How many more examples some people
need to wake up?
Not all said in video above is accurate but the recent events in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan,
Africa are all related to prevent China from overtaking the zionist hegemonic world and to
recolonize China (at least the parasite is trying to hop to China as new host).
Trade war, Huawei, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet ..... the concerted efforts from all zionist
controlled media (ZeroHedge included) to slander, smearing, fake news against China should
tell you what the Zionists agenda are :)
The American President's threatened the Iraqi Prime Minister to liquidate him directly
with the Minister of Defense. The Marines are the third party that sniped the demonstrators
and the security men:
Abdul Mahdi continued:
"After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I
also refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me. Indeed,
the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of
non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, so that the third party (Marines snipers) would
target the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from the highest structures and
the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China
agreement, so I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist
to this day on canceling the China agreement and when the defense minister said that who
kills the demonstrators is a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically
threatened me and defense minister in the event of talk about the third party."
.........
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission found George W. Bush guilty of war crimes in absentia
for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Bush, **** Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers
Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in
absentia in Malaysia.
Unfortunately, this article makes a lot of sense. The US is losing influence and lashing
out carelessly. I hope the rest of the world realizes how detached majority of the citizens
within the states are from the federal government. The Federal government brings no good to
our nation. None. From the mis management of our once tax revenues to the corrupt Congress
who accepts bribes from the highest bidder, it's a rats best that is not only harmful to its
own people, but the world at large. USD won't go down without a fight it seems... All empires
end with a bang. Be ready
"... In our late-imperial phase, we seem to have reached that moment when, whatever high officials say in matters of the empire's foreign policy, we must consider whether the opposite is in fact the case. So we have it now. ..."
"... Lawlessness begets lawlessness is the operative (and obvious) principle. In a remarkable speech at the Hoover Institution last week, Pompeo termed the Soleimani assassination "the restoration of deterrence" and appeared to promise other such operations against other nations Washington considers adversaries. Ominously enough, Pompeo singled out China and Russia. ..."
"... Against the background of the events noted above, it is clear from this speech alone that our secretary of state is a dangerously incompetent figure when it comes to judging global events, the proper responses to them, and the probable consequences of a given response. If we are going to think about costs, the heaviest will fall on Americans in months to come. ..."
"... Immediately after the U.S. drone that killed Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport, Mohammad Javad Zarif sent out a message whose importance should not be missed. "End of US's malign presence in West Asia has begun," Iran's foreign minister wrote. These few words, rendered in Twitterese, bear careful consideration given they come from an official whose nation had just sustained a critical blow. ..."
"... Gradually but rather certainly now, the community of nations is losing its patience with late-phase imperial America. With exceptions such as Japan and Israel, the Baltics and Saudi Arabia, this is so across both oceans and more or less across the non–Western world. In the Middle East, the American presence will remain for the time being, but we are now in the beginning-of-the-end phase. This was Zarif's meaning. And we now know the end will come neither peaceably nor lawfully. ..."
"... Amazing how the US government is bringing back the old days: "Slave markets" See: reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-rights/executions-torture-and-slave-markets-persist-in-libya-u-n-idUSKBN1GX1JY "Pillage", as pointed out in this article. ..."
"... To have such a person as the top diplomat in the USA shows how low the USA has sunk. For him to pretend to be some sort of Christian is sinister and extremely dangerous for everyone. There is NO reason for the US animosity towards Iran except subservience to Israel, which, again without real justification, claims to be terrified of Iran, which unlike Israel is NOT attacking others and has not for centuries. ..."
"... SecStae's remarks about deterrence befit a military commander, NOT a diplomat. Paranoia, grandiosity and violence begin with potus and cascade downward and about. Congress does its part in investing in machinery of war. ..."
"... Pompeo reminds me of the pigs in Animal Farm. He is a grotesque figure, steely-eyed, cold-blooded, fanatical, and hateful. "We lied, cheated, and stole" Pompous Maximus will get his comeuppance one of these days ..."
"... Pillage as policy. The Empire has fully embraced gangster capitalism for its modus operandi. ..."
"... Here is an interesting article that explains how governments have changed the rules so that they can justify killing anyone who they believe may at some point in time have the potential to be involved in a terrorist plot: viableopposition.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-bethlehem-doctrine-and-new.html ..."
"... This rather Orwellian move gives governments the justification that they to kill any of us just because they feel that we might pose a threat and that is a very, very scary prospect. It is very reminiscent of the movie Minority Report where crimes of the future are punished in the present. ..."
Of all the preposterous assertions made since the drone assassination of Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan. 3, the prize for
bottomless ignorance must go to the bottomlessly ignorant Mike Pompeo.
Speaking after the influential Iranian general's death, our frightening secretary of state declaimed on
CBS's Face the Nation
, "There was sound and just and legal reason for the actions the President took, and the world is safer as a result." In
appearances on
five
news programs on the same Sunday morning, the evangelical paranoid who now runs American foreign policy was a singer with a one-note
tune. "It's very clear the world's a safer place today," Pompeo said on ABC's Jan. 5 edition of This
Week.
In our late-imperial phase, we seem to have reached that moment when, whatever high officials say in matters of the empire's
foreign policy, we must consider whether the opposite is in fact the case. So we have it now.
We are not safer now that Soleimani, a revered figure across much of the Middle East, has been murdered. The planet has just become
significantly more dangerous, especially but not only for Americans, and this is so for one simple reason: The Trump administration,
Pompeo bearing the standard, has just tipped American conduct abroad into a zone of probably unprecedented lawlessness, Pompeo's
nonsensical claim to legality notwithstanding .
This is a very consequential line to cross.
Hardly does it hold that Washington's foreign policy cliques customarily keep international law uppermost in their minds and that
recent events are aberrations. Nothing suggests policy planners even consider legalities except when it makes useful propaganda to
charge others with violating international statutes and conventions.
Neither can the Soleimani assassination be understood in isolation: This was only the most reckless of numerous policy decisions
recently taken in the Middle East. Since late last year, to consider merely the immediate past, the Trump administration has acted
ever more flagrantly in violation of all international legal authorities and documents -- the UN Charter, the International Criminal
Court, and the International Court of Justice in the Hague chief among them.
Washington is into full-frontal lawlessness now.
'Keeping the Oil'
Shortly after Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. forces from northern Syria last October, the president reversed course --
probably under Pentagon and State Department pressure -- and said some troops would remain to protect Syria's oilfields. "We want
to keep the oil," Trump declared in
the course of a Twitter storm. It soon emerged that the administration's true intent was to prevent the Assad government in Damascus
from reasserting sovereign control over Syrian oilfields.
The Russians had the honesty to call this for what it was. "Washington's attempt to put oilfields there under [its] control is
illegal,"
Sergei Lavrov said at the time. "In fact, it's tantamount to robbery," the Russian foreign minister added. (John Kiriakou, writing
for Consortium News, pointed out
that it is a violation of the 1907 Hague Convention. It is call pillage.)
Few outside the Trump administration, and possibly no one, has argued that Soleimani's murder was legitimate under international
law. Not only was the Iranian general from a country with which the U.S. is not at war, which means the crime is murder; the drone
attack was also a clear violation of Iraqi sovereignty, as has been widely reported.
In response to Baghdad's subsequent demand that all foreign troops withdraw from Iraqi soil,
Pompeo flatly refused even to discuss
the matter with Iraqi officials -- yet another openly contemptuous violation of Iraqi sovereignty.
It gets worse. In his own response to Baghdad's decision to evict foreign troops,
Trump threatened sanctions -- "sanctions like they've never seen before" -- and said Iraq would have to pay the U.S. the cost
of the bases the Pentagon has built there despite binding agreements that all fixed installations the U.S. has built in Iraq are
Iraqi government-owned.
At Baghdad's Throat
Trump, who seems to have oil eternally on his mind, has been at Baghdad's throat for some time. Twice since taking office three
years ago, he has
tried
to intimidate the Iraqis into "repaying" the U.S. for its 2003 invasion with access to Iraqi oil. "We did a lot, we did a lot
over there, we spent trillions over there, and a lot of people have been talking about the oil," he said on the second of these occasions.
Baghdad rebuffed Trump both times, but he has been at it since, according to Adil Abdul–Mahdi, Iraq's interim prime minister.
Last year the U.S. administration
asked Baghdad for 50 percent of the nation's oil output -- in total roughly 4.5 million barrels daily -- in exchange for various
promised reconstruction projects.
Rejecting the offer, Abdul–Mahdi
signed an "oil
for reconstruction" agreement with China last autumn -- whereupon Trump threatened to instigate widespread demonstrations in
Baghdad if Abdul–Mahdi did not cancel the China deal. (He did not do so and, coincidentally or otherwise, civil unrest ensued.)
U.S. Army forces operating in southern Iraq, April. 2, 2003. (U.S. Navy)
Blueprints for Reprisal
If American lawlessness is nothing new, the brazenly imperious character of all the events noted in this brief résumé has nonetheless
pushed U.S. foreign policy beyond a tipping point.
No American -- and certainly no American official or military personnel -- can any longer travel in the Middle East with an assurance
of safety. All American diplomats, all military officers, and all embassies and bases in the region are now vulnerable to reprisals.
The Associated Press reported after the Jan. 3 drone strike that
Iran has developed 13 blueprints for reprisals
against the U.S.
Lawlessness begets lawlessness is the operative (and obvious) principle. In a remarkable speech
at the Hoover Institution last week, Pompeo termed the Soleimani assassination "the restoration of deterrence" and appeared to promise
other such operations against other nations Washington considers adversaries. Ominously enough, Pompeo singled out China and Russia.
Here is a snippet from Pompeo's remarks:
"In strategic terms, deterrence simply means persuading the other party that the costs of a specific behavior exceed its benefits.
It requires credibility; indeed, it depends on it. Your adversary must understand not only do you have the capacity to impose
costs but that you are, in fact, willing to do so . In all cases we have to do this."
Against the background of the events noted above, it is clear from this speech alone that our secretary of state is a dangerously
incompetent figure when it comes to judging global events, the proper responses to them, and the probable consequences of a given
response. If we are going to think about costs, the heaviest will fall on Americans in months to come.
Immediately after the U.S. drone that killed Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport, Mohammad Javad Zarif
sent out a message
whose importance should not be missed. "End of US's malign presence in West Asia has begun," Iran's foreign minister wrote. These
few words, rendered in Twitterese, bear careful consideration given they come from an official whose nation had just sustained a
critical blow.
24 hrs ago, an arrogant clown -- masquerading as a diplomat -- claimed people were dancing in the cities of Iraq.
Today, hundreds of thousands of our proud Iraqi brothers and sisters offered him their response across their soil.
Gradually but rather certainly now, the community of nations is losing its patience with late-phase imperial America. With exceptions
such as Japan and Israel, the Baltics and Saudi Arabia, this is so across both oceans and more or less across the non–Western world.
In the Middle East, the American presence will remain for the time being, but we are now in the beginning-of-the-end phase. This
was Zarif's meaning. And we now know the end will come neither peaceably nor lawfully.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune , is a columnist,
essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him
on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is
Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via
his Patreon site .
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Well, there's two relevant bits here. Bullshit walks and money talks. Our money stopped talking $23T ago.
What goes around, comes around. Whenever, however it comes down, it's gonna hurt.
Antiwar7 , January 21, 2020 at 13:46
Amazing how the US government is bringing back the old days: "Slave markets"
See: reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-rights/executions-torture-and-slave-markets-persist-in-libya-u-n-idUSKBN1GX1JY "Pillage", as pointed out in this article.
rosemerry , January 21, 2020 at 13:28
To have such a person as the top diplomat in the USA shows how low the USA has sunk. For him to pretend to be some sort of
Christian is sinister and extremely dangerous for everyone. There is NO reason for the US animosity towards Iran except subservience
to Israel, which, again without real justification, claims to be terrified of Iran, which unlike Israel is NOT attacking others
and has not for centuries.
Even if the USA hates Iran, it has already done inestimable damage to the Islamic Republic before this disgraceful action. Cruelty
to 80 million people who have never harmed, even really threatened, the mighty USA, by tossing out a working JCPOA and installing
economic "sanctions", should not be accepted by the rest of the world-giving in to blackmail encourages worse behavior, as we
have already seen.
"It requires credibility; indeed, it depends on it. " This is exactly what should be rejected by us all. These "leaders" will
not change their behavior without solidarity among "allies" like the European Union, which has already caved in and blamed Iran
for the changes -Iran has explained clearly why it made- to the JCPOA which the USA has left.
Abby , January 21, 2020 at 20:15
The only difference between Trump and Obama is that Trump doesn't hide the US naked aggression as well as Obama did. So far
Trump hasn't started any new wars. By this time in Obama's tenure we had started bombing more countries and accepted one coup.
dfnslblty , January 21, 2020 at 12:43
SecStae's remarks about deterrence befit a military commander, NOT a diplomat.
Paranoia, grandiosity and violence begin with potus and cascade downward and about.
Congress does its part in investing in machinery of war.
Cheyenne , January 21, 2020 at 11:49
The above comment shows exactly why bellicose adventurism for oil etc. is so stupid and dangerous. If we continually prance
around robbing people, they're gonna unite to slap us down.
Hardly seems like anyone should need that pointed out but if anybody mentioned it to Trump or any other gung ho warhawk, he
must not have been listening.
Trump and Pompeo seem to have entered the Wild West stage of recent American history. I think they watch too many western movies,
without understanding the underrlying plot of 100% of them. It is the bad guys take over a town, where they impose their will
on the population, terrorizing everyone into obediance. They steal everything in sight and any who oppose them are summarily killed
off. In the end a good guy ( In American parlance, " a good guy with a gun" shows up . The town`s people approach him and beg
him to oppose the bad guys. He then proceeds to kill off the bad guys after the general population joins him in his crusade. it
looks as though we are at the stage in the movie where the general population is ready to take up arms against the bad guys.
The moral of the story the bad guys, the bullies, Pompeo and Trump, are either killed or chased out of town. But perhaps the
problem is that this plot is too difficult for Trump and Pompeo to understand. So they don`t quite get the peril that there gunmen
and killers are now in. They don`t see the writing on the wall.
Caveman , January 21, 2020 at 11:30
It seems the only US considerations in the assassination were – will it weaken Iran, will it strengthen the American position?
On that perspective, the answer is probably yes on both counts. Legal considerations do not seem to have carried any weight. In
the UK we recently saw a chilling interview with Brian Hook, U.S. Special Representative for Iran and Senior Policy Advisor to
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It was clear that he saw the assassination as another nail in the coffin of the Iranian regime,
simply furthering a policy objective.
Vera Gottlieb , January 21, 2020 at 11:19
What is even sadder is the world's lack of gonads to stand up to this bully nation – that has caused so much grief and still
does.
Michael McNulty , January 21, 2020 at 11:01
The US government became a crime syndicate. Today its bootleg liquor is oil, the boys they send round to steal it are armies
and their drive-by shootings are Warthog strafings using DU ammunition. Their drug rackets in the back streets are high-grade
reefer, heroin and amphetamines, with pharmaceutical-grade chemicals on Main Street. They still print banknotes just as before;
but this time it's legal but still doesn't make them enough, so to make up the shortfalls they've taken armed robbery abroad.
paul easton , January 21, 2020 at 12:55
The US Government is running a protection racket, literally. In return for US protection of their sources of oil, the NATO
countries provide international support for US war crimes. But now that the (figurative) Don is visibly out of his mind, they
are likely to turn to other protectors.
One need not step back very far in order to look at the bigger longer range picture. What immediately comes into focus is that
this is simply the current moment in what is now 500 plus years of Western colonialism/neocolonialism. When has the law EVER had
anything to do with any of this?
ML , January 21, 2020 at 10:31
Pompeo reminds me of the pigs in Animal Farm. He is a grotesque figure, steely-eyed, cold-blooded, fanatical, and hateful.
"We lied, cheated, and stole" Pompous Maximus will get his comeuppance one of these days. I hope he plans more overseas trips
for himself. He is a vile person, a psychopath proud of his psychopathy. He alone would make anyone considering conversion to
Christianity, his brand of it, run screaming into the night. Repulsive man.
Michael Crockett , January 21, 2020 at 09:40
Pillage as policy. The Empire has fully embraced gangster capitalism for its modus operandi. That said, IMO, the axis of resistance
has the military capability and the resolve to fight back and win. Combining China and Russia into a greater axis of resistance
could further shrink the Outlaw US Empire presence in West Asia. Thank you Patrick for your keen insight and observations. The
Empires days are numbered.
Sally Snyder , January 21, 2020 at 07:28
Here is an interesting article that explains how governments have changed the rules so that they can justify killing anyone
who they believe may at some point in time have the potential to be involved in a terrorist plot: viableopposition.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-bethlehem-doctrine-and-new.html
This rather Orwellian move gives governments the justification that they to kill any of us just because they feel that we might
pose a threat and that is a very, very scary prospect. It is very reminiscent of the movie Minority Report where crimes of the
future are punished in the present.
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg seemed perfect, a man who defended the
principle of wine-based fundraisers with military effrontery. New York magazine made his case
in a cover story the magazine's Twitter account summarized as:
"Perhaps all the Democrats need to win the presidency is a Rust Belt millennial who's gay
and speaks Norwegian."
(The "Here's something random the Democrats need to beat Trump" story became an important
literary genre in 2019-2020, the high point being Politico's "Can the "F-bomb save Beto?").
Buttigieg had momentum. The flameout of Biden was expected to help the ex-McKinsey
consultant with "moderates." Reporters dug Pete; he's been willing to be photographed holding a
beer and wearing a bomber jacket, and in Iowa demonstrated what pundits call a "killer
instinct," i.e. a willingness to do anything to win.
Days before the caucus, a Buttigieg supporter claimed Pete's name had not been read out in a
Des Moines Register poll, leading to the pulling of what NBC called the "gold standard" survey.
The irony of such a relatively minor potential error holding up a headline would soon be laid
bare.
However, Pete's numbers with black voters (he polls at zero in many states) led to multiple
news stories in the last weekend before the caucus about "concern" that Buttigieg would not be
able to win.
Who, then? Elizabeth Warren was cratering in polls and seemed to be shifting strategy on a
daily basis. In Iowa, she attacked "billionaires" in one stop, emphasized "unity" in the next,
and stressed identity at other times (she came onstage variously that weekend to Dolly Parton's
"9 to 5" or to chants of "It's time for a woman in the White House"). Was she an outsider or an
insider? A screwer, or a screwee? Whose side was she on?
A late controversy involving a story that Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn't win
didn't help. Jaimee Warbasse planned to caucus with Warren, but the Warren/Sanders "hot mic"
story of the two candidates arguing after a January debate was a bridge too far. She spoke of
being frustrated, along with friends, at the inability to find anyone she could to trust to
take on Trump.
"It's like we all have PTSD from 2016," she said. "There has to be somebody."
... ... ...
What happened over the five days after the caucus was a mind-boggling display of
fecklessness and ineptitude. Delay after inexplicable delay halted the process, to the point
where it began to feel like the caucus had not really taken place. Results were released in
chunks, turning what should have been a single news story into many, often with Buttigieg "in
the lead."
The delays and errors cut in many directions, not just against Sanders. Buttigieg,
objectively, performed above poll expectations, and might have gotten more momentum even with a
close, clear loss, but because of the fiasco he ended up hashtagged as #MayorCheat and lumped
in headlines tied to what the Daily Beast called a "Clusterfuck."
Though Sanders won the popular vote by a fair margin, both in terms of initial preference
(6,000 votes) and final preference (2,000), Mayor Pete's lead for most of the week with "state
delegate equivalents" -- the number used to calculate how many national delegates are sent to
the Democratic convention -- made him the technical winner in the eyes of most. By the end of
the week, however, Sanders had regained so much ground, to within 1.5 state delegate
equivalents, that news organizations like the AP were despairing at calling a winner.
This wasn't necessarily incorrect. The awarding of delegates in a state like Iowa is
inherently somewhat random. If there's a tie in votes in a district awarding five delegates, a
preposterous system of coin flips is used to break the odd number. The geographical calculation
for state delegate equivalents is also uneven, weighted toward the rural. A wide popular-vote
winner can surely lose.
But the storylines of caucus week sure looked terrible for the people who ran the vote. The
results released early favored Buttigieg, while Sanders-heavy districts came out later. There
were massive, obvious errors. Over 2,000 votes that should have gone to Sanders and Warren went
to Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer in one case the Iowa Democrats termed a "minor error." In
multiple other districts (Des Moines 14 for example), the "delegate equivalents" appeared to be
calculated incorrectly, in ways that punished all the candidates, not just Sanders. By the end
of the week, even the New York Times was saying the caucus was plagued with "inconsistencies
and errors."
Emily Connor, a Sanders precinct captain in Boone County, spent much of the week checking
results, waiting for her Bernie-heavy district to be recorded. It took a while. By the end of
the week, she was fatalistic.
"If you're a millennial, you basically grew up in an era where popular votes are stolen,"
she said.
"The system is riddled with loopholes."
Others felt the party was in denial about how bad the caucus night looked.
"They're kind of brainwashed," said Joe Grabinski, who caucused in West Des Moines.
"They think they're on the side of the right they'll do anything to save their
careers.
An example of how screwed up the process was from the start involved a new twist on the
process, the so-called "Presidential Preference Cards."
In 2020, caucus-goers were handed index cards that seemed simple enough. On side one, marked
with a big "1," caucus-goers were asked to write in their initial preference. Side 2, with a
"2," was meant to be where you wrote in who you ended up supporting, if your first choice was
not viable.
The "PPCs" were supposedly there to "ensure a recount is possible," as the Polk County
Democrats put it. But caucus-goers didn't understand the cards.
Morgan Baethke, who volunteered at Indianola 4, watched as older caucus-goers struggled.
Some began filling out both sides as soon as they were given them.
Therefore, Baethke says, if they do a recount, "the first preference should be accurate."
However, "the second preference will be impossible to recreate with any certainty."
This is a problem, because by the end of the week, DNC chair Tom Perez -- a triple-talking
neurotic who is fast becoming the poster child for everything progressives hate about modern
Dems -- called for an "immediate recanvass." He changed his mind after ten hours and said he
only wanted "surgical" reanalysis of problematic districts.
No matter what result emerges, it's likely many individual voters will not trust it. Between
comical videos of apparently gamed coin-flips and the pooh-poohing reaction of party officials
and pundits (a common theme was that "toxic conspiracy theories" about Iowa were the work of
the Trumpian right and/or Russian bots), the overall impression was a clown show performance by
a political establishment too bored to worry about the appearance of impartiality.
"Is it incompetence or corruption? That's the big question," asked Storey.
Globalism requires rapacious capitalism. Globalism is billionaires and multi-millionaires
getting richer while the middle classes of the entire Western world get squeezed and then
squeezed more, with once stable working classes ruined.
Liberal voters fall for it because the Globalists swear they are helping all the blacks
and browns of the world. Liberal academics, journalists, artists, and 'ordinary rich' people
back it because they invariably despise both the white working class and the non-Liberal
white middle class. Neocons (WASPs as well as Jews) practice rapacious capitalism religiously
because they worship Mammon.
Hausmeister and I discussed rule by fear, "deimocracy".
That was off topic, and belongs more properly here.
And to that discussion I wish to proffer an interesting related essay>
@ steelcityscribblings.(uk)"Talking WW3 Blues" "...For me the scariest thing is not that
the world is ruled by gangsters – a criminal elite with the US ruling class its top
mafia family. It is that this particular family, and the lesser criminals who ride its
coat-tails, are justifiably worried...."
They too are ruled by fear. Not logos, not knowledge, fear, and panic.
What can go wrong with that?
They conjure up these, the lesser gods of the wars they've made since ...you name a
date... And thus themselves are ruled, as they rule the people, by war and fear and
panic.
For the former tank commander, murder -- not simply double-tapping the target with a
firearm, but blowing him into meaty chunks with a Hellfire missile -- is "real
deterrence."
Pompeo
said during a speech at Stanford University's Hoover Institute "there was 'a bigger
strategy' behind the killing of Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, Iran's elite
foreign espionage and paramilitary force.
The USG Mafia Hit Strategy on steroids is not confined to threatening Iran, however. Pompeo
eluded to Russia and China's leaders being assassinated.
Pompeo didn't come out and say Trump's government will steer Hellfire missiles specifically
at Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or even Kim Jung-un . The message, however, is inescapable,
especially for folks opposed to neoliberal crony capitalist domination of their national
economies, industries, public services, and natural resources
Iran wants a nuke to prevent an attack by the USG in collaboration with the Zionist
government in Israel. Ditto, North Korea. It remembers when the USG bombed virtually every
city, town, and hamlet in the country and killed a third of the population. No doubt the
mullahs in Tehran vividly recall Muammar Gaddafi's fate. They also remember how the CIA
colluded with the Brits to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran and
installed a monarchial tyrant.
It is entirely rational to seek the most effective deterrent to foreign invasion and mass
murder campaigns waged relentlessly by the crony capitalist neolib USG and its little vicious
client, Israel, the racist state where only Jews are considered first-class citizens and Arabs
are tortured and killed -- or at best maimed (during anti-occupation protests, Israel snipers
are instructed to aim for
the eyes ).
For neocons, Trumpsters, and Fox News teleprompter readers, "taking out" Soleimani in Mafia
hit fashion "was a brilliant move."
Yes, of course, murdering leaders of recalcitrant nations is considered a "brilliant move"
by psychopaths. The Italian-Jewish Mafia killed opponents one-by-one or in small groups while
the USG kills opponents in the thousands, even the millions. The Gambino family and Kosher
Nostra founded by Arnold Rothstein (who was himself assassinated) would have loved to take out
their opponents with Reaper drones and Hellfire missiles, courtesy of witless US taxpayers and
debt-serfs.
State Department officials involved in U.S. embassy security were not made aware of
imminent threats to four specific U.S. embassies, two State Department officials said,
further undermining Trump's claims that Soleimani posed an imminent threat. https://t.co/sG9ZXyxOa3
USG embassies were not and are not under threat by Iran. In Iraq, the people protesting
outside the embassy are Iraqis. They want the USG and its contractors out of their country
which is still reeling from Bush the Lesser's invasion, a follow-up on more than a decade of
child-killing (over 500,000) sanctions and a previous invasion by Junior's father, the former
CIA boss who would become president.
Corporate war propaganda media is pushing the narrative that Trump impulsively decided to
slaughter Soleimani, as if it simply came to him out of the blue.
. @douglaslondon5 , who retired
from CIA at the end of 2018, writes that he and his team "often struggled in persuading the
president to recognize the most important threats" because of Trump's "focus on celebrity,
headlines, and immediate gratification." https://t.co/1SlVDNb44l
Hardly. This is simply another anti-Trump gimmick. If you look beyond this one-dimensional
pre-election circus, you'll see Trump's orthodox Jewish son-in-law, Sheldon Adelson, and a cast
of Zionist characters steering the president into war with Israel's enemies. Indeed, Trump is
driven by a pathological need for attention and this has been successfully exploited by neocons
in the service of a tiny nation based on racial and religious superiority.
The basic method Trump used to kill Soleimani was developed by the Israelis >30 years
ago. Here's a screen shot from "Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted
Assassinations," by Israeli author Ronen Bergman, here describing Israeli developments in
late 1980s pic.twitter.com/MWKifPPjPF
The neolib USG with its Israel-first neocon faction is the largest and most deadly Mafia
organization in the world.
The US government has killed millions since the end of FDR's war under false pretense and
has overthrown countries far and wide. It trains and enables sadistic paramilitaries, has armed
crazed Wahhabi jihadists, and is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon against
innocent civilians.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this articl e was
originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
December 3, 1993 The CIA Drug ConnectionIs as Old as the Agency
LONDON -- The Justice Department is investigating allegations that officers of a special
Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into
the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials – despite protests by the Drug
Enforcement Administration, the organization responsible for enforcing U.S. drug laws.
Bush older was the first president from CIA. He was already a senior CIA official at the time
of JFK assassination and might participate in the plot to kill JFK. At least he was in Dallas at
the day of assassination. .
That Iraq is to say the least unstable is attributable to the ill-advised U.S. invasion
of 2003.
Nothing to do with 9 years of sanctions on Iraq that killed a million Iraqis, "half of
them children," and US control of Iraqi air space, after having killed Iraqi military in a
turkey-shoot, for no really good reason other than George H W Bush seized the "unipolar
moment" to become king of the world?
Maybe it's just stubbornness: I think Papa Bush is responsible for the "imperial pivot,"
in the Persian Gulf war aka Operation Desert Storm, 29 years and 4 days ago -- January 17,
1991.
According to Jeffrey Engel, Bush's biographer and director of the Bush library at Southern
Methodist University, Gorbachev harassed Bush with phone calls, pleading with him not to go
to war over Kuwait
(It's worth noting that Dennis Ross was relatively new in his role on Jim Baker's staff
when Baker, Brent Skowcroft, Larry Eagleburger & like minded urged Bush to take the
Imperial Pivot.)
According to Vernon Loeb, who completed the writing of King's Counsel after Jack
O'Connell died, Jordan's King Hussein, in consultation with retired CIA station chief
O'Connell, parlayed with Arab leaders to resolve the conflict on their own, i.e. Arab-to-Arab
terms, and also pleaded with Bush to stay out, and to let the Arabs solve their own problems.
Bush refused. https://www.c-span.org/video/?301361-6/kings-counsel
See above: Bush was determined to "seize the unipolar moment."
Once again insist on entering into the record: George H Bush was present at the creation
of the Global War on Terror, July 4, 1979, the Jerusalem Conference hosted by Benzion and
Benjamin Netanyahu and heavily populated with Trotskyites – neocons.
I think Papa Bush is responsible for the "imperial pivot," in the Persian Gulf war aka
Operation Desert Storm, 29 years and 4 days ago -- January 17, 1991.
Yes I remember it well. I came back from a long trip & memorable vacation, alas I was
a young man, to the television drama that was unfolding with Arthur Kent 'The Scud
Stud' and others reporting from the safety of their hotel balconies filming aircaft and
cruise missiles. It was surreal.
You are correct of course.
"... Trump's threats of auto tariffs to gain trade concessions with the Europeans is certainly nothing new, but using the same to dictate foreign policy is, notes WaPo's diplomatic correspondent John Hudson. ..."
"... Interestingly, in Wednesday's joint statement the European signatories attempted to distance their drastic action away from Washington's so-called "maximum pressure" campaign. "Our three countries are not joining a campaign to implement maximum pressure against Iran," they said . ..."
"... The statement also underscored Europe hopes to use the mechanism "to bring Iran back into full compliance with its commitments under the JCPOA" and in the words of one official quoted in The Guardian to prevent nuclear advancement to the point that the Iranians "learn something that it is not possible for them to unlearn" . ..."
A bombshell revelation from The Washington Post a day after France, Britain and Germany took unprecedented action against Iran
by
formally triggering the dispute resolution mechanism regulating conformity to the deal, seen as the harshest measure taken by
the European signatories thus far. The European powers officially see Iran as in breach of the deal which means UN and EU punitive
sanctions are now on the table.
But according to The Post , how things quickly escalated
to this point is real story : " Days before Europeans warned Iran of nuclear deal violations, Trump secretly threatened to impose
25% tariff on European autos if they didn't," says the report.
This came as a "shock" to all three countries, with one top European official
calling it essentially "extortion" and a new level of hardball tactics from the Trump administration.
After the US leveraged the new tariffs threat according to the report, European capitals moved quick to trigger the mechanism,
which involved the individual European states formally notifying the agreement's guarantor, the European Union, that Iran is in breach
of the nuclear deal.
This followed the Jan.6 declaration of Tehran's leadership to no longer be beholden to uranium enrichment limits. And that's where
things got interesting as Washington's pressure campaign dramatically turned up the heat on Europe.
"Within days, the three countries would formally accuse Iran of violating the deal, triggering a recourse provision that could
reimpose United Nations sanctions on Iran and unravel the last remaining vestiges of the Obama-era agreement," the report
continues .
However, the report notes France, the UK, and Germany were already in deep discussion on moving forward with triggering the mechanism.
"We didn't want to look weak, so we agreed to keep the existence of the threat a secret," a European official cited by WaPo claims.
Trump's threats of auto tariffs to gain trade concessions with the Europeans is certainly nothing new, but using the same to dictate
foreign policy is, notes WaPo's diplomatic correspondent John Hudson.
Interestingly, in Wednesday's joint statement the European signatories attempted to distance their drastic action away from Washington's
so-called "maximum pressure" campaign. "Our three countries are not joining a campaign to implement maximum pressure against Iran,"
they said .
The statement also underscored Europe hopes to use the mechanism "to bring Iran back into full compliance with its commitments
under the JCPOA" and in the words of one official quoted in
The Guardian to prevent nuclear advancement to the point that the Iranians "learn something that it is not possible for them
to unlearn" .
Now that the mechanism has been enacted, the clock starts on 65 days of intensive negotiations before UN sanctions would be reimposed
if no resolution is reached. Specifically a blanket arms embargo would be imposed among other measures, and certainly it would mark
the deal's final demise, given the Europeans are Iran's last hope for being equal partners in the deal.
Also interesting is that in the hours before The Washington Post report was published, Iranian FM Zarif charged that the EU investigation
into Iran's alleged non-compliance meant Europe is allowing itself to be bulled by the United States .
Indeed the new revelation of the secret threats attempting to dictate Europe's course appear to confirm precisely Zarif's words
to reporters
earlier on Wednesday : "They say 'We are not responsible for what the United States did.' OK, but you are independent" he began.
And then added a stinging rebuke: "Europe, EU, is the largest global economy. So why do you allow the United States to bully you
around?"
elley Vlahos
comments on the president's willingness to send more U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia:
It is time to claw back from this toxic relationship, and the first place to start is to transform our current mission of paternalistic
"power projection" to one of "national defense." Who cares what the House of Saud wants to buy -- it's not what the American taxpayer
pays for, and amen to Amash for putting it in such bald terms.
Trump's statement that he will send more troops to Saudi Arabia in exchange for payment sums up his foreign policy worldview quite
well. He has no objection to sending U.S. troops to other countries, and he doesn't mind putting them in harm's way, as long as he
thinks someone will pay for it. Trump is not interested in whether a particular mission makes the U.S. more secure, and he certainly
doesn't think strategically about what the U.S. should be trying to accomplish. He just wants to get someone to fork over some cash.
The absurd thing is that the cash is never forthcoming, but Trump keeps sending the troops to these places anyway.
We saw the same mercenary attitude during the campaign when he
talked about
setting up a "big, beautiful safe zone" in Syria, which he
assured
us would be paid for by Arab client states. We have seen it several times when he talks about "taking the oil" from this or that
country to compensate the U.S. for our military interventions. As long as the Saudis and Emiratis are paying customers for weapons
that they use to kill Yemenis, Trump will happily put their preferences and interests first.
Oddly enough for a self-proclaimed nationalist, the president has no notion of the national interest, but sees everything in narrow
terms of wealth that can be extracted from others. This is why he talks about NATO as if it were a protection racket and shakes down
South Korea for more money, and it is why he thinks it is acceptable to keep U.S. forces in Syria illegally so that they can control
Syrian oil fields. It is why he insists that Iraq pay us for the cost of the installations that the U.S. built during the occupation
of their country. It is also one reason why he relies so heavily on economic warfare in his attempt to coerce other states to do
what he wants, because he seems to think that everyone is just as preoccupied with getting money as he is.
Contrary to the common assumption that Trump espouses some sort of "Jacksonian" foreign policy, this is an approach that ignores
national honor and interest and focuses solely on lucre. Trump resembles nothing so much as a minor German prince from the 17th or
18th century who hires out his soldiers to fight the wars of other countries. This is what a mercenary foreign policy looks like,
and it has nothing to do with making the U.S. more secure
Even granted that Trump doesn't meet the low bar of Jacksonianism in foreign policy, I'm weary of even that much - all the talk
of national honour seems to amount to little more than doing incredibly stupid and wicked things, and then persisting in them,
because to do otherwise would cause a loss of face or credibility.
True believers will not be suaded by mere "facts". (When "fact" has become a synonym for "fake news".) Nor even if their little
noses are rubbed in the Trumpoo. Not even when Trump's daily circus empowers the Left and discourages the old conservatives.
We are begging for a national trauma and we will get it.
The old English and American republicans were exactly right about the dangers of a "standing army" (that is, the professionionalization
of the military). I'm for reinstating the draft not as a means of bolstering our ranks but as a means of mobilizing a permanent
antiwar movement.
I've never liked applying the term "Jacksonian" to foreign policy because the Jackson presidency didn't have much of a foreign
policy (unlike, say, his protégé
James K. Polk ). Most of what gets passed off as "Jacksonian" in terms of foreign policy is really just Gen. Jackson's military
policy during the Creek War, the War of 1812, and the annexation of Spanish Florida. In other words, "Jacksonian foreign policy"
is just another for "militarized foreign policy."
Indeed, I can only imagine how outraged Jackson would be with the imperialism that "conservative" pundits are justifying in
his name. Jackson was fiercely loyal to the ideal of the citizen-soldier/militiaman - and to the men themselves - and would have
been furious if foreign influence in the government turned them into mercenaries. Knowing Jackson, the men responsible for such
treachery might not have lived for very much longer.
To the extent that Jackson even addressed foreign policy, he
(like John Quincy Adams) echoed the wisdom of the Founding Fathers:
If we turn to our relations with foreign powers, we find our condition equally gratifying. Actuated by the sincere desire
to do justice to every nation and to preserve the blessings of peace, our intercourse with them has been conducted on the part
of this Government in the spirit of frankness; and I take pleasure in saying that it has generally been met in a corresponding
temper. Difficulties of old standing have been surmounted by friendly discussion and the mutual desire to be just, and the
claims of our citizens, which had been long withheld, have at length been acknowledged and adjusted and satisfactory arrangements
made for their final payment; and with a limited, and I trust a temporary, exception, our relations with every foreign power
are now of the most friendly character, our commerce continually expanding, and our flag respected in every quarter of the
world.
While I am thus endeavoring to press upon your attention the principles which I deem of vital importance in the domestic
concerns of the country, I ought not to pass over without notice the important considerations which should govern your policy
toward foreign powers. It is unquestionably our true interest to cultivate the most friendly understanding with every nation
and to avoid by every honorable means the calamities of war, and we shall best attain this object by frankness and sincerity
in our foreign intercourse, by the prompt and faithful execution of treaties, and by justice and impartiality in our conduct
to all. But no nation, however desirous of peace, can hope to escape occasional collisions with other powers, and the soundest
dictates of policy require that we should place ourselves in a condition to assert our rights if a resort to force should ever
become necessary. Our local situation, our long line of seacoast, indented by numerous bays, with deep rivers opening into
the interior, as well as our extended and still increasing commerce, point to the Navy as our natural means of defense. It
will in the end be found to be the cheapest and most effectual, and now is the time, in a season of peace and with an overflowing
revenue, that we can year after year add to its strength without increasing the burdens of the people. It is your true policy,
for your Navy will not only protect your rich and flourishing commerce in distant seas, but will enable you to reach and annoy
the enemy and will give to defense its greatest efficiency by meeting danger at a distance from home. It is impossible by any
line of fortifications to guard every point from attack against a hostile force advancing from the ocean and selecting its
object, but they are indispensable to protect cities from bombardment, dockyards and naval arsenals from destruction, to give
shelter to merchant vessels in time of war and to single ships or weaker squadrons when pressed by superior force. Fortifications
of this description can not be too soon completed and armed and placed in a condition of the most perfect preparation. The
abundant means we now possess can not be applied in any manner more useful to the country, and when this is done and our naval
force sufficiently strengthened and our militia armed we need not fear that any nation will wantonly insult us or needlessly
provoke hostilities. We shall more certainly preserve peace when it is well understood that we are prepared for War.
To the extent that Jackson is even endorsing war rather than peace and trade, it is in the context of national defense - literally
defending our national borders from attack, not defending our military bases on/within the borders of foreign countries from attack.
To add to the many outrages of the day coming out of this admin, now sending the troops as mercenaries for hire to saudi takes
it down to a new low, these lows being set almost every week.
The murder of Iranian general must put a new low on the military as well as the drone operators are now in a place not good,
assassins of someone outside of a war and/or combat. It hearkens back to obama's killing program and its probable continuation
by trump.
Not good programs to be affiliated with for the US military for anyone with a conscience.
On January 5th, the Iraqi parliament voted on a resolution to expel US troops from the
country. In attendance was, caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who, according to
reports provided insight into why specifically Iraq was in this situation, and predominantly
spoke about threats that came his way from US President Donald Trump and the US policy
towards the country.
The following is the summary of reports regarding Abdul-Mehdi's comments during the
January 5 vote of the Iraqi Parliament. These reports have been nor officially confirmed nor
denied by the Prime Minister office.
Abdul-Mehdi adressed the US hostile actions against the country. For example, the
politician reportedly said that the US refused to complete the infrastructure and electricity
grid projects unless it is promised 50% of oil revenues. The Prime Minister refused to make
the concession.
Then, when the Prime Minister visited China and reached an important agreement to
undertake construction of the projects instead of the US, President Donald Trump allegedly
called him, telling him to rescind the agreement with China, otherwise there would be massive
demonstrations against him, that would force him out of his seat.
HINT : A 50-person Iraqi delegation visited China in 2019 and that protests began on
October 1st, observed a religious holiday, and then ramped up once again on October 25th.
The flames of the protests were further fanned by mainstream media outlets.
Then, when massive demonstrations materialized against Adel Abdul-Mahdi, Trump once again
allegedly called him. The US President allegedly threatened to position US marine snipers
"atop the highest buildings," who will target and kill protesters and security forces alike
in an attempt to pressure the Prime Minister.
Instead of complying, Adel Abdul-Mahdi refused and handed in his resignation and the US
still attempt to pressure him in cancelling the supposed deal with China.
Later on, when the Iraqi Minister of Defense publicly said that a third side was targeting
both protesters and security forces alike, Abdul-Mahdi allegedly received a new call from
Trump who threatened to kill both him and the Minister of Defense if they kept talking about
this "third side".
Assad said that he finds Trumps brutal honesty refreshing. Instead of hiding behind nicely
worded threats Trump just comes out and tells people what he means. up 19 users have voted.
--
America is a pathetic nation; a fascist state fueled by the greed, malice, and stupidity
of her own people.
- strife delivery
This is how a MAFIA BOSS operates. Trump made an offer Abdul Mahdi couldn't refuse. Trump is
a GODFATHER and his clique is literally a gangster MAFIA using extortion and OPERATING A
PROTECTION RACKET.
Trump had already
asked Iraqi Prime Ministers -twice- if the U.S. could get Iraq's oil as reward for
invading and destroying their country. The requests were rejected. Now we learn that Trump
also uses
gangster methods (ar) to get the oil of Iraq. The talk by the Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul
Mahdi happened during the recent parliament session in Iraq (machine translation):
Al-Halbousi, Speaker of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, blocked the speech of Mr.
Abdul Mahdi in the scheduled session to discuss the decision to remove American forces from
Iraq.
At the beginning of the session, Al-Halbousi left the presidential seat and sat next to
Mr. Abdul-Mahdi, after his request to cut off the live broadcast of the session, a public
conversation took place between the two parties. The voice of Adel Abdul Mahdi was
raised.
Mr. Abdul Mahdi spoke with an angry tone, saying:
"The Americans are the ones who destroyed the country and wreaked havoc on it. They are
those who refuse to complete building the electrical system and infrastructure projects.
They have bargained for the reconstruction of Iraq in exchange for giving up 50% of Iraqi
oil imports, so I refused and decided to go to China and concluded an important and
strategic agreement with it, and today Trump is trying to cancel this important
agreement."
The American President's threatened the Iraqi Prime Minister to liquidate him directly
with the Minister of Defense. The Marines are the third party that sniped the demonstrators
and the security men:
Abdul Mahdi continued:
"After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I
also refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me.
Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the
event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, so that the third party (Marines
snipers) would target the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from the highest
structures and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and
cancel the China agreement, so I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the
Americans still insist to this day on canceling the China agreement and when the defense
minister said that who kills the demonstrators is a third party, Trump called me
immediately and physically threatened me and defense minister in the event of talk about
the third party."
The reliable Based Cat in Iraq seems to confirm the timeline:
TØM CΛT @TomtheBasedCat - 4:00 UTC · Jan 7,
2020
Yes a 50-person delegation visited China in 2019 and then the protests started on October
1st until the Arbaeen dates, then picked up again on Oct 25th. I'm skeptical about the 3rd
party but the timing itself was interesting. The flames were fanned by Gulf media and
Al-Hurra.
A scandal is developing as one consequence of Trump's evil deed after Iraq's Prime Minister
Adel Abdul Mahdi revealed the gangster methods U.S. President Trump used in his attempts to
steal Iraq's oil.
Well well well, looks like Trump has been studying Cheney's map lately now that he is not
fixated on Kim and accusations of being Putin's Puddle.
What is described by the PM is typical behavior of a gangster threatening a weaker
opponent. Trump had better get some LSD to get him back in touch with Reality.
MoA has done great reporting but this report is astounding.
It is stunning.
But it is the standard operating procedure of US elites. Trump is nothing unusual except
for his persona. He gives away the game. Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump, they are all power mad,
vindictive, and vile. The elites that run the two major parties are together in pushing
forward to war behind their political posturing.
"... that every nation produces what oil they can produce. Production must have some relation to reserves. ..."
"... The normal R/P ratio is around 20. That doesn't mean a nation with an R/P ratio of 20 will run out of oil in 20 years. Because as their production declines, their R/P ratio will still hold at about 20 because they are producing less oil therefore their reserves will go further. So an R/P ratio of about 20 is the norm for normal size conventional fields. ..."
"... For giant and supergiant fields the R/P ratio would be greater and for smaller fields, as well as shale fields, the R/P ratio would be smaller. ..."
"... Using OPEC's reserves data for both OPEC and Non-OPEC, OPEC has an R/P of 109 while Non-OPEC has an R/P ratio of about 12. That OPEC number is absurd beyond belief. ..."
"... If we exclude the heavy oil then OPEC's share is close to the 70% I suggested. How does this square its share of the production numbers for the world. This was my original question. I would like to read what the thoughts of other posters are on this as well. ..."
What is the explanation that Non-OPEC produces more than OPEC, but OPEC has 70% of world
reserves?
Although this might have been the case in the early history of oil production, I
would think that this should not be the case near the peak. If I recall correctly, Campbell
thought that OPEC's stated reserves are actually the estimated values produced by the government for each OPEC country?
Well, 79.4% to be exact Some people really believe that unbelievable crap. Well hell,
there are still people who believe the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around the
earth. So why should we be surprised? Some people will believe anything.
I would like to think that most people on this list know that OPEC quoted reserves is
pure bullshit.
Hey, we have a president who lies every time he tweets. And sometimes he tweets 200 times
a day. And perhaps 45% of the nation believes him. The capacity of humans to believe the
absurd is unbounded.
Anyway if IEA and EIA projections are made on the basis of OPEC claimed reserves, we
have a serious problem.
Well, I have always stated, on this blog as well as The Oil Drum, that every nation produces
what oil they can produce. Production must have some relation to reserves.
The normal R/P ratio is around 20. That doesn't mean a nation with an R/P ratio of 20 will
run out of oil in 20 years. Because as their production declines, their R/P ratio will still
hold at about 20 because they are producing less oil therefore their reserves will go
further. So an R/P ratio of about 20 is the norm for normal size conventional fields.
For giant and supergiant fields the R/P ratio would be greater and for smaller fields, as
well as shale fields, the R/P ratio would be smaller.
If a giant or supergiant field is nearing the end of its life, but infill drilling,
creaming the top of the reservoir, this will throw a monkey wrench into their R/P ratio.
While in its prime, the field may have had an R/P ration of 40 or even greater, its R/P ratio
while being creamed will be much smaller, less than 20.
Using OPEC's reserves data for both OPEC and Non-OPEC, OPEC has an R/P of 109 while
Non-OPEC has an R/P ratio of about 12. That OPEC number is absurd beyond belief.
According to Hubbert methodology, at the peak production the number of years to exhaust
the reserve is N = 2/a in which "a" is the intrinsic growth rate
dQ/dt=a Q (1-Q/Q_0)
From Laherrere's reports for world peak, this is between 0.04 and 0.05. This means that
the R/P ratio is between 40 and 50 at the peak. Thus if we say that 1/2 of the reserves are
left at the peak and we take Laherre's URR = 2500, this gives R/P=1250/35=36 years. These are
ball park figures, but suggest that R/P ~ 20 is low. These numbers are for the entire world
and for example for North Sea at its peak Hubbert's analysis gave a = 0.12, so
R/P=2/0.12=16.6, and this illustrates the fact that smaller fields are closer to your number
R/P=20.
If we exclude the heavy oil then OPEC's share is close to the 70% I suggested. How does
this square its share of the production numbers for the world. This was my original question.
I would like to read what the thoughts of other posters are on this as well.
"... Haftar is a US citizen and has ties to the CIA. The USA's position on Libya is unclear to me. I am not sure the US government is supporting any side. Turkey is the only country I see providing support to Tripoli. It seems to me the usual suspects either back Haftar or are watching from the sidelines. ..."
"... W.r.t Libya, they were producing ~7% of the MENA region consumed oil in 2011, and about 3% of the total MENA production (not big, but enough income to run a country). ..."
"... Before my last post, I was thinking to myself: "Didn't Haftar secure/surround most of the oil infrastructure around 2014?" I was sure I had read it somewhere. But if memory serves he was on a major advance, and then withdrew/got pushed, and made a second comeback in the past 2 years. ..."
"... Haftar has clearly switched sides since his twenty years in Langley. Very common in the Middle East, suddenly switching sides. ..."
@casey #2
Libya was never a major producer - and their production levels fell after "the revolution"
and are still really low. Not at all clear it matters compared to say, US fracking
production.
Haftar is a US citizen and has ties to the CIA. The USA's position on Libya is
unclear to me. I am not sure the US government is supporting any side. Turkey is the only
country I see providing support to Tripoli. It seems to me the usual suspects either back
Haftar or are watching from the sidelines.
You seem to have a panache for declaring "truths" to the bar here and often seem very
agenda-driven, with all due respect.
W.r.t Libya, they were producing ~7% of the MENA region consumed oil in 2011, and about 3%
of the total MENA production (not big, but enough income to run a country).
They were producing in range of 800,000 - 1.2M bpd (wikiped says 1.65M) prior to the
NATO/US/ZIO neo-lib/con blood-lust orgy of death unleashed since 2011.
I know that 3% is not big cookies, but it seems significant to me. When taken at 'oil
production per capita, they sit in the top 10 (until Haftars' latest maneuvers) which means
more ability to spend per citizen. The US sits at 23rd place on this metric. It is
bang-for-your-buck that matters for the people on the ground.
They do hold sizeable reserves, and it is all on the heads of the West that they are not
prospering (albeit under a dictator with a crazy taste in fashion; at least he wasn't Reagan,
Bush 1&2, Clinton 1&2, Obama, or the current dumpster-fire).
If I were in the MENA axis, I would certainly have an inclination to sabotage/destroy ALL
oil infrastructure globally, via whatever means possible. Because that would turn all of
those happy little consumers in the "developed" world against their masters for breach of the
social contract (read delusion) that we live under.
Before my last post, I was thinking to myself: "Didn't Haftar secure/surround most of the
oil infrastructure around 2014?" I was sure I had read it somewhere. But if memory serves he
was on a major advance, and then withdrew/got pushed, and made a second comeback in the past
2 years.
I'm going to have to go and do some more reading on Libya, once I've finished reading
Super Imperialism.
My reading list seems to be growing faster than my ability to keep up of late, thanks to
the collective resources of all you Barflies post. :O)
"Haftar has clearly switched sides" Other some Western press making a bit of noise I see no
evidence of this. In fact the opposite. Any drone strike attempts on Haftar you can link me
to? LOL. Don't pay attention to what the press says. Pay attention to who is getting bombed
and who is not. At the end of the day that is how you tell the truth.
What Libya produced before its "revolution" isn't the issue. They used to produce 1.5M bpd -
they're supposedly producing over 1M bpd now. How much is actually exported vs. used
internally or "lost"?
Sure, 1M bpd is significant compared to world oil production of 82M bpd, but my original
point still stands: 1M bpd (a net fall of 500K bpd vs pre-revolution) is not very significant
vs. the US' increase of oil production by 6M bpd in the same period (2014-2019).
"Sure, 1M bpd is significant compared to world oil production of 82M bpd, but my original
point still stands: 1M bpd (a net fall of 500K bpd vs pre-revolution) is not very significant
vs. the US' increase of oil production by 6M bpd in the same period (2014-2019)."
Three issues arise:
(1) The fracking boom generally only produces condensates NOT OIL, especially in the Permian
basin (96%) which must be blended with heavy crude to process it at US refineries.
Furthermore, some 90% of fracking companies or their investors are losing money and the boom
appears to be short lived.
(2) The US is still a net hydrocarbon importer especially heavy crude such as the Russian
Ural blend. Little wonder why Venezuela and Iran are targets for conquest by the "Masters of
the Universe".
“Yes, fracking production has heavily benefited from cheap money.”
This is a ode word for malinvestment. As a result of poor planning these wildcat fracking
operations fail to properly plan the resource extraction stream leading to failures to plan
for such components as roads, fracking sand inputs and pipeline capacity. https://mises.org/library/malinvestment-not-overinvestment-causes-booms
“Fracking has fundamentally changed the role of imported oil in the US.”
Fracking is just a short term stopgap as wells deplete rapidly. Once the condensate boom goes
bust the US will have to invade a couple of other oil producing countries to promote
democracy and the amerikan way.
“It has fundamentally changed the energy mix in electricity generation - from coal
to natural gas.”
Yes, in the short term low natural gas prices have dramatically reduced the use of coal in
the US (excepting metallurgical coal). Currently natural gas prices are at about
$2.00/1000cuft or $71/1000m3. The price is so low that many producers are shutting down, as
they cannot make money due to the massive short-term glut (malinvestment again).
In many places such as the Permian there is massive flaring to get rid of the excess gas
rather than using it for the public good. This is not to say that no one is making money off
this problem as gas pipeline operators are charging several dollars per 1000cuft to take it
off the producer’s hands. There is a movement to use some of this gas to run well-head
operations and the larger companies are better at it due to economies of scale.
As you know, Cheniere is doing well by helping Trump sell “freedom gas” to
Europe at about $213 per 1000m3 on long term contracts. The US is covering this up by
increasing foreign aid enough to cover the additional costs of “freedom gas”.
“And the net reserves of oil and natural gas enabled by fracking is still far above
the total amount of money burned in the creation of this industry - even at the low oil and
historically low natural gas prices today.”
Please elaborate on this statement as I am missing the point. Can you post a comprehensive
paper on environmental costs into the fracking cost-benefit analysis.
“As for panic in Italy - Italy is the closest EU country to Libya. A cutoff will
affect some people, but there seems to be plenty of other sources happy to step
in.”
“As for panic in Italy - Italy is the closest EU country to Libya. A cutoff will
affect some people, but there seems to be plenty of other sources happy to step
in.”
This is a lot of oil to substitute as indicated by the recent Trump threats to Haftar to
turn on the spigot. In addition, changing the blend requires some refinery operation changes
which might be expensive depending on the substituted oil composition.
The very same night Elizabeth Warren's big message is "I don't take billionaires' money!"
Liz has the political instincts of Hilary Clinton. Trump will crush her. pic.twitter.com/cM85kcPYUn
The very same night Elizabeth Warren's big message is "I don't take billionaires'
money!" Liz has the political instincts of Hilary Clinton. Trump will crush her. pic.twitter.com/cM85kcPYUn
"... Speaking of Trump's donors, we wrote Trump a blank check in the 2016 election to deliver on the MAGA agenda that he had sold us. We voted for big ideas like "nationalism" and "populism." The reasons why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were immigration, trade, foreign policy, political correctness and campaign finance and furthering these big ideas of "nationalism" and "populism." He has been a disappointment on all fronts. ..."
"... Orthodox Jews hit the jackpot with the King of Israel and Zionists have been on an unprecedented winning streak. In just the last three months, Trump has issued an executive order to ban anti-Semitism on college campuses, assassinated Qasem Soleimani and has given Bibi Netanyahu the green light to annex large swathes of the West Bank. Trump is even considering allowing Jonathan Pollard to return to Israel. Is it any wonder then that a recent Gallup poll found that Israelis support his "America First" foreign policy over Americans by a whopping 18-point margin? ..."
"... Trump's Chumps have demonstrated in the last two election cycles how easy they are to manipulate. They can be relied on to vote and shill for the GOP no matter what it does. Donald Trump isn't under any pressure from these people to change. He knows his mark better than they know themselves. They are so desperate for acceptance and to participate in elections and to feel like they are "winning" that they will delude themselves like the rest of his cult into believing almost anything. Give a drowning man enough rope and he will hang himself. ..."
I spent months making the case for Trump on
this website. I will be the first to admit that I was wrong and that those who were skeptical of Trump in our
community were right in 2016. In that election, I drank the koolaid and was one of Trump's Chumps. Unlike
AmNats, I have tried to learn something from that experience.
I hate getting fooled by Republicans.
In 2020, we have a far better sense of
Donald Trump. The Trump administration has a record now. Donald Trump's first term is mostly history. We can
now look back with the benefit of hindsight and evaluate our standing after the last three years without being
drunk on Trump koolaid. No one drank the Trump koolaid in our community more deeply than the AmNats. Some of
them remained drunk on the Trump koolaid even after the 2018 midterms. A handful of his most faithful
cheerleaders have never given up faith in their GOD EMPEROR and succumbed to reality.
What is the reality of the Trump presidency?
1.) Those who feared that the Trump
administration would lull the conservative base into a false sense of complacency and put all the normies back
to sleep were right.
Donald Trump has told his base that they are "winning." They wear Q shirts and
"Trust The Plan" at his rallies. They are Making America Great Again simply by having a Republican in the White
House. They are content to go on believing that
even as illegal immigration DOUBLED in FY 2019
and became a far worse problem than it ever was under the
Obama administration. As we saw after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, they are also ready to swallow
Trump's war propaganda against Iran and believe anything their dear leader tells them. It was Julian Assange
and Roger Stone who went to prison under Trump, not Hillary Clinton. Normies are content to have conservatism
in power and
are less willing
to give us an audience with a Republican in the White House.
2.) Those who feared that the Trump
administration would suck all of the energy out of the Alt-Right were right . In the final two years of
the Obama administration (2015 and 2016), the Alt-Right was thriving on social media and was brimming with
energy. Four years later, the country has only gotten worse, but the brand has been destroyed and all the
energy it had back then as an online subculture has been sucked out of the room by Trump and channeled into
pushing the standard conservative policy agenda. The movement has been in disarray and has been divided and
demoralized ever since Trump won the 2016 election. The last few years have been terrible. As soon as Trump won
the 2016 election, conservatives shifted their attention back to policing their right flank. They are far more
successful at policing their right flank when they are in power.
3.) Those who rationalized voting
for Donald Trump on the basis of immigration and changing demographics were proven wrong about that too.
He has refurbished the George W. Bush era fence. Since he has been president, Donald Trump
has built all of three new miles of fence
, which is actually less than W. and Obama. He didn't do anything
about sanctuary cities or pass E-Verify. He has
actually increased
guest worker programs
. There has been no cuts to legal immigration. Instead, Jared Kushner's legal
immigration plan
only proposes to reconfigure the composition of it for big business
so that more high skilled workers and
fewer peons are imported from the Third World. Illegal immigration has remained steady and has surged past the
worst highs of the Obama years. It has recently
fallen back to 2015 levels after peaking in FY 2019
. Trump has vowed to pass an amnesty to save DACA. The
Muslim ban
became an ineffective travel ban
. The only area where he has had any real success is refugee resettlement,
but overall the bottom line is that after four years of Trump there are millions of more illegal aliens and
legal immigrants here. Donald Trump hasn't even
deported as many illegal aliens as Obama
.
AmNats have been purged from Turning Point
USA, banned from its events and reduced to haranguing Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk from the sidewalk. They have
been banned from even attending CPAC. Those who thought that they could work within the system to reform
conservatism were grossly mistaken. Steve King was
condemned by Congress, stripped of his committee assignments and has been treated as a pariah within the
Republican Party
. Michelle Malkin
was deplatformed by Mar-a-Lago
and excommunicated from the synagogue of mainstream conservatism. Ann
Coulter was marginalized in the Trump administration. Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon were both fired. Donald
Trump hired conservatives and staffed his administration with his enemies. While I won't name any names, I will
just point to all the people who actually worked within the conservative movement who have all been purged and
fired in the Trump era by Conservatism, Inc. as proof that working within the system doesn't work and is a bad
idea and those people would have had more job security doing almost anything else.
5.) What about Antifa and Big Tech
censorship? Aren't those good reasons to vote for Donald Trump in 2020? Neither of these issues were on our
radar screen BEFORE Donald Trump won the 2016 election.
Both of those problems became dramatically
worse
as a result of electing the boogeyman as president
. Far from being a victory for the Dissident
Right, we became identified with Donald Trump and were caught in the backlash while he delivered Jeb Bush's
agenda (the boogeyman wasn't real). Before Trump was elected president, Antifa was a tiny nuisance that
protested Amren conferences and there was still a great deal of free speech on the internet. We could also hold
rallies all over the South without serial harassment from these people. Now, everything from harassment and
doxxing by "journalists" to chronic Antifa violence to police stand down orders to deplatforming to FBI
counterextremism witch hunts has became part of the scenery of life under the Trump administration which is
only interested in these new grievances insofar as they can be milked and exploited to elect more Republicans.
In hindsight, it would have been better NOT to have identified ourselves with the boogeyman in 2016.
6.) Isn't having Donald Trump in
the White House a huge victory for "identitarianism" and big ideas like "nationalism" and "populism." President
Donald Trump's signature policy victories have been passing a huge corporate tax cut, criminal justice reform
and renegotiating and rebranding NAFTA.
Trump is a "populist" in the sense that he has DEEPENED
neoliberalism. When you look at his policies, he has continued and further extended the status quo of the last
forty years which has been tax cuts, deregulation, entitlement cuts, free trade agreements and huge increases
in military spending. Trump's economic agenda has been no different from the last three Republican presidents.
He has been all bark and no bite.
Donald Trump is pointedly NOT a
nationalist, populist or identitarian. He carefully avoids ever mentioning the word "White." Instead, he talks
incessantly about the black, Hispanic, Asian-American, LGBTQ and female unemployment rate. He holds events at
the White House for blacks and Hispanics. He delivers policies for blacks and Hispanics too like criminal
justice reform. The "forgotten man" couldn't be further from Donald Trump's mind when he is schmoozing with the
likes of Steve Schwarzman and boasting about the stock market. Trump is a demagogue who recognized that
nationalist and populist sentiments were growing in the American electorate and he has harnessed and
manipulated and exploited those forces for his donors.
7.) Speaking of Trump's donors, we
wrote Trump a blank check in the 2016 election to deliver on the MAGA agenda that he had sold us.
We
voted for big ideas like "nationalism" and "populism." The reasons why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were
immigration, trade, foreign policy, political correctness and campaign finance and furthering these big ideas
of "nationalism" and "populism." He has been a disappointment on all fronts.
Those of us who were duped into believing
that Donald Trump had a team of Jews who were going to craft all of these policies which were going to
stabilize America's demographics should reflect on what has actually happened during the Trump presidency.
Orthodox Jews hit the jackpot with the King of Israel and Zionists have been on an unprecedented winning
streak. In just the last three months, Trump has issued an executive order to ban anti-Semitism on college
campuses, assassinated Qasem Soleimani and has given Bibi Netanyahu the green light to annex large swathes of
the West Bank. Trump is even considering allowing Jonathan Pollard to return to Israel. Is it any wonder then
that a recent Gallup poll found that Israelis support his "America First" foreign policy over Americans by a
whopping 18-point margin?
Trump's Chumps haven't been deterred by any
of this. They want us to write Donald Trump a second political blank check in 2020, which his Jewish donors
intend to cash at the White House,
only this time he won't be restrained by fear of losing his reelection
.
In light of everything he has delivered for them so far, what is Donald Trump going to do in his second term
for his Jewish donors who fund the GOP? Do we trust Trump not to start a war with Iran?
8.) In the last two elections,
Donald Trump has pulled a bait-and-switch and Trump's Chumps are gullible enough to fall for it a third time.
While I was wrong about the 2016 election, I was one of the first voices in our community to wise up to what
was going on. By the 2018 midterms, I saw the bait-and-switch coming and warned our readers about it.
As you might recall, the 2018 midterms were
about tax cuts and the roaring economy, deregulation and putting Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. It
was also full of dire warnings about scary Antifa groups, Big Tech censorship and caravans from Central America
to stir up the base. Trump vowed to issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship. The GOP knows what
its base cares about and shamelessly manipulates its base during election season.
After the 2018 election was over, you
might recall how Trump banned bump stocks and passed criminal justice reform for Van Jones and the Koch
Brothers during the lame duck session of Congress. As we entered 2019, the Republican agenda changed to
overthrowing the government of Venezuela to install Juan Guaidó in power and passing anti-BDS legislation. The
GOP spent the whole year accusing the Democrats of anti-Semitism and promoting Jexodus. Virtually nothing else
was talked about for a whole year in Congress but anti-Semitism until Trump issued his executive order on
anti-Semitism on college campuses after the House and Senate had failed to reach agreement on anti-BDS
legislation. The White House
held its Social Media Summit in July and nothing came out of it
. Antifa disappeared from the agenda and was
replaced by a government crackdown on White Nationalists after El Paso. Ending birthright citizenship was
forgotten about. Illegal immigration soared to its highest level in over a decade last May.
Don't forget how Trump's Chumps told us how
"Chad" it was in 2018 to elect more Republicans to stop Antifa, the caravans and Big Tech censorship and how
those same Republicans once elected to office preferred to fight anti-Semitism for AIPAC.
10.) Trump's Chumps have
demonstrated in the last two election cycles how easy they are to manipulate. They can be relied on to vote and
shill for the GOP no matter what it does.
Donald Trump isn't under any pressure from these people to
change. He knows his mark better than they know themselves. They are so desperate for acceptance and to
participate in elections and to feel like they are "winning" that they will delude themselves like the rest of
his cult into believing almost anything. Give a drowning man enough rope and he will hang himself.
Four years later, Trump's Chumps are still
sitting by the phone waiting for the Donald to call back while he huddles with Steve Schwarzman and Bibi
Netanyahu. They can't see what is front of their own eyes. By going ALL IN for Trump, they wrecked, divided and
demoralized their own movement in order to advance the standard conservative policy agenda. They have been
pushed off the internet and in some cases even to the dark web. In virtually every way, they are worse off than
they were four years ago and have nothing to show for it. Insofar as they are getting more web traffic, it is
because America has only continued to deteriorate under Trump, which would have happened anyway regardless who
won in 2016.
It's not too late for Trump's Chumps to
reclaim one thing that they have lost over the past four years. They can still reclaim their self respect. They
don't have to participate in this charade a second time and mislead people who are less informed because they
now know full well that Sheldon Adelson has bought Donald Trump and the lickspittle GOP Congress.
Note:
Imagine thinking a
New York City billionaire is a "populist." LMAO what were we thinking? He told us what we wanted to hear and we
believed it.
My understanding is that net foreign immigration has gone down in the last few years. Hardly a triumph, I
agree.
There are quite literally hordes of foreigners living here. Even a president who was a combination of
Jesus and Superman would find it excrutiatingly difficult to eliminate immigration under these circumstances.
All this seemed painfully obvious to me in 2016. We all know who Trump had been the first 70 years of his life
– a braggart, a reprobate and a real estate developer who loved celebrities and organized crime figures. He is
married to a high class escort from Slovenia who speaks English worse than a Mexican immigrant. This man is
going to be the savior of Western Civilization? He has always been a fraud.
@MattinLA
Trump has not even made a sincere effort. Where is the effort to stop birth right citizenship? To punish
employers who hire illegals? He doesn't try to build a coalition to stop immigration, he is clearly using it as
political issue to keep his low info base revved up, but Trump doesn't actually want it resolved. It is the
same with abortion, where both Parties are perfectly happy with the status quo because it allows each to fund
raise by pointing at the threat coming from the other side. And at the end of the day it is all about find
raising.
Pretty much an accurate article, but what Democratic Presidential Contender would have been a better choice?
The answer is none. The modern day Democratic Party, and most everyone who identifies with it, is as morally
disgusting and filthy of a political party as has ever existed on this planet. Whatever grievances you have
with DT, wait until the next Democrat gets elected President. The trifecta of Diversity (aka hate and blame
Whitey for everything), LGBTQ insanity, and Climate Change hysteria will be shoved down the throats of this
country like never before. The Obama years were just a warm-up for the cultural destruction that will happen to
this country when the next Dem gets elected.
Actually, just bring the Civil War on. Whites will either get some self-respect and stand up for themselves
before it is too late, or surrender to living in a ghetto trash culture and being ruled over by Jews and their
white hating 'POC' puppets. It's an easy choice in my book.
I started college in 1982 with nothing but high hopes for the future, by 1990 I knew something was terribly
going wrong with this country, and now I know the destruction of this country is virtually guaranteed. No good
choices, indeed, as stated above. WTF happened?
I voted for this executive. I am not ashamed of my vote. However, as someone who voted on agendas and policies,
I disappointed with the results. I knew going in there wasn't much in store for me personally by supporting the
candidate. it was a diversion at the time from the standard fare. The problem with the standard fare is that
they offered more of what were the problems. candidate Trump, actually responded to the issues echoing the same
concerns, even if in a less than civil tenor. He gave as good as he got or better. I would that had been more
substantive, but it was what it was.
There are some things that need to be cleared up in your article, most prominant of which is the fairly
loose use of straw men positions. Just a few:
–the president did not run as a conservative despite comments he made about some conservative aspects of his
own views.
–he never ever abandoned his position on same sex relations and marriage -- both of which are neither
conservative or something he campaigned on, so it was clear from the get go, he had no intention of changing
that game. What he did contend is that religious people have the same protections and they should not be cowed
–the overton window that would permit any president to openly support a condition in which skin color is the
primary or a primary point of view would violate the principles and foundation of the country. but regardless
most of the country sees that as an anathema to the what they want to country to be -- even far right
conservatives are not arguing a white nationalist perspective -- trying to weigh him down with an overton window
position that was never in play, at least not as you suggest it. The president started with a definitive lean
in that direction of sorts, but it probably did not take him, long to figure out -- he was surrounded by whites
in control of the country -- whites are not being pushed around by non-whites, inspite of having elected a
non-white executive. But still he has knee jerk responses to dismantle the nonwhites policies. He remains as
prowhite as any candidate in office. his references to how he claims to have aided nonwhites as pushback
against accusations of being "racist" makes perfect sense. That does not make him "anti-white".
–your bait and switch assail is a tad convoluted. Antifa big tech and tax cuts . . . big tech and antifa
initially responded with the same shock and vitriol as all his opposition when he was elected -- but as time has
worn big tech has moved on seeing the current exec as a nonthreat -- tax cuts proceed unimpeded. The president's
position on Jews and Israel were clear from the start and remain as they were -- one can contend he is
overboard, but there was no bait and switch. The president did not say I was not for Israel and pro limiting
immigration, he made clear he opposed illegal immigration and was proIsrael they are not competing issues . He
has simply abided by one and dragged his feet on the other, if not abandoned it all together.
There are some other issues that need addressing, not the least of which is that many of us who supported
the current executive before and now, have done so calling him out on issues where he has failed or is failing
and have done so from the start -- -
@Priss Factor
the scary part about that is blumpf and the (((deep state))) would do that to you or me too
it was sickening
to see that he seemed to have regained his self confidence from the assassination of Soleimani and was
blathering on at the SOTU as though everything was just fine, better than ever
One good thing Trump did was save us from that shrieking Valkyrie warmongering Hildabeast. If she had been
elected she would have taken it as a mandate to start a war with Russia and/or Iran. Personally I was never
voting for Trump but against Hillary.
Now that the demoncrats no longer have someone like Hillary running it would be pretty safe to vote a third
party which I plan to do this election. Screw King Cyr-ass and his Zionist claque of losers.
@MattinLA
The US economy alone (not to mention the suckiness of the culture and people) has been bad enough going back to
a year or so before the crash that net immigration, I believe, has been outward. Stupid Orange Man yelling at
people "Get outta here! You're fired!" means less when they calmly retort, "I was leaving anyway".
Happened to be in the Emerald city on Wednesday and wandered through the Seattle Convention Center .there were
so many hindoos milling about thought it was some kind of curry cooking convention.
But no .it was something
called Microsoft Ready which is Microsoft's internal marketing, technical, and sales event bringing together
over 21,000 Microsoft staff.
Had to be at least 75% dotheads with a sprinkling of turbanized Sikhs, and maybe
25% whites and asians. Asked one of the dotheads if Paul Allen would be attending this year, but just drew a
quizzical stare.
Noted in the Mr. Softie handouts that these legions of imported cut rate code scribblers are
referred to as "scientists". Trumpstein actually did something about the H1B visa program .he increased it
claiming we need more of these half priced "brainiacs". Can't find enough discount American code scribblers,
you know.
Trump first got my attention when he made those initial comments against the illegal invasion. But later, when
he said that Mexico was going to pay for the wall and talked about putting a "big beautiful door" in it, I
figured he was probably full of it. When he attended AIPAC, I was done.
Congress has actually condemned White Nationalism at least two or three times since Donald Trump has been
president. Far more White Nationalists have gone to prison under Donald Trump than Barack Obama. Trump has
appointed "conservative judges" like Thomas Cullen who put RAM in prison.
After the last 3 years of seditious behavior of lying politicians like Schiff, Nadler and Pelosi and the
traitorous schemes of deep state actors like Weismann, Vindman, Sondland and Yovanovitch I would still vote for
Trump in the hopes that some of these traitors and others in the DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA would be prosecuted.
Hopefully, Durham will do his job before the election and we will see some of the coup plotters going to jail.
Even if that doesn't happen, a final payback to the treacherous Democrats and their propagandists in the MSM
will be another conservative judge on the Supreme Court; a change that will impact the next 30+ years. That
alone will be enough for me.
I agree with much of the analysis I've read here, but let me offer a somewhat different perspective. The author
notes that, "Donald Trump is pointedly NOT a nationalist, populist or identitarian." This is probably true, but
it's also not necessarily a bad thing at this point if you're a contrarian of this sort.
My read of the
situation is that Donald Trump is almost certainly going to lose the general election, despite the confident
predictions of an incoming Trumpslide by deluded supporters. In his defeat, he'll take the last vestiges of
Reagan conservatism down with him. Even if he doesn't, Trump will almost certainly be the last republican
president due to demographic change, so it doesn't matter either way. It would make sense in that light to let
Mr. Trump run and lose on a platform of standard fare conservatism than have him be closely associated with
populism and discredit that ideology on his way out.
People forget that Donald Trump was only made possible by Mitt Romney's failure in 2012. Romney ran a
standard conservative, milquetoast campaign and lost; he was nevertheless called all manner of vile names by
the left but responded like a gentlemen. His defeat came as quite a shock to many rank and file GOPers. Fox
News had convinced them leading up to election day that they were going to win. How could they not? Romney said
all the same things Ronald Regan did and he won; he talked up the military, he repeated economic platitudes and
denounced socialism, he self-immolated over racial issues and claimed democrats were the real racists. So,
obviously, Mitt Romney should – by all rights – win just as Reagan did. Lost on them was the demographic
situation, among other things. 2012 America was not 1980 America. When Reagan won California in 1980, Los
Angeles was majority white; California had two million more white Caucasians than it does now (Trump and Reagan
received almost exactly the same number of white votes in California but with different results); the economy
for blue collar voters was better, so there was less opposition to Reaganomics.
When Romney ran as a traditional, non-offensive republican and lost, he discredited that ideology and made a
louder, more combative alternative possible. That was Donald Trump. In the minds of many republicans,
conservatism could no longer win elections, so why not go all in with a contrarian radical? I expect that
mentality to return sometime after Trump loses this November. Radical sentiment has been quieted as of late
only because normies sheepishly think they are winning. That's probably why the establishment is freaking out:
they know that won't last. You occasionally see moderate democrats asking for peace and quiet, perhaps
realizing this, but it's unfortunately not a message well-received by the fringe left who control social media
and these divisive late night network shows.
My prediction: on election night 2020, there will be a lot of shell-shocked republican normies. Either the
despised socialist is elected or a man who stokes racial animus for personal gain – Pete Buttigieg – will
become president-elect. In the minds of conservative Boomers, that wasn't supposed to happen; it's as if
someone said they could see inside the event horizon of a black hole – total violation of established physical
reality.
Impossible
or so they thought. Republican operatives are already trying to help Bernie
Sanders in both Iowa and South Carolina. They foolishly think Sanders can't win, but that's not true. I've seen
the polls. On election night, Donald Trump will have to deliver a heart-wrenching speech to his deluded
followers conceding defeat to someone they thought couldn't win.
But the Trumpslide. Qanon said to trust the plan*. We're winning. The wall. MAGA.
All exposed as lies. The sort of lies a defeated people tell themselves. Cerebral comfort food for the
weak-minded.
In the process, Donald Trump will discredit Conservatism Inc. just like Mitt Romney did in 2012. Contrarians
will escape the judgment of history and live to fight another day. Most likely, there are yet more dissident
stars on the right to be made. Some older ones may also return in the aftermath.
Considering circumstances, the best path forward (speaking as devil's advocate) is to critique the man
without vocally supporting his defeat. Let him go down fair and square. Starting in November, there will many
republicans in Trump's former base looking for an alternative. They will seek out dissidents they heard about
but dismissed as blackpillers; MAGA supporters will be sidelined. Third Way Alternatives should consider laying
out a well-reasoned, practical and achievable alternative in the present with the anticipation they will be
called upon in the near future.
However, I wouldn't count on that considering the lack of organization and drive I see on the dissident
right. Mr. Griffith's essay, for example, is filled with a strange defeated tone. It sounds as if he just wants
to go back to business as usual before Trump: do his contrarian thing without being harassed. Certainly, life
would be easier. But you would be no closer to any kind of victory, either. As the author notes, dissidents
were tolerated before Trump. But why? I think laying the full blame on Trump is not warranted. Yes, he failed
to protect his followers – that's one big reason why dissent is now being crushed. There is another reason,
however: you were winning. You were only tolerated before because you were on the wrong side of history. The
establishment didn't fear you because you couldn't challenge them. With Trump's surprise victory, the situation
changed. With that in mind, what's the point of going back to business as usual while being on a certain path
to defeat? unless you want to lose (or don't care), unless you simply want the freedom to be a contrarian
without accomplishing anything. Sounds like a grift to me, pardon the rudeness.
If you want to ineffectually complain about the ruling class on Twitter while being free of harassment, then
supporting the democrat is probably your best bet. They'll tolerate you because you don't threaten them. I
think that's what a lot of guys on the right really want, which is why they went so heavily into Yang's UBI. It
was a sort of early retirement option for them, regardless of how they justified it – get free money and cash
out, let the world burn.
*Well, that and to drink bleach to ward off the wuhan coronavirus. Do NOT trust that plan.
Disclaimer: I'm speaking as a neutral third party who was never involved in any of this stuff.
Idiotic article. Yeah, Trump is a Trojan horse who is making. Israel great again. Yeah, he's a fragile,
narcissistic buffoon. The only unabashed positive I can really offer is that he is in 2020, as he was in 2016,
the least bad option.
The author doesn't seem to quite get numbers. God, as they say, tends to favor the side with the biggest
battalions. Perhaps he should take a look at a demographic plot of the map of the United States circa 2020. The
truth is that, if a hyper-competent, charismatic candidate had formed a consensus around Trump's 2016 platform
in maybe 1975, the demographic trajectory of the country could have been changed. It's way, way too late for
that.
If you were stupid enough to think in 2016 that demographic realities were going to be unwound, or even that
there could consensus to address the issue in a serious unapologetic way, I really don't know what to tell you.
You're probably too stupid to be operating heavy machinery, much less posting articles on Unz. Trump's election
is Prop 187, circa 1980's. Far too little, far too late. But still the least bad option.
All there really is at this point is a rearguard action, and maybe win a skirmish here and there. In terms
of the Long War, we don't have the numbers or the consensus. Grow the fuck up.
I'm often asked by people in the US who learn I've lived outside the US the better part of three decades when I
might return to the US, to which I lightly reply, "When the Republic is restored. I guess that means never."
At the end of the day, who better than Trump can you get behind? I guess it is game over. The only problem is
that the rest of the developed world is going in the same problemmatic direction, and places like Uruguay still
have their occasionally lurches into insanity.
2.) Those who feared that the Trump administration would suck all of the energy out of the Alt-Right were
right.
This is very typical. In the waning days of G.W. Bush there was a very strong hard left anti-war movement in
place, and doing well on the internet, and also had a home on some cable stations. Once Obama was elected it
faded into obscurity with-in hours, and never resurrected even as Obama become more hawkish than Bush – both
expanding the War on Terror, and codifying the Bush Doctrine.
1. Trump was a con man as a businessman. How did anyone imagine he wouldn't be a con man as
president?
2. Trump knows which side his bread is buttered. How long do you imagine he would've lasted if he actually
did the things he promised, especially ending the Amerikastani Empire, before ending like Kennedy? Six weeks?
3. Whether the author of this article, with whom I sympathise, changes any minds with it is irrelevant.
Trump is the Wall Street/military industrial complex/zionist candidate for re election, and his return to power
is being arranged even as I write this. The shambolic Daymockratic Party impeachment circus and the bad jokes
posing as candidates in their primaries have one purpose alone: to ensure a second term for Donald Trump. What
any normal person votes for is irrelevant.
A common trope on the right is that the left gets what it wants. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just
witness the shenanigans the DNC is pulling in the current primaries. When Pelosi theatrically ripped up Trump's
speech in the SOTU, she shortly thereafter voted to support the efforts to destabilise Venezuela and support
the CIA-handpicked Juan Guaido.
Pro-Israel PACs have flooded the primaries attacking Bernie. CIA puppet Pete Buttigieg is against medicare
for all. Democrats do not get what they want. The only thing they get is woke rhetoric but the neoliberal
economic system and the imperialist foreign policy remains the same.
Jimmy Dore's reference to the "uniparty" is apt here. So while Mr Griffin's catalogue of Trump's various
betrayals is useful, keep in mind that the disease is bipartisan. The US is in many ways a sham democracy where
the actors perform kabuki theater. You will never get an honest say on the core principles of the system.
Regardless if you're coming from the right or the left. And the media is in on the charade.
He is so duplicitous it's mind boggling. Nancy Pelosi is right when she calls him a liar,
although she's no angel herself.
The Jewish Power structure is in total control. Trump WILL BE the final nail in USA coffin, because he is
dictating for Israel, now. Israel will make even bigger moves after he is re-elected, for sure. No doubt to
further the Yinon plan along.
I voted for him too; but will not be voting at all this year. I refuse to play into their twisted game.
They purposely caused all this Chaos to keep people distracted while Big Tech companies consolidate their
power over the internet and the Military Industrial Complex plans the next false flag to kick off the next
invasion (Iran & Syria).
My guess is that Jewish Democrats like Schiff, Nader, and proxy Nancy have all been part of this horrible
PsyOp that has been going down the last 3 years.
It doesn't matter which "side" you are on anymore because there is really only ONE SIDE.
I wouldn't feel bad about being a "Trump Chump" – there are millions of you, after all.
As someone who would
be in the Bernie/Tulsi camp if I lived in the USA (but would also be furiously opposed to being swamped by
Somalis), here's a little advice, free of charge:
You will never get anywhere being attached to a Party of Capital. They will always want to bring cheap
labour into your country, and they don't care what those immigrants do to your family. Money rules. Forget the
GOP, and start your own party.
Imagine thinking a New York City billionaire is a "populist." LMAO what were we thinking? He told us what
we wanted to hear and we believed it.
Not just a NY billionaire, but one who profited from (a) mega-banks, and (b) the ZioNazi media.
His first two reality TV stunts were WWE, and then The Apprentice. The third is his crown achievement.
You call them Trump's Chumps, I've called them TrumpTARDs, because they are fucking useless, mindlessly
idiotic fools/rednecks/inbred losers.
Fact is the country doesn't stand a chance, the "resistance" is more pathetic than the globlalists. If the
last three years has taught the world anything, it's not just how mindlessly stupid TrumpTARDs are, but how
uncivil, rude, aggressive, and downright despicable.
Nobody has harmed the conservative cause more than the Orange Satan.
All, of course, by design. What still gets me is that conservatives are to utterly stupid to fall for it. At
least the Liberals caught on that Obama was a fake early on – the TrumpTARDs just can't get enough of sucking
that Orange ZioNazi's dick.
this who thing looks related to me.. .. the Cornoavirus, the pipeline, the bombings in Syria, the libya-turkey
GNA thing, the recent airliner crash in Turkey, I feel something is surfacing
Trump proved that the nation state system is disastrous for those humans governed by it. The nation state
system is great for those few who are the puppet governors of the few that rule the world.
The problem Mr. Griffin is that the article does not recognize that USA citizens who not part of the
electoral college cannot vote for either the President or the Vice President. Amendment 12 read it.
We should Trumpet Trump because if we don't we might be next..
There are quite literally hordes of foreigners living here.
Fact is none of the fake conservatives, from the Orange Satan to the Governor of Texas, is against illegal
immigration. It would be easy enough to prosecute employers who hire illegals, but neither the Orange Satan,
nor any State, be it Wyoming or Texas, so-called "Red" (Communist) states, does anything about it.
But yet the idiot TrumpTARDs wail on and on about how the Orange Satan is their savior and how Republicans
are better than Democrats.
It's amazing how unbelievably, astoundingly stupid Americans are.
You are either stupid or lying, I believe lying. I say this because in each of your substantive attacks, you
blatantly misstate facts, even obvious ones.
Personally I am honestly and eyes open clinging to the hope that
Trump is sincerely doing his best for us, because the alternative is civil war, and if it comes to that, it
will come to that. Trump is the last possible peaceful salvation for America.
Here are your lies, which tell me you are not genuine:
> He has refurbished the George W. Bush era fence. Since he has been president, Donald Trump has built all of
three new miles of fence,
A blatant and obvious lie to anyone who is tracking the wall progress – "refurbished" means replaced
completely ineffective fence, including vehicle barriers which you can literally walk around, with 18-30ft high
steel fence. You may jerk off to the technicality that it isn't "new", but we all see through you. Over 100
miles so far with 350 more planned, and he has done it with congress kicking and screaming. He even diverted
defense spending for this purpose, against all of Washington's whining and complaining. These are the actions
of someone who is sincere.
>there have been no cuts to legal immigration
Bull shit. Blatant lie. 2017 saw a 10% decrease in net migration from 1046 million to 930 million. 2018 down
another 25% to 700 million, and 2019 15% to 600 million. That's God damn good work for a man with an entire
bureaucracy and 2 parties fighting him. He didn't even get a law to sign and he still cut legal immigration by
almost HALF. I can hardly believe it myself it's too good to be true. Why lie?
>Donald Trump hasn't even deported as many illegal aliens as Obama.
You know as well as I do that Obama changed the reporting of deportations to include 'voluntary returns'.
Obama deported virtually no one from the interior. Regardless, more importantly, we both know how aggressively
both parties and the bureaucracy have fought to prevent Trump from taking action, and yet against all odds he
secured agreements with Honduras El Salvador and Guatemala to deport "Asylum seekers" there, making an end run
around the legal labyrinth that was keeping them here. That is HUGE and you completely omit it.
You also omitted –
Starting a trade war with China
Supporting the break up of the EU
Demanding funds from allies under our umbrella
Not starting a war in Syria or Iran, both of which they desperately tried to force him into
But most of all, you ignored the fact that the entire intelligence apparatus, the entire media, the entire
establishment has sacrificed their credibility in the attack on Trump.
That is the main reason I still have hope. Your lies bald face lies are why I do not believe you are
sincere.
I love it that the jew and the fag won in Iowa. Of course, I don't love that Trump will probably win in Nov.
but the options to him are dismal to say the least. No matter what, once he's out of office the days of this
"republic"/empire are surely numbered.
I disagree that voting for Mr Trump was a mistake. American elections are always a choice of evils, but in this
case it was more a choice between rapid extinction of our species and run-of-the-mill evil, killing only the
odd million people now and then.
I personally take this cartoon very seriously indeed:
If Hillary Clinton had become President, I believe she would have found a way to start a war with Russia.
And that would have resulted in the death of all human beings, plus many other species.
Mr Trump is execrable, it is true. But he has one enormous virtue: for whatever reason, he is extremely open
and candid. Whereas US presidents going back to the 19th century did frightful things while smiling genially
and pretending to be kind, Mr Trump openly admits how frightful he and his deeds are.
That is hastening the demise of the US empire, which is in the interests of all human beings.
@MattinLA
There are certainly no easy choices. As a foreigner I am hardly in a position to criticize, let alone to
encourage US citizens. But perhaps I could remind you of an early President during whose 8 years in power not a
single American or foreigner was killed by the US government?
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years
without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be
discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such
misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. What country before ever
existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are
not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The
remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or
two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its
natural manure".
– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787), quoted in Padover's Jefferson On
Democracy
@MattinLA
IOW, you're going to vote again? For Mr. Trump?
"In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will
hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our
ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex.
Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.
A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for
liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing
Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be
blamed on bipartisan politics."
Linh Dinh, "Orlando Shooting Means Trump for President," June 12, 2016, @ The Unz Review.
All the system needs is for you to pick Red or Blue, accepting the results until the next Most Important
Election Ever.
As a first time voter in 2016, Trump's relative inaction on all that he promised has made me more aware than
ever of the rot that has set in our political system. I was skeptical that political change could be
accomplished prior to 2016 but optimistic. Now I cannot be anymore pessimistic about the future.
@Chet Roman
" another conservative judge on the Supreme Court; a change that will impact the next 30+ years. That alone
will be enough for me."
Yeah, Right.
Like the impact of all the Republican appointees who issued the ruling in Roe v Wade?
Like the impact of Mr. Kennedy, a Republican choice who helped rewrite the legal definition of marriage?
Like the impact of Mr. Roberts, a Republican choice who nailed down Big Sickness for the pharmaceutical and
insurance industries?
What impact do you honestly expect from Mr. Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump's choice who earned his first robe by
helping President Cheney with the Patriot Act?
Like the "federal" elections held every November in even-numbered years and the 5-4 decrees of the Court,
the partisan judicial nominations and nailbiting confirmation hearings are another part of the RedBlue puppet
show that keeps people like Chet Roman voting in the next Most Important Election Ever.
Your disappointment is the inverse of your expectations. Perhaps you should curb your enthusiasm? So what's
next? Join the Communists? Boycott the system? That will teach them! Trump is the best looking horse in the
glue factory. Do you see a candidate you like better?
The effort to remove Trump from office began before he was even sworn in. In terms of intensity the effort has
been unlike anything any of us have ever seen. And that effort has come relentlessly, from all sides. The
media, the late night comics, the intelligence services, the kritarchy, the bureaucracy they have been united
in thwarting Trump's every move, united in flogging an entirely bogus Russian collusion investigation from his
first day in office. And they IMPEACHED the man over nonsense, for crying out loud.
The most powerful elements in this country have thrown, and continue to throw, everything they've got at
him. They have brought this country to the brink of a cataclysm for their hatred of Donald Trump and their
overriding desire to see him removed from power and his voters punished. Their hatred alone is reason enough to
continue to support Trump.
It was a miracle Donald Trump won the presidency. It is a miracle he is still in office. And a miracle is
the only thing that can save us.
Do you not remember how utterly hopeless things seemed in 2015? How completely we'd been beaten? There was
zero chance the immigration tide could be stopped, for one thing. Do you not realize that it is a miracle that
things are slightly less hopeless now? A miracle that, in 2020, we aren't beaten quite so completely? That, by
some miracle, the chance of achieving an immigration time-out within the next four years is now greater than
zero?
Any Trump supporter who turns on Trump because he disapproves of the job Trump has done as president just
shows his own fractiousness, because, in truth, Trump has not yet had a chance to be president. And
politically, turning on Trump is particularly boneheaded given there is absolutely no alternative and we are
out of miracles.
@Divine Right
The GOP donors would never allow a fully-fledged White populist candidate to slip through the net, Trump was
never such a thing which is why he managed to win the primaries.
By the time the boomers die off, it will be too late and even a White Rights candidate would never won as
the demographics will have shifted so much, and this is assuming Whites start skewing towards GOP on the same
way Blacks skew towards Democrats. In reality the younger Whites still have the virus of individuality in their
minds, thinking that politics is about high-minded ideas instead of group interests.
Poor Brad. I spent all that same time trying desperately to show you how far off you were in the support of an
obvious jew water carrier. Twitter (until they dumped me) and then even signing up for your blog.
I left
comment after comment with valuable information, obvious and thorough.
You ignored it all, even in the face of its blatant OBVIOUSNESS. You were a Drumpfter and with Trump saying
just the right thing, you could probably go back.
It is why I left your site and won't go back. You spent years being totally WRONG.
Reading this is like reading the words of a guilty man who was too stupid to see what was truly right in
front of your face. Or one that knew all along but had a different agenda.
Either way, you have zero credibility or discernment when it comes to politics, so why don't you just keep
it to yourself.
Me, a dumb ole redneck, called it in Aug 2015 and didn't stop trying to warn the world of this OBVIOUSNESS.
You know it and I know it.
Some strong points here, not all of them, but a number.
"He has been a disappointment on all fronts."
No statement could be more accurate.
Trump is a failure, but one with a very loud mouth and a rather twisted psychology that magically converts
all failures into successes. Nothing factual ever fazes him.
And the ability to just keep going is a great asset in politics, even if it means you keep going to do
destructive things. You actions communicate strength and purpose and determination to ordinary people.
After all, much of the ordinary public literally has no idea what is going on, abroad or at home, so poorly
informed are they by the mainline press and the political establishment.
He does a daily war dance of self-praise, finding new phrases to whoop and chant, describing his almost
complete failure in the opposite terms.
But because he is doing overall the power establishment's work – against China, against Iran, against
Russia, for Israel, and in Latin America – they not only do not oppose him, they support him.
He does his work rudely and utterly without grace.
He is a man who wears his ignorance as though it were a finely-tailored suit.
But the power establishment is okay with the grotesque style, so long as they get the results they want. And
they do.
The desired results are mainly negative, not positive, achievements.
But that is the essence of imperial America today, to do harm to others in order to improve its own relative
standing. It does almost nothing positive anymore anywhere. It threatens friends and foes alike. It destroys
international organizations and order. It supports the creation of chaos, as in Syria or Libya or Yemen.
The contrast of America's now-constant threats and hostilities with China's great Belt and Rail Initiative
couldn't be starker. Or with Putin's pragmatic "live and let live" philosophy. We see destruction versus
creation. Coercion versus cooperation. Ignorance versus information. Darkness versus light.
So, Trump, with all of grotesqueries and lies, provides almost the perfect President.
Sorry, America, but that is a very great, if ugly, truth.
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and
the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two
parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election
without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy .Then it should be possible to replace it, every
four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new
vigor, approximately the same basic policies." Carroll Quigley
And so it goes ..at least until enough people
start to understand/believe that the government is their enemy, never their friend , and that a completely
unlimited government [i.e. what we currently endure], regardless of who is president, will continue to take
more of their money and freedom away on a daily basis because:
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting
[central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams
which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree
Sadly, it doesn't matter who we vote for as the jewing will continue unabated.
Proof of this is to always
ask, "Who benefits?"
And the answer is ALWAYS the jews, and the answer is NEVER white people.
Once you understand what the jews want, what their interests are, and you see that everything that happens
seems to be good for the jews, you realize that this awful system is anti-white to the core and it's been
engineered by the nose for the nose. There is no other way to explain the fact that the interests of white
people are NEVER honored. In fact, the interests of white people are not even given a passing thought.
I knew it was going south in a hurry when he moved into the white house and turned it into something resembling
a synagogue.
As an outsider, watching media reporting on American politics, I find myself wondering if I'm
not actually viewing Israeli political news. How do Americans not notice this?
Trump's supposed conflict with congress to get funding for the border wall is just a kosher psyop designed to
give off the illusion that he is fighting to uphold his campaign promises, when in reality he's just carrying
out the jews white genocidal program. He's no different than Obama. Black or white, they take orders from the
same political class: the Jews who control the money, the policies, and the media.
But what's most sickening
about all this is that the same congress that unanimously votes to give untold billions to Israel in foreign
military aid is now telling the American people that there is just not enough money to fund a border wall !
Israel first, America last, that's how congress works.
Why don't the Jews want a strong US border wall built ? Because the JEWS want to genocide White Christian
Americans through mass illegal immigration. Why ? Because non-white third world people have lower-iq's and are
easier for the Jews to control and make slaves out of.
( Destabilizing society for political gains- Offering stupid people free everything will always get votes, and
they know this. )
Funding for the US border wall could be solved overnight by removing Jewish control over the monetary system
and cancelling all foreign aid to Israel, but don't except that to happen anytime soon. Nothing has changed
since Trump has become president and nothing will. Illegal immigration, poverty, unemployment and wars will
accelerate under Trump because those are the natural consequences of following the orders of America hating
Jews. Trump isn't playing some 4d chess strategy and all those who still say this are blind, deaf and dumb. The
Jews are still in full control of the Federal Reserve and by extension the media, government, courts, law
enforcement, education etc. Stop living in a fantasy land and face the facts.
As it was with Bush,Clinton and Obama, the United States is still a vassal state of Israel and controlled by
the Jews. We cannot vote ourselves out of this situation. Democracy means Jewish control that breaks down to
which political candidate gets the most jewish money and jewish media coverage. The Jews pick our presidents,
it doesn't matter if a republican or democrat gets elected, each party is only concerned with advancing the
Jewish world government agenda.
@Priss Factor
Regarding Gen. Soleimani, a true martyr, you should have seen how insultingly the moronic ABC World News anchor
David Muir brought up the name of Gen. Soleimani at last night's DNC debate. And none of the candidates
bothered to correct Muir.
@Gleimhart Mantooso
Keep wallowing in hate and ignorance. Muslims are the only people outside of Christians who revere Jesus,
albeit not as god jr. but as as a mighty prophet.
For sure, Trump has been less than impressive on all fronts. At least he hasn't committed the US to an all-out
war with Iran, but I strongly suspect he will do so after he is re-elected.
As far as
actual
unemployment, January 2020 remains at a stable 21% and all the bs about 3.5% is the usual smoke-and-mirrors:
I think the establishment is once again giving the American voter no real alternatives (but isn't that the
point?). Do you want Trump or a Jewish communist, Trump or Indiana's little Peewee Buttfudge? Whatever. The
final result will always be "X" is president in a White House filled with zionists. Everything American
crumbles while the Israelis continue the dance they started on 9/11.
Machiavelli wrote that the best people to take power are not the best people to run the government. The
implication is precisely that: use the chumps and then discard them.
Despite all the technology, some things
haven't changed.
@Divine Right
" My read of the situation is that Donald Trump is almost certainly going to lose the general election, despite
the confident predictions of an incoming Trumpslide by deluded supporters. In his defeat, he'll take the last
vestiges of Reagan conservatism down with him "
Your comment is very interesting. While I didn't like it
emotionally. Intellectually it was excellent.
I have all of the same complaints as Brad Griffin. I have to admit my perfidy as I have at times believed in
Q and other times I haven't. Right now I'm at the, we'll see, stage as I have no idea what is going to happen
and if he so wished Trump could fall on the deep State like a bear trap. If he is going to do this then the
delay til he can get in a more honest set of judges and push out some the worst of the actors makes sense. Even
his wishy washy staffing the place to the gills with Jews and inconsistent policies. He has several times
stated positions and done things that have put his enemies in very awkward positions that are difficult to
weasel out of. He could still take down portions of the deep State. We'll have to see but I admit it doesn't
look good.
Former CIA head William Casey once said, and it is verified, something like that when no one knows what the
truth is the CIA had done it's job. I think we are at that stage now.
If Trump does not reign in the deep State, meaning the Jews for all practical purposes, or even if he loses
the election I suspect strongly that a vast tsunami of Whites will instantly lose faith in government. I think
it likely that if Trump loses it will be a psychic shock.
If Trump has no plan to take on the deep State and Q is just a deep State actor to delay the day of
reckoning I hope Trump does lose.
There's a path, a very scary one, that may be what Q is all about if he is a deep State actor. Computer
power has continued to increase combined with neural nets computing. The time line for a $1,000 computer chip
with the computing power of a human is 2025. It may be off by a little but it will happen. If when this happens
and the Jews are still in control they could, combined with 5G, build what ever robot army they wished for
around 10 or 20 thousand dollars a piece and murder us all. Elon Musk global network in space would also allow
them global dominance. I've always been suspicious of Elon being a Jew while supporting what he is doing as
being good for the country. When he immigrated to Canada from South Africa he first had a job at a bank
supposedly with one of this relatives. He also has been extremely capable in raising vast sums of capital. Jews
are much more able to do this due to nepotism. He denies being a Jew.
Trump is very much a chump and a liar, as pretty much every president has been from the beginning. This will
include supposed great presidents like Lincoln, Wilson, Teddy and FD Roosevelt, Reagan, Obama, and yes, even
the vaunted JFK.
The problem is and always has been "Murkans" find themselves a political party and basically sign up for
life. They never seem to learn no matter who is put into office, the slow slide to a full blown Marxist type
Oligarchy marches on. I cannot fathom why people go to political rallies and wave and cheer for known liars and
charlatans, hanging on their every promise as if it came from God himself.
Nothing is ever going to change in this country until the corporate money is eliminated from politics, until
lobbying for political favors is made illegal, until BOTH corrupt political parties currently running America
are shown the ash heap of history, AND until people realize there is more politics than marking a ballot.
This country will only be made well when the citizens start attending city, county, and state government
meetings and demand the constitution be upheld. Without our involvement at every level of government, it is
easy for the shysters and crooks to grow fat through graft and corruption.
The choice is ours and ours alone, but if history is any indicator of what will be, I say we be in deep
shit.
Bull shit. Blatant lie. 2017 saw a 10% decrease in net migration from 1046 million to 930 million. 2018
down another 25% to 700 million, and 2019 15% to 600 million. That's God damn good work for a man with an
entire bureaucracy and 2 parties fighting him
Where's the link for this claim? At the 2019 SOTU Trump bragged that immigrants would be coming to the USA
in "the largest numbers ever" under his administration.
Candidate Trump vowed to end H1B visas but president Trump now supports expanding the program. Candidate
Trump vowed to deport Dreamers and all other illegal aliens. Candidate Trump says he'll work with Congress to
allow Dreamers to stay in the U.S. and avoid deportation.
But most of all, you ignored the fact that the entire intelligence apparatus, the entire media, the
entire establishment has sacrificed their credibility in the attack on Trump.
Outside of a few of exceptions like Comey, Strzok and McCabe there's been almost no consequences for any
crazy leftists or deep state operatives for attacking Trump. At most, some (((MSM))) talking heads have
suffered decreased viewership, but that hasn't slowed them down one iota while the FBI has viciously retaliated
against high profile Trump supporters like Mike Flynn and Roger Stone.
I thought Trump was going to go after Hillary if elected and "lock her up?" That was just one of his many
lies and dog whistles.
Yes, Trump is an idiot I know well. I spent a day with him.
The real problem has been, when we have a
candidate that would be good for America, the Jews and the Jewish controlled media destroy him, and the people
do not react appropriately.
Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader all offered their talents for the job. See what happened?
Trump is not the problem. He's the symptom.
Go after the root.
Gerhard Menuhin understood this well enough he named his book accordingly.
Because life is relatively short, the people adapt a "go along to get along" mentality. They fear losing
their rice bowl (job) so they act like coolies (slaves).
People need to change the essential failing thinking only of themselves.
Better to be a martyr once than a slave 10,000 times.
Since both parties are hopelessly corrupt enemies of the people, I vote third party if I can, so I didn't vote
for Trump but I was glad he beat Hillary, because Hillary was a known evil, and Trump? I liked his campaign
promises, to make friends with Russia, to get out of NATO, to stop the "stupid" Mideast wars, to echo Lindbergh
by his motto "America First", which promised a kind of paleo-conservative "isolationism", i.e., stay home, mind
our own business, stop policing the world with regime-change wars. I wrote off his Border Fence as unworkable.
And he started off well. He called most TV news Fake News. He said Media was "the enemy of the people". Wow!
What other politician told such a truth? He met with Putin in Helsinki and believed Putin's word over his own
"Intelligence", and Wow!, again. But it didn't last. His enemies were after him (Russia! Russia! Russia!) from
Day One, and after the Putin meeting FBI and CIA and Media all called him a TRAITOR! Media bad-mouthed him 24/7
for months, and I believe Trump finally caved, joined our enemies in the Swamp he had promised to drain,
because he didn't have the balls to stand up to the constant, unrelenting pressure on him. His first choices
for Secty of State,of Defense, were okay, but then he hired the awful Bolton and then the noxious Pompeo, he
surrounded himself with the loyal-to-Israel Neocons, and now Netanyahu is our President, not Trump.
So he has
become just another enemy of the people. If Bernie is screwed out of the Dem nomination, as he was last time, I
hope he starts a Third Party, with Ron Paul as his Vice, and Tulsi Gabbard as Secty of State.
@Gizmo880
Add to that, who would champion any of these changes in either chamber of Congress? This article perfectly
reflects the adolescent whining that permeates the unz site that everything is not going exactly as I want.
You deserve to be drunk on the junk offered by the Drumpf a narcissistic hedonist from Manhattan in real
estate business (where 9 out of 10 largest real estate enterprises are owned by Jews), who was desperate at
times to hold on to that thing which is most dear to him, the title of unmitigated billionaire, and which could
not be hold on to without the blessings of the Central Park "rabbis" and one who had married non-native white
women of dubious origin (possibly Jewish), at least 2 out of 3 times and a man who wasn't known for his
christian (assuming he is one) piety or charity was suddenly the savior of the White nationalists.
You're
right about one thing: give a drowning (White nationalist) man enough rope and he will hang himself!
@nsa
Trumpstein actually did something about the H1B visa program .he increased it claiming we need more of
these half priced "brainiacs". Can't find enough discount American code scribblers, you know.
Bingo.
BTW, back in the mid 00s when I had certifications in C# programming and SQL, my phone was literally ringing
off the hook with job offers and I never went more than 1 week without a contract job. In the following years
working for a large company in the industry, I gained even more experience in other things in IT that
interested me such as machine learning, parallel programming and cloud computing.
When that company went south in 2016 I lost my job. Furiously searching for a job, it took NINE months
before I landed another. When I talked with all the local head-hunting contractor firms and IT placement
companies, they all told me the same story: all the local companies are pretty much only hiring H1B's now in
their IT departments.
Absolutely disgusting.
That along with many other things that I've seen since 2016 have convinced me that my children have no
future here in this shithole country.
In the final two years of the Obama administration (2015 and 2016), the Alt-Right was thriving on social
media and was brimming with energy.
Yes, in service to Hillary and the Democrats. Not all who called themselves alt-right, but beyond question
it was a "movement" that was and still is wholly compromised. I know it's hard for you to hear, and despite
whatever else he peddled, Freud was on to something when it came to Projection.
It doesn't surprise me that this author has memory-holed his movement's high water mark -- Hillary's
alt-right speech. Throughout the 2016 campaign, while little went Hillary's way, she consistently drew royal
straight flushes, with David Duke, Richard Spencer and various other agents-provocateur, going on CNN and MSNBC
declaring their support for Trump.
Here's your buddy Richard Spencer days after Trump won the election:
A word to the wise, anyone who didn't know to whom this character belongs, and long before this moment,
should assiduously avoid the word 'chump.'
I won't paint with a broad brush. To the extent that anyone cares, it was and remains rather easy to figure
out which in the so-called alt-right can't be trusted. Whether because the FBI or someone else has them by the
short-hairs, or they're Leninist/Stalinist filth doing their part for the cause.
That includes those writing articles like this, lamenting that Trump betrayed you after you voted for him by
being a great president for African Americans too.
Timing is rarely coincidental. Thus this jibber jabber comes just after Trump defeated the latest coup
attempt and even Democrat allied-media is finally forced to begin to concede that he'll win reelection.
Trump will do so with historic support from blacks and Hispanics (for a Republican). Which is why Democrats
and their allied-media are again feverishly pushing their "white nationalist" button again.
Any day now the "GOD EMPEROR (!!!)" is going to "UNLEASH THE STORM!!!"
Oh, yeah, sure some Jews get beat up in midtown Manhattan and Trump swings into action quicker than whale
shit thru an ice floe passing EOs that end up practically paving the way to make it illegal to criticize Jews
Um, OK he sure was quick and decisive for them.
But surely he will get around to doing something for the goys too!!!
The reasons why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were immigration, trade, foreign policy, political
correctness and campaign finance and furthering these big ideas of "nationalism" and "populism."
Well then you
are
a chump. The only tactical reason to have voted for Trump was
to deny Hillary
Clinton executive power
. That was the sole reason any conservative or rightist had to participate in Our
National Sham. To believe that he was going to reintroduce "nigger" to the national lexicon by 2018 was
head-in-the-clouds foolishness.
Thwarting Soros/Hillary remains his major contribution* to American politics: under Trump, the masks on the
other side have all come off. There is no longer any subterfuge about the Unholy Trinity of the Far Left,
meaning the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and the hostage institutions such as academia and
local/state government. The rabid doubling-down of the anti-white Deep State – unthinkable with a nabob like
McConnell or Romney in the Oval Office – is another plus to the Trump Administration: what the talking heads
all nervously refer to as the "deep divisions" in our country is one of the few signs of mental health and
vitality America has experienced in a half-century's worth of decline.
Nobody was going to reverse that half-century in three or four years – it was a physical impossibility; just
as no one was going to pry off Team Shmuel's death-grip without at least pretending not to. Ten
years
would be insufficient for such tasks. But it doesn't mean you petulantly vow to starve yourself because half a
loaf is an insult.
*= it's rarely brought up but his quietly appointing centrist/conservative judges to the bench, boring as it
may seem to tiki-torch revolutionaries, still represents an important step in the right direction and is
probably his
second
major contribution to the struggle,
Trump is the reincarnation of the Roman emperor Caligula and the present government of the ZUS is a
reincarnation of the later days of the Roman empire, in every way!
@MattinLA
America has faced problem like this in the past It will solve the problem in similar or identical terms . Thats
what it does It provides a ruse . Now the ruse is not covering the corners of the lying lips even before next
set of problems emerge straight from the solution.
Trump isn't a god and there's so much to criticize about his track record, all true. But at minimum, Trump did
delay the socialist takeover of the federal judiciary. As disgusting as his kowtowing has been of the neocons
that control the Deep State, the invasion of Iran has still yet to materialize. How would a Hillary presidency
have fared with Scalia's replacement and a no-fly zone over Syria? Good bye First and Second Amendment. The
alternative to Trump is grim.
@Tom Welsh
As bad as Trumpstein is, and make no mistake, the cuckold for Coco-Zionists is bad, Clinton and company would
have been even worse. In 2020 we have anti-White demsheviks like Butt-Plug, the first openly homosexual
candidate for Prez, Warren, Biden and flat out commie Jew, Sanders, and Jew Bloomberg. I guess the Jew is ready
to come out of the shadows and openly run for Prez just like homosexual Butt-Plug. Of course it could be said
that we have a Jew as POTUS right now, President Baby Nut&Yahoo and his VP Jared Kushner.
The biggest thing
Trumpstein has done as Prez is expose how fake the Jew media is, but lets not kid ourselves, with the exception
of Tucker Carlson ( even Tucker doesn't tell the total truth and he won't touch the JQ) even the neocons at FOX
and OAN don't tell the complete truth, and sometimes they do more harm by telling 90% truth and 10% lies than
commie anti-White networks like CNN, MSNBC and all the rest.
Trumpstein is a native New Yorker, what did you really expect?? The guy has been around criminal Jews all
his life, he has Jew lawyers, his daughter has converted to Judaism and she married an orthodox Jew. As bad as
our past Presidents were, some claim LBJ, FDR, and even Eisenhower might have been Jews or had Jewish blood
flowing through their shabbos goy veins, Trump might be the biggest cuckold yet when it comes to the biggest
shabbos goy Prez of all time.
Until a UNITED STATES PRESIDENT OR OFFICIAL GOES AFTER GEORGE SOROS AND THE LIKE AND SERIOUSLY SEEKS TO
IMPRISON HIM AND OTHERS FOR FLOODING OUR COUNTRY WITH ILLEGAL INVADERS, WE DON'T HAVE A LEGIT PRESIDENT.
Do you think Hitler would have stood by and allowed non-Germans or traitorous Germans to flood Germany with
Turks or Pakis and then went out and told throngs of people how he is keeping Germany first? Come on, man.
Trump is better than the alternative, BUT the new boss isn't much different than the old boss. Just another
cuckold influenced by his Jewish masters and Jewish money.
@Priss Factor
It's amusing to read the rabid Trump haters on the right. They have a better option?
Some of the Trump haters
say we should just let the whole thing burn down and that Trump is controlled opposition delaying the
inevitable and preferred civil war. These are people that won't give up their Netflix, won't give up whatever
outlet Game of Thrones is on and won't even put down their IPhone. It's absurd.
Trump is a fat-assed, baby boomer politician whore for the evil and immoral globalizer treasonites in the
JEW/WASP ruling class of the American Empire.
Trump has been screaming like a three dollar whore politician
about flooding the USA with mass legal immigration "in the largest numbers ever."
Trump has refused to deport the upwards of 30 million illegal alien invaders in the USA.
Trump has kept the American Empire garrisons and bases forward deployed and stuck in muck hole regions of
the globe.
Trump has put the interests of Israel ahead of the interests of the American Empire.
Trump is a bought and paid for three dollar whore politician for Jew billionaires Shelly Adelson and Paul
Singer and Bernie Marcus and other billionaire bastards.
Trump has kept his fat mouth shut about the Fed-created and monetary policy induced asset bubbles in stocks,
bonds and real estate. In 2016, fat ass baby boomer bastard Trumpy was calling these same damn asset bubbles
nothing but "fat, ugly bubbles." In 2016 Trump said "we are in a big, fat, ugly bubble" and the asset bubbles
in stocks, bonds and real estate are only bigger and uglier and fatter now.
I hereby challenge baby boomer fat ass Trumpy -- and Teddy Cruz, Marco Rubio, Dan Crenshaw, Tom Cotton and
any other GOP puke who wants to show up -- to a debate on mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration,
tax policy, trade policy, foreign policy, monetary policy, American national identity, multicultural mayhem,
White Genocide and any other damn thing.
Vote for CHARLES PEWITT as a Write-In candidate for president in New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina
and every other state presidential primary.
Charles Pewitt Immigration Pledge:
IMMIGRATION MORATORIUM NOW!
DEPORT ALL ILLEGAL ALIEN INVADERS NOW!
REMOVE THE FOREIGNERS NOW!
REMOVE ALL WHITES OR OTHERS THAT ARE HOSTILE TO THE EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN ANCESTRAL CORE OF THE USA
Ban The Bat Soup Fever People Now!
The Charles Pewitt write-in campaign for president of the USA has called for the immediate implementation of
a BAT SOUP FEVER BAN which will quarantine the rest of the world, including Canada and Mexico. All foreigners
currently occupying US territory will be immediately removed and they will be put on barges with baloney
sandwiches for sustenance on their long voyage back to wherever the Hell they came from. Those who have
deliberately shredded their identification -- like Pelosi shredding Trumpy's speech -- shall be put in a baloney
sandwich camp in sub-Saharan Africa and kept there indefinitely.
The Charles Pewitt write-in campaign for president has stated numerous times that open borders mass legal
immigration and open borders mass illegal immigration brings infectious diseases to the USA and this new
fangled BAT SOUP FEVER is just EBOLA with more sniffles and the walking pneumonia and the boogie woogie bat
soup fever blues.
The Charles Pewitt ban on the Bat Soup Fever People, plus all the other foreigners for good measure, will
bring massive benefits to the American people.
The Charles Pewitt ban on all foreigners in combination with a massive removal of all foreigners in the USA
will boost wages, lower housing costs, reduce income inequality, lower class sizes, protect the environment,
restore cultural cohesion, give US workers more bargaining power, reduce belly fat, reduce commuting times,
provide relief for overwhelmed hospitals and be good for regular Americans and bad for globalizer banker
money-grubbing nasty people.
The Charles Pewitt presidency will extinguish all student loan debt and pay back all student loan debt ever
paid plus 6 percent interest accrued yearly.
The Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion will grant each American citizen with all blood ancestors born in colonial
America or in the USA before 1924 the sum of ten thousand dollars a month -- tax free.
The Pewitt Tax Pledge will abolish the payroll tax and reduce federal income taxes substantially for all
Americans making below 300, 000 dollars a year. Billionaires will be declared illegal and they will be
financially liquidated and the federal corporate tax rate shall be 80 percent and 100 percent for all
corporations that have gone offshore.
God Bless America And Ban The Bat Soup Fever People Now!
Write In CHARLES PEWITT For President On Your Ballot -- God Bless The USA!
@Divine Right
If the Democrats have Pete steal the nominatin, then you can be sure they want to give Trump the election. I
dont think they control Bliombverg, more likely, he controls them so I would call him a wild card. Sanders
would win the election, but as you can see in Iowa, the criminals running the DNC, aka Hillary, are a much
bigger threat to him then Trump.
@Charles Pewitt
And you actually think that guy has a legit shot at winning? And you actually think he will be able to keep all
of his promises? The more I learn about what Hitler had to overcome to become Chancellor of Germany, you
realize that men like Hitler are rare and only come along once every couple hundreds of years. And Germany
wasn't mixed with every kind of brown and yellow race under the Sun either, America is a different animal
altogether. I am not sure if even a man like Hitler could turn America around in 2020. It will take A LOT OF
WORK TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, odds are unless we do a 180% turn, America is going out with a whimper and
sooner rather than later.
@alex in San Jose AKA Digital
Detroit
Net immigration has definitely NOT been outward. Both legal and illegal migration into the USA are still
massive, larger than the outflow from all appearances. The net result, and this is without reference to the
race or color or religion of the wave of immigrants:
a more crowded, more polluted, more expensive, less
trusting society where tens of millions of people cannot communicate effectively with each other in English and
US citizens whose families have been here for generations or even a couple centuries have a harder and harder
time finding full-time jobs with decent pay, benefits, and HAHA a pension.
@Chet Roman
After the last 3 years of seditious behavior of lying politicians like
Schiff
,
Nadler
and
Pelosi and the traitorous schemes of deep state actors like
Weismann, Vindman, Sondland
and
Yovanovitch
While I agree with your main point, what are you going to do? Vote for lil' Mike Bloomberg? Mayor Pete? LOL.
These clowns are completely controlled. Yes this system has boxed us in but Trump at least gives the illusion
of revolt, and he still isn't 100% controlled, only 99%.(Grin) Others will have to pick up the mantle of revolt
against the 'Deep State' when he is gone.
For the time being thankfully Tucker Carlson, Rand Paul and other America First types will be pushing Trump to
follow his campaign promises, however little he actually does. Because the alternative, Biden, Bloomberg, the
mayor Pete & company, is considerably worse.
The main strikes against Trump are 1. His even more fawning than
anticipated towards the Zionist beast. But most of that was predictable however regrettable. 2. His
acquiescence to the Republi'tard tax cuts which has only benefited the rich. The Republicans lost big in the
mid terms because of those cuts but 'lo and behold' Trump was still there. 3. All the other shit-lib policies
that Trump ignored or even supported, like increases in 'legal' immigration. That's the fault of his dopey
daughter and her weird Zionist/Orthodox Jew husband. With the son-in-law's one sided
'Deal of the Century'
falling flat on its face, hopefully this will hasten the moving of said weird son-in-law and dopey daughter
back to NYC 'one'. Then hopefully Trump will turn to advice from the likes of Carlson and Paul who will appeal
to his inner America First soul.
@Ragno
Thwarting Soros/Hillary remains his major contribution* to American politics: under Trump, the masks on the
other side have all ""
How has he exactly ?
Soros and Hillary occupy certain positions . Now they are gone but taken over by some other guys and gals .
It's a job . New employees still haven't been awarded the best employee award yet . That will come at the
retirement for the next set of people to carry on with the same anonymity.
We all know PNAC. How many will bother to know what the new letter head organizations the same crazy bunch
are heading now with new faces ?
Whether it is the openly anti-White demshevik candidate who wins or Trump, it is a win-win for the Jew. And our
demshevik buddies have already hinted at locking up any White who might have the temerity to whine about his or
her countries being flooded with browns, yellows and other hues of hostile third world biological weapons of
mass destruction or God any White who blasphemes the self avowed "masters of the universe" who control
America's media, much of our judicial system, and apparently own all of our serious candidates for POTUS should
face imprisonment according to some of these certifiable cuckold nutjobs. As I commented earlier, Hitler wasn't
some mentally disturbed madman who munched on carpet when enraged, he was a brilliant and brave man, but even
Hitler didn't have to overcome the odds that anyone elected as the American President has to overcome. The
Jewish dream of making America a polyglot of every kind of race under the sun with more colors than a rainbow
has become true. Hitler only had the Jew to worry about for the most part, while the American President has to
tackle not only Jewish power and influence, he has a country full of Chinese, Arabs, East Indians, Africans,
Hispanics of all sorts, just your common everyday African American with a chip on his shoulder the size of a
boulder, and all other assorted groups of malcontents demanding handouts while at the same time cursing our
nation and thinking Whitey owes them something for nothing.
Jan 20, 2017 Here's how much debt the US government added under President Obama
Based on quarterly data released by the US Treasury, the debt at the end of 2008 – just before Obama took
office – stood at roughly $10,699,805,000,000. As of the third quarter of 2016, the most recent data available,
the debt as Obama is set to leave office stood at $19,573,445,000,000.
@Trinity
The USA will thrive like never before after doing two simple things:
3 measly little hikes to the federal
funds rate and remove all the foreigners and the spawn of the foreigners.
The Pewitt presidential administration shall order the privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank to raise
the federal funds rate from the current level below 2 percent to 6 percent and then to 10 percent and then to
20 percent. This whole series of asset bubbles the last 40 years can be traced back to 1981 when the federal
funds rate was 20 percent. Deliberate asset bubble implosions now!
Implode the asset bubbles and financially liquidate the greedy White nation wreckers born before 1965.
Young White Core Americans must be free of the DEBT BOMB MILLSTONE destroying their future and their
country.
The Pewitt presidential administration shall order the Fed to begin contracting the Fed's balance sheet and
there will be a complete halt to dollar swaps and liquidity injections and all the other monetary extremism
crud that keeps the asset bubbles in stocks and bonds and real estate inflated.
The Pewitt presidential administration shall order the immediate implementation of an immigration moratorium
and will begin the immediate deportation of all 30 million illegal alien invaders in the USA. All foreigners
and their spawn shall be immediately removed from the USA and the members of the Deportation Force that puts
this policy into action will get 1 million dollars a year for their patriotic efforts.
Politics in the USA Distilled For My Fellow Americans:
DEBT and DEMOGRAPHY
Monetary Policy
Immigration Policy
The USA must get back to a population of 220 million like it was in 1978.
After Iowa, i'm unclear why anyone still thinks the DNC is interested in making any sort of meaningful change
to our system towards socialism; rest assured they are not. They blatantly committed election fraud to support
the mayor from the CIA, Pete. If he fails, they will put their full support behind Bloomberg, the very
definition of a right wing candidate. The threat to our ruling class is not Trump, its Sanders.
Trump
supports Israel, billionaires, Big Corporations, wars for Oil, Wall Street and so will the DNC candidates Pete
and Bloomberg. The rest are just wedge issues to give the masses the illusion of choice.
"... Sanders and Warren have set themselves apart from the field in having the most credible foreign policy visions and the strongest commitments to bringing our many unnecessary wars to an end. Biden remains wedded to too many outdated and unworkable policies, and just on foreign policy alone Bloomberg is running in the wrong party's primary. Buttigieg is the least formally qualified top presidential candidate on the Democratic side, and his inability or unwillingness to answer most of these questions shows that. If the moderators bother to ask them about foreign policy, the candidates will have another opportunity to address these issues in the debate tonight, and Buttigieg won't be able to get away with saying nothing. ..."
Most of the candidates' responses were predictable. Biden's North Korea policy would be
every bit as unrealistic as Trump's, but he shows even less willingness to negotiate.
Bloomberg's positions were unsurprisingly the most hawkish of the bunch. If there was an option
for using force, he was for it. All of the candidates were unfortunately in agreement with
defining Russia as an enemy.
One of the weirder questions asked the candidates whether they would consider using force to
"preempt" a nuclear or missile test by either Iran or North Korea. Only Yang and Warren said
no. It isn't clear how many of them were serious and how many were just making fun of the
absurdity of the question, but it is disturbing that most of the candidates asked about this
would entertain taking military action against another country because of a test. Maybe it
doesn't need to be said because it is so obvious, but using force to stop a nuclear or missile
test is not "preemption" in any sense of the term. A test is not an attack to be preempted, and
taking military action to prevent a test would be nothing less than an unprovoked, illegal act
of aggression. To her credit, Warren recognizes
how dangerous such an attack would be:
No. Using force against a nuclear power or high-risk adversary carries immense risk for
broader conflict. Using force when not necessary can be dangerously counterproductive. Again,
I will only use force if there is a vital national security interest at risk, a strategy with
clear and achievable objectives, and an understanding and acceptance of the long-term
costs.
In general, Warren's answers were the most substantive and careful. She not only answered
the questions that were put to her, but she gave some explanation of why she took that position
and why it was the appropriate thing to do. She correctly rejected Trump's regime change policy
in Venezuela, and acknowledged that "Trump's reckless actions have only further worsened the
suffering of the Venezuelan people." On North Korea, she remained open to continuing direct
talks with Kim Jong-un, but qualified that by saying, "I would be willing to meet with Kim if
it advances substantive negotiations, but not as a vanity project." Her negotiating position
was similarly reasonable: "A pragmatic approach to diplomacy requires give and take on both
sides, not demands that one side unilaterally disarm first." Both Warren and Sanders correctly
criticized Trump for the illegal assassination of Soleimani, and they recognized that the
president's escalation had put Americans at greater risk. When asked about taking military
action against Iran, Warren rejected the idea of a war with Iran and said the following:
I want to end America's wars in the Middle East, not start a new one with Iran. The litmus
test I will use for any military action against Iran is the same that I will use as I
consider any military action anywhere in the world. I will not send our troops into harm's
way unless there is a vital national security interest at risk, a strategy with clear and
achievable objectives, and an understanding and acceptance of the long-term costs. We will
hold ourselves to this by recommitting to a simple idea: the constitutional requirement that
Congress play a primary role in deciding to engage militarily.
The most revealing set of responses came from Pete Buttigieg in that he gave very few
responses and had remarkably little to say about his plans. He failed
to answer most of the questions he was asked. Of the 36 individual questions included in
the 11 sections, he answered only 17 by my count, and many of those were recycled clips from
previous speeches, interviews, and debate statements. Despite leaning heavily on his military
service in Afghanistan in his campaigning, he failed to answer all of the questions asked about
Afghanistan and the U.S. war there. Buttigieg's failure to respond to most of these questions
underscores the former mayor's lack of foreign policy experience and knowledge, and it shows
that after almost a year his campaign still doesn't have their foreign policy worked out.
Sanders and Warren have set themselves apart from the field in having the most credible
foreign policy visions and the strongest commitments to bringing our many unnecessary wars to
an end. Biden remains wedded to too many outdated and unworkable policies, and just on foreign
policy alone Bloomberg is running in the wrong party's primary. Buttigieg is the least formally
qualified top presidential candidate on the Democratic side, and his inability or unwillingness
to answer most of these questions shows that. If the moderators bother to ask them about
foreign policy, the candidates will have another opportunity to address these issues in the
debate tonight, and Buttigieg won't be able to get away with saying nothing.
I don't trust Warren on this, her flimsiness and pandering and propensity to outright lie
remind me too much of Romney (who speak of the devil got a backbone for once this week!).
Bernie is definitely the best bet for a softer foreign policy.
Warren is one of the most honest politicians. Check her Politifact file, she does far
better than even Bernie. Of course neither compares to Trump, his Politifact file is a
Pants on Fire dumpster fire.
The one thing, and it's only one thing, that causes you to say this is the controversy
over her ancestry. But I don't believe she lied, she was raised with the family lore that
she had native ancestry and she believed that family lore.
If I had a dollar for every white midwesterner who told me that they had Native ancenstry,
I wouldn't be typing comments on disqus, that's for sure. My personal internet comment
typer would be doing the typing for me as I dictated from my throne of mammon.
Im not even really disagreeing. Even if she was wrong, I find it wild that these attacks on
her are playing well in Trumpville, since white midwesterners (my people) falsely claiming
Native heritage is a most common genre.
My guess is that after South Carolina it will be Sanders vs. Bloomberg vs. one of the other
more mainstream Dems, either Mayor Pete, Warren (she's been tacking to the mainstream,
right on economics and "left" on wokeness) or Biden, in that order. A fall-off in funding
will knock everyone else out of the race (or a failure to move the voting needle if Steyer
is self-funding).
... Biden's fundraising has fallen off, and it is unlikely major donors are going to send
cash to a candidate who just ran fourth in Iowa and could run fourth or fifth in New
Hampshire.
...Klobuchar is now in the second tier in New Hampshire, behind Sanders and Buttigieg, but
right alongside Biden and Warren. A third-, fourth- or fifth-place finish would be near-fatal
for them all.
...As for Warren, in her battle with Sanders to emerge as the champion of the progressive
wing of the party, her third-place finish in Iowa, and her expected third-place finish in New
Hampshire, at best, would seem to settle that issue for this election.
Uncle Joe's presidential road show may be a bore and a bust, but the upcoming expose of Biden
& Son International, Inc. should provide a dumpster-load of drama and comedy all summer
long. I wonder how many special guest appearances there will be by the Kerrys, the Clintons,
the Obamas and other nice folks Joe knows from DC.
@anon
IMHO, Bloomberg is ... just one year younger than Bernie, so this is his final rodeo too.
...After the Iowa deep state operation, (it was NOT incompetence), it is clear that the
PTB will do anything, and I mean ANYTHING, to ensure that Socialist Sanders is not the
nominee. Remember, he already has a heart condition. Just sayin'.
The very part-time mayor of South Bend will soon be yesterday's news after South Carolina.
Unlike suburban whites, blacks have too much common sense to vote for a homosexual.
@follyofwar
If it ends up Bloomberg vs Trump what we've got in this country will have transmogrified
further from an oligarchy to a full blown aristocracy–certainly a
plutocracy–where only billionaires can afford to play king. That race won't be Dems vs
GOPers, as both gentlemen have posed as one before switching to the other for simple
expedience. Who will be the veep candidates? A Rockefeller and a Rothschild?
Bootyjudge is just a short, gay and white version of Obama. But he typifies a government
bureaucrat in that he's politically left wing, sexually deviant and hates normal, everyday
Americans especially if their skin is white.
The DNC knows that if Biden were to win the nomination he'll commit so many gaffes, like
burbling about corn pop, his hairy legs and enjoying kids sitting on his lap, among other
things, that Trump would have a field day on Twitter and easily win a second term.
So it's shaping up to be a contest between orange Jebulus vs. anal Pete. By the time the
presidential debates arrive both candidates will be vowing to crush white nationalism and
improve the lives of black and brown people. White people need not apply.
Nevertheless, Trump's cult like almost all white base will cheer madly for a man who
claims to represent them in words only, but almost never in deeds.
Academic historians reject anything smacking of inevitably . Instead they emphasize the
contingency of events as manifested through the inherent agency of human beings and the
countless decisions they make. On the merits, such scholars are basically correct. That said,
there was something – if not inevitable – highly probable, almost (forgive me)
deterministic about the two cataclysmic world wars of the 20th century. Both, in retrospect,
were driven, in large part, by collective – particularly Western – nations'
adherence to a series of geopolitical philosophies.
The first war – which killed perhaps nine million soldiers in the sodden trench lines
(among other long forgotten places) of Europe – began, in part, due to the continental,
and especially maritime, competition between Imperial Great Britain, and a new, rising, and
highly populous, land power, Imperial Germany. Both had pretensions to global leadership;
Britain's old and long-standing, Germany's recent and aspirational – tinged with a sense
of long-denied deservedness. Political and military leaders on both sides – along with
other European (and the Japanese) nations – then pledged philosophical fealty to the
theories
of an American Navy man, Alfred Thayer Mahan. To simplify, Mahan's core postulation –
published from a series of lectures as The Influence of Sea Power Upon History – was that
geopolitical power in the next (20th) century would be inherently maritime. The countries that
maintained large, modern navies, held strategic coaling stations, and expanded their coastal,
formal empires, would dominate trade, develop the strongest economies, and, hence, were apt to
global paramountcy. Conversely, traditional land power – mass armies prepared to march
across vast land masses – would become increasingly irrelevant.
Mahan's inherently flawed, or at least exaggerated, conclusions – and his own clear
institutional (U.S. Navy) bias – aside, key players in two of the major powers of Europe
seemed to buy the philosophy hook-line-and-sinker. So, when Wilhelmine Germany took the
strategic decision to rapidly expand its own colonial fiefdoms (before the last patches of
brown-people-inhabited land were swallowed up) and, thereby necessarily embarked on a crash
naval buildup to challenge the British Empire's maritime supremacy, the stage was set for a
massive war. And, with most major European rivals – hopelessly hypnotized by nationalism
– locked in a wildly byzantine, bipolar alliance system, all that was needed to turn the
conflict global was a spark: enter the assassin Gavrilo Princip, a pistol, Austrian Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, and it was game
on .
The Second World War – which
caused between 50-60 million deaths – was, of course, an outgrowth of the first. It's
causes were multifaceted and complicated. Nonetheless, particularly in its European theater,
it, too, was driven by a geopolitical theorist and his hypotheses. This time the culprit was a
Briton, Halford John Mackinder. In contrast with Mahan, Mackinder postulated a land-based,
continental power theory. As such, he argued that the "pivot" of global
preeminence lay in the control of Eurasia – the "World Island" – specifically
Central Asia and Eastern Europe. These resource rich lands held veritable buried treasure for
the hegemon, and, since they lay on historical trade routes, were strategically positioned.
Should an emergent, ambitious, and increasingly populated, power – say, Nazi Germany
– need additional territory (what Hitler called " Lebensraum ") for
its race, and resources (especially oil) for its budding war machine, then it needed to seize
the strategic "heartland" of the World Island. In practice, that meant the Nazis theoretically
should, and did, shift their gaze (and planned invasion) from their outmoded Mahanian rival
across the English Channel, eastward to the Ukraine, Caucasus (with its ample oil reserves),
and Central Asia. Seeing as all three regions were then – and to lesser extent, still
– dominated by Russia, the then Soviet Union, the unprecedentedly bloody existential war
on Europe's Eastern Front appears ever more certain and explainable.
Germany lost both those wars: the first badly, the second, disastrously. Then, in a sense,
the proceeding 45-year Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union – the only two big
winners in the Second World War – may be seen as an extension or sequel to
Mackinder-driven rivalry. The problem is that after the end of – at least the first
– Cold War, Western, especially American, strategists severely
miscalculated . In their misguided triumphalism, US geopolitical theorists both provoked a
weak (but not forever so) Russia by expanding the NATO alliance far eastward, but posited
premature (and naive) theories that assumed global finance, free (American-skewed) trade, and
digital dominance were all that mattered in a "Post" Cold War world.
No one better defined this magical thinking more than the still – after having been
wrong about just about every US foreign policy decision of the last two decades –
prominent New York Times columnist , Thomas Friedman. In article after article,
and books with such catchy titles as The World is Flat , and The Lexus and the Olive Tree ,
Friedman argued, essentially, that old realist geopolitics were dead, and all that really
mattered for US hegemony was the proliferation of McDonald's franchises worldwide.
Friedman was wrong; he always is (Exhibit A: the 2003 Iraq War). Today, with a surprisingly
– at least with his prominent base – popular president, Donald J. Trump, impeached
in the House and
just acquitted by the Senate for alleged crimes misleadingly summed up as "Ukraine-gate," a
look at the
real issues at hand in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, demonstrate that, for better or
(probably) worse, the ghost of Mackinder still haunts the scene. For today, I'd argue, the
proxy battle over Ukraine between the U.S. and its allied-coup-empowered government –
which includes some neo-nazi political
and military elements – and Russian-backed separatists in the country's east, reflects a
return to the battle for Eurasian resource and geographic predominance.
Neither Russia nor the United States is wholly innocent in fueling and escalating the
ongoing Ukrainian Civil War. The difference is, that in post-Russiagate farce, chronically
(especially among mainstream Democrat) alleged Russia-threat-obsessed America, reports of
Moscow's ostensible guilt literally saturate the media space. The reporting from Washington?
Not so much.
The truth is that a generation of prominent "liberal" American, born-again Russia-hawks
– Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the whole DNC
apparatus , and the MSNBC corporate media crowd –
wielded State Department, NGO, and
economic pressure to help catalyze a pro-Western coup in Ukraine during and after 2014.
Their opportunism seemed, to them, simple, and relatively cost-free, at the time, but has
turned implacably messy in the ensuing years.
In the process, the Democrats haven't done themselves any political favors, further sullying
what's left of their reputation by – in some
cases – colluding with Ukrainians to undermine key Trump officials; and consorting
with nefarious
far-right nationalist local bigots (who may have conspired to kill protesters in the
Maidan "massacre," as a means to instigate further Western support for the coup). What's more,
while much of the conspiratorial Trump-team spin on direct, or illegal, Biden family
criminality has proven false, neither Joe nor son Hunter, are exactly "clean." The Democratic
establishment, Biden specifically, may, according to an excellent recent Guardian editorial
, have a serious "corruption problem" – no least of which involves explaining exactly why
a then sitting vice president's son, who had no serious diplomatic or energy sector experience,
was paid $50,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian gas company .
Fear not, the "Never-Trump" Republicans, and establishment Democrats seemingly intent on
drumming up a new – presumably politically profitable – Cold War have already
explanation. They've dug up the long ago discredited, but still publicly palatable,
justification that the US must be prepared to fight Russia "over there," before it has no
choice but to battle them "over here" (though its long been unclear where "here" is , or how ,
exactly, that fantasy comes to pass). First, there's the distance factor: though several
thousands of miles away from the East Coast of North America, Ukraine is in Russia's
near-abroad. After all, it was long – across many different generational
political/imperial structures – part of the Soviet Union or other Russian empires. A
large subsection of the populace, especially in the East, speaks, and considers itself, in
part, culturally, Russian.
Furthermore, the Russian threat, in 2020, is highly exaggerated. Putin is not Stalin. The
Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union; and, hell, even the Soviet (non-nuclear) military
threat and geopolitical ambitions were embellished throughout Cold War "Classic." A simple
comparative "
tale-of-the-tape " illustrates as much. Economically and demographically, Russia is
demonstrably an empirically declining power –
its economy, in fact, about the size of
Spain's.
Nor is the defense of an imposed, pro-Western, Ukrainian proxy state a vital American
national security interest worth bleeding, or risking nuclear war, over. As MIT's Barry Posen
has argued ,
"Vital interests affect the safety, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and power position of
the United States," and, "If, in the worst case, all Ukraine were to 'fall' to Russia, it would
have little impact on the security of the United States." Furthermore, as retired US Army
colonel, and president of the restraint-based Quincy Institute, Andrew Bacevich,
has advised , the best policy, if discomfiting, is to "tacitly acknowledge[e] the existence
of a Russian sphere of influence." After all, Washington would expect, actually demand, the
same acquiescence of Moscow in Mexico, Canada, or, for that matter, the entire Americas.
Unfortunately, no such restrained prudence is likely, so long as the bipartisan American
national security state continues to subscribe to some vague version of the Mackinder theory.
Quietly, except among wonky regional experts and investigative reporters on the scene, the US
has, before, but especially since the "opportunity" of the 9/11 attacks, entered full-tilt into
a competition with Russia and China for physical, economic, and resource dominance from Central
Asia to the borderlands of Eastern Europe. That's why, as a student at the Army's Command and
General Staff College in 2016-17, all us officers focused almost exclusively on planning
fictitious, but highly realistic, combat missions in the Caucasus region. It also partly
explains why the US military, after 18+ years, remains ensconced in potentially $3 trillion
resource-rich Afghanistan, which, not coincidentally, is America's one serious physical
foothold in land-locked Central Asia.
Anecdotally, but instructively, I remember well my four brief stops at the once ubiquitous
US Air Force way-station into Afghanistan – Manas Airbase – in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Off-base "liberty" – even for permanent party airmen – was rare, in part, because
the Russian military had a mirror base just across the city. What's more, the previous, earlier
stopover spot for Afghanistan – Uzbekistan – kicked out the US
military in 2005, in part, due to Russian political and economic pressure to do so.
Central Asia and East Europe are also contested spaces regarding the control of competing
– Western vs. Russian vs. Chinese – oil and natural gas
pipeline routes and trade corridors. Remember, that China's massive " One Belt
– One Road " infrastructure investment program is mostly self-serving, if sometimes
mutually beneficial . The plan means to link Chinese manufacturing to the vast consumerist
European market mainly through transportation, pipeline, diplomatic, and military connections
running through
where? You guessed it: Central Asia, the Caucasus, and on through Eastern Europe.
Like it or not, America isn't poised to win this battle, and its feeble efforts to do so in
these remarkably distant locales smacks of global hegemonic ambitions and foolhardy, mostly
risk, nearly no reward, behavior. Russia has a solid army in close proximity, a hefty nuclear
arsenal, as well as physical and historical connections to the Eurasian Heartland; China has an
even better, more balanced, military, enough nukes, and boasts a far more powerful,
spendthrift-capable, economy. As for the US, though still militarily and (for now) economically
powerful, it lacks proximity, faces difficult logistical / expeditionary challenges, and has
lost much legitimacy and squandered oodles of good will with the regional countries being vied
for. Odds are, that while war may not be inevitable, Washington's weak hand and probable
failure, nearly is.
Let us table, for the purposes of this article, questions regarding any environmental
effects of the great powers' quest for, extraction, and use of many of these regional
resources. My central points are two-fold:
first, that Ukraine – which represents an early stage in Washington's rededication
to chauvinist, Mackinder geostrategy – as a proxy state for war with Russia is not an
advisable or vital interest;
second, that Uncle Sam's larger quest to compete with the big two (Eur)Asian powers is
likely to fail and symptomatic of imperial confusion and desperation.
As the U.S. enters an increasingly bipolar phase of world affairs, powerful national
security leaders fear its diminishing power. Washington's is, like it or not, an empire in
decline; and, as we know from history, such entities behave badly on the downslope of hegemony.
Call me cynical, but I'm apt to believe that the United States, as perhaps the most powerful
imperial body of all time, is apt, and set, to act poorest of all.
The proxy fight in Ukraine, battle for Central Asia in general – to say nothing of
related American aggression and provocations in Iran and the Persian Gulf – could be the
World War III catalyst that the Evangelical militarist nuts, Vice President Pence and Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo, unwilling to wait on Jesus Christ's eschatological timeline, have long
waited for . These characters seemingly possess the heretical temerity to believe man
– white American men, to be exact – can and should incite or stimulate Armageddon
and the Rapture.
If they're proved "right" or have their way – and the Mikes just might – then
nuclear cataclysm will have defied the Vegas odds and beat the house on the expected human
extinction
timeline. Only contra to the bloody prophecy set forth in the New Testament book of
Revelations, it won't be Jesus wielding his vengeful sword on the back of a white horse, but
– tragic and absurdly – the perfect Antichrist stooge, pressing the red button, who
does the apocalyptic deed .
* * *
Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com . His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation,
Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat
tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma
mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War,
Ghostriders of
Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . His forthcoming book,
Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War , is available for preorder on Amazon.
Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet . Check out his professional website for contact info, scheduling speeches,
and/or access to the full corpus of his writing and media appearances.
"it won't be Jesus wielding his vengeful sword on the back of a white horse, but –
tragic and absurdly – the perfect Antichrist stooge, pressing the red button, who does
the apocalyptic deed .'
The World is full of people who would like to be the one who pushes that button, no matter
what happens!
There is an hint of Samson Option, which basically says; If I can't have it all, then none
shall have anything! Don't blame anyone it is just the nature of man, probably both sides
believe in this! Who will wiling submit to slavery?
Europe will become free when the last armed American occupier leaves the European
continent. This axiom is also valid for Japan, South Korea and other countries.
Space and the moon is the latest theory for how to acheive empire and defend yourself from
empire.
Well defended soverignty that is helpful and useful to other sovereign trading partners in
a diverse mutipolar world of sovereigns, not so much as yet. Switzerland is kind of that and
Russia looks like they're working on it.
China aspires to empire and America aspires not to lose theirs and is taking instructions
from Israel on how to do that.
Melchizedek gave Abraham these seven laws of how to get along. Empire ambitious nations
have trouble with numbers 3, 4 and 5.
93:4.7 (1017.9) 1. You shall not serve any God but the Most High Creator of heaven and
earth.
93:4.8 (1017.10) 2. You shall not doubt that faith is the only requirement for eternal
salvation.
93:4.9 (1017.11) 3. You shall not bear false witness.
93:4.10 (1017.12) 4. You shall not kill.
93:4.11 (1017.13) 5. You shall not steal.
93:4.12 (1018.1) 6. You shall not commit adultery.
93:4.13 (1018.2) 7. You shall not show disrespect for your parents and elders.
When China and Russia abandon the dollar, all that's left for the Empire is Canada and
South America, and they've never been able to stop themselves making a mess of everywhere
south of the fence.
Pretty good article and summation of what America has become and what to expect. America
has sure lost a lot of ground since the 1990's. It's really hard to see America winning at
anything these days.
When the "strategists" were penning their hegemonic theories, they woefully failed to
peruse history properly, especially that of human nature put on existential defense..
Either they were not human, or stunted development humans for were they properly developed
humans, they'd have understood eventual reaction to unprovoked aggression..
Such responses often tend to be totally destructive, especially after long suffering from
aggression..
Now, regarding the BRI/OBOR, we've been saying to the West, if they think it's not good
enough, what inputs, devoid of coercion, rapine, aggression, or deceit, they'd suggest to
improve it..
And it was crickets for a while, until Germany woke up, and decided with Europe that
they'd contribute trade diplomacy..
We're still waiting for that of America under the current Admin, and all we observe is
bullying, coercion, and reality denial..
Until a Bernard Sanders seized the initiative, that with a continously finessed Green New
Deal, the United States of America will lead in the environmental aspect of global trade and
commerce, which the EU has also committed to doing as well..
So then Major, perhaps the time has finally arrived for America to eschew aggression and
imperialism, in favor of the erstwhile business of America.. Trade and Commerce..
So for those who desire swamp drained, and a fresh start for America, you might wanna go
chat with, and support Bernard Sanders, the future, and Us..
Then dump the swamp critters and their current admin enabler..
But as in all things, we can only show you the way.. Traveling on it however, is your
sovereign prerogative..
The author still tends to think that it is all because of missteps, mistakes, ignorance,
incompetence, stupidity....
If you step back from the fray.....and don't get caught up in red/blue team nonsense, it
becomes apparent that there is a theme/strategy that is being played out. It appears to be
conducted in evolutionary phases with Wars allowing larger and more overt advances in their
agenda. Simply put order out of chaos.
We are now about to be manipulated into another major evolutionary phase to advance the
globalist agenda. All the conditions are set for their next major order out of
chaos...scheme. It is pretty obvious that Nationalism/Populism will be the scapegoat for the
cause of the chaos to come. The US will take center stage as an example that you cannot trust
a single country (uni-polar world) not to abuse its power....and history has shown a
multi-polar situation leads to major wars...creating chaos around the world.
Their answer will be global governance and their dream of a global feudalistic utopia will
be well on its way to being realized. Hold on, we are about to enter a global "great leap
forward"...
The unexpected alliance between Turkey and Libya is a geopolitical earthquake that changes
the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean and across the Middle East.
Turkey's audacious move has enraged its rivals in the region and cleared the way for a
dramatic escalation in the 9 year-long Libyan civil war. It has also forced leaders in Europe
and Washington to decide how they will counter Turkey's plan to defend the U.N-recognized
Government of National Accord (GNA) , and to extend its maritime borders from Europe to Africa
basically creating "a water corridor through the eastern Mediterranean linking the coasts of
Turkey and Libya."
Leaders in Ankara believe that the agreement "is a major coup in energy geopolitics" that
helps defend Turkey's "sovereign rights against the gatekeepers of the regional status quo."
But Turkey's rivals strongly disagree. They see the deal as a naked power grab that undermines
their ability to transport natural gas from the East Mediterranean to Europe without crossing
Turkish waters. In any event, the Turkey-Libya agreement has set the stage for a broader
conflict that will unavoidably involve Egypt, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Russia and the
United States. All parties appear to have abandoned diplomatic channels altogether and are,
instead, preparing for war.
On November 27, Turkey and Libya signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that commits
Turkey to providing military assistance to Libya's Government of National Accord (GNA). The MoU
also redraws Turkey's maritime boundaries in a way that dramatically impacts the transport of
gas from the East Mediterranean to Europe. Israel is particularly worried that this new deal
will undermine its plans for a 1,900-kilometer EastMed pipeline connecting the Leviathan gas
field, off the coast of Israel, to the EU. YNET News summarized Israel's concerns in an
ominously titled article: "Turkey's maneuver could block Israel's access to the sea". Here's an
excerpt:
"Two of Israel's wars (1956 Sinai campaign and 1967 Six-Day War) broke out over navigation
rights. Israel must take note of a new reality taking hold in the Mediterranean. It must
regard Turkey's actions as a substantial strategic threat and consider what it may do to
respond to it
This EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zones) designation essentially carved up much of the
energy-rich Eastern Mediterranean between Turkey and Libya, prompting a wave of international
condemnations first and foremost from Greece, Egypt, and Cyprus, who may be directly or
indirectly affected ..Turkey's disregard for the economic waters of Greece, Cyprus, and
Egypt.
Ankara is in effect annexing those areas pending an appeal to international tribunals,
which can take many years to resolve. In practical terms, Turkey created a sea border the
width of the entire Mediterranean ." ( "Turkey's maneuver could block Israel's access
to the sea" , ynet news )
The analysis from America's premier Foreign Policy magazine was no less foreboding. Check it
out:
"Turkey is meshing together two Mediterranean crises in a desperate bid to reshape the
region in its own favor, with potentially nasty implications both for the ongoing civil war
in Libya and future energy development in the eastern Mediterranean.
This month, Turkey's unusual outreach to the internationally recognized government of
Libya has resulted in a formal agreement for Ankara to provide military support, including
arms and possibly troops, in its bid to hold off an offensive from Russian-backed rebels in
the eastern part of the country. The military agreement came just weeks after Turkey and that
same Government of National Accord reached an unusual agreement to essentially carve up much
of the energy-rich eastern Mediterranean between them -- threatening to cut out Greece and
Cyprus from the coming bonanza ." ("Newly Aggressive Turkey Forges Alliance With Libya",
Foreign Policy )
While these new developments are likely to intensify the fighting on the ground in Libya,
they also portend a deepening of divisions within the region itself where new coalitions are
forming and battle-lines are being drawn. On the one side is the Turkey-Libya Axis, while on
the other is Greece, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, France, Germany, UK and probably the
United States although the Trump administration has not yet clarified its position. In any
event, the war between Libya's internationally-recognized government and Haftar's Libyan
National Army (LNA) is just a small part of a much larger struggle over vital hydrocarbons in a
strategically-located area of the Mediterranean. Here's a clip from an article at War On The
Rocks that helps to underscore the stakes involved:
"The discovery of significant deposits of natural gas in the Eastern Mediterranean
beginning in 2009 was a game-changer that upended regional geopolitics. It prompted new and
unexpected alliances between Israel, Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt to maximize their chances of
energy self-sufficiency. The bulk of the gas lies in Egypt's Zohr field, the Leviathan and
Tamar fields in Israeli waters, and the Aphrodite near the island of Cyprus. With recoverable
natural gas reserves in the region estimated at upward of 120 trillion cubic feet, the
strategic implications could not be bigge r. This is about the same amount as the proven gas
in the whole of Iraq, the 12th largest reserve globally .(Israel's gas field) Leviathan is
estimated to hold 22 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, and a potential half a
million barrels of oil." ("Hydrocarbon Diplomacy: Turkey's Gambit Might Yet Pay a Peace
Dividend", warontherocks.com)
Turkey's ambitious gambit makes it more likely that its rivals will increase their support
for the Libyan warlord, Haftar, who is, by-most-accounts, a CIA asset that was sent to Libya
in 2014 to topple the government in Tripoli and unify the country under a US puppet. Haftar's
forces currently control more than 70% of the Libyan territory while almost 60% of the
population is under the control of the GNA led by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj. According
to Turkish news: "More than half of Haftar's troops are mercenaries from Russia and Sudan,
who are mainly paid by the Gulf states."
In April, 2019, Haftar launched an offensive on the government in Tripoli but was easily
repelled. In recent days, however, Haftar has resumed his attacks on the city of Misrata and on
the Tripoli airport in clear violation of the Berlin ceasefire agreement. He has also received
shipments of weapons from the UAE despite an arms embargo that was unanimously approved two
weeks ago at the same Berlin Conference. We expect that support for Haftar will continue to
grow in the months ahead as Berlin, Paris and particularly Washington settle on a plan for
reinforcing proxies to prosecute the ground war and for blunting Turkey's power projection in
the Mediterranean.
The Turkey-Libya agreement is a clumsy attempt to impose Turkey's preferred maritime
boundaries on the other countries bordering the Mediterranean. Naturally, Washington will not
allow this unilateral assertion of power to go unchallenged.
And while Washington's strategy has not yet been announced, that merely indicates that the
foreign policy establishment was caught off-guard by Turkey's November 27 announcement . It
does not mean that Washington will accept the status quo. To the contrary, US war-planners are
undoubtedly putting the finishing touches on a new strategy aimed at achieving their objectives
in Libya while at the same time dealing a stinging blow to a NATO ally that has grown closer to
Russia, caused endless headaches in Syria, and is now disrupting Washington's plans for
controlling vital resources in the East Mediterranean.
Washington sees Turkey's assertive foreign policy as a sign of "defiance" which requires a
iron-fisted response. But any attack on Turkey or Turkish interests will only intensify the bad
blood between Ankara and Washington, it will only put more pressure on the threadbare NATO
alliance, and it will only push Turkish president Erdogan further into Moscow's corner. Indeed,
the Trump team should realize that an overreaction on their part could trigger a fateful
realignment that could reshape the region while hastening the emergence of a new order.
Yes pft, the favored candidate of the DNC is clearly Trump.
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Feb 6 2020 19:25 utc | 58
Only if the ungrateful commoners who identify as Democrats or moderates can't be brought to
heel and give their full throated support for the DNC's favoured Cookie Cutter candidate who
might as well be one of those dolls with a string and a recording you hear when you pull the
string.
Then yes, they would prefer 'fore moar years!!' of the Ugliest American ever to be
installed as President of the United States.
One of things I respect about Tulsi Gabbard is she ain't no Doll with a string attached.
When she made the comment about cleaning out the rot in the Democratic Party, she left no
doubt her intent and goals. And to take on hillary, the Red Queen to boot, why that was
simply delicious.
Alas, the View, the DNC, it's web of evil rich and the media will never forgive her for
Soldiering for her Country.
"... The thoughtless people who constructed " globalism " overlooked that interdependence is dangerous and can have massive unintended consequences . With or without an epidemic, supplies can be cut off for a number of reasons. For example, strikes, political instability, natural catastrophes, sanctions and other hostilities such as wars, and so forth. Clearly, these dangers to the system are not justified by the lower labor cost and consequent capital gains to shareholders and bonuses to corporate executives. Only the one percent benefits from globalism. ..."
"... Globalism was constructed by people motivated by short-term greed. None of the promises of globalism have been delivered. Globalism is a massive mistake. Yet, almost everywhere political leaders and economists are protective of globalism. So much for human intelligence. ..."
If the coronavirus proves to be serious, as it does not appear to be at the present time,
many economies could be adversely affected. China is the source of many parts supplied to
producers in other countries, and China is the source of the finished products of many US firms
such as Apple. If shipments cannot be made, sales and production outside of China are affected.
Without revenues, employees cannot be paid. Unlike the financial crisis of 2008, this would be
an unemployment crisis and bankruptcy of large manufacturing and marketing corporations.
This is the danger to which globalism makes us vulnerable. If US corporations produced in
the US the products that they market in the US and the world, an epidemic in China would affect
only their Chinese sales, not threaten the companies' revenues.
The thoughtless people who constructed " globalism " overlooked that interdependence is
dangerous and can have massive unintended consequences . With or without an epidemic, supplies
can be cut off for a number of reasons. For example, strikes, political instability, natural
catastrophes, sanctions and other hostilities such as wars, and so forth. Clearly, these
dangers to the system are not justified by the lower labor cost and consequent capital gains to
shareholders and bonuses to corporate executives. Only the one percent benefits from
globalism.
Globalism was constructed by people motivated by short-term greed. None of the promises
of globalism have been delivered. Globalism is a massive mistake. Yet, almost everywhere
political leaders and economists are protective of globalism. So much for human
intelligence.
At this point of time, it is difficult to understand the hysteria over coronavirus and
predictions of global pandemic. In China there are about 24,000 infections and 500 deaths in a
population of 1.3 billion people. This is an inconsequential illness. Compared to the ordinary
seasonal flu that infects millions of people worldwide and kills 600,000, the coronavirus so
far amounts to nothing. Infections outside of China are miniscule and appear to be limited to
Chinese people. It is difficult to know for certain, because of the reluctance to identify
people by race.
Perhaps the coronavirus is just warming up and much worse is to come. If so, world Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) will take a hit. Quarantines prevent work. Finished products and parts
cannot be made and shipped. Sales cannot take place without products to sell. Without revenues
companies cannot pay employees and other expenses. Incomes decline across the world. Companies
go bankrupt.
You can take it from here.
If a deadly coronavirus pandemic or some other one does erupt and there is a world
depression, we should be very clear in our mind that globalism was the cause. Countries whose
governments are so thoughtless or corrupt as to make their populations vulnerable to disruptive
events abroad are medically, economically, socially, and politically unstable.
The consequence of globalism is world instability.
It makes sense for rich countries elites to leverage poor backwards shithole countries to
manufacture the things they need because the elites then don't have to worry about anyone but
themselves. Globalism is wonder as it bypasses all that crazy western nonsense like jobs and
wages and society and hope and such.
Globalism is nothing more than the major central banks finding ways to dump off their
inflation which is the deflation of an ever increasing number countries which the major cb's
used to deflate their currencies. The older the cb you are the worse off yo are. From a since
A.D. perspective only the Sterling is what you have to worry. From my last fiat currency
perspective its the Venisthaler that is un doing everything.
To get more zero's you have to add more nine's. They can not be added as nausem like
people think zero's are. The compensation pool has been shrinking for centuries on end now.
Globalism is an attempt to keep the pool growing at all cost which results relentless asset
appreciation. We are out of nine's. The end result of that is hyper deflation for the man and
hyper reflation for the people. Easily provable at a store named Vons owned by the treasury
retired.
That ladies and gents is your simplified street fed explanation. I am not trying to even
remotely write out the longer technical version.
Having said that meet me at what is known as the small walmart around here, which is the
home of what does MU do, what does MU do at walmart it never gets old fame for a real life
walk thru of what globalism is and looks like. We will then progress to the "Big Walmart" not
even a mile away and I will show you what an out of control system looks like.
So we are clear of what I just said. I live in the only place in the world where when a
tourist ask you where Wal Mart is, you get your choice of size. Whats the difference you
ask??? The small Wal Mart has one main entrance, the big one has three. The lady almost
smacked the **** out of the guy I got that from when she asked what the difference was. The
hand came up. You really had to be there.
Regional trade blocks with relatively balanced resource and production capabilities make
more sense. Globalisation just lead to one country seeking to 'DOMINATE' in every sphere of
global activity, raising the threats of economic and military conflict, as clearly
demonstrated and this with the aim of global enslavement to multinational corporations, the
aim of Globalism, really sick psychopathic stuff.
Regional trade blocks relatively balanced for resource and production, provide stability
within each block and lesson competition for outside resource and commercial competitiveness,
and represents a far more long term stable structure.
Within each trade block, as it is economic rather than socio-political the original
identities of each distinct region can be preserved for the long term, so that future
generations can enjoy and share in the different cultures. Race ******** is race ********,
there is only one race and all of it's people are free to share in which ever culture they
choose or combinations there of. Whether you get to move to those regions and enjoy those
cultures will be done to your personal worth, character and ability to contribute to those
societies, just the way it will be.
Some economic blocks will be far more preferable to others and will attract higher worth
individuals (character and ability to contribute to society), the least and most desirable
will become more so as higher worth individuals move to the most preferable away from the
least preferable and make the most preferable more preferable by their active presence.
I would tip the Japan Australia one to be the most preferable for this century, the next
hard to tell (there are real deep problems in the Americas caused by the USA, the EU had an
bad immigrant problem as in they let in too many bad unvetted immigrants, Africa will be what
Africa will be corrupt and Russia China it depends upon how quickly the modernise and
socially advance, the middle of the middles south east to mid east it depends how long it
takes them to come together and religion is a real problem for them).
I've been wondering if this might be some kind of Globalist Drill. It doesn't make sense,
although there is always the potential it could become worse than it is.
I thought so, too. Strangely enough, Wuhan Chinese are now repatriated from Bali back to
Wuhan?!
Instability is a necessary condition to get more conflicts and then wars going. Weapons
production must be kept up; peace and stability would make make weapons production an
expensive hobby.
"... By Paul Adler, Professor of Management and Organization, Sociology and Environmental Studies, University of Southern California. Originally published at The Conversation ..."
Yves here. I wish Sanders would use even more pointed
messaging, like "socialism for the rich". But for those who complain about Sanders not going
after important targets, this slap back at Dimon, who criticized Sanders and socialism at
Davos, shows that the Vermont Senator is landing punches, but choosing his fights carefully.
And banks are much bigger welfare queens than the public realizes. They get all sorts of
subsidies, from underpriced deposit insurance to Federal guaranteed for most home mortgages to
the Fed operating and backstopping the essential Fedwire system. These subsidies are so great
that banks should not be considered to be private sector entities, yet we let them privatize
their profits and socialize their train wrecks.
As we wrote in 2010 :
More support comes from Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England, who in a March 2010 paper compared the banking
industry to the auto industry, in that they both produced pollutants: for cars, exhaust
fumes; for bank, systemic risk. While economists were claiming that the losses to the US
government on various rescues would be $100 billion (ahem, must have left out Freddie and
Fannie in that tally), it ignores the broader costs (unemployment, business failures, reduced
government services, particularly at the state and municipal level). His calculation of the
world wide costs:
.these losses are multiples of the static costs, lying anywhere between one and five
times annual GDP. Put in money terms, that is an output loss equivalent to between $60
trillion and $200 trillion for the world economy and between £1.8 trillion and
£7.4 trillion for the UK. As Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman observed,
to call these numbers "astronomical" would be to do astronomy a disservice: there are only
hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy. "Economical" might be a better
description.
It is clear that banks would not have deep enough pockets to foot this bill. Assuming
that a crisis occurs every 20 years, the systemic levy needed to recoup these crisis costs
would be in excess of $1.5 trillion per year. The total market capitalisation of the
largest global banks is currently only around $1.2 trillion. Fully internalising the output
costs of financial crises would risk putting banks on the same trajectory as the dinosaurs,
with the levy playing the role of the meteorite.
Yves here. So a banking industry that creates global crises is negative value added from a
societal standpoint. It is purely extractive . Even though we have described its
activities as looting (as in paying themselves so much that they bankrupt the business), the
wider consequences are vastly worse than in textbook looting.
Back to the current post. As to JP Morgan's socialism versus the old USSR's planned economy,
one recent study which I cannot readily find due to the sorry state of Google offered an
important correction to conventional wisdom.
Recall that Soviet Russia initially did perform extremely well, freaking out the capitalist
world by industrializing in a generation. There was ample hand-wringing as to whether a less
disciplined free enterprise system could compete with a command and control economy. Economists
got a seat at the policy table out of the concern that capitalist economies needed expert
guidance to assure that they could produce both guns and butter.
The study concluded that central planning had worked well in Soviet Russia initially, until
the lower-level apparatchiks started gaming the system by feeding bad information so as to make
their performance look better (for instance, setting way too forgiving production targets, or
demanding more resources than they needed). The paper contended that the increasingly poor
information about what was actually happening on the ground considerably undermined the central
planning process. That is not to say there weren't also likely problems with motivation and
overly rigid bureaucracies. But the evolution of modern corporations, of devaluing and ignoring
worker input and treating them like machines that are scored against narrow metrics, looks as
demotivating as the stereotypical Soviet factory.
Finally, this post conflates socialism, which includes New Deal-ish European style social
democracy, with capitalist systems alongside strong social safety nets, which the public
ownership and provision of goods and services. It should be noted that public ownership has
regularly provided services like utilities very effectively.
By Paul Adler, Professor of Management and Organization, Sociology and Environmental
Studies, University of Southern California. Originally published at
The Conversation
With his Dimon ad, Sanders is referring specifically to the bailouts JPMorgan
and other banks took from the government during the 2008 financial crisis. But accepting
government bailouts and corporate welfare is not the only way I believe American companies
behave like closet socialists despite their professed love of free markets.
In reality, most big U.S.
companies operate internally in ways Karl Marx would applaud as remarkably close to
socialist-style central planning. Not only that, corporate America has arguably become a
laboratory of innovation in socialist governance, as I show in
my own research .
Closet Socialists
In public, CEOs like
Dimon attack socialist planning while defending free markets.
But inside JPMorgan and most other big corporations, market competition is subordinated to
planning. These big companies often contain dozens of business units and sometimes thousands.
Instead of letting these units compete among themselves, CEOs typically direct a strategic
planning process to ensure they cooperate to achieve the best outcomes for the corporation
as
a whole .
This is just how a socialist economy is intended to operate. The government would conduct
economy-wide planning and set goals for each industry and enterprise, aiming to achieve the
best outcome for society as a whole.
And just as companies rely internally on planned cooperation to meet goals and overcome
challenges, the U.S. economy could use this harmony to overcome the existential crisis of our
age – climate change. It's a challenge so massive and urgent that it will require
every part of the economy to work together with government in order to address it.
Overcoming Socialism's Past Problems
But, of course, socialism doesn't have a good track record.
One of the reasons socialist planning failed in the old Soviet Union, for example, was that
it was so top-down
that it lacked the kind of popular legitimacy that democracy grants a government. As a result,
bureaucrats overseeing the planning process could not get reliable information about the real
opportunities and challenges experienced by enterprises or citizens.
Moreover, enterprises had little incentive to strive to meet their assigned objectives,
especially when they had so little involvement in formulating them.
A second reason the USSR didn't survive was that its authoritarian system
failed to motivate either workers or entrepreneurs. As a result, even though the government
funded basic science generously, Soviet industry was a laggard in
innovation .
Ironically, corporations – those singular products of capitalism – are showing
how these and other problems of socialist planning can be surmounted.
Take the problem of democratic legitimacy. Some companies, such as
General Electric , Kaiser Permanente
and General Motors ,
have developed innovative ways to avoid the dysfunctions of autocratic planning by using
techniques that enable
lower-level personnel to participate actively in the strategy process.
Although profit pressures often force top managers to short-circuit the promised
participation, when successfully integrated it not only provides top management with more
reliable bottom-up
input for strategic planning but also makes all employees more reliable partners in carrying it out.
So here we have centralization – not in the more familiar, autocratic model, but
rather in a form I call "participative centralization." In a socialist system, this approach
could be adopted, adapted and scaled up to support economy-wide planning, ensuring that it was
both democratic and effective.
As for motivating innovation, America's big businesses face a challenge similar to that of
socialism. They need employees to be collectivist, so they willingly comply with policies and
procedures. But they need them to be simultaneously individualistic, to fuel divergent thinking
and creativity.
One common solution in much of corporate America, as in the old Soviet Union, is to
specialize those roles ,
with most people relegated to routine tasks while the privileged few work on innovation tasks.
That approach, however, overlooks the creative capacities of the vast majority and leads
to widespread employee disengagement and sub-par business performance.
Smarter businesses have found ways to overcome this dilemma by creating cultures and reward
systems that support a synthesis of individualism and collectivism that I call "interdependent
individualism." In my research, I have found this kind of motivation in settings as diverse as
Kaiser Permanent
physicians , assembly-line workers at Toyota's NUMMI
plant and software
developers at Computer Sciences Corp . These companies do this, in part, by rewarding both
individual contributions to the organization's goals as well as collaboration in achieving
them.
While socialists have often recoiled
against the idea individual performance-based rewards, these more sophisticated policies could
be scaled up to the entire economy to help meet socialism's innovation and motivation
challenge.
Big Problems Require Big Government
The idea of such a socialist transformation in the U.S. may seem remote today.
But this can change, particularly as more Americans, especially young ones,
embrace socialism . One reason they are doing so is because the current capitalist system
has so manifestly failed to deal with climate change.
Looking inside these companies suggests a better way forward – and hope for society's
ability to avert catastrophe.
Just to add, as a former bank and buy side lobbyist, the industry is not always opposed to
regulation. It's a barrier to entry.
This post is on the money. Banksters and their clients love corporate welfare and
socialism for the rich, especially when so much of, for example, UK QE "leaked" into asset
bubbles in emerging markets, commodities and real estate.
You are right to say that Sanders should use more pointed language. Like Nina Turner, he
should call out oligarchs. That term is used for Russians and Ukrainians, but never for the
likes of Zuckerberg, Musk, Dimon, Blankfein, Schmidt, Branson, Dyson, Arnault et al. The term
regime should also be used. If it's good enough to delegitimise certain governments, it's
good enough to describe the Trump and Johnson administrations. After all, William Hague in
talks with the US government called the British government the Brown regime.
Feynman and Haldane are mentioned above. It emerged this week that Dominic Cummings,
Johnson's main adviser, is an admirer of both, regarding them as free thinkers and
technicians of substance, and championed Haldane's candidacy to be Bank of England governor.
Johnson sided with Chancellor Sajid Javid.
Sanders should use more pointed language or may be not for the moment. May be after the
Super Tuesday. He is being careful and that is good IMO. He doesn't want to give excuses for
easy attacks. I would say, instead of "socialism for the rich", "socialism for the 1%" or the
0,1% even better. Sounds more neutral. A comment yesterday linked an article comparing
Sanders with Gandhi and others and I think it was well pointed. The quiet and careful
revolution!
Sanders understands (as does Trump), that the 2020 battle is *not* for the 35-40% whose
minds are basically made up at each end. Trying to win those over in any numbers (especially
by shrieking invective at them) is a pathetic waste of time and effort.
The winning message must move the 20-30% of voters who either:
(a) voted Obama (hope, for something more than soothing patter) and then Trump (a giant
stubby middle finger to the establishment).
(b) voted Obama in 2008 but have stayed at home since (what's the point? they're all lying
scum)
Sanders simply doesn't bring socialism to America, because he doesn't have a New Deal
(i.e. SocDem) party. That kind of movement will take time (and the upcoming global
climatolo-economic crisis) to build up, under savage attack from the propertied unterests and
continuously subverted by credentialed PMC weasels and Idpol misleadership grifters.
This last is vitally important, but must also be approached prudently lest the entire
movement lose focus, overextend and fall prey to the next Trump .
IMHO, it must focus ruthlessly on delivering:
(a) single payer health care, to starve (if not incinerate) the bloated ticks gorging on
the US health/elder 'care' . cesspool, I can't bring myself to call it a 'system'. This above
all: without it, Americans simply can't compete in any world, walls and tariffs or not.
(b) *real* infrastructure, for the 80%. That's water and sewerage, cross-class public
housing, and busways and light rail to coax Americans out of their cars and suburbs. It's not
5G, vanity EVs and high speed Acelas. And sorry Keynesians, shovel ready is a side benefit,
not the primary purpose. There's a lot to do.
(c) an overhaul of American higher education (still rooted in 17th century divinity
schools). Teaching (and medicine) must again become honored occupations in the country;
administrators must give way to front line practitioners.
. Only then can Bernie move on to the more deeply embedded and multinational targets:
(a) big finance,
(b) extractive industries
(c) the MIC
These behemoths can really only be attacked during a time of crisis. Or they will simply
crush their opponents like insects, or buy them off.
In the case of the MIC, Berniecrats will likely need to be content with strong reassertion
of Federal oversight (more stick, less carrot), and disengagement from doing our 'allies'
dirty work (Trump is already on that road, with one huge Ixception .)
Total dismantlement sounds very nice, but consider: whatever's left of US industrial power
is concentrated in the MIC. America doesn't need to 'buy prosperity down at the armoury', but
like FDR, Bernie and (Tulsi) will also need to have the keels laid down against whatever
whirlwind we have reaped. Baring our breast and saying 'we deserve destruction for our sins'
is a fatuous open invitation to fascism. FDR knew better.
Paul Adler's post here reminds me of John Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State, except
Professor Adler was referring to the financial (i.e. parasitical) sector of the economy. Am I
off the mark in thinking this?
You're right on. Galbraith showed that planning comes naturally from very large projects.
Soviets went to planning because they couldn't bet the entire national economy on some gut
feeling -- they needed to know what would happen. Ditto the gigantic industries in what JKG
called the Planning Sector in the west. Projects spending millions or billions of dollars
over many years couldn't be left to chance. Eliminating chance meant imposing control, which
the gigantic industries could try to do, helped by their access to gigantic capital, and
which the Soviets had done with State power.
IMHO the modern FIRE sector arose from the old Planning Sector. They eliminated the
uncertainties that complicated their planning; they cut their ties with physical processes
that brought those uncertainties; they dumped physical industries onto throwaway economies
overseas (that could be abandoned if they failed); they finally became pure businesses that
dealt only with nice, clean contracts. No muss, no fuss, no bother.
So planning is a tool of any organization, yet is required more the larger it becomes?
While planning may make sense for a company with a single product such as automobiles, does
it make sense for a conglomerate? I mean I think the purpose of a conglomerate is to contain
many diverse product sectors to reduce risk of the conglomerate as a whole to any one sector.
In that way each sector does its own planning, but the conglomerate as a whole does not,
apart from choosing which companies to buy and sell, which can be considered a different type
of planning? In that way are the goals of society planning are different from the goals of
conglomerate planning or that of smaller single product sector companies? Yet in spite of
these differences the techniques of planning are the same? Is that the main point of Alder's
article? Can someone explain please.
If you surf around a bit you can find links to Bernie's views and support of worker
co-ops. There is nothing on his website. In light the burgeoning Socialist smear tsunami, it
is probably not something he wants to emphasize right now. Imagine someone getting up at a
CNN Town Hall and asking him about his attitude towards worker cooperatives. (corporate heads
explode on golf-courses all over America)
Modern theses about leadership, expertise and management underline agile learning and self
leadership to everyone himself and within team and then within larger entities. While I'm
somewhat pessimistic about these corporate trends they still look like they would work much
better with worker co-ops than in traditional top down owned corporations. Basically they are
asking higher dedication from workers, but this only works really well if the profits are
shared with workers in somewhat equitable manner in my opinion.
Also it seems common nowadays that many coding/programming companies, especially the
highly productive ones seem to act more akin to co-ops than monolithically led traditional
companies. The programmers are often engaged more to the company by giving or selling them
shares, and if this happens in large scale the company ownership structure can skew more
towards worker owned 'co-op'-like entity than more hierarchical traditional company, where
owners and workers are usually clearly separated.
Be nice if one could have posted the Forbes 400 but, listed next to each entry, is the
amount of money that they receive from the Federal government both directly and
indirectly.
Yves here. So a banking industry that creates global crises is negative value added
from a societal standpoint. It is purely extractive. [bold in the original]
Which leads to this obvious question: Why should banks be privileged, explicitly or
implicitly, in any way then?
E.g. why should we have only a SINGLE payment system (besides grubby physical fiat, paper
bills and coins) that recklessly combines what should be inherently risk-free deposits with
the inherently at-risk deposits the banks themselves create? I.e. why should a government
privileged usury cartel hold the entire economy hostage?
If you mean "why" in the moral sense, which I believe you do, there is no answer.
If you mean why in the technical sense, examine this sentence:
>why should a government privileged usury cartel
It's not "government privileged", it owns the government. Anything the government is
allowed to do outside of making Jamie Dimon et al richer are considered the actual privileges
by this group, and can, will and have been retracted at will.
If the banks cognitively "own" the government, it's because almost everyone believes TINA
to government privileges for them.
This is disgracefully true of the big names of MMT, who should be working on HOW to
abolish those privileges, not ignore or, in the case of Warren Mosler at least, INCREASE*
them.
*e.g. unlimited, unsecured loans from the Central Bank to banks at ZERO percent.
That neither extreme, capitalism or socialism, works, and that what is best for human
society is some middle ground between the two is a very important message. So I'm very glad
for this post. I realize that a black and white way of perceiving the world is an easy one.
Yet as Alder points out, humans are both individuals and social beings. If people in this
world could get back to thinking more like Ancient Greece in its appreciation for the golden
mean, we would have a much better chance of surviving. Dispensing with all these useless
socialism vs capitalism discussions would be a great time saver. I realize most people
believe in some middle ground, yet making it explicit would simplify things quite a bit. As
for the rest of the article, I need to think about it more. The corporate socialism idea does
tie in with the link yesterday about limited liability.
>That neither extreme, capitalism or socialism, works,
Exactly! Because: There. Is. No. Economic. Equilibrium. Never was, never will be, anywhere
and everywhere. Heck for billions of years, before humans existed let alone learned to talk,
the world changed. Things developed, other things went extinct (although not in the
heart-wrenching way of the Anthropocene, I personally am happy never to have met a T. Rex in
truth), the way the world works even without us is continual change.
So adjust as necessary. Our healthcare system sucks, bring full bore socialism on it. Our
corporate overlords suck, bring full bore free markets (kill patents to start) on them.
You might want to re-think the "kill patents" idea. Our Founders liked them. I just had a
patent "killed" by an examiner who "killed" 42 of 43 patents he examined. It was for a device
which could be saving Corona/Flu victims Right Now. I am going to try to Donate the idea to
Society, but preventing people from profiting from valid Novel ideas is not the solution. I
realize Corporations abuse the Patent System, like every other thing they touch. But I am a
low level individual who is trying to "innovate" and reduce illness. My main motivation was
not monetary but it is always a factor.
I believe you have the wrong target on this issue.
My first rejection on a related patent was just received 2.5 years after initial filing. It
took this long because the Govt. takes money from USPTO (which runs a surplus) and sends it
to the General Fund. USA innovation friendly? Not the way I see it.
"But for those who complain about Sanders not going after important targets "
Consider the wisdom of Susan Webber:
"Wisdom of the CEO is comprimised work. These CEOs "know" that too much candor,
either individually or institutionally, is not a pro-survival strategy."
I think the comparison of banks to welfare queens is quite unfair.
To welfare queens, that is.
Assuming they exist outside of the sweaty PR fantasies of those of a certain political
stripe, presumably even a welfare queen is not living 100% off of the munificence of the
state, whereas the implied value of the "Too Big To Fail" guaranty subsidy was determined to
be very nearly in the same amount as the annual profits of the recipient banks. In other
words, they're complete wards of the state. Doesn't get much more socialistic than that.
Thank you, Yves for this post. Alder has very logical and accessible ideas.
"Interdependent Individualism" is a good way to begin. When he says "socialists recoil
against individual performance-based rewards" I can't help but think the rewards should be
gifted from the workers to the bosses. Because that would be very change-promoting. Top down
has a tendency to stagnate motivation – even offensively – like tossing them a
few crumbs to keep them quiet. imo. This also really does sound Japanese. I'm not sure I can
relate to the way they cooperate; from them there is not so much as a polite argument;
certainly no sarcastic barbs. Americans are the exact opposite – we cooperate
competitively in a sense. But Climate Change will dictate our direction regardless of
decorum. My own sense of our dilemma is that "free market" corporations make their profits by
extracting from labor and the exploitation of the environment, and by externalizing costs to
society. Big disconnect. Huge, in fact. This is why "capitalism" has failed to address
climate change. Anybody else notice that China has forbidden short selling as we speak? Just
like the Fed did in 2009 with QE, etc. That's probably because if the economy crashes
(regardless of how illogical it has become) it will take way too long to put back together.
And there's work to be done. I remember Randy Wray dryly responding to Jacobin's criticism
(of MMT) that the ideological socialists would rather see a bloody Marxist uprising than a
peaceful evolution. I do think Wray is right on ideological blinders on both sides. One
quibble I have with this very wise post is that it assumes (I think) that we cannot change
our ways fast enough to mobilize adequately to address climate change. I think we've been
doing it pretty aggressively since 2009. Literally a world war to control oil and maintain
financial supremacy; serious consideration of our options by the political class (turning to
MMT, etc.); slamming the breaks on trade and manufacturing; subsidizing essential industries.
I'm sure there are other things going on under the radar. So I wouldn't discount our ability
to mobilize – just our inability to admit it. Clearly we want to do things
selectively.
>the Vermont Senator is landing punches, but choosing his fights carefully.
Yes, as Objective Function laid out nicely (funny word for this mess, but whatever) above
– this isn't gonna be easy. If you hope to beat Mike Tyson in his prime, you don't
start by trading heavy blows. Defeat him with small but continuous cuts from multiple
directions.
" senior leaders of three of the largest and most elite U.S. banks were serial criminals
whose frauds are (we pray) without equal." -- William K. Black
Wallstreet on parade website does great job laying out JPM's crime spree. They (JPM) just
came off parole(?) in January on some Felony charges. Someone (Eliz. Warren?) might start a
movement to prohibit public pensions / State and local Govts. from conducting business with
any banks convicted of felonies or entering plea agreements more than, let's say, ten per
year.
A convicted felon can not get a job at a bank run by a 22 times loser- Jamie Dimon, a fellow
felon who should have some empathy.
Wallstreet on parade is one of few sites who discuss Citi's crimes, and the fact that the
Federal Reserve tried to cover up (and succeeded until about 2012) the secret 2.5 TRILLIION
in revolving loans provided to a bankrupt Citibank around 2009. This in addition to the
hundreds of billions we did know about.
I do tend to harp on this because the felon Robert Rubin cost me about 500K in expired Put
options on shittybank because of his blatant, felonious (per FCIC) lies right before the
implosion. His referral for prosecution by the Financial Crises Inquiry Commission
mysteriously withered away
Last month, American military forces
physically blocked Russian troops from proceeding down a road near the town of Rmelan,
Syria. U.S. troops were acting on orders of President Trump, who said back in October that
Washington would be
"protecting" oil fields currently under control of the anti-Assad, Kurdish Syrian Defense
Forces.
Meanwhile, the Russians are acting on behalf of Syrian president Bashar Assad, who says the
state is ultimately in control of those fields. While no shots were fired in this case, the
next time Moscow's forces might not go so quietly.
U.S. officials offered few details about the January stand-off, but General Alexus
Grynkewich, deputy commander of the anti-ISIS campaign, said: "We've had a number of different
engagements with the Russians on the ground." Late last month the Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights reported: "Tensions have continued to increase significantly in recent days between U.S.
and Russian forces in the northeastern regions of Syria."
Stationed in Syria illegally, with neither domestic nor international legal authority,
American personnel risked life and limb to occupy another nation's territory and steal its
resources. What is the Trump administration doing?
American policy in Syria has long been stunningly foolish, dishonest, and counterproductive.
When the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, Washington first defended Assad. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton even called him a "reformer." Then she decided that he should be ousted and
demanded that the rest of the world follow Washington's new policy.
The democratic party must be thee only political party in all world history that actively
suppresses people who want to vote for them.
Looks like the democrats are set to lose the same way they did in 2016. Basically as Matt
Bruenig wrote in his article "The Boring Story
of the 2016 Election
Donald Trump did not win because of a surge of white support. Indeed he got less white
support than Romney got in 2012. Nor did Trump win because he got a surge from other
race+gender groups. The exit polls show him doing slightly better with black men, black
women, and latino women than Romney did, but basically he just hovered around Romney's
numbers with every race+gender group, doing slightly worse than Romney overall.
However, support for Hillary was way below Obama's 2012 levels, with defectors turning
to a third party. Clinton did worse with every single race+gender combo except white women,
where she improved Obama's outcome by a single point. Clinton did not lose all this
support to Donald. She lost it into the abyss. Voters didn't like her but they weren't
wooed by Trump .
The Third Wave neocons pointed out an interesting fact. Clinton won bigly CA, NY, and MA
which gave her something like 7 million votes. However, Trump won the remaining 47 states by
four million.
"... How can they change? The owners are the warmongering monopoly capitalist ruling class. Are you imagining that any decision can ever be made by the lowly peons, the rank and file? ..."
Unless They Change The Democrats Deserve To LoseTrisha , Feb 6 2020 16:12 utc
|
6
The Democratic Party seems to intend to lose the 2020 elections.
The idiotic impeachment attempt against Trump ended just
as we predicted at its beginning:
After two years of falsely accusing Trump of having colluded with Russia [the Democrats]
now allege that he colludes with Ukraine. That will make it much more difficult for the
Democrats to hide the dirty hands they had in creating Russiagate. Their currently
preferred candidate Joe Biden will get damaged.
...
Trump should be impeached for his crimes against Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.
But the Democrats will surely not touch on those issues. They are committing themselves
to political theater that will end without any result. Instead of attacking Trump's
policies and proposing better legislation they will pollute the airwaves with noise about
'crimes' that do not exist.
There is no case for impeachment. Even if the House would vote for one the Senate would
never act on it. No one wants to see a President Pence.
The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump
will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is
the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad
politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will
motivate them to vote for him.
The Senate acquitted Trump of all the nonsense the Democrats have thrown against him.
The state party is now being forced to walk back their error of giving @BernieSanders
delegates to @DevalPatrick who received zero votes in Black Hawk County. Press can dm
me.
We have known for over 24 hours as verified by our county party that @BernieSanders won
the #iacaucuses in Black Hawk County with 2,149 votes, 155 County Delegates. #NotMeUs
#IowaCaucuses
The whole manipulation was intended to enable Buttigieg to claim that he led in Iowa even
though it is clear that Bernie Sanders won the race. It worked:
If a progressive is about to win #IowaCaucuses:
- remove final polls
- use mysterious app created by former Clinton staffers
- Funnel results thru untested app
- Claim app fails
- Hold results
- Reveal only 62% to give false impression of who won
- Refuse to reveal final results
But the cost of such open manipulations is the
loss of trust in the Democratic Party and in elections in general:
In sum: We are 24 hours into the 2020 campaign, and Democrats have already humiliated their
party on national television, alienated their least reliable progressive supporters,
demoralized their most earnest activists, and handed Trump's campaign a variety of potent
lines of attack.
The other leading candidates are not much better. Sanders might have a progressive agenda
in domestic policies, but his foreign policies are fully in line with his party. Matt Duss,
Sanders' foreign policy advisor, is the son of a lifelong key front man for CIA
proxy organizations. He spills out mainstream imperial blabber:
The only thing that Trump's Venezuela regime change policy achieved is giving Russia an
opportunity to screw with the US in our own hemisphere. That's what they were
applauding.
Giving a standing ovation to Trump's SOTU remarks on Venezuela were of course the
Democratic "resistance" and Nancy Pelosi . That was before she theatrically ripped up her
copy of Trump's speech, the show act of a 5 year old and one which
she had trained for . She should be fired.
Impeachment, the Iowa disaster and petty show acts will not win an election against Donald
Trump. While they do not drive away core Democratic voters, they do make it difficult to get
the additional votes that are needed to win. Many on the left and the right who dislike Trump
will rather abstain or vote for a third party than for a party which is indistinguishable
from the currently ruling one.
Either the Democrats change their whole course of action or they will lose in November to
an extend that will be breathtaking. It would be well deserved.
Posted by b on February 6, 2020 at 15:57 UTC |
Permalink The donor class owners of the "Democratic" party have every incentive to
support Trump, who has cut their taxes, hugely inflated the value of their assets, and
mis-directed attention away from substantial issues that might degrade either their assets or
their power, by focusing on identity politics.
It's obvious to me that the two war parties function as one. The Democrats have been winning
since Trump took office--they get their money and they get their wars. If Trump wins, the
Democrats win as billionaires flood more money into the DNC. If Trump loses, the Republicans
win for the same reasons.
The behavior of a five year old is an appropriate reference point for most of the people
working in DC, albeit engaged parents expect more of their children. This vaudeville routine
is giving satisfaction to Republicans, Trump supporters, and those who have been looking for
a clearer opportunity to say "I told you so" to diehard Democratic believers (who will
continue to refuse to listen).
For an American, even one who has always been somewhat cynical regarding cultural notions of
democracy and the "American Way," the show has become patently and abusively vulgar and
revulsive. It does not appear to be anywhere near "hitting bottom." There can be no recovery
without emotional maturity, and the leaders in Washington exhibit nothing of the kind. The
level of maturity and wisdom of the individuals involved is determinative of the political
result, not the alleged quality of the politics they purport to sell. Right now we don't have
that.
"Unless They Change The Democrats Deserve To Lose"
Aren't there 2 levels of "change"?
1. How can they change? The owners are the warmongering monopoly capitalist ruling
class. Are you imagining that any decision can ever be made by the lowly peons, the rank and
file? If you thought anything like that, you should try to find one single instance, in
all history, of this "party" ever having done anything at all out of line with the express
policy of the owners of the country (the high level of people-friendly noise, intended for
the voting peons, never translates into any action of that sort.)
2. If you mean change the electoral policy to win this election, how could they
conceivably manage to change this late? Like a supertanker launched at full speed trying to
make a sharp turn a few seconds before hitting the shore, you mean?
Anyway, in both cases forget what it "deserves", it should be destroyed and buried under,
not only lose.
It would take extreme mental contortions to take U.S. "democracy" seriously at this
point.
I would like to believe that it makes some difference who is elected, but increasingly
doubtful.
How different would it really have been had Hillary been elected (much as it pains me to
consider such a scenario)?
Trump was elected (aside from interference from AIPAC) partly because he was republican
candidate and for some that's all it takes but aside from that because;
- end pointless wars
- improve healthcare
- control immigration
- jobs for coal miners
- somehow address corruption and non-performance of government
- improve US competitiveness, bring back jobs, promote business, improve economy
He claims having improved the economy but more likely is done juice from the FED.
So really, what grade does he deserve?
And yet people are rallying to his side.
Personally I think that the entrenched interests have moulded Trump to meet their
requirements and now it is inconvenient to have to start work on a new president, unless it
would be one of their approved choices.
I voted for Trump because of Hillary.
Now I would not vote for Trump given a decent choice. Fortunately there is an excellent
alternative.
All who count have known for a long time that Trump will have a second term. Baked in. (1)
The Dems agitate and raucously screech and try to impeach to distract or whatever to show
da base that they hate Trump and hope to slaughter! him! a rapist! mysoginist! racist!
liar ! He is horrors! in touch with the malignant criminal authoritarian ex-KGB Putin! Russia
Russia Russia - and remember Stormy Daniels! ( :) ! )
The top corp. Dems prefer to lose to Trump, I have said this for years, as have many
others. In rivalry of the Mafia type, it is often better to submit to have a share of the
pie. Keep the plebs on board with BS etc. Victim status, underdog pretense, becomes ever more
popular.
1. Trump might fall ill / dead / take Melania's advice and wishes into account, or just
quit.
People still talk like democracy really exists in USA.
They channel their anger toward Party and personality.
If only the democrats would ... If only Sanders would ... If only people would see that
...
A few understand the way things really are, but most are still hoping that
somehow that the bed-time stories and entertaining kayfabe are a sort of
democracy that they can live with.
But the is just normalcy bias. A Kool-Aid hang-over. This is not democracy. It is a soft
tyranny encouraged by Empire stooges, lackeys, and enabled by ignorance.
The lies are as pervasive as they are subtle: half-truths; misdirection; omitting facts
like candidate/party affiliations with the Zionist/Empire Death Cult.
The REAL divide among people in the West is who benefits from an EMPIRE/ZIONIST FIRST
orientation that has polluted our politics and our culture and the rest of us.
Wake up. War is on the horizon. And Central Banks can't print money forever.
After watching Pelosi it reminded me that during the Geo. W. Bush era the Democrats were
always claiming to be the adults in the room. It's odd that Mayo Pete's 'husband' is never
seen or heard from. I wonder why? Biden's toast and Epstein didn't kill himself. AND Seth
Rich leaked Hillary's emails to Wikileaks.
-- --
The Clinton-Obama administration had scores of corrupt officials and associates (the
Podestas, for instance). It was necessary to create a firewall once Trump won the nomination.
As so, they attacked his campaign manager, his national security adviser, his family,
himself, using all the means of FISA, wire tapping done by NSA and CIA and Mi6 and probably
Mossad.
Red Ryder | Feb 6 2020 16:56 utc | 14
-- --
Trump is an installment of The Mossad via blackmail and media manipulation, check "Black
Cube Intelligence", a Mossad front operating from City of London. It would make sense the
establishment in the US would eavesdrop on him. Mossad on the other hand would wiretap the
wiretapers and give feedback on Trump. The Podesta you mentioned once threatened the factions
with "disclosure" possibly to keep the runaway black projects crazies in check not that I
wish to play advocate of these people.
-- --
After they lose again in November, they will unleash their street thugs, Antifa, to terrorize
the winners. Meanwhile for the purists of the Liberal Cult there will be many real suicides.
So, bloodshed and death will become reality.
Red Ryder | Feb 6 2020 16:56 utc | 14
-- --
Yes, what we need is just a nazi party in the US to keep communism in check, right? We are
half way there with Trump already aren't we? "Black Sun" technologies (which a part off I
described above) already there, leaking to anyone interested enough that would aid in the
great outsourcing for the Yinon project, so why not? "Go Trump 2020"! (sarcasm)
For whatever reason the only thing the Dems seem to find more terrible than a loss to Trump
is a win with Bernie. I'm no fan of Bernie but it's clear they're out to sabotage the one guy
that would actually beat Trump in an election
While I have no illusions that a Sanders administration will have good foreign policy
objectives, is there not something to be said for shifting money away from the
military-industrial complex in the US? In general Sanders gives me the impression that he
wants to reduce US intervention in foreign affairs in favor of spending more money on
domestic issues. Even a slight reduction in pressure is helpful for giving other countries
the ability to expand their spheres of influence and becoming more legitimate powers in
opposition to the US and EU. Based on this I still see voting for Sanders as helpful even if
he won't bring about any meaningful change in the US's foreign policy.
it's not an actual Stalin quote, but often used as such
he did say something in the same vein, though.
it IS absolutely spot on here:
"It's not who vote that counts, it's who counts the votes"
congratulations, DNC, you're on a par with Joseph Stalin; the most ruthless chairman the
Sovyets have ever had.
so here is your real Russia Gate.
oh, come and smell the Irony. In fake wrestling the producers determine the winner in advance
and the wrestlers ate given their script to follow. The Dems have no intention to win this,
look at the clowns they have running the show not to mention the flawed candidates . The
script calls for the king of fake wrestling, Trump himself, to win yet again. Only a
concerted effort by the Dems and Deep State media, along with some tech help from Bibis crew
can engineer this result, but they are all on board. Dems willing to wait for 2024 when the
producers will write them in for a big Win over somebody not named Trump. The world will be
ready for a Green change by then, and Soros/Gates boys will have their chance to step up to
the plate again.
Enjoy the show if you wish, I'm changing the channel.
It should be clear on what the fight is really about in the US. It's about stopping the rise
of socialism. Regardless of party affiliation, the elites know what the populace wants and
are desperately trying to stop it. I refuse to accept that the Democrats have no idea what
they're doing.
I honestly can't see Sanders getting the nomination with all the corruption openly being
displayed. I would be pleasantly surprised if Sanders did manage to get it, but he still have
to deal with the ELECTORAL COLLEGE (EC). The Electors have the final say. Yes, one can point
out that some States have laws forcing Electors to vote what the populace wants, but that is
being challenged in court. The debate on whether such laws are unconstitutional or not,
remains to be seen. It's too late now to deal with the EC for this election, but people need
to be more active in politics at the State level as that's where Electors are (s)elected.
IF Sanders is genuine then he should prepare to run as an independent just to get the EC
attention.
RR @ 14;
Everything in the U$A today, is driven by the unofficial Party of $, and it's reach
transcends both Dems & repubs. It's cadre is the majority of the D.C. "rule makers", so
we get what they want, not what "we the people" want or need.
They own the banks, MSM media, and even our voting systems.
IMO, to assume one party is to blame for conditions in the U$A is a bit naive.
Question is, can anything the masses do, change the system? Or is rank and file America
just along for the ride?
I'm assuming us peons will get what the party of $ wants this November also.
P.S. If any blame is given, it needs to go to the American public, because " you get the
kind of Gov. you deserve" through your inactions...
It's a lot like living, death is certain, but until that occurs, I'll move forward trying
to mitigate current paradigms.
Pepe Escobar pointed out once that certain members of the "Masters of the Universe" (as he
terms the US elites who actually run things) supported Trump in 2016, and were opposed to
other "Masters" who supported Hillary Clinton. Given that Clinton disappointed her "Masters"
by losing and damaging her credibility with the whole "Russiagate" fiasco, perhaps they
switched sides to Trump - especially given that Trump can be controlled and manipulated more
easily (since he is an idiot and ignoramus) to start the wars the "masters" are yearning for
to improve their corporate profits (regardless of his alleged desire to avoid wars - a
fanciful story also told about Barrack Obama from the beginning as well, which resulted in
Obama destroying four more countries than Bush during his administration.)
So now they've decided the Dems need to be kept out of it for whatever reasons of
incompetent politicking or too much socialism for the "Masters" liking, or whatever. So
they're arranging for the Dems to self-destruct this year.
Just a speculative thought, and I wouldn't put any stock in it absent any real
evidence.
In the end, it doesn't matter. Absent Gabbard being nominated and elected, nothing will
change in US foreign policy anyway. And to quote Percival Rose from the Nikita show about
Gabbard's chances, "That ain't gonna happen."
In December the number of states in expansion was 39. Historically over the past 40 years,
that number dropping to 35 or below has (with the exception of one month in 1986) been the
marker of the onset of a recession.
Note the number is below the lowest level from 2015-16, in which weakness was generally
confined to the Oil patch. It is yet another marker of a slowdown, but not of a recession.
Later this morning we'll get the January ISM manufacturing report, and over the next 48
hours we'll get reports on January auto and truck sales. Both of these will help tell us if the
weakness in the production sector has been spreading or not.
There is a real danger for gangstrism mode of forign policy -- policimakers live in a bubble,
an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs...
Diplomacy, accommodation, compromise, mutuality, the perspectives of others: It is already
clear these are among the defining features of 21 st century statecraft. Jealous of
its dissipating preeminence, the U.S. proves indifferent to all such considerations. There is
no longer even the pretense of deriving authority by way of example, so radical is Washington's
preference for coercive might alone. The paradox is not difficult to grasp: In displays of
unadorned power we also find the limits of power. The Trump administration's conduct of foreign
policy -- primarily but not only in the Mideast -- makes failure and an American comeuppance
inevitable.
... ... ...
Many years ago, during the first term of George W. Bush, Karl Rove gave
an interview in which he asserted that the U.S. was no longer bound by "discernible
reality," as the White House aide put it. "That's not the way the world really works anymore,"
Rove explained. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."
Rove Warning Overlooked
This singularly arrogant remark was much noted at the time but was thought to reflect only
the kookier extremes of the Bush II administration. What a misinterpretation that has proven to
be. Rove was effectively warning us that the U.S. had already begun its fundamental shift
toward sheer power as the instrument of its foreign policies. This is plain in hindsight.
... These policies share two features. They rest on power alone -- in this they are Karl
Rove's dream made flesh -- and they are bound to fail, if they are not already failing.
It is evident now that the European allies will
defy U.S. efforts to sabotage NordStream 2 and keep Huawei out of 5–G.
London announced last week that it will allow Huawei to participate in its 5–G
development program. Germany made
a similar decision last autumn.
In the Middle East, it is equally clear that Iran has no intention of buckling under U.S.
sanctions and military threats. U.S. influence in the region has already begun to decline since
the drone assassination of a top Iranian general on Iraqi soil early last month. The Pentagon
now faces popular
Iraqi demands to withdraw its troops.
And now the Mideast -- Israel and Palestine. The Trump administration sacrificed all claim
to "honest broker" status when it recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December 2017 --
a unilateral move that prompted the Palestinians to stop talking to the U.S. about the plan
Jared Kushner was by then developing. Of all that is wrong with the new Trump–Kushner
plan, the absence of Palestinian input more or less assures that it will prove dead on
arrival.
Power alone is power blind. Power blind is certain to fail, for it cannot see its way.
There is a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those
they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are
based on faulty inputs. Needless to say it's even worse when they believe they can
create their own reality and invent outcomes out of whole cloth.
Things seldom go as planned in these circumstances.
President Trump was sold a bill of goods on the assassination of Iran's
revered military leader, Qassim Soleimani, likely by a cabal around Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo and the
long-discredited neocon David Wurmser. A former Netanyahu advisor and Iraq war
propagandist, Wurmser reportedly sent memos to his mentor, John Bolton, while Bolton was
Trump's National Security Advisor (now, of course, he's the hero of the #resistance for having
turned on his former boss) promising that killing Soleimani would be a cost-free operation that
would catalyze the Iranian people against their government and bring about the long-awaited
regime change in that country. The murder of Soleimani – the architect of the defeat of
ISIS – would "rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them
upon which the [Iranian] regime depends for stability and survival," wrote Wurmser.
As is most often the case with neocons, he was dead wrong.
The operation was not cost-free. On the contrary. Assassinating Soleimani on Iraqi soil
resulted in the Iraqi parliament – itself the product of our "bringing democracy" to the
country – voting to expel US forces even as the vote by the people's representatives was
roundly rejected by the people who brought the people the people's representatives. In a manner
of speaking.
Trump's move had an effect opposite to the one promised by neocons. It did not bring
Iranians out to the street to overthrow their government – it catalyzed opposition across
Iraq's various political and religious factions to the continued US military presence and
further tightened Iraq's relationship with Iran. And short of what would be a catastrophic war
initiated by the US (with little or no support from allies), there is not a thing Trump can do
about it.
Iran's retaliatory attack on two US bases in Iraq was initially sold by President Trump as
merely a pin-prick. No harm, no foul, no injuries. This despite the fact that he must have
known about US personnel injured in the attack. The reason for the lie was that Trump likely
understands how devastating it would be to his presidency to escalate with Iran. So the truth
began to trickle out slowly – 11 US military members were injured, but it was just "like
a headache." Now we know that 50 US troops were treated for traumatic brain injury after the
attack. This may not be the last of it – but don't count on the mainstream media to do
any reporting.
The Iranian FARS news agency reported at the time of the attack that US personnel had been
injured and the response by the US government was to completely take that media outlet off the
Internet
by order of the US Treasury !
Last week the US House
voted to cancel the 2002 authorization for war on Iraq and to prohibit the use of funds for
war on Iran without Congressional authorization. It is a significant, if largely symbolic, move
to rein in the oft-used excuse of the Iraq war authorization for blatantly unrelated actions
like the assassination of Soleimani and Obama's
thousands of airstrikes on Syria and Iraq .
President Trump has argued that prohibiting funds for military action against Iran actually
makes war more likely, as he would be restricted from the kinds of
military-strikes-short-of-war like his attack on Syria after the alleged chemical attack in
Douma in 2018 (claims which have recently
fallen apart ). The logic is faulty and reflects again the danger of believing one's own
propaganda. As we have seen from the Iranian military response to the Soleimani assassination,
Trump's military-strikes-short-of-war are having a ratchet-like effect rather than a
pressure-release or deterrent effect.
As the financial and current events analysis site ZeroHedge
put it recently:
[S]ince last summer's "tanker wars", Trump has painted himself into a corner on Iran,
jumping from escalation to escalation (to this latest "point of no return big one" in the
form of the ordered Soleimani assassination) -- yet all the while hoping to avoid a major
direct war. The situation reached a climax where there were "no outs" (Trump was left with
two 'bad options' of either back down or go to war).
The Iranians have little to lose at this point and America's European allies are, even if
impotent, fed up with the US obsession with Saudi Arabia and Israel as a basis for its Middle
East policy.
So why open this essay with a photo of Trump celebrating his dead-on-arrival "Deal of The
Century" for Israel and Palestine? Because this is once again a gullible and weak President
Trump being led by the nose into the coming Middle East conflagration. Left without even a
semblance of US sympathy for their plight, the Palestinians after the roll-out of this "peace"
plan will again see that they have no friends outside Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. As Israel
continues to flirt with the idea of simply annexing large parts of the West Bank, it is
clear that the brakes are off of any Israeli reticence to push for maximum control over
Palestinian territory. So what is there to lose?
Trump believes he's advancing peace in the Middle East, while the excellent Mondoweiss
website rightly
observes that a main architect of the "peace plan," Trump's own son-in-law Jared Kushner,
"taunts Palestinians because he wants them to reject his 'peace plan.'" Rejection of the plan
is a green light to a war of annihilation on the Palestinians.
It appears that the center may not hold, that the self-referential echo chamber that passes
for Beltway "expert" analysis will again be caught off guard in the consequence-free profession
that is neocon foreign policy analysis. "Gosh we didn't see that coming!" But the next day they
are back on the teevee stations as great experts.
It is hard to believe that Trump has any confidence in Jared Kushner. Yet, he does enough
to go public with a one-sided plan developed without Palestinian input.
a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they
serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are
based on faulty inputs.
The same is true of the economists and financial analysts who live in the bubble of the
NSYE and the echo chamber of Manhattan. All of their conclusions are based on faulty
inputs.
If Trump continues to be 'dumb' enough to consistently hire these people and
consistently listen to them, and if his supporters continue to be dumb enough to
consistently believe all the lies and excuses, then Trump and his supporters are 100%
involved in the neoCON.
Entrapment of Flynn and his own stupid behavior (for former chief of DIA this really
unass[eble naivity) that facilitated it is an interesting case study here...
David G. Horsman Although I am not
familar with all the players, in context to early 2017 the one part of the article I thought
exaggerated was this:'Probably the most intelligent analysis of the Deep State was written for
The Nation by Greg Grandin. Titled "What is the Deep State?", it makes many very good points
I
n 1956, C. Wright Mills wrote that "the conception of the power elite and of its unity rests
upon the corresponding developments and the coincidence of interests among economic, political,
and military organizations."
If nothing else, the "Trump v. Deep State" framings show that unity is long gone.'The three
seem generally aligned with the people on the outside looking in. Infighting is the norm.
Furthermore, first generation immigrants don't want to replicate their culture, they want
the American dream. Their grandchildren might want to "identify" as hispanic, etc., but not
their parents or grandparents. Identity politics only plays in the white middle classes.
"... If the strategy is to pressurise the EU into giving the UK a better trade deal though, it is unlikely to be treated as a credible threat. In the short to medium term, the UK is in no position to set up inspection systems which could handle the volume of goods coming in from EU Member States . ..."
"... The fundamental problem is that the most brilliant team of negotiators in the world can't do anything unless they have a clear negotiating mandate. (This was the case in 1972 and 1991 by the way). There comes a point in negotiations where you have to decide whether to stick, twist or bust, and you can only do that if you have a clear idea of the overall political objectives of your masters. There's nothing worse (it's happened to me) than to be sent out to die in a ditch on some issue only to find out half way through that your principals have had a rethink and changed their position. It doesn't do your credibility any good, but it also makes it practically impossible to negotiate, because nobody believes you afterwards when you say "no." ..."
"... Johnson has one fatal weakness – the Faustian bargain he struck to deliver a hard Brexit to win the prime ministership. Any economic bounce this year will be short-lived: the Bank of England's forecast of 1.1% growth for the next three years could even be optimistic, as both inward direct investment and UK business investment dry up when access to the EU single market and customs union ceases. The Canada-style trade deal Johnson advocates is as close to self-immolation as economics provides. Britain already has a vast trade deficit in goods that will widen alarmingly as competitive overseas exporters take advantage of zero tariffs, while services – where Britain has great competitive strengths – will be crippled by being denied their former EU markets. It is insane and risks an unstoppable run on the pound, as a former cabinet minister privately agreed. Renewed austerity and recession will follow. ..."
"... For Johnson the first objective of Brexit is to place greater controls on labor. The intention is to ensure that by controlling free movement labor itself can be controlled, and so too can its price be kept at rates the government would desire. And that is low, of course. ..."
"... Freeports are instead about permitting the free movement of capital beyond the control of the state and without the imposition of any taxes. ..."
"... Quite bizarrely, given that freeports are effectively declared to be outside the country that creates them, one of the major objectives Johnson has for Brexit is to carve whole chunks of the UK out of the control he claims to have just taken back, and to pass it over to the free loaders who frequent freeports. ..."
"... The aim of freeports is to undermine the state. It achieves this by suspending the law. Freeports permit illicit activity ..."
On the one hand, we Americans are hardly ones to talk about empty posturing, usually
accompanied with moral indignation and finger-wagging. On the other hand, it isn't just that
the Government's approach to Brexit has been heavy on theatrics and thin on substance. It's
also that the UK is in Groundhog Day mode, subjecting the rest of us to tired tropes yet
another time.
The latest iteration of this far-too-familiar play is Boris Johnson acting as if he can
threaten the EU with a no deal at the end of the transition period. Specifically, Johnson has
made a big show of poking the EU in the eye by setting forth his tough guy negotiating demands
over this past weekend. Admittedly, the Prime Minister isn't setting out his position formally
until Monday, but there's no mystery as to what it will be: a rejection of accepting EU rules
yet saying it wants a Canada-style free trade agreement.
... ... ...
The BBC said Johnson also intends to threaten the EU with customs checks at UK point of
entry. As Richard North pointed out, the EU is not impressed :
If the strategy is to pressurise the EU into giving the UK a better trade deal though,
it is unlikely to be treated as a credible threat. In the short to medium term, the UK is in
no position to set up inspection systems which could handle the volume of goods coming in
from EU Member States .
Needless to say, a "senior EU source" has rejected the idea of reacting to Johnson's plan
to impose import controls. "We saw similar threats from Theresa May" he says, "but frankly we
never believed them. And if the UK is actually ready for border checks – which are
indeed coming – then so much the better for both sides".
Even the normally sober Economist concludes that Johnson is aiming for "
the hardest possible Brexit ." He does have a fallback:
"A government source said last night: "There are only two likely outcomes in negotiation,
a free trade deal like Canada or a looser arrangement like Australia – and we are happy
to pursue both." Australia is the new euphemism for No Deal or WTO ! https://t.co/BDpwb4Z3qP
This new stance has prompted bafflement in Brussels, given that Canberra is still in the
process of negotiating a wide-ranging trade deal with the EU.
... ... ...
Needless to say, this does not look pretty. As I said to our Brexit mavens by e-mail
yesterday:
Johnson is playing a game of chicken. He's already lashed himself to the mast of 11
months.
Sir Ivan Rogers basically warned that the early months would amount to shape of the table
talks and he thought negotiations could break down then. I would not see that as lasting but
with time so tight any delay increases the risk of bad outcomes. And Sir Ivan warned that
there had never been a trade deal between countries trying to get further apart. He's
stressed that point so often that I think he is saying at least that the human dynamics of
that make getting to a deal more difficult.
Again, if the time weren't so rigid, the odds would look completely different.
And the EU would almost certainly give an extension if the UK asked .but at a price .and
would Johnson ever ask? The most I can see him being able to finesse might be say a 2 -3
month "technical" extension, which won't buy meaningful negotiating runway given the
complexity of deals like this.
Now we've seen these games of chicken resolve without a crash before, but Johnson is
making it difficult as hell, and the UK is further hampered by a Foreign Office which is
short staffed and has effectively no experience negotiating trade deals.
David's response:
The fundamental problem is that the most brilliant team of negotiators in the world
can't do anything unless they have a clear negotiating mandate. (This was the case in 1972
and 1991 by the way). There comes a point in negotiations where you have to decide whether to
stick, twist or bust, and you can only do that if you have a clear idea of the overall
political objectives of your masters. There's nothing worse (it's happened to me) than to be
sent out to die in a ditch on some issue only to find out half way through that your
principals have had a rethink and changed their position. It doesn't do your credibility any
good, but it also makes it practically impossible to negotiate, because nobody believes you
afterwards when you say "no."
Not only do I not think Johnson has no real negotiating objectives, I also believe that
he's uninterested in even fairly high-level detail, and sees the negotiations as one more
jolly game that he wants to win. My fear is that he's out to deliberately sabotage progress
in order to create drama and tension, only to fly to the rescue at the very last minute. This
is more than dangerous. "Insane" is perhaps the word for it.
Some other takes. Will Hutton in the Guardian contends that Johnson has become a prisoner of
the allegiances he made to become Prime Minister (and Hutton is very complimentary of the moves
Johnson has made so far ex Brexit). I'm not sure I agree, since before his ascent, Johnson was
famed for shamelessly reversing himself and getting away with it. But Johnson sure looks like
someone who is choosing to throw away the steering wheel.
From the Guardian:
However, Johnson has one fatal weakness – the Faustian bargain he struck to
deliver a hard Brexit to win the prime ministership. Any economic bounce this year will be
short-lived: the Bank of England's forecast of 1.1% growth for the next three years could
even be optimistic, as both inward direct investment and UK business investment dry up when
access to the EU single market and customs union ceases. The Canada-style trade deal Johnson
advocates is as close to self-immolation as economics provides. Britain already has a vast
trade deficit in goods that will widen alarmingly as competitive overseas exporters take
advantage of zero tariffs, while services – where Britain has great competitive
strengths – will be crippled by being denied their former EU markets. It is insane and
risks an unstoppable run on the pound, as a former cabinet minister privately agreed. Renewed
austerity and recession will follow.
Johnson and his Brexit cabinet, backed by our Europhobic rightwing press, will blame
dastardly Europeans for the crisis – and the anti-foreigner mood will grow ugly. But
even if the worst is avoided, Britain is plainly not going to grow at "new dawn" rates of up
to 2.8%, as our curiously naive chancellor wants. Rather, the years ahead are going to be a
drip of disappointments, as the reality of a hard Brexit bites. And on this Johnson cannot be
breezily opportunistic and convert to a soft Brexit, tempted though he may be. He will be
imprisoned by his know-nothing right – the European Research Group in full battle
cry.
Richard North
argues , "What this looks like, therefore, is Johnson setting up his alibi for the failure
of the talks, getting his blame game cranked into gear before the EU can react." And Richard Murphy contends Johnson knows what he is doing,
which it to put in place Singapore on the Thames :
Nothing I have yet seen so starkly states what Brexit is all about.
For Johnson the first objective of Brexit is to place greater controls on labor. The
intention is to ensure that by controlling free movement labor itself can be controlled, and
so too can its price be kept at rates the government would desire. And that is low, of
course.
And his second objective is to create freeports. He will claim that these are all about
creating regulation free hubs for enterprise. This is completely untrue. There is no evidence
that regulation free ports have ever generated work, wealth, much employment, or free market
enterprise, come to that. This is unsurprising. That is not what freeports are about, at all.
Freeports are instead about permitting the free movement of capital beyond the control of the
state and without the imposition of any taxes.
Quite bizarrely, given that freeports are effectively declared to be outside the country
that creates them, one of the major objectives Johnson has for Brexit is to carve whole
chunks of the UK out of the control he claims to have just taken back, and to pass it over to
the free loaders who frequent freeports.
To understand how freeports really work I suggest watching this video. I know it's not in
English, but it's good, and explains how the Geneva freeport works to handle diamonds, gold,
armaments, fine art and rare wines, all beyond the control of authorities and all beyond the
reach of tax:
The aim of freeports is to undermine the state. It achieves this by suspending the law. Freeports permit illicit activity. They permit wealth to be accumulated in secret. That wealth is beyond the reach of tax. Research suggests that much of that wealth is also shielded by anonymous offshore shell
companies that disguise the ownership of an asset even if it can be located. The object is to ensure wealth can accumulate without constraint.
This is the paradox that Johnson revealed in his video. He wants to control and constrain
people. He will use that power to oppress, not just those who want to come to the UK but
also, of course, those who wish to leave the UK as well. The market in labour will be
constrained. People will suffer as a result.
At the same time the market in illicit wealth will be liberated to traffic at will. The
cost will be to us all, in lost tax revenue, increased inequality and the undermining of the
rule of law. Additional jobs will be few and far between.
And let's not for a moment pretend that any freeport activity supports markets: creating
ring fences always creates unlevel playing fields that will always, by definition and in
practice, undermine effective markets. So there is nothing in this policy that is about
wealth creation: it is all about wealth expropriation and extraction.
This is what Brexit was for. And Johnson admitted it last night. One day people will
realise.
If Murphy is correct, that would explain Johnson's recent conversion to fixity of purpose,
at least with Brexit. We'll have more clues in due course whether the hard core Brexit faction
is mad like a fox or simply a different variant of the madness we've seen all along.
but it's good, and explains how the Geneva freeport works to handle diamonds,
gold , armaments, fine art and rare wines, all beyond the control of authorities and
all beyond the reach of tax: [bold added]
Gold obviously has value in industry but its use as or to back fiat is inherently corrupt*
and obsolete** too.
So let's please quit idolizing a corrupt and obsolete money form, i.e. Central Banks,
along with other reforms, should be required, in a manner to promote the general welfare, to
sell all private asset forms, including precious metals such as gold.
*Fiat is backed by the authority and power of the State to tax and needs no other backing;
hence to "back" fiat with gold is to do no such thing but is to back gold with the authority
and power of the State to tax, a violation of equal protection under the law.
**Historically, precious metals had some use as an anti-counterfeiting measure but modern
payment systems have no need for such.
Yup, the Freeports thing is clearly the Big Idea that lots of Brexit backers are hoping to
cash in on. Of course, what will happen is that lots of manufacturers will simply move into
the Freeports to save on taxes and regulations and close down their existing premises.
The UK has been there before – Thatcher was a huge fan of Development Corporations
which were low tax low regulation zones in crumbling industrial areas of the North and
Midlands. They became a byword for outright corruption. And of course huge areas which were
supposed to be redeveloped for industry became distribution hubs or frequently just massive
shopping malls (such as Merry Hill in the West Midlands, owned by two major Tory financial
contributors). Various studies after the event intended to demonstrate their success were
quietly buried when the results were not as expected. In reality, they were a costly
failure.
It now appears that this massive euphoria, which culminated in the biggest one-day selloff since
August, may have been a tad excessive, hitting just as China was forced to admit it has a major
viral epidemic on its hands (although in retrospect Ray Dalio's Gartmanesque "
cash
is trash
" declaration just days earlier in Davos, may have been just as powerful a catalyst for
the derisking as the Coronavirus pandemic).
And nowhere was the investor euphoria more apparent than in the tech sector which, as the BofA
chart below shoes, was the most overbought since dotcom bubble.
Then, on Friday, as we duly reported fears that China is losing the fight to contain the
Coronavirus spread finally exploded, and sent the Dow red for the year, with the S&P 500 index now
flat for 2020 as positive early results from 4Q 2019 earnings season offset the economic concerns
of the coronavirus. In short, much of the euphoria that was unleashed by the Fed's launch of QE4 in
October to "fix" the repo market, coupled with central banks cutting rates as if "it's a crisis" in
the words of Bank of America...
... concerns that China's economy may slump to a 5% or lower GDP as a result of the viral
pandemic, have come at the worst possible time. And so, with the market finally cracking,
suddenly panicked investors are asking if what has gone up in almost vertical fashion over the past
year is about to come down.
Namely the handful of tech stocks that has been at the forefront of the S&P's tremendous ascent:
the FAAMGs.
As Goldman's David Kostin write over the weekend, picking up where
Morgan Stanley's Michael Wilson left off two weeks
ago, "today, the S&P 500 market cap is
concentrated in the five largest stocks to a degree not witnessed since the peak of the Tech
bubble.
The five firms – FB, AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL – collectively account for 18% of S&P
500 market cap, the largest share since 2000
"...
... even as earnings are slightly less concentrated, with the top five stocks represent 14% of
profits, the highest level since 2015. During the past three months, aggregate FAAMG returns have
been double the S&P 500 index (19% vs. 8%) and generated 37% of the gain for the entire index
during that time. And with most of tech earnings roughly unchanged over the past year, the bulk of
this price increase was the direct result of multiple expansion, which in turn was made possible by
a record expansion in stock buybacks among tech companies.
So with everyone casting a fearful eye to the first tech bubble in 2000, investors are
understandably curious what happened back then, and are we about to witness the second coming of
the dot com bubble bursting.
Here, Kostin, which has a 3,400 year-end price target understandably does everything in its
power to mitigate fears that the Nasdaq is about to experience a second catastrophic plunge. Here
is what Kostin writes:
Twenty years ago, the US equity market was also dominated by five stocks:
MSFT, CSCO, GE, INTC, and XOM. In March 2000, these stocks accounted for 18% of total S&P 500
market cap and were priced at a substantial premium to the index. Collectively, the firms traded
at a forward P/E of 47x (vs. 24x for S&P 500) and 7.3x trailing EV/sales (vs. 2.7x). The
elevated valuations reflected expectations for rapid growth in aggregate earnings and sales
during 2000 and 2001.
In contrast, full-year 2001 results for the five largest stocks in March 2000 came in
nowhere near the lofty initial expectations.
In aggregate, sales fell by 7% (vs.
expectations of +15%), net margins contracted by 150 bp (from 13% to 11% vs. the original
forecast of 1100 bp of margin expansion) and net income fell by 18% (vs. forecast of +14%).
Three of the five firms actually realized negative sales growth in 2001 (INTC: -21%,
XOM: -10%, CSCO: -24%) and three reported negative EPS growth (CSCO: -72%, INTC: -68%, XOM:
-6%).
In contrast to the devastating misses suffered by the "Big Five" in 2000, Goldman claims that
"lower growth expectations, lower valuations, and a greater re-investment ratio suggest the current
concentration may be more sustainable than it proved to be in 2000." To underscore this point,
Goldman shows the following chart according to which valuations of the five largest companies now
are far more manageable compared to 2000.
But as even Goldman admits,
"in order to avoid repeating the share price collapse
experienced by their predecessors, today's market cap leaders will need to at least meet – and
preferably exceed – current consensus growth expectations,"
which, however, "seem more
achievable based on recent results and management guidance. In aggregate, consensus expects a 100
bp sales growth deceleration (from 15% in 2020 to 14% in 2021), a 20 bp margin expansion (19.5% to
19.7%), and a 600 bp EPS growth acceleration (10% to 16%)."
The good news is that at least for now, these market titans have not disappointed, as Bloomberg
pointed out in "
Like
It or Not, Trillion-Dollar Titans Lived Up to Earnings Hype
." Indeed, four of the five FAAMG
stocks reported 4Q 2019 results this week, which generally came in stronger than expected:
Apple reported a revenue and EPS beat
, with quarterly revenues of $92
billion (+9% vs. the year-ago quarter) beating consensus by 4% as demand for iPhones and
wearables better than expected. Subscriptions came in ahead of schedule, despite a deceleration
in services revenue growth to 17% year/year.
Microsoft posted positive results across every segment
. Sales grew by 14%
year/year and executives affirmed guidance for continued double-digit growth in 2020. Consensus
estimates currently forecast 12% sales growth and 11% EPS growth in 2020 and 12% and 14%,
respectively, in 2021.
FB reported strong 4Q results across almost every financial metric.
Overall
revenues jumped by 25% to $21 billion. While ad revenue beat for the fifth consecutive quarter,
slowing growth in mature markets led to some investor concern.
AMZN's Thursday report was the best of the FAAMG lot
. The company reported
4Q revenues of $87 billion (+21%), above consensus forecasts, and AMZN exceeded the high-end of
its revenue guidance for the first time since 1Q 2018.
Yet while the market leaders did not disappoint in the last quarter of 2019 when stocks exploded
higher with the blessing of the Fed's QE4, what about the current quarter and the future? What
happens to revenues and demand, to established supply chains, to profit margins, if the Coronavirus
epidemic keep spreading and tens of millions of Chinese remain under quarantine? What happens to
Apple's iPhone sales in China if the Cupertino company is unable to reopen its store for a month,
or two, or three? What happens to the already depressed global auto industry if Chinese part-makers
can't transport their parts to their core customers? What happens to China's financial system if
the local banking sector is suddenly paralyzed as the great unknown of how the pandemic
will impact the Chinese economy spreads
?
One thing is certain: with the tech sector priced to perfection, and with multiples of the IT
sector at the highest level since the dot com bubble, and the tech setor the most overbought
relative to the broader S&P500...
... anything less than perfection could lead to a violent selloff among the
massively
overbought handful of tech names that have led the market for much of the past year.
As such, it's suddenly up to China to make sure the FAAMGs in particular, and the tech sector,
and S&P500 in general, can sustain the lofty ascent that Donald Trump demands to ensure his
reelection in November. That, however, may be a big ask as the NYT writes in "
China
Kept World in Dark as Outbreak Rippled
" because, well,
why would China have to keep the
world in the dark if indeed the situation was contained, or containable?
And one lack at
the recent action in the NYSE FANG index...
... indicates that traders are increasingly starting to wonder if the mega tech party was
finally ended, not by a black swan, but a black bat...
Tags
Business Finance
Another Trotskyist attempt at convincing people they don't need nations anymore. No need to
feel proud in your cultural difference which makes the world a beautiful and ineffable place.
Instead, they want monoculture ruled by Technocrats. How "eastern."
I don't mind, because I know that in Christianity's early days, many converts had to hide
to preserve the faith.
Indeed, Philip K. Dick had fever dreams about being a Christian in ancient MENA and hiding
himself amongst the Romans. Jews, similarly, I am sure, felt something akin during the war in
Germany and occupied territory.
Freedom in the neo-liberal lexicon means freedom of the strong to predate on the weak. Free
Trade is a particular example of this. A rational person must expect the UK to be brutally
savaged in dealing with the EU, US and China.
@1, It is true that at present not having a Mediterranean coast is an advantage. But an
optimist might hope that the defeat of the US in Eurasia will bring new peace along the Belt
and Road, and Africa and the ME will see the greatest boom.
"The affirmative task we have now is to actually create a new world order."
-- Vice President Joe Biden, April 5, 2013
"Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective -- a new world order -- can
emerge."
-- President George H. W. Bush, September 11, 1990
"We saw deterioration where there should have been positive movement toward a new world
order."
-- Mikhail Gorbachev, October 19, 2011
"I think that his [Obama's] task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in
this period, when really a 'new world order' can be created. It's a great
opportunity."
Remember it was the British that basically established political Zionism as a state back
in Palestine.
It was Trump that declared Jerusalem as the 'eternal capital' of anti-Christ Judaism.
Boris Johnson is a 'passionate Zionist' by his own proclamation.
This is about a realignment of Zionist interest in the English speaking world.
The EU wasn't going to play ball on the terms of American (and British) Zionism.
The English (KJV) world of eschatology demands a pseudo-Christianity to bow down to the
interests of anti-Christ Jewish nationalism. (It is why the U.S. Senate has passed
legislation making it illegal to criticize 'Israel' as 'anti-Semitic')
American evangelicals are being misrepresented by heretics like John Hagee and a
pseudo-Christianity that cares not for Jesus Christ at all but rather maintains a focus only
on 'Israel'. A dual covenant theology mixed with heresies galore served up in a controlled
media that doesn't allow for the recognition of Christianity as the real Israel against a
history of the destruction of ancient Israel because of their rejection of Jesus Christ as
the Son of God.
The New Testament Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen is Jesus foretelling and giving clear
reason for the destruction of anti-Christ Judaism in 70 AD.
The heresies of John Darby and Cyrus Scofield (again nearly exclusively in English) have
created everything from British Israelism to fear and anxiety hustling crapola such as Hal
Lindsey and The Late Great Planet Earth end of the world heresies.
On the basis of Christian heresy has emerged anti-Christ political Zionism and its vast
adherents in the English speaking world now realigning.
The way most Canadians define themselves and our country is in NOT being like the US in
the most important ways. The decline into US-vassalage has been incrementally implemented
since WW2, but there is still hope. Scheer and Ignatief found out exactly what Canadians
thought about having a dual Cdn/US citizen PM... NOT HAPPENING. Harper found out trying to
US-ify Canada was a bad idea.
The Cdn-US cultural border has been basically open for decades, the effectiveness of CRTC
Cdn-content rules have been diluted to the point of irrelevance. But still we Canucks prefer
little things like our free medical and minimal military bloat to the US shit-show.
But highly unlikely Canada will return to the "preferred trading status" the Commonwealth
enforced. NAFTA Part Deux pretty much blocks that.
So Britain could easily be maneuvered into a similar vassal state situation with the US as
Canada, but what will Britain bring to the table the US military/corporatocracy would want?
No natural resources to speak of, so what is on offer? A handy military lily-pad perhaps, but
the US already has that, and can't see Britain booting the US military off the island.
Britain is in a VERY weak bargaining position with the US, if anything weaker as it closes
one avenue of access/influence the US has within the EU.
Britain has already been a de facto vassal state when it comes to aligning itself with
every empire FP misadventure abroad for 30 years.
I do not think the U.S. will give the U.K. a bad deal. I think this is the hope of many
here who foolishly advocate for the EU, which is really a byproduct of their unconscious from
their academia templates they wish to lay down over the world a la a good technocrat.
They will get along swimmingly. The U.S. is looking for better deals as opposed to getting
raped by China under the globalist paradigm.
The most encouraging aspect of the BREXIT SNAFU is that it confirms the suspicions/ wishful
thinking of many observers that fissures are appearing in the fabric which unites the Masters
Of The Universe/ the 1%.
With China's Belt & Road Initiative gaining momentum, the weaponisation of the USD, and
many countries looking East, it won't be difficult to cook up wedge issues to further erode
the "unity" of the EU.
When the recession starts biting and politicians begin prattling about "Austerity" (for the
99%) it'll be time to instigate a thorough investigation into the Tax Haven Network, and a
vigorous debate about how and why they should be closed down, the assets therein
redistributed in a Fair & Balanced way, and the perps imprisoned or executed for Tax
Evasion, Greed and Perjury.
The englanders refused to accept that the primary issue was never about brexit stay or go,
but what philosophy would underpin england for the next decades.
The picked the mean, racist, classist & regionalist (only the south east matters) Tory
Party so it won't be pretty. Yep the tories won seats in the working class areas of the
midlands & further north in addition to the seats in the bourgeois areas up there they
already held and yep Johnson did make noises about spending up large up there. However since
the remainers in the south east didn't desert the tories, I doubt much will be diverted
outside the south east, represented by long-standing MP's who don't 'talk funny' ie have a
regional accent unlike the new largely inexperienced northern representatives.
It was M Thatcher who introduced the heroin addict traineeships for miners & factory
workers in place of their jobs and I do not see the lobbyists who have worked so hard to
ensure that the financialisation of everything industry grew to be the major component of the
englander economy, countenancing anything more than token funds being diverted from them, not
least because that industry is going to take a major hit.
There is no way the EU is going to agree to england's banks & finance corps getting
anything like the same deal england had in the EU which means that the tax avoidance rorts
are going to be harder to implement whilst being more transparent to regulators.
Already stockbrokers, accountancy firms and a couple of the bigger banks are checking out
the weather in frankfurt now.
If the EU's shift to 137 governments international tax rules for tech giants idea remains as
minimal & toothless as it appears to be, most corporate CFO's are going to see the notion
of doing business in another jurisdiction & another currency expensive & pointless,
when the job can be done easier within the EU.
I'm sure that those banksters who cannot or will not shift their operations outta London
have some big strategy for persuading the EU to give way and treat the City as if it is still
in the EU, but that price will be high for all other englander industries, leaving Jo/Joe
Blow and the rest of the 99% in worse crap than they were before.
In case it gets hard for the UK economically after Brexit, the City of London will ask for
Johnson´s head, who will not hesitate, as Eton privileged class, selling what of
welfare still remains there, especially what Trump will for sure demand, the NHS, to try to
save face...
They will not low Johnson or his successor´s wage, nor will renounce to their
billionaire earnings, it will be he working class who will lose, as always happens. Then,
probably a new labor movement will arise...but after having payed such a price....
The best and most realistic analysis, from satire group ICYMI member (v this time notice
his graveness...)
Much more realistic than the delusional vision by Galloway, since to reach his dreamt
utopic state of affairs through this way, working people in the UK will first have to suffer
a lot, even a confrontation amongst ecah other, which is the "ultra-right" agenda, chaos from
which they reap...
I think Diane Johnstone's piece sums it up the best:
UK Came & Went, Leaving Europe in a Mess
30 January 2020 -- Consortium News
As Great Britain returns to the uncertainties of the open sea, it leaves behind a European
Union that is bureaucratically governed to serve the interests of financial capital, writes
Diana Johnstone
/../
From the start, the question of British membership appeared as a thorn in the side of
European unity. Initially, London was opposed to the Common Market. In 1958, Prime Minister
Harold MacMillan assailed it as "the Continental Blockade" (alluding to Napoleon's 1806
European policy) and said England would not stand for it. But as the project seemed to take
shape, London sought accommodation.
De Gaulle warned from the start that Great Britain didn't belong in a unified Europe,
geographically, economically or above all psychologically.
1. 50% of UK exports do not go to the EU. The "Rotterdam Effect" - whereby UK goods
transported to the rest of the world go via Europe's largest container port and are counted
in Eurostat land as exports to the EU.
2. The net balances of trade is massively in favour of the EU - ie the EU exports much
more to the UK than vice versa. Thus its the EU which desperately needs a trade deal. With
Germany a blink away from recession the last thing they need is tariffs on Mercedes, Audi, VW
etc..
3. Don't underestimate the value of old Commonwealth (Australia, NZ etc) ties
4. The sole ECB guarantor, in reality, is now Germany. When the Euro banks go tits up it
will be devastating for Germany.
5. The UK is a major financial hub, and will not be replaced by Frankfurt or Paris.
6. The UK could very easily do a Singapore by slashing business taxes and becoming the
gateway to Europe.
7. The world does not end when the transition period ends with no deal. See 1 & 2
above. WTO trade terms then apply. Its how the rest of the world trades with the EU, and I
don't see the likes of China or the US complaining.
I could go on. But the over-riding factor is that the UK gets back its sovereignty, and at
last a democratic vote has been respected, albeit belatedly. This will have many positive
effects for the UK. Oh, and the UK won't be the last to leave the EU.
I think b that you got it all wrong. The European Union has no advantage whatsoever since
it's institution are flawed. Just like Occupation put it "The structure of its financial
system and capital flows is not equitable, sustainable or resilient". We saw that very fact
unfold with the Greek crisis where the European union institutions and member states and
countries refused to support Greece in any way whatsoever (Germany, mainly.). Greece is
almost a third world country now to where the government has shortage of drugs and is selling
some of his major islands to billionaire like Warren Buffet.Add to that the rise of anti
European, German and globalist sentiments coupled with like minded terrorist groups such as
the Popular fighter Group and the revolutionary Struggle since the 2008 crisis and we have
pretty much a country in decay , very unstable and about to implode. I could go on and on
adding the so call PIGS country economic and social state therein it wouldn't make a
difference.
There is unity in European union but in name only.
Furthermore the European Union while not being democratic (since its parliament has not
the power and freedom to introduce bills of law and the European commissioners can put any
law they deem so necessary into effect without parliament consent ) has however a tremendous
amount of legal power, when it comes to societal changes and free trade, that can overrule
any member states and countries judicial systems (Let's Think of the introduction of GMO
products and destructive and unhealthy agriculture in spite of states and people opposing
them).
This may very well be one of the reasons why England and part of its ruling elite are keen
to get out of the European Union.
Lets be in honesty and speak truth here, countries and member states of the European Union
are ancient countries b, some having more than a thousand year history. Even if they truly
wanted to make an efficient European union, their differences, different interests and mostly
languages, cultural, practical and natural organizations of society inherited from years past
make the European union way too hard to achieve . Such a dream will take at least a couple of
centuries to happen if it ever does and will require unprecedented sacrifices and a denying
of people long established habits, behaviors, and so on only history can overcome.You, b,
better than anyone knows how politic even with great vision must be based on practical means
and understanding of realities or else its result can be catastrophic. That isn't the path
undertook by the European union.
Talking of economy, I wholeheartedly disagree with your statement on England weaknesses
after the Brexit.
First, it will be easier for great Britain to protect its main industries and tax big
corporations such as the GAFAM and the FANG.
Second, Britain is a very well educated and able country and there is nothing she cannot
mostly (or at least partially) do and achieve on her own in the possibility that she lacks
significant imports from other European countries. If anything,the refusal from other
European countries of importing some products via trade deals will boost inner production and
force Britain to re-industrialize segments of its economy which is very good for employment
and salaries. Britain may take a few years to recover but in the end she will come out of the
European union stronger and richer than she was in it.
Finally lets not fool ourselves England will certainly increased ties with the
commonwealth, the united states and china without major issues. Africa as a whole is not far
behind and I doubt France will ever stop selling cheese and wine to England and Germany stop
selling Cars and machine tools to it.
@ Posted by: NemesisCalling | Jan 31 2020 19:57 utc | 26
No. Nation-States are not born from cultural isolation: economic development develops
culture, not the inverse. The problem with the "cultural genesis" hypothesis is that it is
completely arbitrary: you could come up with an infinite combination of nation-States at
every time, at any stage. It is a hypothesis that explains everything without explaining
anything. It is, therefore, a scientifically useless hypothesis at best; a logical fallacy at
worst.
My observation about the development of the productive forces come from the objective
reality. It is the most scientifically precise description of human societal development in a
historical frame. This is not an opinion of mine: it's a fact. So, let's not waste time with
this anymore, as it would only bother the people who visit this blog.
--//--
@ Posted by: cdvision | Jan 31 2020 22:38 utc | 48
1. Maybe. But, as you state at #5, the UK is basically a rentier economy, so the battle
won't be won by the UK in the exports front.
2. This could be because the UK's productive sector is weak, not that the EU's productive
sector is strong. Besides, we live in a capitalist world, where there are not one, but two
balances: trade and capitals. The UK has a massive surplus in the capitals balance - massive
enough to cut by 7% its entire deficit per year.
3. Well then...
4. True.
5. True. But it will lose its Euro swap services monopoly - not enough to break the bank,
but a minus nevertheless.
6. You know you're desperate when you begin to resort to fucking Singapore to try to
search from some light at the end of the tunnel. First of all: Singapore is tiny. Very tiny.
Actually, it is a city.
Second, the UK's tax rates are already very low, and it already controls the main tax
havens, so there isn't much to lower anymore.
Third: as mentioned here in my first comment, the UK already had more than 750 bilateral
free trade agreements with the rest of the world; the UK was already "free" while it was in
the EU.
True, it won't be the total collapse the Remainers have been touting - but it won't be
that boom the Brexiter are preaching too. Basically nothing will change in the UK in terms of
trade agreements. Fourth: did I mention you're literally comparing a nation-State of 70
million people to a city-state?
7. True. Europe simply isn't that relevant anymore.
But the most funny thing I find about this Brexit debate is how amplified it is: Remainers
think the world will end; Brexiters think the Empire will come back. People, Brexit only
makes things go as they were before . Did the world end when the WTO ruled trade? No.
Did the UK become a superpower again when Thatcher rose to power? No. Was the UK a superpower
before the EEC and after WWI? No.
So, in other words, almost nothing will change. UK will strike some Norway-type deal with
the rest of the EU (is Norway collapsed? No.), it will probably renegotiate its already
existing trade deal with the USA - under unfavorable terms, for sure, since the USA is
infinitely richer and stronger than the UK - and the other one gazillion bilateral deals it
already had before will continue to exist.
The only notable thing I find about Brexit is its symbolism: it represents the inexorable
fall of Europe as a significant world player. In its history, Europe only became a world
player on two short lived occasions: when the Roman Empire was at its apex (the "High
Empire", from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius) and when the British Empire led a coalition of
second-rate empires essentially at the 19th Century (i.e. when capitalism became global).
That's only 350 years in more than 12,000 of human civilization history. During the rest of
it, Europe not only wasn't a world player, but it was probably one of the most peripheral and
poor regions of the planet.
I think MA outlook for Britan is too shadowed in sorrow. Britain strength in fishing waters
and import of germany cars are too underestimated. Britain with there connection to former
colonial countries make them sustainable. In the end germany will bend down to any toll on
cars. Britain has the upper card. Meanwhile the whole french spanish portuguise fishing
industry can wish they where british.
Still you wounder, the Illuminati outpost recommended brexit, what are they planning? Hope
it's a struggle between Illuminati and not a plan to extinguish common people. Eu will fall
like Rom, but the timeline is quit quick. Farage the city of london citizen talking to the
people convinced to leave eu what can be wrong? The world is no democracy and you can just
observe Illuminati decisions.
We should not underestimate the importance of today from the viewpoint of sovereignty and
democracy.
The principal of sovereignty must apply both to the countries we here defend as the
targets of the Empire, and even to the Chief Poodle of the US Empire itself, the UK. It is of
course unlikely, but if Britain is to be free of Brussels it should be free of Washington
too. Hard to imagine when the CIA and MI6 seem to be the same thing.
One of the reasons I voted Leave was to remove the toxic Chief Poodle influence of Britain
from Europe. If the EU becomes less Russophobic with MI6 removed, then this is a win for
Brexit.
The democracy thing is huge though. Here we have had for three and a half years almost the
whole coalition of forces who constitute the ruling-class narrative control (minus a few
Tories) demonise Brexit and portray Leavers as knuckle-dragging racist xenophobe chauvinist
nazi fascist bigoted hateful morons who were duped by a gross rather than net figure on the
side of a bus.
Despite this Leavers have quietly, peacefully and patiently voted in three elections since
the referendum with outcomes favouring Leave. In the 2017 GE both Tory and Labour promised to
respect the referendum and Labour did well. The Lib Dems ran on reversing Brexit and got
nothing. In the EU Parliament elections (there are no elections for the EU commission - now
there's a thing) the Brexit Party basically smashed it and won most of the seats. Then in the
2019 GE Labour was forced by the Blairites (and probably not opposed by the Corbynistas who
are also pro-Eu, contrary to their guru's long-held Tony Bennite Left Euro Scepticism) to
campaign on a rejection of the referendum, and the so-called Red Wall of sold, traditional
Labour working-class constituencies voted Tory because Labour had betrayed them.
And so, after FOUR polls, and the majority of the elites trying to crush the popular will,
finally The Thing is done - at least symbolically - there is more to come.
The future is uncertain, but tonight this is a victory for democracy, and a blow for the
elites who instructed the proles to Remain. The proles refused.
Britain has until the end of this year to make a new trade deal with Europe, with the U.S.,
and with other countries.
The UK already had more than 750 bilateral deals around the world. The argument used by
the brexiters that EU membership was "isolation" is a complete farce.
Nothing significant will change in this front after Brexit.
But the EU will also need to change its urge to centralize and regulate everything. If it
continues on its path other countries may want to follow the British example despite the
damage it will cause to them.
The issue is not between "centralization vs decentralization", but the historical process
of the development of the productive forces.
Before the creation of the Euro, it was economically advantageous for the little poor
countries from the European Peninsula to seek EU membership. After its creation, the
economies begun to diverge: Germany begun to siphon the wealth from its poorer members.
Add to that the worldwide capitalist meltdown from 2008 and you have the toxic mixture for
what is essentially a neoliberal union in the EU.
Centralization and decentralization, in abstract, mean nothing. It's always the historical
context that counts. It's not the quest for centralization that menaces the dissolution of
the EU, but the fact that the EU was already economically declining for two decades that
resulted in its smaller members to complain about its perceived quest for centralization.
This vicious cycle generated a dialetical contradiction which impelled the EU to actually try
to seek more centralization in response - in a classic "self-realizing prophecy" case.
This must be the case, since it explains why Brexit happened in 2016 and not in 2000; why
the Scotish referendum happened in 2015 and not in 1708; and why similar movements are
happening more or less at the same time in Italy and Greece. It also explains why there is
not "exit" movements in Poland and Hungary, even though there are anti-EU movements
there.
IMO, this leaves GB more susceptible to the influences of the empire. I fully expect the U$A
to attack the British National Health Service with pressure to privatize.
Spot on vk! Your analysis of EU dynamics is a pretty succint summary.
Those who think that Brexit will reduce immigration to the UK are fantasists (as well as
racists - at this point UKIP and Farage have an undeniable track record one could plausibly
claim not to know about in 2014). The current UK economic model relies on a large inflow of
immigrant labour to underpin fanciful "growth" statistics, depress wages, and keep up
pressure on the housing market, among other "schemes" in the worst sense of the word, and the
government has already said that it will seek to increase non-European immigration to make up
for decreases in EU immigration. Bye bye Polish plumber, hello ???...
The tell tale sign; debt rises much faster than GDP in the US in the 1920s.
(Japan 1980s; US, UK and Euro-zone before 2008; China after 2008)
The bankers were inflating asset prices with bank credit.
Bank credit effectively brings future prosperity into today.
The 1920s boomed on borrowed money and the 1930s were impoverished as they made the
repayments.
In the 1930s, they pondered over where all that wealth had gone to in 1929 and realised
inflating asset prices doesn't create real wealth, they came up with the GDP measure to track
real wealth creation in the economy.
The transfer of existing assets, like stocks and real estate, doesn't create real wealth
and therefore does not add to GDP. The real wealth creation in the economy is measured by
GDP.
Inflated asset prices aren't real wealth, and this can disappear almost over-night, as it
did in 1929 and 2008.
Real wealth creation involves real work, producing new goods and services in the
economy.
Henry Simons was a founder member of the Chicago School of Economics and he had worked out
what was wrong with his beliefs in free markets in the 1930s.
Banks can inflate asset prices with the money they create from bank loans.
Henry Simons and Irving Fisher supported the Chicago Plan to take away the bankers ability
to create money.
"Simons envisioned banks that would have a choice of two types of holdings: long-term
bonds and cash. Simultaneously, they would hold increased reserves, up to 100%. Simons saw
this as beneficial in that its ultimate consequences would be the prevention of
"bank-financed inflation of securities and real estate" through the leveraged creation of
secondary forms of money."
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Irving Fisher
1929.
This 1920's neoclassical economist that believed in free markets knew this was a stable
equilibrium. He became a laughing stock, but worked out where he had gone wrong.
Banks can inflate asset prices with the money they create from bank loans, and he knew his
belief in free markets was dependent on the Chicago Plan, as he had worked out the cause of
his earlier mistake.
It was those bankers inflating the US stock market with margin lending.
It's not quite the same this time.
Let the bank's collapse for a Great Depression
Save the banks, but leave the debt in place for Japanification .
How did this old belief set come back again?
A new ideology, neoliberalism, was wrapped around 1920s neoclassical economics, to make it
look brand new.
The reckless bankers and robber barons had made a lot of money in the 1920s and they
rather liked the way things had been before, but after the reckless bankers and robber barons
had run riot in the US in the 1920s, beliefs in economic liberalism and the markets were in
short supply.
Just a few diehards, like Hayek, were left and they were hiding out at the LSE in the UK
in the 1930s. He was looking to put a new slant on those old ideas.
In the 1940s, Hayek put together his theories of the markets being a mechanism for
transmitting the collective wisdom of market participants around the world through pricing.
It was never going to get into the mainstream until nearly everyone had forgotten what
happened last time they believed in the markets.
At last, in the 1980s, the people were ready to believe in the markets again.
Before 1980 – banks lending into the right places that result in GDP growth
(business and industry, creating new products and services in the economy)
Debt grows with GDP
After 1980 – banks lending into the wrong places that don't result in GDP growth
(real estate and financial speculation)
Debt rises much faster than GDP
2008 – Minsky Moment
After 2008 – Balance sheet recession and the economy struggles as debt repayments to
banks destroy money. We are making the repayments on the debt we built up from 1980 –
2008.
What happened in 1979?
The UK eliminated corset controls on banking in 1979 and the banks invaded the mortgage
market and this is where the problem starts.
This is the UK, but everyone has made the same mistake.
One economics, one ideology.
Global groupthink.
At 25.30 mins you can see the super imposed private debt-to-GDP ratios.
What Japan does in the 1980s; the US, the UK and Euro-zone do leading up to 2008 and China
has done more recently.
The tell tale sign of neoclassical economics; debt rises much faster than GDP
The PBoC saw the Chinese Minsky Moment coming and you can too by looking at the chart
above. The Chinese bankers had been loading their economy up with their debt products and it
was just about to crash.
Our experts look at public debt and consumer price inflation, but the problems develop in
private debt and asset price inflation so the "black swan" flies in under their radar.
Davos 2018 – The Chinese know financial crises come from the private debt-to-GDP
ratio and inflated asset prices
thatcher was a neoliberal. neoliberalism is both nationalism (for the long con game) and
globalist (the goal)
The Mont Pelerin Society's (Austria 1940's) favorite "economist" F. v Hayek proposed path
of "liberty" and "freedom" [only for the inbred 1% (Neoliberalism)] (Friedman, Buchanan,
"Chicago School", were later disciples)
1) Deregulate global financial markets - DONE
2) Deregulate global trade - DONE
3) Create the illusion and urgency of national bankruptcy with fake (fiat) debt (thereby
neuter a nation's capability to enforce laws - eliminate the people's ability to defend
against being overwhelmed and consumed by the 1%) - DONE
this manufactured illusion of bankruptcy is critical path for the inbred 1%'s agenda. the
"debt" is used to justify austerity measures for the people, and to tee up, the privatization
plan, which is about transforming the public debt, into private debt, where the 1% can
extract usury, ad infinitum.
#AusterityIsCode4Looting - austerity measures are plain evidence, the system has already
been looted by generational globalist wealth.
then lastly, the kill shot:
4) Privatize Everything. recreate us ALL as permanent rent payers of even the most basic
necessities of life (Air, water, food, shelter, health care). the public debt of a ntion has
been effectively eliminated, transmuted into private debt; the service of which (usury) is
FOREVER- Almost COMPLETE
#PrivatizationIsTheft - privatization today is STRICTLY about prioritizing national
productivity (work) away from the commons and general welfare, extracting and transferring it
to the inbred 1% rent-seeking parasites (Extreme Redistribution of wealth from the people TO
the Billionaires, NOTHING for the people)
"People only accept change when they are faced with necessity, and only recognize
necessity when crisis is upon them."
Same old process...Problem, Reaction, Solution
They corrupt the current system and advance their agenda as far as they can (gaining
public support using the process above). When they detect growing resistance and distrust of
the system...they then encourage and use that trend to advance their agenda further using the
same Problem, Reaction, Solution process. The crash/destruction of the current status quo and
the fear and chaos that comes with it will be blamed on populism/nationalism. The people (in
chaos and fear) will seek safety and security...and will willingly accept the solutions
offered up to them. Rinse and repeat.
The bottom line is they know that acceptance of global centralization of power and
control...is a bottoms up process (the people must willing accept/demand it). It must be
accomplished in evolutionary stages through gradualism. However, when they have reach a
certain point and want to take the next major step, they undermine the peoples trust in the
current system and encourage and use the people's blow-back. Blow-back will be blamed for all
the chaos and fear.
When/where did he ever talk about reducing the Federal government to its original
constitutional functions? Never.
When/where did he ever talk about re-enforcing the Bill of Rights on the Feds? Never.
When/where did he ever talk about getting rid of the income tax and the IRS? Never.
When/where did he ever talk about getting rid of the FBI, the CIA, the Federal Reserve,
the NSA, the FDA, the CDC, the EPA [all unconstitutional] etc.etc. etc. ad infinitum? Never,
that's when.
He's just another in a long line of big-mouthed, self-important scam artists –
always, was, and always will be.
I feel sorry for the naive individuals who were fooled, and those who continue to be
fooled. Maybe at least some of them have now learned a valuable lesson.
@TG I said over a
year ago, around the time this Orange Cuck Master gave that SOTU speech and reversed almost
every policy promise he made to his 63 million supporters on his #1 most important issue,
i.e., the border wall, deporting illegals, ending DACA on day one, drastically reducing legal
immigration – which is even more destructive to the future of the GOP to win any more
elections than is illegal immigration, the whole package that got people off their sofas and
down to the polls to vote for him – that it was obvious to me that the globalist deep
state had finally gotten their hands on some kind of leverage over him and had finally put
their dog collar around his Orange lying neck.
Was it related to Jeffrey Epstein? Who knows. I'm sure it is possible, with the way
degenerate behavior seems to now run amok within the super rich and elitist circles. Heck,
the morals of the entire country have pretty much descended into the sewer these days.
I think we are in the last days of this empire's history. I see no White knight waiting in
the wings who will ride to the rescue, and if one did emerge – only half of the country
would support them and the other half of totalitarian, sexual and moral degenerates would
want to kill him.
What we need is a collapse and breakup of America.
In what is happening right now around the Bernie Sanders camp and the Elizabeth Warren camp,
there is an opportunity for these supposed ResistanceTM-people to step up their game
significantly.
After all, in this moment, the anti-Berners are certainly stepping up their own game. The
problem is that there is a large asymmetry here: it is a lot easier to take someone like Bernie
down than it is to build him up, in part because the former can rely on every aspect of the
system, from call-out culture and Title IX-type methods to the most nefarious elements of the
Deep State, while the latter has to actually confront these elements for a change.
... ... ... 1. What's going on right now with Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton is the
beginning of sticking the knife back into Bernie's back. These two played a major role in doing
that in 2016, and now they're getting the band back together again. Okay, that's no
mystery.
The real question is, What are Bernie supporters and those who (one way or another) support
the Democrats, going to do about it? When and if Warren and Clinton succeed in taking Bernie
down–and of course Biden and the Obamas are onboard for this, as well–will
Democrats (and Dem-supporting "leftists," etc.) be so blinded by TDS that they'll just say, "Oh
well, we still have to vote for " Warren, Biden, etc.?
I think this runs parallel to what some have said about "letting the CIA help with the
impeachment"–it's truly delusional, reactionary stuff. Likewise, people getting in a huff
because "Bernie called her a liar on national television." No problem, apparently, that Warren
first called Bernie a liar. Even more, no problem that Warren's whole life and career is based
on a lie–a lie that, even now, she justifies with bullshit about how she "just loves her
family so much." (Of course, with only a very few exceptions, I find the Democratic
Party–and the Republican Party–completely unacceptable anyway. They are both
steering media for capitalist power and money. However, unlike my leftist friends who presently
justify supporting the Democrats, in impeachment and in re-taking the White House, "because
they are the lesser evil," I argue that the Democrats are the greater evil, the "best
representatives" of the current form of capitalism, that the Republicans are in at least some
cases the lesser evil, and that Trump is something different from either one.)
2. Accordingly, I think a Trump/Sanders election would be a very good thing. You may know
that I have been writing a long series of articles I have two basic reasons for hoping Sanders
can get the nomination and that there could be a Trump/Sanders election: i. For Sanders to get
the nomination there will have to be a very strong, dedicated, and focused movement, which will
essentially have to defeat the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party and in whatever one wants
to call the agglomeration of power mechanisms that form the establishment and the State.
Sanders will have to do what Trump did with the Republican Party in 2016, except with Sanders
and the power structures he will be up against (and with which he is more compromised than
Trump ever was), this will be much, much harder. I really don't think it can happen -- and
we're seeing major moves in this effort toward eliminating Bernie just in the week that has
passed since I started writing this. However, this does mean that, if Bernie can build (much
further) and lead the movement to seriously address these power structures,
ii. Despite what you and many others say and (I feel) are a bit too desperate to think,
Sanders does have some things in common with Trump, at least thematically -- and a lot of my
arguments in my articles have to do with the importance of these themes being out there, in a
way that they never would have been with any other Republican, Hillary Clinton or any of the
other current frontrunners besides Sanders, and any of the other media with the very important
exceptions of Tucker Carlson, Steve Hilton, and perhaps a couple others on Fox News (perhaps
Laura Ingram) -- and this is not only something that the anti-Trumpers absolutely hate, they
hate it so much that they can't even think about it.
That is, Trump and Sanders have in
common that they 1) profess that they want to do things that improve the lives of ordinary
working people, and 2) profess that they want to draw back militarism.
What I emphasize is that these terms would not even be on the table if it weren't for Trump
-- and yes, to some extent if it weren't for Bernie, but there is a way in which Bernie can
only be out there at all because Trump has put these things on the table.
Rhys Jaggar ,
The thing you are failing to see here is that Trump did nothing particularly special last
time: the Deplorables had simply had enough shit over enough years that their bullshitometers
were fully sensitised.
So they listened to all the Deep State crap and said: 'Screw You! We're all gonna vote
Trump and piss on your friggin' parade!'
They did not think all that deeply, they just were absolutely adamant about what they DID
NOT WANT.
And Trump just said: 'I understand!'
The words 'I understand' are dynamite in politics. They are even more dynamite if it is
said in a roundabout way, but the meaning is crystal clear to the target audience.
If Sanders wants to win, he has to prove to Main Street America that 'HE UNDERSTANDS!'
He will not win speaking down to them, telling them he knows what is best for them.
They have had two generations of that and are absolutely sick and tired of it.
The way to victory for any US Presidential candidate in 2020 is showing that they
understand, they care enough to DO SOMETHING TO HELP and they have the savvy NOT TO GET PUT
ON A SPIKE BY THE DEEP STATE!
Seamus Padraig ,
Sanders will have to do what Trump did with the Republican Party in 2016, except with
Sanders and the power structures he will be up against (and with which he is more
compromised than Trump ever was), this will be much, much harder. I really don't think it
can happen
I agree. For one thing, Bernie is no Trump; he's just not a fighter. Bernie is weak. They
already defrauded him once back in 2016, and he didn't care. He went ahead and endorsed the
woman who cheated him, and he even spent months criss-crossing the country stumping for her!
Have we seen the merest scrap of evidence this year that Bernie finally plans to take the
gloves off? No, we haven't. He's a lot like Jeremy Corbyn in that regard, and just like
Jeremy Corbyn, I predict he will be defeated–not so much by the voters as by 'his own'
party.
but does anyone think there is a shortage of obnoxious jerks around Warren and
Biden?
Just one little word should suffice: Hunter!
I think you'll find that this work is not going to be nearly so easy as what has passed
for "resistance" among the anti-Trump crowd thus far.
What has passed for "resistance" since 2016 is this:
1.) Working for the government for a while to sabotage Trump.
2.) Then, when you get found out and fired by him, getting a multi-million dollar contract
to write some 'tell-all' book about how evil/stupid (take your pick) your ex-boss was.
3.) Then getting invited onto The View to promote it and prattle on about how you
answer to some "higher calling" so that your serial violations of the law don't
matter–as opposed to, say, Trump's serial violations of decorum, which obviously merit
impeachment.
That's exactly what "resistance" means to these wankers, and that's one reason I am proud
to say that I am not a part of it.
lundiel ,
America's most dangerous president was, imo, Obama. Trump has nothing on him, apart from his
delusions over Israel, Trump has tried, and failed, to exercise control over the security
state. Obama worked with the state while he mesmerised us with stunning speeches about
equality and democracy as he signied off on regime change and assassinations.
Should she ever run, Michelle would be at least as dangerous. The Obamas can make people
believe that they are 'on their side'.
Antonym ,
Bernie is a nice guy – too nice: no match for the shark pools from Fairfax county,
Lower Manhattan or the Clinton clan . The 2016 DNC candidate selection revelations proved
this.
The only untainted strong Democratic candidate is Tulsi Gabbard, but she has all
Establishments against her.
wardropper ,
I'd go further and say that the Americans can't win, whoever is leading them.
The pool from which they make their selections was poisoned long ago.
And it makes me very sad to say that.
Our godless society is overflowing with people who long for moral leadership, but who can't
find it in today's Washminster.
Personal pursuit of a decent inner life is always an option, but Washington and Westminster
are addicted to the other kind – the moneyed surface of life.
The way things are right now, it's extremely hard to say how a bridge from one kind to the
other could possibly be built, but I keep looking
paul ,
Sanders is just another irrelevant mediocrity.
Fair dinkum ,
Since Reagan's Presidency, all US elections have been about rearranging the deck chairs on
the Titanic.
The ship may be sinking slowly, but the outcome will be the same.
I'd say it was long before Ronnie got elected to office. Remember it was Carter and Zyb who
got involved in the imperial quick sand of Afghanistan (mixing metaphors here) that is after
being run out of 'Nam by a bunch of angry natives who had gotten tired of America "being a
force for good" by reining "freedom and democracy" on them from the bomb bays of B 52s which
I think is going to a be similar situation to what will soon happen in Iraq if we dawdle too
long.
Elections have in reality become all pomp with no circumstance. Flip a coin and it always
comes up heads. It's a stacked deck that public are asked to play every two years thinking
the odds are in their favor when it never really is. Might as well head to Vegas following
the dusty trail of Hunter S Thompson.
Charlotte Ruse ,
The day FDR dumped Henry Wallace in favor of Harry Truman the US was f–ked.
Seamus Padraig ,
That phase is over. Now that the Titanic's going down, it's no longer about rearranging any
deck chairs, but about fighting over the life boats!
Charlotte Russe ,
It's not all that complicated Obama laid the groundwork ensuring Bernie's defeat when he
interfered in deciding who would Chair the DNC. Tom Perez was Obama's pick. Bernie wanted
Keith Ellison. Perez guaranteed neoliberal centrist Dems would maintain control. Tom Perez
didn't disappoint– his nominations for the 2020 Democratic Convention standing
committees are a like a who's who of centrism. Most of the folks on this "A list" would fit
quite nicely in the Republican Party.
milosevic ,
threaten to abandon the Dems to start a Workers Third Party
actually doing so, would accomplish vastly more than just "threatening", unless anybody is
really hoping for a remake of Hope and Change, which would change nothing except the specific
flavour of Identity Politics secret sauce disguising the foul taste of neoliberal
fascism.
Exactly! It was always going to be Brexit in name only (BRINO) with Theresa May and Boris at
the helm (due to their establishment masters including the civil service). If the 2019
election hadn't been transparently & despicably corrupt (with its uber smears of Jeremy
Corbyn and the outright rigging with postal ballots) we would not be in this position. The
truth must be that the estab had too much to lose to not rig it.
Will we be leaving all the EU institutions including the ECJ?
Why did Theresa May (and Boris) insidiously sign us up to the Global Compact for
Migration? Why did Theresa May (and Boris) also insidiously sign us up to the EU/European
Defence Union? Do some people not know what I am talking about? Well, there is a Media 'D
Notice' on these subjects. if you need to find out about these things you will have to look
to the alternative media like UK column and social media (like Twitter e.g Veterans for
Britian) to find these things out.
Did you know Lord James of Blackheath was threatened for speaking about the EU Defence
Union last year – that may tell you how important it is that the estab need keep most
of the public unaware of the subject.
Bolton is a war mongering narcissist that wanted his war, didn't get it, & is now
acting like a spoilt child that didn't get his way & is laying on the floor kicking &
screaming!
1. What's going on right now with Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton is the beginning of
sticking the knife back into Bernie's back. These two played a major role in doing that in
2016, and now they're getting the band back together again. Okay, that's no mystery.
The real question is, What are Bernie supporters and those who (one way or another) support
the Democrats, going to do about it? When and if Warren and Clinton succeed in taking Bernie
down–and of course Biden and the Obamas are onboard for this, as well–will
Democrats (and Dem-supporting "leftists," etc.) be so blinded by TDS that they'll just
say,
"Oh well, we still have to vote for " Warren, Biden, etc.?
I think this runs parallel to what some have said about "letting the CIA help with the
impeachment"–it's truly delusional, reactionary stuff. Likewise, people getting in a huff
because "Bernie called her a liar on national television." No problem, apparently, that Warren
first called Bernie a liar. Even more, no problem that Warren's whole life and career is based
on a lie–a lie that, even now, she justifies with bullshit about how she "just loves her
family so much." Indeed, Hillary's intervention in the following days was very likely intended
to take attention away from Warren's attack on Sanders, as well as, of course, to once again
put HRC out there as the potential savior at the convention.
It seems to me that the lesson here is that, if Bernie doesn't get the nomination, no other
candidate (from among the frontrunners) is acceptable, especially because of the role they will
have played in taking down Bernie and his movement.
I have two basic reasons for hoping Sanders can get the nomination and that there could be a
Trump/Sanders election:
i. For Sanders to get the nomination there will have to be a very
strong, dedicated, and focused movement, which will essentially have to defeat the
powers-that-be in the Democratic Party and in whatever one wants to call the agglomeration of
power mechanisms that form the establishment and the State. Sanders will have to do what Trump
did with the Republican Party in 2016, except with Sanders and the power structures he will be
up against (and with which he is more compromised than Trump ever was), this will be much, much
harder. I really don't think it can happen -- and we're seeing major moves in this effort
toward eliminating Bernie just in the week that has passed since I started writing this.
However, this does mean that, if Bernie can build (much further) and lead the movement to
seriously address these power structures, and even beat them in some significant ways, then
something tremendous will have been accomplished -- "the harder they come, the harder they
fall," or at least I hope so. ii. Despite what you and many others say and (I feel) are a bit
too desperate to think, Sanders does have some things in common with Trump, at least
thematically -- and a lot of my arguments in my articles have to do with the importance of
these themes being out there, in a way that they never would have been with any other
Republican, Hillary Clinton or any of the other current frontrunners besides Sanders, and any
of the other media with the very important exceptions of Tucker Carlson, Steve Hilton, and
perhaps a couple others on Fox News (perhaps Laura Ingram) -- and this is not only something
that the anti-Trumpers absolutely hate, they hate it so much that they can't even think about
it.
That is, Trump and Sanders have in common that they 1) profess that they want to do things
that improve the lives of ordinary working people, and 2) profess that they want to draw back
militarism.
What I emphasize is that these terms would not even be on the table if it weren't for Trump
-- and yes, to some extent if it weren't for Bernie, but there is a way in which Bernie can
only be out there at all because Trump has put these things on the table.
A lot of blowback against my articles has been against my argument that getting these terms
and the discourse around them on the table is very important, a real breakthrough, and a
breakthrough that both clarifies the larger terms of things and disrupts the "smooth
functioning" (I take this from Marcuse) of the neoliberal-neoconservative compact around
economics and military intervention.
Okay, maybe I'm right about this importance, maybe I'm not -- that's an argument I've dealt
with extensively in my articles and that I'll try to deal with definitively in further writing
-- but certainly a very important part of not letting Sanders be taken down by the other
frontrunners (and HRC, and other nefarious forces, with Warren playing a special "feminist" and
Identity Politics role here -- a role that does nothing to help, and indeed does much to hurt,
ordinary working people of all colors, genders, etc.) will be to further sharpen the general
understanding of the importance of these themes.
Significantly, there is a third theme which has emerged since the unexpected election of
Donald Trump -- unexpected at least by the establishment and the nefarious powers (though they
were thinking of an "insurance policy"); on this theme, I don't know that Sanders can do much
-- working with the Democratic Party, he is too implicated in this issue, and he does not have
whatever "protection" Trump has here.
What I am referring to are those nefarious powers behind the establishment and the ruling
class, and that have taken on a life of their own -- I don't mind calling this the Deep State,
but one can just think about the "intelligence community" and especially the CIA.
Whatever -- the point is that Trump has had to call them out and expose them in ways that
they obviously do not like, and also his agenda of a world where the U.S. gets along
well-enough with China and Russia at least not to risk WWIII, or, perhaps more realistically,
not to tip the balance of things such that Russia goes completely over to a full alliance with
China, a "Eurasian Union," which both Putin and Xi have spoken about, is not to their
liking.
Whether Sanders would call out these nefarious factors if he were in a position to do so, I
don't know -- I don't have great confidence that he would -- but it is also the case that he is
not in a position to do so, these powers can easily dispose of Sanders in ways that they
haven't been able to, so far, with Trump.
If one does think these themes are important, especially the first two (with further
discussion reserved regarding the powers-behind-the-powers), then I wish that Trump-haters
would open their minds for a moment and think about what it apparently takes in our social
system to even begin to get these themes on the table.
In any case, regarding Sanders, the movement he is building will have to go even further
with the first two themes if Sanders is nominated, and at least go some distance in taking on
the third theme. This applies even more if Sanders were to be elected. (This is where you might
take a look at the 1988 mini-series, A Very British Coup -- except that how things go down in
the U.S. will not be so "British.") Here again, though, if Sanders is to build a movement that
can openly address these questions, this will be tremendous, a great thing.
So this is it in a nutshell: If Sanders were to be nominated, then there is the possibility,
which everyone ought to work to make a reality, that we could have an election based around the
questions, What can be done to improve the lives of ordinary working people?, and, What can be
done to curb militarism and end the endless interventions and wars?
Antonym ,
Bernie is a nice guy – too nice: no match for the shark pools from Fairfax county,
Lower Manhattan or the Clinton clan . The 2016 DNC candidate selection revelations proved
this.
The only untainted strong Democratic candidate is Tulsi Gabbard, but she has all
Establishments against her.
Fair dinkum ,
Since Reagan's Presidency, all US elections have been about rearranging the deck chairs on
the Titanic.
The ship may be sinking slowly, but the outcome will be the same.
I'd say it was long before Ronnie got elected to office. Remember it was Carter and Zyb who
got involved in the imperial quick sand of Afghanistan (mixing metaphors here) that is after
being run out of 'Nam by a bunch of angry natives who had gotten tired of America "being a
force for good" by reining "freedom and democracy" on them from the bomb bays of B 52s which
I think is going to a be similar situation to what will soon happen in Iraq if we dawdle too
long.
Elections have in reality become all pomp with no circumstance. Flip a coin and it always
comes up heads. It's a stacked deck that public are asked to play every two years thinking
the odds are in their favor when it never really is. Might as well head to Vegas following
the dusty trail of Hunter S Thompson.
Charlotte Russe ,
It's not all that complicated Obama laid the groundwork ensuring Bernie's defeat when he
interfered in deciding who would Chair the DNC. Tom Perez was Obama's pick. Bernie wanted
Keith Ellison. Perez guaranteed neoliberal centrist Dems would maintain control. Tom Perez
didn't disappoint– his nominations for the 2020 Democratic Convention standing
committees are a like a who's who of centrism. Most of the folks on this "A list" would fit
quite nicely in the Republican Party.
Bernie a FDR Democrat, is considered too radical by the wealthy who enjoy their Trumpian
tax cuts and phony baloney stock market profits. If Trump, was just a bit less crude and not
so overtly racist he'd be perfectly acceptable. Bernie, who thinks the working-poor are
entitled to a living wage, healthcare, a college education, and clean drinking water is
anathema to the affluent liberals who like everything just the way it is. They long for the
Obama days when two wars were quietly expanded to seven, when the Wall Street crooks got a
pass, and when health insurance lobbyists had their way with the federal government–the
CIA was absolutely ecstatic with Obama. Trump was a bit of a speed bump for the security
state, but nothing really threatening as he stuffed the pockets of the arms industry and the
surveillance state with billions of working-class tax dollars. The Orangeman is having a few
internecine battles with the intelligence agencies, but in the end they thoroughly had their
way with the buffoon.
Bernie on the other hand, is a bit more complex. He can't be as easily attacked. Of
course, the mainstream media news has all the usual Corbyn tricks in their bag, and Bernie
could fall to the wayside like Corbyn if he's incapable of unapologetically fighting back.
Bernie's working-class supporters want to see him give his attackers the one-two-punch and
knock them out before the DNC Convention.
If Bernie manages to win numerous primaries the threat won't come from Warren or Hillary
that's so 2016. The new insidious "Bernie enemy" is billionaire Bloomberg. Who is waiting in
the wings If Biden takes a deep dive, Daddy Warbucks will make a play to cause a brokered
convention. And that's when Perez and his Republican/Dems will takedown Bernie. Bernie's
followers MUST come out swinging and not capitulate like they did last time. They have to
force the issue, create a stir and threaten to abandon the Dems to start a Workers Third
Party. Young progressives have this one big shot at making a difference, and they can't allow
themselves to be sheepdogged into voting for another neoliberal who's
intent on maintaining the status quo. Remember, if you don't move forward you're actually
moving backward into planetary ecocide.
Here's one from Whitney implying that they needn't worry because plans are in the works to
install King Cyrus II as the permanent ruler with the help of his Zionist friends in the
Department of Hebrew Security:
Even so it looks like Trump has decided to get rid of us noninterventionist and antiwar
naysayers by fully bringing in the Dispensationalist Armageddon rapture embracing nut jobs
who stand with the Talmudic genocidal racists in Israel who believe that Jesus Christ is
boiling for an eternity in excrement and that his mother Mary was a whore:
we have witnessed in the UK the defamation of Corbyn the ' Left Disrupter ' as he wanted
to throw back the normal state of political play.
He and the well meaning Labour Party was headed off at the pass.
We have to remember that the Ruling Class have to have fall back positions and that Biden
is better than Bernie as is Warren and so on.
It appears to me that the DNC also has its fallback positions too and Bernie will be
chopped by the Super Delegates once again on the altar of ' electabilty ' ( read any form of
Socialism – American or British is not acceptatble to the PTB ) and that is how it may
end.
The battle at the moment in the UK Labour Party is which leader will back up and support
extra Parliamentary action in resistance to this very right wing Tory government?
In the US the thing is the same if Bernie doesn't get the nomination.
Personally I would think that he would be a plus ( despite his foreign policy views ) but
remember that Trump was a maverick Republican yet I'm not sure that Sanders would veer over
to that position.
If he did then the " action " part of the steep learning curve would have to kick in to
defend him and more to the point his genuinely progressive policies.
In the UK now Corbyn as the personification of ' Socialist ' threat is no longer
doorstepped by the British media.
Instead the installation of a Leftish Centrist by the media ( i.e. a person that is -no
threat to the existing order ) is a requirement.
This is all under the guise of a " Strong Opposition " to the right wing government.
Warren – not Biden seems to be that kind of favourite for the Ruling Class should
Trump fall.
We had Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair – you in the US will get Warren.
I wish Bernie and his backers weel but I don't see it happening.
Maybe Tulsi Gabbard in another 4 years?
She and AOC are very good But this is not their time.
Not yet.
Richard Le Sarc ,
When I think of how Corbyn refused to fight back against ENTIRELY mendacious and filthy
vilification as an 'antisemite', I think it might be possible that the MOSSAD told him that
if he resisted he might end up, dead in his bath, like John Smith.
bevin ,
Where the world weary gather to tell us how they have been let down.
Bill nails it here:
" i. For Sanders to get the nomination there will have to be a very strong, dedicated, and
focused movement, which will essentially have to defeat the powers-that-be in the Democratic
Party and in whatever one wants to call the agglomeration of power mechanisms that form the
establishment and the State. Sanders will have to do what Trump did with the Republican Party
in 2016, except with Sanders and the power structures he will be up against (and with which
he is more compromised than Trump ever was), this will be much, much harder ."
Anyone who believes that elections, as such, lead to great changes needs a keeper. And one
who can read the US Constitution aloud for preference.
But this is not to say that at a time like this-and there have been very few of them in US
history- when there is the possibility of a major candidate challenging some of the bases of
the ruling ideology-albeit by doing little more than running on a platform of refurbished
Progressivism- there is really no excuse for not insisting that the challenge be made and the
election played out.
Sanders is not just challenging the verities of neo-liberalism but, implicitly undermining
the political consensus that has supported the Warfare State since 1948.
The thing about Bernie is that he is authenticated by the enemies that he has enrolled
against him and the dramatic measures that they are taking against him. Among those enemies
are the Black Misleadership Class, and the various other faux progressives who are revealing
themselves to be last ditch defenders of the MIC, Israel- AIPAC is now 'all in' in Iowa and
New Hampshire- and the Insurance industry. It is an indication of the simplicity of Bernie's
political task that no section of Congress gives more support to the Healthcare scammers than
the representatives of the community most deprived by the current system. If he manages to
get through to the people and persuade them that he will fight for Free Healthcare for all
and other basic and long overdue social and economic reforms he can break the hold that the
political parties have over a system everyone understands is designed to make the rich-who
own both parties- richer and the great majority poorer. That has been the way that things
have been going in the USA for at least 45 years.
Here's the point you've missed here Bill and that Bernie had a mass appeal to the
Independents that is until he sold out to the "Democratic" establishment which out of the two
parties has to be the least democratic since it adopted the elitist and plutocratic Super
Delegate system that can ride roughshod over the actual democratic will of the voters.
Of course a cosmetic change has been made that these delegates aren't allowed to vote
until the Convention but as I said it is "cosmetic" since that was originally the way this
undemocratic system was set up in the "Democratic" party until Hillary Clinton used it as a
psychological weapon during that sham called a "primary" to convince the hoi polo that her
nomination or more accurately coronation was already a foregone conclusion.
There is also another factor that most voters are not aware of and that is the so called
"Democratic" party has come up with a dictatorial "by law" that can nullify the result of the
primary if the candidate isn't considered "democratic" enough by the Chairman of the DNC
which in Bernie's case is very possible since technically he is an Independent running as a
"Democrat". This is what Lee Camp the "Nuclear Option".
Personally I gave up on Bernie after he sold out and shilled for that warmongering harpy
Hillary who if elected would accept it as a mandate to launch WW III while ironically trying
to convince us all that the "noninterventionist", "antiwar" candidate was actually the
greater of the two evils.
Yeah right.
Anyway no longer have any faith in the two party system. As far as I'm concerned they can
both go to hell. I've already made my choice:
He probably needs to adjust his message more to appeal to those of us who tend to be more
Libertarian and is not exactly a Russell Means but with a little help from the American
Indian Movement and others can probably "triangulate" his appeal to cover a broader political
spectrum. Instead of what has been traditionally known as the "left".
Greg Bacon ,
After Obama, the golden liar and mass-murderer and now Tubby the Grifter, another liar and
mass-murderer, I have no desire to vote in 2020, unless Tulsi is on the ticket.
If Sanders is smart and survives another back-alley mugging by the DNC and the Wicked
Witch of the East, and gets the nod, he'll take on Tulsi–Mommy–as his VP.
If he does that, then Trump, Jared the Snake and Princess Bimbo will have to find another
racket in 2021.
Yeah Trumpenstein is a far cry from the Silver Tongued Devil O-Bomb-em. Even so both of them
sold us a bill of goods that neither of them delivered on.
But hey that's politics in America at least since Neoliberal prototype Wilson which is lie
your ass off until you get elected at least.
Willem ,
Much magical thinking here.
If we act now and support Sanders things will change for the better?
I surely hope so, but hope and change is soo 2008.
And if the Hildebeast enters the race, life on earth will end?
Don't think so.
Perhaps we should do this different this time. Get away from the identity politics, look
what is really needed, and demand for that, not caring about 'leadership'. You know, French
yellow vests style. Actually if you look a little bit outside of the MSM bubble, you see
demonstrations and people demanding better treatment from the government and corporations
everywhere.
The US 2020 elections, will be a nothing burger I predict. Like all elections are nothing
burgers and if they are not they will fake it, or call it 'populism' that needs to be stopped
(and will be stopped).
I would have voted Sanders though, if I could vote for Sanders, Similar as I would have
voted for Corbyn if I could have voted for Corbyn. Voting is a tic, a habit, an addiction
that is difficult to get rid of, but deadly in the end since we have nothing to vote for,
except to vote for more for them at the cost of everyone else, no matter what politicians
say
It's liberating to lose some of your illusions and silly reflexes, although a bit painful
in the beginning as is with all addictions. The story used to 'feel' so good.
This is just a part of the "Swamp" President Trump has talked about. Funneling money to
family members of elected officials is so prevalent that they don't even see a problem, it's
just business as usual.
"My instincts tell me the Democrats don't want to get rid of Plugs (Biden) on the
corruption angle because then they're all exposed to it." - Rush Limbaugh
Colonel Sanders : " Joe Biden is a very decent man" !!! Comming from the mouth of the
Communist who wants to put YOU in Goulags...It makes perfect sense !
Joe Biden is a friend of mine and he's a really nice guy ... I love my husband or wife
he/she's a really nice person as the ER staff bandages their wounds ... hmm got it
Antonym Cruelty is a sign of a degrading society. Cultures promoting cruelty and torture
have lost any arguments. The Roman empire went down the public games till death phase just
before it collapsed, but that was two millennia ago. The US doesn't have the time excuse but
still promoted its Hollywood violence.
From the biggest kid on the block to bully gone bad
Richard Le Sarc ,
You have to remember that under Talmudic Judaic Law, killing civilians is not just
permissible, but is considered a mitzvah or good deed. And killing children, even babies, is
permissible if it can be said that they would grow up to 'oppose the Jews'. Quite
understandable in a hate-cult where, as the 'revered' Rabbi Kook the Elder declared, it is
believed that, 'There is a greater difference between the soul of a Jew and that of a non-Jew
than there is between the soul of a non-Jew and that of an animal'. What a Divine Burden you
bear, Ant-and with such dignity.
paul ,
Charming, these Levantine folk.
Luckily, Tony Blair is now on the job, working to suppress "the global pandemic of anti
Semitism."
That certainly puts my mind at rest.
Antonym ,
The CIA might have "inspired" Al Qaida or ISIS hangmen but not Assad's. They definitely
trained most Central and South America sadists in official uniform.
Richard Le Sarc ,
Come on Ant-don't be so shy. Israeli trained many Latin American killers and aided them in
drawing up death-lists. You should be proud of Zionist achievements.
Charlotte Russe ,
Guantanamo Bay provided a striking "stage setting" proving there's indeed a "War on Terror."
A "War on Terror is a nebulous concept–how do you battle terror. Terror is an "emotion"
which quickly evolved into rage felt by millions devastated in imperialist wars. How does an
Empire win a War on Terror with 1,000 military bases scattered throughout every continent.
The War on Terror was never conceived to be won, it was meant to be endless.
Now getting back to Guantanamo Bay, most of the victims were gathered by bounty hunters in
Afghanistan or were targeted because of past grievances. The unlucky captives, had nothing to
do with terrorist activities or 9/11. Guantanamo Bay, diabolically tests the limitless way an
Empire can abscond with an individual's freedom. Extrajudicial concepts like "enemy
combatant" are auditioned proving all legal rights can be immediately abrogated with just a
stroke of a pen. The War on Terror produced a new type of captive–someone who was
neither a prisoner of war or a US criminal. An abducted victim held indefinitely in a black
site. In other words, the War on Terror justified extrajudicial transfers from one country to
another circumventing the former country's laws on interrogation, detention and
torture. The War on Terror proved that a mind-boggling event such as a "false flag like 9/11"
generates enough shock to gain public acceptance for legislation like the "Patriot Act" where
frightened citizens are willing to capitulate freedom for safety.
paul ,
Many of the unfortunates murdered or tortured or held indefinitely without trial in US
concentration camps were basically just Afghan or Pakistani yokels handed over to CIA spooks
for a $5,000 bounty. They reckon half the villages in Pakistan were suddenly missing the
village idiot, who had been sold to the CIA.
The Taliban fighters rounded up were engaged in a civil war in Afghanistan at the time
against assorted warlords and drug lords from non Pashtun communities who rejected the
authority of the Taliban government. They had never fought against America, and had no plans
to. Some of them probably didn't know that America existed. They were probably somewhat
bewildered that the US was muscling in on their civil war.
Bin Laden was there as a hang over from the war against Russia. He had been on the CIA
payroll for years, a "heroic freedom fighter" invited round the White House for tea and
buns.
Incidentally, the "enemy combatant" routine is nothing new for the US. In 1945, German
POWs were suddenly designated "surrendered enemy personnel" to deprive them of the protection
of POW status. Eisenhower hated Germans, and wanted to treat prisoners as harshly as
possible. German prisoners held by US forces in the Rhineland area were deliberately deprived
of food, water and shelter, and certainly very large numbers died, though figures are
disputed. There were many murders and summary executions. Wherever they have operated, US
forces have always committed atrocities and war crimes on both a casual and more organised
basis.
Richard Le Sarc ,
It is actually a War OF Terror. And torture is as American as apple-pie.
paul ,
As bad as they are, the US concentration camps at Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib and the
issue of waterboarding, are just the tip of a very large iceberg.
There is a global US Gulag of concentration camps, torture chambers and secret prisons
(including UK territory) where thousands of people have been horrifically tortured and
murdered on an industrial scale.
The torture employed exceeds by far anything Guy Fawkes or the Knights Templar would have
experienced in the 17th and 14th centuries.
paul ,
This torture is the product of very sick and diseased minds from a very sick and diseased
society.
Extreme sexual torture and humiliation. Murder, blindings and maimings. Agonising confinement
in tiny boxes for protracted periods. One unfortunate chained up naked in a freezing cell in
a standing position, medieval style, and just left there until somebody noticed, 17 days
later, that he was dead.
Another kidnapped from Canada and spirited away to US torture chambers in Morocco and
Yugoslavia, where his private parts were mutilated. It transpired that this unfortunate was
not the man they wanted. He just had a similar name to somebody else.
paul ,
And of course the UK and all the US satellites were fully complicit in these crimes and
atrocities.
Not that this will in any way inhibit them from climbing up on their high horse and giving
lofty sermons and pious lectures to all the benighted natives on the rest of the planet about
their human rights failings, and their need to comply with our exalted "Rules Based Order."
paul ,
"We tortured some folks."
paul ,
Of course these are just 2 isolated cases out of thousands and thousands.
One of the worst torturers known as NZ7 was a religious nut job who liked to bring people to
the point of death so he could feel the soul leaving the body.
People were tortured three times a day for weeks and months on end.
Scenes of torture replicated and far exceeded anything in medieval dungeons.
Torture doctors were on hand to advise on how to intensify the torment.
The motivation seems mainly to have been sadism and sexual sadism for its own sake rather
than any genuine interest in obtaining information.
Anal rape was a routine part of the CIA torture manual.
So was freezing people to death and shoving nuts and hummus up people's arses.
People with specialist knowledge of the subject have said that the Gestapo record of
torture was actually far better than that of the US. The Gestapo did torture people, but it
was a very bureaucratic process, and they preferred to intimidate people into cooperating by
playing on their bad reputation.
Richard Le Sarc ,
Many of the worst torture practises used by the USA were borrowed from the Israelis, drawing
on decades of experience torturing tens of thousands of Palestinians. But they are the ' most
moral torturers on Earth'-and don' t you dare forget it.
"... It was no accident that Davos, the promoter of globalization, is so strongly behind the Climate Change agenda. Davos WEF has a board of appointed trustees. Among them is the early backer of Greta Thunberg, climate multi-millionaire, Al Gore, chairman of the Climate Reality Project. WEF Trustees also include former IMF head, now European Central Bank head Christine Lagarde whose first words as ECB chief were that central banks had to make climate change a priority. Another Davos trustee is outgoing Bank of England head Mark Carney, who was just named Boris Johnson's climate change advisor and who warns that pension funds that ignore climate change risk bankruptcy (sic). ..."
"... Of note: Mark Carney upon leaving his position of Governor Bank of England will serve as global warming adviser to Boris Johnson. Who knew Carney was a scientist? ..."
'Greta, bonnie Prince Charles and the pirate billionaires and trillionaires'- In another
post I queried how did Greta go to Davos? Silly me; Greta was invited the keynote speaker.
"Stop Climate change" was this year's theme: the Vision - 'stop the natural cycle of the
universe' -
Now she intends to Trademark 'How Dare You' and set up a Foundation Indeed, Greta found
her sugar daddies. Adults who encourage truancy.
my grandpa was a wise bloke and admonished "when politicians and do gooders are in the
same room, keep an eye on your money."
It was no accident that Davos, the promoter of globalization, is so strongly behind the
Climate Change agenda. Davos WEF has a board of appointed trustees. Among them is the early
backer of Greta Thunberg, climate multi-millionaire, Al Gore, chairman of the Climate
Reality Project. WEF Trustees also include former IMF head, now European Central Bank head
Christine Lagarde whose first words as ECB chief were that central banks had to make
climate change a priority. Another Davos trustee is outgoing Bank of England head Mark
Carney, who was just named Boris Johnson's climate change advisor and who warns that
pension funds that ignore climate change risk bankruptcy (sic).
The board also includes the influential founder of Carlyle Group, David M. Rubenstein.
It includes Feike Sybesma of the agribusiness giant, Unilever, who is also Chair of the
High Level Leadership Forum on Competitiveness and Carbon Pricing of the World Bank Group.
And perhaps the most interesting in terms of pushing the new green agenda is Larry Fink,
founder and CEO of the investment group BlackRock.[.]
TCFD and SASB Look Closely
As part of his claim to virtue on the new green investing, Fink states that BlackRock
was a founding member of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). He
claims, "For evaluating and reporting climate-related risks, as well as the related
governance issues that are essential to managing them, the TCFD provides a valuable
framework."[.]
TCFD was created in 2015 by the Bank for International Settlements, chaired by fellow
Davos board member and Bank of England head Mark Carney. In 2016 the TCFD along with the
City of London Corporation and the UK Government created the Green Finance Initiative,
aiming to channel trillions of dollars to "green" investments. The central bankers of the
FSB nominated 31 people to form the TCFD. Chaired by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, it
includes in addition to BlackRock, JP MorganChase; Barclays Bank; HSBC; Swiss Re, the
world's second largest reinsurance; China's ICBC bank; Tata Steel, ENI oil, Dow Chemical,
mining giant BHP and David Blood of Al Gore's Generation Investment LLC. Note the crucial
role of the central banks here.[.]
Of note: Mark Carney upon leaving his position of Governor Bank of England will serve as
global warming adviser to Boris Johnson. Who knew Carney was a scientist?
Pre-alert:
Tax on Excessive garbage output is coming to your town. You will be restricted to xxxKGs/LBS
annually. Your garbage will be weighed and at December 31st any excess above the permissible
will attract additional tax.
Anyone see the unintended consequences?
Now, Trump has said offhandedly that there's been talk of reinstating the deductions and
raising the mortgage cap. But for the most part, this seems like
idle talk . The federal budget deficit has exploded, but Trump and his team are still
talking up their tax-reform part 2 (though it's likely this chatter mostly a ruse to pump the
market). But suspect any tax cuts between now and November will be focused squarely on aiding
the midwestern states who handed Trump the presidency.
Since the tax-reform package was passed, what was once a trickle of blue-staters fleeing
places like California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and even Texas over the past two
years has become a flood.
And after a smattering of stories detailing the gradual migration from high-cost blue states
and cities like San Francisco and New York (we've paid
close attention to the trend
over the years ), two
WSJ banking reporters have published a deep dive on the trend, signaling its arrival as a
major national issue.
Just like
Carl Icahn and David
Tepper left New York and New Jersey for Florida, millions of Americans are following suit,
swapping Connecticut for Florida, Nevada or Arizona.
Two years after President Trump signed the tax law, its effects are rippling through local
economies and housing markets, pushing some people to move from high-tax states where they
have long lived. Parts of Florida, for example, are getting an influx of buyers from states
such as New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
Though the exact figures have probably changed since the tax reform was passed, this map
helps illustrate how capping SALT and lowering threshold for mortgages impacted each state.
While President Trump, Secretary Mnuchin and the rest of the administration have insisted
that they capped the deductions to end what they described as an unfair subsidy for blue states
. The average US property tax bill in 2018 was about $3,500, according to Attom Data Solutions,
a real-estate data firm cited by WSJ. But in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, hundreds of
thousands of residents make annual property tax payments well above that level. In New York's
tony Westchester County, the average property tax bill is more than $17,000.
Most of the people interviewed by
WSJ said they had long considered moving to a more tax-friendly state. But for many,
Trump's tax plan was the catalyst to actually act on these impulses.
"It was another bucket of straw on the back of the camel," said John Lee, a
wealth-management executive and longtime resident of the Sacramento, Calif., area. Mr. Lee
and his wife, Tracy, moved their primary residence last winter to Incline Village, a resort
community on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
The Lees kept their California home, where one of their six adult children is living. That
means they are still paying California property taxes. But Mr. Lee estimates the move to
Nevada, which has no state income tax, whacked his state tax bill by 90%.
The impact on housing markets in the ten most heavily taxed states has been impossible to
ignore. The
Manhattan luxury housing market is showing signs of serious distress that's provoking
anxieties among the wealthy developers who were expecting a boom in demand. According to Fitch
Ratings, home-price appreciation in these states declined almost immediately after the tax
reform package was passed. By comparison, home-price appreciation was steady for the 10 states
with the lowest property taxes and levels of mortgage interest.
Among Gen Xers and Boomers who have only recently achieved empty-nest status, plotting an
escape from taxation hell has become a simple tenant of good retirement planning.
Rick Bechtel, head of U.S. residential lending at TD Bank, lives in the Chicago area and
said he recently went to a party where it felt like everyone was planning their moves to
Florida. "It's unbelievable to me the number of conversations that I'm listening to that
begin with 'When are you leaving?' and 'Where are you going?'" he said.
Even some states known for having relatively low taxes are being affected by this trend, as
some residents opt for states with no income tax, like Florida or Nevada.
Trumps supposed tax cut was really a tax increase on many Americans. When I see multi
billion dollar corporations like Amazon paying nothing in taxes because Trump gave them a tax
cut, and working people in blue state paying for those tax cuts by having their taxes
increased, it is little wonder why voters are turning to Sanders.
"... A chorus of neocons rushed to second his praise: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and prominent Never Trumper, lauded Trump's intestinal fortitude, while Representative Liz Cheney hailed Trump's "decisive action." It was Carlson who was left sputtering about the forever wars. "Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades," Carlson said . "They still want it now. Let's hope they haven't finally gotten it." ..."
"... Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani's killing -- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals in the region -- a central part of his 2020 reelection bid . ..."
"... The neocons are starting to realize that Trump's presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy, is no less vulnerable to hijacking than those of previous Republican presidents, including the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The leading hawks inside and outside the administration shaping its approach to Iran include Robert O'Brien, Bolton's disciple and successor as national security adviser; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook; Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; David Wurmser, a former adviser to Bolton; and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. Perhaps no one better exemplifies the neocon ethos better than Cotton, a Kristol protégé who soaked up the teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss while studying at Harvard. Others who have been baying for conflict with Iran include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now Trump's personal lawyer and partner in Ukrainian crime. In June 2018, Giuliani went to Paris to address the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose parent organization is the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the MeK for years, demanded -- what else? -- regime change. ..."
"... The fresh charge into battle of what Sidney Blumenthal once aptly referred to as an ideological light brigade brings to mind Hobbes's observation in Leviathan : "All men that are ambitious of military command are inclined to continue the causes of war; and to stir up trouble and sedition; for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by causing a new shuffle." The neocons, it appears, have caused a new shuffle. ..."
"... the killing of Soleimani revealed that the neocon military-intellectual complex is very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the influence and reach of the anti-war right remains nascent; even if this contingent has popular support, it doesn't enjoy much backing in Washington beyond the mood swings of the mercurial occupant of the Oval Office. ..."
"... The neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré. ..."
"... But it was the neoconservatives, not the paleocons, who amassed influence in the 1990s and took over the GOP's foreign policy wing. Veteran neocons like Michael Ledeen were joined by a younger generation of journalists and policymakers that included Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol (who founded The Weekly Standard in 1994), Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas J. Feith. The neocons consistently pushed for a hard line against Iraq and Iran. In his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, for example, Ledeen, an expert on Italian fascism, declared that the right, rather than the left, should adhere to the revolutionary tradition of toppling dictatorships. In his 2002 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen stated , "Creative destruction is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day." ..."
"... Still, a number of neocons, including David Frum, Max Boot, Anne Applebaum, Jennifer Rubin, and Kristol himself, have continued to condemn Trump vociferously for his thuggish instincts at home and abroad. They are not seeking high-profile government careers in the Trump administration and so have been able to reinvent themselves as domestic regime-change advocates, something they have done quite skillfully. In fact, their writings are more pungent now that they have been liberated from the costive confines of the movement. ..."
"... And so, urged on by Mike Pompeo, a staunch evangelical Christian, and Iraq War–era figures like David Wurmser , Trump is apparently prepared to target Iran for destruction. In a tweet, he dismissed his national security adviser, the Bolton protégé Robert O'Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: "Actually, I couldn't care less if they negotiate," he said . "Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and 'don't kill your protesters.'" Neocons have been quick to recognize the new, more belligerent Trump -- and the potential maneuvering room he's now created for their movement. Jonathan S. Tobin, a former editor at Commentary and a contributor to National Review , rejoiced in Haaretz that "the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, for which Carlson is a spokesperson, is losing the struggle for control of Trump's foreign policy." Tobin, however, added an important caveat: "When it comes to Iran, Trump needs no prodding from the likes of Bolton to act like a neoconservative. Just as important, the entire notion of anyone -- be it Carlson, former White House senior advisor Steve Bannon, or any cabinet official like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- being able to control Trump is a myth." ..."
"... One reason is institutional. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hudson Institute, and AEI have all been sounding the tocsin about Iran for decades. Once upon a time, the neocons were outliers. Now they're the new establishment, exerting a kind of gravitational pull on debate, pulling politicians and a variety of news organizations into their orbit. The Hudson Institute, for example, recently held an event with former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who exhorted Iran's Revolutionary Guard to "peel away" from the mullahs and endorsed the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, also writing in the Times , has popped up to warn Trump against trying to leave Syria: "To paraphrase Trotsky's aphorism about war, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in you." With the "both-sides" ethos that prevails in the mainstream media, neocon ideas are just as good as any others for National Public Radio or The Washington Post, whose editorial page, incidentally, championed the Iraq War and has been imbued with a neocon, or at least liberal-hawk, tinge ever since Fred Hiatt took it over in 2000. ..."
"... Above all, Trump hired Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser. Flynn was the co-author with Ledeen of a creepy tract called Field of Fight, in which they demanded a crusade against the Muslim world ..."
"... At a minimum, the traditional Republican hard-line foreign policy approach has now fused with neoconservatism so that the two are virtually indistinguishable. At a maximum, neoconservatism shapes the dominant foreign policy worldview in Washington, which is why Democrats were falling over themselves to assure voters that Soleimani -- a "bad guy" -- had it coming. Any objections that his killing might boomerang back on the U.S. are met with cries from the right that Democrats are siding with the enemy. This truly is a policy of "maximum pressure" at home and abroad. ..."
There was a time not so long ago, before President Donald Trump's surprise decision early this year to liquidate the Iranian commander
Qassem Soleimani, when it appeared that America's neoconservatives were floundering. The president was itching to withdraw U.S. forces
from Afghanistan. He was staging exuberant photo-ops with a beaming Kim Jong Un. He was reportedly willing to hold talks with the
president of Iran, while clearly preferring trade wars to hot ones.
Indeed, this past summer, Trump's anti-interventionist supporters in the conservative media were riding high. When he refrained
from attacking Iran in June after it shot down an American drone, Fox News host Tucker Carlson
declared , "Donald Trump was elected president precisely to keep us out of disaster like war with Iran." Carlson went on to condemn
the hawks in Trump's Cabinet and their allies, who he claimed were egging the president on -- familiar names to anyone who has followed
the decades-long neoconservative project of aggressively using military force to topple unfriendly regimes and project American power
over the globe. "So how did we get so close to starting [a war]?"
he asked. "One of [the hawks'] key allies is the national security adviser of the United States. John Bolton is an old friend
of Bill Kristol's. Together they helped plan the Iraq War."
By the time Trump met with Kim in late June, becoming the first sitting president to set foot on North Korean soil, Bolton was
on the outs. Carlson was on the president's North Korean junket, while Trump's national security adviser was in Mongolia. "John Bolton
is absolutely a hawk,"
Trump
told NBC in June. "If it was up to him, he'd take on the whole world at one time, OK?" In September, Bolton was fired.
The standard-bearer of the Republican Party had made clear his distaste for the neocons' belligerent approach to global affairs,
much to the neocons' own entitled chagrin. As recently as December, Bolton, now outside the tent pissing in, was hammering Trump
for "bluffing" through an announcement that the administration wanted North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. "The
idea that we are somehow exerting maximum pressure on North Korea is just unfortunately not true,"
Bolton told Axios . Then Trump ordered the drone
strike on Soleimani, drastically escalating a simmering conflict between Iran and the United States. All of a sudden the roles were
reversed, with Bolton praising the president and asserting that Soleimani's death was "
the first step to regime change in Tehran ." A chorus of neocons rushed to second his praise: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former
CIA officer and prominent Never Trumper, lauded Trump's intestinal fortitude, while Representative Liz Cheney hailed Trump's
"decisive action." It was Carlson
who was left sputtering about the forever wars. "Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades,"
Carlson said . "They
still want it now. Let's hope they haven't finally gotten it."
Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles
in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the
national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani's killing -- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet
another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals
in the region -- a central part of his
2020 reelection bid
.
The anti-interventionist right is freaking out. Writing in American Greatness, Matthew Boose
declared , "[T]he Trump movement, which was generated out of opposition to the foreign policy blob and its endless wars, was
revealed this week to have been co-opted to a great extent by neoconservatives seeking regime change." James Antle, the editor of
The American Conservative, a publication founded in 2002 to oppose the Iraq War,
asked , "Did
Trump betray the anti-war right?"
In the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation.
Their concerns are not unmerited. The neocons are starting to realize that Trump's presidency, at least when it comes to foreign
policy, is no less vulnerable to hijacking than those of previous Republican presidents, including the administrations of Ronald
Reagan and George W. Bush. The leading hawks inside and outside the administration shaping its approach to Iran include Robert O'Brien,
Bolton's disciple and successor as national security adviser; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Special Representative for Iran Brian
Hook; Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; David Wurmser, a former adviser to Bolton; and Senators
Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. Perhaps no one better exemplifies the neocon ethos better than Cotton, a Kristol protégé who soaked
up the teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss while studying at Harvard. Others who have been baying for conflict with
Iran include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now Trump's personal lawyer and partner in Ukrainian crime. In
June 2018, Giuliani went to Paris to address the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose parent organization is the Iranian
opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the MeK for years, demanded -- what else? --
regime change.
The fresh charge into battle of what Sidney Blumenthal once aptly referred to as an ideological light brigade brings to mind
Hobbes's observation in Leviathan : "All men that are ambitious of military command are inclined to continue the causes of
war; and to stir up trouble and sedition; for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by
causing a new shuffle." The neocons, it appears, have caused a new shuffle.
Donald Trump has not dragged us into war with Iran (yet). But the killing of Soleimani revealed that the neocon military-intellectual
complex is very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its
hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in
the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the influence and reach of the anti-war right remains nascent; even
if this contingent has popular support, it doesn't enjoy much backing in Washington beyond the mood swings of the mercurial occupant
of the Oval Office.
But there was a time when the neoconservative coalition was not so entrenched -- and what has turned out to be its provisional
state of exile lends some critical insight into how it managed to hang around respectable policymaking circles in recent years, and
how it may continue to shape American foreign policy for the foreseeable future. When the neoconservatives came on the scene in the
late 1960s, the Republican old guard viewed them as interlopers. The neocons, former Trotskyists turned liberals who broke with the
Democratic Party over its perceived weakness on the Cold War, stormed the citadel of Republican ideology by emphasizing the relationship
between ideas and political reality. Irving Kristol, one of the original neoconservatives,
mused in 1985 that " what communists call the theoretical organs always end up through a filtering process influencing a lot
of people who don't even know they're being influenced. In the end, ideas rule the world because even interests are defined by ideas."
At pivotal moments in modern American foreign policy, the neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies
that might once have seemed outré. Jeane Kirkpatrick's seminal 1979 essay in Commentary, "Dictatorships and Double Standards,"
essentially set forth the lineaments of the Reagan doctrine. She assailed Jimmy Carter for attacking friendly authoritarian leaders
such as the shah of Iran and Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza. She contended that authoritarian regimes might molt into democracies,
while totalitarian regimes would remain impregnable to outside influence, American or otherwise. Ronald Reagan read the essay and
liked it. He named Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations, where she became the most influential neocon of the era for
her denunciations of Arab regimes and defenses of Israel. Her tenure was also defined by the notion that it was perfectly acceptable
for America to cozy up to noxious regimes, from apartheid South Africa to the shah's Iran, as part of the greater mission to oppose
the red menace.
The neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré.
There was always tension between Reagan's affinity for authoritarian regimes and his hard-line opposition to Communist ones. His
sunny persona never quite gelled with Kirkpatrick's more gelid view that communism was an immutable force, and in 1982, in a major
speech to the British Parliament at Westminster emphasizing the power of democracy and free speech, he declared his intent to end
the Cold War on American terms. As Reagan's second term progressed and democracy and free speech actually took hold in the waning
days of the Soviet Union, many hawks declared that it was all a sham. Indeed, not a few neocons were livid, claiming that Reagan
was appeasing the Soviet Union. But after the USSR collapsed, they retroactively blessed him as the anti-Communist warrior par excellence
and the model for the future. The right was now a font of happy talk about the dawn of a new age of liberty based on free-market
economics and American firepower.
The fall of communism, in other words, set the stage for a new neoconservative paradigm. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History
appeared a decade after Kirkpatrick's essay in Commentary and just before the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9,
1989. Here was a sharp break with the saturnine, realpolitik approach that Kirkpatrick had championed. Irving Kristol regarded it
as hopelessly utopian -- "I don't believe a word of it," he wrote in a response to Fukuyama. But a younger generation of neocons,
led by Irving's son, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan, embraced it. Fukuyama argued that Western, liberal democracy, far from being
menaced, was now the destination point of the train of world history. With communism vanquished, the neocons, bearing the good word
from Fukuyama, formulated a new goal: democracy promotion, by force if necessary, as a way to hasten history and secure the global
order with the U.S. at its head. The first Gulf War in 1991, precipitated by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, tested the neocons'
resolve and led to a break in the GOP -- one that would presage the rise of Donald Trump. For decades, Patrick Buchanan had been
regularly inveighing against what he came to call the neocon "
amen corner" in and around the
Washington centers of power, including A.M. Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer, both of whom endorsed the '91 Gulf War. The neocons
were frustrated by the measured approach taken by George H.W. Bush. He refused to crow about the fall of the Berlin Wall and kicked
the Iraqis out of Kuwait but declined to invade Iraq and "finish the job," as his hawkish critics would later put it. Buchanan then
ran for the presidency in 1992 on an America First platform, reviving a paleoconservative tradition that would partly inform Trump's
dark horse run in 2016.
But it was the neoconservatives, not the paleocons, who amassed influence in the 1990s and took over the GOP's foreign policy
wing. Veteran neocons like Michael Ledeen were joined by a younger generation of journalists and policymakers that included Robert
Kagan, Bill Kristol (who founded The Weekly Standard in 1994), Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas J. Feith. The neocons consistently
pushed for a hard line against Iraq and Iran. In his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, for example, Ledeen, an expert on Italian
fascism, declared that the right, rather than the left, should adhere to the revolutionary tradition of toppling dictatorships. In
his 2002 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen
stated , "Creative destruction
is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day."
We all know the painful consequences of the neocons' obsession with creative destruction. In his second inaugural address, three
and a half years after 9/11, George W. Bush cemented
neoconservative ideology into presidential doctrine: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of
democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The neocons'
hubris had already turned into nemesis in Iraq, paving the way for an anti-war candidate in Barack Obama.
But it was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell. He announced
his Buchananesque policy of "America First" in a speech at Washington's Mayflower Hotel in 2016, signaling that he would not adhere
to the long-standing Reaganite principles that had animated the party establishment.
The pooh-bahs of the GOP openly declared their disdain and revulsion for Trump, leading directly to the rise of the Never Trump
movement, which was dominated by neocons. The Never Trumpers ended up functioning as an informal blacklist for Trump once he became
president. Elliott Abrams, for example, who was being touted for deputy secretary of state in February 2017, was rejected when Steve
Bannon alerted Trump to his earlier heresies (though he later reemerged, in January 2019, as Trump's special envoy to Venezuela,
where he has pushed for regime change). Not a few other members of the Republican foreign policy establishment suffered similar fates.
Kristol's The Weekly Standard, which had held the neoconservative line through the Bush years and beyond , folded
in 2018. Even the office building that used to house the American Enterprise Institute and the Standard, on the corner of
17th and M streets in Washington, has been torn down, leaving an empty, boarded-up site whose symbolism speaks for itself.
Still, a number of neocons, including David Frum, Max Boot, Anne Applebaum, Jennifer Rubin, and Kristol himself, have continued
to condemn Trump vociferously for his thuggish instincts at home and abroad. They are not seeking high-profile government careers
in the Trump administration and so have been able to reinvent themselves as domestic regime-change advocates, something they have
done quite skillfully. In fact, their writings are more pungent now that they have been liberated from the costive confines of the
movement.
It was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell.
But other neocons -- the ones who want to wield positions of influence and might -- have, more often than not, been able to hold
their noses. Stephen Wertheim, writing in The New York Review of Books, has perceptively dubbed this faction the anti-globalist
neocons. Led by John Bolton, they believe Trump performed a godsend by elevating the term globalism "from a marginal slur
to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics,"
Wertheim argued . The U.S. need not
bother with pesky multilateral institutions or international agreements or the entire postwar order, for that matter -- it's now
America's way or the highway.
And so, urged on by Mike Pompeo, a staunch evangelical Christian,
and Iraq War–era figures like
David Wurmser , Trump is apparently prepared to target Iran for destruction. In a tweet, he dismissed his national security adviser,
the Bolton protégé Robert O'Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: "Actually, I couldn't
care less if they negotiate,"
he said . "Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and 'don't kill your protesters.'" Neocons have been quick to recognize
the new, more belligerent Trump -- and the potential maneuvering room he's now created for their movement. Jonathan S. Tobin, a former
editor at Commentary and a contributor to National Review ,
rejoiced in Haaretz that "the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, for which Carlson is a spokesperson, is losing the struggle
for control of Trump's foreign policy." Tobin, however, added an important caveat: "When it comes to Iran, Trump needs no prodding
from the likes of Bolton to act like a neoconservative. Just as important, the entire notion of anyone -- be it Carlson, former White
House senior advisor Steve Bannon, or any cabinet official like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- being able to control Trump is
a myth."
In other words, whether the neocons themselves are occupying top positions in the Trump administration is almost irrelevant. The
ideology itself has reemerged to a degree that even Trump himself seems hard pressed to resist it -- if he even wants to.
How were the neocons able to influence another Republican presidency, one that was ostensibly dedicated to curbing their sway?
One reason is institutional. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hudson Institute, and AEI have all been sounding the
tocsin about Iran for decades. Once upon a time, the neocons were outliers. Now they're the new establishment, exerting a kind of
gravitational pull on debate, pulling politicians and a variety of news organizations into their orbit. The Hudson Institute, for
example, recently held an event with former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who exhorted Iran's Revolutionary Guard to "peel away"
from the mullahs and endorsed the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign. The event was hosted by Michael Doran, a
former senior director on George W. Bush's National Security Council and a senior fellow at the institute, who
wrote in
The New York Times on January 3, "The United States has no choice, if it seeks to stay in the Middle East, but to check
Iran's military power on the ground." Then there's Jamie M. Fly, a former staffer to Senator Marco Rubio who was appointed this past
August to head Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; he previously co-authored an essay in Foreign Affairs contending that it isn't enough to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities: "If the United States seriously considers military action,
it would be better to plan an operation that not only strikes the nuclear program but aims to destabilize the regime, potentially
resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis once and for all."
Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, also writing in the Times , has
popped up to warn Trump against
trying to leave Syria: "To paraphrase Trotsky's aphorism about war, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle
East is interested in you." With the "both-sides" ethos that prevails in the mainstream media, neocon ideas are just as good as any
others for National Public Radio or The Washington Post, whose editorial page, incidentally, championed the Iraq War
and has been imbued with a neocon, or at least liberal-hawk, tinge ever since Fred Hiatt took it over in 2000.
But there are plenty of institutions in Washington, and neoconservatism's seemingly inescapable influence cannot be chalked up
to the swamp alone. Some etiolated form of what might be called Ledeenism lingered on before taking on new life at the outset of
the Trump administration. Trump's overt animus toward Muslims, for example, meant that figures such as Frank Gaffney, who opposed
arms-control treaties with Moscow as a member of the Reagan administration and resigned in protest of the 1987 Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty, achieved a new prominence. During the Obama administration, Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy,
claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the White House and National Security Agency.
Above all, Trump hired Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser. Flynn was the co-author with Ledeen of a
creepy tract called Field of Fight, in which they demanded a crusade against the Muslim world: "We're in a world
war against a messianic mass movement of evil people." It was one of many signs that Trump was susceptible to ideas of a civilizational
battle against
"Islamo-fascism,"
which Norman Podhoretz and other neocons argued, in the wake of 9/11, would lead to World War III. In their millenarian ardor
and inflexible support for Israel, the neocons find themselves in a position precisely cognate to evangelical Christians -- both
groups of true believers trying to enact their vision through an apostate. But perhaps the neoconservatives' greatest strength lies
in the realm of ideas that Irving Kristol identified more than three decades ago. The neocons remain the winners of that battle,
not because their policies have made the world or the U.S. more secure, but by default -- because there are so few genuinely alternative
ideas that are championed with equal zeal. The foreign policy discussion surrounding Soleimani's killing -- which accelerated Iran's
nuclear weapons program, diminished America's influence in the Middle East, and entrenched Iran's theocratic regime -- has largely
occurred on a spectrum of the neocons' making. It is a discussion that accepts premises of the beneficence of American military might
and hegemony -- Hobbes's "ill game" -- and naturally bends the universe toward more war.
At a minimum, the traditional Republican hard-line foreign policy approach has now fused with neoconservatism so that the
two are virtually indistinguishable. At a maximum, neoconservatism shapes the dominant foreign policy worldview in Washington, which
is why Democrats were falling over themselves to assure voters that Soleimani -- a "bad guy" -- had it coming. Any objections that
his killing might boomerang back on the U.S. are met with cries from the right that Democrats are siding with the enemy. This truly
is a policy of "maximum pressure" at home and abroad.
As Trump takes an extreme hard line against Iran, the neoconservatives may ultimately get their long-held wish of a war with the
ayatollahs. When it ends in a fresh disaster, they can always argue that it only failed because it wasn't prosecuted vigorously enough
-- and the shuffle will begin again.
Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of The National Interest and the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.
@ JacobHeilbrunn
Human. Beings. Doing Earth Life. There is no separation in our species, except that, a
disconnect occurred. Who, When, What, Where, and How did the disconnect become an all
powerful power? Acting as though the species Human isn't. The tap root "dis~ease"
(disconnect) must be eradicated/ healed/ rejoining our species into oneness, again.
Top~bottom junk yard dogs is barbaric.
Posted by: charliechan | Jan 30 2020 19:36 utc | 85
An excellent question, "who benefits", clearly it's not everybody. "Profitable for whom",
"rights for whom", "safe for whom", "justice for whom". If the answer is not "everybody",
it's bullshit. What's good for corporations is not what is good for people. We are infested
with economic parasites who blather on about how they are taking "care" of us and giving us
"choices".
lizabeth Warren wrote an
article
outlining in general terms how she would bring America's current foreign wars to an end. Perhaps the most significant part of the
article is her commitment to respect Congress' constitutional role in matters of war:
We will hold ourselves to this by recommitting to a simple idea: the constitutional requirement that Congress play a primary
role in deciding to engage militarily. The United States should not fight and cannot win wars without deep public support.
Successive administrations and Congresses have taken the easy way out by choosing military action without proper authorizations
or transparency with the American people. The failure to debate these military missions in public is one of the reasons
they have been allowed to continue without real prospect of success [bold mine-DL].
On my watch, that will end. I am committed to seeking congressional authorization if the use of force is required. Seeking
constrained authorizations with limited time frames will force the executive branch to be open with the American people and
Congress about our objectives, how the operation is progressing, how much it is costing, and whether it should continue.
Warren's commitment on this point is welcome, and it is what Americans should expect and demand from their presidential
candidates. It should be the bare minimum requirement for anyone seeking to be president, and any candidate who won't commit to
respecting the Constitution should never be allowed to have the powers of that office. The president is not permitted to launch
attacks and start wars alone, but Congress and the public have allowed several presidents to do just that without any consequences.
It is time to put a stop to illegal presidential wars, and it is also time to put a stop to open-ended authorizations of military
force. Warren's point about asking for "constrained authorizations with limited time frames" is important, and it is something that
we should insist on in any future debate over the use of force. The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs are still on the books and have been abused
and stretched beyond recognition to apply to groups that didn't exist when they were passed so that the U.S. can fight wars in
countries that don't threaten our security. Those need to be repealed as soon as possible to eliminate the opening that they have
provided the executive to make war at will.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is
unimpressed with Warren's rhetoric:
But what has Warren offered to do differently, or better? She's made no notable break with the class of experts who run our
failing foreign policy. Unlike Bernie Sanders, and like Trump or Obama, she hasn't hired a foreign-policy staff committed to a
different vision. And so her promise to turn war powers back to Congress should be considered as empty as Obama's promise to do
the same. Her promise to bring troops home would turn out to be as meaningless as a Trump tweet saying the same.
We shouldn't discount Warren's statements so easily. When a candidate makes specific commitments about ending U.S. wars during a
campaign, that is different from making vague statements about having a "humble" foreign policy. Bush ran on a conventional hawkish
foreign policy platform, and there were also no ongoing wars for him to campaign against, so we can't say that he ever ran as a
"dove." Obama campaigned against the Iraq war and ran on ending the U.S. military presence there, and before his first term was
finished almost all U.S. troops were out of Iraq. It is important to remember that he did not campaign against the war in
Afghanistan, and instead argued in support of it. His subsequent decision to commit many more troops there was a mistake, but it was
entirely consistent with what he campaigned on. In other words, he withdrew from the country he promised to withdraw from, and
escalated in the country where he said the U.S. should be fighting. Trump didn't actually campaign on ending any wars, but he did
talk about "bombing the hell" out of ISIS, and after he was elected he escalated the war on ISIS. His anti-Iranian obsession was out
in the open from the start if anyone cared to pay attention to it. In short, what candidates commit to doing during a campaign does
matter and it usually gives you a good idea of what a candidate will do once elected.
If Warren and some of the other Democratic candidates are committing to ending U.S. wars, we shouldn't assume that they won't
follow through on those commitments because previous presidents proved to be the hawks that they admitted to being all along.
Presidential candidates often tell us exactly what they mean to do, but we have to be paying attention to everything they say and
not just one catchphrase that they said a few times. If voters want a more peaceful foreign policy, they should vote for candidates
that actually campaign against ongoing wars instead of rewarding the ones that promise and then deliver escalation. But just voting
for the candidates that promise an end to wars is not enough if Americans want Congress to start doing its job by reining in the
executive. If we don't want presidents to run amok on war powers, there have to be political consequences for the ones that have
done that and there needs to be steady pressure on Congress to take back their role in matters of war. Voters should select
genuinely antiwar candidates, but then they also have to hold those candidates accountable once they're in office.
Donald Trump ran on a platform guaranteed to arouse the hatred of this elite. His
immigration-related proposals and comments
(e.g., " Paris
is
no longer Paris ," "When
Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best") and his advocacy of a
non-interventionist foreign policy were red flags to an Establishment bent on massive
immigration and endless wars in the Middle East to protect Israel. His victory was a hostile
takeover of the Presidency, opposed by the entire spectrum of elite political opinion, from the
far Left to the
neoconservative "Right," and including
Conservatism, Inc. cheap-labor lobbyists like Paul Ryan.
...So it's no surprise that Trump's actual election was greeted with quite unprecedented
anguish and frustration. The Washington Post headlined
The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun the day of Trump's inauguration. [By
Matea Gold, January 17, 2017] (But in fact -- incredibly -- it dates back to even
before his nomination).
So it's no surprise that Trump's actual election was greeted with quite unprecedented
anguish and frustration. The Washington Post headlined The Campaign to Impeach President
Trump Has Begun the day of Trump's inauguration. [By Matea Gold, January 17, 2017] (But in
fact -- incredibly -- it dates back to even before his nomination).
In fact, right around the time of the Republican convention in 2016, James Kirchik was
already openly stating that a coup against Trump was possibility, if he won the election. You
can't say we weren't given fair warning.
I believe the present political crisis should be seen as a struggle between our new,
Jewish-dominated elite, stemming from the 1880–1920 First Great Wave of immigration,
and the traditional white Christian majority of America, significantly derived from
pre-Revolutionary colonial stock but augmented by subsequent white Christian
immigration.
But as Kevin himself later notes, Trump is such a raging Zionist and he's surrounded by
Zionist Jews–including his own family! So I'm thinking maybe this is all actually a
schism between rival factions of Jews: say, globalist Jews vs. zionist Jews. The
WASPs, after all, are finished. They surrendered their country long ago.
The nascent elite defeated Sen. McCarthy, despite subsequent evidence that he was
substantially right. Of course, it is simply a fact that the individuals caught up in the
McCarthy accusations were disproportionately Jewish. McCarthy's crusade may be regarded as
the last gasp of traditional America.
McCarthy himself was controlled opposition. Please note that he never, ever raised the
Judenfrage in public. And with good reason: some of leading advisors, like the
ultra-creepy Roy Cohn, were Jews. So 'Tailgunner Joe' was just more controlled
opposition–and so were the Birchers, too.
I suggest that that the "visceral animosity" that I noted above is motivated by the
parallels between Trump's white working-class base and working-class support for National
Socialism in 1930s Germany. This phenomenon was traumatic for Jewish intellectuals, who at
the time were deeply immersed in classical class-struggle Marxism. It was of critical
importance in motivating the shift pioneered by Frankfurt School toward conceptualizing
Jewish interests in terms of race -- that the real problem Jews faced was white
ethnocentrism, the latter solvable only by propaganda efforts aimed at vilifying white
racial identity (which soon became mainstream in the educational efforts of the Jewish
activist community) and by importing non-whites in order to diminish white political
power.
This! Jewish intellectual support for the working class a hundred years ago was purely and
transparently cynical. In the 1930s, once it became clear that the working class was capable
of acting in its own interests without the help of Shmuel, the Frankfurt Schoolers (who, as
the name implies, originated in Frankfurt, Germany) were stunned. That's why hardly any
Jewish leftists anymore give a rat's rumpus about the working class. And Bernie Sanders is
just a relic of a bygone era assuming he's even sincere.
Assuming eliminating the white majority is the goal, what are Jews supposed to do once
they've accomplished it? This strategy seems self-destructive since all the other racial and
ethnic groups being imported are far less tolerant of Jews.
@Curmudgeon Regrettably, not a single country in the world fully complies with Article 19
nowadays; this standard appears to be just too difficult to live up to:
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom
to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas
through any media and regardless of frontiers.
The 65 Open, Unlimited , un Vetted Immigration plan that was lobbied ... passed by the team
that killed JFK, knew exactly what they were engineering. Their plan to cut off the European
white society and was the end game. 80 % of our immigrants prior to 65 came from Europe
– after the 65 laws – only 8% were permitted. This is the Smoking Gun !..
@Franz Has John Bolton flipped by leaking early drafts of his book and saying that he
will testify if subpoenaed? Not really, he's now trying to help dislodge Trump from office
because Trump is wobbly on starting a war with Iran. After the Soleimani hit at the behest of
his administration neoconservatives, Trump's in-house nationalist isolationists then got his
fickle, ADD ear and talked him down from further escalations. No real tit-for-tat came after
the Iranian symbolic strike on a US empty hangar (one that was prefaced with a warning so as
to ensure no US deaths). Rhetoric aside, both the Iranian leadership and Trump realized that
full-scale war is a very bad idea for both Iran and the US.
The neocon element and their Israeli allies are unhappy to be derailed from their path to
war, so they, including Bolton, probably now believe that it's time to remove Trump and
replace him with Mike Pence, a 100% Useful Idiot for Israel. With Pence, and maybe an
October/November Surprise, the vile, treasonous neocons would get the disastrous war with
Iran they so desperately want America to fight on behalf of Israel.
By the way, it's important to remember that the Democratic leadership decided not to take
their House subpoenas to court and to involve the judicial branch in enforcing them, which it
ultimately would have. The Dems made a political decision to favor expediency over historic
congressional prerogatives and power because they didn't want the impeachment to be near the
election. Won't it be ironic if it ends up that Senate Republicans end up being the enforcers
of subpoenas by using their political clout from being in Trump's party, all due to the book
by a former staffer (and to backroom animosities toward Trump and to Senate interventionists
such as Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney).
Donald Trump ran on a platform guaranteed to arouse the hatred of this elite. His
immigration-related proposals and comments (e.g., "Paris is no longer Paris," "When Mexico
sends its people, they're not sending their best") and his advocacy of a
non-interventionist foreign policy were red flags to an Establishment bent on massive
immigration and endless wars in the Middle East to protect Israel.
While immigration was a big part of his appeal the longest running theme with Trump has
been unfavourable terms of trade and military largesse undermining American primacy.
Saudi Arabia cannot defend itself. The US army cannot be kept in Saudi Arabia, and if the
US wants the Saudi oil money to the kept in US bonds then the US must be prepared to use
military force to defend Saudi Arabia. Iran already has the beginnings of an alliance with
Russia and China having conducted unprecedented naval exercises with them recently. The
Iranians have it in for Saudi Arabia. It really will not do to walk away from Saudi Arabia;
does anyone think China would hesitate to build a base in Saudi if the Saudis decided they
would be a better protector than the US? If the US withdrew from the Middle East, China would
be in there like a shot, nothing would stop them. This is the same China that Trump opposed
the so called free trade with that put people out a job who are killing themselves in the
White Death with fentanyl that China funnels into the US.
DONALD TRUMP: THE MAKING OF A WORLD VIEW by Brendan Simms shows that for past thirty five
years Trump has focused on on trade and economic power and his concern is with countries that
either rival the US economy (especially China) or so called allies that undermine American
strength by exploiting relations with the US. Since the 80s Trump has been extremely critical
of Saudi Arabia , Germany, and Japan's failure to contribute to their own defence.
Indeed, in his call with Zelensky, Trump spotlighted his displeasure that the U.S. was
helping Ukraine while Germany and other European nations were not doing enough.
I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time.
Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than
they are. Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk and I think it's
something that you should really ask them about. When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she
talks Ukraine, but she ·doesn't do anything. A lot of the European countries are
the same way so I think it's something you want to look at but the United States has been
very very good to Ukraine. I wouldn't say that it's reciprocal necessarily because things
are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.
How about Germany opening up a pipeline into Russia? And we are supposed to be fighting
Russia. So Germany is paying Russia like 2 billion dollars a month and they a member of
NATO And we are paying 90% of the cost of NATO.
The hatred oozing from every pore of Schiff, Nadler, and the others mentioned cannot be
explained even in part by hatred of the person of DJT, because none of them know him enough
to hate him the way they do. The American tragedy is that average whites can't see he's a
proxy for them and that that hatred is a brazen display of sanguinary intent about
what they would do if they could, as happened in Russia a century ago at the hands of their
forefathers.
Unless you've worked with them where they're running the show, such as, say, on Wall
Street, you really have no idea how visceral their hatred for you is when they don't need
your cooperation for something or other. In suburban NYC towns on Long Island and up in
Fairfield County, Connecticut you've got thousands of nouveau riche goys working as traders
on the Street tooling around in their Porsche convertibles in dusty pink baseball caps on
Sunday mornings, worshipping at the bagel shop instead of church. They've got the money and
they're surely not going to upset the apple cart for anyone. Mega-sellout Sean Hannity tops
most of them, however, selling out his people and country with a straight face every night
for a cool $40 MM a year, with a net worth of $250 MM, according to Forbes.
For a different take, see Linh Dinh's prescient column of June 12, 2016.
Since at least the closed door reaming apparently administered after Helsinki in summer
2018, "Trump's lack of success in effecting fundamental change" is due to Trump's lack of
EFFORT in effecting fundamental change. And the farcical impeachment is just puppet show
turned up to 11, the latest, desperate way to stir up enough sheep to vote RedBlue and keep
things just as they are.
The whole Impeachment is in MY opinion staged , another story , a fable designed by the
worlds greatest liars . Cover up Epstein , cover up Syria and Saudi Arabia / U.S. military
ops and Venezuela . Of course the Chosen Ones will give only the side of the news fit for the
goy ..
The US deep state is planning it to backfire. Impeachment was proven to be Bill Clinton's
ticket to a second term. They are also running nothing but losers on the Dem side of the
contest. The last thing the MIC will allow to happen is for the people to elect a government
to control their own lives or to control them. When they have hundreds of billions every year
to throw around, all filched from taxpayers, with the money barons calling the shots of whom
is to run for the top position, and mutually reticent about any real control from the people,
they will use the impeachment process to ensure Trump gets a second term.
People who get stuck on "the Jews" become tiresome after long It is more accurate to point
to elite families or institutions like the Rothschilds or Rockefellers, the Vatican, the
Skull & Bones/Trilateral/Bilderberg types, the various secret societies and/or Occultist
sects If you dig even deeper you may realize that archaic hominids and their hybridization
with us plays a role going back millennia
The first problem with blaming Jews and/or Jewish systems is that it absolves non-Jews who
partake and are just as effectually guilty as the Jews who do, so it is to some degree slave
mentality (similar to how black liberals blame "whites" for everything). The other problem is
that there are dark Occult sects whom historically use Jews as a sacrificial front; they'd
rather Jews take the fall than "bankers", "Luciferians", etc., it's literally part of their
playbook.
@Ship Track If I remember correctly, many heavy industries in Germany during that time
were not Jew owned, Hitler received the funding for his NSDAP from companies like Thyssen and
Krupp. They donated because they knew Hitler wasn't really 'socialist' and wouldn't seize
control of their industries, and that he would be a better alternative to the Communist
parties that were on the rise at that time.
Jews have a complete stranglehold on most aspects of money in 2020, I doubt something like
this could happen again, Zionists Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer were donating to Trump
after he won the primaries. All politicians can be bought these days and the buyers are
always Jews.
I am in a foreign country and must "rely" on CNN for the daily news. The CNN despicable
insects reporting is so one-sided pro-Democrats that suggesting "CNN is to Democrats what
Goebbels was to Nazis" is a very mild comparison. Instead of discussing Trump's defense team
points they are deflecting by discussing Bolton book and pathetic Romney's hate. It looks
like Democrats are now holding on to a razor.
Bolton wants to make money by selling his book unfortunately Democrats would not buy
Bolton's book, hence create controversy, Trump slander and they will.
I've never commented without fully delving into an article but today is an exception because
the rhetorical headline says it all: it's a clash of the competing elites of America and
there is no two ways about it!
@Z-man "I'm still hoping he's playing 3D chess with the CABAL but that hope is fading
fast. Lets see the particulars of this 'Deal of the Century' (rolls eyes)."
Z-man, this interview with Ann Coulter (I know, I know) is kind of fun watching for her
comments Trumps "3D" chess. Actually quite a few of these PBS frontline interviews published
on YouTube, Jan 13th, are interesting/worth a casual view:
Wonderful analysis, but didn't Rothschild bail out Trump?
Thank you.
Yes, he did. More than that, Lord Rothschild's son was dating Ivanka. The big Jews were
more or less united in the early years of this century, long past 9/11.
But at some point, in light of the repeated war games that showed Iran defeating the
United States in a conventional war, it occurred to the financial powers that had set up
Israel in the first place that Israel, much as they loved the idea, was getting to be too
high-maintenance. Adolf Hitler had conjectured in his memoirs that the real reason a homeland
for the Jews was being pushed was to give the cover of sovereign immunity to the deprecations
of a criminal tribe. Let's say the main motive was utilitarian. And so the Yinon ambitions of
Israel had to be pruned back somewhat. And so Obama did his nuke treaty. That's when the
big-Jew split came about.
It's a family quarrel snd Trump is s dues-paid member of the Kehilla. But he's broken the
rules of the biggest big Jews and has to be brought down.
"Cyrus card" doesn't doesn't quite render it right. Cyrus wasn't a Jew. And if you're
keeping up on the impeachment, the Parnas recording showed that traditional Jewish religious
concepts, specifically the Messiah, had to be explained to Trump. "In a secretly recorded
video of a dinner with President Donald Trump, businessmen and Rudy Giuliani associates Lev
Parnas and Igor Fruman draw a parallel between the president and the Messiah." (Haaretz) But
the flattery that was on his wavelength and which he retweeted was" King of the Jews". What
he wants is not, what the Adelsons have suggested, a book of his own in the Jewish bible like
the Book of Esther, but to be thought of as the biggest Jew macher of all time.
At the Davos forum an at least 2-year long shutdown of Nord Stream-2 has been
announced
Liliya Karayeva, January 24, 2020
The launch of the Russian gas pipeline "Nord Stream-2", which is needed to supply
Europe with gas that bypasses the Ukraine, will take place not earlier than after 2 years. It
is not ruled out that the project will cease to exist if Western sanctions continue.
Former US ambassador to the Ukraine John Herbst said this at the World Economic Forum
in Davos. He noted that there is no possibility of Russia completing the gas
pipeline.
For the construction, it is necessary to have a company that will ensure the laying of
pipes on the sea bed. However, US sanctions do not allow foreign firms to do this, Eadaily
reports.
Herbst stressed that the Russians "can beat themselves on the chest," but under current
conditions the project may not be completed.
Earlier the pipe-layers of the Swiss company Allseas left the Baltic Sea because of US
sanctions. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia can complete the gas pipeline,
but it will take more time.
Cue you know who.
That former US ambassador to Banderastan certainly knows a lot about the technological
incapabilities of the gas station with missiles, doesn't he?
Amazing; at the time sanctions were applied, the Russian Energy Minister claimed that the
Russian Federation had the ships and the capability to complete the pipeline in only two
months. Therefore it would have opened only a month late.
In fact, a joint statement just after the sanctions were announced to great fanfare said
that the remainder of the pipeline could be completed using divers, although it would be
slow. But Russia is known to have pipe-laying vessels in its inventory which would surely
require little modification to finish the remaining work. Russia simply does not seem to be
in any hurry to complete the project.
I personally think Russia is just approaching completion of the pipeline in a leisurely
fashion, now that there is a new gas-transit agreement with Ukraine and there is no
particular rush to get it done. Russia is committed to transit 60 BCm through Ukraine this
year, so what's the hurry to get a pipeline done which bypasses Ukraine? According to the
Energy Minister – who must be speaking under advisement from field professionals
– Russia could finish it in about 2 months. It would not be in Ukraine's interests to
provoke a transit crisis now, the winter is over and demand will slacken, and there just is
no compelling reason to hurry. But if there were, it would not take long to finish.
The current cocky attitude which assumes the project has been stopped cold with a wave of
Washington's mighty hand and now may never be completed is, however, pure and classic Ukie
nationalist. The Ukrainians seem fated to slobber lovingly all over America whenever it makes
a gesture, and start up again with the tough talk toward Russia. Nord Stream II is dead in
the water, and now it might never be completed – Russia might have to transit gas
through Ukraine until the infants of today are grandparents! It is so much more pleasant to
put your faith in something which sounds like you are going to have an easy life without
doing much of anything; just loll in bed all day on cushions of goose-down, and let the
Russians pay to use your pipes to transit their gas – so easy! It's a wonder there are
any realists left. Keep in mind that those are the same people who will scream that they were
betrayed when the pipeline is completed, and that the dirty Russians took advantage of
Ukraine's frank and open nature.
This US sanctions business often confuses me. I work at ExxonMobil twice a week -- right next
to the Exceptional Nation's embassy are the Exxon offices situated -- and they tell me there
that the project they were undertaking in the Barents Sea, I think, was stopped and is now on
hold because of sanctions, whereas the Exxon activity in Sakhalin is still in operation. The
reason why? Sakhalin is on dry land, the Russian woman whom I teach there told me. "So?" I
asked. She reckons it's because at Sakhalin they use Russian gear and technology, whereas the
offshore Barents Sea rig is US operated.
For Russia, at least, it will serve as an object lesson to not ever again be reliant on US
technology for anything, and be to the least extent possible reliant on technology of its
close allies. That would likely mean Asian drilling technology. Despite what American media
would have you believe, Americans are not the only people on earth capable of developing and
using extraction technology. Russia is also perfectly capable of engineering its own
production methods and equipment. Sanctions are only effective, to the limited degree they
are effective at all, where you as the sanctioner can get all available sources to deny their
use. Arm-twisting to go along with the American sanctions has cost European business
billions, but the important thing to remember about employment of sanctions and successful
work-arounds is that business will not bounce back to its previous arrangements once
sanctions are lifted unless their duration is very short. The sanctions against Russia, quite
apart from the Americans having supplied their own justification for employing them in the
first place (so that the Russians as a whole have a sense of having been unjustly punished,
which taints the American brand), have had the effect of forcing Russia to seek other
suppliers and to develop domestic industry. It has survived the sanctions regime quite well,
and is much stronger for it. It also serves as a reminder to other countries which are not
ideologically aligned with the United States that a dependence on American products could
constitute an unacceptable vulnerability for them as well.
China is the biggest producer in Asia, with an output of nearly 4 million barrels per day.
Although its production has been stagnant or even declining in recent years, that is about to
change; the national government announced last year a 20% increase in capital investment in
production, with the goal of increasing its output by 50% to 6 million BPD by 2025. I think
it would be safe to bet that none of that technology will be American or owned by its closest
allies, since a key platform of the increased expenditure is energy independence.
Looks like two former ministers in the previous Medvedev government got bumped upstairs:
Vladimir Medinsky (Culture Minister) and Maxim Oreshkin (Economic Development Minister) have
become Presidential aides. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news
Alexander Novak is back in as Minister of Energy so he must have been telling the truth
back in December about Russia being able to finish the Nordstream II pipeline construction in
two months. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62625
Either that or his lies are so reliable that the Kremlin knows immediately to believe the
opposite of what he says. But that's not likely, because an Energy Minister who started a
massive project like that and had no prospects at all of completing it would not likely be
reappointed.
Another potential reason for Russian relaxation toward pipeline completion might well be
the global collapse of LNG prices due to overproduction: according to the new (ish) CEO of
Gunvor Group (remember them? The energy company that Putin owned 75% of its shares?), US LNG
exporters are 50 cents away from shutdowns.
"LNG prices are on track to hit an all-time low in Asia later this summer. Gas is also
at its weakest seasonally in the U.S. and Europe since the late 1990s. "There's a surplus
already in the U.S. and Europe. And the mild winter in Asia means another surplus is building
up there," Marco Dunand, chief executive officer of trading house Mercuria Energy Group Ltd.,
told Bloomberg. Torbjorn Tornqvist, chief executive officer of Gunvor Group Ltd., said U.S.
LNG exporters are 50 cents away from shutdowns."
Under such conditions, it's unlikely the Kremlin is overly concerned at the thought of
American LNG carriers steaming into European ports and snatching the energy rug from
underneath them. Think what a great time this would be to have an energy-extraction empire in
which – thanks to western sanctions – your production costs were in rubles and
your selling price was in Euros. Why, you'd still be able to take a profit no matter how low
prices went!
From comments: "Even though the article is exaggerating there is some truth to it. People in
Europe are getting tired of the US's economic bullying. The extraterritoriality of the US law is
nonsense and is driving Europeans and Russians slowly but surely away from the King Dollar. More
and more transactions are conducted in Euro and Europe is moving towards using the Euro both for
internal as well as international transactions."
Notable quotes:
"... Washington's stranglehold over the Iraqi economy is an extreme example of a broader, worrying trend: more and more often, the United States is using its privileged role as custodian of the global financial system to coerce and punish those who object to its methods, be they friend or foe. It has slowly usurped a system intended to provide benefits to the world at large and made of it an instrument for its own geopolitical goals. ..."
"... In turning financial relationships into a tool of empire, the United States follows in the footsteps of ancient Athens. The experience of this predecessor does not augur well for Washington. Athens used its financial power to abuse its allies and in doing so precipitated its own ruination. The United States risks doing the same. ..."
"... During the Great Recession it became evident that in some (not all) respects the United States was unable to fulfil its responsibility as the international economy's manager. After all, an economic hegemon is supposed to solve global economic crises, not cause them. But it was the freezing up of the US financial system triggered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis that plunged the global economy into hot water. The economic hegemon is supposed to be the lender of last resort in the international economy. ..."
"... The United States, however, has become the borrower of first resort -- the world's largest debtor. When the global economy falters, the economic hegemon is supposed to jump-start recovery by purchasing other nations' goods. From the end of the Second World War until the Great Recession struck, it was America's willingness to consume foreign goods that constituted the primary firewall against global economic downturns. ..."
"... When the Great Recession hit, however, the US economy proved too infirm to lead the global economy back to health. ..."
"... The task facing American statesmen over the next decades is to recognize that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to 'manage' affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage. ..."
"... The authors are doing the hypothesis the fall of an empire is founded by using oppression as a primary means to support it's own interests. To support their hypothesis they are comparing the fall of Athens with the US. ..."
"... The article could be summarized as the insight, power projection needs more than a simple projection of force. ..."
"... The usage of financial coercion to get allies in line and putting pressure on other nations is implying others will search for a circumvention of a possible financial coercion ..."
"... I agree that dominance does not vanish overnight but the night is long and full of terrors ..."
"... It has slowly usurped a system intended to provide benefits to the world at large and made of it an instrument for its own geopolitical goals. ..."
"... It continues to exploit a system that was put in place after WW2 and intended to be an instrument for its own geopolitical goals. FTFY ..."
When Iraqi lawmakers voted to expel U.S. forces from the country earlier this month, the
Trump administration's response was swift and forceful: it refused to withdraw and, for good
measure, threatened financial retaliation, saying it would freeze Iraq's accounts at the U.S.
Federal Reserve.
The threat seems to have been effective. Although Iraqi officials still seethe over a U.S.
drone strike that killed a top Iranian commander in Baghdad on January 3, Prime Minister Adel
Abdul-Mahdi has said that his caretaker government lacks the authority to push for a U.S.
withdrawal, and American troops have resumed joint operations with their Iraqi
counterparts.
But that sense of normalcy is deceiving. U.S. forces were in the country at the invitation
of the Iraqi government to help in the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS. By refusing to
withdraw them, the Trump administration is turning a relationship of choice into one of
coercion. Just as alarming, Washington is doing so by threatening to starve its ally of
critical funds, a step that could set off a financial crisis in Iraq, perhaps even economic
collapse.
Washington's stranglehold over the Iraqi economy is an extreme example of a broader,
worrying trend: more and more often, the United States is using its privileged role as
custodian of the global financial system to coerce and punish those who object to its methods,
be they friend or foe. It has slowly usurped a system intended to provide benefits to the world
at large and made of it an instrument for its own geopolitical goals.
In turning financial relationships into a tool of empire, the United States follows in
the footsteps of ancient Athens. The experience of this predecessor does not augur well for
Washington. Athens used its financial power to abuse its allies and in doing so precipitated
its own ruination. The United States risks doing the same.
THE PRICE OF
ARROGANCE
Scholars of the realist school of international relations tend to think of the
During the Great Recession it became evident that in some (not all) respects the
United States was unable to fulfil its responsibility as the international economy's
manager. After all, an economic hegemon is supposed to solve global economic crises, not
cause them. But it was the freezing up of the US financial system triggered by the
sub-prime mortgage crisis that plunged the global economy into hot water. The economic
hegemon is supposed to be the lender of last resort in the international economy.
The United States, however, has become the borrower of first resort -- the world's
largest debtor. When the global economy falters, the economic hegemon is supposed to
jump-start recovery by purchasing other nations' goods. From the end of the Second World
War until the Great Recession struck, it was America's willingness to consume foreign goods
that constituted the primary firewall against global economic downturns.
When the Great Recession hit, however, the US economy proved too infirm to lead the
global economy back to health. It fell to China to pull the global economy out of its
nose-dive by stepping up to the plate with a massive stimulus program. Barack Obama
acknowledged the deeper implications of this when, at the April 2009 G20 meeting in London,
he conceded that, in important respects, the United States' days as the economic hegemon
were numbered because it was too deeply in debt to continue as the world's consumer of last
resort. Instead, he said, the world would have to look to China (and other emerging market
states, plus Germany) to be the motors of global recovery. 'If there is going to be renewed
growth,' Obama stated, 'it can't just be the United States as the engine, everybody is
going to have to pick up the pace.'
Rather, the declinists, in Paul Kennedy, Rob Gilpin, David Calleo and P. Huntington of
the 1980s pointed to domestic and international economic drivers that, over time,would
cause American economic power to diminish relatively, thereby shifting the balance of
power. In essence, the declinists believed that the United States was experiencing a slow
-- 'termite-like' -- decline caused by fundamental structural weaknesses in the American
economy that were gradually nibbling at its foundations.
Layne states even Kennedy (JFK that is) knew that American power would decline into the
21st century,
The task facing American statesmen over the next decades is to recognize that broad
trends are under way, and that there is a need to 'manage' affairs so that the relative
erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not
accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term
disadvantage.
Source; Layne, C., 2018. The US -- Chinese power shift and the end of the Pax Americana.
International Affairs , 94(1), pp.89-111. level 1
... There are other things to say about the negative impact of America's financial empire
(primarily the impact of the petro dollar internationally), but that's again an unavoidable
result of USA being something like 1/8th of the global economy.
The authors are doing the hypothesis the fall of an empire is founded by using oppression
as a primary means to support it's own interests. To support their hypothesis they are
comparing the fall of Athens with the US.
The usage of financial coercion to get allies in
line and putting pressure on other nations is implying others will search for a circumvention
of a possible financial coercion which then leads to a weakening of the financial system as
we know it. The article could be summarized as the insight, power projection needs more than
a simple projection of force.
As for now, most people would agree the capability of the US to coerce everyone will not
vanish over night. Even when this article is directed towards the US, the conclusion is
almost universal. Whether it's the US, EU or China nobody can escape the consequences of his
own actions. level 2
The usage of financial coercion to get allies in line and putting pressure on other
nations is implying others will search for a circumvention of a possible financial
coercion
They are assuming this is a new phenomenon. It is not, the US has been doing the same
thing for 100 years, and 100 years ago there wasn't a risk of the empire falling, so why is
there a risk today?
The difference between 100 years ago and today is information sharing and the internet. So
we know about it.
We are entering a world with 2 dominant global superpowers, after a generation of having
only 1. The real question is how US domestic politics drives outward projects to the rise of
China. Does the US elect politicians who want trade wars and real wars? or does the US turn
more into what the UK did, a very strong first world country that is OK losing the mantle of
dominant superpower relatively peacefully.
Being a superpower or not has no meaningful impact on residents day to day lives.
I agree that dominance does not vanish overnight but the night is long and full of
terrors. [Sorry GOT] What worked for US is we being this beacon of liberty. It is
disappearing as a beacon and also in reality.
Once setting up your technology hubs in Canada
and Western Europe becomes the obvious choice because of American politics, once right and
left just refuse to compromise and want to eliminate each other, it does not matter if other
countries are weak now, what matters is how much gains they can make while the US is fighting
its own civil war.
Foreign investment is attracted to the US economic system, and the rules that govern it,
in part BECAUSE they are different from those in Europe and Canada. "Tech hubs" won't bail on
the US until that changes alonside myriad other economic incentive reversals.
"... During the Great Recession it became evident that in some (not all) respects the United States was unable to fulfil its responsibility as the international economy's manager. After all, an economic hegemon is supposed to solve global economic crises, not cause them. But it was the freezing up of the US financial system triggered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis that plunged the global economy into hot water. The economic hegemon is supposed to be the lender of last resort in the international economy. ..."
"... The United States, however, has become the borrower of first resort -- the world's largest debtor. When the global economy falters, the economic hegemon is supposed to jump-start recovery by purchasing other nations' goods. From the end of the Second World War until the Great Recession struck, it was America's willingness to consume foreign goods that constituted the primary firewall against global economic downturns. ..."
"... When the Great Recession hit, however, the US economy proved too infirm to lead the global economy back to health. ..."
"... The task facing American statesmen over the next decades is to recognize that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to 'manage' affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage. ..."
"... It has slowly usurped a system intended to provide benefits to the world at large and made of it an instrument for its own geopolitical goals. ..."
"... It continues to exploit a system that was put in place after WW2 and intended to be an instrument for its own geopolitical goals. FTFY ..."
During the Great Recession it became evident that in some (not all) respects the United
States was unable to fulfil its responsibility as the international economy's manager. After
all, an economic hegemon is supposed to solve global economic crises, not cause them. But it
was the freezing up of the US financial system triggered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis
that plunged the global economy into hot water. The economic hegemon is supposed to be the
lender of last resort in the international economy.
The United States, however, has become
the borrower of first resort -- the world's largest debtor. When the global economy falters,
the economic hegemon is supposed to jump-start recovery by purchasing other nations' goods.
From the end of the Second World War until the Great Recession struck, it was America's
willingness to consume foreign goods that constituted the primary firewall against global
economic downturns.
When the Great Recession hit, however, the US economy proved too infirm to lead the global
economy back to health. It fell to China to pull the global economy out of its nose-dive by
stepping up to the plate with a massive stimulus program. Barack Obama acknowledged the
deeper implications of this when, at the April 2009 G20 meeting in London, he conceded that,
in important respects, the United States' days as the economic hegemon were numbered because
it was too deeply in debt to continue as the world's consumer of last resort. Instead, he
said, the world would have to look to China (and other emerging market states, plus Germany)
to be the motors of global recovery. 'If there is going to be renewed growth,' Obama stated,
'it can't just be the United States as the engine, everybody is going to have to pick up the
pace.'
Rather, the declinists, in Paul Kennedy, Rob Gilpin, David Calleo and P. Huntington of the
1980s pointed to domestic and international economic drivers that, over time,would cause
American economic power to diminish relatively, thereby shifting the balance of power. In
essence, the declinists believed that the United States was experiencing a slow --
'termite-like' -- decline caused by fundamental structural weaknesses in the American economy
that were gradually nibbling at its foundations.
Layne states even Kennedy (JFK that is) knew that American power would decline into the 21st
century,
The task facing American statesmen over the next decades is to recognize that broad trends
are under way, and that there is a need to 'manage' affairs so that the relative erosion of
the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by
policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.
Source; Layne, C., 2018. The US–Chinese power shift and the end of the Pax Americana. International Affairs , 94(1), pp.89-111. level 1
Yeah this is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, the fed is a complete mess, and has been the
primary driver of asset price inflation, slowing total factor productivity, and marginal labor
productivity (ie limited wage growth), and putting this all together, has been the primary
cause of wealth inequality.
Yes, the fed is a bald-faced nationalized monopoly, and the biggest company in the world.
Yes, it is a clearly political institution that enacts policy for the benefit of stakeholders,
and has issued far more debt than a competitive market otherwise would.
But America's financial system is still the shiniest turd on the block. East Asia is a mess,
Europe is completely stalled, and those are your only real competitors. Bond yields have
bifurcated, with the spread between real yields in the US (which are stable to growing) and
basically every other central bank (which has been or is headed negative, in real terms) so
capital has been increasingly flowing into US assets. China is a slightly different story but
its not worth mentioning because the result is the same.
This is both cause and effect of being the most powerful and effective financial centre.
There are other things to say about the negative impact of America's financial empire (primarily the impact of the petro
dollar internationally), but that's again an unavoidable result of USA being something like 1/8th of the global economy.
The authors are doing the hypothesis the fall of an empire is founded by using oppression as
a primary means to support it's own interests. To support their hypothesis they are comparing
the fall of Athens with the US. The usage of financial coercion to get allies in line and
putting pressure on other nations is implying others will search for a circumvention of a
possible financial coercion which then leads to a weakening of the financial system as we know
it. The article could be summarized as the insight, power projection needs more than a simple
projection of force.
As for now, most people would agree the capability of the US to coerce everyone will not
vanish over night. Even when this article is directed towards the US, the conclusion is almost
universal. Whether it's the US, EU or China nobody can escape the consequences of his own
actions. level 2
The usage of financial coercion to get allies in line and putting pressure on other
nations is implying others will search for a circumvention of a possible financial
coercion
They are assuming this is a new phenomenon. It is not, the US has been doing the same thing
for 100 years, and 100 years ago there wasn't a risk of the empire falling, so why is there a
risk today?
The difference between 100 years ago and today is information sharing and the internet. So
we know about it.
We are entering a world with 2 dominant global superpowers, after a generation of having
only 1. The real question is how US domestic politics drives outward projects to the rise of
China. Does the US elect politicians who want trade wars and real wars? or does the US turn
more into what the UK did, a very strong first world country that is OK losing the mantle of
dominant superpower relatively peacefully.
Being a superpower or not has no meaningful impact on residents day to day lives.
I agree that dominance does not vanish overnight but the night is long and full of terrors. [Sorry GOT] What worked for US
is we being this beacon of liberty. It is disappearing as a beacon and also in reality. Once setting up your technology hubs
in Canada and Western Europe becomes the obvious choice because of American politics, once right and left just refuse to
compromise and want to eliminate each other, it does not matter if other countries are weak now, what matters is how much
gains they can make while the US is fighting its own civil war.
Foreign investment is attracted to the US economic system, and the rules that govern it, in
part BECAUSE they are different from those in Europe and Canada. "Tech hubs" won't bail on the
US until that changes alonside myriad other economic incentive reversals.
There is a huge difference between extremely bright students and medicate ones. Bright students are the future of the society and
need to be nurtures and helped in any way possible for the range of specialties that are important (STEM is one example)
There is difference between the degree in computer science and the degree in some obscure nationality studies (let's say Eastern
European studies; few people that are needed can be paid by intelligence agencies ;-) Obscure areas should be generally available only
to well to do students, who can pay for their education.
Like is the case with alcoholism, some student debt is the result of bad personal choices.
Notable quotes:
"... Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times, ..."
"... "My daughter's getting out of school, I saved all my money, so she doesn't have any student debt. Am I going to get my money back?" ..."
"... So, we end up paying for people who didn't save any money, then those who did the right thing get screwed, ..."
"... "We did the right thing and we get screwed," ..."
"... "Look, we build a future going forward by making it better. By that same logic what would we have done? Not started Social Security because we didn't start it last week for you or last month for you," ..."
"... "We don't build an America by saddling our kids with debt. We build an America by saying we're going to open up those opportunities for kids to be able to get an education without getting crushed by student loan debt." ..."
"... Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) campaigns in Des Moines, Iowa on Jan. 19, 2020. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) ..."
"... "I'll direct the Secretary of Education to use their authority to begin to compromise and modify federal student loans consistent with my plan to cancel up to $50,000 in debt for 95% of student loan borrowers (about 42 million people)," ..."
"... A scholarship system awarding free tuition to the top 5% of college applicants (NOT biased by race, gender, etc) who apply to the U.S.'s best STEM programs, hell yes! Free tuition for future Democrat voters, f^%k that! ..."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) defended her plan to pay off college loans after being confronted by a father in Iowa in an exchange
that went viral.
Senator Elizabeth Warren is confronted by a father who worked double shifts to pay for his daughters education and wants to
know if he will get his money back. pic.twitter.com/t2GGbAnG08
The father approached Warren, a leading Democratic presidential contender, after a campaign event in Grimes.
"My daughter's getting out of school, I saved all my money, so she doesn't have any student debt. Am I going to get my
money back?" the man asked Warren.
"Of course not," Warren replied.
" So, we end up paying for people who didn't save any money, then those who did the right thing get screwed, " the
father told her.
He then described a friend who makes more money but didn't save up while he worked double shifts to save up to pay for his daughter's
college.
The father became upset, accusing Warren of laughing.
"We did the right thing and we get screwed," he added before walking off.
In an appearance on "CBS This Morning" on Friday, Warren was asked about the exchange.
Last night, a father who saved for his daughter's college education approached
@SenWarren and challenged her proposed student
loan forgiveness plan. @TonyDokoupil asks the
senator for her response: pic.twitter.com/jLUXPqChC6
"Look, we build a future going forward by making it better. By that same logic what would we have done? Not started Social
Security because we didn't start it last week for you or last month for you," Warren said.
Pressed on whether she was saying "tough luck" to people like the father, she said "No." She then recounted how she got to go
to college despite coming from a poor family.
"There was a $50 a semester option for me. I was able to go to college and become a public school teacher because America had
invested in a $50 a semester option for me. Today that's not available," she said.
"We don't build an America by saddling our kids with debt. We build an America by saying we're going to open up those opportunities
for kids to be able to get an education without getting crushed by student loan debt."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) campaigns in Des Moines, Iowa on Jan. 19, 2020. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
One of Warren's plans is to cancel student loans. According to
her website , on her first day as president
she would cancel student loan debt as well as give free tuition to public colleges and technical schools and ban for-profit colleges
from getting aid from the federal government.
"I'll direct the Secretary of Education to use their authority to begin to compromise and modify federal student loans
consistent with my plan to cancel up to $50,000 in debt for 95% of student loan borrowers (about 42 million people)," Warren
wrote.
"I'll also direct the Secretary of Education to use every existing authority available to rein in the for-profit college industry,
crack down on predatory student lending, and combat the racial disparities in our higher education system."
Sounds an awful lot like the dad above is right those that did the "right thing" are gonna get "screwed."
Warren you bitch, I paid back my student loans responsibly by working my *** off (140k) and now you want to give others a free
ride? I sure hope that I get a refund for all that money I paid back.
Obama did this kinds thing with housing. I got outbid by 100k on a house. The other bidder who got it didn't make his house
payments so Obama restructured his loan knocking off 100k from his loan and giving him a 1% interest rate on it. He again didn't
make his payments and got it restructured again but I didn't hear the terms of that one.
If student loan debt is such a crisis, force every university to use their precious endowment funds to underwrite those loans
AND let those loans get discharged in bankruptcy. Maybe then those schools would start to question whether having a dozen
"Diversity Deans" each being paid $100k+ salaries is really worth the expense (among other things).
A scholarship system awarding free tuition to the top 5% of college applicants (NOT biased by race, gender, etc) who apply
to the U.S.'s best STEM programs, hell yes! Free tuition for future Democrat voters, f^%k that!
The pissed off dad in this story has only one person to be pissed off at: himself, for being stupid. Understand something about
college degrees: 90% of them, including majors like accounting, are not worth the paper they are printed on. Anyone who works
double shifts to pay for anyone's college degree, even their own, is stupid. Look at why college costs so much: go to any state,
and you'll see that 70% or more of the highest paid state employees are employed by public colleges and universities. You need
to play these sons of bitches at their game, use their funny money to pay for the degree, and walk away. If you play the way these
sons of bitches tell you to play, you get what you deserve.
I used their funny money to get a degree that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on and walked away. I don't give a ****
if the sons of bitches grab my tax refund. Why? Because I have my withholdings set up so they get next to nothing in April. It
costs the sons of bitches more to print up the garnishment letter and send it to me than what they're stealing from me. Guess
what I use for an address? P.O. Box (can't serve a summons to a ghost).
If you're going to do what stupid, pissed off dad did, and work double shifts, you need to be trading out of all that funny
money you're being paid for those double shifts, and trading into personal economic leverage (gold first, then silver). Instead
of having bedrock to build multi-generational wealth, he has a daughter with a degree in pouring coffee, and nothing else to show
for it. He only has himself to blame for drinking the Kool Aid. I can grab overtime every Saturday at my job if I want it, and
every last penny of that OT is traded out of funny money and into gold ASAP.
Understand the US real estate market: the only reason it did not die five years ago was because we welcomed rich foreigners
to come in and buy real estate to protect their wealth. We've stopped doing that, we have an over-abundance of domestic sellers
and a severe shortage of domestic buyers. It's also where history says you need to be if you want to build multi-generational
wealth. Warren actually needs to go further than what she's proposing. Not only does she need to discharge 100% of those balances
by EO, she also needs to refund all those tax refunds stolen under false pretenses. Anything less, and we are guaranteed, for
the next 40 years, to have a real estate market and economy which resembles Japan since 1989.
Why do I buy gold? So I can play people like Warren at their game. I'll take whatever loan discharge she gives me, and have
lots of leverage in reserve to take advantage of what will be a once in a lifetime real estate fire sale.
Make those who want to be bailed out have to pay the bailout back by working every non-holiday Saturday (at the minimum wage
rate) for the government and citizens (e.g who need work done around the house, take care of the elderly - in the bathroom) until
the debt is paid back. AND let those who have not taken the debt relief supervise them - getting paid by the government at the
same rate, minimum wage. 🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞
For a decent college it's between 35-70k a year.... Why? 300k a year library professors, if it weren't for tenure the problem
would largely he self correcting as rntrillments drop...
My how times have changed. My son was a college grad circa 1996. He did the JUCO thing for 1 1/2 years , worked a part time
job for the duration, and picked up an A S while making the President's list. I aid, out of pocket all educational expenses while
he lived at home and provided for a nice lifestyle while he was in school. As promised, he finished his education, out of state,
which I paid for all along the way. 2 more years, he graduated, on the Pres list, and picked up his B S. No student debt, in his
words, was one of the the greatest gifts. Today he is debt free, (so am I ), and he is a very happy , financially secure ( until
the world goes upside down) mature adult. Hey Lizzie, send me a check.
They are all ignoring the real problem...the Federal mandated system of the guaranteed student loan program. Anyone with a
pulse can get a guaranteed student loan, thus creating a massive rise in college admissions. The colleges are guaranteed the money
for these loans, while the lender (the US gov't) is not guaranteed to be paid back by the students receiving these loans,. this
created a fool proof, risk free ability for colleges and universities across the country to jack up their tuition costs at over
a 5:1 ratio of income growth over the last 25 years. The problem is the program itself, students need to earn their ability to
enroll in college through hard work and good grades. Currently, any moron with a high school diploma can go to college on a guaranteed
student loan program and the colleges are more than willing to take on any idiot that wants to go to school despite their aspirations,
work ethics, intelligence, achievements, etc. The universities have been given a blank check to expand their campuses, drastically
inflate the salaries and pensions of professors and administrators of these schools all at the expense of this guaranteed "free"
money from the government that only achieved an immense amount of the population going to overpriced schools in order to get a
diploma in useless pursuits like african american studies, philosophy, creative writing, music, criminal justice, arts, basket
weaving, etc.. The skyrocketing costs of colleges and student debt is the direct result of this miserably failed system of the
guaranteed student loan. The majority of which have no business going to higher education because they don't have the aptitude,
work ethic and intelligence necessary to actually receive a degree in anything that benefits the economy and themselves going
forward. 30 years ago the average state college admission was roughly $4k a year for a good state school, today it is roughly
$20k or far more. Meanwhile, the average income has gone up a meaningless amount. Get rid of the guaranteed student loan program
and make the colleges responsible for accepting the responsibility of the loans for their students. I guarantee enrollment will
decrease and costs will decline making it much more affordable for the truly responsible and aspiring student to achieve their
dreams of a degree without a $250k loan needed for completion nor the lifelong strain of debt on their future incomes. The colleges
are raping the system the same as all these shoestring companies take advantage of the medicaid system and give hovarounds and
walking canes, and hearing aids for free because the gov't reimburses them at wildly inflated prices under some federally passed
mandate. The system is the problem, eliminating the debt will only exacerbate it and cost taxpayers trillions more each and every
year as "free" college will now entice every moron with a heartbeat the ability to go to outrageously priced schools with no skin
in the game on the taxpayer's dime. Elizabeth Warren is an idiot....someone needs to have a sit down with her and discuss this
rationale in her luxurious, state of the art TeePee.
While you are correct corrupting academics with huge payoffs is how you secure their votes and the votes of most of the 'students'
for decades to come.
Any group or industry can be paid off and you might think of the system as a set of interlocking payoffs until you get out
to the margins and the fringes where the cash and benefits are a lot thinner.
Everyone who continues to pay taxes to these neo-Bolsheviks is going to get screwed. The only alternative is to stop funding
these criminals completely.
What a sorry presidential canditate! She flat out LIED about being native american to get FREE college. And now this. Where
has America gone????????? Socialism sems to be what most want nowadays. It has NEVER EVER worked anywhere in the world at any
time! If yoou think therwise, just name ONE countryn it has worked in ! What a lying bunch the democrats are..........................
So all if us have to pay for it. Why did I have to pay for University and College in the 1970's if I wanted to further my education
and now that I am older I have to foot the bill for the young people of today? Pay DOUBLE? (just to buy votes for traitors?)
I think NOT! Take your theft from the people, to buy votes of everyone from young people to illegal criminals to outright criminals
in prison to dead people and resign before we decide to arrest you.
Democrats, HANG IT UP! We are NOT paying for YOUR illegitimate votes.
Notice too how all their "we're going to wipe out your debt!" promises never seem to include the big "endowments" of these
fascist colleges that jacked up tuition 1000% over what it used to cost.
No, those creepy commie profs and their freaky administrators get to keep their big TAX FREE endowments AND their big salaries.
Big Gov by Sanders/Warren don't seem to think that's obscene.
You are absolutely correct. 45 years ago you could almost work part time and actually PAY your way through college. Today you
almost need a physicians salary to pay for these OVERPRICED sewers filled with leftist propaganda.
It's obvious that Warren doesn't teach economics or even math. They weren't smart enough when they took out the loans and they
are not good with paying their bills so move the goal posts to bail them out. Has anyone given the thought that maybe they shouldn't
have gone to college at all. Sounds like they will all work for the government anyways.
Every month for at least the past half year there is a spate of bearish economic commentary
that relies upon one or both of two metrics: AAR rail carloads and/or the Cass Freight
Index.
I have a post
up at Seeking Alpha showing why the first measure is not a representative slice of
transport as a whole, and the second has a history of being very volatile and with a slew of
negative readings in the teeth of continuing expansions.
As usual, clicking on the link and reading helps reward me with a $ or two for my
efforts.
Addendum: after I put together and posted the article, I came up with the idea of averaging
the Cass Freight Index and the Dept. of Transportation's Freight Index after adjusting for the
former's volatility (shown below). It gives us an even less noisy overview of the
transportation sector, although it still does go negative during slowdowns without there being
a recession. In any event, none of the current negative readings are sufficiently below zero to
accord with recessionary readings over the indexes' short history:
spencer , January 25, 2020 10:12 am
Have you thought about how the rapid growth of online shopping impacts the transportation
incidences.
With online shopping the final stage is shipping directly to the consumer rather than the
retail outlet. I 'm an old man that takes probably too many different drugs. But I now get
them online and have them shipped
to my home rather than going to the drugstore.
Amazon now has numerous warehouses and/or transshipping facilities so it is obviously
large enough to significantly impact the data. Tesla does not even have a chain of car
dealers.
So the fundamental question is whether or not the shipping indices are measuring the same
universe that they did in earlier cycles.
Bert Schlitz , January 25, 2020 10:20 pm
Bad core real final demand ain't good. 4th quarter was the worst in 4 years. Bodes not so
good in the 1st quarter.
Not
surprisingly for those of you who are members of the ABA Tax Section, there is a meeting of
that group next week in Florida when a thousand tax lawyers (give or take a few) will be
talking about everything from basis to wealth taxes; GILTI, BEAT, Dual BEIT, to EITC. Yours
truly will be on a panel of the Tax Policy and Simplification Committee, meeting Friday
morning, to discuss how the tax system should respond to the wealth gap. Joining me on the dais
will be Roger Royse (moderator and panelist), Rich Prisinzano from the Penn Wharton Budget
Model, and Dan Shaviro, Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at NYU and a blogger at Start Making
Sense. We'll talk about the income and wealth gap data, including the different perspectives of
Saez & Zucman, serving as wealth tax advisers to Senator and Democratic presidential
candidate hopeful Elizabeth Warren; Penn Wharton Budget Model, applying a more standard budget
model to determine harms and benefits of the Warren Wealth Tax; and Cato INstitute. We'll also
discuss Sen. Ron Wyden's proposal for a mark-to-market system of capital gains taxation
(including a lookback charge of some kind for hard-to-value assets, Prof. (and former Cleary
partner) Edward Kleinbard's Dual Business Enterprise Income Tax proposal, and other means of
making the regular tax system more progressive such as rates, removing the capital gains
preference, and reinvigorating the estate tax that has been the object of a GOP murder squad
for the last 20-30 years at least.
Meanwhile, today in Florida there was a Tax Policy Lecture at the University of Florida on
Taxing Wealth, with Alan Viard, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, David
Kamin, Professor at NYU School of Law, Janet Holtzblatt, Senior Fellow at the Tax Policy
Center, and William Gale, Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy7 at
the Brookings Institution.
Last fall, the Tax Policy Center held a program on Taxing Wealth (w ebcast recording available at this
link ) with Mark Mazur, Ian Simmons, Janet Holtzblatt, Beth Kaufman, Greg Leiserson,
Victoria Perry, and Alan Viard. Sony Kassam from Bloomberg Tax served as moderator. The link
has a series of power point presentations from that meeting as well, for your edification.
Ian Simmons, for example, includes
the letter from billionaires dated June 24, 2019, asking that "[ t]he next dollar of new
tax revenue should come from the most financially fortunate, not from middle-income and
lower-income Americans ." Such a tax " enjoys the support of a majority of
Americans–Republicans, Independents, and Democrats ." It's not a new idea, since all
those millions of middle-income Americans who own their home " already pay a wealth tax each
year in the form of property taxes on their primary form of wealth–their home ." The
billionaires are asking " to pay a small wealth tax on the primary source of our wealth as
well "–such as Elizabeth Warren's proposal, which would tax " only 75,000 of the
wealthiest families in the country " (those with assets over $50 million) and would
generate an estimated $3 trillion over ten years to "f und smart investments in our future,
like clean energy innovation to mitigate climate change, universal child care, student loan
debt relief, infrastructure modernization, tax credits for low-income families, public health
solutions, and other vital needs ." All this is necessary because of the wealth gap: "
[t]he top 1/10 of 1% of households now have almost as much wealth as all Americans in the
bottom 90% ." The signatories support a wealth tax because:
it's a powerful tool for solving our climate crisis
it's an economic winner for America through increased public investments
it will make Americans healthier, addressing the difference in longevity (15 years)
between the richest and the poorest Americans
It's fair -- "[ t]axing extraordinary wealth should be a greater priority than taxing
hard work ."
It strengthens American freedom and democracy, since high levels of economic inequality
lead to political power and pluotocracy and higher levels of distrust in democratic
institutions
It is patriotic -- ' The richest 1/10 of the richest 1% should be proud to pay a bit
more of our fortune forward to America's future ."
Janet Holtzblatt discussed whether wealth should be taxed, with a set of powerful
powerpoint charts . As she notes, there are a number of reasons to think taxing the wealthy
is a good idea because it (slide 4) :
curbs the accumulation of power that comes with the accumulation of wealth–and, I
will add, this is power to get laws and regulations written in your favor, including tax
laws, as well as power that allows pollution, rent-seeking, on-demand schedules for workers
and other 'evils' that come with plutocracy
ensures that the wealth pay their fair share of taxes
finances new initiatives (child care, student debt relieve, climate change policies,
housing initiatives)
provides better data for research on wealth inequality
Those not supportive (or, as JH puts it, "less optimistic") suggest that (slides 5, 7)
even with a wealth tax, the rich remain the richest and the most powerful
incremental changes to current tax system would be more easily implemented
wealth taxes would have a negative impact on savings, investment, entrepreneurship
wealth taxes won't raise as much revenue as claimed
OECD countries with wealth taxes haven't been all that successful (in 1990 12 had them,
in 2018 only 3 still retained wealth taxes: Norway, Switzerland, and Spain)
There are lots of issues with wealth taxes: (slides 8-20)
on what assets
at what rate (tax burden will depend partly on rate of returns on investments
using what exemption threshold (liquidity constraints at lower thresholds; taxing middle
income instead of wealthy)
using what means to prevent tax avoidance (dependents' wealth with parents? include
assets in family-run foundations? restrictive limits for trusts? exit taxes?)
and tax evasion (enhance IRS enforcement, enhance penalties, enhance IRS access to third
party data–but the wealthy have resources to battle IRS claims)
assuming what actual amounts of tax revenues could be raised (" street fights over
revenue estimates among top public finance economists ") (Slide 15)
how much wealth is there? JH notes several 2016 estimates between 86.9 trillion and
101.2 trillion (slides 16-17) {Zucman says just under $115 trillion]
Fed Reserve Survey of Consumer Finance ( 3 year intervals; leaves out Forbes 400
and some pension wealth)
estate tax data (adjusted for mortality probabilities and population)
income tax data (capitalized using assumed rates of returns)
how is that wealth distributed between the top 0.1% and the rest? Bricker 2016 study
estimates range from about 15% to 22% (Slide 18)
how much wealth is hidden by "tax net misreporting rates"? IRS 2016 misreporting:
farms 71%; nonfarm proprietors 64%; CGs 27%; PS/SCorps/Estates/Trusts 16% (slide 19)
how much tax revenues? between 815 billion and 1.098 trillion between 2021-2030
(slide 22, Urban-Brookings TPC Microsimulation Model [ with lower thresholds and rates
than those proposed by Warren]
who pays? 40,000 tax units in the top 1% minus the top 0.1%; 127,000 tax units in the
top 0.1%,with those in the top 0.1% paying between 97% and 100% on the different options
considered
Greg Leiserson discussed the idea of mark-to-market taxation (an idea that Ron Wyden has
endorsed), in "
Taxing wealth by taxing investment income: An introduction to mark-to-market taxation "
(Sept 11, 2019). The key to MTM taxation is that a tax is assessed annually on investments,
whether or not they are sold or otherwise disposed of ('through a transaction that results in
"realization" for federal income tax purposes). The burden of such a tax falls predominantly on
the wealthy, since those are the primary owners of bonds, stocks, real estate empires, and
pass-through businesses that produce investment income, as well as the appreciation of those
assets that is taxed currently as a capital gain on disposition. Leiserson provides a chart
(below) showing the nominal investment income of US households and nonprofits including an
offset for inflation.
As he notes, much of this income is taxed at preferential capital gains rates, and much of
the income tax is deferred because capital gains and losses are generally taxed only when the
asset is sold. Deferral amounts to a reduction in taxes paid under time-value-of-money
principles. But yet another way in which owners of investment assets escape taxation is the
estate tax: appreciation in property in the estate (such as unrealized capital gains from stock
that has appreciated in value significantly over decades) is never taxed, since the heirs get a
step up in basis to market value, so that if the asset were then immediately sold, there would
be no gain remaining.
MTM taxation eliminates the deferral advantage. MTM taxation combined with elimination of
the preferential rate for capital gains would eliminate the preferential treatment of capital
gains that exists in current law. Leiserson notes the difficulties for a MTM system: which
assets are covered, rate of tax applied, and whether there are special rules for volatility.
Further, "[ i]f a comprehensive system of mark-to-market taxation is enacted, then there
would be no unrealized gains at death going forward, because gains will have been taxed on an
annual basis, including in the year the person dies " so long as the system applies over
some transition period to gains accrued prior to enactment. Otherwise, the system would have to
tax gains at death (repealing step-up in basis rule) or at any other disposition, including
gifts, to ensure fair and equal treatment. He suggests other measures–such as limiting
the home sales capital gain exclusion or requiring mandatory distributions of pension account
balances above a threshold, that would be reasonable in a MTM context.
One difficulty with MTM taxation is valuation of assets that are not regularly traded. Ron
Wyden's proposal suggests a lookback charge–an additional tax payment for assets not
subject to MTM taxation that is collected upon disposition to account for the deferral value
while still relying on realization as a trigger for taxation. Wyden and Leiserson suggest
different possible methods. One is to take the gain upon sale and allocate it ratably to each
year between purchase and sale, compute the tax on each year's income at the rate applicable in
that year, and then calculate interest on those unpaid taxes for the years til payment.
Unrealized gains would be deemed realized on death or gift and taxed accordingly.
Three key ideas here:
To protect lower and middle income taxpayers from the tax, there could be a lifetime gain
exemption threshold ($0.5 million, say) that has to be reached before the rules apply or an
asset value threshold ($2 million; $10 million, etc.). Under the latter, taxpayers would fall
into and out of the MTM regime as assets fluctuate. (The asset approach is suggested by
Wyden.)
The revenue raised is significant though it depends on the particular model. Leiserson
suggests MTM combined with elimination of the preferential rate on capital gains "could
easily raise $1 trillion over the next decade–and potentially much more ." He notes
that just eliminating the preferential CG rate gives a much lower estimate–that's
because of "t he ease of tax avoidance under current law such as the ready opportunity to
defer tax by not selling assets and potentially avoid tax entirely through step up in
basis–all while simply borrowing against these same assets to finance any spending
."
"The wealthiest 1 percent of families holds 31 percent of all wealth, and the wealthiest
10 percent holds 70 percent of all wealth." "The highest-income 1 percent of families
receives 75 percent of the benefit of the preferential rates for capital gains and dividends
under current law." The wealthiest 10% would bear the burden of MTM reforms.
Of course, while everybody is talking about taxes, some of that talk is the same old endless
market fundamentalist myth (Reaganomics) about how tax cuts are what make the economy grow and
will actually pay for themselves -- in spite of near 4 decades of evidence to the contrary,
where highest growth rates have generally been in times of higher tax rates, with some
consideration for stimulus impact of tax cuts after periods of recessions. See, e.g., NY Times
editorial, There's No Such Thing as a Free
Tax Cut (Jan 22, 2020).
The op-ed notes that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin "r epeated the risible fantasy
that the Trump administration's 2017 tax cuts will bolster economic growth sufficiently for the
government to recoup the revenue it lost by lowering tax rates " [in the 2017 tax
legislation] even though 2 years in, the " budget deficit has topped $1 trillion ."
This is because, as most of us who haven't drunk the Laffer-curve tax cut kool-aid know and
the Times op-ed reiterates, " businesses responded to increased demand more than they did to
the lower tax rates ." Nonetheless, we should not be surprised that the Trump
Administration is talking about two "big ideas" for taxes if the man gets reelected: 1) cutting
Medicare and Social Security: see, e.g., Trump Opens Door to
Cuts to Medicare and Other Entitlement Programs , NY Times (Jan 22, 2020) and 2)
passing another tax cut bill: see
Steven Mnuchin Confirms Trump's New Tax Plan is Imminent , USNews (Jan 23, 2020). Those two
ideas go hand in hand.
T hough Trump doesn't dare state what he is really doing to his base, who he has deceived
with typical right-wing rhetoric into thinking that he is trying to rightsize the economy to
serve them when he instead engages in class warfare to stuff his own pockets, he is hip to hip
with Newt Gingrich's desire t o "starve the government" to create a huge deficit (we are up to
$1 trillion in our new "gilded age economy") that then provides cover for the wealthy to suck
in even more of the country's wealth by downsizing Medicare and Social Security, programs
essential for those who are not among the wealthy.
This blabbing about authoritarian Russia and China greatly diminishes the value of this
article. The author is Warren foreign policy advisor. Probably she should find a better
advisor.
Compare this blabbing with Putin stance about strengthening of the role of the UN.
Notable quotes:
"... Fourth, the new progressive foreign policy is highly skeptical of military interventions, and opposed to democracy promotion by force. This does not mean that progressives are unwilling or would be unable to use force when it is necessary. But after 17 years of war in the Middle East, they do not share the aggressive posture that has characterized the post-Cold War era. Some are skeptical because they think interventions cannot succeed. Others emphasize the potential for backlash and making the situation worse. Still others hold that stable, sustainable democracy cannot be imposed from abroad but must emerge organically. ..."
"... Fifth, the new progressive foreign policy seeks to reshape the military budget by both cutting the budget overall and reallocating military spending. This should not be surprising. The skepticism of intervention suggests military budgets do not need to be as big as they have been in an era when the goal was to be able to fight two regional wars simultaneously. The centrality of economics to a progressive foreign policy further explains this position; military spending should partly be reallocated to cyber and other technologies that are deeply integrated with the economy and likely to be crucial in future conflicts. ..."
end of history " and
America's " unipolar moment ." And
both camps have undergone a serious reckoning after the Afghanistan, Iraq, and forever wars, as
well as the global financial crisis calling into question neoliberal
economic policies -- namely, deregulation, liberalization, privatization, and austerity.
Prominent foreign policy advocates have quite publicly engaged in
soul-searching as they confronted these changes, and debates about the future of foreign
policy abound.
The emergence of a distinctively progressive approach to foreign policy is perhaps the most
interesting -- and most misunderstood -- development in these debates. In speeches and
articles, politicians like Sen.
Elizabeth Warren and Sen.
Bernie Sanders have outlined an approach to foreign policy that does not fall along the
traditional fault-lines of realist versus idealist or neoconservative versus liberal
internationalist (disclosure: I have been a longtime advisor to Sen. Warren). Their speeches
come alongside an
increasing number of
articles exploring the
contours of a
progressive foreign policy. Even those who might not consider themselves
progressive are
sounding similar themes .
From this body of work, it is now possible to sketch out the framework of a distinctively
progressive approach to foreign policy. While its advocates, like those in other foreign policy
camps, discuss a wide range of issues -- from climate change to reforming international
institutions -- at the moment, five themes mark this emerging approach as a specific framework
for foreign policy.
First, progressive foreign policy breaks the
silos between domestic and foreign policy and between international economic policy and
foreign policy. It places far greater emphasis on how foreign policy impacts the United States
at home -- and particularly on how foreign policy (including international economic policy) has
impacted the domestic economy. To be sure, there have always been analysts and commentators who
recognized these interrelationships. But progressive foreign policy places this at the center
of its analysis rather than seeing it as peripheral. The new progressive foreign policy takes
the substance of both domestic and international economic policies seriously, and its adherents
will not support economic policies on foreign policy grounds if they exacerbate economic
inequality at home. For example, the argument that trade deals must be ratified on national
security grounds even though they have problematic distributional consequences does not carry
much weight for progressives who believe that an equitable domestic economy is the foundation
of national power.
Second, progressive foreign policy holds that one of the important threats to American
democracy at home is nationalist
oligarchy (or, alternatively, authoritarian
capitalism ) abroad. Countries like Russia and China are not simply authoritarian
governments, and neither can their resurgence and assertion of power be interpreted as merely
great power competition. The reason is that their economic systems integrate economic and
political power. Crony/state capitalism is not a bug, it is the central feature. In a global
society, economic interrelationships
weaponize economic power into political power .
China, for example, already uses its economic power as leverage in political disputes with
other Asian countries. Its growing share of global GDP is one of the most consequential facts
of the 21st century. As a result of these dynamics, progressives are also highly skeptical of a
foreign policy based on the premise that the countries of the world will all become neoliberal
democracies. Instead, they take seriously the risks that come from economic integration with
nationalist oligarchies.
Third, the new progressive foreign policy values America's alliances and international
agreements, but not because it thinks that such alliances and rules can convert nationalist
oligarchies into liberal democracies. Rather, alliances should be based on
common values or common goals, and, going forward, they will be critical to balancing and
countering the challenges from nationalist oligarchies. Progressives are thus far more
skeptical of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia and far more interested in reinforcing
and deepening ties with allies like Japan -- and are concerned about the erosion of alliances
like NATO from within.
Contemporary US politics in a nutshell is rule by the rich for the rich, and it's amazing
that 40 years in we are still debating whether or not neoliberal policies are benefiting the
majority (they clearly are not). The income gap continues to grow, economic growth continues
to be siphoned to the top, education and healthcare remain unaffordable for most people, and
the response of the current administration is...to cut taxes further for the wealthy??
In The Great Democracy, Ganesh Sitaraman shows us how both the left and the right have
embraced neoliberalism over the past four decades along with its emphasis on tax cuts,
deregulation, trade liberalization, and limited government. Neoliberalism's faith in the
market has narrowed our conception of democracy, replacing discussions about the common good
and general welfare with discussions about economic efficiency and profit maximization. The
ideology is so deep most people don't even realize that there could be another way.
Sitaraman does a better job than most diagnosing the problems and continually emphasizing
the point that economics cannot be separated from politics. Even if you don't believe that
income and wealth inequality necessarily contributes to a lower standard of living for the
majority -- and that people should earn whatever the market pays them -- the existence of
inequality is detrimental to democracy and skews legislation to favor the rich. The
wealthiest Americans and corporations spend massive amounts of money on elections and
legislation to get the politicians and regulations (or lack thereof) that benefit them the
most. If this wasn't the case, they would not consistently spend tens and hundreds of
millions of dollars on campaign financing and lobbying.
Forty years of neoliberalism is going to be tough to dig ourselves out from, and this
demands some bold and broad legislation. But it cannot be disjointed; it has to be part of a
larger philosophy with clear goals. In this respect, The Great Democracy provides a complete
political philosophy to replace neoliberalism and compete with oligarchic nationalism. It is
based on restoring the ideals of democracy, recognizing that the common good and general
welfare of the people means more than economic growth at all costs. It also recognizes that
political and economic fixes must be implemented together, and that massive discrepancies in
wealth threatens democracy.
Sitaraman goes much further than simply outlining the problems and proposing an overall
political philosophy. He provides several detailed economic and political reforms that seek
to reduce inequality, expand democracy, and improve the standard of living for the bottom 90
percent of the population. His suggestions range from mandatory voting requirements to
reinstating a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent to fundamentally reworking the structure of
the Supreme Court to make it less political. His reform agenda also includes getting money
out of politics, overturning Citizens United, mandating employee representation on corporate
boards, and restructuring executive compensation.
The bottom line is that more of the same will not work. Our political problems will not
solve themselves, and the market certainly won't solve them for us, mainly because it is the
market that has caused them. But we don't want to turn to nationalism either. Sitaraman
simultaneously provides us with a political philosophy that appeals to the ideals of
democracy -- to use as a guide for policy implementation -- while suggesting reforms that
will make our our society more equitable, engaged, and fair. Let's hope the next era of
politics follows this path.
Stop wondering why, "We can't just get along?" Ganesh Sitamaran explains the deep wounds
to our country that aren't going away with the application of civility. Neverthless this
isn't a pessamistic book; in fact it describes how to face the problems that are undermining
our country and start living up to the ideals that are our political birth right, a route
that will bring us better lives and better, more enduring communities. So get this
excellently reasoned and quite readable book. It will save you a shouting match or two at
extended family gatherings as you will then be able to spread some much needed light on the
divisions of the day with irrefutable arguments and a optimism about the future that has
escaped many another current thinker. One person found this helpful
Helpful
A nonpartisan review of the recent history that has hurt our democracy. An important part
of this history is that economics and politics can t be separated. Our government now serves
the rich, not the majority. This book is about how to restore representation of the majority.
Helpful 0 Comment Report abuse
Western elites and their lackeys in the media despise Russian president Vladimir Putin and
they make no bones about it. The reasons for this should be fairly obvious. Putin has rolled
back US ambitions in Syria and Ukraine, aligned himself with Washington's biggest strategic
rival in Asia, China, and is currently strengthening his economic ties with Europe which poses
a long-term threat to US dominance in Central Asia. Putin has also updated his nuclear arsenal
which makes it impossible for Washington to use the same bullyboy tactics it's used on other,
more vulnerable countries. So it's understandable that the media would want to demonize Putin
and disparage him as cold-blooded "KGB thug". That, of course, is not true, but it fits with
the bogus narrative that Putin is maniacally conducting a clandestine war against the United
States for purely evil purposes. In any event, the media's deep-seated Russophobia has grown so
extreme that they're unable to cover even simple events without veering wildly into
fantasy-land. Take, for example, the New York Times coverage of Putin's recent Address to the
Federal Assembly, which took place on January 15. The Times screwball analysis shows that their
journalists have no interest in conveying what Putin actually said, but would rather use every
means available to persuade their readers that Putin is a calculating tyrant driven by his
insatiable lust for power. Check out this excerpt from the article in the Times:
"Nobody knows what's going on inside the Kremlin right now. And perhaps that's precisely
the point. President Vladimir V. Putin announced constitutional changes last week that could
create new avenues for him to rule Russia for the rest of his life .(wrong)
The fine print of the legislation showed that the prime minister's powers would not be
expanded as much as first advertised, while members of the State Council would still appear
to serve at the pleasure of the president. So maybe Mr. Putin's plan is to stay president,
after all? .(wrong again)
A journalist, Yury Saprykin, offered a similar sentiment on Facebook, but in verse:
We'll be debating over how he won't leave, We'll be guessing, will he leave or won't he. And then -- lo! -- he won't be leaving. That is, before the elections he won't leave, And after that, he definitely won't leave." (wrong, a third time)
This is really terrible analysis. Yes, "Putin announced constitutional changes last week",
but they have absolutely nothing to do with some sinister plan to stay in power, and anyone who
read the speech would know that. Unfortunately, most of the other 100-or-so "cookie cutter"
articles on the topic, draw the same absurd conclusion as the Times , that is, that the
changes Putin announced in his speech merely conceal his real intention which is to extend his
time in office for as long as possible. Once again, there's nothing in the speech itself to
support these claims, it's just another attempt to smear Putin.
So what did Putin actually say in his annual Address to the Federal Assembly?
Well, that's where it gets interesting. He announced changes to the social safety net, more
financial assistance for young families, improvements to the health care system, higher wages
for teachers, more money for education, hospitals, schools, libraries. He promised to launch a
system of "social contracts" that commit the state to reducing poverty and raising standards of
living. He pledged to provide healthier meals to schoolchildren, lower interest rates for
first-time home buyers, greater economic support for working families, higher payouts to
pensioners, raises to the minimum wage, additional funding for a "network of extracurricular
technology and engineering centers". Putin also added this gem:
"It is very important that children who are in preschool and primary school adopt the true
values of a large family – that family is love, happiness, the joy of
motherhood and fatherhood, that family is a strong bond of several generations, united by
respect for the elderly and care for children, giving everyone a sense of confidence,
security, and reliability. If the younger generations accept this situation as natural, as a
moral and an integral part and reliable background support for their adult life, then we will
be able to meet the historical challenge of guaranteeing Russia's development as a large and
successful country."
Naturally, heartfelt statements like this never appear on the pages of the Times or any of
the other western media for that matter. Instead, Americans are deluged with more of the same
relentless Putin-psychobabble that's become a staple of cable news. The torrent of lies, libels
and fabrications about Putin are so constant and so overwhelming, that the only thing of which
one can be absolutely certain, is that nothing that is written about Putin in the MSM can be
trusted. Of that, there is no doubt.
That said, Putin is a politician which means he might not deliver on his promises at all.
That is a very real possibility. But if that's the case, then why did his former-Prime
Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, resign immediately after the speech? Medvedev and his entire cabinet
resigned because they realized that Putin has abandoned the western model of capitalism and is
moving in a different direction altogether. Putin is now focused on strengthening welfare state
programs that lift people out of poverty, raise living standards, and narrow the widening
inequality gap. And he wants a new team to help him implement his vision, which is why Medvedev
and crew got their walking papers. Here's how The Saker summed it up in a recent article at the
Unz Review :
"The new government clearly indicates that, especially with the nominations of Prime
Minister Mishustin and his First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov: these are both on
record as very much proponents of what is called "state capitalism" in Russia: meaning an
economic philosophy in which the states does not stifle private entrepreneurship, but one in
which the state is directly and heavily involved in creating the correct economic conditions
for the government and private sector to grow. Most crucially, "state capitalism" also
subordinates the sole goal of the corporate world (making profits) to the interests of the
state and, therefore, to the interests of the people. In other words, goodbye
turbo-capitalism à la Atlantic Integrationists!" ( "The New Russian Government" ,
The Saker)
This is precisely what is taking place in Russia right now. Putin is breaking away from
Washington's parasitic model of capitalism and replacing it with a more benign version that
better addresses the needs of the people. This new version of 'managed capitalism' places
elected officials at the head of the system to protect the public from the savagery of market
forces and from perennial-grinding austerity. It's a system aimed at helping ordinary people
not Wall Street or the global bank Mafia.
But while the changes to Russia's economic model are significant, it's Putin's political
changes that have drawn the most attention. Here's what he said:
(The) "requirements of international law and treaties as well as decisions of
international bodies can be valid on the Russian territory only to the point that they do not
restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not contradict our
Constitution ."
What does this mean? Does it mean that Putin will not respect international law or the
treaties it has signed with its neighbors? No, it doesn't, in fact, Putin has been an
enthusiastic proponent of international law and the UN Security Council. He strongly believes
that these institutions play a crucial role in maintaining global security, an issue that is
very close to his heart. What the Russian president appears to be saying is that the rights of
the Russian people and of the sovereign Russian government take precedent over foreign
corporations, treaties or free trade agreements. Russia will not allow the powerful and
insidious globalist multinationals to take control of the political and economic levers of
state power as they've done in countries around the world. Putin further clarified this point
saying:
"Russia can remain Russia only as a sovereign state. Our nation's sovereignty must be
unconditional. We have done a great deal to achieve this. We restored our state's unity and
overcome the situation when certain powers in the government were essentially usurped by
oligarch clans. We created powerful reserves, which increases our country's stability and
capability to protect (us) from any attempts of foreign pressure."
For Putin sovereignty, which is the supreme power of a state to govern itself, is the
bedrock principle which legitimizes the state provided the state faithfully represents the will
of the people. He elaborates on this point later in his speech saying:
"The opinion of people, our citizens as the bearers of sovereignty and the main source of
power must be decisive. In the final analysis everything is decided by the people, both today
and in the future."
So while there may be significant differences between Russian and US democracy, the basic
principle remains the same, the primary responsibility of the government is to carry out the
"will of the people". In this respect, Putin's political philosophy is not much different from
that of the framers of the US Constitution. What is different, however, is Putin's approach to
free trade. Unlike the US, Putin does not believe that free trade deals should diminish the
authority of the state. Most Americans don't realize that trade agreements like NAFTA often
include provisions that prevent the government from acting in the best interests of their
people. Globalist trade laws prevent governments from providing incentives to companies to slow
the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, they undermine environmental regulations and food safety
laws. Some of these agreements even shield sweatshop owners and other human rights abusers from
penalty or prosecution.
Is it any wonder why Putin does not want to participate in this unethical swindle? Is it any
wonder why he feels the need to clearly state that Russia will only comply with those laws and
treaties that "do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not
contradict our Constitution"? Here's Putin again:
"Please, do not forget what happened to our country after 1991. After the collapse of the
Soviet Union, .there were also threats, dangers of a magnitude no one could have imagined
ever before. .Therefore We must create a solid, reliable and invulnerable system that will be
absolutely stable in terms of the external contour and will securely guarantee Russia's
independence and sovereignty."
So what happened following the dissolution of the Soviet Union?
The United States dispatched a cabal of cutthroat economists to Moscow to assist in the
"shock therapy" campaign that collapsed the social safety net, savaged pensions, increased
unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and alcoholism by many orders of magnitude, accelerated
the slide to privatization that fueled a generation of voracious oligarchs, and sent the real
economy plunging into an excruciating long-term depression.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz followed events closely in Russia at the time and summed it up
like this:
"In Russia, the people were told that capitalism was going to bring new, unprecedented
prosperity. In fact, it brought unprecedented poverty, indicated not only by a fall in living
standards, not only by falling GDP, but by decreasing life spans and enormous other social
indicators showing a deterioration in the quality of life ..
The number of people in poverty in Russia, for instance, increased from 2 percent to
somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, with more than one out of two children living in
families below poverty. The market economy was a worse enemy for most of these people than
the Communists had said it would be. In some (parts) of the former Soviet Union, the GDP, the
national income, fell by over 70 percent. And with that smaller pie it was more and more
unequally divided, so a few people got bigger and bigger slices, and the majority of people
wound up with less and less and less . (PBS interview with Joseph Stiglitz, Commanding
Heights)
At the same time Washington's agents were busy looting Moscow, NATO was moving its troops,
armored divisions and missile sites closer to Russia's border in clear violation of promises
that were made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to move its military "one inch east". At present, there
are more combat troops and weaponry on Russia's western flank than at any time since the German
buildup for operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Naturally, Russia feels threatened by this
flagrantly hostile force on its border. (BTW, this week, "The US is carrying out its biggest
and most provocative deployment to Europe since the Cold War-era. According to the US Military
in Europe Website: "Exercise DEFENDER-Europe 20 is the deployment of a division-size
combat-credible force from the United States to Europe .The Pentagon and its NATO allies are
recklessly simulating a full-blown war with Russia to prevent Moscow from strengthening its
economic ties with Europe.) Here's more from Putin:
"I am convinced that it is high time for a serious and direct discussion about the basic
principles of a stable world order and the most acute problems that humanity is facing. It is
necessary to show political will, wisdom and courage. The time demands an awareness of our
shared responsibility and real actions."
This is a theme that Putin has reiterated many times since his groundbreaking speech at
Munich in 2007 where he said:
"We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international
law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one
state's legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has
overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political,
cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is
happy about this? ." ("Wars not diminishing': Putin's iconic 2007 Munich speech, you
tube)
What Putin objects to is the US acting unilaterally whenever it chooses. It's Washington's
capricious disregard for international law that has destabilized vast regions across the Middle
East and Central Asia and has put world leaders on edge never knowing where the next crisis
will pop up or how many millions of people will be impacted. As Putin said in Munich, "No one
feels safe." No one feels like they can count on the protection of international law or UN
Security Council resolutions.
Putin:
"Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa Instead of bringing
about reforms, aggressive intervention destroyed government institutions and the local way of
life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and
total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life
The power vacuum in some countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa obviously
resulted in the emergence of areas of anarchy, which were quickly filled with extremists and
terrorists. The so-called Islamic State has tens of thousands of militants fighting for it,
including former Iraqi soldiers who were left on the street after the 2003 invasion. Many
recruits come from Libya whose statehood was destroyed as a result of a gross violation of UN
Security Council Resolution 1973 ."
Is Putin overstating Washington's role in decimating Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan or
is this a fair assessment of America's pernicious and destabilizing role in the region? Entire
civilizations have been laid to waste, millions have been killed or scattered across the region
to achieve some nebulous strategic advantage or to help Israel eliminate its perceived enemies.
And all this military adventurism can be traced back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and
the triumphalist response from US powerbrokers who saw Russia's collapse as a green light for
their New World Order.
Washington reveled in its victory and embraced its ability to dominate global
decision-making and intervene unilaterally wherever it saw fit. The indispensable nation no
longer had to bother with formalities like the UN Security Council or international law. Even
sovereignty was dismissed as an archaic notion that had no place in the new borderless
corporate empire. What really mattered was spreading western-style capitalism to the four
corners of the earth particularly those areas that contained vital resources (ME) or explosive
growth potential. (Eurasia) Those regions were the real prize.
But then something unexpected happened. Washington's wars dragged on ad infinitum while
newer centers of power gradually emerged. Suddenly, the globalist utopia was no longer within
reach, the American Century had ended before it had even begun. Meanwhile Russia and China were
growing more powerful all the time. They demanded an end to unilateralism and a return to
international law, but their demands were flatly rejected. The wars and interventions dragged
on even though the prospects for victory grew more and more remote. Here's Putin again:
"We have no doubt that sovereignty is the central notion of the entire system of
international relations. Respect for it and its consolidation will help underwrite peace and
stability both at the national and international levels First of all, there must be equal and
indivisible security for all states." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, "
The Future in Progress: Shaping the World of Tomorrow, From the Office of the President of
Russia)
Indeed, sovereignty is the foundational principle upon which global security rests, and yet,
it is sovereignty that western elites are so eager to extinguish. Powerhouse multinationals
want to erase existing borders to facilitate the unfettered, tariff-free flow of goods and
people in one giant, interconnected free trade zone that spans the entire planet. And while
their plan has been derailed by Putin in Syria and Ukraine, they have made gains in Africa,
South America and Southeast Asia. The virus cannot be contained, it can only be eradicated.
Here's Putin:
"Essentially, the entire globalisation project is in crisis today and in Europe, as we
know well, we hear voices now saying that multiculturalism has failed. I think this situation
is in many respects the result of mistaken, hasty and to some extent over-confident choices
made by some countries' elites a quarter-of-a-century ago. Back then, in the late 1980s-early
1990s, there was a chance not just to accelerate the globalization process but also to give
it a different quality and make it more harmonious and sustainable in nature.
But some countries that saw themselves as victors in the Cold War, not just saw themselves
this way but said it openly, took the course of simply reshaping the global political and
economic order to fit their own interests.
In their euphoria, they essentially abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other
actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and
attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organizations,
norms and rules. They chose the road of globalization and security for their own beloved
selves, for the select few, and not for all." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion
Club)
As Putin says, there was an opportunity to "make globalization more harmonious and
sustainable", (perhaps, China's Belt and Road initiative will do just that.) but Washington
elites rejected that idea choosing instead to impose its own self-aggrandizing vision on the
world. As a result, demonstrations and riots have cropped up across Europe, right-wing populist
parties are on the rise, and a majority of the population no longer have confidence in basic
democratic institutions. The west's version of globalization has been roundly repudiated as a
scam that showers wealth on scheming billionaires while hanging ordinary working people out to
dry. Here's Putin again:
"It seems as if the elites do not see the deepening stratification in society and the
erosion of the middle class (but the situation) creates a climate of uncertainty that has a
direct impact on the public mood.
Sociological studies conducted around the world show that people in different countries
and on different continents tend to see the future as murky and bleak. This is sad. The
future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people see no real
opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping policy."
(Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)
True, life is harder now and it looks to get harder still, but what is Putin's remedy or
does he have one? Is he going to stem the tide and reverse the effects of globalization? Is he
going to sabotage Washington's plan to control vital resources in the Middle East, become the
the main player in Central Asia, and tighten its grip on global power?
No, Putin is not nearly that ambitious. As he indicates in his speech, his immediate goal is
to reform the economy so that poverty is eliminated and wealth is more equally distributed.
These are practical remedies that help to soften capitalism and decrease the probability of
social unrest. He also wants to fend off potential threats to the state by shoring up Russian
sovereignty. That's why he is adding amendments to the Constitution. The objective is to
protect Russia from pernicious foreign agents or fifth columnists operating within the state.
Bottom line: Putin sees what's going on in the world and has charted a course that best serves
the interests of the Russian people. Americans would be lucky to have a leader who did the
same.
He is now granted $40 billion in tax breaks to the biggest fossil fuel
oligarchs–Rosneft and Gazprom. These are privatised companies that were formerly
state companies in the former USSR. Instead of reversing the trend Putin has escalated
privatization.
It seems you were misinformed. Rosneft and Gazprom are still state-owned, the latter
mostly and the former entirely. So if indeed Putin did grant them these tax breaks, it's just
one branch of the government transferring money to another branch of government–sort of
like when the Social Security Administration here in the US buy bonds from the Treasury
Department. It's just an accounting gimmick, not gift to 'oligarchs'. (BTW, why is it that
the media never refer to Soros, Bezos or the Rockefellers as 'oligarchs'? Why only
Russians?)
For Putin sovereignty, which is the supreme power of a state to govern itself, is the
bedrock principle which legitimizes the state provided the state faithfully represents the
will of the people. He elaborates on this point later in his speech saying:
"The opinion of people, our citizens as the bearers of sovereignty and the main source
of power must be decisive. In the final analysis everything is decided by the people,
both today and in the future."
This is what has been missing from so called US Democracy for a while now.
The present day US is a hegemony of Special Interests busy looting the place under cover
their propaganda department (US MSM).
Great article, Mike Whitney. So far it's the only one I've seen that reveals a coherent hard
core in what Putin seeks to achieve with a seemingly bureaucratic rejiggering of the
constitution and ruling echelon. Maybe he's finally ending the humiliating indecision that
has stymied Russia the past three decades: Will the country keep trying to be yet another
pale copy of the financialized U.S. economic sphere, powered by dollar hegemony? Or, will it
free itself from predatory corporate domination in order to duplicate the obvious success of
sovereign next-door China? If your analysis is on the mark, Putin may have now found the
answer to Russia's debilitating post-Soviet identity crisis.
Trump's unexpected election and the parallel rise of nationalism in docile Europe suggests
that much the same crisis has now emerged within the Western empire. Will it be borderless
neofeudal corporatism for the benefit of those at the top of the social pyramid or will
working people regain a voice in their own government? Reading those troubled tea leaves,
Putin may have picked the right moment to launch Russia on the more promising path.
Is Putin overstating Washington's role in decimating Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan
or is this a fair assessment of America's pernicious and destabilizing role in the region?
Entire civilizations have been laid to waste, millions have been killed or scattered across
the region to achieve some nebulous strategic advantage or to help Israel eliminate
its perceived enemies.
No need to qualify the cause of this nefarious plan by referencing some nebulous
objective. There was nothing nebulous about it. The plan to Remake the Middle East was
clearly articulated by Richard Perle, well before the GWOT was launched, in A Clean Break,
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm .
Sooner or later, every Bully will push the wrong opponent and wind up getting his ass
stomped in the dirt.
Sad, but true. I think everyone hopes that the US pulls off some sort of last minute
transformation and repentance, because the takedown would be very ugly for everyone
@geokat62 Don't forget to mention the Oded Yinon Plan, the plan to shatter all Israel's
neighbors into small, dysfunctional, quarrelling statelets. See, Global Research : "Greater
Israel" : The Zionist Plan for the Middle East.
God bless Putin and Russia for saving Syria from the terrorists created by the ZUS and Israel
and ZBritain and ZNATO , these terrorists AL CIADA aka ISIS and all offshoots thereof were
created and armed and funded to destroy the middle east for the zionist greater Israel
project and all of this was brought on by the joint Israeli and ZUS attack on the WTC on 911
and blamed on the arabs.
Who is the greater terrorist, the terrorists or the ones who created them.
@Sean Russia will do very well they are moving in the right direction, they are putting
regulations on those that need it, and better programs for the people.
I once read that you can start out with a strong generation and from that strong
generation ever generation after will become weaker and weaker, until you end up with a
generation like the U.S. has that's like clay in the hands of a master, they can't think nor
even act they just follow the dictates of the master.!!!
@Old and grumpy In regards to sanctions Russia for the last 3 years has been the greatest
producer and exporter of grain, and since food is the most important thing, the ZUS is
pissing into the wind with sanctions on Russia.
"This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people
see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping
policy." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)"
Jeez ain't that the truth. I live in Virginia and it seems that no matter how I vote it
just never changes anything. We just had big demonstrations against the stupid new gun laws
our despotic governor wants to enact and from where I'm sitting it didn't make one iota of
difference. The rank and file have zero to say in how they are governed But we sure get to
finance it with our taxes.
@Anonymous You are delusional and have obviously spent no time in Russia. When the Pussy
Riot grrrls desecrated the altar at St. Savior, Russians went ballistic, from the Patriarchs
down to the blue collar diesel mechanics.
Your so-called "faith" in the US and Europe has already sold out to Globohomo completely.
Most priests are gay and have been buggering the altar boys for decades. Protestant sects
have lesbian bishops. Your "faithful" have not only totally surrendered to the Globohomo
takeover, they now EMBRACE it proudly. "All are welcome." There is now no difference between
Vatican II Catholicism and Unitarian Universalism. Western Europe is so far gone, so
anti-life, there's hardly a white child left. Muslims are sharpening their machetes.
So you think there's no substance behind Orthodoxy. You are mistaken. (I'm Latin Mass
Catholic, BTW)
It's only consistent with his past behavior of reining in post-Soviet Russian
Oligarchs.
And there is the real reason why the "west" hates him. Because who controls the west? Who
owns all of the media, owns the politicians, and controls the narrative? Our very own
Oligarchs, indistinguishable from the Russian version and in fact interchangeable (borders
mean nothing to them). So of course they are pissed if Putin is rolling them back over in
Russia. How dare he.
Also, have you ever noticed that the word "Oligarch" is only every applied in the same
sentence as "Russian?"
Fascism is the most extreme form of counterrevolution. Counterrevolution itself only
emerges as a response to revolution. Nazism, for example, didn't arrive because the
German people all of a sudden lost their bearings from an overdose of Wagner's operas and
Nietzsche's aphorisms. It arrived at a time when massive worker's parties threatened
bourgeois rule during a period of terrible economic hardship. Big capital backed Hitler
as a last resort. The Nazis represented reactionary politics gone berserk. Not only could
Nazism attack worker's parties, it could also attack powerful institutions of the ruling
class, including its churches, media, intellectuals, parties and individual families and
individuals. Fascism is not a scalpel. It is a very explosive, uncontrollable weapon that
can also inflict some harm on its wielder.
Fascism emerges in the period following the great post-World War I revolutionary
upsurge in Europe. The Bolsheviks triumphed in Russia, but communists mounted challenges
to capitalism in Hungary, Germany and elsewhere. These revolutions receded but but their
embers burned. The world-wide depression of 1929 added new fuel to the glowing embers of
proletarian revolution. Socialism grew powerful everywhere because of the powerful
example of the USSR and the suffering capitalist unemployment brought.
Proletarian revolutions do not break out every year or so, like new car models. They
appear infrequently since working-people prefer to accomodate themselves to capitalism if
at all possible. They tend to be last-ditch defensive reactions to the mounting violence
and insecurity brought on by capitalist war and depression.
The proletarian revolution first emerges within the context of the bourgeois
revolutions of 1848. Even though the revolutions in Germany, France and Italy on the
surface appeared to be a continuation of the revolutions of the 1780's and 90's, they
contain within them anticapitalist dynamics. The working-class at this point in its
history has neither the numbers, nor the organization, nor the self- consciousness to
take power in its own name. Its own cause tends to get blurred with the cause of of other
classes in the struggle against feudal vestiges.
Marx was able to distinguish the contradictory class aspects of the 1848 revolutionary
upsurge with tremendous alacrity, however. Some of his most important contributions to
historical materialism emerge out of this period and again in 1871 when the proletariat
rises up in its own name during the Paris Commune. The 18th Brumaire was written in the
aftermath of the failure of the revolution in France in 1848 to consolidate its gains.
Louis Bonaparte emerges as a counterrevolutionary dictator who seems to suppress all
classes, including the bourgeoisie. Marx is able to show that Bonapartism, like Fascism,
is not a dictatorship that stands above all classes. The Bonapartist regime, whose social
base may be middle-class, acts in the interest of the big bourgeoisie.
Robert Tucker's notes in his preface to the 18th Brumaire that, "Since Louis
Bonaparte's rise and rule have been seen as a forerunner of the phenomenon that was to
become known in the twentieth century as fascim, Marx's interpretation of it is of
interest, among other ways, as a sort of a prologue to later Marxist thought on the
nature and meaning of fascism."
The 18th Brumaire was written by Marx in late 1851 and early 1852, and appeared first
in a NY magazine called "Die Revolution". This was a time of great difficulty for Marx.
He was in financial difficulty and poor health. The triumph of the counterrevolution in
France deepened his misery. In a letter to his friend Weydemeyer, Marx confides, "For
years nothing has pulled me down as much as this cursed hemorrhoidal trouble, not even
the worst French failure."
In section one of the 18th Brumaire, Marx draws a clear distinction between the
bourgeois and proletarian revolution.
"Bourgeois revolutions like those of the eighteenth century storm more swiftly from
success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in
sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day- but they are short-lived, soon they
have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [crapulence] takes hold of society
before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the
other hand, proletarian revolutions like those of the nineteenth century constantly
criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the
apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the
half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down
their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before
them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of
their own goals -- until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible,
and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! "
Proletarian revolutions, Marx correctly points out, emerge from a position of weakness
and uncertainty. The bourgeoisie emerges over hundreds of years within the framework of
feudalism. At the time it is ready to seize power, it has already conquered major
institutions in civil society. The bourgeoisie is not an exploited class and therefore is
able to rule society long before its political revolution is effected. When it delivers
the coup de grace to the monarchy, it does so from a position of overwhelming
strength.
The workers are in a completely different position, however. They lack an independent
economic base and suffer economic and cultural exploitation. Prior to its revolution, the
working-class remains backward and therefore, unlike the bourgeoisie, is unable to
prepare itself in advance for ruling all of society. It often comes to power in coalition
with other classes, such as the peasantry.
Since it is in a position of weakness, it is often beaten back by the bourgeoise. But
the bourgeoisie itself is small in numbers. It also has its own class interests which set
it apart from the rest of society. Therefore, it must strike back against the workers by
utilizing the social power of intermediate classes such as the peasantry or the
middle-classes in general. It will also draw from strata beneath the working-class, from
the so-called "lumpen proletariat". Louis Bonaparte drew from these social layers in
order to strike back against the workers, so did Hitler.
Bonaparte appears as a dictator whose rule constrains all of society. In section seven
of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx characterized Bonapartist rule in the following
manner:
"The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has
brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December
10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of
red anarchy- Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the
eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at
their windows by the drunken army of law and order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the
sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is
destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are placed
under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic National Guard, its own National
Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It
supplanted the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military
commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests; the priests
subject it to their own education. It jailed people without trial, it is being jailed
without trial. It suppressed every stirring in society by means of state power; every
stirring in its society is suppressed by means of state power. Out of enthusiasm for its
moneybags it rebelled against its own politicians and literary men; its politicians and
literary men are swept aside, but its moneybag is being plundered now that its mouth has
been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie never tired of crying out to the
revolution what St. Arsenius cried out to the Christians: 'Fuge, tace, quiesce!' ['Flee,
be silent, keep still!'] Bonaparte cries to the bourgeoisie: 'Fuge, tace, quiesce!'"
At first blush, Bonaparte seems to be oppressing worker and capitalist alike.
Supported by the bourgeoisie at first, he drowns the Parisian working-class in its own
blood in the early stages of the counterrevolution. He then turns his attention to the
bourgeoisie itself and "jails", "gags" and imposes a "state of siege" upon it. By all
appearances, the dictatorship of Bonaparte is a personal dictatorship and all social
classes suffer. The Hitler and Mussolini regimes gave the same appearance. This led many
to conclude that fascism is simply a totalitarian system in which every citizen is
subordinated to the industrial-military-state machinery. There is the fascism of Hitler
and there is the fascism of Stalin. A class analysis of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia
would produce different political conclusions, however. Hitler's rule rested on
capitalist property relations and Stalin's on collectivized property relations.
Bonaparte's rule, while seeming to stand above all social classes, really served to
protect capitalist property relations. Bonaparte represents the executive branch of
government and liquidates the parliamentary branch. The parliament contains parties from
every social class, so a superficial view of Bonapartist rule would conclude that all
classes have been curtailed. In actuality, the bourgeoisie maintains power behind the
scenes.
In order to maintain rule, Bonapartism must give concessions to the lower-classes. It
can not manifest itself openly as an instrument of the ruling-classes. It is constantly
on the attack against both exploiter and exploited. It acts against exploited because it
is ultimately interested in the preservation of the status quo. It acts against the
exploiters, because it must maintain the appearance of "neutrality" above all
classes.
Marx describes this contradictory situtation as follows:
"Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time,
like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon's
successor, by springing constant surprises -- that is to say, under the necessity of
arranging a coup d'etat in miniature every day -- Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois
economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of
1848, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces
anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery
of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous. The cult of the
Holy Tunic of Trier, he duplicates in Paris in the cult of the Napoleonic imperial
mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte,
the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome
Column."
Bonaparte throws the bourgeois economy into a confusion, violates it, produces anarchy
in the name of order. This is exactly the way fascism in power operates. Fascism in power
is a variant of Bonapartism. It eventually stabilizes into a more normal dictatorship of
capital, but in its early stages has the same careening, out-of-control behavior.
Bonapartism does not rest on the power of an individual dictator. It is not Louis
Napoleon's or Adolph Hitler's power of oratory that explains their mastery over a whole
society. They have a social base which they manipulate to remain in power. Even though a
Bonapartist figure is ultimately loyal to the most powerful industrialists and
financiers, he relies on a mass movement of the middle-class to gain power.
Louis Bonaparte drew from the peasantry. The peasantry was in conflict with the big
bourgeoisie but was tricked into lending support to someone who appeared to act in its
own behalf. The peasantry was unable to articulate its own social and political interests
since the mode of production it relied on was an isolating one. Marx commented:
"The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar
conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of
production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual
intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the
poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no
division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no
multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social
relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly
produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an
exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and
his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few
score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department.
Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homonymous
magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of
families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their
interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile
opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local
interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests
forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do
not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in
their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent
themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear
as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which
protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The
political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression
in the executive power which subordinates society to itself. "
Intermediate layers such as the peasantry are susceptible to Bonapartist and Fascist
politicians. They resent both big capital and the working- class. They resent the banks
who own their mortgage. They also resent the teamsters and railroad workers whose strikes
disrupts their own private economic interests. They turn to politicians whose rhetoric
seems to be both anti-capitalist and anti-working class. Such politicians are often
masters of demagoguery such as Hitler and Mussolini who often employ the stock phrases of
socialism.
The peasantry backed Bonaparte. It was also an important pillar of Hitler's regime. In
the final analysis, the peasants suffered under both because the banks remained powerful
and exploitative. The populism of Bonaparte and the "socialism" of Hitler were simply
deceptive mechanisms by which the executive was able to rule on behalf of big
capital.
Bonapartism, populism and fascism overlap to a striking degree. We see elements of
fascism, populism and Bonapartism in the politics of Pat Buchanan. Buchanan rails against
African-Americans and immigrants, both documented and undocumented. He also rails against
Wall St. which is "selling out" the working man. Is he a fascist, however? Ross Perot
employs a number of the same themes. Is he?
The problem in trying to answer these questions solely on the basis of someone's
speeches or writings is that it ignores historical and class dynamics. Bonaparte and
Hitler emerged as a response to powerful proletrian revolutionary attacks on capital.
What are the objective conditions in American society today? Hitler based their power on
large-scale social movements that could put tens of thousands of people into the streets
at a moment's notice. These movements were not creatures of capitalist cabals. They had
their own logic and their own warped integrity. Many were drawn to Hitler in the deluded
hope that he would bring some kind of "all-German" socialism into existence. These
followers were not Marxists, but they certainly hated the capitalist class. Are the
people who attend Buchanan, Perot and Farrakhan rallies also in such a frenzied,
revolutionary state of mind?
At what point are we in American society today?
I would argue that rather than being in a prerevolutionary situation, that rather we
are in a period which has typified capitalism for the better part of a hundred and fifty
years.We are in a period of capitalist "normalcy". Capitalism is a system which is prone
to economic crisis and war. The unemployment and "downsizing" going on today are typical
of capitalism in its normal functioning. We have to stop thinking as if the period of
prosperity following WWII as normal. It is not. It is an anomaly in the history of
capitalism. When industrial workers found themselves in a position to buy houses, send
children through college, etc., this was only because of a number of exceptional
circumstances which will almost certainly never arise again.
We are in a period more like the late 1800's or the early 1900's. It is a period of
both expansion and retrenchment. It is a period of terrible reaction which can give birth
to the Ku Klux Klan and the skinheads and other neo-Nazis. It is also a period which can
give birth to something like Eugene V. Debs socialist party.
But if we don't recognize at which point we stand, we will never be able to build a
socialist party. We will also not be in a position to resist fascism when it makes its
appearance.
In my next report, I will take a look at the American Populist movement led by Tom
Watson at the turn of the century. It is a highly contradictory social movement. In some
respects it is fascist-like, in other respects it is highly progressive. If we understand
American Populism, we will in a much better position to understand the populism of
today.
These are the types of questions that we should be considering in the weeks to
come:
1) Why did fascism emerge when it did? Could there have been fascism in the
1890's?
2) Is fascism limited to imperialist nations? Could there be fascism in third-world
countries? Did Pinochet represent fascism in Chile?
3) What is the class base of the Nation of Islam? Can there be fascism emerging out of
oppressed nationalities? Can a Turkish or Algerian fascism develop as a response to
neo-fascism in Europe today?
4) The Italian government includes a "fascist" party that openly celebrates Mussolini.
What should we make of this?
5) What is the difference between fascism and ultrarightism? Ultrarightism is a
permanent feature of US and world politics. Was George Wallace a fascist? What would a
European equivalent be?
6) Is fascism emerging in the former Soviet Union? Does Zherinovsky represent fascism?
Is the cause of the civil war in former Yugoslavia Serbian or Croatian fascism?
7) Can there be a fascism which does not incorporate powerful anticapitalist themes
and demagoguery? Joe McCarthy was regarded as a fascist-like figure, but had no use for
radical left-wing verbiage or actions. What should we make of him?
8) If fascism emerged as a reaction to the powerful proletarian revolutionary
movements of the 1920's and 30's, what types of conditions can we see in the foreseeable
future that would provoke new fascist movements? If socialism is no longer objectively
possible because of the ability of capitalism to "deliver the goods", what would the need
for fascism be? Why would the capitalist class support a new Hitler when the
working-class is so quiescient? Should we be thinking about a new definition of
fascism?
9) Fascism has a deeply expansionist and bellicose dynamics. In the age of nuclear
weaponry, can we expect imperialism to opt for a fascist solution? Would the Rockefellers
et al allow a trigger-happy figure like "Mark from Michigan" in control of our nuclear
weapons?
10) What tools are necessary to analyze fascism? Should we be looking at the speeches
of Farrakhan or Mark from Michigan? Was this Marx's approach to Bonapartism?
2. TROTSKY ON BONAPARTISM AND FASCISM
Trotsky, like Lenin, was a revolutionary politician and not an economist or political
scientist. Every article or book the two wrote was tied to solving specific political
problems. When Lenin wrote "Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism", he was trying
to define the theoretical basis for the Zimmerwald opposition to W.W.I. Similarly, when
Trotsky wrote about German fascism, his purpose was to confront and defeat it.
Trotsky's understanding of how fascism came to power is very much grounded in the
definition of "Bonapartism" contained in Marx's "18th Brumaire", a classic study of
dictatorship in the 19th century. Marx was trying to explain how dictatorships of "men on
horseback" such as Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew, can appear to stand suspended
above all classes and to act as impartial arbitrator between opposing classes, even
though they carry out the wishes of the capitalist ruling class. The capitalist class is
small in number and periods of revolutionary crisis depend on these types of seemingly
neutral strong men.
A true Bonapartist figure is somebody who emerges out of the military or state
apparatus. In order to properly bamboozle the masses, he should have charismatic
qualities. War heroes tend to move to the front of the pack when a Bonapartist solution
is required. Charles DeGaulle is the quintessential Bonapartist figure of the modern age.
If the US labor movement and the left had been much more powerful than it had been during
the Korean war and had mounted a serious resistance to the war and to capitalist rule, it
is not hard to imagine a figure such as General Douglas MacCarthur striving to impose a
Bonapartist dictatorship. Since there was no such left-wing, it was possible for US
capitalism to rule democratically. Democracy is a less expensive and more stable
system.
Germany started out after W.W.I as a bourgeois democracy-- the Weimar Republic. The
republic was besieged by a whole number of insurmountable problems: unemployment,
hyperinflation, and resentment over territory lost to the allies.
The workers had attempted to make a socialist revolution immediately after W.W.I, but
their leadership made a number of mistakes that resulted in defeat. The defeat was not so
profound as to crush all future revolutionary possibilities. As the desperate 20's wore
on, the working- class movement did regain its confidence and went on the offensive
again. The two major parties of the working class, the CP and the SP, both grew.
In the late 1920's, Stalin had embarked on an ultraleft course in the USSR and CP's
tended to reflect this ultraleftism in their own strategy and tactics. In Germany, this
meant attacking the Socialist Party as "social fascist". The Socialist Party was not
revolutionary, but it was not fascist. A united SP and CP could have defeated fascism and
prevented WWII and the slaughter of millions. It was Stalin's inability to size up
fascism correctly that lead to this horrible outcome.
Hitler's seizure of power was preceded by a series of rightward drifting governments,
all of which paved the way for him. The SP found reasons to back each and every one of
these governments in the name of the "lesser evil". (This is an argument we have heard
from some leftists in the United States: "Clinton is not as bad as Bush"; "Johnson is not
as bad as Goldwater, etc." The problem with this strategy is that allows the ruling class
to limit the options available to the oppressed. The lesser evil is still evil.)
The last "lesser evil" candidate the German Social Democracy urged support for was
Paul Von Hindenburg, a top general in W.W.I.. The results were disastrous. Hindenburg
took office on April 10 of 1932 and basically paved the way for Adolph Hitler. Hindenburg
allowed the Nazi street thugs to rule the streets, but enforced the letter of the law
against the working-class parties. Elections may have been taking place according to the
Weimar constitution, but real politics was being shaped in the streets through the
demonstrations and riots of Nazi storm-troopers.
As these Nazi street actions grew more violent and massive, Hindenburg reacted on May
31 by making Franz Von Papen chancellor and instructed him to pick a cabinet "above the
parties", a clear Bonapartist move. Such a cabinet wouldn't placate the Nazis. All they
wanted to do was smash bourgeois democracy. As the civil war in the streets continued,
Papen dissolved the Reichstag and called for new elections on July 31, 1932.
On July 17, the Nazis held a march through Altona, a working class neighborhood, under
police protection. The provocation resulted in fighting that left 19 dead and 285
wounded. The SP and CP were not able to mount a significant counteroffensive and the
right-wing forces gathered self-confidence and support from "centrist" voters. When
elections were finally held on July 31, the Nazi party received the most votes and took
power.
In his article "German Bonapartism", Trotsky tries to explain the underlying
connections between the Bonapartist Hindenburg government and the gathering Nazi
storm:
"Present-day German Bonapartism has a very complex and, so to speak, combined
character. The government of Papen would have been impossible without fascism. But
fascism is not in power. And the government of Papen is not fascism. On the other hand,
the government of Papen, at any rate in the present form, would have been impossible
without Hindenburg who, in spite of the final prostration of Germany in the war, stands
for the great victories of Germany and symbolizes the army in the memory of the popular
masses. The second election of Hindenburg had all the characteristics of a plebiscite.
Many millions of workers, petty bourgeois, and peasants (Social Democracy and Center)
voted for Hindenburg. They did not see in him any one political program. They did not see
in him any one political program. They wanted first of all to avoid civil war, and raised
Hindenburg on their shoulders as a superarbiter, as an arbitration judge of the nation.
But precisely this is the most important function of Bonapartism: raising itself over the
two struggling camps in order to preserve property and order."
The victory of Hitler represents a break with Bonapartism, since it represents the
naked rule of finance capital and heavy industry. Fascism in Germany breaks the tension
between classes by imposing a reign of terror on the working class. Once in power,
however, fascism breaks its ties with the petty-bourgeois mass movement that ensured its
victory and assumes a more traditional Bonapartist character. Hitler in office becomes
much more like the Bonapartist figures who preceded him and seeks to act as a
"superarbiter". In order to make this work, he launches an ambitious publics works
program, invests in military spending and tries to coopt the proletariat. Those in the
working-class who resist him are jailed or murdered.
In "Bonapartism and Fascism", written on July 15, 1934, a year after Hitler's rise to
power, Trotsky clarifies the relationship between the two tendencies:
"What has been said sufficiently demonstrates how important it is to distinguish the
Bonapartist form of power from the fascist form. Yet, it would be unpardonable to fall
into the opposite extreme, that is, to convert Bonapartism and fascism into two logically
incompatible categories. Just as Bonapartism begins by combining the parliamentary regime
with fascism, so triumphant fascism finds itself forced not only to enter a bloc with the
Bonapartists, but what is more, to draw closer internally to the Bonapartist system. The
prolonged domination of finance capital by means of reactionary social demagogy and
petty- bourgeois terror is impossible. Having arrived in power, the fascist chiefs are
forced to muzzle the masses who follow them by means of the state apparatus. By the same
token, they lose the support of broad masses of the petty bourgeoisie."
3. MICHAEL MANN ON FASCISM
Michael Mann believes that 20th century Marxism has made a mistake by describing
fascism as a petty-bourgeois mass movement. He does not argue that the leaders were not
bourgeois, or that the bourgeoisie behind the scenes was financing the fascists. He
develops these points at some length in an article "Source of Variation in Working-Class
Movements in Twentieth-Century Movement" which appeared in the New Left Review of
July/August 1995.
If he is correct, then there is something basically wrong with the Marxist approach,
isn't there? If the Nazis attracted the working-class, then wouldn't we have to
reevaluate the revolutionary role of the working-class? Perhaps it would be necessary to
find some other class to lead the struggle for socialism, if this struggle has any basis
in reality to begin with.
Mann relies heavily on statistical data, especially that which can be found in M.
Kater's "The Nazi Party" and D. Muhlberger "Hitler's Followers". The data, Mann reports,
shows that "Combined, the party and paramilitaries had relatively as many workers as in
the general population, almost as many worker militants as the socialists and many more
than the communists".
Pretty scary stuff, if it's true. It is true, but, as it turns out, there are workers
and there are workers. More specifically, Mann acknowledges that "Most fascist
workers...came not from the main manufacturing industries but from agriculture, the
service and public sectors and from handicrafts and small workshops." Let's consider the
political implications of the class composition of this fascist strata." He adds that,
"The proletarian macro-community was resisting fascism, but not the entire
working-class." Translating this infelicitous expression into ordinary language, Mann is
saying that as a whole the workers were opposed to fascism, but there were
exceptions.
Let's consider who these fascist workers were. Agricultural workers in Germany: were
they like the followers of Caesar Chavez, one has to wonder? Germany did not have
large-scale agribusiness in the early 1920's. Most farms produced for the internal market
and were either family farms or employed a relatively small number of workers. Generally,
workers on smaller farms tend to have a more filial relationship to the patron than they
do on massive enterprises. The politics of the patron will be followed more closely by
his workers. This is the culture of small, private agriculture. It was no secret that
many of the contra foot-soldiers in Nicaragua came from this milieu.
Turning to "service" workers, this means that many fascists were white-collar workers
in banking and insurance. This layer has been going through profound changes throughout
the twentieth century, so a closer examination is needed. In the chapter "Clerical
Workers" in Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital", he notes that clerical work
in its earlier stages was like a craft. The clerk was a highly skilled employee who kept
current the records of the financial and operating condition of the enterprise, as well
as its relations with the external world. The whole history of this job category in the
twentieth century, however, has been one of de-skilling. All sorts of machines, including
the modern-day, computer have taken over many of the decision-making responsibilities of
the clerk. Furthermore, "Taylorism" has been introduced into the office, forcing clerks
to function more like assembly-line workers than elite professionals.
We must assume, however, that the white-collar worker in Germany in the 1920's was
still relatively high up in the class hierarchy since his or her work had not been
mechanized or routinized to the extent it is today. Therefore, a clerk in an insurance
company or bank would tend to identify more with management than with workers in a
steel-mill. Even under today's changed economic conditions, this tends to be true. A bank
teller in NY probably resents a striking transit worker, despite the fact that they have
much in common in class terms. This must have been an even more pronounced tendency in
the 1920's when white-collar workers occupied an even more elite position in society.
Mann includes workers in the "public sector". This should come as no surprise at all.
Socialist revolutions were defeated throughout Europe in the early 1920's and right-wing
governments came to power everywhere. These right-wing governments kept shifting to the
right as the mass working-class movements of the early 1920's recovered and began to
reassert themselves. Government workers, who are hired to work in offices run by
right-wingers, will tend to be right-wing themselves. There was no civil-service and no
unions in this sector in the 1920's. Today, this sector is one of the major supporters of
progressive politics internationally. They, in fact, spearheaded the recent strikes in
France. In the United States, where their composition tends to be heavily Black or
Latino, also back progressive politics. But in Germany in the 1920's, it should come as
no major surprise that some public sector workers joined Hitler or Mussolini's cause.
When Trotsky or E.J. Hobsbawm refer to the working-class resistance to Hitler or
Mussolini, they have something specific in mind. They are referring to the traditional
bastions of the industrial working-class: steel, auto, transportation, mining, etc. Mann
concurs that these blue- collar workers backed the SP or CP.
There is a good reason why this was no accident. In Daniel Guerin's "Fascism and Big
Business", he makes the point that the capitalists from heavy industry were the main
backers of Hitler. The reason they backed Hitler was that they had huge investments in
fixed capital (machines, plants, etc.) that were financed through huge debt. When
capitalism collapsed after the stock-market crash, the owners of heavy industry were more
pressed than those of light industry. The costs involved in making a steel or chemical
plant profitable during a depression are much heavier. Steel has to be sold in dwindling
markets to pay for the cost of leased machinery or machinery that is financed by bank
loans When the price of steel has dropped on a world scale, it is all the more necessary
to enforce strict labor discipline..
Strikes are met by violence. When the boss calls for speed-up because of increased
competition, goons within a plant will attack workers who defend decent working
conditions. This explains blue-collar support for socialism. It has a class basis.
These are the sorts of issues that Marxists should be exploring. Michael Mann is a
"neo-Weberian" supposedly who also finds Marx useful. Max Weber tried to explain the
growth of capitalism as a consequence of the "Protestant ethic". Now Mann tries to
explain the growth of fascism as a consequence of working-class support for "national
identity". That is to say, the workers backed Hitler because Hitler backed a strong
Germany. This is anti-Marxist. Being determines consciousness, not the other way around.
When you try to blend Marx with anti-Marxists like Weber or Lyotard or A.J. Ayer, it is
very easy to get in trouble. I prefer my Marx straight, with no chaser.
4. NICOS POULANTZAS ON FASCISM
Nicos Poulantzas tried to carve out a political space for revolutionaries outside of
the framework of the CP, especially the French Communist Party. Poulantzas wrote "Fascism
and Dictatorship, The Third International and the Problem of Fascism" in 1968 when he was
in the grips of a rather severe case of Maoism.
This put him in an obviously antagonistic position vis a vis Trotsky. Trotsky was the
author of a number of books that tried to explain the victory of Hitler, Mussolini and
Franco in terms of the failure of the Comintern to provide revolutionary leadership.
Poulantzas's Maoism put him at odds with this analysis. His Maoist "revolutionary
heritage" goes back through Dmitrov to Stalin and Lenin. In this line of pedigrees,
Trotsky remains the mutt.
Poulantzas could not accept the idea that the Comintern was the gravedigger of
revolutions, since the current he identified with put this very same Comintern on a
pedestal. Yet the evidence of Comintern failure in the age of fascism is just too
egregious for him to ignore. He explains this failure not in terms of bureaucratic
misleadership, but rather in terms of "economism". This Althusserian critique targets the
Comintern not only of the 1930s when Hitler was marching toward power, but to the
Comintern of the early 1920s, before Stalin had consolidated his power. All the
Bolsheviks to one extent or another suffered from this ideological deviation: Stalin and
Trotsky had a bad case of it, so did Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev.
What form did this "economism" take? Poulantzas argues that the Third International
suffered in its infancy from "economic catastrophism", a particularly virulent form of
this ideological deviation. What happened, you see, is that the Communists relied too
heavily on Lenin's "Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism". Lenin's pamphlet
portrayed capitalism as being on its last legs, a moribund, exhausted economic system
that was hanging on the ropes like a beaten prize-fighter. All the proletariat had to do
was give the capitalist system one last sharp punch in the nose and it would fall to the
canvas.
If capitalism was in its death-agony, then fascism was the expression of the weakness
of the system in its terminal stages. Poulantzas observes:
"The blindness of both the PCI and KPD leaders in this respect is staggering. Fascism,
according to them, would only be a 'passing episode' in the revolutionary process.
Umberto Terracini wrote in Inprekorr, just after the march on Rome, that fascism was at
most a passing 'ministerial crisis'. Amadeo Bordiga, introducing the resolution on
fascism at the Fifth Congress, declared that all hat had happened in Italy was 'a change
in the governmental team of the bourgeoisie'. The presidium of the Comintern executive
committee noted, just after Hitler's accession to power: 'Hitler's Germany is heading for
ever more inevitable economic catastrophe...The momentary calm after the victory of
fascism is only a passing phenomenon. The wave of revolution will rise inescapably
Germany despite the fascist terror..."
Now Poulantzas is correct to point out this aspect of the Comintern's inability to
challenge and defeat fascism. Yes, it is "economic catastrophism" that clouded its
vision. We must ask is this all there is to the problem? If Lenin's pamphlet had not
swept the Communists off their feet, could they have gotten a better handle on the
situation?
Unfortunately, the failure of the Comintern to provide an adequate explanation of
fascism and a strategy to defeat it goes much deeper than this. The problem is that
Stalin was rapidly in the process of rooting out Marxism from the Communist Party in the
*very early* stages of the Comintern. Stalin's supporters were already intimidating and
silencing Marxists in 1924, the year of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern.
>From around that time forward, the debate in the Comintern was not between a wide
range of Marxist opinion. The debate only included the rightist followers of Bukharin and
Stalin, the cagey spokesman for the emerging bureaucracy. The Soviet secret police and
Stalin's goons were suppressing the Left Opposition. Shortly, Stalin would jail or kill
its members. So when Poulantzas refers to the "Comintern", he is referring to a rump
formation that bore faint resemblance to the Communist International of the heroic, early
days of the Russian Revolution.
When Stalin took power, the Comintern became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy
and Communist Parties tried to emulate the internal shifts of the Soviet party. The
ultraleft, third period of the German Communist Party mirrored the extreme turn taken by
Stalin against Bukharin and the right Communists in the late 1920s. Bukharin was for
appeasement of the kulaks and, by the same token, class-collaborationist alliances with
the national bourgeoisie of various countries. Stalin had embraced this policy when it
was convenient.
When Stalin broke with Bukharin, he turned sharply to the ultraleft and dumped the
rightist leadership of the Comintern. He replaced it with his lackeys who were all to
happy to march in lock-step to the lunatic left. The German CP went to the head of the
pack during this period by attacking the social democrats as being "social fascists".
Poulantzas maintains that the Kremlin did not have a master-puppet relationship to the
Communist Parties internationally. Since the evidence to the contrary is rather
mountainous, his explanations take on a labored academic cast that are in sharp
contradistinction to his usually lucid prose. It also brings out the worst of his Maoist
mumbo- jumbo:
"To sum up: the general line which was progressively dominant in the USSR and in the
Comintern can allow us to make a relatively clear [!] periodization of the Comintern, a
periodization which can also be very useful for the history of the USSR. But this is
insufficient. For example, we have seen how the Comintern's Sixth (1928) and Seventh
(1935) Congresses cannot be interpreted on the model of a pendulum (left
opportunism/right opportunism), but that there is no simple continuity between them
either. That corroborates the view that the turn in Soviet policy in relationship to the
peasantry as a whole was not a simple, internal, 'ultra-left' turn. But it will be
impossible to make a deeper analysis of this problem in relation to the Comintern until
we have exactly established what was the real process involving the Soviet bourgeoisie
[Don't forget, gang, this is 1968] during the period of the class struggle in the USSR --
which was considerably more than a simple struggle of the proletariat and poor peasants
against the kulaks."
As Marxists, we should always avoid the temptation to resort to "deterministic" types
of analysis. Poulantzas, the Althusserian, would never yield to such temptation. That is
why refuses to make a connection between the ultraleft attack on the peasantry within the
Soviet Union and the ultraleft turn internationally. I am afraid, however, that no other
analysis makes any sense. Sometimes, a cigar is simply a cigar. Stalin, the
quintessential bureaucrat seems only capable of lurching either to the extreme left or
extreme right. His errors reflect an inability to project working-class, i.e., Marxist,
solutions to political problems. By concentrating such enormous power in his hands, he
guaranteed that every shift he took, the Communist Parties internationally would
follow.
Ideology plays much too much of a role in the Poulantzas scheme of things. The
Comintern messed up because it put Lenin on a pedestal. He also says that the bourgeoisie
supported fascism because it too was in a deep ideological crisis. What does Poulantzas
have to say about the German working-class? What does he say about the parties of the
working-class? Could ideological confusion explain their weakness in face of the Nazi
threat? You bet.
Poulantzas alleges that the rise of fascism in Germany corresponds to an ideological
crisis of the revolutionary organizations, which in turn coincided with an ideological
crisis within the working class. He says:
"Marxist-Leninist ideology was profoundly shaken within the working class: not only
did it fail to conquer the broad masses, but it was also forced back where it managed to
root itself. It is clear enough what happens when revolutionary organizations fail in
their ideological role of giving leadership on a mass line: particular forms of bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois ideology invade the void left by the retreat of Marxist- Leninist
ideology.
The influence of bourgeois ideology over the working class, in this situation of
ideological crisis, took the classic form of trade unionism and reformism. It can be
recognized not only in the survival, but also in the extending influence of social
democracy over the working class, through both the party and trade unions, all through
the rise of fascism. The advancing influence of social-democratic ideology was felt even
in those sections of the working class supporting the communist party."
Comrades, this is not what Lenin said! Lenin said that socialist consciousness has to
be brought into the working-class from the outside, from intellectuals who have mastered
Marxism. Not is it only what Lenin said, it is happily what makes sense. Workers *never*
rise above simple trade union consciousness.
When Poulantzas says that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology "invades" the
working-class, he is mixing things up hopelessly. This type of ideology has no need to
invade, it is *always* there. It is socialist ideas that are the anomaly, the
exception.
Workers have no privileged status in class society. The ruling ideas of any society
are the ideas of the ruling class. When Jon the railroad worker reports to this l*st
about the numbers of his co-workers who are for Perot, he is conveying the same truth
that is found in What is to be Done. The ideas that he supports are being "imported" into
the rail yards. That's the way it goes.
This also explains the murderous fanaticism of the Shining Path. When they witness the
"bourgeois" ideas of ordinary Peruvian workers, it is very tempting for them to put a
bullet in the brain of any of them who stand in their way. If Maoism posits ideology as
the enemy, no wonder they conceive of the class struggle as a struggle against impure
thoughts. The answer to impure thoughts, of course, is patient explanation. This is the
method of Marxism, the political philosophy of the working-class. Marxists try to resolve
contradictions by reaching a higher level of understanding. Sometimes, it can be
frustrating to put up with and work through these contradictions, but the alternative
only leads down the blind alley to sectarianism and fanaticism.
5. DELEUZE/GUATTARI ON FASCISM
In the translator's foreword to "A Thousand Plateaus", Brian Massumi tells us that the
philosopher Gilles Deleuze was prompted by the French worker-student revolt of 1968 to
question the role of the intellectual in society. Felix Guattari, his writing partner,
was a psychoanalyst who identified with R.D. Laing's antipsychiatry movement of the
1960's. Laing created group homes where schizophrenics were treated identically to the
sane, sort of like the Marxism list. Guattari also embraced the protests of 1968 and
discovered an intellectual kinship with Deleuze. Their first collaboration was the 1972
"Anti-Oedipus". Massumi interprets this work as a polemic against "State-happy or
pro-party versions of Marxism". "A Thousand Plateaus", written in 1987, is basically part
two of the earlier work. Deleuze and Guattari state that the two books make up a grand
opus they call "Capitalism and Schizophrenia".
I read the chapter "1933" in "A Thousand Plateaus" with as much concentration as I can
muster. Stylistically, it has a lot in common with philosophers inspired by Nietzsche. I
am reminded of some of the reading I did in Wyndham Lewis and Oswald Spengler in a
previous lifetime. These sorts of authors pride themselves in being able to weave
together strands from many different disciplines and hate being categorized. Within a few
pages you will see references to Kafka, American movies, Andre Gorz's theory of work and
Clausewitz's military writings.
Their approach to fascism is totally at odds with the approach we have been developing
in our cyberseminar. Thinkers such as Marx and Trotsky focus on the class dynamics of
bourgeois society. Bonapartism is rooted in the attempt of the French bourgeoisie in 1848
to stave off proletarian revolution. Trotsky explains fascism as a totalitarian last-
ditch measure to preserve private property when bourgeois democracy or the Bonapartist
state are failing.
Deleuze and Guattari see fascism as a permanent feature of social life. Class is not
so important to them. They are concerned with what they call "microfascism", the fascism
that lurks in heart of each and every one of us. When they talk about societies that were
swept by fascism, such as Germany, they totally ignore the objective social and economic
framework: depression, hyperinflation, loss of territory, etc.
This is wrong. Fascism is a product of objective historical factors, not shortcomings
in the human psyche or imperfections in the way society is structured. The way to prevent
fascism is not to have unfascist attitudes or live in unfascist communities, like the
hippies did in the 1960's. It is to confront the capitalist class during periods of
mounting crisis and win a socialist victory.
In a key description of the problem, they say, "The concept of the totalitarian State
applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode
of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of
molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to
resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood
fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the
Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a
micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before
resonating in a great, generalized central black hole."
This is a totally superficial understanding of how fascism came about. What is Left
fascism? It is true that the Communist Party employed thuggish behavior on occasion
during the ultraleft "Third Period". They broke up meetings of small Trotskyist groups
while the Nazis were breaking up the meetings of trade unions or Communists. Does this
behavior equal left Fascism? Fascism is a class term. It describes a mass movement of the
petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to destroy all vestiges of the working-class movement. This
at least is the Marxist definition.
Fascism is not intolerance, bad attitudes, meanness or insensitivity. It is a violent,
procapitalist mass movement of the middle-class that employs socialist
phrase-mongering.
I want to conclude with a few words about Felix Guattari and Toni Negri's "Communists
like Us". Unlike Deleuze/Guattari's collaborations, this is a perfectly straightforward
political manifesto that puts forward a basic challenge to Marxism. It is deeply inspired
by a reading of the 1968 struggle in France as a mass movement for personal liberation.
Students and other peripheral sectors move into the foreground while workers become
secondary. It is as dated as Herbert Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man".
The pamphlet was written in 1985 but has the redolence of tie-dyed paisley, patchouli
oil and granny glasses. Get a whiff of this:
"Since the 1960's, new collective subjectivities have been affirmed in the dramas of
social transformation. We have noted what they owe to modifications in the organization
of work and to developments in socialization; we have tried to establish that the
antagonisms which they contain are no longer recuperable within the traditional horizon
of the political. But it remains to be demonstrated that the innovations of the '60s
should above all be understood within the universe of consciousnesses, of desires, and of
modes of behaviour."
I have some trouble understanding why Deleuze and Guattari are such big favorites with
some of my younger friends. My friend Catherine who works in the Dean of Studies office
at Barnard was wild about Derrida when I first met her four years ago. She started
showing more of an interest in Marxism after Derrida did. But she is not reading the 18th
Brumaire. She is reading Bataille, Deleuze/Guattari and Simone Weil. My guess is that a
lot of people from her milieu feel a certain nostalgia for the counterculture of the
1960's and in a funny sort of way, Deleuza/Guattari take that nostalgia and cater to it
but in an ultrasophisticated manner. They wouldn't bother with Paul Goodman and Charles
Reich, this crowd. But French and Italian theorists who write in a highly allusive and
self-referential manner: Like wow, man!
6. TOM WATSON
Tom Watson was born in Thompson, Georgia on September 5, 1856. His father owned 45
slaves and 1,372 acres of land on which he grew cotton. These assets put the Watson
family in the top third of the Georgian land-owning class, but not at the very top of the
slaveocracy.
The slave-owning class hated the Northern industrial class which had won the civil
war. The northerners brought an end to the old agrarian ways at the point of the bayonet
during reconstruction. The Yankee industrial capitalist sought free land and free labor.
This would allow him to commercially exploit the south and break up the older semi-
feudal relations.
Young Tom Watson hated what was happening to the south and joined the Democratic Party
soon after graduating college and starting a law profession. The Democrats in the south
formed the political resistance to the northern based Republicans. The "white man's
party" and the Democratic Party were terms used interchangeably.
Some of the southern capitalists aligned with the Democratic Party realized that the
future belonged to the northern capitalist class and joined forces with them. They became
avid partners in the commercial development of agriculture and the expansion of the
railroads throughout the south. Most of these southerners were connected with a newly
emerging finance capital, especially in the more forward- looking cities like Atlanta,
Georgia. Atlanta has always seen itself as representative of a "new south". It was to be
the first to end Jim Crow and it was the first to develop an intensive financial and
services-based infrastructure after WWII.
The intensive commercialization of the south impoverished many of the small and
mid-sized farmers who found themselves caught between the hammer and anvil of railroad,
retail store and bank. The banks charged exorbitant mortgages for land while the
railroads exacted steep fees for transporting grain and cotton. It often cost a farmer a
bushel of wheat just to bring a bushel of wheat to market. The retail stores charged high
prices for manufactured goods and were often owned behind the scenes by bank or
railroad.
Tom Watson identified with the exploited farmers who had begun to organize themselves
into a group called the Farmer's Alliance, which started in Texas but soon spread
throughout the south in the 1880's. The Alliance was determined to defend the interests
of small farmers against the juggernaut of bank, railroad and retail entrepreneur. The
Alliance evolved into the People's Party, the original version of the populists, a term
that is much overused today.
In this emerging class conflict, what side would a Marxist support? After all, didn't
Marx support the Yankees in the Civil War? Didn't the north represent industrialization,
progress and modernization? Wasn't the Alliance simply a continuation of the old
agricultural system?
When Tom Watson joined the Alliance cause, his words would not give a modernizer much
encouragement. He said, "Let there come once more to Southern heart and Southern brain
the Resolve--waste places built up. In the rude shock of civil war that dream perished.
Like victims of some horrid nightmare, we have moved ever since--
powerless--oppressed--shackled--".
The Alliance, like the Democratic Party in the south, was for white people only. The
leader of the Alliance in Texas, Charles Macune, was an outspoken racist.
A preliminary Marxist judgment on the Populists would be negative, wouldn't it, since
their nostalgia for the old south is reactionary. Their roots in the Democratic Party,
the "white man's party" would also make them suspect. Finally, why would Marxists support
the antiquated agrarian life-style of small farmers against the northern capitalist class
and their "new south" allies?
This snap judgment would fail to take into account the brutal transformations that
were turning class relations upside down in the south. As farmers became pauperized by
the commercial interests, many became share-croppers who had everything in common with
the impoverished Okies depicted by John Steinbeck in the "Grapes of Wrath". Others became
wage laborers on plantations, while others entered the industrial proletariat itself in
the towns and cities of the "new south". The class interests of these current and former
petty- bourgeois layers were arrayed against the big bourgeoisie of the south and
north.
This impoverished white farmers found itself joined in dire economic circumstances
with black farmers who had recently been freed from slavery, but who remained
share-croppers for the most part. Those with a pessimistic view of human nature might
assume that white and black farmer remained divided and weak. After all, doesn't racial
solidarity supersede class interest again and again in American history?
The Populists defied expectations, however. They united black and white farmers and
fought valiantly against Wall St. and their southern partners throughout the 1890's and
nearly succeeded in becoming a permanent third party.
At their founding convention, the delegates to the People's Party adopted a program
which included the following demands:
"The conditions which surround us best justify our cooperation; we meet in the midst
of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption
dominates the ballot-box, the legislature, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of
the bench. The people are demoralized...
We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great
political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon
the suffering people...
The land, including all the natural sources of wealth, is the heritage of the people,
and should not be monopolized for speculative purposes, and alien ownership of land
should be prohibited.
All land now held by railroads and other corporations in excess of their actual needs,
and all lands owned by aliens [i.e., absentee landlords] should be reclaimed by the
government and held for actual settlers only."
This program galvanized millions of farmers into action. They joined the People's
Party and elected local, state and federal politicians including Tom Watson himself who
went to Congress and spoke forcefully for the interests of small farmers.
Watson also was one of the Populist leaders who saw most clearly the need for
black-white unity. Watson framed his appeal this way:
"Now the People's Party says to these two men, 'You are kept apart that you may be
separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that
hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both.
You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a
monetary system which beggars both.'"
Watson spoke out forcefully against lynching, nominated a black man to his state
executive committee and often spoke from the same platform with black populists to mixed
audiences.
The Populists were a real threat to the capitalist system. While they did not advocate
socialist solutions, they objectively defended the interests of both poor farmer and
working-class. In many states in the west and north, populist farmers began to form ties
with the newly emerging Knights of Labor. Both populist farmer and northern worker saw
Wall St. as the enemy.
How and why did the populists disappear?
Watson became the Vice Presidential running-mate of the Democratic nominee William
Jennings Bryan in 1896. Bryan had the reputation of being some kind of populist radical,
but nothing could be further from the truth. He was the first in a long line of
Democratic Party "progressives" who fooled the mass movement into thinking that the party
could accommodate their needs.
Bryan did support the adoption of the silver standard (this was favored by farmers who
sought more plentiful currency in expectation that this would bring down prices), but was
cool to the rest of the populist demands. He had no use especially for any anti-corporate
measures.
The populists were fooled into supporting Bryan, but the Democrats knew who their
class-enemy was. Throughout the south, armed thugs destroyed populist party headquarters
and terrorized party members. The combination of Bryan's co-optation and violence at the
street level took the momentum out of this movement.
In a few short years, other factors served to dampen farmer radicalism. There was a
European crop failure and American farmers were able to sell their goods at a higher
price. Also, the United States started to develop as an imperial power through its
conquest of the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The material and psychological
benefits of these new colonies tended to mute class-consciousness among worker and farmer
alike.
The populists dissolved slowly as the twentieth century approached. Some activists
became members of the Progressive Party, while others joined Deb's Socialist Party. The
working-class began to emerge as more of a self-aware, insurgent force in its own right,
especially in its drive to form unions.
What lessons can be drawn about the People's Party? At the very least, it should teach
us that politics can often be unpredictable. Who would imagine that the son of a
slave-owner would end up as a defender of black rights nearly a century before the civil
rights movement?
As we move forward in our study of fascism, and especially as we come close to the
period when Black Nationalism and the militias show up, let us take care to look at a
movement's class dynamics rather than the words of one or another leader. Marxism is
suited to analysis of social forces in formation and development. It is ideally suited to
understanding the types of rapid changes that are beginning to appear on the American
political landscape.
7. PAT BUCHANAN AND AMERICAN FASCISM
The United States in the 1930s became a battleground between industrial workers and
the capitalist class over whether workers would be able to form industrial unions. There
had been craft unions for decades, but only industrial unions could fight for all of the
workers in a given plant or industry. This fight had powerful revolutionary implications
since the captains of heavy industry required a poorly paid, docile work-force in order
to maximize profits in the shattered capitalist economy. There were demonstrations,
sit-down strikes and even gun-fights led by the Communist Party and other left groups to
establish this basic democratic right.
Within this political context, fascist groups began to emerge. They drew their
inspiration from Mussolini's fascists or Hitler's brown- shirts. In a time of severe
social crisis, groups of petty-bourgeois and lumpen elements begin to coalesce around
demagogic leaders. They employ "radical" sounding rhetoric but in practice seek out
working- class organizations to intimidate and destroy. One such fascist group was the
Silver Shirts of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In chapter eleven of "Teamster Politics", SWP leader Farrell Dobbs recounts "How the
Silver Shirts Lost Their Shrine in Minneapolis". It is the story of how Local 544 of the
Teamsters union, led by Trotskyists, defended itself successfully from a fascist
expedition into the city. Elements of the Twin Cities ruling-class, alarmed over the
growth of industrial unionism in the city, called in Silver Shirt organizer Roy Zachary.
Zachary hosted two closed door meetings on July 29 and August 2 of 1938. Teamster "moles"
discovered that Zachary intended to launch a vigilante attack against Local 544
headquarters. They also discovered that Zachary planned to work with one F.L. Taylor to
set up an "Associated Council of Independent Unions", a union-busting operation. Taylor
had ties to a vigilante outfit called the "Minnesota Minute Men".
Local 544 took serious measures to defend itself. It formed a union defense guard in
August 1938 open to any active union member. Many of the people who joined had military
experience, including Ray Rainbolt the elected commander of the guard. Rank-and-filers
were former sharpshooters, machine gunners and tank operators in the US Army. The guard
also included one former German officer with WWI experience. While the guard itself did
not purchase arms except for target practice, nearly every member had hunting rifles at
home that they could use in the circumstance of a Silver Shirt attack.
Events reached a climax when Pelley came to speak at a rally in the wealthy section of
Minneapolis.
Ray Rainbolt organized a large contingent of defense guard members to pay a visit to
Calhoun Hall where Pelley was to make his appearance. The powerful sight of disciplined
but determined unionists persuaded the audience to go home and Pelley to cancel his
speech.
This was the type of conflict taking place in 1938. A capitalist class bent on taming
workers; fascist groups with a documented violent, anti-labor record; industrial workers
in motion: these were the primary actors in that period. It was characteristic of the
type of class conflict that characterized the entire 1930s. It is useful to keep this in
mind when we speak about McCarthyism.
WWII abolished a number of major contradictions in global capital while introducing
others. The United States emerged as the world's leading capitalist power and took
control economically and politically of many of the former colonies of the exhausted
European powers. Inter-imperialist rivalries and contradictions seemed to be a thing of
the past. England was the U.S.'s junior partner. The defeated Axis powers, Germany and
Japan, were under Washington's thumb. France retained some independence. (To this day
France continues to act as if it were an equal partner of the US, detonating nuclear
weapons in the Pacific or talking back to NATO over policies in Bosnia.)
Meanwhile the USSR survived the war bloodied but unbowed. In a series of negotiations
with the US and its allies, Stalin won the right to create "buffer" states to his West. A
whole number of socialist countries then came into being. China and Yugoslavia had
deep-going proletarian revolutions that, joined with the buffer states, would soon
account for more than 1/4 of the world's population.
World imperialism took an aggressive stance toward the socialist bloc before the smoke
had cleared from the WWII battlegrounds. Churchill made his "cold war" speech and
contradictions between the socialist states and world capitalism grew very sharp.
Imperialism began using the same type of rhetoric and propaganda against the USSR that it
had used against the Nazis. Newreels of the early fifties would depict a spreading red
blot across the European continent. This time the symbol superimposed on the blot was a
hammer-and-sickle instead of a swastika. The idea was the same: to line up the American
people against the enemy overseas that was trying to gobble up the "free world".
A witch-hunt in the United States, sometimes called McCarthyism, emerged in the United
States from nearly the very moment the cold war started. The witch-hunt would serve to
eradicate domestic opposition to the anti-Communist crusade overseas. The witch-hunters
wanted to root up and eradicate all sympathy to the USSR. President Harry Truman, a
Democrat and New Dealer, started the anticommunist crusade. He introduced the first
witch-hunt legislation, a bill that prevented federal employees from belonging to
"subversive" organizations. When Republican Dwight Eisenhower took office, he simply kept
the witch-hunt going. The McCarthy movement per se emerges out of a reactionary climate
created by successive White House administrations, Democrat and Republican alike.
I will argue that a similar dynamic has existed in US politics over the past twenty
years. Instead of having a "cold war" against the socialist countries, we have had a
"cold war" on the working-class and its allies. James Carter, a Democrat, set into motion
the attack on working people and minorities, while successive Republican and Democratic
administrations have continued to stoke the fire. Reaganism is Carterism raised to a
higher level. All Buchanan represents is the emergence of a particularly reactionary
tendency within this overall tendency toward the right.
Attacks on the working-class and minorities have nothing to do with "bad faith" on the
part of people like William Clinton. We are dealing with a global restructuring of
capital that will be as deep-going in its impact on class relations internationally as
the cold war was in its time. The cold war facilitated the removal of the Soviet Union as
a rival. Analogously, the class war on working people in the advanced capitalist
countries that began in the Carter years facilitates capital's next new expansion.
Capitalism is a dynamic system. This dynamism includes not only war and "downsizing", it
also includes fabulous growth in places like the East Coast of China. To not see this is
to not understand capitalism.
"The United States, the most powerful capitalist country in history, is a component
part of the world capitalist system and is subject to the same general laws. It suffers
from the same incurable diseases and is destined to share the same fate. The overwhelming
preponderance of American imperialism does not exempt it from the decay of world
capitalism, but, on the contrary, acts to involve it even more deeply, inextricably and
hopelessly. US capitalism can no more escape from the revolutionary consequences of world
capitalist decay than the older European capitalist powers. The blind alley in which
world capitalism has arrived, and the US with it, excludes a new organic era of
capitalist stabilization. The dominant world position of American imperialism now
accentuates and aggravates the death agony of capitalism as a whole."
This appears in an article in the April 5, 1954 Militant titled "First Principles in
the Struggle Against Fascism". It is of course based on a totally inaccurate
misunderstanding of the state of global capital. Capitalism was not in a "blind alley" in
1954. The truth is that from approximately 1946 on capitalism went through the most
sustained expansion in its entire history. To have spoken about the "death agony" of
capitalism in 1954 was utter nonsense. This "catastrophism" could only serve to misorient
the left since it did not put McCarthyism in proper context.
One of the great contributions made by Nicos Poulantzas in his "Fascism and the Third
International" was his diagnosis of the problem of "catastrophism". According to
Poulantzas, the belief that capitalism has reached a "blind alley" first appeared in the
Comintern of the early 1920's. He blames this on a dogmatic approach to Lenin's
"Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism" that existed in a communist movement that
was all too eager to deify the dead revolutionist.
Lenin's theory of imperialism owed much to Hilferding and Bukharin who believed that
capitalism was moribund and incapable of generating new technical and industrial growth.
Moreover, this capitalist system was in a perpetual crisis and wars were inevitable. The
Comintern latched onto this interpretation and adapted it to the phenomenon of fascism.
Fascism, in addition to war, was also a permanent feature of the decaying capitalist
system. A system that had reached such an impasse was a system that was in a permanent
catastrophic mode. The Comintern said that it was five minutes to midnight.
The SWP's version of catastrophism did not allow it to see McCarthy's true mission.
This mission was not to destroy the unions and turn the United States into a totalitarian
state. It was rather a mission to eliminate radical dissent against the stepped-up attack
on the USSR, its allies and revolutionary movements in the third world. The witch- hunt
targeted radicals in the unions, the schools, the State Department, the media and
elsewhere. After the witch-hunt had eradicated all traces of radical opinion, the US
military could fight its imperialist wars without interference from the left. This is
exactly what took place during the Korean War. There were no visible signs of dissent
except in the socialist press and in some liberal publications like I.F. Stone's
Newsletter. This clamp-down on dissent lasted until the Vietnam war when a newly
developing radicalization turned the witch-hunt back for good.
In the view of the SWP, nothing basically had changed since the 1930's. The target of
McCarthyite "fascism" was the working-class and its unions. The Militant stated on
January 18, 1954:
"If the workers' organizations don't have the answer, the fascists will utilize the
rising discontent of the middle class, its disgust with the blundering labor leadership,
and its frenzy at being ruined economically, to build a mass fascist movement with armed
detachments and hurl them at the unions. While spouting a lot of radical-sounding
demagogy they will deflect the anti-capitalist wrath of the middle class and deploy it
against labor, and establish the iron- heel dictatorship of Big Capital on the smoking
ruins of union halls."
One wonders if the party leadership in 1954 actually knew any middle- class people,
since party life consisted of a "faux proletarian" subculture with tenuous ties to
American society. Certainly they could have found out about the middle-class on the newly
emerging TV situation comedies like "Father Knows Best" or "Leave it to Beaver". Rather
than expressing "rising discontent" or "frenzy", the middle- class was taking advantage
of dramatic increases in personal wealth. Rather than plotting attacks on union halls
like the Silver Shirts did in 1938, they were moving to suburbia, buying televisions and
station wagons, and taking vacations in Miami Beach or Europe. This was not only
objectively possible for the average middle-class family, it was also becoming possible
for the worker in basic industry. For the very same reason the working-class was not
gravitating toward socialism, the middle-class was not gravitating toward fascism. This
reason, of course, is that prosperity had become general.
The other day Ryan Daum posted news of the death of Pablo, a leader of the Trotskyist
movement in the 1950s. European Trotskyism is generally much less dogmatic than its
American and English cousins. While the party leadership in the United States hated Pablo
with a passion, rank and filers often found themselves being persuaded by some ideas put
forward by the Europeans.
One of these differences revolved around how to assess McCarthy. The party leadership
viewed McCarthy as a fascist while a minority grouping led by Dennis Vern and Samuel Ryan
based in Los Angeles challenged this view. Unfortunately I was not able to locate
articles in which the minority defends its view. What I will try to do is reconstruct
this view through remarks directed against them by Joseph Hansen, a party leader. This is
a risky method, but the only one available to me.
Vern and Ryan criticize the Militant's narrow focus on the McCarthyite threat. They
say, "The net effect of this campaign is not to hurt McCarthy, or the bourgeois state,
but to excuse the bourgeois state for the indisputable evidences of its bourgeois
character, and thus hinder the proletariat in its understanding that the bourgeois-
democratic state is an 'executive committee' of the capitalist class, and that only a
workers state can offer an appropriate objective for the class struggle."
I tend to discount statements like "only a workers state" since they function more as
a mantra than anything else ("only socialism can end racism"; "only socialism can end
sexism"-- you get the picture.) However, there is something interesting being said here.
By singling out McCarthy, didn't the SWP "personalize" the problems the left was facing?
A Democratic president initiated the witch-hunt, not a fascist minded politician. Both
capitalist parties created the reactionary movement out of which McCarthy emerges. By the
same token, doesn't the narrow focus on Buchanan today tend to lift some of the pressure
on William Clinton. After all, if our problem is Buchanan, then perhaps it makes sense to
throw all of our weight behind Clinton.
Vern and Ryan also offer the interesting observation that McCarthy has been less
anti-union than many bourgeois politicians to his left. The liberal politicians railed
against McCarthy's assault on civil liberties, but meanwhile endorsed all sorts of
measures that would have weakened the power of the American trade union movement.
This was an interesting perception that has some implications I will attempt to
elucidate. McCarthy did not target the labor movement as such because the post WWII
social contract between labor and big business was essentially class-collaborationist.
The union movement would keep its mouth shut about foreign interventions in exchange for
higher wages, job security, etc. Social peace at home accompanied and eased the way of US
capitalist expansionism overseas. The only obstacle to this social contract was the
ideological left, those members of the union movement, the media, etc. They were all
possible supporters of the Vietminh and other liberation movements. McCarthy wanted to
purge the union movement of these elements, but not destroy the union movement itself.
Turning our clock forward to 1996, does anybody think that Buchanan intends to break the
power of the US working-class? Does big business need Buchanan when the Arkansas
labor-hater is doing such a great job?
The SWP has had a tremendous attraction toward "catastrophism". Turning the clock
forward from 1954 to 1988, we discover resident genius Jack Barnes telling a gathering of
the faithful that capitalism finally is in the eleventh hour. In a speech on "What the
1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold", he says:
"Neither past sources of rapid capital accumulation nor other options can enable the
imperialist ruling classes to restore the long-term accelerating accumulation of world
capitalism and avert an international depression and general social crisis....
"The period in the history of capitalist development that we are living through today
is heading toward intensified class battles on a national and international scale,
including wars and revolutionary situations. In order to squeeze out more wealth from the
labor of exploited producers....
"Before the exploiters can unleash a victorious reign of reaction [i.e., fascism],
however, the workers will have the first chance. The mightiest class battles of human
history will provide the workers and exploited farmers in the United States and many
other countries the opportunity to place revolutionary situations on the order of the
day."
Someone should have thrown a glass of cold water in the face of this guru before he
made this speech. He predicted depression, but the financial markets ignored him. The
stock market recovered from the 1987 crash and has now shot up to over 5000 points. His
statement that nothing could have averted an international depression shows that he much
better qualified at plotting purges than plotting out the development of capital
accumulation.
His statement that the "period in the history of capitalist development that we are
living through" is heading toward wars and revolution takes the word "period" and strips
it of all meaning. Nine years have passed and there is neither depression nor general
social crisis. Is a decade sufficient to define a period? I think all of us can benefit
from Jack Barnes' catastrophism if we simply redefine what a period is. Let us define it
as a hundred years, then predictions of our Nostradamus might begin to make sense.
Unfortunately, the art of politics consists of knowing what to do next and predictions of
such a sweeping nature are worthless.
Sally Ryan posted an article from the Militant newspaper the other day. It states that
Buchanan is a fascist:
"Buchanan is not primarily out to win votes, nor was he four years ago. He has set out
to build a cadre of those committed to his program and willing to act in the streets to
carry it out. He dubs his supporters the 'Buchanan Brigades'....
"Commenting on the tone of a recent speech Buchanan gave to the New Hampshire
legislature, Republican state representative Julie Brown, said, 'It's just mean - like a
little Mussolini.'....
"While he is not about to get the Republican nomination, Buchanan is serious in his
campaign. The week before his Louisiana win, he came in first in a straw poll of Alaska
Republicans and placed third in polls in New Hampshire, where the first primary election
will be held. He is building a base regardless of how the vote totals continue to fall.
And he poses the only real alternative that can be put forward within the capitalist
system to the like-sounding Clinton and Dole - a fascist alternative."
These quotations tend to speak for a rather wide-spread analysis of Buchanan that a
majority of the left supports, including my comrades on this list.
I want to offer a counter-analysis:
1) We are in a period of quiescence, not class confrontation.
Comrades, this is the good news and the bad news. It is good news because there is no
threat of a fascist movement coming to power. It is bad news because it reflects how
depoliticized the US working-class remains.
There is no fascist movement in the United States of any size or significance. It is
time to stop talking about the militias of Montana. Let us speak instead of New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. Has there been any growth of fascism? Of course
not. In New York, my home town, there is no equivalent of the German- American bund, the
fascists of the 1930s who had a base on New York's upper east side, my neighborhood.
There are no attacks on socialist or trade union meetings. There are not even attacks
on movements of allies of the working-class. The women's movement, the black movement,
the Central American movement organize peacefully and without interference for the simple
reason that there are no violent gangs to subdue them.
The reason there are no violent gangs of fascists is the same as it was in the 1950s.
We are not in a period of general social crisis. There are no frenzied elements of the
petty-bourgeoisie or the lumpen proletariat being drawn into motion by demagogic and
charismatic leaders like Mussolini or Hitler. There are no Silver Shirts that the labor
or socialist movement needs protection from.
There is another key difference from the 1930s that we must consider. Capital and
labor battled over the rights of labor within the prevailing factory system. Capitalism
has transformed that factory system. Workers who remain in basic industry are not
fighting for union representation. They simply want to keep their jobs. Those who remain
employed will not tend to enter into confrontations with capital as long as wages and
benefits retain a modicum of acceptability. That is the main reason industrial workers
tend to be quiescent and will remain so for some time to come.
In the 1930s, workers occupied huge factories and battled the bosses over the right to
a union. The bosses wanted to keep these factories open and strikes tended to take on a
militant character in these showdowns. Strike actions tended to draw the working-class
together and make it easier for socialists to get a hearing. This was because strikes
were much more like mass actions and gave workers a sense of their power. The logical
next step, according to the socialists, was trade union activity on a political level
and, ultimately, rule by the workers themselves.
The brunt of the attack today has been downsizing and runaway capital. This means that
working people have a fear of being unemployed more than anything else. This fear grips
the nation. When a worker loses a job today, he or she tends to look for personal
solutions: a move to another city, signing up for computer programming classes, etc.
Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" vividly illustrated this type of personal approach Every
unemployed auto worker in this film was trying to figure out a way to solve their
problems on their own.
In the face of the atomization of the US working class, it is no surprise that many
workers seem to vote for Buchanan. He offers them a variant on the personal solution. A
worker may say to himself or herself, "Ah, this Buchanan's a racist bigot, but he's the
only one who seems to care about what's happening to me. I'll take a gamble and give him
my vote." Voting is not politics. It is the opposite of politics. It is the capitalist
system's mechanism for preventing political action.
2) Buchanan is a bourgeois politician.
Pat Buchanan represents the thinking of an element of the US ruling class, and views
the problems of the United States from within that perspective. Buchanan's nationalism
relates very closely to the nationalism of Ross Perot, another ruling class
politician.
A consensus exists among the ruling class that US capital must take a global route.
The capitalist state must eliminate trade barriers and capital must flow to where there
is greatest possibility for profit. Buchanan articulates the resentments of a section of
the bourgeoisie that wants to resist this consensus. It would be an interesting project
to discover where Buchanan gets his money. This would be a more useful of one's time than
comparing his speeches to Father Coughlin or Benito Mussolini's.
There are no parties in the United States in the European sense. In Europe, where
there is a parliamentary system, people speak for clearly defined programs and are
responsible to clearly defined constituencies. In the United States, politics revolves
around "winner take all" campaigns. This tends to put a spotlight on presidential
elections and magnify the statements of candidates all out of proportion.
Today we have minute textual analysis of what Buchanan is saying. His words take on a
heightened, almost ultra-real quality. Since he is in a horse race, the press tends to
worry over each and every inflammatory statement he makes. This tends to give his
campaign a more threatening quality than is supported by the current state of class
relations in the United States.
3) The way to fight Buchanan is by developing a class alternative.
The left needs a candidate who is as effective as Buchanan in drawing class lines.
The left has not been able to present an alternative to Buchanan. It has been making
the same kinds of mistakes that hampered the German left in the 1920s: ultraleft
sectarianism and opportunism. Our "Marxist-Leninist" groups, all 119 of them, offer
themselves individually as the answer to Pat Buchanan. Meanwhile, social democrats and
left-liberals at the Nation magazine and elsewhere are preparing all the reasons one can
think of to vote for the "lesser evil".
What the left needs to do is coalesce around a class-based, militant program. The left
has not yet written this program, despite many assurances to the contrary we can hear on
this list every day. It will have to be in the language of the American people, not in
Marxist- Leninist jargon. Some people know how speak effectively to working people. I
include Michael Moore the film-maker. I also include people like our own Doug Henwood,
and Alex Cockburn and his co-editor Ken Silverstein who put out a newsletter called
"Counterpunch".
Most of all, the model we need is like Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Party of the
turn of the century, minus the right-wing. Study the speeches of Debs and you get an idea
of the kind of language we need to speak. Our mission today remains the same as it was in
turn of the century Russia: to build a socialist party where none exists.
So what happened following the dissolution of the Soviet Union?
The United States dispatched a cabal of cutthroat economists to Moscow to assist in the
"shock therapy" campaign that collapsed the social safety net, savaged pensions, increased
unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and alcoholism by many orders of magnitude,
accelerated the slide to privatization that fueled a generation of voracious oligarchs, and
sent the real economy plunging into an excruciating long-term depression.
Basically the NWO mafia saw that there was an opportunity to loot the place and they did
it – gaining ownership – and stripping everything of value out of the place.
If the US public had the sense to realize it, it's the same as is currently happening to
them.
At the same time Washington's agents were busy looting Moscow, NATO was moving its
troops, armored divisions and missile sites closer to Russia's border in clear violation of
promises that were made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to move its military "one inch east".
Yeah, yeah . . . This reminds me of that line from Animal House: "Face it Kent, you fucked
up. You trusted us."
This was small beer in term's of betrayals the Russians have endured. What I've always
liked about them is that they aren't bellyachers, like the Iranians are at the moment.
Ignore Western Media on Putin. He remains The Indispensable Man for Russia so he isn't
going anywhere for the moment. I'm sure he'd love to become the Russian version of Deng but
that's going to take a lot of preparatory work for him to get there.
@Huxley Very true and this idea that man sets himself at the top of the creation is
exactly the philosophy of "Human Rights", the Masonic model imposed through the UN to the
whole world.
This ideology was launched by Freemasonry during the "Enlightenment", in the 18th century. It
produced the Masonic French Revolution, the Masonic US republic and later the concept of
"democracy".
Published in 1899 by Don Felix Sarda Y Salvany: Liberalism is a sin. This is from a Catholic
priest, but we all share the same enemy. http://www.liberalismisasin.com/
@9/11 Inside job What cult of personality? There isn't one. People mostly like the
decisions he makes, not because he makes them, but because they agree with them.
As to Chabad Lubavitch, Putin is a politician – he mingles with Christians, Jews and
Muslims. As evil as Chabad Lubavitch is, Putin also mingles with the Saudi Barbarians. It's
hardly proof they control him.
Go find something real, you are making a fool of yourself spreading baseless propaganda.
Next you will tell us about the $583 trillion he has stashed away, so he can use it,
secretly, after he retires from his life-long dictatorship.
This is a very valuable article, probably the best written in 2019 on the topic, that discusses several important aspects of neoliberalism
better then its predecessors...
Notable quotes:
"... For some, and especially for those in the millennial generation, the Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started a process of reflection on what the neoliberal era had delivered. ..."
"... neoliberal policies had already wreaked havoc around the world ..."
"... "excessively rapid financial and capital market liberalization was probably the single most important cause of the crisis"; he also notes that after the crisis, the International Monetary Fund's policies "exacerbated the downturns." ..."
"... In study after study, political scientists have shown that the U.S. government is highly responsive to the policy preferences of the wealthiest people, corporations, and trade associations -- and that it is largely unresponsive to the views of ordinary people. The wealthiest people, corporations, and their interest groups participate more in politics, spend more on politics, and lobby governments more. Leading political scientists have declared that the U.S. is no longer best characterized as a democracy or a republic but as an oligarchy -- a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. ..."
"... Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and marketization of everything, indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism. ..."
"... neoliberalism's radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. ..."
"... Demagogues rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism, which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for a free and democratic society. ..."
"... The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy. ..."
"... They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. ..."
"... In spite of these failures, most policymakers did not have a new ideology or different worldview through which to comprehend the problems of this time. So, by and large, the collective response was not to abandon neoliberalism. After the Great Crash of 2008, neoliberals chafed at attempts to push forward aggressive Keynesian spending programs to spark demand. President Barack Obama's advisers shrank the size of the post-crash stimulus package for fear it would seem too large to the neoliberal consensus of the era -- and on top of that, they compromised on its content. ..."
"... When it came to affirmative, forward-looking policy, the neoliberal framework also remained dominant. ..."
"... It is worth emphasizing that Obamacare's central feature is a private marketplace in which people can buy their own health care, with subsidies for individuals who are near the poverty line ..."
"... Fearful of losing their seats, centrists extracted these concessions from progressives. Little good it did them. The president's party almost always loses seats in midterm elections, and this time was no different. For their caution, centrists both lost their seats and gave Americans fewer and worse health care choices. ..."
"... The Republican Party platform in 2012, for example, called for weaker Wall Street, environmental, and worker safety regulations; lower taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals; and further liberalization of trade. It called for abolishing federal student loans, in addition to privatizing rail, western lands, airport security, and the post office. Republicans also continued their support for cutting health care and retirement security. After 40 years moving in this direction -- and with it failing at every turn -- you might think they would change their views. But Republicans didn't, and many still haven't. ..."
"... Although neoliberalism had little to offer, in the absence of a new ideological framework, it hung over the Obama presidency -- but now in a new form. Many on the center-left adopted what we might call the "technocratic ideology," a rebranded version of the policy minimalism of the 1990s that replaced minimalism's tactical and pragmatic foundations with scientific ones. The term itself is somewhat oxymoronic, as technocrats seem like the opposite of ideologues. ..."
"... The technocratic ideology preserves the status quo with a variety of tactics. We might call the first the "complexity canard." ..."
"... The most frequent uses of this tactic are in sectors that economists have come to dominate -- international trade, antitrust, and financial regulation, for example. The result of this mind-set is that bold, structural reforms are pushed aside and highly technical changes adopted instead. Financial regulation provides a particularly good case, given the 2008 crash and the Great Recession. When it came time to establish a new regulatory regime for the financial sector, there wasn't a massive restructuring, despite the biggest crash in 70 years. ..."
"... Instead, for the most part, the Dodd-Frank Act was classically technocratic. It kept the sector basically the same, with a few tweaks here and there. There was no attempt to restructure the financial sector completely. ..."
"... The Volcker Rule, for example, sought to ban banks from proprietary trading. But instead of doing that through a simple, clean breakup rule (like the one enacted under the old Glass-Steagall regime), the Volcker Rule was subject to a multitude of exceptions and carve-outs -- measures that federal regulators were then required to explain and implement with hundreds of pages of technical regulations ..."
"... Dodd-Frank also illustrates a second tenet of the technocratic ideology: The failures of technocracy can be solved by more technocracy. ..."
"... Dodd-Frank created the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a government body tasked with what is called macroprudential regulation. What this means is that government regulators are supposed to monitor the entire economy and turn the dials of regulation up and down a little bit to keep the economy from another crash. But ask yourself this: Why would we ever believe they could do such a thing? We know those very same regulators failed to identify, warn about, or act on the 2008 crisis. ..."
"... In the first stage, neoliberalism gained traction in response to the crises of the 1970s. It is easy to think of Thatcherism and Reaganism as emerging fully formed, springing from Zeus's head like the goddess Athena. ..."
"... Early leaders were not as ideologically bold as later mythmakers think. In the second stage, neoliberalism became normalized. It persisted beyond the founding personalities -- and, partly because of its longevity in power, grew so dominant that the other side adopted it. ..."
"... Eventually, however, the neoliberal ideology extended its tentacles into every area of policy and even social life, and in its third stage, overextended. The result in economic policy was the Great Crash of 2008, economic stagnation, and inequality at century-high levels. In foreign policy, it was the disastrous Iraq War and ongoing chaos and uncertainty in the Middle East. ..."
"... The fourth and final stage is collapse, irrelevance, and a wandering search for the future. With the world in crisis, neoliberalism no longer has even plausible solutions to today's problems. ..."
"... The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to restitch the fraying social fabric, in which people are increasingly tribal, divided, and disconnected from civic community ..."
Welcome
to theDecade From Hell,
our look back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and
ended in a cavalcade of despair.The long-dominant ideology brought us forever
wars, the Great Recession, and extreme inequality. Good riddance.
With the 2008 financial crash and the Great Recession, the ideology of neoliberalism lost
its force. The approach to politics, global trade, and social philosophy that defined an era
led not to never-ending prosperity but utter disaster. "Laissez-faire is finished," declared
French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in testimony
before Congress that his ideology was flawed. In an extraordinary statement, Australian Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd declared that the crash "called into question the prevailing neoliberal
economic orthodoxy of the past 30 years -- the orthodoxy that has underpinned the national and
global regulatory frameworks that have so spectacularly failed to prevent the economic mayhem
which has been visited upon us."
"... Steven Klein is a political theorist who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. He writes and teaches about democracy, the welfare state, and European political thought. ..."
A recent critique of Karl Polanyi reveals more about the limits of our current political debates than anything about the
man himself.
Globalization has not been doing so well lately. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the idea that unfettered free markets
bring unadulterated benefits to society has lost its sheen. Trump's election demolished Republican Party catechisms around
free trade. The irony of our current moment is that the center-left politicians, traditionally wary of markets, have become
the great defenders of global openness, while the opponents of globalization are gravitating to the nationalist right.
Once a relatively obscure Hungarian academic, Karl Polanyi has posthumously become one of the central figures in debates
about globalization. This recent interest in his thought has occasioned an unsympathetic treatment by Jeremy Adelman in the
Boston Review
.
Adelman, a Princeton professor, has scores to settle with Polanyi. But his article ends up revealing more about the limits
of our current political debates than anything about the man himself.
Polanyi's classic book,
The Great Transformation:
The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
, published in 1944, argued that the utopian obsession with
self-adjusting markets had wreaked havoc in nineteenth-century European society, eventually laying the groundwork for the
rise of fascism. His once unfashionable views have witnessed a remarkable revival of late. His name is frequently invoked
when describing the dangers that global market integration poses to democracy. Polanyi has now moved one step closer to
intellectual canonization with the publication of Gareth Dale's excellent biography,
Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left
(2016), the impetus of Adelman's article.
First, there
are
aspects of Polanyi's thought worth criticizing. His historical account of the origins of the
market society is murky. He neglects gender, race, and colonialism, although he was a supporter of anti-colonial struggles.
Yet, instead, Adelman returns to a well-worn and wrong-headed criticism of Polanyi: that his thought represents a romantic
revolt against markets in favor of a warm communalism, a stance that inevitably leads to violent nationalism and tyrannical
"collectivism."
More troubling still is Adelman's explanation for why Polanyi was supposedly attracted to romantic attacks on
liberalism. In Adelman's telling, Polanyi, who was born into an assimilated Jewish family but converted to Christianity,
suffered from a sort of intellectual Stockholm Syndrome: Excluded from European society, he romanticized his murderous
oppressors. He longed for the communal belonging that was denied to him as a Jew. And so Polanyi, Adelman declares, wanted
to "merge into the national
Volk
." This desire explains his "blind spot for reactionary nationalism," which "would
only grow with time" as he looked to the passions of nationalist belonging "as a way to restore a sense of fraternal
community." Polanyi's rejection of liberalism was thus a rejection of his own Judaism. He attacked market liberalism and
excused reactionary nationalism because of his unfulfillable desire to belong in a Europe defined by ethnic unity and
anti-Semitism.
Now, there is much to be said about Polanyi's social circumstances and life story, beautifully recounted in Dale's
biography. The complex identity of assimilated Jewish elites in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Polanyi's lifelong
attraction to Christianity certainly informed his thinking. There is also a larger story here about the attraction of
interwar Jewish intellectuals to various strains of Christianity. Perhaps this fascination reflected a degree of
self-loathing for highly educated Jews, caught in the double binds of Jewish identity: either too assimilated and therefore
incapable of authenticity, or else clinging to their primitive roots. Or perhaps a radical interpretation of aspects of
Christianity provided such Jews with a standpoint to criticize Europe without having their criticisms dismissed on account
of their Judaism. These are all interesting and worthy questions.
For Adelman, though, Polanyi's conversion to Christianity is a bludgeon with which to attack him, a crude device to
explain Polanyi's (again supposed) hatred for European liberalism. But the idea that Polanyi, who was forced to flee
Europe, is some sort of apologist for nationalism is just plain wrong. Indeed, he viewed European liberalism's attachment
to market fundamentalism as the barrier to an alliance between democratically inclined liberals and the working masses. The
worst that could be said of him on this account is that he underestimates nationalism as a source of opposition to markets,
although he certainly was aware of the fascist threat. But his central point was always that, if we want to avoid an
authoritarian reaction to the ravages of the market, we need to develop a democratic alternative to pro-market liberalism.
To tar Polanyi with the brush of reactionary nationalism, Adelman makes some strange claims. For instance, he argues
that Polanyi affiliates Judaism with liberalism, both of which he then views as stepping stones to Christianity and
socialism, respectively. The only problem is that Polanyi explicitly associated
Christianity
, and not Judaism,
with liberalism -- Christianity revealed the principle of individual freedom that is the core of liberalism -- and, for him, both
Christianity and liberalism stood in need of a revision that would push them toward democratic socialism. Of course, deeply
internalized anti-Semitism could be more important than Polanyi's actual statements. The problem with such psychological
arguments, though, is their pointillist quality: They cohere better from afar than up close.
Reading Polanyi is admittedly a frustrating experience. He mixes high theory, historical narrative, and overheated
journalistic polemic into a distinct mélange. Yet at the center of his thinking is a brilliant idea: that the three core
"inputs" of the economy -- labor, land, and money -- are what he calls "fictitious" commodities. By this, Polanyi means that, try
as we might, workers are never going to move at a moment's notice to wherever markets dictate, markets aren't going to
replenish rivers and fields, and governments will bail out banks to keep money flowing. To take one not-exactly-random
example: Since land, to Polanyi, is more than just a resource for market exchange, so too will housing only ever be a
partial commodity. Access to housing is a vital interest, and so democracies will face pressure to introduce a variety of
regulations that "distort" housing markets. So, it is hardly surprising that the financial crisis was centered on
mortgages -- try as we might, we will never get housing markets to be the smooth, frictionless edifices imagined by
economists. A house cannot be moved like a bushel of wheat. Adelman misses the significance of these arguments because he
reduces Polanyi's thinking to the binary of morality or markets. But the central opposition, for Polanyi, is
democracy
or markets. Democratic demands for social protection conflict with the dictates of the market, a fact that is ever
more apparent in our era of financial capitalism.
Adelman boils this down to a simplistic rejection of the market as such, an inability to see how markets can function as
engines of wealth-creation and need-satisfaction. But here Polanyi fully agrees with Adelman about the remarkable potential
of markets. Polanyi's attack on market liberalism is not that it impoverishes the masses in favor of the rich. The problem
with markets, for him, is that they are
so good
at producing efficiencies that they tend to override all other
considerations. To unlock their full potential, markets require the subordination of all individual, social, and political
institutions to their dictates.
Polanyi expresses this as the tension between habitation and improvement: We cannot live off the land while we improve
the land. This is a lesson that the Greeks and other Europeans are currently learning first-hand, as the search for
long-term competitiveness through "structural reforms" leads to massive unemployment. Polanyi thinks this hunt is
politically unrealistic and potentially explosive. Societies create moral expectations around fairness, rewards for effort,
and stability that markets, by their nature, cannot meet. What is efficient from a market perspective can be profoundly
harmful from a human perspective -- Polanyi learned this as a teenager, when his father went through a traumatic bankruptcy.
If Polanyi's argument was just that markets were immiserating and destroyed communal integration, we should certainly
consign him to the dustbin of failed moral economists. Fortunately, that was not his view. But Adelman's line of attack
reveals more about our contemporary moment than it does about Polanyi. It speaks to a growing rift between liberalism and
the left. Liberals want globalization with a human face, while leftists echo Polanyi in fundamentally questioning the
undemocratic political infrastructure of our current market era. The unexpected strength of Sanders in the United States,
Mélenchon in France, and now Corbyn in the UK shows that old political dogmas are dying.
Adelman's read of Polanyi reinforces the liberal view that globalization is a done deal and left anti-globalization
rests on a romantic fantasy, one that cannot but appease the racism and nationalism of the "losers" of the market. Just as,
if you squint hard enough, you can persuade yourself that Polanyi is a sort of self-hating, pseudo-nationalist reactionary,
despite his professed socialism, so too, if you work at it, can you merge Sanders and Trump, Mélenchon and Le Pen into one
anti-globalization, anti-liberal morass.
Yet Polanyi provides a vital avenue out of this paralyzing deadlock between pro-globalization liberalism and nationalist
populism. Our contemporary market order is in crisis not because of fuzzy-headed leftists, adorned in too many buttons, who
refuse to get with the program. Nor is the crisis one last revolt from the losers of globalization, animated by the fever
dreams of white Americans and "native" Europeans. Our order is in crisis because it has failed to deliver on its own
promise of widely distributed, real growth. For Polanyi, the central problem was how to channel the reaction to such
inevitable failures in a democratic rather than authoritarian direction. Polanyi saw many different avenues toward this
goal, including Roosevelt's New Deal. Today, of course, we face different political conditions, but many similar problems:
a massively exploitative consumer credit "marketplace," the degraded power of workers, and flows of speculative capital
that undermine democracy. Tackling these issues, though, will require a more foundational rethink of a global institutional
order that facilitates market exchange above all else.
One last thought: Adelman takes capitalism's revival after World War II as an embarrassment for Polanyi. To be sure,
Polanyi failed to foresee the remarkable resiliency of capitalism, produced in part by the ability of elites to absorb the
undercurrents of his own teaching and construct a form of embedded, organized capitalism. The flipside of post-war
capitalism, though, was the creation of an environmental crisis the full scope of which has only now become apparent. If
Polanyi failed to predict the persistence of our market society, he was certainly prescient about the destructive
environmental implications of unconstrained growth. In this respect, as in many others, we should heed his warnings and
learn from his thought, as today the stakes could hardly be higher.
Steven Klein
is a
political theorist who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. He writes and teaches
about democracy, the welfare state, and European political thought.
"... Yet it took until 1860 for the UK to fully embrace free trade, and even then the unpalatable historical record is that during this 'golden age', the British: Destroyed the Indian textile industry to benefit their own cloth manufacturers; Started the Opium Wars to balance UK-China trade by selling China addictive drugs; Ignored the Irish Potato Famine and continued to allow Irish wheat exports; Forced Siam (Thailand) to open up its economy to trade with gunboats (as the US did with Japan); and Colonized much of Africa and Asia. ..."
"... Regardless, the first flowering of free trade collapsed back into nationalism and protectionism - bloodily so in 1914. Free trade was tried again from 1919 - but burned-out even more bloodily in the 1930s and 1940s. After WW2, most developed countries had moderately free trade - but most developing countries did not. We only started to re-embrace global free trade from the 1990s onwards when the Cold War ended – and here it is under stress again. In short, only around 100 years in a total of 5,000 years of civilization has seen real global free trade, it has failed twice already, and it is once again coming under pressure. ..."
"... Of course, this doesn't mean liked-minded groups of countries with similar-enough or sympathetic-enough economies and politics should avoid free trade: clearly for some states it can work out nicely - even if within the EU one could argue there are also underlying strains. However, it is a huge stretch to assume a one-size-fits-all free trade policy will always work best for all countries, as some would have it. That is a fairy tale. History shows it wasn't the case; national security concerns show it can never always be the case; and Ricardo argues this logically won't be the case. ..."
"When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!" (Alice
in Wonderland, Chapter 4, The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill)
Submitted by Michael Every of Rabobank
2020 starts with markets feeling optimistic due to a US-China trade deal and a reworked NAFTA in the form of the USMCA. However,
the tide towards protectionism may still be coming in, not going out.
The intellectual appeal of the basis for free trade, Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, where Portugal specializes in
wine, and the UK in cloth, is still clearly there. Moreover, trade has always been a beneficial and enriching part of human culture.
Yet the fact is that for the majority of the last 5,000 years global trade has been highly-politicized and heavily-regulated . Indeed,
global free-trade only began following the abolition of the UK Corn Laws in 1846, which reduced British agricultural tariffs, brought
in European wheat and corn, and allowed the UK to maximize its comparative advantage in industry.
Yet it took until 1860 for the UK to fully embrace free trade, and even then the unpalatable historical record is that during
this 'golden age', the British:
Destroyed the Indian textile industry to benefit their own cloth manufacturers;
Started the Opium Wars to balance UK-China trade by selling China addictive drugs;
Ignored the Irish Potato Famine and continued to allow Irish wheat exports;
Forced Siam (Thailand) to open up its economy to trade with gunboats (as the US did with Japan); and
Colonized much of Africa and Asia.
As we showed back in '
Currency
and Wars ', after an initial embrace of free trade, the major European powers and Japan saw that their relative comparative advantage
meant they remained at the bottom of the development ladder as agricultural producers, an area where prices were also being depressed
by huge US output; meanwhile, the UK sold industrial goods, ran a huge trade surplus, and ruled the waves militarily. This was politically
unsustainable even though the UK vigorously backed the intellectual concept of free trade given it was such a winner from it.
Regardless, the first flowering of free trade collapsed back into nationalism and protectionism - bloodily so in 1914. Free
trade was tried again from 1919 - but burned-out even more bloodily in the 1930s and 1940s. After WW2, most developed countries had
moderately free trade - but most developing countries did not. We only started to re-embrace global free trade from the 1990s onwards
when the Cold War ended – and here it is under stress again. In short, only around 100 years in a total of 5,000 years of civilization
has seen real global free trade, it has failed twice already, and it is once again coming under pressure.
What are we getting wrong? Perhaps that Ricardo's theory has major flaws that don't get included in our textbooks, as summarized
in this overlooked quote
"It would undoubtedly be advantageous to the capitalists of England [that] the wine and cloth should both be made in Portugal
[and that] the capital and labour of England employed in making cloth should be removed to Portugal for that purpose." Which is pretty
much what happens today! However, Ricardo adds that this won't happen because "Most men of property [will be] satisfied with a low
rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations," which
is simply not true at all! In other words, his premise is flawed in that:
It is atemporal in assuming countries move to their comparative advantage painlessly and instantly;
It assumes full employment when if there is unemployment a country is better off producing at home to reduce it, regardless
of higher cost;
It assumes capital between countries is immobile , i.e., investors don't shift money and technology abroad. (Which Adam Smith's
'Wealth of Nations', Book IV, Chapter II also assumes doesn't happen, as an "invisible hand" keeps money invested in one's home
country's industry and not abroad: we don't read him correctly either.);
It assumes trade balances under free trade - but since when has this been true? Rather we see large deficits and inverse capital
flows, and so debts steadily increasing in deficit countries;
It assumes all goods are equal as in Ricardo's example, cloth produced in the UK and wine produced in Portugal are equivalent.
Yet some sectors provide well-paid and others badly-paid employment: why only produce the latter?
As Ricardo's theory requires key conditions that are not met in reality most of the time, why are we surprised that most of reality
fails to produce idealised free trade most of the time? Several past US presidents before Donald Trump made exactly that point. Munroe
(1817-25) argued: " The conditions necessary for Free Trade's success - reciprocity and international peace - have never occurred
and cannot be expected ". Grant (1869-77) noted "Within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer,
it too will adopt free trade".
Yet arguably we are better, not worse, off regardless of these sentiments – so hooray! How so? Well, did you know that Adam Smith,
who we equate with free markets, and who created the term "mercantile system" to describe the national-protectionist policies opposed
to it, argued the US should remain an agricultural producer and buy its industrial goods from the UK? It was Founding Father Alexander
Hamilton who rejected this approach, and his "infant industry" policy of industrialization and infrastructure spending saw the US
emerge as the world's leading economy instead. That was the same development model that, with tweaks, was then adopted by pre-WW1
Japan, France, and Germany to successfully rival the UK; and then post-WW2 by Japan (again) and South Korea; and then more recently
by China, that key global growth driver. Would we really be better off if the US was still mainly growing cotton and wheat, China
rice and apples, and the UK was making most of the world's consumer goods? Thank the lack of free trade if you think otherwise!
Yet look at the examples above and there is a further argument for more protectionism ahead. Ricardo assumes a benign global political
environment for free trade . Yet what if the UK and Portugal are rivals or enemies? What if the choice is between steel and wine?
You can't invade neighbours armed with wine as you can with steel! A large part of the trade tension between China and the US, just
as between pre-WW1 Germany and the UK, is not about trade per se: for both sides, it is about who produces key inputs with national
security implications - and hence is about relative power . This is why we hear US hawks underlining that they don't want to export
their highest technology to China, or to specialize only in agricultural exports to it as China moves up the value-chain. It also
helps underline why for most of the past 5,000 years trade has not been free. Indeed, this argument also holds true for the other
claimed benefit of free trade: the cross-flow of ideas and technology. That is great for friends, but not for those less trusted.
Of course, this doesn't mean liked-minded groups of countries with similar-enough or sympathetic-enough economies and politics
should avoid free trade: clearly for some states it can work out nicely - even if within the EU one could argue there are also underlying
strains. However, it is a huge stretch to assume a one-size-fits-all free trade policy will always work best for all countries, as
some would have it. That is a fairy tale. History shows it wasn't the case; national security concerns show it can never always be
the case; and Ricardo argues this logically won't be the case.
Yet we need not despair. The track record also shows that global growth can continue even despite protectionism, and in some cases
can benefit from it. That being said, should the US resort to more Hamiltonian policies versus everyone, not just China, then we
are in for real financial market turbulence ahead given the role the US Dollar plays today compared to the role gold played for Smith
and Ricardo! But that is a whole different fairy tale...
While I agree that the removal of Trump might be slightly beneficial (Pence-Pompeo duo initially will run scared), this Kabuki
theater with Schiff in a major role is outright silly.
Adam Schiff physically resembles a typical prosperity theology preacher -- a classic modern American snake oil salesman. And
with his baseless accusations and the fear to touch real issues , he is even worse than that -- he looks outright silly even for
the most brainwashed part of the USA electorate ;-)
As he supported the Iraq war, he has no right to occupy any elected office. He probably should be prosecuted as a war criminal.
Realistically Schiff should be viewed as yet another intelligence agency stooge, a neocon who is funded by military contractors
such as Northrop Grumman, which sells missiles to Ukraine.
The claim that Trump is influenced by Russia is a lie. His actions indicate that he is an agent of influence for Israel, not
so much for Russia. Several of his actions were more reckless and more hostile to Russia than the actions of the Obama administration.
Anyway, his policies toward Russia are not that different from Hillary's policies. Actually, Pompeo, in many ways, continues Hillary's
policies.
The claim that the withdrawal of military aid from Ukraine somehow influences the balance of power in the region was a State
department concocted scam from the very beginning. How sniper rifles and anti-tank missiles change the balance of power on the
border with the major nuclear power, who has probably second or third military in the world.? They do not.
They (especially sniper rifles) will definitely increase casualties of Ukrainian separatists (and will provoke Russian reaction
to compensate for this change of balance and thus increase casualties of the Ukrainian army provoking the escalation spiral ),
but that's about it. So more people will die in the conflict while Northrop Grumman rakes the profits.
They also increase the danger of the larger-scale conflict in the region, which is what the USA neocons badly wants to impose
really crushing sanctions on Russia. The danger of WWIII and the cost of support of the crumbling neoliberal empire with its outsize
military expenditures (which now is more difficult to compensate with loot) somehow escapes the US neocon calculations. But they
are completely detached from reality in any case.
I think Russia can cut Ukraine into Western and Eastern parts anytime with relative ease and not much resistance. Putin has
an opportunity to do this in 2014 (risking larger sanctions) as he could establish government in exile out of Yanukovich officials
and based on this restore the legitimate government in Eastern and southern region with the capital in Kharkiv, leaving Ukrainian
Taliban to rot in their own brand of far-right nationalism where the Ukraine identity is defined negatively via rabid Russophobia.
His calculation probably was that sanctions would slow down the Russia recovery from Western plunder during Yeltsin years and,
as such, it is not worth showing Western Ukrainian nationalists what level of support in Southern and Eastern regions that they
actually enjoy.
My impression is that they are passionately hated by over 50% of the population of this region. And viewed as an occupying
force, which is trying to colonize the space (which is a completely true assessment). They are viewed as American stooges, who
they are (the country is controlled from the USA embassy in any case).
And Putin's assessment might be wrong, as sanctions were imposed anyways, and now Ukraine does represent a threat to Russia
and, as such, is a huge source of instability in the region, which was the key idea of "Nulandgate" as the main task was weakening
Russia. In this sense, Euromaidan coup d'état was the major success of the Obama administration, which was a neocon controlled
administration from top to bottom.
Also unclear what Dems are trying to achieve. If Pelosi gambit, cynically speaking, was about repeating Mueller witch hunt
success in the 2018 election, that is typical wishful thinking. Mobilization of the base works both ways.
So what is the game plan for DemoRats (aka "neoliberal democrats" or "corporate democrats" -- the dominant Clinton faction
of the Democratic Party) is completely unclear.
I doubt that they will gain anything from impeachment Kabuki theater, where both sides are afraid to discuss real issues like
Douma false flag and other real Trump crimes.
Most Democratic candidates such as Warren, Biden, and Klobuchar will lose from this impeachment theater. Candidates who can
gain, such as Major Pete and Bloomberg does not matter that much.
There were a reported 119 billionaires attending the Davos confab this year – plus the
Donald, who took a day off from Impeachment to address this august gathering of the world's
movers and shakers.
There was also 1500 private jets crowding the surrounding airports – plus the notable
train-traveling 17-year old expert on planetary climate science, Greta Thunberg.
Also, among the 10 billionaires in attendance from communist China is Ren Zhenfei, founder
of Huawei and father of its CFO, Meng Wanzhou. Even as dad courts the rich and famous on the
slopes, daughter languishes in a Canadian jail waiting extradition to the US because she had
the audacity to do business with Iran against Washington's instructions and Trump's latest
fatwa against the Tehran government.
These odd juxtapositions plus countless more got us to thinking about Davos Man himself and
the ultimate juxtaposition of our times.
To wit, the combined net worth of the world's billionaires in the year 2000 was $1 trillion
, according to Forbes, but at this bublicious moment that number is reckoned at just under $10
trillion . So the 2,150 members of the Billionaires Club now have more net worth than 60% of
the world's population combined. That's 4.6 billion people!
In so noting, of course, we are not joining the Bernie Sanders/AOC/Pocahontas brigade. In a
world of free markets, honest money and de minimis government, the more billionaires the
better. But what we sincerely doubt is that there was an honest and sustainable basis for a 10X
gain in the net worth of the Billionaires Club over a two decade period when the world's
nominal GDP only rose from $35 trillion to $85 trillion, or by 2.4X .
After all, the predominately financial assets comprising the world's net worth are merely
the capitalization of its underlying income or GDP. And there is no basis in either sound
economics or basic math for the former to grow nearly four times faster than the latter for two
decades running.
Stated differently, unless the age-old laws of sound money have been repealed by the
economic gods themselves, Davos Man is fixing to become nearly as rare as Neanderthal Man or,
more to the point, has been a case of Piltdown Man all along.
Recall that the latter had been touted by some British scoundrels in 1912 to be a 500,000
year-old homo sapiens and evolution's missing link. Alas, it was actually a ho-hum 50,000
year-old human skeleton fused with the jawbone and teeth of a modern orangutan.
Billionaire Haven
As it happened, it took the world about three decades to figure out that Piltdown Man was a
hoax, but the hoax attendant to Davos Man is already plain as day. That's because by even
tolerating Greta's impending extinction hysteria and the Donald's hideous Greatest Ever Economy
boasts, the assembled billionaires are demonstrating that they are not 4X geniuses after all
– just bubble riders on the great central banking hoax of the 21st century.
Indeed, we would suppose that some kind of guilt-tripping would account for the grandly
named World Economic Forum's (WEF) solicitude for the global warming scam and its
intellectually pre-pubescent poster girl, Greta. But why in the world would the purported deep
thinkers of the WEF not laugh the Donald's malarkey right off the stage?
On the way to Switzerland he tweeted a superlative that would be the envy of the biggest
braggart in the school yard:
"We are now NUMBER ONE in the Universe, by FAR!! .
And then he thickened the goo while at the podium in Davos:
America's newfound prosperity is undeniable, unprecedented and unmatched anywhere in the
world America made this stunning turnaround not by making minor changes to a handful of
policies but by adopting a whole new approach. Every decision we make is focused on improving
the lives of every day Americans. We are determined to create the highest standard of living
that anyone can imagine. "
Folks, that's just blithering poppycock. We are at the end of the longest and weakest
business cycle expansion in history (month # 127), yet real median household income has barely
returned to where it stood two decades ago.
The idea that Trump-O-Nomics has anything to do with paving the way for the "highest
standard of living that anyone can imagine" is just content free bluster.
The facts actually show that the US standard of living has been stagnant for two decades,
rising and falling with the business cycle, but gaining on average the grand sum of $87 per
year (2018 $) since 1999.
That's right. As shown in the graph below, the $63,179 median reported for 2018 is
undoubtedly the high water mark for years to come, yet it represented a mere 2.7% gain from the
$61,526 level (2018 $) posted way back in 1999.
While the data for 2019 is not yet available, it is evident that the various categories of
income gain last year barely kept up with inflation, meaning that real median family income was
flat. So the coming recession in the early 2020s will send the black bars in the chart sliding
lower as they did during and after each of the recessions marked by the white space.
Here's the thing. The Donald's policies have immensely harmed the foundations on which
today's tepidly expanding business cycle rests. Yet there has been no short-run benefit in
terms of accelerating overall GDP growth, and actually a sharp deceleration of business
investment and export growth.
Likewise, the vaunted 70% of GDP attributable to personal consumption spending (PCE) is been
essentially kept alive by borrowing.
Nearly 67% of the gain in personal consumption expenditures since Q4 2012, when the US
economy had fully recovered from the Great Recession, has been accounted for by household debt
growth. The latter (purple bars) is up by a fully $2.4 trillion to a record $16 trillion
compared to personal consumption (PCE) growth of just $3.6 trillion during the same 81 month
period.
What the "strong economy" gummers forget, of course, is that sooner or later you have to pay
the piper when the economy becomes as debt-ridden as today's world. You are supposed to
actually pay down debt during the up-phase of the cycle, but self-evidently that has not
remotely happened this time around the barn.
So you can boast about the Greatest Economy Ever if you are the Donald and reassure about a
"solid" economy if you are stock-options rich Davos Man, but that doesn't gainsay the
unsustainable economic and monetary rot upon which it is all based.
At the end of the day, what the Donald is crowing about is simply the residual momentum of
the debt-ridden, growth-impaired economy he inherited, and what the geniuses gathered at Davos
are calling a "strong" economy is actually a mere simulacrum of a real business boom – a
fiction slathered in artificially and irrationally soaring share prices and stock options
The truth is, we are heading into the strum-und-drang of the Turbulent Twenties, but the
alleged adults in the room at Davos don't have a clue. They apparently think America's
three-decade long fantasy of free lunch economics and unhinged partisan warfare is sustainable
indefinitely.
It's not.
If you are sitting on phantasmagorical stock market paper values and not sweating bullets
about the implications of the central banks' $25 trillion balance sheet, the world's $255
trillion of debt, the Red Ponzi's monumental malinvestment, the Donald's war on trade,
immigrants and fiscal sanity, the bipartisan war on constitutional government in America, the
Empire's claim to global extraterritoriality and the statist grab for power in the name of a
phony climate crisis, then you are not paying attention.
Each and every one of these force vectors are bearing down ominously upon the pathway ahead.
But the malignancies of runaway debt and egregiously inflated financial bubbles stand front and
center.
Here is a graph of US net worth versus national income (GDP) gains since Q4 2000, and it
speaks for itself. To wit:
The net worth of the top 1% (brown line) has soared from $11.8 trillion to $34.5 trillion
or by 193% ;
The nominal GDP has risen from $10.5 trillion to $21.5 trillion or by 106% ; and,
The net worth of the bottom 50% has crept up from $1.4 trillion to $1.7 trillion or by
just 17% .
Needless to say, when the wealth of the top 1% (1.3 million households) is growing at nearly
twice the rate of national income and by 11X more than the bottom half of households ( 63.5
million), there is absolutely nothing sustainable about it.
In fact, it's the reason why the real extinction threat at this week's confab in Switzerland
is not the one Greta is scolding her elders about, but of Davos Man himself.
And if they cannot tell that Trump is the greatest economic charlatan to ever grace high
office in the world's largest economy, they surely well and truly deserve their fate.
Nations with 56% of world GDP have declining annual births and childbearing populations,
nations with 35% of GDP have declining births but still rising/flat childbearing populations,
nations with less than 9% of world GDP have rising births and childbearing populations.
Detailed below are 1950 through 2040 annual births, female childbearing, and female
post-childbearing populations of worlds largest economies. Utilizing UN World Population
Prospects 2019 data.
In the wake of the great financial crisis of 2009, ZIRP/NIRP were utilized, federal deficit
spending soared, asset prices skyrocketed, employment rose to record levels...but strangely
fertility rates and total births have continued falling. Actually, collapsing. Record wealth
has been accompanied by record low birth rates and unwillingness to have children, suggesting
that those reaping the gains of the asset-price-pallooza are not of childbearing age. The
policies since 2009 have rewarded asset holders for being asset holders and penalized young,
poor, and those without assets...for being without assets.
Simply put, costs of living and assets have risen far faster than incomes. Rent, daycare,
insurance, education, healthcare, etc. etc. have taken a progressively greater share of income
leading to fewer and later marriages, fewer and later children, and a general unwillingness to
reproduce. All this has led to collapsing populations of young (and now young adults) among the
nations that consume over 90% of the worlds exports and ultimately means collapsing demand
while excess capacity is set to soar.
So, today I show that of the top 50+ global economies, 6 have rising annual births and
childbearing populations, 9 have falling annual births but still have a rising or flat
childbearing population (the precursor to depopulation), 35+ have falling births, a falling
childbearing population, are in secular decline, and depopulating from the bottom up (negative
birth rates coupled with declining childbearing populations) . Essentially, global consumer
bases are collapsing from the young up, and this situation is only accelerating...and more
debt, more QE, more interest rate cuts are only pushing birth rates and total births lower.
The 20 to 40 and 40+ year-old populations of females are not so much projections as simple
math, these females already exist and are just shifted forward through the next twenty years
assuming existing immigration patterns. Births from 2020 on are projections. Nations are in
order of the percentage change of their 20 to 40 year-old female childbearing populations from
2020 through 2040. GDP and % of total global GDP are also included for
relativity.
Falling (births falling, childbearing population also declining)
***For those nations with large variations of significantly faster declines among
childbearing population than projected in births, I add an estimated dashed line with declining
births mirroring declining childbearing populations.
Taiwan (#15 GDP, 0.7%)
Taiwan 2020 – 2040
20-40 year old females -1.15 million, -35%
Est. annual births -61k, -35% (UN projects -17k, -10%)
40+ year old females +1.3 million, +20%
South Korea (#9 GDP, 1.9%)
South Korea 2020 – 2040
20-40 year old females -2.1 million, -33%
Est. annual births -100k, -33% (UN projects -20k, -6%)
40+ year old females +2.6 million, +17%
Singapore (#21 GDP, 0.4%)
Singapore 2020 – 2040
20-40 year old females -210k, -26%
Est. annual births -30k, -50% (UN projects -18k, -30%)
Many will applaud the fast declining and decelerating population growth of the nations that
do all the consuming, but we are fast approaching a demographic and economic waterfall among
the consuming nations that will leave little to no export led growth potential for poor
nations. And that, coupled with increasingly widely available access to birth control, means
poor nations economic growth (plus birth rates and total births) are likely to follow the
consumer nations down. The outcome is a global inverted pyramid with surging elderly
populations (and the policies to support them) the cause of collapsing young populations.
And what if the 3rd world finds itself and replaces its dependencies? It has the
population growth that the primitive economic model required for the initial cheap labor and
consumption growth.
Get your heads out of your own gimme gimme arseholes and think a bit more laterally.
No you IDIOT (The dumbass who wrote this article) its so simple its not even funny.
When women aren't allowed to work= lots of children born
When women are allowed to work= no children born.
Its so pathetically simple, and to the thomas malthusians who claim this is a good thing,
earth's population isn't getting smaller, the only thing that happens when your wet
depopulation dreams come true is lower iq populations outgrowing higher iq populations and
taking over their territory. Despite your best efforts, african, south american, and indian
populations are still pooping out 8-9 kids.
Demographics is destiny and we will have no chance if we do not face reality.
We don't have enough good jobs and resources for the population now, of course things have
to be done to reduce birth rates. And people living longer just makes things worse. But keep
eating junk food and being a medical zombie because you know...more jobs.
Japan is in real trouble on this issue. Their elderly population is huge and all the young
men prefer virtual girls to real ones. That is going to cripple their economy over the next
two decades.
True. But one day - the Japanese will start having kids again. And their country will still be Japanese and be not overrun by hordes of invaders on
welfare. So it will work itself out.
Global human population passed global sustainable levels late in the 19th Century. Our genius economists need to come up with a new economic model that does not require
endless population growth and resource consumption.
Good luck with that. Economics is a science that failed.
"... But even I was flabbergasted by what Trump did. Absolutely gobsmacked. Killing Qassem Soleimani, Iranian general, leader of the Quds forces, and the most respected military leader in the Middle East? And ..."
"... The first thing, the thing that is so sad and so infuriating and so centrally symptomatic of everything wrong with American political culture, is that, with painfully few exceptions, Americans have no idea of what their government has done. They have no idea who Qassem Soleimani was, what he has accomplished, the web of relationships, action, and respect he has built, what his assassination means and will bring. The last person who has any clue about this, of course, is Donald Trump, who called Soleimani " a total monster ." His act of killing Soleimani is the apotheosis of the abysmal, arrogant ignorance of U.S. political culture. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Whatever their elected governments say, we'll will keep our army in Syria to "take the oil," and in Iraq to well, to do whatever the hell we want. ..."
"... Sure, we make the rules and you follow our orders. ..."
I've been writing and speaking for months about the looming danger of war with Iran, often to
considerable skepticism.
In June, in an essay entitled "
Eve of
Destruction: Iran Strikes Back ," after the U.S. initiated its "maximum pressure" blockade of
Iranian oil exports, I pointed out that "Iran considers that it is already at war," and that the
downing of the U.S. drone was a sign that "Iran is calling the U.S. bluff on escalation
dominance."
In an October
essay , I pointed out that Trump's last-minute calling off of the U.S. attack on Iran in
June, his demurral again after the Houthi attack on Saudi oil facilities, and his announced
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria were seen as "catastrophic" and "a big win for Iran" by the
Iran hawks in Israel and America whose efforts New York Times (NYT) detailed in an
important article, " The Secret History
of the Push to Strike Iran ." I said, with emphasis, " It always goes to Iran ," and
underlined that Trump's restraint was particularly galling to hard-line zionist Republican
Senators, and might have opened a path to impeachment. I cited the reported
statement
of a "veteran political consultant" that "The price of [Lindsey] Graham's support would be an
eventual military strike on Iran."
And in the middle of December, I went way out on a limb, in
an essay suggesting
a possible relation between preparations for war in Iran and the impeachment process. I pointed
out that the strategic balance of forces between Israel and Iran had reached the point where
Israel thinks it's "necessary to take Iran down now ," in "the next six months," before
the Iranian-supported Axis of Resistance accrues even more power. I speculated that the need to
have a more reliable and internationally-respected U.S. President fronting a conflict with Iran
might be the unseen reason -- behind the flimsy Articles of Impeachment -- that explains why
Pelosi and Schumer "find it so urgent to replace Trump before the election and why they
think they can succeed in doing that."
So, I was the guy chicken-littling about impending war with Iran.
But even I was flabbergasted by what Trump did. Absolutely gobsmacked. Killing Qassem
Soleimani, Iranian general, leader of the Quds forces, and the most respected military leader in
the Middle East? And Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, Iraqi commander of the Popular Mobilization
Forces (PMF) unit, Kataib Hezbollah? Did not see that coming. Rage. Fear. Sadness.
Anxiety. A few days just to register that it really happened. To see the millions of people
bearing witness to it. Yes, that happened.
Then there was the anxious anticipation about the Iranian response, which came surprisingly
quickly, and with admirable military and political precision, avoiding a large-scale war in the
region, for the moment.
That was the week that was.
But, as the man said: "It ain't over 'til it's over." And it ain't over. Recognizing the
radical uncertainty of the world we now live in, and recognizing that its future will be
determined by actors and actions far away from the American leftist commentariat, here's what I
need to say about the war we are now in.
The first thing, the thing that is so sad and so infuriating and so centrally symptomatic
of everything wrong with American political culture, is that, with painfully few exceptions,
Americans have no idea of what their government has done. They have no idea who Qassem Soleimani
was, what he has accomplished, the web of relationships, action, and respect he has built, what
his assassination means and will bring. The last person who has any clue about this, of course,
is Donald Trump, who called Soleimani "
a total monster ." His act of killing Soleimani is the apotheosis of the abysmal, arrogant
ignorance of U.S. political culture.
It's virtually impossible to explain to Americans because there is no one of comparable
stature in the U.S. or in the West today. As Iran cleric Shahab Mohadi
said , when talking about what a "proportional response" might be: "[W]ho should we consider
to take out in the context of America? 'Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man
and SpongeBob? 'All of their heroes are cartoon characters -- they're all fictional." Trump?
Lebanese Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah said what many throughout the world familiar with both of
them would agree with: "the shoe of Qassem Soleimani is worth the head of Trump and all American
leaders."
To understand the respect Soleimani has earned, not only in Iran (where his popularity was
around
80% ) but throughout the region and across political and sectarian lines, you have to know
how he led and organized the forces that helped save
Christians ,
Kurds , Yazidis and others from being
slaughtered by ISIS, while Barack Obama and John Kerry were still "
watching " ISIS advance and using it as a tool
to "manage" their war against Assad.
In an informative
interview
with Aaron Maté, Former Marine Intelligence Officer and weapons inspector, Scott Ritter,
explains how Soleimani is honored in Iraq for organizing the resistance that saved Baghdad from
being overrun by ISIS -- and the same could be said of Syria, Damascus, or Ebril:
He's a legend in Iran, in Iraq, and in Syria. And anywhere where, frankly speaking, he's
operated, the people he's worked with view him as one of the greatest leaders, thinkers, most
humane men of all time. I know in America we demonize him as a terrorist but the fact is he
wasn't, and neither is Mr. Mohandes.
When ISIS [was] driving down on the city of Baghdad, the U.S. armed and trained Iraqi Army had
literally thrown down their weapons and ran away, and there was nothing standing between ISIS and
Baghdad
[Soleimani] came in from Iran and led the creation of the PMF [Popular Mobilization Forces] as
a viable fighting force and then motivated them to confront Isis in ferocious hand-to-hand combat
in villages and towns outside of Baghdad, driving Isis back and stabilizing the situation that
allowed the United States to come in and get involved in the Isis fight. But if it weren't for
Qassem Soleimani and Mohandes and Kataib Hezbollah, Baghdad might have had the black flag of ISIS
flying over it. So the Iraqi people haven't forgotten who stood up and defended Baghdad from the
scourge of ISIS.
So, to understand Soleimani in Western terms, you'd have to evoke someone like World War II
Eisenhower (or Marshall Zhukov, but that gets another blank stare from Americans.) Think I'm
exaggerating? Take it from the family of the Shah
:
Beyond his leadership of the fight against ISIS, you also have to understand Soleimani's
strategic acumen in building the Axis of Resistance -- the network of armed local groups like
Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the PMF in Iraq, that Soleimani helped organize and provide with
growing military capability. Soleimani meant standing up; he helped people throughout the region
stand up to the shit the Americans, Israelis, and Saudis were constantly dumping on them
More apt than Eisenhower and De Gaulle, in world-historical terms, try something like Saladin
meets Che. What a tragedy, and travesty, it is that legend-in-his-own-mind Donald Trump killed
this man.
Dressed to Kill
But it is not just Trump, and not just the assassination of Soleimani, that we should focus
on. These are actors and events within an ongoing conflict with Iran, which was ratcheted up when
the U.S. renounced the nuclear deal (JCPOA – Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and
instituted a "maximum pressure" campaign of economic and financial sanctions on Iran and
third countries, designed to drive Iran's oil exports to zero.
The purpose of this blockade is to create enough social misery to force Iran into compliance,
or provoke Iran into military action that would elicit a "justifiable" full-scale,
regime-change -- actually state-destroying -- military attack on the country.
From its inception, Iran has correctly understood this blockade as an act of war, and has
rightfully expressed its determination to fight back. Though it does not want a wider war, and
has so far carefully calibrated its actions to avoid making it necessary, Iran will
fight back however it deems necessary.
The powers-that-be in Iran and the U.S. know they are at war, and that the Soleimani
assassination ratcheted that state of war up another significant notch; only Panglossian American
pundits think the "w" state is yet to be avoided. Sorry, but the United States drone-bombed an
Iranian state official accompanied by an Iraqi state official, in Iraq at the invitation of the
Iraqi Prime Minister, on a conflict-resolution mission requested by Donald Trump himself. In
anybody's book, that is an act of war -- and extraordinary treachery, even in wartime, the
equivalent of shooting someone who came to parley under a white flag.
Indeed, we now know that the assassination of Soleimani was only one of two known
assassination attempts against senior Iranian officers that day. There was also an unsuccessful
strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai, another key commander in Iran's Quds Force who has been
active in Yemen. According to the
Washington Post , this marked a "departure for the Pentagon's mission in Yemen,
which has sought to avoid direct involvement" or make "any publicly acknowledged attacks on
Houthi or Iranian leaders in Yemen."
Of course, because it's known as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," the Pentagon wants
to avoid "publicly" bloodying its hands in the Saudi war in Yemen. Through two presidential
administrations, it has been trying to minimize attention to its indispensable support of, and
presence in, Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen with
drone strikes ,
special
forces operations , refueling of aircraft, and intelligence and targeting. It's such a nasty
business that even the U.S. Congress
passed a bipartisan
resolution to end U.S. military involvement in that war, which was vetoed by Trump.
According to the ethic and logic of American exceptionalism, Iran is forbidden from helping
the Houthis, but the U.S. is allowed to assassinate their advisors and help the Saudis bomb the
crap out of them.
So, the Trump administration is clearly engaged in an organized campaign to take out senior
Iranian leaders, part of what it considers a war against Iran. In this war, the Trump
administration no longer pretends to give a damn about any fig leaf of law or ethics. Nobody
takes seriously the phony "imminence" excuse for killing Soleimani, which even
Trump say s "doesn't matter," or the "bloody hands" justification, which could apply to any
military commander. And let's not forget: Soleimani was "
talking about bad stuff ."
The U.S. is demonstrating outright contempt for any framework of respectful international
relations, let alone international law. National sovereignty? Democracy? Whatever their
elected governments say, we'll will keep our army in Syria to "take the oil," and in Iraq to
well, to do whatever the hell we want. "Rules-based international order"? Sure, we make
the rules and you follow our orders.
The U.S.'s determination to stay in Iraq, in defiance of the
explicit, unequivocal
demand of the friendly democratic government that the U.S. itself supposedly invaded the
country to install, is particularly significant. It draws the circle nicely. It demonstrates that
the Iraq war isn't over. Because it, and the wars in Libya and Syria, and the war that's
ratcheting up against Iran are all the same war that the U.S. has been waging in the
Middle East since 2003. In the end is the beginning, and all that.
We're now in the endgame of the serial offensive that
Wesley Clark described in
2007, starting with Iraq and "finishing off" with Iran. Since the U.S. has attacked, weakened,
divided, or destroyed every other un-coopted polity in the region (Iraq, Syria, Libya) that could
pose any serious resistance to the predations of U.S. imperialism and Israel colonialism, it has
fallen to Iran to be the last and best source of material and military support which allows that
resistance to persist.
And Iran has taken up the task, through the work of the Quds Force under leaders like
Soleimani and Shahlai, the work of building a new Axis of Resistance with the capacity to resist
the dictates of Israel and the U.S. throughout the region. It's work that is part of a
war and will result in casualties among U.S. and U.S.-allied forces and damage to their
"interests."
What the U.S. (and its wards, Israel and Saudi Arabia) fears most is precisely the kind of
material, technical, and combat support and training that allows the Houthis to beat back the
Saudis and Americans in Yemen, and retaliate with stunningly accurate blows on crucial oil
facilities in Saudi Arabia itself. The same kind of help that Soleimani gave to the armed forces
of Syria and the PMF in Iraq to prevent those countries from being overrun and torn apart by the
U.S. army and its sponsored jihadis, and to Hezbollah in Lebanon to deter Israel from demolishing
and dividing that country at will.
It's that one big "endless" war that's been waged by every president since 2003, which
American politicians and pundits have been scratching their heads and squeezing their brains to
figure out how to explain, justify (if it's their party's President in charge), denounce (if it's
the other party's POTUS), or just bemoan as "senseless." But to the neocons who are driving it
and their victims -- it makes perfect sense and is understood to have been largely a
success. Only the befuddled U.S. media and the deliberately-deceived U.S. public think it's
"senseless," and remain enmired in the
cock-up theory
of U.S. foreign policy, which is a blindfold we had better shed before being led to the next very
big slaughter.
The one big war makes perfect sense when one understands that the United States has thoroughly
internalized Israel's interests as its own. That this conflation has been successfully driven by
a particular neocon faction, and that it is excessive, unnecessary and perhaps disruptive to
other effective U.S. imperial possibilities, is demonstrated precisely by the constant plaint
from non-neocon, including imperialist, quarters that it's all so "senseless."
The result is that the primary object of U.S. policy (its internalized zionist
imperative) in this war is to enforce that Israel must be able, without any threat of serious
retaliation, to carry out any military attack on any country in the region at any time, to seize
any territory and resources (especially water) it needs, and, of course, to impose any level of
colonial violence against Palestinians -- from home demolitions, to siege and sniper killings
(Gaza), to de jure as well as de facto apartheid and eventual further mass
expulsions, if deems necessary.
That has required, above all, removing -- by co-option, regime change, or chaotogenic
sectarian warfare and state destruction -- any strong central governments that have provided
political, diplomatic, financial, material, and military support for the Palestinian resistance
to Israeli colonialism. Iran is the last of those, has been growing in strength and influence,
and is therefore the next mandatory target.
For all the talk of "Iranian proxies," I'd say, if anything, that the U.S., with its
internalized zionist imperative, is effectively acting as Israel's proxy.
It's also important, I think, to clarify the role of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in this policy. KSA is
absolutely a very important player in this project, which has been consistent with its interests.
But its (and its oil's) influence on the U.S. is subsidiary to Israel's, and depends entirely on
KSA's complicity with the Israeli agenda. The U.S. political establishment is not overwhelmingly
committed to Saudi/Wahhabi policy imperatives -- as a matter, they think, of virtue -- as they
are to Israeli/Zionist ones. It is inconceivable that a U.S. Vice-President would
declare "I am a
Wahhabi," or a U.S. President
say
"I would personally grab a rifle, get in a ditch, and fight and die" for Saudi Arabia -- with
nobody even noticing . The U.S. will turn on a dime against KSA if Israel wants it; the
reverse would never happen. We have to confront the primary driver of this policy if we are to
defeat it, and too many otherwise superb analysts, like Craig Murray, are mistaken and
diversionary, I think, in saying things like the assassination of Soleimani and the drive for war
on Iran represent the U.S. "
doubling
down on its Saudi allegiance ." So, sure, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Batman
and Robin.
Iran has quite clearly seen and understood what's unfolding, and has prepared itself for the
finale that is coming its way.
The final offensive against Iran was supposed to follow the definitive destruction of the
Syrian Baathist state, but that project was interrupted (though not yet abandoned) by the
intervention of Syria's allies, Russia and Iran -- the latter precisely via the work of Soleimani
and the Quds Force.
Current radical actions like the two assassination strikes against Iranian Quds Force
commanders signal the Trump administration jumping right to the endgame, as that neocon hawks
have been " agitating for
." The idea -- borrowed, perhaps from Israel's campaign of
assassinating Iranian scientists -- is that killing off the key leaders who have supplied and
trained the Iranian-allied networks of resistance throughout the region will hobble any strike
from those networks if/when the direct attack on Iran comes.
Per Patrick
Lawrence , the Soleimani assassination "was neither defensive nor retaliatory: It reflected
the planning of the administration's Iran hawks, who were merely awaiting the right occasion to
take their next, most daring step toward dragging the U.S. into war with Iran." It means that war
is on and it will get worse fast.
It is crucial to understand that Iran is not going to passively submit to any such bullying.
It will not be scared off by some "bloody nose" strike, followed by chest-thumping from Trump,
Netanyahu, or Hillary about how they will "
obliterate " Iran. Iran knows all that. It also knows, as I've said
before , how little damage -- especially in terms of casualties -- Israel and the U.S. can
take. It will strike back. In ways that will be calibrated as much as possible to avoid a larger
war, but it will strike back.
Iran's strike on Ain al-Asad base in Iraq was a case in point. It was preceded by a warning
through Iraq that did not specify the target but allowed U.S. personnel in the country to hunker
down. It also demonstrated deadly precision and determination, hitting specific buildings where
U.S. troops work, and, we now know, causing at least eleven acknowledged casualties.
Those casualties were minor, but you can bet they would have been the excuse for a large-scale
attack, if the U.S. had been entirely unafraid of the response. In fact, Trump did
launch that attack over the downing of a single unmanned drone -- and Pompeo and the neocon crew,
including Republican Senators, were "
stunned " that he
called it off in literally the last
ten minutes . It's
to the eternal shame of what's called the "left" in this country that we may have
Tucker
Carlson to thank for Trump's bouts of restraint.
There Will Be Blood
But this is going to get worse, Pompeo is now
threatening Iran's leaders that "any attacks by them, or their proxies of any identity, that
harm Americans, our allies, or our interests will be answered with a decisive U.S. response."
Since Iran has ties of some kind with most armed groups in the region and the U.S. decides what
"proxy" and "interests" means, that means that any act of resistance to the U.S., Israel, or
other "ally" by anybody -- including, for example, the Iraqi PMF forces who are likely to
retaliate against the U.S. for killing their leader -- will be an excuse for attacking Iran.
Any anything. Call it an omnibus threat.
The groundwork for a final aggressive push against Iran began back in June, 2017, when, under
then-Director Pompeo, the CIA set up a stand-alone
Iran
Mission Center . That Center
replaced
a group of "Iran specialists who had no special focus on regime change in Iran," because "Trump's
people wanted a much more focused and belligerent group." The purpose of this -- as of any --
Mission Center was to "elevate" the country as a target and "bring to bear the range of the
agency's capabilities, including covert action" against Iran. This one is especially concerned
with Iran's "increased capacity to deliver missile systems" to Hezbollah or the Houthis that
could be used against Israel or Saudi Arabia, and Iran's increased strength among the Shia
militia forces in Iraq. The Mission Center is headed by Michael D'Andrea, who is perceived as
having an "aggressive stance toward Iran." D'Andrea, known as "the undertaker" and "
Ayatollah Mike ," is himself a
convert to Islam, and
notorious for his "central role in the agency's torture and targeted killing programs."
This was followed in December, 2017, by the signing of a
pact with Israel "to
take on Iran," which took place, according to Israeli television, at a "secret" meeting at the
White House. This pact was designed to coordinate "steps on the ground" against "Tehran and its
proxies." The biggest threats: "Iran's ballistic missile program and its efforts to build
accurate missile systems in Syria and Lebanon," and its activity in Syria and support for
Hezbollah. The Israelis considered that these secret "dramatic understandings" would have "far
greater impact" on Israel than Trump's more public and notorious recognition of Jerusalem as
Israeli's capital.
The Iran Mission Center is a war room. The pact with Israel is a war pact.
The U.S. and Israeli governments are out to "take on" Iran. Their major concerns, repeated
everywhere, are Iran's growing military power, which underlies its growing political influence --
specifically its precision ballistic missile and drone capabilities, which it is sharing with its
allies throughout the region, and its organization of those armed resistance allies, which is
labelled "Iranian aggression."
These developments must be stopped because they provide Iran and other actors the ability to
inflict serious damage on Israel. They create the unacceptable situation where Israel cannot
attack anything it wants without fear of retaliation. For some time, Israel has been reluctant to
take on Hezbollah in Lebanon, having already been driven back by them once because the Israelis
couldn't take the casualties in the field. Now Israel has to worry about an even more
battle-hardened Hezbollah, other well-trained and supplied armed groups, and those damn
precision missiles . One cannot overstress how important those are, and how adamant the U.S.
and Israel are that Iran get rid of them. As another Revolutionary Guard commander
says :
"Iran has encircled Israel from all four sides if only one missile hits the occupied lands,
Israeli airports will be filled with people trying to run away from the country."
This campaign is overseen in the U.S. by the likes of "
praying
for war with Iran " Christian Zionists Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, who together "
urged " Trump to approve the killing of Soleimani. Pence, whom the Democrats are trying to
make President, is associated with Christians United For Israel (CUFI), which paid for his and
his wife's pilgrimage to Israel in 2014, and is run by lunatic televangelist John Hagee, whom
even John
McCain couldn't stomach. Pompeo,
characterized
as the "brainchild" of the assassination, thinks Trump was sent by God to save
Israel from Iran. (Patrick Lawrence
argues
the not-implausible case that Pompeo and Defense Secretary Esper ordered the assassination and
stuck Trump with it.) No Zionists are more fanatical than Christian Zionists. These guys are not
going to stop.
And Iran is not going to surrender. Iran is no longer afraid of the escalation dominance game.
Do not be fooled by peace-loving illusions -- propagated mainly now by mealy-mouthed European and
Democratic politicians -- that Iran will return to what's described as "unconditional"
negotiations, which really means negotiating under the absolutely unacceptable condition of
economic blockade, until the U.S. gets what it wants. Not gonna happen. Iran's absolutely correct
condition for any negotiation with the U.S. is that the U.S. return to the JCPOA and lift all
sanctions.
Also not gonna happen, though any real peace-loving Democratic candidate would specifically
and unequivocally commit to doing just that if elected. The phony peace-loving poodles of
Britain, France, and Germany (the EU3) have already
cast their lot with the aggressive American policy, triggering a dispute mechanism that will
almost certainly result in a " snapback " of full UN
sanctions on Iran within 65 days, and destroy the JCPOA once and for all. Because, they, too,
know Iran's nuclear weapons program is a fake issue and have "always searched for ways to put
more
restrictions on Iran, especially on its ballistic missile program." Israel can have all the
nuclear weapons it wants, but Iran must give up those conventional ballistic missiles. Cannot
overstate their importance.
Iran is not going to submit to any of this. The only way Iran is going to part with its
ballistic missiles is by using them. The EU3 maneuver will not only end the JCPOA, it may
drive
Iran out of the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As Moon of Alabama says, the
EU3 gambit is "not designed to reach an agreement but to lead to a deeper conflict" and ratchet
the war up yet another notch. The Trump administration and its European allies are -- as FDR did
to Japan -- imposing a complete economic blockade that Iran will have to find a way to break out
of. It's deliberately provocative, and makes the outbreak of a regional/world war more likely.
Which is its purpose.
This certainly marks the Trump administration as having crossed a war threshold the Obama
administration avoided. Credit due to Obama for forging ahead with the JCPOA in the face of
fierce resistance from Netanyahu and his Republican and Democratic acolytes, like Chuck Schumer.
But that deal itself was built upon false premises and extraordinary conditions and procedures
that -- as the current actions of the EU3 demonstrate -- made it a trap for Iran.
With his Iran policy, as with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, what Trump is doing -- and can
easily demonstrate -- is taking to its logical and deadly conclusion the entire
imperialist-zionist conception of the Middle East, which all major U.S. politicians and media
have embraced and promulgated over decades, and cannot abandon.
With the Soleimani assassination, Trump both allayed some of the fears of Iran war hawks in
Israel and the
U.S. about his "reluctance to flex U.S. military muscle" and re-stoked all their fears
about his impulsiveness, unreliability, ignorance, and crassness. As the the
Christian Science Monitor reports, Israel leaders are both "quick to praise" his
action and "having a crisis of confidence" over Trump's ability to "manage" a conflict
with Iran -- an ambivalence echoed in every U.S. politician's "Soleimani was a terrorist, but "
statement.
Trump does exactly what the narrative they all promote demands, but he makes it look and sound
all thuggish and scary. They want someone whose rhetorical finesse will talk us into war on Iran
as a humanitarian and liberating project. But we should be scared and repelled by it.
The problem isn't the discrepancy in Trump between actions and attitudes, but the duplicity in
the fundamental imperialist-zionist narrative. There is no "good" -- non-thuggish, non-repellent
way -- way to do the catastrophic violence it demands. Too many people discover that only after
it's done.
Trump, in other words, has just started a war that the U.S. political elite constantly brought
us to the brink of, and some now seem desperate to avoid, under Trump's leadership . But
not a one will abandon the zionist and American-exceptionalist premises that make it inevitable
-- about, you know, dictating what weapons which countries can "never" have. Hoisted on their own
petard. As are we all.
To be clear: Iran will try its best to avoid all-out war. The U.S. will not. This is the war
that, as the NYTreports ,
"Hawks in Israel and America have spent more than a decade agitating for." It will start, upon
some pretext, with a full-scale U.S. air attack on Iran, followed by Iranian and allied attacks
on U.S. forces and allies in the region, including Israel, and then an Israeli nuclear attack on
Iran -- which they think will end it. It is an incomprehensible disaster. And it's becoming
almost impossible to avoid.
The best prospect for stopping it would be for Iran and Russia to enter into a mutual defense
treaty right now. But that's not going to happen. Neither Russia nor China is going to fight for
Iran. Why would they? They will sit back and watch the war destroy Iran, Israel, and the United
States.
Following the sharp re-drop in oil and natural gas prices in late 2018, bankruptcy filings
in the US by already weakened exploration and production companies , oilfield services
companies, and "midstream" companies (they gather, transport, process, or store oil and natural
gas) jumped by 51% in 2019, to 65 filings, according to data compiled by law firm Haynes and
Boone . This brought the total of the Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust since 2015 in
these three sectors to 402 bankruptcy filings.
The debt involved in these bankruptcies in 2019 doubled from 2018 to $35 billion. This
pushed the total debt listed in these bankruptcy filings since 2015 to $207 billion. The chart
below shows the cumulative total debt involved in these bankruptcies since 2015.
But this does not include the much larger losses suffered by shareholders that get mostly
wiped out in the years before the bankruptcy as the shares descend into worthlessness,
and that then may get finished off in bankruptcy court.
The banks, which generally had the best collateral, took the smallest losses; bondholders
took bigger losses, with unsecured bondholders taking the biggest losses. Some of them lost
most of their investment; others got high-and-tight haircuts; others held debt that was
converted to equity in the restructured companies, some of which soon became worthless again
when the company filed for bankruptcy a second time. The old shareholders took the biggest
losses.
The Great American Fracking Bust started in mid-2014, when the price of WTI dropped from
over $100 a barrel to below $30 a barrel by early 2016. Then the price began to recover, going
over $70 a barrel in September and October 2018. But then it began to re-plunge. By the end of
2018, WTI had dropped to $47 a barrel.
Two major geopolitical events in the Middle East – the attack on Saudi Aramco's oil
facilities last September and the US assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani
– that would have shaken up oil markets before, only caused brief ripples, quickly
squashed by the onslaught of surging US production. At the moment, WTI trades at $56.08 per
barrel, which is still below where the shale oil industry can survive long-term:
And 2020 is starting out terrible for natural gas producers. The price of natural gas has
plunged to $1.90 per million Btu at the moment, a dreadfully low price where no one can make
any money. Producers in shale fields that produce mostly gas, such as the Marcellus, are in
deeper trouble still, because oil, even at these prices, would be a lot better than just
natural gas.
Producing areas with constrained takeaway capacity (it takes a lot longer to build pipelines
than to ramp up production) are subject to local prices, which can be lower still. In some
areas, such as the Permian in Texas and New Mexico, the most prolific oil field in the US,
where natural gas is a byproduct of oil production, limited takeaway capacity has caused local
prices to collapse, and flaring to surge.
The chart shows the spot price for delivery at the Henry Hub:
Texas at the Epicenter.
The most affected state, in terms of the number of bankruptcy filings, is Texas, the largest
oil producer in the US. Since 2015, the state had 207 oil-and-gas bankruptcy filings, of the
402 total US filings. In 2019, Texas had 30 of the 65 US filings.
Delaware, obviously, is not into oil and gas production, but into coddling corporations, and
many companies are incorporated in Delaware, including some oil-and-gas companies in Texas.
When they file for bankruptcy, they do so in Delaware. These are the eight states with the most
oil-and-gas bankruptcy filings since 2015:
Bankruptcy filings are triggered when the E&P companies no longer get funding from Wall
Street or from their banks to continue with their perennially cash-flow negative operations and
service their debts. And this is what is happening now. Wall Street and the banks have started
to demand that these companies stick to an entirely new mantra in the fracking business: "live
within cash flow."
When E&P companies run short on funding, they cut back on drilling activity which puts
the squeeze on oilfield services companies that provide products and services to the oilfield,
including drilling and completing wells. And then these OFS companies go bankrupt.
This is what happened to oilfield-services giant Weatherford
which filed for a prepackaged bankruptcy last July . Back in 2014, before the oil bust, it
had 67,000 employees; by July, it was down to about 26,000. The reorganization plan allowed
Weatherford to shed $5.8 billion of its $7.6 billion in long-term debt. Old shareholders got
wiped out. The creditors got 99% of the restructured company's new shares.
In its report on the OFS bankruptcies, Haynes and Boone cited this pressure from Wall Street
and its cascading effect, which Weatherford had pointed out in its bankruptcy filing:
We note that Weatherford, in its July 2019 filing, attributed its insolvency in part to
reduced drilling activity by producers who have also been dramatically affected by the
commodity price slump since 2015. Investors' pressure on producers to "live within cash flow"
is further reducing demand for OFS services and supplies leaving the OFS sector with little
near term hope for a turnaround in prospects.
What this sector needs are much higher prices for oil and natural gas. But that cannot
happen while production continues to surge. A large-scale culling in the sector – a lot
more bankruptcies – could reduce production, and support higher prices.
But as soon as prices rise above certain levels, with investors still chasing yield at every
twist and turn, the flood of new money will wash over the sector again, with investors having
already forgotten by then that shale oil and gas was where money went to die every time. And
this new money will cause a new surge in production, which will collapse prices once again.
It's a cycle that the shale industry has a hard time getting out of, under the current
loosey-goosey monetary conditions.
The cratering of natural gas prices is bad news for any attempt to encourage
renewables.
From my own situation, I made a substantial capital investment in moving my domestic space
heating from gas to ultra-high efficiency air source heat pumps.
The economics worked out as broadly favourable (this wasn't my motivation, but it helped
justify the investment). My heat pumps have a raw (non-seasonally adjusted) coefficient of
performance of a little over 5. So I get 5kW of heat for every 1kW of electrical input). Here
in the UK I was paying 14 pence per kW/hr for electricity compared with 3.5 pence for natural
gas. With a AFUE efficiency on the gas heat of 90% my heat pumps generated heat at just under
3 pence per kilowatt, the gas heat would work out, net, at around 3.8 pence. So I saved about
10% to 15% in energy costs doing space heating via renewables. Again, here in the UK market,
electicity is about one-third to 40 percent from zero-carbon sources, wind, hydro and
nucelar. So my carbon footprint for space heating using heat pumps was hugely lower (maybe up
to half).
I've just got my utility's latest quote on energy prices. Electricity charges are about
the same. But I'm being quoted 2.5 pence per kilowatt hour for natural gas.
There's no way my air source heat pumps can compete with that. I might as well just burn
the gas and say screw the carbon dioxide emissions. I won't, of course. I'll grin and bear
it. But the shale glut and the uneconomic (wasted) investment in overproduction is massively
distorting the energy market.
Yes. Those are the calculations to be done. I am in the same situation though in Spain the
"spread" between gas and electricity prices in energy terms is smaller compared with the UK
and will probably get even smaller in the future despite the natl gas glut (because tariff
policies and investment in renewables). I am paying about 0,14€/kWh on electricity
consumed (fixed power contract apart but I needn't change it) and gas is at 0,06€/kWh.
The seasonal coefficient of performance of my reversible air/water heat exchanger is 4.5 by
Eurovent (third party certification of performance) so current expenses relative to natural
gas are 0.14/(0.06 x 4.5) = 0,52 that means I save 48% relative to the gas boiler. In fact a
bit less because the seasonal COP of the condensation boiler was about 1.05. But then, there
are other advantages about getting freed of natural gas: not needed periodical inspections.
Also my boiler was ageing and requiring more frequent revisions and repairs. In Spain the
electrical mix is now about 60% renewable + nuclear (approx). Gas prices are also more
volatile.
I among other things was designing, sourcing and installing high efficient NG powered
floor heating system in the North West of British Columbia. I once participated in 2012 in a
symposium by a supplier of heat pump systems.
The maximum savings one could expect because of the demand of the system (basically a reverse
refrigerator with a compressor demanding the most power) was actually 30% of the cost of
gas.
However – and that is the big one – a gas powered system at the time using high
efficiency boilers cost about 5 – 7$/ square foot, depending how much electronic
controls you threw into the system.
This way a new house install at an average 2500 square foot house would set you back an
average of 15 grand. Installing a heatpump system with either 8 -10′ buried PEX loops
or wells to 100′ deep would add between 25 – 30 000$ on top minus the cost for
the boilers at an average of 4500$.
And the typical heat-pump unit would cost between 8-10 000$ with a lifetime of about 10
years, double the cost of a boiler who usually have a somewhat longer lifespan.
The reason: air heat extraction systems in Canada do not work, when the heat is needed the
air temp. is at about – 5 to – 35C ..so only subsoil extraction works with
attending cost of machinery and labour.
The conclusion by all 25 contractors attending was quite unanimous – heat pump
systems in Canada except maybe in the most southern portions – are a waste of resources
and money.
Even here in mild England, despite having a heat pump installation which has capacity for
the space heating load even on a design condition day for winter extremes (let's say minus
5C) I have done a lot of data logging which has shown that in some not exactly challenging or
unusual climatic situations, the heat pump performance doesn't meet anything like submittal
sheet claims.
A few weeks ago, I'd forgotten to run the systems overnight at a low setpoint (but enough
to keep the space at a reasonable temperature -- I usually pick 16C or the low 60s F). When I
went into the kitchen / breakfast nook at seven o'clock-ish it was freezing cold (okay, maybe
not freezing, about 14C) with an outside temperature of 1 or 2C (low 30s F).
I turned the heat pump on, set it to a high output as I needed the space to warm through
relatively quickly before I had coffee then had to leave.
After less than five minutes, the outdoor unit went straight into a defrost cycle. Why?
Because it was one of those typically English damp, foggy mornings (where there was almost
100% RH outside). Even though the outdoor coil would have been, say, 2 or 3C, as soon as the
system started, the coil surface temperature would have crashed to minus 3 or 4C -- whereupon
the saturated outside air promptly froze the coil solid. Coefficient of performance would
have been less than one for the twenty minutes or so I needed to heat the space. I'd have
been better off firing up the gas heat.
Only an isolated and probably unusual use case. But a good illustration that green
technology has limits. For US climate zone 3 or 4 inhabitants, I suspect heat pumps will only
ever be viable in the shoulder months. For the severe winters you guys get, I can't see how
you can avoid combustion heat sources. Not to say that renewables such as air source (or
ground source) heat pumps aren't a partial solution, but the capital costs will be high,
probably prohibitively so for a monovalent system and overall carbon emissions savings won't
be especially spectacular.
Coastal temperate US regions might the best. Many inhabitants there. But I guess it works
in Texas, New México, Arizona (may be not so well in high plains north to the Canyon)
and others. May be Arkansas for instance and north up to Iowa?. It has to be noted that when
temperatures go close to 0ºC or below, and for long hours, performance is much worse.
So, in Madrid (a urban heat island itself) this occurs in winter for about 3-10 hours during
the night (I set thermostats at 19ºC during the night) in an average January day and it
is not big deal.
But, again, the climate is very important indeed. It has to be carefully analysed.
IMO Air heatpump is good for Oz, NZ and the likes, with the south UK being marginal now,
but not-applicable once Gulf Stream goes :)
ground-water, or water-water HP are needed for anything that gets freezing 3-4 months a
year, but that, as you say, has nontrivial capital costs, unless costs of carbon goes up by a
lot.
And, TBH, there are problems even with that. Say if ground-water is using subsurface loop,
it actually has a measurable impact on the soil temperature over few years, which is bad for
a number of reasons. Water-water can be ok if the water source is running water and not
over-used, but I've seen water-water sources that were using ponds freeze large ponds that
under normal circumstances would never fully freeze.
That said, ground-water well driven HPs are IMO very good for large office or apartment
buildings, especially if they work both ways (i.e. cooling into ground in the summer,
avoiding city heat islands).
I think the broadest lesson to be drawn from Clive's experience is that investment capital
is actively making it difficult to transition away from fossil fuels because investment
managers and underwriters absolutely insist on continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects,
even if it loses tons of money!!!
How can we compete with rich, powerful people who insist on wasting money!?!?!!
I have long wanted to use geothermal heat pump. In my case it simply won't happen, sadly.
For one, I would never be able to get the permit to drill the well in city limits. Two, the
equipment would cost more than my older, poorly insulated house itself. Three, our state
government has allowed and caused some of the highest electric prices in the nation, despite
having a huge hydro electric plant in town. We don't get that electricity, it gets sold to
NYC at greatly inflated prices. We don't get the money either. Instead we are forced to
import our electricity with full taxes and tariffs on it.
Last week, the temperatures were down to -15C at night And of course the snow.
Yes, the condition of the building is such a crucial aspect. I used to have beautiful
hardwood window frames, but there were an unmitigated disaster for energy efficiency and
creating a good building envelope. They were an almost complete thermal bridge. And they
could only accommodate the thinnest of double glazing. In a really cold winter's day, I'd
have to set the leaving air discharge temperature fairly high on the heat pump indoor coil to
get warm, which hampered efficiency. I was able to change to triple glazing (which fixed the
problem and significantly reduced heat loss but, again, at a cost ) because the property is
modern. If I'd had an older property, the windows would only have been part of the problem
(solid or poorly insulated walls and an un-insulated slab, for example, would be worse). And
the chances of getting permission to replace windows in a historic house would be slim,
certainly with the UK's tight building control.
And as you say, if you're in zone 5 or 6, you're a bit stuffed with regular drops to -15C
(5F). My heat pumps guarentee operation down to -15C, but capacity takes a nosedive. Luckily,
design conditions here in southern England are -5C, which reduces capital cost massively. And
if design conditions demand operation is guaranteed down to -20C (c. 0F), there is not much
choice of air source equipment available at any price. The only unit I know which is rated
down to below -30C is a Panasonic mini split, which here in the UK costs nearly £2,000
(c. $2,600) for a 3/4 ton unit. Out of reach for most. So you're left with ground source, but
-- as you say about NYC -- forget that idea in, say, London where tunnels and utility
wayleaves can't be interfered with. And ground conditions are difficult too, with a heavy
clay.
Green tech is not a panacea. I don't want to be discouraging, just the opposite. But some
of the talk about how practical it is is fanciful.
I do believe that much good is possible by greatly revising and liberalizing the building
codes, but practally trying to accomplish this is like pulling teeth. For some reason there
is large political resistance to change in this area. Older buildings can easily be made
quite efficient with current tech, but then the problem becomes an economic one. How to
overcome the first costs when the cost of upgrading is more than the structure itself?
FWIW many homes in my area were built in the 70s and 1980s with the assumption that
electric power would be free, or nearly free once the original bond issue for the power plant
was paid off. LOL the bastards managed a 30% rate hike the same year they paid it off, using
every little excuse possible.
Reading your reply, I was struck with just how underdeveloped the building insulation
field is. I have seen blow in and spray in foam retrofit insulation systems used in
commercial construction. (I particularly remember a system for inserting expanding cellular
foam into the void spaces in concrete block walls. [Yes! It can be done!])
Saying the above, I have read about the building insulation codes in the Nordic countries
being very 'tight.' Anyone from there care to enlighten us?
All the above is referencing winter heating. Where we live, summer time air conditioning is
the main energy sink.
Excellent points. Of course there is one plus. In the US we also need cooling in the
summer. My impression was that the heat pump systems could provide this as well, and very
economically.
Yes, we had a hot summer (hot by north European standards at any rate, we had about 10-15
days in the low 90s F and only a single day over 100F, maybe another few weeks in the 80s)
and my A/C cost was well under $100 for the whole cooling season, just because the heat pumps
with variable speed compressors and larger coil surface areas are so efficient when in A/C
mode.
As ambrit says above, even with low US electricity costs (in some areas, anyway), I don't
know how feul-poor folks manage in the south and so-cal with 10 SEER equipment and poorly
insulated homes when you have day after day at 95-100F.
It's dry in SoCal. One can easily survive by opening the windows, avoid direct sun on
windows, and dress accordingly.
I lived in the tropics under the same conditions, no direct sun on windows, behind insect
screen. That, one bed sheet to cover oneself, and a ceiling fan worked well.
Yes, the avoidance of service costs for gas-fired equipment plus the utility connection
fee for the gas service does make me consider the idea of moving away from gas as a fuel
source entirety. I must run the numbers on that to see how it might work out. It's a good
point to consider for anyone looking at the long-term costs for air source water or space
heating.
And you UKers are not precisely big spenders of electricity in per capita terms. About
half than French with all that nuclear power in place. Guess that how the power is delivered
to the grid has an important effect in consumption patterns.
If natural gas prices stayed cratered just long enough to exterminate thermal coal beyond
hope of revival in many countries before the natural gas prices went back up . . . would that
be a good thing?
Can someone at NC explain why the government allows burning flared gas? If it was outlawed
production would drop for oil as well until some way to store and use the gas was developed.
It seems burning natural gas at the wellhead must increase CO2 since gas is a
hydrocarbon.
I think you've answered your own question. The US govt has long had a policy to INCREASE
oil/gas production, side effects be damned.
There's a collective action problem among producers where they'd all benefit if they all
agreed to drop production 20%, say. But, each individual player benefits if they get to cheat
on those production cuts.
Plus, they've all floated a ton of high interest debt, which requires that they put
capital to work to generate cash flow to service that debt. It's clear that we're in the
'ponzi finance' stage of the cycle where new debt has to be issued to keep up payments on the
interest of the older debt. That's why the bankruptcies are perking up.
Bond underwiters, investment mgrs, oil services execs, and other players are all very
incentivized to keep getting new deals done.
First of all, it seems to be up to the states (?). There actually are regulations in Texas
(the Permian basin is the marginal-cost producing location in the US, where most of these
stories are centered). But the state is a friend of the industry and these regs are loosely
enforced. Secondly, emitting unburned natgas (mostly methane) is even worse than CO2 as a
greenhouse gas. Thirdly, they are drilling for oil, not gas, and are hoping to maximize the
oil-to-gas ratio. With low natgas prices and smaller amounts per well than elsewhere in the
US, putting in pipe for natgas is not economical. In fact the oil-gas-ratio varies in simple
geographic pattern that was known for years. The best, i.e. oil-rich land was claimed early,
subsequent waves of development that came on line during the oil price spike in mid 2000s,
are now getting killed. Fourthly, the ones losing money can't afford the extra ongoing
capital investment anyway – recall the very short life cycle of wells in fracking. They
are certainly cutting corners in other environment related tasks, like wastewater
disposal.
So will it stop? Not at the moment no. On the legal front, not until the next Ralph Nader
comes along and we get another wave of federal public interest legislation like we had in the
70s (which neither major party wanted at the time, just like now, and always). Economically,
also no. The marginal producers who were late to the gold rush will exit, but there is no
shortage of oil at even $50. The wildcard is in international developments. We are
suppressing production and export of conventional oil from Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Venezuela.
We are suppressing transport of natural gas from Russia to the EU. There is also
unconventional oil in Canada. I.e. US policy is supporting prices. Net effect on global oil
and gas use? None, since we just produce the difference ourselves, with a bunch of extra
natgas the world doesn't want, and can't be stored, so we burn it. Sucks.
Flaring is usually classed as solution gas flaring, emergency flaring and just unwanted
gas flaring.
These days flaring unwanted gas is rare because of the huge waste. But not long ago
producers could just flare stuff they didn't feel like getting to market, so entire
reservoirs of gas were burned just to get to the oil. This mostly doesn't happen anymore.
Emergency flaring happens in production or refining when a sudden unwanted flow of gas
manifests and for safety reasons, it must be disposed of rapidly. This appears a sudden very
large luminous flares over short timescales. Again, this is rare and essentially can't be
avoided. Flaring is much safer than just releasing.
Solution gas flaring is the bubbles of gas dissolved in liquid that come out of solution
during production as liquid pressure drops close to the wellhead. These need to be collected
or they would fill up liquid storage tanks. The volume and composition of the gas flows
determines the cost of collection. Companies have to balance the cost of collection vs. the
damage to the environment if flared. They usually try to make a case that the containment
cost (the cost to produce it to market, since the market value is usually minimal) is
prohibitive and request a permit to flare. This is the usual minimum compliance approach of
most resource development.
Basically, the conditions to obtain flaring permits vary with jurisdiction and are based
on a balance of revenue vs. environmental damage. These days most places encourage developers
to collect solution gas, but for remote locations in sour plays, that is costly to the
viability of the play.
If no one will build the gas-flaring oil fielders a free pipeline from oilfield to
gas-market, and building their own pipeline would cost more than what the oilfielders could
sell the gas for; they will just burn it in place. The other alternative would be for them to
release the methane UNburned into the air, which would be even worse than burning it
first.
But as soon as prices rise above certain levels, with investors still chasing yield at
every twist and turn, the flood of new money will wash over the sector again, with
investors having already forgotten by then that shale oil and gas was where money went to
die every time
This among the agricultural folk is called the "Schweinezyklus" or "pig cycle". Typical
for larger scale farming when from a previous oversupply the market has tried up, raising
prices and everyone increasing again their pig production till – again – the
market collapses.
I studied agricultural economy and production in the early 1970's when this type of cycle
became typical when farmers moved from mixed production providing risk compensation to dual
or even single products.
Indeed, the situation you refer to looks suspiciously like a process of financialization
of agriculture. Not to wax nostalgic for the "good old days" of backbreaking labour and
crummy living standards, but agriculture used to be a form of 'calling.' Now it's just a job.
Of course, the serfs and other 'forced' agricultural labourers of yesteryear disproved the
ethos of Goldsmith's "The Deserted Villiage."
There was a Golden Age, but it was not evenly distributed.
Frankly it is hard from Wolf's figures to know if he is even right. $207bn of defaulted
debt sounds like a lot of money, but is that from a total of $250bn or $2.5tn? I have no idea
if this is a lot of the industry or a little. And 2019 may be worse than 2018 for defaults,
but both 2016 and 2017 were way higher than that. Are things really getting worse or not? I
am deeply sceptical about the financial viability of fracking, but the case being made here
doesn't justify the sensation rhetoric.
In 1993 I built a house guaranteed to use 6,192 Kwh per year for heating and cooling here
in central PA, near Harrisburg. That includes resistance electric heat for backup. At that
time the cost was less than $40 a month.
Following the specifications to achieve this added about $2,500 to the cost of this 1288
sq.ft. house. It was a result of government requirements but no subsidies except for
administrative cost by the utility. Those requirements were subsequently dropped and the
program disappeared.
My question would be, was this program dropped because of complaints from the general
public, the homeowners as a group, or the builders and developers? $2 USD a square foot added
to construction expense wasn't chicken feed back in the 1970s.
Great article! It causes me to wonder, are the neocons trying to start a shooting war in
the Middle East to drive up US petroleum prices? Make America Great at least Texas. ;-)
I feel like supply control over there is more about petrodollars and perhaps efforts to
hurt Russia and Iran. Meanwhile the US seems to essentially be dumping oil with QE and repo
money funding money losing small fracking plays. I figured ages ago the plan was always to
have the supermajors mop up the wreckage at pennies on the dollar when the party ends.
Paper bankruptcies seem like a small price to pay for the gain in geopolitical influence
of all that extra production. Not being at the mercy of someone turning down the crude tap
can foster much more unilateral, terrible decision making in the middle east.
The invisible hand of the market did well to coddle a massive infrastructure buildup I saw
first hand in the Eagle Ford in Texas. Long term well production may have dropped off
significantly faster than the sales pitch but all of those wells will still be in place to
re-fracture when the market demands it.
3% decline per year means 30% decline in a decade. You can't replace this amount with the new fields, so the consumption
should shrunk and price of oil jump over $100.
JP:
It is interesting to look back seven or so years when the talk of peak oil was
very real. Then, too, everyone said all the easy resources had been found and produced, and called for
$200 oil. But technology has proven that sentiment to be false. I suspect the same will be true in the
future as tech advances march on.
Yes, today's resources are more expensive, but we are still managing to make it work at $60 oil.
Still, in the last five years, we have seen far less exploration and discovery of oil than what we are
consuming. That disparity can't continue forever - we need new oil. And with existing fields declining at
3-4% per year you need to find a lot of new oil. The new oil that may be coming online in Guyana, Brazil,
and Norway this year will close that gap to some extent, even with less growth from US shale than we have
seen in recent years.
JS:
Aside from Iran, do you see any other geopolitical time bombs that people are
overlooking?
JP:
Venezuela, but it's difficult to see Maduro leaving soon. He's survived US
sanctions and local opposition. Even if the Maduro government is replaced, it would take a number of
years for Venezuela's oil industry to come back.
Perhaps a more urgent venue is Mexico. Its oil industry is facing significant challenges in the coming
years.
In 2016, I helped Pemex do its first ever joint venture and we developed the first-ever farm out
structure for Mexico. Farmout is a very common oil and gas transaction in which someone with a lot of
land but not enough money to explore it enters into a transaction with an oil company, swapping capital
for land. This was the first time in 70 years that Pemex had done one of these.
The concept of hydrocarbon reforms in Mexico was based on this idea: let's let private capital take
some petroleum grants and let Pemex use its massive acreage opportunities and allow it to do joint
ventures. I thought those reforms were good and produced fast results, with farmouts being made and new
discoveries and production happening. Within a few years, things were already moving.
The fruits of that were just starting to be seen when the new government came in and stopped it. There
are great shale opportunities within Mexico, but they are undeveloped and the shale boom has bypassed the
country. The regime that makes unconventional oil work has clearly been demonstrated in other countries,
but Mexico has failed to capitalize on this. To make this work, the petroleum regime would need to be a
concessions regime and a regime with a relatively low government take – 50% or less. That's not Mexico
today.
JS:
So what's the solution?
JP:
The key to success for any government is focusing on exploiting as many types of
resources as efficiently as possible.
Different kinds of resources require different recipes - different terms. In Alberta, where I'm from,
we have five different regimes for five different resources. And all five get exploited. Nothing is
wasted.
Take that back to Namibia. It's got a 5% royalty and 35% corporate income tax on its oil reserves –
it's an attractive environment because they haven't found anything yet as the country is vastly
underexplored. They aren't taxing the resource high because they want people to find it. It needs to be
handled on a case by case basis but when looking for new opportunities in oil exploration the petroleum
regime should always be one of the key things you look at. Good geology, good fiscal terms, and a good
petroleum regime -- that's the formula, and at
Recon Energy Africa
,
we think we have found that in Namibia's Kavango Basin.
JS:
Thanks for your time Jay.
As the race to tap Africa's true potential as a major oil and gas producing region heats up, other
companies are also vying for their own piece of the pie, including
Exxon (NYSE:XOM)
recently acquired an additional 7 million net acres from the
government for a block extending from the shoreline to about 135 miles offshore in water depths up to
13,000 feet, with exploration activities to begin by the end of this year.
What Exxon's banking on is that Namibia, which according to theory once fit together with Brazil,
shares the same geology as Brazil's pre-salt basins, Santos and Campos, which have already proved
resource-rich, according to Deloitte.
Chevron (NYSE:CVX)
ranks among the top oil producers in Nigeria and Angola. Other
areas on the continent where the company holds interests include Benin, Ghana, the Republic of Congo and
Togo. Chevron also holds a 36.7 percent interest in the West African Gas Pipeline Company Limited, which
supplies Nigerian natural gas to customers in the region.
British Petroleum (NYSE:BP)
has significant interest in Africa, but not necessarily
the same stake as its peers. While BP has some oil assets in the region, it is focusing heavily on
renewable power generation and natural gas production. Recently, it began work on a project in Mauritania
and Senegal. The company noted, "We see this as the start of a new chapter for Africa's energy story."
Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDS.A)
is a veteran in the African oil and gas game. The
company began drilling in the region in the 1950s, and now has assets in over 20 countries across the
continent. Though it has sold off a number of assets in the region in recent years, it continues to
maintain a strong presence in South Africa.
Total (NYSE:TOT)
is another major betting big on Africa's potential. It has been
present in the region for over 90 years, and it is showing no sign of reducing its footprint anytime
soon. In fact, just recently, the company announced a major oil discovery offshore Suriname. John J.
Christmann, Apache CEO and President noted, "The well proves a working hydrocarbon system in the first
two play types within Block 58 and confirms our geologic model with oil and condensate in shallower zones
and oil in deeper zones. Preliminary formation evaluation data indicates the potential for prolific oil
wells."
It's amazing all the money in the State Department and other intelligence agencies should be
attracting the best minds. Yet a bunch of us sitting here watching this from our boring
office jobs realize how genuinely stupid US foreign policy has been.
A separate Sunni state in West Iraq would be doomed. We need to leave these people alone,
we've made enough foolish mistakes and this will get a lot of people killed. That's along
with US troops being put in harms way for ridiculous reasons like stealing Syrian oil and now
occupying Iraq against their parliaments wishes.
Back in the day you told someone you were American and they wanted to shake your hand and
ask you about this place or that. Now they want to spit in our faces
A Thursday article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone discusses Dennis Kucinich's work in
politics, from Kucinich's eight terms in the United Sates House of Representatives to his two
presidential campaigns to his activities since leaving political office. Taibbi, in the article
focused much on Kucinich's long-term devotion to advancing the case for peace, describes
Kucinich as "antiwar to his core."
For comparison's sake, 80,000 people died of flu in 2018 in the United States alone. (at
least, according to the CDC ).
Coronavirus – or rather, this particular strain of coronavirus, as they are very
common and mostly harmless – has had 800 reported cases to go along with those 26
reported deaths. That's a mortality rate of just over three per cent.
Further, we don't even know the details of those 26 unfortunate patients, it's entirely
possible the 26 deaths are accounted for by the very old, the very young, or the
immuno-compromised. But even if they're not 3 per cent mortality is not high.
The death rate of bacterial meningitis, for example, stands at about 10%. Meningitis is an
unfortunate fact of life, but it's not a public health scare.
SARS, of course, was a public health scare – totally unjustifiably, as it turns out.
Most of you will remember the SARS outbreak of
2002/2003 being similarly apocalyptically covered in the media.
In the end, over the course of just about a year 9000 cases resulted in 800 people losing
their lives. These numbers are rough because, as a syndrome rather than a disease, SARS is
difficultly to clearly diagnose. Assuming the stats are correct, that's a mortality rate of
about 9% or three times this "terrifying" coronavirus.
The simple reality is that this new virus strain is currently affecting a group of people
the size of a small primary school, and has killed fewer than a bad traffic pile-up or a
medium-sized drone strike.
So why the lockdown? Why the fear?
Usually, that means at least one agenda. Maybe more than one.
The Ebola outbreak of 2015/16 resulted in large numbers of NATO-backed doctors descending on
Western Africa to "assist". As a result, ebola vaccines that had been awaiting approval for
years got a 2 year field
study, before being approved .
During the 2009
"Swine Flu" panic , a German MEP accused the World Health Organisation of "creating a
panic" in order to sell vaccines. Though the WHO vehemently denied this, an independent report
later found that several of the "independent flu experts" that WHO consulted had financial
ties to vaccine manufacturers .
If you're agenda-spotting in this case, be on the lookout for a "new" medicine getting
rushed through patent offices. This anti-coronavirus drug will then be bought-up in huge
amounts by hospitals and health services the world over.
Whichever of the handful of pharmagiants owns the patent will get a huge profit boom, plus
the soaring stock prices that go along with owning the miracle cure to the scary disease du
jour .
Longer-term, there is vaccination to consider. Medicine you have to take even if you're not
sick is a goldmine for pharmaceutical companies, and if the government makes them mandatory
(always an issue simmering on the back-burner) well, then that's even better. Not only does it
mean they don't really have to work (I mean, how much work do you put into a product literally
everyone is legally obliged to use?), but the opportunities for large-scale genetic research
(and corruption) are endless.
Generally speaking, fear is always useful. If you can frighten people they do whatever you
say. A fact known to leaders and propagandists for centuries.
Following the Boston bombing, despite the manhunt being for just two alleged bombers, the
entire city of Boston was put on lockdown. The national guard rolled tanks down the street, and
nobody said a word.
Right now, despite fewer than 30 deaths, millions of Chinese people are under a "lockdown".
Public gatherings are being halted. That's power you can't buy.
It never hurts to normalise the idea of martial law. After all, you don't know when you
might need it for real.
I know there is a temptation, in alt-media circles, to see China as a good guy just because
they oppose US imperialism, but they have corruption and authoritarianism there too. Their
officials are just as power-hungry as ours. There's no reason to think they wouldn't take
advantage of a crisis (or even create one), in order to increase their control.
Hell, maybe there is no clear agenda at all. Maybe that's just the psychology of power.
Maybe scaring people feels good, and maybe controlling them feels better. Maybe there's no
point in doing terrible things to get into power if you're not going to use it for its own
sake.
Is it possible there's more to this story? Some fundamental dishonesty most people never
think to question? As always with the mainstream media, it's difficult to take anything for
granted.
We don't know the casualty numbers are accurate, China could be downplaying the
threat to minimise panic.
We don't know that the "lockdown" is as extensive as our media report, the press
could be exaggerating to paint China as hysterical or autocratic.
We don't even know for sure the disease exists at all , when you think about
it.
As usual, absolute scepticism is required. It's hard to say exactly what's happening yet,
but when 26 deaths makes international news that means something is going on.
Kit, when are you going to acknowledge that the Boston bombing was a staged event? They
couldn't make it more obvious. A man who has just had both legs blown off would not be
whizzed along in a wheelchair.
Is it possible there's more to this story? Some fundamental dishonesty most people never
think to question? As always with the mainstream media, it's difficult to take anything for
granted.
Oh yes.
Wikipedia says:
Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds that
include diarrhea in cows and pigs, and upper respiratory disease in chickens. In humans,
the virus causes respiratory infections, which are often mild, but in rare cases are
potentially lethal.
However, further down it says:
The virus was suspected to have originated in snakes,[12] but many leading researchers
disagree with this conclusion [13]
Emerging viral infections continue to pose a major threat to global public health. In
1997, a highly pathogenic avian influenza A (H5N1) virus was found to directly spread from
poultry to humans unlike previously reported transmission routs of
human‐to‐human and livestock‐to‐human, stirring a grave concern for
a possible influenza pandemic.
Authors:
Guangxiang (George) Luo: Above article only article published in journal
Shou‐Jiang Gao: A number of articles co-authored
We are told:
This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not
been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may
lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article
as doi: 10.1002/jmv.25683
No mention of snakes in abstract and you wonder why that is.
"It's complete garbage," says Edward Holmes, a zoologist at the University of Sydney's
Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, who specializes in emerging RNA viruses,
a class that includes coronaviruses like 2019-nCoV. Holmes, who also holds appointments at
the Chinese CDC and Fudan University in Shanghai, is among a number of scientists who are
pointing out -- in virology forums, science Slacks, and on Twitter -- what they deem to be
major flaws in the paper, and calling on the journal to have it retracted. "It's great that
viral sequence data is getting shared openly in real time," says Holmes. "The downside is
then you get people using that data to make conclusions they really shouldn't. The result
is just a really unhelpful distraction that smacks of opportunism."
Preliminary analyses of the genetic data released by Chinese authorities suggest that
2019-nCoV is most closely related to a group of coronaviruses that typically infect bats.
But for a variety of reasons -- including that it's winter and bats are hibernating -- many
scientists suspect that some other animal moved the virus from bats to humans.
Wei's team compared the codons preferred by 2019-nCoV to those preferred by a handful of
potential hosts: humans, bats, chickens, hedgehogs, pangolins, and two species of
snakes.
They reported finding the most overlap in codon bias between 2019-nCoV and those two
kinds of snakes -- the Chinese cobra and the many-banded krait. Taken together, these
results "suggest for the first time that snake is the most probable wildlife animal
reservoir for the 2019-nCoV," the authors wrote. "New information obtained from our
evolutionary analysis is highly significant for effective control of the outbreak caused by
the 2019-nCoV-induced pneumonia."
Editors of the Journal of Medical Virology told WIRED they stand by the publication,
which they say went through a formal peer-review process that found the authors' methods
were solid. That process was expedited -- the reviewers were given 24 hours to comment and
the authors had three days to respond. But given the need for public health information,
they believe the speed-up was appropriate. "With this serious situation, with people dying,
holding this paper up in review would be criminal," says Shou-Jian Gao, the journal's
editor-in-chief. "This is intended to just open the scientific dialogue."
"It's complete garbage", "it's winter and bats are hibernating", "codons preferred by
2019-nCoV to those preferred by a handful of potential hosts: humans, bats, chickens,
hedgehogs, pangolins, and two species of snake [the Chinese cobra and the many-banded
krait.]"
"With this serious situation, with people dying, holding this paper up in review would be
criminal," says Shou-Jian Gao, the journal's editor-in-chief. "This is intended to just open
the scientific dialogue."
If this is science, I don't want it.
Dungroanin ,
Somethings ARE going on – THEY don't want us to know.
1. Brexit bs in 7 days – not the hard brexit THEY want, because they cornered
themselves with a deal that keeps us IN for the next 12 months requiring compliance ha ha
ha.
2. The Syrian escapade is OVER.
The Iran invasion is NOT going to happen. Iraq has a million citizens on the streets
PEACEFULLY confirming to the 2003 invaders to really fuck the fuck off. (And out of the EU,
they will not have us pushing them into ME meddling).
3. Russian bogeymaning is OVER. Russiagate is over. Ukrainegate is fucked because Biden
& Son won't risk being questioned. Trump will not want anymore casualties because he
proved that his military and MIC trillions can't stop the missiles turning the deep bunkers
at their bases from being turned into giant acoustic brain soup drums.
But hey lets look over there – dem chinese have a flu and are taking precautions
when most of them would be in transit for their new year and spread it faster than usual
The Empire is dead and no amount of Integrity Iniative bollocks and media management by
the brass or Royal soap opera can hide the end of the grand game as losers.
Watch as the stolen election victory turns to ashes on their tongues – Corbyn may
still notch up another PM before April.
The whole thing is just another exercise in deeply racist and hate-driven Sinophobia. The
Western MSM presstitute scum are virtually gloating over this affair, and, in the Guardian,
of course, their resident compradore (beep) 'Lily' Kuo, in Beijing, has turned the whole
thing into a great threat to Chinese stability, CCP rule and ' Emperor' Xi, of course, in an
exercise in hate-driven hysteria that will surely get her a pat on the head from her White
Masters.
The death-toll seems less than that in a typical 'flu season, mostly the old and previously
unwell, as usual, but is inflated with pure malice and barely disguised satisfaction. The
admirable Chinese efforts to curtail the spread of the disease are compared to so-called
'repression' of 'dissidents', and our ABC resident presstitute, Birtles, almost twitches with
delight and animus as he relays his agit-prop. The Chinese are about to build a 1000 bed
hospital, possibly in a weekend, while the UK NHS crumbles in the shite that is UK '
society', but now I recall that was euthanised by Thatcher decades ago. You can see why
Western supremacists so hate China. And I would vouch that this disease, so conveniently '
emerging' right at New Year, possibly came via Fort Detrick.
C: they also don't know what this is about (but don't want to admit)
I like scientific journals, more then newspapers as the scientific journals show the
conflict of interest of authors. Guess what
' FGH reports personal fees from University of Alabama Antiviral Drug Discovery and
Development Consortium, and is a non-compensated consultant for Gilead Sciences, Regeneron,
and SAB Biotherapeutics, which have investigational therapeutics for coronavirus
infections.'
We're looking at more people now dying from cancer, on a yearly basis, than all the wars
in human history put together. A greater percentage of people dying from cancer than ever
died from the bubonic plague.
Cancer is a relatively simple one to sort out (and a lot of it comes down to diet -cancers
feed on sugar, although very few oncologists will tell you that).
I would venture that our current tidal wave of cancer is largely due to psychopathy and
its endemic corruption: Big Pharma doesn't want you to die, but neither does it want you
well. Big Pharma wants you somewhere inbetween, where you are constantly ill and having to
pay for their 'cures'.
As an aside, can anyone name me a single member of the UK royal family (and there's an
awful lot of them) who's ever been diagnosed with cancer?
As an aside, can anyone name me a single member of the UK royal family (and there's an
awful lot of them) who's ever been diagnosed with cancer?
There seem to be quite a lot of people who think the UK Royal Family are a
cancer. Does that count?
Einstein ,
Public health panics are ideal for enforcing more controls on an already fearful and
submissive public.
The Wuhan "corona" (crown) virus is about as deadly as 'flu, which we weather without note
every year.
But health bureaucrats have noted how much "terror" panics can swell the budgets of the
military and police. "Epidemics" of "dangerous" bugs offer the ideal opportunity for the
builders of public health empires to follow suit.
Willem ,
3 per cent mortality for a transmittable disease, like corana virus (or common cold) is very
high. Earth has 7.5 billion inhabitants, so if all of them get infected, and 3% die, then 225
million people will die from corona virus.
But then the numbers are, as usual, probably at least partially bogus:
the nominator: 26 deaths are probably not all caused by corona virus, but only correlated
with corona virus. My guess (ad good as anyone's guess) is that of these 26 at most 10
died.
The denominator: who let's himself get tested for the common cold (corona virus). Probably
only the most severe cases. My guess, this virus is for 95% very mild for which no doctor is
visited, and then of the 5% who visit the doctor with common cold symptoms at most 1% is
tested positive for corona, which are the 800 cases. Which makes the denominator not 800, but
800:0,01:0,05:0,95=a very large number.
Now if you divide 10 over a very number, your death rate will be close to 0, similar as
the death rate is due to normal common cold.
The 'medical' sector has long been empowered by those who want their fears salved rather than
question the narratives that are fed and used to gain power or possession of others.
However, as with switching to 'non-violence' – a habitual identification isn't
something to be turned on or off when a crisis comes – but as a way of living.
Weaponised and marketised science gravitated to germ theory rather than the terrain theory
of pleomorphism (of biota).
Closed system thinking posits external 'evils' and 'avengers' for hidden sins and secret
fears, projecting 'cause' OUT THERE and diverting (sacrificing) energy and identity to
defence such that the guardians become guards that lock into fear, frailty and dependency as
the condition for NEEDING Powers that demand sacrifice of freedom and joy in life for a
perpetual threat-managed existence.
Mainstream science is generally the narrative that suits the Establishment – not
just of the 'powers of the day' – but the collective fear seeking protection and
reassurance.
Toxic exposures generate the terrain for a need to clear out or neutralise the toxic
environment – this results in 'inflammations and infections' which of course CAN be
fatal or result in degradation of health and cognition. Our 'Rockefeller medicine' has
focused on interventions that suppress or block symptoms to ward the idea of losing the realm
and skills of relational nursing and clinical doctoring to pharma-technicians – who
interpret most anything as a basis to intensify or increase the level and degree of
interventions.
Fear is contagious – and hidden or masked fears are simply secretly active.
Immunity is not a matter of 'antibodies' but firstly of cellular health and function.
This principle can be transferred to our social political culture.
Hugo ,
The Chinese government faced a lot of international criticism for its perceived tardiness in
handling the 2003 SARS crisis. The heavy-handedness at locking down Wuhan might be to do with
not wishing to face international criticism again.
The deep state clearly is running the show (with some people unexpected imput -- see Trump
;-)
Elections now serve mainly for the legitimizing of the deep state rule; election of a
particular individual can change little, although there is some space of change due to the power
of executive branch. If the individual stray too much form the elite "forign policy consensus" he
ether will be JFKed or Russiagated (with the Special Prosecutor as the fist act and impeachment
as the second act of the same Russiagate drama)
But a talented (or reckless) individual can speed up some process that are already under way.
For example, Trump managed to speed up the process of destruction of the USA-centered neoliberal
empire considerably. Especially by launching the trade war with China. He also managed to
discredit the USA foreign policy as no other president before him. Even Bush II.
>This is the most critical U.S. election in our lifetime
> Posted by: Circe | Jan 23 2020 17:46 utc | 36
Hmmm, I've been hearing the same siren song every four years for the past fifty. How is it
that people still think that a single individual, or even two, can change the direction of
murderous US policies that are widely supported throughout the bureaucracy?
Bureaucracies are reactionary and conservative by nature, so any new and more repressive
policy Trumpy wants is readily adapted, as shown by the continuing barbarity of ICE and the
growth of prisons and refugee concentration camps. Policies that go against the grain are
easily shrugged off and ignored using time-tested passive-aggressive tactics.
One of Trump's insurmountable problems is that he has no loyal organization behind him
whose members he can appoint throughout the massive Federal bureaucracy. Any Dummycrat whose
name is not "Biden" has the same problem. Without a real mass-movement political party to
pressure reluctant bureaucrats, no politician of any name or stripe will ever substantially
change the direction of US policy.
But the last thing Dummycrats want is a real mass movement, because they might not be able
to control it. Instead Uncle Sam will keep heading towards the cliff, which may be coming
into view...
The amount of TINA worshipers and status quo guerillas is starting to depress me.
HOW IS IT POSSIBLE to believe A politician will/can change anything and give your consent to
war criminals and traitors?
NO person(s) WILL EVER get to the top in imperial/vassal state politics without being on the
rentier class side, the cognitive dissonans in voting for known liars, war criminals and
traitors would kill me or fry my brain. TINA is a lie and "she" is a real bitch that deserves
to be thrown on the dump off history, YOUR vote is YOUR consent to murder, theft and
treason.
DONT be a rentier class enabler STOP voting and start making your local communities better
and independent instead.
The amount of TINA worshipers and status quo guerillas is starting to depress me. <-
Norway
Of course, There Is Another Way, for example, kvetching. We can boldly show that we are
upset, and pessimistic. One upset pessimists reach critical mass we will think about some
actions.
But being upset and pessimistic does fully justify inactivity. In particular, given the
nature of social interaction networks, with spokes and hubs, dominating the network requires
the control of relatively few nodes. The nature of democracy always allows for leverage
takeover, starting from dominating within small to the entire nation in few steps. As it was
nicely explained by Prof. Overton, there is a window of positions that the vast majority
regards as reasonable, non-radical etc. One reason that powers to be invest so much energy
vilifying dissenters, Russian assets of late, is to keep them outside the Overton window.
Having a candidate elected that the curators of Overton window hate definitely shakes the
situation with the potential of shifting the window. There were some positive symptoms after
Trump was elected, but negatives prevail. "Why not we just kill him" idea entered the window,
together with "we took their oil because we have guts and common sense".
From that point of view, visibility of Tulsi and election of Sanders will solve some
problems but most of all, it will make big changes in Overton window.
Elections now serve mainly the legitimizing of the deep state rule function; election of a
partuclar induvudual can change little, althouth there is some space of change due to the power
of executive branch.
For example, Trump managed to speed up the process od destruction of the USA-centered
neoliberal empire considerably. Especially by lauching the trade war with China. He also
managed to discredit the USA foreign policy as no other president before him. Even Bush
II.
>This is the most critical U.S. election in our lifetime
> Posted by: Circe | Jan 23 2020 17:46 utc | 36
Hmmm, I've been hearing the same siren song every four years for the past fifty. How is it
that people still think that a single individual, or even two, can change the direction of
murderous US policies that are widely supported throughout the bureaucracy?
Bureaucracies are reactionary and conservative by nature, so any new and more repressive
policy Trumpy wants is readily adapted, as shown by the continuing barbarity of ICE and the
growth of prisons and refugee concentration camps. Policies that go against the grain are
easily shrugged off and ignored using time-tested passive-aggressive tactics.
One of Trump's insurmountable problems is that he has no loyal organization behind him
whose members he can appoint throughout the massive Federal bureaucracy. Any Dummycrat whose
name is not "Biden" has the same problem. Without a real mass-movement political party to
pressure reluctant bureaucrats, no politician of any name or stripe will ever substantially
change the direction of US policy.
But the last thing Dummycrats want is a real mass movement, because they might not be able
to control it. Instead Uncle Sam will keep heading towards the cliff, which may be coming
into view...
In a day like yesterday....US merits to remain in Iraq getting 50% oil revenues while
contributing zero to rebuilt the country they previosuly destroyed and funding and spreading
chaos, unrest and terrorism...
On this day in 1991, the US bombed an infant formula production plant in Iraq as part of
Operation Desert Storm. The US lied, calling it a biological weapons facility, but in
actuality, "it was the only source of infant formula food for children one year and younger
in Iraq."
US industrial production has fallen from 5.4% growth in September 2018 to minus-1.01% in
December. "Production has been negative for the last four months."
Another unforced error. What a politically naive (or evil) twat, this Elithabeth Warren
is
"I can't think of more devastating news if you're running one of these campaigns for
president than the news that your candidate is going to be bound to a desk in Washington, day
after day, in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses." ~Obama's former campaign manager David
Axelrod
Sanders and Warren have the most to lose from a Senate impeachment trial. Iowa is Feb 3 and
New Hampshire is Feb 11. As McConnell told reporters "A number of Democratic senators are running
for president. I'm sure they're gonna be excited to be here in their chairs not being able to say
anything during the pndency of this trial. So hopefully we'll work our way through it and finish
it in not too lengthy a process,"
Clinton trial ran from Jan. 7 until Feb. 12, approximately five weeks. So if McConnell is
shrewd, he will ensure that Sanders and Warren were absent from both Iowa is Feb 3 and Feb
11.
This, however, is an outright lie. If Democrats truly valued America over their own partisan
interests, they wouldn't have forced a hoax impeachment through government, despite the
overwhelming opposition against it. Moreover, if "country over party" mattered to Democrats,
then they wouldn't have commenced talks about impeachment since before the inception of Trump's
presidency.
A new year and new decade may be upon us, but this doesn't mean that Democrats are any less
terrified of seeing their impeachment sham die in the Senate.
As a matter of fact, 2020 Democrat and Sen. Elizabeth Warren spent New Year's Eve raging
against her Republican colleagues and making baseless accusations against Trump, per reports
from Washington Examiner.
Reviewing Warren's Tirade Against Senate Republicans The 2020 socialist's remarks about
Republican members of the Senate came during her New Year's Eve address in Boston,
Massachusetts. Warren lamented over the reality that Democrats will not be able to bully or
intimidate Republicans into voting for a partisan-driven, unfounded sham. This blows Warren's
far-left, unwell mind, so she opted to blast GOP senators as " fawning, spineless defenders" of
President Trump's supposed "crimes."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks in Boston: "[President Trump] has tried to squeeze foreign
governments to advance his own political fortunes. Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress
have turned into fawning spineless defenders of his crimes." pic.twitter.com/sGyLqsA8C7
Shortly thereafter, Warren followed up with the lie that ramming the weakest and thinnest
impeachment through government "brought no joy" to House Democrats. This, of course, just isn't
accurate; House Rep. Rashida Tlaib posted a gleeful livestream prior to the "impeachment" where
she bragged about being "on [her] way to the United States House floor" in order to "impeach
President Trump."
Finally, Warren declared that conservative senators need to "choose truth over politics" or
else President Trump will attempt to "cheat his way" via the 2020 election.
Misplaced Outrage As per usual with Democrats, the outrage is misplaced and misguided. If
Warren is so eager for a trial, then she should be directed this animosity towards House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi who continues to hoard the impeachment articles.
f left-wing Congress members truly believed they had a solid case against the president,
they'd be more than eager for the Senate to receive the articles and begin conducting a trial;
instead, however, raging at President Trump and Senate Republicans is easier than acknowledge
the true reality here.
Democrats forced the weakest, thinnest, and fastest impeachment through the House. The
president did absolutely nothing wrong and will be acquitted either when the Senate holds a
trial or by default if Pelosi keeps hoarding the articles.
The first is that the U.S. is the ultimate law-based society, one whose structure derives
entirely from a single four-thousand-word document created in 1787. The second is that while
Americans think of the Constitution as the greatest plan of government known to man, it's
actually the opposite: a grotesque pre-modern relic that grows more unrepresentative and
unresponsive with each passing year. A pro-rural Electoral College that has overridden the
popular vote in two of the last five presidential elections; a lopsided Senate that allows the
majority in ten urban states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty;
lifetime Supreme Court justices who can veto any law at variance with an ancient constitution
that only they understand – it's a broken-down old rattletrap in need of a top-to-bottom
overhaul. Yet it's so thoroughly frozen that structural reform is all but unthinkable.
The third thing to keep in mind is that as the constitutional system grows more and more
undemocratic, the two-party system that grew out of it in the nineteenth century grows more
undemocratic as well. The result is a bipartisan race to the right. Sometimes, the Republicans
seem to be in the lead as Trump imprisons thousands of immigrants fleeing murderous conditions
in Central America that the U.S. war on drugs helped create. Other times it's the Democrats as
they beat the drums for imperialist war against Russia.
Take all these factors – xenophobia, mindless obeisance to ancient law, a president
imposed against the popular will, etc. – mix thoroughly, place in a super-hot oven due to
a growing imperial crisis, and impeachment is what pops out. The process itself is very old, a
by-product of fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman law. (Impeachment derives from the Old French
empeechier, meaning to ensnare or entrap.) The British abandoned it in the late
eighteenth century when Edmund Burke wasted seven years impeaching an Indian colonial governor
named Warren Hastings on grounds of corruption. (The House of Lords finally acquitted him in
1795). But then the Americans took it up and now, two centuries later, are immersed in the same
brainless exercise.
The results were all too evident in mid-December when one Democrat after another took to the
House floor to denounced Donald Trump for violating the ancient constitution by withholding
lethal military aid from the neo-Nazis of the Ukraine's Azov Battalion.
"We used to stand up to Putin and Russia – I know the party of Ronald Reagan used to,"
declared Adam Schiff, the Democratic point man on impeachment, his voice quivering with
emotion. The fight to defend the Ukraine is "about more than Ukraine. It's about us. It's about
our national security. Their fight is our fight. Their defense is our defense . And when the
President sacrifices our interests, our national security for his election, he is sacrificing
our country for his personal gain."
This was the Democratic line in a nutshell. In order to safeguard the ancient republic at
home, the U.S. must pay foreign satraps to defend its imperial interests abroad. Since no
patriotic American could possibly disagree, any and all problems must stem from meddling by the
evil dictator Vladimir Putin and his traitorous puppet in the Oval Office. Americans must
therefore fulfill the ancient law by impeaching him just as the "founding fathers" would have
wanted. Only then will peace and freedom return to the land of the free and the home of the
brave.
It's all quite ridiculous, but what's even more bonkers is that millions of Americans think
it's true. Trump is meanwhile in his element. Now that Democrats have voted to impeach him in
the House, he'd like nothing more than a lengthy trial in the Senate because (a) acquittal in
the upper house is a certainty and (b) it will allow the Republican majority to put the
torturers to the rack by subpoenaing everyone from Joe and Hunter Biden to Adam Schiff himself
and declaring them in contempt of Congress if they refuse to testify. Senator Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell has described an all-out Senate war as "mutual assured destruction," and he's
right since, once unleashed, the ancient constitutional machinery will grind everything to dust
in its path.
American politics will grow only more farcical. If Putin looms larger and larger on the
world stage; if "the moment has come," as the Times Literary Supplement recently announced , "for
even the most hardened skeptics to admit that he is one of the most successful world leaders of
our era"; if the U.S. at the same time staggers from one imperial disaster to another even
while descending into civil war – then it's not because the Russian leader is
particularly clever, but because the U.S. is locked in an ancient mindset that is increasingly
divorced from reality. It's lost in a constitutional labyrinth of its own making, and
impeachment is leading it deeper and deeper into the maze.
She is now trapped and has no space for maneuvering. She now needs to share the path to the
cliff with Pelosi gang to the very end. Not a good position to be in.
Analysis: The Massachusetts senator's forceful call to begin the process of removing Trump
set her apart from the crowded primary field.
While most fellow 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls ducked and dived to find safe ground
-- and party elders solemnly warned against over-reach -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren stepped boldly
out into the open late Friday and called on the House to begin an impeachment process against
President Donald Trump based on special counsel Robert Mueller's report.
The Massachusetts senator and 2020 Democratic presidential contender slammed Trump for
having "welcomed" the help of a "hostile" foreign government and having obstructed the probe
into an attack on an American election.
"To ignore a President's repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal
behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country," Warren tweeted. "The severity
of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political
considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate
impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States."
It was a rare moment in a crowded and unsettled primary: A seized opportunity for a
candidate to cut through the campaign trail cacophony and define the terms of a debate that
will rage throughout the contest.
"... A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America ..."
"... But it was and is true. Indeed, when I visited Afghanistan back when U.S. troop levels were near their highest, "off camera," so to speak, military folks were quite skeptical of the war. So were Afghans, who had little good to say about their Washington-created and -supported government unless they were collecting a paycheck from it. An incoming president could be forgiven for suspecting that his predecessor had poured more troops into the conflict only to put off its failure until after he'd left office. ..."
"... Accounts like that from Rucker and Leonnig are beloved by the Blob. America's role is to dominate the globe, irrespective of cost. Those officials pursuing this objective, no matter how poorly, are lauded. Any politician challenging Washington's global mission is derided. ..."
"... President Trump has done much wrong. However, he deserves credit for challenging a failed foreign policy that's been paid for by so many while benefiting so few. It is "crazy" and "stupid," as he reportedly said. Why should Americans keep dying for causes that their leaders cannot adequately explain, let alone justify? Let us hope that one day Americans elect a president who will act and not just talk. ..."
fter three years of the Trump presidency, the Washington Post is breathlessly
reporting that Donald Trump is a boor who insults everyone, including generals used to respect
and even veneration. He's had the impertinence to ask critical questions of his military
briefers. For shame!
President Trump's limitations have been long evident. The Post 's discussion,
adapted by Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker from their upcoming book, A Very Stable
Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America , adds color, not substance, to this concern.
It seems that in the summer of 2017, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson, and others were concerned about the president's international ignorance and
organized a briefing at the Pentagon to enlighten him.
Was that a worthwhile mission? Sure. Everyone in the policy world marvels at the president's
lack of curiosity, absent knowledge, bizarre assumptions, and perverse conclusions. He doesn't
get trade, bizarrely celebrates dictatorship, fixates on Iran, doesn't understand agreements,
acts on impulse, and exudes absolute certainty. Yet he also captures the essence of issues and
shares a set of inchoate beliefs held by millions of Americans, especially those who feel
ignored, insulted, disparaged, and dismissed. Most important, he was elected with a mandate to
move policy away from the bipartisan globalist conventional wisdom.
The latter was evidently the main concern of these briefers. The presentation as described
by the article exuded condescension. That attitude very likely was evident to Trump. The
briefing was intended to inform, but even more so to establish his aides' control over him.
While they bridled at Trump's manners, they were even more opposed to his substantive opinions.
And that made the briefing sound like a carefully choreographed attack on his worldview.
For instance, Mattis used charts with lots of dollar signs "to impress upon [the president]
the value of U.S. investments abroad. [Mattis] sought to explain why U.S. troops were deployed
in so many regions and why America's safety hinged on a complex web of trade deals, alliances,
and bases across the globe." Notably, Mattis "then gave a 20-minute briefing on the power of
the NATO alliance to stabilize Europe and keep the United States safe."
No doubt Secretary Mattis sincerely believed all that. However, it was an argument more
appropriately made in 1950 or 1960. The world has since changed dramatically.
Of course, this is also the position of the Blob, Ben Rhodes' wonderful label for the
Washington foreign policymaking community. What has ever been must ever be, is the Blob's
informal mantra. America's lot in life, no matter how many average folks must die, is to litter
the globe with bases, ships, planes, and troops to fight endless wars, some big, some small, to
make the world safe for democracy, sometimes, and autocracy, otherwise. If America ever stops
fulfilling what seems to be the modern equivalent of Rudyard Kipling's infamous "white man's
burden," order will collapse, authoritarianism will advance, trade will disappear, conflict
will multiply, countries will be conquered, friends will become enemies, allies will defect,
terrorists will strike, liberal values will be discarded, all that is good and wonderful will
disappear, and a new dark age will envelope the earth.
Trump is remarkably ignorant of the facts, but he does possess a commonsensical skepticism
of the utter nonsense that gets promoted as unchallengeable conventional wisdom. As a result,
he understood that this weltanschauung, a word he would never use, was an absolute fantasy. And
he showed it by the questions he asked.
For instance, he challenged the defense guarantee for South Korea. "We should charge them
rent," he blurted out. "We should make them pay for our soldiers." Although treating American
military personnel like mercenaries is the wrong approach, he is right that there is no need to
protect the Republic of Korea. The Korean War ended 67 years ago. The South has twice the
population and, by the latest estimate, 54 times the economy of the North. Why is Seoul still
dependent on America?
If the Blob has its way, the U.S. will pay to defend the ROK forever. Analysts speak of the
need for Americans to stick around even after reunification. It seems there is no circumstance
under which they imagine Washington not garrisoning the peninsula. Why is America, born of
revolution, now acting like an imperial power that must impose its military might
everywhere?
Even more forcefully, it appeared, did Trump express his hostile views of Europe and NATO.
Sure, he appeared to mistakenly believe that there was an alliance budget that European
governments had failed to fund. But World War II ended 70 years ago. The Europeans recovered,
the Soviet Union collapsed, and Eastern Europeans joined NATO. Why is Washington expected to
subsidize a continent with a larger population than, and economy equivalent to, America's, and
far larger than Russia's? Mattis apparently offered the standard bromides, such as "This is
what keeps us safe."
How? Does he imagine that without Washington's European presence, Russia would roll its
tanks and march to the Atlantic Ocean? And from there launch a global pincer movement to invade
North America? How does adding such behemoths as Montenegro keep the U.S. "safe"? What does
initiating a military confrontation with Moscow over Ukraine, historically part of the Russian
Empire and Soviet Union, have to do with keeping Americans "safe"? The argument is
self-evidently not just false but ridiculous.
Justifying endless wars is even tougher. Rucker and Leonnig do not report what the president
said about Syria, which apparently was part of Mattis's brief. However, Trump's skepticism is
evident from his later policy gyrations. Why would any sane Washington policymaker insist that
America intervene militarily in a multi-sided civil war in a country of no significant security
interest to the U.S. on the side of jihadists and affiliates of al-Qaeda? And stick around
illegally as the conflict wound down? To call this policy stupid is too polite.
Even more explosive was the question of Afghanistan, to which the president did speak,
apparently quite dismissively. Unsurprisingly, he asked why the U.S. had not won after 16 years
-- which is longer than the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War combined. He
also termed Afghanistan a "loser war." By Rucker's and Leonnig's telling, this did not go over
well: "That phrase hung in the air and disgusted not only the military men and women in uniform
sitting along the back wall behind their principals. They all were sworn to obey their
commander in chief's commands, and here he was calling the way they had been fighting a loser
war."
But it was and is true. Indeed, when I visited Afghanistan back when U.S. troop levels were
near their highest, "off camera," so to speak, military folks were quite skeptical of the war.
So were Afghans, who had little good to say about their Washington-created and -supported
government unless they were collecting a paycheck from it. An incoming president could be
forgiven for suspecting that his predecessor had poured more troops into the conflict only to
put off its failure until after he'd left office.
The fault does not belong to combat personnel, but to political leaders and complicit
generals, who have misled if not lied in presenting a fairy tale perspective on the conflict's
progress and prognosis. And for what? Central Asia is not and never will be a vital issue of
American security. Afghanistan has nothing to do with terrorism other than its having hosting
al-Qaeda two decades ago. Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. In recent years, it's Yemen
that's hosted the most dangerous national affiliate of al-Qaeda. So why are U.S. troops still
in Afghanistan?
Accounts like that from Rucker and Leonnig are beloved by the Blob. America's role is to
dominate the globe, irrespective of cost. Those officials pursuing this objective, no matter
how poorly, are lauded. Any politician challenging Washington's global mission is
derided.
President Trump has done much wrong. However, he deserves credit for challenging a
failed foreign policy that's been paid for by so many while benefiting so few. It is "crazy"
and "stupid," as he reportedly said. Why should Americans keep dying for causes that their
leaders cannot adequately explain, let alone justify? Let us hope that one day Americans elect
a president who will act and not just talk.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a former special assistant
to President Ronald Reagan and author of several books, including Foreign Follies:
America's New Global Empire .
CNN and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, with powerful establishment
support, combined to stage a provocation this week aimed at slowing down or derailing the
campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party presidential
nomination.
Through CNN, the Massachusetts senator's camp first alleged that Sanders told her in
December 2018 a woman could not win a presidential election, an allegation Sanders strenuously
refuted. At the Democratic debate on Tuesday night, CNN's moderator acted as though the claim
was an indisputable reality, leading to a post-debate encounter between Warren and Sanders,
which the network just happened to record and circulate widely.
This is a political stink bomb, borrowed from the #MeToo playbook, typical of American
politics in its putrefaction. Unsubstantiated allegations are turned into "facts," these
"facts" become the basis for blackening reputations and damaging careers and shifting politics
continuously to the right. Anyone who denies the allegations is a "sexist" who refuses "to
believe women."
The Democratic establishment is fearful of Sanders, not so much for his
nationalist-reformist program and populist demagogy, but for what his confused but growing
support portends: the movement to the left by wide layers of the American population. The US
ruling elite seems convinced, like some wretched, self-deluded potentate of old, that if it can
simply stamp out the unpleasant "noise," the rising tide of disaffection will dissipate.
CNN's operation began Monday when it posted a "bombshell" article by M.J. Lee with the
headline, "Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren in private 2018 meeting that a woman can't win,
sources say."
The article animatedly begins, "The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth
Warren met at Warren's apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018." Among other
things, the CNN piece reported, the pair "discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump,
and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could
make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters. Sanders
responded that he did not believe a woman could win."
Lee continues, "The description of that meeting is based on the accounts of four people: two
people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the
meeting." In reality, the story is based on the account of one individual with a
considerable interest in cutting into Sanders' support, i.e., Elizabeth Warren. As the New
York Times primly noted, "Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders were the only people in the
room."
The absurd CNN article goes on, "After publication of this story, Warren herself backed up
this account of the meeting, saying in part in a statement Monday, 'I thought a woman could
win; he disagreed.'" In other words, Warren "backed up" what could only have been her own
account insofar as she was the only person there besides Sanders!
After a pro forma insertion of Sanders' categorical denial that he ever made such a
statement, in which he reasonably observed, "Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course!
After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016," Lee plowed right
ahead as though his comments were not worth responding to. She carries on, "The conversation
also illustrates the skepticism among not only American voters but also senior Democratic
officials that the country is ready to elect a woman as president" and, further, "The
revelation that Sanders expressed skepticism that Warren could win the presidency because she
is a woman is particularly noteworthy now, given that Warren is the lone female candidate at
the top of the Democratic field."
This is one of the ways in which the sexual misconduct witch-hunt has poisoned American
politics, although by no means the only one. Warren's claims about a private encounter simply
"must be believed."
During the Democratic candidates' debate itself Tuesday night, moderator Abby Phillips
addressed Sanders in the following manner: "Let's now turn to an issue that's come up in the
last 48 hours [because Warren and CNN generated it]. Sen. Sanders, CNN reported yesterday that
-- and Sen. Sanders, Sen. Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you
did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that? " (emphasis
added). Sanders denied once again that he had said any such thing. Phillips persisted, "Sen.
Sanders, I do want to be clear here, you're saying that you never told Sen. Warren that a woman
could not win the election?" Sanders confirmed that. Insultingly, Phillips immediately turned
to Warren and continued, "Sen. Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman
could not win the election?" This was all clearly prepared ahead of time, a deliberate effort
to embarrass Sanders and portray him as a liar and a male chauvinist.
Following the debate, Warren had the audacity to confront the Vermont senator, refuse to
shake his hand and assert, "I think you called me a liar on national TV." When Sanders seemed
startled by her remark, she repeated it. CNN managed to capture the sound and preserve it for
widespread distribution.
The WSWS gives no support to Sanders, a phony "socialist" whose efforts are aimed at
channeling working-class anger at social inequality, poverty and war back into the big business
Democratic Party. He is only the latest in a long line of figures in American political history
devoted to maintaining the Democrats' stranglehold over popular opposition and blocking the
development of a broad-based socialist movement.
Nonetheless, the CNN-Warren "dirty tricks" operation is an obvious hatchet job and an attack
from the right. Accordingly, the New York Times and other major outlets have been
gloating and attempting to make something out of it since Tuesday night. The obvious purpose is
to "raise serious questions" about Sanders and dampen support for him, among women especially.
It should be recalled that in 2016 Sanders led Hillary Clinton among young women by 30
percentage points.
Michelle Cottle, a member of the Times editorial board (in "Why Questions on Women
Candidates Strike a Nerve," January 15), asserted that the issue raised by the Warren-Sanders
clash was "not about Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. Not really. And Ms. Warren was right to try to
shift the focus to the bigger picture -- even if some critics will sneer that she's playing
'the gender card.'"
Cottle's "bigger picture," it turned out, primarily involved smearing Sanders. The present
controversy, she went on, "has resurfaced some of Mr. Sanders's past women troubles. His 2016
campaign faced multiple accusations of sexual harassment, pay inequities and other gender-based
mistreatment. Asked early last year if he knew about the complaints, Mr. Sanders's reaction was
both defensive and dismissive: 'I was a little bit busy running around the country'."
After Cottle attempted to convince her readers, on the basis of dubious numbers, that
Americans were perhaps too backward to elect a female president, she continued, again, taking
as good coin Warren's allegations, "This less-than-inspiring data -- along with from-the-trail
anecdotes about the gender-based voter anxiety that Ms. Warren and Ms. [Amy] Klobuchar have
been facing -- help explain why Mr. Sanders's alleged remarks struck such a nerve. Women
candidates and their supporters aren't simply outraged that he could be so wrong. They're
worried that he might be right." The remarks he denies making have nonetheless "outraged"
Cottle and others.
The Times more and more openly expresses fears about a possible Sanders'
nomination. Op-ed columnist David Leonhardt headlined his January 14 piece, "President Bernie
Sanders," and commented, "Sanders has a real shot of winning the Democratic nomination. Only a
couple of months after he suffered a mild heart attack, that counts as a surprise." Leonhardt
downplays Sanders' socialist credentials, observing that "while he [Sanders] would probably
fail to accomplish his grandest goals (again, like Medicare for all), he would also move the
country in a positive direction. He might even move it to closer to a center-left ideal than a
more moderate candidate like Biden would."
On Thursday, right-wing Times columnist David Brooks argued pathetically against
the existence of "class war" in "The Bernie Sanders Fallacy." He ridiculed what he described as
"Bernie Sanders's class-war Theyism: The billionaires have rigged the economy to benefit
themselves and impoverish everyone else." According to Brooks, Sanders is a Bolshevik who
believes that "Capitalism is a system of exploitation in which capitalist power completely
dominates worker power." Accusing Sanders of embracing such an ABC socialist proposition is all
nonsense, but it reveals something about what keeps pundits like Brooks up at night.
The Times is determined, as the WSWS has noted more than once, to exclude anything
from the 2020 election campaign that might arouse or encourage the outrage of workers and young
people. The past year of global mass protest has only deepened and strengthened that
determination.
The Times , CNN and other elements of the media and political establishment, and
behind them powerful financial-corporate interests, don't want Sanders and they don't
necessarily want Warren either, who engaged in certain loose talk about taxing the
billionaires, before retreating in fright. They want a campaign dominated by race, gender and
sexual orientation -- not class and not social inequality. The #MeToo-style attack on Sanders
reflects both the "style" and the right-wing concerns of these social layers.
"... The decision to invade Afghanistan following the events of September 11, 2001, while declaring an "axis of evil" to be confronted that included nuclear-armed North Korea and budding regional hegemon Iran, can be said to be the reason for many of the most significant strategic problems besetting the U.S.. ..."
"... The U.S. often prefers to disguise its medium- to long-term objectives by focusing on supposedly more immediate and short-term threats. Thus, the U.S.'s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and its deployment of the Aegis Combat System (both sea- and land-based) as part of the NATO missile defense system, was explained as being for the purposes of defending European allies from the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. ..."
"... As was immediately clear to most independent analysts as well as to President Putin , the deployment of such offensive systems are only for the purposes of nullifying the Russian Federation's nuclear-deterrence capability . Obama and Trump faithfully followed in the steps of George W. Bush in placing ABM systems on Russia's borders, including in Romania and Poland. ..."
"... There is no defense against such Russian systems as the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which serves to restore the deterrence doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which in turn serves to ensure that nuclear weapons can never be employed so long as this "balance of terror" exists. Moscow is thus able to ensure peace through strength by showing that it is capable of inflicting a devastating second strike with regard regard for Washington's vaunted ABM systems. ..."
"... In addition to the continued economic and military pressure placed on Iran, one of the most immediate consequences of the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal) has been Tehran being forced to examine all options. Although the country's leaders and political figures have always claimed that they do not want to develop a nuclear weapon, stating that it is prohibited by Islamic law, I should think that their best course of action would be to follow Pyongyang's example and acquire a nuclear deterrent to protect themselves from U.S. aggression. ..."
"... Once again, Washington has ended up shooting itself in the foot by inadvertently encouraging one of its geopolitical opponents to behave in the opposite manner intended. Instead of stopping nuclear proliferation in the region, the U.S., by scuppering of the JCPOA, has only encouraged the prospect of nuclear proliferation. ..."
"... Trump's short-sightedness in withdrawing from the JCPOA is reminiscent of George W. Bush's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. By triggering necessary responses from Moscow and Tehran, Washington's actions have only ended up leaving it at a disadvantage in certain critical areas relative to its competitors. ..."
Starting from the presidency of George W. Bush to that of Trump, the U.S. has made some
missteps that not only reduce its influence in strategic regions of the world but also its
ability to project power and thus impose its will on those unwilling to genuflect appropriately
.
Some examples from the recent past will suffice to show how a series of strategic errors
have only accelerated the U.S.'s hegemonic decline.
ABM + INF = Hypersonic Supremacy
The decision to invade Afghanistan following the events of September 11, 2001, while
declaring an "axis of evil" to be confronted that included nuclear-armed North Korea and
budding regional hegemon Iran, can be said to be the reason for many of the most significant
strategic problems besetting the U.S..
The U.S. often prefers to disguise its medium- to long-term objectives by focusing on
supposedly more immediate and short-term threats. Thus, the U.S.'s withdrawal from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and its deployment of the Aegis Combat System (both
sea- and land-based) as part of the NATO missile defense system, was explained as being for the
purposes of defending European allies from the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. This
argument held little water as the Iranians had neither the capability nor intent to launch such
missiles.
As was immediately clear to most independent analysts as well as to President Putin , the deployment of such
offensive systems are only for the purposes of nullifying the
Russian Federation's nuclear-deterrence capability . Obama and Trump faithfully followed in
the steps of George W. Bush in placing ABM systems on Russia's borders, including in Romania
and Poland.
Following from Trump's momentous decision to
withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), it is also likely
that the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) will also be abandoned, creating more
global insecurity with regard to nuclear proliferation.
Moscow was forced to pull out all stops to develop new weapons that would restore the
strategic balance, Putin revealing to the world in a speech in 2018 the introduction of
hypersonic weapons and other technological breakthroughs that would serve to disabuse
Washington of its first-strike fantasies.
Even as Washington's propaganda refuses to acknowledge the tectonic shifts on the global
chessboard occasioned by these technological breakthroughs, sober
military assessments acknowledge that the game has fundamentally changed.
There is no defense against such Russian systems as the Avangard hypersonic glide
vehicle, which serves to restore the deterrence doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD),
which in turn serves to ensure that nuclear weapons can never be employed so long as this
"balance of terror" exists. Moscow is thus able to ensure peace through strength by showing
that it is capable of inflicting a devastating second strike with regard regard for
Washington's vaunted ABM systems.
In addition to ensuring its nuclear second-strike capability, Russia has been forced to
develop the most advanced ABM system in the world to fend off Washington's aggression. This ABM
system is integrated into a defensive network that includes the Pantsir, Tor, Buk, S-400 and
shortly the devastating S-500 and A-235 missile systems. This combined system is designed to
intercept ICBMs as well as any future U.S. hypersonic weapons
The wars of aggression prosecuted by George W. Bush, Obama and Trump have only ended up
leaving the U.S. in a position of nuclear inferiority vis-a-vis Russia and China. Moscow has
obviously shared some of its technological innovations with its strategic partner, allowing
Beijing to also have hypersonic weapons together with ABM systems like the Russian S-400.
No
JCPOA? Here Comes Nuclear Iran
In addition to the continued economic and military pressure placed on Iran, one of the
most immediate consequences of the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal) has been Tehran being forced to examine all
options. Although the country's leaders and political figures have always claimed that they do
not want to develop a nuclear weapon, stating that it is
prohibited by Islamic law, I should think that their best course of action would be to
follow Pyongyang's example and acquire a nuclear deterrent to protect themselves from U.S.
aggression.
While this suggestion of mine may not correspond with the intentions of leaders of the
Islamic Republic of Iran, the protection North Korea enjoys from U.S. aggression as a result of
its deterrence capacity may oblige the Iranian leadership to carefully consider the pros and
cons of following suit, perhaps choosing to adopt the Israeli stance of nuclear ambiguity or
nuclear opacity, where the possession of nuclear weapons is neither confirmed nor denied. While
a world free of nuclear weapons would be ideal, their deterrence value cannot be denied, as
North Korea's experience attests.
While Iran does not want war, any pursuit of a nuclear arsenal may guarantee a conflagration
in the Middle East. But I have long maintained that the risk of a nuclear war (once nuclear
weapons have been acquired)
does not exist , with them having a
stabilizing rather than destabilizing effect, particularly in a multipolar environment.
Once again, Washington has ended up shooting itself in the foot by inadvertently
encouraging one of its geopolitical opponents to behave in the opposite manner intended.
Instead of stopping nuclear proliferation in the region, the U.S., by scuppering of the JCPOA,
has only encouraged the prospect of nuclear proliferation.
Trump's short-sightedness in withdrawing from the JCPOA is reminiscent of George W.
Bush's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. By triggering necessary responses from Moscow and
Tehran, Washington's actions have only ended up leaving it at a disadvantage in certain
critical areas relative to its competitors.
The death of Soleimani punctures the myth
of the U.S. invincibility
I wrote a couple of articles in the wake of General Soleimani's death that
examined the incident and then
considered the profound ramifications of the event in the region.
What seems evident is that Washington appears incapable of appreciating the consequences of
its reckless actions. Killing Soleimani was bound to invite an Iranian response; and even if we
assume that Trump was not looking for war (I
explained why some months ago), it was obvious to any observer that there would be a
response from Iran to the U.S.'s terrorist actions.
The response came a few nights later where, for the first time since the Second World War, a
U.S. military base was subjected to a rain of missiles (22 missiles each with a 700kg payload).
Tehran thereby showed that it possessed the necessary technical, operational and strategic
means to obliterate thousands of U.S. and allied personnel within the space of a few minutes if
it so wished, with the U.S. would be powerless to stop it.
U.S. Patriot air-defense systems yet again failed to do their job, reprising their failure
to defend Saudi oil and gas facilities against a missile attack conducted by Houthis a few
months ago.
We thus have confirmation, within the space of a few months, of the inability of the U.S. to
protect its troops or allies from Houthi, Hezbollah and Iranian missiles. Trump and his
generals would have been reluctant to respond to the Iranian missile attack knowing that any
Iranian response would bring about uncontrollable regional conflagration that would devastate
U.S. bases as well as oil infrastructure and such cities of U.S. allies as Tel Aviv, Haifa and
Dubai.
After demonstrating to the world that U.S. allies in the region are defenseless against
missile attacks from even the likes of the Houthis, Iran drove home the point by conducting
surgical strikes on two U.S. bases that only highlights the disconnect between the perception
of U.S. military invincibility and the reality that would come in the form of a multilayered
missile conflict.
Conclusion
Washington's diplomatic and military decisions in recent years have only brought about a
world world that is more hostile to Washington and less inclined to accept its diktats, often
being driven instead to acquire the military means to counter Washington's bullying. Even as
the U.S. remains the paramount military power, its ineptitude has resulted in Russia and China
surpassing it in some critical areas, such that the U.S. has no chance of defending itself
against a nuclear second strike, with even Iran having the means to successfully retaliate
against the U.S. in the region.
As I continue to say, Washington's power largely rests on perception management helped by
the make-believe world of Hollywood. The recent missile attacks by Houthis on Saudi Arabia's
oil facilities and the Iranian missile attack a few days ago on U.S. military bases in Iraq
(none of which were intercepted) are like Toto drawing back the curtain to reveal Washington's
military vulnerability. No amount of entreaties by Washington to pay no attention to the man
behind the curtain will help.
The more aggressive the U.S. becomes, the more it reveals its tactical, operational and
strategic limits, which in turn only serves to accelerate its loss of hegemony.
If the U.S. could deliver a nuclear first strike without having to worry about a retaliatory
second strike thanks to its ABM systems, then its quest for perpetual unipolarity could
possibly be realistic. But Washington's peer competitors have shown that they have the means to
defend themselves against a nuclear first strike by being able to deliver an unstoppable second
strike, thereby communicating that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) is here
to stay. With that, Washington's efforts to maintain its status as uncontested global hegemon
are futile.
In a region
vital to U.S. interests , Washington does not have the operational capacity to stand in the
way of Syria's liberation. When it has attempted to directly impose its will militarily, it has
seen as many as 80% of its cruise missiles
knocked down or deflected , once again highlighting the divergence between Washington's
Hollywood propaganda and the harsh military reality.
The actions of George W. Bush, Obama and Trump have only served to inadvertently accelerate
the world's transition away from a unipolar world to a multipolar one. As Trump follows in the
steps of his predecessors by being aggressive towards Iran, he only serves to weaken the U.S.
global position and strengthen that of his opponents.
Up to the election of our current President, I agree that we were bullying for the
personal gain of a few and our military was being used as a mercenary force. The current
administration is working on getting us out of long term conflicts. What do you think "drain
the swamp" means? It is a huge undertaking and need to understand what the "deep state" is
all about and their goals.
The death of Soleimani was needed and made the world a safer place. Dr. Janda / Freedom
Operation has had several very intriguing presentations on this issue. It is my firm belief
that there is a worldwide coalition to make the world a better and safer place. If you want
to know about the "deep state" try watching: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cYZ8dUgPuU
All mostly true, but the constant drone of this type of article gets old, as the comments
below attest. We really don't need more forensic analysis by the SCF, what we need is an
answer to America's dollar Imperialism problem. But we'll never get it, just as England never
got an answer to it's pound Imperialism problem.
I like Tulsi Gabbard, but she can never truly reveal the magnitude of the dollar
Imperialism behind her "stop these endless wars" sloganism. Besides, she doesn't have the
billions required to mount any real successful campaign. Only billionaires like Bloomberg
need apply these days.
The Truth is that NO ONE will stand up to Wall Street and it's system of global dollar
corporatism (from which Bloomberg acquired his billions, and to which the USG is bound). It's
suicide to speak the truth to the masses. The dollar must die of its own disease.
Trump is America's Chemo. The cure nearly as bad as the cancer, but the makers of it have
a vested interest in its acceptance.
General Bonespur murders a genuine military man from the comfort of his golf course.
America is still dangerous, Pinky might be tired but the (((Brain))) is working feverishly on
solutions for the jaded .
There has been a perception in the last 25 years that the US could win a nuclear war. This
perception is extremely dangerous as it invites the US armed forces to commit atrocities and
think they can get away with it (they are for now). The world opinion has turned, but the
citizens of the United States of America are not listening.
If the US keeps going down the path they are currently on, they are ensuring that war will
eventually reach its coast.
To challenge the US Empire the new Multipolar World is focused on a two-pronged
strategy:
1. Nullifying the US nuclear first strike (at will) as part of the current US military
doctrine - accomplished (for a decade maybe).
2. Outmaneuvering the US petrodollar in trade, the tool to control the global fossil fuel
resources on the planet - in progress.
What makes 2.) decisive is that the petrodollar as reserve currency is the key to recycle
the US federal budget deficit via foreign investment in U.S. Treasury Bonds (IOUs) by the
central banks, thus enabling the global military presence and power projection of the US
military empire.
All their little plots and schemes failed, as corrupt arsehole after corrupt arsehole
stole the funding from those plots and schemes to fill their own pockets. They also put the
most corrupt individuals they could find into power, so as much as possible could be stolen
and voila, everywhere they went, everything collapsed, every single time.
Totally and utterly ludicrous decades, of not punishing failure after failure has resulted
in nothing but more failure, like, surprise, surprise, surprise.
Routine failures have forced other nation to go multipolar or just rush straight to global
economic collapse as a result of out of control US corruption. Russia and China did not
outsmart the USA, the USA did it entirely to itself by not prosecuting corruption at high
levels, even when it failed time and time again, focusing more on how much they could steal,
then on bringing what ever plot or scheme to a successful conclusion.
The use of the terms "Unintended Consequences", shortsightedness, mistakes, stupidity, or
ignorance provides the avenue to transfer or divert the blame. It excuses it away as bad
decisions so that the truth and those responsible are never really exposed and held
accountable. The fact is, these actions were not mistakes or acts of shortsightedness...they
were deliberate and planned and the so-called "unintended consequences" were actually
intended and part of their plan. Looking back and linking the elites favorite process to
drive change (problem, reaction, solution)...one can quickly make the connection to many of
the so-called "unintended consequences" as they are very predictable results their actions.
It becomes very clear that much of what has occurred over the last few decades has been
deliberate with planned/intended outcomes.
I think the biggest advantage USA used to have was that they claimed to stand for Freedom
and Democracy. And for a time, many people believed them. That's partly why the USSR fell
apart, and for a time USA had a lot of goodwill among ordinary Russians.
But US political leaders squandered this goodwill when they used NATO to attack Yugoslavia
against Russia's objections and expanded NATO towards Russia's borders. This has been long
forgotten in USA. But many ordinary Russians still seethe about these events. This was the
turning point for them that motivated them to support Putin and his rebuilding of Russia's
military.
When you have goodwill among your potential competitors, then they don't have much
motivation to increase their capabilities against you. This was the situation USA was in
after the USSR fell apart. But USA squandered all of this goodwill and motivated the Russians
to do what they did.
And now, USA under Trump has done something like this with China. USA used to have a lot
of goodwill among the ordinary Chinese. But now this is gone as a result of US tariffs,
sanctions, and its support for separatism in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Now, the Chinese will be
as motivated as the Russians to do their best at promoting their interests at the expense of
USA. And together with Russia, they have enough people and enough natural resources to do
more than well against USA and its allies.
I think USA could've maintained a lot more influence around the world through goodwill
with ordinary people, than through sanctions, threats, and military attacks. If USA had left
Iraq under Saddam Hussein alone, then Iran wouldn't have had much influence in there. And if
USA had left Iran alone, then the young people there might've already rebelled against their
strict Islamic rule and made their government more friendly with USA.
Doing nothing, except business and trade, would've left USA in a much better position,
than the one USA is in now.
Now USA is bankrupting itself with unsustainable military spending and still falling
behind its competitors. USA might still have the biggest economy in the world in US Dollar
terms. But this doesn't take into account the cost of living and purchasing parity. With
purchasing parity taken into account, China now has a bigger economy than that of USA.
Because internally, they can manufacture and buy a lot more for the same amount of money than
USA can. A lot of US military spending is on salaries, pensions, and healthcare of its
personnel. While such costs in Russia and China are comparatively small. They are spending
most of their money on improving and building their military technology. That's why in the
long run, USA will probably fall behind even more.
The Anglos in the U.S. are not from there and are imposters who are claiming
characteristics and a culture that doesn't belong to them. They're using it as a way
to hide from scrutiny, so you blame "Americans", when its really them. That's why
there's such a huge disconnect between stated values and actions. The values belong to
another group of people, TRUE Americans, while the actions belong to Anglos, who have a
history of aggressive and forced, irrational violence upon innocents.
It's true that ordinary people are often different from their government, including in
Russia, in China, in Iran, in USA, and even in Nazi Germany in the past.
But the people in such a situation are usually powerless and unable to influence their
government. So, their difference is irrelevant in the way their government behaves and
alienates people around the world.
USA is nominally a democracy, where the government is controlled by the people. But in
reality, the people are only a ceremonial figurehead, and the real power is a small minority
of rich companies and individuals, who fund election campaigns of politicians.
That's why for example most Americans want to have universal healthcare, just like all
other developed countries have. But most elected politicians from both major parties won't
even consider this idea, because their financial donors are against it. And if the people are
powerless even within their own country, then outside with foreigners, they have even less
influence.
1. Nation Building? It worked with Germany and Japan, rinse and repeat. So what if it's
comparing apples to antimatter?
2. US won the Cold War? So make the same types of moves made during Reagan adm? The real
reason the Soviet Empire collapsed was because it was a money losing empire while the US was
a money making empire. Just review the money pits they invested in.
3. Corruption? That was your grandfather's time. The US has been restructured. Crime
Syndicate and Feudal templates are the closest. Stagnation and decline economically and
technologically are inevitable.
4. Evaluating the competition is problematic. However perhaps the most backward and
regressive elements in this society are branding themselves as progressive and getting away
with it. That can't work.
"... they promote the nauseating center-right candidacies of the bewildered racist and corporatist Joe Biden, the sinister neoliberal corporate-militarist Pete Butiggieg and even the marginal Wall Street "moderates" Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris? ..."
"... "Follow the money" is the longstanding mantra in campaign finance research and criminal prosecution. ..."
"... At the same time, both U.S. corporate media managers and the advertisers who supply revenue for their salaries are hesitant to produce content that might alienate affluent folks – the people who hire pricey investment advisors, go to Caribbean resorts and buy Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes and count for an ever-rising share of U.S. consumer purchases. It is those with the most purchasing power who are naturally most targeted by advertisers. ..."
Is it any wonder that the nation's "liberal" cable news stations CNN and MSNBC can barely
contain their disdain for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign and even (to a lesser degree)
for that of Elizabeth Warren while they promote the nauseating center-right candidacies of the
bewildered racist and corporatist Joe Biden, the sinister neoliberal corporate-militarist Pete Butiggieg and even the marginal Wall Street "moderates" Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris?
Next
time you click on these stations, keep a pen and paper handy to write down the names of the
corporations that pay for their broadcast content with big money commercial purchases.
I did that at various times of day on three separate occasions last week. Here are the
companies I found buying ads at CNN and MSDNC:
American Advisors Group (AAG), the top lender the American reverse mortgage industry (with
Tom Selleck telling seniors to trust him that reverse mortgages are not a rip off)
United Health Care, for-profit "managed health care company" with 300,000 employers and an
annual revenue of $226 billion, ranked sixth on the 2019 Fortune 500.
Menards, the nation's third largest home improvement chain, with revenue over $10 billion in
2017.
CHANITX, a drug to get off cigarettes ("slow Turkey") sold by the pharmaceutical firm
Pfizer, 65th on the Fortune 500.
Tom Steyer (billionaire for president)
Lincoln Financial, 187 th on the Fortune 500, an American holding company that
controls multiple insurance and investment management businesses.
Liberty Mutual, an insurance company with more than 50,000 employees in more than 900
locations and ranked 68 th on the Fortune 500 two years ago.
Allstate Insurance: 79 th on the Fortune 500, with more than 45,000
employees.
INFINITI Suburban Utility Vehicle (new price ranging from 37K to 60K), produced by Nissan,
the sixth largest auto-making corporation in the world.
RCN (annual revenue of $636 million) WiFi for business
Jaguar Elite luxury autos.
Porsche luxury autos, selling new models priced at $115,000, $145,000, and $163,00, and
$294,000.
Mercedes Benz luxury auto, including an SRL-Class model that starts at $498,000
Capital Group, one of the world's oldest and biggest investment management firms, with $1.87
trillion in assets under its control.
Otezla, a plaque psoriasis drug, developed by the New Jersey drug company Celgene and owned
by Amgene, a leading California-based biotechnology firm with total assets of $78 billion.
Trelegy, a CPD drug produced by the British company GSK, the world's seventh leading
pharmaceutical corporation, with the fourth largest capitalization of any company on the London
Stock Exchange.
HunterDouglass – elite windows made by a Dutch multinational corporation with more
than 23,000 employees and locations in more than 70 countries.
Humira – drug for Crohn's disease and other ailments, manufactured by Abbvie, with
28,000 global employees and total assets of $59 billion.
Primateme Mist – for breathing, produced by Amphastar Pharmaceuticals.
Glucerna – drug for diabetes, produced by Abbot Laboratories, an American medical
company with more than 100,00 employees and total assets of $67 billion.
Prevagen – a controversial drug for brain health produced by Quincy Bioscience
DISCOVER Credit Card, the third largest credit card brand in the U.S., with total assets of
$92 billion.
Fidelity Investments, an American multinational financial services corporation with more
than 50,000 employees and an operating income of $5.3 billion.
Cadillac XT-6 high-end SUV, starting at $53K, made by General Motors (no. 10 on the Fortune
500 for total revenue), which makes automobiles in 37 countries, employees 173,000 persons, and
has total assets $227 billion.
Comfort Inn, owned by Choice Hotels, one of the largest hotel chains in the world,
franchising 7,005 properties in 41 countries and territories.
Audible/Amazon – books on tape from the world's biggest mega-corporation Amazon,
ranked fifth on the Fortune 500, with 647,000 employees and total assets of $163 billion.
Ring Home Security, owned by Amazon
Coventry Health Insurance, no. 168 on the Fortune 500
SANDALS Resorts International, with 16 elite resort properties in the Caribbean.
Cigna Medicare Advantage, owned by the national health insurer Cigna, no. 229 on the Fortune
500
SoFi Finance, an online personal finance company that provides student loan refinancing,
mortgages and personal loans.
Ameriprise Finance, an investment services firm, no. 240 on F500.
It's not for nothing that bit Fortune 500 firms are represented in my anecdotal sponsor list
above. Last summer, SQAD MediaCosts reported that a 30-second commercial during CNN's
prime-time lineup (Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, and Don Lemon), cost between $7,000 and
$12,000. The price has certainly gone up significantly now that Trumpeachment is bringing in
new eyeballs.
The three most prominent and recurrent advertising streams appear (anecdotally) to come from
Big Pharma (the leading drug companies), insurance (health insurance above all), and finance
(investment services/wealth management). These giant concentrated corporate and industry
sectors are naturally opposed to the financial regulation and anti-trust policy that Senator
Warren says she wants to advance. Amazon can hardly be expected to back the big-tech break-up
that Warren advocates.
Big corporate lenders certainly have no interest in making college tuition free, a Sanders
promise that would slash a major profit source for finance capital.
The big health insurance firms are naturally opposed both to the Single Payer national
health insurance plan that Sanders puts at the top of his platform and to the milder version of
Medicare for All that Warren says she backs. Warren and especially Sanders pledge to remove the
parasitic, highly expensive profit motive from health insurance and to make publicly funded
quality and affordable health care a human right in the U.S. The corporate insurance mafia is
existentially opposed to such human decency.
Both of the "progressive Democratic candidates" (a description that fits Sanders far better
than it does Warren) loudly promise to slash drug costs, something Pfizer, Abbvie, Amgene,
Amphastar, and Abbot Labs can hardly be expected to relish.
None of the big companies buying advertising time on CNN and MSNBC have any interest in the
progressive taxation and restored union organizing and collective bargaining rights that
Sanders advocates.
The big financial services firms paying for media content on "liberal" cable news stations
primarily serve affluent clients, many if not most of whom are likely to oppose increased taxes
on the well off.
The resort, tourism, luxury car, and business travel firms that buy commercials on these
networks are hardly about to back policies leading to the real or potential reduction of
discretionary income enjoyed by upper middle class and rich people.
So, gosh, who do these corporate and financial interests favor in the 2020 presidential
election? Neoliberal Corporatists like Joe Biden, Pete Butiggieg, Kamala Harris, and Amy
Klobuchar, of course. Dutifully obedient to the preferences and commands of the nation's
unelected dictatorship of money, these insipid corporate Democrats loyally claim that Sanders
and Warren want to viciously "tax the middle class" to pay for supposedly unaffordable excesses
like Medicare for All and the existentially necessary Green New Deal.
In reality, Single Payer and giant green jobs programs and more that We the People need and
want are eminently affordable if the United States follows Sanders' counsel by adequately and
progressively taxing its absurdly wealthy over-class (the top tenth of the upper 1% than owns
more than 90% of U.S. wealth) and its giant, surplus-saturated corporations and financial
institutions. At the same time, as Warren keeps trying to explain, the cost savings for
ordinary Americans will be enormous with the profits system taken out of health insurance.
Sanders reminds voters that there's no way to calculate the cost savings of keeping livable
ecology alive for future generations. The climate catastrophe is a grave existential threat to
the whole species.
These are basic arguments of elementary social, environmental, and democratic decency that
the investors and managers behind and atop big corporations buying commercials on CNN and MSNBC
don't want heard. As a result, CNN and MSDNC "debate" moderators and talking heads persist in
purveying the, well, fake news, that Sanders doesn't know how to pay Single Payer, free public
college, and a Green New Deal.
It's not for nothing that CNN and MSNBC have promoted the hapless Biden over and above
Sanders and Warren – this notwithstanding the former Vice President's ever more obvious
and embarrassing inadequacy as a candidate.
It's not for nothing that MSNBC and CNN have habitually warned against the supposed
"socialist" menace posed by the highly popular Sanders (a New Deal progressive at leftmost)
while refusing to properly describe Trump's White House and his dedicated base as pro-fascists.
MSDNC has even get a weekly segment to the silver-spooned multi-millionaire advertising
executive Donny Deutsch after he said the following on the network last winter:
"I find Donald Trump reprehensible as a human being, but a socialist candidate is more
dangerous to this company, country, as far as the strength and well-being of the country,
than Donald Trump. I would vote for Donald Trump, a despicable human being I will be so
distraught to the point that that could even come out of my mouth, if we have a socialist
[Democratic presidential candidate or president] because that will take our country so down,
and we are not Denmark. I love Denmark, but that's not who we are. And if you love who we are
and all the great things that still have to have binders put on the side. Please step away
from the socialism."
It's not for nothing that the liberal cable networks go out of their way to deny Sanders
remotely appropriate broadcast time. Or that they habitually and absurdly frame Single Payer
health insurance not as the great civilizing social and human rights victory it would be (the
long-overdue cost-slashing de-commodification of health care coverage combined with the
provision of health care for all regardless of social status and class) but rather as a
dangerous and authoritarian assault on Americans' existing (and unmentionably inadequate and
over-expensive) health insurance.
Dare we mention that the lords of capital who pay for cable news salaries and content are
heavily invested in the fossil fuels and in the relentless economic growth that are pushing the
planet rapidly towards environmental tipping points that gravely endanger prospects for a
decent and organized human existence in coming decades?
It's not for nothing that the progressive measures advanced by Sanders and supported by most
Americans are regularly treated as "unrealistic," "irresponsible," "too radical," "too
idealistic," "impractical," and "too expensive."
It's for nothing that Sanders is commonly left out of the liberal cable networks' campaign
coverage and "horse race" discussions even as he enjoys the highest approval rating among all
the candidates in the running.
With their preferred centrist candidate Joe Biden having performed in a predictably poor and
buffoonish fashion (Biden was a terrible, gaffe-prone politician well before his brains started
coming out of his ears) falling back into something like a three-way tie with the liberal
Warren and the populist progressive Sanders, the liberal cable talking heads and debate
moderators have naturally tried to boost "moderate" neoliberal-corporatist "second" and "third
tier" Democratic presidential candidates like Butiggieg, Klobuchar and the surprisingly weak
Kamala Harris. It's not for nothing that these and other marginal corporate candidates (e.g.
Beto O'Rourke) get outsized attention on "liberal" cable stations regardless of their tiny
support bases. Even if they can't win, these small-time contenders take constant neoliberal
jabs at Sanders and even at the more clearly corporate-co-optable Warren (who proudly describes
herself as "capitalist in my bones").
Thanks to Harris's curiously weak showing, Biden's dotard-like absurdity, and the likely
non-viability of Butiggieg (the U.S. is not yet primed for two men and a baby in the White
House), the not-so liberal cable channels are now joining the New Yok Times and
Washington Post in gently floating the possibility of a dark-horse neoliberal Democratic
Party newcomer (Michael Bloomberg, John Kerry, Michelle Obama, Sherrod Brown, and maybe even
Hillary Clinton herself) to fill Joke Biden's Goldman-and Citigroup-approved shoes in the
coming primary and Caucus battles with "radical socialist" Bernie and (not-so) "left"
Warren.
So what if running an establishment Obama-Clinton-Citigroup-Council on Foreign Relations
Democrat in 2020 will de-mobilize much of the nation's progressive electoral base, helping the
malignant white nationalist monster Donald Trump get a second term?
As the old working-class slogan says, "money talks and bullshit walks."
"Follow the money" is the longstanding mantra in campaign finance research and criminal
prosecution. It should also apply to our understanding of the dominant media's political news
content. U.S. media managers are employed by giant corporations (MSNBC is a division of Comcast
NBC Universal, no. 71 on the Fortune 500 and CNN is owned by Turner Broadcasting, no, 68 on the
Fortune 500) that are naturally reluctant to publish or broadcast material that might offend
the wealthy capitalist interests that pay for broadcasting by purchasing advertisements. As
Noam Chomsky has noted, large corporations are not only the major producers of the United
States' mass commercial media. They are also that media's top market, something that deepens
the captivity of nation's supposedly democratic and independent media to big capital:
"The reliance of a journal on advertisers shapes and controls and substantially determines
what is presented to the public the very idea of advertiser reliance radically distorts the
concept of free media. If you think about what the commercial media are, no matter what, they
are businesses. And a business produces something for a market. The producers in this case,
almost without exception, are major corporations. The market is other businesses –
advertisers. The product that is presented to the market is readers (or viewers), so these
are basically major corporations providing audiences to other businesses, and that
significantly shapes the nature of the institution."
At the same time, both U.S. corporate media managers and the advertisers who supply revenue
for their salaries are hesitant to produce content that might alienate affluent folks –
the people who hire pricey investment advisors, go to Caribbean resorts and buy Jaguars and
Mercedes Benzes and count for an ever-rising share of U.S. consumer purchases. It is those with
the most purchasing power who are naturally most targeted by advertisers.
Money talks, bullshit talks on "liberal" cable news, as in the legal and party and elections
systems and indeed across all of society.
Watch the wannabe fascist strongman Trump walk to a second term with no small help from a
"liberal" corporate media whose primary goal is serving corporate sponsors and its own bottom
line, not serving social justice, environmental sanity, and democracy – or even helping
Democrats win elections.
One of two things is wrong with America: Either the entire system is broken or is on the
verge of breaking, and we need someone to bring about radical, structural change, or -- we
don't need that at all! Which is it? Who can say? Certainly not me, and that is why I am
telling you now which candidate to vote for.
"... The Americans are the ones who destroyed the country and wreaked havoc on it. They have refused to finish building the electrical system and infrastructure projects. They have bargained for the reconstruction of Iraq in exchange for Iraq giving up 50% of oil imports. So, I refused and decided to go to China and concluded an important and strategic agreement with it. Today, Trump is trying to cancel this important agreement. ..."
"... After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I also refused, and he threatened [that there would be] massive demonstrations to topple me. Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, whereby a third party [presumed to be mercenaries or U.S. soldiers] would target both the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from atop the highest buildings and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement." ..."
"... It could also explain why President Trump is so concerned about China's growing foothold in Iraq, since it risks causing not only the end of the U.S. military hegemony in the country but could also lead to major trouble for the petrodollar system and the U.S.' position as a global financial power. Trump's policy aimed at stopping China and Iraq's growing ties is clearly having the opposite effect, showing that this administration's "gangster diplomacy" only serves to make the alternatives offered by countries like China and Russia all the more attractive. ..."
After the feed was cut, MPs who were present wrote down Abdul-Mahdi's remarks, which were
then given to the Arabic news outlet Ida'at .
Per that transcript , Abdul-Mahdi stated that:
The Americans are the ones who destroyed the country and wreaked havoc on it. They
have refused to finish building the electrical system and infrastructure projects. They have
bargained for the reconstruction of Iraq in exchange for Iraq giving up 50% of oil imports.
So, I refused and decided to go to China and concluded an important and strategic agreement
with it. Today, Trump is trying to cancel this important agreement. "
Abdul-Mahdi continued his remarks, noting that pressure from the Trump administration over
his negotiations and subsequent dealings with China grew substantially over time, even
resulting in death threats to himself and his defense minister:
After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I
also refused, and he threatened [that there would be] massive demonstrations to topple me.
Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the
event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, whereby a third party [presumed to be
mercenaries or U.S. soldiers] would target both the demonstrators and security forces and
kill them from atop the highest buildings and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and
submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement."
"I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist to this day
on canceling the China agreement. When the defense minister said that those killing the
demonstrators was a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically threatened myself
and the defense minister in the event that there was more talk about this third party."
Very few English language outlets
reported on Abdul-Mahdi's comments. Tom Luongo, a Florida-based Independent Analyst and publisher of The Gold
Goats 'n Guns Newsletter, told MintPress that the likely reasons for the "surprising"
media silence over Abdul-Mahdi's claims were because "It never really made it out into official
channels " due to the cutting of the video feed during Iraq's Parliamentary session and due to
the fact that "it's very inconvenient and the media -- since Trump is doing what they want him
to do, be belligerent with Iran, protected Israel's interests there."
"They aren't going to contradict him on that if he's playing ball," Luongo added, before
continuing that the media would nonetheless "hold onto it for future reference .If this comes
out for real, they'll use it against him later if he tries to leave Iraq." "Everything in
Washington is used as leverage," he added.
Given the lack of media coverage and the cutting of the video feed of Abdul-Mahdi's full
remarks, it is worth pointing out that the narrative he laid out in his censored speech not
only fits with the timeline of recent events he discusses but also the tactics known to have
been employed behind closed doors by the Trump administration, particularly after Mike Pompeo
left the CIA to become Secretary of State.
For instance, Abdul-Mahdi's delegation to China ended on September 24, with the protests
against his government that Trump reportedly threatened to start on October 1. Reports of a
"third side" firing on Iraqi protesters were picked up by major media outlets at the time, such
as in this
BBC report which stated:
Reports say the security forces opened fire, but another account says unknown gunmen
were responsible .a source in Karbala told the BBC that one of the dead was a guard at a
nearby Shia shrine who happened to be passing by. The source also said the origin of the
gunfire was unknown and it had targeted both the protesters and security forces .
(emphasis added)"
U.S.-backed protests in other countries, such as in Ukraine in 2014, also saw evidence of a
"
third side " shooting both protesters and security forces alike.
After six weeks of intense protests , Abdul-Mahdi
submitted
his resignation on November 29, just a few days after Iraq's
Foreign Minister praised the new deals, including the "oil for reconstruction" deal, that had
been signed with China. Abdul-Mahdi has since stayed on as Prime Minister in a caretaker role
until Parliament decides on his replacement.
Abdul-Mahdi's claims of the covert pressure by the Trump administration are buttressed by
the use of similar tactics against Ecuador, where, in July 2018, a U.S. delegation at the
United Nations
threatened the nation with punitive trade measures and the withdrawal of military aid if
Ecuador moved forward with the introduction of a UN resolution to "protect, promote and support
breastfeeding."
The New York Times reported at the time that the U.S. delegation was seeking to
promote the interests of infant formula manufacturers. If the U.S. delegation is willing to use
such pressure on nations for promoting breastfeeding over infant formula, it goes without
saying that such behind-closed-doors pressure would be significantly more intense if a much
more lucrative resource, e.g. oil, were involved.
Regarding Abdul-Mahdi's claims, Luongo told MintPress that it is also worth
considering that it could have been anyone in the Trump administration making threats to
Abdul-Mahdi, not necessarily Trump himself. "What I won't say directly is that I don't know it
was Trump at the other end of the phone calls. Mahdi, it is to his best advantage politically
to blame everything on Trump. It could have been Mike Pompeo or Gina Haspel talking to
Abdul-Mahdi It could have been anyone, it most likely would be someone with plausible
deniability .This [Mahdi's claims] sounds credible I firmly believe Trump is capable of making
these threats but I don't think Trump would make those threats directly like that, but it would
absolutely be consistent with U.S. policy."
Luongo also argued that the current tensions between U.S. and Iraqi leadership preceded the
oil deal between Iraq and China by several weeks, "All of this starts with Prime Minister Mahdi
starting the process of opening up the Iraq-Syria border crossing and that was announced in
August. Then, the Israeli air attacks happened in September to try and stop that from
happening, attacks on PMU forces on the border crossing along with the ammo dump attacks near
Baghdad This drew the Iraqis' ire Mahdi then tried to close the air space over Iraq, but how
much of that he can enforce is a big question."
As to why it would be to Mahdi's advantage to blame Trump, Luongo stated that Mahdi "can
make edicts all day long, but, in reality, how much can he actually restrain the U.S. or the
Israelis from doing anything? Except for shame, diplomatic shame To me, it [Mahdi's claims]
seems perfectly credible because, during all of this, Trump is probably or someone else is
shaking him [Mahdi] down for the reconstruction of the oil fields [in Iraq] Trump has
explicitly stated "we want the oil."'
As Luongo noted, Trump's interest in the U.S. obtaining a significant share of Iraqi oil
revenue is hardly a secret. Just last March, Trump
asked Abdul-Mahdi "How about the oil?" at the end of a meeting at the White House,
prompting Abdul-Mahdi to ask "What do you mean?" To which Trump responded "Well, we did a lot,
we did a lot over there, we spent trillions over there, and a lot of people have been talking
about the oil," which was widely interpreted as Trump asking for part of Iraq's oil revenue in
exchange for the steep costs of the U.S.' continuing its now unwelcome military presence in
Iraq.
With Abdul-Mahdi having rejected Trump's "oil for reconstruction" proposal in favor of
China's, it seems likely that the Trump administration would default to so-called "gangster
diplomacy" tactics to pressure Iraq's government into accepting Trump's deal, especially given
the fact that China's deal was a much better offer. While Trump demanded half of Iraq's oil
revenue in exchange for completing reconstruction projects (according to Abdul-Mahdi), the deal
that was signed between Iraq and China would see around
20 percen t of Iraq's oil revenue go to China in exchange for reconstruction. Aside from
the potential loss in Iraq's oil revenue, there are many reasons for the Trump administration
to feel threatened by China's recent dealings in Iraq.
The Iraq-China oil deal – a prelude to something more?
When Abdul-Mahdi's delegation traveled to Beijing last September, the "oil for
reconstruction" deal was only
one of eight total agreements that were established. These agreements cover a range of
areas, including financial, commercial, security, reconstruction, communication, culture,
education and foreign affairs in addition to oil. Yet, the oil deal is by far the most
significant.
Per the agreement, Chinese firms will work on various reconstruction projects in exchange
for roughly 20 percent of Iraq's oil exports, approximately 100,00 barrels per day, for a
period of 20 years. According to Al-Monitor
, Abdul-Mahdi had the following to say about the deal: "We agreed [with Beijing] to set up a
joint investment fund, which the oil money will finance," adding that the agreement prohibits
China from monopolizing projects inside Iraq, forcing Bejing to work in cooperation with
international firms.
The agreement is similar to one negotiated
between Iraq and China in 2015 when Abdul-Mahdi was serving as Iraq's oil minister. That
year, Iraq joined China's Belt and Road Initiative in a deal that also involved exchanging oil
for investment, development and construction projects and saw China awarded several projects as
a result. In a notable similarity to recent events, that deal was put on hold due to "political
and security tensions" caused by unrest and the surge of ISIS in Iraq, that is until
Abdul-Mahdi saw Iraq rejoin the
initiative again late last year through the agreements his government signed with China
last September.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, center left, meet with Iraqi Prime Minister
Adil Abdul-Mahdi, center right, in Beijing, Sept. 23, 2019. Lintao Zhang | AP
Notably, after recent tensions between the U.S. and Iraq over the assassination of Soleimani
and the U.S.' subsequent refusal to remove its troops from Iraq despite parliament's demands,
Iraq quietly announced that it would dramatically increase its oil exports to China to
triple the
amount established in the deal signed in September. Given Abdul-Mahdi's recent claims about
the true forces behind Iraq's recent protests and Trump's threats against him being directly
related to his dealings with China, the move appears to be a not-so-veiled signal from
Abdul-Mahdi to Washington that he plans to deepen Iraq's partnership with China, at least for
as long as he remains in his caretaker role.
Iraq's decision to dramatically increase its oil exports to China came just one day after
the U.S. government
threatened to cut off Iraq's access to its central bank account, currently held at the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an account that
currently holds $35 billion in Iraqi oil revenue. The account was
set up after the U.S. invaded and began occupying Iraq in 2003 and Iraq currently removes
between $1-2 billion per month to cover essential government expenses. Losing access to its oil
revenue stored in that account would lead to the "
collapse " of Iraq's government, according to Iraqi government officials who spoke to
AFP .
Though Trump publicly promised to rebuke Iraq for the expulsion of U.S. troops via
sanctions, the threat to cut off Iraq's access to its account at the NY Federal Reserve Bank
was delivered privately and directly to the Prime Minister, adding further credibility to
Abdul-Mahdi's claims that Trump's most aggressive attempts at pressuring Iraq's government are
made in private and directed towards the country's Prime Minister.
Though Trump's push this time was about preventing the expulsion of U.S. troops from Iraq,
his reasons for doing so may also be related to concerns about China's growing foothold in the
region. Indeed, while Trump has now lost his desired share of Iraqi oil revenue (50 percent) to
China's counteroffer of 20 percent, the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq may see American
troops replaced with their Chinese counterparts as well, according to Tom Luongo.
"All of this is about the U.S. maintaining the fiction that it needs to stay in Iraq So,
China moving in there is the moment where they get their toe hold for the Belt and Road
[Initiative]," Luongo argued. "That helps to strengthen the economic relationship between Iraq,
Iran and China and obviating the need for the Americans to stay there. At some point, China
will have assets on the ground that they are going to want to defend militarily in the event of
any major crisis. This brings us to the next thing we know, that Mahdi and the Chinese
ambassador discussed that very thing in the wake of the Soleimani killing."
Indeed, according to news reports, Zhang Yao -- China's ambassador to Iraq -- " conveyed
Beijing's readiness to provide military assistance" should Iraq's government request it
soon after Soleimani's assassination. Yao made the offer a day after Iraq's parliament voted to
expel American troops from the country. Though it is currently unknown how Abdul-Mahdi
responded to the offer, the timing likely caused no shortage of concern among the Trump
administration about its rapidly waning influence in Iraq. "You can see what's coming here,"
Luongo told MintPress of the recent Chinese offer to Iraq, "China, Russia and Iran are
trying to cleave Iraq away from the United States and the U.S. is feeling very threatened by
this."
Russia is also playing a role in the current scenario as Iraq initiated talks with Moscow
regarding the
possible purchase of one of its air defense systems last September, the same month that
Iraq signed eight deals, including the oil deal with China. Then, in the wake of Soleimani's
death, Russia
again offered the air defense systems to Iraq to allow them to better defend their air
space. In the past, the U.S.
has threatened allied countries with sanctions and other measures if they purchase Russian
air defense systems as opposed to those manufactured by U.S. companies.
The U.S.' efforts to curb China's growing influence and presence in Iraq amid these new
strategic partnerships and agreements are limited, however, as the U.S. is increasingly relying on China
as part of its Iran policy, specifically in its goal of reducing Iranian oil export to zero.
China remains Iran's main crude oil and condensate importer, even after it reduced its imports
of Iranian oil significantly following U.S. pressure last year. Yet, the U.S. is now attempting to
pressure China to stop buying Iranian oil completely or face sanctions while also
attempting to privately sabotage the China-Iraq oil deal. It is highly unlikely China will
concede to the U.S. on both, if any, of those fronts, meaning the U.S. may be forced to choose
which policy front (Iran "containment" vs. Iraq's oil dealings with China) it values more in
the coming weeks and months.
Furthermore, the recent signing of the "phase one" trade deal with China revealed another
potential facet of the U.S.' increasingly complicated relationship with Iraq's oil sector given
that the trade deal
involves selling U.S. oil and gas to China at very low cost , suggesting that the Trump
administration may also see the Iraq-China oil deal result in Iraq emerging as a potential
competitor for the U.S. in selling cheap oil to China, the world's top oil importer.
The Petrodollar and the Phantom of the Petroyuan
In his televised statements last week following Iran's military response to the U.S.
assassination of General Soleimani, Trump insisted that the U.S.' Middle East policy is no
longer being directed by America's vast oil requirements. He
stated specifically that:
Over the last three years, under my leadership, our economy is stronger than ever before
and America has achieved energy independence. These historic accomplishments changed our
strategic priorities. These are accomplishments that nobody thought were possible. And
options in the Middle East became available. We are now the number-one producer of oil and
natural gas anywhere in the world. We are independent, and we do not need Middle East
oil . (emphasis added)"
Yet, given the centrality of the recent Iraq-China oil deal in guiding some of the Trump
administration's recent Middle East policy moves, this appears not to be the case. The
distinction may lie in the fact that, while the U.S. may now be less dependent on oil imports
from the Middle East, it still very much needs to continue to dominate how oil is traded and
sold on international markets in order to maintain its status as both a global military
and financial superpower.
Indeed, even if the U.S. is importing less Middle Eastern oil, the petrodollar system --
first forged in the 1970s -- requires that the U.S. maintains enough control over the global
oil trade so that the world's largest oil exporters, Iraq among them, continue to sell their
oil in dollars. Were Iraq to sell oil in another currency, or trade oil for services, as it
plans to do with China per the recently inked deal, a significant portion of Iraqi oil would
cease to generate a demand for dollars, violating the key tenet of the petrodollar
system.
Chinese representatives speak to defense personnel during a weapons expo organized
by the Iraqi defense ministry in Baghdad, March, 2017. Karim Kadim | AP
The takeaway from the petrodollar phenomenon is that as long as countries need oil, they
will need the dollar. As long as countries demand dollars, the U.S. can continue to go into
massive amounts of debt to fund its network of global military bases, Wall Street bailouts,
nuclear missiles, and tax cuts for the rich."
Thus, the use of the petrodollar has created a system whereby U.S. control of oil sales of
the largest oil exporters is necessary, not just to buttress the dollar, but also to support
its global military presence. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the issue of the U.S. troop
presence in Iraq and the issue of Iraq's push for oil independence against U.S. wishes have
become intertwined. Notably, one of the architects of the petrodollar system and the man who
infamously described U.S. soldiers as "dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign
policy", former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has been advising
Trump and informing his China policy since 2016.
This take was also expressed by economist Michael Hudson,
who recently noted that U.S. access to oil, dollarization and U.S. military strategy are
intricately interwoven and that Trump's recent Iraq policy is intended "to escalate America's
presence in Iraq to keep control of the region's oil reserves," and, as Hudson says, "to back
Saudi Arabia's Wahabi troops (ISIS, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are
actually America's foreign legion) to support U.S. control of Near Eastern oil as a buttress of
the U.S. dollar."
Hudson further asserts that it was Qassem Soleimani's efforts to promote Iraq's oil
independence at the expense of U.S. imperial ambitions that served one of the key motives
behind his assassination.
America opposed General Suleimani above all because he was fighting against ISIS and other
U.S.-backed terrorists in their attempt to break up Syria and replace Assad's regime with a
set of U.S.-compliant local leaders – the old British "divide and conquer" ploy. On
occasion, Suleimani had cooperated with U.S. troops in fighting ISIS groups that got "out of
line" meaning the U.S. party line. But every indication is that he was in Iraq to work
with that government seeking to regain control of the oil fields that President Trump has
bragged so loudly about grabbing. (emphasis added)"
Hudson adds that " U.S. neocons feared Suleimani's plan to help Iraq assert control of its
oil and withstand the terrorist attacks supported by U.S. and Saudi's on Iraq. That is what
made his assassination an immediate drive."
While other factors -- such as pressure
from U.S. allies such as Israel -- also played a factor in the decision to kill Soleimani,
the decision to assassinate him on Iraqi soil just hours before he was set to meet with
Abdul-Mahdi in a diplomatic role suggests that the underlying tensions caused by Iraq's push
for oil independence and its oil deal with China did play a factor in the timing of his
assassination. It also served as a threat to Abdul-Mahdi, who has claimed that the U.S.
threatened to kill both him and his defense minister just weeks prior over tensions directly
related to the push for independence of Iraq's oil sector from the U.S.
It appears that the ever-present role of the petrodollar in guiding U.S. policy in the
Middle East remains unchanged. The petrodollar has long been a driving factor behind the U.S.'
policy towards Iraq specifically, as one of the key triggers for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was
Saddam Hussein's decision to sell Iraqi oil in Euros opposed to dollars beginning in the year
2000. Just weeks before the invasion began, Hussein boasted that Iraq's Euro-based oil revenue
account was earning a higher interest rate than
it would have been if it had continued to sell its oil in dollars, an apparent signal to other
oil exporters that the petrodollar system was only really benefiting the United States at their
own expense.
Beyond current efforts to stave off Iraq's oil independence and keep its oil trade aligned
with the U.S., the fact that the U.S. is now seeking to limit China's ever-growing role in
Iraq's oil sector is also directly related to China's publicly known efforts to create its own
direct competitor to the petrodollar, the petroyuan.
Since 2017, China has made its plans for the petroyuan -- a direct competitor to the
petrodollar -- no secret, particularly after China eclipsed the U.S. as the world's largest
importer of oil.
The new strategy is to enlist the energy markets' help: Beijing may introduce a new way to
price oil in coming months -- but unlike the contracts based on the U.S. dollar that currently dominate global
markets, this benchmark would use China's own currency. If there's widespread adoption, as the
Chinese hope, then that will mark a step toward challenging the greenback's status as the
world's most powerful currency .The plan is to price oil in yuan using a gold-backed futures contract in
Shanghai, but the road will be long and arduous."
If the U.S. continues on its current path and pushes Iraq further into the arms of China and
other U.S. rival states, it goes without saying that Iraq -- now a part of China's Belt and Road
Initiative -- may soon favor a petroyuan system over a petrodollar system, particularly as the
current U.S. administration threatens to hold Iraq's central bank account hostage for pursuing
policies Washington finds unfavorable.
It could also explain why President Trump is so concerned about China's growing foothold
in Iraq, since it risks causing not only the end of the U.S. military hegemony in the country but
could also lead to major trouble for the petrodollar system and the U.S.' position as a global
financial power. Trump's policy aimed at stopping China and Iraq's growing ties is clearly having
the opposite effect, showing that this administration's "gangster diplomacy" only serves to make
the alternatives offered by countries like China and Russia all the more attractive.
One can see how all these recent wars and military actions have a financial motive at their
core. Yet the mass of gullible Americans actually believe the reasons given, to "spread
democracy" and other wonderful things. Only a small number can see things for what they really
are. It's very frustrating to deal with the stupidity of the average person on a daily basis.
This is not Trump's policy, it is American policy and the variation is in how he implements
it. Any other person would have fallen in line with it as well. US policy has it's own inner
momentum that can't change course. The US depends upon continuation of the dollar as the
world's reserve currency. Were that to be lost the US likely would descend into chaos without
end. When the USSR came apart it was eventually able to downsize into the Russian state. We
don't have that here; there is no core ethnicity with it's own territory left anymore, it's
just a jumble. For the US it's a matter of survival.
There were brutal sanctions against Iraq in the 90s. After that the country was devastated by
the invasion of 2003. Hostility against Iran has been continuous. It's no suprise that things
are not going well in the region and that American politics failed. But this was to be
expected.
Good relations with Iran were possible. Even recently Iran thought that the nuclear
agreement could lead to better relations with the West. Iran should be our best ally in the
region because the middle classes there feel close to the West and are very friendly with
Westerners who visit the country. We could have had better results if we had tryed a more
reasonable politics. But it seems that there were other forces that wanted conflict with Iran
and the destruction of Iraq independently of the interests of the US which would have gained
from a more reasonable position. We can say the same about Russia.
After wars and sanctions the only way to hold everything together is through military
means. There was as doctrine which promoted unbridled militarism and the use of force (wasn't
there a saying that "Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus"?). Everybody who didn't
submit to our rules and interests was viewed as an enemy, military force was seen as the
solution to everything.
This is not functioning well. Americans have been decieved by this militaristic doctrine,
this is not going to work. Russia has challenged this, a part of Europe isn't very happy, in
South America you can only run the system ressorting to radical politicians like Bolsonaro
who destroy the environment and create more poverty, in other places this politics created
instability and enemies. I think it should be the time for the American elites to discuss
seriously the ways that the country has been following simply because there are better ways
to have better results.
@anonymous Yes, for the American Empire to exist (and expand) it needs the Petro-dollar,
because only if it is widely used in the world can its collapse be prevented. But why is the
dollar so shaky? Because it is no real money, based on real value, but created out of thin
air as debt and it can only function in an ever expanding pyramid scheme.
The origin of this fraud is the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. And yes that
was mainly a Jewish creation. Nobody, not even Ron Paul, dares to mention that.
Iraq's decision to dramatically increase its oil exports to China came just one day
after the U.S. government threatened to cut off Iraq's access to its central bank account,
currently held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an account that currently holds $35
billion in Iraqi oil revenue. The account was set up after the U.S. invaded and began
occupying Iraq in 2003 and Iraq currently removes between $1-2 billion per month to cover
essential government expenses. Losing access to its oil revenue stored in that account
would lead to the "collapse" of Iraq's government, according to Iraqi government officials
who spoke to AFP.
A very revealing article.
It doesn't make sense for any country to hold reserves in the US. The Zio-Glob CIA
gangsters are ready to defraud or smash up any country that challenges their petrodollar
system. Witness Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Iran and their hostility to Russia and China.
You don't need to twist yourself into a pretzel to figure out why Trump whacked
–the Mafia term–Soleimani.
Jared the Snake's Tel Aviv masters told him they wanted Zion Don to pull the trigger and
their will was done.
I voted for a President Trump and instead, got President Shecky, beholden to Jew and
Israeli interests who has bent over backwards to please the Israeli terrorists, but who will
now go back to his old shtick; pretending to be MAGA or KAG until he gets re-elected, then it
will be gloves off and most likely, another War for Israel and Wall Street in 2021.
Having an Israeli-Firster in the WH isn't unusual, but when you have a vain simpleton who
doesn't understand foreign policy or is so damned lazy, he lets a slumlord take care of it is
a prescription for a major disaster.
"... In my last post, I said it was time to close down this blog, mostly due to its ineffectiveness, short reach, and choir preaching. I wrote that I might as well pound sand for all the good it did. ..."
"... The US began targeting Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This included "freezing" -- polite-speak for theft -- around $12 billion in Iranian assets, including gold, property, and bank holdings. After Obama agreed to return this filched property and money as part of the nuke deal (minus any real nukes), neocons said he gave away US taxpayer money to international terrorists. This warped lie became part of the narrative, yet another state-orchestrated fake news "alternative fact." ..."
In my last post, I said it was time to close down this blog, mostly due to its
ineffectiveness, short reach, and choir preaching. I wrote that I might as well pound sand for
all the good it did.
A few days later, Trump killed a high level Iranian military leader and I have decided a
post is in order, never mind that a round of tiddlywinks will have about the same influence as
a post here. The wars just keep on coming, no matter what we do.
Let's turn to social media where dimwits, neocon partisans, and clueless Democrats are
running wild after corporate Mafia boss and numero uno Israeli cheerleader Donald Trump ordered
a hit on Gen. Qasem Soleimani and others near Baghdad's international airport on Thursday.
Let's begin with this teleprompter reader and "presenter" from Al Jazeera:
"This is what happens when you put a narcissistic, megalomaniacal, former reality TV star
with a thin skin and a very large temper in charge of the world's most powerful military You
know who else attacks cultural sites? ISIS. The Taliban." – me on Trump/Iran on MSNBC
today: pic.twitter.com/YCRARB2anv
It is interesting how the memory of such people only goes back to the election of Donald
Trump.
The US began targeting Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This included "freezing"
-- polite-speak for theft -- around $12 billion in Iranian assets, including gold, property,
and bank holdings. After Obama agreed to return this filched property and money as part of the
nuke deal (minus any real nukes), neocons said he gave away US taxpayer money to international
terrorists. This warped lie became part of the narrative, yet another state-orchestrated fake
news "alternative fact."
Here's another idiot. He was the boss of the DNC for a while and unsuccessfully ran for
president.
Nice job trump and Pompeo you dimwits. You've completed the neocon move to have Iraq
become a satellite of Iran. You have to be the dumbest people ever to run the US government.
You can add that to being the most corrupt. Get these guys out of here. https://t.co/gQHhHSeiJQ
Once again, history is lost in a tangle of lies and omission. Centuries before John Dean
thought it might be a good idea to run for president, Persians and Shias in what is now Iraq
and Iran were crossing the border -- later drawn up by invading Brits and French -- in
pilgrimages to the shrines of Imam Husayn and Abbas in Karbala. We can't expect an arrogant
sociopath like Mr. Dean to know about Ashura, Shia pilgrimages, the Remembrance of Muharram,
and events dating back to 680 AD.
Shias from Iran pilgrimage to other Iraqi cities as well, including An-Najaf, Samarra,
Mashhad, and Baghdad (although the latter is more important to Sunnis).
Corporate fake news teleprompter reader Stephanopoulos said the Geneva Conventions
(including United Nations Security Council Resolution 2347) outlaw the targeting of cultural
sites, which Trump said he will bomb.
Trump said there are 52 different sites; the number is not arbitrary, it is based on the 52
hostages, many of them CIA officers, taken hostage during Iran's revolution against the
US-installed Shah and his brutal secret police sadists.
Pompeo said Trump won't destroy Iran's cultural and heritage sites. Pompeo, as a dedicated
Zionist operative, knows damn well the US will destroy EVERYTHING of value in Iran, same as it
did in Iraq and later Libya and Syria. This includes not only cultural sites, but civilian
infrastructure -- hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, and mosques.
STEPHANOPOULOS: The Geneva Conventions outlaws attacks on cultural objects & places of
worship. Why is Trump threatening Iran w/ war crimes?
POMPEO: We'll behave lawfully
S: So to be clear, Trump's threat wasn't accurate?
Although I believe Jill Stein is living in a Marxian fantasy world, I agree with her tweet
in regard to the Zionist hit on Soleimani:
Now THIS is grounds for #impeachment
– treachery unleashing the unthinkable for Americans & people the world over: Trump
asked Iraqi prime minister to mediate with #Iran then
assassinated Soleimani – on a mediation mission. https://t.co/f0F9FEMALD
Trump should be impeached -- tried and imprisoned -- not in response to some dreamed-up and
ludicrous Russian plot or even concern about the opportunist Hunter Biden using his father's
position to make millions in uber-corrupt Ukraine, but because he is a war criminal responsible
for killing women and children.
As for the planned forever military occupation of Iraq,
USA Today reports:
Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi told lawmakers that a timetable for the withdrawal
of all foreign troops, including U.S. ones, was required "for the sake of our national
sovereignty." About 5,000 American troops are in various parts of Iraq.
The latest:
-- Iraqi lawmakers voted to oust U.S. troops
-- U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS has paused operations
-- Hundreds of thousands mourned General Suleimani in Iran
-- President Trump said the U.S. has 52 possible targets in Iran in case of retaliation
https://t.co/pmUuAQdKlc
No way in hell will Sec. State Pompeo and his Zionist neocon handlers allow this to happen
without a fight. However, it shouldn't be too difficult for the Iraqis to expel 5,000
brainwashed American soldiers from the country, bombed to smithereens almost twenty years ago
by Bush the Neocon Idiot Savant.
Never mind Schumer's pretend concern about another war. This friend of Israel from New York
didn't go on national television and excoriate Obama and his cutthroat Sec. of State Hillary
Clinton for killing 30,000 Libyans.
I'm concerned President Trump's impulsive foreign policy is dragging America into another
endless war in the Middle East that will make us less safe.
Meanwhile, it looks like social media is burning the midnight oil in order to prevent their
platforms being used to argue against Trump's latest Zionist-directed insanity.
It is absolutely crazy that Twitter is auto-locking the accounts of anyone who posts this
"No war on Iran" image, and forcing them to delete the anti-war tweet in order to unlock
their account.
This is complete and utter bullshit, but I'm sure the American people will gobble it down
without question. Trump's advisers are neocons and they are seriously experienced in the art of
promoting and engineering assassination, cyber-attacks, invasions, and mass murder.
Newsmax scribbler John Cardillo thinks he has it all figure out.
"In mid-October Soleimani instructed his top ally in Iraq, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and
other powerful militia leaders to step up attacks on U.S. targets in the country using
sophisticated new weapons provided by Iran "
Imagine this, however improbable and ludicrous: Iran invades America and assassinates
General Hyten or General McConville, both top members of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now
imagine the response by the "exceptional nation."
We can't leave out the Christian Zionist from Indiana, Mike Pence. Mike wants you to believe
Iran was responsible for 9/11, thus stirring up the appropriate animosity and consensus for
mass murder.
Neither Iran nor Soleimani were linked to the terror attack in the "9/11 Commission
Report." Pence didn't even get the number of hijackers right. https://t.co/QtQZm2Yyh9
Finally, here is the crown jewel of propaganda -- in part responsible for the death of well
over a million Iraqis -- The New York Times showing off its rampant hypocrisy.
In Opinion
The editorial board writes, "It is crucial that influential Republican senators like
Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell remind President Trump of his promise to keep
America out of foreign quagmires" https://t.co/2swusvBWbg
Never mind Judith Miller, the Queen of NYT pro-war propaganda back in the day, spreading
neocon fabricated lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. America -- or
rather the United States (the government) -- is addicted to quagmires and never-ending war.
This is simply more anti-Trump bullshit by the NYT editorial board. The newspaper loves war
waged in the name of Israel, but only if jumpstarted by Democrats.
Trump the fool, the fact-free reality TV president will eventually unleash the dogs of war
against Iran, much to the satisfaction of Israel, its racist Zionists, Israel-first neocons in
America, and the chattering pro-war class of "journalists," and "foreign policy experts" (most
former Pentagon employees).
Expect more nonsense like that dispensed by the robot Mike Pence, the former tank commander
now serving as Sec. of State, and any number of neocon fellow travelers, many with coveted blue
checkmarks on Twitter while the truth-tellers are expelled from the conversation and exiled to
the political wilderness.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this
article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global
Research.
"... I have no confidence in Elizabeth Warren "doing the right thing"; she might be susceptible to the pressure and to the ignominy attached to doing the disastrously wrong thing. ..."
"... *Donald Trump, for his part, is reportedly " privately obsessed " with Sanders, not, it seems, with Biden. ..."
"... From a recent episode of the Jimmy Dore Show, it's the cringe-worthy Warren "Selfie" Gimmick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5JWIiVMj6g If this doesn't scream "political novice," I don't know what will. ..."
" if she does anything less than help elect the last and only progressive with a chance,
she damages them both to Biden's benefit "
If Elizabeth Warren's candidacy becomes unviable, the pressure on her to combine her
delegates with those of Sanders -- from those supporting Bernie Sanders and those
legitimately concerned with Joe Biden's chances against Trump* -- will be enormous .
And, if , instead, Warren helps nominate Biden and Biden then goes on to lose to
Donald Trump -- as I'm all but certain he will -- it will be all too clear just who
played a pivotal role in helping to make that match-up even possible.
I have no confidence in Elizabeth Warren "doing the right thing"; she might be
susceptible to the pressure and to the ignominy attached to doing the disastrously wrong
thing.
*Donald Trump, for his part, is reportedly "
privately obsessed " with Sanders, not, it seems, with Biden.
In Sanders' case, his surge in the polls coincided with his emergence as the chief
apologist for the Iranian regime. We needed to point out that he would be dangerous as
president since he made clear he would appease terrorists and terror-sponsoring
nations.
If this is really representative of a line of attack that the Trump campaign plans to use
on him, that would be great. I can't imagine anything that would resonate less with voters.
But I was a bit surprised to see this in a Bernie fundraising mail:
The wise course would have been to stick with that nuclear agreement, enforce its
provisions, and use that diplomatic channel with Iran to address our other concerns with
Iran, including their support of terrorism.
What groups are they referring to when they say this? Hezbollah, which is part of
Parliament in Lebanon? Iraqi PMF that are loosely integrated with the Iraqi army?
Yep, Warren is a political novice, and she's extremely naive. That Massachusetts senate
seat was practically handed to her on a silver platter. She has no idea that she was played
in '16 and she's being played now.
From a recent episode of the Jimmy Dore Show, it's the cringe-worthy Warren "Selfie"
Gimmick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5JWIiVMj6g
If this doesn't scream "political novice," I don't know what will.
She endorced Hillary in 2016. That tells a lot about her... Now she backstabbed Bernie. What's next?
Notable quotes:
"... Warren has a track record of lying: lied about her dad being a janitor, hers kids going to public school, getting fired for being pregnant, and obviously the Native American heritage. ..."
"... My gut is she is going to endorse Joe Biden and prob got a tease of VP or some other role and all she had to do was kamikaze into Bernie with this. It's backfiring but at this rate and given she's too deep into it now when she drops out she'll prob back Biden as she hasn't shown the integrity to back a guy like Berni. ..."
"... She's toxic now. No one will want her has VP. Sanders supporters despise her, she comes from a small, Democratic state and she's loaded with baggage. She brings nothing to a ticket. She torpedoed any hopes or plans she might have had in that regard. ..."
"... Bernie is labeled as a socialist. Actually he is a real Roosevelt democrat. ..."
"... The most impressive thing I have witnessed about Bernie is that he can extemporaneously recall and explain exactly why he voted as he did on every piece of legislation that he has cast a vote on. in. his. life. It is a remarkable talent. ..."
"... The outcome of the upcoming Iowa Caucus is too hard to predict. All the candidates are very close. Sanders needs to turnout young and working class voters to win. ..."
"... My impression is her supporters are mostly older, mostly female, and mostly centrist. Many want to elect a female pres before they die. Prior to the she said event her supporters second choice were split fairly evenly between Bernie and Biden but the latest fracas is driving her most progressive supporters to Bernie. ..."
Warren has a track record of lying: lied about her dad being a janitor, hers kids going to
public school, getting fired for being pregnant, and obviously the Native American
heritage.
As pointed here on NC she's great at grandstanding when bank CEOs are in front of her and
doing nothing following that.
My gut is she is going to endorse Joe Biden and prob got a tease of VP or some other role
and all she had to do was kamikaze into Bernie with this. It's backfiring but at this rate
and given she's too deep into it now when she drops out she'll prob back Biden as she hasn't
shown the integrity to back a guy like Berni.
I don't see how she is anyone's VP. She is too old. You want someone under 60, better 50,
particularly for an old presidential candidate. Treasury Secretary is a more powerful
position. The big appeal of being VP is maybe it positions you later to be President but that
last worked out for Bush the Senior.
She's toxic now. No one will want her has VP. Sanders supporters despise her, she comes
from a small, Democratic state and she's loaded with baggage. She brings nothing to a ticket.
She torpedoed any hopes or plans she might have had in that regard.
I've watched Bernie for years. Even long before he decided to run for president. He is the
same today as he was then. Bernie isn't afraid to advocate for something , even though he
will get a lot of backlash. I also believe he is sincere in his convictions. If he says
something he believes in it.Something you can't say for the other candidates. Bernie is by
far my first choice.
After that it would be Warren. Bernie is labeled as a socialist.
Actually he is a real Roosevelt democrat. As a life long democrat, I can't support or vote
for a Wall Street candidate. Unlike one of the other commenters, I will never vote for Trump
but instead wold vote for a third party candidate. Unfortunate the DNC will do anything to
prevent Bernie from being candidate. Progressive democrats need to get out and support a
progressive or the nomination will again be stolen by a what I call a light republican.
What is great about Bernie is that he is so sure-footed. It was visible in the hot-mic
trap Warren set for him where she got nothing, it actually hurt her.
The most impressive thing I have witnessed about Bernie is that he can extemporaneously
recall and explain exactly why he voted as he did on every piece of legislation that he has
cast a vote on. in. his. life. It is a remarkable talent.
The outcome of the upcoming Iowa Caucus is too hard to predict. All the candidates are
very close. Sanders needs to turnout young and working class voters to win. By many reports,
Warren has an excellent ground game in IA and The NY Times endorsement has given a path for
her to pick up Klobuchar voters after round one of the caucus.
Biden is a mystery to me. How
the heck is he even running. Obama pleaded with him not to. That being said, it wouldn't
surprise me if he finishes in the top two. Buttigieg is the wild card. I think the
"electability" argument will hurt him as he can't win after NH.
According to a recent poll, Elizabeth Warren is one of the most unpopular senators with
voters in her own state as measured against approval rates of all other senators in their
states. I find this very surprising for someone with a national profile. What do voters in
Massachusetts not like about her?
As for me, I find it more and more difficult to trust Warren because she takes the bait
and yields to pressure during a primary when the pressure to back down, moderate, and abandon
once championed policy positions and principles is a great deal less than it is during the
general election. Warren has gone from Medicare4All to a public option to, in the recent
debate, tweaks to the ACA. Despite her roll-out of an ambitious $10 trillion Green New Deal
plan, Warren is now to the right of Chuck "Wall Street" Schumer as evidenced by her support
of NAFTA 2.0 which utterly fails to address climate change. WTF! Where will she be during a
general election?
And her political instincts are awful as recently demonstrated by her woke, badly executed
girl power attack against a candidate who has been a committed feminist for his entire
political career.
She also has horrible constituent service. I had an issue with a federal student loan a
few years ago (I believe it was the servicer depositing money but not crediting my account
and charging me interest and late fees). After getting nowhere with the company, I tried
calling her office, figuring that as this was one of her core issues, I would get some
response, either help or at least someone who would want to record what happened to her
actual constituent. I didn't hear back for about a month, by which time I had resolved the
issue – no fees or additional interest through multiple phone calls and emails.
In other words, Elizabeth Warren's constituent service is worse than Sallie Mae's.
The stupid Ponds cold cream lie is the worst. Unless she teed up the "how do you look so
young!" question , the corrected answer is to point out the nonsense of talking about a
candidates looks and addressing actual sexism.
Instead she has a goofball answer about only using Ponds cold cream which lead to Derm
pointing out her alleged method was not good advice and also pointing out that she appears to
have used botex and fillers, which I don't think people were talking about before then, in
public.
The most generous explanation is she was caught flat-footed and, once again, showed she
has terrible instincts.
If Bernie Sanders can get it through the thick noggin of the nation that he stands for and
will implement the principles, policies, and values of the New Deal–the attitude that
got us through the Great Depression and Wotld War II–he has every chance of being
elected the next President of the United States.
Trust me. By the time it comes around you won't care who gets sworn in as you will just be
glad that all the vicious, wretched skullduggery of this year's elections will finally be
over.
And hoping you get one day of rest before the vicious, wretched skullduggery of
undermining the desires of the American people gets started. Obviously Sanders will make the
Trump years look a cake walk. Anyone else (Democrat or Trump) we will see lots of 'working
for' and 'resistance' type memes while largely doing nothing of the sort, but a whole lot of
'bipartisan' passage of terrible things.
It sounds like Sanders, in the famous 2018 conversation, may have been trying to politely
encourage EW to not run in 2020. Her moment was 2016 and she declined to run then when a
Progressive candidate was needed. Her run in 2020 to some extent divides the Progressive
vote. EW interpreted, perhaps intentionally, Sanders' words to imply that he thinks "no woman
can win in 2020", and then weaponized them against him.
The very fact that she is running at all suggests to me that she is not at heart a
Progressive and in fact does not want a Progressive candidate to win. If she had run in 2016,
Sanders would not have run in order to not divide the Progressive vote. EW knew that Sanders
would run in 2020 and planned to run anyway. It is hard for me to not interpret this to be an
intentional bid for some of the Progressive vote, in order to hold Sanders down.
I agree. She decides to do things based on her own self-interest, and uses progressives as
pawns to work her way up in DC. My guess is that Warren chickened out in 2016 and didn't run
because maybe she didn't think she had a chance against the Clintons. When Warren saw how
well Sanders did against Clinton, how close he was at winning, I think only then she decided
that 2020 was a good chance for a progressive, or someone running as a progressive candidate,
to win the nomination.
She saw how Sanders had fired up loyal progressive support in the Democratic Party. She
chickened out back then when she could have endorsed Bernie in '16, but chose not to,
probably hoping not to burn bridges with Clinton in order to get a plum role in her
administration. Her non-endorsement in '16 worries me because it shows once again that Warren
makes decisions largely based on what is good for her career, not what she thinks is better
for the country (if she really is the progressive she claims to be).
Knowing that there was now a strong progressive base ready to vote for a candidate left of
Democratic candidates like Biden and Clinton, Warren saw her entry into having a good chance
at winning the presidency. Rather than thinking about the implications for Bernie and the
possibility of dividing left-wing voters, her desire to become president was more important.
Remember, this is exactly what Bernie did not do in 2016 when he urged Warren to run, and was
willing to step aside, if she had agreed to do so.
If I had been in Sanders position, I probably would have sat down and talked to Warren
about the serious implications of the both of them running in 2020. How he had hoped to build
on the momentum from his last campaign and the sexism that was used against Clinton in 2016.
Hey, if I had been Sanders, I probably would have told Warren not to run. Not because she's a
woman, but because it would have been obvious to Bernie that with Warren running alongside
him, they would both end up splitting the progressive vote.
What is happening now between the two of them should have been no surprise to either
Bernie or Warren. They are both popular among Democrats who identify as progressive or
left-of-center. Democrats will always find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. And I agree
that when it becomes evident that one of them cannot win, either Bernie or Warren must step
aside for the good of the country and fully back the other. There is no other option if
either of them truly wants the other to win the nomination rather than Biden. I'm hoping that
Warren will do so since it is becoming more clear that Sanders is the stronger progressive
and the stronger candidate who has a better chance at beating both Biden and Trump.
If sheepdog St. Bernard Sanders begins to look like the presumptive nominee, look for a
new candidate to throw her hat into the ring. Her name: Michelle Obama.
I'm so sick of that sheepdog meme (originated by, much as a respect BAR, by a GP activist
bitter, I would say, over many years of GP ineffectuality). The elites seem to be pretty
nervous about a sheepdog.
And now we have Sanders apologizing for an op-ed in the Guardian by Zephyr Teachout
accusing Biden of corruption.
The op-ed simply says what Sanders has said all along, the system is corrupted by big
donors. Then she explicitly states the obvious, which Sanders won't at this point say but
that Trump certainly will: Biden is a prime example of serving his donors' interests to the
detriment of most of the rest of us. Sanders subsequently apologizes for Teachout's baldly
true assertion, stating that he doesn't believe that Biden is corrupt.
I guess we're meant to draw a clear distinction between legalized and illegal corruption.
I don't know. They both look like ducks to me.
I have read that Sanders is the #2 choice of many Iowans who favor JB; it makes a lot of
sense for him to not "go negative" on JB in the run-up to the caucuses.
There will be time for plainer speaking. Sanders has been clear about his views on the
corrupting influence of corporate money in politics. JB is exhibit #1 within the D primary
field and there will be plenty of opportunity to note that.
I suspect that there is a great deal of "method" in what may look to us like "madness" in
the Senator's civility.
To put it another way, I doubt very much that Sanders believes that JB's legislative
agendas were not significantly influenced by the sources of his campaign funds. And I'm sure
that attention will be drawn to this at the right time.
One can charitably affirm that one believes that JB is not a consciously corrupt ,
pay-for-play, kind of person, while also affirming that of course he has been
influenced by the powerful interests that have funded his career, and that this has not
served the interests of the American people. All in due course.
The thing is Warren would make the right argument here: that it's the system that is
corrupted, and make it well. Too bad she has shown so completely that can't be trusted as a
person, because she often looks good on paper
I think Warren misses the key point that the reason why the system is corrupted is because
the players in it are corrupted. They can be bought and sold. That is why they have no
shame.
> The thing is Warren would make the right argument here: that it's the system that is
corrupted
That's not the right answer at all. The climate crisis, for example, is not caused by a
lack of transparency in the oil industry. It is caused by capital allocation decisions by the
billionaire class and their servicers in subaltern classes.
"The real game changer around here, though, might be Iowa State University's decision,
after years of pressure, to issue new student IDs, enabling 35,000 students to vote, even
under Iowa's restrictive new voter-ID law. That's a progressive victory, and in a different
media universe, it would be a story even juicier than a handshake." Iowa is not the
Twittersphere – Laura Flanders
Thanks for giving this the attention it needs, analysis of the primary has been too light
on estimation of delegate numbers and strategy.
Prior to Warren's apparent turn to some new direction, the setup for a 3way DNC with a
progressive "coalition" was not only conceivable, but actually expected from the polls.
We are on pace for Sanders+Warren's combined delegate total to exceed Biden by a healthy
amount (say 4:3) with all others falling below 15% state by state and getting few or no
delegates. Obviously subject to snowballing in either direction, but that's the polls now and
for most of the past year.
Warren's attack on Sanders, and NYT endorsement, say the national party doesn't expect any
such coalition. Therefore Warren has made her choice. That's that.
The path to winning the Dem primary is a little narrower for Sanders, and also for Biden,
since he seems to lack the confidence of his the top strata. The DNC screws a lot up but they
know how to read polls. I'm pretty sure that running Warren in the General is not their plan
A.
Voters in Iowa and the early states (incl. TX and CA) look like they will be deciding it
all this year. The tremendous enthusiasm of Sanders followers gives him, IMO, the best ground
game of the three. Will be an interesting 6 weeks.
I do not even trust Warren to hand any delegates she gets to Sanders at this point.
Because her campaign staff is so full of Clintonites and neoliberals, she might give them to
Biden instead.
She seems to have gone full establishment at this point.
> I do not even trust Warren to hand any delegates she gets to Sanders at this point.
Because her campaign staff is so full of Clintonites and neoliberals, she might give them to
Biden instead.
The youngish rehab therapist, a woman, said this morning that of the women running, she
likes Klobuchar. "If only her voice wasn't so screechy. And I'm saying this as a woman." She
was seriously disturbed by Clinton's attack on Sanders.
Several neighbors are leaning towards Yang.
My impression is her supporters are mostly older, mostly female, and mostly centrist. Many
want to elect a female pres before they die. Prior to the she said event her supporters
second choice were split fairly evenly between Bernie and Biden but the latest fracas is
driving her most progressive supporters to Bernie.
This means most of those remaining will probably migrate to Biden if when she drops out
even if she recommends Bernie. (If 1/3 of her supporters that had Bernie as their second
choice switch to Bernie, then 60% of her remaining supporters have Biden as their second
choice.)
2016 was different, Clinton already had the older females. But there was a period where
just a little support might have tipped the scale in what was a very tight race.
Anyway, I see going forward she will be mostly holding supporters whose second choice is
Biden even as she maybe doesn't reach the 15% barrier
and same with Amy. So I hope they both stay in at least until super tue.
And While I previously thought she was a reasonable choice for veep, I now realize she'd
be an awful choice. Maybe treasury if she does endorse which she will do if Bernie looks a
winner.
How can anyone be surprised at the lack of trustworthiness from a politician who chose to
endorse Clinton in 2016 rather than Bernie? Warren has been playing the DNC game for a long
time now, which ideologically is in line with her lifelong Republican stance before changing
to the more demographically favorable party when she was 47. She's not progressive now, and
never has been or will be.
Both campaigns are backing away from greater public conflict. Whether that holds true in the
long run is anyone's guess, but my guess is that it will. Still, the following is clear:
Warren has been damaged, perhaps permanently, in the eyes of many Sanders supporters who have
considered her a good, and perhaps equivalent, second choice. Her favorability has gone way
down in their eyes and may never recover.
Warren's charge of sexism has inflamed the existing anger of many Democratic and
liberal-leaning women and relit the fire that coursed through the Sanders-Clinton primary and
beyond.
>
Rightly or wrongly, Warren's polling numbers among voters have fallen, while Sanders' polling
has held steady or improved. It's yet to be seen if the incident alters long-term
fund-raising for either candidate, but it might. For his part, Sanders has seen a post-debate
surge in funding .
So far, in other words, most of the damage has been borne by Warren as a result of the
incident. She may recover, but this could also end her candidacy by accelerating a decline
that started with public reaction to her recent stand on Medicare For All. None of this is
certain to continue, but these are the trends.
... ... ...
But if Warren's candidacy becomes unviable, as it seems it might -- and if the goal of
both camps is truly to defeat Joe Biden -- it's incumbent on Warren to drop out and
endorse her "friend and ally" Bernie Sanders as soon as it's clear she can no longer win .
(The same is true if Sanders becomes unviable, though that seems much less likely.)
Ms. Warren can do whatever she wants, certainly. But if she does anything less than help
elect the last and only progressive with a chance, she damages them both to Biden's benefit,
and frankly, helps nominate Biden. She has the right to do that, but not to claim at the same
time that she's working to further the progressive movement.
Bottom line: the corporate press has gone all-in on Warren. She simply MUST be a whore, like Obama, or Hilary/Bill
Clinton. If Warren were a real progressive, the big money would never go for her like this.
I will vote for Bernie Sanders. But I will vote for Trump over Warren. Better the moron
and agent of chaos that you know, than the calculating vicious backstabber that you
don't.
She's got the Clinton's and now Obama folks behind her.
I doubt they are thrilled with her, but probably view as someone they can work with and
the other options are worse or too low in the poll numbers. I assume Buttigieg is fine with
them, but his numbers are stuck.
Personally I cannot consider voting for a drone murderer like Trump, who cozies up to the
Saudis and has tried to cut SS and Medicare. He's shown what he is, just as Warren has. We'll
never get M4A from either one of them.
If it's not Bernie I'm voting Green. I live in a blue state that almost went for Trump
last time – my vote potentially matters and will serve as a signal. Voting for the
lesser murderous corporatist scum is what got us into this mess. I'm over it. I will not vote
for evil.
In 2016 I might just have voted for Trump, as a middle finger to the Dem establishment
that crowned HRH HRC, since at that time he had not committed any war crimes. But now, no
way. One of my unshakeable principles is that I will not vote for a war criminal. Green ,
write-in, or leave the Pres slot blank. But I hope and pray (and I'm an atheist!) that it
doesn't come to this. We really don't have another 4 years to waste on this, the earth can't
wait.
It's very unfortunate that it has come to this, but I've always been uneasy about Warren.
This incident and her accusations against Bernie solidified my suspicions about her. Her
being a Republican until her late 40s, her lies about sending her child to public school, her
lies about her father being a janitor, her plagiarized cookbook recipes, and claiming to be
Native American. It's all so bizarre to me and for a while I had believed her to have a
personality disorder that caused compulsive lying. I wanted to feel good about my vote for
Warren, but now? If she wins the nomination I'll hold my nose and vote for her, but I don't
trust her to not sell out to the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. I also don't trust
her to endorse Bernie if she drops out before the convention. She didn't endorse him in '16,
so what makes progressives think she'll do so this time. It would not surprise me in the
least if she endorsed Biden or agrees to be his running mate.
Warren is not agreement-capable. Much as it pains me to say this, the Obama administration
was correct to hold her at arm's length.
Adding, that doesn't mean that Sanders can't negotiate with her, if that must be done (to
defeat Trump). But any such negotiations cannot proceed on a basis of trust.
The most generous interpretation i can come up with is that i's possible she told the
story to several of her clintonite staffers in confidence. Those staffers went to CNN and
forced her to stand by her story, even if she didn't want to go public, because she was
threatened with staffers calling her a liar.
She might have been mad at Bernie for not bailing her out.
This version, which i don't believe, but consider it possible (not plausible) would be
arguably as bad because her staffers got the upper hand and pushed her around.
The problem is the country has become so irrational and susceptible to soundbites and
twitter shame and etc. that you can't even say "electing a women president would be
difficult" which might be true, or it becomes like Hillary's deplorable remark, we all know
it's true some Trump supporters fit the description, but it gets taken way out of context and
exaggerated beyond all recognition.
She didn't even have to deny it. Should could have just been "That was a private
conversation, I will not go into what was said in private. Bernie is a good friend of mine,
who has supported women candidates on many occasions".
The president base is clarly more narrow then in 2016: he used anti-war repiblicansand
independents aswell as "Anybody but Hillary" voters (large part of Sanders votrs). Part of
military is now Tulsi supported and probalywill not vote at all, at least they will not vote
for Trump.
Fox News 's Tucker Carlson on Monday warned Republicans not to get complacent, and
that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) could wind up taking "many thousands " of votes from President
Trump if he is able to secure the Democratic nomination, according to The Hill 's Joe Concha.
"A year from today, we'll be hosting this show from the National Mall as the next president
of the United States takes the oath of office," said Carlson, adding "Will that president be
Donald Trump? As of tonight, Republicans in Washington feel confident it will be."
"The official economic
numbers are strong. The Democratic primaries are a freak show -- elderly socialists accusing
each other of thoughtcrimes. Republicans are starting to think victory is assured. That's a
mistake ," said Carlson. "America remains as divided as it was three years ago. No matter what
happens, nobody's going to win this election in a national landslide. Those don't happen
anymore. Trump could lose. Will he? That depends on what he runs on. "
Carlson then showed numbers for Trump on the economy that show while the main indicators
are strong, there are some other numbers that should concern the president. He pointed to a
Pew Research study that shows just 31 percent of Americans say the economy is helping them
and their families, and just 32 percent say they believe the current economy helps the middle
class.
Carlson then pivoted to Sanders's potential appeal to certain voter groups and said
Republicans need a plan to battle that appeal.
" Bernie Sanders may get the Democratic nomination ," Carlson said. " If he does, every
Republican in Washington will spend the next 10 months reminding you that socialism doesn't
work , and never has. They'll be right, obviously," Carlson explained. - The Hill
So what's Bernie's appeal?
Recall that a not-insignificant Sanders supporters voted for Trump out of disgust following
revelations that Hillary Clinton and the DNC conspirted to rig the 2016 primary against
him.
According to Carlson, however, "if Sanders pledges to forgive student loans, he'll still win
many thousands of voters who went for Donald Trump last time. Debt is crushing an entire
generation of Americans. Republicans need a plan to make it better, or they'll be left
behind."
"They're conservative in the most basic sense: They love their families above all," the host
concluded. "They distrust radical theories of anything because they know that when the world
turns upside down, ordinary people get hurt. They don't want to burn it down. They just want
things to get better. The candidate who promises to make them better -- incrementally, but
tangibly -- will be inaugurated president a year from today."
According to a RealClearPolitics average of seven (oh so reliable) polls, Sanders would take
Trump if he gets the nomination. Tags Politics
Carlson is right. The overwhelming majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck with
many working two jobs to make ends meet. The economy sucks for the working and middle class.
Facts are stubborn things.
The Chinese, for now, are not contradicting the Trump administration on the promise of
Chinese mega-purchases, because when Trump is more amicable their interests align. If an empty
promise that wasn't even made means the trade war de-escalation goes on, that is fine with
them. They would like to calm the markets as much as Trump would, and in this way they have
added leverage on Trump. Should they change their minds they can always explode the fiction
later on and injure Trump, perhaps strategically right around October.
Now that the dust has settled on the US-China trade deal and analysts have had some time to
pore over its 90+ pages, various chapters and (non-binding) terms that comprise the body of the
agreement, one high-level observation noted by Rabobank, is that the agreement foresees the
total amount of goods exports from the US to China to reach above $ 290BN by end-2021.
The implication of this is that the chart for US exports to China should basically look like
this for the next two years:
As Rabobank's senior economist Bjorn Giesbergen writes, t here are probably very few
economists that would deem such a trajectory feasible (except for the perpetually cheerful
economics team at Goldman , of course), seeing that it took the US more than 15 years to
raise exports from around USD16bn in 2000 to USD 130bn in 2017.
Moreover, the Chinese purchases of goods are beneficial to US companies, but at the cost of
other countries, and the agreement is only for two years. If China will buy more aircraft from
the US, that could be to the detriment of the EU.
According to the document "the parties project that the trajectory of increases will
continue in calendar years 2020 through 2025." But "to project" does not sound as firm as
"shall ensure." So, as the Rabo economist asks, "are we going to see a repetition of the 2019
turmoil caused by the phase 1 trade negotiations after those two years? Or is this supposed to
be solved in the phase 2 deal that is very unlikely to be made? What's more, while the
remaining tariffs provide leverage for US trade negotiators, they are still a tax on US
importers and US consumers of Chinese goods."
But before we even get there, going back to the chart shown above, Bloomberg today points
out something we have pointed out in the past, namely that China's $200 billion, two-year
spending spree negotiated with the Trump administration appears increasingly difficult to
deliver, and now a $50 billion "hole" appears to have opened up : that is the amount of U.S.
exports annually left out and many American businesses still uncertain about just what the
expectations are.
Some background: while Trump officials stressed the reforms aimed at curbing
intellectual-property theft and currency manipulation that China has agreed to in the "phase
one" trade deal signed Wednesday, the Chinese pledge to buy more American exports has become an
emblem of the deal to critics and supporters alike.
The administration has said those new exports in manufactured goods, energy, farm shipments
and services will come over two years on top of the $130 billion in goods and $57.6 billion in
services that the U.S. sent to China in 2017 -- the year before the trade war started and
exports were hit by Beijing's retaliatory measures to President Donald Trump's tariffs.
And while
Goldman said it is certainly feasible that China can ramp up its purchases of US goods ,
going so far as providing a matrix "scenario" of what such purchases could look like
that now appears virtually impossible, because as Bloomberg notes, the list of goods
categories in the agreement covers a narrower group of exports to China that added up to $78.8
billion in 2017, or $51.6 billion less than the overall goods exports to the Asian nation that
year. The goods trade commitment makes up $162.1 billion of the $200 billion total, with $37.9
billion to come from a boost in services trade such as travel and insurance.
Here, the math gets even more ridiculous:
The target for the first year that the deal takes effect is to add $63.9 billion in
manufactured goods, agriculture and energy exports. According to Bloomberg economist Maeva
Cousin's analysis, that would be an increase of 81% over the 2017 baseline. In year two, the
agreement calls for $98.2 billion surge in Chinese imports, which would require a 125%
increase over 2017.
Importantly for China, the deal requires those purchases to be "made at market prices based
on commercial considerations," a caveat which spooked commodities traders, and led to a sharp
drop in ags in the day following the deal's announcement.
Can China pull this off? Yes, if Beijing tears up existing trade deals and supply chains and
imposes explicit procurement targets and demands on China's local business. As Bloomberg notes,
"critics argue that such pre-ordained demand amounts to a slide into the sort of
government-managed trade that U.S. presidents abandoned decades ago" and the very sort of act
of central planning that U.S. officials have , paradoxically, spent years trying to convince
China to walk away from.
This may also explain why a key part of the trade deal will remain secret: the purchase plan
is based on what the administration insists is a specific – if classified – annex
of Chinese commitments. "The 20-page public version of that annex lists hundreds of products
and services from nuclear reactors to aircraft, printed circuits, pig iron, soybeans, crude oil
and computer services but no figures for purchases."
Going back to the critics, it is this convoluted mechanism that has them arguing that
China's stated targets will likely never be met: "This is ambitious and it will create some
stresses within the supply system," said Craig Allen, the president of the U.S.-China Business
Council.
That's not all: as Allen said, among the outstanding questions was whether China would lift
its retaliatory duties on American products as the US keeps its tariffs on some $360 billion in
imports from China as Trump seeks to maintain leverage for the second phase of
negotiations.
Allen also made clear the overall purchase schedule left many U.S. companies uncomfortable
even as they saw benefits in other parts of the deal. "The vast majority of our members are
looking for no more than a level playing field in China," Allen said. "We are not looking for
quotas or special treatment."
As a result, for many manufacturers what is actually changing -- and what China has
committed to instead of given a "best efforts" promise to achieve -- remains unclear.
Major exporters such as Boeing Co., whose CEO Dave Calhoun attended Wednesday's signing
ceremony, have stayed mum about what exactly the deal will mean for their business with China.
In an attempt to "clarify", Trump tweeted that the deal includes a Chinese commitment to buy
$16 billion to $20 billion in Boeing planes. It was unclear if he meant 737 MAX planes which
nobody in the world will ever voluntarily fly inside again.
Finally, prompting the latest round of cronyism allegations, Trump's new China pact also
includes plans for exports of American iron and steel , "a potential gain for an industry close
to the president that has benefited from his tariffs and complained about Chinese production
and overcapacity for years." As Bloomberg adds, the text of the agreement lists iron and steel
products ranging from pig iron to stainless steel wire and railway tracks, but steel industry
sources said they had been caught by surprise and not been given any additional details on
China's purchase commitments.
It is unclear why Beijing would need US product s: after all, in its scramble to erect ghost
cities and hit a goalseeked GDP print, China produces more than 50% of the world's steel,
drawning criticism from around the world – if not Greta Thunberg – for the massive
coal-derived pollution that comes from flooding global markets with cheap steel.
She made a blunder. That's for sure. but still Warren is a better candidate then Trump.
The shell game between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders has transmogrified. The brutal,
post-debate exchange between the duo has the progressive left fearing repeat business from '04:
it happened at just the wrong time, only weeks ahead of the first primaries.
sounds very much like it, in a kind of
ham-fisted, virtue-signaling way -- "Sometimes I fear the American people are still too bigoted
to vote for a woman," or something like that. Yet every Clinton staffer was muttering the same
thing under her breath at 3 a.m. on November 9, 2016.
What's more, Mrs. Warren never denied that Mr. Sanders only ran in the last election cycle
because she declined to do so. Nor can anyone forget how vigorously he campaigned for Mrs.
Clinton, even after she and the DNC rigged the primary against him. If Mrs. Warren and her
surrogates at CNN are claiming that Bernie meant that a person with two X chromosomes is
biologically incapable of serving as president, they're lying through their teeth.
This is how Liz treats her "friend" Bernie -- and when he denies that absurd smear, she
refuses to shake his hand and accuses him of calling her a liar on national television. Then,
of course, the #MeToo brigades line up to castigate him for having the temerity to defend
himself -- further evidence, of course, of his sexism. I mean, like, Bernie is, like,
literally Weinstein.
Then there's the "Latinx" thing, which is the absolute summit of progressive elites'
disconnect with ordinary Americans. In case you didn't know, Mrs. Warren has been roundly
panned for referring to Hispanics by this weird neologism, which was invented by her comrades
in the ivory tower as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina . The
thing is, Spanish is a gendered language. What's more, a poll by the left-wing market research
group Think Now found that just 2 percent of Hispanics call themselves "Latinx." (In fact, most
prefer the conventional "Hispanic," which is now verboten on the Left because it hearkens back
to Christopher Columbus's discovery of La Española .)
So here comes Professor Warren -- white as Wonder Bread, the mattress in her Cambridge
townhouse stuffed with 12 million big ones -- trying to rewrite the Spanish language because
she thinks it's sexist. How she's made it this far in the primary is absolutely mind-boggling.
She doesn't care about Hispanics, much less their culture. Like every employee of the modern
education system, she's only interested in processing American citizens into gluten-free offal
tubes of political correctness.
Of course, if one of her primary opponents or a cable news "Democratic strategist" (whatever
that is) dared to say as much, they'd be hung, drawn, and quartered. Partisan Democrats have
trained themselves not to think in such terms. That might not matter much if Mrs. Warren was
facing Mitt Romney or John McCain in the general. But she's not. If she wins the primary,
she'll be up against Donald Trump. And if you don't think he'll say all of this -- and a
whole lot more -- you should apply for a job at CNN.
... running against Mrs. Warren would be a walk in the park
Your imaginary Trump anti-Warren schtick might have worked in 2016, but boy does it come
off as unfunny and stale in 2020. He's done too much damage. Not funny anymore. I voted for
Trump. After all his betrayals, Warren could rip him to pieces just by standing next to him
without saying a word. Her WASP reserve and Okie roots might even seem refreshing after our
four-year long cesspool shower with this New York City creep.
Didn't vote for Trump, or Clinton for that matter, cast a protest Libertarian vote. In my
red state it hardly matters, but the electoral college is another story. But observed long
ago that indeed Warren is just what the author says, a too politically correct north east
liberal who would be demolished in the presidential election against Trump. Only Biden or
Klobuchar has a chance to unseat the orange man, or maybe better yet a Biden - Klobuchar
ticket.
I've sometimes voted red and sometimes blue, but a Trump Vs Biden contest might well make
me bored and disappointed enough to join you going libertarian.
If the Dems want to lose, Biden and Klobuchar would be a quick ticket to doing so. Warren
would get the job done not much slower, unless she pivoted away from social issues.
To quote Phyllis Schlafly's advice to conservatives and the GOP, what the Dems need is
"A choice, not an echo." Sanders is the closest the Dems have of offering the voters a real
choice, and is the best option to defeat Trump. The D establishment will still pull out all
the stops to try to block him, of course, because even they and their big donors would
prefer a second Trump term over a New Deal liberal with a socialist gloss, but they may not
succeed this time.
Bernie and Tulsi are the most honest and interesting of the Democratic field, even though
their politics generally aren't mine. Nonetheless, I wish them well, because they appear to
say what they actually think, as opposed to whatever their operatives have focus-group
tested.
Biden's corruption will come out in the general. We could write up articles of impeachment
now. After all, Biden, did actually bribe the Ukraine. He said so himself. On video.
I think Trump's unfortunately stronger now than he was in 2016. Clinton's attacks on him
were painting him as an apocalyptic candidate who would bring America crashing down. By
serving as president for 4 years with a mostly booming economy, Trump's proven them wrong.
The corporate media will continue their hysterical attacks on him though, and that will
boost his support. I think Hillary Clinton was more dislikeable back then than Warren is
now, but Warren is probably even more out of touch. The others might also lose, but she
really as a terrible candidate.
What damage has Trump done, as opposed to the damage the media/Dems/deepstate's RESPONSE to
Trump has done?
Trump has reduced illegal immigration with the expected subsequent increases in employment
and wages, saved taxpayer 1 TRILLION dollars by withdrawing from the Paris accord, killed 2
leading terrorists (finally showing Iran that we aren't their bakshi boys), cut taxes,
stood up for gun rights, reduced harmful governmental regulation, and appointed judges that
will follow the law instead of feelings and popular culture.
He is also exposing the deep underbelly of the corrupt government in Washington, especially
the coup organized between Obama, Hillary, the DNC, Brennan, Comey, Clapper and the
hyperpartisan acts of the FBI, CIA, DOJ, IRS and now the GAO (unless you believe that the
"non-partisan" GAO released their report which claimed Trump violated the law by holding up
Ukranian funds for a few months within the same fiscal year on the same day Nancy
forwarded the articles of impeachment by some amazing coincidence).
The problem isn't Trump. The problem is the liars opposing the existential threat Trump
poses to the elitists who despise America.
"For all my reservations about Mr. Trump -- his lagging commitment to
protectionism, his shafting of Amy Coney Barrett, his deportation of
Iraqi Christians, his burgeoning hawkishness, his total lack of
decorum -- he's infinitely preferable to anyone the Democrats could
nominate."
You gloss over a few dozen other failures, most of them bigger than anything you mention
here (immigration, infrastructure, more mass surveillance and privacy violations by govt
and corporations than even Obama).
You realize that the progress Trump has made on immigration is why unemployment is down and
wages are up, right?
Most Americans think that's a good thing.
Democrats, not so much.
I think I disliked the last thing I saw by Davis. Whatever. This one is better. Not perfect
-- some of it is out of touch -- but he makes a case. And, sad to say,
I concur with his prediction for the election, with or without Warren.
I'm starting to like her. I thought she handled herself well at the last debate.
"Presidential". It's been quite a while since we had a real president. Too long.
Forgive me, but Democratic voters put way too much store in presidents being Presidential.
And they spent way too much time talking about Bush's verbal gaffes and Trump's disgusting
personality to get Gore, Kerry or H. Clinton elected.
As the author wrote, it was invented by academics. One problem with the Democrat Party is
that it is teeming with Professor Kingsfield types who are as much connected with the rest
of the population as I am with aborigines.
Finally someone said what most people think. Love the imagined Trump comments to
Warren..."Relax. Put on a nice sweater, have a cup of tea, grade some papers." As i read
those I heard Trump's unique way of speech and was laughing out loud. BTW...Tulsi Gabbard
is such an attractive candidate...heard her interviewed on Tucker Carlson and I think could
present a real challenge to Trump if she ever rose up to face him in a debate. It's curious
someone like Warren shoots to the top, while she remains in the back of the line.
The media deliberately shut her down, just like they are shutting down Bernie. The DNC also
doesn't like her (possibly because she resigned as cochair and is critical of Hillary) and
seems to have chosen their debate criteria -which surveys they accept-in order to shut her
out. I liked her up until she objected to taking out Soleimani-a known terrorist in the
middle of a war zone planning attacks on US assets.
Sorry, Trump was spot on in this attack. Tulsi was completely wrong. However, she is
honest, experienced, knowledgeable and not psychotic, a refreshing change from the other
Dem Presidential candidates. If you haven't figured out yet that CNN is basically the media
arm of Warren's campaign, you haven't been paying attention. That is how Warren continues
to poll reasonably well.
These arguments amaze me. "Since your candidate is too school marmy, or elitist, or (insert
usual democrat insult here), you're giving the electorate no choice but to vote for the
most corrupt, openly racist, sexist, psychologically lying, dangerously mentally deranged
imbecile in the country".
Because rather than an educated person who maybe comes off as an elitist, we'd rather
have a disgusting deplorable who no sane parent would allow in the same room with their
daughter.
Lol, and yet writers like this don't even realize the insanity of what they're saying,
which is basically "that bagel is 2 days old, so I have choice but to eat this steaming
pile of dog crap instead".
"Because rather than an educated person who maybe comes off as an elitist, we'd rather have
a disgusting deplorable who no sane parent would allow in the same room with their
daughter."
No need for the ad hominem, you are overstating your case. Remember, Trump is "educated"
too. And a card-carrying member of the elite. Leave us not kid ourselves, they're all
"elites" of one stripe or another. It only matters which stripe we prefer, meaning of
course whether they are saying what we want to hear. Of all of the candidates, the only one
who does not come off as an "elite" is Tulsi Gabbard, an intelligent woman who is arguably
the most interesting of all the candidates--in part because of her active military service.
I'd even throw in Andrew Yang, a friendly, engaging person who didn't seem to have an ax to
grind. It matters not. Yang is out of the picture and Gabbard has as much of a crack at the
Democratic nomination in 2020 as Rand Paul had at the Republican nomination in
2016--essentially zero.
Lol trump is educated too? You've lose all credibility with such comical false
equivalencies.
Trump is an absolute imbecile who has failed up his entire life thanks to daddy's
endless fortune. If he we born Donald Smith he'd be pumping gas in Jersey, or in jail as a
low life con man.
While I find myself shocked to be found defending anything Trumpean, in all fairness, he is
a college grad-u-ate (shades of Lily Tomlin). The value, depth, or scope of his degree may
be in question, but he does possess a sheep-skin, and hence must be considered "educated".
If one wants to demean his "education" because of his personality, one must also demean a
rather broad segment of college grad-u-ates as well.
He graduated from Penn's Wharton School of Business, ergo he is educated. Because a person
doesn't hold the same political beliefs as another doesn't mean they can't be "educated."
Liz Warren may not hold the same political beliefs as I, but I cannot argue that she isn't
educated.
Lol wow, well I'd say it's hilarious that anyone can be so naive to actually think a
compete imbecile like trump, who so clearly has never read a book in his life, actually
earned his way into college; let alone actually studied and earned a degree.....but then I
remember this country is obviously filled with people this remarkable gullible and stupid,
as this walking SNL sketch is actually President.
I actually think you are spot on in your assessment of what Trump would have become if he
wasn't born to money, but you really are behaving like exactly that kind of Democratic
voter who gets more exorcised by Trump's personal faults than by his policy ones, the kind
of Democrats who couldn't get Al Gore, John Kerry and Hilary Clinton elected.
Really. You think someone that managed to become President of the United States with no
political or military experience would have failed at life if he hadn't had a wealthy
father. You really believe that. You don't think any of Trump's success and accomplishments
are due to his ambition, drive, energy, determination, executive skills, ruthlessness or
media savvy. It was all due to his having a rich father.
Fascinating.
Trump has had no success. He's failed at everything he's ever done. You obviously just know
nothing about his actual life, and believe the made up reality TV bullshit.
The only thing he's good at is playing a rich successful man on TV to really, really,
stupid, unread, unworldly, naive people....well that and giving racists white nationalists,
the billionaire owner class, sexists, bigots, and deplorables, a political home.
I think Trump is and would have been, sans his father's wealth, one hell of a con man. And
I hope to God that he would have ended up in jail for it rather than running a private
equity fund, but the latter would have been just as likely.
However, I should have made that distinction in my original comment. No, I do not think
that Trump would have ended up a gas station attendant.
It's very hard for me to understand how anyone could be so, shall we say sheltered, that
they couldn't see him coming a mile away and laugh their ass off.
He's so bad, so transparent with his obvious lies and self aggrandizing, so clearly
ignorant and unread and trying to fake it, he's literally like a cartoon's funny over the
top version of an idiot con man. I'll never understand how anyone could ever be fooled by
it.
In fact sometimes I think 90% of his base isn't fooled, they know he's a joke, but they
just don't care. He gives them the white nationalist hate and rhetoric they want, makes
"liberals cry", and that all they care about.
It's a lot easier for me to believe THAT then so many people can actually be so stupid
and gullible.
Say what? What policies? The trillion dollar hand out to the richest corporations in the
world, double the deficit? His mind blowing disastrous foreign policy decisions that have
done nothing but empowered Russia, Iran and North Korea while destabilizing western
alliances? The trade wars that have cost fairness and others billions (forcing taxpayers to
bail them out with tens of millions of dollars)? The xenophobia, separating and caging
children? Stoking violence and hate and anger among his white nationalist base? His attacks
on women reproductive rights? His attacks on all of our democratic institutions, from our
free press to our intelligence agencies and congressional oversights?
A pathologically lying racist sexist self serving criminal is enough to disqualify this
miscreant from being dog catcher, let alone president. But his policies are even worse.
You don't seem to know that the University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League school, or what
the Wharton School of Business actually is. Imbeciles do not graduate from the Wharton
School.
Lol, trump is an imbecile, that's not even debatable. What amazes the rest of the entire
civilized world outside of the batshit fringe 20% of Americans who make up the Republican
voting base is how anyone could possible be conned by such a cartoonish idiot wanna be con
man.
It's truly something sane people can't even begin to wrap their heads around.
The Dowager Countess (Downton Abbey, for the un-initiated) nailed her type. In referring to
her do-gooder cousin Mrs. Isobel Crawley, she said: "Some people run on greed, lust, even
love. She runs on indignation." That sums up Warren perfectly.
I'll take it one step further. I bought one of her books, on the 'two-income trap' and how
middle-class families go to the wall to get into good school districts for their children.
She and her co-author make some valid points, but the book is replete with cliches about
men abandoning their families and similar leftist tropes. If that's the best Harvard Law
Warren has to offer, she's not as sharp as she thinks she is, and a bully like Trump will
school her fast.
Evidently Mr Davis dislikes Warren because of her personal style - but all of Trump's
substantive (or even, substance...) issues are acceptable. How shallow of him.
I can't say the two of us exactly line up on everything. But, like Wow: "gluten-free offal
tubes of political correctness." Now that's funny! Wish I'd thought of it.
I liked Warren until this attempt to stab Bernie in the back plus that childish refusal to
shake his hand on national TV. I still don't dislike her, but that was embarrassing. She
definitely has character flaws.
But this piece goes over the top. It's Trumpian. Warren certainly has flaws but if you
are going to judge a politician by their character, in what universe would Trump come out
on top?
Better than Warren.
The problem with affirmative action is when you abuse it, as Warren did, you actually rob a
genuine minority from a genuine disadvantaged background of their chance.
Warren deliberately misrepresented herself as a Native American, solely for career
advancement, and then abandoned her fake identity once she got tenure at Harvard. There was
another woman who was an actual minority that had a teaching appointment at Harvard, but
Warren beat her out, using her false claims of minority heritage to overcome her
competition's actual minority status.
Trump competes on his own.
There what's funny about these arguments. They're basically saying, "your candidate has
some flaws, she's very school marmy, and thinks she knows everything."
"Therefore, OBVIOUSLY people have no choice but to instead vote for the raging imbecile,
the pathologically lying, corrupt to his core, racist, morally bankrupt, sexist imbecile
with the literal temperament of of an emotionally troubled 10 year old."
What unpleasant memories Mister Davis has elicited - - - i once had a schoolmarm like that.
(Shudder)
It is, however, disturbing that Davis has almost captured the style of Trumptweets. The
give-away is a shade more literacy and better grammar in Davis' offerings.
But what of the possibility, as suggested above, that Trump loses to Biden or (Generic
Democratic candidate)?
As I tell my liberal friends, the country survived eight years of Priapic Bill, eight
years of Dubya and Dubyaer, eight years of BHO, and after four years of Trump is yet
standing, however drunkenly.
I think, contra many alarmists, the Republic is much stronger than the average pundit or
combox warrior gives it credit.
And, who knows? Maybe the outrage pornography we get from Tweeting birdies will grow
stale and passe, and people will yearn for more civil discourse? (Not likely, but one never
knows.)
I refuse to use "Bay Stater" for the same reason I dislike being called "Mike": nicknames
are irritating, unless they're outlandish, like "Beanie" or "Boko" or "Buttigieg."
Massachusetts is a beautiful name -- slow and smooth, like the Merrimack.
"Massachusettsian" adds a little skip at the end, as the river crashes into the Atlantic at
Newburyport. It's the perfect demonym.
Speaking of, I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life in Massachusetts --
about 10 minutes outside Newburyport, where my great-great-something grandparents lived
when the Revolution broke out. I don't know how much further back the family tree goes in
Mass., but probably further than yours.
Good luck with that utter nonsense word, then. Bay Stater is not a nickname - it's the
longstanding term (and, for some reason, the Massachusetts General Court also blessed it
legislatively), from long before my folk lived in New England since the mid-19th century
(Connecticut and Massachusetts - hence my reference to Nutmeggers, as my parents made quite
clear to us that there were no such things as Connecticutters or Massachusetters or the
like and not to go around sounding like fools using the like.)
Of course, I'd like to recover the old usage of the Eastern States to refer to New
England. Right now, its sole prominent residue is the Big E in Springfield....
"... In the larger global picture, if the U.S. is to find its own balance in the contemporary world, Friedman argues that the seemingly-endless instability in the Middle East is the first and foremost problem that must be solved. Iran is a major problem here, but so is Israel, and Friedman argues that the US must find the path toward "quietly distanc[ing] itself from Israel" (p.6). ..."
"... This course of action regarding Iran and Israel (and other actors in the Muslim world, including Pakistan and Turkey) is, in Friedman's geopolitical perspective, not so much a matter of supporting U.S. global hegemony as it is recognizing the larger course that the U.S. will be compelled to take. ..."
"... So, it's back to Plan A for the Democrats and the "Left" that would be laughably absurd if it wasn't so reactionary, to get the neoliberal/ neoconservative endless-war agenda back on track, so that the march toward Iran can continue sooner rather than later. For now, the more spectacular the failure of this impeachment nonsense, the better! ..."
Let's be clear, there is a difference between substituting geopolitical power calculations
for a universal perspective on the good of humanity, and, on the other hand, recognizing that
the existing layout of the world has to be taken into account in attempts to open up a true
politics. (My larger perspective on the problem of "opening" is presented in the long essay,
"The Fourth Hypothesis," at counterpunch.org.)
Personally, I find the geopolitical analyses of George Friedman very much worthwhile to
consider, especially when he is looking at things long-range, as in his books The Next 100
Years and The Next Decade. The latter was published at the beginning of 2012, and so we are
coming to the close of the ten-year period that Friedman discusses.
One of the major arguments that Friedman makes in The Next Decade is that the
United States will have to reach some sort of accommodation with Iran and its regional
ambitions. The key to this, Friedman argues, is to bring about some kind of balance of power
again, such as existed before Iraq was torn apart.
This is the key in general to continued U.S. hegemony in the world, in Friedman's view --
regional balances that keep regional powers tied up and unable to rise on the world stage. (An
especially interesting example here is that Friedman says that Poland will be built up as a
bulwark between Russia and Germany.)
In the larger global picture, if the U.S. is to find its own balance in the contemporary
world, Friedman argues that the seemingly-endless instability in the Middle East is the first
and foremost problem that must be solved. Iran is a major problem here, but so is Israel, and
Friedman argues that the US must find the path toward "quietly distanc[ing] itself from
Israel" (p.6).
This course of action regarding Iran and Israel (and other actors in the Muslim world,
including Pakistan and Turkey) is, in Friedman's geopolitical perspective, not so much a matter
of supporting U.S. global hegemony as it is recognizing the larger course that the U.S. will be
compelled to take.
(As the founder, CEO, and "Chief Intelligence Officer" of Stratfor, Friedman aimed to
provide "non-ideological" strategic intelligence. My understanding of "non-ideological" is that
the analysis was not formulated to suit the agendas of the two mainstream political parties in
the U.S. However, my sense is that Friedman does believe that U.S. global hegemony is on the
whole good for the world.)
In his book that came out before The Next Decade (2011), The Next 100
Years (2009), Friedman makes the case that the U.S. will not be seriously challenged
globally for decades to come -- in fact, all the way until about 2080!
Just to give a different spin to something I said earlier, and that I've tried to emphasize
in my articles since March 2016: questions of mere power are not questions of politics.
Geopolitics is not politics, either -- in my terminology, it is "anti-politics."
For my part, I am not interested in supporting U.S. hegemony, not in the present and not in
the future, and for the most part not in the past, either.
For the moment, let us simply say that the historical periods of the U.S. that are more
supportable -- because they make some contribution, however flawed, to the greater, universal,
human project -- are either from before the U.S. entered the road of seeking to compete with
other "great powers" on the world stage, or quite apart from this road.
In my view, the end of U.S. global hegemony and, for that matter, the end of any "great
nation-state" global hegemony, is a condition sine qua non of a human future that is just and
sustainable. So, again, the brilliance that George Friedman often brings to geopolitical
analysis is to be understood in terms of a coldly-realistic perspective, not a warmly-normative
one.)
Of course, this continued U.S. hegemony depends on certain "wise" courses of action being
taken by U.S. leaders (Friedman doesn't really get into the question of what might be behind
these leaders), including a "subtle" approach to the aforementioned questions of Israel and
Iran.
Obviously, anything associated with Donald Trump is not going to be overly subtle! On the
other hand, here we are almost at the end of Friedman's decade, so perhaps the time for
subtlety has passed, and the U.S. is compelled to be a bit heavy-handed if there is to be any
chance of extricating itself from the endless quagmire.
However, there's a certain fly, a rather large one, in the ointment that seems to have
eluded Friedman's calculations: "the rise of China."
It isn't that Friedman avoids the China question, not at all; Friedman argues, however, that
by 2020 China will not only not be contending with the United States to have the largest
economy in the world, but instead that China will fragment, perhaps even devolve into civil
war, because of deep inequalities between the relatively prosperous coastal urban areas, and
the rural interior.
Certainly I know from study, and many conversations with people in China, this was a real
concern going into the 2010s and in the first half of the decade.
The chapter dealing with all this in The Next 100 Years (Ch. 5) is titled, "China
2020: Paper Tiger," the latter term being one that Chairman Mao used regarding U.S.
imperialism. Friedman writes of another "figure like Mao emerg[ing] to close the country
off from the outside, [to] equalize the wealth -- or poverty " (p.7).
Being an anti-necessitarian in philosophy, I certainly believe anything can happen in social
matters, but it seems as though President Xi Jinping and the current leadership of the
Communist Party of China have, at least for the time being, managed to head off fragmentation
at the pass, so to speak.
Friedman argued that the "pass" that China especially had to deal with is unsustainable
growth rates; but it appears that China has accomplished this, by purposely slowing its economy
down.
One of the things that Friedman is especially helpful with, in his larger geopolitical
analysis, is understanding the role that naval power plays in sustaining U.S. hegemony. (In
global terms, such power is what keeps the neoliberal "free market" running, and this power is
far from free.)
*
... ... ...
Two of the best supporters of Trump's stated agenda are Tucker Carlson and Steve Hilton.
Neither of them pull any punches on this issue when it comes to Republicans, and both of them
go some distance beyond Trump in stating an explicitly anti-war agenda.
They perhaps do not entirely fit the mold of leftist anti-imperialism as it existed from the
1890s through the Sixties (as in the political decade, perhaps 1964-1974 or so) and 1970s, but
they do in fact fit this mold vastly better than almost any major figure of the Democratic
Party, with the possible exceptions of Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang. (But
none of them has gone as far as Trump on this question!)
Certainly Elizabeth Warren is no exception, and at the moment of this writing she has made
the crucial turn toward sticking the knife back into Bernie's back. That is her job, in my
view, and part of it is to seem close to Bernie's positions (whatever their defects, which I'll
discuss elsewhere), at least the ones that are more directly "economic," while winking at the
ruling class.
There are a few things Carlson and Hilton say on the Iran situation and the Middle East in
general that I don't agree with. But in the main I think both are right on where these issues
are concerned.
As I've quoted Carlson a number of times previously, and as I also want to put forward
Hilton as an important voice for a politics subservient to neither the liberal nor the
conservative establishments, here let me quote what Hilton said in the midst of the Iran
crisis, on January 5, 2020:
The best thing America can do to put the Middle East on a path
that leads to more democracy, less terrorism, human rights and economic growth is to get the
hell out of there while showing an absolute crystal clear determination to defend American
interests with force whenever they are threatened.
That doesn't mean not doing anything, it means intervening only in ways that help
America.
It means responding only to attacks on Americans disproportionately as a deterrent, just as
we saw this week and it means finally accepting that it's not our job to fix the Middle East
from afar.
The only part of this I take exception to is the "intervening only in ways that help
America"-bit -- that opens the door to exactly the kinds of problems that Hilton wants the U.S.
to avoid, besides the (to me, more important) fact that it is just morally wrong to think it is
acceptable to intervene if it is in one's "interests."
My guess is that Hilton thinks that there is some built-in utilitarian or pragmatic calculus
that means the morally-problematic interventions will not occur. I do not see where this has
ever worked, but more importantly, this is where philosophy is important, theoretical work and
abstract thinking are important.
It used to be that the Left was pretty good at this sort of thing, and there were some
thoughtful conservatives who weren't bad, either. (A decent number of the latter,
significantly, come from the Catholic intellectual tradition.) Now there are still a few of the
latter, and there are ordinary people who are "thoughtful conservatives" in their "unschooled
way" -- which is often better! -- but the Left has sold its intellectual soul along with its
political soul.
That's a story for elsewhere (I have told parts of it in previous articles in this series);
the point here is that the utilitarianism and "pragmatism" of merely calculating interests is
not nearly going to cut it. (I have partly gone into this here because Hilton also advocates
"pragmatism" in his very worthwhile book, Positive Populism -- it is the "affirmative" other
side to Tucker Carlson's critical, "negative" expose, Ship of Fools.)
The wonderful philosophical pragmatism of William James is another matter; this is important
because James, along with his friend Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), were leading figures of the
Anti-Imperialist League back in the 1890s, when the U.S. establishment was beating the drums
loudly to get into the race with Europeans for colonies.
They were for never getting "in" -- and of course they were not successful, which is why
"get the hell out" is as important as anything people can say today.
What an insane world when the U.S. president says this and the political establishment
opposes him, and "progressives" and "the Left" join in with the denunciations!
It has often been argued that the major utilitarian philosophers, from Bentham and Mill to
Peter Singer, have implicit principles that go beyond the utilitarian calculus; I agree with
this, and I think this is true of Steve Hilton as well.
In this light, allow me to quote a little more from the important statement he made on his
Fox News Channel program, "The Next Revolution," on January 5; all of this is stuff I entirely
agree with, and that expresses some very good principles:
The West's involvement in the
Middle East has been a disaster from the start and finally, with President Trump, America is in
a position to bring it to an end. We don't need their oil and we don't need their problems.
Finally, we have a U.S. president who gets that and wants to get out. There are no prospects
for Middle East peace as long as we are there.
We're never going to defeat the ideology of Islamist terror as long as these countries are
basket cases and one of the reasons they are basket cases is that our preposterous foreign
policy establishment with monumental arrogance have treated the middle east like some chess
game played out in the board rooms in Washington and London.
– [foxnews.com, transcribed by Yael Halon]
So then there is the usual tittering about this and that regarding Carlson and Hilton from
liberal and progressive Democrats and leftists who support the Democrats, and it seems to me
that there is one major reason why there is this foolish tittering: It is because these
liberals and leftists really don't care about, for example, the destruction of Libya, or the
murder of Berta Caceres.
Or, maybe they do care, but they have convinced themselves that these things have to swept
under the rug in the name of defeating the pure evil of Trump. What this amounts to, in the
"nationalist" discourse, is that Trump is some kind of nationalist (as he has said numerous
times), perhaps of an "isolationist" sort, while the Democrats are in fact what can be called
"nationalists of the neoliberal/neoconservative compact."
My liberal and leftist friends (some of them Maoists and post-Maoists and Trotskyists or
some other kinds of Marxists or purported radicals -- feminists or antifa or whatever) just
cannot see, it simply appears to be completely beyond the realm of their imaginations, that the
latter kind of nationalism is much worse and qualitatively worse than what Trump represents,
and it completely lacks the substantial good elements of Trump's agenda.
But hey, don't worry my liberal and leftist friends, it is hard to imagine that Joe Biden's
"return to normalcy" won't happen at some point -- it will take not only an immense movement to
even have a chance of things working out otherwise, but a movement that likes of which is
beyond everyone's imagination at this point -- a movement of a revolutionary politics that
remains to be invented, as all real politics are, by the masses.
Liberals and leftists have little to worry about here, they're okay with a Deep State
society with a bullshit-democratic veneer and a neoliberal world order; this set-up doesn't
really affect them all that much, not negatively at any rate, and the deplorables can just go
to hell.
*
The Left I grew up with was the Sixties Left, and they used to be a great source of
historical memory, and of anti-imperialism, civil rights, and ordinary working-people
empowerment.
The current Left, and whatever array of Democratic-Party supporters, have received their
marching orders, finally, from commander Pelosi (in reality, something more like a lieutenant),
so the two weeks or so of "immense concern" about Iran has given way again to the
extraordinarily-important and solemn work of impeachment.
But then, impeachment is about derailing the three main aspects of Trump's agenda, so you
see how that works. Indeed, perhaps the way this is working is that Trump did in fact head off,
whatever one thinks of the methods, a war with Iran (at this time! – and I do think this
is but a temporary respite), or more accurately, a war between Iran and Israel that the U.S.
would almost certainly be sucked into immediately.
So, it's back to Plan A for the Democrats and the "Left" that would be laughably absurd if
it wasn't so reactionary, to get the neoliberal/ neoconservative endless-war agenda back on
track, so that the march toward Iran can continue sooner rather than later. For now, the more
spectacular the failure of this impeachment nonsense, the better!
Bill Martin is a
philosopher and musician, retired from DePaul University. He is completing a book with the
title, "The Trump Clarification: Disruption at the Edge of the System (toward a theory)." His
most recent albums are "Raga Chaturanga" (Bill Martin + Zugzwang; Avant-Bass 3) and "Emptiness,
Garden: String Quartets nos. 1 and 2 (Ryokucha Bass Guitar Quartet; Avant-Bass 4). He lives in
Salina, Kansas, and plays bass guitar with The Radicles.
Dungroanin ,
I have read through finally. And comments too.
My opinion is Bill Martin is on the ball except for one personage- Hilton. If he is
Camerons Hilton and architect of the Brexit referendum – for which he is rewarded with
a 'seat at the table' of the crumbling Empire. The Strafor man too is just as complicit in
the Empires wickedness.
But I'll let Bill off with that because he mentioned the Anti-Imperialist Mark Twain
– always a joy to be reminded of Americas Dickens.
On Trump – he didn't use the Nuclear codes 10 minutes after getting them as warned
by EVERYONE. Nor start a war with RocketMan, or Russia in Syria, or in Ukraine or with the
Chinese using the proxy Uighars, or push through with attempted Bay of Pigs in Venezuela or
just now Hong Kong. The Wall is not built and the ineffectual ripoff Obamacare version of a
NHS is still there.
Judge by deeds not words.
Soleimani aside – He may have stopped the drive for war. Trumps direct contact with
fellow world leaders HAS largely bypassed the war mongering State Department and also the
Trillion dollar tax free Foundations set up last century to deliver the world Empire, that
has so abused the American peoples and environment. He probably wasn't able to stop
Bolivia.
The appointments of various players were not necessarily in his hands as Assad identified-
the modern potus is merely a CEO/Chair of a board of directors who are put into place by the
special interests who pour billions, 10's of billions into getting their politicians elected.
They determine 'National Interests'. All he can do is accept their appointment and give them
enough rope to hang themselves – which most have done!
These are that fight clubs rules.
On the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – after 20 full years of working towards
cohesion- they have succeeded. Iran is due to become a full member – once it is free of
UN sanctions, which is why Trump was forced into pulling the treaty with them, so that
technicality could stop that membership. China is not having it nor is Russia – Putins
clear statement re the 'international rules' not being mandatory for them dovetails with the
US position of Exceptionality. Checkmate.
As for the Old Robber Baron Banker Pirates idea that they should be allowed a Maritime
Empire as consolation- ha ha ha, pull the other one.
The ancient sea trading routes from Africa to China were active for thousands of years
before the Europeans turned up and used unequal power to disrupt and pillage at their hearts
content.
What made that possible was of course explained in the brilliant Guns, Germs and
Steel.
These ancients have ALL these and are equal or advanced in all else including Space, Comms
and AI. A navy is not so vital when even nuclear subs are visible from low orbit satellites
except in the deepest trenches – not a safe place to hide for months and also pretty
crowded with all the other subs trying to hide there. As for Aircraft carrier groups –
just build an island! Diego Garcia has a rival.
Double Checkmate.
The Empire is Dead. Long live the Empire.
Dungroanin ,
And this is hilarious about potus turning the tables on the brass who tried to drag him into
the 'tank'.
'Grab the damn fainting couch. Trump told the assembled military leaders who had presided
over a military stalemate in Afghanistan and the rise of ISIS as "losers." Not a one of them
had the balls to stand up, tell him to his face he was wrong and offer their resignation.
Nope. They preferred to endure such abuse in order to keep their jobs. Pathetic.
This excerpt in the Washington Post tells the reader more about the corruption of the Deep
State and their mindset than it does about Trump's so-called mental state. Trump acted no
differently in front of these senior officers and diplomats than he did on the campaign
trail. He was honest. That is something the liars in Washington cannot stomach. '
Rhys Jaggar ,
I am not an expert on US Constitutional Law, but is there any legal mechanism for a US
President to hold a Referendum in the way that the UK held a 'Brexit Referendum' and Scotland
held an 'Independence Referendum'?
How would a US Referendum in 'Getting the hell out of the Middle East, bringing our boys
and girls home before the year is out' play out, I wonder?
That takes the argument away from arch hawks like Bolton et al and puts it firmly in the
ambit of Joe Schmo of Main Street, Oshkosh
wardropper ,
Great idea.
Main problem is that most Americans are brought up to think their government is separate from
themselves, and should not be seriously criticized.
By "criticized", I mean, taken to task in a way which actually puts them on a playing field
where they are confronted by real people.
Shouting insults at the government from the rooftops is simply greeted with indulgent smiles
from the guilty elite.
Richard Le Sarc ,
George Friedman is a bog standard Zionist, therefore, out of fear, a virulent Sinophobe,
because the Zionists will never control China as they do the Western slave regimes. China
surpassed the USA as the world' s largest economy in 2014, on the PPP calculus that the
CIA,IMF and just about everyone uses. It' s growing three times as fast as the USA, too. The
chance of China fragmenting by 2020 is minuscule, certainly far less than that of the USA.
The Chinese have almost totally eliminated poverty, and will raise the living standard of all
to a ' middle income' by 2049. It is, however, the genocidal policy of the USA, on which it
expend billions EVERY year, to do its diabolical worst to attempt to foment and foster such a
hideous fate inside China, by supporting vermin like the Hong Kong fascist thugs, the Uighur
salafist terrorist butchers, the medieval theocrats of the Dalai clique and separatist
movements in Inner Mongolia, ' Manchuria', Taiwan, even Guandong and Guangxi. It takes a real
Western thug to look forward to the ghastly suffering that these villainous ambitions would
unleash.
Antonym ,
In RlS's nut shell: China can annex area but Israel: no way!
Dungroanin ,
Which area is China looking to annex?
Richard Le Sarc ,
Ant is a pathological Zionist liar, but you can see his loyalty to ' Eretz Yisrael' , '
..from the Nile to the Euphrates', and ' cleansed' of non-Jews, can' t you.
alsdkjf ,
I'm surprised that this author can even remember the counter culture of the 60s given his
Trump love.
Yet more Trumpism from Off Guardian. One doesn't have to buy into the politics of post DLC
corporate owned DNC to know Trump for what he is. A fascist.
It's just amazing this Trump "left". Pathetic.
Antonym ,
Trump .. better than HRC but the guy is totally hypnotized by the level of the New York stock
exchanges: even his foreign policy is improvised around that. He simply thinks higher is
a proof of better forgetting that 90% of Americans don't own serious quantity of stock
and that levels are manipulated by big players and the FED. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/economy/stocks-economy.html
Look at his dealing with China: tough as much as the US stock market stays benign in the
short term. Same for Iran etc.
Sure, he is crippled by Pelosi & the FBI / CIA, but he is also by his own stock
dependent mind. Might be the reason he is still alive ???
alsdkjf ,
Trump crippled by the CIA? Trump?
I mean the fascist jerk appointed ex CIA torture loving Pompeo to replace swamp creature
oil tycoon as Secretary of State, no?
He appointed torture queen within the CIA to become CIA Director, no?
He went to the CIA headquarters on day one of his Administration to lavish praise, no?
He took on ex CIA Director Woolsey as advisor on foreign policy during his campaign,
no?
I tell ya that Trump is a real adversary of the CIA!
Roger that. Trump appoints a dominatrix as DCI. Only a masochist or a sadist would Dream of
Gina..you know the head of the torture squad under Bush. Otherwise nice girl. PompAss is a
total clown but a dangerous one who even makes John Bolton look sane. Now that's scary!
This guy is Hilary Clinton in drag. The only thing missing is the evil triumphalist cackle
after whacking Soleimani. Maybe it wasn't recorded.
So much for "draining the swamp". The Whitehouse has become an even bigger swamp.
my take from this article:
There are, among the murderers and assassins in Washington, a couple of characters who appear
to have 2% of human DNA.
They author may confirm.
two ,
"israel is right in the cen "
sorry, the muderous regime israel has repeatedly proven, it's never never right . please
avoid this usage.
three ,
There are 53 or 54 'I's in the article, including his partner's Is. The author may confirm.
Dungroanin ,
Phew!
That is a lot of words mate. Fingers must be sore. I won't comment more until trying to
re-read again except quote this:
"Being an anti-necessitarian in philosophy,.."
I must say i had a wtf moment at that point see ya later.
paul ,
The idea that Trump's recent actions in the Middle East were part of some incredibly cunning
plan to avoid war with Iran, strikes me as somewhat implausible, to put it (very) charitably.
Even Hitler didn't want war. He wanted to achieve his objectives without fighting. When
that didn't work, war was Plan B. Trump probably has very little actual control over foreign
policy. He is surrounded by people who have been plotting and scheming against him from long
before he was elected. He heads a chaotic and dysfunctional administration of billionaires,
chancers, grifters, conmen, superannuated generals, religious nut jobs, swamp creatures,
halfwits and outright criminals, lurching from one crisis and one fiasco to the next. Some of
these people like Bolton were foisted upon him by Adelson and various other backers and wire
pullers, but that is not to absolve Trump of personal responsibility.
Competing agencies which are a law unto themselves have been free to pursue their own turf
wars at the expense of anything remotely resembling a rational and coherent strategy. So have
quite low level bureaucrats, formulating and implementing their own policies with little
regard for the White House. In Syria, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department went
their own way, each supporting competing and mutually antagonistic factions and terrorist
groups. Agreements that were reached with Russia over Syria, for example, were deliberately
sabotaged by Ashton Carter in 24 hours. Likewise, Bolton did everything he could to wreck
Trump's delicate negotiations with N. Korea.
paul ,
Seen in this light, US policy (or the absence of any coherent policy) is more understandable.
What passes for US leadership is the worst in its history, even given a very low bar.
Arrogant, venal, corrupt, delusional, irredeemably ignorant, and ideologically driven. The
only positive thing that can be said is that the alternative (Clinton) would probably have
been even worse, if that is possible.
That may also be the key to understanding the current situation. For all his pandering to
Israel, Trump is more of a self serving unprincipled opportunist than a true Neocon/ Zionist
believer in the mould of Pence, Bolton and Pompeo. For that reason he is not trusted by the
Zionist Power Elite. He is too much of a loose cannon. They will take all his Gives, like
Jerusalem and the JCPOA, but without any gratitude.
It has taken them a century of plotting, scheming and manoeuvring to achieve their
political, financial, and media stranglehold over the US. but America is a wasting asset and
they are under time pressure. It is visibly declining and losing its influence. And the
parasite will find it difficult to find a similar host. Who else is going to give Israel
billions a year in tribute, unlimited free weaponry and diplomatic cover? Russia? Are Chinese
troops "happy to die for Israel" asUS ones are (according to their general)?
paul ,
And they are way behind schedule. Assad was supposed to be dead by now, and Syria another
defenceless failed state, broken up into feuding little cantons, with Israel expanding into
the south of the country. The main event, the war with Iran, should have started lond ago.
That is the reason for the impeachment circus. This is not intended to be resolved one way
or the other. It is intended to drag on indefinitely, for months and years, to distract and
weaken Trump and make it possible to extract what they want. One of the reasons Trump agreed
to the murder of Soleimani and his Iraqi opposite number was to appease some Republican
senators like Graham whose support is essential to survive impeachment. They were the ones
who wanted it, along with Bolton and Netanyahu.
paul ,
It is instructive that all the main players in the impeachment circus are Jews, under
Sanhedrin Chief Priests Schiff and Nadler, apart from a few token goys thrown in to make up
the numbers. That even goes for those defending Trump.
Richard Le Sarc ,
Don' t forget that Lebanon up to the Litani is the patrimony of the Jewish tribes of Asher
and Naphtali, and, as Smotrich, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, said on Israeli TV a few years
ago, ' Damascus belongs to the Jews'.
bevin ,
" China will fragment, perhaps even devolve into civil war, because of deep inequalities
between the relatively prosperous coastal urban areas, and the rural interior."
This is not Bill, but Bill's mate the Stratcor geopolitical theorist for hire.
What is happening in the world is that the only empire the globe, as a whole, has ever
seen- the pirate kingdom that the Dutch, then the British and finally the US, leveraged out
of the plunder and conquest of America -the maritime empire, of sea routes and navies is
under challenge by a revival of the Eurasian proto-empires that preceded it and drove its
merchants and princes on the Atlantic coast, to sea.
We know who the neo-liberals are the current iteration of the gloomy philosophies of the
Scots Enlightenment, (Cobbett's 'Scotch Feelosophy') utilitarianism in its crudest form and
the principles of necessary inequalities, from the Austrian School back to the various crude
racisms which became characteristic of the C19th.
The neo-cons are the latest expression of the maritime powers' fear of Eurasia and its
interior lines of communication. Besides which the importance of navies and of maritime
agility crumble.
Bill mentions that China has not got much of a navy. I'm not so sure about that, but isn't it
becoming clear that navies-except to shipyards, prostitutes and arms contractors- are no
longer of sovereign importance? There must be missile commanders in China drooling over the
prospect of catching a US Fleet in all its glory within 500 miles of the mainland. Not to
mention on the east coast of the Persian Gulf.
The neo-cons are the last in a long line of strategists, ideologists and, for the most part,
mercenary publicists defying the logic of Halford Mackinder's geo-strategy for a lot more
than a penny a line. And what they urge, is all that they can without crossing the line from
deceitfulness to complete dishonesty: chaos and destabilisation within Eurasia, surrounding
Russia, subverting Sinkiang and Tibet, employing sectarian guerrillas, fabricating
nationalists and nationalisms.. recreate the land piracy, the raiding and the ethnic
explosions that drove trade from the land to the sea and crippled the Qing empire.
The clash is between war, necessary to the Maritime Empire and Peace, vital to the
consolidation and flowering of Eurasia.
As to Israel, and perhaps we can go into this later: it looms much larger in the US
imagination (and the imaginations the 'west' borrows from the US) than anywhere else. It is a
tiny sliver of a country. Far from being an elephant in any room, it is simply a highly
perfumed lapdog which also serves as its master's ventriloquist's dummy. Its danger lies in
the fact that after decades of neglect by its idiotic self indulgent masters, it has become
an openly fascist regime, which was definitely not meant to happen, and, misled by its own
exotic theories of race, has come to believe that it can do what it wants. It can't-and this
is one reason why Bill misjudges the reasoning behind the Soleimani killing- but it likes to
act, or rather threaten to act, as if it could.
(By the way-note to morons across the web-Bill's partner quotes Adorno and writes about
him too: cue rants about Cultural Marxism.)
Hugh O'Neill ,
Thanks, Bevin. The article was so long, I had quite forgotten that he laid too much emphasis
on the Stratcor Unspeakable. Clever he may be, but not much use without a moral compass.
Talking of geo-strategists, you will doubtless be aware of the work of A.T. Mahan whose
blueprint for acquisition of inspired Teddy Roosevelt and leaders throughout Europe, Russia,
Japan.
Richard Le Sarc ,
Friedman is a snake oil peddler. He tells the ruling psychopaths what they want to hear, like
' China crumbling', their favourite wet-dream.
bevin ,
I agree about Mahan's importance. He understood what lay behind the Empire on which the sun
never set but he had enough brains to have been able to realise that current conditions make
those fleets obsolete. In fact the Germans in the last War realised that too- their strategy
was Eurasian, it broke down over the small matter of devouring the USSR. The expiry date on
the tin of Empire has been obvious for a long time- there is simply too much money to be made
by ignoring it.
Russia has always been the problem, either real (very occasionally) or latent for the
Dutch/British/US Empire because it is just so clear that the quickest and most efficient
communications between Shanghai and Lisbon do not go through the Straits of Malacca, the Suez
Canal, or round the cape . Russia never had to do a thing to earn the enmity of the Empire,
simply existing was a challenge. And that remains the case- for centuries the Empire
denounced the Russians because of the Autocracy, then it was the anarchism of the Bolsheviks,
then it was the autocracy again, this time featuring Stalin, then it was the chaos of the
oligarchs and now we are back with the Tsar/Stalin Putin.
Hugh O'Neill ,
Phenomenal diagnosis, Bevin. However, one suspects that there is still too much profit to be
made by the MIC in pursuing useless strategies. I imagine Mahan turning in his grave in his
final geo-strategic twist.
Richard Le Sarc ,
Yes-Zionist hubris will get Israel into a whole world of sorrow.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
More USA Deep State conspiracy theorizing which makes the author American paternalism posing
as authorship that is revenue neutral when it ain't.
Any article with mention of mother-'Tucker' Carlson is one that is pure propagandistic
tripe in the extreme. Off-G is a UK blog yet this Americanism & worn out aged propaganda
still prevails in the minds of US centric myopics writ large across all states in the
disunity equally divided from cities to rural towns all.
MOU
johny conspiranoid ,
"More USA Deep State conspiracy theorizing which makes the author American paternalism posing
as authorship that is revenue neutral when it ain'"
Is this even a sentence?
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
It was a sentence when I was smoking marijuana yesterday, Johnny C. Today it is still a
sentence IMHO, but you transcribed it incorrectly, and forgot the end of the sentence.
NOTE: When I smoke marijuana I am allowed to write uncoordinated sentences. These are the
rules in CANADA. If you don't like it write to your local politician and complain
bitterly.
MOU
Charlotte Russe ,
Bush, Obama, and Clinton are despicable. In fact, they're particularly disgusting, inasmuch,
as they were much more "cognizant" than Trump of how their actions would lead to very
specific insidious consequences. In addition, they were more able to cleverly conceal their
malevolent deeds from the public. And that's why Trump is now sitting in the Oval
Office–he won because of public disgust for lying politicians.
However, Trump is "dangerous" because he's a "misinformed idiot," and as such is extremely
malleable. Of course, ignorance is no excuse when the future of humanity is on the line
In any event, Trump is often not aware of the outcome of his actions. And when you're
surrounded and misinformed by warmongering neoconservative nutcases, especially ones who
donated to your campaign chances are you'll do stupid things. And that's what they're
counting on.
alsdkfj ,
Trump is some virtuous example of a truth teller? Trump?
The biggest liar to every occupy the White House and that is saying a lot.
Swamp Monster fascist Trump. So much to love, right?
He could murder one of your friends and you'd still apologize for him, is my guess.
Hugh O'Neill ,
It was a long read, but I got there. In essence, I agreed with 99%, but I hesitate to share
too much praise for Trump's qualities as a Human Being – though he may be marginally
more Human than the entire US body politic. I was walking our new puppy yesterday when he did
his usual attempt to leap all over other walkers. I pleaded their forgiveness and explained
that his big heart was in inverse proportion to his small brain. It occurred to me later that
the opposite would be pure evil i.e. a small heart but big brain. Capitalism as is now
infects the Human Experiment, has reduced both brains and hearts: propagandists believe their
own lies, and too few trust their own instincts and innate compassion, ground down by the
relentless distractions of lies and 'entertainment' (at least the Romas gave you free
bread!).
I get the impression that Trump's world view hasn't altered much since he was about 11 years
old. I do not intend to insult all eleven-year-olds, but his naivety is not a redeeming
feature of his spoilt brat bully personality. He has swallowed hook, line and sinker every
John Wayne cowboy movie and thinks the world can be divided into good guys and bad guys
depending on what colour hat they wear. In the days of Black & White TV, it was either
black or white. The world seemed so much simpler aged 11 .(1966).
Dungroanin ,
Yet I have yet to see one photo of Trump with a gun or in uniform.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
The Duck learned to dress appropriately for business, I'll give him that. As a New York Real
Estate scion you will never see him dress otherwise. Protocol in business is a contemporary
business suit. No other manner of dress is allowed for the executive class in North America
or UK.
Neoliberals are mostly neocons and neocons are mostly neoliberals. They can't understand the
importance of Brexit and the first real crack in neoliberal globalization facade.
She really was on the wrong side of history: a tragedy for a politician. EU crumles with the
end of her political career which was devoted to straightening EU and neoliberalism, as well as
serving as the USA vassal. While she was sucessful in extracting benefits for Germany
multinationals she increased Germany dependency (and subservience) on the USA. She also will be
remembered for her handing of Greece crisis.
Notable quotes:
"... The UK's departure will continue to hang over Brussels and Berlin -- the countdown for a trade deal will coincide with Germany's presidency of the EU in the second half of this year. ..."
"... Brexit is a "wake-up call" for the EU. Europe must, she says, respond by upping its game, becoming "attractive, innovative, creative, a good place for research and education . . . Competition can then be very productive." This is why the EU must continue to reform, completing the digital single market, progressing with banking union -- a plan to centralise the supervision and crisis management of European banks -- and advancing capital markets union to integrate Europe's fragmented equity and debt markets. ..."
"... its defence budget has increased by 40 per cent since 2015, which is "a huge step from Germany's perspective". ..."
"... Ms Merkel will doubtless be remembered for two bold moves that changed Germany -- ordering the closure of its nuclear power stations after the Fukushima disaster of 2011, and keeping the country's borders open at the height of the 2015 refugee crisis. That decision was her most controversial, and there are some in Germany who still won't forgive her for it. But officials say Germany survived the influx, and has integrated the more than 1m migrants who arrived in 2015-16. ..."
It's a grim winter's day in Berlin, and the political climate matches the weather.
Everywhere Angela Merkel looks there are storm clouds, as the values she has upheld all her
career come under sustained attack. At the start of a new decade, Europe's premier stateswoman
suddenly seems to be on the wrong side of history.Shortly, the UK will leave the EU. A volatile
US president is snubbing allies and going it alone in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin is
changing the Russian constitution and meddling in Libya and sub-Saharan Africa. Trade tensions
continue, threatening the open borders and globalised value chains that are the cornerstones of
Germany's prosperity.
Ms Merkel, a former physicist renowned for her imperturbable, rational manner is a
politician programmed for compromise. But today she faces an uncompromising world where liberal
principles have been shoved aside by the law of the jungle.
Her solution is to double down on Europe, Germany's anchor. "I see the European Union as our
life insurance," she says. "Germany is far too small to exert geopolitical influence on its
own, and that's why we need to make use of all the benefits of the single market."
Speaking in the chancellery's Small Cabinet Room, an imposing wood-panelled hall overlooking
Berlin's Tiergarten park, Ms Merkel does not come across as under pressure. She is calm, if
somewhat cagey, weighing every word and seldom displaying emotion.
But the message she conveys in a rare interview is nonetheless urgent. In the twilight of
her career -- her fourth and final term ends in 2021 -- Ms Merkel is determined to preserve and
defend multilateralism, a concept that in the age of Trump, Brexit and a resurgent Russia has
never seemed so embattled. This is the "firm conviction" that guides her: the pursuit of "the
best win-win situations . . . when partnerships of benefit to both
sides are put into practice worldwide". She admits that this idea is coming "under increasing
pressure". The system of supranational institutions like the EU and United Nations were, she
says, "essentially a lesson learnt from the second world war, and the preceding decades". Now,
with so few witnesses of the war still alive, the importance of that lesson is fading.
Of course President Donald Trump is right that bodies like the World Trade Organization and
the UN require reform. "There is no doubt whatsoever about any of that," she says. "But I do
not call the world's multilateral structure into question. "Germany has been the great
beneficiary of Nato, an enlarged EU and globalisation. Free trade has opened up vast new
markets for its world-class cars, machines and chemicals. Sheltered under the US nuclear
umbrella, Germany has barely spared a thought for its own security. But the rise of "Me First"
nationalism threatens to leave it economically and politically unmoored. In this sense, Europe
is existential for German interests, as well as its identity.
Ms Merkel therefore wants to strengthen the EU -- an institution that she, perhaps more than
any other living politician, has come to personify. She steered Europe through the eurozone
debt crisis, albeit somewhat tardily: she held Europe together as it imposed sanctions on
Russia over the annexation of Crimea; she maintained unity in response to the trauma of
Brexit.
The UK's departure will continue to hang over Brussels and Berlin -- the countdown for a
trade deal will coincide with Germany's presidency of the EU in the second half of this
year. Berlin worries a post-Brexit UK that reserves the right to diverge from EU rules on
goods, workers' rights, taxes and environmental standards could create a serious economic
competitor on its doorstep. But Ms Merkel remains a cautious optimist. Brexit is a "wake-up
call" for the EU. Europe must, she says, respond by upping its game, becoming "attractive,
innovative, creative, a good place for research and
education . . . Competition can then be very productive." This is
why the EU must continue to reform, completing the digital single market, progressing with
banking union -- a plan to centralise the supervision and crisis management of European banks
-- and advancing capital markets union to integrate Europe's fragmented equity and debt
markets.
In what sounds like a new European industrial policy, Ms Merkel also says the EU should
identify the technological capabilities it lacks and move fast to fill in the gaps. "I believe
that chips should be manufactured in the European Union, that Europe should have its own
hyperscalers and that it should be possible to produce battery cells," she says. It must also
have the confidence to set the new global digital standards. She cites the example of the
General Data Protection Regulation, which supporters see as a gold standard for privacy and
proof that the EU can become a rulemaker, rather than a rule taker, when it comes to the
digital economy. Europe can offer an alternative to the US and Chinese approach to data. "I
firmly believe that personal data does not belong to the state or to companies," she says. "It
must be ensured that the individual has sovereignty over their own data and can decide with
whom and for what purpose they share it."
The continent's scale and diversity also make it hard to reach a consensus on reform. Europe
is deeply split: the migration crisis of 2015 opened up a chasm between the liberal west and
countries like Viktor Orban's Hungary which has not healed. Even close allies like Germany and
France have occasionally locked horns: Berlin's cool response to Emmanuel Macron's reform
initiatives back in 2017 triggered anger in Paris, while the French president's unilateral
overture to Mr Putin last year provoked irritation in Berlin. And when it comes to reform of
the eurozone, divisions still exist between fiscally challenged southern Europeans and the
fiscally orthodox new Hanseatic League of northern countries.
Ms Merkel remains to a degree hostage to German public opinion. Germany, she admits, is
still "slightly hesitant" on banking union, "because our principle is that everyone first needs
to reduce the risks in their own country today before we can mutualise the risks". And capital
markets union might require member states to seek closer alignment on things like insolvency
law. These divisions pale in comparison to the gulf between Europe and the US under president
Donald Trump. Germany has become the administration's favourite punching bag, lambasted for its
relatively low defence spending, big current account surplus and imports of Russian gas. German
business dreads Mr Trump making good on his threat to impose tariffs on European cars.
It is painful for Ms Merkel, whose career took off after unification. In an interview last
year she described how, while coming of age in communist East Germany, she yearned to make a
classic American road trip: "See the Rocky Mountains, drive around and listen to Bruce
Springsteen -- that was my dream," she told Der Spiegel.
The poor chemistry between Ms Merkel and Mr Trump has been widely reported. But are the
latest tensions in the German-US relationship just personal -- or is there more to it? "I think
it has structural causes," she says. For years now, Europe and Germany have been slipping down
the US's list of priorities.
"There's been a shift," she says. "President Obama already spoke about the Asian century, as
seen from the US perspective. This also means that Europe is no longer, so to say, at the
centre of world events."She adds: "The United States' focus on Europe is declining -- that will
be the case under any president."The answer? "We in Europe, and especially in Germany, need to
take on more responsibility."
Germany has vowed to meet the Nato target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence by the
start of the 2030s. Ms Merkel admits that for those alliance members which have already reached
the 2 per cent goal, "naturally this is not enough". But there's no denying Germany has made
substantial progress on the issue: its defence budget has increased by 40 per cent since
2015, which is "a huge step from Germany's perspective".
Ms Merkel insists the transatlantic relationship "remains crucial for me, particularly as
regards fundamental questions concerning values and interests in the world". Yet Europe should
also develop its own military capability. There may be regions outside Nato's primary focus
where "Europe must -- if necessary -- be prepared to get involved. I see Africa as one
example," she says.
Defence is hardly the sole bone of contention with the US. Trade is a constant irritation.
Berlin watched with alarm as the US and China descended into a bitter trade war in 2018: it
still fears becoming collateral damage.
"Can the European Union come under pressure between America and China? That can happen, but
we can also try to prevent it. "Germany has few illusions about China. German officials and
businesspeople are just as incensed as their US counterparts by China's theft of intellectual
property, its unfair investment practices, state-sponsored cyber-hacking and human rights
abuses in regions like Xinjiang.
Once seen as a strategic partner, China is increasingly viewed in Berlin as a systemic
rival. But Berlin has no intention of emulating the US policy of "decoupling" -- cutting its
diplomatic, commercial and financial ties with China. Instead, Ms Merkel has staunchly defended
Berlin's close relationship with Beijing. She says she would "advise against regarding China as
a threat simply because it is economically successful".
"As was the case in Germany, [China's] rise is largely based on hard work, creativity and
technical skills," she says. Of course there is a need to "ensure that trade relations are
fair". China's economic strength and geopolitical ambitions mean it is a rival to the US and
Europe. But the question is: "Do we in Germany and Europe want to dismantle all interconnected
global supply chains . . . because of this economic competition?"
She adds: "In my opinion, complete isolation from China cannot be the answer."Her plea for
dialogue and co-operation has set her on a collision course with some in her own party.
China hawks in her Christian Democratic Union share US mistrust of Huawei, the Chinese
telecoms equipment group, fearing it could be used by Beijing to conduct cyber espionage or
sabotage. Ms Merkel has pursued a more conciliatory line. Germany should tighten its security
requirements towards all telecoms providers and diversify suppliers "so that we never make
ourselves dependent on one firm" in 5G. But "I think it is wrong to simply exclude someone per
se," she says.
The rise of China has triggered concern over Germany's future competitiveness. And that
economic "angst" finds echoes in the febrile politics of Ms Merkel's fourth term. Her "grand
coalition" with the Social Democrats is wracked by squabbling. The populist Alternative for
Germany is now established in all 16 of the country's regional parliaments. A battle has broken
out for the post-Merkel succession, with a crop of CDU heavy-hitters auditioning for the top
job.
Many in the political elite worry about waning international influence in the final months
of the Merkel era.While she remains one of the country's most popular politicians, Germans are
asking what her legacy will be. For many of her predecessors, that question is easy to answer:
Konrad Adenauer anchored postwar Germany in the west; Willy Brandt ushered in detente with the
Soviet Union; Helmut Kohl was the architect of German reunification. So how will Ms Merkel be
remembered?
She brushes away the question. "I don't think about my role in history -- I do my job." But
what about critics who say the Merkel era was mere durchwurschteln -- muddling through? That
word, she says, in a rare flash of irritation, "isn't part of my vocabulary". Despite her
reputation for gradualism and caution, Ms Merkel will doubtless be remembered for two bold
moves that changed Germany -- ordering the closure of its nuclear power stations after the
Fukushima disaster of 2011, and keeping the country's borders open at the height of the 2015
refugee crisis. That decision was her most controversial, and there are some in Germany who
still won't forgive her for it. But officials say Germany survived the influx, and has
integrated the more than 1m migrants who arrived in 2015-16.
She prefers to single out less visible changes. Germany is much more engaged in the world:
just look, she says, at the Bundeswehr missions in Africa and Afghanistan. During the Kohl era,
even the idea of dispatching a ship to the Adriatic to observe the war in Yugoslavia was
controversial. She also mentions efforts to end the war in Ukraine, its role in the Iran
nuclear deal, its assumption of ever more "diplomatic, and increasingly also military
responsibility". "It may become more in future, but we are certainly on the right path," she
says.
The Merkel era has been defined by crisis but thanks to her stewardship most Germans have
rarely had it so good. The problem is the world expects even more of a powerful, prosperous
Germany and its next chancellor.Letter in response to this article:At last, I understand
Brexit's real purpose / From John Beadsmoore, Great Wilbraham, Cambs, UK
Its chosen candidates are: Elizabeth Warren, the Republican-turned-progressive who for years posed as a Native American to game
America's system of affirmative action - and Amy Klobuchar, the midwestern senator from the great state of Minneapolis with a reputation
for being an unhinged dragon-lady boss.
That the NYT selected the two remaining women among the top tier of contenders is hardly a surprise: This is, after all, the same
newspaper that kicked off #MeToo by dropping the first expose about Harvey Weinstein's history of abusing, harassing and assaulting
women just days before the New Yorker followed up with the first piece from Ronan Farrow.
...After all, if the editors went ahead with their true No. 1 choice, Klobuchar, a candidate who has very little chance of actually
capturing the nomination, they would look foolish.
Warren is a much better candidate than Biden is in my view.
Warren seems to get into trouble sometimes for all kinds of reasons like most people do, but the problems are usually trivial,
more silly than dangerous. There is tendency in her to stick to her guns even when she does not know what she is doing.
When i run into something unexpected or something that seems to be something i don't understand, i usually backtrack and look
at the problem from some distance to see what happened and why before trying to correct or fix the problem, rather than just doing
something.
Its not a perfect plan, but it seems to work most of the time.
NYT remains a joke. Their endorsement is straight up virtue-signalling.
Here's some reality: Warren's latest antics have cemented her image as dishonest and high-strung. Knoblocker has no charisma
and remains practically unknown.
I've personally sat down and talked with Klobuchar. Not a lot of depth of intelligence in her, that's for sure, easily manipulated
by lobbyists. Warren, at least, knows what the problem is, although she might have swallowed the proverbial Democratic party "kool
aid".
Warren is the deep state establishment pick. If you must vote Dem, pick someone that isn't, or one the establishment seems
to work against. Better yet, vote Trump, safe bet on gun rights, freedoms.
Yes, with Soleimani assassination and subsequent crisis Trump crossed the red line. But the
House is afraid to tell he whole truth... Obama was probably even bigger threat to the US
national security, especially with Hillary as the Secretary of State and hi Libyan and Syrian
adventures.
The 111-page summons urges the Senate to "eliminate the threat that the President poses to
America's national security" as it lays out the case against President Trump.
Hilarious. What other president would've tolerated this?
**** Cheney would've had the homes of these people "visited" by faceless-looking men long
ago, evidence gathered, and a second visit made a few weeks later to protect himself and
Bush. Just to pluck one recent administration out of thin air.
Trump doesn't seem all that worried. Maybe that's for a reason most of us can't possibly
comprehend.
Financialization killed Boeing. All those MBA's who dreamed up outsourced supply-chains
for the Dreamliner. Thought they were going to make a lot of money through savings.
Silly rabbit MBA's... if you don't spend money? You don't make money.
MBA graduates are f*cking useless retards trained in only one system: FAILURE.
What sank McDonald Douglas - bought out by Boeing? Is the same bullsh*t that is ruining
Boeing. Boeing kept a lot of board member & management failures around from McDonald
Douglas. Poisoned the Boeing culture.
How many of you remember all the McDonald Douglas passenger jet success stories? There
wasnt any - the whole mgmt of MD was to to strip out every possible cost and maximize very
profit at the expense of the end customer and the government - and these are the guys who
bought Boeing - and then made the first step of moving the headquarters to chicago. Guess
which party gave lots and lots of government boondoggles to MD?
I had a Polish executive tell me how proud they were as they were about to hire an
American executive who graduated with an MBA.
That is, until I asked him... "Have you checked what happened to the previous companies
that he worked at?"
So the Polish executive did just that. This led to a ban on hiring any American MBA. Turns
out, the American MBA worked at companies, all of which FAILED.
Though, somehow, despite a track record of working at failed companies? The American was
still quite well off.
The ******* alternative you stupid ******* americunt is already in the air. They are
labelled Airbus A220 and A230, otherwise known as Bombardier CS200 and CS300 and they are
sold out 15 years in advance.
That was part of the problem. The parts from Boeing's foreign suppliers MET
SPECIFICATIONS.
That is, until they went to assemble the Dreamliner. Where parts did not fit together.
You see, Boeing found out LONG, LONG AGO... that it was necessary to have manufacturing
close to design. That way, when parts that "met specifications" did not fit? The engineers
and machinists were there to correct deficiencies. Thus leading to reliable planes that were
fit together very well. Only THEN could Boeing could assemble parts in other locations and
mate them together.
This never happened with the Dreamliner. Quadrupled costs. The Dreamliner only exists
thanks to taxpayer subsidies through the ExIm Bank. The Dreamliner WILL NEVER BE PROFITABLE.
Accounting gimmicks make it appear as if Boeing makes money on the Dreamliner.
Amazing that in less than a generation, we go from "if it's not Boeing, I'm not going" to
wondering what the next Boeing screw-up will be and how many will be killed as a result.
The existing 777 is a fantastic plane and, other than pilot error (Asiana at SFO), a
missile attack (Malaysia 17) and some unknown (but apparently not mechanical) issue (Malaysia
370), the 777 has been the safest plane around.
American executives are incentivized to manipulate their company's stock. So they squeeze
the workforce and cut everything to the bone. That's why Boeing, GM, and other household
names are crashing.
According to economist William Lazonick, Boeing spent $43.1 billion on stock buybacks
from 2013 to 2019, raising the company's stock price to a record high just 10 days before
the second crash of its 737 MAX. Boeing CEO Muilenburg collects most of his pay through
stock or compensation based on financial metrics. Yet the company reportedly avoided
spending the estimated $7 billion it would have needed to engineer a safer plane. Less than
10 years after a public sector bailout, GM has spent $10.6 billion on stock buybacks, while
engaging in layoffs and plant closures. That amounts to $221,308 for each of the 47,897
active UAW members currently on strike at GM. Walmart spent $9.2 billion on stock buybacks
from August 2018 to July 2019, which, by my calculations, could have been used to give a
raise of roughly $5/ hour to each of its 1 million hourly workers instead.
Boeing should have been spending all its supposed profits on R&D. The other problem is
the military side of the business is grossly corrupt. Remember the blowup over Air Force
1?
This is what happens when the Federal Reserve lets the financial cat out the bag, and pump
up the stock market to the tune of 35-60 billion every 3 days, because some hedge funds
"could" fail and topple the financial system.
If multiple entities are now too important and could topple the financial system if they
failed, the Fed has massively screwed up.
In 1991 a Boeing purchaser told me that he would give us a contract if we transferred 51%
of the shares to a minority.
This is God's truth
He added that when he could not find minority businesses that would make components
according to specifications, he would buy stuff from minority owned businesses and not use it
but store it in warehouses around the country indefinitely. this in order to meet a quota of
20% purchases from minority owned businesses mandated by the Feds for all government
suppliers.
I can just imagine how bad the discrimination is now.
These are politically connected animals who feed from the trough of government pork barrel
a.k.a taxpayer money. Exactly what has Nikki Haley achieved in her life, except for being a
pathological liar?
These animals were responsible for our reckless fiscal deficits and looming debt bombs
which will soon come crashing down. Kinda good metaphor for Boeing.
All former CFOs and politicians ( civilian and military - only political types in the
military get stars ). No evidence of any engineering expertise. Sad for a once-proud global
leader.
In the "investor economy", there is no morality. EVERYTHING is "commoditized". Even you ..
your DNA. A pricetag hovers over your head like a dialog bubble. Bean counters can
incorporate your morbidity and mortality into mathematical equations showing investors why
cutting costs and saving 0.01% is worthy of investment. While 911 was the paradigm shift for
Rights ... the Lehman "crisis" was its own "911" -- the death of the labor economy ... and
rise of the "investor economy". Nobody works, trading time for dollars. They "invest" Why
work? Investors can kill without being held personally responsible. They only risk their fiat
capital. You die.
Is Warren Warren the Jussie Smollet of politics. I wonder if she claims Bernie attacked her
while wearing a red hat and screaming, "A woman can't win! This is MAGA country!"
Being one of Liz' constituents and familiar with her career and her base (consisting of
people like me,) I think she faces so little consequence for her "embellishments" at least in
part because "we" (her base) inhabit an environment in which, with ease, we adjust facts and
perceptions to conform to whatever our self-serving narrative of the moment may be.
We know that Liz will say anything she imagines will be to her advantage and it's okay
with "us" that she does. In a way, she's our ideal candidate and media darling because she
reflects and affirms our plastic values.
"... Of course, Biden in 2019 said "I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else -- even distant family -- about their business interests. Period." ..."
"... James Biden : Joe's younger brother James has been deeply involved in the lawmaker's rise since the early days - serving as the finance chair of his 1972 Senate campaign. And when Joe became VP, James was a frequent guest at the White House - scoring invites to important state functions which often "dovetailed with his overseas business dealings," writes Schweizer. ..."
"... According to Fox Business 's Charlie Gasparino in 2012, HillStone's Iraq project was expected to "generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years," more than tripling their revenue. According to the report, James Biden split roughly $735 million with a group of minority partners . ..."
"... David Richter - the son of HillStone's parent company's founder - allegedly told investors at a private meeting; it really helps to have "the brother of the vice president as a partner." ..."
Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer is out with a new book, "
Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America's Progressive Elite," in which he reveals
that five members of the Biden family, including Hunter, got rich using former Vice President
Joe Biden's "largesse, favorable access and powerful position."
While we know of Hunter's profitable exploits in Ukraine and China - largely in part thanks
to Schweizer, Joe's brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and his son-in-law Howard all
used the former VP's status to enrich themselves.
Of course, Biden in 2019 said "I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else --
even distant family -- about their business interests. Period."
As Schweizer puts writes in the
New York Post ; "we shall see."
James Biden : Joe's younger brother James has been deeply involved in the lawmaker's rise since the early days - serving
as the finance chair of his 1972 Senate campaign. And when
Joe became VP, James was a frequent guest at the White House - scoring invites to important
state functions which often "dovetailed with his overseas business dealings," writes Schweizer.
Consider the case of
HillStone International , a subsidiary of the huge construction management firm, Hill
International. The president of HillStone International was Kevin Justice, who grew up in
Delaware and was a longtime Biden family friend. On November 4, 2010, according to White
House visitors' logs, Justice visited the White House and met with Biden adviser Michele
Smith in the Office of the Vice President .
Less than three weeks later, HillStone announced that James Biden would be joining the
firm as an executive vice president . James appeared to have little or no background in
housing construction, but that did not seem to matter to HillStone. His bio on the company's
website noted his "40 years of experience dealing with principals in business, political,
legal and financial circles across the nation and internationally "
James Biden was joining HillStone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a
massive contract in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build
100,000 homes. It was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project deal won by TRAC
Development , a South Korean company. HillStone also received a $22 million U.S. federal
government contract to manage a construction project for the State Department. -
Peter Schweizer, via NY Post
According to Fox Business 's Charlie Gasparino in 2012, HillStone's Iraq project was
expected to "generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years," more than tripling
their revenue. According to the report, James Biden split roughly $735 million with a group of
minority partners .
David Richter - the son of HillStone's parent company's founder - allegedly told investors
at a private meeting; it really helps to have "the brother of the vice president as a
partner."
Unfortunately for James, HillStone had to back out of the major contract in 2013 over a
series of problems, including a lack of experience - but the company maintained "significant
contract work in the embattled country" of Iraq, including a six-year contract with the US Army
Corps of Engineers.
In the ensuing years, James Biden profited off of Hill's lucrative contracts for dozens of
projects in the US, Puerto Rico, Mozambique and elsewhere.
Frank Biden , another one of Joe's brothers (who said the Pennsylvania Bidens
voted for Trump over Hillary), profited handsomely on real estate, casinos, and solar power
projects after Joe was picked as Obma's point man in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Months after Joe visited Costa Rica, Frank partnered with developer Craig Williamson and the
Guanacaste Country Club on a deal which appears to be ongoing.
In real terms, Frank's dream was to build in the jungles of Costa Rica thousands of homes,
a world-class golf course, casinos, and an anti-aging center. The Costa Rican government was
eager to cooperate with the vice president's brother.
As it happened, Joe Biden had been asked by President Obama to act as the Administration's
point man in Latin America and the Caribbean .
Frank's vision for a country club in Costa Rica received support from the highest levels
of the Costa Rican government -- despite his lack of experience in building such
developments. He met with the Costa Rican ministers of education and energy and environment,
as well as the president of the country. -
NY Post
And in 2016, the Costa Rican Ministry of Public Education inked a deal with Frank's Company,
Sun Fund Americas to install solar power facilities across the country - a project the Obama
administration's OPIC authorized $6.5 million in taxpayer funds to support.
This went hand-in-hand with a solar initiative Joe Biden announced two years earlier, in
which "American taxpayer dollars were dedicated to facilitating deals that matched U.S.
government financing with local energy projects in Caribbean countries, including Jamaica,"
known as the Caribbean Energy Security Initiative (CESI).
Frank Biden's Sun Fund Americas announced later that it had signed a power purchase
agreement (PPA) to build a 20-megawatt solar facility in Jamaica.
Valerie Biden-Owens , Joe's sister, has run all of her brother's Senate campaigns - as well
as his 1988 and 2008 presidential runs.
She was also a senior partner in political messaging firm Joe Slade White & Company ,
where she and Slade White were listed as the only two executives at the time.
According to Schweizer, " The firm received large fees from the Biden campaigns that Valerie
was running . Two and a half million dollars in consulting fees flowed to her firm from
Citizens for Biden and Biden For President Inc. during the 2008 presidential bid alone."
Dr. Howard Krein - Joe Biden's son-in-law, is the chief medical officer of StartUp Health -
a medical investment consultancy that was barely up and running when, in June 2011, two of the
company's execs met with Joe Biden and former President Obama in the Oval Office .
The next day, the company was included in a prestigious health care tech conference run by
the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) - while StartUp Health executives became
regular White House visitors between 2011 and 2015 .
StartUp Health offers to provide new companies technical and relationship advice in
exchange for a stake in the business. Demonstrating and highlighting the fact that you can
score a meeting with the president of the United States certainly helps prove a strategic
company asset: high-level contacts. -
NY Post
Speaking of his homie hookup, Krein described how his company gained access to the highest
levels of power in D.C.:
"I happened to be talking to my father-in-law that day and I mentioned Steve and Unity were
down there [in Washington, D.C.]," recalled Howard Krein. "He knew about StartUp Health and was
a big fan of it. He asked for Steve's number and said, 'I have to get them up here to talk with
Barack.' The Secret Service came and got Steve and Unity and brought them to the Oval
Office."
And then, of course, there's Hunter Biden - who was paid millions of dollars to sit on the
board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma while his father was Obama's point man in the
country.
But it goes far beyond that for the young crack enthusiast.
With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused
to his father's power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue's gallery of governments
and oligarchs around the world . Sometimes he would hitch a prominent ride with his father
aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he was courting business. Other times, the
deals would be done more discreetly. Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to
be seeking something from his father.
There was, for example, Hunter's involvement with an entity called Burnham Financial Group
, where his business partner Devon Archer -- who'd been at Yale with Hunter -- sat on the
board of directors. Burnham became the vehicle for a number of murky deals abroad, involving
connected oligarchs in Kazakhstan and state-owned businesses in China.
But one of the most troubling Burnham ventures was here in the United States, in which
Burnham became the center of a federal investigation involving a $60 million fraud scheme
against one of the poorest Indian tribes in America , the Oglala Sioux.
Devon Archer was arrested in New York in May 2016 and
charged with "orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal
entity of tens of millions of dollars." Other victims of the fraud included several public
and union pension plans. Although Hunter Biden was not charged in the case, his fingerprints
were all over Burnham . The "legitimacy" that his name and political status as the vice
president's son lent to the plan was brought up repeatedly in the trial. -
NY Post
"... Furthermore, if you don't agree with Sen. Warren's version of events, or if you mention her history of "embellishing," you are a sexist and a misogynist just like Sanders. So fall in line with the establishment narrative, quick. ..."
"... In a statement to CNN, Sanders said before the debate that's not what happened at all. ..."
"... "It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn't win," said Sanders, chalking up the story to "staff who weren't in the room lying about what happened." ..."
"... Warren's staff knows she is prone to "embellish" things ..."
"... No wonder Sanders was complaining about liberals' obsession with identity politics . As an elderly, Jewish socialist, he might be an endangered species, but he's one minority group that intersectional politics has no use for. ..."
The media cannot forgive Bernie Sanders for refusing to "bend the knee" to Elizabeth Warren
regarding her recounting of a now infamous December 2018 meeting between the two, in which the
Vermont senator allegedly said a woman could not be elected president.
Furthermore, if you don't agree with Sen. Warren's version of events, or if you
mention her history of "embellishing," you are a sexist and a misogynist just like Sanders. So
fall in line with the establishment narrative, quick.
That is the clear takeaway after the media took off its fig leaf of journalistic
impartiality at the seventh Democrat presidential debate in Iowa Tuesday.
During the debate, CNN moderator Abby Phillips had this exchange:
Phillips: You're saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman couldn't win
the election?
Bernie: Correct.
Phillips: Senator Warren, what did you think when Sanders said a woman couldn't win the
election?
Warren: I disagreed. Bernie is my friend, and I am not here to try to fight with
Bernie.
This is "when did you stop beating your wife" level debate questioning from CNN. The
question is premised around an
anonymously-sourced story CNN reported Monday describing a meeting between Sanders and
Warren in December 2018, where the two agreed to a non-aggression pact of sorts. For the sake
of the progressive movement, they reportedly agreed they would not attack each other during the
campaign:
They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two
main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument
about the economy and earn broad support from female voters. Sanders responded that he did
not believe a woman could win.
In a statement to CNN, Sanders said before the debate that's not what happened at
all.
"It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she
was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn't win," said Sanders,
chalking up the story to "staff who weren't in the room lying about what happened."
"I thought a woman could win; he disagreed," said Warren in a statement.
Cue CNN's gladiatorial presidential debates.
Eager to strike all the right girl-power notes for the night, Phillips followed up by asking
Sen. Amy Klobuchar the substantive policy question, "what do you say to people who say that a
woman can't win this election?" and Warren earned cheers for a line about women successfully
winning elections.
"Look at the men on this stage," Warren said. "Collectively, they have lost 10 elections.
The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they've been in are the
women: Amy (Klobuchar) and me."
After the debate, media commentators roundly declared Warren the winner, and pundits
attacked the very idea of questioning the veracity of Warren's account.
Here's CNN, just after the debate:
Chris Cillizza, CNN politics reporter: Sanders, look, a lot of it is personal
preference. I didn't think his answer vis-a-vis Elizabeth Warren and what was said in that
conversation was particularly good. He was largely dismissive. "Well, I didn't say it.
Everyone knows I didn't say it, we don't need to talk about it."
Jess McIntosh, CNN political commentator: And I think what Bernie forgot was that this
isn't a he-said-she-said story. This is a reported-out story that CNN was part of breaking.
So to have him just flat out say "no," I think, wasn't nearly enough to address that for the
women watching.
Joe Lockhart, CNN political commentator: And I can't imagine any woman watching last
night and saying, I believe Bernie. I think people believe Elizabeth.
Van Jones, CNN political commentator: This was Elizabeth Warren's night. She needed to
do something and there was a banana peel sitting out there for Bernie to step on when it came
to his comments about women. I think Bernie stepped on it and slid around. She knocked that
moment out of the park.
But isn't this story the literal definition of a he-said, she-said story?
The accusation may have appeared in a "reported-out story," but these are its sources:
"The description of that meeting [between Sanders and Warren in December 2018] is based
on the accounts of four people: two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the
encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting."
Is it sexist to question why this story would come out on the eve of the debate -- after
months of the two candidates getting along as they had promised to do, when
Sanders pulls ahead of Warren in polling ?
In addition to Warren's tenuous relationship with the truth, there also happens to be video
from the 1980s where Sanders says a woman could be president:
1988, @BernieSanders , backing
Jackson:"The real issue is not whether you're black or white, whether you're a woman or a man
*in my view, a woman could be elected POTUS* The real issue is are you on the side of workers
& poor ppl, or are you on the side of big money &corporations?" pic.twitter.com/VHmfzvyJdy
-- Every nimble plane is a policy failure. (@KindAndUnblind) January
13, 2020
Yet, you wouldn't know any of that, listening to the coverage of the debate, where
commentators waxed poetic about Warren's "win" and how any attacks on her predilection for
lying were misogyny itself.
Over on Sirius XM POTUS channel Tuesday, an executive producer on Chris Cuomo's show (Chris
Cillizza filling in) said that the suggestion from Sanders surrogates that Warren's staff
knows she is prone to "embellish" things
is "a misogynistic thing to put out there like, 'oh well, look at the quaint housewife, she is
prone to embellishment.'"
The New York Times also embraced the questionable sexism premise, writing that in"a
conflict heavily focused on which candidate is telling the truth, Ms. Warren faces a real risk:
Several studies have
shown that voters punish women more harshly than men for real or perceived dishonesty If
voters conclude that Ms. Warren is lying, it is most likely to hurt her more than it will hurt
Mr. Sanders if voters conclude that he is lying."
Over at Vox:
The over-the-top language -- likening criticism of an opponent to aknife in the back-- was familiar. When powerful men have been accused of
sexual misconduct in recent years, they and othershave
often complainedthat they've been "killed" or that their "lives are over" The
situation between Warren and Sanders is very different from those that have arisen as part of
the Me Too movement. But the exaggerated language around a woman's decision to speak out is
strikingly similar.
This sort of language is an insult to all women who have had to deal with sexism and
misogyny, both in the workplace and in society, and this need to glom on to any aggrieved
group, no matter how ill-fitting, is getting really stale.
Meanwhile, former Hillary Clinton and Obama Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri
tweeted, "I just rewatched the footage from last night and found it odd that Sanders never says
'a woman could beat Trump.' His formulation is he believes a 'woman could be president.' It's
only when he speaks about his own abilities that he talks about what it takes to 'beat
Trump.'"
This is the old sexist standby: "I'd vote for a woman, just not that woman."
What is it that these people want, for Sanders to endorse his opponent, simply because she
is female? Isn't that the very definition of sexism? By virtue of the fact that Sanders is
still in this race, he obviously thinks he can do a better job as president than Warren. There
isn't going to be another presidential race against Trump, but Palmieri still essentially wants
Sanders to say, in a five-way race three weeks before the Iowa caucus, "Warren can beat Trump
in November."
The question here should be whether this is a person that we can trust, not whether the
candidate is male or female. Does this person have a history of being honest, or do they have a
history of lying?
No wonder Sanders was complaining about
liberals' obsession with identity politics . As an elderly, Jewish socialist, he might be
an endangered species, but he's one minority group that intersectional politics has no use
for.
What are you talking about? If you want to know what Sanders says on this issue, rad his
interview with the NYT which was conducted before this cynical hit job occurred. He says
many voters are misogynistic, but not that a woman can't win.
I think both were telling the truth in that Warren probably took it to mean a woman
can't win, but her campaign cynically released thi story over a year later because she was
slipping in tge pollls behind Bernie.
That's ridiculously generous of you, at least towards Warren. She knows perfectly well his
position on the possibility of a woman president, and women running for office generally.
she knows he campaigned vigorously for HRC after the nomination, and she knows that Sanders
knows that HRC took the popular vote by over 3 million votes, so he obviously knows that it
is highly possible for a woman to win the presidency. This is simply a bald-faced lie on
Warren's part, but she has gained nothing electorally for this desperate smear. Sanders not
only had a record fundraising day after this surfaced, but at least one poll has him up 2
points in Iowa, where he was already in the lead, with Warren stuck at 12%.
Six corporations own something like 90% of the media now.
And CNN is part of the corporate-media-complex.
So not too much of a surprise that they are going after Sanders.
The billionaires are worried he might win, so in a way, this is a good
sign.
The 24 hour news channels depend on Trump to bring in the outrage required to keep up their
viewing figures. So it makes sense that they should help give him a democrat opponent he
can't lose against, like Elizabeth Warren.
While it should be fairly obvious to most that Bernie Sanders political rivals are trying
everything they can to get ahead of him, it's also true that the DNC and the Main Stream
Media, are also trying to trash Bernie in an attempt to take him out as a candidate. The
DNC and the MSM did the same thing the last time he attempted to win the nomination, and it
appears they are doing so now.
The corporate MSM machine should be careful. Another candidate they trashed during the
last election cycle, and ever since, became the President. It seems some voters have tied
the corporate MSM together with the D.C. establishment, and voters that want an outsider to
lead them may just see the MSM's attempts to denigrate a candidate as a ringing endorsement
for the outsider.
As a side note, I find it humorous that the MSM attempts to diminish Bernie's supporters
as zealots and too extreme to be taken seriously... I thought that political candidates
actually worked to gain the support of enthusiastic and motivated supporters? Or, is that
just for the candidates that are acceptable to the Main Stream Media and the political
Parties?
Voted for Trump in great part because Hillary Clinton was such a liar. Now he turned out to
be an even bigger liar than she was. It sure would be nice to have a candidate who didn't
lie so much, but now I don't know whether that would be Sanders or Warren.
Strictly speaking, socialism was an abject failure which ended with the fall of the Iron
Curtain, There is an unfortunate tendency to conflate "socialism" with what is called the
"welfare state." The United States is a welfare state but can hardly be mistaken for a
socialist state.
I think I see it mostly the same way you do, but with semantic differences. I would argue
that communism - the totalitarian version of socialism - was the abject failure. Any first
world modern state is a blend of market-based economies and socialism. The question is
always which exchanges are best left to market forces and which are best managed from
above. And then, how much management to provide. I caution against seeing socialism vs
capitalism as some binary switch to flip.
And the fact is that many of these welfare states were implemented by self-declared
socialists, including many parties that were members of the Socialist, or Second,
International.
Unfortunately, many of these socialist and labor parties hopped on the neo-liberal train
in the 1980's, and are today deathly afraid of their own Bernie Sanders (see Corbyn,
Jeremy), and even more afraid of scaring off international finance and the German Central
Bank.
Point taken. Perhaps "radical socialism" would have been more accurate. Your description of
the modern state as a "blend" is spot-on. An economics professor I once had called ours a
"mixed economy", which was a phrase that has always stuck in my mind.
Social democratic and labor parties around the world turned neo-liberal in the 1980's,
including the Scandinavian ones. They've been helping to rip up the "social contract"
between Capital and Labor, and the social welfare state, ever since, as well as reversing
previous nationalizations and launching privatization. This phenomenon has included
Scandinavia, which is why the parties there are so sensitive to all this talk in the U.S.
about them being models of "socialism."
Fact is, all non-Marxist "socialist" countries are market based, and are in fact capitalist
at the economic base. When did any Scandinavian "socialist" country ever expropriate any
major corporations?
You might actually want to do a bit of research on that point. Going back 60, 70 or 80
years, there might be some nationalizations of railroads, utilities, energy companies and
other major industries not involved in the actual manufacturing of goods in Scandinavia.
Great Britain certainly saw such nationalizations, although revolutionary leftists
sometimes dismissed them as "lemon socialism" because the capitalist class was fobbing off
money-losing or capital-intensive sectors of the economy on the government, in order to
concentrate on more profitable enterprises.
"...we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of
all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth,
the tyranny of a plutocracy."
Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography
"Stand up for what you believe, even if you are standing alone."
"In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles
of the world, and beyond them is more than memory."
J.R.R. Tolkien
"We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are
they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it
is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not
imagination."
C.S. Lewis
"If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says
something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it."
G.K. Chesterton
"The barbarian hopes -- and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it
too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and
effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of
the virtue that has brought them into being.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are
not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we
laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces
there are no smiles."
Hilaire Belloc
"In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they
would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and
that nothing was true. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the
dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and
false, no longer exists."
"... The "movement conservatives" leader was Barry Goldwater who Trump's dad was a big supporter of, and Trump was raised in and among AND represents that faction of elite power. ..."
"... The LIEO or Rules Based Order is based on being closely allied with European elites against Russia to contain the Middle East and Central Asia (Iran and Afghanistan) based on Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard theory. ..."
"... The 1950's triangle of power was superseded by the oligarch's counter revolution that led to supranational trade institutions. Democracies were relegated to a secondary status and run by technocrats for the benefit of oligarchs until Donald Trump. He is a nationalist plutocrat; admittedly a lower level one, a NY casino owner who went bankrupt. Mike Bloomberg represents the other side, a globalist billionaire. Elizabeth Warren is a top level technocrat but no politician. ..."
"... The endless wars are fought to make a profit for the plutocracy and destabilize nations to make foreign corporate exploitation possible. That was why Hunter Biden was in Ukraine. The conflicts are not meant to be won. ..."
"... He makes stupid mistakes. Through the barrage of propaganda, reports of shell shocked troops, destroyed buildings and 11 concussion causalities from Iran's missile attack made it into the news. The military must be pissed. The aura of invincibility is gone. ..."
"... Donald Trump should be removed by the 25th amendment before he mistakenly triggers the Apocalypse. Except the 1% politician VP, Mike Pence, believes that the End of Time is God's Will and necessary for his Ascension. ..."
"... The power triangle theory is less in line with the facts than a simple duality: Wall Street & the MIC, you have to advance interests of both or you're out. ..."
"... Second, the 'meeting in the Tank' sounds like complete b.s. designed to sell books ..."
"... And the 'rules-based international order' rings very false as something that would be said with a straight face by real MIC insiders, which those generals are. ..."
"... Not only sick of wars, his mobster approach to foreign policy and allies is an embarrassment to RINO and Independents. ..."
"... Humanity is in a civilization war about public/private finance being fought by proxies and character actors like Trump. Maybe after this war is over, and if we survive, we can all communicate about the social contract directly instead of through proxy fronts. Do you want to live in a sharing/caring world or a selfish/competitive one?....socialism or barbarism? ..."
That Power Elite theory which was written in the 50s by C.W. Mills is incomplete for today
because in the 60s there was a split among the power elite between the new "movement
conservatives" and the old eastern bank establishment. The conservatives were more focused on
the pacific region and containing China, and the liberal establishment were more focused on
Europe and containing Russia.
The "movement conservatives" leader was Barry Goldwater who Trump's dad was a big supporter
of, and Trump was raised in and among AND represents that faction of elite power. In fact he
is the 1st president from that faction of the elites to hold the oval office, many people
thought Reagan was, but he was brought under the control of George Bush and the liberal
elites after taking office after he was injured by a Bush related person. The different
agendas of the the two factions are out in the open today with one being focused on
anti-Russia and the other being focused on anti-China. It has been like that since the
1960s.
The anti-China conservative faction which Trump represents (and which unleashed the VietNam
War) is screwing up the "rules based order" aka "Liberal International
Economic Order" aka Pax Americana which was set up after WWII at Bretton Woods and then
altered in the 1970s with the creation of the petrodollar and petrodollar recycling into
Treasury Bonds, by destroying the monetary scam they set up to control the world
It needed
the cooperation of the elites of Europe and elsewhere, which Trump and his faction doesn't
care about -- they only care about short term profits on Wall St.
The LIEO or Rules Based Order is based on being closely allied with European elites
against Russia to contain the Middle East and Central Asia (Iran and Afghanistan) based on
Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard theory. China trade is important for them, Russia is
their main enemy. ( War of the Worlds:
The New Class ). Trump and his movement conservative faction is ruining their world order
for their own short term gain on Wall St.
The 1950's triangle of power was superseded by the oligarch's counter revolution that led
to supranational trade institutions. Democracies were relegated to a secondary status and run
by technocrats for the benefit of oligarchs until Donald Trump. He is a nationalist
plutocrat; admittedly a lower level one, a NY casino owner who went bankrupt. Mike Bloomberg
represents the other side, a globalist billionaire. Elizabeth Warren is a top level
technocrat but no politician.
The endless wars are fought to make a profit for the plutocracy and destabilize nations to
make foreign corporate exploitation possible. That was why Hunter Biden was in Ukraine. The
conflicts are not meant to be won.
Donald Trump is way for over his head and getting old. His competent staff are in jail or
fired. Apparently no one told him about the thousands of ballistic missiles that can destroy
the Gulf States' oil facilities at will and make the buildup for the invasion of Iran
impossible. He makes stupid mistakes. Through the barrage of propaganda, reports of shell
shocked troops, destroyed buildings and 11 concussion causalities from Iran's missile attack
made it into the news. The military must be pissed. The aura of invincibility is gone.
Donald Trump should be removed by the 25th amendment before he mistakenly triggers the
Apocalypse. Except the 1% politician VP, Mike Pence, believes that the End of Time is God's
Will and necessary for his Ascension.
The power triangle theory is less in line with the facts than a simple duality: Wall Street
& the MIC, you have to advance interests of both or you're out.
Second, the 'meeting in the Tank' sounds like complete b.s. designed to sell books, with
an obvious sales strategy, as b said, of pleasuring both the pro/anti Trump sides of the
book-buying bourgeoisie.
And the 'rules-based international order' rings very false as
something that would be said with a straight face by real MIC insiders, which those generals
are.
Finally, whether Trump ridiculed the generals or not, that's a sideshow to entertain the
rubes. Trump's always been on side with the big picture Neocon approach essential to the MIC.
Their global dominance or chaos approach is essential to keeping military budgets gigantic
until 'forever'. True that Trump whined about endless wars as a 2016 campaign strategy, but
he was either b.s.-ing or at the time didn't get that they are part of the overall Neocon
approach he backs.
Not a very good analysis by b because this does not explain why 90 % of US corporate media
is hostile to Trump. This does not happen without significant elite support.
That Trump is backed by the military faction is something i have been saying often. But
there are forces within the government faction that dislike him, for example the CIA.
As for the corporate faction, it is not true that free money made them supportive of
Trump. Rather the faction is divided - between the globalist corporate faction, relying on
globalisation, including most tech companies, and US nationalist faction, such as local US
businesses, big oil, shale gas, etc.
Another point - jews have large influence within the US, and 80 % voted against Trump
regardless of his Israeli support. They again voted 80 % Dem in 2018. Having 80 % of US jews
against you means encountering significant resistance.
Demographically speaking, most women, jews, muslims, latinos, asians, afroamericans, lgbt
people, young people, etc. are strongly against him so i think that he will lose. Unless for
some reason they do not vote.
Even if he somehow wins again, this will lead to civil war like situation and extreme
polarisation in the US.
The US military, the various factions within the Deep State, political and corporate
cabals has the attitude of a spoiled 3-year-old: If I can't have it, I'll break it so it is
of little use to others.
Unfortunately, breaking other countries is just fine for the MIC... arms sales all around
and chaos to impede non-military commerce with other major power centers like Russia or
China.
Trump is the product of a dysfunctional family, a "greed is good" trust-fund social circle
and a sociopathic US bully/gun culture.
The fact "bone spurs" Trump weaseled out of the draft will also not play well with the
generals, let alone the grunts who suffer most from endless POTUS idiocy (not limited to
Trump, see Prince Bush/Bandar the 2nd)
All the more proof that most Western "democracies" would be better served with a lottery
to choose their Congressional and POTUS chair-warmers. Joe Sixpack could do a better job. A
200-lb sack of flour would do better than any POTUS since Kennedy.
your: "Trump can't start a war without ruling class backing any more than he can end the
wars if the rulers veto it."
May be, I think is, true in one sense. But Trump is far from the sole agent capable of
starting a war. War, as opposed to simple murder, involve 2 or more parties. Whatever the
intentions, the recent murders by drone in Baghdad hav,e it seems, brought Iran to consider
war exists now...and they have a nifty MAGA policy. On Press TV today they hosted an expert
who called for the execution of several exceptional American leaders...sounds like war to
me.
(Make America Go Away)
The system is so screwy and peopled by such uneducated and delusional people that it's
quite simple that they would do some stupid that that caused a war. Looks like war to me. I
await the horrors.
Decaying empires usually start wars that bring about their rapid ruin. Does it matter how
they do this?
............
The thesis of the triangle of elite factions is fascinating.
Walter recalls that JFK got the reports from Vietnam that said we were winning, while at
the same time Johnson got the true story. And also what happened then with the "correction"
of 1963 (their words) and the immediate change of war policy. Can't help an old guy from
remembering old folly. And noting that history repeats as farce.
The Iran affair is liable to coordinate with NATO. Lavrov spoke to the NATO preparations
today @ TASS...
Some say Trumpie screwed up the schedule, which goes hot in April as a showdown with the
Roooskies. I take that with a grain of salt. But I think the sources I've seen might be
right. They say that if Barbarossa had not been delayed, the nazis woulda won in Russia.
Screwups can be very important.
I can't see any way the US won't use atomic bangers. But maybe...
I agree with wagelaborer in comment #3 and worth a repeat of most of it
"Trump can't start a war without ruling class backing any more than he can end the wars if
the rulers veto it.
US foreign policy is not run by White House puppets.
The US trash-talked Saddam Hussein and starved Iraqis for 14 years, but didn't actually
invade until he started trading oil in Euros.
The US trash-talked Ghaddafi for decades, and even launched missiles which killed his
child in the 80s, but didn't destroy Libya until Ghaddafi decided to sell oil in dinars.
The US has trash-talked and sanctioned Iran for decades, but it was the threat of Iran and
Saudi Arabia making peace that pushed them to assassinate General Soleimani, as he arrived at
the airport on that diplomatic mission.
If Iran and Saudi Arabia make peace, and the Saudis drop the petro-dollar, the US Empire
crumbles.
It doesn't matter at all who is in the White House at the time, the Empire will never allow
that."
Humanity is in a civilization war about public/private finance being fought by proxies and
character actors like Trump. Maybe after this war is over, and if we survive, we can all
communicate about the social contract directly instead of through proxy fronts. Do you want
to live in a sharing/caring world or a selfish/competitive one?....socialism or
barbarism?
I think the "triangle of power" theory walks towards the truth, but is not the truth.
For starters, the USA is a very large and complex society. There are a lot of classes and
a lot of groups which clash and prop up each other all the time. The only consensus is that
it is and must remain a capitalist society, i.e. that capitalism must be preserved at any
cost.
That said, I see many interests involved, but a hierarchy, in layered form. Here's my
opinion on the state of the art of the USA right now:
1) at the highest level, there's the division between the most powerful members of the
capitalist class between what should be the American foreign policy strategy for the rest of
this century. It is divided between two different ideologies: russophobes (i.e. the
"establishment") and the believers of the "clash of civilizations" (i.e. the far-right,
sinophobes). The only thing that unites both groups is the conviction Eurasia should remain
divided, i.e. that Russia and China should not consolidate their newborn alliance. If that
alliance consolidates a century from now, then this contradiction will disappear, but
America's new enemy will be stronger than ever - possibly more powerful than the USA.
2) at the lower level, there's the division of the American people about how the spoils
that come from the imperial conquests should be better shared. This division manifests itself
in the battle between social-democracy and fascism. Neoliberalism is basically a rotten
corpse after 2008, but it is important to state it is not an ideology per se, but a political
doctrine, from which both American social-democracy and American fascism lend some
aspects.
3) at the vestigial level, you have many micro battles which shock with each other. For
example, the good part of the American middle class imploded Elizabeth Warren's support for
universal healthcare because they wanted to keep their class distinction as the class which
has access to healthcare through expensive health insurances (which are often directly linked
to distinct jobs they probably have) - but they still will vote Democrat, and probably will
support Warren as long as she's viable. In the far-right camp, there are those who want to
emphasize the fight against China must happen because China represents modern socialism,
while another part wants to fight China for the simple fact they want some jobs back. In the
deep state, there's the usual Pentagon vs CIA clash of philosophies about how to better
operate overseas. In the lobby industry, each one is fending for themselves.
In conclusion, my take is all of these conflicts have one ultimate cause: the
exhaustion of the American imperial system installed in 1945 . Capitalism doesn't know
national barriers; in 1945, the USA was both the industrial and financial superpower, but
capital must spread and expand or it dies. The Marshall Plan soon begun and, in two decades,
Germany and Japan - both spawns of the American post-war doctrine - directly threatened the
USA as the industrial superpower. It still managed to fend off these two nations with the
Plaza Accord (1985), but at a huge cost: outsourcing its own industrial capacity to China. In
2011, China definitely overcame the USA and now holds the belt of the industrial superpower.
It is now trying to be also the financial superpower, with the "opening up" reforms.
This generated a structural contradiction: the loss of the industrial superpower title
left the USA only with the financial superpower title. But the financial superpower title can
only be maintained, in a nation-State architecture, with increased submission of the rest of
the world - naturally, through violent means and financial sanctions.
However, that was not the way the USA was able to build its overwhelming post-war
alliance: it did so with nation building , i.e. the proverbial "carrot", the massive
investments in infrastructure and better living standards for Western Europe, Japan, Asian
Tigers and Australia. But without the industrial superpower title, the USA cannot maintain
its "alliance" (i.e. the empire), which reinforces its condition as the financial superpower
- which, in turn, increases its necessity to maintain the alliance (empire) which, in turn,
weakens more and more said alliance, which, in turn, increases even more its necessity to
maintain said alliance, and so on, in a downward spiral movement.
The result of this dialectical contradiction is that the USA will, over time, resort to
ever more violent methods to keep the corners of its empire whole, which will drive it ever
closer to an epic war against its ultimate enemy: socialism (China/Eurasia).
"And many of them may actually be as mind-blowingly stupid as he is as well and they don't
see what a problem it is to have such an arrogant moron running the world's only superpower.
If there's one thing right-wingers take as an article of faith it's that expertise is nothing
but a scam and the guy at the end of the bar can run the world better than the pointy-headed
elites. They got what they wanted."
Trump might be appropriate. The survivors, if any, will have more resources, as the ditch
he is heading into.
A slow death by Dims would be worse.
Your analysis nicely maps onto the Braudelian model of the phases of capitalism,
especially as articulated in the chapter by Arrighi and Moore in Phases of
Capitalist Development . They argue that the historical signal that the US had begun to
lose its hegemony in commodity production (M-C-M') was the Nixon shock/Oil Shock (1970-73).
They further argue that the inevitable shift to financial hegemony (M-M'), which has occurred
in every other phase (Genovese, Dutch, British), has taken place more quickly than the one
before it. As a result, they predicted (in 2001) very broadly that the terminal point of this
financial (self-)vampirism -- when the system reaches a point of complete contradiction --
would take place around 2020. One key difference they note between the US global regime with
all prior hegemonic orders is the reach and power of the military. The British Empire was
able to deploy its navy to support its hegemony only up to a point -- and then became a paper
tiger overnight. But the US military has not been deployed to any extent comparable to
1941-45. If it saw a real existential threat to dollar hegemony their military capacity would
postpone any collapse indefinitely -- and throw the world into utter chaos.
My question to you and all is this: where are we in the timeline between their loss of
industrial hegemony and the real crisis of their financial hegemony? Is this the decade of
hegemonic challenge and change -- and therefore war? And to what extent will Iran be the
trigger? Or will it be another GFC and de-dollarization?
The Quiet Crisis: Deaths Caused By Alcoholism Have More Than Doubled by Tyler Durden Sat, 01/18/2020 -
21:15 0 SHARES
Opioid overdoses may have leveled off last year after soaring over the last ten, but
Americans are still dying in droves from another, far more popular substance: alcohol.
According to a series of studies
cited by MarketWatch , the number of Americans drinking themselves to death has more than
doubled over the last two decades, according to a sobering new report. That far outpaces the
rate of population growth during the same period.
Researchers from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism studied the cause of
death for Americans aged 16 and up between 1999 and 2017. They determined that while 35,914
deaths were tied to alcohol in 1999, it doubled to 72,558 in 2017. The rate of deaths per
100,000 soared by 50.9% from 16.9 to 25.5.
Over that 20-year period, the study determined that alcohol was involved in more than 1
million deaths. Half of these deaths resulted from liver disease, or a person drinking
themselves to death, or a drug overdose that involved alcohol.
For more context: In 2017 alone, 2.6% of roughly 2.8 million deaths in the US were
alcohol-related.
One doesn't need to be a chronic alcoholic to suffer from alcohol: Nine states - Maine,
Indiana, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia - saw a
"significant" increase in adults who binge drink, a dangerous activity that can lead to deadly
car crashes and other fatal accidents, according to a report released Thursday by the CDC.
And across the country, Americans who binge drink are consuming more drinks per person: That
number spiked from 472 in 2011 to 529 in 2017, a 12% increase.
Historically, men have been more predisposed to
"deaths of despair" than women: But a study published in "Alcoholism: Clinical and
Experimental Research" found that the largest increase in recent years in these types of deaths
occurred among non-hispanic white women.
Public health crises tied to substance abuse have been plaguing American for decades. So,
what is it about our contemporary society that's causing deaths to skyrocket?
This happens in poor economies. Happened in Russia from 1992 on. Not every area is
affected in The US. Just those with the functional equivalent of a 3rd world or developing
world economy.
I'm watching somebody kill themselves with alcohol as we speak. People have catered to her
alcaholism for 15 years. Her original ezcuse was a family death. Her husband has died now.
Alcaholics always have an excuse though. Alcaholism always seeks excuse.
I am a callous bitch and just cut right to the point. "All of us have to decide to live or
die. Life is a choice. If you decide to die, you will. I hope you havent already
aubconsciously made that decision (can tell by dreams). You should search for a reason to
live. Whatever you choose I will respect that."
Liver deaths? You mean Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease caused by sugary drinks laced
with HFCS has made a spike in liver disease death, so naturally the lazy investigator blames
it on alcohol.
adults who binge drink, a dangerous activity that can lead to deadly car crashes and other
fatal accidents, according to a report released Thursday by the CDC.
a dangerous activity CORRECTION STUPIDITY or CHEAP CHARLIE for not willing to take a UBER
or YELLOW CAB home
What are we talking here $50 at most
Any idea what a DWI will set you back cause I know for a fact in stupidity and 1980's USD
and it taught me
Don't do the crime if you can't spend the dime for a taxi
Some people have a hard time living in crazy town.
I mean, constant war, dollar value sinking, inflation sucking the life outta you, ****
food and a fake society. All the while everywhere you look people are pretending they're
killing it while up to their eyeballs in debt.
I'm actually pretty happy these numbers are this low.
"... While the inequality gap between countries has closed over the last two decades, the gap within most developed countries has widened, leaving millions more vulnerable to a global downturn than they otherwise would have been. ..."
"... "In the UK, for example, the top 10% now control nearly as much wealth as the bottom 50%. This situation is mirrored across much of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), where income and wealth inequality have reached, or are near, record highs." ..."
"... Having considered all of this, we'd like to present another scenario: if Trump loses in November, and the Fed regains the courage to raise interest rates now that President Trump isn't around to publicly browbeat and humiliate them, that might be enough to send markets into a tailspin, even if the Dems take the 'market friendly' road and nominate Joe Biden. ..."
The new head of the IMF, who took over from Christine Lagarde in November, warned that the
global economy could soon find itself mired in a great depression.
During a speech at the Peterson Institute, IMF Chairwoman Kristalina Georgieva compared the
contemporary global to the "roaring 20s" of the 20th century, a decade of cultural and
financial excess that culminated in the great market crash of 1929. According to the
Guardian, this research suggests that a similar trend is already under way , and though the
collapse might not be around the corner, when it comes, it will be impossible to avoid.
While the inequality gap between countries has closed over the last two decades, the gap
within most developed countries has widened, leaving millions more vulnerable to a global
downturn than they otherwise would have been.
In particular, she singled out the UK for criticism: "In the UK, for example, the top 10%
now control nearly as much wealth as the bottom 50%. This situation is mirrored across much of
the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), where income and wealth
inequality have reached, or are near, record highs."
... ... ...
This is further evidenced by the fact that, every time the Fed has tried to
wean the American economy off of rock-bottom interest rates or the central bank's
ever-expanding balance sheet, markets have reacted with fury.
Having considered all of this, we'd like to present another scenario: if Trump loses in
November, and the Fed regains the courage to raise interest rates now that President Trump
isn't around to publicly browbeat and humiliate them, that might be enough to send markets into
a tailspin, even if the Dems take the 'market friendly' road and nominate Joe Biden.
There is a deeper problem in this modern capitalist earth. Human relations are
deteriorating. Because of competitiveness, showing off, jealousy, materialism and
consumerism.
Modern humans are alienated human zombies who have no purpose in life except to
compete.
liar. Men no longer like women they only want teens, **** and casual sex
they detest actual women, don't want to settle down and make a family in their 20s with a
woman their own age - and wonder why at age 55 they are sitting on a bar stool alone with the
other men drinking too much
then they go to thailand and find some desperately poor 20yo who will marry them for a
passport
and then they wonder why as soon as citizenship comes through, the thai divorces their
sorry old arse and goes to make a new life for herself
then they're sitting alone and bitter age 60 hating all women
Prof. Robert Putnam is a sociologist from Harvard. He completed a massive study of
immigration in the 2000s which showed that immigration destroys societal trust and social
capital. Very little has been written about it, and the results of the study were summarized
in a Swedish English-language scholarly journal only--Putnam usually writes books that can be
comprehended by the intelligent lay reader. Someone who posts here wrote that the study was
available on Tor. Many studies with similar findings have been done since. If we ended
immigration, we might lessen the alienation in society today.
A representative of a globalist banking institution who "warned that fresh issues such as
the climate emergency and increased trade protectionism meant the next 10 years were likely
to be characterized by social unrest and financial market volatility."
But she does not mention the real causes of the problems, the bankster ponzi scheme
creating massive inflation or globalist corporations lowering wages by outsourcing jobs and
increasing immigration, while using debt to buyback stocks instead of capital investment.
Place another conniving spokesperson on the ignore list, along with the current and past
Fed Reserve representatives.
I hope y'all are ready for green communism after the engineered collapse.
"Kristalina Georgieva was born in Sofia into a family of bureaucrats.[15] Her father was a
civil engineer who supervised state road-building projects,[16] and her grandfather was a
prominent Bulgarian revolutionary Ivan Karshovski.[17]"
"Georgieva holds a PhD in Economics and an MA in Political Economy and Sociology from the
Karl Marx Higher Institute of Economics (now called University of National and World Economy)
in Sofia.[18][19] Her thesis was on "Environmental Protection Policy and Economic Growth in
the USA". She also did post-graduate research and studies in natural resource economics and
environmental policy at the London School of Economics in the late 1980s and at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[20]"
"Georgieva started her career at the World Bank Group in 1993 as an environmental
economist for Europe and Central Asia. Following this, she served in various positions in the
bank ultimately rising to become director of the Environment Department in charge of World
Bank's environmental strategy, policies, and lending. In this role she oversaw around 60% of
lending operations of the World Bank Group. From 2004 to 2007 she was the institution's
director and resident representative in the Russian Federation, based in Moscow.
She returned to Washington, D.C., to become director of Strategy and Operations,
Sustainable Development."
The US elite super rich benefits tremendously from their slave economies in Europe and
Japan. ECB Draghi a former Goldman Sachs always had a huge stimulus plan and staggering
amounts of asset purchases --the last was 2.9 Trillion Euros-- that at the end of the day
benefited the most the US and the US elite super-rich and Japan's BoJ Kuroda does the
same-thing.
The US elite super rich is delighted, the highly corrupt Trump administration made the
US elite super-rich richer and richer while the middle class gets poorer and poorer and
disappears.
This plan actually began with Reagan. Trump is just continuing (and accelerating) the
process.
Named after the widely-venerated "Oracle of Omaha," the Buffett indicator reflects Warren Buffett's
characteristically simple thinking about stock values. It's the total stock market capitalization of the United
States relative to U.S. GDP.
If the indicator gets too top heavy, with the total market value of stocks significantly exceeding the
productivity of the underlying companies, Buffett would say stock prices are due for a correction. The
historical returns of the stock market back him up on that.
Today the indicator is soaring at a harrowing record high.
The
Buffett Indicator is at a horrific historic high. | Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Just before the Dot Com Bubble collapsed,
total U.S. market cap stood at 146% of GDP
, according to the Federal Reserve's books. Right before the
Great Recession that began at the end of 2007, the U.S. market cap was 137% of GDP.
Warren Buffett has $128 billion in cash to burn and analysts can't figure out why he isn't spending it.
Buffett already explained why two decades and two recessions ago.
'Mr. Buffett On The Stock Market'
Warren
Buffett has seen it all. Judging by Berkshire Hathaway's balance sheet, he's not excited about stock prices
today. | Source: AP Photo/Nati Harnik
He argued that traders can profit from a bubble in the short term by selling equities to each other. But in
the final reckoning, stock values will average out to the ability of the underlying businesses to deliver
profits.
Or as Buffett once told shareholders at an annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting, investors aren't investing in
"lines that wiggle up and down on a graph."
His 1999 remarks spell doom after the stock market's bull run in 2019:
The fact is that markets behave in ways, sometimes for a very long stretch, that are not linked to value.
Sooner or later, though, value counts.
He summarized the nature of equities bubbles:
Bear in mind–this is a critical fact often ignored–that investors as a whole cannot get anything out of
their businesses except what the businesses earn. Sure, you and I can sell each other stocks at higher and
higher prices.
And described the hard limit on stock returns:
The absolute most that the owners of a business, in aggregate, can get out of it in the end–between now
and Judgment Day–is what that business earns over time.
If you go by the Buffett indicator, Wall Street is partying like it's 1999.
That's an unintended consequence of the flood of central bank liquidity. Systemic financial
regulations designed to recession-proof the economy are tailored for banks. The $3.2 trillion hedge fund
sector could be the weak point where the dam finally bursts.
the low-yield environment promotes an increase in portfolio similarities among investment
funds that could amplify any market sell-off..
All-time low bond yields have sent investors in search of higher returns in riskier assets.
A selloff of riskier securities in the asset management sector now poses a spillover threat to
the broader economy. That's terrifying given the amount of leverage in hedge funds.
When this happens on a massive scale, you have the subprime lending crisis. And the
resulting fallout in the mortgage-backed securities market. Then the subsequent credit crunch.
And a loss of investor confidence. And a Great Recession.
Regulation Spurred Hedge Fund
Risk
Taxpayers had to bail out banks that were "too big to fail." So regulations were passed to
keep banks upright in the future. But that's like squeezing a balloon. There's still the same
amount of air in the balloon. It just moves around.
The Wall Street Journal recently
gave some troubling examples . Here's some of the bad behavior in the asset management
industry today:
Funds are dabbling in riskier asset classes, including private markets, real-estate
projects, infrastructure financing and direct lending. Some are making riskier fixed-income
bets, buying volatile assets such as 100-year Argentine government bonds. Others are going
farther afield, investing in greenhouses and waste management.
It used to be fine for wealthy investors to put their own finances at risk. So long as
they're the only ones to take a hit if they lose their investment, that's part of the game.
But now they could be putting the rest of the economy at risk. And a central bank says that
central banks caused it. There are a lot of policymakers today
proposing to raise taxes on the wealthy to shore up the rest of the economy. Maybe just not
handing them so much money in the first place would be a good start.
Disclaimer: The opinions in this article do not represent investment or trading advice
from CCN.com.
"Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It
redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and
selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market"
delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired
their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and
class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their
failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.
It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of
2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a
glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the
epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to
these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either
catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had
– a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?"
George Monbiot
"Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies."
Robert F. Kennedy
"`But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to
apply this to himself.
`Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. `Mankind was my business. The common
welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.
The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my
business!'
It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief,
and flung it heavily upon the ground again.
`At this time of the rolling year,' the spectre said `I suffer most. Why did I walk through
crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star
which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have
conducted me!'
Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake
exceedingly.
`Hear me!' cried the Ghost. `My time is nearly gone.'"
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks
and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and
their equity in the firms."
Alan Greenspan, apologising for his disastrous, ideologically-biased policies promoting
financial deregulation , 23 October 2008
"Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast,
And each will wrestle for the mastery there...
To speak the truth, as truth to me appeared,
Caused noisy protest, I was hooted down.
Such unpleasant incidents occurred
I ran off, to be on my own,
into a wilderness. Utterly forsaken,
I fell into that devil's grip, and was taken."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
"Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be
paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised
means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been [or could
be] passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface
of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."
Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater
"Isn't it a riddle and awe-inspiring that things can be so beautiful, despite the horrors?
I've seen something wondrous peering through my joy in the beautiful, a sense of its
creator.
Only people can be truly ugly, because they have free will to separate themselves from this
song of praise. It often seems they may drown out this hymn with cannon thunder, curses, and
blasphemy. But I have realized they will not succeed. And so I want to throw myself on the side
of the victor."
Sophie Scholl
"Four sorrows are certain to be visited on the United States.
First, there will be a state of perpetual war.
Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses
Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a
military junta.
Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification
of war, power, and the military legions.
Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into
ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of
its citizens."
Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire , 2005
"Do not be fooled into thinking that you will never suffer because you say that I dwell
among you. It is your delusion and lying words. Do you really believe you can steal, murder,
commit adultery, lie, and worship the gods of the world and those other new gods of yours, and
then come here and stand before me in my own house and say, 'We are safe', only to go right
back to all your lawlessness again? Do you not see that this house of yours, which you mark
with my name, has become a den of thieves?"
I just finished the lengthy Dr. Hudson interview/discussion "Democratizing
Money" I was sharing excepts from on the open thread which has great bearing on the
foundational issues of this thread's topic and subtopics, and provides information that help
inform an answer to Rose-Marie Larsson @21, for example.
The history of neoliberalism's rise to power and massive take-off thanks to Clinton, Bush
and Obama is important to understand so it can be undone and the power of both Neoliberals
and Neocons can be diminished.
That Daniel thinks anyone here is trying to argue trump's "some sort of anti-establishment
hero" is grossly incorrect as all the evidence points to him as being an extension of
Clinton, Bush, Obama; although Trump denied any such connection during his campaign, his
actions speak otherwise, the evidence being well presented in Hudson's talk.
Want to learn why the NYSE is going to crack 30,000 by the end of January; read the
discussion. Why 911? To insulate Wall Street from having the set of laws it wanted
established so it could expand its crime spree from being undone or even discussed as it
turned out. (That's my take, not Hudson's.) Finally, what're the main weapons Trump's used in
his foreign policy? Weaponized Financialization and its kin Lawfare.
As Hudson admits, he's radical for the political solution he proposes:
"If you're going to do something so radical as to wipe out the financial class's claims on
the rest of society, you have to go and finish the revolution that Adam Smith, Ricardo, John
Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Marx, and almost every 19th century classical economist
advocated.
"You have to change the tax system so that you avoid having a financial system that makes
its money by taking unearned income and monopoly income or land rent that should be basis of
the tax base, for itself....
"So Steve [Keen] has an elegant mathematical solution that would work, but I'm more
radical when it comes to the political solution.
"[Edgar] You want the creditors to lose in the Jubilee.
"Yes, it's one great advantage. It's just as important to wipe out the wealth of creditors
as it is to wipe out the debt. If you leave the post-1980 gains with the creditors, you're
going to have a ruling class much like the feudal landlords. You're going to have financial
feudalism. If you leave all of this financial wealth intact, while the rest of the economy
has so little wealth
"[Edgar] Well, we already have that.
"Yes, and I want to reverse it by wiping out the financial wealth. It's really overhead,
because it's owed by the bottom 99%, siphoning off their income and ultimately depriving them
of property."
Essentially, Hudson proposes we demonetize the 1% such that they lose their power to buy
government while reregulating banks so they must return to a legitimate business model
instead of their current pursuit of fraud as their business model. Once those two legs of the
triangle are severed, the MIC having lost its allies will be easy to downsize to that of a
"normal country."
You can all go and ignore the whole Trump impeachment, because it's just smoke to try and
hide the real fire.
Joe Biden's actual blackmail of the Ukrainian government, when he threatened to withhold
$1 billion if the Prosecutor investigating his son, Hunter Biden, wasn't immediately
fired.
Russiagate was to hide Clinton's corruption.
Ukrainegate is to hide Biden's corruption.
You can all go and ignore the whole Trump impeachment, because it's just smoke to try and
hide the real fire.
Joe Biden's actual blackmail of the Ukrainian government, when he threatened to withhold
$1 billion if the Prosecutor investigating his son, Hunter Biden, wasn't immediately
fired.
Russiagate was to hide Clinton's corruption.
Ukrainegate is to hide Biden's corruption.
"The Marxist political parties, including the Social Democrats and their followers, had
fourteen years to prove their abilities. The result is a heap of ruins. All around us are
symptoms portending this breakdown. With an unparalleled effort of will and of brute force the
Communist method of madness is trying as a last resort to poison and undermine an inwardly
shaken and uprooted nation.
In fourteen years the November parties have ruined the German farmer. In fourteen years they
created an army of millions of unemployed. The National Government will carry out the following
plan with iron resolution and dogged perseverance. Within four years the German farmer must be
saved from pauperism. Within four years unemployment must be completely overcome.
Our concern to provide daily bread will be equally a concern for the fulfillment of the
responsibilities of society to those who are old and sick. The best safeguard against any
experiment which might endanger the currency lies in economical administration, the promotion
of work, and the preservation of agriculture, as well as in the use of individual
initiative."
Adolf Hitler, Radio Appeal to the German People, February 1, 1933
"Both religion and socialism thus glorify weakness and need. Both recoil from the world as
it is: tough, unequal, harsh. Both flee to an imaginary future realm where they can feel safe.
Both say to you. Be a nice boy. Be a good little girl. Share. Feel sorry for the little people.
And both desperately seek someone to look after them -- whether it be God or the State.
A thriving upper class accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings,
who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings,to slaves, to
instruments... One cannot fail to see in all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid
blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to
erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"At a certain point in their historical cycles, social classes become detached from their
traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties, in their particular
organisational bias, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no
longer recognised by their class as their own, and representing their interests. When such
crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open
for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic 'men of
destiny' [demagogues].
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of
monsters."
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1930-35
"Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.
You agree? Good. Then go with my blessing. But I warn you, do not expect to make many friends.
One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that it is stricken indeed, stricken to the
very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable."
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and
desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and
domestic subjects."
R. J. Rummel, Death by Government: A History of Mass Murder and Genocide Since
1900
"This is as old as Babylon, and evil as sin. It is the power of the darkness of the world,
and of spiritual wickedness in high places. The only difference is that it is not happening in
the past, or in a book, or in some vaguely frightening prophecy -- it is happening here and
now."
Jesse
"The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power
as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others
only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Plunder, rape, and murder they
falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
Tacitus
"Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in
America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and
humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as
bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage.
And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid
enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream
turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with
gas, went bang in the noonday sun."
Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
"Day by day the money-masters of America become more aware of their danger, they draw
together, they grow more class-conscious, more aggressive. The [first world] war has taught
them the possibilities of propaganda; it has accustomed them to the idea of enormous campaigns
which sway the minds of millions and make them pliable to any purpose.
American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them
from doing the people's will and protecting the people's interests; it was the exploiter
entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political
democracy. By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into
infinite misery."
Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check
"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the
need without ever reaching satisfaction."
Erich Fromm
"We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way
and pray another.
If you have not chosen the kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what
you have chosen instead."
"It has been the longest bull market in modern history, enabled by massive Central Bank
intervention. But with trade wars raging, Brexit, Presidential impeachment over something,
etc., there remains a significant risk of a recession over the next 12 months.
If we look at the normalized change in the 10Y-3M curve minus normalized change in 10Y
yields, we can see a heightened recession risk. Lower yields and steeper curves are not a good
recipe. And then we have the decline in S&P 500 earnings estimates. Recession coming?"
Anthony Sanders, Confounded Interest
"Day by day the money-masters of America become more aware of their danger, they draw
together, they grow more class-conscious, more aggressive. The [first world] war has taught
them the possibilities of propaganda; it has accustomed them to the idea of enormous campaigns
which sway the minds of millions and make them pliable to any purpose.
American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them
from doing the people's will and protecting the people's interests; it was the exploiter
entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political
democracy. By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into
infinite misery."
Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check
"There is no clean way to make a hundred million bucks. Somewhere along the line guys got
pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them. Decent
people lost their jobs. Big money is big power, and big power gets used wrong."
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
"The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterwards
with more awful effect."
Robert W. Chambers, The King In Yellow
"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself."
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
"Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives,
but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence
of society."
Samuel Johnson
"The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a
slightly more unstable version."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Make no mistake about it, just as Lehman Brothers was set up to take the fall for
triggering the 2008 collapse, China is being groomed as the new scapegoat for the coming
crisis. But China's economic slump is only a symptom, not the disease.
The reality is that the repeal of Glass-Steagall ushered in the greatest wealth transfer
scheme in the history of America, allowing six mega banks in America to control the vast
majority of insured deposits, use those taxpayer-backed deposits to gamble for the house, loot
the bank from the inside by paying billions of dollars to select employees and customers and
then hand the gambling tab to the taxpayer when the casino burns down. This model is a
staggering headwind on both U.S. and global growth because it has created the greatest wealth
and income inequality since the Great Depression."
Pam and Russ Martens
"Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror."
C. S. Lewis
"Congratulations to the Federal Reserve. You've successfully created the most extreme,
pre-collapse yield-seeking bubble in U.S. history! With lower return prospects than Aug 1929.
While encouraging a debt bubble where half of all 'investment grade' debt is one step above
junk."
John P. Hussman
"All the world marveled at this, and gave their allegiance to the Beast. And they worshiped
the dragon for giving such power to him. as they also worshiped the Beast. 'Who is as great as
the Beast?' they exclaimed. 'And who is able to resist him?' The Beast was allowed to commit
great blasphemies against God. And he was given the authority to do as he willed, but only for
forty-two months."
Revelation 13:3-5
"Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again. But they won't on their
own. So pressure must come from traditional liberal constituencies and the grass roots, like
the much-vilified bloggers...
The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present course, gaming out
each election with political science and a little triangulation magic, their relevance slowly
ebbing as memories of the middle-class republic fade."
"At the end of the day, perhaps, the equity side of the U.S. external balance sheet should
be understood not by thinking of the U.S. as a giant and very successful private equity fund
that borrows to buy equity -- but rather as one giant corporate tax dodge for U.S. based
multinationals
If you think I am exaggerating, I would encourage you to take a look at the IRS data on the
location of U.S. corporate profits -- and the location of the taxes that American firms pay
abroad. U.S. firms are earning big profits in jurisdictions where they don't pay tax, and small
profits in jurisdictions where they do and in the process, reducing their U.S. tax bill as
well. That's real exorbitant privilege."
After having forbidden the Chinese company Huawei to compete in the calls for tender for the
5G network, the United States are now forbidding the Europeans to increase their supplies of
Russian gas. While the first decision was aimed at maintaining the coherence of NATO, the
second is not a result of Russophobia, but of the 1992 " Wolfowitz doctrine " - preventing the
EU from becoming a competitor of the " American Empire ". In both cases, the point is to
infantilise the EU and keep it in a situation of dependence.
Although they were locked in a convoluted struggle concerning the impeachment of President
Trump, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate laid down their arms in order to vote, in
quasi-unanimity, for the imposition of heavy sanctions on the companies participating in the
construction of North Stream 2, the doubling of the gas pipeline which delivers Russian gas to
Germany across the Baltic Sea. The main victims were the European companies which had helped
finance the 11 billion dollar project with the Russian company Gazprom. The project is now 80 %
finished. The Austrian company Omy, British/Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, French Engie, German
companies Uniper and Wintershall, Italian Saipem and Swiss Allseas are also taking part in the
laying of the pipeline.
The doubling of North Stream increases Europe's dependence on Russian gas, warn the United
States. Above all, they are preoccupied by the fact that the gas pipeline – by crossing
the Baltic in waters belonging to Russia, Finland, Sweden and Germany – thus avoids the
Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary), the Baltic States and
Ukraine. In other words, the European countries which have the closest ties to Washington
through NATO (to which we must add Italy).
Rather than being economic, the goal for the USA is strategic. This is confirmed by the fact
that the sanctions on North Stream 2 are included in the National Defense Authorization
Act , the legislative act which, for fiscal year 2020, hands the Pentagon the colossal sum
of 738 billion dollars for new wars and new weapons (including space weapons), to which must be
added other posts which bring the US military expenditure to approximately 1,000 billion
dollars. The economic sanctions on North Stream 2 are part of a politico-military escalation
against Russia.
An ulterior confirmation can be found in the fact that the US Congress has established
sanctions not only against North Stream 2, but also against the Turk-Stream, which, in its
final phase of realisation, will bring Russian gas across the Black Sea to Eastern Thrace,the
small European area of Turkey. From there, by another pipeline, Russian gas should be delivered
to Bulgaria, Serbia and other European countries. This is the Russian riposte to the US action
which managed to block the South Stream pipeline in 2014. South Stream was intended to link
Russia to Italy across the Black Sea and by land to Tarvisio (Udine). Italy would therefore
have become a switch platform for gas in the EU, with notable economic advantages. The Obama
administration was able to scuttle the project, with the collaboration of the European
Union.
The company Saipem (Italian Eni Group), once again affected by the US sanctions against
North Stream 2, was severely hit by the blockage of South Stream – in 2014, it lost
contracts to the value of 2.4 billion Euros, to which other contracts would have been added if
the project had continued. But at the time, no-one in Italy or in the EU protested against the
burial of the project which was being organised by the USA. Now German interests are in play,
and critical voices are being raised in Germany and in the EU against US sanctions against
North Stream 2.
Nothing is being said about the fact that the European Union has agreed to import liquified
natural gas (LNG) from the USA, an extract from bituminous shale by the destructive technique
of hydraulic fracturation (fracking). In order to damage Russia, Washington is attempting to
reduce its gas exports to the EU, obliging European consumers to foot the bill. Since President
Donald Trump and the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, signed in
Washington in July 2018 the Joint Statement of 25 July: European Union imports of U.S.
Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) , the EU has doubled its importation of LNG from the USA,
co-financing the infrastructures via an initial expenditure of 656 million Euros. However, this
did not save European companies from US sanctions. Manlio Dinucci
In another sense, however, the passing of the cold war could not have been more
disorienting. In 1987, Georgi Arbatov, a senior adviser to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev , had warned:
"We are going to do a terrible thing to you – we are going to deprive you of an
enemy."
...Winning the cold war brought Americans face-to-face with a predicament comparable to that
confronting the lucky person who wins the lottery: hidden within a windfall is the potential
for monumental disaster.
Yes! The inability to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite its being published because that policy goal--to
attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world--is actually 100%
against genuine American Values as expressed by the Four Freedoms (1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship; 3.Freedom from want;
4.Freedom from fear) and the articulated goals/vision of the UN Charter--World Peace arrived at via collective security and diplomacy,
not war--which are still taught in schools along with Wilson's 14 Points. Then of course, there's the war against British Tyranny
known as the Spirit of '76 and the Revolutionary War for Independence and the documents that bookend that era. In 1948, Kennan
stated, in an internal discussion that was never censored, the USA consumed 60% of global resources with only 5% of the population
and needed to somehow come up with a policy to both continue and justify that great disparity to both the domestic and international
audience. Yet, those truths were never provided in an overt manner to the American public or the international audience. The upshot
being the US federal government since it dropped the bombs on Japan has been lying or misleading its people such that it's now
habitual. And Trump's diatribe against the generals reflects the reality that he too was taken in by those lies.
I can't say that I've dug into that in detail, although I do recall reading the post.
What I would like to say, however, is that the Cyprus question is one of the pivotal
pieces in the current geopolitical situation.
A few points warranting further investigation to try and tie into a coherent whole:
1) The Cyprus banking crisis c. 2012-2013. This includes Russian oligarch/mafia money, and
whether it was squirreled out of there before the buy-in orchestrated collapse of Laiki
Bank of Cyprus as well as who was behind this push (IMF/NATO/GER/etc)
2) The Turkstream (1 & 2) gas projects (from which Turkey will extract considerable
transit fees for decades to come). This also supports one of the main pillars of the Russian
Federations' economy. Links also to US hegemon trying to kill off Nordstream 2.
3) The plans/MOU for Israel, Cyprus and Greece to build an undersea gas pipe network. This
will effectively by-pass Turkstream, and is probably behind the push to have Israeli claims
over the Golan Heights crystallise (along with the US staying put in Syria and Iraq). I also
recall reading about ISIS shipments of stolen Syrian oil taking a cross-country route through
Turkey to end up being refined in Israel, and on-sold to Greece (and others). This points at
another whole behind-the-scenes dynamic.
4) Recent attempts by Turkey to get involved in Libya, create a new exclusive maritime
zone, develop gas of the coast of Cyprus, and now military involvement. This is drawing
rebuke from Israel, as it will scupper their planned pipe network. Greece likewise is now
trying to send in troops (as observers/peace-keepers, LOL).
Cyprus is also
rallying around to try and stop the Turkish plan from going ahead.
5) Recent
arrests of Israeli intel assets in Cyprus of late also adds further heat to the
situation.
I would really need to dedicate months of my life to try and untangle all of this, and by
the time I did the situation would have moved on. (reminds me of the quote from Wagelaborers'
blog: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're
history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Karl Rove)
About this whole Ukraine-Russia gas transit thing that Felix is panicking about. It seems
Germany had a key role in facilitating
the deal.
However, that risk receded this week after Moscow and Kyiv concluded a landmark agreement
that will ensure Russian gas continues to transit through Ukraine even after Nord Stream 2 is
completed. Germany played a critical role in brokering the agreement and pressuring Russia
to maintain Ukraine's transit status.
Why would Germany spend all this time and resources to construct these pipelines and then
suddenly pressure Russia to maintain the transit fees? That makes zero sense unless you believe
that Germany was acting as a proxy on behalf of a greater power. My pet theory: Germany most
likely caved to US pressure and tried to triangulate at the last minute in a bid to stave off a
larger German-US conflict.
What Germany wants, it seems to me, is (1) cheap energy for German industry, (2) a
maximally weak Russian hand visavi Ukraine (which is now in effect a NATO/EU dependency), and
(3) good enough relations with the Kremlin for Russia not to go rogue. Goals (1) and (3)
obviously sit uneasily with goal (2), which is why we see so much back and forth.
I agree with (1) and (3) but I'd disagree over (2). I am not convinced Germany cares much
about Ukraine's well-being. It is a very small economy (barely over 100 billion USD) and
Germany's trade exposure to Ukraine is minimal. It isn't part of NATO, EU or any other major
Western framework.
If Ukraine collapsed it would create significant refugee streams but Ukrainians are very
easily assimilated into Western European countries, unlike Syrians or Turks, so even in a
worse-case scenario the fallout would not be a major problem. If Croats or Serbs can mix into
Germany easily, I don't see why Ukrainians would be a problem. Germany's shrinking work force
would in fact even need such an influx. The only kink would be Russia's expanding borders if
both Belarus+Ukraine was swallowed up but Germany probably would calculate that Russia wouldn't
attack a NATO ally (and they wouldn't be wrong). I'm not saying Germany would want such an
outcome, only that the worst-case scenario wouldn't be a big problem for them.
I think this has the fingerprints of the US all over it. Trump personally hates Ukraine,
which has been documented in leaked documents during the impeachment process and major
personalities of the Trumpist movement like Tucker Carlson openly cheers for Russia. So it
wasn't Trump or his people who pushed for this but rather the permanent national-security state
that was behind it and they are obsessed with keeping Russia down, or inventing fake
Russiagate hoaxes to justify their paranoia. Germany made a 180 and suddenly pressured Russia
to do something which Germany itself had no interest in keeping for the longest time. That
suggests Germany caved to US pressure and tried to do a compromise. The US interest would be
for NS2 to be scrapped completely. This was a German attempt at triangulating.
Either way, Ukraine got a big win purely because of Great Power politics over which they had
no direct control.
"U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are assessing whether Russia is trying to
undermine Joe Biden in its ongoing disinformation efforts with the former vice president
still the front-runner in the race to challenge President Donald Trump, according to two
officials familiar with the matter
Part of the inquiry is to determine whether Russia is trying to weaken Biden by promoting
controversy over his past involvement in U.S. policy toward Ukraine while his son worked for
an energy company there."
... ... ...
Yes, somehow those dastardly Russians have outsmarted the brightest and best-paid political
strategists in Washington, D.C. by brandishing what amounts to some really persuasive memes
over social media, and for just rubles on the dollar. The techies at Wired went so far as to
call this epic assault on the fragile American cranium, "meme warfare to divide America." By
way of evidence, it cited a very creative meme that screamed, "F*CK THE ELECTIONS," which was
intended, as the ironclad argument goes, to cause a number of impressionable Americans to throw
up their hands in a fit of collective exasperation and say, 'Ok, that's it. I'm staying at home
on Election Day.'
Yes, it's really that easy! Imagine all the money the Russians and their radical new
political technologies could have saved guys like casino tycoon, Sheldon Adelson, who
showered the Trump campaign with $100 million dollars.
Coming decade could see the US take on Russia, China and Iran over the New Silk Road
connection
The Raging Twenties started with a bang with the targeted assassination of Iran's General
Qasem Soleimani.
Yet a bigger bang awaits us throughout the decade: the myriad declinations of the New Great
Game in Eurasia, which pits the US against Russia, China and Iran, the three major nodes of
Eurasia integration.
Every game-changing act in geopolitics and geoeconomics in the coming decade will have to be
analyzed in connection to this epic clash.
The Deep State and crucial sectors of the US ruling class are absolutely terrified that
China is already outpacing the "indispensable nation" economically and that Russia has
outpaced
it militarily . The Pentagon officially designates the three Eurasian nodes as
"threats."
Hybrid War techniques – carrying inbuilt 24/7 demonization – will proliferate
with the aim of containing China's "threat," Russian "aggression" and Iran's "sponsorship of
terrorism." The myth of the "free market" will continue to drown under the imposition of a
barrage of illegal sanctions, euphemistically defined as new trade "rules."
Yet that will be hardly enough to derail the Russia-China strategic partnership. To unlock
the deeper meaning of this partnership, we need to understand that Beijing defines it as
rolling towards a "new era." That implies strategic long-term planning – with the key
date being 2049, the centennial of New China.
The horizon for the multiple projects of the Belt and Road Initiative – as in the
China-driven New Silk Roads – is indeed the 2040s, when Beijing expects to have fully
woven a new, multipolar paradigm of sovereign nations/partners across Eurasia and beyond, all
connected by an interlocking maze of belts and roads.
The Russian project – Greater Eurasia –
somewhat mirrors Belt & Road and will be integrated with it. Belt & Road, the Eurasia
Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Asia Infrastructure Investment
Bank are all converging towards the same vision.
Realpolitik
So this "new era", as defined by the Chinese, relies heavily on close Russia-China
coordination, in every sector. Made in China 2025 is encompassing a series of techno/scientific
breakthroughs. At the same time, Russia has established itself as an unparalleled technological
resource for weapons and systems that the Chinese still cannot match.
At the latest BRICS summit in Brasilia, President Xi Jinping told Vladimir Putin that "the
current international situation with rising instability and uncertainty urge China and Russia
to establish closer strategic coordination." Putin's response: "Under the current situation,
the two sides should continue to maintain close strategic communication."
Russia is showing China how the West respects realpolitik power in any form, and Beijing is
finally starting to use theirs. The result is that after five centuries of Western domination
– which, incidentally, led to the decline of the Ancient Silk Roads – the Heartland
is back, with a bang, asserting its preeminence.
On a personal note, my travels these past two years, from West Asia to Central Asia, and my
conversations these past two months with analysts in Nur-Sultan, Moscow and Italy, have allowed
me to get deeper into the intricacies of what sharp minds define as the Double Helix. We are
all aware of the immense challenges ahead – while barely managing to track the stunning
re-emergence of the Heartland in real-time.
In soft power terms, the sterling role of Russian diplomacy will become even more paramount
– backed up by a Ministry of Defense led by Sergei Shoigu, a Tuvan from Siberia, and an
intel arm that is capable of constructive dialogue with everybody: India/Pakistan, North/South
Korea, Iran/Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan.
This apparatus does smooth (complex) geopolitical issues over in a manner that still eludes
Beijing.
In parallel, virtually the whole Asia-Pacific – from the Eastern Mediterranean to the
Indian Ocean – now takes into full consideration Russia-China as a counter-force to US
naval and financial overreach.
Stakes in Southwest Asia
The targeted assassination of Soleimani, for all its long-term fallout, is just one move in
the Southwest Asia chessboard. What's ultimately at stake is a macro geoeconomic prize: a
land bridge from the Persian Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean.
Last summer, an Iran-Iraq-Syria trilateral established that "the goal of negotiations is to
activate the Iranian-Iraqi-Syria load and transport corridor as part of a wider plan for
reviving the Silk Road."
There could not be a more strategic connectivity corridor, capable of simultaneously
interlinking with the International North-South Transportation Corridor; the Iran-Central
Asia-China connection all the way to the Pacific; and projecting Latakia towards the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
What's on the horizon is, in fact, a sub-sect of Belt & Road in Southwest Asia. Iran is
a key node of Belt & Road; China will be heavily involved in the rebuilding of Syria; and
Beijing-Baghdad signed multiple deals and set up an Iraqi-Chinese Reconstruction Fund (income
from 300,000 barrels of oil a day in exchange for Chinese credit for Chinese companies
rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure).
A quick look at the map reveals the "secret" of the US refusing to pack up and leave Iraq,
as demanded by the Iraqi Parliament and Prime Minister: to prevent the emergence of this
corridor by any means necessary. Especially when we see that all the roads that China is
building across Central Asia – I navigated many of them in November and December –
ultimately link China with Iran.
The final objective: to unite Shanghai to the Eastern Mediterranean – overland, across
the Heartland.
As much as Gwadar port in the Arabian Sea is an essential node of the China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor, and part of China's multi-pronged "escape from Malacca" strategy, India also
courted Iran to match Gwadar via the port of Chabahar in the Gulf of Oman.
So as much as Beijing wants to connect the Arabian Sea with Xinjiang, via the economic
corridor, India wants to connect with Afghanistan and Central Asia via Iran.
Yet India's investments in Chabahar may come to nothing, with New Delhi still mulling
whether to become an active part of the US "Indo-Pacific" strategy, which would imply dropping
Tehran.
The Russia-China-Iran joint naval exercise in late December, starting exactly from Chabahar,
was a timely wake-up for New Delhi. India simply cannot afford to ignore Iran and end up losing
its key connectivity node, Chabahar.
The immutable fact: everyone needs and wants Iran connectivity. For obvious reasons, since
the Persian empire, this is the privileged hub for all Central Asian trade routes.
On top of it, Iran for China is a matter of national security. China is heavily invested in
Iran's energy industry. All bilateral trade will be settled in yuan or in a basket of
currencies bypassing the US dollar.
US neocons, meanwhile, still dream of what the Cheney regime was aiming at in the past
decade: regime change in Iran leading to the US dominating the Caspian Sea as a springboard to
Central Asia, only one step away from Xinjiang and weaponization of anti-China sentiment. It
could be seen as a New Silk Road in reverse to disrupt the Chinese vision.
Battle of the Ages
A new book, The Impact of China's Belt and Road
Initiativ e , by Jeremy Garlick of the University of Economics in Prague, carries the
merit of admitting that, "making sense" of Belt & Road "is extremely difficult."
This is an extremely serious attempt to theorize Belt & Road's immense complexity
– especially considering China's flexible, syncretic approach to policymaking, quite
bewildering for Westerners. To reach his goal, Garlick gets into Tang Shiping's social
evolution paradigm, delves into neo-Gramscian hegemony, and dissects the concept of "offensive
mercantilism" – all that as part of an effort in "complex eclecticism."
The contrast with the pedestrian Belt & Road demonization narrative emanating from US
"analysts" is glaring. The book tackles in detail the multifaceted nature of Belt & Road's
trans-regionalism as an evolving, organic process.
Imperial policymakers won't bother to understand how and why Belt & Road is setting a
new global paradigm. The NATO summit in London last month offered a few pointers. NATO
uncritically adopted three US priorities: even more aggressive policy towards Russia;
containment of China (including military surveillance); and militarization of space – a
spin-off from the 2002 Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.
So NATO will be drawn into the "Indo-Pacific" strategy – which means containment of
China. And as NATO is the EU's weaponized arm, that implies the US interfering on how Europe
does business with China – at every level.
Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2001 to 2005,
cuts to the chase: "America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight
years of war and no end in sight? It's part of who we are. It's part of what the American
Empire is. We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as Pompeo is doing right now, as Trump is
doing right now, as Esper is doing right now and a host of other members of my political party,
the Republicans, are doing right now. We are going to lie, cheat and steal to do whatever it is
we have to do to continue this war complex. That's the truth of it. And that's the agony of
it."
Moscow, Beijing and Tehran are fully aware of the stakes. Diplomats and analysts are working
on the trend, for the trio, to evolve a concerted effort to protect one another from all forms
of hybrid war – sanctions included – launched against each of them.
For the US, this is indeed an existential battle – against the whole Eurasia
integration process, the New Silk Roads, the Russia-China strategic partnership, those Russian
hypersonic weapons mixed with supple diplomacy, the profound disgust and revolt against US
policies all across the Global South, the nearly inevitable collapse of the US dollar. What's
certain is that the Empire won't go quietly into the night. We should all be ready for the
battle of the ages.
There is a lot of talk here and in comment sections at forums about how the American Empire
is going to collapse soon due to its blunders and Russia and China gaining military
superiority over it. This kind of talk is a type of magical thinking and has no basis in
reality. The United States' most potent weapon isn't military, it's economic, and through it
the US government controls the world. That weapon is the US Dollar and ever since Nixon took
it off the gold standard it has been used to further the Empire's imperial hold on the global
economy. The economist Michael Hudson in an article called A Note To China (link at
bottom) explains how this works:
The U.S. strategy is to control your economy in order to force you to sell your most
profitable industrial sectors to US investors, to force you to invest in your industry only
by borrowing from the United States.
So the question is, how do China, Russia, Iran and other countries break free of this
U.S. dollarization strategy?
There are a lot of articles on alt.media sites about how China and Russia are
de-dollarizing their economies in order to resist, and eventually end, the US domination of
the global economy that is preventing them from maintaining independent economic policies
that benefit their citizens rather than global elites and US central bankers.
Russia managed to put a stop to overt US economic imperialism after the looting spree in
the post-Soviet 1990s decimated Russia's ability to provide for its citizens and degraded the
country's ability to maintain economic independence. But it still ultimately got caught in
the neoliberal trap. Hudson again:
Yet Russia did not have enough foreign exchange to pay domestic ruble-wages or to pay for
domestic goods and services. But neoliberal advisors convinced Russia to back all Ruble
money or domestic currency credit it created by backing it with U.S. dollars. Obtaining
these dollars involved paying enormous interest to the United States for this needless
backing. There was no need for such backing. At the end of this road the United States
convinced Russia to sell off its raw materials, its nickel mines, its electric utilities,
its oil reserves, and ultimately tried to pry Crimea away from Russia.
China, Hudson argues, by accepting the advice of American and IMF/World Bank economic
"experts" and through Chinese students schooled in American universities in American
neoliberal theory is in great danger of falling into the same trap.
The U.S. has discovered that it does not have to militarily invade China. It does not have
to conquer China. It does not have to use military weapons, because it has the intellectual
weapon of financialization, convincing you that you need to do this in order to have a
balanced economy. So, when China sends its students to the United States, especially when
it sends central bankers and planners to the United States to study (and be recruited),
they are told by the U.S. "Do as we say, not as we have done."
He concludes that:
The neoliberal plan is not to make you independent, and not to help you grow except to the
extent that your growth will be paid to US investors or used to finance U.S. military
spending around the world to encircle you and trying to destabilize you in Sichuan to try
to pry China apart.
Look at what the United States has done in Russia, and at what the International
Monetary Fund in Europe has done to Greece, Latvia and the Baltic states. It is a dress
rehearsal for what U.S. diplomacy would like to do to you, if it can convince you to follow
the neoliberal US economic policy of financialization and privatization.
De-dollarization is the alternative to privatization and financialization.
Loosening the Empire's hold on economic and geopolitical affairs and moving to a
multipolar world order is a tough slog and the Empire will use everything it can to stop this
from happening. But at the moment even countries under American sanctions and surrounded by
its armies, with the possible exception of Iran, aren't really fighting back. That's a bitter
pill for many to swallow but wishful thinking isn't going to change the world. After all, the
new world has to be imagined before it can appear and right now it's still global capitalism
all the way down.
The article in full, and Hudson's work generally, is well worth reading. He is one of only
a few genuinely anti-imperialist economists and he is able to explain in layman's terms
exactly how the US-centric global economy is a massive scam designed to benefit US empire at
the rest of the world's expense.
I was thinking about
winston2's comment in the previous thread. A good way for China and Russia to respond is
to go after those in the MIC; the CEO, lobbyists, financiers, etc... If they follow the money
and take them out, I suspect we all would see a dramatic turn of events. No need to publicize
their early retirement. Make it messy and public but not to the point of taking out
innocents.
Yes, Michael Hudson is excellent, mostly because he's rare economist, that is, one who
begins from the premise that the 'economy' is a set of historically-situated and specific
modes of exchange and forms of human relations. Aristotle located what we call the economy in
ethics and politics; we follow the fairytales of neo-classical economics and global capital
by imagining that it has some scientific autonomy from human social relations. Marx was right
in following Aristotle's insight by critiquing the very idea of an autonomous economy, which
the chief ideological fiction of late capitalism. Sam Chambers and Ellen Meiksens-Wood are
also excellent critics of this obstacle to reimagining a viable alternative to the economy as
it is propagated by the US neoliberal global apparatus.
Inkan1969 , Jan 16 2020 22:34 utc |
42S , Jan 16 2020 22:37 utc |
43
@Daniel #36:
The United States' most potent weapon isn't military, it's economic, and through it the US
government controls the world. That weapon is the US Dollar and ever since Nixon took it
off the gold standard it has been used to further the Empire's imperial hold on the global
economy.
But at the moment even countries under American sanctions and surrounded by its armies,
with the possible exception of Iran, aren't really fighting back.
Exclude me from this squad. I's always from the opinion that the USA would collapse
slowly, i.e. degenerate/decay. I won't repeat my arguments again here so as to spare people
who already know me the repetition.
However, consider this: when 2008 broke out, some people thought the USA would finally
collapse. It didn't - in great part, because the USG also thought it could collapse, so it
acted quickly and decisively. But it cost a lot: the USA fell from its "sole superpower"
status, and, for the first time since 1929, the American people had to fell in the flesh the
side effects of capitalism. It marked the end of the End of History, and the realization -
mainly by Russia and China - that the Americans were not invincible and immortals. It may
have marked the beginning of the multipolar era.
--//--
The world (bar China) never recovered from 2008. Indeed, world debt has grown to another
record high:
The world governments - specially the governments from the USA, Japan and Europe -
absorbed private debt (through purchase of rotten papers and through QE) so the system could
be saved. But this debt didn't disappear, instead, it became public debt. What's worse:
private debt has already spiked up, and already is higher than pre-2008 levels. The Too Big
To Fail philosophy of the central banks only bought them time.
--//--
Extending my previous link (from the previous Open Thread) about money laundering:
The global TV subscription streaming company, Netflix made $1.2bn in profits in 2018, of
which $430m was shifted into tax havens, reports Tax Watch UK.
The estimated revenue from UK subscribers was about $860m, but most of this was booked
offshore in a tax haven Dutch subsidiary. Netflix claims its UK parent company got only
$48m in revenue. When the costs of Netflix UK productions were put against this, Netflix
was able to avoid paying any tax at all to the UK government. Indeed, it received tax
reliefs for productions in the UK from the government.
A simple question requires a simple answer. Russia's defence expenditure in PPP terms is
probably in excess of $180 billion per year which buys a shedload of "capable military
equipment".
It should be noted that the point Hudson's trying to make in his "Note to China" is to warn
China of what if faces by using historical examples. As S points out @43, Russia's Ruble is
very sound and its dollar and T-Bill holdings are extremely low. The message to China and the
entire SCO community is to cease supporting the Outlaw US Empire's military by supporting its
balance of payments by buying T-Bills. The sooner the SCO community, or just the core
nations, can produce a new currency for use in trade, the sooner a crisis can be created
within the Outlaw US Empire--essentially by turning the "intellectual weapon of
financialization" against the global rogue nation foe.
There is a silver lining to that. If another term of Trump inspires the Europeans to
abrogate NATO and put an end to that alliance and create their own NEATO ( North East
Atlantic Treaty Organization) withOUT America and withOUT Canada and maybe withOUT some of
those no-great-bargain East European countries; then NEATO Europe could reach its own
Separate Peace with Russia and lower that tension point.
And America could bring its hundred thousand hostages ( "soldiers") back home from
not-NATO-anymore Europe.
"... Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute, ..."
"... "Washington is treating the EU as an adversary. It is dealing the same way with Mexico, Canada, and with allies in Asia. This policy will provoke counter-reactions across the world." ..."
"... The National Interest ..."
"... Treasury's War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare ..."
"... "We must increase Europe's autonomy and sovereignty in trade, economic and financial policies ... It will not be easy, but we have already begun to do it." ..."
When the US places financial sanctions one one country, it de facto sanctions many
other countries as well -- including many of its allies.
This is because not all countries and firms are interested in participating in the US
sanctions-based foreign policy.
Sanctions, after all, have become a favorite go-to strategy for American policymakers who
seek to isolate or punish foreign states that don't cooperate with US international policy
goals.
In recent years, the US has been most active in imposing new sanctions on Russia and Iran,
with many consequences for US allies who are still open to doing business with both of those
countries.
The US can retaliate against organizations that violate US sanctions in a variety of ways.
In the past, the US has sued firms such as the Netherlands' ING Groep and Switzerland Credit
Suisse. Both firms have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines in the past. The US has
been known to
go after individuals .
US bureaucrats like to remind firms that penalties await them, should then not buckle under
US sanctions plan. In November 2018, for example, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo
announced :
I promise you that doing business in Iran in defiance of our sanctions will ultimately be
a much more painful business decision than pulling out of Iran.
Fear of sanctions has caused some firms to stop work mid project, such as
when Swiss pipe-laying company Allseas Group abandoned a $10 billion pipeline that was
nearing completion.
Not surprisingly, these firms -- who employ people, pay taxes, and contribute to economic
growth -- have put pressure on their governments to protest the mounting interference from the
US into private trade.
As a result, some European politicians are increasingly looking for ways
to get around US sanctions . In a tweet last week, Germany's deputy foreign minister Niels
Annen wrote "Europe needs new instruments to be able to defend itself from licentious
extraterritorial sanctions."
Another "senior German government official" concluded, "Washington is treating the EU as
an adversary. It is dealing the same way with Mexico, Canada, and with allies in Asia. This
policy will provoke counter-reactions across the world."
But how is the US so easily able to sanction so much of the world, including companies in
huge and influential countries like Germany?
The answer lies in the fact the US dollar and the US economy remain at the center of the
international trade system.
SWIFT: How the US Sanctions the World
By the waning days of the Cold War, the US dollar had become the dominant currency in the
non-communist world, thanks to the Bretton Woods agreement, the petrodollar, and the sheer size
of the US economy.
Once the Communist Bloc collapsed, the dollar was poised to grow even more in importance,
and the world's financial institutions searched for a way to make global trade and investing
even faster and easier.
Henry Farrell at The National Interestdescribes
what came next:
Financial institutions wanted to communicate with other financial institutions so that
they could send and receive money. This led them to abandon inefficient
institution-to-institution communications and to converge on a common solution: the financial
messaging system maintained by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication (SWIFT) consortium, based in Belgium. Similarly, banks wanted to make
transactions in the globally dominant currency, the U.S. dollar. ... In practice, the
physical infrastructure, for a variety of efficiency reasons, tended to channel global flows
through a small number of central data cables and switch points.
At the time, Europe was still years away from creating the euro, and it only seemed natural
that a centralized dollar-transfer system be developed for all the world.
SWIFT personnel have always maintained their organization is apolitical, neutral, and only
interested in providing a service. But geopolitical realities have long intervened. Farrell
continues:
The centralizing tendencies meant that the new infrastructure of global networks was
asymmetric: some nodes and connections were far more important than others. ... What this
meant was that a few states -- most prominently the United States -- had the latent ability
to transform the global economic infrastructures ... into an architecture of global power and
information gathering.
By 2001, the power of this centralized system had become apparent. And in the wake of 9/11,
the US used the "War on Terror" and an opportunity to turn SWIFT into an enormous international
tool for surveillance and financial power.
In his book Treasury's War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare Juan Zarate shows
how the US Treasury officials pressured SWIFT and its personnel to provide the US government
with the means to use this international financial "plumbing" to deprive the US's enemies of
access to markets.
This started out slow, and SWIFT officials were concerned it would become widely known that
SWIFT was becoming politicized and largely a tool of the US and US allies. Nevertheless, the
American regime pressed its advantage, and by 2012 "for the first time ever, SWIFT unplugged
designated Iranian banks from its system, in accordance with a European directive and under the
threat of possible US legislation."
This only strengthened worries among both world regimes and the world's financial
institutions that the basic technical infrastructure of the international financial system was
really a political tool.
The World Searches for Alternatives
Naturally, Russia and China have been highly motivated to find alternatives to SWIFT. But
even perennial US allies have grown far more wary of leaving the financial system in a place
where it can be so easily dominated by the US regime. If Iranian banks can be "unplugged" so
easily from the global system, what's to stop the US from taking similar steps against German
banks, French banks, or Italian banks?
This, of course, is an implied threat behind US demands that European companies not try to
work around US sanctions or face "punishment." From the US perspective, if Germans refuse to
kowtow to US policy, then there's an easy solution: simply cut the Germans off from the
international banking system.
Consequently, Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas announced
in 2008
"We must increase Europe's autonomy and sovereignty in trade, economic and financial
policies ... It will not be easy, but we have already begun to do it."
By late 2019, the UK, France, and Germany had put together a workaround called "INSTEX"
designed to facilitate continued trade with Iran without using the dollar and the SWIFT system
built upon it. Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden have joined the
system as well.
As of January 2020, however, the cumbersome system remains unused. But we remain in the very
early stages of European efforts to get a divorce from the dollar-dominated financial system.
The INSTEX system has been devised, for now, for a limited purpose. But there is no reason it
cannot be expanded in the future. The short-term prospects for a functional system are low.
Longer-term, however, things are different. The motivation for a long-term workaround is
growing. The Trump administration has embraced showmanship that looks good in a short-term news
cycle, but which encourages US allies to pull away. Farrell continues:
Unlike Obama, Donald Trump did not use careful diplomacy to build international support
for [new sanctions] against Iran. Instead, he imposed them by fiat, to the consternation of
European allies, who remained committed to the [Iran agreement put in place under Obama]. The
United States now threatened to impose draconian penalties on its allies' firms if they
continued to work inside the terms of an international agreement that the United States
itself had negotiated. The EU invoked a blocking statute, which effectively made it illegal
for European firms to comply with U.S. sanctions, but without any significant consequences.
SWIFT, for example, avoided the statute by never formally stating that it was complying with
U.S. sanctions; instead explaining that it was regrettably suspending relations with Iranian
banks "in the interest of the stability and integrity of the wider global financial
system."
All of this is viewed with alarm by not only Europe, but by China and Russia as well. The
near-constant stream of threats by the US administration to impose ever harsher limits and
sanctions on both China and Europe has pushed the rest of the world to accelerate plans to get
around US sanctions. After all, as of mid-2019, the US
had nearly 8,000 sanctions in place against various states and organizations and
individuals. The term now being used in reference to American sanctions is "
overuse ." It was one thing when the US imposed sanctions in some extreme cases. But now
the US appears increasingly fond of using and threatening sanctions regularly, without
consulting allies.
This makes continued US dominance in this regard less likely as allies the world pour more
and more resources into ending the US-SWIFT control of the system. In a 2018 report, "Towards a
Stronger International Role of the Euro," the European Commission described U.S. sanctions as "
wake-up call regarding Europe's economic and monetary sovereignty. "
The effort still has a long way to go, but perhaps not as far as many think.
The dollar remains far ahead of the euro in terms of the dollar's use as a reserve currency,
but the dollar and the euro are move evenly matched
when it comes to international payment transactions.
If the rest of the world remains sufficiently motivated, more can certainly be done to rein
in dollar-based sanctions. Indeed, in 2019, former US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew
admitted :
the plumbing is being built and tested to work around the United States. Over time as
those tools are perfected, if the United States stays on a path where it is seen as going it
alone there will increasingly be alternatives that will chip away at the centrality of the
United States.
If the US finds itself not longer at the center of the global financial system, this will
bring significant disadvantages for the US regime and US residents. A decline in demand for the
dollar would also lead to less demand for US debt. This would put upward pressure on interest
rates and thus bring higher debt-payment obligations for the US regime. This would constrain
defense spending and the ability of the US to project its power to every corner of the globe.
At the same time, central bank efforts to drive interest rates back down would bring a greater
need to monetize the debt. The resulting price inflation in either consumer goods or assets
would be significant.
The fact none of this will become obvious next week or next month
doesn't mean it will never happen . But the US's enthusiasm for sanctions means the world
is already learning the price of doing business with the United States and with the dollar.
Took three months to pass the legislation to seize control of the Gold supply even though
they knew the U.S defaulted on the War debt of first world war and America was only partially
involved.
Better move fast. U.S has not declared War for real since Pearl Harbour.
Best way to avert it is to look at the economic calculations being made and slow what they
need for this extended and probably apocalyptic war to start.
They need man power for what is planned but I have a suspicion this time they are planning
for megadeath on all sides.
Nothing will be destroyed. Situations like this are about chipping away and crumbling.
Rome was not built in a day. People sit in wait to find a weak spot of the hegemon and if you
think that the US is a perfect and perpetual hegemon than you are as delusional as Obama.
He bragged in 2015 that he/they twisted arms of countries when they did not do what he
'needed' them to do. (See y-tube). Every country, every person who had arms twisted is
sitting in wait to hit back. Chisel away, apply needlepricks, obedience can be forced; desire
for revenge never dies.
You need to treat people well on your way up because you are meeting them all again on
your way down.
Will The US Obsession With Sanctions Destroy The Dollar?
Hopefully it will destroy the US BULLY TOO...
This saga of Sanctions all started with the Black Jesus Obama and Russia. It was a
disaster then, harmful to Russian women and children and never affect the oligarchs. It is
Stalingrad stuff.
Then along comes the pile of **** known as the Orange Jesus. Considering Trump's pretend
hatred of Obama, he sure loved the community organizers weaponizing of the Dollar Reserve...
So much so the orange ******* now has 40% of the world population under Dollar Reserve
Sanctions. More Stalingrad ****. And the world hates it.
So there is no question that nations will find ways around sanctions and the mother fking
pencil necked poodles that support this mfkirng ****. They can't comprehend that if TRUMP
does this to some country, he can do it to them.
The Dollar Reserve was intended to be apolitical a means of global commerce. At Bretton
Woods, Maynard Keynes addressed the Reserve Currency to avoid this. He recommended a
synthetic reserve currency composed of five of the world's leading currencies called the
BANCOR. He was voted down by the US delegation that only would accept the Dollar over the
Pound. Britain was too weak after the war to oppose the US. So that set up the Dollar Reserve
by intimidation and bullying. What else is new.
Now the US uses their 800 military bases to enforce their Sanctions and Dollar reserve
weaponizing.
This will come to an end. Europe is a larger economy than the US and Asia is larger than
the US and Europe Combined. So this dollar reserve weaponizing crap will end.
Interesting isn't it that the two most economically illiterate presidents in history, love
sanctions. I promise, the Dollar reserve as the primary currency of exchange is THE DEAD MAN
WALKING.... They are also the most RACIST presidents in US History.
Goldamn did a white paper on this... If the US loses the Dollar Reserve the GDP would tank
30%. So yeah... welcome to the the stone age and fighting in the streets. But to neutralize
the dollar Reserve damage only requires competition to the US Dollar.
So far the Yuan is not printed in enough quantity to compete in a big way. The Euro has
never shown the inclination to be anything but a poodle.
WWII has never ended. Look at NATO... who are they opposing... RUSSIA. Give it a rest.
Russia is not going to attack Europe. So this NATO military facade is about to crumble. Trump
attempting to get NATO to attack Iran and enter the Middle east is laughable and won't
happen. Only the British Poodles are stupid enough for that.
And why is Britain fking with anybody... Doesn't the Queen have enough RYSIST issues now
that Harry and Megan have called her a RYSIST? Love to see Britain go it alone but they are
real pussies and have filled the world with hatred so there will be consequences.
Sanctions use the same philosophy of the the Mafia and having to use it means the days of
the dollar hegemony are gradually ending. What goes around comes around. yin-yang.
YES but for the first time they are present. The Euro is a Reserve Currency but Europe has
never asserted its status. Likely due to Germany. Germany destroys Europe in so many way.
Merkel is pathetic.
Now the Yuan as of 2016 is a reserve currency and they are trading Iron ore from Australia
and Brazil in Yuan. Also China has a 24 Trillion dollar internal commodities market that
trades in Yuan. So the mechanics of massive Trade are already set in place in China and
Asia.
Traditionally the largest trading nation had the reserve currency. The US is no longer the
largest trading nation. They are the largest debtor nation however.
This only Bretton woods post World War II rules. Back in the old days gold was trusted
because people who had it actually hd to produce or trade for it. War economy is always pure
fiat even if it means killing your own soldiers and robbing their families.
If it gets dirty everyone is going to have to play the game. Why do you think they are
still dealing with Afghanistan like its the centre of the universe for the last 20 years.
PTSD and ******** propaganda on young men is enough to push them over the edge. Same thing
for the nasty **** that happens to women.
All these currencies are pure fiat floating against perceived demand and ********
technocrats. People want to die in these situations they are going to monetize human misery.
The opiate epidemics in the 60s pushed the U.S of the Gold standard. Where do you think the
French got all those U.S dollars from straight after the war.
Ever heard of this little thing called cryptocurrency? It can't be weaponized like a CB
currency because there is no centralized authority and no need for a trusted third party. It
can cross international borders at the speed of light and cheaply to boot. It's quite clever.
I imagine it will become all the rage in the next couple years.
I dont think you understand the concept of war. They napalmed kids to heard their parents
into concentration camps. That was the Pentagon. Theyre not going to spare your internet
service provider in the name of free trade and libertarian finance.
Bit coin can be used the same way as the military script just by switching off your
computer and forcing you to adopt another currency. They did it every few months in Vietnam.
IBM ran the analytics with a super computer and they still didnt beat the Tet Offensive which
was just people letting of steam for lunar new year by killing anyone who worked with the
Americans.
Hedge. Iodine for fallout. Water purification tablets. Toilet Paper and Sanitary wipes and
shoes. Batteries. You wont be allowed to grow food when it starts.
Economic sanctions, sanctions of any kind, are like pepper: use cautiously, sparingly, and
only when the recipe calls for it. Don't inhale, either. Massive sneeze attacks can follow
and the dish can be ruined.
signed by Trump in 2017 means we have essentially entered into a world where the American
regime is weaponizing sanctions to dominate the planet.
Of course, karma is a law, which cannot be avoided, and this article is right. It is only a
matter of time. Moreover, he is right in that when we lose this status our ability to wage
endless wars throughout the planet will stop. I hope to see that day.
It is my feeling that the primary reason we are not in a major war at this moment is that
our "adversaries" have noted our decline, as well have many astute and not so astute ZH
members have, and are waiting us out. The other is that our military is not as good as we
claim and some of us know it.
GOLD should be trading currently at least at 4,800 and SILVER should be trading today
at triple digits -- The Federal Reserve and PPT like to manipulate the precious metals, stop
manipulating the PM morons.
Let's take a look at the SILVER chart:
SILVER -- TF = Daily -- SILVER --time frame is daily-- has developed a very well known
technical pattern CUP and HANDLE -- SILVER STRONG BUY -- https://invst.ly/pie5l
"Donny Appleseed" send$ his tiding$ to the American lemming... counting all those "0"s
that are only gettin bigger with each sweep of the EST "second hand".
Still allowed to be "alive" after all that damage and all these years!
I just attended a China - US conference. The chinese fund managers who spoke there said
that China's economy is at a standstill and now is the time for "VULTURE" funds to be active
acquiring heavily discounted firms which are over-leveraged. Not the sounds of a ready for
prime time currency. And the market know as less than 2% of global reserves are Yuan as in
the chart and Chinese dollar reserves are 30% of what they were years ago.
Germany's deputy foreign minister Niels Annen wrote "Europe needs new instruments to be
able to defend itself from licentious extraterritorial sanctions."
The BIG problem with the US dollar is not only the data but it is also the staggering
amounts of printing, printing, printing and QE4ever that totally destroy the purchasing power
of the US Dollar. Only GOLD and SILVER are the real 'store of value'.
Let's take a look at the US Dollar chart:
US DOLLAR Index -- TF = 4H -- ROUNDED TOP suggesting much lower levels ahead -- US DOLLAR
STRONG SELL -- https://invst.ly/pj042
Like how in the 80's everybody assumed flying cars were "near future", people who think
the dollar will lose (or already lost) reserve status are delusional.
It will take a long long time to ween the world off of the entire banking complex,
literally made by and through the dollar.
Multiple reasons, primarily:
1) US gov still a strong presence around the world militarily and financially
2) US dollar still the #1 currency used in transactions between major firms
3) US banking system has, in its pockets, about 80% of the worlds billionaire class, which
conversely, makes most of the major decisions around the world
4) SWIFT system and World Bank both huge institutions that literally hold most 3rd world
countries economics (see Venezuela for examples of a 3rd world country trying to NOT do what
the US wants)
In a static geopolitical environment, your points are valid. After all, it's been this way
for a very long time. You would - and perhaps will be however, amazed at just how fast the
dynamics of your 4 points can change when two near equally (and in some cases superior)
military and economic world powers are geopolitically pushed to a limit they will no longer
accept. And guess what? That's coming a whole lot sooner than most think.
EVERY ******* in Washington needs to go and be replace with people who have an interest in
the well being of the country rather than their personal power plays. The world HATES the
Washington assholes almost as much as the US citizens hate the bastards.
Sanctions are used to force another nation into compliance.
Bombs are used to force another nation into compliance.
Anyone still think the treasury and Fed aren't the biggest warmongers around? They have to
be, otherwise the US dollar would be toast, as there is nothing but a military holding it up.
A nation with 5% of the global population, full of fat walmart shoppers, does not have the
productive means to force their will without the war machine. Ironically, that same war
machine is fully funded by the foreigners the bankers bomb, as using the USD means you must
hold dollar reserves. It is a grand racket.
The Russia and Ukraine scandals leading to impeachment are nonsense but Trump should be
impeached for hastening the demise of our reserve currency. Weaponizing the dollar was the
dumbest strategy he ever came up with. Russia and China are gaining friends and influence
every day while the U.S. is becoming an outcast. They are using the Carrot while all Trump
knows is the Stick.
The US UK Israel petrodollar system collapsed overnight with the US military having no
credible response to having its base bombed. A credible response is for the US to have dealt
death from the skies, destroying and severely deteriorating Iran's ballistic launch
capabilities or at the least a strike on its major oil refineries. That did not happen.
Why?
The US & UK airforce are outdated....in fact any conventional air force that relies on
drones or stealth jets to deliver bomb payloads are outdated!
The purpose of an air-force is to bomb targets from the sky. Iranians have shown you can
do it with ultra-cheap short medium range ballistic missiles which are nothing more than crap
aluminum tubes filled with propellant, a low cost cell phone GPS guidance system and a big
payload. You can make millions for the cost of one stealth jet!
IRAN has all US, Israel and Saudi targets mapped and gave a demo of what they can do. By
the time the shitty F35s start their engines on a runway of a worthless aircraft carrier,
thousands of these missiles will be launched by Iran destroying all targets within minutes of
declaration of TOTAL WAR!
THE PURPOSE OF STEALTH has been defeated. There is no deterrence against ballistic
missiles which are faster then aircraft! So by the time the first wave of stupid burger
planes reach IRAN, all BURGER bases in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel and aircraft carriers will
have been destroyed! So the USA cant protect anything without losing everything!
TOTAL WAR even with a weak power like Iran means TOTAL BALLISTIC MISSILE WAR in which case
everybody's base gets destroyed and who ever pushes the button fastest gets to destroy the
targets fastest and everything is over in less than an hour! Since burgers dont have magic
hollywood space lasers, just piece of **** F35s and outdated carriers....burgers cant defend
anything! Burgers have no deterrence for TOTAL BALLISTIC MISSILE WARFARE. There is no time to
start your engines and take off on a runway, the missiles are already on their way and will
hit bases and aircraft carriers within 10 to 20 minutes of declaration of TOTAL WAR.
Trump killed a rook (solemani) in the game of geopolitical chess (which the Persians
invented) and the mullahs in Tehran checkmated the USA and Israel by making redundant the
view that only very very expensive stealth jets can accurately deliver bombs with precision!
No brainer right there...a plane requires life support, complex systems just to support the
idiot who is flying it to the target...a missile requires no stealth technology, its fast,
accurate and deadly with no deterrent! In one stroke the mullahs revealed that the entire US
air-force is obsolete against TOTAL short/ medium range ballistic missile war!
We should have had ballistic missile carriers but we dont because greedy defense
contractor boomers think they are the smartest defense planners when in fact they just loved
to build planes instead of realizing short range ballistic GPS guided precision missiles can
do the same thing! But not much profit in that of course..
US air-force outdated = US ground troops outdated because they rely on US air-force for
back up. So you have to withdraw = NO PETRODOLLAR.
As of today the US cannot defend its bases in Iraq, Israel or Saudi Arabia....
US/UK/Israel/Saudis combined cannot protect anything without losing everything!
That is called check-mate my friends. The petrodollar age has ended and the AGE OF THE
PETROYUAN has begun. China copies everything the US does, they wanted their Saudi Arabia and
they got all of IRAN and IRAQ.
Now Trump has to sign trade deal after trade deal because the world holds a massive amount
of US securities and we have to supply real goods and services...opening up oil fields for
export, everything. Burgers have to become a land of farmers and oil workers to satisfy all
the US dollar holdings out there because TRUMP LOST THE PETRODOLLAR by DESTROYING US CREDIBLE
MILITARY DETERRENCE for the whole world to see...the ability to provide 'SEGURIDY' AS HENRY
KISSINGER would say.
Everybody now knows the US is just another power only burgers have their head up their
asses. A big crash is coming our way and this time we DO NOT HAVE THE PETRODOLLAR FOR
RECOVERY LIKE WE HAD IN 2008!
TRUMP LOST THE WESTERN PETRODOLLAR HEGEMON....HE LITERALLY LOST THE WEST!
THE PETRODOLLAR AGE OF PROSPERITY HAS ENDED! BECAUSE DRUMPF, KUSHNER AND NETANYAHU!
The EVANGELICAL BIBLICAL APOCALYPSE has come and gone! The GREAT SATAN as the mullahs
would call them have been revealed to have no power to price oil in the middle east anymore!
The military humiliation and withdrawal comes next...its a Greek tragedy in modern
times...
Paraphrasing Thucydides
"A society that divides its warriors and scholars will have its wars planned by cowards
and fought by fools"
Trump knocked out a rook and a couple bishops, and ignored opportunities on several pawns.
By not taking the bait, escalations fall onto Iran's shoulders and will be increasingly hard
to justify.
Eventually their retaliation actions blur into the smoke of their terrorist proxies. Then
they fulfill the role thst Trump claims they occupy. Then action on them will be easily
justified. Even now Iran is shredding the JCPOA, that document that they acted like was so
dear to them - thus giving the rest of the world the finger. Hey, you couldn't play their
part worse if you tried...
There is no deterrence against ballistic missiles which are faster then aircraft! So by
the time the first wave of stupid burger planes reach IRAN, all BURGER bases in Saudi
Arabia, Iraq, Israel and aircraft carriers will have been destroyed! So the USA cant
protect anything without losing everything!
That's what Hitler thought, Saddam tried it as well, the theory proved to be wrong.
The purpose of an air-force is to bomb targets from the sky. Iranians have shown you can
do it with ultra-cheap short medium range ballistic missiles which are nothing more than
crap aluminum tubes filled with propellant, a low cost cell phone GPS guidance system and a
big payload. You can make millions for the cost of one stealth jet!
This was particularly hilarious. If that were the case the USA and its allies would be
doing that. Do you not realize the US has had rocket artillery for the past 70 years? The
larger the rocket, and the longer its range, the larger and heavier the transport TEL vehicle
and support base and storage must be. The industrial and technical support base as well. And
the crews to man and employ them get larger as well, as does their training equipping and
paying of them.
That's in fact very expensive, and you run out of rockets real fast.
But stealth jets come back every day, for months, or years, and drop big-*** bombs on your
missile factories, and its industrial support base, it's electricity supply, its fuel supply,
its chemical factories, its bases, bunkers, sensors comms, personnel, ports and the entire
industrial economic infrastructure of the entire country.
then why didnt you boomer? Because Iran's missiles will hit your base anyway..stealth or
no stealth that is the point! The US was supposed to wage such a death match war against
China or Russia...not a 4th rate shithole like IRAN. You boomers literally have your head up
your asses. The 90s is over boomers! The boomer run US armed forces is totally obsolete
because we have been humiliated and the boomers are so shameless they are behaving like
'colored peoples of poor upbringing'.
Hold me back or ill......hold me back or ill.... you will do what? Nothing! No one held
burger boy trump back. Burger boy held himself back because he and his son in law and the
prime brains behind losing the petrodollar, Netanyahu would lose Israel also along with Saudi
Arabia and all burger bases!
oh so I must be a muslim if I said Israel lost the petrodollar because the joke is on you
clowns. Lose the petrodollar boomers lose their 401k and Israel has to negotiate with Iran to
exist...win win if you ask me...cant wait to watch you flip burgers in your 80s.
The fact that you want us to use WWII Japan as comparison completely nullifies your rant.
Furthermore, revisionism and hyped up ability does no good in the real world. We don't need
to ask Hitler or Saddam. Had Saddam moved in on Saudi Arabia rather than allowing forces to
amass it's been a different story. Regarding Hitler, you cinta had little to no hand in the
matter. Case in point.
Thanks for the shrewd analysis. The problem is that Trump appears to be morphing from
the mad negotiator into someone who really is mad. I think he knows he screwed up with
Soleimani and there's no taking it back, only doubling down . You can't talk your way out
of some mistakes. Trump is shrewd, but not very smart and like most bullies he's also weak.
He gets by being such an obvious bluffer and blowhard but when you start assassinating people
and expect to be praised for it it's no longer a game.
I'd say the solution is to give Trump the heave ho this November and not play his game of me
me me. Indeed the Iranians seem to be biding their time to see what happens.
Trump was always only tolerable as long as he spent his time shooting off his mouth rather
than playing the imperial chess master. This reality show has gone on long enough.
Not sure he "screwed up" with Suleimani. He now has something to point to when Adelson
and the Israel Firsters ring up. He has red meat for his base ("look what a tough guy I
am"). He can tell the Saudis they now owe him one.
He added slightly to the fund of hatred for America in the hearts of Sunnis but that fund is
already pretty full. If they respond with a terror attack Trump wins because people will rally
around the national leader and partisan differences will be put aside. Notice how fast
de-escalation happened, certainly feels alot like pre-orchestrated kayfabe.
THE GREAT
RESHUFFLE . I do expect Putin to retire and assume him to be working on a succession plan
to keep the team's aims in operation. He's due to go in about four years. I would not be
surprised if we see something à la Kazakhstan where Nazarbayev still has a
significant advisory authority.
2. CONSTITUTION. Putin suggested constitutional tweaks. A ban on any form of dual
citizenship for certain positions: they must "inseparably connect their lives with Russia and
the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances". The Duma should appoint the PM and
the PM the government although little was said about exactly how responsibilities were to be
divvied up. (Did he support removing the two consecutive term rule? Don't know – depends
on what you think " этим " refers to.)
3. PRECEDENCE. Back when the world was simpler and happier and Russians naïve, the
Constitution (Art 15.4) said "If an international treaty of the Russian Federation establishes
rules other than those stipulated by the law, the rules of the international treaty apply."
Brutal reality has taught Moscow the true nature of the " Rules-Based International Order" and
Putin has proposed to reverse the authority.
WHAT'S IT MEAN? My take . Doctorow .
MacDonald . We
are broadly in step. Robinson
discusses possibilities. Those who see Russia as one man and many robots of course see this as
Putin hanging
onto power forever . But their predictive track record is pretty pathetic, isn't it?
FEDERAL ASSEMBLY ADDRESS. In addition to the constitutional matters above, Putin's address (
Rus ) ( Eng ), touched on other
subjects. He began with population – the births per woman were 1.5 and he wants to raise
that to 1.7 and proposes more day care places and greatly extending existing financial support
programs as well as spending to improve healthcare. All this is possible because "The federal
budget has had a surplus again" and inflation is low. (
Robinson points out, quite correctly, that there's a gap between what The Boss decrees and what
actually happens . Nonetheless I'd say Putin has been much more successful than most
leaders.) Foreign matters received the barest mention: situation in MENA threatening, Russia
ready to cooperate, "defence capability is ensured for decades to come".
RUSSIA INC.
Awara does a study of Russian and American earnings and demonstrates that, in purchasing
power, they're a lot closer than you would think. It's not just money: health, housing and
education – big expenses in the USA – are negligible in Russia.
NOT IN YOUR "NEWS" OUTLET.
Helmer discusses a German parliamentary report that shows that there really isn't any
evidence that Russia "invaded" Ukraine or controls the rebels: "few reliable facts and analyses
aside from the numerous speculations". It calls it a "civil war" (bürgerkriegs). Which is
what it actually is (with assistance from NATO and Russia, to be sure). (
Report, German only ).
TROUBLE IN PARADISE. A contested presidential
election led to pretty strong protests with the Supreme Court changing its ruling. The long
and the short is that Raul Khajimba , an important player and
President for six years,
resigned on Monday . New elections will be held in March. Independent Abkhazia has not been
very stable and I don't have any good sources to guide me on what's happening. Although I have
been told it is determined on real independence, joining neither Russia nor Georgia.
"... Such is the extent of the shakeout in the U.S. shale industry that Permian Basin oil production is closer to peaking than many forecasts suggest, according to one energy investor. ..."
"... Adam Waterous, who runs Waterous Energy Fund, regards the sector's financial position as unsustainable after years of disappointing returns for investors and negative free cash flow. With capital markets now largely shunning shale producers, the impact will begin to show in oil and natural gas output from the largest U.S. oil patch, he said. ..."
Production from these selected top 9 US shale oil companies might be about to fall as shown
by decreasing quarterly crude oil production changes in chart. ExxonMobil (XOM) shale oil is
growing fast about 11% per quarter but probably not enough to offset declines from other
operators.
XOM data is taken from shaleprofile.com, averaging three months into a quarter, then
multiplying by 75% to get crude oil. 75% is used because Pioneer Natural Resources crude to
total shale oil is 75% and Pioneer operates in the Permian which is also XOM main basin.
Pretty sure shale profile reports crude plus condensate, for "oil" production. As the data
matches pretty closely with the EIA's tight oil estimates by play when Oklahoma output is
excluded (shaleprofile only reports Oklahoma output on the subscription service.)
In short, one should not assume 75% of what is reported at shale profile is the "crude"
portion of output. In fact all US output is reported as crude plus condensate, all the way
back to 1860.
There is also Chevron, BP, and Shell operating in US tight oil, all have deep pockets and
will be unaffected by the tightening up of the credit markets. In the past 2 years these 5
have doubled their tight oil output, though most of the increase occurred in 2018 when oil
prices were higher.
Output may drop, that in turn will lead to higher oil prices and higher tight oil output,
also the majors will be able to pick up cheap assets as smaller oil companies that have not
been financially prudent go bankrupt, that may accelerate the growth of tight oil output from
the majors as oil prices rise.
Liquids produced at natural-gas processing plants are excluded. Those are the NGPLs if
memory serves and are not NGLs which I think of as coming from NG at the well head.
In other words liquid from NG is listed two ways: The stuff obtained at the well head
(NGL) and the stuff obtained farther down the line at NG processing plants (NGPL), and the
latter is not included as oil. This is from my failing memory but so is my ability to find my
way home most of the time.
What some do not realize is that the natural gasoline (which condenses from the natural gas
stream at standard temperature and pressure of 1 ATM, 25 C) has always been included in the
crude plus condensate data in the US since 1860. The lower carbon chain products (C2, C3, C4)
are not liquids at STP, they are gases and remain in the natural gas stream until they are
separated at the natural gas processing plant. The definition given by the EIA is quite clear
on this point.
In the Permian basin, the ratio of crude to total oil (incl NGL) produced by Pioneer has
fallen from 81% at beginning of 2016 to 75% at the end of 2019. If this fall is similar for
other Permian producers then it may be harder to continue increasing Permian crude
production.
The comparison between oil production from shaleprofile.com and from Pioneer is very close,
as shown by the two green lines. For 2019Q3, shaleprofile production was 286 kbd compared to
290 kbd from Pioneer quarterly report. Note that both these numbers include crude, lease
condensate and NGLs. http://www.pxd.com/
I read an very interested report here on this forum where US geological Institute had
estimated break even prices for Thiere 6 to 1. Thiere 6 was categorizized as sweet spots with
more than 800 kbpd. As I remember this had break even cost 18 usd each barrel and to next
class you could aproximately multiplay it with 3. I believe this is much of the core
knowledge the Pioneer Mark Papa is estimated US future shale production at wich again is
related to change in rock quality. What we know is in 2014 -2015 I believe US could earn
money at least with some borrowings at 30 usd WTI , 5 years after tjey cant earn money at 60
usd WTI even with huge improvement in drilling efficiency that it is a reason to believe will
go much slower in future. Labour cost and all other will continue to increase. It might be
break even price in 2025 will be above 120 usd WTI iff Thiere 5 runs out as same as Tiere 6
the sweet spots. This mean we will be back to the situation before 2014 when the main source
off oil was offshore, and investment was there. It simply means US need to cut more cost in
shale oil, develop more oil from wells drilled in less quality rock but this challange might
be very hard to solve even for Exxon that is ramping up, the question will be if their
barrels are profittable at 42 usd WTI as they predict. Perhaps Mr. President could give tax
release, or simply start buy up the 1500 billion in depth that need to be payed next 4 years.
Some people may consider natural gasoline (which condenses from Natural gas in the lease
separators) as "NGL", I consider this this to be lease condensate and generally is is mixed
with the crude and sold with the crude. Perhaps Pioneer keeps a separate account of "crude"
and "condensate", in the US these are usually lumped together as C+C, most of the NGPL
produced in the US is Ethane (C2), Propane (C3), and Butane (C4), about 12% of the NGPL is
natural gasoline (C5), roughly 600 kb/d of a 5000 kb/d total output of NGPL. Note that the US
does not count the pentanes plus from NGPL plants as part of C+C output even though it is
chemically very similar to lease condensate. In Canada, for example the pentanes plus from
NGPL is added to C+C from the field, not sure why the US does things this way, Canada's
approach seems more sensible.
Such is the extent of the shakeout in the U.S. shale industry that Permian Basin oil
production is closer to peaking than many forecasts suggest, according to one energy
investor.
Adam Waterous, who runs Waterous Energy Fund, regards the sector's financial position as
unsustainable after years of disappointing returns for investors and negative free cash flow.
With capital markets now largely shunning shale producers, the impact will begin to show in
oil and natural gas output from the largest U.S. oil patch, he said.
"We think we are at or near peak Permian" production, Waterous said last week in an
interview. "The North American oil market has been grossly overcapitalized, which is not
sustainable."
Predicting peak Permian output for 2020 isn't a mainstream view. There's plenty of debate
about how much production growth in the West Texas and New Mexico patch may slow this year as
shale drillers slash capital spending, but the consensus is that supplies will rise, albeit
at a slower pace. Tai Liu, an analyst at BloombergNEF, said in a report Tuesday that the
pessimism may be overdone.
Just because there are newcomers I will re offer up a consideration.
If you have to have it, and you do have to have it, you are not going to let a substance
created from nothingness on a whim by the local Central Bank get in the way.
This is a peak oil blog, and that means scarcity. When something that you have to have is
scarce, then you are going to go get it. The concept of price is a parameter of value --
value that exists only in the imagination of counterparties. Oil moves food and your stomach
doesn't care about the imagination of counterparties. So don't be so sure that price
determines production. Or consumption.
Anybody notice that the price is rather a lot less than it was five or six years ago? How
does production compare to then?
"'There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns.
That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown
unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know."
Economics is the study of how people allocate scarce resources for production,
distribution, and consumption, both individually and collectively.
Supply and demand is the amount of a commodity, product, or service available and the
desire of buyers for it, considered as factors regulating its price.
Watcher, we don't live in a perfect world of instant information and production.
" Over the past five years, the industry and its investors "mistook a massive structural
change for a simple cyclical event," he said. "It's impossible to continue to have uneconomic
production and capex.""
It is basic stuff. I can show you many time periods of increasing price that aligned with
increasing consumption.
And again, worst of all, you know I can show those time periods.
The theory fails. If you find even one instance where it is wrong, it fails. That's the
scientific method. The hypothesis is proposed. Experiments are observed. If even one fails to
support it, that's failure. That's how it's always worked.
There is no oh, but. Price is lower than 6 years ago and production is higher. 2010 to
2014 price rose from $95/b to $112/b. Consumption 2010 89 bpd to 2014 93 mbpd. I found that
without breaking a sweat.
The theory fails. Embrace a new one. And why be surprised? It's a substance whose value
derives from whimsy and counterparty imagination
So rigs and frac spreads continue to fall yet almost all experts predict continued LTO growth
. it would appear the day of reckoning is coming and the majors in the Permian will not save
the day .. wasn't everyone hoping for a pick up in rigs and spreads as budgets were meant to
be renewed in the new year
I think independents are finally getting it that they can't simply look to increase
production as soon as the POO goes up.
I think the change has solely been bought about by investors requiring a return on
investment, I'm not sure we can surmise that LTO producers will act as they have in the past,
I suspect it will take a sustained period of high POO before LTO producers open the spigots
it will create even more of a boom/bust scenario going forward ..
I agree with you Jack, a large increase in oil prices seems unlikely to have much boost in
LTO production for several years because banks will want significant loan payback before
increasing drilling budgets. Dennis' model is an excellent BAU projection, but we live in
more dynamic times than that imho. Banks will need a consistent high oil price to lend like
they did in the past. That seems unlikely given possibility for recession, war, EV adoption,
increased regulation from Democratic prez, etc.
Wall Street is obsessed with the shiny new thing and that is not FF production. Tesla's
share price now more than GM and Ford combined.
Debt mountain for shale producers 2020-2023. Maybe once they get past this mountain banks
will be ready to loan again and rig counts and frac spreads will increase. But only if
there's a consistently high oil price during this period so banks have confidence to lend and
debt is substantially reduced.
It's all about the Permian and has been for quite some time.
None of the other shale basins have enough rigs running to grow production
significantly.
The Bakken is probably the most economic besides the Permian, and it seems the operators
there are in maintenance mode with regard to production.
There are still 397 rigs running in the PB. That is still a large number. I suspect there
are more locations left there than in the remaining shale basins combined (not counting the
ones which produce mostly natural gas).
It takes rigs to drill wells and frak spreads to complete them. No, rigs and frak spreads
have not improved their efficiency that much in such a short time. And drillers and frakers
are not working that much faster.
What you are seeing, or are about to see, is a slowdown in completions. The frak
spreads that are being retired have obviously just finished completing a well. But they
will not be completing another one. That's why you see a lag between falling rig and frak
spread count and completions.
Hell, that's all we need Dennis. If the total number of national frac spreads fall then the
total completions, nationwide, will fall. If production falls everywhere except the Permian,
then that decline will offset any increase in the Permian.
Okay, we know that the lions share of frac spreads are for oil therefore???
I think you are way overplaying your hand with this efficiency stuff. Last time when rigs
and frac spreads declined, then production declined. Why should it be any different this
time?
The simple fact of the matter is: "The total number of frac spreads are falling".
Therefore completions will fall because retired frac spreads frac no new wells. Yes, it is as
simple as that. Saying the remaining frac spreads will be more efficient therefore
completions will not fall, is just wishful thinking at best, and total nonsense at worst.
Well said Ron losing frac spreads means that the maximum number of completions able to be
completed has decreased – the concept of increased efficiency is a red herring when
spreads have fallen 40%!in the past 6 months – spreads efficiency sure hasn't risen 65%
in the same time ..
I think we all agree once the worm turns in the Permian LTO production will decrease, I am
not sure producers will increase production as the POO rises they do have to pay back a lot
of debt and have shareholders to answer to who want a return ..
From what I have read there is always improvement of efficiency in operation regarding new
Buisinesses such as shale. This improvement is normaly linked to exsperiance, increased
volumes i.e. but typical it will slow down during time as much of the easy potential will be
taken out. I see this as drilling padds, skidding systems as same rig could drill more wells
without be dismantled and mounting again. Dere have also been improvements in latheral
lenghts, propant, and fluid . But as Slumberger wrote in 2019, they believed max latheral
lenght already is reach as if increased cost off equipment will be much higher and also risk
increase when operating atbthe limit, more tear i.e. There might still be improvements but
more slow than it have been. According to reports the break even price increase 4-5 times
each Tiere class, and I believe rock quality will be a main challange in years to come as
shale will need higher oil price to earn money, pay back ballons and dividends.
Let's see the next quarterlies from LTO producers noting the continued comments about being
profitable under $50. If Permian centric producers cannot profit on maintaining production
output we know Houston we have a problem going forward .. will the companies be able to stick
to using cash flows from continued operations only or will we see more excuses carted out
again .
Gail makes the case for an oil peak for 2018, predicting production down 1% in 2020 in a
low-price environment. Her take is worth a read even though she likes to go far out on a limb
with little support sometimes
Production from these selected top 8 US shale oil companies might be about to fall as shown
by decreasing quarterly crude oil production changes as in chart below.
very interesting graph it shows what is evident that independents are being forced into
financial discipline at last. I cannot see the majors picking up the slack regardless of what
the MSM say, why would they continue with the growth at all costs strategy which has caused
noting but carnage for the above 8 producers.
Can XOM do all the heavy lifting itself once the independent growth plateaus then falls is
the million $ question. My bet XOM will grow but in a sustainable way, the impact of the
Permian increase will be interesting to note in their quarterly how much has that growth cost
them is the question ..
If we look at Exxon/Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Philips, Shell, and Total combined, they have
increased combined tight oil output from 400 kb/d to 840 kb/d in the past 2 years (Sept 2017
to Sept 2019). Most of this increase occurred from Sept 2017 to Sept 2018 when oil prices
were a bit higher, in the past 12 months output grew by only 155 kb/d. Oil prices matter, low
oil prices may kill tight oil output growth, if so, oil prices are likely to rise.
For my "medium oil price scenario" (maximum WTI price of $83/b in 2018$ reached in 2027),
we get about 195,000 total wells drilled, about 110,000 total horizontal tight oil wells get
completed from 2010 to 2030 (about 26,000 have been completed through November 2019) so
roughly 80k wells completed from Sept 2019 to Sept 2029 in scenario below.
Also link below has spreadsheet you can play with.
Changing row 4 changes completion rate to any rate that seems reasonable. Scenario ends in
2030 for this particular spreadsheet, you can use excel, google sheets, or some other
spreadsheet program, it is saved in microsoft excel format.
On prices remaining range bound, that depends in part of how quickly oil consumption
grows. From 1982 to 2018 the average rate of growth in annual oil consumption has been about
800 kb/d. My $83/bo model has US tight oil growing by about 385 kb/d over the next 7 years,
it is not clear that the rest of the World will be able to fill the 415 kb/d gap each year
(assuming the 800 kb/d C+C consumption growth continues for the next 7 years). That is why I
expect oil prices to rise.
There has been relatively low offshore oil investment over the past 5 years and this is
likely to start affecting World oil output soon, the bumps in output from Brazil and Norway
are likely to be offset by declines in other producing nations (Mexico, China, and UK) and it
is far from clear that we will see higher output from Iran, Venezuela, Libya, or Nigeria.
As always the future is difficult to predict and I am often wrong, so perhaps oil prices
will remain "range bound" in your preferred $55 to $65/bo range. If that is correct Permian
output will grow far more slowly, perhaps growing from 4 Mb/d to about 6 Mb/d. The low oil
price scenario has about 72,000 wells completed from Sept 2019 to May 2030 in the Permian,
about 52,000 wells in all other US tight oil basins for a total of about 124,000 wells for
the low oil price scenario over that period. The completion rate falls from 850 in 2030 to
zero in 2035 for the low oil price scenario and output falls from 8200 kb/d at the start of
2030 to 2600 kb/d at the end of 2035.
I think it unlikely oil prices will remain range bound when World oil output peaks in
2026, that is only 6 years away, growth in oil output will slow significantly starting in
2024 and oil prices are likely to rise (at the latest) by June 2023.
That is a lot of locations. Of course, not all locations are the same productivity
wise.
Incredible how much oil the Permian Basin has produced and will produce in the next
decade.
Interesting how many companies sold out most of their acreage in the PB in the late 1980s
and 1990s, thinking it was past its prime.
I know of a small operator that bought leases in the PB and drilled some good vertical
wells. Martin Co. I don't know what they paid, but I am sure it was a tiny fraction of the
$600 million they sold out for a three years ago.
QEP bought about 9,500 acres from them for $600 million. There was 1,400 BOPD of
production from vertical wells at the time of the sale.
I have been looking at the wells QEP has drilled on this acreage. I don't think $600
million for 450 hz locations was a good deal for QEP. There are some good wells, but not
enough of them.
Yes I agree, all locations will not have the same productivity, I use the average for all
wells drilled for any given month as I am interested in the entire industry, some operators
will have better wells than others, some of this is skill and some of it is luck, I simply
assume generic company X will have a well productivity distribution that will be similar to
the industry average, in practice this is not likely to be true, but if we think of the
entire Permian basin as being run by a single large oil producer (Big Permian Oil Company) it
would be approximately correct, if my economic assumptions are correct.
I also find it amazing how much tight oil has been produced (5.6 Gb so for for Permian
since Jan 2000) and will be produced ( a total of 29 Gb for my model from Jan 2000 to May
2030, and for longer scenarios out to Dec 2079, about 60 Gb URR for Permian basin alone.)
Mike Shellman thinks that is completely wrong, but if the USGS mean estimate is roughly
correct and my medium oil price scenario and other economic assumptions are correct, that is
what the model suggests might happen. Mike is not a fan of the USGS TRR estimates, their F95
estimate is 43 Gb for Permian Basin URR, my low oil price scenario is in line with that F95
TRR estimate, with a URR of about 37 Gb.
If the TRR is low, oil prices are likely to be higher and a higher percentage of the TRR
is likely to be profitable to produce. (For a low TRR scenario the EUR would decrease more
rapidly than my "medium" TRR assumption (the basis for my best guess estimates).
I assume new well EUR starts to decrease starting in Jan 2019. In Dec 2018, my model has
the average Permian well with an EUR of 378 kbo. Chart below shows how the model assumes the
EUR will change from Sept 2019 to May 2030 (end of model scenario) for the Permian scenario I
presented above.
Again this is a guess for how future EUR will change based on a TRR scenario (no
economics) with 255,000 wells and a TRR matching the USGS mean estimate of 75 Gb for the
Permian basin. The rate that the EUR decreases depends on the number of wells completed each
month. Chart is small, click on chart for larger chart.
So they paid 1.33 million per well, I agree the wells do not look very good, for a 2017
average well, QEP has cumulative output of 145 kbo, my basin wide average well has about 190
kbo at 24 months, so the QEP wells about 24% lower than average, yikes.
Yves here. It is striking
how much Biden is able to misrepresent his record. Uncritical media coverage will do that.
By Alex Lawson, the executive
director of Social Security
Works , a non-profit advocacy group that supports expanding benefits to address America's
growing retirement security crisis. Lawson has appeared on numerous TV and radio outlets and is
a frequent guest host of The Thom Hartmann Program , one of the top progressive radio shows in
the country. Produced by Economy for All , a project of the
Independent Media Institute
Recently, a
newsletter from the Bernie Sanders campaign laid out Joe Biden's long record of supporting
cuts to Social Security. The website
PolitiFact weighed in on one part of that record, a speech Biden gave in 2018 in which he
expressed enthusiasm for former House Speaker Paul Ryan's plans to cut Social Security.
PolitiFact wrongly ranked the statement from the Sanders newsletter as "false" because they
willfully refused to understand what Biden said in the speech -- and how it represents decades
of Washington establishment consensus on cutting the American people's earned Social Security
and Medicare benefits.
In the speech, Biden says, "we need to do something about Social Security and Medicare" and
that Social Security "needs adjustments." Biden did not elaborate on what these "adjustments"
were, but a look at his long history on Social
Security is telling.
More recently, Biden led "grand
bargain" negotiations with Republicans during his time as vice president. This "grand
bargain"
would have given Republicans structural, permanent cuts to Social Security in return for
tax increases on the wealthy that would be rolled back as soon as a Republican president got
elected to office.
Time and time again, Biden kept
coming back to the negotiating table, insisting that Republicans were dealing in good
faith. Ultimately, the grand bargain fell through only because of hardline House Republicans
refusing to make even
an incredibly lopsided deal. Biden was fully prepared to make a deal that included Social
Security cuts, including reducing future cost-of-living increases by implementing a chained CPI .
When Washington politicians talk about Social Security cuts, they almost always use coded
language, saying that they want to "change," "adjust," or even "save" the program. That's
because cutting Social Security is incredibly unpopular
with voters of all political stripes. When corporate-friendly politicians like Biden use those
words, they are trying to signal to elite media and billionaire donors that they are "very
serious people" who are open to cutting Social Security benefits, without giving away the game
to voters.
One of those billionaires, Pete Peterson,
spent almost half a billion dollars on a decades-long crusade to destroy Social Security
and Medicare. Peterson died in 2018, but his money lives on in the form of think tanks like the
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), which relentlessly advocate for benefit cuts
while insisting that they are neutral arbiters because they are "non-partisan."
Non-partisan and non-ideological are two very different things, but the media has an
unfortunate tendency to treat them as one and the same. The CRFB and similar groups are
zealously committed to an ideology of cutting the American people's earned benefits. PolitiFact
quotes a CRFB staffer to back up their article, without providing readers with any context
about CRFB's ideology or speaking to an expert opposed to Social Security cuts.
It's easy for people in a D.C. elite bubble, working for think tanks or newspaper editorial
boards, to support cutting Social Security. Cushioned by billionaire money, they have no idea
what it's like to live on the average Social Security benefit of
less than $18,000 a year.
But in the rest of the country, it's a very different story. People love Social Security,
the only thing keeping their grandparents, their friend with a disability , and their young neighbors who recently lost
a parent out of poverty. Grassroots activists across the country, working with
congressional champions like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, put pressure on Democratic
politicians and changed the conversation on Social Security.
After years of hard work, Democrats are united in support of expanding, not cutting, Social
Security. Ninety percent of House Democrats are co-sponsors of the Social Security 2100 Act ,
and every major Democratic presidential candidate has a plan to expand Social
Security.
That includes Biden, who has disavowed benefit cuts and is running on a plan to modestly expand Social Security
benefits. Politicians responding to activist pressure is a good thing, and people have the
capacity to evolve and change. But Biden continually sows doubt that his change of heart is
genuine by continuing to talk about the merits of "
sharing power " with Republicans. He says that "
there's an awful lot of really good Republicans ," and has even stated that he'd consider
making a Republican his vice president .
Biden doesn't seem to have changed much from his time as vice president, when he offered
Republicans "grand bargains" that included Social Security cuts again and again. At this point,
it's
self-evident that the only agenda Republican politicians care about is cutting taxes for
their billionaire donors and stealing earned benefits from the American people. When Biden says
that he wants to work with them, it suggests that he remains open to that agenda. That's very
concerning for everyone who cares about the future of Social Security and Medicare.
Additionally, Biden's past support for Social Security cuts is a major vulnerability should
he become the Democratic nominee. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump
continually promised to protect Social Security and Medicare.
That was a lie . But lying has never bothered Trump, and he'll be happy to use the same
playbook in 2020.
There are numerous videos of Joe Biden calling for Social Security cuts. We can expect Trump
to blanket Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with ads containing that footage.
Democrats win when they can draw a clear contrast with Republicans on protecting and
expanding our most popular government program, Social Security. Nominating Joe Biden would make
that far more difficult than it needs to be.
By Spanish political standards Biden would be considered a hard-core conservative, not
that far from ultraliberal types. He has nothing to offer except business as usual. He would
be a puppet on Trump's hands.
Hard to believe any of this recent, very recent, history is still unknown.
It was the Tea Party that saved Social Security because of its intransigence. Bama/Biden
would've sold SS down the river had the Tea Party been "reasonable."
Strange and uninteresting times these. Boring attacks on truth and common sense social
policy. The only fun part of the story is that England is about to throw itself off the
American cliff too.
I believe it wasn't even the commission which couldn't get that many people to be so
openly evil but just Pete Peterson and Alan Simpsons' personal wish list.
Yeah, which Obomber and Biden were more than willing to honor as a valid discussion, as if
it wasn't stunningly cruel and vicious. The word evil, which would have been my first choice
of adjectives, appears to have been banned by neoliberals – who now openly adore George
Walker Bush – as fundyism ™, since George Walker Bush/ Dick Cheney Days;
as has moral outrage been banned.
I made a decent income during my prime working years, nevertheless I can testify it's just
not possible to live any kind of a comparable lifestyle solely depending on social security.
The fedgov has already trimmed back the COLAs to the point where if hamburger gets pricey,
they substitute it with dog food. I'm serious. If any adjustments are made to social
security, they need to be double-digit increases, not decreases, and not more of this
"chained cpi" crap!
I transfer the problem to the bankers, they pay the difference as the cards never will be
repaid, I am judgment proof and there are no assets for them to attach legally when I kick
off. Salute.
What COLAs are we talking about? Gas, rent, food, insurance all rise faster than the
official rate of inflation and therefore the cost of living increases. It's an insulting joke
and stealth benefit cutting.
I would think that the mismatch between the COLA and the real rate of inflation is a reason
for the mistrust of the government. If the Feds are lying on something that you can easily
check either by your experience or by going online, just what else is bull manure?
Also, just what is it with some people on reforming cutting social security as it
really does not pay much. It is also very difficult to get disability even when everything is
well documented. I assume that they care about orphans, the disabled, and the old? Almost
everyone but the orphans have worked for years and any serious cuts would bring the wrath
that would destroy the careers of politicians who voted for them.
This is almost a rhetorical question, but am I crazy or are the supporters of these
"adjustments?"
This is precisely why this country is so screwed up. When a so called leader of the left
advocates austerity for seniors the end is near. A currency war against your own people.
Thanks Joe!
The end of this system of things is indeed very very near. I welcome its complete
destruction and the installation of Gods rulership on this planet forever.
Let's try to forestall the End Times and Armageddon, shall we? I really rather wish that
the selfish SOBs ruining things any help, even passively, unless it's sending them to prison,
The Hague, or even just bankruptcy court.
Does any significant fraction of the working class believe anything that comes out of that
nether orifice that dares to style itself "Politifacts?" Every piece I have ever read from
that hole reeks of the worst kind of Jesuitical subterfuge, happily selecting and shading
things until they come up with a pronouncement that serves the PTB.
I guess we can add social security to the other issues Biden has been on the wrong side of
such as healthcare.
Having come to Michigan to give praise to Freddie Upton for pushing the 21st Century Cures
Act during Congressional elections and probably pushed him across the finish line bay a small
margin of votes over the Democratic candidate Matt Longjohn. Fred suffered from that hard
work as Commerce Chair taking in $millions in contributions from the healthcare supply and
pharma industry. Fewer NIH clinical trials and real world testing.
Then there are student loans and Biden's inflexibility on bankruptcy for students since
the mid nineties. Of course Biden will tell you how hard he worked and others such as
millennials should do so also. Except we have so burdened a segment of the population we have
stymie the growth one might expect from graduates entering the consumer market and being
successful enough to buy and pay taxes.
I am sorry Yves, Biden is an a**. This boomer would love to talk to him as I did with
Stabenow publicly on the same issue and why she voted for such nonsense.
While it might work in domestic politics, this mad man negotiating tactic erodes trust in
international affairs and it will take decades for the US to recover from the harm done by
Trump's school yard bully approach.
Even the docile Europeans are beginning to tire of this and once they get their balls
stitched back on after being castrated for so long, America will have its work cut out
crossing the chasm from unreliable and untrustworthy partner to being seen as dependable and
worthy of entering into agreements with.
You have it right. The rhetoric "this is a free country" is only true to an extent now
with the constant chipping away at our freedoms on a daily basis.
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4777
Trump
First OK'd Killing Soleimani 7 Months Ago "If Americans Killed"
by
Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/13/2020 - 13:05
0
SHARES
There's been a number of theories to emerge surrounding President Trump's incredibly risky
decision to assassinate IRGC Guds Force chief Qasem Soleimani, including that it was
all the
brainchild
of hawkish Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
But an emerging reporting consensus does indicate that the public justification for the strike
--
that
Soleimani posed an "imminent" threat as he was orchestrating an attack against American troops and
sites in the region
--
was manufactured based on flimsy intelligence. The
evolving and contradictory statements
within the administration itself demonstrates at least
this much.
And now according to the latest NBC bombshell it's becoming clear that the top IRGC general's
killing was
actually months in the works
:
President Donald Trump authorized the killing of Iranian Gen.
Qassem
Soleimani seven months ago
if Iran's increased aggression resulted in the death of an
American, according to five current and former senior administration officials.
Apparently the "option" to take him out was already on the "menu" of Pentagon contingencies long
before Soleimani's fateful Jan.3 early morning passage through Baghdad International Airport.
Reports NBC based on
multiple officials
,
"The presidential directive in June came with the condition that
Trump would have final signoff on any specific operation to kill Soleimani, officials said."
The Dec.27 Kataeb Hezbollah rocket attack on a US base in Kirkuk then became a core element of
the official rationale, given it killed an American contractor
later identified
as 33-year old Sacramento resident
Nawres Waleed Hamid, who
had been assisting the Army as a linguist.
The new report confirms further that it was both National Security Advisor at the time
John Bolton as well as Mike Pompeo that had Trump's ear on the subject
.
"There have been a number of options presented to the president over the course of time" related
to bold steps to curtail Iranian aggression, a senior administration official told NBC, which
reports further:
The president's message was "that's only on the table if they hit Americans,"
according to a person briefed on the discussion.
The origins of the plan to assassinate the top IRGC elite force general and popular "national
hero" inside Iran actually evolved initially out of 2017 discussions involving Trump's national
security adviser at the time, retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
The idea of killing Soleimani came up in discussions in 2017 that Trump's national security
adviser at the time, retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, was having with other administration
officials about the president's broader national security strategy, officials said. But it was
just one of a host of possible elements of Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran and
"was not something that was thought of as a first move,"
said a former senior
administration official involved in the discussions.
The idea did become more serious after McMaster was replaced in April 2018 by Bolton
,
a longtime Iran hawk and advocate for regime change in Tehran. Bolton left the White House in
September -- he said he resigned, while
Trump
said he fired him
-- following policy disagreements on Iran and other issues.
So there it is: Bolton's ultra-hawkish influence is still in effect at the White House.
Congratulations to all involved in eliminating
Qassem Soleimani. Long in the making, this was a decisive blow against Iran's malign Quds Force
activities worldwide. Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.
And the torch is being carried further by Mike Pompeo.
But again while none of this should come as a surprise, it's yet further proof on top of a
growing body of evidence that Washington is yet again telling bald-faced lies to the public about a
major event that could lead America straight back into another disastrous Middle East quagmire.
Tags
Politics
Secretary of State Pompeo claimed that Soleimani was responsible for hundreds of thousands
of deaths in Syria. Basically blaming Iran for all deaths in the Syrian war.
"Increasing the minimum wage can reduce suicide rates, study finds" [ Global News ]. "A
study published Tuesday in the Journal of Epidemiology &
Community Health examined the link between minimum wage increases and suicide rates among
various groups across the U.S., between 1990 and 2015. For every dollar added to the minimum
wage, suicide rates among people with a high school education or less dropped by 3.4 to 5.9 per
cent, the authors found. The effects were more pronounced during periods of high
unemployment."
"When 140 million Americans are poor, why has poverty disappeared from public discourse?" [
Des Moines Register ]. "'It's hard work being poor,' said John Campbell of Des Moines, a
black man of 63 who works at Bridgestone Firestone and is active in the steel workers' union.
Raised in poverty by a single mother of four who died of lung cancer in her 40s, Campbell
enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves and later in the Army from 1973 to '78 to escape his
battles with drugs and alcohol. He went on to have sustained employment and an education
through union programs. But recently, he's been out on disability, living on $300 a week.
He had to refinance his house to pay the $3,000 deductible for the first of two knee
replacement surgeries ." • We are ruled by House Harkonnen.
"Working in the restaurant industry will haunt your dreams" [
The Outline ]. "The restaurant industry has
one of the highest rates of mental health issues in the country. As restaurant owners begin
to address that crisis, they need to include trauma-induced chronic nightmares along with
depression and addiction. The haunting might end, long after the aprons are hung up." •
Servers have "waitmares" -- nightmares about waiting on tables.
"... a friend of mine, born in Venice and a long-time resident of Rome, pointed out to me that dogs are a sign of loneliness. ..."
"... And the cafes and restaurants on weekends in Chicago–chockfull of people, each on his or her own Powerbook, surfing the WWW all by themselves. ..."
"... The preaching of self-reliance by those who have never had to practice it is galling. ..."
"... Katherine: Agreed. It is also one of the reasons why I am skeptical of various evangelical / fundi pastors, who are living at the expense of their churches, preaching about individual salvation. ..."
"... So you have the upper crust (often with inheritances and trust funds) preaching economic self-reliances, and you have divines preaching individual salvation as they go back to the house provided by the members of the church. ..."
George Monbiot on human loneliness and its toll. I agree with his observations. I have been cataloguing them in my head for
years, especially after a friend of mine, born in Venice and a long-time resident of Rome, pointed out to me that dogs are
a sign of loneliness.
A couple of recent trips to Rome have made that point ever more obvious to me: Compared to my North Side neighborhood in Chicago,
where every other person seems to have a dog, and on weekends Clark Street is awash in dogs (on their way to the dog boutiques
and the dog food truck), Rome has few dogs. Rome is much more densely populated, and the Italians still have each other, for good
or for ill. And Americans use the dog as an odd means of making human contact, at least with other dog owners.
But Americanization advances: I was surprised to see people bring dogs into the dining room of a fairly upscale restaurant
in Turin. I haven't seen that before. (Most Italian cafes and restaurants are just too small to accommodate a dog, and the owners
don't have much patience for disruptions.) The dogs barked at each other for while–violating a cardinal rule in Italy that mealtime
is sacred and tranquil. Loneliness rules.
And the cafes and restaurants on weekends in Chicago–chockfull of people, each on his or her own Powerbook, surfing the
WWW all by themselves.
That's why the comments about March on Everywhere in Harper's, recommended by Lambert, fascinated me. Maybe, to be less lonely,
you just have to attend the occasional march, no matter how disorganized (and the Chicago Women's March organizers made a few
big logistical mistakes), no matter how incoherent. Safety in numbers? (And as Monbiot points out, overeating at home alone is
a sign of loneliness: Another argument for a walk with a placard.)
In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles – at school, at college, at the bar, in parliament – instruct
us to stand on our own two feet.
With different imagery, the same is true in this country. The preaching of self-reliance by those who have never had to
practice it is galling.
Katherine: Agreed. It is also one of the reasons why I am skeptical of various evangelical / fundi pastors, who are living
at the expense of their churches, preaching about individual salvation.
So you have the upper crust (often with inheritances and trust funds) preaching economic self-reliances, and you have divines
preaching individual salvation as they go back to the house provided by the members of the church.
"... We know from various Congressional folks that briefers of Congress have failed to produce any evidence of "imminent" plans to kill Americans Soleimani was involved with that would have made this a legal killing rather than an illegal assassination. ..."
"... As Sergey Lavrov and President Putin have stated for a long time (and long before President Trump came along), the USA is 'agreement incapable'. However, now you have to wonder if any country really trusts any agreement they will make with the USA. Without trust on any level, cooperation/trade treaties and so on on are impossible or eminently disposable, i.e., not worth the paper upon which they are written. ..."
"... 603 Americans killed in Iraq, he says Trump supporters claim, but we had millions of Iraqi's, Syrians, Libyans and others killed or their lives uprooted by Bush and Obama and company – yet they were not assassinated. ..."
"... NO. Shockingly bad decision; you can just manage to glimpse around the edges of the war propaganda the embarrassment and backpedaling for having willingly stepped into such a gigantic steaming pile of excrement. The parade of smooth-faced liars on the MSM asserting that the US is now safer (the "war is peace" crowd) is sickening. Some even have the gall to assert that the enormous crowds in Iran are forced to attend by the repressive regime. Of course, there's no evidence of a provocation and they'll never produce any. ..."
"... I find it interesting that Pompeo was "disappointed" – what did he think would happen? For a Secretary of State, he's obviously extremely out of touch with the rest of the world if he didn't have some realistic idea of how this would go down. ..."
"... One other glaring omission from the article – the only reason there was a US military contractor in Iraq available to be killed in the first place is due to the illegal war based on false premises launched almost two decades ago by the US, which continues to occupy the country to this day. ..."
"... Pretty clear who the terrorists are on this case. ..."
"... Fascinating developments on this issue today. Pompeo admits that nothing was "imminent." Given the very specific definitions of Imminence that draw red lines between what is or is not legal in international law, this could get big very quickly. ..."
"... War hawks dressed in red or blue can become mercenaries and create Go Fund Me drives to protect their investments and any particular country which they have a personal affinity or citizenship. ..."
"... Lest we forget: "War is a racket." ..."
"... How does this meet the internationally recognized legal requirement of "imminent" danger to human life required to kill a political or military leader outside of a declared war? All public statements by the U.S. political and military leadership point to a retaliatory killing, at best, with a vague overlay of preemptive action. ..."
"... If you agree that the "Bethlehem Doctrine" has never been recognized by the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, or the legislatures of the three rogue states who have adopted it, the assassination of Suleimani appears to have been a murder. ..."
"... "I cross-checked a Pentagon casualty database with obituaries and not 1 of the 9 American servicemen killed fighting in Iraq since 2011 died at the hands of militias backed by Suleimani. His assassination was about revenge and provocation, not self-defense." ..."
"... The unsuccessful operation may indicate that the Trump administration's killing of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani last week was part of a broader operation than previously explained, raising questions about whether the mission was designed to cripple the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or solely to prevent an imminent attack on Americans as originally stated. ..."
"... For some "exceptional" reason we don't recognize international law! We are the terrorists not them. ..."
Can The US Assassination Of Qassem Soleimani Be Justified? Posted on
January 10, 2020 by Yves Smith Yves here. Even though the
angst over "what next" with the US/Iran confrontation has fallen a bit, there is still a
depressingly significant amount of mis- and dis-information about the Soleimani assassination.
This post is a nice high level treatment that might be a good candidate for circulating among
friends and colleagues who've gotten a hefty dose of MSM oversimplifications and social media
sloganeering.
Update 6:50 AM: Due to the hour, I neglected to add a quibble, and readers jumped on the
issue in comments. First, it has not been established who launched the attack that killed a the
US contractor. The US quickly asserted it was Kat'ib Hezbollah, but there were plenty of groups
in the area that had arguably better motives, plus Kat'ib Hezbollah has denied it made the
strike. Second, Kat'ib Hezbollah is an Iraqi military unit.
By Barkley Rosser, Professor of Economics at James Madison University in Harrisonburg,
Virginia. Originally published at EconoSpeak
We know from various Congressional folks that briefers of Congress have failed to produce
any evidence of "imminent" plans to kill Americans Soleimani was involved with that would have
made this a legal killing rather than an illegal assassination. The public statements by
administration figures have cited such things as the 1979 hostage crisis, the already dead
contractor, and, oh, the need to "reestablish deterrence" after Trump did not follow through on
previous threats he made. None of this looks remotely like "imminent plans," not to mention
that the Iraqi PM Abdul-Mahdi has reported that Soleimani was on the way to see him with a
reply to a Saudi peace proposal. What a threatening imminent plan!
As it is, despite the apparent lack of "imminent plans" to kill Americans, much of the
supporting rhetoric for this assassination coming out of Trump supporters (with bragging about
it having reportedly been put up on Trump's reelection funding website) involves charges that
Soleimani was "the world's Number One terrorist" and was personally responsible for killing 603
Americans in Iraq. Even as many commentators have noted the lack of any "imminent plans,"
pretty much all American ones have prefaced these questions with assertions that Soleimani was
unquestionable "evil" and "bad" and a generally no good guy who deserved to be offed, if not
right at this time and in this way. He was the central mastermind and boss of a massive
international terror network that obeyed his orders and key to Iran's reputed position as "the
Number One state supporter of terrorism," with Soleimani the key to all of that.
Of course, in Iran it turns out that Soleimani was highly respected, even as many oppose the
hawkish policies he was part of. He was viewed as crucial to the victory over ISIS/ISIL/Daesh
in Iraq, much feared by Iranians. Shia take martyrdom seriously, and he is viewed as a martyr.
It appears that even Trump took notice of the massive outpouring of mourning and praise for
Soleimani there up to the point of people dying in a stampede in a mourning crowd in his
hometown. But, hey, obviously these people simply do not understand that he was The World's
Number One Terrorist! Heck, I saw one commenter on Marginal Revolution claiming Soleimani was
responsible killing "hundreds of thousands." Yes, this sort of claim is floating around out
there.
A basic problem here is that while indeed Soleimani commanded the IGRC al Quds force that
supported and supplied various Shia militias in several Middle Eastern nations, these all were
(and are) ultimately independent. Soleimani may have advised them, but he was never in a
position to order any of them to do anything. Al Quds itself has never carried out any of the
various attacks outside of Iran that Soleimani is supposedly personally responsible for.
Let us consider the specific case that gets pushed most emphatically, the 603 Americans dead
in Iraq, without doubt a hot button item here in the US. First of all, even if Soleimani really
was personally responsible for their deaths, there is the technical matter that their deaths
cannot be labeled "terrorism." That is about killing non-combatant civilians, not military
personnel involved in combat. I do not support the killing of those American soldiers, most of
whom were done in by IEDs, which also horribly injured many more. But indeed this awful stuff
happened. But in fact this was all done by Iraqi -based Shia militias. Yes, they were supported
by Soleimani, but while some have charged al Quds suppplied the IEDs, this turns out not to be
the case. These were apparently made in Iraq by these local militias. Soleimani's al Quds are
not totally innocent in all this, reportedly providing some training and some inputs. But the
IEDs were made by the militias themselves and planted by them.
It is also the case that when the militias and Americans were working together against
ISIS/IISIL/Daesh, none of this happened, and indeed that was still the case up until this most
recent set of events, with the death setting off all this an American civilian contractor
caught on a base where several Iraqis were killed by a rocket from the Kat'b Hezbollah Iraqi
group. Of course with Trump having Soleimani assassinated, this cooperation has ceased, with
the US military no longer either fighting ISIS/ISIL/Daesh nor training the Iraqi military.
Indeed, the Iraqi parliament has demanded that US troops leave entirely, although Trump
threatened Iraq with economic sanctions if that is followed through on.
As it is, the US datinrg back to the Obama administration has been supplying Saudi Arabia
with both arms and intelligence that has been used to kill thousands of Yemeni civilians.
Frankly, US leaders look more like terrorists than Soleimani.
I shall close by noting the major changes in opinion in both Iran and Iraq regarding the US
as a result of this assassination. In Iran as many have noted there were major demonstrations
against the regime going on, protesting bad economic conditions, even as those substantially
were the result of the illegal US economic sanctions imposed after the US withdrew from the
JCPOA nuclear deal, to which Iran was adhering. Now those demonstrations have stopped and been
replaced by the mass demonstrations against the US over Soleimani's assassination. And we also
have Iran further withdrawing from that deal and moving to more highly enrich uranium.
In Iraq, there had been major anti-Iran demonstrations going on, with these supported to
some degree by the highest religious authority in the nation, Ayatollah Ali Sistani. However,
when Soleimani's body was being transferred to Iran, Sistani's son accompanied his body. It
really is hard to see anything that justifies this assassination.
I guess I should note for the record that I am not a fan of the Iranian regime, much less
the IGRC and its former and new commander. It is theocratic and repressive, with many political
prisoners and a record of killing protestors. However, frankly, it is not clearly all that much
worse than quite a few of its neighboring regimes. While Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei was not
popularly elected, its president, Rouhani, was, who obeyed popular opinion in negotiating the
JCPOA that led to the relaxation of economic sanctions, with his power reduced when Trump
withdrew from the agreement. Its rival Saudi Arabia has no democracy at all, and is also a
religiously reactionary and repressive regime that uses bone saws on opponents and is
slaughtering civilians in a neighboring nation.
with the death setting off all this an American civilian contractor caught on a base
where several Iraqis were killed by a rocket from the Kat'b Hezbollah Iraqi group.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding this, but it appears to be presented here as a fact.
Kat'b Hezbollah have denied responsibility for that rocket attack. To the best of my
knowledge, no proof whatsoever has been presented that it was not an attack by jihadis in the
area, whom Khat'b Hezbollah were fighting, or by others with an interest in stirring the
pot.
They are having a hard time coming up with public evidence to support any justification,
aren't they?
The latest was Pence's "keeping it secret to protect sources and methods" meme. Purely
speculating here, but I immediately thought, "Oh, Israeli intelligence." Gotta protect allies
in the region.
Debka, run by supposedly-former Israeli military intelligence, was enthusing about
upcoming joint operations against Iran and its allies a month or two ago. In contrast,
they've been uncharacteristically quiet, though supportive of the US, regarding recent
developments.
Secretary of State Pompeo claimed that Soleimani was responsible for hundreds of thousands
of deaths in Syria. Basically blaming Iran for all deaths in the Syrian war.
People more commonly do this with Assad. A complicated war with multiple factions fighting
each other, armed by outside sources including the US, most with horrific human rights
records, but almost every pundit and politician in the US talks as though Assad killed
everyone personally.
Once in a while you get a little bit of honesty seeping in, but it never changes the
narrative. Caitlin Johnstone said something about that, not specifically about Syria. The
idea was that you can sometimes find facts reported in the mainstream press that contradict
the narrative put out by pundits and politicians and for that matter most news stories, but
these contradictory facts never seem to change the prevailing narrative.
That sounds suspiciously like sour grapes and another possible motive for the killing
– revenge.
Soleimani led a number of militias that were successful in defeating the Saudi (and CIA)
sponsored Sunni jihadis who failed to implement the empire's "regime change" playbook in
Syria.
No doubt a lot of guys like Pompeo wanted him dead for that reason alone.
The simple answer NO, killing a sitting army general of a sovereign state on a diplomatic
mission resides in the realm of the truly absurd. Twisting the meaning of the word "imminent"
far beyond its ordinary use to justify the murder is even more absurd. And the floating
subtext to all this talk about lost American lives is that the US can invade and occupy
foreign lands, engage in the sanctimonious slaughter of locals and whoever else gets in the
way of feeding the bloodlust of Pompeo and his ilk (to say nothing of feeding the outsized
ego of a lunatic like Trump), and yet expect to suffer no combat casualties from those
defending their lands. It's the most warped form of "exceptional" thinking.
As an aside, I wonder if the msm faithfully pushing the talk about Iran downing that
Ukrainian commercial jet is designed to take the heat off a beleaguered Boeing. The
investigation hasn't even begun but already we have the smoking gun, Iran did it.
Even the question is wrong. The killing was cowardly, outside all international norms
(this from a country that dares to invoke "international order" whenever it is suitable), a
colossal mistake, a strategic blunder, and plain destructive.
The more one learns about QS' activities, the more it seems that he was "disposed of"
precisely because of his unique talent and abilities to bring together the various local
factions (particularly, in Iraq), so that then – unified – they could fight
against the common enemy (guess who?). He was not guilty of killing amrikans – nor was
he planning to – his "sin" was to try and unite locals to push the us out of ME. It was
always going to be an uphill battle, but in death he may – in time – achieve his
wish.
I'm in this camp too. But with a twist. Pure speculation here – and I'm sure it
would never be exposed, but is there even any proof we did it? Was it an apache helicopter or
a drone; whom have we supplied with these things? Who is this bold? Since our military has
been dead-set-against assassinating Soleimani or any other leader it seems highly unlikely
they proposed this to Trump. Mattis flatly refused to even consider such a thing. So I keep
wondering if the usual suspect might be the right one – the Israelis. They have the
proper expertise. And the confusion that followed? If we had done it we'd have had our PSAs
ready to print. Instead we proffered an unsigned letter and other "rough drafts" of the
incident and then retracted them like idiots. As if we were frantic to step in and prevent
the Rapture. We could have taken the blame just to prevent a greater war. Really, that's what
it looks like to me.
Surely the whole point of the strike is that it was illegal: that is to say that it was a
message to the Iraqis that they are NOT allowed to help Iran evade sanctions, NOT allowed to
do oil-for-infrastructure deals with China and NOT allowed to invite senior Iranians around
for talks: i.e. Iraq is not yet sovereign and it is the US that makes the rules around there;
any disobedience will summarily be punished by the de facto rulers even if that violates
agreements and laws applicable in Iraq.
If you disagree, then what should the US do if Iraq does not toe the Western line?
" The killing was cowardly, outside all international norms (this from a country that
dares to invoke "international order" whenever it is suitable), a colossal mistake, a
strategic blunder, and plain destructive "
I think the immediate impact which has long terms implications for how other countries
view USA foreign policy is simply that any high ranking individual from any other country on
earth has got to be aware that essentially no international norms now exist. It's one thing
to 'whack' a bin Laden or dispose of a Gaddafi but another whole kettle of fish to
assassinate a high ranking official going about their business who's no immediate security
threat to the USA and when no state of war exists.
For example, might a EU general now acquiesce to demands about NATO? Not saying this is
going to happen by a long shot, but still a niggling thought might linger. Surely the
individual will be resentful at the very least. I'm also reminded of a story about John
Bolton allegedly telling a negotiator (UN or European?) that Bolton knew where the
negotiator's family resided. These things add up.
As Sergey Lavrov and President Putin have stated for a long time (and long before
President Trump came along), the USA is 'agreement incapable'. However, now you have to
wonder if any country really trusts any agreement they will make with the USA. Without trust
on any level, cooperation/trade treaties and so on on are impossible or eminently disposable,
i.e., not worth the paper upon which they are written.
This is where the middle term ramifications start to kick-in. We know that Russia and
China are making some tentative steps towards superficial integration in limited areas beyond
just cooperation. Will they find more common ground? Will European countries (and by
extension the EU) really start to deliver on an alternative financial clearing system? How
will India and Japan react? Does nationalism of the imperial variety re-emerge as a world
force – for good or bad?
Will regional powers such as Russia, China, India, France or Iran quietly find more common
ground also? But alliances are problematic and sometimes impose limitations that are
exploitable. So, might a different form of cooperation emerge?
Long term its all about advantage and trust. Trust is a busted flush now. (My 2 cents, and
properly priced.)
As Thuto above says, the simple answer is "No". IF S was guilty of all those things
ascribed to him, he'd have been judged and sentenced (yes, I do realise Iran would never
extradite him etc. etc. – but there would have been a process and after the process,
well, some things would be more justifiable). But we have the process because it's important
to have a process – otherwise, anyone can find themselves on a hit list for any reason
whatsoever.
If the US doesn't want to follow and process, then it can't be suprised if others won't.
Ignoring the process works for the strongest, while they are the strongest. And then it
doesn't.
603 Americans killed in Iraq, he says Trump supporters claim, but we had millions of
Iraqi's, Syrians, Libyans and others killed or their lives uprooted by Bush and Obama and
company – yet they were not assassinated.
I think – just a guess – the reason Soleimani was killed can be summed up in
one word:
Netanyahu.
That, and on a broader, bird's eye view level in broad strokes – Michael Hudson's
recent article outlining U.S. policy of preserving USD hegemony at all costs, that has
existed since at least the 1950's, which depicts Soleimani's assassination as not a Trump
qwerk but a logical application of that policy.
You might say the swamp drainers came to drain the swamp and ended filling it up
instead.
The mostest terriblest guy in the history of this or any other universe, but the average
Joe never heard of until they announced they killed him. His epochal terribleness really flew
under the radar.
The swamp drainers are so busy guzzling as much as they can quaff, without drowning;
writhing each others' dead-eyed, bloated feeding frenzy; that obscene media distractions need
to escalate in sadistic, off-hand terror. But, it's so ingrained into our governance, we just
call it democracy?
Hudson's take on USD hegemony is reasonable, but I don't think we'd assassinate Soleimani
in anticipation of losing it. We have dealt with all the sects in the middle east for a long
time and we have come to terms with them, until now. In a time that requires the shutting
down of oil and gas production. I think (Carney, Keen, Murphy, etc.) oil is the basis for our
economy, for productivity, for the world, that's a no brainer. But my second thoughts go more
along the lines that oil and natural gas will be government monopolies directly – no
need to use those resources to make the dollar or other currencies monopolies. Sovereign
currency will still be a sovereign monopoly regardless of the oil industry. That also
explains why we want hands-on control of this resource. And with that in mind, it would seem
Soleimani might have been more of an asset for us.
I hate to tell you but as much as we are fans of Hudson, he's all wet on this one. The
dollar is the reserve currency because the US is willing to run sustained trade deficits,
which is tantamount to exporting jobs. Perhaps more important, my connected economists say
they know of no one who has the ear of the military-intel state who believes this either.
This may indeed have been a line of thought 50 years ago but it isn't now.
much of the supporting rhetoric for this assassination coming out of Trump supporters
(with bragging about it having reportedly been put up on Trump's reelection funding
website)
I thought I had a pretty strong stomach for this stuff, but it's been really nauseating
for me to see the displays of joy and flag waving over the assassination of someone the
overwhelming majority of people were wholly unaware of prior to his death. My guess is that
it's mostly just a sort of schadenfreude at the squirming of Democrats as they (with few
exceptions) fail to articulate any coherent response.
The response should be clear without any caveats, "Trump is a coward who would never
gamble with his life, but will happily gamble with the lives of your kids in uniform." This
should resonate with most people, I don't believe that neocons really have any grassroots
support.
NO. Shockingly bad decision; you can just manage to glimpse around the edges of the war
propaganda the embarrassment and backpedaling for having willingly stepped into such a
gigantic steaming pile of excrement. The parade of smooth-faced liars on the MSM asserting
that the US is now safer (the "war is peace" crowd) is sickening. Some even have the gall to
assert that the enormous crowds in Iran are forced to attend by the repressive regime. Of
course, there's no evidence of a provocation and they'll never produce any.
Politico Europe is
reporting that behind Europes seemingly supine response, officials and politicians are
'seething' over the attack. Its clearly seen around the world as not just illegal, but an
appalling precedent.
So far, American efforts to convince Europeans of the bright side of Soleimani's
killing have been met with dropped jaws .
The silence from other countries on this event has been deafening. And that should tell
Trump and Pompeo something, but I doubt if they are smart enough to figure it out.
I find it interesting that Pompeo was "disappointed" – what did he think would
happen? For a Secretary of State, he's obviously extremely out of touch with the rest of the
world if he didn't have some realistic idea of how this would go down.
On one hand, the life of each and every victim of head-separation and droning is as
precious as that of one Soleimani.
On the other, the general's is more precious and thus, the behind the scene seething by
Europe's politicians and officials. (They and many others are all potential targets now,
versus previously droning wedding guests – time to seethe).
The more I think about it, the more it seemed like the Administration and its allies were
probing to see how far they could go. They bombed PMUs and appeared to get away with it. So
then they upped the ante when the Iraqis complained and finally got some moderate push-back.
Not taking American lives in the missile strike seems to prove they Iranians didn't want to
escalate. Still, I dont know about the Pentagon, but I was impressed with the accuracy.
Yes. From the picture at Vineyard of the Saker, they hit specific buildings. There were
comments after the drone attack on Abqaiq and Khurais oil fields in KSA that they showed
surprising accuracy, but perhaps this time surprised the intelligence agencies. Perhaps that
was why Trump declared victory instead of further escalating. This is speculation, of
course.
There is also a good article giving more detail of these attacks and underlining the fact
that not a single solitary missile was intercepted. What percentage did the Syrians/Russians
manage to intercept of the US/UK/French missiles attack back in 2018? Wasn't it about seventy
percent?
The Iranians are not done retaliating. They have a history of disproportionate
retaliation, but when the right opportunity presents itself, and that routinely takes years.
The limited strike was out of character and appears to have been the result of the amount of
upset internally over the killing.
I have more a lot more respect for the strategic acumen of the Iranian regime than I do
for that of the American regime. Now it's led by a collection of fragile male egos and
superstitious rapture ready religious fanatics. Before them the regime was led by cowardly
corporate suck ups. They all take their cues from the same military intelligence complex.
One other glaring omission from the article – the only reason there was a US
military contractor in Iraq available to be killed in the first place is due to the illegal
war based on false premises launched almost two decades ago by the US, which continues to
occupy the country to this day.
Aye! This!
assume a ladder on a windy day, with a hammer irresponsibly left perched on the edge of the
top rung.
if i blithely walk under that ladder just as the wind gusts and get bonked in the head by the
falling hammer whose fault is it?
we shouldn't be there in the first damned place.
and as soon as the enabling lies were exposed, we should have left, post haste .leaving all
kinds of money and apologies in our wake.
to still be hanging around, unwanted by the locals, all these years later is arrogant and
stupid.
during the Bush Darkness, i was accused to my face(even strangled, once!) of being an
american-hating traitor for being against the war, the Bush Cabal, and the very idea of
American Empire.
almost 20 years later, I'm still absolutely opposed to those things not least out of a care
for the Troops(tm) .and a fervent wish that for once in my 50 years i could be proud to be an
American.
what a gigantic misallocation of resources, in service of rapine and hegemony, while my
fellow americans suffer and wither and scratch around for crumbs.
Another of many questions that remain involve the warped interpretation of "imminent" of
the Bethlehem Doctrine. What institution will put a full stop to that doctrine of terror?
It is a global hazard to continue to let that be adopted as any kind of standard.
Under the Bethlehem Doctrine the entire political class in the USA, and possibly a few
other countries, could be assassinated. What is legal or justified for one is justified for
all.
Rosser is an economist rather than a philosopher or. jurist, and so he doesn't appear to
realize that "justification" in the abstract is meaningless. An act can only be justified or
not according to some ethical or legal principle, and you need to say what that principle is
at the beginning before you start your argument. He doesn't do that, so his argument has no
more validity than that of someone you get into a discussion with in a bar or over coffee at
work.
Legally, of course, there is no justification, because there was no state of armed conflict
between the US and Iran, so the act was an act of state murder. It doesn't matter who the
person was or what we was alleged to have done or be going to do. There's been a dangerous
tendency developing in recent years to claim some kind of right to pre-emptive attacks. There
is no such legal doctrine, and the ultimate source of the misrepresentation – Art 51 of
the UN Charter – simply recognizes that nothing in the Charter stops a state resisting
aggression until help arrives. That's it.
Oh, and of course if this act were "justified" then any similar act in a similar situation
would be justified as well, which might not work out necessarily to America's advantage.
General Jonathan Shaw, former commander of UK forces in Iraq, put it well: Iran's
objectives are political, not military. Their aim is not to destroy any American air base,
but to drive a wedge between the US and its Arab allies -- and the Soleimani assassination
has achieved more to this end than anything that could have been cooked up in Tehran. The
Sunnis are standing down and the US and Israel now once again face being without real
friends in the region. When push came to shove, all Kushner's efforts amounted to nothing.
How elated the Iranians must be, even in the midst of such a setback.
Which if true means that instead of divide and conquer Trump and Pompeo may instead be
practicing unite and be conquered when it comes to US meddling in the Middle East.
I think that I see a danger for Israel here with a very tight pucker factor. I had assumed
that if there was a war between Israel and Hezbollah, that Hezbollah would let loose their
older rockets first to use up the Israeli anti-missile ordinance that they have. After that
would come their modern accurate missiles.
But part of that Iranian attack on those US bases was the use of older missiles that had been
retro-fitted with gear for accurate targeting which obviously worked out spectacularly.
Israel could assume that Iran would have given Hezbollah the same technology and the
implication here is that any first wave of older Hezbollah missiles would just be as accurate
as the following barrages of newer missiles.
I wonder if it is remotely possible that all countries, say at the UN, could design
acceptable language to make oil and natural gas a universal resource with a mandated
conservation – agreed to by all. Those countries which have had oil economies and have
become rich might agree to it because the use of oil and gas will be so restricted in future
that they will not have those profits. But it would at least provide them with some steady
income. It would prevent the oil wars we will otherwise have in our rush to monopolize the
industry for profit; it would conserve the use of oil/gas and extend it farther out into the
future so we can build a sustainable worldwide civilization and mitigate much of the damage
we have done to the planet, etc. How can we all come together and make energy, oil and natgas
access a universal human right (for the correct use)?
Actually Soleimani was guilty of the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Tens of
thousands of ISIS fighters that is. Do they count? The Saudis, Gulf States and the CIA may
shed a tear for them but nobody else will. When Soleimani arrived in Baghdad, he was
traveling in a diplomatic capacity to help try to ease off tensions between the Saudis and
the Iranians. And this was the imminent danger that Trump was talking about. Not an imminent
danger to US troops but a danger that the Saudis and Iranians might negotiate an
accommodation. Michael Hudson has said similar in a recent article.
I think that what became apparent from that attack last year on the Saudi oil
installations was that they were now a hostage. In other words, if the US attacks Iran, then
Iran will take out the entirety of Saudi oil production and perhaps the Saudi Royal family
themselves. There is no scenario in an Iran-US war where the Kingdom come out intact. So it
seems that they have been putting out feelers with the Iranians about coming to an
accommodation. This would explain why when Soleimani was murdered, there was radio silence on
behalf of the Saudis.
Maybe Trump has worked out that all of the Saudi oil facilities becoming toast would be
bad for America too but, more importantly, to himself personally. After all, what is the
point of having the Saudis only sell their oil in US dollars if there is no oil to sell? What
would such a development do to the standing of the US dollar internationally? The financial
crisis would sink his chances for a win this November and that is something that he will
never allow. And I bet that he did not Tucker Carlson to tell him that.
Fascinating developments on this issue today. Pompeo admits that nothing was "imminent."
Given the very specific definitions of Imminence that draw red lines between what is or is
not legal in international law, this could get big very quickly.
What percent of the presumed Trump base, and imperial Big Business and Banksters, not to
mention the sloshing mass of other parts of the electorate subject to "spinning" in the
Bernays Tilt-a-Whirl, would give a rat's aff about "war crimes" charges? Drone murders to
date, the whole stupid of profitable (to a few, externalities ignored) GWOT, all the sh!t the
CIA and CENTCOM and Very Special Ops have done with impunity against brown people and even
people here at home, not anything more than squeaks from a small fraction of us.
And Trump is the Decider, yes, who signed off (as far as we know) on killing Soleimani
that was lined up by the Borg, but really, how personalized to him would any repentance and
disgust or even scapegoat targeting by the Blob really be, in the kayfabe that passes for
"democracy in America?"
I always though de Tocqueville titled his oeuvre on the political economy he limned way
back when as a neat bit of Gallic irony
I don't know. Might Trump benefit from charges of war crimes, spinning them as further
proof that the United Nations, International Criminal Court, etc. are controlled by commies
and muslims out to get the USA?
As for the imminence of the hypothetical attacks, "There is no doubt that there were a
series of imminent attacks being plotted by Qassem Soleimani," Pompeo told the Fox News host.
"We don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where, but it was real."
Remember that imminent=possible at some time in the near or distant future, and Vice President Dick Cheney articulated shortly after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind's words, "if
there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction -- and
there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time -- the United States
must now act as if it were a certainty." That doctrine didn't prevent Bush's
re-election. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/books/20kaku.html
Declare victory and bring them all home. Leave behind W's Mission Accomplished banner and
pallets of newly printed $100s with Obama's picture.
Along the lines of Bismarck, not worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Not my
20 year old, not anybody else's in my name, either, especially since this began before they
were born.
And to whom will they sell their oil and natural gas? Who cares – its a fungible
commodity of perhaps only of concern to our "allies" in Western Europe. Not my problem and
great plan to mitigate carbon emissions!
War hawks dressed in red or blue can become mercenaries and create Go Fund Me drives to
protect their investments and any particular country which they have a personal affinity or
citizenship.
The whole episode reminds me of a Martin Scorsese plot line. A disagreement among "Made
Men". The unfortunate symbolism and 'disrespect' of the embassy protest demanded a response,
especially after all the fuss Trump made about Benghazi. Some things cannot be allowed. The
Iranians, Russians and Americans probably decided between themselves what would be sufficient
symbolism to prevent a war, and so Soleimani was sacrificed to die as a hero/martyr. A small
price to prevent things spiraling out of control. The Iranian response seems to add weight to
this hypothesis.
Forgive me for taking this a little more in the direction of theory, but can the rest of
the world justify the assassination of CIA/Pentagon/CENTCOM officials in a similar manner
given the opportunity? Are these organizations not an analog to Quds? That seems to be more
in line with the type of questions we need to be asking ourselves as US citizens in a
multi-polar world. This article, despite its best intentions, still hints at an American
exceptionalism that no longer exists in the international mind. The US could barely get away
with its BS in the 90s, it definitely can't in 2020.
The US no longer has the monopoly on the narrative ("Big Lie") rationalizing its actions,
not to say the other countries have the correct narrative, just that, there are a whole bunch
of narratives ("Lies") out there being told to the world by various powers that are not the
US, and the US is having a difficult time holding on to the mic. The sensible route would be
to figure out how to assert cultural and political values/power in this world without the
mafiosi methods. Maybe some old fashioned (if not icky, cynical) diplomacy. It is better than
spilled blood, or nuclear war.
The US military/intelligence wonks overplayed their hand with Soleimani. I think the
Neo-Cons gave Trump a death warrant for Soleimani, and Trump was too self-involved (stupid)
to know or care who he was offing. His reaction to the blow back betrays that.
Now he is f*****, along with the chicken-hawks, and they all know it. They just have to
sit back and watch Iran bomb US bases because the alternative is a potential big war,
possibly involving China and Russia, that can't be fought by our Islamist foreign legions.
It'll demand the involvement of US troops on the ground and the US electorate won't tolerate
it.
Anyone who has worked in the counter-terrorism field knows that when a credible and
imminent threat is received the first act is to devise a response to counter the threat. It
may involve raising security measures at an airline security checkpoint, it may involve
arrests, if possible, of the would-be terrorist(s). It may involve evacuating a building and
conducting a search for a bomb. It may involve changing a scheduled appearance or route of
travel of a VIP.
The point is to stop the operators behind the threat from completing their terrorist act.
What it certainly does NOT involve is assassinating someone who may have given the order but
is definitely not involved in carrying out the act. Such an assassination would not only be
ineffective in countering the threat but would likely be seen as increasing the motivation
behind the attack. Such was the assassination of Soleimani, even if one believes in the
alleged imminent threat. This was simply a revenge killing due to Soleimani's success at
organizing the opposition to US occupation.
We don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where, but it was real.
How does this meet the internationally recognized legal requirement of "imminent" danger
to human life required to kill a political or military leader outside of a declared war? All
public statements by the U.S. political and military leadership point to a retaliatory
killing, at best, with a vague overlay of preemptive action.
If you agree that the "Bethlehem Doctrine" has never been recognized by the United
Nations, the International Criminal Court, or the legislatures of the three rogue states who
have adopted it, the assassination of Suleimani appears to have been a murder.
This is absolutely chilling. These "End Times/Armageddon" lunatics want to destroy the
world. Who would Jesus have murdered? They stand the lessons of his state-sanctioned murder
on their heads
My two-pennyworth? The US press and the circles surrounding Trump are already crowing that
he 'won' the exchange. If, as speculated, he went against military advice in ordering this
assassination, his 'victory' will only confirm his illusions that he is a military genius,
which makes him even more dangerous. There are some rather nasty parallels with the rise of
Hitler appearing here.
The claim that Soleimani had killed hundreds of Americans was repeated, word for word, in
many articles in the papers of record (e.g., New York Times, 1/7/20; Washington Post, 1/3/20,
1/3/20) as well as across the media (e.g., Boston Globe, 1/3/20; Fox News, 1/6/20; The Hill,
1/7/20).
These "hundreds of Americans" were US forces killed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs)
during the Iraq War, supposedly made in Iran and planted by Iranian-backed Shia militias. As
professor Stephen Zunes pointed out in the Progressive (1/7/20), the Pentagon provided no
evidence that Iran made the IEDs, other than the far-fetched claim that they were too
sophisticated to be made in Iraq -- even though the US invasion had been justified by claims
that Iraq had an incredibly threatening WMD program. The made-in-Iran claim, in turn, was the
main basis for pinning responsibility for IED attacks on Shia militias -- which were, in any
case, sanctioned by the Iraqi government, making Baghdad more answerable for their actions
than anyone in Tehran. Last year, Gareth Porter reported in Truthout, (7/9/19) that the claim
that Iran was behind the deaths of US troops was part of Vice President Dick Cheney's plan to
build a case for yet another war.
IIRC the "sophistication claim" was made years ago. Apparently the basic technology is
applied in oilfields to pierce oil well lining tubes at the oil layer. So the Iraqis knew all
about the basic technique, only needed some more information.
About those "603 American deaths" that Soleimani is posthumously being charged with .
"I cross-checked a Pentagon casualty database with obituaries and not 1 of the 9 American
servicemen killed fighting in Iraq since 2011 died at the hands of militias backed by
Suleimani. His assassination was about revenge and provocation, not self-defense."
"The U.S. Government and almost all of the media continue to declare that Iran is the
biggest sponsor of terrorism. That is not true. That is a lie. I realize that calling this
assertion a lie opens me to accusations of being an apologist for Iran. But simply look at
the facts."
"The Trump Administration needs to stop with its infantile ranting and railing about Iran and
terrorism. The actual issues surrounding Iran's growing influence in the region have little
to do with terrorism. Our policies and actions towards Iran are accelerating their
cooperation with China and Russia, not diminishing it. I do not think that serves the
longterm interests of the United States or our allies in the Middle East"
The strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai, a financier and key commander of Iran's elite
Quds Force who has been active in Yemen, did not result in his death, according to four U.S.
officials familiar with the matter.
The unsuccessful operation may indicate that the Trump administration's killing of Maj. Gen.
Qasem Soleimani last week was part of a broader operation than previously explained, raising
questions about whether the mission was designed to cripple the leadership of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps or solely to prevent an imminent attack on Americans as originally
stated.
"Justification"?????
You're kidding right?
"They", those who we firstly "embrace" for our own interests are "for us" until we decide we
are "against them"!
What a farce our foreign policies are!
For some "exceptional" reason we don't recognize international law!
We are the terrorists not them.
Prediction for this stupidest of all worlds: Iraq really does boot us out, T-bone siezes
on this for its obvious popularity among his base, and uses "He Kept Us Out Of War" for
re-election.
Where is my peace dividend after fall of Berlin Wall and Soviet Union?
Poppy and MIC wouldn't have it, hence April Galaspie's "no instructions" response to
Saddam's initial inquiry over the Iraq / Kuwait surveying and mineral rights dispute on
Kuwait's drilling at the border 30 years ago.
If you live is USA, (I moved a decade ago) and you have a medical procedure you need done. I
would recommend not procrastinating and getting it done soon.
8% expense growth (faster than GDP) is unsustainable.
The real problem with american health care is bad management. Hospitals have no idea how much
it takes to cure a patient, and they sell treatments instead of cures. They don't know how
much the treatments cost either, so they just make up numbers. Pharmaceutical companies
charge whatever they can get away with, as the price of insulin shows.
Patients need more protection and better coverage so that insurers are forced to keep the
healthcare providers honest. That is why insurers need to be forced to provide coverage.
Markets economics works because the guy who pays applies pressure to the guy who delivers the
goods. This idea needs to be applied to health care, and prices would get back in line with
other rich countries.
"... These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone's underlying business model. Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the month every month, or you're out. ..."
Tucker could have done a number on Trump friend Schwarzman too.Mark my words you're gonna have another melt down now that all the people who
lost their home and ended up in rentals stop paying their rent that is now 2 1/2 times what
their mortgage was.
This is another fake bubble being securitized and sold off. Just like putting people into
houses with ARMs who couldnt afford them when the rates went up, Scharzman will fill up his
rentals to 99% occupancy with special deals to sell them to investors, when the special deal
period runs out and the rent goes up people will move out looking for cheaper housing and the
securities wont be worth shit.
Blackstone Group , CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman Buys Houses in Bulk to Profit from Mortgage
Crisis
You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation's
impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has
started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is
brewing.
Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly
amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta,
brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed
investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit
by the economic meltdown.
Wall Street's foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million
people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans
need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting
neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution:
It's going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, it's devised a new
form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow up -- again.
Since the buying frenzy began, no company has picked up more houses than the Blackstone
Group, a major private equity firm. Using a subsidiary company, Invitation Homes, Blackstone
has grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions, through local brokers, and in bulk purchases
directly from banks the same way a regular person might stock up on toilet paper from
Costco.
In one move, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. As of November, Blackstone
had spent $7.5 billion to buy 40,000 mostly foreclosed houses across the country. That's a
spending rate of $100 million a week since October 2012. It recently announced plans to take
the business international, beginning in foreclosure-ravaged Spain.
Few outside the finance industry have heard of Blackstone. Yet today, it's the largest
owner of single-family rental homes in the nation -- and of a whole lot of other things, too.
It owns part or all of the Hilton Hotel chain, Southern Cross Healthcare, Houghton Mifflin
publishing house, the Weather Channel, Sea World, the arts and crafts chain Michael's,
Orangina, and dozens of other companies.
Blackstone manages more than $210 billion in assets, according to its 2012 Securities and
Exchange Commission annual filing. It's also a public company with a list of institutional
owners that reads like a who's who of companies recently implicated in lawsuits over the
mortgage crisis, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America,
Goldman Sachs, and of course JP Morgan Chase, which just settled a lawsuit with the
Department of Justice over its risky and often illegal mortgage practices, agreeing to pay an
unprecedented $13 billion fine.
In other words, if Blackstone makes money by capitalizing on the housing crisis, all these
other Wall Street banks -- generally regarded as the main culprits in creating the conditions
that led to the foreclosure crisis in the first place -- make money too.
An All-Cash Goliath
In neighborhoods across the country, many residents didn't have to know what Blackstone
was to realize that things were going seriously wrong.
Last year, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something
strange happening. Home prices were rising. And they were rising fast -- up 20 percent
between October 2012 and the same month this year. In a normal market, rising home prices
would mean increased demand from homebuyers. But here was the unnerving thing: the
homeownership rate was dropping, the first sign for Alston that the market was somehow out of
whack.
The second sign was the buyers themselves.
"I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn't for lack of trying,"
says Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of
residents are African American and Hispanic. Instead, all his buyers -- every last one of
them -- were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.
Between 2005 and 2009, the mortgage crisis, fueled by racially discriminatory lending
practices, destroyed 53 percent of African American wealth and 66 percent of Hispanic wealth,
figures that stagger the imagination. As a result, it's safe to say that few blacks or
Hispanics today are buying homes outright, in cash. Blackstone, on the other hand, doesn't
have a problem fronting the money, given its $3.6 billion credit line arranged by Deutsche
Bank. This money has allowed it to outbid families who have to secure traditional financing.
It's also paved the way for the company to purchase a lot of homes very quickly, shocking
local markets and driving prices up in a way that pushes even more families out of the
game.
"You can't compete with a company that's betting on speculative future value when they're
playing with cash," says Alston. "It's almost like they planned this."
In hindsight, it's clear that the Great Recession fueled a terrific wealth and asset
transfer away from ordinary Americans and to financial institutions. During that crisis,
Americans lost trillions of dollars of household wealth when housing prices crashed, while
banks seized about five million homes. But what's just beginning to emerge is how, as in the
recession years, the recovery itself continues to drive the process of transferring wealth
and power from the bottom to the top.
From 2009-2012, the top 1 percent of Americans captured 95 percent of income gains. Now,
as the housing market rebounds, billions of dollars in recovered housing wealth are flowing
straight to Wall Street instead of to families and communities. Since spring 2012, just at
the time when Blackstone began buying foreclosed homes in bulk, an estimated $88 billion of
housing wealth accumulation has gone straight to banks or institutional investors as a result
of their residential property holdings, according to an analysis by TomDispatch. And it's a
number that's likely to just keep growing.
"Institutional investors are siphoning the wealth and the ability for wealth accumulation
out of underserved communities," says Henry Wade, founder of the Arizona Association of Real
Estate Brokers.
But buying homes cheap and then waiting for them to appreciate in value isn't the only way
Blackstone is making money on this deal. It wants your rental payment, too.
Securitizing Rentals
Wall Street's rental empire is entirely new. The single-family rental industry used to be
the bailiwick of small-time mom-and-pop operations. But what makes this moment unprecedented
is the financial alchemy that Blackstone added. In November, after many months of hype,
Blackstone released history's first rated bond backed by securitized rental payments. And
once investors tripped over themselves in a rush to get it, Blackstone's competitors
announced that they, too, would develop similar securities as soon as possible.
Depending on whom you ask, the idea of bundling rental payments and selling them off to
investors is either a natural evolution of the finance industry or a fire-breathing
chimera.
"This is a new frontier," comments Ted Weinstein, a consultant in the real-estate-owned
homes industry for 30 years. "It's something I never really would have dreamt of."
However, to anyone who went through the 2008 mortgage-backed-security crisis, this new
territory will sound strangely familiar.
"It's just like a residential mortgage-backed security," said one hedge-fund investor
whose company does business with Blackstone. When asked why the public should expect these
securities to be safe, given the fact that risky mortgage-backed securities caused the 2008
collapse, he responded, "Trust me."
For Blackstone, at least, the logic is simple. The company wants money upfront to purchase
more cheap, foreclosed homes before prices rise. So it's joined forces with JP Morgan, Credit
Suisse, and Deutsche Bank to bundle the rental payments of 3,207 single-family houses and
sell this bond to investors with mortgages on the underlying houses offered as collateral.
This is, of course, just a test case for what could become a whole new industry of
rental-backed securities.
Many major Wall Street banks are involved in the deal, according to a copy of the private
pitch documents Blackstone sent to potential investors on October 31st, which was reviewed by
TomDispatch. Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse are helping market the bond. Wells
Fargo is the certificate administrator. Midland Loan Services, a subsidiary of PNC Bank, is
the loan servicer. (By the way, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and PNC Bank are
all members of another clique: the list of banks foreclosing on the most families in
2013.)
According to interviews with economists, industry insiders, and housing activists, people
are more or less holding their collective breath, hoping that what looks like a duck, swims
like a duck, and quacks like a duck won't crash the economy the same way the last flock of
ducks did.
"You kind of just hope they know what they're doing," says Dean Baker, an economist with
the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "That they have provisions for turnover and
vacancies. But have they done that? Have they taken the appropriate care? I certainly
wouldn't count on it." The cash flow analysis in the documents sent to investors assumes that
95 percent of these homes will be rented at all times, at an average monthly rent of $1,312.
It's an occupancy rate that real estate professionals describe as ambitious.
There's one significant way, however, in which this kind of security differs from its
mortgage-backed counterpart. When banks repossess mortgaged homes as collateral, there is at
least the assumption (often incorrect due to botched or falsified paperwork from the banks)
that the homeowner has, indeed, defaulted on her mortgage. In this case, however, if a single
home-rental bond blows up, thousands of families could be evicted, whether or not they ever
missed a single rental payment.
"We could well end up in that situation where you get a lot of people getting evicted not
because the tenants have fallen behind but because the landlords have fallen behind," says
Baker.
Bugs in Blackstone's Housing Dreams
Whether these new securities are safe may boil down to the simple question of whether
Blackstone proves to be a good property manager. Decent management practices will ensure high
occupancy rates, predictable turnover, and increased investor confidence. Bad management will
create complaints, investigations, and vacancies, all of which will increase the likelihood
that Blackstone won't have the cash flow to pay investors back.
If you ask CaDonna Porter, a tenant in one of Blackstone's Invitation Homes properties in
a suburb outside Atlanta, property management is exactly the skill that Blackstone lacks. "If
I could shorten my lease -- I signed a two-year lease -- I definitely would," says
Porter.
The cockroaches and fat water bugs were the first problem in the Invitation Homes rental
that she and her children moved into in September. Porter repeatedly filed online maintenance
requests that were canceled without anyone coming to investigate the infestation. She called
the company's repairs hotline. No one answered.
The second problem arrived in an email with the subject line marked "URGENT." Invitation
Homes had failed to withdraw part of Porter's November payment from her bank account,
prompting the company to demand that she deliver the remaining payment in person, via
certified funds, by five p.m. the following day or incur "the additional legal fee of $200
and dispossessory," according to email correspondences reviewed by TomDispatch.
Porter took off from work to deliver the money order in person, only to receive an email
saying that the payment had been rejected because it didn't include the $200 late fee and an
additional $75 insufficient funds fee. What followed were a maddening string of emails that
recall the fraught and often fraudulent interactions between homeowners and
mortgage-servicing companies. Invitation Homes repeatedly threatened to file for eviction
unless Porter paid various penalty fees. She repeatedly asked the company to simply accept
her month's payment and leave her alone.
"I felt really harassed. I felt it was very unjust," says Porter. She ultimately wrote
that she would seek legal counsel, which caused Invitation Homes to immediately agree to
accept the payment as "a one-time courtesy."
Porter is still frustrated by the experience -- and by the continued presence of the
cockroaches. ("I put in another request today about the bugs, which will probably be canceled
again.")
A recent Huffington Post investigation and dozens of online reviews written by Invitation
Homes tenants echo Porter's frustrations. Many said maintenance requests went unanswered,
while others complained that their spiffed-up houses actually had underlying structural
issues.
There's also at least one documented case of Blackstone moving into murkier legal
territory. This fall, the Orlando, Florida, branch of Invitation Homes appeared to mail
forged eviction notices to a homeowner named Francisco Molina, according to the Orlando
Sentinel. Delivered in letter-sized manila envelopes, the fake notices claimed that an
eviction had been filed against Molina in court, although the city confirmed otherwise. The
kicker is that Invitation Homes didn't even have the right to evict Molina, legally or
otherwise. Blackstone's purchase of the house had been reversed months earlier, but the
company had lost track of that information.
The Great Recession of 2016?
These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to
be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone's underlying business model.
Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the
monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the
month every month, or you're out.
Although Blackstone has issued only one rental-payment security so far, it already seems
to be putting this strict protocol into place. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, the
company has filed eviction proceedings against a full 10 percent of its renters, according to
a report by the Charlotte Observer.
About 9 percent of Blackstone's properties, approximately 3,600 houses, are located in the
Phoenix metro area. Most are in low- to middle-income neighborhoods.
Forty thousand homes add up to only a small percentage of the total national housing
stock. Yet in the cities Blackstone has targeted most aggressively, the concentration of its
properties is staggering. In Phoenix, Arizona, some neighborhoods have at least one, if not
two or three, Blackstone-owned homes on just about every block.
This inundation has some concerned that the private equity giant, perhaps in conjunction
with other institutional investors, will exercise undue influence over regional markets,
pushing up rental prices because of a lack of competition. The biggest concern among many
ordinary Americans, however, should be that, not too many years from now, this whole rental
empire and its hot new class of securities might fail, sending the economy into an
all-too-familiar tailspin.
"You're allowing Wall Street to control a significant sector of single-family housing,"
said Michael Donley, a resident of Chicago who has been investigating Blackstone's rapidly
expanding presence in his neighborhood. "But is it sustainable?" he wondered. "It could all
collapse in 2016, and you'll be worse off than in 2008."
This is not surprising that this has happened. All of the de-regulation on Wall Street,
lobbied for by Wall Street has allowed this to transpire.
Congress does not even read the bills that they sign into law, let alone write them!
Many are written by ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council, the Chamber of Commerce,
the Realtor's assosiation, the Medical Industrial Complex, public employee unions, and
various other special interest groups!
Why is it a pressing issue to actively promote homosexuality? What is the point? That is
really strange! There is a difference between not actively discriminating and actively
promoting!
Are they trying to worsen the AIDS epidemic or lower the birth rate? It does not make
sense to be actively promoting and encouraging homosexuality.
@Colin
Wright There are many venture capitalist that are not Jewish.. Venture Capitalist don't
always advertise their wealth. Not everybody in Wall Street or the City of London is
Jewish.
I think it is important to separate the Jews from the Zionist , many in that
small group (Zionist) are Jewish and Christian but most Jews and most Christians are
neither Venture Capitalist nor Zionist. Time after time I have asked my Jewish friends are
you are Zionist, and most say they do not really know what Zionism is? Zionism hosts many
races among its members; in the states, Christian Zionism is big, maybe bigger even than
Jewish Zionism.. see Christian Zionism : The Tragedy and the Turning: the cause of our
Conflicts (on DVD) by http://www.Whit.org. .
Zionism is an economic system. Zionism is a winner take all system of Economics .
Zionism is like an adult version of the game called King of the Mountain. In such a game,
no one is allowed to play unless they first have sufficient resources to be counted, and
are then willing to and believe they are personally capable of defeating the then residing
well armed king (Oligarch). IMO, all Jews everywhere, would be well advised to avoid being
labelled a Zionist<=hence the reason ?
Zionism is not the same as Judaism, its not a race, its not a religion, its not even
a culture, it is an economic system with virus like attributes.
@Lot
You are quibbling. You are prevaricating. You are obfuscating.
Joyce has assembled a powerful case against a known cast of financial parasites. This
phenomena is hardly new. It brings to mind another financial scandal of a generation ago
that was chronicled in James B. Stewart's book 'Den of Thieves'.
The mega-wealthy swindlers of that era were also all Jews: Boesky, Siegel, Levine,
Milken, among others. Some twenty years later, another Wall Street Jew, Bernie Madoff,
succeeds in pulling off the biggest fraud in US history. There's a pattern here.
Yet all you can do, Lot, is deflect, denigrate, and deny.
Joyce is giving us more actual names. These are the actual perps as well as institutions
they hide behind. These ruthless predators collude with one another as they exploit the
labor of millions of gentiles worldwide, then shower Jewish causes and philanthropies with
their loot. Their tribal avarice is revolting. And insatiable.
Do you deny this phenomena?
Is it all just another 'anti-Semitic canard'?
You even claim [Joyce] is
"retarded and highly uninformed".
Retarded?
He's brilliant and persuasive.
Uninformed?
He's erudite and scholarly.
You, Lot, are demonstrating again devious tribal dishonesty. It's glaring, it's
shameful, and it's obvious. This is a trait I've observed in virtually all of your
writings. You invariably deflect and deny. But Jewish criminality is real.
Joyce aptly concludes:
[T]he prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to an overwhelming degree on
the predations of the most successful and ruthless Jewish financial parasites.
This is a Jewish conspiracy to make Jews look terrible. Congress should slam the breaks
here. The de-regulation of the powerful combined with the over-regulation of the powerless
is criminally wreckless. Kind of like the friends don't let friends drive drunk approach.
Congress slam the breaks, yeah right, that'll happen! Lol!
@Colin
Wright Andrew Carnegie left behind institutions like Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon
University, and over 2500 Free Libraries from coast to coast, in a time when very little
was done to help what we now call the "underprivileged".
In fact, he gave away 90% of his massive fortune–about $75 Billion in current
dollars. Funding, in the process, many charities, hospitals, museums, foundations and
institutions of learning. He was a major benefactor of negro education.
He was a staunch anti-imperialist who believed America should concentrate its energies
on peaceful endeavors rather than conquering and subduing far-off lands.
Although they are even more keen to put their names on things, today's robber barons
leave behind mainly wreckage.
Jews are destroying the world. Everywhere they go, they leave behind nations in ruins. Look
at Europe, Africa and the Americas, Jews have left their ugly footprints. Corruption,
prostitution, drugs and human trafficking are their trade.
@anon
A combination of both I would say, although some would like to make it out that
Anglo-Saxons were the epitome of honour, they too resorted to morallly abject tricks and
swindles to acquire their wealth.
WASPs allowed Jews into their lands and both of them struck a sort of implicit contract
to work together to loot the world, when the word had been sucked dry, the conflict between
Jews and WASPs began and Hitler and the National Socialists were a last gasp attempt to
save the WASP side from being beaten, in the end higher Jewish verbal IQ gave them the
upper edge in the ability to trick people.
It is hard to feel sorry for WASPs, they struck a deal with the Jews centuries ago to
work together and were backstabbed, what is happening to these Third World countries will
now happen to WASP countries, it is poetic justice. Luckily the torch of civilisation will
continue by way of East Asia and Eastern Europe, who were true conservatives in that all
they wished was prosperity for their people in their own lands without any aggressive
foreign policy moves.
Basically, WASPs thought that they could win in the end, but they were out Jew'd and now
they are crying.
The one difference you will notice is that certain subsections of WASPs, notable the
British, actually did build infrastructure in the countries they looted, this to me was
borne out of a sense of guilt, so to be fair, WASPs were not as parasitic and ruthless as
Jews.
But in the end, the more ruthless wins. To quote the Joker
@Lot
Kyle Bass's fund is called 'Hayman', maybe because the MSM loathe the Bass family that
fellow Texican Bass is not related to. They are not the only ones aware of the drawbacks of
a name. Elliot is Singer's middle one.
The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private
equity and distressed debt funds
If someone owes you money and you cannot collect, you factor the account, (sell it on)
and then people who are going to be a lot less pleasant about it will pay them a visit and
have a 'talk' with them. While it is good to have a domestic bankruptcy regime in which
innovation and entrepreneurship is encouraged– to the extent that people are not
routinely gaming the system–I don't see why Argentina should benefit. Singer became
notorious for what he did to Argentina after he bought their debt, and he is pretty upfront
about not caring who objects. Puerto Rico is neither foreign or protected by Chapter 9 of
the U.S. Bankruptcy Code so it is a borderline case, which is probably why the people
collecting that debt tried to hide who they were.
The way he took down Jonathan Bush and others led to Bloomberg dubbing Singer 'The
World's Most Feared Investor'. Singer buys into companies where he sees the management as
as failing to deliver maximum value to the shareholders, then applies pressure to raise the
share price (in Bush's case extremely personal pressure) that often leads to the departure
of the CEO and sale of the company. That immediate extra value for the shareholder Singer
creates puts lots of working people out a job. Because of Singer and his imitators, CEO's
are outsourcing and importing replacements for indigenous workers in those services that
cannot be outsourced. All the while loath to foster innovation that could bring about long
term growth, because that would interfere with squeezing out more and more shareholder
value.
Singer is less like a vulture than a rogue elephant that is killing the breeding pair
white rhinos on a game reserve, and they are going extinct. Well it's a good thing! Thanks
to Singer et al (including Warren Buffett) Trump got elected. According to someone in jail
with Epstein, he had an anecdote about Trump being asked by a French girl what 'white
trash' was, and Trump replied 'It's me without the money'.
Trump is now essentially funded by three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and
Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250 million in pro-Trump political money.
In return, they want war with Iran.
All to the good. Iran won't leave Saudi Arabia (serious money) alone so Iran is going to
have to be crushed as a threat to the Saud family like Saddam before it anyway. If the Jews
think they are causing it, let 'em think so.
https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/trump-creates-a-new-nation/
When the Israelis occupy nearly all of the West Bank with Donald Trump's approval and
start "relocating" the existing population, who will be around to speak up? No one, as by
that time saying nay to Israel will be a full-fledged hate crime and you can go to jail
for doing so
Loudspeaker goes off " All Anti–Zionist Jews to Times Square ".
@Colin
Wright No judeophile, but it's 90% demagogic horsehit.
God forbid anybody should ever have to pay back money they borrow! Why, that's utterly
Jewish!
These so-called "vulture" funds didn't originate the debt. They simply purchased already
existing debt at deeply discounted prices either because the debt was already in default or
was at imminent risk of defaulting, which is why the debt sells at a heavy discount, since
existing debt holders are often happy to sell cheap and get something rather than hold on
and risk getting nothing.
What Joyce zeroes in on is these vulture funds' willingness to use all legal avenues to
force debtors to make good on their debts, including seizing the collateral the debtors
pledged when they borrowed the money. Joyce chooses to characterize this practice as
"Jewish," implying that gentile creditors would instead be overcome with compassion and let
the debtors off the hook and wear the loss themselves.
What Joyce regards as a defect of "vulture" funds, others might regard as an benefit.
The size of these funds, their legal expertise, and their political connections mean that
borrowers can more successfully be held to account. If I owned, say, Puerto Rican debt in
my retirement account, the chances that I could make Puerto Rico honor its obligations are
much slimmer.
None of this is to suggest that finance, as we today know it, is perfect and that it
couldn't be reformed in any way to make its operation more conducive to nationalistic
social values, only that anti-cap ideologues like Joyce weave lurid tales of malfeasance
out of completely humdrum market economics (which is precisely the same market economics
that Tucker Carlson learned about too, btw).
Mr. Joyce
Your obsession with us will prove to be your downfall.
Jewish people have always stood against tyranny against the working class, the poor and
other people of color.
The phrases and catch words that you used to vilify Jews are in many cases pulled from the
age old tropes used to demonize Jews for centuries and are anti-Semitic through and
through. They can't be overlooked nor hidden by claims of legitimate political
disagreements.
We know that it is not only the Jewish community that is at risk from unchecked
antisemitism, but also other communities that white nationalists target.
I find it very offensive that people like you continue to demonize us for no reason.
I dare you to hold a debate with me on this so called "Jewish Influence".
I am not even hiding my name here.
The 2016 presidential elections are proving historic, and not just because of the surprising
success of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, the lively debate among
feminists over whether to support Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump's unorthodox candidacy.
The elections are also groundbreaking because they're revealing more dramatically than ever
the corrosive effect of big money on our decaying democracy.
Following the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision and related rulings,
corporations and the wealthiest Americans gained the legal right to raise and spend as much
money as they want on political candidates.
The 2012
elections were consequently the most expensive in U.S. history. And this year's races are predicted to cost even
more. With the general election still six months away, donors have already sunk $1 billion into
the presidential race -- with $619 million raised by candidates and another $412 million by
super PACs.
Big money in politics drives grave inequality in our country. It
also drives war.
After all, war is a profitable industry. While millions of people all over the world are
being killed and traumatized by violence, a small few make a killing from the never-ending war
machine.
During the Iraq War, for example, weapons manufacturers and a cadre of other corporations
made billions on federal contracts.
Most notoriously this included Halliburton, a military contractor previously led by Dick
Cheney. The company made huge profits from George W. Bush's decision to wage a costly,
unjustified, and illegal war while Cheney served as his vice president.
Military-industrial corporations spend heavily on political campaigns. They've given
over $1 million to this year's presidential candidates so far -- over $200,000 of which
went to Hillary Clinton, who leads the pack in industry backing.
These corporations target House and Senate members who sit on the Armed Forces and
Appropriations Committees, who control the purse strings for key defense line items. And
cleverly, they've planted
factories in most congressional districts. Even if they provide just a few dozen
constituent jobs per district, that helps curry favor with each member of Congress.
Thanks to aggressive lobbying efforts, weapons manufacturers have secured the
five largest contracts made by the federal government over the last seven years. In 2014,
the U.S. government awarded over $90 billion worth of contracts to Lockheed Martin, Boeing,
General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.
Military spending has been one of the top three biggest federal programs every year since
2000, and it's far and away the largest discretionary portion. Year after year, elected
officials spend several times
more on the military than on education, energy, and the environment combined.
Lockheed Martin's problematic F-35 jet illustrates this disturbingly disproportionate use of
funds. The same $1.5 trillion Washington will spend on the jet, journalist Tom Cahill
calculates , could have provided tuition-free public higher education for every student in
the U.S. for the next 23 years. Instead, the Pentagon ordered a fighter plane that
can't even fire its own gun yet.
Given all of this, how can anyone justify war spending?
Some folks will say it's to make
us safer . Yet the aggressive U.S. military response following the 9/11 attacks -- the
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the NATO bombing of Libya, and drone strikes in Pakistan and
Yemen -- has only destabilized the region. "Regime change" foreign policies have collapsed
governments and opened the doors to Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS.
Others may say they support a robust Pentagon budget because of the
jobs the military creates . But dollar for dollar, education spending creates nearly three
times more jobs than military spending.
We need to stop letting politicians and corporations treat violence and death as "business
opportunities." Until politics become about people instead of profits, we'll remain crushed in
the death grip of the war machine.
And that is the real national security threat facing the United States today.
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The main problem of the United States in the existing political and economic system, which
began to be intensively created by the American banking layer since 1885 and was fixed in
1913. This became possible only thanks to the Civil War of 1861-1865. I will explain. Before
the Civil War, each state had its own banking structure, its own banknotes (there were not so
many states, there were still territories that did not become states yet). Before the
American Civil War, there was no single banking system. Abraham Linkol was a protege of the
banking houses of the cities of New York and Chicago, they rigged the election (bought the
election). It may sound rude to the Americans, but Lincoln was a rogue in the eyes of some US
citizens of that time. And this became the main reason for the desire of some states (not
only southern, and some northern) to withdraw from the United States. Another good reason for
the exit was the persistent attempts of bankers in New York and Chicago to take control of
the banking system of the South. These are two main reasons, as old as the World, the
struggle for control and money. The war (unfortunately) began the South. Under a federal
treaty, South and North were supposed to jointly contain US forts for protection. The
fighting began on April 12, 1861 with an attack by southerners on such a fort Sumter in
Charleston Bay. These are the beginnings of war.
This is important - I advise everyone to read the memoirs of generals, and especially the
memoirs of Ulysses Grant, the future president of the United States. The war was with varying
success, but the emissaries of the banks of New York and Chicago always followed the army of
the North, who, taking advantage of the disastrous situation in the battlefields, bought up
real estate, land and other assets. They were called the "Carpetbagger". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetbagger
They were engaged in the purchase throughout the war and up to 1885.
To make it clear to you, in the history of the USA, the period from 1865 to 1885 is called
the "Great American Depression" (this is the very first great depression and lasted 20
years). During this time, the bankers of New York and Chicago completely subjugated the US
banking system to themselves and their interests, trampled the South (robbed), after which
the submission of the US as a state directly to the banking mafia began. At present (since
1913) in the USA there is not capitalism, but an evil parody of capitalism.
I can call it this: American clan-corporate oligarchic "capitalism" (with the suppression
of free markets, with unfair competition and the creation of barriers to the dissemination of
reliable information). Since such "capitalism" cannot work (like socialism or utopian
communism), constant wars are needed that bring profit to the bankers, owners of the
military-industrial complex, political "service staff", make oligarchs richer, and ordinary
Americans poorer. We are now observing this, since this system has come to its end and
everything has become obvious.
For example, in the early 80s, the middle class of the United States was approximately 70%
of the population employed in production and trade, now it is no more than 15%.
The gap between the oligarchs and ordinary Americans widened. My essay is how I see what
is happening in the USA and why I do not like it. It's my personal opinion. In the end, my
favorite phrase is that Americans are suckers and boobies (but we still love them). Good luck
everyone.
We're told that getting ahead at work and reorienting our lives around our jobs will make us
happy. So why hasn't it? Many of those who work in the corporate world are constantly peppered
with questions about their " career progression ." The Internet is
saturated with
articles providing tips and tricks on how to develop a never-fail game plan for
professional development. Millions of Americans are engaged in a never-ending cycle of
résumé-padding that mimics the accumulation of Boy Scout merit badges or A's on
report cards except we never seem to get our Eagle Scout certificates or academic diplomas.
We're told to just keep going until we run out of gas or reach retirement, at which point we
fade into the peripheral oblivion of retirement communities, morning tee-times, and long
midweek lunches at beach restaurants.
The idealistic Chris McCandless in Jon Krakauer's bestselling book Into the Wild
defiantly declares, "I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one." Anyone
who has spent enough time in the career hamster wheel can relate to this sentiment. Is
21st-century careerism -- with its promotion cycles, yearly feedback, and little wooden plaques
commemorating our accomplishments -- really the summit of human existence, the paramount
paradigm of human flourishing?
Michael J. Noughton, director of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St.
Thomas, Minnesota, and board chair for Reel Precision Manufacturing, doesn't think so. In his
Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World , Noughton provides a
sobering statistic: approximately two thirds of employees in the United States are "either
indifferent or hostile to their work." That's not just an indicator of professional
dissatisfaction; it's economically disastrous. The same survey estimates that employee
disengagement is costing the U.S. economy "somewhere between 450-550 billion dollars
annually."
The origin of this problem, says Naughton, is an error in how Americans conceive of work and
leisure. We seem to err in one of two ways. One is to label our work as strictly a job, a
nine-to-five that pays the bills. In this paradigm, leisure is an amusement, an escape from the
drudgery of boring, purposeless labor. The other way is that we label our work as a career that
provides the essential fulfillment in our lives. Through this lens, leisure is a utility,
simply another means to serve our work. Outside of work, we exercise to maintain our health in
order to work harder and longer. We read books that help maximize our utility at work and get
ahead of our competitors. We "continue our education" largely to further our careers.
Whichever error we fall into, we inevitably end up dissatisfied. The more we view work as a
painful, boring chore, the less effective we are at it, and the more complacent and
discouraged. Our leisure activities, in turn, no matter how distracting, only compound our
sadness, because no amount of games can ever satisfy our souls. Or, if we see our meaning in
our work and leisure as only another means of increasing productivity, we inevitably burn out,
wondering, perhaps too late in life, what exactly we were working for . As Augustine
of Hippo noted, our hearts are restless for God. More recently, C.S. Lewis noted that we yearn
to be fulfilled by something that nothing in this world can satisfy. We need both our work and
our leisure to be oriented to the transcendent in order to give our lives meaning and
purpose.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that much of the labor Americans perform
isn't actually good . There are "bad goods" that are detrimental to society and human
flourishing. Naughton suggests some examples: violent video games, pornography, adultery dating
sites, cigarettes, high-octane alcohol, abortifacients, gambling, usury, certain types of
weapons, cheat sheet websites, "gentlemen's clubs," and so on. Though not as clear-cut as the
above, one might also add working for the kinds of businesses that contribute to the
impoverishment or destruction of our communities,
as Tucker Carlson has recently argued .
Why does this matter for professional satisfaction? Because if our work doesn't offer goods
and services that contribute to our communities and the common good -- and especially if we are
unable to perceive how our labor plays into that common good -- then it will fundamentally
undermine our happiness. We will perceive our work primarily in a utilitarian sense, shrugging
our shoulders and saying, "it's just a paycheck," ignoring or disregarding the fact that as
rational animals we need to feel like our efforts matter.
Economic liberalism -- at least in its purest free-market expression -- is based on a
paradigm with nominalist and utilitarian origins that promote "freedom of indifference." In
rudimentary terms, this means that we need not be interested in the moral quality of our
economic output. If we produce goods that satisfy people's wants, increasing their "utils," as
my Econ 101 professor used to say, then we are achieving business success. In this paradigm, we
desire an economy that maximizes access to free choice regardless of the content of that
choice, because the more choices we have, the more we can maximize our utils, or sensory
satisfaction.
The freedom of indifference paradigm is in contrast to a more ancient understanding of
economic and civic engagement: a freedom for excellence. In this worldview, "we are made
for something," and participation in public acts of virtue is essential both to our
own well-being and that of our society. By creating goods and services that objectively benefit
others and contributing to an order beyond the maximization of profit, we bless both ourselves
and the polis . Alternatively, goods that increase "utils" but undermine the common
good are rejected.
Returning to Naughton's distinction between work and leisure, we need to perceive the latter
not as an escape from work or a means of enhancing our work, but as a true time of rest. This
means uniting ourselves with the transcendent reality from which we originate and to which we
will return, through prayer, meditation, and worship. By practicing this kind of true leisure,
well
treated in a book by Josef Pieper , we find ourselves refreshed, and discover renewed
motivation and inspiration to contribute to the common good.
Americans are increasingly aware of the problems with Wall Street conservatism and globalist
economics. We perceive that our post-Cold War policies are hurting our nation. Naughton's
treatise on work and leisure offers the beginnings of a game plan for what might replace
them.
Casey Chalk covers religion and other issues for The American Conservative and is a
senior writer for Crisis Magazine. He has degrees in history and teaching from the University
of Virginia, and a masters in theology from Christendom College.
Just two companies in the US -- Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft -- still have a
pristine, triple-A rating , the researchers noted. While sales of both the safest,
triple-A rated bonds and the riskiest "high-yield" bonds have been declining over the past
five years, there has been a dramatic rise in the amount of triple-B rated bonds that sit on
the lowest rung of the investment-grade ladder, just above high-yield.
You don't need to be Warren Buffet to know J&J and Microsoft are blue chips. The problem
is: how much rotten are the triple B? Financial expertise has degenerated to who know which is
the not-so-rotten-papers instead of knowing which are the most promising investments for the
progress of humanity, free market etc. etc. Having a guy spying for you behind the scenes
became more valuable than being a rocket engineer with a suma cum laude at MIT.
Russia, Iran and China are doing well in biding their time. The whole capitalist system is
ripe for another "corrective" recession somewhere between 2020-2023.
--/-
2. The giant of giants of the Asian Paper Tiger is in trouble:
Samsung was hit by a series of difficulties in 2019, with chip stockpiles bloating and prices
falling
[...]
But the figures beat expectations, analysts said, with chip demand starting to improve and
strong smartphone sales.
So, the Samsung's profit took a nose dive and still this was good news?
Who cares about "expectations"? In capitalism, either you're profiting enough or you aren't.
You can't just move the goal posts like that.
If it happened to some SOE in China, those "experts" would've already be souding the
trumpets of Apocalypse, calling for a complete privatization of the system and the mass suicide
of every CCP member - you know, because "the system doesn't work".
Those two Rijksbank laureates (there's no Nobel Prize of Economics, that's a fantasy term)
are two pseudo-scientists, but the numbers are too clear:
India's gross domestic product has been on a downward spiral for six consecutive quarters,
finishing at 4.5% in the September 2019 quarter. Private consumption, which contributes about
60% to the gross domestic product, is growing at 5.7% in 2019-20, much below the rate for the
previous financial year when it grew at 8.1%.
The National Statistical office has now forecast that India's gross domestic product
growth will hit a 11-year low of 5% in 2019-20, down from 6.8% in the previous year.
People who are reading this blog for enough time know that India cooks the books,
essentially doubling its own GDP growth figures. That means a 5% GDP growth in India actually
means 2.5% (maybe even 2.0%).
India promised the world and its own people it would become a superpower by 2020. They have
357 days left.
Yep. The Chinese agree with me: climate change was the main factor responsible for the
scale, durability and vastness of this year's epic bushfires in Australia. Drier eucalyptus
forests turn even a kid with a matchstick into a deadly eco-terrorist; a lightning bolt into a
massive volcanic eruption.
The Australian government itself agrees with me and the Chinese:
Bushfires are natural to the Australian ecosystem, and they happen every summer - what is up
to debate is the scale and vastness of this years' bushfires. The Australian right-wing, backed
up by the Murdoch media, should not try to pull a Nero and try to blame a random group of
innefective ecologists in a shameful witchhunt.
--/-
5. Age segregation in the UK seems to be serious business:
Britain is one of the world's most age-segregated nations, with the generational divide
increasing over the last decade, according to a new report which calls for urgent action to
address the "age apartheid" dividing the country. [...] According to the report, divisions
have increased as a result of the housing market, with the concentration of wealth now firmly
in the hands of older people. They tend to live in towns and rural areas, while the young are
sucked in by city life.
Nice curiosity if you're into that sociology stuff.
I agree that, today, protecting the Dollar Standard is the main national security
objective of the USA. That is so because issuing the universal fiat currency is a
conditio sine qua non of keeping the financial superpower status.
I also agree that the Petrodollar is the base that sustains the Dollar Standard.
But I disagree with the rest:
1) the Cold War didn't begin in 1945, but in 1917 - right after the October Revolution.
There's overwhelming documental evidence of that and, in fact, the years of 1943-1945 was the
only break it had. Until Stalingrad, the Western allies were still waiting to see if the USSR
and the Third Reich could still mutually anihilate themselves (yes, it is a myth the Allies
were really allies from 1939, but that's not a very simple demonstration);
2) in the aftermath of WWII, the USA emerged as both the industrial and financial
superpower in the capitalist world (i.e. the West). But this was an accidental - and very
unlikely - alignment of events. The USA always had imperial ambitions from its foundation
(the Manifest Destiny), but there's no evidence it was scheming to dominate the world before
1945. The American ascension was more a fruit of the European imperial superpowers destroying
themselves than by any American (or Jewish, as the far-right likes to speculate) design;
3) the USSR had nothing to do with Bretton Woods. BW was a strictly capitalist affair. And
it could not be any difference: the USSR was a socialist country, therefore, it didn't have
money-capital (money in the capitalist system has three functions: reserve of value, means of
exchange and means of payment). The only way it had to trade with the capitalist half of the
world was to exchange essential commodities (oil) for hard currency, with which it bought
what it needed for its own development (mainly, high technological machines which it could
copy and later develop on). So, the USSR didn't "balk" at BW - it was literally impossible
for it to pertain to the agreement.
Michael Hudson is not the only one who's come to understand that maintaining the
reserve-currency status of the US dollar (the "dollar hegemony") is the primary goal of US
foreign policy. Indeed, it's been the primary goal of US foreign policy since the end of
World War II, when the Bretton Woods agreement was put into effect. Notably, the Soviets
ended up balking at that agreement, and the Cold War did not start until afterwards. This
means that even the Cold War was not really about ideology - it was about money.
It's also important to note that the point of the "petrodollar" is to ensure that
petroleum - one of the most globally traded commodities and a commodity that's fundamental to
the global economy - is traded primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of the US dollar.
Ensuring that as much global/international trade happens in US dollars helps ensure that the
US dollar keeps its reserve-currency status, because it raises the foreign demand for US
dollars.
I agree that, today, protecting the Dollar Standard is the main national security
objective of the USA. That is so because issuing the universal fiat currency is a
conditio sine qua non of keeping the financial superpower status.
I also agree that the Petrodollar is the base that sustains the Dollar Standard.
But I disagree with the rest:
1) the Cold War didn't begin in 1945, but in 1917 - right after the October Revolution.
There's overwhelming documental evidence of that and, in fact, the years of 1943-1945 was the
only break it had. Until Stalingrad, the Western allies were still waiting to see if the USSR
and the Third Reich could still mutually anihilate themselves (yes, it is a myth the Allies
were really allies from 1939, but that's not a very simple demonstration);
2) in the aftermath of WWII, the USA emerged as both the industrial and financial
superpower in the capitalist world (i.e. the West). But this was an accidental - and very
unlikely - alignment of events. The USA always had imperial ambitions from its foundation
(the Manifest Destiny), but there's no evidence it was scheming to dominate the world before
1945. The American ascension was more a fruit of the European imperial superpowers destroying
themselves than by any American (or Jewish, as the far-right likes to speculate) design;
3) the USSR had nothing to do with Bretton Woods. BW was a strictly capitalist affair. And
it could not be any difference: the USSR was a socialist country, therefore, it didn't have
money-capital (money in the capitalist system has three functions: reserve of value, means of
exchange and means of payment). The only way it had to trade with the capitalist half of the
world was to exchange essential commodities (oil) for hard currency, with which it bought
what it needed for its own development (mainly, high technological machines which it could
copy and later develop on). So, the USSR didn't "balk" at BW - it was literally impossible
for it to pertain to the agreement.
Correction: the three functions of money in capitalism are reserve/store of value, means
of exchange and unit of account . I basically wrote "means of exchange" twice in the
original comment.
Hello! Michael Hudson first set forth the methodology of the Outlaw US Empire's financial
control of the world via his book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American
Empire in 1972. In 2003, he issued an updated edition which you can download for free
here .
If you're interested, here's an interview he gave while in China that's autobiographical
. And here's his most recent Resume/CV/Bibliography , although it doesn't
go into as much detail about his recent work as he does in and forgive them their debts:
Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year , which
for me is fascinating.
His most recent TV appearances are here and here .
Bingo! You're the first person here to make that connection aside from myself. You'll note
from Hudson's
assessment of Soleimani's killing he sees the Outlaw US Empire as using the Climate
Crisis as a weapon:
"America's attempt to maintain this buttress explains U.S. opposition to any foreign
government steps to reverse global warming and the extreme weather caused by the world's
U.S.-sponsored dependence on oil. Any such moves by Europe and other countries would reduce
dependence on U.S. oil sales, and hence on the U.S's ability to control the global oil spigot
as a means of control and coercion. These are viewed as hostile acts.
"Oil also explains U.S. opposition to Russian oil exports via Nordstream. U.S. strategists
want to treat energy as a U.S. national monopoly. Other countries can benefit in the way that
Saudi Arabia has done – by sending their surpluses to the U.S. economy – but not
to support their own economic growth and diplomacy. Control of oil thus implies support for
continued global warming as an inherent part of U.S. strategy....
"This strategy will continue, until foreign countries reject it. If Europe and other
regions fail to do so, they will suffer the consequences of this U.S. strategy in the form of
a rising U.S.-sponsored war via terrorism, the flow of refugees, and accelerated global
warming (and extreme weather)."
@Cynica #38
Financially, the US dollar as reserve currency is enormously beneficial to the US
government's ability to spend.
And oil has historically been both a tactical and a strategic necessity; when the US was
importing half its oil, this is a lot of money. 8 million bpd @ $50/barrel = $146B. Add in
secondary value add like transport, refining, downstream industries, etc and it likely
triples the impact or more - but this is only tactical.
Worldwide, the impact is 10X = $1.5 trillion annually. Sure, this is a bit under 10% of the
$17.7T in world trade in 2017, but it serves as an "anchor tenant" to the idea of world
reserve currency. A second anchor is the overall role of US trade, which was $3.6T in 2016
(imports only).
If we treat central bank reserves as a proxy for currency used in trade, this means 60%+ of
the $17.7T in trade is USD. $3.6T is direct, but the $7 trillion in trade that doesn't impact
the US is the freebie. To put this in perspective, the entire monetary float of the USD
domestically is about $3.6T.
USD as world reserve currency literally doubles (at least) the float - from which the US
government can issue debt (money) to fund its activities. In reality, it is likely a lot more
since foreigners using USD to fund trade means at least some USD in Central Banks, plus the
actual USD in the transaction, plus corporate/individual USD reserves/float.
Again, nothing above is formally linked - I just wanted to convey an idea of just how
advantageous the petrodollar/USD as world trade reserve currency really is.
The credo of British politics is the words of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the
Prime Minister of Great Britain, Henry Palmerston, uttered in his speech in the House of
Commons on March 1, 1858: "We do not have eternal allies and we do not have constant enemies;
our interests are eternal and permanent. Our duty is to protect these interests. " And these
interests lie in destroying and robbing other nations and keeping their own people in
fear.
It more accurately than ever describes the current state of the United State
whitehead is clearly antisemitic and should be banned from the internet. Abandoning the only friend the usa has in the mideast will have severe consequences for the usa
empire.
When America put Trump in office many of us were seeking a world where the leadership in
Washington would focus on bringing both jobs and money home rather than squandering it on
foreign wars. Simply put, Trump did not come across as a warmonger during the presidential
campaign. If David Stockman is right it could be that the power of the swamp is too strong
and simply cannot be drained.
Stockman, who served as a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan and as
the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, contends
that President Trump has become a hostage of those occupying the very swamp he promised to
drain.
Come Home, America: Stop Policing The Globe And Put An End To Wars-Without-End
NO--we have nowhere to park all of that stuff and nowhere to house all of those troops. It
would help immensely if we just got this over with and started taxing and outright
administering these places we occupy. If we're going to be an empire (which no one ever voted
for) then we need to start acting like it. Rome, Byzantium, England, Spain, France, etc. Just
do it and be done with it.
I wish - not happening yet. Instead they harrass NATO countries to abandon some economic
projects to do more damage to them on top of sanctions. If Iraq sells oil to China it's a
problem for them, even though that could reduce US costs for Iraq. US policies are
cookoo.
All Presidents get turned once in the WH. Maybe it's as simple as threatening to be
kennedy'd.
Frank...Frank-Frank...IT always been about Zionist, Banksters, and the families that run
your world. When will you get it through you little pea size brain you are nothing but
expendable Xenophobe fodder allowed to thrive and be ripped the moment they deem it so.
Maybe if they took the American flag off of every military uniform, plane and embassy and
replaced it with the Rothschild red shield things might become more obvious.
Nordstream II cost $12 billion. Russia is selling 55 billion M3 of LNG to Europe. Add
Nordstream I, another 55 billion, Power of Siberia to China and Turkstream just opened.
And for $5 trillion spent bombing unoffending MENA countries the US has gotten what? Moar
war. That's it.
Russia is building infrastructure while the US destroys.
That letter is no mistake. It shows that there are 2 opposing sides in the US Military,
the dark hats and the white hats. One side wants to end wars, the other side do not. Just
like what Q has been saying all along.
Good old USA. Invade illegally by lying, killing, build an airbase and tell everyone that
they'll leave if Iraq will pay for the airbase and if not they'll sanction Iraq into
oblivion.
Is it any wonder why most of the world is disgusted with their behaviour.
As thousands of American service members prepare for the
worst in the Middle East following an American drone strike that killed Iran's second-most
powerful man, just 23% of registered voters can identify the Islamic republic on an unlabeled
map of the globe, according to a Morning
Consult/Politico survey.
When shown an unlabeled map of just the Middle East, the number rose to a still-abysmal 28%
. Eight percent of those thought Iran was Iraq on the second map - just like Joe Biden
.
Of those surveyed, men were around twice as likely as women to identify Iran on both
maps...
I can't quite understand how gratuitous US piracy and adventurism in places on the globe
beyond the knowledge and reach of most Americans could possibly be compared to Iranian
actions securing their immediate regional borders and interests. You can at least understand
(even if you critique) a US preoccupation with Cuba over the years, or drug cartels in
central America, or economic refugees in Mexico because they are close by and have a more
less direct effect on the stability of the US. But they have no authority beyond that other
than the ability to project violence and force. That's just simple imperialism. But now the
US have whacked a made guy without any real reason (i.e. looking at you the wrong way is not
a reason). Any mafia hood knows that, especially a New Yorker like Trump. So the climax of
The Godfather comes to mind. It is staggeringly naive and frankly moronic to think
that this is about good and evil. I bet Soleimani was no angel, but he wasn't whacked because
he was a bad guy, but because he was extraordinarily effective military organizer. Star Wars
has a lot to answer for in stunting the historical sensibilities of entire generations, but
its underlying narrative is the only MSM playbook now. Even more staggering is the stupendous
arrogance of the US belief in its 'rights' (based on thuggery and avarice), as though it were
the only power in the world capable of establishing a moral order. The lesson in humility to
come will be both long-awaited and go unheeded. Even the mob understand there has to be
rules.
After reading Crooke and Federicci's articles, there is only one way to stop this madness
blowing into a global conflict. Russia and China need to get involved whether they like it or
not. Diplomacy and sideline analysis has run its course. This is their time to stamp their
influence in the region and finish off the empire once and for all. Maybe that way, The
Europeans will grow some minerals and become sovereign again.
Otherwise, China can kiss its Belt and Road goodbye and go into a recession with the loss
of their investments up to this point and become slaves to the Americans again.
And Russia, the enemy du jour of Europe and US will be next and be crushed under economic
sanctions and isolation.
This is the moment that stars are aligned . Russia and China should park their battle
carriers off the Gulf and gives direct warning to Israel and US that any nuclear threat ,
tactical or otherwise, against anyone in the region is a non-starter.
I read so much about these two countries and that they will get involved. I have recited
those lines myself. But after these events and how things are escalating, I cannot see how
they cannot be involved. US is its most vulnerable and weakest with respect to economic,
diplomatic and military conditions.
The time of condemnations, letters of objection to the UN and veto votes in UNSC is over.
There is only one way to deal with a rogue nation and that is by force.
It was not the US decision to fire missiles against the IRGC commander Brigadier General
Qassem Soleimani that killed the Iranian officer and his companions in Baghdad. Yes, of course,
the order that was given to launch missiles from the two drones (which destroyed the two cars
carrying Sardar Soleimani and his companion the Iraqi commander in al-Hashd al-Shaabi Jamal
Jaafar Al-Tamimi aka Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes and burned their bodies in the vehicle) came from US
command and control.
However, the reason President Donald Trump made this decision derives from the weakness of
the "axis of resistance", which has completely retreated from the level of performance that
Iran believed it was capable of after decades of work to strengthen this "axis".
A close companion of Major General Qassim Soleimani, to whom he spoke hours before boarding
the plane that took him from Damascus to Baghdad, told me:
"The nobleman died. Palestine above all has lost Hajj Qassem (Soleimani). He was the
"King" of the Axis of the Resistance and its leader. He was assassinated and this is exactly
what he was hoping to reach in this life (Martyrdom). However, this axis will live and will
not die. No doubt, the Axis of the Resistance needs to review its policy and regenerate
itself to correct its path. This was what Hajj Qassim was complaining about and planning to
work on and strategizing about in his last hours."
The US struck Iran at the heart of its pride by killing Major General Soleimani. But the
"axis of the Resistance" killed him before that. This is how:
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assassinated the deputy head of the Military
Council (the highest authority in the Lebanese Hezbollah, which is headed by its
Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah), Hajj Imad Mughniyah in Damascus, Syria, Hezbollah could
not avenge him until today.
When Trump gave Netanyahu Jerusalem as the "capital of Israel", the "Axis of the Resistance"
did not move except by holding television symposia and conferences verbally rejecting the
decision.
When President Trump offered the occupied Syrian Golan Heights to Israel and the "Axis of
Resistance" did not react, the US President Donald Trump and his team understood that they were
opposed by no effective deterrent. The inaction of the Resistance axis emboldened Trump to do
what he wants.
And when Israel bombed hundreds of Syrian and Iranian targets in Syria , the "Axis of the
Resistance" justified its lack of retaliation by the typical sentence: "We do not want to be
dragged along by the timing of the engagement imposed by the enemy," as a senior official in
this axis told me.
In Iraq shortly before his death, Major General Soleimani was complaining about the
weakening of the Iraqi ranks within this "Axis of the Resistance", represented by the Al-Bina'
(Construction) Alliance and other groups close to this alliance like Al-Hikma of Ammar al-Hakim
and Haidar al-Abadi, formerly close to Iran, that have gone over to the US side.
In Iraq, Major General Soleimani was very patient and never lost his temper. He was trying
to reconcile the Iraqis, both his allies and those who had chosen the US camp and disagreed
with him. He used to hug those who shouted at him to lower tensions and continue dialogue to
avoid spoiling the meeting. Anyone who raised his voice during discussions soon found that it
was Soleimani who calmed everyone down.
Hajj Qassem Soleimani was unable to reach a consensus on the new Prime Minister's name among
those he deemed to be allies in the same coalition. He asked Iraqi leaders to select the names
and went through all of these asking questions about the acceptability of these names to the
political groups, to the Marjaiya, to protestors in the street and whether the suggested names
were not provocative or challenging to the US. Notwithstanding the animosity between Iran and
the US, Soleimani encouraged the selection of a personality that would not be boycotted by the
US. Soleimani believed the US capable of damaging Iraq and understood the importance of
maintaining a good relationship with the US for the stability of the country.
Soleimani was shocked by the dissension among Iraqi Shia and believed that the "axis of
resistance" needed a new vision as it was faltering. In the final hours before his death, Major
General Soleimani was ruminating on the profound antagonisms between Iraqis of the same
camp.
When the Iraqi street began to move against the government, the line rejecting American
hegemony was fragmented because it was part of the authority that ruled and governed Iraq. To
make matters worse, Sayyed Muqtada al-Sadr directed his arrows against his partners in
government, as though the street demonstrations did not target him, the politician controlling
the largest number of Iraqi deputies, ministers and state officials, who had participated in
the government for more than ten years.
Major General Soleimani admonished Moqtada Al-Sadr for his stances, which contributed to
undermining the Iraqi ranks because the Sadrist leader did not offer an alternative solution or
practical project other than the chaos. Moqtada has his own men, the feared Saraya al-Salam,
present in the street.
When US Defense Secretary Mark Esper called Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi on
December 28 and informed him of America's intentions of hitting Iraqi security targets inside
Iraq, including the PMU, Soleimani was very disappointed by Abdul-Mahdi's failure to
effectively oppose Esper. Abdul-Mahdi merely told Esper that the proposed US action was
dangerous. Soleimani knew that the US would not have hit Iraqi targets had Abdul-Mahdi dared to
oppose the US decision. The targeted areas were a common Iranian-Iraqi operational stage to
monitor and control ISIS movements on the borders with Syria and Iraq. The US would have
reversed its decision had the Iraqi Prime Minister threatened the US with retaliation in the
event that Iraqi forces were bombed and killed. After all, the US had no legal right to attack
any objective in Iraq without the agreement of the Iraqi government. This decision was the
moment when Iraq has lost its sovereignty and the US took control of the country.
This effective US control is another reason why President Trump gave the green light to kill
Major General Soleimani. The Iraqi front had demonstrated its weakness and also, it was
necessary to select a strong Iraqi leader with the guts to stand to the US arrogance and
unlawful actions.
Iran has never controlled Iraq, as most analysts mistakenly believe and speculate. For
years, the US has worked hard in the corridors of the Iraqi political leadership lobby for its
own interests. The most energetic of its agents was US Presidential envoy Brett McGurk, who
clearly realised the difficulties of navigating inside Iraqi leaders' corridors during the
search for a prime minister of Iraq before the appointment of Adel Abdel Mahdi, the selection
of President Barham Saleh and other governments in the past. Major General Soleimani and McGurk
shared an understanding of these difficulties. Both understood the nature of the Iraqi
political quagmire.
Soleimani did not give orders to fire missiles at US bases or attack the US Embassy. If it
was in his hands to destroy them with accurate missiles and to remove the entire embassy from
its place without repercussions, he would not have hesitated. But the Iraqis have their own
opinions, methods, modus operandi and selection of targets and missile calibres; they never
relied on Soleimani for such decisions.
Iranian involvement in Iraqi affairs was never welcomed by the Marjaiya in Najaf, even if it
agreed to receive Soleimani on a few occasions. They clashed over the reelection of Nuri
al-Maliki, Soleimani's preferred candidate, to the point that the Marjaiya wrote a letter
making its refusal of al-Maliki explicit. This led to the selection of Abadi as prime
minister.
Soleimani's views contradicted the perception of the Marjaiya, that had to write a clear
message, firstly, to reject the re-election of Nori al-Maliki to a third session, despite
Soleimani's insistence.
All of the above is related to the stage that followed the 2011 departure of US forces from
Iraq under President Obama. Prior to that, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis was the link between the
Iraqis and Iran: he had the decision-making power, the vision, the support of various groups,
and effectively served as the representative of Soleimani, who did not interfere in the
details. These Iraqi groups met with Soleimani often in Iran; Soleimani rarely travelled to
Iraq during the period of heavy US military presence.
Soleimani, although he was the leader of the "Axis of the Resistance", was sometimes called
"the king" in some circles because his name evokes Solomon. According to sources within the
"Axis of the Resistance", he "never dictated his own policy but left a margin of movement and
decision to all leaders of the axis without exception. Therefore, he was considered the link
between this axis and the supreme leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei. Soleimani was able to contact
Sayyed Khamenei at any time and directly without mediation. The Leader of the revolution
considered Soleimani as his son.
According to sources, in Syria, Soleimani "never hesitated to jump inside a truck, ride an
ordinary car, take the first helicopter, or travel on a transport or cargo plane as needed. He
did not take any security precautions but used his phone (which he called a companion spy)
freely because he believed that when the decision came to assassinate him, he would follow his
destiny. He looked forward to becoming a martyr because he had already lived long."
Was the leader of the "resistance axis" managing and running it?
Sayyed Ali Khamenei told Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: "You are an Arab and the Arabs accept you
more than they accept Iran". Sayyed Nasrallah directed and managed the axis of Lebanon, Syria
and Yemen and had an important role in Iraq. Hajj Soleimani was the liaison between the axis of
the resistance and Iran and he was the financial and logistical officer. According to my
source, "He was a friend of all leaders and officials of all ranks. He was humble and looked
after everyone he had to deal with".
The "Axis of Resistance" indirectly allowed the killing of Qassem Soleimani. If Israel and
the US could know Sayyed Nasrallah's whereabouts, they would not hesitate a moment to
assassinate him. They may be aware: the reaction may be limited to burning flags and holding
conferences and manifesting in front of an embassy. Of course, this kind of reaction does not
deter President Trump who wants to be re-elected with the support of Israel and US public
opinion. He wants to present himself as a warrior and determined leader who loves battle and
killing.
Iran invested 40 years building the "Axis of the Resistance". It cannot remain idle, faced
with the assassination of the Leader of this axis. Would a suitable price be the US exit from
Iraq and condemnation in the Security Council? Would that, together with withdrawal from the
nuclear deal, be enough for Iran to avenge its General? Will the ensuing battle be confined to
the Iraqi stage? Will it be used for the victory of certain Iraqi political players?
The assassination of its leader represents the supreme test for the Axis of Resistance. All
sides, friend and foe, are awaiting its response.
And when Israel bombed hundreds of Syrian and Iranian targets in Syria , the "Axis of
the Resistance" justified its lack of retaliation by the typical sentence: "We do not want
to be dragged along by the timing of the engagement imposed by the enemy," as a senior
official in this axis told me.
If the 'source' in this article was so close to Soleimani, then he would also have
mentioned that Russia was dictating terms in Syria.
Soleimani knew this and could not afford to lose Russia as an ally, this would definitely
have happened if another 'player' was brought into the war just because Soleimani decided to
retaliate to Zionist bombing.
Putin, Assad and Soleimani had a long term view of winning in Syria, not making things
worse because of a quick retaliatory strike.
Non-binding resolution asking the prime minister to rescind Iraq's invitation...
The current government is unlikely to push this through. After a new PM is chosen, it
would still take a year or more to move the US troops out by the agreements under which they
set up their base. All of this has to be viewed under the context that the US was
asked to send troops by the Iraqi president.
Yesterday,
Iraqi lawmakers voted to expel foreign troops from the country during an emergency
parliamentary session. Interim Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul Mahdi, stressed during the
session, that while the US government notified the Iraqi military of the planned strike on
Soleimani, his government denied Washington permission to continue with the operation.
In a meeting Monday, Mahdi, a caretaker prime minister who said in November he would resign,
told US Ambassador Matthew H. Tueller that the US and Iraq needed to cooperate "to implement
the withdrawal of foreign forces in accordance with the decision of the Iraqi parliament,"
according to a statement from the PM's office that was cited by
the Washington Post .
Though the Iraq war 'officially' ended in 2011, thousands of coalition troops stuck around.
Their numbers increased following the rise of ISIS in the region.
Ending the US troop presence in Iraq has been a longtime goal of non-interventionists like
Ron Paul and his son, Rand.
That said, even without troops in Iraq, the US will still have plenty of capacity to bully
Iran, and other other regional powers.
AP WASHINGTON (AP) -- Having the leader of Iran's elite Quds Force direct Iraqi forces
battling the Islamic State group is complicating the U.S. mission against terrorism and
contributing to destabilization in Iraq, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency
said Sunday.
In my golden days, I did manufacturing throughput analysis, cost modeled parts, and
reviewed component and transportation distribution. I am curious. Forget all that
neoliberal stuff . . .
Ohh, those golden days
Measurement has its place and is the cornerstone of science, but it is not equal to
pattern recognition. And when applied to social phenomena with their complexity it is
more often a trap, rather then an insight.
You need to understand that.
Deification of questionable metrics is an objective phenomenon that we observe under
neoliberalism.
A classic example of deification of a questionable metric under neoliberalism is the
"cult of GDP" ("If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?") See , for example
For example, many people discuss stagnation of GDP growth in Japan not understanding
here we are talking about the country with shrinking population. And adjusted for this
factor I am not sure that it not higher then in the USA (were it is grossly distorted by
the cancerous growth of FIRE sector).
So while comparing different years for a single country might make some limited sense,
those who blindly compare GDP of different countries (even with PPP adjustment) IMHO
belong to a modern category of economic charlatans. Kind of Lysenkoism, if you wish
That tells you something about primitivism and pseudo-scientific nature of neoliberal
economics.
We also need to remember the "performance reviews travesty" which is such a clear
illustration of "cult of measurement" abuses that it does not it even requires
commentary. Google has abolished numerical ratings in April 2014.
Recently I come across an interesting record of early application of it in AT&T at
Brian W Kernighan book UNIX: A History and a Memoir at late 60th, early as 70th.
Russia is planning level production for the next 4 years.
"As far as the production cuts are concerned, I repeat once again, this is not an
indefinite process. A decision on the exit should be gradually taken in order to keep up market
share and so that our companies would be able to provide and implement their future projects. I
think that we will consider that this year."(2020)
Meanwhile, Russia's energy ministry is assuming that the country's total output is to
average around and slightly above 11.2 million barrels per day until 2024. In other words, it
is not building any cut into its plan.
Russia's peak month, so far, was December 2018 at 11,408,000 barrels per day. The average
daily production for 2018 was 11,115,000 bpd. Average production for 2019 was 11,211,000 bpd.
This is the level they hope to hold for the next 4 years.
Russia's production increased by an average of 96,000 barrels per day in 2019. They are not
expecting any further increase at all. They just hope to hold at 2019 levels for another four
years. I think they will be very lucky if they manage that.
Point is, the world's largest producer, the USA, will likely peak in a few months. The
world's second-largest producer, Russia, is admitting they have peaked. The world's
third-largest producer, Saudi Arabia, has very likely peaked though they do not admit it. OPEC
likely peaked in 2016, *Iran and Venezuela notwithstanding.
*Iran peaked in 2005 at 3,938,000 bpd. My Venezuela records only go back to 2001 when they
produced 2,961,000 bpd. However, they peaked several years before that. However, neither is
producing at maximum capacity today due to political problems. However both are clearly in
decline regardless of political problems keeping them from producing flat out.
If we are at peak oil right now we are damn close to it.
The Russian Chart below is C+C through December 2019.
Ovi, the data in my chart above is from the official Ministry of Energy web site,
converting tons to barrels at 7.33 barrels per ton: MINISTRY OF ENERGY OF
RUSSIAN FEDERATION
In December, total oil and gas condensate stood at 11.262 million bpd, up from 11.244
million bpd in November, according to the data.
Those are the exact numbers I used in my chart above. And yes, 2019 was a new high,
exactly as I stated in the post above. Its yearly average beat the 2018 yearly average by
90,000 bpd.
Concerning 2020 average, it could not be stated any clearer than this:
Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak expects Russian oil and condensate production
of between 555 million tonnes and 565 million tonnes in 2020, or 11.12-11.32 million bpd
using a conversion rate of 7.33 barrels per tonne of oil.
Got an exemption for condensates at the OPEC meeting, though this was not discussed in
the press conference.
Achieving another cut of 70,000 b/d in first quarter appears to be beyond its
capability, given past statements.
Russia is planning level production for next 4 years.
And is prepared for oil prices to drop to $25-30 per barrel.
You wrote: I found this statement interesting, in that if they can't increase
production, and are at max, why are they worried about market share.
I really don't understand that question. If they plan on producing 11.2 million barrels
per day for the next four years, then they should be worried about their market share.
Whether they can or cannot produce more than that is beside the point.
As thousands of American service members prepare for the
worst in the Middle East following an American drone strike that killed Iran's second-most
powerful man, just 23% of registered voters can identify the Islamic republic on an unlabeled
map of the globe, according to a Morning
Consult/Politico survey.
When shown an unlabeled map of just the Middle East, the number rose to a still-abysmal 28%
. Eight percent of those thought Iran was Iraq on the second map - just like Joe Biden
.
Of those surveyed, men were around twice as likely as women to identify Iran on both
maps...
We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are
intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy
does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we
could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies.
If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL
After having forbidden the Chinese company Huawei to compete in the calls for tender for the
5G network, the United States are now forbidding the Europeans to increase their supplies of
Russian gas. While the first decision was aimed at maintaining the coherence of NATO, the
second is not a result of Russophobia, but of the 1992 " Wolfowitz doctrine " - preventing the
EU from becoming a competitor of the " American Empire ". In both cases, the point is to
infantilise the EU and keep it in a situation of dependence. Voltaire Network | Rome (Italy) |
30 December 2019 français italiano
Español PortuguêsTürkçe română Deutsch
norsk
German chancellorAngela Merkel and her Minister of the Economy, Olaf Scholz, immediately
denounced US interference.
Although they were locked in a convoluted struggle concerning the impeachment of President
Trump, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate laid down their arms in order to vote, in
quasi-unanimity, for the imposition of heavy sanctions on the companies participating in the
construction of North Stream 2, the doubling of the gas pipeline which delivers Russian gas to
Germany across the Baltic Sea. The main victims were the European companies which had helped
finance the 11 billion dollar project with the Russian company Gazprom. The project is now 80 %
finished. The Austrian company Omy, British/Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, French Engie, German
companies Uniper and Wintershall, Italian Saipem and Swiss Allseas are also taking part in the
laying of the pipeline.
The doubling of North Stream increases Europe's dependence on Russian gas, warn the United
States. Above all, they are preoccupied by the fact that the gas pipeline – by crossing
the Baltic in waters belonging to Russia, Finland, Sweden and Germany – thus avoids the
Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary), the Baltic States and
Ukraine. In other words, the European countries which have the closest ties to Washington
through NATO (to which we must add Italy).
Rather than being economic, the goal for the USA is strategic. This is confirmed by the fact
that the sanctions on North Stream 2 are included in the National Defense Authorization
Act , the legislative act which, for fiscal year 2020, hands the Pentagon the colossal sum
of 738 billion dollars for new wars and new weapons (including space weapons), to which must be
added other posts which bring the US military expenditure to approximately 1,000 billion
dollars. The economic sanctions on North Stream 2 are part of a politico-military escalation
against Russia.
An ulterior confirmation can be found in the fact that the US Congress has established
sanctions not only against North Stream 2, but also against the Turk-Stream, which, in its
final phase of realisation, will bring Russian gas across the Black Sea to Eastern Thrace,the
small European area of Turkey. From there, by another pipeline, Russian gas should be delivered
to Bulgaria, Serbia and other European countries. This is the Russian riposte to the US action
which managed to block the South Stream pipeline in 2014. South Stream was intended to link
Russia to Italy across the Black Sea and by land to Tarvisio (Udine). Italy would therefore
have become a switch platform for gas in the EU, with notable economic advantages. The Obama
administration was able to scuttle the project, with the collaboration of the European
Union.
The company Saipem (Italian Eni Group), once again affected by the US sanctions against
North Stream 2, was severely hit by the blockage of South Stream – in 2014, it lost
contracts to the value of 2.4 billion Euros, to which other contracts would have been added if
the project had continued. But at the time, no-one in Italy or in the EU protested against the
burial of the project which was being organised by the USA. Now German interests are in play,
and critical voices are being raised in Germany and in the EU against US sanctions against
North Stream 2.
Nothing is being said about the fact that the European Union has agreed to import liquified
natural gas (LNG) from the USA, an extract from bituminous shale by the destructive technique
of hydraulic fracturation (fracking). In order to damage Russia, Washington is attempting to
reduce its gas exports to the EU, obliging European consumers to foot the bill. Since President
Donald Trump and the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, signed in
Washington in July 2018 the Joint Statement of 25 July: European Union imports of U.S.
Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) , the EU has doubled its importation of LNG from the USA,
co-financing the infrastructures via an initial expenditure of 656 million Euros. However, this
did not save European companies from US sanctions. Manlio Dinucci
@Situational
Lefty
...The world is not dependent on Iranian oil. But it is dependent on Gulf oil and gas. A few
missiles fired into a Q-Max
will cause a real problem - mainly in Europe. Without a steady supply of gas and oil from the
Saudis and Emirates it will very quickly get cold and dark in Europe this winter and they'll
soon regret allowing Uncle Sammmy to put a kink in Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream.
Speaking of TurkStream, Putin will be going to Turkey to attend the official
launching with Erdogan right after his pleasant visit with Assad . I wonder
what in the world Putin and Erdogan are going to do with those extra 31.5 billion cubic
meters of natural gas?
Russia and China are relatively isolated. American actions in the last 2 decades have
caused the two to elope and their love affair is going strong. Putin and Xi have already had
30 intimate dates discussing just this very scenario.
Of course, the extra transport costs to ship America's shoes, underwear and pots to piss
in is going to be a bitch for the now burgeoning poor class.
Yesterday,
Iraqi lawmakers voted to expel foreign troops from the country during an emergency
parliamentary session. Interim Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul Mahdi, stressed during the
session, that while the US government notified the Iraqi military of the planned strike on
Soleimani, his government denied Washington permission to continue with the operation.
In a meeting Monday, Mahdi, a caretaker prime minister who said in November he would resign,
told US Ambassador Matthew H. Tueller that the US and Iraq needed to cooperate "to implement
the withdrawal of foreign forces in accordance with the decision of the Iraqi parliament,"
according to a statement from the PM's office that was cited by
the Washington Post .
Though the Iraq war 'officially' ended in 2011, thousands of coalition troops stuck around.
Their numbers increased following the rise of ISIS in the region.
Ending the US troop presence in Iraq has been a longtime goal of non-interventionists like
Ron Paul and his son, Rand.
That said, even without troops in Iraq, the US will still have plenty of capacity to bully
Iran, and other other regional powers.
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4777
Fragmentation In 'The Axis Of Resistance' Led To Soleimani's Death
by
Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/06/2020 - 20:45
0
SHARES
It was not the US decision to fire missiles against the IRGC commander Brigadier General
Qassem Soleimani that killed the Iranian officer and his companions in Baghdad.
Yes, of
course, the order that was given to launch missiles from the two drones (which destroyed the two cars
carrying Sardar Soleimani and his companion the Iraqi commander in al-Hashd al-Shaabi Jamal Jaafar
Al-Tamimi aka Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes and burned their bodies in the vehicle) came from US command and
control.
However, the reason President Donald Trump made this decision derives from the weakness of
the "axis of resistance", which has completely retreated from the level of performance that Iran
believed it was capable of
after decades of work to strengthen this "axis".
A close companion of Major General Qassim Soleimani, to whom he spoke hours before boarding the
plane that took him from Damascus to Baghdad, told me:
"The nobleman died. Palestine above all has lost Hajj Qassem (Soleimani).
He was the
"King" of the Axis of the Resistance and its leader.
He was assassinated and this is
exactly what he was hoping to reach in this life (Martyrdom). However, this axis will live and will
not die.
No doubt, the Axis of the Resistance needs to review its policy and regenerate
itself to correct its path.
This was what Hajj Qassim was complaining about and planning
to work on and strategizing about in his last hours."
The US struck Iran at the heart of its pride by killing Major General Soleimani. But
the
"axis of the Resistance" killed him before that. This is how:
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assassinated the deputy head of the Military Council
(the highest authority in the Lebanese Hezbollah, which is headed by its Secretary-General, Hassan
Nasrallah), Hajj
Imad Mughniyah
in Damascus, Syria, Hezbollah could not avenge him
until today.
When Trump gave Netanyahu
Jerusalem
as the "capital of Israel", the "Axis of the
Resistance" did not move except by holding television symposia and conferences verbally rejecting the
decision.
When President Trump offered the occupied Syrian
Golan Heights
to Israel and the
"Axis of Resistance" did not react, the US President Donald Trump and his team understood that they
were opposed by no effective deterrent. The inaction of the Resistance axis emboldened Trump to do
what he wants.
And when Israel bombed
hundreds of Syrian and Iranian targets in Syria
, the "Axis
of the Resistance" justified its lack of retaliation by the typical sentence: "We do not want to be
dragged along by the timing of the engagement imposed by the enemy," as a senior official in this axis
told me.
In Iraq shortly before his death, Major General Soleimani was complaining about
the
weakening of the Iraqi ranks
within this "Axis of the Resistance", represented by the
Al-Bina' (Construction) Alliance and other groups close to this alliance like Al-Hikma of Ammar
al-Hakim and Haidar al-Abadi, formerly close to Iran, that have gone over to the US side.
In Iraq, Major General Soleimani was very patient and never lost his temper. He was trying to
reconcile the Iraqis, both his allies and those who had chosen the US camp and disagreed with him. He
used to hug those who shouted at him to lower tensions and continue dialogue to avoid spoiling the
meeting. Anyone who raised his voice during discussions soon found that it was Soleimani who calmed
everyone down.
Hajj Qassem Soleimani was unable to reach a consensus on the new Prime Minister's name among those
he deemed to be allies in the same coalition. He asked Iraqi leaders to select the names and went
through all of these asking questions about the acceptability of these names to the political groups,
to the Marjaiya, to protestors in the street and whether the suggested names were not provocative or
challenging to the US.
Notwithstanding the animosity between Iran and the US, Soleimani
encouraged the selection of a personality that would not be boycotted by the US. Soleimani believed
the US capable of damaging Iraq and understood the importance of maintaining a good relationship with
the US for the stability of the country.
Soleimani was shocked by the dissension among Iraqi Shia and believed that the "axis of resistance"
needed a new vision as it was faltering. In the final hours before his death, Major General Soleimani
was ruminating on the profound antagonisms between Iraqis of the same camp.
When the Iraqi street began to move against the government, the line rejecting American hegemony
was fragmented because it was part of the authority that ruled and governed Iraq. To make matters
worse, Sayyed Muqtada al-Sadr directed his arrows against his partners in government, as though the
street demonstrations did not target him, the politician controlling the largest number of Iraqi
deputies, ministers and state officials, who had participated in the government for more than ten
years.
Major General Soleimani admonished Moqtada Al-Sadr for his stances, which contributed to
undermining the Iraqi ranks because the Sadrist leader did not offer an alternative solution or
practical project other than the chaos. Moqtada has his own men, the feared Saraya al-Salam, present
in the street.
When US Defense Secretary Mark Esper called Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi on December 28
and informed him of America's intentions of hitting Iraqi security targets inside Iraq, including the
PMU, Soleimani was very disappointed by Abdul-Mahdi's failure to effectively oppose Esper. Abdul-Mahdi
merely told Esper that the proposed US action was dangerous. Soleimani knew that the US would not have
hit Iraqi targets had Abdul-Mahdi dared to oppose the US decision.
The targeted areas were a
common Iranian-Iraqi operational stage to monitor and control ISIS movements on the borders with Syria
and Iraq.
The US would have reversed its decision had the Iraqi Prime Minister threatened the
US with retaliation in the event that Iraqi forces were bombed and killed. After all, the US had no
legal right to attack any objective in Iraq without the agreement of the Iraqi government.
This
decision was the moment when Iraq has lost its sovereignty and the US took control of the country.
This effective US control is another reason why President Trump gave the green light to kill Major
General Soleimani. The Iraqi front had demonstrated its weakness and also, it was necessary to select
a strong Iraqi leader with the guts to stand to the US arrogance and unlawful actions.
Iran has never controlled Iraq, as most analysts mistakenly believe and speculate. For years, the
US has worked hard in the corridors of the Iraqi political leadership lobby for its own interests. The
most energetic of its agents was US Presidential envoy Brett McGurk, who clearly realised the
difficulties of navigating inside Iraqi leaders' corridors during the search for a prime minister of
Iraq before the appointment of Adel Abdel Mahdi, the selection of President Barham Saleh and other
governments in the past. Major General Soleimani and McGurk shared an understanding of these
difficulties. Both understood the nature of the Iraqi political quagmire.
Soleimani did not give orders to fire missiles at US bases or attack the US Embassy. If it was in
his hands to destroy them with accurate missiles and to remove the entire embassy from its place
without repercussions, he would not have hesitated. But the Iraqis have their own opinions, methods,
modus operandi and selection of targets and missile calibres; they never relied on Soleimani for such
decisions.
Iranian involvement in Iraqi affairs was never welcomed by the Marjaiya in Najaf, even if it agreed
to receive Soleimani on a few occasions. They clashed over the reelection of Nuri al-Maliki,
Soleimani's preferred candidate, to the point that the Marjaiya wrote a letter making its refusal of
al-Maliki explicit. This led to the selection of Abadi as prime minister.
Soleimani's views contradicted the perception of the Marjaiya, that had to write a clear message,
firstly, to reject the re-election of Nori al-Maliki to a third session, despite Soleimani's
insistence.
All of the above is related to the stage that followed the 2011 departure of US forces from Iraq
under President Obama. Prior to that, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis was the link between the Iraqis and Iran:
he had the decision-making power, the vision, the support of various groups, and effectively served as
the representative of Soleimani, who did not interfere in the details. These Iraqi groups met with
Soleimani often in Iran; Soleimani rarely travelled to Iraq during the period of heavy US military
presence.
Soleimani, although he was the leader of the "Axis of the Resistance", was sometimes called "the
king" in some circles because his name evokes Solomon. According to sources within the "Axis of the
Resistance", he "never dictated his own policy but left a margin of movement and decision to all
leaders of the axis without exception. Therefore, he was considered the link between this axis and the
supreme leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei. Soleimani was able to contact Sayyed Khamenei at any time and
directly without mediation. The Leader of the revolution considered Soleimani as his son.
According to sources, in Syria, Soleimani "never hesitated to jump inside a truck, ride an ordinary
car, take the first helicopter, or travel on a transport or cargo plane as needed. He did not take any
security precautions but used his phone (which he called a companion spy) freely because he believed
that when the decision came to assassinate him, he would follow his destiny. He looked forward to
becoming a martyr because he had already lived long."
Was the leader of the "resistance axis" managing and running it?
Sayyed Ali Khamenei told Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: "You are an Arab and the Arabs accept you more
than they accept Iran". Sayyed Nasrallah directed and managed the axis of Lebanon, Syria and Yemen and
had an important role in Iraq. Hajj Soleimani was the liaison between the axis of the resistance and
Iran and he was the financial and logistical officer. According to my source, "He was a friend of all
leaders and officials of all ranks. He was humble and looked after everyone he had to deal with".
The "Axis of Resistance" indirectly allowed the killing of Qassem Soleimani. If Israel and the US
could know Sayyed Nasrallah's whereabouts, they would not hesitate a moment to assassinate him. They
may be aware: the reaction may be limited to burning flags and holding conferences and manifesting in
front of an embassy. Of course, this kind of reaction does not deter President Trump who wants to be
re-elected with the support of Israel and US public opinion. He wants to present himself as a warrior
and determined leader who loves battle and killing.
Iran invested 40 years building the "Axis of the Resistance". It cannot remain idle, faced
with the assassination of the Leader of this axis.
Would a suitable price be the US exit from
Iraq and condemnation in the Security Council? Would that, together with withdrawal from the nuclear
deal, be enough for Iran to avenge its General? Will the ensuing battle be confined to the Iraqi
stage? Will it be used for the victory of certain Iraqi political players?
The assassination of its leader represents the supreme test for the Axis of Resistance. All
sides, friend and foe, are awaiting its response.
Tags
Politics
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation has offered Iraq Tuesday the option to
purchase the world's most advanced missile defense system to protect its airspace, reported
RIA Novosti .
According to the report, the Iraqi Armed Forces could purchase the Russian S-400 Triumf air
defense system, which RIA points out, can "ensure the country's sovereignty and reliable
airspace protection."
"Iraq is a partner of Russia in the field of military-technical cooperation, and the Russian
Federation can supply the necessary funds to ensure the sovereignty of the country and reliable
protection of airspace, including the supply of S-400 missiles and other components of the air
defense system, such as Buk-M3, Tor -M2 "and so on," said Igor Korotchenko, Russian Defense
Ministry's Public Council member.
For the last several months, Iraq has considered purchasing Russian air defense and missile
systems, including the S-400, however, it has been met with fierce pressure from the US.
But with a political crisis between the US and Iraq underway, thanks partly to the US
assassination of Iran's Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Russia could profit as Iraq attempts to
decouple from the US.
Wow! I just suggested it yesterday! 😀 After Iraq kicks the US out, it would need
protection from American/Israeli warplanes. And Russian S-400 can do the job https://t.co/KCz3v705l1
Russia signaling Iraq to continue pushing out foreign troops from their territory with
less fear they gonna be targeted just like exemplified Sulemani when they took out like that
since Iraq can have S-400 and Russian protection if they wanted etc
well well this pesky Russian understands protections will boast their push of the great
satan?
Amusingly, if Trump is indeed serious that Iraq will have to reimburse the US for its
countless military bases, camps and other installations, the US will be able to repay its $23
trillion in debt (and have money leftover), when all is said and done: here is a partial list
of the US camps in iraq:
Camp Abu Naji / FOB Garry Owen (Al Amarah)
Camp Adder also known as Tallil Air Base and Ali Air Base located in Nasiriyah
British comedian Ricky Gervais is dropping red pills at the Golden Globes, joking about
"Epstein didn't kill himself" while telling 'woke' virtue signaling celebrities to stop talking
about politics.
... If ISIS started a streaming service, you'd call your agent,"
"You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than
Greta Thunberg. " as usual David Brett nails it , the british office was one of funniest tv
shows ever
"We have learned today from #Iraq Prime Minister AdilAbdl Mahdi how @realDonaldTrump uses
diplomacy:
#US asked #Iraq to mediate with #Iran. Iraq PM asks #QassemSoleimani to come and talk to him
and give him the answer of his mediation, Trump &co assassinate an envoy at the airport."
Whether he is eating ice cream or not, Trump appears to be on a rampage to recreate the
end of The Godfather.
Less than 24 hours after a US drone shockingly killed the top Iranian military leader,
Qasem Soleimani, resulting in equity markets groaning around the globe in fear over Iranian
reprisals (and potentially, World War III), the US has gone for round two with Reuters and
various other social media sources reporting that US air strikes targeting Iraq's Popular
Mobilization Units umbrella grouping of Iran-backed Shi'ite militias near camp Taji north
of Baghdad, have killed six people and critically wounded three, an Iraqi army source said
late on Friday.
Now would be the perfect time for the Mossad to do its false flag shtick. They wouldn't even
have to try very hard to pin it on Iran. I'll bet that when the news came out that the
Iranian guy had been killed, every neocon on the planet popped a boner that will last for
days. Michael Ledeen is probably mazel tov-ing his ass off.
I don't care about the dead Muslim who got killed, since that's the only kind of "good
Muslim" you're ever going to find, but I would still prefer for the U.S. to get out of the
Middle East altogether. Let those two warring anti-Christ peoples kill each other to their
hearts' content.
"... Maybe so, but ipso facto and for the same reasons, the ‘capitalist class’ don’t actually care about the oppression of women, nor of racial minorities, except insofar as it serves their goals of winning the class struggle. ..."
"... The phrase ‘class struggle’ is invariably misinterpreted by bourgeois liberals (such as yourself), incidentally. The class struggle is not something that working people choose to take part in. The class struggle is something that is going on and will continue whether you choose to fight in it or not (or whether or not you choose to recognise that it is going on, or not). ..."
"... Elites essentially created themselves and then began to create the various stratification strategies that, with increasing elaborations, we have had to live with since then, in order to hold on to the power that they had seized. So Buffet is right. ‘It’s my class that’s….making (the) war.’ ..."
"... The class war is not on any sense fought by the poor who choose to take part in it. The class war is willfully and deliberately fought by the rich, against the poor, who are forced to take part in it simply to defend themselves against this attack (and again, the war continues whether the poor choose to take part in it or not, or even whether or not they recognise that they are taking part in it or not. It’s just that if they choose one of these two options or both of them, then they lose). ..."
"... One of the core misrepresentations of Marxism (and it’s a claim that has been made over and over again, not least on CT comments threads) is that Marxism is a ‘determinist’ philosophy. But as Hobsbawm pointed out many years ago, even a quick skim through the Communist Manifesto, page one, shows this is not true: viz. ..."
"... Sure, of course the rich classes don't care about the oppression of minorities, women, LGBT, etc. They use the oppression of these groups to divide and weaken the lower classes. Of course. But that's not the POINT. ..."
"... The POINT is that some in these class-based movements argue that its WRONG for (e.g.) women's rights activists to focus so much on women's rights -- that instead, they should be focusing on building a broad class-based movement for economic redistribution, fighting inequality... ..."
@ 56 ‘Marxists, it seems to me, don’t actually care about the oppression of
women, nor of racial minorities, except insofar as it serves their goals of winning the class
struggle. They. Just. Don’t. Care.’
Maybe so, but ipso facto and for the same reasons, the ‘capitalist class’
don’t actually care about the oppression of women, nor of racial minorities, except
insofar as it serves their goals of winning the class struggle.
The phrase ‘class struggle’ is invariably misinterpreted by bourgeois
liberals (such as yourself), incidentally. The class struggle is not something that working
people choose to take part in. The class struggle is something that is going on and
will continue whether you choose to fight in it or not (or whether or not you choose
to recognise that it is going on, or not).
You don’t need to read this in Karl Marx, incidentally. Listen to Warren Buffet:
‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class,
that’s making war, and we’re winning.’
This is unquestionably and unarguably true. Back in the day, if you go back 20 or 30
thousand years, you had relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes. It was the changes in
human civilisation that date from about 15000 BCE (some would say earlier than that) that
moved things towards a class-stratified society, but please note this was not a
‘bottom-up’ thing but a. ‘top-down’ thing. Elites essentially
created themselves and then began to create the various stratification strategies that, with
increasing elaborations, we have had to live with since then, in order to hold on to the
power that they had seized. So Buffet is right. ‘It’s my class
that’s….making (the) war.’
The class war is not on any sense fought by the poor who choose to take
part in it. The class war is willfully and deliberately fought by the rich,
against the poor, who are forced to take part in it simply to defend themselves
against this attack (and again, the war continues whether the poor choose to take part in it
or not, or even whether or not they recognise that they are taking part in it or not.
It’s just that if they choose one of these two options or both of them, then they
lose).
One of the core misrepresentations of Marxism (and it’s a claim that has been
made over and over again, not least on CT comments threads) is that Marxism is a
‘determinist’ philosophy. But as Hobsbawm pointed out many years ago, even a
quick skim through the Communist Manifesto, page one, shows this is not true: viz.
‘Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another,
carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either
in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the
contending classes.’
You have a fight between the rich and the poor. Either the poor can win, or there is
mutual annihilation. What can’t happen is long term victory by the rich, because you
can have a society without the rich, but you can’t have a society without the poor (the
‘working classes’) or else nothing will get done. You can have a factory without
managers but not one without workers.
What we’ve seen over the last 100 years (at least since about 1950) is a series of
seemingly endless victories by the rich and powerful over the poor, by the global North over
the global South, and yet, mysteriously, these victories have not led to peace or stability
or anything similar but have instead turned to dust and ashes in their mouths , and it seems
that the current phase of the class struggle will not lead to some fantasy of American power
and dominance for eternity but, instead, the ‘common ruin of the contending
classes’ in the form of climate change and the oncoming eco-geddon.
And all this happens whether you recognize that this is happening or not.
Marxists, it seems to me, don’t actually care about the oppression of women, nor
of racial minorities, except insofar as it serves their goals of winning the class
struggle. They. Just. Don’t. Care.
This is perhaps true, on average. Most such favor measure they see as fixing the problem,
rather than demonstrating their empathy for those suffering. For example, in the anti-slavery
movement, proto-Marxists were often too busy arguing for economic change (i.e. abolition) to
spend as much time as they could have on thoughts and prayers for those enslaved.
Now it may be the case, and certainly a lot of people think, that no such
equivalently-effectively economic change is possible, or perhaps desirable, in the modern
day. But it is not the case that Marxists agree with that assessment; if you disagree with
them, that is the core of your disagreement.
Maybe so, but ipso facto and for the same reasons, the 'capitalist class' don't actually
care about the oppression of women, nor of racial minorities, except insofar as it serves
their goals of winning the class struggle.
Sure, of course the rich classes don't care about the oppression of minorities, women,
LGBT, etc. They use the oppression of these groups to divide and weaken the lower classes. Of
course. But that's not the POINT.
The POINT is that some in these class-based movements argue that its WRONG for (e.g.)
women's rights activists to focus so much on women's rights -- that instead, they should be
focusing on building a broad class-based movement for economic redistribution, fighting
inequality...
On Sunday's broadcast of CNN's "State of the Union," 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) questioned
if President Donald Trump's reasons for the Qasem Soleimani assassination was to distract from impeachment.
Warren said, "I think that the question that we ought to focus on is why now? Why not a month ago, and why not a month from now?
And the answer from the administration seems to be that they can't keep their story straight on this. They pointed in all different
directions. And you know, the last time that we watched them do this was the summer over Ukraine. As soon as people started asking
about the conversations between Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine and why aid had been held up to Ukraine, the administration
did the same thing. They pointed in all directions of what was going on. And of course, what emerged then is that this is Donald
Trump just trying to advance Donald Trump's own political agenda. Not the agenda of the United States of America. So what happens
right now? Next week, the president of the United States could be facing an impeachment trial in the Senate. We know that he is deeply
upset about that. I think that people are reasonably asking why this moment? Why does he pick now to take this highly inflammatory,
highly dangerous action that moves us closer to war? We have been at war for 20 years in the Middle East, and we need to stop the
war this the Middle East and not expand it."
Tapper asked, "Are you suggesting that President Trump pulled the trigger and had Qasem Soleimani killed as a distraction from
impeachment?"
Warren said, "Look, I think that people are reasonably asking about the timing and why it is that the administration seems to
have all kinds of different answers. In the first 48 hours after this attack, what did we hear? Well, we heard it was for an imminent
attack, and then we heard, no, no, it is to prevent any future attack, and then we heard that it is from the vice president himself
and no, it is related to 9/11, and then we heard from president reports of people in the intelligence community saying that the whole,
that the threat was overblown. You know, when the administration doesn't seem to have a coherent answer for taking a step like this.
They have taken a step that moves us closer to war, a step that puts everyone at risk, and step that puts the military at risk and
puts the diplomats in the region at risk. And we have already paid a huge price for this war. Thousands of American lives lost, and
a cost that we have paid domestically and around the world. At the same time, look at what it has done in the Middle East, millions
of people who have been killed, who have been injured, who have been displaced. So this is not a moment when the president should
be escalating tensions and moving us to war. The job of the president is to keep us safe, and that means move back from the edge."
Tapper pressed, "Do you believe that President Trump pulled the trigger on this operation as a way to distract from impeachment?
Is that what you think?"
Warren said, "I think it is a reasonable question to ask, particularly when the administration immediately after having taken
this decision offers a bunch of contradictory explanations for what is going on."
She continued, "I think it is the right question to ask. We will get more information as we go forward but look at the timing
on this. Look at what Donald Trump has said afterward and his administration. They have pointed in multiple directions. There is
a reason that he chose this moment, not a month ago and not a month from now, not a less aggressive and less dangerous response.
He had a whole range of responses that were presented to him. He didn't pick one of the other ones. He picked the most aggressive
and the one that moves us closer to war. So what does everybody talk about today? Are we going to war? Are we going to have another
five years, tens, ten years of war in the Middle East, and dragged in once again. Are we bringing another generation of young people
into war? That is every bit of the conversation right now. Donald Trump has taken an extraordinarily reckless step, and we have seen
it before, he is using foreign policy and uses whatever he can to advance the interests of Donald Trump."
"... "I think the more people who are prepared to stand up and say it [the assassination] is completely, not only inappropriate, not only illegal, not only unjust, but an act of war to do something like this, the better," said Nicole Rousseau with the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, which has been planning anti-war protests in D.C. since 2002. ..."
"... This is the moment, as Donald Trump embraces the neoconservative dream of war with Iran, that the Republican base must stand on their hind legs, lock arms with their progressive allies, and say no . ..."
Now is the time for Republicans of conviction to stand together.
t speaks to the state of American politics when for three years the continued defense of
Donald Trump's record has been: "well, he hasn't started any new wars." Last week,
however, that may have finally changed.
In the most flagrant tit-for-tat since the United States initiated its economic war against
Iran in the spring of 2018, the Trump administration assassinated Major General Qasem
Soleimani, who for more than 20 years has led the Iranian Quds Force. The strategic mind behind
Iran's operations in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the rest of the Middle East, Soleimani's death
via drone strike outside of Baghdad's airport is nothing short of a declaration of open warfare
between American and Iranian-allied forces in Iraq.
While the world waits for the Islamic Republic's inevitable response, the reaction on the
home front was organized in less than 36 hours. Saturday afternoon, almost 400 people gathered
on the muddy grass outside the White House in Washington, D.C., joined in solidarity by
simultaneous rallies in over 70 other U.S. cities.
The D.C. attendees and their co-demonstrators were expectedly progressive, but the
organizers made clear they were happy to work across political barriers for the cause of
peace.
"I think the more people who are prepared to stand up and say it [the assassination] is
completely, not only inappropriate, not only illegal, not only unjust, but an act of war to do
something like this, the better," said Nicole Rousseau with the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, which
has been planning anti-war protests in D.C. since 2002.
Code Pink's Leonardo Flores, when asked what politicians he believed were on the side of the
peace movement, named Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders and Republican Senator Rand Paul. "I
don't think peace should be a left and right issue," he said. "I think it's an issue we can all
rally around. It's very clear too much of our money is going to foreign wars that don't benefit
the American people and we could be using that money in many different ways, giving it back to
the American people, whether it's investing in social spending or giving direct tax cuts."
This is the moment, as Donald Trump embraces the neoconservative dream of war with Iran,
that the Republican base must stand on their hind legs, lock arms with their progressive
allies, and say no .
It's happened before. In 2013, when the Obama administration was ready for regime change in
Syria, Americans, both left and right, made clear they didn't want to see their sons and
daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters die so the American government could
install the likes of Abu Mohammed al-Julani in Damascus.
Of course, it was much easier for Republicans to stand up to a Democratic president going to
war. "It's been really unfortunate that so much of politics now is driven on a partisan basis,"
opined Eric Garris, director and co-founder of Antiwar.com, in an interview with TAC .
"Whether you're for or against war and how strongly you might be against war is driven by
partisan points of view."
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the movement that saw millions march against George
W. Bush's war in Iraq disappeared overnight (excluding a handful of stalwart organizations like
Code Pink). Non-interventionist Republicans can't repeat that mistake. They have to show that
if an American president wants to start an unconstitutional, immoral war, it's the principle
that matters, not the R or D next to their names.
Garris said the reason Antiwar.com was founded in 1995 was to bridge this partisan divide by
putting people like Daniel Ellsberg and Pat Buchanan side by side for the same cause. "These
coalitions are only effective if you try to bring in a broad coalition of people," he said. "I
want to see rallies of thousands of people in Omaha, Nebraska, and things like that, where
they're reaching out to middle America and to the people that are actually going to reach the
unconverted."
The right is in the best position it's been in decades to accomplish this. "I don't know if
you saw Tucker Carlson Tonight , but it was quite amazing to watch that kind of
antiwar sentiment on Fox News," Garris said. "You would not have seen [that] in recent history.
And certainly the emergence of The American Conservative magazine has been a really
strong signal and leader in terms of bringing about the values of the Old Right like
non-interventionism to a conservative audience."
It's the anti-war right, in the Republican tradition of La Follette, Taft, Paul, and
Buchanan, that has the power to stop middle America from following Trump into a conflict with
Iran. But it's both sides, working together as Americans, that can finally end the endless
wars.
Hunter DeRensis is a reporter with The National Interest and a regular contributor to
The American Conservative. Follow him on Twitter @HunterDeRensis .
Teevee coverage of the recent events in the ME has been predictable. Those who hated Trump
continue to hate him, etc.
A few observations:
1. I had hoped that Trump's decision to kill an Iranian general engaged in a diplomatic
mission (among other things) while the man was on the soil of a supposed ally of the US was
something Trump pulled out of his fundament either inspired by war movies or on the
recommendation of "our greatest ally" but I am informed that in fact some idiot in the DoD
included this option in the list of possibilities that was briefed to the CinC in Florida. The
decision process in such matters requires that when options are demanded by the CinC the JCS
prepares a list supported for each option by fully formulated documentation that enables the
president to approve one (or none) and then sign the required operational order. Trump himself
chose the death option. I would hold General Milley (CJCS) personally responsible for not
striking this option from the list before it reached the CinC.
2. The Iranians are a subtle people. IMO they will bide their time whilst working out the
"bestest" way to inflict some injury on the US and/or Israel. When the retaliation comes it
will be imaginative and painful.
3. Trump is now threatening the Iraqis with severe sanctions if they try to enforce their
parliamentary decree against the future presence of foreign (US mostly) troops on their soil.
IMO a refusal to leave risks a substantial Shia (at least) uprising against the US forces in
Iraq. We have around 5,500 people there now spread across the country in little groups engaged
in logistics, intelligence and training missions. They are extremely vulnerable. There are
something like 150 marines in the embassy. There are also a small number of US combat forces in
Syria east and north of the Euphrates river. These include a battalion of US Army National
Guard mechanized troops "guarding" Syria's oil from Syria's own army and whatever devilment the
Iranians might be able to arrange.
4. This is an untenable logistical situation. Supply and other functions require a major
airfield close to Baghdad. We have Balad airbase and helicopter supply and air support from
there into Baghdad is possible from there but may become hazardous. Iraq is a big country. It
is a long and lonely drive from Kuwait for re-supply from there or evacuation through there.
The same thing is true of the desert route to Jordan.
5. Trump's strategery appears to be based on the concept that the Iraqis will submit to our
imperial demands. "We will see." pl
US officials
said the majority stood with Washington "in stark contrast to the United Nations Security
Council's silence due to two permanent members – Russia and China – not allowing a
statement to proceed."
This after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a day after Soleimani's death that the US had launched
an "illegal power" move which should instead be based on dialogue with Tehran.
Forbes characterized Russian objections within the context of the UN
further :
He [Lavrov] said that the actions of a UN member state to eliminate officials of another
UN member state on the territory of a third sovereign state "flagrantly violate the
principles of international law and deserve condemnation."
Similarly China has stood against Washington's unilateral military action, with Chinese
Foreign Minister Wang Yi
saying the US must not "abuse force" and instead pursue mutual dialogue.
"The dangerous US military operation violates the basic norms of international relations and
will aggravate regional tensions and turbulence," Wang told Javad Zarif in a phone call days
ago.
Diplomatically speaking, the US faces an uphill battle on the UN National Security Council,
considering its already provoked the ire of two of its formidable members, who increasingly
find themselves in close cooperation blocking US initiatives.
Interesting. Look what Iranian General fought alongside the Americans when fighting the
Taliban. More and more convinced Israel owns the US and our foreign policy.
Hey jerkoff, look who a certain Iranian General fought alongside the US when fighting the
Taliban. Your projection and deception have all the hallmarks of a dirty ***.
Maybe, just maybe, China and Russia blocked the United Nations Security council statement
because it accused Iran of having provoked the attack on the US embassy in Baghdad.
Of some reason or another ZH does not tell us what the declaration said.
What part of "We don't have the money to fight endless wars" doesn't the MIC
understand?
Homeless people everywhere, bums outside every big box store parking lot, opiod epidemic
in our towns, low wage "jobs" everywhere, schools where are children are sitting in trailers
to study, tens of millions with no access to proper medication or health care, and the
assholes traitors want to waste BILLIONS on useless chest thumping all over the word.
The situation is like an drunk, impotent man walking around threatening to rape ladies up
and down the street.
Sad what has become of this one truly great nation.
The Neocons are not rational actors in any normal sense of the word. They would destroy
and/or enslave every person on this planet if they thought they could pull it off and it
would be to their benefit.
The world's largest evangelist of neoliberalism, the International Monetary Fund, has
admitted that it's not all it's cracked up to be.
Neoliberalism refers to capitalism in its purest form. It is an economic philosophy espoused
by libertarians -- and repeated endlessly by many mainstream economists -- one that insists
that privatization, deregulation, the opening up of domestic markets to foreign competition,
the cutting of government spending, the shrinking of the state, and the "freeing of the market"
are the keys to a healthy and flourishing economy.
Yet now top researchers at the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, the economic institution
that has proselytized -- and often forcefully imposed -- neoliberal policies for decades, have
conceded that the "benefits of some policies that are an important part of the neoliberal
agenda appear to have been somewhat overplayed."
"There are aspects of the neoliberal agenda that have not delivered as expected," the
economists write in " Neoliberalism: Oversold? ", a
study published in the June volume of the IMF's quarterly magazine Finance &
Development.
In analyzing two of neoliberalism's most fundamental policies, austerity and the removing of
restrictions on the movement of capital, the IMF researchers say they reached "three
disquieting conclusions."
One, neoliberal policies result in "little benefit in growth."
Two, neoliberal policies increase inequality, which produces further economic harms in a
"trade-off" between growth and inequality.
And three, this "increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of
growth."
The top researchers conclude noting that the "evidence of the economic damage from
inequality suggests that policymakers should be more open to redistribution than they are."
In some cases, they add, the consequences "will have to be remedied after they occur by
using taxes and government spending to redistribute income."
"Fortunately, the fear that such policies will themselves necessarily hurt growth is
unfounded," the IMF economists stress -- that is to say, increasing taxes and boosting
government spending will not necessarily hurt growth.
The collapse of neoliberalism
These statements represent an enormous reversal for the IMF. It is somewhat like the Pope
declaring that there is no God; it is a volte-face on almost everything that the IMF has ever
stood for.
Since the 2008 financial collapse, widespread rebellions have been waged against these
failed neoliberal policies, with Occupy Wall Street in the U.S. and similar grassroots
movements around the world.
Before the 1970s, neoliberalism was relegated to the obscure margins of mainstream
economics, preached by free-market fundamentalists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich
Hayek.
In the last few decades, however, it became the hegemonic ideology. The IMF has been one of
the most crucial institutions, along with the World Bank, in the spread of neoliberalism.
By the end of the Cold War, socialist alternatives to capitalism had been brutally crushed
in a long series of wars. By the 1980s, with the rise of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in
the U.K. and President Ronald Reagan in the U.S., neoliberalism had come to dominate the new
world order.
Even before the Thatchers and the Reagans, however, there were the Pinochets. The policies
the IMF advocated for decades were rooted in extreme violence and repression.
Chile's
violent neoliberal dictatorship
Chile was the first country to implement neoliberal policies. Still today, neoliberal
ideologues quote Milton Friedman, speaking of the legacy of the reign of far-right, U.S.-backed
capitalist dictator Augusto Pinochet as Chile's "economic miracle." What they overlook is how
Pinochet used a bloodstained iron fist to implement these neoliberal policies.
A
bloody CIA-backed 1973 coup toppled Chile's popular democratically elected Marxist leader,
Salvador Allende, and replaced him with Pinochet. For millions of Chileans, his "economic
miracle" was a disaster.
Pinochet combined fascistic police state repression with extreme free-market policies,
killing, disappearing and torturing tens of thousands of Chilean leftists, labor organizers and
journalists, forcing hundreds of thousands more into exile.
"Chile's pioneering experience with neoliberalism received high praise from Nobel laureate
Friedman, but many economists have now come around to" more nuanced views, the IMF researchers
note in their article.
Boom and bust cycles 'are the main story'
The study was co-authored by three members of the IMF's research department -- Jonathan
Ostry, the deputy director, Prakash Loungani, a division chief, and Davide Furceri, an
economist.
The researchers don't throw neoliberalism out completely. "There is much to cheer in the
neoliberal agenda," they write. But it fails in some crucial regards.
For one, opening emerging economies up to some types of unrestricted foreign capital inflows
frequently leads to financial crises, the IMF researchers note, which in turn create large
declines in economic output and "appreciably" increase inequality.
These boom and bust cycles are not merely "a sideshow they are the main story," the
economists add.
"Capital controls are a viable, and sometimes the only, option," the IMF concludes. This is
a huge reversal. The researchers themselves point out that "the IMF's view has also changed --
from one that considered capital controls as almost always counterproductive to greater
acceptance of controls to deal with the volatility of capital flows."
Austerity can lead
to an 'adverse loop' of economic decline
Moreover, the study notes that it is often better for indebted governments to allow "the
debt ratio to decline organically through growth," rather than to impose austerity. This is
another reversal.
The IMF has for many years ordered countries to cut spending, gutting social services in
order to pay off debt. This has in turn led to a shrinking of the economy, trapping countries
in a spiral of debt.
Greece is a painful contemporary example , although there are many more.
"Austerity policies not only generate substantial welfare costs," the IMF researchers
continue, "they also hurt demand -- and thus worsen employment and unemployment."
Austerity results in "drops rather than by expansions in output." Studies show that, when
government deficits and debts are reduced with a fiscal consolidation of 1 percent of a
country's GDP, the long-term unemployment rate often increases by 0.6 percentage point and
income inequality grows by 1.5 percent within five years.
Taken in conjunction, these effects could lead to an "adverse loop," the IMF warns, where
austerity fuels inequality, which decreases growth that neoliberals insist must be cured with
more austerity.
"The increase in inequality engendered by financial openness and austerity might itself
undercut growth, the very thing that the neoliberal agenda is intent on boosting," the IMF
researchers write. "There is now strong evidence that inequality can significantly lower both
the level and the durability of growth."
The importance of this study is hard to overstate. The IMF is essentially admitted that many
of the policies that it demanded countries implement for decades only made things worse.
The International Monetary Fund appears to be inching toward a more Keynesian economic
position.
To be clear, just because IMF researchers acknowledge the economic reality billions of
working people in the world intimately understand does not mean the IMF as an institution will
act on their research and end these policies -- just as the U.S. government does not
necessarily act on the research of State Department, which has
acknowledged Israel's crimes .
But the IMF's recognition that neoliberalism is not the panacea that cures all economic ills
establishes an incredibly significant precedent, and is a huge victory in the fight for
economic justice -- and in the class war.
Ben Norton Ben Norton
is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the
producer of the Moderate Rebels
podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton . bennorton.com
Just a wild *** guess but what if Maj. Gen. Soleimani was close to kicking the bucket
anyways and wanted to poke America one last time and did so by causing an issue at the
American embassy in Iraq.
If the General was such an asset why be in Iraq? Normally you would send your aide to the
area. If it was really important to meet someone then they would come to Iran.
I don't think Iran is necessarily that careless. I can believe ego can play a big part in
making bad decisions but if he was such an asset for so long why risk it unless you were a
dead man walking already.
The other Iranian leaders could of said to the already dying general if that is the way
you want to go out then by all means do so. It doesn't cost Iran anything if he does.
Just a different look at it. It may also be the reason why Iran won't do anything for
awhile if at all. He might of been a good general in Iran's eyes but still replaceable.
Later.
If our entire dollar racket fueled country were slightly more honestly governed, the Dept.
of Offense would bill Israel for at least 1/2 of its budget.
Some comments reminded me of two sayings at opposite ends of phase space.
The first I learnt from an article of Uri Avnery almost a decade ago. It is the classic
Jewish joke about the Jewish mother in Russia taking leave of her son, who has been called up
to serve the Czar in the war against Turkey. "Don't overexert yourself'" she implores him,
"Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again "
"But mother," the son interrupts, "What if the Turk kills me?"
"You?" exclaims the mother, "But why? What have you done to him?"
"In my view, the correct way to see oppressions is not as a set of different one to one
relationships where one is oppressor and the other oppressed, but one should sum all these
relationships and compare the sum to a sort of societal average, so that those above that
average and those below are the oppressed. As the society we live in is pyramidal, I expect
most people to be below that average."
I don't wish to pile onto Chetan Murthy's thoughtful reply @39, but rather restate the issue
a little more abstractly. I engage with this comment out of respect for MisterMr's
overwhelmingly well-considered comments here and elsewhere on this blog.
I think one of the disadvantages of Marxian analysis–and this particular critique is
much older than I am–is that it does tend to flatten out the contours of human experience
so that it can be rendered more intelligible and commensurable so that there can be a more
easily verbalized dialectic about class. In other words, Marxians are lumpers. And lumping has
its uses, but sometimes contours are needed to understand the underlying processes that result
in the social problems upon which we wish to improve with policy.
One of the advantages of intersectional analysis is that it acknowledges that experiences of
privilege/oppression are contextual because they are socially constructed and because social
construction is messy and non-uniform. We each experience privileges and/or oppressions that
are the results of historical processes (more and more) loosely bounded by geographical
inhibitions to travel.
In this way, an African American man can expect to experience such oppressions as being
treated as untrustworthy; assumed to be prone to violence; assumed to be a habitual drug user;
assumed to lack certain non-cognitive skills (which are really just the current preferred
collective habits of the upper middle class–I teach some of their kids kung fu) etc . A
woman can expect to experience such oppressions as being treated as unintelligent; evaluated
based on a narrow range of acceptability on her appearance, tone of voice, apparel,
accoutrements, hobbies, reproductive choices, sexual choices, really just about any
choices.
Even though each of these specific ways of being harmed by the collective (mostly)
non-conscious will to discriminate based on things that don't matter most of the time in most
places is at root a failure of most people most of the time to exercise their meta-cognitive
skills around the meaning of respect and to whom it is due and what kind of behavior that
requires of oneself, they do not easily offer a consensus on the sorts of policies that ought
to be implemented across a society because each of these oppressions are historically
contingent and enacted in specific kinds of social spaces for specific reasons–reasons
that most people most of the time are not required to articulate because hey, everybody's doing
it.
The difference between kinds of oppressions and the kinds of policy solutions they invite
sharpens when considering white women's and black men's disparate experiences with the police
across the history of the (sort of) former confederate states of America–yes, I know it
was bad everywhere else, too, but my understanding of the history is that the difference is
sharper in the South (no I will not provide J-D with a cite)–or their disparate
experiences interfacing with organizations such as firms and universities as the suite of
policies known as affirmative action became passed and enforced. In some ways, many individuals
classified in each (and both) group(s) aggregately benefited but the benefits were asymmetric
and the accompanying backlash manifested as different kinds of oppressions depending on the
most salient group assignment.
Incidentally, I think one of the better ways that coalitions form are when activist groups
find themselves being deliberately wedged against each other, for instance with aggressive
policing proposals, and try to find another way to meet each group's needs. The recent renewed
advocacy for Civilian Police Review Boards seems like one possible way forward to accommodate
the need from multiple constituencies that have historically been ignored.
I think intersectionality also happens to give us some useful theoretical tools to help make
these kinds of coalitional policy solutions more abundant and more easy to institutionalize
throughout a large and diverse state–which is why there is absolutely a political
interest among some (probably not so much the Marxians) in detracting from it.
Anyway, two cheers (for now) for intersectionality. But don't get cocky splitters.
The term privilege is often misused. The original meaning of the term is simply a right or an
advantage specifically conveyed on a certain group of people. It is not wrong for example to
call the right to attend a university a privilege. Not long ago, that right was a privilege
restricted to men (mostly upper class but also some lower class). The right to vote, if it is
not universal, could also be called a privilege. It is not correct to say that only the upper
class can be privileged – privileges can be to some extent independent of class
structure. OTOH Real privilege is enshrined in law. Habitual discrimination is a different
thing and it's probably better to call it by a different name.
Good point Afghanistan. The newly appointed General Ghaani was active in Afghanistan. As he
is famimiar with the place, that may well be where he decides to retaliate.
The introduction of manpads would be no less significant an impact on the occupying force as
it was when the Soviet's were there when the SEE EYE AYE showered the Afghani's with
Stingers. It completely changed the modus of the Soviet army once they were introduced.
Helicopters became dangerous to be in and could no longer fly near the ground. Good
observations though, the assassination of Assad could prove to be magnitudes greater a spark
than any of us could imagine. I hope for the sake of, among the many, the Christians he's
been protecting from the foreign merc's. that he stays safe. He must keep a low profile and
let's hope the S400's will take care of any Predator drones that try to fly the Damascus
airspace.
It seems US (or perhaps Israel) didn't give you time enough to think about what could be the
next move (breaking news from Sputinik, 23:30 GMT): vehicle convoy carrying Iraqi PMF leaders
hit by airstrike, 6 dead at least.
Thanks for posting this. I wonder if Soleimani consciously ( on many human and beyond human
levels) wanted to offer the Yanks a "target" (a type of sacrifice, namely himself) that was
just too big to ignore, knowing that the stupid enemy would take the bait, and having a
secure knowledge that his death would set in motion a chain of events that will (underline
will) result in the final terrible fall of the US, and Israel. Stupid American "leaders",
right now, they are dancing in idiotic joy, saying foolish words for which we will pay, also
knowing what the future holds: the death of countless people, throughout not only the Middle
East, but here in the US as well. Yes, I do hate them for what they have unleashed.
Rest In Peace, Soleimani. You very well may achieve far more in death that you attained in
your eventful life.
"... Add in the war-profiteers, wide open borders, collapsing infrastructure and history-making wealth inequality, and an entire generation of healthy young white men destroyed by drugs and suicides, a despair engineered by Jews, who unlike Iranians, mock us as they do it. Let's see tranquility on the home front survive skyrocketing food and gas prices. ..."
"... We must prepare our own populist anti-war protest movement to bring the war home. We must remain steadfast in the face of a coming era of political repression nobody has seen in generations. ..."
"... "The U.S. did not only murder Qassem Soleimani. On December 29 it also killed 31 Iraqi government forces. Five days later it killed Soleimani and the Deputy Commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF/PMU/Hashed al-Shabi) and leader of Kata'ib Hizbollah Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. There were also four IRGC and four Kata'ib Hizbollah men who were killed while accompanying their leaders. The PMU are under direct command of the Iraqi Prime Minister. They are official Iraqi defense forces who defeated ISIS after a bloody war. Their murder demands that their government acts against the perpetrators." ..."
"... "Sitting in coffee shop in Chicago listening to Americans. The general sentiment is they had it coming and Iran should be nuked. Glass parking lot is the desired end." ..."
"... That's pretty much the picture i get from reading responses in UK MSM, not only from English, but many giving American addresses. They are all pretty much thoroughly brainwashed, believing as gospel the lies they've told, and still think that they are the "White hatted, good guys, who do good things for the places they bomb and invade". ..."
"... US murder of another nation's leader has no frigging importance in moral or consequential terms. Such is the general IQ status of the west today. Really, it takes someone intelligent and inquisitive enough for years and years to really get aghast and appreciative enough to ponder what the murder of Soleimani in Trump's hand in the manner it was executed would mean to world peace. MSM counts on this stupidity and thrives in lies and false-flag propaganda. ..."
"... The idiots at the helm of the Evil Outlaw US Empire really have absolutely no clue as their short term thinking has destroyed what mental capacities they once had and has reduced them to imbeciles. ..."
The US shows every symptom of an empire on the brink of collapse: an irreconcilably divided
and decaying citizenry, racial and cultural incoherence, a totally detached oligarchy, no
overarching mission or narrative, and an over reliance on international mercenaries to fight
its wars. By 2009, soldiers of fortune outnumbered US military personnel 3-1 in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Add in the war-profiteers, wide open borders, collapsing infrastructure and history-making
wealth inequality, and an entire generation of healthy young white men destroyed by drugs and
suicides, a despair engineered by Jews, who unlike Iranians, mock us as they do it. Let's see
tranquility on the home front survive skyrocketing food and gas prices.
A war with Iran is our line in the sand as well. All white men must boycott the military,
which is run by people who despise us more than any supposed international enemy ever will.
The last 3 years of having our rights and civil liberties whittled away show that it is white
Americans who will always be the US plutocracy's first and last enemy. If you are currently
serving, you can get honorably discharged by declaring yourself a worshipper of Asatru and
anonymously emailing your superior officers pretending to be a deeply concerned member of
Antifa. Even if open war doesn't break out, the recent massive troop buildups in the Middle
East guarantee you will be a target. Let Zion send its anarchist neo-liberal foot soldiers in
your place!
We must prepare our own populist anti-war protest movement to bring the war home. We must
remain steadfast in the face of a coming era of political repression nobody has seen in
generations.
The people of Iran are not our enemy. They share the same abominable foe and deserve our
solidarity. They must know that the citizens of America are ignorant of who rules them, and
that decisions made using our flag are not made by us.
In the name of the existence of our people and the future of our children, and even
broader in the name of humanity, we must ensure that this will be Judah's last war.
thank you b... i see you articulated a paragraph that is out of grasp of the american msm
crowd, so i am going to repeat it.. it is worth repeating...see bottom of post... my main
thought is that no matter what happens everything will be blamed on iran - false flag, and
etc. etc. you name it... all bad is on iran and all good is on usa-israel.. that is the
constant meme that the msm provides 24-7 and that us politicians and the state dept run with
24-7 as well. it is so transparent it is beyond despicable..
@ 13 old hippie.. that about sums up my impression.. thanks
@ 22 BM.. thanks.. i share your perspective, but am not as articulate..
here is the quote from b..
"The U.S. did not only murder Qassem Soleimani. On December 29 it also killed 31 Iraqi
government forces. Five days later it killed Soleimani and the Deputy Commander of the
Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF/PMU/Hashed al-Shabi) and leader of Kata'ib Hizbollah Abu
Mahdi al-Muhandis. There were also four IRGC and four Kata'ib Hizbollah men who were killed
while accompanying their leaders. The PMU are under direct command of the Iraqi Prime
Minister. They are official Iraqi defense forces who defeated ISIS after a bloody war. Their
murder demands that their government acts against the perpetrators."
Sitting in coffee shop in Chicago listening to Americans. The general sentiment is they had
it coming and Iran should be nuked.
Glass parking lot is the desired end.
This sentiment is bottom to top in America. Measured response? No way can Iran 'measure' a
response.
More generally the sentiment is that a little war in Iran, a few nukes, is not even a big
thing. Football scores more important.
"Sitting in coffee shop in Chicago listening to Americans. The general sentiment is they had
it coming and Iran should be nuked. Glass parking lot is the desired end."
That's pretty much the picture i get from reading responses in UK MSM, not only from
English, but many giving American addresses. They are all pretty much thoroughly brainwashed,
believing as gospel the lies they've told, and still think that they are the "White hatted,
good guys, who do good things for the places they bomb and invade".
it seems they will be supportive of an attack on Iran, and if their maniac "leaders", the
basement crazies who got out of the basement, realise this, it increases substantially the
chances of a "hot" war. In that case, should it escalate out of control, your Chicago coffee
deadheads will get the Glass parking lot they want. It just wont be in the ME. Or Russia.
They can have their very own, in their own back yard.
You guys are right on money! I'm a retiree in my seventy's. My social circles are old
school college graduates in late fifties to late seventies, supposedly the segment of
population wise enough to decipher world affairs.
But no, they care more about who's gonna
win today between Titans and patriots or whether Tiger Wood will win another major in 2020.
US murder of another nation's leader has no frigging importance in moral or consequential
terms. Such is the general IQ status of the west today. Really, it takes someone intelligent
and inquisitive enough for years and years to really get aghast and appreciative enough to
ponder what the murder of Soleimani in Trump's hand in the manner it was executed would mean
to world peace. MSM counts on this stupidity and thrives in lies and false-flag
propaganda.
"24 hrs ago, an arrogant clown -- masquerading as a diplomat -- claimed people were dancing in the cities of Iraq. Today, hundreds of thousands of our proud Iraqi brothers and sisters offered him their
response across their soil. End of US malign presence in West Asia has begun."
The idiots at the helm of the Evil Outlaw US Empire really have absolutely no clue as
their short term thinking has destroyed what mental capacities they once had and has reduced
them to imbeciles.
Given the real masters of the universe are the very rich, would the Iranians see them as
logical targets?
Sheldon Adelson comes to mind, as he is a primary backer of both Trump and Netanyahu. As
well as likely not known, or appealing to Trump's base, so avenging his death wouldn't appeal
in the same way as soldiers or diplomats. Especially leading up to the election. Not only
that, but if the very rich were to sense their Gulfstreams are somewhat vulnerable to someone
with a Stinger at the end of the runway in quite a few tourist destinations, Davos, etc, the
pressure from the People Who Really Matter might be against further conflict.
The rule of law has its uses and destroying the structure on which their world rests does
have consequences.
The oil market should be worried. Iran can stop all traffic through the Straight of Hormuz at
will. And that would start a war. Which would keep it closed. It may be a mistake to think Iran's
leadership is more sane than ours.
Iran might also seek to draw Israel into a conflict via Hezbollah in Lebanon. We can't rule
out some sort of grand-scale attack, but an array of smaller-scale activity is our core
bet.
The risk that something bigger will trigger a real war, however, likely will put a premium
on oil prices for the next few months, at least.
Higher oil prices represent a tax on oil consumers and a windfall for producers. World oil
consumption is about 100M barrels per day, so each five dollars on the prices is equivalent to
an annualized tax of about $183B per year, or 0.1% of global GDP. The U.S., however, is both a
huge oil producer and a consumer. Domestic production runs at almost 13M bpd, with consumption
at 21Mbpd. That would seem to suggest that the net effect of higher prices on the U.S. would be
to depress economic growth, but recent experience points in the opposite direction, because oil
sector capex, in the era of shale, is acutely sensitive to prices, even in the short term. When
oil prices collapsed between spring 2014 and early 2016, the ensuing plunge in capital spending
in the oil sector outweighed the boost to consumers' real income from cheaper gasoline and
heating oil, and overall economic growth slowed markedly. This story played out in reverse when
oil prices rebounded in the three years through spring 2018, and economic growth picked up even
as consumers' real incomes were hit.
... ... ...
The wild card is whether turmoil in the Middle East triggers a sustained sell-off in
equities, depressing business and consumer confidence to the point where labor market and
inflation concerns become secondary. We'd be surprised -- the plunge in S&P futures is just
the initial knee-jerk response -- but if Iran takes more drastic action than we are expecting,
it will become a real risk. In that case, the Fed might have no choice but to ease, especially
if credit markets seize-up too. In the meantime, expect defensive stocks to outperform, with
downward pressure on Treasury yields and gains for safe-haven currencies, until Iran's response
becomes clear. To repeat: Iran will respond.
I still can't get any logical explanation as to why this Israeli spy ring, the largest ever
on U.S. soil, was in The U.S. And, why were they dancing after the first plane impact?
News flash. The government in Washington is extremely unpopular as well. More unpopular in
America than the Iranian government is with Iranians. I am saying this because anyone who spent
any time with Impeachment; read how Barr let Epstein and all pedo elites walk away fully
protected, his hideous Operation Guardian, Trump's complete destruction of 1st Amendment rights
to free speech in the guise of "suppressing antisemitism" ... God, how I hate this tyranny
complete with WalMarts and mulatto invaders and LGBT as "normal", the all tranny military,
meaningless laws we are rounded up and shot to death for the slightest traffic infraction
black, white but never Jewish. They get away with everything. Trump made them a protected
class, Judaism a race and a nationality to have special protections at taxpayer expense. What a
wonderful country I just can't get enough of....
No one will miss the US apart frmo the Americans themselves: the polls are clear worldwide
that the world considers the Americans to be ruled by the most aggressive and psychopathic
regimes. They have killed millions since WWII and the world would be a much better place
without the US.
Nothing untrue in this article. Secondary sanctions are evil because they prevent minor
transactions because banks don't think it is worth the severe penalties. So Iranian cancer
patients aren't allowed to buy chemotherapy medications. Trump has gone overboard because he
has learned that there is no political cost to doling these out.
I think this is how US dominance will end. No challengers will end it, although some may
rise in the vacuum. The internal changes the US needs to make to come back are politically
impossible. Sanctions are big government on steroids, and having the US Government sitting
atop the global economy will cause it to seize up. The question is how long commerce will be
able to continue under these conditions.
This stupid idea of "intersectionality" is just a fig leaf on dangerous government policy
Notable quotes:
"... Being labeled a conspiracist is actually not that bad, as probably 80% of major conspiracies (the term invented by CIA to discredit the opposition to Warren commission findings) proved to be the most adequate, albeit "politically incorrect" explanations of the events in question. They are just the explanations that undermine the establishment narrative. Right now most people (around 61% of voters and 71% of independents) believe that CIA operatives at senior levels played active role in JFK assassination. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-one-thing-in-politics-most-americans-believe-in-jfk-conspiracies/ ..."
"... the left, as a movement, is going through a prolonged identity crisis and that his group, instead, intends to stick to the original values, such as class warfare. ..."
"... The right-wingers' major gains from the working class are, according to Littorin, a token of widespread dissatisfaction with liberal economic migration that leads to "low-wage competition" and the "ghettoisation of communities", a development that "only benefits major companies". ..."
"... Littorin described multiculturalism, LGBT issues and the climate movement as state ideologies that are "rammed down people's throats". According to him, phenomena like LGBT-certification and the cult around 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg and "other -isms" happen at the expense of the real issues, such as income equality. ..."
"... "Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing with sexual orientation. We believe that human dignity is primarily about having a job and having pension insurance that means that you are not forced to live on crumbs when you are old," Littorin explained. ..."
"... 20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union, it has never been successfully updated for the 21st century ..."
"... similar thoughts in an opinion piece called "Socialists don't belong to the left", accusing the mainstream left of completely abandoning its base , switching from the working class to "parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the middle class". ..."
As I see it, intersectionality combines a recognition that people are oppressed both through the economic structures of capitalism
and as members of various subordinate groups with a rejection of both:
"essentialist" identity politics, based on the claim that some particular aspect of identity (gender, race, sexuality,
disability etc) should trump all others; and
"working class" politics, presented as a politics of universal liberation, but reduced by the failure of revolutionary
Marxism to another kind of identity politics (I took this formulation from
Don Arthur on Twitter. I had something
to say about class and Marxism
a while back)
likbez 01.02.20 at 1:11 am (no link)
Jake Gibson 01.01.20 at 3:49 pm @35
Here, I thought likbez was just a social reactionary, now I find he/she is also an infowars style conspiracist.
This is an ad hominem attack and as such is without merits.
Being labeled a conspiracist is actually not that bad, as probably 80% of major conspiracies (the term invented by CIA
to discredit the opposition to Warren commission findings) proved to be the most adequate, albeit "politically incorrect" explanations
of the events in question. They are just the explanations that undermine the establishment narrative. Right now most people (around
61% of voters and 71% of independents) believe that CIA operatives at senior levels played active role in JFK assassination.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-one-thing-in-politics-most-americans-believe-in-jfk-conspiracies/
So IMHO if a person views Russiagate as a color revolution against Trump run by intelligence agencies and Ukrainegate as attempt
to replicate 2018 success with Mueller witch hunt on a new level by neoliberal Democrats led by Pelosi and Schumer, this suggests
some attempt of independent thinking, and some level of resistance to neoliberal groupthink. Which may be a bridge too far, but
in general is not that bad, even if wrong.
The opposite camp that does not question the establishment narrative, especially as for Russiagate (and related false flag
operations such as DNC leak converted by Crowdstrike into Russian hack using CIA malware, probably from Vault 7 exposed by Wikileaks
and the creation of Gussifer 2.0 fake personality ) can be called a camp of neoliberal lemmings, or victims of neoliberal brainwashing,
your choice ;-)
Also for an Infowars adept I have friends in strange places -- a faction of Swedish communists -- which somehow managed to
replicate my views almost to a tee ;-)
Almost half of the members of the Communist Party in Malmö are resigning. Instead, they plan establish a new workers' party
that doesn't put as much emphasis on things like multiculturalism, LGBT issues and climate alarmism, which have become the
staples and rallying calls of today's left.
Nils Littorin, one of the defectors, explained to Lokaltidningen that today's left has become part of the elite and has
come to "dismiss the views of the working class as alien and problematic". Littorin suggested that the left, as a movement,
is going through a prolonged identity crisis and that his group, instead, intends to stick to the original values, such as
class warfare.
"They don't understand why so many workers don't think that multiculturalism, the LGBT movement and Greta Thunberg are something
fantastic, but instead believe we are in the 1930s' Germany and that workers who vote [right-wing] Sweden Democrats have been
infected by some Nazi sickness," he explained to Lokaltidningen.
The right-wingers' major gains from the working class are, according to Littorin, a token of widespread dissatisfaction
with liberal economic migration that leads to "low-wage competition" and the "ghettoisation of communities", a development
that "only benefits major companies".
According to Littorin, one of the underlying problems is a "chaotic" immigration policy that has led to cultural clashes,
segregation and exclusion due to an uncontrolled influx from parts of the world characterised by honour culture and clan mentalities.
Littorin described multiculturalism, LGBT issues and the climate movement as state ideologies that are "rammed down
people's throats". According to him, phenomena like LGBT-certification and the cult around 16-year-old climate activist Greta
Thunberg and "other -isms" happen at the expense of the real issues, such as income equality.
"Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing with sexual orientation. We believe that human dignity is primarily
about having a job and having pension insurance that means that you are not forced to live on crumbs when you are old," Littorin
explained.
The goal, according to Littorin is to enter Malmö City Council by 2022. The name of the party remains undetermined, but
Littorin stressed that the word "Communist" will no longer be present.
It's a word drawn to the dirt, a nasty word today, and not entirely undeservedly. In communist parties, there is this risk
of elitism, self-indulgence, and a belief that a certain avant-garde should lead a working class that does not know its own
best interests, instead of asking people what they want.
20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union, it has never been successfully updated for the 21st century
but has been stuck in 100-year-old books. But the principles that Marx formulated, they still apply to me," Littorin concluded.
Earlier this week, Markus Allard, the leader of the left-wing Örebro Party expressed similar thoughts in an opinion
piece called "Socialists don't belong to the left", accusing the mainstream left of completely abandoning its base , switching
from the working class to "parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the middle class".
"... "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." ..."
"... Recently I read Not Fade Away by Laurence Shames and Peter Barton. It's about Peter Barton, the founder of Liberty Media, who shares his thoughts about dying from cancer. ..."
For the longest time, I believed that there's only one purpose of life: And that is to be happy. Right? Why else go through all
the pain and hardship? It's to achieve happiness in some way. And I'm not the only person who believed that. In fact, if you look
around you, most people are pursuing happiness in their lives.
That's why we collectively buy shit we don't need, go to bed with people we don't love, and try to work hard to get approval of
people we don't like.
Why do we do these things? To be honest, I don't care what the exact reason is. I'm not a scientist. All I know is that it has
something to do with history, culture, media, economy, psychology, politics, the information era, and you name it. The list is endless.
Just a few short years ago, I did everything to chase happiness.
You buy something, and you think that makes you happy.
You hook up with people, and think that makes you happy.
You get a well-paying job you don't like, and think that makes you happy.
You go on holiday, and you think that makes you happy.
But at the end of the day, you're lying in your bed (alone or next to your spouse), and you think: "What's next in this endless
pursuit of happiness?"
Well, I can tell you what's next: You, chasing something random that you believe makes you happy.
It's all a façade. A hoax. A story that's been made up.
Did Aristotle lie to us when he said:
"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."
I think we have to look at that quote from a different angle. Because when you read it, you think that happiness is the main goal.
And that's kind of what the quote says as well.
But here's the thing: How do you achieve happiness?
Happiness can't be a goal in itself. Therefore, it's not something that's achievable. I believe that happiness is merely a byproduct
of usefulness. When I talk about this concept with friends, family, and colleagues, I always find it difficult to put this into words.
But I'll give it a try here. Most things we do in life are just activities and experiences.
You go on holiday.
You go to work.
You go shopping.
You have drinks.
You have dinner.
You buy a car.
Those things should make you happy, right? But they are not useful. You're not creating anything. You're just consuming or doing
something. And that's great.
Don't get me wrong. I love to go on holiday, or go shopping sometimes. But to be honest, it's not what gives meaning to life.
What really makes me happy is when I'm useful. When I create something that others can use. Or even when I create something I
can use.
For the longest time I foud it difficult to explain the concept of usefulness and happiness. But when I recently ran into a quote
by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the dots connected.
Emerson says:
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some
difference that you have lived and lived well."
And I didn't get that before I became more conscious of what I'm doing with my life. And that always sounds heavy and all. But
it's actually really simple.
It comes down to this: What are you DOING that's making a difference?
Did you do useful things in your lifetime? You don't have to change the world or anything. Just make it a little bit better than
you were born.
If you don't know how, here are some ideas.
Help your boss with something that's not your responsibility.
Take your mother to a spa.
Create a collage with pictures (not a digital one) for your spouse.
Write an article about the stuff you learned in life.
Help the pregnant lady who also has a 2-year old with her stroller.
Call your friend and ask if you can help with something.
Build a standing desk.
Start a business and hire an employee and treat them well.
That's just some stuff I like to do. You can make up your own useful activities.
You see? It's not anything big. But when you do little useful things every day, it adds up to a life that is well lived. A life
that mattered.
The last thing I want is to be on my deathbed and realize there's zero evidence that I ever existed.
Recently I read
Not Fade Away by Laurence Shames and Peter Barton. It's about Peter Barton, the founder of Liberty Media, who shares his
thoughts about dying from cancer.
It's a very powerful book and it will definitely bring tears to your eyes. In the book, he writes about how he lived his life
and how he found his calling. He also went to business school, and this is what he thought of his fellow MBA candidates:
"Bottom line: they were extremely bright people who would never really anything, would never add much to society, would leave
no legacy behind. I found this terribly sad, in the way that wasted potential is always sad."
You can say that about all of us. And after he realized that in his thirties, he founded a company that turned him into a multi-millionaire.
Another person who always makes himself useful is Casey Neistat
. I've been following him for a year and a half now, and every time I watch his
YouTube show , he's doing something.
He also talks about how he always wants to do and create something. He even has a tattoo on his forearm that says "Do More."
Most people would say, "why would you work more?" And then they turn on Netflix and watch back to back episodes of Daredevil.
A different mindset.
Being useful is a mindset. And like with any mindset, it starts with a decision. One day I woke up and thought to myself: What
am I doing for this world? The answer was nothing.
And that same day I started writing. For you it can be painting, creating a product, helping elderly, or anything you feel like
doing.
Don't take it too seriously. Don't overthink it. Just DO something that's useful. Anything.
Darius Foroux writes about productivity, habits, decision making, and personal finance. His ideas and work have been featured
in TIME, NBC, Fast Company, Inc., Observer, and many more publications. Join
his free weekly newsletter.
This article was originally published on October 3, 2016, by Darius Foroux, and is republished here with permission. Darius Foroux
writes about productivity, habits, decision making, and personal finance.
The White House National Security Council is sharply downsizing 'in a bid to improve
efficiency' by consolidating positions and cutting staff, according to the
Washington Times - which adds that a secondary, unspoken objective (i.e. the entire reason)
for the cuts is to address nonstop leaks that have plagued the Trump administration for nearly
three years.
Leaks of President Trump 's conversations with
foreign leaders and other damaging disclosures likely originated with anti-Trump officials in
the White
House who stayed over from the Obama administration, according to several current and
former White
House officials. -
Washington Times
The reform is being led by National Security Adviser Robert C. O'Brien , who told the Times
that 40-45 NSC staff officials had been sent back to their home-agencies, and more are likely
to be moved out.
"We remain on track to meeting the right-sizing goal Ambassador O'Brien outlined in October,
and in fact may exceed that target by drawing down even more positions ," said NSC spokesman
John Ullyot.
Under Obama, the NSC ballooned to as many as 450 people - and officials wielded 'enormous
power' according to the report, directly telephoning commanders in Afghanistan and other
locations in the Middle East to give them direct orders in violation of the military's strict
chain of command.
Meanwhile, the so-called second-hand 'whistleblower' at the heart of President Trump's
impeachment was widely reported to be a NSC staffer on detail from the CIA, Eric Ciaramella,
who took umbrage with Trump asking Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to investigate former
VP Joe Biden - who Ciaramella worked with.
After O'Brien is done, less than 120 policy officials will remain after the next several
months.
The downsizing will be carried out by consolidating positions and returning officials to
agencies and departments such as the CIA, the State and Defense departments and the
military.
Mr. O'Brien noted that the NSC had a policymaking staff of 12 in 1962 when President
Kennedy faced down the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis. During the 2000s and the
George W. Bush administration, the number of NSC staff members increased sharply to support
the three-front conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism.
However, it was during the Obama administration that the NSC was transformed into a major
policymaking agency seeking to duplicate the functions of the State and Defense departments
within the White House . -
Washington Times
"The NSC staff became bloated during the prior administration," said O'Brien. "The NSC is a
coordinating body. I am trying to get us back to a lean and efficient staff that can get the
job done, can coordinate with our interagency partners, and make sure the president receives
the best advice he needs to make the decisions necessary to keep the American people safe."
"I just don't think that we need the numbers of people that it expanded to under the last
administration to do this job right," he added.
Obama-era NSC officials are suspected of leaking classified details of President Trump's
phone conversations with foreign counterparts .
After Mr. Trump 's election in November 2016
and continuing through the spring of 2017, a series of unauthorized disclosures to news
outlets appeared to come from within the White House . Several of the leaks
involved publication of sensitive transcripts of the president's conversations with foreign
leaders.
Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican and former chairman of the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, said this year that he sent the Justice Department eight criminal
referrals related to the leaks, including those related to Mr. Trump 's conversations with the
leaders of Mexico and Australia.
Former White
House strategist Steve Bannon said efforts to weed out the Obama holdovers was a priority
early in the administration.
" The NSC had gotten so big there were over 450 billets ," said Mr. Bannon, adding that he
and others tried to remove the Obama detailees from the White House .
"We wanted them out," he said. "And I think we would have avoided a lot of the problems we
got today if they had been sent back to their agencies ."-
Washington Times
In addition to Ciaramella, Lt. Col. Alexander Vimdman (likely Ciaramella's source) testified
against President Trump during the House Impeachment investigations - telling the
Democratic-led House Intelligence Committee that he was "concerned" by what he heard on Trump's
call with Zelensky.
NSC official Tim Morrison, meanwhile, testified that Vindman was suspected of leaking
sensitive information to the press , a claim Vindman denied.
These holdovers from the Obama presidency will be sent back to their respective
intelligence agencies but not retrenched. They will continue to be employed, do nothing
useful and receive salary until their retirement date. Great working for .gov isn't it.
My question is whether little weenie ******** Vindman who wore his uniform to the hearings
but wore a suit every day to the White House is out of the White House and kicking horse
turds down the street. Imagine being President of the United States and you can't get that
*** hole out of your house each day. Same comment with Tim Morrison.
"The NSC staff became bloated during the prior administration," said O'Brien."
Imagine that! Useless ******* parasite government employees sucking up a paycheck,
probably paid handsomely. When you see a useless **** government employee, imagine them with
a bandit mask with their hand in the pocket of hard working private sector Americans.
Yes. Worked at Office of Personnel management for 2 years as a contractor. Full of lazy
incompetents hired for any reason other than talent. Deadwood everywhere.
"The attempt to isolate the China-Russia-Iran bloc has no way of succeeding and is clearly
based on short term profits for the corporations pushing American policy, rather than the
health of the economic system as a whole. This is clearly seen in how America is targeting
Europe with sanctions over the Nordstream gas pipeline project from Russia to Germany. If you
think this is just about the Trump administration you would be wrong, this has bi-partisan
support in America and is clearly being pushed by the big banks and corporations with the
politicians in both parties being pushed into doing their bidding. This is a huge mistake and
like the economic meltdown of 2008 caused by the short-term profiteering of Wall Street greed,
we are seeing a far greater mistake being made by the attempt to enforce submission on so many
major economic powers. Their obvious reaction is to isolate themselves from American economic
reach which means they WILL join the Russia-China-Iran bloc.
Brzezinski's 2016 advice to bring Russia-China-Iran in from out of the cold was the smart
path to follow. It still is. It is THE ONLY way to save the world economy from splitting more
and more in ways that adversely affects America more and more and by extension the rest of the
world whose economies are tied to America.
The current leaders of both establishment cliques need to accept that their continuance of
the Grand Chessboard strategy is outdated and self-defeating -- and dangerous. It threatens the
lives of so many on a daily basis around the world, including Americans. The rise of China and
Russia has made a unipolar world impossible unless the Chinese all of a sudden decide to submit
to the LIEO. And that is what the American establishment seems to think they can force on them.
They hope to wait out Putin to change Russia when he is gone. While that may be possible, what
they hope with China is extremely unlikely. China is aggressively courting other nations for
partnerships while America is losing more and more respect among the people and leaders of the
world."
In Q2 2019, thanks to the LNG supply glut and converging prices, the EU's LNG imports jumped
by 102 percent on the year, with Russia accounting for 19 percent of LNG imports, second only
to Qatar with 30 percent, and ahead of the U.S. with 12 percent, the European Commission's
Quarterly Report on European Gas Markets
shows .
Between January and November, LNG imports into Europe including Turkey hit a record high,
beating the previous record from 2011, the EIA said in its latest natural gas update. The U.S.,
Russia, and Qatar boosted their LNG supplies to Europe this year, and the U.S. beat Russia in
volumes supplied to Europe in the latter part of the year, EIA data shows.
While Russia and the U.S. compete for gas market share in Europe, the U.S. hit Russia's Nord
Stream 2 project with sanctions this month, delaying the completion of the project with at
least several months.
Following the announcement of the sanctions, Switzerland-based offshore pipelay and subsea
construction company Allseas
immediately suspended Nord Stream 2 pipelay activities.
Also
The agreement between Gazprom and Naftogaz provides for the rejection of new claims, withdrawal of claims, payment by the
decision of the Stockholm arbitration-Miller
MOSCOW, Dec 21-RIA Novosti. Gas transit through Ukraine in 2020 will be 65 billion cubic meters, and 40 billion in 2021-2024, said
the Head of "Gazprom" Alexey Miller.
In turn, the Minister of energy of Ukraine Oleksiy Orzhel noted that the tariff will increase due to a decrease in pumping volumes.
The agreement provides for the rejection of new claims, the withdrawal of claims and the payment of about 2.9 billion dollars on the
decisions of the Stockholm arbitration court.
In addition, Gazprom and Naftogaz will sign an agreement to settle mutual claims under existing contracts. With Kiev, the Russian
company will sign a settlement agreement to withdraw the claim of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine.
The European Commission in the framework of the new agreement on gas cooperation guarantees the compliance of transit with EU
standards, the Ukrainian side-the independence of the regulator, protection of the interests of the transit customer, predictability
and economic feasibility of tariff formation.
MOSCOW, Dec 21-RIA Novosti. "Gazprom" and "Operator of GTS of Ukraine" on Saturday are preparing in Vienna inter-operator agreement
signed on Friday between Russia and Ukraine Protocol of the contract on gas transit and settlement of mutual claims is already
working, told reporters the representative of "Gazprom".
Workers aged 65 and older will be responsible for more than half of all UK employment
growth over the next 10 years and almost two-thirds of employment growth by 2060, according
to new figures.
Since 2008, we've been witnessing a "reverse stagflation", i.e. low unemployment with low
wages (a phenomenon which is impossible according to modern bourgeois economic theory).
The reason for this is what I mentioned earlier: no more technological progress and
negative birth rates. The USA is still benefitting from mass immigration from Central
America, but this demographic bonus won't last for much: now even the Third World countries
are barely above the minimum 2 children per woman (including most of Latin American nations).
Only a bunch of African nations (which have high mortality rates either way, so it doesn't
matter) and India still have the "demographic bonus" in a level such as to be
capitalistically viable.
This problem is not new in cotemporary history. It happened once: in the USSR.
In the 1970s, only 6% of the Soviet population was necessary to produce everything the
USSR needed, so the only solution available was to expand the economy extensively, i.e. by
reproducing the same infrastructure more times over.
The problem with that is that the USSR had reached its limits demographically. Its
population growth entered into stagnant to negative territory. Decades passed until the point
where it didn't even matter if they came up with a revolutionary technology, since there were
simply not enough children to teach and train to such new tech. Add to that the pressure from
the Cold War (which drained its R&D to the military sector), and it begun to wither
away.
Now we can predict the same thing is happening to capitalism. Contrary to the USSR, the
capitalist nations had the advantage of having available the demographic bonuses of the Third
World - specially China - to maintain their dynamism even when some countries like Japan and
Germany reached negative birth rates. Now China's demographic bonus is over and also much of
Latin America. To make things even worse for the capitalists, China managed to scape the
"middle income trap" and go to the route of becoming a superpower, thus adding to the
demographic strains of the capitalist center.
The solution, it seems, is to do pension reforms and force the old people back to work.
France is going to destroy its pension system; Brazil already did that; the USA was a pioneer
in forcing its old population to work to the death; Italy destroyed its pension system after
2008; the UK is preparing the terrain now that its social-democracy is definitely
destroyed.
As always I find your application of Marxist critique succinct and correct. This coming
decade, with its unravelling of the financialization phase of our current phase of capitalism
(i.e the US consolidation phase following British imperialism, c.1914-2020s), will be its
terminal decade. The signal that we had entered the financialization phase were the shocks of
1970-73, and the replacement of industrial manufacture (i.e. money>commodity>money+x,
or M-C-M') with finance/speculation (i.e. money>money+x, M-M') has unfolded more or less
according to Marx's analysis in Capital vol.3. This is as much a crisis of value
creation as anything else. In Australia (where I am) the process is particularly transparent:
we have almost no manufacturing sector left and so we exchange labour-value created in China
for mineral resources and engage in the ponzi-scheme of banking and property speculation,
which produces no value whatsoever. Either way the M-C-M' phase in Australia has vanished and
government dedicates itself to full-spectrum protection of the finance economy and mining.
All the while a veneer of productivity is created by immigration, which destroys cities
(because there's no infrastructure to accomodate them), inflates prices and creates the
illusion of 'growth'. This is propped up by a media who perpetuate xenophobia by creating
panic about refugees (5%) while saying zip about the fact that Australia only has economic
growth at all because we bring in 250K new consumers every year. This collapsing
financialization phase will only accelerate this decade and we will wake to find we don't
make anything and have crumbling 1980s-era infrastructure: Australia will suffer badly as the
phase plays out, not least because of a colonial-settler looting mentality around the
'economy' that persists at every level of government.
What I like about the point you're making in your post (#32) is the wider expansive
question of productivity -- or, how do we continue to produce value? It is often overlooked
that Marx sought to liberate human beings from expropriative labour of every kind (which
occurred as much under the Soviets as it does today); this means that capital's aorta
connecting labour to value via money must be severed (rather than the endless attempts to
reform capitalism to make it 'fairer' etc, a sell-out for which Gramsci savaged the union
movement). The relation between work and value must be critiqued relentlessly. To salvage any
kind of optimism about the future we need to invest all our intellectual energy in this
critique and find a radically new way of construing the link between time, labour and value
that does not include social domination.
In the meantime the scenario to which you have drawn our attention -- the parasitic
vampirism now attacking the elderly and the retired -- is an inevitable consequence of our
particular moment in late capitalism, hurtling at speed toward a social catastrophe of debt,
wealth inequality, neo-feudalism and biopolitical police state, all characterized by an image
of 70-year-olds trudging to work in an agony of physical suffering and mental meaninglessness
which will end in a forgotten grave.
Normal cyclical patterns have gone missing , and may not be coming back anytime soon...
The U.S. economy has experienced its slowest recovery from a recession in the post-World War
II era, and the longer it lasts the more evidence there is that normal cyclical patterns are
missing. And their absence means market participants shouldn't rely on them to divine the
economy's future.
Consider the myriad developments that are atypical, or even the reverse of normal economic
and financial market behavior. The Federal Reserve shifted from easing credit to tightening
following past downturns, with its target federal funds rate normally raised within a year or
so of the recession's trough, eventually precipitating the next economic contraction. This
time, the central bank kept its policy rate at the recessionary low of essentially zero until
Dec. 2015, 78 months into the recovery . And then, after nine quarter-percentage point
increases, it reversed course early this year with three rate cuts.
Far from the Fed's normal worries about an overheating economy and inflation, the central
bank frets that low and even declining consumer prices will spawn deflationary expectations.
Buyers will hold off in anticipation of lower prices. Inventories and excess capacity will
mount, forcing prices down. The price cuts confirm suspicions and purchases are delayed even
further, sparking a deflationary spiral. The glaring example is Japan, with deflation in most
years in the past two decades and tiny real GDP annual growth of 1.1%.
Also, despite the plunge in 30-year fixed mortgage rates from 6.8% in July 2006 to the
current 3.7%, rate-sensitive single-family housing starts have been muted. They fell from a 1.8
million annual rate in January 2006 to 350,000 in March 2009 as the subprime mortgage market
collapsed, but have only recovered to 940,000.
Mortgage lending criteria have tightened and prime-age first-time homebuyers don't have the
necessary downpayments. The net worth of households headed by 18-to-34-year-olds dropped from
$120,000 in 2001 to $90,000 in 2016, a 44% decline adjusted for inflation. Also, they learned
from the last recession that for the first time since the 1930s, house prices nationwide can
fall.
In past business recoveries, the U.S. household saving rate fell as consumer spending grew
faster than incomes. In this expansion, it's the reverse, leaping from 4.9% to 7.9% in
November, retarding spending.
Past postwar recessions spawned financial problems, but nothing like the 2008 crisis. The
government's reaction was equally severe with the enactment of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and
other stringent regulations for financial institutions that are only now being slowly
relaxed.
In earlier business upswings, a drop in the unemployment rate of anything like the plunge
from 10% in October 2009 to the current 3.5% would have spawned massive wage inflation. This
time, real wages are barely growing.
Globalization transported many high-paid manufacturing jobs to China. With the growing "on
demand" economy -- think Uber Technologies Inc. -- many people trade flexibility in working
hours for low pay. The payroll jobs that are being created are mostly in low-wage sectors such
as retailing and leisure & hospitality.
For years, foreign policy was bipartisan and expanding trade was considered highly
desirable. Now, globalists have been overcome by protectionists, spurred by voters upset over
stagnant purchasing power and rising income and asset inequality in G-7 countries. Trump's 2016
election along with the U.K.'s "Brexit" from the European Union are among the results. Then
there's also the demise of global trade deals, which are being replaced by bilateral agreements
or no pacts at all.
The U.S.-China trade dispute will no doubt persist because China, with a declining labor
force as a result of its earlier one child-per-couple policy, needs Western technologies to
grow and achieve its worldwide leadership ambitions. But the U.S. is opposed to the technology
transfers China wants.
The dollar's slide from 1985 until 2007 encouraged U.S. exports, curbed imports and gave
U.S. multinationals currency-related boosts to profits. Since then, the dollar index has
rallied 33% amid a global demand for haven assets. And it should continue to, given the
relatively faster growth of the U.S. economy, its huge, free and open financial markets and the
lack of meaningful substitutes for the greenback.
Disinflation has reigned since 1980, but real interest rates were positive until the last
decade. But for 10 years now, real 10-year Treasury note
yields have been flat at zero (see my Nov. 19, 2018 column, "Zero Real Yields Are Tripping
Up Investors"). This and the flat yield curve have pushed state pension funds and other
investors far out on the risk curve in search of real returns, bidding up stocks to vulnerable
levels.
Earlier, the Fed was run by Ph.D. economists who clung to widely-held theories even though
they didn't work. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is proving to be much more practical, backing away
from rigid Fed policies such as the 2% inflation target and a zero-bound policy rate as well as
unsuccessful forward guidance.
In this different economic climate, it's hard to time the end of the current recovery.
Still, it will end, due either to Fed overtightening or a financial crisis, like the 2000
dot-com blow-off or the 2007-2009 subprime mortgage collapse. In the current excess
supply-savings glut-deflationary world, it's likely a recession will unfold due to a shock
before the Fed overtightens.
No financial crises are in sight, but there are possibilities such as excess debt in China
and among U.S. businesses, a trade war escalation, consumer retrenchment resulting in
widespread deflation, and disappointing corporate profits measured against sky-high stock
prices. Watch for specific imbalances, not typical past patterns.
Plain English Foundation has voted freedom gas as the worst word or phrase of 2019.
The term comes from the United States Department of Energy, which rebranded natural gas as
"freedom gas" and boasted about bringing molecules of US freedom to the world.
"When a simple product like natural gas starts being named through partisan politics, we
are entering dangerous terrain," said the Foundation's Executive Director, Dr Neil James.
"Why can't natural gas just remain natural gas?"
Each year, Plain English Foundation gathers dozens of examples of the worst words to
highlight the importance of clear and ethical public language.
The full list of 2019's worst words and phrases follows.
The central claim is also addressed to white Christian women, particularly married women,
who are assumed to identify their interests with those of their families.
"If this succeeds, we'll be well on the path to dictatorship." This seems predicated on
the idea that 'whites' will only be able to hold onto power by Dictatorship. Population
trends suggest whites will still be the largest group [just under half] in 2055. A
considerable group given their, to borrow the phrase, 'privilege'. Add conservative Asian and
even Catholic Latino voters, is it that difficult to envisage a scenario where Republicans
sometimes achieve power without Dictatorship? They are already benefiting from the radical
left helping drive traditional working class white voters to the right [helped by
Republican/Fox etc hyperbole].
Radical left is either idiots of stooges of intelligence agencies and always has been.
IMHO the idea that " whites" are or will be the force behind the move to the dictatorship is
completely naïve. Dictatorship is needed for financial oligarchy and it is the most
plausible path of development due to another factor -- the collapse of neoliberal ideology and
complete discrediting of neoliberal elite. At least in the USA. Russiagate should be viewed as
an attempt to stage a color revolution and remove the President by the USA intelligence
agencies (in close cooperation with the "Five eyes") .
I would view Russiagate is a kind of Beer Hall Putsch with intelligence agencies instead of
national-socialist party. A couple conspirators might be jailed after Durham investigation is
finished (Hilter was jailed after the putsch), but the danger that CIA will seize the political
power remains. After all KGB was in this role in the USSR for along time. Is the USA that
different? I don't think so. There is no countervailing force: the number of people with
security clearance in the USA exceed five million. This five million and not "whites" like some
completely naïve people propose is the critical mass for the dictatorship. https://news.yahoo.com/durham-surprises-even-allies-statement-202907008.html
The potential explosiveness of Durham's mission was further underscored by the disclosure
that he was examining the role of John O. Brennan, the former CIA director, in how the
intelligence community assessed Russia's 2016 election interference.
BTW "whites" are not a homogeneous group. There is especially abhorrent and dangerous
neoliberal strata of "whites" including members of financial oligarchy, the "professional
class" and "academia" (economics department are completely infected.) as well as MIC
prostitutes in MSM.
I had hoped to welcome 2020 with a optimistic post.
Alas, the current news cycle has thrown up little cause for optimism.
Instead, what has caught my eye today: 2019 closes with release of a new study showing the FDA's failure to police opioids manufacturers
fueled the opioids crisis.
This is yet another example of a familiar theme: inadequate regulation kills people: e.g. think Boeing. Or, on a longer term,
less immediate scale, consider the failure of the Environmental Protection Agency, in so many realms, including the failure to curb
emissions so as to slow the pace of climate change.
In the opioids case, we're talking about thousands and thousands of people.
On Monday, Jama
Internal Medicine published research concerning the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) program to reduce opioids abuse.
The FDA launched its risk evaluation and mitigation strategy – REMS – in 2012. Researchers examined nearly 10,000 documents, released
in response to a Freedom of Information ACT (FOA) request, to generate the conclusions published by JAMA.
In 2011, the F.D.A. began asking the makers of OxyContin and other addictive long-acting opioids to pay for safety training
for more than half the physicians prescribing the drugs, and to track the effectiveness of the training and other measures in
reducing addiction, overdoses and deaths.
But the F.D.A. was never able to determine whether the program worked, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health found in a new review, because the manufacturers did not gather the right kind of data. Although the agency's approval
of OxyContin in 1995 has long come under fire, its efforts to ensure the safe use of opioids since then have not been scrutinized
nearly as much.
The documents show that even when deficiencies in these efforts became obvious through the F.D.A.'s own review process, the
agency never insisted on improvements to the program, [called a REMS]. . .
The FDA's regulatory failure had serious public health consequences, according to critics of US opioids policy, as reported by
the NYT:
Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis,
said the safety program was a missed opportunity. He is a leader of
a group of physicians who had encouraged the F.D.A.
to adopt stronger controls, and a frequent critic of the government's response to the epidemic.
Dr. Kolodny, who was not involved in the study, called the program "a really good example of the way F.D.A. has failed to regulate
opioid manufacturers. If F.D.A. had really been doing its job properly, I don't believe we'd have an opioid crisis today."
Now, as readers frequently emphasize in comments: pain management is a considerable problem – one I am all too well aware of,
as I watched my father succumb to cancer. He ultimately passed away at my parents' home.
Although these drugs "can be clinically useful among appropriately selected patients, they have also been widely oversupplied,
are commonly used nonmedically, and account for a disproportionate number of fatal overdoses," the authors write.
The FDA was unable, more than 5 years after it had instituted its study of the opioids program's effectiveness, to determine whether
it had met its objectives, and this may have been because prior assessments were not objective, according to CNN:
Prior analyses had largely been funded by drug companies, and a 2016 FDA advisory committee "noted methodological concerns
regarding these studies," according to the authors. An inspector general report also concluded in 2013 that the agency "lacks
comprehensive data to determine whether risk evaluation and mitigation strategies improve drug safety."
In addition to failing to evaluate the effective of the limited steps it had taken, the FDA neglected to take more aggressive
steps that were within the ambit of its regulatory authority. According to CNN:
"FDA has tools that could mitigate opioid risks more effectively if the agency would be more assertive in using its power to
control opioid prescribing, manufacturing, and distribution," said retired FDA senior executive William K. Hubbard in an
editorial that accompanied the study. "Instead of bold, effective action, the FDA has implemented the Risk Evaluation and
Mitigation Strategy programs that do not even meet the limited criteria set out by the FDA."
One measure the FDA could have taken, according to Hubbard: putting restrictions on opioid distribution.
"Restricting opioid distribution would be a major decision for the FDA, but it is also likely to be the most effective policy
for reducing the harm of opioids," said Hubbard, who spent more than three decades at the agency and oversaw initiatives in areas
such as regulation, policy and economic evaluation.
Perhaps the Johns Hopkins study will spark moves to reform the broken FDA, so that it can once again serve as an effective regulator.
This could perhaps be something we can look forward to achieving in 2020 (although I won't hold my breath).
Or, perhaps if enacting comprehensive reform is too overwhelming, especially with a divided government, as a starting point: can
we agree to stop allowing self-interested industries to finance studies meant to assess the effectiveness of programs to regulate
that very same industry? Please?
"If this succeeds, we'll be well on the path to dictatorship." This seems predicated on
the idea that 'whites' will only be able to hold onto power by Dictatorship. Population
trends suggest whites will still be the largest group [just under half] in 2055. A
considerable group given their, to borrow the phrase, 'privilege'. Add conservative Asian and
even Catholic Latino voters, is it that difficult to envisage a scenario where Republicans
sometimes achieve power without Dictatorship? They are already benefiting from the radical
left helping drive traditional working class white voters to the right [helped by
Republican/Fox etc hyperbole].
Radical left is either idiots, or stooges of intelligence agencies and always has been.
IMHO the idea that " whites" are or will be the force behind the move to the dictatorship is
completely naïve. Dictatorship is needed for financial oligarchy and it is the most
plausible path of development due to another factor -- the collapse of neoliberal ideology and
complete discrediting of neoliberal elite. At least in the USA.
Russiagate should be viewed as an attempt to stage a color revolution and remove the
President by the USA intelligence agencies (in close cooperation with the "Five eyes") -- a
prolog to the establishing of the dictatorship by financial oligarchy
I would view Russiagate is a kind of Beer Hall Putsch with intelligence agencies instead of
national-socialist party. A couple of conspirators might be jailed after Durham investigation
is finished (Hitler was jailed after the putsch), but the danger that CIA will seize the
political power remains. After all KGB was in this role in the USSR for along time. Is the USA
that different? I don't think so. There is no countervailing force: the number of people with
security clearance in the USA exceed five million. Those five million and not "whites" like
some completely naïve people propose is the critical mass needed for the dictatorship. https://news.yahoo.com/durham-surprises-even-allies-statement-202907008.html
The potential explosiveness of Durham's mission was further underscored by the disclosure
that he was examining the role of John O. Brennan, the former CIA director, in how the
intelligence community assessed Russia's 2016 election interference.
BTW "whites" are not a homogeneous group. There is especially abhorrent and dangerous
neoliberal strata of "whites" including members of financial oligarchy, the "professional
class" and "academia" (economics department are completely infected.) as well as MIC
prostitutes in MSM.
I am talking about the surveillance state that the American electorate has ignorantly
accepted as necessary in order to keep us safe from terrorists.
Despite previous warning from whistleblowers like Russ Tice, Bill Binney, Ed Loomis and Kird
Wiebe, no action to rein in the surveillance monster was taken until Edward Snowden absconded
with the documents exposing the vast amount spying that the U.S. Government is doing to its own
citizens. But even those weak efforts to supposedly rein in the NSA proved to be nothing more
than mere window dressing.
The spying got worse. Just ask Donald Trump and the members of his campaign that were
targeted first by the CIA and NSA and then by the FBI. Fundamental civil rights were
trampled.
The real irony in all of this is that Barack Obama, as President, took credit for helping
revise the laws in order to prevent the spying exposed by Edward Snowden. But under the Obama
Administration, spying on political opponents--both real and perceived--escalated. We know for
a fact that journalists, such as James Rosen and Sheryl Atkinson, were targets and their
communications and computers attacked by the U.S. Government.
We know, thanks to a memo released by Judge Rosemary Collyer, that "FBI consultants" were
making illegal searches of NSA material using the names of Donald Trump, his family and members
of his campaign staff.
Some of this NSA material came courtesy of the Brits and their collection on U.S. targets.
Some of this material came from the NSA's own collection and storage of all electronic
communications and was obtained using a nifty NSA tool called XKEYSCORE. Listen to Ed Snowden's
description. Also, take time to appreciate the irony that CNN and other journalists were
actually trying to report real news. Now they are full blown apologists for the abuse of the
intelligence collection tools.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/HIsc6DqlMy0
Six years ago, former NSA Technical Director for Military and Geopolitical Issues, Bill
Binney, and Russ Tice, a former NSA analyst, appeared on the PBS News Hour. Once again, they
make very clear the enormous nature to the threat to our civil liberties.
Too bad Donald Trump did not listen to their warning.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/GJS7F-mShpI
Given the robust, wide ranging ability of the NSA to probe all communications by any person
in the United States, it is remarkable that no real dirt on Donald Trump was ever uncovered.
Had such information existed, it would be in the NSA's storage vaults in Utah and crooked CIA
analysts under Brennan's direction would have found it and used it. But that did not happed.
The best the intel folks could fabricate were the salacious claims attributed to reports
ostensibly created by former British spy, Christopher Steele. Turns out that the titillating
account that Trump hired hookers to perform coprophilia (could of been worse, coprophagia) was
nothing more than idle bar talk.
What has happened to Donald Trump can happen to any of us. It is time to take this threat
seriously and put the intel agencies back into a properly monitored corral. Otherwise, we will
lose this Republic.
EB's second paragraph @18 is very clear, I think, about the stakes for one of the more
important issues facing liberals / Democrats in the US. Is the party organized around
protecting women, LBGT individuals, and religious and ethnic minorities from theocrats who
want to tear down Constitutional and statutory civil rights, or is it organized around
working people who may have a stake in a less secular, less socially progressive future, but
will support a strong government if it supports ordinary working families who belong to the
dominant culture?
The "liberalism is fascism; only anarchism is properly socialist" faction seems as strong
as ever, though these days, it seems possible to add a third clause, "big government is
good," to the list, to listen to some people.
It's almost as if what they really mean is "all governments are the same, but don't boss
*me* around."
JQ is right to emphasize the similarities and continuities
between the identity politics of the liberal and rightist varieties. They exist along a
continuum and easily located within the ideological cultural and civilizational symbolic of
Western capitalist polities. Understood as a power-elite *ruling ideology*, this is what is
properly described as "Liberalism". (In contrast, superficial electoral politics and journalism
are merely epiphenomenal when they seek to pigeon-hole parties, politicians and policies into
granular categories of "left", "center", "right".)
For reasons similar to those outlined above, Corey Robin and Slavoj Zizek have rejected
labelling Trump a "fascist", especially when this label comes from political centrists –
DNC Democrats; "bourgeois liberals" etc. Robin and Zizek emphasize the manner in which Trump is
simply capitalist business as usual. And since the start of the Trump admin., Robin also has
noted the many political weaknesses of Trump and the GOP, over and above Trump's neophyte
incompetence and vainglorious stupidity.
See here, for example
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/02/american-institutions-wont-keep-you-safe-trumps-excesses
The problem with Robin's and Zizek's positions though, Fascism is just as much capitalist
business as usual. Capitalist economic activity can operate effectively under both centrist and
hard-right ideologies, the relation of Liberalism (including "conservatism") and Fascism is
along a continuum and the first can readily morph into the second.
Two recent books describe the inter-relationship between Liberalism and Fascism as capitalist
ruling ideologies.
Domenico Losurdo – Liberalism: A Counter-History.
Ishay Landa – The Apprentice's Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism
A review of Losurdo's book on Amazon provides a good summary of its thesis.
"1. Liberalism does not expand the boundaries of freedom in an organic dialectical
process. Liberalism has undergone profound changes in its history, but not because of any
sort of internal tendency towards progress. The expanders of liberty have been rebellious
slaves, socialists, organized workers, anti-colonial nationalists, and other forces outside
of the Community of the Free. Generally, the Community of the Free only grants accessions
when faced with powerful opposition from outside its walls.
2. Ideologies such as white supremacy, social Darwinism, and colonialism were created by
liberals as a means of defending the liberty of the Community of the Free. When the American
Founding Fathers rebelled against Britain, one of their most commonly stated reasons for
doing so was that the British government didn't respect the freedom Americans had imbibed
through their Northern European blood. The Framers saw themselves as the preservers of the
freedoms of the Glorious Revolution, a revolution based on the right of freedom-worthy
peoples to dominate the supposedly insipid masses. They were explicit in this respect, and
the later history of liberalism continued to attest to this tendency.
3. Liberalism contains within itself the semi-hidden corollary that human behavior must be
strictly regulated in order for freedom to be maintained. In liberalism, individuals have the
freedom to compete with one another and rise to the top based on merit. Liberal elites have
often interpreted this as proof that those at the top of the social ladder deserve their
place. The other conclusion that stems from this is that criminals, the uneducated, the poor,
and non-Western cultures fully deserve their servile status. If nature wanted them to be part
of the Community of the Free, so goes the logic, then it would allow them to participate in
liberty. Therefore, the dominated peoples of the world must hold their position due to their
own internal defects. For Losurdo, this belief is what defines liberalism and separates it
from radicalism.
4. In liberalism, liberty has historically been seen as a trait that people possess, one
granted by nature. Thus, liberalism easily justifies its tendencies towards inequality by
devising various ways of explaining why nature simply doesn't grant some people the liberty
it grants others. Meanwhile, radicalism sees the establishment of liberty as an active
process. Interestingly, this indicates that negative liberty possesses a magnetism towards
authoritarianism. Losrudo points out that during the early days of Fascism, many liberals in
the U.S. and Western Europe such as von Mises, Croce, and the Italian liberal establishment
saw Mussolini's regime as a possible defender of classical liberalism and liberty as it was
understood by the Anglo-Saxon theorists of liberalism.
This book is as disturbing as it is insightful. I personally see it as self-evident that
many of the authoritarian tendencies that Losurdo identifies have made a comeback with a
vengeance in the neo-liberal era, and have strengthened since the start of the Great
Financial Crisis. Modern liberals, especially in American academia, often assure themselves
that liberalism will not tolerate any serious regresses into authoritarianism, because of the
myth of the dialectical process I described at the beginning of this review. I even believed
in this to some extent, and if I remember correctly, I recall Slavoj Zizek of all people
praising liberalism for this reason. Fortunately, Losurdo has seriously damaged my faith in
this tendency in liberalism. Again, I don't even consider myself to be a liberal, I identify
as a Leftist (one of the radicals Losurdo describes). Perhaps it speaks to the pervasiveness
of the comforting nature of liberalism's self image that even its critics unknowingly take
refuge in it."
This is an excerpt of a review of Landa's book from Goodreads:
"The last 2 chapters are dedicated to attacking 4 liberal myths about fascism. 1) that it
was "the tyranny of the majority" 2) that it was "collectivist" as compared to
"individualist" liberalism 3) that the "big lie", the use of propaganda etc to cover the
"truth", was unique to fascism/"totalitarianism" or started there 4) that fascism was an
ultra-nationalist attack on liberal cosmopolitanism.
For 1, he focuses not so much on attacking the idea that fascists were a majority (he does
do this, but the book isn't focused on this sort of thing which has been gone over before
many times) but instead how many liberals believed in the tyranny of the majority *against
property owners* and were perfectly willing to accept dictatorship to protect the elite
minority from the dangers of a majority attacking their elite position – and that
liberals were in fact key ideological supporters of the fascist dictatorship to protect the
market against the attacks of socialism.
For 2, he points out first "it should be realized that terms such as "individualism" or
"collectivism" are, in and of themselves, devoid of political meaning, whether radical or
conservative, left or right, socialist or capitalist. It is only the historical content
poured into such signifiers, that lends them their concrete ideological import." These terms
aren't helpful or meaningful as ideals. Nevertheless, he points out how liberal defences of
the individual actually often took place from the standpoint of a greater community or goal
– he points out how Edmund Burke called society a "family" simply to defend that the
elite patriarchs should be able to do whatever they want yet without any responsibility in
return. The collective standpoint acts as a justification for inequalities – that
allowing the elite to do what they want advances greater goals, like culture, the health of
the race, the nation etc. Individualism was actually often a way of advancing socialist goals
by pointing out that every human being deserves a certain quality of life and the elite don't
deserve more.
For 3, he quotes liberal philosophers who believed in the dangers of democracy so talked
about the need for elites to work behind the scenes so the masses believe they're in charge
while really a small elite do everything. He quotes Leo Strauss extensively, which is kind of
weird as he's "post-fascism", but it's valuable as a more developed example of exactly what
other liberal philosophers wanted. It shows that "totalitarianism" isn't so obviously
confined to non-liberal ideologies.
For 4, he points out how common ideas of the nation were for liberals – similar to 2
– as a justification for inequality, as a basis for wealth (Wealth of Nations for
example), as a myth to rally the masses. Again, he's clear that nationalism isn't inherently
"good" or "bad" – pointing to the way nowadays third world nationalism is a valuable
force for liberation while liberal countries at capitalism's centre are stressing the
opposite. He's saying that nationalism isn't a unique quality of fascism at all. He also
quotes Hitler suggesting that if Germany isn't good enough to win its place at the forefront
of countries, he doesn't care for it. He doesn't present it as if it counters the idea of
nationalism in fascism but he points out that it suggests alternative priorities.
The epilogue focuses on one specific historian's (Michael Mann) ideas about how fascism
wasn't able to take hold in north-west Europe because of their "strong liberal traditions".
He points out first that there were serious differences in material conditions but also that
British politicians, for example, were closely tied to fascism, regularly expressing
admiration for it and supporting fascists abroad, while implementing "crypto-fascist" ideas
at home. Fascism was also impossible without ideas from the UK and the US – eugenics
ideas from there especially were very popular among fascists. The idea that it was "liberal
traditions" that stopped it spreading is shown as, at best, incredibly naive."
I agree with '3': I also think that thinking about dictatorship makes us think that the
threat is coming from a certain direction, which makes us unprepared if the threat comes from
a completely different direction (think of this as being like an intellectual Maginot Line if
you want). Things may change in 100 years time (they normally do!).
But it's clear that for the immediate future (by which I mean, roughly up until about 2050
or thereabouts) 'Old Skool' fascist dictatorships are simply a busted flush. Modi might
praise Hitler and Bolsanaro might speak approvingly of the previous military dictatorships
but even they (more or less) stick to democratic norms (elections etc.) although of course
they try and undermine what one might term the 'true' spirit of democracy at every turn (the
only place on Planet Earth which still habitually uses the 'dictatorship' mode of governance
is the area round the Gulf, for very specific socio-cultural reasons).
If you are looking for previous analogues for what we are looking at in the future you
might look at South Africa (which had elections but only for 'whites'), Mexico under the PRI,
Japan under the LDP, etc. Even in the UK, which is nominally a 'real' democracy you have a
situation (and have had since about 1950) in which, while elections are 'real' the Tories
almost always win them, and after 1979, even when the opposition does win the election, it
does not engage in any serious ideological opposition to the political philosophy of the
Tories (the US is like this too, since roughly 1981).
At the moment at least, the Republicans in the US and the Tories in the UK are simply
doubling down on gerrymandering, voter suppression, 'let them eat racism' type crackdowns on
'immigrants' to disguise (and create a 'reason' for) rising inequality, the blizzard of
propaganda we call 'fake news' (which mainly, contrary to popular belief, comes from
'mainstream' media sources): and so far these techniques seem to be working. Outright
dictatorship would create foreign policy problems (e.g. with the UN, the EU etc.) and there
is little sign at the moment that the Right wants to go down that route, at least in the
short term.
>>>"Historically both options have been compatible with "liberalism," which is one
reason why radical movements have in fact been able to achieve certain things, albeit not all
they wanted, within 'liberal' or pluralistic polities."
>>>"it's fine to talk about different kinds of oppression as long as one also
emphasizes a common underlying interest in opposing oligarchy."
Entrance of hitherto excluded groups, partial accession to the demands of political
radicals, is only allowed insofar as it does not interfere with the smooth running of
capitalist business as usual. Leading to what you call oligarchy being the last, common
obstacle and political opponent. But victory here is impossible unless radical political
movements work with a futurist political programme that strives to lay the foundations for the
post-systemic, post-capitalist world system or systems.
A historical example of capitalist colonialism returning to business as usual is the Haitian
Revolution in which the victors of the conflict were still forced into paying reparations to
the losers of the conflict.
However the ideological effects of the Haitian Revolution must also be taken into account.
The resonance of this historical event extended as far as into the writings of Hegel
(master-slave dialectic) as Susan Buck-Morss describes here:
On the question of revolutions and their significance (or lack thereof) see Immanuel
Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis. Significant revolutions have long-lasting
world-systemic effects and aftershocks. They cement into place secular trends of disequilibrium
that disrupt the smooth operations of the capitalist world-system. Efforts to contain these
secular trends of disequilibrium fail to return the capitalist world-system to its modes of
functioning prior to the disruptive revolution. Instead, secular trends of disequilibrium lead
eventually to the capitalist world-system's terminal historical crisis.
A brief account of Wallerstein on revolution can be found here:
"... For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of disparaging and minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn't work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore attacks. ..."
"... When the Bernie campaign wasn't being ignored by corporate media during 2019, innuendos and mud often flew in his direction. But we ain't seen nothing yet. ..."
A central premise of conventional media wisdom has collapsed. On Thursday, both the
New York Times
and
Politico
published
major articles reporting that Bernie Sanders really could win the Democratic presidential nomination. Such acknowledgments
will add to the momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign as the new year begins -- but they foreshadow a massive escalation of
anti-Sanders misinformation and invective.
Throughout 2019, corporate media routinely asserted that the Sanders campaign had
little chance of winning the nomination. As is so often the case, journalists were echoing each other more than paying
attention to grassroots realities. But now, polling numbers and other
indicators
on
the ground are finally sparking very different headlines from the media establishment.
Those stories, and others likely to follow in copycat news outlets, will heighten the energies of Sanders supporters and
draw in many wavering voters. But the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign's chances will surely boost the
decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority.
For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of
disparaging
and
minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn't work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore
attacks.
Along the way, the corporate media will occasionally give voice to some Sanders defenders and supporters. A few
establishment Democrats will decide to make nice with him early in the year. But the overwhelming bulk of Sanders media
coverage -- synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street
Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party -- will range from condescending to savage.
When the Bernie campaign wasn't being
ignored
by
corporate media during 2019, innuendos and mud often flew in his direction. But we ain't seen nothing yet.
With so much at stake -- including the presidency and the top leadership of the Democratic Party -- no holds will be barred. For
the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it'll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign.
While reasons for pessimism are abundant, so are ample reasons to understand that
a
Sanders presidency is a real possibility
. The last places we should look for political realism are corporate media outlets
that distort options and encourage passivity.
Bernie is fond of quoting a statement from Nelson Mandela: "It always seems impossible until it is done."
From the grassroots, as 2020 gets underway, the solution should be clear: All left hands on deck.
Elections aren't real. Democrats will nominate Joe Biden to lose the election. Trump will remain as fascist
strongman and the dems will continue to blame his neoconservative policies on his white trash constituency.
Bernie serves a few important functions.
1. he keeps the radicals from leaving the plantation and going 3rd party.
2. his promotion of progressive policies will make Biden less popular and help him lose to Trump
3. Bernie and his "socialism" can then be blamed for losing the election to Trump
Unfortunately this comment will be buried in this monstrosity of a thread- now at over 300 comments
with only about a third of them having a much relevance.
You might consider re-posting in reply
to one of the foremost comments. Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the
campaign hallucinations.
I've often wondered how it is people could believe the elections could have any positive and
lasting impact on their lives if they have been through a couple of cycles. Do they not also wonder
how it is that these election (marketing) campaigns now stretch out for well over a year nowadays
demanding everyone's political attention, energy and resources. To say it is a colossal waste does
not quite capture the enormity of the mind job being to people.
Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the campaign hallucinations.
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. You "realists" who are true believers that you have the Truth and have a calling to
preach the Truth absolutely must stand against the unwashed masses who claim that your "reality" isn't even
intersubjectively verifiable, much less dialectical & material [eta
& historical
].
I quite enjoyed what SteelPirate/LaborSolidarity had to say about you attempting to gain a vanguard
following by trolling lib-prog sites.
Never pay attention to anyone who claims what's "real" and what isn't. Politics certainly doesn't
exist in the realm of an objective, concrete, physical, naturalistic, materialistic reality which is
shared by a consensus of rational observers. At best, politics deals with intersubjectively verifiable
social phenomena. Thus, politics is mostly idealistic in the belief that each mind generates its own
reality.
This realization is the topic of intersubjective verifiability, as recounted, for example, by Max Born
(1949, 1965)
Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance
, who points out that all knowledge, including
natural or social science, is also subjective. p. 162: "Thus it dawned upon me that fundamentally
everything is subjective, everything without exception. That was a shock."
Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders's Chances of Success- "...the chances he can be elected are pretty small."
(Waiting with bated breath for copious downvotes by those who hate the truth and hate reality).
Most of who support Sanders know that his presidency will involve an uphill battle. Chomsky is
being realistic.
But there really is no better option for meaningful change working within the
political system than supporting Sanders. it is also important to note that "Our Revolution" has
energized many young activists, encouraging them to continue the fight. This goes beyond politics
to social and economic issues. If Sanders leaves us with a movement, this may turn out to be more
important than the presidency in the long run.
Keep working for effective moral and economic justice and democracy!
Well, I have said this several times, it's not the microscopic left that you need to convince, it's
the majority of self-identifying Democrats not supporting Sanders that you need to convince. I am
repelled by the Democratic Party, but there are millions who identify as Democrats and many are
proud of it. You need to convince them, not us.
Yes, although I don't think that those who support a Leftist agenda--whether you actually call them
Leftists or not--are quite so microscopic a group as you imply. But you don't need to convince me
or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect, or that it will be difficult for him to
be elected president. We already know; we simply consider him the best option within this context
of voting.
Have you ever thought of turning your approach to systemic commentary (which is valid
and interesting, BTW, I'm not discounting it) around and saying what candidates you support-- in
this context being discussed of voting-- instead of which ones you don't? And then explaining why
such support would be effective?
I would say that what is wrong with the world is more a fault of the economic and political
system than of Sanders alone--who not only plays small part in causing what is wrong, but a
significant part in trying to correct it. Yes, he works within the system. That is a given. It may
be, as Chris Hedges thinks, that there is no hope working within the system. But Noam Chomsky's
approach also bears serious consideration that even Hedges doesn't discount. Voting will only be a
small part of what brings about change, but it may make some slight difference--if you can stomach
it. And it only takes a small amount of time.
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
I don't see much of an argument that Sanders will be no better as president than Trump (and if
you think so, I'd like to hear you argue it). I suspect you find the compromise unpalatable. I can
understand that. I, too, draw the line at a certain point. I couldn't vote for HRC.
Yes, Sanders isn't perfect. Chomsky also said another important thing: "We're all compromised."
Everyone who is a citizen of the US is compromised, and bears some measure of responsibility for
the military interventions undertaken by our government. Perhaps we should renounce our
citizenship, refuse to pay taxes, etc. But most of us don't -- not even those of us committed to
activist work in other ways -- significant ways -- to make things better.
But you don't need to convince me or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect
-for me it isn' that he's not perfect, it's that I think he sucks
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
-funny, that's a favorite line of Democrats
I get that, but it doesn't negate that Sanders's chances are next to nil.
Your suggestion of me signaling whom I support would fall on deaf ears around here. I have said
this many times- I will probably for the Green Party candidate or the Socialist Equality Party
candidate. If only a Democrat and Republican appear on the ballot then I would refuse to vote even
if I had to pay a fine. I am not in the habit of telling anyone whom to vote for unless asked.
Before a 3rd can succeed, the fantasy that the fix can come through the Democrats needs to be
destroyed. Not to worry, in due time it will be obvious.
My guess/bet is that
V4V
believes that the truth "We're all compromised" doesn't apply to him.
He sees himself as a truth-knower and a truth-teller.
He won't commit to logical argumentation.
He'll preach the truth to you.
I saw this video long ago--and agreed with it. But though Sanders' chances are small, they're still
vastly larger than the NONEXISTENT chances of success of the purist, "Born to Lose" left. Why not just
admit that you've totally given up and simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of
us with some (albeit small) hope?
simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of us with some (albeit small) hope?
-straw man
That isn't what I do because I couldn't care less whom Democrats support and vote for. Typically, I post
some unpleasant truth about Sanders, like his lackluster polling numbers or his support for neoliberal
warmongers and sit back and watch the ad hominems and downvotes roll in. I am not normally on the attack, I am
usually on the receiving end.
I admit that I see this forum as a form of entertainment. I admit I have zero expectation that someone to my
liking will be elected president and that the system is going to change anytime soon. Do I believe it possible?
Yes, I believe it is possible, I just don't believe it possible using the corrupt, Democratic Party as a
vehicle and that's where we differ.
And that the crux of our issue- you believe the Democratic Party can be used a vehicle to convert the
CIA/Wall Street/War Inc. Democrats into the peoples' party, and I do not. If the needed changes are ever to
arrive, it will be in spite of the Democrats not because of them. I hope you stick around because in due time
I'll be telling you, "Told ya so."
The problem with your position is that, unlike Sanders, you don't seem to understand that a third
candidate party candidate hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of being president unless if s/he
somehow gets more electoral votes that
both
the major parties combined. If not, it goes to
the house, and in the current partisan atmosphere, would be decided for the candidate of the House
majority.
The major parties have a death-grip on the presidency while the electoral college exists.
You don't seem to understand that Sanders has a snowball's chance in hell of being the Democratic
Party candidate for many reasons including the DNC arguing in court it is a private corporation and
can legally rig primary and the trusty superdelegates for Biden.
What I propose is a movement
outside the Democratic Party in inside it. I believe any attempt to reform the Democratic Party is
doomed to fail. All this whistling in the dark over Sanders is a distraction and a kicking the can
down the road to the time you Democrats
finally
realize it isn't going to work. You
obviously didn't learn it in 2016, and I would be surprised if you learn it once Sanders tanks and
begins campaigning for Biden just like he did Clinton. I will promise this, I'll say, "I told ya
so" in a matter of months. That's okay, play it again, Sam.
People believe they need others to tell them what to do and give them the illusion somebody cares about
them and has their best interests at heart. That's an archetype in the brain that goes back to our
baby/childhood when we were dependent on our caregivers for sustenance, comfort and life itself.That's
where the original concept of needing "leaders" comes from. But, what happens is psyco/sociopaths see
this weakness in humanity and force their way to the top, to herd and exploit the gullible sheeple for
their own agendas and selfish interests. No matter who rises to the top, she/he got their through the
same system that's been going on since tribes had their chief; chief's lieutenant and witch
doctor/shaman. Those three keep the tribe in line with their own desires. Chief through brute force, his
lieutenant through information and witch doctor through religion and "spiritual" services; and all three
require tribute and fees from the rest of the tribe. So, you will see, regardless of who the next POTUS
will be, that same structure, although more complex today, will repeat itself. New boss/old boss, same
ol' same ol'. All power has to be returned to the people at the local level before Wash. starts WWIII.
But, if that happens, at least we won't have to worry about global warming with a nuclear winter after
the bombs drop.
As usual, I find your analysis and commentary honest and accurate. However, I do take exception to your pulling out
these canards:
"Trump's contempt of Congress and attempt to get Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, to open an
investigation of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in exchange for almost $400 million in U.S. military aid and allowing
Zelensky to visit the White House are impeachable offenses"
Trump has certain executive privileges and him being
guilty of contempt of Congress should be up to the Supreme Court to decide. Jonathan Turley in his testimony made
that quite clear. Military aid was never mentioned in the phone call. Zelensky was unaware aid would be withheld. So
if Trump were using the money as a means to induce Zelensky to do those favors, it was a totally botched one. To
quote Dr. Strangelove, "The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret!"
New avenues for accountability and oversight became possible in Washington, D.C., in 2019, following the
election of a new Democratic Party majority in the House (and the most diverse Congress ever) in the 2018
midterms. As a result, Democrats took hold of the subpoena power that rests in the House of Representatives,
along with the power to set the agenda across congressional committees. As a result, 2019 has been full of
important moments for congressional oversight of both the Trump administration and private business. Here
are five of the most important moments in congressional oversight in 2019.
1. Betsy DeVos, Are You "Too Corrupt" or "Too Incompetent"? ...
2. Big Bank CEOs Are Stumped by Simple Budgets ...
3. Wells Fargo Announces Plan to Divest From Private Prisons in Congressional Testimony ...
4. Rep. Ilhan Omar vs. Elliott Abrams ...
5. Voting to Impeach the President ...
The only people who lie and obfuscate facts as much as Trump and his GOP cult are neo progressive demagogues
and propaganda buffs like Chris 'regime-change-in-America' Hedges.
Absolutely bush should have been impeached, convicted, removed and executed for war crimes and mass murder.
But because he wasn't doesn't mean that our orange Fuhrer shouldn't be.
He is the most dangerous authoritarian propagandist and threat to this country since Hitler.
NObama was a horrible POTUS for the 99% and is THE reason why we have trump, but he didn't poison every aspect
of the government and everything else like your orange Fuhrer is doing, which is the exact same tactic that
Hitler used to create Nazi Germany.
The generic Left is ignoring this aspect of the Trump impeachment circus . The whole farce IS political. Now
Senator Lisa Murkowski wants her Republican Party to rise above politics ( and do the wrong thing ? ). In the
past three years when did the Democrat Party ever rise above politics ? Politics USA is always CLASS politics,
always IMPERIALIST , MILITARIST politics . All the " liberal " Democrats have been slobbering over the
UN-ELECTED shadow government of the United States , the National Security Police State , slobbering over FBI,
CIA bureaucrats , uniformed officials of the Pentagon War Crimes Machine . Join them ?
This Senator Lisa
Murkowski -no surprise - is in good standing with the Israel Lobby collectively determined to nullify the 2016
presidential election . NEWS clip :
[ "There are about 6 million Jewish people living in America, so as a percentage it's quite small, but in
terms of influence its quite big," Farage said. Farage seemed to question why Israel was not facing
election-meddling accusations, saying Israeli groups "have a voice within American politics" but "I don't think
anybody is suggesting that the Israeli government tried to affect the result of the American elections."]
Did not the Kafkaesque Trump impeachment hearings look and sound like Old Yiddish Theater soap opera ? How
many working class Christian Americans have heartfelt moral and cultural ties to the Ukraine of all places, now
celebrating its first Jewish friend of Zionist Apartheid Israel president ? Who in the USA authorized this
character to wage a proxy war against post-communist Russia ? WE THE PEOPLE ?
Guess WHO is promoting the HATE RUSSIA, New McCarthyism ?
$748 billion in 2020 for the military death machine equals $23 MILLION A SECOND.
How many schools or
hospitals could have been built, how many roads or bridges repaired, how many students educated with the money
the MIC has squandered in the few seconds it has taken me to write this?
We are destroying our people from the inside out. This is treason.
"If this succeeds, we'll be well on the path to dictatorship." This seems predicated on
the idea that 'whites' will only be able to hold onto power by Dictatorship. Population
trends suggest whites will still be the largest group [just under half] in 2055. A
considerable group given their, to borrow the phrase, 'privilege'. Add conservative Asian and
even Catholic Latino voters, is it that difficult to envisage a scenario where Republicans
sometimes achieve power without Dictatorship? They are already benefiting from the radical
left helping drive traditional working class white voters to the right [helped by
Republican/Fox etc hyperbole].
Radical left is either idiots of stooges of intelligence agencies and always has been.
IMHO the idea that " whites" are or will be the force behind the move to the dictatorship is
completely naïve. Dictatorship is needed for financial oligarchy and it is the most
plausible path of development due to another factor -- the collapse of neoliberal ideology and
complete discrediting of neoliberal elite. At least in the USA. Russiagate should be viewed as
an attempt to stage a color revolution and remove the President by the USA intelligence
agencies (in close cooperation with the "Five eyes") .
I would view Russiagate is a kind of Beer Hall Putsch with intelligence agencies instead of
national-socialist party. A couple conspirators might be jailed after Durham investigation is
finished (Hilter was jailed after the putsch), but the danger that CIA will seize the political
power remains. After all KGB was in this role in the USSR for along time. Is the USA that
different? I don't think so. There is no countervailing force: the number of people with
security clearance in the USA exceed five million. This five million and not "whites" like some
completely naïve people propose is the critical mass for the dictatorship. https://news.yahoo.com/durham-surprises-even-allies-statement-202907008.html
The potential explosiveness of Durham's mission was further underscored by the disclosure
that he was examining the role of John O. Brennan, the former CIA director, in how the
intelligence community assessed Russia's 2016 election interference.
BTW "whites" are not a homogeneous group. There is especially abhorrent and dangerous
neoliberal strata of "whites" including members of financial oligarchy, the "professional
class" and "academia" (economics department are completely infected.) as well as MIC
prostitutes in MSM.
A central premise of conventional media wisdom has collapsed. On Thursday, both the
New York Times
and
Politico
published
major articles reporting that Bernie Sanders really could win the Democratic presidential nomination. Such acknowledgments
will add to the momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign as the new year begins -- but they foreshadow a massive escalation of
anti-Sanders misinformation and invective.
Throughout 2019, corporate media routinely asserted that the Sanders campaign had
little chance of winning the nomination. As is so often the case, journalists were echoing each other more than paying
attention to grassroots realities. But now, polling numbers and other
indicators
on
the ground are finally sparking very different headlines from the media establishment.
Those stories, and others likely to follow in copycat news outlets, will heighten the energies of Sanders supporters and
draw in many wavering voters. But the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign's chances will surely boost the
decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority.
For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of
disparaging
and
minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn't work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore
attacks.
Along the way, the corporate media will occasionally give voice to some Sanders defenders and supporters. A few
establishment Democrats will decide to make nice with him early in the year. But the overwhelming bulk of Sanders media
coverage -- synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street
Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party -- will range from condescending to savage.
When the Bernie campaign wasn't being
ignored
by
corporate media during 2019, innuendos and mud often flew in his direction. But we ain't seen nothing yet.
With so much at stake -- including the presidency and the top leadership of the Democratic Party -- no holds will be barred. For
the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it'll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign.
While reasons for pessimism are abundant, so are ample reasons to understand that
a
Sanders presidency is a real possibility
. The last places we should look for political realism are corporate media outlets
that distort options and encourage passivity.
Bernie is fond of quoting a statement from Nelson Mandela: "It always seems impossible until it is done."
From the grassroots, as 2020 gets underway, the solution should be clear: All left hands on deck.
Elections aren't real. Democrats will nominate Joe Biden to lose the election. Trump will remain as fascist
strongman and the dems will continue to blame his neoconservative policies on his white trash constituency.
Bernie serves a few important functions.
1. he keeps the radicals from leaving the plantation and going 3rd party.
2. his promotion of progressive policies will make Biden less popular and help him lose to Trump
3. Bernie and his "socialism" can then be blamed for losing the election to Trump
Unfortunately this comment will be buried in this monstrosity of a thread- now at over 300 comments
with only about a third of them having a much relevance.
You might consider re-posting in reply
to one of the foremost comments. Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the
campaign hallucinations.
I've often wondered how it is people could believe the elections could have any positive and
lasting impact on their lives if they have been through a couple of cycles. Do they not also wonder
how it is that these election (marketing) campaigns now stretch out for well over a year nowadays
demanding everyone's political attention, energy and resources. To say it is a colossal waste does
not quite capture the enormity of the mind job being to people.
Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the campaign hallucinations.
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. You "realists" who are true believers that you have the Truth and have a calling to
preach the Truth absolutely must stand against the unwashed masses who claim that your "reality" isn't even
intersubjectively verifiable, much less dialectical & material [eta
& historical
].
I quite enjoyed what SteelPirate/LaborSolidarity had to say about you attempting to gain a vanguard
following by trolling lib-prog sites.
Never pay attention to anyone who claims what's "real" and what isn't. Politics certainly doesn't
exist in the realm of an objective, concrete, physical, naturalistic, materialistic reality which is
shared by a consensus of rational observers. At best, politics deals with intersubjectively verifiable
social phenomena. Thus, politics is mostly idealistic in the belief that each mind generates its own
reality.
This realization is the topic of intersubjective verifiability, as recounted, for example, by Max Born
(1949, 1965)
Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance
, who points out that all knowledge, including
natural or social science, is also subjective. p. 162: "Thus it dawned upon me that fundamentally
everything is subjective, everything without exception. That was a shock."
Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders's Chances of Success- "...the chances he can be elected are pretty small."
(Waiting with bated breath for copious downvotes by those who hate the truth and hate reality).
Most of who support Sanders know that his presidency will involve an uphill battle. Chomsky is
being realistic.
But there really is no better option for meaningful change working within the
political system than supporting Sanders. it is also important to note that "Our Revolution" has
energized many young activists, encouraging them to continue the fight. This goes beyond politics
to social and economic issues. If Sanders leaves us with a movement, this may turn out to be more
important than the presidency in the long run.
Keep working for effective moral and economic justice and democracy!
Well, I have said this several times, it's not the microscopic left that you need to convince, it's
the majority of self-identifying Democrats not supporting Sanders that you need to convince. I am
repelled by the Democratic Party, but there are millions who identify as Democrats and many are
proud of it. You need to convince them, not us.
Yes, although I don't think that those who support a Leftist agenda--whether you actually call them
Leftists or not--are quite so microscopic a group as you imply. But you don't need to convince me
or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect, or that it will be difficult for him to
be elected president. We already know; we simply consider him the best option within this context
of voting.
Have you ever thought of turning your approach to systemic commentary (which is valid
and interesting, BTW, I'm not discounting it) around and saying what candidates you support-- in
this context being discussed of voting-- instead of which ones you don't? And then explaining why
such support would be effective?
I would say that what is wrong with the world is more a fault of the economic and political
system than of Sanders alone--who not only plays small part in causing what is wrong, but a
significant part in trying to correct it. Yes, he works within the system. That is a given. It may
be, as Chris Hedges thinks, that there is no hope working within the system. But Noam Chomsky's
approach also bears serious consideration that even Hedges doesn't discount. Voting will only be a
small part of what brings about change, but it may make some slight difference--if you can stomach
it. And it only takes a small amount of time.
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
I don't see much of an argument that Sanders will be no better as president than Trump (and if
you think so, I'd like to hear you argue it). I suspect you find the compromise unpalatable. I can
understand that. I, too, draw the line at a certain point. I couldn't vote for HRC.
Yes, Sanders isn't perfect. Chomsky also said another important thing: "We're all compromised."
Everyone who is a citizen of the US is compromised, and bears some measure of responsibility for
the military interventions undertaken by our government. Perhaps we should renounce our
citizenship, refuse to pay taxes, etc. But most of us don't -- not even those of us committed to
activist work in other ways -- significant ways -- to make things better.
But you don't need to convince me or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect
-for me it isn' that he's not perfect, it's that I think he sucks
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
-funny, that's a favorite line of Democrats
I get that, but it doesn't negate that Sanders's chances are next to nil.
Your suggestion of me signaling whom I support would fall on deaf ears around here. I have said
this many times- I will probably for the Green Party candidate or the Socialist Equality Party
candidate. If only a Democrat and Republican appear on the ballot then I would refuse to vote even
if I had to pay a fine. I am not in the habit of telling anyone whom to vote for unless asked.
Before a 3rd can succeed, the fantasy that the fix can come through the Democrats needs to be
destroyed. Not to worry, in due time it will be obvious.
My guess/bet is that
V4V
believes that the truth "We're all compromised" doesn't apply to him.
He sees himself as a truth-knower and a truth-teller.
He won't commit to logical argumentation.
He'll preach the truth to you.
I saw this video long ago--and agreed with it. But though Sanders' chances are small, they're still
vastly larger than the NONEXISTENT chances of success of the purist, "Born to Lose" left. Why not just
admit that you've totally given up and simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of
us with some (albeit small) hope?
simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of us with some (albeit small) hope?
-straw man
That isn't what I do because I couldn't care less whom Democrats support and vote for. Typically, I post
some unpleasant truth about Sanders, like his lackluster polling numbers or his support for neoliberal
warmongers and sit back and watch the ad hominems and downvotes roll in. I am not normally on the attack, I am
usually on the receiving end.
I admit that I see this forum as a form of entertainment. I admit I have zero expectation that someone to my
liking will be elected president and that the system is going to change anytime soon. Do I believe it possible?
Yes, I believe it is possible, I just don't believe it possible using the corrupt, Democratic Party as a
vehicle and that's where we differ.
And that the crux of our issue- you believe the Democratic Party can be used a vehicle to convert the
CIA/Wall Street/War Inc. Democrats into the peoples' party, and I do not. If the needed changes are ever to
arrive, it will be in spite of the Democrats not because of them. I hope you stick around because in due time
I'll be telling you, "Told ya so."
The problem with your position is that, unlike Sanders, you don't seem to understand that a third
candidate party candidate hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of being president unless if s/he
somehow gets more electoral votes that
both
the major parties combined. If not, it goes to
the house, and in the current partisan atmosphere, would be decided for the candidate of the House
majority.
The major parties have a death-grip on the presidency while the electoral college exists.
You don't seem to understand that Sanders has a snowball's chance in hell of being the Democratic
Party candidate for many reasons including the DNC arguing in court it is a private corporation and
can legally rig primary and the trusty superdelegates for Biden.
What I propose is a movement
outside the Democratic Party in inside it. I believe any attempt to reform the Democratic Party is
doomed to fail. All this whistling in the dark over Sanders is a distraction and a kicking the can
down the road to the time you Democrats
finally
realize it isn't going to work. You
obviously didn't learn it in 2016, and I would be surprised if you learn it once Sanders tanks and
begins campaigning for Biden just like he did Clinton. I will promise this, I'll say, "I told ya
so" in a matter of months. That's okay, play it again, Sam.
People believe they need others to tell them what to do and give them the illusion somebody cares about
them and has their best interests at heart. That's an archetype in the brain that goes back to our
baby/childhood when we were dependent on our caregivers for sustenance, comfort and life itself.That's
where the original concept of needing "leaders" comes from. But, what happens is psyco/sociopaths see
this weakness in humanity and force their way to the top, to herd and exploit the gullible sheeple for
their own agendas and selfish interests. No matter who rises to the top, she/he got their through the
same system that's been going on since tribes had their chief; chief's lieutenant and witch
doctor/shaman. Those three keep the tribe in line with their own desires. Chief through brute force, his
lieutenant through information and witch doctor through religion and "spiritual" services; and all three
require tribute and fees from the rest of the tribe. So, you will see, regardless of who the next POTUS
will be, that same structure, although more complex today, will repeat itself. New boss/old boss, same
ol' same ol'. All power has to be returned to the people at the local level before Wash. starts WWIII.
But, if that happens, at least we won't have to worry about global warming with a nuclear winter after
the bombs drop.
As usual, I find your analysis and commentary honest and accurate. However, I do take exception to your pulling out
these canards:
"Trump's contempt of Congress and attempt to get Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, to open an
investigation of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in exchange for almost $400 million in U.S. military aid and allowing
Zelensky to visit the White House are impeachable offenses"
Trump has certain executive privileges and him being
guilty of contempt of Congress should be up to the Supreme Court to decide. Jonathan Turley in his testimony made
that quite clear. Military aid was never mentioned in the phone call. Zelensky was unaware aid would be withheld. So
if Trump were using the money as a means to induce Zelensky to do those favors, it was a totally botched one. To
quote Dr. Strangelove, "The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret!"
New avenues for accountability and oversight became possible in Washington, D.C., in 2019, following the
election of a new Democratic Party majority in the House (and the most diverse Congress ever) in the 2018
midterms. As a result, Democrats took hold of the subpoena power that rests in the House of Representatives,
along with the power to set the agenda across congressional committees. As a result, 2019 has been full of
important moments for congressional oversight of both the Trump administration and private business. Here
are five of the most important moments in congressional oversight in 2019.
1. Betsy DeVos, Are You "Too Corrupt" or "Too Incompetent"? ...
2. Big Bank CEOs Are Stumped by Simple Budgets ...
3. Wells Fargo Announces Plan to Divest From Private Prisons in Congressional Testimony ...
4. Rep. Ilhan Omar vs. Elliott Abrams ...
5. Voting to Impeach the President ...
The only people who lie and obfuscate facts as much as Trump and his GOP cult are neo progressive demagogues
and propaganda buffs like Chris 'regime-change-in-America' Hedges.
Absolutely bush should have been impeached, convicted, removed and executed for war crimes and mass murder.
But because he wasn't doesn't mean that our orange Fuhrer shouldn't be.
He is the most dangerous authoritarian propagandist and threat to this country since Hitler.
NObama was a horrible POTUS for the 99% and is THE reason why we have trump, but he didn't poison every aspect
of the government and everything else like your orange Fuhrer is doing, which is the exact same tactic that
Hitler used to create Nazi Germany.
The generic Left is ignoring this aspect of the Trump impeachment circus . The whole farce IS political. Now
Senator Lisa Murkowski wants her Republican Party to rise above politics ( and do the wrong thing ? ). In the
past three years when did the Democrat Party ever rise above politics ? Politics USA is always CLASS politics,
always IMPERIALIST , MILITARIST politics . All the " liberal " Democrats have been slobbering over the
UN-ELECTED shadow government of the United States , the National Security Police State , slobbering over FBI,
CIA bureaucrats , uniformed officials of the Pentagon War Crimes Machine . Join them ?
This Senator Lisa
Murkowski -no surprise - is in good standing with the Israel Lobby collectively determined to nullify the 2016
presidential election . NEWS clip :
[ "There are about 6 million Jewish people living in America, so as a percentage it's quite small, but in
terms of influence its quite big," Farage said. Farage seemed to question why Israel was not facing
election-meddling accusations, saying Israeli groups "have a voice within American politics" but "I don't think
anybody is suggesting that the Israeli government tried to affect the result of the American elections."]
Did not the Kafkaesque Trump impeachment hearings look and sound like Old Yiddish Theater soap opera ? How
many working class Christian Americans have heartfelt moral and cultural ties to the Ukraine of all places, now
celebrating its first Jewish friend of Zionist Apartheid Israel president ? Who in the USA authorized this
character to wage a proxy war against post-communist Russia ? WE THE PEOPLE ?
Guess WHO is promoting the HATE RUSSIA, New McCarthyism ?
$748 billion in 2020 for the military death machine equals $23 MILLION A SECOND.
How many schools or
hospitals could have been built, how many roads or bridges repaired, how many students educated with the money
the MIC has squandered in the few seconds it has taken me to write this?
We are destroying our people from the inside out. This is treason.
@Dutch
Boy rk, employees need to make an adequate wage. Unfortunately, this premise does not
exist in today's business climate.
Henry Ford openly criticized those of the "tribe" for manipulating wall street and
banksters to their own advantage, and was roundly (and unjustly) criticized for pointing out
the TRUTH.
Catholic priest, Father Coughlin did the same thing and was punished by the Catholic
church, despite his popularity and exposing the TRUTH of the American economy and the
outsider internationalists that ran it . . . and STILL run it.
Our race to the bottom will not be without consequences. A great realignment is necessary
(and is coming) . .
This is a timely article for me as I have been pondering the relationship between Jews and
neoliberalism for some time now.
At university I studied under a brilliant Neo-Marxist professor who showed me some theory
and arguments that went a long way towards explaining how to make sense of the global power
structure.
(Just a quick not for those who recoil at the mere mention of Neo-Marxist: the academics
that use a Marxist lens as a tool to criticize the powerful are not all the cuckold communist
SJW types – some of these individuals are extremely intelligent and they make very
powerful arguments backed by loads of data.)
One of the theories I was introduced to was the notion of the Transnational Capitalist
Class in this article called Towards A Global Ruling Class? Globalization and the
Transnational Capitalist Class:
Sklair's work goes the furthest in conceiving of the capitalist class as no longer
tied to territoriality Inherent in the international concept is a system of nation-states
that mediates relations between classes and groups, including the notion of national
capitals and national bourgeoisi. Transnational, by contrast, denotes economic and related
social, political, and cultural processes – including class formation that supersede
nation-states
What distinguishes the TCC from national or local capitalists is that it is involved
in globalized production and manages globalized circuits of accumulation that give it an
objective class existence and identity spatially and politically in the global system above
any local territories and polities.
Since reading your (Dr Joyce) work on the JQ I began to see the connection between age old
complaints of Jews, and what Ford referred to as "The International Jew". In fact, replace
the term "transnational capitalist class" from my passages quoted above (and many others) and
what you have is perfect mirror image of the argument.
This question has come up often lately, synchronistically (or maybe not). I'm somewhat new
to the JQ, having consumed many hours of work (including much of your own) after being sent
down the rabbit hole by the ongoing Epstein case. I was pondering that perhaps, Jews take the
blame for what the predatory capitalists are doing. Not even a week later you addressed this
precise question in your piece about Slavoj Ziszek and now with "vulture capitalism" it is
coming up yet again in Carlson's segment followed by the article right here. It also came up
on the "other side" in the blog I follow of a professor of globalization in this article:
https://zeroanthropology.net/2019/11/27/global-giants-american-empire-and-transnational-capital/
The link above is a review of the book Giants: The Global Power Elite . The review
provides a summary of the book which once again could be a text about Jews if one were to
replace the term "transnational capitalist class" with "Jews". Why I mention it, though, is
the following:
"Chapter 2, "The Global Financial Giants: The Central Core of Global Capitalism,"
identifies the 17 global financial giants -- money management firms that control more than
one trillion dollars in capital. As these firms invest in each other, and many smaller
firms, the interlocked capital that they manage surpasses $41 trillion (which amounts to
about 16% of the world's total wealth). The 17 global financial giants are led by 199
directors. This chapter details how these financial giants have pushed for global
privatization of virtually everything, in order to stimulate growth to absorb excess
capital. The financial giants are supported by a wide array of institutions: "governments,
intelligence services, policymakers, universities, police forces, militaries, and corporate
media all work in support of their vital interests" (p. 60).
Chapter 3, "Managers: The Global Power Elite of the Financial Giants," largely
consists of the detailed profiles of the 199 financial managers just mentioned.
This caught my eye because I immediately wondered how many of those 199 directors are
Jewish. It also pertains directly to this exact article because I am confident that the
vulture capitalists you targeted here are profiled in the book, probably with many
others.
Now, I am not in the business of writing about the JQ, so I wanted to suggest to anyone
out there that is that if they were to obtain a copy of this book and determine how many of
the 199 directors are jews. What this could accomplish is a marriage of the major two
theories of the "anti-semites" (for lack of a better word) and the "Neo-Marxists". I would
argue that perhaps both sides would learn they are coming at the same thing from two
different angles. Most would ignore it, but maybe a few leftist thinkers would receive a much
needed electric shock if they were to see the JQ framed in marxist terms. Perhaps some
alliances could be forged across the cultural divide in this struggle. Personally I believe
that both angles are perfectly valid, and that understanding one without the other will
leaves far too much to be desired when studying the powerful.
"Identity politics involves a demand not merely for tolerance but for acceptance."
For me this is the critical issue. When we 'demand' something from another, or another
group, we are making an explicit statement of our own intolerance, we refuse to accept the
values, attitudes, and/or behaviours of another. And the framing of this demand as a right,
rather than a request, or a suggestion, is a problem for many here.
The levels of bigotry, hatred, and intolerance expressed towards MAGA people in general,
and a few individuals in specific, over the last three years has been breathtaking. The
notion that respect, tolerance, and acceptance cut both ways is routinely explicitly
rejected. Indeed, so much so that both the NYT and the WAPO this weekend felt the need to
remind readers of the need to respect MAGA people. The same might be said of people of faith,
another much-maligned group, especially if these folks happen to be white and Christian.
I'm glad that JH posted the 'amateur' warning, because that's precisely what too much of
what CT has become. People may or may not be engaging in good faith arguments. Calling people
racists and fascists, as a matter of course, in no way contributes anything to any
discussion, and would seem to be a direct violation of the comments policy. Yet, in thread
after thread, that's what we continue read – racist, Christian, fascist, racist,white
fascist, racist, fascist until the terms have lost all meaning, lo these many years.
The ground is moving beneath our feet. If the last few months (years?) are any indication,
the CT community has very few ideas about what is happening in America, Europe, and other
nations, or what to do about it. Or, people are expressing their ideas elsewhere.
Buying into myths does the community no good: remember all the time wasted on Koch
Conspiracy Theories? Then, from 2016 up to the present, leading Democrats and 'progressive'
bubbleheads literally channelled Joe McCarthy 'I have secret evidence, which I cannot divulge
now, that leading members of this administration are in fact agents of a foreign power!' I
mean, you couldn't make that stuff up.
Night after night, day after day for the last three years – TRAITORS, RUSSIAN
AGENTS, and no matter how many times a few (Greenwald, Taibbi, Tracy) tried to point out that
the accusations had been crafted literally by the same intelligence agents that brought us
Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, these factual cautions fell on deaf ears.
Lost in all of this is reality: which is that the world is not twitter. All firsthand
reports I receive from family and friends in Canada, America, and Europe is that people of
different faiths and opinions work hard, if not harder now, to demonstrate respect and
compassion to one another and sincerely enjoy doing so. Huh?
JQ: To get back to the criticism of identity politics from the left, consider what would
happen if your original post was made in a less sedate, more idpol-friendly forum. Nobody
would be engaging with the arguments you've made, which at least some commenters on this
thread have been doing. Instead, they'd be focussing on you , working out which
classes of privilege you enjoy – particularly racial, gender-based and
(dis)ability-based privileges – so that they can attack you from those directions in
the knowledge that any response from you would be considered an expression of privilege, and
thus subject to further criticism.
Since this post is pretty unobjectionable you might get away with it, but I can see at
least a couple of angles of attack in the first line ("Warning: Amateur
sociological/political analysis ahead"): if you're an "amateur", why are you speaking
instead of listening to the people who have direct personal experience of [whatever
marginalised identity]? , and why does this analysis need to come from you when
you could be making space for someone less privileged to give their own, more valuable
analysis?
I read the sequence in the OP differently, I think, from most commenters (and, I think, from
JQ):
Tolerance: Women allowed the vote (19th Amendment, 1920);
Acceptance: Women admitted to all-male Ivy League universities (Yale, 1969)
Deference: Affirmative Action (EEOC, 1965)
Dominance: ? The election of Barack Obama (2008) ?
[Note: This is the interpretation given by those on the right – those currently in
power.]
Identity Politics has served to mask the real problem in the U.S. over the past 30-40
years: growing inequality. Yes yes, I know: intersectionality – but how successful has
that been, really? Examples, please. [Note: Idpol imho belongs to the so-called "private
sphere," not the "public sphere" – I have no interest in the private life of others;
their public life, however, is of considerable interest to me and other citizens.]
I don't think this was accidental. It is to the ruling class's benefit that
citizens/voters coalesce emotionally around issues which detract attention from growing
inequality.
The U.S. is governed by the rich, the 1%. But if this were broadly understood and
accepted, the 1% would be voted out of office at all levels (local, state, national).
Identity politics ensures that voters will be more or less equally distributed between Ds
and Rs, with Ds = pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-abortion; Rs = anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-abortion (+
other issues).
I invite CT commenters to engage in a small thought-experiment: What would it be like in
the U.S. if its Gini score were half what it was in 2016 (so, 20 instead of 40+)?
On a related – though not, for some, alas, obviously so – note, I recommend an
about-to-be-published book by labor historian Toni Gilpin: "The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of
Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland," which will come out
early in 2020. Gilpin analyzes the Farm Equipment Workers (FE) union and their strike in
Louisville, KY against IH (International Harvester), during which blacks and whites united
against IH for economic reasons, and won.
Full economic equality goes a fair way towards advancing tolerance and acceptance,
obviates the need for deference, and does away with the existence of dominance.
It seems to me that in this thread there is a lot of confusion about the idea of identity
and groups, and your comment doubles down with the idea that economic class is an
identity.
First from a old fart Marxist point of view, you are mixing up base (the economic
structure, the relationship with the means of production) with superstructure (blue collar
identity). These two are not the same thing, the same way sex (a biological fact) is not the
same as gender (a cultural thing). Only gender is a matter of identity, biological sex cannot
be, precisely because it is not a cultural thing. For similar reasons class proper is not the
same as identities based more or less on class.
Second, however you want to put it high education at best makes you upper middle class,
not ruling class (although many people of the ruling class also have high education, but they
aren't ruling class because of this). This again is the old (19th century) distinction by Max
Weber between classe and ceto, I use the Italian words because they both translate as "class"
in English damn you anglophones. I recently chatted with a friend who has a degree in
statistics who confirmed that this is still a taught as a bread and butter distinction in
statistics, at least in Italy.
Finally there is a big distinction between identities and the often (but not always)
different moral assumptions that go with that on the one hand, and on the other the way these
identities are used in terms of political marketing, that is something different and mostly
make sense in democracies, but not for example in an argument about colonialism where
identities still exist but the political situation is totally different.
Finally, the problem is that with each identity or set of identities comes a set of moral
values. Now if we see morals as coming from identities but identities as a natural thing, we
enter in a world of moral relativism where only the identity group who cries louder can
manage to force its values on others.
This is in fact the implicit idea in right wing populism, and the reason they sometimes seem
to think that political might makes right.
But in reality:
1) identities are not a natural thing at all, for example gender identities depend on forms
of the family that are obviously historical and linked to economic structures, so is the low
education blue collar identity;
2) many disequalities are objective and we can measure them, for example we know that
economic inequality increased in recent decades.
So on the whole I think it is possible to make a case about objectively more egalitarian
(and therefore better) sets of values and identity.
1. There is a missing category in the 4-stage paradigm, and it is "affirmation." People
can feel tolerated and then accepted, but not affirmed as much as the majority group feels
affirmed, and this is a significant. Although what, specifically, it feels like to be
affirmed, or to extend affirmation, can be murky. Is affirmation even a legitimate or
realistic thing to expect or demand from one's social environment? Why or why not? What
proportion of the social environment should extend affirmation in order for an individual
from a marginalized group feel that they are being treated equally?
2. In every society in which there are dominant identities (I can think of few where the
dominant group is singular and monolithic), there is history to contend with. The four (or
five) states of intergroup relations are not like a light switch that can be turned on or
off. What rate of changed attitudes and relationships of power are realistic to expect?
3. How do we feel about groups who are in some senses marginalized, but that within their
own community, express dominance in harmful ways against some members of their group or
against some members of other groups? What about feminists who look down on specific (or all)
religions, and within their group do not tolerate religious individuals? what about religious
minorities that persecute LGBTQ individuals? and so forth.
I invite CT commenters to engage in a small thought-experiment: What would it be like in
the U.S. if its Gini score were half what it was in 2016 (so, 20 instead of 40+)?
There's been considerable academic work on this subject. Just off the top of my head,
there's the seminal paper by Bland, Castile, Crawford, Garner, Martin, Rice et al. And
another important study of labor force effects by Argent, Arquette, Beckinsale, Garth, et al.
And no literature review would be complete without discussing the groundbreaking work by
Boyne, Carroll, Crooks, Harth, Holvey, Zervos et al.
An alternative take on what "identity politics" might mean:
A style of politics in which people are people are divided – for the purposes of
political organization – on the basis of a small number of characteristics, which
initially appear to be relative hard to change and easy to determine. Further, such groups
are treated as if they were homogeneous, with a shared political interest.
But:
a) Such characteristics are typically not mutually exclusive. A political group that is
"homongenous" wrt to one characteristic may well contain members that differ in some other
politically relevant characteristic, with consequent divergence of political objectives. eg.
"woman" contains both "white women" and "black women". cf. bell hooks
b) Who is a member of the group and who isn't often turns out to be more vexed than it
might initially appear. There exist people of mixed race, people with intersex conditions,
transgendered people, white momen who have grown up in a household with African-American
step-siblings (cf. Rachel Dolezau), etc. etc. A noted feature of "identity politics" is
people getting very, very upset about the existence of a small number of borderline cases
whose political group membership is being argued.
Black Lives Matter isn't just fighting for economic rights: they're fighting for the
right to not be executed in the street.
I think this gets to the heart of the matter: the very thin definition of the word
'economics' held by certain liberals, mostly referring to the precise timing of the next
stock market boom/bust cycle.
To those with a less restrictive definition, people being executed in the street is,
absolutely and centrally, a matter of economics. Those who support or enable those executions
do so because they do not trust the government to effectively defend their private property
rights without such measures.
The radical economic solution to that is the abolition of private property; it is of
course perfectly understandable that those most affected are not keen on waiting for
that.
Nevertheless, the less radical solution is still economic in nature, mainly involving
raising taxes in order to spend the money on a police force adequate to the task of
maintaining public order without such executions. Most of Europe provides the existence proof
that such a thing is possible.
Measurable social issues require the commitment of non-symbolic amounts of societal
resources to solve them. In an ideal world, this would leave the phrase 'identity politics'
for those issues which could potentially be resolved by the right person tweeting the right
thing
There is a horror at finding myself – as a gender critical feminist – adjacent to
arguments like Likbez's @1 that I think puts the fear of God in me. So I feel compelled to
write a comment, though I usually just observe the conversation here.
Likbez @1 is, I think, similar to those people who would pop up in conversations about gay
rights in the 90's and say, "What about this man, who had sex with 300 strangers in one
week," as an example of "gay rights extremism." The difference I notice here is that there is
no longer any concern, on the conservative or progressive side of the argument, with prurient
interest. We glibly discuss the most private details of a child's life and body, and it's
incumbent on everyone involved to either hash out the details while condemning, or hash out
the details while celebrating.
I * do * think a child accessing sterilising medical and surgical treatments for the
purposes of gender affirmation is extreme (and to me it's no less extreme when that child has
a supportive family around them). Another useful parallel might be the conversations we had
about whether it was respectability politics to not include "bareback" subcultures in gay
pride. But again, even there, we had a stable liberal position which could acknowledge the
subculture / without / having to condemn or celebrate it.
I wonder if it isn't the gay marriage debate that has evacuated that liberal posture. Well
might a social conservative answer a question about the decriminalisation of sex between men
by saying, "You can engage in x, y, or z sexual practice, but don't expect me to like it,"
and it's not really remarkable – why would I expect or require a stranger to / like /
the sex I have?! But when it's said about marriage there is something mean about it –
marriages, or at least weddings, are by definition the communal celebration of a sexual
relationship.
Can we as a liberal society tolerate the miserliness of refusal to celebrate gay
marriages? And if we can't, what do we do with this blurring of public and private, this need
to endorse and celebrate what is done by strangers (even the compulsion to have a clear
formed opinion on all the private activities of strangers).
– I wonder if there isn't a further connection with the anxieties of young people, a
need for the approval of strangers.
***
"Instead of being accepted as one element of a diverse community, the formerly dominant
group becomes the object of hostility and derision. The signs of that are certainly evident,
particularly in relation to the culture wars around religion."
I immediately thought John was talking about Catholics. For centuries, where Catholics
have lived as a minority in predominantly Protestant and Anglican societies, they have been
exposed to all the bigotry and mistreatment we associate with minority status. But this has
had no effect on the institution of the Catholic church, or its hegemony in Catholic
societies (and even Catholic communities in protestant / Anglican societies).
(On reflection, I'm not sure that's what JQ is referring to at all).
"Good questions. I'm not sure there is a necessity for a default identity and dominant
groups; I merely observe that in most if not all stable, long-lived societies there has been
such. If you can think of exceptions, they would be very interesting."
As I'm not an expert in the area, I'm probably not a good person to ask. If we assume the
observation is true, however, while it may be interesting I don't see that it is particularly
helpful.If the number of attempts were zero then that doesn't really tell you anything about
if it would work or not.
For example, from my understanding monarchies were the "default" organisational structure
in Europe for a long period of history. One can imagine someone who lived during those eras
saying – correctly – that most if not all stable, long-lived societies were
monarchies. I hope you'd agree that that wouldn't really tell us much about if Monarchies are
the only, or indeed even best way of organising a society?
In short, I think that while your observation may be true (I'm afraid I lack the evidence
to make any claims one way or another), I don't think it really gets us any closer to
understanding whether or not a default identity and/or dominant group are a) necessary, b)
useful, and c) beneficial.
As for the default identity including sexuality: I'm not sure it's necessary, just that
it mostly goes that way.
Again, I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the male/female binary is a) not
necessarily biologically supported (from asking biologists) and b) may in fact not be the
default identity (I believe there are examples outside of western culture, in the
Philippines, Mexico, etc.). Of course, I am not an expert (I believe you've already said your
not either?) so perhaps it would be better to ask someone who is rather than us speculating
in ignorance?
I have trouble in imagining a society in which the default identity does not exclude
bestiality or trandgenderism (not that I'm equating the two).
Out of interest, why did you include bestiality alongside being transgender? I don't see
that it is helpful or clarifying in any way – bestiality is about what you have sexual
intercourse with (and implies a problematic lack of consent), while being transgender is (as
the name helpfully implies!) about your personal gender identity (which is not about
preferences regarding sexual intercourse, and does not have the problematic inherent consent
issue), so these would seem to be very different categories.
[Moreover, and I mean this as a helpful future tip, perhaps if you want to avoid fully any
doubts people might have about whether or not you are equating these two things, but you feel
it is useful to include a form of sexual attraction, why not pick homosexuality, bisexuality,
etc. instead?]
Perhaps I am a bit odd in this respect, but if you ask me to imagine a "default" English
person, I don't think I could. It may be a failure of my imagination, but I would think of
the people I know who are English, and I don't think there is enough commonality for me to
make an assessment. I suspect (though I don't have evidence) that if there is such a thing as
a default identity, it is probably most similar to a stereotype. And, as far as I can tell,
stereotypes are a) generally not excessively helpful to accuracy and b) vary from area to
area and region to region.
Moreover, I would think that "dominant culture" is something that can change (as the OP
implies). For example, homosexuality was illegal until fairly recently (if I recall correctly
England and Wales: 1960s, Scotland and Ireland 1980s), but I think that now the number of
people who would support recriminalizing it is pretty small. The dominant culture which was
hostile to homosexuality is now – at the very least – indifferent, if not
actively absorbing it. While I certainly wouldn't suggest homophobia is a thing of the past,
perhaps in future eras (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out due to our incompetence at
handling looming crises) people objecting to homosexuality will be thought of as odd and
irrelevant – changing the dominant culture still further. Is it not possible, then,
that such a thing could happen with transgender identities?
In short, with respect, I'm not sure what you (or I) can imagine is particularly relevant.
Given that neither of us appear to have much expertise in this area, perhaps we should wait
for others with better evidence and understanding to way in?
[Blast, apologies to the OP, but could you accept this instead of my previous post, I made a
HTML tag error which makes it seem as though one of Stephen's statements is actually mine.]
Stephen @ 56
"Good questions. I'm not sure there is a necessity for a default identity and dominant
groups; I merely observe that in most if not all stable, long-lived societies there has been
such. If you can think of exceptions, they would be very interesting."
As I'm not an expert in the area, I'm probably not a good person to ask. If we assume the
observation is true, however, while it may be interesting I don't see that it is particularly
helpful.If the number of attempts were zero then that doesn't really tell you anything about
if it would work or not.
For example, from my understanding monarchies were the "default" organisational structure
for a long time – and one can imagine someone who lived during those eras saying
– correctly – that most if not all stable, long-lived societies were monarchies.
I hope you'd agree that that wouldn't really tell us much about if it is the only, or indeed
even best way of organising a society?
In short, I think that while your observation may or may not be true (I'm afraid I lack
the evidence to make any claims one way or another), I don't think it really gets us any
closer to understanding whether or not a default identity and/or dominant group are a)
necessary, b) useful, and c) beneficial.
As for the default identity including sexuality: I'm not sure it's necessary, just that
it mostly goes that way.
Again, I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the male/female binary is a) not
necessarily biologically supported (from asking biologists) and b) may in fact not be the
default identity (I believe there are examples outside of western culture, in the
Philippines, Mexico, etc.). Of course, I am not an expert (I believe you've already said your
not either?) so perhaps it would be better to ask someone who is?
I have trouble in imagining a society in which the default identity does not exclude
bestiality or trandgenderism (not that I'm equating the two).
Out of interest, why did you include bestiality alongside being transgender? I don't see
that it is helpful or clarifying in any way – bestiality is about what you have sexual
intercourse with (and implies a problematic lack of consent), while being transgender is (as
the name helpfully implies!) about your personal gender identity (which is not about
preferences regarding sexual intercourse, and does not have the problematic consent issue),
so these would seem to be very different categories.
[Moreover, as a helpful future tip, perhaps if you want to avoid fully any doubts people
might have about whether or not you are equating these two things, but you feel it is useful
to include a form of sexual attraction, why not pick homosexuality, bisexuality, etc.
instead?]
Perhaps I am a bit odd in this respect, but if you ask me to imagine a "default" English
person, I don't think I could. It may be a failure of my imagination, but I would think of
the people I know who are English, and I don't think there is enough commonality for me to
make an assessment. I suspect (though I don't have evidence) that if there is such a thing as
a default identity, it is probably most similar to a stereotype. And, as far as I can tell,
stereotypes are a) generally not excessively helpful to accuracy and b) vary from area to
area and region to region.
Moreover, I would think that "dominant culture" is something that can change (as the OP
implies). For example, homosexuality was illegal until fairly recently (if I recall correctly
England and Wales: 1960s, Scotland and Ireland 1980s), but I think that now the number of
people who would support recriminalizing it is pretty small. The dominant culture which was
hostile to homosexuality is now – at the very least – indifferent, if not
actively absorbing it. While I certainly wouldn't suggest homophobia is a thing of the past,
perhaps in future eras (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out due to our incompetence at
handling looming crises) people objecting to homosexuality will be thought of as odd and
irrelevant – changing the dominant culture still further. Is it not possible, then,
that such a thing could happen with transgender identities?
In short, with respect, I'm not sure what you (or I) can imagine is particularly
relevant.
Seren Rose, likbez is a straight-up christian fascist. If you find your politics overlapping
with his in any way shape or form, it might be a good idea to assess whether the overlapping
part is something you want to keep. Here's a tip: if the overlapping part is based on
excluding a minority from public spaces, there's probably a reason it appeals to likbez.
Also as a gender critical feminist I'm guessing you are in favour of preventing trans
women from using female-only spaces. I recommend you
read this so that when natal women start being harassed and beaten up as a consequence of
your policies, you can't make the excuse that you weren't warned.
Well, I wasn't going to bring it up, but now we're here
Rightwing trolls or troll-like posters like likbez don't focus on transgender activism by
accident. It's the ne plus ultra of identity politics gone wrong: it seems
superficially reasonable, by association with LGB liberation movements, but its claims are
irreconcilable with long-standing goals of other movements usually found on the left
(particularly many kinds of feminism); it demands the use of language that makes it difficult
or impossible to express disagreement and harrasses, threatens and deplatforms people who
refuse to submit; it is relentlessly, viciously misogynistic. And when otherwise sympathetic
people get a glimpse into the nastier side of trans activism and who exactly it is protecting
(the Dana Rivers, the Karen Whites, the Jessica Yanivs, etc. etc.), and especially what its
goals mean for women and girls – the stuff that the activists try with all their might
to stop feminists drawing attention to – they tend to begin to regard it as completely
bonkers. Which is of course one reason why all dissent must be silenced before it can
spread.
I am trying very hard right now to give you the benefit of the doubt in your arguments.
You haven't addressed any of my criticisms or comments in my post at 36 (fair enough, you
don't owe me any answers). I would assume normally you have missed it, didn't think it was
worth replying to, or are formulating a response. However, your most recent comments at 60
are, to put it mildly, very problematic.
First, have you got around to making a working definition for transgender extremism yet? I
only ask, because if I think religious extremism I imagine beheadings, massacres, suicide
bombings; if I imagine political extremism, I imagine violence, bombings, terrorism; but as
far as I can tell your definition of transgender extremism is apparently daring to exist and
ask maybe if they could be treated as human beings rather than evil incarnate. One of those
does not seem like the others.
Here are my problems with your post at 60. I hope you will at least consider this, and
perhaps re-evaluate what you are saying and how you are saying it.
" With this quote I think we reached the point in this discussion when it might be
appropriate to discuss the appropriate scope of repression for deviant minority groups when
their demands conflict with the larger society or more powerful groups ethics and cultural
norms.
"deviant minority groups". OK, so Mormons? Or were they not the deviant minority group you
were thinking of? You see, that's one of the fundamental problems with your assertions
– you are unable or unwilling to offer any clear ideas as to how you come to decide the
term and who it applies to. You seem to operate on what you personally feel comfortable with
– which is not a particularly useful starting point.
The usual "woke" argumentation is very weak in issues outlined below and opposite
arguments have a real weight: I would repression of the minority groups start with pedophiles
and financial oligarchy especially vulture funds leadership such as Romney, Paul Singer, etc.
But this is just me.
Funnily enough, people pushing for transgender awareness are not pro-paedophile. I know
that you seem to struggle with understanding this (or, indeed, anything judging by your
inability to reason), but paedophilia = having sex with children; being transgender = taking
on a gender identity in-keeping with your internal model and different to that assigned at
birth. The key difference there, and bear with me as apparently you find this very complex,
is that one group are raping children, the other isn't. Try repeating this a few times in the
mirror – I am optimistic you will eventually get it.
"IMHO insatiable "demanding" and proselyting of transgender identity already brought us
very close to a strong corporate and community backlash against transgender rights and by
extension LGBT rights as a whole."
You know, people said the same thing about gay rights. And you know what was interesting?
It turns out the whole "line to far" was that they existed. Given you haven't really made any
attempt to explain why you think "personal medical decision" is functionally extremism, I am
not overly confident in your ability to determine what constitutes "too much" demanding.
"Of course transgender folk is just minor, expendable pawn in a bigger game of Dem
Party identity politics, but still."
Yes, because the Democratic party of America basically rules Europe. That was sarcasm, by
the way. I did point out before that making US based judgements and assessments without
considering how it fits into the global phenomena makes you look ignorant. Apparently you
don't think that that was a point worth considering.
Again, when discussing transgender people, you start bringing in sexual abuse with
children. Yet no-where in the article is any reference to transgender people. I am now a lot
less optimistic in your ability to understand the difference. It is also worth considering
that the Catholic Church – which arguably has a little more power and privilege than
the LGBT – has been complicit in covering up a horrific amount of child-rape.
Interestingly, you don't seem to be railing against them.
To summarise
You don't seem interested in researching anything or gaining any facts. You don't appear
to consider other arguments. You repeatedly conflate transgender people with paedophiles. You
don't support your arguments, don't define your terms, and don't seem to care whether or not
anything you say is rooted in evidence.
This is why I am having a very hard job considering you someone who is arguing in good
faith right now.
Finally, as a few comments I hope you will consider.
1) Paedophilia and transgender people
The reason I object to paedophiles is not because they are a small number of people who
are different to me. I object to paedophiles because they are causing harm. They are causing
harm, because they are committing an action (sex) with someone who cannot give consent (a
child).
Transgender people are committing an act (adopting a different gender identity) which
affects only themselves (who give consent because they are undertaking it).
If you do not make a case to link transgender people and child rape, I would appreciate if
you stopped conflating the two. Even if I assume the absolute best case – that you
don't think the two are the same but are trying to incoherently make a point – it makes
for a completely incoherent argument to include here.
2) Transgender people in society
If you want to argue that transgender people should be denied privileges available to
other people, that is your prerogative. But you should probably actually make a case, and try
to support it with evidence. For example, if you could prove that people being allowed to
determine their own gender is objectively bad in some way, that would be a good starting
point. You don't though – and, though I try to avoid ascribing motivations to other
people, I suspect it is because you don't actually have an argument that it is harmful
– merely that you don't like it. And apparently, for you, "I don't like this" is a good
reason to deny rights to one group of people you extend to others. It might be worth
reflecting on what that says about you as a person.
3) likbez
When someone repeatedly refuses to make their case after adopting the burden of proof, it
is very difficult to take them seriously on that topic. It also impacts how you precieve them
on other topics.
You don't owe me anything, and if you wish to continue making unsupported statements,
falacious arguments, and equivication falacies, by all means do continue. I won't however,
consider you as someone who should be considered worth listening to – which I hope
you'd agree is my prerogative.
Undiscovering America. It's too late for that, I think. The muddying of the waters, i.e.
post-historical tribalism, can't obscure the fact that the underlying conflict is between our
individual and our collective identity(ies). It doesn't really matter whether the collective
is family, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sports team. If we aren't, as individuals,
the ultimate arbiters of our own allegiances, and if the collective(s) we belong to, either
by accident, affinity, or choice, are unwilling to give up on the project of defining us
without asking us what we prefer, then our present conflicts will continue, and in all
likelihood get nastier as the stakes in our-post hierarchical, post-literate universe rise
ever higher.
I should probably add that China's much-touted ignoble experiment in Gleichschaltung
is going to introduce modes of historical failure which the world hasn't seen since Roman
times. Xi Jinping has absolutely no effing idea of the doom he's trifling with. Compared to
Donald Rumsfeld, I suppose you could call him a visionary, but only if you love the smell of
apocalypse in the morning.
I've no wish to tell you "this is how you should think", and am open to having a dialogue
with anyone who is interested in doing so (it helps me refine my position or, when I am
wrong, to re-evaluate my premises). I hope, therefore, you'll be will to indulge me a little
when I make the following comments – I would, if you are interested, value your
thoughts (though I don't wish to make demands on your time).
I don't particularly enjoy discussing anyone's private details – I generally prefer
it if private lives can remain private – and certainly would hope I don't do so glibly.
Unfortunately, when there is a discussion about whether or not a person should be permitted
to make a private decision, sometimes it is necessary to discuss the facts surrounding the
case. I would state, however, that to me it is important that as much anonymity as possible
is afforded the individual, and as little of the details are discussed as necessary. Do you
think that that is unreasonable?
My first comments were regarding Likbez's first link. To me, it is not only the first
mentioned, but also the most clear cut. Someone who is 17 wishes to transition, their mother
(who they have alleged was abusive, whom they left 2 years ago) objects. Given that the
individual seems to have made well-reasoned comments, their mother does not seem to be
well-placed to make any evaluations (or indeed make any decisions regarding their child), and
I have no reason to think they are unable to make an assessment regarding their own gender, I
don't see any reason to object. Do you think there is?
Hopefully you'll agree that I have managed to avoid discussing them or their body too
much. If not, I'd certainly appreciate it if you pointed out where I've erred – this is
not sarcasm, I genuinely want to do better.
You appear to have considerable concerns regarding Likbez's second link. You know what
– so do I. It isn't quite as portrayed – further reading indicates that what was
proposed was a reversible treatment with no surgery, which allays some of the concerns
– but I agree that "what age can someone make a reasonable decision regarding their
gender" is a good discussion to have. As is, "what is the best way to handle this", and "how
do we ensure that people are afforded freedom proporitionate with their maturity and
responsibility". However, I would want such a discussion to involve evidence (not specific
details of people, but anonymised scientific evidence), logical arguments, and conclusions
which come as close as possible to achieving the best decision. I hope you would agree that
that is a good approach?
Now, I am not an expert. However, as far as I can tell, the people who study this for a
living seem to say that biology and gender are far more complex that traditional models allow
for. That being the case, it does not seem unreasonable to change these models. After all, if
you are worried about the effects of peer-pressure on children, I would think that being
forced into an identity which causes you incredible discomfort (or even feelings of
dissonance) is probably not good for their long term health. For example, trying to force
people who are homosexual to be heterosexual does not seem to have been good for them, or for
society. I imagine, as a gender critical feminist, you can think of similar examples of the
harm resulting from women being forced into roles far better than I.
In short, my position is that people should be afforded the maximum reasonable ability to
make their personal decisions. In cases where there are concerns regarding their ability to
do so, I am fine with society coming to an evidence based conclusion about where to draw the
line. This will, as always, lead to some inherent unfairness (our systems are
"one-size-fits-all" and this will inherently lead to some people being let down), but
hopefully we can make our society as fair as possible. And, continue to refine.
If you think I am being unreasonable, unnecessarily prurient, or am on a path which is
detrimental, I would certainly appreciate your pointing it out to me – I am always keen
to do better.
Here's a tip: if the overlapping part is based on excluding a minority from public
spaces, there's probably a reason it appeals to likbez.
Imbecilization of discussion of controversial issues like in case of your comment is a
normal development typical for the periods of intellectual declines which naturally follows
the economic decline of a given empire.
There's growing evidence the West is going through the same process as the USSR.
the history is pretty clear: the class-based movements cane first, and they failed to
make any progress toward (or even care about) the rights of these oppressed groups. [ ]
Also, many of these movements explicitly recognize the importance of intersectionality --
why else would you see feminists and gay rights groups so heavily involved in immigrant
rights?
Well, since you're all about fairness and avoiding double standards let's compare
contemporaneous movements. How much did abolitionists help alleviate the oppression of women?
How much did suffragettes fight segregation? Did the LGBTQ rights movement include BTQ for
most of its history? Did any of these historical movements fight against ablism? How much did
they achieve WRT immigrant rights, indigenous rights, and the rights of minority religions?
Or are you comparing very, VERY recent developments in these movements with historical class
identity movements? I'd point out, BTW, that it's very disputable whether gender/racial right
movements came after class identity movements – both are far older than their recent
(to say nothing of modern) forms. And throughout the history of all of these, there
have been not just unhelpful but actively repressive elements in all of them. Yet you're only
comparing contemporary intersectional essentialist identity politics to historical class
identity politics why is that? Especially when modern class identity politics are also
influenced by intersectional thinking and ally themselves with more than than just
class-based movements even if they prioritize class. Yet
here we have you telling us that socioeconomic status is not an identity – that the
idea of identity becomes meaningless if we consider it as such. That has a very particular
and somewhat suspicious look.
To pull this back more closely to the subject of OP, your pile of unexamined privilege
looks an awful lot like you're uncritically accepting the highly-educated/rich/socially &
professionally networked/managerial-professional-executive workers' (i.e., upper class)
"default" cultural perspective, and are insisting that failure to see it is deviant and
immoral (no more and no less than a cis het white Xian man insisting that a mythical 1950s
represents the objective reality of Americanism). The rich minority is dominate in that
epistomology, and the managerial-professional minority is deferred to. Among lower-class
conservative adherents, this translates to education being suspect, but wealth & social
status is taken as proof that these classes are reliably jus'folks who haven't been corrupted
by too much learning; among lower-class liberal adherents, wealth is suspect but the
education & social status proves our elites are woke egalitarians who haven't been
corrupted by greed and power but in both cases, the rich are dominant and the
managerial-professionals are deferred to. 100 years ago this would have been a harder sell,
as our culture was more disparate in terms of class identity, but mass media driven by
consumption (and advertising) homogenized our worldview and humanized the rich to a great
degree, with the result of aggressively encouraging the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire"
mindset and belief in the myth of meritocracy.
The point of everything you TL;DR'd in order to lecture me about How Things REALLY Are
again was not that you're a hypocrite – it's instead how very telling it is that you
don't simply want to de-prioritize the idea of economically-oriented reform, but
de-legitimize the very idea of it. It's appalling to see you invoke intersectionality in this
context; are you so come-lately to it that you don't know its history before it was
housebroken? A common early criticism of intersectionality was that it placed too much focus
on just three intersecting identities: gender, race, and, yes, class. The subsequent trend to
view intersectionality as a thing distinct from class identity is a development that looks an
awful lot like institutional co-opting as former outsiders addressing an insurgent critique
of distorted elite analysis made peace with the academic hierarchy, got tenure, and
mysteriously lost their impetus to challenge privilege based on wealth, education,
profession, or social status. What you've done here has unintentionally been extremely
instructive in terms of what OP discusses; you're providing a case study of a privileged
minority arguing against perspectives that do not conform to the dominant default culture in
order to protect the deference you feel due, and the dominance of the hierarchy which
entitles you to that deference.
Seren Rose @ 67:
You write about a lot of things, and some of them I don't feel qualified to comment upon. But
at least this, seems pretty obvious:
Can we as a liberal society tolerate the miserliness of refusal to celebrate gay
marriages? And if we can't, what do we do with this blurring of public and private
The record here is pretty clear: gay marriage advocates fought for gay marriage not for
the private celebration, but because in ways big and small, myriad public and publicly
regulated institutions and organizations confer advantages upon the married. From family
health insurance policies to "who gets to visit you as you lie dying," to "who gets to pick
up your kids at school."
I think this is a good example of the way that demands by identity groups can get
misinterpreted, either inadvertently or intentionally. Nobody asked for Evangelical pastors
to be compelled to perform gay marriages. What they -did- ask, was that in any public
accommodation or regulated business of any sort, that prefers advantages to married couples,
this advantage be extended to gay couples who are married. And this is no different from the
"full faith and credit" clause that makes marriages in one state valid in another.
(One thing I'd add to tie the idea of class identity politics to the discussion here is that
contemporary upper class resistance to it vs. comparative upper class acceptance of
essentialist identity politics fits well into the zero-sum vs. positive-sum distinction made
by
Peter Dorman . Class identity movements seek to flatten the socio-economic hierarchy via
wealth redistribution, progessive taxation, increased democratization of political processes,
etc. Essentialist identity movements do not directly threaten the hierarchy that entrenches
the rich as dominant and professionals as deferred to – it changes the pool of
available candidates within the heirarchy, which may lead to individuals or sub-groups
resisting if they feel unable or unwilling to compete with individuals previously below them
on other hierarchies, but more diversity in the C-suites is not an existential threat
to the upper class.)
notGoodEnough @ 68:
Stephen: "I have trouble in imagining a society in which the default identity does not
exclude bestiality or trandgenderism (not that I'm equating the two)."
notGoodEnough: "Out of interest, why did you include bestiality alongside being
transgender?"
I have to laugh. We both know why he included that reference, don't we? It's the same
reason "Box Turtle Ben (Domenech)" included it in that speech that Texas Senator John Cornyn
was to deliver ("It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box
turtle. But that does not mean it is right Now you must raise your children up in a world
where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife"). It's
the same reason likbez pretends that pedophiles are an identity group like gay people.
Decent people must feel that bestiality and pedophilia are beyond the pale. By juxtaposing
them with LGBT, the goal is to subtly induce decent people to associate their feelings of
disgust toward (e.g.) sex with box turtles, and gay people and oh-so-icky ways.
It's a tell that Stephen hasn't got a tolerant bone in his body.
TBH, likbez seems to be regurgitating typical transphobic arguments. Linking to homophobic
hate groups does not enhance his position.
He/she clearly does not think that trans people have any rights that he is obligated to
honor.
On the other hand, seems to expect that we are obligated to respect his bigotry.
likbez, you've derailed the thread, and your comments are trolling at best. Nothing further
from you on this thread, please. Also, if I write further on identity politics, please
refrain from commenting.
The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the
bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the
world
Patrick Cockburn | @indyworld |
Nationalism in different shapes and forms is powerfully transforming the politics of the
British Isles, a development that gathered pace over the last five years and culminated in the
general election this month.
National identities and the relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland are changing
more radically than at any time over the last century. It is worth looking at the British
archipelago as a whole on this issue because of the closely-meshed political relationship of
its constituent nations. Some of these developments are highly visible such as the rise of the
Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) to permanent political dominance in Scotland in the three
general elections since the independence referendum in 2014.
Other changes are important but little commented on, such as the enhanced national
independence and political influence of the Republic of Ireland over the British Isles as a
continuing member of the EU as the UK leaves. Dublin's greater leverage when backed by the
other 26 EU states was repeatedly demonstrated, often to the surprise and dismay of London, in
the course of the negotiations in Brussels over the terms of the British withdrawal.
Northern Ireland saw more nationalist than unionist MPs elected in the general election for
the first time since 1921. This is important because it is a further sign of the political
impact of demographic change whereby Catholics/nationalists become the new majority and the
Protestants/unionists the minority. The contemptuous ease with which Boris Johnson abandoned
his ultra-unionist pledges to the DUP and accepted a customs border in the Irish Sea separating
Northern Ireland from the rest of Britain shows how little loyalty the Conservatives feel
towards the northern unionists and their distinct and abrasive brand of British
nationalism.
These developments affecting four of the main national communities inhabiting the British
Isles – Irish, nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland, Scots – are easy to
track. Welsh nationalism is a lesser force. Much more difficult to trace and explain is the
rise of English nationalism because it is much more inchoate than these other types of
nationalism, has no programme, and is directly represented by no political party – though
the Conservative Party has moved in that direction.
The driving force behind Brexit was always a certain type of English nationalism which did
not lose its power to persuade despite being incoherent and little understood by its critics
and supporters alike. In some respects, it deployed the rhetoric of any national community
seeking self-determination. The famous Brexiteer slogan "take back control" is not that
different in its implications from Sinn Fein – "Ourselves Alone" – though neither
movement would relish the analogy.
The great power of the pro-Brexit movement, never really taken on board by its opponents,
was to blame the very real sense of disempowerment and social grievances felt by a large part
of the English population on Brussels and the EU. This may have been scapegoating on a
grandiose scale, but nationalist movements the world over have targeted some foreign body
abroad or national minority at home as the source of their ills. I asked one former Leave
councillor – one of the few people I met who changed their mind on the issue after the
referendum in 2016 – why people living in her deprived ward held the EU responsible for
their poverty. Her reply cut through many more sophisticated explanations: "I suppose that it
is always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner."
Applying life lessons to the pursuit of national happiness The Tories won't get far once
progressives join forces 22,000 EU nationals have left NHS since Brexit vote, figures show This
crude summary of the motives of many Leave voters has truth in it, but it is a mistake to
caricature English nationalism as simply a toxic blend of xenophobia, racism, imperial
nostalgia and overheated war memories. In the three years since the referendum the very act of
voting for Brexit became part of many people's national identity, a desire to break free,
kicking back against an overmighty bureaucracy and repelling attempts by the beneficiaries of
globalisation to reverse a democratic vote.
The political left in most countries is bad at dealing with nationalism and the pursuit of
self-determination. It sees these as a diversion from identifying and attacking the real
perpetrators of social and economic injustice. It views nationalists as mistakenly or malignly
aiming at the wrong target – usually foreigners – and letting the domestic ones off
the hook.
The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the
bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the
world. It can only be ignored at great political cost, as the Labour Party has just found out
to its cost for the fifth time (two referendums and three elections). What Labour should have
done was early on take over the slogan "take back control" and seek to show that they were
better able to deliver this than the Conservatives or the Brexit Party. There is no compelling
reason why achieving such national demands should be a monopoly of the right. But in 2016, 2017
and 2019 Labour made the same mistake of trying to wriggle around Brexit as the prime issue
facing the English nation without taking a firm position, an evasion that discredited it with
both Remainers and Leavers.
Curiously, the political establishment made much the same mistake as Labour in
underestimating and misunderstanding the nature of English nationalism. Up to the financial
crisis of 2008 globalisation had been sold as a beneficial and inevitable historic process.
Nationalism was old hat and national loyalties were supposedly on the wane. To the British
political class, the EU obviously enhanced the political and economic strength of its national
members. As beneficiaries of the status quo, they were blind to the fact that much of the
country had failed to gain from these good things and felt marginalised and forgotten.
The advocates of supra-national organisations since the mediaeval papacy have been making
such arguments and have usually been perplexed why they fail to stick. They fail to understand
the strength of nationalism or religion in providing a sense of communal solidarity, even if it
is based on dreams and illusions, that provides a vehicle for deeply felt needs and grievances.
Arguments based on simple profit and loss usually lose out against such rivals.
Minervo , 1 day ago
Bigger by far are two forces which really do have control over our country -- the
international NATO warmongers but even more so, the international banksters of the finance
industry.
Why no 'leftist' campaign to Take Back Control of our money? Gordon Brown baled out the
banks when they should have gone bankrupt and been nationalised.
Blair is forever tainted with his ill-fated Attack on Iraq. Surely New Liberals or
Democrats or Socialists would want to lock down on that fiasco?
The Nationalism of taking back control could be a leftist project too.
vk @38: "...the reality on the field is that capitalism is 0 for 5..."
True, but it is worse than that! Even when we get AI to the level you describe, capitalism
will continue its decline.
Henry Ford actually understood Marxist analysis. Despite what many people in the present
imagine, Ford had access to sufficient engineering talent to make his automobile
manufacturing processes much more automated than he did. Ford understood that improving the
efficiency of the manufacturing process was less important than creating a population with
sufficient income to purchase his products.
AI is just a tool, unless it is developed to the point of attaining sentience in which
case it becomes slavery, but let's ignore that possibility for now. Capitalists cannot make
profits from the tools they own all by the tools themselves. Profits come from unpaid labor.
You cannot underpay a tool, and the tool cannot labor by itself.
The AI can be a product that is sold, but compared with cars, for example, the quantity of
labor invested in AI is minuscule. The smaller the proportion of labor that is in the cost of
a product, the smaller the percent of the price that can be realized as profit. To re-boost
real capitalist profits you need labor-intensive products. This also ties in with Henry
Ford's understanding of economics in that a larger labor force also means a larger market for
the capitalist's products.
There are some very obvious products that I can think of involving AI that are also
massively labor-intensive that would match the scale of the automotive industry and
rejuvenate capitalism, but they would require many $millions in R&D to make them
market-ready. Since I want capitalism to die already and get out Re: AI --
Always wondered how pseudo-AI, or enhanced automation, might be constrained by diminishing
EROEI.
Unless an actual AI were able to crack the water molecule to release hydrogen in an
energy-efficient way, or unless we learn to love nuclear (by cracking the nuclear waste
issue), then it seems to me hyper-automated workplaces will be at least as subject to
plummeting EROEI as are current workplaces, if not moreso. Is there any reason to think that,
including embedded energy in their manufacture, these machines and their workplaces will be
less energy intensive than current ones?
Twitter blamed a computer glitch after President Trump's retweet of a post containing the
name alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella mysteriously disappeared from his timeline. After
'fixing' the issue and restoring the retweet, the user was simply banned from the platform so
that nobody could see the tweet, which quickly went viral.
" Rep. Ratliffe suggested Monday that the "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella committed perjury
by making false statements in his written forms filed with the ICIG and that Adam Schiff is
hiding evidence of Ciaramella's crimes to protect him from criminal investigations," read the
tweet made by by now-banned @surfermom77, which describes herself as living in California and a
"100% Trump supporter."
Ciaramella has been outed in several outlets as the 'anonymous' CIA
official whose whistleblower complaint over a July 25 phone call between Trump and with his
Ukrainian counterpart is at the heart of Congressional impeachment proceedings.
Trump retweeted the post around midnight Friday. By Saturday morning, it was no longer
visible in his Twitter feed.
When contacted by The Guardian 's Lois Beckett for explanation, Twitter blamed an "outage
with one of our systems."
Some people reported earlier today that someone had deleted the alleged-whistleblower's
name-retweet from Trump's timeline. Others of us still see *that tweet* on Trump's timeline.
When asked for clarification, Twitter said this: https://t.co/Rftkg3nbus https://t.co/XREAvvxjhf
By Sunday morning, the tweet had been restored to Trump's timeline - however hours later the
user, @Surfermom77, was banned from the platform .
Running cover for Twitter is the Washington Post , which claims " The account shows
some indications of automation , including an unusually high amount of activity and profile
pictures featuring stock images from the internet."
Surfermom77 has displayed some hallmarks of a Twitter bot, an automated account. A recent
profile picture on the account, for instance, is a stock photo of a woman in business attire
that is available for use online.
Surfermom77 has also tweeted far more than typical users, more than 170,000 times since the
account was activated in 2013. Surfermom77 has posted, on average, 72 tweets a day, according
to Nir Hauser, chief technology officer at VineSight, a technology firm that tracks online
misinformation. -
WaPo
Meanwhile, Trump retweeted another Ciaramella reference on Thursday, after the @TrumpWarRoom
responded to whistleblower attorney Mark Zaid's tweet calling for the resignation of Sen. Marsha
Blackburn (R-TN) from the Senate Whistleblower Caucus after she made "hostile" comments - after
she tweeted in November that "Vindictive Vindman is the "whistleblower's" handler (a reference to
impeachment witness Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman.
"The watchdog group requested conversations between Ciaramella and special counsel Robert
Mueller, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and former FBI
attorney Lisa Page."
"I don't think there's any actual material reason that there should be any material wants
anywhere on this planet, instead "only" political and managerial ones but that's because I
believe (and I'm not an expert) one can add additional levels of safeguards -- both physical
and administrative -- to existing or new nuclear power-plants and "burn" most of the
byproducts into essentially new fuel thus buying humanity at least several thousands of years
of time instead of for example chopping up large volumes of air and everything in it be it
insects or birds.
We should already be in a post-scarcity world, no -isms required, only kindness and
applied knowledge. So to me that will be our death sentence if that is the final outcome; too
little kindness (towards all life), too little application and sharing of knowledge.
I don't know if that is inspiring or depressing or both :)"
I always find those thoughts scary - since you and I are both NOT Farmers - and depend
upon those little people to supply us with the foodstuffs we need to survive.
It's GREAT to be a rocket scientist - but before a rocket scientist can exist - ya need
Farmers.
Here is a synopsis of the behavioral loop described above:
Step 1. Individuals and groups evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power,
which requires over-reproduction and/or over-consumption of natural resources (overshoot),
whenever systemic constraints allow it. Differential power generation and accumulation result
in a hierarchical group structure.
Step 2. Energy is always limited, and overshoot eventually leads to decreasing power
available to some members of the group, with lower-ranking members suffering first.
Step 3. Diminishing power availability creates divisive subgroups within the original
group. Low-rank members will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power
from higher-ranking individuals, who will resist by forming their own coalitions to maintain
power.
Step 4. Violent social strife eventually occurs among subgroups who demand a greater share
of the remaining power.
Step 5. The weakest subgroups (high or low rank) are either forced to disperse to a new
territory, are killed, enslaved, or imprisoned.
Step 6. Go back to step 1.
The above loop was repeated countless thousands of times during the millions of years that
we were evolving[9]. This behavior is inherent in the architecture of our minds -- is
entrained in our biological material -- and will be repeated until we go extinct. Carrying
capacity will decline[10] with each future iteration of the overshoot loop, and this will
cause human numbers to decline until they reach levels not seen since the Pleistocene.
Current models used to predict the end of the biosphere suggest that sometime between 0.5
billion to 1.5 billion years from now, land life as we know it will end on Earth due to the
combination of CO2 starvation and increasing heat. It is this decisive end that biologists
and planetary geologists have targeted for attention. However, all of their graphs reveal an
equally disturbing finding: that global productivity will plummet from our time onward, and
indeed, it already has been doing so for the last 300 million years.[11]
It's impossible to know the details of how our rush to extinction will play itself out,
but we do know that it is going to be hell for those who are unlucky to be alive at the
time.
And:
The Olduvai theory is defined by the ratio of world energy production and population. It
states that the life expectancy of Industrial Civilization is less than or equal to 100
years: 1930-2030. After more than a century of strong growth -- energy production per capita
peaked in 1979. The Olduvai theory explains the 1979 peak and the subsequent decline.
Moreover, it says that energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus
giving Industrial Civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years. This analysis
predicts that the collapse will be strongly correlated with an 'epidemic' of permanent
blackouts of high-voltage electric power networks -- worldwide.
Will Humans reach the Stars? I believe NOT - and that extinction is but a heart beat away. We
are not a Peaceful species - amongst many others - but the Universe lives in Harmony.
Wells Fargo, Citigroup, PNC Financial Service Group, and CIT Group accumulated hundreds of
thousands of commodity hauling railcars in North America over the last decade. These banks
believed railcars carrying coal, grain, and other commodities were going to be highly
profitable but have recently turned out to be a major
headache as many cars are now in storage because of new regulations and demand woes brought
on by fluctuating commodity markets.
David Nahass, president of Railroad Financial Corp., which provides advisory services to
railroad firms, told
The Wall Street Journa l that "the industry is suffering, there are no two ways about it.
Lease rates are down, and there's not a source of hope about when it will start to
improve."
The Journal, citing the Association of American Railroads (AAR), said about 400,000 railcars
currently sit in storage with no use at all, and many are bank-owned.
"The railroad crisis has hit certain types of railcars the hardest. For instance, coal
shipments have plunged since 2011, which diminished the demand for coal hopper cars."
I thought Trump was going to save the coal industry. He carried his largest wins in WV and
WY. Somebody's not happy.
Gig workers getting screwed. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it - the
modern gig economy is nothing more than the "putting out" system redux from the early days of
the industrial revolution.
And much like the looms and thread from the putting out system, the owners control pricing
for gig workers as well as cut off any possibility of upward advancement. Vice article on
gig workers
Note this isn't one company - it is all of them. When Uber first started, they were paying
over $1/mile for drivers - it is now down to $0.60. Equally, the various other gig startups
pay more to lure workers in, then cut when they need/want to.
When she initially joined Instacart a year ago, Dorton says she could earn up to $800
during a 40 hour workweek picking up groceries at Costco and Sam's Club and dropping them
off at customers' homes. But in recent months, her weekly income has fallen to $400 for 60
hours of grocery shopping. "I made more delivering pizza and waiting tables," Dorton told
Motherboard.
Yes, but with the delivery services contributing to the everlasting restaurant crunch, there
are fewer jobs delivering pizza and waiting tables. That's a feature.
The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private equity
and distressed debt funds. The latter is completely defensible. A lot of bondholders,
probably the majority, cannot hold distressed or defaulted debt. Insurance companies often
can't by law. Bond mutual funds set out in their prospectuses they don't invest in anything
rated lower than A, AA, or whatever. Even those allowed to hold distressed debt don't want
the extra costs involved with doing so, such as carefully following bankruptcy proceedings
and dealing with delayed and irregular payments.
The author is not a finance expert but he correctly spotlights flaws of so-called 'predatory
capitalism' which is disproportionately Jewish.
Private equity is rife with vices like asset-stripping and looting e.g Eddie Lampert
('Jewishness' member) plus El Trumpo appointee Steven Mnuchin at Sears.
Vulture funds often load all sorts of costs, even frivolous ones, and extra interest charges
on the original debt to maximize profit.
Some countries have the Duplum rule which limits the amount you are liable to a creditor
when you default on a debt.
@Robjil
ssociates, was overwhelmingly effective. Before a crucial shareholder vote on the Lee's
planned merger, Samsung Securities CEO Yoon Yong-am said:
"We should score a victory by a big margin in the first battle, in order to take the
upper hand in a looming war against Elliott, and keep other speculative hedge funds from
taking short-term gains in the domestic market."
When the vote finally took place a few days ago, a conclusive 69.5% of Samsung
shareholders voted in favor of the Lee proposal, leaving Elliott licking its wounds and
complaining about the "patriotic marketing" of those behind the merger.
@J
Adelman perpetual victim .everyone hates me without a reason. My sin is greater than I
can bear (Cain) everyone who comes across me will kill me. I spend my time wandering the
earth (boo ho). And despite slaying your brother you are accorded divine protection.
Jesus said (paraphrasing here) that if the unclean spirit is cast out of a man and is not
replaced with something wholesome he takes "seven other spirits" into himself and becomes
totally insane. You did this to yourself and you will realize that your problem is no longer
with man but with God himself. Jacob the deceiver has wrestled all his life against his
fellow man and triumphed but now he will confront God himself. Get ready to meet your Maker
and see how far your excuses will get you with the Almighty.
@J
Adelman nder. Jewish business behavior has a retarding effect on societies. It's
prominent, large, rapacious and extremely selfish.
As long as Jews made their money then fuck everybody else.
Yes, it's unfair when innocent Jews suffer. When the actions of other members of it's DNA
choose schemes and dishonorable ways to make money it's going to happen.
Stop acting like innocent victims all the time. This narcissistic stance might explain why
Jews are hated seemingly everywhere. Relationships with narcissists are no fun and the means
necessary to break free are often hurtful and unfortunate for everyone involved.
Jews see themselves as the ingroup, and the "goyim" as the outgroup. Since Whites are the
"outgroup" it's not just acceptable, but praiseworthy, to exploit them. To "beat" them at
war.
The problem is that Whites wrongly do not see Jews as an outgroup – something that
Jews themselves take great pains to discourage via their various front groups like the
ADL.
There is no "technical" fix, there is no objective "system" that can change this dynamic.
There is no "level playing field."
Whites need to ostracize Jews at all levels. Boycott, Divest and Sanction – not just
their apartheid regime of Jew bigotry in Zionist-occupied Palestine, but at every level of
society, business, civil institutions, etc.
Jews are destroying the world. Everywhere they go, they leave behind nations in ruins.
Look at Europe, Africa and the Americas, Jews have left their ugly footprints. Corruption,
prostitution, drugs and human trafficking are their trade.
@Just
passing through obs time and time again throughout their history, to the point bishops
and priests would harbor Jews in the cathedrals and lock the doors before the peasants could
arrest them.
Indeed, the infighting among Whites promoted by the likes of Jones is yet again another
assist from Catholic powers to their partners, the Jews.
The popular "neo-reactionary/NRx" movement, started by the Ashkenazi Curtis Yarvin, is yet
another "right-wing" fad that blames Calvinists for all the problems in the world.
Jews are blameless, yet again another White ethnicity/religion is at fault.
No wonder Jews get away with what they do. Whites are too busy infighting over false
history demonizing various rival cults.
So, the "vultures" flew out to the West after devouring the Russian empire and now with
the help of the likes of the homeboy or more like a two bit whore, Ben Sasse, they've
descended on America and have started gutting it out.
Where will they fly next? White Christians don't want them and black/brown Muslims can't
stand them but perhaps China is their next destination being that they have shipped most of
the jobs out there and the whole lot of them are marrying "Chinese-American" women in droves
for good measure.
In the coming battle of the titans, the one who's name can't be pronounced, viz. Yahweh,
hopefully has better guns than Jehovah and Allah, for it sure is gonna need it when the
latter two gang up on it maybe Buddha will give it a helping hand being that they're
practically in-laws now!
@Father
O'Hara ians and Chinese (South Asians) are the richest in both countries (except for Jews
of course).
What I have found is that these two groups come from a debt-averse culture, their kids
actually live with their parents until they have saved enough money for a house and other
such things required to start a family.
Whites meanwhile are WAY to trusting of these faceless financial institutions, they get
into debt very easily and thus become slaves, if you have kids, the first thing you should
educate them about is finance and debt, don't throw them out to the dogs either, it's tragic
to see some getting into debt and then having other problems like drugs and alcohol
addictions.
Wow what a confused mess. Here's a summary: Vulture capitalism is bad for no particular
reason but only an evil anti-Semite (like you) would dare criticize capitalism.
I think the term "vulture capitalism" is calumnious to vultures, who, as carrion birds,
perform a useful and purifying function in nature.
The Jews as a collective, i.e., the Jews who identify as such, concur in the death
sentence of Christ handed down by their Sanhedrin and espouse the Talmudic mitzvah of killing
the best of the gentiles (which naturally implies elevating the worst of the gentiles to
power and prominence) are more to be likened to plague bearing rodents. Unlike vultures, rats
feast on corruption and putrescence, spread disease and also kill the living.
We embrace the finance capitalist worldview at our peril. In its essence, it is nothing
but the worship of money making and profiteering as the supreme aspiration of life,
irregardless of its horrible effects on our compatriots and fellow humans. In doing so, we
become Jews at heart.
There is nothing wrong with industry and the profit motive per se. Predatory finance
contributes nothing to the well being of a nation and the needs of the physical economy- it
is supremely toxic and corrosive of both. It must be expunged and its champions expropriated
and exiled. People like the odious Peter Singer have no place in a moral world; they ought to
be first expropriated, then exiled as far away from their host societies as possible.
I was personally wounded by the anti gay rhetoric peppered across this article. I can't
help making the association that Paul singer's son came out as gay and that this must be the
source of the author's animus against him and the others. Shakespeare, who was also
homosexual, described this state of mind as "a green eyed monster," i.e. jealousy. I'm
mortified that other members of the commentariat have not taken issue with this. Maybe we
would be more compassionate to the denizens of middle America if they allowed our most basic
civil rights.
Oh those kind jews have always been for the working class? But there is a white working
class and jews want them extinct from the face of the earth. Read 'Abolishing whiteness has
never been more urgent.' By Mark Levine
@silviosilver
ors to default was CAUSED BY the big Wall Street firms' irresponsible behavior.
Also, most people do tend to temper economic contracts with a degree of compassion.
Gentile capitalism does not exist in a vacuum.
I recall reading about a young female environmentalist who was refusing to leave a
venerable redwood tree that was scheduled to be cut down. The WASP businessman who owned the
tree was extremely patient with the girl, tried to win her over, threw her food and drinks,
and so on. The land with the tree was then sold to some Jewish firm. At that point the
article left off. The tree was cut down with no further negotiation.
The greatest jewish vulture fund is the zionist privately owned feral reserve aka the FED
, is creates money out of thin air and feeds this money to the otherwise bankrupt zionist
banks and not just here in the ZUS but in Europe, and the BIS is the vulture fund of vulture
funds owned by the zionists, the biggest scam in the history of the world.
By the way, Tucker Carlson said that 911 truthers were nuts, that says it all about
him.
@Colin
Wright usual with Joyce (and not only Joyce of course). You take something that is human,
talk of Jews, point to that something in Jews, and pretend, trusting that your readers will
pretend the same, that it's a Jewish-specific something.
Because if you were to say: everyone does this, everywhere, but when Jews do it it's just on
a larger scale, then you'd be shining light on the fact that what changes with Jews is just
skills, and that they are intelligent enough to co-operate more than the others.
Like when Mac Donald speaks of Jewish self-deception.
I feel I am swimming in self-deception everytime I talk with people (more so with women), and
they aren't Jewish. Do people do anything, but self-deceive?
So?
Jews are doing to White countries what Whites and Jews did to India, no honour amongst
thieves, the ones with the higher verbal IQ wins.
Also it is important to note that the reason India came under the sway of Anglo-Zionist
banking cartels so easily was because how divided it was, I reckon that is why they are
promoting mass immigration. Import lots of different groups, then run lots of race-baiting
stories to distract the plebs from their financial machinations.
This is why Jews are well represented in non-antisemitic White Nationalist organisations
like Jared Taylor's AmRen, they are great at playing both sides.
And he funded the building of the Peace Palace ("Vredespaleis") in The Hague, presently
the seat of the International Court of Justice, an institution not held in high esteem in
the home country of the generous donor.
@Wally
't really engage in lofty ambitons to dominate the world and as such are intact at the moment
and seem like they will remain that way for a long time, they are the true conservatives,
WASPs have always had a Jewish streak within their corrupt souls and are now paying the price
for engaging with a criminal race.
Why do you think Epstein has all these Gentiles in his pocket? You think do-gooding
gentiles just randomly decided to get into bed with Epstein and Co.? How many East Asians and
Eastern Euros do you see terrified of being outed as paedophiles.
Don't deceive yourselves, all debts are paid in the end, especially when the creditors are
Jews.
" it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like Singer's escaped major media attention
prior to this ."
Not really. The Jew's grip is starting to slip now, though. More and more people are
becoming aware that they are virulent parasites and always have been.
@Mulegino1
l capitalism is the competition of ideas, innovation, efficient manufacturing and quality
products made and produced by honest companies. That competition can, in theory at least,
make people (and companies) "try harder". But only when a company's success is determined by
the strength of its products, not by the "deals" it cuts with Jewish financial, advertising,
"marketing" and swindling rackets, designed to line the pockets of the Jew while destroying
honest competition by Gentiles who struggle to play fair and innovate.
Jewish vulture "capitalism" contributes NOTHING of value to any company or any culture. It
never has and never will.
@Colin
Wright sity, and over 2500 Free Libraries from coast to coast, in a time when very little
was done to help what we now call the "underprivileged".
In fact, he gave away 90% of his massive fortune–about $75 Billion in current
dollars. Funding, in the process, many charities, hospitals, museums, foundations and
institutions of learning. He was a major benefactor of negro education.
He was a staunch anti-imperialist who believed America should concentrate its energies on
peaceful endeavors rather than conquering and subduing far-off lands.
Although they are even more keen to put their names on things, today's robber barons leave
behind mainly wreckage.
@anon
who were true conservatives in that all they wished was prosperity for their people in their
own lands without any aggressive foreign policy moves.
Basically, WASPs thought that they could win in the end, but they were out Jew'd and now
they are crying.
The one difference you will notice is that certain subsections of WASPs, notable the
British, actually did build infrastructure in the countries they looted, this to me was borne
out of a sense of guilt, so to be fair, WASPs were not as parasitic and ruthless as Jews.
But in the end, the more ruthless wins. To quote the Joker
Andrew Carnegie left behind institutions like Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon University,
and over 2500 Free Libraries from coast to coast, in a time when very little was done to
help what we now call the "underprivileged".
And he funded the building of the Peace Palace ("Vredespaleis") in The Hague, presently
the seat of the International Court of Justice, an institution not held in high esteem in the
home country of the generous donor.
"If man will strike, strike through the mask!"
Ahab, Moby Dick
It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson's
recent attack on the activities of Paul Singer's vulture fund, Elliot Associates, a group I
first
profiled four years ago. In many respects, it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like
Singer's escaped major media attention prior to this, especially when one considers how
extraordinarily harmful and exploitative they are. Many countries are now in very significant
debt to groups like Elliot Associates and, as Tucker's segment very starkly illustrated, their
reach has now extended into the very heart of small-town America. Shining a spotlight on the
spread of this virus is definitely welcome. I strongly believe, however, that the problem
presented by these cabals of exploitative financiers will only be solved if their true nature is
fully discerned. Thus far, the descriptive terminology employed in discussing their activities
has revolved only around the scavenging and parasitic nature of their activities. Elliot
Associates have therefore been described as a quintessential example of a "vulture fund"
practicing "vulture capitalism." But these funds aren't run by carrion birds. They are operated
almost exclusively by Jews. In the following essay, I want us to examine the largest and most
influential "vulture funds," to assess their leadership, ethos, financial practices, and how they
disseminate their dubiously acquired wealth. I want us to set aside colorful metaphors. I want us
to strike through the mask.
It is commonly agreed that the most significant global vulture funds are Elliot Management,
Cerberus, FG Hemisphere, Autonomy Capital, Baupost Group, Canyon Capital Advisors, Monarch
Alternative Capital, GoldenTree Asset Management, Aurelius Capital Management, OakTree Capital,
Fundamental Advisors, and Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP. The names of these groups are
very interesting, being either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or
rural/pastoral origins (note the prevalence of oak, trees, parks, canyons, monarchs, or the use
of names like Aurelius and Elliot). This is the same tactic employed by the Jew Jordan Belfort,
the "Wolf of Wall Street," who operated multiple major frauds under the business name Stratton
Oakmont.
These names are masks. They are designed to cultivate trust and obscure the real background of
the various groupings of financiers. None of these groups have Anglo-Saxon or venerable origins.
None are based in rural idylls. All of the vulture funds named above were founded by, and
continue to be operated by, ethnocentric, globalist, urban-dwelling Jews. A quick review of each
of their websites reveals their founders and central figures to be:
Elliot Management -- Paul
Singer, Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel Cerberus --
Stephen Feinberg, Lee Millstein, Jeffrey Lomasky, Seth Plattus, Joshua Weintraub, Daniel Wolf,
David Teitelbaum FG Hemisphere -- Peter Grossman Autonomy Capital -- Derek Goodman Baupost Group
-- Seth Klarman, Jordan Baruch, Isaac Auerbach Canyon Capital Advisors -- Joshua Friedman,
Mitchell Julis Monarch Alternative Capital -- Andrew Herenstein, Michael Weinstock GoldenTree
Asset Management -- Steven Tananbaum, Steven Shapiro Aurelius Capital Management -- Mark Brodsky,
Samuel Rubin, Eleazer Klein, Jason Kaplan OakTree Capital -- Howard Marks, Bruce Karsh, Jay
Wintrob, John Frank, Sheldon Stone Fundamental Advisors -- Laurence Gottlieb, Jonathan Stern
Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP -- Josh Birnbaum, Sam Alcoff
The fact that all of these vulture funds, widely acknowledged as the most influential and
predatory, are owned and operated by Jews is remarkable in itself, especially in a contemporary
context in which we are constantly bombarded with the suggestion that Jews don't have a special
relationship with money or usury, and that any such idea is an example of ignorant prejudice.
Equally remarkable, however, is the fact that Jewish representation saturates the board level of
these companies also, suggesting that their beginnings and methods of internal promotion and
operation rely heavily on ethnic-communal origins, and religious and social cohesion more
generally. As such, these Jewish funds provide an excellent opportunity to examine their
financial and political activities as expressions of Jewishness, and can thus be placed in the
broader framework of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the long historical trajectory of
Jewish-European relations.
How They Feed
In May 2018, Puerto Rico declared a form of municipal bankruptcy after falling into more than
$74.8
billion in debt, of which more than $34 billion is interest and fees. The debt was owed to
all
of the Jewish capitalists named above, with the exception of Stephen Feinberg's Cerberus
group. In order to commence payments, the government had instituted a policy of fiscal austerity,
closing schools and raising utility bills, but when Hurricane Maria hit the island in September
2017, Puerto Rico was forced to stop transfers to their Jewish creditors. This provoked an
aggressive attempt by the Jewish funds to seize assets from an island suffering from an 80% power
outage, with the addition of further interest and fees. Protests broke out in several US cities
calling for the debt to be forgiven. After a quick stop in Puerto Rico in late 2018, Donald Trump
pandered to this sentiment when he told Fox News, "They owe a lot of money to your friends on
Wall Street, and we're going to have to wipe that out." But Trump's statement, like all of
Trump's statements, had no substance. The following day, the director of the White House budget
office, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters: "I think what you heard the president say is that Puerto
Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt problem." In other words, Puerto Rico
is going to have to figure out a way to pay its Jews.
Trump's reversal is hardly surprising, given that the President is considered extremely
friendly to Jewish financial power. When he referred to "your friends on Wall Street" he really
meant his friends on Wall Street. One of his closest allies is Stephen Feinberg, founder
and CEO of Cerberus, a war-profiteering vulture fund that has now accumulated
more than $1.5 billion in Irish debt , leaving the country prone to a "
wave of home repossessions " on a scale not seen since the Jewish mortgage traders behind
Quicken Loans (Daniel Gilbert) and Ameriquest (Roland Arnall)
made thousands of Americans homeless . Feinberg has also been associated with mass evictions
in Spain, causing a collective of Barcelona anarchists to
label him a "Jewish mega parasite" in charge of the "world's vilest vulture fund." In May
2018, Trump made Feinberg
chair of his Intelligence Advisory Board , and one of the reasons for Trump's sluggish
retreat from Afghanistan has been the fact Feinberg's DynCorp has enjoyed years of lucrative government
defense contracts training Afghan police and providing ancillary services to the military.
But Trump's association with Jewish vultures goes far beyond Feinberg. A recent piece
in the New York Post declared "Orthodox Jews are opening up their wallets for Trump in
2020." This is a predictable outcome of the period 2016 to 2020, an era that could be neatly
characterised as How Jews learned to stop worrying and love the Don. Jewish financiers are
opening their wallets for Trump because it is now clear he utterly failed to fulfil promises on
mass immigration to White America, while pledging his commitment to Zionism and to socially
destructive Jewish side projects like the promotion of homosexuality. These actions, coupled with
his commuting
of Hasidic meatpacking boss Sholom Rubashkin 's 27-year-sentence for bank fraud and money
laundering in 2017, have sent a message to Jewish finance that Trump is someone they can do
business with. Since these globalist exploiters are essentially politically amorphous, knowing no
loyalty but that to their own tribe and its interests, there is significant drift of Jewish
mega-money between the Democratic and Republican parties. The New York Post reports, for
example, that when Trump attended a $25,000-per-couple luncheon in November at a Midtown hotel,
where 400 moneyed Jews raised at least $4 million for the America First [!] SuperPAC, the
luncheon organiser Kelly Sadler, told reporters, "We screened all of the people in attendance,
and we were surprised to see how many have given before to Democrats, but never a Republican.
People were standing up on their chairs chanting eight more years." The reality, of course, is
that these people are not Democrats or Republicans, but Jews, willing to push their money in
whatever direction the wind of Jewish interests is blowing.
The collapse of Puerto Rico under Jewish debt and elite courting of Jewish financial predators
is certainly nothing new. Congo , Zambia , Liberia ,
Argentina , Peru ,
Panama , Ecuador ,
Vietnam , Poland , and
Ireland are just some of the countries that have slipped fatefully into the hands of the Jews
listed above, and these same people are now closely watching
Greece and
India . The methodology used to acquire such leverage is as simple as it is ruthless. On its
most basic level, "vulture capitalism" is really just a combination of the
continued intense relationship between Jews and usury and Jewish involvement in medieval tax
farming. On the older practice, Salo Baron writes in Economic History of the Jews that
Jewish speculators would pay a lump sum to the treasury before mercilessly turning on the
peasantry to obtain "considerable surpluses if need be, by ruthless methods." [1]
The activities of the Jewish vulture funds are essentially the same speculation in debt, except
here the trade in usury is carried out on a global scale with the feudal peasants of old now
replaced with entire nations. Wealthy Jews pool resources, purchase debts, add astronomical fees
and interests, and when the inevitable default occurs they engage in aggressive legal activity to
seize assets, bringing waves of jobs losses and home repossessions.
This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both the
Belgian and
UK governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish firms from using their court systems to
sue for distressed debt owed by poor nations. Tucker Carlson, commenting on Paul Singer's
predation and the ruin of the town of Sidney, Nebraska, has said:
It couldn't be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United States?
The short answer: Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our political
process. Singer himself was the second largest donor to the Republican Party in 2016. He's
given millions to a super-PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never have heard of
Paul Singer -- which tells you a lot in itself -- but in Washington, he's rock-star famous. And
that is why he is almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate than your average fireman,
just in case you were still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh yeah, it is.
Aside from direct political donations, these Jewish financiers also escape scrutiny by hiding
behind a mask of simplistic anti-socialist rhetoric that is common in the American Right,
especially the older, Christian, and pro-Zionist demographic. Rod Dreher, in a commentary on
Carlson's
piece at the American Conservative , points out that Singer gave a speech in May 2019
attacking the "rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party." Singer continued, "They
call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by showers
of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing press rather
than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers." Dreher comments: "The productive
efforts of businesspeople and workers"? The gall of that man, after what he did to the people of
Sidney."
What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn't even any
recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on a
perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his co-ethnics who
believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and who ultimately believe
they have a right to be "showered by free stuff promised by politicians." Singer places himself
in an infantile paradigm meant to entertain the goyim, that of Free Enterprise vs Socialism, but,
as Carlson points out, "this is not the free enterprise that we all learned about." That's
because it's Jewish enterprise -- exploitative, inorganic, and attached to socio-political goals
that have nothing to do with individual freedom and private property. This might not be the free
enterprise Carlson learned about, but it's clearly the free enterprise Jews learn about -- as
illustrated in their extraordinary
over-representation in all forms of financial exploitation and white collar crime. The
Talmud, whether actively studied or culturally absorbed, is their code of ethics and their
curriculum in regards to fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement, usury, and financial
exploitation. Vulture capitalism is Jewish capitalism.
Whom They Feed
Singer's duplicity is a perfect example of the way in which Jewish finance postures as
conservative while conserving nothing. Indeed, Jewish capitalism may be regarded as the root
cause of the rise of Conservative Inc., a form or shadow of right wing politics reduced solely to
fiscal concerns that are ultimately, in themselves, harmful to the interests of the majority of
those who stupidly support them. The spirit of Jewish capitalism, ultimately, can be discerned
not in insincere bleating about socialism and business, intended merely to entertain
semi-educated Zio-patriots, but in the manner in which the Jewish vulture funds disseminate the
proceeds of their parasitism. Real vultures are weak, so will gorge at a carcass and regurgitate
food to feed their young. So then, who sits in the nests of the vulture funds, awaiting the
regurgitated remains of troubled nations?
Boston-based Seth Klarman (net worth $1.5 billion), who like Paul Singer has
declared "free enterprise has been good for me," is a rapacious debt exploiter who was
integral to the financial collapse of Puerto Rico, where he hid much of activities behind a
series of shell companies. Investigative journalists eventually discovered that Klarman's Baupost
group was behind much of the aggressive legal action intended to squeeze the decimated island for
bond payments. It's clear that the Jews involved in these companies are very much aware that what
they are doing is wrong, and they are careful to avoid too much reputational damage, whether to
themselves individually or to their ethnic group. Puerto Rican journalists, investigating the
debt trail to Klarman, recall trying to follow one of the shell companies (Decagon) to Baupost
via a shell company lawyer (and yet another Jew) named Jeffrey Katz:
Returning to the Ropes & Gray thread, we identified several attorneys who had worked
with the Baupost Group, and one, Jeffrey Katz, who -- in addition to having worked directly
with Baupost -- seemed to describe a particularly close and longstanding relationship with a
firm fitting Baupost's profile on his experience page. I called
Katz and he picked up, to my surprise. I identified myself, as well as my affiliation with the
Public Accountability Initiative, and asked if he was the right person to talk to about Decagon
Holdings and Baupost. He paused, started to respond, and then evidently thought better of it
and said that he was actually in a meeting, and that I would need to call back (apparently,
this high-powered lawyer picks up calls from strange numbers when he is in important meetings).
As he was telling me to call back, I asked him again if he was the right person to talk to
about Decagon, and that I wouldn't call back if he wasn't, and he seemed to get even more
flustered. At that point he started talking too much, about how he was a lawyer and has
clients, how I must think I'm onto some kind of big scoop, and how there was a person standing
right in front of him -- literally, standing right in front of him -- while I rudely insisted
on keeping him on the line.
One of the reasons for such secrecy is the intensive Jewish philanthropy engaged in by Klarman
under his Klarman Family
Foundation . While Puerto Rican schools are being closed, and pensions and health provisions
slashed, Klarman is regurgitating the proceeds of massive debt speculation to his " areas of focus "
which prominently includes " Supporting the global Jewish community and
Israel ." While plundering the treasuries of the crippled nations of the goyim, Klarman and
his co-ethnic associates have committed themselves to "improving the quality of life and access
to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that they may benefit from the country's
prosperity." Among those in Klarman's nest, their beaks agape for Puerto Rican debt interest, are
the American Jewish Committee, Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Holocaust Memorial
Museum, the Honeymoon Israel Foundation, Israel-America Academic Exchange, and the Israel
Project. Klarman, like Singer, has also been an enthusiastic proponent of liberalising attitudes
to homosexuality, donating $1 million to a Republican super PAC aimed at supporting pro-gay
marriage GOP candidates in 2014 (Singer donated $1.75 million). Klarman, who also contributes to candidates who support
immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, has said "The
right to gay marriage is the largest remaining civil rights issue of our time. I work one-on-one
with individual Republicans to try to get them to realize they are being Neanderthals on this
issue."
Steven Tananbaum's GoldenTree Asset Management has also fed well on Puerto Rico, owning $2.5
billion of the island's debt. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research has commented
:
Steven Tananbaum, GoldenTree's chief investment officer, told a business conference in
September (after Hurricane Irma, but before Hurricane Maria) that he continued to view Puerto
Rican bonds as an attractive investment. GoldenTree is spearheading a group of COFINA
bondholders that collectively holds about $3.3 billion in bonds. But with Puerto Rico facing an
unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and lacking enough funds to even begin to pay back its
massive debt load, these vulture funds are relying on their ability to convince politicians and
the courts to make them whole. The COFINA bondholder group has spent
$610,000 to lobby Congress over the last two years, while GoldenTree itself
made $64,000 in political contributions to federal candidates in the 2016 cycle. For
vulture funds like GoldenTree, the destruction of Puerto Rico is yet another opportunity for
exorbitant profits.
Whom does Tananbaum feed with these profits? A brief glance at the spending of the
Lisa and Steven Tananbaum Charitable Trust reveals a relatively short list of beneficiaries
including United Jewish Appeal Foundation, American Friends of Israel Museum, Jewish Community
Center, to be among the most generously funded, with sizeable donations also going to museums
specialising in the display of degenerate and demoralising art.
Following the collapse in Irish asset values in 2008, Jewish vulture funds including OakTree
Capital swooped on mortgagee debt to seize tens of thousands of Irish homes, shopping malls, and
utilities (Steve Feinberg's Cerberus took control of public waste disposal). In 2011, Ireland
emerged as a hotspot for distressed property assets, after its bad banks began selling loans that
had once been held by struggling financial institutions. These loans were quickly purchased at
knockdown prices by Jewish fund managers, who then aggressively sought the eviction of residents
in order to sell them for a fast profit. Michael Byrne, a researcher at the School of Social
Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland's largest university, comments : "The aggressive
strategies used by vulture funds lead to human tragedies." One homeowner, Anna Flynn recalls how
her mortgage fell into the hands of Mars Capital, an affiliate of Oaktree Capital, owned and
operated by the Los Angeles-based Jews Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. They were "very, very
difficult to deal with," said Flynn, a mother of four. "All [Mars] wanted was for me to leave the
house; they didn't want a solution [to ensure I could retain my home]."
When Bruce Karsh isn't making Irish people homeless, whom does he feed with his profits? A
brief glance at the spending of the
Karsh Family Foundation reveals millions of dollars of donations to the Jewish Federation,
Jewish Community Center, and the United Jewish Fund.
Paul Singer, his son Gordin, and their Elliot Associates colleagues Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn,
Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel, have a foothold in almost every country, and
have a stake in every company you're likely to be familiar with, from book stores to dollar
stores. With the profits of exploitation, they
fund campaigns for homosexuality and mass migration , boost Zionist politics,
invest millions in security for Jews , and promote wars for Israel. Singer is a Republican,
and is on the Board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is a former board member of the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like the
Middle East Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and is among the largest
funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was also connected to
the pro-Iraq War advocacy group Freedom's Watch. Another key Singer project was the Foreign
Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that was founded in 2009 by
several high-profile Jewish neoconservative figures to promote militaristic U.S. policies in the
Middle East on behalf of Israel and which received its seed money from Singer.
Although Singer was initially anti-Trump, and although Trump once
attacked Singer for his pro-immigration politics ("Paul Singer represents amnesty and he
represents illegal immigration pouring into the country"), Trump is now essentially funded by
three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250
million in pro-Trump political money . In return, they want war with Iran. Employees of
Elliott Management were one of the main sources of funding for the 2014 candidacy of the Senate's
most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a "retaliatory
strike" against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers. These exploitative Jewish
financiers have been clear that they expect a war with Iran, and they are lobbying hard and
preparing to call in their pound of flesh. As one political commentator put it, "These donors
have made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect a return on their
investment in Trump's GOP."
The same pattern is witnessed again and again, illustrating the stark reality that the
prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to an overwhelming degree on the predations
of the most successful and ruthless Jewish financial parasites. This is not conjecture,
exaggeration, or hyperbole. This is simply a matter of striking through the mask, looking at the
heads of the world's most predatory financial funds, and following the direction of regurgitated
profits.
Make no mistake, these cabals are everywhere and growing. They could be ignored when they
preyed on distant small nations, but their intention was always to come for you too. They are now
on your doorstep. The working people of Sidney, Nebraska probably had no idea what a vulture fund
was until their factories closed and their homes were taken. These funds will move onto the next
town. And the next. And another after that. They won't be stopped through blunt support of "free
enterprise," and they won't be stopped by simply calling them "vulture capitalists."
Strike through the mask!
Notes
[1] S.
Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7.
To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being a
result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while maybe
not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit? An application of
"chutzpah" to business, if you will -- the gall to break social conventions to get what you
want, while making other people feel uncomfortable; to wheedle your way in at the joints of
social norms and conventions -- not illegal, but selfish and rude. Krav Maga applies the same
concept to the martial arts: You're taught to go after the things that every other martial art
forbids you to target: the eyes, the testicles, etc. In other sports this is considered "low"
and "cheap." In Krav Maga, as perhaps a metaphor for Jewish behavior in general, nothing is too
low because it's all about winning .
There's a rather good article on the New Yorker discussing the Sacklers and the
Oxycontin epidemic. It focusses on the dichotomy between the family's ruthless promotion of the
drug and their lavish philanthropy. 'Leave the world a better place for your presence' and
similar pieties and Oxycontin.
The article lightly touches on the extent of their giving to Hebrew University of Jerusalem
-- but in general, treads lightly when it comes to their Judaism.
understandably. The New Yorker isn't exactly alt-right country, after all. But can
Joyce or anyone else provide a more exact breakdown on the Sacklers' giving? Are they genuine
philanthropists, or is it mostly for the Cause?
'To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being
a result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit? '
It's important not to get carried away with this. Figures such as Andrew Carnegie, while
impeccably gentile, were hardly paragons of scrupulous ethics and disinterested virtue.
I won't defend high finance because I don't like it either. But this is a retarded and
highly uninformed attack on it.
1. The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private
equity and distressed debt funds. The latter is completely defensible. A lot of bondholders,
probably the majority, cannot hold distressed or defaulted debt. Insurance companies often
can't by law. Bond mutual funds set out in their prospectuses they don't invest in anything
rated lower than A, AA, or whatever. Even those allowed to hold distressed debt don't want the
extra costs involved with doing so, such as carefully following bankruptcy proceedings and
dealing with delayed and irregular payments.
As a result, it is natural that normal investors sell off such debt at a discount to funds
that specialize in it.
2. Joyce defends large borrowers that default on their debt. Maybe the laws protecting
bankrupts and insolvents should be stronger. But you do that, and lenders become more
conservative, investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments. I think myself
the laws in the US are too favorable to lenders, but there's definitely a tradeoff, and the
question is where the happy middle ground is. In Florida a creditor can't force the sale of a
primary residence, even if it is worth $20 million. That's going too far in the other
direction.
3. " either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or rural/pastoral
origins "
More retardation. Cerberus is a greek dog monster guarding the gates of hell. Aurelius is
from the Latin word for gold. "Hemisphere" isn't an Anglosaxon word nor does in invoke rural
origins.
Besides being retardedly wrong, the broader point is likewise retarded: when
English-speaking Jews name their businesses they shouldn't use English words. Naming a company
"Oaktree" should be limited to those of purely English blood! Jews must name their companies
"Cosmopolitan Capital" or RosenMoses Chutzpah Advisors."
4. The final and most general point: it's trivially easy to attack particular excesses of
capitalism. Fixing the excesses without creating bigger problem is the hard part. Two ideas I
favor are usury laws and Tobin taxes.
Very true. What's really disgusting about Singer is that he funds startups in Israel. So as
a Jewish American citizen he cares more for the well being of the average Israeli than
Americans. There's nothing 'conservative' about these hedge fund Jews. I'm glad to be a
Neanderthal according to Mr. Klarman's view. I happen to like Western Civilization and its
inherent beauty especially when confronted against globalist Zionists who think nothing of the
consequences of their behavior.
Jewishness aside, maximizing shareholder is the holy grail of all capitalist enterprises.
The capitalist rush to abandon the American working class when tariff barriers evaporated is
just another case of vulturism. Tax corporations based on the domestic content of their
products and ban usury and vulturism will evaporate.
Someone with the username kikz posted a link to this article in the occidental observer. I
read it and thought it was a great article. I'm glad it's featured here.
The article goes straight for the jugular and pulls no punches. It hits hard. I like
that:
1. It shines a light on the some of the scummiest of the scummiest Wall Street players.
2. It names names. From the actual vulture funds to the rollcall of Jewish actors running each.
It's astounding how ethnically uniform it is.
3. It proves Trump's ties with the most successful Vulture kingpin, Singer.
4. It shows how money flows from the fund owners to Zionist and Jewish causes.
This thing reads like a court indictment. It puts real world examples to many of the
theories that are represents on this site. Excellent article.
Tucker could have done a number on Trump friend Schwarzman too.Mark my words you're gonna
have another melt down now that all the people who lost their home and ended up in rentals stop
paying their rent that is now 2 1/2 times what their mortgage was.
This is another fake bubble being securitized and sold off. Just like putting people into
houses with ARMs who couldnt afford them when the rates went up, Scharzman will fill up his
rentals to 99% occupancy with special deals to sell them to investors, when the special deal
period runs out and the rent goes up people will move out looking for cheaper housing and the
securities wont be worth shit.
Blackstone Group , CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman Buys Houses in Bulk to Profit from Mortgage
Crisis
This is not surprising that this has happened. All of the de-regulation on Wall Street,
lobbied for by Wall Street has allowed this to transpire.
Congress does not even read the bills that they sign into law, let alone write them! Many
are written by ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council, the Chamber of Commerce, the
Realtor's assosiation, the Medical Industrial Complex, public employee unions, and various
other special interest groups!
Why is it a pressing issue to actively promote homosexuality? What is the point? That is
realy strange! There is a difference between not actively discriminating and actively
promoting!
Are they trying to worsen the AIDS epidemic or lower the birth rate? It does not make sense
to be actively promoting and encouraging homosexuality.
In Florida a creditor can't force the sale of a primary residence, even if it is worth $20
million
Unless the law has changed in the last two years they can .. the Fla exemption says the
affected property cannot be larger than half an acre in a municipality or 160 acres
elsewhere.
I had a friend interested in a foreclosed horse farm in Fla .I think it was 200 acres, valued
at about 6 million.
@Colin
Wright se funds, their legal expertise, and their political connections mean that borrowers
can more successfully be held to account. If I owned, say, Puerto Rican debt in my retirement
account, the chances that I could make Puerto Rico honor its obligations are much slimmer.
None of this is to suggest that finance, as we today know it, is perfect and that it
couldn't be reformed in any way to make its operation more conducive to nationalistic social
values, only that anti-cap ideologues like Joyce weave lurid tales of malfeasance out of
completely humdrum market economics (which is precisely the same market economics that Tucker
Carlson learned about too, btw).
Of course that Joyce is peddling his own obsessions, but I have to admit that Singer &
comp. are detestable. I know that what they're doing is not illegal, but it should be (in my
opinion), and those who are involved in such affairs are somehow odious. The same goes for
Icahn, Soros etc.
Ethnic angle is evident, too: how come Singer works exclusively with his co-ethnics in this
multi-ethnic USA? Non-Jewish & most Jewish entrepreneurs don't behave that way.
@Colin
Wright usual with Joyce (and not only Joyce of course). You take something that is human,
talk of Jews, point to that something in Jews, and pretend, trusting that your readers will
pretend the same, that it's a Jewish-specific something.
Because if you were to say: everyone does this, everywhere, but when Jews do it it's just on a
larger scale, then you'd be shining light on the fact that what changes with Jews is just
skills, and that they are intelligent enough to co-operate more than the others.
Like when Mac Donald speaks of Jewish self-deception.
I feel I am swimming in self-deception everytime I talk with people (more so with women), and
they aren't Jewish. Do people do anything, but self-deceive?
So?
I generally like Tucker but thought his piece on Singer was way off base and a silly hit
job. As others above have commented, if you think it's wrong to buy or try to collect on
defaulted debt, what is the alternative set of laws and behavior you are recommending? If debts
can simply be repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function. (Also, while it would take too
much time and space to debate the Puerto Rico situation here, it bears noting that the entire
PR public debt burden of ~$75 billion comes to around $25,000 per resident -- about a third of
the comparable burden of public sector debt per person in the United States, which itself
ignores tens of trillions of "off balance" sheet liabilities for underfunded social security,
Medicare, Medicaid and public sector pension obligations. The source of PR's problems lies
pretty clearly at the feet of PR's long corrupt politicians -- not the incidental holders of
its bonds who would simply like to be repaid or have the debt reasonably restructured.)
Other minor points worth noting:
Joyce names a few Jews associated with Baupost but misleadingly omits its president, the guy
who is running the show: Jim Mooney, a proud graduate of Holy Cross and big supporter of
Catholic and Jesuit causes. If memory serves, Jim was also the guy behind some of Baupost's
biggest and most successeful distressed debt (or "vulture" to use Joyce's pejorative term)
trades. The firm's Jewish founder (Seth Klarman) has also donated tons of money to secular
causes, including something like $60 million for a huge facility at Cornell.
Speaking of donations and Jews, I believe Bloomberg (not technically a "vulture" capitalist
but clearly just as bad -- I.e., Jewish -- on the Joyce scale) gave $1.5 billion to his alma
mater, Johns Hopkins. If memory serves, that may have been the largest donation to any
university ever. Maybe Carnegie's donations were greater in "real" dollars, but Bloomberg's
donation is still pretty significant -- with likely more to come.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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California South L.A. is largely untouched by unrest. That is by design Black Lives Matter organizers wanted to bring the rage over the George Floyd case and so many others to L.A.'s elites, in their own neighborhoods. June 3, 2020 More Coverage 'A good army': L.A. protesters from diverse backgrounds converge on streets Prosecutors charge 3 more officers in George Floyd's death
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Consortiumnews.com June 9, 2020 at 16:10 Benjamin Franklin's statement was "A Republic if
you can keep it." 
David B Harrison June 10, 2020 at 13:54 I agree
completely.Read my comment and you will see how I feel about these subjects.Infantile
anti-American hatred(except hatred of the American Empire) will not win this battle,
solidarity and fellowship will.
Michael McNulty June 9, 2020 at 10:34 I'm sure America really was that beacon on the hill
in the two decades after WWII if we leave Korea, Vietnam, Iran's democracy overthrown and
being the real driver of the Cold War aside. The problem is America took that beacon to set
the world on fire.
1 minute ago The
thing is most people at Zerohedge have no idea about the reality in Germany and the other
European countries and the psychicological robustness of its people. This crisis is nothing
compared to the catastrophies of the 20th century. In times of challenge one can see who is
strong and effective and acting in solidarity. And this is it what the extended Euroland is
going to show soon. A masterplan for Euroland how to overcome this Corona problems. It takes
time to adopt but things do move already in the right direction. Banning travel is a harsh
measure but the right thing in this situation.
Dave
says:
John Giles
says:
Alan Luchetti
says:
Hoobert Herver
says:
Bob Kaufman
says:
Youri
says:
Cliff Cobb
says:
Steven
says:
Claire
says:
More
(@DrJillStein) 
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Ben Norton Ben Norton
is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the
producer of the Moderate Rebels
podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton . bennorton.com
